The Matchmaker of Kenmare (11 page)

I sat in the rear of the jeep, and, to begin with, Miss Begley directed most of her attention back to me.

“Ben, you know this countryside, don’t you?”

“Ben, is there any place in Ireland that you haven’t visited?”

“Ben, how do you remember it all? You must have a huge brain.”

“Ben, I like that shirt very much. I haven’t seen that on you before.”

Flattery, deference, respect, admiration—before long Mr. Miller began to cut in, as I presume she’d intended.

“Ben, have you traveled all along this coast?” she asked me, and Mr. Miller said, “I have. If you go due north from here, you’ll see some of the biggest Atlantic breakers you ever saw. I never dreamed of anything like them, I come from nowhere near the sea, I come from a wide sky, and you can see for miles and miles and not a house anywhere”—and he launched into a description of how, in his boyhood, he measured in the family car the distance to the nearest neighbor. “Twenty-two miles, can you believe that?”

I asked, “When did you come to this side of the world?”

“London was the first place, I was there for eighteen months.” By now he had made himself the focus.

“Just, you know, working,” was how he answered a question she asked, and she pursued with “War work?”

“I’m a soldier. Soldiers do war work.”

“Who’s going to win the war?” she asked him.

“God Himself wouldn’t answer that question.”

“But isn’t Germany winning?”

“Winning, losing—they kinda mean very different things in a war.”

“Who do you think is winning?”

“It’d be good for nobody if Hitler won. Or Japan.”

“What do you think about Ireland being neutral? A lot of people don’t like it.”

“Folks can always volunteer for the British. Or for us.”

“Ben, do you want to be a soldier?” she asked me, and before I could answer Mr. Miller said, “I’d want you in my platoon, that’s for sure, big fellow like you. Can you shoot?”

“Never tried,” I said.

“We don’t have many guns in Ireland,” she said. “We don’t need them anymore,” and when he looked puzzled, she added, “Now that we have our freedom. We had wars here, too, that’s why we’re not fond of guns.”

The jeep bumped us—or was it the roads? I sat back, letting the sun warm my head and face. Watching them I could see the mutual voltage—mostly I could feel the heat from her to him. He seemed unfazed by her force, and I thought,
This fellow could probably handle a live electricity cable with his bare hands
.

“How do you like Ireland?” she said.

Around us spread County Donegal, in that pale mauve light you get in the northwest. The houses sat scattered about the countryside then; they’re more numerous today. Sheep dotted the hills, distant white blobs. A donkey in one field, a pony in another, low stone walls—Mr. Miller looked all around.

“Reminds me of northern Spain,” he said.

“Where haven’t you been?” she said.

We stopped at a pub in Clonmany. The proprietor grew excited at the American, and began to inquire about a job for his son at the new base. Lieutenant Miller undertook to see the young man himself—“Tell him to ask for me,” and wrote out his name. Drinks came on the house. I drank lemonade. Mr. Miller tried Guinness and made a face.

I can freeze that afternoon in my mind. I can go straight back to the moment and see us there, sitting on high stools at a long dark bar, eating sandwiches thick as doorsteps, with old newspaper advertisements plastering the walls, and posters for local charities, announcements of cattle fairs, and boats to Scotland. The sun found a way through the filth on the windowpane to fling a few bars of light on the floor, and the glow caught the young American full in his golden face.

Any attention that our group received went to Miller. A chatty local gave him the day’s newspaper. The proprietor’s wife gave him the largest plate of food. The proprietor gave him and him alone a souvenir mug.

The proprietor knew James Clare—who didn’t?—and, discovering my connection, began to tell me about a haunting on the shore at Malin Head, where the ghosts of two young fishermen kept coming back. They’d been drowned there in the middle of the nineteenth century and everybody had seen these ghosts. I took out my notebook to write it down and, from the corner of my eye, saw Miss Begley and Mr. Miller enter a deep conversation.

When it ended, I wondered whether Miss Begley too had seen a ghost, because, as she sat back, the sun that lit this young officer also
showed a desperation in her face. And a sense of confusion. And, I thought, panic.

That Charles Miller enjoyed our company couldn’t be denied. As Miss Begley fell into a long silence on the way back to Derry, he wanted to know everything about my work. That’s when I told him about the two young Germans washed ashore at Ballymacadoyle, and in the urgency of his response he almost stood up behind the steering wheel.

How old? What did they wear? Were they armed? Did you see a boat? Could they have come from a submarine? Where are they now?
He turned me inside out with questions.

When I had told the tale he subsided and held a silence for long minutes. What did I know in those days—oh, what did I know?

But we could have talked all day and all night, he and I. No wonder I came to admire him so—he showed such interest, not just in me, but in life generally.

“All our neighbors back home—they have old stories,” he said. “Their parents came west, or their grandparents emigrated from Germany or Russia or China. I love those stories.”

I missed him when we parted. He shook my hand and said, simple as a child, “We’ll meet again, Ben. I know it.”

Although I wanted to tell him about Venetia and my own life, the time proved too short. But I sensed that he was the kind of man who would have taken on the tale as a project, and he’d have approached it in a practical way as a difficulty to be solved. He might even have involved himself in the search. I thought,
Maybe I’ll ask him. Maybe he’ll help or have some ideas
.

That night, I said to her, “There was a time when you looked shocked today.”

Sounding candid, she told me, “There’s been intimacy with a girl back home. He says he must marry her.”

“Is there a child?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. He says it’s a matter of honor.”

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“He’s asked me to do something for him. It’s outlandish, but—”

She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“Not just now, Ben. Sleep’s gentle voice is calling me.”

Next morning, Miss Begley and I set out for the South. She, grave and less garrulous than usual, nonetheless made heads turn as we boarded the bus, the straw of her hat as round and yellow as the sun. We had no conversation, not enough privacy, until we caught the train at Sligo, and sat in a compartment, just the two of us. By then something of her bounce had returned.

“Well, what d’you think of him?” she asked me.

“He likes you,” I said. My inner voice said,
And I don’t like that fact
.

She laughed. “I like him.”

“What’s going to happen?” I said.

Mona Lisa smiled again. “We made a deal.”

I said, “Why are you always making deals?”
Because you don’t know how not to
.

“And what’s wrong with that?” she said.

Everything. Everything’s wrong with it
. But I said, “I suppose it brings people closer.”

She smiled again—but told me nothing more.

We parted in Galway, and I gave her a rough sketch of my travels for the next few weeks. Earlier in the year I had at last regularized my own timetable. I wasn’t so scattergun anymore; I moved through the provinces now in a kind of loose rotation. Therefore I could say where I might be reached close to any given time.

And so, in the third week of September, in Watergrasshill post office, I picked up a card from Miss Begley:
CM transferred back to London. Come to England with me. KB
.

Adolf Hitler had red hair. So a woman in Dublin, a cabaret singer, told me. She saw him in Berlin in the late 1930s: Sitting on her father’s shoulders, she watched him drive down the street they call Unter den Linden.

“He was small and red-haired,” she said. “Common-looking. And the crowd went wild.”

That was the kind of detail I loved. I had been following the war in the newspapers and on the radio, and when it reached a finger into Ireland, I wished to touch it. In other words, I wanted to visit three of the four places in Dublin where German bombs fell in 1941. By the time I got to one of them, the worst of the damage had been cleared. Thus, I hadn’t been able to create the sensation I sought—how it might feel to stand on the earth as it rained bombs.

For some unknown reason, I told all this to Miss Begley on the boat from Dublin to Liverpool.

She said, “There’s times, Ben, when I don’t fully understand you. What did you want to know—what it’s like to be hit by a bomb?”

I said, “Sort of.”

“Ah, for God’s sake, Ben.” Not much stopped her in her tracks. “Why?” she said, groping to make sense.

“I’d have a better idea of what war is like.”

She reflected on this, and up went that damn eyebrow again. “Aren’t you afraid of the war?”

“Are you?”

She said, “Why would I be?” in that belligerent tone she used when she didn’t want to be challenged. “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die.”

I said, “There’s a lot to fear.”

“What do you expect we’ll see?”

I said, “Ruined buildings.”

“They’ll be taking it badly,” she said. “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”

“Some of it may hit us.”

And she said, “No. I’m never in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Not, eventually, true—not true at all. But I’ve just remembered something Mother once told me: It’s the mark of a gentleman not to remind people of foolish things they once said.

Miss Begley then admitted that, like me, she’d been expecting to travel through a country shredded by bomb damage. We’d seen the photographs and newsreels of the devastation that struck Dublin. If that had been caused by a lone German aircraft (possibly a navigation mistake, we were told), what on earth must England be like by now? They’d had four years of ruin from the air.

As we stepped from the dockside to the waiting train, I asked her, “Why exactly are we going to London? What precisely will we be doing there?”

She looked at me with an impatient purse of the lips and picked up the book she’d been reading; I gazed out of the train window.

England looked glorious. They were enjoying an Indian summer, long days of golden light falling on leopard-colored trees. The train took us through acres of aftergrass green beyond reason, and spiky deserts of fawn stubble. England had spent the season growing extra food as part of the war effort; now, fallow and spent, their duty done, the fields rested, as calm as a woman after giving birth.

At first I felt confused, because it looked no different from Ireland—pastoral, empty, and still. Yet in my pursuit of every war report I could find I’d seen the rumors that we might get invaded; so these were my thoughts:
If either side invades us, we’ll be exactly the same as England—the wide quiet fields in one half of the equation, the ruined towns and cities in the other
.

By now I had brought under control my resistance to Miss Begley’s
pursuit of Charles Miller. At first I had taken the old-fashioned, hunter-gatherer position, and I announced it.

“You should stop it. It’s unseemly. Men do the pursuing. Men court. Men woo.”

She didn’t reply—and then I shut up, because I recalled that Venetia had been the one who’d initiated our relationship. The day we first connected she did all the running, declared her feelings, said that we were meant to be together. I never questioned it; I just followed her lead.

Therefore I’d have been a hypocrite if I hadn’t supported Miss Begley’s focused drive on London. I knew that I’d help her if I could, but I also expected to do nothing more than stand by and watch. Of course I had no idea what I would be watching.

As if all this weren’t enough, I found myself sleepless again, troubled by something else. The night before coming into Dublin to catch the boat, I’d stayed at a concertina player’s home near the town of Kildare. I’d visited the family in the past, they’d heard my questions, seen Venetia’s photograph, and guessed at my anguish.

This time, though, the woman of the house remarked, “I might have a bit of news for you,” and said that her sister had worked as a cleaner at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and had known Venetia. “They all loved her,” she said.

I nodded.

“Well,” said the woman, “my sister says that they heard at the Abbey that Miss Kelly—well, she’s not well.”

I galvanized. “Where? How do you mean, ‘not well’?” But inside I was screaming,
You mean she might be alive?

My outburst scared her; sometimes I don’t know my own strength. She retreated, and I now believe that I destroyed any chance I had of acquiring her information.