Sunrise with Sea Monster (13 page)

Gone With the Wind,
I said.

What? he asked.

Scarlett, I said. Scarlett O'Hara. And he calls himself Rhett.

And you, I am to presume, are Scarlett?

I nodded and found myself blushing.

He watched, enjoying my discomfiture. I broke the silence.

So what does it say?

It's a request for Scarlett to make all possible contacts with the Republican movement.

I looked at the floor. I felt the same chill again.

Why would I do that?

Why indeed? he asked. But you must now appreciate the extreme delicacy of your situation.

I told him I more than appreciated it. He leaned his face close to mine. Young, but older than his years, his cheeks round
and owl-like, belying his stature.

What we want you to do, Mr Gore, he said, is nothing. Just keep us informed.

Informed about what? I asked him.

Anything. Any subsequent missives that come your way. Any approaches to you from the movement. Anything and everything.

You want me to inform, I said.

In a word. The alternative is the Curragh.

He smiled, and stepped neatly into his empty shoes.

Here, he said, is a copy of Heisenberg's Leipzig paper. If you need any help with the mathematics, I am at your service.

Could it be, I wondered on the train back, that the coefficient of forces acting on any one moral choice would lead only towards
betrayal? That the act of betrayal was now the moral one. I said the word to myself silently and lost myself in its resonances,
its odour of bees, sand and lapping water. I would betray, having no alternative. But whom or what remained to be seen. I
thought of father staring at the radiator, and Rose smoking by the range, and realised there were depths to the act I had
yet to plumb.

Over the next few weeks I laid nightlines religiously morning and evening, bought more so the promenade became festooned with
a string of hooks. I waited for word of those I might inform on or inform, but none came. To pass the time, I began selling
what I caught. I found shops in the city who were glad of anything that slipped by the ration books. We ate the rest, and
soon with the money I made I placed a down-payment on a boat, nets, lobster-pots, lines. Meat and vegetables being scarce,
I sold everything the ocean gave me. I laid lobster-pots from Bray to Dalkey, supplied every eating-house from Jammet's to
the local chippers. I would read him the news of the war each morning, then row out with the first light to empty the pots,
use the net and lines all afternoon. I would play with her in the evening, my fingers, which I could never quite free of fish
scales, moving with hers over the keys. He would sit in the kitchen, quietly vacant, listening to the notes that drifted round
him. We became a family of a kind, a warped reflection of one, but at least a family. Outside of time, of the ferocious time
that waged round the continent beyond us. After a while I hired a local boy to help me with the boat. We extended our reach
to beyond the Kish lighthouse, covered the coast from Wicklow Head to Donabate. And with the cash the sea now gave to me in
fistfuls, I bought Rose a dress.

She had never added to her wardrobe since I left. Eking out what was left of his pension, the only new garment I'd seen her
wear was the smock she welcomed me back in. She was brushing flour from it in clouds with her hands when I made the suggestion.
I was feeding him from his plate his now familiar dinner of smoked mackerel. Rose, I said, with a new and heady sense of possessiveness,
let me buy you something. You buy us enough, she said, with that slight air of tetchiness she used to disguise embarrassment.
No, I told her, I want to buy you something. You, Rose. She looked at me and blushed. What? she asked me. Anything, I told
her. Whatever you need to lift your spirits. My spirits, she said, don't need lifting. Does that mean you're happy then, Rose?
I asked. Father had finished the plate. He stared at the fork absentmindedly. Maybe, she said, blushing again. All the more
reason, I said. And why are you blushing, Rose? Am I? she asked and blushed again.

I knew it had to be a dress, but let her lead to the suggestion. Any hint that her wardrobe was deficient would have driven
her to silence, the kind of blush from which she wouldn't emerge for hours. So I fed him and listened, while she went from
pots and pans to a music stand, a new coat for him, and eventually to what she so rarely allowed herself think of, herself.

We took the train, all three of us together. I lifted him from the platform with the help of two porters and sat him on the
seaward side so the whole vista of the bay would be there for him. He shuddered when the whistle blew, and Rose gripped his
hand as if to reassure him. I tried to share his perspective as the train drew off, and the cold light over the Vico Bay drifted
through the clouds of smoke. Like a child, it seemed, each new turn of the rails intimated a different world. Did he remember,
I wondered, the countless times he must have taken this journey into the Government Buildings in Kildare Street? And if he
didn't, what would he remember of now.

O'Connell Street, when we reached it, was like a drab spinster at a sister's wedding. The Pillar stretched up into the summer
haze, the Guinness barges lolled on the Liffey and some essential life seemed to have departed from it all. We walked through
the thin passers-by to Clery's clock where a few sharp-suited youths waited for their women friends, dragging fast on cigarettes,
checking their watches with the clock above them. Rose looked at the mannequin dresses and I pointed his wheelchair in the
same direction. Their faces seemed to engage his, their eyes bright but unseeing, their perpetually smiling mouths.

Inside, the assistant presumed I was the husband. Rose, after her third dress, fell into that presumption too. She would emerge
from the changing room and twirl for both of us but her eyes went to mine. Each one she tried on brought a new glow to her
cheeks, as if instead of putting clothes on she was taking them off. She chose eventually, a whole outfit with cream and yellow
stripes, as serene and buoyant as a deckchair on a hot afternoon. Then we walked together to the footwear department, and
bought her a pair of laced high-heeled boots. A hat, I felt, would crown the afternoon. I wheeled father towards a room replete
with hats, each suspended at head height like a bird frozen in space, and she followed, all pretence at reluctance having
vanished. The dress having freed her body, the shoes giving it height and poise, it was the hat alone that let her soar. Perched
on her head, her hair bound up beneath it, it was blue, like a kingfisher with a crescent of black lace at the front. I can't
wear this, she whispered. Why are you whispering? I asked her and she glanced from the assistant to father, who was staring
with intense concentration at a tailor's dummy. It seems, she said, profligate. Blame it on me, I said and tilted the hat
slightly and drew her towards a mirror. She looked at herself, then away, then at herself again. She stared, then smiled and
became reconciled to whatever elegance it gave her.

We emerged on to a cooler O'Connell Street, with the sun going down. Fingers of red were beginning to colour the sky beyond
the Pillar. We were drab once more, as drab as the street but laden down with parcels. On the train back father looked at
her with a kind of melancholy, or it could have been a trick of the light. Do you think he noticed? I asked her. Let's hope
he didn't, she whispered, staring out the window at the blue swaths of Dun Laoghaire pier. Why do you say that? I asked, staring
at the silver chrome of his wheels. I think you know, she said, with the kind of finality that made me realise I did.

She made dinner that night and lit candles, saying they were because of the blackout, as if to deny the hint of elegance they
brought to the kitchen. I fiddled with the dials on the radio and found some dance music. You should wear your dress, Rose,
I told her, as she served out the lobster I had caught the day before. No, she said, there'll be another time for that. The
candles gave my father's face the gaunt look of church statues. We ate in silence, listening to Glenn Miller, when the broadcast
was interrupted and Lord Haw-Haw's voice drifted through the room, the precise and mocking Anglo-Irish tones drawing a flicker
of life from my father's eyes. We stared at each other as the voice droned on about Churchill's imminent defeat, the bombs
that would thicken the air over London, and felt quite removed from it all. Her eyes had acquired that glow again, the serene
Italianate blue of Renaissance paintings. I knew what she had referred to in the train and could feel the clouds of its imminent
arrival. I told her about Hans, about the letter I'd received and my meeting in the Castle. Every word though was an avoidance
of the subject we couldn't broach. Will they intern you? she asked, and there was a sense of real fear in her voice. I doubt
it, I told her, since they wouldn't have released me in the first place. So what do they want? she asked. To keep track of
things, I told her, and described how the tall one had talked of the one crowd and then the other.

I wheeled father to bed after dinner, opened out his chair and settled him in it. She came into the room behind me, and I
knew that everything was changing. She took out the dress from its wrapping, held it up to her body and turned to gauge my
approval. Goodnight Donal, she said, her face tilted from the mirror as if waiting to be kissed. I knew if I'd acted on her
implicit invitation, though, she would have denied its existence. So I left.

I lay awake for a long time. I heard the drone of an aircraft that must have lost its way, and wondered should I leave. As
they were dependent on me now, leaving was out of the question and I wondered did I create that dependence with this in mind.
There were no unselfish acts, I knew that now, and my continued presence there could only accentuate that sense of a hot,
cloud-filled summer's day before a thunderstorm. I must have fallen asleep then because I opened my eyes some hours later
to the sound of tapping on the window-pane. Mouse was the first thought that came to mind and I blundered from the bed to
the window as if I was back on the night of my mother's funeral. I pulled back the curtains, half expecting to see the short-trousered
form there, the tousled black mat of hair over the pale face. But there was an adult there in a khaki greatcoat with a fistful
of pebbles, throwing them upwards. I opened the window and caught the last pebble he threw. Gore, he said, Donal Gore. Yes,
I answered and knew the time for betrayal had come again. Be so kind, he said, as to come to the front.

He stood beyond the lip of the veranda as I opened the door, as if expecting to be let inside. Where can we talk? he asked
as I closed the door behind me. Anywhere but here, I said. How about on the harbour wall?

Don't force me to be conspicuous, he said, but followed me anyway. How more conspicuous can you get, I asked, than throwing
stones at a stranger's window at three in the morning? Two, he said. Ten past two.

There was a moon over the harbour, forcing itself through weak fingers of mist. His eyes scanned the empty promenade. You
still feel conspicuous? I asked him and led him down the seaweed-encrusted steps towards the boat. We stood then, on the gently
shifting boards and appraised each other.

You know what this is about? he asked after a silence.

A letter, I hazarded.

He nodded and took an envelope from his pocket. We couldn't make head nor tail of it first, he said. And who is we? I asked,
more as a matter of formality than anything else. You damn well know who we are, he said. The movement. I suspected, I told
him. Then, he said, we brought it to a mathematician in Trinity who cracked it for us. Heidelberg. Heisenberg, I corrected
him. The Leipzig paper on the uncertainty principle. Was never a great hand at the sums myself, he said. But you know this
Rhett Butler? Rhett Butler, I told him, is a pseudonym. So I take it your name isn't Scarlett? he said and smiled for the
first time. I know your name is Gore, he said. What I want to know is who's this other geezer.

A German, I told him, with intellectual pretensions. He interrogated me in a Spanish prison. Arranged my release.

So you two boyos had something in common?

You could say that.

He claims you're his only contact here.

He's wrong. I now share that distinction with you.

But you've met him in the flesh. Face to face.

Yes.

And he's the full shilling?

What do you mean?

I mean the real thing, the genuine article, not some two-faced fly-by-night trying to pull a fast one.

He wears the uniform of the Abwehr, I said, if that's what you mean. He made a pact with me. In exchange for my release, I
would make certain contacts.

With us, he said. I nodded.

Then why didn't you?

The boat shifted under us. I looked at his face in the moonlight, eyes not at all unfriendly, mouth tough and uncompromising
and a pair of shoulders bigger than an ox. The thought of him angry made me feel uneasy.