The City of Strangers (45 page)

We don’t want to go to England. We want to stay here. This is our home. Tom doesn’t want us to go. So we are going to do something about it. We will stay away until you stop it! Love Jane, Alex, Tom.

‘Jesus,’ said Stefan. ‘I didn’t know it had got this bad.’

He caught the look from his mother; she had tried to tell him.

‘It’s just a prank. They won’t be far,’ replied David.

‘It’s not a prank for Tom,’ said Stefan’s mother quietly.

‘I know what you’re saying, Ma, but let’s not make too much –’

‘Come up here,’ she snapped. ‘Would you too, Mrs Lessingham?’

Helena turned on her heel and went to the stairs. As she walked up to the bedrooms Valerie looked taken aback. Even if there had been a certain coolness between the two women, Helena had never given her orders before. Stefan looked at her and shrugged. They both followed his mother upstairs.

A lamp was on in Tom’s room. The window he had climbed out of was still open. Helena was leaning over the small drawer in the table by the bed. Stefan and Valerie stood behind her, impatient to get outside to find the children, but feeling slightly foolish and awkward and unaccountably adolescent. Helena Gillespie took a piece of folded paper from the drawer.

‘I’m sure no one else has seen this except me.’

She opened it up and handed it to her son. There was a picture of a hill, with trees and flowers; on the hill five stick-like figures – a man, a woman, three children. The children brandished a sword, a bow and arrow and a fishing pole. On either side of the hill was a house, one very big, the other small. Next to the small one were two more figures, a man and a woman, Helena and David. It was a picture of Tom Gillespie’s world; the motte, the woods between Kilranelagh and Whitehall Grove, the houses where he and his friends lived. Some of it was what he was about to lose. Underneath were the words: To Mrs Lessingham Happy Mothering Sunday.

Stefan looked at the picture and his son’s almost joined-up writing.

After a moment he gave it to Valerie.

‘Mothering Sunday was two weeks ago, of course,’ said Helena. ‘The fact that he wouldn’t even give it to you, couldn’t, it makes it even more –’

She was crying. Stefan put his arm round her.

Valerie was still looking at the drawing.

‘I hope he’ll let me keep it now.’

She looked hard at Helena.

‘He means a lot to me. I’m sure you know that.’

‘That doesn’t make it easier for him, does it, Mrs Lessingham?’

There was silence for a moment.

David Gillespie called from downstairs.

‘Are we looking for them or not?’

Stefan gave both women a reassuring smile.

‘Pa’s right. They won’t be very far.’

Valerie smiled too. She knew it. But she felt more than she showed.

‘It’s finding them. In the middle of the bloody night, where on –’

Stefan was looking at Tom’s bedside table; he walked forward and picked up the copy of
Tom Sawyer
he and Tom had read together twice now.

‘I think if we held a funeral for them tomorrow, we might find the three of them looking down from the gallery. What do you think, Valerie?’

Helena looked at him in shocked incomprehension.

‘Jesus, Stefan, what sort of a thing is that to say!’

But Valerie Lessingham laughed. They wouldn’t be far.

They found them quite easily, on the far side of the motte, where there was a small clump of trees above the stream that separated Kilranelagh land from Whitehall Grove. By then Tom, Alex and Jane were not that sorry to be found as it happened. It had started to rain; the blanket that had formed their tent was sodden, and so were they. The fire they had tried to light had refused to be lit and the matches they had brought with them were as wet as they were themselves. The food they had taken from the kitchen at Whitehall Grove had fallen into the stream when Tom tripped over and grazed his shin. They were cold, wet, hungry, and they all felt that after two hours, two hours that seemed like the whole of the night, the point had been made. They knew it would change nothing of course, but it had been one last adventure, and as they sat round the open range at Kilranelagh and ate bacon and eggs and drank hot, sweet tea, they felt it had been worth it.

Stefan watched his son, happy and warm and laughing; it wasn’t the night that would stay in his heart for a long time though, it was the drawing and everything that went with it. He didn’t often waste time wishing that things were different but it was there tonight. His father filled his glass with beer and walked across to fill Valerie Lessingham’s, as she made a point of helping Helena wash up.

She stood close to Stefan’s mother for a moment and spoke very quietly.

‘Do you think it will help if we write to him when – if we all write?’

Helena Gillespie nodded.

‘I’m sure it would.’

It wasn’t quite a smile, but it was as close to one as Valerie would get.

A mattress and blankets had been dragged into Tom’s room and that night Jane and Alex slept there instead of going home. Having announced that they had no intention of sleeping and were going to stay up all night, it was little more than twenty minutes after they went upstairs that the three children were fast asleep. Helena and David had gone to bed shortly afterwards.

Stefan sat in the kitchen with Valerie. He poured her another glass of beer. For a moment they sat looking at the fire in the open door of the range. There was nothing much to say. The sense of an end was there between them. Not the end to what they had been to each other sometimes. That had already gone, and more easily than the friendship that remained.

‘I shall take one great failure to England with me, Stefan.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘I never got your mother to call me anything but Mrs Lessingham.’

He laughed. ‘That’s how she sees things.’

‘We’ve never talked to each other, but I like her.’

‘She’d be more likely to call you Valerie if she didn’t like you.’

She looked at him sceptically.

‘It’s how she is,’ he said.

She sipped the glass of beer, still looking at the fire.

‘We’re starting to pack up. I suppose that’s why this happened.’

‘When do you go?’

‘The week after next. Maybe sometime Tom could come and stay?’ she said.

‘We’ll see.’

‘You don’t sound very sure. Is it a bad idea?’

‘I don’t know how things are going to be. I don’t know how easy –’

‘No. I keep forgetting why we’re going. I’m like everybody else. I don’t really believe there’s going to be a war. I suppose, if I’m honest, I imagine a long holiday in Sussex and we all come back here for Christmas.’

‘Maybe if enough of us imagine something like that –’

She looked round at him.

‘You’ve always seemed to be expecting a war. You never say very much about it, but you never say it might not happen. Even Simon doesn’t really think it’s going to happen half the time and he’s going to be fighting in it.’ She laughed. ‘I wonder if those German connections of yours aren’t a little bit suspicious. Not that there’s very much to spy on in Baltinglass –’

He smiled, but he did feel those German connections.

‘I’m German enough to know Germany. I’m German enough to have cousins in the Nazi Party who don’t write to us any more. I’m German enough to know my mother has a reason for not listening to German radio any more and won’t talk about Germany. And I’m German enough not to be able to pretend that when Hitler says one thing he means something else. So it’s hard to agree with the people who are kidding themselves.’ He poured more beer. ‘But apart from all that, well, I’m hardly German at all, surely?’

‘Thanks. And so much for Christmas at Whitehall Grove!’

‘Christmas in Sussex shouldn’t be so bad. Isn’t it home?’

‘I’m not sure it is,’ she said quietly.

He looked at her. He could see tears welling in her eyes.

‘It’s not just Jane and Alex. I’m probably not doing a good job of enthusing them about going to England. I keep saying it’s going home. But it’s not their home. This is. And I suppose – I’ve never thought about it – I’d never realised. You know I spend all my time complaining about Whitehall Grove – it’s falling round our ears – and the farm’s a disaster – and we’re all going to hell in a handcart while Simon swans around the Empire and leaves us all to rot here – well, you’ve been on the receiving end of enough of it.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you at all.’

She smiled, but the smile was only on her lips.

‘The truth is – it’s my home too. I don’t want to go. It’s nothing to do with the war. It’s nothing to do with Simon. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I want us to be a family again. I want the children to know their father, for all of us. I wish it was here. I wish it was all the other way round.’

‘Whatever happens, it won’t go on forever.’

‘Is that the best you can do, Stefan?’ Now she laughed. It wasn’t very good, even for a platitude.

‘You’ll have the children.’

She nodded; that was better; that was true.

For a moment they both looked at the fire.

It was still the children that held them together.

‘Can I sound like your mother, Stefan?’

‘How the hell do I answer that?’

‘I’ve never been very good at making wishes for other people. I wish you – I wish you and Tom – I suppose what I mean is I hope anything that happened between you and me – didn’t get in the way of anything else –’

He sat back and shook his head.

‘Unfortunately there was nothing to get in the way of.’

Then he laughed. It was a throwaway from the list of throwaways he had in stock for the occasions when people said such things. Valerie never had in the past; he liked her because she didn’t push those lazy ideas at him. It didn’t much matter that she had now. But he was conscious of the trip he had taken to Dún Laoghaire the week before. There had been a few days, just a few days out of years, when he had thought differently. It hadn’t lasted very long. And even that tiny, fragile hope, maybe only barely there, had been broken, not by anything in him, not by anything in Kate O’Donnell, but by other people’s battles, other people’s memories, other people’s rattle bags of righteousness and revenge, other people’s wars. The past didn’t only come up at you out of the ground in Ireland; it walked around the streets, following you, and if you turned round to complain it spat in your face.

Stefan stepped out into the farmyard with Valerie. She kissed him on the cheek and got into her car. As she drove away he watched the headlights move down the road towards Woodfield and Whitehall Grove. Then they were gone.

The yard was dark. There was no moon. He heard a high-pitched shriek suddenly break the stillness. It lasted only a few desperate, agonised seconds, but it was enough to fill the night. A fox and a rabbit; the rabbit would be dead. He turned back into the house. He poured himself a last glass of beer. He thought about the three children sleeping upstairs and smiled. He thought about the mother his son had never known and wished, helplessly, pointlessly, as he never allowed himself to do, that something would change.

The rhythm of the summer brought the ordinary business of life back to the farm at Kilranelagh. Valerie Lessingham had left Whitehall Grove, and with her Jane and Alexander. Every few weeks a letter or a card would arrive for Tom from Steyning, in Sussex where they were now living. But the Norman motte on the edge of the wooded valley between Kilranelagh and Whitehall was still whatever kind of castle, or ship, or camp it needed to be for Tom and Harry Lawlor, and other children soon assumed at least some of the roles Jane and Alexander had played, though Huckleberry Finn was never enjoyed as much or as enthusiastically as it had been when Valerie Lessingham had joined in as Aunt Polly, Judge Thatcher, Jim, and, in her finest performance, Huck’s drunken Pap.

Baltinglass was busy with what mattered, as new lambs and new calves fattened on new grass, as hay was made and crops were harvested. There were days in the Garda barracks when almost no one was there. There were guards who had gone home to Kerry and Tipperary and Galway to help with the hay making, and local guards like Stefan Gillespie who were doing the same on their family farms outside the town; and there were the rest of the guards who came to look at the hay-making and the harvesting anyway, and watch their dogs chasing the rabbits that fled the fields in their hundreds as the crops were cut.

There was war and the rumour of war in the background, of course, but it was a long way away, in small countries or places nobody knew very much about. Slovakia and Hungary; a piece of Lithuania called Memel Hitler had annexed, apparently by registered letter; Italy and Albania; Japan and Mongolia.

There was good news too. The war that mattered most in Ireland, the Spanish war, had finally ended. And as the summer faded prayers were said from the pulpits for the fascist government of Generalisimo Francisco Franco. The peace pact between Adolf Hitler in Germany and Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union sounded slightly strange in the light of this. It was the communists who had murdered priests in Spain; it was to protect Christianity from communism that German and Italian planes had bombed Spanish cities. But surely peace was better than war, and if there were parts of Poland that had once belonged to Germany, or that Germany needed, were a few green fields on the other side of Europe worth anyone fighting and dying for?

There was a sense through the course of that summer that it was all too far from Ireland to matter and that as so many times before, when they’d all stopped shouting in London and Paris and Berlin and Warsaw, nothing at all would happen.

Stefan Gillespie remained one of those who was a lot less sure about that. He read the newspapers more than he had before; he listened to the radio news quite late into the night sometimes, from London as well as Dublin, and sometimes from Berlin as well. He wanted no more to do with it all than most of his neighbours; but he was already a part of it. It had touched him twice now, in Danzig and Dublin four years ago, and now in New York. He said little, but when he listened to Adolf Hitler on German radio he didn’t hear what the Reichkanzler said, but what he meant.