A Man Over Forty (25 page)

The Land-Rover came to a halt beneath her, and Balintore and Palladis got out. Each had tied a handkerchief about his
bleeding cuts, and they wore a bloodstained, piratical look. But the villagers cheered them loudly, and several ran up the steps to explain the accident they had suffered, and protest the great goodwill with which everyone had come to their rescue.

Balintore took it upon himself to apologize for their tardy return. ‘I'm afraid we're a little late,' he said.

‘It is half-past two,' said Honoria.

‘We've been involved in an occasion of some delicacy. We met your tenant, O'Halloran—'

‘That man!'

‘And I discovered that he's an old friend of mine. Well, to come to the point, I remembered what you said – you said, if you remember, that you would like him to come and dine with us – so I've invited him for Friday.'

‘O'Halloran?'

‘At half-past seven for eight o'clock. He accepted with pleasure.'

Balintore took a step backwards, and would have fallen but for the presence, close behind, of eight or ten of the villagers who had followed him up the steps to hear what he had to say to Honoria. He smiled, and made a little bow to excuse what might have been an embarrassing mishap.

Breathing heavily, his supporters brought with them the heavy odours of O'Hara's Bar; and Honoria, wrinkling her nose, said coldly, ‘You had better come in, Mr. Balintore.'

Their Misbehaviour bred disorder in the house. Mrs Moloney said to Nelly Kate, ‘They'll not be wanting dinner tonight, that's one mercy.'

‘After all the drink they've taken,' said Nelly Kate.

‘And them sitting round the table till half after three, and us with all the dishes to wash!'

‘Did you hear them roaring and laughing?'

‘Not Madame! She sat with them for the sake of good
manners, but there was no laughter in her voice, not that I could hear.'

‘And the eyes of her as cold as door-knobs on a frosty morning,' said the girl.

‘Let them sleep it off,' said Mrs Moloney, ‘and a poached egg will do for Madame, as it does when she's all on her own, poor soul.'

After their late lunch Balintore and Palladis did indeed go to their rooms and sleep for a couple of hours; but they recovered sooner than Mrs Moloney had expected. By half-past seven – having washed and dressed and resumed a respectable though slightly harassed appearance – they were drinking pink gin in the library, and at a quarter to eight they went to Honoria's small sitting-room, where they were in the habit of meeting her before dinner. Honoria did not come, and when a clock chimed eight they went, a little worried, to the dining-room.

There they found their hostess, solitary at one end of the table, with a copy of the
Spectator
propped against a carafe in front of her, eating slowly a poached egg on toast.

‘I'm afraid I hadn't expected you,' she said, ‘but I dare say Mrs Moloney can find something for you, if you don't mind waiting a little while. She's been rather upset because it was her afternoon off, and you kept her here till half-past three.'

They made a scanty and uncomfortable meal off cold mutton and a cold bottle of claret, and Honoria, after watching them with a disapproval as chill as the wine, relaxed when Palladis gave her a glass of port – there was a decanter, half-full, from the previous night – and said, ‘Well, you've behaved very badly, and though half the village seems to have been just as bad, or even worse – oh, I've been out! I've heard the whole story!– it's you they'll remember, it's you they'll talk about, and I'll be maligned, because you're living here, as if I kept a disorderly house. But I'm a long-suffering, Christian woman, and in spite of the abominable procession that brought you home—'

‘It really wasn't my fault,' said Palladis.

‘And, of course,' said Balintore, ‘I'll pay for any damage to the Land-Rover.'

‘Indeed, I hope you will,' said Honoria. ‘But that's not the point. The point of what I'm telling you, or trying to tell you, is that I'm a very tolerant woman with an unconquerable impulse to forgive or forget injuries and insults – otherwise, of course, I couldn't have lived in Ireland all these years – and while you two were sleeping off the consequences of drinking yourselves silly in O'Hara's Bar—'

‘I don't think we did anything very silly,' said Palladis stiffly.

‘You looked extremely silly,' said Honoria. ‘But, as I was saying, I've forgiven you, and while you were sleeping it off, I've been doing what I could to arrange a dinner-party for you and your friend O'Halloran.'

‘I'm not sure that I can call him my friend,' said Balintore. ‘I used to know him—'

‘According to the story they're telling in the village,' said Honoria, ‘you were comrades-in-arms – blood-brothers in the good cause, I heard one woman say – in that tiresome war in Spain. And it was you who asked him to dinner.'

‘After you had suggested it,' said Palladis.

‘Well, yes, I admit that. I thought he might be good for a giggle, and I still think so. But it's a damned nuisance trying to arrange a dinner-party, and I've gone to a lot of trouble.'

‘Who's coming?' asked Palladis.

‘I tried to get old Colonel Goode, but his wife's in London and he has to stay at home and look after his invalid daughter. And the Sullivans can't come, because he's got gout, and the Harringtons said no, because she's doing a retreat – she's Anglo-Catholic – and he's off to Monte Carlo. So I had to fall back on local talent, and that means Dr Brennan and his wife, who's English, and her sister who's staying with them, whom I haven't met.'

‘Brennan doesn't believe in professional reticence,' said Palladis, ‘so we ought to avoid any reference to accident, disease, or hereditary ailments.'

‘And his wife doesn't utter,' said Honoria, ‘unless you ask her about the children. You can say anything you like to her, and be sure of a patient, sympathetic hearing – so long as you
keep off the subject of little Sean and little Norah, her pigeon pair.'

‘We're going to have a pleasant evening,' said Palladis. ‘You've brought it on yourselves,' said Honoria complacently.

The following day they fished again, with indifferent success, and when they came home in the evening a serene, untroubled sky promised a return of fair weather.

The morning broke bright and calm as a medieval painting. They gave up all thought of the lough, and about eleven o'clock, when they were discussing without enthusiasm a suggestion of Honoria's that they should drive to the seaside and picnic on a beach, they were startled by a muffled explosion and a slight tremor of the ground beneath them.

‘O'Halloran,' said Palladis. ‘He's blasting again.'

‘I suppose he knows what he's doing?'

‘I sometimes wonder.'

‘Do you think there's any danger?'

‘He's not very far away.'

‘Perhaps we ought to go and have a word with him.'

‘He doesn't encourage visitors.'

‘We both know him – I've known him for a long time, if it comes to that – and he was quite friendly the other day.'

‘If he hopes to get £500 from you, he has a good reason to be friendly.'

‘He isn't going to get a penny out of me, but I needn't tell him so. Not yet. And as a prospective shareholder I'm entitled to have a look at the mine.'

‘All right, let's go and call on him.'

They crossed the ha-ha and the limply-wired fence, and walked to O'Halloran's zariba. A notice on a door in the high wall of wickerwork read
DANGER! KEEP OUT!
, but the door hung loose on its hinges, and beside the wooden hut within the enclosure they saw O'Halloran with the three men who worked for him.

He came towards them and said sourly, ‘Can you not read?'

‘The other day,' said Balintore, ‘you asked me to take an interest in your mine.'

‘You promised me £500.'

‘I did nothing of the sort. But you asked me for £500, and I want to see the property you expect me to invest in.'

‘You've come at the wrong time. We've run into a little bit of difficulty.'

‘Well, surely – as a possible investor – I'm entitled to see what your difficulties are?'

Unshaven and out of humour, O'Halloran looked a formidable obstacle to their curiosity. He frowned, and seemed about to speak – thought better of it – and then said harshly, ‘Come on, then. It's nothing to worry about, but I'll be needing more money.'

He led them into the hut. At one end were his living quarters, furnished with a stove, an unmade bed covered by army blankets, a large cupboard, a wash-stand and a bucket, a table and a couple of chairs, and a paraffin lamp; the other end was an office more tidily arranged, with maps and diagrams on a long table, and a shelf of books against a wall.

‘What's your trouble?' asked Balintore.

‘You can see for yourself,' said O'Halloran, and pointed to a coloured diagram. ‘There's more rock than I expected.'

The diagram looked like a cutting through a large and very badly made Neapolitan ice-cream, with a diagonal bisection that apparently represented a steep, downhill approach to a dark blue line entitled
The River
.

‘I don't quite understand it,' said Balintore.

‘That's because you're not a geologist,' said O'Halloran.

‘Where does the river come from?' asked Palladis.

‘You can see for yourself, on the hill beyond.'

‘The little stream that rises by the wood on Slieve Bloom, and then goes underground and disappears?'

‘It comes into the open again at the top of the village, and that's where they used to wash for gold in the days gone by.'

‘But why do you think its underground course takes it this way?'

‘You need to be a geologist to understand that.'

‘How do you know,' asked Balintore, ‘that they used to wash for gold where the stream comes out at the top of the village?'

‘It's in an old book I found, called the Annals of Innisfallen. The book's well known, but the manuscript I found has never
been seen by living eyes, except my own; and the description is there.'

‘Have you got the manuscript here?'

‘I'm showing it to no one!'

‘But if they used to find gold at the end of the village, why do you sink a mine here? Why don't you look there?'

‘They got all there was,' said O'Halloran. ‘They got all that was washed through. It's alluvial gold I'm talking of, you understand that, do you? – Well, so much was washed through, into the open stream, and all that was taken in the olden days. But what they didn't know then was the course the river took, and the depth of it. It opens into a shallow lake –underneath us here where we stand, and under the big house –and that lake's like a sump or trap to catch all the gold that's been running off the mountain for thousands of years. It's a treasury of gold that lies beneath us!'

‘You're quite sure of that?' asked Balintore.

‘I'm telling you what's there! I'm a geologist, and I know.'

‘How much blasting have you got to do?' asked Palladis.

‘There's more rock than I expected.'

‘And if part of the lake is beneath the house, won't there be some danger to it, as you tunnel towards it?'

‘No danger at all. We shan't go near the house.'

‘You're not far from it now.'

‘There'll be no danger, I tell you. We're on solid limestone here.'

‘I wish I could see that manuscript you say you've found,' said Balintore.

‘Come and I'll show you the mine,' said O'Halloran.

He led them to a hole in the ground that had been opened beside an outcrop of rock, and followed a rock wall down into the earth. The roof was supported, a little casually, by timber frames, and the downhill path was steep. Then it levelled, and an old-fashioned stable-lamp showed them a narrow passage with rock on either side. Steps had been cut in a gravelly soil for the next descent, and it became apparent that O'Halloran had found a soft approach, through a fault in the rock, to what might be a series of small caves. Here and there the walls had been revetted, and a doubtful roof shored-up; but the men who
worked for him had not had to carry out a great weight of spoil. Where charges had been fired, the raw limestone shone white as cottage-cheese in the lamplight.

They went down, by more steps, into a cave as big as a billiards-table, but barely high enough to stand upright in; and O'Halloran said, ‘After all that rain we had, this place was flooded to the roof, and I hadn't a pump that could deal with it. I was in despair, I didn't know what to do. And then overnight the water found its own way out. It disappeared, and you see what that means, don't you?'

‘There's a crack in the floor, presumably,' said Balintore.

‘A crack that goes all the way down to the river! It's proof positive that the river's below us.'

‘That's a possibility, but—'

He was interrupted by the loud, reverberating chatter of a pneumatic drill, that filled the cave with an intolerable din. O'Halloran put his mouth to Balintore's ear and shouted, ‘They're drilling holes for the next shot,' and led them forward, by another sloping corridor, to a little chamber like a crypt. This was brightly lighted by pressure lamps, and rough debris from the last explosion still lay pale and bright on the floor. The man with the drill appeared to be boring into solid rock with little more hope of penetrating it than if he had been using a dentist's drill; and two others stood watching him in attitudes of tireless patience. When O'Halloran spoke to them they turned and replied with what looked like a meaningless, gibbering ferocity; for, in the appalling clamour of the drill, neither Palladis nor Balintore could hear a word.