The Living (5 page)

‘Arrives early and stays late, you mean?'

‘Well, not so much that, since he lives downstairs. But I don't think he ever really stops, you know? The company is his life. He's very driven. Which is kind of inspiring, and kind of annoying.'

‘Yes, I could see that.'

We were past City Hall, and I couldn't see Denise welcoming Matthew into our evening plans. ‘Which way are you … I'm … going to meet my friend.' I took a large bite of cod and felt young and stupid.

‘Oh, yes,' said Matthew. ‘My bus stop's this way.'

We parted at the corner of South Great George's Street, and I proceeded towards Dame Lane.

A passage from
Chichester Psalms
was running through my head – halfway through the second movement, a furious invasion of sound from the male voices after a serene and gorgeous soprano passage. We'd spent a lot of time on diction at last night's rehearsal, taking advantage of Tom's expertise as a biblical scholar.

Tom had drilled the men in their glottals and gutturals. Diane had made a point of reading out the translation: it was a text I recognized from Handel's
Messiah
.

Bernstein's music was fractured and spiky, loud and sinister and brash.

insisted the men –

And then the women came floating in again with their dreamy melody from the beginning of the movement, with the text of the Twenty-third Psalm – ‘the Lord is my shepherd' – and a singular marking – ‘blissfully unaware of threat'.

I
DUCKED INTO THE
Stag's Head just as it began to drizzle. Denise had nabbed a table in the corner and was nursing a pint of cider. She greeted me in a parody of her old Ardee accent: ‘How's Hoolie?'

‘Call me that again, Missus, and I'll put your face through the wall.'

‘Can't be going denying your roots, now.' Denise reached up to ruffle my hair.

I dodged her, sniffing in feigned dudgeon. ‘I'm going to get a drink.'

Standing waiting for my Guinness to settle, I glanced along the bar to see if I recognized anyone. Several unmistakable Trinity students, of the sort who had frequented this place since time immemorial. Earnest, bespectacled men with Byronic hairstyles. A woman in dreadlocks and a black cape. A couple of excellent beards.

Two middle-aged men in suits looked as though they'd come to the wrong place. They were both drinking orange juice, and beads of sweat sparkled on their foreheads. One of them had biglensed, silver-rimmed glasses, just like Dad's.

I carried my drink back to our table.

Two pints down, we were joined by some more of the old gang, and the evening grew loud and hilarious. Denise and some of the others wanted to go dancing, but I declined and went to catch the bus.

The cold night air was a pleasant shock. Energized by time passed in good company, I sped along to Dame Street and on down towards Trinity. The pedestrian lights were with me, and I didn't break stride until I got to my bus stop outside the Provost's House. It had begun to drizzle, but my wait was not long. I sat upstairs on the bus and smiled out into the darkness.

I got off one stop early and went to the shop to get bread for the morning. As I stood waiting to pay, my attention was drawn to
another customer. A man: I saw him in profile, silhouetted against the milk cabinet.

He was middle-aged, dressed in a grey suit, with glasses just like Dad's. I was suddenly certain he was one of the two men I'd seen earlier in the Stag's Head.

What – had he
followed
me? Was he some kind of stalker? My stomach tensed.

Don't be ridiculous. He must just live nearby.

I left the shop still anxious, paused a few steps down the road, took out my phone and pretended to be texting.

After a few moments the man came out and walked in the opposite direction from me. He got into the passenger seat of a car parked a little way down from the shop. I turned and began walking again, telling myself to leave it alone, not to be so stupid. I must have been aware of the car's engine starting up, because I knew exactly when to glance as it drove by.

A kick of adrenalin as the car passed me: it had that same
Chichester Psalms
registration number I'd seen before. Which – surely – meant that they
were
following me, this man and his unseen driver – that they'd quite possibly been following me for weeks. I tried to recall exactly where and when I'd seen the car before, but no memory would stay still for me. Even as I told myself not to make a mountain out of a molehill – that everything could be simply explained – my mind whirled and my tongue thickened with fear.

I hurried home, my heart hammering.

Part Two

Modulations

I
PUT THE MAN
with the big-lensed spectacles out of my mind. There was absolutely nothing I could do about him. Sunday lunch in Ardee, meanwhile, was a necessary evil, since I wanted my car back. Dad drove it to collect me at the bus stop. ‘Now,' he said, ‘I got Lanigans to throw in an oil change for free, and I've given her a tankful of petrol.'

‘Thanks, Dad.' I wished he wouldn't keep buying me petrol. It was an encroachment, a silent curtailment of my autonomy.

‘Mind you don't let it run too low.'

Lunch followed the invariable pattern: Mum, Dad, Mícheál and me, Uncle Fintan and Auntie Rosemary, salty soup, roast lamb and three sodden veg, dessert, desultory conversation.

‘Is it George Sweeney you're working for, now, Caitlín?' Dad asked suddenly as we tucked into our over-sugared fruit salad.

‘It is, yeah,' I said. ‘Why do you ask?'

‘Piece about him in the paper.'

‘Oh?'

‘He's got a new book coming out that'll set the cat among the pigeons.' Dad looked at me with unaccustomed eagerness. This
must be the MacDevitt book. I wished I could tell him I had the inside scoop.

‘Hold on till I find it, now,' Dad continued. ‘Mícheál, would you ever get me yesterday's paper?'

Mícheál sighed and began to rise to his feet.

‘Oh, it can wait till after lunch, can't it?' Mum's voice had a warning note; her lips were tight.

‘Not at all!' pronounced Dad, and I saw a wicked twinkle in his eye. ‘Mícheál doesn't mind. Get me the paper, would you?'

Mícheál, sullen, did so.

‘Wait, now, till we see,' Dad said, making a show of juggling the big pages. Triumphant sigh. ‘Here we are.'

The rest of us sat in silence as he read: ‘
Bell Books to detonate green timebomb
– ha. Timebomb is right.
George Sweeney of Bell Books has acquired the memoirs of Eddie MacDevitt, well-known Republican campaigner of the early 1970s
.'

Opposite me, Mum gave a tiny flinch. She closed her eyes for a second, then glanced over at Auntie Rosemary. The atmosphere tightened.

‘
MacDevitt has been living abroad since 1974, address unknown
– best of his play; there's a fair few dangerous men would like to get their hands on him.'

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Uncle Fintan's head hunching slowly down into his shoulders, his body curling like a leaf. Auntie Rosemary had pressed a hand to her chest.

‘
The book, which may be published as early as next spring, goes into
unprecedented detail about the dealings of senior Irish and British government figures with the radical Republican organization Laochra na Saoirse, briefly active in the early 1970s, and will confirm numerous decades-old suspicions
– blah blah blah,' said Dad, taking no apparent notice of the effect the article was having on his kin. ‘Well, of course it will – sure didn't the dogs in the street know what they were at?' He paused for just long enough to make it painfully obvious that nobody else was going to speak, then went on in tones of sonorous joviality, ‘
It is an open secret
– ha, “secret” it says here –
that Sweeney himself, as Seoirse Mac Suibhne, was active in Republican circles—
'

I couldn't bear it any more. ‘Dad,' I said. I looked over at Uncle Fintan, who chose this moment to upset his water glass over Auntie Rosemary's lap.

‘Fintan!' Auntie Rosemary leapt up and bent over to hold her dripping skirt away from her legs.

‘Oh, I'm so sorry! I'm such a. Here, let me.' Uncle Fintan dabbed weakly at his wife, who was glaring at him with ill-concealed fury. He was ashen-faced.

Mum took Auntie Rosemary off to find dry clothes, and Dad sat silently behind the newspaper, apparently unperturbed. Uncle Fintan slumped in his chair, looking miserable.

‘That sounds like a cool book,' Mícheál said to me. ‘Will you be working on it?'

‘Doubt it,' I said, and watched his face fall. He went off to do his homework.

When Auntie Rosemary came back downstairs she said shortly
to Uncle Fintan that they would go, and he put up no resistance. Mum and I showed them out, giving hugs all round as though nothing peculiar had happened.

I followed Mum back into the dining room, where Dad still sat with the paper.

‘You went too far, Paddy,' Mum said to him in a low voice.

He grunted. ‘Ah, sure, she'll live. I was only having a bit of fun.'

A
T WORK THE
next day, George called communal elevenses, which he had not done for weeks. I assumed he wanted to talk about the article in the newspaper, but he said nothing about it at first. We drank our tea and exchanged superficial chat. George made a meal out of his biscuit, chewing noisily and smacking his lips. Paula mostly looked out the window.

‘You'll have seen that article in the paper about Eddie's book, so?' George said at last. He shook his head solemnly. ‘We can't have that, you know. We have to keep her under wraps until she's ready to go. Bloody journalists.' He took another biscuit from the pack. ‘You haven't mentioned it to anyone, have you?' His eyes flicked uncomfortably between the two of us.

‘No,' Paula said, her voice full of contempt. ‘'Cause I'm not stupid, George.'

‘Ah, no, fair enough,' George said. ‘And what about you, Cate? Even a bare mention could do it.'

‘No,' I said, and weathered a little jolt as I remembered telling Matthew about the book. Could Matthew be a journalist? It was
possible, I supposed. But I'd given him no detail – certainly none of what was in that newspaper article. I said, ‘I don't even know what's in the book.'

‘Eddie lives abroad for good reason,' said George. ‘We don't want anyone going after him.'

I looked at George, thinking
open secret … active in Republican circles
. I wondered what he'd got up to.

He laid one hand flat on the table. ‘Now listen. Somebody might try to get you talking. They're full of tricks. And by the way, I saw a young fella snooping around here over the weekend, so don't think it's not happening. I want you to promise me. If anyone asks you about it, it's
no comment
, all right?'

We finished our tea and went back to the main office, where George hovered at Paula's desk. ‘I've to go off in a minute and meet John Lawless about the MacDevitt preface, but tell me, how's our equine friend? Has he come back to you yet?'

‘No, he hasn't,' said Paula to her computer keyboard. Her jaw was set.

‘Might be worth giving him a nudge, no?'

‘Oh, yeah,' said Paula, with open sarcasm. ‘'Cause you know I'm only dying for him to send back his queries so I can stop sitting on my arse here, twiddling my fecking thumbs, George.'

‘Ah, now, there's no need to get upset, Paula, I was only asking.'

‘Well,' said Paula, ‘if you're finished asking, I've a lot to do.'

Despite the tensions, things were better that week. Paula showed me how to apply a consistent house style to the footnotes
and bibliographies of the fisheries conference papers, and I found that I rather enjoyed untangling them.

C
HOIR WAS PICKING
up pace now: several weeks into the season we were beginning to hit our stride. Diane's programme for our Christmas concert was exquisite: Mendelssohn, Copland, Mahler, and of course the Bernstein, our centrepiece. We rehearsed these in parallel with the more popular pieces we'd be performing in Belfast. We socialized together too, and as September took hold, an invitation went round: our bass-line committee secretary and his soprano wife were warming their new flat.

The evening in question was stormy, and when I weighed up the relative merits of drunk-but-wet or sober-but-dry, there was no contest: I'd drive. I donned the long, emerald-green shift dress that I'd worn to last year's Trinity Ball, concealed, powdered, painted, and set off.

The flat was in Ballsbridge, at the top of a tall Victorian house. Donal, the host, let me in and welcomed me upstairs with as much pride as if he owned the whole house. Linda, his wife, met us at the door of the flat and showed me where to put my coat.

We'd sung at their wedding last April – a musical extravaganza in Linda's native County Kilkenny – but apart from that I didn't know the two of them very well. In the spare bedroom, I added my coat to an already impressive pile.

‘Come on through,' said Linda, crossing the tiny hallway and gesturing for me to follow.

The sitting room was large, with a bite cut out of one corner for a kitchen. Music pulsed from an iPod dock in the corner. The room was already quite full of people, of whom maybe a third were from the choir. No Matthew. I checked out the new faces. Old habits die hard.