A Winter of Spies (8 page)

SARAH COULD NEVER REMEMBER
much about their walk home that night. She was so locked in her own thoughts that she could have been struck by lightning and not
noticed
. She was thinking about things she'd never thought of before – big things, with capital letters, like Death, and Freedom, and Honour.

Death was the main thing. They might all speak of freedom and honour, but what it seemed to come down to in the end was always death. She could feel Da's arm enclosing hers as she walked along saying the word to herself under her breath: ‘Death.' She realised that death had never been real to her before. It had only been a sort of idea. Now the word had a new and deeper sound when she said it. It was no longer so easy to say. Before this it had only been a word. Now it was a spray of bright red blood, fountaining out of a man's neck, from a hole put there by someone she'd sat and talked with.

Sarah had been to a wake once. The corpse was an old woman. She'd died in her sleep. They'd washed her and fixed her hair. She lay in her coffin, pale but almost
smiling
,
her hair neatly combed and two copper pennies on her eyes. Her shroud was clean and white and smelled of starch. Her old hands had held a pair of rosary beads. It hadn't exactly looked like fun being dead, but at least it had looked peaceful. But death wasn't that. That spray of blood, that was death.

There'd been plenty of dead in Dublin after the 1916 Rising, of course. But Sarah hadn't seen any of them – they'd been cleared up very quickly. She'd seen the ruins of Sackville Street, but that was different. Buildings were only stones. A bullet hole in a building didn't bleed. Even as she felt Da's arm cosily enclosing hers, Sarah realised that at the end of that arm, nestled now in the pocket of Da's overcoat, was a hand that had held a rifle. Held it and fired it, because that had been his job. Fired it at buildings, and fired it at people. Foreigners, of course, but still people.

She wondered whether Michael Collins had ever killed. She thought of people she knew who most
certainly
had – Mick said he'd killed a man. Mr Doyle in Ringsend had been out in the Rising too – he'd probably shot at people. Hugh Byrne had no doubt killed several before this evening. Martin Ford and nice Simon Hughes had killed too; and Mr Moore, she didn't doubt.

Thinking of Moore made her think again of Da, who'd ‘finished off' a machine-gun nest and then no doubt
killed the Germans attacking his captain. How many dead men was that? And that was one small attack, in a war Da had fought in for over three years. An enormous war – millions and millions had died. British and Irish and Germans, French and Belgians and Austrians … even the list of countries was endless. So many fountains of blood, so many dead, not to mention the maimed that you saw in the street, the legless and armless, and the men who wore masks to hide the faces they no longer had. The ‘lucky' ones – the ones who hadn't died.

Sarah had seen pictures of the big artillery guns both sides had used in that war. What sort of a hole would things like that put in you? Hole? Why, they'd obliterate you, and everyone around you! And people had been
firing
guns like that at Da, and his side had been firing such guns back.

‘Da?' she said. But Da was lost in his own thoughts. Collins had refused to give him a pistol. ‘With a gun,' he'd pointed out, ‘you'll be a dead man if you're raided.'

‘It sounds like I'll be a dead man without one,' Da had said. ‘I can take a few of them with me at least.'

‘That's pride talking. Be practical, James. What about your family? If you start shooting then they're likely to get shot too. Is your pride worth that?'

Da had had no answer to that. But he would have felt better with a gun.

‘For pity's sake, man!' Collins had said. ‘You could be stopped and searched on the way home. You could set off the very thing you want to avoid!'

Da had had no answer to that either. Sarah had seen Collins's point, and obviously Da had seen it too. But he was still brooding on it. Sarah had to call him twice more before he answered her.

‘What is it, Sal?'

‘Do you know how many men you killed in the war?'

He showed no surprise at the question. He was still distracted. He answered her almost dreamily. ‘No,' he said. ‘No, I don't. I wouldn't want to. I couldn't sleep at night if I did. But I never killed anyone who wouldn't have done the same to me. Sometimes that's all that does let me sleep.'

He'd had nightmares for a long time after he came home. He used to wake the whole family up with his shouts and groans. The nightmares – at least those he had in his sleep – had passed. For some ex-soldiers, Sarah had heard, they didn't. For some they continued both night and day. The war hadn't just destroyed lives by physical maiming and death – it had left a lot of men mad. Those men hadn't died either: Sarah supposed they were ‘lucky' too.

Yet even after all that, tonight you could see Da was yearning for a pistol, senseless though it would have
been. What did men find so comforting about guns? She thought of her brother Jimmy's attitude to them: there was a badness in them, he said. But a gun was just a lump of metal, the same way that a poker was. A poker could kill someone too, but it took a human hand to make it do it. It was the same with a gun.

She said nothing more. They just walked on,
preoccupied
again by their own thoughts. Sarah was still
counting
up people she knew who had probably killed. Da knew a lot of old soldiers. She'd always thought of men basically as fathers and brothers, as people who went out and worked in places and came home. But killing was another thing that linked many of the men she knew.

She pictured the smile she'd seen on Hugh Byrne's face in Sackville Street. Not the cold smile she knew, but a warm, happy smile. Was that what it took to make him human, then – a murder? Maybe all that killing had driven him funny, like the madmen from the war.

Sarah felt that a very big thing had happened to her in the past two days, though she had no words to give the thing a name. She'd been a rebel supporter, proud of everything the rebels did. It had all been very simple. Now she'd seen something of the workings of that army and that war, and it wasn't simple at all. She'd imagined Michael Collins in a uniform at the head of his men, even though she knew that was unrealistic. Instead
she'd seen a young businessman in a suit, meeting his men in an upstairs room in a huckster's shop. This was how this war worked, she realised now: men met in back rooms and made decisions. Other men carried out the
decisions
. Still others, the objects of the decisions, ended up dead in the street.

It was all so hidden and furtive – and so deceptive too. Everyone was lying, everyone was something other than what they pretended to be. It was as though almost every adult she knew had been wearing a mask, hiding their true features, like the faceless men left over from the war. Now those masks had slipped, and under them she'd seen their other faces. Da, so publicly against this war, was deeply involved in it. Mick too. Her whole family had lied to her all along – for her own protection, and for theirs, but still they'd lied.

She'd lied to them too, of course, about that time in the lanes – well, not lied exactly, but she hadn't told them the truth. But there were more complicated lies. Moore, who'd been so friendly, was a British agent – except that he was deceiving his masters too. Harry Harte, that mild clerk, was one of Collins's men. Simon Hughes, the
smiling
Londoner who flirted sometimes with Josie, was a
killer
. So was Martin Ford, who for all his occasional gruffness was a laugh and a friendly boy. Of them all, she realised, only Hugh Byrne in the end was truly consistent.
She'd always found him cold and distant, always
remembered
Ma's description of his eyes as killer's eyes. Well, he was a killer: why wouldn't he have killer's eyes?

These things, and others, went round and round in Sarah Conway's head. It wasn't her world that had changed, but her view of it. It was the same world, but now she could see more of it. It was like that time when the man came to fix Ma's clock. He'd laid his tiny
jeweller's
tools out on a big square of green baize on the kitchen table and put the clock down carefully beside them. Then he'd dismantled the beautiful clock-case and removed the inner workings.

Sarah had only been seven or eight then, but she could still remember her astonishment at the sight. She hadn't been able to take her eyes off the clock's insides,
especially
after the man got it going again. On the outside the clock was a beautiful thing, but a still one; the hands hadn't moved for years. But when you took the casing off you saw another clock, a collection of tiny cogs and wheels and springs, like some strange puzzle built by a madman. Each wheel and cog turned, some one way and some the other. And each one, moving, made another one move, and the whole mechanism ticked and turned and whirred like a swarm of strange metal insects
clustered
around their invisible queen.

That sight had been fascinating, but also sort of scary.
Sarah had been thrilled, but at the same time felt her skin itch as though covered by these little metal insects. She'd been both pleased and sorry when the jeweller's man put the casing back on. Ever since, when she looked at the calm outer face of the clock, Sarah pictured to herself the crazy collection of cogs and wheels working busily within. It always gave her a funny feeling.

That was a bit like the way she felt now. Before this she'd only seen the casing of this war. Now the casing had been taken off. She'd started to see some of its cogs and wheels turning. They turned this way and that, big wheels and little ones, all clustered around their own centre. The cogs were plans and lies and people. And what was in the middle of this particular swarm? Michael Collins? Irish freedom? Or just men in streets, spraying blood and dying?

The night grew wilder. A tram passed, sparks hissing from the overhead wires. As they turned into Merrion Square a cab went by, the clopping hooves of the horse echoing in the empty street. It left behind a pile of dung that steamed in the rain. She and Da seemed to be the only people out walking. In Mount Street they met a
convoy
of three Crossley tenders, led by a Lancia armoured car, driving furiously along with no lights – Tans or
Auxies
, coming from Beggars' Bush barracks.

The lorries slowed to a crawl as they passed, and
suspicious
eyes scanned the man and the child as they walked along under their big black umbrella. Sarah, lost in thought, didn't even notice them till she felt Da's arm tighten on hers. She stared through the rain at the black bulk of the lorries, waiting for the flash of light that might be a spotlight or might be the flash of a rifle. She thought of Annie O'Neill, the girl shot in a gateway. At least Annie O'Neill didn't have to think about complicated things any more.

There was a shout from the armoured car which had drawn ahead. The lorries picked up speed and passed. Da and Sarah walked on. The rain beat down on Da's umbrella. Its stretched black cloth, frail yet strong,
covered
both of them, protecting them from the angry night.

It was almost noon on Tuesday. Sarah made her way up Haddington Road after half a morning in school. She hadn't noticed much that was going on there. Miss
Heffernan
, her teacher, had asked her twice whether she was feeling sick. Sarah, listless, had said no. It was true enough – she wasn't sick, just distracted. She sang her ten times tables with the others, but didn't even notice that her mouth was moving. Since Sunday night she'd been in a daze. Now, nearly two days later, she was still thinking of cogs and wheels, and wondering what part her own little wheel was playing in the clockwork of this war. The night before she'd actually dreamed of clockwork – of a great mechanism where, instead of wheels and springs, men and women had intermeshed and turned in their
little
circles, all linked together.

Everyone she knew had been part of the clockwork in the dream, as well as other people she didn't know. Mrs Breen had been turning in a circle with Michael Collins,
and Ma had been linked with Rory Moore. Fowles, the British agent, had been meshed with Hugh Byrne. Ella, linked on one side to Da, had been linked on another side to the film actor Charlie Chaplin. He, in his turn, had been linked with James Connolly and – through the hanged Kevin Barry – back to the little circle that held Michael Collins and Mrs Breen. Martin Ford and Simon Hughes had been moving around with a pair of Black and Tans. The four of them had been taking it in turns to shoot one another, although none of the shots seemed to hurt.

Sarah had been thinking about this dream ever since she woke up. It hadn't felt like a nightmare, but it had been very strange. Really, it had only been a picture of the thoughts she'd had on Sunday, but she puzzled over it anyway. She loved stories about dreams, and magazine articles that explained them, and she'd been trying to
interpret
this one all morning. In the end she'd decided something, and whether it was a good thing or a bad thing she didn't know. It might even be a mad thing, but she didn't care: it felt true, and that was enough for Sarah.

She'd decided that all these people really were linked together like clockwork. What's more, she knew what the clockwork was – it was history, that very history her Da spoke of not being able to escape. The clockwork was history, and its cogs and wheels were men and
women. That was the message of the dream: that men and women ran their rounds, turning this way and that, going about their business; and when you put it all
together
it was called history.

In school she learned of history as something made by kings and queens and armies. But that was only part of the story. It was the part that got into books, but history was more than that. History was herself carrying Simon Hughes's gun, or her brother Jimmy's adventures during the Rising. It was Annie O'Neill dead in a gateway, and her own Da going on strike in 1913. History was, for that matter, her Ma baking in the kitchen.

Mind you, Sarah wasn't entirely sure about that last bit. People might laugh if she said it to them. Da certainly would. The notion of Ma's baking being historic would strike him as silly. ‘Historic baking, eh?' he'd say. Then he'd shake his head and smile and say, ‘Sarah Conway, you're a caution.'

But no, Da wouldn't say that now. He probably wouldn't notice her remark in the first place. Since
Sunday
he'd been distracted. He'd been to see Collins again yesterday, though he hadn't brought Sarah with him this time. He'd been away for hours and had come back
looking
very serious. He'd been silent all night afterwards. Sarah hoped the pressure wasn't getting too much for him.

This morning in school, despite Sarah's denials, Miss Heffernan had finally decided that she was ill. ‘You're looking very pale,' she'd said. ‘You can't concentrate at all, and you haven't got up to a single piece of devilment all morning. You're not yourself. Go home and rest.'

It was typical, really. More than once Sarah had spent hours trying to make Miss Heffernan or some other teacher think she wasn't well, so that they'd send her home. It had never once worked. Now here she was, not even thinking of skiving off, and she was sent out. Life was a lot of things, but it wasn't sensible.

As she passed Haddington Road church a beggar shook a tin can at her from his pitch outside the gate. A couple of coins rattled in the bottom of the can. The
beggar
had no legs beneath the knees. Another ‘lucky'
survivor
of the war, probably. There were a lot of them about.

While the Great War was still on there had been talk of how good things would be after it ended. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland would be made, it was said, into ‘a land fit for heroes'. Then the war ended, and there was no more talk of that kind. There hadn't even been jobs for a lot of the returning soldiers. Sarah had heard that half of the Black and Tans had been
recruited
from the ranks of unemployed ex-Tommies. It had all been a bit of a swiz.

‘Spare a copper for an auld soldier, miss,' the beggar
said, ‘that lost two legs for little Belgium.'

Ma usually gave Sarah a penny to buy sweets on her way home. She fished in her pocket now till she found
today's
coin, and threw it into the box.

‘God bless you, miss,' the beggar said. ‘God bless you, and the saint that bore you.'

Sarah walked on, wondering whether she should
inform
Ma that a beggar had canonised her. She didn't
notice
the approaching motor car until its horn sounded. It drew up to a stop beside her with its engine running. The man she knew as Rory Moore sat behind the steering wheel. Moore wore a motoring cap and coat, and looked very smart. He was alone.

There'd been no sign of Moore since Sunday night. Sarah had imagined him busy next door, persuading Fowles to leave her Da alone. She didn't like him, but she was grateful for his help.

‘Good day to you, Miss Conway,' Moore said, tipping the peak of the cap. ‘Are you going far?'

‘My teacher sent me home,' she said. ‘She thought I was sick.'

‘And are you?'

‘Only distracted. There's a lot going on.'

‘Indeed,' said Rory Moore. ‘Indeed there is.'

Sarah looked admiringly at the car. It must be
wonderful
to have a machine like that. You could just drive and
drive and leave all these troubles behind.

Moore spotted the longing in her look. ‘Why don't you get in?' he said. ‘You can go home in style.'

Sarah considered. She had her doubts about Rory Moore. There was something about him she just didn't trust. Maybe it was only his smoothness. But you didn't have to trust a man to like his car. And wasn't travelling in a machine like this one of her great ambitions in life?

‘All right,' she said. Moore opened the passenger door. Sarah jumped up on the runningboard and clambered in. The car smelled of leather. The whole machine vibrated with the engine's hum. Sarah settled herself gingerly into the seat.

‘We can go for a drive if you like,' Moore said. ‘My work is done for the morning. Where would you like to go? Kingstown? The mountains? Skerries?'

Sarah was very tempted. These distant places were sites for daytrips that normally had to be carefully planned. In a motor car you could just take off and go to any of them. She looked at Moore's hands on the steering wheel. His long fingers were clean, the nails carefully trimmed. They were soft hands, unused to hard work. How many men had they killed? Had some of them been Irish? She longed to go somewhere in this car, but she didn't want to go far with Rory Moore.

‘Let's just go to Herbert Park,' she said, compromising.

‘All right,' said Moore. ‘But we'll go by Donnybrook – that will give you a bit of a drive at least. Ready?'

Sarah took a deep breath and nodded. Moore took off at some speed. Sarah wondered what Da would make of her taking this lift. But as soon as the motor car started to move she lost all thoughts of everything else. They picked up even more speed. The road whizzed by. The buildings on either side of them almost blurred in her
vision
. The wind blew through her hair. Sarah, in spite of herself, yelled with delight.

There was little other traffic on the road, and no other motor cars. Moore passed several horse-drawn vehicles without slackening speed. He tooted his horn loudly each time. Whenever they closed in on a slow-moving van or cart Sarah half-expected to crash into it, but Moore handled the big car expertly. Each time he'd slide it smoothly around the obstruction and leave it in their wake as though it were standing still. Once a cyclist waved his fist at them. Moore tooted the horn at the man, and Sarah laughed.

She looked at those smooth hands holding the steering wheel. They were capable of good driving, that much was for sure. Moore grinned at her. His teeth were bright in his tanned face.

‘This is the way to travel,' he said.

Sarah could only agree. Within moments of starting
off she'd forgotten all about her suspicions of Moore. She'd forgotten about history and clockwork and legless beggars. This was definitely the way to travel, and Sarah just wanted the trip to go on and on. She wanted to drive like this forever, leaving all the new complications of her life behind – even if her driver was one of the
complications
. For now, though, he was just a driver, just a pair of smooth, expert hands on the steering wheel. As she held her hat on her head with one hand, and clutched the dashboard tightly with the other, Sarah Conway's grin was every bit as broad as Rory Moore's. She'd completely lost her unease, caught up in the sheer mad thrill of the ride.