All Our Yesterdays Read Online Free PDF

dinner?” Conn said.
    “It’s pleasant,” Hadley said. “Perhaps we can find a quiet place in the Green.”
    Conn took a bite of muttonchop and drank some claret. He knew how dangerous it was here, and he knew that the danger was one reason they came. It excited her. For himself Conn knew that it was foolish to take such risks, but he knew also that Dublin was his city, and he was goddamned if he would let abunch of foreigners decide where he could eat. And he too enjoyed the danger.
    “Be nice sometime if we were to do it in a proper bed,” Conn said. He paused and drank some more claret, and patted his lips with the starchy white linen napkin. “With clean sheets, and big pillows. And a door that locked.”
    “I rather like the excitement,” Hadley said. “Doing it where someone might come upon us.”
    “It’s exciting,” Conn said. “But it lacks a bit in the area of postcoital languor.”
    She cut a neat small portion of her salmon and popped it into her mouth, switching the fork from her left hand to her right, the way Americans did. She chewed carefully while he looked at her face, how her big eyes held the light of the candles on the table. The light reflected in the windows now, as the evening came down. He could see them both in the dark window, younger than any of the other diners, sitting close together.
    She finished chewing, and swallowed, and said, “I can get languor at home, thank you.”
    “And love?”
    She smiled.
    “So Irish,” she said, and shook her head. “So Irish.”
    He wanted to reach across the table and take her and bend her to him and force her to love him as he loved her. He felt his strength, felt the biceps engorge, swollen against the sleeves of his jacket. It was as if, for that moment, he might force her or kill her. He would make her yield…. And then it passed…. He felt the engorgement drain away…. And he felt diminished, as if he himself might drain away too…. The faith defended, he put his hand on topof hers again, and patted it contritely. He felt the glassy stare of the stag’s head mounted high on the far wall of the dining room.
    Later, in the Green, among some bushes, squirming beneath him in the darkness, moaning in his arms, she bit his shoulder and drew blood. And when it was over they stayed where they were, in silence, catching their breath, smelling the crushed grass beneath them and the damp smell of the Irish earth, and listening to the sound of the heavy lorries as they rolled by.

Conn
    T hey met on a cold night, in a high-ceilinged room, on the first floor of a four-story pinkish brick town house, in back of Trinity College, just up Westland Row from the train station. Mulcahy himself was there, the chief of staff, and Mick Collins, “the Big Fella” head of intelligence, seated behind a long table with maps and papers on it. The high windows were shuttered from the inside, and the doors were locked. The radiators were full on in the crowded room, and Ginger O’Connell, the training officer, portly and red faced, behind the table, was sweating in the heat. Rory O’Connor and Arthur Griffith made five command staff members behind the long table. Conn sat against the back wall on a straight chair that had been moved in from the kitchen.
If the peelers came fishing today they’d get a lot of big ones
, Conn thought.
    “Let us be straight about this,” Collins said. “Their Secret Service has been better than ours.”
    He spoke firmly, as he did everything. He wasn’t in fact such a big fella. Conn was taller. But he was blocky and athletic, and the certainty with which he said things made him seem bigger than he was.
    “We need to slow it down until we can catch up. No one outside this room knows of our plans. There are few of us, each of you will have to act alone. It is the best way to keep it secret.”
    Besides the command staff there were twenty menin the reeking hot room. Collins looked around slowly, making eye contact with each