He had pondered, at first, whether the war had distracted him from his marriage; but, remembering the caged days in the studio-attic in Cork, the search for this cottage in Leap, the restlessness of the days in the bedroom he then used as a studio — he knew that perhaps the war had saved his relationship with Maureen. She had become only a necessary fraction of his life, placed in proportion; he thought that she, too, had accepted that he was somehow disabled from accepting the completeness of a life that centred on the domestic, on a relationship.
This bed thy centre is— He stood up, shrugging the Donne from his mind. The German agent — if indeed one had landed three nights before — would have left no traces, unless he was somehow careless. The float would be buried or hidden inland, and if he was anywhere in the area still, he would have registered at an inn in a plausible disguise or be staying with one of the fellow-travellers who expected a Nazi victory.
He walked slowly through the soft sand, head down, eyes casting about for something out of place. The smoothness of sand where the belly of a dragged float had passed, one half-erased footprint missed in the night—
McBride was a hunter. Something Drummond kept in a kennel until there was a man who needed hunting down. German agents had been landed in southern Ireland, along the Cork coast, since 1937 or "38, most of them taking the quick route north either to Dublin to cross on the ferry as native and neutral Irish to Liverpool; or into Ulster and from Belfast to England. In either case, the object was the same — spying on Britain.
Until perhaps three or four months ago, when McBride had found a dead body on the beach — drowned when his float capsized in a rough sea — carrying papers which gave his nationality as Irish, and which would not have fitted him to cross to mainland Britain, but rather would have suited a resident of the Republic.
Since then, rumours, traces — in one case a killing — of agents who were staying in the Cork and Kerry areas, possibly being taken off again by submarine the way they had come. Rumours of men with assumed English identities — painters, bird-watchers, travellers, students. Swallowed by the damp, musty County Cork earth, for all the hard evidence.
The sun was well up — the day bright, hard as steel against his face, the low hills behind the bay sharp in the dry, frosty air, the sea smooth beyond the exposed mud flat — by the time he reached the point where the road bordered the beach, which itself narrowed to a thin, grey strip. He had found nothing, and wondered whether he might temporarily abandon his search and check Ross Carbery itself, sprawled haphazardly on the far bank of the bay's narrow inlet at the mouth of a lazy river. An agent with the right papers might have gone into the village — they were walking up to the front door these days, after all—
He climbed the steps up to the sea wall and the road, his eyes alert as if he expected to see an unfamiliar ornithologist or cyclist. He walked up to the main road from Clonakilty, along which he had been driven by Drummond the previous evening. He felt almost light-hearted, in spite of his wasted morning, and he whistled to himself, hands thrust for warmth in the pockets of his donkey-jacket. He was happy in his work, and he was working again. Walsingham and his concern with Guernsey had receded in his imagination.
A pony-trap caught up with him just before he reached the bridge across the inlet to Ross Carbery. He turned, and his face darkened as he saw the driver was his father-in-law, Devlin, the principal grocer in the village. Devlin, who must have recognized his walk, his posture, still adopted no conciliatory face. He'd been delivering to the farms, perhaps, and was as reluctant about the encounter as McBride.
"Good-day, Da," McBride said, squinting with the sunlight and perhaps with irony.
"Michael — good-day." McBride observed Devlin's thick neck, the squat body which he could never decide was actual or merely the visual exaggeration prompted by his dislike of the man. In the end, Devlin's Republican politics; his short-changing, his bully's air were little alongside the man's voice, gestures, shape. "How is Maureen?"
McBride climbed up beside the man, acting out their mutual parody of propinquity. Devlin clucked the pony into movement, shaking the reins on its back.
"Maureen's fine."
"You've been away, then?" Devlin continued as the cart moved onto the narrow road bridge. A bull-nose Morris squeezed past it.
"My aunt in Dublin — sick again. You know how it is, Da, when they get old—" Neither of them believed, but both normally accepted, the fiction of his behaviour. Devlin certainly knew that McBride worked for the British, and despised him for it. McBride, for his part, had nothing but contempt for the narrow, bigoted, unrealizable aspirations of the IRA. Sometimes, he wondered when some of Devlin's more outspoken, and less cowardly, acquaintances would get around to an attempt on his life — as a traitor to something-or-other.
"Ah," was all Devlin replied.
"Any strangers in Ross Carbery in the last three days?" McBride asked, studying the pony's rump intently.
Devlin was silent almost all the way across the bridge, then he said: "I haven't heard."
"The lads about as usual, then?"
"They are."
"All of them?" Devlin steered the pony into an alleyway off the main street of Ross Carbery, to the yard behind his shop. He grunted as if it took all his physical strength to control the docile animal. He did not look at McBride, who suspected he was lying.
Devlin provided him with information as readily as if McBride threatened his daughter in some obscure and violent way. He did it, however, simply out of his own fear of Maureen's husband — perhaps even out of fear of Maureen herself. The IRA, for some strange reason, did not frighten him. He did not inform on them, anyway, and the British had lost interest for the moment. McBride had never threatened or coerced. There had been no need.
"Now, Da — anything, anything at all?"
Devlin reversed the pony and trap, then climbed down. He looked up at McBride. His eyes shifted guiltily.
"Someone—" He cleared his throat. "Someone is buying groceries for two—" He choked off any amplification of the bare fact.
"You're sure?"
"I am — twice as much bacon, eggs. Isn't that enough?"
"One of the lads?"
Devlin shook his head vehemently. "No!"
"Da — I don't want him, just his guest." Devlin swallowed, shook his head again. "Come on, Da. His guest won't be Irish, he'll be German—"
Devlin erupted in unaccustomed defiance. Someone had recently warned him about talking to his son-in-law, evidently. The truce was over, and McBride wondered at the reason behind it.
"No, damn you, no! No more than that — find the man yourself, if you want him that much!"
McBride skipped down from the trap, stood before Devlin.
"It's all right, Da — I'll look after you." He felt no reluctance in saying it. Devlin he disliked — but the threat encompassed him, Maureen and her father alike. Devlin hesitated, then nodded. McBride understood his relief. Somehow, just as he was more afraid of him, Devlin regarded him as stronger, more powerful than the IRA men he knew. It wasn't much like respect, but it was a recognition of superiority. "One of the lads, Da. OK, I'll find him—" He frowned. "And what do the silly buggers think they're up to, Da — playing with the Germans? They'll get their fingers burned."