A Parachute in the Lime Tree (4 page)

Nobody felt comfortable flying without Joachim. It didn’t help that the new boy had fallen asleep on the home run the very first time they’d flown together. Besides, they’d all
become so superstitious now, clinging on to their own personal mascots. They’d become just like the old Norway hands, determined to do everything exactly as they’d done it the day before. Before the flight, Oskar off-loaded as much standard-issue kit as he could. Rations, maps, even his beloved
traubenzucker
. Instead, he stuffed his pockets with her letters, his journal and Joachim’s yellow scarf, folded to no bigger than a pack of cards. He left his Luftwaffe watch behind and brought Grandpapa’s pocket watch in its place. As always, in the moments before take off, each man was immersed in his own most intimate thoughts. Oskar thought of Mutti and how she would feel when the word came back that he’d deserted the Reich. Maybe they’d just write him off as a casualty. For her sake, he hoped so.

Rolf took the plane up over the tip of Cornwall and north of the Isle of Man. He skirted the coast of the neutral place they call Éire until they reached the inverted V of Belfast Lough. The mission had seemed straightforward enough, with most of the targets clustered together, but the weather conditions were much worse than had been expected. Cloud cover was 9/10. The crew were tense, focused. Werner was stretched out on the mattress, peering through the glass nose, scanning for cloud breaks through which to drop the incendiaries. Willy fretted about the fuel supply as they circled over the targets. They were all furious that the weather forecast had been so inaccurate.

As for Oskar, he crouched down in his glass pod, jerking the gun this way and that to keep alert for tracer fire. He hoped they would get it over quickly. He was more rattled than usual, sickened by the smell of kerosene and the knowledge that there was only one way out. When the time came he would have to make for the hatch and push his way through it so fast they couldn’t stop him. His only hope was that Rolf would decide to fly home over Éire. A good chance, he thought, provided
the fuel would hold out. It wouldn’t be like Rolf to risk a run down the English coast if there was a safer way of getting home. But they were spending far longer than usual trying to find targets, battling against the dense blanket of cirrocumulus that stretched underneath them. He was painfully aware that each minute was eating away at his chances of escape, until at last the plane scythed up and away from the burning city. They left the coast behind them and veered west. He knew then they were taking the long way home. His heart tightened when he realised he would get his chance.

The parachute hung like a cloud over one of the lime trees at the end of the garden. Still half asleep, Kitty watched the magpies fussing over it like a clatter of nuns. They could fuss away, but it was clear that whoever had come down with it was well gone. Was he lying in a ditch somewhere, his face burned off him, his cries carried onto the bog? She opened the window and listened. Nothing. Maybe this was just the start of it. Maybe this fellow had given the game away and there were dozens of others, all along the coast from Killary Harbour to Roonagh Quay. Those men, hiding the evidence, slipping in like the flu. Most girls would be frightened, she thought. Most girls would be beside themselves at the very thought. She felt a hop in her guts all right but she didn’t think it was fright.

Mother wouldn’t have spotted it yet. Since the funeral, she slept on half the morning. Later, they sat together at the kitchen table and waited for the tea to draw while Mother pasted her bread with bright yellow butter. More than once, Kitty opened her mouth to mention the parachute but the moment never felt right. After breakfast, Mother disappeared into the parlour with
The White Feather
under her arm.

‘I’ll just cock the feet a while,’ she announced, leaving Kitty to the clearing up.

Kitty wandered through the hallway. A stream of light lit up the dust particles in the air, flurries of them, like moments piling up into one more day. She took the scarf from around her neck and snapped it across the hall table to stop the moments from congregating. Then she made her way to the lime tree through the new vegetable garden Sean Galligan
had planted after Father passed away to replace the old one that the brambles had taken. Sean always said you couldn’t eat a peony rose.

By the time she got to the bottom of the garden, the silk of the parachute had ballooned up around the side of the tree like the skin of an onion. Although Easter had been and gone, there was still a nip in the air. Kitty gave a little shiver. If the parachute man was still nearby, he might be watching her, willing her not to call in the Guards, to give him a bit longer to get clear. She smoothed her hair back over her forehead and wondered where the fellow might be.

Back at the house, Mother was sitting bolt upright in the parlour with the wireless tuned to Raidió Éireann. When Kitty opened her mouth to mention the parachute, Mother raised a hand to halt her. She listened attentively until the broadcast came to an end and then she interpreted the news in breathy chunks for Kitty. Hundreds of planes … bombing the daylights out of Belfast … mountains of fire and carnage everywhere … and even the water mains blown up. ‘Those poor people, Kitty, blown to bits by the Germans. Nothing but great big cowardly vultures with their night bombing, and the people half starved up there anyway.’

They didn’t know anyone in Belfast. Mother was always saying what black-hearted bastards they were. Kitty walked over and set her hand lightly on Mother’s shoulder. Her back started to shake even more violently then, as though Kitty had released some terrible, pent-up sorrow that was being spent tonight on Belfast. ‘We’re hardly off our knees yet and there’s people fighting their battles over our heads.’

Kitty wondered how to bring up the matter of the parachute without upsetting her even more. Maybe, she thought, it was best to let it pass; just have Sean cut it down and say no more about it. All the same, she couldn’t help wondering if one day she’d say: that was the day the war came to Dunkerin.

Mother put some Chopin on the gramophone and Kitty decided to keep her trap shut. It wasn’t the right moment, and anyway, she liked Chopin. It was soothing and it always gave her hope that one day there’d be dancing again. Years ago, Cora Redmond used to give ballet lessons in the old ballroom up at Cloheen. Mother said Cora was always carried and had lost the run of herself altogether when she snared Eric Redmond. ‘It’s far from the ballet that one was dragged up.’

It was almost a year, now, since Con signed up for the Ulster Rifles and Mrs Redmond shut up the old house and moved across the border. ‘To be nearer him in spirit,’ she said.

Con had been around during the summer holidays for as long as Kitty could remember. When they were younger, a gang of them would go off together on the bicycles for the whole day, across to Dunkerin Bay where they would fish for crabs in the rock pools and eat sandy doorsteps for lunch. Once he left school, he didn’t come home much any more and the little group of friends began to disperse.

Then one day, out of the blue, Con arrived at the door. Kitty hadn’t even realised he was home. She invited him into the parlour and they had a glass of lemonade. She couldn’t find any biscuits.

‘I’m heading over beyond,’ he said.

‘To fight for King and Country?’

‘For the rights of small nations, Kitty. That’s my war. I’m fighting for no King.’

She thought it was funny, him coming all the way over to tell her what she would have heard in a few days anyway. She hoped he would stay out of trouble. Mind you, wasn’t that what a war was all about? Trouble, then more trouble. Someone had told her that during the Great War there were villages of fellows went off and never came back at all.

‘Try to keep to
terra firma
, Con,’ she said as he left, giving her one of his strong handshakes. He seemed a little hesitant at the
door, as though there was something else to be said, but then he just walked away. She’d like to have seen him in his uniform but Mother said he probably wasn’t allowed to wear it around here. ‘It wouldn’t be wise, anyhow.’

Sean Galligan arrived around mid-morning. By that time, the sun had come out and the parachute was even more noticeable. Sean was chewing on something, looking hard at Kitty.

‘That Gerry parachute you have in the lime tree, Miss. There’ll have been a fella on the end of that yoke. Have you been on to the Guards?’

She looked at Sean’s reflection in the hall mirror. He was raising his eyebrows and pulling a face at the wall. He’d not have done that if Father was still alive. ‘You think I should then?’

‘God knows what the fella might be up to. Couldn’t he be anywhere? Skulking about, waiting till dark.’ Sean walked away, shaking his head.

She followed him out into the garden. Sean ignored her; just kept on stabbing at the ground with the hoe.

‘I suppose we’d better get Sergeant McCreesh up to have a look,’ she said.

‘About time.’

After Sean left, Kitty took a turn around the garden, down as far as the old bathtub where the last of the daffodils lay flattened. The grass was an unnatural, electric green; the colour you sometimes get before gales. She lay down on the electric grass and looked right up into the sky. The thing is, there’s no beginning to a sky. She’d no idea how high a plane could fly, or what happened if it tried to fly too high. She wondered how small a speck he’d have been when he left the plane. She imagined him hurtling through that sky, all the way down to Dunkerin. She brushed her hand over the blades of grass. A spy more than likely. Bloody useless place for a spy. She clenched her fist around a clump of grass and pulled. The moisture in
the grass began to seep into her back and she wondered again whether he was watching her.

Back in the kitchen, she scrambled two eggs and watched as Mother ate them slowly, revolving the mixture loosely in her mouth. ‘Lovely, pet. You’ve a lovely touch with the eggs.’

She didn’t ask Kitty if she had eaten. A little later, when Mother had gone off to tend to her geraniums, Kitty stood at the side door in the grey light and waited for Sergeant McCreesh. By mid-afternoon, he still hadn’t arrived and she began to wonder just how seriously he was taking this parachute business.

It was almost seven when, from some distance off, she heard a noise like a throat clearing. The light had faded a little but she could still see the motorcar as it wound its way towards the house. Meanwhile, Mother was dozing in the parlour, propped stiffly between two embroidered cushions.

When he climbed out of the car, the sergeant looked past her shoulder at first, as though hoping for someone more important to talk to, until he seemed to remember that there were just women in the Hennessy household now. He had the eyes of a hard case and his remaining hair was oiled down carefully across his scalp. The sergeant captured her hand in both of his. She guessed that she was not in any trouble as far as he was concerned.

‘Sean tells me you have a matter to bring to our attention under the Emergency Provisions.’

‘The parachute?’

‘Indeed so.’

‘Sean tells me it’s a German parachute, not that it makes much difference.’

For the second time that day she heard how hundreds of German planes had just bombed the bejaysus out of Belfast, how Dev was sending up the fire brigades and weren’t we all brothers when it came to the bit.

‘Surely to God, Miss Hennessy, that makes a difference. Killary Harbour, Clew Bay.’ He looked over his shoulder and hissed at her ‘U-boats. Taking their ease in our waters. We’d want to watch we don’t swap one master for another.’ He chuckled at his own worldliness.

She led him down the garden to where the parachute was snagged. It no longer looked like it was about to be whipped away by the wind but had entered complicated bondage with the tree. The magpies had gone.

The sergeant tucked his thumb in his belt and seemed lost in contemplation. ‘There’ll be people looking for him, you realise that, Miss Hennessy.’ The sergeant nodded earnestly to himself. ‘Not to mention our own desperadoes.’

‘Who?’

‘Surely you know, Miss, there’s men in this country still think England’s difficulty and that …’

‘IRA men?’

‘I suppose.’

‘I thought you’d them all locked up already.’

‘There’s always one or two slips through the net.’ He looked sharply at her. ‘If you come across anything out of the ordinary you’re to get in touch right away, like a good girl. Any strange movements in and around the farm; anybody you don’t recognise in the vicinity, same thing goes.’

She might have sighed a little because he seemed to think he had worried her after all.

‘Don’t you fret now, Miss. We’ll track him down. The last one over this way, we had him the same day. He’d some class of an attaché case with him that he dropped on the way down. When the lads picked him up, he was in a ditch still looking for his change of clothes. Turned out he hadn’t a word of English. I mean to say, Miss Hennessy, what class of an eejit do they think we are?’

The sergeant had hardly left when Mother emerged from
the kitchen, already dressed for bed in her flannelette nightdress. When she’d gone upstairs, Kitty went over to the back door and fiddled with the bolts, top and bottom. The door seemed to have swollen since the last time she’d bothered to bolt it. She tried to kick it flush with the frame but it wouldn’t budge, so in the end she let it be. She lit a candle that night for a bit of company. What on Earth did you look out for in a German, she wondered. Years ago, Uncle Malachy had brought back a picture book about the last war from his commercial travels up North. She got it down and had a flick through it until she came across a fierce man with blond hair leaping over the mouth of a trench, about to bayonet a cluster of cowering men on the other side. She pulled the eiderdown up around her neck, swallowing dryly as she ran her finger down the delicate little grooves in her throat.

As she lay there, holding her breath, night sounds began to emerge from the camouflage of day: creaks from the staircase, a dull thud some way down the corridor. From the room next door, she could hear the shallow ripple of her Mother’s snore, and on the quarter hour the insistent whirr and clang of the Viennese wall clock Father had brought back from the Alps the time he went for his lungs. All the while, she was aware of the unlocked kitchen door, like a hole in a sock. Eventually, she put on her slippers and walked down the stairs. She brought the candle with her, even though Mother had always told her not to be walking around the house with a candle in her hand. ‘It’s not like we don’t have the electricity, for the love of Mike.’