Ossian's Ride (9 page)

At length we came to what I had been hoping for, a stout gate that simply couldn’t be opened. I lifted the cycles over. This cost some time—I could now see Houseman in the front seat by the driver. But the great thing was that they could not lift the car over, and to attempt to batter a way through would be to risk damage and delay.

Looking back I saw that we had won. The big car was being slowly turned. Another couple of hundred yards along I saw why. The path—it was now no more than a farm track—ran between stone walls which narrowed here and there enough to prevent the transit of any but the smallest vehicle.

We came out onto what in England would have been described as a common. I knew it stretched away to the southeast as far as the huge trunk road from Cavan to Athlone. My plan was to ride as far as we could in this direction, but more of this later.

The immediate danger was that Houseman would get his car onto the common by some other route. We therefore pushed ahead as hard as we could go. After a mile or two, patches of bog appeared. This was good, because it would make the use of a car extremely hazardous. And indeed there was no sign of any car, presumably because Houseman knew the difficulties—it really takes very little in the way of an obstacle to turn this particular form of transportation into a mockery, just a very short stretch of soft ground. Twice we had to lift the bicycles over belts of bog and peat hags that I thought would be sufficient to stop even a jeep.

I learned from Cathleen that there was ample cover within a mile of the main road—trees and bushes, in contrast to the open ground we were now crossing. This seemed to solve the whole problem. It would be useless for Houseman to try to intercept us at the road. All we had to do was to lie in cover until a bus was due—I had my precious timetable. At the right moment we would simply mount onto the road, flag the bus to a standstill and then away! (This was an occasion when the risk of public transportation must be taken.) Everything was easy. I. discounted an attempt to follow us on bicycles; they were much too far behind for that. Horseback might be a good idea, but I doubted if horses would be ready saddled.

And on this basis I allowed the pace to slacken, not to a dawdle by any means, but to a pace more congenial to a tired girl. In this I grievously underestimated my opponent. I want to emphasize this point because a great deal followed from my mistake. Just as two streams, a couple of hundred yards apart, on opposite sides of a watershed, separate implacably to their respective oceans, so this was the point of divergence of my story. If I had hurried Cathleen along I think I would have married her. I think in the long run I would have taken a comparatively lucrative job with I.C.E. (knowing the situation as I do now), and I think we would have settled down to raise a family in peace and quiet on the coast of Kerry. But because I allowed her a breathing space, scenes of horror were to follow in the short run, and in the long run I was to solve the secret of I.C.E.

I was extraordinarily slow in spotting the form of Houseman’s attack. At first I thought that some enterprising farmer must be early at work. We had ridden for maybe ten minutes before I realized that the noise was too loud for just one tractor. Surely every farmer in the district couldn’t have employment for such an implement at six o’clock in the morning?

Not until we mounted a low hill could I convey a real sense of urgency to Cathleen. Some two miles back, perhaps a little more, four caterpillar tractors were heading in our direction.

Even now I was not seriously alarmed, for at our accelerated pace I thought we must be moving quite as fast as the tractors. Ws couldn’t be much more than six miles from the road, and after five of these we would be in cover.

But I was not reckoning on a sudden change of the ground. Quite suddenly it altered from the smoothness of the common to coarse, tussocky grass. We began to bounce and to lose speed. The tractors would hardly be affected. The position was plainly desperate.

There was nothing for it but to abandon the bikes. We could make better time now on foot. At this stage we were about three miles from the cover by the road; the tractors were two miles farther back still, five miles from cover. On this rough terrain they would probably take half an hour to do the five miles. Could we run three miles in the half hour? Without my rucksack, and alone, I believe I could have done it. But Cathleen was no faster than I could manage with the rucksack, so there was no point in discarding it.

I will not dwell unduly on the painful slowness of the following minutes. Nor was it only time that seemed to go “on leaden feet.” We ran until I thought that my lungs would burst, and yet at every stride the tractors closed the precious distance.

Next there came a long stretch of rough uphill ground which had to be taken in the face of quite a fresh breeze. Everything depended on the other side of the hill. With a great effort we would reach the top two or three hundred yards in the lead. If there was reasonable cover on the other side we should be safe.

With every muscle screaming for rest we arrived at the top. Ahead was the best part of a mile of open ground, and then, only then, a plethora of trees and bushes. The tractors would run us down before we could cover half this distance.

If only we had hurried back there on the common. If only we had gained ten minutes. If only—but this was the lesson of life compressed into a single hour.

Then I had an idea. I shouted to Cathleen to run on. with fumbling fingers I tore open the rucksack and pulled out the papers. I could see the drivers clearly by now, grim-faced men in cloth caps. Houseman was a passenger in one of the machines, a great fat slug clinging to the rolling monster. But this would give him a problem to think about. In a gust of wind I released the pages of the manuscript. As if to show its contempt for this appalling rubbish, this desecration of Lesbesgue, the breeze lifted the sheets. Within a minute they were scattered over a couple of acres or more. If they were to be retrieved, Houseman would have to act instantly, for even on the ground the sheets chased along at a merry pace in the direction from which we had come.

There was never any question as to what would happen. Houseman jumped down to retrieve one of the pages, took a quick look at it, and began shouting orders at his band of hoodlums. Even at the risk, I paused to watch them. The scene became ludicrous beyond my fondest hopes. In a sort of fantastic polo game the tractors wheeled hither and thither. Every so often a man would leap down from his seat, and another piece of nonsense was gathered to the fold. Chuckling mightily, I trotted after Cathleen, a modern Milanion anxious to claim my Atalanta.

I saw already that something was wrong, even when I was fifty yards from Cathleen. Her eyes blazed with furious anger.

“You—,” she flared.

I suppress the word not because it was a particularly bad one—I had heard worse often enough before—but because, this was the only time I ever heard her make such a remark.

“And me poor brother not dead in his grave these twelve hours,” she added.

Now I saw the appalling thing I had done. I had casually tossed away the manuscript that Michael gave his life for. I had thrown it to his murderers, and I had done so with a laugh. I started to explain, but then I saw the hopelessness of the real explanation. It’s perfectly true that in the best society one does not integrate the derivative of a function and expect always to arrive back at the original function. But can one expect such a remark to appeal to a pretty girl in an extremis of anger? Of a surety one cannot.

So I tried an appeal to common sense.

“Look, Cathleen, if I hadn’t scattered your brother’s manuscript to the winds we’d have been caught by the tractors. And if we’d been caught, Houseman would have got the manuscript anyway. In fact he’ll find it harder to get the papers out from the bog than if he’d only had to take them from my rucksack.”

This cold logic calmed her a little. But she hammered a fist into the palm of her hand. “At least you should have fought for it.”

No remark could have been better calculated to destroy me. Once again I spluttered with laughter. The trouble went back to my nursery days. I had puzzled for the best part of a couple of years over a little piece that went something as follows:

A asked for it.

B bit it.

C cut it.

D dug for it.

I remember that F fought for it, S sought for it, M mourned for it and that T, most sensibly, simply took it. The problem that worried my childish mind was the nature of “it.”

“Oh, well, if that’s what you’re thinking of me, I’ll be going my way,” said Cathleen.

The humor was gone.

“That you will not. There’s still danger from the road.” Which was perfectly true. It was by no means impossible that Houseman had sent a carload of thugs round by the road with the idea of heading us off. If so they were too late, so long as we didn’t stand around arguing futile nonsense. I seized Cathleen by the arm.

“Come on, girl, you can say all you want to say once we’re safely away from here.”

It would make a nice ending to this episode if I could claim a final encounter with the Houseman gang, there among the trees and bushes. But a hundred men might have searched all day in that wonderful cover and never had sight or sound of us. We reached the road and lay down to wait for the next bus toward Athlone. I judged from my timetable that one would go by somewhere between 8:20 and 8:30 A.M. We had only half an hour to pass.

It seemed that the best place would be to leave the bus near a small place called Tang. Cathleen was of a different mind.

“It’s to Athlone I’m going.”

“But that’s exactly where Houseman will be looking for you, if he wants to look for you.”

“Maybe it’s me that’ll be looking for him.”

I passed this by. “The towns are a bad idea, Cathleen. I doubt if I could stand up even to a routine police inspection.”

“Then it is right for you to stop at Tang, and I will go to Athlone.”

“But it’s only sensible that we should stick together.”

“After what happened back there on the bog, do not think that I will go with you.”

A vision came to me of the pages of manuscript fluttering in the breeze, Michael’s life blood.

“Tell me what better I could have done?”

She refused to meet my eyes. “When I go with a man, it will be with a man who knows how to behave in trouble.”

I heard a fast-moving heavy vehicle away in the distance, which was perhaps as well, because I don’t think I could have found an answer to this last remark.

“Stay here until you see that I’ve managed to stop the bus.” I climbed down a bank and upon the road. There was no point in exposing us both to the risk of a chance shot.

I booked two single tickets, one to Athlone and one to Tang. As the bus raced along, I made one last attempt to persuade Cathleen not to continue to Athlone. The fleeting moments soon passed. We drew up to my destination, and I remembered to give Cathleen a note, for she was without money.

“But how will I repay you?”

“Don’t bother, it’s little enough,” and I added unkindly as I pulled my inevitable rucksack down from the carrier: “When you meet up with someone who behaves well in time of trouble, give it to him with my compliments.”

I dropped off the bus and turned into a country road. So it came about that Cathleen and I parted for the first time.

The hardest decision of my life was to leave the bus at Tang. The temptation to head a campaign against Houseman seemed almost irresistible. Cathleen would have joined me because of her consuming desire to avenge Michael’s death. I had Colquhoun’s notebook. With its help it might have been possible to organize some reliable nucleus, after which I didn’t think the outwitting of Houseman would have been an excessively awkward job.

It is difficult to analyze the reasons why I didn’t do so. Certainly they had no connection at all with Parsonage’s warnings and wishes. His organization creaked and groaned so badly that my awe of him, if it ever existed at all, had blown away with the west wind. At the time I believed it was I.C.E. that swayed the balance. I was beginning to realize that I.C.E. must simply be toying with its opponents, and must be having a good laugh at them in the bargain. So it seemed quite futile to build up an organization that in its very nature was defeated from the start. Why not attack the problem right at its source? This, I say, was the reason I gave to myself. Looking back, I realize now that pique may have had something to do with it.

My plan was very simple, which seemed a good recommendation at the time. But I was soon to learn that it is possible to be too simple, both in plan and in mind. My route lay pretty well along two sides of a right-angled triangle, first a walk of about 120 miles to the south beyond Tipperary, then a drive to the west along much higher ground. There would be no stopping at farms and cottages during this last push, which would carry through from the region between Mallow and Cork, over the highest mountains of Ireland, right into the central peninsula of Kerry. I aimed to make the last eighty miles in two or three forced marches, if necessary during night hours.

One of my first acts, a rite, was to burn the notebook. I had a fair portion of it stored away in my head, so there seemed to be no point in continuing to carry around such a dangerous document. Perhaps I should have handed it to Cathleen, but I thought probably not. As I watched the pages turn to ashes, I felt that at long last I was freed from my embarrassing connections. Once again, an error.

During the week that followed, I had a greater ease of mind than at any later time, right up to the end of the whole business. I moved with the sun, lying out in grassy meadows reading my books, sheltering from the rain. I slept well at night on hard beds, and sometimes on the harder ground. This was a gentle country I was walking in, without any suggestion of the wider horizons of moor and mountain, of sea and storm that lay no great distance away on my right hand.