Don't Look Now (23 page)

'Knew what?'

'That your generation did perfectly revolting things. Far worse than us. Under your best friend's roof. It makes me sick to think of it.'

'What an extraordinary statement,' he said, astonished. 'No one was ever the wiser, so what the hell? I was devoted to Jack Money, although he did bog my chances of promotion shortly afterwards, but for a different reason. He only acted according to his lights. Thought I might put a spoke in the slowly-grinding wheels of naval intelligence, I presume, and he was bloody right.'

Now I can't tell him. It's just not on. Either I go back to England battered and defeated, or I don't go at all. He's deceived my father, deceived my mother (serve her right), deceived the England he fought for for so many years, tarnished the uniform he wore, degraded his rank, spends his time now, and has done for the past twenty years, trying to split this country wider apart than ever, and I just don't care. Let them wrangle. Let them blow themselves to pieces. Let the whole world go up in smoke. I'll write him a bread-and-butter letter from London saying, 'Thanks for the ride,' and sign it Shelagh Money. Or else ... or else I'll go down on all fours like the little dog who follows him and leaps on his lap, and beg to stay with him forever.

'I start rehearsing Viola in a few days' time,' she said. "My father had a daughter loved a man ..." '

'You'll do it very well. Especially Cesario. Concealment like a worm in the bud will feed on your damask cheek. You may pine in thought, but I doubt with a green and yellow melancholy.'

Murphy did another U-turn and the loaves rattled. How many miles to Lough Torrah? Don't let it end.

'The trouble is,' she said, 'I don't want to go home. It's not home to me any more. Nor do I care two straws for the Theatre Group, Twelfth Night, or anything else. You can have Cesario.'

'I can indeed.'

'No ... What I mean is, I'm willing to chuck the stage, give up my English status, burn all my bloody boats, and come and throw bombs with you.'

'What, become a recluse?'

'Yes, please.'

'Absurd. You'd be yawning your head off after five days.' 'I would not ... I would not ...'

'Think of all that applause you'll be getting soon. Viola-Cesario is a cinch. I tell you what. I won't send you flowers for your opening night, I'll send you my eye-shade. You can hang it up in your dressing-room to bring you luck.'

I want too much, she thought. I want everything. I want day and night, arrows and Agincourt, sleeping and waking, world without end, amen. Someone warned her once that it was fatal to tell a man you loved him. They kicked you out of bed forthwith. Perhaps Nick would kick her out of Murphy's van.

'What I really want,' she said, 'deep down, is stillness, safety. The feeling you'd always be there. I love you. I think I must have loved you without knowing it all my life.'

'Ah! ' he said. 'Who's groaning now?'

The van drew up, stopped. Nick crawled forward, threw open the doors. Murphy appeared at the entrance, his furrowed face wreathed in smiles.

'I hope I didn't shake you about too much,' he said. 'The side roads are not all they should be, as the Commander knows. The main thing is that the young lady should have enjoyed her outing.'

Nick jumped down on to the road. Murphy put out his hand and helped Shelagh to alight.

'You're welcome to come again, my dear, any time you like.

It's what I tell the English tourists when they visit us. Things are more lively here than what they are across the water.'

Shelagh looked around her, expecting to see the lake, and the bumpy track near the reeds where they had left Michael with the boat. Instead, they were standing in the main street of Ballyfane. The van was parked outside the Kilmore Arms. She turned to Nick, her face 'a question-mark. Murphy was knocking on the hotel door.

'Twenty minutes' more driving time, but worth it,' said Nick. 'At least for me, and I hope for you as well. Farewells should be sharp and sweet, don't you agree? There's Doherty at the door, so cut along in. I have to get back to base.'

Desolation struck. He could not mean it. He surely did not expect her to say goodbye on the side of the street, with Murphy and his son hovering, and the landlord at the entrance of the hotel?

'My things,' she said, 'my case. They're on the island, in the bedroom there.'

'Not so,' he told her. 'Operation C brought them back to the Kilmore Arms while we were junketing about on the border.' Desperately she fought for time, pride non-existent.

'Why?' she asked. 'Why?'

'Because that's the way it is, Cesario. I sacrifice the lamb that I do love to spite my own raven heart, which alters the text a bit.'

He pushed her in front of him towards the door of the hotel. 'Look after Miss Blair, Tim. The exercise went well, by all accounts. Miss Blair is the only casualty.'

He had gone, and the door had closed behind him. Mr Doherty looked at her with sympathy.

'The Commander is a great one for hustle. It's always the same. I know what it is to be in his company, he seldom lets up. I've put a thermos of hot milk beside your bed.'

He limped up the stairs before her, and threw open the door of the bedroom she had quitted two nights earlier. Her suitcase was on the chair. Bag and maps on the dressing-table. She might never ha'e left it. 'Your car has been washed and filled up with petrol,' he continued. 'A friend of mine has it in his garage. He'll bring it round for you in the morning. And there's no charge for your stay. The Commander will settle for everything. Just you get to bed now and have a good night's rest.'

A good night's rest.... A long night's melancholy. Come away, come away, death, and in sad cypress let me be laid. She threw open the window and looked out upon the street. Drawn curtains and blinds, shuttered windows. The black-and-white cat mewing from the gutter opposite. No lake, no moonlight.

'The trouble with you is, Jinnie, you won't grow up. You live in a dream world that doesn't exist. That's why you opted for the stage.' Her father's voice, indulgent but firm. 'One of these days,' he added, 'you'll come to with a shock.'

It was raining in the morning, misty, grey. Better, perhaps, like this, she thought, than golden bright like yesterday. Better to go off in the hired Austin with windscreen wipers slashing from side to side, and then with luck I might skid and crash in a ditch, be carried to hospital, become delirious, clamour for him to come. Nick kneeling at the bedside, holding her hand and saying, 'All my fault, I should never have sent you away.'

The little maid was waiting for her in the dining-room. Fried egg-and-bacon. A pot of tea. The cat, come in from the gutter, purred at her feet. Perhaps the telephone would ring, and a message would flash from the island before she left. 'Operation D put into effect. The boat is waiting for you.' Possibly, if she hovered about in the hall, something would happen. Murphy would appear in his van, or even the postmaster O'Reilly with a few words scribbled on a piece of paper. Her luggage was down, though, and the Austin was in the street outside. Mr Doherty was waiting to say goodbye.

'I hope I shall have the pleasure,' he said, 'of welcoming you to Ballyfane again. You'd enjoy the fishing.'

When she came to the signpost pointing to Lake Torrah she stopped the car and walked down the muddied track in the pouring rain. One never knew, the boat might be there. She came to the end of the track and stood there a moment, looking out across the lake. It was shrouded deep in mist. She could barely see the outline of the island. A heron rose from the reeds and flapped its way over the water. I could take off all my things and swim, she thought. I could just about make it, exhausted, almost drowned, and stagger through the woods to the house and fall at his feet on the verandah. 'Bob, come quick! It's Miss Blair. I think she's dying ...'

She turned, walked back up the track and got into the car. Started the engine, and the windscreen wipers began thrashing to and fro.

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.

It was still raining when she arrived at Dublin airport. First she had to get rid of the car, then book a seat on the first available 'plane to London. She did not have long to wait there was a flight taking off within the next half-hour. She sat in the departure lounge with her eyes fixed on the door leading back to the reception hall, for even now a miracle might take place, the door swing open, a lanky figure stand there, hatless, black patch over his left eye. He would brush past officials, come straight towards her. 'No more practical jokes. That was the last. Come back with me to Lamb Island right away.'

Her flight was called, and Shelagh shuffled through with the rest, her eyes searching her fellow-travellers. Walking across the tarmac she turned to stare at the spectators waving goodbye. Someone tall in a mackintosh held a handkerchief in his hand. Not him--he stooped to pick up a child.... Men in overcoats taking off hats, putting dispatch-cases on the rack overhead, any one of them could have been, was not, Nick. Supposing, as she fastened her safety-belt, a hand came out from the seat in front of her, on the aisle, and she recognised the signet-ring on the little finger? What if the man humped there in the very front seat she could just see the top of his slightly balding head should suddenly turn, black patch foremost, and stare in her direction, then break into a smile?

'Pardon.'

A latecomer squeezed in beside her, treading on her toes. She flashed him a look. Black squash hat, spotty faced, pale, the fag end of a cigar between his lips. Some woman, somewhere, had loved, would love, this unhealthy brute. Her stomach turned. He opened a newspaper wide, jerking her elbow. Headlines glared.

'Explosions Across the Border. Are There More to Come?'

A secret glow of satisfaction warmed her. Plenty more, she thought, and good luck to them. I saw it, I was there, I was part of the show. This idiot sitting beside me doesn't know.

London Airport. Customs check. 'Have you been on holiday, and for how long?' Was it her imagination, or did the Customs Officer give her a particularly searching glance? He chalked her case and turned to the next in line.

Cars shot past the bus as it lumbered through the traffic to the terminal. Aircraft roared overhead, taking other people away and out of it. Men and women with drab, tired expressions waited on pavements for red to change to green. Shelagh was going back to school with a vengeance. Not to peer at the notice board in the draughty assembly-hall, shoulder to shoulder with giggling companions, but to examine another board, very similar, hanging on the wall beside the stage door. Not, 'Have I really got to share a room with Katie Matthews this term? It's too frantic for words', and smiling falsely, 'Hullo, Katie, yes, wonderful hols, super', but wandering instead into that rather poky cubby-hole they called the dressing-room at the bottom of the stairs, and finding that infuriating Olga Brett hogging the mirror, using Shelagh's or one of the other girls' lipstick instead of her own, and drawling, 'Hullo, darling, you're late for rehearsal, Adam is tearing his hair out in handfuls. But literally ...'

Useless to ring up home from the air terminal and ask Mrs Warren the gardener's wife to make up her bed. Home was barren, empty, without her father. Haunted, too, his things untouched, his books on the bedside table. A memory, a shadow, not the living presence. Better go straight to the flat, like a dog to a familiar kennel smelling only of its own straw, untouched by its master's hands.

Shelagh was not late at the first rehearsal on the Monday morning, she was early.

'Any letters for me?'

'Yes, Miss Blair, a postcard.'

Only a postcard? She snatched it up. It was from her mother at Cap d'Ail. 'Weather wonderful. Feeling so much better, really rested. Hope you are too, darling, and that you had a nice little trip in your car wherever it was. Don't exhaust yourself rehearsing. Aunt Bella sends her love and so do Reggie and May Hillsborough, who are here on their yacht at Monte Carlo. Your loving Mum.' (Reggie was the fifth Viscount Hillsborough.)

Shelagh dropped the postcard into a waste-paper basket and went down on to the stage to meet the group. A week, ten days, a fortnight, nothing came. She had given up hope. She would never hear from him. The theatre must take over, become meat and drink, love and sustenance. She was neither Shelagh nor Jinnie, she was Viola-Cesario, and must move, think, dream in character. Here was her only cure, stamp out all else. She tried to get Radio Eire on her transistor but it did not succeed. The voice of the announcer might have sounded like Michael's, like Murphy's, and roused some sort of feeling other than a total void. So on with the damned motley, and drown despair.

Olivia. Where goes Cesario?

Viola. After him I love,

More than I love these eyes, more than my life ...

Adam Vane, crouching like a black cat at the side of the stage, his horn-rimmed glasses balanced on his straggling hair, 'Don't pause, dear, that's very good, very good indeed.'

On the day of the dress rehearsal she left the flat in good time, picking up a taxi en route for the theatre. There was a jam at the corner of Belgrave Square, cars hooting, people hanging about on the pavement, mounted policemen. Shelagh opened the glass panel between herself and the driver.

'What's going on?' she asked. 'I'm in a hurry, I can't afford to be late.'

He grinned back at her over his shoulder. 'Demonstration,' he said, 'outside the Irish Embassy. Didn't you hear the one o'clock news? More explosions on the border. It looks as if it's brought the London--Ulster crowd out in force. They must have been throwing stones at the embassy windows.'

Fools, she thought. Wasting their time. Good job if the mounted police ride them down. She never listened to the one o'clock news, and she hadn't even glanced at the morning paper. Explosions on the border, Nick in the Control Room, the young man with the headphones over his ears, Murphy in the van, and I'm here in a taxi driving to my own show, my own fireworks, and after it's over my friends will crowd round me saying, 'Wonderful, darling, wonderful!'