Now and in the Hour of Our Death

by Patrick Taylor

  The helicopter made a complete circle, rose, and headed in the direction where, Davy knew, the Sperrins would have their craggy peaks shrouded in the low clouds. It would serve the buggers right if their chopper slammed into one of those mountains.

  He waited and listened as the racket grew softer and softer, until it finally faded and all he could hear was the rain and the barking of the collie.

  Davy felt Eamon stir beside him.

  “Jesus,” Eamon said. “The noisy buggers won’t even let a man get a nap in peace.”

  “They’ve gone,” Davy said.

  “Good thing, too.” Eamon shuddered. “Jesus Christ, but I’m foundered.” He forced a grin. “Mind you, Father, if them buggers come back in their helicopters tonight and they have sensors on board that would pick up a man’s body heat in the dark, they’ll have as much chance of detecting us as they would of finding an ice cream van.” Eamon grunted and smiled at Davy. “Cheer up, Father. It’ll not be long now until we’re out from under this soggy tarpaulin, away from the stink of dead bracken and into somewhere warm, dry, and safe.”

  CHAPTER 33

  VANCOUVER. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1983

  She was warm and safe and pleasantly drowsy when the alarm clock jangled. Fiona pushed the off button, squinted at the dial, noted it really was 7:00 A.M., and snuggled against Tim’s back. She saw a tiny smear of her lipstick on his neck. She didn’t want to get up and leave the cosy bed and the comfort of having Tim so close.

  She didn’t want to get up but knew she must. So must he. He’d told her last night that he had a committee meeting first thing this morning. He’d told her that sometime before—she stretched and wriggled and smiled, thinking of their next lovemakings, not once but twice again in the early hours. She threw back the duvet and saw Tim’s back, where scratches from her fingernails had left a red tracery from his shoulders to the hollow above his tight buttocks. God, but he’d a lovely arse. She bent and kissed one cheek, feeling him stir.

  He rolled on his back, yawned, opened his eyes, rubbed them with the backs of his hands, and mumbled, “Morning, darling.”

  He’d never called her “darling” before, and she liked the easy familiarity of it, as if they had been together for years, not a few short months.

  “Time you were up.” She watched his hand slide along his belly and stroke his penis. She chuckled. “Not that kind of up, idiot. We’ve both to go to work.” And she kissed him before saying, a little breathlessly, “but it would be nice.”

  “Aw.” He fondled her breast, “I hate committee meetings.” He put his lips to her nipple, and she felt his tongue flickering, swiftly, lightly as an adder’s, and she wondered if, like the little snake, he was sensing her through his tongue.

  It would be marvelous to reach for him, love him, spend the day in bed with him, fill herself with him, and—she felt the heat between her thighs—not just down there for the tiny eternity that came with having him inside her. She wanted to talk and explore the Tim of him, and the “them” of them both, and now, as her past receded, a future that she felt could open for her with Tim.

  His hand, warm and soft but for its single callus, fondled the inside of her thigh. She drew one leg up, closed her eyes, and waited for his touch. Then she realized that the very thought of their having a future together meant that they wouldn’t have to cram all their lovemaking into a few short hours like a couple of randy students and that the pleasure could come from the anticipation, the imagining of what was to be as much as from the act itself.

  She shuddered as his fingers found her, grasped his wrist, pushed his hand away, rolled over, and held him to her, feeling his penis hot against her belly. “Not now,” she whispered.

  He dropped a kiss on her hair. “All right,” he said, his voice husky, “I do love you. But I can wait.”

  “I love you, Tim,” she said, loving him for his body but more for his patience, his understanding. “You go and shower. I’ll get breakfast on.”

  “Right.” He rolled out of bed.

  She watched as, naked, he walked to the bathroom, his buttocks flexing as he walked, and he did, he certainly did, have a lovely arse. She almost called him back. Perhaps she should take a cold shower. The sisters at the convent school had been very keen on them for dulling the lusts of the flesh. The poor celibate nuns. They didn’t know what they were missing.

  Fiona chuckled wickedly, left the bed, slipped on her dressing gown, and went through to the kitchen. She tutted to see her von Furstenberg dress crumpled on the floor, where she’d left it last night in her eagerness for him. Passion was all very well, but dresses like that didn’t grow on trees. She lifted it, took it back to the bedroom, and hung it in her wardrobe.

  She could hear the shower and Tim’s tenor voice, horribly off-key, singing, “We’re a band from a land down under…” the words of some Aussie rock group called Men at Work. Doctor Tim Andersen was no Plácido Domingo. He might play on her body as Casals bowed his cello, but the poor man couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

  Breakfast, she told herself, and headed back to the kitchen. As she plugged in the coffeemaker, she heard the cat flap rattle. McCusker came in, tail erect, rigid as Tim’s—she tried to concentrate on the job at hand.

  “Tim,” she yelled—realizing she’d never made him breakfast before and that she was going to enjoy doing it, not just today but in the days to come—“what do you take for breakfast?”

  “What?” She heard the water stop.

  “Breakfast. What do you like?”

  He came round the door. He was wrapped in a bath sheet. “The coffee smells good, darling. If you’ve a slice of toast and bit of marmalade…?”

  There was that “darling” again. “Your word is my command, sir,” she said, popping a couple of slices of whole grain in the toaster.

  “I’m skipper. Just like on Windy.”

  She bristled, just a bit. “It was a figure of speech. I’ve been pretty good at running my own life for the last nine years. I’m not very good at taking orders.”

  He held up his hands, palms out. “I know. I think it’s one of the things that makes me love you … that and the way you taste.”

  She laughed. “Gloria Steinem says that women shouldn’t be sex objects.”

  “You mean,” he said, looking puzzled, “that you object to sex? You could have fooled me.”

  “Tim. Idiot. Here.” She poured his coffee. “Now, if the great skipper can manage to get his own milk from the fridge, he’ll find the butter’s in there, too. When your toast’s ready—I presume you can take it out of the toaster yourself—the marmalade’s in that cupboard. I’m off for my shower.”

  “Right,” he said, still leering. “Sure you don’t want me to come and scrub your back?”

  She was still laughing as she went into the bathroom. And nothing would have given her more pleasure than to have him scrub her back, and her front, and all of her. She knew he would have scrubbed gently.

  * * *

  When she came back, coiffed, lightly made up, wearing her navy-blue suit over a demurely buttoned white blouse, Tim was dressed and waiting for her. She thought that he looked very much the head of a hospital department.

  “More coffee?”

  “No thanks, love. I’ve had my second cup. Time to get going. I’ll call a cab. It’ll be here in a few minutes.” He stood and let his hand fall onto her shoulder. “Can I give you a lift to the school?”

  “It’s all right. Becky’s picking me up in fifteen minutes.”

  “Well,” he said, grinning again, “if I were you, I’d try to get that utterly satisfied look off my face before she gets here. Might shock the poor old thing if she guesses what we’ve been up to.”

  “Becky? I don’t think she’s so easily shocked, Tim.” She squeezed his hand. “She’d be happy for us.”

  “Good for her.” Tim’s voice became soft. “I certainly am.”

  “So am I, Tim. Honestly.” She hesitated, then asked qu
ietly, “When can we do it again?”

  “Right now, if you really want to. Right here on the table, and if Becky walks in, that might really shock her”

  “Stop it, you randy old goat. I mean, when am I going to see you again?”

  “Oh,” Tim said, looking crestfallen, “I’m not absolutely sure. I’ve been away for a week…”

  I know, she thought, and it seemed like a month.

  “I’ll have to check my hospital diary. Tell you what. I’ll call you tonight after work.”

  “I’d like that,” she said. “Very much.”

  “Right. Give us a kiss.”

  She stood and kissed him.

  The buzzer rang.

  “That’ll be my cab,” Tim said, starting to leave. “And when we do get together, wear the creation you had on last night. It bothers me on a boat if I don’t know how to work all the lines.” He dropped a slow wink. “I’d like to have a go all by myself at undoing the one that holds that dress shut.”

  “Get out,” she said, laughing and relishing the thought of Tim undressing her.

  “I’m off,” he said, hesitating at the door. “By the way, I forgot to tell you. You’ve a message on your machine.” He blew her a kiss. “Bye.”

  A message? Now she remembered. Jimmy Ferguson had phoned last night, and she’d let it go into the machine. She’d had better things, much better things, to do. She wondered what he could have wanted. Well, she told herself, walking into the living room, she’d already made up her mind that she wasn’t going to avoid facing reminders of her past. Listening to whatever Jimmy had to say couldn’t hurt now. Not after last night with Tim.

  She paused in front of the flashing red light. Somewhere within her, she remembered that red was the universal danger signal. Stuff and nonsense. She pushed the play button.

  A metallic voice said, “You have one message.” There was a pause.

  “Get on with it,” she muttered.

  “Message one. Sunday, September twenty-fifth, eleven thirty P.M.”

  She heard Jimmy’s Belfast brogue. “It’s me, Fiona. Jimmy. I’m awful sorry to phone so late, so I am, but there’s been a breakout, so there has.”

  A what? She sat heavily in the armchair.

  “A bunch of the lads has got out of the Kesh. The man on the CBC gave a list of names. Look, Fiona, I know this’ll upset you, but … Davy’s out, so he is. He could be headed here. Will you give me a call? 555-2996.”

  The machine clicked off.

  Fiona’s hand covered her open mouth. Her nightmare always started with an explosion, but she was wide awake, and this was no bad dream. What Jimmy Ferguson had just said hit her with greater force than any imagined bomb burst.

  * * *

  Fiona blinked at the morning sunlight bursting through the trees, hardly understanding how she had moved from her flat to Whyte Avenue to wait for Becky. Branches of the old maples swayed gently. There were no maples in Ireland, she thought, but Davy McCutcheon was free there and, according to Jimmy’s message, heading to Vancouver. She’d replayed the recording again to make certain she’d not misunderstood. Dear God, there’d been no mistaking the voice’s bald statement.

  She was trying to make sense of her feelings now, but in the seconds after she’d heard what Jimmy was saying, she’d not taken time to think. She’d rejoiced in Davy’s freedom, inwardly cheering as enthusiastically as a fan whose team had scored the winning goal in overtime.

  In that millisecond where conscious, cold, intellectual analysis of the facts was pushed aside, what she had felt deep within her had been instinctive—and absolutely honest. She wanted him to come.

  Now she’d had time to digest the reality: a man she’d not seen for nine years might show up on her doorstep. Her doubts had started, along with the first grumbling of a migraine, still distant but ominous as the growling of an over-the-horizon thunderstorm. She’d taken a couple of Tylenol ten minutes ago and hoped they’d do the trick, at least for the incipient headache. No tablets, no potions could help her decide what might happen if and when Davy appeared. And if she was so sure she loved Davy, what was she going to tell Tim?

  If ever Fiona’d wanted Becky’s advice, it was now. She wished her friend would hurry up.

  What if she left Tim, Davy showed up, and she found that what she thought she was feeling was nostalgia, not love? Was thinking she loved Davy a subtle way of making him a symbol for the good things she could recall about Ireland: chestnut trees, the Lagan River, her brother Connor before he was killed, the people, the craic? That Ireland had been torn up forever by the Troubles. “All changed, changed utterly” when the “terrible beauty” was born.

  She wasn’t the woman she’d been back in the North. She’d embraced a wider world. Could Davy have changed as much as she had in the last nine years?

  She’d been free to face what Becky called the “dreadful tyranny of limitless choices here in Canada.” But Fiona had embraced those choices freely.

  In Ireland, it had taken all her courage to hew to her decision to get out of the ghetto of the Falls Road by refusing to accept her station in life as a Catholic woman, a position preordained by centuries of tradition. Despite the objections of her family, and defying them had cost her dearly, she’d pursued her goal, finished her teachers’ diploma, even taken up with a Protestant in teachers’ college. That had been the last straw for them. They hadn’t spoken to her since.

  It had been hard to accept at the time, but by their intransigence they had left her unencumbered by family ties and free to chart her own course in this new country.

  It was 1983. Women had demanded, and now had, the right to attain their potential. Canada was a country where people of every nationality were arriving daily, and no one cared tuppence if they went to chapel, church, shul, mosque, or temple. She had been right to challenge her parents’ assumptions, and the way she was now free to live her own life made their stubbornness over a Protestant boyfriend seem almost comical.

  Her regrets about leaving her parents, the North, her friends there had faded. Only the lingering sadness about losing Davy remained. The choice she’d made nine years ago had seemed like a good one then. It had been. She’d been right to emigrate, to put behind her the mayhem that was Northern Ireland, the mayhem that Davy had been a part of.

  God knows, she’d tried to understand him then, to forgive him, and would have if he’d not been arrested. She was certain of that, as certain as she was that she could forgive him now, provided he had foresworn his allegiance to the Cause. He must have. She’d watched his disenchantment grow, accepted his promise that after one last mission he would turn his back on the Provos—forever.

  She knew full well that a committed man wouldn’t be coming to Canada. He’d be going underground in Ireland and fighting on. Jimmy seemed certain Davy was heading here, and surely that alone was proof of his intentions? It had to be.

  In his rejection of the violence, a rejection begun back in 1974, Davy had already started to change. She wondered how he would feel when he began to understand how different she had become.

  He’d been a simple, ill-educated man; it hadn’t bothered her back then, but it might now. Her own life had moved on, but she doubted if Davy’s could in the confines of a maximum-security prison. Would he feel she was too good for him? Worse, would she? Her temples throbbed as she looked at her watch. Where was Becky?

  She was starting to feel imprisoned herself, constrained by an utterly unreasonable yearning for Davy, yet knowing that Tim loved her and, by his love, had a hold over her. Once she told him about Davy, about how she felt, she’d lose Tim, just as she’d had Davy taken from her. And it had cost her sorely.

  Perhaps part of her old attraction to Davy had been in the way she could live vicariously through him. In her young years, she had embraced the civil rights movement as her way of striving for a better Ireland. It hadn’t worked. Davy, in his way, had continued the struggle, and for all her deeply embraced pacifism, she must have
harboured a hope that the Provos would win, the Ireland she wanted so much would materialize. Was that why she’d been able to turn a blind eye to what Davy did?

  If he made it to Vancouver, there’d be risks ahead. He would be in the country illegally. They would never be free from a nagging worry that one day an immigration officer could show up and she’d lose him again. Planning to wait for him made no sense, no sense whatsoever, but when the heart ruled, sense flew out the window.

  The logical thing to do, the sensible thing, was to put Davy away and stay with Tim. There’d be no risks to be taken if she chose that path. It could be a horrible mistake to let Tim go, but unless she stopped feeling the way she did now, it would be unconscionable to keep him hanging on like some kind of romantic insurance policy.

  She rubbed her temple. For all the good the Tylenol was doing, she might as well have rubbed her head with vegetable-marrow jam. That was one of Davy’s old cracks. Where in God’s name had it come from?

  She saw Becky’s car coming, and as soon as it pulled up, Fiona slipped into the passenger seat. “Morning Becky. I have to…”

  “Sorry I’m late,” Becky said tersely and drove off.

  Fiona didn’t bother to fasten her seat belt. She blurted out, “I had a phone call from Jimmy Ferguson. Remember I told you about Jimmy…?”

  “I’m late because I was on the phone with Mum. She’s pretty upset. Dad’s being admitted to hospital. He was full of beans when I was out in Abbotsford on Saturday, but she couldn’t waken him this morning.”

  Not this morning of all mornings. Not when Fiona wanted to—she was being selfish. Her own troubles could wait. “What’s wrong with him?” She wished she’d sounded more sympathetic.

  Becky didn’t seem to notice. “The local doctors think he’s had a stroke. A big one.”

  “I am sorry. I really am.” Fiona turned to look at Becky and saw the moisture in her eyes, how her hands gripped the wheel. “When will you know for sure if it is a stroke?”

  “They’re sending him to Vancouver General. To the neurology unit.”