The Butterfly Cabinet (7 page)

“In exchange for lowered rents!” boomed Lord Ormond from beside me.

“I believe some landlords proffer the same inducement come election time,” said Lady Bucknell sweetly, “though it is a different class of fox being hunted then.” And the table resounded with laughter.

I remember that Mr. Macky—a farmer originally, whom Edward told me had made his money buying up land in the fifties, and whose house was filled with furniture from bankrupt landowners—Mr. Macky liked to pick the wax from his ear in a sort of corkscrew action, examine it briefly and flick it under the table.

“This used to be a country of landowners and peasants,” muttered Edward’s father at my side, “now it is run by shopkeepers and publicans.” I was hoping they would keep up their banter and that I would not be required to contribute. It was clear from that first meal that politics in Ireland were never far from the dinner table.

“What do you say, Harriet?” demanded Lord Ormond. “What do you make of your newly adopted country?”

I looked down the table at Edward, who gave me an encouraging smile. “They say that Ireland, and the north in particular, has many similarities with Scotland,” I replied.

“Indeed!” shouted Lord Ormond. “A strong tradition of dissenters, a fierce sense of independence, an aversion to being branded subsidiary to London.”

“Bravo!” said Lady Bucknell. “There is, however, no sea between Scotland and England, and a sea is a powerful entity. It would take a long time to walk from Edinburgh to London, but the journey is practicable. The fact of being able to put your feet on the earth between the two places makes for a strong link, geographically, economically, intellectually. Ireland is a different country entirely and of all the things that make it different—that
have always made it different—there is none greater than this: it is not, nor has it ever been, joined to England.”

“Good God!” shouted Lord Ormond. “You sound like a Home Ruler, Lady Bucknell. Next you’ll be telling us to vote for the Irish Parliamentary Party.”

There was good-natured laughter around the table before Lady Bucknell sighed and said: “Ireland has been contrary always. The south and the west are busy plotting their independence from the crown while the north expends all its energy in asserting its allegiance, whether the crown wants it or not. The feeling everywhere is changing, however, and not just in Ireland, where nothing is ever the same as anywhere else in the country.”

There was silence at the table, the mood a little altered. I was beginning to sense the complexity of Edward’s, and now my, situation. Edward is a landowner but he is Catholic too, and rural to the bones. Not nationalist, certainly not in the traditional sense; but if one’s nation is one’s land, and one’s attachment to it, and one’s desire every day to stand on it, to have one’s arms elbow-deep in it, to love it and work always to keep it, then yes, nationalist too, though there are few that would call him it, himself included. Where did he fit in, I wondered at that first dinner. He was as much an anomaly as was I.

Edward’s tie to Oranmore is unshakable—to the land, to his mother’s people, particularly to his maternal grandfather, with whom he is favorably compared. Not so Lord Ormond, who is generally disliked by the tenantry, a sentiment that appears to be reciprocated by him.

“It is true what Lord Dufferin says,” he announced to Edward at dinner. “An Irish estate is like a sponge, and the sooner got rid of, the better. If it comes to it,” he added, “if Ulster goes the way of Connacht and the others, if the government offers to buy the land and lease it to the tenantry, bite the hand off them. There is no other way out for us now.”

“It will never happen here,” said Edward. “The tenantry is entirely loyal. I will not sell.”

Was that really only twelve years ago? Edward lived to rue his words. The tenantry have no loyalty to Edward, no more than if he were an unscrupulous rack-renter who made no improvements to the land and fully expected them to finance his extravagant way of life. The one time he stood his ground and refused to lower the rents, events took on a very threatening turn.

Mrs. Macky sat to Edward’s left, unusually jowly for a slim woman. She was not much of a conversationalist. I heard her make some ill-informed remarks on the purity of Aberdonian English, as opposed to that of Inverness, but it was difficult to be angry with her, for her face, with her drowsy brown eyes, had the appearance of that of a Swiss St. Bernard. I heard later that she dosed every one of their children with Mother’s Quietness, turning them into imbeciles with swollen stomachs and shrunken brains, in order to stop their crying. There are acceptable levels of abuse, it would seem, and it takes only a commercial patent to exempt one. I never gave the children more than a mustard spoon of calomel or syrup of poppies, and only as a last resort to shift a stubborn cough or settle an upset stomach.

There was a portrait hanging on the dining room wall of King William III crossing the Boyne. In Edward’s grandfather’s time, he told me, it had hung in the hall, but when his father converted to Catholicism, he had it removed to a dusky corner. Edward remembered the picture, he said, emblazoned with the square and compasses of a Masonic device, his grandfather’s pride and joy. When Edward was born, his grandfather sent for water to be brought from the Boyne and had his first grandson baptized with it in the little Episcopalian church in the village, the one that had been moved stone by stone from the original site near Flowerfield. He often jokes that he is the only Catholic in Ireland to have been baptized in Boyne water, and in a church that had walked a country mile.

Delightfully, near the end of the dinner, during a particularly difficult speech by Mr. Walsh on the island breeding colonies of the gannet, the portrait fell off the wall and very nearly hit Mrs. Macky on the shoulder. I hid my amusement behind my napkin but I suspect Lady Bucknell caught me; I was sure she gave me a conspiratorial wink. There was a commotion, the lady attended to by Dr. Creith, the picture retrieved from the aspidistra where it had fallen, and when it was examined, the hanging wire was found to have corroded, in all likelihood, as a result of the fumes from the gas burners. The dinner disrupted, the ladies withdrew to the drawing room for restorative liqueurs (Mrs. Macky taking the opportunity to empty the bottle of Bénédictine) while the men remained, the picture now leaned against the wall. When the ladies had left the dining room, Edward later told me, and the bottle of claret been replaced by a bowl of whiskey punch, his father proposed a toast: that Gladstone choke on his breakfast porridge; that Edward and his new bride be blessed with a multitude of Catholic sons and that they all grow up in an Ireland with Home Rule. The toast was received with some variation, given the number of Episcopalians and Orange Lodge members assembled, but Lord Ormond did not seem to notice and drank heartily to his own joke. Edward, who is superstitious, did not like it that the picture had fallen.

Lord Ormond was not a fan of Mr. Gladstone. I understood this more clearly when I retired to my room later that night. In the nightstand the necessary article of china for nighttime use bore a portrait on the inside of the prime minister himself.

Edward’s mother passed away when he was only seven. There is a painting of her on the landing, fringed and crinolined, pale faced, fair haired, still. The dress is a glossy intense blue of the ferocious color that was popular then in the fifties. I found it in her wardrobe and had it cut up for Charlotte. The seamstress, a clever, harelipped woman, made three dresses out of its voluminous cone. It was a good silk, and the color suited Charlotte: common blue. Edward loved to see her in it.

Edward clung to the paraphernalia of his mother’s life like it were treasure. An appalling cup and saucer sat always on the oak server in the dining room, a pink and white creation commemorating the temperance movement and emblazoned with banner flags that sang out:
SOBRIETY, DOMESTIC COMFORT, TEMPERANCE AND FREEDOM
. For me, the last of these seemed very much at odds with the other three, although I knew better than to say such a thing to Edward. An eight-pointed temperance star faced away from the drinker, and along the bottom of the cup, which depicted a young man and woman, was the biggest banner of all, which read:
BE THOU FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH
. Each time I looked at it I felt censured from the grave. Edward said that his mother drank tea from it every afternoon and that he could clearly remember her packing it up for dispatch to the basement, where she would personally supervise the removal of tea stains with bicarbonate of soda. I never once used it. The day Gabriel and Morris lassoed the dining room chandelier it was my only regret that they avoided breaking the cup.

It is a myth that men seek marriage partners who mimic their mothers’ characters; she and I could not have been less alike. We have had but one trait in common: we have both been adored by Edward.

I was not unusual, I am sure, in wanting to put my mark on the place; every new wife who inherits a home must wish to do the same. I wanted the rooms full of light. Edward was loath to see furniture and coverings replaced. They were the pattern of his youth, he said. He murmured about the fading of the carpets and the chintzes but I had spent too long in a buttoned-up house behind heavy drapes and I craved air. I wanted as much of the outside in the house as possible. Even in February I insisted on the French windows being opened for at least part of the day. The drawing room curtains were a horror in pelmeted Byzantine gold, as if procured from a Persian harem. The Baroque plasterwork
featured, of all things, a bunch of bananas. In one corner, Edward’s grandfather’s collection from his “grand tour” was carefully housed in mahogany and chinoiserie: an Indian dagger, an ostrich egg, a pair of Chinese slippers. Within a short time, I had replaced the garish reds and heavy greens with the palest of shades, colors that drew light to them, that made the most of the brief winter days. I had the decorators paint the gold-beaded walls in
café au lait
and the curtains replaced with wooden shutters, and after a little while, even Edward could see the benefit of the lighter shades. It was altogether more uplifting, he said, though he never changed a thing in his green leather study and I never intervened there.

I tried my best to let the house breathe so that I could breathe in it. There were some things Edward would not countenance my replacing: a portrait of a relative, a captain of the Thirty-fourth Regiment who had died at the storming of the Redan Fort in 1855; the volumes of divinity with which his mother had furnished the library; a Chinese gong in the hall she had bought at auction; a birdcage in the morning room. I have lost count of the number of guests who have asked me when the decorating will be finished. Clearly, my taste is out of kilter: there is too much on display, not enough drapery and mystery for the sensibilities of the eighties and nineties, not enough concealed.

The one exception to this meadow of color, the one necessarily dark room, is the small north-facing sitting room where the butterflies are kept, where I allowed the darkest of red curtains and crimson damask to remain and to which I moved the heaviest furniture that absorbed the light. I ordered a Morris wallpaper from the Maples catalog, an extraordinary design of white dove and gilt cage with a background so dark as to be almost black. Unexpectedly, when it arrived and was pasted on the sitting room wall and the light caught it near the window, the narrow bars of the cage all but disappeared, leaving only the gilt base and
the bird apparently freed, about to take flight, while in the darker corners of the room the flickering firelight picked out the gilt and showed the bird to be exquisitely caged. Two opposing stories on the same wall, depending on how the light hit. Clever Mr. Morris.

On my first night at Oranmore, in a bedroom without drafts on a still night, I was woken by a rustle, a scratching, the sound of something small running across the floor. I considered my choices: get up, rise the servants and Edward, cause a stir that would leave the entire household sleepless and disgruntled for all of the following day and catch no mouse; or go back to sleep, resolve to employ more cats on the morrow. I chose the latter. Last night I woke suddenly with the sensation of something live having run beneath my head. It felt too big to be a mouse. Then, I had a choice; now I have none.

7 OCTOBER 1968

It’s good of you to come and see me in my room, Anna. I’m not feeling much like talking to the rest of them today. You get tired, you know, looking at the same faces, going over all the same oul’ rigmarole: about the weather that none of us is fit to go out in, and about what’s on the wireless or the TV. Wasn’t it shocking about thon wrecking match in Derry? We saw the whole thing on Telefis Éireann: it was like something out of the dark ages, the police in steel helmets and riot shields batonning the life out of the civil rights marchers, and them all screaming and roaring and Gerry Fitt’s face covered in blood. They say there was shocking trouble after it, bonfires and barricades and youngsters throwing stones, and half the shops with their glass broken and the stuff stolen out of the windows. But then there’s always ones that will see an opportunity for trouble and take it: them uns that has nothing to do with the protest at all. The marchers shouldn’t have been there, says Captain O’Neill, they were told not to go. They’re one-half republican and one-half communist, he says. But haven’t people a right to stand up against injustice when they see it? Giving houses out to single Protestant girls when there’s whole families of Catholics living in one room. We were all sitting watching it and
talking about it and saying how bad it was, and thon wee git John Roddy, who’s as bitter as sloes, pipes up and says, “If they wouldn’t go on breeding, they wouldn’t need so much accommodation.” Well, jeepers, Anna, if I was quicker on my feet, I’d have gone over and walloped him with my blackthorn stick. It’s a good job
The Val Doonican Show
came on and distracted us. Isn’t Val great? “Paddy McGinty’s Goat,” you couldn’t beat it. Give me that over Nana Mouskouri any day.