A Man Over Forty (22 page)

‘That's what she said.'

‘And she was right! She was absolutely right. But you've chosen to make a secret of the fact that you were an adopted child – I can't think why – and by keeping it secret you've made it a guilty secret.'

‘You don't know what it is to feel you have no identity.'

‘Most people would say that you have established yours pretty firmly.'

‘I have no background, no genetic identity.'

‘I suppose one must believe in genes, but I'm sure one shouldn't take them out and look at them. Remember my cousin Weatherby in Jamaica, who's descended from a Regicide and a reformed whore – and from some poor exile out of darkest Africa. He, obviously, is much nicer than his genes.'

‘Better a known Regicide than total anonymity.'

‘You're wrong, quite wrong. Nothing can be worse than established facts. I once had a friend who was passionately interested in genealogy, and for his birthday I wrote a long poem called
Where my Chromosomes have Rested
. It was all too true, and brought our friendship to an untimely end.'

They stood facing each other on Merrion Street, while the rain fell more heavily. ‘I shouldn't have told her,' said Balintore. ‘I've given myself away.'

‘Tell everyone. Give yourself away completely, and you'll have nothing more to worry about. But I'll carry a knowledge of ancestral crime – and worse than that, ancestral folly – till I die. You're better off, because you're free from blame.'

‘That's worth considering,' said Balintore, and took off his hat. The rain fell heavily, and walking perversely slow they went as far as St Stephen's Green and circumvolved its dark and dripping gardens. Their physical discomfort increased, but Balintore refused to hurry. A rapid change of temper had always characterized him, and now he appeared to have left his melancholy mood behind.

‘St Stephen's Green!' he said. ‘It summons a score of thoughts, and at this time of night I can't identify one of them. But I salute them all.'

He waved his hat in the pelting air and said, ‘I like your Irish rain! It's pure, unsullied, and strangely gentle. I feel,
already, that I did the right thing in coming here. Ireland may provide the refuge I'm looking for. We must buy a lot of books before we leave tomorrow: Irish poetry, everything from Tom Moore to Yeats. And Higgins! I must read Higgins again. Some of his poems have the very rhythm of Irish rain.'

They returned to their hotel – Balintore looking as if he had emerged from a waterfall – and without much more conversation went to their rooms. They breakfasted late, went to several bookshops, and at a quarter to one met Honoria and her friend Anne Stirling, and gave them lunch in the Hibernian Hotel. Balintore was quiet, unassertive, and spoke so discreetly that Mrs Stirling – who had seen him on several television screens in England – said impulsively, ‘I would hardly have recognized you!'

At a quarter-past two they put their luggage into Honoria's small Hillman. Balintore had told Palladis, ‘I drink a lot, and sometimes I drink too much. But I never let my thirst drain my host's resources. We'll take with us some gin and some bottles of John Jameson's admirable whisky, and perhaps a little dry sherry.' With this addition, there was room in the boot of the car for only one suitcase, and Honoria said she would drive. ‘And Mr Balintore will sit in front with me.' Palladis shared the back seat, in some discomfort, with three suitcases, a dressing-case, a boot-bag, and several parcels.

A dull but dry morning was succeeded by an afternoon in which a changing sky tore skin after skin, as if off an onion, from an ever more shining brightness until the near-by fields, and a glimpse of distant hills, were all lighted with a purity of green and white and gold – of gorse and grass, a straggle of may-trees and a cluster of white houses – and in the exhilaration of the precarious beauty through which they drove Honoria said – this was a mile or two before they came to Mullingar – ‘Let us go the long way round, and show Mr Balintore how lovely Ireland can be when it's wearing its best clothes. Let's go through Galway, and tomorrow, when it's raining again, he'll remember what lies behind the rain.'

Palladis, annoyed by a suitcase, a dressing-case, and a couple of parcels that fell on him whenever they turned to the right, accepted the proposal without enthusiasm; but
Balintore, who, having talked of Italy, had found Honoria to be a willing listener, said loudly, ‘Yes, indeed! Show me all you can. I feel already that never – yes, never! – can I have too much of Ireland.'

So at Mullingar Honoria bore left to Athlone, and by Ballinasloe and Athenry drove to Galway. There she turned north, on the west side of Lough Corrib, and through the town and the changing countryside beyond it Balintore gratified her by a silence broken only by occasional exclamations of pleasure.

‘Words,' he said presently, ‘cannot do justice. We need a recurrence of the gratitude that some sensitive caveman felt when he looked out and saw that spring had come again. Those hills, that glimpse of the sea, these fields – this is beauty as the full but inarticulate mind of the caveman saw it. This is the innocence of beauty, and my country! I am beginning to believe that this is where I shall live out my life.'

‘All my English friends think I'm mad, quite mad, to go on living here,' said Honoria, ‘and often I think so too. But every now and then – perhaps once a month – I feel that Ireland is the only place where a sensible person can bear to live. Though you mustn't expect too much of your neighbours, of course.'

‘Tell Me,' said Balintore, ‘what this curious structure is.'

On the previous evening, driving from Dublin to the west, they had dined at a fishing-hotel by Lough Mask, and arriving at Turk's Court after eleven, had gone straight to bed. Now, at ten o'clock in the morning, Palladis and Balintore stood at the south window of the long drawing-room and looked at what appeared to be a stockaded camp or zariba in an open field whose near boundary, barely ten yards from the house, was marked by a broken fence above an overgrown ha-ha.

‘That's where O'Halloran is working now,' said Palladis.

‘The mad geologist?'

‘You'll meet him, sooner or later. I see him from time to time, and rather like him. But he's a great nuisance to Honoria.'

‘Did she give him permission to start mining there?'

‘She's done everything she could to keep him out and get rid of him. She's tried twice to get an injunction against him, she's pleaded loss of amenity as well as actual danger to the house, but her lawyers can do nothing. The law itself is on the other side of the fence. O'Halloran is the legal tenant of two fields, one on each side of the house, and nowadays a tenant's in a stronger position than the landlord. The landlord had a long innings, but he's out of luck today.'

They turned and walked to the other end of the long room. It was a handsome room, with a pale golden floor and Persian rugs, eight ancestral portraits of great size and forbidding aspect, a lot of miscellaneous furniture, and dominating all, two vast and glittering chandeliers of Waterford glass. Then from the north window they looked at the derrick which stood less than a hundred yards away. It was some sixty or seventy feet high, sturdily built and firmly bedded on broad wooden sills, and near it was an old-fashioned steam traction-engine.

‘He built that when he was prospecting for oil,' said Palladis. ‘It's not, I believe, the most modern rig, but very ingenious. There's a heavy bit, a sort of chisel, at the end of the cable, and what's called a rocking-beam bounced it up and down in the hole he was cutting; which gradually got deeper. The traction-engine gave him his power, and used to make a lot of noise.'

‘Did he find any oil?'

‘Oh, no.'

‘Is there any oil-bearing rock in this part of Ireland?'

‘O'Halloran thought so. People are drilling in other places, but perhaps only as an experiment.'

‘He must have had some reason for sinking a well here. Or starting to sink one.'

‘He was using a forked twig, like a water-diviner, and it reacted so strongly here that it brought him to his knees. But more important than that, he's found – or says he has found – a hitherto unknown manuscript of the Annals of Innisfallen in
which there's a reference to a hermit who lived somewhere near here in a cell miraculously lighted. Or, as he says, lighted by natural gas.'

‘Why has he abandoned his well?'

‘I don't think he has. But there's another reference in the Annals – or in his manuscript – to alluvial gold in the little brook that comes out above the village. So he's begun to sink a gold-mine to get enough gold to buy modern equipment to strike oil. Or so I gather.'

They walked back to the south window, and looked at the zariba in the field beyond the ha-ha. From a chimney on the square hut with a corrugated iron roof that stood within the six-foot high wattle fence came little gouts of steam, and they could hear, like an iron pulse, the noise of a small engine.

‘There are two things I don't understand,' said Balintore. ‘Why, in the first place, is he sinking a mine here if he hopes to find alluvial gold in a brook near the village?'

‘I think you should wait till you meet O'Halloran. He can probably give you a more convincing answer than I could.'

‘And in the second place, how has it come about that a house of this sort – the great house of the district, a mansion house – lies pinched between two fields whose tenant appears to be mad, and is evidently beyond control?'

‘You must ask Honoria about that. It's a thing that worries her very much, and she likes to talk about it.'

‘She's an attractive woman,' said Balintore.

‘At present,' said Palladis severely, ‘I consider myself her guardian.'

‘Physically,' said Balintore, ‘she doesn't appeal to me. She reminds me of the pineapple you often see at the centre of a dish of fruit on the top table at a banquet. It's agreeably flamboyant, it looks well on a richly appointed table, but it's there for appearance rather than use.'

‘I am very fond of her.'

‘I admire her. But I don't ask for her any more than I would ask for the pineapple in a pyramid of fruit on a silver platter. What one puts on one's plate is a few grapes.'

‘In Ireland you won't even get grapes.'

‘I shan't look for them. I've had a surfeit.'

‘Let us go for a little drive,' said Palladis, ‘and I'll show you something of the country.'

The weather was still warm and bright, and in the Land-Rover they drove through the village to the many-islanded lough where Palladis fished with occasional success. The gently coloured scene excited Balintore's lively admiration. Blue hills rose sharply into the mild vacancy of the sky, and rocky islands, turreted or plumed with trees, were lapped by little genial waves. Gorse patched the fields with gold, and faultlessly-white cottages were halted, as it seemed, in an unpremeditated approach to their first communion. A dunlin tiptoed across grey pebbles, and a trout rose in the middle of concentric ripples.

‘I haven't fished since I was a boy,' said Balintore. ‘My father – my adoptive father – taught me to cast on the little lochs, or reservoirs, in the Pentland Hills. And sometimes we fished a river called the Blackadder in Berwickshire.'

‘If you want to,' said Palladis, ‘you can fish here every day of the week. And every now and then, if you're persistent, you'll get a good basket.'

‘But I haven't a rod. I've got no tackle—'

‘You can borrow all you need. There are plenty of rods in the house.'

‘When can I start?'

‘You'll need a gillie, and if you employ an old fellow called Michael Dooley you'll be doing him a good turn. We'll stop at O'Hara's Bar on the way back, and see if we can find him.'

‘I believe,' said Balintore, ‘that this is the haven I've been looking for. I thought I had found it in Jamaica, but that was a delusion. The haven wasn't enclosed, it was open to unwelcome visitors and incursions from the past. And talking of Jamaica, have you had any news of Weatherby Scroope?'

‘He's married,' said Palladis.

‘Married? But he was all against marriage. When he left us he was going to Florida to stop his father getting married.'

‘He went to Palm Beach, where he met his father and the woman who was threatening to become his stepmother. They had, I gather, a lively argument. A long and acrimonious argument. Perhaps you could describe it as a row. And the
consequence was that the old man had a stroke: a thrombosis, I suppose – that newly devised escape-hatch from the intolerable confinements of modern life. But this wasn't a fatal attack; only disabling. It left the old man partially paralysed and capable only of the infantilities of speech. So Weatherby and the American widow had to nurse him, and in the intimacies of the sick-room Weatherby apparently discovered virtues in her that he hadn't suspected – or, as an alternative, she found in him a livelier surrogate for the comfort she had anticipated from his father – and with the old man's blessing a marriage was arranged, and they have all gone back to the Great House at Fort Appin.'

‘Good God!' said Balintore.

‘Do you think He is?'

‘But that nice black woman with the lovely teeth and the engulfing smile – Mary, who looked after us so well, and was, you said, his mistress – what has happened to her?'

‘He didn't speak of her. But black women have always gone into the discard at a certain stage in the game – and I've no doubt that Weatherby has been generous to her.'

‘In my opinion,' said Balintore primly, ‘that's a shocking and distasteful story.'

‘Let us go to O'Hara's Bar,' said Palladis.