No Enemy but Time (4 page)

How often she and Frank had spent the day down by the river, fishing for the cunning trout, or lazing in the damp grass, talking. There were five years between them, but she thought of him as older. Her earliest memory was of him holding her tightly by the hand, when she was just a toddler, in case she strayed too near the rushing river. There were a nurse, and her parents, but they were dim figures compared with Francis. He was tall and strong, and kept her safe. He shared his secrets with her, and from childhood on, Claire would have given her life to please him. Their rooms adjoined, and if she had a nightmare, he was first in to comfort her and laugh the fears away. He told her about the fairies who lived in the holes on the river bank, and how Billy was half leprechaun. They used to giggle and splutter when they saw the old man, thinking of him sitting on a toadstool in the moonlight. She learned about their ancestors from him, and how they came to Ireland and built Riverstown. For a long time, she was afraid to pass the portrait on the stairs of the one he called the Hanging Judge.

She felt so close to him as she retraced the steps of her childhood and young adult life, that for a moment she was overcome by pain. There was a worn and weatherbeaten seat, hewn out of a fallen tree trunk. Claire sat down, as they had done so many times together, and the years fell away as if they had never been apart and she had never married.

‘I'm different to you, Clarry.' He was fourteen then, thin and very dark, with the intensity of adolescence.

‘How different? You're a boy, that's what's different.' She resented the claim because it raised some barrier between them. She was nine, blonde as a daisy, with big, blue eyes, unaware of her own prettiness. Rather a tomboy, always climbing trees and tearing her clothes and trying to out-ride and outrun everybody else, so she could match up to Francis.

‘I know that, you eejit,' he retorted. ‘I mean really different. I'm half Irish.'

Claire stared at him. ‘What's different then? We're all Irish!'

‘No,' her brother insisted. ‘You're an Anglo. So's Dad. My mother,' he said, lowering his voice, ‘was from the bogs. The Ryans are proper Irish. That makes me half.'

Claire said crossly, still worried, ‘Everyone knows that. You're not different to me, Frankie. Mummy's
English –'

He looked down at that. ‘I know,' he said.

Her mother wasn't Frank's mother, because she had died when he was born. There was no conflict. People had step-mothers and fathers. Claudia Arbuthnot was never cross with him or punished him for anything. His father did that. But he was his real father so it was all right. Claire pulled at his sleeve. ‘Don't be different to me, Frankie. I don't want you to be different.' Her eyes filled with tears. His were very dark; his hair was black. He was amazingly like Daddy. Suddenly he hugged her, then as abruptly pushed her away and jumped up.

‘Don't be such a silly cry-baby. Race you to the old seat!' He was sitting, laughing at her as she hurtled up to him, scarlet-faced and out of breath.

‘You bloody pig,' she gasped. ‘That's not fair. I can't run as fast as you!'

‘That's because you're an Anglo,' he taunted, and was off, daring her to try and catch him. She had a terrible temper, and it always made him double up when she swore at him and clenched her fists. By the time he let her catch him, Claire had forgotten what he'd said, and he had temporarily forgotten why he said it. She only remembered it long afterwards, the night his father turned him out of Riverstown. The day they found the fox.

A few spots of rain fell on Claire. Claire Fraser now, over twenty years later, sitting on the log seat with tears in her eyes. The sun was slipping behind a bank of shower-filled cloud. She got up and quickened her walk up to the house. The key of the back door was in her pocket, the other keys, the stolen bunch, cutting into her hand. Out of so much love, so much misery had come. Out of closeness, such division. Was it true, what he said, that wretched day they said goodbye? ‘It's not anybody's fault, Claire. Not Dad's or Claudia's or mine. If you want to know why things have turned out as they are, you've got to go back to the beginning.'

She let herself into the kitchen, where young Joe Burns had asked about her. Questions that frightened Billy into telling lies. Joe's father had worked for her father, and Joe himself had earned a few shillings helping out, when he was a scrawny boy with a runny nose. But Billy didn't trust him. And Billy knew his own people better than any Arbuthnot ever would.

Claire unlocked the door into the main part of the house. It was dark and shuttered in the hall. She flooded it with electric light. There was a whisper of dampness in the air. You couldn't close up an Irish house without the weather getting into the fabric. And there they were, her ancestors, watching her from the walls. Nearly two hundred years unbroken, living at Riverstown. Births and marriages and deaths; the tombstones on Naas church a testimonial, her own father's the most recent. But his first wife, Eileen Arbuthnot, was not buried there. The division had begun with her.

At the foot of the stairs Claire paused and looked up. There was the portrait she had been so frightened by when she was little. A dour, ill-painted picture of a man in a dark coat and tight cravat, with a stern tight mouth and lifeless eyes. The Hanging Judge. He'd hung Irishmen like apples from the gallows tree. Claire turned away. Look back to the beginning. Whoever said that spoke the doom of Ireland.

Chapter 2

The first Arbuthnot came to Ireland in 1798 to try the rebels who had burned the English garrison alive in their barracks at Prosperous. An odd name for a poverty-stricken Irish village in Kildare. Judge Arbuthnot passed sentence of death by hanging, or exile to the penal colonies in the West Indies, on the men of Prosperous. Some had lit the torches and roasted other men alive in the middle of the night. Others had stood by. They suffered equally.

Hugh Arbuthnot took time off from his duties to tour the countryside, and decided that apart from its inhabitants, it was one of the most beautiful places on earth. The fields were green and lush with pasture, the river Liffey flowed through land that was as rich as his Scottish farm was bleak and poor. His people had wrung a meagre living from it. In Ireland, nature had been over-generous. Cattle grew fat, the rivers abounded with fish. The air was mild, and the rain didn't trouble a Scotsman. He applied for a grant of land and this was sold to him for a nominal sum. He neither knew nor cared who had been evicted from it and left destitute.

The site where Hugh Arbuthnot chose to build his house was a rise in the ground, overlooking the river. Fine lime trees formed a natural avenue for the approach; copper beeches and great elms gave shelter from the wind in the east; should the river flood, as he'd observed it did after heavy rain, the house was safe upon its hill. He brought his wife and children over and they settled into the fine house which he called Riverstown.

His son built a stone wall high enough to keep the poachers out, with handsome wrought-iron gates. The stone pineapples on the two piers at his gateway signified that the owner was a justice. He was a shrewd man, not over-kind-hearted, but the misery of the famine brought people dying of hunger to his gates. They were not turned away. The Arbuthnots prospered. They married with a view to inheritance, attended the local Protestant church and contributed handsomely to its building programme. Their sons and daughters went to England for their education, to Trinity College, Dublin, where Catholics were barred, or to English universities. Younger sons went into the British Army, and one became a distinguished admiral in the Royal Navy.

They tended to choose wives and husbands within their circle in Ireland, and would always describe themselves as Irish. Their excellent record as landlords and non-involvement in local politics saved Riverstown from being burnt down by the IRA in 1922. Neighbours who were not so well thought of stood and watched at gunpoint, while their homes went up in flames.

Philip Arbuthnot was three years old when the Peace was signed that divided Ireland. He was the eldest son, his two brothers having been killed in the Great War. He inherited Riverstown and its eleven hundred acres when he was twenty-seven and married. Neither of his parents had come to the wedding. The rumours said that his bride was already pregnant when he married her. Nobody believed Philip could have done such a thing as marry one of the Ryan girls for love.

Philip was tall with curly black hair and a little moustache that made him look old-fashioned. He was a sportsman and a countryman, uncomplicated in his attitude to people and to life. When he met Eileen Ryan she was sitting on a bank with a dazed look, her bicycle up-ended in a ditch. Her fine red hair glittered like gold in the watery sunlight. Philip stopped, got out and asked her if she was all right.

‘I don't know for sure. Where am I?' There was a sweet lilt of brogue in her voice.

Philip knew concussion when he saw it. And at the moment he helped her into his car, he fell in love with her. It wasn't a long courtship. It wasn't a courtship at all, according to Eileen's outraged family, who viewed her meeting with a member of the Protestant gentry with deep suspicion. They didn't want one of them hanging round Eileen, who was too young yet to know what a fool she was making of herself. They didn't see marriage and didn't want to see it. They foresaw only shame and gossip among their own people.

The parish priest was consulted and summoned Eileen. He came to see her father and advised that she be sent to relatives in Cork and kept there till the danger to her immortal soul was past.

A week later, they eloped to England, and were married in London. The Protestant marriage didn't reconcile his father, who believed that his son had been caught and was marrying because he had some misplaced sense of honour. His mother flatly refused to receive a daughter-in-law who was no better than one of her own maids. The fact that the Ryans were wealthy farmers made no difference. The Ryans were bog Irish. Eventually, they supposed, some means would be found of paying the wretched girl off, when Philip came to his senses.

His father died eighteen months later of undiagnosed cancer of the lung. He didn't disinherit his son, as some of their more extreme friends advised, nor did he tell Philip's mother that he had met his son and daughter-in-law in London. A pretty little wisp of a girl who was certainly not pregnant, she obviously adored Philip. She had a delicacy and charm about her that the old man recognized. He'd seen women in his boyhood with shawls over their heads and bare feet, with the same air of ancient breeding. He wished them happiness, but he didn't ask them to come home.

When he died, his widow moved to a property in Meath and Philip brought his young Irish wife back to Ireland to live at Riverstown. Mrs Gerard, the old housekeeper, had given notice. She was not, she told Mrs Arbuthnot, prepared to work for the likes of
her
.

They drove through the gates and up the avenue of ancient lime trees. It was a bright autumn day in 1938 and as they rounded the bend and came in sight of the river, Philip took her hand and said, ‘Look, darling, isn't that wonderful? Just look at the leaf colour all along the bank there …' She saw the excitement in his face and smiled to please him. Surely the great blaze of reds and golden yellows was a marvellous sight, but they did nothing to ease the apprehension in her heart. At home they took such things without comment. There was little time to stand admiring the view of this or that season when there was a big farm to run and a house and family to be looked after. ‘Oh, God love us, the dirty old east wind is coming up,' her mother would say as the trees turned colour.

‘It's lovely, Phil,' she said softly. ‘Like a picture painting.'

He squeezed her hand and said, ‘A painting, sweetheart. Not picture painting.' He didn't see the faint blush of embarrassment because she turned her head away. All he saw as he glanced at her was his little wife, shy as a fieldmouse, clinging to his hand. Of course she was nervous, he thought, seeing the big white-painted façade of his home come into the open. It was a big place, though the Ryans' farm was substantial enough. She'd nothing to worry about, especially since that old bitch Mrs Gerard had walked off in a huff. Eileen wouldn't have found her easy to cope with. He'd set the staff straight if there was any nonsense …

The gardener was waiting for them at the front door. He opened the car door for Philip, who handed his wife out.

‘This is Doyle,' he said, introducing her.

‘Mrs Arbuthnot.'

Doyle had his cap off and noticed that the new missus half put out her hand to shake his, not knowing what to do.

‘Welcome, sir; welcome, mam.'

Philip guided her by the arm into the front entrance and the hall, where a frightening array of girls in uniforms with white aprons and the cook, whom Eileen had known since she was a child, came up one by one and greeted them. She could feel her cheeks burning as girls she'd been to the convent school with in Naas said, ‘Welcome, mam' and some had slyness in their smiles.

The cook said, ‘Mrs Gerard's gone, sir. Will ye be getting someone else?'

‘That's up to my wife,' Philip said firmly. ‘But I think we'd like tea in the library. And early dinner, please, Mary. Mrs Arbuthnot's tired. We had a long journey.'

‘Was the crossing rough, sir?' Eileen stood there while he chatted to Mary, who was a distant cousin on the Ryan side. Of course he was at ease; he could joke with his servants and turn away, dismissing them with a happy, ‘Good to see you all, and very good to be home.'

How could she do the same, when he wasn't there? He was so happy. When they were alone in the library, a fusty-smelling room full of books behind iron grilles, he hugged her and kissed her.

‘It's wonderful to be back,' he said. ‘Wonderful you're with me, darling. You're going to love Riverstown. How about a little smile then?'