The Rings of Saturn (19 page)

On the evening before my departure I was standing out on the terrace with Edmund, leaning on the stone balustrade. It was so
quiet that I thought I could hear the cries of the bats that flitted zigzag through the airspace. The park was sinking into darkness when Edmund, after a protracted silence, suddenly said: I have set up the projector in the library. Mother was wondering whether you might want to see what things used to be like here. Inside, Mrs Ashbury was already waiting for the show to begin. I sat down beside her under the paper-bag heavens, the light went out, the projector began to whirr, and on the bare wall above the mantel-piece the mute images of the past appeared, at times quite still and then again following jerkily one upon another, headlong, and rendered unclear by the projection scratches. From a window on the upper floor one looked across the surrounding land, the clumps of trees, fields and meadows, and vice versa, approaching the fore-court from the park, one saw the front of the house, first seeming toy-sized from a distance, then towering ever higher till at length it almost toppled out of the frame. Nowhere was there a sign of neglect. The drive was sanded, the hedges were clipped, the beds in the kitchen garden trim, and the now tumbledown outhouses still well maintained. Later one saw the Ashburys at tea, sitting in a kind of marquee one bright summer's day. It was Edmund's christening, said Mrs Ashbury. Clarissa and Christina were playing badminton. Catherine held a black Scots terrier in her arms. In the background, an old butler was making for the entrance with a laden tray. A maidservant with a cap on her head appeared in the doorway, holding up a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. Edmund put in another reel. Much of what followed had to do with work in the garden and on the estate. I remember a slight lad pushing a huge old-fashioned wheelbarrow; a mower pulled by a tiny pony and
steered by a dwarfish driver, mowing straight lines up and down the lawn; a view of a dark hothouse where cucumbers were growing; and a series of over-exposed pictures of a field that looked almost snow-white, where dozens of farm labourers were busy cutting the wheat and binding the sheaves. When the last reel was through there was silence for a long time in the library, which was now lit only dimly by the light from the hall. Not until Edmund had stowed the projector in its case and left the room did Mrs Ashbury begin to speak. She told me that she had married in 1946, immediately after her husband came out of the army, and that a few months later, following the sudden death of her father-in-law, they had come to Ireland, quite contrary to the expectations both of them had of their future life, to take possession of the property he had inherited, which was then as good as unsaleable. At that time, said Mrs Ashbury, she had had not the slightest notion of Ireland's Troubles, and to this day they remained alien to her. I remember waking the first night in this house, feeling I was completely out of this world. The moon was shining in at the window, and the light lay so strangely on the layer of wax left on the floor by more than a century of dripping candles that I felt I was adrift on a sea of quicksilver. My husband, said Mrs Ashbury, never said a word about the Troubles, on principle, although he must have witnessed terrible things during the civil war, or perhaps because of that. Only little by little, from the curt answers he gave to my questions on the matter, did I piece together something of his family history, and the history of the land-owning class that became hopelessly impoverished in the decades following the civil war. But the picture I put together was never more than a rough sketch. Apart from my
extremely reticent husband, said Mrs Ashbury, my only other source of information was the legends about the Troubles, part tragic and part ludicrous, that had formed during the long years of decline in the heads of our servants, whom we had inherited together with the rest of the inventory and who were themselves already part of history, as it were. Years after we moved in, for instance, I learnt a little from our butler, Quincey, about that dreadful midsummer night in 1920 when the Randolphs' house six miles away was set on fire while the Randolphs themselves were dining with my future parents-in-law. According to Quincey, the rebel Republicans first assembled the servants in the hall and told them without further ado that they had one hour to pack their personal belongings and make some tea for themselves and the freedom fighters, and then a great fire of retribution would be raised. First, said Mrs Ashbury, the children were woken, and the dogs and cats, which were quite beside themselves with premonitions of disaster, were rounded up. Later, according to Quincey, who was Colonel Randolph's valet at the time, all the inhabitants of the house stood out on the lawn amongst items of luggage and furniture and all the nonsensical things one grabs at in a state of panic and fear. At the last moment, in Quincey's telling, he had had to run up to the second floor one more time to rescue the cockatiel that belonged to old Mrs Randolph, who, as it turned out on the following day, was deprived in the catastrophe of her up until then perfectly lucid mind. Powerless, they were all forced to stand by as the Republicans dragged a big drum of petrol from the garage across the courtyard and then, with a loud Heave ho!, rolled it up the steps and into the hall, where they spilled out the
contents. Within minutes of the first torch being hurled in, the flames were shooting from the windows and the roof, and before long it was as if one was looking into an immense furnace full of red-hot fire and flying sparks. I do not think, said Mrs Ashbury, that one can even begin to imagine the thoughts of the victims when they witness a sight like that. At all event, the Randolphs, who had always lived fearing the worst and yet did not believe that it could ever happen, were alerted by a gardener who had escaped on a bicycle, and, accompanied by my parents-in-law, drove over to the blaze, which was visible from a long way off. When they arrived at the scene of destruction, those who had started the fire had long disappeared, and all they could do was hug their children and join those huddled together there speechless and paralysed with horror like shipwrecked survivors on a raft. Not till daybreak did the fire abate and the black contours of the burnt-out shell stand out against the sky. The ruin, said Mrs Ashbury, was subsequently demolished. That was before my time, and I never saw it. They say two or three hundred country houses were burnt down during the civil war, regardless of whether they were relatively modest properties or stately homes such as

Summerhill, where the Austrian Empress Elisabeth had once been so happy. To the best of my knowledge, said Mrs Ashbury, people were never harmed by the rebels. Evidently burning the houses down was the most effective way of driving out those families who were identified, rightly or wrongly, with the detested rule of the English. In the years after the end of the civil war, even those who had survived unscathed left the country if they possibly could. The only ones who stayed on were those who had no livelihood except what they derived from their estates. Every attempt to sell the houses and land was doomed to failure from the very start, because in the first place there were no buyers far and wide, and in the second, even if a purchaser had appeared, one could hardly have lived in Bournemouth or Kensington for more than a month on the proceeds. At the same time, nobody in Ireland had any idea how they could possibly go on. Farming was in the doldrums, labourers were demanding wages nobody could afford to pay, fewer crop were being planted, and incomes were steadily diminishing. The situation grew more hopeless with every year, and the signs of increasing poverty, apparent everywhere, grew more and more ominous. Keeping up the house even in the most rudimentary way had long been impossible. The paintwork was flaking off the window encasements and the doors; the curtains became threadbare; the wallpaper peeled off the walls; the upholstery was worn out; it was raining in everywhere, and people put out tin tubs, bowls and pots to catch the water. Soon they were obliged to abandon the rooms on the upper storeys, or even whole wings, and retreat to more or less usable quarters on the ground floor. The window panes in the locked-up rooms misted over with
cobwebs, dry rot advanced, vermin bore the spores of mould to every nook and cranny, and monstrous brownish-purple and black fungal growths appeared on the walls and ceilings, often the size of an ox-head. The floorboards began to give, the beams of the ceilings sagged, and the panelling and staircases, long since rotten within, crumbled to sulphurous yellow dust, at times overnight. Every so often, usually after a long period of rain or extended droughts or indeed after any change in the weather, a sudden, disastrous collapse would occur in the midst of the encroaching decay that went almost unnoticed, and had assumed the character of normality. Just as people supposed they could hold a particular line, some dramatic and unanticipated deterioration would compel them to evacuate further areas, till they really had no way out and found themselves forced to the last post, prisoners in their own homes. They say that a great-uncle of my husband's in County Clare, who used to run his house in the grand style, ended up living in the kitchen, said Mrs Ashbury. For years all he supposedly ate for dinner was a simple dish of poatoes prepared by his butler, who now had to double as his cook, though he did still wear a black dinner jacket and open a bottle of Bordeaux, the cellar not being quite empty yet. Great-uncle and the butler, who were both called William, so Quincey told me, and died on the same day, both well past the age of eighty, had their beds in the kitchen, said Mrs Ashbury, and goodness knows how often I have wondered whether it was a sense of duty that kept the butler going till his master no longer needed him, or whether great-uncle gave up the ghost when his exhausted servant passed away, knowing that without his presence he wouldn't survive a
single day. Probably it was the servants, who often worked for decades for scant wages and were no more able to find a place elsewhere at so advanced an age than their masters were, who kept things more or less ticking over. When they lay down to die, the end of those they had looked after was often imminent as well. In our own case it was no different, except that we shared in the general decline rather late in the day. I soon realized that if the Ashburys had been able to keep their property until after the War, it was purely because they kept putting in money from a substantial legacy left to them in the early Thirties, which had shrunk to a tiny amount by the time my husband died. Even so, I was always convinced that things would improve one day. I simply refused to believe that the society we were part of had long since collapsed. Shortly after we arrived in Ireland, Gormanston Castle was sold at auction. Straffan was sold in 1949, Cartin in 1950, French Park in 1953, Killeen Rockingham in 1957, Powerscourt in 1961, not to mention the smaller estates. The extent of our family fiasco only became clear to me when I had to fend for myself and try to support us all somehow. Since I had no money to pay the labourers' wages, I soon had no choice but to give up farming. We sold off the land bit by bit, which kept the worst at bay for a few years, and as long as we had one or two servants in the house it was still possible to keep up appearances, to the outside world and in our own eyes. When Quincey died, I no longer knew what to do. First I sold the silver and china at auction, and then little by little the pictures, the books and the furniture. But nobody ever showed an interest in taking on the house, which was getting more and more run down, and so we have remained tied to it,
like damned souls to their place. Whatever we have tried, from the girls' sewing to the nursery garden Edmund once started to our notion of having paying guests, has without fail gone wrong. You, said Mrs Ashbury, are the first guest who's ever found his way here in the almost ten years since we put the advertisement in the Clarahill grocer's window. Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder. When Mrs Ashbury had finished her story, I felt that its significance for me lay in an unspoken invitation to stay there with them and share in a life that was becoming more innocent with every day that passed. The fact that I did not do so was a . . . failure that still sometimes seems like a shadow crossing my soul. The next morning, when I came to say goodbye, I had to look for Catherine for a long while. At last I found her in the kitchen garden, which was overgrown with deadly nightshade, valerian, angelica and shot rhubarb. In the red summer frock she was wearing on the day of my arrival, she was leaning against the trunk of the mulberry tree that had once marked the centre of the neatly laid-out herb and vegetable beds within the high brick wall. I made my way through the wilderness to the island of shade from which Catherine was gazing at me. I have come to say goodbye, I said, stepping into the bower formed by the spreading branches. She was holding a broad-brimmed hat like a pilgrim's, the same red as her dress, and now that I was standing beside her she seemed very far away. She looked right through
me, her eyes vacant. I have left my address and telephone number, so that if you ever want . . . I broke the sentence off, not knowing how it might continue. In any case, I noticed that Catherine was not listening. At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms, But then we never did. Oh, for the countless things one fails to do! – Years after that last exchange with Catherine Ashbury, I saw her again, or thought I did, in Berlin in March 1993. I had taken the underground to Schlesisches Tor, and after strolling around that dreary part of the city for a time I came upon a small group of people waiting to be admitted to a dilapidated building that might once have been a garage for hackney cabs or something of the kind. According to a billboard, an unfinished play I had never heard of, by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, was to be performed on a stage behind this quite untheatrical façade. In the gloomy space within, the seating proved to be tiny wooden stools, which immediately put one in a childlike mood of craving marvels. Before I could account to myself for my thoughts, there she stood on the stage, incredibly wearing the same red dress, with the same light-coloured hair and holding in her hand the same pilgrim's hat, she or her very image, Catherine of Siena, in an empty room, and then far from her father's house, wearied by the heat of the day and the thorns and stones. In the background, I recall, was a pale view of mountains, perhaps in the Trentino, watery green as if they had just risen from ice-bound polar seas. And Catherine, as the sunlight faded, sank down below a tree, took off her shoes and laid her hat aside. I think I shall sleep here, she said, or rest a little.
Be still, my heart. The tranquil evening will draw its mantle over our ailing senses . . .