Eva had known good years in Turlough, although last spring she had wept following Maureen’s death from cancer in Castlebar Hospital. Maureen’s sister Kate was doubly distraught at the funeral. The only reason why her husband, Jack, looked well enough to stand by Maureen’s graveside was due to the steroids that were just about keeping the more visible symptoms of his own cancer at bay. Jack’s cancer claimed him two weeks before Eva left Turlough, with Kate occasionally turning up at Eva’s caravan during his final illness – not to talk, but to escape from having to talk to daughters and daughters-in-law who fussed around her when what she really needed was the space to sit in silence. It was a space that she knew Eva would unquestioningly allow her. Kate wasn’t the only elderly woman to discreetly visit The Ark. Often they had nothing in common with Eva, but they knew how she understood the loneliness of grief or the loneliness of being trapped inside the silence of a soured marriage. In her presence, they no longer needed to keep up the brave face they showed to the world. These women no longer saw her refusal to eat meat, take prescription medicine or attend doctors as quite so eccentric. She deliberately never handed out homeopathic remedies to any caller, but referred people to a Castlebar chemist who was being asked for so many remedies on Eva’s recommendation that he had started to study alternative medicine.
Not all of her visitors were brow-beaten by life. Over the years, she made huge numbers of young friends in Mayo, like the social worker responsible for checking on Eva from the Health Board in Castlebar, who rarely turned up alone at The Ark, but invariably brought out some new girl just starting work at the Health Board. These exuberant young women often treated Eva as a surrogate grandmother, asking her intimate questions about relationships that they would never dare ask their own grandmothers. They formed a habit of popping in at unexpected times to seek Eva’s opinion on a new outfit when setting out on an important date or to show off a new boyfriend, invariably phoning Eva afterwards to ask her what she thought of him. Some evenings the Health Board girls called in for no reason, beyond the chance to steal a moment away from their busy lives, when they could chat with her other random callers, their young voices filling up The Ark with laughter.
These were just the local callers. What truly astonished Eva was how the most unlikely faces from her past somehow found their way to that field in Turlough: pupils from her art classes decades ago or travellers whom she once befriended in Morocco or at the Quaker hostel in London. These visitors seemed to feel such a connection to Eva that she would have barely got over her joy at seeing them again before they picked up the threads of past conversions as if the intervening decades were no more than the blink of an eyelid. It was in Turlough that she saw Alan for the last time, when Francis’s school friend turned up on a walking stick, clean-shaved for the first time in decades and so gaunt that his features seemed oddly boyish. He preferred to sleep in a hotel in Castlebar rather than on the window seat, as in past visits, because – as he wryly told Eva – his body was like a census form: broken down by age, sex and religion. Trying to hide her apprehension at his appearance, she teased him by saying that his remark implied there were all kinds of exciting new men in his life.
‘One man only and only fleetingly,’ Alan had replied with a sad smile. ‘Indeed, I’m so out of practice that the whole sex act was rather perfunctory, like a sudden sneeze that came so quickly it caught me off guard. But the chap left such a lasting impression that I fear he will be the death of me. The doctors tell me I have it, Eva, the illness none of my friends want to talk about. It’s so ironic. All my life I was a cautious mouse, but loneliness can make even a near hermit throw caution to the wind just once. I should have stuck to Thomas Mann in bed liked I planned. I wouldn’t mind so much if the chap hadn’t been such a plain Jane to look at. He really should have had drop-dead gorgeous eyes to die for. The doctors give me six months but death is a singularly inexact science. On the journey over here, I had it in my head to ask you whether you wouldn’t mind – after the ghastly business is over and I’ve been cremated – if I could have my ashes posted over and you might consider scattering them in that wood where you scattered Francis’s ashes. It would be nice to be with him: I always felt much better around Francis. But driving across the midlands I realised that Francis belongs here in the West and I don’t. The fact is, cremation isn’t something which Protestants involved in trade in Glenageary really do. Or maybe it’s all the rage there now – like homebrew – but it wasn’t a part of the Glenageary that I came from and the Glenageary I don’t seem to have ever quite escaped from, despite getting out as soon as I possibly could. There is space in the family plot in Mount Jerome Cemetery. I don’t expect you to attend the interment. It’s too far a journey at your age. You’d also need to bring Johnny, having never been separated from him since the day you found him, and I suspect that dogs are not among the usual attendees at Glenageary funerals. There may be no attendees because I can’t imagine anyone left in Dublin who knows me. But still, I shall be buried alongside my father who abused me when I was nine and my mother who caught him and warned me so severely to never tell a soul that I never did until this moment. I don’t know why I’m telling you but maybe I just don’t want to die with that old pain still festering inside me.’
By the end of this speech Alan seemed unaware that he was silently crying, with Eva so shocked that she was equally unaware of it until Johnny climbed onto the window seat and licked the tears off Alan’s face. This had made Alan laugh, as if at the absurdity of the situation, as he gently brushed the dog away. They had sat in silence for an indefinite time: Eva holding his hand and Alan squeezing her gnarled fingers so tight that they remained bruised for days afterwards.
If Alan’s final visit was the saddest occasion she had known during the time The Ark was parked in Mayo then perhaps the most exciting occasion was the arrival into her life of David Sumray, who turned up on her doorstep in Turlough three years ago, after returning to Ireland following a period spent in the Amazon rainforest. She had been friendly with David’s parents when she lived on Frankfurt Avenue: people on her wavelength who had raised their son to follow his star as an adventurer and dreamer. Eva had been mesmerised to hear David’s stories about his time in the Amazon rainforest: how he had cleared a space in a remote spot near a river and slowly proceeded to build a timber house, using techniques learnt from indigenous tribes, who could not speak a word of his language but shyly found ways to communicate with their visitor after realising what he was trying to do. When David ran out of money and needed to leave the rainforest to seek work, they never touched his unfinished dream house. He would return with provisions in a flat-bottomed boat and recommence his solitary task. Because he loved the feel and the mystery of timber, the construction of this house consumed him. When it was finally completed, David had travelled to the nearest town to send invitations to numerous friends across the globe, suggesting that they join him on a certain date for a house-warming. He could not believe how many people arrived by divergent routes, all somehow managing to follow his directions. The party lasted for days that merged together: the world beyond the rainforest temporarily forgotten by everyone present. When the party ended and the last guest left, David realised he had no reason to stay. His dream was to build a house, but not to be burdened by living in it. He had left the door ajar as he pushed his boat away, hoping that some future traveller might chance upon it.
On his first visit to Turlough, this young man, who was only a child when Eva last saw him, talked at great length about his next dream, which was to restore an abandoned schoolhouse in Wexford. On subsequent visits, he always assured her that there would be space for her caravan in the field adjoining his schoolhouse if she ever needed it. David was so much on her wavelength that when Eva was asked to leave Turlough, it was David to whom she turned for help. Unhesitatingly, he arrived within days to tow her caravan here to this overgrown field to allow her to continue to lead an independent life at her own snail-like pace. Sh
e missed the easy stroll to Bridie’s shop but felt secure here, held tight in the care of this young couple. For now, Eva’s dream of Costa Rica would have to remain a dream. But here she had time and space to sit and read and slowly write letters in thick black marker, to meditate and leave open the channels of her imagination to supersensory experiences.
Not that she didn’t need to keep both feet firmly on the ground at eighty-seven. It was vital to concentrate fully when completing her daily chores, like emptying out buckets of hot ashes on the grass and taking Johnny for the daily walks that he still needed, even if they could both only walk a fraction of the distances they once traversed each evening. Eva was finding each winter increasingly difficult. Even when wearing her hernia belt, she needed to wheel her supplies purchased in the health food co-op in Wexford very slowly and carefully in a battered shopping trolley, finding it hard to cope with the extra weight of the library books she was constantly changing, as the library staff valiantly coped with trying to find the obscure books she requested from them. It was vital to remember to carry in only four peat briquettes at a time because if her hernia strangulated it would mean an immediate operation. In hospital she would be powerless to prevent doctors poisoning her body with antibiotics. At least in The Ark she could still nurse herself through colds or flu with the natural remedies whose properties she had first learnt in the Culpeper’s herbal store in Winchester. These remedies took far longer to work than the drugs manufactured by the multinational pharmaceutical companies, but contained no poisonous side effects. The old people on the bus that she took into Wexford each Wednesday laughed when she said this, but then questioned her about homeopathic treatments for their own aches. In her few months in Wexford she had grown to love the comedy on this bus journey: the passengers being almost exclusively pensioners with free travel who boarded the bus as much to gossip and joke with each other as to go shopping in Wexford. These pensioners immediately made Eva feel welcome in their midst because, even if she were a blow-in with what they considered to be odd ideas, she had lived through the same harsh decades they had known. But it wasn’t just old people who afforded her this welcome. The young artists who used David’s schoolhouse as their studio also adopted her. Most had little money and needed odd jobs to buy themselves the time to paint, but their enthusiasm for life made her feel young. When they invited Eva up to the schoolhouse for a party to welcome her, one of them – a poet and painter named Andi who produced beautiful hand-stitched books of poems about the sea – embarked on such a riotous dance that it culminated in him joyously somersaulting off the walls before landing at her feet with a bow.
Their openness and innate understanding of who she was contrasted with the young Health Board official sent to assess her when Eva arrived in Kilmore. Eva accepted that recently her caravan had grown shabby, but because she never measured wealth in terms of what she possessed but only in terms of what she needed – and because she needed very little beyond books and food and writing material – Eva had never considered herself destitute until this young official briskly began her interview, which felt like an infuriated interrogation. Eva realised that she had been spoiled by the interest taken in her by the Health Board girls in Castlebar, who treated her more like a friend than a client. This immaculately coiffured young woman with makeup as thick as body armour had prissily perched on the window seat as if fearful that her outfit might become stained by sitting there. It was such a shock because young people were normally so engaged with life and open to new ideas that welcoming them into The Ark was a pleasure. But the more that Eva tried to make her life fit into the neat boxes on the official’s form, the more she was made to feel like a daft old woman burdening the local authorities by having the audacity to plant herself here. At the end, when the young official finished her inquisition of endless questions, Eva did not rise from her armchair to see the visitor out but sat alone and just for once succumbed to tears, remembering her parents’ hopes for her. The young artist who once enrolled in the Slade School had become an arthritic old woman, humiliated by a slip of a thing from the Health Board. Johnny had rested his old head on her knee and whined at seeing her so upset.
Even now, three months later, the memory of that interview made her feel dirty. But Christmas Eve was a night for repose and not regret. How long had Eva allowed herself to sit here by the light of this single candle summoning up memories? She might have remained lost in thought if another sound had not permeated her thoughts, bringing with it a frisson of unease. Eva realised that she was listening to that same noisy car engine circling around these isolated roads again. But she refused to sit here in fear, turning herself into the pitiful creature the haughty Health Board official had categorised her as. Johnny needed to make his last trip outdoors to cock his leg. She opened the door and watched Johnny limp down the concrete steps. The noisy engine was still out there. Surely it must just be a visitor having trouble locating the church. Johnny limped slowly back up and Eva closed the door. But the dog had barely returned to his armchair before he raised his head to stare quizzically at her. Eva knew that the dog wasn’t quite sure if he heard something, because, like her, his hearing was going. They made for a right arthritic pair, she thought, both straining to listen. Perhaps it was a ghost. She recalled lying in bed on a Christmas Eve eighty years ago, awaiting Mother’s step up the staircase in Dunkineely, and the rich scent of the hand lotion she always used after gardening as she gently stroked Eva’s hair on the pillow.
But this was no ghost because Eva could now hear the noisy engine again, drawing so close that it was hard not to be frightened. Through the window she saw headlights sweeping over the deserted schoolhouse. Then the engine and the lights died. Eva had reason to be scared. Recently there had been a succession of violent robberies on old people who lived alone: elderly bachelors beaten with sticks and hammers, their mattresses ripped asunder in pursuit of any mouldy banknotes hidden away for safe keeping. She took several deep breaths, steeling herself for whoever might be about to break in. Ever since discovering how isolated this field was, she had prepared herself for such an eventuality. She would need to stay calm and tell the intruders that she had no money but they were welcome to take anything else they found. It was important not to panic them into violence. If they did attack her then there were worse places to die than her own home, with at least the horror of having to one day enter a nursing home being avoided. But while the cats would flee out the skylight, Eva simply could not bear the notion that violence might be inflicted on poor Johnny, who would never abandon her. Maybe it would have been better if she and Johnny had been burnt alive last month when she had stumbled with a lit candle and accidentally set the curtains alight before she managed to put them out. Such an inferno would have at least have been brief and left behind no unfinished business except the two cats that surely Jacquie would take in.
Through the window, Eva watched as a torch traced its way along the rough path through the long grass. It could be a friend of David’s checking on her, but she had asked him not to bother returning this evening. The torchlight stopped as if the holder were sizing up the situation. Then it shone slowly over the caravan: the beam blinding Eva so that she needed to look away to see Johnny’s tail down, as it so often was recently. The seconds stretched out as the torch-holder made their way around by the side of the caravan, until a knock came on the door. There was no point in trying to keep it shut when it could so easily be prised open by a crowbar. Slowly Eva opened the door, blinded again by the torchlight until the beam was switched off. The darkness seemed magnified beyond the weak light emerging from the doorway. In the arc of light, looking awkward and embarrassed in a long winter coat, she recognised Kate, Maureen’s sister from Turlough, standing there with a bag at her feet.
‘Kate? Is that really you, Kate?’
‘It’s me all right, Mrs Fitzgerald. I’m after running away.’
‘From what?’
‘What do you think?’ the widow replied. ‘F
rom Christmas. For weeks my daughters keep quarrelling about whose house I should go to on Christmas Day, but with Jack dead I just want to be left alone. Grandchildren don’t want to see their grandmother in tears when they’re sitting down to their big dinner. I asked myself what would Maureen do, and then it came to me. She’d have driven down to you to escape the whole circus. I remember you were always a great woman for the birdwatching.’
‘I still am.’
‘I’ve always liked birds myself, leaving out bread for them and watching out to see if any new bird flew into the garden. I never went birdwatching or anything like that because I didn’t want people to think I was soft in the head, but I always envied you going off for the day with your big binoculars, the size of something that Rommel would have carried. Am I an awful woman to be intruding on you like this? Have you plans for Christmas Day?’
‘I’ve no plans at all,’ Eva said. ‘Would you care to spend it here?’
‘To tell you the truth, Mrs Fitzgerald, I’d love that. I’ve spent the past hour circling these roads trying to find you and I was scared I’d have to drive back to Mayo.’
Johnny came to the door, his tail up, recognising an old friend. He knew there would be talking, with tea made and biscuits for him. Kate bent to hug him, stiff from her long drive. ‘My other bag is in the car. I didn’t want to just presume, you know.’
‘We’ll walk up together later and fetch it,’ Eva said.
‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’
‘It’s absolutely wonderful. Isn’t this exciting? How brave of you to run away.’
Kate laughed. ‘There will be hell to pay. My name will be muck when I return. They all only mean good and would do anything for me except leave me alone. That’s what I feel since poor Jack died, utterly alone. So if it’s no trouble I’d sooner be all alone with you. We can have any class of Christmas we want, with no young fusspots trying to jolly us up.’
An Ark of Light Page 37
