C and I haven’t discussed it yet, but I’m all for packing up and getting out of Dodge when W and K, who arrive at eleven this morning, depart tomorrow. They could drive us to Sligo or thereabout and surely we can find a room in a pleasant inn or hotel-I will do some phoning after the breakfast rush clears the kitchen. Another few days and we’ll be done with this most recent Long and Unlovely Confinement.
You and I should learn to fish, Henry, it would give us something to talk about in our dotage. The sport appears to hold its fans in thrall, they can’t get enough of it-they’ve been known to depart this mortal coil promoting fishing with their final breath. All our anglers out this morning at sunrise, ready to go again full throttle.
Have been adopted by yet another dog-this fellow a Jack Russell of the Pudding variety, long in the tooth like the rest of us, but up for anything. He sleeps under or on our bed, depending on circumstances.
We plan to read the southern writers again when we get home-Flannery O’Connor for one, to look at what happened to the great Irish literary tradition as it traveled across the Pond and slipped under our Magnolia Curtain. My guess is that it wasn’t greatly transformed, which is a good thing.
A fine library at my fingertips, yet have cracked only two covers on its many shelves-a journal kept by the builder of the house on the hill above, and an old volume in which I found this observation of the Irish by Edmund Campion, martyred 1581:
‘The people are thus inclined: religious, franke, amorous, irefull, sufferable of paines infinite, very glorious, many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with warres, great almes-givers, surpassing in hospitalitie… They are sharpe-witted, lovers of lerning, capable of any studie whereunto they bend themselves, constant in travaile, adventurous, intractable, kinde-hearted…’
So there you have in a nutshell the Gaelic side of our heritage. Though written in the 16th century, the description isn’t much out of fashion would be my guess.
Never waste a crisis, said Albert Schweitzer (I think it was Al), but what the kind-hearted people here will do with this latest brouhaha is beyond me. I don’t know much, but I do know this: I will never open a lodging for guests, it is 24/7 and hell to pay to make a bit of heaven for other people.
Take care of yourself and do all that the doctors-and Peggy-tell you to do.
Dhia dhuit, my brother,
Timothy
He had glanced at the nearly bare dining room wall and seen the darker rectangle of paint which the Barret protected against fading. He’d chosen to sit with his back to the sideboard while having breakfast and writing the letter, thus hiding from view another sight he didn’t care for: a barricade of yellow tape across the doors to the garden.
He walked to the library, Pud at his heels, dropped the stamped envelope in the box at the sofa, saluted Malone’s hat in the entrance hall, and stepped out to a shaft of birdsong. He stood for a moment, imagining glaciers lumbering through these regions, carving out what they pleased-valleys, coastlines, mountains, lakes, the astonishing Ben Bulben.
Anna was at her flower beds, crouching among the iris with a pruner.
‘Good morning, Anna.’
‘Good morning, Reverend.’ She didn’t look up.
‘Did you rest a little?’
‘A little,’ she said. ‘And you?’ Not looking up. A rooster crowed beyond the beeches.
‘Well enough. Liam?’
‘He’s out with the sheep, the damp has started a bit of foot rot. He likes tending the sheep.’ She turned to him, her eyes red with the little sleep. ‘It takes his mind off things.’
She dropped spent blooms into a trug; there was a close scent of catmint and lavender.
‘I believe Dr. Feeney would be prescribing a real day off for you.’
‘With all due respect to Dr. Feeney,’ she said, ‘he has never managed a guest lodge. One must keep a pleasing front no matter what comes, and be full of smiles into the bargain. There’s always a scrap one can pull from the deep.’
‘Always a scrap, yes.’ Like the rest of the human horde, he had pulled many a scrap and would doubtless pull more. ‘Counting ours, you’ll have had nine frys this morning.’ He didn’t envy her the labor of it.
‘And box lunches for our anglers and ghillies. But I’ve seen the lean days we were building our business, when there were no frys to be made a’tall at Broughadoon. I’ll take th’ nine over the none.’
He wanted to ask if her roses were troubled with black spot and beetles, as were his, but… ‘If there’s anything I can do…’
She stood and handed him a stem of iris, the bloom golden in color. ‘Thank you for hearing me yesterday; ’t is a great gift to be heard. You really listened, and your prayer-I shall always remember it. I felt I was starving unto death, and it fed me.’
He lifted the curved petals to catch a scent he’d favored since childhood. ‘Something from Macbeth came to me in the night-give sorrow words; the grief that doesn’t speak whispers o’er the fraught heart and bids it break. Thank you for trusting me.’
‘I feel sad for Liam, ’t was the truest link to his da, that painting. Such value can’t be appraised nor replaced and the books are small consolation.’
‘Yes.’
‘’t is in a way like losing his father again. And the final blow is that we hadn’t insured it properly. Loss upon loss. We had meant to…’
They were silent then, looking toward the lake.
‘There’s never any privacy, really, in keeping an inn, even when one lies in one’s own bed. Personal life and possessions are so blended into the business, there’s no telling where one stops and the other begins. One is ever in the company of others.’ She looked at him. ‘But it’s what we love, of course, and one pays a price always for what is loved.’
‘Yes.’
‘In the end, the guest sees everything, it’s all so… intimate; I wish we could protect you from that.’
‘A pet occupation of the Enemy is to distance us from intimacy. Such intimacy is a sacrifice for you and Liam, but a gift to us.’
The cloud moved off her face, she nearly laughed. ‘You’re a very different sort of man.’
‘There,’ he said, laughing.
‘There,’ she said, somehow relieved.
‘The Mass rock-we read about it in the journal. Is there a chance of seeing it?’
‘Past the fishing hut and into the wood a half kilometer. You’ll have a stone wall to climb over. ’t is in a grove, hard by a beech with a limb looking like an elephant’s head. You’ll see the doleful eye and the long trunk.’
‘I saw the anglers going out.’ He had no idea why he was forcing conversation on this stricken woman.
‘The club wanted to sleep in, but the ghillies were paid in advance and so they’re off to get their money’s worth. As for the men, they invited themselves to tag along with the ladies, they’ll be leaving us tomorrow.’ Anna gave him a half-smile from the deep.
He saw movement along the lake path-a man with a camera emerged from the bushes.
‘Garda,’ she said. ‘They’re everywhere.’
He should go about his business and leave Anna about hers. He was glued to the spot, brainless as any eejit.
‘Da wants you to have use of the Vauxhall-if you’ll take the use of it. A terrible old thing, the Vauxhall; still and all, ’t is safe enough to take you round to see th’ beauty.’ She drew off her work gloves. ‘We’re gormless not to have thought of it before.’
‘You’re kind. Thank you.’ He didn’t want to say that the anglers weren’t the only ones having their last day. ‘I regret that the uproar took some of the shine off what Bella did for us. It was a great privilege to hear her.’