Free Hours of Gladness by Thomas Fleming

her forehead. His mother left them alone in the Nook while she caught up on her correspondence with the Tourist Board.
    â€œYou look peaked,” Alice said.
    â€œI am a bit. You don’t get much sleep in intelligence.”
    â€œThat must make it difficult.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œTo be intelligent. I presume that’s why you’re in it.”
    â€œThe old brain does creak a bit.”
    â€œAnything else?”
    â€œCreak? Oh. My conscience, sometimes. For not writing.”
    â€œI’m not talking about that. You never have written. The year you spent in Hong Kong, I got exactly one letter. I mean about the things you’re doing in Ireland.”

    â€œI can’t talk about that.”
    â€œI don’t mean your work. I mean the whole operation. Shooting women and children.”
    â€œThe troops get out of hand now and then. But that’s not policy. We only fire when fired on.”
    A lie. But an official lie was not the same as a personal lie. The Jesuits had taught him that. His father had been right about one thing. The army and the Jesuits did have a lot in common.
    â€œWe’ve been working on a documentary at the BBC. I’ve seen footage. It’s so beastly.”
    â€œYou mean the IRA bombs. I should say.”
    â€œI mean the whole thing. I think we should withdraw and let them fight it out. I found a wonderful quotation from Shaw.”
    â€œOh?”
    â€œâ€˜After all, what business is it of the British if we Irish want to slaughter each other? They were glad to have us slaughter their enemies when they needed us.’”
    â€œDoesn’t make much sense, does it?”
    â€œI think it makes marvelous sense.”
    â€œMakes me glad I didn’t go to Cambridge. They didn’t teach Shaw at Sandhurst.”
    â€œPerhaps they should.”
    â€œPerhaps.”
    â€œI’m going with someone. A producer from the BBC named Dolan. He wants me to marry him. Should I say yes?”
    â€œI didn’t know they had Irish at the BBC.”
    â€œHis family’s been in England for fifty years.”
    â€œWell … I won’t let any understanding we have—”
    â€œFather’s upset. He sent me an army motto: ‘Money lost—little lost; honor lost—much lost; heart lost—all lost.’”
    Her smile was forced. Alice’s father was the former colonel of the Yorkshire Rifles. He had been even more instrumental than Amanda Littlejohn in fostering the engagement to Alice. Littlejohn sensed that all he had to
do was take Alice’s hand and this BBC Irishman would evaporate. But he could not make the gesture. He sat there, frozen, his mind slipping out of Hazelewood Hall, across the Irish Sea to bomb-ravaged Belfast.
    His mother beamed in the doorway. “I hope you’ve had time to lay some deep-dyed plans,” she said. “Dinner’s ready.”
    The meal was a struggle. Littlejohn’s mind had shifted into doublethink, the intelligence mode. He was talking on one level to his mother and Alice about the royal family’s latest scandal, the future of the Liberal Party, while the other half was analyzing data. Was the Irishman at the BBC part of the apparatus? Were they trying to harass him by taking his fiancée away from him?
    He realized now that Alice was important to him. She was a reward that awaited him after a long upward struggle, as at the Irish shrine at Knock, where the pilgrims ascended the mountain on their knees. He was a pilgrim struggling toward some sort of illumination that would include Alice’s generous arms. Now they had taken her away. The stage was bare, leaving him in bitter soliloquy.
    It made him almost regret the information that was sending him to America. It had begun with a rumor picked up in a pub by an informer, confirmed by a second informer, who was supposedly in deepest cover. But it would never have become solid enough