The Matchmaker of Kenmare (15 page)

“Saint-Omer,” she said. “I think he’s in that town.”

“Make sure,” said Miller.

She bent her head again and held herself still as a statue.

“Look at it,” she said. “The pendulum doesn’t tell lies.”

The needle swung in a stronger, straighter line.

Captain Miller nodded. “That figures,” he said.

We all straightened up and I asked, “What’s going on here?”

He said, “What you see is what you see.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Miller said, “Have you ever been to France?”

I recoiled and began to walk away backward. Miss Begley called me back.

“You promised you’d come anywhere with me.”

“Into France? In the middle of the war? Is that what you’re asking?”

Miller said, “With good reason.”

I turned back to her. “Spell it out for me.” Neither of them said a word, and I pressed. “What. Is. Going. On?”

They looked at each other as though to say,
You tell him
.

Miller spoke. “Kate knows somebody crucial in the German war machine. He could provide crucial help.”

“What?”

She said, “He’s a German gentleman. Used to live near us. He still has a house—back at Derrynane.”

“Oh, for Jesus’ sake,” I said to her. “What has this to do with you?”

“He knows me. I was his matchmaker.”

“He trusts Kate,” said Miller.

“Trusts her to do what?” They didn’t answer. Sometimes I’m just quick enough on the uptake. “Trusts you enough to go back to Ireland with you?”

She looked sheepish; he was opaque.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Hans-Dieter,” she said. “I call him Hans.”

“And what about Mrs. Dieter?” I said. I felt like a policeman.

“His name is Hans-Dieter Seefeld. Mrs. Seefeld died. Ann was her name. I was at school with her.”

All of this scene—they’d expected it; they’d worked out everything; they’d anticipated my every squeak of indignation. This plan had been put through every wringer they could find. They were miles ahead of me and I felt livid with anger.

I said, “You’ve decided to do it anyway.”

Miller spread his hands, and said, “So?”

“But this is a bad idea. We’re Irish, we’re neutral.”

He said, “There’s no such thing as neutral when you’re facing evil.”

“But we have to be neutral,” I said. “We’re weak. We’re tiny. And what would happen to us—I mean—” By now I was running out of language as I tried to assess their plan. “Is this—?” I stopped, incredulous. “Is this kidnapping that you’re talking about? Jesus! What books have you been reading?”

“It’ll work. His wife died last year,” said Kate. “She was a close friend of mine. He wants to be where their life was.”

“But why kidnap him?”

Miller said, “I already told you. He can give us crucial help.”

“How?”

Miller said, “I can’t tell you that.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

Kate intervened. “No. It’s kind of secret.”

Miller added, “It’s a lot secret.”

“This is far past ridiculous,” I said. “You’re trying to kidnap somebody German from a country occupied by Germany and take him to a neutral country—have I got that right? I mean—have you ever heard the word
implications
?”

Miller felt my outrage; I could see it in his darkening eyes, and I didn’t care. Apart from our personal safety, which he can’t have cared too much about, did he have any idea how vulnerable we were to the gods of war? Our guerrillas might have forced a treaty out of Britain in 1921—but Europe wasn’t a farmhand war. We’d have no kind of chance in a major conflict—and Miller knew it.

“If you’re trying to draw us into the war,” I said, “that’s about as unfair as you could be. Do you know how weak we are?”

“Yeah, you have six thousand soldiers,” he said.

“I know two of them,” said Miss Begley. “And they couldn’t fire a catapult.”

Miller added, “You have twenty-one armored vehicles, including a pair of tanks.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Call that an army? And our air force? Two dozen planes, and only four of them can work as fighters.”

Captain Miller said, “I know—and I’m asking you to do something that will help protect your country.”

I said, “Nobody will bother to attack us.”

He shook his head. “You’re wrong, Ben.”

“Tell us, so,” said Miss Begley, coming a pace or two to my side.

I know now, from the history of the period, from the government papers long released, that the two great antagonists, Britain and Germany, had drawn up extensive plans to invade Ireland. It didn’t matter that we were a mouse, an island smaller than some of the counties in American states—and certainly smaller than most of the states themselves. The Germans wanted to invade us because we sat a mere sixty miles from England. And the British wanted to invade us to stop the Germans. Did
they need an excuse? If they did, we now might give it to them, and I said as much.

Captain Miller said, “A gambler would take a bet.”

Miss Begley said, “What kind of a bet?”

Miller said, “That one or the other will come in on top of you.”

I asked, “But wouldn’t you fellows stop it?”

He flashed like fire. “You could be sure to stop it now.”

“Ah, go on out of that,” she said. “Ben and me?”

“If he knew—”

“Who?” I said. “If
who
knew?”

“Hitler.”

“If Hitler knew what?” I said; my combativeness surprised me and made him laugh.

“Calm down and listen,” Charles Miller said. He had that most useful of gifts—command without force. “If Hitler knew that we knew his plans, he’d either change them or give them up altogether.”

“And we’d be the ones to cause that?” I said, sarcastic and cold.

Miss Begley stepped forward another pace. “Do you know where your ludeen is?” she said to him.

My turn to laugh; the ludeen, an old word from the Irish language, means the little finger. But Charles Miller looked as startled as though she’d suggested something indecent. She alarmed him further; she reached forward, took his hand, and held it up, then closed his fingers, but tweaked out the pinkie.

“See this? This is your ludeen, and Ben is saying we’d have as much chance of doing anything useful in that war over there as this ludeen.”

Her language often amused me. I’ve preserved as much of it as I can remember. She once said that a man she knew had a face “as shiny as a shark.”

Charles Miller saw no fun in this new turn of phrase. Instead, he said, cold as the east, “Perhaps you should wait until you learn more.”

I blurted, “I know enough. In among the Germans? Kidnap? Is that it? Kidnap one of their top men? Is that what you really want us to do?” My words now came out in chunks. “He’s a German, whose home is in neutral Ireland. He’d be there if he wanted to be.”

“No,” said Miller. “Hitler won’t let him. He’s too useful. They need him too much.”

That night, in the frantic anxiety this turn of events had caused, an
obvious question came sidling up to me. It had a bitter taste:
Why hadn’t she offered her “gift,” her “pendulum,” to me? To find Venetia?

Next day, they sent us back to Ireland. Claudia gave us two official envelopes and said an affectionate good-bye; she kissed me on the lips. A silent gentleman in a black car took us to the train.

One envelope held a document that guaranteed passage through England, Scotland, and Wales. Its power astonished us. We were actually saluted by the policemen and soldiers who inspected us on the train. And our private compartment had a guard standing outside it for the seven-hour journey from London to Holyhead. On the boat to Dublin we were given adjoining cabins. A sentry stood outside.

With my knowledge of her now, from this distance in time, I can see that Kate Begley was manipulating me, managing me, waiting for me to calm down. On the train, she’d initiated no conversations—nor had I, which was the only way that I could fight back. Nor, on board ship, did she attempt to reach me from her cabin.

The second envelope held our Irish passports. We had had no visas of any kind to anywhere, nor had we ever applied, or filled in forms. The supplying of them confirmed that we’d crashed into something very substantial. Government must have spoken to government must have spoken to government—American, British, Irish.

As the boat began to dock, we stood on deck, and I asked the question that had been rolled up and down my mind.

“The needle. How did you do it?”

She said, “The man found himself. That’s where he was.”

“There’s no logic to it,” I said.

She replied, “There doesn’t have to be logic to everything.”

In Dublin, we shopped for clothes. Captain Miller had given us the money, told us what to buy. We then took the train—on which life was
normal—to the southwest; I was to stay at Lamb’s Head with Miss Begley and her grandmother until somebody came for us. It would be “some time,” said Miller.

One night that week, I wrote this entry:

And so we waited. My ice began to melt on the long slog of a journey; from the moment we got to Lamb’s Head, we talked and we talked.

That first night I asked her, “Did you know we were going to be asked to do this task, job, mission—whatever you call it?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You promised to be direct with me.”

No answer.

I said, “All right. This is how we’ll do it. If I’m wrong, say
no
. If I’m right, say nothing.”

She looked at me with disgust.

I said, “This is what happened. He said to you, ‘Would you do something for me? Something big,’ and you asked him about his girl back home, didn’t you?”

Not a word from her.

“Isn’t that how this all came about?” I asked.

Not a word.

And I said, “So it was all set up in advance, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t speak and I had my answer.

I made one more effort. “That day he came here. He knew what he was coming for, didn’t he? And when you and he were down there on the headland—he told you a lot of things that he had learned about you, didn’t he? He startled you with his knowledge of you.”

She said, “I’m going to bed.”

I again failed to sleep. Being without alcohol was stretching me thin. I felt anxious, nervous all over, and I’d been reading too much in the newspapers about the war in Europe—massacres, burning villages, crowded trains to unknown oblivion.
Am I crazy?
I asked myself again and again.
Am I stone mad to thrust myself into the pit of it? And for what?

Some time in the small hours, I rose, dressed, and went out of doors. Even if moonless, and in all seasons, the Atlantic seems to give off a light. On Lamb’s Head, it glowed bright enough for me to pick out the cliffs. I traced the badges of white on the rocks, the white sashes that the ocean wears as she approaches the land, and I could hear her, I could hear her advancing and fading, a rising and falling
swish!
of her waves, and I thought,
She’s the one speaking the words of the night; there’s not a bird or an animal or a wind
.

But I was wrong—the ocean didn’t own the only sound during that winter moment of mildness and calm. Miss Begley slept in a room beside the front door, and, in love with fresh air, she habitually kept her window thrown open. As I walked back across the little plateau that fronted the house, I heard her in her room. She was weeping as desperately as any child ever did, or any grown woman.

If I may, I’ll use this sojourn that was forced upon us to catch up with something. You may recall that I asked at the end of that first meeting with Miss Begley in July ’43 if I might come back to observe her at work. Among the letters waiting when we returned from London, she found a postcard that read, “Dear Miss B., I’ll say ‘yes,’ won’t I, for, as you say, every chance of Love is a Gift from an Angel. Yours very faithfully, E. Mangan (Miss).”

Miss Begley showed me the card.

“I’m excited,” she said. “When you start putting two people together, and you know they’re ideal for each other—it’s just a thrill. This girl needs a kind man. And that’s certainly what she’ll meet.”

Next Sunday came the sound of that same “kind man” whistling like a blackbird: Neddy the Drover trundled up, as shining as the winter sun. His boots gleamed like black marble; he had a sober red tie on a white shirt and a suit of blue serge. I recognized the rig—somewhere in his life dwelt a returned emigrant. The water with which he had plastered down his hair had dried, and he was left with strands jutting all over his pointed head.

“Hello there, Miss. Ah, hello, sir, Mr. Ben! Howya doin’?”

I’ve rarely met a man so easy to like.

Miss Begley took Neddy aside and, as I learned, debated with him as to whether he objected to my presence at his wooing. He had no qualms—because, as I now think, he had no concept of boundaries. It
would never have occurred to him that he had any personal rights, not even something as minimal as privacy. Still, I left them alone, went indoors, and found a dim place in a far corner of the long, friendly kitchen.