Another Heartbeat in the House (37 page)

‘There are some things I'd like to keep, Uncle Jack. Some old books and scrapbooks and journals I found in the attic. There's a first edition of
Vanity Fair
, signed by William Thackeray.'

‘Who's he?'

‘He wrote it.'

‘Take whatever you like, my dear.'

‘Thank you. You're sure there's nothing you want?'

Her uncle sighed down the line. ‘One reaches a stage in one's life when there is no room for sentimentality. If we all clung onto bits of the past, we'd be too encumbered by bloody stuff to move forward. Excuse my French.'

That's nothing, Edie wanted to say. You should hear Milo's.

‘Goodbye then, Uncle Jack.'

‘Goodbye, Edie.'

Edie put the receiver down and turned to see Milo cowering in the hedge, being roundly scolded by an indignant wren. From the aghast expression on her little dog's face she fancied that the wren's language was saltier than any he'd heard before.

As they headed home by the lakeshore road, Edie noticed for the first time that alongside the more recently built bungalows and farmsteads the countryside was mapped with crumbling drystone walls, overgrown potato drills and piles of tumbled rocks. Those boundaries, those drills, those abandoned dwellings – all had been part of Eliza's geography; the people who had lived here had been her neighbours. It seemed to Edie that an entire community had vanished, leaving their homesteads to subside into the ground: this was a palimpsest of past and present, a place where ghosts resided alongside the living. She wondered what it must be like to live in a country where the very fabric of the landscape was a perpetual reminder of wholesale famine; where an encounter with the relics of unspeakable calamity was quotidian.

Back at Lissaguirra she gave Milo a bath and a Bonio, made herself cheese on toast, and took the last quires of paper from the box file. There were still hundreds of pages to be read. At this rate, she'd be up half the night. She made sure there was enough oil in the lamp and turf in the basket, and made a start.

The following morning, St Leger and I breakfasted in the comfort of our apartment. It was the last day we were to spend together in Dublin: he was to return to his family on the other side of the Irish Sea, and I, to our daughter in Lissaguirra.

I had opened the window to escape the suffocating scent of lilies. Clad in a morning robe of embroidered Chinese silk, I was leaning on the wrought-iron balconet that looked out over Rutland Square, drinking my coffee while St Leger perused the
Morning Register
.

‘Why are those houses so dilapidated?' I asked him, pointing at the roofs opposite. ‘Look – there are weeds sprouting from the chimneys. And why are so many of the windows boarded up?'

‘The gentry have departed from the city.'

‘For London?'

‘Not all of them. Some have moved south of the river. You must have seen the fine houses as you travelled back last night from Templeogue?'

‘No. I was too engaged in conversation to notice.' On seeing St Leger's lips purse, I swiftly added, ‘William and I were discussing the merits of Aristotle's unities.'

In fact, William and I had spent the entire journey back to Dublin talking about the novel we were planning to write together. Even when the carriage dropped him at his hotel, he stood on the pavement and would not allow the carman to drive on until we had resolved our dispute as to what the name of our book should be. Since we had hit upon the idea of having two female protagonists, we had finally decided to call it ‘A Novel without a Hero', until a more engaging title might suggest itself.

I took a sip of coffee, and turned again to look out over the square, to the Rotunda that housed the elegant assembly rooms where we had dined two evenings ago, and the pleasure gardens where I had strolled wearing a new pelisse and matching fur-trimmed bonnet. The place had
seemed
elegant then. Now I saw a troop of shabby dandies lolling by the entrance, grinning and taunting a passing gaggle of girls. Arm-in-arm, the bareheaded colleens sashayed down Cavendish Row, insouciant in tattered brocade and down-at-heel boots. Apple women shrilled their wares, and hucksters, their carts piled with cheap crocks, tinware and assorted junk, trundled towards the quays to set up their stalls. An endless line of carriages waited for fares, the horses as ill-nourished looking as their drivers. And everywhere, I saw now from my vantage point above the streetscape, there were beggars. Toothless, ragged, filthy, sick, old and young, crippled and nimble, and – the ones I found most affecting of all – the gaunt women, many of them girls still, holding babies to their breasts.

I glanced over my shoulder at St Leger. ‘This really is a bedevilled country, isn't it?'

He shrugged. ‘Why do you think Sophia was so desperate to leave?'

‘It was Sophia who persuaded you to sell?'

‘It took little persuasion. While I may not honour all my debts, Eliza, I don't expect my son to honour them for me, and the way things stand, a year or two hence even my most productive farmland would be too expensive to maintain, in this obscure corner of Empire.' He drained his cup. ‘Shall I ring for more?'

‘No, thank you.'

I thought of the boy I had given him, who would inherit a mansion in Buckinghamshire, a town house in London, acres of pasture and arable land, as well as plate and paintings and antiquities of inestimable value. He would have no difficulty in honouring his father's debts. My son would be well provided for. My daughter, on the other hand, had nothing – not even status. There would be no debutante's ball for her, no suitors and no society wedding. She would be obliged to make her own way in the world, as I had. Except that I had made my way in the thriving capitals of Paris and London. How was Clara Venus to do it in Boggetybeyondbackwards?

I took an oblique look at my beau. He was scanning the advertisements page in the
Register
.

‘There are estates for sale all over the country,' he said. ‘Things are coming to a parlous pass.'

‘I wonder how much I would make for my house if I sold it?'

‘Who do you think would want to buy it? Nobody wants land in Ireland. That's why the prices are so risible. Besides, why would you want to sell it? You've only just had it built.'

‘An idle question, that is all.' I took another sip of my coffee, watching St Leger over the rim of my cup. ‘But I may want to sell when Clara Venus is of an age to attend school.'

‘I've been thinking about that. Why should she need to go to school?'

‘Don't you want our daughter to be educated, St Leger?'

‘Who better to educate her than you? She would learn more from you, my sweet, than from any rubbishy schoolteacher in the entire county of Cork.' He gave me a smile of beaming benignity, then turned the page of his newspaper. ‘In any case, the only way you could get a decent price for that house would be if you sold it as a fishing lodge, with rights. And you don't have fishing rights.'

‘I know that!' I said, more snippily than I intended.

‘You're happy there, Eliza, aren't you?' I could not see his expression behind the paper, which meant, fortunately, that he could not see mine. ‘You drove a hard bargain, but you got what you wanted in the end.'

‘Yes, I did. But when I consulted my crystal ball, I did not see a child living there.'

‘That's because you were going to deliver it to the foundling hospital. Remember?'

‘I remember,' I said, poking my tongue out at him.

St Leger's pragmatism sometimes vexed me beyond endurance. Reaching for the remains of my breakfast roll, I threw it at a passing seagull. It missed, and to my astonishment, before the bird could swoop to retrieve it from the pavement, an urchin below had fallen upon it and was stuffing it into his mouth.

‘What
did
you see in your crystal ball?' St Leger asked, as I fetched a basket of uneaten rolls from the table, and began to split them in two.

I could hardly reply ‘I saw an astute investment', so instead I said, ‘I saw Lissaguirra as my own rural retreat, where you might come with your hunting friends and we could spend our days enjoying outdoor pursuits and our evenings cosily at home or entertaining on a modest scale from time to time.'

‘That is a pretty picture.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘But it's hardly likely to happen now that you're spending less and less time there.'

‘It's a dilemma,' he agreed. ‘Cork is an interminably long way from London. And now I've no tenants to answer for, I've no real reason to visit, except during the hunting season. Happily, the hunting in Buckinghamshire is a good second best.'

Oh! I thought. How damnably clever Sophia had been! Get him to dump his mistress in the back of beyond, then sell up, and scarper with the heir!

‘Perhaps I should move to Dublin,' I suggested. ‘You often come here for business, don't you?'

‘I do. But you mustn't think of moving here, Eliza. This is no place for a gentlewoman on her own.'

Nor, I had discovered, was Lissaguirra.

‘But wasn't Dublin once the most prosperous city in Europe?' I persisted. ‘My mother's friends used to regale me with stories of their glory days, when they worked the theatres here.'

It was the first time I had ever made reference to my theatrical origins. St Leger jerked his eyes up from his paper, his expression like that of one of the performing dogs that had once competed with my mother for top billing.

‘Your mother was an actress?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where?'

‘In the
Théâtre des Variétés
in Paris.'

‘I know it well.'

He gave me that long, brazenly appreciative look that men always did when they learned of my theatre background, and I wanted to slap him. Instead I took up a knife and started scraping at a pat of butter.

‘Why are you so set against the notion of me coming to live here?' I asked.

‘There are a number of reasons. Since the Act of Union, forty years ago …'

St Leger started droning on and on about agrarian unrest and Catholic Emancipation and economic depression and I nodded along sagely, not listening to a word he said.

Why shouldn't I remove to Dublin? I thought. I'm sure if I sold Lissaguirra it would fetch enough to buy myself a little pied-à-terre in Templeogue next door to Mr Lever. I thought how cosily that gentleman was set up from penning his rollicking war novels (which William had told me were populated by such outlandishly named characters as Major Monsoon and Mickey Free). In Templeogue I could invent silly novelettish heroines and call them Penelope Pureheart or Seraphina Swoon. I could concoct preposterous romances in which Miss Pureheart is abducted by pirates and rescued by a dashing sea captain before marrying the curate, and submit them to a publishing house under a nom de plume and –

‘So effectively I'm telling you not to waste your money.' St Leger's voice broke into my reverie.

‘What? I beg your pardon, dearest heart, I was miles away.'

‘Don't waste any money buying a house here.'

‘London, then. I could get a little house in Fulham or somewhere.'

‘You can't come to London, Eliza. You know you can't.'

I gave him a challenging look. ‘Because poor Sophia is afraid of scandal?'

‘Yes.'

‘That is hardly my concern,' I rejoined.

‘It
is
your concern, Eliza. I am prepared to keep you as my mistress in Ireland, but I cannot do so in London.'

‘Why? Because you have a dozen mistresses there already, I suppose.'

‘
They
are not the mother of my son.' He spoke with uncharacteristic belligerence, and it took me aback.

I held his gaze for a second or two, then dropped my eyes and made a show of daubing more butter onto rolls.

‘La la la,' I sang, while under the silk of my Chinese robe my heart went pitter-pat, as it did any time I came near to overstepping the mark. How lucky I was! How enviable! For a man was unquestionably the best available source of income for most women, even if he was not a husband. And a good man, as St Leger was, was a prize indeed. ‘When Venus roams by eventide, la la, la la, la la la la …'

‘That's a pretty song,' remarked St Leger, shaking out his paper in that way men do when they deem it expedient to move on to other subjects.

‘Yes, isn't it? “'Tis Venus who at midnight passes, la, la la la, la la la …”' I sent him a charming smile as I reached for a dish of raspberry jam. ‘It was a song my mother used to sing. The stage was always ankle-deep in roses afterwards, which the gentlemen had thrown to her.'

‘Was she very beautiful?'

‘Yes.'

‘So now I know where Clara Venus got her looks,' he teased.

I made a little moue. ‘Not from me?' I said, in a piteous voice.

‘Of course from you, my beauty! She certainly didn't get them from me.'