away to conceal them from his father.
‘There are other things you have to know,’ Willis said.
He got up from where he was sitting and went over to the fireplace. Leaning with an elbow on the mantelpiece, he looked into the empty grate.
‘About the family, your mother …’ he continued.
Edward’s thoughts swam and he felt his stomach empty.
‘No, Pappy, please …’ he said.
Willis raised his palm to silence him and started to speak.
When he had finished, it was almost as though Edward did not know where he was. Much of what he had heard, he had not fully understood. He did not like being reminded of his Mama – his Mama was dead, after all – and the Mama he heard about that morning from his father was not the Mama he remembered. He was at a loss.
‘Dympna Canty has brought all this on,’ he thought after his father had left the room.
He wanted to get back into bed and he wanted to sleep. But his father had told him to get dressed and come downstairs. He sobbed as he did so. He was relieved that he had not been punished but he did not understand.
It was only in years to come, and when he was much older, that he would appreciate the full import of his father’s words to him that day. They had not been intended as a punishment and his father could not have understood how cruel they were. But cruel is how the words seemed to Edward and, although he tried to put them out of his mind and never think of them again, they were to haunt his existence for ever after.
1
The Master of Knockfane
THE YEAR WAS 1952, the month was August, the time was evening, and the Master of Knockfane was at home, alone. This was Willis Esdaile and he was not happy to be left alone. He was irritated that his two daughters, who had gone off to play tennis in the early afternoon, could be so inconsiderate as to be this late in returning.
He was fussed in himself as he got up from his tea and moved to the morning room. He liked to smoke in the evening. It was the only time of day he did so and he kept his pipe, a light maple with a serpentine amber stem, on the mantelpiece along with his tin of flake tobacco. There they bullied into disorder a black marble clock, several Staffordshire figures, a pair of china vases, calendar cards, notices from the Royal Dublin Society, the Lune Union Harriers, the county Archaeological Society, and the myriad other organisations whose activities impinged upon his existence. The resulting clutter made for an untidiness that no wife would have tolerated but, with no wife to chide him – although his daughter Julia had recently started to remark upon the ‘mess’ – Willis never considered leaving his pipe and tobacco anywhere else.
Settling into his chair on that particular August evening, he looked at the clock.
‘Almost seven,’ he said to himself, ‘nearly time they were back. Mrs Cox always wants her tennis parties to go on far too late.’
He missed his two girls when they were not there, even when they were only absent for a couple of hours; and he always longed for those weeks when they were at home, Julia from university at Trinity College in Dublin and Lydia from boarding school in Westport. He found it difficult not to indulge them and he nearly always pandered to Lydia’s sensitivities and succumbed to Julia’s demands. He made it his excuse that, as they had no mother, it was up to him to provide them with love enough for two. He did not like to dwell on the past – there had been too much tragedy – and when he thought of the future and what might happen to Knockfane, it only made him unhappy. For that reason and for his own contentment, he chose to live in the present and the present was Julia and Lydia. His son, Edward, he thought of differently which is not to say that he thought of him very often, because he did not. There was no reason to do so. Edward no longer lived at home in Knockfane but with his Odlum grandparents at Derrymahon, and that arrangement suited his father very well.
It was pleasant at this time of day in the morning room as it caught the last of the sun. Slanting through the huge weeping ash and across the grass outside, it dispatched shafts of warmth through the open French windows, bringing the evening’s pollen in its wake and filling the room with the scent of the roses which hugged the wall outside. The room, with its low ceiling and cluttered furnishings, had a cosiness that was alien to the grander drawing room and dining room to the front of the house. Its walls were papered in a busy pattern of cascading roses against a latticed background and from a picture rail hung a collection of watercolours framed in oak and mounted with gilt borders. Brightly coloured, these seemed at first glance to be quite conventional with pleasant streams and ponds, mountains, forests and animals and people engaged in daily chores. But viewed close-up, the costumes, the faces, the trees, the water and the daily chores revealed a stranger world: they were all Chinese so that what looked like a bog was really a paddy field, a peasant in a shawl was in fact wearing a shawl and tunic; and a distant view which suggested the Sugarloaf mountain in County Wicklow was inscribed The Mountain of the Nine Lotuses. The artist was Great Aunt Dora Esdaile who, denied the opportunity of becoming a professional artist, had devoted herself to religion instead and had spent her life as a missionary in China with the China Inland Mission.
In spite of the apparent chaos and dilapidation of the room, its armchairs and sofa lacking any semblance of being a match, it had an air of reliability that went beyond the expectations of ordinary comfort. There was a peacefulness in its lack of pretension. It was a room at ease with itself, a room with a history, and one that had adapted to change. In all these respects it reflected and complemented the character of its principal occupant, Willis Esdaile himself.
He had been born in 1897 – the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee as his mother never tired of telling him – and, from the perspective of the mid-twentieth century, the overall impression was that he was, if not Victorian, then certainly an Edwardian. It was possibly on that account that many people thought of him as old. On the other hand, it could have been because he was a widower and had been, or so it seemed to most people, for ever. For his own part, Willis did not mind being thought of as old and he explained it to himself as the consequence, not of his widowhood, but of his having been Master of Knockfane for almost as long as anyone could remember: his father had died when he was only fourteen and that was more than four decades previous.
A handsome man, portly rather than fat, he was endowed with what might be called ‘bearing’ while a fastidiousness about his dress suggested a certain vanity. He was a country man and his clothes were country too. A dun-colour tweed suit, a stiff shirt collar, gold cuff links and a fob chain, also in gold, that anchored a watch in a waistcoat pocket, polished brogues. His hair, snowy and well trimmed, gave no hint that baldness might be on its way; and, as if to allay any suspicion in that respect, he sported a fulsome moustache. Also white, it highlighted the robust complexion that came from a life lived out of doors.
‘Now, where have the matches gone?’ he mumbled to himself before realising that he had them in his hand. He started to clean the pipe. After a moment, he got up and fetched The Irish Times and settled down to read but his mind soon wandered to matters on the farm. Summer would be properly over in no time. The wheat and barley were ready to be harvested and, if there was no rain in the next week, the crop promised to be very good. The hoggets were nearly at the stage when they could be sent up to the market in Dublin and sold. The sheds, where the stall feds spent their winters, had been all cleaned out and the manure drawn out to the fields ready for spreading in the winter. The hay needed to be brought in. There was so much to do and, in no time at all, there would be the threshing.
Engrossed in such thoughts, Willis thought he heard footsteps on the front gravel.
‘They’re home,’ he said to himself.
Then the dogs shot past the window barking their heads off and after a couple of minutes the hall doorbell sounded. He heard Rose come through the kitchen and go to the door. He didn’t recognise the voice, a man, and wondered who it could be at that time of day. Rose knocked and came into the morning room, shutting the door behind her.
‘It’s that young Mr Benson,’ she said. ‘I told him Miss Julia and Miss