Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  The devil it does, Sir Jonathan thought.

  The room had a beautiful view. The nursing home was on the cliffs outside Bournemouth, and Sarah Maidment was propped up on pillows in her bed so that she could see out over the clifftop gardens to the sea. It was an afternoon of sun and showers, and the sea reflected the different moods of the sky above it: deep indigo under rainclouds to the west, sparkling blue close inshore, a hazy, luminescent grey far out on the horizon. But Sir Jonathan, as he stood in the doorway of the private room clutching his bouquet of flowers, doubted whether Sarah could see much of it.

  She had changed drastically in the month since he had been here last. The once jolly, round face was pale and sunken now, the bones clearly visible through the skin. The sinews in the neck and hands stood out quite starkly too, and her hair was completely white. She turned her head slowly to face him, and he saw that her lips were cracked. Only the eyes - bigger now, cornflower blue like the sea - retained something of the woman he had once loved.

  ‘Johnny?’ she whispered. She didn’t smile. Perhaps it hurt.

  He held out the flowers. The nurse, coming in behind him, took them officiously and arranged them in a vase beside the others. She adjusted the pillows behind Sarah’s head, said: ‘Just ten minutes now. She’s very tired,’ and walked smartly out.

  Ten minutes. Sir Jonathan sat down beside Sarah and took her hand. She had never been a great beauty; but she had given him comfort and laughter where his wife, like Catherine, had given him intensity, drama, strain.

  He asked: ‘How are you, my dear?’ He felt foolish as soon as he had said it, but what else was there to say?

  The answer came in a whisper, so that he had to bend his ear to catch it. ‘Very … poorly, Johnny.’ She flapped her hand urgently towards a glass of water, and he raised it to her lips to help her drink. He realized it was cruel to make her speak.

  To fill the silence, he began to talk himself. Awkwardly at first, telling her where he had been, something of his business in London over the past two days. Her big blue eyes watched him vaguely, travelling over his face, his hands, his clothes. It was borne in on him that this was the last time they would ever see each other; the nurse had made that clear, outside the room. He began to talk instead of the good times they had had together, what they had done. He could not speak of love, he was no good at that. But he managed to remember a play they had laughed at, a party when everything had gone wrong, a time they had got lost together in a cart in the country, a day they had made love in a bathing hut. Her eyes shone; the skeletal face creased in what was meant for a smile; he raised the glass to her lips again and heard the nurse tap softly on the door behind him.

  He kissed Sarah gently on the forehead, on the eyelids. The skin was thin, like waxed paper.

  ‘Goodbye, old girl,’ he said gruffly. ‘Goodbye now. God bless.’

  Outside he could not see very well and he sat down on a metal chair in the echoing, disinfected corridor to blow his nose hard and dab at his eyes. He had seen more death in his life than he had ever wanted but each time it was worse.

  Later, sitting in the train on the long journey back to Holyhead, he remembered the pictures of her two sons and grandchildren on her bedside table, and the things he had not said. He had come with the idea that perhaps he could abandon everything in Ireland, leave it all to her sons, forget the hopeless struggle. But without Sarah it would not work. However much he respected her two sons they were not his own. He did not ever want to see them again, except at the funeral.

  There was only one person left in the world who really mattered to him now, and that was his own daughter Catherine. And for her, he would fight to keep his inheritance, and pass it on intact.

  Next morning, Sir Jonathan sat opposite Harrison in the first-class dining room of the ferry. They were only half an hour out from Anglesey, but already the windows were streaked with spray and it was clear it was going to be a rough crossing. Harrison, to Sir Jonathan’s surprise, seemed in good spirits, quite indifferent to the ominous rolling and pitching beneath them. He sliced the top off an egg, and peered briefly into it before starting to eat.

  ‘Well, we’ve got what we wanted, Colonel,’ he said.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Sir Jonathan was not sure that food was a good idea, and his physical misery was compounded by the memory of Sarah, alone in her room in Bournemouth, fading away without him.

  ‘We’ve got permission to hire our assassin.’

  The words, baldly stated by the little round bespectacled civil servant, sounded vaguely indecent, like a schoolchild speaking brightly of a world it does not yet understand.

  Sir Jonathan frowned. ‘Is that what you understood Lloyd George to mean?’

  ‘Certainly. No politician could have expressed himself plainer.’ Harrison sliced a finger of bread and butter and dunked it in the egg. ‘Our only problem now is for you to find the man. Shouldn’t be too difficult, I suppose?’

  There were several reasons why Sir Jonathan did not answer at once. In the first place, he was not nearly as sure of the Prime Minister’s unqualified support as Harrison appeared to be. Lloyd George’s meaning, Sir Jonathan thought, was as easy to pick up as quicksilver. Secondly, he was far from confident that any one man could find Michael Collins. Especially if the man was to come back alive. In any case, he was in no mood to talk about death and murder that morning. Perhaps because the memory of Sarah was still too close to him, perhaps because the motion of the ship was making any form of coherent thought increasingly difficult. He had come to his decision the night before, but he still found it distasteful. He decided that the sight of Harrison cleaning out the inside of his egg was too much to bear, and stood up abruptly.

  ‘Not difficult at all,’ he said. ‘I know the very man.’

  Then he strode smartly towards the promenade deck, and the fresh air he so desperately needed.

  9. War Hero

  THE DAWN wind whispered through the reeds, and somewhere on the lake a moorhen croaked sharply. Andrew Butler could just make out the tips of the reeds in front of him. They rustled together restlessly, like the points of bayonets, he thought, waiting to go over the top. In the east, the faint grey light along the horizon deepened to a glow of pale lemon. The first finger of sunlight pierced the clouds like a searchlight.

  And it was quite, quite silent.

  He cocked the double barrels of his shotgun, and waited.

  The moorhen croaked again. A coot paddled on to the black waters of the lake, the white mark on its bill faintly visible in the growing light. It jerked its head sharply from side to side, gave a sharp ‘Pip-pip!’ and then dived suddenly under the water.

  A stockdove cooed in the forest behind him, and a cock pheasant crowed. The dog crouched at Andrew’s knee whined and stood up, its nose pointing, its feathered tail straight out behind it, trembling with excitement. Andrew put his hand on its neck to calm it, and hissed at it through his teeth.

  ‘Ssssst, boy.’ But it was a young dog, and did not immediately obey. Andrew growled at it in his throat and forced it down with his hand.

  Then the duck came.

  The first pair came from the southwest, over a stand of trees to his right. He heard them before he saw them, the quick sing-sing-sing of their wings out of the semidarkness. They circled, once, high overhead, turning to land into the wind. He tracked them all the way, the two barrels of the shotgun slightly ahead and below to allow for the deflection. Their bodies glowed with the pale lemon colour of the rising sun; their wings fanned the air busily and then spread into a wide, forward-facing curve as they planed in towards the surface of the lake, webbed feet braced to meet the shock.

  The two ducks skidded along the black surface of the water, sending white spray up to sparkle briefly in the sunlight. Then they stopped, shook themselves to clear the water from their backs, and paddled towards the reeds.

  Andrew lowered the gun. It had been too easy, he told himself. There had even been a moment whe
n they had been so close he could have got them both in the same cone of shot. To test himself he needed a harder shot, further away, moving faster.

  But it was not only that. He thought of himself as hard, unsentimental, professional; but he nearly always found an excuse not to shoot the first ones, now. In memory of the German machine gunners, at Hill 60 outside St Julien, who had found an excuse not to shoot him when he led the first wave across at dawn. He had run so damned hard, his heart nearly bursting with the effort of carrying sixty pounds of kit and lifting his feet out of the stinking bog that the artillery had churned into quicksand, and he had known all along that the machine gunners had him in their sights. How could they fail, with the early-morning sun behind them and three days of artillery pounding to warn them? Yet they had held their fire and let him get through the only gap in the wire, and he had run on and on like a demented maniac, fifteen, twenty yards ahead of the men he was supposed to be commanding, until he could see the line of little pointed metal helmets sticking up above the German trench, and the dark eyes in the mud-covered faces staring at him. A man running to his own death.

  Then the machine gun had opened up, not at Andrew, but at the line of his troops behind, as they struggled to follow him through the wire. Andrew had dived into a shell hole, and in that first half-minute, twenty-six of the company behind him had died. Why the machine gunners had not fired at him he would never know. But it was too late then, they could not see him, and it was the biggest mistake that that group of Bavarians ever made. In a shell hole only ten yards from the German trench, Andrew lined up six grenades in front of him. With the first, he scored a direct hit on the machine gunners who had spared his life; the other five he lobbed at five-yard intervals into the trench itself. Then he jumped into the trench after them.

  In one hand he had a revolver, in the other a long, slim bayonet which he had spent hours polishing and honing to a razor edge. The trench was a shambles of twitching bodies. One of the bodies grabbed his leg. Andrew stuck the bayonet into the man’s neck behind his ear, and ripped his throat out. To his right there was no movement, to his left three soldiers in greatcoats and pointed helmets lunged down from the firing step towards him. Andrew shot the first two before they could turn their long, unwieldy bayoneted rifles to face him. The third was quicker. His jagged, sawtoothed bayonet laid open Andrew’s cheek from jaw to scalp, grinding against bone so that the flesh was all gone and the teeth showed. Andrew jerked aside, but as he fell he shot the man in the stomach and then again in the head and then he dragged himself to his feet and stabbed him through the eye. Then he clapped a field dressing over the bloody remains of his face and lurched along the rest of the trench looking into all the dugouts and sticking his bayonet into any of the wounded who still moved.

  When his sergeant and six survivors reached him three minutes later, Andrew was the only person in the trench still alive.

  They held that section of trench for six hours, and were then ordered to retreat. Andrew was awarded the Military Cross.

  Before he left, his head cocooned in bandages, Andrew had looked at the corpses of the German machine-gun crew. They were very young, hardly out of school. One had tried to grow a moustache but the hair was as soft as a baby’s. His face was frozen in a grimace of utter terror.

  He remembered that face now, as he stroked the quivering dog and watched the coot pop up on the black lake, and paddle in little zigzags across the surface. The machine gunner had not spared him out of mercy, then, but only out of fear: a paralysing fear which had frozen his finger on the trigger. It was not a weakness which Andrew would ever allow himself.

  He who strikes first, he thought, lives to strike again.

  If he had struck a little faster, he would still have a decent face.

  A second flight of ducks flew towards him out of the east. Four of them, high up. As they came in sight of the lake their wings stopped beating and they began to plane round in a wide circle, as though still not quite certain whether or not to land. They divided - two continued to plane down lower, the other two flew round again in another circle. Andrew tracked the higher two, the harder shot. As they reached the trees to his right, he fired. One barrel - two; and both birds fluttered down, in a scattering of feathers, one bouncing off the high branches of a pine tree.

  At the sound of the shots the other two ducks ended their dive and began to fly away from the lake, their necks stretched upwards, their wings whirring in panic. Andrew put down his shotgun and picked up a second, which was lying loaded on a bank beside him. One duck was flying to his left, the other straight towards him. He hit the duck going left first, and then raised the gun sharply overhead to try the second barrel. But he was too late. The duck was past him and skimming the treetops. Though he pivoted swiftly he could not get a line on it before it was gone. He lowered the shotgun ruefully.

  ‘Three out of four,’ he murmured. ‘Getting slow.’

  He had perfected the trick of hitting four in a row in the year before the war, when they had still had shooting parties at Ardmore, and his parents had been alive. It had brought him loud applause, and several guineas in bets, as others tried to emulate it and failed. Now his parents were dead, and he would have to organize any shooting party himself. But he had little desire for company, and anyway, all the friends he valued were dead.

  The dog, which had leapt up at the first two shots, had turned in confusion at the third. It was a young dog, it didn’t mind about his face. As far as the dog knew, he had always looked like that. It stared at him expectantly, quivering with excitement. He pointed to the nearest duck, which had fallen in the lake. ‘Go on, boy! Fetch!’

  As the swimming dog’s head cut an arrowhead across the dark waters of the lake, Andrew saw how the sun had now fully risen into the morning sky.

  The day had begun well enough, but now the rest of it stretched in front of him, empty. Like the house itself, Ardmore, which he had come home to, after the war.

  He wondered how he was going to fill it.

  When he came in sight of the house he paused, as he always did. Ardmore, the house was called - the Big Hill - but in fact the hill itself was behind it. Andrew stood on the hill now, looking down at the back of the house in which he had been born. From up here it did not look so beautiful - a square, solid block of a building, three storeys high, with dozens of chimneys grouped in four great stacks, and a jumble of yards and stables behind it. The real beauty of the house could only be appreciated from the front, where the twin columns of the entrance looked across lawns towards the sea. All visitors approached the mansion that way.

  To his surprise, Andrew saw that some visitors were approaching now. A small black model T Ford was inching its way through the tall wrought-iron gates, three-quarters of a mile away. He watched them through his field glasses. One of the passengers, a young man in a long coat and cap, was holding the gates open. When the car was through, he climbed on to the running board and got in, without bothering to close the gates behind him.

  Andrew was surprised. Hardly anyone came to see him, these days; and no one came unannounced, so early in the morning.

  When he reached the house, the three were already in the hall, talking to Henessy, his father’s old butler. Henessy looked unusually flustered, Andrew thought; the red veins on his bibulous old nose stood out more than ever, and he was taking anxious little steps backwards and forwards in front of the visitors, as though he did not know which one to speak to first.

  They, for their part, were taking scarcely any notice of him. One, a large, heavily built young man in a thick tweed jacket and flat cap, had picked up a delicate statuette of Venus from a side table. He was holding it in hands as big as a butcher’s and examining it with distaste. Another, slimmer but still tall and heavily built, was walking up and down with his hands in the pocket of his trenchcoat, gazing at the family portraits in the hall, and trying to peer into the rooms that led off it. The third, a short fellow with horn-rimmed glasses perched on an
unusually short snub nose, was pacing up and down in front of Henessy, looking at his watch.

  It was immediately clear to Andrew that these were not the class of person who ought to be in the main hall at all. But for some reason, his servants were unable to deal with them.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said in a clear, hard voice, that cut through the querulous protests Henessy was trying to make. ‘Have you come to see me or my housekeeper?’

  A second glance had shown him that Mrs Macardle, his usually forceful cook and housekeeper, was watching from the passageway at the end of the hall, which led into the kitchen.

  The three young men turned to stare at him. There was a studied, deliberate insolence in their manner, something he had met once or twice in Flanders, amongst men from regiments who were near mutiny. It had been a shock then, he remembered; the sudden sick realization of how few the officers were, and how the men could turn the whole structure of the organized world on its head, if they chose.

  The fellow with glasses spoke first. ‘‘Tis yourself we’re after coming to see, Mr Butler.’

  Andrew waited, deliberately staring them out. With his two shotguns broken open over his left arm, the string of ducks stuffed into the game bag, and the setter gazing up at him, he was faintly aware of his resemblance to the twelve-foot portrait of his grandfather on the wall behind the man in the trenchcoat. Except that his grandfather had not had a jagged, seven-inch bayonet scar down the left side of his face. He stared at each man coldly, letting the fact sink in that this was his house, and they had no obvious reason to be in it.

  But they did not seem as cowed as they ought to.

  ‘It’s about money,’ said the biggest man suddenly, the statuette still in his hands.

  ‘I see.’ Having established a sort of dominance by silence, Andrew moved on swiftly. He strode into the hall, unslinging his game bag and handing it to Henessy. ‘Well, we cannot discuss that here. Show these men into the library, will you, Henessy. I’ll join them in a moment. And …’ He put his guns on the floor and took the statuette gently from the big man’s grip. ‘I think we’ll put that back, if you don’t mind. It’s rather valuable and very fragile. The library is over there.’