Free Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found by Allegra Huston Page B

and let Daly’s ghost back in. Dad claimed that one woman houseguest actually saw Daly, when everyone else had gone out with the hunt and she’d been sitting alone in the study reading: the door had opened to admit a man dressed in eighteenth-century costume, who saluted her wordlessly and left again.
    I’m sure Dad provided the ghost, though he never admitted to it: a not-very-local man, an outfit from the film costumers Bermans& Nathans, a briefing on what to do and when to do it. He loved practical jokes, and wouldn’t have let an opportunity like that slip by. At the time, I was never sure whether to believe Betty when she said Daly’s ghost was real. My brain and my instincts rebelled against it. My mother’s absolute vanishment proved that the dead didn’t come back to any kind of life. I never heard her voice, smelled her scent, saw her shadow disappearing around a corner, or felt her presence watching over me. There were no signs of her in the material world. The only traces I had left of her were disappearing into the treacherous depths of my memory.
    That Christmas, the Irish Times ran a coloring competition, a big drawing of Santa with presents that filled half a broadsheet page. I entered it, mainly because Karen Creagh was doing it. She had a red-and-blue color scheme, which I thought was perfect. It would have been cheating to copy it, so, feeling unimaginative and second best, I used purple and yellow. I won: I’d been judged the best colorer in all Ireland. I didn’t believe it. Karen’s entry, for one, was much better than mine, and there had to be hundreds more. I decided it was a fix. I’d only won because I was “Mr. Huston’s daughter” and he was such a huge celebrity in Ireland that they—the Irish Times, the people who were in charge of Ireland—wanted to make him happy. My prize was a beautiful wooden case filled with artist’s oils, like the ones Daddy used.
    Nothing could convince me that I was artistic. Mum had been—Betty showed me the place in the basement of the Big House where she used to arrange flowers—and obviously Daddy was. I knew that those paints were not legitimately mine. I never touched them.
    In the Little House the previous Christmas, Tony had made a Nativity. He’d gone out to the thicket of bamboo at the far end of the garden, where the fox lived, and cut stalks for the stable—it was going to look like a log cabin. I watched as he held them upright, slicing them lengthways with a kitchen knife, straight down, one, then the next, until the knife caught on a joint of the bamboo and sliddiagonally across the pad of flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. First there was just a long red line, then blood started to pulse out of it. The skin pulled apart. Tony stared down at his hand as if it belonged to someone else. Nurse jumped up and ran, sloshing through the gravel, through the gates, across the bridge, up to the Big House. I raced after her. We found Betty, who put Tony in her car and took him to the hospital in Galway. Nurse couldn’t drive.
    While Tony was gone, Nurse told me the story of when he’d fallen off a horse and been dragged through a wood, his foot caught in the stirrup. He’d needed nearly a hundred stitches in his head that time. I began to enfold lack of creative skill into my identity, along with physical cowardice. Carving knives wouldn’t slice me open, and fallen branches wouldn’t tear at my skull.
     
    Lying in bed in the Bhutan Room with a fever, I felt guilty. Nurse was in Dublin, on her annual week’s holiday. It wasn’t anyone else’s job to take care of me, so I ought to be able to take care of myself. I’d been allowed to come live in the Big House with the grown-ups; I wasn’t supposed to be sick.
    Dr. Payne came from Loughrea to examine me. He diagnosed spots on my tonsils.
    Before he went down to dinner, Daddy came into the Bhutan Room to see me. He was wearing a velvet jacket and a silk shirt with a