The Secret of Eveline House

by Sheila Forsey

  She thought back to a different time when they would walk up to the parks in London and have a picnic. She would read some of her writing to him and he would tell her of his plans of being a goldsmith who was known from London to New York. They were on their way to their dreams. Her first play was performed to critical acclaim in London and there was talk of Broadway, and he now had commissions from New York as well as London. But somehow their dreams had damaged their love. She had thought nothing could. Her mind drifted to a long hot summer’s day in London.

  ‘You are not like anyone, Violet, that I have ever met. You make me feel so alive, like I have only begun to live. I was living some half-life up to now. My heart is filled with need for you and fear too, fear of ever losing you.’

  She had seen the fear in his eyes, and she had kissed him. They had vowed to never let anyone or anything pull them apart. But it seemed that something already had. Suddenly living with Henry in Draheen felt like someone had arrived to put her in a straitjacket. She had to break free.

  CHAPTER 11

  Henry took some money out of his wallet, threw it on the table, gathered up his coat and hat and walked out. John Hunt came over to him as he was leaving. He was an elderly man who Henry had met out at a card game. John was a retired solicitor and very distinguished in appearance.

  ‘Buy you a drink?’

  ‘No, I think I need some air after that but thanks.’

  ‘It will all come right. The bright lights of London are far from Draheen but it will all settle in a while.’

  ‘Thanks. Hope you are right. Goodnight.’

  He went outside, lit a cigarette and took a long drag. Looking down the street, he debated what to do. Whelan’s bar was close to the hotel. There was no sign of Violet. He knew she would be home by now. Eveline was only a short walk out of the town. It was best to give her time to cool off. He would just pop in for a drink before he headed home.

  He opened the door of the bar. It was one long counter. Half a bar and half a shop. It was hard to say what the shop sold most of. You could get bacon, eggs, fresh vegetables, butter and tea. In the pub, there was whiskey, porter, ale from the brewery in Kilkenny and sherry and port wine for the ladies, although it was rare that any women frequented Whelan’s bar.

  They bought their supplies in the shop but rarely ventured beyond that. Niall Whelan was wrapping a lump of bacon up in brown paper and tying it with a piece of twine at the shop end of the counter.

  ‘A large one, please, Niall!’ Henry called down to him.

  Niall came up, poured a large glass of Irish whiskey and handed it to Henry.

  ‘Cold night out?’

  Henry nodded as he threw the whiskey down his neck as if his throat was on fire and the whiskey was water and he needed to cool it. Then he ordered another. He could feel the hit of alcohol. Together with the low light and the haze of Woodbine, his mind calmed.

  When Violet had walked out of the hotel, he had felt a sense of dread descend on him. This was a battle he had not anticipated. So much for taking control of his household as Miss Doheny had advised him. It had met with disaster.

  He should have known better than to order Violet to do anything.

  The barman was handing a pint of porter to an old man in a corner, sitting beside a wood fire. The man looked as if he had a wisdom that was only bestowed to few and somehow he had found the key to contentment. A fine pint of porter beside a wood fire with no one to bother him. There was no one wanting to drag him back to London or anywhere else.

  It was a different scene to the pubs in London. Henry had frequented plenty of them. Pubs where the Irish sang of home, buying drinks for the man who might give them a week’s work the following week. The Irish were not afraid of hard work, their vested bodies covered in sweat a common sight on the streets of Kilburn and Camden Town.

  His mind was suddenly cast back to a different pub in Camden Town, a small pub with dark velvet chairs and the ceiling so low you had to bend your head. Scholars and poets tended to collect there and Violet loved it. It was there that he had first told Violet that he loved her. It possibly wasn’t the most romantic of settings. But to him it could not have been more perfect.

  He was drinking a pint of bitter and Violet had a half. There was a man singing a beautiful English love song, the melody hauntingly poignant.

  ‘Are you alright, Henry? There is a faraway look on you there,’ Violet said.

  ‘I was thinking of home. It’s never too far from my thoughts.’

  ‘Could London ever be your home, your real home, I mean?’ she asked tentatively.

  ‘Ireland will always be my home, Violet. I thank London for making a man of me. I was a boy as green as the grass when I arrived here. I thought I knew what hardship was too, but no one really knows what it’s like until you get here. I owe it to London for showing me that there is another life, but I don’t thank it for stealing me from the place I dream about.’

  ‘So what is it about Ireland that you dream about?’

  ‘I dream of my mother, God rest her, and sometimes just of the rivers and the mist on the mountains.’ He caught hold of Violet’s hands and looked intensely into her eyes. ‘I never thought I would fall in love with the most beautiful Irish girl in the world, right here in Camden Town. A girl who makes my heart leap every time I see her and when she speaks it’s like the lilt of an Irish goddess.’

  ‘It’s the bitter, it’s gone to your head – you should stick to the porter. Where is this girl who sounds like Queen Maeve? She sounds enchanting surely.’ Violet grinned.

  ‘Ah, you’re teasing me now!’ Henry smiled, letting go of her hands.

  ‘Ah, yes, ’tis the bitter gone to your poor heart, making you all sentimental,’ Violet said with a laugh.

  Henry had tried to embrace London as much as he could and Fortune had smiled on him. It had miraculously opened the way for him to learn the craft of a goldsmith. No such opportunity would ever have come his way in Ireland. And it came through Mrs Thompkins, their landlady. She was a large woman with a heart of gold who had quietly hitched up with Henry’s father. To outsiders his father was still only a lodger, but Henry knew when he saw them together that it was much more than that. He was happy for his father, but he could not help thinking of his mother. His memory of her had haunted him when they first left. It was as if they were abandoning her, even if she was buried deep in the clay of Wexford.

  Maura O’Riordan met his father at a dance in Ferns and stole his heart. She was the prettiest girl in Wexford, but the years of hardship had thrown lines on her face like a ploughed field. Henry could still see her in his mind’s eye – eyes like cornflowers, dark hair with ribbons of grey running through. He could see her praying when she knew she was dying, praying that the world would be kind to her family and begging Mary Immaculate to watch over her sons and protect them from harm.

  They first arrived in Camden Town in 1931. The Irish were not hard to miss. Although he was barely sixteen his father Jim had secured work for him and his brother alongside himself on a building site. That train station in Wexford that they had started their journey from still had the power to haunt him. Each man with a cardboard box and no sense of anywhere except Vinegar Hill and the dances in Ferns and Enniscorthy, with not a clue of what the roads outside Leinster looked like. They each got a tag pinned on to them, quite like you would a parcel. The tag carried the name of the builder that they would work for.

  His mother had died the year before – the tuberculosis had finally killed her, that and the hardship of a small farm on the edge of the world. They had tried to conquer the land, as their forefathers had, but eventually there was nothing left – the sea had begun to eat away at it, the last crop had failed and the future in Ireland looked as bleak as Mount Leinster on a November evening.

  London had looked like another planet. They got digs with Mrs Thompkins, a widow, and Jim had bonded with her from the very start. Henry knew that she sensed his father’s heart was broken
, from losing his wife and leaving his humble home and everything he knew. It was normally only the sons who went looking for work, but Jim would have died if they left him alone on that farm. He was strong and fit for his age and they hoped that the work would not be too difficult for him.

  Mrs Thompkins had not taken her eyes off Jim that first evening. She had five grown-up children who were all married with their own lives. Her house was warm and cosy, and the sons watched, grinning to each other, as she piled their father’s plate high with thick rashers and eggs and fresh bread.

  But none of that security and comfort did anything to change Henry’s mind about Ireland. He had enjoyed himself after a fashion, gone to dance hall after dance hall, drinking till the early hours and somehow carrying buckets of cement up twenty floors the next morning without falling and breaking his neck. But at night in his dreams he could smell the air in Boolavogue, though it was the smog of Camden Town that he awoke to.

  His father, although a farmer by trade, had always had a flair for making things. He had often spent hours making something out of a small piece of wood with his penknife. It was not too long until he was drafted in to do some carpentry on the building site. Although not trained at it, he seemed to be able to turn his hand to it easily. Mrs Thompkins could see how talented Jim was and it was she who recommended him to Mr Bayley, a jeweller she cleaned for, when he was looking for a carpenter to do some after-hours work in his shop. And that had led to Henry being hired by Mr Bayley and eventually being trained by him as a goldsmith. His brother Anthony had stayed on the buildings. He married a Londoner, Tracy, and within the first year of marriage had twins, a boy and girl. Seamus and Siobhán, with big brown eyes like their father.

  Every Irishman who left his Irish shore dreamed of making it in London and Henry had. He had done it. He had found the love of his life and married her, and they had their beautiful Sylvia. Then he had arrived back in Ireland with a list of connections and enough money to buy the house he had dreamt he would. His world was perfect.

  But now Violet wanted to literally tear it all apart. Sometimes he dreamt he was a young man leaving his home and arriving at that train station in Enniscorthy bound for the cold streets of London. He would awaken in a sweat in his bed in Eveline. It would take some time for his heart to calm down. Then he would thank God he was back in Ireland and thank God for his good fortune.

  There was no way anyone, not even Violet, was taking him back. His chat about her curtailing her writing had made her furious. He knew he had made a big mistake saying that and he cursed himself for it. He knew now it was careless of him not to realise how upset the mere suggestion of it would make her. Upset was one thing but threatening to leave with Sylvia, well, that was another matter entirely.

  The door opened and Peter Binchy, the local tailor, arrived in. Peter’s back was curved at birth and it had handicapped his life with chronic pain. Violet had asked him to make Henry a suit of the best Donegal tweed. When Henry had tried on the finished garment, he knew it was the finest suit that he had ever worn. It was beautifully crafted and Peter Binchy in a different world could have stood tall with any designer of his time.

  ‘A drink for my good friend here,’ Henry said. ‘Throw another large whiskey in mine and, feck it, a pint of porter to wash it down.’

  ‘Thanks, Henry,’ Peter said.

  Dan Holland arrived in and, with a pint of porter before him, took out a tin whistle and began to play an Irish ballad. Soon Henry was singing ‘Boolavogue’ and telling stories of the battle of Oulart Hill and how the boys of Wexford had fought with every ounce of their strength to free Ireland. The rounds were flying, the hours passed and all too soon Niall Whelan was telling them all to go home.

  Henry staggered out alongside Peter at ten past one.

  ‘What am I going to do with this wife of mine? She wants to take us off to live in London. I never want to go back to London, this is my ho … me. I lo … ve Ireland. I love every … one in Ireland. I love you. I love everyone.’ He gave a large hiccup as Peter helped him up the street.

  ‘Women and their fancy ideas! She’s a good woman, is your lovely lady, but all that fancy writing will have to stop. If she is to be a married respectable woman, she will have to act like one. I have an idea. I can have my missus have a word with your missus. Put her on the straight and narrow, know what I’m saying?’

  Henry in his drunken stupor thought this was a mind-blowing idea.

  ‘Brilliant! You get your wife to come visit my wife and explain that she can’t be acting like that. Bloody brilliant! Peter, you’re a genius!’

  ‘It will be all sorted out in a jiffy and, before you know it, she will be waiting at the door with your slippers and a large whiskey.’

  Henry stumbled over a stone and fell to the ground, cutting his face. He stood up with the help of Peter, neither of them noticing the cut. They were outside Peter’s house when the door opened, and a very cross Mrs Binchy was standing there with a look of pure vexation on her face. She was a small woman with her hair tied up in a bun and a blue wraparound bib over a brown skirt, green cardigan and cream blouse.

  ‘Just look at the state of you! You are a right pair of eejits! I thought that you, Mr Ward, had more sense. You’d better come in and I will try to make you look halfway respectable before you have the town talking about you. Get in, the pair of you!’

  Henry stumbled in, almost knocking over a chair.

  ‘God save all here! You are a good little woman – sure we only had a few friendly little drinks. Your good husband and I got led astray a bit up in Whelan’s.’

  ‘Two schoolboys you are, is it? Mr Ward, you don’t look like you needed anyone to lead you astray tonight. Oh, two schoolboys with not a whit of sense once the porter enters your veins and I have the misfortune to be married to one of you.’

  She filled a bowl with hot water from the kettle on the fire and put some salt in it. She steeped a cloth in the liquid and let it cool for a few minutes before taking it out and wringing some of the water from it. She then bathed Henry’s face.

  He flinched. ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Sit still, for goodness’ sake!’

  She took some more water from the kettle and made some strong tea.

  Then she took a loaf of soda bread from the press and cut it into thick slices. She buttered them and put a slice of boiled ham on each.

  Henry was trying to sit on the chair at the table, but the chair seemed to be moving.

  ‘Eat that up and it might sober you up before you go home.’

  ‘You are an angel and a gift to a man in distress, little woman. Oh, a good little woman!’ Henry said, hiccupping.

  ‘A man in distress, my eye – a man with too much whiskey and porter in him!’ Mrs Binchy looked like she could give him a slap she was so vexed.

  Henry barely touched the bread and ham. He stood up but was so unsteady he collapsed on the nearby settle bed. Mrs Binchy tried to get him to stand up again. But he didn’t respond.

  Peter Binchy had fallen asleep in a fireside chair.

  ‘Mr Ward, shake yourself up and get home to your good wife who I hope will give you a piece of her mind when she sees the state of you.’

  But Henry did not hear a word. He had passed out.

  CHAPTER 12

  Betsy knew all was not well in Eveline. Mrs Ward had looked a fright when she had arrived home the night before, alone and frozen from the cold. Betsy felt very protective of Mrs Ward and of Sylvia. She had tossed and turned all night thinking about it. All this upset was not good for Sylvia. She was such a frail little thing. She sensed things so strongly. Betsy never said it to anyone, but it was as if the child was here before, almost angelic in ways. She was the nearest thing to a little angel that she had ever met.

  Sometimes she saw her sitting and staring into space and it reminded her of what poor Saint Bernadette must have looked like when she saw Mary appear to her all those years ago in Lourdes. There was something about Sylvia. She
could act very strangely and she was barely able for the outside world. Betsy feared for her, for the outside world could be cruel to anyone who was different. Some might say she was a bit of a simpleton, but it wasn’t that. She was very clever, could read above her age and her paintings were like nothing Betsy had ever seen before. It was as if they were photographs, the likeness was so good. Sylvia had told Betsy that she was convinced that the family was in danger. Betsy saw the fear in her little eyes. It made her so angry to think that anyone in Draheen could hurt such a gentle little soul. Well, she would try to get to the bottom of it if it was the last thing she did. She knew well that Mrs Ward wanted to flee back to London. She hated to think of them leaving. Her life was so changed since the Wards had arrived in Draheen.

  She had been worried about working in such a grand house but Mrs Ward was so kind she had nothing to worry about. Mrs Ward was not of the gentry herself and neither was Mr Ward, but she was certainly a lady and he a gentleman.

  Miss Doheny had been quick to tell her how the Abbey Theatre in Dublin would not hear of putting on that play, Unholy Love. How Miss Doheny had got wind of this she had no idea.

  ‘It was unchristian, the language in it,’ were Miss Doheny’s words as she counted out eggs for Betsy shortly after she had begun working for the Wards.

  ‘Let God be the judge of that, Miss Doheny. I assume you must have read the script or sailed over to London to see the play, to be able to comment so expertly on it,’ Betsy had replied, daring to cross Miss Doheny who lifted her eyebrow into a high arch and fixed a thin scowl on her thin purple lips.