All Our Yesterdays

by Robert B. Parker

  “Oh, my God no,” she said.

  “He’s not for a free and independent Ireland?”

  “Oh, I think he is,” she said, “in his way. But he wouldn’t want me venturing among the rebellious ruffians.”

  “What’s his way?” Conn said.

  “His way?”

  “You said he’s for a free and independent Ireland in his way. This is your way. What’s his?”

  “Oh, well, he’s older. He’s stable. He believes in good business practices, and a calm homelife.”

  “He’s in business?”

  “Yes. He has a factory. Mulroney’s Heather Scented Irish bath soap. Mostly for export to America.”

  “Not Winslow’s.”

  She laughed, the volume of poetry closed in her lap, a forefinger holding the place.

  “Now, what would that sound like,” she said, “—Winslow’s Irish soap?”

  “It would sound like an oxymoron,” Conn said.

  “You’re educated, aren’t you?” Hadley said.

  “Self, mostly,” Conn said. “I like to read, my father was a schoolmaster.”

  She had brought them lunch in a hamper. Cheese and bread and fruit and a bottle of wine.

  “I had Cook pack this for us,” she said. She handed him an apple.

  “Are you well enough to uncork the wine?”

  “Yes,” he said around a bite of apple.

  “Then please,” she said, handing him the wine and the corkscrew.

  They sat together in the garden and drank the wine and ate the cheese and fruit and bread in the still-weak sunlight of early spring. The wine was a Graves, its flintiness refreshing against the richness of the country cheese, and the sweetness of the fruit. The wine added color to her face, a touch of red along the perfect cheekbones, and her eyes brightened. They finished the bottle.

  “Wine’s gone too quickly,” he said.

  “Remember when I met you the first day in the hospital?” she said. “And you asked for a bit of whiskey?”

  “And you, being nursie-nursie, said I was too sick.”

  She smiled and drew a bottle of whiskey from the hamper.

  “Now you’re well,” she said. “It is time to celebrate.”

  She poured whiskey into his empty wineglass, and some into hers.

  “Just like that?” he said. “Neat? Like a man?”

  “Just like that,” she said. And drank.

  He sipped from his glass, feeling, for the first time in what seemed too long, the warmth of the whiskey enriching him.

  “No pretty little faces?” he said to her. “No delicate wrinkle of the nose, no ladylike heckle to suggest that whiskey is too strong a drink for fragile high church ladies?”

  “I’m not fragile,” she said. “I like whiskey. I like many things that high church ladies aren’t supposed to like.”

  “Do you, now? Well, that’s encouraging.”

  “It was meant to be,” she said.

  They sipped their whiskey.

  “And Mr. Winslow?”

  “I like him too.”

  “Do you love him?”

  She leaned back in her chair, and the pale sunlight rested on her face. She was wearing a mannish tweed suit and a high-necked gray wool sweater.

  “Do I love him?” She swallowed more whiskey. “How utterly Irish of you.”

  “To ask if you love your husband?”

  “It’s in your nature,” she said. “The romance of lost causes.”

  “Is loving your husband a lost cause?”

  “A husband who sees to all your needs, and is proud to have a young and beautiful wife—that is not a lost cause.”

  “And love is?”

  “It certainly should not take precedence,” she said.

  Her eyes were very bright and the flush on her face was deeper. She poured whiskey into each glass, and leaned back again, her eyes closed, her face to the lukewarm sun. Motionless in the wicker chair, there was about her a kinesis to which his own body vibrated like a tuning fork.

  “Practical,” Conn said.

  “Yes!”

  “But pleasure loving,” Conn said.

  “One does not preclude the other,” she said.

  As he healed, Conn’s strength had come back, and he could feel it now in the bunching of muscle between his shoulder blades, in the resilience of his neck.

  “Good to know,” Conn said. His voice seemed disconnected from the burgeoning center of him.

  “Good to know both things,” Hadley said, her face flushed, her eyes shining. He could see her breasts move as she breathed. He hadn’t noticed that before. Was she breathing more, or was he seeing better?

  “Are you well?” she said.

  “Well enough.”

  “Well enough for what?” she said, and her bright eyes were full of laughter now.

  “Anything,” he said.

  And she slid forward onto her knees beside him and he put his arms around her. Her mouth pressed on his and opened. He fumbled at her clothing. She helped him. And helped with his and they were naked on the cold grass, tangled in his blanket. He put his hands on her and felt a quiver ripple through her body. She arched against him, her mouth hard against his. His front teeth cut her lip. He tasted her blood for a moment, and hesitated; but she pressed even harder, and moaned softly, and the center of himself seemed to escape him and envelop them both.

  “Don’t say,” she gasped, her mouth still pressed against his, “that you weren’t warned.”

  Then there was only the inarticulate sounds of their lovemaking, and the twitter of finches in the trumpet vine.

  Conn

  Detectives from G section of the Metropolitan Police were being shot by the IRA on the street in Dublin. Curfew was now midnight to five A.M. Sitting in a café on Grafton Street in the late afternoon, with the high weather clouds scudding fast toward England, Conn drank tea and watched as the city became every day more warlike. The Dublin police were always on the street. And the Royal Irish Constabulary, the peelers, founded by Sir Robert Peel, responsible only to Dublin Castle. British troops moved about in lorries. Aloof from everyone else, brutal, scornful, and many, the mercenaries swaggered through Conn’s city like conquerors. Ex-British enlisted men wore the black-and-tan uniforms for which they were named. Auxiliaries, former British officers, wore dull bottle-green. The men of both forces were combat veterans, blooded in Britain’s colonial wars, hardened in the trenches of Europe. Both forces existed exclusively to suppress the Irish rebellion. The detectives and the Secret Service moved about in civilian clothes, but their weapons too were apparent, deadly angular shapes under tight coats.

  Conn sipped his tea and whistled “The Peeler and the Goat” softly to himself, the lyrics playing silently in his head.

  Your hoary locks will not prevail,

  Nor your sublime oration O

  And Peeler’s Act will you transport

  On your own information O.

  A young medical student named Kevin Barry was hanged one gray morning in Mountjoy Prison. Crowds gathered early on the damp streets outside the prison, before the sun had dried the dew. British soldiers in tin hats stood with fixed bayonets, shivering in the early day. Armored cars moved over the slick streets, forcing passage through the crowd. A woman began to cry. “The poor boy. The poor boy. God help us all!” She swayed as if she would fall and people on either side held her up. Airplanes circled overhead, flying low, unexpected and alien, watching the crowd, like pterodactyls over prey. The mourning of the crowd rose toward them. “Mother of Perpetual Succor help us,” the women cried. “Mother of Perpetual Succor help us.” The Tommies stood motionless, bayonets fixed, eyes straight ahead. Most of them were very young. Conn moved among the people, shoulders hunched against the early chill, hands deep in his pockets. Bad morning for Kevin Barry. Good morning for the cause, he thought. Whenever things looked grim for a free Ireland, the British would pitch in and supply another martyr.

  There was a warra
nt out for Conn. The RIC had captured one of the men from Hollyford, and beaten information from him. So Conn was assigned to IRA headquarters to recuperate. He had few duties as he got well. He attended planning meetings, acrimonious night-long discussions of revolutionary theory. The arguments made him restless. Revolution for Conn was a night on the barracks roof at Hollyford, not extended analysis of Foch’s principles. During most of the planning he thought about Hadley. He lived from house to house, never more than two or three nights. Everywhere he went he carried two guns, the big Webley and a Browning automatic. Everywhere he went he was watchful and thought about Hadley. Days he sat in St. Stephen’s Green, among the orderly flower beds, where nursemaids pushed prams, and shabby undersized men with narrow faces sat on benches and looked at nothing. He watched the people, and kept an eye out for peelers, and mused on Hadley’s thighs and the smooth small slope of her stomach. Sometimes he went to the National Gallery and stared at the paintings hung on high white walls above polished floors in echoing rooms under distant ceilings. He thought of the sounds she made during lovemaking. Sometimes he read in the National Library. Always he was careful. Always he thought about Hadley. He saw her as often as she could get away.

  On a soft evening when the spring had flowered into summer, they ate together in the dining room at the Shelbourne Hotel. They sat by one of the high windows that looked out across the traffic at St. Stephen’s Green. Lorries rumbled past with British troops standing on the sides. Armored cars with mobile turrets moved along the north side of the Green. Occasionally one would swerve in toward the sidewalk. People would scatter, and the car would resume course. The Auxies walked in groups. People gave way to them. They were professional fighters, tough and arrogant in their dull bottle-green tunics, tam-o’-shanter caps at an angle. Some Auxies paused to look in at the diners. Conn looked back at them. One of the Auxies, a thick-bodied man with an eye patch, saw Conn looking and stared back at him. They held each other’s stare and then the Auxie tossed his head contemptuously, and they moved on. Conn laughed.

  “Stared him down, did you?” Hadley said.

  Around them carefully dressed older people were eating dinner. The waiters, in black coats and white aprons, moved humbly among them, never making eye contact, bowing and murmuring and backing away. The Irish make terrible subjects. Conn thought, but they might make grand slaves.

  “Yes,” Conn said. “But I had more eyes than he did.”

  He laughed again and Hadley laughed with him.

  “Ah, Conn,” Hadley said in a stage Irish accent, “you darling boy. Look at you, with your curly black hair and your big smile and a strapping lad you be.”

  “A credit to me race,” Conn said.

  “And carrying two guns and stare down any Auxie,” she said. “You’re like a poster Irishman.”

  “Faith and begorrah,” Conn said, and put his hand on top of hers.

  The Shelbourne was dangerous for both of them. Hadley’s husband was well known among the Ascendancy Irish who often dined there, and Conn, were he recognized, would be shot on sight by any of the British officers billeted in the hotel.

  “Where shall we go after dinner?” Conn said.

  “It’s pleasant,” Hadley said. “Perhaps we can find a quiet place in the Green.”

  Conn took a bite of muttonchop and drank some claret. He knew how dangerous it was here, and he knew that the danger was one reason they came. It excited her. For himself Conn knew that it was foolish to take such risks, but he knew also that Dublin was his city, and he was goddamned if he would let a bunch of foreigners decide where he could eat. And he too enjoyed the danger.

  “Be nice sometime if we were to do it in a proper bed,” Conn said. He paused and drank some more claret, and patted his lips with the starchy white linen napkin. “With clean sheets, and big pillows. And a door that locked.”

  “I rather like the excitement,” Hadley said. “Doing it where someone might come upon us.”

  “It’s exciting,” Conn said. “But it lacks a bit in the area of postcoital languor.”

  She cut a neat small portion of her salmon and popped it into her mouth, switching the fork from her left hand to her right, the way Americans did. She chewed carefully while he looked at her face, how her big eyes held the light of the candles on the table. The light reflected in the windows now, as the evening came down. He could see them both in the dark window, younger than any of the other diners, sitting close together.

  She finished chewing, and swallowed, and said, “I can get languor at home, thank you.”

  “And love?”

  She smiled.

  “So Irish,” she said, and shook her head. “So Irish.”

  He wanted to reach across the table and take her and bend her to him and force her to love him as he loved her. He felt his strength, felt the biceps engorge, swollen against the sleeves of his jacket. It was as if, for that moment, he might force her or kill her. He would make her yield…. And then it passed…. He felt the engorgement drain away…. And he felt diminished, as if he himself might drain away too…. The faith defended, he put his hand on top of hers again, and patted it contritely. He felt the glassy stare of the stag’s head mounted high on the far wall of the dining room.

  Later, in the Green, among some bushes, squirming beneath him in the darkness, moaning in his arms, she bit his shoulder and drew blood. And when it was over they stayed where they were, in silence, catching their breath, smelling the crushed grass beneath them and the damp smell of the Irish earth, and listening to the sound of the heavy lorries as they rolled by.

  Conn

  They met on a cold night, in a high-ceilinged room, on the first floor of a four-story pinkish brick town house, in back of Trinity College, just up Westland Row from the train station. Mulcahy himself was there, the chief of staff, and Mick Collins, “the Big Fella” head of intelligence, seated behind a long table with maps and papers on it. The high windows were shuttered from the inside, and the doors were locked. The radiators were full on in the crowded room, and Ginger O’Connell, the training officer, portly and red faced, behind the table, was sweating in the heat. Rory O’Connor and Arthur Griffith made five command staff members behind the long table. Conn sat against the back wall on a straight chair that had been moved in from the kitchen. If the peelers came fishing today they’d get a lot of big ones, Conn thought.

  “Let us be straight about this,” Collins said. “Their Secret Service has been better than ours.”

  He spoke firmly, as he did everything. He wasn’t in fact such a big fella. Conn was taller. But he was blocky and athletic, and the certainty with which he said things made him seem bigger than he was.

  “We need to slow it down until we can catch up. No one outside this room knows of our plans. There are few of us, each of you will have to act alone. It is the best way to keep it secret.”

  Besides the command staff there were twenty men in the reeking hot room. Collins looked around slowly, making eye contact with each of them. Conn felt the force in the Big Fella’s gaze when his turn came.

  “We’ve all fought, we all know that it’s harder alone. Harder to act with resolve. It is why each of you was asked to volunteer. You are the best we have.”

  Conn knew this was so and he was proud to be there. Still, it was one thing to fire at an anonymous enemy in the midst of a firefight. It was another to assassinate a man with a name, in his home, perhaps in his bed, sleeping with his wife…. He wondered if Hadley slept with her husband. He had seen him once, on the street with Hadley, walking on the west side of Merrion Square near Leinster House. A solid man, in his forties, with dark brown hair and a short thick beard like Grant, the American Civil War general. Hadley had made no sign as they passed, her hand resting lightly on her husband’s crooked arm. He had a pleasant face with a look of intelligence about it. There was about him what Conn thought of as the American look, as if he always slept soundly and dined well, and spent time out of doors. Conn felt something
nearly like camaraderie with this man who did not know him. They had shared the same woman, felt the secrets of her body. He imagined bursting in upon them, revolver drawn, and Hadley’s husband startled sitting up in the bed beside her…. Of course they slept together.

  “It is important that it all happen at the same time,” Mulcahy said. “I want everyone in Ireland to be talking about it on the way to Mass tomorrow. Not only will we cripple their intelligence with this single simultaneous stroke, but it will be a statement, also, of how seriously a free Ireland must be taken.”

  Mulcahy’s thick blond moustache was in odd juxtaposition, Conn thought, to his dark hair. It made him look a bit silly. But he wasn’t silly. Dickie was a good man. So was Mick. All of them were in this dark inherited brotherhood of idealism and savagery. All of them loved Ireland and hated England and loved each other. And he among them hated and loved as they did, though he loved Hadley Winslow more.

  The wallpaper in the room had a design of Doric columns in pink and white. The ceiling molding was thickly ornamental. The radiators hissed and pinged with heat. There was no sound from the street. It is an emblem, Conn thought, of the essential Irish soul: hot, secretive, and dangerous, sealed up with history. Conn smiled to himself. And about to do some damage.

  Collins took out a big gold pocket watch and studied it for a theatrical moment.

  “Eleven o’clock. Time—if you’re going to reach your target before the curfew,” he said. “Wait till it’s after midnight, Sunday morning. And then be quick. It needs to be finished by sunrise.”

  The men stirred. Each of them had a handgun, most had two. There were perhaps a dozen hand grenades in the room as well. Some of the men carried knives. Conn didn’t carry one. Sticking a knife into a man was a bit much, he thought.

  Outside, the cold darkness was a brief refreshment from the steam ridden meeting room, But soon the chill became unpleasant and Conn buttoned his overcoat around his neck and turned up the collar. His target was a British Secret Service man named John Cooper, who lived on Haddington Road near the Beggar’s Bush army barracks. Collins’s intelligence report said he lived in one side of a two-story house with his wife. There were no children. There was no dog. Cooper would be the only man in the house. He was described as thirty-five, balding, medium height, medium weight. Nothing unusual to identify him. A nondescript government functionary who had gone to bed peacefully and would die before morning.