‘What if I plump for Donald?’ I said.
Cormode’s big pointed nose twitched.
‘I suppose what you’d really like,’ he said, ‘is to see your friend Keig heading the movement.’
And I realized suddenly that this was indeed what I would have liked. Cormode must have spotted the reaction.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘personally I feel Keig somehow had a raw deal. If things go right, I have a feeling I could bring him in again.’
Or, how about voting for Cormode?
‘I doubt if even you could pull that off,’ I said.
And when it came to it I left my voting slip blank.
It would have made no difference. Cormode had engineered himself, it turned out, a two-vote victory.
However, despite the little help I got, the Anniversary Meeting was an enormous success, even to the point of the crowds’ enthusiasm causing the local citizenry spontaneously to collect huge amounts of loose change. And it was while I was busy stowing this away in a variety of too thin paper bags and sagging cardboard boxes at the back of a van I had borrowed that a quiet voice came from behind me.
‘Can you spare a minute?’
The note of request was unfamiliar, but the burr was instantly recognizable.
I lurched round in my crouching position in the low-roofed van.
‘Keig,’ I said. ‘Come and have a drink, or a cup of tea.’
‘No. This’ll do. No one’s about. I’ve been watching my chance.’
‘Well, all right, if you’re so keen to keep out of the way. Come in and sit beside me.’
I humped myself down and Keig hoisted himself into the van and, in spite of his girth, settled neatly down among the bags and boxes.
‘What I wanted to say was this,’ he began in a low voice. ‘I’m not far off starting preparations now. Will you join in with me after all?’
I did not hesitate a second.
‘Of course.’
5
So I threw in my lot with Keig again. The pull had been there all along, however much it had got buried by my doubts—or fears—about the way he had dismissed all the weight of opinion contrary to him over how to fight Mr Mylchraine. The mere fact that he had climbed down was all that was needed to send scattering aside the debris of respect for conventional wisdom that had temporarily hidden the invisible bond tying me to him.
It turned out too that I was not to become involved in any dilemma of loyalty. Cormode was master of the exile movement now and liked to show it. So it was easy for me to relinquish my various responsibilities. Soon I even took pleasure in passing on to Clifford Willine the odd occasional commission to write something about Tear—a pretty feeble job he made of that too.
So in place of sitting battering at my typewriter, making telephone calls and shuffling about bits of paper I went marching.
This was Keig’s idea. He told me bluntly that anyone going into Oceana with him would need to be in really good fettle and that I was not. So we marched. In the evenings, while the nights slowly drew in, out in the Dublin Mountains, mile upon mile. At first it was just the two of us, but before long there were others busy also in the ‘military drill’ that Keig had advocated, and been mocked over, in the Swedenborgians’ hall nearly two years before.
One of the first to come was Donald Fayrhare. I was a good deal surprised to see him. I would have thought the ex-lieutenant-commander in him might have jibbed. But we were going to need someone to handle a vessel at sea, and Donald had certainly shown up well in the attack on the landing-craft, so I imagine Keig must have gone out of his way to persuade him. However, during the whole of that evening, and afterwards, I never once detected Donald trying even so much as to assume an air of equality. He simply waited for orders and then obeyed. And Keig, as simply, gave the orders. I handed it to both of them.
Bit by bit our small band grew until fifteen of us were under training. We were an odd lot, but Keig was determined that nothing should get to the ears of the talkative crew in Caveen’s Bar. So he recruited only those he satisfied himself he could trust. We even included a barber, a tubby middle-aged chap called Francis Crowe who worked at one of the big Dublin hotels. He was the last man you would have thought of as a freedom fighter, inexorably pompous of manner, always well-manicured and neat-haired, and noticeably plump in the hips.
I questioned him one Sunday morning after we had been doing a spell of rifle drill about how Keig had picked on him.
‘You were never one of the crowd at Caveen’s, were you?’ I asked.
‘Well, no,’ he answered. ‘Rather inclined to the noisy, some of those people, if you get my meaning.’
‘Then where did you meet Keig.’
He smirked a little.
‘It was a funny thing, really. He came into my salon, you know. Of course, he wasn’t wanting a haircut. I believe his wife does that for him. But he was with a foreign sort of gentleman in a great hurry who intimated he needed a quick trim between planes.’
I suspected this must have been a ‘merchant-of-death’ arms salesman, no less.
‘And Keig?’ I asked.
‘Ah, now that was peculiar if you like. I had just finished my gentleman and he had hurried off. Very generous tipper, if I may say so. And then Mr Keig came up. “You’re from Oceana, aren’t you?” he said. Just like that. No what you might call preliminaries. Well, you know Mr Keig.’
He looked over to where Keig was carefully replacing our rifles in their long wooden crates.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘he must have seen the copy of the old Messenger I had in my pigeonhole. I still get it every week. Keeps one in touch, if you know what I mean.’
‘And on the strength of you being Oceanan he recruited you?’
‘Oh, dear me, no. Mr Keig is a great deal more careful than that. I mean, he asked me first of all why I didn’t mingle with the others. I told him I didn’t think they were all of them a nice class of person. Somewhat irresponsible, I said. And then he asked me what I meant by that, and I told him “Too much talk and not enough do.” Those were my very words.’
‘And then did he recruit you?’
‘Well, yes. In a manner of speaking you might say, yes.’
He sprang suddenly into a fighting stance and went through the motions of loading a rifle. Oddly enough, he adored drill—though I sometimes wondered if he would not have preferred the orthodox sort to Keig’s very practical kind.
But all Keig’s training methods were relentlessly practical, only making me wonder when it would be that we would put them to use. Of that, Keig told me nothing.
‘When only one fellow needs to know a thing,’ he said to me once, ‘then if no one but him is told it won’t get out.’
Yet it was clear that progress was being made. There were occasions when I expected to be made to run up those hills and was not called out. I imagined then that Keig was away making arrangements.
In point of fact, when the time came I did get a little advance warning, thanks to my acquaintance with Keig’s peculiarities. By the middle of February our training was taking the form of exercises combining marching for miles along the deserted stony mountain roads, going up the side of a hill at a run till its slate-blue summit became so much scrawny heather under our noses, perhaps crossing the little River Dodder once or twice and ending with a bout of airgun shooting, popping away at a peeled white stick set against a dark clump of gorse, surrounded as often as not by a ring of curious black-faced sheep. It was at the finish of one of these trials that I got my privileged glimpse ahead.
About half an hour before sunset we had halted by a mound of stacked turf from a peat-bog seeking some shelter from the piercing wind. Keig was the last to arrive, having shepherded us from behind during the final stages. He came at a steady jog-trot swinging his old long-handled axe. Then about fifteen yards away he stopped and I saw him consult the impressive wristwatch he had appeared with one day shortly after our training had begun. I suppose he had set us, and him
self, some secret target time. And apparently we had achieved it. Because suddenly that axe went twirling high up against the faded yellow of the winter sunset sky. At the top of its trajectory it hung for a moment like a thin Indian-ink stroke and then it fell back into Keig’s waiting hands. He threw it only once, but I knew then our moment had come.
The others had to wait a little longer to learn the news, and they heard it in a characteristically terse fashion.
‘See you don’t have anything to do after March the fifth,’ Keig said as we prepared to leave. ‘We’ll be off soon after.’
I sensed the others were abruptly experiencing the same dry-mouthed hollow-stomached exhilaration as I had. They hardly exchanged a look, but I could see they were all suddenly aware of each other and of every detail of our surroundings—the sodden piled billets of chocolate turf, the low pit of the bog darkly gleaming with collected rainwater, the dull stretches of winter heather and distant Kippure almost black at the summit against the now metallic yellow of the sky.
Only Fred Quiddie, the cock-sparrow motor mechanic who had helped bring the launch back from Oceana, was unable to resist saying something.
‘Blast that, the fifth of March,’ he quipped. ‘And me with such a dolly lined up you never saw.’
‘You and your dollies, Fred,’ said one of the others. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t another couple at least ready and waiting before then.’
Fred’s cheeky chubby face split in a grin.
‘And who said I haven’t?’ he replied. ‘Or one anyhow. But she’s no picture, just one of my regulars.’
I was a little surprised at this revelation of the tubby Fred as an active Don Juan. But you never can tell.
Keig was apparently more than surprised. I had thought he had been paying no attention, but he swung round sharply.
‘Dollies?’ he said. ‘You mean women? You mean he goes with women?’
Fred, in face of his friend’s obvious embarrassment, came forward to his own defence.
‘Well, what if I do like a girl when she’s willing?’ he said. ‘You don’t have to be a monk to go and fight Mylchraine, do you?’
‘You don’t have to go blabbing to a lot of women about just what you’re doing,’ Keig answered. ‘Do you want the same welcome from Mylchraine we got last time?’
Fred’s cheerful face looked almost comically upset.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know you had objections.’
‘I have,’ Keig shot back.
He turned to the rest of us.
‘I want none of it when we’re on the island. Do you hear that?’
‘All right,’ Fred answered for us, standing glowering down at his mud-caked boots.
But, unusually for Keig, that was not the end of it. Donald Fayrhare took us both back to Dublin in his small sports car, and after sitting in silence most of the way Keig suddenly barked out a question.
‘Did either of you know about it?’
‘What about?’ I asked, hardly believing he was harking back to that scene.
‘About Quiddie.’
‘I knew nothing,’ I replied. ‘Did you, Donald?’
‘Not a thing, old boy. Fred’s a nice enough chap, but we don’t have all that much in common.’
‘All the same,’ I went on, ‘I’m really so surprised looking back: it fits in with his general outlook.’
‘I ought to have seen that,’ Keig commented, unexpectedly bitterly.
‘I can’t say I hold it against him,’ I answered quickly. ‘Poor chap, if it’s his favourite sport, he won’t get much of it soon.’
‘I’m not certain he’s to come,’ Keig said.
‘But why?’
‘It’s bad. The way we’re going to be on the island, mixing with people. He’ll fall for a pair of legs one day and next thing we know the Keepers’ll be all round us.’
I thought about this as the car zipped along the wide Bray road, even wondering if it had not exposed a twisted anti-sex root deep in Keig’s nature. But when I remembered Margaret and the almost throbbing attraction I had plainly noticed between them I abandoned that line.
‘You know,’ I said at last, ‘unless I’m very badly out, Fred took your warning to heart just now. You realize he’s looked up to you as if you were a god ever since you pulled him out of the sea?’
‘Yes,’ said Keig, acknowledging a fact.
He was silent for a little. The lights of Dublin grew near.
‘All right,’ he said suddenly. ‘We’ll take him.’
We took Fred when the day came. But it was characteristic of our enterprise that we also took someone we had not expected to, ex-Sergeant Jack Ascough. Circumstances arose on the very eve of our departure that even Keig’s meticulous planning had not catered for: one of our party caught flu, badly. He could have been dispensed with, except for one thing. He had been chosen for his knowledge of radio to look after the old secondhand transmitter that was to be our way of keeping in touch with the outside world. I visited the bedside with a decidedly worried Keig and it was obvious the fellow was unfit even to get up, let alone face the next hazardous hours. As we left, Keig’s face was so withdrawn in thought I wondered if I ought not to guide him down the stairs. But suddenly he turned to me.
‘Will Ascough be at Caveen’s still?’
For a moment I did not catch on. Then I remembered: Ascough had been a signals sergeant.
A glance at my watch.
‘Fifteen minutes till closing time, he’ll be there.’
And we found him and Keig talked him into coming, and keeping quiet about it, all within the space of half an hour.
Poor Ascough, I imagine he must have regretted his decision more than once during our journey to Oceana. Because not only had Keig elected to go in the stormy days of March instead of the summer trip we had had for our previous attempt, but he had also decided to make his landfall not on the smooth beaches north of Lesneven but on the far coast, the one that faced the unbroken Atlantic with a long chain of spiky, carved-up, monstrously-shaped granite mountains. They used to say there was nowhere in its whole length where you could be sure of landing even a rowing-boat, but at low tide there were in fact plenty of patches of granite-chip sand—though generally as little as five or ten yards long—hidden between spikes of jagged grey rock. And Keig had built his hopes on finding one of these large enough to beach the old captured launch which he had kept all along quietly concealed in remote Courtmacsherry Bay.
But it was a terrible voyage out to that coast, despite the seasickness pills that Keig had unexpectedly issued to us—a tip taken, I wondered, from the British general’s memoirs I had once seen him read.
And the end of the journey was worse than any of us had foreseen, even at its most storm-tossed moments. We had spotted our tiny beach and Donald had magnificently steered us through a thunderous fury of water to within a few yards of it.
I remember thinking: We’re going to do it after all. We have done it.
And as I formed the words the grey sand ahead was, it seemed whipped right away from us.
I looked round. Towering distorted granite cliffs were bearing down at us from either side behind: we had been caught and swept backwards in some vicious, powerful, channelled tide-race against which our engine was helpless.
Keig, you fool.
The words were the only thing in my mind.
And then a great breaker came riding from our rear. In an instant it completely reversed our direction.
Saved, I thought.
We whirled towards the little beach. And on to rocks.
It needed only a touch. One rending jar on our side. And then the green water was tumbling in and the launch’s deck simply disappeared beneath us.
As the great mass of sea came up into my face I struck out desperately. Water filled my mouth. I longed for air. I felt weak as a kitten, mewingly moving string-soft limbs. Slow thoughts blossomed in my mind, thoughts about the expedition, Keig, his intransigeance, his appa
lling self-confidence.
But, miraculously, that period of sheer hopelessness lasted hardly a minute. And then I felt my wavering legs thump hard on to something firm. I reached forward and in an instant my arms were half-buried in wet shifting sand. I clung to the treacherous stuff with all my might as the undertow began tugging at me, and when at last it relaxed again I found I was still holding on to something semi-solid. I scrabbled slowly forward. There was no more water. I got to my feet and stumbled on, determined to take myself out of this sea’s clutches for ever.
And at last I realized that I must be safe.
I turned round. The edge of the surf was some fifteen yards away, a seething squabbling barrier tossing the remains of the launch—I had a glimpse of the Oerlikon gun—like so many baubles. But unable to touch me now.
And with the cool relief of this thought there came my first unselfish feelings. What had happened to the others?
I took a wild glance to either side. There were figures there, in the surf, emerging from the surf, lumbering, differently coloured oilskin-clad figures. I counted. Four on one side, five to the other. And now three more. Thirteen including myself. All but two of us. Who was missing then? Standing looking back at the tempestuous fury from which I had escaped and from which the others now looked completely safe, I tried to work out who had been wearing what coloured oilskins. We had joked about what a motley collection we were as we had put on the cumbersome garments. But who was missing? Yes, that was it: Ascough.
And in that instant I realized what my mind had been subconsciously balking at: Keig’s black oilskins were not there.
A sense of desolation swept through me. He had landed us in spite of everything, but without him it would be no good. That was all there was to it. No good, hopeless.
And then I saw him. He was crouching low, far out in the fury of the surf, the broad black shape. And like a yellow sash across his shoulder there was Ascough’s limp body.
I ran without thinking down the squelchy sea-soaked coarse sand towards the surf. But when the snake-like undertow caught my feet I stopped. I could not go forward.
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