Debutantes

by Charlotte Bingham

  Their mother, however, was outside such jurisdictions, and taking part of her style from the famous Lily Langtry, she delighted to parade herself domestically and socially unrestrained by ‘the noxious basquine’, as she called it. Moreover she averred it was quite and utterly in keeping with her now famous subscription to the Celtic revival, a membership which it appeared also gave her the right to dress herself in extravagant turbans and figure-hugging hand-dyed dresses which she had herself embroidered in silver or gold.

  Today, however, with Christmas in mind Lady Oughterard was content to shop for velvet for herself and satin for her two eldest daughters, once they had consulted the most recent pattern books to have arrived from England. The girls then spent the last quarter of an hour in the haberdasher’s choosing ornamentations for the hats they had in mind to wear on Christmas Day.

  Later as they were enjoying the unexpected warmth of the winter weather and strolling around the square they met one of their neighbours, a Mr Kilgannon, who was dismounting from his horse outside Swann’s Hotel in the company of another horseman whom Emily at once recognized as her stranger.

  ‘Lady Oughterard indeed!’ young Mr Kilgannon puffed as he doffed his hat and bent low over her layship’s gloved hand. ‘A pleasure as always, as indeed it is to see you two young ladies, Lady Emily and Lady Elisabeth.’

  Poor Elisabeth managed a smile which looked almost genuine as the stout, red-faced young man took her hand in greeting, but the very most Emily could manage was a polite nod. She disliked the wretched John Kilgannon more than she could say, from the top of his prematurely balding head to the tip of his outsize feet, not because of anything he had ever done or said to her, but because he was held up regularly by Miss Hannington as the sort of man to whom Emily could well end up married if she continued to refuse to look to her ways. Miss Hannington was over-fond of threatening this to Emily, since to her mind no gentleman of any real standing would wish as a wife someone who seemed not only incapable of either speaking or behaving as a proper young lady should, but was also seemingly so indifferent to being taught how to be the same. Emily should mend her ways, she was advised almost daily by her governess, lest she end up as so many daughters of impoverished Anglo-Irish aristocrats ended up, seeing out her days in some windy and lonely vicarage as the wife of a rector.

  The tall and oddly handsome stranger who had been left holding both the Reverend Kilgannon’s and his own horse was a different proposition altogether. Emily could well imagine being married to the dashing Mr O’Connor, and them spending their lives together in a romantic, remote and windswept castle overlooking the mighty Atlantic ocean, from which they would ride out daily on a pair of matched horses, across the wild moors of Sligo or along the high cliffs of Clare. When they returned she would play Gaelic songs to him on the piano while he paced the room thinking up ideas for his books, books she would later take down for him in her own hand as he dictated them to her, wherever they might be, be it walking in the hills with their dogs or lying in their candelit bed at night.

  ‘As I was saying, Lady Emily, I do not think you have yet made the acquaintance of my good friend Mr Rory O’Connor.’

  Emily came from her reverie at what she hazarded must have to be the second enquiry tendered by the high-coloured Mr Kilgannon and found herself staring right into the eyes of the man of her so-recent dreams.

  ‘No, at least we have not yet been introduced formally, Mr Kilgannon,’ Emily replied. ‘I did, however, I believe, catch a short sight of Mr O’Connor out hunting.’

  ‘Oh yes indeed!’ Kilgannon said, and he laughed aloud, sticking his tongue out of his mouth as he did so, a habit Emily found particularly repellent and which made her even more determined to hang herself from the great oak at Glendarven if he as much as approached her with a ring in his pocket. ‘Yes indeed – the famous Black Red Letter Day!’

  He laughed again, once more biting his tongue between his front teeth as if to show how naughty he had just been.

  ‘I haven’t a noche as to what may be amusing you so much, Mr Kilgannon,’ Emily replied, tightening the bow on the ribbons under her chin. ‘So perhaps you would be so kind as to introduce my sister and myself to your friend.’

  Having ordered a little half-starved gossoon who was begging nearby to tie up their horses, Kilgannon effected the introductions, providing as he did so a highly condensed version of his friend’s recent history to everyone’s open embarassment.

  ‘Rock House, do you say, Mr O’Connor?’ Lady Oughterard demanded, staring at him from under her swathe of turbaned silk. ‘Do you know that is where Imogen Lissadell is said to have written her famous and wonderful fairy play The Cloak of Green?’

  ‘Lady Oughterard is not just a passionate devotee of the Celtic revival, Rory,’ Kilgannon explained. ‘Oh no, dear me no – she is also a great authority on the poems of Thomas Davis—’

  ‘That is simply not so, Mr Kilgannon,’ Lady Oughterard corrected him. ‘For his poetry is very poor. What I cared for in Thomas Davis was his patriotic inspiration. What I care for in poetry is this young man William Yeats.’

  ‘“Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?”’ Rory O’Connor asked, speaking for the first time.

  ‘For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,

  Mournful that no new wonder may betide,

  Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,

  And Usna’s children died.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Lady Oughterard nodded, looking at the tall handsome dark-haired stranger with sudden appreciation. ‘Congratulations, Mr O’Connor, we share the same tastes. “The Rose of the World”.’

  ‘Mr O’Connor is also a writer, Lady Oughterard,’ Kilgannon told her. ‘Mr O’Connor writes books.’

  ‘Not so at all, Lady Oughterard. So far all I have published are some pieces in Irish Monthly and Irish Fireside so I would not yet call myself a writer of books. Besides, I would rather write stage plays. Have either of you two young ladies ever been to the theatre?’

  ‘We have so,’ Emily answered for the both of them, her colloquialism causing Mr Kilgannon to tilt his head heavenwards and Rory O’Connor to conceal his smile behind one hand. ‘Our Uncle Hubert took us to the theatre in Cork last spring where we saw a Shakespeare play which I have to say I personally found severely yawny.’

  ‘How unfortunate, Lady Emily,’ Rory O’Connor replied after a slight pause. ‘But I think I know the production of which you speak. I believe it was Measure for Measure and if it was I have to agree with you, that it was severely – er, what was it – ah yes, yawny.’

  Catching the light in his eyes, Emily knew then they would be friends for life, even though he had sillied her in the field, and even though she had been responsible for his public disgrace.

  ‘What precisely is it that you have in mind to write for the theatre, Mr O’Connor?’ Lady Oughterard enquired. ‘I am really most intrigued.’

  ‘A mystic sort of play, Lady Oughterard, a drama of magic,’ O’Connor replied. ‘I should write about things such as the Famine I’m sure, but this is what comes into my head. My head is peopled with soulths and sheogues.’

  ‘So it would be, you being a Tipperary man,’ Kilgannon chuckled. ‘To be sure there are more fairies per square foot in Tipperary than in the whole of Connemara.’

  Behind the tubby red-faced young man the horses stamped their hooves and rattled their harness in sudden impatience, while the gossoon still patiently holding them shivered in a breeze which had now turned to a winter wind.

  ‘This lad is dying from the cold, John,’ O’Connor said, dipping a hand into his coat pocket to fetch out a coin. ‘Here, child – go and buy yourself something to eat. And take something home to your mother too!’

  O’Connor took the reins back from the boy who ran off at once, his dirty bare feet pattering on cobbles still wet from the morning mists. Holding both sets of reins in one hand, he then doffed his hat and made ready to leave, excusing himself by reason of
the fact that he had a luncheon appointment with an elderly relative who was quite unable to tolerate his guests being as much as one minute late. Finally, as he gave Kilgannon the set of reins belonging to his horse, he hoped he would have the pleasure of meeting them all again.

  ‘Indeed you shall, Mr O’Connor,’ Lady Oughterard assured him, much to Emily’s private delight. ‘We shall have you come dine with us at the earliest opportunity. Why not on Friday night? Mr Kilgannon is to be among our guests that night, so you could ride over together.’

  John Kilgannon agreed that it was a splendid notion but Emily could see a cloud darkening her hero’s handsome face and she guessed at its reason. Mr O’Connor was afraid the ban imposed on him by her father might extend into the domestic field as well.

  Fortunately for them both a carriage being driven by at that very moment skidded on the slippery cobbles and in the commotion that followed as the two men grabbed hold of their frightened horses’ heads and Lady Oughterard and Elisabeth hurried to shelter in the doorway behind them, Emily managed to speak to her hero without being noticed.

  ‘You have nothing to worry about, Mr O’Connor, you know that I am sure,’ she assured him, helping him steady his horse. ‘My father will not even recognize you away from your horse.’

  ‘Your father sat looking at me for fully five minutes, Lady Emily,’ O’Connor replied, taking the reins from her hand. ‘So I would imagine he could recognize me in the dark.’

  ‘Did you not know that our pappa is all but blind, Mr O’Connor?’ Emily replied. ‘You will be more than safe from being discovered as the infamous hound pounder if you wish to join us for dinner on Friday.’

  Emily turned away and walked over to join her mother and sister. She didn’t have to see the look on the face of the man behind her because she knew it would be the selfsame look that she had seen on countless occasions, every time someone had learned the fact that their pappa now hunted the famous and fearsome Blazer country scarcely able to see more than the outline of the next fence ahead of him, safe only in the knowledge that he knew the country better even than the faces of his own children.

  MAGIC

  By the middle of January Rory O’Connor was regularly to be seen at the various parties, soirées, luncheons and dinners it was Lady Oughterard’s habit to throw with great frequency. And exactly as Emily had led him to expect, Lord Oughterard had failed to recognize him as the reckless young man he had so peremptorily sent home that infamous day, although the more O’Connor observed his host the less he found it easy to believe that the small but strong-bodied man with his shock of snow-white hair and equally niveous handlebar moustache had anything other than perfect vision, so surely did Lord Oughterard do everything. Never once did O’Connor see a moment of clumsiness or an uncertain movement, such as a drink spilled or a staircase hesitantly negotiated. Lord Oughterard moved through his house and among his guests steadily and confidently, never once to be seen asking for the slightest assistance. When O’Connor taxed Emily as to how her father managed to live this way, as though he had perfect vision, she explained that when her father had been told he would lose his sight he had ordered the servants to shutter the entire house up for a week and not to allow one light to be lit anywhere. Then, having learned where everything he needed was in the dark, he finally ordered that from that day on nothing he might require or use must ever be moved from where it was or set in any way differently.

  That Rory O’Connor said he could understand, albeit with some difficulty since he admitted that he doubted he himself would have either such diligence or so much patience. However, this could not explain Lord Oughterard’s extraordinary ability in the hunting field, where it was rumoured he had never been seen to stop at anything. Emily told him that to the best of her knowledge her father was able not only to ride the formidable Galway country faultlessly but lead the way over it because he had trained himself to do so in a similar fashion.

  ‘You’re surely not asking me to believe that he rode it by night?’ Rory O’Connor had asked. ‘That your father learned the lie of the land like he learned the arrangement of his house?’

  ‘No, Mr O’Connor, I am not,’ Emily had replied. ‘For my father’s purposes he considered there was too much light at night, which when you come to think of it there is, too. Once, that is, that your eyes have become accustomed to it. No, what he did was have himself blindfolded and taken out each and every day by the four of us, my two eldest sisters Elisabeth and Constance and myself that is, and Patch Ryan the senior huntsman. We’ve all of us ridden this country before we could walk practically, do you see, and when you think about it—’

  ‘I assure you I would not like even to begin to think about it, Lady Emily!’ Rory O’Connor had interrupted. ‘Personally speaking, the thought taken in cold blood of jumping some of your famous Blazer walls is enough to make most men stay home, let alone taking them blind. Your father is a most remarkable man.’

  ‘He is that,’ Emily agreed. ‘When he was about your age and for a bet, he once rode a ten mile race over the hardest part of the country in a rope bridle and with a cabbage stalk instead of a whip. I’m glad I’m his daughter and not his son and that’s for sure, for he’ll be a hard one to follow.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re his daughter and not his son, too,’ Rory O’Connor had agreed. ‘But for entirely different reasons.’

  A remark at which, to her own fury and surprise, Emily found herself colouring and having to turn away.

  Whenever Lady Oughterard entertained, which to Rory O’Connor she seemed to do every second day of the week from Monday to Thursday and every single day thereafter, she did so on an epic scale, not in the culinary sense but numerically. It seemed there were never less than twenty sat down to dinner and well over twice that number at her more informal soirées. Whenever O’Connor called the house was always full of people, and very different people at that, an odd mix of Lady Oughterard’s Celtic revivalists and mystical literati and her husband’s sporting and political associates. Yet in the tradition of the part of the country where they lived the events were always truly social, which is to say they were times of genuinely comradely intercourse, even on those occasions when friendly discussion turned into more heated debate.

  As a guest O’Connor enjoyed himself from the word go because the company was invariably of the best as were the on-going arguments. One of the most regular points of contention concerned the proper definition of the Irish as a race, a duel fought earnestly between himself and his hostess whenever they found themselves face to face.

  ‘Truth to tell, Lady Oughterard, the Irish came long before the Celt,’ O’Connor would maintain, ‘so strictly speaking the movement to which you are so devoted should be called the Irish revival, if you like, but certainly not the Celtic.’

  ‘What nonsense you do talk!’ Lady Oughterard would exclaim. ‘The Irishman is a Celt and always has been!’

  ‘I am sincerely sorry, but that just is not so. The first humans came here about seven thousand years ago, two thousand years after the ice had melted, in all probability across the land bridges from Europe by way of Scotland, or even in the sort of boat we still use on the lakes and off the coasts hereabouts, the coracle.’

  ‘The coracle, Mr O’Connor?’ Lady Oughterard would laugh, waving one of the long silk handkerchieves she always carried as a flag of protest. ‘Did you ever hear of such a notion, anyone!’

  ‘You must accept that they did, Lady Oughterard, for there’s no other explanation. And they came, so we are told, from as far away as Africa and the Mediterranean.’

  ‘In coracles, you would have us believe?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes! And they were the first colonists here! For three thousand years they lived here prosperously and effectively, but, and here you must brace yourself, Lady Oughterard, they were not Celts, they were Picts.’

  ‘Nonsense, Mr O’Connor! Sheer nonsense!’

  ‘The Picts are the ancient Irish race, I assure you – not
the Celts! The Picts are the rightful inhabitants of Ireland! The Celts came after them – and a very long time after them, too!’

  Since a conclusion to the argument was never reached it was revived regularly, sometimes with everyone who was there joining in, but more generally just between the two main protagonists. At first Emily used to enjoy listening to their debates, but once she realized neither side was going to give an inch she would quickly lose interest and fall back to imagining what married life with the passionate Mr O’Connor might really be like. For the more she saw of him and the more she listened to him the more she became intrigued by him and the more she liked to imagine herself as his wife. He was so knowledgeable as well as so accomplished, as much at home it would seem in, as it were, the salon of life as he was in its saddle. It was unsurprising therefore that after every one of Rory O’Connor’s visits to Glendarven Emily found she had added a little something else to her imaginary romantic castle.

  But best of all, better than his teasing of Mamma, she found herself mesmerized by his tales of the supernatural.

  ‘You will know I am sure, Lady Oughterard, of Mr Yeats’s interest in theosophy,’ he began in the middle of one dinner in the New Year, ‘and that he was once initiated into a secret society called the Order of the Golden Dawn? You know all this of course.’

  ‘I have heard tell,’ his hostess agreed, allowing another of her many cats up onto her knee, but keeping it out of sight of her husband under the old mahogany table top. ‘My cousin Maude and I formed a similar sort of society for ourselves up here a couple of winters ago. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I was sure you must have an interest in the mystical,’ O’Connor replied. ‘And in the magic also.’

  Emily, who was sitting one place up from her hero on the opposite side of the table, now leaned forward in her chair to hear him the better.