Chapter Thirty-Seven
Maureen
It was an hour almost before the girls, and Elizabeth, reappeared in the drawing room.
The tea things had been cleared and Chips had made the first round of cocktails.
Smoke drifted from cigarettes, and in the background, the gramophone played something melancholy.
Maureen wondered was Chips afraid that anything jazzier would offend the ambassador.
The room was quiet, those in it had drifted into small knots together and spoke quietly – or stayed silent.
She had tried to go and sit beside Duff, but he had got up and moved away, to a chair beside the fire that stood alone so there was no way she could join him without having to stand awkwardly, at the mercy of whether he spoke to her or not.
She couldn’t bear that. Not in front of everyone.
Did she regret how cutting she had been during the tennis tournament?
A little, yes. The humiliation of his rejection that morning had stung, so that she had wanted him to feel as hurt as she had.
She knew he was sensitive about his drinking, his weight, the high colour that had come to dominate his face so that he looked, now, far older than she did.
She had used these things precisely because she knew they wounded.
But as soon as she saw that she had succeeded, she had felt his hurt as though it were her own, and been sorry.
But how to go back? She shuffled the cards and dealt another hand of Patience.
None of her hands were coming out, which was a surprise, because usually Maureen found it no more difficult to make the cards do what she wanted than she did to make people do what she wanted.
She sipped the drink Chips had made for her. Too strong, like all Chips’ drinks.
She looked over at Duff again. Anyone could see the anger in his face – it was right there, in the lowered brow and the set of his jaw – but she saw, buried beneath that, the upset too, the humiliation.
She watched Rose cross to him and ask him something, the soothing way she listened to the answer, flattery in every receptive line of her body.
Maureen thought how much more she felt the sorrows of her husband than those of her children.
When the crying of her babies had made her feel on edge and uncomfortable, she had simply called for Nanny to take the crying child away.
No wonder she had seen so little of Caroline, she thought now.
Mostly, she had heard her, wailing night after night in the nursery at Clandeboye.
Until she had requested that the nursery be moved to a floor above so that they might be spared her plaintive cries.
But Duff’s moods were her moods. When he was happy, it infected Maureen with gaiety; when he was tired or gloomy, she too was cast down.
And when he was unhappy – even though it were she who had made him so – she could not shake that misery from herself.
He looked up and she tried to catch his eye, but he ignored her and turned back to Rose.
She looked down at the cards on the table in front of her.
They were knotted and snarled. Again she had failed to bring it about.
She walked over to where Duff sat, conscious that she was watched – by Honor, sympathetically, and by Rose, beside him, with an expression that was difficult to read.
‘Darling,’ she leaned down by his ear, ‘are you sure it is not too hot? I can have Chips ring for someone to move the chair further from the fire. After all, it may be dark but it is still summer.’
‘I can do that myself,’ he snapped, keeping his voice low. ‘Do you think I am so infirm that I cannot move a chair? Or is it just that I am too crocked, too much of a sot, to play a decent game of tennis?’ His voice was gravel.
She recoiled as though he had slapped her.
Standing straight, she met Rose’s gaze by chance.
To her surprise, there was a look of sympathy in the older woman’s eyes.
For a moment, standing there beside her angry husband, Maureen didn’t know what to do.
She felt marooned, unsure whether to step one way or the other – where to go?
She didn’t even have a cigarette in her hand, she thought.
Or anything to cover her confusion. Rose’s look of sympathy had unnerved her. She who hated to be pitied.
‘Here you all are still.’ It was Brigid, returned with Kick, and Elizabeth who made straight for the drinks. ‘I say,’ Brigid turned to Chips, ‘is there something being done in those empty rooms at the end of our hallway?’
‘What kind of something?’
‘A workman of some kind? Servants? I heard a noise, almost like someone crying, but when I went to look, I couldn’t see anyone. The room was mighty cold, however. Far colder than my room which is only next door but one. Perhaps a window has been left open?’
‘Not that an open window would make much difference on a day like today,’ Elizabeth said, looking around at them all.
‘It may be wet and dark, but hardly cold. That fire is really just for show.’ She looked disapprovingly at the grate, then raised her glass to catch the light of the flames against the cut crystal.
‘Since when have you been such an authority on weather?’ Chips said irritably.
‘Not weather,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I couldn’t give a tinker’s curse for weather’ – Maureen saw Rose draw her thin eyebrows together in disapproval – ‘but I am an authority on strange goings-on, even you will admit.’ She giggled.
‘And that noise – I heard it too – was strange. Perhaps a housemaid has a headache, or has received bad news, and is crying alone in an empty room?’
‘Poor thing,’ Honor said vaguely.
‘That is certainly not happening,’ Chips interrupted. ‘The household is entirely accounted for. I would know if it were not.’
‘Well then, a phantom or poltergeist,’ said Brigid enthusiastically.
‘Surely no one actually believes in such things?’ the ambassador asked.
‘Duff’s mother does.’ Maureen joined the conversation. ‘She is a firm believer in the spirit world. She sees fairies everywhere. Hears them. Does what they tell her to.’
‘And what do they tell her to do?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘Is it offerings of sweetmeats and little drops of wine in acorn cups?’ She laughed.
‘At Sheridan’s christening just a month ago, the fairies told Lady Brenda he was a changeling, and she tried to dash his brains out.’
‘Goodness!’ That was Rose, but the shock was in everyone’s face.
‘Maureen!’ Honor looked alarmed.
Maureen wondered had she been wrong to begin the story.
Too late now. She tossed her head. ‘You know it’s true.
You are the godmother; you were there, at the christening,’ she insisted.
She recalled how Brenda, the Dowager Lady Dufferin, had picked baby Sheridan up and held him close to her thin chest, had seen the moment when her face changed – the way her eyes grew wide in fright, the set of her thin lips, the way she straightened her arms sharply, so that the baby was jerked forward and began to cry, the strange angle she held him at, and how instantly Duff had moved to her side and grabbed the child from her.
Lady Brenda had clawed the empty air where the baby had been, saying, ‘He’s not your babe, let me have him,’ then begun to cry when Duff, passing baby Sheridan to Maureen, had led her out of the chapel at Clandeboye.
‘I did not imagine anyone would speak of it,’ Honor said.
Maureen looked at Duff then. It was true that none of them had spoken of it afterwards, and here she was, telling the story as though it were just another piece of tittle-tattle. Duff’s face was thunderous.
‘I am only trying to tell the ambassador that people do believe in such things. Maybe not in America, where everything is new and shiny’ – she made it sound like an insult – ‘but here, and especially in Ireland. The beliefs are old and strange and go very deep indeed.’
‘They do say this house is haunted,’ Honor said thoughtfully then.
‘They say that about anywhere older than last week,’ Chips said indignantly.
‘Oh, what fun!’ That was Elizabeth. ‘Do tell – a woman, jilted on her wedding day, waiting through all eternity for her faithless lover? A man murdered by a rival, compelled to return again and again to the bloody scene?’
‘Nothing like that,’ Honor said, looking around at them all.
Even the ambassador and Doris had drawn near, Maureen saw, so that they all sat or stood close.
‘Rather sad, really. This was a girls’ school, a boarding school run by nuns, after it was the home of the Wrights who built it.
But only for about five years. It closed because some of the girls died, not so much mysteriously as just horribly.
Someone drowned in the river. Then there was a fire, only a small one, but a couple of girls got trapped in a dormitory. ’
There was a silence then. Those who had drawn closer – Doris and the ambassador – stepped back again, but almost without knowing they did it.
‘How horrid,’ Doris said.
‘After that, I imagine not even Catholic parents wanted to leave their daughters there any longer,’ Duff said.
Maureen felt rather than saw Rose flinch, as though someone had leaned over and pinched her.
‘I imagine you’ll find a few walled-in nuns too, if you poke around long enough.
There are always walled-in nuns. Shut away for disobedience, or impiety, or lasciviousness.
Isn’t that what they call it?’ He grinned around at them all, and Maureen felt Rose turn stiff and hard like stone.
Her jawline tightened so it looked like it might shatter, but she said nothing.
‘What a grisly tale,’ Elizabeth said. Even she sounded subdued. She flashed a quick look at Brigid, who, Maureen saw, seemed equally struck.
‘Yes. And the house was in a frightful state when we bought it,’ Chips said. ‘Actual blackboards in some of the reception rooms.’
‘How dreadful for you,’ Maureen said tartly.
‘Honestly, you have no idea the mischief the nuns made,’ he continued. ‘The work Wellesley had to restore it. Every nook and cranny had been boxed off into tiny, terrible rooms. Or decked out with altars and those ghastly statues they love so much.’
‘That is not Catholicism, that is ignorance,’ Rose said. Maureen could hear the creak in her voice, the effort required to sound mild. ‘After all, is there any finer artwork than in the Vatican?’
‘She’s right, you know.’ That was Doris, placating. ‘I have seen it.’
‘Don’t talk to Duff about ignorance,’ Maureen said with a laugh. ‘Darling,’ she reached a hand out, ‘do tell them about McMahon’s wake?’
Duff rolled his eyes. ‘One of our tenants at Clandeboye,’ he said.
‘A Catholic tenant, but a decent chap. Died about a year ago. I was home at the time so I called to the family. He died suddenly and left behind a widow and five small children. I thought I’d stay just a moment but I was shown into the parlour, where the coffin was.
An open coffin. There he was, in a suit they couldn’t afford to bury, and the children, all except the baby, had their hands in the coffin with him, stroking his face and touching his hands, wailing and saying his name again and again.
It was barbaric. The baby played around on the floor, and these children pawed at a dead man’s face, tears falling from them to him, as though they thought he was alive and could hear them, while their mother sat there and let them do it.
There was no decency,’ he said, shuddering. ‘No decency at all. It was obscene.’
‘What did you do?’ Chips asked, curious as always.
‘I gave them money and I left,’ he said. ‘Left as quickly as I could, to get away from that grotesque sight. The whole thing is grotesque – the way they are forever looking towards a paradise after this life, and neglecting to protect those in their charge in this one.’
‘They?’ Rose asked.
‘Yes. Positively relishing misery and privation, and gloating over all the virtue that will accrue to them in the next world.’ He looked around in a way that told Maureen he thought himself among friends, friends with the same ideas as he had.
‘Ah. Not they, then,’ Rose said tightly. ‘In this case, we.’
There was a terrible pause then, and Maureen saw Duff flush red – whether with rage or embarrassment or both, she couldn’t tell.
Only that he was furious. With her. With himself.
For all that his gruff nature led him to be blunt – too blunt at times – he was almost always clever and tactful too.
He did not blurt things out if those things would harm a plan of his or his companions.
And now here he was, led on by her, insulting the very people he wished to charm.
People he needed to charm. Rose walked away.
‘Duff, darling, much as I love you, when you say things like that, I’m afraid you do rather remind me of some very dreadful people I know in Berlin,’ Doris said lightly.
‘What dreadful people?’ Almost, Maureen thought, he was glad that someone had broken the silence, even if it was to confront him.
‘Chips knows the ones I mean, don’t you, Chips?’ He ignored her. ‘The sort who have all kinds of ugly words and names for Jews. Who think them capable of dark plots and cunning subterfuge and that everything they do is in service of some secret end.’ There was nothing light about her voice now.
‘I don’t see—’ Duff began.
‘You will if you think about it,’ Doris insisted, almost kindly. ‘For you are not at all stupid. Everything starts somewhere. Bad deeds begin with vicious thoughts and foolish words.’
‘But …’ Duff was still wrestling with the implications when the ambassador interrupted.
‘It is not at all the same thing.’ He looked appalled.
‘It is exactly the same thing,’ Doris said, giving him a level look.
As though released from a binding spell, Chips swept in then, quickly, with something soothing: ‘Honor, didn’t you say that you didn’t think much of These Foolish Things, at the Palladium?’
‘Indeed,’ Honor said quickly. ‘For all that the reviews were good, I didn’t care for it at all …’
‘How disappointing,’ Maureen said. ‘We also heard good things.’ Conversation was eagerly joined as everyone threw themselves into discussing shows they’d seen – which had been good, which poor.
Even Elizabeth ventured an opinion that was neither confrontational nor inflammatory.
The girls, Brigid and Kick, looked upset; both their faces were stiff, even as they tried to join in, keep the conversation moving, all to try and cover the bare spot where Duff’s remark and Doris’ response still lingered.
We are like cats, carefully kicking dirt over a mess, Maureen thought. Only it is not fastidiousness that makes us, but fear. ‘If only this infernal rain would stop,’ she said.
But it was worth it, she told herself, watching Rose sit close beside her husband.