Free Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Tóibín

nothing more about the nature of their relationship, it is clear there some of his letters are missing. Thirty years earlier, Lady Gregory had destroyed the sonnets she wrote to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, sending him the poems in disguised handwriting but keeping no copies; now, at Coole, she told John Quinn: “your dear letter goes into the fire tonight. I must keep it till then.”
    Â 
    B etween her husband’s death in 1892 and Robert’s coming of age ten years later, Lady Gregory worked to clear the debts on the estate. From 1902, Robert was the owner of the house and the estate, although she had a right, according to Sir William’s will, to live in the house for her lifetime. There was an intermittent conflict between Robert’s interest in being master in his own house, seated at the head of his own table, and his mother’s interest in having Yeats at the head of the table, offering him the master bedroom and devoting her household to the cause of the poet’s comfort.
    Sir Ian Hamilton, a cousin of Lady Gregory’s, described Yeats at Coole: “No one even can have heard anyone play up to him like Lady Gregory … All along the passage for some distance on either side of Yeats’s door were laid thick rugs to prevent the slightest sound reaching the holy of holies – Yeats’s bed. Down the passage every now and then would tiptoe a maid with a tray … All suggestions that I could cheer him up a good deal if I went into his room and had a chat were met with horror.”
    Early in their friendship, Lady Gregory had written to Yeats: “I want you to have all you want, and I believe that suffering has done all it can for your soul, and that peace and happiness will be best for both soul and body now.” A year later she wrote: “How bad of you to get ill just when I am not there to look after you! Do take care of yourselfnow, and feed yourself properly – and with any threatening of rheumatism you should look to your underwear.”
    In September 1907 Robert Gregory married Margaret Parry. Although the Gregorys lived much in London and Paris, Robert’s resentment at Yeats’s usurpation of his rightful place at Coole was exacerbated, if anything, by his marriage. In 1913 Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats: “I wonder if you would mind ordering some wine for yourself this time or is it dry sherry – and perhaps a special decanter. I will explain this strange request when we meet.” In her biography of Lady Gregory, Mary Lou Kohfeldt wrote that “Robert Gregory was startled one evening when he called for a bottle of an especially fine vintage Torquey laid down by his father to find it was all gone, served bottle by bottle by his mother to Willie over the years.” During the First World War, while Robert was in the British Army, Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats about the accounts at Coole, which she was about to go through with Margaret: “If as bad as I think and if you are well off in the summer, I’m afraid I must ask you to pay what will cover your food (not your lodging).”
    Although he was a talented painter and stage designer, Robert did not have his mother’s single-mindedness or energy. And it was clear that the days of landlords living on income from rents was coming to an end in Ireland. In 1909 Yeats wrote in his journal: “I thought of this house,slowly perfecting itself and the life within it in ever-increasing intensity of labour, and then of its probably sinking away through courteous incompetence, or rather sheer weakness of will, for ability has not failed in young Gregory.” In 1912 Yeats wrote an eight-line poem called “The New Faces” about Coole, imagining its mistress dead and the new generation in control. In what Roy Foster calls “one of his moments of superb tactlessness”, Yeats sent Lady Gregory the poem. She was about to return to New York with the Abbey to see John Quinn once