‘OK. Take it.’
Gina looks at her. ‘You sure?’
‘Yes. If there’s something there… well.’ Her eyes are glistening. ‘We need to find it, don’t we?’
‘Yes. We do.’
Up close like this, Gina can see that Claire is barely keeping it together. She reaches over, places a hand on her arm and gives it a gentle squeeze.
On the DART into town, she phones the office and talks to one of the guys in the back – Steve, her favourite, a lanky, laconic programmer from Cork. She asks him if he could do her a favour. ‘OK,’ he says, a little cagey, ‘I suppose, yeah. What is it?’ Looking out at a sombre, overcast Ringsend and clutching the laptop to her chest, Gina says she’ll see him in twenty minutes and will explain it to him then.
‘How?’ Bolger says, after a long pause. ‘I don’t understand what you mean. Broke his heart how?’
‘Well…’ Romy exhales. ‘You know. It was a long time ago now, and maybe -’
‘No, no, tell me. Explain what you mean.’
Romy shifts his position slightly in the wheelchair, wincing as he does so. The move looks uncomfortable but is clearly a delaying tactic.
Eventually, he says, ‘Our party stands for certain things, right? You embody those things. Frank didn’t. It’s that simple. He started out OK, and he was a natural, he had charm, he appealed to people, but pretty quickly he became an embarrassment to the party. He started shifting his position on things. He took up, what’ll we call them, inconvenient causes. He was using the word environment a lot. Back then that was bordering on the radical. I don’t know what he was reading or who he was talking to, but I can tell you one thing, if he’d survived he wouldn’t have got renominated, to say nothing of getting re-elected. And if he was alive today… well, more than likely he’d be wearing a woolly jumper and canvassing for the bloody Greens.’
Bolger looks past Romy now, to the wall on the far side of the room.
What he’s hearing here flatly contradicts what he has always understood, but he doesn’t dispute what he’s hearing either, not for a second – because there’s something in Romy’s voice, a weary, resigned authority, a convincing absence of the need anymore to lie or dissemble. And in a weird way it even accords with Bolger’s own memory of Frank as a kid. He was a contrary little fucker. He’d twist everything around until it was on his own terms. But he got away with it because he was also a star.
‘Look,’ Romy says, ‘when you came back from the States, right, you were wet behind the ears, you were bloody clueless – and I don’t mind telling you that now, because this time tomorrow you’re going to be the fucking Taoiseach – but you had no idea what’d been going on here, and in fairness you had no time to find out either. Because it was all about moving forward. You were thrown straight into the campaign, knocking on doors, tramping through housing estates in the rain.’ He pauses. ‘That must have been quite a shock to the system after Boston.’
Bolger nods, still not looking Romy in the eye, still not speaking.
‘Anyway,’ Romy goes on, ‘in those last couple of weeks before the accident things were chaotic here. Frank got into a row about the rezoning of a piece of land out beyond the airport. He started making threats, saying he’d expose the voting records of a few of the councillors who were in favour of the rezoning – the implication being, of course, that they were on the take.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘After more than ten years of the planning tribunal up in Dublin Castle I think we all know how that one goes, but back then you simply didn’t talk about it. There was consternation in the party. These were councillors your old man sat with, people he’d known for twenty, thirty years.’
Bolger is white now.
‘And he was mortified. Because there was nothing he could do about it.’ Romy pauses, and sighs. He looks exhausted all of a sudden, his skin virtually translucent, like rice paper. ‘So if you have issues with your old man, as they say nowadays… I think it might be less about anything you ever did or didn’t do, and more about the fact that he has issues with himself.’
Bolger finally turns his head. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Look, this is difficult,’ Romy says, speaking in a whisper now. ‘Liam suffered a lot of guilt because… he adored Frank, you’re right about that, but he also had to live with the knowledge that a small part of him was actually relieved when he heard the news that Frank had died. He was saved any further embarrassments in the party. That’s how he felt. I know it. I was with him. I saw it in his face. And I saw him try to bury it. But he never succeeded. And that tormented him for the rest of his life.’
Bolger gets up out of the chair and walks across the room. He stands motionless, staring at the beige wall, trying to process what he has just heard, trying to steady his nerves, his heartbeat, the ripple of chemical reactions in his brain.
After a few moments, Romy says, ‘Your old man thought the world of you, too, you know. He did. He was just never able to say it. He was probably afraid to. Afraid how it’d sound, to himself. Afraid that putting it into words might be another act of betrayal.’
Bolger exhales loudly and then turns around.
‘My God,’ he says, shaking his head, ‘we all think we know what’s going on, but we haven’t a bloody clue, have we?’
‘Not really, no.’ Romy shifts his wheelchair so that he’s facing Bolger again. ‘Listen, Larry. That all just came spilling out there. I’m sorry. Ten minutes ago I was trying to decide whether I preferred turnips or parsnips. I’m not used to adult company anymore.’
Bolger shakes his head. ‘I shouldn’t have put you on the spot like that. I’m sorry.’
Romy shrugs.
Bolger then takes a deep breath. He hesitates before speaking. ‘Three other people died that night, Romy.’
‘I know. It was awful. And there was that kid who survived.’
Bolger stares at him, remembering, making the connection. ‘Yes, yes… of course.’
‘There was a whip-around done for him, you know. In the party. Some sort of fund was set up. He was looked after. It was actually your old man who organised it.’
Bolger nods.
After a while, he looks at his watch. ‘Look, I have to go,’ he says, his voice a little shaky. ‘Thanks for talking to me.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Romy says. ‘And good luck.’ There is an awkward pause. ‘Keep the head, won’t you?’
‘I’ll try.’ Bolger walks towards the door, but stops halfway. ‘As a matter of interest,’ he says, still facing the door, ‘that land you mentioned, the land that was up for rezoning?’
‘Yeah?’
‘What happened to it?’
Romy snorts. ‘Well, Taoiseach, what do you think?’
‘Right.’ Bolger turns around. ‘And where’s this you said it was again?’
Romy narrows his eyes. ‘Beyond the airport somewhere. It was one of those old ascendancy piles. On a few hundred acres. It’s probably a bloody golf course now, or an estate.’
Bolger narrows his eyes. ‘Hang on a second,’ he says, staring at Romy. ‘You’re not talking about Dunbrogan House, are you?’
‘Er…yes.’
Bolger immediately sees it on Romy’s face, the merest hint of confusion, a flicker of doubt, as though he’s just given something away but doesn’t quite know what – and the feeling seems to be as unfamiliar to him as it is unwelcome.
Bolger’s pulse quickens.
‘Yes,’ Romy repeats, in a smaller voice now, ‘Dunbrogan House, that was it.’