Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  ‘Oh, Father! Willingly, of course willingly! It was an act of love, for God’s sake! I should never have told you of it - it was between her and me!’

  ‘My son! My son! Don’t you understand? God was there in the bedroom with you, just as He is everywhere. Such an act of lust as you describe was a sin, not only for you, but for the girl also.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Father, I don’t want to talk about it.’ Quite suddenly, Sean pulled back the curtain, and stepped out of the box. He was shaking, furious. Everything he had ever learnt told him the priest was right and yet it was not so. What did he know about it after all, the shrivelled old fool? Probably knows nothing about women except what he hears in that box.

  Sean felt more than ever like a Judas. He had betrayed Cathy to the Pharisees. Still white-faced, he stalked towards the door.

  A hand gripped his arm.

  He brushed it off angrily. ‘Leave me alone, you old eejit!’ Then he saw it was not the priest at all, but a big man in a thick coat and hat. Square, determined face, short thick moustache - what the devil did he want?

  Two black-robed canons were tugging at the man’s coat, remonstrating with him. One said: ‘Really, Inspector Kee, you cannot … this is a holy place of sanctuary … in the name of God, I implore you!’

  Then Sean understood. He remembered the voices he had heard arguing when he had been in the confessional. The police must have come in after the service, looking for anyone who had stayed behind. The detective snatched at Sean’s arm again but Sean jerked back, nearly falling over his own feet. He ran towards the door. The detective was held back for a few precious seconds by the fluttering canons, then he brushed them aside and sprinted after Sean. Sean was almost at the door when another man, big, in a thick coat like the first, stepped through it. There was a large uniformed constable behind him.

  ‘Lord save us!’ Sean turned to the right, and sprinted back into the church, up the nave towards the altar. He heard shouts, and the clatter of shoes on the polished floor behind him. They were chasing him towards the altar, for heaven’s sake! For a moment he thought of running up to it and seizing the altar table itself, claiming sanctuary indeed. But would they respect it? And where would he go then, anyway? They could just besiege the church until they got him out. He had a gun in his pocket but he couldn’t use it, not here, in a holy place like this.

  I will if I have to, Sean thought.

  There was a door in the south transept, too, but as he ran towards it two other detectives came through it. They crouched, and held out their arms wide, like rugby full-backs ready to bring him down. No way there.

  He spun round, looking wildly to left and right. The first detective was only ten yards away, dashing up the nave. Sean tugged at the pistol in his pocket. The detective slowed. But Sean’s pistol was snagged in a fold of his pocket. As he tugged at it, the detective estimated the distance and nerved himself for a final dash.

  Two choirboys came out of the vestry, to Sean’s right, singing sweetly. A priest in red robes, with a tall golden cross, came after them.

  The vestry door! Sean slipped to his right, avoiding the detective’s outstretched arms like a scrum-half, and plunged into the procession. In the narrow doorway itself he collided with another priest carrying a censer. He swung the man round, shoving him and the now flailing censer towards the detective, and crashed into a gaggle of choirboys. Then he was past them and into a tiny changing room littered with boys’ coats. It had two doors.

  Which?

  He opened the first and it was a cupboard. A selection of coats and priestly robes confronted him. A mitre fell off a shelf on to the floor.

  Sweet Christ! He turned and the detective was floundering towards him through the chaos of choirboys. The other door was three yards away, towards the detective. Sean put his hand in his pocket and this time the revolver came out without snagging.

  The detective tripped, clutched a choirboy, and stood still. ‘Don’t shoot the boys,’ he said.

  Sean said: ‘You stay there and I won’t.’ He cocked the pistol and stepped warily those three long yards across the room. Halfway there he stumbled on a satchel on the floor, and the detective crouched, ready to spring. But Sean didn’t fall and the detective had a choirboy in front of him, either as a shield or by accident.

  Sean reached the door. It had a key in it. He had an idea.

  ‘Get back!’ he yelled. ‘Right back behind these boys! Or I’ll shoot!’

  The detective stepped back. When he was four yards away Sean took the key, opened the door, and stepped outside.

  It was harder than he expected to fit the key in the lock on the outside. He was doing it left-handed, and he fumbled. One second gone, two - is there a bird’s nest in this keyhole, or what? Then the key fitted and turned.

  A second later a fist smashed against the inside.

  Sean looked round the churchyard. He was on the opposite side of the church from the other two entrances, and there were no policemen in sight. Twenty yards away, there was a maze of narrow streets.

  He sprinted through the graveyard towards them.

  Kee had laid his plans carefully. He and Radford had watched the funeral without being seen; they had identified Brennan from his photograph as he went in, and had been certain he had not come out. He had set a guard on all the main entrances to the church, and they had made their way in without being challenged by any of the Volunteers or Fianna who had marshalled the service. He had been sure the operation would restore the prestige of G Division.

  Now, inside the vestry, he gave the door a kick that shook it on its hinges. Then he turned to face the gaggle of terrified choirboys and shocked priests.

  ‘God damn it!’ he shouted. ‘God damn it all to bloody hell!’

  The dissecting room was like a temple in hell, Catherine thought. A temple of a dozen altars, and on every altar a body, and round that body priests in white coats with knives. But it was not hell because it was too cold in here, and the bodies felt no fear.

  She tested the edge of her knife with her thumb. It was sharp, like a razor - it did not rasp across her skin as she had expected, but lifted a wafer of it instead. A pearl of blood squeezed out. She wiped it absently on her white coat, and looked down.

  The body of an old woman lay on the grey slate table in front of her. Human, but invulnerable. The skin pale, waxen, rigid. The old wrinkled breasts sagged sideways; the stomach hung in loose folds, obscene. The eyes were closed, but the mouth - by some error the mouth was open and the teeth gleamed, in a parody of a smile. As though the woman had died in ecstasy, eyes closed, mouth open and lips apart, head tilted slightly back, waiting …

  For whatever was to come hereafter.

  Do I look like that? Catherine wondered. Is that how Sean sees me? How will he see me in thirty years’ time?

  She even looked down to see if the legs were open, knees raised, but of course they were not. It is an obscenity to think like this, she thought, but then everything here is obscene, all of it, and it is not. It is how we are. The final reality.

  She met the eyes of the two other girls - eyes wide and fascinated as her own. The light in the vast dissecting room was pale, cold, clear from the windows high in the roof; the sound at once hushed and reverberant, as in a church or a tomb. Most of the other groups had already begun; there was a soft murmur of voices, a hushed intake of breath from the tables a few yards away. But here all waited on Catherine. She had been chosen, they had given her the knife.

  She placed it at the point of incision, in the middle of the chest, where the ribs met, and pressed. Gently. It did not need much pressure. The skin parted easily, like an oilskin jacket but in silence. No sound at all of the tear that was leaving a long red wound all the way from the solar plexus to the navel, and beyond, below. All the way down and the skin peeled back as though the body were that of a rabbit or a frog, only it was not, this is real this is a human this is what I will be like in thirty years this is what we all are …
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  There was a foul gurgling sound as one of the girls opposite turned away to be sick in one of the bowls provided, and a corresponding snigger from one of the boys’ tables nearby. This was what the male students had expected, what one of them had already succumbed to himself. But it did not affect Catherine. She continued the incision, fascinated at the layers of fat revealed beneath the skin, the organs all more or less where the textbook had said they would be, but different sizes somehow.

  And there was no blood.

  Despite her care she had cut an artery. If this were a living body there would be blood everywhere, she thought, spurting up into my face and all over the floor - I would be red to the armpits. But although there was blood on her fingers and palms, there was remarkably little elsewhere. The organs, as she put the knife down and began to touch and feel and identify, were cold and slippery like meat. It was already easy to forget they were human.

  Until she turned and looked at the face. Unchanged, smiling, ecstatic. Like the image of Jesus with his side transfixed by the spear, and his eyes turned up to heaven, visionary. This old woman gave her life for us, too, Catherine thought, so that people like me could study, and learn to cure others. I should not be afraid or disgusted, her body is beautiful in its way. We all are, every one of us. It is a privilege to do this, it is what I wanted to learn, I must not be squeamish now.

  So all morning, white-faced, reverent and solemn, she and the other girls completed the first stage of their dissection, identifying the organs they had studied only in books, finding the fatty buildup in the heart that had led to the old woman’s end, noting the impurities in her liver. There was some hilarity and attempts at horseplay from one or two of the other tables, a reaction to nerves, but Professor O’Connor stamped on it quickly. He too, Catherine thought, saw this place as a temple of learning, not a meat shop.

  And then it was done and the old lady, whom they would come to know well over the coming weeks, was packed away in ice, her face still blind and ecstatic.

  Catherine washed her hands, changed her coat, and walked out on to the front steps of UCD. Trams, bicycles, and pedestrians bustled everywhere in front of her, busy, ignorant of death. After the hushed clinical horror of the dissecting room, the winter sunshine was intoxicating. Impulsively, she ran down the steps, sending up a burst of pigeons from around her skirts, and set off towards the river.

  If only Sean had been there in the morning. He had said he might have to drop out of the course for a while, but this was the first time it had come home to her. No one could qualify without completing their dissection. She had looked carefully round the room but he had not been there, not answered the roll.

  She would have liked to talk about it with him. She had not been in the presence of death since her mother died, and that had been quite different. Shattering. That once proud beautiful woman frozen in her bed like a waxwork. Although she had expected it for so long, it had seemed to Catherine unbelievable, impossible. And there had been such a welter of feelings: anger, relief, and, above all, a growing resolution that it would not happen to her. Whatever hardships come my way, Catherine had told herself, I will never turn in on myself like that, never be beaten by either men or disease. I will find out what went wrong, and take control of it.

  This morning had been a small step in that direction. Death had become a little more banal, a little more approachable. She had taken the knife, she had opened the body, she had looked inside and seen how it worked and what went wrong. She knew more than before.

  More than Sean, too, she thought, about that. I am a step nearer being a doctor than he is. She stood on O’Connell Bridge, feeling the winter wind cold on her face in the sunlight, and looked at the people around her. There was a mother pushing a pram, with two toddlers clinging to her skirts; some young men in flat caps leaning on the parapet; an old woman making her way slowly, carefully, across the road.

  Catherine watched them all with a strange fascination. They were at once closer to her and more distant than before. The old woman had arthritis, she thought, and the bandy legs showed she had suffered from rickets in her youth. She was probably short of breath because the spinal curvature did not give her lungs enough room in the chest to breathe. Probably her liver would have those white spots on it that I saw today. I understand all that better now than I did, because I have been inside and touched it. Nothing these people think or believe matters at all, because a clogged artery or rotting liver can bring it all to an end in a moment.

  But that’s just why it does matter, she realized suddenly. Any one of these people could die here on the street at any moment and not come back, not now, not ever. They would be just wax and bones and meat, like my mother and two brothers and all those millions who died in the war in France and Belgium and the old lady on the table. Each one of them had hope and love and ideas, until their bodies failed and it was all gone. That’s what I want to learn, to hold death back and give them time. That’s why I want to be a doctor.

  She wished Sean was there to talk about it with her. Then she thought of him on the road at Ashtown and the way he had spoken of his friend Martin dying there. Death could come to Sean at any moment and he is learning to bring it to others. She had a sudden vision of the city as a living creature like a human body, afflicted with the disease of war. The streets were infected with British troops and police, and Sean and the other Volunteers were like white blood cells, eating up the alien bacteria so that the city’s blood could be pure.

  But each white blood cell only lives a short time, she thought. Oh, God, I don’t want Sean to die. I support the revolution but I wish he were not part of it. I don’t want him killed and I don’t want him to do the killing either. It’s too final, it’s too much of a sacrilege. I couldn’t bear to see Sean on the slab like that old woman this morning.

  Or to see someone he’d put there.

  She walked slowly along the quays by the river, thinking. Ahead of her, a young couple sat comfortably on a low wall, their arms around each other, throwing crumbs to a couple of swans. As Catherine passed, the girl threw back her head and laughed, and the boy hugged her and kissed her under the ear.

  Catherine smiled, caught the girl’s eye, and looked away, shivering suddenly with loneliness.

  Tomorrow night, she thought eagerly. At the Gaelic League in Parnell Square. He promised to be there.

  If he’s still alive.

  13. The New Policy and Plan

  THE SERGEANT knocked at a heavy, oak-panelled door, and ushered Andrew in. ‘Mr Butler, gentlemen,’ he said respectfully.

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant. That will be all.’

  It was a comfortable, medium-sized office, with a large desk facing the door. Light streamed into the room from a window behind the desk. But there was no one sitting at the desk. Three men were rising to their feet from a group of armchairs which were clustered around a cheerful fire blazing in a grate to the right. One of them came forward and held out his hand.

  ‘Welcome, Andrew. Good of you to come.’

  Two days ago Andrew had received a letter from his old commanding officer, Sir Jonathan O’Connell-Gort, asking him to come here to Dublin Castle. And since the letter had hinted at the possibility of employment, and Andrew desperately needed money to rebuild Ardmore, he had come.

  Sir Jonathan indicated the other two men. ‘Commissioner Radford of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. And Mr David Harrison.’

  Andrew shook hands with them both. Radford was a fit, broad-shouldered man in civilian clothes, his hair parted in the middle and plastered neatly back over his head. A former athlete, Andrew thought, a rugby full-back, perhaps. Beside him, Harrison seemed small, drab, self-effacing - subfusc was the word that came into Andrew’s head. He bobbed his head, proffered a limp, soft hand, and shrank back immediately into his armchair, where he crouched like a small mouse, furiously polishing his spectacles, as though the effort of getting up had caused them to mist over. Without them, his face seemed naked and d
efenceless; when he put them back on, Andrew was alarmed to see how his eyes appeared to grow suddenly bigger, like eggs dropped into a glass jar.

  ‘Sit down, my boy, sit down,’ said Sir Jonathan. He turned to a table where there were a number of bottles and decanters, and poured a drink. ‘Cigarette?’ The room was already hazy with smoke, as most men’s clubs and offices were.

  ‘Thank you, no.’ Andrew took the drink in the elegant cut-glass tumbler, and sat quietly on the edge of his chair, waiting. He made no attempt to speak.

  Sir Jonathan sat down. ‘I was so sorry to hear about Ardmore,’ he said. ‘It was a terrible thing, a wicked crime. It must have come as a great shock to you.’

  Andrew’s face set grim and hard, as though he were facing the cold wind outside. ‘It was a surprise, certainly. I try not to let anything shock me, any more.’

  ‘Will you be able to build it up again?’

  ‘I don’t have the money.’

  ‘But you will not sell up and leave, I hope? That would be a foolish thing to do now; you will get nothing for the land, in these times.’

  ‘Oh no. I shall never leave Ardmore. That is my land, my country. I shall rebuild it one day, when I can.’

  The Ulsterman, Radford, watching Andrew closely, saw something in the rock-hard utter certainty of the young man’s scarred face that he could recognize. ‘And the arsonists?’ he asked. ‘Have they been caught?’

  Andrew’s eyes, when he looked at the policeman, were quite cold and hard. There was no hint of amusement or irony in them. But Radford, who had been shown a newspaper report about the three young men who had been found in the Blackwater River, felt a tinge of fear at the precision of the response.

  ‘The police have not caught them, no. But there are many mysteries in our country which the police cannot solve.’

  There was a silence. Andrew was aware that all three men were watching him intently. He looked back at each of them in turn, quite coolly, unmoved, unembarrassed. He did not venture to speak.