by Ann Bridge
‘This is really the gents,’ Lady Helen said—‘basin if you want to wash, and that door. I’m afraid we’re rather muddled up, here.’
‘I think you’re quite amazingly well organised,’ the Colonel said. ‘I never saw anything like that before.’ He indicated the sump and the tap.
‘Oh, one must have a boot-wash in Mayo! My husband designed it—do tell him you like it. Not the gents?—very well, come in.’ She led him and Julia up the coat-draped passage and through a door into a small room with a telephone, and racks of fishing-rods on the walls; she opened a door which led into a library, where shelves full of books lined the walls from floor to ceiling.
‘How beautiful!’ the Colonel exclaimed, almost involuntarily; the shelves, and the cupboards below them, were all of some exotic wood of a lovely shade of orange.
‘You like it? Do tell Michael—he designed it. Julia, give the Colonel a drink while I wash my hands.’ Calmly, she went away.
‘These must be some of the most intelligent people in the world’ Jamieson said, while Julia poured him a Gin and Orange. ‘Everything practical, and everything beautiful.’ He took his glass over to the western window, which gave on a long narrow inlet leading out towards an open horizon. ‘Is that the Atlantic out there?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I’m glad you like this place; they have been rather clever about it, I agree.’
A door at the other side of the library opened as she spoke—the Colonel had already been struck by the fact that all the rooms at Rostrunk seemed to have two, if not three doors—and a short thickset man with stiff grizzled hair came in.
‘Hullo, Julia—is this your friend? How d’y do?’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Has Julia given you a drink? Ah, good.’ He poured one out for himself, and turned to his guest. ‘Now you’re Colonel Jamieson—that right?’ General O’Hara made these enquiries in a business-like fashion which fitted in with all those stand-pipes, and the well-equipped workshop, and the boot-wash, Jamieson felt. ‘The Borderers?’ his host pursued. ‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Don’t you go calling me “Sir”! I bet you’re very close to my age. How old are you?’
‘Forty-six, General.’
‘Ah—well you look more,’ O’Hara said bluntly. ‘I’ve have given you fifty-five.’
‘Well as he’s so relatively young, may he go on calling you “Sir”, Michael?’ Julia put in.
‘Now none of your lip, young woman! This girl has no respect for anyone or anything,’ the General said to Jamieson—‘she’s a holy terror. I hope you realise that, for your own sake.’
‘Don’t be a toad, Michael,’ Julia said calmly—she saw that Jamieson was slightly embarrassed. ‘You know you’re really devoted to me.’ She planted a kiss on his grizzled head.
‘There she goes!’ the General said. ‘Get away with anything, Julia will. Where were you in this last war?’
There followed some conversation about regiments and campaigns; Julia presently broke into it with a question.
‘Michael, who are all these glasses for? Are people coming to lunch?’ She indicated the huge silver tray, not very well polished, standing on a small heavy oak table.
‘Oh God, yes!—Helen will have people in. The MacMahons are coming. He writes novels, and he’ll put you in a book as soon as look at you,’ O’Hara said to Jamieson. ‘He’s put us in one already. They came and took a little house down the bay, and we were all nice to them, of course—Dublin people, they didn’t know how to go on here in the least. And before you could turn round, out comes a novel in London, with everyone here and in Oldport drawn to the life!’
‘There was a murder, and Josie, whom you met this morning, was the murderee,’ Julia said, with her soft giggle.
‘Oh, so you went and had one with Josie?’ the General said. ‘Then no more gin for you, Julia.’
‘We brought out a dozen of your stout, Michael,’ Julia said. ‘Surely that merits another little gin?’
‘We’ll see. Now you’re one of these bird-men, and want to study the fulmars on Clare Island, I gather,’ O’Hara said to Jamieson.
Jamieson had done his home-work to some purpose; he had bought and read the book on fulmars, and responded very adequately.
‘Ah. Well our boat’s out of action for the moment, some trouble with the engine; but the boys say they’ll have her all right in a day or so. Delighted to run you over then. Shall you want to stay on the island?’
‘I might need to,’ Jamieson said cautiously.
At this moment the pretty parlourmaid opened the door and ushered in a tall, exuberantly handsome man and a small very pretty woman.
‘Hullo, Blanaid—nice to see you. Morning, Tony,’ the General greeted them. ‘This is Colonel Jamieson.’ The Colonel shook hands, recognising that the couple must be the novelist and his wife—how odd that a woman should be called Blarney, he thought, not realising how Mrs. MacMahon’s name was spelt. Pouring out drinks the General, to his relief, explained him further—‘He’s one of these bird-men; he’s come to study the fulmars on Clare Island.’
Just then Lady Helen swam into the room—there is no other word for the calm smoothness of her entrance—shook hands with the MacMahons, and poured herself a drink. She had changed her dress and arranged her dark hair and her face; her beauty was more striking than ever.
‘Now Helen, you don’t want all that gin,’ the General said. ‘It’s time for lunch.’
‘Oh my darling, I do want it desperately,’ his wife replied. ‘Such a morning of toil!—setting all those infernal lettuces.’
‘Why don’t you let Mick set them? What do we pay him for?’
‘I can’t think! Anyhow he’s no good at setting lettuces,’ Lady Helen said. She turned to Jamieson. ‘What is so odd about the Irish is that they can’t sing, and they can’t garden,’ she observed.
‘Now Helen—’ the General began to protest, when Attracta appeared and said that luncheon was ready.
The door of the library by which the party now left it led through a narrow little passage, like a tunnel, with a low vaulted ceiling, into an oval hall running up the whole height of the house to an oval dome capped with a lantern; a slender spindly staircase, with a graceful gilt balustrade, wound round the wall to the floor above.
‘Goodness, how beautiful!’ Jamieson could not restrain the exclamation.
‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ the General said, pleased. ‘The lantern is all teak and copper—nothing else will stand up to this climate.’
‘Michael, the mussels are getting cold!’ his wife called to him—‘do come in and let us have something to eat.’
The two men followed her down a second tunnelled and vaulted passage, a replica of the one leading from the library, into the dining-room, and sat down at a long mahogany table, where Attracta and another maid handed round dishes of mussels in a border of buttered rice, swimming in a velvety sauce flavoured with their own liquor.
‘You’re not afraid of mussels?’ his hostess asked the Colonel.
‘Goodness no—only they’re such a nuisance marinières, with the shells piling up on the side of one’s plate. This is much more convenient—and quite delicious’ Jamieson replied. ‘What an inspiration to have rice with them, too. Where do you get them?’
‘Oh, the maids go down and pick them off the rocks out there,’ Lady Helen said, with a gesture towards the western window. ‘They love doing it—they go in their feet.’
The General overheard this statement.
‘Helen, how can he know what you mean? “In their feet” means barefoot,’ he informed the Colonel.
‘Oh, thank you.’ Jamieson had in fact found the phrase puzzling. ‘Are you Irish?’ he asked the beautiful dark woman beside him.
‘Not a drop!’ Lady Helen replied briskly.
While chickens in a béchamel sauce succeeded the mussels, Jamieson mentioned to his hostess his strong sense of being in a foreign country.
‘Oh yes, it is utterly foreign. You see even the
people who haven’t a word of Irish speak an English directly translated from the Irish, and it’s very puzzling. Our herd’s cottage is directly east of this house; when I first came here, and his little children came straying along the path pulling the heads off the flowers, I used to tell them to go back to Mama. But that was no good at all—“back” means West, and “over” means East, so the babies were merely confused; they know the points of the compass in their cradles!’
‘Fantastic!’ the Colonel said.
‘Yes, it is. Then there’s “above” and “below”; the points of the compass again. “Above” is the South, because the sun is highest there; “below” is North. My husband rents fishings from Mr. Williams on Lough Darna and the Derrycooldrim Lough; Derrycooldrim lies nearly a hundred feet above Lough Darna, but it is always called “The Lough below”, because it lies due north of Darna.’
The Colonel considered this.
‘Should you be affronted if I said that there may be some excuse for the English view that the Irish are slightly mad?’ he asked at length.
‘Oh no—I don’t go in for being affronted, and I’m not Irish, as I told you. Where I do think the English have been stupid is in failing to realise, over six centuries or thereabouts, what you seem to have spotted in twenty-four hours—that this is a foreign country, and no efforts of theirs could ever make it anything else.’
‘I expect you have something there.’
‘Do have some more chicken’—his hostess said—‘there’s nothing else except strawberries.’
‘The M.40s?’ the Colonel asked, gratefully giving himself a second helping of chicken. ‘By the way, may I mention what delicious food you have? Do you do it, or a girl out of the bog?’
Helen looked at him in surprise.
‘You seem to be unusually quick at picking things up,’ she said. ‘Most people ask where I got my chef; but actually Nonie is a girl out of the bog. I’ve coached her, of course, and the only cookery-book I allow in the kitchen is André Simon’s Gastronomic Dictionary. But how did you guess?’
The Colonel explained about his conversation with Mr. Bowden-Brown the previous evening.
‘I see. Yes, the local girls have got this curious gift for cooking—so odd, when you think that at home they live mainly on potatoes and soda-bread, and do all their cooking over an open turf fire.’
‘What is soda-bread?’
‘What you’re eating—whole-meal flour with soda and skim-milk.’
‘It’s delicious,’ Jamieson said.
‘Of course one has to harry them to a certain extent about cleanth,’ Lady Helen went on tolerantly; ‘that definitely isn’t one of their things, except in the dairy—because as they say themselves, “You can’t fool butter”.’
‘I’m not sure that I understand. You make your own butter, I gather?’
‘Yes, of course. And unless everything to do with it is perfectly clean the butter turns rancid. Even the board on which you beat and shape it has to be scrubbed and scalded.’
‘It’s a charming expression,’ the Colonel said. ‘“You can’t fool butter”!’ he repeated, with relish.
‘Mind you, it isn’t so easy for them,’ his hostess said. ‘Not one of those houses you saw coming out from Oldport has piped water; every drop has to be carried from “the spring-well”, which may be as much as a hundred yards away—and then boiled in a kettle over the fire for scalding or washing.’
‘Not really?’
‘But certainly. That’s why it seems so astonishing to me that these girls come to a house like this, and fit into it so easily.’
Fresh plates were laid, and a huge blue-and-white Nanking dish of strawberries was handed round. Colonel Jamieson helped himself.
‘Well if these are the Old Mayo strain, it was well worth preserving,’ he said, after tasting the fruit. ‘The flavour is superb. Who produces the M.40?’
‘Oh, some research place near Cambridge.’
The Colonel would have liked a second helping of strawberries too, but his host called impatiently down the table to his wife—‘Helen, are we never to have coffee?’—and the party moved back through the tunnelled passage, the hall, and into the drawing-room; as he entered Jamieson paused again, in the same delighted astonishment that he had experienced when he walked through the door into the garden. This seemed to be a feature of Rostrunk, he thought—doors opening onto quite unexpected beauty. The room was roughly diamond-shaped: a large bow-window giving onto the lawn and the sea was exactly reproduced by two slanting walls at the inner end—a design rendered imperative, he realised, by the slant of the tunnelled passages from the library and the dining-room; between these two features were longer stretches of wall, one of which held the fireplace, the other a shallow arched recess. The room was all white; a white carpet, white covers on the furniture, a French wall paper with delicate gilt wreaths on a white ground; the only notes of colour were the curtains, printed in a soft pink, a vieux-rose hearth-rug, and pink cushions on the white sofa and armchairs.
‘What a beautiful room!’ he said to his host.
‘Yes, it is—only it was dotty of Helen to insist on a white carpet here in Mayo, where everyone’s boots are covered with mud all the year round, and the house full of dogs and cats! Sit, Wellington!’ he said to a large Labrador—too late; with a joyful wave of his oarshaped tail, the happy dog swept Mrs. MacMahon’s coffee-cup off a small table onto the floor, where the coffee sank into the milk-white thickness of the carpet.
‘There you are!’ General O’Hara said. ‘What did I tell you?’
‘Julia, do ring the bell,’ Lady Helen said with the utmost calmness. ‘Oh Attracta, another cup, please, and ask Annie to bring a cloth.’
While the ravages caused by Wellington’s exuberance were being mopped up, Mr. MacMahon came over and started to talk to the Colonel.
‘Are you really here to look at birds?’ he began.
‘Yes.’ Jamieson bestowed a rather chilly glance on the handsome young novelist. ‘I’m interested in fulmars in particular,’ he added.
‘Yes, so they said. I thought you were something to do with M.I.5’ MacMahon said.
‘Why should you think that?’ the Colonel asked, in a completely neutral tone.
‘Oh, someone mentioned it—in London, I think. But if you’re interested in birds it’s a pity you weren’t here three months earlier; this spring we had a Rosy Pastor in full plumage keeping company with the starlings along the shore.’
‘I wish I’d seen that,’ Jamieson said. But he had never heard of Rosy Pastors, and was disconcerted to find that at least one person in Mayo had guessed at his real occuption. His main idea at the moment was to escape from Mr. MacMahon—and in this Julia, as so often, came to his aid.
‘Colonel Jamieson, I’m going to ask Lady Helen to let us be a little rude and run away at once,’ she said blandly, coming up to the two men. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’
‘What do you want to show him?’ MacMahon asked.
‘Something archaeological—about which you, poor Tony, know nothing, however knowledgeable you may be about birds!’ Julia said briskly. They made their excuses and farewells, and went out across the hall to the Volkswagen.
‘Mind if I drive?’ Julia said, sliding into the driving-seat.
‘Not in the least. Did you overhear that man?’
‘Yes. He’s a menace. That’s why I took you away.’ She turned left over the cattle-stop at the end of the drive, and along a small road which followed the long arm of the sea out towards the Atlantic; presently it bent up over a hill, and deteriorated into a true Irish ‘bohireen’, a muddy track full of deep puddles, so narrow that the hawthorns of the hedges on either side scratched the car as it passed.
‘I say, look out! What will Mr. Moran say if we spoil his car?’ Jamieson exclaimed.
‘He’s hired it to you to drive about Mayo, and he knows well enough what Mayo is like,’ Julia replied easily. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘What archaeological object are you taking me to see?’
‘Something very queer indeed—a graveyard.’
‘Why should a graveyard be queer?’ the Colonel asked, as the car ran down a hill; Julia swung it round a bend at the bottom, and it was only as they were driving along a gentle, green, grassy valley that she answered him.
‘This one is called Killeen. A Killeen is a place where they bury unbaptised babies and bodies washed up by the sea, when no one knows what their religion was.’
‘Does it matter what their religion was?’
‘Yes, here.’ As she spoke Julia turned the car into an open space, and got out.
Beside the road a small stream ran in a curve below a circular wall, within which gravestones stood up; the stream passed under a small bridge, beyond which, on the seashore, was a rectangle of dry-built stone walling. In the centre stood a sort of altar from which rose, rather crookedly, an upright of roughly-hewn stone.
‘Is that the remains of a cross-shaft?’ the Colonel asked.
‘No—it’s a phallic symbol. This is a pre-Christian site. But the people call it St. Brendan’s Altar, and have a Pater here on his day—a sort of “Pardon”, like the ones in Brittany.’
‘What do they do?’
‘Come and say prayers, the children especially—they get a holiday for it.’
‘Has no one here any idea what it really is?’ Jamieson asked.
‘That’s impossible to find out—Helen has tried over and over again, and got nowhere. But that upright stone is washed over every so often, in a gale, and it is always most carefully replaced.’