An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  Looking back, I confess to being hurt that you never shared the burden of Daddy’s final illness almost until the very end in that dreary Isle of Wight hospital. But you were wise enough to let me be part of the vigil after he slipped into that last coma, so I could at least sit by his bed and hold his hand, like he may possibly have held mine when I was a sleeping child in this house, who had not yet disappointed his expectations. In truth Daddy and I were probably only ever comfortable together when one of us was unconscious. You knew the details of his will when you helped nurse him right up to the end, but I remember how hurt you were to later discover that he had already drawn up his will to deny you or Hazel or I one single perch of land long before the Halloween night when he encountered Jonathan and I here. Daddy wrote us out of his life two weeks after doing what he obviously saw as his final public duty by walking Hazel up the aisle. I saw you try to suppress your hurt at this revelation before you left to go travelling again in Morocco. But anger is part of your Scorpio side and while no good ever comes from anger, no good can come from trying to suppress it. It’s rare that I ask you to do something, but please do one thing for me: be angry with him just once for publicly humiliating us. Go to one of those remote places your soul always yearns for and shout his name in anger. Damn him aloud and it will be done and dusted and you will feel cleansed of bitterness, like I feel cleansed by working in these woods, because if we retain any bitterness in our hearts, Daddy will have won by tainting our spirit.

  Devlin came round today to apologise for any damage caused. I chatted to him on the steps: the front door open into the hallway to reveal the gaping hole where his men removed the old fireplace before Hazel’s offer reached him. I saw him glance up at the cracked window panes and slates missing from the roof. He was curious to know why a woman in Kenya would want to buy back such a ruin and kept asking whether Hazel wished to have the house repaired, presumably hoping to turn an even greater profit from his brief stewardship. I couldn’t tell him how Hazel bought Glanmire primarily out of a refusal to be bested by Daddy and to publicly thwart his wishes.

  The young lad in Turlough Park wanders across to help me in the woods some afternoons. He is wonderful company, clearing grass with a scythe. His people often ask when will you be coming back, but my instincts tell me you don’t want to visit Turlough Park again: you always say that walking through those ornate gates made you feel like the poor relation. I no longer care about such things because I feel like Adam here in the garden, where I work each evening until the light fades, then play Handel’s ‘Water Music’ on our old wind-up gramophone, which somehow survived in a cupboard that Devlin missed when rifling through the house. I sleep in old army blankets on our kitchen floor and always wake refreshed. I wish that Jonathan were here but he will be waiting for me in London when I return next week. He has persuaded me to give up my old flat and move in with him. But for appearances sake, if nothing else, I have asked Peter, who works for me, to convert Jonathan’s basement into a self-contained apartment where I can have my own kitchen and be able to keep my books and files and sleep down there whenever Jonathan has family or important guests staying over. It’s so important to keep an independent address, even if only a notional one. So when you next write to me just add the letter A to the house number on the first line of Jonathan’s address and the postman will drop your letter into the letterbox that Peter promises to have cut into the basement door by the time I return to London.

  While I miss Jonathan, the person I really miss is you. I keep remembering the miniature Eden you made here during the war years; Maureen watching over all of us, coming and going on her bicycle, laughing about all the young Turlough men in love with her. Maybe it’s a fantasy to imagine that one day I’ll create a nursery here, harvesting timber and commercially growing shrubs. But at the very least I’m getting Glanmire ready for your return. One day soon I’ll lure you back to Mayo with me. There are so many wonderful old trees here and new trees I long to plant. I’m enough of a romantic to believe that our true home is not beyond repair. Hazel tells me to consider Glanmire as my home for as long as I live. This is where I plan to die: an old man surrounded by my own trees. These woods can become an Eden for us both again, Mummy, our sanctuary against the world. But this time will be different because it never belonged to us when Daddy was alive. From now on there is no more looking over our shoulders in case he comes back to catch us living our lives. He lost all his power by writing that will. If Daddy had left me this house it would never fully belong to us because we’d still owe his ghost a debt. We owe him nothing now because when Devlin briefly owned this house it broke the chain, allowing us to buy it back on our own terms and we’re finally free to be ourselves here.

  So write to me at my new London address and tell me you’ll return to Mayo soon. Promise me this and it will be a promise I’ll ensure that you and I keep together.

  Your loving, sunburnt son,

  Francis.

  Chapter Eight

  African Skies

  Kenya, 1963

  Throughout the night Eva’s dreams were saturated in vibrant colours as she slept in a guest bedroom in Hazel’s single-storey stone house, overlooking the paved courtyard besieged by intensely blue blossoms of the jacaranda tree and the unadulterated whiteness of agapanthus lilies. Not even the loud rhythmic chirping of the cicadas had disturbed her. Waking now to a blue sky where kites and kestrels circled, Eva felt as if she were opening her eyes in a new Garden of Eden. The metaphor seemed apt because Hazel had warned her to shake out her shoes – left airing on the wooden veranda – before putting them back on in case mamba snakes were tempted to creep into them during the night. Eva walked out on this veranda to gaze out at a dawn so fresh that it seemed to have materialised instantaneously from the darkness to reveal a distant vista of Mount Elgon, which a heat-haze would soon set in to obscure. Everything about Kenya felt exotic, with whale-headed storks and crested cranes wading along the nearby river’s edge. Yet as she gazed around at Hazel’s spacious home, besieged on all sides by lush vegetation, Eva felt a curious déjà vu; an uneasy sense of standing in a place that should be familiar and yet was so inexplicably altered that she could not immediately identify the memory it stirred.

  A furious downfall of rain had beat against the slate roof last night and Eva could smell the parched earth greedily absorbing this rainwater before the sun could evaporate it. Deep underground the roots of the purple bougainvillaea would be competing for each drop of moisture, just like its vines fought for every inch of space and light above ground. The smell of the steaming red soil brought back a memory of how her father had loved the scent of the sweet pea plants beneath his window in Donegal after a downpour of summer rain. She closed her eyes momentarily, the better to remember this man who died while cradling a cat inside his coat in a bomb shelter during the Blitz, so serene in dying that the Londoners huddled around him never even noticed him suffering a heart attack. Father had been her great friend and confidant: her soulmate in ways which Eva knew she had never managed to be for Hazel.

  But perhaps today some sense of closeness might occur, when Hazel drove Eva and three-year-old Alex into the mountains to Mount Elgon National Park to stay overnight at a safari lodge. Hazel was promising spectacular scenery that Eva would never forget, as if determined to provide her mother with a mental scrapbook of colour to sustain her through the long London winter ahead. This African trip was already proving to be the most extraordinary month in Eva’s life. With typical generosity, Hazel had paid for Eva’s ticket from Southampton to Cape Town on The Oranjefontaine, the lower decks of which retained the odour of onions after its cargo was unloaded in England. This route allowed Eva to visit her middle brother, Thomas, in South Africa, even though she felt uneasy at visiting a country whose apartheid system she frequently protested about during her stays in London. But Eva put politics aside because she longed to spend time with Thomas, who had moved to Cape Town in the late 1930s, primarily for health reas
ons after his doctor advised that his respiratory condition, following a bout of TB, needed a drier climate. Like many men of his background, Thomas had struggled to find work in this new Ireland after graduating from Trinity College: his sense of disillusion before he moved abroad deepened by a bitter quarrel with their oldest brother about how Art’s politics had torn their family apart.

  Thomas shared her grave misgivings about apartheid, but little of her time in Cape Town was spent discussing politics. Instead she and Thomas had reminisced about their Donegal childhood: day-long picnics by horse-and-cart and evenings when all five siblings joyously bathed on a nearby jetty that they nicknamed Paradise Pier. Back then they seemed to possess an unbreakable closeness with no thoughts of future family schisms or tragedies. After a week in Cape Town, Thomas and his wonderful family waved Eva off on the final leg of her voyage, which brought her ever closer to her true reason for visiting Africa: to finally meet her granddaughter, Alex. Eva had travelled from Cape Town on The MV Europa, a small Italian ship filled with good-humoured passengers enjoying a long cruise from Venice. It moved slowly up the African coast, with afternoon string concerts featuring Strauss and Ferraris and dance music each night – or musica da ballo as the Italian captain called it. He made the band play ‘Never on Sunday’, after discovering that Eva liked this tune. After this, the Italian men gathered on the promenade deck would hum a few bars for her if she paused to watch their clay pigeon shooting contests in the Mozambique Channel. Eva spent hours up on deck chatting to everyone as she made pencil drawings and noted down material for possible magazine articles, even though in her years of trying to be a writer she had only sold three such pieces. But the important thing was to keep learning. The ship had docked at Beira, the gateway to Rhodesia, before sailing on past the Comoros Islands and the Seychelles before dropping anchor at Dar es Salaam, the principal port of Tanganyika, where the Captain advised her to stay on board unless inoculated against Yellow Fever.

  Over dinner that evening the female passengers at her table described the coconut-lined avenues interspersed with mango trees and how, despite its intense heat, Dar es Salaam had a sizeable population – just under four thousand Europeans. This way in which her fellow passengers regarded all black Africans as invisible, except as nuisance hawkers or curios to photograph, marred her voyage. But she ceased arguing this point when the ship entered the Zanzibar Channel because the coast of Kenya lay ahead, where Hazel promised to be waiting at Mombasa. Watching the Kenyan coastline emerge on the horizon, Eva felt like a pilgrim: a Magi too poor to bear myrrh or frankincense but coming to kneel in wonder before her beautiful granddaughter. Hazel had seemed bemused by Eva’s indifference to the landscape when driving along the highway beyond Nairobi, past the Chyulu Hills and skirting the Nyiri Desert. But by then Eva had eyes for nothing except the car’s milometer: its slowly revolving digits bringing her ever closer to meeting Alex.

  Hazel’s houseboy, Juma, stepped onto the veranda now, carrying water for Eva to wash with. He bowed and left the jug in her room, before slipping quietly back out. The red soil on Geoffrey’s plantation was ideal for growing coffee but it found its way into everything, including the tap water that needed filtering. Hazel was already up at this early hour, working with inexhaustible energy as she pruned shrubs that grew to twice her height. From the veranda Eva gazed at her daughter’s bronzed legs beneath red shorts and her blonde hair tied into a ponytail. Alex ran out from the nursery bedroom, still in her nightgown, to chase her pet mongoose across the courtyard, laughing at the racket that this most unlikely and rather dangerous pet made. The child was chased in turn by Lillian, her latest young English nanny. Hazel stopped working to laugh at Alex’s giddiness and then, when she caught Eva’s eye, she stared across at Eva as if subconsciously trying to convey something that perhaps not even Hazel fully understood. Eva’s sense of déjà vu deepened; the more unsettling for being inexplicable. But during those few seconds it seemed as if Alex had become Hazel at three years old and this lush Kenyan plantation was transformed into Glanmire Wood – not as Glanmire had actually been but as it should have been in an idealised world where the Fitzgerald family had not lost their wealth and status. Then the moment was gone as Lillian scooped Alex up to get her dressed and Hazel turned back to her shrubs, leaving Eva uncertain if her daughter had also experienced this déjà vu which made Eva catch her breath.

  Because it now seemed obvious what Hazel was trying to create in this forest of coffee trees, subdivided by dirt tracks and shaded by silver oaks laden with golden orange blossoms. In Hazel’s mind this was the woodland home that the Fitzgeralds should have possessed, but with Glanmire’s flaws airbrushed out in this reinvention. Here Hazel would never need to cradle Alex’s bare soles to make them warm at night. Here the plentiful servants knew their place. Here bedrooms were not damp and the stables were stocked with good horseflesh. The cordite of political change might hang in the air, like in Ireland during Eva’s childhood, but, even with Jomo Kenyatta transformed from political prisoner into budding statesman, there was no sense that the looming threat of independence could infiltrate these coffee groves where obedient workers sang. Eva wondered if perhaps this was why all settlers made the trek to Africa: to try and mould their childhood illusions about how life should be into an eggshell reality.

  It felt strange being her daughter’s guest. Their relationship had subtly changed during the crises over Freddie’s will. Eva and Francis now deferred to Hazel as if de facto head of the family. On the surface Kenya seemed to suit Hazel: her hair looked more golden, her body oozing vitality. Here she finally possessed the money that was scarce during her childhood; a large home and servants and the confident gloss bestowed by affluence. Outwardly she seemed blissfully fulfilled, but occasionally Eva wondered if Hazel’s resolute show of happiness was a weapon to keep questions about her marriage at bay. Behind Hazel’s zest for life, signs lurked that Eva could not decode. She was disturbed by changes in Hazel’s personality, like how Hazel not only shouted at servants for making trivial mistakes, but regarded such behaviour as normal. Because her husband was away on business, Eva had no idea how Geoffrey addressed his workers. But several of Hazel’s friends – in the awful but aptly named Colonial Club, to which she brought Eva on most nights – did nothing except drink and complain about their servants’ stupidity. They claimed that the local inhabitants had spent centuries living in idleness, never doing more than what was absolutely necessary, until white people came to create jobs and put structure on what they said was previously a wilderness.

  Last night two club members suggested that Eva photograph the village schoolmaster and his pupils outside the hut that served as a school. But they mentioned the pupils in the same way that they mentioned exotic creatures which Eva should look out for on today’s safari in the National Park, as if the villagers were curios to photograph rather than people to befriend. Hazel ridiculed her friends during the drive home, claiming that both women had spent too long in Africa. But Hazel was relieved that Eva hadn’t told them how she had already visited the bar attendant and his family in their hut in the compound behind the club. This would seem like fraternising, although in truth – while the attendant was welcoming – she had felt an uncomfortable social barrier that was absent during her travels in Morocco, where her obvious poverty eroded any chasm of class. At times Kenya felt like the Ireland of her childhood, with people mindful of their place and anxious to maintain a respectful distance.

  Hazel finished sawing the shrubs and stepped back to inspect her work, leaving severed branches on the lawn for the gardener to clear away. She shouted across to ask Eva if she was ready for breakfast. As if awaiting her summons, Juma appeared and set down a huge tray on the veranda. The nursery door opened and Alex ran out to jump into Hazel’s arms to peer shyly at Eva. Hazel claimed that Alex had been talking for weeks in advance about her grandmother’s visit. But the child remained reticent around Eva, shyly answering questions but never initiating cont
act. This was another reason why Hazel was arranging for the three of them to venture alone into the mountains, hoping that Alex might overcome her shyness in the excitement of the trip. Hazel’s version of going alone, however, did not preclude Juma and another servant being sent ahead to prepare the hired lodge.

  Eva could see that Hazel was a superb mother, spending hours every day with the child despite the presence of a governess. She was vigilant about what Alex ate and careful not to spoil her, although her toys were all imported from Hamley’s in London. Hazel was also planning ahead, telling Eva that she was in touch with her former headmistress at Park House School in Dublin to ensure that a place was kept open if they decided to send Alex to Ireland to complete her education. She was also a good hostess, convinced that Eva needed pampering after years of relative poverty. The cook had been told to practice vegetarian recipes, despite his bewilderment that anyone rich enough to afford to eat meat would not do so. Hazel’s comments were hilarious about the charred vegetarian dishes the cook served up, but Hazel could be droll about most things. Pouring Earl Grey tea for Eva now, Hazel made Alex giggle by impersonating the sounds of the animals who might prowl around their lodge tonight: snarling hyenas, baying jackals and the menacing cough of a leopard waiting to pounce. Hazel’s cigarette darted across the table to accompany this last impersonation, but Alex only laughed louder, imbued with the same pluckiness Hazel possessed at that age. Eva tried to join in by making the noise of a cheetah but, instead of laughing, Alex stared back at her grandmother with a shy gaze which Eva longed to break through.