said Eleanor, ‘it was the insult, as Honor saw it, of Eileen having to become a Catholic when she married him not to mention the fact that the little boy had to be brought up as a Catholic too. She resented being dictated to by the Catholic Church and she wasn’t alone in that.’
‘No,’ said Martha. ‘Although, if anything, Honor didn’t give a fig about religion. After she married Dick and went to live in England, the Catholic–Protestant thing meant nothing at all to her. Do you remember how she used to chide us by telling us how bigoted we all were in Ireland?’
‘Do I, indeed?’ said Eleanor. ‘She did mind, though, that Liam was only a labourer and “no class”, as she used to put it, and she was mortified that Eileen had to marry him, as it were. Said she would never be able to live it down.’
‘And I suppose, in a way, she never did,’ said Martha.
Eventually Eleanor replied to Eileen. She invited her to come over and stay at Coolowen, bringing Fergal with her.
‘It’s an odd sort of name to have given the boy,’ she remarked to Martha, ‘I suppose it’s something Irish.’
‘I think it’s a lovely name,’ said Martha.
Although travel between Ireland and England had already become restricted, Eileen and Fergal came to Coolowen during the Christmas holidays that year and, as the visit was a success, they came again for longer in the summer. The sisters were delighted with Eileen, who seemed to harbour no resentment that she had for so many years been banished. They came to see her almost as their own daughter and they were enchanted by the 14-year-old Fergal.
‘A proper little gentleman,’ Eleanor said to Martha. ‘Honor did the right thing in providing for his education. Ampleforth is a very good school, I’ve always heard that. It’s already given him a lot of polish and he has beautiful manners.’
‘Very, very handsome too,’ said Martha.
She looked straight across at Eleanor.
‘And he didn’t get that from our side of the family,’ she said.
Within a year or so, Eleanor had decided – and Martha had given her wholehearted approval – that they should make Fergal their heir. And, the sooner the better, as far as they were concerned. Eileen had no objection to the plan. Having been brought up in England, she had never known Ireland but in the period since the reconciliation, she had grown to love Coolowen and she was very fond of her aunts. Before the war she had had a good job as matron in a school near Birmingham and now she did what she called ‘war work’ without elaborating as to what that work actually was. She could not leave England but was happy that her son would make his life in Ireland.
But if the general sense of satisfaction which accompanied the sisters’ decision, Eileen’s consent, and Fergal’s obliging willingness seemed like the arrival of spring after the cold winter that was the sisters’ years of worry, there lingered an annoying wind which blighted the promise of early growth. This had hardly been referred to in all the sisters’ deliberations even though it was uppermost in the minds of both. The decision that Fergal should one day inherit Coolowen had been relatively simple. He was, after all, their great nephew, their own flesh and blood, and – although slightly indirect – their only descendant. Much more difficult to accommodate was the fact that Fergal was a Catholic. It was of little significance that, being to all intents and purposes an English Catholic, and privileged by a Benedictine education, Fergal did not seem like a Catholic at all. He still was one and for a Catholic to come into Coolowen after centuries of the place being Protestant, was something that Eleanor and Martha could hardly bear to contemplate.
‘I never thought I would see the day…’ Eleanor would say without being more specific.
‘He’s not properly so,’ Martha would reason. ‘He is, after all, half a Protestant just as he is half a Sale.’
‘No,’ Eleanor would interrupt, ‘only a quarter Sale. Eileen is half a Sale.’
By deflecting their conversation to a discussion of such genealogical fractions, the sisters managed to relieve their minds of more uncomfortable thoughts and, a few years later, when Fergal Conroy was seventeen, he came to live at Coolowen.
6
Fergal
FERGAL WAS ONLY seventeen when he first saw Julia.
She was just nine at the time but that made no difference: he fell in love with her on the spot. It was within weeks of his having come to live in Ireland and his great-aunts had asked the Esdailes over to tea. Lydia was only just five and Edward a tough 11-year-old; but Julia, in spite of still being a child, had the poise and allure of a debutante.
‘She’s such an old-fashioned wee girl,’ Aunt Martha said, amused, when she overheard Julia asking Fergal why he was called Fergal.
‘I’m called Julia because I was born in July: on the fifteenth. If I’d been a boy, I would have been christened Swithin.’
When tea was finished, Aunt Eleanor, who always decided such things, told the children that they might get down from the table and go out and play.
‘Fergal will show you the goslings,’ she said, ‘and, if you’re very good, he might take you into the walled garden and let you pick some strawberries.’
They went out through the greenhouse.
‘This vine is hundreds, maybe thousands, of years old,’ said Julia.
‘Are you sure about that?’ said Fergal.
‘Of course,’ said Julia. ‘It’s the true vine. It says so in Liscarrig Church. “I am the True Vine” is painted around the arch above the Communion table. That’s why every year Miss Martha arranges baskets of the grapes there for the Harvest Festival.’
Their feet crunched on the gravel as they walked along the path through the trees towards the yard.
‘She’s still only a baby,’ Julia said when she saw Lydia picking out the white stones. ‘Leave her where she is. She’s always dragging out of me.’
Edward had already disappeared.
‘I’ll show you the goslings,’ said Fergal. ‘Come on Lydia, I want to see if you can count them.’
‘I don’t like ducks,’ said Julia. ‘They’re dirty.’
She stood where she was. She looked down at the ground and then, closing her mouth firmly so that her lips became almost white, she stared at Fergal. He chuckled to himself and smiled. Julia was used to defying her elders and betters, even on the smallest of issues, and she knew she was always successful: in the case of Edward and Lydia, she always just told them what to do.
As the years progressed Fergal became like an older brother to the three Esdailes. But with Julia there was always an additional edge. She soon discovered that she could make him do her bidding and, with the élan of someone a great deal older and more experienced, she sulked, flattered, teased, ignored, and made demands so that Fergal never quite knew where he stood. That was the way Julia liked it, and when all else failed, she would tell him she was going to marry him.
‘Pappy may not allow it, so you’ll have to secretly take me away in the night,’ she would say.
