by Leon Uris
Well, all right, what now? Roger knew that if he reacted violently to Caroline's request it could backfire. Caroline's initial reaction would be that her husband was jealous, a thing that had never crept into their marriage. Otherwise, an assault on Larkin could just possibly stir up Larkin's own thoughts about the fire and O'Garvey. It would be far better to concede and outwardly show that there was no resentment of Larkin whatsoever.
What of the rest of it?
How many times in his own life had he longed for communication with that weak scoundrel of a father of his? Wasn't that really why he had plunged himself into a singlehanded conquest of western Ulster? And Caroline . . . Caroline who opened the door to all those lovely rooms in life that he would never have known otherwise. Caroline who was his best friend, his big brother, his mistress, as well as his wife. Caroline had fought a hard battle against the English system which pawned off responsibility by the cold and impersonal exile of the sons to boarding schools, the Army, the government service. His own father had done that to him. Christopher wanted some of it on his own. That was all right. But Jeremy was rebelling.
Roger stopped in the doorway. "You want this very much, don't you?" he said.
"I swear I believe it's the right thing."
"Has Larkin agreed to take Jeremy on?"
"No."
"It might be best if you spoke to him, rather than I," Roger said.
"Yes, it might be," she agreed.
*
The crossing, exceptionally calm this night, afforded an occasion for artificial comradery. Those rawboned lads of the club were on their gentlemen's best at the communal feasting table. Those gentlemen players recently acquired and the peers made every attempt to be ordinary folk. In that upheaval of the established social order almost everyone was ill at ease.
There were notable exceptions, all being keenly observed by Roger Hubble this night. His father-in-law was entirely at home. He had supped at skull crackers' tables before. His wife, who had done garret duty with wine drinking artists, never lost her common touch. His son Jeremy reveled in the friendship of those rough, sinewy men . . . and Conor Larkin, who had a classlessness about himself. He'd be at home anywhere, Roger thought. The family power play had won.
As for Lord Roger, he was as uncomfortable as if he had been caught in original sin, as were the men, who were equally awkward in his company.
The uneasiness of imposed solidarity modified as the bar was thrown open. Roger retreated quickly to his quarters. In a moment Sir Frederick and his gentlemen players were in a deep strategy session with Derek Crawford and Robin MacLeod. Jeremy wove in and out of the drinkers rubbing elbows. The off-the-field leader of the club, Duffy O'Hurley, organized a songfest while his fireman, Calhoun Hanly, planked out in a corner table. Doxie O'Brien played as much piano as his broken knuckles would allow and songs, neither Orange nor republican, neutrally followed in a show of nonsectarian brotherhood.
The crossing was particularly calm. Caroline settled in a deck chair, covered her lap with a robe and listened to the voices in harmony of sorts as it reached that mellow shank of the night.
Conor came on deck, looked about, saw her and took the edge of the chair next to her. "How's the screen in the Long Hall holding?"
"It should be good for a few hundred years, barring insurrection," she said. "You've been away for a long time. What and where?"
"Just having a poet's go at the world. Nothing much of value was learned except that Ireland's not such a bad old place after all."
"Lucky for Ireland," she said. "Is there a lady as lucky?"
Conor smiled. "I can't say how lucky she is."
"I'm glad for you."
"It took me long enough. You're looking fit enough to play fullback," he said, shifting the subject. "You said you wanted to see me. It's about Jeremy, isn't it?"
Caroline nodded.
"I figured as much."
The moon brought them to the rail. "What with me getting all that special attention when I tried for the club and then having my own forge in the yard and a commission …"
"Just a deserved gesture to an old friend," she said. "And nothing, I might add, you wouldn't have made without my help."
"Jeremy's at practice every day," Conor said. "The two of us have always had a good, open rapport. I think I’ve got the gist of what's going on."
"He has a lot of wild oats to sow, like myself and my father. At nineteen we shouldn't be in all that much of a hurry to get him regimented."
"Aye, and you're a good mum to know that. If you're lucky enough to fall in love, that's one thing. Otherwise, all that was ever truly beautiful to me was my boyhood. It's the meal we sup on for the rest of our lives. Love puts the icing on life. But if you don't find it . . . you must call on your childhood memories over and over till you do. In Jeremy's case, these next years are very necessary as a place to build."
"The boy adores you, you know that."
"Oh, little wanes always make heroes out of big lugs until they find them lying in the gutter drunk one morning."
"Will you take him under your wing?"
"Can I be blunt with you?"
"Of course."
"It's not that we go whoring and drinking till six every morning but the lad will cramp the team's style. I don't care about that too much, I'm pretty much alone and I could keep his nose clean on that score, but we don't exactly come from the same neighborhood. I'd be a fair crack of a freak toting a Viscount around through the Irishtowns of some pretty ugly cities."
"Don't you think that would be good for him if he's going to become the Earl of Foyle?"
"You're a wise lady indeed. There's a possibility of Jeremy collecting a few republican fleas."
"I'd risk that if the boy would pick up a few other things from Conor Larkin."
He laughed. "Who's pulling the Irish blarney on whom?"
"You'll take him on then?"
"You ought to have your bottom paddled just once in your life," he said. "You always get everything you want."
"Not always, Mr. Larkin," she said, meeting his eyes right on.
Conor was confused. He held himself to keep his mouth shut and gripped the railing to stop himself from making a move at her. Caroline held her place, making no effort to either retract her words or remove herself.
"You walked the deck of a ship for years, I understand. Did you ever think about me?" she asked.
"When you're out there alone, night after night, you think about everything, sooner or later."
"That's not what I asked."
"Aye, I thought about you."
"And what did you think?"
Conor smiled softly. "It would do no good to tell you. No one could live up to those thoughts."
"Well, just because you walked the deck of a ship doesn't give you the exclusive rights to daydreaming. I've had a few thoughts of my own about you."
"Oh . . ."
"But it would do no good to tell you about them, either. Not even Conor Larkin could live up to my fantasies."
"Well," he stammered, "I think it's time for a nightcap, myself."
"Just a minute, Conor," she said firmly. "Allow me to say you are one of the loveliest men I've ever met in my life. Nothing is ever going to come of it. Yet I feel no wrong in sharing Jeremy's feelings toward you. Good night, Conor."
"Lady Caroline."
"Yes?" she said, turning.
"I’ll take good care of the lad."
"I know." And she was gone.
He watched the sea for a time and, as he did, the growing sense of distaste in himself mounted. He had played on his friendship with her and with Jeremy to perfection. He had lured the boy to help intrigue him into the tour and a close companionship. Before that he had used them both to get into the yard, onto the team and in a position to have freedom of movement. Now he had an ultimate cover, a British aristocrat as his ward. It was bound to keep any possible suspicion from his activities. Affection for one's enemies was not part of D
an Sweeney's lexicon. Sweeney would loathe to see him have feelings for those people.
Conor found himself drawn down the ladder to where the Red Hand Express was choked down, rising and falling on the movement of the steamer. He stood at the side of the tender car, then touched it.
"Hey there!"
Conor turned, startled. Duffy O'Hurley, who always limped a bit when swacked, swaggered up to him. "What's doing, Conor!"
"Just walking round and round to clear my head from the excitement."
"Yeah, that's right. Your very first tour. Ahhh," he groaned, "just look at this darling. The best Red Hand of them all. Excuse the overburdening sentimentality of it, Conor, but I always come down to say good night to my engine."
O'Hurley was a back thumper with power to spare. Twice Conor had seen Calhoun Hanly's false teeth fly out of his mouth after a backslap. He took the affection from O'Hurley with only a slight wince. What would the answer be when the question was asked? Conor wondered. How many days till Bradford and Brendan Sean Barrett?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Of the Larkin brothers, only Dary had come up from Maynooth Seminary. Conor was in England and, of course, Liam too far away. Brigid stood before the Larkin cottage for what seemed an eternity. The long wait was done. The cairn was over her mother's grave, the last prayer intoned. This cottage was hers now as the land was hers. Ever so slowly to the door. She shoved it open tentatively as though she were entering for the first time. It was exactly the same but all so very different. Her eyes played over the room. The seat nearest the fire would be her own and all the great cook pots would be scrubbed to a shine they had never had before. The creepies and benches and crane and churn and weaver's light holders . . . everything she saw was her own. Tomorrow she'd walk through the fields counting up all that was hers.
She made from room to room, fondling all her possessions, patting the down quilts just so, brushing off specks of gathering dust, mentalizing how she would clean so there would not be another cottage like it.
She came to the bedroom door. She stood at the foot of the bed of the birth of herself and her brothers. The bed of Tomas and Finola. She edged onto the side of it as she had done while attending them sick, then stretched and buried herself in this softness and she closed her eyes as tears filled them.
Back in the best room she smoored the fire as only the woman of the house would do and laid on new turf, then cooked her first meal, setting the table for herself and Rinty Doyle. First, she took Finola's seat for her own, then changed her mind and placed her setting where Tomas had been the head of the house.
"Rinty!" she called to the byre. She poked her head in. "Rimy, where are you?" He was nowhere to be seen. She threw her shawl over her shoulders in a fit of pique and marched steadfastly down the path to the crossroad and burst into McCluskey's public house.
The gentlemen at the bar took off their caps in unison in respect and remembrance of her sainted mother. Old McCluskey squinted, for he was half blind with age and couldn't hear much better. Wee shriveled Rinty was curled up alone deep in the deepest corner enjoying the life out of a glass of Derryale.
"There you are!" Brigid snipped. "And just who gave you leave to get yourself jarred!"
"Jarred? Woman, I'm sober as Father Cluny. I'm having a farewell drop in memory of your blessed mother, Mary save her soul."
"God rest her," Billy O'Kane said from the bar.
"God bless all here," Rinty encored lifting his glass.
"You'll march home this instant or there'll be no tea for you tonight."
Rinty looked at the gentlemen at the bar mortified. They cowered en masse. He smacked his lips, hungering for that last swallow, but capitulated, shuffling to the door and out to the road after her.
"She's got two tusks hanging down over her lip, that one," McCluskey said.
"I wouldn't like even the half of it."
"Jaysus, you'd think they was married."
Back at the cottage Brigid slammed the door and arched her back angrily, wilting the man with the mere look of her. "I'm not against a man having his pint now and again but I'll not be slaving over that fire and you not here for your meals. From now on, if it's McCluskey's or the shebeen you're after, you'll be asking me first. Is that clear?"
"Aye," he whimpered.
"Let's get on with the rosary."
Rinty scratched his head, trying to puff himself up with enough courage to protest. "Can I have a civil word with you?"
"Speak!"
"What I mean to say is there's only the two of us here, each being individual people. If, for example, the party of the first part, myself, finds solace in an evening pint, then why couldn't the party of the first part have that pint while the party of the second part says the rosary? In that manner, both parties will have fulfilled their urgent needs."
"God have mercy on you, Rinty Doyle."
"I'm a man and I have me rights."
"You've been allowed to stray from God because my poor mother was too sick in the past year to contend with a heathen inside her own walls."
"I've me rights, you know, I've me rights."
"So long as you're under this roof you will say the rosary and you will go to mass. I was going to permit you to move to the hayloft but you'll stay in the byre until you give our Lord Jesus Christ his due. Now, on your knees, Rinty Doyle."
Rinty looked heavenward but relief was not on the way. He flopped his arms and grunted down to the floor, kneeling alongside Brigid.
*
The two of them went on living as though Brigid were running a large estate over which she was a baroness. The prayer never started or ended, merely continued. No cottage in the Upper Village was cleaned so ruthlessly, so manicured and so orderly. Every speck was an intruder to be banished, every plate polished to gleam, every doily precisely in place. Dirty boots, tobacco ashes and other manly droppings and their droppers met swift retribution.
The pity of it was that Brigid did not keep herself as well as her home or fields. She grew heavy and what loveliness of youth she had owned vanished as she stood on the threshold of her thirtieth year. Good looks were never so important as land in Ballyutogue, and the Larkin farm was still the best. The bachelors in their early forties and upward sniffed about but they were a sorry lot, indeed, and she all but ran them off with a pitchfork. The drinking brotherhood soon gave her a wide berth.
In the months that followed, Brigid Larkin impressed one and all with her shrewd management of affairs. After nearly working poor Rinty to his own grave she brought in another distant cousin as the second hired hand. She organized a cottage industry, the linen work, marketing for a better price than the individual piecework, and made it otherwise evident she had a touch of Larkin power and intelligence.
Liam and Conor sent the money for Finola's tombstone. The younger son who had prospered greatly in New Zealand also sent money for slates for the roof of the cottage. Liam was also the first of Ballyutogue's sons to commission a stained glass memorial window in the church.
*
After imposing final prayers of the day, Brigid checked out her barony and any unleft business before retiring and each night she opened the drawer of the highboy and took out that faded letter that had come so long ago from Conor. It was the letter that said that Myles McCracken would never return to Ballyutogue. There were only a few words she was able to make out herself but she knew it by memory and it was worn from folding and unfolding.
Due to various circumstances Myles is taking a wife in Derry.
"What are various circumstances?" she had asked Father Cluny when he first read it to her.
The priest said he didn't know but it was useless because he was a married man and she should not see him again.
Her heart cried out for Myles when she learned of the fire and she went to the priest again after a time and asked him to write to Conor. Perhaps she might visit Myles when a year had passed. But Conor had left Derry and no one knew where. Father Cluny dutifully made the
trek to Derry in her behalf. He returned with the sorrowful news that Myles had been committed to the insane asylum.
The ritual of the letter was as regular as the recitation of the rosary. She'd return it to the drawer, turn down the lantern and cover herself in the bed she had craved all her life.
"You were a fool, Myles. If you'd of only waited eight more years you'd be lying beside me now."
Her eyes would flutter from weariness of running the farm and so much praying.
Due to various circumstances Myles is taking a wife in Derry . . .
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The tour!
No royal visit could have caused greater tension and festive air than the rugby fever. The East Belfast Boilermakers were among the few of consequence to come to that black industrial necklace of Lancashire and Yorkshire. There was a mystique about the team being filled with wild Irish rovers.
WELCOME BOILERMAKERS, the banner at city hall declared. Dignitaries and bands greeted, bookmakers sized up, local press of destitute journalistic stature devoured. There was always front-page cove sage and usually a hint of non-existent wagering scandal or rumor of a predawn sexual foray. The pubs were opened wide and those ladies who indulged placed themselves in evidence.
Sir Frederick's spout erupted endlessly and in full glory as he confided that his latest Red Hand with Duffy O'Hurley at the throttle could turn a hundred and ten miles per. He and Duffy and Calhoun Hanly doted over the lines of school kiddies waiting to glimpse through the fabled private cars, and he addressed civic groups and private clubs on matters of Ulster's industrial might, rugby, his charities, Unionist politics. He threw lavish champagne and caviar parties for clients and prospective buyers in a second decade of replaying everybody's childhood dream.
In the days and weeks that followed, Conor often wished Mick McGrath had gotten his taste of the tour, for he wouldn't have spent his life hungering for it. The grand tour was the grand illusion.
