Numerous visitors were due over the next two months before The Ark grew quiet again with the onset of winter. Donal would stay for three nights before an American arrived: one of the Vietnam War conscientious objectors Eva had befriended in the Quaker hostel. A French woman whom Eva met on Lundy Island was due to follow him and then Francis’s old friend Alan, recently returned to London after what Eva suspected was a lonely summer spent among other ageing gay men in Tangiers. At some stage, her old lodger from Frankfurt Ave, Camille, was promising to call by on route to Dublin from the cottage where she painted on Achill Island. Throughout this summer the most interesting people had slept on her window seat or camped out in the field. By some miracle her home had become an ark, just like Alex had christened it: a shelter where the most unlikely people felt drawn to come and talk – about their most precious dreams if young, and often about their most difficult personal problems if older. Perhaps they felt that nothing could shock Eva after all she had endured. These visitors included not only old friends and children of friends, but also hitchhikers passing down the mountainy road from Pontoon Bridge, with whom she fell into conversation. She sometimes invited them to pitch their tent in the small strip of field which the farmer had now fenced off around her caravan.
She had no idea who might be waiting outside The Ark when she got back today. With the tourist season slackening off, she was receiving fleeting visits from a handful of artists who had swapped conventional lives in Düsseldorf or Leipzig to eke out precarious livings trying to sell their work in remote cottages near Parke or Pidgeon Hill, painting or throwing ceramic vases on potters’ wheels in byres where cattle were once milked. Some easily bonded with elderly neighbours who were happy to just see another light in a window on lonely stretches of road. Others struggled to adapt, unable to grasp that the tranquil pace of life here came at the cost of losing some of the social efficiency they were accustomed to. Last week she needed to soothe, with homemade dandelion and elderberry tea, a Dutch potter who had been baffled by the abusive phone call from a staff member of the Connaught Telegraph who called her ‘an interfering mongrel fox blow-in’ for posting them back a copy of their newspaper, imagining they would be grateful that she had taken the time to painstakingly correct every typographical error by hand. Eva had laughed, saying that some locals probably considered her a blow-in, despite having lived here on and off since 1927.
The main street of Turlough was empty now as she led Johnny back up it on his lead. Soon it would teem with life, when classes ended in the primary school across the road. The younger children who spilled out loved to chat unselfconsciously to Eva, but this changed after they entered secondary school and grew too self-conscious to be seen talking to her. But some local children never lost their inner radiance: teenagers who resisted the herd instinct to avoid standing out. One was the daughter of the generous Telecom Éireann workman who arranged for his workmates to voluntarily install electricity for her when she moved into the field. Some months ago Eva heard a timid knock and opened her door to find his daughter standing there, having cycled from the far side of Castlebar to shyly show Eva the most marvellous poem she had just written. Eva would never forget how the girl blushed with shy pride when Eva praised it as a true poem, shot through with vitality and insight. Nor would she forget her own astonishment after the girl confessed that it was the first poem she had ever written, explaining how, until Eva arrived in Turlough, it had never occurred to her to write anything because there was nobody with whom she could have thought of sharing it.
Turning up by the gable of the Round Tower Bar, Eva saw a boy’s bicycle lying on the grass and a pair of knees belonging to someone sitting on the five-bar gate. It must be Marcus, a local boy who first turned up at her caravan on his fourteenth birthday to shyly ask if he could browse the bookshelves that he had glimpsed when passing the caravan. She had loaned him Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet on that visit, and when he returned it two weeks later he gave her a pirated cassette recording of an album called In the City by a new band called the Jam whom he urged her to listen to. Every time he visited her since then she left it up to him to select which books to borrow, while accepting his gifts of homemade cassettes of David Bowie and a Dublin band named The Radiators from Space. Once he overcame his initial shyness, she realised that Marcus had an intellectually curious mind, fascinated by ideas his classmates could never comprehend. Some locals found their friendship strange enough without pop music blaring from The Ark during his visits. But from the animated way in which he discussed each song he played for her, Eva recognised how this local boy was baring his soul. These songs were his code to emotions he did not yet possess the vocabulary to express. Marcus heard Johnny’s bark and leaned forward on her gate to wave. Eva waved back and hurried to meet him, hoping that Donal would not arrive until Marcus was gone. She wanted to give them both the attention they needed.
The journey of the Unidare lorry through Kinnegad and Mullingar passed uneventfully. Outside Ballymahon, a motorist alerted the driver that the wooden spools were coming loose by frantically beeping his horn. The driver pulled over on the narrow road and Donal climbed up onto the back to help retie the safety ropes: the heavy braided cords cutting in his palm as the driver urged him to knot them tighter. He dropped Donal a mile beyond Roscommon town, responding to his shouted thanks with the same inconspicuous nod with which he had greeted Donal at dawn. From here it should have been a short hitchhike through Castlerea and Claremorris and on to Castlebar, but because of Donal’s long hair and beard, his flared jeans and faded army jacket, few motorists seemed inclined to stop. Those who did were often elderly farmers only going a few miles out the road but glad to have someone to talk to for the ten minutes it took before they left him at isolated bends where it was even more difficult to persuade speeding cars to halt. It was dusk before he reached Castlebar. He began to walk out towards Turlough as the darkness grew: cars refusing to stop and some passing so close to him on the twisting road that he feared being knocked down. He had little real idea of where he was going. The only address he had consisted of four words: ‘The Ark, Turlough, Castlebar.’ Exhausted from walking, he sought directions at a bungalow. The middle-aged woman who answered his knock regarded him with initial suspicion when he sought directions to The Ark.
‘The what?’
‘The Ark. Mrs Eva Fitzgerald lives there.’
‘Do you mean the caravan behind the Round Tower Bar? Why didn’t you just say so?’
Until then, Donal hadn’t even known that The Ark was a caravan. The woman sized him up with circumspection.
‘And what business have you with Mrs Fitzgerald?’
‘She is my friend.’
This sounded like an exaggerated claim for someone Donal had not yet met, but something in his tone made the woman relax her guard and nod with a shy smile.
‘My aunt inside mightn’t think so, but if that’s the case I hope you know how lucky you are. Walk on for another mile until you reach Turlough village. Swing left up at the small road just before the pub. You’ll see a gate into the field where she lives.’
Footsteps sounded down the hallway and an elderly woman appeared dressed in black. ‘What mightn’t I think? What are you saying about me? Who is this fellow and what does he want at this hour?’
‘He’s seeking directions to Mrs Fitzgerald’s caravan.’
‘And when did I ever say a bad word about Mrs Fitzgerald? Apart from the time she arrived here looking for us to take some mongrel dog before she adopted him or he adopted her.’
The two women seemed so caught up in their private conversation that they almost forgot Donal standing there.
‘You often say that, for the life of you, you can’t understand head nor tail of her.’
‘It’s true. I don’t understand the woman, but it doesn’t mean I don’t like her. I didn’t even really mind her calling in here that time. I just got fussed in case you’d bring her into the front room because the two armchairs in th
ere were bought by my poor Tommy at an auction that gombeen, Devlin, held at Glanmire House, the year when May McLoughlin’s son was among the Irish troops sent off to keep the peace among them Balubas in The Congo.’
‘None of us understand some of Mrs Fitzgerald’s peculiar notions, but she’s a lovely woman.’
The elderly aunt shook her head, even more infuriated. ‘Did I ever say I had any problems with her notions? It’s not her notions I don’t understand.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘It’s her.’ She glanced suspiciously out at Donal. ‘This is not your business, sonny, so don’t go telling tales to nobody.’
‘I won’t,’ Donal assured her, slightly alarmed.
The black-clad woman turned to her niece. ‘All I ever said is that I don’t understand how she can go about walking for miles every day, chatting and laughing with everyone she meets. Such laughter isn’t natural.’
The niece threw her eyes to heaven. ‘God forgive you, you’d provoke a row even if you were just trapped by yourself in a paper bag. What’s wrong with Mrs Fitzgerald’s laugh? She has a lovely laugh.’
‘What’s wrong is that she has no right to still be laughing. You wouldn’t understand with your husband still alive and your children doing well across in London. You don’t see me swanning about laughing since Tommy died, do you? Maybe your generation never heard of decorum but we did. She’s lost far more than me and it’s not natural for her to gad about so carefree. I’m not criticising her. I’m just saying it shows a lack of respect to those you’ve lost.’
‘So you’d sooner she was an old misery guts sitting in the corner, would you?’
‘I don’t just sit in a corner. I do things too, but I do them with some decorum.’
‘I never called you a misery guts.’
The elderly woman retreated down the hallway. ‘You didn’t need to. Give that boy a glass of milk for the road, bet you he’s parched. Mrs Fitzgerald has daft notions about cows and probably won’t have a drop in the caravan.’
The middle-aged woman looked at Donal and shrugged. ‘Don’t mind her. Every time she meets Mrs Fitzgerald she walks away beaming, looking ten years younger.’
She closed over the door and reopened it some moments later with a glass of milk. Donal drank appreciatively, then listened to her directions again and set off with a renewed sense of vigour. The last mile was less dangerous as the road straightened out. He came to a small cluster of street lights, a garage with a single petrol pump and a tiny corner shop where an old woman shifted her gaze from a blaring television on the counter to appraise him caustically as he passed the open doorway. Reaching the junction beside the pub gable, he walked up the dark side road and located the five-bar gate mainly by touch. He might never have found it without directions because the field looked empty in the dark: the main caravan window facing the other way. The gate creaked when he opened it. This must have alerted whoever was inside the caravan. He was halfway across the field when a door was thrown open to reveal a tiny woman standing in the arc of light which spilled out. Her face lit up with incredulous joy at him having succeeded in finding his way.
‘You’ve found us,’ she said, laughing. ‘How marvellous you’re here! Isn’t life exciting?’
When darkness fell, Eva had grown anxious about the young hitchhiker and was relieved when Johnny lifted his head, alerting her to the creaking gate. Donal looked shy and uncertain as she welcomed him. A poor attempt to grow a beard could not disguise his age. Johnny made friends with him while Eva opened the stove door to toast a thick wedge of bread on a long fork held close to the flames. She could smell the peat flavouring the toast, which she heaped with butter and served to Donal with tea, using the unpasteurised milk she always got in a jug from a nearby farmer when she had non-vegan visitors. The important thing with shy people was to give them enough space to finally feel comfortable talking. For a while the boy focused his attention on Johnny, using the dog as a conduit to find his way into the world of this caravan. But soon he was examining her bookshelves and her most precious paintings and photographs. Although he tried to affect a sense of being streetwise, she liked how his wonder and innocence came out when she lit two candles and they began to talk. Donal lost his shyness when excitedly describing the broadsheets of local poets he had produced using a Xerox copier: a far less complicated process than the Gestetner duplicator on which Art used to produce his homemade pamphlets.
Three hours later Donal was still talking on the window seat with Johnny beside him and Queensly curled up on Eva’s knee. The table was covered with food she had bought in for him, old photo albums he asked to see and copies of new poems, which he read with great seriousness, his hand shaking as she sensed that this was the first time he had read them aloud and her response was vital, not in having to like everything he wrote, but in taking his dream of becoming a writer seriously.
His naïve determination came across as he talked of finding a factory job that would pay enough to feed him but not distract him from his real work as a poet. If a poet he admired, Francis Ledwidge, could labour as a road worker by day and cycle home to write poetry at night, then Donal felt sure he could combine poetry and factory work. But despite such animated talk, Eva worried about him surviving in factories. Art had coped on the Dublin docks because Art was physically strong and thrived on hard labour, regarding it as penance for his privileged upbringing. The tall willowy figure on her window seat didn’t look strong. Donal looked more delicate, like Francis. But perhaps he reminded Eva most of herself at his age, a dreamer who had enrolled in the Slade School of Art, not realising how her small flame of talent would be extinguished when exposed to the competitive reality there.
As with all visitors who found their way here, she said nothing to disillusion Donal as he laid bare his dreams. His art movement was indirectly subsidised by a weekly allowance from his seafaring father: money which Donal more frequently spent on producing broadsheets of other poets than on food for himself. With his father mostly away at sea, Donal had lived alone since the age of fifteen: three older married siblings regularly calling to ensure he was okay. He told Eva about sitting up writing on most nights until dawn and how, when unable to afford a new typewriter ribbon, he would continue to type poems unseen onto a blank page, knowing that a copy of the words would appear on a second sheet underneath this blank one, thanks to the carbon paper stuck between them.
Their immediate affinity made Eva wonder if they had been close in a previous existence, although, when she asked him, Donal claimed to have never previously thought about reincarnation. Eva suspected that perhaps he had half expected to meet a conservative old woman who did not possess books about Andy Warhol’s films. This was a reaction she sometimes encountered when shopping in Castlebar: some people shocked that an elderly widow would wear bright clothing or advocate radical causes. As Donal talked, his enthusiasm brought back Alex’s bright-eyed look. But his face changed when Eva inquired about the book on the supernatural which he had mentioned wanting to write in his newspaper interview.
‘I had to stop writing it,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m here under false pretences because you first wrote to me to say you knew Dermot MacManus. But I wanted to come to give you my book of poems anyway.’
‘You’re welcome for yourself, but why did you stop?’
He went quiet, searching for the right words. ‘I received such bizarre letters after the newspaper interview that I got scared. Two men from Meath wanted me to visit an old ring fort at dusk, where they claimed they had a strange experience when shooting rabbits with their dogs. They wouldn’t divulge what terrified their dogs, but said that they would only risk going back again if accompanied by someone like me who had studied the supernatural.’
‘Please tell me you didn’t go.’ Eva remembered her fears when Francis was young that, in his good-natured way, he could be lured somewhere by men who might overpower him. Donal was not gay but she had seen enough of life to know
that unscrupulous men sometimes preyed on young people’s naivety.
‘When I got their letter, I felt I should go with them, although I didn’t want to,’ Donal admitted. ‘You see, in the newspaper interview I wasn’t setting myself up as an expert on supernatural occurrences, but just someone who was curious. But the tone of the men’s letter made it sound like they would expose me as a fraud if I declined. So I wrote a reply to say that I’d get a bus to Navan on the night they suggested. I placed it on the hall table to post next morning and headed upstairs to bed. What happened next sounds crazy because I was alone in the house, but seconds after I closed my bedroom door something or someone hurled themselves against the bedroom door, almost knocking it off its hinges. I was almost too scared to open the door. When I did, the landing was empty. I didn’t know what had stuck my door with such force. But I sensed someone was trying to warn me. I went downstairs, tore up my reply to the men and abandoned any thought of such a book.’
‘Who do you think was trying to warn you?’ Eva asked gently, suspecting that he had never told another soul about this.
‘I think it was my mother. For years I thought her death hadn’t affected me because I was getting on with life, and on the outside, I didn’t seem to be suffering, not like I see my father suffer when he comes home on shore leave to the bedroom they once shared and hits the bottle hard at times because that’s what men do. He’s a good provider and a good man, but I see him marooned in grief so deep it makes anything I feel seem inconsequential.’
An Ark of Light Page 34
