‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, they’re at me. They’re at me.’
The sound of pounding running feet somewhere upstairs. Now other feet and doors slamming. And ten minutes later. Crooks with a candelabrum crossing to me.
‘Forgive the upstairs intrusion Master Darcy. But that one Dingbats said a rat big as a fox jumped up on her in bed. Sure now if there was a rat it would be very surprising he didn’t take a good bite out of her being as she’s got a body on her like a boneless shoulder of pork.’
One did at this moment find it physically painful to have one’s quiet reverie and privacy so invaded. Perhaps a beam next would bounce down on my head. Or the assembled staff come lurching in, bottles to their lips, quaffing back, having been in the wine cellar. But this tonight is home. In all its hopeless insanity and crumbling dilapidation. Mine. Its land I do so love. Marked up and down and over hills with its mossy stone walls. Where I ran and rode. With sunshine joy, swinging in the lichen grey apple trees. My sisters chasing me. Peeking round the strong sinewed ancient trunks of beech, oak and chestnut. Streams and lakes streaking with trout. Emerald meadows of softest velvet. No footsteps heard. Lonely walks dreaming beyond these halls and rooms. Where I was born. And in such bygone pain. Saw my mother die. And what sadness now. Lies before my feet. Tongue of a vixen. Out there. Screeching. Across the white frosty night. An owl. Calls. Out of a sorrow cold and old. Who doth it be who hoots. And I must. Fight as I have never fought. Never give up. Someone must preserve the architecture. Someone must cherish the porcelain, paintings and silver. Someone must care about the trees, the flowers and butterflies. Someone must love again. The air, the waters and grasses.
To keep
Safe embraced
A moment longer
The jewels
Of life
3
The moonlight gone. And a cock crowing waking me. A wind. My mind aswirl with the most indiscreet of dreams. Dressed as a bishop I was having it off with Lois attired as a nun back in her Dublin studio clacking her castanets. Reached into my side table for my piss pot. Kneel in bed to avoid freezing. And then freezing as one waited for one’s fierce engorgement to subside. What bliss to take a long and most relieving pee. But good almighty grief, feel my knees growing wetly cold. Dear god in the very worst of worst horrors. One’s warm piss is flooding out a crack in the bottom of this bloody pot to soak frigidly into one’s mattress.
Of course frozen out of my wits, Crooks woke me just after dawn. From my nightmare of an arctic mid Atlantic ocean sinking. I had not the heart to tell him to bugger off and let me sleep. Until I was sorely tempted to do just that as the wet paper and sticks he attempted to light smoked up through the soggy turf in the fireplace. Crooks pumping the bellows, puffing out massive clouds of smoke, which joining the billows gusting back down the cold chimney, one could hardly breathe or see across the room.
‘Breakfast’s on the way and have this alight blazing now any second Master Reginald.’
‘O god Crooks, do please leave it. I’ll go down to breakfast. And do please dispose of this cracked chamber pot.’
‘It would be that one Dingbats again.’
‘You must I think Crooks please see she is more careful.’
‘I’ve done everything in my power to train that one up. She’ll swear on a stack of Bibles that the pot wasn’t cracked when she put it there. Set this fire as well so that the devil having a barbecue in hell wouldn’t get it alight.’
It was always hard to estimate the degree of madness any individual staff inmate had reached, being as they were all going mad together. The one true cooperation they genuinely shared. And the only sane consistent thing one could depend upon. But with the future prospects for Andromeda Park already so bleak the addition of the likes of Dingbats made it look dispiritingly quite uncomfortable indeed.
Darcy Dancer dressed. A thick herringbone tweed jacket and cavalry twill trousers. A thick cotton cricket shirt, two layers of woollen underwear. Tiptoe now out in the hall. Avoid alerting a new disaster. Only barely escaping this morning’s asphyxiation. And the frostbite while the windows were wide open for my room to clear of smoke. Good god who’s that. That voice. Crooks mumbling down the hall around the turning to my mother’s apartments.
‘Yes my dear Delia, your royalness, my true and only blessed virgin, I shall be back shortly, madam, with the hot towels, to dry your back.’
My god Crooks is now taking the most diabolical risqué liberties in his ravings. As in the same way, having detested the sight and sound of Miss von B while she was here, raising her to beatified and saintly social heights while apparently demoting the memory of my mother to something regrettably verging on the lascivious.
My breakfast tray brought upstairs by Dingbats left abandoned on the landing. For a host of rats to eat, no doubt. The fire mercifully at my back in the dining room.
Sun glowing faint gold across the whitened landscape. A magpie, feathers shiny black and white, dancing up and down the branches of an orchard apple tree. Pigeons about. Await breakfast. Cold stiff fingered. Write out my purposes in my old blue clasp book. To inspect the horses, the farmyard, garden, old saw mill, the grove of beeches. As one hopes to see the mate of the magpie out in the orchard to avoid any ill luck of seeing only one. Some cheer to find Sexton’s selection of nosegays laid out at my place. Choose the tiny braided bouquet of snowdrops. But it has already occurred to me even before the day has hardly begun that I shall have to find a very rich, preferably from brewing, heiress to marry. To pay for the repairs to floors, ceilings, halls, roof, never mind the plumbing, or replacement of the long disused electric wiring. Which latter at least, one is relieved to know, will still mercifully long remain unconnected to any supply. Otherwise instead of widespread light at one’s fingertips there would be wholesale electrocution.
Darcy Dancer attempting to catch larger sight of Leila who held back nearly an arm’s length as she served. The lace at the wrist of her uniform quite soiled. And upon her hand there seemed two words written with numerals in indelible pencil. When I said good morning upon entering she made no reply. Keeps constantly behind my back. And I must say Crooks snapping his fingers at her did irritate one. But then as she chose a moment as I was turned looking out the window to lift a platter from the sideboard, I found, as I suddenly turned back, that she was staring at me. Her face flushing crimson as she turned away and hurried pantrywards. It could have been that with copious cups of tea, I embarrassingly devoured four eggs, six slices of bacon, several slices of toast and marmalade, one jug of cream, all preceded by a quart of apple juice and large bowl of porridge. As any sensible person in his right mind would, in present conditions and circumstances. But she could think me unreasonably greedy. And now with Crooks growling out to her in the pantry.
‘More toast, more toast, more toast.’
In his own trembling inadequacy Crooks in pouring my tea put a good bit of it in my saucer and on the table. Which he ordered the poor new girl to mop up.
‘Forgive me Master Reginald, it’s been a bit of a night with hunting rats high and low, but tomorrow will have us right.’
Leila returning with a rack of perfectly browned toast to my side, in murmuring my thank you I deliberately turned to look up at her. The brightness of the snow outside revealed her astonishing flashing eyes. The strange quiet beauty of their oriental cast beneath her brows. The iris around the pupil instead of appearing black as it first seemed, was a glowing deep mossy green flecked with blue. And the longest black lashes I’ve ever seen. Her forehead and cheeks of the whitest smoothest skin. Her soft, full but unsmiling lips. Her slenderness. And in her black uniform she did seem so hungry and cold and even, god forbid, consumptive.