Although before his death Father’s was the mood that generally prevailed in the house — a sort of brittle otherworldliness, an ethereally edged detachment, as though saying to the world, ‘We will indulge you for the moment, but bear in mind, please, that as soon as Father’s work is done, we will leave you’ — Mother had always been the steelier of the pair, strict about correct behaviour and what she called ‘breeding’. She knew just about everyone there was to know, and was forever flying about to lunches and gallery openings and book launches and dinner parties, with or without Father in tow. In later years especially she became more and more independent of him, and ran the show in the house as he receded from it.
Shortly after his death, however, she too began to disintegrate. It happened gradually but unmistakably, a slow, irresistible shutting-down, until eventually she wouldn’t go out at all, or even take telephone calls. At the same time she exhibited a sunniness that was quite out of character. Bel and I constantly found ourselves cornered in silly, chatty, endless conversations with her. She’d rabbit away to us with gossip about the neighbours or vague plans to take a holiday or work that needed doing round the house — whatever came into her head, like a kind of domestic Reuters, tickering constantly in her armchair in the drawing room. It was a side of her that we hadn’t known existed, that (we presumed) used to be bounced off Father and now came babbling through to us. We didn’t know quite how to respond, and it wasn’t even clear that she was listening when we did, because she was drinking all the time, martinis for breakfast and whiskey sours to see in the evenings, drinking and talking, talking and drinking. Finally, one night, the situation came to a head.
Over the years, she and Bel had developed quite a fiery relationship, which could be ignited by the most trivial things. I didn’t know what lay at the heart of it, but I had my suspicions. Before we were born, Mother and Father had been quite the stars in Dublin dramatic circles — never professionally, of course, but they were certainly well known — and now some kind of showbiz rivalry seemed to have arisen between Mother and Bel. It was funny, because for the first years, when Bel was still in school, Mother had been very encouraging about her acting ambitions. Then, suddenly, she changed. Suddenly — almost overnight — she seemed to resent them; suddenly she was full of needling opinions and advice, far more than Bel was happy with. ‘Every great actress has an inner core, on which all her performances are hung,’ she’d say: most of her pronouncements were along these metaphysical lines. ‘Your trouble, Bel, is that you have still to find your inner core.’
That, I conjectured, was the source of the bad feeling; that was how it was even before Father got sick. In the months that followed his death, it deteriorated to the point where they could create a fight out of almost anything. Mother would accuse Bel of forgetting things, or neglecting things, of selfishness, narcissism, disloyalty, deceit. At first, Bel was so surprised that she simply took it; but after a while, when everything she did incurred a criticism from above, she began to retaliate. Bel’s practice, when she was hurt, was to shout and scream abuse of every kind until whoever it was went away; the fights got ugly very quickly. One night about six months ago, I arrived home to find Bel standing in the hallway with a face quite drained of colour. Her hands were shaking; Mother was nowhere in sight. She refused to tell me what had happened. All she would say was that, after a protracted discussion, Mother had agreed that she wasn’t herself, and that perhaps she needed some time on her own to think. The black car that had passed me in the driveway belonged to the nice people from the Cedars, taking her away for an indefinite stay.
Which is how the house came to be under my care, and whatever Bel said, I had to work hard to keep its inscrutable momentum, to tie the disparate elements together in some semblance of order — Mrs P’s wandering mind, Bel’s pathological insistence on controlling every aspect of her life, the eccentricities or criminal tendencies of whoever she was seeing at the time, and the house itself, the centuries of stonework and timber, that had its own whims and bad moods to be coaxed through. It was I who kept it all ticking over, who stayed in all day just to centre things a little, give them a bit of focus; it was a tough job and no one thanked me for it. I couldn’t be expected to get things right all the time, either; that is, what happened afterwards wasn’t entirely my fault, whatever they tell you.
I rose early the next morning, in spite of all the excitement the night before. The vet was coming to look at the peacocks, which had developed an infestation of some kind, and I had to let him into the garage. The peacocks were my responsibility. Father had looked after them when he was alive — he was the only one who actually liked them and they had been somewhat neglected since. I had had a peacock-flap built into the door of the garage where they lived, so they could come and go as they pleased, and other than embarrassing visits from the vet we didn’t have much to do with each other most of the time. I felt a little guilty about this, but really it was their own fault: they were the most unrewarding creatures, bone-stupid and filthy, with little sense of loyalty or gratitude, and they got infestations at the drop of a hat if they weren’t paid constant attention.
The vet examined each bird and doused them with some sort of powder; then as usual he started getting cross about their living conditions and exhorting me to change their sawdust more frequently to avoid future infections, etc. ‘And feed them, Mr Hythloday, they’re animals, they need to eat every day, not just when you remember —’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said; it was a little early for exhortations and frankly I think we were all secretly hoping that they would die off quickly and we would be rid of them; I can’t think of any other reason that I should have been left: in charge of them, apart from the practical one that the garage was the only area of the house to which Mrs P did not have a key. Even Mother found the peacocks a little over the top, and Bel reserved a special loathing for them — all her Drama friends had turned Marxist in their Sophister year at Trinity and they gave her a fearful time about them.
The reason Mrs P didn’t have a key was that the peacocks shared the garage with what was probably the most beloved of Father’s objets: a 1930 Mercedes, a pristine, bottle-green Grand Prix racer. It had been a gift from the German ambassador, who lived nearby; Father had developed a special hypoallergenic balm for his daughter, who suffered terrible eczema. He’d never driven the car — in fact, none of us was quite sure whether it could actually be driven — but he’d cleaned it obsessively every Sunday afternoon, buffing vigorously with chamois and beeswax for hours on end. When he was finished, he would stand arms folded at the garage door, watching the light spill over the metal as behind him the sun sank below the trees; and these liminal moments, reflecting on the stationary Mercedes, were among the few times when you could say with any degree of certainty that my father looked genuinely happy.