‘Of course I didn’t tell her. She can smell it off me.’ I shuddered. ‘Look, I need out.’
Alison shook her head sympathetically. ‘I know, Marty. I know.’
‘I have nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ve lost those I love. I’m dying.’
‘I know.’
‘Really?’
‘So I’m ending it. Effective now,’ she said.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Absolutely. The decision has been made.’
‘What … does that mean?’
‘It means you and I shan’t be available any more to help each other in political matters.’
‘But … ’
‘Yes, Marty, we are still friends, of course we are. We will always be friends.’
Despite this being what I wanted most, I felt the cut of loss. We had reached the same point that we had arrived at several months before, but in this case, by agreement.
‘You’re not going back to London, then.’
‘Of course not—or at least, not yet. Look, there are many ways that friends can keep in touch.’
Mysteriously, I was transported back in that instant to the hammock in Waterloo, and the feel of her warm thigh, and the attendant rush of fear and excitement that I had felt then.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ she was saying. ‘I suggest you wait a few months to get acclimatised, then go back to Sugar. You’ll have nothing to hide—you’ll no longer smell of it, to use your expression.’
‘Does Vance know? I realise that’s a stupid question.’
She smiled. ‘Vance really likes you and probably envies you.’
‘He once told me I was a very lucky man. He was talking about Sugar.’
She picked up a knife and sliced a Danish pastry in two. ‘You’ve made a very significant contribution, something we greatly appreciate—and it’s been positive for everyone. At the same time, we understand the finite nature of these arrangements. There’s no point in you being miserable, living apart from Sugar, whom you adore, your lovely Emmet and Georgie. Nurse Fleming.’
‘I can get by without Fleming.’
‘However,’ she poured tea into the cheap white cups, ‘I need to know what exactly happened in south Armagh. Our people are furious but mystified. Can you throw any light on why he may have bolted?’
I had prepared for this in the weeks that had gone by since the incident. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said and met her steady gaze. ‘He came out of the pub and when he saw me he ran for it.’
‘Which, if true, makes our involving you a farce.’
‘Why didn’t you take him out before I arrived?’
‘Because we didn’t have a visual. The pub is two hundred yards from the border. We didn’t know he was in there for sure until he emerged. Our people did a positive ID and relayed it to Special Ops, but by then he was on the move.’
‘It was an idiotic plan in the first place. Imagine if you’d killed the priest.’
She sighed. ‘Perhaps it was foolish. The impression is, however, that something tipped him off. Or someone. You probably have a fair idea of the amount of work involved in an operation like this. Thing is, it very nearly worked, but something happened.’
‘He obviously saw the danger—saw your people. Or heard the choppers.’
‘No.’ She was adamant. ‘He got a signal. Did you see anything?’
I felt a surge of relief. ‘Nothing. I saw him. I was walking towards him. He was saying something to me. Then he started running back towards the pub.’
‘Your in-law—Bobby? Might he have warned him?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said with a spike of glee. ‘Although Bobby was walking behind me, so perhaps he did—who knows?’
She began to pick up crumbs with her fingers. ‘We don’t know how Ignatius Kane became aware of us and we probably never will. The shame is that he’ll kill another couple of dozen innocent people before we get our next chance.’ She sat back. ‘But now it’s over for you.’ I wondered then was there anyone in my life I had not at some point betrayed, Alison included.
‘Aren’t you glad that you’re out of this ghastly business, Marty?’
‘What about you? Are you out of here, too?’
‘Not till next year, or the one after that—then I’m away! Like a kite! Or an enormous balloon! I may sail over you one day in Waterloo. You’ll be sitting outside with Sugar, drinking wine by the lake, and all of a sudden one of your beautiful children will rush over, pointing into the sky and shrieking, “Daddy, Daddy! Look up! It’s Alison!”’
3
DUBLIN—WATERFORD
January—March 1975
At first, my new world was a novelty. My loyalty, now exclusively at the disposal of Iveagh House, felt not just strange, but difficult, a puzzle in itself, for one would have assumed that serving one master was less demanding than answering to two. As time wore on, my working day, once a tightrope on which I had effortlessly performed, was revealed in all its banality, and I realised just how dull were the lives of my colleagues, how blunt compared to the razor’s edge on which I had previously balanced. I was one of them now, a civil servant with a family, although mine had fled, whose soul hid nothing more than the venal thoughts of ordinary men. On the other hand, I could sleep without fear of what I might babble in a dream. My heart no longer leapt.
I had described for Bill O’Neill the events I had been part of in south Armagh in exactly the same way I had described them for Alison. The ordination, the procession to the pub, the appearance of Iggy Kane. I gave Bill the names of all the people in our group, including Iggy’s family and the priest’s. Given the information that I knew Bill was being fed by the army and Gardaí, he would surely have known already about the events at the Ramblers Inn, but although he listened to me amiably, and took detailed notes, he never commented, except to make sympathetic noises when I described the terrifying climax outside the pub. Where exactly Bill’s allegiances lay was never clear to me; he was a complex man. For all I knew, he could well have been briefed in advance of the south Armagh operation.
One day he put his head around my door. ‘Charlie’s back,’ he said with a grin.
After five years in the political wilderness, my old friend Mr Haughey had just been appointed shadow spokesman for Health and Social Welfare. His disgrace and fall from office six years previously had been put aside and left to history.
‘Maybe this time he’ll behave himself,’ I said.
‘This time he’ll go all the way to the top,’ Bill said. ‘No one will stop him now.’
I had never heard Bill express an opinion on an Irish politician before, but Haughey had a way of drawing even the most neutral of men to his forward march. Thereafter, on several occasions, I gave Bill the opportunity to discuss in more detail what had happened in south Armagh, to make a comment, or ask a question about the particular hinterland I had entered, in an effort to determine what exactly he knew, but he never bit. He puffed his pipe and we discussed whatever political common ground existed in Northern Ireland as a way of defusing the crisis that had engulfed the province.
* * *
In Bobby Gillece’s pub the smoke sat at eye level. Our excursion together to south Armagh seemed to have created a new bond between us, as it does between fellow soldiers who have seen action together. From Bobby’s point of view, he and I had been the targets of a British Army ambush, which had at last put us on the same side, and confirmed for Bobby that all his old suspicions and political allegiances were justified. He had inflated his own role outside the Ramblers Inn into a near heroic escapade with which his customers had already become weary.
‘The news from Iggy is not good,’ he said to me from the side of his mouth.
‘Oh?’
‘Their baby was born a week ago.’ The bones in Bobby’s jaw popped. ‘A girl. Poor little thing has a hole in her heart.’
Notwithstanding our new camaraderie, my security lay in staying close to Bobby, for if Iggy suspected that my
warning to him had arisen, not from my spotting the helicopters, but from a loss of nerve, then he would tell Bobby, and Bobby, I was sure, would be unable to conceal it from me.
‘Not fair, is it?’ he said. ‘They’ve waited so long and this is what they get. The doctors say she won’t live.’
‘Sometimes I think this God of ours is a monster.’
Bobby looked at me in surprise, then his bottom lip curled out. He reached his hand towards me and I realised he was drunk.
‘Can I tell you something?’
‘Sure, Bobby.’
He had a grip on me. ‘I think about you a lot. An awful lot.’
The discomfort I had sometimes felt as a child in Fowler Street when he was around now crawled over me.
‘We’ve known each other a long time,’ I said.
‘I know, but … ’ He gasped. ‘You see … ’
‘It’s all right, Bobby, it’s fine.’
‘You see, I was there that day, on the quay,’ he said. ‘I saw what happened.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The day you took the boat to England, to go to school. I saw you on the quay with her.’
‘With who?’ I asked.
‘With Kate,’ Bobby sobbed. ‘Do you not remember?’
4
WATERLOO FARM—WATERFORD
September 1952
Cattle stretched in shade as mallard beat the lake into a frenzy. By the front door, Oscar slept, twitching, occasionally lunging at a fly. Eileen, who had been there since I was born, and for whom every year of the last twelve had been tainted with dread for this moment, stood in her apron, grinding her hands. In my correctly creased grey flannel short pants and tweed sports coat, I was all at once so much taller than she was. Eileen had been persuaded not to make the journey to Waterford.
‘You don’t have to come either, Paddy,’ Nancy said. She threw down her cigarette and swivelled on it with her heel.
‘Some things I need to get in town,’ the Captain said. ‘Come on!’
I clicked my tongue at Oscar, who sat up to have his ears rubbed. I wondered if he would still sleep on the old horse blanket at the foot of my bed. Danny stood at some distance.
‘See you at Christmas, Danny!’
Danny had vivid notions about English women that he had been sharing with me ever since he had heard where I was being sent to school. The Morris gurgled and fumes seeped out from beneath its chrome fender. There was a brief, awkward fumbling with Eileen, then I climbed into the back seat with my wooden trunk, last used in the Transvaal by my maternal grandfather. Eileen at the car window, the Captain staring straight ahead. Nancy revved the engine and we lurched forward.
‘Christ, that bloody woman drives me mad,’ the Captain grumbled as we shot past the lake.
A cloud shadow moved across the mountain. The car backfired, twice, and Harry, my pony, made high, indignant steps across the paddock. That morning I had fed him oats, normally reserved for hunting days, and had later ridden him, flat out, in the big, triangular field. I felt odd now, dressed in the proper clothes required by my new school; for the previous twelve years I had worn hand-me-downs from Fowler Street, and only occasionally clothes purchased from Our Boys in Dublin, when the Captain was flush.
He was not flush any more. A slowness had entered the way he walked, or confronted bad news, or got up from his armchair. It was as if his ever-precarious financial situation had ground him down, leaving behind only a marooned grandiosity. In his study one night, when he had gone to bed, I found a letter he had written to his brother Ted, asking for the loan of five pounds. It was signed, ‘Your loving brother, Paddy’. His trips to England were made to escape his creditors, I had realised that summer when a decent trout from the lake had often meant the difference between supper or not. I had put on his old khaki shorts and tennis shoes and waded out waist deep with a net tacked between two poles. Soon, my shoulders, back and chest were the colour of harness leather and my hair hammered into copper.
I kept glancing back to see Waterloo shrinking beneath me. Even though I accepted the decision that had been made to send me away, and was even looking forward to it, I still wondered why Iggy could attend the Christian Brothers in south Armagh, now his home, while I had to go to England.
The angle of my mother’s cigarette seldom changed. When the ash grew perilously long, she wound down the car window and flicked it out. She now handed back her Craven ‘A’ to me, and the metal lighter that had once been her father’s. I took out a cigarette, flamed it alight and inhaled.
‘If you’re going to smoke, you need a decent lighter,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy you one for Christmas.’
‘How is he going to afford to smoke aged twelve?’ the Captain asked.
‘He can smoke mine,’ my mother said and threw her eyes to heaven.
She was tense in a way I had not noticed before, whether because formerly she had not been tense, or whether I had become more attuned than I used to be, I could not say. The Captain had lost part of his flamboyance and I think that irritated her. I had become gradually aware that she was an attractive woman; when she walked down the Quay, men turned their heads.
Suddenly the twinkling river mouth, always exciting, edged into view. The Captain was rattling on about clubs in London, and how, if there wasn’t another war—this time with Russia—he would be over to visit me. ‘I’m too old to fight, but you might have to,’ he said.
‘He will not fight!’ Nancy snapped and her tone was so unusual that his head went back as if she’d slapped him.
The ever-changing shades and hues seemed to consume us in our descent to the town. A boots was polishing the door brasses of the Granville Hotel as we passed the Clock Tower and pulled up at the customs shed on Adelphi Quay.
‘Russia is not Ireland’s argument, thank God,’ Nancy said and switched off the engine.
‘Oh shit,’ said the Captain.
Auntie Kate and Auntie Angela were standing on either side of Granny Kane, who was perched on an upright chair. My grandmother wore her customary black, but Auntie Kate’s light summer frock was being pressed into her legs by the breeze.
With his English-sounding name, rank and ways, his never-explained sources of income, his sudden disappearances and reappearances, his social connections and ostentatious approach to life my father had become someone whom the Kanes neither understood nor approved of. Even though his mother would never have criticised him in public, and was proud that he had fought a war, she was hurt by the fact that he had distanced himself from his natural family.
Nancy, grasping the awkwardness of the situation, rushed forward to kiss all the women and then thrust me at them, as the Captain stood, hands behind his back, and made remarks to no one in particular about the weather and the perfect sailing conditions.
‘Kate, stand beside Martin,’ said Auntie Angela, who was peering into a Box Brownie. I don’t think I had ever heard her speak more than two words before. ‘Stand still, both of you.’ Auntie Kate wrapped her arm around my waist. ‘Lovely!’ cried Auntie Angela.
I turned to heft out my trunk.
‘Oh, God,’ I heard the Captain say.
‘Marty. Come over here now!’
My mother was beckoning. The steamer let out a short hoot. Granny Kane’s eyes were large with tears. ‘You’re going to break all the girls’ hearts, including mine,’ she said.
‘I’ll be back at Christmas, Granny.’
She was never far from desolation, but the proximity of the Captain, now chatting to Auntie Kate in his courtly, unconcerned way, made the old woman set her jaw.
‘This is for you, love.’ She put her hand into mine. ‘Put it in your pocket quickly,’ she whispered and held me close.
‘Thank you.’ I stole a glance at the Captain, but he was now looking over the vessel like a visiting admiral.
‘We’ll miss you,’ Granny said.
The boat hooted again. Auntie Angela, head down, offered me her cheek. I ha
d to walk around a stack of pallets to get to the gangplank.
‘Marty?’
I stopped.
‘Do I not get one?’ asked Auntie Kate.
We were hidden by the pallets. She turned me, so that she was facing the ship, and clamped her hands to my head as she brought her face to mine. Her most delicious tongue sprang into my mouth and fed there. Over her shoulder, I suddenly saw the Captain approaching, eyes narrowed. I was gasping. My father stuck out his hand.
‘I envy you, boy,’ he said. ‘I’d give anything to play some proper rugger again.’ The corner of his mouth twitched and the old wolfish glint was briefly evident. ‘Keep your flies buttoned, you hear me?’
The bones in my ears hummed. Auntie Kate’s taste was like treasure I wanted to hoard and gloat upon. Nancy too was now beside me, her expression distraught.
‘Bye, Mum.’
‘You … ’ Her face was awash. ‘You are the light and meaning of my life. Do you understand that?’
I heard her words but they meant little. She glowed as she held me out from her. I wondered if I should kiss them all again, including Auntie Kate.
‘Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
She gripped me tight. The porter was waiting with my trunk and then I was in the customs shed, answering questions about where I was going and why.
‘He’s Pa Kane’s grandson,’ the porter told the customs officer.
Seized by love, which now sat within me as a deep and cruel need right at the moment when it could not be satisfied, I stood on the suddenly moving deck of the steamer. The Kanes were huddled together, Auntie Kate to her mother’s right. My mother was by the Morris, one foot on the running board. The Captain was sitting in the car. Waterford began to shrink as the boat forged into mid-stream. Cormorants, erect as sentries, lined the mud banks. The Quay was like a broad hem on the base of the receding, cascading town. I could see my mother waving beyond seagulls as they screeched over the churning wake. As we entered the mid-stream, the ridges of Ballybricken appeared. In my pocket I touched what Granny Kane had made me stuff there. I took out two five-pound notes. Giddily, I stared at them. I looked back again, but the town was lost in haze. The boat’s engines thundered. Gradually, the banks fell away as the land became less significant and we forged our course towards the sea.
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