Turning for Home

by Barney Norris

  I suppose Kate must feel very isolated on her own here with me. It’s a place for family, a house of this size; it’s too big for two people to fill all its silences. Hattie and I thought it was paradise once, of course, our little island, our castle, our home, when we were bringing up Hannah here. Once it was just me and Hattie we were still all right, though I suppose we rattled round a bit, and heated more of the house than we really needed to, spreading ourselves across a lot of rooms. But two people who can only catch sight of each other across the distance of generations, and the distance of loss, as Kate and I do, will always run out of words that are loud enough to take flight through the different rooms and light all this house’s darker corners. Kate is an angel for trying as hard as she does to make conversation with an old man like me. It can’t be much fun for her.

  I felt an idiot this morning at breakfast. I must be getting very old. Or going senile, surely. What was I doing, talking to the poor girl like that? Why did I ask her whether she wanted to come and stay with me? I felt embarrassed for her as soon as I spoke. Of course to her it would sound like a fate worse than death. How awkward it will be for her, having to say no or pretend I never asked. She looked at me then with kindness and, I think, with pity, too polite to tell me what she really felt, and then, horror of horrors, I was reduced to pulling the same silly faces that used to make her laugh when she was young, just to break the mood and the embarrassment in the room. She must have thought me pathetic, really. I saw in the way she looked at me that she felt sorry for what had become of us both, the warmth and laughter we shared when she was a little girl and came to visit on holidays only a memory now, receding.

  I must make myself another cup of coffee.

  The kettle boils, and I wait for the coffee to brew, standing in the kitchen looking absently through the window in the direction Kate went, out of the gates and up into the village where the magnolia is blooming. Then I pour out a cup, and head for the study.

  I hear the phone start to ring while I am still in the hall, and hurry to my desk, sure I am going to miss it. I catch it on the fifth ring, just in time.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Robert?’

  ‘Yes, who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Frank Dunn. Long time no speak.’

  I put my coffee down precisely and carefully on the coaster on the desk. ‘Frank. A long time indeed.’

  ‘I need to see you.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Today, in fact. Put our old heads together.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, yes. Look, we’ll talk more later, all right? I’ll pop by about twelve.’

  ‘Is it really—’

  ‘I’m afraid it is, Robert. Sorry. I’ll tell you when we meet.’

  I listen a moment longer as Frank hangs up, and stand there as the dial tone rings out, the sound seeming huge and long-legged at first as if it bounded the whole of the world while I held it to my ear, and then becoming distant, just a tautness in the room, as I drop my hand back down to my side, put the phone back in its cradle. I walk to the window and look out over the garden. The willow in the middle of the lawn is perfectly still; there is no breeze stirring.

  Frank Dunn is an Honorary Fellow at a college in Oxford who has spent most of his career teaching at Queen’s University in Belfast. He published a book in the eighties called Nominal Identity, a voyage through the shallows of Wittgenstein – as far as I have been able to make out, not having actually read the thing myself. The way signs are formed by things, the way things are formed by signs, or some such stuff.

  It was not in an academic capacity that I got to know Frank, though. We were introduced, with deft delicacy, on the occasion of my first visit to Queen’s in Belfast. I was taken to see the sights and break bread there a few weeks after I first took up my position at the ministry. All of us in the most hideous suits, when I look at photos from that time, though of course we thought they were just the thing back then. The visit was put into my calendar without my having much say about it, I remember, and so I went dutifully through the motions, exchanging platitudes with the vice chancellor, unable to discern any meaningful reason for my presence, only presuming it must be obligatory for whoever was in my position to take an interest in the life of the university. So much of my work used to be ceremonial, really, and done out of no real feeling beyond obligation. So much of what I did with my time was only the dry echo of the rattling of sabres, the changing of guards posted long ago, routines and traditions that had once been the backbone of a whole empire now played out by men in dull suits who didn’t look the part any more, didn’t know why they were doing it all, and would much rather have been back at their desks getting through their in-trays and filling their ashtrays up a little higher, finishing the sandwiches they brought from home for lunch.

  At the end of the afternoon, I found myself being directed as unobtrusively as possible into the office of Professor Frank Dunn. My assistant made the introductions.

  ‘Robert, I’d like to introduce an invaluable friend of the department.’

  ‘Well,’ Frank said, the smile fixed sharp as steel on his face, ‘I don’t know how helpful a term “friend” really is. But it’s very good to meet you.’ He extended his hand to me, and I shook it, watching his eyes carefully.

  ‘Good to meet you.’

  ‘How are you coping with the change of scene from Hampshire to Belfast?’

  I remember feeling not just shock but the sudden coldness of anger tighten in my stomach when he said that, a kind of base longing to lash out or hide. Frank clearly knew the whereabouts of my home, where my family lived, my wife and daughter, the very house where I am now standing some thirty years later. This man, this supposed professor, was making a show of his knowledge because he wanted me to understand that there was a file out there somewhere that had my name on it. The reference to Hampshire was a pure and naked exercise in baring the teeth of my vulnerability, the threat that I and my family faced because of the job I had taken. It tasted like blood, like iron in my mouth, to hear the words spoken. And from an academic, no less – a crumpled little man in corduroy whose desk was propped up with books, not the wilder characters with handshakes like hornbeam I’d been led to expect this from.

  When I returned to my office later that afternoon, the situation was explained to me. I had just got back behind my desk, and was steeling myself to wade back into the endless paperwork, disturbed and unhappy, when someone knocked on the office door. Ian Knight, my liaison in the intelligence services, let himself in, and stood with feet planted firmly on the carpet in front of the desk, as if he expected to be hit by a wave.

  ‘I understand you met Frank Dunn today?’

  Ian and I had only spoken a couple of times at that stage, and we were both still wary of each other. I stared guardedly at him, and I remember thinking that both of us were trying not to blink.

  ‘I did. No one told me who he was. I wasn’t briefed.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Is it standard practice to send me into meetings with people I know nothing about? But who, apparently, know plenty about me?’

  ‘Sorry, Robert. Every now and then things slip when you’re bedding a new team in. You should have been told, but the briefing didn’t happen.’

  ‘So he’s … what – a conduit for negotiations, is he? He’s one of these people you’ve told me about who can pass on deniable messages to the Provisionals.’

  Ian inclined his head in agreement. ‘That’s right. We’ve worked with Frank on and off for the last decade. He’s a valuable contact.’

  ‘He doesn’t fit the profile of the men you told me about, though? I thought all these negotiators ran haulage firms.’

  ‘We wouldn’t use the term negotiators.’

  ‘Well, whatever he is, he doesn’t fit the profile.’

  ‘That’s why you were introduced to him. Frank is unusual, and occasionally very useful to us, because the nature of
his work makes it easy for him to come up with pretexts for travel, and more importantly with pretexts to attend the kinds of meetings that might be a little conspicuous for other people. The people who run haulage firms, as you eloquently put it. So we always like to introduce him to whoever’s in your post, in case you need to have a lunch with him at some point.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘In reality, most of the business we’ve done with Frank is still run through the security services, but your having met him simply opens up another available channel. You’ll probably never need to talk to him again; it’s just about establishing the possibility. Then, if anything ever comes up, we can make the best use of you both.’ Ian smiled broadly, determined to communicate to me that what he had to say made everything all right.

  For all that I was angry at being ambushed by my meeting with Frank, I ended up glad it had happened. It meant the connection was there and waiting in the winter of 1987, when Frank and I found ourselves making unexpected use of it in the wake of the Enniskillen bombing.

  Apart from that one brief period when we worked together in earnest, my relationship with Frank remained a distant one. We met at public events on a few occasions, during and after my time in Belfast, and I like to think we always got on well enough when we did, enjoyed each other’s company, politely, even sincerely in the end, as well as any two people could in the strained and unnatural circumstances which were part of life in that country at that time. But that was a long time ago, and on this bright Hampshire morning, where I find myself standing at the window of my study looking out at the willow and the day, lost for a moment in memory, I realise it must be a decade since I have even heard Frank’s name. On other days it might have been a strange ghost to rise up from the past. But perhaps it isn’t all that surprising today. I look at my copy of The Times where it lies on the desk, the story on its front page, and realise I already know why Frank is calling me now.

  I poured so much of myself out down the phone, over the years. It has drunk up so much of my life. Time after time I called this very house from the office in Belfast, or the house where I slept in the Belfast suburbs, to hear Hattie’s voice, and ask her how her day had been, both of us knowing all the while there was no point going into any real detail, because we had missed it all, another gulp of daylight, another day done.

  I picture myself with a drink at the end of an evening. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh, fine. I turned over the vegetable beds this afternoon.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘I’m very tired tonight.’

  ‘I’m sure you are, with all that digging. Did you get out at all, or have you just been round the garden?’

  ‘I’ve been in the village. I didn’t go into town, I didn’t need anything.’

  Sometimes, when she and Hannah came to visit me in Belfast, or when I came home, it would be ‘we’ who didn’t need anything, both of us together and gathering our lives into the one dance. But those bright times were all too rare, because Hattie never wanted to relocate to follow me, move away from this house and put a distance between herself and the life she had decided to centre here. The fact I had taken a post somewhere didn’t mean she wanted to store away everything about her life and hitch her days entirely on to following her husband. The result was that much of my life was spent away from her. Of course, I regret that, but these are the compromises we make to pay the bills, and to be at peace with ourselves and our ambition.

  The day is lost now, of course. That phone call has overturned all of my plans. I shall have to set my mind to Frank, put my own celebrations aside. Nothing to be done about it; the issue has to be dealt with now it has come up. A catastrophe, really, when so many people will expect things of me today. I look at the pile of unopened birthday cards on my desk, and imagine the lives that lurk behind each of them, the people who went to the trouble to pick something out in WHSmith or some other card shop, and buy a stamp, and take the cap off the pen and begin. It is dizzying to think of the latticework of stories that link their lives with mine, all the closenesses I have ever shared with these people whose thoughtfulness is laid out before me today on the desk, awaiting the blade of the letter opener, awaiting attention. With such ease, with such ignorance, I signed my life away to my country, back when the world seemed young. If I had known the sum of the things I would have to set aside, the things I would pass up because I was needed at work, if I had seen that at the start, would I forge ahead with all of it again? Perhaps the worst of it is that I think I probably would. Who knows what I might have missed out on if I hadn’t lived as I did? I pick up the phone and dial a number I haven’t used in years. A belligerent voice answers on the fourth ring.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Geoffrey, it’s Robert Shawcross.’

  ‘Robert, good morning. How can I help you?’

  ‘I wanted to let you know about a little get-together I’ve got coming up. Thought you might want to come down, and we could put our old heads together.’

  ‘I see. Hang on, Robert, I’ll have to call you back.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ The line goes dead and I replace the receiver. A simple protocol, outlined to me on the occasion of my retirement. I have never had to make such a call at the weekend before. I am glad Geoffrey was in. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise – Frank’s message meant I couldn’t have talked to anyone else. ‘Old heads’ is an agreed phrase – a code phrase, if you will, though that sounds a bit sensationalist to me – to be used if the parties making contact want to conduct their conversations only with individuals already known to them, rather than dealing with the entire security service, most of whom, these days, weren’t born when the Sixty-Niners took up arms. It is a way of having delicate conversations. Everything is reported upstairs in the usual way afterwards, but for as long as any exchange is under way, the ‘old heads’ protocol is a method of ensuring the people involved have all been round the course together before. I would never admit as much to anyone, but it is a protocol that delights me. Thanks to the obsessive caution of the IRA, I don’t have to spend today liaising with the children who run Britain now, only the men among whom I spent my working life. There is pleasure to be had in reconnecting the old links you forged in the heat of youth. The phone rings and I pick it up immediately. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Geoffrey here. Who is it?’

  ‘It’s Frank Dunn. Midday today.’

  ‘I see. Makes sense.’

  ‘I suppose it does.’

  ‘Do you want anyone there?’

  ‘Not yet, no. If you could just stand by?’

  ‘All right. I didn’t have much on today, hope you’re the same?’

  ‘Nothing very much.’ There is no point saying anything else; it wouldn’t change anything to admit how much trouble this is going to cause.

  ‘We’ll speak again when there’s news,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘Absolutely.’ Then I ring off for the final time, and hear the voice of my sister-in-law buffeting through the house as she comes in from the courtyard. Her cry of hello seems to me in this moment, unprepared for it as I am, like the saddest sound I have ever heard. The closest I will ever come to hearing Hattie’s voice again. And the sound is being made by a woman who frequently enrages me, indeed has been enraging me at intervals now for sixty years.

  I never understood how Hattie could have such a sister. One day, a world will come into being where people will be able to be with each other without having to marry into one another’s families. Alas, it will come too late for me. I head for the kitchen to greet Laura, who I know has been looking forward to this day all year. I will upset her more than anyone else when I disappear into the secrecy of my office, but there is nothing to be done. Laura is already washing vegetables under the tap.

  ‘Hello, old thing,’ I say, hoping to annoy her.

  ‘Who are you calling old?’ She turns to face me. We take each other in for a moment. ‘Happy birthday, darling Robert.’ She embraces me and
kisses me on the cheek.

  ‘What are you up to here?’

  Laura waves her arms at the sink in despair. ‘Getting on with the veg. Can you get everything we’ve already sorted out of the larder and we’ll see where we are?’

  ‘All right.’ I embark on the first of what I’m sure will be innumerable journeys from the kitchen to the pantry in the course of the morning, and return hefting a huge plate of salmon, which I deposit on the kitchen table. ‘What they don’t say in the Bible, of course, is just how big the fish were that Jesus had with him when he fed the five thousand. A few of these and it might not have been such a remarkable achievement after all.’

  Laura laughs. I like making her laugh, because she always tries her best not to find my jokes funny. It’s a small triumph to break through her defences.

  ‘Really, Robert. It hasn’t gone off, has it? I’m worried it will have gone off.’

  ‘No, no, all is well. Have no fear. Today will go as well as it always does, thanks to you, Laura. All this is going to be hitch free.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right then. I see Kate’s down already?’

  ‘Yes, she came down last night.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Very subdued. And she’s worried about today. She’ll be all right. It will just take time and support, I think.’

  ‘How much more time does she need, though?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s still very recent, you know. She’ll get better.’

  ‘I hope so. Does she talk about it?’

  ‘Not to me, not yet. I tried chattering away this morning, but that didn’t seem to open her up.’

  Laura turns the oven on. I’m sure there’s sweat on her brow already. She turns to look at me. ‘But we’re not worried about her, are we?’ I suppose Laura must love Kate as well, no matter how fussily and impatiently she expresses it. The way a dog loves a chew toy, you could say.

  ‘No, no. She’ll be fine.’

  ‘After all, bad things happen, don’t they, it’s part of life, and we all just have to come to terms with that. And people come through them, and after a while they get better.’