J. Janes - Betrayal

‘You do that, and the next time I’m away and coming home, you make sure Bridget or yourself builds a fire in my room.’

‘Had you but telephoned, m’am, it would have been exactly as you wished.’

Lord save us but Mrs. Haney certainly knew how to put a person in her place! It was all about to start again. The house and Hamish, the lies, the village, its telephone line and electrical wires crisscrossing above a rain-swept single street, a track, a lane that ran between a straggle of tiny houses, too few of them Protestant so as to equal things out for all, the poverty of the place, the ignorance, the ingrown insularity, the castle and its prisoners of war.

The castle …

Erich Kramer … Erich who had been the captain of a German U-boat. Erich who had asked her to take a letter to his ‘cousin’ in Dublin. Some cousin! She’d been tricked into helping him. Deceived!

For love? she asked and said, her back still to the electric fire, ‘You silly fool. Hamish is the one who loves you. Hamish would rather die than see you come to harm.’

Hamish didn’t come home for supper nor did he ring to say what was keeping him. She ate alone in the smaller of the two dining rooms, the echo of lonely Crown Derby, Waterford crystal and Georgian silver being all around her, as was the flickering of a solitary candle.

At 9.00 p.m. he still hadn’t returned or rung, nor at 10.00. At 11.00 she heard the pony trap, heard him softly chastising William, the stableboy, for having not gone home. At 11.45 she found him in the library but did not tell him she had come downstairs. Instead, Mary stood out in the corridor, the sight of him framed by the white trim of the doorway.

He was sitting by the fire, on the couch at the far end of the room, it being one of those sloppy, comfortable things with large, cushioned arms, a faded olive-green to beige cover and slips that hung loosely and were nearly always rumpled. Having been quickly gone through, a newspaper was strewn about as if impatiently thrown away, some of it on the floor, some on the inlaid fruitwood of the coffee table, the rest on the cushions.

The dog was asleep at his feet, and the white marble of the chimneypiece with its neoclassical columns and its crown of laurel leaves was beyond him. Was it Burke’s Landed Gentry that he was now reading yet again, or the Farmer’s Almanac of 1937 , or Chum , one of his boyhood books? Hamish read widely and with such vigour and absorption, not even a vengeful, parsimonious librarian could stir him from it, and yes, he read voraciously when angry and upset.

The salmon and the trout rods, the basket creels and long-handled landing nets, boots, hats and tackle boxes were in there, too, in their usual jumble, along with the pith helmet from India and the spiked iron one of the German soldier he had had to shoot and kill in France, in that other war.

As always, too, he wore the same grey-flecked Harris tweed suit and waistcoat his rounds demanded, the same trousers with their stovepipe legs, the same blue tie with its multitude of tiny fleurs-de-lis in gold.

The necktie was a thing a French girl had given him years ago and Mary knew she must remind him of that girl and that this had probably been one of the reasons they had married.

The drapes were drawn, the blackout being observed in this place but not in the South, never in the South. 5Belfast had been bombed in April and again in May. Terrible damage and loss of life, 6but since then the Luftwaffe had left Northern Ireland alone and the country had gone back to being just what it was, the centuries of silence and the fight, of course, their precious ‘Rebellion.’

The gold-rimmed eyeglasses were perched well down on the bridge of his nose. A hank of thinning hair, once reddish blond, now of sand and getting grey, hung over the right side of his brow. He seldom gave a care for such things. Perhaps he once had, but in all honesty she felt Hamish was trapped by time, circumstance and profession, he wanting only to revert to his essential self.

Just what that was she hadn’t quite decided.

‘Mary, I’ve awakened you.’

He started to get up-uncrossed his legs and closed the book, threw off the dust of his subconscious as she brushed a cheek against his own and momentarily hugged him.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said.

‘Dublin go all right?’ he asked as she turned to sit in the armchair by the fire. Her chair, his sofa, and the dog not even stirring or taking any notice of her.

‘Yes, fine. Easier than I’d thought. And you? You’re late.’

‘Another incident at the castle. A second lieutenant this time. The Leutnant zur See Bachmann, a nice boy, Mary. Only twenty-four and a great pity it had to happen.’ More he wouldn’t say but they both knew the truth would soon be out. Nothing stayed buried for long in these parts. Not unless the Irish wanted it that way.

‘Please don’t distress yourself, Mary. War makes prisoners of us all. It makes men do things they oughtn’t.’

And here she’d thought he would be upset with her. ‘Would you like a nightcap?’

‘Bushmills?’

‘In the cabinet. I could only get two, though.’

The newspaper was the copy of the Irish Times she’d bought yesterday, and she knew then, as he went to get the whiskey, that Hamish had taken a look in the car himself and had retrieved it. He’d been talking to Jimmy. He would know all about what had happened at the border.

‘A little water?’ he asked, not turning to look at her.

‘Yes. Yes, I’d like that.’

Hamish was almost old enough to have been her father. Fifty-four and not worrying about it, though. Not looking it either. Not really. A grand, tall, humble man with loose arms and a jacket that hung on him giving lots of room because he liked it that way and often had to pull the sleeves up or take the blessed thing off.

There were wrinkles, especially at the far corners of his eyes. The complexion was ruddy, the face broad and very Scottish with a full, if sometimes frightening nose and a chin that jutted out to accept both wind and rain with equal disregard.

There were bags under his eyes, a sag to the cheeks-he’d been biting himself with his back molars and had said over breakfast once, ‘I’m beginning to fold in on myself.’

As he handed her the cut-glass tumbler, their fingers touched and he stood before her, stood there looking down at her wondering, was he? Wondering what he was going to do about her? He had that look about him, had it in the smoky warmth of greeny-brown eyes that searched for answers now and could not be defied for long.

But then, on some sudden thought, or perhaps because of something he’d been reading, he smiled, and at once this was reflected in his eyes and she felt herself slipping back to him and wanted to say, to shout, ‘Don’t make it any harder!’ but could only smile wanly up at him, knowing that she would remind him of the girl he’d found in France and the one he’d rescued from the shores of Loch Lomond in the spring of 1939.

She took a sip. Fraser sat down opposite her on the sofa, wouldn’t touch his whiskey yet, he thought, would just stare at it and wish away the gulf between them, though Mary couldn’t really know this nor how much he wanted simply to forgive and forget. ‘The IRA are trouble, lass. A great deal of it. Captain Allanby had his reasons for being insufferable-orders from the top, no doubt, and word that someone close to this bomber, if not the man himself, would try to slip back into the North at that crossing, though why any of that lot would bother is beyond me. A border crossing when they’ve the whole of the border to slip through? It defies reason, but an order is an order, the High Command omnipotent, and no matter the consequences.’