Tipperary (73 page)

Saturday, the 19th of April 1924

Dearest girl, tell me again tonight of your discovery. Shall we retire early?

Sunday, the 20th of April 1924

My love, of course we shall make all inquiries. I insist. I know little in such areas, as most of my healing did not permit of too much intimacy, owing to the fact that I am not a doctor, and the country people are reticent in the extreme, no matter what danger they feel.

Can we therefore hold back on the restocking of the styes? And let your “pink creatures” do the work for us. Yes, it will take longer, as you have already pointed out, but we perhaps need a slowing of pace.

Wednesday, the 23rd of April 1924

O'Brien—stop! Please stop now!

I too am aware that this should not be. Or certainly that things should be different. But we shall attend to it immediately. As we attended so wonderfully to the mural, the stucco, the marble, and all the other matters. Remember—we addressed what was presented to us with determination, grace, and energy.

Wednesday, the 30th of April 1924

And still, my beloved April, we go on as we are, and as we have been. And if, tomorrow, we are forced to alter matters—then we shall alter them for as long as we are directed.

That is the last of several hundred assorted letters and notes that passed between Charles O'Brien and his younger wife, April Burke Somerville O'Brien. From them, and from the surrounding materials, and from what I was finally about to read, and when added to Charles's History (it is time to drop the quotation marks and give it the full respect it deserves), I knew more about them than if I had lived under their magnificent roof.

The next day, I left Dublin—with the suitcase—and drove home to Clonmel, the capital of Charles O'Brien's cherished county, Tipperary. It took me several weeks to digest what I had learned, and to prove it true. Not that I needed proof—the integrity of all concerned had long been to my mind unimpeachable.

And when I had digested all, and begun my recovery, and my essential pattern of forgiveness, I found that I had acquired the courage to do many things for which I had long wished, and at which I had always failed.

I sold the house, discarded most of the artifacts of my parents' life, left the little street where I had lived since infancy, and moved out here, some miles from Clonmel, to a prettier house, from which I can look down on the river.

My day has changed. I no longer stay in bed until the haphazard hours of noon and later. Without fail, I cook for myself every day, and from time to time I have company; Marian Harney spends weekends and some of her holidays here. We never squabble; I have a sense of achievement with another human being that I never had before.

And that sense of magic I always wanted? It courses through my imagination like molten silver. So much was damaged, so much was shaken—and so much was recovered in such a short time. All of them are now laid to rest in my mind.

And I have plans to write, beginning perhaps with the edition of their letters. Two weeks ago, I had a piece about Laurence Sterne, who lived in Clonmel, accepted by an English newspaper; they're showing a new version of
Tristram Shandy
on television soon. But I have greater plans than that—I am now wealthy beyond my dreams.

Yesterday, Marian Harney and I drove the twenty miles or so to walk again the ruins of Tipperary Castle. The main entrance has almost disappeared. There's a scrap of the demesne wall, and I found a rusted iron spar; I think it came from a gate pillar or something.

The place in general is like Troy, not much left but grass ramparts. Large piles of stones and rubble mark out the lines of the buildings—it was massive. All the terraces except one have long been plowed.

The bridge survives, but it is a bridge to no particular place. And the lake still has a pair of swans; I wonder if they are the descendants of the swans that Charles saw.

When I had finished reading the last letter, more baffled than ever, we broke the brown sealing wax and opened the Joseph Harney envelope. It contained a drawing of Tipperary Castle, the same that had been given to Terence Burke. And it contained a document from Joseph Harney—a letter to me, written many, many years ago.

Dear Michael,

You may never read this letter—but I have charged myself with writing it. You know who I am—although we have never met; I am the same Joe Harney who was Minister for Transport, then Minister for Health, and Minister for Industry and Commerce. You know what I did, I suppose, in the War of Independence, because there have been so many books and articles, and even a film about the battle on Northumberland Road and Boland's Mill. But you do not know about my place in your life, and in that of your parents.

To tell you the truth, I had mixed feelings about the marriage of Charles O'Brien—because I was in love with April myself. But I loved Charles more than I have ever loved any man; I loved his nobility—he had complete decency. He was the most generous, genuine man I ever met. When they married, I told myself that there was only one chance for me now to marry April—but since that would involve the death of my dearest friend through natural causes, that was no chance at all!

You realize that I'm joking—the thing I think I wanted last in life was that anything should happen to Charles O'Brien. Later, I myself married, very happily, a woman whom I adore more with each passing day.

So when they came back from their wedding, in December 1922, I bowed gently out of their lives for a time. Soon I began to visit them, and I visited often. I went there for weekends, and when the civil war ended, I took a job in Limerick, in part to be near them, and I began to take an active interest in politics.

In the spring of 1924, I received a letter from Charles, asking me quite tersely to come to Tipperary as soon as possible. April, he said, was “feeling less than well.” I had a good friend in Limerick, a doctor, called Brendan Hartigan, and he had a new car, so the two of us went out together.

With Charles's permission, Brendan examined April, and he agreed with her diagnosis. “The patient always knows,” he said. April, against all the odds—and, I think, due to Charles's great care of her—was expecting a child. Charles had such mixed feelings.

“How am I going to get her through it?” he asked me. I gave up my job—it wasn't a very important one, anyway—and I came out to help him. In fact, I took over the managing of the place and he devoted all his time to April—he gave her every hour of every day. Running my political life was easy enough, provided I went back into Limerick once every two weeks or so.

Charles O'Brien taught me how to love people; I never saw such devotion. His wife was going to be safe—that was what he decided. The doctors confined her to bed; they told her that if she stayed quiet, she had a very good chance of going the full term. And of course she could not get enough of Charles's company—she lit up when he came into the room, not that he was ever out of her room for long.

Against all the odds, April went the full term. A baby boy was delivered in the last week of January 1925. The mother was fine, the baby was fine, you never saw such excitement. I was there, I heard the cries; everything you ever heard about the birth of an important baby—it happened that night. And never was a baby born that was more important. Certainly you have to go back a long time for a more important birth—that was in Bethlehem, I believe, nearly two thousand years ago! Or so I joked to Charles and April.

After a few days, I fetched old Mrs. O'Brien and she came to see the child, her grandson. And I agreed to stay on at the castle. The country by and large was settling down, and who was I, anyway? I was a fellow who carried a gun once upon a time, and those days were over. And now I was back among people that I loved, and they had a baby. To stay on was an easy decision.

On the night of the 15th of May 1925, a Thursday night—the baby was about three and a half months old—there was a thunderstorm. It was very brief, but we had lightning near the castle. It didn't trouble me; it didn't seem to trouble anyone—the baby was already a sound sleeper, and by now he controlled the entire place anyway.

All the next day I was uneasy. I went around in a kind of querulous mood. You know those days when you're searching for something and you don't know what it is you're searching for? That's what I was like. I went to bed early, I tossed and turned, and then I went to sleep.

The next thing I knew was my door being hammered on, and Charles shouting at me. There was smoke everywhere—and I could not make it out. I ran out of there and saw Charles ahead of me—and there were actual flames ahead of us. They weren't so bad that we couldn't get past, and I caught up to Charles and was beside him—and he was carrying the baby, who was still asleep.

I took the baby from him—we had a clear path now and no smoke and he went back to help April. He shouted to me that she was gathering clothes. As I finished my journey downstairs Charles reappeared, and he skidded a suitcase down the marble steps.

I remember thinking, “This is no time to be packing a case”—but he shouted at me to grab it. I did, and I was almost the only one up and about. We had no bell or alarm gong or anything like that—everybody in Tipperary knew when it was time to eat, so I had no means of warning people.

As far as I could I got away from the castle. I just kept going, the baby crooked softly in my left arm, and lugging this damn suitcase with my right hand. When I got up onto the highest part of the Long Terrace I looked back, and I never saw anything like it. There were flames everywhere in the main building. Now at last people came running out, and I wanted to shout—but I didn't want to wake the baby. So I went back down a little—but even from there I could feel the flames, so I retreated again.

I thought about putting the baby down on the grass—but I was afraid that somebody would step on him. So there I stood, helpless, hoping that someone would see me, and come and take the baby, so that I could go and help Charles and April.

We found out afterward what had happened. The previous day's lightning had hit a metal stanchion embedded in a beam that was rotten but didn't appear so from the outside; and because it looked good it had never been replaced. That beam ran right up under the bedrooms, and all that day it had smoldered. Then, when it caught fire—it went up like tinder.

In those days, we had no fire-prevention treatments for new timbers, and that corridor had all new flooring. And there were fabrics everywhere—April had some kind of tapestry hanging from every wall, and many of them were old. They all caught fire.

One of the older servant-girls came up the terrace, and she saw me and the baby, and she was so thankful. She took the baby, and I went down as fast as I could run. No sign of them—no sign anywhere, and nobody had seen them. People were moving farther and farther away; the smoke was frightful, you couldn't see a thing from the front of the building.

There was a back staircase—all those houses had staircases everywhere—and I headed for that. The servants' hall, and the rooms where we all had our offices—they weren't affected. But the main house was in an even worse conflagration. I never want to feel as frantic again in my life. I ran everywhere, I even got into the house, and then I saw that beams were coming down.

We lost twelve people in that fire. And among them we lost Charles and April. Isn't it ironic—when you think of how they had twice fought off fire? It still remains a source of awful wonder to me that the house— especially the part we had so carefully restored—was so completely burned out. As I'm recalling it now, I see that my hands are shaking.

I spent the days that followed at Ardobreen with old Mrs. O'Brien, and together we looked after the infant. Believe it or not, the old man was still alive, and still sharp. They had seen the fire; they were up all night watching it. I think she knew the worst; he didn't. What broke their heart was the fact that they were now too old to look after their one and only grandchild.

The solution came from Mrs. O'Brien. Charles had told her of one other love affair—a girl he met in Dublin, who now lived in Clonmel. Mrs. O'Brien had met her the day we opened the castle with a grand banquet. The two women had become good friends. Mrs. O'Brien was fond of anybody who was fond of Charles.