The City of Strangers (50 page)

His move to Special Branch wouldn’t be something his father liked either. Years ago David Gillespie had worked in Dublin Castle too, as an inspector in the Dublin Metropolitan Police. He had left because staying would have meant deciding who to inform on. Either he would have had to inform on men he knew were secretly working for the IRA, to British Intelligence in the Castle, or he would have been expected to hand the names of British Intelligence and Special Branch officers to the IRA. As he saw it he had to choose between joining one side and maybe getting shot by the other, or pretending he could really stay out of it and possibly get shot by both sides. He had never believed that spying on your neighbours had anything to do with being a policeman and however Stefan might rationalise what he would be doing, to himself, he would be spying on his countrymen.

The dark corridors of Dublin Castle had left a mark on David Gillespie that had never quite washed off. He wouldn’t approve of what his son was about to do.

When he came into the kitchen Stefan could see that his mother had already been crying. And he knew why. She had a family in Germany still, however little contact there was now. They felt closer, inevitably, at this moment. He had felt it himself, walking past St Patrick’s Cathedral on his way to Kingsbridge, remembering when he had been chosen to sing a verse of ‘Silent Night’ in German one Christmas Eve, while he had been in the choir there as a boy, because of his good German and his family ties. He had cousins he hadn’t seen since his teens who would soon be fighting. And he knew other people who would soon be fighting too. There would be tens of thousands of Irishmen ready to fight for Britain, not because they were British but because they were Irish; he knew men in Baltinglass who would be going, quietly, slipping away, barely telling their friends. Everyone knew it but no one said it.

There was already a lot going on in the farmhouse under Kilranelagh, most of it unspoken yet too. Tom felt the uncertain mood. His first concerns were for his friends in England and for Valerie Lessingham.

‘Will people be bombed in Sussex, Daddy?’

‘I’m sure they won’t. They’re in the country, aren’t they?’

But people would be bombed; the adults knew it would be about that.

‘Harry Lawlor’s dad said the Germans are bound to win.’

‘I don’t know, Tom. I don’t suppose it’ll be that easy –’

Tom looked round uncertainly, almost guiltily at his grandmother.

‘I’m sorry, Oma, I’m not sure I want the Germans to win.’

‘Oh Tom, that’s not how it is.’ She walked over and put her arm round him. ‘I don’t want anybody to win. I don’t want a war at all. Nobody does.’

‘Doesn’t Hitler?’ asked Tom.

‘We don’t, Tom, remember that.’ Helena was fighting back tears.

‘But aren’t we German as well, a bit I mean?’

‘Let’s make do with being Irish, Tom. God knows that’s hard enough.’

It was David who spoke, smiling as he did. And they all tried to smile, as if a few easy words put an end to the real questions hanging over them. But then Tom suddenly left the conversation, and all the awkwardness and concern in his grandparents’ and his father’s minds. He sat down at the table, absorbed in the comic his father had bought him at Kingsbridge Station earlier,
The Magnet
.

‘How do you say this, Daddy?’

Stefan looked over Tom’s shoulder. ‘Mapledurham.’

His son read on and for a few seconds Stefan followed the words below the picture of a fat schoolboy falling into a river. ‘Nobody was in a hurry. Past Reading, and getting on towards Mapledurham, the surroundings were beautiful, especially on a gorgeous August day. The Famous Five of Greyfriars found life worth living. “What about a walk?” asked Bunter. They looked in astonishment. Not once since that holiday on the Thames had started had Billy Bunter wanted a walk!’

As he turned away Tom started to chuckle, and by the time Stefan and his father went out to bring in the cows for evening milking, he was laughing aloud.

When the cows had been milked that evening Stefan Gillespie walked up to Kilranelagh Cemetery and Maeve’s grave. It wasn’t somewhere he went so often now. Needs changed and there was no sense that she was there in the almost physical sense that she had been in the first years after her death. He didn’t go to talk to her in the way he did then, and as Tom still did, but when something important happened he went up on to the hillside of tussocky grass and tumbled stones that was the graveyard. At times, as you walked along the slopes of Kilranelagh, it was hard to know where the cemetery ended and the broken walls of ancient fields began; it was the same scruffy, windblown space. The graveyard had no neatness or order about it, and Stefan still liked that, as Maeve had once liked it too; it tried to make no sense of death. He put some late roses from his mother’s garden on the flat grave stone that simply bore his dead wife’s name, and he thought for a moment, not of her, but of how Tom would cope with him not being there.

As he turned to walk home he noticed a smudge of white and brown at the side of the grave. He knew what it was immediately, in all the undergrowth around him. It was a lily, the rotting trumpet of a single, large arum lily. It had been placed on the grave several weeks earlier, since he had last been there, as a single arum lily had been placed every year at some point and left to rot there. The time of year changed. It could be March, June, September; once it had been Christmas; but it always happened.

At first he had assumed it was a neighbour, or a friend. People didn’t forget here, and that mattered. But as the years had gone on the regular arrival of the lily had begun to trouble him. He had asked eventually whether a neighbour or a friend left a lily there each year; or a relative who came by only occasionally. But no one knew anything. He wasn’t really sure why it had started to trouble him. It was an act of remembrance; that was all. But he felt there was a determination in the anonymity of that act, and a strange claim to intimacy that he knew nothing about; not only to an intimacy with Maeve, but somehow with him too.

It was as if there was someone else who shared his grief, who stood outside and yet was there, once a year, every year. He picked up the slimy remains of the trumpet as he walked off. He didn’t know why but he didn’t like it being there. He felt as if in that empty place, that had for so long been entirely his and Maeve’s and Tom’s, he was being watched in some way. He dropped the thing suddenly and laughed at himself. Clearly going to work in the Special Branch was having its effect.

As Stefan walked back into the farmyard there was a car he didn’t know. It was a black Ford Prefect. Helena rushed out of the kitchen as he stood looking at it, with his father ambling behind and a wry smile on his face.

‘For goodness sake, why didn’t you say something?’

He had no idea what she was talking about.

‘We’ve nothing in! I was there in an apron and slippers!’

‘It’s true,’ grinned David, ‘apron and slippers!’

‘Who is she?’ demanded Helena.

‘Who’s who?’

‘Maybe there are lots of them, Helena, we should give him a clue –’

‘David!’

‘She’s called Kate,’ explained his father.

‘Oh,’ said Stefan, pleasantly surprised.

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ continued his mother.

‘I suppose I didn’t really know there was anything to tell.’

‘Then you don’t know much! God save us!’

Helena turned and stalked back into the house.

‘I don’t know what she’ll think of us!’

As the kitchen door slammed David Gillespie shrugged.

‘Tom’s taken her to see some lambs. He doesn’t seem flustered at all.’

*

When he reached the Moatamoy field he couldn’t see Kate or Tom. He stood looking down at the stolid, barely moving ewes and the furiously energetic lambs chasing round them. He looked across towards the wooded mound that was the Norman motte on the far side of the field. He looked up, beyond it, to the pyramid point of Baltinglass Hill in the distance. Then he heard Tom’s laughter.

He clambered over the fence and walked down the slope of the field towards the motte. He saw Kate and Tom emerging from a dip where the field stopped and the land plunged down into the steep, scrubby valley below the mound. They were deep in conversation and they didn’t notice him until he had almost reached them. Kate smiled broadly then.

‘I was just learning about Huckleberry Finn’s drunken Pap.’

‘Any resemblance is purely coincidental.’

‘That’s some good news then, Stefan.’

‘Kate came to see you, Daddy. She knows all about Tom Sawyer.’

‘I certainly do now,’ she grinned.

They felt the rain that had suddenly started.

‘I think we’d better get back,’ said Stefan.

‘Oma’s making something special for tea!’ enthused Tom.

‘I didn’t want anyone to go to any –’

‘That’s not how it works,’ Stefan replied. ‘Surely you know that?’

They walked towards the gate, ewes and lambs parting ahead of them as Tom led the way, sweeping the stick he was holding in front of him, talking to himself, engaged in a game that Stefan and Kate could have no idea whether they were a part of or not. The rain was falling more heavily.

‘I think I was a bit of a shock to your mother,’ said Kate.

‘Worse than that, I’m afraid. A relief!’

She laughed. He found himself watching her doing it.

There was a roll of thunder; the rain poured down now.

‘Isn’t this a lovely day to be caught in the –’

‘No it isn’t! Run!’ he shouted.

‘I don’t mind at all!’

She stood in the rain and let it wash down her face.

He snatched her hand and started to pull her across the field.

‘We’ll be soaked!’

‘I’m already soaked!’ she shouted.

As they reached Tom, who had abandoned his game and was now running too, Stefan grabbed him with his other hand. The three of them ran on through the sheeting rain together, drenched to the skin, running and laughing, and getting wetter and wetter. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, but they kept on running, and laughing, all the way back to the farm.

It was the First Sunday in Advent and the winter’s first snow was falling lightly on north Detroit and Lake Saint Clair. In Royal Oak the tower that marked the Shrine of the Little Flower didn’t so much look up to the grey heavens as it broke out of the surrounding suburban streets like a fist; ancient limestone that was as raw as new concrete. Despite its height it was squat; despite its sacred heart it was belligerent; it spoke a faith that was solid, impenetrable, immovable. It was a testament to certainty, not to the quiet hope of a night in Bethlehem. On the other side of the Atlantic another cross, broken and crooked, could have replaced the square-cut, crucified Christ facing out from the tower and it would not have looked out of place; the superhuman muscles of Soviet Labour would have sat comfortably there too.

Seán Russell didn’t much like the place. He bowed his head as Father Charles Coughlin raised the host before the packed church and throughout the Mass he felt the electricity of the faith that was all around him, but unlike most of the Radio Priest’s congregation, including Dominic Carroll who sat beside him, he listened with irritation rather than enthusiasm to the homily.

It wasn’t that he disagreed with the venom Father Coughlin brought to bear on the evils of British imperialism; the thieves of Africa, the thieves of India, the warmongers and the wasters of the earth. It wasn’t that he objected to the priest’s half-hearted criticism of Adolf Hitler; the blame for war lay heaviest where it always had, on English greed, English capitalism, English deceit. It wasn’t that he couldn’t join wholeheartedly in the Radio Priest’s prayer that above all else America was not dragged into Britain’s war. But if democracy was a sham he had no great conviction that fascism, or anything else that was on offer, wasn’t a sham as well. He had no time for politics and he despised politicians, even the Republican politicians of his own movement. They were the ones, after all, whose arguments and petty squabbles had broken the IRA into fragments and factions and left it weak and ineffective in the face of the Irish Free State’s half-arsed democracy.

He was a soldier. His only purpose was to remove the stench of England from the island of Ireland; not only from the occupied six counties of Ulster but from every corner of the still-infested Free State that Éamon de Valera now wanted to call a republic. When Ireland was free, how the people of Ireland chose to govern themselves was their business. The IRA was there to give them the right to choose, no more than that. Priests had a lot in common with soldiers, true soldiers; to serve your country and to serve God required the same kind of self-sacrifice, the same kind of purity of intention. It wasn’t a priest’s job to spout politics and Seán Russell didn’t much like the air of self-importance that came off America’s most famous priest.

However, Father Charles Coughlin was important, not only because of his love of Ireland and his hatred of England, but because he, more than almost anyone else, really did speak for the tens of millions of Americans who demanded neutrality. And as everyone knew, without America Britain’s war was lost before it started. So at the end of the Mass, when Robert Monteith introduced him to Father Coughlin at the doors of the Shrine of the Little Flower, the IRA chief of staff shook the priest’s hand with all the appropriate reverence and respect.

Seán Russell had been staying with Monteith in Royal Oak for a week. It was time to move. He was on the run now. His visa had expired and if he was picked up he risked extradition, to Ireland or even to Britain.

However the reality was that the FBI wasn’t looking for him very hard, and in the cities that gave him the sea of Irish America to swim in, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, there would be no police forces scouring the streets for him. If his presence was an embarrassment to the government in Washington, arresting him would be a bigger one still. Irish-American politicians wouldn’t let him be extradited to England to face trial over the bombing campaign, nor would they have him sent back to Ireland where he would be locked up for the duration of the war Ireland had no part in, as an enemy of the state, without even a trial. On the other hand the British wouldn’t stomach him leaving the country to go wherever he wanted, only to end up in Berlin, where the alliance between the IRA and Germany was now his sure and certain hope for the achievement of Irish freedom.