The bright youthful clothes she wore were part of this same quiet assertion, although they caused further gossip on this street where many women dressed as if already in premature mourning or imprisoned by the need to look respectable. Hazel urged her to charge higher fees to stop slipping deeper into genteel poverty. But her art class was not about money. While most parents were well off, others who travelled from outside Rathgar found it hard to afford even the meagre amount Eva felt forced to charge. Eva provided smocks, but encouraged parents to send children along in their oldest clothes. Most mothers felt too inhibited to do so: passing on these inhibitions to their children. It worried Eva if any child was constantly tidy. Each pupil was allotted their own wall space in the studio or in the hallway. This perpetually changing exhibition space ran down the back stairs and around her kitchen walls, leaving her house ablaze with colour. Donna had now finished cutting up the wallpaper. Eva watched her stand at her easel, savouring a sense of importance at having the studio to herself. It was impossibly cruel to imagine this girl burdened by being on one side of a civil war, which had ended but never gone away, with eight-year-old John Shanahan forced to grow up on the opposing side.
‘What will I draw today?’ Donna asked, catching Eva watching her.
This was a trap Eva knew to avoid. Suggesting themes inhibited a child’s ingenuity when all they needed was a blank canvas and the unlimited possibilities of their imaginations.
‘I’m sure your ideas are more interesting than mine.’
The child grimaced. ‘What if I have no ideas?’
‘We all have ideas.’
‘Was what I painted last week any good?’
Donna’s work stood out amongst the other children’s vibrant free-flowing paintings. Her propensity was to paint isolated objects in a subdued way, terrified of risking a mistake or straying from reality.
‘It was what you see in life. But what do you see in dreams?’
Donna laughed nervously. ‘You can’t paint dreams. They would be like … I don’t know … modern art.’
‘And do you like modern art?’
‘My father says nobody can understand it.’
‘Why do you need to understand it?’
Donna smiled. ‘You’re silly sometimes, Mrs Fitzgerald. Not like a proper teacher.’
The girl blushed at her sudden impertinence, but Eva only laughed.
‘I wish I had a penny for every time I’ve been called silly. Draw whatever you like.’
‘Maybe I will try and paint a dream.’ Donna scrutinised the blank sheet on her easel with perplexed anticipation.
Eva slipped away so as not to disturb her, venturing upstairs to see Hazel. Two canvases belonging to Camille, her latest art student lodger, were placed on the landing to dry in the sunlight. Eva paused to admire the richly subtle colours in the landscapes that merged abstract with realism: the lodger’s signature, Souter, was barely visible unless you knew where to seek it. Camille had worked as a nurse in London before attending art school, gaining an experience of life which Eva had lacked in her youth when failing to cope as a student in the Slade School of Art. Eva loved her late-night talks with Camille, and Francis enjoyed her presence on his visits home: he loved the company of girls, and girls loved how he was utterly relaxed in female company, sharing their sense of fun. She walked past the paintings and entered Hazel’s bedroom.
Hazel sat reading on her bed, her blonde hair recently towel-dried. Her feet were bare, the room filled with cigarette smoke. The music of Glenn Miller came from a Bakelite wireless set. For the last year Hazel had been living in at a Meath stables, having met the owners during a Horse Show Week hunt ball where Captain Barry’s London victory on Ballyneety in the George V Gold Cup was still being raucous celebrated. Her wages were low, but Hazel would not feel fulfilled by earning more as a receptionist in some dreary solicitor’s office. Eva suspected that her numerous male admirers in the strata where Hazel mixed would find it slightly vulgar if she earned too much. Hazel’s wages made her job seem more like a hobby, which afforded her the entrée to jump at horse shows and attend hunt balls.
While Hazel still resented how Freddie had made no financial provision for her to attend Trinity, everything about working at the Meath stables suited her: exercising horses at dawn, patiently coaxing them through dressage deportment, rubbing them down with a serenity which only came to the fore when she was in close proximity with animals. The owners spoke about her having the seat of a young Iris Kellett, but Eva could not imagine her daughter possessing the steadfast dedication to master any single discipline. Hazel was only staying in Frankfurt Avenue tonight because she intended driving a borrowed car in tomorrow’s Irish Motor Racing Club’s annual Phoenix Park run. Last year the Evening Mail photographed her at the wheel of a Chevrolet-engined Lola, under the caption, ‘Ireland’s speeding blonde bombshell.’ Eva loved hearing about Hazel’s exploits at championship trials, but her daughter greeted Eva’s talk about the cruelty of fox hunting with the same look that Freddie used to convey affectionate exasperation with his bride early in their marriage. She threw up her eyes now when Eva suggested that she lower the wireless.
‘What will jazz do?’ Hazel teased. ‘Poison their little souls?’
‘I love jazz,’ Eva said, ‘but my classes are about expression, not impression. If the children want to hear music they can make it themselves.’
‘Let those brats loose with drums and tin whistles like the last time I stayed here and I assure you I’ll play Glenn Miller at full volume,’ Hazel warned. ‘If you taught them to draw a straight line you might have more chance of producing artists.’
‘I don’t want to produce artists.’
Hazel shook her hair, amused. ‘What do you want to produce, Mummy?’
A memory returned from Eva’s childhood in Dunkineely. Her youngest brother, Brendan, then aged only twelve, defining character during a chaotic family dinner: ‘Character is what you are, it’s what you do every day.’ She felt the familiar stab of pain whenever she thought about Brendan, even though thirteen years had passed since her brother’s disappearance shattered whatever harmony had remained within her family. Eva might never uncover her brother’s fate, but knew that if Brendan had grown disillusioned with Stalin’s intentions in Spain, he would have possibly signed his own death warrant by voicing his honest objections, because it was in his character to do so.
‘I want to produce character,’ Eva replied.
Hazel sprang off the bed to lower the wireless, displaying the restless energy that was so much a part of her nature. ‘Mummy, you sound positively Victorian,’ she laughed. I wish Francis was still here to hear you. What on earth is character?’
‘You possess it.’
‘In what way?’
‘By never agreeing with anything I say. Or with anyone else for that matter. I worry for you.’
‘That I’ll get myself into trouble with some Not-Safe-in-Taxies Trinity student?’
‘I don’t worry about you losing your virginity; I worry in case you lose your character.’
Hazel looked so hurt and unexpectedly vulnerable that Eva immediately regretted the remark.
‘Like you’ve lost your character,’ her daughter retorted.
‘How have I lost mine?’
‘Think about it, Mummy. What was it that awful stuck-up R. C. on Garville Road called you when you answered his ad for someone to walk his dogs while he went on holidays? ‘A funny little creature.’ That’s how people here see you: A church-mouse, living hand to mouth. You call yourself a teacher, but you earn more from child-minding, dog walking and checking on empty houses when folks go away.’
‘You’re confusing status and character,’ Eva replied. ‘You are born into the former, but born with the later. Art retains his character despite choosing to live as a labourer. Likewise, I’ve shed my class and religion. I couldn’t do it when you and Francis were small. But now you’re both finding your way in life and I can do the same
.’
‘So what exact social class are you now, Mummy?’ Hazel asked.
‘None. I’m simply myself.’
Hazel’s tone was infused with world-weary sophistication, as if explaining home truths to an infuriatingly silly younger sister. ‘You may wish to think that, but you’ll always be the daughter of a Protestant barrister who was too rich to practice law, except for representing a few Dunkineely corner boys arrested for being drunk and disorderly. Uncle Art calls his slum neighbours ‘comrades’, but I doubt if many call him ‘comrade’ in return. To them he’s a dangerous eccentric smelling of money, even if he gave away your family’s fortune. Getting your name in the newspapers for being fined for trying to sell The Daily Worker on O’Connell Street doesn’t enrol you into the working class. The policemen who keep having to arrest him only do so for his own protection, to save him being torn asunder by hostile, actual working-class mobs who have no interest in buying any communist newspaper unless it has Jane Russell in an underwire bra on the cover. Uncle Art may hang on his cross as a self-appointed martyr, but one cannot trade one’s class like a cigarette card. A screwball like Art fools nobody – especially the poor – by trying to blend into a tenement.’
Art is no screwball. He simply believes in his principles.’
‘Even though his principles tore your family apart? Even if the families on the Donegal land he inherited need to keep paying rent into a bank account that Art refuses to touch to pay for basic improvements to their living conditions?’
‘Art never asked those tenants for a penny since Father died,’ Eva argued, weary of having to defend her brother. ‘He would prefer them to stop paying rent and run their tiny farms in tandem, like a collective.’
Eva heard a knock at the front door.
‘Grant me patience,’ her daughter said. ‘Uncle Art’s tenants are not collective farmers in Ukraine, happily singing revolutionary songs while starving to death. And if they were Ukrainian, they’d secretly want what Art’s tenants want: to be let buy their farms or at least have their landlord acknowledge they are still paying rent to give them some security of tenure.’
‘Art will hardly evict them when he doesn’t even consider himself their landlord.’
Hazel regarded her quizzically. ‘And do you think they know that? Country people have reason to fear evictions. Your grandfather tried to protect the Goold-Verschoyle wealth by creating a trust fund bequeathing those lands only to the eldest son of the eldest son. I wish I’d been born an eldest son. Instead I’m meant to flutter my eyelids at any attractive young man with a few thousand shares in British Petroleum. Art is the eldest son and heir, whether he likes it or not. Therefore what else is he, if he is not their landlord?’
The knock was repeated more loudly.
‘Art has told those tenants that he refuses to recognise the acquisition of wealth by inheritance.’
‘So why not enter a solicitor’s office and sign over the land to his tenants?’
Eva sighed, caught as ever between Hazel’s logic and loyalty to her brother.
‘Don’t you think I’ve begged him to a hundred times? He claims it’s a matter of principle. He can only legally sign over the land if he accepts that he’s the legal owner. But it’s against his principles to recognise any system of primogeniture inheritance.’
Hazel snorted. ‘So, the people Art claims to champion suffer for his principles while he passes himself off as a Dublin labourer? If Art wants to blend in with the poor, the first thing he needs to lose is conscientious objections. They are a petit bourgeois luxury the poor can’t afford. But Art never thinks things through. The Soviets kidnap and probably murder his brother, yet Art still acts like Stalin’s lapdog.’
Eva heard the knock at the front door a third time. ‘Art says he knows nothing about Brendan’s fate.’
Hazel walked to the window, watching another mother bring her child up the path. ‘Despite living in Moscow when Brendan disappeared? I saw Art’s picture in the newspaper the last time he was arrested for preaching revolution. His eyes had the haunted look of a man doing penance, even if he can’t bring himself to recognise it. Notice how guarded he gets when Brendan is mentioned? I mean, why did the Soviets revoke his visa to live in Moscow, despite him having a wife and child there?’
‘He says the NKVD told him he could better serve the revolution by returning to Ireland to re-energise the struggle here.’
‘That’s his way of saying they kicked him out like an old sheepdog. Still, he was lucky. When most foreign zealots in Moscow get visited by the NKVD it ends with a kangaroo court and a bullet to the head.’
Eva sighed, growing increasingly agitated from this feeling of being perpetually torn in two, trapped here upstairs inside her old life when she was needed downstairs in her new one. ‘Criticise him all you like, but he’s still my brother. The reason I didn’t revert back to my maiden name after leaving your father is so that people wouldn’t associate you with Art. To your friends in Meath you’re just one of the Mayo Fitzgeralds.’
Hazel laughed. ‘For God’s sake, Mummy. Don’t you know how small Ireland is? They keep two stud books at the stables – one for horses and Burke’s Irish Peerage and Landed Gentry to trace the rest of us back for three generations. Besides I’m not ashamed of Uncle Art. I’m fond of the old fanatic.’
‘And I am not ashamed of being poor,’ Eva replied. ‘I’ve never envied anyone their wealth or looked down on anyone’s poverty.’
The knock came a fourth time, loud and impatient. Eva was relieved to hear Donna open the front door. For the next two hours, she owed it to her pupils to have nothing on her mind except inspiring their imaginations. Eva had hoped that her relationship with Hazel would become easier after her daughter left home, but an edge remained to their conversations that neither seemed able to avoid. They would never have had this conversation if Francis were here. He had a knack of injecting light-heartedness into any situation.
‘Funny little creatures can hardly afford to?’ Hazel lit another cigarette and turned off the wireless.
‘I must go downstairs.’ Eva was unable to disguise her hurt when turning to leave.
Hazel touched her arm apologetically and held out the lit cigarette. ‘I’m sorry, Mummy. You know I fly off the handle. Have a ciggie: a peace offering.’
Eva allowed herself to indulge in the rare treat of a cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘That’s in your character,’ she said. ‘You speak your mind no matter what. Never lose that trait.’
‘Men don’t like that trait. It scares them, especially in Ireland where women aren’t meant to have opinions. Maybe you should have given me the odd going-over with a stick as a child: it might have made me less opinionated. But you were never great for discipline.’
‘I could never have struck you.’
‘Or struck Francis, you mean.’
The jibe was light-hearted but pointed. As a child, Hazel was tough enough to survive any ‘going-over’, but one slap from Eva would have destroyed Francis, who could never cope with unkindness.
‘I love you both equally,’ Eva replied, although the truth was that she loved them both intensely, but differently.
‘I know you try to.’ Hazel smiled, as if pardoning her mother as she combed her hair one last time. ‘Look after Francis for us both. I don’t trust Colville. Was it him I heard earlier, tooting the horn on his latest toy?’
‘An Aston Martin,’ Eva said. ‘Very impressive.’
‘It would be if he didn’t drive like an old lady.’
‘I like him,’ Eva said.
‘Do you trust him?’
Eva couldn’t answer. It would mean addressing the fear in her heart.
Hazel nodded, understanding her silence. ‘Colville’s not the worst, but he’s such a wet provincial. I saw him acting outrageously at a dinner dance last week, so desperate to prove his manhood that he pawed every girl he danced with.’
‘Was Francis there?’
Hazel no
dded. ‘My brother has blossomed into quite the social butterfly. Francis was the exact opposite of Colville, relaxed in his chair surrounded by the most beautiful, unattached girls. I have the big brother every girl in Dublin wants, although they want him as more than a big brother. Valerie had her head resting on his shoulder. They were sharing private jokes like lovebirds, every girl giving her dagger eyes, thinking the best matches aren’t made in heaven but in Trinity.’ She paused. ‘There is nothing going on between them, is there?’
Eva shook her head, noticing the barbed reference to Trinity. Eva had first met Esther O’Mahony among the meagre attendance at a meeting of the Dublin Vegetarian Society. When she introduced Hazel to Esther’s niece, Valerie, an initial coldness developed after Hazel discovered that Valerie was able to attend Trinity. But it was not in Hazel’s character to hold resentment, and the two young women were now close friends.
‘If any girl could turn Francis, it would be Valerie,’ Eva said. ‘But they’re just soulmates. They’re too close to have secrets, but Valerie is discreet. I hope Colville is. He didn’t do anything at the dinner dance to…?’ Eva was too anxious to finish the sentence.
Hazel lowered the hairbrush and shook her long hair loose. ‘Rest assured, Mummy, Colville did nothing to indicate he even knew Francis. Only a few people know and that’s how to keep it. Now, your hallway sounds as crowded as a lifeboat from the Titanic. Run down and enjoy your brats spilling paint.’
Leaving the bedroom, Eva hurried down into the hallway where some mothers whom Donna had let in were being shown around the display of paintings by their excited children. Sunlight streamed in through the open doorway. The youngest child whispered to Eva, ‘Can I have a hideaway?’
‘Of course, Evelyn.’
The girl smiled shyly. ‘I want nobody else to see what I paint. But you can.’
Eva left the front door open as more parents climbed the steep steps: mostly mothers lingering to chat to one another. But when she turned around Eva saw that Mr Shanahan had arrived and was studying his son’s most recent pictures – violent images in dark colours stabbed onto the paper. Mr Shanahan looked drained and gaunt. For a moment Eva wished that Donna’s father could see the anguish of this man whose son he did want his daughter to consort with, but then she was relieved that the two men’s paths hadn’t crossed. Civil War bitterness was too deep. Eva had never grasped all of Sigmund Freud’s ideas, but she understood enough to comprehend what he called the narcissism of small differences. Behind their rhetoric, so little divided these two men in outlook that they could never be reconciled. They needed to cling to perceived differences or lose their identities. All she could do was create a free space for their children. John Shanahan strained at his father’s hand, anxious to join the others.
An Ark of Light Page 5
