Land Beyond the Map

McArdle was no fool. The man simply said, a mocking voice ghosting from the rain-lashed darkness: “And goodnight to you, too, Crane. Just forget all about this foolishness and go home. I’m doing you a favor.”

Crane did not answer; he walked off, head bent against the rain, hands now thrust deeply into his raincoat pockets.

Damn McArdle! And damn the map! In fact, taking everything that had happened — damn the whole business!

And then he remembered Polly and immediately reconsidered his decision. No map, no Polly.

The map had at least done something positively good for him. He was aware of the selfishness of the idea when set beside the tragedy of Adele, but that could not stop him from recognizing it. He luxuriated in the warm glow spreading in him as he thought of Polly. He walked back to the hotel in a remarkably good humor.

She was waiting for him in the lounge, a woman’s magazine folded on her knee, a cup of coffee — stone cold — on the table and a cigarette burning into an inch long ash drooping from her mouth. She smiled weakly as he walked in.

When he told her of his meeting with McArdle in the rain he began to think there was something odd in her reaction when she lost that little smile and blue arc-lights began to snap — as Crane thought, aghast — from her eyes.

“You idiot!” she blazed out as he lapsed into silence. “You nitwit! You utter jackass — you — you…”

Crane sat down. “I thought you’d—” he began. Then: “What’s the matter? I’m not allowing McArdle to frighten me off. I told you so.”

“That’s not it!”

“I was ready in case he started anything funny. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d tried to lay me out. He might just have thought I had the map on me.” Crane studied her. She glared at him with such wrath that he wondered the wall at his back did not burst into flame.

“That’s it, Rolley! That’s the whole trouble —the whole trouble with you! You were ready for him — my God!” Her sarcasm scorched. “You were ready, tensed up with clenched fists in case he tried to shake the truth out of you. Well, you benighted nitwit, why didn’t you grab him instead? You were there with the man who know the answers and you let him get away! Rolley — what’s up with you? You should have grabbed him, run his arm up his back and frogmarched him back here so we could have had a little chat with him. Well?”

Crane had nothing to say.

He could, of course, have said that it hadn’t occurred to him. He could have said that, anyway, even if it had, he wasn’t accustomed to snatching strangers in the street and handling them forcibly. He might have pointed out that McArdle might have resented being manhandled and have called out. A policeman might have agreed with McArdle. That, at least, was a reasonable assumption.

He could have said all this. Instead he lowered his head and looked away. Hell! This girl made him feel like a criminal.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last, lamely.

Quite deliberately, Polly stood up. She let her cigarette ash fall into the cup of coffee, creating a disgusting sight. “Are we still going to County Tyrone in the morning? Now that McArdle’s here in Belfast? Is there any point?”

“I think so.” Crane was tired and his head had begun to ache. “I think so. Allan went that way, and, if what we believe to be true is true, then so did I. I might recall something on the way….”

“A faint hope,” she said, still with that cold and distant voice, standing, looking down on the ruined coffee. “But at least, something. Good night, Rolley. If you run into McArdle again, just let me know. We might get somewhere then.” And she walked off as though she’d just missed a six-inch putt on the eighteenth at Portrush.

Staring after her, Crane returned to his old philosophy.

“Damn the map,” he said under his breath. “And damn all cocky, super-efficient women, too.” And went to bed.

The Austin strode sweetly out along the gray roads next morning, skirting south of Lough

Neagh, dappled with cloud shadow and the glint of sunshine, pushing towards the west. The morning had begun with constraint between the two seekers after the map, and silence filled the car deafeningly. The wastelands and rolling hill-clumps, boggy and sparsely clothed with stunted bushes, enveloped them in a friendly desolation. Every now and then the road ran along a causeway raised above the low-flying marsh. This was turf country. The air smelled sweet. Despite his own impotent inward-directed anger, Crane began to feel good. The horizons extended, the sky expanded — his lungs expanded, too, in keeping with the mood of this vast, desolate and open space — and he realized once more that the world was indeed a great and wonderful place.