Leon Uris (22 page)
Authors: Redemption
Tags: #Europe, #Ireland, #Literary Collections, #Historical Fiction, #Fiction, #Romance, #Sagas, #Historical, #Australian & Oceanian, #New Zealand, #General, #New Zealand Fiction, #History
By the time I renounced the Conservative Party I had come to loathe—no, hate men, methods, words, and deeds. These Tories, methinks, are a confederation of corrupted men using aggression abroad in the form of cheap labor for the English millionaire. Although born into this class, and with boundless admiration for my late father, I cannot and will not continue as an upper-class toad.
Within the year, we Liberals under Campbell-Bannerman had swept into Parliament and I accepted my first sub-cabinet post as Under Secretary for the Colonies.
Rumors of my engagement to the daughter of South African Prime Minister Louis Both were highly exaggerated. True feelings for the lady were nonexistent.
It was incumbent upon me to find a new constituency to remain in Parliament, and I chose Manchester, which I won rather handily.
During my election campaign I had occasion to be guest of that rather gruff bully Ulsterman, Sir Frederick Weed, who was carting his rugby team about the Midlands. Despite his
severe Unionist politics I rather liked this chap and suspected we would be doing business in the future. We recalled our earlier meeting in Hubble Manor, Londonderry, when I was a boy and my father played his now famous “Orange card.”
The purpose of my rambling here was that his Boilermaker brutes went on to take our coveted Admiral’ack to Ireland, but not before dismantling a brothel in Bradford along the way. Weed’s grandson, the Viscount Coleraine, created an enormous and affectionate reputation for his role in the melee. If we had more of the stripe of Weed and Lord Jeremy Hubble, their class would certainly be more palatable. The son-in-law, the Earl of Foyle, Roger Hubble, represents all I abhor.
In my new office I have traveled considerably to the colonies and am rather pleased with the friendship I have developed with my private secretary, Eddie Marsh.
On the other hand I have earmarked for political extinction Sir Frederick Hopwood, whose communication to my boss, Colonial Secretary Lord Elgin, reached my eyes. Among other dastardly remarks he says, “He (meaning me) is most tiresome to deal with and I fear may give trouble—as his father did—in any position to which he may be called. The restless energy, uncontrollable desire for notoriety, and lack of moral perception made him an anxiety, indeed!”
Indeed, indeed! We shall see.
Winston Churchill
Oh, yes, that Ulster-Bradford rugby game was best remembered by my sitting next to Countess Hubble who, somehow, has managed to remain lovely despite her dreary husband. Her scent on that day was divine.
WSC
Rory O’Rory!
How best to tell you this, now? I have found the other half of my half-lived life. She is not what I expected. She sings off-key, which is an insult to my finely tuned sense of melody, she is definitely not redheaded enough, and she prays sitting down, if, indeed, she prays at all, at all. Yet, despite her numerous faults and me own perfection, I’ve fallen madly, madly in love with her.
Her name is Shelley. She is a Protestant lass from the Shankill district of Belfast, a place that has known hunger, cholera, and lingering destitution. Nowadays shipyard workers live here mostly in wee row houses.
Her brother is captain of the Boilermakers team and her father an old-timer at Weed Ship &Iron. Despite the difference of our persuasions, her family saw the happiness in Shelley’s eyes and they accepted me as their son and brother.
Waiting so long has its special rewards. How long have I looked into sterile eyes, into sterile hearts? How shallow the possibilities have been! Now I looked and saw something different, a partner rich to the voice, to the touch, to the sight…so rich I cannot fill myself enough of her riches nor can I believe such riches are mine.
My love of Shelley did not come easily. I had to face the fiercest test of my life in learning from her that she had been the mistress of a married man for three years. I felt a monster called jealousy spit out of me. This monster is beyond your capacity to reason with. It consumes you.
Well, lad, I’ve done a bit of roving and I set me down and explored myself. I had to discard the Irish peasant pride, to overcome the years of the Virgin being pounded into my brain. Shelley told me before we made love that she would not start with a lie, that I must know that when she spoke I was always hearing truth.
She was a poor girl who fought her way to a decent station in life against all odds. In the end, there was nothing to forgive or forget. Why shouldn’t two people have found love with each other to escape the misery of Belfast as she had done? So I grew up very fast, Rory, for the thought of losing her was so staggering I would not inflict it on myself and I am the most fortunate man alive.
We go through our nights intertwined. We are in sorrow when we part for the day and follow bliss when we sight one another after work. Happiness is always around us when we are in each other’s aura.
I know now that Ireland can only own part of me. How we will contend with it is our mystery.
We are keenly aware we may be doomed from the onset. Can I live with one foot in the Brotherhood and one in a pretense of living a normal life with her? Can we ever know peace from the Orange fanatics? For the first time I also question my unalterable march from childhood to a life in the patriot’s game. Can I hold two such loves?
In time I will have to go underground and live life on the run. Can I condemn her to desperate meetings in squalid hideaways with bedsprings poking through and
bedbugs having a meal off our hides? Can task a woman to live in fear of every knock on the door?
Well, Rory lad, I’m off on the Midlands tour, but that’s not the half of it. I have earmarked Sir Frederick Weed’s private train and engine to smuggle guns back to Ireland. Once the tour is over and the first batch moves out of Bradford, the door to any life outside the Brotherhood is closed.
Meeting Shelley this late in the game has now put a serious sting into my commitment. The thought pounds at me that although I was unable to live outside Ireland before I met her, I think I can live anywhere in the world with her at my side. This taunts the life from me, day and night.
From the Midlands Tour
Dear Rory!
For the first time in Ireland’s long and tormented history, we have won the Admiral’s Cup. Aye, the Belfast Boilermakers cleaned out one hairy and foul bunch of ruggers after another and your old uncle did right well by you. All that’s left now is for us to come “down under” and clean out the All-Blacks. I hope you’re on the team when I come!
By Jaysus, in city after city they fell to us like shallow-rooted trees in a tropical hurricane.
Here’s a story to warm your heart. Robin MacLeod, Shelley’s brother and captain of the team, was my roommate and between us we kept a hold on Jeremy in an adjoining room. As you know I was boning the lad up for his entrance exams to Trinity College in Dublin. He played extremely well and was a factor in us winning the cup. Not a stuffy hair on his head. He could have been a miner’s son for all anyone knew and won the admiration of all the beasts he has for teammates.
His grandfather, Sir Frederick Weed, the team
owner, traveled with us off and on, with much finer accommodations. So I let Jeremy spend the odd night with his grandda, and the little devil ends up consorting with prostitutes and thought he was in love with one of them.
After we sorted that out I put him under lock and key. However, there was a celebration to end all celebrations when we won the cup. Jeremy jumped ship on me, stuffing his bed with pillows and shinnying three stories down on the drain pipe. While I slept, the team ended up in a brothel when the losing squad, the Bradford Bulls, arrived on the scene. A rank nationalistic insult was made and a monumental piss-up followed.
Lord Jeremy and most of the Boilermakers were jailed and the press treated it as though it were the second passing of Queen Victoria.
Caroline, after initial fury, saw the humor in the situation, and Sir Frederick was rather proud that his grandson would be a hero on entering Trinity. However, Lord Roger didn’t see it that way. He slapped the boy in a rage, humiliating him beyond reason. My own da, Tomas, struck me once over the books, as you know. That happened a quarter of a century ago and I can still feel the blow.
So, me lad, it seems that fathers and sons have their go, no matter what the circumstances of their birth or wealth or station. Younger brother, Christopher, is a snotty little prick, the apple of his father’s eye.
Our relationship with our parents is the eternal devilment of the human race. There is no way that the new generation can really learn from the old. Each boy and girl must make his own unique and perplexing journey into a relationship that ends with its own unique solution. And oftentimes, we must spend the second half of our life getting over the first half.
Every time I see Jeremy Hubble I pretend also that I am with my nephew Rory a half-dozen years up the line, hoisting a few at the bar, keeping you from consorting with prostitutes, and scraping the mud and blood of the rugby pitch off ye.
So there we are, Rory lad. The Admiral’s Cup and Lord Jeremy were the joy of it. Shelley came over for holiday and when she leaves the gunrunning starts. She does not know of the scheme. And now, the quandary. I love this woman so desperately that believing there could be a life of peace with her away from Ireland is driving me near insane. Before there was Shelley there was never really a thought of life for me that didn’t end up with the Brotherhood.
Shelley MacLeod got one whiff of Conor’s wild notion to flee Ireland and in the instant of euphoria, she agreed. By daylight, her senses had returned. If they ran, the Conor Larkin she loved would be no more. He would turn into a shallow shell of himself and soon be overcome by self-hatred. She knew, in the light of day, the world was too small for them to hide in. Even their wonderment and their love could not come between an Irishman and his dream.
What was once love would grow rancid in a year or two of never mentioning Ireland. She would have to watch him die in pieces.
Conor refused to take her into the suffering and dead-end life needed of a rebel boy’s woman.
They returned to Belfast separately, in misery.
Letters and books to Rory became less frequent. Rory, who could all but feel Conor halfway around the world, was so keen that he figured out what had probably taken place.
The gunrunning scheme moved along flawlessly, recording trip after trip to and from Belfast and Liverpool without a hitch. Something other than departed souls were being dug under in many a village graveyard.
Having set up the route, the English side of it no longer required Conor’s presence. Claiming age and injuries, he resigned from the Boilermaker team.
At first Sir Frederick would not hear of it, but finally relented. In truth, he knew the Boilermakers would not win the Admiral’s Cup again for many years. Moreover, Jeremy was now in Trinity College and no longer a player.
Conor’s forge inside Weed Ship &Iron became a source of a great deal of information for the Brotherhood, most of it distressing. It appeared as though Weed and the Orange crowd were able to smuggle in a
hundred
guns for every one the Brotherhood managed. Moreover, regular British officers were training the Ulster Volunteers, while the government turned a blind eye.
Although it was a comfortable period, Long Dan Sweeney had an itch that would not go away. A standoff bitterness had set in between him and Conor, who now seemed to be in a permanent state of melancholy.
Dan knew that Conor no longer saw the Shelley MacLeod girl and wondered if and why a man’s love could
bite so deeply. To Dan, nothing reached the innards except the movement. A blip of pain, certainly. But not a republican of Larkin’s stature, groomed by grandfather and great-grandfather. Yes, there were fools who went down, but Conor Larkin was no fool. Why the hell couldn’t he shake it!
Dan encouraged more visits north by Seamus O’Neill, who was Conor’s only confidant. Each time Seamus returned from Belfast it was with the same general report.
“Your pal, Larkin, seems to have contracted an abiding case of the red ass,” Dan growled at Seamus in a hideaway south of Dublin in the Wicklow foothills. “I don’t look forward to seeing him up in Belfast anymore.”
“I’ll tell him you need to be treated with the respect due one’s commander—you know, Dan, like you were a British Colonel in the Sudan.”
“Something’s gone wrong with him. He used to make me break up laughing.”
“Ask him, then.”
“Hell, I know why. He busted up with that girl. They came back from England separately. He’s been in a dire mood ever since, isn’t that right, Seamus? That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
“I don’t rat on my pal.”
“There are no secrets from me,” Dan demanded.
Seamus shrugged and poured tea. “Jaysus, Dan, you’d be real easy to find. All you have to do is pick up your trail of dirty teacups. Just because you’re a revolutionary doesn’t mean you can’t wash your teacups. You’ve dirty teacups in every hideaway house you’ve been in.”.
Dan calmed down before his unbowed soldier. “You see, lad, I went and made a basic mistake with Larkin. I let sentiment cloud my judgment. I have developed an unmistakable affection for the man, and that is a mistake. Once I developed a great affection for a man, Richie Leary. Turned out to be an informer. I had to shoot him myself, both kneecaps. Not that anything like that will
ever happen with Conor…it’s just that you can’t develop an affection.”
“Sometimes you can’t help it, can you, Dan?”
“Forget the fucking personality involvement. I need Conor Larkin, and you are going to need him when I’m gone. I see him as our future chief of staff. We can’t have this vinegar between us.”
“He broke up with this woman when they were in Blackpool,” Seamus said.
“He almost didn’t come back to Ireland, isn’t that right, Seamus? I know how a man behaves after he’s made plans to make a run for it.”
“He came back, didn’t he?”
“Half of him came back. I need all of him.”
“It isn’t always that easy. So, you figure it out. Conor’s got a broken heart.”
“I’d figured it out thirty years ago, Seamus. The movement is always a swim upstream against treacherous currents, without ever reaching your destination. Too swift to drag someone along with you…it will pull you both under. I’ve seen a hundred smart lads think they could handle both the Brotherhood and a life outside it. I warned him of that, Seamus. Christ, she’s not even a Catholic girl. She hasn’t a drop of the movement in her blood. She’s from the Shankill and her old man and brother are drum-thumping Orangemen. Damnit, Seamus, I gave him a choice to leave the Brotherhood in peace. It was him who chose to stay.”
Long Dan was reminiscing sharply. It was a hundred Conors and Shelleys. Maybe a hundred and one. “Conor playing something out of your own past, Dan?”
Dan reacted as though he had been struck. His old eyes turned teary, a weird sight. “Her name was Aileen. Aileen O’Dunne. I don’t remember exactly what she looked like, but I’ll never get over how she felt. The Brits stashed me away the first time when I was sixteen. I met her right after I got out. I was twenty-some thing. We all march through the same ten miles of shit…weeping at
O’Connell’s grave…reciting speeches from the dock as kids…even writing more bad poetry…. See, we all walk the same ten miles of shit.”
“Weird breed, aren’t we, Dan?”
“If you love a woman, you cannot take her into a life of her waiting with every tick of the clock to find out if your head’s been blown off…then creeping through alleys to a room in a hideaway…smelling of the damp. And oh, the fucking tears you have to stuff inside until the next glorious meeting. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now. It’s a decision we all have to come to. Later makes it that much more desperate. With the kind of commitment a Conor Larkin makes, keeping a girl he loves so much is a one-way dead-end road to tragedy.”
“What can I say, Dan? He doesn’t see her anymore.”
“When the hell is he going to get over it? We all got to get over it, you know.”
It was Seamus’s turn to feel the grief. “You’d better know the man you’re dealing with in Conor,” he said softly.
“Who is this Larkin anyhow, Jesus?”
“He’s no Jesus. He’s used the Hubbies to a fare-thee-well, and he’ll pull the trigger when he needs to. Don’t question his steel.”
“What then? Irishmen’s poems to their colleens are a large load of bullshit. It’s putrid, childish sentiment, that’s what.”
“You’d better know the man you’re dealing with,” Seamus repeated.
“There is obviously something I don’t understand. Would you be after telling me about it, Seamus?”
“Conor and I go back forever,” Seamus said. “And forever, nothing of beauty has ever escaped his eye. No leaf, no sound, no drop of rain, no sweet word, no scent. He finds beauty in thunderheads and raging seas, and never a woman has he seen or touched did he not find beauty in. Along with his ravenous craving for knowledge and his fury against injustice, this man has gathered in beauty more
fully than any human being I know or have ever heard of. Aye, he’d match Jesus in that department.
“All his life he has held that beauty, giving some to everyone, but never finding the right woman to entirely lavish it on.
“Shelley MacLeod is a wonderment of her own. She has the capacity for this man. I suppose what the two of them discovered was something beyond our universe of comprehension. Don’t you know, Dan, I’d chop off ten years of my life to know ten minutes of what they had for each other. It was so intense, it’s small wonder the both of them didn’t shatter like a smashed glass…that the man came back to us needs no further comment on his loyalty to the movement.”
“Can a man really love so?” Dan pondered.
“Conor Larkin can, and I’d rather see them take their death vows and be together for whatever time is in it for them than kill each other this way.”
“Is the lad ever going to come back to us, really?”
“Never fully. Never even partly until something fills some of the void in him.”
Strange, Seamus thought, how delicately Long Dan holds his teacup when he is thinking deeply. Why, even his little finger is curled.
“Do you think it’s time he was introduced to Atty?”
“In actual fact,” Seamus said, “I’ve been pondering along the same lines. Atty Fitzpatrick can never replace Shelley. But, by God, there’s a woman of his power, and perhaps, praise Mary, she can find the capacity to receive love. She never had it from Des, you know.”
“I thought as much.”
“Even if his void…and her void…can be partly filled it might be something awesome to behold.”
“I never been much in this area,” Dan said, “but it seems something like this has to work or we’ll lose him. Even your man Conor, Jesus or no, can’t keep going like this.”