Free The Truth About Love by Josephine Hart Page A

relieved the siege of Limerick? That man had everything: wealth, brilliance and they say he was very good looking. He died later on the battlefield in France, crying out, ‘Oh that this was for Ireland.’ So he talked of Sarsfield as well as Pearse?”
    “Yes—I found it moving. If a little unsettling.”
    “And why would it unsettle you?”
    “Such passion. Such competition with his sister to know by heart speeches, rhetoric.”
    “Well I’ve told Brother Enda to calm the rhetoric a bit. I’m considering talking to the powers that be about a transfer for that pair, maybe to Dundalk or Drogheda. Might suit their temperaments better. Very passionate towns up there; they’ll feel more at home. I know it was a terrible accident and that any teenage boy, as they call them now, could lay his hands on a chemistry set—maybe more—still, after what happened in the North … in that pathetic campaign. Yes, minds were twisted there, just after we’d all settled down, though never giving up our legitimate hopes for the future. But there’s a world of difference between a free nation building its soul on the tales of men who fought hard and long against a ruthless oppressor and breaking young minds with the weight of old sadnesses and burdening young shoulders with an unpayable debt to ghosts. Do you know how Pearse said you appease a ghost, Thomas?”
    “No Bishop, I do not.”
    “You give it what it asks.”
    “A dangerous concept.”
    “Indeed it is, Thomas. It’s Hamlet , of course.”
    “Who was unequal to the task: ‘an oak tree planted in a costly vase.’”
    “Goethe! It’s marvellous to talk to you Thomas. This conversation with you will help me tomorrow when I visit the O’Haras, to begin to help them to forget.”
    “I doubt they will ever do that.”
    “If they allow themselves to be lost in God’s love they will remember differently. An embarrassing concept to you, no doubt.”
    I cannot resist feeling angry in some obscure way.
    “My father said there were four things a man or a nation could do with their history, which is, after all, their collective memory.”
    “Well now, you have me fascinated, Thomas.”
    I proffer the whiskey.
    “No! I couldn’t. Oh, all right then. Eamonn will be cross with me. Just a splash. Continue. Not with the whiskey. With the story.”
    His small brown eyes behind the glasses he dons for chess can sometimes glitter with a concentrated hunger.
    “My father said a nation could forget, exploit, obscure or live with its history.”
    “What a succinct appraisal. Wouldn’t I have loved to meet your father.”
    I note that he uses the past tense.
    “He rarely leaves Germany now.”
    He has realised his mistake. Coughs, puts his glass carefully on the table. There is an uneasy silence between us now. The Bishop does not know how to deal with the history of my country. But then who does? He sighs and I watch to see him search for another subject, perhaps related in some way to what we currently discuss so that there will be no implication of a too-abrupt cessation.
    “My sister’s husband fought in the First and Second World War. Is it indelicate to mention this?”
    “Not at all, Bishop.” I am surprised he does not use the common terminology “The Emergency” to describe the Second World War.
    “He’s a peer, you know. Much older than Deirdre. But I must say they seem happy. She met him in Dublin. His cousin was shot dead in front of his wife that terrible Sunday morning, 21 November 1920. Though he didn’t tell my sister for years. Thought it might kill the romance, I suppose. Michael Collins ordered the squad—the ‘Twelve Apostles’; never liked that name, obviously—to kill army spies from Dublin Castle. Hard to look a man straight in the face—which I suppose you must—and pull the trigger with his wife standing there screaming. Managed eighteen, they say, or was it fourteen?—it’s debated. They say he hoped the British would retaliate. He