by Neil Jordan
What is?
The fact that he may have loved you.
That's a very large assumption.
Call it what you want.
She got up, suddenly, dispelling my hand.
He'll sleep now.
How can you tell?
He has his habits, like any child. Help me.
I left her in his room, settling him in the dark, the sound of waves outside. I walked back into the kitchen and saw the letter, where I'd left it by the windowsill. I opened it again and looked over its incomprehensible hieroglyphics. I caught the word "Scarlett." I knew that somewhere in the dark well of quantum physics, somewhere between the lines of Gone With the Wind, lay a code that would translate it. How appropriate, I thought, that he had written in a symbolic language that was indecipherable. Then I remembered his statement: that everything must be paid for. I felt a cold wind hit my spine and wondered what form my payment would take. I opened the grate of the range, placed the letter on the coals and watched it burn.
The next morning I took him for a walk again. It was fast becoming a ritual. I felt some expectancy in his shoulders as I pushed his wheelchair down the prom. There was a cold brisk spring wind and flecks of white on every wavecrest. The wind parted his beard in the middle, like a biblical patriarch.
So did you love her, father? I asked him.
But of course, I answered. I could almost speak for him now. I could imagine his voice, like an apologia inside me. So we walked and talked of her. Rose, in all of her manifestations. Teacher, wife, lover, nurse. We decided we relished them all. I moved up from the prom on the path round the Head towards Greystones, bumping his chair over the rocky ground so his head jerked back and forwards as if in agreement with my musings. We can exist, I told him, in the illusion of perfect harmony. I passed the nest of a hedge-sparrow and leaned the chair sideways so he could see the skyblue eggs. I pointed out a hawk to him, hovering at knee level by the cliff face. Nature seemed to complement our union. I told him about the Hitler-Stalin pact. He took this in with his familiar blankness, so I elaborated.
Don't you realise, I said, this means an end to all our arguments. Or to all argument. The beasts are in bed together. Or doesn't it make a difference? He stared at the metal plate of the sea below us and said nothing so I assumed it didn't.
I bumped him on to the smoother surface of the promenade. Figures passed us and nodded, elongated by the morning light. Then, approaching the house I saw a burly shape leaning by the railings. In the shadow of the houses, a bicycle propped beside him. I walked closer and saw a policeman's uniform, topped by a thatch of cropped red hair.
Grand day that's in it, he said, in a thick Kerry accent.
Thank God, I said. I pushed the chair past him, towards the door. He followed, and spoke again.
You received a letter yesterday.
I stopped and nodded. I felt a familiar shiver.
So you would be Donal Gore?
Yes, I said.
Rose opened the door. She looked from him to me to father. The policeman lowered his voice, conspiratorially.
When you're ready, sir, if you'd come with me.
I left father with Rose at the doorway, avoiding her troubled gaze. You'll be back by teatime, said the policeman softly, touching my elbow with one arm, holding the bicycle with the other.
He walked me to the train and took a seat by the window, his bike perched incongruously beside him. Great weather these days, he said, despite the bother over the water. I asked him was I under arrest and he shook his head, smiled sagely and winked. A couple of questions he said, that'll be the long and the short of it. When the train pulled into Tara Street he walked blithely with his bike from the carriage to the platform and out along the low wall by the Liffey. A grand wee country, he said, if they'd only leave us be. His cryptic statements seemed to demand agreement, so I agreed. The boys in the Castle, he said, have a great weight to bear.
The boys in the Castle turned out to be middle-aged with paunches, one with a small holster supporting his. We found them through a succession of low corridors, in a room without windows, lit by a gaslight. The guard who brought me stopped with his bicycle at the door, gestured me inside with a grimace of sympathy.
The thing is, one of the boys said, with no introduction, this will have to be investigated.
What will? I asked him.
The letter, said the second, the damned letter.
You will appreciate, said the first, we must keep an eye on things.
What things? I asked him.
Things from across the water, he said.
Absolutely, I agreed.
And your missive did cause quite a stir.
Am I to assume that it was opened?
Assume what you like, the second one said.
The thing is, the first one said, you'd never be up to the antics of that shower.
And what about the other shower? the second one asked. Sure they're even worse.
A silence fell as they contemplated the virtues of one shower or the other. I stood for a moment, then shuffled.
So what am I here for?
They both looked at me sharply, eyes birdlike, chins puffed beneath their collars.
To meet Mr Soames, the first one murmured. He nodded his head to his companion, who opened an inner door. There was a tallish gentleman sitting by the gas-jets of a fire, shoeless, the soles of his feet raised to the warmth.
Mr Gore, he said and rose and stretched one hand over a sea of papers. Pardon us for bothering you. But you will appreciate the situation you find yourself in is rather delicate and could be interpreted in a number of ways.
I told him I fully appreciated that.
We could make two assumptions, he said. We could assume this letter came to you as part of some prior arrangement, in which case your complicity in an implicit act of espionage will result in your spending the remainder of the war—or should I say the Emergency—in the Curragh Camp. You know the Curragh?
I pictured the row of drab huts surrounded by sheep off the road to Kinnegad and assured him I did.
Or, he said, we could assume that this missive came of its own volition, without any complicity on your part, in which case you can spend the remainder of the war in any way you choose.
I told him the latter was the case, and to contact one Jeremiah Noonan at the consulate in Barcelona, a small officious Corkman with rigid sartorial standards.
We have already done that, he said. We found that your stepmother contacted Foreign Affairs in Stephen's Green with a plea to intervene on your behalf in any way they could. The resultant contact led to a member of the Abwehr conducting you from your incarceration near Madrid.
He took a long breath. The detective behind me exhaled.
You'd never be up to them, he whistled between his teeth.
I myself favour the second assumption, Soames continued. Which in turn leads to two separate courses of action. One can ignore this and any subsequent missives—for I have no doubt that more will follow. Or one can act upon it.
He let the silence in the room speak for itself. He looked at me, then away. The first detective scraped his shin with his fingers and did likewise.
First, I ventured, and found myself copying his syntax, one would have to divine what the missive contained.
We have made some progress, he said and smiled softly. We consulted the professor of mathematics in Trinity College and found the key was Heisenberg's Leipzig paper on the uncertainty principle, published in 1927. Each equation is simply a reference to a page, a line and a word within that line. The only puzzle remaining is the colour code at the beginning.
Gone With the Wind, I said.
What? he asked.
Scarlett, I said. Scarlett O'Hara. And he calls himself Rhett.
And you, I am to presume, are Scarlett?
I nodded and found myself blushing.
He watched, enjoying my discomfiture. I broke the silence.
So what does
it say?
It's a request for Scarlett to make all possible contacts with the Republican movement.
I looked at the floor. I felt the same chill again.
Why would I do that?
Why indeed? he asked. But you must now appreciate the extreme delicacy of your situation.
I told him I more than appreciated it. He leaned his face close to mine. Young, but older than his years, his cheeks round and owl-like, belying his stature.
What we want you to do, Mr Gore, he said, is nothing. Just keep us informed.
Informed about what? I asked him.
Anything. Any subsequent missives that come your way. Any approaches to you from the movement. Anything and everything.
You want me to inform, I said.
In a word. The alternative is the Curragh.
He smiled, and stepped neatly into his empty shoes.
Here, he said, is a copy of Heisenberg's Leipzig paper. If you need any help with the mathematics, I am at your service.
Could it be, I wondered on the train back, that the coefficient of forces acting on any one moral choice would lead only towards betrayal? That the act of betrayal was now the moral one. I said the word to myself silently and lost myself in its resonances, its odour of bees, sand and lapping water. I would betray, having no alternative. But whom or what remained to be seen. I thought of father staring at the radiator, and Rose smoking by the range, and realised there were depths to the act I had yet to plumb.
Over the next few weeks I laid nightlines religiously morning and evening, bought more so the promenade became festooned with a string of hooks. I waited for word of those I might inform on or inform, but none came. To pass the time, I began selling what I caught. I found shops in the city who were glad of anything that slipped by the ration books. We ate the rest, and soon with the money I made I placed a down-payment on a boat, nets, lobster-pots, lines. Meat and vegetables being scarce, I sold everything the ocean gave me. I laid lobster-pots from Bray to Dalkey, supplied every eating-house from Jammet's to the local chippers. I would read him the news of the war each morning, then row out with the first light to empty the pots, use the net and lines all afternoon. I would play with her in the evening, my fingers, which I could never quite free of fish scales, moving with hers over the keys. He would sit in the kitchen, quietly vacant, listening to the notes that drifted round him. We became a family of a kind, a warped reflection of one, but at least a family. Outside of time, of the ferocious time that waged round the continent beyond us. After a while I hired a local boy to help me with the boat. We extended our reach to beyond the Kish lighthouse, covered the coast from Wicklow Head to Donabate. And with the cash the sea now gave to me in fistfuls, I bought Rose a dress.
She had never added to her wardrobe since I left. Eking out what was left of his pension, the only new garment I'd seen her wear was the smock she welcomed me back in. She was brushing flour from it in clouds with her hands when I made the suggestion. I was feeding him from his plate his now familiar dinner of smoked mackerel. Rose, I said, with a new and heady sense of possessiveness, let me buy you something. You buy us enough, she said, with that slight air of tetchiness she used to disguise embarrassment. No, I told her, I want to buy you something. You, Rose. She looked at me and blushed. What? she asked me. Anything, I told her. Whatever you need to lift your spirits. My spirits, she said, don't need lifting. Does that mean you're happy then, Rose? I asked. Father had finished the plate. He stared at the fork absentmindedly. Maybe, she said, blushing again. All the more reason, I said. And why are you blushing, Rose? Am I? she asked and blushed again.
I knew it had to be a dress, but let her lead to the suggestion. Any hint that her wardrobe was deficient would have driven her to silence, the kind of blush from which she wouldn't emerge for hours. So I fed him and listened, while she went from pots and pans to a music stand, a new coat for him, and eventually to what she so rarely allowed herself think of, herself.
We took the train, all three of us together. I lifted him from the platform with the help of two porters and sat him on the seaward side so the whole vista of the bay would be there for him. He shuddered when the whistle blew, and Rose gripped his hand as if to reassure him. I tried to share his perspective as the train drew off, and the cold light over the Vico Bay drifted through the clouds of smoke. Like a child, it seemed, each new turn of the rails intimated a different world. Did he remember, I wondered, the countless times he must have taken this journey into the Government Buildings in Kildare Street? And if he didn't, what would he remember of now.
O'Connell Street, when we reached it, was like a drab spinster at a sister's wedding. The Pillar stretched up into the summer haze, the Guinness barges lolled on the Liffey and some essential life seemed to have departed from it all. We walked through the thin passers-by to Clery's clock where a few sharp-suited youths waited for their women friends, dragging fast on cigarettes, checking their watches with the clock above them. Rose looked at the mannequin dresses and I pointed his wheelchair in the same direction. Their faces seemed to engage his, their eyes bright but unseeing, their perpetually smiling mouths.
Inside, the assistant presumed I was the husband. Rose, after her third dress, fell into that presumption too. She would emerge from the changing room and twirl for both of us but her eyes went to mine. Each one she tried on brought a new glow to her cheeks, as if instead of putting clothes on she was taking them off. She chose eventually, a whole outfit with cream and yellow stripes, as serene and buoyant as a deckchair on a hot afternoon. Then we walked together to the footwear department, and bought her a pair of laced high-heeled boots. A hat, I felt, would crown the afternoon. I wheeled father towards a room replete with hats, each suspended at head height like a bird frozen in space, and she followed, all pretence at reluctance having vanished. The dress having freed her body, the shoes giving it height and poise, it was the hat alone that let her soar. Perched on her head, her hair bound up beneath it, it was blue, like a kingfisher with a crescent of black lace at the front. I can't wear this, she whispered. Why are you whispering? I asked her and she glanced from the assistant to father, who was staring with intense concentration at a tailor's dummy. It seems, she said, profligate. Blame it on me, I said and tilted the hat slightly and drew her towards a mirror. She looked at herself, then away, then at herself again. She stared, then smiled and became reconciled to whatever elegance it gave her.
We emerged on to a cooler O'Connell Street, with the sun going down. Fingers of red were beginning to colour the sky beyond the Pillar. We were drab once more, as drab as the street but laden down with parcels. On the train back father looked at her with a kind of melancholy, or it could have been a trick of the light. Do you think he noticed? I asked her. Let's hope he didn't, she whispered, staring out the window at the blue swaths of Dun Laoghaire pier. Why do you say that? I asked, staring at the silver chrome of his wheels. I think you know, she said, with the kind of finality that made me realise I did.
She made dinner that night and lit candles, saying they were because of the blackout, as if to deny the hint of elegance they brought to the kitchen. I fiddled with the dials on the radio and found some dance music. You should wear your dress, Rose, I told her, as she served out the lobster I had caught the day before. No, she said, there'll be another time for that. The candles gave my father's face the gaunt look of church statues. We ate in silence, listening to Glenn Miller, when the broadcast was interrupted and Lord Haw-Haw's voice drifted through the room, the precise and mocking Anglo-Irish tones drawing a flicker of life from my father's eyes. We stared at each other as the voice droned on about Churchill's imminent defeat, the bombs that would thicken the air over London, and felt quite removed from it all. Her eyes had acquired that glow again, the serene Italianate blue of Renaissance paintings. I knew what she had referred to in the train and could feel the clouds of its imminent arrival. I told her about Hans, about the letter I'd received and my meeting in the Castle. Every word tho
ugh was an avoidance of the subject we couldn't broach. Will they intern you? she asked, and there was a sense of real fear in her voice. I doubt it, I told her, since they wouldn't have released me in the first place. So what do they want? she asked. To keep track of things, I told her, and described how the tall one had talked of the one crowd and then the other.
I wheeled father to bed after dinner, opened out his chair and settled him in it. She came into the room behind me, and I knew that everything was changing. She took out the dress from its wrapping, held it up to her body and turned to gauge my approval. Goodnight Donal, she said, her face tilted from the mirror as if waiting to be kissed. I knew if I'd acted on her implicit invitation, though, she would have denied its existence. So I left.
I lay awake for a long time. I heard the drone of an aircraft that must have lost its way, and wondered should I leave. As they were dependent on me now, leaving was out of the question and I wondered did I create that dependence with this in mind. There were no unselfish acts, I knew that now, and my continued presence there could only accentuate that sense of a hot, cloud-filled summer's day before a thunderstorm. I must have fallen asleep then because I opened my eyes some hours later to the sound of tapping on the window-pane. Mouse was the first thought that came to mind and I blundered from the bed to the window as if I was back on the night of my mother's funeral. I pulled back the curtains, half expecting to see the short-trousered form there, the tousled black mat of hair over the pale face. But there was an adult there in a khaki greatcoat with a fistful of pebbles, throwing them upwards. I opened the window and caught the last pebble he threw. Gore, he said, Donal Gore. Yes, I answered and knew the time for betrayal had come again. Be so kind, he said, as to come to the front.
He stood beyond the lip of the veranda as I opened the door, as if expecting to be let inside. Where can we talk? he asked as I closed the door behind me. Anywhere but here, I said. How about on the harbour wall?
Don't force me to be conspicuous, he said, but followed me anyway. How more conspicuous can you get, I asked, than throwing stones at a stranger's window at three in the morning? Two, he said. Ten past two.