Acts of Allegiance

by Peter Cunningham

  ‘Apart from your working-class cold, are you well, Vance?’

  He laughed somewhat bitterly. ‘I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever get my head above water. When I started out, I had this dream that before I reached forty, I would have it made. Well up the ladder, mortgage paid off, a second house somewhere in the sun, my boys in private schools. I always thought my father was a failure—bloody articled clerk all his life. He and my mother hated each other, drank too much, never took a continental holiday. I’ll be forty this year and I suddenly understand all the shit he put up with just to send me to a good school.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, and then drank his whiskey in two gulps. ‘Ah! That’s better! So, how’s the job, chum?’

  There was a greyness to his pallor that I had not noticed before.

  ‘Place is being reorganised. We are opening new embassies, so there are opportunities. Nothing concrete yet, but I’ve applied.’

  ‘Ah, how I envy you! The ex-pat life, aye? Servants, duty-free booze, never have to pay a parking ticket. Some place in Africa would be perfect for me. Big game, good climate, a swimming pool. The empire, you see! It may be on the way out but it still has its uses.’ He was checking his wristwatch. ‘Now, I must be on a flight, so alas can’t hang about and chat, much as I’d like to. Just to say, much appreciated and all that pack-drill. Job well done.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re pleased,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘You did a brave and honourable thing, chum, not that I would ever have doubted it, mind you, but you can be proud. Society is a better place.’

  ‘For me it was personal.’

  ‘Ah, yes, yes.’ For a moment, he was caught in a private reflection, but quickly shook himself out of it. ‘Chum, you and I probably won’t be seeing much of each other from now on. Always a matter of regret, but there you go, part of our trade, I suppose. By the way, from our point of view, from what we can hear up there, there’s no noise, if you get my meaning.’

  ‘You mean, about me. You mean up in the North?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing. Zero. You’re clear. Just carry on is my advice.’

  ‘They don’t forget or forgive easily up there. Or down here.’

  ‘If they held you responsible, we would know about it. One hundred thousand per cent guaranteed. But they don’t. You’re clear.’

  ‘How exactly did you track us into the forest?’

  ‘Your car, chum. We bugged your car.’

  I gaped. ‘Shit, Vance! You did what?’

  ‘Bugged it. Fitted a tracking device.’

  ‘But they checked my car.’

  ‘Well, they thought it had been checked, chum. Yes, that’s what they thought.’

  ‘I could easily have been killed.’

  ‘Indeed, but of course it was never our intention to put you in harm’s way. If we had known they were going to bring you with them, as they did, and expose you to danger, we would never have gone ahead with the plan. We reckoned they would just take your car, but we never imagined they would take you as well.’

  I had to admire them, even then. A man whose dark hair was sprinkled with snow. Taking my keys. Staring at me from enlarged orbs as if I was a species he had up to then just heard of. And my car must have been fitted out, without my knowing it, before I ever left the south-east.

  ‘Look,’ Vance was saying, ‘he was a low-level little shit. Lethal, of course, but still low-level. They’ll replace him, we know, but the message was the important thing. We delivered the message. It’s over.’

  ‘Then why are you here, Vance?’

  He looked at me curiously. ‘To say goodbye, old boy. We’re not machines, you know.’ He shook his head, as if he might have been offended. ‘And to tie up some loose ends.’

  I felt my heart skip. ‘Go on.’

  He rearranged his legs, and shifted in the chair as if his impending statement required a different position.

  ‘You once asked me to do something,’ he said in a voice that was suddenly conciliatory. ‘To make certain enquiries.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘About Captain Ransom.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He winced and joined his hands, then splayed them out towards me, palms first, in a series of clicks. ‘Well, you see, the reason why your old man was never cremated, and a death certificate never issued, is that he was never found.’

  I stood up. ‘How do you mean, “never found”? He died of a heart attack in Green Park.’

  Vance looked pained. ‘On the evening of Saturday, 24th January 1953, a man was killed in a fight outside the Victoria Stakes, a pub near Alexandra Park Racecourse in Haringey, North London. Although no witnesses came forward, and no one was ever charged, police at the time said they wished to question a Patrick Kane, also known as Paddy Ransom, whose address was The Prince’s Arms public house, Hammersmith.’

  ‘Who was the dead man?’

  ‘A well-known con artist named Frederick Black, a man with convictions for embezzlement.’

  ‘Mr Black!’

  ‘Frederick Black, yes.’

  ‘I always knew he was a crook. So did my mother. Why did they fight?’

  ‘Apparently Black owed your old man money. But that aside, two days later, clothing belonging to Patrick Kane was found beside the Thames in Battersea,’ Vance said grimly.

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘I’m afraid so, old boy.’

  ‘His greatcoat, shoes, hat and wallet,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. You see, he must have drowned, poor chap, then been washed out to sea.’

  I don’t know why, because he’d been dead for nearly a quarter of a century, but I was seized by grief. ‘So he’s not alive,’ I heard myself say.

  Vance flinched. ‘No, I’m afraid not. I have of course been in touch with the police, on and off, on your behalf—they’ve kept an eye out for years. Places like Tangiers, but there’s never been a sighting. Sorry, chum.’

  I was deflated to a point that I knew was not reasonable, not after so long, but nonetheless that is how I felt.

  ‘He was a wonderful chap, your old man, no doubt whatsoever that is what he was, and that is how you should remember him, old boy. A really first-class man.’

  Through the weight of my sorrow, something about Vance’s words, the way he had just delivered them, riveted me. I straightened up. ‘How long have you known this?’

  ‘How long? Let me see—it took quite a lot of winkling to get the files from Scotland Yard.’

  ‘When did you first know that my father had in all likelihood committed suicide? When?’

  Vance bit his lip and, for perhaps the first time ever, I saw guilt in his big, broad face.

  ‘I want to know, Vance.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘all right, chum, but it was all done to protect your feelings.’

  ‘My God.’

  He sighed. ‘I was head prefect. Nessie was terrified. Your mother had telephoned him constantly for over a week when they’d been searching for your old man. “Under no circumstances is this boy to be told his father may have drowned himself, do you understand?” was what Nessie told me. Of course, if the old fool hadn’t said that, I’d not have had the slightest idea, but he was so confused, he said it.’

  ‘You’ve always known!’

  ‘Steady on … ’

  I had him by the throat, and slammed him against the door of the cheap, sliding wardrobe. His face bulged like a rubber ball.

  ‘You’ve always fucking known! All these years!’

  He was gurgling and I suddenly realised that I wanted nothing more than to kill him, and that if I did so, here in this anonymous shithole beside the airport, no one would ever know.

  ‘Did Alison know? If you lie to me, I will kill you, so help me God!’

  He managed to shake his head. ‘She … never did.’

  Through the mist of my grief and rage, I become conscious, albeit faintly, that, despite everything, he and I were still on the same side. I let him go and he flopped do
wn on the bed.

  ‘I’m sorry, chum,’ he heaved, ‘but I did make enquiries, I really did, and the fact is that his body was never found, which is why there never was a death cert, so he could have turned up, couldn’t he?’

  He was rubbing his neck as I brought him a glass of water.

  ‘I had this childish hope,’ I said.

  ‘I know you did.’ He drank the water. Shakily he picked up his whiskey glass again, upended it and swallowed the golden dregs.

  ‘Are you all right, Vance?’

  ‘Oh, I probably deserved it. I’ve dreaded telling you this for years.’ He shook his head. ‘But it wasn’t as if I could have done anything to bring him back. Look, enough of me. Now all that remains is to give you your insurance policy.’

  I looked at him blankly. ‘Do I need one?’

  ‘The question I ask myself every time I write a cheque to those bloodsuckers who cover my house, my car, my holiday perils. Dear God, why did you not make a world where we don’t need insurance?’ He drank water again. ‘In the unlikely event, as I have mentioned before, you call this number.’ He handed me a white card with a phone number scribbled on it. ‘This chap will sort it out. It’s what he does. Of course, in the meantime, if we hear anything … ’

  ‘How unlikely, Vance?’

  ‘Ah, Marty, you know much more about chance than I do—you’re a racing man.’

  With an unexpected prong of regret, I realised that we would never meet again. He moved towards the door and paused. His face was ashen but bruises were rising on his neck. ‘She was wonderful, wasn’t she?’ he said.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said.

  ‘Goodbye, chum.’

  3

  PARIS

  Spring 1981

  From Saint-Cloud, I set out for work every day by train. Emmet, at nineteen, was enrolled in a nearby lyceé. Georgie’s school involved a bus journey which she undertook with Nurse Fleming. I worked as a secretary, with the rank of higher executive officer, and reported to the cultural attaché from my office in our magnificent embassy on Avenue Foch. Part of my job was to help promote readings, recitals and film premieres that reflected the cultural harmony that existed between France and Ireland.

  In Paris, I came to know my children as people rather than props to be tidied away. In Emmet’s case, it was probably too late: he had grown up quickly in every sense and had been old enough when his mother and I had separated for those few months to understand what was happening. He may even have preferred Sugar’s businessman to me. Now he smoked cigarettes and spent most of every day at the home of his French girlfriend—someone he had met at school and to whom only Sugar had been introduced. ‘She’s very pretty, very charming,’ I was told and that made me happy for my son.

  When we did meet, he displayed a healthy disdain for the way I spoke, and proclaimed my stories of the Captain, whenever recited, as ridiculous, and declared that when he was old enough to be able to do so, he was going to change his name to Kane. Nonetheless, I tried to chivvy along our relationship, taking him racing at Saint-Cloud, where he sat bored for the afternoon, and out to lunch at the better restaurants. Emmet was always polite to me, but somewhere in that murky decade where I had split myself in an effort to find my elusive soul, I had lost him.

  With Georgie, it was different. She’d been just a little girl during our separation, and was ten years old when I was posted to Paris. She soon spoke French fluently and was the image of her mother; I could sometimes imagine them as two sisters as they sat at a café table or strolled on a leafy boulevard. Georgie had grown up with the post-Alison version of me. She was charming, and smiled when she saw me, and made a fuss of me, as if I were too fragile to be left to my own devices. She played tennis in Saint-Cloud, but despite inheriting her mother’s talent, refused to take it seriously. Sugar was at first irked by this lack of ambition, but Georgie would have none of it. She and I rode out together from stables in the Forêt de Versailles. I knew she would make a good choice in men when the time came, a conviction that filled me with happiness.

  Often, during those years of strolling by the Seine, or through the sun-dappled colonnades of the Rue de Rivoli, I thought of Alison. I kept her like an icon, for I knew she had fulfilled me in a way that no one else could have. That might have been a poor reflection on my character, but whenever I tried to imagine my life without her, I could not. She had made me feel good about myself, and had allowed me to realise my potential, however warped, and for that small miracle I was grateful. I longed for her, even when I was happy with my family, and I longed to know, which I never would, what she would have thought of what I had done. How I had deceived, then vindicated her. I liked to believe that, on balance, she would have been proud of me.

  At such moments, Iggy was never very far away. I saw him in all the different ways that children perceive one another, his moods and little tricks to get attention, how he was always observing me observing him, how he charmed his dad. His indifference to punishment. The way he had treated Uncle Stanley and, finally, had dispatched the poor man. Iggy had been a strange combination of love and cruelty, a mixture he had kept to the end.

  Five people had died that day in the south Armagh woodlands: Iggy, his half-brother Patrick, baby Jenny and two other members of the Provos. They had been intercepted with bomb-making equipment by the British SAS and had died resisting arrest, the official communiqué stated. Ted Kane Junior would never walk again.

  The ambush made front-page news, but nowhere was I mentioned. Nor did I see my car again: I imagine it had made its way to a breakers yard somewhere in Belfast, courtesy of British Special Forces. When I got home at daybreak, having thumbed a lift to Dublin and then celebrated my escape by taking a taxi, I told Sugar that someone had rear-ended me on my way out of Leopardstown and that my car was a write-off. It was she who insisted on examining the small of my back, where a livid bruise was flowering, and made me get into the Land Rover and drove me to Waterford where an X-ray revealed a lump of glass the size of a thumbnail embedded near my spine. A piece of my car’s rear window, everyone agreed. I was operated on next morning, but the infection had already taken hold. I would not be going home for two weeks.

  My first visitor, apart from my family, was Bobby Gillece. Ashen, the knuckles on his fist bulging, he stared at me.

  ‘Did you see this?’ He pointed to his newspaper and began to cry. ‘Iggy is dead.’

  I gasped as a wave of pain gripped me.

  ‘What happened?’ Bobby asked.

  His mouth was open as I told him.

  ‘How did you escape?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘I hit the ground and rolled.’

  Bobby was blinking rapidly. ‘You rolled?’

  ‘Then I ran.’

  ‘And does anyone—? Did anyone arrest you? Or question you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jesus.’ I saw admiration briefly capture his cat-like face. ‘I mean, if I’d gone up there with you, I would most probably have been killed, too.’

  A nurse came in and checked my intravenous drip.

  ‘Only Jennifer and Ted Junior know I was up there and they’re hardly likely to tell the RUC,’ I said. ‘By the way, you do realise that as far as Sugar is concerned, I was in a car accident in Leopardstown.’

  Bobby’s moustache twitched. ‘What do you take me for?’

  We chatted for a while about the old days, and our memories of Fowler Street, and how Granny Kane had at least been spared this tragedy. Bobby told me he was going north for the funerals.

  ‘Please send my condolences,’ I said.

  ‘I loved him, you know,’ Bobby said, and began to cry again, ‘I loved him like a son.’

  Iggy’s obituary appeared in the local papers. WATERFORD NATIVE DIES IN AMBUSH. It was less about Iggy than about the Kane family and their long association with the city. ‘A first cousin of Mr Kane is Mr Martin Ransom, son of the late Captain Ransom, Waterloo Farm,’ the obituary read, ‘who works as a high-ranking
official in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin.’

  Several national newspapers picked up the story and one of them printed my photograph, taken at least ten years earlier at a race meeting. I wondered, when I saw it, if Bill O’Neill would, at a minimum, want a chat. He never did.

  Neither did Sugar, who must surely have read the papers, bring the matter up, as if over the years she had been taught the subjects to avoid. Not so with Emmet. Our son, who began every discussion from a starting point of scepticism, for which I could hardly blame him, asked, ‘Are you really related to this man Ignatius Kane, like the papers say you are?’

  Emmet was preparing for his Intermediate Certificate exam in the Dublin school he then attended. He was standing at the door to the kitchen, holding a textbook.

  ‘His father and my father were brothers. And, yes, that makes us first cousins.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Emmet!’ Sugar said.

  ‘He was a terrorist! His whole family are terrorists. Ignatius Kane was one of the most wanted men in Ireland. And he’s your cousin? He’s my second cousin?’

  ‘We cannot help being related to people,’ Sugar said. ‘It’s outside of our control.’

  ‘You’re not related to him, Mum. I am. My friends know about this. It’s so embarrassing. What do I tell them?’

  I could have answered, at length, had I been so inclined, or if he had bothered to listen. I could have told him that Ireland is a very young democracy, as democracies go, and that as we work through our differences, sometimes paths diverge, even in families. In such cases, I could have gone on, even the closest childhood friends and blood relations can find themselves on opposite sides, and new alignments take shape, and we come to love differently than we did as children. I could never tell him that I loved someone so much that when she was taken from me, I drew a line through everything I had held dear before and that I would have pulled the trigger myself to put Iggy down if that had been necessary.

  ‘Dad? What do I tell them?’

  ‘Tell them that Ignatius Kane was nothing to us,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all.’