Reaching a small park near the seafront, Eva sat on a bench. She could no more return to London tonight than she had been able to stop herself, as a young mother in Mayo, entering the cold larder at night to sit in silence beside the plucked carcasses of the wild birds left there to hang. Her presence in that larder made no different to those dead creatures, but Eva had still needed to be with them to bear witness. Likewise she would remain by Freddie’s bedside until his final suffering ended. This evening she would send Francis a telegram that would cause her son bewilderment by announcing that she needed to leave London for a while. Eva would keep Freddie’s secret and remain with him, no matter how hard an ordeal it was for them both, because she could not change who she was and could only live her life on her own terms. She was coming to realise that she possessed no special talent beyond a sense of empathy so engrained as to be both a burden and a benediction.
She looked across and saw the schoolboy from the train on the next bench, still engrossed in Treasure Island. His mother smiled curtly at Eva – anxious to be friendly but not over-familiar. Eva leaned forward to address him.
‘Do you like Robert Louis Stevenson?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘My son loved Treasure Island as a boy.’
‘Are you visiting on holidays?’ the boy’s mother asked.
‘My husband is dying in hospital here.’
‘I’m most dreadfully sorry.’
Eva sensed the woman’s attitude change. The context of grief made it acceptable to talk to boys in parks. And Eva’s grief was intense, despite them not having lived as man and wife for years. Remembering the shoebox that Freddie had asked her to take away, she discreetly opened it. It contained his army records, his teaching notes, his MBE medal, an itemised list of his expenditure in the months leading up his hospitalisation and a notebook from the 1930s in which he recorded his daily ‘bag’ of birds killed on shooting expeditions. Underneath this were four five-pound banknotes neatly folded together with a paper clip. Perhaps this was what he wished to give her, money to help find lodgings. Then Eva noticed a tattered envelope at the bottom of the shoebox. Inside it she discovered a small picture of herself, taken in the year Hazel was born. Freddie had obviously asked the photographer to print it in an oval shape that bled away into whiteness. The words on the back of the picture were undated, but his handwriting was unmistakable: ‘My treasure is in here safe forever.’
These words – and their proof that he had once loved her – affected Eva so deeply that she left the park, keeping her head lowered in case anyone noticed her tears. She felt weary as if she had let her life slip by without truly understanding it. She walked quietly along the seafront for ten minutes until she heard her name being called. Turning, Eva saw Jade, the girl from the ferry, run towards her. Joey followed more slowly. Now that Jade could not see his expression, Eva noticed his look of disapproval, as if no middle-aged woman had a right to dress like she did.
Jade was laughing, unaware of Joey’s expression. The girl held out a small bunch of wildflowers. Her excitement was so palpable that it brought back Eva’s earliest memory of being a toddler, intoxicated by the scent of daisies she had just plucked as she ran unsteady towards her nurse’s lap, holding out the daisies to show her. Jade could not disguise her similar pleasure at being able to present the flowers to Eva.
‘They’re nothing special,’ she explained, ‘but I saw them growing on a beach when we were still thinking about pitching a tent. I picked them, hoping we might meet you again.’
‘Did you find somewhere to camp?’ Eva asked.
Jade shook her head. ‘Our friends never showed up and Joey changed his mind.’ She lowered her voice. ‘He gets grumpy: I think he’s scared of new experiences. We’re taking the last train back to London.’
‘Go to my son’s barge party,’ Eva said. ‘You’ll enjoy it. Just tell Francis I’ve been delayed but that I sent you.’
Joey had almost reached them. Jade’s voice went even quieter.
‘I’ll never persuade Joey.’
Eva’s voice was equally quiet. ‘Then go yourself. Be yourself.’
Joey was upon them; his tone possessive. ‘We’ll miss this ferry,’ he told Jade and turned to Eva. ‘We decided Ryde wasn’t for us. It’s more for folk your age. Still it was nice to meet you, Mrs…?’
‘Fitzgerald,’ Eva replied. ‘But please, call me Eva.’
‘Lovely to meet you, Mrs Fitzgerald. Have a nice stay here.’
Eva knew that his copy of Peace News was already in some bin. He placed his arm around Jade’s waist in a firm embrace. Jade looked embarrassed but also cowed, like a flower that had faded after being plucked and placed in a jar with no water.
‘I hope you find the berth,’ Eva said to her quietly.
Jade nodded before being steered into the ruck of passengers heading towards the ferry terminal. Eva watched the young couple being swallowed up. It was getting late. Soon she would need to start knocking on boarding-house doors to find a cheap room simple enough for her needs. Eva walked along by the Victorian railings that separated the wooden pier from the sea. Taking one wildflower from the small bouquet, she tossed it out onto the waves for her husband soon to depart this earth. My treasure is in here safe forever. She tossed a second flower onto the water as a prayer that her son might not get hurt in his relationship with Jonathan and a third as a prayer for Hazel in her new life in Africa, parts of which she suspected Hazel of shielding her from. She cast out another flower as a prayer that Joey, or any other man, would never extinguish the inner radiance which she glimpsed within Jade. Then she let another flower float aimlessly down onto the waves to represent how she seemed to drift through life with no true purpose revealed to her.
She raised the remaining flowers to her lips to breathe in their scent. Again they reminded her of being a child in Donegal, taking her first steps to let her nurse share the wondrous scent of plucked daisies. Those first steps on the beginning of the adventure she was still on. Tomorrow she would return to that hospital to play the role of Freddie’s wife one last time. But this evening belonged to her. Tossing the remaining flowers into the waters, she rooted in her bag for the unsold copies of Peace News, smiling at the thought of Freddie’s apoplexy if he could see her. Eva held them aloft on the pier to let anyone who wished to approach her do so. She strode proudly among the crowds hurrying for the ferry in her bright clothes that would look unsuitable on anyone of her age, except for someone with a pilgrim soul.
Chapter Seven
The Mayo Letter
August 1962
Glanmire House,
Turlough
Castlebar
Mayo
17th August, 1962
Dear Mummy,
How extraordinarily wonderful it feels to once more place this address at the start of a letter. After Daddy died I never imagined I would ever again write to you from here or spend another afternoon like I spent today, stripped to the waist as I laboured with a billhook, a slightly rusty bowsaw and a broad-axe in these woods. It’s so late at night that I should be exhausted. My shoulders will ache tomorrow but I’m too exhilarated to sleep, although I have my sleeping bag rolled out and ready on the flagstones, beyond range of the occasional blazing sparks that shoot out from the grate like dancing fireflies. I should probably not have added more logs to the fire this late, but I love the warmth, the shapes which the flames cast on the cracked ceiling plaster and, yes, I love having for company the fizzing sound of exploding embers punctuating the silence, just like whenever I was ill here as a boy and you’d light a fire in my tiny bedroom grate as a treat. Not that I am lonely for company here, beyond the fact that I’d love to have you here just now, savouring this silence as only you can savour a silence, luxuriating in it as if it were the richest symphony ever composed. Maybe the thought of how you would enjoy this serenity has me sitting up by the light of a paraffin lamp to write this letter at our old kitchen table. It has miraculously survived
, being too battered for anyone to bother bidding on it at the auction or perhaps because Mr Devlin’s workmen considered it too cumbersome to bother manoeuvring out the doorway to be displayed on the daffodil lawn.
That is where so many of our old possessions wound up displayed for auction, that the lawn must have resembled a particularly eclectic bric-à-brac stall at the Portobello Road Market. Though I rather doubt if Mr Devlin – the Castlebar builder who bought this house for a song – used a Cockney barrow boy’s accent to shout out: ‘Get the last of the Fitzgeralds here’ when trying to entice bidders for our old delph and china and cutlery; our pictures and books stacked in tea chests; the forty-gallon copper cylinder he took out, alongside two toilets and washbasins; the beautiful writing bureau where I can still see Hazel drawing sketches of ponies whenever twilight or rain forced her indoors; the mahogany walnut sideboard that Maureen always took such care to polish when Daddy was due home from the war; the six-piece oak dining room suite that seemed as old as this house itself; for miscellaneous chests of drawers and basins and probably even chamber pots that once bore the weight of the great and good; for that mahogany oval table you once loved to write at; for the deck chairs we sat out on during long summer afternoons; for the lino off the floor, which has probably been cut up into strips to let patrons of pubs in Ballavary tramp across it in their wellington boots; and for the ancient fireside chairs – priceless to us and surely worthless to anyone else – on which you and Harry Bennett would sit up reading French poetry aloud late at night during the war, while I lay awake, waiting for Harry to come to bed.
Presumably Daddy, as a proud Fitzgerald, never dreamt that such a public free-for-all would occur. He would have been mortified at our old furniture being gawked at, pawed and bid on – or sometimes not even bid on despite Devlin setting no reserve – by half of Turlough and curious onlookers coming from Breaffy to Bohola, with some families crossing the mountains from as far away as Pontoon for a chance to traipse up our avenue as if attending a circus or a county hurling final. But perhaps Daddy should have considered what his will would entail before allowing spite to rule him. I’m told that old Mister Durcan rose from his sickbed to drive his old car up here, dressed in his best as if attending Sunday Mass. He was too crippled with rheumatism to get out of the driver’s seat, but they say he was the first to arrive and the last to leave, disconcerting Devlin by watching the sell-off with what someone called a judgemental expression: although Bridie in her little shop was caustic as ever when breaking her usual reticent silence to observe that this is how old Mister Durcan always looks when he forgets to put in his false teeth.
I laughed at Bridie’s remark because this is what you must do in local shops – not that I go into too many here because the people in them think they know too much about me, although thankfully I don’t think that they know anything at all about my real life. They just know that I’m the Fitzgerald whose father disinherited me and – as a proud Fitzgerald myself – this is a shadow I carry in Mayo. As our Turlough Park relations wisely declined to turn up to witness Devlin’s hodgepodge fire-sale of the sweepings of Daddy’s life, then – in so much as we were represented there – I like to think it was by that elderly, decent shopkeeper who drove us up here on the freezing winter night in 1939 when you brought Hazel and I back home at the outbreak of war. Bridie – if you could get her to express an opinion – might grumpily claim that old Mister Durcan only drove up to witness the auction because it warmed his old bones to see Fitzgerald possessions piled up, just like his own parents’ possessions were once piled after their eviction from their cabin. But I like to think he drove up to bear witness not out of revenge but from a fundamental neighbourly sense of decency. Certainly his daughters in the pub were one of the few local families not to buy some keepsake. Our old table and chairs are scattered across a dozen local farmhouses now. On my first night home when I called into Bridie’s shop and she insisted on bringing me into the little kitchen beyond the counter to drink tea, I found myself seated on one of our most comfortable armchairs, without Bridie making any reference as to how it came to be there. Even your old friend, Dermot MacManus, late of Killeaden House, who was back home in Mayo for a visit, turned up and bought one of our old oak bookcases – to be shipped to his new home in Harrogate, presumably to hold the research for the book of ghost stories he’s been promising to publish since I was a child.
We could be bitter about what happened, but bitterness would only play into Daddy’s hands so that he would still be manipulating us; we’d still be playing by his rules, even when he is not alive to impose them. As I write, the rooms overhead are denuded of furniture and while there is a curious echo throughout our old home with everything gone, there is also so much new space and light. That’s what I’ve realised on this visit home, sitting in the quietude of this kitchen by night or working by day to reclaim the woods. In the strange way in which life evens itself out, while Daddy thought he had won by playing his ace card of spite, he lost everything, including people’s respect. But he hadn’t bargained on Hazel’s stubborn bloody-mindedness and her Kenyan riches, thanks to which she was able to buy back whatever remains of this ark that you tried to build for me here against the world. Not that I wasn’t bitter and wounded after his will was made public, but eighteen months later I refuse to feel bitterness now. My problem is that I always hurt too easily. A part of me still hurts from Daddy’s actions because rejection is worse than any physical assault. But during these past few days here every blow of my axe through the dense undergrowth besieging this house has felt like healing. I keep discovering so many trees slowly dying of strangulation from a lack of light and space in the undergrowth. Today, as I cleared space around one of them, I realised that this is what you and I both need to do with our lives: clear enough space to allow us to breathe and live simply as ourselves.
If there is no point in feeling bitterness towards Daddy, then there is less point in even feeling the slightest animosity towards the Turlough Park folk who are just about managing to keep that house afloat by supplying Castlebar shops with fruit and vegetables from their gardens and tomatoes from their greenhouse. There is a good and practical woman there trying her best to raise a family in those big rooms. The last thing they needed was for Daddy to burden them by leaving Glanmire to be maintained – County Council rates and all – until my cousin comes of age to inherit. But I suppose Daddy’s dream was always to have young Fitzgeralds playing in these woods and he knew I would never produce an heir, long before he discovered me with Jonathan here. I could never tell you the hurtful names he called me that Halloween night when he burst in half-drunk, so grey and ill that it seemed as if only rage was keeping him alive. Maybe his will was the survival instinct of a dying creature, his desperate wish to keep the Fitzgerald name strong in Mayo for another generation. But between the rates and death duties, Glanmire was a burden and not a blessing to our relations and they did the only practical thing by auctioning off the house and wood to pay the numerous expenses.
At one time the sale of Glanmire House would have been the talk of Connacht, but reports of the auction only crept into the Mayo News as a small item in the local parish notes section that Bridie kept for me. Obviously no local farmer cared to go to the trouble of felling these woods to create more pasture land because Devlin the builder bought the whole kit and caboodle for the knock-down price of two hundred pounds. I know it might have been better if our relations had told us about their plans in advance, because the parish notes in the Mayo News rarely gets passed around the Whites Only club in Kenya where Hazel drinks most evenings. Though I confess that in London I occasionally see copies of that newspaper being avidly read on the Tube by Irish navvies, dog tired from their day’s labour on building sites, and I feel so overcome by homesickness that I often long to ask them if I can peruse the deaths and marriages and reports of court cases over claims of trespass, boundaries and after hours drinking.
I made a point of calling to Turlou
gh Park on my first day back here. What is the sense in holding a grudge, when the family there was just as much an unwitting victim of Daddy’s will: knowing that – as his executor – they would have reneged on their legal duty by simply giving Glanmire back to me, and possibly feeling too embarrassed to offer to sell it to me. Not that I could have afforded the two hundred pounds that Devlin paid and presumably they had no reason to expect that Hazel – with her new life in Africa – would have any use for a tumbledown house with its twenty acres of woodland.
The only person to emerge from the debacle richer is Devlin, who extracted five hundred pounds from Hazel’s solicitor who had to negotiate a price to buy Glanmire back from him. Nobody says it to my face, but this caused great mirth in Turlough – the local builder outsmarting the fallen gentry. The grass along the avenue is still scarred by tyre track marks caused by Devlin during the two months he owned this land. The Durcan sisters say that, following the auction of our furniture, Devlin had planned to level everything, selling the felled wood for timber and scavenging any stonework he could when demolishing the house and then reselling the whole site as farmland.
But thanks to Hazel’s money and also to her love for me, our home – in so much as you and I have a home – has been saved from his bulldozers. My only wish is that you were with me instead of being off on your travels again, gathering even more rosebuds in Morocco. Local people shake their heads when I tell them how you work at odd jobs in Tangiers, living on fruit and water and a weekly bar of the darkest dark chocolate. The villagers probably wonder when you will start to act your age, but I hope you never do. Bingo is the new craze in Castlebar for women who act their age, but I can’t imagine you in any bingo hall, shouting ‘Full House’ and coming home thrilled to win a new-fangled electric toaster. I suspect you would drive the bingo caller to distraction, patiently insisting that no house can ever be truly ‘full’, that it is always possible to create more space for another few lost creatures to shelter, like the family of earwigs you refused to disturb after you found them living in an envelope on top of your wardrobe in Frankfort Avenue.
An Ark of Light Page 16
