Secret Asset

3

Maddie came back to Belfast when her mother Molly telephoned to tell her the doctor’s news. There was nothing to be done except manage the pain. Sean Keaney would die at home.

So she returned to the small brick house where her father and mother had lived for over forty years, just off the Falls Road in Belfast, a house as minimal and drab as any of its neighbours in the row. Only the most careful observer would notice the extraordinary thickness of the front door, or how the painted shutters of the windows were steel-reinforced.

Learning that death was imminent, the family gathered like a wagon train drawing up in a circle for defence. Though it was a sparse circle, thought Maddie. One daughter had died of breast cancer two years before, and the one son—apple of his father’s eye—had been shot dead fifteen years before trying to evade a British Army roadblock. Now only she and her older sister, Kate, remained.

Maddie had come only because her mother had asked her to. As a little girl, her dislike for her father had been matched by the intensity of love she’d felt for her mother, though as she grew up even this was corroded by her frustration at her mother’s passivity in the face of her husband’s domineering ways. Maddie simply couldn’t fathom her mother’s willingness to subordinate her own striking qualities—the musicality, the love of books, the Galway-bred country sense of humour—to the demand of her husband Sean that the Struggle should always come first.

Maddie had known that her father’s dedication to Irish nationalism brought him admiration of a kind. But this had only increased her dislike of him, her anger at his callous treatment of the family. Yet she was never sure which she felt more contemptible—the man or the movement. She had got away from both as soon as she could—leaving at eighteen to study Law at University College Dublin, then staying on to work there.

There was also the violence—Maddie had been fleeing that as well, of course. She had never bothered to count the number of people she’d known who had been injured or killed. Then there were the others, just ordinary people many of them, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She came to believe that the counting would never stop. Her father had been obsessively secretive about his “professional life,” yet as the Keaney family listened to the news of each IRA “operation”—that euphemism for bombings, shootings and death—the hush that settled over them all was knowing, not innocent. No hush could still the impact of the deaths that studded Maddie’s childhood like a grotesquely crowded dartboard. Especially that of her brother, born and bred a Republican, killed before he had any idea that life might give him other choices.

Now she sat with her mother and sister for hours on end, drinking countless cups of tea in the small sitting room downstairs, while in his bed on the floor above them her father lay, heavily sedated. Word went out, through the vast network of comrades, associates and friends, that Sean Keaney would be glad to have final visits from those who had served with him since the Troubles flared in the late sixties. There was never any question of a priest being called, for although Keaney had been born a Catholic, the only faith he held was a rock-solid allegiance to the Irish Republican Army.

The visitors were all known to the family. Kieran O’Doyle, Jimmy Garrison, Seamus Ryan, even Martin McGuinness made an appearance late one night, coming under cover of darkness so his visit would not be noticed—the list was a roll call of the Republican movement. To a man they were long-term veterans of the armed struggle.

Many had served prison terms for their part in assassinations or bombings, and were free now only because of the amnesty provisions of the Good Friday Agreement. During his long paramilitary career, Keaney had managed to avoid any criminal conviction, but along with most of his visitors, he had been interned in the seventies for over a year in the cell blocks of the Maze Prison.

The men were shown upstairs by Maddie, since her mother found the constant up and down exhausting. Standing by the bedside, they tried to make small talk with the man they had known as the Commander. But Maddie could see that Keaney’s condition shocked them—once a barrel of a man, he had been reduced in his terminal illness to a small shrunken figure. Sensing his fatigue, most of his old associates kept their visits short, ending them with awkward but heartfelt final farewells. Downstairs, they stopped to talk briefly with Molly and Maddie’s sister, Kate; sometimes, if they had been especially close to Keaney, they drank a small whiskey.

Maddie could see how much even these brief visits drained her father’s dwindling energy, and she was relieved when there was no one left on the visitors’ list they had drawn up. Which made her father’s subsequent request, uttered after a night of such pain she thought he would not see the dawn break, all the more astonishing.

“He wants to see James Maguire!” she announced as her sister and mother gathered for breakfast in the small kitchen downstairs.

“You can’t be serious,” Kate said incredulously. Even under the umbrella of Irish nationalism, James Maguire and Sean Keaney had at best coexisted edgily, their mutual antipathy held in check only by their devotion to the cause.

“I thought it was morphine talk, but he’s asked twice now. I didn’t know what to say. We can’t turn down a request from our dying father, now can we?”

Her sister looked at her grimly. “I’ll go upstairs and have a word. He must be confused.” But when she came down again, her face was sterner still. “He absolutely insists. I asked why he wanted to see Maguire, and he said, ‘Never you mind. Just get him here for me.’”

And later that day, about an hour before the Keaneys had their tea, there was a knock on the door. A tall, lean man came into the house, and although he was much the same age as the dying man upstairs, there was nothing frail about him. He displayed none of the modesty shown by the other former associates of Sean Keaney, nor did he shake hands with any members of the family. When Kate took him upstairs, she later told Maddie, she found their father asleep—perhaps the bizarre meeting with a long-time enemy would not take place after all. But as she turned back to the visitor, the man said evenly, “Hello, Keaney.”

“Come in, Maguire,” the weaker voice commanded, and Kate saw that her father’s eyes had opened. He raised a bony hand to dismiss her, which he had not done with his other visitors.

Downstairs Maddie waited in the front parlour with her mother and sister, torn between curiosity and disbelief as the clock ticked and they could hear the low bass murmur of the voices upstairs for five, then ten, then fifteen minutes. Finally after half an hour they heard the bedroom door open, footsteps come down the staircase, and, without stopping for even the curtest farewell, Maguire walked out of the house.

Afterwards, Maddie found her father so exhausted that she could not bring herself to ask about the visitor, and left him to sleep. Her sister, less patiently, waited only until after tea to go upstairs, determined to discover the reason for her father’s summoning Maguire. Yet she returned downstairs both dissatisfied and distraught. For sometime during tea their father, Sean Keaney, had died in his sleep.