Jig (18 page)

Patrick Cairney stepped back inside his car. He drove carefully on slippery pavement. When he reached the gates of the estate he got out and pushed them open. A black jeep came out of the trees towards him. There were two men inside. One carried a rifle across his knees, the other climbed out and approached Cairney. He was a stocky man with a pistol strapped to his belt and he came over the snow cautiously. Across the side panel of the vehicle were the words
DUTCHESS SECURITY
.

‘You Patrick?' the man asked.

Cairney nodded.

The man hitched up his belt. ‘Okay. You're expected.'

Cairney studied the man a second. He had the look of security guards everywhere. His face had become pinched from years of scrutinising people. Around his eyes was a dense mass of wrinkles. ‘What's with all the security?' Cairney asked.

The man shrugged. He didn't answer Cairney's question. He turned and went back to the jeep, where he climbed in beside his partner. Cairney returned to the Dodge Colt and watched the black jeep reverse. It vanished behind a clump of trees. Security guards. What was Harry worried about? His collection of old Celtic manuscripts he'd gathered over the years? Or was it those mouldy manuscripts of Yeats and George Bernard Shaw and Joyce that bothered him? Cairney wondered if there were burglars of a literary persuasion in the area, masked men planning to heist the precious scrap of beer-stained paper on which Brendan Behan had written:
To my pal Harry Cairney, may he colonize Amerika
. The old man had that one framed and prominently displayed on the desk in his office.

The house came in view. Patrick Cairney had always thought of it as a monstrosity, sprawling across the landscape like an immense mausoleum. Given a smokestack, it might have passed as a crematorium. It wasn't a house that invited you inside. It lacked any welcoming warmth. Cairney pulled up at the foot of the steps, glancing a moment at Roscommon Lake, then he got out of the car. He marvelled at it all – the mansion, the estate, everything that one poor but overwhelmingly ambitious Irish immigrant had pulled together in his lifetime. There was something to be said, after all, for making your career one of public service in America.

The door at the top of the steps opened. Celestine Cunningham Cairney stood there, looking down at him. She wore tailored tan slacks, a chocolate-brown sweater, a peach-coloured chiffon scarf. Her soft blonde hair hung at her shoulders. Patrick Cairney, who had always thought his father must exaggerate Celestine's beauty in his letters because he was blinded by love, felt astonishment. The woman had the kind of loveliness that stopped men dead in their, tracks, that made all heads turn in crowded rooms and silenced cocktail-party conversations. She moved down the steps without any of the self-consciousness of beautiful women, as if she were quite unaware of the way she looked.

She reached the bottom step and she laid one hand on her stepson's arm. ‘Welcome,' she said. ‘Harry's told me a lot about you.'

She leaned forward and kissed Cairney on the cheek. A stepmother's kiss, tentative and quick and just a little awkward. Cairney wasn't sure what to say. He was still trying to recover from his surprise. What had he expected anyhow? A good-looking matronly woman, maybe, somebody with the face and body of a sympathetic head nurse. Somebody, at best, handsome. But not this. This vision. And, although he didn't like the question, it entered his mind anyway:
What did she see in an old man like Harry Cairney?

‘Harry's waiting for you.'

Patrick Cairney looked over Celestine's shoulder. His father appeared in the doorway, smaller than Cairney remembered him, shrunken, his silver hair thinner than before and his eyes, under the great overhanging forehead, set in deep shadow.

‘Let me hear it, Pat,' Harry Cairney called out in a voice that was curiously cracked.

Patrick Cairney hesitated before he sang. ‘
You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg,/You're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg
–'

His father sang the next two lines hoarsely. ‘
You'll have to be put with a bowl to beg,/O Johnny, we hardly knew ye!
'

‘
With drums and guns, and guns and drums,/The enemy nearly slew ye
–'

‘
My darling dear, you look so queer,/O Johnny, I hardly knew ye!
'

Then the old man was laughing, and Patrick Cairney climbed the steps quickly, thinking how the way they greeted each other never changed. It was a ritual as well preserved as his father's mythical vision of Ireland. And Patrick found it empty and meaningless, a routine first developed in his childhood. It had been embarrassing even back then. Now it was worse because it was forced and ridiculous. Both men embraced, then Harry Cairney stepped back and said, ‘Let me look at you, Pat. Let me take a good long look at you. You've put on some muscles since I last saw you. It must be all those Irish potatoes you've been eating.'

Patrick Cairney glanced at Celestine, who was coming up the steps. She said, ‘Did somebody give you permission to come out here into the cold, Harry?'

Cairney winked at his son. ‘She never lets up,' he said. ‘She keeps an old man in check.'

‘Somebody has to,' Celestine said. She slipped her arm through Harry's and she smiled at her stepson. It was a good smile, the kind Patrick Cairney thought you could bask in on a chilly winter's day. Like having your own private sun.

‘Now let's all go indoors,' Celestine said. She shivered as she ushered Harry inside the house.

‘I'll fetch my luggage,' Patrick Cairney said.

He went back down the steps to the Dodge Colt. He reached inside and lifted his bag from the rear seat. He closed the door. He saw the black security jeep appear on the shore of Roscommon Lake, idling between bare trees.

John F. Kennedy Airport, New York

The man from the State Department was called J. W. Sweeting. He wore a three-piece suit and his hair was immaculately brushed over his broad skull. He had a brown leather briefcase with his initials embossed on it. He sat in the arrivals lounge at John F. Kennedy Airport and studied the man he'd just met from the London flight. The Reverend Ivor McInnes was big, weighed somewhere in the region of two hundred and twenty pounds, none of it flab. He had a large, craggy face that was handsome in a fleshy way. He was about fifty, Sweeting reckoned. The eyes were green and lively and burned into you whenever you looked at them. The British press called him Ivor the Terrible, which Sweeting thought he understood. There was the scent of brimstone hanging all around the Reverend McInnes. Sweeting knew he wouldn't like to sit through one of McInnes's sermons, which would be all thunder and spit. And yet like many people before him J. W. Sweeting realised that there was something attractive about McInnes, a certain quality of roguish charm which, as a political tool, could be extremely useful. It was easy to imagine Ivor swaying large crowds, shaping them any way he wanted.

Sweeting tapped his briefcase. ‘I'll go over the conditions of entry for you,' he said.

McInnes smiled. ‘No need, no need,' he said in an accent that reminded Sweeting of a Liverpool rock singer. ‘I know them all. Your embassy people in London, the gargoyles of Grosvenor Square, already put me through their wire-mesh procedures.'

Sweeting rubbed his embossed initials with a fingertip. ‘In case there's any misunderstanding, Reverend, you were granted an entry visa on the condition that you refrain from speaking in public places or giving inflammatory interviews to the press. State is adamant about that.'

McInnes swivelled his green eyes up to the high ceiling and looked very impatient. ‘I know all this, young man.'

Sweeting sighed. It was the sigh of a man carrying out his duty regardless. ‘You are to refrain from all and any public assemblies. You are also ordered to refrain from addressing any private assemblies, clubs, and associations, organisations, and the like, which are considered partisan in nature. You are prohibited from activities designed to raise funds for any partisan organisations with which you might be associated in Northern Ireland.'

‘Can I actually breathe?' McInnes asked. ‘Or am I forbidden the use of your air as well?'

Sweeting ignored this. ‘You are also deterred from making political statements concerning British or American policy in Ireland, the Irish Republican Army, the conditions of Irish political prisoners in British jails, and any remarks, ambiguous or otherwise, about the Roman Catholic Church.'

‘Did somebody tear up your Constitution? Did somebody just decide to disregard that wonderful document in my case?' McInnes was looking amused rather than annoyed.

Sweeting went on, ‘Your stay is limited to ten days and restricted to New York City and its environs. Any other movements must be cleared in advance with a representative of the State Department. To wit, me. And I'll turn down any and all requests you might make. Is all this clear?'

McInnes nodded. ‘Loud and clear.'

‘Any violation of these conditions will result in your expulsion from the United States. Between you and me, I think you're lucky to get this visa. The fact is, State pursues a policy of fairness towards both sides in the Irish question. If we let in, say, a priest from Tipperary, then we can't keep out a minister from Belfast. Even one whose own church has rejected him.'

‘Are you a Catholic?' McInnes asked.

‘Is that relevant?'

McInnes grinned. He had strong white teeth. He brought his face very close to Sweeting's. It was a characteristic of his, this closing of the distance between himself and his listener, and it forced an uneasy intimacy on whoever Ivor was talking to. ‘I have this reputation, Mr. Sweeting. They say I hate Roman Catholics. I admit I have my differences with the Church of Rome, friend, but as far as individual Catholics are concerned, I don't hate them. They're misguided people, that's all.' McInnes paused. His grin created little squares of puckered flesh all across the expanse of his face. ‘My own church failed to understand that, Mr. Sweeting. They interpreted my objections to Rome as attacks on individual Catholics. Which wasn't what I intended. Far from it.'

Sweeting stepped back a pace. McInnes had been talking very loudly and several people were staring at him.

‘You're misunderstood, is that what you're saying?' Sweeting asked.

‘I'm damned in certain quarters whenever I open my mouth.'

‘Maybe you should keep it shut more often,' J. W. Sweeting said.

Ivor McInnes smiled. He placed one of his big hands on Sweeting's shoulder and rocked the man from the State Department very slightly back and forth. Sweeting once more stepped away. McInnes reminded him of one of those TV salesmen who pitched Herbalife or urged you to send your dollars to some church beamed into your living room from a satellite in the sky. He made you feel you were the most important thing in his life when he talked to you. It was the way the green eyes concentrated on your face and the easy manner, the quiet little touches, the familiarity. He was convincing, Sweeting thought, but so were all the blow-dried evangelists of the air-waves. Where McInnes had the edge over his electronic rivals was in the way he looked – he was rumpled instead of embalmed in polyester, and his silver hair had never been styled beneath a dryer but was unkempt and grew down over his collar.

‘You're not a stuffy little man, are you, Mr. Sweeting?' McInnes said. ‘I thought everybody in the State Department had had their sense of humour expunged at birth. I thought they had their wit circumcised along with their foreskins.'

J. W. Sweeting passed the palm of one hand over his forehead. He was inexplicably nervous all at once. In theory, he should have loathed a man like McInnes. In practice, he was finding it difficult. The green eyes suggested amusement and a benign tolerance for the sorrows of the human condition, and the smile, that big wide-mouthed expression, was magnetic. What Sweeting had expected to encounter was a hateful bigot, which would have been easy to handle. McInnes didn't come across that way at all. Indeed, he appeared reasonable and easygoing, a man given to instant friendships, huge handshakes, intimate gestures. A man who played on your sympathies by insisting, with a down-turned mouth, that he was misunderstood by his enemies, which was a terrible cross he had to carry. He was goddamn
likeable
.

McInnes rubbed his chin. ‘You're not a bad fellow, Sweeting. And because I like you I'll make life easy for you. I'll go along with all your restrictions. I'll whistle any tune you care to hear whether I like it or not, because I'm not here on any political mission. I'll tell you something else. I smell The White House behind all these conditions of yours. I smell Tommy Dawson at work.'

‘Like the State Department, the President is neutral in the Irish question,' Sweeting said.

McInnes laughed. It was a curious sound, a throaty wheeze. ‘Neutral? Tommy Dawson's a black-hearted Catholic Irishman who makes pilgrimages to the dear little town of Ardare in the Republic of Ireland where his grandparents were born. He's about as neutral as the Pope, Mr. Sweeting. And he hates anybody from the North. He hates Ulster.'

Sweeting wasn't going to be drawn into the question of Thomas Dawson's Irish heritage or the matter of his sympathies. He returned to the only subject he was interested in. ‘If you restrict yourself to the research you say you want to do here, then we'll get along just famously.'

McInnes nodded his head. ‘What could be more peaceful and worthy than writing the saga of Ulster labourers in the history of the American railroad? All that sweat and toil. All the sadness of the immigrant worker. The longings. The hopes. The dreams. By God, it's a rich tale. And a complicated one. Besides, I'm a minister without a congregation, and a man has to make a living somehow.'

‘Indeed,' Sweeting said. He thought of how, in support of his visa application, McInnes had submitted a copy of a contract with a small university press for his projected history. It was one book Sweeting would manage not to read, if indeed it was ever likely to see the light of publication.