The City of Shadows (28 page)

‘You're a long way from home.'

‘Are you Father Byrne?'

There was an intensity in the way she was looking at him that made him very uncomfortable almost straight away. But he smiled pleasantly.

‘I am. Is it a holiday then?'

‘I came to see you.' There was no lightness in her voice. He didn't know what to make of her. It was as if there was an accusation in her eyes.

‘Well, I'm glad you did. I just wondered why you were in Danzig.'

‘I was a friend of Susan Field's.' She spoke the words softly.

He looked at her with an expression of almost pained bewilderment. It was as if he had to think hard to understand what she meant before he could answer. Hannah said nothing. She just waited. The next words had to be his.

‘I'm sorry.' He seemed even older as he said the words.

It wasn't much. She could see he knew it wasn't enough.

‘I heard, of course. It's a terrible loss.'

Hannah's presence really was an accusation; she could see that he felt that. Her eyes didn't move from his. She could see how much he wanted to look away too. They stood there, looking at one another, for only a few seconds, but the priest seemed frozen. Something was happening behind his eyes, something painful was forcing itself into his head, from the dark corner where he had pushed it. But he said nothing.

‘I want to know why she's dead. You must know something!' She blurted out the words. ‘I want to know what happened to her.'

‘What
happened
.' He repeated her words slowly, not a question, not a statement, but as if they were in a language he didn't know very well.

‘Nine months ago she went to Merrion Square for an abortion –'

‘Please, I'm sure you know where you are!' he whispered, leaning in towards her, his eyes darting nervously now, as if he was being watched.

‘I do, and I know who
you
are.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I know you were the father of her child and I know you made the arrangements with the doctor, Mr Keller. Susan wrote to me about you.'

He was calmer now. He had never seen her before, but he had realised who she was. He didn't know her, yet he felt as if he did. He had heard too much about her from Susan not to. There was only one person she could be.

‘You're Hannah.'

‘Yes.'

‘You could only be Hannah.' There was a smile on his lips. It surprised her, not because it was a smile, but because it was tender. There was a memory, and somewhere, in a way she didn't understand, it mattered to him. As they walked out of the cathedral he put the sign he was carrying down on a table by the door. ‘Father Byrne Confessions in English.'

‘I know you've lied to the Guards, in your letter. They know that too.'

It wasn't quite the truth. The only policeman who knew was milking cows in West Wicklow. The priest didn't reply. His face was expressionless, but in his silence she could still feel his pain, even though she couldn't get hold of what it was. They were in the gardens now, among the linden trees and the close, neat box hedges in front of the Bishop's Palace. He had said hardly anything, but already he wasn't what she had expected. He was quieter. There was nothing about him that felt like the man Susan had described, talking endlessly, passionately, excitedly through a whole night as they walked the streets of Dublin. He finally spoke again, slowly at first.

‘I didn't know she was dead. It was only when the Gardaí contacted me that I found out. I didn't know what to think. It seemed hard to believe.'

‘But not very hard to lie, to pretend you hardly knew her.'

‘I'm not proud of that. But I couldn't change anything.'

‘And that makes it all right?'

He shook his head, looking down at the ground.

‘I'd already told lies. I didn't know how to undo those. There were a lot of things I couldn't face. I kept lying.'

She almost felt sorry for him as he looked up, but not for long.

‘You know where they found her?'

‘Yes.' He didn't want to think about that; it was in his voice.

‘He's left Ireland now, the man Keller, the doctor. He's been gone for months. They don't know where he is.' She wasn't asking questions now, simply stating the bleak, unhelpful facts to herself. ‘So no one can ask him. No one wanted to ask him though. People even helped him leave Ireland.'

As she watched Francis Byrne she could see something else in his face now; it looked like fear. It hadn't been there before; that was something else, more like self-pity. But suddenly he seemed oddly far away, as if what he was feeling had nothing to do with her or with anything she was saying.

‘I'm sorry,' he said again bleakly.

Hannah persisted, pulling him back to what mattered.

‘What happened the day she went for the abortion?'

‘I don't know. I wasn't with her.'

‘But you knew she was going?'

‘We hadn't seen each other for nearly a fortnight. I was about to leave Ireland to go to Germany. It's what we'd agreed. We both needed to start again. Once we knew it was over, Susan was the one who – she was very firm about what we had to do – even about – she said the end was the end.'

Hannah heard Susan's voice in those last words; that at least was true.

‘Didn't you try to find out if she was all right?'

‘We'd made our decision. It's what she wanted.'

‘You could have asked Mr Keller.'

‘Do you think I felt easy about dealing with a man like that?'

‘No, it must have been unpleasant for you, Father.'

‘That's not what I meant. Not at all.'

The self-pity was back. It was enough of what he meant.

‘I don't know what happened. I can't even begin to imagine – obviously something went wrong with the operation. I didn't have any idea.'

‘You did send her there. You paid for it. She told me.'

‘Yes. It was wrong. All of it.'

‘Perhaps it was God's judgement on her, is that it?' she snapped.

‘Do you think I didn't care about her?'

‘I don't know. I know she cared a great deal about you once.'

‘Look, Hannah, I don't know what she said about me.'

‘Why does that matter now?'

He didn't reply, but it did; it still mattered. She was uncomfortable with him. He felt unexpectedly a part of Susan, in a way that confused her. She didn't know what was true now. She didn't know if she believed any of it.

‘There was a time I did try to talk to Susan, about another way, about leaving the priesthood. It wasn't a long conversation. She said she didn't want me to do that. I think we weren't very good for each other really. She felt that more than I did at the end. We'd both made a mistake. Susan said she didn't want me to destroy my life for that. We went our separate ways.'

‘What about her life?'

‘If I hadn't cared about her life, do you think I'd have gone through with it? There was a child, a child we – it was what she wanted. I owed her that, even if the price was a sin.'

‘I don't care about your sins. I only care about my friend!' There were tears of anger in her eyes.

Her voice was softer suddenly, almost pleading.

‘There must be something else you can tell me!'

‘I did love her. I don't know what she felt about me. I never did.' It felt like the truth, but it was his truth, selfish, secret, self-absorbed.

Hannah wanted to turn on him and scream. She couldn't give a fuck about his feelings, but the words startled her. No, he never did know. She saw something she hadn't seen before, something she had never caught in Susan's letters. The words were in her head again and she could hear Susan's voice saying them; the words tumbling over each other as they did when she spoke. Susan had always used the word love too easily. There was attraction, friendship, fun; there was intellectual fire; there was the joy of a passionate secret; there was sex. She used to laugh at Hannah because she held on to the word love and kept it close, as if it was too precious to use. As Hannah looked at he priest now he seemed weaker, smaller. She wondered if he ever had been quite the man Susan wanted him to be, the man she wrote about when she first met him. Did he really know nothing? After all this time, was it just that he simply didn't know?

‘I need someone to tell me why my friend is dead,' Hannah said, her voice more measured again ‘You're the only person there is. Can't you understand?'

‘I don't know. I only know I wish she wasn't dead. I wish she wasn't.' He whispered the words over and over again, like a prayer. ‘I wish she wasn't.'

As he spoke, the first of the Angelus bells tolled. Father Francis Byrne crossed himself. It was as if he had put on a new face quite suddenly; the vulnerability was gone. He seemed stronger. She knew he would say no more now. He had told her enough of the truth for her to almost lose her way in it. But it still wasn't the whole truth. She knew that. She shook her head.

‘I won't let her be forgotten. I won't stop!'

She spoke quietly, fixing his gaze as she had when she first saw him in the cathedral. Then she turned away, walking faster and faster. The sound of the Angelus bell filled her head. Perhaps it had stopped, but as she hurried out through the park, back towards the road, she could still hear it ringing.

Francis Byrne watched her walk away. He heard the bell too, in his own head. It was a daily sound of reassurance and faith in his life. Now it hurt. The strength Hannah had just seen in his eyes was an illusion. As he whispered the familiar words to himself they seemed less familiar, less comfortable, less reassuring, as if they no longer quite belonged on his lips. ‘Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae.' The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. ‘Et concepit de Spiritu Sanctu.' And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.

*

Hannah sat in the restaurant in Frauengasse for a long time that night. She wasn't hungry, but she didn't want to go back to her room at the Danziger Hof. She needed to do something. She felt a long way from the people she cared about, the people who cared about her. But she wasn't sure being with them would help. Her mother and father thought she was in England. That was a simple enough lie. Other lies weren't so easy. Her mother probably knew some of them, but she would never say anything. Sarah Rosen had always believed that life's difficulties would go away if only you spent long enough not talking about them. Hannah's father never spoke when things went wrong for different reasons; he didn't notice. She loved them; him for his fond blindness, her for her indefatigable hope in a natural law that said things got better if you left them alone and didn't pick at the bones. As a Jew it was an approach to life that set hope defiantly in the face of experience.

Hannah had always envied Susan's family its furious passions and even more furious arguments. In the Fields' house everyone talked about everything; every slight, every mood, every love, every hate. Sometimes it seemed as if the smaller the problem the more noise it generated, as the whole family, mother, father, grandparents, children, dissected and criticised each other's opinions and moods. They lurched from laughter to tears and back again with chaotic intensity; they were rude, dismissive, sarcastic, intolerant and unforgiving, sometimes for as long as a whole afternoon. They told each other everything and if there were no secrets or conflicts or emotional disasters to be revealed, they'd make some up anyway. Hannah's house was, by contrast, a place of small gestures of fondness rather than fierce statements of love and despair. They never said exactly what they felt. And yet it had all changed for Susan. Her mother died, her sisters left Ireland, and after a while her father's voice was only heard in the synagogue. With all the open hearts that had surrounded her as a child, she found no one to talk to in the face of what became the last as well as the first real crisis of her adult life. Perhaps Hannah and Susan weren't so different. Or perhaps there were times you were alone, simply alone, and that was it. Hannah felt that now.

In Palestine Benny was waiting for her to come back. And it was back, not home. Whatever she sometimes wanted to believe, Ireland was still home. It had seemed like a good idea for her to spend these months in Europe. There was the money to collect and send on its circuitous way through Europe to Palestine, to buy arms for the Haganah. There was a system in place and no shortage of helping hands along the way. It wasn't dangerous. Hannah was a courier, no more than that. But she knew why Benny had pushed her forward. It gave her the chance to spend some time with her family in Ireland. He knew she needed to try to find out what had happened to Susan Field too. He wanted her to get it out of her system. Not just Susan. Ireland. He understood that she had to come to terms with her friend's death, but he didn't understand everything it had stirred up. Finding out about Susan was complicated. It was not only a reason to go home; it was also an excuse.

When she first left Ireland for Palestine, Hannah was determined she wouldn't live anywhere she was ill-at-ease. She had felt the darkness in Europe drawing in. She wanted Ireland to be immune from that but it wasn't. Yet Jewish Palestine hadn't become the place she wanted it to be. She was ill-at-ease there sometimes as well. She had poured her passion into it, and if that flagged she had Benny now; he had enough passion for both of them when it came to Israel. But it wasn't enough. She had left her home behind, with the full consciousness that she wanted to escape the kind of mild and unemotional ordinariness of her mother and father's marriage, yet she was going to marry a man she felt friendship and admiration for, rather than love and passion. All around them there were extraordinary things happening. And there was nothing ordinary about Benny Jacobson. Life was too important for ordinariness as far as he was concerned. They were creating a new Israel. But when the door closed on that, and they were alone, she wasn't sure she knew him. When they stopped talking breathlessly about the future of a nation, she wasn't sure they had anything else to talk about. Perhaps he had used up all his passion. He never argued with her; he never lost his temper. How could she tell her parents she was afraid of a life that was only distinguished from theirs by the sunshine?