The Red And The Green (2 page)

Andrew's mother had lately and precipitately decided, very much to Andrew's dismay, to sell her London flat and move to Ireland. The efficient cause of this decision was the Zeppelin raids on London, which Mrs Chase-White represented to her eager and credulous Dublin friends in vivid, even lurid terms. Her nerves, she claimed, could not stand it, with those Zepps always coming over. Andrew felt extreme irritation, not only at what he regarded as a shameful lack of stamina on the part of his parent, but also at what he suspected to be the formal cause of her decision, an atavistic urge to return to the soil of Ireland. Hilda Chase-White,
née
Drumm, was, like her husband, Anglo-Irish; but whereas Andrew's father had spent most of his childhood in Ireland, Hilda and her younger brother Barnabas had been brought up in London. Andrew was vaguely aware that his mother and his uncle had in some way not got on with their parents, but he had never troubled to diagnose what was wrong, nor indeed been in a position to, since his grandparents both died when he was a small child. His maternal grandfather had been a civil servant of small means, but well known in his circle as a gay social man and a party-giver. He was also by way of being a famous practical joker. It may have been that these antics offended Hilda's sense of dignity, or it may more simply have been that she compared the London menage unfavourably with the bigger, grander and altogether more ceremonious houses of her Irish relations. Andrew recalled from childhood the tone of slightly querulous envy with which she spoke of these establishments: a sentiment not shared by his father, who, although he retained a strong nervous interest in his family there, and especially in his half-sister Millie, seemed always thankful to have escaped from Ireland.

The purchase therefore, just completed, of a house in Ireland no doubt represented for Hilda the fruition of a very long-term intention; and, especially since her head was turned by the extreme cheapness of Irish properties, it was with difficulty that Andrew had persuaded her not to acquire one of several available castles, each one damper and mouldier than the last though undeniably inexpensive, and had coaxed her at last into buying a pretty and reasonably sized house in Dalkey. His uncle Barnabas, for some long time now settled in Ireland, had been of little assistance. But as Hilda often said, not much could now be expected of Barney. Barnabas, who had figured as notable in Andrew's childhood because he was a crack shot rather than because he was a promising mediaeval scholar, had latterly, it was generally agreed, gone to the dogs. Barnabas too had felt the urge, as Hilda herself put it, ‘to escape from the parents', though Andrew could not understand what in this case was felt as menacing. His uncle was the reverse of snobbish. But he too had evidently felt some imperative need to return to Ireland, had married into another branch of the family there, and, to Hilda's and indeed to Andrew's intense horror, had become a Roman Catholic. He was even, so Hilda would sometimes report in a whisper, said to be writing a history of the Irish saints, an activity which his sister found for some reason highly improper. It was in addition said of him that he had at one time wanted to become a priest, but Hilda would never publicly countenance this rumour. The fact that Uncle Barnabas had also apparently taken to drink was almost welcomed as a more normal manifestation of black sheepishness.

That some of the family were converts was something which Hilda felt as a continual affront to herself. It caused her real pain, and she spoke about it as little as possible, even to the point of keeping it dark. She had been deeply wounded by her brother's defection, for although her conception of family ties in general struck Andrew as rather worldly, she was, or had been, extremely fond of Uncle Barnabas. ‘The family' was a great subject with Hilda, and Andrew had become a little reluctantly interested in the matter himself, especially as he somehow found it necessary always to explain that Frances was a distant relation. The situation was complicated. ‘We Anglo-Irish families are so complex,' Hilda used often to exclaim with a kind of pride, as if complexity in families were a rare privilege. ‘We're practically incestuous,' his Aunt Millicent had once added. ‘What does that mean?' the child Andrew had asked, but no one had enlightened him. He sometimes felt now that ‘the family' had indeed something of the fascination of the snake that eats its own tail. He was both interested and repelled, and the sense that the family occupied or pervaded Ireland, managing to inhabit most of its corners, largely composed for him the sinister power of that island.

In fact, Andrew had in recent years seen happily little of his remoter relations who owned farms in Clare and Donegal. Frances and her father, Christopher Bellman, who had at one time lived in Galway, had now moved to Sandycove, and Andrew felt no urge, though his mother sometimes suggested it, to go on a familial tour. Dublin and its neighbourhood contained quite enough of the cousinry, and those indeed with whom Andrew had always had most to do. The exploration even of this branch of the family, which was needed in order to make clear his relationship with Frances, was in fact complicated enough. His paternal grandmother, Janet Selborne-Doyle, ‘a great beauty' as his mother always said when she was referred to, had married twice. Her first husband was John Richard Dumay, from whom she had had issue two children, Brian and Millicent. Of these, Brian, it was always said whether truly or not as a result of a nervous breakdown, had become a convert to Catholicism when still a student at Trinity. The ‘great beauty's' second marriage, after the death of her first husband, had been to Arnold Chase-White, and the one offspring of this union had been Henry Chase-White, Andrew's father. Henry married Hilda Drumm, and Brian Dumay had married one Kathleen Kinnard who was in fact a connection of Hilda's mother's family, and who had caused pain and scandal by forthwith adopting the religious faith of her husband. Millicent Dumay then married Kathleen's brother, Sir Arthur Kinnard, and the third sister, Heather Kinnard, married Christopher Bellman, Frances' father. Both Mrs Bellman and Sir Arthur Kinnard had died fairly young, and Andrew could not recall having met them. His Uncle Brian had produced two sons, Pat Dumay, who was a year older than Andrew, and Cathal Dumay, who must now, Andrew reflected, be about thirteen or fourteen. Uncle Brian had died when Andrew was about fifteen, and his Aunt Kathleen had caused some surprise and a good deal of adverse comment by subsequently marrying her co-religionist in the family, his Uncle Barnabas, who it appeared had been one of her early admirers. That marriage had been childless.

Andrew's mother had been impressed and continually preoccupied by the goings on of her Irish relations, particularly the Kinnard family, possessors of an enviable mansion and an even more enviable title, who, especially in the days of Arthur's father, had set a standard both of grandeur and of social freedom which must have made Hilda discontented with her restricted London life and with the ‘mad' yet cosy society of her parents. There was no doubt that she coveted not only the traditional ease of the Kinnard household but also its Irish remoteness from the pettier aspects of the ‘bourgeois' world. Hilda had never been quite sure that her father and mother were blessed with good taste.

Although Hilda had talked about these things to Andrew all his life, he had only very recently begun, in relation to her, to understand them. He had much earlier, and with a kind of nervous distress, apprehended his father's quite different and strangely deep anxieties about Ireland. Some family demon haunted Henry Chase-White. He was fond of his relations, and especially fond of Aunt Millicent. But the source of the trouble, Andrew soon came to conjecture, was his half-brother Brian. Brian Dumay was older than Henry by several years and was a very different kind of man from Andrew's father. Uncle Brian had occupied some post in the Bank of Ireland which never seemed to provide matter for discussion, but in so far as he entered into the life of his nephew he did so in the guise of the perfect all-round out-of-doors uncle. Andrew recalled the scenes, always the same, on hills or beaches, with Uncle Brian leading the way, leaping from rock to rock, followed by the shouting children, while Andrew's father picked his way cautiously behind. And Andrew must have been about ten when he realized, with a tender protective pang which seemed to make him on the instant much older, that his father was a little jealous in case Andrew should compare him unfavourably with Uncle Brian. It was an occasion when they had all been swimming, except for Andrew's father who had found the sea too cold and was sitting in the sandhills with a book. Andrew had run to him and been told almost roughly, ‘You don't want to be here with me. Go back to your uncle.' Since then Andrew had liked Uncle Brian less. But it was not until his uncle died that he realized how extremely attached his father really was to his half-brother who must have represented something robust, attractive and puzzling, which produced in him a characteristic tremor of awkwardness. Andrew met with the same awkwardness, the same shy disguised puzzled fondness in his father's attitude to himself; this barrier was never removed and Andrew felt a special pain when his father died to think that perhaps he had never known how much his son loved him.

Andrew had felt as a child an acute and uncomfortable interest in all his relations, but the magnetic centre of that field of forces had usually seemed to be his cousin Pat Dumay. It occurred to Andrew later that his own peculiar anxiety about Pat somewhat resembled his father's anxiety about Uncle Brian, only Andrew had never exactly felt any liking for his cousin. His interest in him was something more obscure and disturbing. He had spent a good deal of energy in earlier years in trying to impress Pat, and indeed it could scarcely be denied that the folly with the horses which had had such far-reaching results was an attempt to get even not so much with Frances as with Pat.

Pat, who was known in their childhood as ‘the iron man', and who effortlessly excelled in all their sports and games together, had never paid much attention to Andrew. Andrew, a slow-growing child, had often, with rage, been relegated to play with ‘the little boys', and he still felt that Pat casually took him to be younger than he was. There had never been any sort of confidence or friendship between them, although on a few occasions when they were older Andrew had made advances. Pat, who was not much given to talking, would then withdraw into a taciturn dignity, while at the same time seeming not to notice Andrew at all. He moved quietly, his eyes elsewhere, like someone avoiding a small obstacle in his path. In moments of revolt Andrew referred to his cousin as ‘pompous' and affected surprise that he was not more frequently ragged. Yet somehow Pat's formidable dignity seemed to impose itself on others less concerned than Andrew. Other children were usually a bit afraid of Pat, who was capable at times of a good deal of violence. Andrew was reluctant to admit that he had ever feared him. But he had, when younger, felt a sort of awe which had perhaps partaken of a childish horror at Pat's religion. With years of reason and tolerance the horror had diminished, but in the quality of his persisting interest in his cousin there was still a sort of shudder as at something primitive and dark.

The younger brother Cathal, though commonly said to be cleverer than Pat, was of course of less moment to Andrew. He had spent a good deal of time in the past avoiding Cathal, who, being so much younger, had usually figured in one way or another as an impediment. The relations between the two brothers seemed not of the happiest, and Andrew conjectured the existence of some ferocious jealousy. Pat had always, ever since Andrew could remember them together, enjoyed knocking his little brother about, sometimes with a brutality which was alarming to witness. Andrew most poignantly recalled a scene when he himself was about thirteen when he had intervened to save Cathal, then a small child, from a particularly vicious attack. Pat, who had retaliated by giving Andrew a black eye, was subsequently beaten, presumably for this misdemeanour, by Uncle Brian. This occurrence had somehow, for Andrew, defined and confirmed his unhappy sense of connection with his cousin; though he doubted very much whether the incident had had any significance for Pat.

Since he had become more or less grown up, and more especially since he had become a soldier, Andrew felt with some relief that his childhood obsessions about Ireland were beginning to fall away. The tradition of the annual holiday was discontinued, and the dark wet island seemed less of the menace that it used to be. He had not been over there for some while, nor seen any of his relations apart from Frances and Christopher, who were frequent visitors to England. During this period Pat Dumay had been studying law at the National University, and was now apparently working in a solicitor's office. Andrew, rather vaguely hearing news of him from time to time, was gratified to learn that he had not specially distinguished himself in his studies: and the notion that he was after all more talented than his cousin came as a salve to his, in any case diminishing, consciousness of that old rivalry. He was rather surprised that Pat had shown no sign of enlisting, a matter commented on adversely by Andrew's mother, who, vaguely conscious of him as a competitor with her own boy, rather disliked Pat. But this unexpected blemish in the heroic figure of his boyhood was in fact far from displeasing to Andrew, and although he publicly disowned his mother's scornful opinion he secretly shared it.

Andrew's satisfaction at being liberated from Ireland was a little checked by the excessive nervous disturbance which he now felt on visiting the place again, and especially on hearing that his mother proposed to settle there. He had reckoned on seeing very little of Ireland in the future. He had decided, though without announcing this to anyone, to remove Frances from it completely as soon as this could be arranged. The removal of Frances indeed represented for him a sort of final triumph over the past. He felt irritated, and in a curious way a little frightened, to find that the severance could not be quite so complete. He told himself rationally that he must really begin to behave about the whole thing in a more grown-up way. Yet when he thought of the visit which he was to pay the Dumay household on the following day, he was not only childishly pleased at the idea of showing off his uniform and his newly grown moustache: his heart beat faster, he did not know why.