"Yes, I did. He worked for my little organization for some time, until—" Drummond shook his head, watched his daughter bring the fine bone china, the coffee. She served McBride with sugar-lumps from a silver bowl, with small silver tongs. He studied her strong hands, caught her perfume as she moved away again. She and her father disconcerted him, but he could not say precisely how or why. Formidable, perhaps?
"Thank you," he murmured, and attended to Drummond, silently urging him on. "What happened, sir?"
"To your father?" Drummond replied, watching his daughter pouring his coffee with the greediness of the old.
"Yes."
"You don't know, then? Your mother, I mean—" He sipped at the coffee, took two of the biscuits and rested them in his saucer.
"My mother—" He looked at Claire Drummond, who had seated herself on the sofa, crossed her legs, and taken up the posture of an intent spectator. Disconcerting. "My mother told me nothing about my father, except that he died, before I was born. How and why I don't know."
"And you never bothered to ask?" Drummond supplied quietly. "But now, in front of a mummified old man—" Claire Drummond smiled — "you are reminded of your ignorance, and intrigued to know more. Mm?" He sipped again at his coffee. McBride heard his dentures click against the rim of the cup. He felt taken over, subordinated, by the old man and his daughter.
"Do you know what happened, sir?"
Drummond shook his head. "I was in London — one of my rare trips, I'm glad to say. There was one hell of a flap on—"
More to reassert himself than to raise the matter, McBride blurted out: "Smaragdenhalskette, you mean?" Drummond's eyes narrowed, more than anything at the German, McBride surmised.
Drummond nodded.
"I thought you must know quite a bit of it, when you rang," Drummond observed." The German invasion plan, eh?" McBride nodded. "Yes, your father was mixed up in it, in a way. So was I — and young Peter Gilliatt. But I'm not the one to be able to tell you—" He smiled at McBride's complete and child-like disappointment, his comical expression. "I wasn't privy to all of it, by any manner. It was masterminded — if you can call it that — from London by a man named Walsingham in Admiralty Intelligence."
"But my father—?" The remainder of his coffee had grown a skin and he put his cup on a delicate side-table the woman had moved close to his chair.
"Your father used to run off and do errands for Walsingham — and I was told nothing, I'm afraid. I know we were running around here like mad things during late November — about the time your father died — scared stiff the Germans were going to come, agents landing on every tide, that sort of thing, rumours of parachutists and so on, but nothing ever came of it, I'm afraid." McBride looked devastated. "I'm sorry about this, Professor McBride. You seemed to want to talk about your father when you rang — I was glad to be able to help, meet his son. But this other matter— I'm in almost as much ignorance as you, I'm afraid. I don't really know what happened here for almost a week before your father — died. I was in London, advising the Admiralty on this Irish thing. Without being told very much, I'm afraid."
He finished his coffee, put it down, bit a biscuit in half.
"My father, then—" McBride asked, his disappointment evident, interest in his father minimal, mere politeness. "What happened to him? Do you know that, sir?"
"My investigations — on my return here — led me to the conclusion that he was murdered by the IRA," Drummond said levelly. Claire Drummond's head twitched as if her father had slapped her face.
At seven-thirty McBride was waiting for Claire Drummond in the bar of the one small hotel in Kilbrittain. The impulse to ask her to join him for dinner at the hotel had been simply that — a way of retaining some contact with Drummond rather than with the woman. Drummond had closed the conversation soon after the revelation of the manner of his father's death. He had ascertained as much from his network; the body had never been found. McBride's father had had more than one brush with the local IRA, who sometimes helped German agents hide out, fed them, sent them on their way to Dublin and the British mainland. Presumably, they had exacted the price of his interference, his contempt and animosity towards the Republican movement. Drummond had warned him often, but McBride had always disregarded the threat posed to him by the IRA.
Drummond had been — forty years later— visibly moved by the narrative of Michael McBride's demise. Yes, Gilliatt had later helped his pregnant mother over to England, thence to neutral America where she claimed to have distant relatives. Drummond knew no more of her than that.
Nor did he know anything more of Emerald Necklace. McBride was absorbed by the news of his father, and pressed few questions on Drummond during the rest of their conversation. He felt almost helplessly drawn to his father by Drummond's ignorance of the manner and detail of his death. The mention of IRA brought images of a hands-bound, kneeling figure, head hooded, being executed on a barren spot of country, bones growing white in passing seasons, namelessness—
He could not take his book, or himself, seriously. His own ignorance, his mother's silence, seemed exaggerated and derided by Drummond's lack of knowledge. Somehow, he felt they had all let his unknown father die, were all responsible for the namelessness of it.
Men in London, Drummond had added. He must pursue his researches in London. Many of them were dead, but Admiralty records might turn something up, Walsingham was still at the Home Office, so Drummond believed—
But London was distant. Within maybe even ten — twenty? — miles of where they had talked, where he now sat, his father had died. He felt immeasurably sad, weighted with emotion that seemed to be attempting to catch up with itself, make up for lost time — to apologize for the years of light, dismissive feelings towards Michael McBride. He did not expect to be able to do anything; he expected only not to return to London. He felt he must not leave County Cork just in case his present, ennobling emotions deserted him with a change of location. But, what to do?
Claire Drummond walked into the bar, brushing at her heavy dark hair, dressed now in a fur jacket and a dark skirt, and long boots. He smiled, — was about to rise, offer a drink before dinner, replenish his own whiskey, when she transferred her smile to the only other man in the room, the studiously-reading man at the bar.
"Sean!" They embraced, kissed lightly, studied one another in an acquaintance from which he was excluded. "How long have you been in Kilbrittain?" she asked disapprovingly. Before he could reply, however, she turned to McBride. "Mr McBride, this is Sean Moynihan, an old friend of mine." Moynihan smiled, extending his hand.
Michael McBride was drinking in a bar in Clonakilty — the uncarpeted public bar of a grey, dilapidated building that presented itself, rather unsuccessfully, as a residential hotel. The bar was sparsely populated in the early evening, the rain sliding down the uncurtained, grimy windows behind his head, the spilled beer gleaming in wet rings on the stained wooden table. He felt a covert excitement simply in being there. The hotel was known as an IRA meeting-place, — had been since the twenties, and he was awaiting the arrival of a man called Rourke who was a known and vociferous Republican. He lived in an isolated cottage north of Ross Carbery, but had lately been doing his drinking in Clonakilty.
And McBride knew, by a process of elimination that had taken him the best part of two days, that Rourke was the man with the sudden increase of grocery purchases. Words picked up, rumours, friends who had not seen Rourke for a couple of days, changes of habit, a stranger who was a cousin from Killarney — McBride had narrowed the field until there was only Rourke. And his stranger-friend-relative.