A Story Lately Told (8 page)

I was on my pony in a field at St. Clerans. Penny was another hand-me-down from Tony, after he got Sixpence. Penny was a mean, gorgeous little Shetland, bright orange with a thick mane and tail. Cantering around the field, we’d go headlong at the jumps, then she’d refuse at the last minute. I would come unstuck and be forced to get back up each time. This, captured on film for a documentary about Dad’s relationship with all things Irish, his calling out after each refusal and subsequent
fall, “Get back on the horse, honey, you don’t want to lose your nerve!” I was smarting from the last refusal, sailing over Penny’s ears, landing hard in the turf. But God forbid you’d lose your mettle, especially if an audience was involved.

One day, Tony and I were walking over the Sarsfield bridge outside the back avenue. We heard some whimpering in the rushes and discovered two newborn puppies—one black and white, the other gold with a white collar and chest. We fed them warm milk out of a baby bottle and put them to sleep in the barn. The next morning the little black-and-white female had died; we named the survivor Moses, and except for his weakness for biting people on bicycles, he was the best dog that ever lived.

In Courtown we had a fox terrier named Rosie. I still have a scar on my forehead from falling over her. For my sixth birthday I got the first dog of my own—Mindy, a little black poodle and a fine huntress. She loved chasing rabbits alongside Seamus, Dad’s Irish wolfhound, but she never caught any. Seamus was the king of the pack, a noble hound with a wheat-colored coat. Standing on his hind paws, he was over seven feet tall, with a temperament as sweet and gentle as a young deer’s. His head was the size of a lapdog. When he laid his cheek down on your knees, you could almost feel him detach from the rest of his body. He had a deep, resonant bark, and his sheer size dictated that he shouldn’t be messed with. Seamus lived until he was seventeen years old—practically unheard of, since the wolfhound breed almost went extinct and had to be re-bred. They were often prone to rheumatoid arthritis, but not Seamus. He lived on a diet of fresh minced lamb, garden greens, milk, and soda bread, and Paddy Coyne walked him on the boreens every day. When my father was away, he lived downstairs with the
staff. But when Dad was due to return, Seamus would assume his position of dignitary on the upper landing outside Dad’s bedroom.

Sad-eyed Flash was Tony’s dog, a Llewellin setter of bottomless devotion. She followed him everywhere. Creagh always had a few greyhounds in a run out back of the hay barn. He and Paddy Lynch had a co-interest in a racing endeavor.

Kitty Cat was our first cat at St. Clerans. Dad had found her, tiny and starving, outside his hotel bedroom window on a drainpipe when he was making
Moby Dick
in Fishguard, Wales. Kitty Cat had many kittens—as I recall, sixteen at one time, in the backyard of the Little House, which proved lethal to our budgies: Tony’s green, mine blue. There was poor Hortensia, the turtle I attempted to force-feed and then buried alive during her hibernation.

For a short while I had Juliet, a lovely little piglet. Before I left for the holidays in Switzerland, I was hoping to teach her table manners. I returned weeks later to a behemoth. Next thing, she was hanging in the larder, alongside the game birds. To this day, I don’t feel complete without the company of animals. The great tragedy is that we generally outlive them.

•  •  •

When Dad’s friend Pauline de Rothschild visited St. Clerans, she wore a long braid to her waist and thigh-high purple cordovan boots. Dad adored her. He always said that her home, Château Mouton, in France, was the most glamorous place he had ever been in his life—the way things were done there, a high level of wealth combined with exquisite taste. Dad appreciated many of the uses to which wealth could be put, though you might say that money wasn’t very important to him, and certainly he didn’t behave like it was something to hold on to,
because there were moments in St. Clerans when I understand he was very broke. I heard a story not too long ago that his business manager would be so anxious, he had to go and vomit before he’d have conversations with my father about money, because he always knew it would be some hideous story.

Dad could lose huge sums gambling. Horses. Poker. Blackjack. Roulette. There were times when things could be quite tense in the office downstairs. But although the whispered conversations about Dad’s disrespect for money worried me and made me insecure, when he was home at St. Clerans, the standard of living never wavered for a second. There were always lots of guests, the Japanese bath was always steaming, the Limerick ham was always ready to be carved. There wasn’t champagne at every meal, but certainly plenty of it appeared in our house. It was sherry and cocktails at seven, then a three-course dinner, and then port for the gentlemen afterward.

I think we were the only people in the county who had central heating, with radiant heat under the marble floor in the hallway. The local dinner guests used to take off their shoes as they came through the front door to warm their feet. They loved it, especially after a long, cold day’s fox hunting. “Oh, John!” they’d exclaim. “It’s marvelous!”

•  •  •

Dorothy Jeakins was my mother’s best friend, even though she lived far away, in Santa Barbara, California. Dorothy was sixteen years older than Mum, but they shared a deep appreciation for things of beauty, and an ardent interest in design, fashion, travel, nature, and history. Dorothy had worked on Broadway and in Hollywood, had received the Academy’s first Oscar awarded to a costume designer, for
Joan of Arc,
and later was the costume designer for Dad’s film
The Misfits.

I came downstairs at the Little House one morning to find Mum about to leave for Dublin, dressed in a Chanel suit and sporting Russian Red Army dancer’s boots that Dorothy had sent to her from Western Costume, in Los Angeles. I had never seen a woman wearing boots before, other than Wellingtons or riding boots. The ladies of the county wore patent shoes with court heels on trips to the city, or to the races.

Dorothy and Mum loved to talk about clothes and were always sending each other color swatches and camisoles with French lace, pale silk stockings embroidered with butterflies and blue cornflowers, kid gloves with shamrocks at the wrist, tortoiseshell combs and shoe buckles. Packages would often arrive from Dorothy containing treasures from her costume collection. When Dorothy came to St. Clerans, she stayed in the guest room at the Little House.

One night, I awakened to screams from my mother’s room. When I ran down the landing to her door, I saw a flash of linen flapping. Mum had left her window open, and several bats had flown in from the garden. Dorothy, six feet tall and barefoot, in a white batiste nightgown, her long black hair flying, was thrashing the air and shouting, “Get out of here, you evil things!” as Mum cowered in bed, covered up to her chin with blankets.

Dorothy’s son, Stephen Dane, was one of my prospective husbands, although he was a good ten years older than I. Even at seventeen, he was very tolerant and didn’t stoop to ridicule, but photographed me instead, under the gaze of the leering Punchinello in the Little House courtyard, pouting in my veil and tiara. Stephen built Tony and me a very nice tree house in the woods off the front drive. I think he was my first love.

Another dear friend of Mum’s was the American painter Morris Graves, who bought a house, Woodtown Manor, in Co.
Cork. Morris was tall and majestic. He made beautiful drawings from nature and had a special affinity for birds; he dedicated a Japanese scroll to Mum, representing her life—a tender stem emerging from the dark earth into an explosion of white and gold.

Mum took me up to Donegal to stay with friends of hers, Derek and Pam Cooper. They lived in a Martello tower—one of the circular, doorless stone forts on the coast that had been built during the nineteenth-century Napoleonic Wars. Pam cooked lobsters for dinner on top of a great AGA stove. They were straight out of the sea and turned bright orange in the pot. They made a high whistling sound when the water boiled, which was startling, but they were delicious to eat. When you drew a bath, the bog water ran brown from the spigot.

Mum’s friend Iris Tree had been a raging beauty in her youth and was best friends with Lady Diana Cooper. Lady Diana was the wife of the politician Duff Cooper and a muse of the photographer Cecil Beaton, and was considered the most beautiful society girl of the 1920s. She was also the mother of John Julius Norwich, a man who would feature prominently in Mum’s future.

T
he town of Loughrea was seven miles from St. Clerans. Until the mid-fifties, there was a fight in the town square to determine who would be the king of the tinkers. Dad told of having seen two men in fierce combat, one with a board swinging from a nail implanted in his skull. The tinkers were itinerant, but we did not call them gypsies. They were often horse dealers, strikingly beautiful people, with brown skin, red hair, and green eyes. They rode around the countryside in painted canvas-covered wagons pulled by Connemara pony or mule. The women wrapped
themselves in thick wool blankets, carrying babies in their arms, and begged for coppers. They spoke in singsong. The children begged, too. By paying out money, you might have hoped that they would leave, but they would come back with double intensity—the lone child or two could turn fast into a swarm.

The main street of Loughrea was a ribbon of shops, varying in size and function, from Sweeney’s hardware to Kelly’s Newsagent and sweetshop, where you could buy ha’penny sweets and comics. I loved
Bunty
and
Judy,
and Tony loved
Corky
and
Beano.

When I was seven and Tony was eight, we moved on from tutors to real school. Tony was going to the Christian Brothers out near the lake, and I was going to the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy, on the far end of town, a stern, chiseled edifice set on an incline above the rest. There were several churches in Loughrea, most of them Catholic.

On my first day at the convent, I sang the “Marseillaise” at the morning assembly. The nuns were suitably impressed. With the exception of a few novices, who wore bonnets and skirts that touched below the knee, the sisters wore full habits, white wimples framing their faces, stiff as cardboard. Mother Mary Borgia was my favorite. She was easily distracted. She showed me how to illuminate italic capitals with glue and gold leaf when we were supposed to be having piano lessons. Sister Adrian was pale, harsh, and angular; I saw her drag one of the orphans around the classroom by the hair. The orphans were always getting in trouble and seemed to have problems with learning and discipline. Their voices were hoarse; they wore plaid skirts and blue cardigans and bright ribbons in their hair. Their second name was always Mary, as if they were born for suffering.

I was teacher’s pet. I took a pound from Dad’s bureau, the
one in his bedroom, which in a previous life had contained papal vestments from the seventeenth century, and bought eight black babies from Biafra. For two shillings and sixpence, you could christen them any name you liked, and keep them fed for a whole year. I named most of my babies Anjelica Mary.

I remember saying, “Daddy, I want to be a nun,” and his replying, “First of all, don’t call me Daddy, call me Dad.” It frustrated me that my parents didn’t want to be called Daddy and Mummy. “Mummy” sounded so dependable, bright, and friendly: “Mummy,” like “plummy” and “funny,” happy on the tip of your tongue. Mum and Dad, by comparison, were plain, lonely sounds; there was no comfort in them.

“So you want to be a nun, honey. Well, tell me, when are you going to start?”

That sort of crashed the idea. I believe that my parents had emphasized to the nuns that we were atheist, so as not to have them attempt to indoctrinate me in the mysteries of the faith, but I immediately took to the religion, even voluntarily putting my hand out for the cane for not knowing my catechism. Simple and effective, the cane sliced through the air and then, in a sharp snap, like the sound of a Christmas cracker, made contact with my knuckles.

I persuaded one of the novices to take me down to the huge ovens in the basement, where they baked the sacrament. She had agreed to allow me to taste an unblessed wafer. I took one and closed my eyes, imagining that I would be penetrated with a vision of God, but she leaned forward and snapped in my face, “Go on! Chew it, now! You bad girl!”

•  •  •

That summer, Dad took Tony to southern Oregon, and they went down the Rogue River together. Tony was learning how
to shoot an air rifle, and already he was a good angler. I remember resenting not being included, hearing that this was a father-and-son trip. No girls—that meant my mother and me.

But sometimes Mum took me abroad, just the two of us. When I was seven, we went to the ballet in New York. I was disappointed because the prima ballerina was wearing a plain green dress and not a tutu and tiara. When Mum took me backstage, all the dancers came up and hugged and kissed her. The men wore tights and a lot of makeup. It was the first time I reckoned that Mum had lived a former life. We went out to visit Grandpa on Long Island and danced on the beach together. As I held her hand, she led me in a series of grand jetés, each one higher and more abandoned than the last.