The God of the Labyrinth

  Tracing the complicated history of the Boswell papers had made me aware of the difficulties I might face in the quest for Esmond Donelly. Obviously, no amount of patience and diligence would be of any avail unless luck was on my side. Oddly enough, I had a curious feeling of confidence, which may simply have been the outcome of my intense interest in Donelly and the literature of his period—for, apart from Blake and Goethe, I have always found the writers of the eighteenth century a pretty disappointing bunch, and therefore never taken the trouble to study them.

  From what Sue Worthington had told me, I assumed that Jeremy was acquainted with some member of the Talbot family, or perhaps with whoever had discovered the papers in the cow barn. As soon as he came in the door, I asked him:

  ‘What’s the name of your friend who found some of Boswell’s papers?’

  ‘Oh, he didn’t actually find them. They were found by a chap called O’Rourke in Portmarnock.”

  ‘Not Malahide?’

  ‘No, not Malahide, although it’s pretty certain they came from Malahide. As far as I can make out, some of the Boswell papers were borrowed by a retired clergyman named O’Rourke during the first world war, and they never got returned. His son found them after his death.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Well, they’re in the hands of a strange old maniac called Isaac Jenkinson Bates, who lives in Dublin. His nephew’s one of our testers in the distillery and he told me about them one day.’

  ‘Have you ever seen them?’

  ‘No. The old boy’s pretty cagey about them. Obviously, they really belong to the Malahide estate—or perhaps to this American university that bought the papers.’

  ‘But do you know anything about them?’

  ‘Nothing much, except that some of the stuff’s pretty porno­graphic.’

  ‘That sounds odd. I mean, what would a clergyman be doing with it?’

  ‘He was probably a dirty-minded old man.’

  ‘Do you know the address of this Jenkinson character?’

  ‘Not offhand, but I’ve got to ring Dublin on Monday—I’ll ask Hurd—that’s the nephew.’

  And there the matter stood for the weekend. I knew that my chances of getting to see the old boy were limited, if he was as cagey as Jeremy said; but there was just a hope that his nephew might be able to apply pressure.

  On Monday, Jeremy rang me from his office. He had just spoken to the old man’s nephew. Hurd had verified that Jenkinson Bates was extremely cautious about showing his material. But in the course of the conversation, he had mentioned something that sounded promising. Bates was extremely interested in murder. So it was not impossible that he had read my book The Sociology of Violent Crime. Jeremy suggested that I write to him on the subject of Irish murder in the eighteenth century, and try to make his acquaintance that way. Jeremy gave me Bates’s address at Baggot Street in Dublin.

  There was not a great deal more to do in London. I spent two more days there, seeing friends, lunching with publishers and drinking cocktails. Under normal circumstances I would have enjoyed the total change from lecturing; but now I thought about nothing but Donelly. I wrote a letter to The Times Literary Supplement about my interest in Donelly, and another to the Irish Times. And I spent a futile afternoon in the British Museum, trying to discover if Isaac Jenkinson Bates had ever written a book on murder; if he had, it was not in the Museum. On Wednesday morning, Sue Worthington drove us to London Airport to catch the plane for Shannon. Just before we left the house, Jeremy rang, and asked to speak to me.

  ‘I’ve just been talking to Jim Hurd again. He mentioned something that might help you in your approach to old Bates. Apparently the old man believes that the Ireland’s Eye murderer was innocent. Do you know anything about the case?’

  ‘I remember a little. Man called Kirwan.’

  This was a valuable piece of information. At midday we caught our plane, landing in Shannon just over an hour later. Tom Kenny, our local garage man, had driven our old car down to the airport to meet us. Two hours later, we were back in Moycullen.

  There is an immense feeling of relief in returning home from a long journey. I love Ireland: the narrow roads, the shabby small towns, the incredible green of the fields, the low clouds, the peaty lakes. I began to feel something like resentment of Donelly, for preventing me from relaxing completely for a week or so.

  Our house stands half a mile outside Moycullen, up a narrow, rocky lane that becomes a torrent in the rainy season. It is an eighteenth-century vicarage, built of grey limestone, the walls covered with lichen and ivy. We bought it in 1963, on the proceeds of the ‘Sex Diary’. In our absence, Diana’s former husband, Robert Kirsten, had been looking after the house for us. Since 1960 he has been Composer in Residence at a series of American universities, and has been enormously successful. Last autumn he decided he needed a long period of solitude to com­pose, so we invited him to stay with us. He’d been in the house since January; Mrs Healy, the wife of the shepherd down below us, cooked his meals. Kirsten had left for Dublin three days before we returned—two of his chamber operas were being per­formed there, and he was to conduct. The house was empty and peaceful. Mrs Healy had lit fires in the dining room and our bedroom, giving them a cheerful brightness. Our house tends to be dark, since it is surrounded on three sides by trees, and some of the rooms are panelled in mahogany; except for the electric lights, it could be the setting for one of Le Fanu’s novels.

  I stood at our bedroom window—Mopsy was jumping up and down on the bed and making its springs creak—and looked out over Lough Corrib. There was a slight drizzle that was little more than mist. The trees, with their spring buds, looked black and wet. There is a hypnotic quality about our part of Ireland; visitors to our house find themselves sleeping for twelve hours at a stretch, and still yawning at four in the afternoon. As I stood there, the firelight flickering on the walls, I experienced an enor­mous relaxation that made me realise how much my lecture trip had tired me. My emotions seemed to sink into a deep feather bed; a great peace and detachment came over me. And it struck me suddenly that Esmond Donelly might have looked out on this scene, nearly two centuries ago, and seen very much what I now saw. Then I remembered Fleisher’s assertion that Donelly had seduced both illegitimate daughters of the local priest, Father Riordan, and I felt jarred. If it had been one daughter, it would have been understandable; some pretty, innocent country girl, probably brought up by a neighbouring farmer or shepherd (perhaps an ancestor of Sean Healy), who might have seen Donelly as he paused at the local grocer one day for a glass of whiskey or porter, and been fascinated by the well-dressed, cul­tured gentleman. And Donelly would look at the healthy cheeks, and think how pleasant it would be to remove the coarse linen dress and run his hand over the shapely body as if she was a thoroughbred horse. This would be natural and pleasant; but the seduction of two girls indicated a gloating sensuality, an obsession with conquest.

  Mopsy said: ‘Daddy, can I have a bath now?’, and broke my train of thought. I undressed her, put her into the bath, then went downstairs to open the bottle of Californian burgundy I had stood near the fire—I had brought it all the way back for the pleasure of drinking it in my own sitting room. I put a record on the gramophone—Delius’s violin concerto—and allowed myself to sink into a state of blurry and soft-edged melancholy. The wine was very slightly warm. Most of the wine authorities say that one should never expose it to direct heat, but I find that ten minutes in front of a fire never does a vin ordinaire any harm. I poured myself a large glass-full, and drank half of it straight down—the way I like to drink the first glass of wine of the evening. It quenches the thirst, gives the best of its flavour to the palate, and produces an immediate warm glow. Our cases stood by the door, still unpacked; but I wanted to enjoy the savour of being back in my own home. Our sitting room has a distinctive, not unpleasant smell—resembling somewhat the smell of old books.
Most of our furniture was bought by Diana at local auctions—she has a passion for jumble sales and auctions—and there is not an item that could be described as modern. Looking around, it struck me that Esmond Donelly might have sat in a room such as this; for all I know, he had sat in this very room. I reached out for one of the shopping bags Diana had carried on the plane, and found the typescript of Donelly’s Refutation of Hume, and opened it casually.

  . . . I am not criticising Mr Hume’s logic, which is invariably cogent. But I am suggesting that his temperament is such as to blind him to certain varieties of feeling. His logic may demolish the aspirations of the alchymists; but what does he know of their visions?

  I stopped to think about this. It was obviously worth a critical footnote, pointing out the similarity of the idea to Blake’s:

  How do you know but ev’ry bird that cuts the airy way

  Is an immense world of delight, closed to your senses five?

  And again I wondered: How could such a man be a boasting Casanova, pursuing women out of some absurd obsession for mere quantity? And what had Johnson called him: ‘a phoenix of convivial malice’? Somehow, this was the last phrase I would think of applying to the author of the Refutation of Hume.

  The record finished; I went to turn it over, and looked for a moment out of the window that faces west. The clouds were low on the hills of Iar Connaught, but the sky behind them was bright. On the opposite hillside, a row of poplars stood against the skyline. For a moment, I was back in the bedroom at Long Island, tasting the faintly smoky taste of Beverley’s small nipples, then feeling the exploding warmth of loins as I looked past her shoulder at the trees on the cliff top. I pushed away the blurry melancholy, grasped at the flavour of hardness that came over the poplars, and knew again with sudden total insight that human beings must never accept the ingredients of present-consciousness, that greater horizons always lie beyond the bounds of immediacy judgements. For a moment, I was Esmond Donelly, asking what Hume knew of the alchemist’s vision. The contradictions van­ished; suddenly, I understood Donelly. For him, the alchemist was not a transmuter of metals, but a transmuter of conscious­ness; and sex was the philosopher’s stone that could transmute the base metals of ordinary consciousness into vision.

  Mopsy yelled: ‘Daddy, I want to get out.’ I got Diana out of her kitchen and sent her upstairs. I wanted to fix this insight and explore it. Because there was still an obvious problem. No one would deny that sex has this power to raise consciousness to a higher intensity; since Lawrence, it has become a commonplace of the twentieth century. But Lawrence also knew another secret of the sexual impulse: ‘What many women cannot give, one woman can.’ Ever since I had been with Diana, my own interest in seduction had waned to a mere curiosity. I could look at a pretty girl and wonder what kind of bra and panties she was wearing under her clothes or whether she lay passively in bed or moved violently, but the curiosity was not strong enough to lead to pursuit. In recent years, I had even been surprised to discover an increasing tendency to reject those harmless forms of mutual satisfaction that are offered with ‘no strings attached’. A girl at a party once said to me frankly: ‘Why don’t we share a bed afterwards? It’s better than masturbating in separate beds.’ I agreed and we spent the night together, with ‘no strings attached’. But in the morning, I realised that it wasn’t entirely true that there were no strings. Two bodies had interpenetrated; so had two worlds. I didn’t particularly like her world; it was too vague and futile. Like planets that have approached too close, we had caused seismic disturbances in one another. I can no longer remember what she was like in bed; but I can clearly remember certain anecdotes she told me about the failure of her marriage, that still disturb me. I would have done better to leave her spinning in her own orbit.

  This is why I suspect Casanova’s veracity. He was neither stupid nor insensitive—that much is clear. Yet there is little evidence in the Memoirs that these mutual disturbances took place. A girl is young and ‘amiable’; she begins by rejecting the liberties he tries to take, until his blandishments ‘change anger to a softer passion’, after making him promise not to despise her afterwards, she allows him to undo her corset strings. Even if the girl is a seventeen-year-old virgin just out of a convent, there is never any suggestion of the usual difficulties, physical or psycho­logical; only vague references to spending ‘several delicious hours’ or ‘giving ourselves up to an ecstasy of pleasure until daybreak’. There is a dream-like air about it all.

  Donelly was no Signeur Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, that was clear. And the necessity of finding out more about him became an almost physical discomfort. I went into the dining room, where I keep my books on law and criminology, and searched until I found an account of the Ireland’s Eye murder case. It was com­monplace enough. William Bourke Kirwan was an artist who lived at Howth with his wife in the year 1852. One afternoon in September, they hired a boatman to row them out to Ireland’s Eye, the attractive little island that lies a mile outside Howth harbour—and within sight of Malahide. It was a still day, and at seven o’clock, screams were heard from the island. At eight, the boatman arrived and found Kirwan still sketching—a sus­picious circumstance, since it was dark. Kirwan said he wasn’t sure where his wife had gone—he presumed she was somewhere on the other side of the island, still swimming. They found her in a shallow rock pool, her face badly bruised, her lungs full of water. Although a verdict of accidental death was returned, the circumstances were so suspicious that the body was exhumed. Kirwan was sentenced on circumstantial evidence; he claimed not to have heard the screams which could be heard on shore; he had a mistress with a baby in Dublin. Many people believed him to be innocent, and the death sentence was subsequently commuted to penal servitude. He later married his mistress, and emigrated to America.

  I went to my study, switched on the electric fire, and typed out a letter to Isaac Jenkinson Bates, saying that I intended writing about the Ireland’s Eye case in a book on murder, and wondered if he would mind explaining to me why he believed Kirwan innocent. Then I walked down the hill and posted it. After that, I felt relaxed enough to read Mopsy a story about Peter Rabbit.

  I was up early the next morning, and took a stroll around Ross Lake. When I came back, Diana said: ‘Miss Donelly of Croom rang up. She wants you to ring her back.’

  ‘Did she sound friendly?’

  ‘More or less. She says she’s written you a letter.’

  There were two large cardboard boxes full of the correspon­dence that had arrived while we were in the States; so far, I had not worked up the energy to go through them. Now, while Diana cooked me egg and bacon, I emptied them on the floor of the study. I told Mopsy to sort out all those that had been re­directed from my publisher—these could wait. I opened two parcels of records, and several books from publishers who hoped for a favourable quote they could use in advertising. (Regret­tably, they never send the books I would like to get free; only the ones that are likely to get bad reviews.) Finally, I found the letter with a Limerick postmark, addressed in a neat, round hand.

  I must confess that I had not been entirely frank with her in the letter I had written from New Haven. I saw no point in getting doors slammed in my face from the beginning. So I had simply told her that I had heard about Esmond Donelly during my lecture tour—leaving her to infer that someone in my lecture audiences had raised the name—and wanted to write an essay on him for a future book. I took the risk of adding that I had spoken to Colonel Donelly and seen a copy of Donelly’s Travel Diary.

  Her reply made me feel ashamed of myself. Dignified but friendly, she said that she was happy to hear that her ancestor was not entirely forgotten, and that she had spent years trying to persuade an English publisher to reissue the Diary. She and her sister would be delighted to see me any time I cared to call. In the meantime, they would write to the solicitor who was holding the Donelly papers in safe-keeping and get him to bring them to the
house. . . .

  Again I had pangs of conscience, and felt inclined to drop the whole thing. Then I fortified myself with a glance at the manu­script I had already uncovered, and decided it would be absurd to drop a venture whose beginnings had been so auspicious. I rang the exchange and got put through to Miss Donelly’s num­ber. A brisk, rather English voice answered.

  ‘Ah, Mr Sorme, it was kind of you to ring back. Your wife tells me you only got back from America late yesterday. You must be quite exhausted.’

  I said I was feeling fine, and enquired when they expected to get the papers from the solicitor.

  ‘Oh, they’re here now. He was very prompt. We’ve been reading them through. It’s simply fascinating material. How do you propose to travel? By train?’

  When I said by car, she asked me why I didn’t drive over immediately and have lunch with them. I looked at my watch, and said I could be there by mid-afternoon. Before I hung up, she said:

  ‘I hope you won’t be offended if I ask you one question.’ My heart sank. ‘I hope you’re not interested in any of the nasty stories about him?’

  ‘Nasty stories?’ I saw myself entangled in a web of evasions and half-truths. But she said:

  ‘My sister saw one of your books in the library, a book about murder. I hope you’re not interested in the silly rumours about Esmond and Lady Mary Glenney?’

  I was able to say, with an enormous sense of relief, that I had never heard such rumours. She said in a business-like voice:

  ‘Good, I’m delighted to hear it.’ There was a click, and she suddenly snapped:

  ‘Tina, are you listening on the other line?’

  A timid voice said:

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t. It’s a most annoying habit.’ The line suddenly went dead. I stared at the phone for a moment, then hung up.