When a filmwriter who had failed to do a screenplay on Michael Collins contended that he had been unfaithful to Kitty in London with a woman named Hazel Laverty (wife of an artist and a native of Chicago) and received sacrilegious communions, I thought that my friend would go through the TV screen to tear out his eyes. Fortunately for all concerned, Colum Connolly offered evidence in refutation.
When the tape was finished and she asked my opinion, she was a basket case—a lovely one, I might add.
“It’s like John Kennedy’s death, Nuala. We may never know the truth. The IRA thought they were responsible but didn’t want to claim credit because he was so popular with the people. But that doesn’t mean that they were telling the truth or that they even knew the truth. They fit an explanation to the facts they had. So did Meda Ryan and Colum Connolly. I suppose they’re probably right. Yet—”
“Yet you want to see what your gram says in her diary before you’re sure that you don’t have to worry about it. I’ll peek ahead if you want me to. Isn’t it hard though because she writes so small?”
“Don’t do that, Nuala. There’s no terrible rush. I want to treat her story fairly. Read it the way she wrote it.”
She nodded. “I agree.”
“That makes it unanimous. Now, young woman, you’d better be getting back to Chapel Row before the sun comes up. Take a taxi and bill it to my account. You can come back in the morning and recover your bike from wherever your friends downstairs let you park it.”
“Aye,” she said, standing up slowly. “We’re all terrible fragile, aren’t we, Dermot Michael?”
“Indeed we are. It comes from being creatures.”
“Doesn’t it now?”
–– 26 ––
THE NEXT day Nuala arrived in the blue suit with a light blue sweater. She probably had a light gray sweater to match the gray suit—a four-day rotation, like baseball pitchers. But since she worked for only four days a week, that was probably deemed enough.
No jeans and sweatshirt in Jury’s Towers. Not yet.
I was waiting for her in my swim trunks and robe. “Would you mind if I swim with you today, Nuala? I must go to the reception at the Royal Gallery at half five.”
“Sure, it’s your pool, isn’t it now? Besides, you won’t be satisfied till you gape at me in my bikini and meself too fat and too tall.”
I pretended to swat at her rear end. “I said no more self-hatred, didn’t I, woman?”
She didn’t duck as I thought she would, so my hand came into contact with solid butt, very solid.
She was amused by my embarrassment. “And yourself such a terrible brute.” She giggled. “I’m thinking you’re Bigfoot.”
“Maybe I am now. Hurry up and get ready, I haven’t all day to wait for you.”
Bigfoot. Would I have to tell my story to her sometime soon?
I decided that it would be better not to burden her with the whole complicated mess unless it became absolutely necessary. I hoped it never would. If Ma really knew where the gold was, we might be well on our ways to solving the mystery—if the gold was linked to the death of Collins, which it might well have been.
Did I not notice at all, at all the last word in Nuala’s letter to me?
Sure I did. However, I persuaded myself that she didn’t mean it the way it sounded. It was merely the way she’d end a letter to anyone.
Right?
Nuala emerged from the bathroom, her robe tied tightly around her and her arms hugging it even more tightly.
“I can hear the woman talking in my ear as I type her words into your machine,” she said. “ ’Tis almost like she is in the room talking to me. It’s the strangest thing.”
“Literally?” We were standing by the elevators.
“Not quite. . . . Would you be thinking I’m daft altogether?”
“I am not, woman. You’re one of the least daft women I’ve ever known—in that sense anyway.”
She poked my arm. “I don’t want to know what ways you think I am daft. . . . I feel like she’s very close to me, protecting me from harm, maybe lighting a candle somewhere for me and watching me all the time.”
“And not her favorite grandson?”
“Oh, she watched over him all the time.”
“She told you this?” I stepped back to let her out of the elevator.
“Not so I could say I heard her very words, but, oh, Dermot, you’ll know I’m daft, I just feel it as powerfully as I’ve ever felt anything.”
“Will she protect you from me, Nuala Anne McGrail?”
“Haven’t I said I can do that without any help?” She poked me again. “Come ’long with you now, let’s do this swimming thing so you can get rid of all your fantasies.”
“Won’t it make my fantasies worse?”
“On the basis of the part of your story you let me read, I doubt that they could be worse.” Despite her crisp words, she smiled at me affectionately. Maybe she did mean the last word of the letter.
What would I do about that?
“Shall we try the whirlpool?” I asked as we entered the pool area.
“ ’Twould be a terrible sin.” She looked at the spa suspiciously.
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m not terrible good at resisting temptation.”
“It’s easy.” I tossed aside my robe. “You just climb into the whirlpool and push the button.” I sank into the warm waters. “ ’Tis nothing like it on a cold autumn night in Dublin.”
“Umm.” She took off her robe and my heart stopped beating. I wasn’t sure it would ever start beating again.
As I would have predicted, Nuala Anne McGrail would peel off a robe over her minimal swim suit with the practiced ease of someone who had done it in front of men a thousand times instead of someone who was doing it for the first time.
In a floral print ensemble that would have been considered prudish on Cococabana Beach, she was everything I expected and a good deal more.
“Come on,” I urged her. “It won’t hurt you.”
She dipped her foot, a good-size and not dainty foot, into the water. “Brigid, Patrick, and Columcille! Are you planning to boil me alive?”
I extended my hand and helped her into the swirling waters. “You get used to it after a few seconds.”
She sank into the pool and sighed. “Wasn’t I saying it was a grave sin!”
“Against a God you don’t believe in?”
“Would I be wanting to make Her angry if She really did exist?” She threw back her head and closed her eyes, at peace for the moment with the world and everyone in it.
I noted that she took up a lot of the whirlpool—a tall, strong woman, shapely indeed, breathtakingly so, but not petite by any stretch of the imagination. Slender indeed she was but also solid, to say nothing of generously proportioned. Her long trim legs were taut with strong muscles. There was a lot to Nuala, much of it available for my inspection.
She had told me that she had played hurley with the boys when she was a “young one.” When those sturdy young arms swung a club, they could be very dangerous.
The Diana metaphor didn’t fit. No, she was Sionna or Bionna or one of those athletic Celtic goddesses with whom you mess at grave risk.
“Stop thinking those thoughts about me.” She kicked my foot.
“Your eyes are closed. How do you know what I’m thinking?”
“Be quiet.” She sank deeper into the pool. “Don’t I want to relax?”
“Yes, ma’am. . . . Actually, I’m wondering what sport you’d be playing at the college?”
She blushed. “A bit of Irish football, women’s team of course. So all you were thinking was that I looked like an athlete?”
“Actually I was thinking how you’d swing a hurley stick.”
She opened her eyes and grinned. “I still have one in me rooms, in case I need to fight anyone off. Don’t forget that, Dermot Michael.”
“I won’t.”
She took my hand in hers. I
f I was really the heroic protector I claimed to be, I would have gently with-drawn mine.
I told myself better in her hand than on her breast—where it wanted to be. I tried my best not to look at the outline of her nipples, firm against the top of her bikini, and to restrain my fantasy about how they would taste in my mouth.
I thought of how much I hated college and that helped.
Nuala sighed. What was she imagining Ma was whispering in her ear about me? Had she imagined that Ma was telling her to end her letter to me with that one awesome and dangerous word?
“Well”—she sighed again, eyes still closed—“they tell me sex is hard to beat, but this must be more relaxing.”
A signal to a potential lover that she was a virgin?
Did she imagine Ma whispering that too?
What if she wasn’t imagining?
Nuala surely had some psychic sensitivities, no doubt about that. She’d sensed or guessed or whatever that I had lost to death a woman I loved. Ma had been that way too.
“She’s just a good guesser,” my mother would say to me. “She likes to pretend that she’s a bit of a witch.”
Two witches from the same town in the West of Ireland—could they become thick as thieves although one was dead?
Despite the heat of the pool, I shivered.
Ma was always terribly worried that I “wouldn’t make the right marriage.”
She would say that Kel was “a lovely girl, but, faith, I don’t think she really appreciates what’s worth appreciating about you, Dermot Michael.”
She’d pronounce “appreciate” with the hard “c” the Irish use in the word.
Christina was “that little eyetalian thing.”
What would she think of my young friend from Carraroe?
There wasn’t much doubt about that. Not at all, at all.
Would Ma come back from the grave to meddle in my love life?
If she could, she damn well would.
I shivered again.
“Well?” Nuala opened her eyes and glared at me.
“Well, what?”
Had the little bitch been reading my mind?
“No comment on the nearly naked woman?”
“I didn’t want to seem vulgar and stare.”
“Humph!”
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met, Nuala Anne McGrail, more beautiful than anyone I had ever hoped to meet. But I didn’t want to seem to stare at you disrespectfully like you were a sex object.”
“You’ve never looked at me disrespectfully, Dermot Michael Coyne. Lasciviously maybe, but not disrespectfully. spectfully. To tell you the truth”—she smiled affectionately and made my heart stop again—“I don’t think you could turn a woman into a sex object if you wanted to.”
It was my turn to blush. “I hope that’s true.”
“I’m embarrassed by the way you look at me.” She closed her eyes again. “But it’s a nice embarrassment.”
After we had enough of the whirlpool, Nuala and I jumped out, dashed to the inside section of the pool, and swam out under the dividing wall into the outside section. It was raining now, which added to the fun. We raced and frolicked and fought and wrestled and played in the water as young lovers probably have since humans discovered that you could do more with water than drink it.
She was a faster swimmer than I and a stronger wrestler, until I used one of my martial arts holds to immobilize her.
Then in the darkness, with no one or the hotel staff able to see us or interested in seeing us, I kissed her, perhaps the same way Pa had kissed Ma seventy years before.
Our bodies, wet and mostly unclad, pressed together, overruling our sense and judgment. Her breasts pressed against my chest. I caressed her back and butt and kissed her time after time, smothering her eyes and her lips and throat with my affection.
Finally we stopped. Badly shaken, I helped her out of the pool and into her terry robe.
“I’ve never been kissed that way before,” she said calmly. “ ’Tis an interesting experience altogether, isn’t it?”
“I promised no passes in my room,” I replied. “The pool is not in my room.”
“Ah, sure.” She sighed. “Would you say that was a pass? Faith, it wouldn’t fit my definition of one.”
I didn’t want to know what her definition was.
Silently, our minds jumbled with wild thoughts (my mind anyway), we went back to my suite and dressed in our proper clothes (in separate bathrooms, I hasten to add). Nuala, her long hair lank on her blue sweater, was pounding on the Compaq as I left for the reception at the National Gallery.
If I was so stirred up by her and she seemed to be willing enough, why did not I try to bed her, either as a passing relationship or, given who and what she was, a permanent one?
What was the matter with me?
Some of it, I think, was virtue. She was young and naive and innocent—or so I thought then anyway—and probably a victim of a late-adolescent crush on me.
Part of it, most of it I have to admit now, was fear.
When I came back there was another printout with another note on the table next to the picture of Ma and Pa taken shortly before they left Carraroe.
I lingered on the picture—two handsome kids, arms around one another. The original had been taken by “the schoolteacher fella,” Ma had often said. She’d had it colored. Did Carraroe in the background really look like a setting for The Quiet Man?
Could Ma really be dead?
Could she influence Nuala and me even if she were dead?
I turned to Nuala’s note.
She found out where the gold is.
N.
–– 27 ––
September 1920
Well, I know where the gold is.
I don’t know what I can do about it. I don’t dast tell Liam Tomas that I spied on the commandant. He’d be terrible angry at that. If I told him that the gold General Collins needed to buy bullets to free poor old Ireland was hidden within eyesight of our village, he’d ask Daniel O’Kelly about it, since my Liam Tomas is a direct and open man, too open for his own good, I often think. Then there’d be a fight. A man who will hide gold from Ireland will kill to protect that gold. If he knew I was following him and spying on him with Grandma’s binoculars from the Boer War, he might kill me—and do terrible things to me before he killed me.
So it will have to be my secret until it’s safe to tell, if it’s ever safe to tell.
Anyway, I’m sure that Daniel O’Kelly, for all his big talk and all the admiration his men have for him, is a thief and a traitor. I’ll wait till the day that I’m able to tell Liam and he’ll believe me.
After O’Kelly woke up and had his tea, your man packed his kit and prepared to leave. He didn’t carry a Lee-Enfield, none of the IRA men do that in daylight. But he did have a big Mauser pistol under his coat.
“This is the gun that did for Roderick McClory.” He pulled it out and waved the awful thing at me.
“And himself coming home from Mass.”
I was serving him his tea because Ma and Da had gone over to Spiddal for a wake and Tim was back with the Brigade, wherever that might be, and Moire weeping for him.
I think she’s pregnant, God bless her.
“He was a traitor, Nell Pat Malone, in the service of English imperialism. He deserved to die.”
“And himself with a wife and two little gossons.”
“It’s a war.”
“You shot him in the back.”
He shrugged his shoulders and grinned wickedly at me. “If he had a chance he would have shot me. We’re doing it for Ireland.”
“You love killing,” I shot back at him. “You kill for the fun of it. I can see the light in your eyes when you talk about it. You’d rather shoot a man in the back than have a woman.”
“A lot you’d know”—he sneered at me—“about being laid by a man.”
“I know enough about it to know that you’d kill a woman just as easy
as you’d kill a man.”
“You’re a very provoking child, Nell Pat Malone.” He stood up from his table. “I think a man needs to teach you a lesson since your father won’t and Liam O’Riada can’t.”
My heart was pounding something awful and my throat was dry. He meant it. And afterward he’d throw me body into the bay and spread the word that a Tan or an RIC constable did it.
“You come near me”—I backed away from him—“and I’ll smash your skull with this poker and shed not a tear for you.”
When my ma and da had left for the wake and told me to give the commandant his tea, I got the big poker from outside the house and put it right next to the fire-place. I never let it out of my sight or my reach for a moment.
“You wouldn’t hit me with that.” He came closer to me, his hand on the gun stuffed in his belt. “And meself the commandant of the Brigade?”
“If you even touch that gun, I’ll swing this.”
And all the time I was praying to the Holy Mother of God to give me the courage to bash the dirty gombeen man’s skull in if I had to.
We stood there glaring at one another, himself with his hand on the butt of his gun and meself with the terrible poker thing high in air over me head.
Then he laughed and turned away from me. “Someday I’ll tame you, my little hellcat friend.”
“You take your kit and get out of this house or I’ll brain you anyhow,” I shouted at him, knowing now that he was a coward who could be frightened by a terrified little colleen.
He laughed again, picked up his kit, and sauntered out of the house like he was the high king of Ireland himself.
Trembling like an oak leaf falling off the tree in autumn, I watched him go down the path to the road.
Then I put the poker back against the fireplace and began to clean up.
I made up my mind that I would do what I had half thought I might do.
I found Da’s old hunting knife, which he never uses anymore, and slipped it, still in its pouch, into me drawers, hurried out of the house, saddled up Dotty, me pony, and rode after him.
Then I remembered the dusty old binoculars on the shelf in the front room.
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