“No.” The man who hired our great-grandmother was a Protestant, she was Catholic. I understand how things have traditionally worked here, but it doesn’t justify Marian’s decision. “I’m just saying someone like Maitland won’t understand what we’re doing for him.”
“It’s not about him,” she says.
Except it is, in a way. Some people are more unacceptable as victims than others. Eamonn has assured me that this murder cannot and will not happen, and I don’t know if he would have spoken with the same conviction about a police officer in Saintfield.
I think about my mother, working for the Dunlops for fourteen years, then being fired with no notice, no pension. They should at least have paid her two weeks of severance, but a contract was never signed, no one is coming to hold them responsible.
Seamus’s mother was in service, too, and his grandmother, and his great-great-grandmother died in the famine. He has good reason to want a socialist republic. All of us do. Maybe the problem is me, and people like me, for standing in the way of the rebellion, for believing this version of civilization can be improved.
If I tell someone this story in sixty years, they might consider Seamus its hero. They might hope for his plans to succeed, and they might be right. Seamus is willing to die to bring about a fair future. It’s hard to say anymore which of us has Stockholm syndrome.
33
THE LIBRARY IN GREYABBEY is open late tonight. In the children’s corner, Finn sits on my lap while I read him a board book. Our book has pictures of animals with tufts of fake fur. Finn doesn’t want me to turn past the page with the rabbit, and so we stare down at it together.
“Rabbit,” I say aloud. “Rabbit.” After some time, I attempt to turn the page, and he cries and grips the book until the rabbit is reinstated.
There are treasures on the other shelves, but for now they’re not for us. I can’t even guess which ones Finn will like, or whether he will enjoy reading. I can imagine how other children will be, but not him. All of my belief and faith lies with him as he is right now. Each month seems to bring the definitive, true version of his infancy, the zenith, arrived at through a great deal of effort on both our parts.
I can’t move ahead of him, and I don’t need to, either. He practiced how to crawl and to walk on his own. My job, it seems, is to follow him, without any hesitation or regret.
I always become suspicious when other parents tell me to enjoy every second of having a baby, to make the most of these years, since their enthusiasm never seems to extend to whatever age their children are now. Finn won’t disappoint me by being eight years old, or fourteen, or thirty-six. He won’t hurt my feelings by growing up.
“You have no idea how much you will miss this part,” said my mam. But that’s the job, isn’t it? Not to let on.
“Rabbit,” I say again, my voice falling into the silence, while Finn studies the page.
I borrow a stack of board books for us to read and return next week. Glenarm will be over by then. Earlier today, I ordered a rocking horse with a miniature saddle and reins for Finn. It will be his reward, I think, as though he has agreed to let me leave, or to any of this.
On the walk home in the November dusk, Greyabbey looks as simple and inviting as the villages in his picture books. Inside each house, families are preparing dinner, or studying, or playing. I buy two sheaths of pink roses from the florist, and put flowers next to my bed, and on the kitchen table, and in a vase in the baby’s room. They fill the whole house with their scent. Finn looks at home among them, equally new, equally beautiful.
While I cook dinner, Finn yelps to be lifted into my arms, where he can survey the kitchen surfaces, the cheese grater, the pots boiling on the hob. I’ve worked out how to grate parmesan and crack an egg with one hand.
I ring Tom while the pasta cooks. “Are you still okay with taking Finn tomorrow?”
“Sure,” says Tom.
“You’ll need to collect him from day care.”
Tom yawns. “Maybe I’ll work from home.”
“How?”
“He naps, doesn’t he?”
The evening seems to last and last. Eventually Finn falls asleep on my shoulder, his head fitted against me, the dip of his nose pressed to my neck. I don’t want to put him down in his crib. Instead, I make a wall of pillows down the side of the bed, and sleep curled around his body. In the night, he sometimes flings a small, warm hand against my face.
* * *
—
A sound wakes me before dawn. Rain is falling on the roof. I can hear it pattering on the tiles and the downpipes. In the kitchen, I switch on the radio for the weather. It’s Thursday, I’m meant to leave for Glenarm this morning. Seamus plans to assassinate Lord Maitland on Saturday, detonating the bomb as soon as he sails his boat out into the harbor.