Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  The thick curtains were closed. Radford lit the oil lamp, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and sat down to wait.

  This is an odd man, Butler, he thought. Cold, hard, sharp as a whiplash when he speaks, and apparently in love with danger. Yet he’s been out there in the carnage with the rest of them - got a row of medals to prove it. Most of the men Radford had known who had come back from the western front were shadows of themselves; they wandered around as though something inside them were missing, or sat listening and staring at God knew what awful memory. Many of them trembled, or shook and started for no apparent reason; and they could get angry quite suddenly, and walk out of rooms. Radford supposed that the everyday world seemed strange to them, meaningless perhaps after what they had been through. The thing that seemed to comfort them most was to find someone who had lived through the same battle that they themselves had been in. They would relive it in every detail, for hours on end, as though those had been the finest days of their lives. And yet most of them said they never wanted to see a gun again.

  Not a lot of this seemed to fit Andrew Butler, Radford thought. Despite the horrific wound on his face, there was nothing dazed, shaky, or gun-shy about the man at all. He had been through the worst of it like the others, yet Radford could not imagine him reminiscing nostalgically with his comrades. He wondered if the man had any comrades - indeed, if he had anyone he could talk to. This house bore no witness of it, and Butler’s country home had been burnt down. Surely every man needs some companionship, to get the war out of his system, he thought - yet here he is, all alone, volunteering for one of the most dangerous jobs he can find.

  He heard a quiet, scratching, scrabbling sound. Rats, perhaps, or was it a key in the lock? Radford got up and stepped softly across the room, to stand in shadow by a curtain. He was away from the oil lamp here, and could see the door. He rested his hand on the revolver in his pocket and waited. No sense in trusting what you can’t see.

  Footsteps in the corridor, a tall figure dimly lit in the doorway. Sharp, intense face, scar, shadowed eyes, narrow moustache. It was him.

  ‘Radford?’

  ‘Here.’ He moved slightly. The figure turned swiftly to confront him, then they both relaxed.

  ‘All right.’ Andrew stepped into the pool of light, surveying the room briefly. ‘You’re alone? Good. And made yourself at home, I see.’

  He took another glass from a cupboard on the wall, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and sat on the arm of a chair.

  ‘It’s tomorrow,’ he said. ‘In Brendan Road.’

  Radford felt a surge of excitement. ‘Where? What number?’

  ‘I don’t know. Or what time. They’re coming to collect me at the hotel, either late morning or late afternoon. That’s it.’

  Radford thought. ‘I don’t know where it is either. But I can find it on the map, and keep it watched …’

  ‘Listen.’ Andrew leaned forward, staring at Radford and emphasizing each point with a stabbing finger. ‘I don’t want a single policeman seen on that street until I’m inside. Nor anywhere near. This whole show depends on them trusting me. If you can’t keep out of sight, don’t come at all.’

  ‘Sure,’ Radford said. ‘But you’ll need us afterwards. You don’t know how many guards he’ll have with him. If they’re too many for you, I can still flood the place and take him alive.’

  Andrew shook his head. ‘There won’t be too many for me.’

  ‘How do you know? What if they search you before you go in?’

  ‘Leave that to me.’

  Radford sighed. It seemed to him the man was mad. Perhaps this was the way the war had damaged him: he had a desire to die in a blaze of glory.

  ‘At least we’ll be there to get you out. With luck we’ll arrest quite a number of them.’

  ‘Listen.’ Andrew leaned forward again. ‘I’ve told you the name of the street, but I want your word that it won’t go any further - no one else is to know - until you see me go down the street. You can have your men in the general area, but they don’t know - none of them - what the target is, until you call them up. Understood?’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So we wait until you come out? How long? I can’t keep a street like that sealed off for any length of time without someone noticing.’

  ‘Give me half an hour. If anyone comes out after I’ve gone in, you can pick them up, but only when they’re out of sight of the house. If I don’t come out in half an hour, you can knock on the door and put me in a box.’

  ‘And if someone sees us before then? It’s difficult to keep a large number of men outside a place like that without being noticed. Look.’ Radford spread out his big hands, trying to explain. ‘You’re leading us to him, there’s no question about that. But it may be a lot better politically if we just arrest Collins. It’ll restore belief in the police, and show the government can be strong without …’

  ‘And in two weeks he’ll be free. How many people has that man sprung out of prison already? How many prison officers work for him? Anyway, do you think this government’s got the guts to hold a man like that for long? They’ll do a deal with him, you know that. No, Mr Radford, tomorrow I’m going to try to kill him. That’s what we agreed on that contract Sir Jonathan signed. That’s what I’m going to do. You can come in and clean up the mess afterwards, if you like. If I’ve failed, you can charge him with murder.’

  Radford sighed again. He wished he had not agreed to this. Kee would say it was a crime and strictly he would be right. This wasn’t what he had joined the police to do. But then ordinary criminals didn’t carry guns and declare war. Ordinary criminals didn’t set out to decimate the police force. If he played it strictly by the book, Radford thought, there soon wouldn’t be any detectives left alive in G Division for him to command. And Sir Jonathan and Harrison had convinced him that Butler’s mission had prime-ministerial backing. That was why he was here, to keep them in touch with the details of their plan.

  ‘All right. We’ll do it your way.’ He raised his glass. ‘You’re a brave man, Major Butler. I wish you luck.’

  16. The Song of Songs

  IT WAS not easy to arrange meetings in the little back room in the tenement, but Sean and Catherine managed it three more times in the weeks after Ashtown. They met in the evenings, once after, and twice instead of, the Irish classes at Parnell Square. ‘You’ll be losing the language,’ Catherine said to him the second time, and for the next half-hour she spoke only Gaelic, whispering soft endearments as they kissed and wrestled languorously on the narrow bed by the blazing fire. It was an odd feeling: the words she knew were the sort a nurse would say to a young child; she had not learnt the words you would use to a young man who lay naked and sweating above you. So the baby words seemed naughty and thrilling and exciting in themselves. As though they were two children who had escaped the adult world, and were doing something deliberately wicked in a secret hiding place of their own.

  The next time, by way of reply, he read to her from a book of Irish love poetry he had found. He sat on the bed, while she knelt before him, warming her naked body in front of the blazing fire. He stumbled over the unfamiliar words, and she tried to correct him, dreamily, watching the dancing patterns of the flames. When he had finished she leaned her head back against his hips, and ran her fingertips teasingly along the inside of his thigh. She giggled as she saw the obvious result.

  ‘I have a poem too,’ she said in English. ‘I was reading it today, and thinking of you. Listen: I’ll tell you what I remember. My lover is handsome and strong; he is one in ten thousand. His face is bronzed and smooth - well, yours is smooth, anyway - his hair is wavy, black as a raven. His eyes … were like doves, I think, doves washed in milk, whatever they look like. He is majestic, like the mountains of Lebanon, with their towering cedars. His mouth is sweet to kiss; everything about him enchants me. That is what my lover is like.’ She looked up at him, her dark eyes under the short bo
bbed hair twinkling in the firelight, her face small and mischievous. ‘There - don’t you like it?

  ‘Sure, it’s beautiful,’ he said. But he was a little hesitant. He was still disconcerted by the frank delight she took in his body, paralleling, even surpassing, his delight in hers. ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘The Bible, of course. It’s the Song of Songs.’

  ‘The Bible? Oh, come on now.’

  ‘Its true. It’s the song between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Have you never read it? They must have been lovers like us - except they had a palace, of course.’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s not my fault.’ He remembered the priest, uneasily. The smells on the staircase and the noise from the other rooms had begun to irritate him tonight as well, besmirching the little cocoon they were trying to make together.

  ‘No one said it was, silly.’ She bit his buttock with her sharp little teeth, provoking a wrestling match which ended with him sitting astride her on the bed, her wrists pinned down on the pillow by his hands. He watched her breasts rise and fall with the exertion of the fight, and gripped her hips tightly with his thighs to stop her wriggling and throwing him off. She lifted her head and looked down between her breasts at his erection.

  ‘So you are like a cedar of Lebanon,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d taken care of that already.’

  ‘Not quite.’

  And then for a while there was no sound in the room but their breathing, the creaking of the little, unstable bed, and the wild sharp cry that she gave at her climax.

  Then someone started hammering on the floor from the room below. It impinged on Catherine’s consciousness gradually. At first she thought it was just the coursing of blood in her ears.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘Ignore it.’ Sean lay exhausted, his face half muffled in the pillow beside her. ‘They’ll give up in a minute.’

  He was right. The sound stopped, with an indistinct curse from downstairs. They lay quietly, listening to the crackle of the fire. For the first time Catherine thought of the half-dozen families around them, huddled in their tiny rooms, who had probably listened to the sound of the bed creaking and her cries.

  Somehow the beauty of it had gone for both of them. Sean was tired; the failure outside the Lambert Hotel earlier in the evening had made him feel a fool, and now this interference of the neighbours made him feel trapped, hemmed in by pointing fingers who would one day drag him out to prison, or a police bullet in the head.

  He got out of bed abruptly, and began to put his clothes on. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s past ten o’clock. God knows what they’ll be thinking in that posh house of yours. Anyway, I want to get out of this place. I can’t stand it. I’m going to ask Paddy for a move tomorrow.’

  ‘Where to? Will you find another room where we can meet?’

  ‘God knows. I want somewhere cleaner. You’ve no idea what this place is like to wake up to in the mornings. The filth, the smells, the queues for the privy. I hate it.’

  ‘But you’ll find somewhere where we can meet, Sean?’

  ‘Sure, I hope so. Most of them have got landladies, though. It might be hard.’

  Catherine was astonished. She sat up in bed, her breasts rosy in the firelight. She made no effort to get dressed. Sean pulled on his socks irritably.

  She said: ‘What do you mean, Sean? We’ve got to have somewhere to meet.’

  A bootlace snapped, and suddenly all Sean’s fears and doubts surfaced at once. ‘Why have we? Look, Cathy, you may not have thought about this, but I have. It’s a fine thing, but look at it straight. What’s a fellow like me got to give you? Just a grubby room in a tenement, and the chance of being shot any day by the police or army. That’s no good for a girl like you.’

  ‘Sean …’

  ‘It’s got to end sometime, hasn’t it? Look what happened to me today. I was supposed to keep watch on a man in a hotel, a really important one, and I spent so much time thinking about you that he just walked away from me in the street. No one knows where he is now. The fellows are starting to talk. They all know I’ve got a girl but if they knew what we really do I think - I don’t think they’d let me stay in the Volunteers.’

  Her shock at the outburst robbed her of speech for a while, but anger was not far behind. Anger, and a horrible growing sense of disgust; of a trust that had been betrayed. She had not seen their love as a hindrance to his career, or a subject for discussion with the boys.

  ‘Why couldn’t you stay?’ she said. ‘Surely they know I support the Republic – isn’t that enough?’

  ‘It’s not that, Cathy. If I’m to be a soldier, I shouldn’t have a thought for anything else. I shouldn’t really have come tonight, perhaps - I should be out tracking that man. It’s a sort of sin to the movement, to be thinking all the time of a woman; not a sin like the priest said, exactly, but …’

  ‘What do you mean? What priest?’

  ‘Father Desmond. I went to confession.’

  ‘And you told him about me?’

  ‘Not in so many words. I just said I’d been with a woman.’

  ‘Oh. Been with a woman! And what did he say?’

  ‘What do you think, Cathy? That it was a sin. But don’t worry, I walked out of the confessional.’ For a moment Sean’s irritation was past. He grinned, not realizing the damage he had done.

  She said: ‘Well, that’s fine then, isn’t it? You bring me here in the night, and in the daytime you go to a priest and tell him all about it. And I suppose he told you I was the scarlet whore.’

  Sean had finished dressing. He sat down in the only armchair, and glanced across at her. The intensity of her gaze scared him. For the first time ever he thought of her as a burden. That slim, naked figure in his bed; he might never be rid of her.

  ‘No, Cathy, he didn’t say that exactly. But the man had a point, you know. It’s a sin for you too. I mean, have you thought what will come of all this? We could never marry, could we? What if there was a child?’

  ‘What if - you ask me that? Sean? You ask me that now?’

  ‘I should have asked it before, I suppose, but …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But you didn’t seem to worry, so why should I?’

  ‘And you a student of medicine. So-called. Have you read Knowlton?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Charles Knowlton. The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People. It’s a book about how to avoid babies.’

  For the first time in the conversation Sean was speechless. He simply gaped at her. It reminded her of his reaction to some of the medical lectures, but now she felt contempt, not compassion.

  ‘I see you haven’t. Well, I have. And I’ve been making use of the advice in it. Just as well, isn’t it?’

  He found his voice. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I stick a sponge up myself.’

  ‘My God. Is that - why you didn’t bleed, the first time?’

  A faint trace of a smile crossed her face. It was very faint; there was no warmth in it. ‘No. That was an accident on a horse, when I was fifteen. Lucky for you, wasn’t it?’

  The whole conversation offended him. It brought them together in a way he didn’t want, not at all. He said: ‘But that - that’s killing life. That’s a sin against God, for sure.’

  There was a silence. It went on for some time. Sean’s words hung heavily in the air between them. Then Catherine got out of bed and began to get dressed in front of him. There was nothing provocative about the way she did it. Her nakedness seemed an insult, almost. She was careless about the way she put on her clothes, brisk, matter-of-fact. She ignored him, as though he had been a chair or a stuffed baboon.

  When she was dressed she took a comb from her bag and began to push her hair behind her ears with swift smart strokes. Her eyes sparkled in the firelight, but no tears fell. She said: ‘I suppose you, then, have been making love to me all this time in the belief tha
t I would probably get pregnant, and that then you could disown me.’

  Certainly he felt shame now. But also a sullen, deep resentment at the way he had been used. No women did that. No women he knew. He had never even heard of a woman doing it.

  In a sort of harsh whisper, he said: ‘I never thought of it.’

  She turned then and faced him. She had the comb between her teeth, and she was fastening her hair back with a pin. When she had done that, she took the comb out, and said sadly: ‘Sean, Sean, I knew most men were stupid, but truly I never thought it of you.’

  For the first time he saw she was crying. He stood up and held out his arms to embrace her. For a moment she let him hold her, but she stood quite still and cold in his arms, shutting him out. Then she brushed him away.

  ‘Come on. I want to go home.’

  For most of the walk home they didn’t speak. It was not a conversation either could have carried on in front of men singing outside pubs, or army lorries cruising the streets. Sean was tired and furious. But near Merrion Square he began again.

  ‘I suppose you have done this with other men.’

  They had been walking side by side, without touching. He had stopped as he spoke, but she walked on briskly, looking straight ahead.

  ‘Why should you suppose that?’

  ‘Why else would you have read about it?’

  She stopped then, suddenly, so that he almost ran into her.

  ‘To avoid having babies, that’s why! So that when I did meet the man I wanted, I could really love him, as I have loved you, Sean, without being afraid or worried about what would happen. That’s what I thought. I thought it would be beautiful and it was, Sean, it really was, until tonight. You don’t really love me, though, do you?’

  ‘It’s not that. I … I’m not sure I should be thinking about that, now with the war on. I’ve got to concentrate on one thing. Anyway, you shouldn’t have done that - what you did. It’s wrong.’