“Sounds brilliant,” said Barry. “I’d like to go there myself, but I heard it was closed.”
“Unfortunately,” Goulding replied. “What a tragic loss for us all.”
Eamonn Thomas chuckled at the deadpan exchange. “Cathal joined the IRA long before you were born, Barry. He’s a hard man and no mistake. Claims to be a house painter but I never caught him at it. His father fought in the Easter Rising and his grandfather was one of the great old Fenians.”
“Sure don’t we all come from republican backgrounds?” said Goulding. “It’s in the blood.” He reached into his pocket for another cigarette.
Rory Brady remarked, “You smoke too much, Cathal, it’s bad for your ulcer. You should put some food in your belly instead.”
“I’d as soon die of a bleeding ulcer as a bullet. At least I got the ulcer from my own government.” With a wink in Barry’s direction, Goulding added, “A little memento of my treatment in Curragh Camp. Great fun, that. Just think what you missed, Halloran.”
“I’m despondent.”
This time everyone laughed.
“I assume you came looking for me for a reason?” Thomas asked Barry.
Before answering, Barry swept his eyes around the table.
Three ordinary men. If you passed them on the street you wouldn’t notice them. Yet they’re the Army, the only hope we have of getting our country back the way it was supposed to be.
Heroes.
He drew a deep breath. What he was about to do would require a great deal of courage. “I want to go off active service.”
Thomas looked surprised. The other two kept their feelings, whatever they might be, well hidden.
“Have you discussed this with Séamus McCoy?” Thomas asked.
“I have not, sir. I thought it would be best to come directly to you.”
“Because McCoy might talk you out of it first?”
“He might try, but my mind’s made up.”
“You want to resign from the Army, is that it?” Goulding asked. There was no warmth in his voice now.
“Not at all. When I took the oath I meant it and I still do. But …”
They waited, sitting perfectly still. Men who had waited all their lives for something. Men who were determined to make it happen.
“I’ve too much imagination for a soldier,” Barry said. “I can imagine what a man feels when I shoot him.”
“We all can,” Goulding told him. “Some of us from experience. Is this your way of telling us you’re afraid?”
Éamonn Thomas had been watching Barry’s face intently. “I don’t think he’s afraid, not any more than is good for him, anyway. No man could work with explosives the way he does and be a coward. It’s something else, isn’t it?”
Barry nodded. “I’m given this a lot of thought, and …” He met Rory Brady’s eyes. “You once told me the Army needs educated men. I’ve applied to Trinity and taken my entrance exam. I don’t know the outcome yet, but I’m reasonably hopeful of becoming a resident undergraduate there.”
“Go raibh mile maith agat, Ruairi,”u Goulding said to Brady. “You’ve lost us a damned good explosives man.”
“I didn’t expect he’d do this.”
“You misunderstand, I don’t want to resign from the Army!” Barry cried. “If I’m accepted at Trinity I won’t be available for active service, but surely you can find something else for me to do. In whatever spare time I have,” he added rather lamely.
“This is the Army we’re talking about,” said Brady. “If a man can’t—or won’t—fight, what good is he to us?”
“But you told me …”
Brady ignored the interruption. “We’ve never enough men in the field as it is.”
“There are other ways to serve the cause,” Thomas suggested.
“Politics? Politics was highjacked by the Free Staters long ago, Éamonn,” Brady said. “Fianna Fáil claims to be the republican party but they’re just as bad as the others, they haven’t the bottle to drive the British off this island once and for all. As for Sinn Féin, even you would have to admit they’re so marginalised they have no power. Things have changed since the days when they provided the only government we had. The gun and the bomb, that’s your only man now.
“Listen here, Barry. I told you that an education was important and it is. Someday we may be able to afford the luxury of seeing that every Irish child who wants one is offered a place in university. We’re a long way from there right now, though. There are Irish children in the north who can’t even get a primary education. Lemass has his hands full trying to create a viable economy; he’s not worried about what’s happening up there. But until that problem’s solved and this island’s reunited, all our futures have to be postponed.”
“I don’t want my future postponed! I want to go to university and be part of the Army too.”
Cathal Goulding said, “You don’t know when you’re beaten, do you?”
The expression in Barry’s eyes changed dramatically. It was like looking at a different man. A man who, if pushed hard enough, could explode like one of his bombs. “I’m not beaten.”
“We can’t afford to lose this fellow,” Éamonn Thomas told the other two. “Let’s approach this from a different angle. Tell us, Barry: What do you want to study at Trinity?”
“History. And the classics—for my grandfather as much as for any other reason. He studied the classics with Pádraic Pearse. “There I go boasting again. Careful, Halloran!” But I’ll also take courses toward a career in architecture. That’s what I really want. The last time I was in Dublin I was impressed by the bus terminal that Michael Scott designed a few years ago, and—”
“The Army doesn’t need a new bus terminal,” Brady snapped.
In a kindlier tone, Thomas said, “What else interests you?”
“Well, I like photography. I don’t see myself making a career of it, though.”
“Photography!” Thomas beamed. “The very thing. We’re having an uphill fight to win back support for the cause. Most people have forgot about Northern Ireland, they have problems of their own. But you know your way around the north, Barry. You could cross the border from time to time—on the odd weekend, say—and take photographs that would wake them up again. You know what I mean?”
Barry knew. Images of the sort that would remain with him forever.
Too frightened to cry, a little girl with the eyes of a wounded deer watching arson destroy the only home she had ever known. The fire brigade would never come. Her parents would have to seek shelter for their family with their own parents—in a cramped one-roomed flat. As they retreated up the road hugging their few belongings, a sectarian mob taunted them.
A frail old man being frog-marched out of a tenement to be thrown into jail on the word of an Orangeman. When Barry enquired what the charge was, he was warned to mind his own business “or we’ll take you for good measure, Paddy!” The man’s wife, who was badly crippled with arthritis, hobbled after them, protesting that her husband was blind. The constables ignored her.
A woman sitting on a kerbstone with her head in her hands. When Barry approached she looked up in sudden terror. She had been pretty before someone smashed her nose. Her upper lip was still smeared with dried blood. “Who did this to you?” Barry had asked as he crouched beside her. But he knew without asking. A favourite pastime for a certain type of loyalist was to sally into a Catholic neighbourhood and force himself on one of the women. If his victim tried to resist she was beaten.
Such scenes occurred over and over again, year after year. No one in authority did anything to stop it. The Royal Ulster Constabulary was content to stand aside and let any sort of abuse be perpetrated upon Catholics. Meanwhile, Britain, whose “province” Northern Ireland was, turned a blind eye to the suffering of over 40 percent of the population.
“I know exactly what you want,” Barry told Thomas. “I’ve seen it for myself. What the eye can see, the camera can record.”
&nbs
p; Cathal Goulding looked dubious. “Who’s going to fund this little exercise? Cameras, film, all that class of thing. Our treasury’s skint.”
Before cost could become an issue Barry said hastily, “I have a good camera already and I’ll pay my own expenses.”
“Another question: Supposing they turn out the way you want, what are you going to do with the photographs, Eamonn? The United Irishman’s not equipped to publish them.”
“What about An Phoblachtv?” asked Barry, referring to a weekly IRA newsletter that had been sporadically published in the twenties and thirties. There were numerous copies amongst Ursula’s collection of republican periodicals.
“Dead and gone, more’s the pity,” Thomas said.
“Could we not sell photographs abroad?”
Rory Brady brightened. “Now there’s an idea. We could do something along the lines of the Irish News Agency that Seán MacBride established while he was minister for external affairs. He told the Dáil the agency’s primary purpose was to gather news for export, but what he really envisioned was a propaganda agency to counter the unfavourable propaganda about Ireland the British were putting out.”
“I don’t want to play the devil’s advocate here,” said Goulding, “but bear in mind that things didn’t work out the way Seán hoped. His original plan was to operate the agency as a co-op supported by the Irish press in return for furnishing them with material. For a while everybody who was anybody wrote for him, even Brendan Behan—that was before Borstal Boy made Behan famous and he started swanning off to America. But the agency couldn’t get enough support from the Irish newspapers. They saw it as competition for them; they were selling material abroad too. Seán had to turn the whole thing over to the government just to stay afloat. When the government decided to cut expenses a couple of years ago, they closed down the agency and that was that.”
Thomas said, “We can do it differently, we’ll keep tight control ourselves.”
Barry leaned forward with his elbows on the table. His words tumbled out almost as rapidly as Goulding’s. “If we can get our photographs into some newspapers and magazines in America they might pay off. I know contacts in the States who used to be big contributors to the IRA. If they can see what’s happening now they might come on board again.”
“Who? How do you know them?”
Barry had no intention of revealing Ned Halloran’s notebooks. They were his secret asset. “Let’s just say my information comes from an impeccable source.”
The three Army men exchanged glances.
Barry looked from one to another, finding no clue as to their thoughts.
At last Cathal Goulding nodded. “Sin sin,”w he said. “We have a deal.”
Chapter Eighteen
WAITING to learn the result of his entrance exam was excruciating. Days dragged by as if their feet were stuck in the mud. With every one, Barry felt a modicum of his self-confidence drain away. In the back of his mind—and sometimes, particularly at night, in the forefront of his mind—he was always conscious of Claire MacNamara.
There had been no letter from her since he sent the scarf. Had the gift offended her? Was it too expensive? Not expensive enough? Did she think he was trying to pressure her?
ON the thirteenth of July the radio newsreader reported, “At an Orange Order demonstration yesterday the Ulster Unionist MP Brian Faulkner said, ‘We in the Unionist Party are perforce defending ourselves against the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Until the hierarchy renounces its influence in politics, the Orange Order cannot renounce its influence in the Unionist Party.’”1
“I hate to admit it,” Barry told his mother, “but that sounds reasonable to me.”
“It is reasonable. I would rather pull out my fingernails with pliers than agree with Brian Faulkner, but the attitude of the Church continues to make any hope of reuniting this country laughable. Why would northern Protestants want to be part of a society with no divorce, no contraception, and a constitution that hands control of the state to the priests on a silver platter?”
“Now, Ursula, it’s not quite that bad.”
“Is it not?” Her voice was bitter. “You aren’t a woman.”
"WE are pleased to inform Finbar Lewis Halloran that he has been accepted as a resident undergraduate of Trinity College Dublin, commencing with the autumn term.”
THE road to Athlone seemed a lot longer than Barry remembered. He hitched a ride that took him to the outskirts of the town but had to walk the rest of the way. Not walk. Run.
Brushing past people on the footpath, Barry sprinted the last few yards to the sweets shop. Skidded to a halt. Stared in disbelief.
The shop was boarded up.
He was looking at an absolute impossibility. In Barry’s imagination he already had entered the shop, been warmly welcomed—perhaps even kissed—by a girl too beautiful to be real, proposed marriage to her and been accepted and set up practice as an architect and …
The shop was boarded up.
He burst into the newsagency next door. “Where’s Miss MacNamara?”
“The girl in the sweets shop? We haven’t seen her since it closed.”
“When was that?”
“A few weeks ago now.”
“What happened? Is it for sale?”
“I doubt it, not many are buying shops these days. Do you …”
But Barry was out the door and running again.
By the time he reached the aunt’s cottage on the Ballinasloe road his heart was pounding painfully.
The cottage windows were tightly shuttered and there was a padlock on the door. Weeds were already springing up along the front path. Barry bent over and braced his hands on his knees while he caught his breath, then walked all the way around the house. It was as tightly shut as a clam.
In response to Barry’s urgent knock at the nearest house an elderly man peered out. “Mrs. Fogarty’s not there anymore,” he mumbled between toothless gums.
“What happened?”
“She went away.”
I can see that for myself, you old fool. “What about her niece? Claire?”
“She took the girl with her.”
“Do you know why they left?”
The old man scratched his whiskery jaw. “A great woman for keeping herself to herself, Miriam Fogarty. But what I think is, the niece was ill.” His voice dropped to a confidential whisper. “You know.”
“I don’t know. Tell me, for God’s sake!”
“TB, that’s what I think.”
Barry shuddered.
Countries with more resources were well on their way to conquering tuberculosis, but in Ireland the very word still struck panic. Families went to desperate lengths to conceal its presence. Sufferers were often banished from home completely, hidden away to cough out their lives in a sanatorium.
Was it possible that Claire could have TB? Barry searched his memory for clues. The white skin, the red lips, the frequent cough … His heart sank.
“Do you know where they went?” he asked.
“I’d say she’s after taking the girl home.”
“Are you certain?”
“I am not certain. But that’s what I’d do, take her back to her mammy.”
Was I too besotted to think straight? Why didn’t I ask more about her parents—such as their names and address?
All he had was Claire’s remark about a house “at the very top of the hill.” Cork was a city of hills. Or did she even mean Cork city? Cork was a county, too. And most of it hilly.
She could be anywhere.
At the local post office Barry was told that Mrs. Fogarty had left no forwarding address. The telephone office was able to provide a phone book for County Cork which revealed a daunting number of MacNamaras. “Of course they may not have a telephone at all,” the office manager pointed out. “Many people don’t.”
If the neighbour was right in his surmise, possibly Claire was in a sanatorium by now. Which one? How could he find out? Such places had a policy of
strict confidentiality.
Barry spent two long, fruitless days in Athlone, seeking some clue to Claire’s whereabouts. But she had vanished without a trace.
Why didn’t she write and tell me she was going away? She has my postal address.
Maybe she does have TB and was ashamed to tell me. But I wouldn’t mind about that, I’d wait for her until she is well, no matter how long it takes.
He rather liked the image of himself as a faithful swain, patiently waiting for the girl he loved. But realistically he would rather have her whole and healthy and in his arms.
I’ll just have to find her, that’s all. If she is ill we’ll deal with it.
When he returned to the farm, Ursula took one look at his long face and thought he had been wounded. He assured her that no such thing had happened. “I’m just tired, that’s all.”
“It’s more than that surely.”
“Leave it, Ursula.” He gave her That Look.
URSULA closed the account book and massaged the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger. Her eyes felt grainy. There was a nagging pain in the small of her back, reminding her that she was not as young as she used to be.
She had been going over the figures for hours but they did not improve. Although the dairy business had done well enough in the past year, horse sales, upon which all extra expenditure was predicated, were disappointing. Not many in Ireland had the money to buy good horses. Foreign purchasers were few and far between. Sending Barry to university was going to be expensive, and he indicated that he would need a substantial amount of pocket money as well: “Everything costs more in Dublin.” Meanwhile, Eileen had resumed grumbling about the lack of a refrigerator.
Ursula suspected that the older woman was letting the cream go sour on purpose.
She pushed the account book aside and stared bleakly out the window. Too much rain; crops were rotting in the fields. They would have to buy in feed again this winter. And George insisted that the tractor needed an overhaul. “Lucky me,” Ursula said to the empty room. “I’m an independent Irishwoman.”
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