Read Online The Sea and the Silence by Peter Cunningham - Free Book Online

slowly became clear that what I had done might well have saved my marriage. For Ronnie knew nothing of Dublin or the Four Courts Hotel and thought that my humours all sprang from womanly moods. My own behaviour had forced me to reconsider my opinion of him and to accept that if he had succumbed to a moment of indiscretion, then I, by my deliberate intent, had exceeded his impropriety by a distance. It was of no use to try and defend my actions by saying that Ronnie had driven me to them, or to plead justification for myself whilst condemning him. We were both human beings who had erred and who now had to make the best of what we had. Our relationship would be decent and dignified and would stand alone without reference or comparison to other experience. I would have to apply myself anew, forgetting everything that had gone before.
    At thirteen, Hector was as tall as me and up to Ronnie’s shoulder. He now attended a tiny school in Monument, set up and paid for by the Catholic merchants of the town, but, soon, he would have to go away to secondary school, something I had been preparing for. Then Ronnie and I would be alone in the lighthouse.
    One evening in mid-August, when Delaney and I were spending most of every day sewing name tags on to his clothes, Hector came in to where his father and I were sitting and said, ‘I don’t want to go to school in England.’
    ‘Oh, it’ll be fine, don’t you worry,’ Ronnie said. ‘I remember feeling exactly the same before I left Gortbeg.’
    His mouth no longer needed the plastic support, but his face had set into a permanently skewed, almost fractured, look that, sometimes, in brief, unexpected moments, made him seem like a complete stranger.
    Hector said, ‘I don’t mind leaving home, it’s just I don’t want to go to England.’
    ‘Well, I’m afraid, sir, that’s a pity, but you don’t have any more choice in the matter than I did. Sorry, old boy.’
    ‘I’m not going.’
    ‘I don’t wish to discuss it, Hector.’
    ‘Hector, why?’ I asked.
    ‘Only the real West Brits are still doing it, none of my friends are. They’re all going to school in Dublin.’
    ‘And learning gobbledygook,’ Ronnie said.
    ‘The people who still go come back to Ireland and have no friends here,’ Hector said. ‘A friend of mine in school has a sister who got married last year and she’d been to school in England. There wasn’t a single guest at the wedding who lived in Ireland.’
    ‘Thinking of getting married, are you old boy? Think carefully, if I was you,’ Ronnie drawled.
    He had the Anglo-Irish tendency not to engage the specific, to reduce an issue to its most trivial and to forestall the inevitable by refusing to recognise it.
    ‘I’m not going.’
    ‘You’ve always been happy up to now about going, Hector. Everything’s arranged. Isn’t it a bit late to say this?’ I asked.
    ‘Excuse me, but I don’t see the point of a discussion which may give rise to false hope,’ said Ronnie. ‘Leave it, shall we?’
    ‘I’m discussing something with Hector.’
    ‘Which I deem most unwise.’
    ‘Nonetheless, I’m still discussing it.’
    ‘I forbid it.’
    ‘You… what?’
    ‘You heard me.’
    I closed my eyes for a moment. ‘Hector, please leave the room.’
    ‘If you’re discussing me, I want to be here,’ said Hector.
    ‘Please.’
    ‘I’m not going.’
    ‘ Leave the room! ’
    I was trembling as the boy left, shaking his head.
    Ronnie looked at me with a supercilious expression. ‘Congratulations.’
    ‘How dare you! Is that all you can offer him when something huge in his life arises? A patronising smirk? Thinking of getting married, are you, old boy? What kind of a father are you?’
    ‘He’s a child,’ Ronnie sighed, weary of the matter.
    ‘He’s highly intelligent. What’s wrong with what he said? What’s wrong with going to school in Ireland? There must be half a dozen suitable schools. Why does he absolutely have to go to England just