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Authors: Bernie McGill
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and the curtains replaced with wooden shutters, and after a little while, even Edward could see the benefit of the lighter shades. It was altogether more uplifting, he said, though he never changed a thing in his green leather study and I never intervened there.
I tried my best to let the house breathe so that I could breathe in it. There were some things Edward would not countenance my replacing: a portrait of a relative, a captain of the Thirty-fourth Regiment who had died at the storming of the Redan Fort in 1855; the volumes of divinity with which his mother had furnished the library; a Chinese gong in the hall she had bought at auction; a birdcage in the morning room. I have lost count of the number of guests who have asked me when the decorating will be finished. Clearly, my taste is out of kilter: there is too much on display, not enough drapery and mystery for the sensibilities of the eighties and nineties, not enough concealed.
The one exception to this meadow of color, the one necessarily dark room, is the small north-facing sitting room where the butterflies are kept, where I allowed the darkest of red curtains and crimson damask to remain and to which I moved the heaviest furniture that absorbed the light. I ordered a Morris wallpaper from the Maples catalog, an extraordinary design of white dove and gilt cage with a background so dark as to be almost black. Unexpectedly, when it arrived and was pasted on the sitting room wall and the light caught it near the window, the narrow bars of the cage all but disappeared, leaving only the gilt base andthe bird apparently freed, about to take flight, while in the darker corners of the room the flickering firelight picked out the gilt and showed the bird to be exquisitely caged. Two opposing stories on the same wall, depending on how the light hit. Clever Mr. Morris.
On my first night at Oranmore, in a bedroom without drafts on a still night, I was woken by a rustle, a scratching, the sound of something small running across the floor. I considered my choices: get up, rise the servants and Edward, cause a stir that would leave the entire household sleepless and disgruntled for all of the following day and catch no mouse; or go back to sleep, resolve to employ more cats on the morrow. I chose the latter. Last night I woke suddenly with the sensation of something live having run beneath my head. It felt too big to be a mouse. Then, I had a choice; now I have none.
Maddie
7 OCTOBER 1968
It’s good of you to come and see me in my room, Anna. I’m not feeling much like talking to the rest of them today. You get tired, you know, looking at the same faces, going over all the same oul’ rigmarole: about the weather that none of us is fit to go out in, and about what’s on the wireless or the TV. Wasn’t it shocking about thon wrecking match in Derry? We saw the whole thing on Telefis Éireann: it was like something out of the dark ages, the police in steel helmets and riot shields batonning the life out of the civil rights marchers, and them all screaming and roaring and Gerry Fitt’s face covered in blood. They say there was shocking trouble after it, bonfires and barricades and youngsters throwing stones, and half the shops with their glass broken and the stuff stolen out of the windows. But then there’s always ones that will see an opportunity for trouble and take it: them uns that has nothing to do with the protest at all. The marchers shouldn’t have been there, says Captain O’Neill, they were told not to go. They’re one-half republican and one-half communist, he says. But haven’t people a right to stand up against injustice when they see it? Giving houses out to single Protestant girls when there’s whole families of Catholics living in one room. We were all sitting watching it andtalking about it and saying how bad it was, and thon wee git John Roddy, who’s as bitter as sloes, pipes up and says, “If they wouldn’t go on breeding,
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and the curtains replaced with wooden shutters, and after a little while, even Edward could see the benefit of the lighter shades. It was altogether more uplifting, he said, though he never changed a thing in his green leather study and I never intervened there.
I tried my best to let the house breathe so that I could breathe in it. There were some things Edward would not countenance my replacing: a portrait of a relative, a captain of the Thirty-fourth Regiment who had died at the storming of the Redan Fort in 1855; the volumes of divinity with which his mother had furnished the library; a Chinese gong in the hall she had bought at auction; a birdcage in the morning room. I have lost count of the number of guests who have asked me when the decorating will be finished. Clearly, my taste is out of kilter: there is too much on display, not enough drapery and mystery for the sensibilities of the eighties and nineties, not enough concealed.
The one exception to this meadow of color, the one necessarily dark room, is the small north-facing sitting room where the butterflies are kept, where I allowed the darkest of red curtains and crimson damask to remain and to which I moved the heaviest furniture that absorbed the light. I ordered a Morris wallpaper from the Maples catalog, an extraordinary design of white dove and gilt cage with a background so dark as to be almost black. Unexpectedly, when it arrived and was pasted on the sitting room wall and the light caught it near the window, the narrow bars of the cage all but disappeared, leaving only the gilt base andthe bird apparently freed, about to take flight, while in the darker corners of the room the flickering firelight picked out the gilt and showed the bird to be exquisitely caged. Two opposing stories on the same wall, depending on how the light hit. Clever Mr. Morris.
On my first night at Oranmore, in a bedroom without drafts on a still night, I was woken by a rustle, a scratching, the sound of something small running across the floor. I considered my choices: get up, rise the servants and Edward, cause a stir that would leave the entire household sleepless and disgruntled for all of the following day and catch no mouse; or go back to sleep, resolve to employ more cats on the morrow. I chose the latter. Last night I woke suddenly with the sensation of something live having run beneath my head. It felt too big to be a mouse. Then, I had a choice; now I have none.
Maddie
7 OCTOBER 1968
It’s good of you to come and see me in my room, Anna. I’m not feeling much like talking to the rest of them today. You get tired, you know, looking at the same faces, going over all the same oul’ rigmarole: about the weather that none of us is fit to go out in, and about what’s on the wireless or the TV. Wasn’t it shocking about thon wrecking match in Derry? We saw the whole thing on Telefis Éireann: it was like something out of the dark ages, the police in steel helmets and riot shields batonning the life out of the civil rights marchers, and them all screaming and roaring and Gerry Fitt’s face covered in blood. They say there was shocking trouble after it, bonfires and barricades and youngsters throwing stones, and half the shops with their glass broken and the stuff stolen out of the windows. But then there’s always ones that will see an opportunity for trouble and take it: them uns that has nothing to do with the protest at all. The marchers shouldn’t have been there, says Captain O’Neill, they were told not to go. They’re one-half republican and one-half communist, he says. But haven’t people a right to stand up against injustice when they see it? Giving houses out to single Protestant girls when there’s whole families of Catholics living in one room. We were all sitting watching it andtalking about it and saying how bad it was, and thon wee git John Roddy, who’s as bitter as sloes, pipes up and says, “If they wouldn’t go on breeding,
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