The Last Storyteller

  Food and seclusion? Where can we have both? Not a village. Not even a town. Try a city. Where I know a good man.

  I had never seen Mr. MacManus in his bearskin coat—although I had seen the coat. It was impossible to avoid; it hung like a live thing on the back of his front door. The “occasion merchant” told me the story:

  “Didn’t I find it at an estate sale? One of the rooms had been locked off for years. Nobody had a key.”

  Since Mr. MacManus had agreed to buy the entire contents of the house, they’d allowed him to break the lock.

  He found a room that, he said “was as fabulous as the Arabian nightshirts.” (I never interrupted him when he flowed like that: too many gems would have fallen loose.) “There was jewels the size of your knuckles, and a big bowl for washing your behind, a French thing, I think they call it a ‘be-there’; a woman from North Cork bought it from me—they’re very clean down that way.”

  The “jewels” proved less than authentic, costume jewelry from an ancient music hall act. However, he also turned up an early Winchester rifle, a cache of antique maps, and half a dozen bottles of homemade hooch, or “poteen,” made from potatoes.

  “It’d put hairs on your chest,” said Mr. MacManus, “whether you wanted them or not.” And hanging there, too, he found the massive coat.

  The sign on his door said, “Back in Five Minutes.” Venetia asked, with calm logic, “How do we know when the five minutes began?”

  We waited half an hour. As we were talking about driving away, I saw the great figure lumbering along a narrow lane off Catherine Street. He looked like a creature from one of those films of grizzlies in the wild, his arms out from his body, akimbo and relaxed. His hat had a homburg shape, but made of the same ursine fur? Impossible. No: when Venetia later complimented him on the hat, he told us that his wife had made it for him. The coat had been tailored for a man of about six feet, seven inches tall.

  “A giant altogether,” said Mr. MacManus. “So Mamie cut off the hem, and she draped and glued the bear’s fur to an old homburg that had belonged to a priest, and that’s my hat.”

  I, who had years of practice in asking for a bed for the night, had no problem in approaching Mr. MacManus.

  “It’d be an honor,” he said, bowing to Venetia. “And we have new sanitation.” (I almost asked him if it included a “be-there.”)

  She thanked him, and something in the way she spoke made him spin around and stare at her. He clasped his hands in front of him like a man meeting a bishop and said, “Oh, Holy God, tell me it is and tell me it isn’t.” His eyes shone like a child’s. “Didn’t I see you, weren’t you in a show or something?” He wrestled with his memory. “Isn’t your name Alicia Kelly?” (Given his verbal erratics, we were lucky he didn’t say “Alopecia.”)

  “Venetia,” we both said together.

  “D’you remember—of course you do.” He took her hand and chanted, “ ‘O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west, / Through all the wide border his steed was the best.’ I used to follow your show across the country. And you’re not dead at all—I heard you were killed in an accident at sea. ‘Lochinvar’ was my favorite poem ever, and nobody ever recited it as well as yourself.”

  To my great surprise, Mr. MacManus had surrounded himself with luxury. No hotel I knew could offer the same level of comfort: rich, deep beds, superb bathrooms, sumptuous towels.

  “The two of you are the first people to use one of my guest rooms,” he said.

  “How many guest rooms do you have?” Venetia asked. Good. She’s engaging again.

  “I’ve six,” he said.

  “You must have a lot of guests.”

  “Oh, not really, Alicia, but the way I look at it, you never know who’ll show up, and I always like to be prepared.”

  We ate that evening with Mr. MacManus—sandwiches as high as bricks. Venetia managed by breaking off chunks and gathering such contents—ham, onion, chicken, cheese—as fell to her plate. Mamie never appeared, though Mr. MacManus spoke of her all the time.

  Some years later, I discovered that Mamie had been dead for more than three years before our stay there. He simply needed to keep her alive—and that is something I so profoundly understand.

  104

  We stayed in warm comfort for two days and two nights. I had the crude idea that the longer we stayed, the more Venetia would forget that we had problems. Each morning we rose to the sound of talk coming from below. Too early for Mr. MacManus to have customers—so who’s down there? At breakfast he said, “I was just talking to Mamie. She’s gone out to get some messages.” The second morning he said, “You just missed Mamie; she’s gone over to her mother’s. The mother isn’t at all well.”

  Mr. MacManus, in his shirtsleeves (and amazing primrose suspenders), had one of those stomachs that seems unconnected to the rest of the body. It wobbled like a great, separate egg when he walked. I saw Venetia looking at it, transfixed.

  I had some thinking to do. As I often did, I worked out my thought process on paper. I still have those notes, and here they are: Dilemma: unreal. Being pursued by IRA fellows who think I mocked them. Also pursued by thuggish detective who believes by now that I must be a member of the IRA. What to do? First thought remains unchanged: Get to a port with a ferry. Or an airport. Only two on the island: Shannon, Dublin. Get to France. Or Spain, for the sun. No extradition.

  Other dilemma: puzzling and upsetting—Venetia’s state of mind. Yet I glimpse her in there. Can I get her out of there? If we go abroad, will she be different? She thinks there’s a third possibility—that J. Stirling is also following us.

  First option therefore—the major priority: buy time to think and organize. Then choose airport. Arrange money. Make schedule. Explain to Venetia. Contact twins.

  At this stage I knew nothing of Miss Fay and her injuries. Or of Jack’s ranting.

  I decided that we would travel the longer distances by night and the shorter stages by day, to try to keep Venetia’s mood light. With a map from the car, I worked out a schedule that would take us by quiet roads, never seeming hurried, to each best next place. An irony surfaced: our safest point of departure, least scrutinized by those searching for us, would be a place I hadn’t thought of; the forbidden territory of north Belfast had an airport.

  On that first morning I read in Mr. MacManus’s newspaper, “ALL BORDER POINTS CLOSED FOLLOWING BOMBING.” A “fierce outbreak of violence” near the town of Newry had activated “the greatest security operations since the war.” Not a problem for us, with my knowledge of all the many roads. Besides, no general alert had been issued, and I had no sense from any of the reports that the police north or south were stopping people and asking questions. Their searches seemed specific.

  As ever in Ireland, most lives remained normal: no war zones, no emergency measures, no martial law. Indeed, if we hadn’t had newspaper reports, nobody would have known that a new guerrilla campaign had broken out. In general, the country seemed to show no visible support for the IRA—except at an occasion that called for a rekindling of ancient emotions, such as the two funerals.

  I read down the page. No great depth of reporting had yet begun. Given the official disapproval and condemnation, I wondered whether it ever might. We had a degree of self-censorship; the politicians and the church spoke, and the newspapers barked their echoes. Thus did the country build some kind of ill-defined moral antagonism to the men who called themselves “freedom fighters.”

  Nobody tried for balance. Not a reporter or columnist addressed the discrimination in Northern Ireland—no jobs for Catholic men, bad housing for Catholic families, who were always subject to police harassment. In the south we knew so little of what went on in the place that we dismissed with the vague term “up there.”

  105

  We left Limerick by quiet roads. Can we learn to tolerate any of this nonsense? And for how long? Get out. Let it die down. Find a safe town somewhere in Europe. Germany, maybe one of those villages I saw during th
e war. Settle down. New life. You have enough money.

  Did the same thoughts course through Venetia’s mind? I had no idea. She wanted to get out of this stupidity; of that I felt sure. But to settle with me again? From her demeanor, I couldn’t begin to guess.

  Unclear and confused, I tried to buy time. Once we were clear of the city, I drove down a small country lane, looking for quiet, linking roads. It led nowhere. I turned the car in the tightest of spaces and headed back the way we’d come.

  “Where are we going?”

  I didn’t answer, and I didn’t look at her. Some miles later, I turned right. The previous foray had been a left turn. This road led only to a farm lane with a lone white house in the distance. I knew the place, had visited there once, hadn’t stayed.

  “Is this the place you’re looking for?”

  “No, not really.”

  I retraced our route. Out on the road again, I looked for signposts. It seemed that there was nobody in Ireland that day—which is to say that every road and every yard and every village seemed empty. Far away, I saw a man in a hill field with a black-and-white dog—and nothing and nobody else.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Venetia sat up straight. “You don’t, do you?”

  I said, “We’re going down here onto another main road.” True, but I hadn’t planned it.

  “Shouldn’t you be avoiding main roads?”

  I said, “That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

  As though I’d had a plan. As though I hadn’t been screaming at myself inside my head: You imbecile! How did you let your life come to this? What kind of fool are you? Where are you going?

  She said, “Are you as frightened as I am?”

  “Venetia, I don’t know what to do about you.”

  For a moment it looked as though I might have made a breakthrough. It didn’t happen. She caught her breath, sat forward, braced herself—but then sagged and sat back. She closed her eyes. Catatonic again. Unreachable.

  See if you can shake her out of it. Ask her. Go on, ask her the crucial question. Say to her, “Have I got this all wrong? Did I completely do the wrong thing? I’d hoped that you had continued to feel the same about me as I did about you. Was I—am I—wrong in that?”

  James had a good friend who lived in a woodland thirty miles from Limerick. We now sat within his radius. I had been there twice, one time with James, once alone. The man, George Williamson, had married an Irish traveler girl, a “tinker,” to use the term they didn’t like. He interested me because he collected stories of the Gypsies and knew some of their old dialects, including Shelta, the Romany-sounding tongue in which some of them traded horses.

  I admired his house, which faced south in a clearing of the woods; a member of the Guinness family had built it as a love nest for a nineteenth-century mistress. It had oriel windows hanging out over a quiet garden. Bookshelved walls swung open to reveal secret rooms. The main fireplace had been carved in white marble and had birds on branches, warbling etched notes by a vivacious fountain.

  We drove the mile-long avenue through the forest that George Williamson maintained with love and passion. A self-educated arborist, he knew how to graft, to bud. “I like trees to marry,” he said over and over, and on any walk near his house you’d find interesting and cultivated hybrids. Half apple–half pear was the least of it.

  He held to the same principles of hospitality as Randall: turn up any time, stay as long as you like. George had a quiet army of servants—“the H. H.” he called them, the “hired help,” and in his deep seclusion he lived the life of a Renaissance prince. He even dressed for dinner each evening, typically in a brocade smoking jacket with a stiff dress shirt, white bow tie, and monogrammed slippers that had belonged to his grandfather.

  Under the arch, past the peacocks on the acre of lawn, the house glowed in the sun. The crenellations around the windows looked like the lacework of a giant seamstress. George’s butler stepped from the great doorway, immaculate in a black suit.

  “Good afternoon, madam, sir. How nice to see you. Mr. Williamson will be so pleased.”

  Such an intriguing house—such excellent taste. A Parisian hostess might have created it. Not for the first time did I wonder about Mare, his dark-eyed tinker wife, whom I’d met briefly on my two previous visits. True, she had been dressed exquisitely, but that didn’t answer the question of where and how she’d acquired her dazzling sensibility.

  George knew that we all had such questions. Mare said nothing; I had never heard her utter a word. James, who had spoken to her, said that she had the same fast, undulating accent of her people, whom he knew on the road in their bright horse-drawn caravans.

  “Ben!” George Williamson had a handshake of oak. “How. Welcome. You. Are.” He spoke every word one at a time, as though sentences hadn’t yet been invented. I introduced Venetia; she didn’t flinch when I said, “My wife.”

  George took her hands in his. “Such. A. Delight.”

  Within minutes, a tray of drinks had appeared in the hall. Whiskey. Nothing else. With six glasses. He drank as I’d always seen him do: one, two, three, and then he relaxed with the fourth glass. As I’d often done myself.

  “How long can you stay?” Before I could answer, he turned to Venetia and said, “My wife died last month.”

  We both gasped. I said, “George, I’m very sorry.”

  “She walked across this floor, I was watching her, she went to fix some branches that she had arranged in that tall pot over there. I heard her grunt. She put a hand to her head. Swayed. Side to side. Fell. Dead when she hit the floor. Brain. Hemorrhage.”

  His eyes shone. Tears? I thought so. Later I wasn’t so sure.

  A maid showed us to a room. Venetia made for the window seat and looked down at the garden. I bounced on the four-poster bed. A large engraving of Napoleon hung above the fireplace.

  “What a strange man,” Venetia said. “Hidden in the woods.”

  “He doesn’t allow photographs,” I said. “People have wanted to write books about this place.”

  “I can see why.”

  I said, “Not just the architecture. During the building, a feud broke out between two local families—stonemasons and carpenters. Each killed members of the other family.”

  “Look!” Venetia pointed.

  Across the grass, behind tall hedges, two maids in full uniforms of black dress and starched white cap and apron were leading—I counted—four, five, six small children to a perfect stable block.

  “Whose are they?” I mused.

  At dinner we asked. “We saw some children,” Venetia said.

  “My. Dear. You must have been mistaken. When the shadows fall here, the light does. Strange. Dances.” He knew how to close down a topic.

  Three of us sat around the end of a long table, Venetia on George Williamson’s right. We finished a starter course of piquant smoked trout with lime jelly. When the three manservants had taken our plates away, George stretched out his right hand and caressed Venetia’s breasts. Casual. Relaxed. Interested.

  What do you do? Venetia did nothing. I did nothing. George said, “Very beautiful.”

  The next course came, potato and onion soup. Repeat performance. This time Venetia, more prepared, caught George’s hand. She pushed it away.

  “Don’t you like me touching you?”

  I said, “Venetia hasn’t been well.”

  “So. Tactful.” George beamed at me. “Not many guests know that you don’t insult your host.”

  And not many hosts know that you don’t insult your guests. Try it one more time and I’ll break every bone in your face.

  But I smiled, and we all dined on.

  After dinner, we walked to a drawing room—big house, long walk. George put his hand on Venetia’s backside. I didn’t see it, but I guessed it from her little forward trot away from him. I made sure to sit beside her for the last hour of the night.

  Back in the four-poster Napoleon room, Venetia lay down at once.
She fell into a sleep so deep that I was able to pull the bedding out from underneath her and cover her without waking her. All night she remained immobile. I sat on the window seat for hours, looking at the starlight and the shadowed garden below. From time to time I checked that Venetia breathed.

  Somewhere around one o’clock in the morning, I heard a noise in the passageway outside our room. When I eased open our door, I saw one of the aproned maids leave a doorway and walk in the opposite direction. The next morning, as we walked down to breakfast, George Williamson came from the same doorway.

  106

  The lovers spent their third night on the shores of the lakes in Westmeath. There they found an empty castle …

  Though far from Westmeath, I knew a castle. Within a few hours’ drive.

  When Venetia woke the next morning, she sat up and grabbed her hair with both hands.

  “Easy, easy,” I said.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

  “You’re fine, you’re with me, I’m here.” The ironic voice in my head added, If that’s what you think of as “fine.”

  Like a cat with quick paws, she ran her hands around her face. She made little whimpering sounds, scarcely audible. And then made hand-washing gestures. Don’t rub off your skin.

  I knew these symptoms: habits of fear. This woman woke up every morning afraid. It would take me years to heal her. If I got the chance. I knew enough to understand that keeping her from returning to Jack Stirling, no matter how illogical that action would be, might be the battle I’d have to fight.

  “There’s a place we can go,” I said.

  “Well, we’ve stayed with the bear. And we met the wolf last night,” said Venetia. Good. Touch of her old humor.

  “How about an empty castle?”

  She said, “I thought that’s what you were doing. Does this mean that you die when all this is over?”