At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [110]
“Then there’s poor Lady Geraldine. Did I get the simnel cake? Did I enjoy it? Isn’t it the king of cakes? She is quite touched, I find. We are told the family line was saved by a monkey. I do hope not in Mr. Huxley’s sense. O’Neills, O’Donnells, Maguires, unmanageable fillies out of the north. It is the fathers I blame. Cook’s tours of the Continent and the poor children left to mind for themselves. Miss Butler with her darling spaniels and picture-hat. Quite the cavalier.
“Charming couple from Lucan I met in Paris with their daughter Ruth. I’m sure that child’s not all together. Something alarming the way her head lolls. It seems Limerick has evacuated for the season, for not a solitary reply has returned from that quarter. The Misses French insist on coming by yacht. I cannot think how they may hope to debark in this tide. The Bridges will be here, Grattan and Butt, but they of course are Protestant.
“Still, there is nothing like a Protestant to raise the tone. Hence poor Miss Emmet, though I fear she has waited too long and now must be written off entirely. Numerous dreamy blue-stockings who write poetry for the press. I say poetry. I say press. And that poor old tired old thistlewhipper out of Kerry. She also was at Crufts. But her Irish terriers were found thin and straggling in the end. They have been bought as a job lot by the Ministry for War and will work as fetchers and sentinels in the trenches, the creatures. And in fine Miss Ivy Day, about whom least said, soonest mended. I believe the only hope for that child now is a convent’s laundry.”
MacMurrough said, “It sounds a tolerably uninspiring lot.”
Tightly she tensed a temporary knot. “Do not mock the Irish womanhood,” she commanded. “It was not the monks or the chiefs who civilized the Dane, but the Irish slavewomen who nursed his sons. It was not the great kings nor the petty kings who had the Normans more Irish than the Irish themselves, but the daughters of kings whom they took to wife. And it was their Irish wives who kept the Old English to their faith. Who knows, but that the gentlemen took flight, their women might have made something of the planters who replaced them. But the men deserted her, and their dark Rosaleen they beggared to the hillside.”
He watched her reflected view in the glass. An emerald glittered in her hair and fine pearls lustered below. The rest was long and black, as though her shadow and she might be one. “Beggared?” he asked.
“As good as, for all the gentlemen recked of her.”
A last tug and she withdrew. “Still, beggars may not be choosers, and I am sure we shall find many a suitress in the months ahead. That, after all, is what young ladies and gentlemen are for. Now, let you turn round.” His neck reprieved, his hair was next arraigned. “Oh lah, Anthony, you might have visited a barber. You look every inch a banjoist.”
“An’t I supposed to be a musician?”
“You are supposed to be what you are: a MacMurrough leading the young to their duty. Nobody has asked you to be artistic about it. Please don’t smoke.”
He closed the carton lid.
She glanced about the room in a withering way. Huckaback towels rumpled on the shaving stand. Unslopped Minton slop-pail. His papers at his desk. Her hands hugged her arms. “Is it very chilly in here? Does the child lay a fire for you?”
“I forget to keep it sometimes.” Her dress, he saw, was not entirely black. A fine embroidery greened its neck. She looked a very elegant, very tragic relict. “And you, Aunt Eva, what are you supposed to be?”
“I am my father’s daughter.”
“Yet you never married.”
The withering look advanced, narrowing on its way, glinting towards him. Then it passed and settled on the view through the window. “Do hurry, Anthony. I shall need you to organize your boys. The guests will be arriving any time and I had thought how thrilling if our golden heroes served