He ate with relish the thick bread with the butter stabbed on it in Annie’s own style. ‘How,’ he said, ‘did it start? Was she alone? ‒ did she call?’
I waited for Connor. He thrust his hands into his pockets and turned back from the window, where he had been peering into the darkness as if he were waiting for the first of the dawn to outline the mass of trees against the sky, for the first twitter of a bird.
‘I had just come in,’ he said. ‘I was passing her door and I heard her cry out. She was out of bed. She had collapsed when I reached her.’
It was very smooth lying. He had shaken me out of sleep, so he had assumed I had never woken, never heard their voices raised in argument. And he could trust Lady Maude’s pride not to admit a quarrel to an outsider, even her doctor. I wondered how often he lied in this accomplished style; I wondered why he lied. I wondered why Annie had said ‘Has he killed her after all?’
The doctor was nodding his head. ‘Well, it’s to be understood. If it was going to happen, this would have been the time.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘You, Miss D’Arcy ‒ you. Maude Sheridan has been without close family for so long, and then, suddenly, out of the blue, here you are. To say the least of it, it would have been a shock.’
How did he know it had been out of the blue? ‒ how did he know the visit hadn’t been planned? But Otto Praeger had told me that it would be this way; that in a small place like this, people would know more than I could believe possible for them to know. I would have to remember it.
He continued to eat the bread and butter, folding it over on itself, and between bites he wrote prescriptions and special sick-room articles that were to be got. ‘Annie can stay with her for now,’ he said, ‘but of course she’ll have to be spelled. I’ll have to get someone competent who can bathe her, and so on.’ He looked up from the pad at me. ‘You’ll be staying, of course. You could be a help ‒ there’s a special diet she’ll have to follow and you’ll have to see that she gets it.’
I didn’t say anything. Connor’s eyes were on me closely as I nodded agreement. It didn’t have to bind me; I could go any time I really wanted to go. That was what I told myself.
The first light was coming strongly when we went with the doctor to the front door. It had rained a little, and the morning was chill. ‘I’ll be back about eleven,’ the doctor said as he put on his hat. As he was about to start down the steps he suddenly stopped and turned back to me.
‘It’s a good thing you’ve come back ‒ even if it is late. I used to know Mrs. ‒ your mother.’ He had almost said Mrs. Findlay.
I watched as he and Connor went down to the car, and Connor opened the door for him, and stowed his bag. He was the only one who had given me even half a welcome to this house, who had spoken of Blanche as if she had had some identity; and I couldn’t even remember what his name was.
Connor came up the stairs slowly; he looked dishevelled and bone weary. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said. It was not indifferently or callously spoken, but just as if he were too tired to feel any reaction. And then, ‘I’m starved. Do you think there’s anything fit to eat in the house?’
‘We could try,’ I didn’t know quite how to take it ‒ as a gesture of friendliness, as recognition that I would be staying a while or simply the need of a man for food and someone to talk to as a release from strain. I began to make my way back towards the dining-room.
‘Just a moment ‒ I’ll get that brandy Lady Maude didn’t need. If she couldn’t use it, I can. I expect you could, too.’ He came back from his office waving the bottle. ‘Half-full,’ he said, ‘and five star.’ On his way through the dining-room he collected two glasses from one of the sideboards; I picked up the board with the cheese and biscuits still on it. The signs of mice were around it. Connor pushed open the baize door with his shoulder and held it while I passed. ‘Switch is there on your right ‒ can you manage it?’
The light revealed a strange sight. The room, which on one side of the door could once have been a large butler’s pantry, and on the other perhaps a storage room, had been ripped apart, revealing the bare brick walls and dangling electrical connections. In the empty space in the middle were a number of large crates marked with manufacturers’ names ‒ a refrigerator, stove, dishwasher; a double stainless steel sink lay on its side; the floor was strewn with copper pipe.
‘What …?’
‘What was once to be,’ Connor said, shrugging. ‘And never will be. This way.’
He thrust open another door and once again directed me to the switch. This time it was the kitchen I had expected, enormous, flag-stoned, grimly old-fashioned save for the startling newness of a gas cooker and an Ascot water heater above a battered sink and draining board that would have been installed before the turn of the century. There was also an Aga cooker which was lighted, making this the most comfortable room I had been in at Meremount. A steep staircase rose against the far wall; high wooden dressers were stacked with china; a single light over the sink thrust the corners into deep shadow. Connor put the glasses and bottle on the big bare table. ‘The food’s kept out in the scullery ‒ natural refrigeration, Lady Maude says. It’s also a picnic ground for the mice. I advise you to have a nip for courage before we try our luck.’
He held a beautifully cut brandy goblet towards me, a third full. The light caught the rich amber of the liquid, the facets of the glass refracted it. My hand closed over it gratefully. ‘It looks good ‒ it tastes better,’ I said.
He took a second drink. ‘It’s about the only thing that will be good for a long time, I’m afraid.’ He lowered the glass. ‘It’s impossible, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘All of this. This whole bloody situation ‒ the old lady being ill, this terrible house ‒ your being caught here like this.’ His gesture, expansive, despairing, included it all. ‘It isn’t fair to expect you to stay and even try to cope. It isn’t your problem. It never was. But still …’ He took another sip and didn’t seem likely to finish what he had begun.
‘Still what?’
‘Nothing. I won’t try to persuade you. We’ll get extra help ‒ they’ll always come if you pay them enough, and this time we just have to have it. Dr. Donnelly will find a nurse. Someone will do it for his sake, if not for Lady Maude’s ‒ Jim’s a very decent sort. We’ll manage …’
Was he trying to let me out easily? ‒ to make me feel that I could escape all this with no blame attached to me? Last evening, in the office, he had said that he hoped for both our sakes I would go; he had been direct and blunt, and I had believed him honest. I had trusted him, then, but I didn’t any longer. I was riding the see-saw of his alternating friendliness and hostility, the disarming honesty, then the smooth lies. I turned away from the appeal of his masculinity, from the kind of weary sadness that urged me to help him, to ease the burden for him. But he was also saying that he would not blame me if I refused this task. If it was feigned, it was a devilishly subtle performance. So I turned quickly from the folly of allowing myself to like, to be attracted, where I could not trust ‘We’ll see,’ was all I said.
The scullery was what the kitchen had foretold ‒ damp, with splintered wooden shelves where dishes and crocks of food were sparsely arranged. The sinks obviously were no longer used. There were rows of heavy iron and copper pots stacked on the high shelves, unused, I guessed, in the last twenty years. The selection at hand was cheap aluminium and enamel, battered and chipped.
‘Annie does her best, to give her her due,’ Connor said, as if he knew my thoughts. ‘But she was never trained as a cook. She just sort of fell into that when no other help would stay. We try to get help from Cloncath and Fermoyle to do some cleaning, but they never last. Meremount has a bad name. Lady Maude of course, never notices what’s put in front of her, or the state of things in the house. To her, Meremount has always been temporary. Nothing matters here. After a while, everyone who comes into the house feels the same ‒ n
o one gives a damn.’
I was checking the contents of the shelves ‒ ham, dark and dried, eggs, bread, butter, cream, sausages. Last night’s leg of lamb sat there in its congealed fat; the sight of it reminded me of that meal, almost untasted, and my stomach was suddenly in an uproar of protest.
‘Quickly,’ I said ‘Let’s do some eggs and sausage before I get too weak from hunger to lift the pan. And look, these thin pans are no good. Will you reach me down some of those up there ‒ yes, that size.’
‘It’s full of dust,’ he said, surprised, but bringing it down all the same. ‘No one ever uses them.’
‘More’s the pity. They’ll clean ‒ and that one, too, the copper one.’ I gloated over the array. ‘There’s a chef’s treasure in copper pans here. My mother would have loved …’ I didn’t need to finish.
We carried what I had selected into the kitchen and laid it out on the table. Connor slipped off his coat. ‘I’ll clean the pans,’ he said. I nodded, and began to search for whisk and bowls and chopping knives; they were all found eventually, most of them with the appearance of not having been used for a long time. I began to sense what had happened over the years of serving one old woman who didn’t care what she ate, of cooking in a house where the horizons shrank constantly, where no sign of appreciation or satisfaction from beyond the baize door helped those on this side of it to fight the crumbling kitchen. The menus had eroded down to the same few dishes, endlessly, carelessly repeated; the simple, good, abundant food was extravagantly misused to create no taste other than the taste of defeat.
I looked across at Connor, who was wiping the pans with a torn grey cloth. ‘Is there a kitchen garden? Would there be a scrap of parsley …?’
‘I’ll look. There used to be a wonderful herb garden out there, but it’s ‒’ He gestured. ‘It’s like everything else at Meremount.’
He returned, his jacket and hair beaded with rain, clutching a mixed bunch of herbs he had cut at random with a kitchen knife. They were the product of wild overgrowth, coarse, run to seed ‒ parsley, mint, rosemary, thyme. He offered them to me like a bouquet. ‘I don’t know how they’ve survived, but here they are.’ He seemed touchingly anxious that I should be pleased with his garnering.
They smelled of rain and damp earth and the country in spring time. I held them under my nose and thought of how Blanche had loved the smell of herbs ‒ the shallots and garlic that seasoned her dishes, the parsley and thyme and chives that grew in pots on the windowsill of the flat above the traffic of the King’s Road, not fragrant of the country and a rainy morning as this was, but still something to which she must have clung as part of this vanished scene.
‘You know, he said, ‘you’re a very unexpected girl, Maura.’
I raised my head from the herbs. ‘What do you mean?’
‘A contradiction. As modern as your short skirts and yet full of little grace notes as old-fashioned as those herbs and the copper pots.’
I laid down the bouquet. ‘Will you do the toast? I’m almost ready to do the eggs.’
He had a dangerous charm, on the surface so ingenuous that one thought he couldn’t be aware of it, and yet used so skilfully that it had to be calculated. I had to keep remembering that he had been married to Otto Praeger’s daughter, and the daughter of such a man could never have been a simpleton, could never have succumbed to mere good looks. Connor Sheridan troubled and fascinated me ‒ and I would find out what Annie’s words had meant. Over and over I heard those words: ‘Has he killed her after all?’
Cognac at five o’clock in the morning is very potent; Irish cream is rich, eggs are abundant, and Irish sausages are stuffed with real meat. Connor pushed back his chair, stretched, and sighed luxuriously. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever really tasted scrambled eggs before ‒ or you’ve some kind of magic in your hands.’
‘Let’s just say it’s magic, and leave it at that,’ I answered sleepily. Even the coffee hadn’t tasted too bad, considering the state of the coffee-pot and the doubtful age of the grounds. Or maybe it was the brandy ‒ I had let my mistrust of him slip, had put it aside, had left examination of it for another time when my senses would be sharper. I had let myself talk ‒ haphazardly, a bit here and a bit there, about modelling and Claude, about the King’s Road, Blanche’s cooking, even, foolishly, I suppose, a little about Lloyd Justin. What one says over cognac and scrambled eggs in the first hours of the dawn may be too much, but I managed to close my lips on the confession of the letter written in those far-off hours before sleep.
‘Do you think you’ll like California then? All that sun and those swimming-pools and the smog?’ He was only half-joking; I had to remember that he had once responded to the lure of the break from all that was old and stale in Europe; it had not been what he hoped, but he did know the pull, the nagging discontent that sometimes attacked.
‘I didn’t say I was going.’
‘You haven’t said you’re in love with him either.’
‘Love? ‒ no, I didn’t say that, did I?’
‘Is it love ye’re after discussing, then?’
Annie had come down by the back stairs, and she paused midway, the long clumsy robe and wild red hair standing out from her head fashioning her into some sort of untidy recording angel to remind us of what we had momentarily slipped away from, to remind us of the old woman upstairs and the hostility and unhappiness of the night before. Her eyes swept the table with the beautiful Sheridan goblets, the cognac, the cracked kitchen crockery. I was at once aware of what she saw beyond that ‒ that I wasn’t dressed and that Connor was a man of powerful and unusual charm.
‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘Mr. Connor’s the man to be discussin’ it with. He’ll be something of a past-master at it, won’t you now, Mr. Connor?’
The morning fell flat upon us, grey, rain-laden. I rose. ‘I’ll do the dishes before I go up, Annie.’
Six
All day it rained a sodden, sad rain that had no wildness in it, no fury; all day I listened to it, listened as an occasional gust of wind sent it splattering lightly against the window panes, listened to the mournful, steady drip from the eaves. It was the only thing that was constant in that day. The house thrummed with an unaccustomed movement and the sound of voices, voices that strove to keep themselves low, but kept breaking into excited orders and counter-orders; there was the confusion of a house stirring and peopled after a long silence.
First there came Annie’s second cousin, Bridget, from Cloncath. ‘She’ll stay and help for a bit, Mr. Connor. Her legs are young and she can carry trays and answer the nurse’s bell.’ Bridget was a plump young girl, red-cheeked, her fine-complexioned face innocent of make-up; red hair ran in the family.
Then there was the nurse. ‘I’m Mrs. O’Shea, and I’m only doing this for Dr. Donnelly. Everyone knows what it’s like to work for the Auld Lady.’
‘She’s ill, Mrs. O’Shea,’ I answered, as gently as I could. ‘There’s not much she can do except what she’s told.’
‘And haven’t I had plenty that were ill and still wouldn’t take a sup or a bit but what they fancied? ‒ and wound up dead for their trouble? But still, she’s a patient, and not many of them have got the better of Molly O’Shea yet.’ She talked all the way up the stairs as Michael Sweeney carried her bag, his ears wide for her comments and my answers.
‘Mother of God, will you look at all the stuff that’s here? And all of it auld things you wouldn’t be caught dead with. Enough to furnish a hotel they always say in town …’
‘Aye, or a castle,’ Michael put in. ‘And most of it too grand for a cottage, Molly O’Shea.’ He bristled with a kind of defensive pride in what, until this moment, he had regarded in the same light as the nurse did; it had been something that he and Jim Duffy, the other farm worker, had to move about the house at Lady Maude’s whim, to make room for more. Now it was something that belonged to the family, suddenly his family. I sensed in him the fear that had struck everyone in the house when the news of t
he old lady’s illness had reached them, the fear and nostalgia that the end of an era had come; they didn’t like what they had now, but they liked the thought of change even less …
In her room Mrs. O’Shea looked about her with open scorn. ‘Well, I never thought I’d see the day I’d be sleeping in an auction room.’ Her competent, managing hands touched the dusty lace bedspread that was slowly falling into tatters. ‘And I never thought I’d see on a bed that belonged to a Tyrell a thing that Molly O’Shea would have thrown out donkey’s years ago. Well, I’ll see my patient now.’
She lingered, though, in the big, old-fashioned bathroom that must once have been a dressing-room and which connected both with her room and Lady Maude’s. ‘Well, it’s close at hand, though I’d not give it marks for comfort. At least there’s a fire ‒ that’s something.’ The gas fire was new, and it had been a hasty addition; there were crude holes torn in the panelling to permit the gas pipe to come through.
Mrs. O’Shea touched my arm, a gesture of inquisitive sympathy I didn’t like. ‘I hear your poor mother’s dead ‒ God rest her soul. Sure none of us ever expected to hear of her again ‒ someone said she died years ago. Not that anyone would ever know from Lady Maude. So close-lipped no one ever knew even the name of the man … Ah, well, you’re back, and I’m sure it’s a grand thing for the Auld Lady to be having her own kin about her now, though I’d take a bet on it it was a terrible shock for Mr. Sheridan, and he expecting …’
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