Betrayal at Lisson Grove - Anne Perry [60]
‘Do you know him?’ she asked instead.
‘I?’ McDaid raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ve met him, of course, but know him? Hardly at all.’
‘I didn’t mean in any profound sense,’ she parried. ‘Merely were you acquainted.’
‘In the past, I thought so.’ He was watching Cormac while seeming not to. ‘But tragedy changes people. Or then on the other hand, perhaps it only shows you what was always there, simply not yet uncovered. How much does one know anybody? Most of all oneself.’
‘Very metaphysical,’ she said drily. ‘And the answer is that you can make a guess, more or less educated, depending on your intelligence and your experience with that person.’
He looked at her steadily. ‘Victor said you were . . . direct.’
She found it odd to hear Narraway referred to by his given name, instead of the formality she was used to, the slight distance that leadership required.
Now she was not sure if she were on the brink of offending McDaid. On the other hand, if she were too timid even to approach what she really wanted, she would lose the chance.
She smiled at him. ‘What was O’Neil like, when you knew him?’
McDaid’s eyes widened. ‘Victor didn’t tell you? How interesting.’
‘Did you expect him to have?’ she asked.
‘Why is he asking, why now?’ He sat absolutely still. All around him people were moving, adjusting position, smiling, waving, finding seats, nodding agreement to something or other, waving to friends.
‘Perhaps you know him well enough to ask him that?’ she suggested.
Again he countered. ‘Don’t you?’
She kept her smile warm, faintly amused. ‘Of course, but I would not repeat his answer. You must know him well enough to believe he would not confide in someone he could not trust.’
‘So perhaps we both know, and neither will trust the other,’ he mused. ‘How absurd, how vulnerable and incredibly human; indeed, the convention of many comic plays.’
‘To judge by Cormac O’Neil’s face, for him at least, it was a tragedy,’ she countered. ‘One of the casualties of war that you referred to.’
He looked at her steadily, and for a moment the buzz of conversation around them ceased to exist. ‘So he was,’ he said softly. ‘But that was twenty years ago.’
‘Does one forget?’
‘Irishmen? Never. Do the English?’
‘Sometimes,’ she replied.
‘Of course. You could hardly remember them all!’ Then he caught himself immediately and his expression changed. ‘Do you want to meet him?’ he asked.
‘Yes – please.’
‘Then you shall,’ he promised.
There was a rustle of anticipation in the audience and everyone fell silent. After a moment or two the curtain rose and the play began. Charlotte concentrated on it so that she could speak intelligently when she was introduced to people in the interval. To know nothing would imply that she was uninterested, which would be unforgivable here.
She found it difficult. There were frequent references to events she was not familiar with, even words she did not know. There was an underlying air of sadness as if the main characters knew that the ending would include a loss that nothing could ever alter, no matter what they said or did.
Was that how Cormac O’Neil felt: helpless, predestined to be overwhelmed? Everybody lost people they loved. Bereavement was a part of life. The only escape was to love no one. She stopped trying to understand the drama on the stage and as discreetly as she could, she studied O’Neil.
He seemed to be alone. He looked neither to right nor left of him, and the people on either side seemed to be with others. Not once all the time she was watching did they speak to O’Neil, or he to them, not even to glance and catch the eye at some particularly poignant line on the stage, or a moment when the audience seemed utterly in the grasp of the players.
The longer she watched him, the more