Peeling Oranges (9 page)

***

On her return to Spain, my mother went walking with Patrick through the Madrid streets:

It was good to feel her on my arm, like an assurance, like carrying a little piece of Ireland around with me in exile. M was struck by the poverty all around her. She had thought of Ireland as the only poor country. I have no objection to her doing social work, but it seems to have made her light-heartedness disappear – the more she examines the world of the have-nots. I don’t know if it is a good thing. The poor may be poor but they are indigenous; they don’t suffer that wrenching of heart strings only known to the likes of us.

As they walked the paseo, they witnessed the victims of war in the streets: men with a shirt sleeve or a trouser leg dangling; the sound of crutches striking stone; women in black widows’ weeds; blind vendors sitting on stools on street corners; child beggars, barefooted and emaciated; the icy look of hunger which not even a Spanish sun could thaw:

M was amazed on seeing used tooth brushes and half cigarettes on sale in the shops, and fountain pens on HP; but the smell of the dead men’s clothes, she said, was just the same as in the Iveagh market at home.

‘The poor are the same all over. Remember in The Grapes of Wrath? Such poverty among the poor farmers in America.’

‘Would you like to go over there?’ I said.

‘Me?’ she said.

‘You got the offer before.’

She tried to smile. ‘I’m sorry, Patrick. Was I getting carried away?’ She pulled my collar up. There was a cold bite in the air. ‘Try to straighten up,’ she said, and then touched my face with a gloved hand and kissed me. I felt a longing for her, a hopeless longing.

‘You could go,’ I said, ‘if you really wanted to.’

‘Look, the queues are starting,’ she said, changing the subject, ‘the long winter queues’.

***

My mother was grateful to Patrick for helping in Gearóid MacSuibhne’s escape, but it is clear that she was still solicitous about the IRA man’s welfare, especially among those whom she simplistically deemed ‘the Germans who kill Jews and other races’. If they took a turn against him – and Gearóid could fly off the handle very easily – God knows what they would do to him. He could wind up in a concentration camp or worse.

Suggested experimentation with AI was another matter. She considered the whole idea sick. ‘We don’t need to deepfreeze our love. Love should never be put on hold.’ She said that such a thing was not for human, Christian life. She still believed that there was plenty of time to have children. She thought they were going about it in the wrong way, ‘without enough passion’.

As the days got hotter and as summer approached, my mother became more alluring:

She danced for me tonight in our bedroom. Someone was playing flamenco guitar outside on the street. Our shutters were open to all and sundry. She tried to arouse me under a Spanish moon, gyrating to the music. She was like the Indian pipe player rousing the snake; but the snake refused to come up. I felt acutely embarrassed when she began to disrobe on her own accord. It was downright brazen, not at all ladylike. I averted my eyes and told her to put her clothes back on and to turn off the light. God knows who was watching her making a spectacle of herself.

She apologised. She didn’t know what had got into her. ‘It must have been the heat,’ she said. ‘I just looked up and I saw the moon like a mother watching over her little stars.’

And then she wept.

***

In a letter to my mother, Gearóid mentions Patrick. He refers to him as her
bourgeois
husband; but he admits the diplomat saved his life from that fool of a fascist driver whom he hoped had been got rid of.

When my mother received this letter, giving details of Jiménez’s actions, Patrick was in Barcelona. She saw the driver on the street polishing the embassy car. Without any fear or prior thought – she was so incensed – she went out directly to where he was and, with the palm of her hand, slapped him hard across the face.

When Patrick returned, she remonstrated with him. Why had he not told her about Jiménez? ‘He threatened Gearóid’s life and endangered yours. Did you even report it? Why can he not be sacked?’ ‘He cannot be sacked,’ Patrick replied almost resignedly, ‘and that’s all there is to it.’ ‘What is the matter with you?’ my mother said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re afraid of that little pipsqueak.’

Two days later Patrick Foley was severely reprimanded for the behaviour of his wife. He was warned that his diplomatic career could be in jeopardy. The reprimand had come, he writes, directly down the line from Francisco Franco himself.

That night Patrick cautioned his wife about the dangers of loose talk and impetuous action, especially in a diplomatic environment, and in such a tense climate as prevailed in war time. He quoted Minister Mac Bride: ‘Every action of a diplomat credits or discredits his nation, because he or she is the representative of that nation.’

Patrick records:
She was getting dangerously close. Jiménez is milking me dry for his silence and all M does now every night is gaze incomprehensibly at the moon.

And then ‘suddenly’ the following evening:

...she has cut her hair to shreds with a scissors. She thinks she is not beautiful any more. She says beauty fades when love fades. What am I to do? I will have to hide her away until it grows again. What will the embassy staff think?

***

Meanwhile Gearóid continued to write to my mother, fearlessly recounting his exploits.

The German plan to attack Britain was going ahead. So was the plan to instigate a revolution simultaneously in Ireland.

A U-boat was sent to Ireland with the revolutionaries, including MacSuibhne, on board. But the leader, Seán Russell, who was to plan the campaign, died on the voyage, of a perforated ulcer. Gearóid wrote to my mother saying that if they could not start a revolution in Ireland, they would make their own
blitz
on the neighbouring island.

On the twenty fifth of July 1939 a bomb was planted in a tradesman’s bicycle box which was left standing in Broadgate, the main street in the medieval city of Coventry. At two thirty p.m. the bomb exploded. It shattered twenty five shops, blasted holes in the street, overturned cars, scattering glass, handbags and children’s toys.

It also killed fifty people.

One of the dead was a young woman who was trying on a wedding dress when the bomb exploded.

The man who planted the bomb walked from the scene of the explosion. He did not run, as some of the newspapers maintained. Only when he had turned the corner did the man run in the direction of the train station. Workmen commented on the speed of the man. In parts of Ireland they said he ran like a hurler in Croke Park, soloing towards goal with a bomb like a
sliotar
balanced on his hurley stick, and the British metropolitan police were the opposing team hot on his heels.

If only Uncle Tomás had been as fast.

When my mother read about Coventry, she wondered about the betrothed girl: what her wedding dress looked like, what lace and frills there were, what her husband-to-be was like, how many children they would have had. She wondered about these things as a child wondered about a fairy tale.

Gearóid wrote to her to say two men were hanged for the bombing on rather flimsy evidence. He said he was lucky to escape but that he felt bad about the two men.

My mother had a strong social conscience but she also was what she was. She did not weep for the victims of Coventry because, in her eyes (at that time), they were casualties of a just war. The Dublin people on the North Strand killed by a German bomb were similar casualties. One can’t cry for the whole world. Pity, after all, is selective, like memory.

Gearóid was kept busy in 1939. He dyed his hair black and placed bombs at train stations throughout England (‘I planted oranges in their stations.’).

In 1940 Coventry was hit once more – this time devastated from the air by German bombers. One thousand people were killed.

The sealion had mated with the dove.

***

My mother found it difficult to settle in Spain. No sooner had she arrived back there than the second World War broke out, and although Spain was declared neutral, the country was awash with foreign agents and intrigue. Patrick insisted that she stay within the parameters of the embassy.

Angela Martínez became friendly with her. They began to confide in one another as knowledge of each other grew. My mother was surprised at the amount of information Angela had on her husband’s personal life. When she drew this to Patrick’s attention, he recorded:

I told her that I knew she was nosy but that I had to confide in someone when she was away. I told her that she was just a big earth mother and everyone in the embassy knew that.

***

Angela taught my mother how to embroider ornamental designs in Spanish lace. It kept her occupied during the long hours of curfew, or when Patrick was away on embassy business. Or during the long nights when he did not come home at all.

She heard of Franco’s continued executions of republicans long after the Civil War had ended. It was as if victory had to be won over and over again. She witnessed two wars fuse into one in a country that was supposedly neutral.

And all the time she missed the sounds of home: familiar language, the hawkers’ cries, the Cathedral bells – when Saint Patrick’s bells rang, she said, Christ Church or John’s Lane answered. She missed the shop. She missed Muddy and Gearóid. She missed the taste of Irish butter. The letters Gearóid wrote to her, she read again and again. Perhaps these letters were now usurping the role formerly played by romance novels in her imagination. Gearóid, to her, was a romantic hero who happened to be her real-life protector and surrogate brother as well.

It irritated Patrick:

‘Are you learning them by heart?’ I said. Perhaps I was jealous. I never witnessed her reading any letters which I had written to her. My heart missed a beat when I thought of his visits to her when I was away.

‘It whiles away the time,’ she replied. ‘It gets tedious being cooped up here, don’t you know? I get homesick.’

***

The next day a letter arrived (ten days after being posted according to the postmark) from Peg to say Muddy was ill. It was the excuse my mother needed to head home.

***

Muddy always looked frail, but that was her nature. She boasted that she had outdistanced many a more robust-looking person and even talked about joining a tontine.

Mam wrote to Patrick saying that her mother’s illness did not seem to be too serious – it was more like a flu, but the consumption fear was always there. She tended her for a number of days until she saw signs of recovery. She went to Peg’s flat, but her sister was not there. Then, leaving her mother in what she deemed the capable hands of a trusted neighbour, she set out for Rathfarnham where she said she had many things to unload:

When I got to the house Peg was already there before me. She seemed to have been taken off guard. She thought I would still be with Muddy.

‘I decided to tidy up the house a bit for you…’ she said, ‘in case you came out.’

She was quite uneasy standing in the hallway with the spring sunshine showing up all the dust.

‘How did you get in?’ I said, but before she could answer, I heard footsteps on the stairs and I looked up and saw Gearóid descending, buttoning his shirt. Gearóid in broad daylight, half-naked.

The table had been set for tea. Two China Coronation cups bearing the face of George VI. Had Gearóid noticed? He just stood awkwardly in a corner. Had he gone off his rocker?

My rag was out, more against Peg than him. My own sister! She should have known better. Using someone else’s house like that. And yet it was him I attacked first. I took a Coronation cup with the royal visage and smashed it against the wall.

‘Were you going to kiss a royal English gob?’ I said in Irish. ‘What sort of hero are you?’

‘Take it easy, Martha,’ he said. ‘I prefer the saucer anyway.’

I knew he normally drank from a saucer. That’s why seeing him prepared to use a cup – and what a cup! – really maddened me. He drank from a saucer, not from bad manners, but as a socialist gesture, don’t you know, an attack on gentility.

I broke the handle off the other cup and handed it to Peg.

‘That’s a Liberties’ cup now,’ I said.

I tackled her about Muddy. I told her she could have swallowed her pride for once. She said she did go to the shop when a neighbour told her Muddy wasn’t well, but Muddy refused to see her. You know, Patrick, stubbornness is an inherited trait.

She said she had to catch the last tram into the city. She repeated that she hadn’t intended staying and that Gerry called expecting to find me. She would leave now so that the two of us could catch up on all the gossip. ‘All the gossip,’ if you don’t mind, and ‘Gerry!’ Gerry, I ask you.’

***

My mother’s letter to Patrick did not reveal what she and Gearóid discussed that night in Rathfarnham. One is left to wonder if her moral outrage was justified. Martha was a married woman. Peg and Gearóid were free agents (in a manner of speaking). Is it possible she was jealous of her older and contrary sister? I think of my aunt and wonder. I read the letter again, but paper and ink cannot show the flush on the cheeks of a woman who perhaps had never known such flushes before.