1949 (36 page)

Some had vanished as surely as if the ground had opened and swallowed them up.

How strange it was to be so far removed from it all! Walking over a summer field starred with wildflowers while an armada of clouds sailed serenely overhead, it was easy to imagine that the world was at peace.
War? What war?

That attitude was dangerous. Ignorance was dangerous; it left one unprepared.

The Ryan brothers, who lived on the other side of Clarecastle, walked out to the farm every morning. Ursula had them call at the newsagent's shop on their way and buy the papers for her.

The civil war in Spain was long since over, superseded by something worse. But in the pages of the
Clare Champion
and the
Limerick Leader
updated casualty lists containing local names still appeared from time to time. Ursula never found Ned Halloran among them.

That meant nothing. Many men went missing in war and were never accounted for.

In the pages of the
Irish Times
and
Irish Press
Ursula followed news of the war in Europe. She also listened avidly to the wireless in the parlor. Most farmhouses kept the wireless in the kitchen, but Ursula spent no more time in that room than necessary. She was learning to farm but she would never learn to cook well. The meals she prepared out of necessity could best be described as filling.

Fortunately Barry liked everything. Even eggs. So Ursula bought a rooster and a harem of hens.

After their evening meal she let Barry stay up for a while to listen to the wireless with her. Ursula treated the occasion as an event the way Henry had done so long ago when he read the newspapers to her, and gave Barry hot cocoa—until the cocoa ran out.

“We shan't be getting any more, I suspect,” the shopkeepers said. “The war, you know.”

 

Ursula listened alone to the last news bulletin on the wireless before she put out the lamps and went to bed.

She had not contacted Lewis during the stopover in London, nor had she seen Finbar while in Dublin. She did not want either man to know she was back in Ireland. All that was over now.

Yet in her dreams she could not escape her memories. Sometimes she awoke with a blurred sense of reality to find that the man in the bed beside her was a chubby little fellow with red-gold hair.

“You finally have a letter from Ursula,” Ella told Henry when he arrived home one evening.

“Thank God. We've heard nothing from her in months and I was getting very worried. The situation in Europe…”

“You needn't worry anymore, dearest. The letter's postmarked ‘Éire.'”

Henry almost snatched the envelope out of his wife's hand. While Ella hovered beside him, he read the letter aloud.

“We are safe at home,” Ursula had written, “on the farm in Clare.”

Ella raised her eyebrows. “‘We?'”

Henry read on. “So much has happened I hardly know where to begin. And yet nothing has happened here; not on the larger scale. People furtively pull back the curtains to spy on their neighbours just as they have always done. Their only interest is in the personal, not the global, and I am supplying a full quota of titillation.

“‘I am sorry to tell you that Lucy Halloran was killed in a farming accident this spring. From my point of view it was a blessing in disguise because she left the farm to me. I only learned this when I returned to Ireland, in need of a place to live and a way to support myself and Barry.'”

“Barry?” Ella echoed. “Who in the world is Barry?”

“Be patient, Cap'n, I'm coming to that. “‘Barry is the best news of all,' she says. ‘He is my son, Finbar Lewis Halloran.'”

Ella looked around for the nearest chair and sank onto it. “Her son? I don't understand, Henry. When was she married? She never mentioned it before.”

Henry's eyes were racing over the page. “She doesn't say anything about being married, Cap'n.”

“Dear God.”

“And she doesn't give any details about the boy's…mmm…father.”

“Do you suppose she picked the child up in Europe as an orphan, a foundling? Like history repeating itself? Is that why his surname is Halloran?”

“Mmm…no. Listen to this. “‘Barry was born in Geneva on the sixth of April, 1939. Ella will be glad to hear I had an easy birth. My obstetrician was one of the best in Europe. Afterward I was able to keep Barry with me while working at the League. In Ireland that sort of situation is not possible—unless one is running a farm, as I am now.'”

Henry put down the letter. He and his wife stared at each other.

At last he cleared his throat. “Little Business always was a law unto herself,” he said.

 

Turning a rundown tillage farm into an up-to-date dairy business would require a daunting amount of money. For the first time in her life, Ursula entered a bank to ask for a loan.

The Bank of Ireland on O'Connell Square in Ennis was an imposing structure by Irish standards, but Ursula swept through the doors as if she were accustomed to doing business there every day.

The bank manager, who recently had transferred up from Limerick, was amused by this woman with her audacious plans. She held title to a good-sized farm, but in the west of Ireland money was loaned as much on family reputation as on collateral. The manager narrowed his eyes to suspicious slits. “Who are your people, Miss Halloran?”

“Does the name Ned Halloran mean anything to you? He fought in 1916.”

The man's expression changed abruptly. “Sure didn't I meet Ned Halloran when I was just a young lad? My da served with him in the War of Independence. He was a hard man, was Ned. His teeth were the softest part of him.”

Ursula ignored the use of the past tense. “Ned Halloran is my father,” she said.

That night the banker casually mentioned his new customer to his wife. Her face froze with outrage. “Do you not know that woman isn't married?”

“I do of course, it's on her loan application. But she has excellent collateral and the kind of attitude that—”

“She isn't married yet she has a
child
,” his wife hissed. “How can you loan money to someone of such low morality?”

Part of the bank manager's business was to know everyone else's business—and keep it confidential. Over the years his wife's proclivity for gossip had caused him a number of problems, and was the principle reason he had been transferred from his last posting. “Her morality won't show on the balance sheet!” he snapped. “And that's all they pay me to worry about.”

As soon as she had the money Ursula began buying cows. She hired builders to convert the barn into a modern milking parlor like those she had seen in Europe. The workmen argued with her over almost every detail. “You don't know what you're doing,” she was told repeatedly.

“I know that I'm the one paying you. Do it my way or someone else will.”

They were taken aback by her directness, but they did what she wanted. A job that paid in money rather than promises was worth keeping.

George and Gerry were put to work mending fences and reseeding pastures so the cattle could graze year-round. They were still hard at it when the cows arrived. Twenty black-and-white Frisians, a hardy breed originally developed in the northern Netherlands and valued for the quantity of their milk.

On the day they were delivered to the farm Ursula walked among them like a miser gloating over his gold. Stroking the spotted hides. Rubbing the knobbly skulls between the large ears. To take such joy in life when thousands were losing theirs as the war gathered momentum seemed like a betrayal, but she could not help it.

“Be careful, Miss,” Gerry advised. “Dairy cows ain't pets.”

“They won't hurt me,” Ursula assured him. “Animals never hurt me.”
Only people
.

 

Although America remained neutral Germany was threatening shipping in the North Atlantic. Yet mail continued to go through. Henry Mooney's letters attempted to discover, without asking outright, the circumstances of Barry's birth. Ursula's replies consisted of farm news and updates on the Irish political scene.

“She's not going to tell us,” Henry told his wife.

“She probably thinks it's none of our business.”

“But it is, Cap'n! She's family!”

Ella gave him a pitying look. “She's a grown woman, dearest. With a family of her own.”

“Do you have any idea how much courage she'll need to raise a child when she's not married? It would be hard enough over here. In Ireland it must be…mmm…hell in a handbasket. People will be merciless to her.”

 

Many were—or tried to be. Ursula never actually said she was widowed but was willing to give that impression. No one believed it because Barry's surname was the same as her own.

As Ursula had written to Henry, curtains were twitched aside when she passed on the road. Hostile eyes peeked out at her; disapproving heads were shaken. The good women of Clarecastle made a point of avoiding her in the shops. Even in Ennis, the county seat, she was subjugated to stares and whispers.

From the very beginning she trained herself to act as if she did not notice. When the self-righteous treated her as if she were invisible, she responded by acting as if their bad manners were invisible. She went about her business with her chin up and giving everyone the same dazzling smile.

I have nothing to be ashamed of; I've given life to a child. You're the ones who should be ashamed, you vicious old harridans who profess to be Christians
.

When, from the pulpit, the parish priest condemned “the invisible gas of moral turpitude seeping under Ireland's doors,” Ursula stopped going to Mass. She sought a more compassionate God in the fields and meadows and whispered her prayers to the wind.

She was at work before sunrise and continued to work until dark. Aside from taking a long nap in the afternoon, Barry toddled along behind his mother or played happily nearby. The first time he fell down and skinned his knees he glanced toward Ursula. His crumpled face was on the verge of tears. Ursula made herself laugh. Taking his cue from her, Barry laughed too.

Until Barry came to the farm the Ryan brothers had had little contact with children. They considered them almost another species of animal, unpredictable and incomprehensible, best observed from afar. Barry changed all that. The two crusty old bachelors doted on him.

Barry Halloran did not cling to his mother's apron strings. Ursula did not wear an apron anyway. As soon as he was able to walk on his own, Barry wandered off by himself from time to time. “ '
Sploring
,” he called it. Ursula gave him his head, though either she or one of the Ryan brothers was always aware of his location. “Call for help if you get into difficulties,” he was told.

He never called for help.

Ursula was adamant that the cows and their environment be kept spotlessly clean. The Ryan brothers grumbled aloud but began to take pride in their work. Without being told they sought out things that needed to be done, and did them. Every day brought some improvement to the place.

Neighboring farmers began nodding to Ursula when they met her in the road. Their wives continued to ignore her as if she were a bad smell in the air, but she did not care. She had the farm and Barry. She did not need the good opinion of other women.

 

The wireless brought unrelenting bad news. The German Luftwaffe had increased aerial attacks on shipping in the English Channel. British losses were mounting up.

Mail boats and passenger steamers leaving Britain for Ireland were escorted by British destroyers for much of the way, following a zigzag evasive course that invariably made them late for arriving. Boats leaving Irish ports for Britain were accorded the same service in reverse.

In France a little-known brigadier general and tank expert, Charles de Gaulle, urged his countrymen to fight on. “Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of the French resistance must not go out.”

The British navy removed the threat of the French fleet falling into German hands by destroying most of the ships as they lay at anchor in Algeria. A thousand French sailors were killed in the process. The British government expressed regret at the loss of life and hoped it would not adversely affect Anglo-French relations.

“Britain is now fighting on alone,” Churchill announced in a wireless program rebroadcast from the BBC. “Let us brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts a thousand years men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.'”

“ '
Chill
,” said Barry. “ '
Chill
, Mam?” He looked at her questioningly.

She started to reply, “Our enemy.” Bit back the words. “A brave man,” she said instead.

 

The war was moving closer to home.

On the twenty-sixth of August three women were killed when a creamery in County Wexford was struck by a German bomb. The Germans claimed the plane had been lost in fog.

At the end of the month Berlin was shaken by a British bombing raid. Royal Air Force planes struck back in retaliation for a massive air attack on London. In an exuberant report to Parliament, Churchill paid glowing tribute to the RAF pilots. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Again Ursula was moved by his oratory. Because she was Irish she had an inherent sympathy for the underdog.

How odd to think of Britain as the underdog!

“Will America enter the war?” Ursula wrote to Henry, though she thought she knew the answer already. America had no territorial interests in Europe. It would do what de Valera was doing, stand aside and let the nations with imperial ambitions fight amongst themselves.

Some Irish people took the neutrality policy to the extreme by refusing to think about the war at all. They withdrew deeper into themselves; speaking softly, thinking circumspectly, narrowing their horizons to one small island, and within that, to county and parish and townland.

Ursula Halloran continued to follow the international situation as best she could. Elsie Lester kept her better informed about the League of Nations than any other source. The League had almost disappeared from the Irish consciousness.

After months of political intrigue, Joseph Avenol had resigned in August. Seán Lester was the new secretary-general. He dolefully predicted he might be the last. No one had faith in the League anymore. Even the Swiss government was withdrawing its support. The organization's presence in Geneva was seen as endangering Swiss neutrality.

At the end of September Elsie wrote, “I just had a rather upsetting telephone conversation with my husband. He was passing through London on his way back to Geneva. A committee including Seán and the president of the International Court of Justice had planned a meeting of the League's supervisory commission, and wanted to hold it in Lisbon to keep some presence on the international stage.

“Although both Spain and Portugal claim to be neutral, the Spanish government issued a barring order against the League. The committee members were turned away at the border—very unpleasantly, I gather. They considered themselves lucky to get away unharmed. Only the fact that Seán was Irish kept the matter from being worse than it was. Fortunately the Spanish still think of Ireland as a friend.

“I wish my husband would come home, Ursula, but I never say that to him. His integrity is too deep to allow him to run away. That is one of the reasons I love him.”