Edge of Glass Page 12

  I could feel O’Keefe’s enjoyment as he and Michael made their many trips from car to scullery, feel his kindly but definite patronage. ‘There ‒ I’m thinkin’ you’ll not starve at Meremount now, Miss D’Arcy.’

  But it needed Annie to say it for me. She stood staring at the loaded shelves after O’Keefe had gone, twisting her hands. ‘Oh, the shame of it! Just to be thinkin’ of what will be said in Cloncath when the story gets out, as Kevin O’Keefe will make sure that it does.’

  ‘But, Annie, there’s no shame ‒ people often send food to help out when there’s an illness in the house, and everyone knows there’s extra work and no time for cooking.’

  ‘That isn’t it, Miss Maura. Look you here ‒ there’s eggs and butter and bacon. Bread, too. Things no decent house would be without, no matter what. Sure, the story will be around we’re beggars here at Meremount. And I wouldn’t put it past O’Keefe to have put them in himself, just for the sake of what he’d have to tell in the pub. That he brought bread to Meremount. Oh, I’m tellin’ you, I’ll be goin’ to early Mass of a Sunday from this on so as not to be meetin’ the winks and the nods.’

  And I felt her shame also; it was silly, it was unreasonable, but I felt it. That was the first time I identified myself with Meremount.

  But we had smoked salmon sandwiches and fruit cake when the vicar called at tea-time to enquire after Lady Maude. The Reverend Stanton was a threadbare young man who ate what was put before him as if he needed it.

  ‘Lady Maude won’t want to see me, of course,’ he said. ‘She’s not religious.’ And that part of his duty done, he went on to talk as though he were also starved for a listener. He told me that he was not married, that he had just come from four years as minister to a poor parish in Connemara where he had spent his time taking care of the physical needs of the Catholics because there were so few Protestants, and they didn’t seem to have spiritual needs for him to minister to.

  ‘Before the Treaty,’ he said, ‘it would have been unthinkable to have given someone like myself ‒’ with a single gesture he indicated the youth, his poverty, his garrulousness, ‘‒ the parish church of the seat of the Tyrells. But things have changed. The Protestant Church in Southern Ireland,’ he said morosely, ‘is withering away. Look, I have an enormous church, built in the days of the Protestant Ascendancy, very expensive to keep up. My permanent parishioners number no more than forty, and many of them don’t come except at Christmas and Easter. Sometimes I don’t blame them. The bellows of the organ are broken, the roof leaks, and the church is miserably cold. All my flock is so old …’ He said it with a kind of anguish, all the time eating as if those good things, too, might suddenly wither away. ‘I stand in the pulpit on Sundays and wonder if they understand a word I say ‒ or care to understand it. I talk about the world’s hungry, the world’s dispossessed, the Bomb ‒ and it’s not their concern. A lot of them are English living in Ireland for cheapness, and their greatest worry is whether inflation will erode their savings or pension to less than the break-even point before they die. I tell you, Miss D’Arcy, it’s discouraging. Will you come on Sunday? Sometimes a young face … And you’re a Tyrell. The name still counts with them, a reminder of the better days. Even if they come just out of curiosity …’ He reached for more cake before I could extend the plate. ‘But that’s no good, is it? I never thought in my student days that I’d ever hear myself urging someone to come to church for what it might do to other people. Religion has become a form, and I’m talking to myself. But will you come on Sunday?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be here on Sunday. Lady Maude isn’t seriously ill, and there is a nurse. There’s not much reason to stay.’

  He looked dismayed. ‘You can’t go so soon,’ he said. ‘You’re needed. I don’t mean for nursing.’

  I shrugged, and because he was young and truthful and despairing, I said what was on my mind. ‘I’m not needed in any case. My mother left here more than twenty-three years ago, and she never came back. Now that I know this place and know Lady Maude, I understand why. She was married then, Mr. Stanton ‒ but she met my father in London. Ever since that time Lady Maude has behaved as if she had died. I suppose you already know that?’

  ‘Yes, I know. People have long memories, and the Irish still enjoy retelling a good story. You suddenly appearing here, when no one even knew you existed, makes it all the better, don’t you see? Rounds it out for them. But you’re needed for yourself, don’t you see?’

  ‘No, I don’t see. I’ve upset Lady Maude by coming, and Dr. Donnelly as good as said I caused her heart attack. And I haven’t changed anything, except to make it all a little harder, perhaps.’

  ‘But you must see.’ His cup rattled agitatedly in the saucer. ‘This house had need of something young and fresh and beautiful. Someone with some enthusiasm ‒ some hope ‒ left in them.’

  ‘But surely Mrs. Sheridan was young and …?’ I couldn’t finish. His face had assumed an expression of utter distaste. It was all the more startling for his not being able to control it. He put his cup down and rose.

  ‘I didn’t know Mrs. Sheridan very well. I must go now.’

  ‘You don’t know me either.’

  ‘I know the difference,’ he said. ‘Call on me if you need me. I mean it. God knows, few enough people seem to need a minister these days.’

  He picked up the few remaining sandwiches from the plate and munched on them gloomily as we threaded our way through the furniture in the hall and out to his dilapidated car.

  IV

  After Mr. Stanton had gone I went upstairs to relieve Mrs. O’Shea in Lady Maude’s room. All day I had known that at four-thirty I was to take over while Mrs. O’Shea had her tea and a rest, and I had dreaded it. As I opened the door I wondered again, as I had done countless times that day, why I came into the presence of this old woman as if I were going to punishment; the only answer I could find, a faint answer and not very convincing, was that the world of non-involvement, the cool world was what I had sought escape from. But need this involvement have been so total? Did it demand that I be the scapegoat for Blanche? To that I had no answer.

  It was worse than I had expected. The door had barely closed after Mrs. O’Shea when Lady Maude turned fiercely in the bed ‒ much too quickly for a woman who was ill ‒ so that she faced directly the chair in which I sat. ‘Why did you permit it? It’s a disgrace!’

  ‘What is, Lady Maude?’ I knew what she was going to say.

  ‘Otto Praeger sending food here! How does he dare? See, I am laid up only a single day, and already everything is falling to pieces about me. He would never have dared offer this insult if I had been at the door to meet it.’

  ‘You’re mistaken. He asked if he could help, and I said he could. I explained about all the extra people in the house ‒ and Mrs. O’Shea likes her food, you know ‒ and the callers, and I asked if he would send over some things. I didn’t expect so much ‒ a ham, perhaps, and some fruit. Mr. Praeger is very generous.’

  ‘The man is a scoundrel! He’s just like all the other foreigners who have flocked into this country stealing what isn’t theirs. For years Praeger has been waiting for just such an opportunity. And to think it came at your invitation!’ Her voice rose dangerously. I heard it in the shrill cadence of the night before when Connor, not I, had been with her in this room. It frightened me.

  ‘Please, Lady Maude … If you excite yourself you may …’

  She half-turned her face, as if she could not bear the sight of me. ‘Why do you pretend to care? It is too late to care. The caring should have come from my daughter. She should have been here to guard the inheritance that was hers, to rebuild it ‒’

  ‘She tried!’ I broke in, knowing that I shouldn’t even begin to engage her in this argument, but unable to dismiss the memory of the letter that had forbidden further communication from Blanche. ‘You know she tried after I was born ‒’

  ‘When it was too late! When the damage was done. She knew she
could never return here. She deserted me. She left me to be surrounded by fools and liars and cheats. I married a fool, and he gave me nothing. My only child deserted and betrayed me. My inheritance was stolen from me ‒ yes, stolen! You don’t suppose I don’t know that Otto Praeger was behind all the people who wouldn’t wait any longer for some trifling sums of money owed to them? So he got Tyrell almost for nothing, and he refused to return the carpets and pictures and silver ‒ all our beautiful things that he found in the cellars.’

  ‘Tyrell was burned,’ I said. ‘Nothing could have remained after all those years.’

  ‘Lies and treachery,’ she cried, as if I had not spoken. She was wandering, I told myself; her mind, already shadowed by phantoms from a tragic past, was magnifying imagined wrongs. But there was no stopping her; the stream of her words washed over me, scouring, abrasive, corroding.

  ‘And not content with having Tyrell, he sent his daughter to take Meremount. She seduced that fool Connor whom I brought from nothing, and there she is in my household, taking it from me, taking this, taking that, pushing me aside …’

  ‘She was giving,’ I said quickly, defending Connor rather than his wife. ‘You can’t say she wasn’t paying for what she did here. And the money that was going to be put into the glassworks …? What about that?’

  ‘Another lie. A worthless promise. I had heard it before. Blanche had used it to cover her corruption, her faithlessness. I had made her the best match in the whole of Ireland ‒ the Findlays had money, English money, and they were going to invest in the glassworks. And what came of it? ‒ only desertion and betrayal and scandal. If Blanche had done what was expected of her, if she had been the daughter I was entitled to, the wife that the Findlays had the right to expect, the glassworks would have prospered. There would have been money ‒ and Tyrell need not have been lost. But she wanted only what her own selfishness demanded. She was greedy and lustful, and I was the one to suffer for it. And then this other one came, and there were the same promises. And they came to nothing. And now you have come ‒ too late. Just to torment me. Is it any wonder I have no peace? Everything is gone.’

  Her tone dropped down into a barely audible muttering. I saw her fists clenched on the bedcovers. She seemed to have forgotten that I was there, or did not care; I was of no consequence. She had forgotten why this stream of talk had begun. Her wrongs, brooded over day after day for many years, were now completely dominant, and not I, nor anyone else, would ever right them. They were her only reality. I sat and watched the thin tense figure in the bed, myself shaking a little, my hands pressed together, conscious of my longing for a cigarette. The minutes dragged by; she said nothing more. Gradually the rigid frame relaxed back into the pillows, the muttered words had ceased, the hands were still. Incredibly, she had dropped into sleep; she was older than one thought. I went close to check, and her breathing was even and free.

  When I went back to the chair I noticed that the rain had stopped. There would be a sunset.

  Bridget’s tap on the door delivered me. I put my finger to my lips, and she came close and whispered to me. ‘There’s a man on the telephone for you, Miss Maura. Annie says I’m to sit with Lady Maude for a spell.’

  I nodded, and as I rose to go, she whispered again, her eyes bright with curiosity and excitement. ‘It’s Mr. Carroll, that’s who it is!’

  V

  All day I had waited either for him to come to the house or to telephone; I had begun to think that he would disappear as he had done that night at the White Hart. I was angry with him, and wretched from the last scene with Lady Maude, and at the same time I wanted desperately to see him.

  My palms were sweating but I hoped my tone was cool. ‘Hello?’

  The remembered voice answered me, the siren voice that had lured me into this bog. ‘Well, it seems,’ he said, ‘I brought you into more than either of us bargained for. How are you?’

  ‘How do you think I am? ‒ so confused I don’t know which side is up. For Heaven’s sake why didn’t you leave me where I was?’ It was easier to blame him than to reason why I didn’t just leave all this myself.

  ‘Ah ‒ wasn’t I always the one to be stickin’ my nose in where it wasn’t wanted?’ It was said with a teasing regret; he had slipped back into that caricature brogue. ‘I’ll have to be beggin’ your forgiveness. Where can I see you?’

  ‘What for?’ Why should I make it easy for him?

  He sighed. ‘Nothing like good old English bluntness, is there? It’s a fair question, but I don’t happen to have an answer. Perhaps I should apologise. Perhaps I could set you right side up about a few things. Perhaps I just should come right out and say I’d like to be seeing you, allanah. Will any of these answers do? Or do I have to be completely logical and English?’

  ‘Oh, what the hell!’ I was tired and fumbling, and I couldn’t fence with him. ‘Where do I meet you? Anywhere but here.’

  ‘Anywhere but Meremount is right. I’m not exactly welcome there. And better leave out any of the pubs for twenty miles about ‒ I’m what might be called a well-known character in such places, and of course all Cloncath knows that Blanche Sheridan’s daughter has suddenly appeared.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘Here ‒ my cottage. Do you mind?’

  I brushed the question aside. ‘How do I get there?’

  ‘Not too difficult. But you have to take the long way round. I hear you’ve already been to Castle Tyrell, so you know how to get that far. Well, just don’t cross the bridge leading up to the lake. Just follow it straight through. It comes to the North Lodge. That’s where I live. The gates are closed, though. There’s a stream and the remains of ‒’

  ‘‒ a bridge,’ I finished for him.

  ‘How do you know?’

  I felt a kind of coldness engulf me, the premonition that the knowledge I had sought might turn out to be more than I wanted to know. I said quietly, ‘I’ve been there before,’ and put down the receiver.

  There were lights on already in Castle Tyrell as I drove by on the far side of the lake, although the dusk had hardly begun to settle ‒ so many lights burning just for one man; I wondered if the black nights of the concentration camp gave him now the urge to hold back the darkness, or if it was merely an extravagance, like the over-abundant food. I remembered that I had not telephoned him to thank him for the food sent to Meremount; I didn’t know how to tell him that it had been too much.

  Lights and an open door greeted me at the lodge. There was a stab of recognition as I saw the tall figure lounging in the doorway; he straightened as the headlights of the car swept over the cottage. He had his hand on the door before I had fully come to a halt.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come.’ Now there was no mockery in his voice; the accent was natural, soft. He peered into my face closely as I got out of the car. ‘You’ve not been having an easy time of it, I see.’

  It betrayed an awareness, a concern I hadn’t expected. ‘Do I look that much older?’ It was an attempt to shrug it off.

  He answered me seriously. ‘You do that … you look older. Come on in.’

  I paused in the cottage door, Brendan behind me, and I think it was a sight and a feeling my senses had been craving since I had come to Meremount. The first thing was that it was warm; a fire burned brightly in the white-painted brick fireplace, and its spirit and cheerfulness seemed to reach out to embrace me at once. It was a very small house ‒ when it had been built in the eighteenth century the perfect proportions had mattered more than the comfort of the lodge-keeper’s family. This defect now had been overcome by taking down the interior walls, leaving just the brick chimney column and the narrow staircase, white and uncarpeted, to the second floor. Standing in the doorway I could see beyond the chimney piece to the new kitchen fittings along the back wall. There was very little furniture ‒ two chairs, a sofa, a wall fitted with shelves for books, a radio and record-player. There was a large orange rug on the floor and golden tweed curtains at the tiny leaded windo
ws. It was plain and bare, and, after Meremount, an incredible refreshment.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ I said.

  ‘Sure it’s just a humble wee bit of a place. Hardly fit for a Tyrell atall, atall.’

  ‘There you go again! Did you ask me here just to laugh at me?’

  ‘I did not.’ He closed the door. ‘’Tis me shyness, Miss D’Arcy that takes a hold of me tongue, and I find it saying a devil of a lot of things I never meant it to.’

  ‘Shy! ‒ You don’t know what the word means!’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. He took my raincoat and laid it across the back of the sofa. ‘How is it that Lady Maude hasn’t got you wearing the Tyrell tweed?’

  ‘The what tweed?’

  ‘You must have noticed it. It’s that blueish tweed that everyone around Meremount wears. All the Tyrell servants used to wear it in the old days, they say ‒ a sort of everyday livery, it was. They say there was an enormous order for it on the looms up North at the time Castle Tyrell was burned. The Tyrells couldn’t pay for it, but the mill couldn’t sell it, either, because no one wanted a servant’s tweed. So there are whole bales of it up in the Meremount attics, and Lady Maude doles it out to Annie and the farm hands. I don’t suppose they mind ‒ it saves their own clothes, but none of them would be caught dead going into town in it. What will you have to drink?’

  ‘Do you have Irish whiskey?’

  ‘I do. But who’s been teaching you to drink that?’

  ‘Who else but Connor? Not Lady Maude.’

  ‘Ah, yes ‒ Connor. Well, he’s need of it from time to time in that house, I’m sure. Will you have ice with it? You see I’m able to offer you all the amenities.’

  ‘Yes, please. How did you get this cottage?’

  He brought the drinks from the kitchen area where he had prepared them. ‘You mean, how did I get Otto Praeger to let me have it? Well, obviously, he didn’t need the money. I have it rented ‒ he wouldn’t sell. It happened to be vacant, and I needed a place to live. The family that was in it he moved to the new estate cottages he built ‒ they had seven kids, and this place was an elegant slum. Sure you must have noticed that Otto Praeger’s a bit daft about the Irish ‒ about their letting him be here and all. So he’s after giving the estate workers all kinds of fancy frills ‒ a bit of a benevolent despot, you might say, but so far, he’s harmless. Of course, there’s method in his madness; they’ll not leave him to go and work elsewhere that they don’t get his pretty cottages and the bus to take them to Mass on a Sunday, and the Christmas party and the August picnic races, and all the little bits of feudal paraphernalia he surrounds himself with. He loves it all, of course. Calls the lot of them his family. It amuses him to spend his money on this make-believe family, but then he doesn’t have to put up with the screaming kids one minute longer than he wants to.’