A Parachute in the Lime Tree by Annemarie Neary

Author:Annemarie Neary
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752480657
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

Dublin

Hedy Lamarr and the Parachute Man

Kitty had been out with a fair few fellows up in Dublin. Without exception, they were a shower of octopuses. There’d not been a hint of that with the German. Maybe he was just brought up to be gentlemanly (not that it made a blind bit of difference to the octopuses, and them indoctrinated against the sins of the flesh since they were in short pants).

It would give you the pip: fellows lining up to take her out that summer up in Dublin before Father became ill but not a flicker of interest from the one who’d fallen out of the sky. She imagined dandering down Grafton Street with Oskar on her arm, taking tea and little cakes in Bewley’s. It would be dreamy to be away from Dunkerin with somebody as glamorous as him. Rita was driving her mad with her letters: this dance and that one. To hear her, you’d think she was out at dinners in Jammet’s every other night of the week. Oh, to be back in the land of the living with Oskar to show off around town. There’s no way Rita could beat that: a man who’d floated down to earth like a dandelion clock. Sure she wouldn’t have to say he was a German at all. She could pass him off as some other class of a foreigner; do the talking for him, if she had to.

As for a place to stay, Aunt Effie would put them up. She wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Effie didn’t give a fiddler’s what anybody thought. Didn’t they say she had a fancy man herself, some fellow with a funny name who dressed up in Indian clothes and pretended to be the doorman? That’s what Father used to say, anyway. Mother was horrified. ‘Whisht now, Frank,’ she’d say. ‘That’s an awful thing to say. Sure he’s just one of those poor divils who come to Effie looking for the Light.’

‘So that’s what they’re calling it these days.’

She couldn’t make head nor tail of Oskar. Whatever about the lack of movement on the romantic front, there was no sign of him making any move for Wicklow either. If he was a spy, which she very much doubted, then he didn’t have a lot of get-up-and-go about him. She’d reached the conclusion that he was a bit of a dreamer, really. She wasn’t surprised he’d left the war. She reckoned the war would do just fine without him. She couldn’t for the life of her imagine him being any good at all when it came to dropping bombs. All Oskar seemed to do was sit and dream and fiddle around with his knife on scrag ends of wood. One morning, when she arrived at the shed, she jumped with fright when she saw the knife, until she realised he was just whittling away at something. He had a little leather book that he wrote in, too: pages and pages of spiky script.

The thing that puzzled her the most was that she still couldn’t see how he’d reached Dunkerin in the first place.

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