William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

‘I had word from Mr McTighe,’ Feeny said.

‘Are we calling in there?’

‘He’ll have a beer for us.’

‘We were only being big fellas when we went round with the magazine.’

‘It’s remembered you went round with it.’

Liam Pat never knew where the copies of the magazine came from. Dessie Coglan just said the lads, but more likely it was the barber, Gaughan, an elderly man who lost the four fingers of his left hand in 1921. Liam Pat often noticed Dessie coming out of Gaughan’s or talking to Gaughan in his doorway, beneath the striped barber’s pole. In spite of his fingerless hand, Gaughan could still shave a man or cut a head of hair.

‘Come on in,’ Mr McTighe invited, opening his back door to them. ‘That’s a raw old night.’

They sat in the kitchen again. Mr McTighe handed round cans of Carling Black Label.

‘You’ll do the business, Liam?’

‘What’s that, Mr McTighe?’

‘Feeny here’ll show you the ropes.’

‘The thing is, I’m going back to Ireland.’

‘I thought maybe you would be. “There’s a man will be going home,” I said to myself. Didn’t I say that, Feeny?’

‘You did of course, Mr McTighe.’

‘What I was thinking, you’d do the little thing for me before you’d be on your way, Liam. Like we were discussing the other night,’ Mr McTighe said, and Liam Pat wondered if he’d had too much beer that night, for he couldn’t remember any kind of discussion taking place.

*

Feeny opened the door of the room where the curtains were drawn over and took the stuff from the floorboards. He didn’t switch the light on, but instead shone a torch into where he’d lifted away a section of the boards. Liam Pat saw red and black wires and the cream-coloured face of a timing device. Child’s play, Feeny said, extinguishing the torch.

Liam Pat heard the floorboards replaced. He stepped back into the passage off which the door of the room opened. Together he and Feeny passed through the hall and climbed the stairs to Liam Pat’s room.

‘Pull down that blind, boy,’ Feeny said.

There was a photograph of Liam Pat’s mother stuck under the edge of a mirror over a wash-basin; just above it, one of his father had begun to curl at the two corners that were exposed. The cheap brown suitcase he’d travelled from Ireland with was open on the floor, clothes he’d brought back from the launderette dumped in it, not yet sorted out. He’d bought the suitcase in Lacey’s in Emmet Street, the day after he gave in his notice to O’Dwyer.

‘Listen to me now,’ Feeny said, sitting down on the bed.

The springs rasped noisily. Feeny put a hand out to steady the sudden lurch of the headboard. ‘I’m glad to see that,’ he said, gesturing with his head in the direction of a card Liam Pat’s mother had made him promise he’d display in whatever room he found for himself. In the Virgin’s arms the infant Jesus raised two chubby fingers in blessing.

‘I’m not into anything like you’re thinking,’ Liam Pat said.

‘Mr McTighe brought you over, boy.’

Feeny’s wizened features were without expression. His priestly suit was shapeless, worn through at one of the elbows. A tie as narrow as a bootlace hung from the soiled collar of his shirt, its minuscule knot hard and shiny. He stared at his knees when he said Mr McTighe had brought Liam Pat from Ireland. Liam Pat said:

‘I came over on my own though.’

Still examining the dark material stretched over his knees, as if fearing damage here also, Feeny shook his head.

‘Mr McTighe fixed the room. Mr McTighe watched your welfare. “I like the cut of Liam Pat Brogan.” Those were his words, boy. The day after yourself and myself went round to him the first time wasn’t he on the phone to me, eight a.m. in the morning? Would you know what he said that time?’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

‘ “We have a man in Liam Pat Brogan,” was what he said.’

‘I couldn’t do what you’re saying all the same.’

‘Listen to me, boy. They have no history on you. You’re no more than another Paddy going home for Christmas. D’you understand what I’m saying to you, Liam Pat?’

‘I never heard of Mr McTighe till I was over here.’

‘He’s a friend to you, Liam Pat, the same way’s I am myself. Haven’t I been a friend, Liam Pat?’

‘You have surely.’

‘That’s all I’m saying to you.’

‘I’d never have the nerve for a bomber.’

‘Sure, is there anyone wants to be? Is there a man on the face of God’s earth would make a choice, boy?’ Feeny paused. He took a handkerchief from a pocket of his trousers and passed it beneath his nose. For the first time since they’d entered Liam Pat’s room he looked at him directly. ‘There’ll be no harm done, boy. No harm to life or limb. Nothing the like of that.’

Liam Pat frowned. He shook his head, indicating further bewilderment.

‘Mr McTighe wouldn’t ask bloodshed of anyone,’ Feeny went on. ‘A Sunday night. You follow me on that? A Sunday’s a dead day in the city. Not a detail of that written down, though. Neither date nor time. Nothing I’m saying to you.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Nothing, only memorized.’

Feeny went on talking then. Because there was no chair in the room, Liam Pat sat on the floor, his back to the wall. Child’s play, Feeny said again. He talked about Mr McTighe and the mission that possessed Mr McTighe, the same that possessed every Irishman worth his salt, the further from home he was the more it was there. ‘You understand me?’ Feeny said often, punctuating his long speech with this query, concerned in case there was incomprehension where there should be clarity. ‘The dream of Wolfe Tone,’ he said. ‘The dream of Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell. The dream of Lord Edward Fitzgerald.’

The names stirred classroom memories for Liam Pat, the lay teacher Riordan requesting information about them, his bitten moustache disguising a long upper lip, a dust of chalk on his pinstripes. ‘Was your man Fitzgerald in the Flight of the Earls?’ Hasessy asked once, and Riordan was contemptuous.

‘The massacre of the innocents,’ Feeny said. ‘Bloody Sunday.’ He spoke of lies and deception, of falsity and broken promises, of bullying that was hardly different from the bullying of Huxter. ‘O’Connell,’ he said. ‘Pearse. Michael Collins. Those are the men, Liam Pat, and you’ll walk away one of them. You’ll walk away ten feet high.’

As a fish is attracted by a worm and yet suspicious of it, Liam Pat was drawn into Feeny’s oratory. ‘God, you could be the Big Fella himself,’ Dessie Coglan complimented him one night when they were delivering the magazines. He had seen the roadside cross that honoured the life and the death of the Big Fella; he had seen the film only a few weeks back. He leaned his head against the wall and, while staring at Feeny, saw himself striding with Michael Collins’s big stride. The torrent of Feeny’s assurances and promises, and the connections Feeny made, affected him, but even so he said:

‘Sure, someone could be passing though.’

‘There’ll be no one passing, boy. A Sunday night’s chosen to make sure of it. Nothing only empty offices, no watchmen on the premises. All that’s gone into.’

Feeny pushed himself off the bed. He motioned with his hand and Liam Pat stood up. Between now and the incident, Feeny said, there would be no one in the house except Liam Pat. Write nothing down, he instructed again. ‘You’ll be questioned. Policemen will maybe get on the train. Or they’ll be at the docks when you get there.’

‘What’ll I say to them though?’

‘Only that you’re going home to County Cork for Christmas. Only that you were nowhere near where they’re asking you about. Never in your life. Never heard of it.’