Acts of Allegiance

by Peter Cunningham

  ‘Very nice, too, Paddy, well done you,’ said Mr Black.

  ‘D’you know how long I’ve been coming here?’ the Captain said grimly. ‘Nineteen bloody forty.’

  ‘That long really?’ said Mr Black.

  ‘And they fob me off with a shitty little one-bedroom suite.’

  ‘People have no respect any more, have they?’ said Mr Black sadly. ‘The times we live in.’

  ‘I’ll show them a thing or two about respect,’ said the Captain and threw down his napkin.

  ‘Oh, God!’ cried Nancy. ‘Leave it alone, Paddy.’

  ‘Bloody Bolsheviks!’

  ‘The fact is,’ said Mr Black, ‘when you’re generous to them, all they do is come along and take advantage of you.’

  ‘I expect because it’s our first time they were trying to make a good impression,’ Mrs Black said.

  ‘I’ll make an impression on somebody,’ the Captain snarled, pushing back his chair. ‘Waiter!’

  I was conscious of sudden silence. A stooped, bald little man in a white jacket appeared.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Get me the manager.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  As Mr Black looked across to his wife, and their eyes met, I realised all at once that my father was no match for these people, which made me hate them.

  ‘Yes, Captain?’ The head waiter was beside my father’s chair.

  ‘Are you the manager?’

  ‘Not yet, Captain, unfortunately,’ said the head waiter in a brave attempt at joviality, ‘but what can I do for you?’

  ‘I asked for the manager,’ the Captain said. ‘Get him.’

  ‘If anything’s the matter with dinner, Captain, you should tell me.’

  ‘The dinner is perfectly adequate,’ said my father. ‘The problem is with the attitude of the people who run this fucking hotel!’

  I could see Mr Black absorbing the unfolding situation with a little smile. The piano had gone quiet. Everyone in the dining room was looking at my father, except for Daisy. She was looking at me, and when I smiled, the point of her tongue emerged like the head of a hungry worm and tapped the lovely little indentation at the centre of her upper lip.

  ‘Captain,’ the head waiter said with a deep breath, ‘it’s ten o’clock. The manager is off-duty, and I must ask you to show some respect to the other diners.’

  ‘Was I shown respect?’ the Captain cried. ‘Was it respectful to put me and my family into a cubbyhole?’

  My mother stood up. ‘I’m going to bed. Good night, and thank you very much for dinner, Fred.’

  ‘You will sit down!’ roared the Captain, like someone beyond the reach of land.

  ‘Captain … ’ the waiter began.

  My father was on his feet. ‘D’you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to buy this hotel and sack the Bolsheviks who run it. Then we’ll see who shows me and my family the respect we deserve.’

  Black was helping Nancy arrange her stole as the pianist struck up a lively number and the formerly curious customers at other tables were shaking their heads.

  ‘Have I been unreasonable?’ the Captain asked Mr Black. ‘Have I stepped out of line?’

  ‘Not one inch, Paddy,’ said Mr Black, ‘not one inch.’

  ‘You,’ the Captain said to the head waiter, ‘get your black tail out to the telephone and tell the manager that I don’t care what time it is, Captain Ransom wants to see him in here, now! D’ you understand? Now!’

  Daisy smiled at me as her tongue swam out again and beckoned me with a little movement of its curled wet tip. All at once, the intense physical need I had felt when Auntie Kate had washed my hair in Fowler Street swept through me.

  ‘Captain, I’ll have to ask you to leave,’ the waiter said, taking my father’s elbow.

  ‘Get your fucking hands off me!’

  ‘Please, sir … ’

  ‘Allo, allo.’ Mr Black was looking towards the door.

  It took me a few seconds to recognise Ollie from earlier in the evening.

  ‘Good night to you, Ollie,’ said Mr Black. ‘How has your evening been?’

  A smile split Ollie’s narrow face and he stuck both thumbs in the air. ‘Winner all right!’ he chortled. ‘Winner all right!’

  Nancy kept saying she wished we could go home. Although I never wanted to meet Mr Black again, I had spent the night on my made-up bed dreaming of Daisy.

  ‘It’s our turn to entertain the Blacks tonight,’ the Captain said and honked the horn as we overtook a double-decker bus. ‘I’ve booked a table in Jammet’s.’

  ‘How much is that going to cost, Paddy?’

  ‘Who cares?’ my father cried. ‘It’s the bookmakers who’ll be paying!’

  ‘We should have used the money you won to pay our bill in the hotel,’ she said.

  ‘Fuck that hotel.’

  As if everything was being synchronised by forces unknown, the Blacks’ maroon Bentley, driven by a uniformed chauffeur, glided by and I could see Daisy staring out, her pale face empty of interest.

  ‘I don’t trust him, Paddy,’ said my mother. ‘He’s just appeared from nowhere, like a toadstool.’

  ‘Have you ever found a hundred and thirty quid under a toadstool?’ snapped the Captain.

  ‘We can’t afford to mix with these kinds of people any more,’ Nancy said. ‘He’s a professional gambler.’

  ‘I know exactly what he is,’ the Captain said. ‘He trusts me to have money on for him. You saw what happened last night? This is the opportunity of a lifetime.’

  ‘I have a bad feeling,’ Nancy said.

  As soon as we had parked and walked up the hill to Leopardstown, my father hurried off, like someone already late for an appointment. Nancy and I found the damp tearooms, where she ordered tea and an elaborate stand of cakes, but then discovered, when we had finished, that she had no money to pay for it.

  ‘My husband will pay,’ she told the manager as we paraded out and she went to the ladies’ room.

  I huddled at the end of a building, watching horses being led around and the owners waiting for their jockeys. All at once I saw Daisy, tall, elegant and beautiful to my eyes, standing with her parents. An official in a white coat stuck his arm out.

  ‘Owners and trainers, sonny,’ he said. ‘Get lost.’

  Staring in, aching to be near her, I was overwhelmed by the sense that she and I were on the one side of something I had only just discovered. I did not know then that I would never see her again, or that the image of her lovely face would stay with me for many years.

  When the Captain reappeared, he was perspiring.

  ‘Are you involved here?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘Number six belongs to Fred,’ said the Captain from clenched teeth.

  All I remember after that is my father’s ashen face, and our swift departure from the racecourse, during which I did not dare remind them of the unpaid tearoom bill, and our surprising drive directly back to Waterloo, a three-hour journey, without bothering to collect our luggage from the Shelbourne. Little was said and the smoke from my parents’ cigarettes filled the car. Although Waterloo was wrapped in night, Danny was standing outside the front door, with Eileen beside him, wiping her tears. I wondered how she knew that my father had backed a loser.

  ‘What now?’ the Captain barked, jumping out.

  I heard low talk and knew they didn’t want me to hear.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Nancy said.

  ‘Some children found him,’ I heard Eileen say.

  ‘How found him?’ my father snapped.

  ‘In the old forge in Jail Street,’ Danny said. ‘An anvil fell on him. Killed him straightaway.’

  My mother began to wail.

  ‘Christ, shut up!’ the Captain cried. ‘God forgive me but he’s better off.’

  ‘He was your brother, Paddy, even if he was retarded,’ Nancy sniffled.

  ‘What a bloody mess,’ the Captain said.

  12

  DUBLIN

&nbs
p; June 1971

  We had moved to a more spacious house, in Sandymount, just five minutes from the beach to which Nurse Fleming brought Emmet, and Georgie, our daughter, every day. Sugar played tennis competitively in Fitzwilliam. On most weekends, we drove down to Waterloo, where Alison and Christopher were frequent visitors. On the last occasion they had stayed, a plan to go on holiday to Malta had been discussed. In Iveagh House, I was part of an ever-expanding team whose goal was to finally make Ireland a member of the European Economic Community. My work was valued, particularly when small concessions were needed from my counterparts on the British side.

  Charles Haughey had been arrested on charges of conspiring to import arms and had left office in disgrace. It was an international sensation. Even though Haughey was subsequently acquitted, it would be five years before he was allowed back into government. My meeting with him in Paris seemed to have been forgotten, for which I was grateful, since I had feared that he might refer to it during his trial, but he never had.

  Domestic economic issues were beginning to dominate the political debate. I continued to brief Alison on matters that would interest her, including those files on Ulster that Bill O’Neill sometimes left lying on his desk, or information stamped for Bill’s attention from the nearby Department of Justice.

  Sugar had become impatient with me over small things, such as jobs around the farm left undone, or promises to the children unfulfilled, charges I always defended by pleading commitments at work. It had long been accepted that during the week in Dublin my homecoming was unpredictable, to the extent that our having dinner together had become an exception. I put Sugar’s darker humour down to the toil of the many tensions I held within myself and must have been projecting.

  One Friday, as we drove into the south-east, when I asked casually what time Alison and Christopher were expected—for they had been invited for the weekend—Sugar, at the wheel, said, ‘They’re not coming.’

  ‘Oh, really? Why not?’

  ‘Because I rang them up and cancelled them.’

  ‘Cancelled them?’

  ‘Yes, Marty. Do you have a problem with that?’

  Nurse Fleming and the children had become unusually still. We drove for another hour in silence, until our mountain appeared.

  ‘Will you bring me fishing, Daddy, please?’ asked Emmet.

  ‘Perhaps. Let’s get unpacked first and we’ll see.’

  ‘Daddy’s far too busy to go fishing,’ Sugar said and drove the car down the hill and over the lake bridge in a shower of pebbles.

  Later, when the children had gone out with tadpole nets, we stood in the kitchen, the deal table between us.

  ‘Why did you cancel the Chases without telling me?’

  ‘Is she that bloody important to you, Marty? That we can’t come down here for a weekend without her lumbering after us? With her supercilious know-it-all expression on her big face? You love it, don’t you, all that English shit about history and shires and the war? Well, I’m sick to the back teeth of it.’

  She was not to be diverted.

  ‘I just don’t know you any more. I haven’t a clue what’s going on inside you, or where that thing, whatever it is, is taking you. It’s as if I’m being continually deceived.’

  ‘I’m not deceiving you.’

  ‘Are you screwing her? It would be easier if you told me the truth.’

  Yes, it would have been simpler had I been conducting a traditional affair, rutting in cars and in the rooms of cheap hotels.

  ‘I have never loved anyone but you since the day we married. Nor do my plans involve departing from that standard.’

  ‘Then what is it that makes you the way you are? You’re like a man who’s been hollowed out. What is it?’

  I cursed myself for putting all I loved in jeopardy for the sake of something I scarcely understood. ‘My position is complicated. Occasionally I have to inhabit a sort of no-man’s-land in order to discharge my duties. It isn’t easy.’

  ‘I didn’t marry a civil servant, Marty. I married a farmer with a romantic home in the hills. Now you clock in and out, you never tell me anything. We never talk anymore—do you realise that? And yet when Alison bloody Chase is around, you never shut up—whispering to her when you think other people aren’t looking, staying up together long after everyone else has gone to bed. It’s nauseating.’

  I felt as if my foundations, never altogether reliable, were about to crumble.

  ‘Sugar, I’m not an accountant or a vet. What I mean is, I don’t have a job that lends itself to discussion at home. Alison and I—well, our work occasionally overlaps, as you can imagine. And yes, there are certain subjects that cannot be discussed formally, at intergovernmental level. So I suppose we do tend to swap policies now and then, when we meet socially, on a one-to-one basis, which I accept is inconsiderate and ill-mannered, and for which I apologise. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘What subjects?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What are the subjects that cannot be discussed formally at intergovernmental level? What exactly are the ideas you swap with her when you and she are down by the lake, pretending to be interested in the children fishing? What do you drone on about long after Christopher has passed out and I’ve gone to bed?’

  ‘Well, I can’t exactly say.’

  ‘Oh? Because you’ve forgotten? Or because you can tell her things that you can’t tell me?’

  ‘It’s not like that, Sugar. Alison and I—’

  ‘Well then what is it like, Marty? What does she know that I don’t?’

  ‘There are such things as secrets,’ I said, knowing how pompous and pathetic that sounded. ‘Official secrets.’

  She stared at me. ‘Are you telling me you’re some sort of spy?’

  It took all my resources to maintain my composure, for what she had just said—the word she had used—hit me in the gut like a mallet.

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ I said, trying not to bluster. ‘I’m just an executive officer in a government department.’

  She stared. ‘My God, look at you! You’ve gone pale!’

  ‘Sugar … ’

  ‘I think you are! You’re a spy! You’re giving her information, aren’t you? Stuff you can’t give her officially. Does she pay you for that? If she does, I’m damned if I know where the money goes.’

  ‘Sugar, please.’

  ‘Deny it then. Go on.’

  ‘Of course she’s not paying me. There’s nothing to pay me for.’

  ‘Let’s face it, Marty, she wouldn’t have to pay you, would she? You’d much prefer to be working for Alison and her lot in Whitehall than for Bill O’Neill—admit it!’

  ‘Sugar, I’m not a spy!’ I shouted, more in terror than anger. ‘Stop this!’

  ‘Or maybe she’s the spy, feeding you information! Which makes you both spies. Oh, Christ, what have we got into? God help me and my children.’ She sat down heavily, her gaze on something distant that did not include me. ‘You’re impossible to engage with,’ she said with a resignation that made me despise myself.

  ‘I’m doing my best to describe my job.’

  ‘I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.’ She pressed her hands to her temples. ‘I’ve always supported you, changed my life in order to marry you and lived like a shrew ever since. I’ve carried more than my share of the work and the worry. We’ve drifted apart. Why? You tell me there’s not another woman, and I believe you. So it has to be this work of yours. If your work is above board and decent, then say so. But if you’re doing something wrong, then you should stop.’

  ‘I’m doing nothing wrong,’ I said, trying my utmost to believe it, wishing that Alison were there, for she could have explained better than me what I was doing, and why.

  ‘I hate your job, Marty, which is most unhealthy, because it’s leading me to hate you. I live in the shadow of what you do. I sit some days and cry for the whole morning, not knowing why I’m crying, and then realise it’s because much of the time I’m
married to a stranger.’

  I felt cut because I knew she was at least partly right.

  ‘I’m just lucky I have Fleming. She’s so kind and helpful.’

  ‘You … discuss this with Fleming?’

  ‘She knows. Women know. She supports me, and I’m very grateful to her.’

  Sugar was suddenly calm, in an almost eerie way.

  ‘I actually decided to leave you, Marty. My parents know how I feel. There’s room for the children and me in Carlow, although Fleming will have to leave. I had made my mind up.’

  ‘“Had”?’

  She shook violently. ‘My father has cancer.’

  I could not speak.

  ‘It’s inoperable. He has only a few months to live. I’m not landing in on my parents in the circumstances. Unfortunately, I have to stay here with you.’

  ‘Sugar, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t, please,’ she said as I reached for her.

  ‘I’ll leave,’ I said.

  ‘Where would you go? To a digs in Leeson Street so you can be near your office? Be near her?’

  ‘I mean I’ll leave the job. Not immediately, but at the end of the year. I’ll have certain entitlements by then.’

  She looked at me sadly. ‘You’ll never leave it. It owns you.’

  ‘I never saw it as anything more than a means to keep us going, to pay for Waterloo.’

  ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’

  ‘I’m a free man! I’ll do what I want, and if leaving my job means saving my marriage, that’s what I’ll do.’

  And then I was on my knees, holding her around the waist, her warm belly to my face as the poverty of my life overwhelmed me.

  13

  DUBLIN

  1972

  The New Year began badly. On the penultimate day of January, a Sunday, thirteen male civilians were shot dead in Derry by the British Army. We were in Waterloo when the telephone rang, an unusual event, since I had given few people the number. It was Alison.

  ‘Christ!’ I said when she told me. ‘This is disgraceful.’

  ‘We’re on it,’ she said. ‘This evening we’re announcing a sworn inquiry, chaired by a very senior judge. If there was wrongdoing it will be exposed quickly and efficiently. We are urging everyone to be calm.’