Annie Suthurst asked: “Will you be going out tonight, Mr. Essex?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Annie. No: I really don’t think I could stand it. They cheered and went mad when the war started. Now they cheer and go mad because it’s ended. The two things don’t make sense to me.”
“It’s like Mafeking night,” said Annie. “That didn’t make sense to me.”
It wouldn’t. Annie’s husband had not lasted as long as Mafeking night.
“I’ll make you a nice Lancashire ’ot pot,” she said. “When you’ve ’ad that, just stay in by your own fire and read a book.”
And that was what I did, while the dervishes were loose without. When I went from the dining-room to my study, I found the curtains drawn, my chair pulled up to the fire, and my slippers on the fender. There, alongside the chair, was the little table with my pipes and tobacco jar and spectacles. Annie looked after me well.
Too well by a long chalk, I thought, as I settled into the chair. She’s making a regular old codger of me. I’m only forty-seven.
I put the spectacles on my nose, reflecting sadly that not so long ago I had exulted because I could do without them and Dermot couldn’t.
Well, forty-seven. And turning into a bit of a misanthrope. Feeling more at home in the winter than in the summer, because in the winter there are firelight and drawn curtains and one’s own company. Grey now, not only in that spot over the temples that Maeve used to find attractive, but all over; and putting on no weight with the years: thin as a thread.
Annie came in with coffee. “Now, don’t you get up, Mr. Essex.”
But I got up, peering at her querulously over the spectacles. “Damn it all, Annie Suthurst,” I said, “what are you trying to turn me into! Why shouldn’t I get up? Is the creaking of my old bones so distressing to you?”
“Nay, don’t harass your carcass, Mr. Essex. Ah’m sure you’ve got plenty to do in that old office of yours all day long. A rest at neet won’t hurt thee. Now, sit down wi’ a nice book. Ah’ll not worry thee again.”
The fact was, of course, that Annie would always spoil me because she had never got over the miracle, as she thought it, that Blatch and I had achieved between us. The shame that had been averted from the memory of her dear Maeve... Annie had proved utterly reliable. Not even to me had she ever mentioned what had happened. We had stood side by side on that day which now seemed far off; that blustery day of late winter when Maeve was buried. On one side of the raw gash in the earth, to which the small body that a week before had been so gaily dancing had already been committed, I stood and held Annie’s arm, and on the other Dermot and Sheila stood side by side, not touching one another. Dermot’s head was up and his beard thrust forward and the eyes stared out of his pale face beyond and through us all. Sheila alone of us looked steadfastly down into the grave, even after the clods had begun to fall, lost, it seemed, in some reverie stretching back through the years, perhaps to that day when the old Fenian Flynn had held us with his wild eye and wilder tales, and Sheila had cried out suddenly that the child was stirring in her.
And now the child lay there, having herself been quickened with child; and as, with Annie still clinging to my arm, I broke away from the people now putting on their hats and talking together—Wertheim, and Blatch with that baby-faced son Roger of his, and a few other officers on leave, and boys and girls from the Choose Your Partner company—I thought not only of Maeve but of that other life, life sprung from my life, so that a part of me seemed to have died with her and to have been buried there that March day without hope of resurrection.
It all surged upon my memory as I sat in my room that Armistice night and listened to the jubilation. Even in the staid precincts of Berkeley Square the merrymakers came in arm-linked bands, shouting, blowing upon trumpets, singing the songs to which four years—four such years!—had given the sanctity of dire association. All through the evening the songs came up to me: Tipperary, When it’s with You, it’s Wonderful, Till the Boys come Home.
There would be that, too. Oliver would be coming home. Around the chill of my heart a faint warmth awakened at the thought. Livia... would he want Livia now? Would Livia want him? I saw nothing there. And Maeve was gone. Did I remain? Did I count? I had yet to find out. I had written to him at his prison camp when Maeve died. Twenty months ago. There was no answer. I waited for six months, then sent him food and tobacco. There was no answer.
*
There was a ring at the door of the flat. I heard Annie Suthurst shuffle out from her bed-sitting-room and break into cries of pleasure. She came bustling into my room, so overcome that she forgot to knock at the door. “Coom in, Mr. Rory. Coom in.”
Yes; it was Rory. “I’ll see you later, Annie,” he said, seeing that she hovered there, making ecstatic noises, unwilling to take her eyes off him. “You pop along for a moment. Well, Uncle Bill?”
He stood grinning in his old diffident, deferential fashion. He was wearing a not-very-good-looking navy-blue suit, and with his big hands, grey eyes and rough black hair, with his short stocky body bearing down firmly on his feet, he looked like a young officer of the merchant marine ashore for the night.
Our hands met in a hard grip. “Sit down,” I said. “You don’t change much, Rory.”
“No, so Maggie says. She says I just—deepen.” He smiled deprecatingly. “You don’t mind having one of His Majesty’s convicts defiling your home?”
“I was longing for someone to talk to, and I don’t think there’s anyone I’d rather talk to than you. How is Maggie?”
“As well as can be expected,” he said grimly.
I knew he was referring to Donnelly’s death, and that made me think of Easter, 1916—of Rory lying behind the parapet of a roof, picking his man, watching him twist and fall and shudder to stillness. Strangely, I had not thought of that till his remark brought it to mind. And looking at him now—at the great width of his shoulders and the steadiness of his hands lying in his lap like rocks—I still could not see this Rory as that Rory. I took my mind from the whole matter.
“You’ll be able to marry Maggie now,” I said.
“We are already married. She is staying at Father’s house. We thought there was no need to make a fuss, so we just got married, and we came across when it was all over.”
“I wish you joy, Rory. Maggie’s a fine girl.”
“She is that,” he said emphatically. “But that’s no reason why she or I should know anything about joy. It doesn’t matter about being a fine girl and having a fine country to live in. You can be any sort of damned scallywag so long as you kiss the boots of the British. Then you might find some joy. But Maggie and I don’t expect much joy. That’s why we came to see Father and Mother and Eileen. You never know.”
“So you’re still in it? You’re going back?”
Even as I spoke them, the words sounded flat and without meaning. The answer was there in Rory’s resolute pugnacious young face. He did not permit himself the indignation that I deserved. He said simply: “Yes. We shall go back. There’s a lot to be done.”
He would neither smoke nor drink. He sat hunched into his chair and told me something about Donnelly. Maggie had been allowed to see him in gaol. “She told me,” Rory said, “that they didn’t cry. There wasn’t a tear between them. He wanted to know all she had been doing that Easter, and when she told him, he said: ‘That’s a good girl. Do the same thing next time. Because there will be a next time, and a time after that, till the last time comes. Then all these times won’t matter any more. And now kiss me.’ So she kissed him and came away.”
“He was a good man,” I said.
“He was the best man I have ever known,” Rory said, “the best and the bravest. The sort of man I should like to be.” He added after a moment: “So you see, we shall go back.”
“Yes, I see that.”
I puffed my pipe in silence for a while, feeling diffident and humble in Rory’s presence. His utter single-mindedness had that effect on me—of making me feel more humble than I felt with anyone else. I said suddenly, impulsively: “Rory, you don’t have to wait to be the sort of man Donnelly was. You’re the same breed, and as good a man as Donnelly any day. You know, I’ve watched a lot of boys grow up in my time, and you’re quite the nicest boy I know.”
The colour mounted to his cheeks, but he turned off the embarrassing moment with a laugh: “Ach, Uncle Bill, you’re thinking of that old poem, The Whitest Man I Know. To hell—no, I’m not that sort. But thank you all the same. I believe we do understand something of one another, you and I. Otherwise, I couldn’t say what I’m going to say now. But I came to say it, so here goes. Thank you for what you did for Maeve.”
“But, my dear boy, I did nothing. I...”
His grey candid eyes were looking me through and through. I hesitated, flustered. “I don’t know how you did it or exactly what it was you did,” he said. “But, you see, I know that Maeve committed suicide. And I know that no one knows that—not even Father and Mother.”
I felt perspiration trickling on my forehead. I wiped it away with a handkerchief, got up and poured myself a drink. There was utter silence in the room, broken only by the light tinkle of the decanter against the whisky-glass.
“She was going to have a child by Oliver.”
I had taken a drink, and turned to face him as he said this. His head was sunk into his chest; his underlip was thrust forward and his eyes seemed to have shrunk to little points having the hard grey glitter of granite. Now I was seeing the Rory who had crouched behind the parapet, finger on trigger. Now a cold breath of doom seemed to be in the room with him. Sitting there, still hunched up and unmoving, he said: “She wrote to me from the theatre the night she died. She must have scribbled the note in an interval and given it to someone to post. I was already back in Ireland then. She told me what she was going to do and why she was going to do it.” He added simply: “You see, we were very fond of one another, and I was proud of Maeve. We told one another everything.”
He glowered at the fire for a while, then went on: “I said nothing to my friends. They’d know soon enough, I thought. I waited for the row. I expected the papers to be full of it—the inquest and all that. And there was nothing—nothing except that Maeve was dead, and all the columns of praise. Then I knew that somebody had cooked it, and I guessed it was you.”
I broke in eagerly: “Yes, I—”
He interrupted me with the holding up of one big hand. “Please! Say nothing. There must have been a doctor concerned. I can see that. I don’t want to know. I only want to thank you. I’m glad you did it. I should have hated...”
He broke off, frowning. Presently he said: “I did you an injustice. At first I thought in my bitterness that what you had done was to save Oliver’s skin. I apologise for that. You did it because you loved Maeve. Always and always. Those are Maeve’s words: always and always. I want you to know that, too. She always loved you, and believed that you loved her but that you were too blind to know your own heart. It’s a pity. I wish you had married Maeve. So much would have been so different. Because now...”
He got up, leaving the sentence unfinished, but my own heart finished it for him. Because now Oliver and I have a matter to settle.
He shook hands, and I went out with him to the landing. Still the shouting and tumult came up from the streets. “Armistice!” he said. “Now you’ll be able to give all your attention to the wild Irish.”
I stood there till I heard the street door bang. I never saw Rory again.