An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  She turned now, feeling foolish for having stood so long in that cellar and entered the kitchen which held so many memories: Francis and Hazel’s laughing voices during the war years when this house became a sanctuary with their father away in the army, the bustle at this kitchen table in the early 1930s when she and Freddie struggled to make a success of Glanmire House as a shooting lodge. Eva could recall labouring with the cook to pluck and singe each slaughtered wild bird that Freddie and his guests proudly displayed on the front steps: standing over them like overgrown toddlers anticipating exaggerated praise for having successfully deposited turds in a chamber pot, before they adjourned to the drawing room for whiskey.

  By then Eva was already a vegetarian. Her overwhelming sense of compassion made her feel the plight of each bird with the same agony as if the shotgun pellet had pierced her own flesh. She remembered the awful nausea when – pregnant with Hazel – she would grasp the legs of each slain woodcock and golden plover to pluck upwards from the tail to the head, before plucking the legs and breast, knowing this needed to be completed while the bird was still warm. Having to enter the cool north-facing larder used to perturb her more than any haunted wine cellar because she could offer no gesture of atonement to the pale carcasses hanging by their bound feet for several days until rigor mortis had passed, with Eva needing to regularly check for any greenish tinge if a bird became over-hung. In the month before Hazel’s birth, the cook took pity on her when the evening meal was being prepared, banishing Eva to prepare colcannon or a casserole of vegetables. The cook would cut off the neck of each bird being prepared for dinner, wiping away congealed blood before removing their wind-pipes and inserting her fingers to catch hold of the gizzard and extract it carefully so that no entrails spilled out. Deftly removing the lungs she would separate the liver from the gallbladder with a sharp knife and then, only when the bird was trussed for roasting would she allow Eva to help with the main preparations for those dinners, where Eva always served herself the smallest possible portion of fowl – just enough not to antagonise Freddie – and spent the meal discreetly concealing it under an uneaten pile of mashed potato.

  Not that such lavish meals occurred every night. Despite Freddie’s plans, relatively few paying guests were lured to make the long trip from England by his small advertisements placed in Wildfowler’s Shooting Times & Country Magazine. The handful who came invariably praised his ability to find the best cover to shoot woodcock, his wisdom regarding the relative merits of retrievers over red setters, his generosity in pouring post-dinner measures of whiskey and his indefectible energy in guiding them across seemingly inaccessible bogs despite being impeded by the club foot which prudent guests learnt never to mention. They enjoyed his fireside stories about his most notorious ancestor, George Robert Fitzgerald, who once caused mayhem in Mayo by riding roughshod with his own lawless militia, who caged his father inside a cave with a live bear, and haughtily placed the noose around his own neck to jump to his death after the first two ropes broke during his public execution for murder in Castlebar in 1786.

  As the guesthouse sank deeper into debt, every shooting guest left with a hearty handshake for Freddie, praising his prowess as a storyteller and a damn fine shot and vowing to return. Few kept their promise, but it always surprised Eva to see how her husband basked in such praise, while appearing to brush off all compliments. Maybe when growing up as the poor relation in the Fitzgerald family, Freddie had needed to develop his gruff hail-fellow-well-met persona as a shield against an Ireland in which he felt increasingly out of kilter. It hurt him to watch Mayo County Council gleefully demolish Big Houses when rate bills, death duties and the Wall Street Crash made it impossible for old families to sustain them: the walls of once grand houses being deliberately ground down to fill potholes. Eva remembered public tears in Mayo train stations during the 1930s: impoverished parents bidding farewell to children fleeing poverty by emigrating to Boston and Chicago. But she also recalled elderly Protestant couples sitting quietly in the single First Class carriage, anxious to pretend they were unnoticed, as they slipped away from decaying ancestral homes to spend their final years – like Eva’s own parents eventually needed to do – in exile in drab English seaside towns.

  As Freddie’s dreams of a successful shooting lodge collapsed, this new social order of the Free State kept encroaching on his childhood domain: Freddie needing to sell off small parcels of land to local farmers to stay afloat. She remembered him spending most days in 1936 wandering the bogs alone with only his Holland ejector 12-bore gun and a dog for company and most nights drinking his way deeper into the debt of every Castlebar publican. This left Eva struggling with mounting bills, two small children and the realisation that – apart from her joy at being a mother – she was living a lie. Glanmire House was only saved from the bailiffs by their decision to emigrate in 1937 after Freddie secured an unlikely job as manager of a Culpeper Herbal Shop in Winchester.

  Leaving the kitchen now Eva walked back up the stairs to the main house, careful to tread softly when passing their bedroom door, although his snores reassured her that Freddie was still sleeping off the whiskey he had drunk alone in the kitchen last night after they completed any final business needing to be conducted between them. She had come here this weekend not just to say farewell to a house that had been her home but also to secure Freddie’s agreement not to make any claim on a small legacy which Eva had recently been left in her late mother’s will. Eva would need every penny to purchase the two-storey red-brick Victorian house on Dublin’s Frankfort Avenue which she had bid on, because no bank would offer a loan to a woman in her unregulated circumstances. She hoped to support herself there by taking in art students as lodgers and teaching child art classes, although she had not risked Freddie’s ridicule by mentioning this second aspiration. But such a home would allow her to create a nest for her children for as long as they needed her. She had not sought, and nor had Freddie offered, any financial support for her new life: Freddie obviously feeling he was showing restraint and decency in allowing her to retain all of her mother’s legacy, while he continued to pay Francis’s Trinity College fees.

  It would be hard to survive but after today she wanted Freddie to have no claim over her so she could live on her own terms. However, just now as she stepped over her suitcases in the hallway and opened the tall front door one last time to walk out onto the front steps, she did not feel strong. The daffodil lawn in front of the bay windows was overgrown, the gravel on the path so choked by weeds as to be barely visible. Up the wooded slope behind the house there were three oaks in a clearing, to which she used to secretly run as a young mother to press her arms around their trunks, trying to draw comfort from their inner strength during moments of utmost despair when she felt utterly trapped. But she felt no need to revisit those oaks this morning because after today she would no longer be trapped on these steps which had been the scene of so many departures.

  She recalled their first departure in 1937: Francis and Hazel crying at leaving behind the only home they had known and Eva apprehensive because Freddie knew nothing about herbal medicine or managing a shop, and they both knew as little about Winchester as Winchester knew about them. Perhaps this was the secret of the unexpected happiness they had enjoyed together during their eighteen months in the small live-in flat above the Culpeper shop on Jewry Street, where Eva worked as the unpaid assistant that Culpeper’s expected the wives of all managers to become. To Freddie’s credit, he stopped drinking during this period and knuckled down in that provincial English city, no longer burdened by needing to keep up the appearance of being a Fitzgerald because nobody in Winchester recognised the weight of that famous surname. This was when Eva remembered him at his happiest: an anonymous Irish emigrant; albeit an educated, Protestant freemason, unlike the majority of Irish emigrants back then.

  But his Fitzgerald pride never went away. When war broke out in 1939, Chamberlain warned of an imminent blitzkrieg, predicting a hundred thousand civ
ilian deaths before Christmas. With factories working all night to stockpile cardboard coffins, Eva and Freddie decided it would be prudent for her to bring the children back to Mayo while he stayed on in Winchester. But when Freddie phoned the Culpeper regional office, the local manager shrilly told him that no English public school man would permit his wife to flee dishonourably in time of war. She further suggested that if Freddie could not control his wife, he should also hand in his notice and flee like an Irish coward, leaving her to find a responsible married couple to manage the shop. That same afternoon Freddie received a deeply apologetic phone call from the head office in London. The managing director – aware of how Freddie had increased turnover threefold in Winchester – begged Freddie to ignore this outburst, explaining that the local manager came from Coventry where a no-warning IRA bomb had recently killed five innocent passers-by.

  But Freddie’s pride was insulted by her inference of cowardice and the reference to him not having attended a good English school. He had barely waved Eva off on the long journey to Mayo before he attempted to enlist. As a middle-aged man whose club foot prevented him from serving on the front line, he was initially only accepted in the Royal Artillery embodied Territorial Army, although he would willing have stormed any Normandy beach or hacked through any Burmese jungle. But his ability to shoot, his imperious manner and his genuine desire – and uncanny ability – to drum the rudiments of marksmanship into even the rawest recruit attracted the attention of the Army Education Corps who commissioned him into their ranks as a Second Lieutenant.

  By the spring of 1943 Freddie had attained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, hobnobbing with hard-drinking fellow officers in Hyde Park Barracks in London, where he was tasked with overseeing security at several royal residences. His role and salary gave him the social status he had yearned for all his life, but it came at a price for Francis, when Freddie insisted on uprooting their son from Ireland to attend a harsh English boarding school where many of Freddie’s fellow officers sent their sons. By then Eva had abandoned her attempts to educate the children here in Mayo and was renting a house near Dublin to allow Francis to attend the progressive Aravon School and Hazel to become a popular day girl in the nearby Park House. When Freddie summoned his teenage son to England, Hazel insisted on remaining in Dublin as a boarder at Park House. But Eva reluctantly went to live with Freddie in the Officers’ Quarters at his barracks, sensing that it was important to stay close to Francis. Eva had not minded living through what newspapers called the ‘Baby Blitz’, when Hitler made one final, comparatively ineffectual attempt to bomb London in January 1944. She had felt an empathy with the ordinary Londoners who stoically sheltered in underground tube stations. What she found more stressful was mingling with the officers’ wives at awful cocktail parties, although Freddie adored such gatherings, regaling people with colourful West of Ireland tales closer to the pages of Somerville and Ross novels than to the Mayo she knew. He had seemed incapable of not working in some reference to the prestigious school which he claimed their son was greatly enjoying.

  Francis’s weekly letters from the boarding school were censored by his headmaster – a man whose petrifying rages were supposedly caused by headaches brought on by the steel plate that was inserted in his skull during World War One. Reading between the lines, Eva sensed how Francis was being viciously bullied there. When she visited the school behind Freddie’s back, Eva discovered her fifteen-year-old son to be so distraught that he seemed close to a nervous breakdown. Her marriage had never recovered from the furious row when she announced her intention to remove Francis from that school and return to Mayo to nurture him back to health here. Freddie finally consented after she insinuated that it would be only a matter of time before the sons of his fellow officers told their fathers about Francis’s fragile mental state, damaging Freddie’s newfound status in the Officers’ Mess.

  This status was now gone, with Freddie released from military service to try and find a new niche in an Ireland that had stayed neutral throughout that war and remained indifferent towards it. Just like Eva, Freddie was having to restart his life. Recently he accepted a positon as mathematics teacher in a boarding school in Wicklow: the same job he had held in 1927 when travelling to Donegal to seek a wife. He would undoubtedly still rattle around these empty rooms during school holidays, but once the school term resumed after this Easter break and he took up his new post in Wicklow, Glanmire House would cease to be anyone’s real home.

  A cough disturbed her thoughts. She turned to find Freddie standing behind her in the doorway: an old greatcoat thrown over his pyjamas. Neither would mention how he ended up sharing the same bed as her last night. They wouldn’t properly mention anything because there was nothing left to be said. Even if there were, it was not in Freddie’s nature to discuss what he truly felt.

  ‘You’re off,’ he remarked after a moment.

  She nodded. ‘I thought I’d catch the early train.’

  ‘Whatever it is, it certainly won’t be early. The blasted train is always late, even though it only starts in Westport. You’re all packed.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Are your cases heavy?’

  ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll wait at the crossroads and flag down the early bus into Castlebar. It will save me walking through Turlough village.’

  He nodded judiciously. ‘Wise. Not that too many folks will be stirring in the village at this hour. They’ll be too busy squinting out at you from behind their curtains.’

  ‘I don’t tell people our business, Freddie.’

  ‘You don’t need to. There are eyes everywhere. Even when you tell them nothing, they still think they know it all.’

  ‘I’ll meet no one on my walk down to the small crossroads,’ she assured him. ‘If I did, they’d just presume I’m home for the weekend.’ He was almost standing to attention, yet she could see an agitation in his fingers: nerve ends screaming for one shot of whiskey. ‘Will you be all right, Freddie?’

  ‘Me?’ He rubbed his chin as if surprised by the question. ‘All I need is a shave and I’ll be grand. I’d better set to, closing up the house properly or tinkers will break in and lift everything. Their own laziness is the only reason they haven’t swiped the lead off the roof.’ He glanced back into the hallway. ‘It’s not beyond repair. Too big a task for me, but Francis has his heart set on restoring it one day when he comes into his inheritance. Don’t ask me how a horticulturist will make a living in Mayo, but there again, ask me nothing about that boy. Maybe he’ll marry a rich American or make a fortune when he moves to London. In my last summer in London a lot of officers took their wives to the Chelsea Flower Show now that it’s being staged again. I was amazed at the stories they brought back about this craze for garden designers and the fees they charge. A fool and his money are easily parted. If the boy is looking for fools, there’s no better place than London.’ He stopped, realising he was talking too much, trying to bridge the awkwardness of their farewell. ‘Tell him the spare key is in its usual spot if he wants to bring down any Trinity pals.’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ Eva said softly, knowing how difficult her husband and son found it to communicate directly.

  ‘Good. That’s settled. Well, if you want to catch that bus, then I guess…’

  ‘I know.’

  He reached behind him for the two suitcases and placed them on the outside steps. Eva walked back to pick them up and stopped a foot away from him. Close enough to reach up and plant one last kiss on his check or for him to reach down and embrace her. Too close for Freddie though who stepped back and glanced up at the sky. The sun had gone in and it felt colder. His eyes stared out past her across the vista of his diminished domain. ‘There will surely be rain later but I’d say it should stay fine till you get the train at least.’

  ‘Hopefully so. Goodbye Freddie.’

  Freddie took another step back, a step closer to enforced bachelorhood, a step nearer to the cure of that first Skylark whiskey. He gave the sky a f
inal caustic glance. ‘Hopefully so is right. The weather is changeable. You just never can tell how things will pan out.’

  Chapter Two

  Painting and Character

  Dublin, April 1951

  In this new life Eva was making for herself as a separated woman her motto was to always be prepared. During her marriage Freddie always claimed that she permanently lived in the ether: too naïve a dreamer to organise anything practical. Her unregularised status as an estranged wife made her the topic of talk among her middle-class Dublin neighbours on Frankfort Avenue in Rathgar. Eva had lost any last vestiges of financial security by leaving Freddie but found it a relief to be without a husband. What she found lonelier was the realisation that her two children were starting to no longer need her like they once did.

  Both were here this afternoon but neither saw Frankfort Avenue as their true home anymore. Even Francis – whom she loved more than anyone on earth – had moved out in January to commence a clandestine love affair with Colville, an older fellow student in Trinity College. The sound of his joyous laugh came from upstairs, through the open door of the bedroom Hazel used on her increasingly infrequent visits. Eva longed to be upstairs joining in this light-heartedness but it was important to give Francis and Hazel their own time alone. Personality wise they were utterly different, yet even as small children Eva never knew them to quarrel. Each harboured such a protective instinct towards the other that it was often hard to tell who was the older: Francis being the most carefree, while Hazel – two years his junior – saw herself as the most mature. More mature than Eva, as Hazel’s raised eyebrows often made clear.