She glanced at me, looked away, and I saw that she did not believe me, although she was too polite to say as much. “And Roisin?” Kathleen asked. “Was she in the CIA as well as the IRA?”
“She wasn’t in the CIA.”
“Then why did they shoot her?”
So I told her about Seamus’s betrayal, and that too sounded lame, and I was beginning to wish Kathleen Donovan had not come to see me on this bright dry morning, but then I went back to the beginning, right to the very beginning in the smoky Dublin pub when Roisin had come in from the night with raindrops glistening in her hair, and on through to the day when I had piled the stones on her grave. I left Axel out of the tale, and I sketched over the end of our relationship, but the rest was truthful enough.
“So she has no gravestone?” Kathleen asked when I had finished the story. “No memorial?”
“I paid for masses to be said for her in Dublin,” I told her truthfully.
Kathleen shrugged, as if doubting that the masses would do a scrap of good. She walked in silence for a long time, then suddenly spoke of her elder sister, saying how even as a child Roisin had been obsessed by Ireland. “She didn’t go there till she was fourteen, but by then she already spoke Gaelic and she could tell you the name of every county, and the name of every street between St. Stephen’s Green and Phoenix Park.”
“I remember watching the television news from London with her once,” I said, “and at the end they would always give the weather forecast, and that day they said it was going to be a lovely sunny day over England, Scotland and Wales, but there’d be clouds and rain over Ireland, and Roisin got so angry because she thought the English meteorologists were just being anti-Irish.”
Kathleen smiled in recognition of the story and I thought how like Roisin she looked, and I turned away because I did not want to betray anything, not on this cold day when, at last, I was confessing most of my sins.
We walked on, heading south now. To my right I could see my house across the bay’s headwaters while to my left the ocean seethed beyond the dunes. “I always wanted Roisin to come and live here,” I confessed to Kathleen. “I had this dream of raising children and of going shopping on weekends and of sailing on the bay.”
Kathleen looked up at me, surprise on her face, and for a second I thought she was going to cry, but then she offered me a rueful smile instead. “Roisin was never very motherly, not unless she changed when she reached Ireland?”
I shook my head. “She never changed. She was Cathleen ni Houlihan till the very day she died.” Cathleen ni Houlihan was the great fighting heroine of Irish legend.
Once again Kathleen smiled in recognition. “When Roisin was eight she offered to pay me her allowance for the rest of her life, all her allowance, mind you, the whole weekly dollar, forever, if I would just change names with her. She so wanted to be called Kathleen.” We had reached the innermost dunes and now threaded them toward the sea. “She wanted me to sign our name-changing pact with drops of real blood. She even had one of Mom’s kitchen knives all ready.” Kathleen laughed at the memory, then gave me an accusing look. “Did Roisin join the IRA because of you?”
“Not because of me, no, but I introduced her.”
“Did she kill anyone?” It was a hostile question.
“Not directly, at least I never heard that she did.” I walked in silence for a few paces. “I tried to stop her getting involved, but it was no good. And after I left Belfast she stayed on by herself. I know she never shot anyone, but that was because she couldn’t use a gun. She used to shut her eyes before she pulled the trigger, and it made her a lousy shot. But she did what she could. She told me about going into a bar once, looking for a man, and she pretended to be an American journalist, and when she found the guy she went back and told the gunmen exactly where they could locate him. That way they were able to walk straight to his table and not risk drawing attention to themselves by asking questions. But she was frustrated too. They didn’t really trust her, not like their own people. They used outsiders like us when we could be useful, but they never really trusted us in Belfast. I think that’s why Roisin wanted to be trained at Hasbaiya, so she could equip herself for a campaign in London. An American doesn’t stand out in London the way they do in Belfast or Derry.”
Kathleen still walked with her head down. We crossed the sand track that led to the summer shacks at the far end of the beach, then climbed the last line of dunes before the sea. “Did you betray her?”
“Me?”
“You said you were CIA. So you must have informed on her along with everyone else.” Her voice was hostile, her accusations wild.
“It didn’t work like that.” I knew I dared not describe van Stryker’s Stringless Program. “I didn’t inform on her. I loved her.”
“Did you want her to live in Belgium with you?”
“More than I wanted anything else.” I walked past a dead gull’s feathered bones and I spoke of a love’s ending. “Roisin thought my job in Belgium would be dull. It was too far from the armed struggle, you see. I was still doing a job for the IRA, but it wasn’t a job she could help with, and she desperately wanted to be involved at the heart of things and I was going to be at the edge, and so she refused to come with me. We used to meet whenever we could, or whenever I could persuade her. Sometimes I’d fly to Dublin, and sometimes she’d come to Belgium. She once helped me deliver a yacht from Spain to Sweden, and I thought she was so happy during that voyage.” I stopped, remembering Roisin’s real happiness, the sound of her laughter, the gentleness that was surprising in her when she could be eased away from her hatreds. Except it had been her hatreds that made her feel alive. She had enjoyed the voyage, but felt guilty for being away from the fight. “I wanted to marry her,” I told Kathleen, “but she wasn’t interested.”
I stopped at the crest of the dunes to see a ragged sea breaking and foaming and spewing a winter’s spray along the endless sand.
“Was there another man?” Kathleen asked with a cruel acuity.
“Yes.” The great breakers crashed unending on to the cold deserted beach.
“Who?” Kathleen asked, and waited my silence out, so eventually I went on, even though I did not want to.
“The first I knew of was before I left Belfast. He was called John Macroon. He was younger than Roisin, a hot-head, a wild boy. God, he was wild. He would dare anything. And he was also a good Irish Catholic boy, scared witless of women, but I knew Roisin had broken his fears. I just knew from the way she talked and from the way he looked at me, but I never dared ask her, just in case she told me the truth. Once she came to me with a bruised face and I knew he’d hit her, but she wouldn’t tell me what the bruise was. And I didn’t want to believe she was being unfaithful, so I pretended everything was good between us. Then Macroon died, shot by a soldier in an ambush. He was on his way to plant a bomb at a country police station and the soldiers knew he was coming and they just shot him. No warning, no questions, just bang. And that night she was weeping fit to flood all Ireland with tears, and she told me about him.”
I crouched at the foot of the dunes on the beach’s edge. The sea was empty of boats. There were tears in my eyes and I blamed the wind that smelled of salt and shell. “Macroon was very rough with her, but she said that she did not want him to die without knowing a woman. Christ!” I blasphemed aloud, and Christ, but how I hated to remember, yet I remembered only too well. I remembered my pain, and my need to hear every last damned detail of what I saw as a betrayal and Roisin claimed was a gesture of comfort to a hero. I remembered her defiance, her anger at me, her hatred for my tenderness, though later, in the night’s tears, she had wanted my comfort.
“You say Macroon was the first?” Kathleen asked.
“There were others,” I said, then was silent for a long time, or for as long as it took for a dozen great waves to break and shatter along the empty shore. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you any of this in Belgium. I guess I should have written to your family when she died, but somehow Roisin wasn’t the kind of person you thought of as having family.”
Kathleen had found some tiny scraps of shell that she was lobbing idly on to the beach. “I think we all knew she was dead. You can sense it, can’t you? She’d usually remember to send a Christmas card, or a card for Mom’s birthday, but when we didn’t hear for so long…” She shrugged. “But we wanted to know, you understand? We wanted to be certain one way or the other. Mom doesn’t have too long, and Dad’s kind of frail too, so I promised I’d find out for them.” A gull screamed overhead and Kathleen pushed a strand of dark red hair out of her eyes.
“What will you tell your parents?”
She was silent for a long time, then shrugged again. “I guess I’ll lie to them. I’ll say she died in a car accident
