‘They seemed perfectly adequate. Very well, if you could please…’

‘I’ll see to it this morning.’

We had reached the door where one of the young men in brown coats had leapt forward to hold it open.

‘Put down fish paste’, Mother said.

‘Fish paste.’ Mr Rafter wrote in solemn fashion. ‘And the champagne?’

‘Just make sure it’s good.’

‘Of course’, said Mr Rafter, stepping out after us, ‘but will there be much required?’

Mother stared at the shopkeeper. Part of her expected Mr Rafter to know the answer to such a question without his having to ask. We did not entertain very often, but when we did, he should have known that it followed an invariable pattern. At the same time, she considered the question as verging on the impertinent and was not prepared to discuss with a grocer outside his shop how many people we were having in or how much champagne they might drink. And finally, I knew — and knew that Mr Rafter also knew — that Mother had not until that moment attempted to work out how many people might, in fact, be coming to Bella’s party.

‘Sufficient, Mr Rafter,’ she said and swept towards our car, me hurrying behind her.


I had been to school in Wales. In a tradition initiated by my sister, Lolo, and continued by Bella, three times a year I had boarded the mail boat and sailed to Holyhead. I was meant to have gone on after school, as Bella had, to Paris and Geneva, where one learned to cook and to be in all ways perfect, but there was a war and so I had attended an academy for those purposes in Dublin. My brothers too had been to a minor English public school, with the result, probably intended, that none of us knew very many of the local people around Tirmon, as if Tirmon was not the place we lived but merely dropped in to during holidays. This structured aloofness bound Anglo-Irish society to itself; by necessity we reached to the far corners of Ireland for our friends, as if we Anglo-Irish were all related by virtue of ascendancy, inter-marriage and religion, and above all by our resolute non-Irishness. If any one thing defined us, that was it. We knew what we were not, and every action and attitude flowed from this fact. We had suffered the onset of Irish independence by, in the main, ignoring it. That we no longer controlled the country in which we lived or that we had been allowed up to now to continue as before seemed to have occurred to no one. We were, of course, not English either, a more awkward truth. The native Irish had only us to go on as an example of Englishness and we gave full value for money in playing the part; but when we went to England or to Wales, we understood that to the English or the Welsh we were Irish. We were, in fact, part of a new race, born of successive plantations from the Middle Ages, but a race that had, by even the most modest standards, failed. We had failed to keep the land we had been sent to settle. Failed to find a way of living with the people we had been sent to rule.

On the morning of the big day, Mother, having seen my father installed in the morning room, took her easel, pallet and paints and disappeared in her pony trap. She would not return, I knew, until evening, for like a child that closes its eyes to hide from monsters, once out of sight of all the bustle and preparation, she would feel safe. Harry, who had come home the day before, was outside, helping to haul up a tent, as Mr Rafter and relays of his men carried in hampers. Harry had always been the one who had made the jokes and livened up the atmosphere at meal times and made Daddy laugh.

‘I’ve never seen so much food,’ I said.

Bella, in a long dress of cool, baggy sleeves, dragged on her cigarette. She said, ‘It will all go to the pigs tomorrow, like the last time.’

‘Better than being stuck for enough.’

‘Miss Practical. Perhaps you might be practical enough to pour the tea.’

We sat in what was called the sunroom, a lean-to at the gable of the house, whose sun was about to be blotted out by the rising tent.

‘By the way…’

Bella drew her legs in beneath her and reached for her cup.

‘I met Norman last night and he was very keen to know that you would be here tonight.’

‘Really.’

‘Miss Ice. Really. Well yes, he was, really. You’re such a little fool.’

Norman Penrose lived with his father on a thriving estate outside the village of Grange, seven miles distant. In his early thirties, charming and unfailingly courteous in his offers in the problems of Longstead, he had always been generous and helpful. And yet, for all his excellent points, Norman made my flesh crawl.

‘I’m very sorry, Bella,’ I said thinly. ‘I didn’t realise that you were so touchy about Norman. Maybe it’s you he’s really after.’

Bella’s face assumed a slow, insouciant smile. ‘I don’t think so, darling. My taste in men is somewhat different.’

‘You mean married.’

Bella ran out her tongue and played it on the crown of her upper lip. ‘Why not?’

I felt myself foundering. ‘What happens if you get caught?’

Bella looked at me from drowsy eyes. ‘London is full of wealthy men with wives in the country. They look after you.’

‘Please don’t get hurt!’ I blurted, unable to stop myself.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Bella said and stretched like a beautiful, pampered cat. She put her cup and saucer down and looked at me with dreamy curiosity. ‘May I say something about Norman without having my head bitten off?’

‘Say it.’

‘Norman is a catch. There is a war. You are a young girl without experience and, if I may say so, few prospects. Forget your childish feelings for Norman. When you’re twenty-five and he’s thirty-five, or whatever, it will be very different. Listen to the voice of experience. He admires you greatly.’

‘And I find him lacking in everything I admire.’

‘The reality, of course, is that he lacks nothing. He farms nearly two thousand acres. They own half of Belfast.’

‘Does love mean nothing to you?’

Bella’s face became spiny. ‘What do you know about love? Do you think that’s all there is in life? Do you think you can eat love and it can keep you warm? Look at this place! When will you grow up?’

Outside, Mr Rafter had materialised and was straining on a rope with Harry.

‘I wonder is this the last time?’ I said.

‘Why?’ asked Bella sharply.

‘Mother says we are like a ship without a captain, that Longstead is drifting.’

‘“Mother says’”. What nonsense! Allan will be Longstead’s captain.’

‘If he comes home.’

‘How do you mean, “if”’? Of course he’ll come home — he has to.’

‘He’s fighting a war, Bella.’

‘You make life so complicated!’ she cried. ‘Certain things are understood. Allan will come home, Longstead will still be here and you will come to realise that the sun rises every morning, with or without love.’


I walked through fields that afternoon, down by the lake and over meadows where lambs leapt and tumbled, into woods where our hives were found, through natural pergolas of wild roses and woodbine, and sat on a boulder by a copse from which Longstead could be picked out in the distance. The copse was surrounded by a waist-high wall of large, uneven stones that incorporated a fairy mound where oak trees grew at eccentric angles. The dead had been laid here over millennia, the bodies of warriors brought on handcarts from battle, great chieftains in their cloaks and breastplates and whole clans that had perished in epidemics. No one disturbed a fairy mound lest they troubled the dead, not even my brothers, who used to shoot pigeons here at dusk; they never stood on the mound itself but took up their positions on the perimeter.

Why, as the youngest, I should have to be the worrier, I did not understand. Bella — beautiful, worshipped — worried only for herself. Lolo, who had married a bishop’s son and lived in Fermanagh, would arrive later that day and the whole house would echo to her empty chatter. I was, it seemed, the only person competent to worry. For now, on a day of great peace and confident expectation, as swallows flew high, as men spoke happily about the hay that would be saved, as the whole bounty of the earth seemed to eddy deliciously in the warm air, I sat shivering, my back clammy from a fear I could not name.


Identical twin sisters, the unmarried Misses Carr, who lived a few miles from us and hunted their own pack of harriers, arrived with baskets of home baked biscuits. They always dressed the same, and wore the same shade of lipstick; even their hunters were picked so that no one could tell one from the other. The Misses Carr had a knack of always being in the thick of everything: funerals, christenings, parties. Although my father said they were the most irritating women he had ever met, they were among the few whom Mother counted as her friends.

Daddy’s appearance at seven that evening marked the formal opening of proceedings. His stiff, white shirt-front and collar seemed an ominous extension of his pallid face. He looked so old. Lifted into his armchair by Harry and placed by the drawing room fireplace with a glass of champagne, he presided over the embryonic gathering with a lopsided smile.

‘You look so dashing, Daddy!’

Bella, radiant in a dress of azure voile, her hair piled on her head, her shoulders bare and lovely, bent and kissed him.

‘You’re good enough to eat, my dear. You both are.’ My father’s strong voice still belied his appearance.

Bella’s eyes saw me with amusement. ‘Our Iz has turned into quite the young woman, hasn’t she, Daddy?’