Leon Uris (15 page)

“Really?”

“No, just remove our so-called masters’ work and do a bit of cleaning up.”

“Maybe just a clever way of getting his foot in the door, don’t you think, Caroline?”

“By the time he finishes that work, we’ll have a damned good idea if he’s the real thing or not.”

“Good thinking, dear. I’ll get on this directly.”

“The folder here makes a lot of references to the screen. I’ve left everything on the refectory table in the Long Hall. You’ll find the translations from St. Columba’s, his own drawings, historical references, the whole kit and caboodle.”

Roger had been tweaked. Well, the report was probably full of holes. He’d better find them. God knows how much she wanted the restoration, but another disappointment would go down hard.

Morning found Roger Hubble red-eyed from reading through the night. In a sense, he thought, completion of the screen would amount to a symbolic end to Caroline’s monstrous spending on the manor. The place now matched some of the greatest stately homes and castles
in England. Indeed, the great screen would be a suitable, if outlandish, gesture of their imperial existence.

“There you are, Roger,” Caroline said, leading a tray-bearing servant.

“Fascinating,” Roger said. “This part really intrigued me.” He lay flat several sheets of drawings of some tiny detail work on the screen and the same work on other projects in England. “Well, I suppose it’s all right for Tijou to steal from Tijou.”

“Particularly if he is the only one who could execute it.”

“And Larkin thinks he can copy them?”

“We won’t get to that for months, until after he removes the counterfeit sections.”

“This is also very interesting,” Roger said showing the drawings of the masterworks before Tijou’s time. They were of heavy-handed metal-pounders in comparison. It did show that Tijou lifted the entire craft.

“Shall we let him have a go at it?” she asked.

“Yes, but first a couple of precautions. I’d like to have a separate set of translations by our own people to make certain these Gaelic church records are authentic. Also, I’ll have Swan run a security check on him, you know, anarchist activities. One thing does trouble me. Must he have this Clanconcardy ore?” He nodded to a plate of scrapings.

“Hmmm, like butter… or silk…”

Caroline smiled inwardly. Or, she thought, a woman’s skin. She looked and saw no mangled mess but a fully restored screen soaring and swirling and interlocking in a grandeur unmatched. She saw a great velvet curtain the size of a mainsail on the largest ship afloat. The curtain was raised by a handful of servants on a pair of winches. It rose! And there was the great screen in all its splendor!

She and her father often wanted a number of things more than anything.

Tomas Larkin accepted the fates, one after the other.

He accepted that Dary was doing well in seminary and would actually become a fine priest, if there was any such thing.

He accepted that Brigid would either remain a spinster or marry some wizened specimen with some acreage. Her only love, Myles McCracken, had flown Ballyutogue. Myles worked for Conor in his forge and was taken with a factory girl, Maud Tully.

Tomas accepted that Mother Church always wins in the end. He had made a fierce piss-up at his father Kilty’s wake on learning that his da had taken absolution.

On further consideration, he slowly came around to giving God the benefit of the doubt. Father Lynch, a blister of a man, had grown theologically acceptable. Maybe he owed absolution to his wife? Maybe he owed it to his neighbors? If he left them believing he had seen the light, it would give them something to cling to after he was gone.

So Tomas took absolution, as fate dictated.

What Tomas Larkin would not accept was that his beloved Conor would not return. Mr. Lambe came to retirement age at his forge and could no longer start up a
new apprentice. The old man traveled to Derry to try to convince Conor to take the forge but returned empty-handed and broken-hearted.

Still, Tomas would not accept that fate. Only after a young blacksmith arrived from Scotland and bought the forge, did Tomas yield.

For month after month he woke up with a lump knowing now Conor was not coming back. It wasn’t until he finally accepted that fate, that the terrible wrong he had done Liam seeped into his mind and grew until it began to possess him. He wrote to Liam to come back home and take the Larkin farm.

Tomas had been feeling poorly of late. He knew without consulting the doctor what was wrong with him. It was the diabetes. He had seen too much of it. He now counted the days until he heard from Liam.

The return letter finally arrived, written for Liam by a priest. Liam was already along his way to becoming a squire some day and was not returning to Ireland. The moment Tomas received the news, he quit fighting his illness and collapsed in the field. Shortly thereafter, Tomas Larkin was on his deathbed.

The power of their love prevailed over stubborn pride as Conor came to his father’s bedside. Tomas had gone blind but in the darkness of the room was able to pretend he could still see.

At his end of the line, Tomas was able to reflect, with a measure of good humor, on his foolish mistakes. For the most part, he was relatively at peace because his three sons were faring well. Poor dear Brigid had made her own bed by not going to Derry with Myles.

As for the end of the Larkin name on the land, Tomas was most concerned for fear his neighbors would have to endure with the last of the chieftains gone. His lordship was testing new steam machines in his field that could do the work of twenty to fifty men. Those machines, Tomas reckoned, would probably end up doing what the British
and the famine together were unable to do, drive them off their land.

When Conor left his father’s side for a spell, Tomas drank a fatal bottle of poteen he had hidden beneath his pillow and soon fell into a coma.

For sixteen days and nights the family held a death watch while kneelers outside the cottage spoke prayers so thick with fright they were too heavy to ride the wind.

On the seventeenth day, the giant fell.

The death of his father was soon followed by the departure of Andrew Ingram. Conor’s prolonged grief was worsened by a strange new brittle and angry behavior from Kevin O’Garvey. The time he spent in Celtic Hall also fell into lethargy.

What lifted Conor now was pouring his energy into the great screen. Each time he thought deeply of it and each time he touched it, his sorrows seemed to fade for the moment.

Conor worked in something of a trance in the weeks following Tomas’s death, becoming more and more involved in the mystery of Jean Tijou. Conor’s dreams did not know day from night…

“Why have I been called to heaven?” he asked.

“Well, look at these gates, Conor lad. I’ve been meaning to repair them for five thousand years.”

“Why me, St. Peter? I’m only a croppy from up in the heather, and you know how the system works.”

“Ah sure,” St. Peter answered, “but thanks to the Big Fellow we’ve installed a different system up here. I am commissioning you to repair heaven’s gates on behalf of all the Irishmen who have been fucked over by the British.”

“I can’t stand in for all that many people.”

“You fix it up, Conor lad. I want these gates to be Irish….”

*  *  *

Dawn these days often as not found Conor Larkin treading along the Foyle Quay, thunderously deep in concentration, after having been awakened from his sleep by finding an answer to one of Tijou’s mysteries. Like a good actor, he was going deeper and deeper into the role he was playing. As he and Tijou had mumbling conversations an incredible truth revealed itself to him. The great screen was beyond mere artisanship. It was a pure work of art to stand tall alongside Greek statuary and Lady Caroline’s collection of Impressionists…and the great music. The screen was its own masterpiece.

Tijou, at a certain point, realized he was in some sort of state of divine creation, sailing on a sea no one had ever sailed before, and either knowingly or inadvertently set up traps all over the screen so it could never be duplicated.

An awesome answer came to Conor during a visit to Seamus O’Neill in Belfast during which they attended a concert that concluded with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. As Conor listened, he likened himself to the conductor, attempting to interpret what the composer meant. This work was astonishing, clear, so perfect that the listener needed no other teacher than his ears.

What he heard was probably the greatest piece of music ever composed. It was well played by an orchestra entirely caught up in its majesty and soaring somewhere together.

What Conor Larkin learned that night was that art, be it music, a magnificent piece of literature, or a great painting or sculpture, followed an absolute line of logic, and no music composed before Beethoven was as logical as his Fifth Symphony.

A great artist starts with one line on canvas.

A great writer starts with one line on paper.

A great musician starts with a single, often simple phrase as Beethoven’s four notes…and takes a flight of logic to its otherworldly conclusion.

But what of the Impressionists in Lady Caroline’s museum? The line of logic was still there, only defused by the light or exaggerated by the tone and expression.

There was a great deal of art and music and occasional literature where the line of logic was broken or never existed, and the words or sounds or images that reached canvas were not art, but an anti-art of distortion. Conor suspected that the quasi-artists in those cases were men of lesser talent with no capacity, skill, patience—or genius—to take on the mind-breaking, gut-wrenching task of following logic to a conclusion. A man of genius, van Gogh, remained logical as he painted, even in his insanity.

Those who could not put down the simple line ended up making cacophonous sounds or pitifully distorted logic in the creation of anti-art.

These smaller, self-proclaimed artists who lived in the shadows of the few mighty, sold their discord, confusion, and warped lines to the critical element who were also small people. They, in turn, created an illogical language to describe illogical art and music.

Ironsmiths, stone masons, and men who carved on cave walls were simple sorts with ponderous metal and siege weapon tools. The early artisanship in wrought iron was crude, but it all started with a logical line, because it was honest.

A Jean Tijou comes along and elevates the line and logic to a Fifth Symphony in iron, a majestic march to the mountaintop, then beyond, the epitome of human genius.

When Conor returned from Belfast he found those single and simple lines and followed them on the screen into their exquisite cascades, and the mystery became less and less threatening.

Twice a week Conor arrived at the manor by horseback before daylight. A scaffold had been erected and a forge set up in a fireplace. Shortly after the great house drifted
into its day, the Countess would make a morning appearance and they would talk through the upcoming work.

Their time together took on great anticipation as he unrolled drawings, tried different strengths of brushes, cleaning toxins, and explained what his incredible eye saw.

When Caroline was a little girl she wanted her daddy to take her into the shipyard. When Mommy died and it was herself and Daddy, she renewed that hope. It didn’t happen. She turned to music and art. Everything she did was quite decent. She played a decent Chopin, she wrote well, her paintings were pleasant but without the gift from God. Daddy couldn’t buy the gift, nor could she create it.

This, and the gender curse, propelled her to Paris eventually, to loll in the glow of creative geniuses, model for them, love one, collect scraps of their creativity. This was the company she adored. She might have stayed in Paris, but Freddie refused to take a second wife to try for a male heir. In the end, her love for her father brought her back to Belfast, the beginning of her exile to the colonies.

For a time, when she restored Hubble Manor, she was able to rub elbows and breathe the same air as the imported artisans, but they finished and left. Her lone satisfaction now was the pale infusion of drama and music she had brought to Londonderry.

The croppy lad was there, and it soon became apparent to her that she might have under her patronage a man of unusual talent. As he drew down Tustini and Schmidt from the great screen the project took her back to the most intense dreams of her life… to bear witness… to inspire… to catch the twinkling vibrations… to live in the afterglow of creativity.

Both Conor and Caroline realized they had to lock away, in their own secret rooms, their footloose imaginations. They proceeded properly, artisan and patron with lovely decorum, intimate on matters of the screen, free to laugh a lot together. When touching was necessary, in showing plans or climbing the scaffold, it was
carried off so that a house that ran on gossip had nothing to gossip about.

Decades of scum fell to Conor’s continuous experiments of compounds, acids, and gentle abrasives. Age and unskilled hands and fire and cannon shot had left twisted seaweedlike bunches of iron. Timbers above and the foundation below were in tentative condition. Magnificent filigrees of leaves and vegetation and animals and lily pads were mutilated or missing.

Little by little the counterfeits were removed. Off came the Valhalla-inspired, mercilessly weighted sections of Joaquim Schmidt. Down came the starbursts of a puzzled and overwhelmed Italian master.

The original sections were now scrutinized by magnifying glass, inch by inch, and began to grow back in time in a rebirth of beauty. Each session, as Conor gained confidence, the level of his artistry rose. Each time it rose, Caroline knew without words. The silent communication was a flow from master to screen to patroness.

A good thing was taking place and it could be felt throughout the manor house. Roger felt it and treated himself to long visits, highly impressed, as Conor explained the logic behind his moves.

Other than Caroline Hubble and his own assistants, Conor steered clear of the prattle of life in a stately home. In fair weather, he took his lunch outside beneath a century-old English oak. In the beginning he was granted solitude so he was able to stick his face into a book, but soon that wall was breached by Jeremy Hubble.

The teenage Lord Jeremy, Viscount Coleraine and eventual heir to the earldom, was totally taken by his first legitimate hero, the great Gaelic footballer. Jeremy, and later his mates from ascendancy families, buzzed around Conor and badgered him into kicking and passing the awkwardly shaped Irish football and organizing little get-up scrimmages.

Conor tried to shoo Jeremy off, to no avail. When the
weather was foul, which was more often than when it was fair, Jeremy reckoned that the Long Hall itself would serve as a fine indoor playing field.

When Conor returned to work, Jeremy continued to hang around making himself uselessly useful. At first he fetched, brought things up the scaffold. Later, he wheedled Conor into helping him with his school lessons.

One day, Conor’s apprentice boy was ill. The Viscount Coleraine leapt into the fold and pumped the bellows, reveling in the sooty job. Stripped to the waist, he proved he would not be defeated by the demand of the bellows and soon his fetching and pumping and other bits of work became helpful.

What is not to like about Jeremy, Conor thought. How nice that a kid could grow up in such expansiveness and carry on a rapport with the staff, speaking to them as he spoke to his mother. His grandfather had been and remained a ruffian and adored Jeremy. He’s almost like a natural, normal Irish boy, Conor thought.

Conor told himself not to let a deep friendship take root. Their parting was inevitable and there could be little contact once he left. He did not want the boy to be broken-hearted.

After five months, Conor had completed what he set out to do. The mood of the place changed noticeably as he wound down to pack up. A night before his departure Caroline came to him, whiskey in hand, poured two stiff ones, and asked him to be seated at their “office,” the refectory table.

“I want you to stay and do a complete restoration,” she said right off. “If you can’t do it, it can’t be done. I am expressing Lord Hubble’s wishes as well, and certainly Jeremy agrees.”

“I feel quite good about what we’ve done here, but in truth it has only been a repair job.”

“Your modesty is only to be matched by the dazzling arguments you intend to make. How do we get twenty tons of Clanconcardy ore, you’ve got a forge to run in
Londonder—er, Derry. You’ll have to destroy twenty molds to find the right one, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It’s your fate, Mr. Larkin,” she said with a brogue. “Now, here is my problem. We are heading to the end of the century. I intend to have a series of celebrations unlike anything this part of Ireland has ever seen—”