He Loves Me Not...He Loves Me

by Claudia Carroll

  Bridie and her brother-in-law had spent the afternoon gleefully going over the Hall, deciding on what should be done and announcing its fate room by room. A few particular gems stood out like sore thumbs in Portia’s memory.

  ‘Well, for Jaysus’ sake, Mickey, that monstrosity has to go for starters,’ she’d said on seeing the antique Victorian full-size dining table in the Red Dining Room. ‘Rip the whole thing out – including them ugly stone gargoyles in the ceiling; they remind me of Shamie’s mother. Then the indoor heated swimming pool can go here, we can take up that manky aul’ floor and make sure the pool has covers that slide over it when ya press a button, like in the James Bond films.’

  ‘But, Bridie, sure none of your family can swim,’ Mickey interjected.

  ‘That’s not the feckin’ point, ya thick?, we can keep tropical fish in it, it’ll be fabulous. And as for that,’ she said, pointing threateningly at the minstrels’ gallery in the Ballroom, ‘I’d demolish it this minute if I could. What the feck use is it to anyone anyhow? Sure you’d never even get a karaoke machine up there.’

  Not even the Library, probably the only respectable room in the Hall, containing as it did a considerable number of leather-bound first editions, escaped a lash from her acidic tongue.

  ‘First thing tomorrow, Mickey, I want all them dusty aul’ books belonging to the Davenports put in cardboard boxes for that happy day when they move out. Then we can rip out all the shelves and put in a full-length Mexican theme bar. And as for them ugly looking yokes,’ she added, pointing to the original Georgian fifteen-pane sash windows, ‘the sooner we get rid of them, the sooner we can get the double glazing in.’

  Then, after another few hours of this, came the killer blow. Drawing himself up to his full height of five feet two, Mickey delivered his final pronouncement.

  ‘I’ve had a decent look at the place for ya now, Bridie, and I have to tell ya, I’ve seen some right shitholes in my time, but Davenport Hall takes the gold medal. Sure, yerself and Shamie would only be wasting yer money trying to renovate the place, it’s beyond hope. Ya may as well put a match to ten million euros as even try to salvage it. Sure the damp-proofing alone would run into millions.’

  ‘So what do you suggest, Mickey?’

  ‘Flatten the place quick as ya can when the fast-track housing gets under way, build yerselves yer dream home here on the original site from scratch and instead of Davenport Hall, call it Shamie Joe Nolan Junior Hall.’

  Bridie thought for a moment, entranced by the idea, then reluctantly shook her head. ‘Think of all the bastard conservationists, Mickey, they’d have a field day. You know what them tree-huggers are like, Shamie says they should all be bulldozed over.’

  ‘For a smart woman, yer’re not thinking straight, Bridie. You and Shamie are the rightful owners of the Hall now, and no doubt you’ll get it insured for a fair few quid. Suppose someone left a cigarette smouldering in that dusty aul’ library some night, and the whole place was to go up in flames . . . all I’m saying is, stranger things have happened.’

  ‘Do you know, I had a premonition on my wedding day,’ said Lucasta, smoking a cigarette and continuing to gaze into space. Portia, Daisy and even Mrs Flanagan all turned to look at her in surprise, momentarily shaken from the depression that hung like a fog over the four of them. It was unheard of for Lucasta ever to speak about her husband. Indeed, with that innate knack she had for airbrushing anything disagreeable out of her life, you could be forgiven for thinking that she’d been a widow for at least twenty years.

  ‘What happened, Mummy?’ asked a very red-eyed Daisy, looking and sounding as vulnerable as a four-year-old.

  ‘Well, on the morning of the wedding, your grandfather was taking me to the church on the back of his new Vespa moped which he wanted to try out. And just as we were leaving my parents’ house, he ran over my favourite cat, Fidelity, and killed him stone dead. Then as we arrived at the church, a single magpie did its business all over my veil. And, of course, your father hadn’t even arrived at the church because his car broke down so he had to hitch a lift from a hearse, which happened to be going in the same direction. So just as I was wiping bird shit from my veil, I saw what I thought was a funeral procession arriving, but it turned out to be the groom. Then I remember a black raven getting caught in your grandfather’s hair, causing him to fall and crack his head on the stone steps outside the church. As I rushed to help him up, some blood oozing from the side of his head went all over my wedding dress. I slipped in a puddle of the blood and landed on my coccyx and had to be carried up the aisle. Then the photographer got sick at the sight of all the gore and started to vomit on the altar. That’s why there aren’t any photos of the wedding, you know. It was like Sweeney Todd’s bloody cellar.’

  ‘But, Mummy, how could you have possibly gone ahead with the wedding? It seems to me that if you’d driven past a billboard on the side of the road with a sign saying, “Lucasta, do not marry Blackjack”, the signs couldn’t have been clearer,’ said Portia.

  ‘Signs? What signs are you talking about, darling?’ replied Lucasta, puzzled. ‘Do you think that if there’d been any kind of signs for me not to go ahead with my own wedding that I, of all people, wouldn’t have seen them?’

  Portia just caught Daisy’s eye and a flicker of a smirk passed between them.

  ‘No, darlings,’ Lucasta went on, ‘the premonition I had was crystal clear. We’d left the church and were driving up to the Hall for our wedding reception, when I glanced over to the field behind the Hall and there it was. A tractor.’

  ‘You saw a tractor,’ said Mrs Flanagan, struggling to see where this was going, ‘in the middle of a field. In summer. On a country estate with two thousand acres. And that gave ya a premonition . . .Why?’

  ‘Because at that moment, I knew. And I remember turning to my husband of ten minutes and saying, “Mark my words, Blackjack. The day will come when culchies will live at Davenport Hall.”’

  ‘Ah would you ever get up to bed,’ replied Mrs Flanagan. ‘Do you think I don’t have enough to worry about without listening to you? Jaysus, if you’d brains you’d be dangerous.’

  Portia knew she wouldn’t get a wink of sleep that night. Unusually for her, she’d had a couple of her mother’s gin and tonics and was now feeling the worst ill effects imaginable. As she lay on her bed, the whole room seemed to swirl around her in a sickening kaleidoscopic blur. Worry was gnawing at her insides, gripping at her till she couldn’t breathe. What in God’s name were they to do now? The Davenports had been in plenty of tight scrapes before, especially where money was concerned, but nothing, nothing, nothing compared with this.

  Blackjack had never exactly been father of the year as far as Portia was concerned, but as she lay wide awake for yet another hour, she could see his face clearly in her mind’s eye and a rage like she’d never experienced before came over her. Two million he’d sold them out for, lock, stock and barrel. Typically, he’d not even bothered to phone his wife and daughters to tell them himself, but then he always was one for allowing others to do his dirty work for him. Then, furiously kicking the bedclothes off her, she found herself wondering how long that amount of money would last even him at the blackjack table. Had he walked through the door of Davenport Hall that night, she honestly believed that she’d have killed him. And that no jury in the land would have convicted her.

  Five a.m. and daylight was beginning to creep through the cracks in the wooden shutters of her bedroom windows. From outside, she could already hear sounds of the film crew cranking up for the day, particularly Serge, whose voice would carry over the Grand Canyon.

  ‘You know I cannot function in the morning without something hot and wet inside me, and I’m referring to caffeine, so no knocking on the make-up bus for at least ten minutes!’

  Portia turned over. Years of being independent, self-reliant and alone had turned her into the least needy woman imaginable, but Christ, she thought, just once, just this one time, I so wish
Andrew was in bed beside me. Just so she could feel his strong arms around her and know that there was at least something that couldn’t be taken from her. She hadn’t heard a single word from him since the party, nothing. Since they’d met, they’d rarely been separated. Not since the first night they’d kissed and then the night when they’d kissed again, but this time she had shyly led him by the hand to her bedroom and he’d gently but firmly shut the door behind them.

  Something was up. She wasn’t quite sure what, but something was definitely up.

  Chapter Nineteen

  STEVE HAD BEEN nothing short of saintly in the miserable days that followed. He had worked like a Trojan on behalf of the Davenports to see if there were any possible loophole in the sale of the Hall, anything at all that would prevent the family from having to move out.

  ‘This is a listed building, Steve, there’s a preservation order on it,’ Portia had reasoned as she paced up and down the estate office for about the thousandth time. ‘It may be crumbling around our ears but it is part of the county’s heritage, there have been Davenports here for over two hundred years. Doesn’t that count for something? Isn’t there some Government department we could appeal to for help?’

  He looked up at her from behind the desk he was sitting at and, just for a moment, their eyes locked. Without needing to say anything, they both knew that, in the history of useless, rubbish plans, that particular one took the biscuit. Any hope the Davenports would have had of gaining Government assistance had gone out of the window years ago, the day Blackjack wheedled a sizeable grant from the Heritage Department on the assumption that it would go towards the restoration of at least part of the Hall. A few months later, when an inspector from the department called to see what use the cheque had been put to, they discovered that Blackjack had used it to buy a racehorse, thoughtfully naming it ‘Government Grant’.

  Portia shrugged her shoulders and smiled wryly across the desk at him. ‘Worth a try,’ she said.

  The new owners of Davenport Hall had graciously condescended to allow filming to continue at the Hall until they took up residence.

  ‘Look here, Bridie,’ Shamie had pleaded with her, flushed with the success of his trip to Las Vegas, ‘how in the name of God would it look if I was to turf out that crew before they even finished the bloody film? Could ya imagine if that got into the papers? Jaysus, I can see the headlines now: “TD NOLAN IS A FAT PHILISTINE”, and then none of them leftie actor types would ever vote for me! And I’d never get an Arts and Heritage portfolio then, not a snowball’s chance in hell. No, let them finish whatever aul’ shite it is they’re filming and then the whole lot of them can go.’

  Jimmy D. had breathed a colossal sigh of relief and treated himself to one of his biggest Havana cigars to celebrate this stay of execution. Had Shamie Nolan called a halt to filming, the logistics of the crew having to relocate would have been nightmarish. They had completed the exterior shooting, but now had to move inside to film the interiors, which included a ballroom scene with enough extras in it to make Cecil B. De Mille run screaming in terror. It was scheduled to be shot at the end of the week, which gave Johnny and the rest of the crew some much needed time to light the gloomy interior of the Hall and generally set up. It also gave the already overworked design department a breathing space to transform the crumbling, decaying Ballroom into something that would look semi-decent on screen, as opposed to a reception room with bin liners on the ceiling, which you would swear had just been bombed.

  But as Jimmy D. puffed away, reclining on his favourite armchair in the Library, he felt more contented than he had done in weeks. Ella Hepburn was working out terrifically, better than anyone could have imagined. Christ, he thought, it was so good finally to work with a professional after weeks of acting as a referee during Montana and Guy’s squabbling. She was a class act, gave no trouble, turned up on time, knew her lines and just got on with the job in hand. Not for nothing had she been at the top of her profession for over fifty years, he reflected. And she certainly had Guy in the palm of her hand, that was for sure. He’d been as meek as a little lamb since she’d arrived. Of course the rumour mill on the set had gone into overdrive with talk of the passionate affair they’d embarked on, but it sure as hell didn’t bother Jimmy D. Film sets were always notorious hotbeds of sex and intrigue, and once all of his actors turned up for work at five a.m. each morning, what did he care if Ella Hepburn was sleeping with a boy young enough to be her grandson? The press permanently camped out at the front gate were running wild with the story and, as every producer and director in Hollywood knew, all publicity was good publicity.

  Pity about Daisy Davenport though, he thought. She was such a pretty thing and Guy had behaved like a shit towards her, dumping her the minute Ella came along. If he thought this was some kind of career move on his part, he was sadly mistaken. Ella Hepburn had a reputation as a man-eater for whom the phrase ‘doesn’t count on location, darling’ might have been invented. Married, single, gay or straight, she’d shag anything with a pulse and move on as soon as the film was in the can. And now, on top of being dumped so publicly, poor Daisy, together with her older sister (who’d been nothing but lovely, kind and welcoming to the crew since day one) and their insane mother all had to move out of the home that had been in their family for centuries. He sighed and took another great puff of his cigar, surveying the room around him as though he owned the place.

  What was happening to those women was such God-awful luck, they didn’t deserve it. Surely there was something he could do to help?

  Daisy had never been particularly attentive or academic during her miserable schooldays, but one phrase which her English teacher had drummed into her time and again now kept coming back to haunt her: ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions.’

  It just seemed so apt now, with her world coming to an end, she thought, as she wrapped a towel around her naked body and limped on her swollen, bruised ankle from the bathroom back to her bedroom.

  She’d cried so much in the last few days she could barely see straight and her head was thumping so badly she almost thought she was going to pass out. And as if things weren’t bad enough, the bloody film crew had relocated inside the Hall and were crawling all over the house so the only place she could get any kind of privacy was in her bedroom. At least there’s no chance of running into Guy and his old lady girlfriend here, she thought as she opened the door and slipped inside.

  And nearly fell over with shock. The curtains had been pulled and just about every spare surface had been completely covered with candles, making the whole room twinkle like the fairy lights on a Christmas tree. And lying on the bed wearing nothing but a pair of Arsenal boxer shorts was Paddy, surrounded by dozens of chrysanthemums artlessly tossed all over the counter-pane. He was smoking a cigarette and nearly jumped out of his skin when she walked in.

  ‘Ah Jaysus, ya gave me an awful fright,’ he said, stubbing out the fag into one of the burning candles.

  ‘I gave you a fright?’ she replied incredulously. ‘Paddy, what are you doing?’

  ‘I heard about your aul’ fella selling the house and all, and I thought you’d like a bit of a pick-me-up,’ he said, grinning at her and suggestively patting the bed beside him. Daisy looked at his long, skinny, spotty white body with his farmer’s red-neck tan, thought for a moment, and then allowed her towel to slip to the floor as she snuggled in beside him. What the hell, she thought, any port in a storm.

  ‘Just hold me, Paddy,’ she whispered, with fresh tears starting to flow. ‘Hold me tight.’

  ‘Come here to me, luv,’ he replied, locking his thin arms around her. ‘It’s not your fault yer aul’ man’s a wanker. And ya can come and live with me in my flat in Drimnagh anytime. Course, me ma would be there as well, but you’d get on great with her.’

  Daisy gulped back more tears, thinking about how much she’d been coping with; how funny that in the midst of all her troubles, it was someone’s kindness t
hat made her want to cry even more.

  ‘Now don’t mash them chrysanthemums into the sheets whatever you do,’ Paddy said, starting to sneeze. ‘I had to go to three different garages to get them and now I think I’m allergic.’

  Unlike her younger daughter, Lucasta wasn’t going down without a fight. ‘If my fucking bastard of an ex-husband thinks I’m going to take this lying down, he’s got another think coming,’ she ranted at Mrs Flanagan as they both sat at the kitchen table smoking cigarette after cigarette. Beside them lay countless empty wine bottles all soaking in basins of water to remove the labels before they could be miraculously transformed into Eau de Davenport. ‘I came here as a child bride in the nineteen sixties, you know, surely I must have earned squatters’ rights or something by now?’

  ‘Yeah,’ replied Mrs Flanagan, only half listening. ‘I suppose ya could tell the press lads outside ya were going on a hunger strike or something by way of protest. Wouldn’t do ya any harm to lose a few pounds either.’

  Lucasta turned to her as though she’d just had a revelation. ‘Mrs Flanagan!’ she said in astonishment. ‘You’re an absolute genius and God knows that’s something I don’t get to say very often.’

  ‘Don’t fecking tell me, yer’re going to go global with yer Eau de Davenport.’

  ‘The press camped at the front gates! That’s the answer! I’ll march straight out there and appeal to them directly. I’ll be like Joan of Arc crusading before the troops!’

  ‘Joan Rivers more like. Before the plastic surgery.’

  ‘Oh, piss off. I come from a long line of rebels, you know. My grandmother was a suffragette and her sister fought for Irish freedom in the GPO in nineteen sixteen.’