She went on, parading all the reasons she could think of before him, talking as much to convince herself as to convince him. I just don’t want to leave him, she thought. I’m afraid, afraid I won’t see him again. And I can’t give him up...
When she finished he got slowly to his feet. She watched him move slowly to the water’s edge. He bent over and scooped up a handful of small stones. One by one he skipped them out to sea. After a few moments she rose and walked forward to stand by his side.
“I think you should go to Berlin,” he said slowly.
She didn’t say anything.
“Ellen, there’s nothing I’d like more than to have you with me in Connemara. I hadn’t even thought of it until you mentioned it. I hadn’t dared. I only knew how I felt about you, you see. I couldn’t be sure that you felt the same way about me.”
“Oh, David...”
His hands found her shoulders, and his eyes sought hers. “But you have to go to Berlin. You say you don’t want to now, and I’m sure you don’t, but if you pass up this chance you’ll be sorry later. You’d start to regret it the minute we got to Connemara. You’d wonder what sort of an opportunity you were passing up. You’d keep thinking about it, and you’d start to see me as a man who was already getting in the way of your career—”
“Oh, don’t be silly!”
“It’s the truth. You do have to go to Berlin, you know. And Berlin won’t last forever. How long is it, a week? You could come back to Ireland as soon as the festival is over. Unless you’ve decided by then that you don’t want to see me.”
“That won’t happen.” She swallowed. “Would you want me to come?”
“More than anything.”
He kissed her. She felt warm and secure in his arms, and yet there was a feeling of awkwardness between them that had not been present the night before. She had been too forward, she told herself. She had made a suggestion that it was not her place to make, and he had tactfully but definitely rejected it, and she felt personally rejected in the bargain. Now they were awkward with each other, and it might take them time to get over it.
She felt a drop of rain on her hand, then another on her forehead. “I think it’s starting to rain,” she said.
“Yes, I just felt a drop.”
“I suppose we’d better get back to town.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
He shook the sand out of the blanket, folded it neatly, and slung it over his arm. She took his hand, and they headed slowly back toward town.
They each needed to be alone, and both of them recognized this. She went to her room after making plans to meet him in an hour or so. She sat for a few minutes at her window, watching the rain pour down on the streets of Dingle. After a while she opened her guitar case and sat on the edge of her bed, playing the instrument softly, not singing now but merely playing old melodies on the guitar and letting her thoughts drift with the rhythms of the music.
She was still playing when Sara Trevelyan entered the room. “Don’t stop on my account,” the teacher said. “You play beautifully. I thought I might listen for a moment or two.”
“How was your expedition?”
“Ill-fated, I’m afraid. I did reach Gallarus Oratory, and it looked every bit as remarkable as the photograph. Extraordinary structure! But I only had a few minutes there, when a look at the sky told me that this country was about to be favored with a bit more rain. Fortunately I started back right away. I did get rained upon, but I missed the worst of it. And I also proved to myself that I’m too old to be pedaling a bike up and down hills. How was your day at the beach?”
“All right.”
“No more than all right? Well. Let me leave you alone, Ellen. I think I’ll lie down in my room for an hour or two. These old bones could do with a rest. And do play that guitar. I enjoy listening to you.”
But Ellen did not return to the guitar after the older woman left the room. Instead she put it back in its case and sat on her bed, staring moodily about. She picked up her purse, dumped it out on the bed, and sifted through its contents idly. She looked at her passport, remembering how she had presented it to David the night before. “Everything there is to know about me. Age, height, weight, place of birth, color of hair, color of eyes...”
Was that all she was, the sum total of those few facts?
She opened the passport and read the dry data to herself. Such an important document, she thought. And she peered at her own face in the passport photograph. (“A full-face shot, no larger than three inches by three inches, no smaller than two and one-half inches by two and one-half inches; both ears must show.”) It certainly did not flatter her, she thought. But then she had never taken a very good picture. They’d had several sittings to get a portrait shot of her for use on her second record album, and she had never been particularly satisfied with the picture eventually chosen.
She started to close the passport, then noticed that the corner of the photograph had come loose. That was wrong, she thought. They sealed the photo to the passport, and it had to remain that way. She poked the corner back into place and it sprang persistently loose again. She wetted her finger with the tip of her tongue, touched her fingertip to the back of the loose corner, and sighed in dismay when the entire photograph came loose altogether.
Now what was she supposed to do? Probably the simplest thing would be to get some glue and put the silly thing back where it belonged. But would that be considered tampering with her passport? Maybe she was supposed to present herself at the nearest American consulate — wherever that might be — and have them laminate the photo in place according to their own particular methods. But what a load of red tape that would involve!
She looked at the passport and then at the troublesome photo, and then gaped in astonishment at a third article, which she had not seen before. It had been lodged in back of the photo, and now it was on her bedspread, very small, but suddenly alarmingly prominent.
She recognized it at once.
It was microfilm, a small square of microfilm, and it had been carefully hidden behind her passport photograph.
Ten
Slowly, as if in a dream, she got to her feet and crossed her room. She closed her door and turned the key in the lock. She felt dizzy and thought that she might faint. She sagged against the door, clutching at it for support, until she felt strong enough to walk back across the room and sink onto her bed.
Her mind worked furiously. Everything was suddenly falling into place, every piece interlocking neatly in her mind. She could see the whole picture very clearly now, and it left her with a sick feeling at the pit of her stomach and a patch of dryness at the back of her throat. She looked at her hands; her fingers were shaking far more violently than they had done that last night in London, after the mugging.
The mugging. Of course — that had been part of it, the start of it. It had seemed odd, even then, that two men would stalk her carefully all the way through Soho and halfway to her door simply to make a grab for her purse. The few pounds it was likely to contain was hardly adequate compensation for their trouble. But they had not wanted money. They were trying even then to get hold of her passport. The passport had been in her other purse. Otherwise they would have fitted the microfilm into it that very night, and then the next morning they would have found some clever way to return it to her. Perhaps a man might pose as a detective and explain that it had been found in a gutter somewhere. They would have found a way, and in a few weeks the microfilm would reach its destination in Berlin.