Inch Levels (33 page)

‘What will happen instead?’

She shrugged – and now she looked at him, and he read again a terrible bleakness in her eyes.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘We carry on living. Isn’t that what we’ve always done?’

It was true. How many times had she pulled his head back into the air, into the light? How many times had she made sure that he carried on living?

And now look at us.

And that was that conversation.

Not so long ago, Patrick thought now, as he lay in his blue hospital bed. Not so long; and not long to go. For me. He watched his sister through virtually closed eyelids. And it’s true: we’ve carried on living.

Although in my case, no. He smiled slightly and closed his eyes. No, not me. I’ve carried on dying.

‘Do something for me.’

She stiffened a little. ‘What?’

‘Something difficult,’ he said.

‘Oh – Patrick –’

‘– but not impossible.’

Margaret relaxed a little. ‘Go on.’

‘Just – make a little effort with her, that’s all.’ No need to name names. ‘She is the way she is: and besides, you might need each other in the future.’ Margaret stirred uneasily at that – well, he could see why, pregnant with potential meaning as those few little words were – and Patrick went on, speaking as clearly, as lucidly as the drugs and his dry mouth permitted. ‘I mean, it’ll just be the two of you left. You might need one another, that’s all.’

From the expression on Margaret’s face, it would seem that she rather doubted it. But still – circumstances being what they were, as Patrick well knew, she nodded, she agreed, she promised.

And when she left, Patrick waited a couple of minutes and then pressed the little red button on the end of the flex that would summon a nurse. When one arrived, with gratifying speed, he said, ‘I need to speak to someone in the police.’ She looked a little – startled, he noted, though ‘instantly engaged’ might be a better way of describing it. Well, let her look whatever way she wanted to look. ‘Can you do that for me?’

When she left, bustling and squeaking out of the room, Patrick sank a little further into his pillows. Yes: this was right. The sands were running fast now in the hourglass – and besides, there was really no other decision he could make.

*

Five months later, late March of the following year – and Margaret and Sarah went walking again at Inch Levels. The winter just past had been damp and mild, with hardly a frost: and now the fields were beginning to respond to the sun again, and the hedgerows, tentatively, to swell and green. The ditches were brimming and the geese were already gone. The trial was scheduled for May, though of course it was understood that the verdict was already a foregone conclusion. Robert had gone mildly: his relief had been tangible.

The two women might have turned right, following the little river upstream through sparse woodland to the bridge and back: a short walk, avoiding the shingle beaches, the lough, the gaunt, ruined castle outlined on its little promontory. They might have: and in fact, there was a short pause as they stood there in the car park, a short pause as Margaret grasped her courage. A firm hold: white knuckles, she thought; and if the set of her mother’s shoulders was anything to go by, she was feeling the same. And nobody, surely, would blame us if we turned right.

They turned left.

They walked slowly along the gravel track. Calm, white skies and calm green fields. This is a good thing we’re doing, Margaret thought: the right thing, a healthy thing.

But there was a self-consciousness to their walk. It showed in their gait, in their hands shoved into pockets, in a pattern of lifetimes that could not be overcome so easily, not just like that. Not easy, she thought: damn, it never will be easy. We’re feeling our way, that’s all. Trying to square up, she had thought, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror: and it’ll take as long as it takes. And Patrick was right: it’s just the two of us, now.

And there the sea wall ended, and the natural contours of the land took over, gathering themselves into the hills to the west; and there was the lough, the place where Christine Casey had been set on the ground and then pushed, shoved into the shallow water. A single posy of yellow daffodils, some muddy footprints: that was all, now. They hadn’t brought flowers themselves: they hadn’t brought anything except themselves – though this, surely, was the point. Wasn’t it? – Margaret had thought that morning, considering herself in the bathroom mirror. Yes, it was: flowers, or any other offering, would have been – a shield, brandished, a defence of some kind.

Better to come naked, better to come as themselves.

‘Do you remember coming here?’ Sarah said, looking out at the water. ‘A long time ago now? What, coming up on twenty years?’

‘I remember.’

‘Your brother was here, and Cassie.’

‘I remember.’

‘My head was full.’

Margaret paused and then said, ‘None of it was your fault.’

‘I know that, in my head. But,’ and now Sarah breathed in deeply, a long and noisy breath through her nostrils, ‘my heart tells me something else. It tells me that a lot of things have been my fault. So –’

‘So –’

‘So, be patient with me.’

Margaret said nothing.

‘Please, be patient,’ her mother repeated, and Margaret nodded.

‘We might walk on,’ she said, ‘a bit further; make a longer walk of it.’

Sarah smiled a little. ‘A longer walk,’ she said, ‘let’s do that.’

So they struck out along the shingle, the two of them. The sky was lightening a little now, Margaret noticed: the disc of the sun was showing white, sailing behind thinning white clouds; and their shadows were falling away behind them as they walked.

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The scene in this novel in which a sea mine explodes on ‘Shell Beach’, is drawn directly from Irish wartime history. On 10 May 1943, a sea mine was observed by local people floating in shallow waters off Ballymanus beach, on Donegal’s west coast. A crowd had gathered on the beach when the mine exploded, killing nineteen men and boys.

Although such an event could not be hidden – the blast killed a large proportion of the townland’s male population; and it was heard across half the county – the Ballymanus disaster has never, for a variety of reasons, entered the popular consciousness in the way it ought to have done. Sixty years passed before an official memorial was established on the dunes above the beach.

The absorbing
Tubáiste Bhaile Mhánais
(directed by Keith O’Grady and produced by Westway Films in 2011 for BBC Northern Ireland) tells the story of the Ballymanus explosion. The film is recommended to readers with an interest in a secluded history.

I acknowledge with gratitude a Literature Bursary from An Chomhairle Ealaíon/The Arts Council of Ireland, which enabled the completion of this novel. Thanks are also due to the staffs of the National Library of Ireland; the Library of Trinity College Dublin; the Irish Studies Reading Room of Dublin City Libraries; the Museum and Heritage Service of Derry City Council; and the Central Library, Derry; and to the Director and staff of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig.

Impressions of historical Hampstead are borrowed from Penelope Fitzgerald’s essay ‘Well Walk’, in
A House of Air
(Harper Perennial, 2003).

I’m grateful to Lucy Collins of University College Dublin for vital and generous comments at a critical moment; to Sarah Bannan, Stephen Faloon, Marie Gethins, Martina Kelly, Anne Mary Luttrell, Ruth McDonnell, Eina McHugh, Gary McKeone, John McManus, Niamh McManus, Caitríona O’Reilly, and Catherine Toal; and to Marja Almqvist, Bernie Furlong, Eileen Kavanagh, Kathleen Murray, and Suzie Perry, for constructive and necessary feedback.

Thanks also to Maurice Walsh; to the splendid team at Head of Zeus, especially Georgina Blackwell, Richard Milbank, and in particular my editor Neil Belton; and to Véronique Baxter at David Higham Associates.

Love and thanks to my family: especially to my parents, Maureen and Charles Hegarty, and my aunt, Anne Farren, for sharing with me their childhood impressions of a distant Derry and Inishowen; and above all to my partner John Lovett, for encouraging this book over the line.

Neil Hegarty, 2016

N
EIL
H
EGARTY
was born in Derry and studied English at Trinity College Dublin, receiving his PhD in 1998. He is the author of the authorized biography of David Frost and of
The Story of Ireland
. This is his first novel.

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First published in the UK in 2016 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Neil Hegarty, 2016

The moral right of Neil Hegarty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781784975784

ISBN (XTPB): 9781784975791

ISBN (E): 9781784975777

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