A Partisan Diary

Sunday, October 02, 2005

The Queen Anne House

I went back to the Queen Anne house. I was with a daughter who was then composing a story about a daughter named Ann who went back in time with her step mother to visit her father at the time of his first marriage. It was to question him.

My daughter is named Ann. We were with my present wife. We had just come from visiting the hospital where the daughter was born. A midwife there had been in a photograph who may have remembered that year. She certainly had heard of the house. The daughter worried that her birth may have undermined her citizenship elsewhere as her real mom had suggested. She was told not to worry about this; Ireland was doing very well lately. But she thought that this was not the point. It was a spiritual matter.

The house had deteriorated. The paintings I had organised had become soft and crumbly. The basement had been flooded for two centuries before I had started the draining. Ongoing subsidence was inevitable. The perfect masonry of the sixteen hundreds had columned into wrinkles on the facing wall. But all of the windows were unbroken in their ruthless symmetry, a symmetry that inspired in Ireland a thousand houses just like it. For this was the original built by that maverick, that man entranced by Italy and grace. Who on his return from sun and passion slapped down this masterpiece in the middle of a decayed King John castle in a scatter of cow huts as if to say the past is over.

I asked Ann what she thought of the house. She found it hard to answer. She mentioned how it was getting dark and she was worried about where they would sleep. Some of the hotels had been spooky and she got anxious. She hoped dad would not talk about the forbidden things even in strange and sneaky ways like he does. He should not corner her especially given her condition. She was not supposed to say what her mom was doing and her sister didn't want anything to do with anything at all. Ann didn't want dad to tell any more ghost stories.

We were devils in it those years ago. We burned. We hated one another's innocence and stupidity. We expressed this as love. We adored each other's drying souls with angry hostility. The result became great hunts after one another relying on the greed each had for the future, the greed that masquerades as submission to ideas and fantasy. There also was an aesthetic. This was the best group ever. Each of us was the best as us. We believed. Except for one traitor. The total effect of all this was to create an energy which cut through the past and celebrated tension. We had to do something to pass the time in that little place. Or was that it?

Years later, now, the house has a guide. My daughter quite fancied him. He wanted, as all professional guides do when talkative ghosts revisit, to close the doors. He wanted to bind the house in the castle walls and shut up the house for another night. I flew into the grounds past him and around the house. I raced into the reconstructed gardens. He followed telling me the rules and the times. My daughter was near to tears. But this was because this house was not the house of her story. I told her she should not have begun it before she came here.

It was bigger of course and much, much stronger. It was more complicated but that should not be frightening. It had a castle around it with a shadowy tower. Who expected that? It had courtyards and outbuildings. It stood in a perfect rectangle in a large stone courtyard. It had a majestic tall carved door in the very middle of the first of three storeys with stone surrounds. It had dozens of sunset lit windows and an arching roof full of chattering birds. It had a guide that now remembered her father as a myth mentioned in the guidebook. It had on the second floor the windows that looked out from the first room in which she had lived.

The guide began to enjoy guiding the returned ghosts. Ann’s father was waving his arms and pointing at the past. Unfortunately the house was closed to him but the guide didn't mind telling him what was now in it. Yes, they were now showing again the wall of framed political cartoons arranged eclectically in random squares with no apparent theme or chronology so that the eye leapt from place to place looking for sense in the surrealism. Had the ghost done that?

They had moved the exhibit of the work of hopeful women forced into compulsory government schemes and some similar private utopian co-operatives dedicated to the manufacture of fake traditional products for sale to wealthy and guilt-ridden bourgeois whose houses were later burned down by insurrectionists. They had moved it to the green room.

The paintings by the sex mad farmer impressionists collected by a bad priest, a poet, and never exhibited but kept for private viewing on the walls of the staff quarters were gone into storage as was the famous painting of the Satan Club which showed the House's founder against the statue of Pan. The staircase from the seventeenth century the guidebook said was restored at the time of the ghost was pristine. He told the guide he had done this by employing a builder of wooden boats from the Shannon river village who reconstructed the unique carving with ease using what had been thought to be extinct skills.

The guide pointed beyond the iron gates to the town. The town, before the house was restored, had smelled of its slaughterhouse and of permanent despair. It had developed the perennial rot of resentment and historical excuses. It had been destined to join the network of grey drug estates hidden behind the treed tourist trails. It was a nasty little place with pub vomiting and curtain peeping.

Now look at it. The house had put the dirty little place spanking new on the main road at last. The pubs were now painted and jolly. They had blackboard menus outside and tables on the street. There was a candle shop. The school was new and the clinic had two doctors. They had brochures and were twinned with Germany. There were countless gentrified bed and breakfasts. Other attractions had emerged from ruins and mysteries. A wonderful round tower with a good restaurant. A monastery free from allegation and infused with romance. They even had a large map for tourists with a 'you are here' arrow in an enormous glass case on a high iron stand right in front of the house. People came on Sundays.

They had done this all without minor royalty or famous London antique dealers like the other towns. Well that was not entirely true, the ghost said. He told the guide how the gang that had worked on the house had befriended the then bitter and defensive aristocrats skulking in the neighbouring towns.

There had been the sister of a boyfriend of the princess, a wife of a war hero without testicles who often entertained both major and minor royals hiding out to conceal their idiosyncrasies. Her castle and gardens were now developed to be a linked stop in the chain of attractions across Ireland. The town was fixed up with Victorian gee-gaws. That had started in the time of the ghost. She was the one famous for saying that one royal looked like something rolled up in a carpet. That had been to the ghost. He had thought it was a marvellous reference to both the politically promiscuous Cleopatra and present unofficial obesity hidden from the London press.

Another nearby place, a larger castle, had extensive grounds. The aristo in that had been an elegant diplomat before inheriting the place in a chain of circumstances that included someone packing it up in their Daimler on an ancient oak. It was the stuff of dreams, unbelievable. The guide knew all that well. He knew it was true. The daughter was amazed. This was not what mom had told her. The stepmother was silent.

This aristo and his wife, the young, thin flighty countess, the one who had written to the ghost for years after when he had gone to the savannah and was living in a hut teaching under a baobab tree, she had written with advice on how to get servants based on her experiences as the chatelaine of the Ambassador in the same African country; this aristo had invited the ghost for dinner, not to a dinner around their dining table for fifty but, as an act of special grace, to a barbeque in their forest as they knew the ghost had come from Canada. They wanted to talk to the ghost about how he had done it, made the house so famous.

They told him their family had once had a butler from Canada. For him a grandfather had built a log cabin in the castle grounds. Or was it was the aristo's father, the one who had invented the magnetic mine, who had befriended the locals so that the place wasn’t burned down? He was very diplomatic.

Before dinner, before they all motored in land rovers between the rows of cypress to the cabin, they would have drinks in the library. Seated around a fire built in a fireplace the size of his bedroom as a child in Canada, they were all startled when a piece of plasterwork dating from the fifteenth century fell from the ceiling onto the head of the dowager countess shattering, as it bounced onto her gin and tonic, leaving dust on the headrest of the white leather chair, on the dowager and on a puddle of gin near the mouth of the polar bear. The dowager countess, mother or grandmother to someone, had just been telling of her tremendous bed wetting fright again last night on seeing the phantom of the maid murdered in her bedroom years ago for the love of a peasant.

Their big castle too was to be part of the route and vibrating system of cultural regeneration of the area envisioned by the gang. And from their garden came many of the cuttings for the plants for the gene bank garden of ingredients for ancient witchery they had made in a courtyard at the house. From cookbooks found in the vast attics of the countesses' castle they found the names of herbs and weeds that were authentic. The countess offered to take her guitar and sing in the reconstructed garden wearing the veils she had purchased in the market of a desert city during one of her husband's assignments. Did the ghost want to see them? They were in her room. He ruled that out. She offered to make jam for sale instead from the herbs in the garden to sell at the castle gate.

The guide told them on tours of the house grounds and castle of the European awards the restoration project the house had won. He told them of the heads of state and ministers who visited. The daughter said she had never heard of this from mom. Wasn't there a dark room somewhere?

We had other visitors too some from my past and some for the others on staff. None came from the future at the time, God bless us. Although that has changed now. There were visitors from the maturity that I had before I went to Ireland and before some betrayals by people and by ideas. My visitors looked on my madness and were contemptuous. They weren't the only ones. The people from the past couldn't understand my speech and mind. No one could understand the others either. If my daughter had returned then what would she see? She would not find her mother. I knew that.

The guide said that the tiny blue-eyed cultural man from the nation's holy drinks family was generally given credit for the accomplishments at the house. The ghost seemed to be saying different. The guide said that the tiny man and the knowledgeable crusading local historian, the simple teacher born in the bogs but now raised to heights of great scholarship are now said to have done it all. The ghost told the guide that this was all bullshit. He still had the clippings, pictures and one trophy or at least he knew who did.

The tiny man hadn't done much. He hadn’t even raised funds. He had only sent troublesome daughters of the rich donors to his society, mainly daughters of Americans befuddled by Irish heritage and commercial royalty to be the voluntary staff of the ghost. Most of these were weird at home. They drank madly in the local pubs, slept to noon under the impressionist paintings and scandalised half the town, priests and wives. They entertained the other half and were reported to have been lengthening every confession by inspiring references to sins previously unknown even to the priests.

At the same time the wives and other connections of the tiny man frequently came to the door of the house at all hours creating great disturbances shouting to the ghost asking where the tiny man was. One, a German princess of a small house, claimed that one of the American restoration volunteers had stolen her parrot and the curtains from her bedroom window at the tiny man's own castle. Another, the former mistress of the great painter, was simply lost herself; she knew she had been given a cottage somewhere and the tiny man was there but did the ghost know where it was?

The tiny man had entrusted a former Australian diplomat and owner of another castle, the one most haunted, to find someone to execute the restoration of the house project. I think the tiny man agreed with the Australian that I was to do it because of my experience. But I think he just wanted me to restore the house physically, which was not how I ever understood it.

The house had been the basis of the town. It had been the home of the spiritually burning in the boggy darkness. The Australian may have understood me a little. He was the son of a hotel millionaire who had won his first hotel gambling in the outback. I think he had married a Medici. The Australian diplomat was retired to Ireland after a bad innings at running spies and subversives in the gay community in Cuba. He wrote plays. One was about Somerset Maughan.

Before the Australian came to get him the ghost had been writing heritage and history columns for the local provincial newspaper under the name of a woman fish seller in an Irish traditional song. Under the same name he had won the national women's short story of the year award. Under another woman's name he had won the poetry award too. Being neither from that country nor being a woman bothered him. He had gotten some friends of his, women, to do the newspaper interviews prior to the award ceremony. One was a potter. The other trained horses. One told the interviewer that short story writing was like pottery. The other said poetry was like riding a horse.

Before the ceremony he had confessed to one of the judges, a famous feminist novelist. She said she would kill him but he didn't believe her. He had heard that kind of thing before. He asked her how she liked the story. It was about Africa to which he had never been before. It was confessional like everything he wrote. The poetry was about betrayal, loss and sometimes birds. She only said she would kill him. He would never write again. He said he had done it to prove feminism could work. They had to pulp a hundred thousand copies of the Country Journal which had already printed the interviews.

The newspaper writing was only one of three jobs he was doing. He taught literature to the sons and daughters of protestant farmers destined to go to good universities in England. Their parents all read the Country Journal. He managed a youth hostel built in an old Norman tower which had a well-known kissy ghost that appeared in his room one night before turning into a bird. The hostel collected people from all around the world. He gave Zionists beds next to Palestinians. He used to drive from job to job on a little scooter through the rain and the mud. It had seemed like a few miles as he composed in his head but he saw from the map now that it was dozens. The school now was a four star hotel beside the river that he dreamt about through the window while teaching the magical realists. His students were waiters and his bookshelf was on display in the gift shop with the books on the local witches and phantoms and other period artefacts.

The well-known and legendary international tiny man had heard of his articles, his management of the hostel and had sent the Australian spymaster, one of the first in the country ever to die of aids incidentally, the other being the priest and editor of the short story magazine who used to visit the youth hostel to discuss literature with everyone, the tiny man had sent the Australian to recruit him for the House project. He was perfect to lead it.

But if it hadn't of been for the friends of the ghost, the ones he'd recruited from staff of that parochial newspaper, none of the work would ever have gotten done. The other volunteers were useless. It was the group of friends who came up with the vision and the themes. The sports reporter, who later became a national investigative journalist and who unfortunately suicided last year for reasons of spiritual confusion, the guide may have heard of him, did the research for the projects. His brother had been involved in a famous prison escape involving the blowing up of walls, so he also was assigned in the work liaising with the department of national monuments. He once asked the ghost not to ask who was staying in the staff quarters. The ghost didn’t ask but asked in return that the sports journalist not inquire much into the backgrounds of the very happy rich German girls who visited, one of whom knew all about dynamite and techniques of kidnap. She had talked international politics with the journalist far into the night. He had talked to her about his brother the real man of the family. He himself was frightened of girls but liked ideas. The step mother's predecessor, a former stewardess, hated him.

There was the women who later became an even more famous journalist herself working for many international papers including one in San Francisco. She was also now a genuine historian and a campaigner for Asian democracy against dictatorships. She had written for years from Thailand but had come from the town. There was another woman too who helped with the work in arranging lending from the national gallery, the displays of art, the design for rooms, museum displays, who later became a mid-wife in San Francisco. And why not?

The local historian had actually opposed all the work they did. Bit by bit and part by part. He opposed every display and every change. He wished to use the house for his lectures on bogs and rocks and little people. He did not even want the outbuildings to be used for music evenings with soda bread and onions. That had been a great success. He didn’t want the house newsletter to print poetry. He opposed the volunteers, although one woman, a dancer from Chicago, had complained about groping at the time of the Viking exhibit. The local historian had regularly slandered the tiny man behind his back. He pointed out that he was probably the illegitimate son of a dictator and that his elder brother, now the chairman of most things, had rented him out at Oxford for pocket money. But this may have been historically accurate.

Those journalists-to-be, and I, found the cradle for the daughter in a country cottage. We slung over it chains of African plastic birds and I opened the window to the crows outside in the tower. I made her pâtés in the kitchen and fed her crushed up lobster meat from the countess’s kitchen. I sang to her in that room until she was asleep then telling her about the time they tried to kill me at home, all of them, first the government, then my comrades and finally my loved ones.

The guide said he had always suspected the local historian and the tiny man of being chancers. And why not? That is how things are. You never know. Anyone can be a gombeen man; anyone can be the real thing. He was glad he heard the story. It would help keep his work interesting. He offered the ghost for approval the analysis that not much had changed since the ghost had been there, not in the displays, not in the rooms nor in the gardens. Nothing had changed either in some of those people. But the town was fine now. The house gave it life.

The daughter began to cry as we left for she had discovered she could not remember her room. She could not remember her birth and this was not what she expected. I thought it was worse now that she had come and we had no time to come back tomorrow.

As it had been just after her birth I had to go on for other things or not make the time. The stepmother looked forward to our next stop. Tomorrow the river she said.