Ashes In the Wind (27 page)

‘The Nationalists have got their Moors; we’ve got Paul Robeson,’ says Robert.

‘Ideologically impure, that comment. And he can sing,’ says John.

Next to the stage there is a small group of journalists and brigadiers, healthy and well dressed, a sharp contrast to the four hundred ragged soldiers sitting in the well of the hall. Kate is one of two women in the group; she is wearing a dark green tunic, and looks to John like someone from a world to which he no longer belongs. He manages to catch Kate’s eye and she waves. After the concert he hurries outside. The journalists are already in the bus. Kate rubs a clear space in the glass, presses her hand against the window, and is gone.

Three days later the Nationalist counter-attack begins. The weather clears, the bombing and the strafing are relentless, and the Republicans are slowly driven back to the edge of the town. Teruel is no longer pretty, much of it destroyed by grenades and dynamite in the house-to-house fighting. The bombs of the Condor Legion have completed the destruction. Only a few buildings are intact. Most are shells, their walls cracked, an occasional half-floor with a ruined bedstead or bath. In the streets, now under six inches of snow, there are abandoned carts, several burned-out tanks and the frozen bodies of dead mules and horses.

John’s section is told to make their own way out and regroup when they can. They pass another section of their battalion guarding a small group of prisoners huddled on the ground. On the wall above them someone has painted, ‘
Teruel será la tumba del
fascismo
.’

‘This lot overran their advance,’ says the lieutenant. ‘Or else they got lost. Some of them are your countrymen, leftover Micks from the Bandera Irlandesa.’

John looks at the men sitting on the ground, looks again and sees Tomas Sullivan – gaunt, bearded, left arm in a makeshift sling, no boots and bleeding feet, the man he had last seen in Kilmainham Jail awaiting the hangman.

‘Tomas,’ says John, and Tomas raises his head.

‘What are you going to do with them?’ John asks the lieutenant.

‘What do you think? We’re not taking them along with us.’

‘That man’s mine. I’ve unfinished business with him.’

The lieutenant hears the intensity in John’s voice, then says, ‘One bullet’s as good as another.’

John prods Tomas to his feet with his rifle. Tomas rises slowly, and John escorts him around the corner and into a ruined shop fifty yards away.

Tomas looks at John for the first time. ‘You need to know how to do this. One shot to the heart, one to the head to finish the job.’

The guards and the prisoners hear two shots. One of the younger prisoners begins to cry, his tears leaving two pale streaks in his grimy face. An older man sitting next to him puts an arm around his shoulder. Three minutes later John comes round the corner, his rifle slung over his shoulder. His hand shakes as he lights a cigarette.

‘Now you’ve got the hang of it, you can help us finish off the rest,’ says the lieutenant.

‘That was family business, an old score settled. We’ll see you at the rendezvous.’

As they trot down the street Robert looks at John curiously. ‘That was strange.’

‘We should have stopped the executions. That boy can’t have been more than seventeen.’

‘Hard to do after you’d just picked one of them out and polished him off yourself. That lieutenant would have shot us if we’d tried to stop him.’

‘We should have tried.’

The retreat from Teruel is disorganized and drawn out; it is several days before the battalion regroups and is reinforced. They are held in reserve until the battle of the Ebro. This last desperate attempt to win the war, a long battle of attack and counter-attack, finally ends in November with the Republicans thrown back across the river.

The International Brigade is withdrawn in October. A month later they are given a farewell parade in Barcelona past President Azaña and General Rojo. Three hundred thousand people line the streets, the women throwing flowers, many weeping, as the tired, dirty soldiers march down the Avenida Diagonal.

‘La Pasionaria has told us, “We are history, we are legend, we can go proudly.” I think we should go quickly,’ says Robert. ‘It’s an odd way to celebrate defeat.’

‘Let’s celebrate being alive.’ John looks at Robert, gaunt with dysentery, a shrapnel scar on his forehead. ‘We’re abandoning these people to the Nationalists. We know how bad that will be. I’m not sure they do.’

‘Now what do we do? Back to manorial rolls, back to horse-coping?’ says Robert.

‘For as long as Hitler lets us.’

They make their way across the Pyrenees in a train crowded with refugees, and then on to Paris, where they part. John spends two days at the Paris office of the
New York Times
, trying to find Kate.

‘I can’t tell you where she is,’ says the duty editor. ‘You can see from the paper that her last despatch was from Madrid.’

Back in England John tries the London office with little more success. Kate’s next piece is from Paris, and he curses his timing. He sends a hopeful telegram asking her to meet him for lunch at the Savoy in a week’s time.

Against the odds Kate arrives for lunch. John watches her come down the short stairway into the restaurant; she is wearing a white dress that makes her arms and legs look very brown. John stands up and hugs her tightly. Kate is surprised for a moment at his embrace, kisses his cheek, then pushes him away to look at his face.

‘God, you look tired. I’m glad you tracked me down. I’ve never seen you in a suit before, only your scarecrow uniform.’

They talk about the war, and then about each other. At the end of lunch John takes her hands in his over the empty glasses and says, ‘I want to marry you.’

‘Oh my. I thought you Englishmen were reserved.’

‘I’m Anglo-Irish, and unreserved. I mean it.’

‘My dear, you hardly know me. We’ve spent an evening and this lunch in each other’s company.’

‘And a night together.’

‘I’m surprised you remember – you went straight to sleep the moment you got into bed, and I had to shake you awake in the morning to get you to first parade in time.’

‘I remember what you looked like with no clothes on.’

‘You were seeing at least two of me that night.’

‘I’ll make up for it. I’ve booked a suite here for three days. I can return your Jarama hospitality. It’s a much nicer room.’

‘That wouldn’t be hard. But I’d like to inspect the suite.’

Kate and John don’t leave the Savoy for three days, and are married ten days later by special licence. Robert Keen is their best man.

J
OHN
AND
K
ATE
spend their brief honeymoon in the Lake District, where the rain fails to spoil their enjoyment of each other. Finding out whom they had married, after less than a week’s acquaintance, is exciting. They already know they are well matched in bed, which is where they spend most of their time, but they also discover they are compatible over breakfast, on long walks even in the rain, on their fondness for dogs and dislike of cats, on their preference for whisky over gin. Each knows little enough about the other’s history, and indeed about the other’s country, to make discovery a pleasure. When John tells Kate he wants to train horses again in Ireland, when Kate tells John she intends to continue as a journalist for the
New York Times
, it seems a reasonable balance.

John takes Kate back to Ireland to stay at Burke’s Fort, where Kate is presented to Charles and Cis. They are about to move out to the dower house on the edge of the estate, and young Charlie and his Irish wife have already moved in.

John has told Kate about Chantal. He has not told her about Grania, about the Trafalgar Folly, about the possibility that he has a daughter living a few miles away in Maryborough. He knows that Charles and Cis will have erased that part of his past from their minds.

Two days before they are due to leave for London, young Charlie says over breakfast, ‘The O’Connells are selling Killowen, twenty miles away from here in County Kildare. Forty boxes, a cobbled yard, two hundred acres, access to the Curragh gallops and a nice dry house with a fanlight. It all needs work. They’re asking fourteen thousand and I hear they’ll take twelve.’

John does some quick arithmetic and rings the bank. Kate thinks the house is charming.

‘It’s your decision, though,’ she tells John. ‘You’re the one who is going to be living here all the time. And I’m not going to make the curtains.’

John laughs. ‘I picked you out in Alicante as a real American home-maker. How could you have deceived me so?’

Forty-eight hours later the house is theirs. They decide to lock it up and ask young Charlie to find someone nearby to keep an eye on it until they return.

‘And that may not be for a while – there’ll be a war before the year is out,’ says Kate.

‘Dev’s determined to keep Ireland out of it, and I think he’s right. It’s too soon after the War of Independence to be fighting on the same side as the British, and conscription won’t work here. I hope the Republic will be friendly neutrals, though the Treaty Ports have gone,’ says Charles.

‘I’m still a hybrid, still Anglo-Irish,’ says John. ‘I feel bound to volunteer if they’ll take me. I can’t have Kate risking her life as a journalist while I sit at home. She’s off to Berlin next week while I try to find the Royal Irish Dragoons.’

John finds the Royal Irish Dragoons in Tidworth.

‘I see your father was a Dragoon,’ says the commanding officer. ‘Won an MC, killed on the Somme. I can make you a second lieutenant, though you’re a bit long in the tooth, give you a troop, see how you get on. None of us knows anything about armoured cars as they haven’t arrived yet, so you won’t be at a disadvantage. At least you’ve been under fire, unlike the rest of our troop leaders.’

For the next six years John and Kate meet as often as they can manage, in the South of England where the Royal Irish Dragoons spend all of the Phoney War, in London on leave, in Cairo, and in Paris after the liberation. James Burke is born in Dublin, the first of his family for two hundred years not to have been born in Derriquin. Kate is combining a report on Ireland’s role in the Emergency with a trip to Killowen for two months before James arrives. She cables John in Egypt, ‘A nine-pound boy; both of us fine.’ James spends most of the war at Burke’s Fort alongside his cousin Fred, born later in the same year. When the war is over John is a stranger to his five-year-old son, who bursts into tears when he is first introduced to his father.

Back at Killowen after demobilization in 1946, John gradually restores the house and the yard, with a little help and some money from Kate. Racing in Ireland recovers quickly after the war. For some time John struggles with only a dozen mediocre horses in the yard, surviving through a number of big bets at decent odds.

‘It’s a risky strategy,’ says Kate. ‘I’m a Boston Puritan at heart, at least about money. We could always live in the house without the horses and let the land. My income from journalism is pretty steady.’

‘I’ll make a go of it, you’ll see. I’m the first Burke to have a proper job – I’m not going to be the first to live off his wife’s money.’

‘What about your grandfather and Letitia Hamilton?’

‘It was different then.’

John does make a go of it. He has several good wins with difficult horses, buys unbroken four-year-olds out of muddy fields in the South and the West, and passes them on to new owners at reasonable prices. Most of the new owners stay with the yard.

One day Michael Molloy turns up at the yard looking for a job.

‘I’m too old now for the jumping game. I can’t do the lighter weights any more, and I’ve broken five collarbones, three wrists and an ankle. I haven’t counted the ribs. I reckon I learned enough watching you and Tom O’Brien at Lambourn to be useful to you here.’

John agrees. He has been his own head lad since he started at Killowen, and Michael proves invaluable. He is a good judge of when a horse is out of sorts, and a hard bargainer with the feed merchants. Killowen’s growing prosperity is reflected in the yard. The boxes are whitewashed, the doors painted, loose slates replaced, and the tack is immaculate.

‘Some of your competitors believe a smart yard puts owners off, looks expensive. They’d rather use binder twine than repair a head-collar properly,’ says Willie O’Driscoll, a cattle dealer from County Louth who is one of John’s biggest owners. ‘I think you’ll find the paint pays for itself.’

It does pay for itself. John no longer has to rely on the bank, and can afford the boarding school fees for James.

‘I think it’s pretty barbaric,’ says Kate. ‘Sending our boy away for three-quarters of the year to be looked after by cranky schoolmasters. I bet you half of them are queer.’

‘Well, boarding school did you no harm. You’re often away, and the stable routine doesn’t give me a lot of time to spend with James. It’s better than the Christian Brothers.’

‘The Brothers aren’t the only alternative.’

James goes away to school despite Kate’s misgivings; the public school system is an aspect of Anglo-Irish life that she decides to accept, not least because she is away on assignment for at least half the year. She gets some satisfaction from pointing out to John the inaccuracy of the description.

‘Typical of the English to describe something as public that’s the exact opposite.’

John grunts and doesn’t reply.

James isn’t consulted, and leaves Killowen for preparatory school in Northern Ireland with a bewildered acceptance that this is the way things are. He shares a dormitory with twelve other eight-year-olds, who seem equally miserable for most of their first term. The routine and the discipline, the latter often random and supported by the final sanction of the headmaster’s cane, give James a carapace of toughness that dismays Kate at the beginning of every holidays.

‘It takes him a week to get used to being hugged,’ she says to John. ‘And just as we’re getting to know each other he’s off again.’

‘Or you are. There’ll be nobody about to hug him when he’s out in the world. And he says he likes it, he’s made friends there.’