Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “He would be right.”

  “Thank you very much, sir,” she said meekly. “I will obey you this time.”

  “We’ll see what the next time brings, madam.”

  Head still averted, she slipped away.

  I was still a shallow child. However, I had proven to myself that I could be authoritative with a woman when the situation demanded. My mother would have been very pleased with me.

  “You have to learn to stand up to women, Eddie, including myself. Sometimes you’re just too nice.”

  Sergeant Finnucane joined me at the riverside. The fog was rolling in from Galway Bay.

  “Insisting that she ride back in the carriage with you?”

  “You’re an excellent detective, Tommy. However you’re wrong on one point. I’m staying here.”

  “And yourself giving money to that little imp that’s with her all the time.”

  “Josie … Am I that obvious, Tommy?”

  “Wouldn’t I be inclined to say that your goodness is obvious? … We don’t see that in many reporters.”

  I felt myself blushing.

  “Well,” he went on, “there’s a couple of new developments.”

  “Ah?”

  I dared not think what I was indeed thinking. If Nora would be a widow in a few months, she would need someone to take care of her.

  “They’re saying that Johnny Joyce was the treasurer of the local secret society and that he held back ten pounds, a lot of money out there.”

  “Who’s saying this, Tommy?”

  “Some of the locals. It’s all very indirect, mind you. That’s the only way they can talk. They’re also saying that they thought Peg was an informer because she used to chat with our lads, as if talking to a policeman means you have something important to say to him.”

  “Do they believe these are the motives for the murders?”

  “They could just as well mean that I shouldn’t pay any attention to these stories or that I should pay attention to them. My hunch is that they’re telling me these are excuses, which is just about as far as they’ll go with the Royal Irish Constabulary.”

  I raised the question with Bishop Kane later that night as we were eating supper in his house by the bay.

  “Do you think, my lord, that the people in the valley know who the killers are?”

  “Absolutely, Edward, and why they were murdered. They probably can’t account for the violence of the murders, so they’ll ignore that. By now, however, they have an explanation with which they’ll live and which they will pass on to their children.”

  “And they will not tell the police?”

  “They don’t trust the police, though they like some of them. They think that if they try to tell anyone the truth, they won’t be believed and worse things might happen. And they’re probably right.”

  “Someone like Nora Joyce will let her husband die for a crime he didn’t commit, as you yourself say, and not try to tell the truth?”

  “She’s more intelligent than most of them, Edward,” he said, filling up my wineglass. “Still, she’s a fatalist. The rules against talking to the police are as natural for her as breathing air. Myles probably told her not to tell the Royal Irish Constabulary who killed his cousin. It would do no good, and she has no one to defend her against revenge.”

  “Didn’t Tony Joyce break the rules?”

  “On a spur of the moment opportunity for money and revenge without thought of what might result. People in the valley might shun him when he returns from his comfortable quarters in the inn in Outhergard. They’ll also have explanations for what he did that they may not approve but that will stand. Nor is there anyone likely to want revenge against him, especially with Royal Irish Constabulary lads protecting him for the rest of his life.”

  “He’d be safe and Nora wouldn’t?”

  “Not unless she married again, which I don’t think she will in any event.”

  “Not even to protect her child?”

  “We don’t know yet that the child will be born or live or whether Nora will survive.”

  How, I wondered, could everyone be indifferent to her fate? Perhaps because they saw its inevitability. I didn’t, however, though I wasn’t sure what that meant, much less what I could do.

  “When will Bolton reconvene the hearing?”

  Bishop Kane lifted the last of his small piece of apple pie to his lips. I had long before finished my very large piece.

  “Those who say he never will wouldn’t be far from wrong. Next month he’ll announce that the hearing has been adjourned to Dublin, the day after he’s loaded the accused on a special train and carried them off to Dublin.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “It will be easier to get indictments and convictions there. The judges and juries will have little time for savages from the West of Ireland. Bolton would not trust jurors, even Protestants, out here with the weak case he has.”

  “Then there’s no hope?”

  “None, as far as I can see. A few of them may end up with twenty years in Dartmoor. If Bolton is desperate enough he may even set someone free if they provide evidence for the Crown.”

  “Does it not matter whether a defense lawyer could tear apart the case as Mr. Concannon did today?”

  “You don’t understand, Edward. The defense doesn’t matter, especially not before a jury that is mostly Dublin Protestants and a few Catholics who want to prove how responsible they are, especially after the murders of the new Lord Lieutenant and his secretary in Phoenix Park last year.”

  “I told Nora Joyce today that she should never give up hope.”

  The bishop sighed and put down his wineglass, which he had just picked up.

  “That is true in so far as God is concerned. She should hope in God’s eventual goodness. She is far too intelligent to hope that good will triumph over evil in this world, especially for Irish-speaking peasants from Connemara.”

  Back here in my hotel room with Galway Bay glowing in the moonlight outside my window, I feel the same despair. As an American I believe that good will always triumph over evil. That obviously isn’t true.

  Yet the fatalism here in the West of Ireland is pervasive and insidious. These people believe that, when faced with the power of Dublin Castle and Westminster, they will always lose, no matter how unjust the English behavior may be. I try to remember my Galway-born grandparents. They were not so pessimistic, but perhaps that was because they left this terrible place when they were still young.

  I make two resolutions tonight. I will continue to follow this case to its conclusion, and I will go up to Maamtrasna again to try to interview some of the people. Maybe while I’m up there I can slip a few more pounds into Josie’s grubby little hand.

  13

  “HERSELF WOULDN’T run all the way with you?” Nuala was sitting at the table with a late morning cup of tea, reading the Fitzpatrick manuscript. She did not look up at me.

  “She did not. She sat down halfway and waited patiently for me to return.”

  “Stubborn wench … We’ll be having puppies making a mess in a couple of days. You’ll have to clean up after them and myself with such a delicate stomach.”

  “You’re having me on, woman, and yourself with the least delicate stomach in the world.”

  She giggled and turned a page.

  “Aren’t the children watching Barney? Herself will be along soon. She did well in her exams.”

  Had Ethne phoned from Galway or had Nuala merely picked up a signal? Better not to ask.

  The exuberant, passionate woman of yesterday had disappeared. My wife was now a cool and disciplined professional woman in a severe blue suit, with her hair tied into a bun: Nuala Anne the accountant and the detective.

  “Well,” she said, closing the manuscript and returning it to the folder from which it came, “’tis clear, isn’t it, who the chief killer was and probably why?”

  “You’ve figured it out?”

  “Haven’t you?”
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  “What’s the motive for the violence?”

  “What it usually is: sex.”

  “Won’t you tell me?”

  “No, you’ll have to figure it out yourself.”

  Ethne bounced in, overjoyed that she had done well on her examination.

  “Now I’ll be able to go to postgraduate school, like the priest says I should.”

  “And in the United States!” Nuala chimed in, hugging our mother’s helper.

  It was all settled. Naturally.

  The small ones dashed into the room, the Mick crawling furiously. Fiona ambled in after, wagging her tail. Family celebration.

  “I’m so grateful for all your help, Mr. Coyne!” Ethne said to me, her eyes shining.

  I had not done anything at all.

  Our celebration was interrupted by the Mick’s grabbing the leg of a chair and tottering forward a step. He promptly fell on his rear end and gurgled with pleasure.

  Nuala picked him up and hugged him.

  “Aren’t you getting to be the great big grown-up boy?”

  He gurgled again.

  My feeling was that he would milk the one-step phenomenon for a long time before he tried the second step. It is alleged, probably untruly, that his father had done the same thing.

  “Well, Dermot Michael, isn’t it time that you got dressed? Don’t we have lunch at the Renvyle House at half one?”

  “We do indeed.”

  Later, as we strolled up the road to the hotel with ocean pounding on either side and Inishboffin glowing in the sunlight, my wife gave me an envelope.

  “Isn’t the solution to the Maamtrasna mystery in there, Dermot love?”

  “If you say so … . Does it ruin the story for you to know how it’s going to end?”

  “Sure, we don’t know. I only know who was behind the murders. I don’t know what happens to Nora. I don’t think she’s as strong as your man thinks she is and himself such a fine young man.”

  “He probably wants to bring her to America with him.”

  “Och, nothing good will come of that, will it? Yanks shouldn’t marry immigrant Irish women.”

  “Especially if they’re from Galway.”

  “More especially if the girls are from Connemara.”

  “No good will come of that at all, at all.”

  “Just so,” Nuala said, concluding the banter.

  Then she added, “Your man is a lovely, sweet boy, but he isn’t as tough as you are, and she’s a brave lady, but not as tough as I am.”

  “Who is?”

  She slapped my arm in protest, gently however.

  Renvyle House is a charming old place, though there’s probably not much left of the seventeenth century home of the Blakes. Still, the various restorations had paid proper attention to the past while adding the conveniences of the present—heated swimming pool, nine-hole golf course, and tennis courts.

  Nuala and I had bought rights to use the sports facilities. We had engaged in fierce tennis matches in which she had won more than she lost and in sullen golf matches that I always won and herself having a handicap. We tried to swim in the pool a couple of times a week. Nuala—in a one-piece suit because she wasn’t sure that she wasn’t still too fat—had, needless to say, created a sensation.

  Oliver St. John Gogarty’s paragraph about the hotel hung in the lobby and at every table in the dining room. As “stately, plump Buck Mulligan” had put it, “My house stands on a lake, but it stands also on the sea, water lilies meet the golden seaweed. It is as if, in the fairy land of Connemara at the extreme end of Europe, the incongruous flowed together at last, and the sweet and bitter blended. Behind me islands and mountainous mainland share in a final reconciliation at this, the world’s end.”

  He was a good poet who lived long enough to be tarred with the Buck Mulligan label. How he must have hated Jimmy Joyce.

  The comfortable dining room, casual and restrained but charming and homey, provides striking views of the lake and the ocean and the islands beyond. The food, river trout today, was superb, and the smell of smoldering peat reminded one that one was indeed in Ireland.

  “We’ll have themselves here for supper over the weekend,” my wife informed me. “Sure, shouldn’t we eat here more often?”

  “We’ll have to bring the kids.”

  “They’ll be perfectly well-behaved.”

  Sure.

  “After our golf match.”

  The sensible thing for Nuala Anne would have been to give up on golf. However, she never gives up on anything, except singing. She’ll never be able to beat me on the golf course because there’s no way she can hit a drive as far as I do. Even on our small course here at the hotel, where drives are not so important, she doesn’t have the calm required to one-putt a green.

  “I’ll beat you this time,” she promised. The dining room was practically empty at half one because the fishermen from all over Europe were out taking advantage of the May fly season.

  Seamus Redmond, the manager, joined us. He was a trim, handsome man in his early forties, with a red face and a touch of white at the sideburns of his black hair. Immaculately dressed and unflappable, he was a product of the best hotel management school in the world—not that he needed to learn about charm.

  “I’m sorry to be late,” he said smoothly as he joined us. “Things have been a bit dicey all morning, as you may imagine. I think, Nuala Anne, you’ll find the trout to be to your taste.”

  “Wouldn’t I be astonished altogether if I didn’t?”

  Her brogue became thicker when she was talking to someone from this part of the world she had not met before.

  “I would imagine you don’t have mornings like this very often.”

  “No.” He sighed. “Thank God.”

  “Will the killings hurt business?”

  “If there’s no more of them they won’t. On the contrary, they’ll probably attract the curiosity seekers … . Isn’t that the place where they did for the three Russians? …”

  “Have you had them before?”

  “Not this particular group. They come, surprisingly enough, for the May fly season. Russians, same as everyone else, love to fish.”

  “Did you know they were military officers?”

  He shrugged.

  “I did not. If you ask me did I think they were into some kind of crooked business, I would have said that probably they were. Most Russians with money are. They didn’t bring women along, as they do in other places, and generally the kind of women you don’t think are their wives. I assumed they liked to fish. I still do as a matter of fact.”

  “The Gardai have no clues?”

  “Not that they’re telling me. The murders, they say, were ‘professional.’ We don’t have anyone staying here who looks like a professional killer, whatever they look like.”

  The trout was served. My wife tasted a delicate bit of it with a fork and rolled her eyes.

  “I’m glad you like it, Nuala Anne … . We have Russian cops coming out here tomorrow with their ambassador and people from our foreign office. We don’t exactly need that. The Russians characteristically assume that if someone dies in a hotel, the hotel is responsible. I’ll be diffident and polite since it’s all for show anyway.”

  “Do you see any connection between their deaths and the other incidents around here?”

  “Like that gobshite shooting at you? I honestly don’t know. I suppose there must be a connection, but no more than the Garda do I know what to make of it.”

  “No one has been trying to buy the hotel?”

  “Scores of people have been trying to buy it for the last several years. It’s a gold mine, as you might imagine. The Station House down in Clifden isn’t really competition. Indeed, I think we actually help one another. The company that owns Renvyle House will never sell it because it will simply become a richer and richer gold mine. There are not”—he swept his hand—“many views like this.”

  Nuala cautiously raised the wineglass to
her lips. She rolled her eyes again. The doctor said that an occasional half glass or even a small full glass would do her no harm. This was, however, the first time she had experimented with it.

  “And with a heated swimming pool,” my wife said innocently.

  “Yes.” Seamus Redmond grinned. “The rugged West of Ireland coast and a heated swimming pool. I’m told, Nuala Anne, that you swim in the ocean.”

  “Sure,” she said, “I’m a Galway woman. Where else would I swim? I don’t mind the heat in the pool at all, at all, because haven’t I become half Yank? No one grimly determined to buy it, come what may?”

  “Not really. There’s so many places around the world, the big companies don’t waste their time on someone who is reluctant to sell. There’s also gombeen men in Dublin and even in Galway City, who would like to develop this stretch of the world. However, we’re not about to sell any of our land and none of the major landowners are either. Bungalows like yours are fine, and we could even stand a few more. We don’t want a Bull Island beach out here.”

  My wife winked at me. Bull Island had marked a kind of turning point in our relationship.

  “I imagine that the environmentalists,” Nuala remarked gently, “would have a grand time altogether if anyone seriously tried to ruin Renvyle.”

  “They would indeed and, the way things are now, they’d probably win.”

  “You bought up the land before Ireland’s burst of prosperity?” I asked.

  He smiled and said, “One that no one of my generation believes can possibly last, even though it seems evident that we have crossed a critical turning point.”

  “Higher standard of living than the bloody Brits,” my wife, who didn’t used to be a Nationalist, added.

  “Indeed yes. Besides our holdings, the T.D. has some good stretch of land. If he tried to develop it, he’d be voted out of office the next time around, and that would be the end of his political career. That’s why he’s as astonished as everyone else at the destruction of his bungalow.”

  “He wants to be the Taoiseach?”

  The word is pronounced something like “tay-shock” and is what they call the Prime Minister of Ireland.

  “Well, a minister first. He’s an able man, concerned about both the economy and the environment of the West of Ireland, which isn’t an easy course to steer … . Incidentally, he came up here this morning and would very much like to have coffee with you after dinner … . Or lunch as you would call it, Dermot.”