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No Enemy but Time

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

The dawn was breaking as the cars rolled off the ferry at North Wall; there was a sullen, red-streaked sky, with banks of threatening clouds building up on the horizon. After the stale fug in the tiny cabin, she gulped down the clean sea air, the car window wide open. It was a hired car. If they were watching for her, they wouldn't expect her to travel on the night boat from Liverpool, with a rough sea battering at the B & I ship, while the drunks and the seasick threw up in the smelly lounges.

Even so, she had hidden herself in the claustrophobic cabin, afraid she might be recognized. She was difficult to disguise, being tall and strikingly blonde with a face that had appeared too often in newspapers and smart magazines. The charming wife of the youngest member of the Cabinet. Articles about her family life, the handsome Georgian house in Gloucestershire, Homes and Gardens, colour supplement, Vogue profile material. All the pre-packaged nonsense of a plastic person, she said once, but that only made her husband angry. 'If you hate it all so much, why don't you go back to the bogs?' was his retort. The bogs; that was how he dismissed Ireland. He'd said it once too often, and this time she'd taken him at his word. Slowly the line of cars inched towards the Customs sheds. She drove into the green section. She had nothing to declare. She was waved on by a sharp-eyed young officer, who boasted he could smell a smuggler from fifty yards away. She hadn't realized until she was bumping along the road away from the dock that she'd been shaking like an aspen leaf. There had been no time for a cup of coffee and she'd eaten nothing the night before, going straight to her cabin. She felt weak and her head ached. No cigarettes either: early-open cafés tempted her going through Dublin, but she resisted. The Irish are the most inquisitive race in the world. Every head would turn if a woman walked into one of those male preserves. She couldn't risk that.

The roads were empty in the grey light, and she jumped traffic lights, making smart time. As she turned on to the dual carriageway that ended only a few miles beyond Naas, the rain spat against the windscreen. She fumbled, looking for the windscreen wipers in the unfamiliar car. The little arms flashed back and forth against the glass, fighting the lashing water.

'That's Our Lady weeping for your sins, Miss Claire, their cook used to say when the heavens opened. So many tears, she thought, and so many sins to be washed away. And so much blood. Centuries of blood-letting; at times the rivers of Ireland ran tainted water that the cattle wouldn't drink. It was so dark she switched on her car lights. 'God,' her husband said, whenever she'd brought him home before her father died, 'what a bloody awful climate ...' He never noticed the brilliant sunny days, hot as the Mediterranean, when the sky was vivid blue, and the air as sweet as wine.

She saw the signpost, white on green, pointing to the turn off, opposite Kill. How many times she had felt a lift of excitement when she saw that sign and knew that Riverstown was only ten minutes away. Coming back from school in England, being met at the airport, hoping to find Francis the other side of the door into the main building. Running to hug him without being in the least self-conscious. He was her brother, and she loved him best in the world after her own parents. And next came the wonderful, handsome, shabby old house where they had grown up together. Less than a mile now, down the twisty road past Straffan.

The storm had spent itself, and a thin sun was showing through. She stopped the whirring wipers, wound the window down and smelt greedily the scent of grass and overgrown hedgerows that nobody bothered to trim. There at the end of the road was the turning to their gates. There was a signpost saying 'Clane', and its other arm said 'Naas' in faded lettering. The local children loved to turn them round. Nothing had changed in the last three years. The visitor would still travel miles in the wrong direction.

From the gates ahead, she had left for her wedding in the big Church of Ireland church in Naas. Miss Claire Arbuthnot, shrouded in her English mother's family lace, with pearls shining like drops of new milk round her neck. Claire had heard the Irish maids talking in the kitchen, 'Pearls are tears ... God love her, she shouldn't be wearin' those on her weddin' day ...'

Her half-brother had said, 'Why do you have to wear his bloody family jewellery ...'

'Because it's my wedding present and I'm not a superstitious idiot like you.' And then, because she couldn't bear to quarrel with him the night before she left for a new life, she said, 'I'm wearing your mother's brooch, Fran. It's my something blue.' He'd looked ashamed then, and mumbled about being sorry. On the morning she saw him standing in the body of the church, dark as a gypsy in his morning suit. The little brooch with its sapphire heart was pinned to the silk bow of her dress. She gave him a special smile as she passed by on their father's arm. But the girls' whispering had been right. She still had the pearls, but there had been many tears since she first wore them.

She didn't turn into the gates, although they were open. Her mother always got up early and exercised her dogs before breakfast. Claire drove past, bearing left down a small side road, following the curve of the grey stone wall that surrounded Riverstown.

Billy's cottage was set back off the road, behind a neat little hedge. He had kept lurchers when they were children, and used to take Francis lamping for rabbits. She had been furious that he wouldn't take her too. It wasn't fit for a young girl, he'd explained in his thick brogue, and her half-brother had grinned and mocked her behind his back. The dogs' descendants were still with him, though rheumatism made it difficult for him to go scrambling over the fields at night with the powerful torch to blind the rabbits. They began to bark as she walked the few yards to his front door. There was no bell. She knocked. She saw a lift in the lace curtain and wondered whether Billy had his woman with him. Everyone knew about Billy's woman, but he kept her hidden and it was supposed she must be married. The door opened and he stood there, staring at her, a squat little old man in shirt-sleeves and braces, a cap set on his head. He was never seen without it, except at Mass. He hated showing his bald head. For a moment he stared, and then his face broke up into a huge smile. 'Jaysus, it's yerself! Will ye come in?'

Sitting in his kitchen, with a cup of tea and a begged cigarette, she didn't try to pretend when he said, 'What's wrong wit' ye, Claire?' He'd been there to pick her up when she fell off her first pony; he'd taught her to fish and to know about dogs, and whatever mischief she and Francis got up to, he never told a tale. He was, as her mother had said for twenty years, the laziest codder God ever put breath into, but Claire loved him, and he loved her as if she were his own. She looked him in the eye, and saw him turn and blink. There was tinker blood in him, so her father said. Tinkers always shifted away if you held their gaze.

'I've come to help Frankie,' she said. Fear shuttered his face. Now he wouldn't look near her.

'Sure there's no helping him,' he muttered. He went to the stove and lifted the lid off the teapot to distract himself. 'Pay no thought to him,' he muttered. 'Not God himself could do anything for him.'

'Billy,' she said quietly, 'he's my brother.'

'Only the half of him,' the old man said. He poured more tea into her cup, fumbled with the bottle of milk and dropped the tin-foil top. 'It's the other half that's been the death of him.'

She exclaimed in anguish, and he couldn't keep his head turned from her. 'Dead! You mean they've found him?'

'No, no, no ... not yet so, but they're lookin'. He's no time left at all. Have you been up to the house yet?'

'No, and you're not going to tell Mother I'm here.'

'And how would I, seein' she's away?'

Claire said, 'Where's she gone?'

He frowned, sucking at his lower lip. 'Off to stay wit' auld missus Keys down in Cork. You're to bolt and bar the house up, she says to me. He'll not hide himself at Riverstown.' He slid a sly look at Claire when he said that. He had always hated Mrs Arbuthnot. He rubbed his stubby nose. 'I padlocked them gates after herself drove away,' he muttered.

Claire said, 'They were open, that's why I thought she was at home.'

'I'd better go up and take a look,' he mumbled again, but he didn't move.

After a long pause, Claire said, 'Would it be the Gardai who opened them ...?' Knowing that the Irish police would have come to Billy for the key.

He was already frightened, and the question irritated him. 'Jaysus, if it's the others in there, waitin' for him ...'

Claire touched his arm. He was old and she could see the empty teacup was trembling in his hand. 'It's not them,' she said. 'They'd know Frankie wouldn't come home. It could be the Special Branch waiting for me.'

He let out a deep breath. 'You? Oh, Mother o' God, what have ye to do wit' any of this?'

'I told you, I've come to try and find him,' she answered. 'I didn't tell anyone, not my husband, no one. I just got on the ferry. But my husband will guess. He'll guess I've come back and why. He'll tell the authorities in Dublin.'

'I never liked that fella,' Billy snorted. 'You'd no business marryin' a fella like that.'

'I don't like him much either,' Claire admitted. She managed to smile at him. 'You're going to help me, Billy, aren't you?'

He shook his head vigorously. The cap stayed glued on. 'No. Ye'll get divil an' all help from me, gettin' yerself into trouble. Go home to England and yer husband, like him or not, and yer children. What about them?'

She felt very tired suddenly, and angry with him for trying to find a weak spot. 'You don't have to help me,' she said. 'I'll manage on my own.'

He muttered a curse; he knew Gaelic, and spoke it among his own. He had always pretended to his employer that he didn't. 'Ye'll stay where ye are.' He heaved himself up from the kitchen chair and reached for his coat behind the door. 'I'll take the dogs for a walk up by the river and see what's to be seen. If the Gardai's up there, I'll talk to them, so. I'm not to know about the gates ... There's bread and a bite of ham in the larder. I'll not be long.'

Claire watched him through the window, lifting the lace curtain as he had done. His steps were slow, moving to the kennels where the lurchers lived, fastening them to their leads, shouting at them as they leapt up at him in excitement. He was an old man, and frightened of the death squad of his countrymen, yet allegiance to them was in his blood. A deeper allegiance than his love for the children of the Anglo-Irish landlord he had worked for since he was a homeless lad knocking at the kitchen door to ask for a cup of tea and an odd job. Why should Billy put himself at risk for the sake of his hereditary enemies, whether he'd helped to bring them up or not? And she remembered then the old adage tossed around the dinner table by her parents' friends, when the drink had loosened their tongues, and things were said that stuck in the mind like grit in the eye.

'The trouble is, you just can't trust them. All smiles to your face, and the minute your back's turned, they'll rob you blind. Or walk out and let you down at the last minute.' It was servant talk, of course. But the taint was there, right throughout the race of native Irish. You can't trust them. And you never intermarried. It wasn't just class, as Francis used to say when he raged against the system. It was race, and there would never be peace while that discrimination lasted.

Claire turned away from the window. She sat down in the one comfortable chair; it had come from their housekeeper's room, and had found its way to Billy's kitchen, like the strip of Turkey carpet with the hole in the middle.

The turf stove was alight, and she felt drowsy in the warmth. When they were on holiday from school, she and Francis used to come to Billy's cottage and sit in the kitchen, drinking tea. He taught her brother how to roll a cigarette, and she remembered him doubling up with delighted laughter as the boy coughed and spluttered on his first smoke. 'You'll help me, won't you, Billy?' The stout refusal, and then the shambling figure going up the long path beside the river, up to the house. He wouldn't find her brother Francis there. Nor would the hard-eyed men from Dublin, if her husband had alerted them. Nor, thank God, the merciless executioners of the IRA.

He was being hunted; she was the only person in the world who knew where he would go to hide.

Billy Gorman trudged up the long path to the kitchen garden and the back of the house. On his way he passed the main drive, and he could see that at the end of it the gates were open. He cursed under his breath, shaking his head at his own folly in coming up to the house at all ...

But he couldn't turn back now. Whoever was inside could have seen him from the windows. He took a cheap cigarette out of his jacket pocket, paused and lit it with a match in his cupped hand. It wouldn't be them. It wasn't their way to come in the open. They struck in darkness: the kicked-in door, the burst of gunfire, the hooded killers vanishing like demons into the night. But not always, he remembered. They killed the poor idiot from Sallins in broad daylight ... He sucked in smoke and coughed. Too late to stop now; better him meeting them than Claire, he thought, and drew courage. For some reason he remembered old Doyle, the gardener, dead now for thirty years, leading him up the same pathway round to the back door and into the kitchen for the mid-morning cup of tea. He'd been a hard man to work for, but he taught Billy everything he knew about that garden and how to take care of it. And when he died, he left the few bits in the cottage to Billy. The back door was ajar. He saw a shadow moving through the kitchen window, and half turned to break into a shambling run.

'Billy! I was just comin' down to look for you.' There, framed in the doorway, was young Joe Burns, looking to Billy like a guardian angel in his blue Garda uniform.

He gasped with relief. 'Jaysus, I thought ye was a burglar ... I'll tie up the dogs.' The kitchen was cold; the Aga was turned down while Mrs Arbuthnot was away. For a moment or two Billy was too relieved even to ask what he was doing in the house, or how he'd managed to get in when it was all locked up.

The young policeman said in his friendly way, 'It's a careless man ye are, Billy, leaving them gates and the back door open.' He was a pleasant boy, newly recruited into the local force at Clane. He'd been born there and the Burnses had been part of the village for generations.

Billy squinted at him; his heart had stopped hammering with fright. 'I locked up everything meself,' he insisted.

Joe Burns shook his head reproachfully. 'Ye thought ye did,' he said. 'We knew at the station Mrs Arbuthnot was away; she always lets us know, these days. I was passing when I saw the gates not shut properly, so I thought I'd best come in and see if everything was all right at the house ...'

Billy rubbed his nose and shook his head. 'I'd swear I locked them,' he muttered. The policeman wasn't convinced, but Billy thought, I locked them gates. I locked all the doors. I've been doin' it for thirty years, since old Doyle died. I didn't forget. He looked into the smiling blue eyes of the policeman. There were three cigarette butts in a saucer on the kitchen table. He'd been there for some time.

'Well now,' Burns said, 'ye've saved me the trouble of comin' down to see you. I was on my way when you come up.'

But not in a hurry about it, Billy said to himself. Sitting in a kitchen cold as charity, smoking. Waiting.

'When's Mrs Arbuthnot comin' back?'

Billy said, 'I don't know. She'll ring me up the day before.'

'It must be terrible for her,' Joe went on, 'her son gone missing and all this stuff about him on the radio and television.'

'He's her stepson,' Billy mumbled. 'It's not the same.'

'Ah, you're right,' Joe Burns nodded. 'It's the daughter she had ... the one that married that English fella. Isn't he in the British Government or something?'

Billy didn't answer; he grunted.

'You've known them all, Billy,' the easy voice went on. 'Is it true what's said about them two?'

'What two?' he asked.

'The brother and sister. It's said they were so close she'd be after coming over when he disappeared. I don't think she'd take a risk like that meself ...'

'What risk would that be?' Billy gazed at him in innocence. He could scent danger, as his beloved dogs could sight a hare a mile away. And every antenna quivered with alarm. The blue uniform didn't signify safety any longer. Billy didn't know what was wrong, he only knew that something was.

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Excerpted from No Enemy but Time by Evelyn Anthony. Copyright © 1987 Evelyn Anthony. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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