Shamrock Green (51 page)

She took the bundle into the hall, sorted out three or four addressed to other tenants and put them carefully on the scarred table that lurked under the staircase. She glanced at the great wad of letters that remained, surprised and intrigued by their uniformity:
War Department. War Department. War Department
– fourteen in all, each franked with an identical postmark, each addressed in the same cramped script.

She ran into the apartment where Sean, strapped into his baby-chair, was determinedly gnawing on a bone ring that Maeve had bought for him. He looked up when his mother entered, his dark brown eyes round and his mouth crimped into a little questioning O as if he sensed her excitement and didn't approve. She swept away the breakfast dishes and shouted for Maeve who had gone out to the water closet in the back with the chamberpot and who, still sleepy and grumpy, stumbled back into the room, scowling.

‘What?'

‘Letters,' said Sylvie. ‘Look, dearest, lots of letters.'

‘Open the blessed things then,' Maeve said and, kicking the empty pot back under the bed, sat down and reached for a knife.

It was all very ordered and correct, all completely crazy. Some clerk in some gloomy office had carefully post-dated fourteen postal orders, had signed and stamped them and put them in separate buff-coloured envelopes, had addressed the fourteen separate envelopes and fed them into the postbag, presumably one at a time. Fourteen payments; fourteen weeks since Gowry had been reported missing; fourteen weeks during which time he had all but dwindled out of existence. Fourteen times three shillings and sixpence came to forty-nine shillings which was not a very great deal but might be a lifesaver if work proved difficult to find or if some kind, caring man didn't come along soon.

Sylvie was so stunned at first that she didn't realise the significance of the fourteen hand-printed envelopes and fourteen three-and-sixpenny postal orders. Then Maeve raised her hands, spread like an angel conferring a blessing, and shouted, ‘He's alive. Daddy's alive.'

Sylvie sat down. ‘No,' she said. ‘How do you know?'

‘Look,' said Maeve, chattering with excitement, ‘it's back pay. It's all back pay. Fourteen weeks of back pay. He never was dead, never was missing. They just lost his pay book or whatever they call it an' now they've found it they're coughing out what's due as if nothin' had ever happened. No letter of apology, just fourteen weeks of soldier's pay right up to…'

‘Last week,' said Sylvie.

Maeve rose, a lark ascending, plucked up her half-brother, baby-chair and all, and whirled around the room with him.

‘Daddy's alive, Daddy's comin' home. Daddy's comin' home. Ay-hay, ay-hay, ay-hay,' she chanted while Sean, deprived of his bone ring, bellowed in frustration and alarm.

*   *   *

The clear tonic sunshine of autumn had begun to dim and thicken into the first misty days of winter and the leaves, which should have gone out in a blaze of glory, had withered to a lifeless brown. Though he stood for hours at the fence on the breast of the hill above the Usk staring across the river valley, Gowry had never watched the changing seasons with such disinterest and if it hadn't been for the teeth, might have sunk irredeemably into melancholy and despair.

The teeth gave him more trouble than the hand. The hand – or, rather, the lack of it – was something he could almost put out of mind. It bothered him only on those occasions when some stupid little chore had to be done, like buttons, bootlaces, buttering bread or opening a letter or a tin.

For the most part he kept the hand buried in his pocket, itching, scabrous and leaking a little serous fluid into a light gauze dressing.

Easy to ignore the hand, the stump that the surgeons were so proud of and the thumb that stuck up in a permanently cheerful gesture. He couldn't ignore the teeth, though, not even when the wire was removed from his jaw. The teeth, like his fingers, were no more; gone, vamoosed, left behind with a million other grisly trophies that would surface one day in the wheat fields of France.

All that would have been fine with Gowry, just dandy, for, much of the time, he felt that all that was left were the missing fingers and teeth, that the rest of him just wasn't there at all; until, that is, they came to make him presentable again and began fiddling with plaster casts and moulds and to their satisfaction, not his, stuffed his mouth with vulcanite and porcelain, a great ugly wedge of vulcanite that thrust his upper lip into his broken nose and trapped every grain and seed that entered his mouth.

The nagging, salivating discomfort of false teeth constantly reminded him that he had survived and that Becky had not, that Becky had left him behind.

The letter from Father Coyle offered little comfort, the letter from Angela even less. It had taken five weeks for the letters to catch up with him. He had been in a bad way before the letters arrived and in a worse way afterwards. He hadn't shed tears, though, not even when he learned that Rebecca was dead. She had died on a hospital train somewhere along the line that led to the coast. She had been ill for months, so the padre informed him, and had died with Gowry's name on her lips. How the padre had obtained that information Gowry had no idea, given that the padre had been with him in the field near Trônes Wood at the time or, to be absolutely accurate, had been zigzagging away into the strange half-light of a sunny September afternoon.

He liked to believe – the one fallacy he allowed himself – that Becky had passed on at exactly the same moment that he had passed out and that in the ether above the battlefield, a little to the north of Guillemont, his soul and hers had crossed for an instant, spinning and spiralling like those damned little aeroplanes in a blue and empty infinity.

Father Coyle was resting in a Catholic hospital in Antrim. He had a broken arm, a clean break apparently, clean as a whistle. He hoped to be back ‘in service' in four to six weeks. Father Coyle did not offer to visit him and Gowry was thankful for that. He wanted nothing to do with the father or what the father offered, wanted none of what Angela offered either: that smooth, plump, chimerical creature who had shared more of her life with Becky than he had done and whose expressions of sympathy were so cloying that they almost made him sick.

He replied to neither the padre nor the nurse, though by then he had learned how to press the upright thumb on to a slippery sheet of notepaper and write with his good hand. It was, the nurses said, quite an achievement. They were very keen on achievements, the staff at Maidenhall, praising every small triumph of dexterity and every small triumph of the will. They wanted him to will himself well again, to pretend that he was as good as new, that the skill with which they had patched him up was reward enough for what he had gone through and what he was going through now.

It would have been a calm and healing time in the South Wales military hospital if it hadn't been for the vulcanite and porcelain plate that rubbed his gums raw and made his upper lip so stiff that his nose hurt and his eyes watered.

The nurses thought he was crying. He wasn't crying. He had deliberately chosen grief over nothingness and, like many another survivor, daily rehearsed the terrible explosive patience that was necessary to put up with all the fussing and busyness with which the doctors, nurses and welfare organisations insisted on filling his days.

They drove him out with other walking wounded to visit Tintern Abbey and Monmouth Castle, to concerts in Newport and, once, to a Chaplin film in a picture house in Cardiff. Every evening there was a brass band to listen to or a singsong or a male voice choir. He went on excursions and sat through concerts without complaint, complying with the rules of recuperation as he had complied with the rules of war, except that there was no meekness in him now, only a soft suffusion of anger as he came to realise what he had really lost.

Only when he leaned on the fence at the foot of the lawn and looked out on the Vale of the Usk in the winter-coming gloom was he forced to acknowledge his true situation. He was an Irishman who had loved a Scots girl, imprisoned in Wales and attended for the most part by the English – the blessedly efficient English – in a unity of nations that reeked, that stank of irony.

It was not yet four o'clock, but dusk was already sifting down as he walked back up the slope to the conservatory where the wheelchairs were and the legless practised hopping among the potted palms. Lights glimmered wanly in the wards and he had no sense of what was to come, no warning. He let himself in by the side door. He could smell cabbage and the burnt-toast odour that the tea urns gave off. He was on his way into the dining-hall to draw a cup of tea when he first caught sight of his mother.

She was seated on a bench in the corridor that led to the hall. At first he thought he was seeing things, that grief had finally affected his brain but as he walked towards her and saw her steely little eyes fixed upon him he realised that she had come to berate him and he felt much as he had done when the ambulance had turned over and buried its snout in the earth.

‘What's this you've been doing to yourself?' Kay McCulloch said. ‘Are those supposed to be teeth? I've seen better teeth on a horse.'

‘Who let you in, Ma?' Gowry said. ‘There's no visiting today.'

‘I happened to be in the neighbourhood.'

‘In the neighbourhood – in Wales?'

‘I was up seeing your brothers.'

‘Where are they?'

‘Frongoch.'

‘Where the hell is that?'

‘Merioneth.'

‘That's miles away, miles an' miles away.'

‘I know. I can't stay long.'

He stood before her, sheepish and unaccountably ashamed. It had been weeks since he had spared a thought for his family. He had been preoccupied with Becky and the shattered dreams of what might have been, of a future no longer linked to the past. He had thought of Sylvie, of Maeve, of the time just before the war, but that other period in his life, his time in Glasgow, seemed like someone else's story, not his.

He looked around, found a chair and pulled it up to the bench.

He seated himself before her, the stump tucked into his lap.

‘What are they doing in Frog – Frongoch?'

‘Haven't you heard?' his mother said. ‘Frongoch's an internment camp for Irish prisoners. Didn't you get my letter?'

‘Aye, I got your letter.'

‘They were in Stafford jail for a while but then they were moved to this camp in Wales.' She laughed drily. ‘They're billeted in an old distillery.'

‘That'll suit Charlie.'

‘Eighteen hundred of them locked up there, out in the wilderness at the back of beyond. Peter's not well.'

‘Is that why you were allowed to visit?'

‘Forbes pulled a few strings,' his mother said. ‘Are you well?'

‘Well enough,' said Gowry. ‘Better than I look, I suppose.'

‘Will they send you back to the front?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

He held up his hand, thumb cocked.

She stared at it. ‘Well, that's your driving days over and done.'

He had almost forgotten that the same forceful molecules that had made her family so successful in the shipbuilding business thickened his mother's blood too. He remembered his grandfather's huge house high above the park and his brother Forbes's mansion in Brunswick Crescent and thought how he might have become rich and respected and spared the grief that had come upon him. But he wouldn't have chosen another path even if it had been possible, for if he'd stayed in Glasgow he wouldn't have known Becky.

‘What are you going to do with yourself, Gowry?'

‘I haven't decided yet.'

‘The Shamrock's gone. The British blew it up.'

He felt nothing, not surprise, not regret.

‘The man's dead, her fancy man.'

‘Is he?' said Gowry.

‘Shot during the Rising, murdered in cold blood – so they say.'

‘Did you ever meet him?'

‘Thank God I did not.'

‘Tell me about Peter,' Gowry said. ‘How sick is he?'

‘The wound he got in the fighting won't heal properly. It's not right for him to be in that dismal camp, not with winter coming on. Fortunately he's got Charlie to look after him, and the Trotter boy.'

‘How long did you stay in Frongoch?'

‘An hour.'

‘It's a long way from Dublin to North Wales for a short visit.'

‘I didn't sail over from Dublin. I came down from Glasgow by train.'

‘Ah!' Gowry said.

He could hear the clink of teacups and the cheerful cries of the nursing staff. The dining-room would be crowded, for food and drink offered comfort. He would have settled for a parboiled tin of bully beef if he could have his own teeth to eat it with.

Conscious of his mother's stare, he put his hand to his mouth.

‘Are they going to be leavin' it like that?' she asked.

‘Yes.'

‘What a mess.'

‘Ain't it, though?' said Gowry.

‘You haven't asked about her yet.'

‘How is she? Maeve, I mean. She must be nearly grown up.'

‘They all thought you were dead.'

‘What?'

‘We all thought you were dead.'

‘I'm not dead. You can see I'm not dead.'

‘Word came through that you were. Missing believed killed.'

‘Oh, for Christ's sake!' Gowry said. ‘That's ridiculous.'

His mother had changed not at all, not in appearance or character. She had never been a typical tradesman's wife, of course. She had always had a certain style, a certain class. She had her Franklin upbringing to thank for that. And she had Forbes to look after her, Forbes, her darling son. Come to think of it, his grandfather had been Welsh. Gowry had all but forgotten that the old man, old Owen, had been born in Wales and had learned his trade in a Cardiff foundry. Now, two generations later, he, Gowry, had returned to within sniffing distance of Cardiff's docks and blistered chimneys; another grim irony, he thought, to add to his collection.