The match ended to a round of polite applause and the elderly lady was wheeled away from the back of the courts. He saw her reach out for a small plastic glass of champagne.
She was left alone a moment and he noticed the edge of her wheelchair catch on the artificial turf.
— Lottie Tuttle, she said, stretching out her hand.
— George Mitchell.
— Oh, we know who you are, Senator, we saw you this morning with that awful backhand.
He reared back and laughed.
— You’re American? he asked.
— Lord, no.
She finished the small glass of champagne.
— Canadian. Sort of.
— Sort of?
— Newfoundland.
— Beautiful place.
— Lottie Ehrlich was the name. Once. Long ago.
— I see.
— I go back to the Druids, really.
She laughed and pushed the right side of the chair and it spun gracefully. He could hear elements of Irish in her accent.
— I live out by the peninsula. Strangford.
— Ah, he said. I’ve heard of it. The lake.
— Indeed. The lough. You should come visit, Senator. You’d be most welcome. We’ve a small cottage on the water.
— Well, I’m rather tied up now, Lottie.
— We’re hoping you’re going to sort out this mess for us, Senator.
— I’m hoping that, too.
— After that you can return to your backhand.
Lottie smiled and made her way around the back of the court to talk with the tournament winner. She pushed the wheelchair along entirely by herself, but then she turned around with a grin.
— Really, Senator, your problem is that you’re not planting your back foot properly.
HE SAW HER a few times after that. She was a regular at the club. She had, by all accounts, been a handy player once. She had lost her grandson to the Troubles years ago. The Senator never inquired how the boy died: he did not want to get himself in the business of having to choose sides, whose fault, whose murder, whose bomb, whose rubber bullet, whose bureaucracy.
What he liked about Lottie Tuttle was the manner in which she insisted that she still push herself along in the wheelchair.
He saw her early one morning guide the chair out to the middle of one of the courts. She wore a wide white skirt and white blouse. Even her racquet was ancient, a great wooden frame with red-and-white catgut. A younger woman set up on the opposite side of the net and lobbed a few shots at her. They played for half an hour. Lottie hit only three or four balls, and afterwards she sat at the back of the court, exhausted, her swollen arm wrapped in ice, until she fell asleep and dozed under a blanket.
HE RUNS THE gauntlet of the offices at Stormont. Rows of low squat buildings. Hardly palatial. The Gulag, they call it. A good name. Appropriate.
His car pulls up slowly. The crowds are gathered outside the gates. Candles on one side, flags on another. He keeps his head down, inhabits the backseat. But in the rear of the crowd he spies a man carrying a sign, and a bolt of joy moves through him: The incredible happens.
Hallelujah to that, he thinks, as the gates open up, and the car nudges through, flashbulbs erupting at the windowpane.
He walks from the car park and takes the steps two at a time: even jet-lagged, he wants to carry an energy into the building.
THEY ARE ALL here now: the North, the South, the East, the West. The Unionists at one end of the corridor, the Republicans at the other. The Irish government downstairs. The British upstairs. Young diplomats plying the middle ground. Moderates scattered about. Pretty young observers from the European Union walking through with clipboards. The hum of the photocopy machine. The pattering of keyboards. The smell of burned coffee.
His walk is careful but energetic: handshakes, eye-flicks, nods, smiles. Tim. David. Maurice. Stewart. Claire. Seamus. Charles. Orla. Rory. Francoise. Good morning. Great to see you. We’ll have that report ready at noon, Senator.
A bounce in his step. Along the drab gray corridor. Into the small bathroom. A quick change of shirt. He shoves his arms briskly through the sleeves. He would hate to be caught shirtless. He leans into the mirror. The hair grayer than it should be. And a little more scattered on top.
He whisks a quick comb through the hair, parts it sideways, splashes a bit of cold water on his face. A river comes back to him, he does not know why: the Kennebec. There is a song he heard once, at a dinner in Dublin. Flow on lovely river, flow gently along, by your waters so clear sounds the lark’s merry song. The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy. He has heard them often, late at night, singing in the hotel bars, notes drifting up to his room.
His staff is waiting in the outer office. Martha. David. Kelly. They, too, are dark-eyed with lack of sleep.
They phone down the hall to bring in de Chastelain and Holkeri. Followed by their own staff, Irish and British both. A long trail of the weary.
— How was your flight, Senator?
— Wonderful, he says.
They grin and nod: of course it wasn’t. Their own war stories. Delayed flights. Forgotten anniversaries. A burst water pipe on Joy Street. A missed wedding in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A flat tire on the road from Drogheda. A sick niece in Finland. Something in their separateness has bound them together. They are all entirely sick of the process, but the deadline has jolted them awake.
— So tell me, he says, where do we stand?
What they have is a sixty-page draft, two governments, ten political parties, little less than two weeks. Strand One. Strand Two. Strand Three. None of the strands yet set in stone. The incredible weave of language. All the little tassels still hanging down. The tiniest atoms. The poorly tied knots. There is the possibility of an annex. The rumor of a rewrite. The suggestion of a delay. Where are they in London? Where are they are in Dublin? Where are they in the Maze? Or is that Long Kesh? There has been a call for transcripts of the plenaries. What exactly does substantive negotiations mean? Did the security team check the political background of the canteen staff? There is talk of a farm on the Tyrone border where whole crates of rocket-propelled grenades have been hidden. Someone has leaked the MI-5 report to the London Times. Could anyone please decommission the Sunday World? Paisley is cooking up a protest outside the gates. Did you hear that Mo Mowlam took off her wig again? Can you believe that they tried to smuggle a tape recorder into the Stormont inside a sofa? There are whispers of assassination attempts from within the prison walls. A 440-pound bomb was defused in Armagh. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the grounds of a Catholic kindergarten. The Women’s Coalition has called for calm and decency. The light in David Trimble’s office was on until four thirty in the morning. Someone should make sure that the Sands graffiti in Ballycloghan is scrubbed off. The one thing that should be working flawlessly are the photocopy machines. Make sure the word draft is stamped clearly across every page. Was there absolute clarification yet on the North-South ministerial council?
Everyone jumping off their own ledges, sailing out into the middle of the air, developing patterns of flight on the way down.
LATER IN THE morning, alone in his back office, he turns the desk lamp on. A small tilted urn of light. His desk has been cleaned. His photos dusted. The pile of papers stacked high. The red light on his private message machine blinks. He skips through the messages: seven in all. The second to last from Heather. She must have called in the middle of the night. Listen, she says. The sound of his son sleeping. Listen. The small intake of Andrew’s breath. He plays it twice and then a third time.