‘I did not call him that.’
‘You thought it long before I said it.’
‘You are drunker than you think, Fogarty.’
‘No, miss, I am not. The wickedness here is not intentional, miss. Well, you know about the wickedness, for you have acutely sensed it. So did Mr Pulvertaft at first, so did his wife. Charlotte did not, nor Adelaide, nor did the boy. Emily sensed it until a while ago. Emily would linger down by the old abbey, knowing that the men who lie dead there have never been dispossessed by all the visitors and the strangers there have been since. But now the old abbey is a lady’s folly, a pretty ruin that pleases and amuses. Well, of course you know all this.’
‘I know nothing of the sort. I would ask you to leave me now.’
‘You have thought it would be better for the boy to have his military life, to perish for Queen and empire, and so extinguish this line. Listening to talk of the boy’s romance, you have thought that would not be bad. So many perish anyway, all about us.’
‘That is a wicked thing to say,’ I cried, made furious by this. ‘And it is quite untrue.’
‘It is wicked, miss, but not untrue. It is wicked because it comes from wickedness, you know that. Your sharp fresh eye has needled all that out.’
‘I do not know these things.’ My voice was quieter now, even, and empty of emotion. ‘I would ask you to leave this room at once.’
But Fogarty went on talking until I thought in the end he must surely be insane. He spoke again of Charlotte’s marriage to Captain Coleborne, of Emily and Adelaide, of George Arthur taking the place of his father. He spoke again of the hungry passing without hindrance through the gates of the estate, to feed off what its trees and bushes offered. He spoke of his sister and himself left after the old man’s death, he glad to see the decay continue, his sister persuaded that they must always remain.
‘The past would have withered away, miss. Instead of which it is the future that’s withering now.’
Did he mean the hunger and the endless death, the exile ships of those who had survived? I did not ask him. He frightened me more than ever, standing there, his eyes as dead as ice. He was no humanitarian, he repeated, he was no scholar. All he said came from a feeling he had, a servant’s feeling which he’d always had in this house during the years the old man had let everything decline. Poor Protestants as they were, he and his sister belonged neither outside the estate gates with the people who had starved nor with a family as renowned as the Pulvertafts. They were servants in their very bones.
‘You have felt you have no place either, miss. You can see more clearly for that.’
‘Please go, Fogarty.’
He told me of a dream he’d had the night before or last week, I was too upset to note which. The descendants of the people who had been hungry were in the dream, and the son of George Arthur Pulvertaft was shot in the hall of the house, and no Pulvertaft lived in the place again. The road that had been laid in charity was overgrown through neglect, and the gardens were as they had been at the time of old Hugh Pulvertaft, their beauty strangled as they returned to wildness. Fogarty’s voice quivered as his rigmarole ridiculously rambled on; an institution for corrected girls the house became, without carpets on the floors. The bones of the dogs that generations of Pulvertafts had buried in the grounds were dug up by the corrected girls when they were ordered by a Mother Superior to make vegetable beds. They threw the bones about, pretending to be frightened by them, pretending they were the bones of people.
‘I don’t wish to hear your dreams, Fogarty.’
‘I have told you only the one, miss. It is a single dream I had. The house of the estate manager was burnt to the ground, and people burnt with it. The stone walls of the estate were broken down, pulled apart in places by the ivy that was let grow. In a continuation of the dream I was standing here talking to you like I’m talking now. I said to you not to perpetuate what has troubled you.’
He took my tray from me and went away. A moment later I heard him in the lavatory, depositing the food I had not eaten.
‘Not a bad soul,’ Miss Fogarty remarks, ‘when you come to know her.’
‘Her father was a solicitor’s clerk.’
‘Oh granted, there’s not a pennyworth of background to the creature. But I’d hardly say she wasn’t good enough for Erskine.’
Fogarty does not comment. His sister resumes:
‘I would expect to be invited to the house for late tea. I would expect her to say: “Why not walk over on Wednesday, Miss Fogarty, if you have a fancy for it?” I would expect the both of us to walk over for cards with the Erskines of an evening.’
‘She has pulled herself up by marrying him. She is hardly going to drop down again by playing cards with servants.’
‘Friends,’ corrects Miss Fogarty. ‘I would prefer to say friends.’
‘When a bit of time goes by they’ll dine with the Pulvertafts, she and Erskine. You’ll cook the food at the range, I’ll serve it at the table.’
‘Oh, I hardly believe that’ll be the order of it.’
Fogarty considers it unwise to pursue his argument and so is silent. Anna Maria Heddoe, he thinks, who was outraged when two guileful peasants tried on a trick. Well, he did his best. It is she, not he, who is the scholar and humanitarian. It is she, not he, who came from England and was distressed. She has wept into her pillow, she has been sick at heart. Stranger and visitor, she has written in her diary the news from Ireland. Stranger and visitor, she has learnt to live with things.
Without meaning to, Verity had taken her mother’s place. Six months after her mother’s death she had given up her flat and moved back to the house where she and her two brothers – both of them now married – had grown up. She had pretended, even to herself at times, that she was concerned about her father’s loneliness, but the true reason was that she wished to make a change on her own account, to break a pattern in her life. She became, as her mother had been, her father’s chief companion and was in time exposed to traits in his nature she had not known existed.
