‘What delightful happenstance brings you to the mists and mountains of the ancient kingdom of Connaught?’
‘Must you talk like a bad translation of a French play?’ asked Maud.
‘I saw the advertisement in a newspaper,’ I explained.
Mr Devlin pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose and looked pained. ‘The newspapers are not the least part of the horrid distemper of mediocrity that has engulfed the modern world. Television sets, motor cars, aeroplanes polluting the air we breathe. However, in this case’ – he bowed to me – ‘we have been the beneficiaries.’
‘Our television doesn’t get much chance to pollute the air,’ said Liddy gloomily. ‘The reception’s so hopeless it isn’t worth watching. It’s those sodding mountains.’
‘Don’t swear, darling. It isn’t clever,’ said Constance, going over to the sideboard and ladling out a bowl of soup for Eugene.
‘Who wants to be clever, for God’s sake?’ replied her niece.
Eugene looked reprovingly at Liddy. ‘Those mountains you curse so inelegantly, my child, keep the wicked world at bay. That reminds me of a poem I wrote after reading an account of the battle of the Boyne.’ He took a deep breath and began to recite.
‘Heavenward coiled the smoke of battle
Darkening the plain and frightening the cattle
While all around grim-visaged mountains steep
Cursed England’s pitiless pride and the sheep …’
There was much more in this style. The rhyme schemes were unexceptionable. I repressed a smile as I remembered conversations with Kit. I thought of Burgo and how he would enjoy the eccentricities of Curraghcourt. Then I wished I hadn’t, for the now familiar misery trotted obediently back to heel like a well-trained dog. I tried to distract myself by watching covertly everyone else’s reactions to Eugene’s performance.
Liddy continued to eat her soup, while drumming her fingers loudly on the table and affecting deafness. Flavia fastened her eyes on her book while Flurry found the centre of gravity of each of his eating implements in turn by balancing them on his finger. Maud said, ‘Faugh!’ and continued to smoke her cigarette with her eyes closed as though she wished to shut out the sight of Eugene standing in the attitude of a wine waiter, his napkin over one arm, the other hand thrust out as though bearing an invisible tray. Constance hovered at his elbow, holding the plate of soup. I waited with poised spoon and tried to finish my mouthful of bread but it was so stale that the crunching brought Eugene’s protuberant eyes immediately to my face.
‘You must eat, Eugene,’ said Constance when his memory faltered. She put the soup in front of him, took a piece of bread from the basket, broke it into bite-sized pieces and buttered them for him. ‘You missed breakfast. It isn’t good to fast when you expend so much intellectual energy.’
Maud, her eyes still closed, opened her mouth in silent, mirthless laughter.
‘I confess I failed to notice the omission.’ Eugene sat down next to Constance and smiled his thanks. ‘When one’s head is in the clouds the exigencies of the body are as the buzzings of a gnat.’
Eugene’s grubby lace jabot dangled perilously near his soup. His coat was sadly out at elbows. His appearance was of a piece with the room. I enjoyed myself, briefly, imagining we were all in a satire by Sheridan. When Flavia looked up I asked her, in a low voice, what she was reading.
‘The Incredible Journey,’ she replied.
I remembered with dismay the story of two dogs and a cat who undergo appalling suffering during their cross-country wanderings. I had been furious with the author when she had permitted the loyal old bull terrier to die within sight of home and happiness. I wondered whether I should say something to Flavia about the unhappiness in store. But perhaps I should not interfere. Surely it was her mother’s place to protect her daughter? Where was Violet? Could she really be locked up in an attic with some Irish version of Grace Poole to curb her most savage lunatic excesses?
The door opened. It was not Violet who came in, however, but Sissy.
‘I’m late again.’ Her upper lip glistened with sweat, her hair hung in matted clumps, her red velvet dress was sprinkled with burrs and grass seed. Her breasts were heaving above the tight bodice.
‘Evidently your mother did not teach you punctuality.’ Maud’s eyes were open and alight with the pleasure of a call to arms. ‘She was too busy telling fortunes. Or stealing babies from prams.’
Sissy laughed, wrinkling up her monkey face. ‘Why would she when she had a baby every summer for ten years till Dadda went off with the woman in the bicycle shop? ’Twas more likely she’d put some of us into other folk’s prams.’
Maud looked angry at this failure of her barb to lodge. ‘How do you account for your appearance? Have you been tumbling in the hay with a pedlar?’
‘Ah, Maudie, you know I like your son-in-law too well to look at another man. ’Twas a butterfly that caught me fancy. Through brake and briar it led me till I was tired with running and me heart was lepping out of me breast.’ Sissy laid a filthy hand on that nearnaked part of her anatomy.
‘I detest being called Maudie.’
‘But I like to be friendly,’ Sissy explained charmingly and threw herself into the empty chair next to Flurry whom she proceeded to pet and kiss.
‘Don’t!’ Flurry protested, smoothing his hair and wiping his spectacles on his napkin.
Constance insisted on helping me to clear the soup plates and bring in the main course, a bastardized version of salade niçoise with potatoes, tuna, hard-boiled eggs, tinned beans and mayonnaise. Sausages, of course, for Flurry. The mayonnaise was an odd colour. I had made it with the dregs of a bottle of what looked like olive oil which was all I could find in the larder. I hoped it was merely a coincidence when Timsy complained a few days later that he could not find the lubricant he put on his boots to keep out the wet.
‘This salad’s really good,’ said Liddy. I was pleased to see that she tucked in with enthusiasm.
‘It just shows, my girl, how your palate has been mistreated.’ Maud seemed to excuse herself from the obligation to make intelligent and amusing conversation. ‘But it is an improvement on the boiled ligaments and withered tubers your aunt provides. Though the mayonnaise has a peculiar taste.’ She was like a ballista, the device invented by the Romans for firing off arrows with terrific thrust in quick succession.
I looked apologetically at Constance but her eyes, usually vague and wandering, were fixed on Eugene.
‘How did the writing go this morning?’ she asked him.
‘I struggled with a stanza and got it out fairly well in the end.’
‘Eugene is writing a ballad about Deirdre’s lament for the sons of Usnach,’ Constance explained to me.
‘How interesting,’ I said.
Eugene bowed in my direction, dipping his jabot into the mayonnaise. I was uncertain whether I ought to bow back. In the end I contented myself with a slight nod.
‘Not for us.’ Flurry waved half a sausage on the end of his fork then looked abashed as he caught his aunt’s eye.
‘Have you published much?’ I asked Eugene.
‘He fears the corrupting taint of commerce,’ Constance answered for Eugene. ‘But I think it’s a shame.’ She smiled at him to dispel any suggestion of criticism. ‘It would do people so much good to read his work. And he could always refuse to take the money.’ Of course he could, I thought, if he were completely deranged. ‘Poetry inspires the higher, nobler instincts,’ Constance continued. ‘It softens men’s hearts and calls them to brotherhood.’
‘Dear me, yes,’ said Maud. ‘One can imagine the IRA reading Eugene’s little rhymes about inconstant moons and decaying buds, bursting into tears and throwing away their detonators.’
This sarcasm seemed to go beyond the point of what was permissible. I glanced anxiously at Eugene but he was gazing, one finger on his lips, at the bowl of rotting fruit in the middle of the table, perhaps polishing a metaphor.
‘What are the main themes of the ballad?’ I asked him. I was too ashamed to display my ignorance by asking who was Deirdre.
He waved large, white hands, blotched with ink. ‘Disenchantment. The realization that love is merely the blinding idealization of another person. The rift in the lute.’
A cloud of tiny flies rose from the brown, liquefying mass in the fruit bowl and the light of inspiration leaped into Eugene’s prominent eyes.
‘Would you be an angel and read some of it to us before dinner?’ asked Constance, with such sweetness that I at once regretted my cynicism. ‘Bobbie adores poetry.’
Eugene looked at me with approval.
‘I should love that,’ I murmured.
‘You are either a liar or a fool,’ said Maud.
Eugene rewarded me with a sad smile. ‘I hope you like our Irish poets?’
‘Oh, yes.’ I struggled to think of one. ‘Um … Louis MacNeice.’
Eugene frowned. ‘You admire him? Really? I have always considered him sadly out of tune with what it means to be Irish.’ He put on what I was already able to recognize as his reciting face: flared nostrils, the inner corners of his eyebrows lifted above his nose to make a circumflex of pained surprise at the treachery of the world ranged so meanly against him. ‘“Ireland is a gallery of fake tapestries. Inbred soul and climatic maleficence. Drug-dull fatalism.” Sentiments I cannot echo.’
‘I particularly like W. B. Yeats,’ I said hastily.
‘Ah-h-h. Yes!’ I saw I was on safer ground. ‘Our greatest poet, without doubt. But he himself pronounced it Yeets you know, to rhyme with Keats. Willie Yeats: a genius, a colossus. He knew what it was to love and be rejected.
‘O heart! O heart! If she’d but turn her head,
You’d know the folly of being comforted.’
I perceived that Eugene was like a poor street fiddler who knows only one tune. Thanks to Maud Gonne, Yeats was practically a bottomless pit on the subject of unrequited love and Eugene did his best to plumb it. Constance looked deeply engaged and I tried to imitate her. Everyone else reverted to their former occupations of drumming fingers, reading, balancing knives and forks and closing their eyes. Except for Sissy, who listened with eyes filled with tears, leaving me in no doubt that she had her proper share of Irish sympathy and sensibility.
Pudding was tinned raspberries, evaporated milk and meringues. I had made the meringues the size of ping-pong balls because of lack of time. It was not by any stretch of imagination a lunch to be proud of but its enthusiastic reception was gratifying after the indifference with which my efforts had been met at Cutham Hall. I began to make plans.
TWENTY-ONE
‘It’s all so awful, I know,’ said Constance as we sat with cups of tea at the kitchen table, late that afternoon. ‘You’ve worked so hard. I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘No need,’ I said. ‘Truthfully, I’ve enjoyed myself. I’ve always loved putting things right … That is,’ I collected myself, ‘putting my own stamp on things. I’m terribly bossy though I’m aware it’s unattractive. Also I get great pleasure from simple things, like cleaning this, for example.’ I admired yet again the exquisite George I teapot, now reflecting the light in shooting points from its gleaming sides. ‘This is quite a valuable piece, you know.’
‘Is it? I don’t think I even knew it was silver. It’s been brown as long as I can remember.’ She looked round the kitchen. ‘It all looks so different already. What a good idea to get rid of those old hams. I’d got so used to them being there that I never saw them.’ Five ancient pig legs, thick with dust, the colour of bog oak and so hard even the flies had given them up, had been hanging from the rafters. ‘Timsy was supposed to cure them with saltpetre and whiskey but I think he must have drunk it because the few slices we had off them were tainted.’
We looked towards the fireplace where Timsy, Pegeen and Katty were enjoying their tea. The black bottle was back on the hearth. The ‘girls’, as they were generally referred to though they were both in their thirties, had worked surprisingly well and I thought they had earned it. Katty and I had turned out the pantry and the still room, rejecting anything with a bloom of fur or a rank smell – about three-quarters of the contents – washing the shelves and saturating the insides of the fridge with bicarbonate of soda. Pegeen had scrubbed the floors throughout the service quarters, which comprised, besides the kitchen and the pantry, a still room, a game larder, a dairy and a storeroom for china and glass.
Each time I asked them to do something they exchanged remarks in Gaelic which I was certain were insulting. They wanted me to know that I was an oppressive English tyrant and that my ways of doing things were not a patch on the good old-fashioned Irish ways. Katty was visibly angry when I made her throw away the milk in the cream pans and scald them with boiling water to remove the rancid grease adhering to their rims on which flies fed greedily. But because I was keeper of the black bottle they did as I asked them. Now they sat with their skirts rolled up over their knees, roasting their thighs.
Timsy’s intention was to subdue me with Irish charm, consisting of extravagant compliments. This did not improve the girls’ opinion of me. Pegeen began by joining in the praise but she soon grew jealous. With every pretty speech from Timsy in my favour Katty’s hooked nose, spotted with soot, seemed to curve further down to meet her pointed chin, wrinkling her mouth and dark moustache. I had asked Timsy to cut back the bushes that crowded the high windows of the basement area, which were actually at ground level. Each time I looked up his teeth were bared in a grin as he leered at me through the filthy glass. Now shafts of light penetrated the Tartarean gloom.
‘Oh damn!’ said Constance suddenly. ‘Is this Thursday?’
‘I think it may be.’ I did some calculations. ‘Yes.’
‘Oh, bother! Father Deglan comes for dinner every Thursday. Your first proper evening with us. What a nuisance!’
‘Does it matter? Would you rather I ate in the kitchen? I don’t mind at all.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it! No, it’s just he’s a bit outspoken, and what with Maud … I’d have liked you to get used to us before suffering the full onslaught. He’s really a very good man but he’s fiery by nature. Brimstone is in that man’s nostrils. He’d have been a good general or perhaps a buccaneer. He was put into the seminary at the age of eight and he didn’t have the heart to disappoint his parents.’
‘That was admirable of him. I doubt if I’d be so unselfish. One’s whole life thrown away to please someone else’s whim.’
‘It’s much more than a whim. Every Catholic mother dreams that her son may become a priest, and not only in the hope of pleasing God. Priests have power and often they come from poor families that have none. That part of it suits him. If he’s not lecturing me about Finn and Sissy, it’s about the children not attending Sunday afternoon service. What’s the good of making them sit in a church if their minds and hearts are mutinous?’
‘No good at all.’
‘Father Deglan gets furious and tells me I’m unfit to have the care of them. Then he tries to bully the children about saying their prayers but it only makes them hate him.’
‘Doesn’t Violet – Mrs Macchuin – have a view on this?’ My curiosity about the mysterious Violet had grown to the point that I decided to risk being thought rudely inquisitive. A dish of something called stirabout, which looked like thin porridge, had been prepared for her at lunchtime and carried upstairs by Pegeen. But there had been no other sign of Violet’s existence.
‘Who knows what poor Violet thinks about anything? I usually go and see her about this time with a cup of tea. Why don’t you come with me?’
I made a fresh pot of tea and Constance carried the tray. We went up to the second floor of the castle. It must have been on the same level as my tower room for I saw through one of the windows that the three bowls of meat – Constance’s erstwhile stew – that I had put out on the roof a little earlier were surrounded by crouching cats.
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br /> ‘This is Violet’s room.’ Constance opened a door at the end of a long corridor.
The smell of disinfectant made me sneeze. The only light in the room came from several candles, including one in a little red glass pot, burning before a statue of the Virgin Mary. On each side of the shrine was a window. The curtains were drawn tightly together to block out all natural light. I peered into the choking gloom and made out a bed. On it lay a body. Constance tiptoed to the bedside and I followed her.
‘Hello, Violet,’ she whispered. ‘It’s Constance. How are you, darling? And here’s Bobbie who’s come to see you.’
Now my vision was beginning to adjust to the darkness I saw an expressionless face with closed eyes and dark hair carefully fanned out over the pillow. Above the bedclothes her hands were neatly crossed on her chest as though she were an effigy on a tomb. Only the slight stirring of the sheet stretched tightly across her body belied the appearance of death.
‘How do you do, Mrs Macchuin?’ I touched the hand that lay uppermost. Its warmth was unexpected. I was even more startled when the lips parted to utter a faint sound, something between a hum and a grunt. Her mouth opened and closed several times like a baby making sucking motions in its sleep.
‘Are you thirsty, sweetheart?’ said Constance. ‘We’ve brought you a lovely cup of tea.’
It was pathetic to see the way the head lolled helplessly as Constance took two pillows from the chair next to the bed and propped up the lifeless body. She poured the tea, added a generous amount of milk and put the liquid to her own lips to test the temperature. A box of bendable straws stood on the bedside table beneath a picture of Christ with his heart exposed and bleeding. Constance put one end into the slack mouth and slowly the pale liquid was drawn up. I watched in silence as the cup was consumed. Sometimes there was a fit of gasping as liquid entered the windpipe. Constance patted the frail bony shoulders until it subsided.
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