The Matchmaker of Kenmare (17 page)

I was so slow in those days. Too slow to see what had already been unleashed between Miss Begley and “CM,” too slow to understand how each was playing the other. And too slow to grasp that Kate Begley’s life might have been sheltered out there on the edge of the ocean, but her mind wasn’t.

No parachutes, no tap on the window in the dead of night, no submarine surfacing off the headland. Instead, after weeks of uncertain waiting, we got Bawn Buckley. The old smuggler himself docked his boat one bright morning, climbed up the headland path, strode into the kitchen, and said, “Are ye ready, lads?”

And Mrs. Holst, face as sweet as a cake, smile as ready as a child’s, never asked a question, never queried our departure. Did everybody know everything—except me?

If it’s night, and I’m returning from one of the Irish islands, I always feel the mainland approaching. Perhaps it’s because I have a sense of how long the journey should take. Or perhaps it’s because great landmasses tell you when they’re near. France did.

If we were stopped and boarded—by either side—we were neutral. That was the whole point. We’d be taken, we hoped, for a fishing boat from the southwest of Ireland who had been fouled by German apparatus
and war debris, causing us to put into port at Le Crotoy, renowned for mending nets.

Miss Begley slept for much of the journey. When she did join us in the little wheelhouse, she seemed as calm as wool. Bawn Buckley whistled and sang; he was, Miss Begley told me, an outstanding navigator. If he said that he was going to find landfall at Le Crotoy, then he would. And he treated her with tender, grandfatherly regard.

We hung offshore waiting for the tide. Bawn Buckley said that the skies promised weeks of unseasonal good weather. The long, comforting shape of France hardened through the breaking light. Not a vessel did we see in that quiet dawn. We stayed outside for another hour, as though becalmed, and when a small fishing smack headed in past us, we followed and sauntered into the harbor.

There’s not much to see in Le Crotoy, except massive expanses of beach. When the tide ebbs, the sands have almost a desert feeling. Hazes shimmer over them, even in cold weather, and mirages appear—of hills and dunes and silver pools that vanish as you near them. Miss Begley and I were to walk those sands for three days. We were expected, we discovered, in the tiny hotel; Bawn Buckley stayed on the boat.

Were we afraid? That’s the question I asked her as we walked those wide sands, those long days. In the flat sunshine and air cold as frost, Miss Begley kept on a woolen hat, as close to her head as a helmet.

She said, “I don’t know whether I’m excited or afraid.”

But once again, Miss Begley knew far more than I did, because on our first walk she said, “We have to go north along the beach for an hour. Then we’ve to turn and walk back for an hour. Then out for another hour. Then back to the harbor café.”

“How do you know all this?”

She said, “Just walk.”

On the third day, midway through our first hour, with the tide far out, a galloping horse appeared. Far, far down the sands from us, its hooves sent up flights of spray. In the distance we could tell only that it was equine. No color discernible, or breed. We stopped to watch.

A bareback rider. We stared. The horse veered toward us. It increased its speed. A teenage girl—that was the rider. Draped low along the neck. Gripping the mane. She never looked at us. As she thundered past, ten yards away, a tiny package fell.

I retrieved it; an old ring box, glue-wrapped in strong blue paper. No indication whence it came. We opened it with Miss Begley’s fingernails. Inside, we found a square packet of the same tough blue paper. Unfolded it had only the word
Larbaud
. We walked on.

When we returned to the café for lunch, Bawn Buckley joined us. He took the piece of paper, had a furtive look. After lunch we walked the sands again, and at the end of the day we wandered down to the men and women sewing the repairs in the nets.

Under Miss Begley’s tuition, I had been practicing my newfound vocabulary on the locals. For instance, I ordered our food at each meal. Blinking in the late sun among the net menders, I now asked if the name “Larbaud” meant anything to them. A man complimented me on my French—
“Bravo! M’sieu d’Irlande,”
and a woman too.

Nobody answered the question. But there are ways of not answering a question so that the inquirer is not offended. We strolled away, into the little café for dinner. A waitress more or less marched us to the big sea-view window. Miss Buckley nudged me.

Parked outside stood a bright yellow van with the name
Cirque Valéry Larbaud
. Beside it, in the sunny evening, stood a man and a girl, juggling colored plates to each other—husband and much younger wife, we would discover. Both wore clown suits without the faces or red noses, though he had a conical hat with yellow pom-poms.

“Now what do we do?” I whispered.

Miss Begley murmured, “Why do you think they gave us this table?”

The landlord, lean as a greyhound, long, sallow face, one eyelid drooping, came over. He muttered,
“Très chaud,”
and opened the window beside the circus.

The jugglers now began to sing. In French, it had the weight and lilt of a folk song, and they sang it very slowly in time to the rhythm of the juggling.

Miss Begley looked at me, her cheeks reddening, and said, “I have it. The song. They’ll pick us up tonight.” She waited. “They’re repeating it—two o’clock. Listen.” And they sang the chorus over and over,
“Deux heures. Ici. Deux heures. Ici.”

The pair of clowns finished juggling and held out a hat. I dropped
some coins through the open window, as did Miss Begley. And so did two men I hadn’t seen until that moment—German officers, coarse yet starched young men who applauded and walked off. With tooting horns and rattling bells, the Larbaud circus pulled away from the café, and we heard it clang up the little streets of Le Crotoy.

Later that evening, we alerted Bawn Buckley to the fact that we might be missing for some time. When we returned from the boat, the landlord with the drooping eyelid handed me an alarm clock. It was set to 1:45
A.M
.

There was no moon when we rose, yet the light seemed not to have left the sky. Shoals can cause this effect; a great movement of fish just beneath the surface will grant a light to the sea. That night I saw the gleam of Heaven in the water and the sky. I always associate the color silver with hope.

The drooping-eye landlord gave us mugs of hot chocolate. As we drank, he peered through the window. Soon, he snapped his fingers at us and opened the café door. Outside, a man appeared, the husband who had juggled. He said not a word, merely turned so that we followed the beam from his very weak flashlight.

We walked through short twists and turns, past the high dark bulk of a church. A steep lane took us down to a sheet of water. In a rowing boat, the juggling young wife waited. We stepped on board, and as she cast off she waved good-bye to her husband.

In all of this, nobody spoke. We did as bidden or as events indicated.

“Go where others lead; do as you’re told,” Captain Miller had said in London. My fear had been that we’d forget some of the instructions, but in the moment they were few, and they never amounted to more than, “Follow what happens.”

The curly-haired wife rowed like an athlete—long, powerful strokes
that disturbed little water. Within ten minutes or so, she nosed the boat into an inlet, a lagoon. She steered us under trailing branches and tied the boat to a ring on a wooden fence.

We followed her up a long staircase. Now we had almost no light, because trees surrounded the place and deep foliage hemmed in the walls. At the top of a long climb, she tapped on a door, and waited.

In the silence, I listened to the night. I heard almost nothing—perhaps a slight wash from the water below, perhaps a rustle of leaves. For that moment I had a sensation that recurs with me and is not uncomfortable—that there was no world and I didn’t exist.

Our guide folded her arms in a patient attitude, and we took our cue from her. The waiting felt like three or four minutes, a long time on a sightless, soundless night. When the curly-haired woman’s shape disappeared from the gloom, we followed her into deeper darkness. A presence beside us closed a door and drew a curtain; I heard the bolt rattling home.

Then light flooded, and we blinked inside a French farmhouse kitchen, of a kind that I’ve seen many times since. A woman stepped forward, dressed for a day out in the world, though the porcelain clock on the mantel now said a quarter past three in the morning. She welcomed us with friendly if unsmiling handshakes and indicated the room.

At a table sat four men. One of these was her husband, a farmer—the lady of the house, we would learn, was the local doctor. Of the other three, all very much younger, two belonged to the British and American forces. And one—who became and remains my friend—led the local maquis, the French Resistance. Hugo Barrive’s name was on every wanted poster in every village in the north of France.

He spoke first, in perfect English, with a very slight accent: “May I have your names, please?” and when we’d answered without a hint of fear or reserve he said, “Sit down.”

No drinks were offered, no informalities, and the curly-haired, juggling wife, Annette Larbaud, sat a little away from the table, as did the doctor, a frown on her face too.

“Thank you for coming here,” said Barrive, “and we will now tell you the details of the assignment. We are most appreciative of your help, and Captain Miller has our gratitude.”

“We have a question.” When Miss Begley butted in on any situation,
her force of presence, and the clarity of her speech, and perhaps the unusual Irish accent, ensured that she was heard.

The
maquisard
and the three other men turned a little in their chairs.

Miss Begley said, “Will anybody be killed because of what we do?”

Barrive said, “This is war.”

“We won’t have anything to do with anything that gets somebody killed,” she said.

Hugo Barrive said, “But you will save a lot of lives.”

“You don’t know that.” She was scolding him. “But you will know if somebody gets killed. I only ever act on what I know, and I won’t do something if it’s going to have a bad end. And I won’t do something just because somebody tells me it might have a good end. This gentleman you’re going after, he was my neighbor. He was married to my friend.”

The
maquisard
surveyed Miss Begley as a man looks at a pretty girl in a bar. He smiled and said, “A defined moral position, is that it?”

“I don’t care what you call it.” She spoke in a civilized way, with no rudeness, but as direct as a knife.

“What do you need?” he said.

And she replied, “There’s to be nobody killed in anything we do for you.”

“What do you think it is that we want you to do?”

“If I’m to fetch somebody—and that’s what I was asked to do—he has to live.”

In French, the farmer spoke to the
maquisard
, and the Englishman also said something—they both spoke so swiftly that I didn’t catch any of it. But Miss Begley did and said, “Oh, sure. Fine. Send us back if you like. But that’d be your weakness, not ours. And anyway you can’t do this without us.”

The
maquisard
smiled like a gracious host and said, “Why would we kill him? He is wanted for what he knows.”

Miss Begley subsided; he had charmed the passion out of her.

The briefing began. Nearby, in the town of Saint-Omer, the Germans had established a major communications facility. It aimed to get as much information as possible from across the English Channel. Along the coast, teams of German listeners and French collaborators gathered such radio signals as they could. They took them back to Saint-Omer, to the German official in charge of deciphering and interpretation. A civilian,
he was considered one of the key operatives in the occupation of France and the monitoring of Allied intentions. He had been one of the many Germans who had first come to Ireland for the fishing, and then stayed, in love with the terrain.

And by now I realized how deep a reconnaissance Captain Miller had made.

“We know a lot about this man,” Hugo Barrive said.

To which Miss Begley said, “Well, you’d have to, wouldn’t you?”

A tussle developed between Barrive and Miss Begley, the Irish country girl who, in her way, had as much daring and originality as anybody in that room, and a great deal more than most.

“His wife was very nice. They had no children,” said Miss Begley.

“He wants to marry again,” said Barrive.

Miss Begley laughed and shook her head.

“Captain Miller is one smart fellow,” she said, and we laughed with her.

“So you will do it?”

She said, “Describe exactly what you want?”

They told us the circumstances that existed and the scheme they had conceived. I was to pose as a writer, researching the travels of monks through Europe. Miss Begley was to pose as my cousin—we had our Irish passports—and we would stay in Saint-Omer and watch for Mr. Seefeld. They knew all his movements; they’d been tracking him for months.

“He’s very German,” said Barrive. “He does the same things every day at the same time. It will be easy to bump into him.”

“I’d know him anywhere,” she said. “Full head of hair. Big lips.”

In the first meeting she was to reminisce with him and then arrange a drink or dinner, if possible for that evening. The rest of the operation would be handled by the men whom we’d just met in the farmhouse. They’d whisk him from Saint-Omer, and then we’d be taken back to the boat at Le Crotoy. They told us that Bawn Buckley knew to expect an extra passenger on his journey back to Ireland. Barrive thanked us and left the house with his companions.

Was I still afraid? I’m not sure. They had arranged it as a placid event, easy to accomplish—or so they’d claimed. When I look back, it seems
both ordinary and preposterous—but so do many of the events in all our lives, and most of us have never lived inside a war.