The Matchmaker of Kenmare (14 page)

Compare it to how remote, how small, how
local
was Miss Begley’s home at Lamb’s Head, a place that she had never left and where she could never have met upper-class English people of opaque purpose. Or an enigmatic American officer—who now came back into our lives with some emphasis.

One morning, when we had been studying with Madame Samadett for some days, we found a new student waiting—Captain Charles Miller, tawny and huge, had draped himself across the sofa like a lion.

As usual, we launched into our greeting ritual with Madame, in which she asked us how our evening had been, had we heard from our parents, how we had slept—all in French. As Madame spoke, Captain Miller tried to make us laugh from behind her back. He turned his eyes inward, stuck two fingers up his nostrils, then tweaked his ear like a key that made his tongue pop out and back in again. To round off this performance, he made a goofy, bucktoothed face with a drooping eyelid.

Unaware of this clowning, Madame almost warmed to what she saw as the exuberance and delight of our replies; it would have been her first smile. She introduced us, and said that Captain Miller would be taking part now and again, just to brush up his French. He behaved as though we’d never met before, asked Miss Begley her name twice.

“Miss Beggar? Miss Wiggly?”

Madame corrected him with wide elocution and made him practice.

“Begg. Lee. Begg. Lee.”

Captain Miller made a meal of it, and then kept saying, “Kate. Begg. Lee. Kate. Begg. Lee.”

When he came to my name, he said, “Bennnnnnn,” drawing out the
n
like a note on a mouth harp. “Mak. Cart. Tea.”

Madame, perhaps catching on, thanked him with severity, and our studies began.

So, I believe, did the actual courtship of Charles Miller and Kate Begley, once my two dear friends. They handled it with a mutual cunning. For instance, to make smooth their own path, they made Madame part of an evident attraction between the pair of them, so that she could watch, as it were, a relationship growing under her wing, and perhaps become their emotional sponsor.

They pulled little stunts that I now see were lovers’ games. In our first conversation class, Captain Miller asked, “Madame, is it true that the French are more interested in love than in war?”

Miss Begley chipped in, also speaking her best French, “Who wouldn’t be?”

Madame answered, “The French prize love above everything else.”

Miss Begley said, “Not like the Americans.”

This opened a debate, exactly what Madame had wanted, and she sat back as they discussed, with an occasional halting interjection from me—not much more than a
“Vraiment,”
or a
“Mais oui”
or a
“Bravo!”
Essentially this was flirtation; they knew it, Madame knew it, and I knew it. After the second or third day, it would indeed have appeared to any moderately astute watcher that a new relationship was forming.

And still Madame never smiled, though she blushed frequently, and began to steer the studies toward realms of romance and love. She asked Captain Miller to read a poem by Paul Verlaine:

And, in a moment that I shall never forget, she asked Miss Begley to read that description of D’Artagnan when we first meet him in
The Three
Musketeers
. Miss Begley read it with an actressy passion, her Kerry accent driving the romance of the text:
He had an open and intelligent face, and a hooked but finely chiseled nose. An experienced eye might have taken him for a farmer’s son upon a journey …

I watched all this enthralled, and yet fighting down what the Musketeers would have called “harsh pulses” in myself. As I’ve told you elsewhere, my emotional metabolism has a governor on it: I seem to regulate the rise of my feelings to the surface, until I can cope with them. If I can. If I can’t, that becomes a matter of grave difficulty.

Soon the three of us began to spend several evenings a week together outside the classroom, plus long weekend. We wandered London on foot, getting ourselves back to the Ritz in the small hours. Miller claimed that he was billeted somewhere else; he never specified.

For the first ten days of those two weeks, that is, before they moved her to a different room on a different corridor, Miss Begley would then fling open the door between our rooms, and, while undressing with an air of great relaxation as she walked up and down (she must have known that I’d never peep), talked nonstop through the open door about our adventures with the man she called “the Captain.” She had much of which to sing—those were merry, merry nights.

Was our jollity intensified by the war? Yes, because the cliché is true: Everywhere we went, people seemed heightened in glee. Captain Miller in his uniform sometimes received applause if we walked into a restaurant; in pubs they served us the first round free.

In all this time I never touched a drop. Nor did I feel like a ticking bomb, as I had done once or twice since Miss Begley had imposed her drink controls on me. I think that I must have felt some sense of responsibility—because there’s no doubt that I was the gooseberry, the willing chaperone. Before long, our trio felt like a duo—the unit of them and me.

They grew close at great speed. Perhaps it was accelerated by the war; perhaps it would have happened anyway. Neither took the lead; in that sense, they resembled Venetia and me. Each took care of the other, each demonstrated affection equally—and they never made me feel extra or spare.

We went out every night. No lights, remember; every building, every door, every window, every night had to be subject to blackout, to try to deny the German bombers. Yet Captain Miller always seemed to know where he was going; now and then he checked a piece of paper with his tiny flashlight, and when he eventually knocked on any door he was welcomed. Then, when we’d fluttered our way through the heavy curtains, fun greeted us—London was a party, it seemed, with people made newly reckless by the war, as though saying to the world, “This might be our last night on earth—let’s enjoy it.”

I wonder what they made of us, those laughing revelers. “Cheers, mate,” the universal drinking greeting of the English, summed up how they seemed, and the young American cheered them up further. Here, now, I saw the true coupledom of Charles Miller and Kate Begley—not so much in how each introduced the other, but in a kind of joint proprietariness. The world could see that they were together, and they wanted the world to see it.

In the back of one pub one night stood several snooker tables.

“Are they shooting pool?” Captain Miller asked me, and I shook my head, not knowing what he meant. The three of us wandered over to watch and stopped next to two men, faces white under the long lamps, intense in their focus.

When they broke, they greeted us.

“Are you shooting pool?” said Captain Miller again.

“No, mate, we’re shooting Germans. Just like you.”

Everybody laughed, and they began to explain the game to him. One handed him a cue, the other explained the rudiments, then set up the white ball and a red. Captain Miller slotted the red into the farthest pocket and kept the white ball on the table convenient to the next red—which he then drilled into another corner. The men whistled.

“Clear it, Major,” they said, and everybody laughed—and then he did clear the few reds left on the table, and attacked the colored balls, ending on the black. Led by the two Londoners, we all cheered.

“Kate, you try,” he called, and she trotted over.

She couldn’t line up the cue on the ball.

“I’m not tall enough,” she said, and Captain Miller got behind her, lifted her, and held her so steadily that she was able to attempt a shot.

That, however, is not what I watched. I saw the expression on her face change. Up to then, I had been with them all the time they were together, and I had never seen anything other than a jocose punch or swipe, typically from her to him. Now, feeling his hands around her rib cage, she closed her eyes for a moment, and next I saw the blush that happened so rarely as to be recognizable at once.

Another night, we’d come out of a pub in Drury Lane, where the proprietor, to compensate for the closure of so many theaters, had arranged a concert of the most mixed bag you’ve ever seen—Mozart to juggling; it reminded me of Venetia’s road show. The sirens whined, and Captain Miller knew—again—where to go. We raced to a station in the underground, and clumped down many, many flights of stairs with hundreds of Londoners.

Sleeping bags, blankets, old mattresses—we made ourselves comfortable, and, with Miss Begley snuggled between her two men, we watched the place fill up. I tried to listen for the outside world, but by now we had come down so deep that I couldn’t hear the siren anymore. Soon, the crowd settled too, waiting for the all clear, which would be relayed to the platforms.

It took a long time. I dozed, so did Miss Begley. In fact, she awakened me, because she’d become restless. I felt her move away from me, and closer, closer to Captain Miller. He, for the first time, put his arm around her. Bit by bit, she heaved herself ever nearer to him, until she lay almost astride his thighs.

Claudia never told us—not me, anyway—why we were learning French. If I’d asked anybody they wouldn’t have said anything more than “The pieces will fall into place.”

As they did. In essence, Charles Miller had found Kate Begley, and Claudia had “cleared” both of us for the task ahead. Claudia was a kind of spymaster, working in circumstances that gave her unrivaled contact with all sorts of useful people. Few in wartime London had as deep an address book. Claudia reached her long, alabaster fingers into the highest levels of the English war cabinet; it did no harm that her father had been a close friend of Churchill since school.

Through Churchill’s transatlantic connections—he’d had an American mother—Claudia was given the specific task of working as a deep liaison with the U.S. military long before President Roosevelt entered the war in Europe. She never said so, no matter how close we became, but I believe now that she prepared and trained spies for them.

Her “marriage market,” as she called it privately, provided her cover. She’d been doing some unpaid publicity work for the hotel before the war, and now she decided that the Ritz could become even more famous as a glamorous venue. Through London came large numbers of interesting and exciting men of all nationalities, especially Americans and Canadians. The Poles came too—some of them had been aristocrats—and the Australians, and the Free French, and the Free Italians, and exotic Armenians and Hungarians. Thus, Claudia came to know every useful diplomat and soldier who passed through during the war.

As a kick start, she had taken one of the large suites one evening and held what she called the first of her “fifty-fifty” cocktail parties—fifty handpicked women from the top echelon of London and surrounding counties, and fifty even more carefully handpicked men, most of whom had packed their dress uniforms before being posted to Britain.

For the women, she’d had cards printed, like old-fashioned dance
cards, which she’d distributed before the evening. On the card, ten blank lines invited the names of ten men they had met and would perhaps like to meet again. After the party, in the ladies’ cloakrooms, they could grade the names in the order of preference, and Claudia would arrange for them to meet any or all of them.

War generates license, and when the romances got under way, her “girls,” as she called them, reported back to Claudia all kinds of pillow talk.

“It took some juggling,” she told Miss Begley. “It still does.” She was talking about more than matchmaking.

One morning, after ten and a half weeks with Madame Blue Lipstick Samadett, Captain Miller walked in. He’d been absent for a few days again, he wore his uniform, in which we hadn’t seen him for weeks, and this man-boy now had a new and more threatening authority. He muttered to Madame, who half-bowed and quit the room; I think it crossed her mind to walk backward, so deferential did she seem.

He sat in Madame’s chair behind the desk. Without a greeting he said to Miss Begley, “We think we’ve found him.”

Miss Begley said, “So this is it?”

Captain Miller said, “The French know where he is. We want you to make sure.”

Did I look mystified? If I did, nobody noticed—or cared.

He opened a map of France and pushed it to her. “Do your stuff.”

Miss Begley looked at me in an almost disturbed, embarrassed way.

“Don’t laugh,” she said.

You may remember that I told you she had “one specific gift that I still can’t fathom.” From her handbag she took a small purse, and from the purse she took a needle and thread.

“Did you bring something?” she said to Captain Miller.

Out of his pocket Miller took a sock and handed it to her.

“You must have broken into his house?” She laughed, sunlight in her bead-brown eyes.

He replied, “We have friends everywhere,” and he didn’t laugh.

Miss Begley rubbed the needle through the wool of the sock.

“Concentrate on the coast,” Miller said.

Her elbow on the desk, Miss Begley bent her hand over the map of France. The needle dangled just above the French coast. Without encroaching, I looked over her shoulder. Miller sat back. We heard only our own breathing.

Nothing happened. Down along the coast of France she moved her hand as carefully as a watchmaker, using her arm like a little crane. Back up she went again—Le Crotoy, Fort Mahon, Le Touquet, Boulogne, Calais, up as far as Ostend.

Without raising her head she said, “Nothing.”

“Go inland an inch,” Captain Miller said.

She moved the hanging needle over Abbeville and Montreuil, right up to Calais again: “Nothing.”

“We know he’s there somewhere,” said Captain Miller. “Move in another inch.”

She positioned the needle halfway between Calais and Dunkirk and lowered her hand slowly. And then I saw her neck stiffen, and she held herself tighter. She stopped moving her hand, and the needle swung over and across in a straight line.