Acts of Allegiance

by Peter Cunningham

It seemed impossible that I might have forgotten Waterloo, but that evening, snug, well fed and in love, I could easily have imagined that Fowler Street was where I belonged and that the world to which I was returning was a cold illusion. I went down to the garden to await my turn at the toilet shed. The storm had blown through and the town was bathed in bone-white moonlight. My ears picked up a choking sound. Frost pierced me as I made my way down the icy path of the narrow garden. Iggy was squatted next to the buttress wall, beyond which lay a well of darkness.

  ‘Iggy?’

  He shivered and sobbed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Uncle Stanley … Uncle Stanley … ’

  ‘What did he do to you?’

  Iggy’s eyes screwed up and he began to cry again. Behind him, on an ash tree growing crookedly from the wall, one of his kittens had been crucified. The squirming animal’s black fur was torn where six-inch nails had been hammered into it.

  ‘Don’t tell Daddy, please,’ Iggy said.

  Never before had I felt quite the same need to protect someone. I ran up to the little shed beneath the back steps and found a claw hammer. The nails, when I got to them, had not been driven straight or deep. Gingerly, I drew them out, first from the hind legs. The tiny creature wriggled, spat and hissed. Iggy pressed his hands to his ears. I covered the thrashing legs with my left hand and drew out the remaining nails. The kitten leapt into the void.

  ‘She’s gone!’ Iggy cried.

  I hunkered down beside him, but when I tried to put my arm around him, to keep him warm, he pushed me away angrily, as if I were somehow to blame for what had happened. We stayed side by side at the end of Granny’s garden until the blood on my hands was crusted. Way below, on the moonlit river, a trawler with an orange spinnaker was tacking upstream. The metal wheels of horse drays made their penetrating revolutions. In another country, where I had not yet been, my father’s ship was setting sail.

  Part II

  GUELPH LINE, CAMPBELLVILLE, ONTARIO

  The Recent Past

  When they first arrived here, at dead of night, so many years before that she strains to put a number on them, she wanted dawn never to break. The personnel who had travelled with them from RAF Lakenheath had left. Only as night yielded did she fall into a fitful sleep, and then, soon afterwards, she awoke, bereft and terrified. Eventually, she went out to the garden to find her bearings. Although it was still only nine in the morning, the day was searingly hot. Sun bored into her neck, and in a moment her dress was clinging wet.

  The swimming pool, an ugly structure raised on scaffolding and accessed by a ladder, brimmed. Sparrows chattered within a large maple and, as she stood in the overwhelming heat, mutely observing the bountiful tree, a cloud of Monarch butterflies swirled past, brilliant as creation.

  Over the months that followed, she came to value the seclusion of their new arrangements. Apart from the occasional truck blast, it was always peaceful: the earth that had been scooped out and banked when the house was built acted as a muffler to the traffic up on Guelph Line.

  He was a different story. In the early years, he was often restless, and made phone calls to his contact person, telling him or her, as the case was, that he feared he was going mad. The answer was always the same: it is your choice, Mr Price, but you should know that we consider you to be in permanent danger. How great is this danger, he would ask? Well, Sir, they replied, there have been certain reports that concern us, and since your absolute safety is our priority, we strongly recommend, for the moment, that you remain in place.

  Two years later, and only after the most almighty set-to, they provided him with a car. At first, it was a novelty. With the security detail trailing behind, he drove her weekly to Milton, or the short distance into Campbellville, or to Niagara on the Lake, where they sat, like ghosts looking in through a window. He soon tired of that and the car is now seldom used.

  Any break from their routine is a novelty. For example, the upcoming pension reassessment has been their talking point for weeks. She can tell he is looking forward to meeting the doctor who will come to evaluate him, and that he will insist that this person stays on afterwards for tea.

  She remembers some years back, when he took a bad turn and she had him rushed by ambulance into Milton. The casualty doctor’s teeth sparkled and the undersides of his hands were vivid pink. ‘No-thing wrong with his heart!’ the doctor cried joyfully. ‘No-thing at all!’

  1

  WATERLOO FARM

  January 1962

  The big triangular field was nailed like a pennant to the throat of the mountain. Flanked by gorse and heather, it fell greenly from its peak in a series of smooth undulations to the lake stream. The races were being run off in conditions of piercing sleet, snow and ice-laden winds as the runners jumped downhill into driving flurries and crossed the fences laid out along the runnel. Twenty-five or thirty cars, as well as Land Rovers and a few tractors, huddled on either side of the short run-in to the winning post. It was a setting of unbelievable discomfort and unqualified affirmation. My Ransom forbears had presided over the local point-to-point in this field since midway through the nineteenth century, and now, while time still allowed, I had resumed the tradition.

  The farm had had no water since before Christmas, when frost had cracked the cast-iron pump like an eggshell, and on Saint Stephen’s Day Sugar had made it into the labour ward in Waterford just in time. She came home a few days later with a boy and a nurse, and I broke asunder a hundred-year-old wooden threshing machine to keep the stove alight.

  ‘The woman is not used to this,’ Sugar had said to me on New Year’s Eve, referring to the nurse whose name was Fleming. ‘She’ll leave.’

  ‘I’ll have to drive her home and petrol is scarce, so tell her she can’t bloody leave,’ I had said.

  After school, I had joined the Royal Engineers for three years, been posted to Africa, seen some action, got demobbed in 1961 and then married. Although we had no money, we decided to try and make a go of Waterloo. It was beautiful but there was no living in it, something I should have known from growing up there. Nonetheless, Sugar and I had both been romantic enough to try and defy reality. In summer, I fished and she played tennis; in winter, we hunted, shot, read and rutted, as she had it. Then the child was born and I knew immediately that we could not go on like this. Something had to be done. We had decided to flog the lot for what we could get, up sticks and move to Canada.

  Below me, teal skimmed the surface of the streamlet, then soared, pressing tight to the thigh of the mountain. Despite these wretched conditions, I was rather enjoying myself, for it seemed to underline just how apart we were up here in our eyrie.

  As the jockeys’ silks penetrated the newly thickening snow like the wings of inexplicable butterflies, I plodded down towards Sugar. Nurse Fleming was carrying Emmet, our son, whose nose alone was apparent. She was tougher than Sugar had given her credit for, Miss Fleming, and may even have been enjoying the day. Must have been a decent sort to have stuck to her post out here, I reflected, as I watched her wading through the snow and singing softly to my newborn son.

  ‘The place is looking great, Marty,’ said Bobby Gillece.

  I had not seen him walking over, his hat pulled low, his ginger moustache snow-laden.

  ‘Or the bit you can see of it,’ I said.

  Although a Fianna Fáil alderman in Waterford Corporation, Bobby’s efforts to go further in politics had not succeeded. He had inherited a bar—Bobby’s Bar—in O’Connell Street, where he and Auntie Kate lived.

  ‘Business good?’

  ‘Good enough, good enough.’ Bobby had acquired false teeth, but they sometimes wobbled when he spoke. ‘The hours are hard, Sundays, bank holidays. Work, work, work. We never go on holidays.’

  ‘The same as a farmer, then.’

  ‘The lads that have it made are sitting above in Dáil Éireann with a mileage allowance and a fat pension. Not that I’ll ever see it.’

  ‘You could
try again?’

  ‘Nah, fuck them, they had their chance. It’s just a pig’s trough up there anyway. I’ll do my own thing.’

  ‘Time flies, doesn’t it? Seems like only yesterday when you were chasing after Auntie Kate in Fowler Street,’ I said with a grin.

  Bobby looked at me warily. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. ‘I remember you and Iggy, too. Right little gangsters the pair of you.’

  I had often wondered about Bobby’s marriage to Auntie Kate. They had been together for over a decade, and even though there were no children, everyone hoped there still might be.

  ‘How is Iggy?’ I asked, for I knew Bobby kept in touch.

  ‘As well as can be expected. It took him a long time to get over Ted.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Bloody tragedy,’ Bobby said. ‘It’s a police state up there and if you’re on the wrong side of it, God help you. He’s my godson, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I said as the image of the Flying Squad went through my mind, closely followed by an image I had never seen: of Bobby in the kitchen in Fowler Street, kissing Iggy.

  ‘You should try and meet him. How long has it been?’ Bobby asked.

  ‘A long time. Not since we were children. Not since they left Waterford.’

  ‘He’d love to see you, I know he would,’ Bobby said. ‘He often talks about you.’

  ‘Does he ever come down this way?’

  ‘Never. He’s too busy. They live in their own new world up there,’ Bobby said.

  I wondered when we left for Canada would Sugar and I ever come back to Waterloo, or would we be too tied up in our own new world to ever bother. A flurry of snow briefly doused us.

  ‘Great old place, this,’ Bobby said but kept looking to the valley. ‘Long may it last.’

  His words rang alarm bells in my ears. Perhaps it was my guilt for having decided to sell Waterloo that had attuned my senses, but all at once I knew that he knew, and for that I resented him. As if to confirm my suspicion, Bobby said, ‘Inheritance can be hard, Marty.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, knowing my voice was harsh.

  ‘You come into what you didn’t ask for, you have to try and keep it on out of a sense of obligation. At the same time, you still have to live your life.’

  We tugged our hats even lower and dug deep into the pockets of our coats. Sheep on a hillside half a mile away stood out intermittently like flecks of tin.

  ‘Where will you go?’ he asked.

  ‘Canada, perhaps.’

  ‘You’d have contacts there, I suppose.’

  ‘From the army. One chap makes animal feeds out in Western Canada. Says I could be a salesman.’

  The snow ceased abruptly and we had sight of a knot of bright colours moving at mid-speed over a starved landscape.

  ‘There’s another way too, you know.’

  Bobby’s teeth wobbled.

  ‘You could get a job in Ireland, hold on to Waterloo,’ he said.

  ‘Who the fuck would employ me?’

  ‘Maybe they would,’ Bobby said and handed me a tear of newspaper.

  It would be days before I remembered our discussion, or even looked at the public-sector notice advertising the competition. Frantic shouts could suddenly be heard, and a crowd was running towards the stream. I could see steam rising from behind a brush fence. A mare had slid into the butt and cartwheeled, onlookers said later. The horse had landed with full force on her rider who now lay, motionless, one leg pointing to the sky. What I remember most, though, was the small girl running downhill with hands outstretched to the crumpled heap of silks and crying out, ‘Dada! No, please, Dada!’

  * * *

  Three weeks later, I sat in a leather armchair in the first-floor room of a beautiful mansion overlooking St Stephen’s Green. The man across from me, in his mid-forties, with raven hair brushed to a flat shine, was called Mr Séamus de Bárra. He had a round, enquiring face and wore spectacles with dark rims. More than a hint of the priest clung to Mr de Bárra. His card said he was a counsellor in the Political Division of the Department of External Affairs.

  ‘You served in the British Army and your father had a good war, Mr Ransom,’ he said.

  Outside and below, a bicycle bell tinkled.

  ‘I must say, I didn’t think such things counted here, especially not in this building,’ I said.

  ‘You’d be wrong there. Political decisions are the froth of a moment. When the froth subsides, you’re left with the bedrock,’ Mr de Bárra said.

  ‘Neutrality in the defining war of the century is a bit more than froth,’ I said.

  Mr de Bárra smiled thinly. ‘I can see how you’d feel that, your father having fought so gallantly, and won, but young nations need to define themselves, particularly where their old neighbours are concerned. We both survived—that’s the main thing.’ He sat back and regarded me with interest. ‘We are a small nation with few resources apart from our people. We have to box clever, Mr Ransom. Times are tough, I don’t need to tell you. Go down to the North Wall any night of the week and count the young lads taking the boat-train to Euston.’

  ‘If we’d fought, the American money would be here now,’ I said. ‘The young lads might not need to take the boat-train.’

  ‘The great advantage of being alive is that you can live in the present. Leave the past to the dead, Mr Ransom, or to the professors down in Trinity College, is my advice.’

  I had a feeling we had met before, which we clearly had not.

  ‘Freedom starts in the blood but it’s proven in the pocket. Leaving aside matters such as injustice, criminal misrule and the flagrant and persistent breach of standards long held to be common between civilised peoples, we still have to wake up every day and put food on the table. This can be a problem for a poor island nation, no matter how free. We may have severed our heads from Britain, but not our bellies. We need them, Mr Ransom, now more than ever.’

  He crossed his legs and made a delicate gesture with his small hands, like a priest offering a chalice to his congregation. ‘You are blessed with unique assets with which to help your country. It will, of course, take time for us to realise that potential, and for the moment we cannot say where your assets will be best invested. We will equip you in whatever way we can, we will give you a good job, a rank and a pension, but we will in no way try to change you. You must continue to be yourself, to live the life you were born into, which includes continuing to own your lovely farm outside Waterford and circulating here and across the water in those circles for which our political status is merely an amusing footnote. You will be their kind of chap, but you will be our chap too—do you get my meaning?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said as my ears became full of competing noises.

  Mr de Bárra got to his feet. He had grown used to power, I could see, and would never be easily intimidated.

  ‘I have one question. Elementary but necessary.’ His unflinching stare. ‘What man are you at the end of the day, Mr Ransom?’

  I saw in frames of time broken down so small they were immeasurable a boy in short pants trying to heft a sack of coal from a dray. I said, ‘An Irishman.’

  ‘I like the way you say that,’ chuckled Mr de Bárra and briefly clapped my shoulder as we walked from the room. ‘It has style.’

  At the foot of the great stairs, we paused at a door, beyond which lay my coat in the care of a porter.

  ‘You will receive an envelope in the next few weeks with all the details. There will be an exam in Dublin, but you’ll have no problems. Have you a few words of Irish at all?’

  ‘Cúpla focail,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Mr de Bárra said and extended his hand. ‘You’ll be very welcome here, Mr Ransom.’

  ‘Marty,’ I said with a rush of uplifting hope.

  ‘De Bárra,’ said the Counsellor in the Political Division and opened the door.

  2

  DUBLIN

  1965

  The Department of External
Affairs was run with slender resources, the legacy of successive governments regarding it more or less as a nuisance. My desk overlooked the Iveagh Gardens, in which students from the university walked hand in hand, or sat on benches, or on warm days lay on the grass, puffing cigarettes. As an executive officer, I shared with two others an office adorned with an Adams-style fireplace and fragments of rococo plasterwork on the ceiling. My days were often spent exchanging drafts of proposed treaty clauses with the visiting members of foreign trade delegations. Each evening, the custom was to bring them to dinner in the Russell Hotel, near the office, or to Jammet’s at the end of Nassau Street, where Château Mouton Rothschild was usual, the cost of which could only be justified in light of the ultimate trade benefits to Ireland. On those occasional evenings when I was included, I could unfailingly, when I arrived home, transcribe the details of what had been revealed over dinner, and relay them the next morning to the First Secretary in my section, Bill O’Neill.

  Bill was a man of few words who seldom allowed the pressure of work to ruffle his demeanour. He smoked a pipe and always wore what appeared to be the same, carefully pressed, pinstriped dark suit. Unmarried, in his late thirties, Bill lived, presumably alone, in a flat off Lower Baggot Street to which no one I knew had ever been invited. His ever-curious expression always made me assume that he knew what I was thinking.

  Some weekends, if the weather was particularly foul, and the prospect of opening up Waterloo and trying to heat it too much, I brought Sugar to the races at Leopardstown, just south of Dublin. As we drank hot toddies and watched sodden horses battle it out, I developed a nodding acquaintance with some of the rising men in Ireland, characters who were clever with money, whose politics was Fianna Fáil and who measured their success by their proximity to the Minister for Finance, Charles J. Haughey. One of these men, Bunny Gardener, an accountant who was close to Haughey, was very charming and always made a point of greeting me and Sugar whenever we met. I must have given him my card, for he occasionally sent me complimentary tickets for those race days when, as he put it, the boss would not be needing them.