‘What are you watching for, Mum?’
‘Nothing,’ she’d say, and go back to some busy work. But I knew what she was watching for. Colleen, heading towards home, a small child’s hand in hers. Love and reason have never been well acquainted.
On Armistice Day I had never seen so many people in one place as there were on the streets of London. With Megs, Louisa and our friend Emily Hastings, I went out into the celebrating throng. What noise and joy. We couldn’t stand shoulder to shoulder, everybody moved sideways.
Megs, Louisa, Emily and I tried to hold hands as we made our way through the streets but it was impossible. It should have been frightening, being trapped in the midst of so thick a crowd, but the happiness was even thicker. You can’t imagine the joy and goodwill. If you tripped, a hundred hands reached out to catch you. If you sneezed, a thousand people said ‘God Bless You’。 A soldier caught Megs’s arm as she tripped over the curb, then tipped his hat and revelled on with his mates. I searched the crowd, as if there were any reason for Finbarr to be held within it, as if – being lucky enough that he loved me – I could be lucky enough to summon him before my eyes.
Somewhere out in the masses, Agatha Christie was walking too. During this stretch of time, a lonely married lady with her husband off to war, she’d occupied herself by taking a course in shorthand. When Armistice was announced right in the middle of class, everyone stumbled out into the celebrations, marvelling at the crowd just as we did. Englishwomen – Englishwomen! – dancing in the street. For all I knew, Agatha and I were shoulder to shoulder, either once or many times during that heady day.
I’m not sure when Megs and I were jostled apart, but somewhere I lost hold of her fingers, a laughing matter and not a frightening one. We’d all catch up eventually. I made it as far as Trafalgar Square. A delivery truck rumbled up Northumberland Avenue with soldiers draped over every inch of it, so I couldn’t make out the advertisements written on its side. Just as the truck came to a halt, not able to go a single bit further because of the crowds, a soldier jumped off the bonnet and landed up ahead of me, his peaked army cap covering cropped black hair.
It was such a swift and light-hearted movement. Seconds earlier the world had been only the throng, no individuals, just one great mass of human life. I had barely existed myself except as a part of it. Now, though, even though a good fifty bodies jammed into the space between us, there were only two people in all of London. Finbarr and me. Facing each other with joyful eyes. Oh, as if I’d conjured him up. Make a wish, Nan. The sort of miracle that convinces us life on earth has meaning. His black hair shone blue in the London grey as it had on his own emerald island.
‘Is it you?’ he shouted. He held a bottle of champagne in one hand. ‘Am I drunk? Am I dreaming?’
‘It’s me.’ My voice rasped with the shouting of it.
‘Step aside,’ Finbarr commanded the crowd. ‘That’s my girl. I see my girl.’
Could the Red Sea refuse Moses? Could the throng refuse this handsome, blue-eyed soldier, home from victory safe and sound?
In his khaki uniform and army boots, Finbarr made his way through the cleared path and swept me up in his arms. When the crowd closed back in, he hoisted me onto his shoulder, and I saw multitudes spreading all over London, as if an ocean of people had washed into the city, flowing through its undammed streets. All of them beaming, the sky above us free of danger.
‘You didn’t tell me you were coming to London,’ I shouted down to him, and he slid me off his shoulder and into his arms.
‘I only found out day before yesterday,’ he said. ‘There was no time. Anyway, I knew I’d find you.’ As if London were Ballycotton and he only had to wander the docks, asking fishermen where Nan O’Dea lived. ‘It’s like a miracle, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘You’re like a miracle, same as ever.’ His voice had changed. Deeper, raspier, as if something had broken inside his throat, which indeed it had. In that moment I owed it to the shouting but would learn later it was a permanent alteration, brought on by mustard gas.