An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘I hope he isn’t a handful,’ Mr Shanahan said. ‘He is when he is at home these days.’

  ‘Run along, John,’ Eva said. ‘Play in the garden if you like.’

  They watched the boy stomp off towards the garden.

  ‘Can you get him to paint something cheerful?’ Mr Shanahan asked. ‘I’d like to bring a picture into his mother in hospital.’

  ‘I’ll try. But it’s no harm to let John get out what he’s feeling inside.’

  ‘Maybe so.’ The father sounded doubtful. ‘He clams up if I try to talk to him. Can you mind him next week? I can’t afford to take any more time off work. The new minister and I are not exactly bosom pals … our fathers took different paths.’

  Eva didn’t know which government department Mr Shanahan worked in. Could it be the same building where Donna’s father worked? Perhaps the two men regularly passed each other in the corridors, studiously avoiding eye contact.

  ‘I’ll mind John whenever you want,’ Eva promised. ‘And don’t bother coming back for him this evening. I’ll make sure he is dropped home safe.’

  The man nodded his thanks and left. The Shanahan house was on Donna’s route back to Rathmines and the girl would savour the responsibility of bringing the boy home but Eva knew better than to step across these numerous hidden fault lines. The prudent thing would be to walk the boy home herself. She entered the studio where children were attaching sheets to easels, although smaller students preferred to use the floor. Eva placed one easel in a corner to let Evelyn have her hideaway. She walked over to Donna, who had completed a realistic picture of a child peering over a wall at a ball in an adjoining garden.

  ‘I thought you were going to paint a dream?’ Eva said.

  ‘Last night I dreamt that our ball got thrown over the wall by mistake. I remember feeling so frustrated that I couldn’t ask for it back because Daddy says we’re forbidden to talk to the family next door.’

  Donna impulsively layered the picture with a layer of stone grey paint that obscured everything.

  ‘What is that?’ Eva asked.

  ‘The colour of frustration.’ Donna looked at Eva, shocked by the irrationality of her remark. ‘That makes no sense, does it?’

  ‘It does,’ Eva assured her. ‘Remember you’re painting a dream.’

  Walking around to check on her other pupils, Eva realised how at times these classes felt like a dream for her. They could be exhausting if things got out of control, but she was always caught up in the children’s excitement. Her final pupil arrived, looking around eagerly for a free easel. He was the grandson of old Mr Durcan who owned the main pub and grocery shop in Turlough village, a mile from Glanmire House. The shop was split in two: drinkers hidden away behind a wooden partition. His two daughters who ran the shop were always cautiously respectful towards Hazel but made a great fuss of Francis, who loved to spend hours at their counter gossiping with them. Eva never knew their brother well, but remembered him delivering messages up the long avenue to Glanmire House: a highly intelligent but reserved boy – the first of the Durcans to attend university. Eva remembered the excitement in Turlough when he qualified as a barrister: locals stopped using his Christian name and began calling him ‘Mr Durcan’, just like they addressed his father. On her final visit back to Mayo the Durcan sisters had hinted at talk of their brother being made a judge. Eva greeted this man’s wife now – another Mayo woman – and leaned down to address his nine-year-old son.

  ‘Hello, Paul.’

  The boy smiled. ‘Hello, Mrs Fitzgerald.’

  His smile radiated a sense of wonder, not just because he loved the freedom of these painting sessions but because he was addressing one of the mythical Fitzgeralds of Turlough. The boy spent his summers sleeping above the pub run by his aunts in Turlough village and had told Eva about how scared he once felt for his soul when tempted to step inside the small Protestant graveyard on the side road leading to Glanmire House. The Durcan family had hauled themselves up within two generations. Paul’s grandfather, old Mr Durcan, was born on the roadside in the 1890s, following his parents’ eviction from their cottage by bailiffs employed by the Fitzgerald family. This was something the Durcan sisters never mentioned during all her years of buying groceries in the shop. The Durcans’ social rise echoed the Goold-Verschoyles’ journey in reverse. She didn’t know if Paul’s father, the judge-in-waiting, would have much time for things as impractical as art, although the boy’s mother seemed very in tune with his sensitive nature. But the fact that the class was conducted by a Fitzgerald – even if only through marriage – would make it acceptable.

  ‘What will you paint today, Paul?’ Eva watched the boy stare around the studio.

  ‘A scream,’ he replied.

  ‘And how will you paint that?’

  ‘Zigzag, zigzag.’

  Both Eva and Paul’s mother laughed at his enthusiasm.

  ‘That sounds marvellous,’ Eva said, knowing it would be. From his first painting of a stick-like figure surrounded by furious dabs of colour – which he entitled Match-Man Breaking Clouds into Cotton Wool – she had rarely known a child with such a vivid imagination.

  Hazel’s jibe about Eva earning almost no money was true, yet Eva felt rich simply by being among these children. John stormed in from the garden, trying to pick a fight with a boy playing with modelling clay on the floor. Eva led John to the easel beside Paul, suggesting that he pin up a blank sheet. In reply John raised his brush and painted a long red trail across Eva’s face. The boy stepped back defiantly, expecting to be slapped for boldness. Eva wondered if he longed to commit a similar outrage at home and gain his father’s complete, if angry, attention. Eva decided to respond by laughing. Taking John’s brush from him she painted the same line across his face, imagining Freddie’s apoplectic expression if he could see his wife now.

  ‘We’re two of a kind,’ she announced. ‘Indian braves.’

  ‘You’re only a squaw,’ John replied, but his tone had mellowed.

  ‘Will you draw us a wigwam?’

  ‘Draw your own.’

  ‘I’ll make mine as black as possible,’ she said.

  ‘Then I’ll paint mine in bright colours that you’ve never even heard of.’

  ‘I dare you to,’ Eva challenged him.

  The boy shrugged, but she saw how he was intrigued by this turn of events. ‘Pin me up a sheet so, because you never do proper teaching anyway.’

  Paul lowered his brush to address the boy. ‘I can’t work if you’re going to be a cranky pants.’

  John Shanahan disdainfully examined the zigzag streak across the black background on Paul’s sheet. Eva knew that for these few moments at least he was forgetting his unspoken fears about his mother.

  ‘What’s that squiggle meant to be?’

  ‘A scream.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know a scream if it bit you.’

  ‘So what is the squiggle then?’ Paul asked and Eva realised how acutely sensitive he was to John’s pent-up emotions.

  ‘A train, silly. Look, I’ll show you.’ John snatched up Paul’s brush, dipped it in paint and drew two tracks that encased the zigzag. ‘Rushing at night through the mountains.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Paul stepped back to examine the picture. ‘Isn’t he right, Mrs Fitzgerald? Why didn’t I see that?’

  Other children stopped their work to gather around. ‘If it’s night-time,’ Donna asked shyly, standing at John Shanhan’s shoulder, ‘how can we see the tracks with no moon or stars?’

  ‘The stars are blocked by clouds,’ John said, ‘but a half moon is about to peep out. Look, and an aeroplane is passing as well.’ He began to paint, losing his gruffness as he enjoyed being the centre of attention. He added in the aeroplane and glanced back at Donna, anxious for her approval. She rewarded him with a smile. ‘You’re not good at finishing these, are you?’ he told Paul. ‘I’ll help you make another one if you like.’

  ‘All right,’ Paul agreed. ‘We’ll call it Drago
n Being Chased by a Flying Octopus.’

  ‘You do the dragon,’ John said. ‘I’ll draw the octopus.’

  The whole class became caught up in painting, exchanging ideas aloud as Eva walked around. Donna returned to her easel to add a piercingly blue eye besieged by black eyelashes in the sky above the garden where the girl yearned for her ball. ‘I don’t know why,’ she confessed, ‘but if ever I do anything wrong I get caught, so maybe this eye is God watching me.’

  ‘Or your inner voice,’ Eva suggested. ‘Your conscience.’

  The girl went quiet and Eva knew she had probed too deeply. Donna quickly painted two red high-heeled shoes in the space below the eye. ‘It’s finished now,’ she announced.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘The sort of American shoes I’d like to own one day, if my father ever let me.’

  A shout alerted Eva to a spillage. She fetched the mop as Evelyn sang to herself, painting quietly in the corner. Paul and John chatted excitedly, cramming ever more colourful objects into their picture. Eva hoped that the hospital would allow John’s mother to hang it over her bed. She approached Evelyn’s corner, asking permission to enter the hideout and examine the girl’s painting of a cluster of small figures gathered around a huge woman who loomed over them.

  ‘Is that me?’ Eva asked.

  ‘Don’t be silly, that’s a real teacher with a stick. This is you.’ Evelyn drew in someone standing among the small figures. ‘You’re just like a child yourself. That’s what my mammy always says.’

  Other voices kept demanding her attention, wanting to mix colours or play in the garden now that their paintings were finished. One toddler found a drum and marched into the hall, banging it and singing at the top of his voice. He stopped and stepped back, disconcerted by the look he received from Hazel who was descending the stairs. Hazel peered in at the mayhem and laughed, picking her way through the children to kiss Eva.

  ‘Goodbye, Mummy. You look absolutely ridiculous with that streak of paint on your face.’ Hazel smiled affectionately as she hurried towards the front door, anxious to embrace her burgeoning life. ‘Then again, that’s exactly in your character, so I suppose you look exactly like yourself.’

  Chapter Three

  Making an Exhibition

  Dublin, September 1951

  If Eva didn’t hurry she would be late for the theatre. All day she had been rushing, first into town to check the gallery space, then out to a small printer in Drumcondra to collect the catalogues and now back into the city to eat here in one of the few cafés where she wasn’t considered a crackpot for ordering vegetarian food. But even here the waitress who had just served her a plate of overcooked vegetables did so with a glance that conveyed either sympathy or condescension, as if anyone ordering a meal without meat surely only did so out of poverty. The Dublin Vegetarian Society had recently proclaimed that its membership was doubled, putting a positive spin on the fact that – apart from Eva and Esther O’Mahony – it still only possessed twenty-two other registered members. But at least this evening’s meal was palatable, although Eva would need to eat quickly if she was to meet Francis’s friend Max outside the Gate Theatre before the curtain went up.

  These past six months felt like one headlong rush, until three weeks ago when duty engulfed her again, anchoring Eva back into an orbit of concern for her son. But this morning Francis rose from his bed in Frankfort Avenue of his own accord, which meant he had at least slept – perhaps fretfully and probably not all night – but long enough to gain some respite. Certainly he was sleeping peaceful on the three occasions last night when Eva had opened his door to sit by his bed, watching over Francis like when he was a boy, resisting the compulsion to stroke his hair lest she wake him. He needed rest to recover from the trauma of lying awake, night after night, face to the wall to try and prevent Eva glimpsing his tears. But Francis was beginning to recover because the human heart miraculously always recovers. The heart is not propelled by pure economics, though Art would undoubtedly describe what happened to Francis as another example of how Marx correctly preached that human activity is essentially governed by economic greed. Or, to put it more traditionally, that money always marries money, even when an actual marriage, or any public display of affection, is out of the question.

  This summer it had finally felt as if Eva could get on with her own life, until three weeks ago when she received a distraught dawn phone call from Francis, a plea for help in removing his possessions from Colville’s Fitzwilliam Square love nest. Colville had abruptly given him an order to be gone by noon. Everything Francis owned had fitted into one suitcase and two cardboard boxes, easily shunted back to Frankfort Avenue by taxi.

  But that taxi journey had marked the end of this brief summer of respite where Eva had allowed herself to stop worrying about her son, so lulled by his joy at living with this slightly older lover that she had become conscious of a weight lifting: a burden of responsibility lodged deep in her subconscious ever since Francis first confided in her about being homosexual.

  Thankfully, Freddie had never discovered Francis’s relationship with Colville, though he would have dismissed Colville’s family as social upstarts compared to the mighty – if mightily impoverished – Fitzgeralds. But a great family name only got you so far, even in affairs of the heart. Eva had always sensed that it would only be a matter of time before Colville dumped her son for a more socially appropriate ‘special friend’ who was as wealthy as himself. She felt so close to Francis that she experienced any anguish he endured just as keenly as he did. The past three weeks had been a nightmare, sitting up to console him and trying to create a space where he could feel safe. Yet, even amidst her pain, one part of her was relieved that this liaison was over with its constant dangers of exposé, arrest for gross indecency and certain expulsion from Trinity College.

  She had offered to cancel the exhibition of work by sixty of her students that was due to open tomorrow night. But Francis was insisting that it go ahead, like he was insisting on her continuing to teach her classes and to go to the theatre with Max. Her decision to attend tonight’s play was made easier by the fact that this morning Francis announced he would not be sleeping at home tonight. This suggested the possibility of a new man in his life. While Eva worried for his safety, she was relieved to see him strike out once more for happiness. She recalled her mother’s words as Eva left her childhood bedroom on her wedding morning: ‘No matter what hand life deals you, promise me that you will strive tooth and nail for the right to be happy.’

  It was Esther O’Malley who first suggested staging an exhibition in the basement gallery of Brown Thomas department store. They had been attending a debut exhibition there by Robert Ryan and Tony O’Malley, two young Munster and Leinster Bank officials, when Esther pointed out the store’s owner, Senator McGuire, who often made his gallery available to new artists. Because the Senator was in conversation with Victor Bewley – whom Eva knew from Quaker meetings – she found the courage to approach him and the Senator immediately offered his gallery for free. For the past two months her excitement was matched only by that of her pupils. Eva noticed a subtle change in how neighbours addressed her after The Irish Times – Rathgar’s bible and barometer – ran an article about how Dr Whilhelm Viola of the Royal Drawing Society, whose book on child art was her bible, had agreed to travel from London to launch what would be Dublin’s first exhibition of child art, brushing aside any question of a fee in his reply to Eva’s timid letter of invitation.

  The reporter, smelling of peppermints and self-importance when he visited her studio, wrote a condescending piece about how children in Rathgar were as good or – as he phrased it – as bad at art as Jackson Pollock. But he missed the point. For a start Pollock was a great artist whom the reporter was too prejudiced to appreciate. But child art was not meant to imitate adult art. It was a journey of blossoming. Eva was not attempting to produce artists, but rounded individuals with creative imaginations. She wanted to prevent what Wordsw
orth called the ‘shades of the prison house’ from closing off their minds, to set them free by giving them a belief that everything was possible. The Irish Times reported that Dr Viola would speak about how child art aimed to develop free and independent personalities: a statement which – as Donna’s mother wryly informed Eva – would certainly ensure that the Department of Education boycotted the event.

  Eva didn’t care who attended, she simply wanted to celebrate the oasis of creativity she was trying to create. But now even this exhibition felt in danger of being overshadowed by Francis’s breakup. Hazel’s romantic life was equally complex and often as volatile as her daughter’s own character. But in so much as Hazel let Eva see into her world, it was Hazel who generally dumped suiters for being what she would call insufferably wet. On the one occasion when Hazel had been jilted, her friends were able to flock around and fuss over her, to Hazel’s growing irritation, as Eva recalled. But with homosexual love affairs there could be no public sympathy lest it attracted comment. You grieved alone, keeping your pain below the radar. So far Max, Alan and Valerie O’Mahony were the only Trinity friends to visit Francis since the breakup.