James looks embarrassed.
‘I thought I’d better tell you, otherwise who knows what you’d imagine – it was one of the only times we met in six years.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you know the secret of our marriage? It’s absence. I love Ireland, but I don’t want to live there all the time. I love your father, but I don’t want to be a trainer’s wife, cooking up big breakfasts for ungrateful owners. I want to go to two race meetings a year, not two a week. And I don’t want to drive a horsebox except in an extreme emergency. So off I’ve gone to interesting places, Palestine, Moscow, Korea, Berlin, Vietnam, South Africa. But I always come back, and we’re always glad to see each other.’
‘You were quite exotic compared to my friends’ mothers.’
‘Was that a good thing? I couldn’t stand the Pony Club, but I did see you ride in your first point-to-point, though my eyes were closed most of the time.’
‘You did? Where did I finish?’
‘First, last, who knows? I didn’t care as long as you got round safely. By the way, he’d love it if you rode out with him tomorrow.’
James rides out with his father every morning for the rest of the week, which makes him feel better about leaving for Oxford so soon after his long absence in the army.
‘The vacations are good,’ he said as he kissed his mother and gave his father an unaccustomed hug. ‘I’ll be back for Christmas.’
James arrived at Worcester College, Oxford, as one of a mixed bag of freshmen – half eighteen-year-olds, happy that National Service had been abolished, half twenty-year-olds who had just finished two years in the armed forces. On his first day he was dressed as if he were still in the army, stiff white collar, regimental tie, hacking jacket, grey flannel trousers, suede chukka boots. It took him three days to change to another uniform – jeans, blue shirt, baggy sweater. The stiff collar, jacket, flannel trousers and boots were never seen again.
‘Sounds ditchwater dull to me,’ says Kate. ‘You might as well become a chartered accountant.’
James has just told his mother that he has passed the Civil Service exam and been accepted by the Treasury.
‘Not a bit. The public finances, how much tax is raised, how it’s distributed, how expenditure is controlled, that’s the most important part of government. No money, no public services.’
As he speaks, James realizes he is parroting the words of the Civil Service brochure. He knows the reason he chose the Treasury was that it was the hardest department to enter. ‘It’s for the real high-flyers, but with your degree and a Blue you should have a good chance,’ his tutor had told him.
‘Darling, I’m sure you know what you’re doing,’ says Kate. ‘By the way, I have to go into Dublin on Monday. I’ll be in hospital there for a few days.’
‘What for? Is it serious?’
‘Tests and investigations, that’s all.’ Kate’s voice is steady, although she isn’t looking at her son, picking up and polishing a silver cup as she speaks.
James is too scared to press his mother for more details. His father is equally vague when they are out together on the Curragh gallops, watching the first lot come up the hill, two horses at a time, steam coming out of their nostrils in the cold December air.
‘You know as much as I do,’ says John. ‘Your mother isn’t one to make a fuss. Look, that’s Handyman alongside Touch of Class – only a four-year-old and he’s not pressed to keep up with the older horse. He’ll win first time out in a couple of months. You can come up to Dublin with me on Thursday to collect her if you like.’
The Dublin hospital is an old-fashioned building staffed by nursing nuns; the corridors are clean and there is an air of calm and competence. Kate is sitting up in a four-woman ward when they come in.
‘You needn’t both have come up to collect me,’ she says, although she is clearly happy to see the two of them. ‘You aren’t going to have to carry me out, you know.’
‘I was promised lunch at the Gresham,’ says James.
‘I’m hungry enough for that after three days here,’ says Kate. ‘Now let me get dressed and pack my things and we’re off.’
On the drive back to Killowen they talk about horses and the crisis in the Congo. ‘I’ve persuaded the Irish Times to send me there; there’s a big Irish contingent in the UN peacekeeping force.’
‘Only if the doctor says so,’ says John.
‘Ma, exactly what were you in hospital for? What were they testing?’
‘I have a lump in my breast – the tests are to find out if it’s malignant, whether it’s spread. Whether I’ve got cancer or just a lump.’
The three of them are quiet for what seems to James a long time. He sees the whites of his father’s knuckles as his hands tighten on the steering wheel, and realizes they are both hearing the word ‘cancer’ for the first time. The word hangs in the air for the rest of the journey.
James goes off to London to find a flat, first extracting a promise from Kate that she’ll call him with the test results. A week later she speaks to him.
‘The bad news is that I’ve got cancer. The good news is that they don’t believe it’s spread. So I’m going in next week for a mastectomy, and they think that and a course of chemotherapy will fix it. James, are you there?’
James cannot speak for a moment. There is a constriction in his throat and he wants to cry. He manages to get out, ‘This is a terrible line,’ puts the phone down and weeps. After a couple of minutes he collects himself, rings Kate back, apologizes for the bad line and says, ‘When do you go into hospital?’
‘We’re leaving for Dublin now. They’ll operate tomorrow. The sooner the better, they said. Come and see me at the end of the week when I’ll be in a fit state to see you.’
A week later James flies back to Dublin, goes to the hospital and joins his father at Kate’s bedside. John is holding Kate’s hand; he looks up and says, ‘They say they’ve got the worst of it, and the chemotherapy is just to make sure.’
Kate holds out her other hand to James and says, ‘I’m an Amazon now. That was my nickname at St Timothy’s, so life is imitating art. I can’t wait to get home.’
Kate is back at Killowen in ten days’ time, weakened and thin after radiotherapy. She is losing her hair. ‘They say it will grow again, so I’m not bothering with a wig. I’ve got four fetching skullcaps, all in different colours.’
There is no more talk of going to the Congo.
James gets a month’s deferment of his arrival at the Treasury and stays at Killowen. In the beginning, Kate is up and about the house, but she gets progressively weaker and has to stay in bed. It is soon clear, but unspoken, that the cancer has spread. She goes back to hospital by ambulance for more tests and is back at Killowen after two days.
‘They’ve done all they can,’ she tells John and James; they are sitting beside her bed, which has been moved downstairs into the drawing room. ‘I’ve got you two, I’ve had a good life, and I’m not in any pain at the moment. Dr Donnan has plenty of morphine if it gets bad, and we’ll get a nurse in when I can’t manage.’
‘We won’t need a nurse,’ says John, ‘I’ll look after you.’
And he does for the six weeks that Kate has left, while James and Michael Molloy deal with the horses and the owners. For her last two days Kate is unconscious; she dies quietly in bed on a sunny March morning, John and James each holding one of her hands.
The funeral five days later is in St Mark’s church. Kate’s older brother, a Trust lawyer, flies over from Boston for the day; the Burkes come from Queen’s County; four of Kate’s journalist colleagues; several owners and their wives; and all the lads from the yard. And Robert Keen is there from Oxford.
There is no eulogy. ‘I’m not having some strange clergyman repeating second-hand platitudes about her,’ says John.
He reads the lesson from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and as he begins, ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’ James realizes that his father be
lieves every word.
Robert Keen stays the night at Killowen and cooks the dinner. ‘If you’ve been a bachelor for as long as I have, you become a decent cook or starve.’ After three bottles of claret between them Robert talks about Lambourn.
‘You never made a decent fist of that horse of mine. I hope you’ve done better since.’
‘Placed twice, fell four times, not bad for a no-hoper bought out of a seller for sixpence. Only a friend would have had him in his yard.’
‘What was that good horse of the Vincents? Won at Chepstow, fell in the lead in the big novice chase at Cheltenham. Never did much after that.’
‘Knocknarea. And I moved on soon after Cheltenham, if you remember. You know,’ John says, turning to James, ‘Robert and I were comrades-in-arms in Spain.’
‘That’s where we met your mother, in Alicante, in Jarama, in Teruel. She was gorgeous,’ says Robert. ‘Your dad took her away from me just as I was beginning to make an impression. She was genuinely interested in mediaeval history.’
John laughs for the first time in several weeks. ‘We spent a long time drinking at a café, and I walked her back to her hotel.’
‘Pretty unsteadily as I remember. Kate had a better head for the Red Infuriator than you.’
‘What was the war like in Spain?’ asks James.
‘Hot, disorganized, not very dangerous most of the time. Cruel and violent on both sides. We never seemed to be in one place for very long. And the more they told us we were winning, the more we knew we were in trouble.’
‘Teruel was bloody cold and bloody dangerous,’ says Robert. ‘We were lucky to get out alive. That was strange, coming across those Irishmen fighting for Franco.’
‘Indeed it was. Have some more whiskey.’
Later, after Robert has gone to bed, James asks his father about the lesson in church.
‘Dad, you read it well. As though you believed every word.’
‘I do believe every word. “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I couldn’t make any sense of this life if I didn’t think there was something more, particularly since Kate’s gone. I’m not sure the Church of Ireland has the answer, but the New Testament may. I’ll probably go to Mount Athos again this summer when the season’s done. You know I went there instead of your mother years ago. No women allowed, not even American journalists. You can imagine how angry that made her. I found it a comforting place and I need comfort right now.’
‘So do I,’ says James. ‘Dad, I wish I could...’ and before he finishes John stands up and the two men embrace for a long moment.
James stays with his father at Killowen for a week, then goes back to London to begin his life in the Treasury. The strangeness of this new world and the twelve-hour working days are a powerful distraction from the shock of his mother’s death. And he meets Linda Armstrong again.
Linda was in the same year as James at Oxford; slim, dark-haired, she was one of a group of three clever girls from Lady Margaret Hall who would have been dismissed as bluestockings if they hadn’t been so pretty. James had seen her at parties and dances during his Finals year, but they were no more than acquaintances.
They meet again almost a year later at a day’s induction course for new civil servants.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Women are allowed to join the Civil Service, you know. And in the administrative grade, not just as typists. I’m in the Department of Health. You’re in the Department of Penny-Pinching, I suppose.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound patronizing,’ and at the end of the day James asks Linda out for a drink.
‘Hadn’t you better consult the Handbook on Ethics? It will look as though I’m lobbying you for an increased allocation,’ says Linda, then sees the disappointed look on James’s face. ‘That was a joke. Don’t they have jokes in the Treasury? A drink would be good.’
They go to a bar in Northumberland Avenue, and then to a restaurant off Trafalgar Square. They had last seen each other at the Worcester Commemoration Ball. Linda, in the same party as James and his Italian girlfriend, had been escorted by an undergraduate wearing the dark blue tailcoat of the Bullingdon Club, to whom James had taken an instant dislike. James had one enjoyable, decorous dance with Linda, and afterwards wished for something more.
Over coffee James asks, ‘What happened to your Bullingdon Club man?’
‘What happened to your sultry Italian?’
‘She went back to Rome.’
‘William went back to Shropshire.’
James and Linda have a leisurely courtship, the pace dictated in part by the demanding hours of their jobs. After their first serious argument, when Linda says how disgraceful the squeeze on the Health budget is, and James explains how excessive public debt is crippling the country, they agree to leave their work at the office.
They become lovers after six months.
‘I’m not in a hurry to jump into bed with you or anyone else for that matter. William was a disaster. Or perhaps it was me.’
It wasn’t Linda, as James discovers when they finally sleep together. Linda attributes considerable sexual experience to James because he is two years older. ‘And you were in the army,’ she says, as though that clinches the matter. James does his best to live up to Linda’s view.
In their second summer James takes Linda to Killowen.
‘We’ll have the place to ourselves. Dad’s gone off to Mount Athos – he goes there every summer now for a month’s retreat. Michael looks after the yard while he’s away.’
‘I love the high ceilings and big windows. It’s all very simple,’ says Linda. ‘Irish houses, even the grand ones, are less fussy, feel lived in.’
‘Almost all our family stuff was burned in The Troubles,’ says James, telling her the story of Derriquin and Eileen. They visit Burke’s Fort for lunch, and afterwards Fred shows them around the stud.
‘Your dad was the stallion man at the Fort when he was young, looked after our great horse, The Elector, won the big prize at the Dublin spring show with him. Never had anything as good since. He’s done well with the horses at Killowen. Would you ever move back when he retires?’
‘I’m not sure. I’m well on the way to becoming English – educated there, working in London. If I’d been to St Columba’s and Trinity College, Dublin, it might be different.’
They walk on, and James reminds Fred of their golfing expedition to the West of Ireland.
‘We were independent for the first time, driving that little Ford Prefect, staying in B&Bs, drinking in those run-down bars. The sun shone every day, unheard of in Galway and Mayo. Do you still play?’
‘Gave it up after you left for the army. I was never in your league. Didn’t you get a Blue?’
That evening James and Linda have dinner on their own at Killowen. They finish a bottle of wine between them, sit in front of a turf fire, and James says, ‘I think we should get engaged.’
‘Engaged? You mean, “Mr and Mrs Alexander Armstrong are pleased to announce...” in The Times? Shouldn’t you be on one knee?’
‘I’m too comfortable. What do you think?’
‘I think yes.’
James and Linda are married a year later in the chapel of Worcester College. ‘It was where we first met,’ says James.
‘Yes. And you had an Italian beauty looking at you adoringly all evening.’
‘Well, your Bullingdon beau spent the evening looking at himself every time he passed a reflective surface.’
‘No wonder we got together.’
The marriage is as simple as James and Linda can negotiate with Mrs Armstrong. James heads off the suggestion that they should leave the church under an arch of Royal Irish Dragoons sabres, pointing out that the university golfing team of 1963 would be most upset if thei
r offer of an arch of golf clubs was trumped. They leave the chapel archless, have a fortnight’s honeymoon in Corfu, and begin their new life in a small house in Fulham that John Burke helps them to buy.
‘There’ll be little enough left when I’m gone,’ he says to James. ‘There’s a hefty mortgage on Killowen, and the racing barely covers the interest in a good year. But the money’s of most use to you now.’
31
THE BOAT CHUGS slowly back to Ouranopolis in a cloud of diesel fumes. As John walks up the hill from the harbour at Daphne the breeze from the sea cleans away the diesel, replacing it with the scent of laurel, valerian, myrtle and oleander, leaving far behind the sharper, earthier smells of Ireland, peat, horse sweat, saddle soap, Guinness and whiskey. All he needs is in his small rucksack – two of everything, shirts, pants, socks, handkerchiefs and a single towel.
It is a four-hour walk across the island to the monastery of Stavronikita. The peak of Mount Athos is cloud-covered and the view of the coast recedes behind him as he climbs the rough road. Beyond the watershed the road is replaced by mule tracks, and John has to stop to regain his breath after each scramble out of the network of valleys separating him from the sea on the north. He passes through small woods of chestnut and oak, sees the occasional vineyard, and meets only one other pilgrim heading back to Daphne. When the buildings of the monastery come into view, his pace and his pulse quicken. He feels he has left home and is coming home.
The guest master greets him with an affectionate embrace, gives him some bread, cheese, olives and a glass of raki, and shows him to his room. It is the room he had on his previous visit – hard bed, single blanket, wooden table, jug and basin, a small window looking out over the harbour. A painted wooden cross hangs on the rough, flaking, whitewashed walls. The routine of the monastery embraces and sustains him – long services, simple meals, work in the garden, fishing, solitary contemplation and prayer.
The monks in Stavronikita are friendly but incurious – John’s Greek is still patchy, and unnecessary conversation is discouraged. Meals are taken at speed against a background of a reading from a sacred text. The monks, less than thirty in a collection of buildings that once housed over a hundred, are often outnumbered by the guests, who stay one or two nights and then move on. John is one of three who have permission from the Abbot to remain longer, and he has arranged a donation to the monastery that makes the monks happy to have him there. And he is a good fisherman, going out in the boat from the harbour twice a week to net fish for the table.
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