Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

He had known by mid-morning that the policeman, hitting his feckin' golf balls, had not been shot. He had been told by lunch- time that his volunteers had made it back to the safety of the mountain. It was not until now, late in the evening, that he had heard the reasons for the failure.

It was the third time in as many months that young Patsy had brought him news of an aborted mission.

The front car, clean, without weapons on board, as was usual, had been a quarter of a mile ahead of the A.S.U.'s vehicle. They had seen the first roadblock, and called back on the C.B. radio. There were two routes to the target. They had tried the second. Again a vehicle checkpoint. They'd quit. The first car had driven the narrow lanes all through the small communities close to the Lough. Well, it could just have been chance. The whole bloody area had been stiff with bastards, not just around the police inspector's home.

Why, that morning, the morning he was to be attacked, had the way not been open to the Chief Inspector's house?

That night, when his wife had gone upstairs to quieten the baby and then to bed, the O.C. sat in front of the dying fire, and the anger whipped his mind.

The congregation spilled out from the chapel. Ten o'clock Mass was no longer the centrepiece of community life, not as it once had been, though the cars and vans were parked for fully 200 yards, both sides of the road. There were gaps among his flock, the Father had noticed, at the very front and the very back. His sermon had been aimed at those very missing teenagers and young people; he had spoken of a youth in their society that was numbed by television, corrupted by the pursuit of material goals. It was a favourite theme of the Father's. He never spoke of violence. The war, the Provos, the consequences of their actions, were never a part of his Sunday sermons. He was a heavy man with a penetrating voice, but he never used his stature to preach against the war. Had he been challenged on the substance of his sermons, he would have said that his parishioners were intelligent, they could make up their own minds on the morality of the campaign of the Active Service units. And in the privacy of his bishop's study, he would have said that his work in the mountain parish made for a lonely life, one that would be lonelier still if he denounced the Provisionals. He married the hard men, he baptised their children,. and if thay were ambushed by the army he buried them in the Republicanl plot in the cemetery field. He had already told his bishop that it was only his study of French Renaissance painting and the companionship of his books on the subject that kept him his sanity and his faith.

They came out into the frosted sunlight.

They were the businessmen, the wealthy; the unemployed, the poor, they were the farmers anil the tradesmen and the skilled workers; they were the volunteers of the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army. It would have been the Father's opinion, and his information would have been at least as complete as that of the senior Special Branch officer at Dungannon police station, that on any night he might be called out to inform the family of any of twenty-five men that their loved one had been shot dead on active service. From his viewpoint, from the pulpit, he could have counted at least fourteen of the twenty-five celebrating Mass with him that Sunday morning.

Mossie had seen Attracta Donnelly with her Kevin and her parents. He would have had to cross the road to speak to her. And then there were others who stopped to talk to her. Mossie waited. His Doloures held his Patrick's hand, keeping him on the pavement. His Francis carried little Mary. His Francis, eight years old and the eldest, that was a boy to be proud of. Siobhan and his mother talked with his mother's long-standing friend, the housekeeper of the Father. His children were well turned out, better dressed than most, good clothes and good shoes.

Suddenly behind him a baby, the one that had howled through Mass, screamed in protest. Mossie turned. The O.C. carried the baby.

"What the feck happened yesterday?"

"We was unlucky." Mossie ignored the fury of the hissed whisper.

"The place was heavy with them."

"It's what I heard."

"… There was police and army all over."

"That's bad."

"… Was they waiting for it…?"

"How would you know?"

"… Our boys, they had to cut out…"

"Best thing."

"… Had the police, army, information…?"

"I just heard the boys couldn't get through."

"… There was roadblocks all round…"

"Best they cut out."

"… I want to know who knew, everyone who k n e w… "

"Wasn't many, couldn't have been."

"Every last one who knew, because if I've a tout…"

The O.C.'s words died behind the bellow of his baby, and he was gone away up the line of parked cars to where his wife waited.

There was a freeze in Mossie's mind, a chill in his gut. He shouted across to Siobhan and his mother. He took little Mary from Francis. He snapped his fingers for Doloures and Patrick to follow him.

He walked towards his old Cortina. Mossie Nugent was tall and spare and with rounded shoulders under a thin neck. He always wore his best suit to Mass. Heavy, tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles dominated a pale, gaunt face. His hair was neatly combed and there were flecks of cream paint behind his right ear. He would have admitted that he was a man without friends on Altmore, but that was the way for those who climbed high in the Organisation. He had not been spoken to by any of the fellow worshippers, other than the O.C.

Few came forward to offer small talk to a man known to be deep in the Organisation. They hung back around him, they waited for his smile and his greeting before coming forward to shake his hand or slap his back. If he caught a man's eye, if he stared back at it, cold, then that man would flinch. That was the power of the Organisation. But he would have claimed that he was liked, and the old people for whom he did unpaid work would have sung his praise, and the young men of the mountain, the Devitt boy and the Brannigan boy and the Riordan boy, would have failed to hide their admiration of him. The younger men, they would have recognised that he had fought the war longer than most, with greater commitment than most. A man who had little to offer in friendship, but who had gained respect for his kindness to the uninvolved, and admiration for his staying power with those who belonged. He was said by the few who knew to be the best, the most thorough, intelligence officer of the East Tyrone Brigade since the twenty-year war had flared again. It was how he would have wished it, that he should be a man alone in the mountain society. His walk was swinging, awkward, the legacy of a fall from a ladder, the damage now past recovery. It was only four years since he had come back to Altmore mountain, and before that he had been on the mainland for six years, in the South for four years, in prison on remand and under sentence for three years. To his own community, where he had been born, reared, schooled, he was something of a stranger.

Mossie was impatient to be gone. He called again to his wife and his mother to hurry themselves.

They were a busy couple. It was what Service life had taught them and retirement had changed nothing.

Sunday was not an exceptional day for them, not a day for rest, it was when they dealt with the week's unanswered letters and other paper work.

Cecily Beck had covered the dining-room table with the receipts from the local branch of the Red Cross, the monthly bills, and would settle them all before tackling the chore that she so enjoyed of writing the weekly letter to her son now flying a jump jet Harrier in Belize.

The village, north of the Buckinghamshire town of Aylesbury, was dominated by its magnificent beech trees, certainly more thun a hundred years old, beside the church. Most of the leaves, they annually complained, seemed to fall in their garden, onto their lawns and flower beds. Peter Beck raked leaves, and would not be finished before it was too cold and too dark to stay outside any longer. Then he would work on the speech that he would make next week at the British Legion dinner. It was inevitable that a man who had commanded an infantry battalion would be invited when he retired to the village, to become the British Legion club’s chairman.