NINETEEN
She died suddenly. “My mother died suddenly,” I say whenever anyone asks. Which is rarely, as you would expect. “A coronary. Massive.” Or so he said, the doctor who rang me and I thought, but she’s a small woman! “Massive” seems wrong. I pulled the telephone off at the root and threw it against the wall. And I cried out “No” and again “No No.” And “No.” But then everyone says no. And then the doctor rang my mobile. Which of course she’d given him. For emergencies. On my instructions. Mothers become more obedient as they grow older. And when he rang back I said, “It’s over,” and he remained silent. Like her. I went home for the funeral. A witness. The only family witness as it happens. Daragh, though he was not physically there, followed her out to where the others lay, walking beside me step by step. We must all find our own best way to endure.
Daragh did his mourning in another country. And I sent photographs of the graves. Helpful as ever. Bishop Fullerton said mass. He’d been “very fond of Sissy O’Hara. Very fond.” Spoke to all of us who’d come “to see her off,” which was virtually the entire town. Referred to the tragedy of “Tom and Sissy’s boy” and how she’d borne so much loss in “her life of quiet courage and spiritual dignity here, in our community.” Lovely speech and then the letters! About what they’d meant, what she’d meant to everyone. How can I summarise? Or guide you to what lay beneath the weight of the words? Perhaps everyone knew that in a sense life had almost defeated them but they’d somehow loved on, loved life, had revered it still. I could tell from the letters that people seemed grateful to know that it is possible, that love can do that. Just in case. And if she’d shocked despair out of herself, once, years ago in a mental hospital, well, that’s what was demanded to make the unendurable endurable. It was an honourable course. They’d lived close to what was lost. He’d always believed that was the only way.
And they had been happy. What more can one say?
TWENTY
So time marched on without either of them. It’s a quickstep. I relied on Patricia, Bridget’s daughter, and on Bogus for stories of what was real, there, in the place that had become the dream-landscape of my life.
Once when I went back to deal with certain issues, as my solicitor put it, I visited Bogus. Aoife was resting so she couldn’t greet me. The news was on. “Gerry looks like a monk on TV, a real ascetic, don’t you think Olivia? Martin doesn’t, but is a very dedicated man. They’re ‘naturals’ on TV. Though Gerry’s more natural than Martin. But I suppose Martin has other means of communication. And they know short and snappy works on television. Is it sound-bites, they call them? You know, I think the newsmen seem a bit soft on them. Have we laden them down with guilt about Ireland, the sins of their fathers and grandfathers, their great-grandfathers? Ah now, here come the Unionists. Listen to them! Hopeless! Useless! Inarticulate! Apart from Paisley, who lacks a certain charm, wouldn’t you say? Isn’t it amazing, Olivia, they have no facility, none, in the language of the country to which they’ve sworn allegiance and for which they’ve often given their lives. No one understands their story, no one ever will, even if they knew how to tell it. What’s the point? They’ve no history of oppression. And singing the praises of… King Billy? Oh for God’s sake! The Battle of the Boyne? Oh dear, oh dear. And pride in a religion that, as they see it, had defeated Rome, the Mother Church. No one wants to defeat their mother. And no humour. None. At least if they’d sat beside Catholics they’d have got the rhythm of language and have learned how to tell a joke. They’ve had a poor education in the things that matter. Still, I suppose segregation means you won’t be contaminated by another point of view. You know you’re right, all the time, about everything. Both religions agreed on that, at least. They’re together on the idea of segregation. It’s a blessing. Do you not agree, Olivia? It’s an education.” I couldn’t answer because Aoife banged on the floor and he looked at me—with what? I’d rather not know. But he wrote it to me. Determined man, in his own way.
Forgive me, Olivia. I seem to be losing my way. Jim Brannigan’s ill again. Marjorie may go to live in Dublin. Which I find a very painful thought. I’m sure, since you’re a perceptive woman, that you’ve noted I’m not exactly impervious to the glories of Marjorie Brannigan. “Time cannot wither her,” though it’s withered me. Aoife is still not well. I do my best, Olivia, and I know it’s a brutal thing to say but a permanently unwell wife breaks the spirit. A man must tell someone the secrets of his soul. Someone has to know. I want advice, Olivia. I’ve thought of writing Marjorie a letter. What do you think Olivia? Would a letter be a sin? A letter from me? It would, wouldn’t it? I know. I’m prepared to lose my soul but I think it’s lost already. It’s hers. Marjorie has my soul. What can I do, what can my body, the temple of my soul, do but accompany it on its long, long journey of worship? If I had one hour with her after these decades of desire and waking dreams I would suffer the eternal flames of hell, laughing. I’d be laughing, as they say. There, my confession, Olivia, but I trust you more than any priest. Especially now.
Your friend,
Bogus
P.S. Does love drive you mad, Olivia? And now I have a terrible question. I keep asking myself this question, over and over. I keep thinking that if I get the answer right on this I’ll have learned an essential thing. Ah, who am I to think that I could discover an essential thing? But my question, or is it our question, could it have been all for love? And sure isn’t love just torture, Olivia! Was it love spirited Jean McConville away from her nine children? Men can be demons to women! Oh the long list of men and women loved to death for love of Ireland. I’ll stop now. I’m tired and Aoife is calling me. Again. Burn this. I should never have written it—but I had to. I just had to. And I’ll post it.
I wish he hadn’t.
In our few other calls or meetings we made sure we were on safer ground. For us, at least. “Hasn’t the lexicon expanded through years, Olivia: broadcasting ban, the disappeared, human bombs, hunger strikes—didn’t anyone warn that woman Thatcher of the significance of hunger strike in Ireland, didn’t anyone mention the famine?” That, years later, became part of Holocaust Studies. Bridget, who feels very strongly about the Famine, goes to the theme-park—two hundred acres in Limerick—and, alas, she brings back photographs. And Bridget is not photogenic. Oh there’s one I’d love you to see: she’s standing beside a newly constructed coffin-ship, which I told her didn’t seem to be her style at all. God—she looked daggers at me and sure I sent them winging back to her.
“She thinks her trump card is the granddaughter, Carly—Carly Ní Houlihann—what are we coming to, Olivia? Eighteen now, at Trinity. ‘Brilliant girl’ according to Bridget. French is her subject. Amazing when you think we’re not exactly linguists. But maybe we are. I’ve heard Carly is living with her boyfriend, Eton boy, Tristan! Dresses like a tinker, but there you are. I suppose we’ve come a long way. Who ever thought the Taoiseach would be a separated man? Twice. Divorced? Well, as Bridget said, ‘it’s complicated.’ Still, we’ve come a long way. Sexual intercourse—may I use that phrase, Olivia? It still shocks me to be able to say the words out loud—sexual intercourse began in Ireland rather later than 1963. But we caught up. I think we would both agree that we caught up. Much later, when we saw the light, when it came to light that the Bishop of Galway had an illegitimate son. ‘WHAT? NO!’ Priests have no power over us any more.
“And once religion loses that power all that’s left is love of God rather than fear of God. I suppose we’ve been more frightened in our bedrooms than we’ve … well, you know what I mean. Isn’t He the ultimate Father? Who wants their father in the bedroom? Am I shocking you again Olivia? Why do I find it so easy to talk to you? We’re great friends aren’t we? Are you shocked? What’s wrong with being shocked? Anyway, ‘Fuck ’em’ is the feeling now. And fuck ’em we do. We’re on ‘the long slide to happiness.’ Thanks for the Larkin, Olivia, though that long slide is a bumpier ride than people let on. Loved the last line of ‘I Remember, I Remember’: ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’ We can’t say that any more, can we, about Ireland? Have I gone too far, Olivia? Don’t go now! Talk a bit more.” Though I hadn’t said a word.
Bridget, as she grew older and felt perhaps that she did not have the time left to write a long letter about long ago, sent postcards. And annually, on St. Patrick’s Day, greetings for “old times’ sake,” though no longer with a shamrock—“It’s not that fashionable any more. Only in America, for the parade.” And sometimes I saw her when I returned, which was rarely. She was careful with a woman from another tribe, as she saw me now. “Ah Olivia, sure we’d hardly recognise you.” And then, “Though I suppose it’s because you’re still the same!” Terrifying! She phoned occasionally. “Mr. Middlehoff has gone more into himself. Lost in himself. They say he’s depressed. Ridiculous, I say. He’s just sad. And of course he’s got no religion. Nothing to help him. The sadness descended deep on him when Mrs. Calder died a few months after his father. Though he was never a bundle of laughs, was he, Olivia? Now he doesn’t want to talk to anyone, which in Ireland is a definite sign of insanity.” And she’d laugh. She was right, he probably was lost in himself. Lost in the old dream of Harriet Calder, talking to her silently, the way half the best conversations in a human life go on. Silently. With ghosts. I wrote to him. His reply was short. The normal thank-you letter. A nothing thing really. Just manners.
The letters, the cards and the phone calls from Bridget and Patricia and Bogus grew less frequent as we moved inexorably towards that biblical moment, the millennium, when, with shock, one realised one had lived much of one’s life in another century. The last word on Robert Carter and Bishop Fullerton arrived without warning. Patricia was the messenger. She took time over it, news of death mustn’t be rushed. Robert Carter died first. “He always stayed loyal to Mr. Middlehoff, Olivia. Perfidious Albion does friendship well,” she wrote. And I thought my mother would have laughed at that. I miss her laughter. Always will. Turned out Robert Carter was a war hero. He’d told no one, perhaps believing that an English war hero, even in the Ireland of the sixties and seventies, would not be welcome. Later perhaps he’d forgotten his heroism, sometimes people do, or perhaps he understood that a nation’s history is like a carefully constructed family photograph album. There must be excisions. In fact the local paper, which Patricia sent to me, picked up the
Times
obituary and with great delicacy managed to explain in considerable detail the nature of his heroism, the courage with which he’d tended the wounded, without making much of the fact that he was an English soldier. It was a minor masterpiece of elective editing. Bishop Fullerton, who’d believed himself to be in the spiritual preservation business, a kind of area-manager for the Holy Father and for whom the Galway debacle had dealt a blow to his vision of Ireland as “a unique gift to His Holiness, the ultimate example of the perfect Catholic country,” was killed in a car crash on St. Stephen’s Day. He was driving himself. Eamonn was in the Caribbean on his Christmas holiday. “The blessing of that!” Such a relief to Eamonn’s family who’d long feared the death of a bishop on their conscience. The car belonged to the Palace and was a write-off. However Bishop Fullerton, knowing the car to be Palace property, left money to Eamonn to buy his family a new Mercedes. It came with the admonition to “behold St. Christopher! Then go thy way in safety, Eamonn, My Good Shepherd.” Which evidently had Eamonn’s family in “floods of tears, for days.” Tears that turned to laughter. The way tears do.
Though tears came again. We were crying for our friends, like everyone else that September day when the world changed. As did Ireland. And in the ashes of that September day in New York the Provisional IRA finally traced the out line of their own destruction. And that figure—over three thousand dead—became more than a question of mathematics. We’d started our own reckoning, over three thousand of our own dead, which in the context of Northern Ireland is the equivalent of six hundred thousand in America, and one hundred and fifty thousand in Britain. “Quantity has a quality all its own,” as someone once wrote. Bogus rang me: “It’s over now, Olivia. Try raising money for the boys back home in a New York bar now.”
Bogus was right. Though we did not know it then, a discussion had been scheduled for 11 September 2001, between Mr. Bush’s representative, Mr. Haass, and Gerry Adams concerning the “Colombian Connection.” It was going to be very frosty anyway, but that day turned into one hell of a tough conversation as Americans fell from the sky and nine human bombers taught America what it was like to be blown to pieces for a cause. It was indeed over then. “The boys” were nobody’s heroes any more. And because they’re fast learners they acted. Quickly. “We’re not like al-Qaeda.” That was a pretty important message to get across. And lo and behold, on 28 October 2001 the Army Council of the Provisional IRA declared that they had put all their weapons “beyond use.” Forensic use of language. Even going back to 1923, when de Valéra called “Time’s up” during the Civil War, we “buried” the weapons. And, unlike “the disappeared,” we remembered where we’d buried them. It was too important to forget. Arms, and the man who decides what to do with them, present a linguistic as well as a logistic challenge. They always have. After the disaster of the 1956–62 Border Campaign, Mr. Ó Brádaigh ordered his men “to dump arms,” which is another thing altogether. Which everyone in Ireland knew, since careful interpretation is our forte. So “weapons beyond use” was taken by many to be a statement of unusual clarity. We latched on to them, invested hope in them—hope that those three little words signified that the thirty-year war might begin to draw to a close. Though peace, we discovered, would be a long drawn-out affair.
Which was not true of the miracle, the absolute, irrefutable national miracle of Ireland, which turned out in the end to be economic. What a surprise the surprise ending to our sad story was. None could have guessed, none could have foretold that we would one day be one of the richest countries in Europe. This miracle did not come about as a result of a pilgrimage to Lourdes by tax inspectors and accountants. Oh no. Though the Hand of God must have been there, somewhere. Our increasing wealth, of which there was barely a hint in the eighties, became undeniable in the nineties. The Celtic Tiger settled down in a landscape that must have felt initially alien to him. Though he soon prowled his elegant path through the land, his progress noted by the whole world as he devoured every prejudice of those who’d ever, ever underestimated us. What a shock to them all! All we’d ever needed was a chance. That more or less summarised the feeling.
And it mattered in ways we could not imagine. The present—now—was a very attractive place. More attractive than the past. “Money, Olivia, is like a ticket to the future and at last we can afford the fare!”
Now that we had everything we could wait for the rest, for the dream. After all, who wouldn’t want to join us when they could see just how great it was? Yes, we could wait for the North. We had the money now to wait it out. And we did. And in March 2007, one of the longest peace negotiations in modern history—thirteen years—drew to a close. It wasn’t the moderates who won. Because during that time every decent and moderate politician had been sidelined in Northern Ireland and we were all left with the one “who looked like a monk” and the one who’d taken Holy Orders all right, but not the ones with which we were familiar. Still we had peace. Of a kind. The exhausted hand of history had grabbed Gerry Adams and Dr. Paisley, who, as Bogus wrote, were now “ready for their close-up even though neither of them got what they wanted. And the world marvels at the smiles. Though no one, have you noticed, has run laughing into the streets. Might bump into the man or woman who murdered their brother or mother or maybe a cousin. That would spoil the whole thing. And they’re given to a bit of strutting you know, Olivia, which might seem unforgivable, but after all they murdered for a noble cause. But I suppose peace is about forgiveness. No ASBO for them. I suppose it depends on what your definition of anti-social behaviour is.”