Chapter Twenty Three: Dublin, Wicklow September, 1928
“Madge, have you a lipstick?”
Molly called to her roommate, who was out on the sun porch for the requisite daily two hours. She was not allowed even that anymore; no more than half an hour a day when the weather was fine, preferably in the solarium. The vagaries of the weather, even in the Wicklow Mountains, were now counted too much for her. She’d have gone to Switzerland, but she didn’t want to be so far from the girls, and now it was too late. With an effort, she pushed herself up with one hand and rummaged through the drawer with the other, but the effort was exhausting. She hated wheelchairs. It was impossible to see over the tops of things. Madge came in from the porch, dragging her Turkish-towelling dressing gown behind her.
“Yeah? Wha’d you want?”
“A lipstick. I have one here, but the blasted thing’s broken off. The girls are coming and I don’t want to look like a ghoul.”
“If you’re a ghoul I’m Greta Garbo,” Madge said dryly. She went to her own bedside table and pulled out a lipstick. Handing it over, she went back outside. She still had another twenty minutes’ airing. She hated the sun porch. She had enough freckles already, as she complained at least twice a week. She didn’t tan like Molly. She wasn’t anything like Molly, and it was only Molly’s extreme case that kept her from hating her entirely. So she said with good-natured honesty. She could afford to be so honest. Madge would go home soon, strong and well again; the best Molly could hope for was to be allowed to die among family, a matter still under debate with the staff.
They had told her a fortnight ago not to expect a cure or even another long remission. She cried a little, then pulled up her socks and rang Dick Eustace to come out and help her settle her affairs. In truth it was a relief, apart from the odium of leaving the girls orphans.
Dicky was a brick, never deviating from his old calm demeanour. There were no scenes of regret or, God forbid, grief. Just two old friends conducting business as they always had. She was grateful for that. He came out from Greystones, a short drive in his Bentley, and spread out all the paperwork on a table in one of the meeting rooms, sitting beside her, his now silver hair falling over his forehead as he enumerated the status of various trusts, stocks, properties and goods to which she was heir. She had never had much interest in money; it was easier to leave it to the accountants. As long as she had enough to get by, and she always had done. So she was shocked to discover that her net worth after the death duties were cleared would amount to nearly £100,000, not including jewellery. Well! The girls would certainly want for nothing…. At her expression, Dicky gave her a twitchy little smile.
“I always said you were a catch, Gerry.”
She gave a little laugh; pleased at the compliment, when she knew how ghastly she looked. “Only an old friend would say that, darling.”
He looked at her a long moment. “They are the best sort,” he murmured. He cleared his throat and cleared up the papers before them, colouring. He hadn’t changed from their Castle days; he was still a charming man, for all his butterflies. “You had another matter you wished to discuss, I believe.”
She drew a long, painful breath. “Yes. I need your assistance in a delicate matter regarding Katie.”
He shook his head. “I’m closer than a confessional,” he assured her. It was touching that he should concern himself so closely with her when he had a staff of barristers, accountants, and clerks. But he had always stuck by her, allowing no one else to manage her affairs. She nodded. His kindness made what she had to say easier.
“I would like to make a separate provision for Katie, quite exclusive of the general estate… some sort of trust fund, I suppose, under the jurisdiction of her natural father should he return to Ireland…” She waited, but his expression did not change. “Under yours if not, as my executor. If you would be so be so kind.”
His lips thinned a moment. “I see. Have you an address for this person?” He looked up at her, his eyes full of unspoken things.
“Yes,” she recited to him by heart the address of the Boston Globe, Mick’s employer. “I am concerned because I haven’t heard from him for some time.” She looked at her hands, uneasy with the divulging of the secret in any way to outsiders. “…It was his intention in the New Year to return to Ireland. He said he would write with word of when he booked passage…” She faltered. “I don’t know what has happened.” Tears stung her dry eyes painfully and she winced.
Dick was silent a long moment, plainly moved by the pathos of her appeal. “I’ll see what I can do,” he assured her quietly. “… What amount do you wish to set aside?”
She bit her lip. “Forty-thousand,” she decided, nodding. She had weighed the benefits of various proportionate sums in the last nine months. She needn’t do this at all. If she let be, no one would ever know. But she knew and Mick knew and her basic sense of fair play came to the fore. It was funny to care so much what happened to others after one was dead. Patsy and Neddy, Mummy too, would have fits, but that couldn’t be helped. Caro would stand up for her, as she always had. And Dodo. She had no wish to cause a family quarrel but she had to do what was right. Right for Mick, but mostly for Katie. She deserved a father, a connection with the Raffertys and Kilgallens, with Sally being so much older. Sally would marry soon and then where would poor Katie be; stuck with Patsy? Molly would rather have her living in Sligo, or Cavan, than let Patsy rear her.
She wheeled herself over to the door of the sun porch with a hand mirror and turned up the lipstick. It was siren scarlet, a deep, lush crimson. What fun, she thought. Maybe I’ll paint myself up like Theda Bara. Wouldn’t Mummy get a kick out of that? She did not, the effort being more than she could cope with, although she had been careful to ask Nora, one of the student nurses who liked her, to help her dress. Everything was just so: she wore a frock of sapphire blue crepe, her blue paste brooch, silk stockings and cross-strap Italian shoes. She was perfect from head to foot. If she could have got up to slink in the doorway with her fur she’d have looked a film star. That’s what Nora was always saying, “Oh Mrs. Leary, you look just like a film star!” It was very sweet, but she hadn’t anything to judge by. She’d been to the pictures in O’Connell Street with Sally and Kate, but she didn’t keep up with the magazines and such as even Lizzie did. But she humoured Nora.
“Oh yes, and who would you say I looked like?”
“Oh, Gertrude Lawrence,” the girl nodded emphatically.
She hadn’t been the only one to compare her to the cinema folk. In the summer of 1924, when she had only been out of hospital a few weeks, she went to tea at Liz’s in Merrion Square. She was the first to arrive, so the effect was even more stunning. She was still very thin, but she had gone shopping for new clothes and come decked out in the latest finds – a very sheer silk muslin frock white with a pale blue flowered print, a long strand of lapis beads and the most scrumptious blue satin shoes. She had a paste bandeau in her newly waved hair. She had lounged in the drawing-room doorway then, making up like Gloria Swanson with her head tossed back, and when Liz looked up to see her, she laughed,
“There you are, darling, ever the fashion plate!” She rose from the chair and came to give Molly an airy kiss. Liz was comfortable now. She was perfectly dressed and coifed, as befitted a lady of her station. “Wherever did you get it?”
“Slyne’s,” Molly said, kissing her back. “My mother’s just got back from Switzerland and of course had to go shopping for the summer, so I went along.”
Liz grinned. “You went shopping with your mother? Oh my, that must have been an experience!”
“Molly laughed. “Oh, darling, you should see her,” she said as they went to sit down. “She’s cut her hair and everything. She’s quite swish. When I met her in the hall I’d hardly have recognised her. The Alpine air must have affected her, for she bought a pair of trousers.”
“Your mother, wearing trousers? Oh this I have to see! I’d never have believed it!”
Molly nodded. “Come to tea next Thursday. She’ll be there.”
“Huh! It sounds as though the two of you are getting on famously!” Liz said. She rang the bell.
“It’s all my aunt,” Molly insisted, shaking her head. “The more time Mummy spends with Caro the less stuffy she becomes…. I only wish she’d done it years ago.”
“So darling,” Liz said when the teacart had been brought round, “What have you been doing since you were let out of jail? I was positively delighted when I heard you were back in town!”
Molly gazed at her friend, thinking how apt the expression was. Coming home again was certainly like walking into the sunlight after a long term of prison confinement. But, as with a prisoner, she found the outside world strange after her absence and found herself clinging to old habits of the hospital routine, her life being still very structured and quiet; old habits of Derry, too, were hard to break and scandalised everyone: walking everywhere, or answering the door herself. How to explain that it was because Eileen, her house-parlour maid, was playing a skating game with the girls in the upstairs dining room? She laughed a little.
“I’ve spent most of the time contacting decorators for the house! Our tenants left it in an awful state, and I never got round to it before. Everything’s falling down in disrepair, and the furniture needs to be updated. The garden is a sight! And I have a deluge of mail to answer, letters and invitations. I don’t know how I shall ever get through them all.”
“Poor you,” Liz pouted. “So popular!” She smiled. “Should I count myself lucky to have been at the top of the pile?” She rose and poured out tea for them, looking up sidelong as she did. “So,” she murmured, “when is that dashing artist of yours coming back from the States? I swear my dear he was positively gorgeous! Better than John Gilbert any day of the week. It’s no wonder that the two of you were – Oh dear. Have I said something wrong?”
“No,” Molly said, too quickly, shaking her head. “… I had a letter from him last week. We had been discussing it while I was in Wicklow, his coming home.” She frowned. “He’s very stubborn and refuses to ‘live off a rich woman’ as he said. He wants to make sure he has enough money and a position at the National School before he comes back. Good grief!” she exclaimed. “He’s completely exasperating! Paddy never minded my money, and he had more reason to.” She sighed.
Liz handed her a cup of tea, her mouth pursed judiciously. “I can tell you this now he’s gone,” she began.
“What?”
She sat down on the sofa, a picture of ease with her comfortable, generous Edwardian curves. “He rang here, do you know, when you were in town for your father’s funeral. I remember it quite distinctly. He was rather short when told you were unavailable.”
“What did you tell him?” Molly remembered the phone call at Mick’s the one night, when the caller had rung off without a word. She had known then that it was Paddy, even before she went home to his abuse and his sneer about this same friend who had “told her lies before.”
“I told him you were for an early bedtime.” Liz’s mouth twitched in a smile.
“Are you envious?” Molly countered, lowering her head.
Liz rolled her eyes, stood, and looked out the windows at the garden. “God, darling, who wouldn’t be? George is as exciting as a loaf of bread when it comes to that, and there you are with a simply scrumptious husband, even if he is a Fenian, and a wild-eyed artist who can’t keep his hands off you and kisses you in my hall when he thinks no-one is looking!” She turned round. “You didn’t think I saw that, did you? No, I thought not. You always did have all the manly beaux Gerry. Vince, Phillip, Jack, Dicky. They were all at your feet. Then there was Pat, and we knew you were gone, the moment we laid eyes on him. He was heavenly, so attentive, doing things that the rest of us only dreamed our chaps would do. Who wouldn’t be envious, to be swept away like that? And then there was Michael. I saw his painting of you, did I ever tell you?”
“No.”
Liz nodded. “In O’Connell Street. It was beautiful, a lovely tribute. I have one of his pieces in the north-west bedroom.” She smiled a little. “All for the cause of true love. Someone should have it.” They looked at each other.
“I’m sorry,” Molly murmured. Liz smiled again, painfully.
“It’s all right, darling,” she murmured thickly. “We get by.”
Maire came ahead of Mrs. Tunney, who lived out at Dun Laoghaire. Liz put on her society smile.
“Silvie, dear, how good to see you! Do come and sit down. You know Mrs. Leary, don’t you?”
Molly wheeled the chair over to the mirror in the bath to check her hair. She was struggling backwards out the door again when Madge came in from outdoors and pulled her out into the room.
“You make me feel like the princess with the hoptoads,” she said.
“Oh stop,” Molly said. “It’s only the trappings.” She heard a squeal from the hall.
“Mummy!” She looked up to see Katie tearing over. Sally and Grace followed more sedately at a distance. Katie was half in her lap in a moment. It hurt, but she wasn’t about to complain.
“Darling Caitin poppet!” Molly cried. “There’s my big girl!” It was very hard on Katie only being allowed to see her once a month. It was special dispensation to see her at all. Sally and Grace came in and they gave her dutiful kisses.
“Hello, Mother, what a charming frock. That colour looks so well on you… Sarah, darling, I wouldn’t have recognised you! Who painted your face? You look positively scrummy!” For the last two years Sally had preferred to be called Sarah. It was what she was called at school. She was very tall now. Inheritance had been kind to her, for the angles of her father’s face that gave him such a dashing look had softened in her to stateliness. She would always be beautiful. There was no denying Paddy was her father; his face was imprinted strongly on hers and the hazel eyes were the very same. If her hair had been redder, as it once was, she’d have given the family the spooks. At seventeen she was luscious, with the gorgeous figure of the Jacobs women. How proud Paddy would be of his cailín rua if he could see her now.
“I have a lovely visit planned for us, darlings,” she said, still holding Sally’s hand. “We have the conservatory all to ourselves as everyone else is out on the grounds in the sun, and I’ve ordered a special tea just for us.” The wheels of the chair were stuck in the carpet. “Can you turn this thing around Mother? These wheels are always so annoying.” Grace came and with Sally got the chair off the carpet.
“Mummy,” Katie’s voice had softened from its native Derry whine. “May I sit in your lap?” She asked it every time.
“No, poppet. You know it’s against the rules.” Better to blame the hospital staff, who really weren’t that strict, than to wound the child’s feelings by saying it hurt.
“But I’ve missed you, Mummy.”
She touched the wavy fall of hair across the child’s forehead. “I know lovey,” she said earnestly. “I’ve missed you too. But it’s like school: you don’t want to get Mummy into trouble now, do you?”
“No.” Katie pouted.
“Oh, by the way Mary,” Grace said, “I have some of the girls’ work along to show you.” They had just begun a new term two weeks before at the Loreto Convent in Bray. She glanced across at Sally. “Sarah took a first in Maths, and English.” Molly smiled at her.
“There’s your father,” she said. Sally blushed and smiled. The subject of Paddy was a tender one with them. Sally was uncomfortable with it, but also so obviously craved any little bit of news. She liked to hear how he was in his Trinity days as a young man, how he danced and sang and made up to all the girls, took firsts in everything he did and won scholarships and fellowships. As long as she lived, Molly was determined to oblige her, to counteract what others in the family may say of him, for he was a good man and the child should be allowed to have those happier memories. All Sally could remember herself were the bad times after 1914. Molly suspected that she wanted to forget he was a republican, and given everything that had happened, perhaps that was understandable. But Paddy would not have liked it. Paddy would not have cared to be whitewashed into some sepulchral icon. So she was content to let Rory and Dan and Cate have their say.
“Mummy,” Sally said as they went down the hall, “Cara Morrisey has asked me to join them hunting in Scotland over the winter recess. May I? It’s only for the fortnight.” Sally had become very keen on outdoorsy pursuits. She was a fine hunter, but Molly knew she meant stalking now, and not foxhunting. Grouse shooting or some such.
“Yes, dear,” Molly said, smiling up at her mother. “If you promise not to bring back the trophy.” She remembered the time she was blooded at her first hunt. Grace was disgusted beyond measure, and the trophy had ended up in George and Liam’s room.
“Yes, I remember,” Grace said ruefully. “Girls, your mother came back from the hunt the first time looking like a veteran from the Boer War, painted up with the blood and dragging the brush in tow.”
They stared at her. It was not done in the Portmarnock Hunt Club anymore. Many things were not.
“Yes,” she said, to quell their alarm, “and we also wore corsets to ride! Which is more barbaric, I wonder?” The girls wore jods now, as she had never been allowed to do.
“Speaking of haberdashery,” Grace said, “there’s a package for you, Mary. Some kind of footwear. I gave the box to Matron to put away.”
“Oh, those would be the tennis shoes I ordered.” They had been special ordered as most of her shoes were, and had taken six months to arrive from London. “Give them to Patsy, I’m sure she can make use of them, if her feet aren’t too wide.” There was an uncomfortable silence.
“…No,” Grace said at last. “I don’t believe they are.” She had broken the taboo. Under no circumstances was one to imply that one was less than one hundred percent. But Mummy knew what the doctors had said. They came into the conservatory with its cream coloured hangings and salmon carpet runners, with the splendid view out over the valleys. “Here we are,” Grace said brightly.
“Mummy,” Sally said later when Grace had gone with Katie to the ladies lounge, “can I tell you something?”
Molly looked over at her. “Yes, dear.” Though she could guess by the tone what it had to do with. Sally was blushing. Oh, to be a young girl again! She had not been older than Sally when she was engaged to Vince. Those were different times.
“I met a fellow at a mixer in Dublin. One of the tea dances at the Metropole… He wants to write to me… I met him skating at the Rotunda rink, too, with Cara and Jenny.”
Molly smiled. “Who is he? Is he of a good family?”
Poor Sally could hardly speak the words. “His name is James Pearson and he is studying for the Civil Service examination.”
“Not the CID, I hope?” She said with some irony. It would be too much for Sally to get mixed up with a G-man. It was lost on earnest Sally.
“No Mother, in the Telegraph office.”
“How old is he?”
She shrugged. “Twenty-one.”
“And where are his people from?”
Here she was surer, and said emphatically, “Blackrock.”
Molly sighed. “Well, I don’t see the harm of it, as long as Grandmama agrees.” Sally squeezed her hand.
“Oh, thank you, Mummy!” she exclaimed, and kissed her.
It made her sad. Some young man had asked her daughter ‘out walking’, and she would never know him. Never know whether it stuck, whether they married and had children, or whether it was a passing fancy. But she hid her anguish all that afternoon. They had Darjeeling and crab sandwiches, Dublin Bay prawns and meringues, and Sally played her favourite Beethoven piece on the piano in the lounge. Afterward they took a turn on the grounds. When the girls were chasing each other on the path up ahead, she put her hand on her mother’s on the chair.
“You heard what the doctors said,” she began uneasily.
“Yes,” Grace said evenly after a time.
She could hardly speak the words. “I want to go home, Mother. I want to go to Baldoyle. I want to see the strand at Howth, and the horses in the paddock. I want to go home.” Painful tears slipped down and fell on her frock, staining it dark.
“We’ll arrange it, dear.” Grace promised, in a low unsteady voice, and patted her hand.
She sat for a long time after they had gone, out on the portico before the lawn and gardens. The sun was setting over the mountains and the sky was orange and scarlet and the soft sounds of twilight were creeping up. It was beautiful here. Peaceful. But it was not home. While she mused, someone nearby indoors had turned on the wireless, and presently she heard the sound of John MacCormack’s beautiful tenor. The song was half over before she caught the words:
And when you come and all the flowers are dying
If I am dead as dead I well may be
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an Ave there for me
And I shall hear though soft your tread above me
And all my grave shall warmer, sweeter be
For you will bend and tell me that you love me
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me
She turned her head against the side of the chair, shaking, too weak to cry. “Turn it off,” she begged those listening indoors. “Turn it off, please turn it off!” Beautiful Wicklow was a blur around her, and she collapsed on the arm of the chair, unable to breathe, coughing, struggling for breath. A sister, an orderly and a doctor were out in an instant.
“Mrs. Leary, what happened,” the sister was crooning, as she eased her head back. “Here, don’t take on so. We’ll have you back inside, darling Mrs. Leary. The evening air is too much in your state.”
“No, no, no” she protested, still strangling for air. “It was the song, the wireless --”
She was put to bed again and given a salt rub followed by ice packs which helped, but she was very tired. She refused supper that night, even the clear soup they sent she let grow cold on the tray. Dear Sister Ferguson came in to enquire after her.
“No, I’m just tired.” She insisted. “I’m just tired. I don’t want anything.”
“Well,” Sister said. “I’ll look in on you again in an hour to see if you require anything.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
Ferguson tucked in and smoothed the bedclothes and went away again, her starched pinafore crackling with every step. Molly looked over at her collection of photographs and sketches on the stand. The girls in a formal portrait; a snap of them at Kingstown. A family picture with all the Learys and Ernie and Rosie’s children scattered about before them. A sketch Mick had sent her of Corcoran’s in Boston where he had done a mural. Another of the Charlestown docks. Paddy’s graduation picture from 1904 that Trina gave her after he died. A snap of Mummy in Nice from her trip there last year. One of herself, Sally and Joe that she had made for Paddy when he was at Frongoch….
She was so tired, felt so very far away from all of them, the living and the dead. Maybe it was an allegory. Isn’t that what Paddy used to call it? An allegory… She could reach none of them, so simply looked until her weariness overtook her.
She fell to dreaming and found herself in College Park during the Opening Day ceremonies in 1909 She was there with Paddy – how young and beautiful he was, with his smiling, unlined face! And everyone was dressed to the nines She wore her pale yellow silk frock and Easter hat. They went down the receiving line together and she was introduced to everyone in the School of English apart from Dan Oliver who was across the field at one of the events. There was a lot of speech-making, by the Provost and Vice-Provost, the Regents; the heads of various schools, by some of the junior staff, including Paddy, who spoke there without the merest trace of his Kerry accent, but in a fine Dublin drawl that made him sound like a bank clerk; by the valedictorians of the graduating classes too. It was so thrilling to look on him from afar, to watch his sinuous grace and the way women young and old nearly swooned over him. He belonged to her. Of all these bright young co-eds, some of whom were devilishly attractive; he had instead chosen her. She had him. If Mrs. Mahaffy’s remark was to be given credit, he was desperately in love with her, and he certainly acted like it that day. He held her hand openly and even kissed her on the cheek, whispering rude or witty things into her ear at auspicious moments to make her laugh. When someone asked her if she were cold in her thin dress, he smiled at her and whispered in her ear, “Don’t worry, we’ll hot things up later.” He was his charming self, as ever in those days.
She looked up then, as the wind was blowing her skirts about her calves, and there was Mick, across the lawn, in a company of undergraduates who were larking about. A girl was with him. Marjorie Reckle. He met her eye and grew suddenly angry, storming over across the distance while she could do nothing but recoil in horror.
“You were meant to be with me!” He shouted at her in front of the company. “You betrayed me!” She looked for Paddy, but he was in his Volunteer uniform with a rifle in hand, on the reviewing stand with a group of men she did not know. She was helpless and confused.
“I didn’t!” She insisted, “I didn’t!”
Mick took her by the arm, and then she was in his house in Townsend Street. It was when her father had died, and they were in his bedroom lying on the bed. The phone rang. He stumbled out to it, but the caller had rung off. He came back to where she lounged on the bed, shaking his head with a puzzled expression.
“Who was it?” she asked, yawning.
“Someone calling from a pub,” he shrugged. “They rang off.” She felt a chill, and frowned, but he said,
“All these interruptions!” He crawled across the bed to her, kneeling over her in his hastily donned jumper. “But no more!” He kissed her and she yielded to his embrace. They made love again and it was glorious.
Katie had been born of that fire. That fiery white swirling madness that engulfed them - engulfed her - and she was drowning in it, in the crashing white sea, iridescent and magnificent.
Enraptured, trembling, at long last she reached the farther shore.
It was 29 September 1928. She was thirty-seven years old.
Friday, 18 October
Mickey received the letter from Eustace and Eustace, barristers-at-law, delivered to his mailbox at the Globe’s offices.. He had come in from an assignment at half-two in the afternoon and was going to lunch with Reilly. They never made it to lunch. He tore out of the building and down to book passage to Ireland as soon as possible. After almost a year of frustrating silence from Molly the letter from her lawyer was the worst shock he ever got. She was dead. She was dead of tuberculosis, said the accompanying personal note from the head of the firm, a friend of hers by his own account. She had been at the sanatorium in Wicklow all along. Too ill, probably, to answer his letters. He felt awful for every terrible thing he had thought, and worse still after he saw the tremendous sum of money she had left for Katie in trust with him.
They had argued over money for years. It never mattered to her as it did to him. She was right, it didn’t matter, only being together mattered, and now she was dead and he would never have the chance again. He left everything in Boston for Joe Reilly to deal with, just fled. He withdrew the money he had on hand at the bank and exchanged it for £400, and fled. He had time to cool his heels during the crossing, for it took a week, by which time he was eaten through with remorse. They landed at Cobh on the morning of the 17th and he took the first train for Dublin, waiting only long enough for his bags to be unloaded. In Dublin he paid a porter to send them to the Hibernian Academy. He’d worry about the house, later. It was mid-afternoon, dark and raining. He’d forgotten how oppressive an Irish rain could be. He ran out of Harcourt Street railway station for a cab to Mountjoy Square, and was nearly run over by the Rathmines tram in the process. It had stopped raining by the time he arrived on the North side, but he was wet through already as his overcoat was flapping open as he had stood in the drenching rain waiting on the cab.
There was no answer at the front of Number 60 and the shades were drawn, a black wreath hanging on the door. He went down the kitchen stair, like the old days when visiting Kate, and banged on the window. The kitchen was dark but for a single bare lightbulb hanging over the great worktable in the centre of the room At length, a youngish woman in a brown dress and service apron came to the street door. He could tell by her face that visitors were not the rule these days. She looked at him curiously, wet through as he was and bearded as an escaped prisoner. He came up the kitchen stairs again.
“I’ve come to enquire about Mrs. Leary,” he said. “I received a letter from her solicitor, and I would like to speak to someone in the family about it.”
The woman shook her head. “There’s no one here, sir, but me. I’m just minding the house until they get things sorted out. Her sister would be able to help you. In Merrion Square. Number--”
“Yes, I know the number,” he said abruptly. He touched his hat to her. “Thank you for your time, Miss.”
He raced to the tram in O’Connell Street and took it as far as Stephen’s Green before transferring. In Merrion Square he pounded the doorknocker. It was now going on five o’clock, and he had been running round Dublin for nearly two hours.
“Sir?” The little house-parlour maid who opened the door was startled at such urgency.
“I want to see Mrs. MacNeeson,” he said shortly, her name coming up unbidden. “I am a friend of Mrs. Leary.”
She opened the door further. “Certainly, sir. Won’t you come in, sir?” He was shown into the hall. “Who do I say is calling?”
“Michael Rafferty.” The maid looked uncertain, both at his terseness and the Catholic name, but went as she was bidden to find her mistress. He stood in the hall, looking up at the tall ceiling with its rococo stuccowork. It was a beautiful house, impressively done over in the modern style, but retaining the best of its Georgian elegance and grace, from the electrified chandelier to the sweeping stairs and Italian tile floors. He looked down at one of the side tables and recognised there a piece of Molly’s Limoges, an Irish colleen dancing a jig in perpetuity. He picked it up. On the bottom were her initials in gold ink, MML, and the date 9-9-12. A birthday gift from someone. A well-meaning relative probably. She hated kitschy Irish things. Like Parnell with his aversion to green.
“Good afternoon.”
He looked up, bric-a-brac in hand, and found her sister standing at the bottom of the stair. She had come on him noiselessly, so absorbed was he in thought. He put down the miniature. This young woman was still as coldly beautiful as when they had last met in O’Connell Street. She was dressed head to toe in impeccable black. If one must mourn, one must do it in style.
“Mrs. MacNeeson, how good of you to see me--”
“Not at all,” she said freezingly. “You have no business here. My sister is dead.”
It was as if she had opened his chest with a knife with those words, spoken with such utter lack of feeling. Molly had said her sister hated her, and he could well believe it. Oh my beloved! He ached unbearably.
“I know,” he said quietly. “Her servant said you could tell me--”
She was unmoved. “I have nothing to say to you,” she cut him off tersely.
There was a strident call from upstairs.
“Anne!” He was confused and looked up toward the voice, not realising that Patsy was the Anne to whom the old lady spoke. The mother. She was stalking down the upper passage to the stairs with a long angry stride remarkable for a woman of her age. She had to be sixty at least. “You will not turn him away Anne!”
“This is none of your concern, Mother,” Patsy said coldly. She turned back to him. “Mr. Rafferty,” she made his name the worst epithet, “you made a mistake in coming here. My sister had no words for you when she died.”
The world turned grey and he leant on the table, his ears roaring. Mrs. Clennaghan was beside him and her strong hands were on his arms. He heard their exchange, dimly, faintly, but it meant nothing to him.
“Anne, will you lie to the man in the face of the lawyers? See how he is! What would you say to the girl? She knows who he is! We are obliged to comply!”
“Katherine is--” Patsy began. The name brought him up again out of his faintness. Grace turned to him. “Mr. Rafferty, Michael – may I call you Michael? – my daughter specified in her will that if you returned Katie was to go to you.”
“I know,” he managed thickly.
“That isn’t all she specified,” Patsy murmured scathingly. She gave him a loathsome glance. “He’d never have come back if I had my way,” she exclaimed and they stared at her in surprise. “What did she do, send to you by the lawyers? I thought I got rid of all your correspondence!” The letters! Molly had not forsaken him, she had never received them, nor he hers. This hateful woman before him had thwarted them. The impact hit him like a lorry. He raised his head.
“Do you care to explain that?”
“There needs no explaining,” she looked down her nose. “She gave me her letters to send and I did not, nor gave her yours either. We’ve had enough of Molly’s scandal in this house.” He regarded him hatefully. “I should have known you’d come back for your bastard once the money was free.”
He could hardly think, he was so outraged. This sister had done this to them for no other reason than her outraged morality. Had she ever loved anyone better than life? Had she any idea of the torment she had caused these last ten months? He doubted it. It took everything he had not to strike her. He had nothing now. Molly was dead. He was dead too inside. He had nothing except Katie and he would fight this woman ‘til his dying breath if needs be to have her.
“Anne, how could you?” Grace exclaimed, looking at his considerable effort to control himself. “How could you be so cruel? He’s Katherine’s father, and your sister loved him. When she was dying all she wanted was to see him again. How could you be so heartless?”
“They are adulterers,” Patsy said strongly, “flaunting it and their bastard in our faces in public, with no consideration for decent people!”
“I could tell you a thing or two, Anne Vera,” Grace said, shaking with wrath, “that would take you down. Do not make me do so.”
“Where is my daughter?” Mick demanded. He would have Katie away from this poisoning woman with no love or understanding in her. What harm had she done the child already?
“She’s not here,” Patsy said smartly, though she was clearly shaken by her mother’s threat.
“She’s at school in Bray,” Grace said, before more damage could be done. “We will show you where. Anne!” she snapped. “What did you do with the letters?”
“I have them upstairs,” she replied, bristling with hostility. “I was going to burn them once everything with the estate has been sorted out.” She glared at him. Oh, that would have upset her applecart, too, that everything had not come automatically to her. He could see it now. It was not simply Katie’s irregular birth.
“Get them,” Grace ordered. “They belong to Michael now.” She turned to him again and in the softening of her features he saw Molly’s face. His mind recoiled even now. She could not be dead. She could not. How could he live without her? He had lived on hope all these long years in America. Grace patted his arm. “Come and have a drink,” she said, and he nodded dumbly, following her into the front parlour.
He accepted the generous glass of whiskey and took a large burning swallow to calm his trembling chill. She motioned him to sit and he did so, pleading from her the information he had not had from Patsy.
“Please tell me what happened? The last thing I had from her was in January. She seemed well enough. I know she had been in and out of hospital since she got back to Dublin, but she seemed well enough. I was planning to come home then, but I heard nothing from her--” he struggled for composure. “Why did she give the letters to Patsy to send? How did she come to have control of them?”
Mrs. Clennaghan was silent a while, gauging him perhaps, but when she did speak she would not look at him, but kept her gaze fixed on her hands in her lap.
“She went into Newcastle for the last time late in January. It had been a very bad winter for her. She seemed to improve a little when she first arrived, but in March or April, I can’t remember now, things took a turn for the worse. She declined rapidly. By August we knew it was only a matter of time. Anne had taken over the correspondence early on because there was trouble with the IRA holding up postal stations. None of us ever suspected that Anne kept out your letters, as others reached their destinations. Certainly Mary did not. I knew the truth about Katherine before she died, from her own hand. She wrote me a note when I was in Nice in the summer. But I knew before, Michael. I know my daughter, and she was always so careful about the girl…. She asked me to tell her, not to leave it to Anne. I did so before we went out to Newcastle the last time. The child was shocked and I think does not understand very well still, but she knows you were close with Pat, and a near relative to a family they knew in the North, so I think it will go well with you, though it may take some time. I will say, to his credit, that Pat was an excellent father to her. He loved her no differently from the others, for which you ought to be grateful. She is very confused and lonely, Michael. If you can stand more of an old lady’s opinions, I think it best to leave her boarding at the school. She is home at the weekends and holidays. It is close enough that we go out there frequently for events…. She needs her sister right now, Michael. Sarah has always been a second mother to her, and is especially so now.”
A servant came in with the box of letters. Grace looked up and took them from her. “Thank you, Meg.” The girl curtseyed and was gone. He drank the last of the whiskey.
“Tell me,” he said, running a hand over his face, “was it hard for her at the end?”
Grace sighed. “They say not. It was in the evening. Sister Ferguson said she had some trouble, but I don’t think she suffered long. Do you know, Michael, we saw her that day. The girls and I went out that afternoon. She was so cheerful when she met us, and very lovely. I don’t think I ever saw her looking more so. They told us afterward that she wasn’t herself that evening, and refused to eat. She was so weak. She was in a wheelchair at the end, you know, they wouldn’t allow her to walk. She just slipped away in her sleep. She never complained. She was very brave, Michael.” Grace looked up across the room and her eyes glittered tears that did not fall. “Mary was always brave.” She patted his hand. “I’ll leave you now. Stay as long as you like. Just ring if you need anything.” She rose to her full height. “I am pleased to meet you, Michael Rafferty,” she said, holding out her hand. He took it, and her grip was still strong. Molly got it from somewhere.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said sincerely. His eyes filled, and he could hardly get out the old, proper words, “I’m very sorry for your trouble.” The old lady nodded and left him alone in the quiet room with the box of letters.
His glance fell to a photograph on the side table, of Molly in 1925. He had a copy of it in Boston. Sable stole and bobbed hair, naked shoulders and downcast eyes, all the fashion for photographs. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Oh God! To waste away in that horrible way, pining because he did not come. He had never lived up to her love. Because of him she had endured abuse from all sides and he had denied her from pride alone. He could have come back after Paddy died. She had written to him then when she was laid up ill at Christmastime, begging him to come home, to be with her. The memory was galling.
. If he had only known she was so ill the last time…. He faltered on the awful truth: if he had known, it would have made no difference. He could not change the path of despair she had chosen. She had given in by then, like the Dark Woman, to the brutal times. He wept a long time. But when it was done there was no peace in his heart; the past could not be undone, and he was left only with regrets.
Bray, Co. Wicklow
April, 1929
“Da, look what I found!”
Mick looked over his shoulder, away from the watercolour he was working on, to the pond where Katie was splashing about. They had found a quiet picnic spot in the hills above the town to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon, the last of her spring holls.
“What’s that, Caitín?” He squinted as she came running up. She thrust a bit of wood into his hand.
“It is a fossil?” She asked him.
He turned the soaking wee piece of wood over. On the other side there were the marks of ferns. He brushed at them with his paint-stained fingers, but they were indelible. “Do you know I believe it is.” He put an arm about her and drew her near, kissing her hair. “You’ve become quite the botanist.”
“Archaeologist, if you please,” she teased, pushing away from him. “Botany’s plants only.”
He laughed. “Well, whatever you are, you’re catching up your sister, that’s sure. So you’re going to be another Howard Carter is it, digging up tombs in Egypt?”
“No,” she said earnestly. “I want to stick to Ireland. There’s enough here to explore for ages.” She took the fossil away from him and stuck it in her pocket, going back to the pond where she had been collecting interesting bits of this and that for three hours while he painted. She had a whole collection of such things at home: rocks, plants, various types of bog sludge in jamjars, not a few newts, frogs, and other creatures, impaled or otherwise preserved. The child was fascinated with the natural world and did well in science. She would be straight on for University College in a few years. He had no wish to keep her back.
They were so easy together. Every day was an adventure, even if it were only to the dairy for the milk. They made an adventure of it, laughing and lively together in the way that he had always hoped. She was a creature unto herself, Katie. Bold and fiercely independent of mind. She ran in with the nuns at school sometimes because of it. Her curiosity and practicality outranged their dogma, and if something were illogical to her she had no compunctions about saying so. In some ways she was much like her mother, but in others not at all; the scholarship was one. Maybe that came from him and maybe it didn’t. His interest had always run more to literature than science. Maybe it was the early influence. However jealous he might sometimes have been of his long time with her, Paddy had taught Katie well, he could not grudge that.
It was Katie who enabled him to come to terms with his old mentor. When they were first together, she would ask him questions about him and it was galling because it was months before she stopped calling Paddy “my Dada”. But he had answered her questions honestly and so come to look back on his relationship with him with a kinder eye. Katie told him the way he was with them in Derry and unmistakably there was honour and gentleness that had not been wholly crushed by his brutal activities.
Then he and Katie had gone to an open house at TCD this last February at the beginning of spring term. Walking through the old buildings caused him the most poignant anguish for those lost days. They had been so young then and full of ideals. He took her up to Botany Bay and Paddy’s old office. Knocking on the door, they found it unlocked and so pushed it open. The walls were lined with different books and there were different desks and chairs. No sharp-eyed redheaded professor greeted them, lounging in his chair, smoking endless cigarettes. But above the window was still the old handbill for a lecture by J.P. Mahaffy. It brought him to tears. The room was suddenly full of the man. He had always been bigger than life. It did not surprise that his ghost should linger in this place.
“Is this it?” Katie whispered, tiptoeing into the Holy Sepulchre.
“Yes,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “This is it. He was sitting right there, where that cabinet is now, do you see? I was so afraid of him, everyone was.”
Katie looked up at him in surprise. “Why?”
He closed his eyes, swallowing back tears. “Because he was so brilliant.” He was assailed by a thousand bittersweet memories.
“Is that why Mummy loved him?”
Mick drew a shaking breath. “Aye. That’s why I loved him too.”
They stood for a long moment in silence and through the aching rush of long-forgotten love he said a prayer for the fallen and the dead, grateful for the good that had been.
“Come on, darlin.” He said hoarsely to Katie at last, ushering her out. And he closed the door behind them, on the past.
***
“Let us bury the dead past of dissensions. Let us leave it that each of us,
like I did myself, believed in the correctness of their choice. I concede
that those on the opposite side believed that their decision was the right one too.”
- General Tom Barry, at the unveiling of a memorial to Michael Collins in Cork, 1965
Molly called to her roommate, who was out on the sun porch for the requisite daily two hours. She was not allowed even that anymore; no more than half an hour a day when the weather was fine, preferably in the solarium. The vagaries of the weather, even in the Wicklow Mountains, were now counted too much for her. She’d have gone to Switzerland, but she didn’t want to be so far from the girls, and now it was too late. With an effort, she pushed herself up with one hand and rummaged through the drawer with the other, but the effort was exhausting. She hated wheelchairs. It was impossible to see over the tops of things. Madge came in from the porch, dragging her Turkish-towelling dressing gown behind her.
“Yeah? Wha’d you want?”
“A lipstick. I have one here, but the blasted thing’s broken off. The girls are coming and I don’t want to look like a ghoul.”
“If you’re a ghoul I’m Greta Garbo,” Madge said dryly. She went to her own bedside table and pulled out a lipstick. Handing it over, she went back outside. She still had another twenty minutes’ airing. She hated the sun porch. She had enough freckles already, as she complained at least twice a week. She didn’t tan like Molly. She wasn’t anything like Molly, and it was only Molly’s extreme case that kept her from hating her entirely. So she said with good-natured honesty. She could afford to be so honest. Madge would go home soon, strong and well again; the best Molly could hope for was to be allowed to die among family, a matter still under debate with the staff.
They had told her a fortnight ago not to expect a cure or even another long remission. She cried a little, then pulled up her socks and rang Dick Eustace to come out and help her settle her affairs. In truth it was a relief, apart from the odium of leaving the girls orphans.
Dicky was a brick, never deviating from his old calm demeanour. There were no scenes of regret or, God forbid, grief. Just two old friends conducting business as they always had. She was grateful for that. He came out from Greystones, a short drive in his Bentley, and spread out all the paperwork on a table in one of the meeting rooms, sitting beside her, his now silver hair falling over his forehead as he enumerated the status of various trusts, stocks, properties and goods to which she was heir. She had never had much interest in money; it was easier to leave it to the accountants. As long as she had enough to get by, and she always had done. So she was shocked to discover that her net worth after the death duties were cleared would amount to nearly £100,000, not including jewellery. Well! The girls would certainly want for nothing…. At her expression, Dicky gave her a twitchy little smile.
“I always said you were a catch, Gerry.”
She gave a little laugh; pleased at the compliment, when she knew how ghastly she looked. “Only an old friend would say that, darling.”
He looked at her a long moment. “They are the best sort,” he murmured. He cleared his throat and cleared up the papers before them, colouring. He hadn’t changed from their Castle days; he was still a charming man, for all his butterflies. “You had another matter you wished to discuss, I believe.”
She drew a long, painful breath. “Yes. I need your assistance in a delicate matter regarding Katie.”
He shook his head. “I’m closer than a confessional,” he assured her. It was touching that he should concern himself so closely with her when he had a staff of barristers, accountants, and clerks. But he had always stuck by her, allowing no one else to manage her affairs. She nodded. His kindness made what she had to say easier.
“I would like to make a separate provision for Katie, quite exclusive of the general estate… some sort of trust fund, I suppose, under the jurisdiction of her natural father should he return to Ireland…” She waited, but his expression did not change. “Under yours if not, as my executor. If you would be so be so kind.”
His lips thinned a moment. “I see. Have you an address for this person?” He looked up at her, his eyes full of unspoken things.
“Yes,” she recited to him by heart the address of the Boston Globe, Mick’s employer. “I am concerned because I haven’t heard from him for some time.” She looked at her hands, uneasy with the divulging of the secret in any way to outsiders. “…It was his intention in the New Year to return to Ireland. He said he would write with word of when he booked passage…” She faltered. “I don’t know what has happened.” Tears stung her dry eyes painfully and she winced.
Dick was silent a long moment, plainly moved by the pathos of her appeal. “I’ll see what I can do,” he assured her quietly. “… What amount do you wish to set aside?”
She bit her lip. “Forty-thousand,” she decided, nodding. She had weighed the benefits of various proportionate sums in the last nine months. She needn’t do this at all. If she let be, no one would ever know. But she knew and Mick knew and her basic sense of fair play came to the fore. It was funny to care so much what happened to others after one was dead. Patsy and Neddy, Mummy too, would have fits, but that couldn’t be helped. Caro would stand up for her, as she always had. And Dodo. She had no wish to cause a family quarrel but she had to do what was right. Right for Mick, but mostly for Katie. She deserved a father, a connection with the Raffertys and Kilgallens, with Sally being so much older. Sally would marry soon and then where would poor Katie be; stuck with Patsy? Molly would rather have her living in Sligo, or Cavan, than let Patsy rear her.
She wheeled herself over to the door of the sun porch with a hand mirror and turned up the lipstick. It was siren scarlet, a deep, lush crimson. What fun, she thought. Maybe I’ll paint myself up like Theda Bara. Wouldn’t Mummy get a kick out of that? She did not, the effort being more than she could cope with, although she had been careful to ask Nora, one of the student nurses who liked her, to help her dress. Everything was just so: she wore a frock of sapphire blue crepe, her blue paste brooch, silk stockings and cross-strap Italian shoes. She was perfect from head to foot. If she could have got up to slink in the doorway with her fur she’d have looked a film star. That’s what Nora was always saying, “Oh Mrs. Leary, you look just like a film star!” It was very sweet, but she hadn’t anything to judge by. She’d been to the pictures in O’Connell Street with Sally and Kate, but she didn’t keep up with the magazines and such as even Lizzie did. But she humoured Nora.
“Oh yes, and who would you say I looked like?”
“Oh, Gertrude Lawrence,” the girl nodded emphatically.
She hadn’t been the only one to compare her to the cinema folk. In the summer of 1924, when she had only been out of hospital a few weeks, she went to tea at Liz’s in Merrion Square. She was the first to arrive, so the effect was even more stunning. She was still very thin, but she had gone shopping for new clothes and come decked out in the latest finds – a very sheer silk muslin frock white with a pale blue flowered print, a long strand of lapis beads and the most scrumptious blue satin shoes. She had a paste bandeau in her newly waved hair. She had lounged in the drawing-room doorway then, making up like Gloria Swanson with her head tossed back, and when Liz looked up to see her, she laughed,
“There you are, darling, ever the fashion plate!” She rose from the chair and came to give Molly an airy kiss. Liz was comfortable now. She was perfectly dressed and coifed, as befitted a lady of her station. “Wherever did you get it?”
“Slyne’s,” Molly said, kissing her back. “My mother’s just got back from Switzerland and of course had to go shopping for the summer, so I went along.”
Liz grinned. “You went shopping with your mother? Oh my, that must have been an experience!”
“Molly laughed. “Oh, darling, you should see her,” she said as they went to sit down. “She’s cut her hair and everything. She’s quite swish. When I met her in the hall I’d hardly have recognised her. The Alpine air must have affected her, for she bought a pair of trousers.”
“Your mother, wearing trousers? Oh this I have to see! I’d never have believed it!”
Molly nodded. “Come to tea next Thursday. She’ll be there.”
“Huh! It sounds as though the two of you are getting on famously!” Liz said. She rang the bell.
“It’s all my aunt,” Molly insisted, shaking her head. “The more time Mummy spends with Caro the less stuffy she becomes…. I only wish she’d done it years ago.”
“So darling,” Liz said when the teacart had been brought round, “What have you been doing since you were let out of jail? I was positively delighted when I heard you were back in town!”
Molly gazed at her friend, thinking how apt the expression was. Coming home again was certainly like walking into the sunlight after a long term of prison confinement. But, as with a prisoner, she found the outside world strange after her absence and found herself clinging to old habits of the hospital routine, her life being still very structured and quiet; old habits of Derry, too, were hard to break and scandalised everyone: walking everywhere, or answering the door herself. How to explain that it was because Eileen, her house-parlour maid, was playing a skating game with the girls in the upstairs dining room? She laughed a little.
“I’ve spent most of the time contacting decorators for the house! Our tenants left it in an awful state, and I never got round to it before. Everything’s falling down in disrepair, and the furniture needs to be updated. The garden is a sight! And I have a deluge of mail to answer, letters and invitations. I don’t know how I shall ever get through them all.”
“Poor you,” Liz pouted. “So popular!” She smiled. “Should I count myself lucky to have been at the top of the pile?” She rose and poured out tea for them, looking up sidelong as she did. “So,” she murmured, “when is that dashing artist of yours coming back from the States? I swear my dear he was positively gorgeous! Better than John Gilbert any day of the week. It’s no wonder that the two of you were – Oh dear. Have I said something wrong?”
“No,” Molly said, too quickly, shaking her head. “… I had a letter from him last week. We had been discussing it while I was in Wicklow, his coming home.” She frowned. “He’s very stubborn and refuses to ‘live off a rich woman’ as he said. He wants to make sure he has enough money and a position at the National School before he comes back. Good grief!” she exclaimed. “He’s completely exasperating! Paddy never minded my money, and he had more reason to.” She sighed.
Liz handed her a cup of tea, her mouth pursed judiciously. “I can tell you this now he’s gone,” she began.
“What?”
She sat down on the sofa, a picture of ease with her comfortable, generous Edwardian curves. “He rang here, do you know, when you were in town for your father’s funeral. I remember it quite distinctly. He was rather short when told you were unavailable.”
“What did you tell him?” Molly remembered the phone call at Mick’s the one night, when the caller had rung off without a word. She had known then that it was Paddy, even before she went home to his abuse and his sneer about this same friend who had “told her lies before.”
“I told him you were for an early bedtime.” Liz’s mouth twitched in a smile.
“Are you envious?” Molly countered, lowering her head.
Liz rolled her eyes, stood, and looked out the windows at the garden. “God, darling, who wouldn’t be? George is as exciting as a loaf of bread when it comes to that, and there you are with a simply scrumptious husband, even if he is a Fenian, and a wild-eyed artist who can’t keep his hands off you and kisses you in my hall when he thinks no-one is looking!” She turned round. “You didn’t think I saw that, did you? No, I thought not. You always did have all the manly beaux Gerry. Vince, Phillip, Jack, Dicky. They were all at your feet. Then there was Pat, and we knew you were gone, the moment we laid eyes on him. He was heavenly, so attentive, doing things that the rest of us only dreamed our chaps would do. Who wouldn’t be envious, to be swept away like that? And then there was Michael. I saw his painting of you, did I ever tell you?”
“No.”
Liz nodded. “In O’Connell Street. It was beautiful, a lovely tribute. I have one of his pieces in the north-west bedroom.” She smiled a little. “All for the cause of true love. Someone should have it.” They looked at each other.
“I’m sorry,” Molly murmured. Liz smiled again, painfully.
“It’s all right, darling,” she murmured thickly. “We get by.”
Maire came ahead of Mrs. Tunney, who lived out at Dun Laoghaire. Liz put on her society smile.
“Silvie, dear, how good to see you! Do come and sit down. You know Mrs. Leary, don’t you?”
Molly wheeled the chair over to the mirror in the bath to check her hair. She was struggling backwards out the door again when Madge came in from outdoors and pulled her out into the room.
“You make me feel like the princess with the hoptoads,” she said.
“Oh stop,” Molly said. “It’s only the trappings.” She heard a squeal from the hall.
“Mummy!” She looked up to see Katie tearing over. Sally and Grace followed more sedately at a distance. Katie was half in her lap in a moment. It hurt, but she wasn’t about to complain.
“Darling Caitin poppet!” Molly cried. “There’s my big girl!” It was very hard on Katie only being allowed to see her once a month. It was special dispensation to see her at all. Sally and Grace came in and they gave her dutiful kisses.
“Hello, Mother, what a charming frock. That colour looks so well on you… Sarah, darling, I wouldn’t have recognised you! Who painted your face? You look positively scrummy!” For the last two years Sally had preferred to be called Sarah. It was what she was called at school. She was very tall now. Inheritance had been kind to her, for the angles of her father’s face that gave him such a dashing look had softened in her to stateliness. She would always be beautiful. There was no denying Paddy was her father; his face was imprinted strongly on hers and the hazel eyes were the very same. If her hair had been redder, as it once was, she’d have given the family the spooks. At seventeen she was luscious, with the gorgeous figure of the Jacobs women. How proud Paddy would be of his cailín rua if he could see her now.
“I have a lovely visit planned for us, darlings,” she said, still holding Sally’s hand. “We have the conservatory all to ourselves as everyone else is out on the grounds in the sun, and I’ve ordered a special tea just for us.” The wheels of the chair were stuck in the carpet. “Can you turn this thing around Mother? These wheels are always so annoying.” Grace came and with Sally got the chair off the carpet.
“Mummy,” Katie’s voice had softened from its native Derry whine. “May I sit in your lap?” She asked it every time.
“No, poppet. You know it’s against the rules.” Better to blame the hospital staff, who really weren’t that strict, than to wound the child’s feelings by saying it hurt.
“But I’ve missed you, Mummy.”
She touched the wavy fall of hair across the child’s forehead. “I know lovey,” she said earnestly. “I’ve missed you too. But it’s like school: you don’t want to get Mummy into trouble now, do you?”
“No.” Katie pouted.
“Oh, by the way Mary,” Grace said, “I have some of the girls’ work along to show you.” They had just begun a new term two weeks before at the Loreto Convent in Bray. She glanced across at Sally. “Sarah took a first in Maths, and English.” Molly smiled at her.
“There’s your father,” she said. Sally blushed and smiled. The subject of Paddy was a tender one with them. Sally was uncomfortable with it, but also so obviously craved any little bit of news. She liked to hear how he was in his Trinity days as a young man, how he danced and sang and made up to all the girls, took firsts in everything he did and won scholarships and fellowships. As long as she lived, Molly was determined to oblige her, to counteract what others in the family may say of him, for he was a good man and the child should be allowed to have those happier memories. All Sally could remember herself were the bad times after 1914. Molly suspected that she wanted to forget he was a republican, and given everything that had happened, perhaps that was understandable. But Paddy would not have liked it. Paddy would not have cared to be whitewashed into some sepulchral icon. So she was content to let Rory and Dan and Cate have their say.
“Mummy,” Sally said as they went down the hall, “Cara Morrisey has asked me to join them hunting in Scotland over the winter recess. May I? It’s only for the fortnight.” Sally had become very keen on outdoorsy pursuits. She was a fine hunter, but Molly knew she meant stalking now, and not foxhunting. Grouse shooting or some such.
“Yes, dear,” Molly said, smiling up at her mother. “If you promise not to bring back the trophy.” She remembered the time she was blooded at her first hunt. Grace was disgusted beyond measure, and the trophy had ended up in George and Liam’s room.
“Yes, I remember,” Grace said ruefully. “Girls, your mother came back from the hunt the first time looking like a veteran from the Boer War, painted up with the blood and dragging the brush in tow.”
They stared at her. It was not done in the Portmarnock Hunt Club anymore. Many things were not.
“Yes,” she said, to quell their alarm, “and we also wore corsets to ride! Which is more barbaric, I wonder?” The girls wore jods now, as she had never been allowed to do.
“Speaking of haberdashery,” Grace said, “there’s a package for you, Mary. Some kind of footwear. I gave the box to Matron to put away.”
“Oh, those would be the tennis shoes I ordered.” They had been special ordered as most of her shoes were, and had taken six months to arrive from London. “Give them to Patsy, I’m sure she can make use of them, if her feet aren’t too wide.” There was an uncomfortable silence.
“…No,” Grace said at last. “I don’t believe they are.” She had broken the taboo. Under no circumstances was one to imply that one was less than one hundred percent. But Mummy knew what the doctors had said. They came into the conservatory with its cream coloured hangings and salmon carpet runners, with the splendid view out over the valleys. “Here we are,” Grace said brightly.
“Mummy,” Sally said later when Grace had gone with Katie to the ladies lounge, “can I tell you something?”
Molly looked over at her. “Yes, dear.” Though she could guess by the tone what it had to do with. Sally was blushing. Oh, to be a young girl again! She had not been older than Sally when she was engaged to Vince. Those were different times.
“I met a fellow at a mixer in Dublin. One of the tea dances at the Metropole… He wants to write to me… I met him skating at the Rotunda rink, too, with Cara and Jenny.”
Molly smiled. “Who is he? Is he of a good family?”
Poor Sally could hardly speak the words. “His name is James Pearson and he is studying for the Civil Service examination.”
“Not the CID, I hope?” She said with some irony. It would be too much for Sally to get mixed up with a G-man. It was lost on earnest Sally.
“No Mother, in the Telegraph office.”
“How old is he?”
She shrugged. “Twenty-one.”
“And where are his people from?”
Here she was surer, and said emphatically, “Blackrock.”
Molly sighed. “Well, I don’t see the harm of it, as long as Grandmama agrees.” Sally squeezed her hand.
“Oh, thank you, Mummy!” she exclaimed, and kissed her.
It made her sad. Some young man had asked her daughter ‘out walking’, and she would never know him. Never know whether it stuck, whether they married and had children, or whether it was a passing fancy. But she hid her anguish all that afternoon. They had Darjeeling and crab sandwiches, Dublin Bay prawns and meringues, and Sally played her favourite Beethoven piece on the piano in the lounge. Afterward they took a turn on the grounds. When the girls were chasing each other on the path up ahead, she put her hand on her mother’s on the chair.
“You heard what the doctors said,” she began uneasily.
“Yes,” Grace said evenly after a time.
She could hardly speak the words. “I want to go home, Mother. I want to go to Baldoyle. I want to see the strand at Howth, and the horses in the paddock. I want to go home.” Painful tears slipped down and fell on her frock, staining it dark.
“We’ll arrange it, dear.” Grace promised, in a low unsteady voice, and patted her hand.
She sat for a long time after they had gone, out on the portico before the lawn and gardens. The sun was setting over the mountains and the sky was orange and scarlet and the soft sounds of twilight were creeping up. It was beautiful here. Peaceful. But it was not home. While she mused, someone nearby indoors had turned on the wireless, and presently she heard the sound of John MacCormack’s beautiful tenor. The song was half over before she caught the words:
And when you come and all the flowers are dying
If I am dead as dead I well may be
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an Ave there for me
And I shall hear though soft your tread above me
And all my grave shall warmer, sweeter be
For you will bend and tell me that you love me
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me
She turned her head against the side of the chair, shaking, too weak to cry. “Turn it off,” she begged those listening indoors. “Turn it off, please turn it off!” Beautiful Wicklow was a blur around her, and she collapsed on the arm of the chair, unable to breathe, coughing, struggling for breath. A sister, an orderly and a doctor were out in an instant.
“Mrs. Leary, what happened,” the sister was crooning, as she eased her head back. “Here, don’t take on so. We’ll have you back inside, darling Mrs. Leary. The evening air is too much in your state.”
“No, no, no” she protested, still strangling for air. “It was the song, the wireless --”
She was put to bed again and given a salt rub followed by ice packs which helped, but she was very tired. She refused supper that night, even the clear soup they sent she let grow cold on the tray. Dear Sister Ferguson came in to enquire after her.
“No, I’m just tired.” She insisted. “I’m just tired. I don’t want anything.”
“Well,” Sister said. “I’ll look in on you again in an hour to see if you require anything.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
Ferguson tucked in and smoothed the bedclothes and went away again, her starched pinafore crackling with every step. Molly looked over at her collection of photographs and sketches on the stand. The girls in a formal portrait; a snap of them at Kingstown. A family picture with all the Learys and Ernie and Rosie’s children scattered about before them. A sketch Mick had sent her of Corcoran’s in Boston where he had done a mural. Another of the Charlestown docks. Paddy’s graduation picture from 1904 that Trina gave her after he died. A snap of Mummy in Nice from her trip there last year. One of herself, Sally and Joe that she had made for Paddy when he was at Frongoch….
She was so tired, felt so very far away from all of them, the living and the dead. Maybe it was an allegory. Isn’t that what Paddy used to call it? An allegory… She could reach none of them, so simply looked until her weariness overtook her.
She fell to dreaming and found herself in College Park during the Opening Day ceremonies in 1909 She was there with Paddy – how young and beautiful he was, with his smiling, unlined face! And everyone was dressed to the nines She wore her pale yellow silk frock and Easter hat. They went down the receiving line together and she was introduced to everyone in the School of English apart from Dan Oliver who was across the field at one of the events. There was a lot of speech-making, by the Provost and Vice-Provost, the Regents; the heads of various schools, by some of the junior staff, including Paddy, who spoke there without the merest trace of his Kerry accent, but in a fine Dublin drawl that made him sound like a bank clerk; by the valedictorians of the graduating classes too. It was so thrilling to look on him from afar, to watch his sinuous grace and the way women young and old nearly swooned over him. He belonged to her. Of all these bright young co-eds, some of whom were devilishly attractive; he had instead chosen her. She had him. If Mrs. Mahaffy’s remark was to be given credit, he was desperately in love with her, and he certainly acted like it that day. He held her hand openly and even kissed her on the cheek, whispering rude or witty things into her ear at auspicious moments to make her laugh. When someone asked her if she were cold in her thin dress, he smiled at her and whispered in her ear, “Don’t worry, we’ll hot things up later.” He was his charming self, as ever in those days.
She looked up then, as the wind was blowing her skirts about her calves, and there was Mick, across the lawn, in a company of undergraduates who were larking about. A girl was with him. Marjorie Reckle. He met her eye and grew suddenly angry, storming over across the distance while she could do nothing but recoil in horror.
“You were meant to be with me!” He shouted at her in front of the company. “You betrayed me!” She looked for Paddy, but he was in his Volunteer uniform with a rifle in hand, on the reviewing stand with a group of men she did not know. She was helpless and confused.
“I didn’t!” She insisted, “I didn’t!”
Mick took her by the arm, and then she was in his house in Townsend Street. It was when her father had died, and they were in his bedroom lying on the bed. The phone rang. He stumbled out to it, but the caller had rung off. He came back to where she lounged on the bed, shaking his head with a puzzled expression.
“Who was it?” she asked, yawning.
“Someone calling from a pub,” he shrugged. “They rang off.” She felt a chill, and frowned, but he said,
“All these interruptions!” He crawled across the bed to her, kneeling over her in his hastily donned jumper. “But no more!” He kissed her and she yielded to his embrace. They made love again and it was glorious.
Katie had been born of that fire. That fiery white swirling madness that engulfed them - engulfed her - and she was drowning in it, in the crashing white sea, iridescent and magnificent.
Enraptured, trembling, at long last she reached the farther shore.
It was 29 September 1928. She was thirty-seven years old.
Friday, 18 October
Mickey received the letter from Eustace and Eustace, barristers-at-law, delivered to his mailbox at the Globe’s offices.. He had come in from an assignment at half-two in the afternoon and was going to lunch with Reilly. They never made it to lunch. He tore out of the building and down to book passage to Ireland as soon as possible. After almost a year of frustrating silence from Molly the letter from her lawyer was the worst shock he ever got. She was dead. She was dead of tuberculosis, said the accompanying personal note from the head of the firm, a friend of hers by his own account. She had been at the sanatorium in Wicklow all along. Too ill, probably, to answer his letters. He felt awful for every terrible thing he had thought, and worse still after he saw the tremendous sum of money she had left for Katie in trust with him.
They had argued over money for years. It never mattered to her as it did to him. She was right, it didn’t matter, only being together mattered, and now she was dead and he would never have the chance again. He left everything in Boston for Joe Reilly to deal with, just fled. He withdrew the money he had on hand at the bank and exchanged it for £400, and fled. He had time to cool his heels during the crossing, for it took a week, by which time he was eaten through with remorse. They landed at Cobh on the morning of the 17th and he took the first train for Dublin, waiting only long enough for his bags to be unloaded. In Dublin he paid a porter to send them to the Hibernian Academy. He’d worry about the house, later. It was mid-afternoon, dark and raining. He’d forgotten how oppressive an Irish rain could be. He ran out of Harcourt Street railway station for a cab to Mountjoy Square, and was nearly run over by the Rathmines tram in the process. It had stopped raining by the time he arrived on the North side, but he was wet through already as his overcoat was flapping open as he had stood in the drenching rain waiting on the cab.
There was no answer at the front of Number 60 and the shades were drawn, a black wreath hanging on the door. He went down the kitchen stair, like the old days when visiting Kate, and banged on the window. The kitchen was dark but for a single bare lightbulb hanging over the great worktable in the centre of the room At length, a youngish woman in a brown dress and service apron came to the street door. He could tell by her face that visitors were not the rule these days. She looked at him curiously, wet through as he was and bearded as an escaped prisoner. He came up the kitchen stairs again.
“I’ve come to enquire about Mrs. Leary,” he said. “I received a letter from her solicitor, and I would like to speak to someone in the family about it.”
The woman shook her head. “There’s no one here, sir, but me. I’m just minding the house until they get things sorted out. Her sister would be able to help you. In Merrion Square. Number--”
“Yes, I know the number,” he said abruptly. He touched his hat to her. “Thank you for your time, Miss.”
He raced to the tram in O’Connell Street and took it as far as Stephen’s Green before transferring. In Merrion Square he pounded the doorknocker. It was now going on five o’clock, and he had been running round Dublin for nearly two hours.
“Sir?” The little house-parlour maid who opened the door was startled at such urgency.
“I want to see Mrs. MacNeeson,” he said shortly, her name coming up unbidden. “I am a friend of Mrs. Leary.”
She opened the door further. “Certainly, sir. Won’t you come in, sir?” He was shown into the hall. “Who do I say is calling?”
“Michael Rafferty.” The maid looked uncertain, both at his terseness and the Catholic name, but went as she was bidden to find her mistress. He stood in the hall, looking up at the tall ceiling with its rococo stuccowork. It was a beautiful house, impressively done over in the modern style, but retaining the best of its Georgian elegance and grace, from the electrified chandelier to the sweeping stairs and Italian tile floors. He looked down at one of the side tables and recognised there a piece of Molly’s Limoges, an Irish colleen dancing a jig in perpetuity. He picked it up. On the bottom were her initials in gold ink, MML, and the date 9-9-12. A birthday gift from someone. A well-meaning relative probably. She hated kitschy Irish things. Like Parnell with his aversion to green.
“Good afternoon.”
He looked up, bric-a-brac in hand, and found her sister standing at the bottom of the stair. She had come on him noiselessly, so absorbed was he in thought. He put down the miniature. This young woman was still as coldly beautiful as when they had last met in O’Connell Street. She was dressed head to toe in impeccable black. If one must mourn, one must do it in style.
“Mrs. MacNeeson, how good of you to see me--”
“Not at all,” she said freezingly. “You have no business here. My sister is dead.”
It was as if she had opened his chest with a knife with those words, spoken with such utter lack of feeling. Molly had said her sister hated her, and he could well believe it. Oh my beloved! He ached unbearably.
“I know,” he said quietly. “Her servant said you could tell me--”
She was unmoved. “I have nothing to say to you,” she cut him off tersely.
There was a strident call from upstairs.
“Anne!” He was confused and looked up toward the voice, not realising that Patsy was the Anne to whom the old lady spoke. The mother. She was stalking down the upper passage to the stairs with a long angry stride remarkable for a woman of her age. She had to be sixty at least. “You will not turn him away Anne!”
“This is none of your concern, Mother,” Patsy said coldly. She turned back to him. “Mr. Rafferty,” she made his name the worst epithet, “you made a mistake in coming here. My sister had no words for you when she died.”
The world turned grey and he leant on the table, his ears roaring. Mrs. Clennaghan was beside him and her strong hands were on his arms. He heard their exchange, dimly, faintly, but it meant nothing to him.
“Anne, will you lie to the man in the face of the lawyers? See how he is! What would you say to the girl? She knows who he is! We are obliged to comply!”
“Katherine is--” Patsy began. The name brought him up again out of his faintness. Grace turned to him. “Mr. Rafferty, Michael – may I call you Michael? – my daughter specified in her will that if you returned Katie was to go to you.”
“I know,” he managed thickly.
“That isn’t all she specified,” Patsy murmured scathingly. She gave him a loathsome glance. “He’d never have come back if I had my way,” she exclaimed and they stared at her in surprise. “What did she do, send to you by the lawyers? I thought I got rid of all your correspondence!” The letters! Molly had not forsaken him, she had never received them, nor he hers. This hateful woman before him had thwarted them. The impact hit him like a lorry. He raised his head.
“Do you care to explain that?”
“There needs no explaining,” she looked down her nose. “She gave me her letters to send and I did not, nor gave her yours either. We’ve had enough of Molly’s scandal in this house.” He regarded him hatefully. “I should have known you’d come back for your bastard once the money was free.”
He could hardly think, he was so outraged. This sister had done this to them for no other reason than her outraged morality. Had she ever loved anyone better than life? Had she any idea of the torment she had caused these last ten months? He doubted it. It took everything he had not to strike her. He had nothing now. Molly was dead. He was dead too inside. He had nothing except Katie and he would fight this woman ‘til his dying breath if needs be to have her.
“Anne, how could you?” Grace exclaimed, looking at his considerable effort to control himself. “How could you be so cruel? He’s Katherine’s father, and your sister loved him. When she was dying all she wanted was to see him again. How could you be so heartless?”
“They are adulterers,” Patsy said strongly, “flaunting it and their bastard in our faces in public, with no consideration for decent people!”
“I could tell you a thing or two, Anne Vera,” Grace said, shaking with wrath, “that would take you down. Do not make me do so.”
“Where is my daughter?” Mick demanded. He would have Katie away from this poisoning woman with no love or understanding in her. What harm had she done the child already?
“She’s not here,” Patsy said smartly, though she was clearly shaken by her mother’s threat.
“She’s at school in Bray,” Grace said, before more damage could be done. “We will show you where. Anne!” she snapped. “What did you do with the letters?”
“I have them upstairs,” she replied, bristling with hostility. “I was going to burn them once everything with the estate has been sorted out.” She glared at him. Oh, that would have upset her applecart, too, that everything had not come automatically to her. He could see it now. It was not simply Katie’s irregular birth.
“Get them,” Grace ordered. “They belong to Michael now.” She turned to him again and in the softening of her features he saw Molly’s face. His mind recoiled even now. She could not be dead. She could not. How could he live without her? He had lived on hope all these long years in America. Grace patted his arm. “Come and have a drink,” she said, and he nodded dumbly, following her into the front parlour.
He accepted the generous glass of whiskey and took a large burning swallow to calm his trembling chill. She motioned him to sit and he did so, pleading from her the information he had not had from Patsy.
“Please tell me what happened? The last thing I had from her was in January. She seemed well enough. I know she had been in and out of hospital since she got back to Dublin, but she seemed well enough. I was planning to come home then, but I heard nothing from her--” he struggled for composure. “Why did she give the letters to Patsy to send? How did she come to have control of them?”
Mrs. Clennaghan was silent a while, gauging him perhaps, but when she did speak she would not look at him, but kept her gaze fixed on her hands in her lap.
“She went into Newcastle for the last time late in January. It had been a very bad winter for her. She seemed to improve a little when she first arrived, but in March or April, I can’t remember now, things took a turn for the worse. She declined rapidly. By August we knew it was only a matter of time. Anne had taken over the correspondence early on because there was trouble with the IRA holding up postal stations. None of us ever suspected that Anne kept out your letters, as others reached their destinations. Certainly Mary did not. I knew the truth about Katherine before she died, from her own hand. She wrote me a note when I was in Nice in the summer. But I knew before, Michael. I know my daughter, and she was always so careful about the girl…. She asked me to tell her, not to leave it to Anne. I did so before we went out to Newcastle the last time. The child was shocked and I think does not understand very well still, but she knows you were close with Pat, and a near relative to a family they knew in the North, so I think it will go well with you, though it may take some time. I will say, to his credit, that Pat was an excellent father to her. He loved her no differently from the others, for which you ought to be grateful. She is very confused and lonely, Michael. If you can stand more of an old lady’s opinions, I think it best to leave her boarding at the school. She is home at the weekends and holidays. It is close enough that we go out there frequently for events…. She needs her sister right now, Michael. Sarah has always been a second mother to her, and is especially so now.”
A servant came in with the box of letters. Grace looked up and took them from her. “Thank you, Meg.” The girl curtseyed and was gone. He drank the last of the whiskey.
“Tell me,” he said, running a hand over his face, “was it hard for her at the end?”
Grace sighed. “They say not. It was in the evening. Sister Ferguson said she had some trouble, but I don’t think she suffered long. Do you know, Michael, we saw her that day. The girls and I went out that afternoon. She was so cheerful when she met us, and very lovely. I don’t think I ever saw her looking more so. They told us afterward that she wasn’t herself that evening, and refused to eat. She was so weak. She was in a wheelchair at the end, you know, they wouldn’t allow her to walk. She just slipped away in her sleep. She never complained. She was very brave, Michael.” Grace looked up across the room and her eyes glittered tears that did not fall. “Mary was always brave.” She patted his hand. “I’ll leave you now. Stay as long as you like. Just ring if you need anything.” She rose to her full height. “I am pleased to meet you, Michael Rafferty,” she said, holding out her hand. He took it, and her grip was still strong. Molly got it from somewhere.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said sincerely. His eyes filled, and he could hardly get out the old, proper words, “I’m very sorry for your trouble.” The old lady nodded and left him alone in the quiet room with the box of letters.
His glance fell to a photograph on the side table, of Molly in 1925. He had a copy of it in Boston. Sable stole and bobbed hair, naked shoulders and downcast eyes, all the fashion for photographs. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Oh God! To waste away in that horrible way, pining because he did not come. He had never lived up to her love. Because of him she had endured abuse from all sides and he had denied her from pride alone. He could have come back after Paddy died. She had written to him then when she was laid up ill at Christmastime, begging him to come home, to be with her. The memory was galling.
. If he had only known she was so ill the last time…. He faltered on the awful truth: if he had known, it would have made no difference. He could not change the path of despair she had chosen. She had given in by then, like the Dark Woman, to the brutal times. He wept a long time. But when it was done there was no peace in his heart; the past could not be undone, and he was left only with regrets.
Bray, Co. Wicklow
April, 1929
“Da, look what I found!”
Mick looked over his shoulder, away from the watercolour he was working on, to the pond where Katie was splashing about. They had found a quiet picnic spot in the hills above the town to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon, the last of her spring holls.
“What’s that, Caitín?” He squinted as she came running up. She thrust a bit of wood into his hand.
“It is a fossil?” She asked him.
He turned the soaking wee piece of wood over. On the other side there were the marks of ferns. He brushed at them with his paint-stained fingers, but they were indelible. “Do you know I believe it is.” He put an arm about her and drew her near, kissing her hair. “You’ve become quite the botanist.”
“Archaeologist, if you please,” she teased, pushing away from him. “Botany’s plants only.”
He laughed. “Well, whatever you are, you’re catching up your sister, that’s sure. So you’re going to be another Howard Carter is it, digging up tombs in Egypt?”
“No,” she said earnestly. “I want to stick to Ireland. There’s enough here to explore for ages.” She took the fossil away from him and stuck it in her pocket, going back to the pond where she had been collecting interesting bits of this and that for three hours while he painted. She had a whole collection of such things at home: rocks, plants, various types of bog sludge in jamjars, not a few newts, frogs, and other creatures, impaled or otherwise preserved. The child was fascinated with the natural world and did well in science. She would be straight on for University College in a few years. He had no wish to keep her back.
They were so easy together. Every day was an adventure, even if it were only to the dairy for the milk. They made an adventure of it, laughing and lively together in the way that he had always hoped. She was a creature unto herself, Katie. Bold and fiercely independent of mind. She ran in with the nuns at school sometimes because of it. Her curiosity and practicality outranged their dogma, and if something were illogical to her she had no compunctions about saying so. In some ways she was much like her mother, but in others not at all; the scholarship was one. Maybe that came from him and maybe it didn’t. His interest had always run more to literature than science. Maybe it was the early influence. However jealous he might sometimes have been of his long time with her, Paddy had taught Katie well, he could not grudge that.
It was Katie who enabled him to come to terms with his old mentor. When they were first together, she would ask him questions about him and it was galling because it was months before she stopped calling Paddy “my Dada”. But he had answered her questions honestly and so come to look back on his relationship with him with a kinder eye. Katie told him the way he was with them in Derry and unmistakably there was honour and gentleness that had not been wholly crushed by his brutal activities.
Then he and Katie had gone to an open house at TCD this last February at the beginning of spring term. Walking through the old buildings caused him the most poignant anguish for those lost days. They had been so young then and full of ideals. He took her up to Botany Bay and Paddy’s old office. Knocking on the door, they found it unlocked and so pushed it open. The walls were lined with different books and there were different desks and chairs. No sharp-eyed redheaded professor greeted them, lounging in his chair, smoking endless cigarettes. But above the window was still the old handbill for a lecture by J.P. Mahaffy. It brought him to tears. The room was suddenly full of the man. He had always been bigger than life. It did not surprise that his ghost should linger in this place.
“Is this it?” Katie whispered, tiptoeing into the Holy Sepulchre.
“Yes,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “This is it. He was sitting right there, where that cabinet is now, do you see? I was so afraid of him, everyone was.”
Katie looked up at him in surprise. “Why?”
He closed his eyes, swallowing back tears. “Because he was so brilliant.” He was assailed by a thousand bittersweet memories.
“Is that why Mummy loved him?”
Mick drew a shaking breath. “Aye. That’s why I loved him too.”
They stood for a long moment in silence and through the aching rush of long-forgotten love he said a prayer for the fallen and the dead, grateful for the good that had been.
“Come on, darlin.” He said hoarsely to Katie at last, ushering her out. And he closed the door behind them, on the past.
***
“Let us bury the dead past of dissensions. Let us leave it that each of us,
like I did myself, believed in the correctness of their choice. I concede
that those on the opposite side believed that their decision was the right one too.”
- General Tom Barry, at the unveiling of a memorial to Michael Collins in Cork, 1965
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