The town’s grocers now stocked foreign cheeses, brie and camembert and Port Salut, and wines were available to go with them. The plush Cocktail Room of the New Ormonde set a standard: the wife of a solicitor, a Mrs Duggan, began to give six o’clock parties once or twice a year, obliging her husband to mix gin and Martini in glass jugs and herself handing round a selection of nuts and small Japanese crackers. Canon Cotter looked in as a rule and satisfied himself that all was above board. He rejected, though, the mixture in the jugs, retaining his taste for a glass of John Jameson.
From the windows of their convent the Loreto nuns observed the long, sleek cars with GB plates; English and American accents drifted on the breeze to them. Mothers cleaned up their children and sent them to the Golf Club to seek employment as caddies. Sweet-shops sold holiday mementoes. The brown, soda and currant breads of Murphy-Flood’s bakery were declared to be delicious. Mr Healy doubled the number of local girls who served as waitresses in his dining-room, and in the winter of 1961 he had the builders in again, working on an extension for which the Munster and Leinster Bank had lent him twenty-two thousand pounds.
But as the town increased its prosperity Carraveagh continued its decline. The Middletons were in their middle-sixties now and were reconciled to a life that became more uncomfortable with every passing year. Together they roved the vast lofts of their house, placing old paint tins and flower pot saucers beneath the drips from the roof. At night they sat over their thin chops in a dining-room that had once been gracious and which in a way was gracious still, except for the faded appearance of furniture that was dry from lack of polish and of a wallpaper that time had rendered colourless. In the hall their father gazed down at them, framed in ebony and gilt, in the uniform of the Irish Guards. He had conversed with Queen Victoria, and even in their middle-sixties they could still hear him saying that God and Empire and Queen formed a trinity unique in any worthy soldier’s heart. In the hall hung the family crest, and on ancient Irish linen the Cross of St George.
The dog that accompanied the Middletons now was called Turloch, an animal whose death they dreaded for they felt they couldn’t manage the antics of another pup. Turloch, being thirteen, moved slowly and was blind and a little deaf. He was a reminder to them of their own advancing years and of the effort it had become to tend the Herefords and collect the weekly eggs. More and more they looked forward to Fridays, to the warm companionship of Mrs Gerrity and Mr Healy’s chatter in the hotel. They stayed longer now with Mrs Gerrity and in the hotel, and idled longer in the shops, and drove home more slowly. Dimly, but with no less loyalty, they still recalled the distant past and were listened to without ill-feeling when they spoke of it and of Carraveagh as it had been, and of the Queen whose company their careless father had known.
The visitors who came to the town heard about the Middletons and were impressed. It was a pleasant wonder, more than one of them remarked, that old wounds could heal so completely, that the Middletons continued in their loyalty to the past and that, in spite of it, they were respected in the town. When Miss Middleton had been ill with a form of pneumonia in 1958 Canon Cotter had driven out to Carraveagh twice a week with pullets and young ducks that his housekeeper had dressed. ‘An upright couple,’ was the Canon’s public opinion of the Middletons, and he had been known to add that eccentric views would hurt you less than malice. ‘We can disagree without guns in this town,’ Mr Healy pronounced in his Cocktail Room, and his visitors usually replied that as far as they could see this was the result of living in a Christian country. That the Middletons bought their meat from a man who had once locked them into an upstairs room and had then waited to. shoot soldiers in their hall was a fact that amazed the seasonal visitors. You lived and learned, they remarked to Mr Healy.
The Middletons, privately, often considered that they led a strange life. Alone in their two beds at night they now and again wondered why they hadn’t just sold Carraveagh forty-eight years ago when their father died: why had the tie been so strong and why had they in perversity encouraged it? They didn’t fully know, nor did they attempt to discuss the matter in any way. Instinctively they had remained at Carraveagh, instinctively feeling that it would have been cowardly to go. Yet often it seemed to them now to be no more than a game they played, this worship of the distant past. And at other times it seemed as real and as important as the remaining acres of land, and the house itself.
‘Isn’t that shocking?’ Mr Healy said one day in 1968. ‘Did you hear about that, Mr Middleton, blowing up them post offices in Belfast?’
Mr Healy, red-faced and short-haired, spoke casually in his Cocktail Room, making midday conversation. He had commented in much the same way at breakfast-time, looking up from the Irish Independent. Everyone in the town had said it too: that the blowing up of sub-post offices in Belfast was a shocking matter.
‘A bad business,’ Fat Cranley remarked, wrapping the Middletons’ meat. ‘We don’t want that old stuff all over again.’
‘We didn’t want it in the first place,’ Miss Middleton reminded him. He laughed, and she laughed, and so did her brother. Yes, it was a game, she thought: how could any of it be as real or as important as the afflictions and problems of the old butcher himself, his rheumatism and his reluctance to retire? Did her brother, she wondered, privately think so too?
‘Come on, old Turloch,’ he said, stroking the flank of the red setter with the point of his shoe, and she reflected that you could never tell what he was thinking. Certainly it wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to talk about.
‘I’ve put him in a bit of mince,’ Fat Cranley said, which was something he often did these days, pretending the mince would otherwise be thrown away. There’d been a red setter about the place that night when he waited in the hall for the soldiers: Breen and Maguire had pushed it down into a cellar, frightened of it.
‘There’s a heart of gold in you, Mr Cranley,’ Miss Middleton murmured, nodding and smiling at him. He was the same age as she was, sixty-six: he should have shut up shop years ago. He would have, he’d once told them, if there’d been a son to leave the business to. As it was, he’d have to sell it and when it came to the point he found it hard to make the necessary arrangements. ‘Like us and Carraveagh,’ she’d said, even though on the face of it it didn’t seem the same at all.
Every evening they sat in the big old kitchen, hearing the news. It was only in Belfast and Derry, the wireless said; outside Belfast and Derry you wouldn’t know anything was happening at all. On Fridays they listened to the talk in Mrs Gerrity’s bar and in the hotel. ‘Well, thank God it has nothing to do with the South,’ Mr Healy said often, usually repeating the statement.
The first British soldiers landed in the North of Ireland, and soon people didn’t so often say that outside Belfast and Derry you wouldn’t know anything was happening. There were incidents in Fermanagh and Armagh, in Border villages and towns. One Prime Minister resigned and then another one. The troops were unpopular, the newspapers said; internment became part of the machinery of government. In the town, in St Patrick’s Protestant Church and in the Church of the Holy Assumption, prayers for peace were offered, but no peace came.