Ashes In the Wind (41 page)

‘Per house.’

‘That’s more like it. A hundred thousand euros isn’t to be sniffed at down here. I’ve got a big project coming up in Cork that might interest you.’

‘Twenty houses is the most we’ve ever built in one go.’

‘You need to think bigger. You’re Bacon Roll Man; you pitch up at some Spar counter every morning, order a bacon roll and a sausage if they’ve got one, twenty John Player Blue, the
Daily Star
, a bottle of Lucozade and a Mars Bar. And you’re happy driving...’ he looked out of the window ‘...last year’s Rover 400. You don’t have to settle for that.’

Michael was stung into looking at the Cork project, a massive development on the edge of the city, two hundred houses, a hotel and a supermarket. A new GAA stadium (‘We’ll build that last’) clinched the planning approval.

‘I can’t finance my share of something that big.’

‘You can, sure. Fifty per cent of the equity will cost you four hundred thousand euros, which you’ve got in the bank. (Michael’s ‘How did you know that?’ went unanswered.) The Anglo-Irish Bank will lend us eight million and the income from Phase One will fund the rest.’

It worked out exactly as Declan had forecast, except that the prices realized for the houses were twenty per cent higher than the original budget.

‘It’s all about the marketing,’ explained Declan. ‘Ardcullen Heights is a great name, fifteen minutes’ drive from the centre of Cork, a beautiful show home, three “Sold” signs as you look out the sales office window, and it’s all over bar the shouting. Anglo-Irish are eager to lend one hundred per cent of the purchase price to anyone who’s breathing, and they bundle the mortgages up and trade them on to the Yanks. When we tell the punters the price will be twenty per cent higher in a year, they can’t get their pens out fast enough. And the way property is moving in Ireland at the minute they’ll double their money soon enough.’

A few years later, visiting cousins in Cork, Michael decided to show Ardcullen Heights to Aisling.

‘You know something,’ he said to Aisling as they walked around. ‘I’m proud of this place. I know it’s a sunny day, and that helps, but we laid it out like a village, not on a grid, the houses aren’t identical boxes and we built them well. All lived in, mostly first-time owners from rough flats and houses in Cork.’

They went into the supermarket, busy with shoppers from the city. Michael bought twenty John Player Blue, the
Daily Star
, a bottle of Lucozade and a Mars Bar; Aisling looked at his basket in disbelief.

‘What are you doing? You don’t smoke any more. And you should put that Mars Bar back, you’re not as slim as you were.’

‘It’s a private joke,’ said Michael and didn’t elaborate. ‘Let’s go and look at the stadium. I had to bully Declan into building it. He said it was only ever an aspiration – I said we’d promised it to the planners and it wouldn’t make a good headline: “Kerry football star breaks word to Cork GAA”.’

Stadium was a grand description for the arena, which had seats for two thousand spectators.

‘They’ll fill it for a big club game, especially one against a Kerry side,’ said Michael as they walked onto the pitch, where a group of young players were being coached at one end.

A ball was kicked towards them; it seemed about to float well over Michael’s head until he jumped up and caught it cleanly with his fingertips. He jogged towards the young man coming to retrieve the ball, quickened up, faked with his right shoulder and went left, bounced the ball off his foot back into his hands, then kicked it long and high to sail through the goalposts thirty yards away. There was a little round of applause from the players as Michael jogged back, smiling, to Aisling.

‘One point to Kerry – but I’ll feel it in the morning.’

Declan and Michael had made ten times their money from Ardcullen Heights in two years; Michael’s share was four million euros. They used Section 23 to avoid most of the tax.

‘Onwards and upwards,’ said Declan. ‘I’m looking at a great site down on the Quays. We’re going to build Ireland’s tallest building there.’

‘You’ll never get planning permission for that.’

‘In Cork they’d build on your big toe at the minute. We’ll have an architectural competition, get in the big names, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, then choose an Irish architect who understands about costs and will design something we can build.’

Michael and Aisling met the movers and shakers of Ireland, to whom Michael’s sporting record was as important as his recent share of the Ardcullen Heights development. They went to the Fianna Fáil tent at Galway Races (‘It’ll cost us ten thousand euros each to watch the politicos lorrying into the wine,’ said Declan), they saw the Ryder Cup as the guests of the Anglo-Irish Bank, they went to the Chelsea Flower Show with their estate agents, and Michael bought a villa in Portugal and a new Mercedes. Aisling, who had put on a few pounds after their marriage, lost them and more in order to fit into the smart clothes she now ordered from Dublin and London.

There was a curious mixture at these functions. Most of the men and women were well dressed, confident, talking in loud voices about private jets, Spanish villas and ‘blades’, which Michael learned from Declan meant helicopters. But there were always two or three couples who looked out of place, the men in brown suits and heavy brogues, the women clearly unaware about the latest trends in fashion.

‘Don’t be fooled,’ said Michael to Aisling. ‘That one over there, looks like a Letterkenny cattle dealer, makes half the cement in Ireland and owns six Dublin hotels and the big golf club in Kildare.’ He pointed to a large, red-faced man of about sixty, having an awkward conversation with a young banker. ‘They say he’s worth a billion euros and he looks like he’d need to borrow the price of his next dinner.’

Michael was always sought out for his view about the likely finalists in the next All-Ireland, while Declan worked the room and glad-handed the politicians and the bankers.

‘We’re on the inside track,’ said Declan. ‘We’re being shown things by the bank not just in Ireland but worldwide.’

They were having dinner in a Dublin restaurant with two Michelin stars; in the previous nine months they had invested together in waste disposal in Holland, hotels in Serbia, a chain of cinemas in Spain, an oilfield in the Niger Delta and a casino in Macao.

‘This is heady stuff for a bricklayer from Drimnamore,’ said Michael.

‘You’re not a brickie any more, you’ll be in the Irish Rich List next year. You’re a hero in
The Kerryman
already; you’ll be in the Dublin papers when we pull off the Big One.’

The Big One was the Millennium Tower in Cork, twenty storeys high, three hundred flats, penthouses for three million euros, single-bedroom apartments for three hundred thousand. ‘A Landmark Building for a Landmark City,’ the marketing brochure said.

‘A hundred million to build it. We each put up four million, the bank lends us the rest and rolls up the interest until we start selling. We’ll clear twenty-five million each when we’re done.’

‘It’ll take all my cash,’ said Michael.

‘And mine. But Anglo-Irish have offered us a chance to make a quick two million euros each through taking some of their shares at a friendly price. They need our support, and it gets us the loan for the Millennium deal. We can do it through CFDs, so we only put up ten per cent of the money, and they’ll lend us that anyhow.’

‘What’s a CFD?’

‘Contract for Difference. Gives you tremendous gearing when the shares go up.’

‘And if they go down?’

‘Down? Anglo-Irish shares haven’t been this low for years. This stroke will push them up, and we’re in good company. All the big men are in.’

Declan and Michael went in alongside the big men. Then the financial world imploded and the Irish property market collapsed. Shares in the Anglo-Irish Bank, which had once been valued at thirteen billion euros, were worthless. The Cork Millennium Tower was never built; the government agency that took over all the bust banks’ liabilities sold the site three years later for one and a half million euros, a tenth of the fifteen million Declan and Michael had paid. The twenty thousand in cash that Aisling’s father had put away in the safe was long gone.

B
ACK
AT
D
ONHEAD
, James reminds himself that he is still paying rent for the Allenmouth flat. He decides to make a final visit to end his lease and sort out the furniture; he makes himself a promise not to see Anna again.

Allenmouth and his flat are as he had left them; the weather is overcast and damp. He talks to George, gives him three months’ rent in lieu of notice, and resells him the furniture at a substantial loss.

‘The difference is my profit margin,’ says George cheerfully. ‘But I’ll leave it all up there. It’ll be very easy to let now. And you can always come back as a tenant.’

James borrows a pot of white emulsion and blots out the words of Socrates that he had so carefully written on the wall. They hadn’t done him much good. He keeps only the Wemyss beehive mug to remind him of Allenmouth.

He thinks about saying goodbye to Jack Pearson, decides against it, and has a last drink in the Allen Arms. It is a Saturday evening, and the bar is crowded with holidaymakers, the regulars absent or banished to the smaller snug. He is about to leave when a man comes in with a couple of friends, orders a lemonade and starts talking to Sally behind the bar. When the man turns and looks directly at James, he realizes this is Zach; close to, he understands why Anna loved him. And may love him now. He is tall, with golden skin, tight curly hair, a broad smile. And it dawns on James it was Zach dancing with the group in the Scout hut, Zach who’d tried to pull him in, Zach who had looked hurt when James had turned away. He finishes his drink quickly and goes back to the flat.

He is packing the next morning when he hears footsteps on the outside staircase. His heart starts pounding as the door opens. It is Zach, not Anna.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I won’t stay long. I want to ask you to leave Anna alone.’

‘I’m not sure you have the right to ask that question. It’s up to Anna; she doesn’t belong to you.’

‘Look at you, man. You’re old enough to be her bloody father. How can you make her happy?’

‘That’s for Anna to decide.’

‘I’m in love with Anna. And she loves me.’

‘Beating her up is a funny way to prove it. And she didn’t love you enough to keep...’ James, shocked at himself, doesn’t finish the sentence.

‘The baby? She told you that?’ Zach takes a step forward and punches James hard, knocking him over. ‘Keep away from her. Find a woman your own age.’

James, whose nose is broken, stays where he is on the floor and fumbles for a handkerchief; Zach stands over him for a moment, thinks about hitting James again, and then leaves. James gets up slowly and sits in his chair for half an hour, bleeding into a handkerchief, his head still reeling from the blow.

Then the door opens for the second time that morning. It is Anna.

‘How dare you say that to Zach? I’ve just seen him, he told me he’d punched you and why.’

‘He turned up uninvited, warned me off.’

‘He’s been in a state ever since I told him.’

‘I wasn’t feeling calm. When you said you had unfinished business with Zach, I didn’t realize that meant you were going to fuck him in the clubhouse.’

‘Who I fuck, and where, is my business. Spying doesn’t suit you. You’re a pair of jealous, immature schoolboys. I don’t want to see either of you ever again.’

James returns to Donhead with a badly damaged nose and a broken heart. The former he deserves, the latter is harder to handle. He has felt the pain of loss before: when his parents had died; when Linda had walked out of Donhead and their marriage. But he had thought of Allenmouth as a new beginning, a change that meeting and loving Anna had crystallized. He had clung to the belief that he and Anna could have made a life together, even though he also knew that the differences between them made this, as Anna had pointed out, improbable. Improbable, but not impossible. Until now.

He misses her company; he misses her in bed; he mourns the loss of what he had found for a moment in Allenmouth.

He escapes again to the Ireland of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. His great-grandparents’ struggle to survive at Derriquin and deal with the monstrous tragedy of the Famine gives him a sense of proportion about his own emotional upheavals. His great-grandfather had decided that preparing for the next world was more important than dealing with the present, and had escaped via the Gospel to the Merrion Hall. His father had also escaped, although to Mount Athos and a more exotic religion than the austere, unforgiving creed of the Plymouth Brethren. Did James have the same melancholic, religious gene? Perhaps his mother’s no-nonsense, irreligious Puritanism had cancelled that gene out, or at least watered it down.

Five months later he is sitting at his desk looking out at the park; Achilles’ destroyer is busy rounding up his does and keeping off two younger, smaller stags. James hasn’t decided what to name him yet.

His phone rings; it is Matthew, whom he hasn’t seen since Holy Island.

‘Come to lunch at the Cavalry Club next Thursday. I’ve been made lord-lieutenant, so you and I can celebrate. And I get to wear my old Royal Irish Dragoons uniform on ceremonial occasions.’

‘Will it still fit?’

‘It will after another week at the Holy Gulag and a trip to Jones, Chalk and Dawson in Sackville Street. One o’clock suit you?’

Matthew is in ebullient form. He’s had an international award for his arboretum, his eldest son has married a good Northumberland girl and presented him with a grandson. He is delighted with his new job.

‘Ceremonial entirely, suits me down to the ground. No committees, no fund-raising, no politics, just smile and shake hands, greet the Queen whenever she visits the county. And a KCVO after ten years. Imogen’s having her hair done, by the way, lunchtime was the only appointment she could get.’

After lunch the two men go out onto the Piccadilly pavement, where Imogen is waiting by Matthew’s car. She ignores Matthew’s ‘Come on, Imogen, we’ll be late,’ kisses James and says, ‘I bumped into your friend Anna, the masseuse, in Fenwick’s in Newcastle last week, and asked how you were. She said she didn’t know. We were both in the maternity department; I was buying clothes for our first grandchild.’