(one front, one rear), off which opened the bedrooms.
‘There’s not another house in Ireland with a staircase like it,’ Willis would say. When he was a child, the wood of the handrail and balusters was stained and grained as oak with an effect so ponderous as to make flight seem very unlikely. But when Annette came to Knockfane she had the hall wallpapered and the stairs painted a cream colour, creating a much lighter effect.
Willis slept at the front of the house in the big bedroom above the drawing room. It had the luxury of a dressing room attached, and it was here that the children, Edward and Julia, had their cots when they were babies, in order to be near their mother. There had in generations past, been times when Knockfane’s six bedrooms had scarcely been sufficient – Hugh and Flora had nine children, although only six of them survived. Then there were other periods when most of the rooms had not been used at all. Willis’s father had been an only child and during his time, Knockfane had been an empty lonely place, but with Edward and Julia and Lydia there, this was no longer the case. They each had a bedroom off the half landing and in the years following Annette’s death, when there was a housekeeper who was also expected to be a nanny, she occupied the fourth room there. It was the least attractive, with a small window that looked out north across the dormer roofs of the annex. The window to Edward’s room was almost obscured by the magnolia tree and on more than one occasion when he was still quite small, he climbed out the window and down the tree in order to terrify and alarm the housekeeper. When the last housekeeper left and was replaced by a local woman, Mrs Rooney, who came on a daily basis and did not live in, Edward moved to the housekeeper’s room, saying he could no longer sleep with the noise of the starlings in the tree. Thereafter, even after he moved to Derrymahon, that remained his room and he always slept there on visits home.
The house retained the memory of Annette but, just as her life had been cut short, so too had the improvements she had intended to make to the place so that there was a poignancy about the cheerfulness of the hall and staircase, the master bedroom, and the drawing room which had all been decorated in her style. The other rooms, in stark contrast, retained the atmosphere of half-a-century earlier and the dark memory of Granny Esdaile.
‘Mama had this room painted before I was born,’ Willis would say and, even though the room in question – be it the morning room or the dining room – was so old-fashioned that it seemed almost modern and the memory of his mother was hardly pleasant, there would be a note of pride in his voice.
5
The Sale Sisters
WHEN ROBERT THE first Esdaile married Mary Sale of neighbouring Coolowen in 1715 he set a precedent whereby the two families would often intermarry down through the centuries. In one generation, the Sales might have come to the rescue by providing a bride when a suitable union had eluded a reprobate Esdaile son, and in another period a Sale who seemed destined for a life as a bachelor might have been saved from such a fate by an Esdaile daughter, who for long had been lodged firmly on the proverbial shelf. It was a scheme of things which had worked very well and although paying little heed to the demands of marital happiness, it had ensured the survival of both families down through the centuries.
But such an arrangement had never been an option for Willis as the three Coolowen sisters, Honor, Eleanor and Martha, were almost twenty years his senior. Honor, the eldest, married a British army captain and, when the couple had a daughter, it was assumed that – with time and a little more effort – they would later produce a son: the son who would succeed to Coolowen. But ‘there can be many a slip twixt cup and lip’, and Captain Dick’s death at the Somme in 1916 was just such a slip, so that Eileen, his 10-year-old daughter, was left as the solitary hope for a future generation of Sales. To compound the calamity, Eileen eloped at the age of eighteen and – becoming a Catholic in the process – married an Irish navvy whom she had met on the boat to Liverpool. Honor, feeling disgraced, cut off all contact with her daughter and ignored the birth of her grandson nine months after the elopement. When her son-in-law, Liam, met his death in an accident two years thereafter, Honor made it known that she regarded the tragedy as ‘just retribution’ for Eileen’s waywardness and iniquity. As to her grandson, Fergal, she never met him.
Meanwhile the other sisters, Eileen’s aunts Eleanor and Martha, embarked upon the familiar voyage that was a life of permanent spinsterhood. ‘They never married’ is what people used to say of Eleanor and Martha, as though it had been their choice entirely. Their father, in making his will, had bequeathed Coolowen to Eleanor but Martha continued to live there. It was Eleanor who always took charge and Martha – who insisted that she was always in pain and ‘never strong’ – always gave way; and that was the pattern of their existence, an existence in which companionship and affection was constantly challenged by aggravation and discord. Their celibate state was unsatisfactory – and a source of disappointment – to both of them; but, more to the point, it meant that, as sure as leaves fall from a tree, they would be the last of the Sales of Coolowen.
When Honor died unexpectedly, in the summer before war broke out in 1939, it came as a great shock to her two sisters. They had thought of Honor, as they thought of themselves, as young, and her sudden death brought a discordant note to the pleasant melody that had for long been life at Coolowen. The outbreak of war in Europe, and the consequent privations in Ireland, as well as the loss of Honor, made Eleanor and Martha fearful for the future. Although they did not voice it much to each other, they felt – for the first time in their lives – vulnerable. They recalled Honor’s persistent urgings that they must think of what was to become of Coolowen and their resulting irritation when she, no more than they, could not come up with a plan; and, while they had been content to drop the subject then, they felt the need to take it up again after her death. But no matter how often they discussed it, a solution always eluded them.
It was Martha who, without mentioning it to Eleanor, wrote to Eileen a few months after Honor died.
‘Your Aunt Eleanor does not know that I am writing this…’ her letter began and then she said how much they missed Eileen and having news ‘about her little boy who, I suppose, must be fourteen by now’. She mentioned how they had always tried to get Honor to put the rift behind her and make contact with Eileen but that Honor never would. In the letter, Martha suggested that Eileen should write to them – ‘without mentioning this letter’ – as she knew that Aunt Eleanor would be open to reconciliation if the approach came from Eileen herself. She hoped that Eileen did not feel angry ‘as she had every right to be’ at the family’s treatment of her and that ‘the means might be found for her and her son, Fergal, to be made welcome at Coolowen’.
When Eileen’s letter arrived a few weeks later, it was Eleanor who opened it.
‘It’s from Eileen, of all people,’ she said when she took the letter out of the envelope. ‘I wonder what she has to say for herself.’
The letter was very friendly with hardly any reference to the years of estrangement between Eileen and the family. She hoped the sisters were well and that with all the shortages – ‘I know you have rationing in Ireland too although I suppose it’s easier being on a farm’ – times were not too difficult for them.
‘Well,’ said Eleanor as she took off her glasses, ‘it’s friendly enough. What do you think she means by writing to us?’
Martha knew that, underneath, Eleanor was very pleased to get the letter. She also knew that, if she herself expressed too much enthusiasm, Eleanor would not respond to it or pursue the possibility of a reconciliation. Over the next few weeks they talked the letter over.
‘Honor made her last years very miserable by taking the attitude she did,’ Eleanor would remark to Martha. ‘It’s what killed her in the end.’
‘God never intended that a mother would cut a child out of her life the way Honor cut
