“Well, what d’you think of him?” she asked me.
“He likes you,” I said. My inner voice said, And I don’t like that fact.
She laughed. “I like him.”
“What’s going to happen?” I said.
Mona Lisa smiled again. “We made a deal.”
I said, “Why are you always making deals?” Because you don’t know how not to.
“And what’s wrong with that?” she said.
Everything. Everything’s wrong with it. But I said, “I suppose it brings people closer.”
She smiled again—but told me nothing more.
We parted in Galway, and I gave her a rough sketch of my travels for the next few weeks. Earlier in the year I had at last regularized my own timetable. I wasn’t so scattergun anymore; I moved through the provinces now in a kind of loose rotation. Therefore I could say where I might be reached close to any given time.
And so, in the third week of September, in Watergrasshill post office, I picked up a card from Miss Begley: CM transferred back to London. Come to England with me. KB.
31
October 1943
Adolf Hitler had red hair. So a woman in Dublin, a cabaret singer, told me. She saw him in Berlin in the late 1930s: Sitting on her father’s shoulders, she watched him drive down the street they call Unter den Linden.
“He was small and red-haired,” she said. “Common-looking. And the crowd went wild.”
That was the kind of detail I loved. I had been following the war in the newspapers and on the radio, and when it reached a finger into Ireland, I wished to touch it. In other words, I wanted to visit three of the four places in Dublin where German bombs fell in 1941. By the time I got to one of them, the worst of the damage had been cleared. Thus, I hadn’t been able to create the sensation I sought—how it might feel to stand on the earth as it rained bombs.
For some unknown reason, I told all this to Miss Begley on the boat from Dublin to Liverpool.
She said, “There’s times, Ben, when I don’t fully understand you. What did you want to know—what it’s like to be hit by a bomb?”
I said, “Sort of.”
“Ah, for God’s sake, Ben.” Not much stopped her in her tracks. “Why?” she said, groping to make sense.
“I’d have a better idea of what war is like.”
She reflected on this, and up went that damn eyebrow again. “Aren’t you afraid of the war?”
“Are you?”
She said, “Why would I be?” in that belligerent tone she used when she didn’t want to be challenged. “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die.”
I said, “There’s a lot to fear.”
“What do you expect we’ll see?”
I said, “Ruined buildings.”
“They’ll be taking it badly,” she said. “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”
“Some of it may hit us.”
And she said, “No. I’m never in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Not, eventually, true—not true at all. But I’ve just remembered something Mother once told me: It’s the mark of a gentleman not to remind people of foolish things they once said.
Miss Begley then admitted that, like me, she’d been expecting to travel through a country shredded by bomb damage. We’d seen the photographs and newsreels of the devastation that struck Dublin. If that had been caused by a lone German aircraft (possibly a navigation mistake, we were told), what on earth must England be like by now? They’d had four years of ruin from the air.
As we stepped from the dockside to the waiting train, I asked her, “Why exactly are we going to London? What precisely will we be doing there?”
She looked at me with an impatient purse of the lips and picked up the book she’d been reading; I gazed out of the train window.
England looked glorious. They were enjoying an Indian summer, long days of golden light falling on leopard-colored trees. The train took us through acres of aftergrass green beyond reason, and spiky deserts of fawn stubble. England had spent the season growing extra food as part of the war effort; now, fallow and spent, their duty done, the fields rested, as calm as a woman after giving birth.
At first I felt confused, because it looked no different from Ireland—pastoral, empty, and still. Yet in my pursuit of every war report I could find I’d seen the rumors that we might get invaded; so these were my thoughts: If either side invades us, we’ll be exactly the same as England—the wide quiet fields in one half of the equation, the ruined towns and cities in the other.
By now I had brought under control my resistance to Miss Begley’s pursuit of Charles Miller. At first I had taken the old-fashioned, hunter-gatherer position, and I announced it.
“You should stop it. It’s unseemly. Men do the pursuing. Men court. Men woo.”
She didn’t reply—and then I shut up, because I recalled that Venetia had been the one who’d initiated our relationship. The day we first connected she did all the running, declared her feelings, said that we were meant to be together. I never questioned it; I just followed her lead.
Therefore I’d have been a hypocrite if I hadn’t supported Miss Begley’s focused drive on London. I knew that I’d help her if I could, but I also expected to do nothing more than stand by and watch. Of course I had no idea what I would be watching.
As if all this weren’t enough, I found myself sleepless again, troubled by something else. The night before coming into Dublin to catch the boat, I’d stayed at a concertina player’s home near the town of Kildare. I’d visited the family in the past, they’d heard my questions, seen Venetia’s photograph, and guessed at my anguish.
This time, though, the woman of the house remarked, “I might have a bit of news for you,” and said that her sister had worked as a cleaner at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and had known Venetia. “They all loved her,” she said.
I nodded.
“Well,” said the woman, “my sister says that they heard at the Abbey that Miss Kelly—well, she’s not well.”
I galvanized. “Where? How do you mean, ‘not well’?” But inside I was screaming, You mean she might be alive?
My outburst scared her; sometimes I don’t know my own strength. She retreated, and I now believe that I destroyed any chance I had of acquiring her information.
“Oh, hold on, Mr. MacCarthy, hold on. I mean, the same woman, she told me something myself once, and wasn’t it all a lie?”
My face, I know, went white, and I walked out into the night. This was the old, awful pattern: Cleft in twain again. No farther along, no more healed or eased.
And yet, I observed something. However scorching this woman found my reaction, I could sense that the flame of that particular lamp was running low on oil. And I surmised why: As she herself might have put it, Kate Begley had marched right into the fields of my private anguish, pitched her tent there, and was now redirecting the soldiers of my zeal. As a consequence, I was thinking more about her than about Venetia. For the first time, but not the last, I felt disloyal.
32
As I was having these thoughts, something ridiculous took place. The train stopped at some junction, Crewe, I think, and took on passengers. Up to then we’d been seated in a compartment, just the two of us, facing each other, by the window. Now a woman opened the door and raised an inquiring look.
To my annoyance, Miss Begley said, “Come in, there’s only us.” Before I could help, the woman hoisted a crimson suitcase up to the rack and plonked herself down.
I understood the invitation. In the privacy of the compartment, our conversation about what would happen in London had been cranking up again. This newcomer’s presence, though, meant that I couldn’t press anymore, couldn’t ask yet again, “What exactly are we going to London for?”
Now comes the silly part. Miss Begley engaged with the newcomer: Where are you from? Are you going to London? Isn’t it a lovely day? A short time later, they’d reached fortune-telling, soothsaying, crystal gazin
g.
“I believe in it wholeheartedly,” said the passenger. “Do you?”
“Well, I’d have to,” said Miss Begley.
“Why is that?” said the passenger.
“Because,” said Miss Begley, “I do a bit of it myself.”
A hand to her mouth, the woman breathed, “Oh, you don’t, do you?”
I thought, Oh, God. She’s going to drag this out all the way to London.
And Miss Begley did. “I consider it a gift that I mustn’t waste,” she said.
Another inward groan from me: We’re going to get the works here
The woman, a decent creature of fifty or so, undramatic except for her crimson suitcase, said, “How much do you charge for telling a fortune?”
“Oh, I only charge if I’m set up, and if it’s a working day.” I concede that Miss Begley’s next remark may have come out of kindness; she said, “Would you like me to tell your fortune? There won’t be any charge,” and she smiled like a beauty queen.
The woman said, “You don’t know how much I need it.”
Miss Begley slid along the leather seat, and the woman slid to meet her halfway.
“Now. Which hand do you write with? Because that’s the hand I want to see first.”
Here’s the worst part; not only was the woman hooked—so was I. I picked up my newspaper, shook it out, opened it, pretended to read—and eavesdropped like a spy.
“H’m.” Miss Begley mused. “H’m. I see. I see.”
My mind shouted, What is this rubbish? But my next thought was, Well, who can’t believe in magic?
“You’re widowed,” said Miss Begley.
The woman said, “Yes. My husband was—” and Miss Begley interrupted: “No. Don’t tell me.”
The woman said a chastened, “Oh, I, I was—” and halted.
“Your husband was killed in the war. I’m very sorry for your loss,” and from the corner of my eye I saw Miss Begley raise her head, look at the woman with full sympathy, and return to her head-bent task. “And you’re on your way to London, for two reasons. You want to continue the inquiries about war widow compensation. And you’re hoping to get a job, I’d say in the clothing business.”
The woman almost cried out. “How do you know?” she said. “How do you know all this?”
Miss Begley said, “I’m afraid I don’t know. Does an artist know why he can paint?” And again she went, “H’m.”
The woman said, “May I ask a question?”
“Yes, dear.” Miss Begley sounded like an old lady.
“What’s the difference between the two hands?”
Miss Begley answered like an expert. “It’s different for many fortunetellers. For me, the left hand has all the character you received at birth. And the life you’ve lived so far is in it too. Your right hand—that’s what’s going to happen to you, that’s what’s ahead for you. Another way of putting it is—the left hand is what you got, the right hand is what you’re going to do with it.”
“How much can you tell about my life so far?” said the woman, thrusting her left hand forward.
Miss Begley took the hand as though it were a napkin of embroidered silk. She scrutinized the palm, caressed it, traced some lines.
“Well, you’ve had an interesting life, haven’t you?”
The woman looked alarmed and pleased.
“May I ask—are you still keen on him?”
The woman said, “On whom?”
“On him. You know.” Miss Begley somewhat lowered her voice. “You know who I mean?”
The woman blushed, and Miss Begley said, “Oh, my goodness. Let me see your right hand again. Well, well.” She sounded so final. “Have you actually made arrangements?”
The woman, startled as a bird, said, “How do you know all this? I mean, how do you know?”
Not for the first time, I felt reduced. Day in, day out, I tried to keep some intellectual rigorousness in my work. I approached my note-taking with a hardworking conscience. Every report that I sent in met the required standard of high legibility and provenancing detail. I wrote in a clear and wide hand, used indelible black ink, in lined, stoutly bound notebooks.
Every person I interviewed was given the appropriate date, on both calendar and clock; the interview was timed and supported with an identification, often with a brief family tree; for instance, Thomas Buckley, so-called “Bawn.” Son of Michael John Buckley, and Hannah Fitzgerald, both of Portmagee, Valentia Island; married 1909, Margaret, so-called “Madge” Ahern of Castleisland; no children.
If the tale or tradition I was collecting had echoes of something else within my knowledge, I footnoted it, so future generations of students had at least a search to pursue. I relished this requirement to be accurate and consistent; I told myself that I had little time for frippery—yet now here I was, traveling with, essentially, a walking box of low-rent hearts and tawdry flowers. But look, there must have been, there may still be, something intellectually low-rent about me because I’d also loved the shoddier parts of Venetia’s road show.
And thus did the cheapness of the music drag me down. Despite my loftier intentions, I, the Wandering Scholar, couldn’t get enough of this stuff, especially the fortune-telling. You can see, can’t you, how it must have appealed to someone with my burdens? And you can guess my next thoughts, which would recur over and over: How about reading your own palm, Miss B.? Or mine?
33
A city at war teems with opposites. As walls fall and naked gables claw the sky, people rediscover purpose. And so they scurry here, they scurry there, like ants hoping to dodge a great human boot. That was my first experience of bombed streets. My parents knew London well, had often described it to me, and once brought back a book called Wonderful London in Pictures.
Our train arrived in the early afternoon. That day, and for many days beyond, I walked where buildings leaned against one another with broken shoulders—some of them little more than ghosts from that old book.
This was my third kind of war. From legends and mythologies, from Finn MacCool and his mighty Irish warriors, from the Red Branch Knights of the Ulster Cycle and the Twinkling Hoard, from Sparta, Thermopylae, de Bello Gallico, and all of Caesar’s campaigns, from Hector and Hercules, I knew of valiant war, victors and vanquished, hand-to-hand heroes, swords, javelins, and spears.
At home in Goldenfields, I’d been a child during our Irish Civil War, a family struggle where every man brought a gun to breakfast. We’d had ambushes near our gates, torture in our fields; we’d known of brothers fighting each other, split to their blood by the political structures that prevail to this day.
For instance, Mother visited a family where the father had killed a man in a guerrilla action out in the hills, and he’d got back home just as the police brought in the body of the man he’d killed—his own son. However epic the scale, war was always personal. That was what I knew from my reading and from my childhood; and to my surprise, that was what I found in wartime London.
When you see a house where a room still hangs on the outside walls, and there’s still some furniture, and the flowered wallpaper still glows, and there’s a coatrack with garments still hanging from it, and the rest of the house has peeled away and fallen—that’s personal.
And when you see a young woman standing on a pile of rubble and begging the police and fire workers, “Dig faster,” and “Over here, I thought I heard something!” and they rush to her, and they tell you in an aside that her two children aged six and four are beneath the rubble, as is her officer husband, and that he’d had an arm blown off at Dunkirk a few years earlier—that’s personal too.
We’d lost our way from the train and walked too far. Around midafternoon, we rounded a corner and saw the scenes I’ve just described (and as I noted them down that night). Miss Begley turned away from the distressed young woman and walked off a few yards, gasping. She put down her suitcase and stiffened her shoulders to establish some resolve. For myself, I have a delay mechanism on my e
motions; this wouldn’t hit me for several hours. If at all.
I walked to Miss Begley and said, “Come on. Let me take you away from here. I’ll ask directions,” and I turned to go back the way we’d come.
“No,” she said. “We should see this, we should see it.”
And so we walked right into the Second World War. An occasional hiatus notwithstanding, it would be a long time before we’d walk out again. The smell will still come back if I evoke it: plaster dust, sewage, leaking gas—the smell of death as I know it.
Bombs had taken out four houses along that street. Flanked by the other untouched buildings, they looked like gaps in a row of teeth. There hadn’t been time to stretch cordons; London had suffered a heavy twenty-four hours. One of those freaks of compressed air that you’ll find in all bomb blasts had blown the young mother out of the house onto the pavement while her children and their father lay beneath immeasurable weight.
We weren’t in a poor area, and the woman spoke with an educated accent—war has no respect for social class. Miss Begley, as ever, found a job to do. She walked forward to take care of the grief-stricken woman.
We settled in at the small hotel that Miss Begley had booked, then walked out to find a meal before the light fled the sky. I had taken care to bring money with me, and to make banking arrangements, should we need them. Up to that moment she hadn’t confided in me. Still, we had an agreement—“You help me and I’ll help you”—and I’d gone along thus far. Although I was a little frustrated, it suited me; I was curious about the war and England’s survival, and I’d established with James Clare that I could always work at collecting lore among the Irish in London.
Now, though, with my own emotions bruised again by word of Venetia, and stirred by the violence of war as we’d seen it, I needed some security.
“All right,” I said. “No more evasions. How much are you going to tell me?”
Some of the fight had left her too and she said, “I don’t know what to tell you. I think”—she paused and reflected—“I think I’m waiting just now.”