We carry the trestle table out and put it up under the willow’s branches, green and budding in the spring light.
‘Are you all right lifting this?’ I ask, worrying he should be taking it easier than he is.
‘Don’t you start. I’m quite all right.’
‘I bet your doctor wouldn’t like it.’
‘But my doctor isn’t here.’ He smiles at me, looking a little tired, but I can see he isn’t struggling. ‘Not much further. Keep up.’
Manning the bar means standing out in the wind, if there is any, away from the shelter of the marquee. I resent that just as much as I resent opening bottles for people I hardly know who seem to think they have some claim to me, because of where we come from, because of the history we nominally share. The willow doesn’t offer any real shelter from the elements, not this time of year, but it looks nice, and that’s important, I suppose, so that’s where the bar’s always set up. No matter that it means I have to stand in the cold: it makes a pretty picture. I guess it would be wrong to complain though. If Grandad wants me to help him, I’ll do whatever he asks.
‘So you can’t tell me what’s going to be keeping you busy today, then. This secret project.’
He smiles. ‘I’m afraid not, no.’
I nod. ‘Or you’d have to kill me, right?’
He laughs indulgently, pleased to be striking a pose in my eyes as a geriatric James Bond.
‘Is something bad happening?’
He shakes his head. ‘The only bad thing that could happen would be for Laura to find out that I’m doing a bit of work, and then to spend the whole afternoon going on about the state of my heart. That would be a rather awful diplomatic incident; I don’t know where we’d bury all the bodies.’ He winks at me. ‘It’s all very dull and administrative; you mustn’t worry about it, it’s nothing. I’m just needed. Even now, every now and then, I’m still halfway useful for one thing or another.’
‘I’m sure you are.’
‘Speaking of which, I ought to go in really, lend a hand, so we don’t fall behind. Do you mind?’ He gestures to the boxes of wine already waiting among the roots of the willow.
‘Of course not, no.’
Grandad stretches his shoulders, readying himself for the next thing. ‘Won’t be long before people start arriving.’
I watch Grandad as he walks away from me, then busy myself with setting up the wine on the table. I wonder why he mentioned his heart, if he’s feeling pain somewhere today? Or is he always in pain, and I just never think to wonder about it, about how things must be for him now? He goes into the house, and I’m alone again.
from Interview 42
There were a thousand different scams on the go for getting messages in and out the prisons, out the H Blocks. Simplest thing everyone got up to was secreting written notes, of course, everyone knows about that. Most of the news coming out of Long Kesh prison had been up someone’s arse before anyone read it. Which you might call ironic, because many would say the newspaper a lot of that stuff got written up in was only good for bog roll itself. I’m not telling that joke cos I agree with it, mind you, I just heard it, and maybe it’s funny, I don’t know. Sometimes things would get intercepted, there’d be a cavity search and something would be found. But not so often. And anything really important, we’d get a more respectable visitor. People are less likely to cavity-search some pillar of the community. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? So we’d get folks from the church. Or there was this guy used to come from the university, we thought that was hilarious. Used to say he could correct our spellings as well, if he wanted.
Robert
IN THE MEMORY it is Remembrance Day, a few minutes before eleven in the morning: the moment the nation I served gathers together to recall and reaffirm its central myth, and to express its truest image of itself, rendering the grey wet November morning into something suddenly, fleetingly beautiful. I have always loved the Remembrance service with the fierce passion I suppose can be expected of a man whose boyhood played out against a landscape of bombed screamings, shattered uncles, evacuations. But I can’t imagine anyone ever attends those ceremonies and fails to be touched by what they hear and what they see, no matter who they are and what they’ve lived through. I can’t imagine it’s possible to absorb those days, and think of the millions of dead littered down the years of the last century and all the centuries vanished before, and not feel something for them.
I can still see the scene very clearly. I remember where I was standing when I heard the news. I was in my overcoat in Belfast rain, watching the laying of wreaths that glimmered weakly in the grey November weather. I can see myself among the assembly, one more pale and corpse-like face in a sea of solemn faces gathered together in the act of remembering. I had planted my feet in the wet, dead grass beneath me, and from my redoubt behind the shelter of the collar of my coat I watched children troop poppy wreaths up the central aisle to the memorial. I remember wondering idly whether snipers ever tried to get at events like these, in the minutes before someone brought me the news. The coincidence of that thought has lodged in my mind. I remember deciding that it would never be worthwhile shooting at a Remembrance Day parade. Every attempt to attack or apprehend people at funerals during the Troubles ended as a public relations disaster. If you shot someone while they remembered their dead, you were sure to end up on the wrong side of the story when it crawled through the next day’s papers, and the consequences started to play out through the back-room meetings, the military briefings, the arms caches broken open and men tramping through grey fields to the murders waiting for them in the endless sucking hedgerows. History would end up casting you as the heel.
Miles from where I was passing the morning in Belfast, in the Fermanagh town of Enniskillen, there were soldiers parading towards another war memorial that Remembrance Day in 1987 when the wall of the reading rooms opposite the memorial exploded out into the street, killing eleven people and injuring sixty-three others. An IRA bomb intended for the soldiers had been concealed there the night before, waiting heavy with death in the dark of a sports bag. Bad intelligence meant it detonated before the soldiers had arrived, and its victims were civilians and a police officer. The targets of the bomb watched appalled from further down the street as a cloud of brick dust drowned the dying.
The day was a disaster for the IRA. It emerged that the bombing had been hurriedly sanctioned by a middle-ranking IRA officer as retaliation for the violent disruption of the funeral of two Republican gunmen the previous week. Police baton-charged the funeral of Eddy McSheffrey and Paddy Deery when someone fired a three-volley salute over their coffins. One of the coffins was knocked to the ground in the fight that ensued. Plastic bullets were fired into the mourners. So as Remembrance Day approached, the IRA transported a forty-pound bomb to Enniskillen, moving the parts piece by lethal piece in relay, using several cars, in order to avoid detection.
It was a day to turn the tide, and perhaps it sounds callous to say it now, but I saw the opportunity before me immediately, even as I hurried away from the service I had been attending and into the fogged, clammy back seat of a waiting car. Attritional, soulless conflict had ground Ireland down for long years. The sections of the general public sympathetic to the Republican cause held fast to their beliefs, but they were tired, they were demoralised, depressed. Their lives had been limited by what had happened around them in their name; low dark roofs had been put on their dreams. I was driven to the site of the bombing. It was clear as day what a terrible thing had happened. I listened to a man who had been trapped beneath the bricks with his daughter. He had held her hand and told her he loved her while she died. Later that day, he was put on television, and I felt ashamed to watch him speak of forgiveness while I myself still felt so angry at what I’d seen. The bodies were still being removed when I got there, loaded on to stretchers and then into ambulances to be taken away. The paramedics were gentle, efficient, their distress written clear on their faces, their training show
ing plainly in the precision of what they did. People were crying around them, yet they carried on. The police combed the area for further devices with grim, meticulous patience, the streets closed off, blood and brick dust on the ground around them, scorched into the memory of everyone there.
When I returned to Belfast, trailing that brick dust like guilt behind me on my shoes, I found a message waiting for me to say Frank Dunn had called the office twice. I returned the call, and within the hour Frank was sitting in front of me. He looked terrible. A man who hadn’t slept, his face now mottled with what seemed to me like a sense of shame, a sense of urgency. He may not have been any part of the IRA, he may only have been a conduit. But he knew that in my office the shadows of their actions fell on him.
‘We have to do something,’ he said.
‘What can be done?’
‘That’s what we have to discuss. We have to come up with a plan.’
‘That’s what your contacts want, is it?’
Frank raised his hand in an equivocating gesture. ‘It’s not about what those guys want. That’s not the only thing that brings me here, don’t you see that? I’m not just a messenger boy. I’m here now because I want to do the right thing. I’ve not been sent. You have to understand, Robert, I haven’t even told my contacts I’m talking to you now.’
I ran my finger down the spine of the diary on my desk and wondered what I was supposed to say. ‘I see. Are you offering me information then?’
Frank laughed, grimly. ‘I’m not an informer. I don’t know anything you don’t and I don’t go in for all that. I’m here because this has to change now; we can’t be having things like this happen any more, and the community knows that, the community won’t stand for it. I want to help to start a conversation. We can’t be having days like today, Robert, we have to make a change.’ Frank leaned forward in his chair while he spoke, his elbows on the arms of the seat and his eyes very blue, and I saw the sincerity there, for the first time, and the hurt and the fear roiling in him.
‘I agree with you entirely,’ I said.
‘So I’ve come looking for assurances that dialogue is what your government wants as well. That’s what I want to hear. I can bring you the people you need to talk to. So I want to take that message back, and let people know there’s an ear to speak into, people are going to listen. Because today is a disaster and I’m afraid what it might lead to, if people head in the wrong direction now. If I can tell my contacts you’ll solve this by talking and not by making arrests, they’ll come to the table themselves.’
I listened carefully to Frank, and weighed my words. ‘I understand. I can tell you, Frank, there is nothing I want more, and nothing the government wants more, than to facilitate that conversation. A conversation that might start to turn us in the direction of peace.’ It was overstepping the mark, but I knew my staff believed Frank to have influence; it was too big an opportunity to miss.
Of course, I’m probably overstating the significance of that moment if I say that it changed very much. Across Britain and Ireland on that day, conversations between intermediaries for both sides led to the same resolutions, time and again, and Frank and I were only one scene played out among many that all led towards the same resolution. That day we were part of a broad consensus, a wave of rare agreement. So in the end I risked very little in stating my opinion as I did. Nevertheless, I like to think that was a day when I took a stand. When I look back across the years, I think I see that what I agreed to on that day became part of a change in the history of Northern Ireland, the start of something. Frank did as he’d promised, and a series of meetings flowed from that moment that could be said to have made a difference. As a result, I’ve always felt that on that day I was part of something important. Something unusual, at least. I had retired by the time of the Good Friday Agreement, but when it was signed I still felt able to look at the way the tide had turned and recognise how much of that had started after Enniskillen. The decision I took that day, meeting with Frank Dunn and then ploughing on through the painstaking negotiations that followed, the messages he brought to me and those that I passed back through him, were part of that new chapter in the history of Ireland and of the United Kingdom. The years of meetings and negotiations, of ceasefires and brinkmanship and argument, the rest of my life’s work unfolded from there.
Frank had risked more than me by speaking as he did that morning. By approaching a civil servant of my rank, he had effectively obliged his contacts to engage with any British offer of negotiation; to do otherwise would have been a de facto act of violence, a commitment to other silences and aggressions still to come. For this, Frank was later severely reprimanded by officers of the IRA. On the one subsequent occasion – after the talks we engendered together had taken place and our collaboration was concluded – when I found myself in the same room as him, he told me he had been kicked into the cold as far as those contacts went, and no longer considered himself to be a conduit for anyone.
‘I was told in no uncertain terms I should count myself lucky that no more will come my way than an excommunication,’ he told me over champagne, elegant in bow tie in the corner of some reception.
‘I can’t really believe you merit even that much censure.’
‘It was embarrassing for them. I made decisions for them, didn’t I, I forced their hand. I knew I was doing it, but I think it needed to be done. I don’t regret it at all, I’m just glad I wasn’t kneecapped.’
‘I hardly think kneecapping was ever a likely outcome.’
Frank shrugged. ‘You never know, though, do you?’ And as he studied the inside of his champagne flute, I saw that he was serious.
Those had been almost the last words Frank and I spoke to each other. We were interrupted then by another guest at the party, who broke in to talk to us both about academic politics, never imagining for a moment, I suppose, that the two of us would have any other kind of politics in common.
I get back to work in the kitchen with Laura, trying not to get under her feet, lifting and stirring and apologising as the plan that has been mapped out in her mind is made flesh and revealed to me in increments. Shortly afterwards the guests start arriving. I take up my station by the front door and welcome the familiar smiles of my family and my friends as they come into the house, deposit their coats, put their heads round the kitchen door to say hello to Laura and make their way out to where Kate is manning the bar.
‘How lovely to see you, Anthea.’ I kiss a distant cousin on the cheek, a woman I remember once sharing a camping holiday with in west Wales, long ago when Hattie and I were young and newly married.
‘So lovely to see you again, Robert, it’s been too long.’
‘Has it been two years?’
‘Three, in fact.’
‘Good Lord, isn’t that extraordinary?’
Anthea is replaced almost immediately by a niece whose name I momentarily forget, along with the names of all three of her sullen, black-clad, greasy-haired children, who are sulking from the indignity of the car journey, I suppose, and won’t meet my eye.
‘How lovely to see you.’
‘You too, Robert, so lovely. You remember Dylan and Chelsea and Ivan?’
‘Of course, of course.’ By a supreme effort, I manage not to laugh at their names. No wonder they look miserable. I hope they manage to steal some alcohol from the bar early enough in the afternoon that they can get drunk and enjoy themselves.
It is perfectly enjoyable seeing people and making small talk in this way, but I can’t quite fix myself to the task. My mind continues wandering. In the wake of Frank’s call I can’t just live in the day around me. Wherever I look now, the events of that Remembrance Day are waiting just beneath the skin of the garden to draw me back into the labyrinth of memory. All the life and crispness of the moment I am in have been drained away by that call, and I hear the siren song that is the thought of being needed elsewhere, of still mattering in the way I did when I was younger.
Hannah and
Michael arrive just before eleven. I take her aside before she can get as far as the kitchen to see Laura, and smile, and kiss her on the cheek, and fix her with a look. ‘You know Kate’s here, don’t you?’
Hannah crosses her arms, appraising me, guarded. ‘Dad, are you going to give me a lecture about behaving myself?’
‘It might be very boring but the thing is that, as a rule, darling, you don’t. Do you think it might be possible to be gentle around her today?’
‘Mustn’t embarrass the family.’
‘No, actually, that’s not the reason. The reason is that I want this mended, like you do, like we all do. All I want is to see you two speaking to each other again.’
Hannah puts her hand on my arm. ‘I know, Dad.’
‘She’s been through a lot.’
A look of exasperation passes across my daughter’s face, and I recognise her old impatience with me.
‘I understand, OK? I think I know my own daughter. Michael and I talked about it on the way here.’
I suppose that is all anyone can do, in the end.
‘All right. Come and say hello to Aunt Laura, then. Kate’s running the bar outside.’ I follow Hannah as she makes her way through to the kitchen, then find myself diverted by another tranche of guests coming into the main room, and have to welcome them and show them where to put their coats. By the time I look for her again, she isn’t in the kitchen any more. I suppose she’s gone to look for Kate. Now I will most likely miss the moment when my daughter and granddaughter see each other again for the first time since Kate went into the hospital, since the changes that have undone them. I feel my shoulders tense at the thought I won’t be there when it happens, to try and keep them from hurting each other. But it is too late now: she’s out of sight. They will find each other. I just have to hope they both feel ready for it when they do.
Those two women, with their whole lives trailing behind them, their rich lives, filled with talents, beset with troubles, would not exist if it weren’t for me. Strange to think it. Turning to look for them, finding nothing, I glimpse instead the birthday cake that Laura has made me, waiting in the larder to be brought out at the end of the afternoon. She must have left it in the car, and only remembered after I took out the salmon. The cake is heavy with candles, a petrified forest of wax and years, enough to burn your eyebrows off. How can I have gathered so much fire so quickly, when it seems only yesterday that we looked round this house for the first time?
Turning for Home Page 9