Edge of Glass

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘No ‒ I haven’t seen it. Is it in the house?’

  ‘Ach ‒ I had forgotten. Lotti made her little museum at the works with the Sheridan glass collection. You will see it. Come, I hear O’Keefe with the tray.’

  He switched off the light and closed the door. ‘But there are many other valuable things at Meremount. You must have noticed.’

  ‘I keep falling over furniture,’ I said. ‘There’s so much of it there’s no place to stand back and really look.’

  ‘You must look. It is worth it. Ach, what a sale it would make at Christie’s! There are things that even Lady Maude has forgotten about ‒ Lotti used to tell me. She was not an expert, but she had seen enough to know.’

  ‘Where did it all come from?’

  ‘I am told Lady Maude began going to auctions very soon after she was married ‒ that was after Tyrell and its contents had been burned in the fire. You understand, Maude Tyrell would have had the best connections in Ireland among people who had houses full of beautiful things. Times were bad, and people were leaving ‒ the time of the Troubles, and then the depression years. Sometimes they sold off their best things privately ‒ for the money and for fear they also would be burned. She already knew the best things in many of the houses, and she could make her price before the auction …’

  ‘Aye, and pay dearly,’ O’Keefe said, chipping in with the assurance of a servant who knows his master’s weakness. Ireland was Praeger’s weakness, and any story that related to it. ‘Didn’t herself run poor Mr. Sheridan into debt many a time to buy some load of stuff they didn’t have use or room for? ‒ even back in those days when the poor man was alive. After he died she went on at a merry old jig, and wasn’t it the solicitors who had to get the money from the glassworks to pay for it. There wasn’t ever much money, but what there was she spent ‒ and more.’

  ‘Her mania,’ Praeger said, with surprising gentleness. ‘Everyone has their little madness.’

  ‘Aye, and that’s the truth of it, sir,’ O’Keefe acknowledged. ‘With some it does be the horses, and with others the drink. But the Tyrells were always daft in a special way.’ And nodding, as if to urge us to eat, he left us.

  ‘But think of it,’ Praeger said, and his tone was wistful. ‘Almost fifty years she’s had of buying furniture and pictures and china ‒ at times when prices had to have been very low. She is like the investor who bought stock after the crash of ’29. There are a few minor masters among those pictures stacked against the walls which she doesn’t even recognise ‒ perhaps one or two that are more than minor. Strange things happen when a family who doesn’t know the value of what they have sells at country auction. Lady Maude’s eye is educated about furniture, but she is appallingly ignorant about market values. But then, she never thinks of reselling, so why should she care what it is worth?’

  I told him about the shop in King’s Road, and Blanche’s skill in buying. ‘How often,’ he said, ‘she must have thought of what was stored at Meremount …’

  I talked on, about Blanche, the shop, our lives, the personal dismay I had fallen into after her death. Finally I came to tell him of her own small collection of Sheridan Glass, and how Brendan had taken the Culloden Cup.

  His eyes widened over the story of the Cup, but he did not want to talk about Brendan. ‘You have been led here by a twist of glass,’ he said softly.

  Tea had been served in one of the rooms facing the lake. Today it was I who poured the tea, and he was free to make inroads on the large tray of sandwiches. It was a hard choice whether to look at the sunlight on the lake and the mass of azaleas beneath the windows, or to turn to the splurge of colour of a huge Hans Hofmann against the wall. ‘Take the sunshine,’ Praeger answered, when I said this to him. ‘In Ireland you must always take the sun when it offers; there are plenty of days when one would rather not look out the windows. Those are the days for the paintings.’

  He urged on me the scones and little cakes, and I tried to eat more to please him. He had his second cup of tea, and he said, ‘I see they have you working hard at Meremount.’ His eyes were on my hands. There hadn’t been a brush at the kitchen sink where I washed, and the soil from the garden was under my nails.

  I smiled. ‘I hoped you wouldn’t notice, but it’s pretty hard to eat with your nails tucked in.’ I began to tell him about the herb garden, about the prints on the stairs in King’s Road, about Blanche’s cooking, and the first night’s dinner at Meremount.

  ‘Ah, so.’ He nodded. ‘Things will not have improved since Lotti was there … You know now about Lotti, of course. The other day I could not then tell you. One has these moments …’

  I nodded. ‘Yes … I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Well, that is how things go.’ His small shrug was not of indifference, but a gesture to tell me that I could not be expected to bear his pain, to assume his sorrow. Unlike the young men, Connor and Brendan, he did not ask that I also carry the burden. He seemed to have lost the human knack ‒ if ever he had had it ‒ of being able to ask for something, of making an emotional demand. It was a dangerous policy; I had come to believe that those who ask for little get little.

  ‘I got her out of Germany, you know, before they took me.’ He assumed, of course, that I had now been told his own story. ‘It was a hard thing to do ‒ to send my only child out as the child of a Swiss woman returning to Switzerland. All through the war she lived there, and it eased those years for me to know that she was safe, and fed, and would survive, if I did not. I survived though ‒ for a sight of her, I often think. When I did see her, she was already a person, and I had had no part of shaping her. Then it was necessary to work very hard to make some money ‒ daughters in Swiss schools are expensive. That was my mistake. It would have been better to have taken her back into a collapsed Germany, have risked hunger and cold for her just to have kept her with me, to have her know that I wanted her with me. But I was preoccupied with getting back what I had lost, and I made the mistake of believing spending money will make up for not spending time. By the time she was twelve I had lost her. When I had both money and time, she was not there for me any more. She was not mine ‒ but then she never had been. So … Lotti was here at Tyrell and Meremount briefly, and then I lost her again. Now that she is gone it is hardly different than it was before.’ I could not believe that; I was remembering the anguished cry that had woken me by the stream.

  He gestured, ‘Do not distress yourself, Miss D’Arcy. The hold that parents have is, at best, tenuous. It is better if one does not deceive oneself. All I had from Lotti was the hope of a relationship in the future ‒ when she was older and if I were yet alive. There was very little in the present.’

  ‘But, surely … with her married to Connor and here at Meremount so near you …?’

  ‘Ah!’ He made a gesture of command towards the tea-pot and at once the indulgent gnome of my fancy was gone, and there was the authoritative man of business in his place. Quickly I refilled his cup.

  ‘Lotti would never have stayed at Meremount.’

  ‘But Connor …?’

  ‘Nor stayed with Connor and the marriage. Lotti was not made that way. She was amused, intrigued … Women, I notice, find Connor very attractive. But you see, Miss D’Arcy, Connor, as they say these days, plays it straight. There are few mysteries in Connor’s charm. He has looks and virility. It is just there ‒ quite simple. Once Lotti discovered that she had to do no more to hold him, that there were to be no twists and turns to the marriage, she grew a little bored. It would have become worse, and it would have been the death of the marriage.’

  ‘But why did she begin it? ‒ didn’t she know?’

  ‘She was mistaken. She came here in a moment of ‒ what shall we say ‒ of ennui, of dissatisfaction. Who can say what this glimpse of the simple life did to her, what fantasies she wove into it? Or perhaps she mistook this for one of the country playgrounds of the rich, and Connor and Meremount were her toys. Why else the wild plans for doing over the house? ‒ w
hy the weaving factory? ‒ why the stables? And did she want to splurge on advertising for the new Sheridan glass in all the expensive magazines in Europe to be able to say, ‘I am Sheridan!’ After the mass-produced commercialism of Otto Praeger, perhaps the idea of hand-blown crystal appealed to her. She was going to play with her toy estate, her toy horses, her toy glasshouse in the time when she wasn’t doing what she had always done ‒ which was simply to move about Europe looking for where the most was happening. Perhaps Meremount was something to do in August when her kind of people are somewhat at a loss to know what to do.’

  ‘But Connor …’ I said again, feeling helpless before the bluntness of his speech.

  ‘You are right, Miss D’Arcy. You are right. Connor was not a toy husband. He didn’t know what the jet set did ‒ he didn’t care. He was serious about something in life ‒ the Sheridan glassworks, and perhaps that was part of his novelty for Lotti. It is ‒ what do they say ‒ camp? ‒ to be serious. I am serious, but then I am German. I did not expect seriousness from Lotti, who was a child of the war ‒ with no roots but chaos. But Connor succeeded in keeping her here at Meremount for eight months, except for little shopping trips ‒ and that was longer than I expected.’

  ‘You didn’t want the marriage?’

  ‘I was totally and utterly against the marriage. I knew there was no chance it could succeed. I did not want to witness the waste of emotion and energy that would go on before it was finally ended. For Lotti it was playing a game, though she would not admit it. For Connor it was desperately serious. I did not see why these two had to go through their pitiful exercise only to arrive at its inevitable conclusion. As it was ‒’ his hand fumbled blindly for a scone, and he spilled half the strawberry jam he had taken on a spoon, ‘‒ the conclusion was unexpectedly final.’

  We did not talk any more about Lotti while we finished tea; we hardly spoke at all. But, when Otto Praeger came to see me to the car, he said abruptly, ‘You will drive me a little way? Today I have not yet had my walk.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He squeezed his bulk into the seat beside me; I would have smiled at the sight of him, his earnestness, his importance, his sheer size in the little battered car, but his face did not permit it. His mouth was working strangely, his fingers gripped and ungripped the top of his cane.

  As we crossed the bridge in front of the Castle, he said, pointing with one stubby finger, ‘To the North Lodge, if you would be so good ‒ if you have time.’

  I almost checked the car in my surprise, but managed to say nothing. After all, why should Praeger not go to the North Lodge? ‒ it was there I had first encountered him; but this continual revisiting of the place where his daughter had met violent death seemed a strangely morbid quirk in a man so eminently pragmatic. But he was more aware of my reaction than I thought, aware that he seemed to be stepping out of character. ‘If I take my walk to the South Lodge I am expected to return by way of the farm workers’ cottages. They are hurt if I do not. And today I have not the heart nor the energy for the children. They demand smiles, and some days I have no smiles in me.’

  The late afternoon sun filtered through the new green of the trees along the avenue, dappling the road before us, speckling Praeger’s face with moving splashes of brightness. I slowed the car so that we seemed to glide through the green cavern of the arching boughs, but still the end of the avenue came too soon, the sight of the North Lodge and the gates barring our way. I braked gently to a halt, but Otto Praeger made no move to leave the car. So I reached and turned off the ignition. The rushing of the stream was suddenly loud.

  ‘Brendan told me about himself and Lotti,’ I said. ‘I know about the night she died.’ I was compelled to say it. Praeger had shared with me things I believed he had given to no one else; he had turned and revealed the other side of the coin of Lotti. I could not keep back from him that I had this other knowledge as well.

  ‘So …’ The word was long-drawn out; he gave himself time before continuing. ‘You know Brendan Carroll well?’

  ‘No … hardly at all. And yet I do, I suppose. Surprisingly well.’ It was true; he had revealed most, perhaps all, of himself to me. I knew what Brendan cared about; it was more than I had known for certain of any other man. ‘You see, he cared about Lotti. He cared very much about what he had caused to happen to all of you ‒ Connor and you and Sheridan Glass ‒ because of that night. He had the idea that my being here would make up in some way for Lotti. Of course, it can’t be so, but he tried … he cared about it.’

  Praeger nodded gravely. ‘I do not doubt that he cares. But he is of less importance in this matter than he believes.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that Brendan Carroll was only incidental in the whole happening of Lotti’s death. That they intended to be together in Copenhagen would have been only a trifle to Lotti, although I suspect it was momentous for Brendan. Possibly for Lotti it would never have had a sequel, though I think Brendan imagined it was the beginning of a permanent, and, eventually, a licit relationship. Lotti, I swear, had no such thought. She was going through one of her periods of being bored with Meremount and Ireland ‒ it had been raining for a week, and there was nothing to distract her. Why not say that she was going to London for a few days of shopping ‒ and why not tell Brendan that she would go to Copenhagen with him? Brendan was being used ‒ no less of a toy than any of the other things she had taken up here, and would eventually drop when she tired of them.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this about Lotti?’ I cried. ‘This is … hateful. I had no need to know.’

  He turned and looked straight at me, his face stern. ‘Lotti is dead. You are very much alive, and now, very much involved in the situation she left behind her. I have known death too well not to cherish life, and to know that the dead must serve the living. I will not permit you the false picture of Lotti. I will not permit you the image of her that the people around here were given ‒ the golden-haired princess, the Lady Bountiful. It simply amused Lotti to play that role for a time. It would not have lasted.

  ‘Nor,’ he went on, ‘will I permit you to be forced into the role that Brendan’s sense of guilt would have you take up. Neither Connor nor Brendan understood fully what Lotti was, though they would have come to it eventually. I am not saying they had no knowledge of women ‒ that would be absurd. But neither of them comprehended the degree of selfishness she possessed, the urge to self-gratification, the lightness of her attitudes.’ He gestured. ‘Ah, but all the blame does not lie with her ‒ I must assume a great part of it myself for the way I let her grow up. She opened her eyes on a world in chaos. There were no values except one’s own survival. Nothing was sacred. You survived or you went under. Nobody cared. Lotti did not care then ‒ she never learned to care.

  ‘Connor or Brendan would never have been a match for her in sheer selfishness. In this case, it was Lotti who was the seductress!’

  ‘I really can’t believe all this,’ I said slowly. ‘Why did she marry Connor at all? The kind of girl you tell me Lotti was’ ‒ now I understood more fully Brendan’s description of Lotti’s kind of girl ‘‒ would just have had an affair with Connor which was ended when it suited her.’

  ‘Ah, yes. At any other time, yes. What no one knew was that Lotti was a very shaken young woman when she came to Tyrell that time. Why do you think she came flying back to her dull old father, in his dull Irish retreat? She had just been engaged in one of those international liaisons which make the gossip items in countries less innocent than Ireland. It had come to an end that was not her making. She was out of her class ‒ I will not name his name, because you would know it ‒ but the man was infinitely more experienced, infinitely more ruthless, even more selfish than Lotti. She had more than met her match, and her own world was sitting back and laughing at her. Connor was a salve to her pride. Her pride at that time demanded a marriage ‒ a marriage to an aggressively masculine man. When the pictures of them together appeared in th
e magazines ‒ and Lotti made sure that they did ‒ her circle would know that she had not picked up a weakling, or a homosexual, or any of these half-males with which that world is peopled who can be bought for mere money. Lotti Praeger had a man ‒ a real man, and for a time he satisfied her. But it was coming to an end ‒ I knew the signs. Brendan Carroll was incidental to all this ‒ a means to fight her boredom. I even saw her begin to practise her little, charming wiles on the Reverend Stanton …’

  ‘Oh!’ I remembered the look of distaste that had crossed Patrick Stanton’s face when Lotti had been spoken of, how he had talked, and I had not then understood, of the need that house had for youth and enthusiasm. He had not used the word innocence, but that was what he had meant. ‘You don’t need to tell me all this. You shouldn’t have told me! I don’t need to know!’

  ‘You do need to know.’ Suddenly a kind of passion broke through his heavy earnestness. His hand gripped my wrist, and the hold was fiercer, stronger than I would have thought the pudgy hand capable of. ‘You do need to know. You stand now between these two young men ‒ as Lotti once did. You came to Ireland because of Brendan. Perhaps you are staying because of Connor. Whatever you do from this on ‒ whatever your choices, and I suspect you will have to make choices ‒ do not be confused by the role Lotti played in their lives. With Lotti it is all over. Neither of them now could love her, because they know her. Do not forget it.’