Reckless

by William Nicholson

  When they reached the prime minister’s office Mountbatten went in alone. Rupert stayed in the outer office. After a while Philip de Zulueta came out, with a list of people for the PM’s secretary to bring in for a meeting.

  ‘I know it’s the weekend, Monica. The PM says no one’s to panic. Keep it calm.’

  He saw Rupert sitting on the side of a desk, smoking.

  ‘You up to date with the news?’ he said with a thin smile. ‘There’s good and there’s bad.’

  ‘I heard they started shooting.’

  ‘Khrushchev’s put an offer on the table. He’ll pull the nukes out of Cuba if the Americans pull theirs out of Turkey.’

  ‘Well, Jesus!’ exclaimed Rupert. ‘That’s a deal we can do. The Jupiters are coming out next summer anyway.’

  ‘You’re not a politician, are you?’ said de Zulueta.

  ‘So what’s going to happen?’

  De Zulueta shrugged.

  ‘I wouldn’t make any plans for the weekend.’

  He went back into the meeting, closing the door behind him. Rupert lit another cigarette and smoked it in silence. He thought of Mary in Ireland. Maybe her great wind was coming after all. Maybe the sinful world was about to be swept away by the righteous anger of the Lord.

  He felt frightened, and powerless, and stupid.

  You do your job under the illusion that you have some influence, that your opinions matter. You scurry about gathering information, analysing it, producing conclusions. And all it achieves is precisely nothing.

  I have a position without power, advising a military establishment without power, in a nation without power. Whether we live or die is outside our control. We could all go fishing. It would make no difference.

  Suddenly Rupert had a vision of his entire life as if illumined by a brilliant white light. In this brutal glare he saw that all his efforts as adviser to the Chief of Defence Staff, which he had presumed applied reason, even wisdom, to the key decisions of the day, were in aid of something else entirely. It was all to foster in himself the belief that he was necessary. This was the true drive: not world peace, or national security, but the vital importance of the life and work of Rupert Blundell. It was almost comical once you saw it. The youthful dream, standing on the terrace at Cliveden, of putting an end to war. The moralistic huffing and puffing, all designed to say: look at me! I matter! I’m important, aren’t I?

  Because of course the truth is none of us matter. Not me. Not Mountbatten. Not Macmillan. We’re all spectators.

  He thought of the attack plan in the event of war. The Vulcans would go first, and drop their bombs. Then the Thor missiles would be launched, to hit the same targets. The Vulcan crews knew they had little chance of making it back. Even now, the crews would be playing cards in the huts on the airfields, in full flight gear, on Quick Reaction Alert. What did they say to their wives and children as they left home this morning?

  Beyond that door men who believed themselves to hold the fate of the nation in their hands were finding ever more elaborate ways of deciding to do nothing. In the bright light of his vision Rupert saw that they were all powerless, and their lives were of no significance. How are we to live with this knowledge?

  He saw then how limited his own philosophical explorations had been. He had gone a little way, in understanding that each of us is fundamentally alone. That had seemed to him brutal enough. But he had hardly begun. We’re not just alone. We’re without meaning. Without value.

  We are each of us a cluster of atoms, blown together by random winds, tugged about for a while by the balloon of our vanity. Perhaps this is why we stumble from war to war. Lacking any true purpose we breed ourselves enemies. Driven by fear, we wreak destruction. Those who survive call themselves victorious. Then the wind blows, and the atoms are dispersed again.

  And yet here we are, courting the illusion that our lives matter. We have no choice but to live as if what we do makes a difference. So we live two lives at once. In one we are the lord of our little universe, and the wider world exists to serve us. In the other we are specks of dust.

  ‘Hello, Rupert.’

  A middle-aged woman stood before him. She wore a grey suit, and spectacles, and had her hair in a tight bun.

  ‘It’s Joyce. Joyce Wedderburn.’

  ‘Joyce!’

  He hadn’t recognised her. The passing years had not been kind to her. She had thickened, in face and body, so that she looked now as if the old Joyce had been coated in layers of a putty-like substance.

  ‘Still with Dickie?’ she said.

  ‘As ever. He’s in there.’

  He nodded at the closed door.

  ‘I’ve gone back to work. I’m on the War Book, with Beryl Grimble.’

  She deposited a file on Monica’s desk.

  ‘Bad show,’ she said.

  ‘Bad as it gets,’ said Rupert.

  ‘Funny to think that out there they have no idea, really.’

  Rupert was recalling what he’d heard of Joyce’s life since he’d last known her. Marriage. Children.

  ‘How’s the family?’ he asked her.

  ‘Blissfully ignorant,’ she said.

  She took out a snapshot and showed it to him. A drab-looking middle-aged man with a drab-faced girl beside him.

  ‘That’s Geoff. And that’s our Sally.’

  ‘I told you it would all work out for you, Joyce.’

  ‘And for you, I hope, Rupert.’

  ‘Well, no snapshot to show you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Really?’ She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘I was sure someone would have scooped you up by now.’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I should have come back for another shot.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, do you remember our one date in Kandy? When you got cold feet and practically ran away?’

  Rupert stared at her.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘At that Chinese restaurant in Kandy. We were chatting away, and our conversation got the tiniest bit personal, and I saw it on your face. You were terrified I was going to go all sweet on you. You just switched off, like a light going out.’

  ‘No, Joyce. You’ve got it all wrong.’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter now. It was awful at the time, but it’s all years ago. I can laugh at myself now. You must have thought me such an ass.’

  Rupert found himself in a state of agitation.

  ‘Listen, Joyce. I have to get this right. Are you telling me that when we had that horrible Chinese meal in Kandy you were hoping it might lead to something more between us?’

  ‘Of course I was. Why do you think I was there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Friendliness, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, Rupert! I’d been making eyes at you for months. But I never really expected it to go anywhere. I mean, let’s face it, I’m no oil painting.’

  Rupert found himself speechless.

  ‘But you see, you’re quite right. Geoff came along. I wouldn’t say he’s quite in your class, but he’s made me very happy. And then there’s Sally. She’s fourteen now. Doing well at school. So all’s well that ends well. Unless this war happens, of course.’

  She darted forward and gave Rupert a peck on the cheek.

  ‘For old times,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a cup of coffee one of these days.’

  She left. From the back, moving briskly, head held high, she looked like the old Joyce again.

  ‘Old flame, eh?’ said Monica.

  ‘In a way,’ said Rupert.

  He was overwhelmed by the realisation of how his life could have been so different. The smallest alteration in the past, a different look, a different word, and he could have been married to Joyce all these years. The change in her appearance which had so struck him would have taken place imperceptibly, day by day. He would be the man in the snapshot.

  It was an impossible thought to take in. The actual life he had lived presented itself so strongly as t
he only possible life he could have lived. But it wasn’t true. Even as he had been telling himself that he was no more than a helpless cluster of atoms borne hither and thither on the wind, Joyce had walked in to prove him wrong.

  We make our own destiny. If I’m alone, then somehow, for some reason, that’s the life I’ve chosen.

  The meeting in the PM’s office now broke up. The door opened and the Foreign Secretary came out, with Sir Thomas Pike, Chief of the Air Staff. Mountbatten followed, with Macmillan.

  ‘Nothing that looks like mobilisation,’ the prime minister was saying. ‘Just keep it all as low-key as possible.’

  Walking back with Rupert, Mountbatten said quietly, ‘It’s not looking good.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Kennedy told Harold last night that if he doesn’t receive the right assurances from Khrushchev in the next twenty-four hours, he’s going in.’

  ‘What do we do then?’

  ‘It all depends on the Russians. If they retaliate against West Berlin, we’re in the mess whether we like it or not. We have Operation Visitation on standby. There’s a Cabinet meeting scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. If the PM hits the button then, we go to Precautionary Stage. That means helicopters on Horse Guards Parade, and we’re all off to Turnstile.’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘My only consolation is that once we’re down in that god- awful quarry, Harold can’t give the order for nuclear retaliation unless I put my code alongside his.’

  Rupert didn’t ask the obvious next question. What could the man say?

  ‘There’s not one officer in all our forces wants to drop the bomb,’ said Mountbatten. ‘Not even Bing Cross. The Americans are something else. They’re the true believers. What was it you said, Rupert? The worst wars are the religious wars.’

  54

  By Saturday the tents had spread over the headlands on either side of Kilnacarry. What with all the rain over the last month and the ground being so boggy, every day there was another car with its wheels spinning in the mud.

  The more panicky the news bulletins, the more the crowd grew in Buckle Bay. They were there in all weathers, singing and praying. One of the Hennessy brothers from the hardware shop in Donegal was selling candles and matches from the back of his van. When the sun went down the pilgrims lit their candles and it was like Christmas down there, until the wind blew the flames out again.

  The crowd remained camped outside the Brennan house too, with Mary Brennan inside a virtual prisoner. Of course she was not a prisoner, as Eamonn told her. If she wanted she had only to say the word and he’d fetch his Massey Ferguson and drive her out of the village. Up on the high seat of the tractor the pilgrims would not be able to reach her.

  Mary had come to hate and fear the pilgrims, with their reaching hands and their hungry eyes. But she knew it was not only their need that kept her a prisoner in Kilnacarry. She had begun something with her three nights of visions all those years ago, and it was up to her to finish it. The difficulty was, she didn’t know how.

  Penned in the little cottage, she felt unable to think clearly. At last she could stand it no more.

  ‘Get me out of here, Eamonn.’

  ‘I’ve not got enough fuel to take you to Dublin.’

  ‘Not Dublin. Not yet. Just take me out onto the cliffs. Somewhere they can’t follow.’

  So Eamonn fetched his tractor and drove it to the back of the cottage, and Mary came out fast and climbed up with him, and they were away before the pilgrims knew what was happening.

  Eamonn took the tractor off the road, over the dunes and out to Dawros Head, to the last spur of rocky land, where the ocean reached out before them to the far horizon. When the engine stopped its throbbing the world was silent. Then the sounds came, the wind and the waves and the seagulls.

  Mary looked out over the sea and breathed in the salty air and felt the confusion slowly blow away. Eamonn said nothing. It struck her then how kind he was, and how undervalued.

  ‘Sorry to cause so much trouble,’ she said.

  ‘Makes a change,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a good brother, Eamonn. And a good son.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘You are. Staying by Mam all these years.’

  ‘Just the way it happened.’

  All these years he’d been home. Herself gone, Bridie gone.

  ‘Have you ever wanted to leave?’

  ‘Why would I leave?’

  ‘You might find a girl.’

  ‘There’s no telling,’ said Eamonn, as if he’d never given it any thought to speak of.

  ‘You must get lonely at times,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe I do.’

  ‘I get lonely,’ she said.

  As she said these words she caught a sight of the world of home that was new, and shocking. In place of the green rain-soaked hills she saw a desert. In place of the whitewashed cottage she saw a prison. Here they had led starved and lonely lives, among ignorant and unhappy people.

  ‘Is this the life you wanted, Eamonn?’

  ‘You get what you get,’ he said.

  She remembered him as a boy, captivated by a Superman comic.

  ‘You were going to go to America.’

  ‘I would have liked that,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Eamonn.’

  It made her angry. This good hard-working man with his wasted life. But who could you blame for it? Not Mam, widowed by the age of thirty.

  ‘God owes you more,’ she said.

  ‘You tell him, Mary.’

  ‘You’ve done the right thing all your life. When’s it your turn?’

  In this new bright light she saw her family, and the people of her village, and the great crowd of pilgrims, and she understood that they had all been abandoned by God. They didn’t yet know it themselves, but they feared it with a terrible fear. That was why they reached out to her. They wanted a miracle, a touch of God in their hard lives. It needn’t be much. Just a little magic to promise them that they weren’t lost and abandoned after all.

  Make God real to us, they begged her. Don’t leave us in this mess of a life without the promise of some shining glory to come. Give us a sign. And if it’s to be the great wind that sweeps everything away, so much the better. The end of the world strikes for the great as well as the small. We’ll all be equal in the apocalypse.

  But the truth is we’re all lost and abandoned. There’s no glory to come. The whole giant edifice of faith is a story made up by a child.

  She wanted to shout out loud, to shout at God, to shame him for having taken advantage of her.

  ‘Fifteen years,’ she said. ‘That’s enough, isn’t it?’

  She started to shake. Suddenly the emotions flooding out of her were too strong to control.

  I should have had a life of my own. I should have had babies of my own. I was a child, a stupid child! Why did you have to take away my life?

  They were sitting squeezed tight together on the tractor seat. She could feel her body shaking against Eamonn’s big strong body, but he didn’t know how to put an arm round her.

  Slowly the moment passed.

  ‘You want to go back now?’ Eamonn said.

  The light was fading. Mary looked down at the shore. It was low tide. The crowd in Buckle Bay would be lighting their candles, shuffling forward over the wet sand, waiting for their miracle.

  If none of it’s true, why not give them what they want? In the absence of eternal glory, put on a show. Then when the show’s over, they’ll leave at last.

  ‘Eamonn,’ she said, looking down at the white surf as it rolled in and then withdrew. ‘At low tide your tractor can go out on the beach, can’t it?’

  ‘Go anywhere, this one,’ said Eamonn.

  ‘Could it go round the headland from Kilnacarry and into Buckle Bay?’

  ‘If the tide’s far enough out.’

  ‘Could you take me into Buckle Bay, over the sea?’

  ‘Like you’re Jesus, coming o
ver the water?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘I can give it a go.’

  He started up the engine, and turned the tractor about. They rumbled back over the coast path and into the village. Lights were glowing in the shop and in the pub. He dropped down onto the harbour road and followed the slipway where the fisher-men hauled in their boats. The tractor wheels swished in the shallow water. A few men loitering on the harbour wall stared to see the red tractor drive into the sea, but Eamonn didn’t go far. Hugging the coast, he followed the strip of beach round Buckle Head. He couldn’t see the ground over which he was driving because it was under water. Now and again the tractor hit a big rock and gave a lurch.

  ‘You all right there? Hold on.’

  ‘I’m fine, Eamonn.’

  The grey cloud-filled sky was fading into night. Eamonn was steering more by feel than by sight.

  ‘Don’t want to damage your tractor, Eamonn.’

  ‘Take more’n this to hurt her’, he said.

  ‘You have headlights?’ she said.

  ‘You want ’em on?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  At their deepest point the water came halfway up the great wheels, and the bigger waves broke against the side of the tractor and splashed their legs. Then they were round the headland and making for the beach, and the water was receding once more.

  ‘Told you she’d do it,’ said Eamonn.

  There ahead was Buckle Bay. Paraffin lanterns, electric torches, candles, glowed among the figures crowded onto the beach. The strains of a hymn came over the water. This was how the pilgrims passed the long hours. They said the rosary together, and they sang hymns. They had guitars and harmonicas. It was a sort of beach party in honour of the end of the world.

  Mary had made no plan. It was all the impulse of the moment. The anger she had felt on Dawros Head was still with her, burning inside her like a liberation. She no longer cared what she did.

  ‘Turn on the headlights, Eamonn.’

  He clicked a switch. The tractor’s lights weren’t strong, but coming out of the sea like that, bouncing over the water, they created a sensation in Buckle Bay. The singing stopped. Voices cried out. All eyes were on the approaching brightness.

  ‘Keep driving till I say stop.’