Hungry Hill (33 page)

“Blow expense,” said Johnnie. “You know perfectly well that I should allow you anything you want. All that we can arrange.”

“Darling,” she said, “how sweet and generous of you,” and she patted him on the head, which was worse, he thought, than if she had stormed and raved at him.

“I wonder if Eliza would care to come out with me,” she said, “as a change from Saunby? We could stay at a hotel and look for a tiny villa together. I think I shall write to her tonight. I should prefer Monte Carlo to anywhere else. More going on…

And she opened the door and left him in the dining-room alone, and he thought suddenly how after all these years he knew nothing of his mother, nothing of her mind or her heart. And whether he had broken that heart by his words this evening, or whether she had none to break, was something that he would never know, or anyone else. No one but Almighty God would ever look into the soul of Fanny-Rosa and read the truth.

The next morning he woke full of remorse for his hard words of the evening, and went along to his mother’s room to apologise and ask her to stay. He had been drinking too much, he said, she must not take any notice of what he had said; but he found her surrounded by boxes and books and every describable article, clothes long put away, hats, sashes, gloves, relics of the years that had gone.

“So amusing,” she said. “I keep coming upon things I had forgotten. Here is a little old hat that I wore when I became engaged to your father,” and she picked up a crumpled straw object, the size of a saucer. “It might do for the kitchen-maid on Saints’ days,” she added, tossing it aside.

“Here is your first shoe,” she laughed, showing him a scarlet baby slipper. “I must not throw that away.

You only wore it a few weeks, your foot grew so quickly. Look at this satin gown. I had it new to wear in Bath, where your father and I once spent a week of tremendous gaiety, and then I started Edward shortly afterwards and was soon too large to put it on. Most annoying, I remember. With a little alteration it would do very well for me now.” She held it up against her.

Johnnie watched, despair in his heart. There was so much sadness, it seemed to him, in all these things that had once been part of her.

“I think we were very foolish yesterday,” he said.

“You had better change your mind and stay.”

“Oh, nonsense,” she answered; “it’s a great mistake to go back on a decision. I learnt that many years ago. Besides, I am beginning to look forward to my little villa. I shall enjoy seeing a lot of people again, and going about. You are treading on that muff, darling. Would you mind moving?”

And he thought that perhaps after all she was not acting, she really had a wish to go, and, because that seemed to him almost more tragic than if she had longed to stay with him, he went downstairs to the dining-room and drank half a bottle of whisky. In a week’s time she had gone… .

Johnnie shut himself in the house and saw no one.

The weather was bad, it rained day after day. The mist would hang about the creek and hide Doon Island, and Johnnie, staring from the windows, would watch the mournful, driving rain, hear the sucking sound of it in the gutters, and see the low, grey clouds sweeping over Hungry Hill.

Then, because there would be nothing else to do, he would go out into the rain and walk up the drive through the park, and go into the gate-house and talk to Jack Donovan. The man amused him; he had a coarse, easy sort of humour, and a fund of stories about the people of Doonhaven that appealed to Johnnie’s warped sense of the ridiculous. Probably most of them were untrue, but that did not matter. And Johnnie in his turn would relate his experiences abroad, generally the more discreditable ones, because they made Jack Donovan laugh the loudest. The time he had broken into a harem in Turkey and made love to a veiled lady when her husband was from home was a favourite one with the Donovans combecause Kate Donovan too would be of the company, watching him round the corner of her eyes while she pretended to cook her brother’s dinner. She had smooth fair hair, almost white in colour, parted in the middle, and Jack told Johnnie that it reached below her waist and she could sit on it.

“Let’s have a look at it,” said Johnnie, and she pretended to be shocked at once, refusing and making a pother about it, but her brother urged her.

“Go on, Kate; you should not be so proud before the Captain.”

And after much persuasion she let it down, peering through her hands at Johnnie. It transformed her at once from a rather ordinary young woman to something original and intriguing, and Johnnie thought what a delight it would be to wind his fingers in the hair, twist it into knots, and make play with it.

This sight of Kate Donovan with her hair down gave him an excitement, and soon almost every day he would wander up to the gatehouse and look in and have a chat with the brother and sister. The little stuffy kitchen, with its smell of cooking, its dingy lace curtains, its tawdry crockery, its china figures of the Virgin and St. Joseph on the mantelpiece, and the large wooden crucifix on the wall, became more homely to him and more comfortable than the cold, empty rooms down at Clonmere.

Gradually Jack Donovan took to being out when Johnnie came. His sister would bring a bottle of whisky from the cupboard, and a glass, and pour it out for him, saying the afternoon had a chill to it.

Johnnie would watch her over the rim of his glass, amused by her pretence of shyness, which he knew very well was assumed, and then he would ask her to take down her hair, and after much shaking of her head and turning away from him she would do so. It would be quiet in the kitchen, with no sound but the ticking of the clock, and Johnnie, with the whisky inside him and Kate Donovan on his knee, would feel a pleasant lethargy steal over him, as he played with her long flaxen hair. How much more comfortable it was to be doing this than sitting all alone in the dining-room at home. Through half-closed eyes he would see the picture of the Pope on the wall opposite, with the rosary beneath, and the incongruity of what he saw compared to what was going on in the kitchen made the laughter rise within him, so that he would hasten to bury his face in Kate Donovan’s hair and hide his amusement from her.

Sometimes, back at Clonmere, he would suffer from reaction. It was really rather lamentable, he would think, to go up every few days to his own lodge and make love to his lodge-keeper’s sister. Conversation with Kate was impossible, she had none; he went to see her for one purpose only. It was a way of passing the early autumn days of 1857.

He would suffer from reaction most when he paid his occasional visits to his brother’s house, East Grove, in Slane. A longing would come over him, that had neither rhyme nor reason, to see his brother’s wife Katherine. As soon as he entered her house he would be aware of a sense of peace that he experienced nowhere else. She would come to him, across the drawing-room, and give him her hands, and say, “I am glad to see you, Johnnie. You are going to stay the night, of course,” and would take no denial.

Thomas would carry his bag to the spare room upstairs, and then tea would be brought, and he would sit beside Katherine while she poured it out, watching her hand on the tea-pot, the curve of her shoulder, the long, slim neck, the exquisite, calm profile.

“What have you been doing with yourself, Johnnie?” she would ask, laying a hand on his knee and looking in his eyes, and he would be filled with sudden loathing for his life and everything he did. Loathing for his useless, hopeless days, the lying in bed in the mornings, the futile pretence of seeing Adams the agent, the sitting alone in front of the whisky bottle in the dining-room, the walking up to the gate-house and the sordid fumbling interlude with Kate. The return to Clonmere and the whisky bottle once again. He gazed round the drawing-room of East Grove. It was comfortable, kindly, with the fire in the grate and the polished brass fender. The carpet was a soft green, and the shining chintzes had apples in them. There were flowers on the table, flowers on the mantelpiece. Katherine had some work on her lap, for she was expecting a baby shortly, but this work she put away, because, she said, such domestic sights were not particularly interesting to the beholder.

“I wish, Johnnie,” she said, “you would leave Clonmere for a time and come and stay with us. I should love to have you here, and when Henry is out-wh he is very often-you would be a companion. I don’t seem to see very much of my godson.”

“I should like it,” said Johnnie, “more than anything.”

“Well, then?”

He shook his head.

“No,” he said stubbornly, “two people who are happy, like you and Henry, don’t want a third coming in to spoil the harmony.”

“Don’t be foolish, Johnnie,” she said.

“It would only make us happier if we thought you were being happy too. It’s lonely for you in that big house all alone, and although I am not going but and about much just at the moment, we could read together, and I would play to you, and Henry would love to have your company when he returned in the evening.”

Johnnie thought what it would mean to sit here, day after day with Katherine, in the peace and quiet of Katherine’s house. Just to sit and watch her hands, folded as they were now, would be enough. Just to listen to her calm voice, and now and again to have her eyes smile at him, as she glanced up from the book she would be reading.

Presently, when Thomas had removed the tea, Katherine went to the piano and played very softly.

She seemed so remote, so detached from the world, as she sat there on her music-stool, looking away towards the window. What does she think of, Johnnie wondered. What goes through her mind ?

Does she give to Henry the peace she gives to me? He closed his eyes, and as he listened to her playing, Johnnie created the illusion for himself that this was his room, his house, and his wife who was sitting there at the piano, and that when she had finished she would come and bend over him, and touch his hair, and ask him if he was content. Then the door opened, and Henry came into the room, radiant, smiling.

“Hullo, old fellow; this is a surprise,” he said, and Johnnie rose from his chair, a guest in his brother’s house, the dream shattered into foolishness.

Katherine closed the piano and went at once to her husband. He kissed her, and stood talking to Johnnie with his arm about her.

“How do you think she’s looking?” asked Henry proudly, and without waiting for an answer he plunged into an account of his day, telling some amusing story about the civic luncheon he had been obliged to attend, where the honorable member for the city had made a tactless speech.

“I suppose,” said Katherine, “you smoothed the whole thing over, and invited all those who were offended back to dinner?”

“I did nothing of the sort,” said Henry. “I wished the affair well done with, so that I could get home to my wife.”

And once again he bent his head and kissed her, and Johnnie saw her look at his brother with an expression that brought a pain to his heart.

“She loves him,” he thought, “he makes her happy,” and as he dressed for dinner, and heard them talking to one another in the room next to his, he thought suddenly of all the women he had never loved, who had made a momentary excitement and no more.

What a dreary, worthless little procession they made through the years, ending now with Kate Donovan in the gate-house kitchen. Oh God, he thought wearily, if everything had been different, if I’d never gone into the regiment, never been through that blasted senseless war, but stayed here in the country, met Katherine and asked her to help me. Perhaps she would have married me instead of Henry. We would have lived together at Clonmere and she would have had my children, not his; and she would have looked at me in the way she looked at Henry ten minutes ago.

There was a little pot of flowers on his dressing-table-she must have arranged them there before he came up to dress for dinner- and a book beside his bed, and a fire in the grate-signs of her care, her thoughtfulness-and there was a neatness and a comfort about the room so different from his own bleak bedroom at Clonmere.

In the room next door he pictured Katherine sitting before her mirror, brushing her hair, while Henry wandered in, fastening his collar and tie, the intimacy between them a natural happy thing, making them closer to one another than before. It was something that he would never know, this sharing of life between a husband and wife. The only memories he had were sordid, grey… .

Dinner at East Grove was at seven o’clock. The candles were lit on the polished table. A parlour-maid helped Thomas hand the plates. And Johnnie, seated beside Katherine, compared her ways and his brother’s once more to his own, when, sprawling alone in his dining-room, he would be faced sometimes by a stained cloth and tepid food, and after cursing the servant until the man was white with fear, he would decide not to eat at all, and stretch out his hand to the decanter instead.

When Katherine had risen and left the brothers together, Henry glanced across at him, with a curious half-shy expression, and said: “I suppose you would not care to make me your agent, would you, Johnnie?”

“Why, what’s the matter with Adams?” said Johnnie.

“I don’t mean you should dismiss Adams,” replied Henry, “but allow me to act as-well, as overseer, for want of a better expression. You’re letting the place go rather to pieces, you know, old boy, and it seems such a pity, when I think of all the care and trouble and expense put upon it by grandfather.

Don’t be annoyed with me for saying this. I’ve wanted to speak to you about it for some time.”

Johnnie flushed, and stuck out his jaw.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “The place is run in the way I like it to be run, and that’s all there is to it. As a matter of fact I think very little of Adams, and I shall no doubt be my own agent in future. You would probably find it more trouble than profit.”

“All right,” said Henry swiftly. “We’ll say no more about it. I only suggested it, as I thought it might help, and take some of the business off your shoulders. Been up to the mines lately?”