Acts of Allegiance

by Peter Cunningham

  5

  WATERFORD

  March 1975

  Bobby squirmed and for a most uncomfortable moment I thought he was going to try to kiss me.

  ‘Your grandmother had asked me to go aboard and make sure you had the best cabin.’

  Outlandishly, after so long, I could still respond to the memory of his wife’s tongue with a degree of longing.

  ‘I grew up next door to the ship’s captain. He insisted I go on to the bridge for a half-one. We had a bottle downed when I looked out the porthole and saw you and Kate.’

  I sat back. ‘Bobby, with the greatest respect, that was almost twenty-five years ago. And you weren’t even married.’

  ‘We were engaged. She was wearing my ring. But, look, you were only a boy … ’ He shook violently and looked as if he might be about to cry again. ‘I never said anything to her. I was … I was afraid she’d … I didn’t want to lose her … ’

  And then he did cry with big, noisy gulps, into his sleeve, unable to look at me.

  ‘After that … even though we were married … we never … Every time I tried … I never could … ’

  ‘It’s all right, Bobby, it’s all right.’

  ‘I would have loved children,’ he sobbed. ‘I would have loved a little girl.’

  A week later, I rang Sugar from the Royal Hotel in Carlow. An hour later, she sat across from me in the hotel’s wood-panelled bar.

  ‘I want you to come home. I won’t bore you by apologising again, except to say that I have taken certain measures. You will find me changed. My mind is clear. I’m a free man, truly free. Everything you did was understandable. I would have done the same, I’m sure. What is easy for some men is difficult for me, something I didn’t realise when I was getting into all this. But I can’t live without you, because I love you. Give me one more chance.’

  She looked at me for such a long time that I thought it really was over. But then she reached across and took my hand. ‘I will, Marty,’ she said.

  Her mother never appeared the next day, a minor blessing. Later, at home, Sugar told me that part of the reason she had decided not to leave me permanently was that her late father, Canon Ferguson, had always spoken of me in terms of affection. Even when she had despaired of me, he had insisted that she try and see my good side. I said a quiet prayer of thanks to that country rector. He had also served two masters on the battlefield, God and man, which made us more alike than he could have ever known.

  Sugar and I resumed our lives in Dublin and Waterloo, although since Emmet went to school in Dublin, Waterloo was thought more of as a place for holidays. We never discussed the Dublin businessman, as if he had not existed, somewhat like the work I had left behind. Sugar came to me in bed without restraint, and told me one morning, when I mentioned the need for caution, that when we’d been separated she’d gone and had her tubes tied. I was flabbergasted.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I wanted my children to be only yours.’

  Why I should have felt deprived, I’m not sure, since she was depicting her action as having been made out of love for me, but I did. On the other hand, I had to balance this information with the numerous acts I had been involved in, and kept from her, over almost a decade, although none seemed as personal as a tubal ligation. I was not aware that I had wanted more children, but now the choice had been made for me.

  From Sugar’s point of view, my new dispensation, which is how I privately thought of it, was a success. It took me time to realise that I had nothing to hide, in the same way I had read how those who defeat the urge to suicide suddenly realise that there is nothing to despair. For a while I could imagine myself back as the carefree young farmer, living in his hilly outpost, his life stretching before him, just as the bounty of the land stretched into the distance beneath Waterloo.

  I bought a second-hand Land Rover, and a cob for Emmet. He and I shot rabbits in the foothills, and went to the seashore at Benvoy, outside Tramore, and once caught a sea bass off the rocks.

  6

  WATERLOO—DUBLIN

  January 1976

  I know exactly when I felt the tug. It was on Christmas Day in Waterloo, carving the goose, my wife and children and Nurse Fleming all wearing party hats, a decanter of wine glowing from the table, hoar frost on the window glass, the yawning presence of our mountain all around us. It took me over quickly, in less than a minute, sucked my breath from my chest and left me weak. I had to concentrate on the glistening bird flesh beneath my hands in order not to show my family that I had been seized by a primal craving.

  Over the days that followed, I put my condition down to an excess of well-being, something every man experiences from time to time, and tried to deal with it in bed with my wife. In early January, the weather turned rainy and I read books to regulate my mind, not that I disapproved of masturbation, but because masturbation did not work. The images became so insistent in their detail that every time I drank a whiskey I could see her face. How was this possible, I reasoned, when I was married to a beautiful woman without inhibitions? With whom I was deeply in love? The mother of my children?

  Even more puzzling was that, in our years of working together, I had never fantasised about her with such force, or seriously considered calling in the ancient promise she’d made on that faraway summer’s day. Nor had I essentially regarded her as other than a colleague with whom I was doing necessary, albeit irregular, work. Now I couldn’t rid myself of … I couldn’t even say it. It was as if I now needed her in a different way. Was I in love with her? How could I be? Making love to Sugar, I saw Alison’s perfect face, her knowing brown eyes; even as I bestrode my wife’s trim body, I yearned for Alison’s bulk.

  It was as if by the subtraction of the tasks she had formerly set me, whether in the simple relaying to her of classified information, or the more complex interactions she had designed with meticulous attention to detail, a want had been created in me that only she could satisfy. So used had I become to living in the shadow, that now, out in the sun, the direct light was more than I could bear. Simply, I was sick for the want of her. All in all, I suppose, a rather pathetic way of trying to explain why, one Monday in mid-January, I rang her.

  7

  COUNTY WICKLOW, IRELAND

  January—June 1976

  As I approached the cottage, I felt an apprehension far greater than I’d ever felt when I had reason to be fearful, for my adultery had not yet taken place and I was simply on the way to meet an old family friend. Part of my anxiety was without foundation, but nonetheless centred on Iveagh House finding out that I was having an affair with, or about to have an affair with, a high-ranking official in the British Embassy, as if they would somehow find more to disapprove of in a sexual than in an intelligence betrayal.

  The address to which she had directed me was in a county I knew little, a mile outside a village I’d never been to. I had no idea whose house it was, or if she used it often. Rainwater spilled from the gutter and ran down the faded brickwork. Someone had left a wheelbarrow of weeds on the lawn the previous summer, where it now stood, drenched and rotten. Her car was parked around the side. I rang the bell.

  Light spilled down the hall as the front door was opened. She seemed, as always, to know exactly what I needed, for she stepped towards me and in an instant we were kissing with abandon. I’m not proud of this, but I’m not ashamed of it either. As if we’d spent our whole lives waiting, we lurched, half-entwined, upstairs, dropping clothes as we went, and made as one for the large double bed that filled almost the entire space at the upper level.

  Later, as we drank tea, a cat that must have climbed the trellis outside was sitting on the sill of the bedroom window. ‘It must have seen everything,’ I said, and we laughed.

  ‘Don’t you like cats?’

  In so many ways she was like a cat: calculating, pleasure-seeking and ultimately quite dangerous.

  ‘We never had cats,’ I said. ‘I mean in Waterloo. But I remember them in Fowler St
reet. Iggy liked them.’

  She looked at me in mild surprise, as if I’d broken a fundamental rule. I got out cigarettes and we smoked them with an ashtray between us, until eventually I could take the cat’s scrutiny no more and went and shooed it away.

  ‘You’re full of surprises,’ she murmured as I returned to bed. She ran her finger over an old scar on my rib cage. ‘Looks like you were tortured. Were you?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Kenya?’

  ‘Collateral damage.’

  ‘We are all damaged in some way, aren’t we?’

  She told me that the cottage belonged to a cousin of Christopher’s, a woman who lived in London and owned an art gallery. She seldom came to Ireland and had given Alison and Christopher the key.

  ‘Where is Christopher?’ I asked, as if he came under the heading of damage.

  Alison snorted. ‘Back in London. Has been for nine months.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘How could you?’

  ‘Is he …? Are you divorcing?’

  ‘I’m not sure if I can be bothered, to be honest, and I dare say he lacks the energy in that as in all other things.’

  ‘He had a job here.’

  ‘Even Whitehall cannot persuade a commercial bank to indefinitely employ an incredibly ineffective, lazy man. He’s trying to get into some sort of consultancy or other. How is Sugar?’

  ‘Very well, thanks.’ I started another cigarette. ‘My mother died last month.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry,’ Alison said. ‘I didn’t know whether I should mention it.’

  ‘Why would you not?’

  ‘None of my business, is it?’

  I looked at her. ‘You English really are different to us.’

  ‘Maybe in some ways,’ she said and licked my ear, ‘but not in others.’

  ‘I’m glad of that.’

  I had never met anyone like her, which of course had always been the case, but the impression was further enlarged by our new relationship. In the months that followed, always meeting in the same place, when we made love as if our lives depended on it, she never once demanded anything of me in the form of promises, or that I would leave my wife, or even that there would be a next time. One day, as we lay in each other’s arms and I felt the luxurious weight of her breasts against me, I said, ‘I think I love you’, to which she replied, ‘You don’t love me the way you think you do.’ The Provos had again bombed London, maiming dozens and causing havoc, but we never referred to it. Warm sunshine poured in the upstairs windows, drenching us bountifully, making us feel that we’d been picked out for some sort of celestial affirmation.

  She was a woman for whom pleasure arose chiefly from what was in her power to give. It wasn’t better with Alison than with Sugar—it was different. I was infatuated in a way that puzzled me, since at home with my wife, when we lay sweat-soaked in the aftermath of making love, I was happy. But with Alison an additional ingredient existed. She was Alison.

  A desperation began to taint the edge of our trysts, since she mentioned that there would soon be a new ambassador, and that she herself would in all likelihood be transferred. She told me this as she lay on me, warmly, softly, her large supple body flexing minutely as she sought to rouse me once more, the point of her long tongue pouncing on the tiny pools of flesh at the base of my ears. I fancied I could hear the blood rushing back to my groin. And so could she, for she began to slide down my big frame with the ease of a mermaid, her tongue circling my hard nipples, her lips wet through the forest of my stomach, her pauses innate with wisdom, until the covers were thrown back and she presented her face to me in profile as her lips worked me in unison with her fist.

  As the weeks went by, her posting became the dominant issue. When, in early May, she told me that once she had read the new man into his job, she was being assigned to Washington, we hugged like two people in a cart on their way to the guillotine.

  8

  DUBLIN

  June 1976

  Alison had been busy for almost two weeks with her new ambassador, someone I was beginning to resent, since his hectic schedule had put an end to our afternoons in County Wicklow.

  ‘What about tomorrow?’ I asked her, on the phone.

  ‘Not a chance.’ She sounded breathless. ‘This man must never sleep—wants me to work every evening. I’m staying in the embassy residence most nights.’

  ‘Next week then?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I know he has to go to London for a briefing, so maybe. I’ll call you.’

  I was disappointed, since it seemed like an opportunity lost and neither of us had an idea what we would do when she left for Washington. Her departure would, of course, simplify matters, but I feared for myself in her absence.

  I spent the weekend in Waterloo, with Sugar and the children, took the Monday off and we barbecued by the lake. On Tuesday morning, the weather was so good that I called in sick, and returned to Dublin later in the Land Rover on my own, and sat out in the garden with Schubert turned to full volume on our new cassette deck, drinking enough to take the edge off my need. I wondered if I resumed my intelligence services to Alison, or her successor, if that would deal with my physical craving—but if I did, would Sugar not come to suspect it? Would I not smell of subterfuge all over again? The next morning, at nine-thirty, I arrived into Iveagh House, drank coffee, sat in on a routine meeting about the political aspects of proposed changes to the Common Fisheries Policy, returned to my office on the second floor, opened the windows that overlooked Iveagh Gardens with its carefree summer students, wondered briefly what it would be like to be eighteen again and answered my telephone. It was nearly eleven o’clock.

  It was Bill O’Neill. ‘Marty, there’s been a bomb.’

  Sugar drove the children and Fleming back to Dublin. That evening we huddled together, watching the nine o’clock news. My feeling was one of eerie detachment, as if this was all happening thousands of miles away to people I had never met. I couldn’t speak, and even had I been able to, I don’t know what I would have said. The government had declared a state of emergency.

  ‘I’m sorry for the things I said about her,’ Sugar said. ‘Nothing would ever make me wish for this.’ Like a man listening for the door latch, I tried to work out what she knew. ‘I’ve spoken to Christopher,’ she said. ‘He’s devastated. You read about it the whole time and it means nothing, then something like this happens to someone you know. All I can think of is the four of us going to the pictures together, or in Waterloo having a picnic, or out walking in Kerry. Her poor children.’

  I must have looked stunned, which I was, although my mind was like a fretful dog, running to check each part of its squalid enclosure, darting to the points of possible weakness, doubling back, rechecking, caught within the confines of its shabby world. Gradually, the details became known, from the news bulletins, and from unofficial briefings. The ambassador’s car, a Jaguar with an armour-plated underbody, had collected him from Dublin Airport shortly before ten that Wednesday morning, travelling in a four-vehicle convoy that was headed, with appalling irony, for the building in which I worked. It was to be the ambassador’s introductory meeting with our minister, an arrangement Alison had not told me of, so I assumed it had been arranged since we had last spoken. A senior civil servant had sat up front beside the driver. The new ambassador and Alison were in the back. A back-road route had been chosen, known only to the embassy and the Gardaí. Less than two miles along this quiet country lane, a bomb of lethal force, concealed in a culvert, was triggered. The Jaguar was directly hit.

  She was laid to rest two weeks later, not far from their holiday home on Caragh Lake, the place Christopher said she loved the most. He was pitiful, a man of my own age, but who could easily have passed for sixty, overweight, ruined by drink, cuckolded even if he didn’t know it, unemployed and now bereaved. What would have happened, I kept asking myself, if all those years before I had not been offered a job in the Department of External Affai
rs? Alison and Christopher would still have married, of course, and had children, but I would have been in Canada, peddling chicken feed to support my family and not standing in a cemetery in County Kerry, grieving more than I could ever show.

  9

  DUBLIN

  September—November 1976

  The sense of failure was enormous. Our security services were inept, our intelligence inadequate, our response to the murder of the ambassador and a good woman predictably hysterical. The fact that the Provos had been tipped off as to the route from the airport by someone inside our security services didn’t bear thinking about. Thousands of Gardaí and army personnel had their leave cancelled and spent fruitless man hours in a hunt for killers they knew would never be apprehended. The emphatic assurances of the Taoiseach that those responsible would be brought to justice sounded hollow even to those who wanted to believe him. Any betting man with even half an idea of how things worked in Ireland would have had money on the outcome: no one would ever stand trial for Alison’s or the ambassador’s death.

  I knew I had myself to blame, for if Armagh had gone to plan two years before, there was a chance this might not have happened. His handwriting was all over it. The precision of the blast, the clinical efficiency of the bomb. I spent weeks trying to come to terms with this new conflict: he had taken from me something beyond love. As if he had blown me up too. All of which, of course, was muddled, since I had always known what I was getting into and that Alison was no innocent, but had been part of a potent intelligence apparatus that threatened everything he stood for.

  And me? Just a minor player with whom history had not yet adequately dealt. But soon would, I expected, even as I hoped against hope that I was wrong. I was trapped in a seething kind of phoney peace that I could discuss with no one, until, in the second week in September, at eight on a Monday evening in Sandymount, the private line in my study rang and I answered it.