1949 (41 page)

“The Pacific theater,” Eileen remarked at the breakfast table. “Doesn't that sound exotic and far away?”

Ned reached for a piece of toasted bread. “It is far away. Are we out of marmalade?”

“There've been no oranges in years. You know that.”

“Honey, then.” He spread the golden syrup liberally on his toast and retired back behind his newspaper. “Damned war,” he was heard to mutter. “A man needs marmalade.”

“Isn't it strange,” Elsie Lester wrote to Ursula, “the way everything comes down to the personal in the end? Millions have died and Europe lies in ruins, yet when I heard that the American army had smashed through the German lines, my first thought was for Seán. The war will soon be over. He will be able to come home.

“The League of Nations exists in name only now. Without the support of the great powers it is nothing. America has no interest and the Russians will never forgive their expulsion from the League in 1939. As Seán once predicted, a new organisation will be needed when the war finally ends. That is why he is hanging on in Geneva: to preserve the League's archives so they can be of use to whatever follows it.”

Ursula read the letter to Ned. When she finished he commented, “You sound wistful, Precious.”

“Perhaps I am. Part of me would love to be in Geneva with Seán Lester, waiting to see what will be born out of all this. Something like the League of Nations is desperately needed, but it must be given teeth.”

Ned nodded. “You mean military might. That's what it always comes down to. Men can make as many pretty speeches as they like, talking about universal brotherhood and common decency, but in the finish-up it's the big brother with the hard fists who protects the little brother from the bullies.”

“You're talking about the IRA now. And the north.”

Ned gave a weary sigh. “I'm afraid the IRA's all but destroyed. Thanks to Dev, mostly.”

“You don't sound very bitter,” she noted with surprise.

“I told you, I don't hate anyone. Do you remember when the British hanged those two IRA men in 1940? I happen to know that Dev made personal appeals to both Eden and Chamberlain to spare their lives. He said the reprieve of the men would be an act of generosity a thousand times more valuable to Britain than anything that might be gained by killing them.”
⁵

Ursula said hotly, “Yet he's sanctioned the executions of Republicans himself!”

“Sometimes morality depends on circumstance, Precious. I've spent a lot of time in the north and I got to know some of the Unionists up there. Talked to them.
Listened
to them.

“Northern Protestants always viewed the British Isles as one great empire, social, cultural, and economic, in whose magnificence they shared. When Ireland opted out of the empire they were reduced to a minority enclave in the corner of a small island on the far edge of Europe. It frightened the life out of them, Precious; made them feel the way the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto must have felt. Doomed and desperate.

“The Unionists' fear has skewed their version of morality. It's driven them to do things that God-fearing men should never think of doing. That doesn't make it right, but it is understandable.”

“I never thought I'd hear you saying such a thing, Papa.”

His lips quirked. “If you live long enough, you'll hear yourself saying things you never thought you'd say.”

Later, long after she had gone to bed, Ursula found herself wondering,
How did he know about de Valera's personal appeal to Eden and Chamberlain? That wasn't in the newspapers
.

On the twenty-fifth of August, 1944, French tanks led the Allies into Paris. A wildly ecstatic greeting awaited General Charles de Gaulle when he arrived in the city that evening. A towering figure as striking as Eamon de Valera, de Gaulle was reported as saying, “I wish simply and from the bottom of my heart to say,
Vive Paris
.”

After that it seemed that almost every day another city was taken by the Allies. The German response was vicious. When an uprising was threatened by the Polish resistance movement, Nazi tanks razed the beautiful old city of Warsaw.

“I wonder if there is anything left of the Europe I remember,” Ursula said to Eileen.

Up to her elbows in dishwater, Eileen glanced around at her own small kingdom. “Probably not,” she said complacently. “But sure, you have this.”

Foals in the field and calves in the pen. A blizzard of butterflies on an August morning.

I have everything I could possibly want
.

Everything
.

Of course I do
.

 

Henry's despair leaped off the pages of his letter.

Ursula approached Ned with trepidation. He read Henry's letter impassively. Once he looked up. “So Kathleen finally married Paul,” he said. “Good.” When he finished reading he handed the letter back to Ursula. “And Henry has a daughter.”

“He does, Papa. Two, in fact. I met Bella when they were still here in Ireland. She was a beautiful little girl and I expect she's a beautiful young woman.”

“Who has run away with some man.”

“So it appears.” Ursula was watching Ned carefully. His face and voice gave away nothing, but his eyes began to take on a distant stare. “Papa? Is one of your spells coming on? Can you see me?”

“I can see Síle,” Ned replied disconcertingly. “She ran away with a man once. Not me; long before me. If someone had intervened in time, perhaps she…” He fell silent. Ursula waited.

Ned's fingers plucked at the knees of his trousers. “What did you say the boy's name was?”

“Michael Kavanagh. His father works for…”

“My sister Kathleen. I know.” Ned heaved a deep sigh. “Leave it with me.”

“How will you…”

“Leave it with me!” he roared. It was the first time since his return that he had showed any sign of temper.

The anger was still there, then. Simmering under the skin.

 

Henry Mooney opened Ursula's letter with trembling fingers. “I put your case to Ned,” she had written.

Ella clasped her hands together. “Oh, Henry, is there any chance Ned's friends here can find Bella?”

“Don't get your hopes up, Cap'n. America's a huge country, and if someone doesn't want to be found it's almost impossible to find them. That said, the Irish Republican network is very, very wide.”

At the end of August the Russian army captured the oil fields of Ploesti, depriving Germany of a third of her oil supplies, and swept on toward Bucharest.

A few evenings later, the newsreader on the wireless had a tone in his voice Ursula had never heard before. “We are informed that evidence of unsuspected Nazi atrocities has just come to light in Poland. Russian officers entering the Maidenek concentration camp have learnt that an estimated one and a half million internees were murdered there under conditions of what is termed ‘clinical efficiency.' The bodies were stripped and burnt. Clothing and valuables were sent to Germany while the ashes were used…” His voice broke. “While the ashes were used as fertilizer.”

Ned and Ursula stared at one another aghast. Suddenly the farmhouse parlor was too dark; the paraffin lamps could not assuage the gloom. Eileen was singing to herself in the kitchen but they did not hear her.

September, October. Nazi armies were on the run throughout Europe. Field Marshall Erwin Rommel committed suicide.

General Douglas MacArthur triumphantly waded ashore in the Philippines, saying “I have returned.”

Harvest time. Saving the hay. Children studying at the kitchen table.

The spring foals were growing almost visibly. They had inherited the temperament of their Irish draft mothers, but lacked the athleticism of their racehorse sire. Plodding and good-natured, they did not measure up to the memory of Saoirse.

“I was hoping for reliable field hunters that could also do a bit of show jumping,” Ursula told Gerry. “Once the war is over there'll be a good market for them again. I'm going to put our mares to a different stallion next year—and perhaps buy a couple more mares as well.”

“We don't have enough pasture,” Gerry warned. “Besides, I thought you was going to sell horses, not buy more.”

“Only the colts. We'll keep the fillies to breed from.”

“I'm after telling you there's not enough grass. We have dairy cows to feed, remember?”

“The holding across the road has been lying vacant for years,” Ursula said. “It's only eight acres, but eight good acres. I always did think their grass was better than ours.” Her eyes sparkled. “I'll have another little chat with my bank manager.”

The bank manager had been one of those who scoffed when Ursula bought the first brood mares. “You'll find that horses are an expensive hobby, Miss Halloran. We don't eat horse meat in this country.”

Yet he could not deny that the farm was prospering. Ursula planned every step carefully. No corner of the land was unproductive. On dry, stony soil at the far end of the highest field she had even planted a variety of herbs, which she gathered and dried and sold in bunches at the market. They were prized by local women who used them for homemade medicaments. The preceding year Ursula had borrowed enough money from the bank to reroof the house and install an indoor toilet. Within ninety days she had repaid the loan.

When other farmers came to him with excuses instead of repayments, complaining that the land would no longer provide a living, the banker invariably suggested they have a talk with Ursula Halloran. None of them did, of course. She was only a woman.

But if she was ready to expand her operations, he was willing to help.

Late in November Elsie Lester wrote to Ursula: “My husband feels that recent developments have vindicated him. As you know, there has been a four-power meeting in Washington, D.C., to discuss creating an organisation to insure worldwide security after the war.”

“How would I know?” Ursula muttered to herself. “There's been nothing on the wireless or in the papers. We might as well be on another planet.”

The letter went on. “Such an organisation will find the experience of the League of Nations invaluable. This is what Seán has been waiting and hoping for. The new body will be called the United Nations, with a special Security Council composed of the United States, Britain, China, and Russia. France is to join them later, and smaller countries will fill another six seats.

“It is a foregone conclusion that the British will vote against Éire being allowed to join, but Seán is hopeful. De Valera knows President Roosevelt personally. They met in 1919 when Dev was in the States on a fund-raising expedition,
¹
and the two got along very well. Seán thinks Roosevelt may be persuaded, as Wilson was not, to consider Éire a separate and sovereign state deserving a position in world affairs.”

Ned was in the farmyard, greasing the chain of the bicycle. He looked up as Ursula ran toward him. “What is the exact quote from Robert Emmet, Papa? You know the one I mean.”

He smiled. “‘When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written.'”

 

Another Christmas was approaching. The pudding was already made using honey instead of sugar, which gave it a rather gluey texture. In the yard the geese were fat. On Christmas Eve George would behead two of them with an axe. Eileen's children would pluck the birds—under protest.

That morning Ursula was up early, but not as early as Ned. When she passed his room she noticed that the door was slightly ajar. “Papa?”

No answer.

Ursula took a half-step inside.

The bed was neatly made. For a moment she was afraid he had vanished again, but his coat was still hanging on the back of the door. On the wash stand lay the cord he usually wore around his neck.

The silvery key on the cord seemed to glitter in the dim light.

Ursula picked it up and hefted it in her hand. An object so small…yet it must guard something very important. But what? Ned had few possessions. “Always travel light” was one of his axioms.

Her eye was drawn to his army backpack, wedged between the bed and the locker. Still holding the key, she stooped and hefted the pack onto the bed. It was heavier than she expected.

“What are you doing, Ursula?” asked a soft voice.

She whirled around. Ned lounged in the doorway, holding his shaving mug and brush. “I was out of shaving soap,” he said, “so I went down to the kitchen to get a few slivers. What's your excuse?”

Ursula responded with the challenging, Ned Halloran look she had perfected for herself years ago. She could stand up to him now. In some curious way their roles had been reversed; she was the adult, he the child. “I was snooping, Papa, you know how curious I am.” She held up the key. “I was wondering what you lock with this.”

The tension went out of his face and he almost laughed. “How can anyone argue with such total honesty? Here, I'll show you.” Ned stepped past her and took a black metal lockbox from his pack. “I keep the manuscript of my book in here,” he said, setting the box on top of his locker.

“May I look at it?”

“Why? Is there something in particular you want to know?” His voice was soft again, almost a whisper. “Perhaps you're curious about other Christmases. Such as 1939, when the IRA raided the army arsenal in the Phoenix Park and got away with a million rounds of ammunition.”

“My God! Were you there?”

“Och, I've been lots of places. Will-o'-the-wisp, that's me. Like my old friend Michael Collins.”

Her words tumbled over one another. “Were you in the Phoenix Park raid? What happened to all that ammunition? Did it go to the north? Did you…”