Edge of Glass Page 11

I ended it by opening the door to Lady Maude’s room. Connor was there, having been summoned from the office by Annie to meet Mrs. O’Shea. As we entered ‒ Mrs. O’Shea commanding in her starched uniform and broad belt ‒ Lady Maude’s hand was raised feebly in a gesture of protest. She said something, and Connor bent over her to hear it.

  ‘Quite unnecessary.’ The whisper reached across the room. Mrs. O’Shea flushed, and her chest went out.

  ‘Dr. Donnelly will be the judge of that. And it’s not here for the joy of it I am.’ She looked about her briskly, dismissing any opposition. ‘Now, Mr. Sheridan, there’ll be some changes here. Would you ever call back Michael Sweeney, and you’d best send for Jim Duffy, as well.’

  ‘What kind of changes, Mrs. O’Shea?’

  ‘This furniture, Mr. Sheridan ‒ this furniture. I can’t nurse in a room like this. If, God save us, there should be an emergency, a doctor couldn’t move in this room. If we should need an oxygen tank …’

  Despite another protest from the figure in the bed, what Mrs. O’Shea wanted was done. For the moment she had power; she knew it and enjoyed it. But I couldn’t help thinking that she would have used it less if the patient had not been Lady Maude Sheridan. The old woman lay in the bed, grey-skinned and exhausted-looking; the lids fluttered closed on her eyes when Michael and Jim arrived to carry away what Mrs. O’Shea said must go. I felt that I should reach out and take her hand to ease the agony of seeing her beloved things go, but I knew that the act would have been furiously resented. For a brief time, in her moments of struggle during the night, we had joined forces in the common battle, had been united. But I knew I must never presume on that moment. No one must ever feel sorry for Lady Maude Sheridan; respect and not pity was what she demanded. When some clear spaces began to show along the walls, there came again the fierce whisper from the bed.

  ‘That will do.’

  ‘Lady Maude, I am in charge in this room,’ Mrs. O’Shea said.

  ‘Enough.’

  The habit of respect and obedience would die hard. The men put down the table they had lifted, took their caps, and left. Mrs. O’Shea turned her back and began to fuss over the contents of her nursing bag to cover her defeat. She jerked her head in its starched veil at Bridget, who had been carrying out small objects. ‘You can go now, Bridget. And be back sharp at half-twelve so that I can have my lunch.’ Her tone had the crack of anger. I was dismissed along with Bridget. It didn’t seem right to leave Lady Maude alone with Mrs. O’Shea’s resentment, but I guessed that the old lady would, even in her weakened state, hold her own in any battle of wills.

  Outside, Annie waited. ‘Mr. Connor said to tell you he’s gone to the works for a few hours. If there’s anything you need, he said, you’re to give him a ring.’

  I should have expected no different. He’d left me to all this, as if to say ‘I told you you didn’t have to stay ‒ but since you have stayed, don’t think it’s going to be easy.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said shortly, and turned to Michael and Jim, who stood, interested spectators beside the furniture that they had carried from Lady Maude’s room, waiting instructions. They looked as if they enjoyed being on hand to see if I would manage or would flounder under what I had taken on. What devastating people the Irish are, I thought ‒ on the surface concerned and sympathetic, underneath just a little cruel.

  ‘Now, we’ll have to find somewhere in one of these other rooms to put these things. She’ll want them back just as soon as she’s well …’

  I moved swiftly along the passage, but I should have waited for Annie, should have taken my prompting from her. But I didn’t; I charged on, splashing about an uncertain authority.

  ‘What about here?’ Almost at random I selected the room next to the one that Mrs. O’Shea would occupy. I threw open the door with a show of confidence, expecting the usual crowding, the usual scene of neglect and disorder, the mouldering air of a closed room. In the first shock of seeing what was actually there, the handle slipped from my grasp and the door crashed back against the inside wall.

  It was dim; the curtains were drawn tightly. What I was first aware of was the hyacinth-like perfume that lingered. I could see very little except the shine of many mirrored surfaces in the darkness, the watery sheen of silken curtains and carpet. But the vision was already being cut off; Annie had reached past me, and was closing the door.

  ‘We’ll find some other place, Miss Maura, I’m thinkin’ Mr. Connor would not be too happy to have these rooms disarranged. Aren’t they Mrs. Sheridan’s rooms? ‒ and no one is allowed in them.’

  I was bewildered. There were too many new things to remember. ‘Mrs. Sheridan?’ I repeated, stupidly.

  ‘Miss Lotti ‒ Mr. Connor’s wife.’

  The day wound on, the very thrust of it, the trivia of what needed attention giving me no time for thought. When we came downstairs after the furniture finally had been disposed of at the end of the bedroom corridor, there was the telephone call from Otto Praeger. The telephone was in Connor’s office.

  ‘This is Otto Praeger here, Miss D’Arcy.’ Precise, exact, a businessman; hard to imagine the gnome.

  ‘Yes, Mr. Praeger.’

  ‘I was sorry to hear of Lady Maude’s attack.’ Was he sorry, or did those of a certain age always hate to hear of anyone stricken?

  ‘The doctor said it was mild. But she must rest. It’s hard to make her do that. She refuses to go to hospital, but we have managed to get a nurse …’

  ‘Ah, so. You are staying then. I thought you would stay.’

  ‘I’m staying for a while. I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘What one means to do and what one does rarely coincide. Now I must ask you what I can do to help you.’

  I did not take it as I would have taken such a platitude from anyone else; it was not a conventional enquiry, a way to end up a conventional phone call. For a moment I held

  the receiver and thought of what Otto Praeger could do. I thought of the choked chaos of this house, its poverty, the stubborn refusal of an old woman to admit change, the ancient routine; the services that had almost ground to a halt. Then I thought that his daughter had lived here, his daughter, Lotti, whose money and youth had not won out against Lady Maude. I thought of Castle Tyrell, geared to the service of one man, smooth, clean, efficient, though an efficiency that had an Irish twist to it, given through affection, not because it was possible to command it. I thought of the one thing that Otto Praeger could do immediately.

  ‘Yes, there is something.’

  ‘I am glad. What is it?’

  ‘It’s going to sound funny ‒ but we need food. The food here is ‒ well, it’s not good, and we have more people to feed. I’ll get the kitchen better organised and then I’ll be able to cope. But just for the beginning, it would be a help.’

  ‘Yes, I understand. I know about the food at Meremount, and the kitchen. I understand perfectly. It will be attended to. Is there some other thing?’

  ‘Just one other thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When there’s time ‒ when things settle down here, I would like to come and see you.’

  ‘Ah, so ‒ yes, of course, you would like to see Castle Tyrell?’

  ‘Castle Tyrell doesn’t mean very much to me, Mr. Praeger ‒ it hasn’t until now. I would just like to come and see you.’ I wondered why suddenly I wanted so much to see him; if, in him, I was seeking a refuge of sanity and common sense from this house of unease.

  There was only a fractional delay. ‘It would be the greatest pleasure, Miss D’Arcy. Yes, come! If I am in Frankfurt when you come, come the next day. I will be back.’

  I left Connor’s office feeling as if I had established some sort of line of retreat; I felt better. I was even able to take calmly Annie’s wail of protest.

  ‘The cheek of some people! Molly O’Shea, if you please, will have two lamb chops for lunch. Just a little underdone, she says. And here’s me with nothing in the house. It was the day to order, but with al
l that’s been going on …’ She sounded indignant, but she was more worried; the forlorn routine of the house had fallen apart, and she was not able to handle the new.

  ‘Well, Mrs. Of Shea will just have to settle for an omelette, won’t she? Don’t worry, Annie ‒ I’ll make it. We’ll chop some of that ham …’

  I watched her face carefully. It was a crucial moment; if she let me take over the kitchen from her, we might survive. If she held on, refused to let me in, I might as well pack and go this moment, for all the use I would be here.

  She sagged into dependence, showing her relief in a wide smile that revealed yellow false teeth. ‘Aren’t you the one now, Miss Maura? Whoever would be thinkin’ to look at you that you could do the like of it?’

  Then I borrowed her raincoat from its hook in the scullery and went out into the garden. When I had asked about the herbs she had looked blankly at me for a moment and then offered that I would find ‘a few lavender bushes and some auld plants down at the end’. It was an ancient garden, older than the present house, perhaps, high walls festooned with thick wisteria vines, beautiful, intricate brick paths, an arbour collapsing under the weight of tangled honeysuckle. Near the house, work had been done recently; the beds had been cleared and spaded, the paths scraped free of mud and gravel; but this late in the season no vegetables had been set out, and fresh weeds were sprouting. Further from the house the old state of neglect persisted ‒ paths disappearing under soil and weeds, and the rampant rank growth of plants gone out of control. At the far end, where the afternoon sun would strike, where an old stone bench invited the leisure hours of the lady of the house, I found the herbs. It was sad to see their neglect ‒ unpruned, gone to seed, choking on themselves. I recognised the lavender, untrimmed of last year’s flower heads, the monstrous growth of geraniums. Strangely, I recognised others too, not just the parsley and thyme of the windowsill above the King’s Road, but others ‒ borage, rosemary, sweet marjoram, savory and sage. Once Blanche had brought back from an auction a set of eighteenth-century prints of herbs, and hung them on the stairs leading up from the street door to the flat. Part of my learning to read had been those names, chanted over and over, my fingers tracing the outline of stalk and leaf and flower. Now, for the first time I saw them as living things, and in the garden where Blanche herself must first have learned their names.

  II

  We had used the last of the ham on Mrs. O’Shea’s omelette, so I made one for Annie and myself with the herbs. Annie didn’t care for it; she nibbled the edges tentatively, poked about in the runny centre, and then settled for bread and cheese, her faith in me considerably shaken. We ate at the kitchen table, and all the time her stream of talk flowed on; a listener was not someone to let go lightly. I didn’t discourage her.

  ‘Sure Lady Maude couldn’t tell the difference between a cabbage and a carrot,’ Annie sniffed when I asked her about the replanting of the vegetable garden. ‘’Twas all Mrs. Sheridan’s doing. She had some gardening big-wigs down from Dublin. The whole place ‒ kitchen-garden as well as the big garden ‒ was to be done over to look the way it used to look in the old days. ’Tis my private opinion, mind you, that they were going to carry it a bit far ‒ in the auld days people just planted things where they wanted them without havin’ to be told where. But they had these auld prints and charts and ’twas to be a show-place. They made a start on the kitchen-garden ‒ ’twas all cleared out ready to be planted this spring. They didn’t get as far back as that stretch where the lavender is. Then Mrs. Sheridan … had the accident. And that was the end of it. Everyone just packed up and went away. Everything stopped. I’ll tell you, ’twas a sad thing.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I wasn’t sure, then, whether she meant Lotti Sheridan’s death, or the cessation of the work. We were washing the dishes by then, and Annie paused with the dishcloth held in suspension and gave a sigh that was sheer exaggeration.

  ‘Oh, there were to be grand doin’s, I’m tellin’ you, Miss Maura. Wasn’t the place crawlin’ with the experts tellin’ Mrs. Sheridan what was to be done. We were to have central heating, mind you. And water and bathrooms everywhere, and new curtains and carpets, all the panelling stripped down and repaired, and the floors all seen to.’ She said it like some litany she had repeated to herself many times. ‘A new kitchen ‒ an American kitchen. Mrs. Sheridan was going to bring a chef from London or some place to help me, and sure with all the fixin’ there was to be done about the place, wouldn’t half of Cloncath have been knockin’ down the doors to work for me.’

  She pointed to the new gas cooker and the Ascot heater over the sink. ‘’Twas as far as we got. Mrs. Sheridan insisted that the Aga was too hard to cook on, and put this one in just for the time being ‒ that and the gas heaters in the bathrooms upstairs. There was an unholy row about that, I do remember. Mrs. Sheridan ordered it put in in the bathroom Lady Maude uses as a surprise to her. Herself was off at an auction when they did it ‒ in a hurry-like, because Mrs. Sheridan had her doubts about Lady Maude being too pleased with it, atall. Well, when Lady Maude saw the holes chopped in the wall for the pipe wasn’t there the devil of a row. And she never would use the heater even though Mrs. Sheridan had a whole line of gas tanks delivered from the Lord knows where at terrible cost. They’re down in the cellar now, and I do try to be economical with the gas, because when it’s gone, there’ll be no more.’

  ‘Lady Maude didn’t care for the changes?’

  ‘Well, now, Lady Maude was a wee bit slow to agree with all the plans ‒ didn’t want her things disturbed, and didn’t like the men from Dublin. After the day when they put in the gas heater behind her back she never would leave the place for fear of what would be done without her knowing. But she would have come round, no doubt of that at all. Mrs. Sheridan had the knack of getting her own way, and she was very attached to the house.’

  ‘She was?’

  ‘Proud of it, she was. She once showed me a picture of it in some auld book she found in Dublin about Irish houses. They do say in it that Meremount is something special, though you could never tell it to be lookin’ at it, could you now? But she was going to do it all over, and make it a showplace, and all the magazines were going to come to take pictures of it. Of course, some day she would have had Castle Tyrell, but she liked Meremount better. It was like a hobby, you might say. And her so happy with it all ‒ flitting about from one thing to another like some beautiful bird. Mad for everything Irish, she was. Of course, there were big plans for the glassworks, but she had some schemes all her own ‒ a weaving factory in Cloncath, for one. Irish tweeds and the like, and special laces. And wasn’t she mad about horses, so there was to be a racing stable. All the drawings and things are still up there in the rooms she and Mr. Connor had. He won’t let anyone touch them. All her clothes are still there, dresses and fur coats, and things you’ve never dreamed of. Lady Maude wasn’t able to stop her fixing her own rooms, you see. She turned a dressing-room into a bathroom, and I never saw the like of it in me life ‒ all mirrors and such. Like something in the pictures. Well, it’s done for now, and so is she, poor lady. All the beautiful plans are ruined. We’re stuck back the way we always were at Meremount.’

  She smoothed her apron with her big rough hands. She seemed to brood over something that had been briefly glimpsed and then whisked away.

  ‘I suppose she … I suppose Mrs. Sheridan was pretty?’ I wondered why it mattered to me what Lotti Sheridan had looked like; it was not a question I could ever ask Connor.

  Annie’s head came up. ‘Lovely, she was. One of those faces you want to keep lookin’ at. Great eyes, she had, with hair about the colour of the stubble in the fields after haying. Everything she did was beautiful. Oh, Mr. Connor was mad for her! Only a few weeks they knew each other before they were married, and then eight months she was here, and that was the finish of it.’

  ‘You all miss her then …’

  ‘Miss her? We do, yes. But you’ll never hear her name spoken between Mr. Con
nor and Lady Maude. Since she went he spends a lot of time in that office of his, just sittin’ there. Never goes near Mrs. Sheridan’s father, either. Can’t bear to talk about her. But it isn’t as if she never was, if you know what I mean. Things changed at Meremount while she was here, and we’re missin’ the thought of them ever since. There’ll be no money put into the glassworks now, and none of the things he planned to do will ever be done. Things get a wee bit slower every day. It’s hard to think how it was ‒ how it was goin’ to be. Nothin’ happens any more.’

  She put the damp dishcloth across the back of a chair. You’re the only thing that’s happened at Meremount since Mrs. Sheridan went. And who can be tellin’ what will come of it, atall?’ She said the last in a low tone, as if it were her own private ruination, not meant for my ears, but surely something I must already know.

  III

  At mid-afternoon the shooting-brake came from Castle Tyrell, driven by O’Keefe, who greeted me as if I had been a long-time fixture at Meremount, and strove to give the impression to Michael that he knew a great deal more about my arrival than it would have been possible for him to know.

  ‘And how are you today, Miss D’Arcy? Himself was very concerned about you. Sure, it’s a terrible thing that happened to Lady Maude. Whoever would have thought it, with you just come? ‒ be careful, will you now, with those dishes.’ This last to Michael, who had opened up the stiffly hinged gates to the kitchen garden to permit the big car to back up near the scullery door. ‘Sure it’s behind the plough you still should be, Michael Sweeney, with the big hands on you.’

  Together we brought the food in and laid it on the scullery shelves. Somehow its richness made that grim, sad room seem worse. There was a whole smoked salmon, there were game pies and fruit pies, there was lean moist ham, four kinds of sausage, smoked trout, a roasted joint of beef, baskets of fruit, baskets of vegetables, fruit cake and soda bread. There was a box of tinned delicacies ‒ caviar and artichoke hearts, Portuguese sardines and smoked oysters, hearts of palm, preserved ginger, anchovies. I lost track of it all, and I knew I had made a mistake.