King of Morning, Queen of Day (12 page)

I
AM GETTING LAZY
and lackadaisical. I have not been keeping you up-to-date, dear diary. It has been almost ten days since I last made an entry in your pages. I can make all manner of excuses—my moods, my feelings, this general lethargy which seems to have filled my bones with lead; this thing in my belly. Sometimes I feel I am nothing more than an elaborate fold of flesh wrapped protectingly around this tiny, inhuman thing. Sometimes I feel I am a great fat lazy bubble of warm oil, tautly stretched, ready to burst at the slightest tap. But the truth is that the honesty of your pages, the openness of your secret heart, frightens me. You reproach me; you demand that I confess.

So, if I must confess, I will confess. And what sin shall Emily confess this day? Sloth? Already confessed, set down in blue ink, and absolved into the receiving paper. Anger, perhaps? Yes,
anger,
diary.

They were so apologetic, so careful and chary lest the least little word would cause me to once again tip over the breakfast table and storm off to my room. Everything was explained to me in very slow, very deliberate, very simple words, as if I were a foreigner, or an idiot.

I can still see the smile on Mummy’s full, moist lips; still hear the smug politeness in her voice as she said, “Emily, we are going to have to move from Craigdarragh. I know it won’t be easy for any of us—we all love this house dearly—but with the money your father will receive from the sale of the lands, we’ll be able to find a nice little place somewhere close to Dublin where we can all try to be a family once again, with the governess I promised for you so you can continue your education, and maybe even a nurse for the baby.”

I imagined this
nice little place,
some
desirable gentleman’s town residence
in Ballsbridge or Palmerstown—a red brick terrace with steps to the front door and servants in the basement and smoke pouring out of the chimneys with nothing to see from the window but other chimneys pouring out smoke, and rooftops, and telephone wires. A place where the wild spirit of the land has been chained up and tamed and smothered under
respectability
and
properness
and
progress
so long it has died and rotted without anyone ever noticing. Horrible! Horrible! I jumped up and knocked over my chair, screaming, “No! No! No! No! You can’t sell Craigdarragh. You can’t sell my home. You can’t, You can’t make me go to Dublin. I’ll run away, just you see…” and I was halfway out of the room before the simultaneous replies came: “The notices have already been posted in the newspapers,” and “Where do you think you could go in your condition, girl?”

Anger, diary, anger, and a growing, crushing grey cloud of misery. I suppose I had always considered it somewhere in my heart to be an inevitability that Craigdarragh would have to be sold. But being an inevitability does not make it a joy. Dying is the inevitable of inevitables, but that does not make it into a thing to be looked forward to. My only respite from the anger and the sense of despair growing day by day, hour by hour, was in the attic rooms—particularly that room I have named the Room of the Floating Rowers. There especially is a spirit of serenity and tranquility, a sense of beauty and wonder waiting to be discovered. I find myself drawn to that spirit, but also I fear it, for it is the spirit of the old magic, the magic of stone and sky and sea. Strange—that which repels me is also that which attracts me, perverse creature that I am.

I have discovered a splendid and totally idle amusement: with a pair of Mrs. O’Carolan’s sewing scissors, I snip out the beautiful and complicated floral patterns on the rolls of old wallpaper and borders. Having cut out the twining vines and stems and climbing roses and ornate foliage and fantastical birds half living, half flame, I then move the shapes around on the floor, arranging and rearranging and mixing and mingling and combining them into funny little hybrid creatures: flowery chimeras; cloudy dragons; ugly, funny little basilisks made from tangled foliage; goblins and sprites woven from flourishes and curvets. It was the patterns themselves that suggested the pastime to me; they seemed to me somehow incomplete in themselves—parts of a greater pattern that had been separated and trapped, immobile, powerless, on the printed paper. All I provide is the connection between long-sundered parts.

Remarkable—when I am sitting on a cushion on the floor, busy with scissors and glue pot, the time just vanishes. Before I know it the latticed rectangle of pale autumn sunlight has moved from the left wall across the floor to the other wall and Mrs. O’Carolan is calling me for supper. Perhaps time is flowing faster up there in the attic. Perhaps the accumulated mass of the past gathered there is pulling time out of the future faster, like a weight on a line. Or perhaps, more mundanely, it is only that I am getting older every year and that it is the accumulated weight of time behind me that is unreeling the years with ever-increasing speed. What a horrible thing it must be to grow older and find that ever-decreasing number of years hurrying you faster, faster toward your grave, as if time were impatient to be rid of you.

I have deliberately hesitated in writing down the events of the Harvest Mass, not because it is the pinnacle (or should I say, rather, pit?) of this confession, but because what I saw there disturbed me so—disturbs me still.

I have always loved the great festivals of the Church. At those times, on those days, I feel the Church succeeds in bringing the spiritual realm and the worldly together. The flickering light of the Advent candles; the patient tolling of the iron bell, out across the winter fields, calling all the people to celebrate the death of the year and the birth of the Redeemer, the sombre pallid sorrow of the Paschal drama, pure, stripped of all colour and decoration, contrasted so wonderfully with the joyful celebration of resurrection and rebirth on Easter Day. When the Church reaches back to its ancient, elemental roots, heaven and earth seem closest. Most especially at the Harvest Mass, with the stacked sheathes of barley, the careful piles of apples and pears, the baskets of gooseberries and blackberries, the hampers laden with scrubbed carrots and parsnips, leeks the size of your arm, golden heads of onion and cauliflower, bushels of oats and rye; sacks and mounds of potatoes.
Mountains
of the noble potato are watched over by corn dollies and woven straw St. Brigid’s Crosses. All celebrate the goodness, the holiness, of the earth we walk upon. For me it has always been the highlight of the Church Year. This year, as on every other Harvest morning, I was up with the lark getting myself ready. I dressed in my very finest, all earth colours, choosing russets and browns, tans and mustards and fir greens from my wardrobe. There wasn’t much that would fit around my bump, but nevertheless, by ten thirty I was downstairs in the hall waiting for Daddy. When he came out of the drawing room, pulling on a pair of driving gauntlets, he was most surprised to see me.

“Emily,” he said, “what are you doing?”

“I’m going with you to the Harvest Mass,” I replied.

“My dear,” he said, and from the words
my dear,
I knew nothing good was going to follow. “My dear, you can’t come this year. I’m sorry, you’ll have to stay behind.”

I bit back the fury.

“Why can I not come?” I asked. Then out of the drawing room came Mummy, tying the ribbon on her Sunday hat in a bow beneath her chin, and the fury almost overwhelmed me, because Mummy never, never, goes to chapel. The one small battle she won over the Pope was that I would only go to Mass when and if I wanted to; she herself remained resolutely Protestant.

“Emily, darling,” she said, “you’re looking very prim this morning.”

“She wants to go to the Harvest Mass,” Daddy said, and Mummy looked at me as if I were a sick lamb or a lap dog and said, “But darling, dearest, you can’t possibly go in your condition. Emily, darling, you don’t know what you might catch, and, well, you wouldn’t want to do anything that might hurt baby, would you? Just give it a miss this year, darling, all right? There’ll be other years.”

As if I were a lap dog, or a sick lamb. I was too furious to be able to do anything but stand there, dumb, stupid, while they got into the car and drove off. Mrs. O’Carolan waved shamefacedly and guiltily from the tip-up seat in the back. I watched them turn through the gates and down the road to Drumcliffe crossroads. Mummy’s words whispered over and over and around and around in my head. But not the words she said; the words she meant.
“Darling, dearest, we can’t possibly let you be seen out in your condition. I mean, what would the tenants, the priest, the neighbours, my friends think, for heaven’s sake, if they saw an unmarried pregnant girl of not even sixteen sitting as bold as brass in the very House of God?”

It was that decided me. I would not be shut away and hidden, a sordid object of sin and shame. One thought rang in my head as I stormed down the drive and along the road to the crossroads: I would be there, in the front pew, on my knees before my parents and the entire parish and God Himself. They were ashamed of me; they blamed me for what had happened; they held me responsible. A painful stitch in my belly wanted me to give up and stop, but it only stoked my fury all the more. I marched the mile and a half to the chapel in twenty minutes.

Father Halloran was about to start his homily (doubtless another tirade against the godless Protestant Unionists in the next county and the atheist socialists in Dublin); the people were rising from the prayer for the preacher as I entered. All I really remember is staring. Father Halloran was staring at me, and, seeing him staring, the parishioners turned around to see what had commanded his attention. My own father was blushing with embarrassment, rising from the pew to come to me, hurry me out. And myself; staring—not at the craning necks and turned heads, but at the centrepiece of the Harvest display. At the heart of the corn sheaves and plaited breads and St. Brigid’s Crosses, there,
her,
all Chantilly silk and creme organdy, the bride’s dress filled with dried flowers.

November 8, 1913

Advertisement in the
Irish Times

Carswell & Greer: Estate Agents

For Sale

(By private contract or auction)

Craigdarragh House & Estate

We are delighted to be offering for sale this superb property in Drumcliffe, County Sligo, comprising of a superior Georgian country residence set in two and one half acres of mature landscaped gardens, together with its 180-acre estate. Situated eight miles from the town of Sligo upon the south-facing slopes of Ben Bulben Mountain, adjacent to the local beauty spot of Bridestone Wood, the property offers all the charm of the rural life with the conveniences and comforts of urban sophistication, and would, in our considered opinion, make the perfect country seat for a discerning gentleman farmer—perhaps a retired military officer or colonial administrator.

Craigdarragh House dates from 1778 and was constructed in the Palladian style by Mr. James Gandon, later architect of the Dublin Custom House, and is a superlative example of his early work in the smaller country house
metier.

The ground floor interior by John Adam comprises of a Classical entrance portico, a spacious hall with hung staircase, one of the few examples of its kind in the western counties; a main drawing room enjoying superb views across Sligo Bay; a dining room; two studies; a small library; a games room with billiards table; a morning room with attached conservatory; a kitchen with scullery and housekeeper’s bed-sitting room; larder; and laundry room. The first floor interior, by the same architect, contains two master bedrooms at the front of the house, each commanding fine vistas of sea and mountain; three secondary, or guest, bedrooms; two bathrooms, a W. C., and a nursery. The spacious attic contains domestics’ rooms, storage, and shelving, and may be reached by means of a concealed servants’ staircase.

All is tastefully decorated, and much is period and in exquisite condition.

Exterior features include a stable block and stable yard with small hay loft, a disused gate lodge and two and one half acres of finely landscaped grounds, including rhododendron walk, sunken garden, Italian garden, walled kitchen garden, gazebo, and grass tennis court. Approximately fifty yards from the main house, close by the demesne-wall, is a small observatory.

The sale will also include the estate of Craigdarragh, comprising of 180 acres of farmland, fifty acres of which consist of the woodland known as Bridestone Wood, and the remainder being divided between three tenant farms of sixty, forty-five, and twenty-five acres respectively.

The tenancies are held under secured ninety-nine-year leases registered since the 1881 Act, and the rentable values set by the Fair Rent Court range from five guineas per acre per annum for the richer lowland leases to fifteen shillings per acre per year for the poorer hillside farm.

The tenant farmers also enjoy rights of foraging and coppicing in the estate woodlands and rights of communal grazing on the common hillside beyond the demesne wall. The prospective buyer will please note that these tenancies, though renegotiated under the 1903 Act, have been held by the same families for at least seventy-five years and that the farmers can be considered exceptional and trustworthy tenants.

The vendor has instructed us to advise any interested parties that house and estate are intended to be sold as an entity: offers for the estate alone will not be entertained, offers for the house and gardens only in the event that, no purchaser for the entire property being forthcoming, the tenant farmers exercise their option to purchase their tenancies. However, we are quite certain that there will be no shortage of parties with an interest in the property as an entirety.

Quite simply, a property of this quality must be personally inspected to properly appreciate the value for money it represents. Potential purchasers may arrange for personal tours of the property either through our Dublin office, our Sligo branch, or through the estate owner, Dr. Edward Garret Desmond; telephone Sligo 202. Without doubt, Craigdarragh is one of the finest and most desirable properties to have featured on the open market in recent years, and, together with the proven profitability of the tenant farms, consideration will only be given to offers in excess of £23,000.