An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  In fairness it was not Freddie who had contacted her with this news. He would have no wish to drag Eva away from her new life; indeed possibly no wish to ever see her again. So why was she about to join a queue of passengers for the Isle of Wight ferry? Out of duty? No. Eva freed herself from such shackles, even if freedom came at a high price. Freddie never understood her needs, which would make today’s confrontation even harder. She was here because compassion was ingrained in her character – a trait which once attracted Freddie but he would now regard as weakness. Her instinct to feel other creatures’ pain was one of what Freddie once mockingly called her imbecilic deficiencies. But Eva had earned the right not to care if she looked foolish, if this was how pragmatic people wished to see her. She had given up any safety net of domestic unhappiness to let her soul float free, at an age when men rarely bothered to glance at her. Indeed most people paid her so little heed that she felt invisible. Yet she felt a curious affinity among young people, even if some of them seemed unsure what to make of her. Among her own generation she often sensed an air of reproach, but in recent months she rarely cared what anyone thought of her. This new life she was creating in London – after selling her typewriter in Tangiers last autumn to pay for her passage home – was exhilarating. She felt immersed in the whirlwind of a world on the cusp of change. The 1960s were only four months old, but Eva sensed this decade would be different. Her role within this change would be infinitesimal, but at least she might have a chance to feel that she lived amid kindred souls.

  She had never expected to regard London as home. But Francis lived there and her son rooted her to this earth. Eva would walk through fire for him. Therefore when she received his distraught letter last Halloween, her sole thought was to move to London to be near him. His natural radiance was absent in that letter and – reading between its lines – Eva had sensed he was close to a nervous breakdown after his traumatic encounter in Glanmire House. The start of a new decade seemed an apt time to start afresh and put another dream behind her, after three years of travelling through Spain and Tangiers, harbouring the fantasy of becoming a writer.

  With her typewriter sold, all that remained of her aspirations was an envelope of rejection slips and receipts from the anonymous agent who had extracted eleven guineas from her from posting her manuscript about child art to random publishers. Sidgwick and Jackson had actually offered to publish the book if Eva dropped her financially prohibitive stipulation that it contain a colour section of the paintings referred to in the text. While Eva treasured their offer as a validation of the fact that she could write, her book would have felt hollow without the vibrant energy of those paintings and she was now reconciled to the fact that she would never become a published author.

  She accepted this with the same stoicism as she had recognised, soon after arriving at the Slade School of Art, that her ability to express herself in exquisite line drawings was too ill-defined to survive as a commercially competent artist. What purpose she was put on this earth for still remained hidden to her conscious mind. If she had applied herself more methodically at the Slade School, her father might never have reluctantly agreed to her ill-matched marriage, although even now Eva clung to a hope that, at some stage of their courtship, Freddie possessed genuine feelings towards her and not just towards her dowry, which he had seen as the salvation of Glanmire House.

  Eva hadn’t dwelt on such questions for years, but last week’s letter had brought her unresolved marriage back into focus. She had been too busy trying to make up for lost years of unhappiness. Her new life in London was financially difficult, but she felt a deep sense of wellbeing at being close to Francis and his dynamic new friends, although she worried about their closeted world in where danger could lurk everywhere. It thrilled her to see Francis recover from the horror of what happened the previous Halloween in Mayo. Once again he seemed held aloft inside a luminous, fragile bubble of happiness. His happiness connected her to a pulsating city. Young people were responsible for London’s charged atmosphere. When Eva spent two hours last night selling the CND magazine Peace News outside Hyde Park, every copy she sold had been to someone young. Even passing gangs of Teddy Boys had winked at her, with Eva feeling no apprehension in their presence.

  Why had she grown so passionate about the anti-nuclear cause? Certainly the planet was threatened, with de Gaulle exploding an atomic device, despite protests from America who wanted to keep such toys only for itself. Previously Eva had distrusted righteous public zeal, feeling that mass movements to improve humanity were like machines trying to sweep seaweed off a beach. No matter how hard they worked, the incoming tide invariably washed up more misery. But now she needed to believe that change could occur if enough individuals stood up to such evil men as the Mississippi police officers who shot ten black men on a segregated beach last month. As a token of this belief she kept a framed newspaper picture above her bed, showing Chief Luthuli of the banned ANC launching a passbook-burning campaign in a South African black township.

  Gazing around now at the queue for the Isle of Wight ferry, Eva remembered the unsold copies of Peace News in her bag. Selecting an unoccupied pillar outside the terminal, she arranged copies at her feet and stood, patiently holding one aloft – glad to do something practical to take her mind off her confrontation with Freddie when the ferry docked in Ryde. Her practice was not to call out but let people approach if they wished. For ten minutes passers-by ignored her. Then a young African woman stopped to buy a copy, looking dynamic in a satin frock with a white nylon jacket, gold earrings, black gloves and a hat topped with a scarlet feather. Eva had barely finished talking to her when a peanut seller pushed his barrow up to where Eva stood and coarsely ordered her off his patch.

  ‘Move along, wog-lover. Nobody wants that communist rubbish, you daft old bitch.’

  The man dropped the barrow handles at Eva’s feet in a territorial gesture. Shaken by his aggression, Eva joined the queue of passengers. It gave her a taste of the hostility Art had encountered in the early 1950s when he kept defiantly trying to sell the Daily Worker on Dublin’s O’Connell Street. The ferry was so crowded when she boarded that she needed to stay on deck. Through a window she saw the mother and boy from the train seated in an inside lounge. Treasure Island was open again on his knee. Something about the boy’s absorption was painful to watch, reminding her of Francis’s vulnerability at that age. Eva found a space on a wooden bench on the exposed upper deck and a girl in her early twenties leaned across to touch her knee.

  ‘The barrow-man shouldn’t have addressed you like that,’ she said. ‘Joey was going to go have words with him, weren’t you, Joey? But then the queue started moving.’

  Her companion nodded, although he looked so slight that the peanut seller would have blown him away with one breath. The couple had a haversack and a rolled up tent. Their aura of love dispelled the miasma left by the barrow-man.

  ‘It was nothing.’ Eva smiled. ‘I’m fine now.’

  ‘What were you selling?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Peace News.’

  ‘Joey will buy one, won’t you, Joey?’

  Joey looked less certain but carefully counted out coins to pay for the copy which the girl insisted that Eva take from her bag.

  ‘Were you on the Aldermaston march?’ she asked, oblivious to a look of disapproval from the middle-aged man nearby. ‘My sister walked all the way and said it was fab.’

  ‘That’s because she met her new boyfriend there,’ Joey interjected.

  The girl pulled a face. ‘Don’t mind Joey. He can take nothing serious. She loved taunting the Yankee soldiers guarding the base. I bet you were there.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Eva confessed. ‘I was travelling at that time.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Morocco. Tangiers, Marrakesh.’

  ‘What were you doing?’ The girl almost bubbled with excitement.

  Eva paused. She no longer told people of her attempts to become a writer. ‘Just living my life.
Gathering rosebuds is what my son called it.’

  The girl laughed. ‘I bet you’re a beatnik and write poems. My name’s Jade. Are you staying in Ryde? It’s a dump but our friends say one café makes great cappuccinos. We’re meeting them for coffee. Will you join us?’ She spied Eva’s hesitation. ‘Joey will pay, our treat. Isn’t that right, Joey?’

  The young man nodded uneasily. With vivid clarity Eva could envisage him fifteen years from now, relieved to have entered the sanctuary of middle age when new ideas could be put away in favour of gardening. Jade might believe she could ignite Joey’s potential, but if they ever married, Joey’s growing waistline and cynicism would gradually extinguish Jade’s sparkle unless she found enough courage to break free.

  ‘You’re kind,’ Eva said. ‘But I have to visit somebody and then I have these copies of Peace News to sell.’

  ‘We’ll help,’ the girl persisted. ‘Our friends would love to meet you. You dress so … well let’s just say you don’t dress like my mother. And they play music in this café.’

  ‘I doubt if the lady likes skiffle, Jade.’ Joey’s affectionate exasperation was a carbon copy of Freddie’s early in their marriage.

  ‘I do,’ Eva replied, partly to let Jade win the argument. In London she might have enjoyed going with them to one of the small Soho cafés where Francis took her. Eva loved the huge rubber plants and cane chairs there and the noise of Gaggia machines dispensing frothy coffee while young people listened to the jukebox or guitarists sang Lonnie Donegan numbers, accompanied by friends providing rhythm on washboards. Francis preferred new-style British jazz and collected Acker Bilk EPs, although his special friend – as he liked to euphemistically refer to Jonathan – favoured old-style jazz and sometimes brought them to Humphrey Lyttleton’s jazz club in Oxford Street. The innocence of skiffle appealed to Eva but she declined the girl’s offer.

  ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be staying in Ryde. It could be hours or weeks.’

  Jade smiled. ‘You sound like a nomad.’

  Her father had used this word to describe the tinkers who camped each year behind the house in Dunkineely: the cook allowing them access to running water and the gardener told to turn a blind eye to any vegetables that disappeared from the garden, provided they stole no more than they needed. But such nomadic tinkers possessed a purpose, mending agricultural implements or making tin cans. What role had a separated, middle-aged woman?

  ‘When do you return to London?’ Eva asked.

  ‘Tomorrow or even tonight if our friends don’t turn up,’ Joey said. ‘It’s too early in the year to camp but Jade has a daft wish to sleep out in a tent if we can find a remote beach.’

  Jade poked him playfully. ‘Are you saying you have the courage to knock at a boarding house and ask a landlady for a room?’

  He shrugged, uncomfortably. ‘It’s not my fault if you wouldn’t wear the wedding ring Sylvia offered to loan you.’

  ‘I shouldn’t need a fake ring,’ Jade said hotly. ‘This isn’t the Middle Ages.’

  ‘No,’ Joey agreed glumly. ‘But it is the Isle of Wight.’

  ‘If you return to London tonight my son is hosting a barge party on the Thames,’ Eva said. ‘Francis’s parties are always exciting. You’d love them. I’ll write down the address just in case.’

  Taking out a slip of paper Eva wrote down directions to the wharf where the hired barge was berthed. Joey suspiciously scrutinised the address when she handed it to him.

  ‘But we don’t know your son.’

  ‘No, but Francis loves to meet new friends.’

  ‘Hopefully we’ll find a beach to camp on, but if we return to London this evening we’ll definitely go,’ Jade promised.

  But Eva doubted if Jade would be able to overcome Joey’s reluctance. Whatever Jade saw as an adventure, Joey would consider a threat. Eva suspected that he only felt secure when having Jade exclusively to himself. He would be happier if Eva moved away from them. Therefore she rose, complaining of feeling stiff if she sat for too long and walked towards the ferry’s prow to watch Ryde come into view.

  Eva had no idea how Francis found money for his twice yearly barge parties, inviting everyone he knew, rich or poor, to attend. He happily lived on bread and margarine for weeks in advance so that he could be an unstinting host. This afternoon he would start to cut up the full salmon kept in his bath for the past two days because it was too big for his fridge. By seven o’clock the salmon would be laid out with canapés and hors d’oeuvres on the barge, and borrowed wineglasses arrayed, with so many bottles waiting to be opened that Francis would be penniless for months. By eight p.m. conservative members of the Irish Genealogical Society – of which Francis was the London secretary – would be unwittingly mixing with homosexual cliques. There would be members of the Irish Club in Eton Square, fellow horticulturists and random strangers whom Francis invited, mingling together while ‘All I Have to Do is Dream’ played on a record player and coloured bulbs lent the barge a magical quality in the dark. On such nights it always seemed to Eva that this rented barge resembled an ark built by Francis to shelter everyone he loved. She had taken the morning train to Portsmouth to allow herself time to get to London and be part of tonight’s magic if she wished. But Eva suspected that she might not be returning to London for some time, with Francis hurt and puzzled by her non-appearance, especially if she could not explain her absence to him.

  Francis hurt easily. This was why she had felt so nervous when – before a dinner party eighteen months ago – Francis had confessed to having met someone truly special: a Welsh orthopaedic surgeon named Jonathan with his own practice in Harley Street. Eva had felt caught up in her son’s excitement but also scared for him, begging him to be careful not to get hurt again. Francis had laughed off her concern, asking why Jonathan would possibly hurt him. Waving aside her mentions of previous romances, Francis had declared that love and hurt went together in a cocktail of risk.

  Eva turned around on the deck to observe Jade and Joey lost in conversation. She doubted if Jade would care about Francis’s sexuality, beyond the fascination girls often felt, but she knew that Joey would feel affronted and irrationally threatened by it. Jade sensed her gaze and waved. Eva waved back but kept her distance. If Jade were alone Eva would enjoy meeting her friends for coffee but she needed to be extra careful with her money now. Her poverty was more awkward in England than in Spain, because many of Francis’s new friends – who were essentially Jonathan’s friends – seemed as rich as Jonathan himself.

  Francis urged her to teach child art again, but her attic flat was tiny and besides, when Eva closed any chapter in her life, she never wished to return to it. She survived because she ate little and was good at finding odd jobs. Two summers ago she worked as a hotel chambermaid on the island of Sark. The previous summer was spent in Tangiers, working as a child-minder for a rich English couple while using the British Council Library there to study the ancient Moroccan philosopher Sidi Ahmed abu al-Abbas al-Khazraji as-Sabti, whose simplicity she responded to. Eva needed to keep her poverty secret from Francis’s wealthy friends or it would mar their relationship. They might try to loan her money or suspect her of wanting to borrow some. Worse of all, they would pity her. Men like Jonathan had no concept of how she juggled pennies because only big sums registered with them. Francis would gladly share every shilling he possessed with her. This was why she needed to engage in the subterfuge of keeping two pound notes in her purse which she could produce whenever her son pressed her for reassurance that was she not penniless. Occasionally if she felt that Francis was growing suspicious of seeing these same pound notes, she would exchange them for four ten-shillings notes, but she was careful never to dip into this float, even if sometimes it was virtually all the money she possessed. She would find it impossible to stay in London if she became a financial drain on Francis, who needed to juggle so many other worries to keep his garden-design business afloat. Eva could only be honest about money with her poorer friends.
She loved to share her food with them or let them share with her, for the joy that people who understand hunger feel when helping each other. There was no charity or condescension in gestures between equals.

  Eva dismounted the gangplank when the ferry docked. She would not mention the copies of Peace News in her bag to Freddie. She would say nothing to upset him, although her presence alone would do that. It was not easy to travel here, knowing she would receive no welcome. But she was still Freddie’s wife and he had no other visitors. His soul belonged on a Mayo bog, not in an Isle of Wight hospital. She wondered if the Freemasons had got him this bed or if some ex-army chums from the British Legion pulled strings. She had not heard from Freddie since he lost his job in Wicklow. But she knew from Hazel that last year that he had secured a post as a maths teacher in a remote Devon school. Freddie remained on tolerable terms with Hazel. In contrast, he and Francis had spent years carefully avoiding each other, maintaining the semblance of a relationship by exchanging curt cards at Christmas. This uneasy truce had held until, unbeknownst to each other, both decided to spend last Halloween in Glanmire House.

  Only last week, when reading the letter from Mayo, had Eva realised how much agony Freddie must have been enduring when he limped up the dark avenue to their crumbling house. But he had told nobody about his cancer, refusing to yield to pain or self-pity until he collapsed in that Devon school three months ago. By then – according to the letter – Freddie’s cancer was so advanced that doctors could do little beyond amputating his leg to buy him more time.

  Eva walked for fifteen minutes before she reached a small, nondescript hospital with neglected Victorian stonework down a Ryde side street. How typical of Freddie to choose to die in such a remote place without telling anyone. It reminded her of how animals instinctively move away from the herd when they sense their own death approaching. Freddie’s preferred death would be to walk from a tent into the Antarctic, quietly saying ‘I may be some time.’ The Isle of Wight offered little room for such heroic gestures. The front-desk porter directed her up two flights of stairs and along a grey north-facing corridor. The ward nurse informed Eva that Freddie was mercifully asleep because they had managed to get sufficient morphine into him.