No Enemy but Time (16 page)

They all laughed then.

Frank said, ‘I'll take you over next week.'

‘I'll take
you,'
she said triumphantly. ‘I've got a car and I passed my test! First time.'

‘God help us,' her brother said solemnly. ‘They must be paralysed and blind to let you near a car! I'm taking
you
, or we don't go.'

They bantered like children and Philip watched benevolently. His son had changed. The old aggressiveness had gone, leaving a reasonable young man who didn't contradict on principle. Even when he was at Oxford, the discussion on the North would have ended in a sullen row. He felt relieved and happy. Except for the anger burning in him over the brooch. Mary Donovan. What a thing to do … what a treacherous creature, after all the years she'd worked for them and the kindness she'd received, right up to the time she died in hospital, the treatment paid for by Philip himself. God, he fumed inwardly, what a people. And there was the memory of Eileen, also wearing blue, with the little cheap tinselly brooch pinned to her dress, standing where Claire had stood that evening in the same room. Going off to Claudia Hamilton's dinner party. It could still hurt him to think of her. Poor little thing, so vulnerable and young, with such a short life left to live.

They left the table and he said, ‘Let's have our coffee in the study, shall we?' He didn't want to go back into the drawing room again.

It was such a happy summer. There were tennis parties with friends, a trip to the west, where Claudia had a little fishing lodge, swimming in the sea, cold enough to take your breath – and the joy of riding round the farm. Both farms, because Frank had thrown himself into improving his inheritance at Meath. Claire went over the house with him and agreed with their father. It was too big and needed modernizing; what on earth would a young man do, rattling round in such a place? She didn't want him to move out of Riverstown and she influenced him shamelessly against the idea.

‘I won't sell,' he insisted. ‘I like it. It's mine, Clarry. She left it to me. I might want to live here one day.'

‘All right then,' she countered. ‘Let it. That's sensible.'

He hesitated, looking round the rooms on one of their tours of the house. Claudia had undertaken to sort through the clothes and personal possessions of the old lady, and her solicitor, Hugh Lorimer, had gone over the land titles and estate papers with Frank. Part of the farm was tenanted. Frank had dismissed any suggestion that he might try to repossess.

‘Nobody gets turned out of their homes by me,' he had said. ‘There's been enough of that in Ireland.'

Lorimer had stared at him for a moment and then let the remark pass, feeling he might not be able to handle this young man's affairs with any sympathy.

‘I'm not going to let it either,' Frank told Claire. ‘I don't want strangers living here, making it theirs. I'll keep on the caretaker for now. I might spend a few weeks a year here – build up some shooting. There's plenty of scope. And hunt a couple of days with the Meath. Whatever happened to old Reynard's house, by the way?'

Claire shrugged. ‘Nothing. The nephews sold off the land and the local butcher bought it. He left the house to fall down; it's no good to him and nobody else wanted it. Dad said they've sold all the lead off the roof and got a big price for it.'

Frank said, ‘We'll go over one day and take a look. See if we can see the old devil skulking under a hedge.'

They both laughed. ‘Oh, people swear they've seen him,' Claire insisted. ‘Even Mummy said she saw a fox vanish in there.'

‘Claudia is just as superstitious as the rest,' he said. ‘Who's the butcher?'

‘Flanagan,' Claire told him. ‘He's got a chain of shops in Dublin and he's gone into land. Dad says he's a millionaire. And a bloody vandal,' she added, quoting.

‘I don't see that,' he said. ‘What does some big Anglo pile mean to him? Why should he care what happens to it?'

‘But it's part of history,' Claire protested, not very sure of her ground. ‘I mean, it's an old Irish house, like Carton,' naming the grandest ducal house in Ireland, threatened with the same fate.

‘It's not part of Flanagan's history,' Frank said quietly. ‘If it is, it's a part he'd probably like to see fall down.'

Claire looked at him. ‘Don't talk like that in front of Dad, will you? Whatever's got into you since you've been away?'

‘I've learned about the other side of the coin,' he said. ‘If I was Flanagan, I wouldn't just strip the roof and let the rain in, I'd dynamite the bloody house and everything it stands for.'

‘Frank!' She stared at him, horrified.

He shook his head. ‘Don't worry; I'm not going to say anything at home. I did it once, that night we came back from hunting over here, remember?'

‘Yes,' Claire said. ‘I remember. There was an awful row because you didn't want to go to Rowden.'

‘That's right,' he nodded. ‘I said if Dad felt like he did about the Irish, why did he marry my mother? He never answered, and I've never asked again and never will. But I found a lot of answers in America. Come on, Clarry, we should go, or we'll be late for dinner.'

They drove home in silence. She felt low-spirited and uneasy. Life was such fun and they had so many things to enjoy together. Why had he spoilt it all with those dark words? An idea came to her. It was so frightening that she gasped. Frank turned his attention from the road.

‘What's the matter?'

‘Frank,' she said. ‘Frank, you haven't joined anything, have you?'

‘No, if you mean the IRA.'

‘Oh.' She gave a great sigh of relief. ‘Thank God for that!'

He drove on, concentrating on the road. ‘I went to a rally in Boston,' he said. ‘I nearly joined something called The Friends of Sinn Fein. But I didn't. I wanted to come home and settle down and see more for myself. It's the cautious Scots in me, I suppose.'

‘Oh, don't be so bloody silly.' Claire dismissed it impatiently. ‘You're no more Scots than I am. Three hundred years ago Dad's ancestor came from Scotland. We've been in Ireland ever since. Anyway, I'm glad you didn't join anything. Whatever they say in America, Dad's right. They don't live here and they don't know. Changing the subject from boring old politics, are you going to the Butlers' dance?'

‘I might,' Frank said. ‘If you're going. We've been asked to stay, Claudia says.'

‘They'll have that fat lump Olivia lined up for you,' Claire said mischievously. She was in good spirits again, back on safe ground with him.

‘She's a very pretty girl,' he retorted. ‘You're jealous.'

‘Jealous of her big fat bottom? Thunder Thighs, that's her nickname. The dance might be fun.'

He smiled at her. ‘Do you really want to go?'

She nodded. ‘Do you?'

‘We'll see,' he said, teasing in his turn. ‘We'll talk about it tonight. Look, there's poor old Donny, waiting to see the Dublin train come by.'

‘Let's stop,' Claire suggested. ‘I haven't seen him for ages.'

Donny and his obsession with trains was a part of their childhood. When they rode down to Sallins on their bicycles, they'd see him standing on the bridge over the railway line, gazing intently up the track for the train to come. Frank pulled into the side and they got out. He saw them and grinned, winking furiously with one eye in his excitement. No one knew his age for sure, but he was one of eleven children, and simple-minded from birth. Harmless as a baby, as everyone knew, with this passion for the trains that kept him rooted to the bridge in hopes of seeing one. As children they gave him some of their sweets when they bought them from the village shop; later Frank would slip him a bit of money and he'd thank them both with his frantic winking and gaping smile.

‘Hallo there, Donny,' Frank said. ‘How are you?'

He gabbled happily that he was well, and then said, surprising them both, ‘Ye've been gone long away!'

‘I've been in America, Donny,' Frank answered.

‘Oh, ach,' Donny nodded, and mumbled. ‘Ye've been gone long away,' he said to Claire.

‘Yes, but we're home now,' she comforted. ‘How's your mammy?'

He smiled and nodded, ‘Well, well. She'll be comin' soon. She'll box me ear,' and he chuckled at the thought. ‘No train yet. So one's coming'…' He turned back to gaze over the parapet down the line.

Mammy was a stout and stalwart woman in her sixties, and the sight of her leading her son home for his tea, often by the scruff of his collar, was a local joke.

Frank found some change in his pocket. ‘Here, Donny, get yourself some cigarettes.'

He was very dirty and the hand that closed over the money was black as a crow's claw. A little spittle ran down his chin, but his eyes were bright with pleasure.

‘God bless ye … God bless ye …' He watched them get into the car and waved to them as they drove past him. Through the rear window Claire saw him turn back to his vigil.

‘Fancy him noticing we'd been away,' she said.

‘He's not that stupid,' her brother answered. ‘Given a little help and special schooling, he mightn't have been as bad as he is. But it's too late now. So long as he has his train now and then, he'll be happy enough.'

‘That's the wonderful thing about Ireland,' she said. ‘Nobody bothers him. He'd be taken into some mental hospital if this was England.'

‘Or America,' Frank pointed out. ‘But the Irish aren't frightened or ashamed of handicapped people. To them they're as much children of God as everyone else and they leave them alone.'

‘And so they should,' she agreed. ‘I bet the mammy goes through his pockets when he gets home and takes that money!'

‘I bet she does,' Frank said, and they both laughed.

‘A child of God'. Claire thought she'd never heard Frank talk in that way before. Surely he wasn't becoming religious …? She'd have to tease him to find out.

Philip was out, Claudia busy in the house and Claire disappeared upstairs. Frank went into the study and poured himself a drink.

He was abstemious by normal standards; getting drunk didn't appeal to him. He was glad to be alone, to have time to himself to think. The whiskey was enough to soothe without fuddling. He shouldn't have spoken out to Claire. It had worried her and there was no way she would understand. She wouldn't understand how America had affected him. It was a curious liberation, a chance to expand beyond the confines of his class, education and background. A challenge because only achievement counted and he had set out to achieve, from the time he went to an English school with his father's dictate echoing through his mind: ‘You're not going to grow up an Irish yob …' Nobody could deny what he had done, but they wouldn't understand why he had done it. Not for himself, not for his father, but for the faded image in the photograph. For the whole half of him that was forever denied as if it carried shame. The bog-Irish blood that he was expected to live down. He had decided to live up to it instead. America gave him the example. Men of Irish ancestry were politicians, businessmen, academics, let alone a President who had become a legend throughout the world. He could explore his ancestry with a freedom impossible in his own country. Ireland was an American cult, its history enshrined in the folklore of the descendants of the early immigrants. Frank Arbuthnot learned of the leaking ships with starving refugees from the famine, setting sail for a new life across the Atlantic; of the convicts transported to Australia; of the early heroes of Irish resistance to English rule; of the persecution of the native Church and the evictions of families crippled by rents they couldn't hope to pay. And, inevitably, of the long and bitter political oppression of the minority in the North.

He was too intelligent and too educated to accept such an unbalanced popular view, but for the first time he was in a position to listen and to make his own judgement. The past was a lamentable record, nothing could excuse that. What was needed was a change in attitude, an expiation, if necessary, for the sins of all their forebears. The first goal must be to redress the wrongs of the Irish in the North. That was as far as Frank had been prepared to go when he came home.

He had finished his whiskey. Soon his father would come back from the meeting in Dublin; they'd gather for a drink before dinner and talk about their doings in the day. He wasn't going to relinquish the house in Meath, however hard his family pressed him. It was a restitution to his dead mother; Lorimer had told him as much. He wouldn't be keeping him on as his solicitor. There would be a new attitude and a new regime. A second home where he could feel at liberty and where, for the first time in its history, Irishmen would come on equal terms. ‘Don't talk like this to Dad …' He smiled, thinking of his sister, so worried that there might be conflict between the people she loved. There was no doubt in Claire, no instinct for self-torture. Generous-hearted, open-natured, she combined all that was best in Claudia and in Philip. She was the one person in the world who made him happy just by walking through the door. For her sake, he would keep the peace at Riverstown, and maybe she would spend time with him in Meath.

At dinner he said, ‘If you want to go to the dance at Butlers Castle, I'm game.'

Claudia said, ‘Sylvia told me they've got English guests for the weekend. We won't be going, but you should enjoy yourselves.'

Claire said, smiling at Frank, ‘It'll be great gas,' and he smiled back at her.

‘It always is when we're together. I can't wait to see Thunder Thighs.'

Neither Claudia nor Philip knew what they were both laughing about.

The following week they set off in Frank's car for the trip down to Cork and the dance at Butlers Castle. And that was how Claire met Neil Fraser.