1999 (43 page)

Turning on his heel, he left her standing there and retreated to his darkroom. His plundered darkroom, where every bottle and box had been opened and at least seven rolls of undeveloped photographs exposed to the light.

He flung himself onto a stool and sat there trying to cope with the awful sense of betrayal.

After a while Barbara knocked at the door.

I should have switched on the red light. Not that it makes any difference now.

“Barry, let me in. Please, I have to talk to you.”

He did not answer.

“I wasn't trying to make trouble, really I wasn't. I just didn't think.”

You just didn't think.

“I'm sorry for what I said. I know you aren't active in the Army anymore—that's right, isn't it?—so there seemed to be no harm…”

Her voice trailed off.

She stood on one side of the locked door while he sat on the other. Neither spoke.

After a long time he heard her walk away.

 

Barry stayed in his darkroom until the house was quiet. The evening meal had been served, his children had gone to bed, even the boarders had retired. Barbara no doubt was upstairs in their bedroom. Her bedroom.

Walking on the balls of his feet, he made his way to the secret closet he and McCoy had prepared together long ago. Silently he gathered up his weapons and Ned's notebooks. Silently he carried them out to his car.

And drove away.

He returned for breakfast in the morning but he did not speak to Barbara. He managed to act normally towards the children, though once or twice he saw Patrick slant a speculative look in the direction of his parents. As soon as they left for school Barry went upstairs and began packing his things.

Barbara followed him. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I'm doing?”

“You can't leave me! What about the children?”

“I'm not officially leaving; this is divorce Irish style. I'll spend my nights someplace else, but I'll be here as much as I can for the children. If you play your part well enough they may not even realise we've separated, at least not for a while. You can do that, can't you? It seems to me you're a pretty good actress.”

She began to weep. Her tears did not move him.

The six
P.M.
news reported, “Acting on a tip from an undisclosed source, yesterday the Gardai searched the home of a known republican in Harold's Cross. It has been hinted that an arrest is imminent.”

Barbara wrote out her resignation and mailed it in to RTE.

 

On November twenty-second, Margaret Thatcher resigned. The Iron Lady was replaced as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party by her former protégé, John Major.

In December the IRA called a three-day Christmas ceasefire.

 

Christmas was relatively normal in Harold's Cross, though by now all three Halloran children were aware that something was wrong between their parents. So was Ursula, who regretted she had made the difficult journey to Dublin.

“We're going to go home early,” she told Breda. “It's too cold here.”

“It's probably even colder in Clare,” the nurse said.

Ursula shook her head. “I doubt that seriously.”

She was careful to take McCoy's Christmas present to her, and his card, back to the farm from which she had brought them.

 

Early in 1991 a series of heavy storms swept across Ireland, causing massive flooding and widespread power outages. Fourteen people died.

On the fifth day of the new year IRA incendiary bombs destroyed a factory and six shops in the Belfast area.

The following month an IRA mortar was fired into the garden of 10 Downing Street. It landed within yards of the room where John Major, the new prime minister, was holding a cabinet meeting. No one was injured, but the meeting was relocated in the basement.

One morning a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary appeared at the Sinn Féin office in Belfast, claiming he was a journalist and had an interview booked. When the duty press officer said there was no such interview planned, the RUC man emptied his weapon into the unarmed occupants of the office and calmly walked out. He left three men dead—including a young father who had just come to the office with his two-year-old son, seeking advice about a domestic problem.

Northern media attention ignored the plight of the victims, preferring to focus on the RUC officer. According to them he was the victim. He was described as a hero who had “simply lost his head.” Nationalists were blamed by inference for the killings, it being claimed that the “stressful situation” in which the officer was working was solely responsible for his mental breakdown.

The three Irish nationalists who went into their graves were mourned only by their families and friends. Nothing was said in the media about the stressful conditions in which they had lived for their whole lives.

Within days, UFF gunmen murdered five nationalists, including a fifteen-year-old boy, at Sean Graham's bookie shop on the Ormeau Road. Nine others were seriously wounded. The attack took place in broad daylight only a few minutes after a pair of RUC Land Rovers that had been parked across from the shop for most of the day finally drove away. The killers were never caught. No one was charged.

It became a tradition for members of the Orange Order parading down the Ormeau Road to tauntingly wave five fingers in front of Sean Graham's shop.

 

March third saw four Catholic men shot dead when members of the UVF attacked a pub in Cappa, County Tyrone.

Eleven days later the Birmingham Six were freed after spending sixteen years in prison. The latest appeal against their convictions had been granted when it was proved that the scientific evidence against them was seriously flawed. The Appeals Court also accepted that the police had beaten their confessions out of them.
¹

“Terrorists Released!” screamed headlines in the unionist newspapers.

In May Danny Morrison, former publicity director for Sinn Féin, was convicted along with seven others of false imprisonment. They had been holding an RUC informer captive.

 

Barry had prepared a small apartment for himself on the ground floor in Mountjoy Square. It was a convenient location from which to work on the house, though he no longer felt any urgency about completing the task. Nor knew what he would do with the place when he did.

In the basement he had set up a new darkroom. Elsewhere in the house he had replicated the secure hiding place in Harold's Cross, and stored his weapons and the notebooks.

A man of powerful sexual appetites, he missed Barbara very much—physically. Even his anger did not dampen his desire. He had spent a lifetime developing iron self-control, and he put it to use. He could go to Harold's Cross every evening and spend time with his children, speak in a civil tone to his wife, observe her full curves and creamy skin and those amazing tawny eyes—and then return to Mountjoy Square.

To lie awake at night, remembering her body and her skin and those tawny eyes.

When he thought about the bitter words Barbara had flung at him—which he often did, the way the tongue will continue to torment a sore tooth—he understood why she had said those things. She knew his soul, even if she did not understand it. Just as he knew hers.

We're chalk and cheese,
he muttered to himself.

He was not guilty of “raising money for terrorists,” though she probably would never believe him. She had known perfectly well what she was doing when she told an outsider about the notebooks. In retrospect she was sorry, as she always was when she was caught doing something she shouldn't, but that had not changed her true feelings about the IRA.

And somehow he did not care anymore.

 

“Your leg moved? Show me!” Breda demanded.

Ursula gripped the arms of the wheelchair and concentrated until sweat burst out on her forehead. “Just a minute; just a minute now…I can do it again.”

And she did.

 

The U.S. launched Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, claiming the purpose was to liberate Kuwait. The Gulf War was broadcast on television, live and in colour. As millions of people watched day after day the war became entertainment rather than a news event.

 

On the sixth of August, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, a computer research scientist, posted an item on the Internet that made public his creation, the World Wide Web.

And the world changed.

 

According to the 1991 census of Northern Ireland, Catholics comprised 38.4 percent of the population. The figure might have been slightly skewed by the fact that a number of those questioned refused to admit to belonging to any organised religion at all.

And the number of murders committed by paramilitary organisations continued to grow, and grow. By the end of the year ninety-four more people would have died due to the Troubles.

 

In November Sinn Féin held its Ard Fheis in Dublin. By a unanimous vote Dublin City Council refused Sinn Féin the use of the Mansion House, where other political parties frequently held their annual conferences.

Although he was not a member of Sinn Féin, Barry Halloran attended the Ard Fheis. He met old friends, took numerous photographs, and talked to everyone who would talk to him.

One of these was an elderly Frenchman who had retired to West Cork; a self-proclaimed socialist who recently had joined the party. Barry was interested to meet someone who had chosen to move into Ireland instead of out of it.

During a break for lunch the two men enjoyed a long conversation over the worst coffee Barry had ever tasted. He found himself boasting about his Swiss passport. “I'm a true European,” he remarked.

The other man said, “The Americans and the British have no understanding of what it means to have one's homeland overrun by a foreign power. We French do. We also understand resistance very well indeed. In France we do not describe the IRA as terrorists. For us, the terrorists were those who collaborated with the Nazis.

“Shall I tell you about the spirit which fuels resistance? During the last days of the occupation of Paris, when we were still fighting at the barricades, we were joined by a small boy, a street urchin. He insisted that he wanted to fight for Paris too, but we would not give him a weapon. He was, after all, a
petit enfant.
Or so we thought.

“The little boy found a hand grenade somewhere and came trotting back toward us, proudly holding up his trophy. He was only a few metres away when a band of men carrying a Nazi flag entered the street. The little lad whirled around to throw his grenade at them. At that moment my comrades recognised them as fellow members of the Resistance who apparently had found their own trophy, and shouted a welcome to them.

“Tragically, the lad had already pulled the pin on his grenade. There was nowhere he could throw it without killing fellow members of the Resistance. I saw him take one deep breath, then, in the bravest act I saw during all that terrible war, the little fellow tucked the live grenade into his belly and curled himself into a ball around it, taking all the damage himself.”

 

On the fourth of December Charles Haughey met with John Major in Dublin. The two prime ministers agreed to meet twice a year thereafter.

When Philpott answered the doorbell he saw Barry standing on the steps with a suitcase in either hand. “I've come home in time for Christmas,” he said. “Don't ring Barbara, though. I'll tell her myself when she gets home from work.”

“She's not at work. She quit her job at RTE a year ago.”

“Sorry?”

“Didn't she tell you?”

“She did not tell me.” Barry stepped into the house and put down his suitcases. “Do you mean she's been keeping it a secret all this time?”

“I don't think it was meant to be a secret; we all knew. I just assumed you did too.”

“Who was that at the door?” Barbara called from the top of the stairs. She started to come down. Seeing Barry, she halted. “Why did you ring the doorbell instead of using your key?” Then she noticed the suitcases. She hurried the rest of the way. “Are you ready to apologise at last?”

“I don't apologise,” he said.

She threw back her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Well, neither do I! Especially when I'm right. Do you think you can just waltz back in here anytime you choose?” She was trying hard to sound angry; trying to keep him from realising how thrilled she was that he was back.

“I do not think that, Barbara, which is why I rang the doorbell. I am asking if I may return.”

Philpott scuttled off towards the kitchen.

Barbara already knew her answer, but she would not make it easy. “Why should I take you back, Barry?”

“Why should I stay away any longer?” he countered. “We've both made our points, have we not?”

The marriage did not resume where it had left off. Barbara insisted on what she called a “trial period,” during which Barry was to sleep in another room. Now she was the one who lay awake at night. Thinking of him. Feeling him so close to her, only a few paces away. Wondering why she had ever let things go so far in the first place.

Home again, Barry slept soundly.

In Clare Ursula could barely sleep for excitement. She was planning a Christmas surprise for the family. Barry had promised he would drive down to collect herself and Breda a few days before Christmas.

 

On the twenty-third of December the IRA again announced a three-day ceasefire—shortly after a series of IRA incendiary devices disrupted trains in London.

As he had done so many times before, Barry lifted his mother into his car and stowed her wheelchair in the boot. Breda Cunningham did not say a word; let him help his little old crippled mother while she watched—with a twinkle in her eye.

Ursula's eyes were twinkling too.

The drive to Dublin was still wearying, though slightly more comfortable now that Barry had a bigger car. “Do you ever miss Apollo?” his mother asked.

“If I was going to miss that old car I never would have let it go. Which I didn't,” he added with a chuckle. “Apollo's available for Barbara whenever she wants it.”

“Does she drive to work?”

“She gave up her job at RTE almost a year ago.”

Ursula turned in her seat so she could see his face. “Why did you not tell me?”

“I suppose I'm inclined to keep things to myself. I learned it from you after all.”

In the backseat of the sedan, Breda Cunningham gave a snort. “It's easier to get information from a fence post than from your mother.”

Ursula let a few more miles roll by before quietly asking Barry, “Have you told Barbara about…you know?”