Cashelmara (34 page)

“Let’s not kiss until it’s dark,” said Sarah.

But I knew that any delay might spell disaster for me. The effects of the evening wine wouldn’t last forever. “What’s wrong with kissing in daylight?” I said truculently.

“It just isn’t romantic!”

“Who says it’s not romantic?”

“I say it’s not!” In the dim light I saw her mouth harden stubbornly. “I want to wait till it’s dark.”

“You’re so used to getting what you want, aren’t you?” I said, panic bowling me to the brink of losing my temper. “Well, this is the wrong moment for you to expect to get what you want, because this is where I get what I want for a change, so don’t try and stop me and don’t say another word or I’ll send you straight back to your damned papa.”

“Patrick!”

“And believe me, he won’t be at all pleased to see you!”

“How dare you say such a thing!” she cried in fury. “And how dare you swear in front of me like that!” But there was excitement in her eyes, and I suddenly realized that my aggressive behavior, normally so foreign to my nature, had appealed to her. I pulled her quickly toward me, and although she protested her resistance didn’t last long. We kissed very passionately. My body moved hard against hers, and I was aware not only of urgency but of my small secret core of fear. I knew I had to be quick or God alone knew what might happen, but my fingers were so stiff and a great heaviness seemed to be weighing on my limbs and all the bedclothes kept getting in the way.

“Patrick, don’t do that.”

“Stop telling me what to do!” I yelled, remembering Derry’s suggestion that American women would be all too willing to give a man instructions, and suddenly the thought of Derry gave me confidence, just as it always did, and I knew I was going to be safe.

It was over. Relief swept through me, streaming into every muscle of my body. Rolling away from her, I lay limply, the sweat blinding my eyes and my heart thudding in my chest, and so absorbed was I in the aftermath of the experience that I did not at first realize that Sarah was crying.

I felt more guilty then than I had ever felt in my life. I can’t bear to hurt people or see them in pain.

“Sarah, forgive me,” I tried to take her in my arms, but she pushed me away. “Sarah, I didn’t mean—I was simply so anxious …”

She was struggling out of bed. She was sobbing openly now and her eyes were swollen with tears.

“I’m so sorry,” I said uselessly. “I’m so sorry, Sarah.” I followed her from the bed, but she turned and pushed me away again, her clenched fists shoving hard against my chest. I felt sick with distress. I could only stare at her dumbly until at last she said, her voice shaking, “I want to be alone for a while.”

“Yes. If you like. Of course.” I groped my way to the door of the dressing room. “Shall I come back later?”

She didn’t answer, and presently, seeing no alternative, I left her.

I lay awake for a long time in the dressing room before I managed to sleep. I wanted to get up early so that I could slip back into bed with Sarah before she could wake and remember she was angry with me, but I slept until my man came into the room to draw the curtains.

Even before I opened my eyes memory was returning to me in thick suffocating waves.

I waited a long time before entering the bedroom, but when I heard Sarah dismiss her maid I took a deep breath, knocked softly on the door and forced myself across the threshold to apologize again.

But Sarah gave me no chance to open my mouth. As I stopped awkwardly she jumped to her feet, ran across the room and flung her arms around my neck.

“Oh, Patrick, are you dreadfully angry with me?”

“Me?” I said, hardly able to speak for shame. “Angry? No, of course not. I thought perhaps you—”

“Oh, I’m very well,” she said, giving me a quick smile. “Very well indeed. Shall we go downstairs?”

“Sarah, about last night …”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said with another quick smile, her voice clear and level.

“But—”

“I just don’t want to talk about it, Patrick.”

I stared. Her smile faded. She turned away before the expression in her eyes could betray her, and I heard her say in a muffled voice, “Does it have to happen often?”

I still felt almost too full of guilt to speak. “Not if you don’t want it to.”

“I see,” she said and added in a calm, sensible voice, “I quite understand, of course, that it has to happen sometimes, and you needn’t worry that I won’t always do my duty, Patrick, because I want to be a good wife to you and I do love you so much, truly I do.” She was crying by this time, and I was so upset that I could only take her in my arms and mutter some platitude—God knows what it was—and at last she blinked back her tears and plucked up enough courage to ask when it would be necessary to repeat the experience.

“Oh, not for another month at least,” I said, wanting only to be kind, and so it was that I made no further attempt to touch her until we were three thousand miles away from New York beneath the black slate roof of Cashelmara.

It was July when we arrived at Cashelmara. The wild fuschia hedge was in bloom behind the vegetable patch, and beyond the tousled lawn the beds were bursting with potato plants. It was a totally utilitarian garden at Cashelmara. My father had been indifferent to flowers and thought of soil only in terms of crop rotation, manure and research into the prevention of the blight.

My original plan had been to extend my honeymoon by making a leisurely tour of Europe and returning in the late autumn to settle at Woodhammer Hall, but after a year’s absence from home I found I had no inclination whatsoever to potter around the Continent for a few months. Sarah was disappointed when I suggested postponing our tour, but she was too eager to see England to protest for long.

“Will we stay in London before going to Woodhammer?” she demanded, but I explained no one ever stayed in London during August.

“It’ll be July when we arrive!”

“Well, as a matter of fact I thought we might visit Cashelmara before we go to England,” I said. “The liners stop at Queenstown, and we could travel to Galway by train.”

“But I thought you said you hated Cashelmara!”

“Yes, it’s a tiresome sort of place, but my father would have thought it was my duty to go there once a year to see that all was well, so I may as well get it over with before we settle at Woodhammer. Besides, I’m awfully anxious for you to meet my friend Derry Stranahan.”

“I’m sure I should like that very much,” said Sarah, resigning herself to the Irish visit more gracefully than I had dared hope. “I guess it would be educational for me too to see a little of Ireland.”

Quite an education, I thought, remembering Cashelmara with a suppressed shudder. However, even Cashelmara was inviting, since Derry would be there to greet us, so I promptly wrote to tell him we were on our way. I also wrote a similar letter to my favorite sister Annabel, but I saw no reason to announce my intentions to anyone else. I’ve never had two words to say to my sister Katherine or my cousin George, and as for Marguerite, who was by this time in London with the boys, I knew Cousin Francis had already written to tell her of our plans.

My father had left his London townhouse to Marguerite for life with a reversion to the boys and had provided liberally for his second family by bequeathing them various financial interests, but both estates had been left to me. No doubt he would have left Cashelmara elsewhere if it had been possible, but most unfortunately for me it was entailed in favor of the eldest son, and there was some difficulty (which I had never quite understood) about barring the entail. I was to learn more about this difficulty later, but when my father died all that mattered to me was that I was master of Woodhammer Hall. My father knew there was no place on earth I loved better than Woodhammer, and he was too kind and too just to deprive me of it simply because some obscure legal mumbo-jumbo had yoked me to those awful acres in Ireland.

I thought of my father often after we had landed in Ireland, and I thought of him even more as we traveled north toward that unspeakable wilderness he had called home.

“Is all Europe like this?” Sarah asked, appalled, knowing the answer was no but so horrified by the streets of Queenstown that she craved reassurance.

“Of course not!” I said firmly. “Ireland happens to be the most backward and poverty-stricken country in Europe, that’s all. Try not to notice the beggars, darling.”

“But the smell!” exclaimed Sarah, very chalky, and ordered her maid to find her a bottle of cologne.

“The worst beggars are always to be found in Queenstown,” I said. I had no idea whether this was true or not, but I had to try to cheer her up somehow. “All the scum come here to emigrate.”

“But if they can only afford to dress in rags how can they afford to emigrate?”

“The landlords often pay the passage. It’s a cheap way of clearing the land and getting rid of them,” I explained, remembering stories about the coffin ships of the famine but not knowing whether those ships still plied their human cargo across the Atlantic. The truth was that I knew very little about Ireland apart from the fact that most of the Irish are shiftless drunkards, and no visit to Cashelmara had ever encouraged me to learn more. It was not that I hated the Irish. On the contrary I felt sorry for them, for I was sure that if I had been condemned to live in a country like Ireland with nothing to do all day but watch rain pattering upon a potato patch I would have quickly become a shiftless drunkard too.

“The weather!” exclaimed Sarah. “The mud!”

“Yes, I know,” I said unhappily. “I’m sorry it’s such an awful journey, darling, but it’ll be better in Galway, I promise you. There’s a very good hotel by the railway station.”

Well, it was a good hotel by Irish standards, but by New York standards I suppose it did leave something to be desired.

“The food!” cried Sarah after one mouthful of her dinner, and later protested, “Patrick, is this supposed to be coffee?”

“I can order tea.”

“I can’t abide tea,” said Sarah, very sorry for herself by this time, and I knew she was wishing she was back in New York.

The dreadful journey progressed inch by inch. A hired carriage took us without incident from Galway to Oughterard, but from Oughterard every mile led us deeper into a harsher, darker world. I had never paid much attention before to the mud cabins or the ditches where the less fortunate inhabitants of County Galway lived, but now I was so conscious of Sarah’s horror that I felt I was seeing them all for the first time. I found myself praying: Please, God, not another mud hovel, but the next moment we would round a corner and come across not one hovel but two with the usual bunch of half-naked children rooting among the manure heap and the reek of pig offal mingling with the peat smoke.

“But why is Ireland like this?” said Sarah desperately. “Why doesn’t someone do something about it?”

“Well, the English do try,” I said loyally, “but the Irish like to be this way. They’re hopeless. The country’s hopeless. I mean, look at the country. Just look at it.”

Sarah shuddered.

It was indeed very ugly. Huge mountains, bald as eggs, rose from a wasteland of black bog and empty moorland, and as we drew closer to their shadowed valleys the desolation wrapped itself around us in suffocating folds.

“Patrick, I don’t want to go on,” Sarah burst out wildly, in a fearful state by this time. “I can’t. Tell the driver to turn back.”

“Darling, please …” I put my arm around her and gave her a kiss. “Look,” I said with hideously false jollity, “the sun’s coming out at last! And we’re nearly there. It’s just over the top of the next hill.”

I somehow managed to soothe her, but she still hid her eyes to blot out the view from the windows. By this time we had left the main road and were journeying upward through a narrow gulley to the pass. The sun did indeed manage to shine feebly for two minutes, but it disappeared again as soon as the carriage lurched to the pass’s summit and we could look down on the valley below.

“There’s the lough,” I said brightly to Sarah. “It’s called Lough Nafooey, which means Lake of the Winnowing Winds. And there’s Cashelmara. Can you see the white house over there amidst the trees?”

Sarah took one look at the valley and hid her eyes again. “It’s all shut in,” she whispered. “All those mountains in a circle. It’s all shut in.”

“The mountains won’t seem so bad when we reach the house. It’s really a very nice house,” I added, trying not to sound too glum, but to be honest I was getting a little tired of Sarah’s appalled expression, and I did wish she would buck up a bit and stop teetering on the brink of hysterics. God knows I didn’t care for those bald lumpy mountains either, but after all there’s plenty of wilderness in America; I mean, Ireland’s not the only place on earth where you can go for miles without seeing a trace of civilization.

She must have heard the note of irritation in my voice, for she did make an effort to be sensible. After she had blown her nose and wiped away a tear she said she supposed the scenery wasn’t really as frightening as all that. “It’s just that it’s so different from anything I’ve seen before,” she said tremulously, and I knew she was thinking of the hustle and bustle of Fifth Avenue and all the horses careering down Broadway.

The carriage zigzagged laboriously to the floor of the valley, crossed the stone bridge which spanned the Fooey River and set off over the bog that fringed the lough’s western shore. We could see Cashelmara clearly on the hillside ahead of us, and suddenly I realized that despite all the trials of the journey I was excited. I no longer cared about the rain and the mist and the damp. I forgot the ugly landscape and the exhaustion of travel and the ordeal which was Ireland. Slipping my arm from Sarah’s waist, I stood up as best I could in the cramped interior of the carriage and leaned out of the window to see if there was any hint of a royal welcome lying in wait for us.

The carriage reached the gates of Cashelmara and swayed through the larchwoods up the long curling drive.

I saw him as soon as we rounded the last bend. He was standing on top of the steps with the front door open behind him, and when he saw the carriage he waved languidly and sauntered down the steps to the drive. He wore wide-check trousers and a Prince of Wales pea jacket and looked no end of a Heavy Swell.