She emerged a few moments later, wrapped in a terry robe and huddled within her own arms so the robe couldn’t come open. I glanced up from my Herald-Tribune. “Don’t catch cold, Nuala Anne.”
She laughed, granting me for the moment the last word.
I put the paper aside and walked to the window. It was dark already, but in the glow of the lights around the pool I would get a distant look at Nuala in a swim suit, a possibility that seemed decidedly attractive.
A few minutes later, a young woman still shrouded in an ample robe emerged from the inside of the pool area and bent over to feel the pool water. Even from the fourth floor I could sense the surprise on her face. It really was warm. Quickly she tossed aside her robe and eased herself into the pool.
Moire Nuala Anne McGrail in a bikini was well worth admiring, even from four stories up. “Wow,” I said to myself. “Wow!”
Her crawl, as I might have expected, was better than mine, smooth, strong, and determined. Naturally.
Shaken, I would have said visibly shaken, I went back to my paper. Then I tossed the paper aside, turned on the Compaq, and returned to my short story that was in the Nuala.doc file.
On the first page I typed in bold caps, 30-point type:
ABSOLUTELY
CONFIDENTIAL—
THIS MEANS YOU,
NUALA ANNE!
Then I indulged myself in a rhapsodic piece about a woman swimmer, not totally uninfluenced by Seamus Heaney’s swimming otter poem in which the otter at the desert museum in Tucson reminds him of his wife back home in Ireland.
Would she honor my restriction?
Hard to tell and it didn’t much matter. If she did read it, she was smart enough to realize that it was a love letter, albeit a clinically descriptive one.
She’d also know I was stealing just a bit from Seamus.
Hell, steal from the best!
The phone rang.
“Dermot Coyne.”
“Hi, Dermot. This is Patrick. I’m a friend of Anthony’s.”
“Nice to hear from you, Patrick. Any friend of Anthony’s is a friend of mine.”
He laughed “I’m glad to hear that. . . . You know where Bray is?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think you could find you’re way out there on public transportation?”
“Why not? Don’t they have sonnets in the car ads?”
Patrick chuckled. So I knew the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit).
“You get off at the station in Bray and turn to your right and walk along the tracks till you come to the street with the Martello Tower, the street where Joyce’s family lived for a while when he was growing up—not the one in Black Rock, mind you. Turn right again, cross the tracks, and walk towards the harbor. On the harbor road you turn right again and you’ll come to a place called the Harbor Bar, white with red trim. I’ll be sitting in the corner by the window. Do you think I could buy you a pint or two out there at half six?”
“Absolutely.”
“And, Dermot, no Savile Row and no jogging suit, right?”
“I should look like a bit of a bum?”
“By your standards, yes.”
“Okay.”
“And, Dermot, one more thing: Come alone, got it?”
“That’s the way I planned it!”
“Great! I’ll see you. Bye, Dermot.”
The voice, I reflected as I hung up, was pure Midwest. Not Chicago exactly. Certainly not St. Louis. Maybe Minneapolis. Maybe Milwaukee, about which Angela Smythe of regretful memory did not know.
A Midwesterner, probably Irish and with a sense of humor.
I heard Nuala opening the door, so I quickly saved the Nuala.doc file and turned off the computer.
“Change your clothes, woman, or you’ll catch your death of cold.”
She burst out laughing. “You sound authentic, Dermot Michael.”
“Weren’t the best of models provided me for years?”
She collapsed into the same chair I had occupied yesterday. “ ’Tis at least venially sinful, possibly mortal.” She sighed contentedly. “I’ll have to ask me priest the next time I go to confession. Or Father George if I answer the phone when he calls.”
“It beats the North Atlantic, huh?”
“Ah, does it ever!” She leaned forward, clutching the robe so it would not open and reveal any of herself in the bikini. “Sure, the heated pool is probably the greatest contribution of you fockingrichyanks to human culture.”
“Did you try the whirlpool?”
“I did not.” She wrapped herself tightly in her virtue and her robe. “That’s certainly a mortal sin.”
“I’m humiliated by your crawl, Nul. It’s a lot better than mine.”
She straightened up in righteous rage. “You came down and watched me, did you now?”
“Woman, I did not.” I gestured at the window. “Would I be invading your privacy?”
She bit her lip, blushed, and laughed. “You’re a desperate man, Dermot Michael Coyne, son of the dark stranger, desperate altogether.”
“It wasn’t only the crawl I admired, Nuala.”
“Humph!” She rose to change her clothes.
“You wear that immoral swim suit when you swim in the North Atlantic? With your ma?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” she demanded haughtily. “And, just to give your prurient adolescent fantasy something to worry about, Dermot Michael Coyne, sometimes I swim in the North Atlantic without anything on at all, at all.”
In high dudgeon, mostly feigned, she sailed into the bathroom and slammed the door.
Ah, the games our reproductive urges force us to play.
I went to my bedroom and dressed for my swim. When I came out, Nuala was already at the computer.
“Fast shower?”
“I can take a shower here?”
“You can.”
“I’ve never taken a shower in all my life.”
“Be sure you wear your swim suit when you do.”
She threw her Irish dictionary at me, gently so it landed on the couch.
I left quietly.
After my swim I dressed in an old jacket and jeans. “I’ll be going out, woman. I’m not sure when I’ll be back, but I will keep count of the number of jars I take.”
“At last I can work in peace, can’t I now?” She was frowning over the diary, either displeased with what she was reading or searching for the right word.
“See you tomorrow.”
“Don’t get fluttered.”
“I’ll try not to.”
— NUALA’S VOICE —
Well, Nell Pat,
I’ll tell you one thing, anyway. You and his mother did a good job in raising that lad and fair play to you both, says I. One of me teachers said that you can predict a man’s attitude towards women if you know his relationship with his mother and vice versa. He has the blarney and all that but I’ve never met a young man who is so respectful. He scares me the way he soaks me up with his eyes, but I’m not afraid of him at all, at all. He wouldn’t do anything to me unless I encouraged him.
Now, Nell Pat, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Don’t I have the worst crush I’ve ever had in all me life and meself hardly knowing him? My legs turn to water whenever I see him and my heart thumps away like it’s gone crazy.
It’s just a crush, I know. Nothing more. I’m too young to marry anyone, much less a young man who has been badly hurt a couple of times already and meself not the one to heal him unless he’s willing to heal himself.
Maybe in five years.
But I have the crush now, not five years from now. I’ve never known anyone quite like him. And you got me into this, you know you did.
Why? Couldn’t you just have left me alone? I’m not like you and he’s not like your man.
And he isn’t much of a detective, is he now? A dreamer and a poet and a storyteller and that’s all wonderful. But if he hadn’t hired me, he would have messed up this quest of his before he started.
He’s not going to like it when he finds how many of his mistakes I’m going to have to cover up, not at all, at all. His male ego is pretty weak to begin with, and there being no reason for that either.
Ah, Nell Pat, for all of that, am I not already half in love with him? And himself being so sweet and gentle?
–– 22 ––
PATRICK LOOKED like Mick Collins, a handsome, curly-haired Irishman with a quick smile and flashing blue eyes.
“Hi, Dermot.” He shook hands vigorously. “Welcome to the Harbor Bar.”
For a moment I was spooked. Mick Collins was dead. As far as anyone knew, he died without children. This couldn’t be a descendant of his, could it?
Like all Irish pubs, this one was dense with cigarette smoke, as thick as the fog outside, which obscured the rest of Bray, a seaside resort for the Victorian era and now a commuter suburb for the posh folk in Dublin 4, as Nuala would have called them.
In the Harbor Bar, like many a serious Irish bar, the conversations were in whispered tones, as if we were in a funeral parlor with the corpse present or a library with the head librarian just around the corner. The Harbor Bar was a bar not for serious drinking—the patrons could nurse a pint all night long—but for serious talk.
I recovered quickly from my shock at how much Patrick looked like Michael Collins. The world was filled with genial, witty Irishmen with charming smiles—even if this man was broad-shouldered and powerfully built, just like the Big Fella.
“Hi, Patrick. The Harbor Bar isn’t what I expected. It’s not a dive, just a respectable bar.”
He glanced around. “For rich yachtsmen in the summer. Note all the sailing paraphernalia scattered about and the overturned barrels in front for drinking outside during the season. They’re not around now. These folks are mostly locals. They nurse their drinks pretty carefully, the women keeping accurate count of the number of jars their menfolk have consumed.”
“I’ve noticed the habit.”
We both laughed. “You’ll have a pint?”
“One at the most.”
“Let me get them. My company likes its salesmen to pick up the tab. Helps the image.”
The DART station at Lansdowne Road was a quaint old place, constructed as a stop for the Dublin horse show in the last century—the Dublin–Kingstown (as Dun Laoghaire was called in those days) railroad being the second oldest in the world. Fare on the DART for the half-hour ride to Bray was 98 pence, as good a mass transit bargain as you can find anywhere in the world.
On my ride along the picturesque coast of Dublin Bay—it looks a little like Naples when the sun is out, which in my stay was a rare event—I thought about Nuala. I absolutely could not afford to become seriously involved with her, I told myself firmly.
Patrick and I sipped our drinks and talked about Ireland. I listened carefully, searching for the hints I was supposed to hear from him. If there were any in the first fifteen minutes, I missed them.
“There are those that think the whole thing was a mistake, you know?”
“The Rising, the War, the Troubles?”
“Right. If the Brits had given the Irish home rule in the 1800s, or even before the Great War, this whole island would still be a happy part of the United Kingdom and the Ulster problem wouldn’t exist.”
“That’s altogether possible.”
“Moreover,” he continued, hand on his pint, “with the boundaries of Europe coming down, a United States of the British Isles makes a lot more sense than two separate nations.”
“Perhaps it does.”
“From the point of view of history, the existence of a separate Irish nation, truncated from its northern counties, may be seen as an aberration, a nationalist blip in an internationalist trend.”
“Could be.”
He sounded like a glib professor whose specialty was the long view of historical processes, a geopolitician from Georgetown maybe.
Which might be exactly what he was.
“Mind you, it wasn’t the plan of the Irish leaders. At first the ordinary folk thought that they were quite mad. The Brits drove the people into the arms of the IRA in the end. Still, until 1916 most of the Irish could have lived quite comfortably with a dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian variety. Some people think they can still live with it.”
“Return Ireland to British rule!”
“Not rule in the old sense of the word, heaven knows, but a federation—a federal parliament in Westminster and regional parliaments in Dublin, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and maybe Belfast. It would make a lot more sense.”
“Maybe.”
“The root of the present problem was the termination of the independent Irish parliament with the Act of Union in 1800. In time that could have evolved, especially with Catholic political emancipation, into a functioning Irish parliament bound to England by loyalty to the crown and common interest.”
“A lot of ‘ifs’.”
“Sure, Dermot, we’re just speculating.” He smiled genially. “Aren’t we? The point some people make is that with the emergence of a united Europe, we have a framework now for reconsidering the relationship between the two British Isles. When that happens it becomes clear that the present nationalist pretense at separate countries masks a de facto unity of problems and concerns and interests. In a United Europe, a new union between Britain and Ireland becomes almost inevitable—and the beauty of it is that it solves the Ulster problem overnight.”
“I suppose it might.”
“The Irish people, who as you well know don’t hate English people at all, would accept reunion enthusiastically, especially if it promised to solve a lot of the current economic problems. The Republic of Ireland, let’s face it, is not economically viable and never will be. But as a part of a larger British Union, let’s call it that, this island would prosper.”
“Like it did in 1849.”
Patrick ignored my reference to the Great Famine. “This whole idea assumes that the English have learned from their past mistakes.”
“They often haven’t.”
“Isn’t the Anglo-Irish peace initiative a sign that times are changing? . . . Unfortunately, most of the con-temporary Irish political leaders are irrevocably committed to the symbols of 1916, even though they don’t take them seriously. No one has the courage to step forward and say, look, we had to be independent for a while so that we could come to understand interdependency. Let’s now rejoin Britain as full partners.”
He was thinking the unthinkable and making it sound reasonable and inevitable.
“The economic problems here are not going to get any better. In a few years, by the end of the century at the most, a new generation of political leaders in this country, and in the North too, will begin to say let’s end this foolish independence and return to interdependence. The promise of better economic conditions will bury the memories of 1916, which don’t mean much to young people anyway.”
“That sounds very reasonable.”
“There was too much war-weariness in Britain in 1919 and 1920 and too much legitimate anger and frustration in Ireland for common sense to develop a new relationship. In the next century, it is very likely that those years will be forgotten and leaders and people on both sides will understand the opportunities in reaffiliation as more or less equal partners.”
“More or less?”
“Great Britain is the large island and the larger and richer component of any union. Obviously it would be the senior partner.”
Did Patrick believe any of this stuff that he was arguing so plausibly? Or was he trying to tell me that there were people who did believe it?
“Obviously.”
“Nonetheless, all the economic advantages would be to the Irish partner, wouldn’t they?”
“I presume so.”
“I’ll fetch us both another pint. No woman keeping track.”
“I’ll be asked.”
“So will I.”
We both laughed. Was Patrick married to an Irish wom
an? Or an Irish American? Not that the difference mattered as far as counting the “jars” was concerned.
“Where was I?” He placed the Guinness on the Formica table in front of me. “Oh yes, the advantages of union. The most serious obstacle to reunion will be that British leaders and people will not want to believe in the long run such a renewed partnership would be of benefit to the senior as well as the junior partner. The English are, ah, a little weary of the Irish just now.”
“Are they?” This was all bullshit.
“However, there are responsible people on both sides who see this as the wave of the future, who indeed have always seen it as the wave of the future. They’re prepared to wait till the appropriate time and then go public with a plan for political and economic union that will be irresistible to both potential partners.”
“Ah?”
“The trick of it will be to persuade both peoples that the plan is not a return to a past relationship, but an opening up of a whole new relationship in the framework of a united Europe and that it would solve at one stroke the Ulster question.”
“If the lads and the Prots would buy it.”
“They might not have much choice, you know. The world is growing weary of their nasty little seventeenth-century religious war.”
“They have a long record of not caring what the world thinks.”
“Too true. The paradox is that the worse the conflict up there is, the closer we come to the day when these responsible people will be able to advance their plan.”
“I understand.”
So maybe these “responsible people” were not above making the situation in the Six Counties worse. I had better not ask that. The rules of the game said that I should listen and not ask.
“As you may imagine”—Patrick spread out his lean and graceful hands—“these responsible people are not necessarily representatives of their respective governments, though I think I may say that they are not without contacts in those governments.”
“I could well believe that.”
“I must insist”—his eyes were blank, his sharply sculpted face emotionless as he spoke—“that these people have enormous respect for Ireland and a determination to see that the imperialism does not reappear, though in truth imperialism doesn’t work any more, as our friends in the former Soviet Union are presently discovering. No one intends, I repeat, to deprive the Irish of their freedom. The dream is rather to sustain that freedom in a new relationship with England while at the same time improving the economic conditions on this island.”
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