The Eleventh Commandment

‘Ireland never was contented.’

‘Say you so? You are demented.

Ireland was contented when

All could use the sword and pen.’

‘Walter Savage Landor,’ Maggie said. ‘But do you know the next line?’

The waiter bowed.

‘And when Tara rose so high …’

Tara blushed, and Connor burst out laughing. The waiter looked puzzled.

‘It’s my name,’ Tara explained.

He bowed again before clearing away the plates. While her father was settling the bill and her mother was collecting her coat, the waiter asked Tara if she would like to join him for a drink at Gallagher’s when he came off duty. Tara happily agreed.

She spent the next couple of hours watching an old movie in her room, before creeping downstairs just after midnight. The pub Liam had suggested was only a few hundred yards down the road, and when Tara walked in she found him waiting at the bar. Liam wasted no time in introducing her to the joys of Guinness. She wasn’t surprised to discover that he had taken the job as a waiter during the holidays before he completed his final year at Trinity College, studying the Irish poets. Liam was surprised, however, to find how well she could quote Yeats, Joyce, Wilde and Synge.

When he took her back to her room a couple of hours later, he kissed her gently on the lips and asked, ‘How long are you staying in Dublin?’

‘Two more days,’ she replied.

‘Then don’t let’s waste a moment of it.’

After three nights during which she hardly slept, Tara departed for Oscar’s birthplace in Kilkenny, feeling qualified to add a footnote or two to The Joy of Sex.

As Liam carried their bags down to the hire car, Connor gave him a large tip and whispered, ‘Thank you.’ Tara blushed.

At Stanford in her sophomore year, Tara had what might have been described as an affair with a medical student. But it wasn’t until he proposed that she realised she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him. It hadn’t taken her a year to reach a very different conclusion about Stuart.

They had first met when they bumped into each other. It was her fault - she wasn’t looking when she crossed his path as he swooped down the face of a large wave. Both of them went flying. When he lifted her out of the water, Tara waited for a richly deserved tirade of abuse.

Instead he just smiled and said, ‘In future, try and keep out of the fast lane.’ She performed the same trick later that afternoon, but this time on purpose, and he knew it.

He laughed and said, ‘You’ve left me with two choices. Either I start giving you lessons, or we can have a coffee. Otherwise our next meeting might well be in the local hospital. Which would you prefer?’

‘Let’s start with the coffee.’

Tara had wanted to sleep with Stuart that night, and by the time she was due to leave ten days later, she wished she hadn’t made him wait three days. By the end of the week …

‘This is your captain speaking. We’re now beginning our descent into Los Angeles.’

Maggie woke with a start, rubbed her eyes and smiled at her daughter. ‘Did I fall asleep?’ she asked.

‘Not until the plane took off,’ Tara replied.

After they’d collected their luggage, Tara said goodbye to her parents and went off to join her connecting flight to San Francisco. As she disappeared into the crowd of arriving and departing passengers, Connor whispered to Maggie, ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if she turned round and took the next plane back to Sydney.’ Maggie nodded.

They headed off in the direction of the domestic terminal, and climbed aboard the ‘red-eye’. This time Maggie was asleep even before the video describing the safety drill had been completed. As they flew across the States, Connor tried to dismiss Tara and Stuart from his thoughts, and to concentrate on what needed to be done once he was back in Washington. In three months’ time he was due to be taken off the active list, and he still had no idea which department they planned to transfer him to. He dreaded the thought of being offered a nine-to-five job at headquarters, which he knew would consist of giving lectures to young NOCs on his experiences in the field. He had already warned Joan that he would resign if they didn’t have anything more interesting to offer him. He wasn’t cut out to be a teacher.

During the past year there had been hints about one or two front-line posts for which he was being considered, but that was before his boss had resigned without explanation. Despite twenty-eight years of service and several commendations, Connor was aware that now Chris Jackson was no longer with the Company, his future might not be quite as secure as he’d imagined.

8

‘ARE YOU CERTAIN Jackson can be trusted?’