The door to the house in Charleville stood open—mystifying, given how cold the house always seemed to be. I rang the bell and called but nobody answered. What must I do now? Stand and wait, ring the bell again.

A woman next door, wizened as a broom, said, “They’re not up yet, they don’t get up ’til ’tis late, they’re very like that.”

I was about to argue that I knew some of them were up, I’d already met them, when I heard the voices. So I followed them. I went into the house, along the passageway I’d first been drawn along by Sarah, and I heard the voices more loudly with each step—Venetia and her mother in an argument. Of my father’s voice, or any male voice, or even Mrs. Haas, I heard nothing.

At the foot of the stairs I stopped; that’s where the argument came from—the room directly above. No argument this, but an outright fight, with voices rising all the time. I still couldn’t hear what they were saying—and by now I didn’t want to, so I called, “Hallo? Hallo?”

The voices stopped. Sarah appeared and said, as though never in an argument in her life, “It’s Ben, dear Ben. Ben, come up, let’s see you.”

Venetia appeared, her head above her mother’s shoulder—and from the way she looked at me I knew that my new parents had judged everything right. This was the direction to follow.

I climbed the stairs. “Is, ah’m—”

“Is Harry here? No, Ben,” said Sarah, “but you are.”

When I reached the landing, both women took my hands, as I had seen them do with my father. This produced the eeriest possible feeling in me—and at that stage in my life I didn’t even know about Oedipus at Colonus, and the death of the king. They led me along the passageway, which was at least as long as the one downstairs, to a small and what Miss Fay would call a “very marvelous” sitting room.

Sarah went into the room first; Venetia squeezed my hand and I followed her. Given what I’ve so far told you, given the maelstrom of my life, why did I feel that I had come to some different but infinitely truer kind of home?

I sat with Sarah and Venetia. They were unquestionably the two most beautiful and exciting human beings that I had ever seen, and they made me feel that I was the center of their lives. But I reminded myself that it was my choice to feel so.

When I was about ten, I asked Mother if she’d ever heard anybody say anything about me. She said, yes, that her friends talked about me. Mollie May Holmes said that I was “as demure as a girl;” Kitty Cleary said that I was “a sweetheart.” When I protested these troubling observations, Mother turned them into compliments. I never saw it like that. What boy could, especially if he was saving the world?

In that very marvelous sitting room those descriptions came back to my mind. Is that how these people see me? Demure? A sweetheart? God, I hope not.

We talked—no, they talked, I listened. They told me about the house, about making films in Killarney—that’s when I first heard of Esmeralda—about the Abbey and Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge. I don’t think the sun moved around the sky that afternoon; I believe it stood perfectly still high above me, as did time itself.

My idyll ended when my father came back. We heard him call from downstairs. The arch of Venetia’s eyebrows told me to go. On the staircase, he and I shook hands like friends, not father and son; I left the house edgy at my ousting.

Had I been less irked, I might not have exploded when I reached home. “Demure”? That vanished like the coward that it was. No sweetheart I—not at all. I, who had never raised my voice in anger, who wouldn’t say “Boo!” to a goose, screeched and screamed, rampaged and roared. I kicked the floor. Mother recoiled; her friendly dog had suddenly developed rabies.

“What, Mother?”

She waved a document. “It’s only a piece of paper.”

I now think there may also have been self-destruction and revenge in it. And a hastening of fate, as though sick of worrying as to how she could keep the farm going, she relinquished it.

“It’s a mortgage, Mother.”