I was not offended. I felt fairly confident that I had been excepted by the majority of these good-natured, generous-hearted people from the general prejudice against my kind.
‘It was considered thoroughly unpatriotic to fight alongside the English. I’m afraid Ireland was shamefully ignorant about the persecution of the Jews. You have to understand that the majority of country people were still fetching water in buckets from wells.’
‘Honestly, you needn’t feel you have to make excuses. There’s plenty I could apologize for on behalf of the English. I declare a détente.’
Sissy distracted us at this point in the conversation by pounding the contents of the mortar so violently that a sludge of berries and herbs splattered across the kitchen table. As we had finished washing up Constance invited Sissy to join us in the drawing room. She put down her pestle, folded her arms and stared at us with unconcealed animosity, so we went away, feeling obscurely guilty.
‘Oh dear,’ said Constance as we sat on the sofa together, the worn Turkey rug over our knees, and took up our needles. ‘Sissy’s so difficult these days. She seems so unhappy. I wish I knew … It’s too bad of Finn. What was I talking about? Oh, yes, about Daddy.’
‘Was your father killed in the war?’
‘He almost got through it unscathed. But in nineteen forty-five, only weeks before the end, he was wounded by shrapnel. After months in hospital he was sent home. Granny told me later he wasn’t the same man. He’d become an introvert. Silent and depressed.’
‘I suppose he’d seen terrible things.’
‘He was so isolated, that was part of the trouble. No one here understood or sympathized with what he’d been through. My mother found herself married to someone who preferred walking over the mountains alone to going to parties. They tried to patch things up. I was born in nineteen forty-seven. I have faint memories of a man with half his face crisscrossed with white lines from the shrapnel who was always clearing his throat and looking out of the window. He used to pat my head with a stiff hand when he saw me but he had a horror of noise so Finn and I were kept out of his way. Then, when I was five, something awful happened. I remember my mother and grandmother and all the servants weeping, and the Garda coming to the house. Finn was brought home from school. They told us that Daddy was missing and they were looking for him. A few days later they brought back his body on a hurdle. He’d drowned in the lake. Finn and I knelt down on the landing and peered through the banisters. We saw them pull back the coat that was over his body to show my grandfather. Daddy’s face was a dark blueish-grey, like wet slate …’ Constance’s eyes filled with tears. ‘It’s silly of me to be upset after all this time.’
‘Not silly at all.’ I felt my throat tighten in sympathy. ‘I had no idea. I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known.’
Constance shook her head. ‘It was twenty-seven years ago. But I see that face so often in my dreams. Well, Mummy hated Curraghcourt after that and went away to Dublin. She came back to see us occasionally but Granny and Mummy had never liked each other. Mummy died when I was eight. Granny said it was drink that killed her. They buried her next to my father. When Granny was dying she told me Daddy had left her a note before he went down to the lake but she’d destroyed it. Suicide’s a mortal sin, of course. I can understand how she felt. But I’d so like to have had that note.’
Constance had forgotten about the carpet and was leaning against the arm of the sofa, her needle cupped in her hand, her thoughts far away. On the rug by the hearth Maria sighed and lifted her head to rest it on Osgar’s large hairy flank. He licked his muzzle, speckled with turf-ash, and stretched a back leg. Outside gusts of wind chucked warm summer rain like handfuls of buckshot against the windows. Beyond stood the encircling mountains, their sides burnished with sluicing water, shielding us from the volatile mood of the Atlantic. All was wildness without, and warmth and safety within. Between us and the nearest cinema, café, amusement arcade and petrol station lay a vast, unpeopled, unfenced region of black lakes, sullen bogs, shuddering trees, crashing rivers and quaking cotton grass. Wild goats lay beneath dripping rocks while foxes stalked rabbits and birds clung to branches or nested among asphodel and bell heather.
‘It’s difficult to imagine being unhappy for long here,’ I said. ‘There’s a sort of in-built self-righting mechanism in its peacefulness.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ said Constance. ‘But in almost every generation there’ve been Macchuin wives making tracks for the bright lights of Dublin. I suppose the men have always had things like hunting and shooting and fishing to distract them from the drumming rain. As a child I was never bored. I loved riding my pony and helping with the lambing and the harvest. Everyone was kind to me. But I still dream that I see my parents walking towards me, not dead after all, but only having been away on a long, long holiday, and I run towards them weeping with joy.’ Constance put down her needle and rubbed her eyes as though weary. ‘I wonder if Finn thinks about them; if he dreams of them, too? Do you know, we never talk about them at all?’
‘Perhaps you’re each afraid of upsetting the other.’
‘I think it may be Granny’s ghostly influence at work. She disliked anything that interfered with the domestic comfort she put all her energy into creating. After the civil war, I think she was always a little afraid. When Grandpa was late, I remember, she used to pace up and down this room, up and down, up and down, until she heard his voice in the hall. Then she’d dart into that chair’ – Constance pointed to the armchair that held the slumbering Eugene – ‘and snatch up her sewing and smile as though she hadn’t a care in the world when he came in.’
I let my eyes wander over the drawing room which had been created at a high point of civilization, at the lovely old furniture, at the portraits of dead Macchuins – the Cosway and the Kneller particularly good – at the fine ceiling, at the yellow damask walls, pigeongrey in the shadows, and felt moved by something akin to love. Curraghcourt was my home in a way that Cutham had never been. I had work to do here. I could be useful. I could not imagine it as the background for a pacing figure, beset by fear in a turbulent world where observing a particular form of worship was enough to earn a bullet through the heart. The melancholy beauty of Ireland had got into my bones like the damp.
‘Constance, are you there?’ Father Deglan stood in the doorway, his greasy curls tumbled about his brow, excitement manifest in every feature. ‘Have you heard it yet? I met Thady O’Kelly on the road; he says it’s all over the wireless. So I turned round at once and came back, thinking maybe Finn would be on the telephone with the news from Dublin.’
‘What is it? What’s happened?’ Constance looked bemused.
‘Our boys have surpassed themselves, that’s all. Not thirty miles away up the coast they’ve blown up Earl Mountbatten!’
THIRTY-SIX
At breakfast we were disinclined to talk much at first. We had listened to the early news bulletin on Maud’s wireless, which did not tell us much more than Father Deglan had heard from Thady O’Kelly the evening before. An old man, an old woman and two fourteen-year-old boys had died when their fishing boat had been blown up in the bay of Mullaghmore. The IRA had claimed responsibility. Of course Lord Mountbatten had not been just any old man but an instrument of British imperialism and a member of the royal family. But I felt, as I’m sure Constance did, for the man himself, for the violence of his death and for the grief of those who had loved him.
‘Those poor children.’ Constance was the first to speak as she contemplated her untouched egg with wet eyes. ‘Innocent young lives. Oh, it was cruel!’
‘Cruel?’ said Maud who, having been disturbed at an unusually early hour, had broken the habit of years and come down to breakfast. ‘It was cowardly! Wicked! Disgraceful! In fact I can’t think of words bad enough to describe it. This country groans and whines and licks its centuries’ old wounds in public but in private it’s sly, sneaking and vicious!’
‘It was unfortun
ate about the boys.’ Eugene crumbled his slice of toast and blinked mournfully. ‘I’m afraid it will make us rather unpopular.’
‘Do you think they felt … anything?’ Flavia’s book lay closed by her plate. She looked green. The proximity of the deed made it all the more harrowing.
‘No, darling,’ Constance said at once. ‘It would have been very quick. They wouldn’t have had time to register pain.’
‘Why should those boys have been killed?’ persisted Flavia. ‘How can it be part of God’s plan? Father Deglan said that the mighty had been cast from their thrones. But those boys weren’t mighty, were they? One of them was the son of a fisherman.’
‘Don’t forget, darling, they’re in heaven now’ – Constance paused in the process of cutting the rind from Eugene’s bacon to smile tremulously at her niece – ‘where it doesn’t matter a bit what race or religion you are and they’re much, much happier than they could ever have been on earth had they lived to be ninety.’
‘Tchah!’ Maud pushed away her plate of food untouched. ‘It’s no good that fool of a priest trying to make it into an act of national heroism. It was cold-blooded murder, that’s all.’
‘Murder? Who’s murdered?’ Sissy came in just then. ‘If you mean those people up the coast, well, it’s war, isn’t it? What about all our boys shot by the British? The lads that were hanged after the Easter Rising? How many children was it died during the famine and none to help them?’
‘Ah, you remember the poem by Lady Wilde on that subject?’ Eugene smiled gently as he looked around the table.
‘Bread! Bread! Bread! and none to still their agonies.
We left our infants playing with their dead mother’s hand:
We left our maidens maddened—’
‘Please, Eugene.’ Constance looked stern. ‘After yesterday’s atrocity, I don’t think things that happened more than a hundred years ago—’
‘Why should we care because this lot were lords and ladies?’ interrupted Sissy. She glared at me defiantly from beneath her stiff black fringe, seeming oblivious to anything but the aggravation of my English presence. ‘Except it’ll make the British more sorry.’
‘I can’t listen to any more of this.’ Maud got up and hobbled out of the dining room.
‘I agree with you, Sissy,’ I said. ‘Class makes no difference at all. And if the IRA thought blowing up an earl would make the English suffer more, they were mistaken. We’re not particularly fond of our aristocracy. But the successful targeting of prominent people will make the British feel more vulnerable – and more determined to punish.’
Sissy raised her right hand. ‘“These Protestant robbers and brutes, these unbelievers of our faith, will be driven like the swine they are into the sea by fire, the knife or by the poison cup until we of the Catholic Faith and avowed supporters of all Sinn Fein action clear these heretics from our land.” That’s the oath of allegiance to Sinn Fein. And we mean every word.’
But for the mood of gloom created by the tragic event of the previous day I would have been amused by this dramatic formulation which sounded like the kind of thing we made up when playing Robin Hood in the shrubbery as children.
Sissy put her face close to mine. ‘That’s three less of them.’ She held up the appropriate number of fingers. ‘That’s what.’
Her eyes were so close to mine that she squinted. For the first time I felt alarmed by her antagonism.
‘That’s enough, Sissy.’ Constance sprang up, looking furious. ‘I don’t want to hear another word of quarrelling and feuding in this house. No!’ She held up her finger threateningly as Sissy opened her mouth. ‘I mean it! Not another word, from you or anyone else on the subject of war or religion. Let us all try to behave like Christians, at any rate!’
‘I don’t remember seeing you angry before.’ Eugene stopped eating to look at her while egg yolk dripped from his fork on to his plate.
‘O Deirdré, terrible child,
For thee, red star of our ruin,
Great weeping shall be in Erin—’
Constance clapped her hands over her ears. ‘I think I’m going mad.’ She rushed from the room.
Eugene turned puzzled eyes to me. ‘What did I say?’
‘I hope it hasn’t made you hate us.’
Constance and I were in the kitchen, preparing lunch. We had just been told by the boy who delivered the groceries from Dicky Dooley’s shop that the IRA had blown up eighteen British soldiers at Warrenpoint only hours after the murder of Mountbatten and his family.
‘Not hate, no. I do feel sad. It’s awful to imagine the grief of all those families. Poor young men. What did they ever do to deserve it? They probably went into the army to have adventures or to get away from home. I am angry, I have to admit, but I also feel guilty. The more I learn about Irish history the more ashamed I feel of the way the British have behaved in the past.’
‘You feel guilty? I can tell you, I feel as though my hands are dripping with gore. I wish I could stop thinking about it. I get a horrid pain in the pit of my stomach whenever I think of those boys …’
‘Don’t, Constance.’ I looked up from the lettuce I was washing. ‘We know neither of us would do such a thing to our worst enemies, no matter what the provocation. I don’t believe it’s anything to do with nationalism. It’s everything to do with people feeling angry about themselves, about their disappointments and failures and weaknesses. And it says something about men. They enjoy being violent, that’s all. Fighting and killing is much more fun than hard work.’
I plunged my hands into the water and swooshed the lettuce about furiously. Because of the rain every crinkle of every leaf was choked with mud. It was our first real crop after the handful of radishes the flea beetles had left us.
‘There are female terrorists,’ said Constance.
‘Yes, but how many have been implicated in shootings and bombings? Perhaps one in fifty? If that?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Constance was chopping the lettuces that had bolted and were too bitter to be eaten as salad into a saucepan to make soup au père tranquille for dinner. ‘But for all we know there may be thousands of wives and mothers and daughters egging the men on. You know, Bobbie, I can’t share your prejudice against men. Think of Eugene and Finn and Flurry.’
‘Flurry’s not a man yet. But I agree with you, he’s entirely lovable at the moment and it’s impossible to imagine him as a selfish brute.’
‘Would you say Finn was selfish? Or brutal?’
‘No, not brutal, of course not. Anyway, he’s your brother. I wouldn’t accuse him of brutality and selfishness to your face even if I could justify it.’
‘I know you think he ought to be here doing his share of the work. You needn’t deny it. I know you too well. But he does so much good as a senator. Besides, we need his salary.’
‘If I’m prejudiced against men I’m even more so about politicians and their usefulness, but I expect you’re right.’ I decided to change the subject in case I was required to give Eugene a character reference. ‘Isn’t it annoying about the lettuces bolting? I’ve consulted the book and it says it’s because they were transplanted later than April.’
‘And Finn’s been so generous to Eugene,’ Constance persisted.
‘Mm. Yes.’ I had to admit that many men would have been annoyed to find a guest invited for dinner still there nearly a year later. Whether this was generosity or inertia I was not prepared to say.
‘And think how good he’s been to Violet and Maud.’
It was true that to Maud, not the easiest of mothers-in-law, Finn was unfailingly courteous and that before he left for Dublin he had given us carte blanche from what I knew were limited resources to buy for Violet whatever we thought might improve her lot. But there had been those years of neglect before. A man ought to be good to his wife without anyone thinking he deserved praise. And there was his mistress, possibly now ex-, but still beneath the same roof as his invalid wife. I realized that Constance could
cite the presence in the house of Sissy, a penniless refugee from the harsh world of vaudeville, as yet another instance of his open-handedness. Constance was naturally inclined to take her brother’s part. And I … well, I had to admit that Constance was right: my view of men had become jaundiced.
‘And there’s Kit,’ Constance went on. ‘Surely you can’t hold anything against him? He’s the perfect English gentleman. Well mannered, well educated, charming – and he adores you.’
Having dried the leaves in a tea towel I began to tear them into small pieces. ‘Aren’t you exaggerating?’
‘It’s obvious from the way he looks at you. Also – don’t be annoyed – we had a little talk.’
I stopped tearing. ‘What about?’
‘There! I ought to have known better than to tell you. Now you’re cross.’
‘I’m not. What did he say?’
‘Not much, honestly. Just that you’ve had a hard time from the press – of course I knew that anyway – and that that man, Burgo Whatshisname, treated you very badly. He thinks you need protecting. He’s worried that you might react by starting another affair on the rebound that would be equally disastrous.’
‘Is he indeed!’ I felt my face grow warm with indignation. ‘Listen, Constance, I got what I deserved. Burgo made no secret of the fact that he was married. I knew it before I allowed myself to fall in love with him. Contrary to popular mythology it’s a voluntary state, I think. Anyway, I’d seen enough of the world to be certain that an affair with a married man invites more kicks than ha’pence. But I was bored and miserable and I told myself that this was different. Of course it wasn’t. I admit it made me unhappy but it’s over now and I’m quite all right. I don’t need to be treated like a green-sick girl who’s been jilted by an unscrupulous villain. Don’t tell me he thinks I’m going to run away with Michael McOstrich? Though it would be none of his business if I did!’
Moonshine Page 52
