Inch Levels (7 page)

Because. Because Margaret had just turned fifteen: would be leaving school in a few more years; would take off for somewhere else, for university, please God, grabbing the opportunities Sarah herself had lacked; and home and family would henceforth be for occasional weekends only. Margaret was growing up. She was surely old enough to have a portion of the family past filled in; and Sarah besides was aware of an urge, once more, to unburden herself, to seek a sort of – yes, of absolution.

And now here she was standing atop the sea wall, and her silent son wandering the shingle strand below, and her daughter, silent too – but with a different kind of silence – watching him. And nothing said.

Margaret must have picked up – she was hardly a lump of wood, after all – the distress in the room. But nothing was said. Sarah filled the room with distress, and filled Margaret with it too, likely enough, and then left; went along to the kitchen and made a cup of tea instead. Tea, she thought, would perk her up. It had, too. Now she looked down from the sea wall at her children, still trailing along the water’s edge. Patrick ought to be wearing his coat, she thought: there was no more rain for now in that grey sky – but it wasn’t warm. She watched her children for a moment: Patrick a lonely figure below on the stones, already long of limb and thin, gangly, awkward; Margaret nearby, standing looking at the sea.

‘They’re fine,’ Cassie said from below: she was shadowing Sarah from the gravel path, she was reading her mind. ‘It isn’t cold.’ Though her own hands were shoved deep into the pockets of her old coat – but now laboriously she too climbed up the grassy slope, hands clutching at the long, damp grass until she too was safely on the level. She took a breath of the air, a glance at the flat sea stretching below – and now they struck out in silence, the two women, leaving the two children behind on the shingle.

It was Sarah’s usual walk, her usual beat – passing the humming pumping station and on, a mile or so, until the sea wall gave way to naturally rising ground, the lough on one side and the flat green fields on the other. Once she glanced back: there was Patrick on the edge of the water; there was Margaret on the shingle behind him: bent studying, looking for – for something, for seashells and white feathers.

When Margaret was younger, she had passed through a spontaneous, outspoken phase: bursting in from school filled with the latest lessons, with new knowledge she had not possessed only the day before. Liberated from the humid embrace of her school gang – of Veronica and her group – she became for a short period a tomboy: given, as Martin said dramatically one evening at the kitchen sink, ‘to martial word and deed’. At thirteen, her class studied the Elizabethan wars in Ireland, the Battle of Kinsale: she was filled with enthusiasm for stories of doom and strategy, of powerful, clashing personalities, of Hugh O’Neill’s desperate march south through a frozen, wintry Ireland to succour the invading Spaniards at Kinsale, with a landscape left undefended behind him.

‘Powerful stuff,’ Martin said, listening with evident pleasure.

‘Then when O’Neill was gone, the English came and burned his lands,’ Margaret went on. ‘When he came back, everything was burned and broken.’

‘Burned and broken,’ Patrick repeated, the potatoes cooling on his plate. Cassie listened too, her fork suspended in the air.

‘And the crowning stone of the O’Neills smashed to bits by the English.’

‘How did they do that?’ Patrick asked, staring at her through saucer eyes.

Margaret shrugged. It was unimportant, the
how
of it all. ‘Some special tool, I suppose.’

Sarah was surprised by the energy, the glee over such material in a girl; and a little disturbed too, war being something that – as everyone was beginning to realise – could not be left to the pages of the history books. Still, she must encourage the reading, the interest: she knew her duty. She took Margaret to the library, and waited while her daughter browsed and then took her home again. But the girl must have caught something: something disturbed, like a ploughed field. Certainly this period had not lasted very long; she changed, practically in front of the family’s eyes, into a cautious, measured teenager; she began to hold her classmates at arm’s length; she had fewer friends. She allowed Patrick in, but nobody else.

Became, in effect – yes: not unlike her mother.

Well, thought Sarah, apples and trees. Though she tried to reason with herself: children did change, she said, all children change – it was nothing much to worry about. She was unconvinced, unconvincing. She didn’t convince herself and she didn’t convince Martin, who had thought he was at last getting in that tomboy Margaret a model of a daughter to whom he could relate. No chance. ‘Too much baggage in this family,’ he murmured one evening; and she took the point.

What’s past is past: this was Sarah’s official mantra, even if she herself never had the means of putting it into practice. As an approach, it worked well enough: worked on the surface, worked if nobody asked too many questions. Certainly she never told her children much about her past – and nothing at all of substance. Born in Donegal; little by way of family there; met their father and married him: so much they knew. The barest bird-bones of a life, though enough to withstand a little incurious scrutiny.

She had too the wherewithal, if necessary, to augment this skeleton with a few facts, some telling details: their marriage in Derry and, more or less straight after, a short honeymoon spent touring Ireland, the unpleasant crossing to Holyhead in the teeth of a late-summer storm; the resulting shocking seasickness; and the grime of the train to London. Later, the dismal first marital home in digs off a decaying Camberwell Grove; the dirt suspended in dull London skies. ‘The smell of gas in the air,’ she told them once, cannily, ‘and feeding the meter on cold nights to keep the place warm.’ Her children looked at their glowing coal fire, looked back at her, wrinkled their noses in distaste at a life they wanted nothing to do with and asked nothing more.

Later still – by which stage her life was in any case slipping into the realm of the known, the verifiable – the removal from London back to Derry, where Cassie joined her once more. Children did not in any case tend to worry themselves about their parents’ previous life: and Sarah knew this too. Hers was a story threaded with illusion and opacity: like most people’s stories, it served – so long as nobody poked and dug and queried too much. Much better, she had imagined, to remain in a sort of continuing present tense.

But later, as she watched her children grow – their past and present stretching long shadows into their future, pale sunshine and shadows – she was obliged to recalculate. And now, with Margaret fast approaching adulthood, the painstakingly created structure of Sarah’s own life was beginning minutely to fracture. Could there be repercussions? – for her, other people, for children? She watched her children set off for school in the early morning, their shadows running away from them; she saw them return in their usual state of disintegration, with uniforms and ties askew at the end of a long day. Patrick, she imagined, was fine: he was too young to notice much. But there was Margaret, about to step forward into her future, without having much of a past.

Sarah fretted: her thoughts clung, unreasoning and indelible. And she was tired: the exhaustion and tension that came from the effort to keep part of one’s identity hidden permanently, permanently in shadow, like the far side of the moon. She held her children at arm’s length for so long now that her very limbs seemed set, like plaster of Paris. Too late, now, to think of flexing, of bending. Too, too late: she realised this as she sat on the end of Margaret’s bed. She could speak only to Cassie: and Cassie only shook and shook her head.

They reached the end of the wall. There was the shallow sea, with terns and oystercatchers busy in the rich, muddy water. The slight breeze died away; and they stood still looking out onto the water, listening to the waves, the thin sound of water hissing between stones. On the far side of the water rose ruins, the gaunt outline of the castle. Wordlessly agreeing, they scrambled down the smooth seaward slope of the wall and sat on the beach. The stones were larger here, and smooth and polished: they fell away from their feet towards the water’s edge.

‘Just a beach,’ Cassie said suddenly; she slid a glance.

A pause.

‘Yes.’ Sarah nodded at last. ‘Just a beach today.’

*

‘Just a beach, this time,’ Cassie said. The stones were soft and smooth against her hands; the wind was gone. She glanced again at Sarah. All morning in the house, all through the silent drive out here to the slob lands, she had felt Sarah’s sadness. That was what it was: this is what it is, Cassie thought: the sadness of it, back again.

It never went away. Not really: only for moments now and again, and then it picked it up once more. Again and again.

Sarah, carrying it around with her all these years. So I must say something, Cassie thought: I have to say something. ‘Just a beach,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘Just a beach today. The best beaches are the ones with nobody on them, I think.’

Cassie imagined about the children. Out of sight now, scrabbling and crunching on the shingle beach. The ground falling away from under them. And no need for it.

Cassie braced and said: ‘Stop thinking about it.’ She felt, not for the first time, an impulse to reach for Sarah and embrace her, to clutch her hands and arms. But no: Sarah didn’t like to be touched: instead Cassie steadied herself there on the shingle, reaching her fingers into the stones as though to root herself to the ground. Enough to ask the question, to say something.

Which was something they never did.

She remembered the strangeness of the feeling the previous night, lying there in her bed in the darkness, with just a rind of yellow streetlight outlining the curtained window. She had imagined she was standing out there, on the silent suburban street, looking in on Sarah’s life unfolding on the other side of the window. It was like being at the cinema. The girl Sarah had been, long ago when Cassie first came to the farm, when she first saw her, with the grief of her mother’s loss across her pale face; the fields in which she grew up, the seashore and the white gateposts and long, hedge-lined driveway and smoky, white-washed farmhouse. And all that had come later: all this flicked through her mind in short sections, passing by the window, passing out there on the dark street – as though they were the newsreels, Cassie thought, from the old days in the cinema. Pictures of another life.

Though – no: these stories gradually assumed a life of their own. No, a
sound
: birdsong in the fields drowned by the rasp of a low-flying plane above the waters of the lough, turning and banking in the way that she remembered; the rap of those heavy boots on the long driveway; the dry rattle of a poker raking out the ashes in the farmhouse, in the hearth, long ago; the deep sound of explosions at sea, trembling through the house, through the rocks; and the sound of the other explosion, this one a wall of noise as she crouched on hands and knees behind the rocks, her hands covering her head, her ears ringing. Sarah’s life, come alive. Cassie took her courage in her hands and said again, ‘Stop thinking and thinking.’

*

‘I don’t,’ Sarah said.

Which was untrue, of course. Of course, Sarah thought: of course I think about it all every day; about everything, about the unfolding of it. She knew her story was only a tiny element – an obscure one – in a larger story. And she understood that this knowledge did not much matter to her. She stayed centre-stage.

So: yes.

And also no: for hadn’t she managed successfully enough to shuffle this body of knowledge into a crevice in her mind? – it hadn’t even been all that difficult.

‘Plenty of people,’ Sarah said, ‘saw worse things than I did. They don’t talk much about it, but they still carry it all around in their heads.’ She looked back along the shingle: there were her children now, moving into view, along the edge of the water. ‘I do think about it,’ she said. ‘But I have, don’t I, to try to leave it all behind me? I don’t have the energy for all this.’

All this concentration on the past
and
the present, she thought: is what I mean. Yet she was: concentrating on present and past; flooding her life with the past: the seawall crumbling. She could smell the danger of it – for them all, and for her children, most of all – she could smell it in her nostrils.

And yet, there was nothing she could do. She was set fast in her course. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we’ll go back to them.’ She got up from the sand with a little difficulty – feeling her age, feeling her weight – and watched thin Cassie get up too, with a sprightlier air: and they began their tramp again along the shelving shingle, back towards Patrick and Margaret. As they went, Sarah scanned the sand for driftwood to bring home – and she soon found a bleached branch, as beautifully smooth as if it had been lathed. She stooped, picked it up, running her hands the length of the cool white wood.

‘Martin will like this.’ Cassie nodded. ‘Come on – let’s be getting back.’

Then Cassie said, ‘For the children.’

For their sake, she meant: for the children. Stop thinking about it, if you can. What will become of you all, if you keep thinking about it?

And Sarah had no answer to that.

*

Patrick crouched by the water’s edge. The shingle was crisp underfoot, the sea calm and almost motionless, with only tiny waves hissing through the sand and shingle. He suspended his hands in the icy water until he felt them begin to numb, his skin taking on a tint of blue. Then he sat back, stood up suddenly, shook his hands in the cool air until they dried. They were out of sight, almost, Cassie and his mother: they were out on the point, where the sea wall ended, with water in front of them and water to the right, and the island and the ruins of the castle ahead. As he watched, they vanished around the curve of the wall.

‘Come too, Patrick,’ his mother had said: held out her gloved hands; and then she took her gloves off and he watched her small white hands, reaching, stretching towards him. ‘Come too. Why don’t you come too?’