We had recited that scene in one form or another at least two dozen times since we had come to Ireland. In her head, my wife knew I was right. In her gut, she wasn’t altogether sure. We were, I thought, making progress. The conversations were more likely to end in laughter than they had been earlier in her recovery from the birth of the Mick.
YOU’LL BE HAVING THAT CONVERSATION WITH HER FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, YOU FRIGGIN AMADON.
“I suppose you’re right.”
YOU’LL GET TIRED OF IT.
“I love her too much ever to get tired of it.”
“There’s really not much of the old manor left,” Matt Howard said to us as he met us at the door. “Still, it’s a pretty good restoration with the addition of plumbing, electricity, and central heating. We have peat fires in the fireplaces just to preserve some of the atmosphere. You live more comfortable lives in your bungalow down the road than any of the lords and ladies lived in their Big Houses a century ago, more comfortable than they could have imagined as a possibility.”
“And themselves not having motor cars,” Nuala Anne noted, a touch of irony in her voice.
We had pulled up on the paved driveway of the house amid the two Rolls, a Bentley, and a Mercedes. No BMW, however. Maybe around in the back. We parked at the end of the line, behind a Rolls. Someone had polished it so brightly that it was immune to the thin mist that hung in the air, a mist perhaps rising out of the cemetery beneath the ground.
“And myself a member of the Labor Party,” Matt Howard laughed genially.
“New Labor,” Nuala said.
We had driven through the valley, along the Traheen River bank on a dirt road. The sky was gray and ominous. Or it would have been if it were in America. As it was, it might have been a typical Irish sky. There were sheep on the hills and still a few homes in which the last of the descendants of the men and women of 1882 still lived and still tended sheep. There were television antennae on all the roofs. I could barely pick out the ruins of John Joyce’s house, halfway up the mountain. The manor house was on a hill all right. The hill of the church, as Nuala said it was?
How dare I doubt?
“Come on in! Come on in! It’s a pleasure to have you visit us!” Matt Howard enthused. “I don’t know much about the history of these parts, though my wife does. She’s a Philbin and a Casey, names with long local histories, I gather. I’m astonished that you think our house is built on top of a cemetery. The original house was here for a long, long time.”
“Not to say under the house,” Nuala remarked as we entered the parlor of the rehabilitated manor. “But in front of the house, underneath the park land you’ve created.”
“Hmm … Interesting!”
The parlor—or perhaps I should call it the drawing room—was a perfect recreation of a small Georgian manor house that in other parts of the country would now be a gourmet restaurant. The furnishings, the paintings, and the carpet were all authentic antiques. The room had electric lights and the peat in the fireplace was mostly symbolic. There was running water nearby. The inhabitants of the room wore modern clothes. Yet for a moment I felt that we had crossed the barrier of two centuries.
My wife seemed to sniff the air, as if she were looking for something.
We were introduced to the other luncheon guests: Daphne Howard, Matt’s blond and perfectly groomed wife, pretty but with a rather vacant look in her eyes; Ona, a teenager in the required jeans and UCD sweatshirt, whose short stature, red face, and smile were duplications of her father; and a tall, bald man with hooded eyes in a dark suit, Tomas O’Regan, the builder who had restored the house. I remembered that Seamus Redmond had told us that he was a bit of a crook. Having earned a nice fee for his design of the house, he might well want another fee for adding to it or rebuilding it from another owner.
Preluncheon drinks were served. Nuala asked for some Tipperary Water and I for a drop of Bushmill’s, straight up, of course.
“’Tis the Green Label you’re drinking, is it now?” Matt asked.
“Is there any other kind?” I asked, confident that the house would have it.
“That’s what me da says all the time,” Ona exploded. “’Tis grand altogether and it clears the sinuses, he says.”
“Dear …” her mother protested weakly.
“I’m sure you don’t touch the stuff, my dear,” her da said as with a very heavy hand he filled a Waterford goblet for me. Powerscourt, of course.
“Sure, isn’t Guinness the best?”
“’Tis,” my wife said with a sigh.
“You don’t drink, my dear?” Daphne asked. Her accent was very much upper-middle-class British. Her husband talked a bit like a London cockney who didn’t care what people thought.
“Didn’t me son drive me into a fit of depression he made such trouble in coming, so I’m taking them little pill things for a year and doesn’t me doctor say if I so much as ride in a car with a man who has knocked off a jar of Bushmill’s, I’ll go over the top and round the bend and across the edge altogether?”
She offered this perfectly honest explanation with such good humor that everyone laughed with her. This was a new twist, a new persona—Nuala Anne laughing at her infirmities and luring everyone into laughing with her.
She donned a new personality with the same ease with which she drew on a new bikini thong.
“I don’t know much about the history of this area,” Matt continued the conversation. “My cousins who lived here deserted it long ago, driven out by the Land Leaguers, I believe.”
“It was a ruined house before 1882 when the Joyces were buried out where your park is,” Nuala explained, “and the old church was over there where that Rolls thing is parked in front of our van.”
“Really? How interesting! Was Myles Joyce buried there?”
“Och, wasn’t the poor man buried in quicklime under the jail where that terrible Cathedral thing is now? ’Twas the John Joyces, all five of them, who were buried there, them as who were murdered.”
“How dreadful!” Daphne exclaimed with little affect, a kind of for-the-record protest.
“In their house up on the side of the mountain,” Nuala gestured, “the one with the blackthorn bush.”
“And Myles was innocent, was he not?” Matt asked, interested in getting the facts and getting down to business.
“He was,” Nuala replied, “and himself leaving a young pregnant wife.”
“And the Brits knew he was innocent, didn’t they?” Ona insisted vigorously.
“They did,” I said, “as did everyone in the valley. But Dublin Castle wanted men at the end of the rope and the valley knew that no one would listen to them.”
“What happened to the poor woman?” Ona asked.
“We don’t know yet.”
“I think Jimmy Joyce had a word to say on the subject.” Matt Howard frowned as if trying to remember a quote from that most quotable if least intelligible of men.
He picked up a phone, “Simon, would you bring down that passage from Joyce I found last night?”
To us he said, “Simon Tailor is my confidential secretary. He will join us for lunch. Now, however, he is putting the finishing touches on some remarks I must make in the House the day after tomorrow for the P.M.”
Simon Tailor was a tall, lank, young man with thick glasses and long black hair. He behaved with the shy courtesy of the very upper class Oxford graduate, which some people confuse with diffidence.
“I have the quote, m‘lord,” he murmured. “It’s from Joyce’s article ‘Ireland at the Bar.’”
Matt Howard took the old book, produced glasses from his jacket pocket, put them on, and then took them off to provide a preface.
“Joyce wrote this twenty-five years after the event, I’m told. He may have some of the details wrong. It’s strong stuff. I must tell you, for the sake of candor, that the P.M.’s wife called it to my attention.”
Who else?
Matt put his glasses back on and began to read.
“’Public opinion at the time thought him innocent and today considers him a martyr. The court had to resort to the services of an interpreter. The questioning conducted through the interpreter was, at times comic, at times tragic. On one side was the excessively ceremonious interpreter, on the other, the patriarch of a miserable tribe, unused to civilized customs, who seemed stupefied by all the judicial ceremony.
“‘The figure of this dumbfounded old man, a remnant of a civilization not ours, deaf and dumb before his judge, is a symbol of the Irish nation at the bar of public opinion. Like him, she is unable to appeal to the modem conscience of England and other countries. The English journalists act as interpreters between Ireland and the English electorate, which gives them ear from time to time and ends up being vexed by the endless complaints of the Nationalist representatives who have entered her House, as she believes, to disrupt its order and extort money.’”
He closed the book, returned it to Simon, who slipped quietly out of the room.
After a moment’s pause for emphasis, he took off his glasses again.
“Is that accurate enough, Ms. McGrail?”
“Doesn’t everyone call me Nuala Anne?”
“Fair enough,” he agreed.
“Well,” she said, “the tribe wasn’t all that miserable and he wasn’t all that old, but your man has the right of it about what happened.”
“What a mess England has made of Ireland,” Matt said, with a sad shake of his head.
“And ourselves with a higher standard of living these days,” she murmured as if that were a terrible thing altogether.
Ah, the woman knew how to make points.
“Well,”—Matt Howard rubbed his hands together briskly—“let’s go in for lunch.”
The dining room was also a replica of the era when the judicial murder of Myles Joyce was possible, though the crystal and the china were, I thought, considerably more modern than anything that would have been available in the West of Ireland, say, in 1850. The “lunch” was French—sea bass and then veal with mysterious sauces. The portions were small, indeed too small for me. My wife ate cautiously and carefully, as if she were afraid that too much food would dull her investigative sensitivities. The wine, incidentally, was a white burgundy and exquisite. I went easy on it because I did not know what amusements might await me back at our bungalow.
YOU’RE A HORNY BASTARD. STOP STARING AT HER.
“She’s mine. I have a right to stare at her. Whenever she dons one of her new personae, I fall in love with that character.”
YOU’RE FULL OF SHIT.
“I’m a polygamist. I love all the different women she is.”
I GIVE UP ON YOU.
“Now, Tom,” Matt Howard turned our luncheon chatter about children and fashions to more serious concerns, “were you aware that there was a cemetery in front of our house?”
“Hardly,” Tomas O‘Regan said, in a very tony English voice, despite his Irish name. “If there were one, we certainly would have respected it, both because of the stern Irish laws on such matters and out of reverence and respect. In fact, all we found was an overgrown meadow with stones scattered about. We could always unearth it, m’lord, if you wish.”
“And the old church?” Nuala asked.
O’Regan looked at her as if she were an impudent and disrespectful young woman.
“My dear, I am in the restoration business. I have, if I may say so, an international reputation for preserving monuments from the past. There may have been a church there in centuries past, but there was none such five years ago.”
“Isn’t it odd,” I asked, “that the Lord of Ballynahinch, who built the house, would have put it up opposite a cemetery?”
“If there were indeed one there, it might have been odd. However, it might have looked to him like an unkempt meadow, just as it did to us.”
“In fact,” Matt Howard interjected, “the man who built it lived here for only a few years and, after his death, his son abandoned it and returned to London. The house was sacked many times from 1850 on by Ribbonmen and Fenians and such like. When my ancestors came over here they stayed in a townhouse in Galway.”
“Is there a tradition that the house was haunted?”
“My dear young man,”—Tomas O’Regan turned his patronizing eye on me—“if one believes the legends, every manor house in Ireland is haunted.”
“And they may be,” Nuala murmured softly.
“Wouldn’t it be fun,” Ona said, “if our house were haunted?”
“Dear …” her mother protested ineffectually.
“I think, Dermot … more wine? Good … I think I can assure you that there are no psychic manifestations here. It is a pleasant place to visit occasionally, but otherwise dreadfully dull.”
“No Ribbonmen or suchlike around?” Nuala said gently.
No one laughed.
“Except for that explosion and the murders up at Renvyle House, which we could quite do without,” Matt said grimly. “We could, of course, dig up the cemetery and have the bishop come over and bless it, if you think that best.”
“Darling, wouldn’t that be quite vulgar?”
“Sure, aren’t they at peace,” Nuala agreed. “Still maybe just a little digging to be sure and then we could put up a nice memorial marker to the John Joyce family and to all the others buried on this hill through the ages.”
That didn’t sound exactly like something Nuala would say. She was up to something.
“Well, we might just do that. What do you think, Tom?”
“I would not recommend it, m’lord. It might attract tourists, which I don’t think is quite what you have in mind. Perhaps a plaque in the house that the Bishop might bless …”
“Isn’t it strange,”—Simon Tailor spoke for the first time—“that the locals didn’t protest when the Big House was first built here in the last century? Surely they could have made representations to your ancestors that this was, uh, hallowed ground?”
“I don’t think my ancestors took too kindly to representations in those days, Simon. The local people were savages who were best kept at bay with a stout club and a gun or two when necessary.”
“Of course, m’lord … Still that wouldn’t be true today. If the Caseys or the Joyces that still live in the valley thought this land was sacred ground, would not they have complained, perhaps not quite so respectfully as their predecessors?”
“A point well taken, Simon. Naula Anne, what would you say to that?”
“We’re quiet folk out here, Matt,” my wife said gently, “even as were the folk who lived in the valley in the 1880s. We’re not like your Dublin or even your Galway folk who will announce a protest at the drop of a brick wall. Maybe they’d just as soon see the past covered up and forgotten and who could blame them? So maybe me idea about a monument wouldn’t be so wise after all.”
My wife never, I repeat, never changed her mind that quickly.
The meal turned to sherry trifle with heavy (very heavy) cream and the conversation to politics.
Then me wife played another card.
“None of your mining folks have been exploring around here, have they now?”
“Hunting for mountains of gold is it?” Matt Howard beamed. “No, I’m afraid not. Your hordes of protesters from Galway and Dublin would be swarming all over the place if there were any hints of gold or even zinc in these mountains. You remember the fuss they made several years ago when there were stories about Cro Patrick being a mountain of gold. Of course, worse luck for Ireland, there wasn’t a word of truth in it.”
“And, sure, we didn’t need the gold anyway, did we?” Nuala said briskly.
“You certainly did not, but it would have helped,” Matt said with a shrug of his big shoulders.
“All the precious metals are gone?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, Dermot. You never know for sure about such things. Still, the hills of the West of Ireland have been pretty well assayed,
and no one has found much of anything. There might be a few strains of gold or silver or copper or zinc here and there and they might mean a tidy sum for a poor farmer, but hardly enough to affect world markets—any more than that petroleum which is supposed to be deep beneath the ocean off Cork but just now would cost too much to bring to the surface.”
“As Nuala suggested, Ireland no longer needs fantasies to have a decent standard of living, more decent, I quickly add, my dear, than that across the Irish Sea, despite our current prosperity.”
“Touché,” Nuala admitted with a smile.
There was something sinister about that smile, I thought. She’s playing a deep game, relying partly on her shrewd native intelligence and partly on whatever that other thing is that hides inside her.
We returned to the parlor for coffee and drinks. I opted for a cognac, which turned out to be the best I had ever tasted in my life.
“You must tell us, Nuala Anne,”—Matt turned us to serious conversation after he had poured the drinks—“what you think of the strange crimes over at the hotel—poor Colm MacManus losing his house in that explosion, which, to be candid, rocked our windows way out here, the dastardly attempt on your life, those unfortunate Russians …”
“I think the Russians are a separate matter,” Nuala said calmly, “though perhaps not completely unrelated. The others were attempts to frighten people. I assume that they will continue until the proper people are frightened.”
“My goodness,” Daphne whimpered.
“Do you think they’re trying to frighten me?” Matt Howard demanded. “If they are, they’re wasting their time.”
“M’lord, I think we should be careful,” Simon Tailor said meekly.
“Careful be damned!”
“Do you consider yourself Irish or English, Matt?” I asked, hoping he didn’t mind the question.
He didn’t seem to mind.
“Well, how would you describe yourself, Dermot?”
“We have a category for it—Irish American.”
“And you Nuala Anne?”
“Irish and American.”
“So, despite my London accent, I choose a definition that fits between the two islands, both English and Irish.”
Irish Love Page 22
