Читать книгу Knockfane - Homan Potterton - Страница 9

3

Romance

LIKE MOST OF his kind at the time, Willis Esdaile was familiar with the Bible and whenever he sighed or complained affectionately at the difficulty of bringing up two daughters on his own he would shake his head and say, ‘Laban’s lot is not an easy one.’ He was referring to the story, told in the Book of Genesis, of Laban and his two daughters, Leah the elder and Rachel the younger. ‘Leah was tender eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well favoured’ and when Willis Esdaile looked at Julia and Lydia he was in no doubt but that Lydia was his ‘tender-eyed’ Leah, Julia his ‘beautiful and well-favoured’ Rachel. Neither of the girls was exactly like their mother and, unlike Edward, who was an Odlum through and through, neither of them took after their mother’s side of the family, although Julia could be fairly sharp and determined. Annette’s mother was a gentlewoman: beautiful, educated, refined, talented in a myriad ways, but long suffering and, ‘if the truth be told’, as people used to say ‘far too good for T.E. Odlum’. He had married her for her money, or rather for Derrymahon, which was her family home; but her parents always despised him as ‘an upstart from the west of the Shannon and not a proper Odlum at all’. In the end, after he had persuaded them to sign over Derrymahon to him and when he immediately evicted them, they were proved right.

Whatever his faults, however, T.E. Odlum knew how to farm and was singularly astute when it came to business affairs. He pulled Derrymahon, which had been in decline for decades, together and even though it was not the most propitious time for a Protestant in Ireland to acquire more land, T.E. bought up several of the neighbouring farms and ended up owning well over a thousand acres. Many people saw it as some sort of justice when he had no son of his own to inherit all that he had accumulated but T.E., once he came up with a plan to ‘adopt’ his Esdaile grandson, did not mind unduly; and, in actual fact, he took pleasure in a perverse way in depriving Willis Esdaile (whom he disliked) of his own son.

Not that Willis was particularly dismayed by this turn of events as he had rarely seen eye to eye with Edward and, even when his son was a little boy, he had not actually cared for him all that much. When, therefore, Edward left school at sixteen and went to live at Derrymahon, his father was not very bereft. It was entirely fitting that Edward had inherited the Odlum genes, and his father often thought (but never said), that Edward and T.E. were made for each other. Besides, Edward’s departure left Willis to enjoy the company of his two daughters without any of the aggravation that is occasioned in bringing up a son.

Annette had died in giving birth to Lydia and within a year of her death, and in that awful September of 1939, war broke out in Europe and what was known as ‘the Emergency’ was declared in neutral Ireland. At Knockfane, it was Julia who, although only five at the time, took charge. At least that was how it seemed. She became mother to 7-year-old Edward, nurse to the baby Lydia, and she became wife to her father.

In the early years of his widowhood, Willis often considered marrying again but he never considered it with any great intent. He felt a strong loyalty to the memory of his dear Annette and he was sure that he could never love another as he had adored her. The difference in their ages of fourteen years had never made any difference to them as Annette had adored Willis too; and when her father, T.E. Odlum, opposed their marrying, which he did with firm resolve, his intransigence only served to make the bond between the two of them all that stronger. When, eventually, they did marry they had been supremely happy together; and Knockfane, which had been such a lonely house for as long as Willis could remember, had sprung to life as a result of Annette’s effervescence and gaiety.

Willis Esdaile was one of two, his younger brother, Todd, being just eighteen months his junior. Neither of their parents had loved the boys very much and nor had the parents loved each other very much either. Yet when his father died, his mother, ignoring the reality of what her marriage had been and filled with remorse for the wasted years, went into a deep mourning and cut off almost all contact with the outside world. She became distant from the affairs of Knockfane and distant too from her elder son; but that was as nothing to her treatment of Todd. While she had always disliked the younger boy, she now came to loathe him. Old Mr Holt the solicitor eventually intervened when Todd was scarcely seventeen. In return for the boy’s agreement that he would leave Ireland – even though the world was in turmoil with the First World War – and emigrate to New Zealand, his mother paid him £500. At the same time Granny Esdaile took to her bed and there she spent her remaining years, willing herself to die. Eventually, on the eve of Willis attaining his majority and coming into Knockfane, her wish was fulfilled so that, instead of a celebration, Willis’s twenty-first birthday, in the severe winter of 1916–17, took the form of a wake.

As he struggled with the farm, taking over its management from the series of incompetent farm managers who had allowed it to deteriorate in the years since his father died, Willis had little time to think of sweethearts or marriage and, when he did think of either, it was only to come to the conclusion that his options were fairly limited.

Turning thirty, he held out little hope of romance although, at the same time, he did not give way to despair. Then in September of that year, on a beautiful Indian summer afternoon, he strolled into the household produce tent at the annual Liscarrig Agricultural and Fatstock Show and at that very moment his eyes were opened to love. On the far side of tables laden with fruit cakes and seed cakes, simnel cakes and sandwich cakes, Madeira cakes and Victoria sponges, a laughing girl dressed in peach was pencilling notes on the catalogue of the show. More than any of the confectionery, even that which had already been awarded a highly commended badge, the girl was – in Willis’s view – utterly and indescribably delectable.

Forgetting himself entirely, he moved across the tent to where she was standing.

‘We don’t often see a stranger in these parts,’ he said.

She peeped out at him from under her straw hat and beamed.

‘I’m Annette Odlum,’ she said.

Willis just stared.

‘T.E.’s daughter …’

The name was vaguely familiar to him.

‘You know … Derrymahon Herefords … we came all the way from Waterford this morning. Papa is here to judge the cattle and the ladies’ committee has asked me to help assess the cakes.’

‘That’s a dangerous task,’ said Willis ‘Of course I know the Odlum name …’

He looked down at the dress she was wearing. It wasn’t silk but was in a fabric somewhat similar, plain and, as it was the late 1920s, in a sack-like style with no waist: just a ribbon of satin at thigh level and the suggestion of a flared skirt below.

‘By the way, I’m Willis Esdaile,’ he said, holding out his hand.

‘How do you do?’ said Annette.

She smiled. Her eyes were a delicious brown and liquid like a raindrop left behind on a petal after an early morning shower.

And that was that as far as Willis and Annette were concerned. Like others before them, they ‘no sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved’.

It would be almost three years before they would marry but, as they always admitted to each other afterwards, both of them decided at that first moment that marry each other they would.

Throughout his life, Willis often thought about that day and he often told his daughters about it too; but when they pressed him with ‘What happened next?’ he was always less forthcoming.

‘Why was it three years before you got married?’ they would ask. ‘It can’t just have been because Mama was only seventeen that Grandpa was against it. You were old enough to have sense enough for the two of you. And you were already in charge at Knockfane.’

But, however pressed, their father would never go into any more detail.

‘We married when we did,’ he would say, ‘and didn’t the pair of you arrive into the world in time enough?’