Images and Shadows

by Iris Origo

  It was to her, and to my grandmother that, in 1923, I first brought my Italian fiancé, before our engagement was officially announced—somewhat disconcerting him, on the day of his arrival, by presenting to him the sight of a well-brought-up American family eating corn-on-the-cob—and it was there that we spent, with our engagement approved, one of the happiest months of my life, canoeing on the river and sailing in the Bay. It was to Westbrook that, after the Second World War, we both returned, bringing with us our two little girls of six and three. As we entered the hall and the grandfather clock began to chime, and my children ran to the French window with cries of delight at their first glimpse of the croquet-lawn and the river at its foot, all the war years were suddenly swept away. Here at least, I felt, nothing has changed! The shrubs were still as trim, the great trees as majestic, the milk as creamy, the house’s appointments as impeccable, as before the war. Moreover my grandmother, though already approaching her ninetieth year, still kept, as she did to the year of her death, the keen enjoyment of the present moment which was one of her greatest charms: the guest to lunch, the drive in the electric car through the woods, the game of Scrabble after dinner, the small family festivity. I can see now the joint celebration on a later visit, of her birthday and that of my younger daughter, with the candles lighting up precisely the same expression of alert, unclouded delight on the faces of both the great-grandmother and the child.

  In my children’s recollection, indeed, Westbrook has remained an earthly paradise, and the months they spent there, the happiest part of their childhood. There was so much to do and see: the thickly-wooded islands to explore (feeling as safe and remote as Huck Finn or Robinson Crusoe himself ), the river for canoeing, the barns on the home-farm which housed the fine herd of Jersey cows, the long-legged nuzzling calves, the trees of the arboretum, some of them with low, spreading branches which formed a green tent into which one could creep and lie, savouring the aromatic secrecy and darkness. As I watched my children enjoying these delights, I renewed the happiest recollections of my own childhood, and saw them fascinated, as I had been, not only by this carefully planned and planted world, but by what still remained of the original wild life of the island: the snapping turtles which laid their eggs on the sandy riverbanks, and of which the bite, we were warned, could take off a man’s leg, the squirrels and chipmunks and opossums and the vast variety of birds, and most of all, the family of wild swans on the river, at first so shy that they would take flight at any human approach, but gradually becoming so tame that they would glide up close to the river-path as we approached and dip their slender necks into the water for bread-crumbs. On one exciting day they even emerged onto the lawn, their ungainly gait on dry land a singular contrast to their majestic progress on the water. Sometimes, too, we would all go driving with my grandmother in the high, outdated, open electric car, in which, until her eyesight failed, she drove herself over the roughest tracks in the woods. Always, though ‘Granapa’ was not with us, she would point out the trees and shrubs that he had planted and the paths he had planned, so that we still felt him to be our invisible, protecting host. Perhaps, indeed, the greatest gift of Westbrook was one which was never explicitly put into words: an awareness which could not fail to reach us, that what we saw was the creation of a completely happy marriage.

  There was also another side to those last years—one which the children did not know and were too young to imagine. It consisted in the deep emotional undertow which, except in the hours in which they were with her, continually swept their great-grandmother back towards the past. The sorting and re-reading of literally thousands of old letters, each bundle carefully inscribed and dated in her own hand, the ordering of old diaries and photographs—these, with her own Bible readings, filled the hours upstairs in her own room, until her eyesight failed her. Old joys, old sorrows, even old grievances and resentments filled her thoughts, and gradually, too (with no intention but one of love and piety), the very images of the dead became somewhat blurred and conventionalised, faded as it were in the light of their own haloes, until one could no longer clearly perceive the original human face.

  Moreover it was impossible not to feel—especially coming from war-time Europe, where so many great houses had met with destruction and so many others, though still standing, could not hope to return to the life of the past—that we were existing in a world without a future, one which only my grandmother’s presence rendered justifiable at all. In this, of course, Westbrook was only sharing the fate of many other large American houses, both in the country and the town, which had not suffered material destruction, as in Europe, but merely belonged to another way of life, in a country in which no tradition obliged one generation to continue what the preceding one had built. As early as 1905 Henry James, returning to his native land to observe ‘The American Scene’, had foretold the inevitable future decay of all the great houses that were then still rising on the Eastern seaboard, and of the life that was being led in them. ‘Private ease,’ he remarked, in Europe, was justified by the fact ‘that old societies are arranged exactly to supply functions, forms, the whole element of custom and perpetuity.’ But in America, he pointed out, precisely the opposite was true. ‘For once that we ask ourselves in Europe what is going to become of a given piece of property, whether palace, castle, picture, parure, or other attribute of wealth, we indulge in the question twenty times in the United States—so scant an engagement does the visible order strike us as taking to provide for it.’ And he proceeded, in one of his imaginary addresses, to upbraid the great houses of ‘Uppermost Fifth Avenue’: ‘What are you going to make your future of, for all your airs, we want to know? What elements of a future are at all assured to you? … What you are reduced to for “importance” is the present, pure and simple, squeezing itself between an absent future and an absent past.’

  These remarks might already have been addressed to Westbrook, as to many other houses of its kind, when first I stayed there as a girl—and twenty-five years later, they seemed still more pertinent. But I was mistaken: Westbrook still had before it a more stable and useful future than I could have foreseen. Long before then Olivia had fully realised that, much as she loved every stone and tree, it would be neither possible nor desirable to continue such a mode of life alone, after her mother’s death, and it was she who, with her usual liberality and good sense, formed the plan which was perhaps the only way of saving the place. The farm, by then, had already been sold, but all the rest—house, grounds, and woods—was made over by my grandmother to the State of New York, with the proviso that Olivia might remain there during her lifetime, with an endowment of one million dollars, to be used as a botanical garden and park, open to the public, while the house was to be turned into a central office and tea-room. Picnics and amusement-parks were forbidden and cars were to be left near the entrance, so that visitors could enjoy, undisturbed, ‘an oasis of beauty and of quiet for those who delight in outdoor beauty’.

  This indeed is what has taken place. For two years after her mother’s death Olivia, with a board of trustees, prepared the necessary changes, and then, with the arrangements completed, moved out for good. What she must have felt at leaving one can only surmise, but I think that later on she found a real satisfaction in the success of the scheme, and in watching Westbrook, in its new aspect, coming to life again. In the first year that it was opened to the public (1954) it was at once evident, by the number and type of visitors, that it met a real need; and ten years later the number of annual visitors had risen to 134,000.

  So at last—after the death of almost everyone who originally lived there—a new pattern has taken shape. The beauty which my grandparents created for themselves and their friends now gives pleasure to thousands in a way which their children, too, would have fully approved, and which again brings the past to life. Children still hide under the sweeping branches of the willows, family parties explore the woods, young couples stand beside the azaleas at the water’s brink. But I must confess
that I myself have not had the courage to return there; and what has happened to the wild swans, I do not know.

  1 The staff—after the stables, with the English coachman and innumerable grooms, had been given up—consisted of fourteen: a housekeeper, a butler, two footmen and a parlour-maid, three in the kitchen, two housemaids, two chauffeurs, a laundress, and a night-watchman. The same staff was employed in New York, where, until the 30’s, there was also an outdoor night-watchman, shared by several families on the block, who patrolled the area, checking doors and windows. He was on duty on even the bitterest winter nights, from 10 p.m. until the early morning.

  Outdoors, the Westbrook gardens and grounds required for their upkeep eighteen men, as well as a superintendent and two men in the dairy.

  2

  Desart Court

  For nothing is better or more precious than when two of one heart and mind keep house together, husband and wife … But they know it best themselves.

  ODYSSEY, VI, 183 1

  The atmosphere of the other house in which my childhood’s holidays were set, the home of my mother’s Anglo-Irish parents, Desart Court, was in many ways very different from that of Westbrook. Far more beautiful in appearance—since it was an Italianate house built towards the end of the eighteenth century of the grey local limestone known as ‘Kilkenny marble’, with an austere central block of classical design linked by two semi-circular passages to the wings for children and guests—it stood in gently rolling parkland, looking across the gay, untidy patchwork quilt of what had originally been designed as a formal Italian garden, towards the misty purple outline of the mountain Slievenaman. But its neglected, overgrown shrubbery of laurel, laburnum and lilac, hawthorn and rhododendron, and its brick-walled garden where the grass was thick under the apple-trees and blackbirds were almost as numerous among the currant-bushes as rabbits in the flowerbeds, would have horrified any of the Westbrook gardeners, and reflected a way of life that was at once less luxurious and more easy going. Yet both houses had one thing in common: a child felt safe there. And Desart, too, was the creation of an unusually happy marriage.

  Of my Irish family’s history I only know that our ancestor Joseph Cuffe—the great-grandson of a Henry Cuffe who was executed on Tower Hill for taking part in Essex’s rebellion—served under Cromwell in Ireland and was presented by him with the lands of Desart, ‘Cuffe’s Desert’, in the sense of reward. His grandson, John, the first Baron Desart, married Dorothea Gorges, whose mother, my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Nicola Sophia, the daughter of Hugh Hamilton, Lord Glenawly, was the protagonist of a well-known Irish ghost story, one which fascinated us as children and to which we gave the name ‘The Black Velvet Ribbon’.

  Nicola, who was born in 1666, was left an orphan at an early age and was brought up, together with a young cousin, Lord Tyrone, in an idyllic country childhood, in the manner of Paul et Virginie. They were, however, both inculcated with the ‘baneful principles of Deism’, and when, having reached the age of fourteen, they were separated, they both came into the hands of guardians determined ‘to extirpate the erroneous principles instilled into their youthful minds’ and to teach them the truths of the Christian faith. Before parting, they exchanged a solemn vow that whichever of them died first would reappear to the other, to reveal which view of the universe was the true one and when, after Nicola’s marriage to Sir Tristram Beresford, they met again, they repeated their pact. Shortly afterwards, when Nicola and her husband were staying with some neighbours, the Magills of Gill Hall, she came down one morning to breakfast looking pale and distracted, wearing around her left wrist a wide black velvet ribbon—but to all her husband’s inquiries she merely replied that, though she had never refused any other request of his, this was a matter that she could not explain. She would never, she added, be seen again without the black velvet ribbon.

  At that moment a footman entered, delivering a letter sealed in black. “It is as I expected,” Lady Beresford exclaimed, “Tyrone is dead.”

  Still, however, she refused to reply to her husband’s inquiries, and a few years later, having received from her a son and heir, he died, without apparently ever learning that on the night in question his wife had received a visitor from another world. This was, of course, Lord Tyrone, whom she suddenly awoke to find ‘sitting on the bedside’.

  “For Heaven’s sake, Tyrone,” she cried (this part of the story is told in her own words), “for what purpose have you come here at this time of night?”

  “Have you forgotten our pact?” he replied. “You must know that I departed this life on Tuesday last at four o’clock and have been deputed by the Supreme Being to appear to you, to assure you that revealed religion is the only true one.”

  He then went on to tell her that the child she was then expecting would be a boy, and would in due course marry his own daughter. Soon after the baby boy’s birth, he added, her husband would die and after a time she would be married again to a man who would make her very unhappy; she would have four more sons and daughters and would die when she reached her forty-seventh year.

  She then asked for some outward token, which would serve next day as a proof that he really had visited her and had not merely been a figure in a dream. First he lifted up the heavy red velvet bed-curtains through a hook high above the bed (but this, she objected, might have been done by herself in a nightmare), then he laid two fingers upon the chest of drawers, charring the wood (but this, she said, might have been an accident). Next he wrote a few words in her pocket-book—but these too, she said, she might doubt the next day. Finally he told her to stretch out her hand, and she obeyed.

  ‘He touched my wrist—his hand was as cold as marble—in a minute the sinews shrank and every nerve withered.’

  He then warned her never to let anyone see her wrist—and was gone.

  Time passed and, one after another, Lord Tyrone’s prophecies came true. Lady Beresford’s son was born, her husband died and, though, in the hope of avoiding the fulfilment of the latter part of the prophecy, she moved to a small country village where the only man of her own class was an elderly clergyman, he unfortunately possessed a schoolboy son, Richard Gorges, who, in due course, grew up, made love to her, persuaded her to marry him, gave her two sons and two daughters and made her as miserable as Lord Tyrone had foreseen.

  She then awaited with some apprehension the coming of her forty-seventh birthday, but it passed uneventfully and when the forty-eighth drew near she decided to give a small party to celebrate the event, in the belief that her cousin’s predictions had at last worn themselves out. She invited a few friends to spend the day with her, her guests including the Archbishop of Dublin and an old clergyman who had baptised her in infancy. In the course of the day she told them that this party was to celebrate her forty-eighth birthday. But the old clergyman interrupted her; he had recently, he said, examined the registers of the parish where she was born and could assure her ladyship that she was only just reaching the age of forty-seven!

  “You have pronounced my death warrant,” Lady Beresford replied and, inviting the Archbishop of Dublin, who afterwards testified that this had occurred, and her son Sir Marcus Beresford (then a boy of twelve), to go with her into her bedroom, she told them the whole story. She also told her son that he would undoubtedly one day marry Lord Tyrone’s daughter, Katherine de la Poer, and exhorted him ‘to conduct himself so as to deserve that high honour’. She then lay down upon the bed to compose herself and when, a few hours later, her son and daughter returned to the room, they saw that she had already left this world. Then they at last unbound the black velvet ribbon from her wrist, and found it as she had described it, with ‘the sinews shrunk, every nerve withered’.

  Her son, as had been foretold, married Katherine de la Poer and became the first Marquess of Waterford, and one of her daughters by her second husband, Richard Gorges, married John, the first Lord Desart. The connection of the ‘Lady of the Black Velvet Ribbon’ with Desart Court was thus ind
isputably not very close, but her story haunted my imagination and added a touch of romance to the stately grey house and the distant blue hills. Was the veil between the two worlds quite easy to lift? Besides, there was one room at Desart—a guest’s room overlooking the drive, to which I was promoted when I was considered old enough to leave the nursery wing—in which there was a lingering atmosphere of deep apprehension, of overwhelming sadness, which I at once felt on the first night I slept there. My grandfather’s elder brother, I was told later on, was a hard and reckless rider to hounds, and day after day in the hunting season, as dusk began to fall, his young and anxious wife would stand with a candle in the window of this room, looking across the stretch of rolling parkland and waiting for him to come home. She knew, she said—though of course he only laughed at her—that one day he would have a fatal accident, and though in point of fact this did not occur, she left in that room, still lingering there some fifty years later, her long-drawn-out, unbearable grief and fear.

  Several years later—this story was told by my mother—my great-uncle Otway Cuffe, who (unlike my grandfather) was much interested in psychic matters and who had spent some bad nights himself in ‘the north room’, drove over to Desart late one evening, in my grandfather’s absence, with Mrs. Standish O’Grady, who had some psychic gifts herself, and they were both surprised to see a light shining in the north bedroom window, and a faint figure standing there. “The maids should be downstairs now,” he said, “and there is no-one else in the house!” As he spoke, the figure disappeared, and the light with it, and when they went upstairs they found the door locked from the outside.