Another Heartbeat in the House (54 page)

Such houses are generally empty, waiting for someone to inhabit them; like rescue dogs, they have been loved once and yearn to be loved again. Ireland is full of them, from mansions to the meanest cottages: erstwhile homes that retain some essence of the people who lived there, and have been abandoned for reasons – financial, geographical, political or personal – about which we can only speculate.

The heartbeat of this book is such a place: a house that lives and breathes, as many of the characters who populate the pages once did. I came upon it by accident one day whilst driving in a remote and outstandingly beautiful tract of countryside. On rounding a bend in the road I saw first a lake, then a stone-built pier, then the house. The style was Georgian, I guessed, or early Victorian: two-storeyed, six-bayed, it reclined at the top of a grassy slope, gazing over the water at the blue hills beyond. It was unoccupied, and it was for sale. It was love at first sight.

I asked an historian friend to do some sleuthing, but there was scant information available. All census and Land Registry documentation had been destroyed in the National Archive when the Four Courts in Dublin was set alight during the Irish Civil War. The Ordnance Survey records of 1838 showed that a dwelling had been extant: it had been restructured shortly thereafter into a sizeable house, which was known to have been let as a hunting lodge from the late 1800s.

My friend came up with two significant results. One was a valuation report dating back to 1891, on which the following observation had been written in a clerk's neat hand: ‘House vacated furnished. Value reduced one half for extreme remoteness of situation: dwelling is approached by a bridle path 1/2 mile away from a very bad road.'

The second was a personal narrative written in 1927 by a Dr Crowley, a Dublin surgeon who had taken a long lease on the property, then owned by an absentee English landlord. Dr Crowley was clearly a keen fisherman, remarking:
The fishing was superb (perhaps too easy)! We had over three hundred trout – white and brown – in the larder, and had difficulty in giving them awa
y. But what interested me more was his chronicle of the lodge, which read as follows:

In the first half of the 19th century the region was the haunt of sportsmen who enjoyed the excellent shooting and fishing that were to be had thereabouts. However, the necessity of travelling thither from their estates morning and evening over bad roads, either on horseback or by pony and trap, curtailed their hours of sport in summer and ruled it out altogether in winter.

One day, one of the gentlemen suggested that they would glean more enjoyment from the hunting if they had a cabin where they could stable their horses, kennel their dogs, and eat and sleep without the effort of the tiresome daily journey. All readily agreed that it was a good idea and should be adopted – but where to site the cabin was hotly disputed. Eventually one of the ghillies suggested that they leave the site to chance – ‘where the next hare got up.' This was agreed to, and the next hare got up where the lodge now stands.

The original building was a long narrow cabin that ran diagonally to the river. The construction had a flagged floor, stone and mortar walls and thatched roof, which suited the requirements of young men who needed no more than a dry bed and a hot meal. Over the ensuing years it was extended: a second storey was added and a series of six bay windows put in. The result was a hunting lodge in the French style, of pleasingly simple proportions, planted in an Arcadian idyll.

When I happened upon the lodge, it had been converted into a youth hostel. But since the adjacent river had burst its banks – causing landslides and flooding – it had fallen into a sorry state, and had lain for some years disused and derelict. Inside, the once spacious rooms had been converted into dormitories and partitioned by plasterboard walls. Many of the floorboards were rotting; the smooth marble of the mantelshelves was chipped and broken; windows were boarded up, there was damp everywhere. Along the hallway, the great hooks were still in place that had once supported heavy fishing rods; beyond the French windows there was evidence of the limestone slabs that had formed the parterre, and on one of the shutters in the former drawing room the initials ‘
' had been carved.

I longed to buy it. I dreamed of rehabilitating it, of transforming it into a writers' retreat or an auberge for hill-walkers; but even if I could raise enough for a deposit, it would cost a small fortune to replace the roof, the windows, the floors, the heating and the plumbing. There was no way I could afford to resuscitate the faltering heartbeat of the house.

I felt sorry for it: its history had been obscured for over half a century, the valuer had disparaged and underrated it, an online review by
hostelz.com
had described it as ‘shabby chic at best' and bemoaned the fact that there was ‘no television, no internet, no nothing …'

But its isolation was integral to its beauty. After visiting it on half a dozen occasions and falling ever more deeply in love, I decided that if I couldn't breathe new life into the house, I could at least give it a story. What, I wondered, might have happened in the half-century between the Ordnance Survey report of 1838 and the bargain-basement valuation of 1891?

I set to work. I knew that William Thackeray had travelled extensively in the region when he was writing his
Irish Sketch-Book
in the early 1840s. I knew that he had visited Ireland two years previously in an attempt to reunite his poor deranged wife with her mother and sister. I also knew that in 1847 – the year
Vanity Fair
was published – Thackeray had engaged for his daughters a governess who had lived with them in their home in Kensington for several months. Her name was Eliza Drury.
!

A narrative started to take shape. In my imagination, E.D. was clever, audacious and beguiling. She was an adventuress, a prototype feminist. She recalled to me Becky Sharp, the heroine of Thackeray's most famous novel. And when she and her modern-day counterpart Edie Chadwick – accompanied by a little dog – danced into my head, when Jameson St Leger strolled in with a roguish smile, and when two women – both called Biddy – were enlisted to housekeep, some sixth sense, some providential sprite, told me that the house had a story to tell, and that its heart had started to beat again.

You can find images of the house and some of Eliza and Edie's friends by visiting
www.pinterest.com/heartbeathouse/

AS A CHILD
, I used the backs of my father's architectural designs to draw on, so I must attribute my enduring fascination with the fabric of houses to him. That my fascination continues is due in no small measure to my godfather, Pádraig Murray, who made the beautiful floor-plans of Eliza's house which feature on the preceding pages. Fionán de Barra found ‘Lissaguirra' for me, and Elma Brazel, who was its custodian for many years, passed on details of its history.

Sometimes the act of writing is likened to constructing an edifice. To continue the architectural analogy, these are the people who helped me build the book, and to whom I owe heartfelt thanks. Harriet Bourton and Bella Bosworth were there at the foundation stage sporting hard hats, as was Charlotte Robertson. Marian Keyes and Hilary Reynolds climbed the scaffolding with me and explored the house as it was being constructed. Heidi Murphy made sure the structure was sound, Beth Humphries smoothed the plasterwork, and fellow writers Cathy Kelly, Sue Leonard and Abby Opperman kindly inspected at the decorating stage.

Sometimes I sought refuge from the building site behind the Baroque facade of Rathmines library. There I was provided with all the books I needed to research the building project. Among the most helpful and inspiring were DJ Taylor's brilliant biography of William Thackeray; Eoin Burke's compilation of harrowing testimonies of the Great Hunger,
Poor Green Erin
, and of course, one of the most glorious novels ever written,
Vanity Fair
.

Among those who helped me prepare the house for viewers were Margaret Halton of United Agents, the dynamic teams at Transworld Ireland and in the UK, and Becky Glibbery, who designed the beautiful cladding. Praise be also to those bibliophiles – booksellers and bloggers – who showcase the property on their display shelves.

If a house is to be a home, it needs a robust heartbeat. Final thanks go to the abiding keepers of my heart: my husband, Malcolm, and my daughter, Clara.

Questions for Discussion

♦ Both main characters are young, self-reliant women trying to make their way in life under difficult circumstances – yet they are also very different characters. Did you identify more with Edie or Eliza?

♦ How does Kate Beaufoy evoke the different time periods and places in her novel? Did you get a real sense of different eras?

♦ In what way do you think the structure of the book – a story within a story, and letters within stories – affects the way you read it?

♦ Eliza is an outspoken, resourceful woman in a hierarchical society – how does she use her guile to make her way? What did this book tell you about the position of women in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and Ireland?