by Jane Arbor
The Professor’s reply exploded as “Pah!” and Conor went on less evenly,
“You have a point. You see the Lake as a charmed circle that should be sacred to the past. But try as you may, Professor, you can’t halt the future, and since we’re not mincing our words, if the fate of Ireland were left to people like you, we might still all be on a total diet of the worthy potato with an occasional bowl of stirabout for afters!'”
“And what was ever wrong about potatoes and stirabout as a diet? Haven’t generations of good Irishmen thrived on both all through the centuries?”
Conor agreed, “They have, so. And starved too in their thousands whenever the potato crops failed and the stirabout oats had to go to pay the landlord. You shouldn’t forget the famine of 1848, not to mention a lot of the lesser ones which didn’t make so much news.”
The older man’s eyes snapped. “We don’t suffer famine now. And if you, young man, cared anything at all for the future of the country you wouldn’t be despoiling its face as you’re doing with your hotels and your golf links today and—I wouldn’t put it past you—your night clubs and your casinos tomorrow,” he retorted.
Conor stood up, ground out his cigarette. “You’re wrong there, you know. For it’s because I care that I realise that one of our best hopes for the future is to sell the beauty of this country to people who weren’t fortunate enough to be born in it. We have the scenery for them, and the welcome, and the lush climate that grows palms and orchids all the way from here, clear down to the Kerry Ring. But they need too as good hotels, as bright playgrounds as they can find elsewhere. And as such things are my business, are you willing to settle for a golf-course at your back door or not?”
The Professor stared. “Do I ‘settle’ for the thing? Have I any option? What do you mean?”
“This,” said Conor. “If I’m not to lay out a golf-course on the land, I’m not interested in keeping it. In which case I’ll re-offer it to the fellows whose bid for it was lower than mine.”
“So—?”
“They were,” said Conor gently, “an English firm planning to cut their savage English taxes by building a button factory on it. Have you ever smelt a button factory at full blast, Professor? Or if they should turn it down, the next on the list were some German speculative builders, with planning permission as good as in their fist. Well?”
“A button factory! A building estate! Is it blackmail that you’re at, Mr. Burke?”
“You could call it that, I daresay,” Conor allowed.
“Then”—the Professor drew a long breath—“you may do what you like with your own, for I’ll not bargain with you. However, since we are on the subject and we are not likely to meet again at my wish, perhaps you’ll oblige me by telling me whether it is also true that you have bought the Spellane Acre too?”
“The Spellane Acre? I have. Haven’t you the alert ear for the news, Professor? Sure, nothing escapes you! And since you’re bound to ask, I’m thinking of building a house on the Acre.”
“Only one? Not a set of bowling alleys and a small motel as well?”
“Neither. Just one house,” Conor confirmed.
“What for?”
“To live in—what else?”
“To live in yourself? Don’t you live in that public place you have across the lake?”
“I do. But you’re right there—it is a public place. And a man wants a house of his own when he marries—as I shall. Hence my purchase of the Acre.”
“I see. Well, thank you, Mr. Burke—you’ve been frank, at least.” The Professor rose and moved heavily towards the door, turning back to address Kate as he reached it.
“We’re forgetting our hospitality, daughter,” he said. “You’ll excuse me, I know, but you should offer our guest a drink.”
He went out.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He left silence behind him. Then Kate, taking decanter and glasses from the sideboard, said in a low voice, “Did you have to be quite so brutal?”
Conor waved aside her gesture towards the decanter. “Not for me. I’ll drink with the Professor when he’s willing to drink with me—not before. But—‘brutal’? Not a bit of it! He was enjoying himself, didn’t you know?”
“He was not!”
“Ah, but he was. The tiger in him was fighting for his Ireland, throwing me on to the other side. But from the gleam in his eye, he knew very well that there’s little enough that the likes of me can do to change the real Ireland in the latter end.”
“To hear you arguing, one would think you and people like you were intent on doing it as fast as you can!”
“And how fast is that? Let’s face it, we’re not dictators, running a police state; there’ll be turf dug, haycocks mounded by hand and honourable bargains struck by a slap of the palm, long after your time and mine, please God, and in his heart your father knows it. What’s more, though he’d die rather than admit it, I suspect he knows we’re both on the same side. He, preserving his folklore and his Gaelic culture, and I, attracting the tourists in my own way—aren’t the two of us really at the one job of throwing our country in the face of the world and saying, ‘Look ye here—for you’ll be glad you did’?”
Kate sighed, “I hope so.”
“I know so, and there may yet be a day when the Professor will allow that I’m right. Meanwhile, will you take a trip with me one day to look Over the Spellane Acre? I’ve had an architect at work on plans for my house there and I’d like your opinion on the layout.”
“You’ve got house plans already?” Kate looked her surprise. “But I thought you’d only just bought the Acre?”
“So I have. But as I meant to get it at any price the house is ready for building as soon as we have all the red tape rolled up. So will you come?”
Kate hesitated. “I—don’t know anything about house architecture.”
“Rubbish. You must know what a woman would like to see in the first house of her own. Say Sunday then? You’ll lunch with Mother and me at the Lakestrand and we’ll go over to the Acre afterwards?”
“All right. Thanks, I’d like that,” Kate agreed, unable to deny herself the bittersweet of an afternoon alone with him, even though she bought it at the price of advising him on a house to which he would take another woman as his bride. Was there such a woman for him yet? she wondered—and realised instantly how little she wanted to know that there was.
The Spellane Acre was thickly wooded land at the far end of the lake at the point where the water narrowed to a mere neck before broadening and narrowing, again to a series of lesser pools like strung jewels on a chain. About a mile short of the Acre the shore road turned inland, making it necessary to leave the car there and to walk lakewards through the woods to the spot where Conor proposed his house should stand.
The place itself was a comparatively small clearing, ringed about by pine and beech and towering hornbeams; the lake no more than a few glimpses of blue between the boles; the almost tangible quiet broken only by the rustling of leaves.
They stood in silence, looking about them. “Well?” Conor invited.
“It’s lovely,” said Kate. “But are you going to like it yourself?”
“And why should I not?”
“Because I’d have said you would find it too closed in. These trees—”
“Ah, you think I have a grudge against trees for their own sake. But supposing I told you I don’t mean to lay an axe to one more than I need to make a garden and to cut a drive through from the road, what then?”
“I’d be very glad to hear it.”
“And surprised, having pre-judged that I’d surely raze the lot, until I had the lake staring me in the face as it does below at the Lakestrand? You don’t see that an open shore there is good business, whereas here it would be rape for rape’s sake.” He surveyed her quizzically. “You still think of me as a cross between Attila the Hun and Ghenghis Khan, don’t you, Kate?”
“Oh course not!”
“Then how?”
But before she could answer he had misread the shadow which crossed her face, and added, “All right, that wasn’t fair. So sit down now, till I show you the house plans. For that’s what you’re here for—to vet them for me.”
He chose a natural armchair of above-ground pine roots, sitting slightly above her and leaning over her shoulder in order to hold the blueprint spread between them.
The house, he explained, was to be of white stone beneath a roof of olive-green pantiles, with matching shutters to all the sun-facing windows; neither bungalow nor two-storeyed, but on two levels, thus best utilising the slight incline on which it must be built. The main entrance would face the woods, the garden would run lakewards. Here—his finger stabbed variously—was the dining-room, the living-room, the breakfast patio, the kitchen quarters, the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the nursery suite. Was the latter well planned for its purpose? was a perambulator park a “must” and where should airing cupboards be ideally placed? were some of the questions he asked of Kate and which she answered as levelly and impersonally as she could.
She had come hatless, and now and again, as she bent over the plans, she had to hold back the black wing of her hair which would fall forward over her brow. Once, too, it was Conor’s finger under it which held it back, and at his unexpected touch she flinched involuntarily.
Instantly, as at a wasp-sting, his hand dropped away and he straightened, putting distance between them as he said in a tone less even than his earlier one, “All right again, Kate. You don’t need to spell it—”
“Spell what?”
“That, for all our truce, you haven’t forgotten a certain assault upon your person. Not that you need fear it’ll happen again like that, for it won’t. Meanwhile,”—he tweaked her hair deliberately—“the next time we meet in Halloran’s, I’ll treat you to a card of bobby-pins for this forelock of yours. Or come to that, what’s wrong with your ear as a bracket for it when it hinders the job in hand?”
At that Kate laughed shakily, ashamed of the nervous, over-aware reflex which had earned his teasing. Obediently she latched the offending strands behind her ear; he approved, “That’s better,” and the imaginary crisis was over, the current switched off.
Later, when the blueprint was rolled up and she sat clasping her knees while Conor made a pillow of his linked hands and lay staring up into the filigree of leaves overhead, she asked, “After the plans have gone through, how long will your house take to build?”
“You should ask the builders. Though they are willing, and the materials are to their hand, the time will be as short or as long as I choose it should take. Why?”
“I—wondered. Whether, that is, you mean to move into it as soon as it’s finished, or not until after you’re married?”
“Live alone in it before I bring a wife to share it with me? Why should I want to do that while I have the Lakestrand as a roof for my head?”
“I—don’t know.” Kate smiled faintly as she turned to look back and down at him. “You see, Conor, at the moment I feel rather as if you were a serial story of which I’d somehow missed an instalment. For instance, until you told Father you had bought the Acre and meant to build a house here, I hadn’t a clue that you were—engaged.”
Silence greeted that. Then Conor said, “Rest easy, you’ve missed no instalment. I’m not engaged nor near it at the moment. And supposing I do build a house for my future wife and the mother of my children, have I to be hotfoot to Grafton Street for an engagement ring before a stone of the place is laid?”
“But you said—”
“That I mean to marry? And why wouldn’t I? Don’t most of us? Must a man leave his intention unspoken in the air until the very minute of asking his woman if she’ll have him?”
“Then you haven’t asked—your woman ... yet?”
He sat up, then stood, brushing pine-fronds from his trousers and then from his hands before offering them to Kate to help her to her feet. “I have not,” he said. “What’s more, I’m not doing it until I judge the one I’m choosing has also chosen me. She’s welcome to all the time she needs to make up her mind for sure, but the one answer I’ll not take from her at the latter end is No.”
At that, for all the thrill of the touch of his hands and his nearness as she faced him, Kate managed another tremulous laugh. If there wasn’t one already, there would be a girl he would love, and one day he and she would stand together on the very spot under their own roof-tree. But as he would not understand that this was matter for tears to a girl named Kate Ruthven, she laughed instead.
“Oh, Conor, I wish I had your recipe for self-confidence,” she told him. “Don’t you ever envisage failure at—anything?”
“Envisage it? I do surely. And of course I’ve known failure—what man hasn’t? But once I’ve looked it squarely in the face and dared it to happen, it mostly doesn’t.”
“You’re very lucky.”
He shook his head. “It’s no question of luck. Only of not crying for the moon until you’ve a ladder long enough to bring you within reach of it.”
“But isn’t crying for the moon merely another name for ambition?”
“It is not, It’s another name, if you like, for wishful thinking, and where did that ever get anyone?” he retorted unanswerably as he turned on his heel and led the way back to the car.
Bridie was away that week, on a visit to their Castlebar relatives. But as soon as she returned she tapped the local grapevine and was quickly abreast of the news of Conor’s latest projects. Kate warned her against discussing the matter of the golf-course with the Professor, but on their first time alone together she wanted to hear all Kate could tell her about Conor’s purchase of the Spellane Acre and the house he meant to build there.
“He usually tells me everything, but for some reason he’s playing a bit ‘possum’ about it,” she complained. “When I asked him if it was true he had bought the Acre, he just said, ‘Surely’, and when I told him I thought he might have waited to ask me as well as you to vet his plans, all he said was ‘Why?’—just like that.”
“And you said—?” prompted Kate.
“Well, that I had masses of ideas about house-planning; that every normal girl had, and how did he know I couldn’t have contributed something? But I didn’t get any change out of that either. He said he was sure I could, but that just one more opinion would have been a case of too many cooks; he had his architect’s ideas on paper and his own in his head, and when he wanted a woman’s advice he had asked yours. But what does he want another house for, Kate, when he has the Lakestrand already?” puzzled Bridie, blissfully unaware that Conor’s plans for his future held any pain for Kate at all.
Meanwhile someone named “Rory” cropped up increasingly in Bridie’s account of her holiday.
At first he appeared formally as “Mr. Tierney”; then as “Rory Tierney” and finally as “Rory”—at which point Kate probed for details which Bridie was bubblingly eager to offer.
Rory was a friend of their Ruthven cousins; he was just twenty; on Long Vacation from Dublin University; a wizard with cars and a lamb. He had—well, rather haunted her uncle’s house after meeting her at a barbecue and she had—sort of—liked him a lot. And wasn’t it odd? He had friends of his own in Morah Beg and he had suggested that the next time he came to visit them, he should look up Bridie too.
“If he does, Kate, do you think we could lay on a party for him, or if Father wouldn’t wear that, could we make a foursome—you and Dennis and Rory and I—and go over to the Lakestrand for dinner?” asked Bridie. And later, anxiously, “Supposing Rory does come, he doesn’t have to hear about Guy Davenport, does he?”
To which Kate’s reply was as emphatic and reassuring a No as she could achieve.
Rory Tierney, in fact, lost little time in keeping his promise.
One morning he arrived unannounced—a lean strip of young manhood with roguish blue eyes under a black cowlick of hair—in a veteran car which he had tuned himself to a concert pitch of pe
rformance.
He was a young man of parts and forethought too. Since he was inviting himself to lunch, he had bought his own in Morah Beg’s supermarket—sausages, a chop and two kidneys—and would cook theirs along with his, if Kate would allow him the use of the kitchen. Which, being given permission, and aided and abetted by Bridie, he proceeded to do and maintained a bland total innocence when, at the table, Professor Ruthven congratulated Kate on a most excellent meal.
Afterwards, his car being as resourcefully equipped as the White Knight’s charger, he produced fishing gear from it and took Bridie fishing on the lake. They caught nothing, but called in at the Island for tea, and returned having made a date with Dennis for dinner at the hotel that evening.
Once more the car produced the necessary, and the jeaned and jerkined Rory who borrowed the bathroom to change in emerged from it dark-suited and groomed, his slim male youth the perfect complement for Bridie in white, her hair a flaxen cloud under a white Alice band and her face innocent of make-up except for the added touch of coral to her lips. By all the signs, she was coming out from Guy Davenport’s mean shadow at last, thought Kate gratefully.
Kate herself wore red—a square-necked figure-moulding sheath of a dress which was a rare choice with her. Wryly she knew her dislike of it sprang from a blunt comment of Conor’s on it—“As chic as they come, but not you, Kate,” he had said once. But Dennis approved it; Dennis was her escort tonight, and she wore it to please him.
They met him in the hotel lounge, where Rory announced that the evening was his treat; he had already phoned to order dinner and a table had been reserved for them until they were ready. They spent a gay half-hour over drinks before adjourning to the dining-room, and it was as they were taking their places that Kate, glancing about her, suddenly stiffened with shock.
She touched Bridie’s arm. “Across there—on the far side of the flowers—isn’t that Hester Davenport with—?”