Bishop's Delight, page 4
‘Or maybe wine!’ another man offered.
‘Whatever it was, he sat down beside me on the rock and asked me where I’d learned my trade. He wasn’t in any hurry. We talked about the weather and the price of lobsters, and then he asked me about headage on sheep. He seemed in the best of spirits. He said he was going out to catch a pollock for his dinner, and that he’d give me the rest of the catch if I was still there when he got back. I helped him push the boat down the slip. He rowed out past the Carraig and started the outboard. He raised his hand and waved, and that was the last I saw of him.’
‘You’re sure he had the oars with him?’ Woody asked.
‘Didn’t I see them with my own two eyes!’
‘There were no oars in the boat when she was found.’
‘You’d think a smart man would carry enough petrol to take him home,’ another man put in.
‘What did I tell you? Tight as tuppence in a rag.’
‘It’s a mystery,’ the old man said. ‘Like hell and original sin, some things can never be explained.’
‘Does his wife ever come down here?’ Woody asked.
‘You mean Spindrift. Now she’s a darlin’. She talks to everyone. She never goes out in the boat with him, but she does all her own shopping, and she never has to carry it home. There’s always someone to help her, and then she’ll ask him in and give him a good big glass of whisky and a plate of home-made biscuits. They say her biscuits are as big as cartwheels.’
‘Spindrift is the opposite of Spume,’ someone said.
‘They’re both the same,’ the old man explained. ‘When the sun is shining, I’d be hard put to tell the difference.’
They turned and watched the ten o’clock news from where they stood. Woody watched Sweetman giving the accepted version of events and then saying as an afterthought that there was a growing swell of local opinion that suspected foul play. People were beginning to ask questions. What happened to the oars? And what happened to Mr Maguire’s lunch bag? Where was his hand-line? If he had tried to swim ashore, surely he’d have left his jacket and trousers behind in the boat? Some people were beginning to wonder if there was more to the Taoiseach’s disappearance than meets the eye. Woody couldn’t help marvelling at Sweetman’s ingenuity. Without saying anything of substance, he had planted a seed that he would nurture regularly and diligently for however long the story ran. Sweetman was a cynic who believed in nothing except his own powers of mischievous invention. That was what kept him going—that and the fact that the world was full of people who loved nothing better than a good conspiracy.
‘That man on the television knows more than he’s letting on,’ Fergus said.
‘What can he know that we don’t?’ one of the others asked.
‘I’ll bet he’s been talking to someone local.’
‘Josie Hynes, who else? It was Josie who found the boat.’
‘Josie’s head was always full of nonsense, and nonsense spreads like wildfire,’ Fergus summed up.
After four pints of Guinness, Woody slept soundly. The following morning he asked Josie Hynes if he’d take him out for a day’s fishing. Josie said he was going out anyway and to come along if he felt like it. Josie was waiting for him on the slip with two fishing rods and two hand-lines. At first, Josie was silent. He did everything that needed to be done without once looking at Woody. They headed into the wind, Josie in the stern and Woody facing him on the middle thwart. When Woody asked him what he thought of Maguire’s disappearance, he said quite simply that Maguire had been kidnapped.
‘It was on the news last night, but not spelt out. A nod is as good as a wink …’ he added.
‘Why would anyone want to kidnap Maguire?’
‘For a ransom, don’t you see? Or maybe it was a splinter group from the North. The world is a dangerous place these days. No one knows what’s on anyone’s mind.’
They headed straight out into the wider bay. Josie showed him where he’d found Maguire’s boat. ‘This is the very spot. If you look over my shoulder you’ll see the spire of the Protestant church in line with the White House Hotel.’
Of course, there was no telling how far the boat had drifted before being discovered. One thing was certain: a sensible man, even a strong swimmer, wouldn’t think of swimming ashore. If Maguire had run out of petrol and lost his oars, he would have been better off staying in the boat in the hope of being found.
‘The wind was from the east, blowing off the land,’ Josie explained. ‘It was a strong wind, strong enough to blow you all the way to America. When I told the schoolmaster that the boat was empty, nothing in her except a bottle of holy water, he said that was how the Marie Celeste was found, apart from the holy water.’
‘He couldn’t have been thirsty,’ Woody said. ‘If he had been, he’d have drunk the holy water.’
Josie cast a critical eye in his direction. ‘Old Fergus said he was carrying a bag. God knows what was in it. But that’s another story. Inverrone is swarming with journalists and cameramen, and every man jack of them has his own story. By the time Sunday comes there will be as many stories as journalists. It’s the world we live in, and there’s no changing it.’
The sky was cloudy. They motored up and down the bay, trailing their hand-lines to no avail. Woody had brought sandwiches and beer, which they shared in silence. Then they went back to the shadow of the land and allowed the boat to drift, while Josie kept complaining about the poor take. Still, by evening they had caught half a dozen pollock and thirteen mackerel between them. Woody was more than happy; he considered it a day well spent. He left his share of the catch with Josie and walked back to the village, thinking that perhaps there might be something in Sweetman’s theory after all.
6
Coming out of the greengrocer’s, Anna ran into Woody. She had driven down to the cottage that morning, thinking that it might help if she met some of the locals who’d seen or talked to Jim on the fatal afternoon. She had already spoken to the police, but they were no help at all. She simply could not believe that she’d never see her Jim again. Woody was full of sympathy, as you’d expect. He was an old friend, and at times like this friends were precious. He carried her shopping, and, so as not to break a custom, she invited him in for a drink. She wished to talk to someone she knew, and she wanted to hear what Woody had to say, and in particular what he would be saying in his column on Sunday. As an old friend of his, she might even manage to influence his opinion.
‘I think Sweetman is barking up the wrong tree,’ he said.
‘And what tree should he be barking up?’ she asked.
‘It isn’t as simple as he makes out. At this stage no one has all the answers.’ It was in his interest to keep his true thoughts from Anna.
‘Do you think he drowned?’ she pursued.
‘Unfortunately, it’s a possibility, but only a possibility.’
‘Jim is a strong swimmer,’ she said. ‘At home he swims twice a week.’
‘There are strong currents in the bay here. He suffered from arrhythmia. He could have had a heart attack in the water, or he could have got cramp.’
‘Unfortunately, the evidence could point in that direction,’ she conceded. It was not what she believed, but she thought it wise not to share her true thoughts with a man who was obviously on the lookout for a new slant on a straight story. Deep in her heart she knew that Jim was still alive, and that he’d get in touch with her as soon as the time was ripe. In the weeks before his disappearance, he had been withdrawn and self-absorbed. Quite possibly, he might even have had a threat from the New Invincibles, for whom the Northern Ireland peace talks were anathema. He wouldn’t have told her because he knew she was a worrier. Jim was shrewd; he was lying doggo and he would send for her as soon as the coast was clear. In the meantime it was in his interest and in hers to give the impression that he had drowned.
The moment she heard the news on the radio, she went to his study to see if his journal was still in the drawer of his writing desk. It had gone. She knew Jim as well as she knew herself. He was a man of set habits. His journal was important to him. He called it his insurance against a rainy day, and he wrote it up every night before going to bed. She used to make fun of the precious tome, calling it the Book of Me, Moi and Mé Féin. Like all men, he had his little rituals. He never took his journal on holiday, but he always took it to the cottage on their weekends away. She had searched every room in the cottage without finding any trace of it. Wherever he had gone, he had taken the hefty volume with him. It was that more than anything else that convinced her he was in hiding.
She invited Woody to stay to dinner because it was in her interest, and Jim’s, to have a friendly wolf in the pack. Already the wolves were whimpering. They would howl at their loudest in the Sunday papers.
‘Dinner is nothing special,’ she explained, ‘only cold chicken and salad, but maybe the Volnay will make up for it. Jim always kept a supply of it here.’ She did not mention that out of the case he had brought down there were only two bottles left. Wherever he had gone, he wouldn’t run dry.
‘So what will you be writing for Sunday?’ she asked when they had finished the bottle.
‘I was planning to weigh up all the possibilities and come down in favour of accidental death by drowning as the most convincing explanation.’
‘Do you have to mention the other possibilities? It will only give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists.’
‘You needn’t worry; I’ll make them look ridiculous. The police are right for once. The statement they issued after Sweetman’s programme put it in a nutshell: “We have yet to complete our investigations. We are not treating the Taoiseach’s disappearance as suspicious at this time.” ’ He didn’t agree with the police, but there were times when a journalist must hang fire in the service of the greater public good. On this occasion it so happened that he would be pleasing Anna as well, which in the long run was not unimportant. To write the definitive biography he would need access to Maguire’s papers, and Anna was now the sole custodian of his archive.
He didn’t outstay his welcome. When they’d had coffee, he said he felt tired after his day’s fishing and that he was planning to have an early night. He’d enjoyed talking to her, but it was sad to observe the depredations of the years in her face. She was no longer the Anna he had loved as a young man. It wasn’t just physical deterioration; it was a kind of lignification of the personality that he had often observed in elderly wives who had surrendered their individuality in long service to a self-centred bighead. The Anna in his imagination was the soul of effervescence. She had lost her originality of mind and most of her verbal exuberance. She used to be so unpredictable; you never knew what she’d come out with next. Now she spoke like a suspicious politician confronted with a journalist searching for a chink in her armour. But perhaps her mind was on Jim. Though she’d had a terrible shock, she obviously hadn’t lost hope. ‘There’s expectation from the sea, but not from the land,’ she’d said, translating an old Irish proverb. It gave him an insight into her thinking. She was still hoping against hope that he’d be back.
When Woody had gone, she put Mozart’s String Quintet in C Major on Jim’s CD player and poured herself a glass of Balvenie, her favourite single malt. She’d had very little of the wine at dinner because she needed to keep her wits about her for Jim’s sake, especially in the company of a journalist who never missed a trick. She lay back on the sofa and closed her eyes. She had often been alone in the cottage before, but she’d never felt so alone before because Jim was always somewhere in the offing—the word drew her up sharp. Of course, he was still somewhere in the offing, somewhere in the shadows that surrounded her; the only difference was that she didn’t know precisely where. She had to admit that over the years they had gradually drifted apart. He never stole up behind her any more to surprise her with an enveloping hug, and he’d stopped lifting her clean off the floor in his arms and whispering nonsense in her ear, but he was scrupulous in his attention to her every need, especially on the rare occasions when she went down with flu.
Unlike most politicians, Jim was a good man. He had presided over the most prosperous period in the history of the State, but, unlike some politicians she knew, he’d refused to avail of the many opportunities that came his way to feather his own nest. In spite of what journalists said, he simply wasn’t interested in money; he had put both houses and the cottage in her name because, he joked, she would be highly unlikely to run off with them. Once, when she’d asked him if there was anything in the world he’d like to own, he said, ‘Achill for its people. The sea isn’t for sale.’ In the early years of their marriage they went to Achill every summer, and then he suddenly lost interest. They began going to France instead. Paris, he said, was the most civilised city in the world. He saw London as ‘little better than a shoppers’ Disneyland’, wilting under the weight of a history that was foreign to most of those who roamed its streets.
There was a silly side to Jim; he often did the silliest things just to prove a point. He once walked the length of Oxford Street from Marble Arch to Tottenham Count Road and claimed that he’d heard only eighteen native English speakers on the way. When she asked him who counted as a native English speaker, he laughed at what he called her naïvety. ‘In a hundred years’ time the lingo spoken on the streets of London will have become incomprehensible to most proper Englishmen.’ That was Jim on his high horse, but most of the time he was sensible, and anyhow he wouldn’t be Jim without his moments of silliness. Furthermore, she knew that he only indulged his silly side while they were alone together. He’d never say these things to any of his friends, except possibly Bill MacBride who was another old blather with a weakness for foolish fantasies.
Unlike MacBride, Jim was an accomplished actor; the man the nation saw on television and in Dáil debates was not the real Jim at all. On television he looked at ease with himself and at home in the world. He was light-hearted and cheerful, always ready to turn the tables on an interviewer with a joke, even if the joke was on himself. Then he would come home and shut himself up in his study for an hour to lick his wounds. He resented the awful familiarity of journalists, which he found offensive, not to mention their unspoken assumption that he was out to delude the public for his own unworthy ends. He would readily admit to her that as a politician he was merely a salesman of second-hand ideas, that his only gift was his ability to make people listen and be persuaded, but he also said that he would never admit such a thing to anyone else, and that pleased her because it showed that she was the only person he could trust.
To understand Jim, you needed to know about his upbringing. He never knew his mother or father; as a week-old baby he was dumped on the doorstep of a childless TD and his wife, who said that she’d keep the baby because she’d always wanted a fair-haired boy. The baby looked healthy and well cared for. He was wrapped in a white christening shawl and placed in an expensive wicker basket. On his bib was pinned a birthday card on which was inscribed a poem in an italic hand:
I am of Ireland
And of the holy land of Ireland.
Cast out by preachy piety,
I beg you in your charity
Bring up my son in Ireland.
The word ‘son’ was blotted, as if by the writer’s tears. The poem touched the hearts of the childless couple. As they didn’t know the baby’s name, they gave him their own surname and had him christened James in the hope that he might be great. When he was four, they adopted a three-year-old girl called Sarah to keep him company, but in spite of their best efforts the two children never got on. Sarah was headstrong and demanding while Jim was good-natured and obedient. He was also bright. His foster parents didn’t have to spend a penny on his education; he won a scholarship to secondary school, and another scholarship to university. There he never talked about his mysterious origins. To most people he was the son of Mick Maguire, TD for East Mayo, famous in his time for never having asked a question in the Dáil.
Given his history, perhaps it was no wonder that Jim saw himself as a man on a divinely inspired mission. Like Moses, another basket baby, he would become leader of his people. And like Moses, he would be no ordinary leader. He would climb a mountain above the reach of other politicians, above the grey world of grubby compacts and compromises. He looked around for a modern hero to emulate and found him in General de Gaulle. He could never aspire to de Gaulle’s towering stature, but he would emulate his incorruptibility, and perhaps match it.
At first, success came easily. He was elected to his foster father’s old seat in parliament, and within ten years he was leader of his party. He became Taoiseach for the first time at the early age of forty-three. He saw politics as a game with its own obscure rules, and for a time he seemed to enjoy its verbal battles, its uncertainties, and its occasional inspirational victories. The only raincloud in his heavens was his foster-sister, Sarah, who had become dependent on a daily bottle of vodka to keep her happy and relied on Jim’s generosity to provide it. She kept pestering him for money, and he kept reasoning with her to no avail. When she began talking to gossip columnists about his past, he saw it as the last straw. He refused to see her any more, and that, of course, ignited more tinder. He was no longer a leader whom no one cared to question. Soon he was a mortal man whose dubious origins were common knowledge, and unfortunately they were origins that invited both reductive speculation and psychological probing.
The gossip that resulted wounded him in a place where no dart had reached before. She had tried to make him see its irrelevance, telling him that no one took these things seriously, but nothing she said could salve his terrible loss of pride. For the first time in their life together, she realised how vulnerable he was. He rarely watched television with her; he spent more and more time alone in his study. He had withdrawn from a world of which he had once been king.
