An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  Jade put on Francis’s hat. It suited her. She leaned forward to kiss Eva and this time when Francis’s hat touched her skin Eva did not cry. The men were self-consciously packing the files into a suitcase. But Eva ignored them as she held Jade’s hand and smiled.

  ‘Good luck on your travels, Jade.’

  ‘And good luck on yours.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Daffodil Lawn

  London, Winter 1966 & Co. Mayo, Spring 1967

  Three days after Francis’s cremation Eva accompanied Hazel and Alex to Heathrow Airport as they commenced their journey back to Kenya. In the terminal bar, with Alex distracted by gazing out through the huge plate-glass windows, Hazel confirmed Eva’s suspicions that her marriage to Geoffrey was over. She was evasive about the reasons or about her future plans, beyond affirming that Kenya would remain her home. ‘Francis wasn’t the only one receiving ultimatums from solicitors. Jonathan probably thinks his legal eagle is a Rottweiler, but he became a pussycat when I called into his office yesterday to give him a flea in his ear about those bullying letters he sent to Francis. If he gives you any trouble just let me know. I’ll enjoy venting my spleen on the weak coward. I’m becoming well practiced in legal affairs. For months I’ve been dealing with big cats in the Kenyan courts; hyenas dressed in decorous wigs.’ Hazel glanced protectively at Alex who was mesmerised by the size of the planes outside. ‘We keep any animosity hidden from Alex. To be fair, Geoffrey is good like that. Alex brings out the best in him. Maybe in us both. They’ll be calling us to board soon.’ Hazel rose. ‘Mind yourself. You might think you’re doing all right, but that doesn’t mean you are all right. I’ll send you my next address when I have it. Who knows: I might even be sending you a new married name.’

  Eva remained at the tall window in the viewing section long after Hazel’s plane took off, her palms pressed to the glass as if this would somehow allow her to retain the warmth in Alex’s final hug before she followed her mother through the departure gates. But eventually Eva felt foolish standing there. She needed to confront the loneliness of the Tube journey back into London, knowing that she would be unable to do anything except sit in silence for the next few days in the emptiness of Francis’s old flat. But Jonathan had other plans. When she returned to the basement flat, she discovered that three painters had arrived in her absence to start redecorating it. It was the Welsh surgeon’s unsubtle hint that he wanted her gone. The workmen were embarrassed by her arrival, obviously not having been told about the circumstances of her stay. They offered to cease work and return the next morning if they could leave their ladders and paint cans there. But, with Hazel gone, Eva felt overcome by such sudden, deep exhaustion that she was too bone-tired to even converse with the men. She smiled apologetically, conscious of being in their way as she motioned for them to carry on.

  Gathering up the few remaining possessions belonging to her or Francis, she stuffed them into any bags she could find. It took three trips to bring everything up onto the pavement. She stood outside Jonathan’s house, bewildered by what to do next and unsure if she had enough money for a taxi. Footsteps ascended the basement steps. It was the oldest of the workmen. She was immensely thankful that he asked no questions and said nothing beyond a single sentence, ‘I could use a break; get a bit of air.’ He stood beside her and lit two cigarettes. Only when Eva reached for the proffered cigarette did she realise how her hands were shaking. The man didn’t comment on this as he opened the white van that the painters had arrived in and made space for her belongings to fit into it. Courteously he opened the passenger door to allow her to climb up into the seat. Eva did so, too weary to argue. He didn’t speak again until he started the engine.

  ‘If you had an address…?’

  He nodded when she gave him directions to her attic flat, being wise and kind enough to say nothing else on their journey there. Only when they reached Notting Hill and he was taking out her possessions to stack them on the front step did he speak again.

  ‘That basement you left has an odd atmosphere. Peaceful but I sometimes get a feeling working in places. When we came back from lunch every door we had left closed was wide open, even the little cupboard doors. It gave us all a bit of a turn.’ He paused. ‘Will you be all right from here?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘It was nice to meet you, ma’am.’

  Eva was relieved that he didn’t try to shake her hand. Just then she was not able for physical contact. She was similarly relieved that the other tenants in the house seemed to be out when she needed to make several trips up all the flights of stairs before she had everything crammed away in her tiny room. She felt she had held onto too much but it seemed wrong to leave any part of Francis behind in that basement. She was not sure what time it was but she only had sufficient strength left to lie down on the bed and cover herself with as many blankets and coats as she possessed. When she finally woke, she thought she had only slept for a few moments because the same evening light filtered in through the cheap curtains, but then realised that she was so exhausted she had slept for almost twenty-four hours.

  The days that followed were primarily about survival. Eva was desperate to find a small room where she could lick her wounds because she could not bear to stay in that flat any longer. She didn’t know if Francis’s spirit guided her or if it was by pure chance that she spotted a tiny notice in a shop window advertising a vacancy for a caretaker at the Quaker International Youth Hostel near Portobello market. Eva was taken on, two days before her rent ran out in Notting Hill. This hostel became her new home. Every morning she needed to rise before dawn to scrub down the long kitchen table where two cats always slept; gently swooshing them away so that she could lay the table for breakfast before the guests started to come down.

  Her wages were tiny but the hostel provided a large room, rent free, where she could live and store the last of Francis’s possessions, which she had now placed in a trunk. She knew he had wanted her to give away everything but Eva couldn’t bring herself to destroy his letters, even old business ones written to clients outlining plans for gardens. Every night she added to the weight of the trunk by writing another letter to her son, knowing that she would trade all the remaining years of her life just to know that one of these sentences might actually reach Francis.

  Over that winter and the following spring, the Quaker hostel became her sanctuary. She found herself drawn into deep conversations and friendships with many long-stay guests, especially the young American men who, refusing to fight in Vietnam, had fled to London when called up by the draft board. Often their fathers had disowned them, like Freddie disowned Francis. Watching these young men cope with being ostracized was like watching Francis’s pain again, but Eva – who told nobody in the hostel about her son – found herself watching for signs of Francis everywhere. On freezing nights, she wandered through the parts of London he most loved or through unfamiliar streets around Bayswater and Kensington. Perhaps Jade was mistaken in her dream, but Eva yearned for one glimpse of his ghost there. At night she prayed for his younger, carefree ghost to appear in her dreams, but his will-o’-the-wisp spirit only populated other people’s sleep. Two other friends of his sent her cards that described dreams which echoed Jade’s image of him, radiant with joy as he worked in a cornfield. It was only in Eva’s dreams that he never smiled. In these dreams all she ever saw was his distress, the blue blotches on his face and how his body had been slumped after trying to rise one last time to swallow more pills. Perhaps Francis smiled in strangers’ dreams because his pain was over, but Eva’s pain only deepened with each passing night.

  This was why the routine of the hostel was good for her. It forced her to rise early and scrub down the table, to shoo away the cats and make porridge, to take bread from the oven and converse with guests. At Christmas, one of the American conscientious objectors – or draft dodgers, as she sometimes overheard Londoners unkindly refer to them – gave her a copy of Meetings with Remarkable Men by
the Armenian philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff. She spent Christmas Day alone reading it – ignoring entreaties from Alan to join him. Gurdjieff was more than simply a distraction from her grief: she saw his book as a sign that it was time for her soul to resume its journey. Eva memorised passages about him voyaging into remote corners of Asia to seek the lost wisdom of antiquity. While engrossed in its pages, his Himalayan journeys seemed more real than the Portobello market stalls near the hostel. The first hints of spring were appearing when Eva finished the book for the third time and reached the realisation that she needed to bring Francis’s ashes back to the Mayo wood that he loved.

  Alan offered to accompany her on this journey, but it was something she needed to do alone. When the train from Dublin pulled into Castlebar station, Eva politely deflected all questions from the solitary taxi driver waiting there in hopes of a fare, and asked him to take the back road out by Brafey to avoid her being spotted in Turlough village. Hoping to buy his silence she gave a more generous tip than she could afford when he dropped her near the roofless, overgrown gate lodge at the entrance to Glanmire Wood. But Eva knew that he had recognised her and would probably spend his tip by stopping for a drink in The Round Tower bar to inform all of Turlough that the Widow Fitzgerald had returned alone, carrying an urn with her son’s ashes.

  But as soon as she began walking up the overgrown avenue that snaked through trees for a quarter of a mile before reaching Glanmire House, Eva knew that she was not alone. The ghost of a twelve-year-old boy silently stalked her from among those trees. Eva had waited months to scatter these ashes, until certain that the overgrown lawn would be a blaze of daffodils. But she had also been waiting until she felt capable of letting go of these ashes she had kept beside her bed in the Quaker hostel.

  Clouds hung low overhead, the day alternating between showers and sudden bursts of sunlight, which seemed to intensify the colour of every drenched leaf and wildflower and tuft of grass. The sky darkened again as she caught her first glimpse of the house, framed by the old chestnut tree whose branches spanned the width of the avenue. Rain began to fall and Eva sought shelter among a cluster of tress that allowed her to survey the house without approaching any nearer. She could almost hear Francis’s voice in her head, softly scolding her for sitting alone, cold and hungry among these trees when so many old neighbours would welcome her into their homes. But Eva had not written to tell anyone in Turlough that she was coming. The village was surely awash with rumours about Francis’s death. Over the previous six months sympathetic and circumspectly written letters had been forwarded to her by circuitous routes. Each letter was heartfelt, but left so much unsaid between the awkward clichés that Eva could not tell which details of Francis’s death were common gossip here. Probably not the fact that he was homosexual – Eva suspected that many Mayo people knew little about such a world. But suicide was something everyone in Mayo understood and whispered about, with bodies recovered from lakes and causes of death fabricated to prevent the shame of a loved one being banished to an unconsecrated grave.

  More messages of condolence probably awaited her at Turlough Park, if Eva could ever bring herself to visit her in-laws who were now trying to transform the family seat into a guesthouse to keep it afloat, like she had done with Freddie in the 1930s. They were undoubtedly being forced to field all kinds of questions about Francis’s death. But in recent months, Eva was too preoccupied with surviving to contact the Turlough Fitzgeralds. If she was honest, the Scorpio side of her nature still resented how Freddie had favoured his in-laws over Francis in his will, even if Devlin the Castlebar builder was the only person to make a real profit. Francis never bore any resentment towards her in-laws, who were placed in an impossible situation by having to execute Freddie’s will. But to visit Turlough Park would make Eva feel poor in a way that no amount of living abroad in reduced circumstances ever did. In Tangiers or London she could slip free from her caste but here in Mayo she would feel imprisoned by everything left unsaid in the way that locals stared at her.

  The rain had eased up and there was no excuse for Eva to remain hunched down under this great chestnut tree which marked the point where the front lawn began. She could hear Francis’s voice in her head, urging her to find enough strength to step forward and set them both free. Eva slowly rose and approached the boarded-up house. There were more daffodils in bloom around her feet than she had ever seen on this overgrown lawn, intermingled with a proliferation of wildflowers. Francis’s hand-painted sign still hung above the locked front door: Please do not enter, this is my home. It was the message he had first written on a piece of wood before leaving for England as a boy before the war, and a message he carefully repainted every time he came home. Eva feared that the sight of this sign would reduce her to tears, but she refused to cry here on the lawn where the ghost of his younger self might see.

  Threading her way carefully among the wildflowers, Eva reached the spot where she could still remember Francis lying, bare-chested, many summers ago, joyously content like in Jade’s dream. She did not kneel or speak and felt curiously numb as she turned in slow motion to let Francis’s ashes spill from the urn until they lay in a perfect circle around her, dusting the long grass and stems of flowers. This wood was truly her son’s home once more. Nobody could ever again disinherit him. The sun went in behind the clouds and she knew that rain would soon fall, gradually helping his ashes to seep into the soil and nurture these daffodil bulbs.

  Eva had no idea how long she stood there, never wanting to leave the circle of precious ash. But because Francis’s ghost was watching she needed to pretend to be strong. Unsure where she would sleep tonight, Eva finally managed to step outside the circle and not look back. Scrambling up the grassy incline into the woods, briers scratched her hands and tore at her clothes. She was afraid that, if she looked back, she would see a bare-chested boy standing on the lawn watching her. If she saw him she would not be able to go on living, such was her longing to be with Francis. She climbed through the trees at a frantic pace, hoping to fool his ghost into thinking that she was leaving him behind so that he could pass on unencumbered into the next life, but she would still have traded her soul for one touch of Francis’s hand. Eva only stopped climbing when she reached the secluded spot where three old oaks clung to the crest of the hill: her secret haven to which she would run for solace as a young mother, whenever despair threatened to overwhelm her.

  Eva leaned against these oak trees in the rain to catch her breath and try to regain her composure. This long journey was meant to be about attempting to let go of grief, but for now all that Eva possessed to hold onto was grief: it was only the ache of grief which made her feel alive. She had found the strength to come here, but even after scattering his ashes she knew that in her heart she hadn’t the strength to let Francis go. She wrapped her arms slowly around one of the oak trees and pressed her face against it. Only then, in that most private of spaces, did she allow herself to cry.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The White Eagle Lodge

  London & Morocco, 1967/1968

  Eva worked as a caretaker at the Quaker International Youth Hostel in Portobello throughout the spring and summer of 1967. In June, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band began to be continually played in the common room. The young residents seemed amused at how much Eva liked the album and even more amused by her occasional references to the communal record player as a gramophone. Animated discussions occurred over the lyrics of each song but they never descended into arguments: the guests open to even the most outlandish interpretation or hidden meaning conjured from the songs. Their excited debates about this album and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds reminded Eva of boisterous debates among her family during childhood meals in Donegal: her parents happily presiding over the mayhem of opinionated voices clamouring to be heard. Freddie always claimed that this unorthodox upbringing had left her out of synch with time, but maybe it was a case that she was simply born before her true time.

  By the s
tart of July, Eva found herself unable to listen to that Beatles album any longer. This was partly because she kept wondering what her father – who never went anywhere without a volume of Walt Whitman – would have made of it. But she especially wondered if Francis would have liked it. Eva kept trying to live in the here and now but all thoughts led back to Francis, even when joyously momentous events occurred. In July, Alan held a discreet party to celebrate homosexuality being finally decriminalised in England and Wales. Even though Eva tried to enter into the spirit of the occasion, inwardly she was plagued all evening by unanswered questions. If homosexuality had been legalised one year earlier, would Jonathan have been so panicked on the night the policemen called, convinced that any public scandal would set the cause back? Would Francis and he have drifted so far apart without the constant pressure to conceal their love? Decriminalisation was an issue Francis had passionately cared about, while knowing it would be no panacea because no law could banish prejudice. But at least if you were assaulted by gangs of thugs who proudly proclaimed themselves to be queer-bashers, you would no longer be afraid to report your injuries to the police. At Alan’s party, she raised her gin and tonic at every toast and tried to feel happy for Francis’s friends who had spent decades living in the shadows, but the evening was soured by her growing bitterness that Francis was not there to share in this victory.

  This bitterness grew as September approached. It congealed into such a surge of renewed anger towards Jonathan that Eva could not bear to be in London on the first anniversary of Francis’s death. This left the problem of what to do with Francis’s trunk, but the Quakers assured her it would be safe in the hostel and they would hold open her job and room if at all possible. She suspected that she had just about enough money to live cheaply for the winter in Morocco and told anyone who asked that she was travelling somewhere warm due to the arthritis afflicting her hands.