Acts of Allegiance

by Peter Cunningham

  She checked the time and took out her keys. ‘Christopher and I so enjoyed Waterloo last time. I have never seen the children as happy and of course you know how much I adore it there. How is Sugar?’

  I must have hesitated, for she missed nothing.

  ‘Marty?’

  ‘It’s just—’ I didn’t want to tell her, since it seemed like a confidence too far, but then I realised that there was little this woman did not know. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘This arrangement you and I have, my contact with Vance—it means I have to conceal things from Sugar and I hate doing that. I’m sure she senses it too—I can tell from the way she looks at me that she suspects something is going on. Maybe I was naïve, but this was not a problem I had anticipated.’

  ‘Has she said anything?’

  ‘She accuses me of being evasive, of concealing things. The problem is that I haven’t yet mastered the art of dishonesty to the extent of being able to deceive the mother of my children.’

  Alison winced. ‘If it’s any consolation, I understand. This is a lonely business, believe me. It’s like a little club that no one else can join—not Christopher, not Sugar, not our children. But it’s the price we pay for doing what we do. I, for one, believe that what I do is the right thing and so I’m prepared to pay that price. The question is, are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I expect the answer is probably yes, but at times I really don’t know.’

  We stood there, damply, aware that we had become, in a way, partners, and that, barring something unforeseen, this was just the beginning of the road.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Good, Marty, I knew you would be.’ She bent forward to allow me to kiss her cheeks. ‘You do know, don’t you, that you’re my favourite Irishman in the world.’

  10

  DUBLIN

  July—August 1969

  The North erupted. Riots became commonplace and our government really feared that the trouble could engulf the Republic. Mr Haughey’s plans had succeeded alarmingly, even if I could not be sure that my contact with Iggy, which I had made through Bobby Gillece, had been the catalyst. On those occasions when Haughey came to Iveagh House for receptions, I made sure to keep well clear of him. And yet, in that beautiful summer, in our own jurisdiction, life was sweet.

  ‘May I ask you something?’ said Sugar.

  It was a lovely evening in Rathgar, and the fragrance of sweet alyssum from the garden next door drifted in deliciously.

  ‘Where exactly are your father’s ashes?’

  ‘My … father’s ashes?’

  ‘I was putting flowers on your mother’s grave in Waterford recently and I suddenly asked myself, where is your dad? Certainly not with your mother, or if he is, the headstone makes no mention of it. You see, if you and I were hit by a bus next week, I would like to think we would be remembered together.’

  ‘And so we shall be,’ I said. ‘Not that I’ve given much thought to it, but I know we can buy a grave in Ballyhale. Catholic, of course, because you Prods can’t buy graves like we can, but if that’s not a problem for you, Ballyhale it will be.’

  Sugar tossed her head. ‘It’s not a problem at all for me, Marty, as long as we can be together.’

  ‘Exactly. I’ll see to it.’ I poured white wine and sat back. ‘I should visit my mother’s grave more often. I really appreciate that you bring her flowers.’

  Sugar took a deep breath and composed herself in the way her tennis opponents would have recognised. ‘I loved your mother,’ she said, with more than a hint of reprimand, ‘even though I knew her only in her final years. We spoke a lot. She told me about your father—much more than you ever have.’

  ‘Am I being criticised, or have I got that wrong?’

  ‘You are annoyingly evasive, Marty.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘It means slippery, Marty. I ask you a question about your father’s ashes and you slide out of giving me an answer. I wasn’t brought up like that.’

  ‘Where has all this come from? Here we are, having a quiet drink—’

  ‘I’ve never tried to conceal anything from you—have I?’

  ‘If you’re referring to my father, I can’t hold forth on someone who died when I was thirteen.’

  ‘But you do remember him.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You were at his funeral.’

  ‘Is that a question or a statement of fact?’

  ‘It’s an assumption.’

  ‘Well, you should be careful with your assumptions is my advice. I was sent home from school. My mother met me off the steamer and drove me to Waterloo where she insisted I have a gin and tonic. I learned then that my father had been dead for three weeks and had already been cremated. All that came home were his greatcoat, shoes, hat and wallet. We never discussed him after that. And since you raise your eyebrows, let me repeat what I have just said: we never discussed him again. And if you think what I’ve just described is strange, you don’t understand the kind of house I grew up in. So, no, I did not attend his funeral, and no, I don’t know where his ashes are.’

  We sat without speaking for some moments.

  ‘You’re angry with me,’ she said, ‘but your reaction to my question is no surprise, just part of a pattern. Of you hiding things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Your work—what you do exactly. Now I get the impression that I’m not being told everything about your father.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you said my mother had elaborated on him.’

  ‘There’s no point in being angry with her too.’

  I made a point of gathering my thoughts. From where I sat, I could see seagulls form an arc on the Dublin skyline.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You see, Nancy suited herself when it came to talking about my father. The fact is that I’ve searched high and low and I can’t find him. The records of eight London crematoria have no record of him. My mother always refused to discuss it, even though I pressed her. The Captain was insolvent, up to his neck with bookmakers and loan sharks. He could have disappeared and started a new life somewhere else. A new name. Fits him like a glove. He would only be in his early sixties. He could still be alive.’

  ‘Oh, Marty.’ Sugar’s face radiated kindness. ‘I’m sorry, I never realised.’

  ‘It’s like I’m forever living in a dream where one day he comes back.’

  Sun warmed the back of my neck as I sat there, wondering why it had taken me so long to tell her, and then realised that I had been ashamed to do so.

  ‘Your mother did talk to me about him. Towards the end,’ Sugar said.

  ‘What did she say?’.

  ‘She told me that she adored him from the first moment they met. She was twenty and had never been in Dublin. He was on his way to England to fight the war. He asked her to marry him, there and then. She said he was ashamed of having grown up poor, but proud of the fact that his mother had given all of them a clean, ironed handkerchief every morning. He was ashamed they had no indoor plumbing and told her that his father had sat on a bucket in his bedroom after breakfast to empty his bowels and that it was Paddy’s job to take out the slops. She told me that she loved him for everything—for his daring, his charm, his madness, his faults. He had seen terrible things during the war, she said, and the fact that he had kept his sense of humour, despite all that, made him her hero. She loved his style, and the dash they cut together at Epsom, or the Horse Show. He brought her to Covent Garden and they took a box. They stayed in The Ritz and lunched at The Savoy where she once saw Winston Churchill at the next table. When Winston saw her, he smiled. None of that would have happened if she had stayed in Waterloo and never met Paddy, she said.’

  I could see tears in my wife’s eyes.

  ‘Look, I regret not having spent more time with her,’ I said, ‘particularly towards the end.’

  ‘It was woman’s talk.’


  ‘I’m sorry if I have upset you.’

  ‘I just wished I had had a mother like that.’ Sugar sniffed. ‘I was pregnant during her last months. She used to laugh at me and say that she hoped for my sake that my baby wasn’t as big as you had been. I asked her had it been very painful. She said it could have been worse. “When you ride horses as a girl it spreads your hips and everything between them. I just popped him out,” she said.’

  Did the past ever take place? I wondered. Did it ever tangibly occur? Or had I imagined it?

  ‘What else did she tell you?’

  ‘Oh, this and that.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘She had lung cancer, Marty; she was on a lot of medication. Sometimes she didn’t make sense.’

  ‘Nonetheless … ’

  Sugar bit her lip. ‘She once said something quite odd.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We were chatting about, I don’t know, where I would send Emmet to school, something like that, or at least I was doing most of the talking, because she used to get quite drowsy, and then, completely out of the blue, she said, “Fred Black was Paddy’s ruination.”’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Yes, she did. I asked her who Fred Black was, but she’d gone to sleep. I tried again the next day, but she just looked at me.’

  ‘Fred Black,’ I said.

  ‘That was the name she said, yes. Who was he?’

  I felt a weight on my chest. ‘I don’t know,’ I said as our neighbour started up his lawnmower. ‘Any more than I know where my father’s ashes are. I simply don’t know.’

  11

  DUBLIN SHELBOURNE HOTEL

  Late December 1951

  A young, fair-haired maid was unpacking my mother’s clothes and carefully placing them in drawers that smelled of mothballs. She reminded me of a time I could not quite remember, but which was warm and intensely pleasant, and I wanted to drink in her pleasingly round figure and her anxious but pretty face from which her fair hair had been tied back beneath a white cap, and, from where I lay on my parents’ bed, I could see that above one of her knees her stocking was laddered. After Waterloo, which my parents had barely had time to open up before leaving it again, the Shelbourne was blissfully warm. Nonetheless I felt sad. Iggy and his dad had been due to leave Waterford that day for good. By now they would have reached their new home on the border.

  ‘I’m going to the bar to meet that man.’ The Captain upended his gin, slapped his cheeks with Old Spice, combed back the greying wings of his hair and stood upright. ‘Everyone on best behaviour, aye?’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Nancy said, lighting a cigarette. ‘You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.’

  I found it curious how my father’s various smells lingered after him—the sharp hit of his aftershave lotion, the faint sweat that always clung to his jackets, his boot polish.

  ‘Oh God! Marty?’ My mother sounded husky, as she did every evening at this time. ‘Marty? Come here, pet, and clip me!’ She sat hopelessly at the dressing table, a string of pearls in her hands, the cigarette in her mouth.

  ‘I can’t seem to close it.’

  I knew these pearls, which were taken out for special occasions; the catch was worn and hard to fasten to the tiny eyelet, which I now attempted to do.

  ‘I hate these evenings,’ she said. ‘A lot of fuss for nothing.’

  As I laid my hands on her neck with its little race of golden hairs, and thought about the maid who had just left, and was wondering if my mother would mind if I bent down and kissed her neck, she leant forward for her lipstick.

  ‘Don’t move, Mummy.’

  Her smoky-green eyes sought me out from the mirror.

  ‘Well done,’ she said, testing the necklace, getting up, draining her glass, pouting at her image in the dress with the huge collar, reaching for her fox stole and evening bag. ‘Well done, love.’

  Holly boughs adorned the lift. She took my arm and, when I looked at her in surprise, smiled beautifully. From the hall, I could hear the Captain’s whinnying laugh. In the Horseshoe Bar, a small, dapper individual with a goatee beard stood beside my father.

  ‘Ah-ha!’ cried the Captain. ‘Better late than never!’

  My mother allowed the goateed man to kiss her cheeks.

  ‘Champagne, my dear?’ he enquired in what I would later learn was a Cockney accent.

  ‘Do fish swim?’ shouted the Captain and the other man harrumphed.

  ‘Thank you, Fred,’ my mother said. ‘This is Martin, our son. This is Mr and Mrs Black, Marty.’

  Next to Mr Black, a fat woman with hooped, gypsy-like earrings and wearing a low-cut dress that was bright as silver-plate, sat on a barstool. Beside her, on another stool, sat a girl about my age, her bare legs crossed.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Martin, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Black. ‘You’re a fine big lad, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ve worked it out that by the time he’s seventeen, he’s going to have cost me eleven grand,’ the Captain said. ‘Eleven grand!’

  ‘Good thing you’re loaded then, Paddy,’ said Mr Black and winked at me. ‘Martin, meet my daughter, Daisy.’

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  She brushed back her fair hair and slid her glance sideways, as if inviting me to look for something whose location was known to her alone.

  ‘Daisy’s not been herself after the crossing,’ her mother said.

  ‘I’ll need more than a few winners to pay for this chap’s education, let me tell you!’ barked the Captain, in full performance mode. ‘I’m taking him with me to London next year. Show him the sights, you know? We’ll stay in my club on Piccadilly.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Mr Black.

  ‘The In and Out Club,’ my father said. ‘I often buy Anthony Eden a drink there. Anthony Eden.’

  ‘He’s a smashing looking bloke, Anthony Eden,’ said Mrs Black. ‘I love his hats.’

  ‘Asked me to call him Tony,’ said the Captain, his expression wild. ‘The new Foreign Secretary! D’you know what he told me? That Churchill sleeps all day, pissed as a newt! Anthony Eden told me that, in the members’ bar, true as you’re standing there! Churchill!’

  ‘Now, Martin, let me tell you something,’ said Mr Black, drawing me to one side. ‘You listen to your dad, you hear me? He and I are very good friends. Your dad’s a very clever man.’

  A diamond tiepin burned just above the buttons of his waistcoat. I could see Nancy blowing smoke from the side of her mouth, her way of telling me that she loathed these people.

  ‘The trouble is what to do with cash,’ I heard Mr Black tell my father as a man dressed like a spiv suddenly appeared at Mr Black’s elbow.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Mr Black, listening. ‘Just wait a sec.’ He turned to the Captain. ‘Ollie here keeps his ear to the ground—don’t you, Ollie?’

  ‘As close to it as I can, boss.’

  ‘A Basset Hound, if ever there was one, our Ollie. And what do you hear, Ollie? You can tell the Captain.’

  Ollie leaned in and the lights from the bar sparked off his hair gel. ‘I hear thirteen-to-two trap one, Harold’s Cross last race this evening,’ he hissed.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Mr Black again. He nodded once to Ollie. ‘The usual.’

  ‘Consider it done, boss.’

  As Ollie made to leave, Mr Black called out. ‘One sec, Ollie. Paddy? D’you want on?’

  Consternation flooded my father’s face. He slapped the pockets of his jacket and smiled crookedly.

  ‘Don’t really follow the dogs,’ he said.

  ‘Nonsense. I insist,’ said Mr Black. He flashed out a pair of tenners. ‘Have a hundred and thirty to a score on for the Captain as well, and be quick about it!’

  ‘Consider it done,’ said Ollie again.

  ‘Happy, Paddy?’

  The Captain’s face was lit by a foolish grin. ‘Well, yes, thank you very much, Fred.’

  The menus had arrived in the hands of a head waiter dressed in a
black tailcoat.

  ‘We had the beef here last night. I just love it, don’t you?’ said Mrs Black to Nancy.

  ‘I love the fish in the Russell,’ my mother said.

  ‘Ever thought of putting a few dogs into training?’ Mr Black asked my father. ‘Beef done rare.’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Black.’

  ‘I know just the man to start you off,’ Mr Black said.

  ‘Your table is ready now, Mr Black.’

  ‘A hundred and thirty to a score,’ the Captain whispered, and I saw Nancy roll her eyes as we made our way across the hall to the dining room.

  Never before had I seen the Captain in a group of which he was not the obvious leader and, of course, he had just now as good as accepted money, something he had always forbidden me to do. In the restaurant, Mr Black sat at the head of the table and ordered the wine. Occasionally, he whispered to my father, whereupon the Captain sat back, blinking for a moment, then let out a whistle of air.

  Mr and Mrs Black ordered asparagus; my father did the same. I’d never heard of asparagus. When the rectangular dishes arrived, the Captain took a knife and fork to his, and cut the asparagus into little pieces, but the Blacks used their fingers to pick up the green spears and dip them in melted butter. A pianist raced up and down his keyboard, turning to the room for applause after each melody was concluded. The Captain had become ever more expansive, referring to upcoming business deals that even I knew were unlikely to arise.

  ‘Quite nice the suites here, aren’t they?’ Mrs Black observed as our main course was served.

  ‘Poor Marty has to sleep on the sofa in ours,’ my mother said.

  ‘Oh, really? Do you not have a second bedroom?’ asked Mrs Black. ‘Ours has a second bedroom.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Paddy, we’re perfectly fine as we are,’ Nancy said.

  ‘Did you say your suite has two bedrooms?’ I could tell by my father’s glinting stare that he had picked up the scent of an enemy.

  ‘It’s what we’re normally given in a decent hotel,’ said Mrs Black.

  ‘Two bedrooms?’ my father said.

  ‘Well, we’re only staying here because you recommended it,’ said Mrs Black.