Tipperary (59 page)

We chatted a little. I told him about Tipperary Castle, and about Charles O'Brien's text. Henry Lisney paid close attention; for a bellicose and opinionated man he proved a good listener.

“So how did your, ah'm, relative—” He pointed to the portrait. “How did she get involved?”

“Well—she was the chatelaine, so to speak. And I have no evidence that she's in any way related to me.”

He snorted. “I have! The best evidence is the evidence of your own eyes. That's why we use the term ‘eye-witnesses.’ ”

Henry Lisney told me that Trinity College had photographed every piece of art in the collection, and he promised to send me a transparency of April's portrait. I gave him my address.

On the drive home, I laughed. Now, if it had been a portrait of Charles O'Brien and if Henry Lisney had said I looked like Charles— I might have begun to think that Charles and my mother had had a little fling sometime.

One of the points about teaching is this: it makes you driven by text. You depend on the printed word for every handhold. In full flow, you sometimes walk the tightrope of imagination. But always, always you return to the text. When I got back home I began a long haul through Charles's “History” for what I might have missed.

Overall, he drew an odd picture of April Burke. First comes the moment when she steps on the small chair in Oscar's bedroom to straighten the picture that got skewed. Other than that momentary eye contact, she gave no impression of being aware of Charles for as long as he was in that room.

At the funeral, she physically recoiled from him. And it seems clear that when she feared he was stalking her, she used her connections to have him run out of town—no small matter in the liberal days of fin de siècle Paris, where the Irish were popular.

He next met her at her father's home in London. She had—probably deliberately—stayed out at lunch in order to avoid Charles, about whom she had been told overnight by her papa. When she did find him there, drinking with her father, she threw him out.

In all of these descriptions, Charles did not shrink from describing her behavior—a curious decision. Given his undoubted passion for her, might he not have wished to portray her in a more idealized light? I answer that to myself by saying that his reports of her arose from his innocence—he didn't understand how she came across in his text. But—I'm not sure . . .

In fact, she is almost kind when she first mentions Charles. In that early letter to Mrs. Moore (the reply has never been found), she contents herself with calling Charles “a strange man—a big Irish fellow, with, I confess, a light in his eyes and a deep voice.”

April comments on his “well-trained manners”—but of course she also says, “I am given an impression that he may be quite dangerous.” Touch of racism, too—nothing new in that.

Now the mysteries and contradictions begin. On the one hand this woman is depicted as cruelly rejecting. In Charles's mother's journal she's “icy” and “conniving”—you could hardly use stronger language as a woman in Amelia O'Brien's generation. Yet when her own father dies, April falls apart with grief and insecurity in her letter to Kitty Moore.

Here's another point: when Oscar Wilde told April the story of Tipperary Castle and the death of its owner, April professed to have no knowledge of it. And when Terence Burke went with Charles to Somerset, he had already declared himself astounded by the fact that he might own a great estate in Ireland.

Yet in evidence during the High Court hearings, April said that she had known about Tipperary Castle and their possible connection to it since she was ten years old. And she said too—in fact, won the case on it—that she had found, and known that she had found, her natural home. So at the very least, do we have here a tribe of deceivers?

And what about the fact that, after strong rejections, she blandly asks Charles to caretake the castle? And then marries Stephen Somerville— which copper-fastens her chances of winning the case? Did she know in advance that Somerville was a violent drunk? Did she care? In another contradiction, when Amelia shows tenderness during April's bereavement, April collapses into the older woman's arms.

The text by itself had already told me that I was seeing a difficult woman. Ancillary reading made her complex. Even though I felt that I recognized and understood everything she did, I had to wonder at Charles's judgment. And then came Noonan.

8

SUNDAY, JANUARY THE 25TH 1920.

Things have become so difficult for Charles. His heart breaks while his castle builds. As the works proceed excellently (everybody praises his orderliness), his life falls into turmoil. This love affair between April and the bantam Noonan is now turning out so scandalously that I cannot write of it here. I do not wish to see such matter in my Journal.

Our lambing has started early. We had two last night. Bernard believes we shall have at least two more in the next day or so. He thinks it is all due to the rain. We have one lamb in the kitchen, in a box by the fire. That used to be Euclid's job—only then he would not let go of them!

I sent a note to Charles. He needs to spend some nights here. But he has written back to say that he cannot.

W
e had ever believed that the most beautiful and difficult works should be left until the end. Also, we had agreed—April, Harney, and I—that the house's jewels could be summarized as the Ballroom, the Great Hall and Grand Staircase, the great Odyssey mural, and, above all (in every sense), the plasterwork, the magnificent stucco details that adorned every wall and ceiling in the formal parts of the building.

In the last days of 1918 we had already been able to calculate how long it would be before the stucco work could begin. And in the last days of 1919, I commissioned the stuccodores; since it has died as a trade in Ireland (how we mourn the great Stapletons and Wests), I found four Italian brothers who had worked in, among other places, the Vatican halls in Rome.

Three years, the Paglalonis told me—three years to repair these damaged plasterworks and put them back in place. I was jubilant; I had watched their careful perusals of everything that they must approach, and I had expected a span of ten years. With so much damage, we had all despaired of ever achieving the originals—and then I watched the brothers at work. No one else that I can envisage could work so precisely, with such comprehensive energy, and so fast.

We gave them, as they requested, vacated sites in which to work (with the exception of the Ballroom wall with the mural). They began by spreading black fishermen's tarpaulins on the floors, on which they laid every piece of plaster, large and small, beneath the place on the wall or ceiling whence it had fallen. (We had preserved everything in numbered and listed boxes.) As they did this, they talked to each other all the time, in unusually slow speech—indeed, every syllable that they spoke seemed at odds with the speed of their movements.

As for their delicacy! No man handled a pearl from the sea as tenderly as a Paglaloni caressed a piece of stucco, be it the head of a great bird or an as yet unidentified crumb of plaster that turned out to be a grape or a flower bud or a bead.

I watched them closely as they assembled the pieces on the ground, and then surveyed the prospects of elevating the existing pieces to their sites above. Each brother took command of a sector of the stucco for that wall, or that ceiling in that room or corridor; and when they had worked through the assessments of the linear pieces, they investigated each cornice. The simplest pieces had been placed on the flat wall; the corners of each room held wonderfully elaborate displays—of cornucopia or fruit trees or great blossoms or creatures; and in the middle of the ceilings spread the great medallions with dramatic stucco creations in relief. In the Ballroom we had a Neptune with ocean billows and tridents.

It seemed to me as if they must make all new material; that was not so. For example, inside the heads of birds, inside the bunch of flowers, the Paglalonis found the baskets of wire supports built and placed there by the original plasterers, as the little cages over which they draped their beautiful designs. When first I saw these structures, I felt that it was like looking into the broken hearts of the birds and the other creatures. Now these fortunate little beings would have their hearts restored, and they could again parade their beauty before the world.

For long times before, I had been enjoying almost daily conversations on my own pet matter, the mural in the Ballroom. Our French contractors, the Lemms, had advanced to a most interesting phase of the renewal, and had also expressed some surprise at what they had uncovered. The limestone of which the castle walls had been constructed had, they declared, proven a friend to the mural. They had found considerably less damp than they had expected, and the coat of congealed powder (as I had described it) had actually given the mural some protection. Much of their early labor, they said, had been the careful removal of this concealing white cake.

“All such work,” Claudette Lemm said, “where you want to uncover beauty—it has mistakes, it must have. We made a mistake by not removing all of the white mask in the beginning, really. But we feared that it would expose the painting too soon. Then we changed our decisions, and we have been able to move ahead, really.”

On the morning that the Paglalonis arrived, Madame Lemm showed me the point of revelation that the mural had reached—Odysseus's torso, and much of the mural's upper half. I cheered so loudly that the Italian brothers peered in; when we beckoned them to come and see, their delight exceeded mine. I did not grasp what they said, but I heard “Fragonard,” and “Watteau,” and “Delacroix.” The Lemms stood by, smiling, and when the Paglalonis left, Claudette beamed me in conspiracy.

“That was why we showed them, really,” she said. “To set them the standard of the house.”

“Were they discussing who painted it?” I said.

“Yes. They are wrong. It is not Fragonard; it is stronger. And we do not think that Watteau came to Ireland. It cannot be Delacroix, we think; he is not born when this was painted, really.”

I said, “Do you know?”

The Lemms looked at each other. Claudette said, “We think it was Vien.”

“Vien?”

“Yes. Joseph-Marie Vien.”

I said, “A moment—I want to find Mrs. Somerville.”

April came to the Ballroom shortly afterward and viewed the mural with much pleasure.

“Do you know of Vien?” I asked. “A French painter.”

April directed her answer to Claudette.

“Father or son?”

“The Elder.”

They nodded, so pleased that she knew.

Serge Lemm said, “We know that he painted some murals outside of France and Rome, but we do not know where they are.”

April said, “Do his dates fit?”

I said to the Lemms, “We think this part of the castle was built between seventeen-sixty and seventeen-seventy.”

Claudette Lemm said, “Then his dates fit. He was born in seventeen-sixteen and famous by the age of thirty.”

“But this is so exciting!” April exclaimed, and then walked from the Ballroom, passing me without a word. I saw the look from Claudette to her husband. Amid all that beauty and discovery my heart sank, because I knew that they pitied me.

From the Harney oral depositions:

We all had a fair idea of what was going on. I often overheard the workmen talking about it—workmen gossip like old women. Besides, after a while the “lovebirds”—as the workmen called them—didn't bother to hide it.

You can imagine the bind I was in. Dermot was my friend and comrade-in-arms, and Charles was my deeper friend and comrade in life.

I thought about interfering—my own mother told me that I should put a stop to it, that I should tell off Dermot, and what was he doing anyway with an Englishwoman, if he was such a little patriot? But, as I said to her, each of them wanted the other, the pair of them's free as the air, and Charles had made no move toward April.

That was the point where I had the most difficulty. I knew what was in Charles's heart—and it was unfortunate that I was the only one who knew. Charles had told me that for as long as he didn't see April or hear her voice—all those years when he never heard from her—he could handle it all. Ever since he came to work alongside her, though, his heart had been bursting every day.

So he had made a plan—which was very like Charles. He figured it like this: In 1920, when we had hit the last heights of the castle works, he was sixty years old. Her father, he told me, would have been sixty-six had he lived, so April—who talked about her father every day—had been in the habit of loving an older man.

Somerville had been seven years older than she was, and there was thirteen years between herself and Dermot Noonan. Charles was twenty-two years older than she was. Mind you, Charles was a very youthful man; most people took him for forty-five or -six, that quick walk he had, and all the energy.

He also reckoned that the main work on the castle would finish around 1921 or '22. If all went well, he said to me, he intended to take April on a long tour of what had been restored. He was then going to tell her that he had seen it all as a labor of love—from him to her. And he was then going to ask her to marry him.

You see, they actually got on very well. I was at most of their meetings; in fact, I saw them together more than any person on earth. And I have to vouch for the fact that they were a natural pair. They never argued. One never deferred to the other, one never overruled the other. They worked it out from the point of view of common sense.

I always said to Charles that he and April would make a great couple. He knew it, and I think that she did too. But when he showed no enterprise toward the capture of her heart, as they say in books—she turned away. And the only reason he didn't approach her earlier was because she had turned him down so hard in the past.

Talk about a tragic time! There we were, rebuilding this beautiful house, this magnificent palace. And running a lot of Tipperary's war from the castle at the same time. And there I was, watching my friend Dermot, and I already knowing that in this case—and not for the first time—he was being more opportunist than sincere.

The everyday conduct of that love affair was very severe on Charles. He'd meet April and me in the morning for breakfast—if she came down that morning—and he'd know by the dreamy and tired look of her that she'd been up half the night with Dermot. Maybe they'd gone out in the car somewhere, nearly daring the soldiers to arrest them.