An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  Two sets of footsteps descended the stairs toward the kitchen.

  ‘I suspect Geoffrey’s family don’t need to turn up on doorsteps looking for free anything. His pals were planning to drive out to the Forty Foot Men Only bathing cove to shake off any cobwebs. If you’re used to the heat of Kenya there’s a novelty in swimming naked in the freezing Irish Sea. Still, if you have the key, I could use a Dubonnet and soda to stiffen the nerve before I get dressed and you could go mad and have a gin.’

  ‘It’s too early for Dubonnet and too early for gin.’ Francis’s voice chided them good humouredly from the kitchen doorway. He was barefoot and tousle haired, his dressing gown tied loosely over his pyjamas and his arm draped around the shoulder of Valerie O’Mahony who held aloft a proffered bottle of champagne. ‘It’s champagne or nothing to toast my sister.’ He glanced around. ‘Is the coast clear?’

  ‘He’s upstairs getting shaved,’ Hazel assured him.

  ‘It’s too early for champagne,’ Eva said.

  Francis rolled his eyes in mock reproach. ‘Mummy, this is no time to start acting your age. It’s never too early for love or champagne. Am I right, Valerie?’

  The bridesmaid laughed. ‘You’re always right. I left it out on my bedroom windowsill all night: the Rathgar version of the ice bucket. We’ll all have a ciggie to cloak the smell on our breath.’ She smiled at Hazel. ‘Well, dear heart, are you ready to have and to hold, from this day forward?’

  ‘According to God’s holy ordinance,’ Francis added. ‘To love and to cherish, in sickness and in health, in Ireland or in Kenya.’

  ‘We can’t say, “for richer, for poorer”,’ Valerie teased. ‘Not after you told me the size of Geoffrey’s plantation.’

  ‘It’s hardly Meath pasture land,’ Hazel protested. ‘It’s volcanic red dirt, perfect for coffee and only if the monsoon rains come.’

  ‘I feel a monsoon coming here.’ Francis was using his thumbs to edge the cork off the bottle. ‘If you don’t want it to shower the entire kitchen then can somebody have a mug ready?’

  ‘Wait,’ Eva protested, laughing. ‘I have proper flutes.’

  ‘Champagne waits for no one,’ Francis warned. ‘Besides any fool can drink champagne from a champagne flute. Let’s be decadent.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Hazel scooped up four earthenware mugs and reached him just after the cork popped and champagne began to spill out in fizzing bubbles. She handed around the half-filled mugs and raised hers in a toast.

  ‘To those we love,’ she pronounced.

  ‘To voyages ahead,’ Francis added. ‘And happy landings.’

  All instinctively paused to listen out in case Freddie’s footsteps were descending the stairs and then they clinked mugs and drank. Today would be a succession of speeches and elaborate toasts, but Eva knew that this was the one she would always remember, made truly special by being so simple, surrounded here in this kitchen by those she most loved.

  Hazel downed her mug in one go.

  ‘Now I’ve a dress to put on,’ she announced. ‘Make-up to do and a bridesmaid who is meant to be helping and not trying to get me drunk. The photographer will be here soon and my hair is a mess. It’s all hands on deck and do promise, Francis, to turn up in church in something more fetching than those pyjamas that make me you look like Michael Darling in Peter Pan.’

  ‘I shall look immaculate,’ he promised with a laugh. ‘We shall all be immaculate. Now I’ll race you upstairs and bring the rest of that bottle for luck. I want to get into that bathroom before you lock the door and refuse to come out.’

  The three young people ran, joking and chattering, up the stairs. The aura of their warmth, vitality and optimism still filled the kitchen. Eva knew that the two girls would burst into Francis’s bedroom during every stage of the preparations, seeking his opinion and approval. Eva wanted to help, but her main duty was to keep Freddie out of their way. She carefully washed any remaining champagne from the mugs so that the smell would not torment Freddie. Then she entered the passageway, which six months ago had been a kaleidoscopic blaze of colour. Hazel had chosen new tasteful wallpaper after Eva removed the children’s paintings that previously covered every inch of wall. The total redecoration was not just done to get the house ready for today’s wedding but because the display of paintings were too big a reminder of how Eva’s dreams of running a child art studio were over.

  As she walked up the stairs and crossed the hallway to enter the bright front room, Eva remembered how a row of small easels once stood there. Her moment of apparent triumph – the acclaim that had greeted the Brown Thomas exhibition – had sown the seed of destruction. Perhaps her naivety was equally to blame; she had failed to grasp the socially competitive nature of parents in the goldfish bowl of Rathgar and Rathmines. Eva’s classes were about allowing children to develop their individual personalities through art, and she had presumed that the parents understood this. But after the extensive newspaper coverage, the parents became obsessed with the next exhibition. Public exposure of the magic occurring within the room had tainted the process. Every parent began to have opinions on what should happen next. Children began to compete in class: some older pupils complaining that the younger ones were holding the class up to ridicule.

  Donna’s father had demanded that in future a rigorous selection process be employed before any painting by a member of his family was publically displayed again. He suggested bi-annual shows with independent judges and prizes and rosettes for winning entries. Most families who had taken his family’s side in the Civil War felt automatically obliged to take his side in this argument also. Nobody seemed to understand that Eva had never planned to hold a second exhibition; she merely wanted to introduce Dublin to Franz Cižek’s radical ideas in the hope of inspiring other art classes to spring up. Some parents were appalled at her refusal to countenance a second show, although a few mothers like Mrs Durcan, who were on the same wavelength as her, signalled their relief. But Donna’s father became an unstoppable force, determined not to be thwarted by a woman and especially by a Protestant woman. He tracked down a retired school principle with impeccable credentials: her late husband having been appointed to the Senate by W. T. Cosgrave in 1931. She was prevailed upon to start a conventional art class, training children to mimic dull pastiches of what adults expected art to look like – mainly Paul Henry style West of Ireland landscapes. No parent who voted Fianna Fáil would allow their children to join this breakaway class. Indeed most did not want their children to desert Eva’s cosy studio, but, as one parent explained, they could hardly be publically seen to be ‘bested by a Blueshirt’.

  For a few weeks their children rattled about in Eva’s half empty and now joyless studio, until a young widow – an accomplished Sunday afternoon painter with strong Republican ties – was prevailed upon to open a studio in Ranelagh. Eva appreciated how this young mother, struggling to raise two small children, found the grace to visit her one evening. Originally a typist in the Department of Education, she was forced to resign from the Civil Service after her wedding, due to the ban on married women. Two years ago her husband had drowned swimming off the Galway coast, during a visit to the Gaeltacht to improve his Irish and his job promotion prospects. The woman was embarrassed at stealing away most of Eva’s remaining pupils but she explained her inability to resist the pressure put on her to start this class. She simply couldn’t continue trying to financially survive by spending each evening churning out sentimental paintings of the Ha’penny Bridge for sympathetic neighbours to purchase when she displayed them at the local church fête. Eva had felt nothing except empathy towards this woman, who although twenty years her junior felt socially obliged to dress as if she were several decades older, and whose fingers kept nervously twisting the ends of the headscarf she removed once inside Eva’s house. Eva’s art studio might have limped on with the support of progressive mothers like Mrs Durcan, but the arguments with ambitious parents complaining that their children learnt nothing prac
tical in her classes had tainted the innocent joy of it. That night Eva not only gave the young widow her open-hearted blessing, but presented her with the twelve miniature easels Art once built, along with brushes and half used tins of paint, refusing the woman’s entreaties for Eva to accept some payment. All Eva had asked was that the new teacher never leave out more than two jars of any colour, to let the pupils experience the joy of learning how to share. Eva permitted herself a white lie in pretending that this advice came from her old tutors in the Slade School and not from Ireland’s most notorious communist.

  Despite Freddie’s strenuous objections, Hazel had posted an invitation to today’s wedding to the attic flat Art now occupied off Mountjoy Square. It was up long bare flights of stairs, where so many spindles had been smashed for firewood, that on the few occasions Eva visited him, she was afraid the handrail would collapse. Art wouldn’t attend the church or the party but Eva suspected she would glimpse him standing among the pedestrians thronging Dawson Street, so inconspicuous in his workman’s clothes that no Llewellyn would have any clue about his identity or his impassioned articles in the Irish Worker’s Voice supporting the Mau Mau Uprising against white rule in Kenya. Max also planned to be in Dorset Street, having told Francis of his intention to watch the bride’s arrival from behind the tall art nouveau stained-glass windows of the National Bible Society of Ireland bookshop across from the church.

  Her Frankfort Avenue neighbours – far friendlier after growing used to Eva – would be less discreet. It was only a matter of time before the first onlookers arrived: local women pouring into this front room to admire the wedding gifts laid out on a long deal table covered with a velvet cloth. These women would smoke and gossip and reminisce about their own weddings; declining sherry but drinking endless cups of tea from the fine bone china tea service (also borrowed from Esther O’Mahony), ready to flock out into the hallway and clap Hazel when she finally descended the stairs, clutching her posy of mixed flowers and red carnations.

  Eva needed to focus on getting dressed. She unlocked the drinks cabinet and went upstairs to her bedroom. Freddie had carefully shaved. She didn’t know if his suit was purchased or borrowed but it looked brand new; the trousers and waistcoat fitting him perfectly, the jacket lying on the bed waiting to be donned. He was putting on the same silver cufflinks he had worn on their own wedding day, cufflinks that once belonged to his father. He saw Eva glance at them.

  ‘Some things you don’t sell,’ he said, ‘even when stony broke.’

  Eva knew better than to ask why he placed such sentimental value on them. It would be easier to break out of Alcatraz or Robin Island than find a way to see into Freddie’s heart. He patted his checks with aftershave, luxuriating in the stinging sensation and humming to himself. He was in such good form that Eva judged this a good moment to produce the form she had in her drawer.

  ‘Freddie, while you’re here, you might just sign this for me.’

  He glanced at the official document that she placed on the bed.

  ‘A passport? You know you don’t need one to travel to the mainland.’

  ‘England isn’t my mainland, Freddie. Besides, it’s not where I want to go.’

  His look was quizzical. ‘Then where? The newlyweds won’t be keen on you bunking in on them, despite whatever balderdash they say out of politeness.’

  Eva heard a knock at the front door and knew that her window of opportunity was closing.

  ‘I’m not thinking of Kenya either: I don’t think I’d like it there. I don’t know where I’m going or if I’ll go anywhere. I just know that if I decide to travel I’ll need a passport and to get an Irish one I need your consent. Just sign the form, please. Let’s have no unpleasantness today.’

  He gazed at her bluntly. ‘Do you think I’d want to stop you? I’ve never stopped you doing anything, even if I never understand half the things you do.’

  Francis had gone down to open the front door. Eva heard excited laughter now as two of Hazel’s closest friends trooped upstairs to help with Hazel’s preparations. The chatter grew louder as Valerie opened Hazel’s door and welcomed them in. Freddie was scrutinising the passport application form.

  ‘Look, you haven’t even filled out the damn thing properly. You’ve left half the questions blank – age, occupation, everything.’

  ‘I found it confusing: every second sentence in Irish. I’ll fill it in properly later.’

  His glance contained a sly scepticism. Despite not really knowing Eva at heart, he knew her well enough to know when she was holding something back.

  ‘Hand me a pen. If you don’t want to tell me where you’re going, that’s fine.’

  She watched him sign his name and add M.B.E. after it. He handed it back. Eva nodded her thanks.

  ‘I don’t even know if I’ll go anywhere, Freddie. But I like the notion of being free to travel. When I was young I was too scared.’

  Freddie shrugged and donned his jacket. ‘I’ll just warn you. Foreigners aren’t like us.’

  ‘That’s what I’m hoping.’ Eva placed the form back in her drawer. A knock came on the bedroom door. Esther O’Mahony entered without waiting for a response and surveyed them both. ‘Freddie Fitzgerald, you look like a handsome devil. You also look like you are currently in the way. And needless to say Eva hasn’t even started getting dressed. I’m banishing you to the scrutiny of the dozen women waiting to be entertained downstairs. Be gone. This room is requisitioned by females only.’ Esther waited until Freddie shut the door behind him before turning to Eva ‘You’re a terror. You make a terrible mother of the bride. By now you should be fixing your hat as the icing on the cake of your outfit. I hope Freddie never strayed from the floorboards. I only inquire to know if a woman would be safe with him in a taxi.’

  ‘If she were his wife, yes.’

  Esther laughed. ‘Let’s get you looking beautiful.’

  Eva didn’t mind Esther jollying her along. It prevented her from thinking about how far away Hazel was moving and her sense that all the coordinates of her life were starting to drift apart: not violently but in that natural way in which dandelion spores allow themselves to be blown apart. After today, this house would cease to be Hazel’s home. She knew that Francis was planning to move to London as soon as he graduated and was already inundated with offers of work, from old college friends and acquaintances who had started new lives over there and were looking for someone to design their gardens. She had already witnessed his work on old Dublin houses, where a younger generation who drank in Bartley Dunne’s wanted their parents’ old formal gardens replaced by the spontaneity and colour that Francis brought. Establishing himself as a landscape gardener would be a difficult challenge but one he appeared to relish. London was waiting for Francis to conquer, whereas – once he took the boat – only silence would soon await her in the rooms downstairs, which, from what she could hear through her bedroom door, were rapidly filling up with boisterous well-wishers downstairs. Eva was glad that Hazel and Francis were setting forth on voyages that offered the prospect of happiness. It was the natural order for her to be left behind.

  Her financial position in Dublin was perilous but not yet precarious. She had good friends and causes she passionately believed in, no matter how unpopular and misunderstood those causes were. She had a book she secretly dreamed of writing. She had the anchor of a house which nobody could take from her. The nest she once tried to make for Hazel and Francis was now empty but she could easily fill it with more art student lodgers, thrilled to find a landlady who understood the importance of space and light, and who would allow them to treat their rooms as studios. Such vibrant lodgers would help to keep her young. But perhaps the moment that a house became an anchor it not only gave you security but weighed you down: becoming a terminus and not a stepping stone. She needed to seriously consider her future but not today. This was Hazel’s day. Hazel had cautioned her against causing a fuss by weeping in church, but Eva was more likely to shout aloud in joy whe
n the minister told the groom he could now kiss the bride. Maybe those earlier few sips of champagne were going to her head but Eva felt giddy with sudden excitement. Esther obviously felt this vibrancy surge through her body because she smiled, looking down as she fussed over the final touches to Eva’s hair.

  ‘How are you, dear heart?’

  ‘I’m positively glowing.’ Eva reached up to touch Esther’s hand resting on her shoulder. ‘Aren’t we lucky? Isn’t life exciting?’

  ‘It is, dear heart.’

  ‘This is going to be a great day.’

  Esther laughed. ‘For everyone except poor Freddie, determined to stoically sit through it sober. Or at least until Hazel throws her posy over her shoulder on the steps here in her going-away dress. When Geoffrey’s car turns the corner I fear for anyone caught in Freddie’s path to the drinks cabinet. Now here you are at last, shiny as a new pin. Do you think we are allowed into the bedroom of the bride-to-be to see what the young people have done to her?’

  ‘She will be radiant,’ Eva said. ‘Even in a baggy jumper, Hazel looks radiant.’

  ‘She’d better not be planning to walk downstairs wearing a baggy jumper to greet the crowd waiting to see her off, or Freddie will take to the drink early.’

  They knocked three times on Hazel’s door: voices warning them to stay out until everything was ready, and they were finally admitted. The room smelt of flowers due to the bouquets of flowers that had been arriving for days. Francis had left the guests downstairs in Freddie’s hands and come back up to join Valerie and Hazel’s other friends in this inner sanctum. All looked flushed and giddy with excitement. Only Hazel looked calm as she turned to face Eva, wearing a white organdie wedding gown with white nylon veil and a headdress of white violets and lily of the valley. She took a last puff of a cigarette, which Francis then lifted away from her lips to ensure that nothing stained her satin white gloves.