Ashes In the Wind (43 page)

Afterwards, anti-climax. James still thinks about Anna and Anna’s son, but no longer with any hope that he might persuade her to live her life differently, with him.

One evening he telephones Georgia and asks her to come down to Donhead alone in the middle of the week.

‘Dad, what’s the matter? Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, no crisis, but I’ve an idea to talk over with you.’

When Georgia arrives they sit together in the Donhead library, and James tells Georgia that he wants her and Stephen to take over Donhead.

‘You’re young enough to enjoy living here, and it’s a great place for children, as you know. It’s commutable for Stephen, and he’s always said he can work from anywhere provided the communications are good. The house needs work, starting with the roof and the attic windows, but the two of you can afford it.’

‘Dad, I’d love it. But it’s a big step for Stephen. So I’ll need to talk to him. And where will you go?’

‘I’ll keep the London flat. And you’ll have me to stay from time to time.’

‘Provided you don’t bring a hundred knights.’

‘Luckily, I have only one daughter. And she a Cordelia,’ as he gives her a hug.

Stephen agrees, provided, he says to Georgia, ‘We have a free hand – it won’t work if your father keeps telling us what to do.’

‘Dad isn’t like that. He doesn’t look back.’

James doesn’t look back. He finds leaving easy. The London flat is furnished, and he takes just his clothes, his personal papers and the Wemyss jug from Allenmouth. Donhead had arrived out of the blue; James departs almost as suddenly.

He doesn’t look back, but once in London finds he has little to look forward to. His two or three applications for jobs that seem suitable for an ex-Permanent Secretary come to nothing. He resists a suggestion that he should chair a Committee of Enquiry into the Funding of the Arts; he applies to become Provost of his old Oxford college, gets on the shortlist, but fails to manipulate the internal politics of the Senior Common Room. When they appoint his old boss at the Treasury, James thinks this serves them right.

He has Anna’s address; she and Jack have moved to live in Allenmouth with her father. James sends her a short, affectionate letter that avoids any suggestion of getting back together and encloses a cheque for three thousand pounds ‘to help with Jack’s and your living expenses’.

Anna replies a week later, enclosing the uncashed cheque.

‘It’s not that the money wouldn’t be helpful, and it was generous of you to send it. But Jack and I need to be independent. I don’t want to be beholden to anyone other than my dad, and that’s difficult enough for me as it is.’ She signs the letter ‘Love, Anna’, but its tone is neutral, and there is no suggestion that they might meet, or that James has any right to see Jack.

James keeps the letter, but pushes Anna and Jack into a distant corner of his mind.

Georgia worries about him. ‘Dad, you’re not ready for a bath chair. Write another book, or take up golf again. You’re eligible to enter the President’s Putter, aren’t you?’

‘I haven’t played golf since Oxford,’ says James and remembers guiltily that this isn’t quite true. ‘But I don’t like that world enough to become part of it. I’ve finished my monograph and can’t bring myself to write
Memoirs of a Permanent Secretary
. The truth would be libellous, and the bowdlerized version makes me yawn just thinking about it.’

‘Well, you need something, you need a project,’ says Georgia. ‘Wasn’t Levin your hero? Don’t you remember what he said about work, that lyrical passage about scything? Where’s your copy?’ She goes to the bookshelves, finds
Anna Karenina
, thumbs through the last fifty pages, and reads aloud:

‘The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he felt the moments of unconsciousness in which it seemed the scythe was moving by itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own, and as though by magic without thinking of it the work turned out regular and precise by itself. These were the most blissful moments.’

‘There you are. That says it all. Levin took up bee-keeping. So find some blissful moments, or I’ll start looking for a Dorset widow to keep you occupied. Incidentally, you’ve never told me what you were doing all those weeks in Northumberland. What were you up to?’

Georgia’s antennae are good; James gives an unconvincing reply about needing a complete break and deflects further questions by agreeing to find a project.

A month later he is sorting through family papers when he finds an old map of the Derriquin Oyster Fishery, marking the enclosures that he saw off Oysterbed Pier when he last visited Kerry. He is taken by the language – parcs, ambulances, perches – and impressed by the quantities, a total of 9,494,109 oysters in 1883 after ‘allowing fifteen per cent for waste or losses’. ‘Part of a lot of 1,276,800 bought of Corbigny at sixteen francs, scattered in different places’. And he recalls one of his fellow members at the Dublin launch of his monograph, a man who was writing a detailed history of Irish aquaculture, oyster, mussel and fish farming, saying, ‘There’s hardly an oyster bed anywhere in the Republic now. It’s a tragedy.’

James goes back to Drimnamore and walks again to Oysterbed Pier. He finds one of the Doyles, a man in his nineties, who remembered his father and his grandfather, and who had worked in the oyster beds as a young man.

‘It’s a crying shame there are no more Kerry oysters. We’ve beautiful clear water and a great rise and fall of the tide. I’m telling you, our oysters knocked the Galway men sideways when they tasted them.’

James tries to find out who owns the strip of land at Oysterbed Pier and the foreshore, but nobody in Drimnamore seems to know. He contacts the family solicitor in Dublin, who looks into the question and comes back ten days later, rather embarrassed.

‘It appears from our records that you do. The property and the foreshore were transferred by your grandfather to the Derriquin Oyster Fishing Company, there were a hundred shares all owned by Henry Burke, and no one seems to have bid for the company in the 1922 auction. We have the share certificates here. They probably aren’t worth much, unless you get planning permission.’

James sees this as a sign. He spends the next six months visiting oyster fisheries in Essex, Brittany and Galway, and finds and hires a manager from Galway with a degree in aquaculture to start the new enterprise from scratch.

‘You’ll have ten per cent of the company; I’ll put up all the capital,’ he tells Danny Byrne, an enterprising thirty-year-old. ‘It’ll be worth nothing if it flops, a fortune if it does well.’

Danny laughs. ‘Not many fortunes made out of oysters so far,’ he says. ‘But we’ll see. It’s a grand place for it all right, big tides, clean water, a good little pier. A bit far from our market, but they seemed to have managed well enough back in the last century. I’ll give it a real go.’

‘H
ERE
’
S
THE
LIST
of what we need,’ says Danny Byrne to James. ‘My guess is that it’ll come to around two hundred thousand euros.’

James whistles. ‘No wonder oysters are expensive.’

‘That’s doing everything properly – new shed, washing and grading machines, purification system, repairing the old enclosures in the water, fixing the pier, buying a decent boat. There’s no point chucking a hundred thousand spats in the water and hoping for the best. And EU and Dublin grants will pay for half of it.’

James feels better at the halving of the bill. He and Danny order the equipment and spats for delivery the following spring. He lets his London flat and finds a small cottage on the Drimnamore River half a mile from Oysterbed Pier. It has a good view, no electricity and an outside privy. The owner, Jeremiah Casey, has moved to the new development on the edge of Drimnamore.

‘That cottage was built by your great-great-grandfather in 1840. I didn’t know when I was well off,’ he tells James. ‘Now I’ve got electricity, flush toilets inside the house, no deposit and fifty years to pay. But just look at the state of the feckin’ place. A year ago they were guarding the site in case all this stuff got pinched. Now you couldn’t give it away. God only knows when the rest of the houses will be finished. The four of us who bought off plan thought we were getting a bargain. We couldn’t sell today for the half of what we paid. The eejit banks even evicted the family from Number Three, would you believe it? They shoulda paid them to stay.’

‘Wasn’t Michael Sullivan the builder?’

‘Indeed he was. Financier, developer, builder, he did the lot. And then the banks pulled the rug out from under him. He’s bust, God help him, back to being a builder again.’

James signs a lease for a year and spends the next two weeks sorting out Pier Cottage. It is small, three square rooms, the front door opening into a kitchen that separates the bedroom from the parlour, three windows on both sides and one at the south-east end overlooking the river mouth and the Kenmare estuary. It’s like going back to Allenmouth, James thinks, remembering his campaign furniture with regret. And I still go outside to the lavatory.

‘I had a septic tank installed five years ago that the EU paid for,’ Jeremiah had told him. ‘Before that it was just a long drop.’

The kitchen doubles as a bathroom, the enamelled iron bath sitting on claw feet, green-stained around the plughole but otherwise serviceable. A wooden cover sits on the bath and serves as a kitchen counter.

‘You’ll get your kind of furniture over at Tralee,’ Jeremiah advised him. ‘The craft village there is on hard times, they’re giving stuff away.’

James drives the oyster fishery’s truck along the coast road past Staigue Fort, past Derrynane, over the Coomakista pass, past Waterville where he had fished with his father on the Butler’s Pool and Lough Currane, and into Tralee.

The craft village is a faded glory: café, pottery, jeweller, furniture maker and knitwear shops all wondering at the sudden ending of the boom. The largest shop carries a sign saying:

Kerry Alternative Therapies

Acupuncture, Mystic Healings, Yoga, Reiki,
Thai Massage, Crystal Singing Bowls, Tarot Cards,
Golden Heart Chakra Essence

On the door someone has scrawled ‘Going, Going, Gone’ in white paint.

James, the only customer, sits in the coffee shop.

‘It is late September,’ says the middle-aged woman who brings him a pot of tea and some freshly baked soda bread. ‘But it’s been quiet all summer.’

She sits down with James and shares his pot of tea. James comments on her accent.

‘There’s lots of Brits in the village – if you count the people from Dublin and Cork we’re almost all ex-pats. We came here to get away from it all. We certainly did that, and we seem to have got away from prosperity into the bargain. We’re better off than most, my husband has his Post Office pension, you don’t need much to live on out here, and there’s no need to impress the neighbours. We’ve all stopped paying rent. I walk to work and we sold the car a year ago. Bought two second-hand bicycles, cheaper and healthier.’

She laughs. ‘Our children think we’re mad, but we wouldn’t go back to Northampton.’

Walking around the craft village, James finds a set of deep-blue hand-made cups and some rugs in the weaver’s shop in blues and greens with Celtic knots woven into the fabric. He buys a couple of simple bentwood chairs, and in the antique shop a pair of late nineteenth-century oil lamps with green oil chambers and brass stands. The stock is mostly house clearance junk, although in one corner there is a small Irish Sheraton half-moon table.

‘That’s the real thing,’ says the owner. ‘Completely unrestored.’

James pulls open the central drawer and sees in the top corner a peeling brown label. ‘Derriquin Castle, Morning Room, No. 37.’

He shuts the drawer, negotiates a price and the table is his.

Back in Drimnamore, he realizes he hasn’t bought a bed, mentions this to Jeremiah, who nods, and two days later a double bed arrives complete with mattress, pillow, sheets and blankets.

‘Eighty euros would do it,’ he says. ‘Distressed stock. By the by, help yourself to the turf from the stack outside the cottage. I’ve got underfloor heating.’

James scrubs the stone floors of Pier Cottage down to their original grey, paints the walls white and whitewashes the outside. He installs a Calor gas tank for cooker, fridge and hot water, and when his books arrive from London he feels at home. The Sheraton table looks magnificent and out of place in the corner of the kitchen.

No more out of place than I am in Drimnamore, thinks James, but in reality he has a sense of purpose and a sense that he belongs. After a week’s hard work he is tired, satisfied and happy.

Danny Byrne comes to James with a layout for the oyster shed and a builder’s estimate. ‘Sixty thousand euros, plus VAT, which we’ll get back. I’ve agreed you and I will each work three days a week on the site, and that’s to be deducted from the price. At unskilled labour rates. I hope you’re happy with the idea.’

‘Good. Only one quote, and from Michael Sullivan?’

‘He said he’d met you. And they say he’s a good builder, a good craftsman. The man from Kenmare said it would be a hundred thousand euros, and he and his team would have to come out from Kenmare every day. Sullivan wants the work, says he’ll finish it in three months.’

‘Doesn’t seem long. What about planning permission?’

‘It’s a breeze-block shed with a concrete floor, rendered walls, a prefabricated pitched roof and slates from a Cork quarry. Replacement building, so no planning permission is needed. Sullivan can start on Monday week if we sign today. He’ll only have to blow on the old shed for it to fall down, and there are lots of hungry builders’ merchants around.’

James signs the contract and they start work a week later. Michael Sullivan is builder, site foreman and labourer all in one, telling James and Danny patiently and precisely what they have to do. He is firm with the other two workers from Drimnamore; after four days one of them fails to turn up.

‘That’s why I hired two,’ says Michael. ‘I never thought the both of them would see it through. James, I want you on the cement mixer today. Danny and Joe can set up the forms for the floor pouring.’