They walked up the grand staircase where Powerscourt had been shot. They came to one of the smaller rooms on the first floor. High up on the wall by a window was a mythological painting about three feet square. In front of an Arcadian landscape with a brooding sky of dark clouds, it showed the Four Seasons, facing outwards, hand in hand in a stately dance. Autumn, at the rear of the painting, had dry leaves in her hair and represented Bacchus, the God of wine. To the right of Bacchus was Winter with her hair in a cloth to keep out the cold, then Spring, her hair braided like ears of corn, and Summer, linked to Spring on her left and Autumn on her right. The picture was framed on the right by a block of stone that might mark the site of someone’s grave and on the left by a statue showing the youthful and mature Bacchus with a garland. At the bottom edges of the painting two putti played with an hourglass each. The musical accompaniment was provided by Saturn, the god of time, playing on his lyre, and in the clouds above, Apollo, the sun god, drove his chariot across the sky to create the day.
‘It’s called A Dance to the Music of Time,’ said Edward, looking closely at Apollo’s companions in the clouds. ‘It’s by a Frenchman called Nicolas Poussin. He was always doing stuff like this,’ Edward went on airily, ‘mythological scenes, idealized landscapes, philosophical messages tied up with the poetry of Ovid or somebody like that. I think he painted some of them for a cardinal or some other grand fellow in Rome.’
Sarah was wondering why Edward had brought her here to see it. It was certainly beautiful but there must be a reason. ‘What does it mean?’ she said.
‘Well,’ said Edward, ‘originally it had to do with the myth of Jupiter’s gift of Bacchus, god of wine, to the world after the Seasons complained about the harshness of human life. It could mean lots of things. It could mean we should all be thankful not just for the gift of wine but for the stately order of the seasons which hold our lives in the pattern of their dance. I don’t think these Seasons are dancing very fast, you see. Time is going round at a fairly steady rate. The infants with the hourglasses, of course, represent the passing of time, the vanity of human aspirations, the fact that everything is going to end.’
‘You sound as if you think it’s a sad painting, Edward,’ said Sarah, taking his hand.
‘No, I don’t think it’s sad,’ he said, his eyes locked now on Saturn with his lyre. ‘These Seasons in a way are all trapped in their dance, like the characters in Keats’ ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ whose happy melodist, like Saturn here, unwearied, is forever piping songs forever new. They could go faster but the painter won’t allow it. They could change places but Poussin won’t allow that either. If you were inside the circle, you wouldn’t be able to get out. Maybe, for the moments we look at the painting, we’re trapped too, trapped in the contemplation of our own mortality.’
‘You’re sounding very philosophical today, Edward. Do you think it’s the influence of Treasure Island?’
‘No,’ said Edward laughing. ‘It just made me think about time and time passing, Sarah. What’s happening over there in the square also makes you think of time passing. You can’t help it.’ You can’t put it off much longer, Edward said to himself. ‘You think time doesn’t affect you. People talk about having all the time in the world. They don’t. We don’t. It’s going away from us constantly, like the sand in those hourglasses. Eventually time, our time, quite literally, is going to run out.’
Suddenly Sarah thought she understood what was going on, the visit to the painting, the philosophical musings, the digressions into the history of art.
‘So, you see, Sarah,’ Edward went on, unaware that he had been rumbled, ‘I have been thinking that sometimes we must seize time in the way people talk about seizing the day. We can’t put things off till another day or week or month. Delay is futile. We must grasp the moment. Sarah, will you marry me?’
The question came on Sarah very unexpectedly. She knew it was coming but she hadn’t expected it to pop out so suddenly. Maybe Edward hadn’t intended it either. Maybe Time had seized Edward rather than the other way round. She squeezed his hand very tight.
‘Of course I’ll marry you, Edward,’ she said. ‘What took you so long? I thought you’d never ask.’
Lady Lucy was keeping watch in the hour before midnight. The nurse had tiptoed out of the room, saying she would be waiting outside on the stairs. This, Lady Lucy realized, was the first time she had been alone with Francis since he was shot. All day she had been seeing the same scene. She was at a funeral. She was burying another husband. Like the first one, this funeral had an honour guard of military colleagues, jackets pressed, trousers immaculate, clouds and sky visible in the burnished toecaps of their boots, polished swords raised in unison to give the last salute. By the graveside she had a child holding each of her hands as if their hearts would break. The Dead March from Handel’s Saul echoed round her head to accompany these pictures. She remembered the military bands playing it as Victoria’s funeral cortège had made its melancholy way through the streets of a mourning London.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her husband’s hand. She remembered him suddenly at the National Gallery where he had taken her on their first outing and she had talked about Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. She remembered him talking to the twins only the week before, walking them in his arms up and down the drawing room, that soft voice telling the latest of his children about the house he came from in Ireland, and the blue colour of the mountains and the great fountain at the bottom of the steps. She started to cry. She hadn’t let herself cry very much in case it upset the children but now there was nobody here, only Francis, and he couldn’t hear and he couldn’t see and she might never hear his voice again. She was racked by sobs, wondering if he knew how much she loved him, how happy he had made her, how her whole life with him had been illuminated by the power of his love for her.
‘Oh Francis,’ she whispered to him, ‘my poor darling. I love you so much. Please come back. I can’t bear it when you’re not here.’ Suddenly she remembered saying ‘Please come back’ to him before, at that terrible early morning parting at the railway station when he went off to the Boer War. Day after day, she remembered, there had been notices of the fallen in the newspapers, columns of names of the dead that seemed to grow longer every month. But Francis had survived all that. He had come home without a scratch. Now this investigation into an Inn of Court had left him virtually dead. She made a resolution there at a quarter to midnight on the fourth day of her husband’s illness. When he was better she was going to take him away somewhere warm, Amalfi perhaps or Positano, where they could look at the spectacular views and the deep blue sea. She would give him a beaker full of the warm south, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim. And when he was better, not before, she was going to ask him to give up investigating for ever. No more heaps of masonry falling on him in cathedral naves. No more maniacs tracking him through the elegant galleries of the Wallace Collection. No more desperate races down the mountain roads of Corsica with the bullets whining off the rocks. No more butchered bodies dumped in the fountains of Perugia. Nobody could be expected to put up with all that any more. She certainly couldn’t. Then, as she looked at that beloved face, which seemed now to be turning slightly grey, she started weeping uncontrollably again. For she might never have the chance to take Francis off to the Italian sunshine and the winding streets of Positano. He might be dead before she had the chance to take him there. He might die tomorrow. He might die tonight.
Somewhere above her she heard a child weeping. It’s Olivia, she thought, come for her midnight cry. She began to compose herself. As she trudged slowly off to comfort her weeping daughter, she tried to steady herself with the words of Dr Tony: ‘Of course there’s hope. Let us not forget that. Let us never forget that. There is always hope.’
Next morning the children continued their progress through Treasure Island, Olivia, possibly because she wasn’t reading, becoming much better at hopping round the room on her crutc
h broomstick. If she were allowed outside with it, Johnny Fitzgerald felt sure, she would begin hurling it at her enemies like Long John Silver himself. Just after lunch Edward and Sarah arrived and their engagement was toasted in champagne. Edward apologized for daring to bring any glimmer of happiness into such a tragic household and was immediately told to shut up by Johnny Fitzgerald. Olivia wanted to know what an engagement was. She thought gauges had something to do with trains. She remembered a long story her father had told her once which involved, for some reason, train gauges. Were Edward and Sarah going on a train? If so, could she come too? Like her father, she was very fond of trains. When all was explained to her Olivia decided that she had better not ask any more questions. She thought now it would be like the twins’ christening all over again but with Edward and Sarah having to put their heads in the font.
After lunch Johnny Fitzgerald ordered a change in the reading matter for Francis. Lady Lucy and he, Johnny informed the company, were going to read Tennyson. Tennyson, after all, had been one of Francis’s favourite poets. Johnny did not think it wise to mention it, but he remembered Francis saying years ago in India that he would like someone to read the last section of the poem he, Johnny, was going to read at his, Powerscourt’s, graveside after his funeral. And, Johnny remembered, it was a poem Francis knew off by heart.
Lady Lucy gave a spirited rendering of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, the children and the nurse enchanted by the rhythm and the romance of the story. Then Johnny began ‘Ulysses’, a poem about the Greek warrior hero who finally comes home to his island of Ithaca after twenty years of war and wandering. Soon he is bored, he cannot rest from travel.
‘Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.’
The twins were asleep beside the bed. Edward and Sarah were sitting beside the flowers. Lady Lucy was by her husband’s side and Thomas and Olivia were on the opposite side of the bed. Thomas remembered his father telling him stories about Troy, about Achilles sulking in his tent, about the body of Hector being dragged round the city walls, about the wooden horse that finally ended the war. He looked at his father’s face and began to cry silently. Only the nurse noticed the tears running slowly down his cheeks and slipped him an enormous handkerchief when nobody else was looking. Johnny was thinking as he read of the various Indian councils and the even stranger Indian governments he and Francis had seen. He went on.
‘I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!’
Lady Lucy suddenly wondered if her question to Francis in Positano would be fair. How dull he would find it to make an end to detection, to give up what had become his career since he left the Army for what he might call a woman’s whim. No, she corrected herself, casting a guilty glance at her husband, he would never say that to her. But he might think it. He would hate it, Francis, rusting unburnished. Had she the right to ask him? Johnny Fitzgerald remembered that there was a tricky passage coming up about the passing of Ulysses’ life: ‘of life to me little remains; but every hour is saved from that eternal silence.’ That, he felt sure, would not seem appropriate in these circumstances. Nor would the lines about handing control over Ithaca to his son Telemachus. That might set Thomas off. So he moved on, hoping nobody would notice.
‘There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas.’
It was at this point that they heard a low muttering noise from the bed, like thunder far away. There was a faint stirring of the bedclothes as if Powerscourt was wriggling about in his sleep. Johnny Fitzgerald read on. Edward and Sarah left their chairs and tiptoed over to take a closer look. Olivia had grabbed hold of Thomas’s arm and wasn’t going to let go.
‘My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me –
That ever with a welcome frolic took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads –’
During this passage the murmuring turned into a recognizable voice. The voice was weak but it was definitely Powerscourt’s and he was speaking the words of Tennyson’s poem in unison with Johnny Fitzgerald. Lady Lucy began to cry. Thomas was squeezing the bedclothes in disbelief. Olivia stared at her father as if she had never seen a male person before. On they went, the two friends, Powerscourt and Fitzgerald, that had ever with a welcome frolic taken the thunder and the sunshine so many times together in so many different parts of the world in days gone by.
‘. . . you and I are old,
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.’
We’re not finished yet, Francis and I, Johnny Fitzgerald said to himself. He paused as if Powerscourt’s return from the dead should be properly celebrated.
‘Don’t stop, Johnny, please don’t stop.’ Lady Lucy felt the thread, the skein of her husband’s life was tied up with the poem, that they had to continue together, she was certain of it. Powerscourt’s voice was almost normal now. The nurse and Lady Lucy had raised him to a semi-sitting position. He smiled weakly at the people around him as if he had just come back from an afternoon nap.
‘The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.’
If the return of Powerscourt’s voice was the first miracle of this extraordinary afternoon, the second was just about to begin. Master Christopher Powerscourt, youngest of all the Powerscourts, was waking up in his Moses basket.
‘Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.’
Christopher knew that voice. He had been listening to it nearly every day of his life, except for the last four or five. He liked the voice. He raised a small hand. Then he smiled at his father. It was a beautiful smile. It lasted a long time. It was the first time Christopher had smiled at anyone in his life. Lady Lucy and Thomas and Olivia all saw it, those deep blue eyes lit up, the great beam going right across his tiny face, his look of intense happiness. Powerscourt began to cry. Tears of joy were running down his face until he saw that his twin son might follow his example and start crying too.
The poem went on. There was now a ring of hands, Edward to Sarah to Johnny Fitzgerald across to the nurse, weeping uncontrollably, to Lady Lucy, to Powerscourt, to Olivia and Thomas and a last link to Christopher in his basket. A circle of love, with words by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
‘It may that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.’
Christopher smiled once more, this time at his mother. He seemed to like smiling. Maybe he was going to be a happy child. Everybody round the bed felt certain that Powerscourt had turned the corner, that he wasn’t going to die. A very faint colour was beginning to return to his cheeks. Lady Lucy felt incredibly tired suddenly as she looked at her Francis. She wondered if she would have the courage to ask him to give up investigating for ever when they went to Positano. Edward was thinking of the terrible ordeal Powerscourt had gone through in solving a couple of murders in an Inn of Court. Sarah supposed she would have to describe this extra
ordinary scene to her mother, the return of Lazarus Powerscourt, Powerscourt Redux, helped on his journey back to life by a beautiful first smile from his baby boy. Casting his eyes down to the end of the poem, Johnny Fitzgerald knew how right Lady Lucy had been to insist on his reading to the very end of ‘Ulysses’. For these last lines could be Powerscourt’s epitaph, not an epitaph for him now, but one that would serve so well when his life had run its natural course. Johnny let his oldest and closest friend say the final words on his own, Lord Francis Powerscourt’s voice firm now, his two sons holding hands, his own hands locked with those of his wife and his daughter.
‘Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’
Death Called to the Bar Page 31