1949 (27 page)

The Irish general election in July included a referendum on the new constitution. Fianna Fáil won both, handily, causing gloom in the Fine Gael party. Its political future looked bleak.

Finbar began to feel that everything he touched turned to ashes. Even his work. External Affairs was increasingly absorbed with internal affairs. He could imagine what Ursula, with her internationalist outlook, would say about it.

He wished he could sit down with her and talk about it. He wished he could sit down with her and talk about almost anything.

How did it go wrong? Had he lost her before that damned Englishman showed up?

But surely not. The Eucharistic Congress…she was his then, most assuredly. She let him hold her and touch her and…

He tried not to let his thoughts follow that dangerous path to its conclusion, but sometimes he could not help it.

Ursula Halloran was a knot of agony in his mind.

 

On the twenty-eighth of September Hitler and Mussolini staged a massive floodlit demonstration in Berlin to announce that they believed in peace. However Hitler also reiterated Germany's pressing need for more living space to feed and support her people.

In October the Duke and Duchess of Windsor announced they would visit Germany to study conditions under the National Socialist Party. When they arrived in Berlin they were warmly greeted by Adolf Hitler, and lavishly entertained as his guests.

 

For once Finbar did not go home to Donegal for Christmas. He bought a Pilot 5 shortwave radio that guaranteed American reception, and remained in Dublin, hoping against hope he would run into Ursula.

 

Ursula was in Clare for Christmas. Hoping against hope that a letter had arrived from Ned. There was none. Lucy would not even discuss her brother. Her talk centered on the dreadful burden of her own life. She was sure she had tuberculosis, the hired men were stealing her blind, the farmyard gate was rotten and gone to splinters but she could not afford a new one….

Ursula lost her temper. “You don't know how lucky you are! You own land and have a decent roof over your head. You can afford to pay other people to do the hard work for you. Nine-tenths of Ireland is worse off than you. You should be down on your supposedly rheumatic knees thanking God for your blessings.”

“It's easy for you to talk,” Lucy retorted. “You with a good job in the city and a lot of fancy frocks. Meanwhile the years are passing me by. I haven't even had a new dress in ages.”

“We're all getting older,” Ursula observed dryly, “and my frocks are far from fancy anymore. Besides, you could afford to buy a new dress if you really wanted to.”

Lucy bridled. “And who would I wear it for?”

“You could come with me to pay a call on Eileen,” Ursula suggested. “We haven't seen her since Frank's funeral.”

Lucy pretended not to hear.

The following day Ursula went alone to Newmarket-on-Fergus. The shopkeepers from whom she bought presents for Eileen's children could not tell her where to find the Mulvaneys. Only the coal merchant was able to give directions. Lucas owed him money. “If it weren't for the babbies I'd let them freeze this winter,” he growled.

Ursula gave the man the few shillings she had left.

Ned's youngest sister was living several miles east of the village in the most recent of a long series of rented hovels. The family moved almost as often as the rent came due, because Lucas Mulvaney drank most of what he earned. His work record was like his rental record: a long series of odd jobs from which he invariably was fired.

Ursula was dismayed by Eileen's appearance. The flirtatious charmer had transmogrified into a slatternly, middle-aged harridan with bleary eyes.

“I'm Precious,” Ursula said when Eileen did not seem to recognize her. “Ned's daughter.”

“Oh. Well, you'd best come in, then.” With a weary sigh, Eileen stepped back and let Ursula enter the house.

 

When she left the shack an hour later Ursula was crying. Saoirse's money, which she had been sending to Lucy since Norah's death, would have to be divided and a portion sent to Eileen with strict instructions never to tell Lucas.

Knowing Lucy would not approve, Ursula did not tell her.

 

On the twenty-ninth of December, 1937, the Constitution of Éire came into force. At the instigation of the Republican women, a black flag was flown from Sinn Féin headquarters in Dublin.

The first week of the new year brought Ursula a late Christmas present from Henry and Ella, and an angry letter from Lucy.

The present was a new novel by an American writer, John Steinbeck. “
Of Mice And Men
was recently published here to wide acclaim,” Henry explained in an accompanying note. “It is the ultimate novel about friendship, and all the more powerful because the friendship leads to shocking violence. As I read it I could not help thinking of Ned and the quarrel between us. I wish we could heal those wounds before it's too late. Perhaps someday we can.”

Lucy wrote, “Why are you sending less money to buy feed for your horse? Do you expect me to make up the difference? I will not waste good money on an animal that does not earn its keep. Just last week a young man came around selling iron gates made of heavy pipe. If I had any money to spare I would buy one for the farmyard.”

Reluctantly, Ursula approached Thomas Kiernan to ask for a rise in wages.

He refused. “My dear girl, you are already being paid over half as much as a man, though you have no wife and children to support. What would you spend more money on? Cinema tickets and fripperies, I suppose. Well, a rise is out of the question. Even if the station could afford to give you one, which it can't.”

She would not, could not, tell him her private business. If she said, “I have an old horse to support and an impoverished aunt who isn't really my aunt but needs help,” what would Kiernan say? He would laugh at her. She would have confirmed his belief that young women were frivolous.

Her small list of personal indulgences was already pared to the bone. Now she eliminated it altogether. She would give up the occasional pint of Guinness after work. She would not buy any more books, even secondhand. There would be no replacements for clothes that wore out and no professional services for them either. Instead of taking her clothes to Louise for washing, as she might have done, Ursula would buy a box of Rinso at the corner shop and wash them herself.

Pride would not allow her to admit her problems to Louise Hamilton. Louise would tell Hector and he would gloat.

 

On the seventeenth of January Eamon de Valera visited London for talks with Neville Chamberlain. “Government sources predict,” said the 2RN newsreader, “that there will be a positive resolution of the economic war.”

A few days later Ursula sent the usual sum to Clare to buy feed for Saoirse, and an equal amount to Eileen for herself and the children.

The next month, charging that Prime Minister Chamberlain was too anxious to please Hitler and Mussolini, Anthony Eden of the Foreign Office resigned from the British cabinet. It was true that Chamberlain's inclination was to placate the fascists. Like most of Europe he was terrified at the prospect of another war only twenty years after the last.

“Appeasement is a dreadful mistake,” Ursula remarked to Helena Moloney. “For centuries Ireland tried to appease England and look where it got us.”

 

In March Adolf Hitler annexed Austria. Ursula prepared the news announcement herself, frowning as she typed: “The German Fuehrer drove through Vienna today in a triumphant cavalcade, wearing the brown Storm Trooper uniform and giving the fascist salute to wildly cheering crowds. In reclaiming his native land, Hitler has become the absolute ruler of an empire of seventy-four million people.”

None of the great powers protested the annexation of Austria.

A plebiscite put to the Austrian people overwhelmingly approved the arrangement. As Heidi Neckermann wrote to Ursula, “It would take a courageous individual to vote ‘no' in a room draped with Nazi flags and filled with storm troopers. Jews, of course, were forbidden to vote.”

She no longer sounded as enthusiastic about Hitler as she had been.

 

After months of complex negotiations, in April Eamon de Valera and Neville Chamberlain signed a new Anglo-Irish Agreement ending the economic war.

The
Irish Times
wrote: “On April 25, 1916, Eamon de Valera was in command of Roland's Mill, in armed rebellion against the British Crown. On April 25, 1938, the Prime Minister of England, with a gracious gesture, handed back to the prime minister of Éire a pair of field glasses that had been taken from him by the British officer who arrested him twenty-two years ago.
¹

De Valera had won large concessions. Under the new agreement Éire was granted the so-called “Treaty Ports”—fortified naval bases at Cobh in Cork, Berehaven in Kerry, and Lough Swilly in Donegal—which Britain had denied to the Free State in 1921. De Valera stressed that the Irish people were only recovering what had been wrongfully taken away from them.

There would be no Royal Navy access to these ports in time of war unless the Irish agreed. Henceforth Éire would be responsible for her own coastal defense.

New trade arrangements favorable to Irish farmers caused widespread rejoicing. The British government also relinquished its claims for all unpaid land annuities in return for the comparatively small sum of ten million pounds.

Partition would remain; apparently there had been no serious effort to remove it. But the agreement was seen as a triumph for de Valera.

It was not enough to change Ursula's feelings about him.

 

Lewis Baines paid a visit to Dublin in May. He had been absent for several months, an absence Ursula did not comment on. She did not want him to think she was pining for him.

In fact, he had wanted to come but decided against it. Best to let the affair cool off a bit, he told himself. Make her anxious. That was part of the game.

They went to the races at Fairyhouse and sat in a box, the first time Ursula had done either. But she had a knowing eye when it came to horses. Betting on the ones she picked, Lewis won seventy pounds. When he tried to give her half, she declined.

He was aware, though he was too much of a gentleman to say so, that her clothes were beginning to look a little shabby. He could not understand why she refused to take money she obviously needed. His repeated insistence on sharing the winnings almost provoked a quarrel. Ursula threw the pound notes onto the ground between them. “I never take money from men.”

 

On the twenty-fifth of June, Douglas Hyde, the modest and unassuming founder of the Gaelic League, was inaugurated as the first president of Éire. There had been rumors that the office might be offered to Seán Lester, but nothing came of them.
²
Within a matter of days, President Hyde took up residence in the former Viceregal Lodge, officially re-renamed
Aras an Uachtarain
.
^*
On his way to the Phoenix Park the president paused at the GPO out of respect for those who had fought there in 1916.

The gesture touched Ursula's heart. In his honor—and at her suggestion—2RN presented a program in which the surviving members of the first Dáil reconstructed the session during which the Irish Declaration of Independence was drafted.

Eamon de Valera had been president of that Dáil. The Republican Dáil.

When he entered the broadcasting studio Ursula contrived to be busy elsewhere.

“I won't be a hypocrite,” she told Helena Moloney afterward. “I respect Dev for what he did in the past, but as far as I'm concerned he's betrayed the Republican cause since he came to power.”

She did not discuss these feelings inside the broadcasting station. Like many people in the years following the Civil War, Ursula Halloran had become expert at dissembling.

 

When the map of Europe had been redrawn at the end of the Great War, the Republic of Czechoslovakia was created by the union of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia. A parliamentary democracy closely allied to Britain and France, Czechoslovakia became the most industrially advanced country in Eastern Europe. Eventually it was ripe for the picking. Both Poland and Hungary pressed territorial claims.

Czechoslovakia included the Sudetenland, a mountainous region in northern Bohemia with a predominantly German population. Adolf Hitler began inciting the Germans of the Sudetenland to demand union with the Third Reich. By March of 1938, officers wearing German uniforms had been seen in the streets of Prague.

The Czechoslovakian government was willing to fight rather than surrender the Sudetenland. Everyone expected Britain and France would use their diplomatic clout on behalf of their ally, and keep the situation under control.

Ursula wrote to Henry, “It would be nice to believe all quarrels can be resolved by diplomacy, but I am not convinced. In Ireland we have learned the hard way that bullies will not back down just because someone talks reason to them.”

 

The summer that had begun with warmth and sunshine turned cold and wet. By July the weather was almost the sole topic of conversation. A bomb blast in Palestine and growing tensions in Europe did not compel half as much attention. They were far away. Weather was here and now, in your face, down your neck, squelching in your shoes.

As Finbar Cassidy was crossing Dame Street on the last day of August he saw Ursula emerging, white-faced, from a public telephone kiosk. Her eyes met his. Her face crumpled into tears and she ran toward him.

Finbar barely had time to open his arms before she collapsed into them. “What's wrong?” he kept asking. She was weeping too hard to answer. Her whole body began to shake.

Finbar scooped her up and ran toward the open gates of Trinity College. Trinity had been founded by Queen Elizabeth in 1591 for Protestant students only. Although Catholics were now admitted, many Dubliners still considered Trinity as alien ground, a bastion of hated colonialism.