Another Heartbeat in the House (53 page)

From my dressing-room window, I watched as he harnessed his horse. Young Biddy was standing by with several packets of oiled paper, one of which doubtless contained half the Pavini cake that she had baked last night especially for him. I could not let him go without some memento!

As I turned away from the window, my eyes fell upon the pelt that St Leger had given me, taken from the wolf that he had claimed to have dispatched himself even though the animals were long extinct. I dragged it off the ottoman at the foot of the bed, and hurried downstairs and out into the courtyard.

George had mounted his horse. ‘Here!' I said, thrusting it at him. ‘Here is a present for you!'

Dust motes went spinning into the air as he took it and looked at it uncertainly.

‘Is it a wolfskin?' he said.

‘Yes. It's to take home, and wrap your Baby Buntings in.'

‘Thank you very much,' he said in the diplomatic tones of a man humouring a
zanni
.

‘Wrap them carefully.'

‘I will.'

He rolled the pelt up, and stuffed it into his saddlebag. He would never know it, but it was probably the most apropos hand-me-down he had ever been given.

That night, I wrote my will. I left all dividends from my investments to Young Biddy. If she should predecease me, they will go to Martha.

As for my personal things – my papers, notebooks, my unpublished novels – I imagine they will end up where they deserve to: on a bonfire of the vanities. How strange to think that once I was arrogant enough to believe that I could make a living as a lady novelist; how, when I failed, it was so convenient to blame the baby carriage in the hall.

‘Great geniuses now in petticoats … shall write novels for the beloved reader's children,' William wrote in
Vanity Fair
. 'Twas a fond fancy; still, it gives me comfort to conjecture that one hundred years from now geniuses in petticoats will outnumber those in breeches.

But just because
my
play is played out, don't think that by putting the cap on my pen I am shutting the lid on the cardboard theatre. I will end this chronicle with a flourish – by telling you that I left the house and its happy hunting grounds to George, Duke of Roesworth and Marquess of Cholyngham. Bravo!

I don't know what will become of Lissaguirra. But I would like to think that as long as these walls stand, there will be no trophy hunters living here. As I sit looking out over the lake, I think of the houses I've heard tell of over the course of my life that have been crammed
cap à pie
with accumulated treasures: old masters, statuary, gold plate, antiquities. Great houses in great cities, all intended as display cases for the accumulated wealth of their owners. I never could understand how anybody could be happy living in such places. I never could understand what it all meant. Because as long as Clara Venus was alive she was all the treasure I could ever hope for.

The swans have re-emerged from the rushes. Perhaps, in years to come, somebody will sit upon this window seat and watch another pair glide past on the water. I like to think that some day someone will be happy here. I like to think that some day, there will be another heartbeat in this house.

EDIE HAD NO
choice but to take Milo with her. Every time she shut the kitchen door behind her, he set up a wailing so plaintive and sustained that she thought his tiny lungs would burst.

‘This is the second time you've gone out today without me!' he sobbed. So, by shortening his lead and securing it to the wicker carrier on the bicycle, she strapped him in as one might strap a baby into a pram. Milo looked surprised and not a little resentful, but he soon settled down and seemed to enjoy the ride, his small ears buffeting in the breeze as they set off down the hill.

As she pedalled along between hedgerows with her little dog in the basket and the wind in her hair, Edie wondered if she might come back some day and spend more time exploring these environs; perhaps she could persuade Ian to come with her?

Once Jeremy and Iseult Darling were ensconced in Lissaguirra with their baby – their darling baby! – she and Ian could come here on a fishing holiday. Or – if Ian wasn't taken with the idea of fishing – they could hire a car and follow the route taken by Thackeray up to the north or along the western coast, of which he had written, ‘
It forms an event in one's life to have seen that place, so beautiful is it, and so unlike all other beauties that I know of
…'

Down towards the crossroads Edie bowled: past fields that were full of gambolling lambs and their stoic, ruminant mothers; past neat homesteads with washing dancing on the lines and bold-eyed, snotty-nosed children at play, and past cows being herded off to the milking parlour across a landscape that had once been a blasted wasteland. It had all the appearance of an idyll, a scene Wordsworth might have penned paeans to, or Constable immortalized in oil on canvas. But Edie knew that if you took hold of a corner of this arcadian backdrop and pulled, the layers beneath would tell a very different story. She wondered how these people had come through, how they had struggled out of the graves that had been dug for them not a century before, the voices of their ancestors urging them on, exhorting, hectoring, imploring them to push forward towards a new, independent future.

She finally came to a stop outside the telephone box, which stood incongruously between a fairy thorn and a well dedicated to Saint Brigid. Unstrapping Milo from his basket, she let him off the lead and warned him not to go adventuring without her.

‘A sheep might get you,' she said.

‘I don't care!' said Milo, chasing his tail. ‘I will charm any sheep.'

Inside the phone box the paintwork was scratched with graffiti. It was mild, inoffensive stuff compared to the hieroglyphics that Edie perused at Gloucester Road tube station most mornings.
Ciarán loves Kitty
, read one manifesto;
Up the Republic!
another.

Because she did not have enough change to make a trunk call, Edie asked the operator if the other party would accept the charges. A minute or two later, she was put through to Mr Byard at Heinemann Publishers. She imagined him sitting at his desk in the office in Covent Garden, surrounded by manuscripts and in a fug of cigar smoke, red pencil behind his ear, galley proofs spread in front of him.

‘Edie! What a surprise. I infer from the operator's accent that you're still in Ireland?'

‘Yes.'

‘Have you had a good break?'

‘Yes, thank you. But I'm coming home tomorrow. And I'm afraid I didn't get around to doing any copy-editing whatsoever.'

‘Never mind. You needed the time off.'

‘But I'll be back in work on Monday.'

‘Splendid! We're rather snowed under with manuscripts, I'm afraid.'

‘I have another one for you.'

Mr Byard gave a tiny sigh. ‘Unsolicited?'

‘Yes. Well, no, in a way.'

‘Either you asked to see this manuscript or you didn't, Edie.'

‘I didn't ask to see it – it presented itself to me. But it was almost as if it was meant to come my way, as if it had been waiting for me to find it.'

Mr Byard's next sigh was rather more world-weary.

‘Did you write it yourself?'

‘No!'

‘Very well. I'll have a look. Is it fiction?'

‘No.'

‘In that case, is it libellous?'

Edie thought of the individuals who had played the more nefarious roles in Eliza's narrative; the family secrets that had been unearthed; the political misdeeds that had been connived at, or edited out of an entire generation of history books.

‘Not any more,' she said. ‘You can't libel the dead. It was written nearly a hundred years ago.'

‘Does it have a title?'

‘No.'

Mr Byard's sigh was lugubrious this time.

‘I could make one up for you,' Edie suggested. ‘It's a first-person narrative … How about
Eliza Drury
?'

‘No. I'm going to be giving eponymous heroines a wide berth. Daphne du Maurier's new novel will generate a devil's spawn of copycat titles next year.'

‘What's it called?'

‘
Rebecca
.'

‘What's it about?'

‘An old house haunted by a dead woman, and a young woman who finds –'

The pips went, and the operator enquired whether they wished to extend the call.

‘No, thank you,' Edie told her, feeling rather relieved not to have to hear any more about Daphne du Maurier's new novel. She didn't want any charges of plagiarism being levelled at
her
. ‘I'll see you on Monday, Mr Byard.'

‘I look forward to it. Goodbye, Edie.'

‘Goodbye.'

Rebecca
. The name would lend itself to a striking jacket design: it was wrong what they said about not judging a book by its cover – the cover of a book was important. She wondered if Hilly had known about this new novel of Miss du Maurier's; if she had perhaps seen an outline, or even a first draft.

If Hilly were still alive, Edie knew, they would be comrades withal. They would sit together over tea and cakes in Valerie's Patisserie and swap stories about their forthcoming projects; Edie pleased as punch for her friend's success, Hilly listening eagerly as Edie related the story of the remarkable manuscript she had uncovered. She could hear Hilly now – her delighted laugh, and her voice saying,
It looks as though you might have found your bestseller, Edie!

Edie stood deep in thought for a moment. Then she took from her satchel the clover-bowed house key of Lissaguirra Lodge and – locating a patch of pristine paint beneath the telephone – she scratched on it the following:
Edie & Hilly For Ever
. It might not be as artistic as the wreath of oak leaves and the ace of spades that Eliza had had carved on the shutter in her house, but it had totemic significance all the same. Maybe a hundred years hence someone making a phone call would spot it, and wonder who Edie and Hilly might have been.

She opened the door of the telephone box to find Milo doing his wees up against the stone that marked the holy well.

‘Milo! That's very disrespectful,' she chided.

‘I'm no angel,' said Milo.

‘That's for sure.'

Edie waited for him to finish, then dumped him back in the basket, and fastened his baby harness.

‘Imagine Mr Byard asking me for a title,' she said sniffily as she pulled on her beret. ‘A title's the last thing he should be concerned with. You'd have thought he might have shown rather more interest in the author.'

She wheeled the bike away from the verge and pushed off, wobbling between the potholes that pockmarked the road.

‘You are a dunce, Edie,' said Milo. ‘The book already has a title.'

‘Oh, really Mr Clever Clogs? What is it, prithee?'

‘La la la,' sang Milo.

‘Oh, come on! Tell me.'

Milo turned to Edie and smiled in such an insufferably superior way that Edie wanted to hit him a dig.

‘Haven't you guessed?' the little dog said. ‘It's called
Another Heartbeat in the House
.'

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
Charles Dickens

HAVE YOU EVER
seen a house and thought:
this is the one?
I don't mean a house you might aspire to buy, or one you wish you had bought, or one you could never, ever afford and can only fantasize about. I mean one that takes you by surprise, that fills you with powerful, complex feelings: a sense of loss, a sense of belonging – even a sense of déjà vu. One that seems to reverberate with an echo of memories you never knew you had: the walls, the windowpanes, even the silence speaks.