Jig (34 page)

He wondered if he could sneak away in the night, if he could wait until the others were asleep and then vanish swiftly. Maybe he could hitch a ride to Albany County Airport and fly back to New Jersey. Home. He'd forget he ever participated in any of this insanity. He didn't belong with people like Seamus Houlihan these days, or with thugs like Rorke and McGrath. They stood for the old world and the senselessness of a war whose roots were buried in a history that should have been forgotten long ago. He turned the prospect of departure around in his mind. A risky business. Maybe. But waiting might prove fatal.

A movement on the balcony caught his eye and he looked up. Houlihan was standing there, legs apart, hands on the rail.

‘Waddell, Fitz,' Houlihan called down. ‘I'd like to see you and the others in my room right away.'

‘Right, Seamus,' Waddell replied.

Fitzjohn started towards the stairway, looking back once at the empty swimming pool. He wondered how long Houlihan had been standing on the balcony and whether he'd heard any of the conversation with Waddell.

Roscommon, New York

Patrick Cairney had drunk just a little more of his father's brandy than he intended. When he went inside his bedroom and lay down, his. head was spinning. He didn't close his eyes because that way the spinning was worse. He had to sit up and concentrate on something inside the room, an object he could focus on until the nausea had passed. He stared hard at his canvas bag, which sat locked on the dresser. After dinner there had been several toasts proposed by Harry. Sentimental toasts, tributes to the composers of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic written at Easter 1916 at the time of the Rising.

All Harry's heroes had been signatories of the Proclamation, and he could recite the entire document by heart. Certain words came back to Cairney.
Supported by her exiled children in America
…
Ireland strikes in full confidence of victory … We pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of Irish freedom
… We pledge our lives, Cairney thought, though not necessarily our brains or our skills. During the toasts he'd fought with the urge to silence Harry and stuff the empty words down his throat and tell him how little significance they had, how meaningless they really were. This streak of cruelty inside himself wasn't surprising, but what astounded him was the forceful way it had suddenly risen. Harry's beatific expression, the way he sniffed as he recited the sacrosanct old sentiments – Patrick Cairney despised it all, the facile nature of Harry's words, the easy emotions. He despised a life given over to talk, endless talk, and no action.

The Cause needed action. Not the empty rattling of old men
.

He let his thoughts drift back to the beginning, the very beginning, when he had first come to Finn's attention. In those days he'd gone around the fringes of clandestine political groups in Dublin as if his head were going to explode. Here he was in a divided country where injustice was a commonplace event and, if you excluded the mad bombers and the angry snipers, nothing much was being done to correct the situation and get the English out. Here he was on an island whose northern section was constantly on the edge of apocalypse. When he'd visited Ulster he'd been sickened by the flames and the raddled buildings and the rubber bullets fired by British soldiers and the checkpoints and the Saracen cars and tanks and the kids who mindlessly parroted a hatred they had inherited, a whole desolate world galaxies removed from Harry's green dreams that had been spoon-fed to him throughout childhood. And he'd been impatient back then, insanely so, driven by an urge to transform his emotions into direct physical action. People were suspicious of him because he was American. Because he hadn't been born and raised in Ireland. He wanted to tell them he knew more about Ireland and its history than any of them.

But it wasn't until he'd gravitated into Finn's orbit that the opportunity came up to serve the Cause. He remembered now the precise moment in Glasnevin Cemetery when Finn had given him a gun and a mission to accomplish. It was the most perfect moment in his life. He'd stepped through a door into a different world where justice was something you pursued outside courts of law, where you moved beyond the realms of the Queen's laws and her lawyers and judges, those bewigged fools whose only interest lay in the maintenance of a status quo that had always protected them and their privileges. You created your own justice. And it was fair, the way it was supposed to be.

Finn said once,
It's a monastic life this. There's no glamour and no comfort. You can't have a family and kids. You can't hold down some regular job. You're always going to be standing outside of things, and every bloody shadow you see will make you wonder if there's a gun concealed in it. You want that, Jig?

Yes. Yes he wanted that. He wanted that the way he had never wanted anything else. He had given up his life for the Cause.
But where would the Cause be if he didn't get that missing money back?

Now he pushed the window open, hoping the cold air would clear his brain. Four brandies had brought him to this condition, but then he wasn't accustomed to alcohol. He looked out at the shadowy waters of Roscommon Lake. The night was intensely cold, moonless. He drew the window shut. He was suddenly anxious to get away from Roscommon, anxious for action, anxious to locate Finn's money.

He was thirsty. He opened the door and gazed down the flight of stairs to the first floor. The house was silent and dark, save for a thin light that burned dimly somewhere below. He moved towards the stairs and went down. He stepped inside the large kitchen – stainless steel surfaces and high-tech appliances, he noticed, which meant Celestine had redecorated the room since Kathleen's time, when the kitchen had been chintzy and floral. He found a glass and pressed it against the ice dispenser, then he filled it with water from the faucet. He drained the glass quickly, and stood with his back pressed against the sink. Once, this kitchen had been the warm heart of the house. Now it seemed more like a transplant, a triumph of the new technology. What did it tell him about the difference between Kathleen and Celestine? he wondered.

He became conscious of a voice drifting very faintly towards him through the open door. It was Celestine's. For a moment he wondered if she and Harry had come back downstairs for a nightcap, but as he strained to listen he realised he heard only one voice. He set his glass down inside the sink and went out of the kitchen. There was a thin light that burned through the crack of a doorway at the end of the hall. He moved towards it, even as he realised that he should have gone the other way to the stairs and back up to his bedroom. This was none of his business. Nothing that happened at Roscommon had anything to do with him.

He stopped outside the sitting room. Celestine was standing with her back to the door, a telephone receiver held in place between shoulder and jaw. She wore a blue silk robe that shimmered in the light from a nearby lamp and in one hand she held a glass of whiskey. Cairney heard her say, ‘I'm not making it up,' and then she turned around and saw him in the doorway, and her expression was one of restrained surprise, almost as though she'd expected to find him standing there. She put the receiver down, perhaps a little too quickly, and the first thing Cairney thought was that she had a lover somewhere, somebody she talked to when Harry was fast asleep upstairs. He didn't like the idea, but it made some kind of sense. How could Harry satisfy her at his age and in his health? Why
wouldn't
she look elsewhere for consolation?
I'm not making it up
. He wondered what she was referring to.

‘I spy,' she said lightly, like a child involved in a game of hide-and-seek.

He pushed the door open. ‘I didn't mean to creep up on you.'

‘Enter.' She gestured with her glass. It was an expansive motion, a little careless. She was slightly drunk. Cairney had a small insight into her life. A beautiful young woman married to a man forty years older than she was, probably lonely in the isolation of Roscommon – what was there to do at times but blur her life with liquor? And perhaps a lover she met now and again.

‘Harry's physician,' she said, pointing to the phone. ‘I make my daily progress report. Dutifully.'

Patrick Cairney wondered if that was a lie. He'd become so good at telling them himself, he should have been expert at detecting them in others, but he wasn't. She had hung up so quickly, though, without any farewell, and it was so late in the evening for a routine medical report, that he assumed it wasn't Harry's physician on the other end of the line. He watched her go to an armchair and sit, crossing her legs. Between the folds of the robe a stretch of pale thigh was visible briefly before she rearranged the garment.

‘Want a drink?' she asked.

‘I've had too much already.'

‘People talk about the Irish Problem, but they miss the point,' she said. She indicated her drink. ‘
This
is the Irish Problem. Jameson's elixir of life.'

Cairney smiled. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe there wasn't any man in Celestine's life other than Harry. He was so accustomed to paranoid thinking, to looking for levels of meaning beneath the superficial, that it was difficult to regard things in any normal fashion. An assassin's habit. You came to think that every situation was fraught with hidden significances. Nothing was ever ordinary, nothing innocent.

Celestine put her glass down on the coffee table. She let her hands fall into her lap. ‘Why don't you sit down, Patrick?'

He didn't move. ‘I was thinking of going back upstairs. I need some sleep.'

She turned her face slowly towards him. At a certain angle, her beauty seemed to have been sculpted in delicate, fragile detail. The fine mouth, the perfectly straight nose, the strong jaw that suggested a streak of determination. ‘Harry told me he wanted you to go into politics.'

‘He had some notion I'd follow him into the Senate, I guess.'

‘Why didn't you?'

‘I'm not a committee man,' he answered. ‘I don't work well in collaboration with others.'

‘A loner. Or was it rebellion against Daddy?'

Cairney shrugged. ‘Maybe both.'

Celestine reached out for her glass. She raised it to her lips but didn't drink. ‘Why archaeology?' She said this last word in a manner that might almost have been mocking, as if she couldn't bring herself to believe that he was really what he said he was.

‘Why not?'

‘It just seems so quaint, that's all. I have this image of you in khaki shorts and a pith helmet, directing a bunch of Arabs to dig holes in the sand. You never wanted to be famous like Harry? You never wanted your name to become a household word?'

‘Never.' Cairney moved towards the door. The security of the unlit hallway.
I never wanted to be anything like my father
.

‘Why is it I always get the impression you're running away from me? What is it? Don't you care for my company?' she asked.

‘I'm just tired.'

She stood up. She drained her glass, set it down. ‘Don't go. Stay a little longer.'

Her hands were stretched out towards him, and the expression on her face was one he couldn't quite read. A look of anxiety? He wasn't certain. But he recognised one thing beyond any doubt – his compass was going crazy again. He couldn't cross the space between himself and Celestine, couldn't possibly move towards her and clasp those hands in his own. Couldn't touch her. And then he thought:
I could, I could go to her so goddam easily
. He felt like a man flirting with the notion of his own ruin. Yet it appealed, the whole idea caught his fancy.
There, Harry. I had your wonderful wife. How does that affect your gorgeous dreams? Your infallibly beautiful wife and your cosy little world at Roscommon where you live your life falsely?

He stared at her. He imagined how readily his father must have fallen in love with this woman. He could see the old man losing his heart like a bird deliriously set free.

‘Please stay,' she said.

He looked at the paleness of her shoulders and the way the silk robe hung loosely against her body.

‘You're leaving in the morning, I understand,' she said.

Cairney nodded his head. Why was he still here in this room, this danger zone? He had no business in this place.

Her hands were still held out to him. ‘I have the feeling you won't be coming back.'

‘Maybe,' he said.

She lowered her hands slowly to her side. ‘You're afraid of me,' she said.

He wanted to say he was more afraid of himself than anything else. But he didn't speak.

‘You don't have to be,' she said. ‘Why are you always so twitchy around me?'

‘I didn't notice.'

‘I come near you, you jump. I ought to get one of those little bells lepers used to carry. I'd ring it whenever I moved within ten feet of you.'

Cairney pressed his fingertips to his eyelids to ease his headache. Harry's wife, he thought. Keep remembering that.

‘I make you tense,' she said.

‘No –'

‘Look at yourself, Patrick. You can't wait to get away from me, can you? Can't wait to hurry upstairs to your little bedroom.' She picked up her empty glass and sighed. She looked very fragile just then. ‘I'm sorry. I shouldn't be talking to you like this. Forget I ever said anything. I drink too much sometimes and say things I don't mean, that's all. My mouth has a mind of its own. Change the subject.'

He leaned against the wall. ‘I think you're unhappy,' he said. Jesus, it was the wrong thing to say. It was provocative, which meant it needed explanation. He should have simply said good night and gone upstairs, but now, in a sense, he'd committed himself.

Celestine poured herself another shot of Jameson's. ‘Is that how you see me?'