The Red And The Green Read Free Page A

something of the fascination of the snake that eats its own tail. He was both interested and repelled, and the sense that the family occupied or pervaded Ireland, managing to inhabit most of its corners, largely composed for him the sinister power of that island.
    In fact, Andrew had in recent years seen happily little of his remoter relations who owned farms in Clare and Donegal. Frances and her father, Christopher Bellman, who had at one time lived in Galway, had now moved to Sandycove, and Andrew felt no urge, though his mother sometimes suggested it, to go on a familial tour. Dublin and its neighbourhood contained quite enough of the cousinry, and those indeed with whom Andrew had always had most to do. The exploration even of this branch of the family, which was needed in order to make clear his relationship with Frances, was in fact complicated enough. His paternal grandmother, Janet Selborne-Doyle, ‘a great beauty’ as his mother always said when she was referred to, had married twice. Her first husband was John Richard Dumay, from whom she had had issue two children, Brian and Millicent. Of these, Brian, it was always said whether truly or not as a result of a nervous breakdown, had become a convert to Catholicism when still a student at Trinity. The ‘great beauty’s’ second marriage, after the death of her first husband, had been to Arnold Chase-White, and the one offspring of this union had been Henry Chase-White, Andrew’s father. Henry married Hilda Drumm, and Brian Dumay had married one Kathleen Kinnard who was in fact a connection of Hilda’s mother’s family, and who had caused pain and scandal by forthwith adopting the religious faith of her husband. Millicent Dumay then married Kathleen’s brother, Sir Arthur Kinnard, and the third sister, Heather Kinnard, married Christopher Bellman, Frances’ father. Both Mrs Bellman and Sir Arthur Kinnard had died fairly young, and Andrew could not recall having met them. His Uncle Brian had produced two sons, Pat Dumay, who was a year older than Andrew, and Cathal Dumay, who must now, Andrew reflected, be about thirteen or fourteen. Uncle Brian had died when Andrew was about fifteen, and his Aunt Kathleen had caused some surprise and a good deal of adverse comment by subsequently marrying her co-religionist in the family, his Uncle Barnabas, who it appeared had been one of her early admirers. That marriage had been childless.
    Andrew’s mother had been impressed and continually preoccupied by the goings on of her Irish relations, particularly the Kinnard family, possessors of an enviable mansion and an even more enviable title, who, especially in the days of Arthur’s father, had set a standard both of grandeur and of social freedom which must have made Hilda discontented with her restricted London life and with the ‘mad’ yet cosy society of her parents. There was no doubt that she coveted not only the traditional ease of the Kinnard household but also its Irish remoteness from the pettier aspects of the ‘bourgeois’ world. Hilda had never been quite sure that her father and mother were blessed with good taste.
    Although Hilda had talked about these things to Andrew all his life, he had only very recently begun, in relation to her, to understand them. He had much earlier, and with a kind of nervous distress, apprehended his father’s quite different and strangely deep anxieties about Ireland. Some family demon haunted Henry Chase-White. He was fond of his relations, and especially fond of Aunt Millicent. But the source of the trouble, Andrew soon came to conjecture, was his half-brother Brian. Brian Dumay was older than Henry by several years and was a very different kind of man from Andrew’s father. Uncle Brian had occupied some post in the Bank of Ireland which never seemed to provide matter for discussion, but in so far as he entered into the life of his nephew he did so in the guise of the