Kathleen scooped sausages, black pudding and a fried egg onto Minogue's plate. Iseult leaned her chin on the heels of her hands, and elbowed into the plate exactly the way her parents had tried to train her out of doing for years. She watched her father attack the sausages. He looked up at her,
'Isn't it awful entirely?' he said quietly.
Kathleen sat down. She watched Minogue pour her tea.
His shirt-cuffs were dirty. He had missed a bit shaving under his ear. Hair was bushing out of his nose. She looked over to Iseult and saw her looking back. Her vision changed with the salty film which came between them. When she blinked, a drop popped on the table-cloth. Kathleen kept her head down then. The odd time, when she looked up, Iseult was looking at her, a big open face like the moon on her, as if she knew.
'Tell us now,' Minogue said at last. 'Any chance you'd set us up for one of those music recitals again?'
As was his habit when working to a deadline, Allen skipped his tea. He felt that his public lectures needed to be revised now. The danger, he felt, was in routinising the delivery. He had noticed his own inner voice telling him that he was drifting into cliches. His metaphors strained him. He was actually tiring himself out by trying to suppress the inner critic. He tried to persuade himself that every audience was a new one, but that didn't satisfy him.
This time it wasn't just a matter of setting up some new idiom or sprinkling in new anecdotes and metaphors. He had come up with a good one during the week: ^' We cannot live in the subjunctive or pluperfect anymore than we can live in the future. Mental illness is also a case of people largely living out false histories. Living out life in the wrong tense. Wrongs done us in childhood, wrongs done in history must not put blinkers on the future… ' That'd certainly strike a chord in any audience.
Allen sat back. He wondered if this sounded a bit academic. Where would he deliver this one? Newry? Allen remembered that Newry was largely a Catholic town. He determined to blot this understanding out so that he would not skew the lecture because of the fact. He would not pander to partisan learnings. He had spoken in Newry before and he had been heckled a lot, but he had also been applauded. There was an informal committee there to welcome him and to put him up.
Allen switched on the radio for the half-six news. Two armed men were still at large in the Blackrock area after a shooting incident today. A Garda was dead and one of the group was in custody. Police believed that they had intercepted the group en route to a bank robbery. All roads in the vicinity had road-blocks manned by armed Gardai and members of the armed forces.
He stiffened in his chair. The small of his back began to ache. He began his habitual inner talk to relieve the stress. He tried to loosen his muscles but couldn't. Abruptly he switched off the radio. He noticed that his hand trembled slightly.
Allen tried to return to his notes. He could easily take six months off. Greece, say, or Sardinia; someplace warm, distant. Maybe the break could be complete: he might never come back.
At this notion, Allen's thoughts of the lecture all but fled from his mind. He could not afford to think of this possibility. It threatened to burst completely through the dike he had built to staunch such thoughts. Again he tried to rescue his former life by concentrating on his notes. It wouldn't work. Allen threw his pencil across the room. He let his arms hang loose over the arms of the chair. The silence after the radio seemed to indict him as he looked at the refined cliches in his notes. He saw the hopeful, expectant faces of his audiences, those thoughtful, law abiding citizens-exactly the ones who were not involved in the violence. Those others were out in the night somewhere, planning, watching, waiting. They had waited for Allen. Now they had drawn him into their cycle of malignant atavism.
Daily he had checked to see if he was drifting into that helplessness and passivity which his training led him to expect. He had noticed a distance growing between his waking thoughts and his work. Some sleeplessness too, but he had preserved a spark by dint of his own powers. He could not always staunch the fear which came to him when he was reminded of where he now stood.
Allen willed himself up from the chair. He stood for a count of twenty, barely quelling this bout of panic. He knew that it would get worse too. How many more crises could he withstand, keeping up the manic fafade of a normal life? How long before he broke… or before he would make his break? Maybe now, this evening, this miserable evening, the reckoning had come. He hadn't risen to being a professor of psychology in Trinity College from a poor emigrant family in Birmingham just to go under meekly, another victim.
Allen felt the fear and hatred ebb and a determination setting in in their place. He looked about his office, at the remnants of what was his old life. He could phone travel agents for a start.
Allen reconnected the phone. It rang almost as soon as he took his hand off it. 'Allen?'
'Yes?'
'I've been trying to reach you for some time now. You should stop this childish business of unplugging your phone. We must meet. As soon as possible, actually.'
'Your office?'
'No. It's better if we meet outside Trinity.'
Loftus paused as if trying to sense the atmosphere for cues.
'O.K., then. I'll be dining alone in the Granary. I'm leaving now. I'll expect you there presently.'
Allen put down the phone without answering. The image of Agnes McGuire came to him. He had watched her from a distance in the church at Walsh's funeral. Her face radiated a calm, even when she paused to whisper to Walsh's parents. There was an irreducible truth to her which Allen had recognised in a handful of people he had met over his lifetime. She was an enigma to him but overwhelmingly of this world at the same time. Not the longing for a matriarchal comfort in him, no, more a feeling he remembered as a child, on a visit to Liverpool. He had seen a great tanker anchored offshore, mysterious and inaccessible to him. Promise.
Outside, puddles at the edges of the pathways held sections of Trinity buildings, moving them as Allen walked by. Parts of the cobblestones had dried. The grass seemed to breathe. The air was close. Students were calling to each other across the echoing stone square. A gowned lecturer helloed him in the gathering gloom, pipe smoke smell trailing him. Lights swelled soft yellow out onto the stones. Allen felt that he had let down a load, a load that had clung to him for most of his life. He did have a choice, one choice at least, and he was determined to use it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Moroney and Galvin, the two Special Branch detectives, stepped from their car in Baggot Street. They had been preceded by plain-clothes officers from a surveillance unit some hours before.
Neither of the detectives was happy with what they had heard. The driver of the Mercedes had picked up the stolen car with its plates doctored in a lane behind Baggot Street. On the way in from Blackrock, they had been radioed that the garage had been located. They had had to decide whether to keep a lookout on the premises or whether to go in right then and there. Curiously, it was Galvin, the detective who had done the heavy with the prisoner, who was in favour of keeping watch.
'You never know. They mightn't have heard… ' he had said.
'It's been on the radio and the telly,' Moroney replied.
'But they mightn't reckon on our pal telling us anything. They might be kind of slow on the details. Might come in a hurry to tidy up or something.'
Moroney wondered if perhaps they hadn't an embarrassment of riches. Perhaps they had done their job too well, getting the driver to tell them what he had.
'Ah, give them credit now. They'll have been mobile and ready to get the hell out at a moment's notice. I have an idea that there might be something useful in this place for us. My guess is that it's part of a network. I think we have to move fast. We have to get some results, that's the politics of the thing right now. The shootings and bombings are on the up and up. Can't wait.'
Galvin said nothing.
'We'll go in, what?'
'All right,' Galvin said.
The two men walked by the entrance to the lane. The light was poor. They recognised the old coachhouses,
