Edge of Glass Page 6

  II

  ‘What is your name?’ the gnome said.

  I told him, and he nodded. ‘I am Otto Praeger.’ It was the first time we had spoken during the journey. He tilted his head back in an awkward, unaccustomed movement, and stared up at the trees overhead, the way one does in an open car.

  ‘Your ancestors, Miss D’Arcy, planted these trees. They built the house I live in ‒ Castle Tyrell. I bought it and what remained of the estate a little more than ten years ago.’ He glanced sideways at me. ‘You wonder why I bother you with all this when you have more important things on your mind? It is to prepare you for what you will be told when you see Lady Maude ‒ if you see Lady Maude. She will undoubtedly tell you all this, and much more. Her madness is her family ‒ the lack of it, and the past ‒ too much of it. She is obsessed with the way things used to be. She lives, I think, only for the day when she will repossess the house she sold to me, when she will live again in the place where she was born. In the nature of things it can never happen, of course.’

  ‘This is the Sheridan family …’ I was sorting my way through the relationships.

  ‘Not the Sheridans. Lady Maude was a Tyrell. She married beneath her rank, and while the world has forgotten about such things, she never can. Charles Sheridan was in trade ‒ I don’t think it ever occurred to her that he was the descendant of a famous glassmaker. I wonder if she has ever forgiven him ‒ he’s been dead many years ‒ for so far over-reaching himself as to ask her to marry him. Or herself, either, for the necessity of having to accept him.’

  He had been right to discourage me, and Blanche had been right in that long-ago decision to keep me away from this. ‘The rest of the family?’ I asked faintly.

  ‘As I told you ‒ no one. Not a Tyrell, and not a close Sheridan. There’s a Sheridan running the glassworks, but he’s the son of a distant cousin ‒ Connor Sheridan.’

  I had been waiting for the other name, but it had not come. So I asked. ‘Do you know someone called Brendan Carroll?’

  I felt, rather than heard, the intake of breath; the bulk in the seat beside me seemed to quiver.

  ‘I do,’ he said, and that was all. I saw the pudgy hand clasping and unclasping the stick; he didn’t any longer look up into the trees.

  Finally the avenue ceased to run on into the distance; I could see the glint of calm water. We crossed another stone bridge over the stream that fed a small, artificial lake to which sloped brilliant green turf and banks of azaleas. On a low rise was the house, a long pile of stone battlemented, turretted, towered, the odd result of many generations of building fever ‒ not beautiful, but unalterably impressive. At the far end the house joined, but did not blend into, an ancient square tower, which rose high above it, a fortress tower from the days when bowmen watched from the slit windows for the invader who came from the sea mists.

  Involuntarily I had slowed the car as I stared.

  ‘They burned it during the Troubles,’ Otto Praeger said. ‘The family could no longer live there, and there was no money to put it back in order. It stayed roofless until I found it, a shelter for the small animals of the wood that grew up within its walls. It might have been,’ he added, ‘less expensive to have razed the whole thing and begun again ‒ but in those days I was in no mood to tear anything down. By 1945 I had seen too much of the world blasted out of existence.’

  I wondered what he himself had lost by the end of the war to make him cherish this pile ‒ and where he had lost it. Oddly, with the exception of the ancient tower, the house itself had little real effect on me; it was as if I looked at a pasteboard cut-out, a toy thing made for play. Otto Praeger said my ancestors had built it, but my experience of my ancestors stopped with Blanche. I should have left it that way, I thought. I was not of the time or the generation that could venerate family or buildings or a special plot of earth; Lady Maude would feel that the rejection of her only direct descendant all those years ago had been prophetic and justified. Tomorrow, probably, I would leave for Spain.

  The drive led past the house and round to the other side. I parked the car on the gravelled space below a terrace. This end of the house was mid-Victorian Gothic, all the windows and doors elaborately and heavily arched. An attempt to lighten the effect had been made by placing tubs planted with pansies on the flight of steps that led to the main door, but they were dwarfed by the scale of the house itself. As we got out the door opened and a youngish man wearing a dark grey servant’s jacket and a bow tie, wildly askew, ran down the steps.

  ‘It’s himself,’ he called back over his shoulder to someone unseen in the hall.

  ‘I am,’ Otto Praeger said in a low voice, ‘chaotically but affectionately served. I tried it another way, with an English butler and housekeeper, but the house went to pieces in a month. So now we do it their way, and we almost manage.’

  ‘Mr Praeger, sir,’ the man said, hurrying towards me. ‘Wasn’t I about to send out after you. It’s gone half-two, and you’ve no lunch in you yet.’

  ‘Well, then, we’d better have tea, hadn’t we, O’Keefe?’

  ‘Tea?’ Consternation showed in O’Keefe’s face. ‘At this hour? I’ll see what herself has to say about that.’

  ‘Yes ‒ tell her I’m hungry.’

  ‘I will that, sir. And what will I be doing with the baggage, sir?’

  ‘Baggage?’

  O’Keefe was staring at the bags piled in the space behind the seats. ‘Oh, that … well, I’ll give you instructions later.’

  I waited until O’Keefe had gone ahead of us, calling again to whoever was in the hall, ‘Himself will be wanting tea. He’s hungry. Tell Mrs. Sullivan.’

  ‘You should have told him to leave the bags where they are,’ I said. ‘I’m not staying. The hotel in Cloncath seems the best bet ‒ at least it’s neutral ground.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as neutral ground in Ireland, Miss D’Arcy ‒ as you will learn. If Lady Maude refuses to see you, you will, of course, spend the night here. And no one will know that that was not what we intended all along.’

  ‘Whatever happens,’ I said, ‘tomorrow I’ll go.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he answered. ‘We’ll see.’

  III

  ‘I have sent Lady Maude a note,’ Otto Praeger said.

  ‘A note? Wouldn’t a telephone call have done?’

  ‘She rarely consents to talk on the telephone, I understand. I myself have never tried to telephone her. And if I did now, half of Cloncath would know it within the hour. But we will have tea, and wait. The reply will be here soon. It is no distance to Meremount.’

  We were seated in a room which overlooked the lake at the furthest end of the building from the old tower, a handsome room that served as Otto Praeger’s study. It opened off the central hall, which had surprised me by being plain and modern, when I had expected heavy Victorian panelling; then I recalled his talk of the roofless walls where a young forest had begun to grow up. It had been restored in rough white stucco and uncarved wood, its plainness serving to emphasise the brilliance of the collection of Chinese rugs and ceramics. The hall had opened out on to a long gallery of connecting rooms facing the lake, their walls hung with paintings. I had wanted to linger, but Praeger had bustled me into his study.

  ‘Later,’ he said. ‘You will come later. Everything I will show you later. Now we will have tea.’

  Before O’Keefe had arrived with the trays and tea-pots, a heavy, middle-aged woman, wearing what seemed almost an unconscious caricature of an Irish countrywoman’s dress of thick tweeds and brogues, presented herself at the door. She carried a notebook and pencil, and a sheaf of papers.

  Immediately Praeger waved her away. ‘Later, Fräulein, please. Did O’Keefe not tell you I had a guest? ‒ and I have not had my lunch.’

  The woman nodded. ‘Yes, Herr Praeger. And do not forget your pills.’

  When she had closed the door Praeger observed sadly, ‘The young ones are pleasanter to look at, but if one travels with a you
ng secretary, people make stupid remarks, and the Press is snide. Also the young ones are not so efficient, and they never remember the pills.’

  ‘Do you travel much, Mr. Praeger?’ I was confused about what all these strangers were doing in Ireland.

  He blinked, as if I should have known. ‘My offices are in Frankfurt,’ he said. ‘Yes ‒ I travel a good deal.’

  ‘Frankfurt? But you live here!’

  ‘I live here a few days a week.’

  I spread my hands, indicating the house. ‘But all this for so little time …?’

  He eased himself down into an armchair opposite me. ‘I saw Europe destroyed, Miss D’Arcy. I promised myself that if I should survive I would find myself a place that war hadn’t touched.’ He shrugged. ‘When I found this, it also bore scars of a long war ‒ but it was an honourable and just fight. And remember, in those days there weren’t many places a German was accepted. But these people were decent and kind, and if they disliked me, they kept it to themselves. Only Lady Maude ‒ she, of course, being an aristocrat, and Anglo-Irish, felt it her duty to despise me, as she took my money for her house ‒ oh, excuse me, I should not have said those things. There is nothing so boring to the young as a self-pitying old man. And she is your grandmother …’

  ‘She is my mother’s mother,’ I said. ‘Whether she is anything to me personally, we’ll have to find out.’ His expression was doubtful, and I gave vent to the resentment and dismay that was growing in me. ‘Mr. Praeger ‒ my car’s out there. I’m free to go any time I want. I don’t owe Lady Maude anything ‒ not anything at all.’

  O’Keefe was entering then with the tea things, and Praeger made only one slight comment. ‘You will excuse me ‒ but things are never quite as simple as that.’

  Then he busied himself with pouring for me, and trying to get me to eat. ‘You are thin,’ he said. ‘But a lot of girls are thin these days, even the German girls. They all look as if they are trying to be models.’

  I let it go. I was becoming more nervous as we waited, and I didn’t want to eat; I felt as if I had a race to run, and it should be on an empty stomach. I regretted the beer by the stream; I regretted almost everything I had done since Brendan Carroll’s telephone call. Mrs. Sullivan seemed to have decided to throw lunch and tea into one meal, and there were plates of smoked salmon, a potato salad, ham, cheese, as well as the obligatory silver tray of tiny sandwiches and cakes. Otto Praeger gave up urging me to eat, and settled to it himself; he ate silently and with relish. I smoked a cigarette and drank tea, and when the telephone rang in the silence I started, and some of the liquid spilled into the saucer.

  ‘Yes, Fräulein,’ Otto Praeger said. ‘Yes, put him through … Yes, she is. Yes … yes, I will direct her. I think she is able to find her way. Good-day.’

  He turned to me. ‘That was Connor Sheridan. I also sent a message to him at the glassworks. He and Lady Maude are expecting you.’

  I put the cup down slowly; my knees didn’t seem to want to bear my weight when I stood up.

  IV

  I found Meremount easily, and too quickly. Fräulein Schmidt’s typed directions were painfully explicit, but I didn’t need them. Otto Praeger had told me to return to the North Lodge where I had parked the car to eat lunch, and to continue on the Cloncath road. Meremount’s gate was about a mile further. When I saw it I forgot my nervousness for a moment in the sheer pleasure of looking at it. It was a perfect Queen Anne house, exquisite in every proportion and line and detail, as symmetrical, as straightforward, as pleasing as a child’s drawing of a house. It was surrounded by the pasture land of its farm, an orchard on each side of its gently curving avenue where sheep cropped the long grass. The lodge was a small cottage of the same period where washing hung out to dry; here the iron gates stood open. They looked as if they had rusted that way and would never close again. There was no real garden that I could see ‒ just a rough lawn surrounded by the sheep fence, a few scraggly rhododendrons under the windows, a circular bed of unpruned roses into which the weeds had encroached, and some geraniums in pots at the bottom of the steps. A high brick wall continuous to the front facade cut off the view of the outbuildings and might have concealed another garden; rampaging ivy and wisteria almost hid it. After the groomed massiveness of Otto Praeger’s castle, Meremount was reassuring.

  The big front door stood open, and on the steps and down on the weedy gravel circle before the house were scattered pieces of furniture, obviously taken from a battered lorry that stood to one side. There was a fine little writing table, a Victorian washstand, numbers of unmatched chairs, some of them very good ‒ and all set about haphazardly as if they had dropped out of the sky. From the hall I could hear the sound of voices raised in altercation; one voice, thin and ageing, was always dominant and imperative.

  ‘No ‒ you idiot! There! Turn it there!’ I moved towards the steps. There were mumbled objections, and the voices of two men giving each other instructions. Then there was a cry, and the sound of shattering glass. It was instantly followed by recriminations from the high thin voice. ‘And how, Michael Sweeney, am I to replace that? That sconce was nearly two hundred years old. For all you know your great-great-great grandfather made it for Sheridan …’

  ‘Whist! ‒ don’t fuss yourself, Lady Maude! Haven’t we the exact same thing hanging in our hall? Sure we never use the thing since we got the electricity, so you’re welcome to it.’

  I had reached the top of the stairs. A thin, grey old woman wearing a blue-green tweed skirt and jacket stood half-turned to the open door. With their backs to me, hands on hips, two men surveyed the frame of a high four-poster bed, and scattered on the floor about it, the crystal from the pendants of a small sconce. They had obviously been trying to manoeuvre the bed along a narrow passage through a collection of furniture greater than any Blanche had ever had at one time in the shop. It was the weirdest assortment of things I had ever seen, good, and less than good ‒ pieces to furnish a mansion and a dozen cottages, chairs, tables, desks, sofas, bric-a-brac ‒ the rubbish and gems of a whole life-time. It all stood there, without even the order of an auction gallery, waiting for something, for some place to go. It completely obscured the magnificence of the hall, the slim columns which divided its lofty spaces. Above the sea of furniture I could just glimpse the delicate tracery of two Adam mantles, and just the beginning of a wonderfully carved staircase which opened from the hall at the right. The dust lay thick on the mantels and the chandeliers, on all the furniture but that nearest to the small aisles that had been left for the people who had to inhabit and move about this storehouse.

  The old lady sensed my shadow at the doorway, and turned fully towards me. She said nothing, just stood looking, and I felt right into my limbs the merciless scrutiny of the faded blue eyes; a slight working of the lips was the only sign of emotion she betrayed. I stood rooted, unable to move or speak.

  The two men now became aware of her gaze fixed on something beyond them. They turned ‒ they were dressed in somewhat similar fashion in odd working trousers tucked into gum boots, and roughly cut jackets of the same tweed as the old lady wore. I guessed that they were farm labourers called in to help move the furniture off the truck. Their mouths fell open a little as they took me in.

  Her voice came again, thinner, shriller, forced; there was some emotion after all. ‘Well, leave it now. Leave it and go and bring in the other things before a shower destroys them. Michael Sweeney, don’t stand there gaping. Don’t you see my granddaughter has arrived?’

  And then to me. ‘Well, come along. I’ve been expecting you.’

  V

  ‘How do you take it?’

  ‘Without milk or sugar, please.’ She shot me a sharp glance, as if I had been guilty of affectation, but said nothing as she handed across the dark tepid liquid in the Crown Derby cup. She indicated the plates on the small table between us. ‘Bread and butter? ‒ a scone?’ I was afraid to refuse, so I tried to nibble at one of the rock-hard scones, with it
s butter not spread, but stabbed in an extravagant lump on its unyielding surface. The dry crumbs caught in my throat, and I coughed.

  Again the sharp look. ‘You’re not ill, are you? You’re too thin …’

  I shook my head unable to answer. While I struggled with the crumb, she didn’t take her eyes off me, and I could feel all the criticism she didn’t bother to express ‒ didn’t she know this was the era of the short skirt and the straight long hair? ‒ and that I didn’t wear either one extraordinarily short or long, and they both were clean, and one well combed? I knew I got no good marks for that, though; her own hair was worn in magnificent high silver plaits above a face of translucent skin, crossed by hundreds of tiny fine lines, and stretched on bones that reminded me of what Blanche’s bones had been. She had beautiful hands, uncared for, and she managed the thick slabs of bread and butter, and then a scone, as if they had been the delicate kind put before Otto Praeger; but then she must have known what to expect because she spread it all thickly with strawberry jam from a smeared crystal pot.

  We were seated in what she termed the drawing-room, a large high room with a beautifully ornamented ceiling and panelling. Not much of the panelling was visible for the furniture that stood about the walls ‒ the high mahogany bookcases, empty of books, but crammed with silver and china, the library tables thrust up against the bookcases, the big rococo commodes, the side tables, the round tilt tables on their delicate tripods. We sat on Chippendale chairs with frayed tapestry seats and backs in a relatively clear space before the carved marble mantel. I could see the rest of the room forlornly reflected in the gilt-framed mirror above it, the long curtains whose silk had gone to shreds along their stiff folds, the rain-streaked french windows that led out to a garden that had almost vanished under a tangle of briars and vines. Here the furniture was not the catch-bag variety of the hall; it was all of extraordinary quality and carefully selected, as if this had once presented the appearance of an ordinary drawing-room. But somewhere along the line it had all got out of hand; it was now a sad storage room full of furniture that no one ever used. As I took it all in I was reminded of the shop in King’s Road ‒ of the years when I had absorbed without knowing it the basic styles of the great cabinet makers ‒ Chippendale, Sheraton, Hepplewhite, Adam. I could not have put names to every style and period I saw, but Blanche could, and now I knew where she had learned them.