Women of Courage (73 page)

She saw his face quite clearly. She could never forget it. It was a face that she knew too well.

Sean only saw the car itself, not who was in it. It surged up the road towards him, bouncing and swaying on the rough surface, and he saw a confused blur of faces behind the windows, nothing more. When he had taken the pin from the grenade everything seemed to slow down, and the crack of the pistol shots were pinholes in an eerie silence, waiting for the explosion. Only two or three seconds, but time had slowed down. He swung his arm behind him, thinking only: My hands are too sweaty, it will stick to them like glue, I won’t be able to let go! And so he hurled it with extra, vicious force, straight at the goggled, helmeted chauffeur. But at the same moment the car lurched violently to the left, to avoid the still writhing body of the police constable. The bomb, thrown too hard, sailed over the car roof and burst on the road behind. And the car was gone, up the road towards Ashtown Gate and the safety of Phoenix Park.

‘Now! Get the second - that’s our man!’ Martin, Sean and two others seized the great, heavy, lumbering cart and dragged it one, two, three feet further out into the road. Not far, but enough to make the passage between it and the hedge narrow, perilous. The second car was nearly upon them but it was going slower and an appalling hail of bullets was rattling on to it - far, far more than had met the first. Sean felt a rush of fierce, savage pride - they would do it this time, it was stopping, it was caught! He pulled the pin from another bomb and threw it easily this time, with skill and without fear, like a cricket ball. The bomb hit the door pillar, smashing all the windows on one side, and the car lurched feebly, hopelessly into the right-hand ditch. More bombs were coming now, from the hedges beside the road. They burst all around the car, but none seemed to go inside it. The chauffeur climbed out, his gloved hands above his head.

‘We did it!’ yelled Martin, his eyes alight with triumph. ‘We got the bugger!’

‘That’s just the chauffeur!’ Sean yelled back. ‘We’ve got to be sure of French. Can you not get closer and put a bomb right inside it?’

‘Surely.’ Martin grinned. Sean had thrown both his Mills bombs but Martin had one ready in his hand. He dashed out from behind the cart into the middle of the road. Sean ran after him, a yard, two yards behind, revolver in hand, thinking to shoot French if he saw him.

Martin was still running when he stumbled and fell, nose down on the hard ground.

Sean had played a lot of Gaelic football but he had never seen anyone fall like that, straight down on his face without trying to break his fall with his hands. And the body was immediately, suddenly limp, like a rag doll. The grenade rolled out of the fingers, round and round in a little circle, like an egg. The pin was still in it.

‘Martin!’ he yelled. But as he ran forward to his friend the ground began to hop and skip all around him like a cloudburst. There was an enormous noise everywhere. He looked up and saw the army lorry pulled up at an angle across the road, and all the soldiers firing their rifles at him.

He picked up the grenade, bent low, and scurried back behind the cart, where two other Volunteers were shooting at the lorry with their revolvers. There was a great pain in his chest, but he had not been hit at all. ‘Martin!’ he said. ‘They shot him!’

‘Don’t worry about that, son. We’ve got French!’ said the man beside him. There was a gleam of exhilaration in the man’s eyes. Sean looked past the body of his friend to the shattered car in the ditch. How could they be sure? He pulled the pin from the bomb and hurled it, and this time it went straight and true, end over end through the air and in through the window. There was a huge echoing explosion and blast fragments came out of all the windows. That’s for you, Martin, he thought.

The Crossley tender revved up its engine and came straight towards the cart. Sean fired his pistol once, twice, and then it jammed. His companion grabbed his sleeve, dragging him back. ‘Get away, boy! Come on, out of this!’

‘But what about Martin?’ Sean said.

‘He’s dead, son. There’s nothing to be done. But you save yourself and live - live for Ireland!’’

Then Sean was running, dodging and swerving from side to side, around the side of the pub to where he had left his bicycle. And so away, pedalling like a lunatic down the long road towards Windy Harbour and normal life in Dublin. Halfway down the road there was a herd of cows, shambling into the dairy on the edge of the city to be milked. Sean and his companions rode straight down upon them screaming like eagles, their coat-tails flapping in the wind behind them, and the cows panicked and began to climb up on each other’s backs and push each other into the ditch.

Only when they had the cows between them and any pursuit by the army lorry did Sean begin to laugh, and then for a while he could not stop. He laughed as he pedalled, great long laughs of triumph and exhilaration, with the tears not far behind.

2. A New Dance

T
HE BULLET-scarred limousine pulled up in a spray of gravel outside the Viceregal Lodge. The passengers piled out. Lord French, his revolver smoking in his hand, strode up the steps and barked orders at the astonished sentry. By the time Sir Jonathan, the other ADCs, and Detective Sergeant Halley followed him under the Ionic pillars of the elegant portico, the old general had servants and soldiers scurrying across the vast hall in every direction, their heels clicking urgently on the marble floor.

In all the flurry, Catherine was temporarily forgotten. She sat down, white-faced, stunned, on a little gilt chair in the corner. She was certain it had been Sean. That smooth, boyish face, the wide grin, the silly stick-out ears; there could be no doubt. That one second had burned a picture of him into her mind, as though her eye had been a camera. She could see him still, like a photograph - if only photographs could be in colour. He had been half-smiling, his young face flushed with excitement and determination, his arm bent back to throw the bomb. Like a hero, she thought. It was truly heroic - a young soldier of Ireland in action, taking up arms for the republic against the armed might of the British Empire! A young man in civilian clothes, a cloth cap and long tweed coat, daring to stand out in the middle of the street to attack a convoy of enemy soldiers!

Because of Sean, the Viceroy, that old fool French, was running around like a scalded weasel, his face bright red with indignation above his white moustache. So much for discipline and firmness!

Catherine began to laugh. And when she had begun, she found it hard to stop. Her voice echoed in the hall.

A butler spotted her and came over. ‘Can I be of assistance, madam? You were in the car, weren’t you? I can see you were hurt.’

Catherine controlled herself with an effort. ‘What? No, I’m all right.’

‘Forgive me, madam, but your face is bleeding.’ He turned and clicked his fingers. ‘Mrs Boyd! Here, please!’

Catherine touched her cheek hesitantly. It was wet, slippery; her fingertips came away red. A short, middle-aged woman in a housekeeper’s cap and apron came up.

‘Oh, my dear, that looks nasty! Have they shot you too?’

‘No, it’s just a cut, I’m sure.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll be all right, if I can just wash it. Don’t make a fuss, please.’

‘All right, miss. I’ll show you.’

Catherine followed the woman down a corridor, past a number of sculptures and paintings, and up a flight of stairs. She opened the door into a large bathroom. In one corner was a bath with a massive oak shower cabinet at its head; there was a window with stained glass in it, a window seat, some cane chairs and stools, and a large basin with a mirror.

‘You sit down there, dear,’ said the woman, pulling up a stool. ‘I’ll clean it up for you.’

The sight of her face in the mirror was a shock. Her small bob hat was awry; and under it, ragged fingers of blood trickled down a paper-white skin. She took off the hat, astonished. She didn’t feel bad - how could her face be such a mess?

She had a small, delicate face with large deep-set eyes and dark pageboy hair, which her hands tried to pat into place. The overall effect was normally of a sort of elfin beauty. Now she looked as though she had been torn by a cat.

The housekeeper ran some warm water into the basin and began to dab at her forehead gently with a flannel. ‘There’s a few cuts just under your hair,’ she said soothingly, ‘but not too bad. Heads always bleed a lot. I remember my son once …’

Catherine did not listen.
Sean
did this, she thought. Did he see me in the car? Would he still have thrown the bomb if he had? A fortnight ago he kissed this face. She remembered how it had felt …

They had met in her first term at University College, in October. As one of only thirty-two women among some hundred and sixty men studying medicine, she had been plagued by youths inviting her to ceilidhs, picnics, tennis parties - quite enough to satisfy her father, if these had been the sort of young men he had had in mind. But Catherine, like the other women, had been more serious about her studies than most of the men - predictably, for it had been a hard struggle to get in - and she had rejected most of the invitations as distractions.

Sean had seemed to her one of the more serious students. She remembered the first time they had met. He had sat next to her in a lecture, and afterwards asked if he could buy her a cup of coffee. Then he had started to talk, not about anything trivial or flirtatious, but about the subject of the lecture, the structure of the colon and small intestine.

It was one of many subjects which she found very difficult to discuss with male students. Either they avoided it altogether, because it was indelicate, or they became defensively childish, elaborating on all the most repulsive details to see if she would be embarrassed.

But Sean had been simply interested - and, it turned out, a little confused. After a few minutes’ conversation she found herself having to repeat most of the lecture over to him again, illustrating the main points from her notes. There were quite a few things Sean had not taken in, or had misunderstood. And he had not been insulted by this, merely grateful.

‘I do take notes,’ he said. ‘But he goes so fast, don’t you think? That’s hardly fair, when it’s all new stuff.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose they expect us to read it all ourselves, as well. That’s what I do. I look up the titles of the lectures to see what’s coming, and then try to read about it beforehand. Then the lecture’s clearer; it comes as a sort of revision.’

‘Mary and Joseph! Whenever do you find the time?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. In the evenings.’ She realized how priggish her explanation had sounded, and tried to make amends. ‘I’m alone a lot. I probably don’t have so much to do as you do.’

‘No.’ He regarded her with a rather quizzical, fetching grin. Soft hazel eyes, smooth, brown, carefully back-combed hair, a little dimple appearing on his cheek. Two months later, in the Viceregal Lodge, she could remember that grin clearly; at the time, it had had a definite unsettling effect on her pulse. ‘I’ve got the books, of course, but I’m afraid I don’t have that much time for them. I’m out most evenings.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Well now.’ The grin got wider, and more quizzical. ‘For one thing, I go to the Gaelic League. I’m learning the language.’ Then he said, in hesitant Irish:
‘Do you have the Gaelic?’

‘Of course I do,’
she answered fluently.
‘My nurse spoke it.’

‘But that’s tremendous! You must come. You can teach us!’

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘It’s a long time since I had a nurse, you know. I’m sure there are a lot of things I’d say wrong, or I’ve forgotten.’

‘It doesn’t matter!’ His face lit up, in a way quite different from when they had been discussing medicine. ‘You had the Gaelic as a child - I wish I had. We should all learn it, you know! We’ll never be a nation if we lose our language.’

And so she had gone along to the Keating branch of the Gaelic League, in 46 Parnell Square, opposite the Rotunda Lying-in Hospital. It had been a strange experience. There was an odd mixture of people: students like themselves, working men, actors, one who claimed to be a playwright, some intellectuals with wispy beards, and several middle-aged women - including, once, a tall woman in a wide hat and sandals, who was said to be the Viceroy’s elder sister. The use of the Irish language was equally varied. One or two spoke it fluently, others contented themselves with writing words down, or speaking about Gaelic enthusiastically in English. Catherine seemed to be the only one who had learnt the language as a child; and that was not such an advantage here, either, because nearly everyone in Parnell Square wanted to discuss politics, and she had not learnt the vocabulary for that, picking up seashells with her nurse on the beach in Galway.

It was a busy, fascinating place. There were several classes going on every night, and some of these seemed to attract quite a different clientele. There was a group of men who met in a room upstairs, and came and went briskly on bicycles. Some she recognized - elected members of the Dail, prominent Sinn Feiners. They came down in ones and twos, smoking and talking busily, and rode away again into the night. One or two might look in on the way, and give Sean a friendly wave. She had been impressed, and teased him in Gaelic:
‘Is it yourself that’s the armed revolutionary, then, a chara? A Fenian with a gun?’

He winked at her, his open eye sparkling above that wide engaging mischievous smile, and said:
‘I am that.
’ She had only half believed him, then; but today, in the Viceregal Lodge, she saw it was true. It was a thrilling, sobering thought. No wonder his eyes lit up more when he spoke about Ireland than about medicine. He was really at the heart of the movement she admired so much.

Two weeks ago she had been with Sean to a ceilidh. It had been hot, noisy, charged with emotion. Catherine had danced all evening, relishing the sense of being part of a crowd of Irish people, touching, singing, swinging each other round in the dances. Her own life was so intense, so lonely, she had been intoxicated by the sense of togetherness - the sense of touch.