The Blackwater Lightship

CHAPTER SEVEN

That night before he went to sleep Declan asked them to put another bed in his room; Larry and Paul found a camp bed upstairs which they dismantled and took downstairs and put together again beside Declan's bed. Helen came in and sat on a chair and watched them as they made it up.

'Do you want me to sleep here?' she asked Declan.

'Maybe. I don't know. Sometimes I wake and it's not easy.'

'You can call me. I'm just in the next room.'

'They'd all wake, or you'd think there was something wrong.'

'No I wouldn't. Call me if you need company. Cathal and Manus wake me all the time.'

'Do they never wake their daddy?'

'Sometimes,' she said and smiled, 'but their daddy is a great sleeper.'

'Anyway, I'm going to take a Xanax tonight, so I'll probably be all right. If I'm not, Paul or Larry can sleep here.'

'Is Mammy smothering you with attention?' Helen asked.

'She's finding it all very tough. She's jealous that I didn't want to come to her house. She brought me there today to show me where she would have me sleeping and how much space there was for my friends. No mention of you. But it won't be long before she has a room for you, too. I have a new word to describe her which I picked up from Paul.'

'What's the word?' Helen asked.

'The word is "needy",' Declan said. 'She's needy and she never was that before. I mean she's become needy over the past year or so.'

'Earlier, when we walked on the strand,' Helen said, 'she was different, she was mellow and sort of sad, and I feel she's going to embrace me and all I can do is cringe, but otherwise she's been a complete bitch to Paul and Larry.'

'Yeah, they can't get over it. But Granny is making up for it, isn't she?'

'Granny', Helen said, 'is all charm.'

Larry woke Helen in the night to say that Declan needed company. For the length of a breath she could have been twenty years younger, moving hastily from her room to his. It was just a flash, but it was real and almost perfect; she was surprised at how little the memory disturbed her, how natural the connection seemed.

She put on a pullover and went and sat by Declan's bed.

'Now I feel I've woken the whole house,' he said. 'The Xanax has worn off. There's no point in trying another.'

Larry had been sleeping on the camp bed. Now he and Declan lay on their beds, each with his hands behind his head, while Helen sat on the edge of Declan's bed. They listened to the distant roar of the sea and the moths' brittle wings against the window-pane, but they said nothing. Helen was tired and she wondered what they would say if she said that she wanted to go back to sleep.

'I'd love to have a real house to go back to – you know, a house of my own,' Declan said. 'Somewhere bright and clean.'

'Even an apartment?' Helen asked.

'Even an apartment,' he said.

'Why don't we find you one next week?' she asked.

'No, I mean that was my own, that I had painted and furnished myself.'

'But we'll do that,' Helen said. 'We'll paint it and furnish it, and it will be all bright and clean.'

'Maybe,' Declan said. 'What do you think, Larry?'

'I'm all for it,' Larry said.

Helen made tea in the kitchen and was joined by Lily, who wanted to know if everything was all right. She gave her mother a mug of tea and told her that Declan was almost asleep and it would be a mistake for her to disturb him. When Helen had drunk her tea, she felt even more sleepy.

'I'm going to bed for a while,' she said. 'Wake me if you want me. I'll drive to Dublin and rent you an apartment and furnish it and decorate it, if you want, Declan. You should think about it.'

She did not wake until nine in the morning. She wished there was a back door to the house so that she could sneak out to the car and drive to Blackwater, make her phone call and buy the paper without having to consult anyone. Instead, she would have to go into the kitchen and brave them all. It struck her for a moment how simple Hugh and Cathal and Manus were compared to these people, how settled their relationships, how easy and modest their requirements. In the kitchen now, she was sure, as she got out of bed and went on tiptoe to the bathroom, warring factions were already at work, strange demands and alliances, energies that no one could understand. Soon she would leave, she thought, if only for a day or two, and once she began to imagine a possible escape she felt satisfied, more secure in her mind.

It was Saturday now. Declan was already up, sitting in the chair beside the Aga, taking his drugs. Larry was doing the dishes, the rest of them were sitting at the kitchen table.

'I'm going into the village to get the paper,' Helen said.

'We already have the paper, thank you,' her grandmother said.

'I have to phone Hugh.'

'You phoned Hugh last night,' her mother said.

'I'm going into the village,' Helen said firmly.

'Helen always does what she sets out to do,' her grandmother said.

'I'll come with you,' Larry said, his hands covered in suds.

'No, I'm going now and on my own and I won't be long,' Helen said. She closed the kitchen door behind her.

She knew that Declan had given up his flat in Dublin, but it had not occurred to her until now that this left him at everyone's mercy. Surely they could rent him a comfortable apartment somewhere in Dublin with a garden and large windows. She knew that it would be better if her mother thought of this and did all the organisation. When she went back, she would try to plant the idea in her mother's mind.

Hugh was still in bed when she rang, but the boys were up; she asked Hugh's mother if she could talk to them.

Cathal came first to the phone.

'How are you?' she asked.

'Fine,' he said quietly.

'You were in bed early last night,' she said.

'I think so.'

'Are you having a good time?'

'Yes.' He sounded subdued.

'Is your bed comfortable?' she asked.

'Yes.'

'I'll be up soon, so you'll be able to show me all the sights.'

'Do you want to talk to Manus? He's trying to grab the phone,' Cathal said.

'OK, and tell your father I rang.'

Manus came on the phone. 'We're going fishing,' he said.

'For what?' she asked.

'For all morning,' he replied.

'Is your daddy asleep?' she asked.

'He's not coming. Uncle Joe is coming.'

'Have you got a fishing rod?'

'We're allowed to use the ones here. But we have to go now.'

'You sound very busy,' she said.

'Will you ring again later?' he asked. He was trying to sound like an adult.

'Yes, I will.' She laughed. 'I'll ring again later.'

Manus put down the phone.

Helen bought the paper and sat in the car on the bridge reading the headlines, turning the pages. She looked through the section Apartments to Let, and realised that her mother would relish this work, dealing with landlords and leases.

Lily was in the lane when she returned. On seeing Helen she waved, as if to flag her down. Helen let the car roll down the hill towards her.

'Declan's gone blind in one eye,' her mother said.

Helen parked the car and went with her mother into the house. Declan was sitting exactly where he had been in the kitchen.

'What happened?' Helen asked.

'I felt over the past while that I was losing the sight in it, and now it's gone. It was always going to go, but the other one's fine, the other one's taken care of. I've explained it all.'

'Helen, tell him we should call the doctor,' her mother said.

'Declan, we should call the doctor,' Helen said.

'There's nothing the doctor can do,' Declan said. 'Ask Paul, he's the expert.'

'Paul isn't a doctor,' his mother said.

'He's read a big book and he knows all about the new therapies. Ask him,' Declan said.

Paul was sitting at the kitchen table.

'I have a few books out in the car. I'll show them to you if you want, but everything Declan is saying is true.'

'He's as calm,' his grandmother said. 'Look at him. I'd be tearing my hair out.'

'I've done all that,' Declan said. 'And I'm not calm. I only look calm.'

'There's a good eye man in Waterford,' his grandmother said.

'It's not the end of the world,' Declan said. 'I just have one eye, but I can see fine. Does the left one look a bit funny?'

'No, it looks perfectly normal,' Helen said.

'Yeah, well I'm going back to bed to sleep on it. If I lose my nose or my mouth or one of my toes, I'll let you all know.'

'Have you taken all your pills?' his mother asked.

He stopped and looked at her.

'You sound exactly like my mother,' he said.

'Is this serious?' Lily asked Paul when Declan had left the room.

'No, he's right about it, it's been coming for the last while. It's the end of something, rather than the beginning. They'll check the other eye more closely now, but they won't be able to do that until next week.'

'Should we not just let the doctor know?' Lily asked.

'On a Saturday morning? No, we should leave her alone.'

'Oh, I got a terrible fright when he said it,' his grandmother said. 'It's the one thing I dread. Your eyes are your most precious possessions. And Declan has the most beautiful eyes. His father, God rest him, had beautiful eyes as well. Lily used to go on and on to me about his eyes.'

'Declan's going to be buried with him now,' Lily said.

'I think Declan wants to be cremated,' Larry said.

'Oh, no one down here has ever been cremated,' Mrs Devereux said.

'Well, he says he wants to be cremated,' Larry said.

'No, he'll be buried like all the rest of them,' Mrs Devereux said. 'I wonder what put it into his head about cremation.'

No one spoke until there was the sound of a door banging upstairs.

'Oh God, listen to that! Oh God, listen!' Mrs Devereux said, standing up.

'What's wrong, Mammy? What's wrong?' Lily asked.

'You remember it well, Lily. My mother and my sister Statia were great believers in it. And that banging door just reminded me of it now. Two knocks would come to the door before someone in the family died. I heard it clearly the night before Statia died. And I woke your father and said we may get up now and drive into Bree because that's the sign for Statia. I got it for my mother, God rest her, we all got it.'

'Did you get it for my father?' Helen asked.

'No; I was just thinking, I didn't. Ah, it's part of the old ways, you'd hear no one talking about that any more, none of the neighbours. And there were other families like ours who had it too, a special warning that someone was dying. It was a gift, I suppose, but there's no one believes in it any more. It's died out.'

'But you did believe it?' Paul asked.

'I did believe it,' Mrs Devereux said. 'I do believe it. I know that I heard it when my mother was dying and I heard it when Statia was dying, but I haven't heard it since, I don't think. I don't know what it is about now, but whatever it is, something like that wouldn't have the same meaning. I don't know what it is.'

'And did you think the door banging upstairs was a sound like that?' Helen asked.

'It just reminded me of it, that's all,' Mrs Devereux said and walked over to the window and looked through the curtains.

Helen noticed her mother saying nothing, seeming disturbed. She wanted to ask her if she too had heard this sound in the past, but decided not to.

'One of the things about having children,' her mother said as though she had not been listening to them, as though involved instead in another conversation, 'is that you fear for them so much. I always felt with Declan that he wasn't able for things. He'd wake easily and cry easily and he was afraid of school and he got sick easily. And when I saw him going anywhere on his own, I always felt that he needed more strength than he had, or someone to watch out for him. The feeling never left me. Helen was always leading the other kids around. You never had to worry about her. But Declan, I've never stopped worrying about him.'

'He'll sleep for a while, Lily,' Mrs Devereux said. 'I don't think he slept very well last night.'

'Where does he stay in Dublin?' Helen asked.

'He stays with Larry, or with a friend of ours, Georgina, who has a big house,' Paul said.

'That's something we could do, isn't it, Mammy?' Helen said. 'We could find him his own place.'

Her mother nodded distractedly; clearly she wanted to talk more about Declan as a child or wanted to avoid talking about the warning knocks to the door when someone was dying. Helen knew that she had raised the subject at the wrong time, and now it would be hard to raise it again.

Declan slept for some of the morning and then woke complaining of a stomach pain. It had begun to drizzle outside as Helen and Larry changed the sheets and pillowcases for him; he sat and shivered in the chair in his room.

'Declan, if you want us to get you an apartment or a small house in Dublin, just say it, say it in front of Mammy, and we'll do it, we'll get it this week.'

'Thanks, Hellie,' Declan said. 'I'll think about it.'

He sank back into the bed and moaned. The bruise around his nose seemed to grow darker every day. 'Leave me,' he said. 'I'll try and sleep again.'

'No,' Helen said; 'you should try and stay awake so you can sleep tonight. Let us stay with you for a bit.'

'OK, bossy-boots,' he said, laughing, 'but I might sleep.'

Larry brought him the Irish Times and Declan leafed through it and then left it down. Larry sat at the bottom of the bed and told Declan and Helen all his plans for making the house more comfortable for their grandmother.

As the afternoon went on, Declan began to go to the toilet at fifteen-minute intervals and came back looking drained. He still had the pain in his stomach, he said. Helen and Larry sat with him while Paul hovered in the room outside. The older women stayed in the kitchen.

'It's a funny thing about the eye,' Declan said. 'It's a relief to have it all over. I used to see all sorts of floaters in front of it, but now I see nothing. That part is finished, anyway.'

The others nodded. It was hard to think what to say in response. After a while, Helen went into the kitchen and left Paul to take her place.

Her mother was in mid-sentence when Helen opened the door. She stopped, and put her cup down.

'Say it to her,' her grandmother said. 'Say it out.'

'Say what?' Helen asked.

'No, I was just saying, Helen,' her mother said, 'I would have loved a daughter who cared a lot about clothes and furnishings and colour schemes and all that. You know, when you came into my house the other day, I would have loved if you had made suggestions about colours or where to put things. I'd love if you had come into my bedroom and looked at my wardrobe and picked out some dress or suit that I never wear, or some jacket, and admired it.'

'It's a new daughter you need then,' Helen said. 'With all your money, why don't you buy one?'

'No, Helen, you're being too hard,' her grandmother said. 'She was just saying that you don't have a great interest in clothes.'

'I'd love if you were the sort of daughter who'd come down and see me and take an interest in my house and my garden and my clothes,' her mother said.

'Your house is very nice,' Helen said coldly.

'Declan loved my garden and was full of ideas yesterday as to how to improve it,' Lily said.

'It's a pity I'm not Declan,' Helen said.

'How is he?' her grandmother asked.

'He's starting to get bad diarrhoea,' Helen said.

'God, the poor man,' her grandmother said. 'You know we should kneel down now and say a decade of the Rosary for him.'

'You can leave me out of that, Granny, if you don't mind,' Helen said.

'I'll say the Rosary with you later, Mammy,' Lily said.

'Oh, I'll pray on my own. I don't know what's got into the two of you.'

'Mammy,' Helen said, 'I'd love if one of my sons was a really good musician \a151 his father would love it too, but they're not, neither of them, and we just have to live with them as they are. I suppose I wish one of them had been a girl, I'd like to have had a daughter, but I don't think about it. I wish you'd been satisfied with me at some stage, even though I'm not what you wanted. I wish you'd stop wishing I was someone else.'

'Helen, I've always accepted you,' her mother said.

'That's a lovely word for it, thanks,' Helen said.

'Helen and Lily, stop the two of you and make up,' Mrs Devereux said.

Later in the afternoon when Paul came into the kitchen, he looked worried.

'It's very difficult to get rid of diarrhoea once it starts,' he said. 'He's taken a few things to stop it, but they don't seem to be having an effect.'

'What should we do?' Helen asked.

'Hope it goes, but if it continues into tomorrow he'll have to go back to St James's.'

'Is it something he ate?' Mrs Devereux asked.

'No; he's had problems with his stomach for the last year,' Paul said. He went out and the three women sat at the kitchen table.

'He knows it all, that young man,' Lily said.

'I think he's been through a lot more with Declan than we have,' Helen said.

'I don't think there's ever any substitute for your own family,' Lily said.

Helen wondered if everything her mother said was designed to irritate and provoke her.

'Declan has been very lucky with his friends,' Helen said.

'And not so lucky with others,' Lily said.

'What do you mean?' Helen asked.

'Well, there must be people who led him astray. I wonder where they are now.'

'I don't think he needed much leading,' Helen said.

'When Declan left my house, he was a young man anyone would be proud of,' Lily said.

'He was also gay,' Helen said.

'The two of you will have to be separated,' Mrs Devereux said.

'But isn't it funny that his two friends are healthy and he's sick? It's easy for them being around him now,' Lily said.

'I don't know what you mean,' Helen said.

'Your grandmother told me that one of them gave a very vulgar account of himself. He's lucky I was in the other room. I would have run him out of here. And you all laughed and egged him on!' Lily said.

'Including Granny,' Helen said.

'Oh Helen, when I thought about it afterwards, I imagined your grandfather and things like that being said in this room,' her grandmother said.

Helen addressed her mother directly: 'It was funny, and you weren't here for it and you missed it and there's no point in making moralistic comments about it.'

'Listen to the teacher with her class,' Lily said.

'You'll just have to learn to tolerate people,' Helen said. 'And it seems really odd to me that you can talk about what sort of daughter you'd like to have had in front of me.'

'Would you rather that I did it behind your back?' her mother asked.

'Yes I would, actually,' Helen said.

'I just wish you'd take an interest in me and my life,' Lily said.

Helen noticed her mother's face changing, as it had done in the car the previous evening. Suddenly, she seemed vulnerable, desolate, as though she were waiting for the one remark to which she would have no reply. Her eyes were filling with tears.

'Mammy, I will do that,' Helen said. 'When all this is over, I will do that, but you'll have to stop wishing I was somebody else.'

'And I'd love to meet your children and Hugh,' her mother said.

'The younger one is a little terror,' her grandmother said.

'I'm sure they'd love you, Mammy,' Helen said.

'Oh would they, Helen? I don't think they would.' Lily began to cry. Mrs Devereux came and put her arm around her shoulder.

'I'm sure they would, Mammy,' Helen said again.

Lily wiped her eyes and took out a mirror and began to reapply her eye make-up. Helen could see that she was getting ready to say something else. 'The fact that you didn't ask us to your wedding', Lily began again, 'is not nothing, not just something we missed for a few hours one day. We never saw you smiling and happy, having something you wanted, being with someone who loved you and who you loved. We never even saw photographs of it, if there were any photographs. And we never saw you with your babies. We missed all of that.'

The crying and the sympathy, Helen saw, had given her mother strength and courage. She spoke as though she believed that no one would contradict her, or reply to her. Helen sat back and smiled before she spoke.

'I didn't want you at my wedding. It was important for me that you would not sponsor me, or take credit for me, when it had nothing to do with you. You had all my life to see me smiling and happy, and since you took no notice of me in private, I wasn't going to have you make a big play of me in public. But I do agree with you that it's not nothing.'

'You've said enough to each other now,' Mrs Devereux said. 'Helen, I've never known a child who was as loved as you were by both your father and your mother, who was brought everywhere and given everything. They would come down here on a Sunday and their biggest boast would be that you had walked two steps, or said a word, or grown your teeth. I've never known a child who got as much attention as you.'

'Sorry, Granny. I know Declan's sick and it sounds petulant and spoiled to be complaining.'

'What are you complaining about?' her mother asked.

'I'm complaining that you don't love me the way I am, you want me to change. I'm complaining, actually, that you don't like me.'

'Helen, do you think if you had a problem that I would not drop everything to help you, to come to your assistance?'

'But that's not what I want from you. You've just invented a person in extreme need. I'm not that person, stop inventing me and projecting things on to me.'

'You're a very cold person, Helen,' her mother said.

'You can say anything about me and it will sound true,' Helen said.

'You know, after your father died, I could never get you close to me. I came home, and I noticed it first at the funeral that you wouldn't meet my eyes. When we settled back in together, the three of us, you were distant, you gave me no affection, you never told me anything and you brought no friends home, there were no girls whispering or watching television together. It was you studying, or going to bed on time, or moving around the house like a ghost passing judgement on us all.' Her mother's eyes were sharp; her voice was full of contempt.

'I never understood,' Helen said, 'how you could leave us down here for so long without visiting us when my father was sick.'

'Is there a need to rake over everything?' her grandmother asked.

'You don't know what happened to your father,' Lily said, 'how afraid he was, and how lonely and upset he was in the hospital even though I was there every day. I had no choice. Is that what's been eating away at you all these years?'

'Declan and I felt abandoned then, even though Granny and Grandad were nice to us, we felt abandoned, yes, if that's what you want to know. Yes, and I suppose it's true that it has been eating away at me all these years, as you put it. I'm the one who took it to heart.' Helen was almost crying now.

'And carried it with you,' her mother added.

'I've never trusted you again, that's all. And it's not true to say that I was distant and you couldn't get through to me. You were never on my side.'

'I did what I could for you,' her mother said, 'and you never gave me an inch. Even I remember when your exam results came in, you just looked at them, you wouldn't even smile. But that's all long past now. I'd love to see you in your own house, to see if you're any different there.'

'I remember one of those summers,' Helen said, 'after I finished my degree and I was alone in that flat in Baggot Street. I had bought a book on cookery, and there was a brilliant vegetable shop around the corner just beside the Pembroke, everything fresh, and herbs and spices and even vegetables I'd never seen before. I used to go in there and over to Stephen's Green, and I'd wake in the morning with the whole day to myself, to walk around in the sun, cook something, read the paper, read a book. I loved the area, the freedom, the quietness, and I thought to myself, If nothing ever happens to me like marriage or friendships, I'll have achieved this. I'll have got away. And I still feel that, and there's no point in saying I don't. I feel I got away.'

'From what?' her mother asked.

'From you.'

'What did I do to you?' her mother asked.

'I don't know, but as you yourself put it about the wedding, it was not nothing.'

'So why do you want your children to see me?'

'Because we can't go on like this.'

Helen went to the window.

Earlier her grandmother had made sandwiches, which were now piled up on a plate. She went towards Declan's room to announce that sandwiches and soup were ready.

Declan wanted two people to have their soup and sandwiches in his room. He did not "want to be left alone. Helen and Larry joined him.

'I've just been fighting with Mammy,' Helen said.

'One of the things I've noticed about the women in your family,' Larry said, 'is that they talk like they run things.'

'They do run things,' Declan said. 'But you've never seen them with men. I mean real men, not wimps like us. When real men are around, they shut up and make tea.'

'That is pure nonsense,' Helen said, laughing. 'Mammy has never once shut up in her whole life and when Granny makes tea it's a form of power play.'

As Declan went to the toilet, he told them to say nothing until he came back. He did not want to miss anything. Larry and Helen ate in silence.

When Declan came back, Larry resumed. 'I mean that even if there were men around, I bet that wouldn't change them very much. They'd still go on the same way.'

'Fighting with each other,' Declan said. 'What were you fighting about?'

'We were fighting about why she wasn't invited to my wedding.'

'Oh yeah, I've heard that one before all right,' Declan said.

'Your granny says that the two of you are exactly alike,' Larry said.

'That's all rubbish,' Helen said. 'I'm not like her at all.'

In the hour Helen and Larry sat in the room with Declan, he went to the toilet five or six times and came back each time looking exhausted and dispirited, curling up in the bed and closing his eyes. The morning's drizzle had cleared up now, although the ground was still wet. When she touched Declan, Helen knew that he had a temperature. The room, she thought, was too hot, the atmosphere too stuffy. She opened the window.

In the kitchen she told Paul that Declan was getting sicker.

'At some stage,' Paul said, 'he'll have to go back to the hospital, but nothing happens in hospitals at weekends, so there's no real point in him going back until Monday.'

Helen looked at her mother, who looked away. She realised that her mother was not speaking to her.

Helen told them that she was going to walk alone to Ballyconnigar along the strand and then take the road to Blackwater, where she wanted Paul to collect her in an hour and a half. She went to her room to change her shoes and put on a pullover.

'Maybe you'll think about some of the things I said to you,' her mother said when she came back into the kitchen.

Helen left without replying.

As she made her way down the rain-soaked edge of the cliff, she realised that at some point in the afternoon the opportunity had come and passed for her to put her arms around her mother, cry alongside her, forgive her everything, and promise to start a new relationship. She shuddered. Most people, she thought, would have been tempted, and would regret not having gone some way towards an enormous reconciliation. She shuddered again at the thought as she stepped on to the damp sand.

In all the talk about the past, there was one scene especially which haunted her, which remained strangely beyond her understanding. She could not tell her mother how that day when she came from Dublin with her husband's body, and Helen met her in the foreground of the cathedral for the first time in months, her mother had seemed regal, remote, the last person a little girl would want to hug or seek comfort from. She watched her mother that evening as much as she watched the congregation or the coffin. She seemed totally transformed. Helen knew as she knelt there why Declan had been kept away; her mother could not have maintained this stance, this proud, public bearing, with a small boy clinging to her. An older girl could be kept at bay much more easily. Her granny could look after her, or her father's sisters.

Helen remembered that the house that night was filled with people, with cups of tea and sandwiches being passed around, and more people arriving. She stayed close to her grandmother, and made sure that she and no one else was sleeping in her own bedroom. What she hated more than anything else was the familiarity people had with her; strangers knew her name, and, because her father had just died, impressed the idea on her that they were full of sympathy for her. They pointed at her and introduced her to people, and she wished, as soon as they arrived, that they would all go. Her mother held court.

Those days after her father's death were dream-days, as though captured on badly processed film. And all the time, as her father's body spent its first long days in the grave away from everyone who had loved him, her mother was at the centre of the strangeness, utterly placid, beautifully dressed, receiving people, talking calmly. Her daughter watched her from, the bottom of the stairs, or caught a glimpse of her each time a door opened, thinking sullenly: When all these people go, you will just have me, but you don't know that yet. And after a week or two, but especially when school term began, that was how it worked out. On nights when they did not go to Cush, and Declan went to bed, Helen sat by the fire relaxing, watching something on television in the half-hour before going upstairs. Her mother sat opposite her with no idea how to talk to her, how to treat her, none of the cosy companionship Helen had built up with her grandmother. Helen did nothing to help her; she turned the television off and stared into the fire and stretched. Without even trying, she was creating a barrier which would be hard now to break. Her mother smiled at her, asked if she was tired, and Helen nodded and packed her books for the next day, and yawned and went to her room, to her own realm, where she lay in bed and thought about the uneasy presence down below. Even then, she "was dreaming about getting away.

She walked close to where the waves broke and withdrew and broke again. There was no one else on the strand. She wondered where the small stones came from that studded the shore between here and Ballyconnigar. Did they come from the land or the sea? Did they remain deeply embedded in the mud and marl that made up the face of the cliff? And then when the slice of cliff or big boulder of cliff fell, did the sea wash them clean and deposit them here?

She listened as a wave knocked them against each other like chattering teeth, and then retreated. In the time when they had come here after her father died, when all the funeral crowds and sandwich eaters had gone, and there was just Lily and Helen and Declan and their grandparents, Lily would sit at her mother's kitchen table and innocently talk without stopping: all her woes, all her hopes would spill out. Helen could not listen to her; she had vivid memories of corning down here to this strand with the landscape slowly being eaten away and willing the sea to come more quickly towards them, taking the house and the fields, removing all trace of where her grandparents had lived. She imagined the sea, angry and inexorable, moving slowly towards the town, everything dissolving, slowly disappearing, the dead being washed out of their graves, houses crumbling and falling, cars being dragged out into the unruly ocean until there was nothing any more but this vast chaos.

She pictured her mother now, sitting at the kitchen table having more tea made for her. At some stage when she was a little girl, Helen thought, Lily had worked out a way of doing whatever pleased her, of liking and disliking people and things at will, and of always being supported. For years no one had argued with her, or asked her to stop, and for three days now she had been openly rude to Paul and Larry, clearly hostile to them. The first thing she would do when she got back, Helen thought, would be to shake her mother, force her to be polite to Paul and Larry, treat them like friends of Declan's who had been there for him when no one else was. But thinking about changing Lily was stupid, Helen knew; no amount of shouting or shaming would make any difference. Her mother was best left alone, tolerated and kept at bay, because nothing now would change her or improve her. It was too late.

Helen inspected the ruins of the Keatings' house. She stopped once more to look at the shreds of wallpaper and the floorboards and the half-rooms open to the wind and the sea. She wished that she could pray now for something – for Declan to be better, or for Declan not to be worse. But she realised as she walked through the car park and then up through the fields that she could not pray. She could only wish; and she fervently wished that what was coming could be delayed or stopped as she made her way along the road into the village.

It struck her as she walked along – still brooding over her mother \a151 that the view of Lily she had been offered during the previous four or five days confirmed all her prejudices. It was that hopeless mixture of looking for sympathy and demanding attention; it was the ability to turn hot and cold, swamp you with affection and then turn her back because she was busy. As Helen passed the limekiln she could picture her mother's head over the crowd at the funeral, and she pictured her again now as she sat at the table in Cush, and Helen saw in both versions of her mother's face a desolation and a helplessness, and, more than anything, a fear that would never leave her now.

Helen realised that she would never in her life experience that fear and desolation and helplessness she had seen in her mother's face. Some time in the year around her father's death, she had trained herself to be equal to things, whatever they would be. And this was what she was now resisting, something she had killed in herself, which in her mother was coming to the fore again, unadulterated and unashamed. All those early raw emotions which Helen had watched her mother direct at everyone but her, emotions which were flaunted in public and hardly used in private, these were now back at the kitchen table in Cush. And she was being asked to become friends with their owner.

Hugh would smile and say that she was taking things too hard. It would all mend, that was his view. He wanted her to see her mother and grandmother, but he would not accept that this would mean yielding something in her own nature. 'Talk to her, that's all you can do,' he said.

They had been married for more than a year when Hugh's father died. Helen had loved her father-in-law in the short time she had known him, and deeply regretted – she was pregnant with Cathal then \a151 that her children would not know him. He had been a big, smiling, friendly man and he lay in an open coffin in the hallway of the house. The expression on his face was mild and satisfied. Helen's mother-in-law sat close to the coffin, turning sometimes to look at him, or touch his face, as though to admire it or make sure that no great change was coming over it. And Hugh's brothers and sisters wandered in and out of the hallway, stopping for a while to touch the coffin or touch their father's hand. All of them cried at various times, and all of them took turns to sit by the coffin while their father's body lay there, lit only by candles, his skin waxen in the flickering light, his presence increasingly shadowy and distant.

No one in Hugh's family watched things as Helen did. She looked out for a niece or nephew or cousin or aunt or brother or sister who watched everything, who took everything in as though it were not happening to them. But there was no one like that except Helen herself at this funeral; they were all involved in being themselves, and this surprised her and impressed her. She wished she had been like that at her father's funeral instead of watching everybody, instead of observing her mother as though she were someone she had never seen before. And she "wondered, as she passed the ball-alley on her way into Blackwater, how different she would be now if she had spent those days after her father died openly grieving for him. Would she be happier now?

In the village she found Paul outside Etchingham's pub. He was agitated.

'I thought I should phone the hospital,' he said, 'but there was no one there I could talk to, so I phoned Louise at home, but she's out. They're expecting her back any minute but not for long, so I've got to keep trying. Your grandmother is going to have to get her mobile phone working, if only just for one or two nights.'

'Is Declan really sick?' Helen asked.

'If he's like this so early in the evening, there are real possibilities for serious diarrhoea and high temperatures and headaches in the middle of the night.'

'Does he have a headache?'

'He's beginning one.'

'And what's his temperature?'

'At the moment it's a hundred and two, which is very high for so early in the evening, and he could be dehydrated too.'

'And what could they do?'

'If the headache got worse, there's a slow-release morphine they could use, and there's an injection they could give him, but you'd need a doctor to write the prescription or give the injection.'

'You sound like a doctor,' Helen said.

'I've been through this with Declan a good few times, and I know Louise,' Paul said.

After a while he got through to Louise. Helen watched him talking to her, knitting his brow and listening and then talking again. He hung up. 'She'll be back at ten o'clock,' he said, 'so if things are worse we're to phone again. We're to keep him cool. She's worried about the diarrhoea and she knows how bad the headaches have been in the past. So we'll call her at ten if we need to.'

They drove back to Cush in silence. As soon as they came into the house, they could hear voices in Declan's room. Paul walked past Helen, sensing that something was wrong.

'It's all right. It's nothing,' Declan was saying as his mother and grandmother stood over the bed.

'He's had a bit of an accident,' Larry said, having signalled Paul to leave the room with him. 'I think there's diarrhoea all over the bed and vomit as well.'

Paul went back into the bedroom. 'It would be better if everyone left the room,' he said. He turned to Mrs Devereux. 'Could you get fresh sheets?' he asked her. He turned to Lily then and asked her to switch on the shower and make sure that it was hot enough. He asked Larry to get a basin of water and some soap. His tone was brusque, almost bossy. 'Could we clear the room? It needs to be much less stuffy in here.'

When Lily did not move, he gestured to her to leave. 'It really would be better if we had some privacy in here,' he said.

'Could I talk to you outside?' she asked.

Helen followed them both to the kitchen.

'Could we talk afterwards?' Paul asked.

'Don't you dare speak to me in that tone!' Lily shouted.

'We'll talk afterwards,' Paul said calmly. 'I have a job to do.'

He went back to Declan's room, where Larry was waiting for him with a basin of water. Mrs Devereux had already brought the fresh sheets. Larry went upstairs to run the shower. Helen stood in the kitchen looking out of the window.

'I don't know who he thinks he is,' her mother said.

Helen sighed.

Her grandmother came into the room and sat down. 'We put all the sheets into a bucket outside. Paul said he'll wash them once they've soaked for a while. Isn't he very good?'

Helen felt that her grandmother was deliberately provoking her mother.

'We could easily put them in the boot of my car and I'll stick them in the washing machine when I go home,' Lily said.

'Well, it's a pity you're saying that now rather than doing it at the time,' Mrs Devereux said.

Helen watched her mother bristle quietly at the table as Paul came into the room.

'His headache is getting worse,' Paul said. 'Also, he needs to drink a lot if he doesn't want to become dehydrated. I should have got him 7-Up when I was in the village.'

'How dare you speak to me the way you spoke to me in there!' Lily stood up and faced him. 'I don't know what you think your place is here.'

'Look,' Paul said, 'I knew as soon as I came in that Declan felt humiliated and I decided that he needed privacy and I didn't notice him saying that he wanted you all back in when you left.'

'As far as we are concerned you have no business here,' Lily said.

Helen sought to interrupt her, but Lily continued. 'Maybe it's time you and your friend thought of taking yourselves out of here.'

'Like now, immediately?' Paul asked patiently. 'Just because you want us to?'

'As soon as you can, yes,' Lily said.

'And just because you want us to?' Paul asked again.

'Well, I do live here,' Lily said.

'No you don't,' Helen interrupted.

'It is my mother's house,' Lily said.

'Declan asked Larry and myself to come down here,' Paul said. 'We have, Larry more than me, the two of us have been looking after him during very difficult times when I didn't notice his family around.'

'We weren't around because we were told nothing,' Lily said.

'I wonder why you were told nothing. Maybe you could ponder that, instead of getting in the way and making pointless arguments,' Paul said.

Helen felt that he had gone too far, but he remained placid and in control, weighing each word he said.

'I wasn't in the way,' Lily said.

'Well, it looked like that to me,' Paul replied.

'I'm his mother!' Lily shouted.

Paul shrugged. 'He's an adult and he has got a bad headache and he needs a drink and there's no room for this sort of hysteria.'

'So are you going to leave?' Lily asked.

'Listen, Mrs Breen,' Paul said, 'I'm here as long as Declan is here and you can take that as written in stone, and I'm here because he asked me to be here, and when he asked me to be here he used words and phrases and sentences about you which were not edifying and which I "will not repeat. He is also concerned about you and loves you and wants your approval. He is also very sick. So stop feeling sorry for yourself, Mrs Breen. Declan stays here, I stay here, Larry stays here. One of us goes, we all go, and if you don't believe me, ask Declan.'

'What do you mean, "not edifying"?' Lily asked.

'He's nearly thirty years old and he's afraid to tell you things, for God's sake,' Paul said. 'I haven't time for this. Larry, could the mobile phone be got working, could the battery be recharged?'

Lily began to cry and "went upstairs. Helen left the room and went and sat on Declan's bed.

'What happened?' Declan asked.

'Mammy had a row with Paul,' Helen said.

'She shouldn't have done that. He always wins rows, he always knows what you're going to say next,' Declan said. He put his hands over his eyes and winced. 'The pain comes in waves,' he said and got out of bed again to go to the toilet. 'I'm feeling really sick again.'

Helen met her grandmother at the foot of the stairs.

'That was a bit rough,' Helen said.

'Oh, she's all right,' her grandmother said. 'She'll cry it but of herself. She can put people out of her nice house in Wexford if she likes, but she can't put people out of here. They'll go in their own good time.'

They went back to the kitchen, where Larry was trying to recharge the mobile phone.

'Sorry, everybody, if I sounded offensive,' Paul said.

'You'd feel sorry for poor Lily,' Mrs Devereux said, 'putting her big foot in it without a leg to stand on, as the fellow in Ballyvalden used to say.'

'Does anyone have a screwdriver or a pen-knife?' Larry asked. 'I need to check this plug.'

'I have a knife here.' Mrs Devereux reached into her apron pocket.

'Granny, that's a flick-knife!' Helen said.

Mrs Devereux pressed the switch and the blade flicked open. It looked dangerous. She handed it to Larry.

'Granny, why do you have a flick-knife?' Helen asked her.

'Helen, I don't know if you saw all the programmes about old people being attacked, old people living alone. Oh, it was all they talked about around here; the Kehoes nearly built a moat around their house and the guards in Blackwater were nearly driven out of their minds by the strange sightings. People kept asking me how I was managing. I had no peace and, as you can imagine, Lily was out here day and night with brochures about alarm systems. It was madness. But I'd seen this thing' \a151 she pointed to the flick-knife – 'on the television and it seemed even better than a gun. So I went into Wexford and I asked Mr Parle in Parle's Hardware and he said he didn't stock them, they were too dangerous, and no one in Wexford would stock them. So I explained what I wanted it for. I think he thought I wanted it as a present for a grandson or a nephew. But when I told him he brightened up no end and said he would order one for me, and we talked about shapes and sizes. He said I was quite right to take the law into my own hands. He seemed to know all about flick-knives. And a few weeks later I went into Parle's and there it was, new and shiny.'

'But, Granny,' Helen asked, 'can you use it?'

'Use it, Helen? You just press the switch.'

'And what would you do if an intruder came into the house?' Helen asked.

'I'd stab them, Helen. I'd disfigure them,' her grandmother said.

'God, you sound as though you mean business,' Larry said.

'You're a lesson to us all, Mrs Devereux,' Paul said. 'I'm glad I didn't try and break in here.'

'Does Declan know about the flick-knife?' Larry asked.

'No,' Mrs Devereux said.

'I must go and tell him. This battery should be recharged in about half an hour,' Larry said.

Larry bumped into Lily at the door. She addressed Paul across the room.

'Declan says you're his best friend and I mustn't be rude to you, so I agreed to do what he says.'

'Actually, I'm his best friend,' Larry said.

'Actually, you're just a young pup,' Mrs Devereux said, smiling at him.

'It's OK, I understand. I'm sorry too,' Paul said to Lily.

'Declan's getting sick into the basin all the time,' Lily said. 'He says the headache is getting worse, and he's back in the bathroom again now.'

'What time is it?' Paul asked.

'It's nine o'clock,' Helen said.

'We'll try Louise on the mobile at ten,' Paul said.

While they had dinner each of them took it in turn to stay with Declan. He spent most of the time going to and from the bathroom.

At a quarter to ten Paul established that the mobile phone was working. He asked Mrs Devereux for the name and number of her doctor in Blackwater so that Louise could phone him if she needed to.

'I'll have to draw the line now,' Mrs Devereux said. 'I've been going to old Doctor French for years and I go to his son as well now that he's home, and they know more about me than I do myself, and they're as nosy, God bless the two of them, as the two Kehoes. And I don't want them to know anything more about me.'

'That's fine,' Paul said, 'except you don't have a phone book or a Yellow Pages so we can find some other doctor.'

He rang Directory Enquiries and found the number of the Garda station in Kilmuckridge, the village north of Blackwater; the guard gave him the number of two general practitioners, including the doctor on duty that night.

'You are the essence of efficiency,' Helen said to him.

He rang Louise, and left a message for her to call the mobile number when she returned. As Mrs Devereux poured tea for everyone, Helen noticed that her mother was trying to smile at Paul.

With the first sharp ring of the mobile phone, the two cats sprang from their perch, bringing with them plates and bowls from the upper shelves of the dresser which crashed to the floor and broke into small pieces; the cats leaped across the room and escaped in a flash through the kitchen door as Mrs Devereux screamed at them. 'The whole house will be destroyed,' she said.

Lily tried to calm her down while Paul took the phone into the hallway. Helen began to pick up pieces of crockery and delph.

'The cats have such a quiet life normally,' Mrs Devereux said when Lily had forced her to sit down. 'It must have been the last straw. It was the same when I bought the electric mixer. Six feet into the air they went, the two of them, but they broke nothing that time. They wouldn't come back into the house for two days.'

When they had picked up and swept away most of the shards which lay all over the kitchen floor, Paul came in to say that a Doctor Kirwan from Kilmuckridge was going to visit, that Louise had spoken to him, he would know exactly what to do, and someone would have to go to Wexford, to the chemist shop which was on all-night duty, to get the slow-release morphine for Declan.

When Larry came back from Declan's bedroom Paul told him what had happened.

'I got one of those plates as part of a dinner service as a wedding present, nearly sixty years ago,' Mrs Devereux said.

'They're a bad business, cats,' Larry said. 'We'll drown them if we find them.'

'A little pup, that's the best description of you all day,' Mrs Devereux said.

'Sure you couldn't have two cats up on a dresser like that,' Larry said. 'They'd be bound to knock everything over at some stage.'

'I'd say they take a very dim view of you lot,' Mrs Devereux said. 'And if that terrible handphone goes off again, I don't know what will happen.'

'Two scalded cats, Garret and Charlie,' Larry said. 'I'm raging I missed it.'

When the doctor came, Declan was in the bathroom. He walked downstairs slowly, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. He seemed to Helen almost impossibly thin. The doctor went into the bedroom with him; the rest of them stayed in the dining-room and kitchen. Helen saw that her mother had changed her clothes. When her grandmother did not come to the front door to greet the doctor, but waited nervously in the kitchen, Helen realised that she did not want the doctor to see her or recognise her.

Having finished with Declan, the doctor stood at the dining-room table and wrote a prescription. Helen noticed that his hair, which hung in loose strands around his head, had been badly cut. It was as though someone had put a bowl around his head and then applied a pair of scissors. She spotted Paul watching it as well.

'I've given him an injection -which -will control his bowels for a while. He needs to drink a lot of liquid. This prescription is for the morphine. I'll phone the chemist when I get back, and he'll have it ready for you. He's on the quays in Wexford town, close to the Bank of Ireland.

'This is a very remote place,' he said as Lily paid him.

'It's very good of you to come,' she said.

As soon as the doctor started up the car, Larry and Paul went into Declan's room to talk about his hair.

'You'd think with the amount of money he makes he'd get a proper haircut,' Larry said. 'If I went around like that, people would laugh at me, but just because he's a doctor he gets away with it.'

Mrs Devereux came into the bedroom.

T knew his father, old Bree2y Kirwan,' she said. 'He's very nice. His mother is very nice too, she was a Gethings from Oulart. I didn't know he was home.'

'Is his father's hair like that too?' Larry asked. He gave Mrs Devereux a description of the doctor's hair.

'Oh stop now about his hair. I'm sure he's saving up to get married, giving good example, which is more than I can say for some.'

Declan was quiet now. Larry and Paul drove into Wexford to get the pills for him. Mrs Devereux stood in front of the house, caning the cats in whispers. And Lily and Helen sat in the bedroom, Lily holding a packet of frozen peas on Declan's forehead. 'This will keep the pain down for a while,' she said. She fixed his pillow and pushed his hair back.

Helen was uncomfortable in the room; her mother was still not talking to her. She began to speak to Declan as though Helen were not there.

'Helen says that I abandoned you and her when your father was sick.' Lily's voice was gentle and soft as she spoke, as if they were children still and she was telling them a comforting story before they went to sleep. 'I wrote all the time,' she went on, 'and your granny assured me that if I visited it would just unsettle you, that you were happy here, and it would be better if there were no interruptions to your routine, that she would have to get you settled all over again if I came. So that's why I never visited. You can ask her and she'll tell you. I wanted to come down and your father wanted me to come down, even if just for a day, but your granny said it would be too much for you, me arriving and then going away again. It would be too emotional.'

Lily was almost crying now, but Helen saw that Declan was watching her and his eyes were hard. She wondered if he believed his mother. Helen did not.

'Why did you leave me in Byrnes' house for the funeral and never see me?' Declan asked.

'That was everyone's advice at the time; they all said that you were too young to take in your father's death, and you'd be too young to see the coffin and the grave. And Declan, I would have broken into pieces if I'd seen you in those days, I would have broken into pieces.' She was crying now as Declan softened and held her hand. 'I couldn't have done anything else, Declan and Helen,' Lily said. Her crying had become louder.

Helen did not notice her grandmother coming into the room. By the time she saw her she was already holding Lily, rocking her back and forth.

'It's a vale of tears, Lily,' she whispered to her. 'It's a vale of tears, and there's nothing we can do.'

The pills had no immediate effect. Between one and two in the morning Declan's pain became almost unbearable. Helen and Lily and Paul and Larry took turns sitting with him in the dark, but they could not touch him or speak to him.

After three o'clock his pain began to ease. He took a sleeping pill and a Xanax and said he would sleep until the morning now if he was lucky.

When Helen went to bed, she thought about Hugh and the boys and the words of reassurance which had come from Donegal. Cathal and Manus were all right; they did not notice her absence, they were having a good time. How would she know, she wondered as she lay there, if one or both of them was miserable and missed her, but learned to mask it and disguise it, and did not complain? Manus would know how to complain, but Cathal would not. He would say nothing, as he had said nothing on the phone that morning. She thought about Hugh and how easygoing and dependable he was, and how much she loved him and the boys loved him. For a moment, as she lay there in the night, she felt the glow of his love, and felt reassured that nothing that had happened to her was being passed on to her children. She resolved to think harder and pay more attention so that Cathal and Manus could feel secure in the world and feel none of the currents which went through her grandmother's house now every moment of the day. As she turned and tried to sleep, however, she knew that anyone who was close to her must have learned long ago to live with and manage this web of unresolved connections. She clenched her fists and swore that she would do her best to protect them.