‘Excuse me, Reverend Mother, excuse me, Mrs Murphy.’ Sister Bernadette glided into the room after a preliminarily respectful knock on the door and stood there looking hesitant and worried. ‘Captain Robert Newenham is here. I told him that you were with a visitor but he was very pressing about speaking to you now. He said that he meant to phone you yesterday afternoon, but he was detained by business to do with the death of the city engineer. Shall I tell him that you will phone him later on, Reverend Mother?’
‘No, I’ll speak to him now. Bring him in here, please, sister.’ Her eyes met Lucy’s, but neither smiled, nor moved until Sister Bernadette had taken herself off, closing the door with an emphatic click as an indication of her disapproval of the interruption of Mrs Rupert Murphy’s visit.
‘God whispered a word in his ear,’ said Lucy mischievously.
‘More likely that he wants me to put in a good word for him with the bishop. It probably suddenly occurred to him that I would have influence in that direction.’ A death always meant a reshuffling, one saw it in church affairs and no doubt it was the same in the county council and other such businesses. While Robert Newenham was kept in a state of apprehension by James Doyle, he would have been reluctant to call attention to himself, or to attempt to seek a better salary, but now he would be in line for promotion. The Reverend Mother arranged her face into a welcoming smile as the heavy tread in the corridor signalled his arrival.
‘Reverend Mother!’ he exclaimed heartily. ‘I’ve just come to see how you are after that terrible event at the market.’
It was a poor excuse and she guessed that he had come to see whether she had information.
‘You know Captain Newenham, of course, don’t you, Mrs Murphy? Captain Newenham, Mrs Murphy,’ she finished stiffly and indicated an upright chair near to the door.
‘But of course, of course. We’re second cousins, aren’t we?’ He walked over towards the fire. Lucy gave him her hand and smiled up at him. She had decided to play the friendly affable role in comparison to her cousin’s stiffness. Lucy and I would make a good pair in a music hall, thought the Reverend Mother as she gazed at him coldly and listened with an inward chuckle to Lucy’s flow of reminiscences of Captain Newenham’s father, now transformed into a spirited and adventurous youth, and her glowing recollection of the party that he had held to celebrate the reopening of the Munster Arcade.
‘Such fun. So informal. Any chance of another party? A little bird told me that Roches Stores is now ready to be reopened. So clever of you to think of holding a party before all the dreary clothes and pots and pans and cheap furniture is brought in to spoil the lovely architecture,’ she said gazing up at him roguishly.
‘Do sit down, Captain Newenham,’ said the Reverend Mother coldly, while her cousin beamed at the visitor and patted a chair beside her invitingly.
‘Sit here beside me and tell me all about those wonderful fittings that you have ordered. My husband tells me that you sent to London for many of them. The marble tiles, he was telling, you got them from the place that supplied Harrods in London. Wonderful, isn’t it, Reverend Mother?’ Lucy didn’t wait for an answer, just swept on. ‘I can’t wait to see them. You’re so like your poor father. He was a man of great taste. Oh, do tell me that you are going to allow some guests to see the place before it’s spoiled. Everything is of the best, Reverend Mother, so I’ve been told. Mahogany and teak and bronze fittings, so I hear.’ Lucy went on chanting the perfections of the newly built department store and Robert Newenham glanced from one to the other while the Reverend Mother allowed her mind to wander over the probable cost of all that luxury and of how many homes for the poor could have been built with half the sum expended.
‘And you are going to have a party, aren’t you, Captain Newenham? Now, don’t tell that you won’t.’ Lucy shook a finger at him. ‘I so love a party.’ She sighed wistfully and then said, in a voice that she strove to make sound tentative, ‘You wouldn’t like any help with the guest list, would you? I don’t want to put myself forward, but a woman’s touch, you know.’
‘That would be so extremely kind of you,’ he said gallantly, although there was an uneasy look in his eye.
‘I know what,’ said Lucy clasping her hands together in an ecstasy of admiration of her own cleverness, ‘just before you came in, the Reverend Mother and I were discussing a fundraising initiative which she wanted me to organize for her school. What would you say, Reverend Mother, to have an affair held at Roches Stores? I’m sure that the bishop would come, wouldn’t he? Dr Cohalan is such a great supporter of the work done here among the poor. And I wonder whether the Earl of Cork would come? It’s so easy to get people when it is for charity, isn’t it? And then I can tell him all about your war record. He’ll have a great fellow feeling as he fought in the Great War also. In fact, a year or so ago, he was telling me that he was having a chat with Captain Schulze from the Dorsetshires whom he’d met in France.’
It was lightly and airily done. Lucy took bites of her cake in between sentences and leaned over to touch the teapot while she delivered the last sentence. The Reverend Mother, standing slightly in the background was able to observe Captain Newenham’s face very carefully. For a moment it seemed as though he were about to deny the acquaintance. His mouth opened quickly, but then he shut it and after a minute bowed his head in a gesture that could have meant anything. There had, she was sure, been a momentary flicker of apprehension in his eyes.
He took his leave a few minutes later, promising to put the proposition to the council and to be in touch with Mrs Murphy about the guest list. The Reverend Mother obligingly provided him with paper and pencil so that he could write down the Montenotte number and she stood close enough to see that his hand slightly shook as he wrote the word and the numerals. A well-groomed man, she thought. Not a hair astray, moustache neatly clipped, boots polished, snowy white handkerchief protruding from his pocket. But as she stood beside him to touch the bell for Sister Bernadette, she was aware of the strong smell of sweat that came from him.
And Lucy was right. Captain Newenham had very ornate handwriting. The first stroke of the letter M curved around to form almost a circle, then rose to twin peaks, before descending to form another swirl. It was beautifully done.
‘He’s scared,’ said Lucy triumphantly, as the sound of the footsteps died away. ‘He’s scared and it was the mention of Captain Schulze that did it. He has a guilty conscience about him. I’m sure of that, but then, as Rupert says, “opinions don’t count in the law”. We’ll have to get evidence that they knew each other. Leave it to me. I’m going to have fun with this.’
NINE
W.B. Yeats:
Being young you have not known,
The fool’s triumph, nor yet,
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind.
Eileen had waited for darkness to fall before she walked up the steep incline of Barrack Street. The fog was thicker than ever. It filled the narrow space between the small, red-brick houses on either side with a miasma of stinking vapour that tasted of sulphur and made her eyes water. It deadened the sound of the bells and obscured buildings – almost as though the progress of centuries had been wiped away and Cork had reverted to being a marsh again. There was something rather eerie about it, almost a sense of floating along in a ghost-like vapour and Eileen purposely made the steel-tipped heels of her boots ring out against the brick pavement. A shivering girl under a gas lamp, misled by the boots, the breeches, the short hair and the jauntily placed cap, called out an invitation to her, but Eileen ignored it. They had to make a living these poor girls, she supposed, but if ever Ireland became a republic the party, and she, would campaign to put an end to prostitution. There would be jobs for all that wanted them, women as well as men, meat in the pot and milk for their children. The glow of satisfaction at the th
ought warmed her and she ignored the freezing fog and walked briskly up the familiar pavement.
The front door to her mother’s cabin was locked – a sign of the troubled times during the last few years. During her childhood, the door had always been on the latch. Eileen tapped softly and waited, keeping well into the shadow of the doorway and alert for any watching eyes.
‘Who’s there?’ Her mother was at the other side of the door instantly. Things were very unsettled; there would have been a time when everyone on Barrack Street would have trusted a neighbour, but the bitter civil war had split communities, streets and even families and now little trust was left.
‘It’s just me, Eileen,’ she whispered at the keyhole and heard the lock turn. In a moment she was through the door and had shut it behind her. The kitchen was warm, she was glad to see. Maureen had a daily job cleaning out Tommy’s Bar and Eileen herself brought money home from time to time. It was one of the rules of the Republican Volunteers that support was to be given to a mother if, like in most households, the father had died or disappeared, and Eileen always kept back a portion of the takings from a raid in order to make sure that her mother had plenty to eat and fuel to warm the one-roomed cabin. She slipped a ten-shilling note into the vase on the shelf over the fire and sat down on the settle-bed.
‘Kettle’s singing,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘I’d love a cup of tea, Mam.’ Now that the moment had come for explanations, she found herself feeling reluctant to start. The ritual of swinging the kettle over the hottest portion of the fire so that the high-pitched note turned to a deeper bubbling sound, the scalding of the tin pot, the careful measurement of the tea leaves, the two mugs unhooked from the dresser, the soda bread extracted from the tin that kept it safe from any rat and, if times were good, spread with a small piece of butter from another tin. The cabin was full of old biscuit tins – their defence against rodents. Her mother carefully saved them when cleaning out the public house.
‘I suppose that if you’d become a teacher, you’d have had a house up in St Luke’s Cross and a servant to make your tea, Mam,’ she said affectionately. It had been one of the tales of her youth, how her mother nearly became a teacher, had stayed on at school after the rest of her classmates had left, had been about to study for an examination, but then had decided to have a little girl of her own instead. As a small child Eileen had been immensely flattered that her mother had chosen her instead of the glittering career as a teacher, but by the time that she was nine or ten years old had guessed the truth. Who was her father, she had often wondered, but had never dared to ask. She knew that she had been luckier than most of her friends. Her mother had the single child, not the nine or ten of other families, had loved that child, supported her, told her stories, taught her to read before she went to school and from that very first day had encouraged her in her studies, had sat with her every evening sharing a pleasure in the stories in her reading book, explaining history, finding new ways to work out sums, teaching her poems and songs.
‘Whenever Ireland becomes a republic, I might try to get to university, Mam,’ she said now as she sipped the first, too hot, taste of the tea. No soda bread, tonight, she thought and hoped that all was well with her mother, feeling glad that she had brought the ten-shilling note. ‘I have to do my best for the country first,’ she said apologetically, but knowing that her mother understood. They had shared a dream and the crumbling lime plaster of the walls still held yellowed pictures of the martyred heroes. ‘But after that …’ she finished.
‘Please God,’ said her mother heroically.
‘You’ve still got Pearse’s declaration up on the wall,’ said Eileen. ‘I told the Reverend Mother about the walls of this room and all the history that is stuck there.’
Her mother clicked her tongue. ‘You had no business saying something like that,’ she said reprovingly. ‘I’ve always told you to keep your tongue in your mouth and let your brain work before you speak, but you were always a chatterbox, always knew best.’ The words were tart but Eileen knew they hid an immense pride.
‘I have to try; I have to do my best for Ireland,’ she said earnestly, not answering the last statement but the unspoken reproaches that she knew must go through her mother’s mind sometimes. If only her daughter had stayed on in school, perhaps she might have won the Honan Scholarship, might have had three years paid for at Cork University, and might now be studying for the further qualification to be a teacher.
‘What you have to do, you have to do,’ said her mother stoically. ‘I sometimes feel bad that I’ve led you astray. All that poetry and all those stories. Of course, you were as bright as a button and you sucked it all up like a young calf, but I should have had more sense. Poetry can have a great effect on you when you’re young.’
‘Stop worrying,’ said Eileen. ‘Nothing in life is safe. You told me that yourself.’
‘True for you; look at all the people getting shot on Patrick Street, and even in the English Market, so I’ve heard. I don’t know, it’s a hard life.’
Her mother was looking old. And yet she was only in her early thirties. Her back was bent from continually carrying heavy buckets of water and her hands were swollen, red and sore-looking from the harsh bars of Sunlight soap that she used to scrub the stone flags of the public house where she worked. She hadn’t much of a life, Eileen thought sadly.
‘If we get our republic and I qualify for a good job, you’ll never scrub another floor again,’ she said passionately.
‘Floors have to be scrubbed. Someone has to do it. I don’t mind; I’m used to it. I worry about you, though. Still, you’re looking blooming on it. Well, I suppose you’re just as safe out there in west Cork as you would be here in the city.’ Her mother was pursuing her own thoughts. Eileen had never told her that their unit was not in west Cork, but very much nearer, down in Ballinhassig, only seven miles south of the city. The less she knew about her daughter’s whereabouts and activities, the better it was for her. ‘Was that young man who’s supposed to have shot the city engineer, was he one of your crowd? He was, wasn’t he? I can see it in your face.’
‘No, he wasn’t. Sam was completely against everything that we did. He’s been set up for this.’
‘But you know him, don’t you?’ Her mother looked at her sharply. ‘Sweet Jesus! Don’t tell me! He’s a boyfriend of yours, is he?’
‘He’s a reporter on the Cork Examiner,’ said Eileen. The urge to confide in her mother was becoming irresistible. She could feel the beginnings of a smile tremble at the corners of her mouth and she bit her lips to suppress it.
Maureen heaved a sigh. ‘Trust you,’ she said affectionately. ‘You had all the boys in Barrack Street running after you, and you’d never give any one of them the time of day, and now you have to go and fall in with this fellow. He’s a son of Mrs O’Mahony in the English Market, isn’t he?’
‘That’s right,’ said Eileen. She leaned down to poke at the mound of half-burned turfs and watched them collapse into a pile of softly-glowing white ash.
‘And how did you meet him?’
Eileen was silent for a moment. Outside of her own unit, no one was supposed to know that she wrote a column for the Cork Examiner under the byline of ‘A Patriot’. She posted it to the newspaper offices and her payment came back to a P.O. box in the General Post Office in Patrick Street. Still, the Reverend Mother had guessed – by the style of writing, apparently and she had told Dr Scher, so perhaps it would do no harm to let her mother into the secret.
‘You see one of my jobs for the unit is to, well, I’ve never told you because I didn’t want you to get into trouble because of me, but I’m the one who writes that column in the Cork Examiner—’
‘You needn’t tell me,’ interrupted her mother. ‘The one by “A Patriot”, that’s you, isn’t it?’
‘How did you know?’
‘I know how you write, haven’t I read enough of your essays when you were in school and you brought a Cork Examiner once or
twice with you when you came here and I’d find it open at that page. You can’t keep any secrets from your mother, you know. I used to tell you that, didn’t I?’
‘Well, that was how I met Sam. I wrote something for the Cork Examiner about the struggle to establish a republic and in the next edition he, Sam O’Mahony, had a column making a mock of all my arguments – he really tore it to shreds, and a lot of what he said was just stupid. I sent him a warning, but he did the same thing the following week and so I waited for him one evening in the laneway. I pretended to take his arm, getting quite close to him and then I put my hand back into my pocket and dug my pistol into his ribs. I told him to say nothing and he just looked at me, with my short hair and my breeches and my cap and my boots and he said out loud without a scrap of bother in him, “You’re just a girl, aren’t you?”.’
A reluctant smile came over her mother’s weather-beaten face. ‘And what did you say to that, something smart, if I know you?’
‘I just poked my pistol a bit more into his ribs and said, sarcastic-like, “Even a girl couldn’t miss at this range”.’ She giggled and then quickly sobered. ‘We walked side by side down Patrick Street and we were arguing like mad, stopping every few yards and facing each other. I had all the good arguments, but he kept on dragging other things up and then he stopped at Pavilion Cinema and pulled away from me, just as though he was sure that I wouldn’t shoot him.’
‘And what happened next?’ Her mother, despite her tired, time-worn face, was still the same romantic, enthusiastic mother of Eileen’s youth. They two of them devoured the books that she brought home from school, discussed them into the small hours of the night, argued over the meaning of a line of poetry, over Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice – her mother liked him and Eileen, always the rebel, didn’t. She thought that Lizzie could do much better for herself. They had been friends, not just mother and daughter, and for some time now, Eileen had longed to tell her about Sam O’Mahony. She gave a slight giggle at the memory of that first evening when she and Sam had gone into the warm, cigarette-smoke-scented darkness of the cinema.
A Shocking Assassination Page 10