The trouble is, she thought, after she had taken her sedative and gone back to bed, words leave a wound, the wound leaves a scar. The nurse will never give out pills to patients again without a doubt somewhere at the back of her mind as to whether she is doing the right thing. Like the question-mark in her father's conscience about not passing poor old Nick for promotion and so giving him his chip on the shoulder. it was bad to die with something on your conscience. One ought to have some warning, so that one could send a telegram to anyone who might have been wronged, saying, 'Forgive me', and then the wrong would he cancelled, blotted out. This was why, in the old days, people flocked round a dying person's bed, hoping, not to be left something in the will, but for mutual forgiveness, a cessation of ill-feeling, a smoothing out of right and wrong. In fact, a sort of love.
Shelagh had acted on impulse. She knew she always would. It was part of her character, and had to be accepted by family and friends. It was not until she was on her way, though, driving north from Dublin in the hired car, that her journey, hastily improvised, took on its real meaning. She was here on a mission, a sacred trust. She was carrying a message from beyond the grave. It was absolutely secret, though, and no one must know about it, for she was sure that if she had told anyone questions would have been asked, arguments raised. So, after the funeral, complete silence about her plans. Her mother, as Shelagh guessed she would, had decided to fly to Aunt Bella at Cap d'Ail.
'I feel I must get right away,' she had said to her daughter. 'You may not realise it, but Dad's illness was a fearful strain. I've lost half a stone. I feel that all I want to do is to close my eyes and lie on Bella's sun-drenched balcony, and try to forget the misery of the past weeks.'
It was like an advertisement for some luxury soap. Pamper yourself. A naked woman deep in a bath of bubbling foam. In point of fact, the first shock over, her mother looked better already, and Shelagh knew that the sun-drenched balcony would soon fill up with Aunt Bella's very mixed bunch of friends socialites, bogus artists, boring old homos, what her father used to call 'phoney riff-raff', but they amused her mother. 'What about you? Why don't you come too?'-the suggestion half-hearted but nevertheless made.
Shelagh shook her head. 'Rehearsals start next week. I thought, before going to London, I'd push off alone in the car somewhere. No sort of plan. Just drive.'
'Why not take a friend?'
'Anyone would get on my nerves at the moment. I'm better alone.'
No further contact between them on anything more than the practical level. Neither said to the other, 'How unhappy are you really? Is this the end of the road for me, for you? What does the future hold?' Instead there were discussions about the gardener and his wife coming to live in, visits from lawyers left until after her mother returned from Cap d'Ail, letters to be forwarded, etc., etc…. Without emotion, like two secretaries, they sat side by side reading and replying to the letters of condolence. You take A to K. I'll take L to Z. And more or less the same message to each: 'Deeply touched… Your sympathy so helpful…' It was like sending out the Christmas cards every December, but the wording was different.
Looking through her father's old address book, she came across the name Barry. Commander Nicolas Barry, D.S.O., R.N. (Retd.), Ballyfane, Lough Torrah, Eire. Both name and address had a line through them, which generally meant that the person had died. She glanced at her mother.
'I wonder why that old friend of Dad's, Commander Barry, hasn't written?' she asked casually. 'He isn't dead, is he?'
'Who?' Her mother looked vague. 'Oh, you mean Nick? I don't think he's dead. He was in some frightful car crash years ago. But they were out of touch before that. He hasn't written to us for years.'
'I wonder why.'
'I don't know. They had some row, I never heard what about. Did you see this very sweet letter from Admiral Arbuthnot? We were all together in Alexandria.'
'Yes, I saw it. What was he like? Not the Admiral-Nick.'
Her mother leant back in her chair, considering the matter.
'Frankly, I never could quite make him out,' she said. 'He'd either be all over one and the greatest fun, especially at parties, or ignoring everybody and making sarcastic remarks. He had a wild streak in him. I remember him coming to stay soon after Dad and I were married-he was best man, you know, at the wedding-and he turned all the furniture upside down in the drawing-room and got very tight. Such a silly thing to do. I was livid.'
Did Dad mind?'
'I don't think so, I can't remember. They knew each other so well, served together, been at Darmouth as boys. Then Nick left the Navy and went back to live in Ireland, and they somehow drifted apart. I had the impression actually that he had the sack, but I never liked to ask. You know what an oyster Dad was about Service matters.'
'Yes…'
(Poor old Nick. A chip on the shoulder. I'd like to shake him by the hand again and wish him luck….)
She saw her mother off at the airport a few days afterwards, and made her own plans for departure to Dublin. The night before she left, searching amongst her father's papers, she found a scrap of paper with a list of dates and the name Nick alongside with a question-mark, but no word of explanation as to what the dates referred to. June 5, 1951. June 25, 1953. June 12, 1954. October 17, 1954. April 24, 1955. August 13, 1955. The list bore no relevance to the rest of the papers in the file, and must have been slipped in there by accident. She copied them down, and put them in an envelope inside her tourist guide.
Well, that was that, and here she was, on the road to… to do what? To apologise, in her deceased father's name, to a retired naval commander passed over for promotion? Wild in his youth? The greatest fun at parties? The image conjured up was not one to whip the appetite, and she began to picture a middle-aged buffer with a hyena laugh who put booby-traps on the top of every door. Perhaps he had tried it on the First Sea Lord and received the boot for his pains. A car accident turned him into a recluse, an embittered one-time clown (but gallant, her father said, which meant what-plunging into oil-infested waters to rescue drowning sailors in the war?) who sat gnawing his fingernails in some old Georgian mansion or mock castle, drinking Irish whisky and regretting all those apple-pie beds.
Some seventy-odd miles from Dublin on a balmy October afternoon, though, with the countryside becoming greener, lusher, yet somehow sparsely inhabited, the glint of water more frequent away to the west, and suddenly a myriad pools and lakes with tongues of land thrusting between them, the prospect of ringing the bell of a Georgian mansion faded. Here were no high walls encircling stately demesnes, only wet fields beyond the road, and surely no means of access to the silver-splintered lakes beyond.
The description of Ballyfane in the official guide had been laconic. 'Situated west of Lough Torrah with numerous smaller loughs close to the village.' The Kilmore Arms had six bedrooms, but there was no mention of mod. cons. If the worst came to the worst she could telephone Nick his old friend's daughter stranded in the neighbourhood, could he suggest a comfortable hotel within ten miles, and she hoped to call upon him in the morning. A butler would answer, an old retainer. 'The Commander would be pleased if you would accept his hospitality here at Ballyfane Castle.' Irish wolfhounds baying, and her host himself appearing on the steps, leaning on a stick….
A church tower appeared over the crest of the road, and here was Ballyfane itself, a village street straggling up a rise flanked by a few sombre houses and shops, names like Driscoll and Murphy painted on boards above doors. The Kilmore Arms could have done with a coat of whitewash, but marigolds in a window-box making a valiant attempt at a second flowering suggested someone with an eye for colour.
Shelagh parked her Austin Mini and surveyed the scene. The door of the Kilmore Arms was open. The entrance hall that also served as a lounge was bare and neat. Nobody was in sight, but a handbell standing on the counter to the left of the entrance seemed there for a purpose. She rang it briskly, and as a sad-faced man emerged from an inner room, limping and wearing spectacles, she had a fearful feeling that it was Nick himself, having fallen on hard times.
'Good afternoon,' she said. 'I was wondering if I could have tea?'
'You can,' he told her. 'A full tea or just the pot?'
'Well, full, I think,' she replied, with a vision of hot scones and cherry jam, flashing him the smile she generally reserved for the stage-doorkeeper.
'It will take about ten minutes,' he said. 'The dining-room is to the right, just three steps down. Have you come far?'
