Together when the silence is golden

We didn’t say much, because after years there’s nothing to say. And yet, it was extraordinary, as if a new horizon beckoned us

THE LADY wife has taken to the cigarettes for health reasons. She says it relaxes her. She sits at the table folding loose tobacco into tiny strips of paper, and then slips out the back to puff. Of course I go with her, and the two of us end up standing there in the back yard looking at the sky, which can be interesting because the swallows have built a new nest high up under the guttering, where the cat can’t reach them.

They’ve been at it for a week, and it’s just finished, and we were both gawking up at it one evening when the lady wife said, “Is it swans that never part?”

I said, “I’ve heard that said, but I don’t know if it’s true.”

“What about ducks?” she said.

“Haven’t a clue,” I replied.

She said, “I think humans are more like ducks than swans.” She was sucking the last of her little cigarette. I said, “Rolling cigarettes suits you; it gives a woman something to do, now that knitting has become unfashionable.” We often play with each other like this.

She said, “When you were in the hospital, I saw you waddling along the corridor one day, making that slithering noise with your slippers, and I said, ‘Yes, that’s a duck.’”

Then we went inside and sat at the table and ate big lumps of bacon between slices of bread, and washed it down with mugs of tea. In the old days, this light evening meal was widely known as The Tea.

After the conversation about the swallows there was nothing else to talk about. We sat in silence, waiting for the rice pudding to heat in the microwave, and it was just one of those evenings, when someone eventually breaks the silence by saying something like, “Why don’t we go and look at the lake?” It’s the kind of thing people said years ago, when they had nothing to do. Or so I thought.

Married couples, with little excitement in their lives, and missing the children who had scattered to the furthest corners of the globe, would often finish their rice pudding and look at each other and say, “Why don’t we go and look at the lake?”

Not that I was a fly on the wall of every house, but when I was young I saw enough people sitting in their cars, at various lakeshores, staring out the window, and so I presumed such things. I presumed they had no wild adventures ahead of them, like I had. And maybe in my heartless youth I had little sympathy for them.

My father lived in the drawing room, with his newspaper, quietly separated from my mother who rarely sat down and was always washing something under the tap in the kitchen, but I know their existence was nevertheless symbiotic, because every five minutes he would go down to the kitchen to tell her something he had read in the paper, or ask her opinion on such national issues as the blowing up of Nelson’s Pillar, or the legalisation of contraceptives, and she would say, “I can’t answer you now, I’m trying to wash the carrots.” And there are people who still live in such conjoined balance that their names are never spoken except as pairs; Tom and Maureen, Lynn and Harry, Mary and Seán.

The roads of Ireland are full of little cars, going to and from health centres, and supermarkets, and social welfare offices, with old swans.

Young people don’t see love like that; in terms of two people depending on each other. At least I didn’t.

So it’s funny, being at the dinner table, finishing the rice pudding and hearing the beloved say, “Why don’t we go and look at the lake?” As if now it was our time to be doing such things. Now that the Leaving Cert is over, and now that the child has launched herself into a new world, the lake beckons us.

So off we went. She and me, silent and bewildered, after years of companionship, in her car, staring out the window at the blue of the water, the reeds glimmering in the evening sunlight, and the ducks. There are always ducks.

And we had one of those lovely evenings, just looking at the lake. And we didn’t say much, because after years there’s nothing to say. And yet, it was extraordinary. As if a new horizon out there beckoned us, with things we had never, until that moment, imagined.