The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Read online

  “You know that they have the building of the new Museum, the two of them,” I said. I might have added that I had had rather more company on those occasions when I had stopped before that site, on the north side of the square with the Academical Institution at its centre, than when I stopped here. Less pure and massive they might have been, and erected at considerably less than the ten thousand pounds Millar’s was rumoured to be costing, but we had no shortage of churches in the town; we had never yet, on the other hand, had a museum.

  Millar shook his head. “I had heard,” he said, then, something catching his eye, ran to the foot of a ladder at the top of which, some thirty feet distant, a man worked on the architrave of an enormous window arch. “Do you think perhaps a narrower chisel for that angle?” he called up.

  He declined the invitation to dine with me that evening, but promised he would see me on Sunday, when no amount of vandalism to his project would persuade the workmen to forgo their day of leisure (he did not think from listening to their talk that they were too much concerned with worship), and when we might go for a walk together instead.

  We met in front of the bank on Castle Place directly after morning service, under skies at once overcast and brighter than where I had just been. I had had it in mind to suggest the Cave Hill for our walk, and perhaps afterwards a stroll down Buttermilk Loney, but Millar, although he was not in the strictest sense working, was not wholly at rest either.

  “I thought we might go to the Giant’s Ring,” he told me.

  I had only the vaguest sense of where it lay: in the parish of Drumbo, several miles to the south of the town, and therefore, from my point of view, entirely in the wrong direction; but “lead on”, I said, making light of my disappointment, “to the Giant’s Ring!”

  There was not a town in this island or the next, Millar said as we walked, more convenient than ours to a site of such antiquity – not less than three millennia, most of those expert in these matters agreed – or such mystery, as the Giant’s Ring, with this one suggesting a burial site, that one a place of sacrifice, and still another a connection to the worship of a sun god.

  And what did the people of Belfast do? Why, they raced horses there, of course.

  He had touched on the two reasons why my sense of the monument’s whereabouts had remained so long untested. My grandfather would not easily have been reconciled to the fact that it had once been used for pagan ritual, and never mind that there had been then no other, which is to say no more Christian, ritual of which to partake. “A thing can strike you as inherently wrong, even if you do not know yet what is right.”

  As for the race meetings, which for a number of years had been held there at Whitsuntide, in my grandfather’s system of values they ranked only a little above pagan ritual.

  It was a walk of more than an hour and a half from the White Linen Hall along the Dublin Road, and took me – had I but known it – past the spot where I would eventually build my own house, although at the time it was nothing but farmland, among the richest in the county, if not the entire country. (The winter barley was coming into ear; I plucked a couple of beardy stalks for us to chew on as we went.) We interrupted our journey at Shaw’s Bridge, coming off the road so that Millar could inspect the bridge’s underside from the vantage point of the towpath, which ran alongside the River Lagan as far as Lisburn. A captain in Cromwell’s army was supposed to have built a bridge of oak here, and to have left his name attached, even though that bridge had been replaced by a stone one and that stone one washed away by a flood before the bridge we stood under was built, and was lucky still to be standing, said Millar, pointing out several areas of recent repair.

  “It is perhaps best not to know these things,” I said.

  “It is perhaps advisable then that you never accompany me under the Long Bridge.”

  The Long Bridge had spanned the Lagan then for the past one hundred and fifty years. For at least the last fifty of them there had been calls to tear it down and start again.

  I thanked Millar kindly for the caution. “Now all I will be able to think about as I cross it is what is under there that I am not seeing.”

  From Shaw’s Bridge to the Ring it was country lanes and paths so winding and perplexing that at one point we convinced ourselves we had passed the same stand of birch trees twice in five minutes. We called out to a farm lad we glimpsed across a hedge asking if he would lead us to the Ring for a penny and he immediately turned and ran, which puzzled us a great deal. At length, however, and more by luck than design, we found the right track and almost unexpectedly in the end stood on a broad earthen rampart, a near-perfect circle (around, it had to be admitted, a near-perfect racetrack) some six hundred feet in diameter, in the utter stillness of that spring afternoon, trying to accommodate to our understanding the evidence of our eyes. Millar it was who broke the silence. The so-called Primitives who had constructed this rampart three thousand years ago had, he said, more sense of harmony and proportion, to say nothing of natural drama, than all but a handful of the people now permitted to practise their craft upon the towns and cities of our realm. I accepted without question, without him even having to state it, that my friend was to be numbered among that handful.

  At the centre of the arena and entirely screened by the rampart from all but the birds of the air, the balloonists and the deity (God the Father, or god the Sun), was a cluster of large stones, perhaps a dozen in all, including those lying flat and at a little distance from the main formation: a cromlech, Millar called it. Large quantities of bones had in the recent past been found in the fields round about, lending credence to the view that these stones had formed the entrance to a passage grave, and that the Ring had, over time, attracted to it lesser, satellite graves. To the eyes of a great many others, however – to my eyes seeing them for the first time – the stones had the appearance of a collapsed Druidical altar. It was difficult to disentangle the foreboding from the awe as we walked out towards them, difficult to walk rather than slow march.

  The topmost slab came to just below my shoulder, which, in the years since our first meeting in Smithfield, had pulled away a good three inches above Millar’s. For him the slab was a perfect pillow on which to dream ladders into heaven. He closed his eyes and moved his hands over the stone, as though it were communicating with him through a form of geological Braille.

  “Do you ever have the feeling that your life to this point has been nothing more than a prologue?” he asked me suddenly. “A preparation for the thing for which you will be remembered?”

  “I do not imagine that I will be remembered for anything at all,” I said, with a laugh that sounded false even to my own ears. What I ought to have said was, so far removed was I from the child who had expected very soon to join his father and mothers, and despite the odd presentiment of a few moments before, I did not truly imagine that afternoon that I would ever die.

  Millar opened his eyes and took the measure of the site again. There were in the rampart seven distinct dips or breaches, which might at one time have been the points of entry for great processions of our ancestors, whatever they were intent on on arrival here at the centre. “All that I have done up to now has been but a sketch for what I intend,” he said. “Even Rosemary Street. Even before those clots got at it.” I had begun to circle the cromlech while he talked so that now we faced each other over the top of one of the more upright stones. “I have been talking to the Presbytery of a congregation near to Lisnabreeny, on the road to Ballygowan,” Millar said. “Do you know where I mean?”

  I did, in the gentler hills of Castlereagh, across the Lagan Valley from the Cave Hill and Black Mountain. My grandfather had a cousin, the manager of La Mon’s Mill in Gransha, further out that road, whom he entertained once a year and to whom he paid in return precisely one visit, on a horse borrowed for the day from Dr McDonnell. It was what he liked to call his holiday.

  “Are you then to be the official architect of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland?” I ask
ed Millar.

  “Well, that was one of my misgivings,” he said. “Even as I was pacing out the plot with two of the elders, nodding at their assurances that I should be given free rein, I was asking myself was this really the time to be taking on another church. And then the elder elder mentioned, by way of aside, Conn O’Neill’s castle. Half the walls in the neighbourhood, he told me, were built from its leftovers.”

  “Conn O’Neill?” I said.

  “My reaction exactly,” said Millar. He had joined me by now on my side of the stone. We sat with our backs to it. I thought of us outside Billy Pollard’s handball alley, with our pennies and our slabs of honeycomb. “The elder said to me, ‘You know the story, don’t you?’ And when I told him I did not he shook his head. ‘Man, dear,’ he said.”

  I confessed I did not know it either. Millar shook his own head. “Man, dear.”

  Conn O’Neill, as the elder elder’s story was passed on to me, was the last of the great Gaelic chieftains of Clandeboye, whose lands ran down to the banks of the River Lagan, at the opposite side of the ford from which Belfast eventually grew. There had been a castle of sorts at Castlereagh since the time of the Normans, although never as grand as under the O’Neills, when, so great an advantage did it enjoy over the surrounding countryside, it had acquired the name of “Eagle’s Nest”. Belfast itself would have appeared an insignificant huddle of huts and hurdles in those early years of its settlement, even its castle a plaything, and indeed to begin with Conn was not greatly perturbed by the latest newcomers to the valley. Then he made the fateful decision to entertain his family and friends at a grand feast, which, as grand feasts then were inclined to, degenerated into an orgy of drunkenness (this was a Presbyterian elder speaking through my friend), so prolonged that eventually there was no wine, no whiskey, no porter, no intoxicating liquor of any description to be had in the entire castle, whereupon Conn, with his reputation as host at stake, dispatched a wagon down to the settlers’ town for fresh supplies. As his men were beginning their ascent again to the Eagle’s Nest, however, a party of English soldiers obstructed them and tried to confiscate their wagon and all its cargo. Fearful of returning empty-handed, the servants drew their swords and in the scuffle that ensued one of the English fell, mortally wounded. Sir Arthur Chichester – the original Sir Arthur, the Charter Chichester – was incensed . . . and perhaps secretly pleased at the opportunity that now presented itself. Hardly had the wine been broken open in Conn’s Castle, the famous victory toasted, when more English soldiers arrived with a warrant for the arrest of Conn himself, on charges of levying war against the Crown, and the great debauch ended with the chieftain of Clandeboye nursing his head in Carrickfergus gaol.

  And that was the beginning of the end of him. Some months later a Scottish lord, Montgomery, arranged to have him smuggled out of the prison in return for a share of his lands, which, such was the mire of indebtedness that Conn found himself in, quickly turned into the greater portion of them. At his death, a dozen or so years later, he owned nothing beyond his castle walls. And once he was gone they too fell.

  “Conn might have been a fool,” Millar said, stepping outside the elder’s tale, “but swindling a fool is hardly a heritage of which we can be proud.”

  “And so . . . ?” There was clearly an “and so”.

  “And so I began to wonder if that might not be the place to lay down a marker, a reminder to the great-great-to-the-power-of-however-many-grandchildren of the land-grabbers that there is more to us than simple avarice . . . or ought to be.”

  I was accustomed to Millar’s way of talking, his striving for a kind of purity, but I felt the need to introduce a grain, at least, of doubt.

  “Can one building do that?” I asked.

  “If it is the right one, it can.”

  “I would not expect you to give them the wrong one,” I said, and he laughed.

  The day had continued overcast, but there was warmth beneath the cloud. We sat for a time, a pair of drowsy-heads, making only fitful attempts at conversation. I dipped my toe into the troubled waters of the Harbour improvements, but in the matter of leisure I was closer in those days to the artisans than to my architect friend: such talk was finally too much like work for a Sunday afternoon. The grass when we started to our feet was grown damp around us. We stretched, pulling down handfuls of air, letting out long groans that began in pain and ended in an ecstasy of release. A strange performance, although the stones had no doubt witnessed stranger, and who was to say but that they would witness stranger again.

  As we walked back towards the town, Millar, reinvigorated by the rest, or the stretching, pumped me for anything I might tell him about the Museum, which, as to the building itself, was not much beyond what might be observed by anyone stopping on the pavement opposite with twenty minutes on his hands. I was a little more familiar with the Natural History Society whose members had almost willed the Museum into being as a home for their meetings and for the curios from the different kingdoms of nature that they brought along to them. My grandfather, with his fondness for societies, had as a matter of course attended an early meeting, in the Library at the White Linen Hall. “Clever,” was his verdict, “but too young.”

  I did know from having heard it discussed in the Ballast Office that a bottle had been inserted at the architects’ suggestion into the Museum’s foundation stone, which Lord Donegall himself had laid the year previous. Included in it were examples of the coins then current on the island, copies of all five local newspapers, an almanac (this was clearly some size of bottle: a Nebuchadnezzar, a Melchior), and a portion of the Scriptures, the book of Job, the twelfth chapter – “Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this?” etc. – transcribed in fifteen languages, as a guide for future generations, a sort of Rosetta Stone.

  Millar stopped as abruptly as if he had walked into a post. He looked at me, his eyebrows inverted Vs of bemusement.

  “I am only repeating what I heard said,” I told him.

  “I know,” he said and shook the Vs away. “I know.” But several times after that, in the companionable silence that once again descended on us, I plainly heard a tut escape him. Rosetta Stone!

  I tired considerably in the final half mile and by the time the White Linen Hall’s cupola came into view I was close to limping.

  “Have you hurt yourself?” Millar asked.

  Given his lambasting of Duff and Jackson I could only imagine what he would make of Ferris and Bright, of me for consorting with them.

  “I twisted my ankle coming down the stairs,” I told him, and tried to disguise my discomfort. “It really is not anything much.”

  I did not tell him either, therefore, about Maria and my walks to the Mill for Grinding Old People Young. All the things that had been so consuming me in recent weeks indeed seemed, when I was alone that night and lying in bed, embarrassingly trivial.

  What would I be remembered for? What was the act to which my life till now had served merely as prologue?

  I could not see anything other than a succession of days at the Ballast Board and I knew in that instant that a succession of days like that would finally be unendurable.

  *

  I awoke at not much after half past five to the baying of dogs. Mr Sinclair, who had the house next to Dr McDonnell’s, had lately been keeping his hunting pack kennelled in his gardens, which stretched back, like our own, on to Fountain Street, and two or three times in the week would run the dogs through the streets before the town was fully roused. I drew the curtain back a few inches from the left edge of the window frame and with my fingertips made a porthole in the condensation. The very first sight I met with was Lord Belfast astride a grey mare, talking to Mr Sinclair’s master of hounds by the wall of the old Castle gardens and appraising the dogs as they flowed past, a limited palette of white, black and tan.

  Lord Donegall was often to be met with about the town, “acting”, some shopkeepers, familiar with his terms, were move
d to complain, “as if he owned the place” – except that even with the leases he had sold of late it is moot whether he was in fact acting. I had never before, though, had the opportunity to view the “older son” at such close quarters. I do not mind saying that he cut an impressive figure, at once straight-backed and relaxed in the saddle, as befitted one who had been a captain in Hussars before his entry into Parliament. He had for some time sported a pair of small moustaches, indeed had provoked quite a “craze” for them among the young men of the town, which had still not fully abated, but this morning his lip was as bare as if it had all his life been innocent of hair; his side-whiskers too had been trimmed back to just below the ear. He wore a top hat and a coat with an astrakhan collar, so that it was difficult to determine whether he was making his way home very late, or had set out from it unusually early. It was said that in looks he resembled more his mother, but in his habits and the hours he kept he was incontrovertibly his father’s son.

  When the Marquis finally resolved to live only at Ormeau, the family’s former butler, a man called Kerns, had taken over the house at the end of Donegall Place and turned it into the Royal Hotel, which by location and imprimatur quickly became the foremost establishment in the town. According to rumour, Lord Belfast had a room kept in it in permanent readiness – the same room he had slept in as a child – for those nights when the prospect of the journey to Ormeau, or of the reception awaiting him at the end of it, was too much to contemplate. There were other rumours, of the sort that men who would like to have an hotel room of their own to avail of will always put about, although on one occasion, it is true, I had seen – all who were abroad that noontime had seen – the Earl’s wife, Lady Harriet, leave the Royal in a fury, infant son and daughter hurrying to keep pace with her, and get into the carriage in which she had drawn up just minutes before. I heard her voice, too, would wager I would have heard it had I been instead in my grandfather’s house at the opposite end of the street. “What are you waiting for, you imbecile?” she shouted to the coachman. “Go!”