Shamrock Green (50 page)

‘Which way, Padre?'

‘To the left, I think. Yes, there's the village. The wood must be—'

A mortar bomb exploded. Earth rained down on the cab. The vehicle canted up on two wheels, hung there for a moment then fell back with a bone-jarring crash. Gowry pressed on through the curtain of debris, though he was dazed by the explosion. He could no longer hear the colonel cursing and wondered if the old boy had lost his grip. He glanced behind him and drove carelessly over corpses – he hoped they were corpses – and a litter of the stuff that polluted every battlefield. He spotted a bridge, not the bridge he'd spotted through the periscope but another just like it: four planks across a drainage ditch with three or four dead Germans draped on the verge. At least Gowry supposed they were dead until one of them reared up and started shooting.

The windscreen shattered.

Gowry punched out the glass that remained in the frame and there was glass everywhere, glass in his lap, glass on his bare arms, glass clinging to his shirt. He knew he was bleeding and had a terrible, shocking pain, but he didn't know where. He fought the wheel one-handed, trying not to pass out. He swerved broadside to the Jerries and swung away in an accelerating arc. He could no longer see the approach road, couldn't see much of anything. A grenade went off, lifting the back of the Ford like a kick from a mule.

The padre reappeared.

‘All you all right?' he said. ‘Look, you've been hit.'

‘Never mind me,' said Gowry. ‘What about him back there?'

‘I fear he'll lose the leg, whatever happens.'

‘Is he still with us, though?'

‘Of course I'm still bloody with you,' came the colonel's shout. ‘I've been through worse than this with better men than you, Sperryhead. Stop bloody dithering and get me to a quack.'

Gowry said, low-voiced. ‘Have you given him last rites?'

‘He refused to accept them,' the padre answered.

Gowry said, ‘I went to mass, Father. I made a confession and took the sacrament. Was it wrong of me to do that?'

‘Did it give you comfort?'

‘Aye, it did.'

‘Did you go to mass in Amiens with your young lady?'

‘How do you know about Amiens?'

‘It's a very nice town,' the padre said. ‘Beautiful cathedral.'

‘That's not what I meant, Father. Did Becky tell you—'

‘What have you done to your hand?'

‘What?'

He had driven the last fifty or sixty yards without conscious thought. When he glanced down he saw what the padre meant. His left hand had been reduced to a mess of bloody tissue by the bullet that had splintered the windscreen. He tried to clench his fingers. Couldn't. When he tried to clench them again pain leaped up the length of his arm, searing every sinew and muscle. He would have screamed if the padre hadn't been with him. He moved the hand to the gearstick and tried to grasp it. Couldn't. Looking up, he saw a horse and gun carriage directly in front of the wheels. Tried to swerve. Couldn't. The front wheels lifted and the lizzie tilted. He wrapped his good arm around the wheel and leaned against the sway. The horse, all swollen up, was coated with black flies. They rose from the carcass and flew in a buzzing cloud into the cab.

Gowry thrashed from side to side to keep the flies out of his mouth. The ambulance bucked and somersaulted. He shot forward, smashing his nose and mouth on the steering wheel. The padre came over the top of him and they thudded against the roof of the cab and hung there together, upside down.

Bleeding from nose and mouth, Gowry tried to focus.

The padre's eyes were open. One arm was looped behind his neck and his legs were folded up to his chest. Gowry politely turned his head and spat out blood. He thought: if this sort of thing goes on much longer I won't have any face left. He spat again and probed the jagged edges of broken teeth with his tongue.

He rotated his neck and peered at the priest.

‘Pah … pah…'

‘I think,' the father said, ‘I can just about reach the door.'

‘Pah…'

Cheek by jowl with Father Coyle, belly pressed against the father's buttocks, all he could feel was embarrassment.

‘Soh … soh-ly,' Gowry said.

‘No, I really can reach the door,' said the father.

Gowry's nose and mouth were filling with blood. He couldn't spit it out, couldn't spit on a man of the cloth. He had always been fastidious. Charlie used to jeer at him for being so fastidious. He had been fastidious with Sylvie, even more so with Becky. He had been gentle with Becky, more so than he had ever been with Sylvie. He wondered where Becky had got to. He should have asked Father Coyle while he'd had the chance. He thought: imagine Father Coyle knowing about Amiens. There was something spooky about Father Coyle knowing about Amiens. He wondered if you could drown in your own blood and if he was injured badly enough to be sent back to Saint-Emile.

Cheered by the prospect, he eased himself away from the clergyman and gave the priest room to wriggle out of the cab.

The vehicle shifted, tilting again. He wondered where Becky was right now and, come to think of it, where he was. How far were they from the clearing hospital? Had they left Jerry behind? Were they safe?

Still pondering these difficult questions, Gowry passed out.

*   *   *

He opened his eyes. Father Coyle was pouring water on his face and wiping it with a handkerchief. The handkerchief was pure white and spotless. Gowry stared upward. Sky above him. Two little aeroplanes flying round and round, like a dance, a mating dance. He puffed out his cheeks and blew and saw that the planes weren't planes after all but flies, filthy black flies. He tried to speak. Couldn't. The shape of his nose, a huge nose, marred the view.

Father Coyle trickled water into his mouth. He swallowed blood.

‘I'm afraid we've lost the colonel.'

‘Lho … lho…'

‘He's dead. I'm sure he's dead. I think the tumble broke his neck.' The padre seemed calmer now, not at all scared or sheepish. His cheeks were ruddy as if he'd been slapped. He tucked away the little glass water bottle and sat back on his heels. One arm trailed behind him like a broken wing; otherwise he seemed to be intact. ‘I can see the road. It isn't far. I don't think the Germans are in this sector. I do hope not. I'll have to fetch someone to take care of you.'

Gowry tried to hoist himself into a sitting position. He was eight or ten yards from the upturned ambulance, lying on dry yellowish earth. Through a little forest of wheat stubble he stared at the horizon and its wreath of smoke.

‘I think I'd better head for the road. I'm really not sure about the wood.' The priest leaned over him. ‘Don't try to move. I'll bring help.'

He wetted his fingers, touched them to Gowry's forehead and made the sign of the Cross. Then he sat back and rolled away.

Gowry lay on his side. He felt broken beyond repair. Saint-Emile would be the best place for him, yes. He would tell them: send me to Saint-Emile, to Becky. Yes, my lovely Becky will take good care of me.

He watched the padre darting across the plain, an ardent little figure, full of tadpole energy, darting and flickering through the strange afternoon half-light. He watched the priest become smaller and smaller, then vanish altogether.

He looked up at the sky, blue and infinite, at the two flimsy little aeroplanes dancing among the clouds.

‘Becky?' he said. ‘Rebecca?'

There was no answer save the distant mutter of the guns.

Chapter Twenty-five

The wedding in Wexford had been a whiz-bang affair that had lasted the best part of a week and it wasn't the drink that had dragged Sylvie down – she was after all a nursing mother – so much as the unremitting jollity. Eventually even Maeve had wearied and on the train back to Dublin all three McCullochs, including Sean, had slept. Meeting the Trotters explained where Turk got his energy, for all the family members were massive in size, hearty in appetite and filled with inexhaustible enthusiasm. It seemed to Sylvie that they had discovered a means of cramming forty hours into each day and ten days into each week, for, in the midst of all the drinking, eating and singing work had gone on uninterrupted, a round of cattle purchase, cattle shifting and selling, each transaction settled with a spit and a handshake and a glass.

If she'd been concerned that Pappy and Mammy Trotter would be leery of Breen's bride and her fatherless children then all her fears were put to rest. There was no scarcity of cash and no scarcity of affection and the children, even Algie, were welcomed as ambassadors for the spirit of goodwill that prevailed in the farmhouse out on the Crossabeg Road.

The wedding itself was held in the new church near the Abbey of St Sepulchre. Pauline looked lovely in a bridal gown of corn-coloured silk that one of Breen's sisters had worn some years before and which, after a lot of work with needle and thread, had been reduced to fit Pauline's trim figure. She was modestly veiled, of course, and had behind her a train of perfect little pages in spotless white shirts and well-sponged trousers and flower girls in almost-matching dresses. The moment had been very decent and solemn indeed, though the solemnity was reduced just a mite by Algie shouting out, ‘Mammy, I need to pee,' as Pauline came up the aisle from linking her name with Breen's in the parish register.

Afterwards, there had been speeches, some funny, some long-winded, toasts galore, toasts to groom and bride, to Mr Brendan Trotter, the father of the groom and father of the feast, and to all the brave men who were prominent by their absence, Turk number one among them. Even so, Sylvie felt sure that Pauline and her lost children would have a good life in Wexford, as safe as any life could be in the troubled times ahead.

On Friday morning Pauline accompanied the McCullochs to the railway station. Breen had gone off to do business in the glens and had taken the younger children with him in the back of the horse-van. She looked well, looked younger did Pauline. The innocent naïvety had gone from her eyes and the faint, startled anxiety too. She stood under the wooden archway out of the rain and took Sylvie's hand.

‘I've you to thank for this,' she said. ‘If you hadn't come to Endicott Street then Breen wouldn't have come lookin' for you an' wouldn't have fallen in love with me.'

‘Nonsense,' Sylvie said. ‘You owe me no thanks for anything, Pauline.'

‘Fran then,' the young woman said. ‘Perhaps it was Fran lookin' out for us all from above. He would do that, Fran would, if he could.'

‘Do you miss him?' Sylvie asked.

‘Aye, but not so much as all that. You?'

‘Yes.' Sylvie was relieved to see the train approaching. ‘I miss him.'

‘You'll get over it,' Pauline said.

But Sylvie was not so sure.

*   *   *

The tenement in Endicott Street had been ‘looked after' by two of Father Mack's parishioners while Sylvie was off at the Wexford wedding and if there had been any trouble in the house then those stalwart volunteers would surely have sorted it out. They had also collected the weekly rents, for Father Macken's superiors hadn't yet decided what was to be done with the tenement and in the muddled way of administrators, even Church administrators, did nothing at all. Little had changed, except that profits were now divided between John James Flanagan and Father Macken's church restoration fund.

Sylvie, Maeve and Sean exchanged Fran's tiny room for Pauline's ground-floor apartment, which, in their absence, had been cleaned and repapered by the stalwart caretakers. The rent was modest but Sylvie had spent much more than she anticipated during the past few months and returned from Wexford more worried about money than anything else.

She tried to convince herself that it would only be a matter of time before some good honest man came along, and waited eagerly for the arrival of a tenant for Fran's room in the hope that some miracle of love at first sight might happen to her as it had happened to Pauline. The room, however, was let to another dour bachelor old enough to be her father. He gave her barely a second glance and, like so many of his generation, seemed more interested in drinking than courting and spent most of his evenings at the bar in McKinstry's.

Nine days after her return from Wexford, though, a miracle did occur.

Sylvie had written to her mother-in-law at Brunswick Crescent in Glasgow where Forbes and his family lived. She had written to Kay McCulloch not because she wanted anything – not yet – but because she had learned that burning your bridges wasn't a good idea and because … well, because she missed Gowry and regretted that she had let him down. She was awaiting a letter from Glasgow, then, and perhaps a letter from the Red Cross or Widows' Welfare, though she had virtually given up hope of hearing anything from any of the aid organisations. She had all but reconciled herself to the fact of her husband's death but, late at night, when Maeve was asleep, she would fish out the letter from the War Information Office and read it again and again, as if it offered the possibility of multiple interpretations instead of that one irrefutable sentence:
I am afraid, however, that there is little room for hope that your husband is alive.

She was out on the steps in the autumn chill waiting for the postman when it came to her that something beneficial was about to happen. It was as if there were an aura in the street, a wave of light sweeping down from the railway and the canal, like sunlight peeping under cloud: absolutely no accounting for it, for she, unlike Pauline, had never been superstitious and there were no wise women hanging from her family tree and if there had been her father, an engineer, would surely have cut them down.

Even so there was a feeling within her that something unexpected was about to happen when she stepped down on to the pavement to receive the bundle of letters that the postman, with a rueful shrug, handed her.