The Private Wound (11 page)

I was bewildered still.

“You see, Dominic, if the English Government thought we were going in against the North, with or without German encouragement, it would give them an excuse to invade us first. It's the Treaty Ports they'd be after.”

“I see your point, Father. So it's not my alleged immoral
life, but my espionage activities, which have made me your parishioners' target,” I said nastily.

“It would account for your cottage being searched,” said Concannon. “But not necessarily for the other episodes. Did you ever visit Galway Bay or Clifden, with your great big field-glasses?”

“I often go into Galway. And I drove up to Clifden once. With my great big field-glasses. What an innocent bird-watcher has to put up with! But they're not Treaty Ports, are they?”

“They could be used. By smaller vessels.”

“I think the whole thing's absolutely mad,” I said with exasperation. “Confound your politics! It's all so—so amateurish.”

“Dominic, there's no one so amateurish over here as an amateur politician. And no one so professional as a professional one.”

“You have it, Father.” Concannon gazed at me broodingly. “Michael Collins now—he had a short way with Castle spies. Maybe you ought to take the first aeroplane back to England.” That upward tilt again at the end of the sentence.

I suddenly had a strong intuition—or was it a delusion?—that this calm, intelligent policeman was reserving judgment about me, that he had not convinced himself I was
not
a spy. It was an unpleasant sensation. Never before had I felt so completely a stranger in the land of my birth.

I decided I'd go into the attack. “If I
am
a spy—and I see you're not sure about it yet—duty would obviously require me to stick it out here. If I'm not, commonsense should tell me to go home at once. Well, I'm staying. Yet I'm not a spy. I'm just an Anglo-Irishman—beg your pardon, West Britisher—who doesn't like being pushed around. The Garda are welcome to investigate me: but also they're in duty bound to ensure that I'm not murdered.”

A damnably pompous speech, but at least it had the effect of disconcerting Concannon.

“We know our duty, thank you, Mr. Eyre,” he said stiffly. “I would like to take your fingerprints now, so we can eliminate them from the others on your car.”

“By all means. But haven't your criminals over here learnt yet about the use of gloves?”

“We're a backward nation, Mr. Eyre.” He smiled forgivingly.

Father Bresnihan had the last word. “There are criminals and criminals, Dominic. Like there are sinners and sinners.”

The next day I returned to the cottage. Sean had miraculously got my car running again. The front door was not locked; the key was in the drawer where I'd always kept it, my MSS on the table. I had a sense of anticlimax, ruffled by an occasional wave of fear. Would there be another attack? What form would it take? Concannon had told me he was putting a plain-clothes man in the cottage up the road, and indeed for a week or so I was to come across a man—or rather, a succession of men—desultorily filling in the potholes or trimming the roadside grass. And I heard footfalls at night, patrolling round the cottage from time to time. No doubt these were not local men: they would have been sent from Galway or Ennis. But, in a district like ours, everyone would know in a few hours they were not road-menders.

That first afternoon I walked over the fields to Lissawn House. Flurry and Harry were in the kitchen, drinking tea. Flurry clapped me on the shoulders.

“Dominic! How
are
you! This is a great moment, a solemn moment. The returning hero. They ought to make a fillum of your hairbreadth escape. We must drink to it, Harry.”

He lumbered out to fetch the whiskey. Harriet threw herself into my arms. “Are you all right? Did you get my message?”

“No, love.”

“That damned priest! I bet he destroyed the note. No, it's all right. It was quite pure—just a message of sympathy from Flurry and myself.” She looked up anxiously into my
eyes, felt the back of my head. “My God, what a bruise! Are you really—?”

“G'wan, Harry. Give him a kiss. He deserves it,” came the voice of Flurry from the door.

“I was just feeling this lump on his head. It's a whopper.”

“I bruise easily.”

She gave me a smile of complicity. “All right, I will. I've fallen for the wounded hero.” And she kissed me quickly, full on the lips, in front of Flurry. I was embarrassed; yet her recklessness was flooding into me again like a tide.

We talked a while. I had to relate the whole story to them. Harriet's eyes were sparkling. “At last something has happened in this dead-alive hole!”

“Thanks very much, Harry. I just hope somebody else'll provide your entertainment next time.”

“Next time?”

“D'you think your local assassin won't have another shot at bumping me off?”

“Boo, you're not windy?”

“Of course I am. What do you think, Flurry?”

The pale grey eyes in the ashen face glanced at me uneasily. Was it the look of a would-be murderer who had failed? Or that of a lazy man who didn't want to be involved in trouble?

“I don't know at all at all. I had a word with Seamus, but he's heard nothing about who the fella might be. Has Concannon any ideas about the—the—what the hell's the word?—the motive?”

I told him the theory that I'd been taken for a British spy. The notion excited Harry's childish mind. Flurry was unimpressed and said, “
You
a spy! God help us, what'll they think up next?” I was obscurely annoyed by this. It was not the first time Flurry had made it clear that, in his mind, I was no man of action.

“You'd better come and live up here for a bit. Seamus and I—you can hire us as bodyguards.”

“Thank you. But I wouldn't think of giving you the trouble.”

“Now he's in a huff. You don't really fancy yourself at the cloak-and-dagger stuff, do you, Dominic?”

That damned Irish intuition again. A slob like Flurry had no right to it.

“Ah well,” he continued remorselessly. “If you're determined to set up as a lone wolf, at least you'd better keep your door locked. Keeping the wolf inside the door. That's a good one, Harry.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” I mirthlessly replied. “You know it's interesting about the key. How did the man who lay in wait for me inside my cottage the other night
know
that the door would be unlocked?”

“Nobody locks his door here.”

“Not even at night? Not even when he's suspected of being a British spy? The point is, they couldn't
bank
on the door being unlocked. So they'd have a key, just in case. Who would have a duplicate key? The lock was changed when your brother did up the cottage.”

Flurry gave his boisterous bellow of laughter. “Sure that's great! Isn't it killing, Harry? So the Mayor it was who bumped you. It's a lovely idea. But Kevin's a coward. He'd no more—”

“Kevin couldn't have done it himself. He could have had it done, though.”

Flurry had a sobered look. “But why in mercy's name?”

“If he's secretly engaged in some extremist activity, and
if
he thought I'd discovered something about it—accidentally or as a spy for the English—”

“Ah, get on!”

I told them about overhearing Kevin and the stranger talking in the study. “He couldn't be certain I don't understand
Irish. And I must say it is rather strange that he at once invited me to dinner, kept me under his eye the whole evening, and the moment I got back to the cottage—”

“So you'd never have had time to pass on the information to anyone else?” Flurry's lack-lustre eyes had lit up now: I could see the old flying-column commandant look through them. His next action was characteristic. He hurried from the room, and I heard him bawling outside for Seamus.

While he was gone, I asked Harriet about the night I'd been set on. “Flurry was asleep with you, wasn't he, by midnight?”

“Yes. Why? Are you jealous?”

“For God's sake! Be serious for once! You'd have woken up if he'd left you?”

“I should think so. We did go to bed a bit sozzled, though,” she replied indifferently. “What's all this in aid of?”

“I just wanted to make sure Flurry hadn't crept out and clobbered me himself.”

Harriet laughed merrily. “Oh boy, what drama!”

“Of course he couldn't have driven me to the strand and left me there in the car. He'd have had to walk all the way back.”

“I expect he had an accomplice,” she said with childish mockery. “Oh Dominic darling, you
are
an ass! Be your age!”

At that moment Flurry returned with Seamus O'Donovan. Seamus congratulated me on recovering so well from what he called, rather oddly, “your accident.”

“Never mind about that. He's alive. Dominic, tell Seamus what you just told us.”

I did so.

“Now then, Seamus me boy, you're the eyes and ears of
Charlottestown. Did you ever hear tell of my brother's being mixed up in I.R.A. extremist activity?”

Seamus took his time. The brilliant blue eyes were gazing away towards the mountains far beyond the window. “I did not,” he replied at last.

“No rumours at all?”

Seamus shook his head. “Not about him. There's always gossip of this political stir or that. Some of the Civil War irregulars is always trying to stir up trouble. Sure there's some ones round here is scared of their own shadows. But I never heard a one putting the talk on Kevin.”

“The fella Mr. Eyre heard with Kevin—was there any stranger in Charlottestown that day?”

“There was. A fella came to Sean's garage for petrol. He seemed in a hurry, Sean told me—could hardly pass the time of day with him.”

“What time of day would he have passed?” I asked.

“About half six, Sean said.”

“That could have been the man I heard talking to Kevin, then?”

“Did Sean describe him?”

“He did not, Flurry. I'll ask him to. I'll ask around and see if anyone else saw him.”

“You do that, Seamus. But you'd only come at the half of it,” said Flurry. “There had to be one fella taking Dominic to the strand, and another fella with a second car to get the first one away.”

“There would so. Unless Mr. Eyre's attacker dumped him there and just walked back to wherever he lives.”

They argued it for some while. I felt more and more like a dummy which had been used for an operation. Now these two ex-gunmen had taken it over. Courteously excluded from the conversation, I simmered with impatience at their maddening Irish blend of openness on the surface and opacity beneath. A devious race.

Flurry and Seamus were still at it when I decided to leave. Absently they bade me good-bye. Harriet walked a little way along the river with me. When we were out of sight of the house, she pushed me against a tree and rammed her body at mine. I kissed her close, but could not respond more. Father Bresnihan's words were in my mind; and I had a backlash of compunction about Flurry.

“Don't you want me any more, darling?”

“Of course I do. But my head—I'm not absolutely fit yet.”

She looked at me with that pitiless female insight. Why does one need lie-detectors when there are women about? However, she only smiled. “Will you be fit two nights from now? I'll come to you by the river, if it's a fine night. Do you know, it's more than a week since last time?” She bit my ear hard, then whispered into it, “I'm wild for you, my poor little wounded hero. You'd better come or there'll be trouble. Look after yourself till then.”

And she was off through the trees, humming to herself, not looking back …

So all went on as before. Well, perhaps not quite as before. There was a touch of desperation now in our love-making; and with it a certain tenderness seemed to have entered Harriet's attitude towards me, which I had not felt before. She could never be a clinging woman, but the way she sometimes gazed at me now—there was a new softness, an almost sacrificial look.

As for myself, I was still riding high in the insolence of lust. Now and then I spoke to Harriet harshly, testing my power over her. I did not seek to plumb the depth of her feeling for me. I had written to Phyllis, saying I did not think she and I were suited: Harriet had never asked me to do so, nor did I tell her I had. Phyllis wrote back without rancour, releasing me. But it never occurred to me that I
might marry Harriet. She was a priestess in the temple of the body, adept and still a little mysterious: one did not marry priestesses. Beside, such was her sexual arrogance that I always felt in her an antagonist, a challenger. It was this arrogance which kept bringing my infatuation to white heat again, and prevented her (so I believed) from even noticing that in most other ways I found her the reverse of stimulating.

Love-affairs have their watershed—a point where, unobserved may be by the participants, they level out and will soon start to go downhill. Ours, I should think, was reached that July. Disenchantment had not yet set in: but, as I say, there was a touch of desperation—like that one gets from blazing autumn flowers when the first frosts of the year have come.

The result of this desperation, heightened by the coming war and my own equivocal position in Charlottestown, was to throw Harriet and myself together more constantly, and to make me still more reckless where Flurry was concerned. There had been no more attacks, no more warnings, no anonymous letters. It was as if the place had washed its hands of me. Father Bresnihan was distant, but polite. I saw the Kevin Leesons several times during the fortnight after the episode of the strand: they both seemed solicitous about my health and my work, and I could perceive no trace of guilt or anxiety in Kevin's manner. Concannon came to see me twice, but he was distrait, and uncommunicative about his investigations: I imagined these had reached a dead end. My passport he found to be in order: I had not visited Germany, on this one, at any rate: but, if I were a secret agent, no doubt I'd have had a drift of false passports at my disposal.