Acts of Allegiance Page 3

  ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  ‘Granny says she is going to marry Bobby Gillece.’

  ‘Mister Gillece,’ my father corrected.

  ‘Mister Gillece.’

  ‘Not my kind of chap,’ the Captain said.

  I knew better than to ask why. It was more productive to discuss matters such as the war, or Winston Churchill, or London.

  ‘Dad, how does a sniper work?’

  He narrowed his gaze. ‘A sniper, aye?’ He placed one polished shoe on the mid-step of a stile we had come to so that the crease of his trousers stood out like a bayonet. ‘Needs to be a peculiar sort, not one you’d seek out for a pal. Keeps to himself, doesn’t say a lot, has the whole thing worked out upstairs. Often uses a building, or a tree, or a belfry. Spends hours up there. Like deer stalking. Knows his man, you see. Knows his man is down there and that his man’s name is on the bullet. Knows his man the same way as I know you.’

  As clouds parted, the light in the valley leapt extravagantly.

  ‘Have you ever seen one at work?’

  ‘Just heard one. Like the crack of a dry branch. All he needs is half a second. No more.’

  My father sat very still, the ash on his cigarette grown long.

  ‘And what does the man who’s hit feel?’

  He shook his head. ‘Just like turning out a light.’

  When we went out and met friends, such as the Santrys, the Captain was charming and amusing and behaved as the natural leader of the group. Handsome and urbane, a delightful companion, he was an officer and a man of honour. At home, it was a different story. Some days he stayed in bed with the curtains drawn, or he would rise before dawn and work on the farm beside Danny until they were both exhausted. He was quite a good horseman, but he had never been able to afford a good horse. Sometimes, when I asked him about his business ventures, he would look at me strangely and, in that moment, I saw fear in his face.

  In summer, Waterloo was a blessed place, a warm and scent-laden heaven with its own mountain, which we climbed for picnics and from whose high flanks the distant river mouth and the city of Waterford could be seen. Winters were harsh and inhospitable. From October to early May, we were always cold and frequently hungry. No such discomforts existed in Fowler Street, where everyone ate till their bellies bulged, the coal fire blazed for eight months of the year and I could be near my cousin Iggy.

  6

  DUBLIN

  1964

  During the week we lived in a three-bedroom house on a terrace in Rathgar, one of those charming houses with tiny railed-off gardens to the front and enough space behind for a lawn and a shed for the lawnmower. Every Friday at around three o’clock we climbed into our Morris Minor and drove down to Waterloo. On Monday morning, we all got up at seven, locked Waterloo and drove for two and a half hours back to Dublin.

  My work in the Economic Section of the Department of External Affairs mostly involved the numerous trade treaties and agreements that Ireland was trying to establish or, where treaties already existed, to extend. Trade was vital, as we had belatedly discovered: we had to earn foreign exchange reserves; we could no longer sit like Celtic gnomes, isolated from the world and hoping that our belief in the Virgin birth would see us through.

  ‘Ireland is changing, you know,’ I said. ‘Becoming less insular. We’re putting the past behind us.’

  ‘Dad says we should never have left the Commonwealth,’ Sugar said. ‘He says it was like walking out of the best club there is.’

  Her father was rector to a tiny and dwindling Church of Ireland congregation in County Carlow. Gentle and conciliatory, Finley Ferguson had been a chaplain in the war, during which he had been struck by shrapnel and lost the use of a lung. He had been nursed by Madeleine, who came from Belfast, and they married during his convalescence. Madeleine was an impatient, ambitious woman, whose husband was no match for her.

  ‘And perhaps he is right,’ I said, ‘but nations are different to people. Nations follow their own star, which is how Parnell saw it. When your destiny is in your own grasp, you do what you must.’

  ‘Dad sees it in his parish work,’ Sugar said. ‘There’s very little money around. People are poor. They emigrate from this great nation of ours. He says what he sees is heart-breaking.’

  ‘I think, after independence, and the civil war, we were like a wounded bird. We had to curl up and hide for decades in order to rediscover our strength and pride. To rediscover ourselves, really. To heal. That’s the process from which we are now trying to emerge.’

  Sugar looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Incidentally, what are they really like—the people you work with? Do they all hate the British with a passion? Can’t say I blame them if they do.’

  ‘They are far cleverer than that. They understand the Brits. It comes from having someone stand on your neck for seven hundred years—you develop a high sense of awareness as to his weight, his change of mood. You know it every time he farts. He, on the other hand, is largely unaware that you exist.’

  ‘How did they ever give you a job? On the face of it, you embody everything they despise.’

  ‘I am the grandson of Pa Kane from Fowler Street, Waterford, never forget. He was a friend of de Valera’s. Granddad once lured a British soldier into the back of a shed and cut his throat with a boning knife.’

  ‘Marty, stop!’

  ‘There was a war. Worse things happened, believe me.’

  Sugar shuddered. ‘At home, Mother was always talking about standards. About how standards are what distinguishes the civilised from the barbaric, about how the standards in the North are entirely lacking here—or, at any rate, in Carlow.’

  The Fergusons lived in a modest bungalow with a painfully tidy front garden. The contrast between this paean to self-contained Protestant standards and Waterloo’s sprawling untidiness, with our dung-stands and hens and our warren-like interconnecting rooms, must have confirmed to Madeleine, on her sole visit, that her only daughter had made a huge mistake, for she never set foot in Waterloo again.

  ‘She’s a filthy snob,’ I said.

  ‘That, too.’

  ‘How did she ever produce a sweet girl like you?’

  ‘If it wasn’t for Dad, I would have died.’ She looked at me. ‘You seldom speak of your parents.’

  ‘Do I not?’

  ‘You know you don’t.’

  ‘Dad died when I was still at school. Mother remarried, as you know.’

  ‘I’m just sorry I never met her before she became ill.’

  My childhood memories had alkalised into a few vital images: walking Waterloo’s fields with my father, walking the streets of Waterford with Iggy.

  ‘Do you think that one’s religion has a bearing on the standards to which your mother refers? I know she disapproves of Catholics, but how does she feel about the Renaissance? Has she ever been to Florence, for example? Or Rome? Does she think Leonardo da Vinci was a Prod?’

  Sugar laughed. ‘She probably does.’

  We had met in Main, the home of the Santry family, old family friends, at a midsummer party. She was standing to one side, in the lofted entrance hall, by a long, gilt-framed looking glass, hands joined at her waist, chin raised, her fair hair gathered up and clasped to reveal her long smooth neck. She was lovely. Her cornflower-blue eyes gleamed. Her dress, made of grey twinkling stuff, was fastened at her throat and followed the outline of her figure to her toes; but behind, it was scalloped out to reveal her firm back, deliciously. Her bare arms were shining brown, a silver bracelet clasped her wrist and she wore no rings.

  The ballroom, reached through an arch scrolled with vines, was floored in wooden tiles that had become loose here and there, so that as we moved into the waltz, it seemed we were accompanied by castanets.

  ‘I’m a bit rusty,’ I said, an understatement.

  ‘You’re doing brilliantly.’ She glided. ‘It’s vast here, isn’t it?’

  ‘They play tennis on the roof.’

  ‘I know, I’m of
ten invited. Do you not play?’

  ‘Never have.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No time, I suppose. Or laziness. But I fish,’ I said.

  ‘There’s a river at home and it’s full of trout this time of year. We catch lots.’

  ‘On a dry fly?’

  ‘To be honest, my father and I put on boots, get into the river with a net and catch them underneath the banks when they’re asleep.’

  The four-piece band was swaying bravely through its routine.

  ‘I bet you’re very good at tennis,’ I said.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Instinct. Tell me how you do it.’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ I said and allowed my hand to touch the small of her back.

  ‘There’s a lot of hard work involved, but it’s worth it.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re very determined.’

  ‘It’s very technical and boring.’

  ‘Then bore me.’

  ‘It’s all about learning things like reaching higher—and higher!—in the serve.’ She soared from the floor until, for a moment, her nose was level with mine; then sank again. ‘And the new double-handed return.’

  ‘You must have started young.’

  ‘Mother made sure of that,’ she said with a laugh that suggested she did not think it funny.

  ‘Don’t you find it quite stuffy in here?’

  ‘I’m meant to meet someone,’ she said. ‘He’ll be looking for me.’

  ‘Your boyfriend?’

  ‘Well a friend, yes. You may know him. Christopher Chase.’

  From the French windows, four steps led down to a terrace facing south. A moon had yet to rise, but starlight was spread in broad washes and the night carried the musk of Norwegian spruce. As we stood at a hedge of beech, through the trees I could see Waterford blinking in the distance. I cupped the match for her cigarette and she dipped to the flame.

  ‘I love this part of the world,’ she said as she exhaled smoke. ‘People do what they want. Look around you here—everyone is so relaxed. I envy them.’

  She was suddenly so sad that my heart lurched for the want of her. A barn owl sank along the black-etched tree line.

  ‘Oh, there’s a ship coming in,’ she said.

  A tiny set of twin fore-and-aft lights was pushing up the far-off estuary.

  ‘Look!’

  I turned to her as a meteor from out over the Comeraghs tore through the heavens and plunged into the night where the ocean began, or so it seemed.

  ‘We think it has landed here,’ she said, ‘and yet they say it all happens millions of miles away.’

  ‘What does it make you think of?’

  ‘Of all the other times in my life I’ve been out on such a beautiful night. You?’

  ‘Where we come from, where we’re going. How stars collide.’

  We stood there, in our moment. I could see how each individual hair was swept up into the bundle above her neck, and the tiny race of gold that channelled tightly down between the blades of her shoulders.

  I drew her close and she kissed me.

  7

  WATERFORD

  November 1951

  From way below our feet cobblestones echoed under the iron shoes of a dray horse being led to one of the Quays’ enclosures. A light rain washed down Patrick Street.

  Iggy loved danger. He loved pushing situations to the limit, as when he crawled at dead of night into the Gent’s bedroom where my uncle was sleeping noisily and drunk, and robbed change from the pockets of his discarded trousers. Iggy used his pen to spatter ink on the unknowing back of the Christian Brother who regularly flogged him, an offence for which, if discovered, he would surely have received an epic thrashing. His resolute indifference to authority made Iggy irresistible. He had me stand guard outside the window of Wise’s shop when he went in to steal oranges and sweets. If I saw Mr Wise approaching from the rear of his premises, I would, as instructed, draw my fingers across my throat, like a pirate, upon which signal Iggy would leave the shop at speed. I sometimes imagined us, pistols in our belts, as members of the Flying Squad.

  Sometimes he mocked me for the way I spoke, pointing out that I had an English accent, which made me try to speak like him, but when I did so he scorned my efforts. He had a habit of hacking up saliva and launching globs of spittle across the street, a practice he excelled at and which I instantly began to imitate. He claimed he could piss further than me, but when it became obvious he could not, I curtailed the arc of my flow so as not to upstage him. The day it was announced in Fowler Street that Uncle Ted would marry Mags McGinn, a woman who had inherited a farm in south Armagh, and that Uncle Ted and Iggy would leave Waterford within the year, I hated that woman with all my heart and prayed at night that she would die so that Iggy and I could stay together.

  The rain intensified as we walked down Michael Street, across the Apple Market and into Spring Garden Alley. I didn’t mind getting wet, and neither did Iggy, whose hair was plastered flat, making his square head seem even more unusual. Earlier he had made off with bullseyes from a shop in the Apple Market where I had distracted the owner with requests for chocolates she did not have. Midway along the Quay, a man with side-whiskers stood in the rain, peering at the rusting hulk of an abandoned trawler. Stanley Kane, my father’s younger brother, was got out in a three-piece suit of green-and-amber tweed; gleaming brown boots with good laces doubled around the ankles; a cream-coloured shirt whose tail now impended below the jacket; and a scarlet tie that flashed like a hot poker as he turned and saw us. Iggy shot an orb of glistening spit that landed just short of Uncle Stanley’s boot.

  ‘Uncle Stanley, you’re to come home now,’ he said. ‘Look, we have sweets for you.’ He produced a bullseye and began to suck it provocatively. ‘Yum! This is yummy, Uncle Stanley!’

  Uncle Stanley retreated from his prospect of bobbing gulls, churning currents and the tattoo of rain on the grey river. Apart from bringing in coal for the fire in Fowler Street, and doing some minor jobs in the garden for Granny Kane, Stanley’s days were spent down here, on the quay, beside the never still river.

  ‘Sweets,’ he said and put out his hand.

  ‘Come on!’ Iggy said with a nudge to me. ‘Come on, Uncle Stanley.’

  ‘Iggy … ’ Uncle Stanley took a step in our direction, hands held out.

  ‘Is your arse clean, Uncle Stanley?’ Iggy asked and held up the sweet. ‘Say, “My arse is clean,” and I’ll give you one.’

  When Uncle Stanley reached out, Iggy laughed and danced away. My uncle lunged, but his movements were uncoordinated, and he dropped twenty yards behind us, breathing heavily. Every so often, Iggy picked up pebbles and flung them at Uncle Stanley’s big troubled face.

  ‘Is he with you?’ asked Granny Kane when we came in, and then, when she saw her son, cried, ‘Oh, thank God! You’re two great boys! Thank God Stanley’s home.’

  8

  WATERFORD

  Early December 1951

  The night before my parents were due back in Ireland, when we had washed at the tap stand in the yard, Auntie Kate opened the back door and called out.

  ‘Marty! I’m going to wash your hair—come up here!’

  ‘I’d rather not, thanks, Auntie Kate.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you what you’d “rather” or not,’ she said, copying my accent. ‘I said, come up here.’

  I had been out helping Uncle Ted and Iggy, delivering coal, and my hair was matted with dust. Auntie Kate’s firm, bare arms rippled.

  ‘Take off your shirt.’

  As my ears sang and I braced myself on either side of the enamel basin, I prayed that Iggy would not walk in.

  ‘You’re a hardy lad, aren’t you?’

  She pressed me down and poured warm water over my head from a jug. I felt the cold shampoo and heard her screw back the top on the bottle.

  ‘I know you’re going to like this,’ she said.


  Her fingers were in my hair, circling with great thoroughness as she sudsed me. Her thumbs entered the groove at the base of my neck and the tips of her fingers gently probed my ears. My groin had rushed into tumult. She reached over to work the scalp above my forehead and her elbows rested on my bare shoulders. She had enfolded me from behind, and I could feel her heat on my backside.

  ‘You have a lovely long back,’ she said quietly as she rinsed suds from the basin, held my chin in her hand and kissed the nape of my neck.

  I could not stand upright, and she knew it. She poured from a second jug and slicked down my hair. I pressed against the hard table edge and she helped me grind gently, her hands cupping my shoulders. As we rocked together, I suddenly went beyond the point of caring. I let out a cry and she pulled me to her in order to prevent me from swooning. I felt her kiss my shoulders.

  ‘Now, that’s much better, isn’t it?’ she murmured and handed me a towel.

  That final night, a cold front had moved in and the town was covered in snow. I came downstairs, dizzy with pleasure and confusion, eager to drink in another sight of Auntie Kate, but she was busy cooking and did not appear to notice me.

  ‘Where’s Ignatius?’ Granny Kane asked. ‘Is he not eating?’

  ‘I put his in the oven,’ said Uncle Ted between mouthfuls, winking at me. Earlier I had caught a whiff of burnt rubber, which meant that Iggy, or his father, had been using the soldering iron at their workbench.

  Uncle Stanley appeared, furtively, dusting snow from his clothes. As he struggled from his topcoat, he seemed agitated, water puddling at his feet.

  ‘Stanley, go upstairs now and change those clothes,’ said Granny Kane.

  Uncle Stanley slunk away, drooling midway between glee and terror.