He woke during the night and went downstairs to his study. He had been dreaming, but now the dream had escaped him. He went into the kitchen and took some cold water from a plastic bottle in the fridge. He sat at the kitchen table for a while and then went back into the study. It was a warm night.
He sat at his desk and looked down at the judgment he had written in longhand on foolscap pages. It was ready to be delivered. He wondered for a moment if he should have it typed, but he was worried about it being leaked. No one knew about it; even as he sat down to write it himself he did not know what he would say, what he would decide. There was so little to go on, no real precedent, no one obviously guilty. Neither of the protagonists in the case had broken the law. And that was all he knew: the law, its letter, its traditions, its ambiguities, its codes. Here, however, he was being asked to decide on something more fundamental and now he realized that he had failed and he felt afraid.
He took a biro from a drawer and began to make squiggles on a pad of paper. What was there beyond the law? “Law”; he wrote the word. There was natural justice. He wrote the two words down and put a question mark after them. And beyond that again there was the notion of right and wrong, the two principles which governed everything and came from God. “Right and wrong”; he wrote the two words down and then put brackets around them and the word “God” in capitals beside them.
Somehow here in the middle of the night with the moths and midges drawn to the window, the idea of God seemed more clearly absurd to him than ever before; the idea of a being whose mind put order on the universe, who watched over things, and whose presence gave the world a morality which was not based on self-interest, seemed beyond belief. He wondered how people put their faith in such a thing, and yet he understood that the courts and the law ultimately depended for their power on such an idea. He crossed out the word “God.” He felt powerless and strange as he went back to read random passages of his judgment. He felt a need to go to bed and sleep some more: maybe he would be more relaxed about his judgment in the morning.
Carmel did not stir in the bed when he came into the bedroom, but he knew that she had woken. When he got into bed he put his arms around her. She kissed him gently on the neck and then turned away from him, letting him snuggle against her. She fell back asleep, and he lay there for a while holding her until he grew drowsy and fell asleep as well.
He was wakened by the alarm clock and reached across her to turn it off. They both lay there without moving or speaking, as though still asleep.
“Are you in court today?” she finally asked, almost whispering.
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you have a full day?”
“There’s a lot of work to get through.”
Another last day of term; he hoped that all the urgent applications for injunctions would go elsewhere. He knew that the press would be in his court today. This case was newsworthy. He hated the journalists’ faces looking up at him, eager for something instant which they could grasp and simplify. He snoozed for a while and when he woke he found that Carmel had left the bed. He moved over to her side and lay in her heat until he knew that it was time to get up.
It was a fine morning. Thin wisps of white cloud hung in the sky like smoke, and the sun was already strong. He realized as he tested the water in the shower that he would like to get into his car now and drive with Carmel to Cush and never set foot in the court again.
She was still in her dressing-gown when he came downstairs. She poured tea for him.
“I think everything is ready now,” she said. “Are you looking forward to getting away?”
“Yes, I am. I was just thinking that I’d be delighted never to set foot in the court again.”
“You’ll feel differently at the end of the summer.”
He went into his study again and sat at the desk. The judgment still lay there. He thought that he should read it over again before going into the court, but he could not face it. He felt unsure about it, but as he left the house and drove into the city the uncertainty became deep unease. It was not yet nine o’clock when he arrived at the Four Courts, and he was not due to deliver his judgment until eleven, or maybe later, depending on what injunctions were being sought.
The line of reason in his judgment was clear, he thought. It had not been written in a hurry; evening after evening he had sat in his study and drafted it, working out the possibilities, checking the evidence and going over the facts. Even so, he was still not sure.
He stood at the window of his chambers and looked out at the river which was low now because of the tide and because of the good summer. He watched a boy moving between lorries and cars on a horse, riding bareback with confidence. When the lights changed to green, the boy and his horse joined the flow of traffic towards Capel Street.
He had taken the judgment from his briefcase and placed it on the table. He went over and looked at it again. It was, he thought, merely a case of unfair dismissal, an appeal from the Employment Appeals Tribunal. It was simply his job to decide if the woman had been unfairly dismissed or not, if she deserved compensation, or if she should get her job back.
The case had happened in one of the border towns. A lot of people must live on the edge there, he thought, with strange upheavals, odd comings and goings. But this had nothing to do with the case as far as he was concerned, he knew that she had been involved in politics, he had read that in the newspapers; she had been part of the hunger strike campaign, she had canvassed for Sinn Fein. She was well known from pickets and platforms. But none of this was germane to the case.
She had become pregnant and she had moved in with the father of her child, himself married with children of his own, his wife having left him. Was she right to do this? He tapped the desk with a fingernail before answering to himself. There was no law to stop her. But, all the same, nothing in the Constitution offered her encouragement. She was not acting according to the Christian principles outlined in the preamble to the Constitution, nor was she offered the protection which the Constitution offered to any member of a family. No judgment thus far in the history of the Constitution and the courts had called what she was involved in “a family.” It was, instead, a broken family. Her child would be illegitimate in the eyes of the state. But she was not breaking the law by living with this man, or by having a child. The law offered her the same protection as any other citizen. Her rights under the law were only diminished when those rights came into conflict with another’s rights.
The school had sacked her, and since she was not a member of a trade union, she could only go to the courts to seek redress. Counsel for the school had maintained that she was not fit to be a teacher in a religious school, that her personal life was in breach of the school’s ethos and articles of association. Her having a child outside wedlock was not the issue, counsel had maintained, but her continuing to live openly with a married man was. She had been warned, he said, but she had continued, in full knowledge of her employers’ wishes, to act against them. The parents of children under her care had complained, counsel for the school had emphasized.
Who was right? He had spent three days listening to the evidence and the arguments and then six weeks working towards a conclusion, a judgment. He remembered how calm the head nun had been when she came to give evidence, and how the teacher, too, had been direct. There was a pride, almost a nobility in the way they spoke. He realized that this was one of the few cases in which he had ever been involved where both sides were clearly telling the truth and were not afraid of the truth. Both women were sincere; neither wished to hide anything, except one had no job now, and wanted the court to right the wrong which she felt had been done to her.
He remembered their faces, the teacher much older than he had expected, the nun younger-looking. He took notes, asked questions, sought clarifications. He forced the teacher’s counsel to admit that there was no absolute right to employment and that employers had the right, under several acts, to dispose of the services of an employee. But the counsel had continued to argue that living with a married man did not constitute grounds for dismissal.
Counsel for the nuns asked the court how a pregnant teacher living with a married man in a small town could not convey some of her ethos to the students. Surely, he argued, teaching involved more than giving information to young people? Surely the ethos of the school was clear to her from the beginning? Surely she knew what she was doing? Surely the manager of the school could not have done otherwise than dismiss her?
There was no argument about facts or truth, guilt or innocence. In the end he was not the legal arbiter, because there were no legal issues at stake. Most of the issues raised in the case were moral issues: the right of an ethos to prevail against the right of an individual not to be dismissed from her job. Basically, he was being asked to decide how life should be conducted in a small town. He smiled to himself at the thought and shook his head.
As he worked on the judgment he realized more than ever that he had no strong moral views, that he had ceased to believe in anything. But he was careful in writing the judgment not to make this clear. The judgment was the only one which he could have given: it was cogent, well-argued and, above all, plausible.
He went to the window again and stood there looking out. How hard it was to be sure! It was not simply the case, and the complex questions it raised about society and morality, it was the world in which these things happened which left him uneasy, a world in which opposite values lived so close to each other. Which world was the one that could claim a right to be protected?
He went over to his bookshelves and took down his sacred text: the Irish Constitution, Bunreacht na hEireann. This contained the governing principles to which the law was subject. The preamble was clear about the Christian nature of the state, it specifically referred to the Holy Trinity. He thought about it again: to become pregnant outside marriage and to live with a man already married was clearly alien to Christian principles. It had never been accepted in any Christian society, he thought, until he realized that he had taken the argument too far. What was a Christian society? Had there ever been one?
The nuns ran a school which was dedicated to the spread of Christian principles. What right did a teacher have who was knowingly in breach of those principles?
His tipstaff came with tea. He began to think again; he wrote down three words on a notepad: charity, mercy, forgiveness. These words had no legal status, they belonged firmly to the language of Christianity, but they had a greater bearing on the case than any set of legal terms. If the teacher were merely pregnant, the nun had said, they could have forgiven her, but the fact that she continued to transgress—he wrote the word down with an exclamation mark after it—meant that they had to take action.
One other matter began to preoccupy him. The family, according to the Constitution, was the basic unit in society. What was a family? The Constitution did not define a family, and at the time it was written, in 1937, the term was perfectly understood: a man and his wife and their children. But the Constitution was written in the present tense, it was not his job to decide what certain terms—he wrote “certain terms” in his notepad, underlined it and wrote “uncertain terms” below that—such as “the family” had meant in the past. It was his job to know what these terms meant now. This woman was living with a man in a permanent relationship, they were bringing up children. Did a man, a woman and their children not constitute a family? In what way were they not a family? They were not married. But there was no mention of marriage in the Constitution.
He thought about it for a while and the consternation it would cause among his colleagues, a redefinition of the concept of the family. The teacher would have to win the case then, and the nuns would have to lose. The idea seemed suddenly plausible, but it would need a great deal of thought and research. It had not been raised as a possibility by counsel for the teacher. Lawyers, he thought, knew that he was not the sort of judge who would entertain such far-fetched notions in his court.
If he were another person he could write the judgment, but as eleven o’clock grew near he knew that the verdict he had written out on his foolscap pages was the one he would deliver, and it would be viewed by his colleagues as eminently sensible and well-reasoned. But he was still unhappy about the case because he had been asked to interpret more than the law, and he was not equipped to be a moral arbiter. He was not certain about right and wrong, and he realized that this was something he would have to keep hidden from the court.
The downstairs corridors of the Four Courts were like some vast marketplace. He had to push his way through the passage leading to the side door of his court.
“The courtroom is packed, my lord,” his tipstaff said.
“Are we ready then?” he asked.
He tried to act as businesslike as possible when he came into the courtroom and everybody stood up. He sat down, arranged his papers in front of him, put on his reading glasses and consulted with the clerk, learning that there were several barristers seeking injunctions. He tried to deal with them promptly, realizing that, if he hurried, he could be finished by one o’clock, which meant that he could be in Cush by four, or half past four, and if the weather was warm enough he could have a swim. He told the clerk that he was ready to begin the judgment. He surveyed the court for a moment: the press benches were full as he had expected, and the public benches were also full. There were a lot of young women, he noted, and he presumed that they were friends and supporters of the sacked teacher. He knew that this judgment would be news. It would be carried on the radio and there would probably be editorials in the newspapers. He would certainly be attacked in The Irish Times. As he settled down to read the judgment, sure now of his conclusions, he thought about how ill-informed and ignorant the comment would be, and how little of the processes of law the writers would understand.
He did not intend his judgment to be dramatic, but he wished to set out the facts first, clearly and exactly. The argument at times, he knew, was close and dense and it would be difficult for most people in the court to follow, but a great deal of it was clear. After half an hour, when he had set out the facts and paused for a drink of water, he was aware that no one in the court knew which side he was about to come down on. He could feel the tension; and the few times he looked up he could see them watching him carefully. He caught the teacher’s eye only once: she had the resigned look, he felt, of someone who knew that she was going to lose. People would have warned her that he was not a judge who would rule in her favour.
As he read on and came near the passage which would make the result clear he found that he was enjoying the tension and noticed that he had begun to speak more clearly and distinctly, but he stopped himself and went back to the rigorous monotone which he had adopted at the beginning.
A murmur started in the court as soon as it became clear that he had decided in favour of the nuns; from the bench it sounded like the murmur in a film, and he felt that he should bang the desk with a gavel and shout “Order in the court,” but he continued as though there had not been a sound.
When he had finished, counsel for the nuns was on his feet immediately, his face flushed with victory. He was looking for costs. There was no choice, he could delay it until the new term, but it would be pointless and he wanted to have done with the case. The costs would be high, he listened to the submission from the other side and the teacher was now unemployed. It would be hard for her to find another job. When he looked over at her he saw that she had a man beside her who was holding her, and both were looking up at him as though afraid. Her counsel begged the court not to award costs against her but, according to the judgment, she was in the wrong, she had taken the case and she had lost. He ruled against her without offering any explanation. He wondered as he gathered up his papers if she would appeal, but he thought not; he had based a great deal of his judgment on matters of fact rather than law, and the Supreme Court could not dispute many of his findings. She would not have much chance of winning an appeal, he felt.
Back in his chambers he went to the telephone immediately.
“I’m ready now,” he said as soon as Carmel answered.
“We’re going to pick up Niamh in Rathmines. She’s decided to come down with us today. She’s taking the carrycot and all the things so we’ll need to collect her,” Carmel said.
“I thought she wasn’t coming,” he said.
“She’s finding it very hard,” Carmel said, as though he had complained about her coming.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said. He sat down at his desk and put his head in his hands. He could feel the sweat pouring down his back and his heart beating fast. He tried to control his breathing, to breathe calmly through his nose. He tried to relax. He remembered Niamh best when she was fourteen or fifteen, when she was still growing; even then she was tall for her age and interested in sports; hockey, tennis, swimming. They had pushed her too hard, Carmel said, forced her to study when she did not want to. She had studied social science when she failed to get the points for entry to study medicine. She had become a statistician, working on opinion polls and surveys of social change. She had become independent and distant from them until she was pregnant, when she and Carmel became closer, but he did not believe that she had felt any affection for him since she was in her early teens.
He waited there as his heart kept pounding. He wondered if he was going to have a heart attack, and he waited for a dart of pain, or a sudden tightness, but none came and slowly the heartbeat eased.
Niamh was standing at the door of the small house down a side street in Rathmines. She waved when he beeped the horn and shouted that she would not be long.
“I thought she was living in a flat,” he said.
“Yes,” Carmel said, “but there are three flats in the house and she knows the other people, they’re all friends. They’re very good to her, they babysit and help out.”
Niamh came out of the front door with the baby. He noticed that she had lost weight and let her hair grow longer. She smiled at them.
“I hope there’s loads of space in the boot because I have to take the computer as well as the baby, and that’s not forgetting the go-car and the cot.” She handed the baby to Carmel. Eamon went into the hall and helped to carry out the cot and put it in the boot.
“The computer will have to go on the back seat,” he said. “Are you sure you need it?”
She went past him without answering. He carried a suitcase and put it into the boot. He stood there then looking at the baby who looked back at him sullenly and curiously, fixing on him as something new and strange. Suddenly, the baby began to cry, and continued to roar as they arranged the go-car on the roof-rack and set off through Ranelagh and Donnybrook. “He’s very big,” he said after a while when the child had quietened down. “He’s much bigger than I expected him to be.” He looked behind at the child who began to cry again.
“It’s better maybe if you don’t look at him when he’s like that,” Niamh said.
He knew as they drove past Bray that if they turned on the radio they would get the three o’clock news which would probably report on the judgment. Carmel would want to know about it, she would want to discuss his reasons for ruling in favour of the nuns, she would go away and think about it and want to discuss it further. With Niamh in the house it would be worse. He realized that he would prefer if they never found out about it. It would be difficult to explain.
“Who else is living in the house with you?” he asked Niamh. There had been silence in the car for some time. Both women told him to keep his voice down.
“The baby’s asleep,” Niamh said.
At Arklow he took a detour to avoid the traffic in the town. It was close to four o’clock, and it was only now that he became relaxed enough to enjoy the good weather, the clear light over the fields and the heat which he knew would persist for at least two more hours, despite the clouds banked on the horizon. When they passed Gorey, the baby woke and began to make gurgling sounds.
“You should teach him ‘The Croppy Boy,’” he said and laughed to himself as they passed a sign for Oulart. Niamh said that she would have to change his nappy, so they stopped the car and got out. He walked up and down taking in the heat as the two women busied themselves around the child, who had begun to cry again.
When they reached Blackwater Carmel said that she wanted to stop to get some groceries and to order The Irish Times for the duration of their stay. The baby was asleep again and he and Niamh sat in the seat without speaking. He closed his eyes and opened them again: in all the years there had hardly been any changes in the view from here up the hill. Each building was a separate entity, put up at a different time. Each roof was different, ran at a different angle, was made of different material: slate, tile, galvanized. He felt that he could be any age watching this scene, and experienced a sudden illusion that nothing in him had changed since he first saw these buildings.
* * *
They drove towards the sea at Ballyconnigar and then turned at the hand-ball alley to Cush. There were potholes on the narrow road and he had to drive carefully to avoid them.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked.
“I’m not making any more dinners,” Carmel said and laughed.
“I hope you can cook, Niamh,” he said.
“Niamh is an excellent cook,” Carmel said.
“It’s time men pulled their weight,” Niamh said drily.
There was always that moment when he saw the sea clearly, when it took up the whole horizon, its blue and green colours frail in the afternoon light. The road was downhill from then on. He drove along the sandy road, saluting a few people as he passed.
“I want to unload really quickly,” he said, as he stopped the car beside the house, “because I want to go for a swim before the sun goes in.”
“I’d love to go for a swim too,” Niamh said.
“I’ll take the baby if you both empty the car,” Carmel said.
Niamh had gone to change, and he stood waiting for her. There was a sweet, moist smell from the high grass in front of the house. He was tired and felt the burden of the day in his back muscles and his eyes. Suddenly he looked up and his eye caught the rusty red paint on the galvanized iron of the gate. He liked the colour, and it seemed familiar as he stood there and took in the scene: the rutted lane, the tufts of grass clinging to the sandy soil of the ditch; and the sound of a tractor in the distance. He stood there for a moment fixing on nothing in particular, letting each thing in the landscape seep towards him, as he tried to rid himself of everything that had happened that day.
The light was clear; down on the strand they could see as far as Curracloe. Niamh wore only a light dress over her swimming-suit, so she was already in the water while he was still undressing. When he took off his shoes he felt an instant release as though a weight had been lifted from him. Most of the strand was in shadow. He left his clothes on a boulder of dried marl and walked towards the sunlight on the foreshore, stepping gingerly over the small, sharp stones which studded the sand.
The water was cold; Niamh waved to him from way out. He watched her long, thin arms reach up from the water as she swam parallel to the shore. He was tempted, as usual, to turn back, but he waded in further, jumping to avoid a wave, and then he dived in and swam hard out, gliding over each swell as it came. He turned and put his head back, letting it rest on the cold, blue water, and opening his eyes to stare up at the sky. He breathed in deeply and floated on the waves, relaxed now and quiet. He curled back towards the water after a while, and swam further out, each movement half instinct, half choice.
He cast his eye down the coast and noticed as he turned that a family was moving slowly up the strand towards the gap, carrying rugs and babies, struggling as they reached the cliff. He watched Niamh wading out and drying herself. She waved to him. No one else would come until the morning, except maybe a tractor using the strand as a short cut. He was tired now; the swimming would be easier the next day and the day after that. He changed to a dog paddle which consumed less energy than the breast stroke. A cloud passed over the sun and left him in shadow so that he could feel a cold wind on his face. He turned again and floated, keeping his eyes closed for as long as he could, not knowing whether the water was taking him in or out. For a few seconds he forgot himself, sustained by the rise and fall of the water and the knowledge that it would carry him as long as he relaxed and remained at peace.
As soon as he arrived back at the house he knew that Carmel and Niamh had been listening to the six-thirty news.
“Well, you were busy this morning,” Niamh said.
“Was it on the news?” he asked, as though it was a routine matter.
“Do you think I should be sacked as well?” she asked.
“Your father’s on his holidays, Niamh,” Carmel said.
“That’s not what you said before he came in. My father thinks that unmarried mothers shouldn’t be allowed work,” she laughed bitterly.
“What exactly is biting you?” he asked.
“That poor woman in Monaghan. How could it be right to sack her?”
“Read the judgment and find out,” he said.
“Did you bring it with you?” she asked.
“Of course I didn’t.”
“I think it’s a disgrace, that’s what I think,” Niamh said. “It’s an outrage.”
“But you would think that, wouldn’t you?”
“I know about it. I know what it’s like to be a woman in this country, and I know what it’s like to have a child here.”
“And I suppose you’re a legal expert as well.”
They had supper in silence, which was broken only by the whimpering of the baby. He faced the window and noticed the first throbbing rays of the lighthouse glinting in the distance. He wanted to ask Carmel what she had said about him and his judgment before he came in, but he realized that he could gain nothing by doing so.
“Do you want more tea?” Carmel asked him.
“Yes, please,” he said. He tried to make his voice sound neutral, as though he was not annoyed with them. He was too tired now to want any further argument. He sat at the table as they cleared away the dishes.
“We’re going to take Michael for a walk,” Carmel said to him. “Are you going to stay here?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Are you all right?” She put her hand on his shoulder.
“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m glad to be here.”
He stood up and walked into their bedroom, and rummaged through the suitcases until he found a book. He lay down on the bed, but as soon as he opened the book he knew that he was too tired to read. He knew that he would sleep. He took off his jacket and his shoes and rested on his side, facing away from the window.
She woke him when she turned on the bedside lamp. He felt heavy and tired as he turned towards her.
“It’s all quiet now,” she said. “You were fast asleep.”
“Is it late?”
“It’s after ten. You were on the news again. Not you, but there was a report about you.”
“Nothing that they haven’t said before.”
“The Irish Council for Civil Liberties—Niamh says that Donal is a member—have issued a statement.”
“Our son and our daughter,” he said and laughed.
“They’re fine people, both of them,” Carmel said.
“I suppose I’m the one who’s wrong?”
“No, you’re all right too,” she stood over him and smiled. “After a few days here you’ll be fine.”
She lay down beside him, not bothering to take off her shoes.
“I’m tired too,” she said, as she turned towards him and put her arms around him. “I don’t know why I’m so tired.”