The Blackwater Lightship

CHAPTER FIVE

Helen woke and looked at her watch; it was ten o'clock. She heard sounds: voices and something being pulled or pushed. She lay back and dozed, and then woke fully and lay with her hands behind her head. Her mind kept wandering back to her mother's house, and the glimpses she had had the previous day of her new life. She could not understand how her mother faced going back to that house after a day's work, or why she had chosen to live alone so far from the town.

She remembered hearing from Declan how the old house had been sold. Declan had mentioned this casually, as though he were telling her that their mother had changed her car. He was surprised at how upset Helen had become, and admitted that although he had known it for some time he did not think it was important enough to tell her. When had the sale happened, she had asked him, and he told her that their mother had moved to Wexford four or five months before. And who had bought the house? Declan told her that he had not the slightest idea. And what had happened to the furniture, the ornaments, the pictures, the photographs? Declan laughed at her concern about these and said he didn't know.

'There were things belonging to me in that house,' Helen said to him.

'What things? Don't be so stupid!'

'Things in my room. Books, photographs, things that mattered to me.'

'She cleared out your room years ago.'

'She had no right to do that.'

The house was gone now. In her mind, she went through the rooms again, how each door closed – the door to her parents' room almost noiseless, the door to Declan's room more stubborn, impossible to open or close without alerting the whole house \a151 or the light switches – the one outside the bathroom which Declan when he was tall enough loved turning off while someone was inside, the light switch inside her bedroom door, firm and hard, to be turned on and off decisively, unlike the light switch in her parents' room, which could be switched on and off with a little flick.

She pictured the house empty and ghostly, like a ship under water, as though it had been left as it was on the last day she saw it. The box of Mass cards and sympathy cards for her father under her parents' bed, and another box full of old photographs. The opening to the attic covered by a square of wood which could be shifted sideways on a windy night.

Someone else lived there now. This was what happened to houses, Declan told her. Get over it, he said in a mock American accent.

In the days after she heard about it, however, nothing about the sale of the house seemed to her normal or inevitable. In the first year of their relationship, she had made an agreement with Hugh that she would tell him when she was upset or worried, that she would not keep things bottled up, as was her habit, withholding something important from him so that he would find out only months later the cause of a period of silence and blackness. But she could not tell him about the house and her feeling on hearing the news of the sale because she could not think why she should mind so much.

She was angry with her mother, having tried to feel nothing about her for years, and having believed that her mother would never be able to provoke her again. She remained for days in a silent rage. Hugh watched her pretending it was nothing until she realised that she would have to tell him what it was. He was puzzled by the source of the anger, and he wondered if it was not about something else.

He told her that she would have to resolve it by talking about it; he loved the language of emollience and reconciliation. They went to bed early and she talked for hours while he held her and listened. He tried to understand, but the conflicts were too sharp and too deeply embedded for him to fathom. She felt she needed to revisit the rooms of the old house, even in her imagination, knowing that something had ended. She needed, she thought, to let it end, to ease it out of herself. These rooms no longer were hers; instead, now, the rooms of the house she shared with Hugh and the boys belonged to her.

It was a few days later as she was driving home from school that a thought struck her which caused her to pull in and sit in the car and go back over everything again. It was this: she could not put the house and its sale out of her mind because she believed that she would some day go back there, that it would be her refuge, and that her mother, despite everything, would be there for her and would take her in and shelter her and protect her. She had never entertained this thought before; now, she knew that it was irrational and groundless, but nonetheless, as she sat in the car, she knew that it was real and it explained everything.

Somewhere in the part of her where fears lay unexplored and conflicts unresolved, there was a belief that the life she had made with Hugh would fail her; not precisely that he would leave her, but more exactly that she would some day or night appear at her mother's door asking to be taken in and forgiven and her mother would tell her that her room was always there for her, and that she could stay as long as she liked. The boys did not exist in this scenario, nor the possibility that she could ever take refuge in her mother's new house, and she realised that it was a fantasy, and something that she must not think about. However, it overcame her like a sudden nausea, and she knew that she could not tell Hugh about it, it would seem too dark and disloyal to him, it would frighten him even more than it frightened her.

She had it in the open now – she was sure she was right about it \a151 and she would have to combat it quietly herself, tell herself over and over that she would never need to appear at her mother's door like this, or sleep, comforted by her mother, in her old room. The house was gone, she thought. I have a new house. But the dark thoughts about the old house continued to trouble her.

And it was only now that it struck her that Declan had just the previous evening enacted the fantasy that she had feared so much. He had come back asking for comfort and forgiveness, as she had felt she would, and they had been ready for him, as though they too had always been alert to their side of the bargain. She was frightened by the symmetry in this, but she did not know what it meant.

Her grandmother came in with a cup of tea and put it on the locker beside her bed.

'Declan's just up,' she said. 'He's in the bathroom. Lily went into Wexford at the crack of dawn, she said she'd be back sometime this morning.'

As soon as Declan had finished in the bathroom, Helen got up and had a shower and dressed herself. The day was overcast and windy. When she went into the kitchen, Declan and her grandmother were there, Declan sitting beside the Aga looking frail and uneasy.

'It's a terrible day,' he said. 'Granny says it might clear up, but it's a terrible day.'

She realised that he was trapped here now, that he had dreamed about this house and the cliff and the strand, but the dreams had not included the possibility of an ordinary morning, with a grey sky and a whistling wind, had not included his trying to talk to his grandmother as she washed up. Her first urge was to think of an excuse to go into the village, offering perhaps to take Declan with her, and to stay there for as long as she could. Her grandmother, she presumed, was as uncomfortable as they were, her routine destroyed by these two half-strange interlopers.

'Do you go into Wexford much, Granny?' Helen asked as her grandmother sat down at the kitchen table.

'Oh, I go in once a week,' she said and sipped her tea.

'How do you get in?' Helen asked.

'This only started last year when I sold the sites,' her grandmother said, moving over to sit at the kitchen table. 'I decided that I would go to Wexford every Wednesday. So I asked around and I discovered that Ted Kinsella in Blackwater ran a sort of hackney service. So I arranged with him that he would drive me into Wexford on a Wednesday morning and collect me outside Petit's supermarket at four o'clock. And I paid him very well for this, as you can imagine. And it was lovely.' Her grandmother smiled and continued. She appeared to relish this opportunity to talk. 'I had the day to myself. I would buy a paper and a magazine and sit in White's or the Talbot and have tea and then I'd wander through the town and look at the shops, and I tried out every place for lunch in the whole town. You'd have to go early or late, or else you'd get into a crush with all the office people. And, of course, I'd avoid your mother.' She laughed, almost maliciously. 'And then I'd go to the supermarket and I'd do the whole week's shopping. I didn't know myself. But it couldn't last, of course. Didn't Ted Kinsella let it be known around that he was driving into Wexford twice of a Wednesday, and didn't he start bringing in all sorts of people with him? Oh, they'd want to know all your business, and they'd look up in your face as they'd ask you were you going to sell any more sites. And then one day \a151 this was the week before Christmas – Ted arrived and told me, if you don't mind, that he had to collect another passenger at five and would I like to wait in the car or would I like to wait somewhere else. And he was already ten minutes late! Oh, I cleaned his clock for him now. I was raging. And I was paying him the same as I was paying him when I drove in on my own. So when I got home I sent him a note with Tom Wallace the postman saying that I wouldn't be going into Wexford any more. I gave no reason. Sure he knew the reason.' She paused and pursed her lips as though she was indignant once again.

'So I thought about it and after a week or so \a151 and I had got used to going in there, it brightened up my whole week – I rang Melissa Power, who's Lily's secretary. I used to know her father and she's very private. Lily had sent her out here a few times with messages when she was too grand to come herself. And I told her not to tell Lily I rang – I was in the phone box in Blackwater – and I asked her who the best taxi driver in Wexford was. I knew there were a few because I had seen ads for taxis in the People. And she gave me the name Brendan Dempsey and I rang him, and he said that it would be expensive all right, but in actual fact it was less than that old fool Ted Kinsella had charged me, and he sounded very nice, very refined, and I go in with him now \a151 oh, he has a beautiful car, I don't know what it is, and I tell him I feel like the Queen of Sheba sitting in it, and some days he knows I don't want to talk, and he always asks me if he can turn the radio on. And he's interesting, he follows the news and he doesn't put his nose into my business, so I have a lovely day on a Wednesday.'

She sat at the table and looked at them both, as though defying them to contradict her.

'You're a great woman, Granny,' Declan said.

'Did you go to Wexford yesterday?' Helen asked.

'I did, Helen,' she said. 'So, with what you brought, we're well stocked up now with plenty of groceries.'

They sat in silence for a while until they heard a car approaching.

'Whisht now,' their grandmother said; 'that's not Lily's car.' She went to the window and parted the lace curtains, and then she walked out into the hallway, closing the kitchen door. Helen and Declan could hear a man's cheerful voice asking her if she was Declan's granny.

'Oh Jesus!' Declan said.

'Who is it?' Helen asked.

'It's Larry. I didn't think he'd come today.'

Helen remembered that Declan had told Paul to give directions to a Larry as well, and tell him to come as soon as possible, but clearly he was now embarrassed by his friend's arrival. She wondered if he was content now with simply her and her mother and her grandmother, or if he felt awkward at the arrival of another uninvited guest.

Her grandmother came into the kitchen accompanied by Larry, who began to talk as soon as he arrived.

'Will you look at you?' he said to Declan. 'You look as though you haven't left that chair since you arrived. I'd say all the women are spoiling you.'

Helen watched as Declan instantly brightened up.

'God, it's very hard to find this place,' Larry continued without getting his breath. 'I went all over the country. No one knew any Breens, and then I realised that your granny mightn't be called Breen.'

'My granny is standing behind you,' Declan said.

'Will you look at the cats?' Larry said, pointing to the top of the dresser. 'What are they called?'

'The black fat one is Garret and the other one is Charlie,' Mrs Devereux said.

'Are you serious?' Larry asked.

'Yeah, Larry,' Declan said dryly, 'she's serious.'

'The skinny one looks just like Charlie,' Larry said. 'The names are gas. And is this your sister?' He spoke without pause, smiling all the time.

Larry was too friendly, Helen thought, too open in his manner, but nonetheless he was, she felt, a relief after Paul, who was too formal and distant.

'Don't mind him,' Declan said. 'He only talks non-stop when he's nervous.'

'What?' Larry asked. 'Who's nervous?'

'Hey, Larry,' Declan said, 'shut up.' He smiled at Larry.

'Would you like a cup of tea, Larry?' Mrs Devereux asked.

'No, no, I'm all right, thank you,' he said. 'God, it's gas the names of the cats.'

'Stop, Larry,' Declan said.

'God, it's a great place this,' Larry said.

'Did you bring your measuring tape?' Declan asked. 'I'm sure Granny wants some renovations done.'

'I did, as a matter of fact,' Larry said. 'I have it in the car. Do you know I had real trouble finding this place?'

'If you don't shut up, we're going to drown one of the cats.'

'Declan!' his grandmother said.

'Granny, I have to say something drastic to shut him up.'

'OK, OK, I'll shut up,' Larry said. 'God, it was a long drive down.'

'Both cats,' Declan said emphatically. 'We'll drown both Garret and Charlie.'

'What's this about a measuring tape?' his grandmother asked.

'Larry', Declan said, 'is an architect.'

Helen noticed that Declan ate nothing at lunch, and when she and Larry and her grandmother had finished eating, he lay back in the chair beside the Aga and closed his eyes. Outside, the sky had cleared, but there was still a wind and no certainty that the sky would not cloud up again soon.

'I'd love to go down to the strand,' Declan said. 'Not for long, just for a minute before it starts raining again.' He kept his eyes closed.

'Sure we'll go down with you,' Larry said.

Declan shaded his eyes with his hands all the time as they tried to make their way down the cliff, saying that the light was too much for him. Helen saw how frail he was as they helped him from step to step. When, finally, she and Larry were standing on the strand, having run down the last stretch, Declan stood alone, unable to manage. Larry offered to go back up and help him but then Declan suddenly ran down the bank of loose sand. He seemed pale and exhausted.

'I should have brought my togs,' Larry said and looked at the sea. There was a wind blowing a thin film of sand along the strand.

'I want to stay here on my own for a while,' Declan said. 'I just want to sit here where there's shelter. If the two of you go up, I'll follow you later.'

'Why don't we go for a walk first?' Larry asked.

'No, I'll just sit here,' Declan said.

'We can't leave you here,' Helen said.

'Hellie, I'll be fine. I just want to look at the sea and think, and then I'll come back up.'

Helen told him about the gap to Mike Redmond's house, which was easy to climb; she and Larry walked towards it.

'Is he all right there?' Helen asked Larry.

'I got a big shock when I saw him in the room,' Larry said. 'He looks awful, doesn't he?'

'How long have you known him?'

'Since college.'

'Do you think we should leave him there?'

'If that's what he wants,' Larry said.

'Sometimes you forget he's sick, or you don't realise how sick he is,' Helen said.

'The problem is that he forgets as well,' Larry said, 'or he puts it to the back of his mind and then he remembers. It's very hard.'

They walked up the gap until they came to the ruin of Mike Redmond's house. Larry walked around it, touching the walls and the chimney breast.

'Your granny is lucky that her house is further back from the cliff,' he said.

'There used to be a big garden in front of this house,' Helen said.

'The foundations are very thin and the walls are not very strong,' Larry said.

'Have you brought your measuring tape?' she asked.

He looked at her earnestly. 'Why?'

She laughed until it struck him that she was mocking him.

'You're 'worse than Declan,' he said.

They walked back along the clifftop in silence, Larry staring out to sea and stopping to look down at the coast. 'I didn't know there were places like this still left in Wexford,' he said.

As they walked up the lane, they saw Lily driving towards them. She stopped at the gate of her mother's house.

'Is Declan inside?' she asked.

'Mammy, this is Larry, he's a friend of Declan's,' Helen said.

'Hello,' she said coldly. 'Is Declan inside?' she asked again.

'No, he's on the strand,' Helen said.

'Who's he with?' her mother asked.

'No one. He's on his own.'

'How did that happen?'

'He asked us to leave him there. He said he wanted to think.'

'Helen, that is irresponsible.' She began to walk towards the cliff.

'Where are you going?'

'I'm going to get him,' her mother said.

'He wants to be left alone.'

Her mother continued walking away from them towards the cliff.

'It's mucky,' Helen shouted at her, but her mother did not turn.

'Look at her shoes,' Helen said to Larry. 'She'll never get down the cliff.'

'A mother's love's a blessing,' Larry said.

'I presume you're being sarcastic?'

'It's not just you and Declan can go on like that,' Larry said.

'I thought you were a nice simple chap,' she said.

'I think I prefer your granny to your mother,' he said.

'I did that for a while too,' Helen said. 'It's a mistake.'

They sat in the kitchen and listened as Helen's grandmother moved about upstairs. The cats on top of the dresser had disappeared. When her grandmother came down the stairs and into the kitchen, she had a cat under each arm.

'These two gentlemen', she said, 'are disturbed by all the visitors.'

'You've a great view here,' Larry said.

'View?' she asked. 'You can get fed up looking at the sea. I can tell you that now. If I could turn the house around, I would.'

'It has great character, the house,' Larry said.

The cats jumped out of her arms and made their way to the top of the dresser, where they scowled down at Helen and Larry.

'I'm bad on my feet,' her grandmother said. 'I'd love to make my bedroom downstairs, but then the bathroom's upstairs. There's no justice.' She went to the window and parted the lace curtains. 'Oh, here's Lily now,' she said.

Helen and Larry stood up as they heard Declan and Lily talking. As Helen opened the kitchen door, she noticed her mother's shoes all covered in marl and muck. Declan, she saw, had been crying. They did not come into the kitchen, but turned towards the room where Declan had slept.

'Is he all right?' her grandmother called after them.

'He's fine. He's just going to lie down.'

When Larry went and sat in front of the house, Helen's grandmother guardedly closed the kitchen door and checked the window to make sure no one was coming.

'Helen,' she asked, 'is this man Larry, is he going to stay here as well?'

'I don't know, Granny.'

'Helen, are we going to put them into the same room?'

'I don't know.'

'I suppose we're all modern now,' her grandmother said, going again to the window, 'and I'm as modern as anyone, but I would just like to know. That's all.'

'Granny, do you mean – are they partners?'

'Yes, that's what I mean.'

'No, they're not.'

'So where is Declan's partner?' her grandmother asked.

'He doesn't have a partner,' Helen said.

'Do you mean he has nobody?'

'He has us,' Helen said. 'And he has his friends. That's not nobody.'

'He has nobody of his own,' her grandmother said sadly. 'Nobody of his own, and that's why he came down here. I didn't understand that before. Helen, we'll have to do everything we can for him.'

Her grandmother kept her eyes fixed on a point in the distance and said nothing more. When Larry came in and saw them, he pretended he had been looking for something and he left the room as soon as he could.

Helen went to her room and lay down and tried to sleep. She stared at the ceiling, aware of her mother sitting with Declan in the next room, and surprised that the window was just a small slit in the wall, making the room a shadowy, cavernous space, full of damp smells. She had not remembered it like this.

She thought about the previous year when she had come down here with Hugh and Cathal and Manus. The boys had been excited and interested. Manus had a video about hens, and he had spent the journey from Dublin talking about the hens he was going to see in Cush. Cathal, in recent weeks, had become interested in the idea of young and old. His grandmother in Donegal was old; was his grandmother in Cush old? he asked. Helen explained that his grandmother was in Wexford, his great-grandmother was in Cush and, yes, she was old.

The boys had packed their bathing togs and buckets and spades, even though they were only staying one day. Helen explained about the cliff.

'But is there sand?' Cathal asked.

'Yes, plenty of sand,' she said.

'Do they talk English in Cush?' he asked.

'Plenty of English,' Hugh said.

As soon as they got out of the car and stood in front of their great-grandmother's house, the boys looked around them suspiciously. The house seemed decrepit; one of the windows upstairs was broken. When her grandmother came to the door, Helen watched her as though through the eyes of the two boys. There was something frightening about her presence. The boys did not move as Helen and Hugh went towards the old woman. Helen was afraid that Manus might run back to the car, or worse call her grandmother a witch or some other word from his increasingly large vocabulary.

The boys did not want to come into the house. When Helen asked if Hugh could take Manus to see Furlong's hens, Hugh seemed almost too grateful for the excuse to leave.

Helen beckoned Cathal to come inside. He stood in the kitchen, inspecting everything, his gaze critical and utterly unselfconscious.

'Oh, he's the image of your father, Helen,' her grandmother said. 'Isn't he the image of your father!' Cathal looked at her coldly.

When Hugh and Manus returned, it was clear that the trip to see the hens had not been a success.

'They were all dirty,' Manus said.

'Oh now,' Mrs Devereux said, 'Mrs Furlong washes them with soap and water on Mondays, so you came the wrong day.'

'Do you live here?' Manus asked her.

Hugh sat beside the Aga, Helen and Manus and Mrs Devereux at the kitchen table. Cathal would not sit down.

'Your mother now will be here any minute,' her grandmother said to Helen.

'Is she your mother too?' Manus asked.

'No, Manus,' Helen said, 'she's my mother, but she's Granny's daughter. Isn't that a good one?'

Manus wrinkled his face in mock disgust. He hated it when he did not understand things.

'Did you live here?' he asked Helen.

'No, it's my granny's house,' she told him.

'There's an awful stink,' he said.

He began to examine the fly-paper, which hung from the ceiling near the light-fitting. He called Cathal over.

'The flies are dead,' Cathal said, 'and they're stuck to the paper.'

'Lift me up,' Manus said to Hugh.

'You're to be good, Manus,' Helen said. 'It's Granny's house.'

'I want to see the dead flies,' he said.

'The paper is all sticky,' Cathal said.

'It's all manky,' Manus added.

The cats appeared at the window and her grandmother went out and carried them in, one under each arm. As soon as they saw the visitors, they jumped up to their perch on the dresser. Manus wanted someone to help him fetch them down so he could play with them, but Mrs Devereux explained that they didn't like little boys.

'What did you bring them in for?' he asked her sharply.

The day was mild and sunny and Helen thought it might be best for everyone if Hugh took the boys down to the strand. She would go as far as the cliff with them.

She and Hugh were careful to say nothing as they walked down the lane, pretending that this was a normal outing with buckets and spades. Hugh lifted Manus in his arms as they approached the cliff, Helen held Cathal's hand. Just as they came to the edge, the sky darkened and the boys looked down with amazement and alarm.

'Is that the strand?' Manus asked.

'Yes, and you use steps to go down,' Helen said.

'What steps?'

She pointed them out to him.

'And you run down the last bit;' she said.

'I hate it,' Manus said.

'It's lovely when you're down there. And the sea is much warmer than Donegal.'

'It's all dirty,' he said.

'Do we have to go down?' Cathal asked.

'No,' Helen said, 'you can do what you like.'

She realised that they were used to the long sandy beaches in Donegal, and that the marl of the cliff and the short strand seemed strange to them.

'But I think you'd like it down there,' Helen said.

'How long are we staying here?' Cathal asked.

'Just today.'

'We're not sleeping here, sure we're not?'

'No, we're driving back later.'

The boys stood there, downcast and subdued.

'Manus, I'll give you a piggy-back if you come down now,' Hugh said.

'No, I want to sit on your shoulders.'

'All right.'

'And I'm not swimming if it's cold,' Manus said.

Cathal shook his head at Helen, signalling that he did not want to go down the cliff.

'You can come up with me,' she said, 'and sit in the car and read your comic'

'Can I sit at the steering wheel?' Manus asked.

'When you come back,' she said.

Helen and her grandmother waited for her mother to arrive while Cathal sat in the car reading his comic. When Hugh and Manus came back and her mother still had not arrived, she took the cold lunch she had brought from the car into the kitchen and they all sat around the table. Her grandmother had made soup and wanted to cook pork chops, but Helen insisted that they eat only the food she had brought. As she moved from the table to the dresser, she had a sudden memory of Declan being handed one of those willow-patterned plates with onions and carrots on it which he "would not eat. She almost wished now that her grandmother would produce some items that the boys did not eat \a151 cheese, for example, or cabbage \a151 to see their reaction. They would have responded with contempt, they would have refused even to look at the food.

They ate lunch and drank tea afterwards, all the time listening out for Lily's car. They talked about neighbours in Cush, Hugh cut a piece of cardboard for the broken window upstairs, Cathal read his comic and Manus tried to entice the cats from their lair. Helen made sure that there was never silence.

When she brought Cathal to the toilet, he asked if he could look around the house, and she told him he could. Downstairs, when she said to him that she and Declan had once slept in these rooms, he became interested. But when he asked her why they had slept here and not in their own house, she became vague. Cathal, however, persisted, and she told him that her father had died.

'And was your daddy old?' he asked.

'No, Cathal, he was young,' she said.

'And why did he die then?'

'That happens sometimes.'

'Is your mammy old?'

'She's older than me, but she's younger than Granny.'

'And she's not dead?'

'No, we're going to meet her.'

He pondered on what she had said, but he did not seem satisfied.

'Was Declan like Manus when he was small?'

'He was very like Manus,' Helen said.

'What does the image of your father mean?'

'It means you look like him.'

'But he's dead.'

'When he was alive.'

'Did they take photographs of him?'

Her mother did not arrive and the afternoon waned. Finally, they decided to leave. Hugh and Cathal and Manus went to the car.

'I'm nicely hoped up with you all,' Helen's grandmother said to her. 'That Lily is a law on to herself.'

'Tell her we came anyway,' Helen said.

'I'll clean her clock,' her grandmother said and turned towards the dresser, as if to look for something.

Now, for the first time there was silence. Her grandmother did not turn until Helen began to speak.

'We all have a lot to put up with, Helen,' her grandmother said, interrupting her.

Helen said nothing.

'What were you going to say?' her grandmother asked.

'I was going to thank you for the day, and say that you should come up to Dublin and see us.'

Her grandmother looked at her.

'After all those years I suppose it's nice to hear you saying that,' she said. Her tone was bitter, almost angry.

Helen smiled and turned and walked out of the house. In the car, as Hugh started the engine, she rolled down the window and they all waved at her grandmother and Hugh honked the horn as they set off for Dublin.

She waited until later that night, when she had drunk most of a bottle of red wine, to tell Hugh what her grandmother had said.

'We won't go near them for a good while so,' he said.

Now she was back under the same roof with them. She stood up from the bed and studied herself in the old mirror. She could see how tired her eyes looked. She sighed and opened the door and went back out to join her mother and her brother and his friend in their grandmother's house.

Later, as she sat in the kitchen, they heard another car in the lane. Mrs Devereux looked out through the curtains. 'Oh, here's another of them now,' she said.

'Who, Granny?' Helen asked.

'Look yourself,' she said.

Helen saw that it was Paul. He was carrying a suitcase. They watched him talking to Larry.

'Someone else deal with him,' her grandmother said.

Helen went to the door and brought Paul, followed by Larry, into the kitchen. She introduced him to her grandmother, who smiled at him warmly.

'It took me a bit longer than I thought,' he said. 'It's very hard to find this place. I had to ask at nearly every house.'

'Oh God Almighty, I'll have them all on top of me now,' her grandmother said. 'I'll have them in droves.'

'What do you mean, Granny?' Helen asked.

'The neighbours', she said, 'will smell the news.'

'How is he?' Paul asked.

'He's lying down,' Helen said.

'And he hasn't eaten since he came,' her grandmother said.

'No, his appetite can come and go,' Paul said. 'I brought him some clean clothes and there are drugs he needs and Complan.'

'Did you bring the Xanax?' Larry asked.

'I brought a packet of it. I used the old prescription.'

'What's Xanax?' Helen asked.

'It cheers him up a bit,' Larry said.

'Cheers him up,' her grandmother repeated. 'Maybe we should all have it.'

Helen's mother came into the room and examined them all disapprovingly.

'He wants a glass of milk and he shouldn't be left alone like that again, and he wants to know if his friends can stay in the spare room upstairs.'

'This new fellow'll have to bring his car in from the lane first, or it'll roll over the cliff,' her grandmother said.

'Paul,' Helen said. 'His name is Paul.'

'We'll have to get sheets and blankets for them,' her grandmother said. 'Are there any more coming?'

'A line of cars from Dublin,' Helen said.

'We should put a sign up saying we're open for business,' her grandmother said.

In the late afternoon when Larry and Paul were in the bedroom with Declan, and Helen was in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother, voices could be heard, and then a knock came at the kitchen door.

'Come in,' Helen's grandmother said.

Two middle-aged women, Madge and Essie Kehoe, clearly sisters by their looks and the way they dressed, entered the room and managed to take in everything even before they spoke.

'Dora, we were just passing and we saw all the cars and we were wondering were you all right.'

Helen watched her grandmother moving towards the kitchen door and closing it behind her two visitors. Tin as right as rain,' she said.

'You have plenty of visitors, Dora?' Madge asked.

'Just down for the day, Helen and her friends.'

'Her husband isn't down?'

'No, no, he's in Donegal.'

'And the boys?'

'In Donegal too.'

'Donegal,' Madge repeated.

Helen left the room and told her brother and his friends not to make a sound. She went upstairs and flushed the toilet noisily.

'We read all about you on the paper nearly every week, Lily,' Essie was saying as Helen came back into the room.

'Oh, Lily's a big shot now,' Madge said to nobody in particular. 'She's in the IDA.'

'Is the red car your car?' Essie asked Helen.

'That's right,' Helen said.

'But that's the car that stopped and asked us directions,' Madge said.

'No, the white car is Helen's,' Lily said firmly.

'And not the red car?'

'No.'

'Whose is the red car then?'

'They're friends of mine, they teach in my school, and they're staying in Curracloe. They've gone for a walk,' Helen said.

'Well, I hope it doesn't rain,' Madge said. They drank tea and looked around them. 'And will you be staying here tonight now?'

'I don't know,' Helen said.

'It's a while since you stayed the night here, Lily,' Essie said.

'I might well have passed up and down when you weren't looking, Essie,' Lily said.

'Oh, Madge would see you then,' her grandmother said coldly and stared towards the door.

'You haven't been down here since last year, have you, Helen?' Essie asked, ignoring the last remark.

'No.'

'And what do you think of the improvements she's made, Lily?' Madge asked, pointing to the radiators.

'Lovely, lovely,' Lily said.

When they had gone, Mrs Devereux put her finger to her lips and went to the window. 'Say nothing now! They're inspecting the cars!'

Helen and her mother went to the window.

'Stand back both of you!' her grandmother ordered. When the Kehoe sisters had finally disappeared, the three women began to laugh.

'I was in school with Essie,' Lily said. 'She was a right hunt.'

'If you'd known her mother, you'd know that she never could have been any other way,' Mrs Devereux said.

'How do you put up with them, Granny?' Helen asked.

'I don't put up with them, Helen,' her grandmother said. 'Did you not hear what I said to them? They'll be raging about that.'

'The oul' father, oul' Crutch Kehoe, used to beat them with nettles,' Lily said.

'Well, if that's all he did to them, they're not too bad,' Mrs Devereux said. 'They'll go off now and they'll fill whoever they meet with the news and gossip. The only lucky thing is they have no telephone.'

As Helen went down to Declan's room to tell the others what had happened, she heard them talking animatedly. It was Larry's voice she heard, telling a story, and the other two interrupting, laughing, egging him on. She left them there; she did not go into the room.

Her grandmother sat by the window. As the pale light from the sea faded and the shadows grew, Helen focused only on the old woman; she watched her white hair and her long thin face. When her grandmother spoke, the voice was sharp and determined.

'Oh, when I saw you getting out of the car,' she said to Paul, 'when I saw you, I said to myself- here's another of them now.'

'Granny, what do you mean?' Helen asked her.

'I think you know what I mean, Helen,' she said.

'She means homosexuals,' Paul said.

'Granny, you can't talk about people like that.'

'When I saw him getting out of the car' – the old woman spoke as though she were talking to herself, trying to remember something \a151 'it was the way he walked or turned and I wondered what sort of life he was going to have now, what sort of person he could be.' She raised her head and looked across the room at Helen.

'It's a difficult time for all of us,' Helen said.

'It's difficult for them, Helen, and it always will be.'

'I think she means homosexuals again,' Paul said.

'Well, I'm happy,' Larry said. 'I'm not happy being here now, but my life's happy.'

'It's a stupid word, "happy",' Paul said.

There was silence now. The four of them sat in the gloom as the lighthouse began to flash. Her grandmother looked out of the window as if she had heard a sound or someone approaching. Then she faced back into the room. 'I'm old and I can say what I like, Helen.'

Helen realised that she was still afraid of her grandmother, that she would not confront her or defy her. She stared at her across the room, knowing that the old woman could not see the resentment, the dislike. Her grandmother turned to Paul and Larry, her two visitors.

'Declan never told us anything about himself. We always thought that he had a great life in Dublin. No one knew he was sick and no one knew he was one of you.'

She said nothing for a while, but it was clear that she had merely stopped so that she could gather strength for what she was going to say next.

'But I knew something. I've known it for a year now and I never told anyone or said anything. Declan came down here last summer. He left his car way back somewhere so I heard no car, but for some reason I went out to the lane, and I looked down towards the cliff and I saw him coming towards me. He must have passed the house without calling in, or maybe he went down by Mike Redmond's and walked along the strand. And now he was coming towards me, but he didn't expect to see me, and I think he didn't want to see me, and I think that he would have passed by my house if I hadn't come out to the lane. I hadn't seen him since Christmas, and I don't think he had been down here for more than a year. And when he came towards me I could see that he had been crying and he was so thin and so strange, like as though he didn't want to see me. He was always so friendly, even when he was a little boy. And he tried to make up for it when he came into the house. He was all smiles and jokes, but I'll never forget seeing him. He had tea here, and both of us knew that there was something awful, something very wrong. I knew he was in trouble, but AIDS was the last thing I thought of, and I thought of everything.'

Helen held her breath in the semi-darkness as the lighthouse started up. She wondered why her grandmother had not told her this before.

'I knew Declan came down here,' Larry said. 'He used to drive out of Dublin on his own, usually to Wicklow, to the mountains; he would drive along those roads for miles. He drove to Wexford a few times, to his mother's house, but it was always late and he never went in. I think he hoped she'd find him there like you did. But he never saw her. And then he'd drive back to Dublin.'

'I knew something would happen and I waited for it,' Mrs Devereux said, as though she had not been listening.

Helen wanted her grandmother to stop talking. She directed a question at Larry and Paul. 'Do your folks know that you're gay?' she asked them.

'Tell her your story,' Paul said to Larry.

'I've told it too many times,' Larry said.

'Make him tell it,' Paul said to Helen.

'My grandmother would love to hear it,' Helen said. She knew that this was the nearest she could come to defiance. 'Come on, Larry,' she said. 'We're all full of curiosity.'

'All right,' Larry said. 'But if it gets boring stop me. After I qualified, I was involved in a gay group in Dublin, and we organised fund-raising and we started a news sheet, and we had meetings all the time. I helped out a bit, and I was around a lot, so the time Mary Robinson invited gay men and lesbians to Aras an Uachtarain, I was on the list and I couldn't say no. It was a big deal. We really enjoyed getting ready for it. I know it sounds stupid, but we thought that because the law still hadn't been changed it might just be a private visit. Anyway, all the newspapers were there, and radio and television. Mary Holland was there and a fellow from RTE, it wasn't Charlie Bird, I can't remember his name, but I realised that he was from the six o'clock news and they were going to film us all having tea with the President.'

'Oh she's very nice, Mary Robinson,' Mrs Devereux said, 'she's very refined. There aren't many like her.'

'Yes, we all loved her,' Larry continued, 'but this didn't help me. I still wondered if I could sneak out. I mean it. I actually wondered what would happen if I disappeared. I realised that I would never be able to face any of my friends again, but I thought that would be a small price to pay. I looked around and asked myself if maybe one other person felt like I did, but I think I was the only one who wanted to hide. We stood in a row to be photographed and filmed. Everybody smiled and was very relaxed. I think even I might have smiled. But I wasn't very relaxed. You see, no one at home knew. I had to go back to my flat and phone Paul here and borrow his car and drive down to Tullamore. I got there just before the six o'clock news. I knocked on the door and my mother answered; my father was in the hall. I had worked out what to say, but when I saw my mother it was no use, I couldn't say it. I just blurted out, "You're not to watch the six o'clock news," and I walked into the sitting-room and stood like an eejit in front of the television.'

'And what happened then?' Helen asked.

Larry sighed and stopped.

'Telling it is worse than when it happened.'

'Go on,' Paul said.

'Anyway, I was standing there and my mother kept asking me what the problem was, but I couldn't tell her. My father sat on the sofa looking at me like I was mad. I realised that maybe I could tell my mother, but I certainly couldn't tell him. So I said I needed to be on my own with my mother. My father said that he would go out but I told him not to. I was sure that he'd meet someone who would have seen me on the television. Or he'd go down to the pub and he'd see me himself.'

'Your son's a big girl,' Paul said.

'Shut up, Paul,' Larry said.

'So what happened?' Helen asked.

'He went into the kitchen, but I still couldn't say anything and suddenly my mother looked at me and said: "Are you after joining the IRA?" I couldn't believe it.

Can you imagine me in the IRA? I don't think there was anyone in Tullamore ever in the IRA. They're all too bloody boring. No, I said, no. And then I told her.'

'And what did she say?' Helen asked.

'She said that I would always be her son no matter what I did, but I was to get back into the car this minute and go back to Dublin and she would deal with my father and she would phone me later on. She couldn't wait to get me out of the house. She was all pale and worried-looking. I think she would have been happier if I had been in the IRA.'

'Oh come on,' Helen said, 'that's not true.'

'OK, that's not fair about the IRA,' Larry said. 'I think she was just shocked and surprised. You know, in my family my brothers and sisters \a151 even the married ones \a151 still haven't told my parents that they are heterosexual. We don't talk about sex. She was nice about it afterwards, and she still is OK about it, but my father just grunts at me in the same way as he did before. At least if I was in the IRA we would have something to talk about. It'd be more normal.'

'And are you and Paul partners?' Helen asked.

'Him? You must be joking,' Larry said.

'You'd want to be mad,' Paul said.

'What? To be with you, or to be with him?' Helen asked.

'With him,' Paul said. 'Or maybe with either of us.'

'So do you have a partner, Larry?' Helen asked.

'Tell them, Larry,' Paul said.

'I do, Helen,' Larry said, 'but I couldn't tell you about it.'

'Go on, Larry,' Paul said.

'I'm sure Mrs Devereux has heard enough,' Larry said.

'Oh, don't worry about me,' the old woman said. 'There's nothing would shock me. When you've gone through life like I have, there's very little you don't know.'

'Funny, it's easier to talk like this in the dark,' Larry said. 'It's like going to Confession, except there's no lighthouse in a confession box.'

'Come on, we're all waiting,' Paul said.

'We'll hear all about Paul later on,' Larry said.

'Tell the story,' Paul said.

'Stop me now if I go on too long,' Larry said. 'There's this big family a few doors down from us at home. There are five girls and four boys. My folks are friends with the parents. The parents are very religious – the father is in the Vincent de Paul and the mother is always saying Novenas. They're nice normal people. Their youngest son lives in Dublin. And I'm with him at the moment. That's been going on a few months. The only thing is that I've also been with the other three, I mean the other three sons. Two of them are married, but that doesn't seem to stop them. It's funny, they're all different. The youngest fellow is great.'

When he had finished speaking there was silence. Helen could see traces of light through the window, but the room was now entirely dark.

'They're a terrific family. It must be something in the genes,' Paul said after a few moments.

'It's in their genes all right,' Larry said. 'And in their Terylene trousers.'

'I've heard everything now,' the old woman said. Her voice was hard and it was louder than it needed to be, as though she were addressing some higher power. 'Four of them! They must be a right crowd.'

'My mother has enough to think about at the moment, I imagine,' Helen said.

'I told you that you wouldn't want to hear it, Mrs Devereux,' Larry said.

'Oh guard your heart, that's my advice to you, guard your heart and be careful of yourself

Just then the light was switched on and Helen's mother stood at the door. 'What are you all doing here in the dark?' she asked.

Helen blinked and covered her eyes against the harshness of the electric light. She wished her mother would turn it off again.

'Declan is after being sick, but it's not too bad,' her mother said. 'I've cleaned it up, it's all right, but I think he might go asleep now. I hope he will. I don't know what you were all doing in the dark.'

'We were talking, Lily, we were talking, and we didn't notice the night coming down,' the grandmother said.

'What were you saying when I came in the door?' Helen's mother asked.

'I was saying to the boys that this is a very hard time and it is nice to have their company,' the grandmother said. Helen watched her as she turned her face towards Larry as if daring him to contradict her. 'That's what I was telling them, Lily,' she said.

The old woman stood up then and looked out at the night. She pulled her chair back and began to draw the curtains slowly until Larry came over to help her. As he approached her, she raised her hand as though to hit him. He moved away from her, laughing.

They made up the beds for Larry and Paul in the small room upstairs while Lily took her leave of them, saying that she had not been able to sleep the previous night, making her mother promise that she would turn on the mobile phone. She said she would be back in the morning. Helen walked out to the car with her.

'I couldn't sleep the first night I came here either,' she said.

'If there is a problem, you will give me a ring, won't you?' her mother said.

'I found it very strange being back here after all this time,' Helen said.

Her mother started the ignition and began to reverse the car in the yard. Helen stood out of her way.

Later, when she returned from Blackwater, where she had phoned Hugh, she found Declan by the Aga in his pyjamas and slippers. Paul and Larry and her grandmother were sitting at the kitchen table looking at a full-page advertisement in the Wexford People for Lily's computer company.

'She's a big noise, your mother,' Paul said.

'Lily was always very independent-minded,' Helen's grandmother said. 'Even when she was a baby, if you picked her up to cuddle her or put her on your knee, she'd want to be let down to crawl around on her own, or walk when she was old enough. You could never tell her what to do. You couldn't even tell her to get up in the morning. She'd be up before you. She was always a great worker and she had great brains, she won a university scholarship. The nuns loved her. I took in bathers first so I could pay for her to go to FCJ in Bunclody, and, you know, she nearly became a nun.'

'I never knew that,' Helen said.

'Oh, the nuns loved her,' her grandmother went on, 'and when she was in her final year and we drove her back up after the Hallowe'en break, they called us in, and they had never looked up or down at us before, oh they were very grand, the nuns, a French order. And Mother Emmanuelle, the grandest of them all, told me that she believed Lily had a vocation. I smiled at her and said that would be the happiest thing for us. It was all smiles until I got out to the car and I said to your grandfather that I was going to pray to God to stop Lily entering the convent.'

'And did you not want her to be a nun?' Paul asked.

'Lily? Our beautiful daughter? Have all her hair cut off? And a veil and a draughty old convent and only doddery old nuns for company? I did not! And I lay awake every night thinking about how to stop her. I knew that we could say nothing to her, that talking to her would make no difference. Your grandfather, who was a very good man and is getting his reward in heaven, said that we should accept God's will, and I said that my not wanting her to be a nun could also be God's will.'

'Good man, Granny,' Declan said.

'So what did you do?' Helen asked.

Her grandmother looked at the floor and said nothing.

The others looked at her in silence, waiting for her to continue.

'I'll make tea,' she said. 'I'm talking too much.'

'No, you're not, you have to tell us,' Declan said.

'I'll make the tea,' Helen said.

'Well, I thought and I thought,' she said, licking her lips. 'And I knew that I had until the end of the Christmas holidays to stop it. And I thought about Lily. You know, when other girls were playing nurses, she had to be the best nurse, and when it came to dressmaking, she'd keep me up all night with patterns and material. She always did what everyone around her did, only more so. It was the same with her studies. She had to be the best and the most enthusiastic. She was with the nuns day and night, so, of course, she wanted to be one of them. And once all that struck me, then I knew what to do. It was just before we collected her for Christmas.'

'What did you do, Granny?' Helen asked as she filled the teapot.

'Lily needed to have her head turned, that was all. And my sister Statia was married to one of the Bolgers of Bree and she had five sons and no daughters, and they were the wildest young fellows in the county Wexford. They were nice and decent, mind, but Statia loved them all, and she was softer than I was, and she'd let them roam the countryside and have parties, when no one else was having parties, and go to dances in their father's car and not come home until dinnertime the next day. And they had cousins on the Bolger side who were nearly as bad. All they thought about were hurling matches and girls and dances. Three of the cousins were on the Wexford team.

'I went out to Bree. I left your grandfather in the car and I talked to Statia, and Statia understood, and even if she hadn't understood she would have done what I asked. And I asked her to take Lily for the time after Christmas and let her loose with the Bolgers. So we left her in there on St Stephen's Day. She was a bit surprised but she suspected nothing, and we didn't collect her until the day before she was due back in school. And Statia let her go to every dance and hop. She flew around the country in cars and vans, wearing clothes she borrowed from one of the Bolger cousins. She was as mad as a cat, Statia told me. She had them in stitches describing oul' farmers who came to the dances. She was the best dancer and she was a great goer. Her cousins knew everyone, and their cousins knew everyone else. Soon then Lily knew everyone too. It was the same as the nuns. She wanted to be one of them, except that now she wanted to be at the dance in Ballindaggin or the dance in Adamstown. When we didn't hear from her, we knew it was working.'

'Granny, were you not afraid that she'd get into trouble?' Declan asked.

'They were different times, Declan. Her cousins were looking out for her. And she wasn't the sort of girl you could take advantage of

'I'm sure she wasn't,' Helen said as she began to pour the tea.

'So she went back to the FCJ, and spent her time sneaking out letters to fellows with the day-girls and keeping the other girls up late on the dormitory. She must have studied as well, because she got her scholarship, but her head was turned and we were called in before we took her home for Easter, and we were told that she was becoming a bad example to the other girls, and she had changed completely. Oh, I said to Mother Emmanuelle, I said, we haven't noticed any change. It must be something in the convent, I said. Oh, she gave me a look, and I looked back at her. And she knew she'd met her match. And that's how we stopped Lily becoming a nun.'

'And wasn't that lucky for all of us?' Helen asked.

'It must have seemed like that at the time, anyway,' Declan said.