On opening night, Maisie sat in the second row beside an empty seat. She put her handbag on it and waited. Every so often she looked over her shoulder to see if he had come. The hall filled with the murmur of voices and the crackling of chocolate papers. From behind the curtain came the boom of a microphone, or the clatter of dance steps. The lights were lowered. In the dark Jonathan Adams slipped in beside Maisie. She reached over and took his hand. He heard the opening chorus as if it were coming from a different planet. Then his eyes watered as Catherine, nervous and covered in shiny red make-up, threw her arms dramatically wide, and stamped to the centre of the small stage in her riding boots and buckskin trousers. She pulled out a gun and fired overhead with a quiet click. Offstage, the sound of the shot came seconds later. Then Annie Oakley, with a wild whorish fling, sat on her sister’s shining-trousered knee and, swaying her legs like a trollop, began singing a song whose refrain was taken up by fifty girls dressed as cowboys. And it was a refrain that Jonathan Adams despite himself could not get out of his head that night as he drove through the black lanes of the border country:

Oh, you can’t get a man

with a gun

Oh, you can’t get a man

with a gun

With a gu-un, with a gu-un

No, you can’t get a man

with a gun

Jonathan Adams had learned his lesson.

Now, when he had to accompany Major Bunting and the Reverend Paisley, he always stood at the furthest remove. When the Apprentice Boys marched, he stood in any available laneway away from the action. He heard the shots in Derry that were fired supposedly by the IRA before the British Army shot thirteen dead. A month later, he was standing at the start of a march that set off to commemorate the deaths of the thirteen. He saw assembled there faces he knew from posters, faces of Catholic revolutionaries, Marxists, students. He had got to know them all over the years since that terrible day in Duke Street. He might even have seen Jack Ferris there. He was helpful and tactful. And it was not cowardice, but cunning, that drove him into the background.

He was only waiting to get out. A man of understanding holdeth his peace. The merciful man doeth good to his own soul; but he that is cruel troubleth his own flesh. He learned to hold his peace. To let the law protect him. He must not be one who soweth discord among his brethren.

Not that these Republicans were his brothers.