Claire Kilroy: The Devil I Know

Access was still via the construction gate, the grand entrance depicted on the sales brochures having failed, like everything else, to materialise. Hickey’s Portakabin was still there, crushed like a can of Coke, and my paint-spattered chair was no doubt in the vicinity had I the heart to look; I did not. The thirteen storeys of his eleven-storey hotel were draped in tattered netting like a famine refugee. I keep saying it was Hickey’s hotel, but it was mine too. I was equally responsible, equally irresponsible. Scum was spray-painted at periodic intervals along the perimeter hoarding.

I crossed the road to the ribbed columns of the castle entrance. Sir Tristram has passencore rearrived .

The iron gates were open. That threw me. I had presumed I’d find them chained shut, that I’d have to scramble over the orchard wall. I passed between the pillars and braced myself for the trip-trap crabwalk of Larney. My blood fizzed like anaphylaxis. It ionised in my veins.

Nothing. Still as a rock pool. As chilly and silent too. I pushed my way through the glossy shrubbery to the glade in which the gate lodge stood. Windows were broken and roof slates missing. A buddleia sprouted from the chimney stack and the garden was a poisonous ragwort thatch. I hadn’t laid eyes on the place since my childhood, about a thousand years before, and although I had been dragging my weary carcass around ever since, I did not think I could find the strength to drag it much further. The gatekeeper’s cottage was a derelict wreck and so was I.

Something was coming over me. It was taking hold. I had never known exhaustion like it. I laboured up the avenue in search of Mrs Reid. I had no right to expect to find her sitting at her kitchen table as if nothing had changed, but I did, and on some level I still do. For a full eight years, the figure of Mrs Reid had been sitting at her kitchen table in my mind’s eye, a refuge for my thoughts when a refuge was needed, which was often, a night light during the many bad dreams. The mind needs to preserve chambers of sanctuary and she was mine. But her net curtains were torn and the padlock clamping her door shut had streaked the paintwork with rust. I am ashamed to say that I have no idea what became of Mrs Reid. It did not occur to me that she would be evicted upon the seizure of my assets. Never thinking of others; that was me all over then. All of me, all over then.

Equally, and oppositely, I did not expect to find M. Deauville’s brass plaque, his tarnished calling card, still on display by the front door, but then, who was left to remove it? Not a soul. The castle was gaunt and deserted. They say it has a ghost now. I would like to join him. At times I think I already have.

My key did not fit in the lock. That was a kick in the teeth.

I went around the back. The castle was boarded up like the rest of the country. A carpet of bindweed had smothered the sunken gardens. I paused at the tradesman’s entrance but continued around to the vandal’s entrance and climbed through that instead, seeing as I was the biggest vandal of them all. They had pulled off the plywood boards and broken the catch on a sash window. Cider cans littered the parquet floor like autumn leaves.

The interior was suspended in gloom. I flicked a light switch. The power had been disconnected. It hardly mattered. I didn’t need lights. There was nothing left to bump into. The furniture had been removed. I made my way along the corridor, throwing open door after door. The silverware, the china, the paintings, the books in the library, the bookcases themselves: gone. The marble fireplace bearing the family motto had been prised from the great hall, exposing an aghast and toothless mouth. I gaped at it and it gaped back. Qui Panse . Not any more. Strip the place of valuables, Edel had warned me. Why am I still banging on about her? No one is listening any more.

In the rhododendron gardens, the invasive common species had prevailed. Father had culled the ponticums annually, identifying them by marking their barks with a slather from his pot of white paint while they were in flower, but the collection had been left unattended for so many years that the specimen varieties had been choked. I closed my eyes and raised my face. Spring sunlight shimmered down on me through a canopy of translucent new leaves. It was on a sunshot day in early summer that I had found Edel here, or she had found me, and all these years later I could still see her picking her way through the showy blossoms like a woodland fawn. The garden path up which she led me had long since been swallowed by briars. I would never find that dell of bliss again, if I ever really found it in the first place. She is up in the house on the edge of the moors, I am told, still trying to make the sums add up. Hickey signed it over to her and then she threw him out. The last I heard he was driving a taxi.

I was thinking of them both when the rambler joined me. ‘Nice old pile, isn’t it?’ he remarked. I turned to him but he kept his gaze on the castle, which, when I contemplated it through his eyes, framed by the boughs of spring blossom, could have been an illustration from a child’s storybook, a fairytale with a prince and a princess and a wicked elf. ‘Desperately sad, really, when you think about it,’ the rambler continued. ‘The first St Lawrence, Sir Amoricus, was a descendant of Sir Tristram, a knight of the Round Table, or so it is alleged. And now it has all come to such an undignified end…’

Ah, a local historian. God preserve me from local historians. The things they have written about our family. My door is open to real historians, but a local historian is merely a nosy local by another name. This one carried with him an upturned golf club, and he leaned his weight on its moulded head, a man who was not yet ready to admit to the world that he required a walking stick to get about. ‘Continuous succession to the Barony of Howth remained in the direct male line from 1177. But the final son was a bit…’ The local historian spun his finger by the side of his head to indicate a churning brain. ‘A bit funny. You know yourself.’

I did.

‘A tragedy, really. He died recently.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes. Overdosed in an airport hotel.’

‘When?’

‘Soon. Tonight.’ The historian checked his watch. ‘It is happening as we speak.’

It took me an age to absorb this information. An age, an age. I am still grappling with it. I am floundering to this day. I looked to the historian. ‘Can’t anyone save him?’

‘Like who? There is no one. He has no one left. The hotel cleaners will find his body in the morning.’

‘But he’s not in the hotel room. He’s here. He’s with us.’

The historian shook his head. ‘He couldn’t bring himself to make the journey home when it came down to it. Couldn’t face up to witnessing the damage he’d done, so he went straight to the hotel instead. Locked himself into the room, switched off his phone, knocked back a jar of sleeping pills with the contents of the minibar. A coward right to the bitter end.’

The historian reached forward and used the vulcanised handle of the golf club to raise the shoot of bramble that strayed across our path and hook it back on itself. I marvelled at the offhandedness of this gesture under the circumstances. A man was dying, a young one, barely forty. ‘The benighted fool had squandered everything, you see. Every last farthing and more besides. What past generations had laboured to create, destroyed just like that.’ The historian clicked his fingers. ‘A whole way of life gone. He racked up a debt that can never be settled. But a debt must be settled, mustn’t it? Isn’t that the nature of a debt?’

I lowered my head in shame and noticed that the historian had etched an eye in the earth with the handle of the club. I took a step back. ‘He had notions, the young master. Thought he could make millions overnight. They all thought they could make millions overnight. But that’s the problem with setting yourself up as a little god. You invite the other fella in. Don’t you?’