cigarettes, discovering herself with an older man. You fell in love with all that and you manage to blame a woman who’s dead. Why not blame yourself, Cosmo? Why not simply say you wanted a change?’
‘I do blame myself. I’ve told you I do.’
‘Why didn’t you marry your girl? Because James and Julia would have despised you? Because she wouldn’t have you?’
He didn’t reply, and a reply wasn’t really expected. She was right when she mentioned their children. He’d known at the time of the affair that they would have despised him for making what they’d have considered to be a fool of himself, going off with a girl who was young enough to be his daughter.
‘I want you to understand about Mags,’ he said. ‘There’s something we have to talk about, it’s all connected, Cicily. I should have felt sorry for you, but there was always you and Mags, chatting. I kept saying you were all right because you had Mags. I couldn’t help it, Cicily.’
‘Mags has nothing to do with it. Mags was always blamed by people, ill-used behind her back –’
‘I know. I’m sorry. It simply appears to be true, it’s hard to understand.’
She sobbed, seeming not to have heard him, still twisting the dress between her fingers. She whispered something but he couldn’t hear what it was. He said:
‘I’m telling you because I love you, Cicily. Because it can’t be between us.’
But even as he spoke he wasn’t certain that he still loved Cicily. There was something stale in their relationship, even a whiff of tedium. A happy ending would be that Cicily would find another man and he a girl as different from Cicily as the girl in his office had been. Why should they sit for the rest of their days in Tudors or the bar of the Glenview Hotel trying to make bricks without straw? What was the point, in middle age, of such a dreary effort?
In the room that had been Mags’s the weeping of Cicily grew louder and eventually she flung her head on to the pillow and pressed her face into its softness in an effort to stifle her sobs. He looked around at the familiar clothes – dresses and hats and skirts and blouses, pairs of shoes lined up on the floor. At this age happy endings with other people weren’t two a penny, and for a moment he wondered if perhaps they had the strength and the patience to blow life into a marriage with which they had lost touch. He shook his head, still standing by the door while Cicily wept. It was asking too much of her; how could she suddenly look back at every cut knee Mags had bandaged, every cake she’d baked, every word she’d spoken, and see them differently? How could she come to consider that Mags, an innocent predator, had got her own back simply by being in their house? Yet Cosmo knew that that was the truth. He and Cicily would try for a bit because they had no option, but the disruption that Mags’s modest presence had so meticulously denied would creep all through their marriage now, a victim’s legacy from her victim’s world.
Poor Irish Protestants is what the Fogartys are: butler and cook. They have church connections, and conversing with Miss Fogarty people are occasionally left with the impression that their father was a rural dean who suffered some misfortune: in fact he was a sexton. Fogarty is the younger and the smaller of the pair, brought up by Miss Fogarty, their mother dying young. His life was saved by his sister’s nursing the time he caught scarlatina, when he was only eight.
Dapper in his butler’s clothes, a slight and unimposing man with a hazelnut face, Fogarty is at present fascinated by the newly arrived governess: Anna Maria Heddoe, from somewhere in England, a young woman of principle and sensibility, stranger and visitor to Ireland. Fogarty is an educated man, and thinks of other visitors there have been: the Celts, whose ramshackle gypsy empire expired in this same landscape, St Patrick with his holy shamrock, the outrageous Vikings preceding the wily Normans, the adventurers of the Virgin Queen. His present employers arrived here also, eight years ago, in 1839. The Pulvertafts of Ipswich, as Fogarty thinks of them, and wishes they had not bothered to make the journey after old Hugh Pulvertaft died. House and estate fell away under the old man, and in Fogarty’s opinion it is a pity the process didn’t continue until everything was driven back into the clay it came from. Instead of which along had come the Pulvertafts of Ipswich, taking on more staff, clearing the brambles from the garden in their endeavour to make the place what it had been in the past, long before the old man’s time. The Pulvertafts of Ipswich belong here now. They make allowances for the natives, they come to terms, they learn to live with things. Fogarty has watched surprise and dismay fade from their faces. He has watched these people becoming important locally, and calling the place they have come to ‘home’. Serving them in the dining-room, holding for them a plate of chops or hurrying to them a gravy dish, he wishes he might speak the truth as it appears to him: that their fresh, decent blood is the blood of the invader though they are not themselves invaders, that they perpetrate theft without being thieves. He does not dislike the Pulvertafts of Ipswich, he has nothing against them beyond the fact that they did not stay where they were. He and his sister might alone have attended the mouldering of the place, urging it back to the clay.
The governess is interesting to Fogarty because she is another of the strangers whom the new Pulvertafts have gathered around them in their advent. Such visitors, in the present and in the past, obsess the butler. He observes Miss Heddoe daily; he studies her closely and from a distance, but he does not reveal his obsession to his sister, who would consider it peculiar. He carries Miss Heddoe’s meals to her room when normally this duty would be Cready’s or Brigid’s; he reads the letters she receives, and the diary she intermittently keeps.
‘Is the child alive?’ I demanded when he returned a half-hour later for the tray.
‘Oh yes, miss. No doubt on that. The living child was brought to Father Horan.’
I was amazed but he seemed hardly surprised. I questioned him but he was vague; and the conversation continuing because he lingered, I told him the Legend of the True Cross, with which he was unfamiliar. He was delighted to hear of its elaborations, and said he would recount these in the kitchen. The stigmata on the child have been revealed on feet and hands only, but the priest has said that other parts of the body must be watched. The priest has cautiously given an opinion: that so clearly marked a stigma has never before been known in Ireland. The people consider it a miracle, a sign from God in these distressful times.
