An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Mrs Fitzgerald.’

  The woman leaned forward and smiled, with fat knees and a peaceful pussycat face. Eva found that she trusted her absolutely.

  ‘Do you know something, Mrs Fitzgerald? I’ve become a great grandmother. I hope you live long enough to experience how marvellous that feels. I think you have lost someone dear to you. Is it your son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you would like to know of him?’

  Without expecting a reply the woman sat back: arms folded and eyes closed. Eva watched her for a long time, not nervous but enjoying the silence broken only by her peaceful breathing. Then the woman began to speak so quietly that Eva needed to lean forward to hear, not realising for a moment that the words seemed to belong to Francis.

  ‘Mummy, I’m happy.’

  The elderly woman began to unselfconsciously make shapes with her hands in the air. Ever since he was a boy this was one of Francis’s mannerisms whenever he talked animatedly. Eva didn’t make a sound, but at the word ‘Mummy’ tears of happiness entered her eyes. She felt convinced that this was Francis talking, though Mrs Cooke’s voice had not changed. If she had tried to impersonate a male voice, Eva would have felt suspicious, but this message seemed utterly natural.

  ‘I tried so hard to leave everything in order.’ The woman’s eyes remained closed, her breathing so peaceful that she might be asleep. Eva remembered how Francis’s desk had been perfectly tidied, the only untidy thing in Jonathan’s basement being the empty pill jar and the torn-up solicitor’s letter. ‘But move on now. Keep nothing of mine out of sentiment. Only keep what is useful and beautiful.’

  Mrs Cooke opened her eyes and blinked twice. ‘He seems to have gone,’ she said in the same tone of voice, only slightly louder. ‘I think there was more but it’s late and I find it hard to keep focused. I’m not as young as I was. Did any of that make sense?’

  Eva leaned forward to touch the woman’s ringed hand. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There’s nothing to thank me for. He has obviously been hoping to reach you.’

  ‘I’ve kept too many of his possessions. Possessions are a dangerous trap and burden.’

  ‘It’s never easy to let go, Mrs Fitzgerald. I feel tired now so I may just sit here for a while. Can you see yourself out?’

  Eva left the motionless woman and walked into the main chapel, her footsteps loud as she entered the vestibule. Undoing the bolt, she closed the door softly behind her, knowing that she would never have any need to return. ‘Mummy, I’m happy.’ Eva knew that she had a duty to her son to find happiness again, to ensure that her sorrow never dragged Francis back. Last spring she had scattered his ashes, but only now did she feel able to let go of the infinite fragments of his soul. Holding out her hands, Eva imagined them swirling upwards, breaking into smaller and smaller particles until there was nothing left and Francis finally slipped free of her loneliness. Emerging onto Kensington High Street, she walked among the passers-by, unnoticed and unimportant. She was planning a bonfire of everything in Francis’s trunk, so that – for his sake – she could commence a new life without him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Eight Drafts of a Letter

  Lundy Island, Bristol Channel, July 1970

  This was Hazel’s clear, precise handwriting. There was no doubt about it and it made each page precious. Every crinkle on the notepaper was also precious because, even though an unknown hand had flattened out the sheets to make them legible, surely it was Hazel who caused these creases by furiously scrunching up each unfinished letter to be discarded in her wastepaper bin. Though maybe she had not hurled them away in fury but in despair: despair at feeling unable to find the right words to express her frustrations at how life was panning out at thirty-seven years of age. The only problem with this notion was that Hazel didn’t do despair: despair was a weakness and Hazel never succumbed to weakness. She did fury all right. She did anger as readily as she did generosity or spontaneity or radiated her unquenchable zest for life. Hazel had been angry with Eva or angry with life on the last occasion they spoke, six months ago: a crackling long-distance call routed through a dozen operators, any of whom could have been listening in as the minutes clocked up at an extortionate cost to be added to Hazel’s telephone bill – or to the bill of whoever Hazel’s new husband was.

  Despite some distortion on the line that night, Eva had been able to recognise how alcohol was making Hazel slur and recognise also the unmentioned and surely unendurable stress that must have caused this anger to spill out as Hazel forensically dissected Eva’s failings as a mother; detailing every poor choice made. The complaints had delved right back to when Eva uprooted Hazel from Winchester to drag her and Francis back to Mayo to avoid Hitler’s blitzkrieg that all of her Winchester classmates had lived through, with friendships so strengthened by sharing this ordeal that if they remembered Hazel at all, it was as an Irish coward who ran away – the phrase someone in the Colonial Club used after Hazel described her wartime childhood. Collecting wild berries in the woods was all well and good but did nothing to prepare them for the real world. Nor did hauling Francis away from being bullied in that English boarding school equip him to deal with Jonathan’s solicitor in London four years ago. Hazel had kept asking how could Francis have developed any backbone when Eva never allowed him the space to stand on his own feet, like Hazel now needed to stand on her own feet – alone or as good as alone – being blanked by former friends at the club since the divorce from Geoffry, leaving Hazel barely able to show her face in the one establishment within fifty miles where she was once able to at least enjoy a bit of company.

  Eva could remember how at intervals a disembodied foreign voice interrupted the tirade, informing Hazel she had thirty seconds left, with Hazel demanding that another five minutes be added to the call, no matter what the cost. Eva had felt increasingly devastated, not at Hazel’s accusations but at how her daughter seemed so isolated in her new marriage, that the only person left to vent her spleen on was the mother in London from whom she was growing increasingly estranged. At intervals when the phone line improved, Eva had heard the plonk of a crystal whiskey tumbler being placed down on a wooden surface as Hazel moved on to ridicule Eva’s devotion to half-baked charlatan mystics and other ridiculous notions, which had always embarrassed Hazel when she brought home friends during her years at Park House School. By this stage Eva remembered realising how the phone call had ceased to be a conversation but a diatribe rehearsed in Hazel’s mind on numerous nights lying awake in her new life, about which Eva knew nothing. Hazel had droned on about the Sunday when Eva shocked two of her school friends by suggesting that, because it was gloriously sunny, they would all feel closer to God and more truly celebrate His Sabbath by traipsing out into the countryside to rejoice in its beauty rather than listen to a stuffy sermon in church: another social faux pas which ended two more friendships when her friends told their indignant mothers. This was before she even started on Eva’s weakness for idealistic young men like Harry Bennett during the war and Max in Dublin, back when Eva believed that letting children smear paint across whitewashed pages of The Irish Times stolen from neighbour’s bins could prepare them life, by which stage Hazel had needed to seek refuge from her lunacy by living in at the Meath stables.

  Eva could still vividly recall every word of Hazel’s stored- up anger during that phone call: an anger being used to cloak ongoing tribulations about which she knew nothing. It made her scared now to pick up the first creased letter in case it contained another diatribe of bitter home truths. Yet she had no other option if she was to begin to make sense of what these two policemen who had arrived from London were trying to tell her. Eva didn’t care what barbed comments these letters might hold, provided they revealed something about what had occurred in Kenya. Yet no words written here could explain the inexplicable. Alan and the policemen were cautiously watching, waiting for her to do something. All she could
think to do was run her palm across the first sheet of crumpled notepaper embossed with Hazel’s address and begin to read, trying to rationalise each word, to let what was being said and unsaid filter into her consciousness so she could make sense of it.

  The Argyllshire Farmstead

  Kitale

  Trans-Nzoia County

  Kenya

  7th July, 1970

  Dear Mummy,

  Thank you for your last three letters and apologies for my slow reply. I see your spirit of wanderings has taken you on yet another journey. Lundy Island sounds remote and peaceful and easier to reach than Tangiers. It may also have the advantage of possessing such a rudimentary telephone exchange, that your chances of being harangued some night from Kenya are slim. If truth be told I was slightly sozzled when last we spoke – and perhaps I spoke a trifle too frankly and unfairly. I can’t really recall because my abiding memory of our chat is the frightful phone bill that arrived soon after and caused yet another kerfuffle with my less-than-better other half.

  But I am glad you are off somewhere that suits your temperament and glad too that you are currently with Alan, who was always a brick and good friend to Francis and is that rarest of creatures: a fundamentally decent man. I rather suspect that Lundy is full of dreary people heartily tramping about in wet clothes and excitedly comparing what birds they spotted as they drink warm English bitter or whatever the local brew is out in the Bristol Channel. Being stuck on an English nature reserve would not be my cup of tea: though looking back over the past month, my life would have been better if I had stuck to tea. Abstinence is not an easy virtue in Kenya, but nothing feels easy just now, even just remembering to avoid looking at my face in a mirror. It’s been a bit chaotic, Mummy, which is the main reason why I have not replied to your lett…

  Hazel’s handwriting spluttered out, midway through the word. Eva turned over the page in case anything was written there, but it was blank. She tentatively picked up the next crumpled sheet but this abortive letter was even briefer and less informative:

  The Argyllshire Farmstead

  Kitale

  Trans-Nzoia County

  Kenya

  7th July, 1970

  Dear Mummy,

  As you well know it is not in my character to beat about the bush, so I have some bad news for you and you may as well hear it straight…

  Eva looked up at the two policemen, not sure how they expected her to respond. She counted the exact number of words of this second unfinished letter as if this might yield some clue, before carefully placing it face down on top of the first one. There were six more letters in the pile that the policemen had carefully removed from a folder after arriving on the island. They watched her with solicitude and concern, as if the letters were a code that only she might be able to decipher. She felt pressurised to speak but had no idea what to think or feel. In so much as she could feel anything it was a numbness, as if the outside world was suddenly very distant and she could never fit back inside the life she was leading an hour ago.

  ‘How difficult was I to track down?’ she asked.

  ‘You should not have been hard to find,’ the first policeman replied. ‘These letters explicitly state that you’re currently residing on this island, but the Kenyan police forwarded them to the Met in London because London was your last known official address. Maybe nobody thought to read such personal letters addressed to you. The focus was on locating you so you could be officially notified. It has taken us ten days to track you down. There are procedures we follow, calling to the known address and then checking with the Gas Board or various banks to try and locate a more recent address if we draw a blank there. People would be surprised at the footprint they leave in their dealings with utility companies, but you didn’t leave much trace, Mrs Fitzgerald. No forwarding address after you left London. Almost like you wished to make yourself invisible.’

  Eva had not bothered to leave a forwarding address at her last flat because she had already written to Hazel about her plans to spend the summer on Lundy. Her family had shrunk so much that it only took one letter to Kenya to inform any next-of-kin about her whereabouts. All her possessions remained stored in one trunk, which the Quakers still allowed her to stow in their Portobello hostel when she went on her travels. Eva looked down, oddly shocked to observe that her hands, toying with the next crumpled page, were not shaking. Perhaps the truth had not yet sunk in. Perhaps she would never know the truth because, despite Kenyan independence, the white settlers there lived in a world within a world which dealt with uncomfortable truths in its own way. The one truth she was sure of was that she had not needed to travel to Lundy to render herself invisible: a sixty-seven-year-old widow was invisible, no matter what city she lived in.

  Lundy was only three miles long and half a mile wide, yet every time Eva explored a new part of this island it yielded further surprises. The island off the Devon coast was uncluttered by roads or cars. Its sole pub was set amid a tiny cluster of houses called the village. These houses, and some other properties scattered across the island, had been restored by the Landmark Trust to be rented out to birdwatchers. Three months ago Eva had secured work with the Trust, thanks to a white lie about her age. If they knew she was an old age pensioner they might think her incapable of performing her duties, which involved cleaning cottages between lettings. For this she received a modest stipend and the free use of a cottage.

  For the past month she had been helped by Alan, who was spending his summer with her. Eva loved the companionship of Francis’s homosexual friends who looked out for her, knowing that they could confide in Eva in ways they could not talk to their own mothers, and who found in her a safe harbour from an intricate maze of affairs that still generally needed to be conducted in secrecy for safety’s sake because no change in a law could simply eradicate hatred or random assaults. Eva suspected that Alan’s usual summers in Tangiers were more romantically engaging than this summer on Lundy. But Alan lacked the hedonistic qualities she witnessed in some men who travelled to Morocco: their frantic quest for pleasure feeling like a cloak against loneliness. With Alan’s prematurely greying beard and Eva’s still youthful features, day-trippers who made the two-hour crossing from Ilfracombe on the M.V. Lundy Gannet sometimes mistook them for a contented married couple.

  They had been content here, even when laughing at visitors’ misconceptions of them. Alan passionately enjoyed teaching science in his London polytechnic. It was a secure job, and while he feigned poverty in his tattered jumpers and old tweed jacket she knew that this was just part the prudent camouflage that he had employed throughout his life to deflect attention away from himself. Like many gay men of his age who worked in the professions, he was finally secure without the usual economic strains of family life. Money was often their sole consolation amid the inconsolable loneliness of old age – a consolation Eva accepted that she would never know. Alan never argued about any of her beliefs but always agreed to disagree. Occasionally they discussed their experience of the White Eagle Lodge, but neither ever felt any need to return there. They possessed enough common interests, notably a shared love of birds, which made them often venture out each dawn to cliffs called The Devil’s Chimney to watch for auks. Sometimes Eva saw birds of prey circle over Ackland’s Moor, but otherwise this island would have felt cut off from any sense of danger had it not been for her growing concern about Hazel. Every day Eva had been anxiously waiting for a letter to arrive. She had never imagined eight of them – unfinished and unexplained – being delivered in this way. Picking up the third sheet, she steeled herself to read Hazel’s words.

  The Argyllshire Farmstead

  Kitale

  Trans-Nzoia County

  Kenya

  7th July, 1970

  Dear Mummy,

  Would you believe this is the third time I have tried to write to you this afternoon? I get exasperated after just a few lines because you really can be a fusspot in some of your letters. Was it really necessary to sen
d three epistles in the past two months, filled with concern for me? Mummy, look at yourself, surviving on a rock in the Bristol Channel by cleaning toilets for redbrick birdwatchers who idolise Harold Wilson. I have a house and servants – even if I need to shout to get the simplest thing done. I can’t pretend that life just now is easy. One might say that breaking up with Geoffrey was a terrible mistake, but at least I had the courage to make it. I did it because I have never been afraid to take risks. Kenya is the sort of place where everyone takes risks, maybe just to pass the time when there is not much else to do except watch the natives prepare to swamp all over us. So you take a small risk or maybe a stupid risk, because someone at the club dares you to, or you dare yourself, or because at certain times of night in that club – back when I felt welcome there – your skin starts to crawl because you’re sick of looking at the same faces or you have hit the bottle too early in the evening and you start to look back over your life and wonder how you ended up here.

  Or maybe it’s because the night train to Nairobi is the only thing still moving across that landscape and one night, once upon a time in a fairy tale which turned sour, you offered to drive a man home from the club who was too incapacitated with whiskey to drive himself. This man whom you half-thought you might be in love with because he paid you such attention and seemed infatuated with you – this man dared you to race the night train. Of course back then he didn’t think you would have enough courage to do so, not knowing what stuff you are made of. That moonlit night you were determined to show him how much you love a challenge, how as a girl on your horse you often raced the Castlebar train pulling out of Manulla Junction to reach the level crossing before it did. This man didn’t know that when your blood is up, fear is just another drug and suddenly you feel alive again, like as a girl jumping the steepest bank. You love how you suddenly have his full attention; how his amusement turns to fear in the passenger seat as you speed along the red dirt road running parallel to the train tracks. So close to the speeding train that you sense the driver and stoker stare out at you, so bewildered by what is happening that they don’t know whether to speed up or slow down as you swing sharply left across the level crossing seconds before the hooting train reaches it. Suddenly the train has flashed past into the distance; the car has stopped dead, having swung around in a whirl of dust and you and he both laugh at the sheer outrageousness of it all, so exhilarated that it only seems natural to kiss.