Next week they would remove his name.
NINE
“It’s for you,” Andrea said, coming back into the living room of her house where he was helping her to close her bags.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. It’s a man’s voice.”
In three hours’ time they would be on the plane to London. Was it the police? The IRA? His father? “Sorry,” he said to Andrea. “But would you mind asking who it is?”
She came back. “It’s a Father Connolly. He says he knows you. He says it’s urgent.”
“I don’t know any Father Connolly,” he said, but went at once to the phone, nervous. Could something have happened to Moira?
“Yes?” he said.
“Is that you, Mike?” It was a local voice. No one except the Americans called him Mike.
“What is it?”
“This is Matt Connolly, Mike. How are you?”
“I’m sorry. Who?”
“Father Matt. We were at St. Michan’s together. Now do you remember?”
“Oh, hello,” he said. But the truth was he did not remember. Most of his schoolmates he had long forgotten. Especially the sort who went on to be priests.
“Listen, Mike. I hear you’re taking off for London any time now, is that right?”
“Yes, I’m leaving in an hour or so. What is this about?”
“Mike, it’s not something I want to talk about over the phone. Where are you? Could I come up and see you for a wee minute? OK?”
“Look, I’m very busy. What is it? I really have no time.”
“It’s important,” the voice said. “It’s not something that can wait. Whereabouts are you?”
He looked at his watch. “I’m at 31 Mountjoy Avenue. Can you be here in half an hour?”
“Sure, that’s only about five minutes away, Mike. I’m at the Clarence. They’re the ones who gave me your number. Will I come up?”
“All right.”
He went back into the sitting room and told Andrea.
“I’ll clear out,” she said. “I have to go down to the office, anyway. Why don’t we meet back here at twelve?”
A few minutes after she had gone he stood looking out of the bay window in her sitting room. A small car drove slowly up the avenue, its occupant searching for house numbers. It went past him, then stopped, backed up, and parked outside his door. A priest got out. He wore dark clerical trousers, a black wind-breaker and a black shirt with a white clerical collar. He was short and stout, about Dillon’s age, with thinning hair and a red face. When he had locked the car he turned and stared up at the house. Dillon, standing in the bay window, looked down at him. He looked up at Dillon, searchingly, but with no sign of recognition. Then he unlatched the gate, walked up the path, and rang the front doorbell. Dillon went to answer.
When he opened the door the little priest put out his hand tentatively, like a gambler deciding to place his bet. “Mike, how are you? Remember me now? We were in Senior A together.”
“Come in,” Dillon said. He clasped the priest’s hand. It felt wet. He led him into Andrea’s sitting room, its walls embellished with Greenpeace appeals to “Save the Whales.”
The priest looked at these warily, then pointed to Andrea’s luggage which was piled up alongside the coffee table. “So, you’re taking off, are you, Mike. London, is it?”
“Yes.”
The priest, with the confidence of his kind, sat down proprietorially in the best chair and took out cigarettes. “Smoke? No, I don’t blame you. Bad habit.” He grinned up at Dillon, then lit a cigarette. “Maybe you were the year before me,” he said. “I have a feeling you don’t remember me, Mike.”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” Dillon said. “It was a long time ago.”
“And you went on to Queen’s after that, didn’t you? And then abroad. The Continent, was it? Or London? Anyway, you don’t remember me, but I remember you, well. Wee Matt Connolly? No? Doesn’t ring a bell?”
Dillon shook his head and sat down on the window seat, well away from this priest. He looked at the priest’s raw, red face, his icy-blue eyes, his confident smile. He knew that “Wee Father Matt,” in the authoritarian way of most Irish priests, thought of himself as someone special, a person of a higher calling than the laymen he dealt with. He would have no idea that, to Dillon, a priest was at best a fool who believed in something totally false, at worst a dangerous meddler in other people’s lives.
“No,” he said. “Wee Matt Connolly? You’re right. Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Well, no matter,” the priest said, hitching himself forward in the chair. “The thing is I’ve come to ask you a favor. Well, not a favor, exactly. There’s something I want to discuss with you. It concerns a boy I know. Actually, he’s the son of a parishioner of mine, a lovely woman, I won’t give you her name, you’ll see why in a minute.” The priest then looked around as though worried that they might be overheard. He leaned forward even further, sitting now on the edge of the armchair, lowering his voice to a confessional murmur. “It’s to do with this business the other night, with yourself and your wife. Can I ask you one thing? Are you going to England for good?”
“Why do you want to know?”
It was as though with that question Dillon had declared his hostility. At once the priest’s confidence seemed to falter. “Sorry, now; it’s none of my business, of course. I just wondered.”
“Wondered what?”
“I wondered if it had anything to do with—you know, being worried about the Rah.”
“The what?”
“The Rah, the IRA—you know, that’s what people call them.”
“You mean that’s what their supporters call them?”
The priest tried a smile. “Mike, I’m sure I know how you feel, people breaking into your house at night, pulling guns on you and your wife. Who could blame you? But, the thing is, nobody was hurt. Thanks to you, of course. Now, I know that Mrs. Dillon is very much against the Rah. She’s taking a strong line. Now, it seems she told some newspaper people that you recognized one of these lads who came to your house?”
“Where did you see that?” Dillon asked. “It wasn’t in the papers, was it?”
“I don’t know,” the priest said. “Maybe not. Anyway, I heard it somewhere. Or maybe it was the police that said it, when they came to see her. They came to lift her son.”
“And did they ‘lift’ him?”
“No. He wasn’t at home.”
“Was he one of the ones who were in our house that night?”
“Oh, no, Mike,” the priest said. “Take it easy, now. I’m not saying that. The trouble is, this boy is very headstrong and his mother thinks he just might be mixed up with the Rah. When the police came round he wasn’t home, as I said. And the truth is, she hasn’t seen him since. Poor woman, she’s half demented, worrying about him.”
“Is his name Kev?”
There was a silence. The priest’s red face flushed full of blood, his icy blue eyes blinked as though faced by a bright light. “Kev,” he said, neither affirming nor questioning the name, pronouncing it as though it were a foreign word he had just learned. “This woman’s a lovely woman,” he said. “She only has the one child. The father died ten years ago. You know what these lads are like, they’re just kids. They get these romantic notions. They see the injustice around them. Die for Ireland. All that. We heard it all in school.”
“Yes, we did,” Dillon said. “That was one of the troubles with our school.”
“Depends on your point of view,” the priest said. “There is injustice here. Discrimination against Catholics is a terrible thing. These kids see that.”
“We all see that,” Dillon said. “But does that justify going into someone’s house at night and threatening to kill his wife if he doesn’t go out and plant a bomb in a place where a whole lot of innocent people will be killed? What’s the Fifth Commandment, Father? ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
“Hold on now, Mike,” the pr
iest said, an edge of anger in his voice. “I take your point. I’m not saying I agree with these kids. I say they see what’s going on here as a political situation. There is injustice here. You know that as well as I do. This boy I’m talking about, he’s only nineteen. He’s not a murderer or a criminal. Maybe he’s misguided, I’ll grant you that. But we’re talking about him being locked up in a place like Long Kesh for maybe as long as fifteen years. That’s shocking waste of a young life. And I’m thinking of his mother, too. Of her life from now on, if that happens.”
“And what about my wife?” Dillon said. “What if they’d killed her?”
“Ah, but they didn’t, did they?” the priest said. “They probably had no intention. I mean, they left the house before it was time for the bomb to go off. I mean, there you are.”
“But they did intend to kill Pottinger. And if that meant blowing up whatever poor souls happened to be in the same building as him, that was all right, too. I’ll tell you something, Father. If the police find that boy, Kev—vicious little bastard that he is—I’ll make sure he’s a lot older before he gets a chance to kill anybody else.”
When he had said it he sat, staring at the priest’s red face, knowing at last what he had done. It had been said. It was as clear as if he had said it to the IRA themselves.
“Well, of course, that’s up to you, Mike,” the priest said. “I can see you’re very angry about this. I quite understand. But, just let me say that if I was you I’d think about it. You’re off to England now. It may never come up. I sincerely hope it doesn’t. But, considering the—political climate here … well, sometimes it’s not a good idea to get too involved. You know what I mean. My problem now is, what will I tell his mother? I wouldn’t like to tell her what you just said. She’s worried enough as it is.”
“Tell her what you like,” Dillon said, standing up.
The priest stood up too. There was a silence. “Well, thanks for seeing me, anyway,” the priest said, and this time he did not offer his hand.
He walked ahead of the priest into the hall. He opened the front door to let him out. He had said it. It was too late to take it back. He watched the short, stout figure go down the path. At the gate, after opening it, the priest turned and looked back at him. “Think about it, will you?” he said. “’Bye, now. Safe journey.”
The priest walked to his car, unlocked the door and got in. The little car turned around in the street and went back the way it had come.
“Are you worried about it?” Andrea said later. “You are, aren’t you?”
“I should have kept my mouth shut.”
“Anyway, the police haven’t found him. He’s probably down South by now.”
“Maybe. But what if they pick him up in six months’ or a year’s time? It will always be hanging over my head, damn it.”
They were outside her house, putting her bags and his into the rented car for the drive to the airport. “Wait,” she said. “Is that everything?” She went up the path to the front door and turned to look back at him, smiling, holding up her key for him to see, then posting it back through the letter box. She came down the path, shut the gate, and said, “That’s it. Goodbye, Belfast. We’re on our way.”
They drove up Peter’s Hill, along the Shankill Road, the working-class Protestant ghetto. Within minutes they had left the city and were driving along the hedged country roads which had not changed since his childhood. It was a clear Irish summer’s day, white clouds lazy in blue skies, a cool breeze, sunlight on the rolling hills above the lough. As they approached the airport, police were flagging down cars and trucks, moving them into a roadside detour to search for hidden guns and bombs. But, as they drove up to this checkpoint, the armed, flak-jacketed policeman in their path peered in at them through the car’s windshield, then, straightening up, waved them on through, unsearched. Dillon, seeing the airport terminal ahead, thought of old wartime films, the car passing through a frontier station, the border guards waving the escapees on to freedom. There was one last link with the past, one thing he had not done. When the car stopped at the terminal entrance he said to Andrea, “I have to make a phone call. Would you mind turning in the car?”
He loaded the baggage onto a metal trolley and watched as she drove off to the Avis car-park. He pushed the trolley into the terminal building, searching for a public phone. When he found one he rang Donegal.
“Is that you, Mister Michael?” It was Deirdre’s voice. “She’s up in the vegetable garden. Will you wait till I fetch her, or do you want her to ring you back?”
“I’ll wait.”
Opposite him was an airport gift shop, with racks of magazines, paperback books, gimcrack gifts, children’s toys. He stood staring at them, his mind far away, in the graveled walk behind Kinsallagh House, seeing her come out of the walled vegetable garden, her old blue gardening hat pulled down over her lank gray hair, wearing a rain jacket greened with age, worn wellies and a tweed skirt, long out of style. She would be pulling off her gardening gloves and putting them in the trug which she carried like a handbag. Tall, thin, she still had the walk of a young girl, a girl now faded into a gray, often silent figure who, nevertheless, was the true owner of the hotel and its grounds.
It had always been the same: his father meeting the guests, peacocking in the public rooms; his mother shy, behind the scenes, buying supplies, running the staff, supervising the meals, and, in the time she stole from these busy hours, walking, solitary, in her gardens, devoted as a priestess in some sacred grove, feeding, planting, pruning, giving the gardens color and life. His mother was at home in Kinsallagh as his father would never be. She had been born in a large country house in County Cork. Her father, a minister in the first Irish government, retired there to farm and practice law when De Valera came to power. Dillon’s mother, born and brought up in an Ireland free from British rule, had in the eleven years she lived in Belfast, those first eleven years of her son’s life, remained a stranger to the North. She was, he sometimes thought, a typical Southerner in her attitude to Ulster. To her it was a separate place, a place left behind when Ireland formed itself into a small nation-state with its own flag, its own currency, its government, police and army, its delegates to international councils, its peacekeeping forces in the Middle East, its street signs and official documents in a language few people understood. In fifty years of separation, North and South had become alien to each other as never in the centuries of English rule. The Southern Irish did not brood on Ulster’s troubles. They had troubles of their own. The North was another country, ruled by Britain. It was a place they did not quite understand.
Now, holding the receiver to his ear, he heard her footsteps in that faraway hall, heard her soft Southern voice say, “Mary, the creamery milk is here. Will you tell Pat?” And then, calm as though she had not been worried, she picked up the phone and said, “Is that you? I hear you’re off to England, is that right.”
“I’m at the airport now. I meant to ring you sooner.”
“Don’t worry. I know you were very busy. Your father told me. What a terrible business that was.”
“Yes … Anyway, it’s over now.”
“Is it?” she said. “Good. How’s Moira?”
“She’s all right. At least I hope she is. I wanted to tell you. She’s not coming with me.”
“Why not?”
“She doesn’t think we should leave. She wants to stay here.”
“Oh,” his mother said in that quiet voice she used as a shield to hide her thoughts. “Does that mean you’re breaking up with her?”
“Yes. Actually, it started before all this. It—it would have happened anyway.”
“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” his mother said.
He was surprised that she had said it. “Why is that?” he asked.
“Well, you weren’t very happy together, were you? I had that impression. Your father and I don’t agree on this, but I never thought Moira was very stable, poor girl. Are you going to get
a divorce?”
His mother was religious as his father was not. For her, divorce must seem a grave sin.
“I have to,” he said. “There’s someone else.”
“An Irish girl?”
“No, she’s Canadian.”
“But you’d live in England?”
“Yes.”
He heard her catch her breath and then she said, “Your father doesn’t know any of this, does he?”
“No. I wanted to talk to you first.”
“I’ll tell him,” she said. “Michael?”
“Yes?”
“Are you sure this time? About this girl?”
“Yes, Mama, I’m sure.”
“Is she worried, the girl? I mean about the IRA?”
“Not as much as I am,” he said. “That’s why we’re going to live in England.”
“That’s not the real reason,” his mother said. “You always wanted to get away from here, didn’t you? Still, I suppose it’s the best thing. That’s what the police advised, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Mama. I have to go now.”
“I know. Michael, I’m glad you rang. I’m glad you told me. And good luck with the new job. The Ormonde, is it?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll keep in touch with Moira,” his mother said. “I think I should, don’t you?”
“Yes. I’m worried about her.”
Lies of Silence Page 16