Reckless

by William Nicholson

  It was a grand blowy day. Mullaghmore beach stretched in a long crescent of brown sand almost all the way to Bundoran. Across the choppy water of Donegal Bay they could see St John’s Point and Drumanoo Head.

  ‘We come here every August,’ said Mountbatten, striding into the wind. ‘But it’s not the same without Edwina. You never married, did you, Rupert?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? If you don’t mind my asking.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m the marrying kind,’ said Rupert. ‘Bit of a loner.’

  ‘A loner? I can’t really imagine that. I hate being alone. Even when Edwina and I were fighting, and God knows there was enough of that, I’d rather be with her than on my own.’

  Rupert said nothing. He understood that it was a comfort to Mountbatten to have someone to talk to about Edwina.

  ‘Poor old bugger, banging on about his wife.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Rupert. ‘I envy you.’

  ‘Don’t bother. It’s hell losing her. They told me on the phone, in the middle of the night. It was the governor of Borneo himself. Edwina was in Borneo for the St John Ambulance people. I didn’t know what he was saying at first.’

  They walked on over the sand.

  ‘I still dream the phone’s ringing, and I answer, and this voice is there, telling me she’s dead.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t want never to have known her.’

  ‘No. God, no. It’s a funny business, though. I adored her, but I’m not sure she adored me. I never really felt good enough for her.’

  ‘Maybe we expect too much,’ said Rupert.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘This idea of love. We expect the other person to love all of us. But I don’t see how that’s possible.’

  ‘Oh, it is!’ cried Mountbatten. ‘Edwina could be foul, utterly foul, but I loved her even then. That’s what happens when you truly love someone. You even love their faults. You love all of them.’

  ‘Do you think you knew all of her?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ But then he frowned and corrected himself. ‘Though perhaps not. I didn’t always understand her. Is that what you’re getting at?’

  ‘I’m not sure that people can ever fully know each other,’ said Rupert. ‘Did Edwina know all of you? In the way you know yourself?’

  Mountbatten thought about that.

  ‘No. Not like that.’

  ‘But you didn’t try to conceal part of yourself from her?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. Not consciously, at any rate.’

  ‘Then it must be that no one can ever know you as you know yourself. Because each one of us is simply too complicated. It’s like someone saying, “Oh, I know France well, I adore France.” The truth is he knows hardly anything of France at all.’

  ‘Well, well.’

  He came to a stop, and began scraping at the damp sand with the toe of one boot.

  ‘It’s not a lot of fun thinking the way you do, though, is it? A bit on the gloomy side.’

  ‘It can be.’

  ‘So you’ve given up on love, have you?’

  ‘I’ve learned to be content on my own.’

  As he said this Rupert thought of Mary Brennan.

  ‘But you never know,’ he added. ‘There might be someone out there.’

  ‘Someone you could love?’

  ‘Someone I could be with, while still being on my own.’

  ‘You’re a hard man to please, Rupert,’ he said. ‘You’re determined to suffer.’

  His scraping away at the sand was taking the form of a circular ditch. He turned to look at the waves hissing into the shore.

  ‘The tide’s coming in. We could build a moat. Have you ever built a moat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s really great fun. I’ll show you. But we should get nearer to the water.’

  He strode towards the waves, and picked a spot a pace or two from the highest current water-mark. Then throwing himself down on his knees, he began to burrow in the sand with his hands.

  ‘Come on. We’re building a castle with a moat.’

  Rupert squatted down beside him and together they set about heaping sand into a mound, and hollowing out a surrounding channel.

  ‘How are you getting along on my “Aim for the West”?’

  ‘Very well,’ said Rupert. ‘Actually, I’m having a bit of a struggle stopping myself from getting carried away with it.’

  ‘Get carried away. Why not?’

  ‘You don’t want a treatise on eschatology.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Last things. Death, judgement, heaven, hell.’

  ‘Do you think we need it?’

  ‘I think the Cold War’s about more than great power rivalry. That’s what makes it so scary. I think it’s really a war of religion.’

  ‘You call Communism a religion?’

  ‘Actually, I think something a bit more involved than that. I think we in the West, and the Americans in particular, see Communism as a religion. That’s why they’re so afraid of it. America is a righteous nation, a land of believers. They hear the claims of Communism, about how they’ve got history on their side, and they understand that as a claim of faith. I’m not sure the Russians see it that way. But that’s another matter.’

  ‘So you think the Cold War is a religious war because that’s the way Americans think?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s bad?’

  ‘Very bad. The worst wars are wars of religion. More atrocities are committed in religious conflicts than in battles for land or resources. Religious wars are about good and evil. You die before you surrender. Killing your enemy is a kind of purification of the world.’

  ‘God help us!’

  ‘If he’s there.’

  The sandcastle was growing. The moat round it was almost complete.

  ‘Now,’ said Mountbatten, ‘we dig a channel to the sea. But we leave a wall between the channel and the moat.’

  The digging progressed.

  ‘So you see,’ said Rupert, ‘I’ve rather lost sight of your “Aim for the West”.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Mountbatten. ‘What you say gives me hope. I find myself thinking of our British way of doing things. We don’t go in for ideology. We don’t go in much for revolutions. We’re reformers. We make the world a better place one step at a time. That way of thinking doesn’t hold with religious wars.’

  ‘Not at all. But it’s not exactly a rallying cry, is it? Make the world a better place one step at a time.’

  Mountbatten laughed. He stood up.

  ‘Now, you see, the channel’s almost there. Shall we make it longer, or wait for the tide?’

  Rupert looked at what they’d built. The channel in the sand ran from the water’s edge up the beach to the castle with its surrounding moat. As the tide came in it would find the channel and run down it to the castle.

  ‘Let’s make it longer,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what my grandsons always answer. It’s the lust for destruction.’

  He knelt down once more and resumed scooping.

  ‘So have you come up with an answer yet?’ said Mountbatten. ‘I’m getting there,’ said Rupert. ‘I see it in two stages. The first stage is all about managing the intentions of the other side. The second stage is about managing our own intentions. And whatever we do there has to take account of America’s sense of manifest destiny. Somehow we have to take that drive to destroy the evil enemy, and redirect it into a mission to save the world.’

  ‘A mission to save the world. Not bad.’

  ‘If we can get all their generals and their missile launchers and their bomber crews to be prouder of not starting a war than of starting one, then maybe we can make it to the end of this century.’

  Mountbatten was on his feet again.

  ‘The next wave will find it,’ he said.

  They stood side by side in the wind coming off the Atlantic, and waited for the next big wave. It came at
last, seething and boiling, sucking in on itself and breaking, then rushing in a sheet of spreading foam over the sand. The water entered the channel and swept down to the wall of sand that defended the moat.

  ‘The third wave will break through,’ said Mountbatten.

  ‘Is that a prophecy?’

  ‘No, that’s hard intelligence. I’ve done this before.’

  The second wave rolled in. The sand wall began to crumble.

  ‘I like what you say, Rupert,’ said Mountbatten.

  ‘All the arguments about weapons deployment,’ said Rupert, ‘they’re all irrelevant. The danger lies in the ideas behind the weapons.’

  The third wave rushed in. The sand wall fell. The moat filled with seawater.

  ‘Now,’ said Mountbatten, ‘if you were a seven-year-old boy you would jump on the castle and destroy it.’

  ‘Plenty of seven-year-old boys in the world,’ Rupert said.

  Neither of them jumped on the sandcastle. They stood and watched as the swirling seawater caused it to crumble slowly away.

  34

  On the fourth day of his week at Classiebawn, Rupert borrowed one of the estate cars to drive to Kilnacarry. The car was pulled up in the narrow yard bounded by the castle walls, in front of the main entrance. Mountbatten, detail-obsessed as ever, came out to instruct Rupert.

  ‘There’s only one way to turn here. Hard right forward, then back, pulling hard with your left. Then forward again. Then back.’

  Rupert attempted this manoeuvre, but not to Mountbatten’s satisfaction.

  ‘No, no! Not hard enough around!’

  He leaned in the car window and seized the wheel himself. In this way the car was turned at last.

  Rupert drove off, through Donegal and round the coast road to Killybegs, filled with amusement at how Mountbatten had controlled the car even when he wasn’t in the driving seat. How frustrating, if you have the habit of leadership, to find you have only limited power after all, and the world refuses to do your bidding. But what self-confidence! As so often with Mountbatten, Rupert marvelled that the man who had been proved wrong by life so many times continued to overflow with the certainty that he was right. It was a kind of animal energy, the same drive that propelled his vanity. And yet alongside it lay the deep diffidence of a man who could say, ‘I’ve never been much good with women.’

  From Killybegs he followed the signs across the wild peninsula to Ardara, and so down a bumpy white road to Kilnacarry.

  The village was a straggle of thatched whitewashed houses on the hillside leading to the sea. A small stone church stood a little apart, on the headland. Each house had its own plot of land, bounded by walls of loose stones. Tethered cows turned to gaze at him as he passed by. There was no sign of any people.

  He pulled up where the road ended, and got out of the car. A cold wind came funnelling in between the headlands. He buttoned his coat up to his throat. A dog peered out from behind a house and barked at him.

  There was a bar, and a shop with a sign advertising Carroll’s No. 1. Rupert went into the shop, making the bell on the door clink. There was an old lady inside, buying tea and sugar. Behind the counter a thin woman with reddish hair, wearing a white apron, gave Rupert a nod. The old lady was slowly counting out coins.

  Rupert’s intention was to enquire after the Brennan family. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure what he would do. He was trusting to the gossip of a small village. Whatever Mary was hiding, someone here would surely know something.

  While he waited, he looked round the shop. It was small, and poorly stocked. Its most prominent feature was a wire rack displaying leaflets and postcards. The postcards showed different views of the same small bay. The leaflets had a black-and-white photograph of a girl on the front. The girl was gazing upwards into the sky. On her round face was a look of ecstatic surrender.

  Rupert took out one of the leaflets. It was headed The Visions of Kilnacarry. Even as his eye travelled down the block of print he realised he knew the girl in the photograph.

  On August 6, 1945 Mary Brennan, 12, was playing on the sandy beach of Buckle Bay as the sun was setting over the sea …

  The old lady was done at last. She bobbed a greeting at Rupert as she made her way out. Rupert approached the shopkeeper.

  ‘A soft old day,’ said the shopkeeper. Then seeing the leaflet in his hand, ‘Are you here for the visions?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rupert.

  ‘You should’ve come in early August,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘There was a terrible crowd in the village then. The priest had a service on the beach at sunset. Oh, it was something!’

  ‘That’s where this girl saw the visions?’

  ‘Buckle Bay, yes. The next bay along.’

  She nodded the direction with her head.

  ‘And where is she now?’

  ‘Oh, if you’ve come for Mary Brennan you’re out of luck. She’s been in a convent these past ten years and more.’

  ‘Do you know where?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know that. You’d have to be asking the priest.’

  Rupert took out his purse to pay for the leaflet and for one of the postcards of Buckle Bay.

  ‘What do you make of these visions yourself?’ he asked the shopkeeper.

  ‘I was there,’ she replied, giving Rupert a significant look. ‘I saw it for myself.’

  ‘You saw what?’

  ‘The stillness. I was there, on the third evening, when Mary received the warning. She prophesied all of it. You can believe me or not, as you please.’

  ‘What did she prophesy?’

  ‘The bomb,’ she said. ‘The atom bomb on Hiroshima. Mary saw it in her vision before it happened. She told the priest.’

  ‘And there was a warning.’

  ‘The great wind. Well! We all know what that is. That’s the end of the world.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rupert. ‘Of course.’

  ‘But Our Lord made Mary a promise. He told her, “When the time comes I will speak to you again.”’ She tapped the leaflet. ‘It’s all in here. Mary Brennan will come back to Kilnacarry. She’ll walk on that beach again. And the Lord will speak to her again.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rupert. ‘I see.’

  ‘Sure it’s a consolation,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘The world can’t end until Mary comes home.’

  Rupert thanked her and went out into the cold wind. He sat in his car and read the leaflet. He read of the great crowd that had been present on the third evening, and read the testimony of those who had seen the ‘stillness’. He read of the many signs of Our Lord’s mercy that had been granted since, to visitors to the site of the visions. A woman from Wicklow had been cured of a disfiguring rash on her face. An American priest who had lost his faith found it again in the course of one of the August vigils on Buckle Bay. A deaf child began to hear.

  The text of Mary Brennan’s appeal to the world was laid out in the leaflet.

  Our Father in heaven is saddened by the sinfulness of mankind. Why must you inflict such suffering on each other, he asks, when I made you to love each other? …

  This time all living things will be destroyed by a great wind. When this great wind sweeps over the land, it will be made clean …

  Yours is the generation that will perish …

  He read of the simple shrine that had been built on the spot where Mary Brennan had seen her visions of Jesus, and of the explosion of devotion that had followed. Many thousands now made the pilgrimage to Kilnacarry each year. Father Dermot Flannery, parish priest of Kilnacarry, who had himself witnessed Mary Brennan as she had her visions, was raising money to build a chapel in the bay. All donations gratefully received.

  So this was Mary’s secret. Not some sordid affair, but something entirely innocent, and in its way moving. Rupert sat in his borrowed car and pictured the child she had been, her face shining with love, made bold by an unquestioning faith. It made him smile. Then he felt a surge of tenderness towards her; and along with the tenderness, a powerful sense
of relief.

  Is this all, Mary? Is this your shameful past?

  Rupert had been brought up as a Catholic. He was familiar with the language of visionaries, with their promises and their threats. The recipients were always children, most commonly girls. Their usual fate was to spend the rest of their life in a nunnery. But Mary had run away.

  No special destiny for you, Mary. So what is it you want?

  He decided to seek out the priest.

  Rupert crossed the village on foot, and entered the church. There he found a woman on her knees, scrubbing the stone floor. He asked where he could find the priest, and was directed to his house.

  Father Dermot Flannery was grey-haired, with a pouchy sagging face and misty eyes. His cassock was stained with what looked like egg and ketchup. He showed no surprise at Rupert’s appearance.

  ‘Have you come about the visions? Sure you have. There’s nothing else brings strangers to Kilnacarry.’

  ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you, Father.’

  ‘Well, as to that, a little disturbance is a healthy thing.’

  He led Rupert into his parlour and offered to make a cup of tea. Rupert accepted.

  ‘So what would be your particular interest?’ he said as he bustled about with a teapot. ‘All the way from England as you are.’

  Rupert had no intention of giving away Mary’s secret. He took refuge in a cover story, borrowed from the leaflet.

  ‘I was born and raised a Catholic,’ he said. ‘But I’ve lost my faith. I heard about the shrine here.’

  ‘So you’ve come for signs and wonders.’

  The priest didn’t seem as delighted about this as Rupert had expected.

  ‘I don’t really know why I’ve come.’

  ‘But you know your Bible, I hope. You remember the words Our Lord spoke to Thomas. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”’

  Rupert felt admonished. His respect for Father Flannery rose.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose so.’

  The priest shot him a keen look.

  ‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘We’re all frail vessels.’

  ‘What about you, Father? Do you believe in these visions?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I saw the child as she received the warning on the third evening. But that’s not why I believe. I believe because the warning she has given us is in accordance with the teaching of the Church. And I believe because the shrine has been the saving of Kilnacarry.’