‘He’ll wake soon,’ the nurse assured her. ‘Not even the effects of morphine last forever. It’s a bit early for visiting, but you’re welcome to stay. You’re the first visitor Mr Fitzgerald has ever received. Are you a relation?’
‘I’m his wife.’
The nurse looked puzzled. ‘Mr Fitzgerald gave a cousin in Mayo as his next of kin.’
‘I’m Freddie’s wife.’ These grey walls were sapping Eva’s will. She hated hospitals and never attended doctors, preferring to treat herself with homeopathic remedies.
‘I don’t mean to doubt you.’ The nurse looked embarrassed. ‘Why don’t you return in half an hour? He’ll be awake by then.’
But Eva didn’t leave. She was glad of a chance to sit by Freddie’s bedside without having to argue or explain. Freddie was in serious pain after the amputation. His rambling voice occasionally called out in unconscious delirium. There were other patients in the ward, but the nurse draw the screens for privacy. Eva held Freddie’s hand and whispered ‘It’s Eva’; reluctant to wake him, yet trying to make him sense he was no longer alone. He seemed to respond because he muttered her name, but gradually she realised that, in this morphine-induced limbo, he was addressing a different Eva: the young woman with whom he once fell in love. Most of his words were unintelligible, but occasionally Eva found herself listening to snatches of conversations that might have occurred thirty years ago. Maybe these were the emotions he was never able to articulate. His voice alternated between whispers and shouts of pain that caused the nurse to check him.
Feeling she was in the way as the nurse adjusted the drips, Eva walked out into the corridor. One window had a view of the seafront. To keep her promise of attending Francis’s party tonight she would need to get the late afternoon ferry across the Spithead. Her son – who had no idea his father was dying – wanted her in London and her husband needed her here. She had that familiar sense of being torn in two. Eva heard the nurse’s footsteps approach.
‘Mrs Fitzgerald?’
Eva turned. ‘Yes?’
‘Your husband is awake. I’ve made him as comfortable as I can.’
The nurse stayed at the window, allowing Eva to enter the ward alone. The screens remained drawn around the bed. Freddie had got the nurse to prop him up, although any movement surely caused him pain. She suspected that he had refused more morphine so as to be alert. There was no greeting, just a whispered question.
‘How did you find me?’
‘Your relations in Turlough Park.’
He sighed. ‘I never took them for traitors.’
He had lost so much weight, he looked tiny in the bed. Wrapped in blankets he reminded her of one of the wounded birds who must have desperately tried to hide in the reeds after Freddie shot them, knowing there was no escape as they heard his gun-dog sniff them out.
‘They felt I should know,’ Eva said. ‘I’m still your wife.’
‘Don’t think you can butter me up by coming here dressed in rags.’
‘I didn’t come to butter you up and I like my clothes. They’re comfortable.’
‘You came because they must have told you that I’ve revised my will.’
‘I know nothing about any will. I came because they said you are sick.’
‘I’m not sick, I’m dying.’ Freddie closed his eyes and breathed deeply as a wave of pain overcame him. Opening his eyes, he stared at her. ‘You’ve been written out of my will for years. But now I’ve written out your son too. I’ve disinherited him.’
‘Francis is also your son.’
‘Hazel is ten times the man Francis ever was.’
‘And Francis’s soul is ten times deeper than Hazel’s or yours or mine.’
‘Soul?’ Freddie almost spat the word. ‘I’ve never seen a man’s soul so I’ve no proof we possess them. But I know what I saw with my own eyes last Halloween.’ Freddie’s voice was low, fearful that other patients might overhear. ‘Step out of the ether, Eva. See what you’ve raised, with your crack-pot ideas and mollycoddling. Francis is no Fitzgerald. When a Mayo mob put a noose around George Robert Fitzgerald’s neck, he leapt to his death and showed that we’re no sissies. Mayo people still remember him for that.’
‘People remember a crazed brute who chained his father into a cave with a bear,’ Eva chided. ‘Is that the son you want?’
But Eva knew that it wasn’t. Freddie had never needed Francis to be a genius or a statesman. He simply wanted a replica of himself: someone who understood the best cover for shooting woodcock and the measure of a good whiskey. She recalled Freddie buying Francis a gun for the boy’s ninth birthday, helping to wedge it into his shoulder: one of the rare occasions when Freddie didn’t seem awkward about having physical contact with his son. Francis’s first lucky shot had killed a rabbit on the avenue, causing Freddie to rush off and boast about his son’s prowess while Eva held the boy in her arms, letting him cry for the dead creature as they lay in Glanmire Wood like hunted creatures themselves.
‘I have no son,’ Freddie announced quietly.
‘Don’t say that.’ His words hurt more than if Freddie had slapped her, more than the humiliation of him telling the hospital he had no wife.
‘I’ve left Glanmire to my cousin’s young son in Turlough Park. The boy is only thirteen, but they can hold it for him until he comes of age and he can add my land to Turlough Park when he succeeds to that in turn. The IRA failed to burn us out and Free State governments failed to wipe us out with their rates and inheritance taxes. I’ll not betray my ancestors by letting Fitzgerald land pass to a degenerate. You’ve heard it from the horse’s mouth, so now go away and let me die with whatever dignity I can muster in this place.’
‘You could leave Francis one thing,’ Eva said quietly. ‘Your love.’
‘Love?’ Freddie looked so baffled that all anger drained from him. He gasped in sudden agony and closed his eyes. ‘Forgive me, you shouldn’t have to see this … phantom pain is sneaky, it catches you off guard. It’s the queerest thing how part of you can be gone but its ghost won’t go away. All my life this leg gave me grief: jeers of boys at school, even other army officers who saw my limp and felt cocksure I wasn’t up to it. I showed them by being harder than them all, never letting anyone see my pain. So why does my leg hurt ten times worse since they amputated the damnable thing? Every blasted nerve end ambushing me. I’m shot through with morphine when I could really use a stiff whiskey, Eva.’
She noted how, almost accidentally, he uttered her name, perhaps without being aware of it. There was a time when Freddie had a way of saying her name that was tender and affectionate.
Freddie opened his eyes to observe her. ‘You’ve disappeared into the ether.’
‘I’m here, Freddie. It’s you who needs ether or laudanum.’
He grimaced. ‘You might think this is the worst pain a man could endure, but you’d be wrong. All my life I’ve known physical pain. It’s with me so constantly that you might call it my only true wife.’
‘Don’t say that, Freddie.’
‘For the past year I’ve known there was something wrong that no doctor could fix. I have my flaws and don’t deny them. My tutor in college once said that I had all the attributes to be a great mathematician – logic, mental exactitude. He said the one quality I lacked was imagination. I never understood why mathematicians needed imagination. Figures should just add up or condense to their square root: everything in its logical place, making sense. But great mathematicians see figures that aren’t there; complex theorems that may never be proven; leaps in the dark that no club-footed student like me could make. Isn’t it funny, Eva? This damnable foot even hobbled my imagination.’
‘It was never your foot, Freddie. Who knows what you might have become if it wasn’t for your weakness for drink.’
He shook his head. ‘That’s what everyone thought – poor drunk-as-a-skunk Freddie, in debt to every Mayo publican who hadn’t barred him.’
‘You were a prisoner to drink,
Freddie. It’s not your fault.’
‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘Drink didn’t rule me; it set my imagination free without being burdened by logic. Some nights I ended up in low shebeens in Mayo, drinking in solitary confinement surrounded by ruffians who greeted me by respectfully touching their caps, but whose eyes warned me they’d never forgotten the evictions we Fitzgeralds carried out in bad times. You might think that drinking in such dens was as low as I could sink, but some nights when a space cleared around me at the counter and I’d take out a pencil and paper, under the pretext of adding up the game I’d bagged on the bogs that day, my mind felt free to solve the most abstract Algebraic equations.’ Freddie looked up with pain in his eyes. ‘Why couldn’t the boy have at least been good at maths? If he hadn’t the guts to grasp a rifle, was it too much to ask that he could grasp an equation? It would have given us something in common.’
‘You have your love of Glanmire in common,’ Eva said. ‘Your son is intelligent: a qualified horticulturist.’
Freddie snorted. ‘Can you really call that a profession?’
‘He runs a successful garden-design business.’
‘Garden design isn’t a business.’ Freddie shook his head weakly. ‘It’s a way to meet bored housewives when their hubbies are at work, though God knows the unfortunate hussies picked the wrong man with him.’
‘You’ve never been fair to him. Mathematics isn’t everything. In school he was brilliant at French.’
‘But poor at Latin.’
‘What’s wrong with French?’
‘Latin is the root of all language. French is just…’ Freddie gasped slightly.
‘Just what?’ she asked.
He shook his head, struggling to speak. Eva saw how severe his pain was, but knew he would continue, fuelled by the dogged determination with which he faced every obstacle. He had lost his father at fifteen. Eva often longed to go back in time and place her arms around him when he must have sat alone in the kitchen of Glanmire House as a distraught boy, shoulders hunched in grief. Did Freddie possess a different personality before that childhood bereavement? After the loss of his father did he lock himself into this hard shell where nothing could touch him?
‘French is a dalliance,’ he said weakly. ‘A coquettish trick they teach daughters in Swiss finishing schools to help them ensnare the right husband.’
Despite the grim surroundings, Eva laughed. ‘Listen to yourself. You hadn’t the money to send Hazel to Trinity, yet alone a Swiss finishing school.’
He shrugged. ‘Hazel never needed continental airs or jiggery-pokery. I saw her leap ditches grown men baulked at, back when she was so young I needed to argue with the Master of the Galway Blazers before he’d let her ride with them. She used to be the talk of Dublin during Horse Show week – more men watching her jump than watched the Aga Khan’s Nations Cup. No girl needs a Trinity degree to flag down a husband if she drives racing cars at daredevil speed. My only fear was that she’d have too much pluck for those anaemic young doctors and solicitors in Dublin rugby clubs. She was wise to bag an outdoor type with a Kenyan plantation. The police take no nonsense in Kenya. They deal with the Mau-Mau like the British should have dealt with the IRA.’
‘You can’t say such things, Freddie. An atrocity is an atrocity, whoever commits it.’
‘Any atrocities in Kenya were against white farmers. Police reprisals were simply an eye for an eye. You always had too much time for the New Testament.’
Eva thought of Freddie’s fury if he knew about the copies of Peace News in her bag. ‘The New Testament is about love and forgiveness. Are they such terrible notions?’
‘Were the IRA preaching love and forgiveness when they burnt the roof over Lord Mayo in 1923 or forced George Moore to watch his house and library burn to the ground, twenty miles from us in Mayo? That’s another reason to leave Glanmire to a true Fitzgerald. We need to consolidate our land to stop us being driven from our rightful place.’
‘You didn’t change your will for that reason,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s the last weapon you have to hurt your son.’
‘What son?’ Freddie summoned up such fierceness that Eva feared for him. ‘What son disgraces his father? I have no son and if you think you can soft-soap me into changing my will, then get the hell away and let me die in peace.’
‘I didn’t come to make you change your will,’ she said. ‘Let’s have no more talk about it.’
‘Then why have you come?’ Genuine bewilderment replaced his angry tone. ‘Do you not think it’s hard enough to die here without having an audience?’
‘There’s no good way to die,’ Eva replied gently.
‘There’s a gentlemanly way.’
‘What’s that?’
‘What I planned last Halloween. A shotgun can go off if a hunter is careless when cleaning it. There may be whispers of suicide, but nothing proven. If the Freemasons have a word in the right ear, life assurance companies generally cough up.’
Eva risked touching his hand. The skin felt like parchment, blue veins protruding. ‘Would you have really done that, without telling any of us?’
‘If a gentleman planned such a thing, do you think he would implicate anyone by burdening them with his secret?’ He looked at her hand on his wrist and then at her face. ‘You’ve aged.’
‘I’m fifty-seven, Freddie.’
‘But part of you is still young, whereas I’m an old man suddenly. The first time I saw you, you reminded me of an elfin creature. You still have that quality of not quite belonging to this world.’
His voice was more matter-of-fact than affectionate.
‘I’d have found it heartbreaking if word reached me of you lying dead for months before somebody stumbled across your body in the basement of Glanmire House,’ she said. ‘You’d have only had the ghost of the butler who hanged himself for company. Glanmire is lonesome in winter.’
Freddie stared at her. ‘I wouldn’t have minded the lonesomeness. All my life I’ve dealt with lonesomeness. Last autumn I could barely walk, but I knew I only had two choices. To end it all with a shotgun in Mayo or end up dying in a godforsaken hospital like this. Maybe I’d have never pulled the trigger, sitting alone in Glanmire, but I wanted to give myself the choice. And more than anything, just one last time I wanted to feel the winter rain and wind in Mayo. I was in no fit state to travel but I said nothing to the headmaster of the penny-farthing school I was reduced to teaching in – just that I’d be gone for the mid-term break. The sea crossing was rough but I could always hold my drink, no matter how high the swell. I didn’t care about the pain; I just wanted to see Glanmire one last time. Dublin could go to hell: I only dallied there long enough for one whiskey in the bar of Kingsbridge Station for old time’s sake.’
He paused. Eva saw how chapped his lips were. She wanted to pour him water from the carafe on his locker, but sensed that it was wiser not to interrupt or give him cause to ask why she hadn’t enough sense to smuggle in a half bottle of whiskey in her handbag.
‘I’ve always loved that train journey across the length of Ireland: the lights of Athlone marking where you cross the Shannon into Connacht. Then the lights of every sleepy town bringing you closer to Mayo. Roscommon and Castlerea, Ballyhaunis and Claremorris and the halt at Manulla Junction for anyone changing for Foxford. I always get impatient at that isolated junction because the next stop is Castlebar. Sixty years I’ve been doing the journey, yet it still makes me feel like a boy. Last Halloween I cadged a lift from a motorist heading out through the dark from Castlebar to Turlough Village. Such a fuss the Durcan sisters made when I popped in my head into the Round Tower Bar for a drink and to purchase a bottle of Skylark whiskey. They insisted on me having a drink on the house, summoning old Mr Durcan from his fire in the parlour to shake my hand.
‘I’d barely made my excuses to escape out the door before a customer ran out from Bridie’s tiny grocery shop across the road. That Kate Dowling woman: the sister of our maid, Maureen, with w
hom you got far too friendly during the War. “You’re so welcome home, Mr Fitzgerald,” she gushed. I couldn’t shut her up, rabbiting on about how well Maureen is doing since she hightailed it off to America in search of a man. But I didn’t mind her delaying me because the woman made me feel … I don’t mind using the word … respected. She understood the worth of the Fitzgerald name, unlike the dullards in the Devon school where I struggled along until the pain in my leg got so severe this January that I couldn’t dress myself, let along beat trigonometry into yokel numbskulls. I’m not saying there was any badness in the teachers there, where the headmaster knew when to turn a blind eye to a man with the honest shakes on a Monday morning. But they had no spark or sense of breeding. So, to be honest, even though the wind and rain howled around me in Turlough, it did my soul good to see the respect in the villagers’ eyes.’
Eva wondered if Kate Dowling knew that Francis was already staying in Glanmire House that night. The Durcan sisters always doted on Francis. It would be unlike him not to call into their pub and pop his head into Bridie’s shop, even after travelling all day from London for the privacy of a romantic weekend away, afforded by the seclusion of Glanmire House. Francis probably introduced Jonathan to the Durcan sisters, who would have been awed by his patrician air, with Jonathan charmed by their Tilly lamps and local expressions, like all rich British visitors were. Francis would have mentioned Jonathan’s interest in early nineteenth-century architecture, claiming that he was advising Francis on how to make parts of Glanmire House habitable again. Jonathan would have jested in the pub that, no matter how damp the house was, he had known worse billets when serving with the Army Medical Corps on the Mediterranean front during the war. Their age difference would have thrown Bridie and the Durcan sisters off the scent, although Eva doubted if women like Bridie ever guessed at Francis’s secret or knew that such relationships even existed between men.
An Ark of Light Page 14
