The Blood Upon the Rose (12 page)

She felt very tender all over and warm and moist down below. She ran her hands down his stomach and cupped her hands over his erection and thought: How did that ever get inside me? Then he came inside, slowly, much more slowly and for a moment they just lay there, trembling and looking into each other's eyes, using all their effort not to move.

She said: ‘Oh, you, Sean.’

He said: ‘Caitlin. I’ve got you now.’

She raised her legs, slowly, until they were crossed behind his back, his little hard buttocks under her heels, and she said: ‘No, I've got you.’

Then she squeezed him gently, as if urging a horse to walk, and they began to move.

A long time later, they got dressed. The fire had died down to red embers. Sean peered at his watch. It was quarter to ten.

Catherine was glad he had not lit the lamp. She was afraid of what the light would do to the nest-like intimacy of the room. She was worried about her hair, though. There was no mirror in the room, but Sean lent her a comb, and she straightened herself up as best she could. She was glad she had had her hair cut short; the long tresses she had had as a child would have been impossible to manage like this.

‘Will you walk me home, my love?’ she said.

He nodded, and thought for the first time of the neighbours they might meet on the stairs, the stories that would be told. He didn't want it to get out, he didn't want to face the nods and winks of the other Volunteers. He had thought a soldier should be like a priest, free of all ties, all weakness. It could so easily be made to seem sordid, what they had done.

He said: ‘I’ll try and find a better place if I can.’

‘It’s not the place, it’s who’s in it.’ She kissed his lips softly, and rubbed her nose against his. ‘Sean. You will love me, won't you?’

‘Of course I will.’ He suddenly felt hugely protective, the more so because he knew he was unable to offer her any real protection at all. He put his arm round her, and opened the door. ‘Come on, little woman. I’ll take you home.’

The journey through the night streets began quietly enough. Each room in the tenement grumbled and twitched with life, but they met no one on the stairs. There were people in the streets outside, but none that Sean recognized. He deliberately led them a circuitous route, turning back on themselves several times, and waiting in a doorway once, kissing, to see if anyone followed.

It was not until they were within half a mile of Merrion Square that the evening erupted. A lorry drew up at a crossroads in front of them. Four soldiers got out, their tin hats and rifles clearly silhouetted against a distant streetlight. Sean drew her quickly into an entry. ‘It's all right, they're facing away from us,' he said. ‘But we'll go back and round the other way.’

She whispered: ‘All right. But what are they going to do?’

He didn't need to answer. As the line of soldiers waited, blocking off the nearer end of the street, two lorries roared into it from the other end, headlights blazing. They stopped halfway along, orders were shouted, and armed men poured out of it. They hammered on a doorway, and, as soon as it opened, rushed inside.

Sean said: ‘They're looking for people like me - and even you, perhaps. Anyone who can give them information about Sinn Fein. I don't think they'll find much, though. Just drag some more poor people out of their beds, and gain us more support.’

People threw open their windows to see what was happening, and jeered at the soldiers. A man was dragged, struggling, out of the house, stood up against the railings and searched. When he protested, he was punched, kicked and bundled into the back of the lorry. A woman, perhaps his wife, came out in her nightdress, screaming. Three Tommies took her arms and hauled her back inside.

‘It's monstrous!’ said Catherine. ‘What right have they to do that, in our city?’

‘You ask your father,’ Sean murmured quietly.

The cold anger in his voice made her shiver. She held his waist tightly, and hoped he was unarmed.

He watched for a moment longer, then turned his back on the scene. ‘Come on. We'll go up this way. Walk slowly, and remember to look like we're lovers.’

That part was not so hard. On the way they met two policemen, hurrying towards the noise. Sean bent his head towards Catherine, and they gave him hardly a glance. But the joy had gone from it. She thought he was annoyed, embarrassed by her presence.

At the corner of Merrion Square, they stopped. All the lights were on, downstairs, in the O'Connell-Gort house. Catherine straightened her back. They could not part in silence.

‘This is it, then,’ she said. ‘Young lady Catherine goes in to face an irate butler, and a maid and housekeeper driven wild with worry. Wish me luck, Sean.’

He grinned. ‘I do that. You'll face them down, surely.’

‘I’ll have to. After all, I'm my own mistress, and I've done nothing wrong, have I? Have we?’

Don't reject me now,
Sean, she thought.

He didn't. Instead, he drew her, straight-backed and indignant, into his arms, and kissed her hungrily. She thought: There's a streetlamp over there. Anyone who looks out will see me being kissed by a common, cloth-capped Mick.

Then she forgot all about it.

When they paused for breath, she said: ‘When will I see you again?’

‘Not tomorrow. I’ll be with the Volunteers all evening, and it's no good in the day. Tuesday night, at the Keating Branch.’

‘All right.' Two days. It seemed so long. ‘Sean?’

‘Yes?’

‘Take care of yourself. And . . .’ The vision of her normal, respectable life returned to her. It seemed quaint. ‘Her ladyship thanks you for a wonderful evening.’

He seemed nonplussed. Then he touched his cap and grinned. ‘To be sure, ma'am. My pleasure.’

He turned and strode quickly away, while Catherine squared her shoulders and walked towards the bright lights and imposing pillars of her Georgian home.

6

‘So there you have it, gentlemen.’ The Prime Minister passed the buff manila envelope across his desk to Harrison. ‘The decision of the Cabinet as I have explained it to you.’ David Lloyd George, a short, mercurial Welshman with twinkling eyes and a drooping moustache, leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands under his chin. ‘How do you think Lord French will take it?’

Sir Jonathan sat very straight in his chair. On the long journey over from Dublin with Harrison he had thought a great deal about government policy in Ireland. He had arrived in Westminster in time to see Lloyd George present his revised Home Rule Bill, which would give a partial self-government to a divided Ireland; at once too much and too little, Sir Jonathan thought, and far, far too late: without doubt it would be derided and exploited by the Sinn Feiners, and gain the government nothing. What was needed was a consistent policy, real interest instead of neglect from the politicians, and firm, unyielding military control.

Now he was here in the Prime Minister's study to brief him on the military situation. ‘Lord French would have preferred a clear declaration of martial law, Prime Minister,’ he said.

Lloyd George sighed. ‘I have already explained why that is not possible. It is essentially a police matter. But the army already has extensive powers under the Defence of the Realm Act. If you use those, and arrest the leaders, it will have the same effect.’

If we could find the leaders, Sir Jonathan thought, and then trust you politicians not to do a deal with them once they are caught. He said: ‘In Dublin at least, Prime Minister, the effective police force is at a very low ebb.’

‘So you have told me,’ Lloyd George snapped. ‘It is your job, Colonel, to give them support and stiffen them up.'

So easily said, Sir Jonathan thought. This is getting us nowhere. The man lives in another world. Another country.

Harrison gave a small, apologetic cough. The two men's eyes turned to him. His large, goldfish eyes peered through his spectacles at Lloyd George. ‘And … er … the other matter we discussed, Prime Minister?’

Sir Jonathan stiffened. All the way across the Irish Sea, Harrison had been urging on him the merits of this other policy, which he had first broached in the Viceregal Lodge a few days ago. Despite the firm line he had taken with the two policemen, Sir Jonathan had qualms about it. The sincerity of that Inspector - what was his name, Kee? - had impressed Sir Jonathan despite himself. Of course the army should not normally resort to secret murder. But then, how would the man have felt if his own daughter had come within an ace of being torn to mangled shreds by a terrorist's bomb? And if the politicians would not give them open, consistent support, what else was there? The other policeman, Radford, had looked as though he might understand that. As Harrison clearly did.

Lloyd George did not answer Harrison's question at once. He pushed his chair back, stood up, strolled to the window, and looked out. It was already dusk, and the garden of 10 Downing Street was grey, indistinct. He clasped his hands behind his back, fiddling with them under the tails of his frock coat. His voice, when he spoke, was measured, cautious, resonant.

‘I understand your difficulties, gentlemen. This is not an ideal world, and when we are dealing with cutthroats and murderers it is necessary to consider methods which in public we should abhor. So if you were able to find a man brave enough to venture into danger to do this work, he would, of course, deserve our full support. Terrorism must be put down, and the rule of the law upheld, by each and every means open to us.’

He turned to face them, stroking his moustache thoughtfully. ‘Does that answer your question, Mr Harrison?’

Harrison slipped the manila envelope into his briefcase, and stood up. ‘I think so, yes, Prime Minister,’ he said.

The devil it does, Sir Jonathan thought.

The room had a beautiful view. The nursing home was on the cliffs outside Bournemouth, and Sarah Maidment was propped up on pillows in her bed so that she could see out, over the clifftop gardens, to the sea. It was an afternoon of sun and showers, and the sea reflected the different moods of the sky above it: deep indigo under rainclouds to the west, sparkling blue close inshore, a hazy, luminescent grey far out on the horizon. But Sir Jonathan, as he stood in the doorway of the private room clutching his bouquet of flowers, doubted whether Sarah could see much of it.

She had changed drastically in the month since he had been here last. The once jolly, round face was pale and sunken now, the bones clearly visible through the skin. The sinews in the neck and hands stood out quite starkly too, and her hair was completely white. She turned her head slowly to face him, and he saw that her lips were cracked. Only the eyes - bigger now, cornflower blue like the sea - retained something of the woman he had once loved.

‘Johnny?’ she whispered. She didn't smile. Perhaps it hurt.

He held out the flowers. The nurse, coming in behind him, took them officiously and arranged them in a vase beside the others. She adjusted the pillows behind Sarah's head, said: ‘Just ten minutes now. She's very tired,’ and walked smartly out.

Ten minutes. Sir Jonathan sat down beside Sarah and took her hand. She had never been a great beauty; but she had given him comfort and laughter where his wife, like Catherine, had given him intensity, drama, strain.

He asked: ‘How are you, my dear?’ He felt foolish as soon as he had said it, but what else was there to say?

The answer came in a whisper, so that he had to bend his ear to catch it. ‘Very … poorly, Johnny.' She flapped her hand urgently towards a glass of water, and he raised it to her lips to help her drink. He realized it was cruel to make her speak.

To fill the silence, he began to talk himself. Awkwardly at first, telling her where he had been, something of his business in London over the past two days. Her big blue eyes watched him vaguely, travelling over his face, his hands, his clothes. It was borne in on him that this was the last time they would ever see each other; the nurse had made that clear, outside the room. He began to talk instead of the good times they had had together, what they had done. He could not speak of love, he was no good at that. But he managed to remember a play they had laughed at, a party when everything had gone wrong, a time they had got lost together in a cart in the country, a day they had made love in a bathing hut. Her eyes shone; the skeletal face creased in what was meant for a smile; he raised the glass to her lips again and heard the nurse tap softly on the door behind him.

He kissed Sarah gently on the forehead, on the eyelids. The skin was thin, like waxed paper.

‘Goodbye, old girl,’ he said gruffly. ‘Goodbye now. God bless.’

Outside he could not see very well and he sat down on a metal chair in the echoing, disinfected corridor to blow his nose hard and dab at his eyes. He had seen more death in his life than he had ever wanted but each time it was worse.

Later, sitting in the train on the long journey back to Holyhead, he remembered the pictures of her two sons and grandchildren on her bedside table, and the things he had not said. He had come with the idea that perhaps he could abandon everything in Ireland, leave it all to her sons, forget the hopeless struggle. But without Sarah it would not work. However much he respected her two sons they were not his own. He did not ever want to see them again, except at the funeral.

There was only one person left in the world who really mattered to him now, and that was his own daughter Catherine. And for her, he would fight to keep his inheritance, and pass it on intact.

Next morning, Sir Jonathan sat opposite Harrison in the first-class dining room of the ferry. They were only half an hour out from Anglesey, but already the windows were streaked with spray and it was clear it was going to be a rough crossing. Harrison, to Sir Jonathan's surprise, seemed in good spirits, quite indifferent to the ominous rolling and pitching beneath them. He sliced the top off an egg, and peered briefly into it before starting to eat.

‘Well, we've got what we wanted, Colonel,’ he said.