Another Heartbeat in the House (50 page)

Then Edie went back into the house, sheafed together the pages of Eliza Drury's manuscript, secured them with a stout elastic band, and laid them carefully at the bottom of her suitcase.

Mrs Callinan lived in a neat cottage in a row of other neat cottages on the Mallow road. In front of the house was a tiny square garden with a flagstoned path and a circular flower bed in which a straggly fuchsia bush grew.

Edie knocked on the front door and a voice called, ‘Come in. I'm expecting you.'

She pushed open the door into a small porch where outdoor paraphernalia was tidily arranged, then stepped into a room that was dim and chill, for though the sun was bright outside it struggled to infiltrate the putty-coloured lace curtains.

Mrs Callinan was sitting very upright in a chintz armchair by the fireplace with a shawl over her lap and her hands resting on the arms of the chair. A small table had been set for tea, and a kettle stood on a brass trivet on the hearth, even though there was no fire. A paper fan had been set in the grate, as a background to a sickly-looking plant of indeterminate species; both were specked with soot.

‘You see?' said Mrs Callinan. ‘I have everything ready. I didn't want to waste time foostering about because I tire easily and I know you want to quiz me about Lissaguirra. Prospect House, as it's called now. Your name is Edie Chadwick; I shall call you Edie if you don't mind. I'm used to calling my pupils by their Christian names. I won't stand up.'

‘How do you do, Mrs Callinan? Thank you so much for agreeing to see me.'

Mrs Callinan inclined her head and indicated an armchair opposite. ‘You may take a seat there. Please pour us both tea, and help yourself to tea brack. I won't have anything to eat. A drop of milk, no sugar.'

‘I brought you some chocolates.'

‘Thank you. You may leave them on the sideboard.'

Edie had bought a box of Milk Tray in the posher of the grocers' shops. She had brought Mrs Callinan another gift – a memento of the house where she had been born – but the chocolates had been received with such indifference that Edie felt apprehensive about presenting the old lady with something that might prove even less welcome. She set the box on a crocheted runner, then poured tea into porcelain cups and cut a thin slice of brack. She hated tea brack, but she said, ‘Goodness! This looks delicious.'

‘We have dispensed with the formalities. You may ask your questions. And please hurry up about it.'

Edie felt terribly nervous, suddenly, and then realized that it was because Mrs Callinan reminded her of the maths teacher at her prep school who hadn't liked her. She supposed that to a lady in her nineties she, Edie, must appear a mere youngster. If that were the case, she decided, she'd do exactly as she was instructed.

‘As you wish, Mrs Callinan.' She cleared her throat. ‘Why was the name of the lodge changed from Lissaguirra to Prospect House?'

‘The Frobishers decided that the house should have an English name.'

‘Who did they buy it from?'

‘Some English nobleman. I never met him. He sold the place because he had no use for it. He lived in England: it was no longer the thing to keep a residence in Ireland. It was the time of the Nationalists and Charles Stewart Parnell, and unrest was fomenting.'

Edie felt as though she were back in her loathsome history class. She didn't want a lecture on politics, she wanted a personal account of the house and the people who had lived there. She had pictured herself and Mrs Callinan sitting down and having a cosy natter together in front of a turf fire, with Mrs Callinan calling her ‘lovie' while she reminisced about the old days, and then Mrs Callinan might have come out with the great revelation that she was Eliza Drury's daughter, and the whole story would have been resolved and maybe wound up with a happy ending, with news of grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. But Clara Venus was dead, and so were Eliza and St Leger and William Thackeray, and really, what was the point in Edie having come here at all?

‘So who lived there before the Frobishers?'

‘My mother, Bridget Cassidy, and a lady named Eliza Drury.'

‘You're Young Biddy's daughter!'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘I mean – I have a picture of you with your mother and father, and another lady, standing outside the house.'

Edie delved into her bag and produced the framed daguerreotype that she had wrapped in pretty floral paper and tied with a ribbon.

‘Unwrap it for me, if you would be so kind. I have difficulty untying knots.'

Edie noticed for the first time that Mrs Callinan's hands were gnarled and claw-like, like the hands of an Egyptian mummy. She felt a rush of sympathy. The former schoolmistress had clearly gone to some trouble to have tea ready and laid out in advance of Edie's arrival so that she did not betray telltale signs of arthritis. She unwrapped the daguerreotype and laid it on Mrs Callinan's lap.

‘My mother,' said the old lady, leaning forward and peering at the photograph. Edie saw her smile for the first time, a smile so minuscule it was as though a tiny pin-tuck had lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘And my father. He died shortly after that picture was taken. Eliza – Miss Drury – was the last to go. She and my mother died within weeks of each other. They had become quite dependent upon each other in their old age, but I was married then, you understand, with responsibilities, and could not take them in. I was schoolmistress here in Doneraile for many years.' She looked up from the photograph and regarded Edie with a kind of challenge, as though defying her to doubt that an old lady such as she should ever have held a position of authority.

‘I have met some of your old pupils,' said Edie. ‘They speak of you with great affection.'

‘I doubt
that
!' said Mrs Callinan, with a rusty laugh. ‘Respect, perhaps, but hardly affection.'

‘You taught them well. I have never seen such beautiful handwriting.'

‘Of whom do you speak?'

‘Seán the Post and Mrs Healy. They write in the same hand.'

‘It was Miss Drury who taught me copperplate. She taught me to read and write when I was very small, and to appreciate art and philosophy. I was reading Voltaire when I was ten. We studied all the classics together. And of course, she taught me to speak French.
Parlez-vous français, mademoiselle?
'

‘
Un peu
.'

‘I spoke French continually with Eliza. She always made me call her Eliza, never Miss Drury.
J'étais une babillarde formidable!
' Mrs Callinan laughed again, and this time her laugh was that of a much younger woman, bell-like and rather flirtatious. She looked down at the photograph, and Edie saw her expression change. Suddenly she was grave again. ‘You came for something, Miss … Miss Drury?'

‘Chadwick. My name is Edie Chadwick.'

‘Of course it is. And I am tired now. It is time for you to go. I have answered all your questions, I think. You came to find out about the history of the house, didn't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Yes. Yes. There it is. I have it ready for you.' She nodded toward a large manila envelope that lay on the stool beside her. ‘There it is,' she said again. ‘Take it. Take that … thing. It has papers in it. Take it!'

Edie reached for the envelope. ‘What is it?'

‘I told you! It contains some writing of – of the woman of whom we were speaking. It was in the strongbox in which she kept her will. Have you had your tea?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then go.'

‘May I do anything for you, Mrs Callinan? May I fetch you something before –'

‘No! Go. Just go.'

Edie took a step towards the door. She felt dreadful, leaving the old lady all on her own. She owed it to her to be at least of some small service. She turned back to reiterate her offer of help, but Mrs Callinan had forgotten she was there. She was sitting hunched over the photograph, gazing at it.

Edie stepped out onto the front step and closed the door behind her. Mrs Healy was hovering by the garden gate.

‘I guessed you wouldn't be long,' she said. ‘Did you have any luck?'

‘I don't know.'

‘She was looking forward to a visit.'

‘She was?' Edie sounded dubious.

‘She always does. But then she gets confused and isn't able for it, and covers by being cantankerous.'

‘She was very dignified,' said Edie.

‘I'm glad. That would be the end for Martha, if she thought she was losing her dignity. That's the worst thing for us women – when the dignity goes. It's the only thing we have to cling onto, to remind us that we were once somebody.'

‘I'd say Mrs Callinan was … formidable, in her time,' said Edie.

‘She was. She can be, still. I'll go in to her now, and give her a hand.'

‘That's neighbourly of you.'

‘We mind each other hereabouts. Always have done, and – please God – always will. Good day to you, Miss Chadwick.'

‘Good day, Mrs Healy.'

‘Have a good trip back to London.'

‘Thank you.'

Edie walked back to where she'd left her bicycle, on the main street of the village. When she reached it, she laid the manila envelope carefully in the wicker basket. Eliza's writings, Mrs Callinan had said. She thought she had read all of Eliza's story. Maybe this was the last chapter.

Sending a smile to Seán the Post who was cycling down Buttevant Road, Edie stepped down on the pedal of her bike and started off for Lissaguirra.

I AM LOOKING
through the library window at the lake. The swans are there: they are not, of course, the same pair that glided across the water to greet us when Clara Venus and I arrived that November day decades ago, on a dray drawn by a donkey. There have been generations of swans at Lissaguirra since, and they have all mated for life – but for one pair whose union ended when the chicks were killed by a fox.

I remember very little about that time. From the moment I woke on the morning of the day Death came lurching into our lives, memory and nightmare are merged in one grotesque chimera. It was as if that day, and the days and weeks that followed, happened to someone else. I liken it to the parlour game called Consequences, where neither the beginning, middle nor end of the narrative makes sense. ‘
Eliza Drury
met
Jameson St Leger
in
a wood
. She said to him,
Where is my child?
He said to her,
I was after the fox
. And the consequence of the story was:
chaos, horror, madness.
'

They say I tried to dispatch St Leger with a knife, as Rochester's mad wife had done in Miss Brontë's novel: I used on him the knife I had never thought to use on one so dear. They say I tried to kill myself by walking into the lake. They say I nearly died of the fever I contracted – and of course I wished I had, because after Death took Clara Venus there was nothing to live for.

How fortunate was the poet Wordsworth, that the images that flashed upon his inward eye happened to be a field of beauteous daffodils! I wonder what he might have made of the images that ambush
my
inward eye, leaving me stunned and sick with shock. Sometimes I relive snatches of that evening: the frantic stumbling through the wood, the brambles that tugged at my hair and sleeves, the taste of blood from the lacerations on my face, the howls of anguish that tore my throat. St Leger slumped at the kitchen table, head upon his arms, the expanse of his broad shoulders, the grip of Young Biddy's fingers as she wrested the knife from me. The shingle beneath my bare feet, the heavy silk of the water, the weight of the stones in my pockets, the frigid, welcome embrace of the lake, Christy's strong arms as he carried me back to the house.