The Heather Blazing (2 page)

He realized as he wrote the judgment what it meant: the hospital would be able to discharge the child, and the parents would be left with the responsibility of looking after a handicapped son. He added the proviso to his judgment that the Health Board should ensure, in every possible way, that the child's welfare be secured once he was discharged from the hospital. He noted the state's account of the social services which the parents would have available to them, and he said that his judgment was provisional upon those services remaining at the parents' disposal.

When he finished the judgment he saw that counsel for the state and for the hospital were already on their feet, looking for costs. He consulted with counsel for the plaintiff who said that he wanted the court to make no order regarding costs. He caught the mother's eye, he remembered her giving evidence. She would have little chance if she appealed to the Supreme Court, he felt. He decided to put a stay on costs, and he told the lawyers that he would consider the matter in the new term. One of the laywers for the hospital said that his client would rather have the matter decided now.

“I think you mean that your client would rather have the matter decided in his favour now but, as I've said, I'll decide in the new term.”

*  *  *

When he was back in his chambers he telephoned Carmel.

“I have everything ready,” she said.

“It will take me a while. I'll see you as soon as I can,” he replied.

He put the receiver down and went again to the window. He watched the small, soft delineations between layers of cloud over the opposite buildings, the strange, pale glow through the film of mist and haze. Suddenly, he had no desire to go. He wanted to stand at the window and clear his mind of the day, without the pressure of the journey south to Cush on the Wexford coast.

The murky heat of the day would settle now into a warm evening in Cush, the moths flitting against the lightshades, and the beam from the lighthouse at Tuskar Rock, powerful in the dense night, swirling around in the dark.

He went back to his desk and thought about it: the short strand at the bottom of the cliff, the red marl clay, the slow curve of the coastline going south to Ballyconnigar, Ballyvaloo, Curracloe, Raven's Point and beyond them to the sloblands and Wexford town.

He stood up and wondered if he had anything more to do; his desk was untidy, but he could leave it like that. He was free to go now; he went over to the bookcases to see if there was anything he should take with him. He idled there, taking down a few books, flicking through them and then putting them back again. He went back to the window and looked at the traffic, which was still heavy on the quays, but he decided he would drive home now, pack up the car and set out.

He drove along Christchurch Place and then turned right into Werbergh Street. It had begun to rain, although the day was still bright and warm. He hated days like this, when you could never tell whether the rain would come or not, but this, in the end, was what he remembered most about Cush: watching the sky over the sea, searching for a sign that it would brighten up, sitting there in the long afternoons as shower followed shower.

He had known the house all his life: the Cullens had lived there until the Land Commission gave them a better holding outside Enniscorthy. Himself and his father had gone
there as paying guests every summer, and each of the daughters had been what he imagined his mother would have been had she not died when he was born. He remembered each of their faces smiling at him, the wide sweep of their summer dresses as they picked him up, each of them different in their colouring and hairstyle, in the lives they went on to live. In his memory, they remained full of warmth, he could not remember them being serious or cross.

He turned off Sandford Road and pulled up outside the house. He left the keys in the ignition as he went in. The rain had stopped now and the sun was out. He found Carmel sitting in the conservatory at the back of the house with the door open on to the garden. She was wearing a summer dress.

“What's wrong?” he asked. She said nothing, but held his look. Her expression was rigid, frozen.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I was asleep,” she said. “I woke when you rang, and then I was so tired I fell asleep again. It must be the summer weather, it's very heavy.”

“Do you feel all right?”

“I feel tired, that's all. Sometimes I hate packing and moving. I dread it. I don't know why.” She put her hand to her head, as though she was in pain. He went to her and put his arms around her.

“Maybe we could take some of the plants down with us. Will there be room for them?” she asked quietly.

“I'll try and find space for them,” he said.

“Sometimes it looks so bare down there, as though the house wasn't ours at all, as though it belonged to someone else.”

He began to pack the cars with bags and boxes, and then he carried out her flowering plants and her sweet-smelling lilies and tried to place them carefully and gently in the boot or the space behind the front seats of the car. “One quick jolt and they'll be ruined,” he said and smiled.

“Oh, drive carefully, please,” she said. It had begun to rain and a wind rustled through the bushes in the garden. He found an umbrella to give her shelter as they went out to the car, closing the door behind them.

He drove away from the house. They did not speak until they were beyond Shankill.

“There's something I have to tell you,” she said. “I was going to tell you this morning, but you were too preoccupied. Niamh came over yesterday to say that she's pregnant. She thought that we had noticed on Sunday when she came for dinner, but I didn't notice anyway. Did you notice?”

He did not reply. He looked straight ahead as he drove. Niamh was their only daughter.

“It was the last thing I thought of,” Carmel went on. “She sounded very cool, but I think she was dreading having to tell me. How could she be so foolish! I couldn't sleep last night thinking about it. I rang Donal but he didn't know either. You'd think she would have told her brother.”

Carmel did not speak again until later when they stopped at the traffic lights in Arklow. The atmosphere in the car was tense with their silence.

“I asked her who the father was. I didn't even know she had a boyfriend. She said she didn't want to talk about the father.”

When he had driven through the town she spoke again.

“She went to England to have an abortion, and she couldn't face it. She was in the hospital and everything; she had paid her money. I told her that we'd do what we could for her. Imagine Niamh having an abortion. So she's going to have the baby and she's going to keep it. Eamon, I wrote her a cheque. But it's a terrible thing to happen, isn't it?”

“When's it due?” he asked her.

“November,” she said. “I can't think how I didn't notice.”

He turned left at Gorey and took the road south towards Blackwater.

“Well, what do you think?” she asked.

“It doesn't matter what I think.”

“It's so hard to talk to you sometimes,” she said.

*  *  *

He parked the car in the lane and opened the side gate into the garden, letting Carmel go in ahead of him. He had the key. The house had been aired; there was a fire burning in the living room, which their neighbour had lit for them, but there was still a musty smell. Carmel shivered and went over to sit by the window. Eamon carried in the first of the plants and put them in the glass porch at the front of the house. The damp smell had always been in the house, he thought, no amount of air or heat would ever get rid of it fully. And there was another smell too which he remembered now: a smell of summer dresses, a female smell. The women who had taken care of him here. He could almost smell them now, vague hints of their presence, their strong lives, their voices which had been heard in this house for so many years.

The nettles had come back into the garden, despite the weedkiller which had been put down in the spring. The nettles seemed taller than ever this year. He would get one of the Carrolls to put the front garden right. Then there would be a new smell of cropped grass, fresh and sweet with a hint of dampness.

He carried the suitcases and boxes in from the car. By now, Carmel had placed her plants all over the house and was in the kitchen. He went over and smelled the lilies which she had put in the porch. He took out the small cassette player and placed the two speakers at opposite ends of the room. He plugged it in, put on a cassette and turned the sound up and listened to the music as he unpacked the cases and cleared out the car.

They were close to the soft edge of the cliff, the damp, marly soil which was eaten away each year. He listened for the sound of the sea, but heard nothing except the rooks in
a nearby field and the sound of a tractor in the distance, and coming from the house the swells of the music. He rested against the windowsill and looked at the fading light, the dark clouds of evening over the sea. The grass was wet now with a heavy dew, but the air was still as though the day had been held back for a few moments while night approached. He heard Carmel moving in the front room. She wanted everything in its place, the house filled with their things, as soon as they arrived, and he stood up now and ventured in to help her.

Childhood. The voice teaching was still vivid in his mind, but he could remember nothing his father said in those early years. Nor could he remember walking from the primary school across to the secondary school except for the bare, creaking stairway to the classroom where his father taught.

He drew on the blackboard with chalk—he remembered this clearly—until he was old enough to sit at the back and listen, or read, or look out of the window at the Turret Rocks and the Wexford Road. He drew maps of main roads and side roads, using different colour chalk, he drew squiggles and matchstick figures. Behing him, the drama of the classroom went on. Sometimes a cheer, a sound like “Weee, wooo,” followed by laughter went up from the boys in the class, but soon it would die down again and his father would resume. Sometimes he was bored, he couldn't wait for the bell to ring. One day he walked up to the top of the class and asked his father if it would be much longer and the class cheered. His father told him to go down and wait in the yard.

He learned to wait, to be quiet, to sit still. And when the schoolday was over they walked home together, the teacher whose wife had died and his son, to the empty house in the new estate up on the hill. A woman came every day, first Mrs. Doyle and then Annie Farrell, and made the dinner in the middle of the day then left them their tea on the kitchen table. His father had work to do, homework to correct, books to read, articles to write. Eamon went out to play, careful not to sit on the cold cement in case he got a cold, and not
to get into fights. He was allowed to bring other boys into the house, but they had to play quietly. Often, when they left to go home and have their tea, he felt relieved. He had the house to himself again and could sit opposite his father and work quietly at his lessons. He wondered at his father's handwriting, the strange, indecipherable script, he stared at each word and tried to tell the letters apart, but it was a mystery to him and he did not understand how anyone could read it.

On Wednesdays after tea they walked down to the office of
The Enniscorthy Echo
to collect a copy of the paper, fresh from the printing presses. Once, a man tried to explain to him about printing, but it was the voice and the size of the printworks he remembered, the rattling noise of the machines and the small, thin pieces of metal with words written on them back to front.

His father's article appeared on an inside page. Scenes From Enniscorthy's Past by Michael Redmond, BA, B. Comm, the headline said, and sometimes there was a photograph of a face or an old part of the town such as the Duffrey or Templeshannon. Each week when they came home his father would cut the article out and paste it into a scrap book. He brought a cloth in from the kitchen to wipe away the paste which oozed from the sides of the newspaper when it was pressed down against the cardboard of the scrap book.

Eamon must have been eight then, or nine. The war was on. He sat in Father Rossiter's car at the top of the Shannon waiting for his father and the priest to finish talking to a grey-haired woman at the door of her house. Each time they seemed about to walk down the cement path towards the gate they started up again. Talking. He was allowed to go with them into some of the houses, but not others. They were giving out money and food vouchers from the St. Vincent de Paul Society. There was a strange smell in some of the houses. He looked around to see if he could find what
exactly made those houses so different from his own: so bare, and often cold as well.

Most of the men were in England; they were in the British Army or they were working in factories. In all of the visits he never saw a man in any of the houses. Some of the women were smiling and shy when they spoke, staring into the fire and leaving awkward silences until his father and the priest stood up to leave. Others were outspoken, full of words. 'Tis God's truth now, they would say. I'm not telling you a word of a lie. May God forgive me, Father. They had long stories to tell, and letters to search for and then find and offer to the visitors to read. There was one woman who cried, who broke down in front of them and rocked back and forth in her chair, as children his own age sat helplessly watching her, who were pale-faced and suspicious of the two men and the child who had come to the house to listen to their mother telling her story, her face suddenly red and blotched from crying.

*  *  *

If they moved the car he would be able to see the town below, follow Rafter Street from the Market Square, along to Court Street and then John Street with its line of trees and then the Back Road, Lymington House, Parkton, Pearse Road and Parnell Avenue. Sometimes, the two men would talk for hours, lighting cigarettes and letting the car fill up with smoke and the smell of sulphur from the matches.