An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘Thank you.’

  He switched on his headlights, slammed the door and drove off. The gathering dusk seemed more pronounced after he was gone. Eva re-entered the freezing caravan, suddenly nervous on her own. It felt ridiculous to feel anxious in this place that was once home. But she had always slept in the house, with paraffin lamps and log fires lighting up familiar rooms. It was too dangerous to enter any part of the old house now except the basement. Eva had lost count of the number of fallen trees that had smashed onto the roof over the years. Last spring when she explored the basement with her granddaughter, they had climbed halfway up the back stairs to peer towards the rooms where Hazel and Francis once played as children, unsure if the floorboards would still take their weight if they tried to enter. On that trip she discovered how intruders had torn out the last Georgian fireplace with its black marble surround from the main bedroom. When dragging it across the hallway the floorboards had collapsed, plunging the heavy fireplace down into the haunted wine cellar below. Traces of blood had suggested that at least one intruder was injured, though since the Troubles started in the North, you were never sure what blood in a remote location signified.

  Tonight as she stared out of her window at this ruined house, Eva questioned the wisdom of returning to a place with so many ghosts. An anonymous pension in Morocco might have been better, somewhere warm for her arthritis and her soul. But she lacked the will to start travelling again. Finding some candles in a packing case she struck a match. It spluttered out and she had to close the caravan door before a match would stay aflame long enough to light two candles. Placing them on the low table, she sat back on the window seat, which she still thought of as Alex’s bed. It didn’t feel like an ark now, but the walls would look better when Eva’s pictures were re-hung and the shelves less bare after she unpacked her old books. Eva understood this routine of moving better than anyone, having spent much of her life doing it.

  Tomorrow would be time enough to start unpacking. The clock had not been wound for days, but she knew it must be around half past five. There seemed nothing else to do except get into her bed fully dressed and hope not to wake until morning. Eva ate some carob chocolate, because she felt she ought to. Then she opened the skylight to allow the cats to come and go. They were disorientated but would enjoy exploring the crumbling house to the consternation of mice who had found refuge there. The caravan felt even icier with the skylight open, but – apart from her concern about what might happen to her cats – Eva hardly cared whether she was found frozen to death here.

  This thought sounded self-pitying and therefore wrong. She remembered a D. H. Lawrence poem about how a bird could fall dead from hunger without having felt one moment of self-pity. But such stoicism was easy in print. In the past two months Eva had found that the solace of books failed her. Even Martin Buber’s great theological study, I and Thou, brought none of the comfort that one touch from his namesake, the missing tomcat, would have provided. But where philosophy failed, her body’s instinct for survival took over. Tomorrow she would try to uncover the pipes from the ancient water tank mounted on masonry piers behind the house and use the rainwater collected there for boiling.

  The two kittens scrambled up the empty bookshelves and jumped expertly through the gap in the skylight. But Queensly stayed behind, watching Eva with wise, compassionate eyes. The old cat climbed slowly onto Eva’s lap and settled down, seeking not to be patted but to offer what warmth she could.

  ‘Good mother puss,’ Eva said softly. ‘Wise old mother puss.’

  Queensly lifted her head to listen, then sprang off Eva’s lap to approach the door. Somebody was out there. Eva heard solitary footsteps crunch across the frozen grass. She remembered how Freddie had often returned alone to Glanmire during the last years of his life. Perhaps this was his ghost outside, about to enter that dark ruin with a bottle of Skylark whiskey in his pocket. But these footsteps lacked the peculiar sound which Freddie’s club foot used to make. The footsteps stopped outside the caravan. The voice that called out belonged to another time. It had aged greatly but was still unmistakable.

  ‘Mrs Fitzgerald? Are you in there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Eva replied, unsure if the voice was real.

  The door opened and a figure stooped her head to enter, stamping her wellington boots to inject some warmth into her feet. ‘Mother of God, Mrs Fitzgerald, you can’t just sit here getting your death of cold. Have you not even got a stove?’

  ‘I have,’ Eva said. ‘I just haven’t lit it.’

  ‘Well it’s high time you did.’ The young woman drew closer, only she wasn’t a young woman anymore. Maureen’s figure had become thickset, with glasses and permed hair that was tinted slightly blue. But her essence had not changed since the morning in 1939 when she stood before Eva as a girl in old clothes, ready to scrub down the flagstones on her first day as a maid here.

  ‘Is that really you, Maureen?’ Eva asked in wonder. ‘You went to America years ago. I often think of you enjoying every mod con.’

  ‘Ain’t I the dumbest woman in Christendom not to be over there still enjoying them? Instead I’m back living in my sister’s bungalow. My weekly highlight is bingo in Castlebar every Tuesday night. You remember my sister Kate, don’t you, Mrs Fitzgerald? She married Jack Dowling from out Carrowkeel way.’

  Eva nodded, recalling a barefoot child standing up proudly on her father’s ass and cart whenever Maureen’s father arrived with turf during the war. Freddie had always referred to Maureen as ‘that maid’, but during the war she had been like a younger sister to Eva and an older sister to Hazel.

  ‘Now let’s get a fire going before we turn into icicles.’ Maureen opened the cast iron stove to peer inside. ‘Mother of God, but you’re an awful woman, Mrs Fitzgerald. The fire is set and all if you’d only toss a match in it.’

  ‘I wasn’t cold.’

  ‘Are you codding me? A polar bear would need an electric blanket tonight. Will you not come up to Kate and Jack’s bungalow and stay with us?’

  ‘No.’ Since receiving the news from Kenya, nothing was able to touch Eva. If she cut her own wrists she would not have been surprised to find her blood too frozen to seep out. But now in Maureen’s presence she felt an infinitesimal stir within her, a foretaste of human warmth, like a hairline fissure in a sheet of ice.

  ‘Well, pass me the box of matches and we’ll make do here. We knew colder nights together in that old house during the war.’

  Maureen closed the skylight despite Eva’s protests, saying that if the cats wanted to come back in they could knock at the door like Christians. She rigged up a cylinder of gas and soon had a kettle boiling under a blue flame as she opened the stove again and added in larger sticks and some turf. Finding a fork among the cardboard boxes, Maureen knelt before the stove to toast a thick slice of stale bread.

  ‘I had every mod con in the States, true enough,’ she said. ‘A dishwasher, air conditioning and more television stations than you could shake a stick at. But some nights I’d have swapped them all for the chance to make toast on a fork by an open fire.’

  ‘When did you come back?’

  ‘Six months after my Frankie died from cancer. They introduced protective masks in the chemical factory where he worked twenty years too late.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Eva replied.

  ‘You would have liked Frankie. He was a laugh. Even with a name like Bergeson he claimed to be half-Irish. Bald as a coot by the age of forty and always smiling. He had a black man’s teeth and a Cavan man’s laugh.’

  ‘You’re still hurting over him,’ Eva said softly.

  ‘To tell you the truth, Mrs Fitzgerald, every week the loneliness hurts more. When I was a girl the nuns made it sound like I had only to hold a boy’s hand to fall pregnant on the spot. Frankie and I were thirty years sharing a bed without a sign of a child stirring, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Oh, I had the best of neighbours in Boston, but neighbours are no substitute for kin when you find yourself
alone. This toast is ready now. Where did you pack your butter?’

  ‘I’m a vegan now. I don’t eat butter.’

  Maureen raised her eyes. ‘Mother of God, won’t the cows be thrilled? They can enjoy a lie-in on Sundays. What do you eat so?’

  ‘A soya spread, when I can get it.’

  Maureen brought over the toast and two cups of black tea. The caravan was starting to feel warm. Queensly deserted Eva to settle on Maureen’s lap.

  ‘This is the high life,’ Maureen remarked. ‘Here I am, dining with the gentry.’

  Eva smiled. ‘I’m hardly gentry. I doubt if there’s a soul in the village who is poorer. Name anyone else living in a caravan.’

  ‘Where you live doesn’t change who you are. Folks around here still see you as a lady. That big fool of a truck pulling this yoke was spied coming through the village. The whole parish is wondering how you think you can survive up here. Now eat up your toast.’

  Eva put down the cup she had been holding between her hands mainly for its warmth. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘I know,’ Maureen said. ‘Food has lost any taste since my Frankie died. But I make myself eat. I can’t believe poor Master Francis and Miss Hazel are dead. I can see them still as children, roaming about the woods here. After Frankie died I found myself talking about him to strangers on the subway in Boston, to anyone who would listen. I couldn’t seem to stop blathering away. But a real lady like you wouldn’t do that. She’d suffer in silence, bothering nobody, stuck alone in a wood. Kate and I cried our eyes out for you when news reached Mayo about your granddaughter. You and I never had secrets during the war, Mrs Fitzgerald. If you’d like, you could talk to me.’

  Maureen’s fingers stopped stroking the cat and slowly entwined themselves with Eva’s gnarled fingers. Both widows sat in a silence broken only by the cat’s peaceful breathing. Then Eva spoke.

  ‘She was two months away from her fifteenth birthday and ever so beautiful. You never saw a child like her, Maureen, interested in everything, longing to embrace life. Every girl in her boarding school loved her. They envied her going back to spend the summer with her father in Kenya. It was such a simple thing to happen, to get an insect bite. But they had no antibiotics and she caught a virus out there in the bush, too far away to be rushed to any hospital. Everyone did everything they could, nobody was to blame. Everyone was heartbroken. I keep trying to be positive, Maureen. Alex will never face the problems you and I have, she’ll never grow old and lonely or lose her radiance. She was perfect and died perfect. I tell myself her death was quick and she didn’t suffer much. But my heart is broken beyond repair. Ten years ago I had a son, a daughter and a grandchild. I’d give my life gladly to have saved any of them. It makes no sense that I’m still here and all three are dead. Life is simply not fair.’

  Eva’s voice was quiet but she was crying. A kitten began to scratch at the door. Queensly stirred and stretched. Eva kept a tight hold of Maureen’s fingers.

  ‘But life isn’t fair, is it?’ Maureen said. ‘It’s not fair on those it takes or fair on those of us who get left behind. But what can we do?’

  Eva relinquished her grip and rose to open the door and let in the kitten. The faintest trace of blood stained his paws. Out in the dark he had been on a killing mission. Eva gazed out at the darkness.

  ‘We can live our lives,’ Eva said, ‘What other choice do we have? These mornings when I wake up – barely caring if I wake up – I feel oddly free. It’s a terrible freedom, but the freedom that comes from knowing there is nothing else that life can do to me: fate can have no more tricks up its sleeve. I’m numb with grief, Maureen. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel warm again. But I’m afraid of nothing now. My sleepless nights are over because life has nothing left to steal from me.’

  ‘Close over that door and keep out the cold,’ Maureen replied. ‘Remember the long nights during the war when we’d sit up talking, only leaving the house to fetch firewood? This time we can do it in reverse. We can sit out here on the lawn and only enter the house for firewood. There’s enough timber in that ruin to keep this stove going forever.’

  Eva laughed: a sound she had forgotten. ‘Won’t Kate be worried?’

  ‘She’ll think I’m off in Castlebar chasing after some bingo announcer with sideburns.’ Maureen’s smile could not prevent a glimpse into her own loneliness. ‘Jack will have the telly blaring full-blast at home. They can have a good bicker like married folk do and I’ll not be in their way. You tell me your story, Mrs Fitzgerald, and I’ll tell you mine. We’re two old ladies going nowhere fast. We’ve all the time in the world now.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Company

  Turlough, Co. Mayo, January 1976

  For several days now the black-and-white stray collie had skulked fearfully about in the high meadow at the top of the small field behind the Round Tower Bar, into which local farmers had helped to transport Eva’s caravan six months ago. The young dog disappeared into the bushes separating the field she was in from this meadow whenever anyone appeared along the isolated road where a five-bar gate marked the makeshift entrance to Eva’s latest home. But several times each day, hunger forced the dog to make abortive forays down through a flooded ditch that passed close by her caravan. From here a gap in the hedge might allow him to slink out from the ditch and raid the open bins in the back yard of The Round Tower Bar – the front entrance of which faced onto the single street that Turlough village possessed. This street consisted of two pubs, Bridie’s tiny shop that hadn’t changed in half a century, a garage with a disused petrol pump, a two-roomed 1920s schoolhouse and a scattering of houses.

  On every occasion when the dog made this excursion through the wet ditch, Eva sat quietly in her window, anxious not to frighten him. Once he even turned his head to bestow on her a timid, co-conspiratorial glance, before making himself small again in the ditch as he peered intently towards the bins that might contain scraps of food. Eva willed him on but inevitably his courage failed. The pub yard betrayed occasional signs of human life and the welts clearly visible on the dog’s back showed that, for him, people represented sticks and beatings.

  The collie was older than most puppies dumped on country roads in January by parents whose offspring had grown tired of their Christmas gifts. He looked like he had been systematically kicked and tormented by an owner who was probably a pillar of his community. It was possible that this dog had been wandering since New Year’s Eve: he was so lean that his bones were visible whenever he limped into view. Realising that he belonged to nobody locally, Eva had left food for him outside her door on one particularly freezing morning. But though she kept the door closed, the dog knew that Eva was inside the caravan and, being a person, he could not be sure of trusting her.

  Eva was aware of the danger of starting to feed him because she did not want to be burdened by the responsibility of another pet. Yet if he stayed living in the bushes, the local farmers would soon learn of this stray dog and consider him a menace to their sheep. But she could not bear to see him suffer, so on the next evening she carried food up to where her field joined the high meadow that had become his sanctuary. She placed it down, aware of him watching her from within the thick bushes. Only when dusk provided sufficient cover did he risk slinking out from the undergrowth. He approached the food cautiously, tail lowered as if convinced it was a trap that would result in another beating. After wolfing down every scrap, he stared at her caravan until Eva opened the door. Momentarily they scrutinised each other before he limped away.

  In contrast to the dog, Eva had experienced nothing but kindness in the fourteen months since returning to this Mayo village. During the weeks after her caravan was towed up the overgrown avenue to be moored on the unkempt lawn outside Glanmire House, Eva simply wanted to hibernate in the depths of winter, unnoticed by the world. But while she may have wished to hide away in a cocoon, the innate decency of her old neighbours ensured that she came through this worst period of grieving. Pe
ople tried not to be intrusive, but Eva noticed their protective attitude towards her within days of trying to settle back into Glanmire Wood. Maureen had just been the first and most frequent of numerous callers, returning the next day with her sister Kate and brother-in-law Jack: a ladder tied to his roof rack so that he could disappear into the foliage covering the side of Glanmire House to try and see if the ancient water tank was workable. Within weeks, all of Turlough had called to welcome her home. Middle-aged women who had last ventured up the avenue as barefoot girls were driven up it by farmer husbands, awkward in their Sunday suits. They brought small gifts and shyly mentioned their own sorrows to let Eva know how they understood her suffering. Every visitor insisted that she was too isolated up there without water or electricity. But she had not been ready to leave Glanmire Wood, even when conditions grew so harsh that she was snowed in and neighbours sent up their hardiest sons on tractors to check on her. It was hard living but the frozen whiteness of those woods had perfectly suited her sombre mood of mourning.

  When spring came, the farmer who owned this field behind the Round Tower Bar offered her a small site within the field to park her caravan for a peppercorn rent. The other local farmers who towed her caravan here refused all offers of payment. The Durcan family no longer owned the pub, but the new owners remembered her from the 1940s. The gate into her field was only a hundred yards from the gable of their pub, with Bridie’s small shop located on the other corner of this small junction. Eva’s location was screened from the pub and the road by bushes. It was near the village and yet private: just one street light visible outside a farmhouse at the crest of the bend, where the farmer’s wife told her to come with a jug for milk any time she wished.

  A week after moving into the field, Eva made her first trip into Castlebar and got caught in the drizzle and the dark when beginning the six-mile walk back to Turlough. The narrowness of the winding road perturbed her, although she hoped that motorists would spot her bright yellow oilskin raincoat and matching hat. Three cars passed, too close for comfort, before the fourth car halted. The driver – a local man who worked for Telecom Éireann by day and was a St Vincent de Paul volunteer at night – insisted on driving her to her gate and shining a torch across the rough path in the field to ensure she got safely inside The Ark. She thought no more about him until he returned with three of his work colleagues on the following Saturday morning. Armed with shovels and spades, they spent the entire weekend digging two trenches from the road right up to her caravan, installing electric cables in one and a hosepipe in the other so that, by dusk on the Sunday, The Ark possessed not only running water but electricity and a telephone. She would still need to empty out an Elsan toilet but this was no hardship. The work being done that weekend created a carnival atmosphere in the village: the owner of the Round Tower Bar constantly appearing with trays of ham sandwiches for the men and Bridie providing over-sweetened tea, caustic advice and grudging praise. Passing local motorists even stopped their cars to remove their jackets and take a turn at the digging, loudly discussing local Gaelic football matches and politics. Eva had spent all the Sunday excitedly chatting to everyone present, praising their kindness, laughing at remarks and getting so caught up in the excitement that only later, after everyone had gone, did she realised how this was the first day when she had not been ambushed at some stage by such grief that she could do nothing beyond sit in silent despair.