The Matchmaker of Kenmare (12 page)

“Oh, hold on, Mr. MacCarthy, hold on. I mean, the same woman, she told me something myself once, and wasn’t it all a lie?”

My face, I know, went white, and I walked out into the night. This was the old, awful pattern:
Cleft in twain again. No farther along, no more healed or eased
.

And yet, I observed something. However scorching this woman found my reaction, I could sense that the flame of that particular lamp was running low on oil. And I surmised why: As she herself might have
put it, Kate Begley had marched right into the fields of my private anguish, pitched her tent there, and was now redirecting the soldiers of my zeal. As a consequence, I was thinking more about her than about Venetia. For the first time, but not the last, I felt disloyal.

As I was having these thoughts, something ridiculous took place. The train stopped at some junction, Crewe, I think, and took on passengers. Up to then we’d been seated in a compartment, just the two of us, facing each other, by the window. Now a woman opened the door and raised an inquiring look.

To my annoyance, Miss Begley said, “Come in, there’s only us.” Before I could help, the woman hoisted a crimson suitcase up to the rack and plonked herself down.

I understood the invitation. In the privacy of the compartment, our conversation about what would happen in London had been cranking up again. This newcomer’s presence, though, meant that I couldn’t press anymore, couldn’t ask yet again, “What exactly are we going to London for?”

Now comes the silly part. Miss Begley engaged with the newcomer:
Where are you from? Are you going to London? Isn’t it a lovely day?
A short time later, they’d reached fortune-telling, soothsaying, crystal gazing.

“I believe in it wholeheartedly,” said the passenger. “Do you?”

“Well, I’d have to,” said Miss Begley.

“Why is that?” said the passenger.

“Because,” said Miss Begley, “I do a bit of it myself.”

A hand to her mouth, the woman breathed, “Oh, you don’t, do you?”

I thought,
Oh, God. She’s going to drag this out all the way to London
.

And Miss Begley did. “I consider it a gift that I mustn’t waste,” she said.

Another inward groan from me:
We’re going to get the works here

The woman, a decent creature of fifty or so, undramatic except for
her crimson suitcase, said, “How much do you charge for telling a fortune?”

“Oh, I only charge if I’m set up, and if it’s a working day.” I concede that Miss Begley’s next remark may have come out of kindness; she said, “Would you like me to tell your fortune? There won’t be any charge,” and she smiled like a beauty queen.

The woman said, “You don’t know how much I need it.”

Miss Begley slid along the leather seat, and the woman slid to meet her halfway.

“Now. Which hand do you write with? Because that’s the hand I want to see first.”

Here’s the worst part; not only was the woman hooked—so was I. I picked up my newspaper, shook it out, opened it, pretended to read—and eavesdropped like a spy.

“H’m.” Miss Begley mused. “H’m. I see. I see.”

My mind shouted,
What is this rubbish?
But my next thought was,
Well, who can’t believe in magic?

“You’re widowed,” said Miss Begley.

The woman said, “Yes. My husband was—” and Miss Begley interrupted: “No. Don’t tell me.”

The woman said a chastened, “Oh, I, I was—” and halted.

“Your husband was killed in the war. I’m very sorry for your loss,” and from the corner of my eye I saw Miss Begley raise her head, look at the woman with full sympathy, and return to her head-bent task. “And you’re on your way to London, for two reasons. You want to continue the inquiries about war widow compensation. And you’re hoping to get a job, I’d say in the clothing business.”

The woman almost cried out. “How do you know?” she said. “How do you know all this?”

Miss Begley said, “I’m afraid I don’t know. Does an artist know why he can paint?” And again she went, “H’m.”

The woman said, “May I ask a question?”

“Yes, dear.” Miss Begley sounded like an old lady.

“What’s the difference between the two hands?”

Miss Begley answered like an expert. “It’s different for many fortunetellers. For me, the left hand has all the character you received at birth. And the life you’ve lived so far is in it too. Your right hand—that’s what’s
going to happen to you, that’s what’s ahead for you. Another way of putting it is—the left hand is what you got, the right hand is what you’re going to do with it.”

“How much can you tell about my life so far?” said the woman, thrusting her left hand forward.

Miss Begley took the hand as though it were a napkin of embroidered silk. She scrutinized the palm, caressed it, traced some lines.

“Well, you’ve had an interesting life, haven’t you?”

The woman looked alarmed and pleased.

“May I ask—are you still keen on him?”

The woman said, “On whom?”

“On him. You know.” Miss Begley somewhat lowered her voice. “You know who I mean?”

The woman blushed, and Miss Begley said, “Oh, my goodness. Let me see your right hand again. Well, well.” She sounded so final. “Have you actually made arrangements?”

The woman, startled as a bird, said, “How do you know all this? I mean, how do you know?”

Not for the first time, I felt reduced. Day in, day out, I tried to keep some intellectual rigorousness in my work. I approached my note-taking with a hardworking conscience. Every report that I sent in met the required standard of high legibility and provenancing detail. I wrote in a clear and wide hand, used indelible black ink, in lined, stoutly bound notebooks.

Every person I interviewed was given the appropriate date, on both calendar and clock; the interview was timed and supported with an identification, often with a brief family tree; for instance,
Thomas Buckley, so-called “Bawn.” Son of Michael John Buckley, and Hannah Fitzgerald, both of Portmagee, Valentia Island; married 1909, Margaret, so-called “Madge” Ahern of Castleisland; no children
.

If the tale or tradition I was collecting had echoes of something else within my knowledge, I footnoted it, so future generations of students had at least a search to pursue. I relished this requirement to be accurate and consistent; I told myself that I had little time for frippery—yet now here I was, traveling with, essentially, a walking box of low-rent hearts and tawdry flowers. But look, there must have been, there may still be,
something intellectually low-rent about me because I’d also loved the shoddier parts of Venetia’s road show.

And thus did the cheapness of the music drag me down. Despite my loftier intentions, I, the Wandering Scholar, couldn’t get enough of this stuff, especially the fortune-telling. You can see, can’t you, how it must have appealed to someone with my burdens? And you can guess my next thoughts, which would recur over and over:
How about reading your own palm, Miss B.? Or mine?

A city at war teems with opposites. As walls fall and naked gables claw the sky, people rediscover purpose. And so they scurry here, they scurry there, like ants hoping to dodge a great human boot. That was my first experience of bombed streets. My parents knew London well, had often described it to me, and once brought back a book called
Wonderful London in Pictures
.

Our train arrived in the early afternoon. That day, and for many days beyond, I walked where buildings leaned against one another with broken shoulders—some of them little more than ghosts from that old book.

This was my third kind of war. From legends and mythologies, from Finn MacCool and his mighty Irish warriors, from the Red Branch Knights of the Ulster Cycle and the Twinkling Hoard, from Sparta, Thermopylae,
de Bello Gallico
, and all of Caesar’s campaigns, from Hector and Hercules, I knew of valiant war, victors and vanquished, hand-to-hand heroes, swords, javelins, and spears.

At home in Goldenfields, I’d been a child during our Irish Civil War, a family struggle where every man brought a gun to breakfast. We’d had ambushes near our gates, torture in our fields; we’d known of brothers fighting each other, split to their blood by the political structures that prevail to this day.

For instance, Mother visited a family where the father had killed a man in a guerrilla action out in the hills, and he’d got back home just as the police brought in the body of the man he’d killed—his own son. However epic the scale, war was always personal. That was what I knew from my reading and from my childhood; and to my surprise, that was what I found in wartime London.

When you see a house where a room still hangs on the outside walls, and there’s still some furniture, and the flowered wallpaper still glows, and there’s a coatrack with garments still hanging from it, and the rest of the house has peeled away and fallen—that’s personal.

And when you see a young woman standing on a pile of rubble and begging the police and fire workers, “Dig faster,” and “Over here, I thought I heard something!” and they rush to her, and they tell you in an aside that her two children aged six and four are beneath the rubble, as is her officer husband, and that he’d had an arm blown off at Dunkirk a few years earlier—that’s personal too.

We’d lost our way from the train and walked too far. Around midafternoon, we rounded a corner and saw the scenes I’ve just described (and as I noted them down that night). Miss Begley turned away from the distressed young woman and walked off a few yards, gasping. She put down her suitcase and stiffened her shoulders to establish some resolve. For myself, I have a delay mechanism on my emotions; this wouldn’t hit me for several hours. If at all.

I walked to Miss Begley and said, “Come on. Let me take you away from here. I’ll ask directions,” and I turned to go back the way we’d come.

“No,” she said. “We should see this, we should see it.”

And so we walked right into the Second World War. An occasional hiatus notwithstanding, it would be a long time before we’d walk out again. The smell will still come back if I evoke it: plaster dust, sewage, leaking gas—the smell of death as I know it.

Bombs had taken out four houses along that street. Flanked by the other untouched buildings, they looked like gaps in a row of teeth. There hadn’t been time to stretch cordons; London had suffered a heavy twenty-four hours. One of those freaks of compressed air that you’ll find in all bomb blasts had blown the young mother out of the house onto
the pavement while her children and their father lay beneath immeasurable weight.

We weren’t in a poor area, and the woman spoke with an educated accent—war has no respect for social class. Miss Begley, as ever, found a job to do. She walked forward to take care of the grief-stricken woman.

We settled in at the small hotel that Miss Begley had booked, then walked out to find a meal before the light fled the sky. I had taken care to bring money with me, and to make banking arrangements, should we need them. Up to that moment she hadn’t confided in me. Still, we had an agreement—“You help me and I’ll help you”—and I’d gone along thus far. Although I was a little frustrated, it suited me; I was curious about the war and England’s survival, and I’d established with James Clare that I could always work at collecting lore among the Irish in London.

Now, though, with my own emotions bruised again by word of Venetia, and stirred by the violence of war as we’d seen it, I needed some security.

“All right,” I said. “No more evasions. How much are you going to tell me?”

Some of the fight had left her too and she said, “I don’t know what to tell you. I think”—she paused and reflected—“I think I’m waiting just now.”

“For what?”

She said, “All right,” and unfolded the next phase.

Many of the American officers were billeted in the Ritz Hotel, she said, although “Mr. Miller,” as she still called him, hadn’t been staying there. Nor had he disclosed his address. She said, “This is all I know. He wants me to go to the Ritz Hotel at noon and meet a woman named Claudia.”

I’ve been looking back over my account so far of Kate Begley and myself in that year, 1943. What hasn’t come across yet is what I later called the “quicksilver” between us. By that I don’t mean the verbal challenges, the benign sparks that we sometimes struck off each other. I mean that quicksilver is another name for mercury, one of the densest metals in the world, and it has a very narrow range from cold to hot—and back again.

We arrived at the Ritz so early that we had to dawdle in the park nearby. How different we looked—Miss Begley a tube of dark red serge in her trim jacket and mid-calf slim skirt, fashionable beyond the powers of Lamb’s Head or Kenmare, and I like a half priest or young undertaker in my trademark black suit. I towered over Miss Begley. She claimed five feet four inches, but it always looked doubtful, especially when she stood beside me—or Mr. Miller.

At the Ritz reception desk, we asked for Claudia and our inquiry caused a stir. The clerk fluttered, and a senior figure overheard. The lady was, he said, “in residence and expecting two visitors,” to which Miss Begley said, bright as a breeze, “That’ll be us.”

“I’ll just call through, if I may,” said the Ritz man.

Miss Begley whispered to me, “This Claudia must be some big shot.”

No matter what we may claim, we don’t anticipate most of the major events in life. Accidents, prizes, sudden betrayals—they crash into us. Or they break slowly over us, as in this case, where I had no inkling, no flicker of premonition. Nor did Miss Begley, no matter how fey she liked to be; months later, when I asked her, she admitted as much.

Yet, when the Ritz man escorted us down a long, thoughtful corridor, why did I offer to stand back and wait outside as he knocked on the door? Why did I, with a rush of urgency like blood to the head, think about getting out of there fast? The Ritz man, one of whose eyes was blank white, shook his head.

“You’re very much included, sir.”

——

Let me tell you about Claudia, who lived to the age of ninety-six. A very specific and elite grapevine knew her as “Claudia at the Ritz,” and she found classy English wives for foreign men, including officers and diplomats. Up to the time we met her, she’d been having modest success, but felt that she should have been doing better—or so she told us.