“Are you getting many calls about the piece?” asked Flaherty.
“My erstwhile constituents on the Upper West Side are all aghast at my innocent comments, which you so viciously twisted. I gotta get outta town. Sometimes it’s good to be Bi-Continental!”
“Bi-Continental!” howled Flaherty. “You fraud!”
“I am, indeed, and I’m going back to Dublin tonight. I’m fleeing the flaccid liberal hoors of New York City for the starched reactionary hoors of Dáil Éireann.”
At the cocktail party, Eoin stood off to the side as his boss amused the gentry with his wit and stories of the London of his youth. He slowly sipped an Irish whiskey, never taking his eyes off Collins. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw her advancing on him, and Eoin was, frankly, stunned. She was wearing a silver dress that emphasized her oversized bust. The dress descended to just above her knee. Eoin thought he had seen bigger postage stamps. Her blonde bobbed hair was obscured by the cloud of smoke that her cigarette, in its smart holder, was making, not unlike a Great War dreadnought advancing at flank speed. So, Eoin thought, this is what a flapper looks like.
“Captain Kavanagh,” the woman purred, “I’ve heard so much about you.” Eoin nodded his head. In front of him stood this stunning woman, perhaps in her early forties, with the most bedazzling smile he had ever encountered. For a moment, Róisín didn’t exist. She was old enough to be his mother, but Eoin’s willie began telling him that things like age didn’t matter in this case. “I’m Deametrice Churchill,” she said.
“Yes, Lady Deametrice,” replied Eoin. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
“The pleasure is all mine.”
Eoin knew exactly who she was. What was important was that she was the cousin of Winston Churchill, one of the head negotiators for the Crown. They may have been blood relatives, but Lady Deametrice, unlike her jowly cousin, had won the genes sweepstakes.
She was wearing a low-cut dress that made her buoyant breasts bubble to the top, and Eoin had to remind himself to lock his eyes on her blue eyes and not her swelling bosom. Eoin didn’t know what to say. “The General,” he finally blurted out, “really appreciates your hospitality.”
“Yes, the General told me. He’s an extraordinary man.”
“He seems to t’ink so.”
“What’s that, Captain?”
“I said I t’ink the General might agree with your description of him.” Lady Deametrice laughed, and Eoin saw what remarkable teeth she had. Eoin always checked out a woman’s teeth. It was a subconscious part of his impoverished childhood that he couldn’t escape. To Eoin, sound teeth were a sign of wealth.
“Captain Kavanagh,” whispered Lady Deametrice conspiratorially, “you have a devilish sense of humor.” She placed her hand on his, and Eoin thought she could probably see his willie begging for freedom in the front of his pants.
“This is a remarkable party, Lady Deametrice,” Eoin said. “We don’t have hooleys like these in Dublin.”
“Hooleys!” she exclaimed, laughing. “You have a wonderful way with words—just like the rest of the Irish do! Thank you—I like to think I am just ahead of the social curve here in London. I like to think,” she added, stretching out her neck like a proud swan, “of myself as the vanguard of the avant garde!” Eoin had no bloody idea what the fuck the avant garde was, but he politely nodded. Lady Deametrice gave him an unexpected peck on the cheek, shocking Eoin. “I have to go back to General Collins now, before all these shameless hussies hijack him. He has the most extraordinary blue eyes, don’t you think?” Eoin grunted under his breath, and his willie slowly receded from what might have been a deadly ambush.
Collins stood in the middle of the drawing room, surrounded by women. One by one they dropped away, and Eoin saw Collins intently talking with just one woman, intensely lithe with sensitive, dark, mournful eyes. Later he would discover that this was Lady Lavery, wife of the famous painter. What he didn’t know is that Collins had known Hazel Lavery, an American, during his previous life in London. They had been brought together by their mutual interest in all things Irish, both political and cultural. Now, less than a decade later, they had been reunited. It was an acquaintance that would have long-lasting implications for both Collins and Ireland.
Three hours later, the crowd of guests had diminished to just a few. Collins walked over to Eoin. “Lady Deametrice wants to show me her paintings upstairs,” he said, almost in a whisper.
Eoin stared at the floor. “Do you want me to stay?”
Collins did not respond immediately. “Yes,” he finally answered.
“Be careful,” Eoin warned.
“I’m always careful with the enemy,” Collins replied, with a sly smile.
Collins ascended the stairs behind Lady Deametrice, keeping an eye on her muscular arse and legs. She was rumored to be a superb equestrian, and Collins didn’t doubt it for a moment. He wondered what kind of paintings she owned.
Once inside her bedroom, Lady Deametrice excused herself and went to the bathroom. When she returned, she was stark naked. She didn’t say a word as she climbed on the bed and stuck her derriere out. Michael Collins, his own willie standing straight up now, stepped back, surveyed the scene—then gave a rambunctious laugh.
“And what’s so funny?” said Lady Deametrice, stunned at the laughter, looking back over her left shoulder at Collins.
“Oh, I just thought you would make the most perfect British secret service agent.”
“Oh,” said Lady Deametrice, seemingly insulted, as she came to a sitting position on the bed. “Don’t be ridiculous.” Immodesty became her, thought Collins.
“Lady Deametrice,” Collins said smoothly, “one can never be too careful of the machinations of the British Empire.” Collins then leaned over and kissed her gently on the lips. “Perhaps another time,” he said, as he headed for the bedroom door.
“General Collins,” she called out, panting slightly.
“Yes?”
“You have tremendous self-discipline.”
Collins laughed. “In your case, Lady Deametrice, the discipline is not easy to enforce. You were made for temptation.”
Lady Deametrice laughed. “Thank you,” she said, before adding, “I’ll give your passionate regards to my cousin, Winston.”
Collins nodded and smiled. “I’m sure you will.” And with that, the elusive Dublin Pimpernel, along with his devoted bodyguard, soon disappeared into the London night.
146
“Today is my birthday,” wrote Collins to Kitty on October 16. “Only one who remembered it was my sister, the nun.”
Collins was premature. Eoin remembered his boss’s birthday. “Happy thirty-one, General,” he said, catching Collins by surprise.
“What did you get me?”
“Same thing you got me for my birthday last week.”
“I didn’t give you anything.”
“I know,” said Eoin, with a sly smile. Then, from behind his back, he pulled a bottle of Jameson’s. “Will you share a drop with me?”
Collins found two glasses, and they clinked them in salute. “Happy Birthday, General,” Eoin said, suddenly dead serious. “You have great work to do here in London. May God bless you.”
“The last thing I need right now,” said Collins sternly, “is a sycophant. And that’s that!”
“Jaysus,” replied Eoin, “and all along I thought I was Sisyphus!” He laughed. “You’re one big fookin’ boulder, y’know.” Then Eoin paused, before adding, “Commandant-General.”
“Sisyphus,” said Collins.
“Sisyphus.”
Collins looked down at his bodyguard, appreciative of his devotion, and said, “I think you read too much.” With that, he cleared the glass of its whiskey in one gulp. Little did Michael Collins know that he was celebrating his last birthday.
147
Although it was the city of his youth, Collins felt terribly alone in London. The soul-deadening work of the treaty, plus the terr
ibly dark, fog-infested weather, tackled his spirits by the knees. Also, he knew that, back in Dublin, he was being undercut by de Valera, Brugha, and Stack, and he was pretty sure that Childers, the delegation’s secretary, was, as Griffith had always maintained, de Valera’s informer. (Bluntly, Griffith referred to Childers as “that damned Englishman.”) He felt like he was on the plank, and a pirate was poking a sword into his backside. There was only one place to go, and it wasn’t going to be dry.
Because of the troubles back in Dublin, there was a sense of negativity and pessimism surrounding the delegation and the talks. Early in the negotiations, de Valera had told Griffith, “If war is the alternative, we can only face it, and I think that the sooner the other side is made to recognize it, the better.”
This happy eagerness for more war—especially from someone who had escaped the worst of the battle—disturbed Collins. “Who should one trust,” he remarked to Eoin, “even on my own side of the fence? Beyond Griffith, no one.”
Yet while forces were working against him, he did have three women—two in England, and one in Ireland—who were focused on him. It was no secret that Kitty was what kept him going. Although she was in Ireland, Collins wrote her and lit a penny candle for her every day—sometimes several times in a day. (Eoin, in fact, was beginning to refer to Collins as “The Arsonist,” much to Tobin’s and Broy’s amusement.) Sometimes, Collins thought negotiating with Lloyd George was easier than negotiating with Kitty. She could be an awfully odd girl, as she herself admitted, calling herself, at various times, “moody,” “childish,” “peculiar,” and “silly.”
Collins, ever the businessman, reminded her in his letters of their “arrangement” or “contract.” Perhaps their attraction to each other was based on the fact that they were complete opposites. Kitty was emotional, displaying her heart on her sleeve, while Collins was the master of compartmentalization and organization. It was through this compartmentalization that Collins could be Minister for Finance, TD, Director of Intelligence of the IRA, head of the IRB, a Commandant-General of the IRA, and now a chief negotiator of the treaty—and do a superb job in all of them.
Now he added romance to his portfolio, probably neatly tucking it in somewhere between Finance and Intelligence. Maybe because Collins was approaching marriage the way he approached collecting dossiers on the British Secret Service, Kitty always seemed to be wavering. Collins was in such a rush that it seemed he treated Kitty, whom he genuinely loved, like he would treat Eoin or Batt O’Connor. It seemed that, even in love, he wanted his orders carried out to the letter. Not surprisingly, Kitty had trouble turning the other cheek, as Eoin or Batt often did. “My one ambition is to have you like me—in the right way,” she wrote Collins. “All will yet be well if I was sure that you won’t be getting into those fits of temper with me and hurt me so much and make me feel that we are most unsuited. Otherwise, dear, I love you, but the other will count a big item to my happiness.”
She also worried about Collins’s fidelity. She had seen the photographs of Collins in London and heard the rumors about other women. “I hope I have the pleasure of gazing on you (among all the beauties),” she wrote to him.
“I never said any such thing,” he would earnestly protest in denial. “Newspapermen are inventions of the devil.”
She was jealous when a friend of hers innocently commandeered Collins’s knee, reminding him that her friend “had the loan of his knee.” Then the apologies would follow: “And I do hope it pleases you well to know this, and that you are really not fickle, and will love me all the more if I devote my life to you only.” But, in her own way, she was very direct with Collins, telling him what was in her heart and not sugar-coating it. “I’m very sensitive, will always be looking for a pinhole to reproach you if I noticed anything, and there’s where the trouble lies.”
And, of course, there was always the trouble with Harry. By November, the Harry situation seemed to be finally, albeit glacially slowly, resolving itself. To put it mildly, Harry was desperately in love with her. “I’m wondering if you are ever a wee bit lonely for me,” Boland wrote Kitty on his way to America, “and are you longing as I am for the day when we shall meet again? Won’t you send me a wireless and say you have made up your mind? If you have done so, cable yes, and if you are still in doubt, then for God’s sake, try to make up your mind, and agree to come with me . . . I would just love to have you come to America, where we will spend our honeymoon in perfect bliss!” He signed it, “Your devoted lover.”
Harry was pulling out all the stops. He had half the Irish Republican Brotherhood sending notes to Kitty, encouraging her to marry him. “And if only Harry—and his friends—would stop storming Heaven with his prayers,” Kitty wrote Collins, “I wouldn’t be getting unhappy and such mixed and peculiar feelings.” Finally, Kitty declared the truth: “I told Harry I didn’t love him.”
But how Harry loved her, as his pleading letters from America resolutely declared. Would she come to America, marry him, and then honeymoon in sunny California? No, Harry, she would not. Her heart was with the other rebel, now entrenched in London with the most thankless job in the history of Ireland. “I may be wrong, but I think Harry is capable of deeper affection for me than most men,” Kitty wrote Collins, “but he also knows that I don’t love him—it’s no effort for him to be a great lover, and, of course, he gets no thanks.” Finally, it seemed, Harry had come to comprehend the bad news. “Must really write Harry soon. Poor Harry, he’s getting used to me at last and seems quite happy now, thank God.”
And if her Michael was playing the field of young beauties in London, Kitty could dangle the thing that women always dangle—sex—in front of her “Elusive Pimpernel”: “I love to have you here, but we must be really good, no bedroom scene, etc., etc, etc. . . . I’m wearing my old long frock, black and very low! Of course you would be shocked!”
And, finally, she reveals that she has given her all to Collins: “I’ve given you what I’ve never given any other man; indeed, it’s not much, I suppose, but you have it anyway.”
So as Collins was working on the torturous negotiations of making a nation, Kitty was working equally hard on the difficult questions of love and marriage and her ultimate decision to be “married to a gun.” Even as she succumbed to Collins’s love, she had an odd way of expressing it: “Here was I—a victim, actually—to a man. Don’t laugh—that’s not exactly it, but my way of putting it!!”
Finally, she surrendered to Michael Collins: “How anxious I am to secure your love really well. It is too bad that our little romance should have such ups and downs. Sweetheart, wouldn’t you like me to be more sensible and not be silly? Whereas it’s so good to know that you have someone who won’t forget you. Your trouble is hers. One not complete in anything without the other. That’s my conception of love, and you are the first who made me believe in love, and that’s why I wouldn’t like to be ever disappointed in you. You will forgive me for saying this, won’t you?”
“Bring the car around,” Collins said to Eoin.
“Where to?”
“Sir John Lavery’s house. He’s going to paint me.”
“What’s the address?”
“5 Cromwell Place.”
“Cromwell,” repeated Eoin, as Collins raised his eyebrow. Eoin kept his lip buttoned shut and did not say what this omen might mean.
Lavery was painting all the players in the treaty drama, and, now, it was Collins’s turn. The two of them went to the Cromwell Place address, and Collins removed his overcoat. “It’s heavy,” he said, handing it to Lavery. “Don’t drop it. There’s a gun in the pocket.” Lavery handled the coat gingerly, and Collins looked around the room for an appropriate seat. Out of habit, he took a seat facing the door. There would be no surprises. Eoin nodded his approval, and Sir John began sketching as Collins, uncomfortable, fidgeted like a child in his chair.
The sitting had been arranged by Lavery’s wife, Hazel, known to all as Lady Lavery. She interrupted her
husband’s work once, and Eoin recognized her as the woman who had commandeered Collins attention at Lady Deametrice’s party. Lady Lavery couldn’t take her eyes off of Collins, but Sir John paid no attention. Perhaps the thirty years’ separation in their ages had some impact. “They are a queer lot,” Eoin said to himself. Eoin’s suspicions increased when he would accompany Collins to eight o’clock mass at Brompton Oratory, the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, where Lady Lavery would be waiting for him. Collins may have been lighting candles for Kitty, but he was reciting the “Mea Culpa” with Hazel. Perhaps “mea máxima culpa” was more appropriate.
“I don’t understand this,” Eoin told Róisín, when he was back in Dublin with the General.
“Don’t be naïve,” she said to him, and then added a devilish laugh. As usual, Róisín was about ten lengths ahead of Eoin in life experience.
Kitty was right to be a little suspicious of “the famous M.C.,” as she called him. For, while women like Lady Deametrice Churchill would literally throw their bodies at him—Eoin joked that the pulchritudinous London ladies hell-bent on seducing Collins lent new meaning to the term “bodyguard”—it was finally becoming obvious to Eoin that there was one woman in London who had caught the eye of the notorious gunman.
Collins was coming to learn that he could always depend on Hazel Lavery for a supportive ear and to serve his needs as a back-channel communicator with the British establishment. His thoughts may have been with Kitty, but the person who had his ear in London was the sad-eyed Hazel.
Lady Lavery’s life story reminded Eoin a little bit of Erskine Childers. They were born outside the sphere of Irish nationalism—Hazel in America, Childers in Britain—yet both had converted to the cause of Irish Republicanism. Hazel had actually gone one step further, in that she had converted to Roman Catholicism. But while the stoic Childers took an antagonistic approach to the treaty talks, Lady Lavery did all she could do with her social contacts to help Collins and Griffith close the gap in the negotiations.
The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising Page 47
