Ashes In the Wind

by Christopher Bland

  The next morning James walks to find the hall where his great-grandfather had preached the Revival to the Brethren. The façade survives in all its late Victorian splendour, Corinthian columns, big windows, the roof crowned by a small colonnaded dome. Behind the façade is a charmless, efficient hotel. ‘Rebuilt after the fire’ is the receptionist’s explanation of the change; she is uninterested in James’s attempt to find out its history. The interior is unrecognizable. James looks at his old postcard, mourns the loss of the huge theatrical space with its curious wrought-iron pulpit, and wonders at a Dublin that in 1902 could fill three thousand seats for John Burke on ‘The Coming of the Kingdom’.

  He drives out to Burke’s Fort to spend a couple of nights with his cousin Fred. Fred has kept the Archduke’s stud going after his father’s death; horse-breeding seems to be the one area of Irish economic life that has survived the crash.

  ‘Actually, it was the china dogs that saved us. Dad spent everything he had, and more, on the horses and the hounds,’ says Fred.

  ‘China dogs?’

  ‘That’s what we called them. You remember those two big animals that sat either side of the fireplace at the Fort; china dogs, twenty-five pounds, was the probate valuation. The Trustees told me I would have to sell Burke’s Fort, house, horses, land and all, to clear off the debts. Christie’s came over and didn’t find much to get excited about. The Ferneley of the Archduke was a copy. Until they saw the dogs. They weren’t dogs, they were Meissen lions, made for Augustus the Strong’s Japanese Palace in 1730-something; God knows how they got to Queen’s County. A woman from the Met in New York came over specially to see them, and we sold them for seven hundred thousand dollars. That did the trick all right.’

  ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘We’re still breeding, but profitably these days. We’ve half a dozen good brood mares of our own, a decent stallion, and we sell everything we breed at Goffs’ yearling sales. Stallion fees are exempt from tax, thanks to Charlie Haughey, though God knows for how long,’ says Fred.

  ‘Haughey was a complete crook, wasn’t he?’ asks James.

  ‘He was, of course, in a rich Fianna Fáil tradition. But he’s our crook. And you’ve had a few in England, by the way. We have a liking for gombeen men; we expect little from our politicians, and least of all honesty. So we’re rarely disappointed.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yes, we. We’re all Irish now – Irish passports, the children go to our local school where they learn Gaelic, and we’ve been Catholics ever since Dad converted. He was never a Unionist, even ended up a senator for a while. So we’ve survived, prospered even. The Anglo-Irish don’t exist any more, except in little pockets of resistance in the South of England. Anglo-English, that’s what they are now. When you toss a coin in Ireland you call heads or harps. We’ve called harps.’

  James doesn’t argue. He is disturbed by Fred’s hard-headed realism and the unsentimental elimination of the tribe to which he belonged. Why does it matter, why am I unwilling to become an Englishman by default? James asks himself. He doesn’t have a satisfactory answer.

  Fred and James ride around the estate the next morning. Cantering up a ride, they pass a burned-out building on the edge of a little copse.

  ‘That’s the Trafalgar Folly,’ says Fred. ‘Built by my great-great-grandfather. They say he kept a woman from the village up here. The IRA torched it just after the end of the Civil War. Your father was the stallion man here when it happened, before he went off to train in England.’

  ‘Odd timing, given that the wars were over.’

  ‘Indeed. It was a warning to us that they could burn down Burke’s Fort whenever they felt like it, treaty or no treaty, truce or no truce. I was told your father had got across the local IRA man in one way or another. Johnnie Mannion, he was called. My dad thought your father would be better off in England for a while, so away he went. I’m not sure we ever heard the full story. Did your father ever talk about it to you?’

  ‘He wasn’t the talkative sort.’

  The following day James visits their old home at Killowen in County Kildare. His father’s training yard is now in the hands of a thrusting young Irish trainer. John Malone has switched to the Flat from National Hunt.

  ‘The Flat’s where the money is,’ he explains. ‘The Arabs aren’t interested in steeplechasing or hurdling. Neither are the men at Coolmore, and they know a thing or two about making money out of horses.’

  He shows James around; it is almost unrecognizable from the yard that he remembers. The central yard with forty boxes, the doors gleaming with white paint and black ironwork, is supplemented by a couple of large American-style barns. The staff all wear zipped dark-green jackets with ‘Killowen Racing’ in white lettering on front and back.

  ‘The barns are new since your father’s day. Economical, easy to clean, one girl can keep an eye on thirty horses. And we’ve ten furlongs of our own all-weather gallops out the back now. We use them all the time, and the horse walker,’ pointing to the circular machine in which six thoroughbreds are walking steadily round and round. ‘I’m planning a pool so I can swim the horses, great for any kind of muscular problem.’

  ‘It’s grand to see the place looking like this,’ says James as he shakes John’s hand and says goodbye.

  He sets out for Kerry on a long drive as strange as the road in from Dublin Airport. Every town he passes through has new shopping centres and new industrial estates. Most look deserted. Further south along the Ring of Kerry, old whitewashed thatched cottages lie abandoned, replaced by hacienda-style houses set closer to the road, all with well-tended rock gardens, wishing wells and wrought-iron gates. On the outskirts of Drimnamore there is a new estate of thirty houses – ten are finished and lived in, the rest are half built, the roads and the landscaping still to be completed. Reinforcing bars stick up out of crumbling concrete blocks and look like rusty, twisted sugar candy. Against a sagging fence there are neat stacks of banded breeze-blocks, lengths of yellow drainage pipes, a six-foot-high cable drum and an abandoned digger. A forlorn sign says, ‘New House Finished to Your Own Specification. Reduced Price. Bank Sale’.

  He checks into the Great Southern Hotel, which he remembers as a run-down example of what his father used to call Irish Insane Asylum architecture. There is now a glass-and-steel reception area; signs advertise the Great Southern Spa experience and encourage guests to make reservations for the Kerryman Restaurant or the Ring of Kerry Bistro. The receptionist is disappointed that she can’t persuade him to have a massage and detox treatment.

  The next morning he drives into the village. Drimnamore is cheerful in the sunlight. The houses and shops, whose universal colour used to be a dreary mixture of browns and blacks, have all been painted or rendered in reds and greens and blues. There is a large modern sculpture in the middle of the green. James sits down on a handsome new wooden bench; a little brass plaque says, ‘In Memory of the Volunteers who fell at Staigue Fort, April 1920’. He looks across to the bridge as a couple of buses come by and drive on round the Ring, the occupants, numbed by the four-hour journey, no longer curious enough to look out or take pictures.

  James goes into the Protestant church, which is open and empty. As he reads the memorials to his ancestors, he experiences a strong feeling of returning home. He has never lived in Derriquin, never lived in Kerry, but in some strange sense he belongs here. The Burke family pew, with its high sides and private fireplace, has gone, as have all the brass pew plates, which are now glued to a wooden board by the entrance to the church.

  In the churchyard he looks for and finds his grandmother’s grave; next to it, with an identical headstone, is the grave of William McKelvey. Both graves are badly overgrown, the headstones covered in green and grey lichen, partly obscuring the lettering. Halfway down the slope to the river is the Burke family tomb, a small stone building with a pitched roof and a classical pediment supported by a pair of plain Doric pillars. On the pediment is a cartouche with the Burke coat
of arms, worn away by Kerry wind and rain. The tomb is surrounded by a low wrought-iron fence; a couple of sections are missing. James takes a closer look and sees that there is a large diagonal crack in one of the walls. The iron door is slightly ajar. He steps over the railings and pulls the door open; dust, twigs, a scattering of earth and a few small skeletons of mice and birds cover the floor.

  On stone ledges that run around three sides of the room there are a dozen coffins, some lead-lined and intact, others crumbling, two totally disintegrated with dry bones and scraps of fabric thrusting through the crumbling wood. Several of the coffins have brass name-plates; his great-grandmother’s is clearly labelled, ‘Letitia Burke, 1821–1902’. The bones of a hand are resting on the rotten wood; James replaces them alongside what is left of Letitia.

  He sits down on an unoccupied lower ledge; perhaps he is reserving his place. These are his forebears, his DNA, or some of it; James is overcome by contradictory feelings of belonging and loss. The sour air makes breathing difficult; he puts his face in his hands and his body is racked with dry, heavy sobs.

  After ten minutes he pulls himself together, goes to the general store on the far side of the green and buys a broom, a dustpan and brush, a pair of garden shears, a bucket and a strong scrubbing brush. He trims the grass and cleans the two gravestones, then returns to the tomb to sweep the stone floor clear of years of dirt. He leaves the coffins alone; by lunchtime he has restored the tomb to a state of relative respectability. He is pleased with his work, feeling he has discharged an obligation to both the place and the people. Nobody comes to ask what he is doing. Returning to the general store for the second time, he finds the name of a local builder, goes to see him and together they negotiate a price to fix the crack in the tomb and repair its door.

  Back at the hotel, he has dinner in the Kerryman Restaurant, which is comfortable and crowded. The food is excellent. James looks around at the prosperous, well-dressed, confident Irish men and women, and contrasts them with the clientele he remembers from almost forty years ago. Then the guests had been mainly English or Anglo-Irish, the food dreary, the public rooms down-at-heel. On Saturday night the men were in dinner jackets and the women in long dresses, dancing foxtrots and quicksteps after dinner to the music of a four-piece string band. This evening, none of the men wears a tie. James removes his own and puts it in his jacket pocket.

  The next day he walks over to Derriquin via Oysterbed Pier. There are now no signs of oyster cultivation apart from a few crumbling concrete pens exposed by the falling tide. Off to one side is a low, half-ruined building; there is a barely legible sign over the big double doors, which are half open and sagging off their rusty hinges. ‘Derriquin Oyster Fishery’, James reads; the grass has grown around and inside the building, and its roof and walls look as if one more November gale would push them over. He sees an old oyster shell in the grass, bends down, picks it up and wipes it clean with his handkerchief. The mother-of-pearl gleams in the sun.

  He walks on around the shoreline, remembering the gaunt, turreted outline of the castle from his last visit with his father. John had been a reluctant guide. He had pointed out his old bedroom window at the top of the central tower, but didn’t want to spend much time at the castle.

  ‘Exactly what happened?’ James had asked that evening in the hotel. His father had thought for a moment, then told him the whole story. Until then James had heard only the barest of outlines; it was the first time he had seen his father weep.

  The path is overgrown with rhododendrons and azaleas run wild from some long-ago formal planting; when James comes round the headland there is nothing where the shell of Derriquin used to stand. For a moment he thinks he hasn’t walked far enough, then sees the sea wall stretching towards him and realizes the castle has been demolished.

  He walks on, running his hand slowly across, down, across, up the waist-high battlemented wall; Derriquin has been replaced by a car park. Beyond, there is a modern clubhouse instead of the old wooden pavilion, and the nine-hole golf course that used to run through the demesne has been upgraded to, as its sign proudly boasts, the ‘Derriquin Castle Championship Golf Course – eighteen holes, seven thousand two hundred yards. Visitors Welcome.’ James does not feel welcome. He feels violated by the final disappearance of his father’s house, of his house.

  He doesn’t go into the clubhouse, turning back to the hotel via the old walled garden. That too has changed; a sign on the outside says ‘Sullivan Construction – Six Magnificent Executive Homes in a Gated Environment’. He opens the garden door, new and painted red, onto a building site where grass, fuchsias and foxgloves once grew, where crumbling glasshouses used to lean against the wall. The foundations for half a dozen houses are laid out, the building lines neatly marked by wooden pegs and taut twine.

  The only sign of life is in the far corner, where a man in a hard hat is standing, smoking a cigarette. Noticing James, he puts out the cigarette, picks his way across the site, holds out his hand and says, ‘Mr O’Malley, you’re early. I’m Michael Sullivan.’

  James explains he is not Mr O’Malley. ‘I’m just having a look around.’

  ‘That’s fine, help yourself. Here, have a brochure. They’re going to be great houses, each with half an acre, each with a great view. Look out to sea.’

  James does look out to sea across several islands to the coast on the far side of the estuary and the low mountains beyond.

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘If you’re interested, you can buy off plan, ten per cent down, fitted out to your own specification.’

  ‘I’m not in the market, but thank you.’

  ‘Ah well. To tell you the truth, O’Malley who I took you for is from the bank in Dublin, and if he doesn’t do the decent thing there’s no telling when all this will be finished. If ever.’ He offers James a cigarette and lights one for himself. ‘From England, are you?’

  ‘I grew up in County Kildare,’ James replies. ‘Tell me, what happened to the burned-out shell of the castle?’

  ‘Pulled down by the County Council. They said children were playing there and might get hurt. They used the stone for the clubhouse and the car park foundations. You’ve been here before?’

  Before James can decide how to reply, they hear a car pull up outside the wall.

  ‘That’ll be O’Malley now,’ says Michael. ‘Nice meeting you.’

  James thanks him for the brochure, passes Mr O’Malley at the gate and watches him pick his way across the site to Michael. O’Malley is dressed like an undertaker, and perhaps that’s what he is, James thinks. He walks slowly back to the hotel; it has started to rain, and the dripping, wild shrubberies along the path exactly match his mood.

  In his hotel room he takes a careful look at Michael’s brochure. It has been well designed and expensively produced, and James admits to himself, a little reluctantly, that the architect, or at least the artist, seems to have a good feeling for materials and building design.

  This is his last evening in Kerry. He tries the bistro, has a steak and a couple of glasses of red wine, and takes his coffee in the bar overlooking the little harbour below the hotel. The view looks washed and hazy after the rain; the setting sun touches the tops of the Scots pines over where Derriquin used to be.

  As he is about to finish his drink and go upstairs, Michael Sullivan comes into the bar and orders a pint of Guinness. He looks around, sees James and walks over.

  ‘Michael – we spoke out at Derriquin. Mind if I join you?’

  ‘I’m James.’

  ‘How was your banker?’ James asks as Michael sits down.

  ‘Like they all are, the bastards. All over you to lend money when you don’t need it; they pulled the plug on me and my partner the moment times got rough. It’s his development now, and he can finish it himself since he won’t finance me to do the work. I’m ready to start over. I never pledged my home as security, and I’m back to what I know best, building houses for other people.’

  �
��I like the look of the houses in your brochure. I can’t say I admired the new bungalows along the Ring of Kerry.’

  Michael laughs. ‘I’ll buy you another drink before I tell you why you’re wrong.’

  He comes back with a Guinness and a whiskey. ‘You’re typical of the Anglo-Irish. You want to keep us in small, picturesque, damp, thatched cottages, and when we try to build anything new you insist we get the blessing of the Irish Georgian Society.’ He says this with such good humour that James is unable to take offence.

  ‘Fair enough. It is your country, but it needs looking after.’

  ‘Well, the good news is that there’ll be little enough building for a while yet. The Irish recovery is on the long finger.’

  Michael stands up. ‘I’m away home. I need to tell the wife about Mr O’Malley. Lucky I’m married to a strong woman.’

  ‘Lucky indeed.’

  The next day James drives to Cork, catches the midday plane to London and is back in Donhead by the evening. He has laid some ghosts to rest through restoring the family tomb. And the demolition of Derriquin has put an end to his long-harboured fantasy of rebuilding the castle and returning there.

  38

  ANNIE SULLIVAN WAS grandmother, mother and father to Michael Sullivan, and the only source of memories of Tomas, for whom Masses were said once a year in the church at Drimnamore. Father Michael said Tomas died fighting for Holy Mother Church, but Annie still had to pay for the Masses. A proposal to erect a memorial to him and other members of the Bandera Irlandesa had been discussed for the last twenty years by the County Council.

  She still kept her dead son’s Garda uniform cleaned and pressed in a cupboard with the peaked cap of a District Inspector beside it on a hook, ready for a morning inspection or the Last Trump. Annie could hardly remember Kitty, whom she blamed in some unreasonable corner of her heart for Tomas’s death. Michael Sullivan had one photograph of his parents taken at a Garda ball in County Clare, his mother beautiful and smiling in a red dress, his father a head taller, serious, looking out beyond the reach of the camera.