Hearing Hazel’s bedroom door close, Eva entered the hallway and was rewarded by the sight of Francis descending the stairs, smiling at her. Eva instantly forgot her preparations for the art class. In that moment she was consumed only by Francis’s happiness: her heart buoyed into a tumultuous state of joy by simply being in his presence. Francis laughed as he reached the bottom step.
‘You look positively radiant, Mummy,’ he teased. ‘Like you have a dashing young man stashed away, waiting for Hazel and I to leave.’
Eva smiled, amused. ‘I’ll soon have a house full of dashing young men – dashing about knocking over paintbrushes and easels: all eight years of age.’
He towered over her: so boyishly, strikingly handsome at twenty-three that girls regularly fell in love with him, though Eva had long abandoned hopes of any girl physically arousing his interest.
‘Sounds like I’m leaving at the right time, before I’m knocked over by a stampede of miniature Picassos. I hope they appreciate how lucky they are to have you. I remember you teaching me to paint during the war, the fun we had creating cave paintings on the cellar walls in Mayo, and then panicking to whitewash them again whenever Daddy sent a telegram to say he was arriving home on leave. We’d even need to drag Hazel indoors off her pony to help us make Glanmire look respectable again. Our little secret.’
Eva couldn’t resist reaching up to brush his unruly hair back into place.
‘We never had secrets,’ she said softly, being rewarded by Francis stooping to lightly kiss her forehead.
‘Do you know how rare and lucky that makes me?’
Their relaxed intimacy was broken by a car horn beeping on the street.
‘Lucky in love,’ Eva teased.
‘Lucky and late. Colville can be impatient. Since he got his new Aston Martin he loves showing it off. We’re taking Max for a spin to Howth. Three may be a crowd, but it’s damn good camouflage. Now open the door before Colville takes out his hunting bugle too.’
Eva opened the heavy oak door to wave down at Colville, a twenty-six-year-old Westmeath man leisurely finishing off his degree at Trinity with the somnolence of an affluent diner dawdling over an opened bottle of vintage port. Since the age of fifteen Francis had been honest with Eva about his sexuality – an open secret among his small coterie of Trinity friends. Colville was becoming Francis’s entrée into the circles Freddie would love to see his son mix within, regularly taking Francis to dine in the Kildare Street Gentleman’s Club – Dublin’s last bastion of Protestant Ascendency privilege. But it would be impossible for Francis to be open with Freddie about his relationship with Colville, who now had Francis squirrelled away in a discreet love nest flat on Fitzwilliam Square, used by his family – whose fortune came from distilling – for occasional trips to Dublin. Freddie only knew what Freddie wanted to know. He deliberately avoided inquiring into their son’s life, although he sometimes made a point of speaking approvingly about how, after the Allies liberated the concentration camps in 1945, they re-interned all homosexual prisoners found there.
Francis’s friend, Max – a shy young American painter also studying in Trinity – waved at Eva from the back seat as Colville beeped the horn of his open-topped car again, more from playfulness than impatience. Francis pointedly ignored him, lifting Eva up to swing her around on the front step as he kissed her goodbye. He put her down and laughed as Eva playfully pushed him away, even though her protective instincts longed to draw him back inside where he would be truly safe.
‘Run down or Colville will be mad at me for delaying you.’
‘Colville mad at you?’ Francis smiled. ‘He’s mad about you. All my friends are – Alan and Max especially, although Max is mad for everything Irish. He’s dying to find someone who wants to attend a play in the Gate Theatre. You should go: you always say you’ve no one to visit the theatre with.’
Eva laughed. ‘I’m old enough to be his mother.’
Francis squeezed her waist. ‘My friends say you’re more like a sister to me. Or maybe they’d prefer if you were my sister, because Hazel puts the fear of God into half of them. I’m unlikely to get introduced to Colville’s mother, but I gather she can be a right dragon: snobbish in that insecure way new money always feels it needs to be. Colville says I’m lucky to have you as a mother.’
‘Being lucky is good.’ Eva couldn’t resist kissing him one last time before he raced down the steps. ‘Being careful is even better.’
She wasn’t sure if he heard her as he leaped into the passenger seat without opening the door. Colville said something in mock reproach and both young men laughed, although Eva was relieved to see no display of over-affection, nothing to set them apart from any college pals on a jaunt to show an American around Dublin. Neighbours would not be suspicious. Indeed the appearance of such a car lent her house an air of prosperity that she plainly did not possess. Freddie needed to scrimp to pay Francis’s college fees, which to his credit he did. He remained baffled by Hazel’s anger at discovering that no savings existed to also allow her to attend college. Freddie had told Hazel that no woman with her looks or breeding needed to waste time setting foot in Trinity to find a suitor, while Hazel had called her father a dinosaur. Eva and Francis both left the room during this row, knowing that – as Freddie and Hazel could be mirror image Fitzgeralds to their core – both were incapable of backing down in any argument.
Colville beeped his horn one last time as he sped away: Francis waving back, the epitome of happiness. Eva loved seeing Francis at his most radiant like this. Yet she knew that his happiness was as fragile as the bubbles Hazel used to blow from a jam-jar as a child: luminous, wondrous and always only a microsecond away from bursting in mid-air. Even with discretion, two young men could not indefinitely live as lovers in Dublin without eventually letting the mask slip, even just once. One indiscretion was all it might take to attract hostility, ostracism, blackmail or physical assault.
But Eva could not worry about such dangers now because, as she closed over the door, she reminded herself of her new motto to always be prepared. She had other responsibilities: her art class starting in half an hour’s time being one of them. Once again she checked the jam-jars of paint in the large south-facing front room she used as a children’s art studio. There was white, vermilion red (which Mother always called cinnabar), orange, chestnut brown, crimson, lemon yellow, turquoise blue, purple, black and leaf green. Her oldest brother, Art, had urged her to mix only two jars of each colour so that the children would unconsciously learn the revolutionary collective principle of co-operation by needing to share the jars. Eva placed lids on the table for older pupils to mix their colours on: the previous dabs of brown, blue, white and yellow in them having congealed into a soft grey. When she began two years ago Art had built her a dozen miniature easels, refusing the money Eva tried to pay him and insisting instead on billing her at the official union rate of a jobbing carpenter. The easels were sturdy, although after she told one parent they were constructed by her brother, Art Goold, Eva was amused to see the woman furtively sprinkle holy water on an easel before letting her child use it. The incident taught her to be cautious about how much she told her new neighbours about her family’s tangled past. To hold communist beliefs in this city was akin to being seen as the Anti-Christ and Art’s frequent arrests were making his name notorious.
As the door knocker rapped now and she opened her front door, Eva sensed that it would also be prudent to say very little to the senior civil servant who stood on her top step with his twelve-year-old daughter. Donna from Rathmines was among her most eager pupils. Eva always let her arrive early to help out before each class, knowing the child craved a sense of responsibility.
‘Hello, Mrs Fitzgerald,’ Donna said brightly. ‘Can I light the fire?’
Eva smiled and handed her a box of Maguire and Patterson matches, watching the girl run into the front room to kneel down and light the tightly coiled sheets of old newspaper beneath the kindling and stacked turf in t
he fireplace. Eva liked to have a fire blazing when the other children arrived. Donna’s father followed his daughter into the studio, proceeding with self-assured circumspection while studiously ignoring the children’s paintings on every wall. Normally Donna’s mother brought her but her father seemed eager to reassure himself that nothing disreputable was occurring beneath this roof. He watched the flames spread in the fireplace and nodded approvingly, as if needing to pronounce judgement.
‘I’m glad to see you have one symbol of my national culture here, a turf fire.’
‘I always think that no child who stares into its flames will get stuck for inspiration.’
Donna’s father pondered this last word, scrutinising it for any trace of subversion.
‘It’s hard to get good turf,’ he pronounced. ‘Those fellows selling it door to door try to swindle you on the weight. If the sack feels unusually heavy it’s because they’ve filled the bottom with wet turf. Turf needs to be dried out.’
‘I know. My father’s cousin carried sacks of it up long flights of tenement stairs.’
The civil servant turned to study her, mildly amused. ‘Your father’s cousin was a coalman?’
‘She was a countess: Countess Markievicz. In her final years she regularly drove to Wicklow to fill her car with turf and logs, delivering it as a gift to freezing families. My father always claimed it wasn’t the spells in jail that destroyed his cousin’s health, it was those bitterly cold flights of tenement stairs.’
Donna’s father’s expression became guarded. Dublin’s poor had loved the Countess for turning her back on a life of privilege to fight for them, but her revolutionary activities earned less respect here in Rathgar among her middle-class neighbours, especially among those who voted for the Treaty. Eva rarely mentioned this family connection, but had felt slighted by the veiled insult in his comment about the turf fire: his implication that someone like Eva could not regard herself as truly Irish.
‘My wife tells me that Jack Shanahan’s son attends your classes,’ Donna’s father said. His tone was cautious, his words left hanging as if they carried an inference that Eva should be able to decode.
Eva lowered her voice, watching Donna use the tongs to rearrange sods in the grate.
‘Do you know Mr Shanahan? I don’t like to ask him directly but I hear his wife’s cancer is bad. She’s five weeks in hospital. I’m not sure how much his son knows, but you can sense the terror buried inside the boy.’
The man digested this information as if it were news to him. He shook his head. Eva mistook this for an expression of sympathy, then realised the gesture implied that she had misunderstood the import of his remark. He chose his words with even greater care. ‘I don’t know the gentleman personally, but my father was once interned in Frongoch with his father. I’m not criticising the choices other families made later on: I’d just prefer if Donna and Jack Shanahan’s son don’t get too close. To avoid any awkwardness, inappropriate birthday party invitations or suchlike.’
Eva couldn’t prevent herself smiling. ‘Donna is a very grown-up twelve-year-old girl and John Shanahan is an immature eight-year-old boy. I can’t imagine anything inappropriate occurring…’
Eva stopped, realising from his askance glance how she had misinterpreted his remarks and the purpose of his visit. The silence with which he greeted the Countess’s name could only mean that Donna’s family took the Free State side during the Irish Civil War. She now realised that the Shanahan family must have supported de Valera. For the last three decades the families who took opposite sides in the Civil War had devised ways to avoid having to socialise, but because nobody had previously taught this type of child art in Dublin, Eva’s house was unaffiliated territory. Eva sensed how Donna’s father would be happier speaking to Freddie or Hazel because he would know exactly which social class he was dealing with. Eva’s déclassé state discommoded him.
‘Oh, I understand now,’ she said.
The man sighed, visibly relieved. ‘Then you’ll understand that it’s nothing personal. I’ve never spoken to Jack Shanahan but I’m dreadfully sorry to hear about his wife.’ He glanced towards the fireplace, anxious to change the subject. ‘Donna’s doing a great job with that turf.’
‘It’s good turf,’ Eva said, ‘I’m from Donegal so I know. I can give you the name of the man who supplies me if you like.’
Donna’s father buttoned up his black coat. ‘That’s hardly necessary: we only burn Newcastle coal in my house.’ He hesitated, then added awkwardly, feeling the necessity to make a conciliatory remark. ‘I don’t know what you do in these classes but you’re bringing Donna out of herself. She can make her own way home.’
Donna seemed too absorbed in the fire to notice him leave, but she was conscious of some unspoken undercurrent in the conversation because when Eva closed the front door she turned to find the girl holding a box of charcoal sticks in the studio doorway.
‘Can I still come here?’ Donna asked anxiously.
‘Of course.’ Eva smiled. ‘Now would you like a task?’
‘Yes, please.’
Eva set Donna to work slicing up lengths of cheap wallpaper. Boys loved to draw complex sets of train tracks on these long strips, inventing hazardous viaducts for engines to cross. Eva began to cut up strips of white butcher’s wrapping paper, which was cheaper than the paper sold in art shops that Eva could not afford. During her first year of running the studio she was so poor that she had sometimes enlisted her great friend and kindred spirit, Esther O’Mahony, to help secretly raid local dustbins at night for old copies of The Irish Times. The two friends would sit up, chatting and laughing as they whitewashed each sheet of newsprint to give her pupils a flimsy white canvas to paint on. Her finances were now less precarious and Esther rarely needed to join her in moonlight bin raids but Eva still constantly needed part-time jobs to keep this studio afloat.
Eva didn’t care how menial such jobs were if they helped her fulfil her dream of being a teacher. She had been equally poor in the early war years, when Freddie could only send a little money back to her and the children in Mayo, until his promotion changed everything. Yet even amid her poverty she had still been viewed in Mayo as part of the gentry: afforded the automatic respect which so infuriated her brother Art. In contrast Art spent the war years frequently imprisoned for agitating for revolution in the Dublin slums, organising rent strikes in new working-class estates in Cabra and Crumlin, and refusing to accept his inheritance as the eldest son after their father died. People in Mayo and Donegal always made allowances for Eva’s ethereal nature. In Frankfort Avenue she fitted into no social caste: her new neighbours unsure what to make of her. But Eva knew what she wanted to make of her life. Freddie’s disdain had helped kill any dream of becoming an artist, but – inspired by the joy she remembered from painting as a child – Eva was fulfilling a new dream in running this studio devoted exclusively to child art.
Art might wish to change the entire world, but Eva could only affect change at her own snail-like pace. Dublin echoed to the tramp of young footsteps heading for the boat to seek work in England. Those who stayed had little money or prospects: anyone in a job cowed into conformity for fear of losing it. In a society where creativity was considered deviant and self-expression frowned upon, she wanted to offer a sanctuary where children’s imaginations were allowed unchecked freedom. When starting her studio two years ago she used a sunless back room, because Freddie – on an awkward visit from his Wicklow boarding prep school – maintained that it would be a disgrace to see her front room destroyed by paint.
Despite having left him to gain her independence, Eva had followed his advice back then when her self-confidence was low. In fact she might never have found the courage to persevere with her plans if Freddie had not brought with him a visitor that evening: an impeccably dressed, stern-looking poet who taught at the same prep school. Eva was unsure if Monk Gibbon’s abrupt manner stemmed from arrogance or extreme shyness. Dublin people were wary of Gibbo
n’s tongue. He said little during their visit as she babbled on about her plans, scrutinising her so piercingly that Eva wondered if Freddie had brought him along to make her realise how ridiculous her dream seemed. But as he was leaving, Gibbon surprised Eva with the gift of a book, Child Art and Franz Cižek, by Dr Whilhelm Viola, an art teacher who once studied under Professor Cižek when allowed to work in Cižek’s famous children’s studio in Vienna.
Since then this book became her bible, a beacon of encouragement when her initial hand-written notices attracted only two students. She loved Cižek notion that children drew what they thought and not what they saw, that naturalistic expression was unnatural in a child and any teacher with a rebel in their class was blessed. She savoured the story of the Austrian girl who, after painting a purple elephant, logically explained to Herr Cižek that grey was too dreary a colour for such an exotic animal. But what inspired her most was Monk Gibbon’s inscription on the flyleaf: ‘To Mrs Fitzgerald, from a fellow teacher.’ Eva still recalled her shock at seeing the words ‘fellow teacher’ in his copperplate handwriting. Gibbon’s inscription lent her confidence to grasp that this was who she might become: an evoker, drawing forth children’s latent radiance. She had reached an age when many women felt marooned and obsolete: their designated task of child raising done. But maybe her true life was only starting. For years she had reined in her dreams to do the right thing for others. Now each art class seemed like a tiny declaration of independence, an assertion of her right to be herself.
An Ark of Light Page 4
