The Last Storyteller (34 page)

The boy disappeared, hell for leather, up a track on which I could never drive—gone before I could get hold of him. Venetia stared after him. At that exact moment another car arrived and blocked the lane. Out climbed Little Boy and a uniformed policeman.

“Well, now. Thanks for waiting.” He grinned with sarcasm.

“What do you want?”

“You, Little Boy.”

How do I play this? Don’t fight him. Use cunning. If you can find some
.

“Where do you want us to go?”

He looked at me, daring to believe that I’d comply. “So what you gonna do, make a statement?”

I nodded.

“Name names?”

I nodded again.

“Times and places?”

I nodded once more. “Sure.”

“Gerry,” he said to the uniformed man, “get in there beside him and don’t take your eye offa him.”

I said, “No room. Look.” On the back seat lay our luggage, as untidy as Venetia had ever been. “I’ll follow you,” I said. “I’m sick of all this.”

“Any tricks,” he warned, “and you’ll be singing high notes.” He looked at Venetia. “We want to talk to you, too, miss.”

They climbed into their car, moved up the road a little, and waited.

I knew every stick and stone of that countryside. You can guess what happened next. Little Boy had his car pointed in one direction, and I took off in the other. We raced away from him. Two steep dips on that crooked old road helped.

To my left ran an old cart track that connected to another road through woods. I turned at a sharp angle. Steamed the hundred yards into the trees. Hidden from the road. Stopped and waited. Opened my door. Heard Little Boy’s car roar past the entrance to the cart track. He hasn’t seen us. Climbed back in and began to move forward. Slow, even, and steady across rough ground. I found the old track, in better condition than I might have expected, protected by the woodland.

By now Venetia had begun to weep.

I’ve slept in this wood. At least twice. Over there, I think. Can I see it? Yes. An old limekiln. Like a large, unfinished igloo. Made of stone. Cold as snow. Slept there in bad times. But is this time any better? Jesus!

Venetia began to rock back and forth.

Stop the car. Attend to her. You’re clear for the moment. Stop the car. Get out. Go around to her door, open it, and squat there. Talk to her. Stop the car!

“What’s the matter, my love?”
Why won’t she answer?
“Venetia, come on, tell me.”
What does that shake of the head mean?
“Are you all right?”
Face streaked with tears. She’s trembling. Is she well or unwell?
“We’ll be safe soon. I promise.”
There it goes again, that silent shake of the head, like a grieving child. In a woman her age
. “Venetia. Please tell me!”

She leaned back, head on the seat, eyes closed, tears streaming down.

“You’re wanted by the police. Oh, God. You’re some kind of awful criminal. I can’t handle this.”

Nothing but tears have I seen. Since I found her. Crying more than not. Why? What am I doing wrong? These events, they’re not my fault. Is this all going wrong, was this all wrong to begin with? Has the dream fallen apart? But I still love her. I love her more than ever
.

In failure I stood back, stepped away from the car, leaned against a tree, and closed my eyes. I waited some moments for the ruckus inside my head to calm down. The sounds of the woods took over—leaves, birds, a distant cow, rustles at my feet—and murmurs in my mind. The hard cylinder of the tree began to assail my shoulders. And then matters changed again. Without as much as the noise of a footfall, Venetia crossed the few paces—the hundred miles—between us and laid her head on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t recognize this dreadful world of yours.”

“Neither do I.”

“I think we must be under some old curse,” she said. “Probably from the evil in my family.”

We stood without moving, my arms around her shoulders. Her shaking stopped.
What is the way back to her, the way in? What have I done wrong? Twenty-five years of longing and wanting and yearning, and now that she’s back again, now that the long dream has been realized, why and how am I wrecking it?

A sardonic voice in me took over.
Because, you idiot, you do nothing but whine. You’re hesitant, indecisive. And when you try to be decisive, you make bad choices. You consort with risky and ruthless people. This is no way to build a new world. With the love of your life? No, not at all. Stop thinking about yourself, you donkey. Get some practical steps going. Look at yourself. Why are two, maybe three, lethal groups of people now pursuing you? You must have some responsibility in this. And you have no way of coping with it
.

We shook ourselves loose and walked back to the car.

“Let me try to make us safe,” I said.

“Please,” said Venetia, and in the car she fell asleep.

In that part of Ireland, there’s a handsome peak—they call it a mountain, but it’s more of a modest hill. Forest stretches on the generally bare ground like whiskers on a face most of the way up, and a forestry trail climbs through it. I knew the views from the highest point, three hundred
and sixty degrees; and I needed half of that to see where our pursuers might be. (You can grasp how few cars we had in the Irish countryside during the 1950s!)

With Venetia still asleep, I reached the top of the trail. From the edge of the trees I could look back at where we’d been. Not a car in sight. Some farm machinery. Fields here and there, dotted with animals. A river. We could stay here all day.

And we did. She remained asleep, and in the late afternoon, when she woke up, declared hunger.

A day of hard thinking produced this notion: we need to lie low until we get to a port. And by my reckoning, we couldn’t hide in small places where the jungle drums beat; they’d find us, any of them, within hours.

Food and seclusion? Where can we have both? Not a village. Not even a town. Try a city. Where I know a good man
.

I had never seen Mr. MacManus in his bearskin coat—although I had seen the coat. It was impossible to avoid; it hung like a live thing on the back of his front door. The “occasion merchant” told me the story:

“Didn’t I find it at an estate sale? One of the rooms had been locked off for years. Nobody had a key.”

Since Mr. MacManus had agreed to buy the entire contents of the house, they’d allowed him to break the lock.

He found a room that, he said “was as fabulous as the Arabian nightshirts.” (I never interrupted him when he flowed like that: too many gems would have fallen loose.) “There was jewels the size of your knuckles, and a big bowl for washing your behind, a French thing, I think they call it a ‘be-there’; a woman from North Cork bought it from me—they’re very clean down that way.”

The “jewels” proved less than authentic, costume jewelry from an ancient music hall act. However, he also turned up an early Winchester
rifle, a cache of antique maps, and half a dozen bottles of homemade hooch, or “poteen,” made from potatoes.

“It’d put hairs on your chest,” said Mr. MacManus, “whether you wanted them or not.” And hanging there, too, he found the massive coat.

The sign on his door said, “Back in Five Minutes.” Venetia asked, with calm logic, “How do we know when the five minutes began?”

We waited half an hour. As we were talking about driving away, I saw the great figure lumbering along a narrow lane off Catherine Street. He looked like a creature from one of those films of grizzlies in the wild, his arms out from his body, akimbo and relaxed. His hat had a homburg shape, but made of the same ursine fur? Impossible. No: when Venetia later complimented him on the hat, he told us that his wife had made it for him. The coat had been tailored for a man of about six feet, seven inches tall.

“A giant altogether,” said Mr. MacManus. “So Mamie cut off the hem, and she draped and glued the bear’s fur to an old homburg that had belonged to a priest, and that’s my hat.”

I, who had years of practice in asking for a bed for the night, had no problem in approaching Mr. MacManus.

“It’d be an honor,” he said, bowing to Venetia. “And we have new sanitation.” (I almost asked him if it included a “be-there.”)

She thanked him, and something in the way she spoke made him spin around and stare at her. He clasped his hands in front of him like a man meeting a bishop and said, “Oh, Holy God, tell me it is and tell me it isn’t.” His eyes shone like a child’s. “Didn’t I see you, weren’t you in a show or something?” He wrestled with his memory. “Isn’t your name Alicia Kelly?” (Given his verbal erratics, we were lucky he didn’t say “Alopecia.”)

“Venetia,” we both said together.

“D’you remember—of course you do.” He took her hand and chanted, “ ‘O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west, / Through all the wide border his steed was the best.’ I used to follow your show across the country. And you’re not dead at all—I heard you were killed in an accident at sea. ‘Lochinvar’ was my favorite poem ever, and nobody ever recited it as well as yourself.”

To my great surprise, Mr. MacManus had surrounded himself with
luxury. No hotel I knew could offer the same level of comfort: rich, deep beds, superb bathrooms, sumptuous towels.

“The two of you are the first people to use one of my guest rooms,” he said.

“How many guest rooms do you have?” Venetia asked.
Good. She’s engaging again
.

“I’ve six,” he said.

“You must have a lot of guests.”

“Oh, not really, Alicia, but the way I look at it, you never know who’ll show up, and I always like to be prepared.”

We ate that evening with Mr. MacManus—sandwiches as high as bricks. Venetia managed by breaking off chunks and gathering such contents—ham, onion, chicken, cheese—as fell to her plate. Mamie never appeared, though Mr. MacManus spoke of her all the time.

Some years later, I discovered that Mamie had been dead for more than three years before our stay there. He simply needed to keep her alive—and that is something I so profoundly understand.

We stayed in warm comfort for two days and two nights. I had the crude idea that the longer we stayed, the more Venetia would forget that we had problems. Each morning we rose to the sound of talk coming from below. Too early for Mr. MacManus to have customers—so who’s down there? At breakfast he said, “I was just talking to Mamie. She’s gone out to get some messages.” The second morning he said, “You just missed Mamie; she’s gone over to her mother’s. The mother isn’t at all well.”

Mr. MacManus, in his shirtsleeves (and amazing primrose suspenders), had one of those stomachs that seems unconnected to the rest of the body. It wobbled like a great, separate egg when he walked. I saw Venetia looking at it, transfixed.

I had some thinking to do. As I often did, I worked out my thought process on paper. I still have those notes, and here they are:
Dilemma:
unreal. Being pursued by IRA fellows who think I mocked them. Also pursued by thuggish detective who believes by now that I must be a member of the IRA. What to do? First thought remains unchanged: Get to a port with a ferry. Or an airport. Only two on the island: Shannon, Dublin. Get to France. Or Spain, for the sun. No extradition
.

Other dilemma: puzzling and upsetting—Venetia’s state of mind. Yet I glimpse her in there. Can I get her out of there? If we go abroad, will she be different? She thinks there’s a third possibility—that J. Stirling is also following us
.

First option therefore—the major priority: buy time to think and organize. Then choose airport. Arrange money. Make schedule. Explain to Venetia. Contact twins
.

At this stage I knew nothing of Miss Fay and her injuries. Or of Jack’s ranting.

I decided that we would travel the longer distances by night and the shorter stages by day, to try to keep Venetia’s mood light. With a map from the car, I worked out a schedule that would take us by quiet roads, never seeming hurried, to each best next place. An irony surfaced: our safest point of departure, least scrutinized by those searching for us, would be a place I hadn’t thought of; the forbidden territory of north Belfast had an airport.

On that first morning I read in Mr. MacManus’s newspaper, “
ALL BORDER POINTS CLOSED FOLLOWING BOMBING
.
” A “fierce outbreak of violence” near the town of Newry had activated “the greatest security operations since the war.” Not a problem for us, with my knowledge of all the many roads. Besides, no general alert had been issued, and I had no sense from any of the reports that the police north or south were stopping people and asking questions. Their searches seemed specific.

As ever in Ireland, most lives remained normal: no war zones, no emergency measures, no martial law. Indeed, if we hadn’t had newspaper reports, nobody would have known that a new guerrilla campaign had broken out. In general, the country seemed to show no visible support for the IRA—except at an occasion that called for a rekindling of ancient emotions, such as the two funerals.

I read down the page. No great depth of reporting had yet begun. Given the official disapproval and condemnation, I wondered whether it
ever might. We had a degree of self-censorship; the politicians and the church spoke, and the newspapers barked their echoes. Thus did the country build some kind of ill-defined moral antagonism to the men who called themselves “freedom fighters.”

Nobody tried for balance. Not a reporter or columnist addressed the discrimination in Northern Ireland—no jobs for Catholic men, bad housing for Catholic families, who were always subject to police harassment. In the south we knew so little of what went on in the place that we dismissed with the vague term “up there.”

We left Limerick by quiet roads.
Can we learn to tolerate any of this nonsense? And for how long? Get out. Let it die down. Find a safe town somewhere in Europe. Germany, maybe one of those villages I saw during the war. Settle down. New life. You have enough money
.