The Sea and the Silence by Peter Cunningham

but contempt for my husband; rather, I wanted to spare my son the debilitating environment of hate. So I spent several days over my reply, attempting to achieve a balance and hoping that in Hector’s new wisdom, I would find the consolation for which I ached. But before my letter could be posted, word came from Dick Coad in Monument to say that Langley Shaw was dead.
    We drove south in late August sunshine in a car rented by Hector at Dublin Airport. I had brought a picnic basket and we stopped along the coast at a place where wooden benches overlooked the flat Irish Sea.
    ‘How are you coping?’ he asked.
    We both had the same green eyes, but Hector’s had been newly wrought by a process of pain.
    ‘Better. No problems about money, for one thing. And life is always better when something nasty has been confronted.’
    ‘You look well.’
    ‘Thank you, Hector.’
    ‘Have you… is there…’
    ‘No, there is no one.’
    ‘I’m sorry. I just wanted you to know that if there was, I shouldn’t mind.’
    ‘That is very sweet of you.’
    I took his hand and warmed my cheek with it. He had filled out into a man and his hair was cut short except for a quiff at the front that fell over his forehead. I looked at his big hands and wondered what kind of a woman he would find.
    ‘What about you? They must all be swooning over you.’
    ‘Nothing too serious, Mother, don’t worry.’
    ‘I won’t. I’m sure she’ll be lovely.’
    ‘She’ll be like you.’
    ‘Oh, Hector, that’s kind but you mustn’t waste your life looking for a younger me. It’s not worth it.’
    ‘I have to make that decision.’
    As the peak of Dollan came into view, he asked, ‘Are you going to speak to him?’
    ‘I shall sympathise with him.’
    ‘I shan’t. I think he has let us down in a way that is beyond forgiveness.’
    ‘I find that concept difficult, Hector.’
    He pulled in at one of the bends in the foothills as the town appeared all at once below us.
    ‘You could have left him, couldn’t you?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘You were in love with someone else, that doctor who came from England after Ronnie’s accident.’
    ‘You mean Hedley Raven? Where on earth did you get that idea?’
    ‘Rosa Santry told me.’
    ‘Rosa Santry?’
    Hector covered my hand with his.
    ‘When I was in Monument last year, Rosa came in to see me. Dick Coad asked her to, I think. They thought I was going to top myself or something. Beautiful woman. She told me that years ago she saw you and this English doctor together on the riverbanks in Main. She said you were in love.’
    I could not stem my tears, nor even protest innocence. ‘I didn’t know she saw us.’
    ‘As long as it wasn’t my fault.’
    ‘How could it possibly have been your fault?’
    ‘You probably thought you had to stay with Ronnie on account of me.’
    Shame rose within me like a monster. ‘Hector, he meant nothing. Believe me, he was nothing at all.’
    Hector had reserved two rooms in the Commercial. It seemed eerie being in lodgings once again in a town I had come to know so well. Before supper, I went for a walk down Long Quay. Attended by swarms of seagulls, trawlers were discharging their boxes of catch. Farther down the wharf, a ship was taking on lumber as members of her crew, their eyes white in their dark faces, leant over the deck rails and smoked cigarettes. I thought, for all its size, how much more tame Dublin was than Monument, how in Dublin one lived in settled, leafy suburbs untouched by commerce or the smell of fish or foreign tobacco. Hector, because of everything that had happened, because of how he now saw Ronnie, would never come to live here, might never, in fact, come back here again. For both our sakes, I had hoped he might return: for his own, because I valued Monument so dearly on his behalf; and for mine because I had imagined myself coming down to visit him. He was in the bar reading the evening paper when I came back in. The front page