19
‘Will you go and see your old home, Francis?’ Lady Lucy’s voice came back to him as he stirred from an uneasy sleep at half-past eleven in the morning. Even in Ireland, he reflected bitterly, they wouldn’t serve breakfast at this hour. Lucy and Powerscourt had been drinking tea at home when he told her of this expedition to his native country. He had smiled at her. He had always meant to bring Lucy to Ireland on one of those Journeys to the Unknown as he referred to them. Once he had gone as far as to book the tickets. But he never had. Perhaps he was superstitious about taking a second wife on the same journey that led to the drowning of the first.
‘I don’t know if I will or not, Lucy. Maybe I’ll be too busy. Do you think I should?’
Lady Lucy cast a protective glance towards the small figure of Olivia who had fallen asleep on the sofa, her left arm wrapped round her face as if to protect her from evil.
‘Yes, I think you should, Francis. It might do you good to look at it all again. And the gardens should be very beautiful at this time of year.’
‘I just wonder about the ghosts, Lucy. I should think they’re very strong too, in the springtime with the soft light lying across those mountains.’
Yet here he was, in the early afternoon, the Wicklow countryside drowned in sunshine, outside the driveway to Powerscourt House, Enniskerry, where he and his sisters had lived until he was a young man. An old gardener called Michael O’Connell recognized him on his way up through the rhododendrons. Powerscourt wondered if he was the first ghost.
‘Lord Francis, how very nice to see you again. I’d have recognized you anywhere. The family are away just now if you want to have a look around. Nothing much has changed, you’ll be glad to hear.’
Powerscourt remembered the old man teaching him how to string conkers, how to make bows and arrows, how to ride a horse. He had fought at Crecy on these well-kept lawns. He had hidden inside the Wooden Horse and sacked Troy, better known as the stables, under the old man’s watchful eye. A small shed behind the house had done service as the Black Hole of Calcutta. He had lain low on the hills around the house, one of Wellington’s riflemen at Waterloo, while the French artillery pounded their positions, waiting for the final, doomed, onslaught by Marshal Ney and the Imperial Guard.
Then he was at the side of Powerscourt House. It stood on the top of a hill, looking out over the mountains. In front of it was the most remarkable ornamental garden in Ireland, a copy of some ornate Italian extravaganza outside Rome. A long long flight of steps led down to a spectacular fountain in a little lake at the bottom. Bronze putti holding bronze urns marked the passage at the sides of the steps. Powerscourt remembered two of his father’s friends racing their horses up the steps for a bet, the winner making off with fifty pounds. He remembered trying to slide down them in the winter when they had frozen solid and he had nearly broken his neck half-way down.
He looked up at the house. That window there, third from the left on the second floor, had been his bedroom. He had looked out across the steps and the waterfall to the blue hills beyond. He remembered his mother coming to see him one day, so excited because she was going hunting on a cold clear winter’s day. He had asked her why she liked it so much. She ruffled his hair with a laugh, he must have been about ten at the time.
‘Quite simply, my darling, it is the most exciting thing in the world. When you’re riding fast across the countryside, the horse firm and strong beneath you, jumping over hedges and all that sort of thing, it’s exhilarating, it’s wonderful. It makes me feel so alive.’
Powerscourt had smiled, he remembered. He never liked hunting. The nearest he had ever come to the same feelings was one hot and dusty day in India when he and Fitzgerald had ridden with the cavalry against a rebel army. He recalled thinking that you were bound to feel very intensely alive because any second you could be equally intensely dead.
He looked down to the windows of the great drawing room on the ground floor. He had tried to hide in there once before a ball. His father loved dancing, especially with his mother, and once a year the Powerscourt Ball attracted the cream of local and Dublin society. He saw him now, looking very dashing in his white tie and tails, entertaining a group of ladies before the fire, the laughter rising right through the house and the band playing over and over again the waltzes his parents loved so much.
Then he turned on his heel. The memories were coming too fast. The ghosts were winning the battle. He felt the tears coming and he wasn’t sure he could stop them. He saw his mother in the soft evening light brushing his sisters’ hair. She always used to do it before they went to sleep, the hypnotic rhythm of the brush, mother and daughters mesmerized by the sheen on the hair. He could see his father in his study, staring sadly at the account books, telling his only son that it hadn’t been a good year, but that things would look up after Christmas. Powerscourt thought now that he had been putting a brave face on it for the little boy. Things never looked up at all, not after Christmas, not after Easter, not after the summer holidays.
Powerscourt was fleeing the ancestral home as fast as he could now. The influenza had come back, the terrible influenza that had carried off both his parents, the unbearable funerals, the torrents of tears by the gravesides, the desolation that seemed to be with them all for ever. He had thought of going to look at the headstone in the church by the side of the front drive. He couldn’t do it. He set off back to Greystones, his face wet with tears, as the wind rose among the trees and his sodden handkerchief began to drip on to the grass beneath.
He thought suddenly of Lady Lucy. Had she known how terrible it might be for him? Did she realize how powerful the memories would be? Probably she did, he thought. He thought of her, holding Thomas solemnly by the hand, Olivia clutched to her shoulder, all waving him goodbye to him at the front door in Markham Square before he left for Ireland. ‘Come back safely, my love,’ she had whispered as she kissed him goodbye. I must be strong for Lucy, he said to himself as the sobbing began to subside. I must be strong for Thomas and Olivia. As he thought of his wife and children, his tears dried and by the time he returned to Greystones he was composed.
There was a storm that night. The afternoon sun had disappeared by tea-time. A strong wind began to blow in from off the sea. By nightfall the waves were crashing against the walls of the little harbour, cascades of spray shooting up from the rocks beneath the Imperial Hotel. Powerscourt went for a walk along the sea front. The words of a hymn floated out from a tiny church behind the beach.
Abide with me;
Fast falls the eventide:
The darkness deepens;
Lord with me abide!
He thought suddenly of the sailors on their mission from Germany. Were they somewhere out to sea praying to their German gods that the storm would abate, making everything fast, taking in sail as quickly as they could? ‘God help sailors,’ an old gentleman with two mufflers said to Powerscourt as they passed each other by the little railway station, ‘on a night like this.’