Lies of Silence

by Moore, Brian;

  “We could go down the road, I suppose. There’s a place called the Bewley. But, wait, what’s it matter now? I’ll have to tell her today.”

  When he said that, she reached up and kissed him. “Still,” she said. “I think it would be easier if we go out somewhere. The staff here would see us having breakfast. They know you spent the night here. Gossip. All that.”

  “You’re right. Let’s go out.”

  “I’ll go down and wait for you in the lobby,” she said. “It’s not far, this place, is it? We can walk?”

  “It’s five minutes away.”

  He let her out. When she had gone down the corridor to the lift, his room phone rang. It could be my father, he’s been ringing since yesterday. He let the phone ring and, when it stopped ringing, he went out, locking the door. The corridor was empty. She had already gone down.

  When the lift came, he saw inside it Ernie, one of the porters, with a loaded baggage trolley. This was something that was forbidden. Porters were supposed to take the service lift unless a guest accompanied the baggage. Ernie, guilty, said, “Morning, sir,” then avoided his eye, hoping not to be challenged on his fault. At the third floor two guests got on and when the lift reached the lobby Ernie held the door open, nodding to him again as he followed the guests out.

  As he crossed the lobby, Duffy, the night manager, waved to him from the reception desk. “You’re in early,” Duffy said.

  “I slept here. I’m going out for a minute. Back soon.”

  He saw her, standing by the newsstand. She had bought two newspapers and was reading one of them. As he went toward her he saw that the clock over the stand showed eight-fifteen. And remembered: Keogh was to call at nine, but might call before then.

  “All right?” she asked.

  “No. Sorry, but we’ve got to eat here. I forgot. I’m expecting that call from London.”

  She hesitated, and then, in the sudden way she had, she laughed, said, “What the hell,” and walked ahead of him into the dining room.

  The dining room area which was normally used for breakfasts had been diminished by half because of the bombing. Now, only ten tables were set, closed off by banquet screens. Luckily, all of the tables were not yet taken. Alice, the hostess who came up to him, smiled and shrugged. “A wee bit cramped, aren’t we?” she said.

  “Can we have that table?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Dillon.” She seated them and waved menus in the air. “No sense handing out these. We don’t have a full breakfast on. All we can do is juice, coffee and toast. We might manage boiled eggs. Would you like boiled eggs, Miss?”

  “No, thanks. Orange juice and toast,” Andrea said.

  He remembered then about the phone call. “Excuse me,” he said. He went into the lobby, picked up a house phone, and told the switchboard where he was.

  When he came back she was reading the newspaper. “Listen to this, Michael. There’s a story here about the bomb. They’re saying that, if it was an attempt to murder Pottinger, then it’s a whole new change of policy for the IRA because until now they’ve never targeted him. They point out that if the bomb had gone off with no warning it would have killed hundreds of people besides Pottinger. The police say the IRA didn’t give any warning but they won’t say how they found out about it.” She looked at him. “That means they’re trying to protect you, aren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “But what’s the point? The IRA must know that it could only have been you who told.”

  “Or Moira,” he said. “They left before the bomb was due to go off. She could have been the one who phoned the police.”

  “Oh, God. I didn’t think of that.”

  The waitress had arrived with coffee and their breakfasts. “Will there be anything else?” the waitress asked.

  He shook his head. Andrea sat, not looking at him, staring at her coffee cup. “So you’re in equal danger?” she said.

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “If you go to London with me and she stays here and something happens to her—you know what I’m thinking—how would we feel?”

  “I don’t think anything’s really going to happen.” He said it angrily, frightened that if Andrea thought about it she might change her mind.

  “But you can’t be sure, can you? She really should go, shouldn’t she? And if you tell her about us it gives her another good reason not to go.”

  “Look, it’s up to her. It has nothing to do with me anymore.” But even as he spoke he knew he had said something ignoble, something Andrea might remember and hold against him. Now, trying to correct his mistake, he said, “And if I do go along with her stupid notion and stay here, and you leave and I lose you? Look, it was over between Moira and me before this ever happened. She’s not going to go, no matter what I do, no matter what I say. I know her.”

  She did not speak. She sat, looking at him, as though she were trying to make up her mind. At nearby tables, conversations continued in the churchly tones which people adopt when in a public place. Beyond the screens a plastic sheet had been erected over the gaping hole in the restaurant wall and, in the car-park outside, he could hear the contractor’s trucks arriving to start work on rebuilding. The whispered voices, the background noise of the trucks, made her silence even more threatening. Then, at last, she reached her hand across the table and said, “All right. If you’re sure?”

  He put his hand on hers. “I’m sure.” As he did he glanced at the tables nearby. No one was looking at them. And then, coming toward him from the dining room entrance, he saw Alice, the breakfast hostess. Behind her, tall, walking quickly, was Moira.

  “Now, Mrs. Dillon,” Alice said, waving Moira on, pointing to his table, then turning, with a professional smile, to return to her station. Moira came up to him. She was wearing the same red shirtwaist dress she had worn last night, her feet in sandals, walking with that quick lithe swing of her hips as though she were a model in a fashion parade.

  He stood up. Did she see us? “Hello there,” he said to her, trying to keep his voice casual and easy. He turned to Andrea. “This is my wife, Moira. Moira, this is Miss Baxter of the BBC.” He pulled out a chair. “Have you had breakfast?”

  “Yes,” Moira said. She did not sit down. “I was just on my way home.” She looked at Andrea. “Would you excuse us for a minute?”

  “Yes, of course,” Andrea said. She stared up at Moira.

  “Won’t be long,” he said. Moira nodded to him, indicating that they should go out in the lobby. Had she seen them, would she make a scene, would he tell her now?

  When they reached the lobby, Moira looked back into the dining room. “Who’s that girl?”

  “I told you. She works for the BBC. What was it you wanted to see me about?”

  She looked at him and suddenly, watching the skin around her cheekbones tighten as though she would scream, he knew she had seen them holding hands. “I just stopped off on my way into town,” she said. “I wanted to tell you. You remember what we were talking about last night?”

  “At supper, yes.”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about it all night. I mean it. Go to London if you want. But I’m definitely staying here.”

  It was the moment to tell her, but he knew he could not do it. Not with Andrea so close. “We’ll talk about it later,” he said. “Will you be home this afternoon?”

  “No. I rang Peg Wilton this morning. I’m starting right away in her shop. How long have you known that girl?”

  “What girl?”

  She jerked her head in the direction of the dining room. “That girl!”

  “A few months. Why?”

  Suddenly, she laughed, angry, close to hysteria. “Why?” she said. “Why?”

  At that moment, Jimmy, one of the bellboys, came running across the lobby. “Mr. Dillon, you’re wanted on the phone. They said it’s London.”

  “That’s my boss,” he told Moira. “It’s about the transfer.”

  She looked at him. For a moment he thou
ght she was going to hit him, but she said, “Go on, then. I have to go myself,” and walked back across the lobby with her swift angry stride.

  He watched her as she pushed her way through the revolving doors. He then signaled Jimmy and pointed to Andrea’s table. “Tell that lady I’ll be back in a moment. Tell her it’s London on the line.” He ran toward the mezzanine stairs and his office.

  As always, Keogh’s secretary made sure he was standing by before transferring the call to her boss. He waited, tense, until the familiar voice said, “Hi, Mike. Dan Keogh. How’s it going?”

  “Fine.”

  “Mike, I’ve been talking to Dwayne and we’re going to pull you out. You worked at the Ormonde didn’t you?”

  “Yes, years ago.”

  “I’m going to put you back in there. As an assistant manager. How does that grab you?”

  “Terrific. Thank you.”

  “OK, come on over as soon as you can pack up. Hold it—”

  He waited on a silent line until Keogh’s voice came back on again. “Mike, I’ve got to hang up on you. Burke—that the name of your assistant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell him to take over but don’t raise his hopes. OK? Dwayne’s looking for a replacement for you there. ’Bye, Mike. See you soon.”

  “Thanks,” he said again, but Keogh had already rung off.

  The Ormonde, one of the grander hotels in the Alliance chain, looked out, like the Grosvenor and the Dorchester, onto a view of Hyde Park. He had worked there for six months while in training and had heard a rumor that the Ormonde’s manager, Ronny Pomfret, was a year or two away from retirement. Dillon stood, looking out at bleak Belfast rooftops, but seeing the long sweep of the Ormonde’s facade, the waiting queue of London taxis under the porte-cochère, the top-hatted doormen escorting veiled Arab ladies and their attendants toward waiting limousines. He remembered calm lobbies filled with flowers and the baskets of fruit and buckets of champagne sent up with compliments to the suites of important guests. He thought of the smooth patina of Ronny Pomfret’s days, the Jaguar waiting in the hotel’s underground garage to drive him home to his villa in the stockbroker belt, his children in good schools, his holiday house in Provence. If Keogh is putting me in now as an assistant manager, there’s always the chance …

  But then, like a referee’s whistle signaling a foul, a police siren sounded outside. Suddenly, in clear focus, he saw again the Belfast rooftops, the gray mountain looming over the city. Even his momentary daydream seemed tawdry, for wasn’t it a proof that his ambition in life had shrunk to a vision of himself as a head flunky in morning clothes, a glorified servant, condemned to smile and turn the other cheek to the condescension, bad manners and arrogant assumptions of people who could pay hundreds of pounds for a night’s lodgings? And Andrea? Would she be content to live with such a man, and for how long?

  At the thought of Andrea he hurried back down to the lobby. She was coming out of the dining room. “Has she gone?” she asked.

  “Moira? Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, really. I was called to the phone and she left. Listen, the transfer’s OK. That was London on the line.”

  When he said that, Andrea looked at him in a way that worried him. “I have to run,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Look.” Alarmed, he took hold of her wrist. “It is all right, isn’t it?”

  “I hope so,” she said, and pulled herself free. “’Bye, Michael.” She walked quickly across the lobby and, as Moira had minutes before, pushed through the revolving doors and was gone.

  SEVEN

  Inset in the heavy front door were two leaded panels of colored glass: circles, triangles and squares of pink, yellow and green which gave a distorted, drunken view into the front hall. When he turned the key and pushed open the door the movement sent the post scattering across the shiny linoleum within. The morning newspaper was stuck halfway through the letterbox. He did not bother to remove it. He closed the door behind him and stood in the kaleidoscopic shadows cast by the colored glass. The house was quiet as a church. There was no sign that the police had been here. He looked in at the open doorway of the sitting room. The sofa, the television set, the chairs, no longer looked familiar. It was as though he had left this house, not yesterday, but years ago, and now, coming back into it again, he saw it as a stranger would, shabby, ordinary, with pictures and ornaments which, were he the owner, he would at once remove.

  In the kitchen, the alarm clock on the dresser ticked loud as a metronome. The formica-covered table and four kitchen chairs seemed odd and unfamiliar. Was it here that four men in woolen balaclava helmets sat waiting for morning and a bomb to go off? He turned and went back into the hall. He climbed the stairs. Is this the house where Moira and I lived three years as man and wife? How strange it seems, a house rented for a summer month at the seaside, a place I will drive past a year from now, wondering which front door was mine.

  On the landing he looked in at the bedroom, at the unmade bed, at Moira’s blue nightgown lying on it, rucked up from where the tall IRA youth had sat. He opened the wardrobe. His clothes, on racks and shelves, seemed like everything else here, as though they belonged to someone else. He found a suitcase, and began tossing clothes into it. Minutes later, in the room which had been his study, he took from a drawer the documents and papers he had set aside the other night. As he closed the drawer he looked at the wall of books, those books which were the only things here he had felt to be his own. Were there some he should take now? For he sensed he would never see them again.

  He went to the window and looked out at the avenue. Between the hours of 10 A.M. and 4 P.M. the avenue was usually empty of traffic other than delivery vans and service vehicles. Now he saw, coming toward him, a white Ford car. The Ford seemed the same one which had kept him under surveillance the night before last. It drove slowly past his house and, as it did, he saw the top of the driver’s head, and his hand, loosely gripping the wheel. The Ford drove on up the avenue, stopped at the intersection, then turned right and disappeared.

  Was it the same Ford? Should he telephone the police? Or would he seem hysterical, a fool? White Ford cars were common. It was a coincidence, that’s all.

  He told himself to calm down. He put the papers he had come for in his suitcase and shut the case. He walked slowly downstairs to the front hall and stood, listening for the sound of the white Ford coming back. He heard only the loud tick of the kitchen clock. They had probably seen him drive up and now they would be watching for him to come out, get into his car and drive off. The white Ford would follow him.

  Leave the car. Don’t go near it. Go out the back way.

  He went down the hall and opened the back door which led into the garden. He looked right and left at the other gardens by the driveway. There was no one in sight. He shut the door and ran up the garden path to the gate. When he reached the gate he saw ants, marching in a column across the path, to and from Teddy’s blood-clotted body. Suddenly, it seemed more dangerous to go out this way. If they were watching the front they would also watch the back. Walking alone up the driveway and into the avenue he would be a clear target. He turned, and ran back into the house. He went down the hall and opened the front door. The avenue was deserted except for a small boy, riding his tricycle on the pavement. He went out the front door and ran down to the street, throwing his suitcase into the back seat of the car. He put the car in gear and drove down the avenue, watching for the white Ford. He came onto the main road, meeting a stream of traffic. There was no white Ford in sight.

  Peg Wilton’s antiques shop was in the center of the city in an area forbidden to motor traffic. At the gates of this enclave, security guards carried out perfunctory searches of the hand baggage of pedestrians entering the area. Apart from this precaution it could have been a prosperous shopping area in any British city. Department stores, clothing boutiques, restaurants and furniture showrooms were crowded in the midmorning s
hopping rush. There were no signs of bomb damage in these central streets, no graffiti, no armed police or British Army patrols. Peg’s place was beside a large toy shop whose windows were alive with electronic games and windup toy cars and trucks which bumped into obstacles, overturned, righted themselves, and continued their meaningless progress. A group of children stood, intent as military observers, watching these displays as Dillon passed by and went in at Peg’s door to the sound of a shop bell. The shop seemed to specialize in old costume jewelry, silver photograph frames, Tiffany-style lamps and antique mirrors. It was empty of customers. As he entered, Peg appeared from a little room in the back. She wore a flowered yellow silk dress and carried, affectedly, a long silver cigarette holder in which there smoldered a half-smoked cigarette.

  “Michael!” She embraced him, touching her velvet-cushion cheek against his, left, then right, like a French general bestowing a military honor. “I heard!” she said. “Isn’t it awful—and unbelievable? To think I was in your house earlier that same night!”

  “Where’s Moira, is she here?”

  “Moira, my dear, has just been seen on Ulster Television. Didn’t you know?”

  “No. What about?”

  “Well, she’s decided to tell exactly what happened to both of you that evening. I think it’s really brave of her, don’t you?”

  “How did she get on the telly so soon?”

  “When she told me the story this morning she asked if I knew anyone from the papers who would listen to her and, of course, I’m a great friend of Penny Davis, you know, ‘The Morning Show,’ so I rang Penny up. And, of course, it was a scoop for Penny. They rushed her over to the studios right away.”

  “When was she on?”

  “She was on the news. I just finished watching. I went next door where they have a set.”

  “Are you expecting her back?”

  Peg raised her long holder, took a draw on her cigarette. “I’m not sure,” she said. “And I’ll tell you the truth, Michael, I’ve been having some second thoughts.”