Making Way

Once In Another World

First published 2013

by New Island

2 Brookside

Dundrum Road

Dublin 14

www.newisland.ie

The author has asserted his moral rights.

PRINT ISBN: 978-184840-233-1

EPUB ISBN: 978-184840-234-8

MOBI ISBN: 978-184840-235-5

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

New Island received financial assistance from

The Arts Council (An Comhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland

The wind was bitter and his eyes watered as they scanned the empty street. A hailstorm, an hour previously, had filled the spaces between the cobblestones with tiny beads of ice, and they glittered in the slanted light of the streetlamps. Mixed in with the wind was the plaintive lowing of the cattle from the livestock market off the North Circular Road.

Holland pulled his heavy greatcoat about him and walked briskly through the darkened streets towards the river.

McDaid was waiting for him in front of the Irish Press offices on Burgh Quay. His hat was pulled low and he gripped his collar tightly to his neck. A newspaper van spluttered into life on the other side of the river.

“These are hard times for the Movement. We don’t want to lose you because of a touch of carelessness, do we?”

Holland’s eyes followed the white edge of the water as it lapped against the quayside.

“To be honest, I didn’t think anyone really gave a damn about me any more.”

Holland looked as if nothing could surprise him. He looked tense though. His years in the Movement had taken their toll. His head moved slightly from side to side, his eyes strained to collect the maximum amount of information from his field of vision. There was no one watching as far as he could see, but he wondered why McDaid had chosen such a spot to meet. It felt wrong.

McDaid read his anxiety. “Take it easy, man. I chose this time because of Broy’s Special Branch thugs. There’s a gap in their shifts. The lazy bastards get a couple of hours’ extra sleep from two till five, all on Free State overtime. Anyone who sees us here will take us for printers from the Press offices. I know the names of a few fellas in there if we’re asked.”

“The Movement is in a mess. HQ hasn’t a clue what to do. Nothing but spouting about raids on post offices and banks. And all it will do is bleed us of our best men.” McDaid spat over the embankment. “I’ll tell you something but you have to keep it under your hat—,” he looked up, “if you ever bothered wearing one, that is. We may be able to get our hands on some really big money. It will get us back into gear in the North.”

Holland looked sceptical. “To be honest, I’ve had enough of hanging around here waiting for campaigns that never get off the drawing board, always being told we’re ‘on the verge’. I’m thinking of volunteering for Spain.”

McDaid’s eyes burned and he turned to face Holland directly for the first time.

“Don’t go there,” he hissed. “Take it from me, it’s nothing but a sideshow and they don’t need more clowns.” He drew in a deep breath. “I have something for you, something you’ll enjoy—it’s a driving job.”

“Enough joking. You’ll be a chauffeur. Your boss is a foreign businessman. From Hungary.”

“I don’t want a job, I want to go to Spain. Your generation got their fill after the Rising. Now it’s our turn.”

“Patience, patience. That will come, but we need you in this job. It’s important. You’re to drive this Hungarian fella around the city. It pays four quid a week.”

“There is more to it than just driving. You’re to keep an eye on him as well. You’ll need a gun.”

“Hold on! You want me to risk a couple of years in Arbour Hill for a civilian job?”

“It’s all been arranged. The gun is registered in his name and he has a licence. All you’ll have to do is keep it in the car. It’s as simple as that. Think of it; you’ll have some money in your pocket and you’ll be well rested before we start the next campaign. What do you say?” McDaid pressed Holland’s arm. “You can always quit if it doesn’t suit you.”

McDaid stared up at the younger man. His eyes were watery from the cold. He made Holland think of a very old, very clever dog.

“We can arrange that. Just steer clear of the constabulary for the first few days.”

“All in good time. The gun’s a Parabellum. There are two magazines, eight rounds in each. I’ve been trying to get rid of it for weeks. I was worried they’d find it. It’s a nice piece … reliable.”

“I’ve used them. They’re devils to keep clean though. Is it the old make, 1915?”

“No, it’s the new one. Lighter. Fits nicely in the hand. To think I was close to chucking it into the river during the week.”

“It’s all at your feet in that cloth bag there. The address is there too. Just go round to them and mention the driving job. They’ll be expecting you. Give the name Tom Byrne. No need to broadcast any details about yourself.”

“I know you. You can’t live off the land for the rest of your days, and I don’t want you leaving the country on us.”

McDaid took a last look at the river. “I’ll be heading back. Those mugs won’t even have missed me. I’ll send a message when I want to see you again. Do you have a cigarette for your old Commandant?”

“You’re still at that malarkey? Oh well, any port in a storm.” McDaid put the cigarette Holland proffered him into the inside pocket of his coat. “I’ll have the pleasure of it later. Hard to light it in this wind anyway.” McDaid pulled down the rim of his hat. “I’ll be off then. Remember, the name’s Tom Byrne.”

“One minute, Commandant. Why are you giving this job to me? There’re plenty of married volunteers who could do with the money.”

McDaid’s eyebrows tightened and he pursed his lips. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“What about Conall Caffrey? He knows Dublin better than I do. He’d be a better bodyguard.”

“Caffrey’s in England for the present. You’re the ideal man. Forget about the others and get down to this fellow as soon as it’s daylight. Sinn é, conversation is over. Goodbye now.”

Holland suddenly felt a pang of loneliness. He watched McDaid’s energetic retreat across O’Connell Bridge to the other side of the river. His eyes scoured the streets around him before he reached down for the cloth bag, but his fearfulness dropped away as soon as his fingers touched the hard outline of the German-made Parabellum. Its coldness was electric, like that of a living thing crackling with pent-up energy. He caught a glimpse of the gun’s alien metallic sheen in the streetlight, an illusion of pure white on a surface of absolute black. Parabellums had been used in Easter 1916, the IRA shot the British with them during the War of Independence, and Irishmen died with them in their hands during the Civil War. It was heavy, weighed at least two pounds, and was much too large to fit into his coat pocket. So much for the new version, he thought.

He tucked the bag under his left arm, grasped the barrel with his right hand to stop it from slipping, and began to walk back to his digs in Stoneybatter. The heavy metallic weight of the gun filled him with a peculiar comfort. The raw smell of gun oil circulated in his head.

Having reached Church Street, he halted briefly and placed the bag on the ground in front of him while pretending to tie his shoelaces. He heard nothing but sensed the presence of someone watching him. When he started moving again, he thought he could hear another set of footsteps coming from the street behind him, footfalls calculated to match the rhythm of his own steady progress. A professional, he thought, and not a clod-hopping cop.

The faint echo of an echo that Holland was listening to was suddenly submerged by the screeching of a milk cart approaching from the top of the hill. The cart was moving slowly but the metal rims of the wheels shot an occasional spark into the air where they struck the cobblestones. After it had passed, Holland darted into Smithfield and then threw himself into the black maw of Thundercut Alley. He ran at full speed, clutching the Parabellum tightly against his chest. With high walls to the left and right of him, the unlit alleyway was so narrow that he could have easily have reached out and touched both sides. Anyone tailing him would have to be extremely foolhardy to risk following him in here, but, just in case, he halted abruptly at the bend near the Queen Street exit and crouched down to gather his breath.

The cold air was heavy with the stink of urine. In almost complete darkness Holland fumbled for the Parabellum and loaded a magazine. It clicked smoothly into position and he released the safety catch. At the far end of the alley, he heard faintly the noise of a heel slipping on the cobblestones, the sound amplified by the walls. He tensed, his finger pressed against the trigger guard. It was so dark that he was unable to see the gun in his hands. Like the blade of a knife, a shadow crossed the lighted entrance of the alley. It wavered and hovered in the air for a second and then was gone. Holland waited a few more minutes, invisible even to himself. Then he grinned, picked himself up, stashed the Parabellum in its bag and took another route home through the intimate warren of back streets and lanes behind the Smithfield Market.

The offices were situated in a dingy side street halfway between Dame Street and the river. When he arrived at the address, it was already late morning and the skies were darkening. The name Mundial Financing glittered amid a constellation of small silver signs at the main door of the building. Holland climbed the stairs at a lope, his body still tightly muscled and fit after an autumn’s training in the mountains. On the third floor, he pushed open a door and his eyes immediately met those of a smartly dressed, dark-complexioned young woman sitting at a desk. She was click-clacking away on a typewriter in a small but impeccably equipped office.

The secretary raised her eyebrows. He was coldly perused by a pair of dark brown eyes. The examination completed, she stood up, primly smoothed out the folds of her skirt, and disappeared into a room immediately behind her desk, pointedly closing the door behind her. Holland could hear her conversing with a man inside.

Behind the allure of the secretary’s perfume, he was able to detect another even more captivating aroma. It emanated from everything in the room: the expensive furniture, the waxy-headed paper in the typewriter, the bundles of Manila envelopes, the stacks of thick documents bulging from the filing cabinets. He thought: Who do these people finance? Why are they hidden away in such a dreary street when it’s clear they have the wherewithal for something much better? He peeped at the papers on the secretary’s desk and craned his neck to take a look at the letter she was typing. All he could ascertain was that the language was not English.

“Curious, aren’t we?” The secretary had returned. “Mr Farkas would like to talk to you now. I will take your coat.”

He pushed the door open and went inside. Farkas was standing formally at his desk in a pose that Holland suspected was supposed to look military. He was about average height and fit-looking for his age, which Holland estimated to be in the mid-fifties. Despite his fair hair, his skin was sallow, as if he had once been very tanned and the colour had gradually drained away. In the large, disk-like face, the delicate nose and mouth seemed isolated, like features on a sketchy explorer’s map. Farkas would have been a good cherub if it weren’t for his eyes: Holland felt them, dark and searching, fastening onto his face.

“Tom Byrne’s the name. I was told you were looking for someone to fill a position.”

Farkas said something, which Holland didn’t catch, and then lazily stretched out his hand. Holland extended his own hand, but Farkas, as if he had forgotten his original intention, had now changed his mind and touched him lightly on the arm instead. He looked critically at Holland’s clothes.

Holland was relieved that he had kept his coat on. The suit he was wearing had once been his Sunday best, but was now worn away at the elbows and knees. His tie was stringy and out of shape and his shoes were scuffed and cracked. Farkas extracted a pince-nez from the pocket of his jacket and examined Holland even more closely.

“You are Mr Farkas, aren’t you?” he asked, stumbling over the unfamiliar-sounding name.

“Ah yes, my manners, where are they? I am terribly sorry but I place great importance on first impressions. It’s a habit of mine. Before conversation, one has only the magnetic personality to assess, the essence of the physical presence.”

“Very interesting,” Holland said. He wondered if the man was a nancy. The accent didn’t help much: it was evidently based on upper-class English but was too mechanical to be convincing, as though he had to struggle with each word to keep it from being dragged down and moulded into a foreign flatness.

“Now to business. Your duties will include driving me to work and back each day…”

Holland’s eyes tightened. “Wait a second. Are you telling me that I have the job? Do you not want to know anything about me?”

Farkas replaced his pince-nez, walked behind his desk and started to finger a thick portfolio.

“I know all I need to know. You have come highly recommended. And there has been a perlustration of your abilities.”

Farkas smiled knowingly and Holland suddenly understood why he had been followed the night before.

“If anyone should ask questions, it should be you,” Farkas said. “Ask all the questions you wish. You must be curious about this company? What we do and so forth.”

“If you want to put it like that, yes. For example: what do you think we do?”

“I’m not well up on the world of finance, but you probably send money backwards and forwards. And I’m sure everything is done very discreetly. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have chosen such a hidey-hole for an office.”

Farkas beamed at him and Holland noted a white scar on his left cheek as the muscles stretched into a smile.

“Excellent. You are quite perceptive. We deal in bonds, obligations, promissory notes, stock certificates.” He wagged his finger playfully. “But I do not approve of the word ‘hidey-hole’. Better to say that we place a great importance on discretion, especially on our clients’ behalf.”

“Ah yes, let us say £4 a week to start with. Is that sufficient? You won’t have to work every weekday. If you prove satisfactory, you can expect an increase after a month. And there was something about arms. Your referee said that you preferred using your own. That is perfectly in order. Just keep the weapon in the car. I have a licence for it.”

“Around the city for the most part. We will visit a number of clients, the embassies and consulates occasionally, merchant banks, the Stock Exchange. However, we may also have to drive farther afield; perhaps to England.”

“Ah yes, the gun. You know about guns I’ve been told. This is very important, but of course, as with everything else, discretion is our byword. It is simply a precaution. This company deals in sensitive information, the movements of funds and so on. If we get involved in any sort of unpleasantness, it must be at the most imperceptible level.”

Holland felt as if he had popped up inside a bizarre Hollywood film, with Farkas playing the role of shady continental aristocrat. His own role was still undecided. He could be the honest shamus or the mad Mick gunman, or something else entirely.

“Tomorrow would be fine. There is one other matter however.” Farkas’ eyes traced a line from Holland’s head to his shoes. He was suddenly acutely aware of the difference between himself and his new employer, who was dressed in an expensive suit, with starched collars and a silk tie fastened with a pin. “Are they the only proper clothes you have?”

“Do not concern yourself. We can have you fitted up for something suitable.” Farkas reached for Holland’s hand again. “I’ll see you tomorrow then. If you arrive here at eight o’clock, my secretary will give you the keys to the car. It’s parked at a garage in the next street: a Wolseley, four-door saloon, quite new. She’ll tell you where to find it. You simply drive out to my address and I will give you instructions from there.”

The interview was at an end. Holland left the office unsure what to think. On the street he stopped and drew cold air into his lungs. He thought about the money he would earn and the pleasure of being able to drive a car again. But the job itself sounded extraordinarily vague. Why the gun? Why did a respectable businessman need an armed chauffeur?

That night Holland drifted through the back streets on the north side of the city. He sucked thoughtfully on a cigarette and tried to ignore the stench and noise of the tenement houses, with their open hall-doors and red-raddled stairways. Carefully stopping and checking at shop-windows in case he was being followed, he gradually made his way to a well-known Republican hangout called O’Phelan’s.

The bar was already full and bursting with life when he arrived. Most of the regulars were hangers on, not volunteers. Holland ignored them, although a few tried to grab his attention. He walked quietly behind the counter and knocked on a door on the other side. A panel slid back and a pair of eyes examined him unblinkingly for a couple of seconds. The door creaked open about twelve inches and Holland squeezed his way past the man on guard duty.

He entered a wood-lined room with a hatch in one wall for ordering drinks. There was a single customer only, Conall Caffrey, sitting with a glass and a pint bottle of stout: the naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling made his skin shine a waxy yellow. Caffrey jumped to his feet as soon as he caught sight of Holland. He was of medium height and heavily built with thick blond hair, flattened down with Brylcreem.

“Holland! Long time since last time! Come here. Let’s be getting you a bottle of stout.”

The man’s accent was more refined than Holland’s—South Dublin with traces of an English inflection on some words.

“I was,” said Caffrey in a hushed voice, “on a little visit. I’ll tell you about it, but first we have to sit down nice and quiet like.”

A bottle and glass appeared at the hatch and Caffrey passed over the money. He winked at Holland as he placed them in front of him.

Holland shook his head. “I’ve never taken to this place. No escape routes. If the Staters launch a raid, we’ve had it.”

“You’re wrong. They’ll never get us in here. We bar the door, and do you see that panel there?” Caffrey pointed to a section of the wall. “It comes off and there’s a passage out to the backyard. The Staters aren’t clever enough to seal off the whole street. We’d be up and gone before they’d even figured out we were here.”

“Yeah, and if they find out about the passage, it’d make a very handy trap. One man with a revolver could capture the lot of us.”

Holland settled back and relaxed as much as he could on the hard wooden seat. He unbuttoned his coat and hung it on the back of the chair.

“I was in Ipswich for a couple of days and the amount of skirt was astonishing. I gave the girls over there the story that I was an Irish doctor seconded to the local hospital and they all fell for it. You could do with a weekend in England yourself, Holly. The English girls are amazing—pretend you’re a toff and they’re just asking for it, not like the Holy Mary brigade over here. A good-looking lad like yourself would have it made.”

“Oh yeah, purity of the race and all that. You’ve been spending too much time in McDaid’s company.”

“I was thinking of heading over to Spain, but the Commandant got me a job instead.”

“Not in the light-bulb company? There must be a dozen volunteers working shifts there. If we could design bulbs that blow up, we’d put the Free Staters on the run.”

“No, I’ve got a driving job. I’m to cart this Hungarian businessman around in a fancy car. The money’s all right.”

Before Caffrey had a chance to reply, the door swung open and three men walked in.

They seemed surprised to see Holland. Caffrey stood up and shook their hands. “Let me introduce you to these fellas, Holly. They’re just down from the Wee North. This is Jimmy and Seamus and Butty.” Caffrey sat down and put his arm around Holland. “You know, I love this man. He’s like a brother to me. We’ve had more close calls than you’d ever believe.”

The Northerners looked sceptical but one of them screwed his cigarette in his mouth and offered Holland a hand. They were narrow-faced men with big muscular arms and shoulders and eyes that sparkled like cut glass in the dull light of the snug. They pushed themselves onto the bench.

One of them looked at Holland. “Have you ever been up to the occupied Six Counties yourself?” The man’s eyes bored into him.

Holland felt his throat catch as he answered—a little too quickly: “No, we’ve never been to Belfast.” He saw once again the man on the waste ground, the blood blossoming on his chest, the look of disbelief in his eyes, the recoil as the revolver bucked like a living creature in his hand. Oh yes, he and Caffrey had been to the Six Counties all right: they had run through the streets of Belfast with the harsh cries of the women behind them. They had hidden in the cellar of a safe house for two days before being shipped back to Dublin in the back of a lorry. And they had kissed the shit-laden streets of Dublin with relief when they arrived.

“I thought you said you were in Belfast once,” continued the man turning to Caffrey. The heavily stressed vowels made Holland feel they were being interrogated.

“Ah yes,” answered Caffrey, playing up the Dublin half of his own speech. “Just the once. I’d heard the women of Belfast were fine things altogether. And the rumours were true. I don’t suppose any of you have a sister?” His levity was commendable, but Holland knew that all he was trying to do was cover up for Holland’s gaffe.

“You’d better stay away from my sister. She wouldn’t be safe with some cute Southern hoor like you.”

“The women of Belfast produce good fighting men anyway,” added another. They laughed again in their peculiar, aggressive manner. “And we need them too. We’re the ones done the real fighting in this country. D’ye remember ´35? Up on a roof plugging mad Orangemen with the buggers in the RUC and the B Specials firing at will. That was war. And y’know, there was fuck-all in the way of help from you Southerners.”

Caffrey put on his serious face. “We’ll be up to help you one of these days. If we could just get de Valera off our backs.”

“That’s the trouble with the twenty-six counties. Each time you’re getting all ready to come and help us, there’s suddenly another split in the Movement and a new Chief of Staff. And now there’s de Valera, the man who’s able to sign his name but can’t seem to read what he’s signing. Ah sure he’ll unite the country too—on paper. It’ll all be there in black and white in his little desk drawer. I’ve heard we’re going to have a united Ireland in his new constitution. What’s it they call it now, Butty?”

“Oh aye, it’s going to make the Orangemen piss in their beds,” said another.

Caffrey and Holland smiled uneasily. In an organisation full of fanatics and extremists, none were to compare with the men from the North. They were the nearest thing the Movement had to front-line troops.

The conversation meandered over the well-worn themes: the lack of new recruits, the shortage of arms and ammunition, men who had been rounded up or shot. After another drink, Caffrey and Holland made their excuses and left.

“All they asked was if you had been up to the North, an innocent bloody question. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost and start telling them that we have never been to Belfast. Jesus, Holly, I’m beginning to worry that you’re losing your grip.” He pulled Holland closer and whispered in his ear: “Don’t forget who shot a hole in their beloved hero of the Falls Road.”

Holland grabbed Caffrey by the neck and yanked him close. “Yeah, Caff, and you know what bothers me: it looks like we plugged the wrong man. The Northerners got the real informer two weeks later.”

Holland let go and Caffrey reeled back on his heels. His eyes were black holes in a face pale with anger. “Holland, you are out of line. We are foot soldiers, nothing else. We carry out our orders.”

Holland realised he’d gone too far. “You’re right. It just bothers me never getting the whole story.” He clapped Caffrey on the shoulder and pretended to punch him on the arm. “You could have warned me that you were meeting a bunch of Northerners.”

“I didn’t know they were going to be there. Forget it. They were too drunk to notice anything. Maybe they thought your sister had been violated by some Ulsterman on the rampage.”

Caffrey caught Holland’s arm and said in a plummy English accent. “Things are afoot, me lad. Don’t worry about your lovely family.”

Caffrey rubbed his nose. “Bob’s your uncle,” he said before running off down the street.

Back in his bedroom he could not relax enough to sleep. The Northerners had upset him. For a long time he lay in the motionless darkness trying to control the violent pictures streaming through his mind. The skin in his mouth and throat was dry, as if he had been shouting hard. Eventually he summoned the strength to pull himself out of the bed and switch on the light. There was a noggin of Jameson’s whiskey in his bedside locker. He took a swig from it and walked over to the window. No other source of illumination was visible in the street: his room sailed dizzy and alone over a sea of absolute night.

The following morning was fresh and blustery. A clear sharp easterly had swept away the malodorous air of the previous night from the tops of the crowded tenement streets and the pigsties and cattle pens of Stoneybatter. Holland reached the Mundial office just after eight o’clock and ran into the secretary halfway up the stairs. He noticed her legs, smooth, lean and tanned. When he greeted her, she looked flustered, as though caught in some indiscretion, but quickly regained her poise and coldly handed him the keys to the car and the lock-up. When he asked for Farkas’ address, she smiled coldly and gave him directions to a street in Sandymount. She told him that he did not require the house number.

Holland found the lock-up easily enough. He unhooked the padlock and swung open the heavy doors. Inside was the bulk of a Wolseley saloon. Holland had never actually sat in a luxury motorcar before, let alone driven one. He climbed inside, leant back in a seat that reeked of best-quality leather and ran his fingers along the wooden instrument panel. When he started the engine, it hummed like a colony of well-bred bees.

It took him about ten minutes to reach the Sandymount address. Farkas was standing on the street corner. To Holland’s surprise his employer was wearing a crumpled mackintosh and a trilby that had seen better days. One of his long-fingered hands held a black attaché case while the other was tucked nonchalantly into his pocket. Only his sallow complexion and the continental appearance of the attaché case marked him out from the other office functionaries hurrying towards the city centre.

Holland drew in beside the kerb and shouted at him to hop in. Farkas climbed into the back seat.

“Last time I saw that look I was in school about to get a pandying from the master.”

“I would like to remind you that I am your employer. We can dispense with the ‘sir’ but I would like a modicum of respect.”

Holland caught Farkas’ eyes in the mirror. “For your information I told you to hop in so as to avoid attracting attention. If I started acting the chauffeur, everyone in the street would notice, wouldn’t they?”

Farkas looked at him intensely, as though his remark had made a deep impression on him.

“You are perfectly correct of course. I had no intention of insulting your intelligence.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence. Farkas took out his pince-nez from an inside pocket and read through his papers while Holland concentrated on the traffic, which mostly consisted of great shoals of cyclists. Farkas thanked him when they arrived at the office and then disappeared up the stairs while Holland parked the car.

Holland had no idea what to do for the rest of the day. Back at the office the secretary ignored him. He took a seat and began to leaf through a sheaf of newspapers on a nearby table; he had never seen so many different titles before. Apart from the Irish dailies, all the British quality papers were there and at the bottom of the heap he even found old copies of Le Figaro (which he took to be an Italian paper) and the Frankfurter Zeitung.

Without lifting her eyes from the document she was proofreading, the secretary said: “He reads only what he needs to know.”

Pardon me for opening my gob, thought Holland. He soon grew tired of all the articles about problems in Europe, the fascists, the communists, the Spanish war (all the news seemed to be happening somewhere else these days, although it pleased him to read that the Irish fascists were still on the decline), and settled down to read the sports pages.

When he had his fill of reading the columns of black print, he watched the secretary for a while from his safe redoubt behind the newspaper. Her face had begun to fascinate him, although he did not consider her beautiful. She looked nothing like the fair-haired, rosy-cheeked girls displayed on the giant billboards beside the Phoenix Park. Her face was too long and angular, her hair a disorderly mass of black curls. But there was something about those coal black eyes, the way they were slightly slanted, as though constantly enquiring after some item she had lost. And then there was the mouth, the full red lips, even more striking because of her dark complexion, quite unlike the anaemic or painted lips of Irish girls. He wondered vaguely if she was French; her accent was difficult to place.

Lunchtime arrived but nothing was said. The secretary took out a packet of sandwiches from her bag and began to eat. She devoured her food in short predatory bites.

Holland left the office without saying a word and found a place selling hot meals for a reasonable price on Dame Street. He treated himself to the mixed grill, “the whole show” as the man said—sausages, egg, liver and fried potatoes for two shillings—and washed it down with tea. Then he returned to the office, collected some newspapers and sat in the car to read them until Farkas emerged about two hours later. Again they drove in silence; the only sound, besides the changing of gears, was the occasional ruffle of papers from the backseat. Holland dropped him off at the same street corner in Sandymount. Farkas alighted on the pavement and glanced back at Holland.

“Well, we’ll have to find you something more suitable tomorrow. And a hat of course.”

“Whatever you say, boss,” said Holland and drove off. He took the coast road for the pleasure of it, stopped the car beside the beach and opened the window. The cold, antiseptic air filled his lungs and this sensation made him recall his mother’s face. She was young again, just as she was in the old photographs he had of her, smiling as the wind tugged at her hair. She does not see him: she exists in the moment, perhaps before he was born, when her life was happy. He restarted the car, conscious of a weakness inside him, a fatal vulnerability that even membership of the Movement cannot heal.

He drove to the city centre, returned the Wolseley to the lock-up and walked to his digs.

“I sat and read newspapers all day in front of a snobby-looking secretary. She could hardly be bothered looking up when I asked her a question.”

Holland thought for a few seconds. “I was doing a steady line for a while, but in my business that’s not always easy. It didn’t work out.”

Mrs Mullen placed her hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. “You’re a good man. You’ll make some girl very happy. Can I get you more potatoes?”

“Yes, thanks. By the way, if anyone rings up asking for a Tom Byrne, it’ll really be me they’re wanting.” Mrs Mullen gave him a questioning look. “It’s because of the Special Branch. If they know I have a job, they’ll try to get me kicked out of it.”

“My own husband will be out in less than a month. I know how hard things will be for him.”

That was the night Mrs Mullen visited him in his room. Afterwards he could not really convince himself that her visit had come as a surprise. Since his arrival, she had paid an unusual amount of attention to him, as though he were a special guest rather than an ordinary tenant. She was constantly brushing his coat or asking his advice or wondering whether he might be hungry or thirsty.

She came into his room just before dawn. The squeaking of the doorknob woke him immediately. She was dressed only in her shift, her large breasts protruding through the thin fabric. Holland was at first unsure whether or not he was dreaming. Mrs Mullen held her finger to her lips as she climbed into the bed beside him. The springs creaked in protest. Her body filled up the bed with raw animal warmth.

He ran his fingers inside her nightdress and up her sides and felt the weight of her breasts, their coolness contrasting with the intense warmth of her belly.