The Last Storyteller (31 page)

We drove past a sign for the road to Lough Gur, and to my astonishment, she looked across at me, sharp and expectant.

“Don’t you want to take me down there?”

I shook my head. “But how do you know about it?”

She took a moment before replying, then said, “It was part of my imprisonment.”

It was my turn to look at her in anticipation. “Now, that is something you’ll have to explain.”

Again she unfolded at her own slow pace. “Sarah told me a story. About her father, my grandfather. I’m sure you remember him.”

I nodded.
Who could forget him?

“He was once suspected of killing somebody. Of course he denied it, but Sarah said it was true, and he had dumped her body in that lake and moved it later. If I came back to Ireland, I’d have been in danger of a police investigation. They’d have interrogated me if they thought I knew about it.”

This is not the moment to tell her that the murderee was Venetia’s own grandmother, little Sarah’s frail mother. And that I had sat there and watched the police drag the lake for, possibly, Venetia’s own body. That, in part, was the official response to my reporting her as a missing person
.

I said, “Nobody would have asked you any such questions. That was a bit far-fetched.”

“Not if you were afraid of your own shadow.”

Ha! A twitch of the veil, a glimpse into what her life then had been like. Fear all the way
.

“Was that how it was?” I asked.

She didn’t answer; she took a pace back into her shell.

How can I keep her from retreating, how can I keep her out and bright? If Jack Stirling didn’t exist any longer, would her life be better?

Some minutes later, I turned off the Charleville road, and then turned again, down a lane that became a cart track that became a field.

Under a great tree, I stopped and looked at her.

“You fell asleep here,” I said, and climbed out of the car. She followed me and we walked to the tree, not yet in leaf, and stood looking up at it.

“Do you remember?” I wanted to gauge how much she—and her memory of me—had been damaged.

She thought about it. “You told me that it was an old copper beech. That it had been an ornamental tree in a great estate. And when the new Irish government came in and the old estates were broken up and the land divided, this was the only part of the estate left intact. I remember everything about it.” She’d become animated, full of her old self. “It’s like Russia, it’s like Chekhov—wasn’t there a great house here somewhere?”

“And not a trace of it left,” I said. “I’ve seen the sepia photographs. It was magnificent.”

She looked up at the heavy branches, some low enough for grasping and swinging. “But the tree is still here. And, look—the buds will soon swell.” She walked all around it, circled to where I stood, and leaned back against the tree trunk. “And I can tell you something about this tree that you don’t know. When I woke up here that afternoon,” she said, “I guessed that I was pregnant. I remember the feeling so well. Slightly dizzy in my head, my eyes full of magic dust, and I could just sense the beginnings of a feeling of warmth, and delight and safety. You had a striped shirt, green and white stripes. And white pants. You had taken off your shoes to go barefoot on the grass.”

Too cold that morning to stand for long in the shade; but we did linger in the car. Venetia huddled deep into her coat—a heavy navy tweed we had just purchased for her in Limerick. She pulled a scarf around her neck, reached for my hand, and pressed it to her cheek.

“We both went through bad times,” she said.

“I didn’t know how to handle it,” I said, and I thought,
You have a better chance now; you know more, you’re more mature. So take your own advice. Don’t rush it. Take it easy. Give her her own time. Don’t make the mistake of driving a conversation about the future. Let her wounds cool. Let John Jacob heal her
.

Such healing. Such balm. I want to tell you now the story of our day and our night with John Jacob, because for a time, for a crucial, magical few hours, your mother became once more the complete Venetia.

We came away from the great copper beech more relaxed than at any time since the night we ran from the Olympia Theatre. In Charleville, Venetia said, “Stop the car. I want to see the house.” We stood on the high sidewalk across the street. Did somebody live there now?

For twenty-five years I had avoided this stretch of the town, unable to look.
Shall I point out to her where I found the head of Blarney, her ventriloquy doll? Over there, in front of the little gate. On the cobbles. Midnight. The witching hour. I kicked his head. By accident. Shall I tell her how I found that front door open, how I ran screaming around the house, up and down the stairs several times? Looking for her. But knowing she was gone
.

I said nothing. Nothing about my wild panic. My fierce certainty. Something awful had happened. Nothing about my dread to look to the floor lest I see bloodstains. It all came back—and I said nothing.

Perhaps I should have spoken and let her know my truth. But I didn’t, and now I’m telling you, her children. Not for the first time, as you know, but, I hope, for the last.

We stood side by side, not touching. This was the house where I’d first met Venetia. Where we’d shared a bed so often, so thrillingly. I think it must have been Charleville’s weekly half-day holiday, because not a soul did we see. We climbed back into the car.

Venetia’s mood subsided again, but not in that same shocking fashion. However, the moment we reached the top of John Jacob’s lane, she
emerged from her hiding place, looked all around, at the dense and benign trees, and the high, grassy bank of the lane ahead of us, and said, “Stop the car!”

She jumped out and walked ahead of where I’d parked, her arms out-flung, her head thrown back. I walked after her, and when she heard my footsteps she spun around.

“This is a fairy-tale place,” she said. “Look!” She pointed to the plume of smoke from the chimney.

I said, “It’ll be wood smoke.”

“Can we walk down? Will the car be in anybody’s way if you leave it here?”

She took my arm and set the pace, strolling with slow, thoughtful steps, marveling all the way.

“Oh! Can you imagine what these hedges will be like in spring and summer?!” And “Look! Are those wild apple trees?” And “We have to come back for midsummer’s day.” She began to recite: “I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, / Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, / With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.”

She clapped her hands and spun ahead of me, once again the girl I’d first seen onstage, in that damp, raggedy hall in Cashel, with my father close to swooning beside me.

These changes in her, these highs and lows of moods, these sudden “appearances” and then cold “disappearances”—is that a sign of damage?

I halted us, wrinkled my nose. “Sniff,” I said. “Can you get it?”

She made herself look like a dog, a setter’s nose to the blue, cold air.

“I’ll never forget this.” She returned to the canine pose, comically this time, and raised a hand like a pointer’s paw. “What wood is it?”

“I’ll let him tell you.”

When we reached his gate she said, “Let’s stop for a moment. I want my eyes to photograph this.”

We didn’t stop for long, because John Jacob O’Neill opened his front door and stepped out to meet us. In Ireland, we didn’t hug when we met; we didn’t demonstrate affection. Unlike the two of you, Ben and Louise: I’m so grateful for your embraces, with which you are both so generous to me.

And men of John Jacob’s age—for whom reticence was a way of
life—they, especially, didn’t show affection in public. But he had traveled the world and had learned other ways, and so he walked across to us, and held his arms out to Venetia as though she were his long-lost daughter.

“How are you, girl?” he said. “A lot of good people have been waiting for you.”

Venetia fell into his arms. Like father and daughter, they stood for a moment as she admired the house, the neatness of the garden. Proud as a parent, he showed her the apple trees, the garden bench he’d made with his own hands, the thickness of the walls, told her about the cherry wood on the fire. Inside he gave her the same tour he had given me. I followed, keeping a short distance away; I wanted her to have the same full experience of his welcome I’d had.

John Jacob must have thought me out of earshot, because he began to speak of me.

“This man of yours,” he said. “He’s a remarkable fellow.” I couldn’t see them, but she must have been listening attentively, because he continued: “Some people I know—or, I should say, knew; his late boss was my dear friend—they thought the world of him. And from everything I’ve seen, he’s a steady and loving fellow. If he has a fault, it’s that he’s a bit too conscientious. But if you were looking for a man with whom to grow old, and who will look after you—that’s Ben.”

Venetia said something I couldn’t hear, and John Jacob replied, “Let life do it. We’re always pushing rivers, and it doesn’t make them flow faster or better.”

They emerged from the rooms at the back, hand in hand. When they came toward me, John Jacob said, “I’m keeping her here forever. Is that all right?”

To which Venetia said, “And I’m staying. I’m never ever going anywhere else.”

Naturally, John Jacob made tea—it’s impossible to sit and talk in an Irish countryside house without tea. He produced a pie he had made, telling us, “I store my own apples in hay. It keeps them very fresh. I picked these back in September, and so I always have an apple something-or-other for Christmas Day. Maybe applesauce with goose.”

When he’d finished his pottering and served us, and while Venetia ate her way through most of the apple pie, he plied her with questions about the stage.

“How much do you have to project your voice?”

“Is there a trick to projecting it?”

“How do you project without your voice going harsh?”

“What’s the best register, do you find, for projecting? Is it soprano or contralto? I’d say contralto wouldn’t be as hard on the voice, although people complain that my voice is sometimes too deep for them to hear everything.”

I watched her, while pretending otherwise. She answered every question with a smile. By the time she’d mopped up her giant segments of pie, she’d engaged as much as I’d ever seen her.

“There are tricks,” she said, “techniques. I’m sure you have them, too, Mr. O’Neill. Inflection. Timing your breathing. I used to take singing lessons.”

“Oh, I took singing lessons from a lady in Valparaiso,” he said, excited by the memory.

“Valparaiso?” Her enchantment with him grew—and he was off.

“I was walking down Serrano Street one morning, I was going out to visit friends in Viña del Mar, I was wearing a white suit, and I heard this wonderful man singing from a window above my head. I looked up, and there he was in full voice, glorious. He had a fat belly, a white shirt, and red suspenders.

“So I stepped back and listened to him, and when he had finished I
applauded him, and he bowed down to me. I called up to him, ‘Sir, where did you learn to sing like that?’ and he said, ‘Right here in Valpo, and not only that, I learned in that house there behind you. See that big doorbell? Push it hard and you’ll find somebody who’ll teach you to sing like me.’

“So I pushed the doorbell, and a lady opened it. She was a maid, and she showed me in, and I met this other lady, her employer, and I said to her, ‘Senora, can you teach me to sing like the gentleman across the street?’ And she said, ‘He sings to me every day as payment for his lessons.’ And then she asked me, ‘Sir, have you any money? Because that’s how I make my living.’ And I said, ‘How much money do you need?’ And she said, ‘Sir, I won’t charge you anything because you said “need” and not “want.” ’

“And she taught me to sing; her name was Rosa-Rosa Pionara. Of course I fell for her—she was sixty-six and I was thirty-three.”

Was he telling us the truth? Did it matter?

Venetia, her eyes shining, said, “Will you sing for us now?”

John Jacob O’Neill said, “I’ll sing you a snatch of a song I’m fond of, because when I heard it, out west in America, I knew that it had come from County Armagh.” He sang, “As I walked out in the streets of Laredo, / As I walked out in Laredo one day; / I spied a young cowboy wrapped up in white linen, / Wrapped up in white linen as cold as the clay.”

Venetia took over: “Oh, beat the drum slowly, play the pipes lowly, / Play the dead march as you bear me along.” And, with her harmonizing, they joined forces on the last lines: “Take me to the green valley and lay the sod o’er me; / For I’m a young cowboy who knows he’s done wrong.”

When they finished I stood and applauded, and they both performed little mock bows.

“A standing ovation,” said John Jacob. “My first.” He turned to Venetia. “But not your first, I daresay. Now it’s your turn.”

She said, “Who’s your favorite character in Shakespeare?”

“Oh,” he said, “I had a lady friend once who used to tell me I was Prospero. Now, was that a compliment or not?” He reflected for a moment. “Hamlet, of course. Though sometimes we take much of our learning from the minor characters, and I’m very fond of poor Ophelia.”

By now we had all sat down. Venetia clapped her hands, and with that single gesture she commanded our attention.

“Ophelia?” she said, in an inflection that signified something interesting to her. “Well, in that case.”

She closed her eyes, and then, as though holding a veil, covered her face with her hands and lowered her head. John Jacob looked at me wide-eyed, and we both sat back. Not breathing.

Venetia raised her head as though lifting a great weight, took her hands from her face, and, crazy of eye, looked from one to the other of us.

John Jacob said, as though nervous of frightening her, “How now, Ophelia, what’s the matter?”

A lesser person might have halted in surprise at his acuity and his knowledge, but Venetia stayed in character.