Edge of Glass Page 8

  ‘Too few for Lady Maude. She had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for me. My father was about a third cousin of her husband, Charles Sheridan. I doubted they’d even met ‒ my father died when I was quite young. After Charles died Lady Maude carried on the glassworks with the manager she had ‒ or didn’t carry it on, because it did even less business than it had before ‒ and I can tell you, Irish glassmaking hasn’t been exactly a growth industry. By the time the manager ‒ Fogarty, was his name ‒ died a few years ago, there almost wasn’t a Sheridan Glassworks left. The Sheridans have been great glassmakers and, in my opinion, they’ve been damn’ good fighters, too. But Ireland and the times have been against them. I don’t know how much of the history of your mother’s country you know, but I can tell you doing any kind of business in Ireland until about ten years ago was more than a small battle. That Sheridan Glass continued to exist in Ireland for more than two hundred years ‒ even Waterford Glass disappeared you know, and was only revived ten or so years ago ‒ says a great deal for the men of the family. They just never let go ‒ that’s their history.’

  He swirled the liquid in his glass slowly; he had a thick, powerful body, with a look of strength, but now the broad shoulders seemed to hunch beneath the heavy tweed jacket.

  ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that I am not the Sheridan with whom their history ends.’

  ‘Is it likely to end ‒ now?’

  He shrugged. ‘Something has to happen, soon. It has either to come to an end, or it has to have fresh capital. It needs fresh everything ‒ and the money for fresh ideas. It needs rebuilding. Glassmaking’s one of the arts that hardly has changed much over the centuries ‒ only a certain degree of mechanisation is possible with a hand craft. But you still need glasshouses that don’t let the rain in ‒ and furnaces don’t last forever. The men grow old, and new ones don’t come in to train. They get better wages in England. Sheridan Glass is moribund, and it will soon die. Everything is worn out.’ He raised his head and made a visible effort to shake off the depression that had fallen on him. ‘For God’s sake, in the accounting department they re still on high stools and they’ve never heard of an adding machine.’

  ‘And what are you? ‒ accountant or glassblower?’

  ‘Neither. The only qualification I have for being here is that my name is Sheridan. Lady Maude is a traditionalist, even when it comes to the traditions of lesser people like the Sheridans. I’d never even visited the glassworks when I was growing up ‒ I knew about them, of course, but they weren’t a very important concern, and there wasn’t much interest in them. Then the revival of Waterford stole what little glory they had ‒ Waterford is the only name people know in Irish glass. I grew up within an easy drive of Cloncath ‒ my father was a solicitor in Bray ‒ and I’d never seen the glassworks until the old lady roped me in four years ago.’

  ‘How?’ I had fished out cigarettes from my bag and extended them to him; after exploring his own empty packet he accepted mine, and then nodded his thanks. He lighted it and began to talk again, eagerly, as if he had forgotten his hostility in the sheer need of a listener.

  ‘I dropped out of Trinity ‒ lack of ambition and lack of money. There was nothing for me in Ireland except a widowed mother, and we didn’t get along. So when Lady Maude contacted me I was in Canada. Gone to make a fortune, of course, and when the letter arrived what was I? ‒ I was the assistant manager of a medium-sized hardware store in Calgary, with four of the boss’s sons growing up and stepping on my heels. And there wasn’t any fortune to be made there. A letter came first from my mother, who’s a snob, and who was no end impressed with a visit from one of the Tyrells. And then a letter came from the old lady telling me it was my duty to come and run the glassworks and the farm. I knew there had to be a snag, because she had left it so late to come looking for a Sheridan, and I had no qualifications whatever. But in the middle of a Calgary winter, and after two years in a hardware store, anything seemed an improvement. She had sent the money for the fare ‒ canny old woman to know that when you’re under thirty, the fare to anywhere is irresistible. And ‒ well, I suppose I was homesick, though as soon as I got back I wondered what there was to be homesick for in this rain-soaked backwater. Then I came to the glassworks, and to Meremount, and I knew I should have gone anywhere in the world instead of coming here. I should have taken that fare money and gone as far from all this as I could go.’

  Somehow the sense of shock he must have known then was still in his voice, the frustration of a young man who is suddenly made older because a bright dream is gone. He shifted in his chair, and then rose and went to the window; momentarily I was forgotten and shut out as he seemed to live again the sickness of that long-ago disappointment.

  ‘The glassworks,’ he said, ‘were so run down you could smell them rotting. Everyone in the place seemed to be about a hundred years old. I didn’t know what I was doing ‒ what I was supposed to do. Lady Maude just threw me in and let me learn the best way I could, quite confident, of course, that because my name was Sheridan I would know it all by instinct. The day I arrived she was off at an auction, and I knew what I was stuck with. Well, Meremount you can see for yourself. It’s uncomfortable and damn’ cold. It’s dirty and it needs every kind of repair done to it, Meremount is a nightmare, and the farm is a laugh ‒ a few cows and sheep and some badly-drained land, a few rotting fruit trees. It hasn’t had a penny spent on it in fifty years. In Lady Maude’s eyes the farm is simply the land that surrounds Meremount, and Meremount in its turn is just a storage place for the furniture that crazy old woman collects against the day when she is going to get Castle Tyrell back again and furnish it.’

  He turned to look at me. ‘That’s what she expects to do. That’s what the piles of junk are for.’

  ‘Most of it is a long way from being junk.’

  ‘Wait until you’ve got a dozen bruises on you from bumping into it in the dark ‒ most of the lights don’t work, either, you’ll find out.’

  I sat thinking about it, the woman alone through the years, husband and child gone, family inheritance gone, hardly attempting to cope with a decaying glassworks and a run-down farm, her only passion the acquisition of furniture for a castle she would never live in. I saw it, the mountains of furniture slowly piling up, while the floors sagged with the weight of it, and the windows were darkened by its bulk, while her mind grew more baffled and confused as the years piled on her also. I began to understand, finally, what kind her madness was.

  ‘Why did you stay?’ My voice seemed a whisper in the quiet.

  He came back to the desk, rested his hands on it and leaned towards me.

  ‘What should I have done? Where was I to go? ‒ and what better offered to a man who had nothing? She promised me ‒ no, to give the old devil her due, she never made a formal promise. She gave me to understand, she let me believe that there was no one else to inherit. She had disowned her daughter ‒ a lot of people around here think Blanche was killed during the London blitz. There was no one else but me. So I stayed ., . and sweated my guts out, and kept Sheridan Glass going for another few years … for whatever little was there, for some hope for the future.’ He added, ‘That’s all changed now.’

  ‘What has changed?’ But I knew the answer; sickeningly, I knew it.

  ‘You ‒ you have happened. She never told me there was a child.’

  ‘I make no difference. I’m leaving in the morning. I want nothing that’s here.’

  He straightened. ‘You must think me naive. You have come to see what’s worth having, to establish your claim. And with that mad old woman the single fact of being the granddaughter of a Tyrell counts more than all the sweat I’ve put into Sheridan Glass. You heard her ‒ “the last of my blood-line”, and all that nonsense.’

  ‘But I’m not staying, I keep telling you. Tomorrow I’ll be gone.’

  ‘That’s what you keep telling me.’ The smile that cracked his face had no humour, just the self-mocking irony of a shrug. ‘Well,
I always was an unlucky bastard. Always too late or too early. You’ve come, that’s what makes the difference. Even if you go, she’ll count on you coming back. And there’s the will. No one knows what the old she-devil has put in the will. Now that you’ve come, she could change it.’

  ‘She won’t change it.’

  ‘Perhaps it doesn’t need to be changed. She’s probably always believed in her addled mind that you’d come. Perhaps you’re in it already.’

  ‘Now you’re talking nonsense. I’m leaving first thing in the morning. My coming this once can’t have made any difference.’

  He picked up the whiskey. ‘I hope you do leave first thing in the morning. For both our sakes I hope you do just that. Now, let’s have another drink and act as if you hadn’t just wrecked everything I’ve worked for in the last four years. I don’t know which is worse ‒ to drink alone, or to drink with an enemy.’

  We sat and sipped the strong liquid, and a pale evening sun struggled through the grime of the window, and touched the Culloden Cup with marvellous grace. I thought of what had happened to me since the moment that Brendan Carroll had first reached past me and plucked Blanche’s great find from its shelf. He had brought the Cup home, but he had meant me to follow it, to know this house of madness and despair. Well, I was here, and no one believed that I would leave in the morning.

  II

  Dinner was served in a room whose curved alcove of long windows overlooking the ruined garden would have been a thing of serene beauty if the eye had not been distracted by everything else that the room contained ‒ the four sideboards of various periods, one delicate Regency piece stacked on a sturdy oak, the assortment of chairs that seemed common to every room in the house, the walls full of spotted mirrors and pictures dark with smoke and age ‒ good or bad I couldn’t tell. We ate at a table placed somewhere roughly in the middle of all this, and were served by the red-haired woman, whose name was Annie, still in the tweed skirt and blouse, her face flushed with exertion and some embarrassment as she lugged the tarnished trays in and out the service door. Connor hacked at the tough, over-cooked leg of Iamb, and Annie carried around the shrivelled potatoes and watery cauliflower. Lady Maude ate calmly, without looking to see how anyone else fared ‒ as if the food at Meremount must always be beyond reproach. Her eyes, though, fell sharply on the label of the wine that Connor poured into the unmatched Sheridan glasses.

  ‘Nuits St. Georges? Where did that come from?’

  ‘I drove into Cloncath and got it ‒ your cellar’s been empty a long time, Lady Maude.’

  ‘Not from the ‒’

  Connor filled her glass. ‘Not from the housekeeping money. My own contribution to Miss D’Arcy’s pleasure.’

  ‘Young girls don’t need strong drink.’

  There was no time to feel surprise at Connor’s gesture of hospitality, the knowledge that he had taken trouble over this one thing he could do to make the food palatable. As I took the first sip I said to Lady Maude, ‘I’m twenty-three.’

  Her fork clattered against the plate as she jerked her head around to see if Annie was still at the littered sideboard. But the service door was closed.

  ‘I did not think it would be necessary to point out to you that these people thrive on scandal and gossip.’

  Surprised, Connor put down his glass. ‘What in the world is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Lady Maude,’ I said, looking at her and not at Connor, ‘is referring to the fact that anyone who wants to calculate will know that I was born before my mother was married to Eugene D’Arcy ‒ before Major Findlay was killed.’

  He leaned back. ‘I see ‒ oh, I see it now.’ The hooked eyebrows were raised high, and then gradually settled. He also spoke to Lady Maude. ‘What an evil-minded, unforgiving old woman you are to care about such a thing! So, what if the last of the Tyrells was born out of wedlock? It’s only in this blasted country that children of love are matters for shame or regret ‒ and in minds like yours, Lady Maude. So that’s why your granddaughter has never been spoken of, why no one ever got an answer to a question about Blanche. You’ve sat here alone, lonely, all these years … what a waste! What an unbelievable waste!’

  ‘Be quiet, Connor Sheridan. What do you know of what is behind all these years? You didn’t live them ‒ none of you young, stupid, heedless things had to live them. How do you know what harm Blanche did me? I should have had my grandchildren about me here ‒ born as they should have been born, growing up here, learning the things they would have learned. Instead of which I have ‒’

  Connor broke in. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you owe Maura an apology.’

  ‘What apology did I ever get from her mother?’ Then she ended it; her long arm, clad in its dusty black velvet, shot out and she rang the bell violently. Almost instantly, as if she had been waiting on the other side of the baize door, Annie appeared to clear off the plates that were still half-full. In silence we were served a fruit pie whose crust was a close match in hardness to the scones of tea-time. Annie still hovered at the sideboard, and bumped her way in and out of the service door, breathing heavily, trying to handle the plates without noise, but never succeeding My throat was tight, and it became harder to swallow. I sat between two enemies; I didn’t even feel grateful that one had chosen to champion me in this case. He had done it only to taunt Lady Maude. I pressed too hard on the unyielding pie-crust and it skidded off the plate and down into my lap. Lady Maude looked across at me as if she might have expected no less.

  As I scrubbed at the fruit stain with the limp greyish napkin, I was aware again of the dress itself. It was a Mary Quant design, one of the long-sleeved, collared, deceptively demure dresses that were currently the height of young fashion. I wore it with white lace stockings, and I cursed myself for being such a fool as to have had the idea of pleasing the old woman, even superficially, with the quaintly old-fashioned look the costume achieved. I despised myself now for the half-hour I had spent ripping the two-inch hem and hurriedly replacing it with a tiny turn-back to give the dress extra length. It seemed now such a craven thing to have done, a denial of myself.

  The scraping of Lady Maude’s chair ended my thoughts, and the dreadful silence. She rose, her body looking leaner and slighter than before in its long ancient gown collared in yellowed Limerick lace. She seemed more frail and worn than she had done that afternoon, as if the hours and their happenings had taken their toll.

  ‘You may tell Annie I will not require coffee.’

  Connor held the door open for her, and closed it after he had watched her progress across the crowded hall; in the semi-darkness I could hear the two minor collisions she had with the piles of furniture. Connor returned to his seat.

  ‘You saw that? She didn’t want to stay, but she made herself sit there until a respectable amount of this wretched pie was eaten so that Annie wouldn’t run to tell the countryside that we had a disagreement at table on your first night here. You’ll find that the Irish have as great a sense of face-saving as any Oriental. And the sad part of it is that she can’t conceive of any servant having the intelligence to keep her mouth shut out of loyalty. She demands loyalty from Annie as her due, and she hasn’t the faintest appreciation of what she’s getting from that poor woman.’

  ‘Lady Maude looks ill,’ I said.

  ‘She always looks ill. She’s getting on ‒ in her seventies ‒ and she eats nothing. Not that that proves anything. The food in this house would set anyone against eating for life.’

  ‘Why do you stay then? There must be other places you could live.’

  He shrugged and went and brought the wine bottle and a board with cheddar and biscuits to the table. ‘Because it’s cheap. Because I can keep my eye on her and try to stop the worst of the follies if I’m in time. Because she is, after all, rather old and mad.’

  He looked at me closely and we both knew what he had not said ‒ because he had believed that this house also was to be his. He poured more wine, and his manner didn’
t try to deny the thought.

  Annie came clattering through again. ‘Put the things here, Annie. Lady Maude has gone up ‒ she won’t have coffee.’

  ‘Then I’ll not be givin’ meself the trouble of takin’ it up to her. Will that be all ye’ll be wantin’ now?’

  ‘It will. Good-night, Annie.’

  ‘Good-night, Mr. Connor. Good-night, Miss Maura.’

  ‘Good-night, Annie.’ The words seemed to linger even after the baize door had finally, reluctantly, swung to behind that tweed skirt. I savoured them, commonplace as they were; for the first time in my mother’s house I had been addressed in ordinary words in an ordinary way. I watched as Connor reached into his pocket and brought out matches. Slowly, softly the candles in the two prism-hung candelabra came to life. The chaos of the crowded room slipped back into the shadows; what was left was the height and grace of its proportions, the long slender rectangles of twilight at the windows, and the two of us, facing each other, washed with the glow of the candles. Connor’s hand motioned towards the coffee-pot.

  ‘It’s undrinkable,’ he said, ‘but you can give it a try.’

  It was undrinkable. So he refilled my glass and I nibbled cheese with the wine, leaving the damp biscuits on the board. A quiet closed over us, a small interlude more serene than anything I had known since I entered this house. I stretched a finger and gently touched the hanging prisms, creating the sweet ring of crystal against crystal.

  ‘Sheridan?’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘They must date from about the 1750s ‒ possibly from the hand of the master himself. There wasn’t a very big volume of production those first years in Ireland, so a lot of the quality work was Thomas Sheridan’s own.’

  ‘And this house? He didn’t build this house, did he? ‒ it’s earlier than the time he came to Ireland.’

  ‘Build this house? There was never a time in Ireland when Sheridan Glass was prosperous enough to build this house. It belonged to a lady called Anne Grant, the spinster daughter of an English landowner. She was plain as a pikestaff ‒ there’s a portrait of her somewhere around the house ‒ twenty-nine years old, and in spite of being an heiress in a small way, no one wanted to marry her. Thomas Sheridan’s son was twenty years old, and a golden youth. He had all the family’s hard-headedness, though, and plain little Miss Grant didn’t mind at all that he married her, and used her money for Sheridan Glass, and moved his family into Meremount. I suppose the alliance of an English heiress to a common glassmaker raised eyebrows, but probably she was past caring ‒ and he was very handsome. It’s been the farm land belonging to Meremount that’s saved Sheridan Glass ‒ they didn’t start to sell that off until the Troubles … were forced to sell it off, I suppose.’