The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising (56 page)

 146

“
T
oday is my birthday,” wrote Collins to Kitty on October 16. “Only one who remembered it was my sister, the nun.”

Collins was premature. Eoin remembered his boss’s birthday. “Happy thirty-one, General,” he said, catching Collins by surprise.

“What did you get me?”

“Same thing you got me for my birthday last week.”

“I didn’t give you anything.”

“I know,” said Eoin, with a sly smile. Then, from behind his back, he pulled a bottle of Jameson’s. “Will you share a drop with me?”

Collins found two glasses, and they clinked them in salute. “Happy Birthday, General,” Eoin said, suddenly dead serious. “You have great work to do here in London. May God bless you.”

“The last thing I need right now,” said Collins sternly, “is a sycophant. And that’s that!”

“Jaysus,” replied Eoin, “and all along I thought I was Sisyphus!” He laughed. “You’re one big fookin’ boulder, y’know.” Then Eoin paused, before adding, “Commandant-General.”

“Sisyphus,” said Collins.

“Sisyphus.”

Collins looked down at his bodyguard, appreciative of his devotion, and said, “I think you read too much.” With that, he cleared the glass of its whiskey in one gulp. Little did Michael Collins know that he was celebrating his last birthday.

 147

A
lthough it was the city of his youth, Collins felt terribly alone in London. The soul-deadening work of the treaty, plus the terribly dark, fog-infested weather, tackled his spirits by the knees. Also, he knew that, back in Dublin, he was being undercut by de Valera, Brugha, and Stack, and he was pretty sure that Childers, the delegation’s secretary, was, as Griffith had always maintained, de Valera’s informer. (Bluntly, Griffith referred to Childers as “that damned Englishman.”) He felt like he was on the plank, and a pirate was poking a sword into his backside. There was only one place to go, and it wasn’t going to be dry.

Because of the troubles back in Dublin, there was a sense of negativity and pessimism surrounding the delegation and the talks. Early in the negotiations, de Valera had told Griffith, “If war is the alternative, we can only face it, and I think that the sooner the other side is made to recognize it, the better.”

This happy eagerness for more war—especially from someone who had escaped the worst of the battle—disturbed Collins. “Who should one trust,” he remarked to Eoin, “even on my own side of the fence? Beyond Griffith, no one.”

Yet while forces were working against him, he did have three women—two in England, and one in Ireland—who were focused on him. It was no secret that Kitty was what kept him going. Although she was in Ireland, Collins wrote her and lit a penny candle for her every day—sometimes several times in a day. (Eoin, in fact, was beginning to refer to Collins as “The Arsonist,” much to Tobin’s and Broy’s amusement.) Sometimes, Collins thought negotiating with Lloyd George was easier than negotiating with Kitty. She could be an awfully odd girl, as she herself admitted, calling herself, at various times, “moody,” “childish,” “peculiar,” and “silly.”

Collins, ever the businessman, reminded her in his letters of their “arrangement” or “contract.” Perhaps their attraction to each other was based on the fact that they were complete opposites. Kitty was emotional, displaying her heart on her sleeve, while Collins was the master of compartmentalization and organization. It was through this compartmentalization that Collins could be Minister for Finance, TD, Director of Intelligence of the IRA, head of the IRB, a Commandant-General of the IRA, and now a chief negotiator of the treaty—and do a superb job in all of them.

Now he added romance to his portfolio, probably neatly tucking it in somewhere between Finance and Intelligence. Maybe because Collins was approaching marriage the way he approached collecting dossiers on the British Secret Service, Kitty always seemed to be wavering. Collins was in such a rush that it seemed he treated Kitty, whom he genuinely loved, like he would treat Eoin or Batt O’Connor. It seemed that, even in love, he wanted his orders carried out to the letter. Not surprisingly, Kitty had trouble turning the other cheek, as Eoin or Batt often did. “My one ambition is to have you like me—in the right way,” she wrote Collins. “All will yet be well if I was sure that you won’t be getting into those fits of temper with me and hurt me so much and make me feel that we are most unsuited. Otherwise, dear, I love
you
, but the other will count a big item to my happiness.”

She also worried about Collins’s fidelity. She had seen the photographs of Collins in London and heard the rumors about other women. “I hope I have the pleasure of gazing on you (among all the beauties),” she wrote to him.

“I never said any such thing,” he would earnestly protest in denial. “Newspapermen are inventions of the devil.”

She was jealous when a friend of hers innocently commandeered Collins’s knee, reminding him that her friend “had the loan of
his
knee.” Then the apologies would follow: “And I do hope it pleases you well to know this, and that you are really not fickle, and will love me all the more if I devote my life to you only.” But, in her own way, she was very direct with Collins, telling him what was in her heart and not sugar-coating it. “I’m very sensitive, will always be looking for a pinhole to reproach you if I noticed anything, and there’s where the trouble lies.”

And, of course, there was always the trouble with Harry. By November, the Harry situation seemed to be finally, albeit glacially slowly, resolving itself. To put it mildly, Harry was
desperately
in love with her. “I’m wondering if you are ever a wee bit lonely for me,” Boland wrote Kitty on his way to America, “and are you longing as I am for the day when we shall meet again? Won’t you send me a wireless and say you have made up your mind? If you have done so, cable
yes
, and if you are still in doubt, then for God’s sake, try to make up your mind, and agree to come with me . . . I would just love to have you come to America, where we will spend our honeymoon in perfect bliss!” He signed it, “Your devoted lover.”

Harry was pulling out all the stops. He had half the Irish Republican Brotherhood sending notes to Kitty, encouraging her to marry him. “And if only Harry—and his friends—would stop storming Heaven with his prayers,” Kitty wrote Collins, “I wouldn’t be getting unhappy and such mixed and peculiar feelings.” Finally, Kitty declared the truth: “I told Harry I didn’t love him.”

But how Harry loved her, as his pleading letters from America resolutely declared. Would she come to America, marry him, and then honeymoon in sunny California? No, Harry, she would not. Her heart was with the other rebel, now entrenched in London with the most thankless job in the history of Ireland. “I may be wrong, but I think Harry is capable of deeper affection for me than most men,” Kitty wrote Collins, “but he also knows that I don’t love him—it’s no effort for him to be a great lover, and, of course, he gets no thanks.” Finally, it seemed, Harry had come to comprehend the bad news. “Must really write Harry soon. Poor Harry, he’s getting used to me at last and seems quite happy now, thank God.”

And if her Michael was playing the field of young beauties in London, Kitty could dangle the thing that women always dangle—sex—in front of her “Elusive Pimpernel”: “I love to have you here, but we must be really good, no bedroom scene, etc., etc, etc. . . . I’m wearing my old long frock, black and very low! Of course
you
would be shocked!”

And, finally, she reveals that she has given her all to Collins: “I’ve given you what I’ve never given any other man; indeed, it’s not much, I suppose, but you have it anyway.”

So as Collins was working on the torturous negotiations of making a nation, Kitty was working equally hard on the difficult questions of love and marriage and her ultimate decision to be “married to a gun.” Even as she succumbed to Collins’s love, she had an odd way of expressing it: “Here was I—a victim, actually—to a man. Don’t laugh—that’s not exactly it, but my way of putting it!!”

Finally, she surrendered to Michael Collins: “How anxious I am to secure your love really well. It is too bad that our little romance should have such ups and downs. Sweetheart, wouldn’t you like me to be more sensible and not be silly? Whereas it’s so good to know that you have someone who won’t forget you. Your trouble is hers. One not complete in anything without the other. That’s my conception of love, and you are the first who made me believe in love, and that’s why I wouldn’t like to be ever disappointed in you. You will forgive me for saying this, won’t you?”

“Bring the car around,” Collins said to Eoin.

“Where to?”

“Sir John Lavery’s house. He’s going to paint me.”

“What’s the address?”

“5 Cromwell Place.”

“Cromwell,” repeated Eoin, as Collins raised his eyebrow. Eoin kept his lip buttoned shut and did not say what this omen might mean.

Lavery was painting all the players in the treaty drama, and, now, it was Collins’s turn. The two of them went to the Cromwell Place address, and Collins removed his overcoat. “It’s heavy,” he said, handing it to Lavery. “Don’t drop it. There’s a gun in the pocket.” Lavery handled the coat gingerly, and Collins looked around the room for an appropriate seat. Out of habit, he took a seat facing the door. There would be no surprises. Eoin nodded his approval, and Sir John began sketching as Collins, uncomfortable, fidgeted like a child in his chair.

The sitting had been arranged by Lavery’s wife, Hazel, known to all as Lady Lavery. She interrupted her husband’s work once, and Eoin recognized her as the woman who had commandeered Collins attention at Lady Deametrice’s party. Lady Lavery couldn’t take her eyes off of Collins, but Sir John paid no attention. Perhaps the thirty years’ separation in their ages had some impact. “They are a queer lot,” Eoin said to himself. Eoin’s suspicions increased when he would accompany Collins to eight o’clock mass at Brompton Oratory, the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, where Lady Lavery would be waiting for him. Collins may have been lighting candles for Kitty, but he was reciting the “
Mea Culpa
” with Hazel. Perhaps “
mea máxima culpa
” was more appropriate.

“I don’t understand this,” Eoin told Róisín, when he was back in Dublin with the General.

“Don’t be naïve,” she said to him, and then added a devilish laugh. As usual, Róisín was about ten lengths ahead of Eoin in life experience.

Kitty was right to be a little suspicious of “the famous M.C.,” as she called him. For, while women like Lady Deametrice Churchill would literally throw their bodies at him—Eoin joked that the pulchritudinous London ladies hell-bent on seducing Collins lent new meaning to the term “
body
guard”—it was finally becoming obvious to Eoin that there was one woman in London who had caught the eye of the notorious gunman.

Collins was coming to learn that he could always depend on Hazel Lavery for a supportive ear and to serve his needs as a back-channel communicator with the British establishment. His thoughts may have been with Kitty, but the person who had his ear in London was the sad-eyed Hazel.

Lady Lavery’s life story reminded Eoin a little bit of Erskine Childers. They were born outside the sphere of Irish nationalism—Hazel in America, Childers in Britain—yet both had converted to the cause of Irish Republicanism. Hazel had actually gone one step further, in that she had converted to Roman Catholicism. But while the stoic Childers took an antagonistic approach to the treaty talks, Lady Lavery did all she could do with her social contacts to help Collins and Griffith close the gap in the negotiations.

After talking with Róisín, Eoin couldn’t help but wonder what was going on behind closed doors with Collins and her ladyship. Even while in London, the rumors had started. The two of them were often seen riding together to a function, and the London press—brutally yellow long before the advent of Rupert Murdoch’s filthy pseudo-journalism—started referring to Hazel as Collins’s “sweetheart.” Kitty, back in Longford, was not amused, and Collins would try to joke his way out of his tight fix, always blaming the antagonistic English press. Although he would never tell Kitty, London afforded Collins a separation—and a sense of privacy—that a parochial city like Dublin could never provide. Soon Collins had nicknamed Hazel “Macushla,” and friends of hers, such as George Bernard Shaw, began referring to Collins as her “Sunday husband.”

But the compartmentalized Collins managed to stay several steps ahead of the rumormongers. They would have been shocked if they knew he had been trying his hand at poetry, directed not at his fiancée, but to Lady Lavery:

Oh! Hazel, Hazel Lavery:
What is your charm Oh! Say?
Like subtle Scottish Mary
You take my heart away.
Not by your wit and beauty
Nor your delicate sad grace
Nor the golden eyes of wonder
In the flower that is your face.

Years later, when asked about the Collins-Lady Lavery relationship by historians, senior statesman Eoin Kavanagh struck to the script. “Sure, General Collins was too busy working on the treaty. I was with him every minute, and I know there was nothing inappropriate. Everybody knows that. He was devoted to Kitty Kiernan.”

But if his interviewers had looked closely, they could have seen the jolly dance in Eoin’s eyes, for he remembered the very words of Michael Collins himself: “All poets are interested in only one thing—getting shagged!”