“Could I have a word with you in private?” the man asked.
“What is it about?”
“Just a wee word with you. I won’t keep you long. Is there somewhere we can go?”
They went back through the revolving doors and Dillon led him to the small unused television room where, earlier, he had been with Andrea. When they went into the room the man glanced back as if to make sure they were not being followed. He went over and turned off the image on the muted television set. “If you don’t mind,” he said, then looked back at Dillon. “I’m here for Dr. Pottinger.”
“Yes?”
“The police have told Dr. Pottinger, in confidence, of course, about what you done here this morning. And Dr. Pottinger has asked me to pass on to you his thanks for your courageous action. You’re aware, of course, that this was an attempt on the Doctor’s life?”
“Oh, was it?”
“Oh, there’s no doubt about it. It was a deliberate attempt to murder him. I gather, then, from what your wife told the police, that neither one of you was aware of the purpose of the bomb?”
“That’s right.”
“These IRA fellas never mentioned a word to either one of you all night?”
“No.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” The man’s white moonface slipped into a quick, guilty grin.
“Why is it funny? Why should they confide in us?”
The man hunched his shoulders, as though embarrassed.
“Is it because we’re Catholics, is that what you mean?” Dillon said.
“Not at all, not at all,” the man said hastily. “There’s just one question we want to clear up. Inspector Randall says you and your wife don’t want any mention made of your part in what happened. He says he advised you to stay out of this for fear of reprisals.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And you’re going to follow that advice?”
“Yes.”
“Good. So long as we know that. You see, Dr. Pottinger is giving a press conference later on today and he wanted to be clear on that point.”
“I see.”
The man’s fingers flipped the pages of the black leather-bound book absentmindedly, as though he was considering what he must say next. The book was, Dillon saw, a Bible.
“Well, as I said, in that case Dr. Pottinger will respect your decision.” Again the man’s face creased in a grin. “I gather you have no high opinion of the IRA, Mr. Dillon?”
“No. Nor of Dr. Pottinger either.”
The hand that held the Bible lifted it up as if making a debating point. “Mr. Dillon, we have many enemies. That is the penalty we pay for doing the Lord’s work and speaking up for the people of Ulster. Thank you for your help. Have a good day.”
The man bobbed his head in farewell and, gripping his Bible, turned and left the room. Dillon stood, impotent in anger. What if Moira had been killed, would they still have had the nerve to come and thank me for what I’d done?
A bellboy’s voice was paging him. “Mr. Dillon, please.”
He went out to reception. One of the bellboys came up, telling him there was a call for him. “They said it was urgent,” the bellboy added. “It’s from the BBC.”
He ran upstairs to his office. The red light blinked on his phone. When he picked it up and said, “Dillon here,” at once her voice, rushed, worried, speaking in a low tone as though she were in a place where she was overheard.
“Michael, I can’t come at five. The taping’s been preempted but I have to help out at a press conference. Funnily enough, it’s about the bombing.”
“Is it Pottinger giving it?”
“Yes, how did you know?”
“Doesn’t matter. When will you be free?”
“I don’t know. I know we have to talk, but—”
“Listen,” he said. “I have to drive down to Lurgan to see Moira. She’s with her mother. She’s going to stay there tonight. I’ll tell her I have to come back here later. I’ll make some excuse. Could we see each other at, say, ten?”
“At the hotel?”
“Yes. And listen. I spoke to Harrison just now. I think it’s going to be all right about my transfer.”
“But what about Moira? You’ll have to bring her, won’t you?”
He was silent. “Look, we’ll talk about it. I’ll see you at ten.”
“What a mess,” she said. “It’s a real mess, isn’t it?”
“It will be all right,” he said desperately. “Look, it will be all right.”
“How can it be?”
“Look, please—don’t be upset. Andrea?”
There was silence on the line.
“Andrea?”
“Yes?”
“Listen, we’ll talk about it. I’ll work it out, it’s going to be all right.”
“I’ll see you at ten,” she said.
FIVE
The car which had been sent over from McAuley’s, the car hire people, was a small, shiny Fiat with less than five hundred miles on the odometer. The motorway connecting Belfast with Lurgan was well designed and well signposted, a high-speed autoroute which provided occasional glimpses of new factories and neat farmhouses set in well-tilled fields. It was a reminder that this part of Ireland was a part of Great Britain, its roads and public services far superior to those in the Irish Republic, less than a hundred miles to the south. Driving on this road, Dillon might be in one of the English shires. But tonight, he was reminded of what, on a normal night, he would ignore. Visible on his right, looking like a factory in the late summer’s light, was the notorious prison where, under British supervision, torture had been carried out, a place where Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries, demanding to be treated as political prisoners, had refused to wear prison garb, going about draped only in blankets, walking their excrement-smeared cells like bearded Christs. It was a place where the false martyrdom of IRA hunger strikers had come to world attention, the prison the British called the Maze and the Irish Long Kesh.
He looked at it now as he drove past. Men who had spent years behind those walls were the organizers behind last night’s nervous boys. Someone who might still be imprisoned there could have arranged for the Semtex bomb, the white Ford, the presence of a twelve-year-old delivery boy in the hotel car-park, the girl in the yellow muffler who followed him into the shop. This prison, which on a normal evening would be a familiar, ignored part of the landscape, had now become a factor in his life. He looked in the rearview mirror at the cars moving in the lane behind him. Would one of them turn off with him, when the sign ahead said Craigavon? Which one would it be?
When he reached the turnoff and drove up the ramp to the rotary which led to Lurgan, he pulled over to the side of the road and waited. But the only vehicle which followed him up the ramp was a bakery van which entered the roundabout then drove off in the opposite direction to the town. But what did that prove? They could be in that van. They had seen him pull over, and had moved on to deceive him.
He put the car in gear and drove on into the town, telling himself that he must stop thinking like this. Unless he did, from now on every suspicious-looking stranger, every innocent bakery van, would be an object of menace, a cause for alarm. But even as he warned himself he knew that he could not control it. He was afraid. He was not brave or defiant as he would have wished to be. He was afraid.
Moira’s mother was a native of Lurgan. When Moira’s father gave up his butcher’s shop in Belfast, her mother had persuaded him to come back here and buy a house in the lower town. Dillon drove now into a street of row houses and small shops and, at its end, a railway station. The houses, built seventy years ago, had small cramped rooms, narrow back yards, and back windows opening on to an ugly rubbish dump. He drove around to the rear, and parked his car in a small lane on the edge of this dump.
As he went into her back yard, Moira’s mother, standing by the kitchen window, saw him and came to the door to let him in. “Michael, how are you?” she said, embracing him, press
ing him against her large bosom.
“Hello, Maeve, is Moira here?”
“She is, surely. Come in, come in.”
Maeve was, Dillon sometimes thought, the unconscious first cause of Moira’s bulimia. Like Moira she was tall, with beautiful hands and long elegant legs. But she had become fat, enormously fat, a corpulence emphasized by a relentless smoker’s cough which made her gross body shake like a loose pudding. Unlike Moira she seemed blind to her surroundings so that the sitting room into which she now ushered Dillon was as depressing as the lounge in an old people’s home: plastic-covered sofa and chairs, a television set which was never shut off, garish kitsch paintings, cheap statuettes of nymphs and Disney animals, ethnic rugs and tasseled cushions, all of them purchased as souvenirs on package-tour holidays to the Costa Brava, Florida and the Algarve.
The room was empty. “Where is she?” Dillon asked.
“She’s upstairs, lying down,” Maeve said. “Sure, she’s whacked out. You must be the same, yourself. Could I get you a drink or something?”
At that moment he heard footsteps on the stairs outside and Moira’s voice. “Mama, is that Michael?” And then she came into the room. She did not greet him. “I couldn’t sleep,” she told her mother. “And it’s almost six. Will it be on the six o’clock news?”
It was. It was not the first item of news, which was a fatal airline crash in West Germany, nor the second, which dealt with the resignation of a senior British Government adviser in a dispute with the Prime Minister. It was the third announcement. In even tones, the familiar BBC newsreader began, “In Northern Ireland …” and at once the screen was filled with television footage of the car-park, the wrecked cars and rubbled walls, the destroyed interiors of the restaurant and the Emerald Room. Dillon, sitting on the sofa with his mother-in-law, leaned forward, strangely excited. Suddenly, he had been plucked from the invisibility of ordinary life. There on television, watched by people all over the British Isles, were scenes and events he had helped to create. As the camera moved past the rubbled hotel wall into the debris of the Emerald Room, he heard the newsreader’s voice say, “The bomb was placed just outside this room in which the Reverend Alun Pottinger was speaking to a group of his supporters. While no group has yet claimed responsibility it is believed that this was an attempt to assassinate Dr. Pottinger.” The image shifted to a half-dozen reporters and photographers surrounding Pottinger whose face, Dillon realized, looked more real on television than when he had seen it this morning.
“Dr. Pottinger, do you think this was an attempt to assassinate you?”
“Ask the IRA. Of course it was. It would be a lot easier for the enemies of Ulster if I was out of the way.”
“Is this a change of tactics, then? There’s never been an attempt to assassinate you before.”
Pottinger grinned into the camera. “How do you know? Anyway I’m in good hands. God’s hands. Thank you, now.”
The image shifted to the newsreader in the studio. “In East London today …” the newsreader began and at that point Moira got up and switched the set off.
Dillon turned and saw Moira’s father Joe standing in the doorway, ruddy-faced, wearing his old bottle-green Barbour jacket, his Labrador tail-thumping behind him. “Well, you’re on the big news now,” Joe said, smiling. “Hello there, Michael.”
“Hello, Joe.”
“I was just going to take the dog for his walk. I’ll be back in a wee while.”
Joe went out again. “Listen,” Maeve said. “Have you had your supper?”
“No, not yet.”
“We’ll have a bite here, then. You’ll stay, won’t you?”
“I will,” he said. “Thanks.” Maeve went off to the kitchen. Alone now with Moira he turned, suddenly tense. She was sitting in one of Maeve’s plastic-covered armchairs, her hands joined on her lap, looking out of the small window at a row of flowerpots which masked the ugly back yard from view. Clouds, heavy with rain, massed above the house.
“How are you?” he asked. “How do you feel?”
She did not answer. She looked down at her feet, then, with her toe, eased her left sandal off until it dangled loose. She raised her long leg up, the sandal dangling, studying it as though waiting for it to fall on the floor.
“I came because you said you wanted to talk to me, remember?”
She eased the sandal back onto her foot. “Are you afraid of them?”
“The IRA? Yes, in a way.”
“Are you going to run away?”
“I asked for a transfer today.”
“Without asking me?”
“It came up,” he said. “I didn’t have time. They sent Harrison over from London to see the damage. It just seemed logical to tell them what the police had told us.”
“I’m not going.”
If she did not come, if she did not want to come, then he would not be abandoning her, he would not have her like a millstone around his neck in London. “What do you mean?” he said.
“I’m not leaving here. That’s definite.”
“Why?”
“This is my country. I’m not going to let those bastards push me out of it.”
“But aren’t you worried about being killed?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. He realized that she was not angry. The Moira who quickly lost her temper when you crossed her was not this woman who now looked at him as though he were a stranger she had met at a party, interested in his point of view, but willing to debate it.
“You’d be safer in London,” he said. “At least, the police seem to think so.”
“But if we do leave,” she said, “if people like us let the IRA push us around, how do you think we’re ever going to change things?”
“I’m not here to change things.”
“That’s true,” she said. “This is a perfect excuse for you to run back to London.”
He wanted to say, It’s up to you, but, at the same time, he was ashamed of wanting to say it. “Look,” he said. “I can’t go to London and leave you here. What if something happens to you?”
“What if it does? Do you care?”
“What are you talking about?”
She walked across the small room and stood at the window, looking out at the gathering rainclouds. “I think you know what I’m talking about.”
“Because I phoned the police? Is that it? Look, it’s hard to explain. I know.”
“Do you know? Do you?” Her voice, calm until now, had a tiny tremor in it. She kept looking out the window. “I sat at home and waited for you.”
He stared at her back. Was she crying?
“I didn’t know what was happening to you,” she said. “I didn’t know about the bomb. I just knew they’d taken you away. They told me to stay in the room and not move, or you’d be killed. So, even when I heard them leave the house, I didn’t move. I was afraid for you. Last night, when we were both in the house, I wasn’t afraid of them. But this morning, knowing they had you, not knowing what they would do to you, I was no different from the poor bloody people who’re so scared of them they keep their mouths shut when the police come around. I was afraid for you. But you weren’t afraid for me, were you?”
She turned to look at him. She was crying.
“I was,” he said.
“No, you weren’t. And the truth of it is you’ve never felt about me the way I do about you. And you never will. So go on, go to London. I’m staying here. Last night taught me a lesson. You can’t avoid responsibility by pretending things aren’t there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You know what I mean. You and me.”
“Listen—” he said.
“No, you listen. You stood up to them this morning. You were willing to lose me to do it. Well, I’m going to stay here now and stand up to them, even if it means losing you.” She turned away. “What am I talking about? I can’t lose you. I never had you.” Again, she began to cry. At that moment, he heard the s
ound of the front door opening. “Give me a Kleenex,” she said. He gave her one and she wiped her eyes hurriedly as her father came into the front hall.
“Come on, Rex, come on,” her father said, pulling at the old dog’s lead, dragging him into the hall. “It’s started to rain,” her father said. “We had to come back. But he doesn’t want to come back, poor old fella. He misses his walk.”
“Is that Dada?” Maeve’s voice called from the kitchen.
“It is,” Joe said.
“Good thing you came home. Supper’s ready.”
In a small alcove off the kitchen, the table was laid with plates of ham and a lettuce-and-tomato salad, a loaf of soda bread, a teapot and cups. Rex, thumping his tail against the table leg, settled in under the white tablecloth, snug at his master’s feet. Dillon saw that, as usual when he and Moira ate with her parents, her mother had set out her best china and silver and at each place a freshly ironed linen napkin replaced the paper ones she would normally use. He knew this was done because Moira had laid down the rules. For she was, at once, her parents’ devoted daughter and their judge. Her schooling with the Sacred Heart nuns had erased her broad Belfast accent, so that she did not speak like a girl who was their child. Her university degree, the first ever earned on either side of her family, and, above all, her marriage to Dillon who had been born of parents who made hers feel ill at ease, all of it had changed Joe and Maeve’s roles, so that now it was as though they were Moira’s children, warned to sit up straight, to mind their table manners and be on their best behavior when she put them on public view. And even tonight, after knowing what had happened in the past twenty-four hours, that awkwardness persisted in the way they poured the tea, passed the soda bread, and offered more ham as soon as Dillon began to finish what was on his plate.
It was then that he noticed Moira had eaten nothing except a slice of tomato and some lettuce. It was a bad sign. He wondered if she had seen chocolates somewhere in the house. Or would she go out to get them later, under pretence of taking a walk?
He looked at the window. Rain blurred the windowpanes. Joe was talking, quietly at first, asking questions about last night. But then he put his napkin down on the table and in a way Dillon had never heard him speak before, said, “My daughter! My daughter! Sittin’ in her house with the IRA pointin’ a gun at her head. Before the war, when I was a wee boy, if anyone had told me that, I’d have said you’re daft. I mean, back then the IRA was finished, a bunch of dodos that nobody heeded anymore. Sure, we had the same Troubles in those days, a Catholic would never get a job if there was a Protestant up for it. But then the war came and there was more jobs and I used to think all that bigotry’s dyin’ out and after the war things will get better. But they didn’t. And then in the sixties the civil rights marches started and it was on the telly an’ the whole world saw the Prods beatin’ us up and the police helpin’ them. And I thought: now that the outside world sees what’s goin’ on here, things will get better. But they got worse. And you know the rest. After all this fightin’ there’s more Catholic unemployed here than ever there was. And we’re being ‘protected’ by the IRA, a bunch of thugs, that has no program except killin’ people. They’re against the Irish Government as much as they’re against the Brits. And who are they for? Themselves! And who’s for them? Nobody, except some stupid Yanks who know nothin’ about what’s goin’ on here, and a few of my people, people born in the Falls Road and places like that. And the worst of it is, it’s people like us, ordinary Catholics, who are the only ones who can stop them. Instead of that we’re helpin’ them to go on destroyin’ this country because we’re too stupid to see the truth. And too frightened of them gettin’ back at us.”
Lies of Silence Page 10
