Hotel to see Mr McNamara, I knew he’d bought the birthday present that he and my mother would jointly give me. Twenty minutes ago he’d walked into the dining-room with the wrapped parcel under his arm. ‘Happy birthday, boy,’ he’d said, placing the parcel on the sideboard beside the other three, from my sisters. It was the tradition in our house – a rule of my father’s – that breakfast must be over and done with, every scrap eaten, before anyone opened a birthday present or a Christmas present.
‘It was McNamara said that,’ my father continued. ‘Ivy-clad Ireland. It’s the neutral condition of us.’
It was my father’s opinion, though not my mother’s, that Ireland should have acceded to Winston Churchill’s desire to man the Irish ports with English soldiers in case the Germans got in there first. Hitler had sent a telegram to de Valera apologizing for the accidental bombing of a creamery, which was a suspicious gesture in itself. Mr McNamara, who also believed that de Valera should hand over the ports to Churchill, said that any gentlemanly gesture on the part of the German Fuhrer was invariably followed by an act of savagery. Mr McNamara, in spite of being a Catholic, was a keen admirer of the House of Windsor and of the English people. There was no aristocracy in the world to touch the English, he used to say, and no people, intent on elegance, succeeded as the English upper classes did. Class-consciousness in England was no bad thing, Mr McNamara used to argue.
My father took from the side pocket of his jacket a small wrapped object. As he did so, my sisters rose from the breakfast table and marched to the sideboard. One by one my presents were placed before me, my parents’ brought from the sideboard by my mother. It was a package about two and a half feet long, a few inches in width. It felt like a bundle of twigs and was in fact the various parts of a box-kite. Charlotte had bought me a book called
‘From Mr McNamara,’ my father said, pointing at the smallest package. I’d forgotten it, because already the people who normally gave me presents were accounted for. ‘I happened to mention,’ my father said, ‘that today was a certain day.’
It was so heavy that I thought it might be a lead soldier, or a horseman. In fact it was a dragon. It was tiny and complicated, and it appeared to be made of gold, but my father assured me it was brass. It had two green eyes that Frances said were emeralds, and small pieces let into its back which she said looked like rubies. ‘Priceless,’ she whispered jealously. My father laughed and shook his head. The eyes and the pieces in the brass back were glass, he said.
I had never owned so beautiful an object. I watched it being passed from hand to hand around the breakfast table, impatient to feel it again myself. ‘You must write at once to Mr McNamara,’ my mother said. ‘It’s far too generous of him,’ she added, regarding my father with some slight disapproval, as though implying that my father shouldn’t have accepted the gift. He vaguely shook his head, lighting a Sweet Afton. ‘Give me the letter when you’ve done it,’ he said. ‘I have to go up again in a fortnight.’
I showed the dragon to Flannagan, who was thinning beetroot in the garden. I showed it to Bridget, our maid. ‘Aren’t you the lucky young hero?’ Flannagan said, taking the dragon in a soil-caked hand. ‘You’d get a five-pound note for that fellow, anywhere you cared to try.’ Bridget polished it with Brasso for me.
That day I had a chocolate birthday cake, and sardine sandwiches, which were my favourite, and brown bread and greengage jam, a favourite also. After tea all the family watched while my father and I tried to fly the kite, running with it from one end of a lawn to the other. It was Flannagan who got it up for us in the end, and I remember the excitement of the string tugging at my fingers, and Bridget crying out that she’d never seen a thing like that before, wanting to know what it was for. ‘Don’t forget, dear, to write to Mr McNamara first thing in the morning,’ my mother reminded me when she kissed me good-night. I wouldn’t forget, I promised, and didn’t add that of all my presents, including the beautiful green and yellow kite, I liked the dragon best.
But I never did write to Mr McNamara. The reason was that the next day was a grim nightmare of a day, during all of which someone in the house was weeping, and often several of us together. ‘My father, so affectionate towards all of us, was no longer alive.
The war continued and Ireland continued to play no part in it. Further accidental German bombs were dropped and further apologies were sent to de Valera by the German Fuhrer. Winston Churchill continued to fulminate about the ports, but the prophecy of Mr McNamara that foreign soldiers would parade in O’Connell Street did not come true.
Knitting or sewing, my mother listened to the BBC news with a sadness in her eyes, unhappy that elsewhere death was occurring also. It was no help to any of us to be reminded that people in Britain and Europe were dying all the time now, with the same sudden awfulness as my father had.
Everything was different after my father died. My mother and I began to go for walks together, I’d take her arm, and sometimes her hand, knowing she was lonely. She talked about him to me, telling me about their honeymoon in Venice, the huge square where they’d sat drinking chocolate, listening to the bands that played there. She told me about my own birth, and how my father had given her a ring set with amber which he’d bought in Louis Wine’s in Dublin. She would smile at me on our walks and tell me that even though I was only thirteen I was already taking his place. One day the house would be mine, she pointed out, and the granary and the mill. I’d marry, she said, and have children of my own, but I didn’t want even to think about that. I didn’t want to marry; I wanted my mother always to be there with me, going on walks and telling me about the person we all missed so much. We were still a family, my sisters and my mother and myself, Flannagan in the garden, and Bridget. I didn’t want anything to change.
After the death of my father Mr McNamara lived on, though in a different kind of way. The house in Palmerston Road, with Mr McNamara’s aunt drinking in an upstairs room, and the paper-thin Mrs Matchette playing patience instead of being successful in the theatre, and Mr Matchette with his squashed forehead, and Kate O’Shea from Skibbereen, and the spaniel called Wolfe Tone: all of them remained quite vividly alive after my father’s death, as part of our memory of him. Fleming’s Hotel remained also, and all the talk there’d been there of the eccentric household in Palmerston Road. For almost as long as I could remember, and certainly as long as my sisters could remember, our own household had regularly been invaded by the other one, and after my father’s death my sisters and I often recalled specific incidents retailed in Fleming’s Hotel and later at our breakfast table. There’d been the time when Mr McNamara’s aunt had sold the house to a man she’d met outside a public house. And the time when Mrs Matchette appeared to have fallen in love with Garda Molloy, who used to call in at the kitchen for Kate O’Shea every night. And the time the spaniel was run over by a van and didn’t die. All of it was preserved, with Mr McNamara himself, white-haired and portly in the smoke-brown bar of Fleming’s Hotel, where snuff could be bought, and Bovril as well as whiskey.
A few months after the death my mother remarked one breakfast-time that no doubt Mr McNamara had seen the obituary notice in the
At the end of that year I was sent to a boarding-school in the Dublin mountains. Miss Sheil continued to come to the house on her Raleigh to teach my sisters, and I’d have far preferred to have remained at home with her. It
