Chapters (15)
‘A pity there’s no prettiness in her,’ her father had said when she was five or six, her first awareness of a chilly truth. Yet later, when she lifted her clothes from her body and stood naked by a looking-glass, some quality was borrowed by her carelessly endowed features. In that, Sarah was certain she was not mistaken: hair and eyes, lips and nose, became part of a pleasing whole with her soft and economically distributed flesh.
This secret, shared only with herself, is a secret no longer; nor is her despair in her father’s rectory. The pages of those years of resignation reveal that she believed she would not, even once again, pass through the white gates of Carriglas, nor sit beneath the strawberry trees. She believed she would not enter the drawing-room, nor see the island’s fuchsia hedges in bloom, nor open the door of the icehouse, nor watch the waves breaking on the rocks at Elador’s Bay. But in all those gloomy prognostications Sarah misled herself.
Dunadry Rectory, December 13th, 1930. Today my father died.
Within a month she was invited to return to Carriglas in a capacity that was not quite defined, and later was not either, housekeeper of a kind. ‘Poor wretched Sarah!’ Mrs Rolleston has no doubt said. ‘She’ll be quite penniless.’
That, in fact, was so; and her diaries tell how in the spring of 1931 Sarah repeated the journey she had first made almost twenty-three years earlier. She was even met, in much the same way, by Haverty at the railway station. ‘I wonder what you’ll think of the place these days,’ he remarked, and from his tone of voice she knew at once that everything was going to be different. That, of course, was only to be expected: Villana and her brothers were no longer children; revolution had drifted into civil war since Colonel Rolleston’s death at Passchendaele, though peace seemed generally to prevail now; Mrs Rolleston was approaching her ninetieth year. ‘D’you remember Balt the solicitor?’ Haverty said. ‘He’s courting Villana. Another thing is, there’s talk of a bridge.’
He did not add that a child had been born to the maid who’d been searching the dresser drawers in the kitchen on Sarah’s first evening at Carriglas, the child of the butler, who had not lived to marry the mother.
‘You’ll remember Brigid?’ was all Haverty said. ‘She’s the cook these days, after old Gerrity was taken.’ His wife was employed in the kitchen also, he said. ‘A slip of a thing you’ll remember her as.’ He did not touch upon the woman Villana had become, nor even mention John James or Lionel, or their grandmother. She would see it all, he intimated without words: all of it was waiting for her.