by Ann Bridge
“I don’t think I could afford a mink coat” Julia said, rather taken aback.
“Oh, I would sell it very reasonably. It’s much too big for me; I’m sure it would do for you. Tommy—my son-in-law— bought it big so that it would go over other things; but the whole point of a fur coat is surely not to have to wear a lot of other things?”
“How right you are!” Julia agreed warmly, relieved to be on this safe generalisation. But her relief came too soon.
“Then will you come and see it one day? Quite soon? I want the money to get a new pony for my little cart. I have a cottage down near the Killaries.” She fumbled in a large black handbag with an enormous silver clasp, and pulled out a black morocco card-case which actually contained that rarity in the modern world, visiting-cards, one of which she tendered to Julia—only to draw it back again. “Oh no— that’s where I used to live; I’ll scribble my new address on it.” More fumbling produced a silver pencil, with which she scrawled rather than scribbled “Ponticum Cottage, Lough Sayle, County Galway.”
“It was called Hawthorn Cottage, but there are no hawthorns, so that was silly” old Lady Browne pronounced briskly. “But it’s smothered in ponticums, so I changed the name. The O’Haras know the way there; he comes to fish in the lough sometimes, and he always brings me a fish. Very proper, the General is!” said the old lady, with a sudden cackling laugh.
“Now Grannie, you know perfectly well that by good rights General O’Hara ought to bring the fish to me” said a very tall pale young man, who had come up to them, tea-cup in hand, and now positively loomed over the little table by which they sat. “The Lough is mine.”
“Oh, perhaps legally—or more likely your father’s” said the old lady sharply. “But what good would trout be to him out in Ceylon? And a young man like you can catch your fish yourself. No, what the General does is quite right. I’m sure you agree with me, Mrs. James,” she said turning to Julia.
“I think General O’Hara has a great sense of propriety, as you said yourself just now” Julia said, wishing she could find some way of escaping from this uncomfortable companion. As before, her sharp-eyed host soon came to her rescue.
“Mary” he said, coming up and taking the old lady’s cup, “come to the library with me; there’s a friend of yours waiting there for you. You will excuse us, I hope?” he said to Julia.
“Oh yes, Richard” the old woman said, getting to her feet with surprising agility; a sparkling expression of delight spread over her wrinkled old face as she walked off beside him. The young man sat down in her chair, carefully adjusting his long legs to avoid the little table.
“Now he will give my Grandmother whisky, which will make her quite impossible” he said resignedly. “But then he will send her home with the chauffeur, so that will be all right; he knows I’ve got to go to the Young Farmers’ Dinner in Oldport tonight. Was she trying to sell you the fur coat? It isn’t mink, you know.”
“She did mention it” Julia said; somehow the young man was not in the least an uncomfortable companion.
“I thought so. It doesn’t belong to her either; my mother lent it to her the last time she was at home, because it was an unusually cold winter, and my grandmother kept the cottage so icy. She has very little sense of meum and tuum,” he added, with a cool grin. “Oh, I ought to have introduced myself—the name is Terence White. Are you really Mrs. James?”
“No, Mrs. Jamieson” Julia said, laughing outright.
“I thought so. I mean, I thought your name wouldn’t be what Grandmother said it was.”
“Old people are apt to be forgetful” Julia said politely.
“Yes. Hers is a peculiarly selective form of forgetfulness; but she is also a little deaf—not wholly selectively!” he added.
“I hope she likes living in the cottage?”
“Oh yes—she insisted on it. I suggested she should come and live in a wing of Kinturk, but nothing would induce her to, although there is central heating that would have kept her warm for nothing. She said she wanted to live on her own land.”
“Is the cottage on her own land, then? Much land?”
“Thousands of acres!” the young man said, laughing. “Lough Sayle is mine, as I reminded her; but a long stretch of the sea-coast belongs to her, unfortunately.”
“Why unfortunately?” Julia had no hesitation in plumping out the question to this cheerful young man, who was so remarkably frank about the peculiarities of his relations. For the first time, however, he hesitated a little.
“Oh—well—foolish old ladies who have absolute control of a lot of property are liable to get into the hands of unscrupulous characters” he said. “And we have plenty of those about in these parts.” He got up. “Let me get you another cup of tea.”
“Oh, thank you” Julia said, rising too. “I think I will try to see a little more of my hostess.” And she followed Master White over towards the table where Mrs. Fitzgerald presided over a massive silver tea-service on a vast silver tray.
“May I take a chair by you?” she asked.
“Oh yes, do—I’ve hardly seen you. Did Richard rescue you from old Mary?”
“Well, he came and took her away” Julia said, amused, studying the fine resolute face—yes, she could see Norah marshalling her maids with broomsticks at the attic windows, and loading her husband’s gun to threaten the tipsy intruders. But why “as dead as a maggot?” Maggots always seemed so revoltingly alive. She must ask Gerald—and later, as they were driving back to Rostrunk, she did.
“Oh, it’s just an old country saying. I don’t know its origin —you’re right, it’s not as flatly accurate as most things country-people say. What did you make of the Fitzgs.?”
“I think he’s an absolute charmer—and she looks a splendid person; I didn’t get much talk with her. Couldn’t we go again some time when they’re alone?”
“Yes, we can and we will” he said, pleased at the suggestion. “I saw you talking to poor old Mary Browne.”
“Yes—I thought she was rather pathetic.”
“Goodness, why? It’s the last word most people would use about her.”
“Well, isn’t she fairly dotty?” Julia asked. The man burst out laughing.
“No, only uninhibited—to a degree you find incredible!” he said. “She’s really quite sharp, especially where cash is concerned.”
“Her grandson didn’t seem to think so” Julia said, a little defensively. “He spoke of her as a foolish old lady, who might easily fall a prey to unscrupulous people; he seemed quite worried about it.”
“Oh, Terry White said that to you, did he? I wonder what’s been going on?” he said, half to himself. “But rest assured Terence wasn’t worrying in the least about his grannie’s financial position, only about her lack of public spirit! —which is only another aspect of a lack of inhibitions,” he said gaily to Julia. He looked at his watch; they had passed through Martinstown and were in the green undulating country on the approaches to Oldport. “Do you mind if we stop and have a drink in the town?” he asked. “We’re in good time, and there’s someone there I might learn a bit from over a drink.”
“Josie, I suppose” Julia said easily. “Yes, let’s. He’ll know whatever there is to know, and quite a bit that there isn’t.”
Gerald looked at her, a little surprised.
“Oh, you know Josie Walshe, do you? I shouldn’t have thought the O’Haras patronised him much.”
“He produces Michael’s supply of Guinness, and I go in there sometimes to pick it up. Helen leaves her messages there too. I think she quite enjoys him,” Julia said easily. “Anyhow I do.”
So they pulled up under the modest sign of “Walshe’s Hotel” in the wide grey street, and went in. The small bar, as usual in the evening, was fairly full; Mr. Walshe greeted Julia with his usual warmth. “So you’re back from Africa, Miss Probyn! Well well—it’s good to see you again. And bless my soul if it isn’t Mr. O’Brien! It’s an awful while I didn’t see you.”
“I’ve been abroad too, Josie,” Gerald said, shaking the publican’s hand, “having a holiday. And I’m wondering if I mightn’t have stayed a bit too long” he added, in a lowered tone, leaning over the bar till his head was close to Josie’s greying curly one.
“Come into the snug—Miss Probyn will want to be able to sit down” Mr. Walshe said loudly. “Mary Ellen!” he shouted, in a stentorian roar, as the others edged their way through the crowd of farmers with glasses of Guinness in their hands towards the far end of the bar; a door here opened in front of them, and Walshe’s tiny sweet-faced wife appeared in it.
“Do you look after the bar a minyit; I want to give Miss Probyn a chair in the snug” the landlord said. “Miss Probyn, what will you take?”
“Oh, just a gin and vermouth, please Josie”—and “Same for me” Gerald added; Mrs. Walshe opened another door on the further side of a small dark passage, and they passed through into a little room with a table and several wooden chairs—the “snug,” a great feature of Irish pubs. Its one window gave on the garden; a fire of turf and logs burned brightly in the grate. After a hurried “You’re heartily welcome” to her new guests Mrs. Walshe hastened off to her duties in the bar.
“I never was in here before” Julia said, moving over and looking at the bare garden. “I wonder why they have sparrow-wire over the window?”
“I can tell you that—to keep the jackdaws out” Gerald said.
“No!—how extraordinary. Do you mean to say they’d come into the house?”
“Come through every chink, and make an appalling mess”—but just then Mr. Walshe entered carrying a small metal tray with three glasses of gin and vermouth. “Have a chair, Miss Probyn—and you too, Mr. O’Brien.” Julia sat down at the table and took the offered glass. “Here’s luck!” the host said, raising his.
This ritual over—“Well now, Josie, what news have you for me? Has our poet been very active lately?” O’Brien asked.
“Well he was, but ’twas little enough that came of it in the end.”
“How was that?”
“He got after one or two back the Bay; Jimmy Kelly would have agreed right away, but there wasn’t enough space on his holding. So he got Joe Carey and Peter Sweeny to come in too.” Julia pricked up her ears at this. “Back the Bay,” she knew, meant westwards down the long arm of the sea at the head of which Rostrunk stood; Kelly and Carey and Sweeny were all close neighbours of the O’Haras.
“So what happened?” O’Brien asked, offering Mr. Walshe a cigarette, and lighting one himself; Julia was already smoking.
“Lady got to know of it somehow—from Norah Sweeny it could be; she works up at the House odd times—and she told the General, and he roared them out of it.”
Julia and Gerald both smiled at this description of General O’Hara’s methods.
“I’m not in the least surprised; it was foolish ever to try that on” O’Brien said.
“Well that’s the way it was. So now Billy’s looking for some place else.”
“You don’t know where?”
“Well he does be tearing around a lot in that boat of his, but it goes so quick, he’s gone before you’d see him.”
“Well let me know if you hear any more, Josie.”
“I will, Mr. O’Brien, Sir.”
On their way on to Rostrunk, Julia asked Gerald what all this was about, and what O’Rahilly wanted “space” for on the Bay? He drew into a gateway and pulled up, and turned and looked at her.
“Do you know, I think you’d better not hear about it from me, since the O’Haras are now directly involved” he said. “Ask Lady Helen—she will tell you.”
“How can I have heard enough to know anything to ask her?” Julie objected.
“Ah, how can you? Well, you’ll have to say ’twas something you overheard being said about O’Rahilly in Josie’s. You’ll manage all right,” the man said easily, starting his engine again.
In fact Julia didn’t even have to ask. She left it for that evening, though she was seething with curiosity at all this mystery-making—for why on earth should what Terence White had said to her about old Lady Browne have prompted Gerald to stop in Oldport and pump Josie about O’Rahilly’s activities? It was all most puzzling. But next morning, as she and Lady Helen were sitting in the drawing-room sewing and chatting, the well-known odious roar of the motor-boat came in through the open windows; to her surprise her hostess sprang to her feet, letting the sheet on which she was putting a patch fall to the floor, and hastened across to the big bow to look out. “Surely he can’t be coming down here again?” she exclaimed.
He wasn’t—when Julia joined her at the window they saw the white plume of the wave from the speed-boat flash across the blue gap between the two headlands, and disappear towards the North.
“What is it, Helen?” Julia asked.
“Oh my dear, that revolting man! Do you know what he’s trying to do now?”
“No—tell me.”
The story when it came fully justified her friend’s anger, Julia felt. Jimmy Kelly, through O’Rahilly, had been offered an enormous sum for his “holding,” a modest farm stretching along the sea-shore and extending perhaps a quarter of a mile inland; it was wanted by developers, identity unknown, to build a large hotel with a beach, a swimming-pool, a restaurant, “and a discothèque!” Lady Helen said indignantly. Julia began to gurgle with laughter.
“Goodness, how did Jimmy pronounce discothèque?” she asked.
“It wasn’t Jimmy, it was Norah—and it isn’t funny!” her hostess said, rather vexed; then she began to laugh herself. “Well yes, it is, in a way—‘Something in the order of a dis-gotax’ was what Norah Sweeny said to me—‘Would you know what that might be, Lady?’ ” As usual Helen O’Hara reproduced the local speech perfectly. “But you must agree it’s a horrible idea. Of course the tourist industry is madly important, but we’re getting plenty of tourists, and no one wants the sort of tourist that that kind of set-up would attract, except these greedy dollar-snatchers in Dublin—even the Government is against the idea.”
“Oh, do you know that for certain? That’s rather useful.”
“Yes, Michael went up to Dublin and saw the Tourist Board people—his namesake among others—and they don’t want it in the least. But it’s rather difficult to stop—you see it isn’t exactly illegal to build an hotel, and they offer these poor wretched people such a fantastic amount of money that once it’s been dangled before their eyes, the authorities would be rather unpopular if they snatched it away again by refusing planning permission. You wouldn’t believe the sums that were mentioned to Carey and Kelly and the Sweenys by that wretched man. Of course he’s acting for someone—Billy hasn’t got a bean—well, except his house and that boat.”
“How does it stand now?” Julia asked.
“Oh, Michael was able to stop it. You see he owns all the land between the Bay and the County Road, and he told Billy he would never let them have a foot of it to build an access road on—of course the lane would be impossible for that sort of traffic. And water—they could only get that from the Lough, and he owns that too, so he’s in quite a strong position here. But we don’t want that kind of development anywhere in the West. You do see that it’s a horrible idea?”
Julia did—perhaps even more practically than Lady Helen. Since her return to Morocco on her Intelligence job she had seen the results of the handiwork of developers there: the flimsy villages of châlets and bungalows being run up on the beaches round hotels, dance-halls and casinos, and the effect on the local inhabitants of disproportionate wealth and undreamed-of indecorum being flaunted before their eyes—bikini-clad women coming to the doors of their nualas, the tent-like reed-built structures in which most of them lived, and asking to buy meat for their dogs from people who only ate it four times a year. There was demoralisation from high wages, too easily earned, for a short part of the year, and unemployment for the rest of it; there was understandable disaffection and disconte
nt; there was actual injury to the local morals. And that this situation might be reproduced here in Ireland was definitely a very unpleasant idea indeed.
“Yes, it’s appalling” she said. “And I see that it’s not too easy to prevent, for the reasons you’ve given—unless one could somehow get after the developers themselves, and make them see reason and lay off. You’ve no idea who Billy is acting for?”
“None. Michael asked him, of course, but he wouldn’t say. Said he’d undertaken not to ‘divulge’ it,” Lady Helen said with a contemptuous accent on the word ‘divulge.’ “And the people Michael saw in Dublin didn’t know either—in fact they had no idea that this was going on till he told them about it.”
“Of course if they applied for planning permission I suppose their identity would have to come out” Julia said thoughtfully.
“Yes, but then it might be too late.”
Gerald had arranged to come and collect Julia on the day of the fair in Oldport when the cow Belinda was to be sold and a replacement bought—she had never been to a fair, and wanted to see one. “Well, wear gum-boots” he said.
“Why on earth, if it’s fine?” she asked.
“You’ll see!” he said, with his rather sardonic grin.
So on Wednesday he came and picked her up; it was a fine day, with alternate clouds and sun, but no rain—Gerald glanced at Julia’s feet, and saluted her gum-boots with “Good girl!” Out in the lane, beyond the cattlestops which protected the O’Haras’ premises from their neighbours’ animals, he slowed down.
“Well, did Lady Helen tell you what Billy’s after?” he asked, switching off the engine.
“Yes, she did indeed. It’s a really wicked idea” Julia said energetically. She went on to recount the main facts as she had heard them—“In fact, you see, it was really Billy whom Michael ‘roared out of it’! But Gerald, don’t you think that the vital thing is to find out who is behind him, and get after them?”