They went out through my hall with their torches and night sticks, the damp rising in a fine mist from their tunics.

‘Ring us, Ma’am, if he ever bothers you again.’

‘He won’t. Please don’t hurt him,’ I said.

Over the couple of weeks that followed I tried to equate the pain with that of childbirth, an inevitable human process that always preceded freedom and exultation; for however much I rationalised what I had decided or tried to concentrate on Christmas, I could not escape the cruel image of Ronnie dead. All my fears for him were on behalf of Hector, who I knew must still have kept a small place in his heart for the man he had so adored. That understanding decided me, not due to any meanness on my part where Ronnie was concerned, but because it was well past the time when Hector should have been told the truth.

As the days drew in, I hoped Ronnie would have the courage to end his own life rather than have to face the shame of a trial and prison, of impoverishment, of living off the charity of friends like the Santrys, for he would die of sadness from all that anyway; better if it came quick and on his own terms, which was how his life had been lived, however warped. My image was of him in the sea that day he had called out to me, his pink, bobbing head, and now in the sea again, but dead. I would not be hypocritical, I had decided. When the time came I would not go down to Monument and honour him dead where I had denied him alive.

The late November Dublin streets, although dark and wet, embraced me with a welcome anonymity. As I had used to do in Sibrille, I found a pub where I could sit with a book on an afternoon with a pot of tea, on the edge of voices and discussions; the evenings on which there was no bridge to play, I spent either in the RDS library or at home in my bedroom. As the year hurtled towards its nadir, so the lights of the shops grew ever brighter and the fires of the pubs warmer. As December turned, newspapers spoke of more trouble in Belfast, of bombs. On television, soldiers ran under sniper fire. A church burned to the ground. I wondered if Hector, were he posted there in the New Year, could refuse to go.

On the days leading up to December 7th, the burden of Ronnie’s fate became almost unbearable. Walking home along Herbert Park, I almost wished him to be hiding in the shadows or sitting in the dark cars parked along the road outside my house. In shops and pubs, I heard his voice, I was sure, or saw his face in a queue waiting for a bus. I could not shake myself free of him. I wished the news would come so that I could mourn him properly, on my own, and reclaim my life. This impending event led me to wonder how I could have such clear foresight about the end of someone else’s life, and whether that was wrong, or if I should or could do anything to save him. Several times I picked up the phone to ring people who might somehow be effective in heading off what was going to happen: Rosa, Dick, Father O’Dea. But then I realised as I replaced the phone, unused, that whatever I achieved by ringing them would be temporary, a mere delay, that the same agony would revisit me at Ronnie’s next convulsion, as it always had, and that my life, in the meantime, would remain in limbo.

I tried to focus on Christmas, making lists, constructing dates for Hector and myself. A play. A meal in a good restaurant. Drinks with a few new friends. I walked into Dublin on December 6th in an effort to connect myself with people and events and thus become part of them. Strings of lights crisscrossed Grafton Street. People stood at a large shop window, at one end of which sat a Santa Claus, at the other, rows of new television sets, all on an English station which was showing pictures of someplace in Northern Ireland where a man had been shot by a sniper at a distance of three-quarters of a mile. Reality, although brutal, was welcome, as if I had needed to scuff my hand against something rough in order to wake up. I bought wrapping paper and Christmas cards and went home and slept soundly.

I woke up excited by a decision I had come to overnight: I was going to buy a television set. I wondered what was involved and whether I was in time to have it installed by Christmas. I was putting away the things from breakfast when the doorbell rang. For some self-protective reason, I walked first into the front room and to the bay window from which the hall door could be seen. There stood the silver haired guard of some weeks before, this time cap beneath his arm, and a tall, grey-faced man in a suit.

My legs became unsteady at the knees, for despite the fact that I had envisaged the moment down to almost this very detail, I had not anticipated its physical effect. I began to cry, for somewhere in Ronnie there had been a person I had loved, but he had remained resolutely hidden for much of our life together. I was glad too for him, as I went into the hall, that it was over at last. My tears, as always, were for what Hector was going to feel, or if he would be able to weep. I would do so for both of us.

‘Ah, Mrs Shaw.’

He was a kind man with big warm hands. I held on to his arm.

‘Where would you like to sit, Ma’am?’

I was crying and shaking my head. We sat together, me and the guard, and he held my hands in his.

‘So you know, Ma’am?’

I nodded. ‘I’ve known for weeks.’

I saw the guard and the other man exchange glances.

‘I can stay here as long as you want,’ the guard said. ‘You must have great memories.’

I laughed. ‘Some. Some not so great.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘How… How did..?’

‘Instantly,’ said the other man, pulling over a chair. Something about the way he spoke. He introduced himself, but I heard nothing. He said, ‘He didn’t suffer.’

‘He’s with God now, Ma’am,’ said the guard. ‘Hector is with God.’

‘Ronnie, I said. ‘Hector is our son.’

The men looked at one another.

‘Ma’am,’ said the guard, ‘Hector has been killed in Belfast.’

How slow the mind, I often thought in the months after, but how quick the heart. I began to scream, even as I knew what they were telling me was impossible. The other man’s voice, English, the words ‘military intelligence’. I ran upstairs to my bedroom and locked the door because I thought they were trying to kill me. I screamed. As long as I screamed, I could not hear.

I can’t say how it came about, but the evening of that day arrived without time intervening. My house was so filled with old friends that I thought I was back in Monument. Dick Coad, Father O’Dea. The Santrys. Bibs Toms. And neighbours from the other houses in the road who brought food and a chaplain of some sort who seemed to be connected with the British Army, who sat trying to get it through to me: he spoke of intelligence, of heroes and cowards. Of Hector’s background, which was why he had volunteered for military intelligence. The first British officer to be murdered in Ulster.

History had been stood upside-down and hung there, gloating. The faces of dead men, blood on their lips and in their nostrils, and a game played on a huge expanse, assailed me.

‘I’ve lost him,’ I said.

Rosa held my hands in hers. She was warm and kind.

‘You must find him, Iz. You must bring him back.’

People came and went continuously and my head was spinning. And then Father O’Dea, gently, my sorrow in his eyes, said, ‘Iz, love, poor Ronnie’s here.’

That day saw the second great hinging of my life. As they led him in, I could see the truth of the saying that no matter how wretched you are, there is someone, somewhere, even less fortunate. For there were men far more despicable in the world than Ronnie Shaw, but few more pitiful.

‘I had nowhere else to go.’

‘I know, Ronnie.’

He knelt at my feet and wept, his sobs unending, as if all that was in him must try and leave him by his eyes. He made me calm. He looked at me now and then from the face of a stranger, not an outsider, just someone I had not seen before. Even as the shadows of evening stole from the open door to the hall across the living room and the people from the nearby houses began to go home and the murmurings from all over the house ceased, Ronnie cried. I kept thinking how sad it would be for Hector to see his father like this. It was Dick Coad who helped him up, at last, and brought him out and down the front steps and put him in a car to drive him home to Monument.

INTERLUDE

Dick Coad sat back from his desk, his memory racing. The journey home from Dublin on the day after Hector’s death had been the loneliest of his life. He had not believed before that he could love her more than he already did. He had been wrong. If he had only had the courage when she had moved to Dublin to follow her, to attend to her every need, to be the friend she relied on most — the thought had pursued him for years. To give her love. ‘My lovely Dick Coad’. The image of the years that they might then have had together seared Dick. What had held him back? Lack of nerve, granted. But was there not something more? Fear of what he did not know?

Dick looked at the second package on his desk. Down on the quayside, out of sight, the hooter of the mud dredger sounded. He had heard the rumours over the early years, of course, the whole town had been alive with them, could speak of little else. Many seemed to think her coming to live in Sibrille — almost amongst them, as it were — was brazen and outrageous. Except for her shopping trips, she was rarely seen, had few friends. It was as if, even at twenty-three, she had lived most of her life before she ever came to Monument. Something she never spoke of, nor indeed had Ronnie, although he must have known.