plastic sheeting that I had wrapped and sealed around the long wooden box that I now wrestled up from the damp sandy hole and on to the hearth. I had last seen this box seven years before, when, just hours before leaving the house, I had wrapped and hidden it.
The telephone rang.
I swore.
It rang four times, then there was a loud click in the kitchen and suddenly Sarah Sing Tennyson’s voice sounded. “I’m sorry I can’t speak with you right now, but if you’d like to leave a message after the tone I’ll get back to you just as soon as I can.” Another click, a beep, and I assumed the caller had rung off, but then a man’s voice spoke. “Where the hell are you, Sarah? I’ve tried the loft. Listen, baby, just give me a call, OK? Please? This is William, just in case you’ve forgotten who I am.” The last few words were spoken in a petulant whine, suggesting that William had been severely pussy-whipped by Ms. Tennyson. I grinned in sympathy for poor William, then laughed as I thought of the FBI or the CIA trying to decode the lovesick fool’s message. The phone, I was sure, had to be bugged. I might have been thanked by van Stryker, but that did not mean I was trusted.
I carried my unearthed box over to the long table that was littered with twisted paint tubes, sketch books, pads and magazines. I made a space, then used a pair of Sarah Tennyson’s scissors to slash through the plastic wrapping. I levered the top off the box and found the contents just as I had left them.
On top of the box was a US Army issue Colt .45 automatic dating from the Second World War. Its magazine held a paltry seven rounds, but they were powerful. I cleaned the pistol meticulously, dry-fired it a few times to make sure that everything was working, then pushed one of its magazines home. I dropped the gun into a pocket of my oilskin jacket, and, feeling a good deal safer, went to open my tin of Spam.
I made myself some crude sandwiches, enlivened them with Sarah Sing Tennyson’s mustard, then, before eating and because the broken kitchen window was filling the house with bitterly cold air, I lit a fire with Sarah Sing Tennyson’s kindling and logs. I found some of my tenant’s cardboard and masking tape, which I used to make a crude repair to the window, and afterward used her coffee and grinder to make myself a pot of fresh-brewed that I carried with the sandwiches to my fireside.
Food had rarely tasted better. It was like the magic moment at the end of a sea watch, after a bitter trick at a frozen wheel in a stinging spray and a cold wind, when the worst of junk food thrown together in a pitching boat’s galley tastes like a banquet. It made me wonder why more five-star restaurants did not feature Spam and mustard sandwiches on their menus.
I also wondered what had happened to modern art for, as I ate, I stared in puzzlement at Sarah Sing Tennyson’s paintings. Two or three of the canvases were recognizably pictures of a lighthouse, and the rest were recognizably like the two or three that had some remote relationship to reality, but beyond that the canvases were a drab mess. She did not seem to brush the paint so much as trowel it on like rough plaster, yet clearly she was some kind of recognized artist for she had claimed to make a living from her painting. Her most puzzling effort was a splatter of purple and brown and white paint which, when I turned it round on its easel, bore a small and helpful label on its reverse: “Sunset, Nauset, October 1990.” If that was a sunset, I thought grimly, then the environment was in a worse state than the most fearful doomsayers suspected. I turned off the electric lights and carried the coffee to the big window.
The wind gusted at the black panes. Over its fretful noise I could just hear the roar of distant water where the ocean breakers tumbled on the outer face of the barrier beach. Closer, in the cold darkness, a thousand rivulets of salt water were creeping up from the bay, flooding the salt marshes and rippling the eel grass where the most succulent scallops grew. There were oysters out there too, and the best clams in the world, and mussels, and lobsters to make an appetite drool. And when a family tired of lobster there were cod cheeks or fresh swordfish steaks or bluefish or herrings, and in the old days it was a rare house that did not have a whole deer carcass hung up at winter’s beginning, and in the fall there were ducks and beach-plums and cranberries and wild blackberries. It was a good place to live. And to die, I remembered, and so, the sandwiches finished and the coffee drunk, I went back to my unearthed box.
I took out the Colt’s remaining magazines, then lifted out my second gun, my favorite, a semi-automatic M1 Carbine. It was a simple battle-ready rifle, also dating from the Second World War, yet it felt balanced and it fired beautifully.
I cleaned and loaded the M1 which, like the Colt, had been stolen in Boston for eventual delivery to the IRA. I had kept both guns back from their shipment, wanting them for myself, and now they would help protect Saddam Hussein’s gold. Thinking of the gold reminded me that in the morning I must find a public telephone to discover if Johnny had any news of
In the meantime I carried the two guns upstairs. Sarah Sing Tennyson had installed no electric lights on the second floor so I had to find a candle to light my way to the bedroom where I discovered my antique whaling harpoon back on the wall. The harpoon was a nasty piece of work; its rusting iron head was six feet long, wickedly barbed, and socketed on to a wooden pole handle that gave it another six feet of reach. I used the harpoon to brace the door in case an enemy tried to surprise me in the night, then I undressed, laid the guns close to hand, climbed under Sarah Sing Tennyson’s patchwork quilt, and slept.
I slept like the dead. I slept through the dawn and into the morning, I slept through the night’s rising tide and through the forenoon’s ebb and I did not wake till the seas were pushing in again to the marsh channels. A bright winter sunlight streaked the yellow panelled wall and lit the stripped-pine chest of drawers on which Sarah Sing Tennyson had placed two Staffordshire dogs. I could smell the ocean, and I could smell her scent on the sheets and pillowcases. It had been so long since I had smelt that in a bed, a woman’s smell, and I immediately, predictably, thought of Roisin.
There had been women enough since Roisin, but none like her. Sometimes I told myself that I had romanticized Roisin’s memory as a shield to protect myself from other entanglements, yet in truth I wanted entanglement. I wanted to be like Johnny. I wanted to wake to a house full of noise and children and dogs and muddle. I wanted a wife. I wanted what passed in this world for normality, and yet was such a rare privilege for it was only made possible by love.
I rolled over. Sarah Tennyson had hung four prints on the wall which divided the bedroom from the stairwell. They were old prints of faraway cities, all domes and spires and arches. Where had she bought them? With whom? And what men had come to my house and lain on these sheets and shaved in my bathroom and taken their evening drinks on to the deck to watch the shadows lengthen across the marsh? Had browbeaten William slept here and wakened to the sound of tidewaters creeping through the marsh? I smelt the woman-smell on the warm sheets and was jealous.
I turned on to my back. The bedroom dormer faced east toward the sea and once, when the bay’s tide had been unusually high, I had seen the water’s dappled ripples reflected by the rising sun on to this bedroom ceiling, though usually the high tides stayed a hundred yards off in the intricate channels beyond the deck. I had always dreamed of putting an old duck punt in the closest channel and, at the bay’s deep-water edge, where a secret tideway wriggled past Pochet Island, I had planned to moor a small cat-boat that a child could sail down past Sampson Island and Hog Island and Sipson Island and Strong Island and so to the new raw cut where the great Atlantic had ripped the barrier beach apart and clawed the houses off from Chatham’s foreshore. This was a place for kids to grow, for this was God’s adventure playground. It was a place where a child could play wild and yet feel safe. It was a place to romp with dogs along the tideline and to scratch for clams in the mud and to climb on fallen trees and to take a canoe across the bay to where the ocean beaches stretched empty. It was a place where God had so arranged matters that television reception was bad and a child could therefore grow without the worst corrosion of all.
Except I would raise no children here. I was forty, I had never been married, and Roisin, whom I had thought to bring here because she would love the bay and the beaches and the sea beyond, was dead. God, I thought, forty years old! In the trade of terror that made me an old old man. Most kids started in their teens and were burned out by their early twenties. They met girls who wanted babies, and mothers do not like their babies’ fathers to be serving life imprisonment in Northern Ireland’s Long Kesh or in Eire’s Portlaoise Jail, and so the milky new brides would nag their menfolk into giving up the gun. A few men, like Seamus Geoghegan, survived longer, but only because they had never been hen-pecked out of the business. I smiled, thinking of Seamus watching the Celts play netball.
