Now and in the Hour of Our Death (32 page)

“I'll think about it.”

Perhaps she should give Jimmy a call. Despite his connection to Davy, simply hearing his and his wife's and Siobhan's Belfast accents had been pleasingly familiar.

Why not take Jimmy up on his offer and at least have a chat with Siobhan? Although Fiona had just met the girl, she was the only one Fiona knew who had faced up to the death of a man with whom, according to Jimmy, she'd been so deeply in love. At least Fiona assumed Siobhan must have managed to get over the young soldier because she was married now, with children. She wondered if Siobhan would be willing to talk about it, and, if she was, could that be taken as a sign that she had indeed weathered her loss?

A disturbance in the pool broke Fiona's train of thought. The orca was spy-hopping, pectoral fins on the water's surface, his entire head raised vertically above. She stared into his huge eye.

To Fiona, the orca's brown eye was full of ineffable sadness, like the misery in Davy's blue eyes the day she'd gone to the Kesh to tell him she was leaving him and leaving Northern Ireland. She knew that, try as she might, it was one particular scene she would never forget.

The whale slid soundlessly below, barely disturbing the waters as he sank, and she tried to let the memory of that day submerge and take the sadness with it. She leaned back on the wooden plank that covered the concrete, taking her weight on her hands.

She felt Becky's hand on her own and the warmth both of the wood beneath her palm and from Becky's hand above.

“Are you all right, old thing?”

Fiona heard the concern in Becky's voice, forced a smile, and said, “I'm fine. I was just thinking.”

“Dare one ask what you were thinking about?”

How typical of Becky, to be sensitive to others' feelings and be desperately afraid of overstepping whatever inner boundary her inborn English politeness had drawn. “Of course,” Fiona said. “I was remembering the day I told Davy I was going to Canada.” It pleased her that she could say that without hesitating and without feeling too uncomfortable. “It was visiting day in the Kesh. I think that seeing those orcas captive in that tank”—she nodded toward the pool—“I think that's what brought the whole thing back.”

“Is thinking about him still bothering you?” Becky's voice was soft.

“A bit. But not as much. He's fading like an old sepia-tint photo, except that one image. It's still clear as a bell.” That one, she thought, and the nightmare in all its horrid clarity.

Becky's voice was soft. “It's going to hurt. There's no question of that, but”—she squeezed Fiona's hand gently—“I know the analogy is a bit hackneyed … but it's like lancing a boil and letting the pus out.” She squeezed more tightly. “And it sounds to me as if you've had the courage to pick up the lancet.”

Fiona looked down into the pool. The surface was flat, and through the aquamarine she could see the outlines of the two orcas in its depths. Wouldn't it be nice, she thought, and silently chastised herself for even thinking the word “nice.” She spent hours trying to persuade her pupils to let “‘nice' take a holiday” and find better synonyms. But it would be nice if her life could always be so calm as the pool was then.

A streak raced from the depths. White Wings, a Pacific white-sided dolphin who lived in the pool with the orcas, rocketed through the surface and curved in a high, graceful arc before returning to cleave the water with its blunt snout, reentering the pool as cleanly as an Olympic diver yet leaving expanding circles of wavelets to disturb the tranquility.

That, thought Fiona, was pretty much the way her own mind worked. She could still remember some of the psychology courses she'd taken at teachers' college. It was Jungian, that was the word. Whenever she believed everything was going the way she would like, thoughts of Davy or the damn dream would come roaring up from the depths of her unconscious, just as the dolphin had surfaced. And as he had left his ripples as mementos of his coming, so did they.

“I think,” said Becky, “you've started something, wondering aloud about jailbreaks. I think the dolphin's trying to do a runner, too.”

That made Fiona laugh. She squeezed Becky's hand. “Thank you,” she said.

“Whatever for?”

“For listening. For making me laugh.”

“You are, to use the expression of our Canadian cousins, entirely welcome.” Becky stood. “Judging by the way my tummy feels, it's lunchtime. We should be moving along to the Teahouse.”

“Right,” said Fiona, “and it's my treat.”

Becky chuckled in her turn. “Correct me if I'm misquoting Marlon Brando, but it's ‘an offer I can't refuse.'”

*   *   *

The Teahouse was packed inside, the buzz of conversation deafening. Fiona was pleased when the hostess was able to seat them at a quiet patio table, where she could look over a low hedge and across Burrard Inlet. The sun, now that the autumnal equinox had passed, was lower in the sky. Great cumulonimbus clouds stood, puffed, white ramparts, ragged grey anvils over the North Shore Mountains to her right and above Point Grey ahead. Below her, the water's surface was a filigree of silver where the sun struck, dulled here and there by the clouds' tattered shadows.

“Isn't that lovely, Becky? The sea looks like a Turkish plate I saw in an antique shop once. The copper had been worn away in patches, and the brighter pewter shone through.”

“It really is very pretty,” Becky said. “Look how tiny the sailboats seem.”

Fiona watched the boats heeling to a stiff breeze. “They're having fun,” she said, remembering Bowen Island. “I do enjoy sailing with Tim.”

“The good doctor's back tonight, isn't he?”

“I'm going to make him supper at my place.”

Becky raised one eyebrow. “Good for you, girl. Trite though it may sound, the way to a man's heart is definitely through his stomach; and speaking of stomachs, I'm famished.” Becky picked up her menu. “And I could murder a glass of something white, dry, and
very
chilled.”

A waitress came and took the drink orders.

Fiona sat forward in her wrought iron chair and rested her forearms on the glass tabletop. She watched how intently Becky studied her menu. Her friend certainly enjoyed her—what would Becky call them? “Vittles.”

Fiona was glad that she'd met Becky: someone who would listen, someone who put Fiona completely at ease, someone to whom she could open up as she had done at the aquarium earlier, a woman with the knack of being able to say the right thing and, more importantly, one who knew when to say nothing.

Some of Fiona's Canadian acquaintances, knowing of the Troubles back in Ireland, thought that it was odd that an Irishwoman and an Englishwoman could be so close. Why the hell shouldn't they?

They had a lot in common: teaching, the opera, books, an ability to find the same things hilarious, often to the confusion of their Canadian acquaintances, and something that Fiona knew she had taken time to recognize—a shared background, even if they had come from different sides of Saint George's Channel, which separated England from Ireland.

The ten-year gap in their ages made no difference. As girls, they had read the same Bible (although as taught by clergy of different persuasions); studied the same books at school, the same works of Shakespeare; been taught the same history, even if—as Fiona recognized years ago—the history had been slanted in favour of the English. They'd listened to the same pop groups, watched the same television programmes, probably read the same newspapers. They spoke the same language, though with different accents, different nuances, but each understood the other's subtleties. Their sameness was what had brought them together in the first place, and from that coming together a friendship had grown. She wondered if Becky was of the same opinion? She looked questioningly at her friend, who must have misunderstood the look.

Becky pointed at the menu. “Are you having trouble deciding, Fiona?”

“Not at all. I'll have a Caesar salad. I told you, I'll be cooking a big dinner tonight for Tim.”

“Indeed. Lucky Doctor Tim. I'm having sardines on toast for my tea, so if you don't mind, I'm going to tuck in now, and the scallops meunière sound absolutely delicious.”

The waitress appeared with their drinks. Fiona ordered their meals, then raised her glass to Becky. “Cheers.”

“I think,” said Becky, “we can do better than that. Let's drink to homecomings.”

Fiona thought of tonight and Tim. “To homecomings and, Becky”—Fiona looked across at her companion—“to friendship.”

“I'll certainly drink to that.” Becky took a healthy swallow, then stifled a tiny burp.

Fiona sipped, glanced out toward the road past the Teahouse, and watched two joggers running past, Lycra-clad, grimly determined, never smiling, ignoring each other, oblivious to the sea, the mountains, the billowing clouds above. On they ran, conscious only of their individual pulse rates, the miles covered, their improved cardiovascular status, toned thighs, and selfish hopes for everlasting life.

They thought they were running
to
something. Fiona knew she had fled from Northern Ireland and still ran from her memories, and she believed that inside every jogger there was something
from
which they were running. Everyone did that in their own way, she supposed. Some drank or used drugs, some shopped, some were workaholics, some hid in a religion.

She looked across the table to where Becky sat, seemingly contented in the sunshine, and wondered what, if anything, chased after that most placid of women. It was none of Fiona's business, she knew, but realized that if something were troubling Becky deeply, she'd let down her reserve and tell her friend Fiona.

And Fiona smiled because she knew that, unlike the self-contained joggers, she and Becky each had a friend to run with.

 

CHAPTER 28

CASTLEDERG. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1983

How much longer would they have to keep running? Davy stared at the darkness through the side window of the car racing along the country road to Castlederg, where a bridge spanned the Derg. Eamon, who was driving, said the river was the last obstacle between them and the safe place in Tyrone—if there wasn't a roadblock on the bridge.

Davy hoped to God there wouldn't be. He'd had enough close calls since he'd got outside the wire at the Kesh, but now they were on the last lap, and he had nothing to do but sit with his thoughts.

Although his heart rate had slowed, he moved restlessly in the backseat. Perhaps, he thought, it's just the darkness that's unsettling me. He was used to Belfast and its streetlights. One or two always managed to survive the glass-shattering street riots. Corridor lights had burned all night in the Kesh. Even the flare of Molotov cocktails hurled by the Loyalist mobs as they rampaged through the streets of the Falls in the early days of the Troubles would have been preferable to the impenetrable gloom outside the car.

The last time he'd experienced the utter nothingness of the countryside at night was way back when he'd been training as a boy in the Tyrone Sperrin Mountains.

The Sperrins weren't very far away now, and it struck Davy that there was a certain symmetry in his being taken back to Tyrone, where the whole bloody thing had started for him when he was sixteen.

Da had enrolled Davy and Jimmy Ferguson in the old Official IRA. They'd been sent down here from Belfast. Someone senior in the organization had decided that Davy would be trained as an explosives expert.

Back then he'd believed in the Cause, and, when one of his devices had gone off prematurely, killing Da and wounding Davy, he had strengthened his resolve to fight for a free Ireland.

After the explosion, he'd had to lie in a crude shelter, nursed by wee Jimmy. God, even if Fiona wouldn't see him when he got to Canada, and Davy couldn't believe that was true, had to believe it wasn't true as fervently as he used to believe in the struggle, it would be great to see Jimmy Ferguson again. Him and his quoting William Butler Yeats.

In the long, dark nights, with only the cold, distant stars for light, Jimmy would sit by Davy and recite: “O'Driscoll drove with a song / The wild duck and the drake / From the tall and tufted reeds / Of the drear Hart Lake…” or, “Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one a gazelle.”

When he'd first met Fiona, he'd thought of her as a gazelle, and he'd kept that thought through the last nine weary years. He knew that lovers could part, that often after a time they found someone else. Davy smiled wryly. Who the hell was he meant to meet in the Kesh? Eamon? Poor Sean Donovan? As his smile faded, he knew that, had he been on the outside with every woman in Christendom, waiting and willing, not one of them could have taken Fiona's place.

But she must have had other men. Davy flinched when he realized what “had” could mean. He didn't want to imagine her in bed with a stranger, with anyone but him, but he couldn't help himself, and the images tore at him.

Nine years was a hell of a long time to stay celibate, and to distract himself he thought back through the long years since he'd last been in Tyrone. He could remember one more line that Jimmy was fond of, from Yeats's “Down by the Salley Gardens,” “She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; / But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.” And he
had
been foolish back then. They all had, believing they could get rid of the British.

Was he full of tears? He'd only shed them the day after she'd left the Kesh having told him she was going to Canada. All of his other tears, for the people his bombs had killed or maimed, were buried somewhere deep inside him along with the ones he should have shed for Da, killed by the bomb that had shattered Davy's thigh.

He tugged his pants away from his thigh, feeling their dampness, smelling the stink of the ditch where he'd crouched after staggering across the road outside the Kesh and smashing his way through a blackthorn hedge. He imagined he could still hear the racket of choppers clattering over his hiding place, the drone of a high-winged monoplane, the whining of tires on tarmac as Saracen armoured cars and Land Rovers sped past him toward the prison.