Forbidden Fruit (24 page)

“One.”

“Ask.”

“Why’d you hire me?”

“Because I can’t stomach any more fucking Irish. They should all go home to England or America.”

I now understood my primary qualification for the job. I also knew that Randall, in addition to a basically kind nature, had
a tongue on her that could cut to the bone.

Within a few days I was slinging the connecting cords in and out as fast as the best of them.

In my free time, Bridget introduced me to raw Dublin life while my parents took me out at nights for dinner in hotels like
the Hibernian and the classy Shelbourne on the north side of Stephen’s Green. One evening, Daddy called up a doctor friend,
Harry Burke. He lived in Howth, a suburb on the northern arm of Dublin Bay. He came over and took us to his beautiful house
for a meal.

Bridget kept trying to find out what I was doing in Dublin. We met up after work in Sonny’s, a bar in Ranelagh, not far from
our hotel. In that relaxed atmosphere, she freely gave information about herself. “I really wanted to be a Shakespearean actress,
Murphy,” she told me in the manner of Lady Macbeth. “And now look at me. Thirty-one years old. I rent a one-bed flat with
running water, mostly down the walls. My job is supervising idiot telephonists in a Dublin hotel. How did I sink so low?”

Sipping my ginger ale, I said: “Shakespeare would have appreciated the tragedy.”

“Tra-ge-dy,” she said, theatrically. “More a Whitehall farce. And you?”

I spoke guardedly about my broken marriage and my desire to find peace in Ireland.

“That’ll do,” she said, coolly. “To start with.”

One night, she broke down in tears as she told me of an affair that resulted in an ectopic pregnancy. “I lost one tube, Murphy,
so I guess I’m sterile, and my gall bladder was in such a state it rotted my teeth.”

“That’s why you’ve had them capped.”

“Murphy, you are an
awful
sod. You were not supposed to notice.”

“They’re really very beautiful,” I said.

“Sure, so beautiful everyone notices them as soon as I open my mouth.” They had not lessened her attractiveness. At least,
Jim Wentworth, the hotel chief of security, found her irresistible.

I introduced Bridget to my parents and they instantly took to each other. They were all larger than life.

In the first week of September, Eamonn, back from Australia, telephoned. Daddy took the call. Eamonn invited all three of
us to dinner the following Saturday night.

“You free, Annie?”

“Probably not, Daddy.”

I wanted to be as relaxed about Eamonn as I could.

“Talk to him yourself.”

“Hi, Eamonn,” I said. “Have a good trip Down Under?”

“Can we talk?”

“Sure. And your brother?”

“There’s no extension to that phone?”

“Not at all. I have a job at the Burlington which keeps me pretty busy.”

“Listen carefully. I will drop your parents back at the apartment about ten and meet you straight after.”

“Sounds good, but it must have been really hot there.”

“Leave the Burlington by the side exit, walk left along Burlington Road. After a hundred yards cross over to the junction
with Wellington Road. See you at five past ten.”

“I’m sorry, too, Eamonn, perhaps another time.”

“And, Annie, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

“My parents are really keen to see you again.”

My father nodded agreement from the couch.

“Pet, I love you.”

“God bless, Eamonn.”

I put the phone down. “He sends his love.”

On Saturday night, I turned down Bridget’s offer of a drink in Sonny’s, saying I had a splitting headache. I was very excited
at the prospect of seeing Eamonn again. What was the surprise in store? A present from Australia?

I left the hotel soon after ten. I was standing in the rain at the road junction when a medium-blue two-seater sports car
drew up alongside me. All I saw was the capped head of the driver.

Just my luck
, I thought,
a curb crawler
. I walked on a bit. But the driver was not giving up on me. I was young and shapely and this was Saturday night in Dublin.

I heard the window on the passenger side open electronically and a familiar voice said: “Why are you cold-shouldering me,
Annie?”

“Jesus,” I squawked, “you really scared me.”

He had a glossy black cap on his head and he was wearing a long trench coat though the weather was mild. I glanced at the
car. A brand-new expensive-looking Lancia. Was I the loose woman to go with the fast car?

“Where’d you get
this
?”

As I settled in to the lush bucket seat, he leaned over and gave me a kiss that smelled of the big cigar he was smoking. “Good
to see you again. Oh, the car, I had it imported direct from Italy.”

Not keen to hang around in the vicinity of the hotel, he drove off in his usual tearing hurry.

“It’s got a gear stick,” I said.

“Sorry about that. Restricts my hand movements somewhat. But you should see the way it corners.”

“I believe you.” I was anxious for him not to prove it.

The smell of new leather was almost as strong as his cigar. I had never smelled that kind of cigar aroma before. We were heading
north into the rain-arrowed lights of the city, past tall run-down Georgian houses in Leeson Street toward the green.

“I shall miss the Mercedes,” I said, remembering.

“No need.”

“You didn’t sell it or trade it in for this?”

He shook his head. “The Mercedes will be for official visits; this for, shall we say, pleasure?”

I was so pleased to see him again I did not bother to ask where he was taking me. He clearly had a precise location in mind.
Any dry warm room out of the rain would do.

We headed for O’Connell Street, but just before the Liffey we turned west. The whole place was lit up and crowded at this
hour. Green smoky double-decker buses kept obstructing us, so Eamonn had to shift gears like a racing driver. We continued
past the huge Guinness complex toward Heuston Station with the Phoenix Park on our right. The giant Wellington obelisk in
the park was my last landmark. He was telling me about his priest brother and the places he had visited, Sydney and Melbourne,
and the people he had met, including many aboriginals in the outback.

I took in little, so enraptured was I by his presence. He filled areas of my being that were desolate without him.

By the time I was ready to peer through the windshield, we were in an ill-lit suburb blackened by rain. “Where’re we going?”
I asked anxiously.

He threw his cigar stub out the window. “Trust me.”

I did, of course, but some things did not add up. We had already driven for about thirty minutes. This was not exactly motel
country and, in any case, he was in his clericals. Without warning, he turned off the main road into a dark side street. As
he slowed down, I sensed danger. Maybe he intended that. But this was a new kind of danger, one that did not emanate from
my own inbuilt fears but from him. He was my security; I did not like to feel nervous in his company.

On the left, was a large paint-peeled unhinged metal gate that looked as if it had not been closed in years. I saw what looked
like a huge cavern ahead and a small sign, “Sand and Gravel.”

Bridget had recently taken me to see Sean O’Casey’s play
Shadow of a Gunman
. Its eerie atmosphere had got to me.

For a few seconds, my racing brain told me: What if the surprise is not the car but a brutal death? A bishop who fornicates
is not dependable; break one commandment, break them all. And where better to dispose of my body than in this out-of-the-way
place? Eamonn has always covered his traces. He has never given me a present or written me one letter to which he signed his
name.

What finally shook me was that he drove in to the gravel pit so fast and halted so sharply between piles of sand and crushed
stones that it was plain he had been there before. How else would he have known that there was no night watchman, that he
would not run into heavy machinery? The place was demonic. What made it worse was the excitement of a reunion with the man
I loved and who obviously could not wait to have sex with me.

Eamonn whipped off his cap and tossed it behind him.

“Wait,” I said, “I want some answers. First, how’d you know where this place was?”

“Saw it on my way to and from Dublin.”

“But you pulled up in this exact spot, as if you’ve been here many times before.”

“Only this afternoon, in preparation.”

“For
what
?” Picking up on Mary’s phrase, I said, “You mean this is our new love nest?”

He was already tugging off his top clothes. I was reminded of my Texas days. This was teenager stuff. Painful memories of
nights behind steamed-up car windows crowded in on me.

“Isn’t this a perfect spot, Annie?”

Compared with the luxuries of Inch and its views of the sea, it was like a doss house. Worse, lust was taking over. It is
hard to love tenderly while you are tumbling and groping in the bucket seats of a sports car.

What was the alternative? he argued. We could not go back to Inch on a permanent basis. He was too well known to book us into
a hotel in Dublin. Once my parents returned to America, I would take over the apartment and we would be free.

I quieted down and we enjoyed a fun evening in the fogged-up dark. The front seats folded back but we soon emigrated to the
back. I have never known a man so agile in such a restricted space.

We took off any clothes that got in our way and the rest were undone. He expended on me the pent-up feelings of three weeks
of abstinence. His long drawn-out sigh was something to treasure.

For a couple of hours we stayed there, our chat broken up with a second session of lovemaking.

I told him about my new job. I gave him a graphic account of Mary’s visit to Dublin and he hooted with laughter. He told me
my parents were very pleased with the way I looked and that the ten pounds I had put on suited me. “But be careful,” he warned,
“your mother has noticed the spring in your step.”

“Does she suspect you are responsible?”

“All I can say, Annie, is she kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye and once she said, ‘Annie seems like a woman
in love.’ “

We agreed to meet in two weeks, when Eamonn would be free. The night ended with his dropping me off near the apartment.

My parents were in bed but next morning, my mother said: “We had a wonderful evening with the Bishop in the Hibernian Hotel.
Harry Burke joined us for dinner.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Yes,” Daddy said. “Harry disagreed with Eamonn about the changes he made to his Cathedral. I don’t think they get on.”

Mommy said, eyeing me, “He sends you his special love.”

“That’s nice of Harry,” I said.

“Eamonn did.”

“Oh,” I said, nonchalantly, “it’s nice of him, too.”

B
Y DAY, I worked at the hotel with Bridget. I spent most evenings with her, too, but a few with my parents. Whenever Eamonn
came to town, he had priority.

I was never really reconciled to love in a gravel pit. There was little talk and a lot of action. Nor did I like the furtive
way, as soon as we drove homeward into the city lights, he asked me to hand him his collar, chain, and jacket from the backseat.

By early October, Bridget had guessed there was a man in my life. Once she got me tipsy and wheedled out of me where I had
been staying before I came to Dublin.

“A very interesting man, the flying Bishop,” she mused. “I’ve read so much about him. Quite young, too.”

One Friday night, she invited Wentworth and me for drinks at her small ground-floor apartment. All she had on was a robe with
blue ruffles; and she played tapes and we drank.

I walked past the apartment at eight the next morning and banged on her bedroom window.

“Get up, you sluts,” I said loudly, in my best Irish accent. “I want you both out of my bed-sit this very hour.”

Whispers inside before Bridget pulled back the drape. “Murphy,” she screamed, “you absolute bloody shit.”

I saw Wentworth’s pinkie with its emerald ring appear above the sheet.

“You realize, Randall,” I said, “you and that lump in bed with you will roast in hell.”

Wentworth slowly surfaced from beneath the covers with a venomous, “You fecking bitch, Murphy.”

Bridget came to work at midday. “Murphy, come and have a spot of tea with me in the cafeteria, if you’d be so kind.”

“C’mon,” I said, “don’t fire me. We had such fun.”

“You and I did.” She sipped her tea in a melancholy way. “But a tragedy happened last night.”

“What?” I asked naïvely.

“I was robbed of my innocence by the security officer of the Burlington Hotel.”

“But he was a gentleman last night, Randall.”

“I do feel a bit better today,” she admitted. “But, you bastard, you encouraged him. I’m going to get you.”

And she did. That very night.

I was about to climb into Eamonn’s Lancia when I saw someone very like Bridget hiding behind a tree.

I had been edgy all night. The rain was pelting down and the gravel pit looked like something out of hell. The first lovemaking
session was more strenuous than usual because over his boxer shorts Eamonn wore designer long johns to ease his colitis. The
long johns were from Germany; they were of nylon and a remarkable cherry red. I ragged him, saying his cardinalate tights,
like his socks, betrayed his ambitions.

I could see him getting worried. Was my nervousness rubbing off on him? “I am wondering, pet, if the tires are stuck in the
mud.”

He got into the driver’s seat and switched on. When he engaged the engine, the rear tires whizzed around. This went on for
several minutes. The high-pitched revving sound in that cavernous place attracted attention. A car marked
GARDA
slowly cruised past the gate.

“Police,” I shrieked. We waited with bated breath until the car passed by a second time.