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re
i
imagining
land V OLUME 9 4

melania Terrazas Gallego (ed)

Trauma and IdenTITy In

ConTemporary IrIsh CulTure
'Reading the eye-opening essays in this collection, one is struck
by the many different ways through which recollections of
troubling experiences have been creatively reconfigured as
traumas that pervade Irish literature, cinema, music, historical
writing and digital media. The extent of this unsettling
realisation is revelatory'

Guy Beiner, author of Forgetful Remembrance and

Remembering the Year of the French

'This volume proposes essential insights into how trauma and

memory studies cast light on Irish identities, both historically
and in the present moment. It effectively and ethically
considers the role of gender and cultural production in terms
of investigating traumatic experience in postcolonial and
postmodern contexts. Trauma and Identity in Contemporary
Irish Culture is a rich and timely addition to the
interdisciplinary fields of Irish studies, cultural studies and
trauma studies'
Dr Miriam Haughton, NUI Galway, author of Staging
Trauma: Bodies in Shadow (2018)
Trauma and Identity
in Contemporary
Irish Culture
Reimagining Ireland
Volume 94

Edited by Dr Eamon Maher,

Technological University Dublin – Tallaght Campus

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien
 Melania Terrazas Gallego (ed)

Trauma and Identity in

Contemporary
Irish Culture

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-
bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : A CIP catalog record for this
book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

ISSN: 1662-9094
ISBN 978-1-78997-557-4 (print) • eISBN 978-1-78997-558-1 (ePDF)
eISBN 978-1-78997-559-8 (ePub) • eISBN 978-1-78997-560-4 (Mobi)
Cover image: ‘Crossing Borders’ by Emer Martin.
Cover design by Peter Lang Ltd.
© Peter Lang AG 2020
Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,
52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom
[email protected], www.peterlang.com
Patrick Speight has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
Contents

List of Figures     ix

Preface     xi

Acknowledgements     xv

Melania Terrazas
Introduction     1

part i Literature and Film     

Asier Altuna-García de Salazar

1 From Undoing: Silence and the Challenge of Individual
Trauma in John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017)     15

María Amor Barros-del Río

2 Trauma and Irish Female Migration through Literature and
Ethnography     37

Ruth Barton
3 Avenging the Famine: Lance Daly’s Black ’47, Genre and
History     59

Part II Memory and Digital Archives     

Lorraine Dennis
4 Reflection of Trauma in the Prisons Memory Archive: How
Information Literacy, Human Experience and Place Are
Impacted by Conflict    81
vi Contents

Patrick J. Mahoney
5 From the Maze to Social Media: Articulating the Trauma of
“the Blanket Protest” in the Digital Space     103

Part III   History     

Síobhra Aiken
6 “The Women Who Had Been Straining Every Nerve”:
Gender-Specific Medical Management of Trauma in the
Irish Revolution (1916–1923)     133

Eunan O’Halpin
7 Personal Loss and the “Trauma of Internal War”: The Cases
of W. T. Cosgrave and Seán Lemass     159

Part IV   Music     

Fintan Vallely
8 Di-rum-ditherum-dan-dee: Trauma and Prejudice, Conflict
and Change as Reflections of Societal Transformation in the
Modern-Day Consolidation of Irish Traditional Music     185

David Clare
9 Traumatic Childhood Memories and the Adult Political
Visions of Sinéad O’Connor, Bono and Phil Lynott     211

Part V   Creative Writing     

Emer Martin
10 Hungry Ghosts: Trauma and Addiction in Irish Literature     245

Pat Boran
11 Fellow Travellers     265
Contents vii

Melania Terrazas
12 Trauma and Identity Issues in Pat Boran’s Work: An
Interview     267

Notes on Contributors     291

Index     297
Figures

Figure 8.1. “Justice Knieeboard. Hanging a Piper for Playing

Seditious Tunes”    192
Figure 8.2. Women on stage at the “Rising Tides” concert as part
of FairPlé’s first seminar, Liberty Hall, Dublin, autumn
2018    202
Preface

As Ireland commemorates the centennial anniversary of the founda-

tion of the Free State, scholars, artists and commentators are asking a
range of new questions about trauma and memory in a range of spheres.
A violent, and invariably traumatic, internal civil war cast a long shadow
after the state was established in 1922. Yet public analysis and acknow-
ledgement of several aspects of the trauma experienced in such a divisive
conflict were met with silence for decades. The impact of the Civil War
on women, for example, was essentially ignored or dismissed as insig-
nificant until very recently. The outbreak of “the Troubles” in Northern
Ireland in the late 1960s, followed by thirty years of violence, likewise
marked an episode of protracted trauma in Irish society. Since the 1990s,
emerging evidence of physical, sexual and human rights abuses perpet-
rated historically in religious institutions has also opened up a dynamic
field of analysis in the domain of trauma and memory (Pine; Smith).
A post-revisionist interpretation of Irish history is therefore often pre-
sented as a history of trauma.
Trauma is a much-used term in interdisciplinary Irish studies. But, in
reality, it is a complex vehicle both for social commentary and academic
analysis that is often riddled with ethical challenges. How does one nar-
rate, record, represent or remember a trauma? As I have observed in my
research on sexual trauma and the violence women experienced in the Irish
Revolution, telling the stories of “victims” of traumatic events, in particular
those who chose not to “tell” or report past crimes and did not give open
consent for or want their trauma ever to be publicized, must be carefully
considered in violence studies (Connolly 2019a, 2019b, forthcoming). Few
victims of rape, in particular, ever consent to their stories being inscribed in
a public archive or forum. The study of trauma is therefore in itself rife with
moral ambiguity and those who do choose to narrate traumas, especially
as an observer and not a survivor, have to resolve serious ethical questions.
This potential for harm places a considerable onus on researchers of sexual
xii Preface

violence to ensure that our projects are designed with care and rigour.
Moreover, as David Fitzpatrick reminds us, trauma is multifaceted and not
just about victims: “Historians’ … primary function is to explain what oc-
curred by assessing events from the perspectives of victim, perpetrator and
onlooker alike” (7). In addition to the issue of consent, intergenerational
hurt can also underline the cyclical potential for re-traumatization of vic-
tims, families and secondary victims. According to Cheung: “Visual art
is an especially tricky breeding ground for polymorphous representation,
misinterpretation, and insensitivities … There is the challenge of com-
bining honesty with dispassion, and at the very least, of avoiding exploit-
ation” (n. pag.).
In this volume, Melania Terrazas and the other authors address these
sensitive questions as they relate to Ireland in a deeply ethical and multi-
faceted way. A new comprehensive text that seeks to interrogate further
the concept and ethics of trauma research is a timely intervention in Irish
studies. Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture achieves a
strong balance between conducting ethical research and providing a de-
tailed exploration of silenced traumas in a number of domains. Terrazas,
in the Introduction, provides an essential review of key theoretical debates
in the field of trauma and memory studies, thereby laying out a framework
for the chapters that follow on substantive questions (covering gender, war,
revolution, music, film and literature). Internationally, a body of psycho-
logical research into the effects of various traumatic events (such as assault,
rape, war, famine, incarceration) was developed in the 1980s and led to the
official recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder. Since the 1990s, an
interdisciplinary field of study involving literature, psychology, history and
philosophy has consolidated and concentrated on questions of memory,
forgetting and narrative. A number of subsequent critical writings applied
trauma theory to the memoirs of Holocaust survivors and war veterans and
to other topics such as sexual violence in women’s fiction (see Whitehead).
Terrazas’s integrated Introduction will be an indispensable reference point
both in this field and for future studies of trauma and memory in the inter-
disciplinary arena of Irish studies.
Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture interrogates the
meaning of Irish identity through the lens of trauma and memory, in a
Preface xiii

number of contemporary Irish literary and visual works and other cul-
tural practices. A sustained interdisciplinary approach provides a ground-
breaking reassessment of received constructions of Irish identity by cen-
tralizing the place of trauma and memory studies in Irish society. Each
chapter provides detailed and sustained analysis of how trauma is/was both
experienced and remembered. The common connection between silence
and trauma in numerous literary works by John Boyne, Edna O’Brien,
Sebastian Barry, Colm Tóibín and Kevin Barry is explored in the opening
chapters. An exploration of trauma and memory in the genre of film- and
documentary-making, including in the context of prisons, highlights the
potential for activism and empowerment in cultural production. The po-
tential for state archives to illustrate the trauma experienced by men and
women in the Irish Revolution is also demonstrated in chapters that docu-
ment the psychological and gendered impact of the violence. The last two
parts of the volume also contribute to our understanding of how trauma
has influenced the thematic direction of Irish popular music and explores
the consequences of addiction in Irish culture, including in the work of
Emer Martin and Pat Boran. The application of the body of work classi-
fied as the trauma paradigm to Irish history, culture and society in this
collection represents an important contribution to knowledge that will
be of relevance to scholars in Irish studies, history, sociology, psychology,
medical humanities, cultural studies, gender studies and literary criticism.

Linda Connolly

Bibliography

Cheung, Ysabelle. “Art after Auschwitz: The Problem with Depicting the Holocaust.”
Vice Newsletter, 15 September 2015.
Connolly, Linda. “Towards a Further Understanding of the Violence Experienced
by Women in the Irish revolution.” MUSSI Working Paper Series, no. 7, 10
January 2019a, <http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/10416/>.
xiv Preface

——. “Sexual Violence and the Irish Revolution: An Inconvenient Truth?” History
Ireland, November 2019b.
——, ed. Women and the Irish Revolution: Feminism, Activism, Violence. Indiana
University Press, 2020, forthcoming.
Fitzpatrick, David, ed. Terror in Ireland 1916–1923. Lilliput Press, 2012, p. 7.
Pine, Emilie. The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary
Irish Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Smith, James. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of
Containment. Notre Dame University Press, 2007.
Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Acknowledgements

Working on this book has been a truly life-changing experience for me

and it would not have been possible without the support and guidance
that I received from many people. I want to thank the Spanish govern-
ment, who provided a Salvador de Madariaga Visiting Scholarship which
funded my research at NUI Galway two years ago. The research on which
this volume is based was also funded by research projects REGI 2018/36,
EICOD 19/18 and AOCYRC 19/23 (Vice-Rectorate for Research,
University of La Rioja). I am also grateful to EMYDUR (School of Master
and Doctorate Studies, University of La Rioja) for their support. This re-
search is also in line with the objectives of the Centre of Irish Studies
Banna/Bond (EFACIS), which I lead at the University of La Rioja.
I would like to say a very big thank you to the General Editor of Peter
Lang’s Reimagining Series, Eamon Maher, and to Senior Commissioning
Editor Anthony Mason, for trusting me to carry out this project and for all
the support and encouragement they gave me during the months I spent
editing this volume. Without their guidance and constant feedback, this
volume would not exist. Every effort has been made to trace copyright
holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material.
The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and
would be grateful for notification of any corrections that should be incorp-
orated in future reprints or editions of this book. My deep appreciation also
goes out to Seán Crosson and Daniel Carey for their help at NUI Galway,
to Eunan O’Halpin and Ruth Barton for editorial discussions at TCD, to
Linda Connolly for her kindness in writing the preface to this book and,
finally, to Irish writers Emer Martin and Pat Boran for their huge gener-
osity, friendship and support.
I would like to thank all the contributors, with whom it has been a
pleasure to work during this project. Each of them has taught me a great
deal about their subject. I gratefully acknowledge all the contributions –
thank you very much for your good humour throughout the whole process.
xvi Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to all the members of the magnificent editorial

committee of the journal Estudios Irlandeses who read and refereed all
the contributions to this volume – many thanks for your time, unstinting
commitment and invaluable comments and suggestions on the essays sub-
mitted. Many thanks also for the support I received from other academics
who were willing to read the papers and to offer valuable and generous feed-
back for the authors. My most sincere gratitude goes to Carolina Amador,
Guy Beiner, Constanza del Río, Barry Devine, José F. Fernández, Anne
Fogarty, Rosa González, Miriam Haughton, Cahal McLaughlin, Angus
Mitchell, Eve Morrison, Bill Mulligan, Hedwig Schwall, Laura Watson,
Feargal Wheelan and last, but not least, Alwyn Harrison. Thank you all very
much for your help. Finally, I would also like to say a heartfelt thank you to
my family and loved ones for always believing in me and encouraging me.

Melania Terrazas
Melania Terrazas

Introduction

According to Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Cultural trauma occurs when

members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horren-
dous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness,
marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in
fundamental and irrevocable ways” (1). The study of cultural identity,
for its part, emerges out of a sense of belonging to a group and, at the
same time, because of all the aspects that make that group different
from others. It is also possible to examine identity as an effect of social
dynamics in which other determining factors, such as class, nation, race,
ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion, play an important role. Identity
is at stake in questions and problematics to do with all these issues.
Thus, the study of cultural identity is “multidisciplinary and interdis-
ciplinary, with roots in social/personality psychology, microsociology,
and anthropology” (Grayman-Simpson 2).
The analysis of culture from a combined aesthetic-ethical perspective
is intrinsic to various critical approaches that emerged in the last decades
of the twentieth century, “the ethical turn” that took place “in the related
fields of literary theory and moral philosophy, the most relevant of which
are Trauma Studies, Memory Studies and the Theory of Affects” (Onega
et al. 1). The multiple nature of trauma and memory studies, which combines
aspects of history, anthropology and sociology, among other disciplines,
is also extremely valuable as a means of casting new light on the notion of
identity, because it is dynamic, located in time and subject to continuous
renegotiation, and it implies a process.
Identity – especially national identity – is a social and historical con-
struct. Identity, or the image of who one is, “may be either a self-composed
image” or “imposed from the outside” (Buchanan 242). In the particular
2 Melania Terrazas

case of Irish women’s identity, for example, the personal and the social
were closely linked and it is widely acknowledged that “women in the
post-famine period were offered the role said to be the most important in
society – bringing up children in the Catholic faith” (Horgan n. pag.). The
Church’s social role was crucial. As O’Toole (n. pag.) argues: “the church
that became such a dominant force in the State and which was largely con-
structed after the Famine, gave order to a traumatised society”. It is also
widely accepted that literature has had a significant role in this relegation
of women to invisibility in the domestic sphere since the last decades of the
nineteenth century, “as the various familiar Irish Writers’ posters” show, with
their lack of “even a token woman among their 12 featured writers” (Doyle
n. pag.).1 Yet, since “the famous Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
affair in 1990, which was so bereft of female writers that an extra volume
had to be commissioned to atone” (Doyle n. pag.), with recent decades’
increasing “confidence in female voices” (Enright, qtd in Lavan n. pag.) and
the last few years’ referendums to legalize divorce, contraception, same-sex
marriage and to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, we
have witnessed “the death of 19th-century Irish Catholicism” (O’Toole
n. pag.) – Ireland is becoming more culturally liberal in many respects,
and Irish women’s lives have attracted great attention.
The idea of “cultural memory” in Ireland has been investigated in
great detail by Frawley in the second volume of Memory Ireland: “cultural
memory can be analyzed not only […] through groups of people – like
those in the diaspora […] – but also through particular forms: organiza-
tions of individuals, cultural mediums such as photography, architecture,
music, literature” (Diaspora xxii). As far as “memory practices” are con-
cerned, Frawley argues:

Many of these cultural forms embody materially – through, for instance, language,
music, photography – and, because of their distinctive expressions of culture, give rise
to distinctive memory practices. There are other cultural forms that develop their own

1 To mark International Women’s Day, The Irish Times “created an antidote to

the all-male Irish Writers poster of bars and student bedrooms” (Doyle n. pag.).
Readers can download the poster at: <http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/
portraits-of-the-artists-as-women-1.2129106>.
Introduction 3

memory practices through the rehearsal of an identity. That is often the case among
particular subsets of the population: minority groups, those who speak a particular
language or dialect […] there is an almost endless possibility for identifying oneself
not only as Irish, but also as something else, with that “something else” often pro-
viding a distinctive way into a wider body of what I have been calling Irish cultural
memory through a memory practice. Each of these memory practices embodies a
particular memory discourse, and, perhaps more important, transmits a particular
memory discourse. (Diaspora 129)

These concerns drive this book too. The last two centuries of Irish his-
tory have seen great traumas that continue to affect Irish society. Through
constructing cultural trauma, Irish society can recognize human pain and
its source/s and become receptive to the idea of taking significant and re-
sponsible measures to remedy it. The intention of this volume is to show
the mediating role of the literature and film scholar, the archivist, the social
media professional, the historian, the musician, the artist and the poet in
identifying Irish cultural trauma past and present, in illuminating Irish na-
tional identity (which is shifting so much today), in paying tribute to the
memory and suffering of others, in showing how to do things with words
and, thus, how concrete action might be taken.
Identity transformations are certainly marked by activism and gender
shifts,2 yet many are triggered by conflict, traumatic episodes and much
debate. Regarding activism and trauma, Emer Martin,3 a contributor to

2 In a recent and thought-provoking oral history of long-term feminist work and ac-
tivism for social change, Irish academic, feminist and activist Ailbhe Smyth wrote
that: “Ireland was a country where women could not be young”, where they could
not show themselves to be “energetic and enthusiastic”, as young women are, be-
cause they “had to be wives and caring mothers from a very early age”. Smyth is right
to argue that “Irish young girls now are being listened to like they have never been
listened to before” (2019 n. pag.) and their activism is visible locally and globally.
Three very significant and recent examples of such activism are: “RepealEight”, a
coalition to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution; “Extinction
Rebellion Ireland”, a direct action group rebelling for climate action; and the
“Homeless Ireland action collective”, a group that fundraises, lobbies and protests
to help the homeless across Ireland.
3 The book cover of this publication, a painting titled Crossing Borders by Emer
Martin, was part of an exhibition in Kerry. It depicts a face shadowed with barbed
wire, yet undefeated, resilient like Irish identity.
4 Melania Terrazas

this volume and an Irish writer who has done much to drive the debate
over Ireland’s history of shame and pain through her work in the press
and her recent epic novel The Cruelty Men, argues that Ireland has had a
peculiarly lengthy and brutal colonial story: the controlling presence of
Great Britain, a civil war, extreme repression at the hands of church and
state and an ongoing conflict in the north (p. 305).
Thus, trauma has, or has had, an important role in the construction of
Irish identities, and trauma studies has greatly advanced our understanding
of cultural memory and contemporary Irish culture both north and south.
Ideology has been a key part of these changes and transformations in gender
and identity are marked in literature and other cultural and memory prac-
tices. In this regard, Emer Martin’s chapter in the present volume reflects
upon how her novels trace the repercussions of such traumas in modern
Ireland across generations, while the other contributions show the ways in
which trauma and identity studies illuminate the analysis of various forms
of representation as cultural constructs.
The last decade, during which a number of trends have utterly trans-
formed the economy, social attitudes and technology, is particularly rele-
vant in helping us understand the Ireland of 2019. If we add to this picture
“the introduction of digital media, publicly available networks and the
development of the Information Society, identity” becomes “a pressing
contemporary issue” (Halperin 533) in Ireland today, as Mahoney shows
in Chapter 5. In fact, identity-related issues are so pervasive today that
identity has become a new field of study “with implications right across
the board, ranging from the individual through to the organisational, the
national and international” (Halperin 533).
Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture makes a case for
the value of trauma and memory studies as a means of casting new light
on the meaning of Irish identity in a number of contemporary Irish cul-
tural practices, and of illuminating present-day attitudes to the past. This
interdisciplinary project not only emphasizes positive aspects within the
trauma paradigm, but also incorporates concepts of diverse theoretical
provenance as ways of challenging trauma studies orthodoxy and counter-
acting trauma’s pernicious effects on Irish identity. The focus is thus on the
particular social components and cultural contexts of traumatic experience,
Introduction 5

and the interdisciplinary perspective given by the following chapters has a

strong ethical content and wide-ranging implications.
The aim of this volume is both to offer a reassessment of historical
ideas of Irish identity and to explore the place of trauma and memory in
Irish society. The book is also intended to contribute to the ongoing crit-
ical debate on identity and trauma issues in contemporary Irish cultural
studies, since they have become extremely relevant recently. The critical
approaches herein are of a very interdisciplinary nature, since they combine
aspects of sociology, philosophy and anthropology, among other fields. In
this regard, the volume offers an innovative, interdisciplinary and up-to-
date collection of essays on trauma, identity and memory studies’ function
in literature, film, culture and society that uses alternative frameworks for
theorization and analysis, and thus as a basis for action.
The collection consists of a preface and twelve contributions by aca-
demics from nine universities on two continents and two renowned con-
temporary Irish writers representing different perspectives of the function
played by the trauma narrative in contemporary Irish culture and identity.
The book also includes an index of subjects, writers, historical figures, dir-
ectors and films for readers’ reference.
The essays are organized thematically into five sections, each focusing
on a topic relating to trauma and identity, a historical period, a text or a
specific cultural practice. The collection also seeks to offer an interdiscip-
linary inquiry into how innovation in form and themes are cultivated in
selected works in order to question, deconstruct and reconstruct the notion
of identity. In doing so, the contributions bring to the fore the traumatic
histories of religious, political, sexual and ethnic minorities who have been
forced into silence or forgotten. Regarding the notion of identity, these
essays also enable us to move beyond contemporary trauma and memory.
In this sense, the focus of this book is a future-oriented one.
The contributors approach the relationship between trauma and iden-
tity from complementary perspectives. These approaches explore the func-
tion of trauma in, for instance, the repression and expression of emotions
or the representation of many instances of discomfort and mental distress
that lie at the heart of trauma. This is an investigation of the secular func-
tion of literature, film, historical testimonies, culture, music and art in
6 Melania Terrazas

contemporary Ireland. The collection also focuses on the processes of decol-

onization and globalization. Regarding the study of cultural contexts, the
essays explore postmodernism, but also postcolonialism. In sum, Trauma
and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture provides a view of trauma as
multiply configured with diverse representations in Irish culture.
Opening the collection, Asier Altuna-García de Salazar’s “From
Undoing: Silence and the Challenge of Individual Trauma in John Boyne’s
The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017)” focuses on trauma and silence and draws
out how they are related. He considers how Boyne plays with these ideas
and the interpretive difficulties posed by the novel because it manipulates
and plays with fictional techniques. Altuna-García de Salazar provides a
detailed, meticulous and nuanced account of Boyne’s novel and his artistic
approach. The essay shows how silences operate in Boyne’s text; considers
why he orders his text the way he does, moving location from Ireland to
wider global contexts; and reflects on whether Boyne is justified in seeing
the referendum on gay marriage as a marker of social change.
In “Trauma and Irish Female Migration through Literature and
Ethnography”, María Amor Barros-del Río shows that ethnography and lit-
erature are complementary disciplines that can broaden our understanding
of the complex phenomenon of Irish female migration. Four novels, Edna
O’Brien’s The Light of Evening, Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side, Colm
Tóibín’s Brooklyn and Mary Costello’s Academy Street, serve as illustrations.
The last essay in the literature and film section, Ruth Barton’s “Avenging
the Famine: Lance Daly’s Black ’47, Genre and History”, analyses Daly’s
film from various points of view in order to elicit the elements that con-
tributed to its popularity at the Irish box office. Barton discusses Daly’s
repurposing of the modern Western as a historical narrative without par-
allel and his cinematic treatment of the social dimensions of the Famine.
She examines the effectiveness of Daly’s narrative strategy with reference
to arguments around the place of genre in minor national cinemas and as
an intervention in Irish historical cinema. Barton’s essay interprets Black
’47 as springing from Daly’s desire to style the study of Famine historiog-
raphy in a new way, replacing victimhood with agency.
Part II, “Memory and Digital Archives”, opens with Lorraine Dennis’s
essay, “Reflection of Trauma in the Prisons Memory Archive: How
Introduction 7

Information Literacy, Human Experience and Place Are Impacted by

Conflict”. As an academic personally involved in the Prisons Memory
Archive (PMA) project, she discusses the process of making the documen-
tary films Armagh Stories: Voices from the Gaol (2015), directed by Cahal
McLaughlin, and We Were There (2014), directed by McLaughlin with
Laura Aguiar, two important contributions to Troubles studies. Dennis’s
essay elaborates a rationale for the whole film-making process, from the
initial exposition of the historical context of the Troubles to description
of the material and the way in which the production team dealt with the
interviews. Her piece constitutes an invaluable document on one of the
most praiseworthy initiatives aiming to heal the wounds caused by three
decades of conflict. Dennis’s discussion of the shortcomings of the PMA
project and her predictions of its future give her essay added relevance.
Patrick J. Mahoney’s chapter, “From the Maze to Social
Media: Articulating the Trauma of ‘the Blanket Protest’ in the Digital
Space”, offers an original and contemporary look at the role of social media
as a coping mechanism for former blanket protestors in post-Troubles
Northern Ireland. Thirty-five years after the conclusion of the Blanket
Protest in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, its participants are still dealing with
its lingering effects. Drawing from interviews, quantitative and qualita-
tive social media data, and the findings of Brandon Hamber’s 2005 study,
Blocks to the Future, this chapter addresses the ongoing issues facing ex-
prisoners and the use of “social media therapy”. This allows Mahoney to lay
the foundations for his convincing claim that digital spaces offer a means
of re-establishing and maintaining a sense of group cohesion amongst ex-
prisoners. The two essays in this section on trauma, memory and digital
archives provide a complementary view of the Troubles and researchers’
concern with ethics.
In the first chapter of Part III, “‘The Women Who Had Been Straining
Every Nerve’: Gender-Specific Medical Management of Trauma in the Irish
Revolution (1916–1923)”, Síobhra Aiken discusses the medical treatment of
female revolutionaries in the 1920s and 1930s. She examines how women
suffered from a range of diverse ordeals during Ireland’s revolutionary
period. Medical diagnosis and treatment of “exhausted nerves” was often
strongly informed by gender ideologies. As a result, medical treatment for
8 Melania Terrazas

female revolutionaries tended to emphasize re-domestication and promote

re-feminization, while men’s trauma treatment was intended to quickly
return the patient to the conflict zone. Aiken’s investigation of the Military
Service Pensions Collection gives some insight into the often questionable
treatments prescribed to women and highlights how, throughout the 1930s,
women’s mental welfare continued to be connected to the female repro-
ductive system. Aiken’s conclusion constitutes a very sensitive response to
unconventional forms of cultural memory.
Eunan O’Halpin’s “Personal Loss and the ‘Trauma of Internal War’: The
Cases of W. T. Cosgrave and Seán Lemass” is a reflective essay on how the
experience of political struggle and personal loss influenced two key male
political figures in independent Ireland: W. T. Cosgrave, who headed the first
Irish government from 1922 to 1932, and Seán Lemass, who was Taoiseach
from 1959 to 1966 and is considered a great economic and social modernizer.4
O’Halpin’s chapter rigorously examines significant new historical sources,
such as the archive of the Bureau of Military Service Pensions and Medals
Collection, and uses Charles Townshend’s concept of “the trauma of internal
war” to show that the two founding fathers of independent Ireland served as
heads of government without ever making public reference to personal loss
or trauma. O’Halpin’s conclusion draws the reader’s attention to the contrast
between the suppression of traumatic memory of the Irish Revolution at a
personal level by these two men and the public commemoration of the war. It
also examines how those personal experiences of revolution influenced their
lives and mentalities. The chapter concludes by considering the difficulty of
determining the impact of trauma upon group consciousness. O’Halpin’s
essay on accounts of men’s painful memories complements Aiken’s contri-
bution on the medical treatment of female revolutionaries.
Next come two essays which demonstrate the richness and variety
of traditional and modern Irish music. The first, “Di-rum-ditherum-dan-
dee: Trauma and Prejudice, Conflict and Change as Reflections of Societal
Transformation in the Modern-Day Consolidation of Irish Traditional
Music” by musician, writer and lecturer Fintan Vallely, is a look at how in

4 For more on Lemass’s family losses, see O’Halpin’s article “Séan Lemass’s Silent
Anguish”.
Introduction 9

the 1980s music took the place of literature as a hallmark of Irish identity,
invested most prominently in men, as a consequence of both the rise to
fame of Irish rock musicians and the international promotion of traditional
Irish music. Vallely identifies The Chieftains as central to this until 1996,
and notes that since then Riverdance has been most the prominent element.
His point is that this visibility represents the rise of a onetime music of the
underclass to international prominence and national representativeness,
effectively a successful postcolonial struggle for formal recognition of both
Irish music’s Irishness and its inherent artistic sophistication. Ideology
is shown to be crucial to this, and these transformations are said to have
been marked by gender shifts and debate. Taste and fashion are identified
as key drivers, too, as are aesthetic innovation and education, all of them
conditioned by funding and patronage. Vallely’s contribution to the book
reflects upon societal transformation relating to gender in the traditional
music community and multiple representations in Irish music.
The second essay on music, “Traumatic Childhood Memories and
the Adult Political Visions of Sinéad O’Connor, Bono and Phil Lynott”
by David Clare, discusses how three of Ireland’s most prominent popular
musicians have processed personal childhood traumas in their work. Clare
asserts that while Lynott’s music was not used for political activism in the
same way – or degree – as that of O’Connor and U2, there is a highly sig-
nificant political agenda in his work. His experiences of racism during his
Dublin childhood led him to repeatedly assert that a black Irish identity
is possible. Clare’s analysis of these three artists’ music highlights common
lyrical tropes and themes in their work. Vallely’s essay as a musicologist
and Clare’s as an academic specializing in the intersection of music and
performance, contribute to our understanding of how trauma and gender
have influenced the thematic direction of Irish popular music.
The fifth section, on creative writing, closes the volume with a re-
flective piece by Emer Martin; a previously unpublished poem by Irish
poet, editor and broadcaster Pat Boran; and an interview conducted with
Boran by Melania Terrazas. In “Hungry Ghosts: Trauma and Addiction in
Irish Literature”, Martin offers a compelling previously unpublished reflec-
tion on trauma and addiction in her own writing by using the metaphor of
hungry ghosts, which are familiar figures in Buddhism. She dwells upon
10 Melania Terrazas

this idea because she sees her books as full of hungry ghosts. Martin’s piece
is a fascinating and original meditation on how unresolved trauma mani-
fests. She considers History a traumatic, violent, unsettled place for most
nations, and especially for Ireland, and discusses how the consequences
of all this turmoil play out through the characters in her books Breakfast
in Babylon, The Cruelty Men and its sequel Headwreck. What is more, the
latter two works trace the repercussions of traumas in modern Ireland,
where she often sees her hungry ghosts manifesting in addiction. The de-
pendence on alcohol and drugs in postcolonial Ireland, for example, is
thus discussed as a self-medicating and symptom of a festering unresolved
wound. Martin’s reflection on Ireland’s history of trauma and remorse in
her two most recent books aims to show that victims must be listened to.
Pat Boran’s “Fellow Travellers” is a very evocative poem on relations be-
tween Irish Travellers and the settled community that presents a fortuitous
encounter three decades ago between the poetic persona, a member of the
settled community, and a group of Traveller women of different generations
from whom he hitched a lift. The poetic voice calls for greater tolerance
and addresses the trauma narrative in Traveller identity, describing certain
social issues affecting Irish Travellers today that need consideration: social
inclusion, tolerance, equality of education and opportunity, decent ac-
commodation and sanitary conditions.5 Boran’s poem presents the stoic
suffering6 (a “patch of resistance” (310)) of younger generations of Irish
Travellers in the face of the settled community’s indifference to their “local
traveller camp” (310), which must be addressed in Ireland today.7 Boran’s
hope seems to be that these issues are addressed by wider society. Ultimately,
the poet’s reflections on Irish Traveller women draw attention to important
cultural questions while situating his poem as a means of returning Irish

5 “The Traveller Movement”, a national network of organizations and individuals

comprising both Travellers and settled people, is committed to seeking full equality
for Travellers in Irish society.
6 I am very grateful to the poet for this observation.
7 Especially since former Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s announcement of the formal rec-
ognition of Irish Travellers’ unique heritage, culture and identity by the state on
1 March 2017, which is also a recognition that they are an important part of contem-
porary Irish culture and identity, yet also of its past and present trauma narrative.
Introduction 11

Travellers – “Fellow Travellers” here – to their rightful place in history,

and of asserting the social value of poetry.
Finally, Melania Terrazas’s contribution, “Trauma and Identity Issues in
Pat Boran’s Work”, consists of an interview conducted with Boran during Irish
Itinerary 2018 (EFACIS) conference at the Centre of Irish Studies Banna/
Bond (University of La Rioja (Spain)). The conversation focuses on Boran’s
poetry, fiction and broadcasting, and his passionate discussion of trauma
and identity issues in his work, which covers a broad range of issues from
interpersonal and family relations to formal innovation, and what he loves
about Ireland. Boran also offers a number of insights into creative writing and
shares his thoughts on identity, gender, conflict, memory, aesthetics and his
compulsion to write. Boran’s poems explore the trauma and dislocations of
Irish contemporary life, and although they acknowledge neglect and failure,
he considers the work they do as a prerequisite to a kind of progress, in part
a healing, but also a containment of that trauma. In sum, the interview al-
ludes to a type of indirect, suggestive poetry that emerges from a space where
imagination, memory and experience collide through the interaction of dif-
ferent forms and points of ethnic, geographic or social origin.
To conclude, this collection is intended to lead readers to reconsider
the connections between trauma, Irish cultural memory, identity, famine,
diaspora, gender, history, revolution, the Troubles, digital media, literature,
film, music and art. Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture
reflects on and highlights important cultural questions around Irish iden-
tity, while each of the essays offers a means of exploring different ways to
remember culture that are the outcome of, and are moulded by, specific
forms of cultural discourse.

Bibliography

Alexander, Jeffrey C. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” Cultural Trauma and

Collective Identity, by Alexander et al. University of California Press, 2004,
pp. 1–30.
Buchanan, Ian. Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford University Press, 2010.
12 Melania Terrazas

Doyle, Martin. “Putting Irish Women Writers Back in the Picture.” The Irish Times,
23 February 2015, <http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/putting-irish-
womenwriters-back-in-the-picture-1.2113897>. Accessed 18 June 2018.
Frawley, Oona, ed. Memory Ireland: History and Modernity. Syracuse University
Press, 2011.
——, ed. Memory Ireland: Diaspora and Memory Practices. Syracuse University
Press, 2012.
Grayman-Simpson, Nyasha. “Cultural Identity.” The Sage Encyclopedia of Abnormal
and Clinical Psychology, ed. Amy Wenzel. Sage, 2017, pp. 934–35.
Halperin, Ruth. “Identity as an Emerging Field of Study: Areas of Research and
the Cross-disciplinary Challenge,” DuD. Datenschutz und Datensicherheit 30,
2006, pp. 533–37.
Horgan, Goretti. “Changing Women’s Lives in Ireland.” International Socialism
Journal, no. 91, 2001, pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj91/horgan.htm.
Accessed 10 May 2015.
Lavan, Rosie. “Enduring Fictions: Celebrating The Long Gaze Back.” The Irish
Times, 4 April 2018, <http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/enduring-
fictionscelebrating-the-long-gaze-back-1.3450501>. Accessed 20 May 2019.
Martin, Emer. The Cruelty Men. Lilliput Press, 2018.
O’Halpin, Eunan. “Séan Lemass’s Silent Anguish.” The Irish Times, 21 July 2013,
<http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/se%C3%A1n-lemass-
s-silent-anguish-1.1469235>. Accessed 20 May 2019.
O’Toole, Fintan. “The Long Irish 19th Century Is Finally Over.” The Irish Times,
30 June 2018, <http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-the-long-
irish-19th-century-is-finally-over-1.3537581>. Accessed 20 May 2019.
Onega, S., et al. “Introduction.” Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and
Transhistorical Functions of Literature, eds Onega et al. Palgrave Studies in
Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2017, pp. 11–17.
Smyth, Ailbhe. “Post-Repeal Ireland: A New Dawn?” 18th International AEDEI
Conference, “Difference and Indifference in Irish Studies,” 29–31 May 2019,
Universitat de les Illes Balears. Keynote address.
 Part I
Literature and Film
A sier Altuna-García de Salazar

1 From Undoing: Silence and the Challenge of

Individual Trauma in John Boyne’s The Heart’s
Invisible Furies (2017)1

abstract
John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017) represents the tensions and challenges
between the “individual” traumas of Cyril Avery, an adopted gay man in Ireland born out
of wedlock in 1945, and the power structures that have been “silencing” and “affecting”
his life up to 2015. With this novel Boyne advocates the necessity of reading against the
grain of so-called “smaller” or “individual” traumas and the ability to listen to the “silen-
cing” power structures containing them. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of silence,
the unsayable and trauma, this essay contends that The Heart’s Invisible Furies represents
an approach to power issues in the analysis of individual trauma within Irish social and
historical discourses of the twentieth century and how these are closely linked to the con-
cept of “silence”. In Boyne’s novel, these power structures constitute a challenge for those
who try to undo overbearing influences on their lives.

This essay approaches the novel The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017) by
the bestselling Irish writer John Boyne, read both as social history and
as fiction. Boyne’s novel describes the tensions and challenges between
the “individual” traumas of Cyril Avery, an adopted gay man in Ireland
born out of wedlock in 1945, and the power structures that have been
“silencing” and “affecting” his life, and those of others closely related
to him, up to 2015. The latter represents a time of social and individual
undoing and challenge for the protagonist and for Ireland, and also

1 The research carried out for the writing of this article was financed by the Spanish
Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) within the research pro-
ject Inconvenient Truths: Cultural Practices of Silence in Contemporary Irish
Fiction (FFI2017-84619-P) AEI/FEDER, UE.
16 Asier Altuna-García de Salazar

represents this man’s temporal point of perspective in the novel. As this

essay shows, in The Heart’s Invisible Furies traumatic individual silences
are undone but this does not mean that the violence they bespeak can be
easily resolved or erased. In the novel Boyne is concerned with the rep-
resentation of recent social history in Ireland but he also plays with fic-
tional devices such as flashbacks, suspense, brisk dialogues, the recourse
to memory, cameos by historical figures and references to important
moments of recent Irish history in order to concentrate primarily on
tropes of silence and individual trauma. With this novel Boyne advo-
cates the necessity of reading against the grain of so-called “smaller” or
“individual” traumas and the ability to listen to the “silencing” power
structures that contain them.2 As this essay contends, this may provide
a more thorough and comprehensive representation and understanding
of any individual and/or society at any given time. On the one hand,
harrowing though they may be, individual narratives turn out to be
more specific and expose smaller cases of traumatic dimensions (rape,
domestic violence, drinking issues, child abuse). On the other hand,
many power structures that differ from major traumatic situations or
“shocks” (persecutions, famines, genocides, ethnic cleansing) tend to
be lost in the overall analysis of such individual narratives. Hence, patri-
archal identity formation, heteronormative structurings, national(ist)
and religious conservatism, gender identity construction, the education
system, postcolonialism, economic capitalism and Marxism are amongst
those “silencing” power structures that are the cause of a number of
individual and societal traumas. These trauma events, as Greg Forter
states in his study on trauma and the literary form, are “chronic and cu-
mulative” and, more importantly, tend to be “woven into the fabric of
our societies” (260). Drawing on theoretical frameworks of silence, the
unsayable and trauma, this essay ultimately contends that The Heart’s

2 Roger Luckhurst’s seminal study The Trauma Question delineates the many dif-
ferent contexts that have been attached to trauma which do not refer to major-scale
traumatic events only. Thus, he lists domestic abuse, traumatic childhoods, histories
of gender, sexual and racial violence among those histories that “have indubitable
reasons for finding explanatory power in ideas of trauma” (1–2).
From Undoing 17

Invisible Furies represents an approach to power issues in the analysis

of individual trauma within Irish social and historical discourses of the
twentieth century and that these are closely linked to the concept of “si-
lence”. As Boyne shows in the novel, these power structures constitute
a challenge for those who face and try to undo their lasting and over-
bearing influence on their lives.
As an author, John Boyne has already published eleven novels for adults
and five for a younger audience, including the well-known international
bestseller The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006). He is also the author of
a short story collection and regularly serves as a book reviewer for presti-
gious journals and magazines. He has won three Irish Book Awards, the
Hennessy Literary “Hall of Fame” Award and a number of international
literary awards. His body of work has been published in over fifty lan-
guages.3 His writing style shares an inquisitive eye for detail in dialogue
and character description with insightful references to historical events
both in Ireland and worldwide.
The Heart’s Invisible Furies is Boyne’s second novel for adults after A
History of Loneliness (2014), which is also set in Ireland. Both novels are
narrated through the voice of an ageing male character who has suffered
from and is a victims of different types of individual trauma in Ireland. Their
traumatic experiences are the direct consequences of oppressive and silen-
cing abuses of power by institutions and societal frameworks over a long
period of time. Boyne applies brisk narrative devices that encapsulate swift
dialogues and flashbacks, the central role of memory in the representation
of traumatic events of the past, a passion for character detail, a mastery
of language and tinges of humour, even though the events described are
harrowing. In The Heart’s Invisible Furies, Boyne also addresses the concept
of masculinity together with trauma and silence. In this vein, both novels
appear at a time, as Tracy and Holohan argue with regard to the repre-
sentation of the male in recent Irish fiction, of “an extensive and ongoing
period of soul-searching on the present and the future character and values
of their [Irish] postcolonial, post-Catholic, postmodern, neoliberal island
nation” (2). In both novels, Boyne advocates the necessity of the dialectics

3 For more information, see <http://www.johnboyne.com>.

18 Asier Altuna-García de Salazar

between past and present when silence, memory and individual traumas are
at stake. This is more obviously the case in The Heart’s Invisible Furies, as the
time span in which the whole re-enactment of the main male character’s
memory is framed – between the year of the protagonist’s birth, 1945, and
2015 – also represents a period of overall change in Ireland. This seventy-
year span poses challenges with regard to identity for the main characters
because, as Jeannine Woods explains,

Patriarchal, heteronormative structurings of Irish identity were bolstered and com-

plicated by the central role of the Catholic Church in nationalist discourse and in
post-independence Irish political and cultural life; discourses on national purity were
closely bound up with sexuality and with Catholic morality. (29)

Stylistically, The Heart’s Invisible Furies presents Boyne’s thematic and

narrative concerns with what can be represented through language. The
main character, Cyril, grows out of what cannot be said – as it reflects an
oppressive outside reality – and has to address the notion of unsayability.
In his recent study on the philosophy of the unsayable, Franke contends
that “the unsayable is what repels language, yet it requires language of some
kind in order to be descried, so as to register at all” (3). Cyril has to over-
come and undo discourses of silence and oppression that have conditioned
his subjectivity and identity over the last seventy years in Ireland. He faces
these discourses both directly and indirectly, when what happens to other
characters in the novel also conditions him. Boyne blends the individual
with the communal in order to address traumatic events in Ireland that
have affected society as a whole. The overall silence of the unsayable per-
meates all layers of the social spectrum and conditions the permanence of
trauma. This is also in line with Franke’s contention that “the unsayable
cannot be made manifest at all, except in terms of this trace that it leaves
in the speech that fails to say it” (3). In The Heart’s Invisible Furies Boyne
presents discourses of the unsayable in Irish society which, for Franke,
“typically emphasize that what is not and even cannot be said is actually
the basis for all that is said” (7).
The novel explores a likely and much-expected rupture in the
continuity of the influence of power structures in Ireland, especially that
of the Catholic Church, and advances challenges which offer political,
From Undoing 19

economic and social change, eventual individual understanding and the

undoing of silence. As Epinoux has contended in her volume on new themes
in recent Irish fiction, the overall exploration of culture, society, history and
politics in today’s post–Celtic Tiger writing “implies the notion of wan-
dering through an unknown country in order to examine and observe its
transformations and stigmas” (4). In the same vein, Constanza Del Río con-
tends that in the contemporary Irish novel, “individual or family traumas
easily veer to the collective or historical if read allegorically” (8). But The
Heart’s Invisible Furies presents plain facts, direct dialogues and cameos by
Irish politicians and artists which leave no space for allegory. Rather, they
are easily recognizable parts of Irish history. Boyne’s intention is clear in
his representation of individual and collective traumas in Ireland, implying
a link between the traumatic past and the challenging present with a view
to a new future, yet to be imagined. The Heart’s Invisible Furies shares with
much recent Irish fiction what Epinoux contends is the advocacy of the
“task of imagining a post-Celtic Tiger space, of exploring new sustainable
political, economic and social forms, and cultural identity” (3).
The three parts and epilogue of The Heart’s Invisible Furies thus ad-
dress individual and social traumas caused by power structures during key
periods of Irish history. These traumas have been silenced and placed a
heavy burden on the male protagonist’s identity. Bringing the historical
past back to the present of the main character’s memory allows for the
undoing of the silence of this Irishman and those around him, and, as a
consequence, also allows for the reparation of the failures of Irish history
and society. In this vein, Boyne’s narrative strategy aligns with Gibbons’s
and LaCapra’s belief that the fictional move that inscribes trauma in recent
Irish storytelling exorcizes the ghostly events of the past and the silenced
voices and, therefore, makes room for critical and ethical judgement.4 Part I,
subtitled “Shame”, extends from 1945 to 1973. It depicts de Valera’s Ireland,
the overpowering presence of the Church, and significantly ends with the
accession of Ireland to the then EEC, the death of the influential Primate
of Ireland, John Charles McQuaid, and de Valera’s retirement in 1973. Part
II, “Exile”, covers the 1980s which, though a time of recession, emigration

4 See Gibbons (97) and LaCapra (43–85).

20 Asier Altuna-García de Salazar

and political corruption – epitomized by Charles Haughey’s time in office –

also witnessed the rise in the globalization of the Irish arts with U2’s Joshua
Tree and Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments. Part III, “Peace”, features Celtic
Tiger Ireland, two female presidents of Ireland, Mary Robinson and Mary
McAleese, but ends with Fianna Fáil’s leader Bertie Ahern’s corrupt gov-
ernment and the banking crisis of 2008. The epilogue of the novel finishes
on 22 May 2015, when Ireland legalized same-sex marriage by popular
vote. This historic decision meant the reconfiguration of what was ac-
ceptable with regard to sexual mores in Ireland, a country, as McDonagh
writes, “once renowned for its so-called strict adherence to Catholic social
teaching” (66). Boyne addresses the slow but progressive changes of Irish
society over these seventy years. In doing so, he also renegotiates the con-
cept of masculinity in Ireland in the novel and advocates a more inclusive
understanding of the Irish male. Boyne’s choice of an Irish gay man as the
main character evinces a need to reassess heteronormative identity in Irish
writing today. In his study on Colm Tóibín’s fiction, Guillermo Severiche
contends that “the image of the gay male became … a space to re-define
Irishness. Novels that represent gay men also participate in the creation of
new perspectives on Irish national identity” (118). Ultimately, The Heart’s
Invisible Furies not only bears out Severiche’s claim, but also represents
and aligns with McDonagh assertion regarding gay and lesbian activism
and revolution between 1970 and 1990 in Ireland: that “to be Irish and
homosexual was not mutually exclusive” (77).
Boyne’s recurrent use of Irish history as a backdrop of individual and
family traumas throughout the novel also represents an attitude towards
the past. For Constanza Del Río, this use of history in many contem-
porary Irish novels underlines the “unremitting effects of the past on the
present, these being two features that turn [novels] into fitting vehicles
for the articulation of historical tensions that may not be settled yet, at
least for certain sectors of the Irish people” (13). However, The Heart’s
Invisible Furies should not be strictly regarded as historical fiction even
if it includes cameos by renowned Irish political, religious and artistic
figures during specific periods of Irish history. Leszek Drong, who has
approached post-traumatic realism and the representations of history in
recent Irish novels, contends that “it has become a tired cliché of the current
From Undoing 21

episteme to identify historical writing with fiction” (19). But the present
essay claims that Boyne’s narrative style in the novel fictionalizes theme,
topics and the lives of the main protagonist and other characters in such a
way that it challenges mainstream history. As an author of fiction, Boyne
is an example of Drong’s idea that, “although not necessarily committed
to solid historical facts, many writers contribute unique insights related
to the individual experiences of their characters, which makes their works
much more engaging than the sweeping generalizations commonly offered
by historians or sociologists” (19).
The first and longest part of The Heart’s Invisible Furies, “Shame”,
introduces the main action and characters and is a clear reflection on the
concept of shame and all its “silenced” traumatic ramifications: individual
shame, community shame, institutional shame and national shame. Set
between the years 1945 and 1973, “Shame” deals with undesired pregnan-
cies, illegal adoption, single motherhood and hidden sexual orientation
against the backdrop of religious, educational and institutional power
structures. The latter seek to silence all dysfunction and forcefully main-
tain the ideals of the new “Irish-Ireland” in the young Republic. Boyne
uses humour, brisk dialogues and swift changes of scene but introduces
individual trauma and silence from the start. In the opening scene Boyne
scrutinizes the wound of trauma from the very womb. He approaches
shame through Cyril’s mother, Catherine Goggin, in 1945. Her pregnancy
is made public at mass by the parish priest in the small village of Goleen in
West Cork, a priest who will later be known to have “fathered two children
by two different women” (Boyne 13). Public shame is attended by lack of
love and support as Catherine is rejected by her own family. She has to
leave for Dublin, where she ends up sharing a flat with two young men,
who are later revealed to be a couple. She has to lie about her condition
to obtain a position as a waitress at the Dáil Éireann, but is asked to leave
in her last month of pregnancy as the elected members of the Dáil, the
TDs, complain that “seeing a woman so far along in her pregnancy puts
them off their custard slices” (Boyne 48). When Cyril’s mother asks her
supervisor, Mrs Hennessy, about the possibility of returning to the Dáil
after the birth, she reveals she has arranged not to keep the baby, as “a little
hunchbacked Redemptorist nun … is going to come to the hospital and
22 Asier Altuna-García de Salazar

take the child away” (Boyne 49) for adoption. Mrs Hennessy cries at such
a prospect and later confesses she had been raped by her own father, who
had drowned her baby girl in a bucket of water and “threw her in a grave”
(Boyne 51). The year 1945 ends more tragically with the murder of one
of Catherine’s flatmates, Séan MacIntyre, by his own father, who cannot
stand the idea that his son is homosexual. Seán’s father forces Catherine
to open the door of the flat she shares with the “queer fellas” (Boyne 53),
as he wants to “beat some decency” (Boyne 54) into his son. That very day
Cyril, the protagonist of the novel, is born. Cyril’s childhood and his life
as a teenager and a young adult within his adoptive family comprise the
rest of this long first part of the novel.
The discourses of silence and unsayability feature heavily in “Shame”
in Boyne’s attempt to encapsulate the individual traumas of Cyril and
those around him within the power structures that cause and contain
them. His rejection by the Averys, his adoptive parents, as he was not a
“real” family member and had apparently been bought after the Averys
signed “a sizeable cheque to the Redemptorist convent for all their help
in the matter of finding a suitable child” (Boyne 61), and his education as
a boarder at the Jesuit Belvedere College in Dublin lead Cyril to reflect
upon the power of religious institutions in Ireland. Then his unrequited
attraction to his best friend Julian Woodbead, his first hidden “encounters”
and cruising in Dublin make him question his sexuality. Having found no
solace in confession, Cyril gets a girlfriend. In one of Boyne’s many com-
binations of comedy and drama, Cyril, unsure about his sexuality, even
visits a doctor, who retorts “there are no homosexuals in Ireland” (Boyne
219) and decides to inject Cyril in his scrotum. Cyril eventually surrenders
to an unwanted marriage, from which he escapes on his very wedding day.
In the first part of the novel Boyne extends the idea of shame beyond in-
dividuals, Cyril’s mother, her gay flatmate and Cyril, to the overpowering
Catholic Church, the Dáil and Ireland’s domineering patriarchal society.
Boyne makes all these heteronormative structures responsible for these
individual traumas. He not only addresses what is not said but also what
is. Beville and McQuaid write in their study of the presence of silence in
the Irish discourse, that the binary of silence/speech “negotiates a relation-
ship to silence that can be fearful and defined by hierarchy and ideology”
From Undoing 23

and represents an “oppressive aspect of silencing” (2). In the novel Boyne

extends this oppression to power structures in Ireland and represents what
Dauncey asserts in her study of the use of silence in fiction: “silence is not
a fixed category … and it is inextricably related to the issue of silencing”
(1). In the same vein, for Olsson, silence in modern literature becomes an
“acute social problem … which demands that every subject expresses her
or his submission to and inclusion in disciplinary relations of power” (3).
The power structures in Ireland represented in The Heart’s Invisible
Furies remind any critic of the Foucauldian concept of “elements of the
apparatus”. These comprise a “thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble con-
sisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions,
laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral
and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid”
(Foucault 194). Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s hypothesis that in the
Western world the apparatus works towards “desubjectification”, Olsson
contends that, “every process in which a living being becomes a subject
involves a moment of desubjectification, or erasing earlier or competing
forms of subjectivity” (24). Boyne makes the male protagonist of his novel
a representative of the “subaltern”5 who is subjugated and made to suffer
by the Church and its priests and nuns, the (largely religious) education
system, the civil service (including doctors, teachers and civil servants in
ministries), the Gardaí and heteronormative structurings. Conscious of the
fact that the “subaltern” male protagonist occupies the site of an aporia,
Boyne makes Cyril undo silence and find a voice with which to speak. It
is no coincidence that Boyne chooses the silencing of the first life events
of the characters in his novel around the sites of religious and political
power in Ireland. For Woods, in Ireland “visibility vis-à-vis marginality and
marginal sexuality (or indeed any expression of sexuality) has a particular
resonance and significance” (31). Cyril’s mother’s unwanted extramarital
pregnancy, her male flatmates’ relationship and Cyril’s awakening to his
own homosexuality attest to this. The title of the novel, The Heart’s Invisible
Furies, already hints at the way to represent marginality and render it more
visible through storytelling.

5 See Spivak (28–37).

24 Asier Altuna-García de Salazar

Boyne’s blend of history and fiction introduces real-life figures such as

Irish President Éamon de Valera, Taoiseach Jack Lynch, Charles Haughey,
the writer Brendan Behan and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. State
and Church moulded individual and public minds in Ireland between 1945
and 1973. In The Heart’s Invisible Furies Boyne represents the influential par-
ticipation of the Catholic Church in the writing of the Irish Constitution,
with all its references to the role of women and family; the passing of the
Adoption Bill in the 1950s “only after foreign newspapers drew attention
to what some termed the ‘black market’ in Irish babies” and the malign
conspiracy theory “against Catholic adoption societies”, as Irish historian
Diarmaid Ferriter shows (Occasions 330–1). The 1952 Adoption Bill pro-
vided for the adoption of orphans born outside of wedlock. Boyne also
addresses work restrictions for pregnant and married women – in the 1956
Civil Service Regulation Act – and the many restrictions on homosexuals,
who, according to Ferriter, underwent “humiliating treatment … with the
aversion therapy” (Occasions 489). These are some instances of the “silencing”
power structures that started to change from 1973 onwards. In the 1970s,
as Ferriter contends, “whatever the degree of social liberalization there was
in some areas, there was nothing approximating free love and tolerance of
sexual diversity, but instead the persistence of homophobia that was ‘tangible
and frightening’” (Ambiguous 583). The 1980s, the point where the second
part of Boyne’s novel starts, were no better: “both tolerance and prejudice
were on display in the limited public debate about homosexuality” (Ferriter
Occasions 495). Boyne chooses transnational discourses to present Cyril’s
life in different contexts as a way to globally approach individual trauma,
silence and oppressive structures outside Ireland too. In The Heart’s Invisible
Furies Boyne utilizes fictional devices, such as international settings, to re-
flect change and challenge outside the influence of Irish institutions.
The much shorter second part, “Exile”, features Cyril away from Ireland,
first in Amsterdam and later in New York. However, Boyne’s fictional
strategy to move his main character abroad does not hide the influence of
power structures that, for Boyne, are not only predominant in Ireland but
are, rather, transnational in scope. Besides, he presents scenes which make
explicit references to major and minor traumatic events: the Holocaust, the
AIDS epidemic and individual traumas. Although Boyne wants The Heart’s
From Undoing 25

Invisible Furies to be read within discourses of trauma and power struc-

tures that are significant in the construction of the identity of individuals,
his cross-connection of different types of trauma is problematic. Boyne is
provocative in equating the incommensurate trauma of the Holocaust with
the oppression of the gay community globally. Though perhaps erroneous
in his comparison, Boyne wants to address the importance of individual
traumas. In her approach to how trauma is articulated in recent Irish fic-
tion, Anne Goarzin states that trauma theory has placed itself “in the rather
exclusive field of major-scale traumatic events” where “collective traumas
dominate” (8), as Caruth and LaCapra, among others, have shown. For
Boyne, The Heart’s Invisible Furies must be read against the grain. He rep-
resents smaller and individual traumas caused and silenced by Irish power
structures that tend to be obliterated in many analyses of recent fiction.
In “Exile” Cyril encounters his true love in Amsterdam, Bastiaan
Van den Bergh, a doctor. There Cyril compares what he has left behind in
Ireland to the liberal values of the Netherlands. Though still unaware of
all the people formerly connected to his life, who appear in the first part
of the novel, Cyril meets characters from a past that has a clear bearing
on his present existence. Readers are reintroduced to Jack Smoot, Seán
MacIntyre’s boyfriend from the first part of the novel, who had shared a
flat with Cyril’s biological mother, Catherine. Jack had left for Amsterdam
after Seán’s murder on the day of Cyril’s birth. In a chapter entitled “The
Anger of the Exile”, Jack talks about the stagnation of Ireland. For Jack, the
country is still enmeshed in “silencing” and oppressive power structures –
the Church and the state, mainly:

Nothing will ever change in that fucking place. Ireland is a backward hole of a country
run by vicious, evil-minded, sadistic priests and a government so in thrall to the collar
that it’s practically led around on a leash. The Taoiseach does what the Archbishop
of Dublin says and for his obeisance he’s given a treat, like a good puppy. The best
thing that could happen to Ireland would be for a tsunami to rise up in the Atlantic
Ocean and drown the place with all the vengeance of a biblical flood and for every
man, woman and child to disappear for ever. (Boyne 336)

As noted above, Boyne sets major and minor traumas at individual and
community levels against the backdrop of the remembrance of Nazism in
26 Asier Altuna-García de Salazar

the Netherlands and the oppressive power structures in Ireland that affect
Cyril. Bastiaan’s family and Cyril engage in conversation about happiness,
oppression in Ireland, sexuality and trauma. Bastiaan’s parents are survivors
of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and he recalls their separation on
their wedding day and their internment in Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz,
respectively, during the Second World War. Their major-scale trauma is
remembered when Cyril finds a job as a junior curator at the Anne Frank
House in Amsterdam. Bastiaan’s parents had met Anne Frank’s relatives
before the Second World War in Amsterdam. The comparison Boyne makes
between the traumatic Nazi past and that of homosexuals globally, with
his reference to the major epidemic of AIDS, occupies much of “Exile”.
In Amsterdam Boyne introduces the reader to a young Slovenian immi-
grant, Ignac, who lost his mother at an early age and whose father, “Ignac’s
pimp” (Boyne 357), is using him as a “hustler”. Ignac’s father wants his son
back working in the streets, as he has discovered that Cyril and Bastiaan
are helping him to escape it. As with the end of the first part of the novel,
Ignac’s father wants to kill his son, because he does not obey. But Jack Smoot,
owner of the pub where the meeting of Ignac’s father, Cyril and Bastiaan
occurs, “couldn’t let it happen again” (Boyne 361). Cyril does not under-
stand what Jack means by this, but has to leave Amsterdam for good after
seeing that “Smoot’s accomplice in the disposal of the body was a woman”
(Boyne 362). Although they come close to meeting on many occasions in
the novel, Boyne ensures that Cyril does not coincide with his real mother,
Catherine Goggin, thus adding suspense to the narration.
Cyril and Bastiaan migrate then to the USA, as Bastiaan is offered a pos-
ition at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, as the head of the Communicable
Diseases Department. Their newly “adopted” son, the Slovenian Ignac,
goes with them. It is not coincidental that Cyril experiences negative re-
actions to homosexuals in the USA, as these are the years in which AIDS
was first recognized.6 Fleeing from Amsterdam, where Cyril witnessed
male prostitution, illegal migration and a murder, he arrives in the USA
at a time in which gay people were considered “AIDS carriers” (Boyne
370) and when attacks on homosexuals were frequent. The discourse of

6 AIDS was first recognized in the USA in 1981.

From Undoing 27

Irish history with regard to AIDS in the 1980s – “the first four cases of
AIDS in Ireland were identified in 1983” (Ferriter Occasions 504) – is also
referenced in the novel. Boyne reproduces judgemental attitudes towards
gays in the USA, who were not the only ones carrying AIDS, and compares
them to attitudes in Ireland. Shame, guilt, marginalization, frustration
and lack of governmental information on the disease have been recorded
by Irish historians and also by writers, such as Colm Tóibín in his 1999
novel The Blackwater Lightship. Boyne extends the “silenced” individual
traumas within the discourse of AIDS and the responses to homosexuality
to power structures that are not exclusive to Ireland but rather expressions
of conservative, religious and patriarchal attitudes globally. He introduces
his own take on the discourses of AIDS and masculinity. The greatest
challenge Cyril faces comes the very day his unrequited first love, Julian
Woodbead, dies of AIDS in Mount Sinai and Bastiaan is killed after he
and Cyril are attacked in Central Park by three men who have seen them
embrace. Boyne treats AIDS as a major trauma that is forcefully silenced
and attached to homosexuality exclusively. As stated above, his narrative
strategy cross-connects AIDS to other collective traumas in history. It is
not a coincidence that on the fatal night of Julian’s death and Bastiaan’s
murder, Cyril is first seen reading an “article in the New York Times on
Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, whose trial had just begun in Europe”
(Boyne 416). Ignac’s girlfriend, a historian, wonders “why anyone is inter-
ested in that stuff any more” (Boyne 416), to which Cyril retorts, “that’s no
reason why he shouldn’t be held accountable for the things he did in the
past” (Boyne 416). Boyne thus engages with accountability and memory
as elements that undo silence and power. Through Cyril’s story Boyne
represents the renegotiation of individual trauma through memory and
the undoing of silence regarding the overpowering structures of all kinds
that dominated Ireland between 1945 and 2015. The author does this with
a view to accountability and remembrance as necessary conditions for the
ultimate reassessment of trauma in Ireland and also elsewhere at the indi-
vidual and community level.
During the fatal night in New York, power structures have a twofold
effect at individual and community levels. First, they result in Julian – who
contracted AIDS through heterosexual sex – dying alone, ashamed, because
28 Asier Altuna-García de Salazar

his reputation as a womanizer will be gossiped about in Ireland. People will

mistake him for something he is not – a homosexual – and hence ques-
tion his gender identity. On the other hand, the gang attacks Bastiaan and
Cyril as they see in them repulsive members of a community they have
the right to do away with. These men resort to homophobic violence as a
consequence of the presence of an illness that could pollute society, and
as such has to be eradicated. Boyne’s twist on the discourses of AIDS and
homosexuality is, however, present with Julian’s death, which can be read as
Boyne’s allegorical approach to the challenges and the changes of perspec-
tive needed in Ireland to accept a more inclusive notion of masculinity. In
a recent study on the political embodiment of AIDS in Colm Tóibín’s The
Story of the Night (1996) and The Blackwater Lightship (1999), Guillermo
Severiche contends that “the development of narrative devices to show-
case the body’s internal dimension, its pain and decay, [must be seen] as a
political statement” (125). Boyne has Julian die of AIDS and not his gay
friend, Cyril. Julian, the epitome of heteronormative masculinity in the
novel, succumbs to an individual trauma resulting from the silencing of
the tragedy of AIDS, wrongly attached to gays only. Through Julian’s death
Boyne provides an allegory of the tragedy of the (ultra)masculine Irish
body, which is also subject to the social and political power structures of
society in Ireland. Boyne presents the need for a more inclusive conception
of masculinity and also, in turn, of Irish identity. However, in The Heart’s
Invisible Furies Boyne’s representation of a heterosexual man’s death from
AIDS acquires another dimension. As Severiche states, “what affects the
personal body, what hurts and kills it painfully, has an equal impact in a
broader perspective” (116).
With Julian’s death from AIDS Boyne advocates the reconfiguration
of masculinity. Against the backdrop of the 1970s and 1980s the Ireland
depicted in the novel still “viewed sexual acts between males as criminal
activity and homosexuals as sick and perverted” (McDonagh 66). Boyne
breaks with the idea that only gay males died of AIDS. He wants to leave
AIDS outside the debate about homosexuality in Ireland, as the illness
can affect any Irish male, or female, irrespective of their sexual orientation.
Instead, Boyne centres his denunciation on the “silencing” power structures
and the individual and social traumas they have caused during the periods
From Undoing 29

represented in the novel. With the characters of Cyril and Julian, Boyne
portrays Irish males, gay and hetero, as they are conditioned by inadequacy.
In his research on forms of resistance undertaken by lesbian and gay ac-
tivism in Ireland between 1970 and 1990, Patrick McDonagh has collected
accounts of the social damage suffered by Irish gay men. For McDonagh,
the inadequacy felt by these people also impacted on their closest family
circle. This oppression “does the damage” as it leads “to self-oppression and
a sense of alienation” which, ultimately, influences how gay people relate
to and “build up emotional connections or strong bonds with other indi-
viduals” (79). This is caused by silencing discourses that do damage to the
subjectivity and identity of individuals such as Cyril and Julian. Ultimately,
Boyne presents the oppressive silence of Irish society in the 1980s as the
main cause for loneliness in the individual. For him, loneliness, which was
also the main motif in his previous novel in the Irish setting, A History of
Loneliness, is even more acute when Irish society as a whole does not feel
responsible for it. McDonagh believes that:
Most of Irish society at the time did not consider the treatment of Irish homosex-
uals to be in fact oppressive. Homosexuals were considered deviant individuals. If
homosexuals felt insecure or like second-class citizens, then that was the result of
their own actions, rather than society’s. (80)

Boyne ends “Exile” with Julian’s revelation that Cyril has a son back
in Ireland. Cyril was unaware of this, but recalls the only time he had sex
with Alice, his former fiancée an Julian’s sister, whom he abandoned on
their wedding day before leaving for Amsterdam.
The third part of The Heart’s Invisible Furies, “Peace”, presents a
process of acceptance, reassessment and undoing of different kinds of
“silenced” traumas experienced by Cyril and those around him. It also
presents Boyne’s idea that individual agency in this process of undoing
has been more powerful than religious and political discourses in Ireland,
which are still enmeshed within power structures. Cyril becomes a rec-
ognized member of his former fiancée’s family, now that he knows he
has fathered a son. Cyril’s adoptive father, Charles Avery, also dies after
admitting to Cyril that he should have behaved differently towards
him. Boyne depicts new concepts of family, fresh reconfigurations and
30 Asier Altuna-García de Salazar

understanding of sexuality in Ireland. The action of “Peace” takes place

when the Celtic Tiger is in full expansion and questions about Ireland’s
past and the influence of power structures are starting to come to the
surface. The representation of Celtic Tiger Ireland – a time of global-
ization – allows Boyne to refer to more traumatic global settings when
9/11 finds Cyril in Dublin. The narrative structure of The Heart’s Invisible
Furies uses coincidence, brisk changes of setting and recourse to memory
by many of the characters so that the protagonist, Cyril, reconciles with
the present and the past. He becomes a grandfather and lives with his
former fiancée’s family, in Boyne’s representation of new family structures.
Eventually, Cyril reunites with his real mother, Catherine Goggin, and
travels with her to Goleen to find that his father had been his mother’s
married uncle, with whom she had had an affair. Cyril’s life story unfolds
and he understands the importance of reassessing one’s story truthfully
by undoing the imposed silencing structures that dominate the lives of
the characters in the novel.
The epilogue, entitled “Beyond the harbour on the high seas” includes
a final section, “The New Ireland”, and takes Cyril to the year 2015, once all
his individual traumas have been retold and the silence has been undone.
Boyne’s final depiction of Ireland is that of a country starting to wake up
to a new reality after the referendum on same-sex marriage. Cyril regrets
that change had not come long before: “why couldn’t Ireland have been like
this when I was a boy?” (Boyne 584). The “new” Ireland Cyril is living in
brings change and challenges the understanding of freedom of choice at all
levels, including relationships, marriage and sexuality. On seeing Ireland’s
new situation, Cyril retorts, “Sure everyone can get married now … It’s the
new Ireland. Did you not hear?” (Boyne 587). Boyne advocates the reassess-
ment of power structures in Ireland and the need for accountability and
reconciliation as part of this healing process. Undoing silences concerns
both individuals and Irish society. Boyne ends The Heart’s Invisible Furies
in a positive tone with respect to the characters and Ireland. In the final
scenes, Cyril’s mother, aged 86, gets married for the first time to a man she
has met on the social network Tinder. Cyril’s grandson has a male partner
and their open kisses in public make Cyril regret his past reality, as a victim,
but see Ireland’s new ethos in a promising way:
From Undoing 31

It was something that never could have happened when I was that age. And yet for
all my happiness at seeing my grandson happy and secure in who he was, there was
something terribly painful about it too. What I would not have given to be that
young at this time and to be able to experience such unashamed honesty. (Boyne 582)

In the final lines, when Cyril walks his biological mother down the
aisle of the registry office on her wedding day, he “realized that [he] was
finally happy” (Boyne 588).
This essay has shown that the power structures depicted in Boyne’s
The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017), such as patriarchal identity formation,
national(ist) and religious conservatism, gender identity construction
and heteronormative structurings, were the cause of much trauma and
imposed silences over decades in recent Irish history. As shown in the
novel, these structures tend to be “cumulative” and “interwoven” in the
Irish case. For Boyne, a process of remembrance – of retelling – is required
before the undoing of silence and accountability are recognized in the new
Ireland. In The Heart’s Invisible Furies Boyne advocates that any approach
to the rapid changes that have swept over national and individual iden-
tity in Ireland should also consider the way in which power structures in
Ireland have diminished or augmented their influence. For Beville and
McQuaid, today’s perspective on the silence imposed by all these power
structures in Ireland depicted in recent Irish fiction should be taken into
account, “especially when the social and political structures, which framed
the damaging events, are still in existence in some shape or form” (13). The
same critics go on to examine the inquiries and reports that have brought
to light some of the major examples of structural power in Ireland. These
have shown the consequences for the whole of society because “silence was
maintained for the sake of community” (Beville and McQuaid 13). But, as
Boyne contends in The Heart’s Invisible Furies, this silence needs undoing
and reassessment, and, accordingly, finds representation in his fiction. In
her study on voice and silence in contemporary fiction, Vanessa Guignery
writes that “silence is not necessarily the opposite of speech, and needs
not be equated to absence, lack, block, withdrawal or blank (as is often
the case in Western tradition)” (2). Indeed, in Irish literature silence has
traditionally carried a myriad of meanings and The Heart’s Invisible Furies
is another important example. Whether rendering historical suppression
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 "This must be got to Dacent Smith at once," thought he; "and in
the meantime 'Crumbs' must be watched."
He placed the message carefully in his pocket-book. Then, a
new thought having struck him, he hurried out and sought Sergeant
Ewins. The sergeant occupied one compartment of an old railway
coach, which had been turned into huts for the men. Ewins was
lying on his bunk when John entered, reading a Sunday paper by the
light of a fort candle as thick as a man's wrist.
"I want to have a word with you, Ewins," said John, sitting on
the edge of the chief gunner's bunk, which had formerly been a
railway seat. "Can you tell me," he went on, "if it is possible for
anyone to make a landing on the south shore, there? I mean in the
bay below the look-out."
"It's possible, of course," Ewins answered, "but risky."
"You don't think it possible," inquired John, "for a submarine to
lie out there in the bay and send a small canvas boat ashore?"
Ewins shook his head.
"You've forgotten our minefield—a submarine could not pass it,
sir."
"No, I haven't forgotten that," answered John; "but suppose the
Germans know where our mines are?"
"Then they'd know more than we do, sir," answered Ewins.
"Nobody in the fort knows that, except the Commander, and perhaps
the Colonel."
"The reason I am asking you," went on John, "is that I have
discovered something and want to give you an opportunity of
coming down on the shore with me."
"To-night, sir?" inquired Ewins.
 John nodded.
"I suppose, Ewins, it seems fantastical and impossible to you,
but I have a theory that the Germans intend to bring a boat ashore
there. In my opinion, they have been there before to-night."
Ewins's eyes opened wide.
"Do you think that is so, sir?" he asked in a voice of deep
amazement. Then his eyes brightened. "I'd like to come with you,
sir, if you think there's any likelihood of that sort of thing."
"I don't only think it, I know it," said John. "It may not be to-
night, because of the full moon, nor to-morrow night. But some time
or other, and maybe soon, I am prepared to bet my hat that a
German will land from the sea. He will land, Ewins, in the bay below
us, within a quarter of a mile of where we are now sitting."
The manner in which Ewins took this information filled John
with satisfaction. The old soldier was spoiling for a fight. For four
years he had had nothing better to shoot at than a target, and he
was longing for a chance of real action.
Nevertheless John's fear was correct, for that night and the next
night the moon shone brilliantly, and nothing happened on the
shore. "Crumbs's" message lay unread in the bright moonlight. The
third night, however, the sky was overcast.
But by a sudden, swift turn of circumstances John was not there
to see what happened.
Manton's record on "Crumbs's" secret signal had been taken
with the utmost seriousness by Dacent Smith, and on the afternoon
of the third day, when John was alone at tea in the mess-room, an
orderly thumped along the passage.
"A gentleman to see you, sir," said the orderly.
 "What's his name?" John asked.
"Captain Sinclair, sir."
John rose, and a minute later Captain X. stepped into the little
room. Captain X. was in uniform, and John noticed that he wore the
Mons ribbon and the D.S.O.
"Surprised to see me, eh?" exclaimed the young man, gripping
John's hand heartily; then dropping his voice, "I'm here from the
Chief. Is it quite private here?"
"Quite," John answered, "but I would rather take you into my
room."
They went along the passage to John's bedroom. John seated
himself on the bed, and Captain X. or Sinclair occupied the only
chair.
"The Chief's thoroughly stirred up," said Sinclair, plunging into
his subject without preliminary. "He has passed on your information
to me. I must say you seem to have all the luck, Treves. A signal on
the sands, eh? That beats everything for cunning. I have heard of
clothes being hung out in the Morse code, and Morse smoke signals
from a chimney—by the way, do you think your chap Sims signals
with smoke from his bakehouse?"
John shook his head.
"I have spent hours looking at his chimney," he said. "It was the
first thing I thought of when I began to suspect him, and it was only
an accident which made me get on to his real game after all. I knew
any kind of flash signal was out of the question here."
"Neatest thing they've done yet, eh, Treves? I must say this sort
of thing makes the fight full of zipp and go," he said. Then he looked
at John with a commiserating eye: "I am going to dash your spirits,
old chap."
"Well, get on with it," said John.
"I am going to pick up the plums you have shaken off the tree."
"How's that?"
For answer Sinclair drew an envelope from his pocket. John
recognised the colour and shape of the envelope in a minute. He
read the short, typed letter with gathered brows, then struck a
match and destroyed it carefully. The letter contained an order from
Dacent Smith that John should surrender his position at
Heatherpoint to Captain X., and was to resume work immediately
against Cherriton, Dr. Voules, and Mrs. Beecher Monmouth.
"It's rough luck, old chap," said Captain X., "but I expect that
before this big movement is finished you will have as much chance
of adventure as I shall."
"I hope so," said John. "But I was looking forward to the result
of 'Crumbs's' signal. Last night the moon shone out of pure
cussedness."
Captain X. sprang up to the window and looked out.
"It's clouding up to-night, old chap," he exclaimed joyously,
"and you'll be away for the fun. Hallo!" he said. His eyes were
lowered and were fixed upon a man in shirt-sleeves in the doorway
opposite. "Is that 'Crumbs'?"
"Yes," said John, "but don't let him see you looking at him. I am
not so sure that he hasn't spotted something."
"He'll spot something in a day or two," said Captain X., coming
back from the window, "and in the meantime the Chief's orders are
to leave him a long rope."
 John's orders from his Chief were that he should report to
Colonel Hobin and leave Heatherpoint immediately. He began to
change his clothes, and talked to his companion at the same time.
"You can rub acquaintance with 'Crumbs' while I get out of the
fort," he said. "He mustn't see me in mufti. I shall spend a night in
Newport, and call on Dr. Voules to-morrow morning."
"Who do you think Voules is?" asked the Captain.
John shook his head.
"I shall know more about that to-morrow," he said.
When he was ready to go he shook hands cordially with his
companion. He always felt older than Captain X., though their ages
were the same. Captain X.'s audacity and joy in life amused John.
His colleague always put so much zest into everything he did.
"I should advise you," he said, gripping the Captain's hand, "to
use Ewins if you want any help on the beach to-night. He is an old
soldier, and I should think, if an awkward moment arrived, you could
rely on him."
"Thanks," said Sinclair. "This is a new game for me. I have
never had the chance of angling for a German submarine
commander before, but I expect there'll be one ashore here to-night,
eh, Treves?"
"Somebody comes ashore," responded John, "and reads those
signals."
He went out and sat in the mess-room for a few minutes,
leaving Sinclair time to occupy "Crumbs'" attention while he slipped
away from the fort.
 CHAPTER XV

The situation at Heatherpoint was exactly to the liking of Captain

Sinclair. He realised, from what John had told him, that "Crumbs"
was no mean antagonist, and he was feverish to make the spy's
acquaintance. But the manner in which he strolled into "Crumbs's"
bakehouse before John's departure was the most casual in the
world. One of Sinclair's chief gifts was an innocent and infectious
smile, and under the most trying of circumstances he was always
cheerful. With this smiling cheeriness of manner Sinclair possessed,
as is often the case, a fair share of astuteness.
"It smells good in here," he said, putting his head into
"Crumbs's" warm atmosphere.
"Crumbs," who was kneading dough at his board, turned about.
"Don't mind me," said Sinclair cheerfully. He stepped into the
bakehouse and held a good-humoured conversation with "Crumbs."
He spent a quarter of an hour in cheery garrulity, and when he went
away, "Crumbs," from the darkness of his lair, watched him stride
across the asphalt yard towards the officers' quarters. The man's
eyes narrowed as he recalled that Sinclair had been peering at him
out of John's quarters a little while earlier. When his work was
finished that night "Crumbs" cleaned himself and had a chat with
Ewins, who was smoking a pipe on the step of the old railway
carriage that formed both men's quarters in the upper fort.
"Who's this new captain we got?" Private Sims asked.
 "Don't know," answered Ewins. "He's done his bit, seemingly."
He was referring to Sinclair's Mons ribbon and the D.S.O.
"We seem to be getting a lot of changes lately," pursued
"Crumbs." He had removed the flour from his eyelashes and
moustache, and his lean, sallow, discontented face and glassy,
strange-looking eyes struck Ewins as particularly unpleasant. Sims
was generous in handing cake and so forth whenever chance
occurred, but he was not liked in the fort. The other men could not
get the hang of him, and when he rose presently and shambled
away into the fort buildings, Ewins, who was expecting every minute
to be called by Sinclair, was not sorry.
For an hour or two that evening "Crumbs" pottered about. He
gossiped in the kitchen, had a talk with the sergeant controlling the
leave-book, found his way into the mess-room, and complained to
Parkson, who was adjutant, on the quality of the flour being supplied
from outside. After that the Colonel met him in the corridor, where
he had no right to be, near Sinclair's bedroom. And, as the Colonel
was the one man in the fort, outside Sinclair, who knew the truth
about him, he questioned "Crumbs" somewhat sharply.
"What are you doing here, Sims?"
"I have just been in, sir, to complain about the flour to the
adjutant. I wasn't thinking," he went on, with a perfect semblance of
an absent-minded air, "I wasn't thinking, and I came here instead of
going along to the right——"
"You ought to know the run of the fort by this time," said the
Colonel, and passed on.
It was an hour later that Sims, who had made a shattering
discovery, sat in his cubicle of the railway compartment, with the
door locked, and penned a rapid letter. He wrote fluently, in the
manner of a man whose education has been thorough and efficient.
His lips twitched slightly as his pen sped over the paper. There was a
tense expression upon his sallow face, and he pulled nervously at his
long, drooping moustache.
At the head of the letter he put no address.

"Dear Doctor," he wrote, "our plans are threatened. The new officer
here, Lieutenant Treves, has been watching me closely for the past
week. He has cross-examined Ewins about the guns, and evidently
knows something. To-day a second officer has arrived, a Captain
Sinclair. I doubt him also. They both suspect me. But my important
news is that to-night I secured my first opportunity of going through
Treves's belongings. I was able to open his dispatch-box, and among
other papers of no importance, I discovered a letter from Cherriton,
with whom he has apparently some association. The letter was
signed by Cherriton, which clearly showed me that Treves is playing
both for and against us. I have suspected him for days. I implore
you, doctor, to probe this matter. If you hear no more from me you
will know that things have gone wrong. I beg of you to act
drastically and immediately.—S."

When "Crumbs" had finished this letter he read it carefully through

and avoided blotting it, so that there could be no trace of its
existence. When the letter had dried he placed it in an envelope and
addressed it to "Dr. Voules, Rollo Meads, Brooke."
It was the custom at Heatherpoint for the fort letters to be sent
to Freshwater post office every night at seven precisely in a locked
bag. "Crumbs," with his letter in his pocket, hovered about the
orderly-room until the bugle began to blow seven. He then hurriedly
followed the orderly into the mess-room, where the adjutant nightly
locked the bag with his key. Lieutenant Parkson was in the act of
locking the bag when "Crumbs" shambled into the little room with an
apology. He handed his letter to Parkson, who dropped it in and
locked the bag.

CHAPTER XVI

John decided to walk into Freshwater, and then take the train to
Newport. As he made his way along the road from Heatherpoint,
carrying a small handbag, a red bicycle came towards him.
"Are you going to the fort?" he asked the telegraph boy.
"Yes, sir."
"Anything for Treves?"
The boy nodded.
"Lieutenant Treves, sir."
A minute later John had torn open an envelope containing a
telegram, which ran:

Come to me at the Gordon Hotel, Newport. Shall be there this

evening. ELAINE.

Elaine's wire came to him as an utter surprise, a surprise that was

tinctured with pleasure. He had never forgotten her since their first,
and only meeting. He had indeed thought of her a hundred times,
recalling her as she stood in the little room in Camden Town.
Without doubt she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
During the past weeks every moment of his time had been
occupied, and there had been no possibility of carrying out his
promise to visit her.
As he walked he drew out her telegram and read it carefully
through, possibly for the sixth time. The wording brought to him a
measure of comfort; he felt, somehow, that she was not in so
distressed a state of mind as when he had received her former wire
to Bernard Treves.
"I shall see her within an hour," thought John, as he stepped
into a train at Freshwater. But as the train drew nearer to Newport
his high spirits evaporated; he began to argue that Elaine Treves
was outside his sphere of work. Dacent Smith had impressed upon
him the intense seriousness of the German menace on the South
Coast; no private considerations, John told himself, held precedence
of the duty that lay before him. Elaine Treves was a victim of the
innocent deception he had been obliged to practise. But it was not
his fault that she was an extremely beautiful woman, and that she
believed him to be her husband.
At the Gordon Hotel, a small quiet, specklessly clean building,
John entered the hall, and found Elaine herself descending the
stairs. For a moment the girl did not notice him, and John was free
to observe the daintiness of her costume, the slender dignity of her
figure, and the quite astonishing beauty of her grey, long-lashed
eyes. The note of pathos that had been apparent when he first met
her was now not so marked. She struck him as serious, but not
depressed.
Elaine had descended the stairs to the vestibule before her eyes
met his.
"Oh, Bernard," she exclaimed, and instantly took his hand in her
gloved fingers. "But you can't have come in answer to my wire?" she
went on.
"No," said John; "I came on other business."
"You are not angry with me?"
"No; why should I be angry?" asked John.
"Because I wired to you," said Elaine. "Let us go upstairs,
Bernard. The sitting-room's empty; we can talk there."
She led him up to a little, parlour-like apartment, with a gay
carpet, and a circular table in the middle of the room. Here she
closed the door and stood with her back to it, looking up into John's
face. Her eyes searched his closely. Her splendid beauty, the wistful
expression of her face, a certain shy girlishness, all appealed to
John's feelings. He found it difficult to sustain the searching gaze
lifted to his.
Suddenly Elaine drew in a deep breath.
"Bernard," she whispered, "you are different."
John turned away.
"Yes," he answered, quietly, "I suppose I am a little different."
"Ever since the last time I saw you I have felt it," went on
Elaine. "I have thought much of our last meeting," she added.
"So have I," John answered lamely, not knowing exactly how to
handle the situation. They were seated now on opposite sides of the
hearth, and Elaine was taking the hatpins out of her hat with pretty
feminine gestures that held John's attention.
"I was only going a lonely walk," she explained, "when I met
you, but I won't go now; we'll have tea here together. You will
notice," she went on, placing her hat on her knee and piercing it
with her long hatpins, "that I have not scolded you for failing to
write to me."
"I am sorry," said John, "but I have been tremendously
occupied."
"I guessed," said Elaine, "that you were at home with your
father. I am so glad of that, Bernard; I used to feel," she went on,
hesitatingly, "that you were not treating him well, and that his
indignation against you was—was—" she hesitated a moment—"well
—justified."
John had been observing her closely.
"Why did you wire for me, Elaine?" he said, using her name for
the first time.
Elaine looked at him, and then away. The colour rose to her
cheeks, a delicate colour that enhanced her beauty.
"I don't know," she said. "I got a little frightened, I think. You
see, your friend, Captain Cherriton, began to call on me rather
regularly."
John pricked up his ears.
"Did he cross-examine you about me?"
Elaine shook her head.
"He scarcely mentioned you."
"Oh, I see," said John, suddenly enlightened; "he came to force
his unpleasant attentions upon you. Is that it?"
 Elaine was silent a moment. She was thinking how well John
carried himself. The husband she had known, neurotic and nerveless
and irritable, now appeared before her clear-eyed, calm and more
manly than she had ever believed him to be. She felt herself drawn
to him, as she had felt herself attracted on that last meeting in
London. Her nature was quick and ready to forgive.
"I had to forbid him the house in the end, Bernard."
John sat suddenly erect.
"Was he impudent to you?"
The sudden lowering of his brows and tension of his figure
caught Elaine's interest.
"Then you do mind, Bernard?" she asked quietly.
"Of course I mind, when you are insulted," he returned. "Or,
rather, I ought to mind."
For, like a blow, the thought suddenly struck him that he himself
was treating her with gross injustice. It was one thing to deceive, in
a good cause, Colonel Treves; it was another thing to deceive this
young and beautiful girl, who was another man's wife. And he, John
Manton, was standing in that other man's shoes.
John's situation at that moment was as delicate as any situation
in which he had yet found himself. It was an easy matter to confront
Manwitz and Cherriton, and even Mrs. Beecher Monmouth, in the
character of Bernard Treves. It was not so easy to present himself in
that character before Bernard Treves's wife. The thought that had
occurred to him at their first meeting came again into his mind; at
any moment he might make a false step. An unlucky turn of phrase,
a lack of knowledge of some incident in their mutual past, might
instantly betray him. For Elaine Treves, despite her striking beauty
and her intense femininity, was quite keenly alive and intelligent.
They took tea in the hotel, and after the meal John suggested a
walk in the town. Elaine readily assented, and together they
explored the quaint side streets of Newport. If matters had been
different, if John had accompanied her in his own character, and had
not had to act a part that was extraordinarily difficult, he would have
been in the highest of spirits.
Already he had remarked upon Elaine's air of distinction. She
knew how to dress, how to put on her hat, how to make herself in
all respects a delightful picture of girlish attraction. John knew
nothing of feminine economics, or he would have been aware that
her fashionably smart costume and that pretty hat she wore had
cost almost nothing at all, and had been mostly the work of her own
hands.
During the walk they stopped and looked into a quaint curiosity
shop. John admired a set of old Chippendale chairs and a pair of
inlaid duelling pistols. He and Elaine were standing close together as
he spoke, and he felt her slender, gloved hand laid delicately on his
arm.
"Bernard!"
"What is it?" asked John.
She was looking up into his face, a pleased expression in her
fine grey eyes.
"Your taste seems to have changed utterly."
"Oh, I don't know," said John. "I—I—perhaps my taste has
matured——"
"You used to hate all old things."
 John was looking down into her face, that appeared to him now
as the most beautiful in the world. He made no answer to her
remark, and Elaine went on:
"You look at things so differently, Bernard."
"In what way?" John asked.
"I don't know," answered she. "I have a sort of queer feeling,
Bernard, that you are yourself, and yet there is something that has
occurred to make you different."
John felt that the discussion was drifting in an awkward
direction.
"Do you know what I think?" he remarked.
"What do you think?" asked Elaine, as they walked together.
"I think I ought to do something to make up for all the bad
times—er—I have given you in the past."
She was silent, walking along gazing before her.
"They were bad times, some of them, Bernard," she returned,
quietly. She moved a little nearer to him as they walked. "But I have
always felt," she went on, "that it was not really you. I feel that—
that the unfortunate habit you had contracted, the—the——"
"I understand," John intervened.
"I believe now," went on Elaine, "it was not really you. You were
not responsible, and I always hoped that some time, when you had
conquered yourself, you would become different."
She paused a moment, and John felt her arm slip through his. It
was strange, but his pulse-beat quickened at this quiet manifestation
of her growing feeling towards him. He felt that, somehow or other,
she was being drawn towards him, that she was, as it were,
shielding herself under his protection. And yet, all the time, the
situation was an impossible one. He had no right to permit advances
of this sort; the deception he was practising upon her was utterly
and completely cruel. What would have happened, he asked himself,
if he had suddenly faced her and had said: "I am not your husband,
I am not Bernard Treves—but John Manton? The man you believe
me to be—your husband—is a drug-sodden and hysterical
degenerate, a soldier who has been guilty of treachery to his
country."
His thoughts switched back to the necessity of turning the
conversation. He could feel the warmth of her arm resting upon his
own.
"Let us talk of cheerful things," he said. "For instance, that is a
very pretty hat you have on."
"Do you like it? I made it myself."
"Yes, I like it," responded John, appearing to look at it with the
critical eye of a husband. "Of course," he said, "it is quite easy for a
hat to look well where you are concerned."
Elaine was frankly pleased.
"Why are you flattering me, Bernard?"
"That wasn't flattery. If I set out to flatter you, I should talk in
quite a different way to that."
"Do you know," she went on quickly, "when I met you in the
hotel my heart was beating terribly. I was afraid you might be
angry!"
"How could I be angry?"
"I don't know," she said; "but sometimes, Bernard, you used to
be so dreadfully angry at the things I did."
 Somehow the recollection of these things appeared to sweep
over her, for she drew her hand away from John's arm.
"I thought we were going to talk of cheerful things," John
reminded her. He began to draw her attention to the quaintness of
the streets, and managed, until their return to the hotel, to keep her
mind fully occupied with trivialities.
When they reached the little sitting-room at the hotel, he rang
the bell and ordered dinner to be prepared for two at seven o'clock.
"May we have it here in the sitting-room?" he asked the waiter.
"Certainly, sir," answered the man.
Elaine, whose air of constraint had quite vanished again, went
to her room, took off her hat, and put on an afternoon blouse. When
she returned to the sitting-room John noticed her little attempt to
dress herself for the evening.
"I thought you'd like to see me in something smarter for
dinner," she said. "Do you like it, Bernard?"
"It could not be better," said John. Inwardly he was saying: "I
like everything about you; I like your fine, dark hair; I like your
frank, beautiful eyes, and your honesty and your simplicity, and the
fact that you are a girl and yet a woman. What I do dislike, however,
is the fact that you have a waster of a husband, and that I have no
right to be here this minute standing in that waster's shoes."
They sat down together at the round table in the middle of the
hotel' parlour. The waiter, a gloomy individual, in tired-looking dress
clothes and in a white shirt that should have been washed a week
earlier, lit four pink-shaded candles, served the soup, and went away.
Soup was followed by fish and an excellent entrée. John, looking
over the top of the pink-shaded candles, saw a brightness in Elaine's
eyes. He had been talking gaily keeping the conversation away from
anything personal, and telling her anecdotes that made her laugh.
And all the time, although he was not aware of the fact, he was
drawing her towards him, fanning the flame of love that the real
Bernard Treves had never kindled. She was experiencing new
feelings towards this man whom she believed to be her husband.
The shifty look in his eyes that she had disliked in the past had
vanished. The Bernard Treves who sat before her looked frankly and
keenly into her face. He was not in the least intimate; he was,
indeed, somewhat aloof, but this very quality of aloofness puzzled
and attracted her.
By the time dinner was cleared away and the cloth removed,
Elaine was completely at her ease. Her old fear of offending her
husband had totally vanished. She could not understand her own
feelings and began to take herself to task for having been hard with
him in the past. When Bernard Treves had persisted in his habit of
heavy drinking and drug-taking, she had been obliged to make a
stand. She had done everything she could to win him to better ways.
But when to these habits he had added violence and other cruelties
towards herself, she had informed him that until he made some
effort to control himself she could not live with him as his wife. It
was characteristic of her, as it is sometimes characteristic of gentle
people, that firmness lay beneath an unaggressive exterior. She had
kept her word. But to-night, for the first time, she began to doubt
the justice of what she had done. She told herself that she had been
hard on Bernard Treves, that she ought to have clung to him,
however low he sank.
 CHAPTER XVII

John, who had deposited himself on a chair at the hearth, lit a

cigarette, and was consuming it with a good deal of satisfaction. He
had never in his life partaken of an evening meal that had given him
so much satisfaction; even the funereal and shabby waiter seemed
to him a creature of delight, and the little room in the hotel—he
would always remember it as an apartment brightened by the eyes
of Elaine Treves. It was not usual for John Manton to be led away,
but to-night, for some minutes, he let his senses toy with
impossibilities. He permitted himself to forget the existence of
Bernard Treves. And when the waiter left the room, and Elaine rose
and came towards him, he made no effort to avoid her approach, as
he had done once or twice earlier in the evening. She stood beside
his chair and laid her hand on his shoulder. John looked up and saw
that her face had grown serious.
"I want to make a confession to you, Bernard."
"Let it be a cheerful confession," smiled John.
"I was mistaken, after all."
"It's easy to make mistakes," returned John.
"I ought not to have sent you away from me," said Elaine.
John thought a moment, then observed quietly:
"Perhaps I deserved to be sent away."
"Do you remember, Bernard, when you came to Camden Town
after you had seen your father?"
John, naturally, did not recollect.
"I do not recall it very clearly," he said.
 "When you—you——" She broke off, and again, as she had done
in the street, she moved a little away from him. A wave of aversion
towards him appeared to sweep over her. "When," she went on, "I
told you that we could not be together again until—until——"
"Until I could behave myself," John put in.
Elaine nodded slightly in assent.
"I thought that I was doing right, and when you said you'd
never forgive me I still held out. I wonder, Bernard, if you will forgive
me?"
"Of course I'll forgive you," returned Manton, magnanimously.
He would have forgiven her anything. He could not believe her
capable of anything which would need forgiveness. She came to him
again and stood before him, looking down.
John, out of politeness, that she should not be standing when
he was seated, stood up, and suddenly he felt Elaine's hand in his.
"Bernard," she whispered, "you care for me still——"
"I care for you more than ever I did," said John. He tried
valiantly to slip his hand from hers.
"You love me, I mean?"
Elaine's face was upturned; there was a wistful expression in
her fine, grey eyes, and there was something more than wistfulness.
John could see it shining there. Inwardly he was conscientiously
cursing the Fates that had placed him in this impossible position—
and yet outwardly he was glad. He was thrilled and happy that this
situation had arisen. Then his thoughts took a turn, and his spirits
sank. The love he saw shining in her eyes was not for him, but for
Bernard Treves. He put away her hand and moved back in his chair.
"You do love me, Bernard?" she whispered again.
 "Yes," John answered. He was convinced that there was no
other thing for him to say.
"And you'll forgive me for sending you away?"
John nodded.
Elaine went on again: "It was wrong not to let you stay with
me. I had no right to do it; after all, a wife has no right to act as I
did."
"Why think of it and worry about it now?" said John, attempting
to strike an ordinary tone of voice.
"But I want to make everything straight between us, Bernard."
John led her to a chair, and she seated herself. He tried to turn
the conversation, but this time he failed. Elaine felt a growing desire
to wipe away all misunderstandings between them.
"I have still my confession to make, Bernard."
"What is it?" inquired John cheerily.
There was a silence for a moment—a silence that John felt to be
momentous, that rendered him uncomfortable. Then Elaine's words
came to him, uttered in a low tone.
"I never loved you till to-night, Bernard!"
John was conscious of a sudden and exultant thrill.
"Is that all your confession?" he asked.
Elaine nodded. Her hand was in his. John lifted it to his lips.
Then recollection came to him; he drew himself erect, standing away
from her.
"It's getting late, Elaine," he said. "I ought to be going." There
was something vibrant and new in his voice that caused her heart to
beat violently. "You see," John went on, somewhat clumsily, "I have
important work to do to-morrow."
 But Elaine had not loosed her grip of his hand. She suddenly hid
her face on his shoulder; he could feel her arms about him. For a
minute, what was to John an awkward silence, subsisted between
them, then Elaine spoke again:
"Why should you go, Bernard?" she whispered. "I was cruel to
you, but I did not wish to be cruel."
"You are never cruel," protested John. "Don't think of it any
more."
His situation in that moment was the hardest that Fate could
have possibly imposed upon him. Here was the finest woman he had
ever met—young, beautiful and ardent, with her arms about his
neck, whispering love to him. She was speaking to him as a wife to a
husband whom she loves, and all the time he was not that husband.
And, to complicate matters, he felt now that the love she was
prepared to offer was not offered to the other—to Bernard Treves—
but to himself alone.
"Bernard," she murmured, "at the back of my heart, through all
those black days, I whispered always that some time I should be
happy."
"I am sure you'll be happy," said John. "It will not be my fault if
you are not." He drew in a deep breath. "But to-night—I must go; I
—I am very busy; I have many things to do to-night. Confidential
work." He lifted her hand, bent and kissed her slender white fingers.
"Some day I'll explain."
A minute later he was gone.

* * * * *
The gloomy-looking waiter, who had served dinner the night before,
informed John that the only way to arrive at Brooke was by hired
pony-trap or by bicycle. Choosing the latter method, John, early in
the morning, hired a bicycle, visited the hotel, and said good-bye to
Elaine.
"You'll come back to me this evening, Bernard?" whispered she
as she kissed him good-bye.
"This evening," said John. "I had no right to let her kiss me," he
continued inwardly, "but, after all, it's part of the deception, part of
the character I am obliged to play." Nevertheless, he felt uneasy as
he rode the winding and hilly path to Brooke. The night before he
had played his part valiantly and well, but he felt that in regard to
Elaine tremendous difficulties were ahead.
It was eleven o'clock when John reached the road which led to
the empty, forlorn line of shore at Brooke. He could see the sea
ahead of him, a grand expanse of blue ocean. He passed quaint
Brooke church on his left hand, and suddenly slowed up near a large
solid-looking dwelling, overgrown with creepers. Here was Rollo
Meads, with a strip of garden in front. As John neared the dwelling
he noticed a gardener at work. Something in the quiet and homely
exterior of the house made him for a moment think he had made a
mistake, but as his hand fell upon the gate the gardener lifted his
face, and John recognised the pallid countenance and close-set eyes
of Conrad, the manservant who had first admitted him to Manwitz's
house in St. George's Square.
Conrad informed him that Dr. Voules was in and was awaiting
him.
 "Now," thought John, as he followed Conrad to the front door,
"matters may begin to move again." Dacent Smith had for some
time been groping towards the identity of Dr. Voules, and John
realised that in being permitted to undertake the work he was now
upon he was being trusted and favoured by his Chief. He resolved, in
his interview with the doctor, to exercise the most extreme caution,
and to play the part of Bernard Treves with the closest simulation.
There was silence as John stepped into the hall of Rollo Meads.
The servant preceded him along the passage, knocked on a door,
then entered, and vanished, leaving John alone. Conrad emerged a
minute later, and summoned John towards him.
"Will you please go in, sir."
A moment later John found himself in a good-sized morning-
room, with two windows overlooking a lawn and a garden. The room
was heavily furnished with a long oak table in the middle, and half a
dozen massive dining-room chairs surrounding it. At the head of the
table Doctor "Voules" was seated. He wore a markedly English-
looking tweed suit, but his thick neck, his circular head, and heavy
jaws showed him to be not quite the amiable retired doctor he
pretended to be. Seated on Voules's right hand were two men,
deeply sun-tanned. One of the men wore a blond beard, and looked
frankly and honestly at John. The other was a fair-haired man, with
a supercilious-looking expression. John put both down at once as
naval officers. Standing at the fire-place, in uniform, was Captain
Cherriton. The air of the room was heavily impregnated with the
smell of cigar smoke. Cherriton was smoking a cigarette, but Doctor
Voules held in his powerful mouth a long, black cigar. He flashed a
keen scrutiny upon John as the young man stepped into the room
and closed the door behind him.
"You are Mr. Treves, eh?"
John assured him that he was.
"You will take a seat," said Voules, pointing to a vacant chair
upon his left hand. "These are two friends of mine," he said,
indicating the blond-bearded man and the supercilious younger man,
"Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Rogers."
"I am pleased to meet you," said John, making a swift mental
summary of each man's appearance.
"I am glad to make your acquaintance," responded the blond-
bearded man, and his accent was so thoroughly German that it
would have betrayed him anywhere. The other man appeared to
speak no English at all, for he merely nodded.
"Sit down, Cherriton," commanded Voules, and Cherriton, who
was lounging at the hearth, came and seated himself at John's side.
"I am in the thick of it," thought John. He wondered what was
to occur, what attitude Voules would take towards himself, whether
Voules would regard him as of consequence, and of possible use, or
would he fail to trust him.
"You are no longer in the army?" Voules inquired, looking into
John's face with cold grey eyes. It was his custom to examine
personally such men as were brought to him; he had infinite belief in
his own powers of judgment, and in many ways he possessed a
shrewd and penetrating mind. His infinite confidence in himself,
however, sometimes led him into mistakes. He believed, as he
looked at John, that he was examining a weakling, and a drug-taker.
Cherriton had supplied all information as to Bernard Treves's
unstable character and habits, and though Voules was a little
surprised to find the young man healthy and vigorous looking, he
was deceived by the manner in which John avoided his eyes; he was
still more deceived when John, cleverly resting his elbow on the
table, permitted his sleeve to fall back so that Voules could see
pinpricks on his wrist, the sort of wound that is left by a hypodermic
syringe used for administering morphia and cocaine.
Voules's sharp eyes instantly fell upon this tangible evidence of
the drug habit. He was quite satisfied with the evidence of his own
eyes.
"You are no longer in the army?" he repeated.
"Well, as a matter of fact," John said, after a moment's
hesitation, "my father has used his influence, and I am to be
restored to my commission."
Voules's eyes widened a little.
"Indeed," he remarked. He appeared to consider this change in
John's circumstances for a moment, then he put out a hand and laid
his heavy fingers on John's sleeve. "You have told this news, eh——"
he paused a moment; "you have told this news to Alice?"
For a second John hesitated; he did not realise who Alice was;
then he remembered her as Mrs. Beecher Monmouth.
"No," answered John, "I have not told her yet, but I intend to
write and tell her to-night."
"Ah," said Voules, "you think she will be pleased?" The intensity
of his gaze increased. John saw quite plainly a doubt in his eyes.
"You think she will be pleased?"
"I am sure of it," said John.
"And why?"
 "Because I can be of more use, doctor."
"We have a very high opinion of the lady in question," said
Voules; "we have every reason to trust her."
"I hope you will have every reason to trust me," John said.
Voules looked at him silently for a minute.
"I hope so," he announced. "We shall make it worth your while
to serve us." He paused for a moment, and glanced at Cherriton.
"Cherriton has already told you," he said, "that when the Day
arrives, when the success that is bound to come, has been given to
us, we shall not forget our friends in England." He suddenly turned
away from John, and looked at the blond-bearded man on his right.
His voice seemed to deepen in tone, and he began suddenly and
rapidly to speak in German. "What is your opinion of our young
English friend here?" he rapped to the blond-bearded man.
"I cannot judge of him, Excellence."
Voules went on still in German:
"Manwitz and Rathenau have each testified to his usefulness; he
is also in the hands of a lady who can well supervise his doings."
The blond man fingered his blond beard, sliding it through his
hands.
"Excellence, let me say, may I not suggest a certain reserve in
our conversation, in the circumstances."
Voules laughed for the first time. John noticed that his teeth
were strong and well kept, and that his laugh was not at all
pleasant.
"Our Englander," he said, "understands not one word of
German. We may speak freely, Muller. Is it not so, Rathenau?" He
turned quickly to Cherriton.
 "Yes, Excellence," answered Cherriton, with his contemptuous
curl of the lip. "Not one English officer in a thousand knows half a
dozen words of German; our friend is no exception."
"He is well controlled by the particular lady mentioned?"
inquired Voules.
Cherriton smiled.
"Quite, Excellence; even if she cared for him in the way he
believes she does, she would still watch him like a cat."
"True," said Voules; then again turned to John and spoke in
English. "My apologies to you, Mr. Treves," he said, "for speaking in
German, but my friends here speak no English."
"I don't mind in the least," answered John. He did not in the
least, and as he had understood every word it made no difference.
"In regard to your reinstatement in the army," went on Voules,
"I offer you my felicitations. You will be able to help us even more
than in the past, and I may hardly say that the reward will be in
proportion to the work done. If you are stationed in London we can
find work for you in London. If, on the other hand, you are returned
to your regiment, then you can also help us. The treatment you have
received at the hands of the army, Cherriton tells me, is abominable.
You are quite honourably acquitted of allegiance to your nationality. I
tell you this, that you may have no inner qualms; in serving us you
serve the cause of Kultur. Is that not so, Cherriton?"
"Yes, Herr Excellence."
"Kultur," thought John; "Kultur, that stabs in the dark, that
murders children and women; that calls might right. Kultur that
takes a man sodden with drugs and turns him into a traitor to his
country; then, having made him commit crimes against his fellow-
countrymen, has the audacity to tell him that he is acting the part of
a man of honour! Some day," thought John, a sudden blaze of fury
burning through him, "you, Voules, will be taught a very different
culture from that." Aloud John said nothing, but merely sat nervously
in his chair, fidgeting with his collar, and clasping and unclasping his
hands upon the table—an excellent imitation of the real Treves.
"Is there anything you would wish to say?" inquired Voules.
John looked guardedly at the two men who sat opposite.
"Please go to the window," commanded Voules.
The two men rose obediently and crossed the room. John
dropped his voice.
"I understood," he said to Voules, "that I was to receive"—he
stopped, looked into Voules's face, then turned his eyes away.
"Rathenau," Voules commanded, "ring the bell."
Cherriton rang the bell, and a moment later Conrad entered the
room.
"The packet, Conrad, for Mr. Treves."
Conrad went out and returned a moment later, carrying a small
white packet. He handed it to Voules, and Voules passed it to John.
"Thank you—thank you!" exclaimed John, taking it quickly. He
knew the packet contained cocaine, and he slipped it carefully into
his pocket.
"You will report to us wherever you are?" inquired Voules.
"Wherever I am," answered John.
"Great matters are pending," responded the doctor; "soon you
will be of use to us. In regard to finance," he added, after a
moment's pause, "you will write to our Captain Cherriton." He rose
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