“They’d be afraid to have it ever come out!” I exclaims.
Dick Mulcahy smiles, the only time he smiled during our conversation. “I rather think so, Mrs. O’Riada. It would be an enormous embarrassment to them. And while they’re often not perceptive when the question is Ireland, they will understand this document very clearly.”
I feel very proud and myself expecting that the Free Staters would know what to do with the picture.
“So you see that it’s no exaggeration to say that you’ve played an important and critical part in winning Ireland its freedom.”
“We’ll always be proud of that,” says me man.
“Won’t we indeed?” I add.
“That’s why I am so sorry that I can’t urge you to stay. You deserve a rich reward for your ingenuity and courage. You deserve, in fact, to be honored as hero and heroine in the country we’re trying to build here. Eventually perhaps, long years from now, we may be able to acknowledge your bravery. Now. . . .” He shrugs his little shoulders and taps his boot again with his riding crop. “As you will understand, I’m sure the value of this photo and the story I’ve written down as you’ve told it to me depends entirely on our willingness to keep it secret for many years, at least till the man in question is dead.”
“I see,” says Liam.
I don’t see, not that it matters and myself not wanting to be a heroine of Ireland.
“Your decision to emigrate then is most fortunate as well as most wise. There is an informal agreement among all parties that no action will be taken against those who leave the country. Should you remain, there are several different groups on various sides who would like to see you dead, Captain, and perhaps you too, Mrs. O’Riada. Many people on this island have long memories.”
“Well, we’re leaving anyhow,” says me man.
“I understand that and I lament it and I praise it. I wish it could be otherwise.”
“Someday we’ll come back when it’s all over,” says I.
The general looks at me with those soft little blue eyes of his. “I wouldn’t recommend it, Mrs. O’Riada, not for a long time anyway. It will be years, perhaps decades, before you could return safely to this land you’ve helped to free. In all candor, and it pains me deeply to say this, it might be wise never to come back.”
And so that’s that. We shake hands and he thanks us again for all we’ve done and he leaves for his car and we get on the third-class coach for Cork, never to return again to Ireland.
“ ’Tis just as well,” says Liam. “I’m not sure that I would ever want to come back.”
He knows that’s not true and so do I, but we have to pretend and we’ll have to pretend long enough so that we actually believe it.
“We have ourselves”—I take his hand—“and our future life together.”
“Aye.” And he pats me belly. “And our young one.”
–– 56 ––
NUALA WAS sobbing next to me in the car. She had begun to cry part of the way through her reading of the last entry in Ma’s notebook. Having finished the story, she gave way to tears of pain, grief, rage.
I let her cry.
“I’m sorry for breaking down, Dermot.” She sniffled finally. “I’m nothing but a hysterical woman.”
“A woman you are, Nuala Anne McGrail. Hysterical you’re not. Those pages demand tears. Mine will come eventually.”
“When you’ve had time to think about it.” She sniggered through her sniffles.
“You got it.”
We both laughed.
“Still, it was horrible sending those two children off into permanent exile. Ireland isn’t it worth it.”
“It doesn’t take away the agony of that entry, but, as I have said, they got over it. They were very comfortable indeed till the Great Depression, and they survived that. Mom told me that they never expelled any of their tenants because they couldn’t pay their rent and that they lowered everyone’s rent. Pa bought a lot of land during those years, and they raised their kids and sent them off to college and became wealthy during the boom after the war.”
“That doesn’t lessen the suffering of those days.”
“Nor the memories. Even at the worst they were happy and far more affluent than they would have imagined possible. Carraroe must have seemed a dream of their youth when they were busy with their own children and their company.”
We were struggling through the ancient city of Limerick on the Shannon River, back in the main flow of Friday afternoon traffic. Great sheets of rain, thick and dark and monotonous, continued to float across the land. It would be late at night before we arrived in Galway at this rate.
Beyond the rain, the city itself, which Nuala had insisted was “grand” even though she’d never seen it, seemed like a set for a futuristic movie of the world after a nuclear war—drab, ugly, broken, sick.
“You don’t know whether they saw any of their family ever again.” She was wiping her face with a tissue, having come prepared for a good cry as she translated the final entry.
“If the family migrated to America, I’m sure they did. I’ll have to search the others out if the baptismal records from Carraroe give me any hints.”
“Maybe they didn’t have much in common with them as the years went on. That’s the way it is with Ma and Da and me brothers and sisters: They still love one another but they don’t have much to talk about.”
“She didn’t tell us the name of the man in the car, did she, Nul?”
“She did not. I didn’t think she would. Do you have any ideas?”
“I don’t trust Mulcahy. Obviously he wasn’t the man in the car himself. But he seems a little too slick for my taste—a small man with a big gun. He had a lot to gain from Collins’s death. He could take over the war and fight it his way—and he was reputed to be closer to the Republicans than Collins was. Eventually Kevin O’Higgins, who was the backbone of the Free State until he was shot, dumped Mulcahy because he thought he was too soft. If he was behind the plot, getting rid of Liam and Nell was a smart move.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted. “I didn’t like him much either.”
“It was all a little too smooth to suit me.” I went on. “I can’t see that two kids, both barely old enough to go to university, would have been in all that much danger, particularly in the years head. So maybe the story about using the picture to force the British to sell them arms was concocted to be sure you were rid of them and make them feel that, even in exile, they had helped Ireland.”
“You’re a deep one, Dermot Coyne.”
“That’s my line!”
“It could all be the truth. I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to prove it if it is.”
“I’m not sure that we’ll ever know the full story.” I stopped for a red light, a blur in the swirling, spinning, dancing sheets of rain.
“You don’t think it was the Brits?” Nuala asked.
“General McCready of the British army was furious because of the assassination of his friend Field Marshal Wilson and suspected Collins of ordering the execution. He might have wanted revenge. He had advocated withdrawal from Ireland, however, because he knew the war no longer could be won. If they attempted to reimpose English rule, the spigots of Irish-American money would have opened again, the Republicans would have been able to buy more weapons, and the situation would have reverted to the way it was before the truce.”
“And Westminster?” she asked, as if she hadn’t already thought these questions through herself and more quickly that I could.
“The civilian government, Lloyd George and Churchill, didn’t want to give up Ireland, but they didn’t want the costs of a continued war of skirmishes. Historians agree that Churchill was not speaking seriously when he threatened a reoccupation. He would have liked to retake the country, bloody imperialist that he was, but he knew that the costs would be too high. It doesn’t follow, however, that he didn’t give cautious moral support to those who had retained the dre
am of one kingdom for the two islands.”
“Your friends in the Consortium? Maybe your man’s granda?”
“That’s a distinct possibility, Nul, one that would explain why Martin Longwood-Jones is on the list, even though, when you stop to think about it, it doesn’t sound like his cup of tea. He might be stuck with a duty of honor that has been passed on to him.”
“They’re odd people, but”—she was prepared to defend the descendants of the founders of Trinity College—“they’re as Irish as we are.”
“And maybe more Irish than we are.”
“That’s your favorite theory?”
“I don’t know. As I say, I don’t trust General Mulcahy at all. I can’t believe permanent exile was necessary.”
“Some of us Irish have long memories.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Is there a link between Casement’s gold and Collins’s death”—Nuala had put on her thinking cap and was in no rush to take it off—“besides the fact that Nell and Liam knew the truth of both events?”
Or maybe she merely wanted to see how I worked when I had my thinking cap on.
“The link, unless I totally misunderstand it, is what they don’t want me to learn. I won’t necessarily find it out here. Daniel O’Kelly, as we know, was involved in both projects, but he’s long dead and gone and I doubt that anyone would want to protect his reputation.”
“So maybe it all comes to the identity of the man in the car?”
“I’ve thought that for a long time, Nuala. We may never find out who he was. Or if we do find out, it may not make any difference after almost seven decades. Or we may never have even heard of him. He might have been someone who was well known in the Galway of 1922 but who means nothing to us. Or, if he were a cousin of Longwood-Jones’s twice removed, someone who doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Maybe.” She wasn’t convinced.
“What do you think, Nul?”
“I think that we’re dealing with eejits who don’t know the risks they take when they call back the dead, particularly at Sahmaintide.”
We had our tea—with wonderful homemade scones—in the lobby of the Old Grand Hotel in Ennis, a quaint and charming place where, it was alleged, the Clare Brigade of the lads used to meet in bygone days. (“Them Clare eejits.” Nuala dismissed the whole country and its citizens.) It was already dark, night coming early in these late-autumn months in northern Europe.
“The traffic should improve now that the working day is over.” I tried to sound cheerful.
“Sure, isn’t it still a long drive to Galway City and Carraroe beyond?”
“You can stay at the St. Catherine Hotel overnight.”
No kidding, that was the name of the “fancy hotel in Salt Hill” where Nuala proposed to put me. I suspected that her notions of “fancy” and mine might be different.
“I can not. If I’m that near me da and ma I’ll stay the night with them. I can take the bus from Salt Hill to Carraroe.”
“Not while you’re working for me.”
“I’ll not have you driving a Connemara road at night in a storm like this.” she insisted, “and yourself at the wheel all day with that wiper thing swishing back and forth and lulling you to sleep.”
The solution, I thought to myself as I gave up the argument, was that she would stay in Salt Hill, a resort suburb of Galway City on the road out to Connemara. I’d insist and argue and she’d agree finally that I was right.
With Nuala there’d always be arguments and herself giving up only when she was obviously wrong, which wouldn’t be too often.
As we chugged along the road through County Clare, we passed The Burren, the rocky land rushing down the Atlantic about which the poet laureate John Betjeman wrote when he spoke of the rocky land, “Where a Stone Age people breeds the last of Europe’s Stone Age race”—an imperialist metaphor if there ever was one.
I was able to see only the Clare highway and that dimly as the wipers labored futilely to sweep the windshield clear of rain. Beside me Nuala was sleeping, her face looking incredibly young when I glanced at it quickly. A shy child for all her verve and intelligence.
Except that being a people with a direct line to their own archaic roots made the Irish more important to the world instead of less. No British imperialist could possibly understand that.
I must stress that while I was sleepy, I did not fall asleep. I can sleep almost anywhere and under almost any circumstances and for any length of time, from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours.
I do not, however, fall asleep at the wheel of a car Never.
Mind you, I was close to it a number of times during that long, dark, and somber day.
I was awake, if not wide awake, when the accident occurred.
We were on the road from Dramore into Galway City, almost on the fringes of the city. Traffic had thinned out so that only an occasional pair of headlights assaulted my eyes as I peered through the rain searching for the proper side of the road.
I was thinking to myself that I should have decreed that we spend the night at the Old Ground in Ennis. It would have been sensible and reasonable. Nuala, however, wanted to sleep in her own bed.
Stubborn, contentious woman.
What happened next happened very quickly—in time shorter than it required for me to write the first part of this sentence.
Afterward I’ve tried to reconstruct it many times. Each time I’m sure there were two sharp retorts, both of them before I lost control of the car.
Tires don’t blow gaping holes in themselves in the rain on the road from Dramore to Galway, do they?
If there were two explosions, it was not an accident caused perhaps by a sharp rock on the road, but attempted murder.
Anyway, I heard, as best I can remember, a sharp sound and then another. Almost at once, the car began to grind and skid. I struggled with the wheel but it did not respond.
“Blowout! Blowout!”I yelled.
“Dermot!” Nuala awoke and threw her arms around me.
The Benz careened in one direction, hit something, and then caromed back across the road and plunged nosedown into a ditch. The last thing I can remember is that it heeled over on its side like a sailboat in a high wind.
Then the world went out.
–– 57 ––
“ARE YOU all right, lad?”
The most Irish face I had ever seen peered anxiously at me—a round, mobile, intense face of a man in his early sixties, ready to smile or grieve, to laugh or console, to pray or to denounce in a fraction of a second.
I blinked at the face. I hadn’t been out long, but where was I and who was this man with the Irish face and the black raincoat and beret?
A blowout! The front tire had blown out!
“Nuala!” I shouted.
“Still alive.” She sighed. “Next to you and grateful I was saying me rosary.”
“You were sleeping, woman!”
“I was not!”
“I think we’re all right, sir,” I said to the man in the beret.
“Call me Ed, call me Ed! Now, there’s nothing to worry about at all, at all. We’ll get this door open first thing,” he announced. “Make sure you can move all your limbs. We don’t want to hurt you worse if you’re injured. I’ll be calling the ambulance if we need one. Now don’t worry. Everything will be all right. Bejesus, your guardian angels were working overtime, weren’t they now?”
The car had heeled over on the side of the ditch, smashing one door and binding the other against the ditch. The crash had smashed the windows and the sunroof. The rain had swept in, drenching us.
I ached in every part of my body. However, my arms and legs seemed to be all right and I had no difficulty breathing.
“I guess I can navigate all right. What about you, Nuala?”
“I’m destroyed altogether”—she sighed—“but nothing is broken.”
“You have a nasty cut on your head, lad, but don’t think anything about it.” He pull
ed fiercely on the door. “Don’t give it another moment’s worry. We’ll take care of everything in a jiffy. Sure, the hospital is just down the road a bit. Now push hard against the door, if you don’t mind. Again. Aha, there it is now. Let’s see if we can get you out of there.”
He helped me out and we both gave a hand to Nuala, whose only complaint was that her brand-new jacket had been destroyed altogether.
“Have you the drink taken, lad?” Ed asked as I tried to walk and found that I still could.
“I have not,” I said, “except for a glass of sherry at lunch in Killarney.”
“I know.” Nuala backed me up. “Wasn’t I watching him real careful?”
He laughed a big, raucous, infectious laugh. “Well, I don’t know about you Yanks, but here in Ireland that’s not what we call the drink taken. I was wondering, and please pardon me for asking, because it’s none of me business and I’m not a Guard at all, at all. I saw you veer off the road suddenlike, and sure, didn’t I say a prayer as quick as I could and I’m wondering if the driver has the drink taken.”
“We had a blowout, Ed. It’s a good thing you prayed because it must have woke up the angels who are supposed to be patrolling this road on stormy nights.”
He shook with laughter. “Sure, aren’t they the most overworked angels in the world! Now take a few more steps just to make sure you are in good shape. Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll have a truck tow for your car first thing in the morning, and I’ll ring to the rental agency and we’ll have another one for you first thing. Are you all right, lass?”
“Me angel did a better job than the one who works for himself. I don’t even have a cut.”
“Well, then, good enough. We’ll just take you down to the hospital and have them take a wee look at you and then worry about where you’ll be staying for the night. Don’t give it another worry. We’ll take care of everything.”
“I don’t think we need a hospital, Ed.”
“Sure, it will do no harm at all, at all to be sure. And I’ll be calling the Guards and giving them an account of the accident and that’s a terrible big hole in your tire, isn’t it now? Your Michelins aren’t supposed to do that, are they? But they weren’t designed to deal with our Galway rocks, were they, lass? Now we’ll put you in my car and yourselves soaking wet and drive over to the hospital, won’t we?”
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