Colonfay

by O'Grady, Myles;

  “You never got on with him. Of course you didn’t. He wasn’t an easy man to get on with at the best of times. And after the war he was frozen inside himself. He didn’t have anything to give you except how to ride and how to fish and how to read. He gave you that. And the genes. It’s a pity you never bothered to know him. If you had, you’d know his life was blighted by what happened in Flanders.”

  Dermot insisted, “What happened is what I’m trying to find out. A lot of people went through the same thing and came out of the black tunnel at the end. Even the ones who were crippled for life. And he did recover, more or less.”

  “You’re a hard man. Like him, unforgiving. He wasn’t sorry for himself at all. He didn’t want your sympathy. He just wanted to be left alone in his—sadness? melancholy? anguish? loneliness? I don’t know.”

  “But you do know more than you’re telling, Paddy.”

  “Yes. Perhaps, Dermot.”

  “Well?”

  “Go back a bit. He grew up with the Yuill boys, Bertie and Vere, Lord Duncannon, and their sisters, Lady Irene Congreve and Lady Gweneth Yuill. He was almost an adopted son of the Earl and Countess of Bessborough. Your maternal grandfather, after all, was his Agent, after he lost most of his property. Mike stayed with them in London, when he was at Stonyhurst, and that gave him an English slant on things too.

  He hunted with them. He raced point-to-point against them and the Beresfords at Curraghmore. His best friend before the war was Norman Leslie who practically lived at the Big House. He spent weeks of his holidays with the Greers at the National Stud. He joined the 12th Lancers and went to France when most of them went with the Irish Guards. Look at what happened.

  Eric Greer, twenty five, a colonel commanding a Battalion of the Irish Guards, and his brother, both killed in 1917, the same battle as your father got his gassing. Norman Leslie killed at Mons in 1914. Lord De Freyne and his brother George both killed the same day in 1915, and buried in the same grave. Dermot Browne, Robert Gregory of Coole, Basil Blackburn, John Hamilton and Eddie Stafford-Harman, killed the same day. Peter Connellan, at Armentières in ‘14. James Brooke, Maurice Dease. All his friends.”

  Paddy paused.

  “And Archie Yuill, the next in line in the Yuill baronetcy. Who would inherit the earth. The sun around which the entire Kilkenny hunting universe revolved. Loved by everybody. A natural leader.

  Your father came back to an empty world. A wreck of a man and probably thinking he had no right to be back.”

  He stood up and started to walk around the room, picking up books and pictures and putting them back down again, obviously agitated. He relit his pipe and finally seemed to make a decision. He sat down and looked at me as if deciding whether to go on or not.

  “You can’t stop now,” Dermot challened him.

  “We’ll see. Let me come at it in my own way again. What I’m saying—all right, all right, I’m repeating myself—is he was not the holy terror that went off in 1914, that’s a fact. Everybody remembered him as harum scarum. And fun. And outgoing. And here’s this bundle of misery casting a curtain of gloom on everthing. And it wasn’t the wounds.”

  “What was it, Paddy?”

  “Now hold your horses. I’m trying to give you the picture and put it in proper focus for myself as well. Ease off.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Not at all. Patience isn’t one of your family’s trademarks. But I have to get it right.”

  They were sitting by the fireplace of the farmhouse at The Paddock. It used to be the Home Farm. It was familiar. Dermot expected Mrs. Harrington to come in with a big round of home-made bread. The kitchen was modern now but the great fireplace remained. Paddy Harrington was born there. He too grew up with Dermot’s father and his aunts. But he had to work on the farm and he was lucky to get a scholarship to St. Kieran’s College in Kilkenny and afterwards he went to Maynooth. But there was something out of gear with him and his confessor decided that the lusts of the flesh were too much for him. Instead of taking the cloth he wound up a classics master at Blackrock with the Jesuits.

  Something happened over a boy and he became a literary editor of the Irish Times, writing poetry and hitting the bottle. He still was writing the odd script for Irish radio. His own sister, Edith, had been the best horsewoman in the county, and rode at every Meet.

  Paddy took up where he left off. “Listen, you left here when you were ten, I think. Didn’t I take you to Fiddown myself? So you should know the background a bit. Nothing was clear in Ireland in 1918. All I’m saying is he was a changed man and it wasn’t the wounds that did it. There was a deeper wound.”

  Dermot complained, “But the gas didn’t do him much good. After all, he got a one-hundred percent disability pension. He must have been nearly dead. And they gave him a medal.”

  “Ah, you’re right, of course. He was a wreck physically, with his lungs shrivelled up by that mustard gas, burning him all the time, and coughing and wheezing like the Rosslare Express. I’m not saying he wasn’t affected by it. Of course he was.

  “The medal? Yes, he got an MC on the Somme. Military Cross. He wouldn’t talk about it. Except once. He was ashamed of it. When he was well gone one night and someone kept at him about it, he put his drink down and pounded the table and he looked at the man and he said, “They handed them out with the rations. So many per unit. MCs for most people and DSOs, Distinguished Service Orders, for a few. The higher the rank, the more decorations. The more men you killed, the higher the honor. Look at Butcher Gough over there in Tipperary. General Sir Hubert Gough, KCB, Knight Commander of the Bath, MC, DSO and two bars. Sent back in disgrace from Ypres. He didn’t kill enough of our chaps that time.

  “And don’t forget all our other Ascendancy heroes. We supply the generals. Field Marshal Sir John French, our new Viceroy, he killed enough of us until they pulled him out as a Commander in Chief who despite his own name couldn’t even talk to the French. They covered him with medals and orders and gave him fifty thousand pounds to put in his hip pocket and the thanks of a grateful King for making such a cock-up of it. Sir Henry Wilson, Sir Stanley Maude, well, he was at Gallipoli, Sir Bryan Mahon, and all the others who are now back on their Irish estates. For a while.

  “Here’s how it happened, once and for all. I was cowering in a trench until the barrage ended. I was shit scared. Our own barrage, supposed to creep up in front of us. Expect six percent casualties from our guns, General Rawlinson said. I’d moved a platoon into the middle of noman’s land to have a head start when the balloon went up. I was bloody sure no one would make it to the German front line from our own. We had eight fifteen-inch naval guns for a front of twenty eight miles. You’d think they’d find a target away from me.

  “One landed too close and blew in the trench. I dug myself out of it through the mud and was lucky enough to find a hole and a body to stand on. His guts came out when I put my weight on his back. I cursed him. I climbed out and straightened up, to see if I could.

  “I was stunned. I was covered in mud. When I stood up, not thinking, I was in a daze, and suddenly there were these seven jerries, right in front of me. I still had my revolver in my hand and I was just thinking to throw it down, I was so tired, when they put up their hands and shouted ‘Kamarad’. They thought I was the Angel of Mons rising from the earth, with a full regiment about to surface around them.

  “And I just had the wit to drive them back. You have to understand something. They weren’t all dedicated killers. They were a Bavarian Reserve Regiment. They’d had a million shells thrown at them in the past few hours.

  “The bloody things didn’t go off, a third of them, and they didn’t cut the wire the way they were supposed to for General Rawlinson. ‘Don’t worry, chaps,’ says he, ‘There’ll be no Germans around when you walk into their positions.’

  “That’s all there was to it. Seven jerries equals one Military Cross for your hero. A split second later and they’d have had me in the bag. The Second in Command, shittin
g himself and leading from the rear, got a bar to his DSO, and Haig got a count of seven Bavarian pioneers to offset against fifty seven thousand front line troops he threw away that day.

  “For days we were collecting the wounded from mud, sliding them back on ground-sheets. Some of them drowned when we left them lying in trenches waiting for orderlies to take them back. And the jerries let us collect them from noman’s land, and helped us. I tell you, there were no willing heroes. Except the dead. Now that’s the last time I want to hear about it. It doesn’t matter a fuck who won the war. It could have been stopped in ’16. But the glory boys wanted a victory. Four hundred thousand British corpses on the Somme and another four hundred thousand at Passchendaele for nothing. Everything else is a lie.”

  Dermot said, quietly, “I suppose it was quite a speech at the time. Not too well known then but it’s all old hat now.”

  “Yes, everyone knows everything except what it’s like. The price of everything and the value of nothing.”

  Dermot asked, “Did he say anything else about the war? I only remember finding his medals one day and playing with them before my mother took them away. Mons Star and two or three others.”

  “Not much but what he did was explosive, too, to coin a phrase. But I would ask you to remember that he was going through another hell. His hair all fell out. It came back later. I’m wondering if it wasn’t an effect like chemotherapy, the poison might be the same base. He couldn’t sleep at night. He’d walk the roads and the woods. He told me one day the scream of the vixen was the most frightening thing he’d ever heard, worse than the screams from the wounded on the barbed wire. He stayed well away from everyone. Like a bear with a sore ear. He took to the bottle and he sat in the corner of Anthony’s bar not talking to anyone.”

  “What snapped him out of it, Paddy?”

  “Arrah, yer a great fella for simple answers to complex questions. You’re not at all Irish. Sure, we like to take our time and talk around it. You know the old one about how do you get to Waterford and the answer that you can’t start from here; you have to go to Carrick-on-Suir first, but sure the road’s grand. That’s the way we are. I thought you said you were a wordsmith? Ease off a bit and I’ll be after telling you.”

  He was playing the stage Irishman. Obviously, he wanted time to phrase it delicately. For a man who had taken all the prizes in Greek and Latin at Maynooth, he was laying it on with a trowel. Dermot stood up and poured himself another cup of the black tea.

  “Take your time, Paddy,” he said. “I don’t have to be back in London till Wednesday.”

  “A party at Mount Juliet, that’s what broke the spell. That and a little incident at Knocktopher when the I.R.A., nearly shot him. There was what you’d call a big fallout from it, and you’re part of it yourself.

  “The first meet of the Bessborough Hounds was on Boxing Day 1919, just before the so-called war of independence. Everyone who was left alive was out. There were a lot of gaps in the ranks. It was quite an event. Fasten your seatbelt and put on your earphones and watch the big screen. Don’t blame me if you don’t like the scenario. I’m thinking of it as a script for Irish Television, so I’ll tell it that way. It’s a reconstruction of events as I heard them from the lady in question and a few others who were at the party. Brendan MacMahon and Gerry Redmond saw most of the action.

  Let us fade in on the crossroads at the Main Gates of Bessborough House. Horses held by grooms are prancing about, snorting steam in the cold weather. Huntsmen in pink are standing around drinking their ‘stirrup cups.’ Some are mounted. There are quite a few locals watching the scene. They would follow the hunt on foot as far as possible.

  There’s the sound of hounds braying, hooves stamping, shouts of grooms, and a sudden cheer.

  Let us jump on the title: The Young Master is Missing.

  Then we cut to a Rolls Royce that has just arrived. The chauffeur opens the door and out steps Lady McConnell, Letecia, known to intimates as ‘Lally,’ of Mount Juliet.

  She is a woman of about thirty, immensely tall; golden-haired, statuesque, and commanding would describe her. A crowd gathers around her and her laugh can be heard above the other sounds of the meet. The chauffeur then opens the boot and we see that it is a well-stocked bar. The Master and other officials and friends join her in drinking. The grooms are invited to participate.

  A big chestnut is led up to her and she is given a leg up to sit sidesaddle. Her glass is handed up to her and she toasts the assembled crowd. In her black, divided, full-length riding habit, bowler hat, and white silk cravat, a tall figure on a tall mount, with her head thrown back in laughter, she is a presence. A devil-may-care.

  Now let us cut to a long shot of a rider approaching down the Long Walk … it is Mike McManus. He is walking his horse slowly, timing his arrival for the departure of the hunt. Lady Lally sees him and gallops off to meet him. She turns her horse to join him and leans across to kiss him exuberantly.

  Let’s hear the sound of a hunter’s horn.

  She slaps his horse on the rump and takes off, leading the field at a lively pace.

  Now, here we see two horses grazing by a style. Two riders are sitting side by side on it. They are Lady McConnell and your father, Mike.

  L.M: Welcome back, Mike. I missed you.

  M.M: You didn’t miss much.

  L.M: Still feeling sorry for yourself. Stop it. Bill’s due back this week with one leg and half his face burned off. He’ll never ride again. And here’s you still spluttering a bit but otherwise sound in wind and limb. I hope. When are you going to prove it to me? Tonight? We’ll have our first postwar thrash.

  M.M: I’m not up to it, Lally.

  L.M: If you don’t use it you lose it. I’ll expect you this evening.

  She leans over and grabs an intimate part of his anatomy. Next we see a rollicking dinner party, everyone merry and not quite sober. Lady McConnell stands to propose a toast.

  L.M: We have an old friend back. I’d like to propose a toast of welcome to Mike and his to his rapid recovery. Especially that.

  Much laughter and a chorus of—To Mike! Speech, speech!

  Lady McConnell dashes down the table and hoists him to his feet because he is obviously on the point of bolting. All escape routes are blocked.

  M.M: Bad cess to ye all. Can’t you leave a man in peace? But thanks. We have a smaller table than before and a lot of absent guests. If you’ll allow me to I’d like to propose a toast to them. To Maurice, and Richard, and Basil, and—he stops almost unable to continue—Norman and Dermot and Peter and Eddie and all the other absent friends.

  A voice at the end of the table said: You forgot the Young Master, Archie, Mike.

  MM paused and then said, quietly: No, I didn’t. Not by a long chalk.

  After another long pause, ambiguously: Not for a moment.

  He sits. There is an embarrassed silence before the table becomes animated again.

  Now let us cut to the bedroom. It’s morning. We see Lally and Mike, in a state of undress, lying on the bed. There’s the remains of breakfast on a tray. She is stroking a long scar on the inside of his thigh.

  L.M: Another few inches and you’d be a gelding.

  M.M: I’m beginning to think that would have been a pity.

  She looks closely at the wound scar and then bends.

  Now let us return to the respectable drawing room. They are both properly dressed

  L.M: What was all that about Archie last night? Everyone was shocked. We thought he was one of your best friends. Same regiment and everything. Together on the Somme, weren’t you? Were you near him when he was killed?

  M.M: I shot him.

  So, let us freeze on the horrified face of Lady McConnell.

  And so, son of Mike, we fade out.

  Dermot said, “Whew!”

  Paddy asked, sarcastically, “Well, will you give me a job writing film scripts? Or are they not dramatic enough for you?”

  He stood and staggered a bit as he we
nt to the table and poured another stiff drink.

  “Too dramatic, Paddy. Unbelievable. To be honest I find it all a little corny and, if you’II forgive me, sentimental. Slushy.”

  “Maybe so, but I think it’s the gospel truth. I told you you might not like the scenario.”

  “How do know it’s the gospel truth? Man murders baronet in front line trench, sounds slightly imaginative to me.”

  “Not murders, Dermot. Executes. This is a semantic point which exercises us a lot in Holy Ireland these days and evermore.”

  “Elucidate, Professor.”

  That’s what Paddy told Dermot. The narrative was his father killed Archie Yuill to save him from the ignominy of a court martial and being shot by a firing squad as a coward. He did it to save the family. But he couldn’t live with it afterwards. And he was cast out of the group.

  Suddenly, Dermot remembered. He went cold. His voice cracked as he talked.

  “Yes, it was a nice try, Paddy. But there’s another possible scenario. He was ordered out of the dugout. He was in a funk. He refused to go. Yuill threatened him with a court martial. He shot Yuill. Then, in a panic, he climbed out of the dugout and confronted the Bavarians. They surrendered. He took them back. He got an M.C. He said Yuill had been killed charging the Hun front line trench. Yuill was awarded the D.S.O., posthumously. Everyone came out smelling of roses. He was a coward and a murderer.

  Paddy was upset. He looked at the floor.

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “I remember when he was rolling drunk one day. He kept repeating, ‘He wanted to have me court-martialled.’

  I asked—Who?