Edge of Glass Page 9

  He cut squares of cheese methodically, evenly. ‘Over the years England has clamped all kind of restrictions on Irish industry and farming ‒ duties, tariffs, outright prohibition of exports. The descendants of Thomas Sheridan have made just about every kind of glass there is just to keep the furnaces alight ‒ though sometimes they were down to one furnace with the senior Sheridan as gaffer and his own sons as his team. You can see it all in the order books at the works ‒ young Sheridans riding all over Ireland trying to get orders for anything that would bring in money ‒ bottles and crown glass for windows, as well as chandeliers for the mansions of the English. They hadn’t the energy ground out of them as most of the Irish had by that time ‒ and they had the good luck not to be Catholic, although they had supported the Jacobite cause. If they had been Catholic the penal laws would have finished them. But they hung on, and their own energy saved them ‒ and the Meremount land. But glassmakers they stayed, even when it was hardly worth the trouble. Sheridan Glass still exists.’

  Now it was Connor who touched the prisms. ‘It doesn’t all have to be like this,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t all have to be hand-blown and shaped, it doesn’t have to be only for the rich. You can make glass by assembly line, pressed glass, inexpensive ‒ glass for housewives and factories and hospitals. There’s money in glass. The world can’t get along without it now ‒ test tubes and television tubes and all the rest. Sheridan Glass ought to make both kinds. The old kind by the old methods for those who can pay for tradition, pressed glass for those who need it ‒ and that’s everyone. But that needs capital, and capital we don’t have. So Sheridan Glass still exists but unless something happens soon to save it ‒ it will disappear.’

  Then with a single quick gesture he brushed his hand across all the prisms, their violent collisions loud and strident in the gentle darkness, as if an angry wind had swept them. I started, and at this moment a light-coloured shape suddenly appeared at the end of the table, and padded silently towards the light from the candles. It was the most extraordinary cat I had ever seen ‒ long, awkward Siamese limbs and brilliant blue eyes, its pointed face, ears, the paws and tail a smoky lavender-blue. It greeted Connor in a thin, plaintive voice, and waited while he cut a piece of cheese and extended it on his fingers.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind cats,’ he said to me.

  ‘No, I don’t mind them. This is your cat?’ It couldn’t be, I thought. Two creatures had never less belonged to each other ‒ the feline quality was no part of his rock-hard masculinity.

  ‘Her name is Sapphire. No, she isn’t my cat. I don’t much care for cats.’

  ‘But you feed her.’

  ‘I feel sorry for the poor devil.’

  She couldn’t be Lady Maude’s cat, either, I thought. The old lady needed no companionship of this kind; cats were too independent for her autocratic nature to tolerate. I watched as Connor cut another sliver of the cheddar and Sapphire nibbled at it delicately. The brilliant blue and creamy beauty of the cat, and what I thought of as the darkness of Connor ‒ the hair, the brows, the smudges of dark lashes were a potent foil for each other. During this time over the wine and cheese, and linked with this new aspect of him revealed in his gesture to the cat he did not particularly like, something had begun to grow between us ‒ not friendliness, because he did not want me there, but, strangely, a kind of trust because he had not pretended anything different. I could ask my questions and he would answer them or not, just as he pleased. I thought he would not lie.

  ‘Who is Otto Praeger?’ I said. ‘Why doesn’t Lady Maude like him?’

  ‘Otto Praeger?’ He seemed for a moment reluctant, as if he were trying to make up his mind about something. ‘Yes, you met him, didn’t you? Just like him to manage to meet you before anyone else knew you were here. With all the other things I’d forgotten about him meeting you. He didn’t forget, though. With, typical German efficiency he sent a message to me at the works as well as to Lady Maude that you’d arrived ‒ didn’t trust the way she’d behave, I suppose. And it was a good guess ‒ she might well have decided not to see you. But then he usually guesses right, that man. He went to a lot of trouble …’

  ‘I was impressed with him. Who is he?’

  ‘Before the war he was Praeger Optics ‒ Bergen cameras are a small part of Praeger Optics. Since the war ‒ well, I suppose he’s the kind of man you think of when someone mentions the German economic miracle. Since the war he’s built a whole empire in light industry ‒ plastics, small appliances, that kind of thing. He’s in everything that has a mass consumer market.’

  I felt let down; Otto Praeger had talked of survival, and I had sensed something more heroic in that stout little gnome. ‘And the war,’ I said. ‘What did he do during the war? ‒ make gun sights and binoculars?’ It sickened me a little to think of Castle Tyrell bought with such things. ‘Was he a …’

  ‘A Nazi? ‒ no. And he didn’t keep quiet about the Nazis, either. He spoke out, and they took his business away from him. One of the leading manufacturers in Germany couldn’t publicly disagree with Hitler’s policies and still be allowed to stay around. They sent him to a concentration camp, even though he had powerful friends to plead for him, as well as the Church. In this Irish climate you’ll never see Otto Praeger without sleeves, but I have seen the numbers tattooed on his forearm.’

  ‘He stayed alive, though.’

  ‘He stayed alive, and went back and fought them for what remained of Praeger Optics. It was almost nothing ‒ factories bombed, no trained staff left. But he’s a man gifted with energy, and very persuasive. The Americans were desperately anxious to restore Germany as a buffer against Communism. So he got his loans, and that was all he needed. The man has a genius for money, of course. He knows where to use his strength. He knows how to borrow. It’s one thing to have survived ‒ another to make the survival count.’

  I thought of Praeger, and the green, peaceful acres in a country unblasted by war that he had craved; I thought of him alone in the hugeness of his turreted house.

  ‘It was Lady Maude who sold him Castle Tyrell? Is that why she doesn’t like him?’

  ‘She wouldn’t like anyone to whom she had been obliged to sell. Praeger gave her a pretty generous price for an uninhabitable ruin and some grazing land, but by the time the debts and interest were settled, there was almost nothing left. She keeps blaming everything on the burning of Tyrell and on Praeger for paying her so little, but the fact is that it would have gone that way whatever happened. Her father didn’t start the rot, he just kept it rolling. The Tyrells have all been a bit weak in the head for generations ‒ they had all the traditional talents of the aristocracy ‒ horses, women and gambling. But when the I.R.A. burned the place during the Troubles, the old boy really went off his head. Maude’s only brother, you see, was killed in the fire. So Maude married poor Charles Sheridan because he was willing to take both her and her crazy father, and by that time, they say, she’d turned down a dozen much better suitors as being beneath her. After the fire, when the whole sorry state of the Tyrells was let out in the open, it was a case of beggars can’t be choosers. So Charles Sheridan had the bad luck to be accepted. Then, of course, the Sheridan land adjoined the Tyrell land, and she was always expecting to move back.’

  ‘Why did they burn it?’

  He shrugged. ‘Why did they burn anything in Ireland? To make a point. The Tyrells were landlords ‒ that was enough. The Tyrells were opportunists. They fought for Elizabeth, and after the conquest of Ireland was completed, their land was their reward ‒ land and a title. When Cromwell was finished with Ireland, the Tyrells owned half the county ‒ why do you think it’s called County Tyrell?’

  My mouth dropped open a little. ‘I didn’t think of it.’

  ‘Then think of it, and remember it, and don’t be surprised that the name of Tyrell isn’t exactly loved around these parts even to this day. So, they murdered Maude’s brother ‒ accidentally or not. But they’ll tell you to go count the p
easants lying dead in Tyrell ditches after they’d been thrown off their land and the roofs ripped off their cottages. Ask what the Tyrells did for their tenants during the Famine ‒ nothing. And don’t be surprised if Otto Praeger’s more popular than you’d expect a German to be. True ‒ he spends money, and that’s always popular. He’s built a plastics factory near Wexford that employs a lot of people. Good reason to be popular. But always remember that Ireland for a long time has been hospitable to the enemies of England.’

  I had sought another world as an antidote to the cool world of Claude’s London and found this pool of violence and madness and remembered grudges. Of course I didn’t belong here either; I clung to the thought of Otto Praeger as a symbol of something more understandable, whose life, though holding horror and hardship, seemed more commonplace than this.

  I said, ‘Who is Lotti?’

  His head jerked back. ‘What do you know about Lotti?’ I wasn’t sure which was first in his tone, anger or pain; why did it seem to echo the anguish that had been in Otto Praeger’s voice when he had called that name?

  ‘Nothing. I don’t know anything about Lotti. Just the name. It was what Otto Praeger called to me ‒ Lotti.’

  ‘When ‒ when was this?’

  ‘This afternoon. I had lunch by a stream on the road in to Cloncath ‒ where the bridge is collapsed. I went along the bank a little on the wall side. I lay down for a few minutes and I fell asleep. He woke me by calling that name ‒ Lotti.’

  He was a long time in replying; I wondered if he ever would. I saw his fingers grip the edge of the table as if he were going to rise. ‘Lotti … yes, I can see. The hair ‒ she wore it in the way you do, straight, long, though yours is darker. She was one of those bright Nordic blondes.’

  ‘She’s dead?’

  ‘Dead, yes. She was killed at that bridge last November. Lotti was Otto Praeger’s daughter.’

  He drained the last of his wine, and finally did get to his feet. The movement was heavy. ‘Lotti was my wife,’ he said.

  I sat and watched as he moved away, retreating from the light of the candles until the darkness engulfed him. I listened to the sound of the door opening and closing softly, the sound, muffled, of him moving through the hall; distantly I heard the closing of the heavy front door and after a minute came the noise of a car engine, the crunch of loose gravel under tyres, the uneven rhythm as they hit the ruts on the drive. It was not driven fast; this was no sudden flight. It was like the way he had left the dining-room, deliberately, patiently, heavily, as if acceptance of a young wife’s death had been achieved hardly, and he was afraid to shatter it by too violent protest. I wished I had never heard of Lotti Praeger. I would never have asked my question, would have left in the morning without having to witness this muffled grief.

  I blew out one set of candles, and took up the other candelabrum. The cat still crouched motionless on the table, her gazing eyes never leaving me. I knew now that she had been Lotti’s cat, and the same kind of pity that Connor confessed to also stirred in me. ‘Come on, then,’ I whispered. I didn’t know why I whispered. The cat stretched and uttered the low little cry with which she had greeted Connor. She jumped down from the table and I felt her brush my legs. She was at the door as I opened it, and with me as I threaded my way through the maze of furniture in the hall and mounted the beautiful wide carved staircase. She ran ahead of me, and kept returning, moving with the agility of her kind through the small objects that were piled on every tread of the stair and on the landing ‒ lanterns, Chinese vases, warming-pans, fire-dogs, footstools. One large window at the landing gave the slim outline of a crescent moon and a faint glow to touch the dark shapes of the chests and folded rugs and tapestries. I shielded the candle flame and leaned close to the window, searching for another light in the darkness of the countryside, but there was none. There was not a wind to stir a tree, not a dog to bark. It felt as if, in the whole world, no other human soul was left alive; I was strangely grateful for the warm brush of the cat once more against me. I moved on up the staircase to my room.

  Someone ‒ Annie, I supposed ‒ had turned back my bed and put two hot-water bottles with hand-knitted covers on them between the sheets, and drawn the frayed damask curtains against the darkness and the emptiness of the night. A small electric fire attempted to warm the great spaces of the room, a lamp was lighted by the bed. On a big Georgian silver tray stood an exquisite Dresden cup and saucer and a battered, leaky Thermos containing hot chocolate. I blew out the candles and the acrid scent of the smoke lingered.

  In one of the three writing-tables I found age-spotted paper stamped Meremount, County Tyrell, Ireland. I wondered how it would strike Lloyd Justin when he opened it, perhaps on one of those sun-filled Californian patios they showed in films and magazines. The cat perched beside me as I wrote; when it had cooled she delicately lapped the chocolate I had poured into the saucer. She stayed there while I slowly covered the pages with words of finality, the end of the Californian dream. I couldn’t begin to understand fully yet what the hours of this day had done to me, or why I now was sure when before I had not been. But I had glimpsed the legacy of passion and toughness and frailty that was mine from the Tyrells as well as the Sheridans, and I knew why the bland comfort of the life in the sun with a man like Lloyd was not to be. I had nothing and no one then to put in Lloyd’s place; but I would take my chance, suddenly knowing that the certainties were no more certain than the wildest leap into an unknown future. This though, was not what I said to Lloyd; I made the words as gentle as possible, and I told him that I was not coming.

  Five

  I was awakened by the voices ‒ the high, old voice, shrill now, too loud, and the lower deeper tones of a man speaking; I could distinguish no words. The cadence was angry, staccato, rising and falling. But under the eiderdown, with the hot-water bottles held close, I was warm, and the day had been one of unusual length and complexity. I let myself fall back into sleep, the cat curled at my feet, leaving to them whatever it was they shouted at each other about.

  I didn’t hear him, though, when he entered the room. A scream froze on my lips as I felt his hand.

  ‘Maura! Wake up ‒ oh, for God’s sake wake up!’ The bed-lamp snapped on full in my face. Connor was shaking me roughly. ‘Maura … Maura!’ Behind him the door to the room was wide open, and the lights in the hall switched on.

  I struggled out of sleep. ‘What is it? What’s all …’

  ‘It’s Lady Maude ‒ she’s had some kind of attack. Heart ‒ stroke. I don’t know. She’s unconscious. Do you know anything about what to do?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I fumbled for my dressing-gown and slippers. ‘Have you rung a doctor?’

  ‘I was going down to do that. Would you stay with her? ‒ see if there’s anything you can do, will you?’

  I was following him along the hall, running. ‘What about Annie?’

  ‘Useless,’ he said. ‘She’ll have hysterics. There …’ He thrust me towards an open door on the opposite side of the passage from my room, but did not come with me into the room. ‘Will I bring up some brandy?’

  ‘Ring the doctor,’ I said fiercely, but softly. ‘And spirits are the worst thing to give anyone. Hurry!’

  The old woman lay on the bed sprawled sideways across a mound of pillows as if Connor had lifted her and put her there. She was wrapped in a faded purple dressing-gown, and the silver hair was bound into a single thick braid. In her unconscious state she seemed terribly shrunken, the colourless skin cleaving to the bones of the face, the lips tinged with blue. My inexpert fingers could find only the faintest flutter of a pulse; the breath was so slight I wasn’t certain it was there at all. I could almost feel her slipping away from me as the seconds passed, and in a final, despairing moment I pulled the pillows out from beneath her head, turned it sideways so that the tongue would not slip back, and then bent and placed my own lips on hers. Never before this had we touched each other; now we were locked in this most intimate, desperate
act. In what I thought might be the last minutes of her life I forced the breath from my lungs steadily into hers, withdrawing my lips to let it escape, going back each time to my task, breathing the smell of her age and decay, seeming to die a little myself with each breath.

  Then I felt and heard the return of her own breath, faint, but growing stronger. The thin-veined eyelids flickered open; there was an instant of recognition. I didn’t know that I had won anything; she might have come to this point on her own. But she knew that a battle had been fought for her, and we were joined by the bond of the struggle as well as by blood. Very slowly I straightened.

  From the doorway came a long, wailing cry. Annie stood there as if she were afraid to come nearer, the dressing-gown clutched about her.

  ‘Mother of God, is she dead, then! Has he killed her after all?’

  II

  The doctor slowly ladled three spoonfuls of sugar into the tea Annie had made and brought to Connor’s office. ‘It was a warning,’ he said as he stirred. ‘But Maude Sheridan never pays attention to warnings. After that slight attack she had two years ago ‒ you remember that, Connor? ‒ I told her there could be others, and what she had to do to try to avoid them. She told me she’d die in her own time and her own way ‒ as if she had any say in the matter. But that’s the Tyrells for you!’ He gave a derisive, affectionate snort. ‘Well, I wish I could get her into hospital ‒ but she’s flatly refused to go. There ought to be tests to determine the damage to the heart. Ah, well ‒ we must do the best we can here. She must have complete rest. I will insist on that. And she must have a nurse. If I can ever get anyone to stay with her.’ He seemed to doubt it.