Silence and concealment

Silence and concealment are recurring pressures in the novel: they govern what people can acknowledge about political violence, personal loyalties, and intimate relationships. Through Cushla’s memories and encounters, silence appears both as a burden and as a practical means of getting through the day. Yet omission does not erase what happened. Images, gestures, and consequences remain, waiting to be understood.

Public violence and private memory

In one early news montage, scenes of a riot and a march to Stormont are followed by footage of a parked car exploding. The sequence ends with Mary Peters holding her Olympic medal, a familiar image of achievement set against violence. Eamonn notes that she won it three years earlier; a man in the bar regards it as the last local event worth being proud of. The broadcast puts public violence and a shared emblem of pride into the same short sequence, but the juxtaposition does not resolve the tension between them.

That tension returns when Cushla watches coverage of the Ulster Workers’ Council strike on its first anniversary. The report moves from a poster proclaiming that Dublin is only a Sunningdale away to a bloodied Dublin pavement, then to the strike’s effects: businesses closing, pubs eventually ordered shut, paramilitaries parading openly, and Brian Faulkner announcing the collapse of the power-sharing government. Cushla feels anger as she watches and wipes the bar counter while the regulars look on. The physical routine of cleaning accompanies her attention to the broadcast, but it cannot make the remembered events disappear. Her reflection is that saying nothing can be easier than forgetting. In this recollection, silence is not evidence that the past has passed; it is a way of living beside what remains difficult to absorb.

Deprivation, loyalty, and concealment

The anniversary report opens into Cushla’s memories of the strike’s everyday consequences. She recalls Leslie bringing milk to her house in a Lucozade bottle, still wrapped in its orange covering, and Gina embracing him in gratitude. Later, Gina and Cushla drink tea boiled on a Primus stove. Cushla recognizes Leslie’s action as kindness, while Gina interprets it as a demonstration of what he could do. Their different readings expose an uncertainty beneath the practical help: the gesture offers relief, but also makes power and dependence visible. The family’s response is not a simple account of generosity, and the difference between what can be said about the act and what Gina believes it means remains unresolved.

Cushla also remembers being stopped on the road to her father’s grave. A tractor blocks the way; masked men halt her car, and one approaches with a shotgun. Gina recognizes the masked man as Fidel because his beard protrudes beneath the mask. He lets them pass. For several days, however, Cushla is occupied by an empty larder and an empty fuel tank. Only after the strike ends does she grasp the full significance of the encounter: someone she had known most of her life had stopped her at a paramilitarised checkpoint established to prevent people like her from participating in government, and had pretended not to know her. Recognition happens first; its political meaning arrives later. The delay shows how immediate material needs can crowd out the interpretation of an alarming experience, while the pretence of anonymity masks a relationship already known to both people.

Omission in intimate relationships

Michael Agnew gives omission its clearest formulation when Cushla challenges him about lying. He answers by distinguishing a direct falsehood from the things he leaves unmentioned. The distinction does not make his conduct transparent. Instead, it identifies a way of withholding information while preserving a claim to honesty. Silence here is active: it depends on selecting what another person is allowed to know, and it leaves Cushla to judge the gap between what has been said and what has been kept back.

A later conversation with Gerry makes the costs of secrecy more explicit. He explains that Cushla’s mother believes they went to Dublin for a weekend together, and that he does not mind covering for her but needs to know enough not to expose her inadvertently. When he asks whom she was with, Cushla says she cannot tell anyone. His question about whether the person was one of the fathers from school reveals the limited explanations available to him, not the hidden answer. Their exchange shows that concealing a relationship draws other people into the work of concealment: Gerry may protect Cushla, but without the relevant facts he risks compromising her instead.

Surveillance and the widening circle of knowledge

After Michael’s death, Cushla considers how many people may connect her to him. The possible witnesses include people from an exhibition and a party, neighbours who saw her coming and going, and people she cannot name. She remembers that, during her final year of teacher training, the RUC visited every student’s home after a classmate was arrested for involvement in a bombing campaign in London. The officer who came to the Laverys’ home drank in the family bar and did not search Cushla’s room, treating the visit as a formality. Her family later joked that she was incapable of making a bomb. Now, she understands, the circumstances are different: the police may trace Michael’s movements and question his friends. What once seemed dismissible as routine has become a precedent that sharpens her fear of investigation.

That fear makes concealment unstable. Jimmy has already said that Cushla and Agnew were in cahoots; if he noticed, she reasons, others may have noticed too. Her private knowledge is therefore not secure simply because she has kept it unspoken. The account distinguishes the secret itself from the widening network of people who might infer it, remember an encounter, or be asked about Michael. Silence cannot control what others have seen.

Memory, loss, and what remains unspoken

The novel returns to the limits of silence in its later movement toward Cushla and Davy McGeown’s reunion. Before meeting him as an adult, Cushla has pictured the moment as an encounter with a small boy. Instead, Davy stands before her as a middle-aged man. She recalls having searched for him on the street and in classrooms, asking Gerry to check each new telephone directory, and replaying a recording of Tommy McGeown’s funeral to look for Davy among the mourners. Police and news crews crowd the scene as shots are fired over the coffin, and she cannot find him. The search gives her absence a concrete history: she did not simply forget Davy, but repeatedly tried to locate him and failed.

When they meet, Cushla tells him that she looked for him. The remembered searches and the present exchange bring private memory into speech, but do not undo the years in which she could not reach him. Across these episodes, silence takes different forms: a family’s unspoken interpretation of a helpful gesture, Fidel’s pretence not to recognize Cushla, Michael’s calculated omissions, and Cushla’s inability to disclose whom she has been with. The novel does not treat them as equivalent. Their consequences differ, but each leaves something to be carried in memory, inferred by others, or finally spoken aloud.