Redemption - Leon Uris [32]
“Perhaps it is because you have made Ireland a moldy swamp,” she answered.
“Can we negotiate?” her father said candidly.
“One does not negotiate with the English without getting buggered,” she replied, only half joking.
“I’ve watched you wander among the lepers for years,” he said. “I’ve had my moments of great consternation. More than once I’ve asked myself, what the hell are we doing here? Well, I was born here. My estate is out there. Things have been done a certain way for centuries and despite a pang of conscience now and then, I have always known I could not change things.”
“That’s a very pleasant line of justification for picking the Irish carcass clean in a most hideous way. Your class—”
“Our class, Atty.”
“Your class,” she continued, “has reduced these people to the most destitute in Western civilization. Their larder is empty,” she said.
“That’s a fact. The time of the estates is coming to an end. Although it is all beyond my reach, there must be a supplanting of new ideas, the kind that you are up to. Look here, my velvet collar has turned shiny. I’m not going to keep up the pretense, and I know you won’t, either. This is a shabby place, growing shabbier.”
“I will say, Father, that you have been better than some.”
“I shall not turn against my class, Atty. The radical goings-on in Dublin are beyond me, yet I see a time coming when we will completely fade from the landscape. I suggest there will be very few Irish tears shed for us when we leave. Now, do you want to listen to my proposition or not?”
Atty loved her father almost as much as she despised his class. Is it more evil to be aware of his evil and not do anything about it? Most of his goodfellows accepted the fortunate circumstances of their inheritances without a ha’penny of guilt. Sneering down on the inferior croppy Irish justified the exploitation. At least her father did not do that.
“Here is my proposal. As you know by your study of the estate books, I have transferred a decent sum to London to see out your mother’s and my days. I am quite provincial myself and am actually very fond of Ireland. Yet, I cannot bear the thought of doing my declining years in a townhouse in Dublin. Dublin is seedy. A few stone facades scarcely cover a shantytown soggy with all those pubs and their bad poets. I am going to retire to the comfort of London. You have my major sins on the table—my class loyalty, my inability to change the world.
“The estate is in rather decent order,” he continued. “Murphy and my land agents have done an admirable job in the framework in which they’ve been allowed to operate. We have tried not to inflict too much more pain on our tenants. I have set aside a tidy little trust for you to conclude your education, which you now reject. So, go to Dublin and use this money to keep yourself. All I ask is that you indulge your mother now and then and let her give a few parties a year so you can examine and guillotine her newest collection of eligible suitors.”
“No, Daddy, you want more. Now what is it?”
“Atty, for seventeen you are a monster. All right, then. By the time you reach your twenty-first birthday, the barony will be yours whether I survive or not. You have to promise me that you’ll keep things in balance with Murphy. Once Mother and I die, you can do with it what you will.”
“Why the wait, Father?”
“I want to live in London as a retired member of the gentry and not as some sort of traitor.”
Atty’s answer would be quick—in five years she would be able to make of Lough Clara what she had dreamed of doing since she was a child.
“Meanwhile, join the bloody rising,” he finished.
“I agree, Father. Lough Clara will still bear the family crest until you and Mother die. I hope that won’t be for a long time. But understand what I’m doing in Dublin.”
“Oh hell, we all know that. You see, Atty, I have known all along what I am and cannot be otherwise or even pretend to be otherwise. The potato famine turned me into a lump instead of a crusader. I was happy when I was