‘Yes, the “too posh to wash” brigade, I call them.’ Mrs de Courcey laughed cruelly as she turned to attract the attention of a passing waiter.
‘But really, you must try to put that unfortunate Davenport woman out of your head, Edwina dear. It’s most unlikely he’ll ever see her again.’
Portia couldn’t believe her eyes when she woke to hear the grandfather clock in the hall chime midday. She never slept in, ever! As she hurriedly pulled on a tracksuit and tripped downstairs to grab some coffee, she overheard voices coming from the old servants’ kitchen.
‘How in the name of Jaysus am I supposed to get lunch organized when you have two hundred bleedin’ bottles of water all over the kitchen table?’
Oh God, Portia groaned, Mrs Flanagan in one of her moods. All she needed.
‘I am trying to run a business here and a little support and encouragement wouldn’t go amiss!’ Lucasta screeched back at her. ‘I watch costume dramas on TV, you know, I know how the aristocracy is meant to be treated by staff. Housekeepers are supposed to use phrases like: “You rang, my lady?” not: “What the fuck do you want now?”’
Portia sighed deeply to herself and opened the door, wondering what fresh hell this could possibly be. There sat Lucasta, amid stuffed ashtrays, surrounded by dozens and dozens of empty wine and spirit bottles, patiently soaking them in hot water and removing the labels one by one.
‘Oh, good morning, darling,’ said her mother, glancing up, ‘you’re just in time to help me.’
‘Mummy, what on earth are you doing?’ Portia asked, almost dreading the answer.
‘Richard bleedin’ Branson here has decided to save herself the bother of getting perfectly good water from the well outside for her new business venture,’ sniffed Mrs Flanagan disapprovingly. ‘Oh no, because that would be what a normal person would do.’
‘Well, I would go down to the well but . . . it’s raining,’ said Lucasta like a sullen six-year-old. ‘And don’t use that dreadful sarcastic tone with me, Mrs Flanagan. I’ve a good mind to sit you down and make you watch every Merchant Ivory film ever made as a lesson in how employers should be spoken to. You can treat them as training videos.’
‘If you think I’m going to lick yer arse on the money you pay me, yer’ve another think coming. Jaysus, I’d earn more working in McDonald’s.’
‘Yes, but you’d need to be able to cook before you’d get a job in McDonald’s!’
‘Mummy, stop it!’ Portia pleaded, well used to intervening in the scraps she and Mrs Flanagan regularly indulged in. ‘Now please tell me what’s going on.’
‘This’, said Lucasta, theatrically waving an empty wine bottle right under Portia’s nose, ‘is your future. Eau de Davenport. Organic spring water. Practically pure. Yes, I could be unimaginative and spend a fortune mining for water underground, but why bother? Much easier just to use good old-fashioned tap water. It’s all the bloody same anyway. And you know, I’m not leading customers astray in any way, the labels on the bottles will clearly say “Eau de Davenport” and that’s precisely what they’ll get. Do you know, I feel just like that Michael O’Leary. I’ve got entrepreneurial vision just like him. Eau de Davenport could very well become the Ryanair of the bottled-water business.’
‘And where on earth did all these empty bottles come from?’ asked Portia, attempting to shift some of them off the huge pine kitchen table so Mrs Flanagan could at least have some space.
‘Well, darling, you’d be amazed how much booze we get through in this house,’ replied Lucasta, looking a little sheepish. ‘I was just saying to Andrew that I simply can’t believe the amount of bottles lying by the bins outside—’
‘Andrew?’ Portia interrupted. ‘Do you mean he’s here?’
‘Yes, darling, he’s been here all morning helping me. He’s just outside bringing in some more bottles.’
‘Lovely fella,’ said Mrs Flanagan approvingly as she mopped up some water Lucasta had sloshed all over the flagstone floor. ‘Now, Guy van der Post is definitely more of a ride than him, but I think he could be a bit high maintenance. No, there’s a lot to be said for a bloke that’s more normal, like. Jaysus knows, it’s a rarity in this house.’
Before Portia even had time to gather her thoughts, the back door opened and there he was – laden down with as many empty bottles as he could carry, drenched to the bone and still managing to look super-sexy.
‘Good morning!’ he said, grinning at her as he unloaded some of the bottles on to the kitchen table. ‘And please allow me to introduce myself,’ he went on, twinkling at her just as he’d done the previous night, ‘I’m your mother’s new business partner.’
Chapter Thirteen
‘OK, PEOPLE, THAT’S a wrap for today,’ Johnny wearily called into his walkie-talkie as the crew slowly began to pack up their equipment and head for the hills, every one of them soaked to the skin.
‘Jesus H. Christ, I’ve been on some miserable shoots in my time but this is one for the records,’ moaned Jimmy D. as they both trudged up the dirt track (which, by now, was virtually a mudslide) at the edge of Loch Moluag and on the mile or so towards the Hall.
‘Ah, cheer up,’ Johnny replied, lighting up a cigarette, ‘think of the fabulous cordon bleu meal that the mad housekeeper will have waiting for you when you get back.’
‘We’ve been working on the exteriors for two weeks now and I barely have ten minutes of usable film in the can,’ continued Jimmy D., ignoring the jibe about Mrs Flanagan’s culinary efforts. ‘What the fuck is Harvey Brocklehurst Goldberg gonna say? He could close down the whole shoot if this continues. Hell, it’s happened before.’
Johnny didn’t reply, but hauled his weary bones on through the driving rain in silence. It had indeed happened before. Only a few years ago, he’d been Assistant Director on a huge, big-budget American blockbuster about the Normandy landings (shot on Dollymount Strand in Dublin) called D is for Deliverance. Within three weeks of production, the backers had pulled out and the entire film collapsed, with the result that no one, cast or crew, ever saw a penny of their wages. The crew promptly nicknamed the film D is for Dole.
It had indeed happened before.
‘Oh Guy, you were so wonderful today,’ gushed Daisy breathlessly as she threw her arms around his neck. ‘I was watching your scene from the monitor and you were just magnetic!’
‘You really think so?’ he replied, pouring himself a large, neat glass of Jack Daniel’s. ‘Well, you know, the script is good and the director is good, but obviously, not as good as me.’ Somehow, Guy always managed to sound like he was giving an interview on The Johnny Carson Show.
‘That bit where you took Magnolia’s hand in yours and told her that you loved her so much that you wanted to smack her across the face . . . I had tears in my eyes, it was all so real!’
This, needless to say, was music to his ears. ‘Honey, just for that, I’m gonna let you watch me shower,’ he drawled as he sat on the sofa of his Winnebago struggling to wrench off his Victorian riding boots whilst simultaneously knocking back the whiskey. He also had a towel draped around his neck, which made him look, and behave, like a boxer after a prize fight.
‘Mmmm, what a perfect end to a dreary day, my darling,’ she replied, slipping out of her wet gear and sashaying to the bathroom, divesting herself of jeans and all the layers of woolly jumpers it was necessary to wear in June in Ireland if you didn’t fancy a bout of pneumonia. Then, ruffling her blonde curls and looking like a young Brigitte Bardot, she turned to him seductively from the bathroom door and said, ‘And if you’re very, very good, I just might join you.’
‘Caroline, I need you to take an urgent message to Daisy for me,’ Montana commanded as Serge patiently unclipped the enormous hairpiece which was practically stapled to her head.
‘Do you mean now, Miss Jones?’ replied Caroline as she picked up various discarded bits of rain-drenched period costume Montana had dumped carelessly on the floor.
‘Yes, now. Whatever
,’ hissed Montana, who’d had quite enough attitude for one day.
‘Well, good luck, honey,’ Serge chipped in, his mouth full of the hairclips he was deftly removing. ‘I saw her disappear into Guy’s trailer just now, and honey, that pair are sooo hot to trot! I’ve never seen a Winnebago jiggle up and down like that before; I was afraid they’d cause a mudslide.’
‘Not that Mr van der Post’s extra-curricular social activities are of any concern to us,’ snapped Caroline.
‘Oh, keep your pantyhose on, Mother Teresa,’ sighed Serge, who was by now removing Montana’s expertly applied make-up with what looked like a large trowel. ‘Don’t you know that gossip is the teat at which the crew of any film set suckles?’
‘What was the message, Miss Jones?’ asked Caroline, choosing to ignore Serge and his mixed metaphors.
‘Just give her this,’ replied Montana, curtly handing over a scrap of paper she’d been scribbling on, ‘and tell her I’ll see her later.’
As Caroline picked her way through the lashing rain and across the muddy forecourt towards Guy’s trailer, she was unable to resist. Curiosity had got the better of her and besides, Romance Pictures were paying her far too much to renege on her duties now. Montana Jones was her charge whether she liked it or not, and Caroline was being paid to keep her on the straight and narrow for the duration of the shoot. She tore open the note, making sure to shield it carefully from the pouring rain with her umbrella: Daisy. The well has run dry. Urgent. And if you’re reading this, Caroline, you’re even more of a sad bitch than I thought.
Unmoved by this dig at her, she was about to shove the note hurriedly back in its envelope, when she was suddenly startled by a voice from behind her.
‘Why do all the best women go for wankers?’ It was Paddy, drenched to the bone, hauling an armful of sound cable back to base and looking sadly in the direction of Guy’s trailer. ‘I was even going to ask Daisy to go for a Super Macs tonight.’
Caroline gave him one of her ‘how dare this pile of chopped liver address me?’ killer glares before knocking rapidly on the trailer door. ‘Is that so, Paddy. Super Macs. How on earth could any woman refuse?’
‘If you’re going in there, just let her know, discreetly like, that she coulda had me.’
‘So, without further ado, I declare the motion to apply for rezoning passed by twenty-two votes against one!’ And with a flourish, Paul O’Driscoll banged his gavel down, thus bringing the extraordinary meeting of the Kildare County Council to a close.
‘Jaysus, that couldn’t have gone better,’ Shamie Nolan proudly declared to anyone who’d listen. Then he turned to his wife, Bridie, who had outdone herself in the style stakes tonight: she was wearing a bright pink, badly copied Chanel suit, complete with a corsage, which might have been passable if worn by Sarah Jessica Parker, but made a middle-aged politician’s wife look like she was soliciting. ‘Listen, luv, I’ll just get in a few rounds for the lads, to thank them for coming at such short notice, like. Would you ever have a word with Steve Sullivan for me?’
‘With the greatest of fecking pleasure,’ she replied with an edge in her voice. ‘You just leave that gobshite to me, Shamie.’
Then, pausing only to check that the false tan hadn’t dribbled down her legs in the lashing rain outside, she marched up to poor Steve, who sat alone at the end of the hotel room, staring out the window and fiddling with a Biro.
‘Well, I hope yer’re fecking delighted with yerself,’ she began. ‘Ya do realize that all yer’ve succeeded in doing here tonight is pissing off your local TD who, I might add, has thrown an awful lot of legal business in your direction over the last few years.’
Steve sighed sadly, with the air of someone who already knew that the battle was over and lost. ‘Bridie, you don’t understand. The Davenports are old friends of mine. The Hall and the land are all they have. There have been Davenports living there for over two hundred years, it’s their heritage, it’s all of our heritage.’
‘Heritage me hole. If they’d taken better care of the Hall in the first place, this never would have happened. Sure my eleven-year-old, Shamie Junior, went on a school tour there and fell clean through a rotting floorboard. The poor child had to be rushed to the accident and emergency in Kildare and given penicillin shots for two weeks.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. I hope he was OK.’
‘Shamie Junior is a girl. Anyway, the point is, the Hall should have been condemned years ago—’
‘No, Bridie,’ Steve interrupted, unable to take much more of this conversation. ‘The point is that no member of the Davenport family is going to allow the County Council to condemn the building, serve them with a compulsory purchase order, knock it down and rezone all of their land for residential purposes. Over their dead bodies will that ever happen.’
‘Except that Lucasta and the girls aren’t the legal owners, are they, Steve? The legal owner of Davenport Hall is Lord Blackjack himself, now out in Las Vegas having a grand aul’ time of it, from what I hear. And the family’s heritage never kept him awake at night, now did it? Sure it’s well known in the town that Blackjack would sell his own liver for cash. I’d say he’d be delighted with the few extra bob. More money for him to spend on his teenage girlfriend.’
There were no two ways about it. Andrew was in love. Davenport Hall had completely and utterly captivated him. At his insistence, Portia had spent an entire evening patiently giving him a guided tour of the Hall, the Dining Rooms, various Drawing Rooms, the stinking Music Room, the Billiard Room, the freezing Ballroom, the Long Gallery and the Master Bedrooms, with Andrew tirelessly asking questions about the history of the Hall and the few artefacts lying about that miraculously hadn’t been flogged off.
‘Why is the Ballroom separate to the rest of the Hall?’ he’d asked, his keen, educated eye not missing a thing.
‘Wow, hardly anyone ever notices that,’ replied Portia, genuinely impressed. ‘It was built at a slightly later date, eighteen hundred and one, in fact. You see, the fourth Lord Davenport was big mates with the Prince Regent, who was having an affair with Lady Coyningham from Slane Castle at the time. He used to come over quite regularly to see her and would stop off here en route for a few stiff brandies and to water his horses. So Lord Davenport almost bankrupted the family adding on the Ballroom, thinking it would impress his royal guest, but no sooner was it completed than the Prince dumped his Irish mistress and never set foot in the country again. So that Lord Davenport died in penury, you know, and they say his dying words were, “Set fire to the fucking Ballroom and give thanks that at least I managed to live longer than that fat Hanoverian bastard.”’
Andrew threw his head back and howled with laughter. ‘Go on,’ he said, encouraging her, ‘more anecdotes from the family archives, please and, by the way, why is the Powder Room locked? I’d love to see inside.’
‘Because the bins aren’t collected till Thursday,’ Portia replied sheepishly, ‘and if we keep them outside, we get rats.’
She couldn’t believe it though; she’d never shown the place to anyone who seemed so genuinely interested in period houses before. In fact, usually she was mortified leading people from one manky room to another and seeing the disgusted look on their faces when they saw the dilapidated state it had fallen into. Not Andrew. He couldn’t see or hear enough and seemed genuinely fascinated by the tales Portia could tell about the antics of her colourful ancestors.
There was the family legend about the brutish Lord Davenport who’d had an affair with Emily Brontë and was rumoured to be the inspiration behind the character Heathcliff, which he particularly enjoyed.
Then there was the story of George Davenport, the second lord, who was a founder and active member of the United Irishmen. His good friend Robert Emmet had recruited him in the 1790s, probably because of his vast wealth rather than anything else; poor George Davenport was known locally as the thickest revolutionary Ireland ever produced – which was no mean feat. In fact, it was reckoned by h
istorians that his misguided republicanism actually resulted in British rule being extended in the greater Kildare area by at least twenty years.
During the 1798 rebellion, he was entrusted with one simple task, which his lordship still managed to make a complete pig’s ear of. Emmet charged him with storing several tons of gunpowder and hundreds of rifles sent over from France until the glorious day when Leinster would arise in rebellion. But poor dim old George foolishly hid the ammunition in the coach house and then forgot all about it. One fateful night, legend had it, he was groping a dairymaid at the back of the coach house and afterwards lit up a pipe, throwing a taper from his lantern carelessly aside where it landed on a keg of gunpowder. Eyewitnesses claimed that the explosion could be seen from as far away as County Carlow. His lordship was killed instantly, thus passing on the land and title to his nine-year-old son, Frederick Davenport, who unfortunately only retained the title for a year. He died in suspicious circumstances, thus passing the Hall on to his uncle, whom locals immediately nicknamed ‘Richard III, the nephew killer’.
All that’s known of poor young Frederick’s steward-ship at the Hall was that he hated his governess and, upon ascending to the title, sacked her immediately and closed down every school for miles. He may not have been the most impressive ancestor the family had produced, but he was certainly by far the most popular among the children of Ballyroan.
Andrew roared with laughter, egging Portia on to let more family skeletons out of the closet. He didn’t even complain when they discovered that one of Lucasta’s cats had given birth on a Georgian ottoman and was now using it as a litter tray. Eventually, they both collapsed, exhausted, on the huge Louis XV armchairs in the Yellow Drawing Room, which at least had the remains of a fire flickering in front of it.
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