The Child Left Behind. Anne Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ her, but I never thought you felt that way too.’

      ‘Well,’ Finn said, ‘d’you think I should have carried a banner advertising the fact that I love Gabrielle Jobert?’

      ‘No, but—’

      ‘It wasn’t just her father we had to worry about either,’ Finn said. ‘It was the army. When I admitted at first how I felt about her to the captain he warned me away from her. He said the town was full of girls more than willing, with fathers not as formidable as Pierre Jobert, but when you have your eye on the main prize you don’t settle for second best. We both knew, though, that if the army got a hint of any sort of romance between us, I could be whisked away to join the rest of the company before I had time to draw breath.’

      ‘Well,’ Christy said, ‘if it was all this cloak-and-dagger stuff, where the hell did you meet? You could hardly be out of doors in the depths of winter, however hot with passion you were.’

      ‘If I tell you that, then you are not to mention it to another soul,’ Finn said. ‘It would sort of spoil it then.’

      ‘Don’t see why it should,’ Christy said, ‘now your affair is over and your bird flown away to Paris.’

      ‘We didn’t have an affair,’ Finn retorted. ‘And it isn’t over. Although I will probably have left here by the time she returns from Paris, she has said she will wait for me.’

      ‘Oh, yes?’ Christy said sneeringly. ‘Were you born yesterday or what? Her father probably has some person he feels suitable for her to marry and he will have a fair choice, for the girl is a looker and set to inherit the bakery, I suppose, as she is the eldest.’

      Finn remembered Gabrielle saying her father wanted her and her sister to make what she termed ‘good’ marriages, and her reaction to that. ‘Maybe her father will have some ideas that way, but Gabrielle has sworn to me that she will only marry for love, and that she loves me, and that she will wait.’

      Christy looked at his friend pityingly, certain that he was heading for one massive disappointment if he thought that was actually going to happen, but what he said was, ‘All right then, where did you conduct this great love affair? And you are all right, I shan’t tell a soul where your love nest was.’

      ‘A farmhouse I stumbled on one night,’ Finn said. ‘It is quite a way from the camp though some of the land the camp is on belonged to the owner, but Gabrielle said when he died there was no one to inherit and so the house is lying empty. I cleaned it up because it was filthy, and we used to have the fire alight, and it was real cosy. I even brought a blanket from my own bed.’

      ‘But how did she get out of her father’s house?’

      ‘She climbed out of the bedroom window and down a convenient tree there,’ Finn said. ‘Because her father has to get up so early, the whole house retires at eight thirty every night. She would wait until it was all quiet and creep out. Her sister was the only one to know because they shared a room.’

      ‘God!’ Christy breathed. ‘I wouldn’t have said she had enough gumption.’

      ‘Oh, she has gumption enough, believe me.’

      ‘And did you…you know?’ Christy said, nudging Finn with his elbow.

      ‘That’s none of your bloody business.’

      ‘Maybe not,’ Christy said, ‘but I bet you didn’t go to all that trouble to bloody well hold hands.’

      They had reached the Headquarters and as they went up the steps Christy caught sight of Finn’s face, with a smile playing around the corners of his mouth. Suddenly he knew with absolute conviction that Finn Sullivan had lain with Gabrielle Jobert and was remembering their nights of passion. Oh, how he envied him. He would have sold his soul for such an experience himself.

       SEVEN

      With the casualty lists rising in Ireland and no sign of the promised Home Rule, an insurrection began in Dublin on Easter Monday. The postman told Biddy about it the following morning and when the men came in for breakfast they could scarcely believe what she related.

      ‘Surely not,’ Thomas John said. ‘They would not be so stupid as to take on the might of the British Army.’

      ‘I don’t know so much,’ Joe said. ‘There are plenty of stupid fellows in that Irish Republican Brotherhood, or whatever they call themselves these days.’

      ‘Well, I think we need to know what is happening in our own country,’ Thomas John said decidedly. ‘Someone of us must go to Buncrana and buy a paper.’

      Tom went in on the old horse, and when he got home, regardless of the jobs awaiting attention on the farm, Thomas John spread the paper on the table.

      ‘Just a thousand of them,’ he said in disgust. ‘What on earth can a scant thousand men achieve? Connolly and Pearse are leading them to be slaughtered.’

      ‘They have both sides of the Liffey covered, though,’ Joe put in, impressed despite himself. ‘And taken over the GPO in Sackville Street like the postman was after telling Mammy.’

      ‘Hoisted up the tricolour flag too,’ Tom said. ‘It might be ill timed, stupid or whatever you want to call it, Daddy, but isn’t it a fine sight to see the tricolour flying in Ireland again?’

      ‘Aye it is, son,’ Thomas John said rather sadly. ‘And take joy in it, because it won’t flutter there for long. It wouldn’t hurt to get a paper each day though and keep abreast of things.’

      That night Tom wrote to Finn telling him all about the uprising.

      The worst thing is, there are so few of them pitted against the might of the disciplined British Army. Daddy thinks the whole thing is doomed to failure and I am inclined to agree with him. In fact the rebels might have hindered, not helped, the peace process.

      Finn tried to be concerned, but the uprising seemed far removed from the war in France. It was as if Buncrana was in his distant past, almost another life, a life that hadn’t Gabrielle in it.

      The day that he received Tom’s letter he met Father Clifford in St-Omer. He was really pleased to see him and he greeted him warmly. ‘But what are you doing here, Father?’ he asked.

      ‘I am here to tend to the injured in the hospital,’ the priest replied. ‘Father Kenny has been taken ill himself and I offered to take his place for a while.’

      ‘So have you left our battalion then, Father?’

      ‘No, not at all,’ Father Clifford said. ‘This is just temporary. I am moving out with you.’

      ‘No one knows when that will be yet?’

      ‘The next forty-eight hours, I heard,’ Father Clifford said.

      Finn knew that once he moved from St-Omer there would be no way that Gabrielle could find him. In his reply to Tom that night he mentioned not one word about the uprising, but said that the whole company was on the move, no one knew where, and he was heartbroken at leaving behind his beloved СКАЧАТЬ