Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

One rainy morning about two o’clock, as she and Ursula detoured through Ballsbridge, a man, hatless and trench-coated and pointing a gun, stepped into the dark street in front of the car. When Ursula braked hard, he jumped into the back seat and gave curt orders. “Drive through Palmerston Park and towards Dundrum. Not too fast but don’t slow down. Keep in the middle of the road. I’ll tell you when to stop. And for your own sakes, no tricks.”

Ursula panicked into silence, concentrated on the driving, but Carey was panicked into just the opposite. She began chattering and giggling for a reason she could not at first discover, but soon her nerves propelled her more and more surely into a pattern of behaviour; she felt the kind of unspeakable terror she sometimes felt on the stage, but which she could always with an effort control, and which sometimes seemed to help rather than hinder her performance; and this too, she decided, must be a performance. So she fell into a rather broad and bawdy impersonation of a girl who had had too many drinks and was not particularly distressed at being kidnapped in the middle of the night by a forceful and handsome male. The man made no response. After a few miles there was a stretch of lonely country, and here he gave the order to stop; he then changed places with Ursula and took the wheel. Carey, sitting now beside him, kept her eyes on his stern profile and prayed that somehow, during the short interval of the drive to wherever they were bound for, she could talk herself and Ursula out of being raped, or even into being raped as a substitute for being murdered; maybe if she played up to him with all she had she could win him over. So she played. Actually the man was an exceptionally high-minded member of the Republican Army, burning with political zeal and puritanical to the point of primness. He had never even had a woman, much less raped one, and his only murders had been cold-blooded ones of men; on this occasion all he wanted was the car. Amidst empty moorland, where the climb began towards the Sally Gap, he brusquely ordered the two girls into the road, gave them a receipt for the commandeered vehicle (correct I.R.A. procedure), and drove off with scarcely concealed contempt for a couple of prostitutes.

Carey, indeed, had proved herself an effective actress, but her judgment had not been shrewd in her choice of the play. It was a combination that was to happen again in her life. The more immediate result, however, was a near collapse from the strain of the whole incident, for the two girls had to walk miles in the rain before they were picked up; they both caught bad chills. Furthermore, the theft of the car meant that from then on the problem of getting home from the theatre would be much more burdensome. “It’s Ursula I’m really sorry for,” Carey told her stepfather. “The car wasn’t insured and she hadn’t finished paying for it.”

“She should keep the receipt,” he answered judicially. “A truly independent Ireland has a responsibility in all such cases—I’m sure eventually it will realize that.”

During her next non-acting spell Carey visited her great-uncle in Kingstown. He had been her childhood hero, and as he lived in a district where there had never been any ‘trouble’ she could expect to relax more easily than at home. Captain Halloran (retired from the British Navy after a somewhat eccentric career) lived in a hillside house overlooking the harbour; he was seventy-odd, keen-eyed, loganberry red in countenance, with endearing qualities; he liked youngsters and animals, gave generously to the undeserving, and was a cheerful loser at Leopardstown races. Comfortably off, he kept a couple of horses which he galloped over the local countryside, or else hitched to a variety of two-wheeled vehicles that might well have been in a museum. Carey was driving one of these things on an August afternoon when she met Paul Saffron.

Paul was then twenty-nine, attractive in a slightly mannered way that sometimes suggested the feminine but never the effeminate; a little plump, with wavy black hair, intense blue-grey eyes, and a long strong nose, he was striking enough to be noticed in a crowd, and much more so on a quiet Irish road. Carey stared at him from some way off, and with growing apprehension, for he was hatless and wore a raincoat whose pockets bulged.

In truth the bulge on one side was from cigars, the other was from a rather conspicuous copy of the New York Times. The reason for this was that he wanted to be taken for an American before anyone could shoot him, and the reason he thought such a thing possible was that, being the kind of journalist as well as the kind of person he was, he thought anything possible. He had, in fact, just lately stepped down the gangway on to Irish soil with an almost conditioned reflex of naďveté, for he knew his job was to write something about Ireland that would be readable by those who were not really interested in Ireland at all. Somewhat to his carefully nurtured surprise there had been no ambush on the pier as the boat from Holyhead put in, so he had ignored the waiting train to Dublin and strolled inland through the first Irish streets he came to. It was often his luck to find things to write about thus casually—a dog or a child or a shop window or anything that met his eye. (One of his most successful pieces had been about a cat playing with a skein of wool in the ruins of an earthquake.) This time it was a girl, a girl driving a horse and some sort of a buggy along the road towards him, and he first noticed her because she was sitting on one leg in a way that looked uncomfortable. Now why? Or WAS it uncomfortable? Good enough for a start… Then he glanced at her face, which did not seem to him beautiful so much as appealing and piquant; it had a look that somehow complemented the question-mark of the posture. Maybe a talk with such a chance-met native would save him the effort of walking further, for he disliked walking; so he stepped to the middle of the road in front of the cantering horse.

“Well?” she said, before he could speak a word, and he caught then a quality in her voice that stirred him far more than anything in her looks. He did not guess that it was fear, and that she had not yet noticed his Times.

“Can you tell me where this road leads to?” he asked.

“Just up in the hills.”

“Ah, then I’ve lost my way. Are you driving into town? Could you give me a lift back?”

“Sure. Jump up.”

She had been too scared not to invite him, and he took her readiness for affability. This made him pleased with her, for he liked people to like him, and when he thought they specially did so he paid them the supreme compliment of talking about himself. He did this then, as they clop-clopped through the peaceful downhill streets; he told her who he was, of his recent arrival in Ireland, his mission to report on that disturbed country for an American magazine, his real ambition, which was quite different, and the extreme likelihood that he would one day be famous. He talked to her, indeed, as he could always do to anyone (whether celebrity or bell-hop) when he felt in the mood or thought it worth while—as if he had known and would continue to know them all his life, and as if neither his nor theirs could possibly have been complete before the meeting. It was a technique that had won him both friends and enemies, and would have perhaps worked out all right on balance if he had ever felt a need to discover who were which.

Carey, on her part, was warming to the relief of finding him not another gunman, and the warmth put her at odds with herself for having been so mistaken. She listened to his chatter in a daze, unwilling to try her voice lest there might still be too much tremor in it. By the time they reached the centre of the town she had said scarcely a word, and was already chagrined to find him so content with her silence. The looks she gave him were increasingly quizzical. “Well, here we are,” she said at length, pulling up at a corner.