The Death of Love

by Bartholomew Gill

  “Which is the point.” Her mother glanced at O’Suilleabhain, then reached for the orange cost. “Put this back on before you catch your death and come in the house. I’ll wet some tea, and you can tell us what you’ve been up to.”

  Bresnahan wrapped the coat over her shoulders and looked up to find O’Suilleabhain’s eyes fixed on her thighs. “I can’t stay long now. I’ve something on in the village at eleven.”

  “Mossie,” her father said, and shook his head. Bresnahan waited, but all he added was, “He’s not been himself since he quit the Dail. Wild, like, and unpredictable,” which was about the worst thing that could be said about a doctor in a farm community and certainly the worst that she had ever heard her father say about a good friend.

  “Don’t you see much of him anymore?” she asked.

  Her mother shook her head. “He’s grown strange. It’s like he’s disappeared up into the mountains there where his mother’s people were from. If he doctors anymore, it’s to sheep and goats.

  “And, Rory, you come in too now. How long has it been since you two shared a word?”

  It was the real point, at least to her parents. O’Suilleabhain and she had grown up together, and it had once been an unspoken agreement between the families that the two would one day marry, which made the best of agricultural sense. Being the oldest male, Rory had inherited his father’s four hundred, mostly well-drained acres, and with Ruth’s inheritance they would have a stake in life that few could disparage.

  Added to that was the seeming advantage in husbandry of such a match, since both had grown into strong, strapping, good-looking individuals with native intelligence much above the average. Rory had the dark, unlikely good looks that were sometimes seen in the West of Ireland: black curly and lustrous hair, green eyes, and the sort of chiseled features that seemed too good to be believed. Yet by dint of hard work, shrewd bargaining, and a natural gift for gab, O’Suillieabhain had managed to get other men to take him seriously. The women, of course, had from the start, and rumor was he had by-blows scattered throughout the country.

  It had proved a problem for Bresnahan, since from the moment she became aware of the opposite sex there was nobody for her but Rory O’Suilleabhain. In comparison, all others came up short or narrow or dim or poor, and she had no spark of sense after him whatsoever. Two years older than she, Rory had only to glance her way for color to rise to her cheeks, and what was worse, he seemed to know it. With his easy way of going on, he would chat her up and be great with her when others weren’t around, confident that she—and her 350 acres, her father’s excellent house and barns—would be his for the asking when it suited him. But in town or at a dance or with his somewhat older friends, sure, he didn’t see her at all.

  Thus afflicted, Bresnahan had pined for Rory O’Suilleabhain through all of her adolescence and much of her early womanhood, wishing to make herself and her parents happy. In the meanwhile Rory was out sparking with this one and that, and his mother was sitting in the Bresnahans’ kitchen representing him as the “catch of Kerry,” her very words. Finally, when Bresnahan had decided that if she couldn’t have Rory, she wouldn’t have anybody from Sneem at all and would leave for a career in parts distant, Rory had taken her aside. But he had asked only if it “really, truly” was what she wanted without making any further representation of affection or desire.

  A year passed and then two and three, in which her mother relayed to Dublin, where she’d begun her career in the Guards, the rumors of Rory’s engagements to this one or that. Yet Rory still didn’t marry, which kept a dim ember burning in her heart. Somehow in the city there was nobody as tall with the cut of his head or his shoulders or the way, when he turned his eyes and attention on her, he could make her glow.

  More time passed, and finally one summer, when she had returned to help with the haying and had gone out for a late drink with a cousin, she had bumped into Rory and his mates at the bar. With the good, dry weather they too had been working dawn until dusk and—Bresnahan later tried to tell herself—the drink must have gone to his head. Loud, so they could be heard by most in the small pub, one of his friends had asked Rory when he planned to do the expected thing and “take title” to the adjoining farm.

  “That’s all I need of a night,” he had said. “A bloody big red Guard at the door, fist in one hand, ‘breathalyzer’ in the other.” His friends had roared, and Bresnahan, devastated by the comment, had pretended to use the facilities but instead had skulked out the back door.

  Three full years ago. Before she had decided to remain in Dublin and make friends and become an active part of the city. And before she had met Hughie Ward.

  Now Rory O’Suilleabhain reached out and touched the sleeve of her riding jacket, saying, “Might I have a word with you, Ruthie—before we go in the house.”

  “About what?” her mother demanded; pride had its limits.

  “Ah…?” His opaline eyes pleaded with her to intercede. It was a word Bresnahan had discovered in a thesaurus one lonely night years before, when she had been mooning over him.

  “Ma, we’ll be right in,” said Bresnahan.

  Her father took the mother’s arm and nudged her toward the door. “Come along, Ruthie drinks coffee. I’ll get out the new maker she brought us last Christmas.”

  “Don’t be long now, standing out here in the chill. And there’s the clock running on to eleven. Remember your job.” And Dublin and the city, she meant.

  Both O’Suilleabhain and Bresnahan waited until the door had closed. With chin raised and from the height of her recent personal and professional successes that a rude character such as Rory O’Suilleabhain could never hope to emulate, she turned and looked down her long, vaguely Spanish nose at him. How many interviews had she conducted since then? she asked herself. Dozens and dozens with every class of brazen, perfidious character. She waited.

  “It’s about that night, a few years back.” His startling eyes flashed over at her to test her reaction, and she realized they still had their power. O’Suilleabhain was without a doubt the handsomest man she had yet to lay eyes on.

  “Haven’t I been hammering me head off the wall these three long years, wishing I could take back what I said. I was wrong. Worse, I was drunk, and I only hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me, Ruthie.”

  Still she waited, watching him squirm under her measured gaze. She tried to remember all the sleepless nights she had spent trying to conjure the image that was before her now, wondering what he was doing, whom he was with, and when she would hear at least some of the words that he was speaking to her now.

  “How can I make it up to you?”

  Bresnahan blinked. She had an idea. O’Suilleabhain was a…gadabout, to phrase it discreetly, and he would be on chatting terms with most area residents. No country gorsoon, if a local, would be unknown to him.

  “What say?” He offered a hand. “Will you forgive me?”

  Bresnahan’s smile was neither conciliatory nor forgiving. Instead it was accompanied by a single arched blond eyebrow and not one but two quick squeezes of his hand. “Those green eyes—how can I resist them?”

  In a flash his smile muted from gratitude, through relief, to prurient design. His eyes yet again drifted down her body.

  “But there is one thing.”

  “You name it, it’s yours. Anything.”

  “It’s nothing, really.” She stepped around him and began making her way to the house. “Just your definition of a word.”

  “And which is that?”

  With her hand on the door, she turned to him. “Breathalyzer.”

  His handsome brow furrowed, and he looked away. When he got it, he began a deep, full laugh that startled the geese in a pen. “You really have changed,” he said.

  What about you? she thought. “Are you coming in?”

  “I am, I am. Wait till I tell the lads what you said. They’ll love it.”

  And her reputation would be rehabilitated entirely in a count
ry where words, appearances, and gestures often mattered more than deeds and facts. Take her father, for instance. The mere presence of O’Suilleabhain at their table would cheer him for a month.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Other Woman

  NOREEN MCGARR THOUGHT she must be suffering acute social and ambulatory deprivation. Just to be walking through the public rooms of Parknasilla—noisy with conferees, their families, and all the talk surrounding Paddy Power and his untimely death—gave her a thrill.

  At the same time she could not bear the thought of having abandoned her baby into the hands of some governess whom she did not know. Without a doubt such a person had been screened and trained by the hotel, but it was equally likely that she was a local farm girl, used to the cries of pen, barn, and field animals and not to laments of the subtlety of her Maddie’s.

  Thus believing that she could distinguish Maddie’s cries even among a nursery filled with other gamboling tots, Noreen had placed the baby audio monitor, which she had brought with her from Dublin, in the crib that Maddie would use when sleepy. She had then hooked its remote receiver to the belt of her dress. Without the desired results.

  First, all of the children sounded the same, in spite of their various nationalities. And often their shrieks rose to such a pitch that Noreen kept having to adjust the volume, if only to prevent people from turning to her as she moved from the Shaw Lounge, passed the Pygmalion Restaurant, and up the stairs to the Shaw Library. There, she examined the many photographs of George Bernard Shaw, who wrote several of his plays while staying at the hotel, and the volumes of Robert Graves, who had spent his summers here when his grandfather had rented Parknasilla as a summer residence during the last century.

  Even outside it was no better. After having donned a warm winter coat, Noreen found herself having to turn the receiver this way and that until finally she ignored the thing and gave herself over to the pleasure of a long walk that led through willows to a footbridge and an island that was one dense willow grove.

  Up in their suite on the bed, the dresser, and two tables, McGarr had unstacked and arranged Paddy Power’s note cards. In the sitting room he had done the same with the photocopies that he had discovered in Nell Power’s suite at the Waterville Lake Hotel.

  Most immediately apparent was the sheer volume of the cards that pertained to Power’s career. They began with a quick description of how, after taking degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, and the London School of Economics, Power had spent nearly a decade working for various banks in the City of London. He then threw over his job to return to Dublin and a post as financial adviser to the political party that Sean Dermot O’Duffy was beginning to control.

  The two men hit it off immediately, and on economic matters saw eye to eye. Upon being named taosieach, O’Duffy’s first act was to appoint Power to a similar position in government. McGarr then read through the cards of the subheadings that he had noticed when he first found the cards in Nell Power’s suite at the Waterville Lake Hotel: “Political Roots,” “Political Debts,” “Economic Policy,” “Favors Done,” “Election Financing,” “I, Bagman,” “Dirty Tricks.”

  Under the last heading there was a section detailing how O’Duffy had by design gone after Mossie Gladden, snubbing him in party caucuses and meetings, continually selecting less senior and less savvy men for party preferment, and—worst of all—excluding Mossie’s constituency, whenever he could, from any optional government appropriation. “It was a standing order,” Power wrote, until the “good doctor blew up, denounced O’Duffy, and resigned.” One of O’Duffy’s supporters then stood for election and took Gladden’s seat.

  It was cruel really—how it was done publicly. Sean Dermot might have simply let the matter rest, but the public squelching he gave Mossie seems to have unhinged him. He’s obsessed with O’Duffy, and the other day he told me that the country would be better off without O’Duffy “one way or the other,” and that anybody who “took him out” would be looked upon as a martyr in the long run. “Let history be the judge.” When I asked him where he got the phrase, “took him out,” he said, “From friends,” and would not elaborate. (* See “Mossie” heading.)

  Under the heading “I, Bagman” there were listed thirteen—McGarr counted them—cards filled with dates and sums and nothing else. The fourteenth said:

  What I did today has made me feel cheap. I know that politics is a dirty business, but I find it interesting to note that politicians, in order to remain above suspicion and reproach, only need to direct and not take part in the unequivocal squalidness of their practices.

  Today I was made to accept money from a Protestant religious organization which is interested in erecting a drug-and-alcohol clinic in Ballymun. I asked Sean Dermot when we had begun accepting contributions from religious groups who were trying to do good; he told me we would cease immediately, whenever that religious group became the majority religion. No matter the purpose? I asked him. “What better purpose than our own?” he answered cynically. “We always try to do good.”

  In order that I not be perceived as having been a willing party to this wretched affair, I will now describe exactly how and from whom and in what form I both received and delivered this money. Who knows, the whole thing might come to light after I’ve passed away, when I will have no chance to explain that in this particular case I was an unwilling messenger.

  There followed a detailed record of the entire exchange, which had occurred nearly fifteen years earlier. McGarr remembered that certain Dublin newspapers had lambasted O’Duffy for not having done more to aid the efforts of the Protestant sect when he was so solicitous of any and every Catholic health and welfare program. It had been perceived then that O’Duffy had bowed to their pressure, but here was the truth in black and white with names, dates, and pound amounts. And, of course, O’Duffy himself was prominently mentioned on one occasion accepting money directly from Power.

  It was political dynamite even now, he guessed. O’Duffy might deny it, but would the much-respected Paddy Power, who had gone on to become as successful as O’Duffy in his own right, have lied to himself? There would not be many voters who would think so, especially if it seemed as if Power’s death had been in any way unusual.

  There was another subheading, called “Gossip,” which attempted to sort out fact from fabrication surrounding the romantic affairs of the major figures in O’Duffy’s early governments including O’Duffy himself, who—if Power’s note cards were accurate—had had a fling with Nell, Power’s own wife. “Nell can never resist a ‘man-of-action,’ which, I suppose, in my own time was myself. And will be again.”

  Even skimming each card, it took McGarr over an hour to work through that material. When he had finished, he lit a cigarette. As ever now since he had been married, he was trying to quit, but somehow he equated quiet, thoughtful work, like this, with smoking, and there was no fighting the need.

  Cigarette in hand, he wandered into the sitting room to ascertain that the photocopies were the same as the cards. They were, even to pointing up the subheadings, each of which had been copied on a single sheet, revealing a methodical care.

  Almost as though to clear the bad taste in his mouth, McGarr drew deeply on the cigarette and looked out at the boxwood maze below him in the Parknasilla gardens. He had always known that the politics offered for public consumption in the media was a mere shadow play of what went on, say, in the sitting room of Sean Dermot O’Duffy’s cottage in West Cork, but he had not even begun to guess at depths of the intrigues, the avidity with which vendettas were pursued, enemies harried, and loyal followers—no matter how undeserving—rewarded. Fergus Farrell, commissioner of the Garda Siochana, came to mind.

  True, it was the raw material in the strict sense of a biography or memoir that Power would have had to edit and soften. And, sure, there were innumerable references to the Dail, the Constitution, the high courts, law and legality, right and wrong, the structure of the bureaucracy, rule and order. But what
struck McGarr most was how primitive it all seemed. It read like a narrative of a bunch of wee lads out in the play yard or, perhaps more accurately, warring factions of some primitive tribe—your gang and mine—who had agreed to fight their nastiest pitched battles surreptitiously, out of the public eye.

  Why? Because they were more similar than dissimilar, and what united them in discreet, cabalistic strife was greed.

  Still, would O’Duffy or anybody tied to him actually murder to achieve their ends? McGarr rather thought not. If all the skulduggery exposed in the cards was crime, it was white-collar crime. Often it had involved millions upon millions of pounds, but not once did Power mention violence.

  McGarr returned to the bedroom and picked up the stack of cards that had pricked his interest and dealt with a subject Power had called “Final Tally.” Some of the cards were yellowed and handworn, as though he had returned to peruse them time and again. Also, he noted how the man’s handwriting had become smaller, more dense, and crabbed as he had grown older, which effectively dated them.

  The grouping appeared to be Power’s thoughts about what was important in life. Certain cards with quotations caught McGarr’s eye as he flicked through them: by Nietzsche, “Man is the sick animal,” and then Power’s explanation: So many possibilities, only one life. By Hakuin, “Not knowing how near the Truth is,/ People seek it far away: what a pity.” By Geulincx, “Do not despair, one thief was saved. Do not rejoice, one thief was hung.”

  There was a longer quote from Joyce, which McGarr recognized as a passage from Ulysses that seemed almost prophetic, given the way Power had been found. Ultimately, what does it all come down to? Power asked at the top of the card. The answer? “A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward…. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.”