the catastrophist by RONAN BENNETT

Author:RONAN BENNETT
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Published: 2000-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

After we’d been together a couple of months she’d had to return to Rome to talk to the paper about her contract. We decided that instead of her coming straight back to London we would take a holiday in Ireland and that she would fly to meet me in Dublin. Her plane was late. There’d been fog at Rome and they’d waited on the runway for three hours.

“The pilot was coward,” she complained as she marched into the arrivals hall.

“A coward,” I said in a gentle reminder.

I was always in two minds about whether to correct her mistakes—as she insisted I do—or savor them.

“Yes, coward,” she said as though I hadn’t understood the first time. “He could have taken off after just one hour.”

She was so annoyed by the pilot’s timidity she forgot to kiss me.

We drove to the west, pursued by rain.

“We are always unlucky with the weather,” she said.

“Ireland’s unlucky with the weather.”

It was late April and Mayo was still in the gray wrap of winter.There was sleet and hail, both were fierce, driving the dogs and the sheep to shelter. At Westport the river boiled over the stone bridge and I had trouble getting the car across. Vai, vai, she said, kissing me. We found a cottage to rent five miles from the town. The bed linen was damp. I built a fire and kept it in all night.

Next day out walking we took refuge from a downpour in a warm bar. We got talking to the farmers and laborers and, several rounds into the afternoon, she brought the conversation round to the IRA. In front of outsiders the reaction of country people is rarely marked, but the change in atmosphere was unmistakable. I felt the stiffening of the people around us, their withdrawal. Inès blundered on, misreading silence for license, the slant of her talk more and more tendentious. She stopped only when I caught her eye.

Back in the cottage I said icily, “Couldn’t you see how embarrassing that was for them?”

“Perhaps it was just embarrassing for you.”

“Yes, it was.”

“Well, it isn’t embarrassing for Italians to talk about the partisans,” she snapped back.

“The IRA are not the partisans. ”

The outsider with strong but uninformed opinions about Ireland is nothing new, but to hear someone so close to me speak this way was more than I could bear. For the first time I shouted at her.

“They are not partisans. They are foolish seventeen-year-old boys who get shot in some pointless, bungled raid and die alone in a cow-byre on a freezing winter night with their guts hanging out. They’re middle-aged bachelors who’ve lived all their lives with their mothers on some godforsaken smallholding and then blow themselves and everyone around them to bits with their homemade bombs. They’re not fighting Germans, Inès, they’re shooting ordinary policemen who have homes and wives and children.”

“The German soldiers in Italy had wives and children as well.”

Her arguments were glib and sentimental. When we returned to London I found myself wondering for the first time if I had made a mistake.

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