She looked him in the eye. “You’re being remarkably frank.”
He held her gaze. “I won’t lie to you again.”
That surprised her. “Really? What are you doing here in Dublin?”
“I’m supposed to find out whether the republicans are planning an insurrection. My boss reckons that with all the republican contacts you’ve made over the last year, you may know, and that you might be willing to tell me.”
“So you were going to get in touch with me,” she said, as much to herself as him. Was fate trying to tell them something?
“Yes,” he said simply.
“And why in heaven’s name would you think that I would betray my Irish friends?” she asked angrily.
“I don’t believe you would,” he said. “It was my boss’s idea, and I went along because . . . well, because I wanted to see you again.”
She chose to ignore that. “Why would he think I’d betray my friends? And to you of all people?”’
That hurt, but he persisted. “You might oppose a rising on pacifist grounds, and warning the British government—through me—might save a lot of lives, including those of friends. Or—and this is his reasoning, not mine—you might still hold a torch for me and be willing to tell me anything I wanted to know.”
Lovers tell each other secrets, she thought. This was more than she’d bargained for. “And what do you think?” she asked after a long moment’s hesitation.
“I’ve never stopped holding a torch for you.”
“I . . .” she began. “I meant about the chances of my telling you Irish secrets.”
He shook his head. “I’m not going to ask you.”
She felt bemused. Here she was racking her brain for a credible way of passing on the false news, and here he was holding out both hands. “What will you do—does one resign from whoever it is you work for?”
“Oh, I shall still investigate—I’ll simply leave you out of it. I’ll say you just laughed in my face when I begged for your help.” He smiled. “As I’m sure you would.”
“Probably. But aren’t you afraid I’ll go back to all these republican contacts and tell them what you’re doing here?”
“I expect they know already, but . . .” He shrugged. “It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.”
“You seem very sure of yourself,” she said.
He smiled at that. “Far from it.”
She felt like she was walking a wire. What was she going to do?
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “I mean, I presume you’re here for your paper.”
She explained what she was working on and about Cumann na mBan, glad that he’d changed the subject. As ever, he was a good listener.
What he heard was the passion in her voice, the passion she brought to everything, the passion she had once brought to him.
Seeing that in his eyes, she felt the sense of panic return. This was all too confusing—she needed time and space to think. “I have to go,” she announced abruptly. “I’m meeting someone.”
“Oh. Of course.”
But she still had Mulryan’s message to deliver, and it wouldn’t sound very convincing as part of a hurried good-bye. Kollontai’s judgment, that this was unfinished business, suddenly reared up in her mind, both appalling and arousing. She was wondering how to broach the possibility of another meeting when he beat her to it.
“Could we meet again?” he asked, fully expecting rejection.
This surprised her even more. Was he doing it again, this time relying on apparent honesty to deceive her? “What for?” she asked. “If you’re not going to ask me any questions . . .”
“We could always talk about something else.”
She made a show of considering the idea. “All right,” she said. “For old times’ sake. How about Saturday?”
“All right,” McColl agreed, as surprised as he was pleased. “How about a drive?”
“Yes,” she said. “A drive would be nice. Let’s go to the sea.”
On the hansom ride back into town, Caitlin wondered what on earth she was doing. A drive, for God’s sake—why hadn’t she suggested somewhere more public, like a bar or another cafeteria? Why hadn’t she just accepted the opportunity he’d presented, claimed her pacifism prevented her from supporting a rising, and told him what Mulryan wanted London to know? It would be over, and she’d never have to see him again. Finished business.
Except it wasn’t, and after the last hour she knew that more surely than ever.
Back in the house on Mary Street, she said nothing to Maeve about her rendezvous with McColl or their plans for another. She did arrange to meet Mulryan in the Imperial’s bar, and this time he came alone.
“McColl’s here for the reason you thought,” she told Mulryan.
“And did you tell him there’s no need to worry?”
“Not yet. He wouldn’t have believed me if I had. I’ll need time to get his trust back.” She noticed a look of disapproval come and go on the Irishman’s face—he would ask her to sleep with the enemy if the situation required it and then condemn her for agreeing to do so. “But there’s one thing I want from you.”
“And that would be?”
“Your word that my part in this business is kept secret. I don’t want every republican in Dublin thinking I’m a whore.”
“They wouldn’t be thinking that.”
“Oh, yes they would. And that wouldn’t be in your interest. You don’t want one of your foreign allies discredited like that.”
Mulryan shrugged. “Very well, then—I give you my word.”
“All right. I’ll let you know when I’ve told him. And more to the point, when he’s told his bosses in London. If your boys take their revenge before he passes it on, it’ll all have been for nothing.”
As Caitlin walked out of the bar, she caught a glimpse of herself in one of the mirrors—a stern-faced young woman with a confident step and no hint of the turmoil within.
McColl was less than frank with Dunwood. He meant to tell the MI5 man that Caitlin had sent him away with a flea in his ear, but he changed his mind. It was all very well telling Caitlin that he could investigate a possible insurrection without her help, but in truth he had no other contacts, and if she was out of the picture, Cumming would expect him to leave the whole business to Dunwood and his colleagues.
McColl had no intention of being recalled just yet. He hadn’t been able to read Caitlin at their strange reunion but supposed that that was an improvement on their previous meeting, where he’d been left in no doubt about her feelings. He hadn’t expected her to agree to another meeting and was still searching for a reason that made sense. One thing he was sure of—she would never betray her Irish friends. So why meet him again? Was it remotely possible that she might be willing to give him another chance?
He told Dunwood that he was still hoping to win her over, told himself that he was taking a well-deserved holiday. Who knew? Perhaps deceiving the Service for her would turn out better than deceiving her for the Service.
The Room at the Royal Hotel
As he drove the Model T across the city on a cold but sunny Saturday morning, the thought crossed McColl’s mind that this was the day she could avenge her brother, by luring him out to some lonely byway where armed republicans lay in wait. He told himself he didn’t care. If he was that wrong about her, it didn’t much matter if he lived or died.
Drawing up in front of the house on Mary Street, he remembered the day he had collected her on Shanghai’s Bubbling Well Road for another drive in the country. It was the day after that when they’d first become lovers.
Caitlin answered the door. She was glad that Maeve was out on one of the Volunteers’ frequent weekend exercises, because she wouldn’t have to make up some story to explain her assignation with one of the enemy. “Where are we going?” was the first t
hing she asked after settling into her seat.
“I thought Howth for a start,” he said. “Then on up the coast if the weather holds.”
“Okay,” she agreed.
She seemed unsure of herself, McColl thought as he worked their way out of the city. In the past, questions about her work had been almost guaranteed to provoke a vigorous response, but not this morning.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said as they finally reached open country, “that you have me at a disadvantage. All I know about what you’ve been doing is what I gleaned from Jed, but you probably know everywhere I’ve been in the last year and everyone I’ve talked to.”
“I was shown your file when I came back from India,” he conceded. “It didn’t have quite that level of detail, but I do know about your job, and your friendship with Sylvia Pankhurst, and that you spent the summer in Europe.”
“I should have known there was a file,” she said. “I’d love to see it.”
“That would get me fired.”
“It might be worth it. I suppose you know about Michael Killen, too?” She knew she was trying to hurt him and thought a little less of herself.
He maneuvered the Ford round a slow-moving hay cart. “I know who he is and that you spent time together. I don’t know how you felt about him.”
She resisted telling him. “No, you couldn’t learn that from a file. But you probably know that I haven’t seen him lately.” She refrained from adding what Maeve had told her, that Michael had recently announced his engagement to another member of Cumann na mBan.
“No, I didn’t know,” he replied. “You’re not being followed anymore,” he added.
“Do I have you to thank for that?”
“Not only, but I’m happy to take the credit.”
She stared out the window for a few moments. “So can you tell me what you were doing in India?”
“Trying to track down terrorists.” He explained about Jugantar and told the story of his and Tindall’s pursuit of the group, which had reached some sort of conclusion with Jatin Mukherjee’s death.
“You sound as if you admired him.”
“I did. But not his methods. Too many innocent Indians died.”
“Sometimes it can’t be helped, if anything is going to change.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think that’s the case in India. Not yet anyway.” He smiled. “I met Mohandas Gandhi again.”
“How?”
McColl explained how he’d stopped off in Ahmedabad en route to Bombay.
“He disappointed me,” Caitlin said. “How can he recruit young men for this war after everything he’s said and done? I don’t understand it.”
“Me neither. I asked him, but I can’t say I followed his argument.” McColl tried, without much success, to repeat the gist of what Gandhi had said. “But I can still see why Indians want to follow him. And once the war’s over, I suspect he’ll give us a run for our money.”
“Once the war’s over, I think all hell will break loose,” Caitlin declared. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of Alexandra Kollontai?”
“No.”
Caitlin explained who Kollontai was, where she came from, and what she stood for. Listening, McColl felt as if he were back on the Manchuria, where she’d first introduced him to a world he knew nothing about, a world of women intent on radical change. Some just wanted the vote, but most wanted so much more, from easy contraception to unrestrictive clothing, equal opportunity to equal pay. Kollontai apparently believed that the road to women’s liberation led through world revolution, and it seemed as if Caitlin agreed with her.
There were a few more clouds in the sky by the time they reached the small fishing port of Howth, but it was still a beautiful day. “This is where they brought the guns ashore last year,” Caitlin said as McColl pulled the Ford up alongside the harbor.
“I know, I was here,” he said without thinking.
“You were?” she said, surprised.
He paused, silently cursing the way that so many things led them back to Colm. “I was looking for Tiernan and Brady and your brother,” he admitted. “I’d been looking for weeks, turning up at any republican event I heard of.”
“Did you find them?”
“No.” He refrained from adding that spotting Brady in Dublin later that day had set them on the plotters’ trail. “But I watched them unload the guns and joined the march back into Dublin.” He smiled. “It ended badly with the shooting in town, but up until that moment it was a pretty amazing day. On the way back, some soldiers tried to disarm the crowd, and you could see men disappearing through hedges and hightailing it across the fields clutching their new rifles, and all the soldiers could do was watch them go.”
“I wish I’d seen that.” She pointed at the cliffs away to their right. “That looks like a good walk.”
They left the Ford at the foot of a path and started to climb, McColl carrying the sandwiches and beer he’d brought along for their lunch. As the path curved round to the south, the Irish Sea spread out before them, silver blue in the early-winter sunshine. The one visible craft was a yacht heading into Dublin Bay, tacking against the westerly breeze.
They reached a wooden bench overlooking a precipitous drop. “Do you want something to eat?” McColl asked.
“No, I want to be kissed,” she said, surprising both of them.
He did as she bid, and after only the slightest hesitation she responded. And once started, they seemed unable to stop, pressing against each other as fiercely as the need to breathe allowed.
And then they were simply holding each other, her head resting against his shoulder.
“I love you so much,” he told her. Wise or not, it was something he had to say.
She wiped away a stray tear. “God only knows why, but I can’t seem to stop loving you.”
“I know I—”
“No,” she said. “No more explanations. I just want to make love.”
“There are hotels in Howth.”
“Then let’s go to one.”
They walked back arm in arm, hardly speaking. What was she doing? Caitlin asked herself. What she wanted to do, was the answer. She wanted to lie with this man again, to have Kollontai’s waves of passion sweep over her, to drink from the Russian’s cup of love’s joy, however deep it might be. Tomorrow was tomorrow.
The first hotel had empty rooms in abundance. McColl signed them in as Mr. and Mrs. McNally and tried to ignore the knowing smirk on the desk clerk’s face.
Their room was large, with a splendid view, which they didn’t stop to admire. He helped her undress, unclipping her modern brassiere at the back and lifting it off her shoulders before gently cupping each breast and kissing her on the neck.
The first coupling was short, almost desperate, and oh, so sweet. They came together and collapsed together, laughing at the absurd perfection of the moment.
Then, and for most of the next two days, it felt to them both as if nothing had changed since their New York parting, that all the guilt and anger had somehow been magicked away.
They also both knew that this wasn’t true, but for now only love and desire seemed to matter.
After the weekend in Howth, they restricted their trysts to the hours of darkness, sharing his bed at the Royal. Their passion showed no sign of waning, and, lying cradled in his arms, Caitlin asked herself why it was so much better with him than it had been with other men. It was almost as if those idiots who claimed there was only the one perfect partner were actually right.
She also wondered why a reasonable God would give all this with one hand and threaten to take it away with the other. Ireland clearly divided them, and even if she could fully forgive him for Colm, her brothers’ friends would not. And was there any place on earth where a radical journalist and an agent of the British Crown could happily coexist?
&nbs
p; On Wednesday she was waylaid in the Imperial lobby by an impatient Mulryan, who asked her “how many nights” she thought it would take to regain the Englishman’s trust. She could tell he wanted to say it more crudely, that as far as he was concerned each extra “fuck” was a further betrayal.
Still, she knew she couldn’t delay much longer. A few more days, perhaps. “I’ll tell him this weekend,” she told the Irishman.
McColl spent the days pinching himself. Was this too good to be true? He occasionally saw something in her eyes that sent corrosive shivers of doubt racing up and down his spine, but then a look of love from the same green eyes, a look he couldn’t believe was faked, would bring him back to his senses.
On the Wednesday he saw Dunwood and gave him an edited version of what was happening. The “laughed in my face” story was obviously not going to work, so he invented another, one that had her refusing to betray her friends. “I don’t think she’s going to tell me anything,” he confided to Dunwood. “Maybe it’s time we started looking for other sources.”
In the meantime he relished the moment. Double lives were usually short ones, and even if the two of them could sustain this daily pattern of Dracula-like transformations, changing from lovers to foes with each rising of the sun, it seemed cruelly inevitable that sooner or later their jobs would pull them apart. She had already told him that her paper was keen to see her back in London.
As it happened, it was McColl’s boss who called time. “You have the rest of the week to get something out of her,” Dunwood told him at a hastily arranged meeting. “Cumming needs you back in London by Sunday. Another job’s come up.”
“Do you know where?” He’d known that this moment would come, but leaving her again was hard to accept, even though they’d both agreed that their work would have to come first until the war was over.
Dunwood laughed. “You think he’d tell me?”
He told her that evening, as they lay in bed with the rain beating down outside. “I’m going to Glasgow soon,” she told him. “To report on the rent strikes. I thought I might go and see your mother and tell her about my meeting with Jed.”
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