Nine
The sound of the horn in the driveway came about ten in the morning; it was a gentle sound, but impudent, somehow gay. I guessed who it was, and I ran to the front door before Annie could get there. Brendan leaned against the iron balustrade of the steps.
‘Good morning to you, allanah. I’ve been told by those who should know that it’s very rude to honk for a lady, but I’ll be damned if I can make the bell work. Is it the fairies have got to it, do you think? ‒ or just that Lady Maude doesn’t want callers?’
I looked at him; he was smiling, relaxed; he looked back at me with untroubled eyes; there was no beginning of conflict here, no anger waiting to rise. I hadn’t known until this moment how tense I was, waiting for something to happen, a little afraid, the fear centred in this house, centred in the highly charged involvement between Connor, Lady Maude and myself.
I answered, saying quite simply, the truth. ‘It sounded like the trumpet of liberation to me. But you’re going, aren’t you? Isn’t this the day you leave?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that could depend on you. There’s always more time to be leaving in, isn’t there now? ‒ always another plane, tomorrow or the next day. I was thinking I’d say my farewell to this Ireland of the legends in a fitting manner if I could persuade you to share the farewell with me. I’m of a mind to feast my eyes again on the Rock of Cashel ‒ and it seemed to me that I could do no better with my last day on the auld sod than to introduce one of Ireland’s chief glories to a new-found Irishwoman. Will you come, then?’
Mrs. O’Shea had already departed, dressed in splendid black, for the funeral of Great-Uncle Patrick; I had just finished preparing poached salmon to be eaten cold for lunch. My turn in the sickroom would not be until four o’clock. I was suddenly free, and it had become a holiday.
‘I’ll come,’ I answered.
‘Cashel of the Kings,’ he said. ‘The ancient seat of the Kings of Munster ‒ they do say that St. Patrick himself came here to baptise one of them.’
We had come upon it from the north, a great, dramatic outcropping of limestone rising two hundred feet out of the Plain of Tipperary. More strongly here did one feel the past even than in O’Ruairc’s Tower ‒ here, century piled on century. First the great cross of St. Patrick, raised against a windswept sky, set in a stone the legends said was the coronation stone of the Kings of Munster; it had stood a thousand years with the black rooks cawing above it and the Irish rains beating upon it, gradually smoothing out its carved faces, while the buildings of a holy and sacred place grew up about it.
‘The Round Tower,’ Brendan said, ‘has been here since the tenth century. Cormac’s Chapel ‒’ leading me into a gleaming jewel of red sandstone, ‘‒ is twelfth century. Built by Cormac MacCarthy, King of Desmond. They say it’s the best example of Hiberno-Romanesque architecture anywhere in Ireland ‒ but then since the English didn’t leave us too much of anything, I suppose that isn’t too great a distinction. Come ‒ the Cathedral is very grand and big, but it won’t move you the way Cormac’s Chapel does.’
‘You know it all very well.’
‘Someone brought me here when I was a kid ‒ all my brothers and sisters, too ‒ and I went daft over the place. I used to save up bus fare to come here when I started as an apprentice with Sheridan Glass. Instead of taking out the prettiest girl I knew, the first thing I did when I got my first car ‒ a very old car, mind you ‒ was to drive here. I remember it was a Saturday, and pouring with rain, and I was here all alone. I climbed up to the top of the Round Tower, and I felt as if I were the King of Munster. People do tell me that one of my troubles is that I occasionally act that way. Daft, you know.’
We wandered within the open-skied vastness of the Cathedral. ‘Thirteenth century,’ Brendan said. ‘Unroofed in the eighteenth century by order of the Protestant Dean of Cashel, of hated memory.’ Above, the rooks wheeled and circled endlessly; they seemed eternal, like the Cross and the sky; we climbed the ninety feet of the Round Tower and looked out over the plain and to the ruinous Hore Abbey, half a mile from the Rock. ‘I’ve always wanted to own a ruin,’ Brendan said. ‘It’s such a splendidly useless thing ‒ and this is such a damn’ practical world.’
Outside the Cathedral, black-faced sheep grazed on the rich grass clothing the burial-ground; we walked among the tombstones, the sheep moving only slightly to let us by, and I read names and dates. The Archbishops slept in their stony niches within the walls of the Cathedral; out here humbler people of the countryside were buried. Some of the dates on the slabs were recent.
‘When I’m very old,’ Brendan said, ‘‒ and mind you, I intend to live to a great old age, the Bomb or not ‒ when I’m very old and I feel death coming on me like a chill, then I’ll come to live near Cashel so that I can be buried up here, with the sheep and the ruins and the rooks.’ It began to rain, and the roofless spaces of the Cathedral were washed with opal mist; we came down off the Rock, climbed over the gate and walked across a small field to the garden of the Queen Anne mansion that had been the Palace of the Archbishops of Cashel. ‘Them that took the roof off,’ Brendan commented darkly. It had been turned into a small luxury hotel, and lunch was served in a room that reminded me of the dining-room at Meremount, if the Meremount room had been cleared of furniture and its proportions had been visible.
As we drank coffee, I asked the question that had been on my lips almost since the beginning of the journey.
‘Did you bring Lotti here?’
He looked up from his cup. ‘I did. It wasn’t much of a success. Lotti wasn’t the kind of girl for ruins.’
‘But you brought her here thinking she was?’
‘Hoping she was, perhaps, but knowing that she came just for the hell of it ‒ to get away from Meremount, perhaps to have something to throw at Connor when she complained that he never took her anywhere. But coming to see some ruins wasn’t Lotti’s idea of going anywhere at all. Going somewhere meant London or Paris ‒’
‘Or Copenhagen?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Or Copenhagen.’
‘You’re hard on her. But yet you loved her.’
‘I told you I fell in love with Lotti the first night I met her. Loving comes after falling in love. Sometimes it never comes.’
‘Did it with you?’
He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t meant to. Love, for Lotti, would have been a burden too great to carry. She didn’t understand it ‒ well, who does, for that matter? But she didn’t want it. She wanted to go to bed with a man she liked, and have fun with him. Nothing was meant to be serious. But Connor was serious ‒ he was serious about a lot of things, particularly Sheridan Glass and marriage. She got bored ‒ but more frightened, I think, than bored. She couldn’t stand the responsibility of anyone being desperately serious about her ‒ so she turned to me. What she never knew was that I, under all this nonsense I talk, was just as serious as Connor. She wanted a playmate, and I ‒ well, I suppose I wanted to be loved. When I knew I wasn’t going to get that I was ready to finish it.’
‘But you didn’t finish it. You were on your way to Copenhagen with her. You would both have had your few days of fun, and Connor was never to know. Wasn’t that the way it was?’
Again he shook his head. ‘No, that wasn’t the way it was. Yes, I went along with the plan for her to come to Copenhagen and say she was going to London ‒ I agreed, because it was very hard to say no to Lotti. But then I wanted to call it off. I could imagine how it would be in Copenhagen ‒ yes, that part of it any man would have wanted with a girl like Lotti. But it was what it would have been like afterwards that I couldn’t either imagine or face. Back at Cloncath, working with Connor, seeing Lotti at the works almost every day and carrying on as if that was all I saw of her. I can lie with the best of them if I have to. But a sustained lie, a lie that I had to carry on, not for the love of a woman but only for the sake of possessing her ‒ well, I just didn’t think I could stand it. I was out of my depth. Lotti was too much f
or me, and at last I got enough sense to admit it.’
‘But you still were going to Copenhagen?’ I hoped I sounded sceptical. The truth was that Brendan had touched a part of me that no man had ever found before, the deep need in me to know that some man had wanted love as much as I had, and did; had understood enough of it to know that what was offered was not the real thing, who had refused to give more when he knew that what he was paid back was false coin. He had wanted the responsibility of loving, had sought the burden of it, the obligation. I felt strangely envious of Lotti as I listened, envious and sadly wondrous at what she had rejected. Of all the things she had been given in her life, she hadn’t known how to take the one thing of value. She had cast away the thing I hadn’t yet found ‒ she had been offered love, and she had wanted only pleasure.
‘There would have been no trip to Copenhagen,’ Brendan said. ‘At least, not with me. I was going to tell her when she came that night that it wouldn’t work, I was going to tell her that she would take her plane to London, just as she had told Connor she was taking it. And I would go to Copenhagen and do the job I was supposed to do. And I would look around for someone to take my place at Sheridan Glass. Yes ‒ I was running from her. I was running for my life. But I took too long to understand that it had to be that way. I didn’t tell her in time. I waited until that night, and then it was too late. The bridge came down, and I was too late to stop her coming. And they knew ‒ Connor and Praeger ‒ that I was the one she was coming to.’
‘You didn’t tell them? ‒ about you deciding it was all over … calling off the Copenhagen trip?’
His lips twisted. ‘And deny Lotti when she was dead? She wasn’t the kind of girl you did that to, either. We were both as guilty as hell, whether Copenhagen was part of the story or not. I had almost loved Lotti, and I wasn’t going to take that away from her after she was dead. God knows, few enough people loved her then ‒ not the ones who should have.’
And then he beckoned the waiter and paid the bill. It rained all the way back to Meremount; we didn’t talk and we both smoked too much.
Brendan halted the car when we were half-way down the avenue to Meremount. The rain was coming down heavily now, the rapid swish of the windscreen wipers was like a knell to the day.
‘Would you ever,’ he said, ‘give an Irishman a kiss on his last day on his native soil? He that took you to Cashel of the Kings, don’t forget?’
I leaned towards him; there was sweetness and some heartbreak in our kiss. He held me for a long time close against him, his fingers stroking my neck, twining in my hair. He said, very softly, as he released me, ‘Will I ever, I wonder, see you again …?’
I had no answer; I was not meant to answer, then.
He drew the car in close to the steps at Meremount; the rain poured down solidly. But some prickling sixth sense too made me glance upwards as I ran up the wet steps to the front door. Connor was at the window of the upstairs room at the end of the house on the right. The window was curtainless, the room used for nothing but the storage of furniture. He did not attempt to move back to avoid my gaze, but met it with the same calm assurance, akin to arrogance, he had always shown. He would have seen that the car had stopped before it had drawn up to the steps; probably he guessed what had happened then.
When I closed the door I went to a side window and watched as Brendan turned the car, and it started up the avenue and then vanished. I wanted to call him back; the sense of foreboding that this house possessed so strongly reached and gripped me. I felt a sense of menace in it. The rain-dark afternoon deepened the shadows of the hall and the staircase. I waited for the door of the room from which Connor had watched to open when I reached the bedroom floor, but it remained closed, the silence more threatening somehow, than if it had opened with a crash. Connor had a way of making his displeasure felt. For the first time I began to wonder if there had not been more reason than sheer self-indulgence in Lotti’s flight from Connor.
II
After I had changed I went to take my turn in Lady Maude’s room. Annie brought tea for us both, announcing that Connor had been and gone again, and that he wouldn’t be in to dinner.
‘Very restless, Mr. Connor is these days ‒ all this coming and going. He’s as bad as when ‒’
Lady Maude cut her short. ‘Annie, don’t gossip.’
I marvelled that she had never learned that no one in these times could speak in that fashion to servants and expect them to stay ‒ but Annie seemed not to have learned either. She took the rebuke meekly. ‘Yes, m’lady.’ The Tyrells did not count any more, except with those for whom they still counted very much.
The evening dragged slowly by. I asked if Lady Maude had any sewing for me to do; her gesture of reply was impatient, almost contemptuous. ‘Sewing? ‒ no. Annie puts a stitch in anything that needs doing. I have no time for fuss or feathers.’ I thought of the cobbled darns in the worn damask napkins we used, and knew the extent of Annie’s needlework. Lady Maude indicated an article on wood anemones that I was to read aloud, and when that was done she had me sift through a stack of ancient National Geographic for a favourite piece on the high Himalayas. The description of the snows and the solitude seemed to soothe her; when she spoke again her tone was softer.
‘Tomorrow we will begin Churchill’s Life of Marlborough.’ She indicated a row of volumes on the mantelshelf. Going closer I saw that they were all Churchill works, from his account of the Boer War right through World War II. I had a sudden frightful vision of myself trapped in this house reading Churchill and the National Geographic to an old woman who refused to die.
When Lady Maude was settled for the night, after Annie had brought the last cup of tea and herself gone upstairs, I took my bath in the room adjoining hers; it was a quick business because the water was tepid and the place was stamped with the grimness that most of Meremount wore. I was a little intimidated, perhaps, by the sight of Lady Maude’s toothbrushes, the worn flannel and sponge, the few toilet articles that lay about, bespeaking the austerity of her life. As I splashed hurriedly in the bath I heard Connor come in; I heard his voice in the hall outside as he spoke to Sapphire, then the quiet of the night fell completely on Meremount. Then I lay in bed ‒ Mrs. O’Shea’s bed ‒ with my feet on Annie’s hot-water bottles and pondered the slow twilight of this aristocrat, who had long ago given up concern with the world about her, neglected by that world, supremely indifferent to the neglect, her imagination feasting on such things as white-tailed deer and wood anemones, and the snow-bound reaches of the high Himalayas. And as I had previously thought of myself trapped in that existence I now thought of Connor.
III
‘For God’s sake will you wake up, Miss? Wake up!’ For the second time since I had come to Meremount I was shaken out of sleep, but this time with rough, purposeful hands. ‘There ‒ gather yourself up and run downstairs and get Dr. Donnelly on the phone. Tell him he’s needed out here.’
The only lights came from Lady Maude’s room ‒ the two connecting doors were open, and Mrs. O’Shea’s figure was outlined by it. She wore her hat and coat still, and the gloved hands with which she had shaken me were damp with rain. I struggled out of sleep, sitting up slowly.
‘What’s the matter?’ My head ached; with great effort I held my eyelids open.
‘Gas! ‒ that’s what’s the matter. The gas fire in the bathroom left turned on and the flame out, and God alone knows what it will have done to my patient. Hurry now, tell Dr. Donnelly I don’t know the damage, but he’d be best to come. And he’d better telephone for the ambulance.’
Then Mrs. O’Shea’s body stiffened as a call came from the bedroom. ‘Maura ‒ Maura, are you there?’
‘It’s her ‒ and praise God she sounds all right. No, don’t waste time going in to her. I’ll attend to that.’ Mrs. O’Shea called this after her as she hurried through the bathroom. ‘Ring through to Dr. Donnelly. But I don’t think we need the ambulance …’
Then I heard her voice, auth
oritative as ever, showing none of the alarm it had betrayed when she had shaken me from sleep. ‘Well, now, Lady Maude, what’s all this? A fine scare you’ve given me, and me just back this minute from a funeral. Now, just let me look at you ‒ well I had to open the windows to get a bit of fresh air. Very stuffy it was in here. A fine night it’s going to be after all. The rain’ll be done in no time at all, so it will.’
I found slippers and gown and ran for the phone in Connor’s office. Only the light from the upstairs passage illuminated the stairs. On the way down I brushed against a pile of brass fire irons stacked on one of the treads. They went hurtling before me, taking a whole mountain of small pieces with them. At the bottom in the darkness I heard Lotti’s cat give a howl of fear, and then I heard, but could not see, her terrified scamper through the hall.
I got through to Dr. Donnelly at once. ‘I don’t understand what it’s all about. Mrs. O’Shea’s just come back and wakened me. Something about a gas fire being on without being lighted, and she thinks Lady Maude may have been affected. But I heard her talk ‒ she seems all right.’
Edge of Glass Page 21
