Acts of Allegiance

by Peter Cunningham

  Mr Haughey often showed up at receptions in Iveagh House, when my role was to wait inside the door and greet visitors, or direct them to the cloakroom. A bantam of a man, his intense blue eyes searched the room over my shoulders. Power oozed from him. The source of his personal wealth, his political ruthlessness, and how he was said to be generous to his friends when it came to sharing market-sensitive information known only to the exchequer, was part of the common gossip. Occasionally, I spotted him at the races, a princely aura to him, moving assuredly with a gaggle of acolytes in his wake.

  3

  DUBLIN

  1966

  Sugar said one evening in January, ‘You’ll never guess who rang today. Christopher Chase.’

  ‘Christopher?’

  ‘Yes, apparently Alison is being sent to work in the embassy here and Christopher’s got a job in a merchant bank.’

  I felt a little pull of excitement. ‘Good for Christopher,’ I said.

  Over the months that followed, the Chases arrived in Dublin and settled in, and their two daughters found suitable schools. We gave whatever support we could. No plan existed, no formal arrangement. We were just a foursome in our mid-twenties, with Alison the only member who was not Irish, as we sometimes liked to remind her. It was a given that the Chases would spend some weekends with us at Waterloo, where we all hiked, played tennis and caught trout, and that I would show them around the hidden alleys and squares of Waterford. On several occasions, we all drove to County Kerry and spent the weekend with the Chases in their holiday bungalow on Caragh Lake. Alison was Whitehall to her core, but what she did exactly in the British Embassy was never discussed. I came to value the intellectual dimension she brought to our little group, and the scope of her erudition, particularly when it came to English history. To my great delight, she revealed that she was writing an account of the allied advance on the Rhine, which allowed me to dig out my father’s papers from 1944, long mouldering in a box, and present them to her.

  I threw a party in Waterloo for Sugar’s twenty-fourth birthday. All the guests were locals, except for Alison and Christopher. It wasn’t until the van from Wise’s grocery arrived that Sugar had any clue of what I’d arranged, and then she began to fret that the house was a shambles, and said that I should have painted the place in my spare time, or at least tidied away our stacks of inherited books and pictures, and did we have sufficient plates, glasses and cutlery for twenty people? She was still declaiming as I gathered her up and carried her to our bedroom.

  September light curled softly around the lake and danced up the side of the mountain. Michael Small, my mother’s husband, danced the Twist with Sugar, and Jack Santry was moved to sing a ballad about fox-hunting that ran to over twenty verses. Later, Bobby Gillece poured his heart out to Sugar, who sat attentively as he described his anguish when he had tried to get the Fianna Fáil nomination for the general election, and failed, she told me afterwards, adding that something about Bobby always gave her the creeps. It was after midnight when the last of our guests drove away. Christopher had gone to bed, wall-eyed, and Sugar, a rug pulled up to her chin, was asleep on the sofa.

  ‘A nightcap,’ I said to Alison.

  A bench beyond the tennis court overlooked the lake as moonlight rippled in the silky water. Somewhere, way out behind the wall of darkness, the rasp of a fox gave notice that she was on the move.

  ‘How lovely it is here,’ Alison said.

  ‘We are the lucky beneficiaries of someone else’s fore-sight.’

  ‘That gets lost sometimes,’ she said, ‘the fact that we are often just carriers, part of a line, or a team. Like a relay race.’

  ‘I know,’ I said and felt my heart skip.

  ‘You’ve been passed the baton, Marty. It’s up to you whether or not you want to take it and keep going.’

  ‘Are you sure we should be having this conversation?’

  ‘You are very much part of a tradition, one that is old and honourable.’

  ‘Oh, come on! We’re just hill farmers!’

  ‘You know what I mean. I can help you keep that tradition going.’

  My blood must have suddenly warmed, for I felt it rush into my neck and groin with a sudden blot of happiness.

  ‘You are ideally placed,’ she said. ‘What is more, the kind of relationship I propose is exactly what your superiors in Dublin would expect of someone in your position. There is nothing wrong in such an arrangement. On the contrary, it is honest and upright since only good can come to both sides from it.’

  The moon had come to a point where the shoulder of our mountain would shortly devour it.

  ‘I do of course understand how such a proposal may not suit you, and how you will need to reflect before you decide. Neither is there any urgency required. In fact, my advice is that you take as much time as you need to make up your mind, since decisions of this kind have to be made alone.’

  ‘I’m a freak,’ I said. ‘I don’t belong to one side or the other.’

  ‘It is the world around you that is freakish. You and I, on the other hand, know what it is to hold the longer view. We live in an era full of contradictions, where chaos is the only certain outcome. You can be a bulwark against that chaos, those contradictions.’

  I could have breathed in the scents of the dying summer and slept for ever.

  ‘They’ll hate me,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll be doing the honourable thing,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.’

  I made no decision, but swayed for months in a cross-breeze of indecision, perhaps lacking the courage to admit what I really was. Entranced by the prospect Alison had held out to me, yet terrified by my own potential, I decided to put distance between us, to give myself time to think. When we were invited to the Chases’ Halloween party, I invented a reason why I could not accept. Then, just before Christmas, when some small concessions were suddenly made by the British in an aspect of trades and tariffs in which I was directly involved, Bill O’Neill called me in and told me that I was to be promoted to higher executive officer, which meant that my salary would be increased. When I came home and told Sugar, she jumped into my arms, wrapped her legs around my waist and hugged me.

  4

  LONDON

  Spring 1967

  Our embassy was located in a decent house on Grosvenor Place and overlooked Buckingham Palace Gardens, a detail that always raised a smile, on the first telling. An important trade memorandum between Ireland and the United Kingdom was dragging its way to a conclusion and, because of my experience, Bill O’Neill had sent me over to help out. After Séamus De Bárra’s sudden death the year before, Bill had been promoted to the Political Division as Counsellor and had taken me with him. Bill was the man who liaised, from time to time, on behalf of the department, with the intelligence sections of both the Garda Siochána and the army, although with whom he liaised, or about what, was never discussed.

  The Naval & Military Club, on Piccadilly, known also as the In & Out, was where my father had once been a member. The porter, Hobson, recalled him.

  ‘Remember the Captain very well, sir. Liked a little flutter, as I’m sure you know. Knew his form, Captain Ransom.’

  Hobson’s glass-fronted cubicle occupied a corner of the spacious hall, at the Piccadilly entrance, and looked out on Green Park. A coal fire blazed beneath a grand portrait of the monarch. Hobson had apparently served as an orderly during the war and had been decorated. With a head of persistent blond curls, he was a man for whom nothing was impossible if it involved him receiving a ten-shilling note. I breakfasted every morning in the dining room, beside the inner courtyard with its pool in which ornamental carp thrashed among lily pads. On rainy days, the Underground brought me to Hyde Park Corner where I surfaced amid the extensive statuary associated with Wellington.

  My mission entailed the sort of endless redrafting with which I had become familiar, the scrambling for position, the tireless appraisal of the effects of our decisions on third
countries, and the stamp of our legal people on every paragraph. Still, it was exciting to be in London, where a sense of power, lacking utterly in Dublin, made me yearn to somehow be part of it but at the same time to remain as I was. In the evening, when I sat in what was known in the club as the ladies’ bar, with its door to Half Moon Street, its chintz couches and the daily newspapers correctly arranged, I felt a sense of homecoming that both comforted and surprised me. One of my counterparts in Whitehall contacted me during the first week and took me to dinner in Soho, after which we went on to a nightclub where we both got drunk. In the days that followed I made contact with friends who had been fellow-officers, but, apart from one invitation to supper in Cheyne Walk, all the others were either away, or if not, promised to call me back, which they never did.

  One day, I left the embassy at lunchtime and made my way to Somerset House on the Strand, where the details of all deaths in the UK since 1937 were stored and indexed. I expected to find the entry quite handily, but that evening, when I was the last member of the public remaining, I had still not found what I was searching for. Perplexed, I returned a few days later, and searched again, but the outcome was no different.

  At the beginning of the following week, I was included in a birthday luncheon at a restaurant in Knightsbridge, which ended with no one returning to the embassy, circumstances that I gathered were not unusual. Later, at the club, I was seized by a deep yearning that had waited more than six months for its moment, but which, now that it had arrived, had to be answered. I went to the coin-box by the lift and dialled the number. It was answered on the second ring.

  ‘Alison Chase,’ she said.

  5

  LONDON

  Spring 1967

  She was brief, asking me where I was staying, and for how long. Something in her manner, or tone, which was efficient and business-like, made me immediately regret the call, as if I had handed over something I could not get back, or had misinterpreted what she had said to me that night by the lake or as if the drink of earlier had made a fool of me.

  A week later, after a long meeting on the second floor of the embassy, where a trade delegation from Canada was being entertained, I left in the dark and, despite the rain, decided to walk back to the In & Out. Buses sloshed surface water on to the pavement opposite Old Park Lane. I crossed to Green Park, with its scent of cut grass, and then jay-walked back across the wide thoroughfare to the front entrance of the club where I arrived soaked and dripping in front of Hobson.

  ‘Let me take your things, sir. I’ll hang them downstairs beside the boiler. Be dry as toast in a jiffy.’

  He took my hat, mac, scarf, gloves and umbrella. I was looking forward to an evening with a drink after dinner, the newspapers, and, if there was anything worth seeing, an hour at the new colour television that had been installed in the ladies’ bar. I was beginning to forget my telephone conversation with Alison.

  ‘And a letter for you, sir.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Hand-delivered before lunch,’ Hobson said.

  The train sped by way of industrial locations, past huddled roofs of weeping smoke, by upstairs windows with curtains drawn unevenly. Mongrels shook out bags of rubbish in the spectral post-dawn. Occasionally, we passed water-filled craters in the midst of terraces where the bomb damage of more than twenty years earlier had yet to be redressed. In rain, I disembarked at Watford, as instructed. Outside the station, the lights of an Austin Cambridge flashed. I peered inside it, expecting to see Alison, but a man half my size with a military haircut got out and held open the back door.

  ‘Is Alison …? Mrs Chase … is she …?’

  ‘I expect so, sir,’ he said cheerfully as I climbed in.

  The last of the suburbs gave way to vales and shires where cattle huddled along dripping hedgerows and dark blankets of crows rose and fell over the terrain. After thirty minutes, in pounding rain, we turned into an open gateway and drove up an avenue between white iron railings, the sort you might expect in a nursing home. A gravel sweep washed up to a porch. Did Alison work here when she was in England? The front door was opened. A large man stood there, smiling crookedly, face animated. His wad of russet hair was crisp and crinkly and he wore a navy bowtie with white spots.

  ‘Hello, chum.’

  I stared at him. ‘Good God! Vance!’

  6

  SAINT LAWRENCE ABBEY SCHOOL, SHROPSHIRE

  February 1953

  Some nights, I preferred to go out alone and wade through snow drifts rather than spend another long evening huddled at the outer rim of the great fire. I trudged up behind the castle, imagining myself on Waterloo farm, and probed the hedgerows with the light beam of a torch to make out the yellow eyes of the Welsh ewes clustered there. Their completeness comforted me. I yearned for a fleece to warm me in freezing England, to sleep in the penetrating air, to smell the dung of animals. I longed to be Iggy, and at home with my dad.

  We were served our meals in three separate locations: juniors, such as me, in a warm room beside the kitchen; intermediates in a large, cold, rectangular hall with enormous paintings depicting boars being hunted and killed; and the senior boys in a freezing circular tower that was also the school library. Dom Nestor, Saint Lawrence’s headmaster, his hands twisted into bulbous, arthritic knuckles, presided at the high table. Known as Nessie, he had one eye pupil locked into the bottom of its socket, his nose dripped, and his Adam’s apple protruded almost level with his chin. We ate the estate’s mutton, as a rule, but every other week the brother in charge of the farm killed a pig.

  After supper and before second study, all sixty of us knelt in the playroom and Nessie led us through the rosary. Unlike the boys from London or Manchester, I was unaffected by isolation. Some, like Welch, and Belclare, the son of a baronet, spent hours planning to run away, although, as I pointed out, since the school lay in a mountain range ten miles from a town, a run-away in such weather would soon perish. We attended the main mass every morning, a mandatory duty, except that junior boys were also on a rota as altar boys, serving the monks in the church’s side altars.

  I was instructed in such duties by Vance, a prefect several classes above me. His father worked in the diplomatic corps and they lived in Belgium, he told me.

  ‘Mother is an alcoholic,’ he said as he pointed vaguely to where the soutanes hung. ‘She’s having an affair with an Italian diplomat.’ It was as if he was describing something he had come across in a book. ‘The old man hates her, of course, but one has to keep up appearances. If they weren’t bloody Catholics, they’d have divorced. What does your father do?’

  ‘A landowner.’

  ‘Oh, really? How much?’

  ‘We’ve never really counted.’

  ‘My old man got a bullet in the crotch during the war.’

  ‘My dad shot Germans.’

  ‘They all say that.’

  ‘No, mine did. Twenty in one go. Then he went off and played a round of golf.’

  ‘My father shot a man in Singapore. Through the left eye.’

  ‘Killed him?’

  ‘Left eye, chum, in here and out here. Bloody big hole. Course he killed him.’

  ‘He had a reason, I take it.’

  ‘He was in bed with this chap’s wife and the bugger came home and found them. Had to shoot his way out. Do you believe in the afterlife?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I think so.’

  ‘All this nonsense they stuff down our throats here, mumbo bloody jumbo, if you ask me. We live, we eat, we fornicate, we die. So how about your old lady? Anyone else in her knickers?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Vance smiled as if I was slow on the uptake. ‘They all do it, you know.’

  I swallowed. ‘What?’

  ‘Come on, Ransom! They’re like bunnies, after only one thing. You ever fucked one?’

  ‘No,’ I said, wishing I had paid more attention to Danny’s descriptions behind the pigsty in Waterloo.

  ‘Me neither, but I’m hopi
ng to this Christmas. The chauffeur is bringing me to a brothel. Ah well, look, this mass thing is like falling off a log. Who are you serving?’

  ‘Father John.’

  ‘Ah. Hates it if you’re not quick up with his wine, or if you put in too much bloody water. Queer as a blind drake, of course, but so are they all, let’s be honest. But you’re probably safe given your size. They like smaller chaps, like what’s his name in your class? Blond hair?’

  ‘Belclare?’

  ‘Is that his name? You can bet he’s had a rumble from one of them. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind giving him a length myself. Don’t have any cigarettes, do you?’

  My father never wrote to me, but my mother did. Her letters came every week and told me of the day-to-day life in Waterloo, of how well my pony was doing, of the hunt the previous week, during which the fox had run a straight line for five miles from Ballyhale, and how they were all looking forward to me coming home for Easter. Each week I climbed to a combe in the hills behind the abbey with her letter and read it over and over.

  ‘Ireland remains a discontented province of the Empire,’ proclaimed Dom Alfred, a man of wobbly jowls who had written books on history. ‘It is to be hoped that someday she will appreciate the favours that have been graciously bestowed on her and will play her part in the great family of British nations. Yes, Ransom?’

  ‘Ireland is a Republic, father, not a province of the Empire.’

  ‘I was using a figure of speech, you odious child. A small and poor country such as Ireland will always have to rely on her larger neighbour to survive, one way or t’other. It is to England’s credit that she has not cut Ireland adrift.’

  Welch, sitting directly behind me, stuck his toe into my back and kicked. Sniggers encouraged Dom Alfred to continue.

  ‘We are in the middle of an unprecedented geopolitical crisis in which solidarity between the nations of the West means that the idea of neutrality, as proclaimed by little Ireland in the last war, is the tactic of fools. In the face of the Soviet threat, Irishmen, too, will have to fight if we are to be spared from this new evil.’