Chapter 6 #20
There is an uncomfortable silence. Liam picks unhappily at a loose end in the sleeve of his jersey.
Eugene in his cradle gives a squawk like that of a songbird that has sighted a cat.
And Phina is distracted, oddly, by the sight of Enda, who is chewing the crust of her bread, apparently listening, her legs folded under her, but Phina wonders if she is actually thinking about something else entirely.
Her daughter seems abstracted, as if the conversation has nothing to do with her, a matter between her brother and her mother, and she is merely waiting to see what the outcome will be.
Despite everything else that’s going on, Enda’s sense of exclusion pains Phina in a way she can’t quite identify.
Why shouldn’t Enda feel part of this, just because she is a girl?
Added to this is the fact that Enda, Phina realises, is the one whose opinion she would like to hear: her mind is quick; she is uncowed by life, ready to embrace and parry whatever it might throw at her.
Enda—Phina’s fierce, impulsive daughter, whose intelligence does not mark her out for an easy life—is the most likely to come up with a solution.
“He mustn’t,” Liam is saying hoarsely, his face turned to the fire. “He mustn’t go alone. We don’t know what might…We can’t let that happen.”
Phina unties and reties her apron with nervous fingers.
The truth of what Liam is saying moves through her, like blood through organs, like water through a landscape.
Liam is right, of course he is. Tomás cannot go alone.
What if he gets the melancholy when he’s out there on the island?
What if he doesn’t make it back this time?
She glances again at Enda and is struck anew by the injustice of her daughter’s position, by what she has lost in coming here to the peninsula.
Her education, her friends, the possibility of training to be a teacher.
And now only this: a decimated village on a windswept tongue of land, no schooling, no companions other than her siblings, and no future other than being taken in marriage by a farmer or a fisherman.
Phina cannot see Enda as a biddable country wife.
It makes her want to stamp her foot, makes her want to grab Tomás by the lapels and say, Do you see what you’ve done to her?
Phina shuts her eyes, purses her mouth. For a moment, behind her lids, inked in light, she seems to see the patterns of trees, the deltas of boughs spreading into branches spreading into twigs spreading into foliage.
“There is another way,” she hears herself say.
The journey to the island is, as Tomás expected, arduous and long.
The division’s ungainly charabanc of carts, horses, sappers marching in approximate unison, equipment and supplies lashed to their backs, charts rolled into leather holders, accompanies them from the town, as far as the coast, where Tomás, two sappers and Liam are set down.
The division continues on its way while Tomás waits for a favourable tide on the curved stone harbour of a village he has never been to before.
It’s a cluttered place with cottages crouched low beneath a cliff, half-seen faces peeping out from behind doors left ajar, then ducking out of sight when they see the soldiers.
The sappers doze in the shelter of the harbour wall, caps over their eyes. Tomás goes over his notes, the details of his commission. Liam, he is distantly aware, climbs up and over the rocks and along the cliff-face.
When their boat finally appears, on an outgoing tide, the boy seems eager to get aboard: his is a black shape at the corner of Tomás’s eye that leaps from the harbour to the currach before the boatmen have a chance to beckon them forward, shouldering perhaps more baggage than his thin frame can realistically handle.
Tomás is heartened by this, but doesn’t of course praise him—it wouldn’t do for the boy to get a big head.
All the same, it pleases Tomás that the child seems to have caught some enthusiasm for the trip.
As the currach detaches itself slowly from the harbour wall, the boatmen pulling and sculling on their oars, the people from the cottages coming out to watch, now that the soldiers are safely onboard, Tomás feels an unaccustomed lightness in his chest: he and his son, at work together.
He pictures them, for years to come, striking out like this, the pair of them.
As the mainland recedes, he reaches out a hand and pats his son, only a little too hard, on the back.
Then, so as the boy doesn’t get the idea that life in a surveying division will be easy, he orders him to sort out their packs.
Stack them neatly there, child, against the side, where no one will trip on them.
The boy turns instantly and bends to lift and tidy their things.
Tomás, mollified, oblivious now to everything but the task ahead, turns to look across the water, and at a column of rock emerging from the smudged line that divides sea from sky.
A light tremor of apprehension reaches him, like distant thunder, and he gropes for his logbook.
The island appears at first, he writes, in an uneven hand but that is only due to the pitching of the boat, nothing more, as inhospitable as may be, solid dark rock—in all probability basalt—with a deep channel of dangerous water running through it at the velocity of a river-current.
A multitude of seabirds, gannets and black-headed gulls wheel around the island in a mostly clockwise motion, driven by a prevailing wind in a direction of north-north—
Tomás looks up from his page, wondering where they might find a landing on such a place, pulling his compass from his pocket, squinting up at the sun, to establish whether they have yet altered their course from west-south-west to south-south-west, as he predicted they would, when he is aware, at the corner of his eye, of a sudden movement, like that of a bird, but it is instead the cap being torn from the head of his son by the stiff breeze, and hadn’t Tomás told the child to remove it before they set sail, but he didn’t listen, and now he will have a cold head for the length of their stay.
When Tomás glances over, to give the child a stern told-you-so look, he thinks his eyes are deceiving him or his mind playing a trick on him because he sees, or seems to see, not his son, but his daughter.
Tomás starts, turns his head and then his whole body towards the child.
There! Sitting at the side of the boat, one arm dangling over the side so that she may skim the water with her fingers, the two long plaits of her hair whipping behind her, is his daughter! Enda! Right there, bold as anything.
Tomás’s hands convulse on the page of his book, snatching at his pencil. He turns the other way, and sees their pack, the boxes of supplies, the instruments, the boatman, the two redcoat sappers, who are leaning weakly over the sides, puking like puppies. No Liam.
“By God,” he cries, letting book and pencils fall, lurching across the wooden floor of the currach, causing it to rock and pitch, and the boatman to yell at him to sit down, for the love of God, seizing Enda by the arm, “what are you doing here? Where’s your brother?”
Enda turns and looks up at him in that brazen and provoking way she has, face set. She shrugs and says something but the wind snatches away her words.
“What’s that?” Tomás shouts, shaking her by the arm, ignoring the boatmen who are still bawling at Tomás to sit down.
She repeats herself: a garbled account of a tree and a broken shinbone and a plan of Mammy’s and the copse and something about a bonesetter, but three things are clear to Tomás: that he’s been tricked, that Liam will not be assisting him on the island, and that Enda will have to stay for the duration of the project because the boatmen will not risk the winter tides after this.
A hand of a boatman reaches out and yanks Tomás down, and he acquiesces, numbly, unthinkingly.
The seabirds shriek and keen above his head, gliding in huge and invisible circles, and the merciless rocks of the island where he will spend months of his life loom ever closer, and Tomás sees himself as if on a map of the entire country, a pinprick, a fleck, tiny and wholly insignificant.
The two sappers seated on the planked bench at the stern of the flimsy vessel, one of whom lost his breakfast only minutes before, are distracted from their seasickness by the sight of the native labourer, a taciturn and grumpy chap whom it’s usually hard to get a single word out of, becoming animated.
The man, for no reason at all that the sappers can see, suddenly flings down his work and leaps up, lurching across the boat to engage in an animated and heated argument with his daughter.
The sappers perk up, their nausea forgotten, nudging each other.
The sea is choppy and freezing, and the island ahead, where they have been billeted for months, looks to be as cold as a witch’s tit, and this piss-poor boat seems ill-equipped for such a perilous trip.
For now, however, the dumb show at the front of the boat is providing a modicum of entertainment.
The labourer seems furious about something, and other people’s anger is always amusing.
He is a funny-looking chap anyway, with bandy legs, very few teeth, and the furtive, squinty look of most of his type.
The soldiers watch, grin, as he gesticulates to the bay behind them, then to the girl and back again, the pair of them gabbling away in their impenetrable patois.
With an impatient bark, the boatmen pull the labourer down to a seated position and continue to row, as if nothing at all is happening, their backs to the wind, their oars scooping into the water, lifting, scooping again.