Two days after Lizzie arrived home from combat training camp, the young soldier called at The Woods once again, this time arriving by bicycle and out of uniform.
Mr. O'Neill happened to be trimming the hedge that separated the tennis courts from the front driveway when the stranger came through the middle gates. He naturally assumed it was someone to see him in his official capacity as magistrate—sign some papers, issue a writ—anything but hedge clipping. Grateful to whatever deity he doubted existed for providing a moment's diversion, he laid down the hedge clippers and approached the visitor.
"Ah, I take it that you are a member of the British Army, then," Mr. O'Neill said as he shook hands with the young man.
Mr. O'Neill could hardly suppress a smile at the formality of the address.
"So, you took it to mean she would be willing to see you again socially. I see." It struck James O'Neill's funny bone: the idea of Lizzie and a British soldier. He beckoned the young man to accompany him.
Mr. O'Neill led the young man into the front hall and back to his office. He invited him to have a seat while he found Lizzie. Deirdre, who happened to be in the kitchen having her after-school cup of tea, looked up as her father came in and closed the door carefully behind him.
"Is he planning to take her into custody?" Deirdre whispered.
Deirdre had liked the young man too, had even felt a twinge of envy when the young man was so taken by her sister—a girl who despised everything he stood for.
"It's not up to us to tell the boy what she intends," Mr. O'Neill said.
"Where do you think she's been these past weeks? A Girl Guides training camp in the Sperrin Mountains?" Deirdre was surprised how bothered she still was by the envy.
He returned to the study where the young man was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a wingback chair.
"Ah, yes. She had mentioned something about that," Carter said. He omitted to mention that he'd heard this when he'd stopped her motorcycle at an army roadblock.
Just then Lizzie came in. The young man immediately got to his feet. A well-bred boy, her mother would have said.
"Ah, the British dancer!' Lizzie said as she shook his outstretched hand.
"At your service." He replied with mock formality.
"Daddy, I know who he is, only too well. His name is John Carter, and he's a captain in His Britannic Majesty's 14th Harass-the-Irish Regiment—or some such thing," she teased.
"The Hussars, madam, are now a tank regiment—but, since we have no tanks yet, and they've taken away our horses, we drive around in lorries." He had said all this with an absolutely straight face.
Mr. O'Neill excused himself then with the explanation that a hedge wanted clipping badly before it got too dark.
"So, you belong to His Majesty's 14th Lorry Regiment," Lizzie said.
"You're a Catholic, then?" Lizzie said. She had assumed that, being English, he would be some brand or other of Protestant. The touch of amazement in her voice was not lost on Carter.
"I don't think that such a thing is possible for the immediate future," Lizzie said. She had liked this man from the first time she'd set eyes on him at the dance, and the attraction was apparently mutual. Rejecting him was hard but, given her commitment to the struggle against the very things he represented.
"And the other possibility?" Lizzie prompted.
"Yes, I would like that," Lizzie replied. She shook his hand. She watched till he'd gone through the lower gates where he turned and waved.
I wonder whether and under what circumstances . . . Lizzy thought as she headed into the house.
Born in Co. Tyrone, N. Ireland, he studied at St. Columb's College, Derry, All Hallow's College, Dublin and The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. Seamus served as a priest in Sacramento, CA. for eleven years before leaving, getting married, and beginning his practice as a psychotherapist in San Francisco.
Though Seamus has always had a passion for writing, it was in San Francisco that his creative writing efforts took off. Two of his plays were selected for workshop production by The American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco. His plays attracted the legendary literary agent, Bertha Klausner who became his agent. It was at her urging he began work on his first novel and took courses in short story and screenplay writing at University of California, Berkeley.
He and his wife, Diane, now live in Southern California.
Bitter Oranges, a novel, tells the story of a young, bewildered Irish priest coming to California in the anything-goes 1960's, and how he takes to this sexual liberation as a fish to water. Parallel with his ethical decline, however, runs his increasing advancement within the church bureaucracy. This creates a tragi-comical dilemma when faced with an unexpected promotion and subsequent repercussions. Written with an insider's knowledge and perspective, the novel presents a compelling and insightful view of the secretive, yet very human, world of seminarians and priests.
The Woods, his second novel — published 2017 (available from Amazon, Apple, KOBO, B&N). It is the story of four educated sisters in the 1920's who break all the rules of their upper-class social group. The novel takes a reader from the artists' life of Montparnasse, to a scandalous liaison in an English seaside resort; from a communist revolt in a girls' boarding school, to an IRA ambush of British troops. But there is a cost to all of this rebellion and it looms over each of the sisters at all times.