Redemption - Leon Uris [63]
Their time together took on great anticipation as he unrolled drawings, tried different strengths of brushes, cleaning toxins, and explained what his incredible eye saw.
When Caroline was a little girl she wanted her daddy to take her into the shipyard. When Mommy died and it was herself and Daddy, she renewed that hope. It didn’t happen. She turned to music and art. Everything she did was quite decent. She played a decent Chopin, she wrote well, her paintings were pleasant but without the gift from God. Daddy couldn’t buy the gift, nor could she create it.
This, and the gender curse, propelled her to Paris eventually, to loll in the glow of creative geniuses, model for them, love one, collect scraps of their creativity. This was the company she adored. She might have stayed in Paris, but Freddie refused to take a second wife to try for a male heir. In the end, her love for her father brought her back to Belfast, the beginning of her exile to the colonies.
For a time, when she restored Hubble Manor, she was able to rub elbows and breathe the same air as the imported artisans, but they finished and left. Her lone satisfaction now was the pale infusion of drama and music she had brought to Londonderry.
The croppy lad was there, and it soon became apparent to her that she might have under her patronage a man of unusual talent. As he drew down Tustini and Schmidt from the great screen the project took her back to the most intense dreams of her life… to bear witness… to inspire… to catch the twinkling vibrations… to live in the afterglow of creativity.
Both Conor and Caroline realized they had to lock away, in their own secret rooms, their footloose imaginations. They proceeded properly, artisan and patron with lovely decorum, intimate on matters of the screen, free to laugh a lot together. When touching was necessary, in showing plans or climbing the scaffold, it was carried off so that a house that ran on gossip had nothing to gossip about.
Decades of scum fell to Conor’s continuous experiments of compounds, acids, and gentle abrasives. Age and unskilled hands and fire and cannon shot had left twisted seaweedlike bunches of iron. Timbers above and the foundation below were in tentative condition. Magnificent filigrees of leaves and vegetation and animals and lily pads were mutilated or missing.
Little by little the counterfeits were removed. Off came the Valhalla-inspired, mercilessly weighted sections of Joaquim Schmidt. Down came the starbursts of a puzzled and overwhelmed Italian master.
The original sections were now scrutinized by magnifying glass, inch by inch, and began to grow back in time in a rebirth of beauty. Each session, as Conor gained confidence, the level of his artistry rose. Each time it rose, Caroline knew without words. The silent communication was a flow from master to screen to patroness.
A good thing was taking place and it could be felt throughout the manor house. Roger felt it and treated himself to long visits, highly impressed, as Conor explained the logic behind his moves.
Other than Caroline Hubble and his own assistants, Conor steered clear of the prattle of life in a stately home. In fair weather, he took his lunch outside beneath a century-old English oak. In the beginning he was granted solitude so he was able to stick his face into a book, but soon that wall was breached by Jeremy Hubble.
The teenage Lord Jeremy, Viscount Coleraine and eventual heir to the earldom, was totally taken by his first legitimate hero, the great Gaelic footballer. Jeremy, and later his mates from ascendancy families, buzzed around Conor and badgered him into kicking and passing the awkwardly shaped Irish football and organizing little get-up scrimmages.
Conor tried to shoo Jeremy off, to no avail. When the weather was foul, which was more often than when it was fair, Jeremy reckoned that the Long Hall itself would serve as a fine indoor playing field.
When Conor returned to work,