Ashes In the Wind (39 page)

‘It’s been coming for a couple of weeks now; I didn’t know he’d finally been kicked out. Doubt there’s much meat in him – too busy fighting. I’ll take him away. I kept the last set of antlers he cast; I’ll let you have them for the hall.’

James cleans his rifle and puts it away. Allenmouth and Anna seem miles and years distant, a dream and – as he remembers standing just inside the clubhouse – a nightmare.

There is more than enough to occupy him at Donhead. He makes a couple of trips to the London Library to do some background reading on his Irish project, and later spends three days in the strange, bunker-like British Colindale periodical library poring over back numbers of
The Kerryman
and
The Irish Times
. His family curiosity has turned into something deeper; he has decided to expand his notes into book form, although he knows his subject is too narrow to find a publisher. He plans a trip to Dublin and Drimnamore; he hasn’t been to Drimnamore since he was there as a boy of fourteen on a brief fishing holiday. Derriquin, he knows, is a ruin, and most Irish records went up in flames when the Four Courts were burned, but he wants to get a better feeling for the countryside and the city in which his great-grandmother had spent most of her life.

Dublin Airport is five times the size of the intimate, provincial terminal James remembers. Dublin International, which he used to call Collinstown, has all the retail soullessness of Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle. The departure and arrival boards, which in the old days used to show London, Belfast and Shannon, with an occasional charter to Benidorm, now list
Bahrain, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Paris, Brussels, Prague, Moscow, Shanghai, all new destinations and the source of a transformed Ireland’s momentary riches.

Driving into the city centre, James sees new buildings everywhere – offices, hotels, industrial parks, gated executive estates. There are cranes on the skyline, but they all seem to be idle; many of the new buildings have ‘To Let’ signs offering ‘Favourable Terms’, and one, a twelve-storey office block, has ‘
BANK AUCTION
’ in enormous letters blocking out the windows.

‘And none of it’s paid for,’ says the cab driver. ‘The whole country is banjaxed. The politicians, the builders and the bankers have fucked everything up. Your man O’Malley went up the spout for three billion euros last week…’

James stays in one of the new hotels on St Stephen’s Green, a hotel like every other five-star boutique hotel in the world except for its eclectic collection of Irish pictures – Jack Yeats, Paul Henry, Roderic O’Conor, Mary Swanzy, Sarah Purser, Louis le Brocquy. In the main room there is a full-length portrait of Eva and Constance Gore-Booth.

The light of evening, Lissadell,

Great windows open to the south,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.

James murmurs Yeats’s lines to himself and asks the concierge about the pictures.

‘Ah well, they’re nice enough now, but it’s a tax racket – you can write the cost off if you allow public access, and sticking the pictures on the wall of a hotel counts too.’

The next morning James walks to find the hall where his great-grandfather had preached the Revival to the Brethren. The façade survives in all its late Victorian splendour, Corinthian columns, big windows, the roof crowned by a small colonnaded dome. Behind the façade is a charmless, efficient hotel. ‘Rebuilt after the fire’ is the receptionist’s explanation of the change; she is uninterested in James’s attempt to find out its history. The interior is unrecognizable. James looks at his old postcard, mourns the loss of the huge theatrical space with its curious wrought-iron pulpit, and wonders at a Dublin that in 1902 could fill three thousand seats for John Burke on ‘The Coming of the Kingdom’.

He drives out to Burke’s Fort to spend a couple of nights with his cousin Fred. Fred has kept the Archduke’s stud going after his father’s death; horse-breeding seems to be the one area of Irish economic life that has survived the crash.

‘Actually, it was the china dogs that saved us. Dad spent everything he had, and more, on the horses and the hounds,’ says Fred.

‘China dogs?’

‘That’s what we called them. You remember those two big animals that sat either side of the fireplace at the Fort; china dogs, twenty-five pounds, was the probate valuation. The Trustees told me I would have to sell Burke’s Fort, house, horses, land and all, to clear off the debts. Christie’s came over and didn’t find much to get excited about. The Ferneley of the Archduke was a copy. Until they saw the dogs. They weren’t dogs, they were Meissen lions, made for Augustus the Strong’s Japanese Palace in 1730-something; God knows how they got to Queen’s County. A woman from the Met in New York came over specially to see them, and we sold them for seven hundred thousand dollars. That did the trick all right.’

‘Good Lord.’

‘We’re still breeding, but profitably these days. We’ve half a dozen good brood mares of our own, a decent stallion, and we sell everything we breed at Goffs’ yearling sales. Stallion fees are exempt from tax, thanks to Charlie Haughey, though God knows for how long,’ says Fred.

‘Haughey was a complete crook, wasn’t he?’ asks James.

‘He was, of course, in a rich Fianna Fáil tradition. But he’s our crook. And you’ve had a few in England, by the way. We have a liking for gombeen men; we expect little from our politicians, and least of all honesty. So we’re rarely disappointed.’

‘We?’

‘Yes, we. We’re all Irish now – Irish passports, the children go to our local school where they learn Gaelic, and we’ve been Catholics ever since Dad converted. He was never a Unionist, even ended up a senator for a while. So we’ve survived, prospered even. The Anglo-Irish don’t exist any more, except in little pockets of resistance in the South of England. Anglo-English, that’s what they are now. When you toss a coin in Ireland you call heads or harps. We’ve called harps.’

James doesn’t argue. He is disturbed by Fred’s hard-headed realism and the unsentimental elimination of the tribe to which he belonged. Why does it matter, why am I unwilling to become an Englishman by default? James asks himself. He doesn’t have a satisfactory answer.

Fred and James ride around the estate the next morning. Cantering up a ride, they pass a burned-out building on the edge of a little copse.

‘That’s the Trafalgar Folly,’ says Fred. ‘Built by my great-great-grandfather. They say he kept a woman from the village up here. The IRA torched it just after the end of the Civil War. Your father was the stallion man here when it happened, before he went off to train in England.’

‘Odd timing, given that the wars were over.’

‘Indeed. It was a warning to us that they could burn down Burke’s Fort whenever they felt like it, treaty or no treaty, truce or no truce. I was told your father had got across the local IRA man in one way or another. Johnnie Mannion, he was called. My dad thought your father would be better off in England for a while, so away he went. I’m not sure we ever heard the full story. Did your father ever talk about it to you?’

‘He wasn’t the talkative sort.’

The following day James visits their old home at Killowen in County Kildare. His father’s training yard is now in the hands of a thrusting young Irish trainer. John Malone has switched to the Flat from National Hunt.

‘The Flat’s where the money is,’ he explains. ‘The Arabs aren’t interested in steeplechasing or hurdling. Neither are the men at Coolmore, and they know a thing or two about making money out of horses.’

He shows James around; it is almost unrecognizable from the yard that he remembers. The central yard with forty boxes, the doors gleaming with white paint and black ironwork, is supplemented by a couple of large American-style barns. The staff all wear zipped dark-green jackets with ‘Killowen Racing’ in white lettering on front and back.

‘The barns are new since your father’s day. Economical, easy to clean, one girl can keep an eye on thirty horses. And we’ve ten furlongs of our own all-weather gallops out the back now. We use them all the time, and the horse walker,’ pointing to the circular machine in which six thoroughbreds are walking steadily round and round. ‘I’m planning a pool so I can swim the horses, great for any kind of muscular problem.’

‘It’s grand to see the place looking like this,’ says James as he shakes John’s hand and says goodbye.

He sets out for Kerry on a long drive as strange as the road in from Dublin Airport. Every town he passes through has new shopping centres and new industrial estates. Most look deserted. Further south along the Ring of Kerry, old whitewashed thatched cottages lie abandoned, replaced by hacienda-style houses set closer to the road, all with well-tended rock gardens, wishing wells and wrought-iron gates. On the outskirts of Drimnamore there is a new estate of thirty houses – ten are finished and lived in, the rest are half built, the roads and the landscaping still to be completed. Reinforcing bars stick up out of crumbling concrete blocks and look like rusty, twisted sugar candy. Against a sagging fence there are neat stacks of banded breeze-blocks, lengths of yellow drainage pipes, a six-foot-high cable drum and an abandoned digger. A forlorn sign says, ‘New House Finished to Your Own Specification. Reduced Price. Bank Sale’.

He checks into the Great Southern Hotel, which he remembers as a run-down example of what his father used to call Irish Insane Asylum architecture. There is now a glass-and-steel reception area; signs advertise the Great Southern Spa experience and encourage guests to make reservations for the Kerryman Restaurant or the Ring of Kerry Bistro. The receptionist is disappointed that she can’t persuade him to have a massage and detox treatment.

The next morning he drives into the village. Drimnamore is cheerful in the sunlight. The houses and shops, whose universal colour used to be a dreary mixture of browns and blacks, have all been painted or rendered in reds and greens and blues. There is a large modern sculpture in the middle of the green. James sits down on a handsome new wooden bench; a little brass plaque says,
‘In Memory of the Volunteers who fell at Staigue Fort, April 1920’. He looks across to the bridge as a couple of buses come by and drive on round the Ring, the occupants, numbed by the four-hour journey, no longer curious enough to look out or take pictures.

James goes into the Protestant church, which is open and empty. As he reads the memorials to his ancestors, he experiences a strong feeling of returning home. He has never lived in Derriquin, never lived in Kerry, but in some strange sense he belongs here. The Burke family pew, with its high sides and private fireplace, has gone, as have all the brass pew plates, which are now glued to a wooden board by the entrance to the church.

In the churchyard he looks for and finds his grandmother’s grave; next to it, with an identical headstone, is the grave of William McKelvey. Both graves are badly overgrown, the headstones covered in green and grey lichen, partly obscuring the lettering. Halfway down the slope to the river is the Burke family tomb, a small stone building with a pitched roof and a classical pediment supported by a pair of plain Doric pillars. On the pediment is a cartouche with the Burke coat of arms, worn away by Kerry wind and rain. The tomb is surrounded by a low wrought-iron fence; a couple of sections are missing. James takes a closer look and sees that there is a large diagonal crack in one of the walls. The iron door is slightly ajar. He steps over the railings and pulls the door open; dust, twigs, a scattering of earth and a few small skeletons of mice and birds cover the floor.

On stone ledges that run around three sides of the room there are a dozen coffins, some lead-lined and intact, others crumbling, two totally disintegrated with dry bones and scraps of fabric thrusting through the crumbling wood. Several of the coffins have brass name-plates; his great-grandmother’s is clearly labelled, ‘Letitia Burke, 1821–1902’. The bones of a hand are resting on the rotten wood; James replaces them alongside what is left of Letitia.

He sits down on an unoccupied lower ledge; perhaps he is reserving his place. These are his forebears, his DNA, or some of it; James is overcome by contradictory feelings of belonging and loss. The sour air makes breathing difficult; he puts his face in his hands and his body is racked with dry, heavy sobs.

After ten minutes he pulls himself together, goes to the general store on the far side of the green and buys a broom, a dustpan and brush, a pair of garden shears, a bucket and a strong scrubbing brush. He trims the grass and cleans the two gravestones, then returns to the tomb to sweep the stone floor clear of years of dirt. He leaves the coffins alone; by lunchtime he has restored the tomb to a state of relative respectability. He is pleased with his work, feeling he has discharged an obligation to both the place and the people. Nobody comes to ask what he is doing. Returning to the general store for the second time, he finds the name of a local builder, goes to see him and together they negotiate a price to fix the crack in the tomb and repair its door.

Back at the hotel, he has dinner in the Kerryman Restaurant, which is comfortable and crowded. The food is excellent. James looks around at the prosperous, well-dressed, confident Irish men and women, and contrasts them with the clientele he remembers from almost forty years ago. Then the guests had been mainly English or Anglo-Irish, the food dreary, the public rooms down-at-heel. On Saturday night the men were in dinner jackets and the women in long dresses, dancing foxtrots and quicksteps after dinner to the music of a four-piece string band. This evening, none of the men wears a tie. James removes his own and puts it in his jacket pocket.

The next day he walks over to Derriquin via Oysterbed Pier. There are now no signs of oyster cultivation apart from a few crumbling concrete pens exposed by the falling tide. Off to one side is a low, half-ruined building; there is a barely legible sign over the big double doors, which are half open and sagging off their rusty hinges. ‘Derriquin Oyster Fishery’, James reads; the grass has grown around and inside the building, and its roof and walls look as if one more November gale would push them over. He sees an old oyster shell in the grass, bends down, picks it up and wipes it clean with his handkerchief. The mother-of-pearl gleams in the sun.