The woman had gone into Andoversford for food. Moynihan, red-eyed from the bravado of a sleepless night guarding him, was hungry and wanted breakfast. Claire Drummond had acquiesced reluctantly, sensing something uncalculating, vindictive about the Irishman. McBride, who was cramped and aching from sleeping on the sofa, felt dirty and helpless and angry. His sleep had been ragged and broken by dreams of his own danger and by the repetitive, insistent, humiliating impression of himself as a dupe, someone led by the nose by people cleverer than himself to this cottage and this captivity. On waking, his diminished self persisted, and he felt, too, the helplessness which would force him to fall in with Claire Drummond and Moynihan. How could he not do as they wanted?
Moynihan grudgingly filled him a glass of water, tipped it against his mouth, waited while he gulped it down. The tepid, night-tasting liquid made his empty stomach rumble audibly. Moynihan sat opposite him, slumped in his chair. He looked tired and careless, yet also the animosity he felt towards McBride emanated from him like electricity, gleamed in his red-rimmed eyes. McBride was afraid of him. He believed the hatred was sexually inspired — Claire Drummond, who Moynihan could never possess, who had slept with McBride. He wondered whether Moynihan's political fanaticism was stronger than his jealousy, his gnawing sense of humiliation which he evidently blamed on McBride.
Moynihan stood up, and walked over to McBride, who flinched as the Irishman loomed over him. The gun was very evident, lightly held but dangling meaningfully towards McBride's lap. McBride was afraid, anxious for the return of the woman.
'Was she good in bed, Yank?' Moynihan asked after a long time, as if he had reviewed the whole of his past relationship with Claire Drummond in the extended, creeping silence. The clock on the mantelpiece, rewound the previous night, ticked with a solemn hysteria.
'What can I say that's safe,' McBride heard himself saying as if the words and the casual tone belonged to someone else; a more considerable man than himself, or a figure from melodrama. 'Either way you're going to hit me. If I say no, your ego will be insulted, and if I say yes, she was fine and she climbed all over me and don't you miss it nights, you're going to—' Moynihan hit him at that point, not with the temporarily forgotten gun but with his fist, as if he did not wish to take too much advantage, hurt too much, appear to need the gun to inflict himself on the American. Blood seeped from the corner of McBride's mouth, exciting Moynihan. His hand twitched at his side, where he hid it like something he did not wish to be accused of owning. But this was him, the Yank, the bastard who'd—
'Was she good?' he ground out.
'Yes, dammit! Why in hell's name do you want to know? What good can it do you?' McBride struggled to sit upright again, elbowing himself up, his bound hands tingling with cramp. He sensed he was on a path he had not consciously chosen, but which he had known was there for him to take. He hadn't meant to anger Moynihan, but he had done it deliberately, all the same. Suddenly, he knew that he didn't want Claire Drummond to come back yet. Not until—
'You bastard,' Moynihan breathed, leaning closer so that McBride could faintly smell his unwashed mouth and the staleness of last night's supper and his fitful sleeping. And his unwashed body exuded a discernible odour. 'You bastard.'
'Come on, Moynihan, you're just angry because your piece of tail went to someone else's bed. You're not interested in a scientific account or a consumer's report. You want to know — yeah, I screwed the ass off your woman!'
He steadied himself for the blow. Moynihan raised the gun, but then again used his clenched fist into the side of McBride's face.
'Shut up!'
McBride spat out the mouthful of blood. 'You
'Shut up, keep your filthy mouth shut!'
'What is it with you guys? You can blow people to pieces but you can't deal with your own balls? You hide in corners watching your women like you watch your bombs go off! You're a prick, Moynihan, a gutless woman-loser — Paddy Pumpkin-Eater, had a wife and couldn't keep her!' Moynihan was standing a yard or so away from the sofa with its brick-coloured stretch covers and the furious, hunched body of McBride occupying its centre. He made a move towards the American, then held off as if he wanted to go on listening while the voice lashed him. His face coloured like a lying child's. 'Jesus Christ!' McBride breathed, baring his teeth as if to attack Moynihan like a wolf. 'The big tough terrorist wants to
'Shut up, shut up!' Moynihan pressed his gun against McBride's groin, just as the woman had done the previous night. 'I could blow it off for you, McBride. Then try laughing with your balls on the floor.' Moynihan's face was cold with a sheen of sweat and self-disgust. McBride had shown him an image of himself the truth of which he felt compelled to acknowledge. McBride, their eyes only a foot or so apart, was afraid. The pain in his groin was minimal, to be disregarded — because now he knew why he had arranged this quarrel; it had produced this open, frontal proximity.
'You haven't got the balls to do it. She might be angry—' Moynihan jabbed downwards, and McBride winced and cried out — and grabbed the gun with both hands, jerking upwards and to the side at once, so that the round in the chamber discharged into the ceiling. McBride felt sound go far away, and his own breath was the only noise he understood. Moynihan was yelling, or just breathing, as McBride jerked him by his gun hand to one side, toppling his weight over the arm of the sofa, rolling after him, landing on top of him, knee out into Moynihan's groin.
The desperation that would pump the adrenalin was beginning to come into Moynihan's face, but it was too late. McBride was ahead in that play, felt the hope of escape surge through him. He dropped his head, striking Moynihan across the bridge of the nose with his forehead, then lifted his head as the blood gushed and struck Moynihan's hand against the floor time after time, beating his head into the Irishman's face once more. Moynihan groaned and released the gun. McBride stood up, and his legs felt insecure and newborn under him, the frame top- heavy and overbalanced. He rocked to and fro, holding Moynihan's gun in his two bound hands. It was a big Smith & Wesson from TV police serials, awkward and heavy in his grip. Moynihan lay with his eyes closed, groaning, holding his nose and mouth in cupped hands as if drinking cool water. McBride struck him across the temple with the barrel of the revolver, and he lay still.
The room reasserted itself, returning with the sense of birdsung silence from outside the windows. No sound of a car, the woman not yet returning. He was indecisive now, the body running down like a broken spring without the injections of anger and desperation. He began quivering with shock and the realization of inflicted violence.
He went into the kitchen, scrabbled in a drawer under the enamel sink for a knife, came out with a carving knife which he tried to jam unsuccessfully into the drawer, then the door-jamb, finally squatting on the floor with the knife pressed between his thighs while he stroked the strips of cloth over the blade. They parted singly, and slowly, and he cut himself on his wrists and clenched, eager fists a number of times before he could pull the last of the cloth apart and begin to rub the bleeding wrists. Then he stood up, but cramp assailed him, making him hobble to the rear door of the cottage.
He listened. No car-noise. He paused on the edge of the fine morning, framed in the doorway, coatless and chill with the breeze already, the blue sky interrupted by some rolling white cloud with smudged grey lower edges. He studied the landscape. A farm, and village, the rulered line of the main road half a mile away, and clumps of woodland stretching across the folded, flowing countryside.
He begun running, recklessly, as fast as he could, almost overbalancing in his rapid movement down the slope. The wind yelled in his ear and his blood pounded. He was free now.
He did not hear the siren of a police car, growing louder behind him.
Claire Drummond was anxious to get back to the cottage. The danger inherent in her appearance in Andoversford was more apparent to her because she was the one who had squeezed the trigger of the little Astra twice into the face of the pig in the multi-storey car park. Moynihan's breakfast—
Still, she had to mollify Sean Moynihan somehow, at some little cost. He hated McBride too much, and so
