"And anyone without a few bob?"
"Let them go out and work for it. That's what the Poles and Latvians and all are doing, and fair play to them. If there's a generation of Irish too lazy to work, that's a shame for them, but what are we supposed to do about it? Sponsor them to drink all day and go to the shops in their pajamas?"
"So you came back to Tyrrellscourt, and trained?"
"Not really. You have to be…touched by God to be able for that."
"Touched by God?"
"Laugh if you like," she said. "But it is a kind of vocation. I've often watched Francis during the day, inspecting the horses and the lads in the morning before work begins, checking the earth and watching the sky, supervising the feeds, right the way to patrolling the yard at night, listening for a restless horse, the wrong kind of cough, and all in silence: there's a kind of devotion to it, it's…I used to think he was like a monk. Only the horses had called him, not God."
"Your brother Vincent said much the same: the horses knew F.X., they didn't like Vincent at all."
"Good sense they had," she said, the wistful look she had had in talking about F.X. curdling when it came to her other brother.
"What caused the falling-out between you and Vincent?" I said.
Regina simply shook her head. Whatever it was, I wasn't going to hear it from her. She looked quickly at her watch, and I pressed ahead before I was cut off.
"So you didn't have a similar vocation?"
"No. The only thing I can compare it to is a musician. The kind who, they make the records, they give the concerts, they have the career, but the only time they're truly alive is when they're playing, is in the music. And F.X. was like that, at race meetings, he'd be hiding behind the horses, and when they won, there were no fists in the air, no big shite talk to the crowd like some of the knackers you see masquerading as trainers these days, it was just a quiet nod, the sense that this was as it should be. And I loved to play piano, classical, my favorite thing now, but if you think you can play the piano, and then you hear a Barenboim, a Rubinstein, well if you're not a total idiot, you understand immediately what you don't have. And to try would be futile, really. But you want to do something, you believe in what's being done. So I did what I could. I ran the house for him. I took night courses in bookkeeping so I could keep an eye on the money. I took cookery courses so when owners came to visit, they could bring their wives and children. I made sure the gardens were kept up. And I dressed up and went with him to Cheltenham and Ain-tree and Leopardstown and all, chatting to the Queen Mother and so forth."
"Like a wife."
"It wasn't unusual where we came from. Eldest son inherits the farm-"
"Youngest becomes a priest, unmarried sister comes home and keeps house for the brother-"
"Not unusual at all."
"She never married."
"Nothing like that," Regina said sharply. "There was more than one fella, over the years. But none of them…I don't know, unless you're going to settle for less. And I had all this, I didn't need any man's money."
She gestured toward the window, and then around the room.
"This house was in ruins, some 'oul dacency sisters were hanging on for dear life, until they gave up the ghost. We got it for a song in 1970. Francis put the whole thing in my name, I had the idea for all this."
"Well done," I said, and meant it.
"And so that was another thing, you're a successful woman, you attract gorgeous-looking fellas with expensive tastes and no funds, and you scare off the me-Tarzan types. So what can you do?"
"What did you do when Jackie Tyrrell appeared on the scene?"
Regina sighed and shook her head at that.
"What did I do? I invited her down here, you know. Jackie Lamb. She was in school with me. And she'd been writing to me, all this very flattering stuff, she was working for one of those Irish women's magazines, wanted to do a feature, sisters are doing it for themselves, all very exciting. So down she comes, and it's soon very clear she has F.X. in her sights."
"And were you hurt by that?"
"Hurt? What do you mean, hurt? I told you, there was nothing like that. Do you think I was after her?"
"I didn't mean about her. I meant, hurt that your brother…there must have been a very strong bond between you both. It can't have been easy to bring another woman into that."
Regina Tyrrell looked at her watch again, and lifted her hands up and almost clapped them.
"Four-thirty. Sun over the yardarm. Miranda said you drank."
"I do."
"Don't we all?"
"Does F.X.?"
"Of course he doesn't."
Light spilled from the far end of the room as Regina opened a white wood door that concealed a fridge freezer and produced a bottle of Tanqueray and a bottle of Schweppes tonic. She found glasses and brought the drinks to the desk and we drank in near darkness. I thought of asking her to put the light on, but then found I didn't want to.
"I wouldn't say I was hurt," Regina said. "But it was hard not to feel excluded. I mean, she was at the races instead of me. Literally. And of course, she had the finishing school thing going on, and the magazine and all, these lady writers who were friends of hers up in Dublin, gossip columnists and what have you, giving her great write-ups for the frocks. So yeah. But like I mean, I just moved in down here and let her get on with it. There was a time she was up and down to me three times a day, how does this work, when does Francis like his dinner, all that. Felt like his ma so I did."
"You said F.X. doesn't drink. Jackie Tyrrell said there were a lot of things F.X. didn't do."
"Really. I wouldn't know."
"Because it seems odd on the face of it that they never had children. She said-"
"Yeah. She said that to me too. And says I to her, there are things a sister shouldn't really have to know about her brother, and that's one of them."
"No curiosity?"
"No thank you. Did she tell you all this the night she died?"
"She did. I was the last person who saw her alive. Apart from her killer."
"What did she say about me?"
"She said you run all this, and you run your brother too."
Regina laughed mirthlessly.
"That's the way Jackie saw everything. It was all about control."
"And what is it all about for you?"
The question seemed to catch her unawares. In the pale light I thought I saw something like vulnerability, even fear, cross her face.
"The future. It's all about the future."
I forbore from asking the obvious question-what kind of future could the Tyrrells have when the current generation was too old to provide another?-but I felt it lay heavy in the air between us.
"She also said you were glad when she and Francis got divorced. And that she was going to tell me a thing or two about you," I said.
"And did she?"
"That was the last thing she said to me. The next time I saw her, she was dead."
Regina 's hand went automatically to her throat, and she shuddered, whether in sympathy or out of relief, I couldn't tell.
"What kind of relationship did you have with Miranda Hart?" I said.
Regina shrugged.