One of our own
Billy O’Callaghan
Sometimes, when I am down in the pub of a quiet night for a game of cards and the talk at the bar turns to reminiscing, Tadhg Lowry’s name might get brought up, since it’s known I knew him. It’s not that we were friends, exactly, and I can’t say I was ever quite comfortable around him, but London is a tough place to be when you’re young and on your own, and I’ll never deny the good turns he did me, how he set me up when I first arrived and looked out for me on and off after that for the time I was over, and for all of that I was and remain truly grateful, no matter what else might be said. After work had taken me away from his stamping ground, up to Romford, Cricklewood, and for most of my second summer over there even out as far as Maidenhead, I didn’t see so much of him, but sometimes of a weekend I’d walk into a pub and he’d be in there, and he’d step away from whoever he was with, even if it was a woman, some beauty you wouldn’t have wanted to take your eyes off of for gold, and we’d stand at the counter and chat for the slow length of a drink, catching up, our ease probably exaggerating a closeness but not quite put on, either, given the many touchstones we shared, he doing most of the asking, wanting to know how I was getting along, how I was finding the work and what I might have lined up next, and I knew without having to be told that I could take up the phone and call him any time, for any reason or any kind of trouble, financial or otherwise, and he’d be there. I heard the stories, of course, the ones the newspapers couldn’t print, some of them enough to
make a hangman blanch, and I saw the kind of men he associated with and how most behaved in his company, the edge he had them on, but understood that in certain lines of work reputation thrived as much on myth as on fact, and my father always said that you had to take the measure of a man as you found him.
I left home for London in the April of 1953, at not yet eighteen, and came back October, ’55. Towards the end of August that year my father had taken a turn, collapsed above in our back field, and after that needed to take it easy. Angina, the doctor said, or something akin. He’d go the colour of flour during an attack, and you’ve never seen such a look of terror come over anyone. Death frightened him something fierce, a dread he’d held onto from his time spent in the hills all those years back going against the Free Staters, and he never after closed his eyes easily once night settled, though you’d not get a word out of him about that, and you quickly learned better than to ask. By the time of his turn he was into his fifties, young by some estimations but a fair enough age for our corner of the world, and after the nearly two and a half years spent away, I’d had my fill of London and was glad to be home.
That’s not to say that life in England was bad. Work on the building sites took it out of you, but I never minded that, and even with all the drinking that got done I managed to put a bit of money by, not a fortune but enough to get me half-settled. And if I’d not gone across I’d never have met Anne, standing so shy and lost-seeming in that Cricklewood dancehall among girls she worked and lodged with. When I asked her to dance she lowered her eyes but after a hesitation that had my heart slamming gave her hand to me and let herself be led out onto the floor, and we moved in one another’s arms out of the song that was playing, All of Me, and into and through the slow next, Because of You, neither of us particularly adept with our footwork or keeping time but
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neither one of us really caring either. She’d been in England only a matter of weeks, and was nursing in some geriatric hospice, but after where she’d come from, the hilly quiet of a nowhere place tucked in along the Cork-Kerry border, was struggling badly with the ways of a city so sprawling and chaotic, and I knew within minutes of talking to her, even with the music playing around us at a roar, that she was already getting set to bolt for home. Still, there’s always an old stocking to fit an old shoe, as my mother used to say, and that’s how it was with us. By the time the telegram arrived, eight or ten weeks later, with word of my father’s turn, we’d already decided to marry, and I was working all the hours I could, trying to gather together enough to get it done properly, but the news of the old man’s collapse made our decision for us and hastened everything along.
It’s the going I am remembering now, though, rather than my returning. Leaving home was hard, even with the little we had. I remember my mother’s tears. And my sister, Sally’s, too. I hardly saw Sally after; by the time I’d come back, with Anne in tow, she’d already married and was living in Gory, working the till for a local butcher. She was there when we eventually buried the old man, and another time, after we got the car, I took Anne and my mother up to Wexford on a visit, and in the few years since we’d last seen her she’d fallen away to nearly nothing, and was all leathery skin and jutting bones, hardly seven stone of her remaining. Cancer gone rampant, though she didn’t tell us that then. They’d already cut away chunks of her and you could see by how delicately she was holding herself that the smallest movement had her in pain, but we sat in a cafe on Gory’s main street drinking pots of hot, sweet tea and working our way through plates of sandwiches and cakes, and she smiled a lot in a way I sensed she probably hadn’t in a long time, to hear about home and to recollect again all that she’d left herself forget, and when it was time for us to go she put
her arms around my neck and kissed me, and if I’d been asked at that moment and could have answered honestly I’d have admitted to understanding that she meant that kiss as a final goodbye. She was a few years older than me, and when you’re a child any such age gap feels impossibly wide. But when I think of her now, what’s remained with me more than anything was the sight of her at our kitchen table, the morning of my leaving, sobbing into her hands. And our mother, the same. People were back and forth all the time from England, even then, the ferry two or three times a week in and out of Cork city, and daily crossings from Dublin, so it was nothing like the death in the family suffered by those who had loved ones taking off for America or Australia, but to them it had the feel of that. My father had an envelope with what little could be spared already tucked into my coat pocket waiting for me, and he shook my hand and didn’t say much but I knew by how he took himself away out with the dogs ahead of my going that he was as cut up as the rest of them. I’ll admit seeing that, of him especially, got to me, had me choked so I could hardly speak, and when the time at last came to leave I very nearly thought myself into staying put, but then the door ahead of me swung open and the sun was shining with the promise of a warm day, and at that age, still more boy yet than man, excitement wins out every time over heartache.
I can’t say whether London had been my intention or not. I mean, whether or not I’d planned on staying. I’d had England in mind in a general sense for some time, but I set out from home for the capital mainly because of Kit Lowry, below in the village, persuading me. The war wasn’t that long finished and London had taken a ferocious pounding in the Blitz, so there was no shortage of labour going for a strong and willing back, and in my time over there I often fell into work on sites that got going before six and wouldn’t shut down till near enough midnight. Some lads I came to know went on the underground, digging their way through long
nights and deep into the following days, bringing terriers down there with them on long leashes in an effort to keep the rats at bay. The pay wasn’t high for the kind of toil that was expected of us but amounted to considerably more than I was used to and could have earned at home, assuming there’d even been work here enough to let me earn at all, and I didn’t mind in the least that it was just digging, boring out trenches and mixing concrete, because hadn’t I grown up with a spade to hand, hadn’t the shovelling made me strong.
Kit Lowry was from the end of the village, opposite Canny’s shop, with Arundels on one side of her and old Daw Dálaigh on the other. Hardly even half a house: one room with space partitioned off inside the front window for a bed, and out in the few square feet of back yard, a privy. But as small as it was, she’d reared a family there, even if, by the time I knew her, anyone she had belonging to her were long years gone from the place. I remember her as a quiet poor creature. Harmless. Always alone and nearly always with a smile. Due to some palsy she had a hung eye, which used to frighten me when I was very young, and the skin on the point of one cheek was broken out in something that, thinking back on it now, was almost certainly a beginning of the cancer that would eventually take her. But other than that, she looked the way all old people looked back then. Add twenty years to whatever age she actually was and you’ll have the idea. From nearly the time I started school I used to run messages for her, bringing her milk and butter, a bit of fish from whatever had been freshly caught. She had a daughter married to a horse trader above in Limerick, but there was no further mention of her and I don’t know if they had much at all between them. And there was the son, Tadhg, who’d worked for a time with my father on the boats. Even though he’d taken off to England years earlier, due to some trouble that didn’t get talked about, and never once returned, not even to visit,
he made sure to send her money every month, enough to keep her going, and a Christmas wouldn’t pass without the postman dropping off a splendid parcel of gifts that she mostly gave away, to my mother and to others in the village, scarves, blankets, pots of honey, small tins of sugary jellies or soft toffees, fruit cake soaked in rum or brandy. When she heard I was heading across for work she insisted I stay with Tadhg, assuring me that he’d be delighted to have me in with him until I was properly settled and that he knew all of London’s Irish for ten miles in every direction, upstairs and down, and would have the inside track on the best jobs to get on and the ones to steer well clear of. Tadhg would show me the ropes, she said. See I didn’t fall by the wayside like so many did and always will.
My father agreed that it was sensible. A few nights in a spare cot, or even just an armchair, would save me the initial cost of digs and give me a chance to get my bearings. He had half a generation on Tadhg but remembered him as a decent type. Having crewed fishing boats together, they’d been friendly for a time, and the impression he’d held onto was of a fair man to work, and good enough company to drink with after long shifts spent out hunting the herring. That’s who I was to be taken in by. Tadhg Lowry. A man like ourselves. One of our own.
It was Easter before I could get away, committed as I was to finishing what work I had going with one of the local farmers, lambing through most of March and in the inner fields getting the sugar beet sown, my father always going on about a man not being worth much if he couldn’t stand to his word, and the extra weeks had allowed Kit to get a letter off to Tadhg, so that when I eventually arrived into Paddington, later in the day than I’d hoped after a delay with the train down from Fishguard, I had a scrap of paper folded into my trousers pocket with the address of a pub and a name, Daithi, to ask for of the man behind the bar. He didn’t
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speak or even so much as glance my way while I explained myself, just kept drawing pints of stout for men at the far end of the counter, and when he’d delivered them their drink and taken their money to the till he wiped his hands dry on his apron, picked up the black receiver of a telephone that was kept tucked in beneath a small shelf crowded with bottles, and dialled a number from memory. I tried to listen but he had his back to me and spoke in a murmur, and so little was said that the call took no more than a few seconds. When he hung up he wiped his hands on his apron again and without asking pulled a tankard of stout from one of the row of taps along the bar and set it down before me. “Taken care of,” he said, still without lifting his eyes to me, when I began to dig in my pockets for change, and then he again drifted away towards where the other men were huddled and joined them in chat, leaving me on my own. Ten minutes later a man of late thirties or early forties, who I hadn’t noticed entering, came and stood beside me, considered me a moment without passing remark, then looked away up along the bar until the barman noticed. A whiskey was put before him, and my glass taken from me and refilled.
On first consideration, he seemed ordinary. My own height or thereabouts, lean frame, hair an oiled and neatly-combed blackness, silvering in flecks at his temples and above the ears. A heavy moustache filled a lot of the lower part of his face, and the flesh of his cheeks, jaw and chin was ridden in the shadow of a shave gone overdue. Nothing you wouldn’t see in a hundred pubs of an evening hour, but with a demeanour that made him tough to be at ease around. Even when he smiled it was like that. Nothing he said or did, even, but an atmosphere. Like a gun waiting to go off. I don’t know how else to explain it. He drank his whiskey like it was water, and because the bottle had been left beside him he finished what he had and helped himself to another, bringing the level halfway up the glass. I noticed that the men at the other end of
the bar, five of them in a pack, had quietened from the boisterous way they’d been and seemed to be taking turns at stealing glances in our direction. The barman stood with them and stared, too, openly. Watching me as much as Tadhg, I suppose curious. But Tadhg ignored them, and mostly ignored me. He was halfway into his second whiskey before he cleared his throat and asked, very quietly, how his mother was, and I knew by the softness sifting into his voice that he was aware of the situation at home, and the toll that time had taken. I talked in response, too much, and maybe too loudly, because his brow tightened and he made a flattening gesture with one hand then checked his watch and suggested I drink up. His place wasn’t far, he said, but across the river, Hayles Street, Elephant and Castle, and there could be traffic on the bridge at this hour. He had someone to see later in the evening, a bit of business, and he wanted to get me settled first, but if I wasn’t too exhausted from my travels, and if I felt in the form for a chat, we could pick this up later, over a proper drink.
He had the top floor of a three-story Georgian terraced house, on a clean but ordinary street narrow enough that you could almost reach out and touch the houses opposite. The traffic kept us to an unhurried speed, and he talked around a cigarette kept nailed into one corner of his mouth, his tone thick with the same softness I’d heard in the pub, pointing out various sites of interest. We passed along by Marble Arch, with Hyde Park to the right and, on my side, in that direction, Mayfair, and beyond it, Soho, and then on past Buckingham Palace, which we couldn’t quite make out from the road, and slowly through Westminster before crossing the bridge, finally, into Lambeth. The two flights of stairs up to his flat creaked beneath our weight, and I let him lead the way onto a narrow landing with a heavy door. Inside, once he’d switched on a couple of standing lamps, was decorated in a simple, old-fashioned style, pale green and mauve striped wallpaper, a dark wood folding
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table and two matching timber chairs against one wall, and against the other, a sideboard with a large box wireless and beside it, a nest of bottles on a pewter tray. A settee filled most of the centre of the room, the upholstery a plush emerald suede but old and well-worn; and set at an angle to it, a high-backed armchair. From the entrance, directly opposite where I was standing, I could see his bedroom, a door left partially ajar revealing a meticulously made iron-framed single bed and a wardrobe beside a window that looked out onto what must have been a back garden. To my right, another door gave onto a small bathroom, just a toilet, tub, sink and shaving mirror. All told, a modest flat, clearly sufficient for his needs but not the kind of place you’d have expected when, in the years following, the newspapers printed all the stories about him and the kind of money he was supposedly earning. Compared with what I was used to, though, little short of palatial. I was given blankets and a pillow for the settee, and told I’d be comfortable enough until we could get me sorted with better. I cleared my throat and started to thank him but he only shook his head and glancing again at his watch said that he’d be back probably by nine, and not later than ten, and I should take it easy, have a wash if I liked, or listen to a bit of wireless.
The order of things gets jumbled now. Time once spent doesn’t remain linear. And so, I make do with fragments, some that hold their moments vividly, others that feel faded and confused. In the eight or nine days I spent with him, he was most of the time just glimpses. Out most evenings and often staying gone all night, getting back just as the dark was starting to thin. I was always up by then, used as I was to early rising, and with him fairly out on his feet from being so long awake we’d sit a while with mugs of tea that I made, our chat kept to little or nothing, made for its own sake. When exhaustion finally overcame him, and so that he’d
have some quiet (though he never once asked it of me) to sleep until early afternoon, I’d take off, get some breakfast in one of the cafes in and around Lambeth or Walworth, a bacon or fried egg sandwich or a bowl of porridge, before picking a direction at random and, regardless of rain or cold, just start walking. And in that way, even as overwhelming as the city would remain for me, seeing London for at least some of what it was, in its many and varied astonishments and states of ruin, let me very gradually begin to get my bearings. Within all of that, and at some point early on, he mentioned that he’d heard from asking around about labouring jobs going in a couple of places and that, if I was happy for him to do so, he’d speak to some people on my behalf. By the time he came back to me about it I must have been in his home the better part of a week, and even though the generosity he’d shown was over and above anything I could have hoped for, idleness, an entirely unnatural state to me, had me already climbing the walls and desperate to take work of almost any kind. He nodded at that, understanding, and the following morning or the one after—a Sunday, I know, because I’d just come in from mass, a promise I’d made my mother and Sally and one which I’d not long keep, despite my best intentions—he gave me a piece of paper with the scrawled address of a site in Camberwell and a second address for lodgings, room and board an easy walking distance from the job, nothing fancy but clean, dry and warm, and with the first fortnight’s rent already taken care of. Having to accept that hurt my pride a bit, and I tried to insist on paying my own way, even though it’d have been tight with the little I had, and he nodded and said that I was going to be paying it from there on out, but that the start was at the insistence of his mother, who he wasn’t going to refuse, not for me or for anyone, and as far as he was concerned it was scant enough appreciation for the way I’d helped her out all the years and the very least he could do. Embarrassed, I read
the addresses and tried to make their foreignness mean something, and then Tadhg pressed another piece of paper on me, this one obviously a phone number, written in blue ink, and suggested that I commit it to memory if I possibly could because notes had a way of getting lost, but that I shouldn’t hesitate to call at any time and for whatever reason and I’d be looked after. I shook his hand when he offered it, and then, because he seemed embarrassed too, and even though it was only early yet, we had a drink, which he poured, sitting at the table against his living room wall, with the bottle between us and the wireless playing what my mind now tries to insist was John McCormack, a sweet nostalgic tease from home, if more of my host’s or even my father’s vintage than mine, The Last Rose of Summer. It is entirely possible that I am conflating two disparate moments, because such chance seems suspiciously opportune, but even if, as I’ve said, the order of things does get skewed, these are the basic facts as I have held them and know them to be. When I am asked now about having known Tadhg Lowry in London, this is what I remember.
The first night, the night of my arrival, my time alone was passed with the newspaper that he’d left behind. When he at last reappeared in the doorway he seemed distracted, his thoughts probably still with wherever he’d just been and whatever he’d had to do. “Now, then,” he said, the words wearying to him. “How about that drink?” Just that, before turning and starting back down the stairs, leaving me with no choice but to follow.
That night, it was drink, plural. A pint of best bitter in the Prince of Wales at the top of the road, then on to the Three Stags, eating chips from newspaper, sodden with salt and vinegar, as we went, before finishing up, well past closing, in the Tankard. Other nights, or evenings, it was the Ship, or pubs down Kennington Road, the Black Prince, the Dog House, the Cock Tavern. Glasses were pushed his way wherever he went, men stood to shake his
hand and lean in with some whispered word. Most of it hung at a distance from him, and he’d say little, maybe nod in response to something asked, and the cold way he kept himself half-turned discouraged lingering. We’d stand at the end of the bar, with the front door in view at half a turn of the head, and if he felt in the humour for talking he’d go on in murmurs about recollections he had, of the old days and people who’d have been before my time but whose families I knew, or farms he’d worked on as a boy and which we had in common, or how it had been on the fishing boats, the kind of ordeal that asked of a man. The kind my father was, too, straight as the day was long. One night, in the Stags, just before last orders, a man came in, a short, bald, bulldog type with an old chalkline of a slash-mark down one side of his face from the hollow beneath his eye to the corner of his mouth, and he made a demonstration of standing for all to see in the open part of the floor, like a dare, almost, before approaching the counter, beating back a quick shot of something strong, and without so much as a further glance around him shuffling back out into the night. Tadhg drew the attention of the barmaid and asked her, by name, Debbie, for the same again, pints of best bitter with whiskeys alongside, doubles, and not that Scottish piss either, proper stuff, Irish. Then he patted me companionably on the back and muttered something, to himself more so than to me but clearly for my benefit, about needing to make a quick call and that he’d be back in a tick. Debbie brought the glasses, and smiled worriedly when he smiled at her in going. She had a girlish demeanour but was hard to accurately age, with long blonde hair, low fringe and big shining hazel eyes, a flash kind of beauty until you got close enough to see the effort made, yet even then nice-looking. The low-cut blouse was part of the act, and I tried not to stare and had to clear my throat before I could answer her questions, put in a cockney accent so broad it practically dispensed with consonants, about what bit of the bog
I’d crawled out of and how long I’d been over. She leaned forward ahead of me with her bare elbows on the bar and studied me with wide-open intensity, a professional smirk not even beginning to mask an interest in who, exactly, I might be, how it was that I knew Tadhg and whether or not, as far as she was concerned, I might be someone worth bothering with. Her fingers were decked in chunky gold rings, thick mannish lumps, sovereigns, and her wrists halfway up her forearms heavily bangled, but her nails were short and ugly, flecked with old crimson varnish and bitten to the quick, and I sensed enough to understand that I’d do well to be reticent with my responses.
When Tadhg returned some twenty minutes later I detected a new tightness around his eyes. He kept picking at the corners of his mouth with the tip of his tongue, perspiration lacquered the skin of his temples beneath the harsh electric light, and when he reached for the whiskey glass I noticed, without letting on, that the skin was raw and slightly bleeding along the knuckles of his left hand, that whatever he’d caught them on hadn’t easily yielded. And if the fire of the drink buoyed him, or seemed to, and he barked at a happy volume to Debbie, who was standing watching, for the same again, and one for herself, a large one, if she thought she could handle it, I still couldn’t help but catch the strain in his tone, or glimpse evidence of the effort he was making for the sake of whoever might have been looking on.
It would be dishonest of me now to deny knowing even back then what he was about, the kind of life he had going, the man he was or had let himself become. And while those skinned knuckles amounted to the only tangible evidence I ever registered of anything in that direction, neither did the facts do much to hide themselves. Wherever we went in London he was known, and there was no missing how people behaved around him, the edge his mere presence put them on, the anxiety that turned
their smiles. Most nights, after we’d come back from one of the pubs, he’d sit in his armchair, tight, checking his watch every few minutes, not saying much, until restlessness put him in front of the oval wall mirror to consider the meticulousness of his collar and the fine knot of his tie, or to further neaten his side parting with a pocket comb. He’d meet my eyes only in reflection, and nothing was said or done beyond a nod from me and from him the same, returned. And then, at ease only on the surface, he’d go, and be out until the break of morning.
On the Sunday, I moved in to my new digs, and if it wasn’t as neat as Tadhg’s place, and had more of the look of a monk’s cell about it than a bedsit, it was still clean and fit for purpose. Parked at the kerb, Tadhg sat waiting with the window wound fully down despite a cold east wind blowing, his car, a silver-dark Rover, a year off from new but still immaculate. “Take your time,” he’d said, when a woman, drawn by the engine’s rumble, appeared from behind one of the row of front doors and recognising him for who he was had raised a shy hand in acknowledgement. “Pack your things away, get properly settled.” I nodded, got out, thanked him again from the footpath, then turned and let my new landlady lead the way upstairs. Mrs. Jessop, Elsie, a woman of about Tadhg’s age, or my father’s, though older looking and widowed in the war. “Killed in Tunisia, he was,” she said, without turning her head as she started into the flight of stairs. “My Laurence. The Battle of Medenine, 19th of March, 1943, fighting with the 50th Infantry. I dreamed of him that morning, if you’ve ever heard of that to happen. Well, I say dreamed. I’d been up early, washing, and after sitting down ahead of making the breakfast, didn’t I nod off. And in he came, just like he used, and stood smiling at me from the doorway, brazen as a cur. Not saying a word, not doing anything. Only smiling, like he’d had a horse home at a big price. When I
woke my cheeks were wet from crying and I knew in an instant what it meant. My old mother was from West Cork, same as you, Adrigole, if you know it, and she often talked of such occurrences. Two days later a small fellow in a uniform arrived on the front step, and he only nodded when I said I already knew, so I suppose he’d seen the like of it happen a fair bit.” She waited on the landing while I pretended to inspect my room, which was fine, basic but more than sufficient, a single bed, small side locker, rug on the bare timber floor thinned by years of wear. Against the wall in one corner, beside a tall narrow net-curtained window that looked out on other windows, a chest of drawers with a large white ceramic bowl for washing, and inside it, a large matching jug. “There’s breakfast at seven,” she said, while I set my canvas sack on the bed and laid out my few belongings—spare shirt, trousers, the heavy pullover that had been my father’s, a couple of books Sally had given me, socks and under-things. I felt embarrassed that there wasn’t more, but if she noticed she didn’t pass remark. “Tea, toast, porridge. An egg of a Sunday. Or a kipper, if it can be got. I usually leave supper till late evening, but if you have to work on, you can let me know.” I tried to smile, and turned and thanked her, and she considered me and seemed to take my measure. “I have some rules,” she added, in a softer voice. “But I don’t reckon we need trouble ourselves about them just now.” I agreed that we wouldn’t, and seemingly satisfied, her mouth pinched into a slat, we started back downstairs.
“She’ll keep you well enough,” Tadhg said, setting down his glass of bitter on the bar after taking a long slow draught. “You’d do worse.” He’d known the husband a bit, in passing, Lar Jessop. Only according to some who’d soldiered with him, it wasn’t in combat he got killed but in some back-alley brothel in Tunis, chivved by a local pimp after he’d gone rough on one of the house girls. Still, he’d done his share, two years in North Africa, sand
clogging every crack, never backing up from a fight, and plenty could have gone the way he went because that was the way with a lot of them over there, long lonely nights in a war that seemed to have forgotten how to end. Poor old Elsie had it all to do now, and what little she was able to bring in from her lodgers kept her going, just about. She didn’t know about Lar and didn’t need to, because what difference would it have made, other than to sully what had in her mind only ever been good. “Cause her no trouble, now.” He gazed at me, then took up his glass again and drank. “I know you won’t anyway, because the kind you are is written broad and clear across your face, and that’s a good thing, it’s what you have going for you. I just mean, don’t keep her waiting on what’s owing, try to stay in advance if you can. She has a daughter, Millie, and there might be photos on the wall, but you’ll do right not mentioning her or asking anything in that direction. I’ll fill you in another time, if you decide you want me to, but not now. And you can believe me when I say you’re a sight better off not having to hear it.”
We stayed drinking until nine or a little after, but though our paths crossed now and then over the next couple of years, that was the last night we properly sat and chatted. And understanding it was likely to be, and possibly too because the pub we were in, the Grove House, was quiet and maybe a little off his usual beaten track, he seemed more able to open up. He talked of Ardgroom, home, told me how his father, Ned, had come from just over into Kerry, Bonane, a few miles out of Kenmare on the Cork side. Fishermen, his crowd were, the same as all of us, but Ned was built wrong, a big man, too big for a boat deck, looking back on it, more fit for field work or laying roads, or for fighting, which to hear it told he’d done his share of and more besides, a man who drank whenever it was there to be had and stood sour when it wasn’t. Because he’d gone off a boat one night in rough water,
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whether accidentally or by intent, when Tadhg was only young, six years of age, there was little enough of him to recall except how he used to laugh, like a saw dragging back and forth through damp wood, his breath a constant rasp. That and the vicious way he’d go in on his wife and children after he’d had either too much or not enough, with fist or belt or whatever came to hand, even one time the poker reddened from the fire, the marks of it Tadhg still had across one shoulder and his poor mother had worse, if anyone only knew. A cruel bastard, to tell it right, who in the end only got what was coming to him but didn’t get next nor near hard enough. I listened, half-expecting Tadhg to start using this as justification for what had come after, as if the same in some form or another hadn’t been going on in every second or third house, because of men whose lives had settled smaller than they’d have hoped and dreamed and in considering themselves snared and maybe taken for a fool were always after someone easy and other than themselves to blame. But that’s not who Tadhg was, and afterwards, when I was back in my lodgings and trying to get familiar with that strange bed, I felt ashamed for having thought so little of him as to assume he’d stoop to that. He was a man, for all his faults, with good in him as well as bad, possessed—if there was truth at all in the whispers—of a monstrous streak but, from all I’d seen and come to know, amounting to more besides. My bedsit’s dark was thinned somewhat by the lit rooms of the building behind, two windows, side by side, directly facing mine at a distance of no more than twenty feet, an old man in one who sat polishing boots; and in the other a woman of about my age, in nothing but a flimsy cerise slip, hair a black plethora of curls spilling down her back and around her shoulders, pacing restlessly until something, a knock on her room door, brought her abruptly to attention, and after she’d moved out of the window’s framing she stepped back into view only once more, for a few fleeting
but heart-pounding seconds, her demeanour no longer anxious but striving now to bewitch, moving in provocative half-danced hitches, peeling the stringy straps of her already modest covering away in outrageously teasing fashion, her smiling, almost leering gaze locked into the hidden spot from which she’d just reappeared, before reaching out and snapping off the standing lamp to drown her scene and my show in fullest night. I lay there then, halfdrunk and wide awake, lonesome and afraid and feeling, all of a sudden, a long way not only from home but from love. And after the longest time spent listening to a hundred distant sounds and nothing, I closed my eyes and began, very softly, to say my prayers, imploring of God that I might be spared from falling as some of those I’d glimpsed or encountered so far had, and to protect me from London’s isolating, corrupting harm, or, if that was not possible, to at least let whatever purgatory I was going to have to bear be brief.
What followed was for the most part only work. The site in Camberwell, digging out foundations on a complex of flats, offered an initial five weeks that ran on, once I’d proven my worth, to more than four months, mixing and hodding for the brickies, English lads, northerners mostly, who were relentless in taking the piss until they either saw that I wasn’t rising to their jibes or had someone whisper in their ears to ease off, and after that we all got on well enough. As easy as I was on my own, and if I’m being honest, preferring it that way, at least until I met Anne, I’d join them most days for a pint, usually in the Grove House, and once I grew used to their ways found them to be decent types, though I quickly learned, for the sake of self-preservation, to take my leave after the first hour, just as they were settling in for the long haul. And it was never hard to pass the time. Nights were read away on novels and history books borrowed from the local library, and I spent Sundays and midweek evenings exploring the city,
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stopping in at the National Gallery or up to the British Museum if the day was threatening rain but otherwise just walking the streets, or catching the Tube out to Richmond Park, Kew Gardens or Greenwich, trying to answer an old need within myself for a sense of clean air and open space. On occasional Saturdays, when the site shut down early and we were able to get away by noon, I let some of the local lads who were fanatical about West Ham drag me across London to a game, but to my surprise I found watching the cricket at the Oval, which was only a short stroll from my digs, far more to my taste, the test matches especially but Surrey’s County Championship matches, too, that side, with the likes of Sturridge, Laker, Lock and May in their line-up, enjoying a run of dominance that would last most of the decade, and even after I’d eventually moved out of the area for a job in Romford, lured by the promise of another four months’ solid employment and a notable bump in pay, I came back down whenever I could to catch games. Months passed before I saw Tadhg again, though on the building sites I’d often hear his name mentioned, standing among the other lads, or on their periphery, all of us coated in sand and cement dust, or mud, if we’d spent the morning digging, and dog-tiredly sipping mugs of hot tea during our few minutes of break, listening while the few who always tried to act in the know ran their mouths about whatever had happened the night before, a diamond smash-and-grab above in Golders Green or some Hackney hard man beaten to jam over the wrong thing said in a pub about somebody’s missus. His name was never far from those conversations, and I remember reading about him in the papers one time, still in my first year, he up in court on a charge, ultimately thrown out due to lack of witness testimony, of ABH, which had cost some heavyweight thug a left eye.
And then, one evening either towards the end of August or already into early September, the days still full of fire, an Indian
summer with, at that stage, and as far as the radio’s weather forecasters could predict, no end yet in sight, I came into the Grove House straight from the site with a few of the other men, gasping for glasses of the cider that would cut into our raging thirsts, and immediately noticed him in the corner, alone, with a tumbler of whiskey seemingly forgotten in front of him. I went and greeted him, and he looked up and stared and after a hesitation took my offered hand. I asked if I could sit and when he didn’t respond lowered myself onto the stool across the small table from him, and because he had nothing yet to say I kept silent too, and I sipped at the cider and had to resist the urge to charge into it for its sweetness. Finally, he noticed his own drink untouched beside his left hand and drained it with such a snap I was sure he’d cracked the glass. I half-turned and gestured to the barmaid for the same again.
“I had a letter,” he said, when he was able, his voice so soft I could hardly hear him. “She’s dying. My mother. The other thing has her stomach eaten away. Same as took her own mother. The doctor is talking about a bed in a hospice in Bantry, which she says won’t be too bad. There’s not much time in it. A matter of weeks. Maybe not even that long. She won’t eat a morsel, can’t keep anything down.” He shrugged, and let his fingers twist the empty glass on the table. “And that’s that, that’s all there is of it.”
It was hard to know what to say. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, and I was, truly. I remembered how she used to smile at me when we’d speak, the kindness of her even when she had nothing. “Are you going across? If you left now, you could be there by this time tomorrow.”
But he just shook his head, and in lieu of words sucked down the newly arrived whiskey. I hurried into my own drink, and the coldness of the cider was good but halfway down, being the second pint of it, began to cut, as it always did with me. I turned and beckoned to the barmaid again, calling for another round, but
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to make the next whiskey a large one and to switch mine to bitter. Still gripping the emptied glass, he seemed beyond talk, and I let him keep the silence and stayed at the cider, feeling every swallow now a sting but in the syrupy coldness of it still some pleasure too, and not stopping until the fresh drinks arrived and I’d paid, letting the barmaid count out what she needed from the handful of coins I had. She held one side of her full, painted lower lip in the pinch of horsey front teeth, and I blushed a little when she lifted her eyes suddenly to mine and caught my stare, but I suppose she was used to men watching her and was perhaps even flattered by the interest because a smile, just the smallest turning, gathered at the corners of her mouth.
Tadhg’s gaze caught on her retreat, but absently, more out of habit than interest. “Going back won’t help,” he said, perhaps seeking absolution. “And I have too much on. If I went now I’d be running, and I won’t run. Not from anyone.” I didn’t ask what he meant because it had been all the murmured talk on our site, the same probably as on sites and in pubs all across the city. A couple of brothers, with some solid muscle backing them, were leaning in from Bermondsey, trying to gain a foothold in Walworth and the Elephant and Castle. Already a killing over in Rotherhithe was being linked to the feud, the body of some known chap dumped in the park just down from the Blacksmiths Arms, stabbed more than fifty times after hours of torture and left mutilated beyond easy recognition. “I know what you’ll be thinking,” he added, in between sips from the fresh glass, and I was glad that he was slowing down but had the sense too that, this evening, anyway, it was probably only a temporary hesitation. “That she’d want to see me, or that I’d have need of it myself, to be able to hold her in my arms and kiss her cheeks for one last so long. But the truth is, we’ve already said our piece long since. And our goodbyes. It’s too late for anything else.”
At my back, I was aware of the men I’d come in with talking in a shielded way, focused more on us than on one another. We’d carried the rat smell of concrete in here with us, baked into the skin of our faces and hands, tightening our flesh and leaving us parched. Tadhg, immaculate, polished to such a sheen, was my opposite in every way except for the common ground of who we’d both once been. He sipped more whiskey and I drank my bitter, and I told him that, anyway, I was sorry, genuinely, that his mother was a fine woman, as decent as I’d known. He considered me until I began to grow uncomfortable. “You never used the number,” he said. Just stating the fact, not criticising or judging. I looked back at him and admitted that I hadn’t needed to, that the digs he’d set up for me had worked out better than well, and work, too. He nodded, and made a sound from his throat that could have meant anything but felt like an admission of respect. “Well,” he said, finishing his drink and getting somewhat heavily to his feet, “keep onto it. Nothing’s changed. If you need anything, it’s a phone call away. Always.” Then he held out his hand, and I rose to meet it, wiping my own hand out of habit against my shirt front before giving him my grip. His hand was big but gone a little bit to fat, not hard like mine was, not rough, and it came as a surprise that I was the one who had to go easy. I accompanied him to the door, my glass still half-full, and he ignored my workmates as we passed but stopped at the end of the counter, drew a large denomination note from his wallet, and instructed the barmaid that the working men were drinking on him this evening. I stood in the doorway and openly watched him down the street, his stride unhurried and seemingly without concern, and if there’d been anyone waiting, some hard chaw lurking in a doorway or parked and ready, and even though I’ve hardly raised even my voice in anger the entirety of my life, I’d have run without a heartbeat’s hesitation to assist him. But that warm evening, apart from a boy walking with an untethered foot
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beagle and, further along, some young girls playing hopscotch, the road was quiet, empty all the way to its turning. When he was finally out of sight I drifted back inside, but even though a fresh pint of bitter had been drawn for me I knew I’d had enough, and after a few minutes, time during which I doubt I spoke more than a few words, and without even finishing the glass I was holding, I took my leave.
After that our paths were rare in crossing, and never again with such connection, the very occasional meetings, in one pub or another, surely never quite as accidental as in my enduring innocence I tended to assume. His discreet way of keeping a check on me, I suppose, though maybe it answered some need on his part, too, a reminder of the home place that, during his dark days, probably felt impossibly far away.
Back in Elsie Jessop’s that same evening, I sat in my room and wrote a letter to my mother, three or four pages back and front, almost without stopping, going on about London and what it was like, and the abundance of work, as long as you had a strong back and could bear the strain, and about Tadhg, folding in mentions of him so that he filled a lot of the space between what I was trying to say but couldn’t, what he was like, not mentioning what people said and thought of him, but suggesting it, insinuating, even as I spelt out in effusive fashion how he was with me, the decency he’d shown. And then, the reason for my writing, making mention of his mother, poor Kit, and whether they knew at home about her troubles, and how short her time was, if indeed it hadn’t already run out. I mentioned the hospice in Bantry, and the fact that she had no one, and whether, for all she’d done for me and that Tadhg had, or just because she was a neighbour in need, one of our own and someone who’d ever only thought good of us all and everyone, they might visit with her, see that she had what she
needed in the way of bits and pieces, personal things and such, or just be there to sit with her and chat, hold her hand if she wanted so that it wouldn’t be strangers who’d have to. I signed the letter with love, a word that had me hesitant only because I’d never been easy with it, no one in our family had, even though we’d always kept the meaning of it among us in abundance, and before sealing the envelope that I’d prepared so carefully, folded two five pound notes, a fortune for me, in among the pages.
A short time later, not so late on for the weather to have turned properly autumnal yet but far enough into September for the worst of the heat to have burned itself out, I came in from work one evening to find my mother’s response waiting on the small hall table, the familiarly crude hand filling me in on all the happenings from home, most significantly that my sister was pregnant, again, three months along but already starting to show, so God bless and spare her and the child both, another bull in prospect. I got to the second page before learning that Kit Lowry had died and was already buried, but that she’d gone peacefully, in her sleep. My mother had been with her at the end, a fact that made me unaccountably sad, but proud, too, and because of the morphine injections there’d been little in the way of struggle and almost no pain. If the old woman had called out in her final hours for the comfort of her own flesh and blood then that went unmentioned. With the letter folded into my pocket, I sat and out of duty ate the plate of supper that my landlady set before me, followed by afters, pudding, Mrs Jessop called it, probably custard and rice, or an apple she’d stewed to pulp and stirred a little golden syrup through. I can’t recall specifics of the food, but I’ve kept onto that living room in the moment as if it surrounds me still, the exact dusty whiteness of the evening light, the cold Englishness of it all, the simple but refined old-fashioned precision of the room’s surfaces, lace tablecloth, the trinket shelf of cheap painted-plaster ornaments,
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leather-framed photographs, a clock on the mantelpiece beating away the seconds and the small shuddering of cars passing by on the road outside like tides washing in at me and away, rubbing me gradually frail. My shirtsleeves were rolled up my arms to beyond the elbow, my thick sunburnt skin still warm from a raw carbolic scrubbing, and after so much shovelling sand and hefting concrete blocks everything felt delicate in my hands, the knife and fork, the glass of milk I now and then reached for to wash down what I was eating, and I understood suddenly and with an almost strangling desperation that I’d still be this in forty years, if I didn’t somehow get away.
At the top of the road, on a corner coming onto Denmark Hill, I found a telephone box, and encased in its silence fed coins into the machine, dialled the number from memory, uncertain that I even had it right after all this time, and watching the sky blunted of colour beyond the scratched glass waited an interminable length until the line crunched in my earpiece and fell open, and a voice, a woman’s voice, youngish, as young as my own, I thought, barked a half-shouted “Yes? What was it?” tired-sounding and impatient, as if paying only partial attention to me over the casual and clearly more enticing racket of some busy room. I told her who I was after, and she told me to speak up if I wanted her to hear me, so I repeated, louder, that I wanted to speak to Tadhg Lowry. Immediately then she turned more attentive and I could imagine her waving a frantic arm at whoever was nearby, whatever groups were dawdling in conversation, to can it, and when I listened hard I was able to catch the pull of her breathing, while she told me that Tadhg wasn’t available to talk but that she’d take a message if I wanted to leave one. No, I said, because I couldn’t think of what to say, and hung up without leaving my name with her.
The rest was work. Between then and my finally leaving to return home, London changed for me. A job on one site took me
out of Mrs. Jessop’s lodgings for a room up in Romford, and then after that back down into different corners of the city, the order muddled in my mind now but sites in Islington, Finchley, Stratford, and for the hot months of ’54, all the way out to Maidenhead— countryside, after what I’d been used to—as part of a crew tasked with tearing down a crumbling Victorian tenement terrace for a small complex of high-end apartments. And somewhere within all of that, one night in the Cricklewood dancehall, there’d been Anne, who turned my thoughts serious in all the ways they hadn’t already been.
Anne was nervous in pubs, having known the ruin of drink from home, and the night we danced, as she sat at the bar with me while we caught our breath between jives and slow turns, I knew without her having to say anything, so when she asked for lemonade I ordered two, making nothing of it but deciding in that moment that, for as long as we were together, she’d never again have to see me with a glass of anything stronger in my hand. And then, one night, late, walking her back to her flat from the cinema, holding hands and laughing easily together at what we’d just seen, Alastair Sim in The Belles of St. Trinian’s, or Trouble in Store with Norman Wisdom, the comedies her choice always unless there was a decent-looking western showing, cowboys being her weakness, she said, studying me around a teasing smirk for my reaction, a car drew in ahead of us at the kerb, and as we came alongside, the front passenger window was hurriedly rolled down and a familiar voice called out to me. I stooped to see Tadhg leaning across from behind the wheel. “Have you time for a drink, then?” he said, passing his smile back and across between me and Anne, after I’d made quick introductions, and I hesitated only a beat before asking if we could make it a pot of tea instead. “Even better,” he said, attuned as he tended to be to the least atmospheric shift. “Come on, hop in. I know a place, not far, that stays open
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late. Let you sit up here with me, sweetheart. Give the big fella the back seat. And don’t worry. I’ll not keep you out long,”
He took us only a few streets away, moving at a near crawl through narrow back lanes, which had me slightly worried until we came out again onto a busy, well-lit road, and to a stop finally outside a nice hotel, the décor ornate in satin wood, polished brass and pinkish red plush. In a room off the lobby, empty apart from one elderly man asleep in a far corner, newspaper unfurled across his lap, clusters of armchairs and low-set tables stood like a scattering of small islands across the long carpeted floor, the spread between them assuring privacy and discretion. A thin man in a dark suit appeared and nodded to Tadhg’s instructions, returning minutes later with a tray of fine-bone cups and saucers and matching tea pot, and then again with a three-tiered platter loaded with sandwiches, small cakes, and scones smothered in butter, jam and clotted cream. We ate, working our way through the sandwiches and towards the sweeter pieces, and Anne answered the questions asked of her, about where she was from and what she was doing now, how she was finding London and how a nice girl like her had become tangled with the likes of me, what kind of witchery had been called into play, which embarrassed her and made her glow with happiness, especially when I reached out for her hand and held it. “Black magic,” I said, and sipped tea for timing and effect. “She’s an expert at it. I didn’t stand a chance.”
“Well,” Tadhg said, glancing quickly at me before resettling his gaze on her, “you cast your spell in a decent direction. He might not be rich,”—“not rich, no,” I agreed, “definitely not, and not likely to be”—“but he’s a decent type, who’ll work long and hard to keep you content. And that’s not nothing, though it hardly needs saying. If only everyone going the road had as much.” Anne smiled at that, shyly, and squeezed my hand.
“Your mother,” I said, after the silence between us all had stretched enough. “I’m sorry, Tadhg. I called the number you gave me that time but didn’t want to leave a message.”
“I know,” he was staring at the tea in his cup. “Thanks. And I know what your mother did. Your family. I wanted to straighten things out, any cost, I mean, but I was worried I’d be causing offence. It’d have been you sending money back, of course.” He hesitated, and started to reach inside his suit coat for his wallet, but I raised a hand and shook my head. We didn’t need to say all that might have been said, and it was better that way and after a few more moments of silence, during which he struggled towards a grudging acceptance, the awkwardness passed, and the subject shifted back to lighter fare, what I was doing for work now, the film Anne and I had just seen, and whether I still went to watch the cricket. He had two seats for the Mousetrap at the Ambassadors the following Sunday but unfortunately something had come up which meant he’d have to be out of town, and if we had nothing else on that night we’d be most welcome to them, that it’d save them going to waste. A full year and a half or so into its run, The Mousetrap remained the hottest show in the West End, and tickets were like gold dust even if we could have possibly afforded them. “I’ll phone the Ambassadors tomorrow and have your names put on them, and you can collect them at the box office on the night. And don’t worry. I’m not out of pocket. I know a girl working there, is all it is. But I’m glad you can use them.”
“He’s nice,” Anne said, after we’d refused an offered lift in favour of a late walk. She held my hand with ease now, and I let her set the pace and was glad that she kept us to a stroll, neither one of us quite ready yet to have the night end even though the time was already by then coming on for midnight. “There’s something, I don’t know, shy I suppose, about him, like an old sadness. But you’d see he’s also full of shadow. My grandfather was in the
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trenches, in Flanders, and you’d see that in him, too. Tadhg is nice, I like him, but it’s only the surface of him is at ease. I’d dread to see him angry.”
That was a moment when I almost put up a wall between us, a barricade of what felt better left untold. The old ways of home, the warning to give up little and say nothing. Instead, I sighed and explained who Tadhg Lowry was, the world he inhabited, the things I’d heard said of him, robbery, violence, maybe worse, but also how generous he’d been to me, and about his mother, and who they’d been as people.
“We’re all of us more than one way of being,” she said, from my arms, after stopping me in the porch of her building’s doorway with a long kiss and lingering embrace. “I suppose the problems start when our bad outweighs our goodness.” Her mouth was beside my ear and I could feel the fiery drizzle of her breath, slow and made unsteady by longing, and my own breath in response pressed harder, in small bites, struggling for restraint. For ease, we kissed again, and then, finally, she smiled and coughed a little gentle laughter against my mouth and with a hand flat against my chest eased me back. I went unwillingly, but stood until she’d unlocked her door and with a parting smile slipped inside into that waiting dark.
We were home a year, longer than that, maybe, and married, when word reached the village that Tadhg had been jailed for his part in the killing of two men, brothers, as well as the grievous wounding of a third. With a hatchet someone said, which wasn’t true, though there’d been a hatchet involved, one of the brothers having brought it with intent into a pub, the Stags, and in the ensuing struggle had lost hold of it, and the third man, in the fracas, had taken at least a couple of blows of it, the first hard enough to shatter his left arm above the elbow, the second embedding the
blade deep into the meat and bone of the left shoulder. Shots had been fired, too, but according to the newspapers the brothers were killed a harder way, with fists, stamping boot-heels and a whiskey bottle used to bludgeon. A death sentence had been briefly, if not in any serious way, considered, because there was enough of a question about who had actually initiated the carnage for a twentyto-life stretch to be quickly settled upon, life because of Tadhg’s refusal to implicate others who’d been involved, even though the police already had the full picture and needed only confirmation of their suspects. And that was it, life in Pentonville, locked in and the key thrown away, forgotten—except by a few, friends, acquaintances, me. And Anne, too, because one night, lying in bed, late, she suggested I might write, that it might do a bit of good, lift his spirits, because it had to be very black in that hole. She was heavily pregnant then, which would date the night to April or even May of ’58, because the first two of her pregnancies had been lost early, almost before she’d even begun to show, which had us both for a time worried that children weren’t going to be a part of life for us, and I remember the darkness of the room and the sensation of the rain lashing at the small bedroom window’s glass away to my right, but was so folded into my own rambling thoughts that at first I hadn’t even been sure she’d spoken, her words holding to such a hush. I told her that I was no good at such things as letters and wouldn’t begin to know what to say, but she turned herself to face me and insisted that whatever I did say would be fine as a gesture, some small assurance to Tadhg that he was still thought of at home, and well remembered. I lay awake after that and watched her sleep, full to aching with love for the heart she had in her that she’d been able to make such room in it for half a monster, the depth to which she could feel the world, and prayed that our child, boy or girl, would consist so much more of her than of me. Later that morning, when I arrived in from the milking,
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she had a pot of tea brewed, set a plate of buttered soda bread and softly fried eggs before me, and sat opposite, with a sheet of paper to fill and a pen held at the ready. “It’s just a letter,” she said, though I’d not reacted. “And it’ll mean so much.” I started in on the eggs, and left unsaid my concern that Tadhg, given where he now was, mightn’t have appreciated being reminded of better days. While I ate, she wrote, occasionally composing lines aloud for my approval but mostly trusting that she knew best what to say, and finally I went back out into the yard and with another long day of work ahead, gave the matter no further thought. Eventually, a response came, the handwriting uncertain but the lines full nevertheless of Tadhg’s voice, thanking us for writing, with belated congratulations on our marriage, nice news indeed, and how he hoped for the pair of us only happiness. He’d settled in well enough; Pentonville was the same as anywhere else that wasn’t home once you got your mind right about it, and we all had to be somewhere, when all was said and done. As he didn’t ask that we write again, Anne didn’t press me to do so, but over the next few years, because letters kept arriving from him, not often, maybe five or six times in all, but with reasonable regularity, I understood that she had continued the correspondence. Sitting beside the fire of an evening, I’d listen while she’d read his latest words aloud, and all were of a similar tone, the air of them resigned, accepting, detailing in broad strokes a tedious routine and offering gratitude for whatever had been most recently sent, the book that helped pass his evenings or the brown scapulars which had apparently, and to my surprise, been requested, and ending invariably with some specific one-sided reminiscence of home, how Christmases had been for him as a boy, walking to early mass with his mother of a frozen morning, or what days were like out on the boats in bad weather, back and shoulders aching and hands cut raw from hauling nets. That, and remembering the village as well as certain
of its people, surrounding himself with ghosts now that all else had been lost. She read his letters as they arrived the couple of times a year, and for his sake we stood at his mother’s grave whenever we were down visiting my own dead, whispered a prayer that I hoped would count for something and stooped to lay a posy of daffodils at the headstone of an Easter time or a few sprigs of redberry holly ahead of Christmas. Beyond that, though, Tadhg crossed my mind less and less, busy as I’d become, with fields to be worked and cattle attended to, days never long enough for all that needed doing, as well as with what was going on at home, the baby finally born to us, a girl, more like her mother than even seemed possible in both looks and countenance, though with a tuck in her smile that even I couldn’t deny was mine, and in time, hardly a year apart from one another, two more babies, boys this time, healthy as could be hoped for, that prayer answered anyway.
And then, a week ago, I came in cold from a drenching, an hour earlier than usual due to the rough May gales flaying our hillside, and found Anne at the table, eyes red from weeping, another letter ahead of her, held down from its folds by the fingers of one hand. I knew instantly what had happened, but stripped down out of my field gear, pulled on the clean trousers and heavy wool sweater I wore around the house, before crossing barefoot to her side and setting a hand on her back. She looked up at me and then her expression all at once crumpled and she pressed her face to my chest, and we remained that way a minute or more before I raised and resettled her into a proper embrace, kissed her eyes and cheeks and mouth, then led her through to where the fire was lighting. Tadhg was some weeks dead, found stabbed several times in the showers. The parcel containing her last letter to him and the book she’d sent, the copy she had read of Benedict Kiely’s There Was an Ancient House, which she’d hoped they might exchange thoughts on once he’d had a chance to get through it,
BILLY O’CALLAGHAN
was returned unopened in a larger brown envelope containing a note, typed on headed paper, recounting in some of the coldest words imaginable the sad and tragic news. Dead and buried, dealt with. One of the London underworld’s most feared men, the newspapers had it, apparently littering their front and early inside pages in the days after with a gaudy rehash of the killings that had led to his incarceration and linking him, tenuously in most cases, to other notorious figures, whether as enemy or ally, as well as a scattering of smiling shots alongside various film and television stars, sensationalising connections, and listing rock musicians, footballers and even minor royals among the litany of alleged acquaintances. The Press had the side of him they wanted, not the side I’d known and had introduced to Anne, and not the side Anne had further uncovered through their correspondence, the remnants of who he was once the hard front had been chiselled back, and maybe who he’d always been, deep down. He’d been other things too, of course, the devil to those who courted that of him, something else again, probably, to others in different situations. The same as all of us, I suppose, though with him to an extent many times magnified. We’re none of us straightforward. That evening, Anne sat and wept, and I kept an arm around her and watched the fire while night came slowly on, listening and making sounds of agreement and consolation whenever she whispered something, speaking of him, remarking, remembering. Then, because the hour had grown already late, we went through into our room, and I undressed slowly while she she checked on the sleeping babies and got into bed with the kerosene lamp burning lowly on the locker beside me so that I might watch her undress. Life continues, some of it in darkness, more of it in light, and we carry what we can and try to keep room among our burdens for what matters most. Tadhg, bright as he’d been, amounted for us to a flickering, brilliant in moments but ultimately only one star
in the sky we hold above us, one of so many. Her tears, and my sadness too, were as much for the manner of his ending, the horror and loneliness of how it must have been for him, as for the actual loss, because we’re the kind who remember with some regard the bridges we’ve crossed. But as terrible as what had happened was, we have the children to worry about, and fields to work, and one another to cherish, and she understands, as I do, that there’s a place for grief, a proper place, in a small corner of the heart. Not forgotten but tucked away with the rest of its kind, and rarely enough resurrected, if we are to go on.
Tomorrow morning, it being another Sunday, our day of rest apart from the usual attending to the animals, Anne and I will visit the old cemetery after mass, and when we’ve said a prayer over the bit of dirt that holds my own dead we’ll lay a small fresh bunch of flowers on Kit Lowry’s grave, that being all we can do now. That, and not forgetting.