Tipperary (55 page)

We stayed the night, and dined as we had lunched—at the long, long table in whose polished wood I could see my face. Through dinner, Miss Beresford began to fall asleep. Soon a maid arrived and assisted her upstairs, with April following.

I do not believe that we learned much of how a Great House is run— but April and Miss Beresford became true friends, and soon corresponded.

As we drove away from Curraghmore, she asked me, “Miss Beresford—is she what you would call an Irish eccentric?”

I corrected the term: “An Anglo-Irish eccentric.”

The weather held up—dreamily golden days, with the hedges full of blossoms, and the wavy fields yellow with grain. We had planned our distances well, and we reached our other appointments in an excellent frame of mind. Soon it became apparent that, by comparison with some others of the Anglo-Irish, Miss Beresford might be counted the sanest person we met.

Lady Argus in Ballydaniel bathed her feet in her own urine every night—“to harden the skin.” I wished that she had not chosen to do so in front of her guests. The Mountpatricks fought at dinner—not merely squabbled. Taking exception at some idea of her husband's, Lady Mountpatrick rose from the table and struck him across the head repeatedly with a book. He caught her by the ankle and pulled her to the floor— then resumed eating as his wife crawled back to her chair.

Sir Michael Cross—who had, it was said, a thousand guinea-hens on his lawns—introduced to dinner a young man who wore rouge, and Lady Cross remonstrated, “If Michael's catamite continues to steal from my dressing-room, I'll soon have no rouge left.” Raising her eyebrows to April she said, “And if it were only the rouge”—at which point the young man, named Angus, began to cry.

The Shandons came in from a shoot about an hour after we arrived. Lady Shandon saw us in the great hallway (where we had been much entertained by the disputes of the servants), came running up the steps, and almost fell. It soon became clear that she had been drinking heavily— though not as heavily as her husband.

“I don't know who you are, sir,” he said to me. “I don't know the doxy with you, I've never heard of any of you, I haven't been expecting you, and as far as I'm concerned you can bugger off.” At dinner he was charm personified: “Now tell me all about yourselves, my dears.”

The remaining house had immense charm; Drishane will ever remain uppermost of that tour. Here, in a pretty setting where you can smell the ocean from the window of every room, we were the guests of the distinguished writer Miss Edith Somerville. Her books about Englishmen in Ireland, and their humorous mishaps at the hands of the roguish locals, had become quite famous; April had been devouring them. When we arrived, there was a contest as to which lady wanted to meet the other more, as Miss Somerville had known all about the Limerick Somervilles and the castle lawsuit.

I believe that I have never eaten so much bread and scones. Miss Somerville sat at the head of her dining-table, speaking of her deceased literary collaborator, “Martin Ross”—in real life, her cousin Violet Martin—as though the lady had not died two years earlier, in 1915.

The talk, as it often did, went to the Easter Rising. By now, many people knew that I had been in Dublin that week, and Miss Somerville said that she had wanted to be there herself, “with a gun in my hands— but I consulted my love and she said, ‘Yes, but where shall you be each night, and how shall I find you when I come back from where I am?’ So I stayed in Drishane.”

So naturally did she speak these words that April asked me later whether Miss Somerville did indeed refer to a deceased woman—what had been their relationship? I explained that the literary partnership sprang from what would have been called a “romantic” connection, had one of them been male.

Drishane spoke many things to me—and, I would discover, to April—as to how Tipperary must be run. While reeking of literature and art, the house also sat on a working farm, in whose daily operations Miss Somerville had immersed herself. In residence and acreage very much smaller than Tipperary, it gave us a feeling of what we might do. Brilliant visitors came often to Drishane. And not just members of the Ascendancy; the literary and artistic lions came too—Mr. Shaw had recently stayed there; Mr. Yeats was soon expected. Painters and dancers and great lawyers sat at Miss Somerville's feet and found her both challenging and adorable.

But it seemed to me that we had an advantage over every other Great House in Ireland, and one that we had not yet, through pressure of restoration works, examined in full. We had a theater.

My heart danced at this thought, but I refrained from raising it with April. All in good time, I thought. As we drove home, I found myself torn between two strong feelings: the excitement of this theatrical prospect and the apprehension lest some attack or other mishap had taken place at the castle. In the event, we found all in excellent shape, we were greeted as returning heroes, no bad news awaited us—and they had begun the restoration of the great mural at the western wall of the Ballroom, my own pet project.

If my mother, Margery Coleman Nugent, had been the photographer in Dublin who met and took care of Charles O'Brien at the end of Easter Week and later sent at least one piece of correspondence to him, why had I never heard of it?

That and other, related thoughts irked me when I first read these recent sections of Charles's text. I stopped reading—and I changed course; I began to rifle my memory. The first haul was as predictable as a trawler's— a lot of mundane stuff and one or two glittering, appetizing items.

You can't call my childhood life in any way remarkable. I would have liked more enchantment. For instance, some children have the feeling that they are adopted. They fancy that they came from Gypsies or some other exotic root. I didn't. My complaint was that our house was so small.

It wasn't large enough for the adventures enjoyed by children in the storybooks I read. We had no back stairs, no dark corridors, no stone-floored, mysterious pantries. I didn't have a paneled wall that might open any night and beckon me to sunny, magical lands. My ceiling was too low for me to fly around the room. The window wasn't a casement—a fairy wind could not blow it open. And anyway, it looked out on a little street, not into a garden dark with laurel bushes, where winding paths led to a glistening lake.

It's not that I didn't try; I did. But I didn't even have wallpaper. The walls were painted a dull beige, with a chocolate-brown door. I wasn't able to do anything about that.

How wonderful it would have been if my father had been carrying Michael Collins's gun. How thrilling if he had been a fire-eater. I'd have settled for a juggler or some mild card tricks.

But my mother had been this quick-off-the-mark photographer whose pictures of Easter Week became famous. Although I wasn't allowed to tell anyone, on account of her reticence, it was thrilling to know it.

I think my delight at her place in history imbued my teaching spirit. Earning a monthly salary in a small country town in Ireland did not keep me from all vividness. And, as her early career rewarded her all through her life, mine prospered similarly; I am proud of the excitement that I generated. To this day, I meet men I taught as boys. They single me out when they see me in town. Sometimes they call to the house with a small gift at Christmas. Always they tell me that they remember things I taught them, and how I made lessons come alive, that there was never anything they didn't understand. Some of them will recite from Dryden or Pope, or one of Shakespeare's sonnets. One man called his champion grey-hound Horatio!

When our only child died (of meningitis—she was four), we were showered with letters. And when my wife, Polly, died a few years later, of cancer, the funeral was half a mile long. That's what teaching gave me— because I put into it my energy and my sense of knowledge's thrill.

So—to summarize again: first I had a weird feeling that I belonged to these pages or they belonged to me, or should so. And then, at the shooting of Charles, I realized that I truly did have a natural connection to this text. The details of 1916 confirmed it; I simply did not know how deep the involvement went.

Nor did I know—or for a moment anticipate—that it went even deeper to April Burke than to Charles O'Brien.

As I read that description of my mother, and as I read that she had written to Charles, my searches intensified. No stone, I told myself, would not be turned; no stream would not be sourced. That's how I came to see the acres of the Great War's white crosses. And otherwise I'd never have come so close to Easter Week, whose every battle I have since traced. But those scrutinies—and their findings—were only the overture.

I shall now describe the events surrounding the great mural, over which I feel especial proprietorship. The Ballroom runs east to west, and the sunlight beams in through the southern, floor-to-ceiling French doors, which lead out to the Main Terrace and the Parterre. During all the works, I kept reminding myself that, one summer night, here in this Ballroom, guests would dance, and between dances stroll outside to take the air.

From the three drawing-rooms, three pairs of painted doorways—all fruits and flowers, nymphs and shepherds—open into the Ballroom; at the other end, the room concludes in a mighty wall. By comparison with my later scrutinies, I did little more than glance around me on that first visit as Responsible Overseer; too much debris prevented and discouraged me. In the following days and weeks, however, I left nothing unseen—and that is how I came to discover the mural.

I had no idea of its existence. On the day that I first took over, I concentrated on finding and assessing the safe places in the castle, and I did not discover the painting for four days. In fact, it took a specifically strong and directed beam of sunlight to suggest that the wall had not been painted a simple white; I ascertained it while wrestling with a handle on one of the tall doors, trying to determine whether rust had irretrievably eaten the lock.

Turning away, I looked down the Ballroom, and thought that I saw a phantom of some kind; certainly I became aware of a great presence. I have no propensity to spectral experiences; they interest me only for curiosity, never for belief. Yet, almost mocking myself, I looked again. No, I had not been wrong the first time; yes, the room did contain a specter—a massive figure in the middle of the wall, whose scarlet and yellow garb came faintly through what I had taken to be white paint.

Down the ballroom I walked, trying not to mask the sun's beams. I touched the wall, and soon realized that the “white paint” was, in fact, a kind of mold that had formed all over the wall. It took the form of a stiff white powder, coating and obscuring everything; the tunicked figure behind it proved simply too strong to be contained.

With the utmost care, I began to brush away the caked powder. I am proud that I had the sense to do it down low, in one corner, a tiny patch at first, where any damage that I might cause would not easily be perceived, would not leap out at the eye. The powder was stiff; it needed my pocket-knife, with which I took even greater care than I had done with my hands and fingernails.

Under the caking (caused by dampness on top of paint, as I later learned), lay a mural of brilliance and vivid color. It had as a theme Odysseus the Wanderer, Homer's great hero, but at that moment all I could discover was a scrap of purple cloth, which seemed part of a gown or cloak, and the paw of a small animal, perhaps a dog.

While the light was with me, I walked along the wall, peering as closely as I could, in a fair state of excitement. I soon established that the mural ran the entire width of the Ballroom wall, and from floor to ceiling. By placing my face close to the moldy coating, and glancing askance along the face of the wall, I could see a little more of the painting—and it looked magnificent. Immediately I vowed that however it would be done, that painting would one day be restored, its genius shown to the world, and perhaps even its painter identified and hailed.

I supervised the reclaiming of that mural myself. For two years I searched the world for the best restorers. The war in Europe undoubtedly hindered me, but at last I found my man—or, rather, my man and his wife. They came from France, from near Avignon—Serge and Claudette Lemm. Both spoke good English, she more than he because she had spent some years in Scotland. In their late thirties, quiet and elegant, they had met on a church work in Tuscany and had since restored many wall paintings in French houses.