Constance paused as though expecting me to say something. I frowned, concentrating on fastening off my thread.
‘It’s hard for us to understand what a driving force sex can be for some men,’ she went on. ‘Although,’ she added quickly, as though correcting herself, ‘women have strong needs, too, of course, and just as much right to gratify them. Anyway, it was at our party for Lughnasa that Finn and Sissy met. That was the year before you arrived. Sissy looked so attractive. Alive and warm – different, you know, from the other girls. Not nervous and giggling like the village girls, who were shy of him. Or putting on airs like the daughters of the gentry, who’d been warned by their mothers not to have anything to do with married men. Finn could have had his pick of the older ones who were bored by their dull husbands. But he’s not the type to get a thrill out of cuckolding a man under his nose.’
‘I suppose not.’ I peered more closely at the galloon (a sort of braid) that had edged the old torn hangings, wondering how much of it could be saved.
‘Sissy was wearing something dramatic in her usual style, with bunches of flowers behind her ears. She made him dance with her. Put her arms round him and dragged him on to the floor. After a while he started to enjoy himself. She can be very engaging if she wants.’
‘I’ve seen that.’
‘They got rather drunk, the two of them. She stayed the night. I hope you’re not shocked?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘He was lonely, you see. And she made it plain she wanted him. Sissy was right, she did comfort him. Only, sadly for her, she wanted more than that. I acquit her entirely of any mercenary motive. She really fell in love with Finn. I’m probably biased as he’s my brother but I think he’s good-looking.’
‘Yes.’
Perhaps there was a coldness in my tone which encouraged Constance to sing her brother’s praises.
‘And he’s clever and well educated. By comparison with what she’d always known he might even have seemed well off. The romance of the Big House. Who could blame her?’
I gave a half-smile that might have been acquiescence.
‘She’d had such a hard time.’ Constance seemed eager to win sympathy for Sissy, and by association for her brother’s cause. ‘Her father was a drunkard who beat her and she joined the circus when she was fifteen. The trapeze artist wanted to marry her but he had a terrible temper too so she ran away with a travelling theatre company. When that folded she lived a hand-to-mouth existence selling medicines and spells and living in a deserted bothan halfway up a mountain, miles away from anywhere. But men were always hammering on the door wanting something else besides a cure for rheumatism. Once she was raped. Apparently she put up a good fight and he has the marks on his face to this day. Here’s the nest!’ She pulled out handfuls of cotton wadding from the back of the sofa. ‘The entire thing seems to be a lying-in hospital for mice. Luckily the last lot of occupants have gone.’
‘We’ll have to get it reupholstered, I think. Poor Sissy! Did she report the man to the police?’
‘That would have been a waste of time, I’m afraid. In this part of the world a girl of Sissy’s reputation would get no sympathy from anyone. They’d say she’d asked for it by living alone and wearing her hair long and dying the ends red. It’s wickedly unfair. They’d never say that about a man.’
‘Did she tell you all this?’
Constance looked sad. ‘You’ve seen for yourself, she’s never trusted me. Or even liked me, it seems. No, Finn told me. He wanted me to understand what she was doing here. He was dismayed to wake up with a terrible hangover and find her in his bed. He expected her to leave at once. But when she begged him to let her stay he didn’t have the heart to send her back to that kind of life. It was weakness, perhaps, but also the right kind of generosity, to my mind. I don’t think they slept together much after that. He felt he was taking advantage of her, knowing that it could never come to anything. You don’t think too badly of him, now you know, do you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think badly of him at all.’
When the children went back to school for the Lent term Constance and I redoubled our efforts to get the house into good order for the visit of the Hibernian Heritage inspector. I was too busy to brood much on the unsatisfactory state of my heart. It was almost as it had been last autumn when Finn had been in Dublin and I had not yet learned to think of him in any other light than as a cantankerous employer, unfaithful to his wife and neglectful of his paternal duties. But had I not even then begun to change my idea of him? I could not say exactly when the disarming of my prejudices had begun.
Kit made himself extremely useful during the days he remained in Kilmuree. He and Timsy moved furniture to our dictation and carried down treasures from the attic storerooms. We decided to repaint the dining room. Constance said she had always hated the brown paint chosen by her grandmother, a horrible colour applied thickly over every detail of the plasterwork except for the ceiling. If Constance was right in thinking that the La Franchini brothers were the original stuccatori, then the room could be dated to the middle of the eighteenth century. We tried to scrape back to the original paint but damp had destroyed the layers beneath. As the drawing room was lined with yellow silk damask and the bits of the hall that weren’t panelled were painted a sort of buff, the dining room had to be something quite different. The Georgians were fond of colour and would have found the prevailing taste for magnolia from cellar to attic an extraordinarily joyless and uninspired style of decorating. We decided on Dutch pink, in vogue from 1750 onwards. Joyfully we took down the ugly brown rep curtains. In a trunk on the top floor we had found what we thought might be the original silk ones, frail and faded at the edges where the sun had scorched them but still a beautiful grey-blue.
Kit drove to Williamsbridge and had gallons of paint mixed to match the sample I provided with the help of Flavia’s paintbox, and we got down to it without delay. It was not as easy as we had imagined. So few things are. In the middle of each wall was a large roundel depicting a scene from Aesop’s Fables bordered by swags of flowers, fruit and birds, which had to be undercoated, then picked out in three shades of white. The work required concentration and a steady hand. The frieze was to be given the same time-consuming treatment. The manticores were barely distinguishable from the chimerae beneath their overcoats of brown paint. One day there might be enough money to remove the earlier layers and restore the plaster to its pristine sharpness. After the first day Constance, Kit and I had paint on our clothes, hands and faces and in our hair. Our nostrils were filled with the smell to the point of nausea, our tempers were in rags, and we had undercoated less than a tenth of the area. Constance went to the telephone and the next day Dicky Dooley’s brother, Eamon, who was a decorator and handyman, came to help.
Further assistance came from an unexpected quarter. Flurry proved capable of long hours of painstaking brushwork. What is more he actually enjoyed it. It was a useful incentive to get on with his homework so he could get to grips with the twirls and arabesques of intertwined leaves, flowers and fruit, the fine detail of pelts and feathers and the plump limbs of the putti. He was more accurate and disciplined than any of us.
‘I would help,’ said Flavia after tea on the first day of decorating, ‘but I’ve been given this lovely book to read for homework.’
She held it out to show me. It was A House of Pomegranates. Clearly in the opinion of Flavia’s English teacher Oscar Wilde’s Irishness outweighed any corrupting moral influences. But I was doubtful of the wisdom of this choice.
‘Lovely stories,’ I said, ‘but some of them are terribly sad. Why don’t you ask her to give you The Canterville Ghost instead? It’s so much more cheerful.’
‘Oh, but I must read it. I’m the only one in the class who’s been given a proper grown-up book. All the others are still on kid’s stuff. If I don’t read it she’ll think it’s because I can’t.’
It was not long before the sound of sobbing accom
panied the smell of oranges issuing from beneath the dust sheets covering the dining table. We all, Kit included, remembered weeping over the death of the faithful swallow in ‘The Happy Prince’ so it was not surprising that poor Flavia, whose sensitivity to the pain of others was so finely tuned, was devastated. ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ was too harrowing to finish. Flavia’s eyes became so swollen she could hardly see. The book went back to school the next day accompanied by a note from Constance which was untypically sharp.
‘What persuaded us this was a good idea?’ Kit surveyed the one wall we had finished after four days’ hard work. ‘I hate this colour. It’s old ladies’ vests, tinned salmon and elastoplast. I bet the man from the ministry will say it’s got to be changed. I’m thankful I’m leaving tomorrow. I’d rather drown myself in the lake than paint another inch!’
‘My grandfather drowned himself in the lake,’ Flurry called from the top of the ladder.
Kit looked aghast. He was generally so socially adroit that he must have felt his blunder acutely. Perversely, when I saw that he could be vulnerable, I came nearer to loving him than at any other time. ‘Oh, Constance! Did he? I’m so sorry. Naturally if I’d known I’d never have made a joke of it—’
‘Of course you wouldn’t.’ Constance waved her paintbrush at him. ‘I know that. Don’t give it another thought. I think I like this colour,’ she continued hastily to cover the awkwardness. ‘I’ve never done anything in the least what you might call creative without being tortured by hideous doubt. I try to tell myself that there are no aesthetic absolutes and the only thing that matters is whether I like it. But that’s nonsense, of course. If a tunnel-visioned, colour-blind psychopath with delirium tremens happened to pass by and said it was a bad choice I’d be immediately convinced he was right.’
‘’Tis a pity you wouldn’t listen to me, Miss Constance,’ said Eamon Dooley, who was washing his brushes and drying them on his cap. ‘Didn’t I say to paper the whole thing in woodchip and hide all them mounds and hollows? ’Twould make it modern and bright and ye could paint it a nice neutral shade. I wouldn’t be painting the outside toilet this colour, not if it was the last pot of paint in Galway.’
‘I suppose you’d like to get rid of the mouldings as well,’ said Constance in a nettled tone.
‘I would. It’s old-fashioned. And not decent, neither.’ Eamon looked disapprovingly at the fat little boys tripping along the frieze with nothing but a swirl of plaster to conceal their nakedness.
I stood back to view the pink. I also was experiencing indecision. ‘I like the way it changes with the light. It’s almost blue in the shadows and sort of pale apricot in the lightest parts.’
Eamon Dooley looked at me pityingly. ‘I’ll be off. Back at eight-thirty tomorrow. Goodnight all.’
‘That means ten o’clock,’ said Constance after Eamon had shut the door behind him, ‘but at least he comes.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Time for Eugene’s tea.’
‘There’s some chocolate cake in the tin,’ I said. ‘Or there are meringues.’
‘Better be the cake. Meringues tend to make a mess.’
These days Eugene bore himself as though he were made of valuable porcelain. He hardly bent at the joints for fear of making the elbows of his coat and the knees of his trousers baggy. A speck of soup landing on his shirt front made his eyes bulge with distress and sent Constance running for a cloth.
‘Have a look at this,’ I said as soon as Kit and I were alone. From the pocket of my jeans I took a sheet of paper on which were written several verses.
‘“The Well-Tempered Love”. What’s this?’
‘Constance’s latest poem. It’s about Eugene.’
‘I think it’s good,’ Kit said when he had reached the end of five stanzas. ‘Sensitive but strong. Original.’
‘I wanted her to let Eugene read it but she says she’s afraid to. I’m certain he’s crazy about her but it’s so difficult after a long period of friendship to broach the subject of love.’
‘It is hard to tell people how much you love them. There are so many words for hatred: repugnance, loathing, abhorrence, hostility, abomination, disgust, enmity, revulsion, execration. One could go on for ages. But love? There’s adoration, devotion – not quite the same thing. I can’t think of any others.’
‘Fondness, sympathy, affection …’ I began.
‘I’m fond of my dogs. I sympathize with junior doctors and single mothers. I have some affection for my old headmaster. None of these feelings comes anywhere near what I feel for you. I’ll be leaving in a few hours, Bobbie. Let me love you a little.’
I shut my eyes, willing myself to blank out the image of … someone else.
‘Darling!’ he murmured. ‘I really think you’re just beginning to—’
‘Do you really like your headmaster?’ We had forgotten that Flurry was up the ladder, painting a pineapple. ‘Mine spits when he talks. Right into your face. He blew me up once because I wiped my face on my sleeve. I didn’t know I shouldn’t have.’
I could not decide, when Kit and I kissed each other goodbye in the hall after dinner, whether the regret I felt was due to the departure of a competent pair of hands or to something altogether more significant.
The visit of the inspector coincided with a miraculous drying of the atmosphere. The veils of rain evaporated to reveal a sky bright with high, white cloud and we saw the mountains for the first time for weeks. On the morning Mr O’Brien was expected to arrive we whisked away the strings that conducted the rain into the buckets and, on second thoughts, the buckets, too. We hoisted out of harm’s way the turf chain that dangled into the stairwell, intending to stun him only with our charms. With my hairdryer we got rid of some of the blotches of damp on the damask on the drawing-room walls. We mopped up the puddles in the hall and the basement corridor.
‘I’m so nervous,’ said Constance. ‘Just one more trip to the lav and then I’ll try and see it through.’
I was pretty nervous myself. But when Mr O’Brien arrived he turned out to be jolly and friendly. He was a little round man in a green tweed suit with a waxed moustache, spectacles and a hearty laugh. I expect he was used to being fêted by hopeful owners. We sat him in a chair beside a roaring fire in the hall and pressed him to drink sherry and eat devilled nuts and cheese sablés, baked that morning. His forehead glistened with heat and consumption as he patted the dogs and laughed at our jokes. But all the time his eyes were roving about the hall, fastening on the vaulted ceiling, the panelling, the longcase clock by Thomas Sanderson of Dublin, the wonderful side table, the Irish delft chargers.
‘Come, ladies,’ he said when he had eaten the last sablé, ‘let us view the ancestral pile.’
While Constance rushed to the lavatory, Mr O’Brien walked around and scribbled things in his notebook. I followed meekly behind, ready to point out any treasure he might have missed. But his eye was sharp and when it fell on anything good it glinted with pleasure. Even the marvellous chased brass lock on the front door was recorded. As we conducted him round our prearranged circuit he peered, stroked, tapped, sniffed and wrote busily. All the precious things we had brought down from the attics – the four chairs covered in gold Genoese velvet; the Chippendale green-lacquered chest of drawers; the George II mahogany drawing table; the pair of giltwood mirrors; even the fruitwood tea caddy in the shape of a pear – drew him like iron to a magnet and merited at least half a page each.
‘Charming, charming!’ he said of the drawing room. ‘All of a piece and wonderfully lived in.’ He touched the wall delicately. ‘Mm. Damp, of course. Of course.’ He looked up. ‘A very fine ceiling indeed!’
We had left the dining room until last.
‘Oh, my dears!’ cried Mr O’Brien as we opened the double doors. ‘It can’t be … it can’t be.’ He walked about in circles on tiptoe, swinging his arms, gazing up at the ceiling.
I had schooled Constance carefully. ‘It’s believed in my family to be by the La Franchini—�
�� she began.
Mr O’Brien cut her off with a bellow of joy. ‘I thought so, I hoped so, I prayed it would be so! Of course if possible it must be authenticated but’ – he made upwardly thrusting movements with his fat little hands – ‘this is precious, precious, precious! Good heavens! What …?’ He stared at Sissy’s repairs in the mouldering corner. ‘How … An octopus. Yes, hm.’
‘It’s a mermaid,’ said Constance.
He turned away from her and I saw in the looking glass his face contorted with pain. Then he resumed his survey of the room. With a cry he ran to the fireplace and stared at the painting of the woman in grey. ‘Is it … Could it be – a Gainsborough?’
Constance and I exchanged excited glances.
‘My dears, the jewel in the crown! And Dutch pink! What a joyous colour! Perfect! Absolutely perfect!’
And suddenly I was quite sure that it was.
The three of us sat at one end of the dining table for lunch and ate off the beautiful Berlin service with the best silver. After three courses, with wine, coffee and cognac, Mr O’Brien wandered along the path between the miroirs d’eaux, burping gently, pencil in hand, making further extensive notes. We told him of our intention to make a flower garden and to restore the octagonal dairy. We showed him the granary and explained our plans for it. Four men waiting inside looked up from their game of cards, touched their caps to us and murmured polite greetings.
‘It’ll make a capital tea-room!’ Mr O’Brien rubbed his hands. ‘And isn’t that little building on stilts an apple store? Just the sort of thing to appeal to visitors.’ He took a step or two towards it.
I placed a detaining hand on his arm. ‘Unfortunately the key is missing. Temporarily.’
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