The Argyllshire Farmstead
Kitale
Trans-Nzoia County
Kenya
7th July, 1970
Dear Mummy,
Thank you for your various letters and your concern. But I’m afraid you read too much into my silence. The fact is the last few months have been a bit chaotic and I was laid up. Well not exactly laid up, but I broke my wrist, a spot of bother with a motoring accident, but just a few cuts and bruises, nothing I won’t get over. It made answering letters a bit difficult but my wrist is well on the mend. Nothing much to report from Kenya because nothing much happens here, but hubby number two and I knock along even when we rub each other up wrong. You’d think I would be used to the heat here by now, but what I would not give for one of those soft days of rain, as we called them in Mayo, when damp drops seemed to just hang in the air. Here it can be a case of monsoon or nothing. I suspect it is rather more temperate on Lundy Island, which sounds exactly your sort of place, full of people on your wavelength, as you like to say. I hope you are happy there, but you know that I would always find a place for you here, even if money is a bit tighter than it once was and life is just a trifle complex of late. But you know that I would never see you stuck and you are reaching an age when you need to properly look after yourself.
Still look at what I’m doing: worrying about you after scolding you for worrying about me. There’s nothing to worry about. I’m fine. I always get through. I think it might be time to start planning for Alex to attend boarding school in Dublin, as some time away from Kenya might be good for her. But – like everything else when you’re a divorced woman – this may need some subtle negotiation. My one great comfort is that Geoffrey loves her and wants what’s best for her. Alex would love to scribble a few words of her own here or add one of her wonderful drawings, but she is staying with a school friend at present, although I know that she would wish me to pass on her best wishes and love to you. I must finish now because it really is frightfully late. It’s astonishing how writing a short letter can take such a long time.
Yours as ever,
Hazel
Chapter Sixteen
The Ark
Curracloe Strand, Co. Wexford, Early September 1972
This small caravan which Eva purchased last year cost every penny she had managed to save up. She was receiving a tiny English pension from her time working in different jobs over there. The Irish state took this sum into consideration before granting her an even smaller means-tested Irish old age pension. Between the two pensions there was barely enough money to survive on, but Eva was doing more than surviving: for the past week she had lived with such resolute energy and purpose that she barely found time to sleep. The caravan simply had to be made ready on time: the packed bookshelves tidied, the floor swept and all of Eva’s papers and letters filed away into cardboard folders. Somebody precious was coming home today and homecomings always needed to be perfect.
Queensly, the mother puss whom Eva adopted as a stray, was curled up on top of two neatly folded blankets on the long window seat where Alex would be the first ever person to sleep. In the months since purchasing this caravan, Eva had started to mentally call this window seat ‘Alex’s bed’. Because, as she explained by letter to Alex, before her granddaughter left Kenya for Dublin, the caravan equally belonged to them both. Situated in the corner of a small field, a small distance away from other caravans in a makeshift caravan park, which a local farmer had created for Dublin-based holidaymakers, and near a tiny steep path that led down to the vast sand dunes of Curracloe Beach, it was not much of a home from home to offer to a child raised on a large coffee plantation. But it was only seventy miles from Park House Girls’ School in Dublin, where Alex had arrived as a boarder ten days ago, and Eva would happily walk those seventy miles at any time, night or day, for the chance to spend ten minutes with her cherished granddaughter – the only family she had left.
In her letters from Kenya during the past year, twelve-year-old Alex always expressed delight at the idea of having a caravan as her private retreat on any weekends when she wished to escape from boarding school. Their correspondence started shortly after Hazel’s death when Eva received a tender letter from Alex, in which the child desperately tried to comfort Eva at having lost a daughter. Her simply phrased words – and the thought of the young girl putting aside her own anguish to console her grandmother – had made Eva weep like she hadn’t cried since being overcome by grief in a London park on the day after Francis’s cremation. In the two years since Alex’s first letter they had become weekly pen pals, sharing a similar childish delight in the everyday mystery of simple experiences while remaining acutely conscious of each other’s unspoken loss.
The one thing they never discussed was the nature of Hazel’s death. The Kenyan inquest had returned a verdict of suicide, but Eva still found it hard to countenance a fighter like Hazel leaving Alex without a mother. However, Eva was vigilant to ensure that she never even accidentally hinted in any letter at her doubts about the circumstances in which Hazel died; doubts that still ambushed her when she woke at night. That policeman on Lundy had been as wise in his own way as a Rudolf Steiner or Kahlil Gibran in forewarning her that she would have to accept the painful unknowability of certain truths. For months after Hazel’s death, the only image of her daughter that Eva could summon up was an image she had never seen: her dead body discovered in a blanket. But over time, and especially through her correspondence with Alex, more joyous and vibrant memories returned that she stored up to share with her granddaughter when the moment was right.
Alex’s growing intimacy with Eva, and the presence in Ireland of some of his own relations, may have persuaded Geoffrey to follow Hazel’s wishes to see their daughter educated here. Eva was relieved that Alex was now away from Kenya until the school term ended next May. Uganda was only a day’s drive from her father’s land and Idi Amin’s recent speeches in Kampala praising Hitler terrified Eva. Journalists, judges, politicians and anyone else who might potentially oppose Amin were being disappeared – their mutilated bodies sometimes found floating in the Nile. Recently Amin had announced the forced expulsion of fifty thousand Ugandan Asians to Britain, while his border war against Tanzania and Somalia threatened to further destabilise an unstable region. But from Alex’s letters, the child seemed blithely unaware of such turbulence so close to Kenya’s border, or else she had inherited her mother’s pluckiness in facing down danger. Throughout the summer just ended, her letters to Eva had brimmed with excitement in counting down the days until she finally saw Ireland: her only anxieties ever expressed being about whether her new classmates would like her.
Such anxieties about making friends proved ill-founded. In the ten days since Eva had travelled to Dublin to be present when Alex first arrived at the school, she had eagerly awaited Alex’s daily letters and rushed to the post office each afternoon to ensure that the child received replies by return of post. Alex had a gift for words, often enclosing small poems and drawings. Her letters were crammed with news about the other girls being fascinated by stories of Kenya, about how the winter clothing her father ordered from Cassidy’s department store in Dublin was still not delivered to the school, and about how much she was looking forward to finally spending a Saturday night in Eva’s caravan.
Eva’s giddy sense of expectation reminded her of being a twelve-year-old herself, barely able to wait for a promised treat back in Donegal. All morning she had been cleaning and re-cleaning every surface in the caravan, finding this the only way to stop herself running out to the gate of the caravan park to peer down the small lane in the hope that Alex would arrive early. The child was being driven down by a Mrs Conyngham – the mother of a classmate who lived beyond Wexford town. Alex was spending tonight with Eva, who would accompany her by train back to the school on Sunday afternoon before rushing to catch the last train back to Wexford. Mrs Conyngham had offered to collect Alex tomorrow afternoon, saying that a train journey to Dublin
and back in one day was too much for a pensioner. But Eva jealously guarded every second she could spend with Alex, who had expressed delight at a chance to see Wicklow by train. Besides, with her granddaughter now at the centre of her life, Eva no longer felt like a woman whose seventieth birthday was only a year away.
A car horn sounded at the gate and Eva needed to stop herself rushing out. She paused to check her hair in the mirror, then tried to walk calmly down the caravan steps and onto the grassy path. It was unusual enough for the grandmother of a pupil boarding in an exclusive Dublin school to live in a field, without the grandmother also acting like a madwoman. Eva’s composure only lasted for the few seconds it took Alex to scramble from the car and run towards her. They hugged like schoolgirls, simultaneously talking and laughing until Eva broke away to thank Mrs Conyngham. Alex remembered her manners, shaking hands with the woman and wishing her classmate a nice night away. They calmly waved as the car drove out of sight down the overgrown lane, but were only just waiting to be alone before starting to hug each other again, laughing and swapping stories.
‘Show me the two cats,’ Alex said eagerly. ‘I’m dying to pat them.’
When Alex entered the caravan, Eva saw how she had inherited Hazel’s way with animals. Another child might have rushed over to Queensly, who had been joined on the blankets by Martin Buber – a stray old tomcat who found his way into Eva’s life over the summer and whom she named after one of her favourite philosophers. Instead, Alex dropped onto her knees and gave the softest purr, patiently waiting until Queensly decided to approach. This allowed Eva the chance to study her granddaughter. Physically she would grow up to be as tall and beautiful as Hazel, but their personalities seemed different. Alex possessed her mother’s inner toughness but seemed less highly strung. The fault-lines always waiting to surface in Eva’s relationship with Hazel felt absent. Queensly eventually rose and cautiously padded over to brush against Alex’s legs. The girl patted the cat’s arched back, then examined all the food which Eva had prepared and laid out on the low table.
‘You’ve gone to too much trouble,’ Alex said, shy suddenly. ‘There’s no need to spoil me.’
‘But I want to,’ Eva replied. ‘Let’s spoil each other.’
The girl laughed. ‘All right, Granny-Mum, you can spoil me if I can spoil you.’ Alex glanced back out the open doorway at the empty caravans in the field. ‘Have we the caravan park all to ourselves?’
‘Yes,’ Eva replied. ‘They are mainly owned by Dublin families, but once the school term starts people rarely bother making the trip. I was alone here all last winter.’
The elderly farmer who owned this field was initially weary of Eva living here all year round, perplexed by what to make of Eva’s accent. He feared taking in an eccentric who might become a charity case or create trouble. Although lured back to Ireland by the plans to have Alex educated here, Eva had no interest in ever again owning a house here, even if she could afford one. She had barely possessed the price of this caravan, but she liked the notion of a dwelling on wheels which could move as she moved. It gave her privacy, without anchoring her to one place. Old friends from Dublin and London could stay a few nights as they wished, but after all her travels what she really wanted was the chance to be alone with two cats for companionship and enough space to finally unpack all her books stored in a trunk for years. When locking her door on her first night in this field, Eva had felt a deep serenity. Frankfurt Avenue was the last place where she possessed her own front door and could genuinely lock out the world. But Frankfurt Avenue was always too big once Hazel and Francis moved out, with constant worries about keeping up appearances. A different type of sanctuary existed in this field, a liberating sense of being safe and yet remaining outside the ambit of normal life.
‘Show me the earwigs,’ Alex said, examining the bookshelves built by a local carpenter who had been baffled by Eva’s insistence on him using all the available wall space for shelving. ‘I laughed so much when you described them in a letter.’
‘I’m not sure they’re still here,’ Eva replied. ‘The holidaymakers who own those caravans would call me slovenly if they saw this, but earwigs don’t spread diseases or harm humans. I just think they have a right to live. They don’t disturb me and I never disturb them.’ From the top of the tall bookcase Eva carefully took down a brown envelope, inside which she had previously discovered a nest of earwigs. They now scurried around in panic at finding their small world jerked about. Alex peered into the envelope, fascinated.
‘I also laughed when I found them,’ Eva said. ‘Your late uncle Francis used to be so amused when I left another family of earwigs undisturbed on top of my wardrobe in Frankfort Avenue, although back then, if I remember right, the envelope they took up residence in was white and considerably larger. So I suppose both the earwigs and I have needed to downsize. Maybe family isn’t the right term for earwigs, but I see them as a family because earwigs are the only insects to harbour maternal feelings. The mother doesn’t abandon her eggs after laying them, but watches over them even after they hatch.’ Eva looked at Alex and smiled. ‘Not many people know that, but not many people can stand the sight of earwigs. I’ll put them in my bedroom if you’re uneasy about having them so close to where you’re sleeping.’
Alex smiled back. ‘I grew up surrounded by snakes, so why would some harmless insects bother me? They belong here. If mice or wild dogs found their way to this caravan, I bet you’d let them come in too.’
Eva needed to stand on her tiptoes to carefully replace the envelope on top of the bookcase without dislodging its tiny occupants. She leaned down to stroke Queensly who, having brushed her tail one final time against Alex, lazily came over to her. Seizing his chance, Martin Buber now cautiously padded across the rush mats on the floor to make friends with Alex. ‘Mice wouldn’t last long with these two cats,’ Eva said. ‘I always leave the skylight slightly ajar to let Martin Buber venture out on nocturnal hunting trips and he likes nothing better than to be sitting on my bed when I wake, proud at having brought me an offering of a dead mouse. You can’t expect cats not to be hunters when hunting is in their character. Animals are simple; they haven’t lost their way. Give them warmth and food and they’re content. Humans always feel that, no matter what they have, there’s something else they need to chase after in case they miss out. Humans have forgotten the secret of how to be content. Friends in Tangiers and Dublin keep asking me to go and live with them, but I’ve reached an age when I’m happier living on my own with just cats and earwigs and the wind coming in off the beach at night for company.’
‘Then I hope I’m not in your way,’ Alex said, suddenly anxious. ‘Do you mind me being here disturbing you?’
Eva laughed. ‘How could you ever disturb me? Anyway, we’re different when we’re young, before we lose our inner radiance. Occasionally, if people get lucky they never lose this radiance and I think you’re going to be one of those. You’re not disturbing me at all. The very opposite: you root me to this earth. You are the very reason I’m here. I can’t tell you how excited I’ve been, looking forward to this day: the most perfect I’ve known in years.’
Alex nodded deeply, looking carefully around as if trying to memorise every detail of the caravan. ‘I love it here,’ she announced. ‘I feel at home already. The only thing it lacks is a name. I always feel strange just writing down your name and the location of this caravan site when addressing the envelopes. We should give this caravan a name. We don’t need a name plaque at the door or anything. It can just be our secret.’
‘You christen it,’ Eva suggested. ‘Then it will feel like it belongs to you as much as me.’
The child cradled the black tomcat to her breast and walked over to sit on the long window seat that would be her bed. She pondered this quandary seriously for several minutes while stroking the cat, who settled contently in her lap. Finally she looked up, face lit with excitement.
‘The Ark,’ Alex said, ‘because that’s what it
is. It’s the cats’ ark and the earwigs’ ark and my ark. Kenya is so far away and sometimes I get homesick when I wake in the dormitory at night. But if I can think of a light shining in the window of this caravan in this field I won’t feel lonely knowing that you’re here, just seventy miles away. Seventy miles is nothing where I come from.’
‘The Ark.’ Eva nodded as if a solemn decision had been reached. ‘I’ll never refer to it as anything else, even though it’s not much of an ark. Barely space to swing a cat: not that Martin Buber would let you swing him.’
Alex laughed. ‘The name suits it. Some girls at school rattle on about their fathers owning things, but we can ignore such talk and be ourselves here. Like living inside an adventure. This Ark has everything we need.’ She hesitated. ‘Except a television.’
Eva’s heart sank. ‘I’ve never felt a need to own one even if I could afford it,’ she explained apologetically. ‘I listen to the BBC World Service, but you’d probably find that dull. However, we can find the foreign station that plays pop music: Radio Luxembourg, isn’t it? But I’m sorry if you’re missing all kinds of television programmes by being here.’
‘Most programmes I’ve seen in Ireland are silly and I prefer reading,’ Alex explained. ‘I devour books. But it’s just that Kipchoge Keino is running in the steeplechase this afternoon at the Olympic Games. For months all of Kenya has been talking about him. After what happened last Tuesday the races probably don’t seem important anymore, but as the Olympic Committee President said, the games must go on because no matter how dark life gets, we still need to go on living.’
The child went very quiet. Eva knew that Alex was not just speaking about how the Olympics in Munich had been overshadowed by the massacre of Israeli athletics by terrorists earlier this week. Alex’s words bought the weight of their shared private tragedy into the sunlit space of this caravan. She imagined all the nights when Alex surely lay awake in Kenya, grieving Hazel’s loss, at this age when more than ever the girl needed a mother to confide in. Eva had endured so many losses, but this was no time to be ambushed by grief; this was the time to be strong for her granddaughter and rejoice in the miracle of them being together here. Eva sat on the window seat beside Alex and took her hand.
An Ark of Light Page 29
