Redemption - Leon Uris [55]
What of Caroline? She was aware that both her father and husband were scoundrels, but there was no way she could have known about the shirt factory. If she found out now, what would happen to her own marriage?
When Enid let Caroline into Andrew’s study she could see the pallor of his face. Enid excused herself as Caroline took a chair uncomfortably, then did the obvious foolish thing of trying to bait him with candy. She unrolled a map of the district on his desk.
“Roger has all but agreed to donate three hundred acres of land here for the college. O’Garvey says the minute Roger announces he’s in favor, he’ll start the bill through Commons.”
Ingram looked at the map. “Lovely situation on the Protestant side of the river, in Ulster, between Lettershambo, the largest arsenal in western Ireland and a military barracks two miles away.”
“Let’s get the damned thing built and worry about student riots later,” she retorted.
“That will be for you and my successor to iron out.”
“As the chairman of your board and as your friend, I have a right to know. Without you, Andrew, there are no woods or forests of learning in Londonderry, only an empty, rock-filled, windswept moor.”
Andrew’s eyes were misty. “I always held in disgust that my robed and hooded colleagues espoused the ideas of brave men, but from a position of no danger to them. That is why I left the campus. I have infused in a few extraordinary pupils the struggle required to have a grand ideal win out over evil. Yet, when I came to my own Rubicon, I slunk away.”
“Just how vague do you intend to be, Andrew?”
“I knowingly let someone lead me into a game of deals and lies and compromise, pretending to myself that I had done the right thing and that I had let go of nothing sacred. Such mendacity has brought me to a conclusion that I have forgone five decades of idealism.”
“I see a lovely man dreaming about being a perfect self in a perfect world who had to come face-to-face with the reality that he wasn’t perfect.”
“Caroline, I was party to a scheme. The price was to lie to myself by making myself believe there would be no price to pay. There is no such thing as a free lie. If I stay in Derry, those young people will turn acidly from idealists to cynics because I have betrayed them. Better that their beloved mentor simply disappear into the Scottish heather.”
“Who the hell are you to believe that you are the only one who is going to get through this life without making your deals with the devil?” She looked at him as she had never looked at him before. “What do you think my marriage was?”
Andrew turned away, stung by her stab.
“When I was a wee lad,” he whispered, “ our family was Scottish poor, which is about as terrible as being Irish poor. The one thing we had was a warm fireplace glowing at night and my daddy gathered us about to read the Bible. We all knew it so well that we’d only pretend to read, because actually we could recite it from memory…and I moved on to Burke’s writings on the French Revolution…and Gulliver’s Travels and Oliver Goldsmith…and Thomas Jefferson and Plato…and Mendoza and the great philosophers of the East. I was a fortress, Caroline, a fortress that could not be conquered. In my years as an educator, no man, no army could breach my fortress. Can you imagine my joy when I was able to secretly pass along the most passionate and stupendous of my books and their thoughts to a pair of yearning croppy boys from up in the heather?”
“You have told me that redemption is the greatest of all human qualities,” she insisted.
“So it is. I must redeem myself in Scotland, lass, for here I will shake the walls down.” For an instant he hovered on letting it all go. Soothing Caroline’s curiosity would change her life, forever. She was stuck in Derry with a preordained existence.
Enid knocked and entered with a tray of tea, cognac, and Irish whiskey. The whiskey helped with Caroline’s sense of numbness. Enid had also grown pallid, and Andrew’s eyes were very weary.
“Why exile yourself to a nameless boarding