A Story Lately Told (6 page)

To John from Ricki

November 8, 1957

My horse Errigal is going like a dream; I had him out yesterday, on the roads and in the field, and his mouth is so light you can do anything with him; this week had been push and go personified; and it has been about five in the evening, on two occasions, when we have ridden out, and yesterday was the first good daylight work he’d had all week. Riding in the evening has been something special and marvelous, though. The weather, since Monday, has been clear and clearer; yesterday was the first hard frost, and again this morning the garden lay somnolent under the glazing. The sky has blazed blue, the remaining few Beech leaves are brazen against the sky; the world is so fragilely, delicately still, it seems it must break. Riding in the bleached blue light of the moon was extraordinary—the air so clear and perfectly cold, temperature ideal for the life of
a horse. Last night was the full, the moon rose bright blush pink, the same color as old, well cared for copper, so bright at first that the stars were quite outshone, save for one impudent—probably Venus—who defied extinguishing.

My mother was out of her element in the rough West Country, trying to do everything beautifully. She was an exotic fish out of water, even though she made a good effort. She’d organized a hunt ball early on at St. Clerans. It was the dead of winter. The temperature was subzero. She put up a marquee in the Little House yard—Guinness and champagne were to be served. And oysters brought up from Paddy Burkes pub in Clarinbridge. And a band. She was wearing a white strapless taffeta evening dress. It was twinkling with hoarfrost inside the marquee, so cold that no one could bear to go out that night. I remember my mother, her eyes shining, hovering alone at the entrance as the band packed up their instruments early to go home. She was as beautiful, as translucent and remote, as one of the photographs I’d seen in the ballet books she had given to me, like Pavlova or the Queen of the Willis in
Giselle.

Over the summer, Tony and I went with Nurse and Mum to Achill Island for a few weeks’ holiday. Joined to the mainland by a causeway and fringed with deep-purple heather, Achill is an outcropping of limestone, where much of the amethyst in Ireland is quarried. A small hotel and a couple of shops were the only concessions to the outside world. Along the drive, there were thatched cottages, few and far between. Tony fished and I gathered seashells with Nurse on the beach near the harbor, where the black curraghs came in off the Atlantic with their catches of silver mackerel like lost souls on the end of catgut lines of colored feathers.

Mum and Nora Fitzgerald, a good friend of my parents’ and Dublin’s premier wine merchant, would occasionally go out into the countryside by night and saw down billboards that they thought were a blight to the landscape. I remember some pranks of theirs, like stealing an enormous iron key and locking the baronial doors to the dining room of a hotel called Ashford Castle, trapping all the guests eating lunch inside. Then off they went, cackling.

Mum and Nora had another big joke between them, “The Merkin Society,” and any stray sheep’s wool snagged on a line of barbed wire was fertile ground for hilarity. Although I had no idea that the source of this joke was the rather specialized information that a merkin was in fact a pubic wig, I sought to join their evident enjoyment by procuring some animal stickers at Woolworth’s and affixing them to the doors of the Little House with handwritten messages that went “Start the day the merkin way!” and “A merkin a day keeps the doctor away!” Evidently I had struck the right note, as this seemed to vastly amuse them.

D
esigned by the architect Richard Morrison, the Big House had been built in 1784. There was a fountain on the front lawn that Dad had found in Paris, and a ha-ha beyond it—a sunken wall that allowed for an unobstructed view across the wide horse pasture, with its two wind-and-rain-battered oak trees. The turf-brown river ran alongside, with daffodils on its banks, midges skating on the surface, and red-beaked moorhens nesting in the brackish reeds and dogwood at the river’s edge, icy cold when Tony and I waded in to fill a jam jar with glossy little eels, our legs so white, we looked phosphorescent in the bog water.

The front door to the Big House was moss green, and on it hung a large brass knocker—a nobleman’s hand, with a lace cuff, holding a ball. You would hear it echo inside on the polished black marble floor of the front hall, with its imprint of fossils and ancient shells. To the right was the dining room. The walls were papered in a reproduction of a Kenzo screen, which Dad had a printmaker make up in Japan—a bird standing on a flowering stump of wood. The tiered Italian candelabra was hand-lit at night, and the long mahogany table shone with Georgian silver and Waterford crystal. Across the hall was the drawing room, its colors pale gold, gray, pink, and turquoise. Dad had found a gold-leaf sunburst in a Mexican church, which sprayed across the ceiling, from the center of which hung an eighteenth-century French chandelier. A Tang horse lifted a graceful foreleg. A large, incandescent Monet
Water Lily
hung on the south wall.

The inner hall, with terra-cotta walls and an Aubusson carpet, boasted an extremely well-supplied bar. The study walls were painted Gauloises blue, and curtains of red báinín wool hung by the tall windows. Dad’s art books occupied a full wall above a mahogany cabinet that contained a record player and supported three large Veracruz figures sitting cross-legged atop it.

In a spacious kitchen clad in antique tiles shipped from Mexico, there was an oil painting of a barefoot, airborne Madonna, raising her fingers in a blessing. A bow window looked out onto my octagonal playhouse, outfitted with a small cast-iron stove on which I would fry in butter the tiny potato chips that Dad loved. The playhouse once was a dairy to the main house, and the small ruin of a monastery beside it was now largely overgrown. When the house was being restored, some workmen who were connecting a water pipe dug up two human skeletons.
The Gardaí were brought down from Dublin, but it was soon determined that the deceased were monks who had met their fate peacefully, in the previous century.

Behind the kitchen were the pantry and the TV room, where we watched the first heavyweight prizefight televised in Ireland—the collision of Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston. Dad wrote in his autobiography, “The little TV room would be thick with smoke and expletives, the staff would join in modestly but with gusto; we were on common ground.”

There was a larder in the basement where the kills of the day were hung, mostly birds that had seen the wrong end of Tony’s gun—wood pigeon, grouse, duck, snipe. At dinner you had to watch out not to break your teeth on the shot pellets that brought them down.

The Gun Room had French doors that opened out onto a stone-and-concrete moat surrounding the house like a secret passage. On the bright forest-green walls hung taxidermy game that my father had shot in Africa and India—the head of a snarling young tiger hung opposite a placidly bovine water buffalo. The pelt of the tiger lay underfoot next to a pool table lined in red felt. Several impala gazed on the locked-down rifles with the glassy-eyed, dumb expressions of the unfortunately surprised. Next door, the office, with its top shelf of Oscars and other awards, was the destination of the long phone calls, the heated discussions with the business managers.

Down the hall was the wine cellar. My mother had created an area by the back door for flower arranging, and original Toulouse-Lautrec posters from the Moulin Rouge hung on the surrounding walls.

When Dad returned from filming
The Barbarian and the Geisha,
he was enchanted by the ways of the Orient. He installed a
full Japanese bath, which cooked at a temperature almost high enough to boil an egg, and imported shoji doors and mats and some large Japanese rocks from Hokkaido, despite the fact that similar stones littered the fields of Co. Galway. When we tried to circumnavigate the nudity rules and chose to wear bathing suits, we were seriously admonished by Dad, whose tolerance for our apparent lack of sophistication in these matters was obviously strained.

On the top floor of the Big House, two carved mermaids from a Mexican church organ decorated the landing. All the upstairs rooms had fireplaces—even the bathrooms. Off the staircase was the Napoleon Room, so called because of its lavish Empire bed. Next door was the Lavender Room, a little claustrophobic, with French cotton fabric depicting shepherdesses lining the walls. And opposite, the Bhutan Room, with persimmon-and-indigo silk-embroidered curtains.

The Red Sitting Room separated the Grey Room from my father’s wing on the upper landing. On special occasions, we would meet there by candlelight at sunset for drinks or champagne before dinner. It was an exquisite little room, with an open fireplace and flocked wallpaper the color of old poppies and a pale-blue-and-green Juan Gris harlequin on the wall. In the center of the room was a mysterious
pietra dura
Florentine table from the eighteenth century inlaid with colored stone to create an image of scattered playing cards, a dagger, a key, a ring, and a rose. The Grey Room was the most beautiful guest room in the Big House. Its walls were the shade of a pigeon’s wing, and a Renaissance crucifix hung above the bed.

Dad’s quarters had dusty forest-green cut velvet on the walls, beige carpeting, and a canopied four-poster Florentine matrimonial bed adorned with artichoke-leaf carvings and turtledoves
with necks entwined. One bay window overlooked the river, the other the driveway, the fountain, and the wide pastures beyond. This was Dad’s inner sanctum, the hub where ideas were formed, judgments passed, and decisions reached.

It may be that no art object in the Big House was of more unusual provenance than the Monet
Water Lily.
The story went that Mum had gone to Long Island to pick up Tony and me from Nana and Grandpa and bring us back to Deauville. When she returned, Billy Pearson and Dad decided to come down from Paris to join her and check out the racecourse and the local casinos. One day, strolling around the harbor, Dad noticed an art gallery and walked in. After he struck up a conversation with the owner, she invited him to see some pictures from her private collection. “They were all masterpieces,” said Dad. But a single work stood out from the rest. It was one of Monet’s famous paintings of water lilies at Giverny. When Dad asked her how much it cost, he was astounded to find out it was priced at just ten thousand dollars, an extraordinarily low sum for such a great work, but he could not afford it. He was broke.

Dad asked Mum for eight hundred dollars, the last of the housekeeping money, to go gambling. She told him that if she gave it to him, she was going to come along. So Mum, Dad, and Billy went off to the casino to try their luck. Dad lost all the money immediately on chemin de fer and asked to sign a voucher for more, but the casino would not give him credit. The producer Mike Todd happened to be there and lent Dad a thousand dollars. Dad placed the bet as Billy wandered off to the bar.

A short while later the bartender said to Billy, “It looks like your friend is on a roll.” Dad had won his first bet and followed it by another and another. At six wins, the casino was having
trouble covering the bet, and because the odds were so low, everyone was now betting against Dad. People were crowded around the table shouting and urging him on. Mum was jumping up and down. Dad was doubling his money again and again. “I was having a helluva time,” Dad recalled. And then his luck turned. He lost it all on the next hand. Mum blanched, until the dealer pushed a small stack of chips across the table to Dad, just over ten thousand dollars. It was what the casino had been unable to cover.

“It’s okay, honey,” said Dad to Mum. “We won the Monet.”

•  •  •

There was a brief succession of housekeepers, cooks, maids, and menservants at the Big House, until Madge Creagh, our cook from Courtown House, accepted Dad’s offer to come to work at St. Clerans with her husband, Creagh, our charming and impeccable butler for years to come. Creagh was courteous, self-effacing, and correct. In the pantry, where the maids would make little curls of butter and squeeze the oranges for the breakfast trays, he would use a bone on the hunting boots to make them shine like black mirror. Mrs. Creagh was a fantastic cook. She was a round, smiling presence in her white apron, her pink hands dusty with flour. She always had a fresh loaf of bread baked in the huge AGA cooker and delighted my father by learning how to make an excellent Mexican-style chili and beans. The Creaghs occupied a small apartment in the basement with their daughter, Karen, who later would be an All Ireland Champion céilí dancer.

•  •  •

Tony and I were often at a distance from our parents. Although later we would spend more time up at the Big House, for the most part it was reserved for Dad’s appearances over the Christmas
holidays and the few other visits he might make throughout the year. Then, like a sleeping beauty awakened, the house would come alive, glowing from the inside, turf fires burning in every room. The activity in and around the house would go into a different rhythm; even the dogs had an air of expectancy. Dad always brought wonderful presents: kimonos and pearls for Mum, a blue polka-dot Spanish dancing dress for me, a matador’s suit of lights for Tony, a life-size doll called “Little Black Sambo” that walked when you raised his arms, a glass tea set from Mexico that Mary Lynch and I put outside in the hollow of a chestnut tree for the fairies. I lived in the storybooks Mum gave me, like
Grimm’s Fairy Tales,
with its fantastical illustrations by Arthur Rackham, where elves and fairies hid like chameleons among the leaves and flowers, and witches lived in the roots of hawthorn trees. For a long time I believed in fairies.