An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  Eva smiled as she patted her hernia belt. ‘Sure, we’re young ourselves still.’

  The stove was almost out, but a few more peat briquettes would soon have it ablaze. Eva lit the candles and put on the kettle. The two old women forgot about their tragedies and laughed at the idiosyncrasies of young love as they opened the stove door and held out thick slices of bread to make toast in the old way. Johnny dozed peacefully on the window seat between them. For all his arthritis, Eva knew that he would love a run tomorrow when they would have themselves a Christmas to remember, driving out on the Wexford slob lands where nobody would ever find them, to watch Greenland geese. She could almost hear Alex saying, with her beautiful young laugh: ‘Look Granny-Mum, the roof may be nearly caving in, but I named it well. The wounded are still finding their way here. It’s still an ark in the fields.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Last Cat

  Kilmore, Co. Wexford, Autumn 1995

  Last night, the struggle to continue living in this caravan ended when the last of her cats finally died. He was in such pain that Eva had needed to use the dregs of her chloroform to put him down. She lay awake for most of the night: his small corpse against her breast, forced to accept that – with all the animals in her care now dead – this dilapidated dwelling could not be called an ark. Its roof leaked in two places: buckets placed to collect the drops of rainwater. Even in dry weather, the aluminium walls were now so damp that many books were succumbing to mould. For weeks she had been carefully selecting which unblemished ones to give away as gifts to visitors, being guided in this task by the memory of how thoughtful Francis was in making up parcels of his books to bequeath to friends. The empty bookcases gave The Ark a curious echo, but letting go of possessions was a necessary part of the process of preparing for her eventual death. Eva did not know how long more she had: she just knew that she finally needed to accept the advice of her friends and leave behind this sanctuary. In recent days, the majority of her possessions had already been moved to a small County Council bungalow in a nearby remote hamlet. Eva had resisted leaving The Ark until now because it was the only home her cat ever knew, and it was hard enough for him to be dying without also suffering from the anxiety of being disorientated. But when David came to check on her this morning, Eva had sent him off to fetch a spade. She now sat alone during these final moments in The Ark on the window seat that was once Alex’s bed, awaiting his return, finally ready to acquiesce to the inevitability of time.

  For a year now she had known in her soul that it was impossible to continue this struggle. Her legs were as thin and brittle as sticks. Last month, she tried to cut down some tall nettles growing near her caravan, not realising that they were screening a hole until she tumbled into it. It had happened just after dawn, when nobody was stirring in the independent hostel which David now ran in the old schoolhouse a few hundred yards away: the art studios needing to be closed because every old classroom was required for guests. Eva had resisted the urge to call out for help from those guests, knowing that if she managed to eventually wake someone, it would probably be some foreign backpackers with little English who would not know what to make of the situation. They would have only made it worse by phoning for an ambulance to whisk her away into the maelstrom of a crowded Accident and Emergency ward that would feel like a prison. Instead she had strained every shred of willpower to haul herself out of that hole, inch by agonising inch, her hand further stung by nettles as she somehow found the strength to mount the caravan steps: the sickly elderly cat circling around her, meowing in distress. Consulting her homeopathic books on how to keep the bruising down, Eva had declined to mention this latest fall to the various kind friends who checked in on her over the following days, because every time that people found her collapsed it only increased their concern for her to leave The Ark.

  It was the quest to find Johnny after he went missing last year that drained the remaining strength from her legs. For six days, Eva walked every side road in search of him: her friends driving around at dusk to search for her and eventually persuade Eva to let them drive her home. The whole parish helped to look for her half-blind dog after he wandered off. Eva had babbled on fretfully to these kindly neighbours about fearing how someone working for a pharmaceutical company might have kidnapped him to use in some excruciating animal testing experiment in their torture chambers of diagnostic laboratories: Johnny ending up as trapped and friendless as Brendan, decades ago in that gulag. But this had only been her way of keeping her worst and most irrational fears at bay, by mentioning them aloud. In her soul she had known the truth was more prosaic: Johnny was simply following the instinct of all dying animals.

  To ensure that the herd was not forced to leave the lair after one of them died and the body started to rot, animals who sensed their time had come often slipped away like this to await death on their own. It was for her sake that Johnny had limped back out to the wet, lonely ditches from which she once rescued him as a starved beaten pup. During his last week in The Ark, Johnny constantly whined at the door, wanting to be let outside to stand trembling on the wet grass, tail down, staring at the moon. Poor Johnny Joe-Joes, her truest friend. Initially, after his disappearance, Eva felt unable to stay in The Ark without him. Even when neighbours brought her home at nightfall, Eva would slip out again by the light of a handheld torch, stumbling and falling and picking herself back up as she called his name aloud along the tiny roads they both loved. When she eventually accepted that Johnny was not coming back, Eva was touched by how many local people called to sit with her while she wept like she had not wept since Alex died. Her loneliness without Johnny was intense, yet she had needed to embrace this isolation because her great fear had always been that she might die before the last of her pets, lest they suffered neglect in her absence. Today she could finally put that fear to rest: when Eva buried this dead cat after David returned with his spade, her last duty would be completed in The Ark.

  At ninety-three years of age, the prospect of again living in a house frightened her after years of seclusion in the fields. David and Jacquie had asked her to come and live with them, but her soul needed its independence. Over the past year, a local woman, Brenda, had become her great protector. Eva admired her strong stance against cruelty to animals locally, how she stood up to farmers and to Department of Agriculture officials if they showed reluctance in enforcing laws to protect livestock. It was Brenda who forced Wexford County Council to provide Eva with a tiny bungalow in the nearby hamlet, Brenda who raised funds to furnish it and Brenda who organised the clean-up after the previous tenants left. From now on, Eva would no longer need to fret about The Ark toppling over in winter gales. She would have a paid home-help calling in for one hour each day and dry shelving for those of her books for whom she had not yet found the right recipient. So why was Eva – who never feared change and had so often moved home in her life – dreading the moment when David transported her remaining books and papers and her solitary two suitcases of clothes to this small dwelling amid a dozen similar bungalows occupied by families she didn’t know?

  Not that she intended to stay long in that small Council bungalow. It would be a staging post, providing breathing space in which to regain her strength and plan her final move. What she really longed for was a chance to finish her life among young people who shared her beliefs. While physically unable to march in demonstrations anymore, she dreamed of being allowed to sit in the offices of an animal rights movement and slowly compose handwritten letters of protest in thick black marker, still able to fight at her snail’s pace for what she believed in. If only she could be allowed to occupy even the smallest corner of such a campaign office, it would keep her in touch with young people, just like living here in this caravan had done for the past five years.

  Eva had lost track of how many fascinating visitors from around the world had stayed in David’s hostel: curiosity causing many to wander down the field to find out who lived in this caravan. Sometimes girls who
had travelled alone across India had tapped at her door to ask if they could sketch her. Their sense of unencumbered joy reminded her of Jade, to whom she once gave Francis’s hat as a gift when the young Londoner was setting off to explore the world. Or sometimes it was young men with barely any English, content to simply sit for a few moments, gazing around at her books and paintings as they stroked her cat, which had loved to curl up on visitors’ laps. They were young seekers after truth, intrigued to discover an old woman who had read the same books they were now discovering and once enjoyed the nomadic life they now led. Visitors living out their dreams, who possessed little money and who occasionally baffled her with wild talk which made her suspect they might be high on some narcotic, and sometimes overstayed their welcome, or who sometimes betrayed how Eva’s stories had started to bore them. But they were young people who had made her laugh with their zest for life and who filled up her caravan with their laughter. People to whom she never needed to explain her life, because this ark made her seem like a fellow traveller. Eva recognised that the caravan was now dilapidated: its insulation so poor that the cold crept into her arthritic bones, no matter how many layers of clothes she threw over her makeshift bed. But it had still always acted as a beacon, luring in exciting new visitors. Eva knew little about the isolated hamlet she was moving to, but she doubted if such unusual visitors would stumble across her in that bungalow where she would now live in far more comfort, but her life would lack any context.

  Eva gazed out the window but there was still no sign of David returning with his spade. Sitting quietly, cradling the dead cat’s body on the window seat, she scolded herself for yielding to pessimism. Life had taught her how impossible it was to know what adventures lay ahead. How could she have imagined the extraordinary miracles that had occurred in this field? Like the evening when her sister Maud’s son turned up from Dublin, accompanied by a foreigner who embraced her, announcing that he was her Art’s Russian son, free at last to visit his late father’s homeland under perestroika. Or the miraculous letter which arrived after Eva told an Auckland backpacker about how a young New Zealand officer once wanted to marry her when Eva was only seventeen and he was recuperating from the Great War by staying with her family in Donegal. Eva never knew how the backpacker tracked Jack down in New Zealand, but one morning a letter arrived in handwriting that Eva still recognised three-quarters of a century later. Jack had married twice and known joy and tragedy in his life, but although he enclosed a recent photograph, Eva could not see him as this old man in his nineties. Holding his unexpected letter, she was able to conjure up his laughing face, aged twenty-two, his lips so close to hers that she could still recall her sense of being both thrilled and scared, on the cusp of womanhood.

  Or the night when a friend collected her from this field to drive to the Garter Lane Art Centre in Waterford, where the poet Paul Durcan was giving a reading and how, before the reading started, he presented her with a collection of his poems, Crazy About Women, all composed in response to paintings in Ireland’s National Gallery. From the stage, the poet spoke about how his lifelong obsession with painting had stemmed from magical childhood afternoons when his mother brought him to Eva’s art classes in 1950s Dublin. Paul’s reading gave her a sense, decades later, that perhaps she had not failed as a teacher after all, because just maybe the joyful chaos of her small studio had opened up a handful of children’s minds to new ways of seeing the world. Indeed, in recent years she was continually surprised by how the most unlikely people – often strangers on the street – claimed to have somehow drawn solace and inspiration from her. Perhaps her years of struggle had some small effect after all, although Eva could think of nothing special about herself. So maybe it was a case that her increasingly shabby ark retained something of the aura which each wondrous visitor left behind after they had sat here with her over the years. Maybe this was the aura which new visitors felt when they climbed up these steps. If so, it meant that her way of life only made sense out here in the fields.

  The prospect of a cul-de-sac of small houses filled her with dread. But she knew it would be selfish to remain here any longer, being a worry for all her friends by falling into bushes and nearly setting the caravan alight several times. She had lived in houses before. Brick walls would not feel strange once she got used to them. Her bird table was already erected in the back garden and she would leave extra nuts on the windowsill. For years now, wild birds had flocked around her caravan at dawn, some virtually alighting on her shoulders if she stood still for long enough after putting out the nuts and stale bread they feasted on. Perhaps in time these birds would eventually learn to seek her out in her small garden there. She would regain her strength by not having to endure the hardships of caravan life. She would have more time to read and think and campaign. She would try to blend in with new neighbours and make them understand her. But she would miss the open space where young friends could pitch their tents alongside The Ark. She would miss hearing Marcus from Turlough, who had grown into such a lovely young man, rise when it was still dark, on his visits to girlfriends, to walk to Kilmore Quay and watch the sun come up. Such friends would still visit her in this Council bungalow, but she knew that the psychic energy would feel different in an estate with blaring televisions and children aimlessly kicking football.

  Still, such a wonderful group of friends had gone to such trouble to arrange this move for her that it would be selfish to feel sad. She had to embrace the future, always remembering George Orwell’s words: ‘no bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit’. Eva rose and walked to the door as David’s car drove in through the small entrance at the hostel. Eva saw Jacquie in the passenger seat: a young child on her knee. It was typical of Jacquie’s generosity of spirit to come and support her in this leave-taking. They emerged from the car and David took a spade from the boot. All that remained in The Ark were ghosts whose whispering voices she could no longer hear. Eva could imagine those ghosts sitting there, shimmering shapes merging into each other: her departed fellow travellers on this long voyage. A song entered her head that Alex used to love, written by an interesting young thin-as-a-rake Englishman, about an astronaut stepping from his capsule into the infinity of space. The sun emerged from behind clouds, making the wet grass glisten so that Eva felt almost blinded. Standing as tall as her stooped shoulders would allow, Eva declined to look back as she stepped forth from The Ark, cradling the corpse of the last cat tenderly in an old white jumper.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Beethoven’s Ninth

  Co. Wexford, Autumn 1998

  Eva’s hands were now so stiff that trying to write even one postcard exhausted her, but she could still manage to read books slowly with the aid of a magnifying glass. The important things were to try not to get frustrated by life or panic about not being able to achieve something in every remaining day. Her bedroom light would be put out soon, although she saw little chance of getting any sleep in this nursing home. Strangers kept her awake by walking in and out of her room all night. The night nurse denied this, claiming that Eva was always asleep whenever she checked on her. But the staff presumed that everyone slept soundly. Eva suspected that this was because they drugged every other patient at night except for her. She was the only patient still with her wits left, the only patient who seemed to somehow always create a fuss and yet the only patient who could truly make the staff laugh. Eva was not complaining, because everybody here was kind, especially the matron who – being an Aquarius – understood her. Adjusting to life here was proving difficult and Eva had no intention of staying for much longer before resuming her travels. But she knew she would not have survived another winter in that bungalow if her friends hadn’t found her a bed in this small, remote Wexford nursing home.

  When she had first moved to that small estate, Eva used to occasionally wave from her window to the children kicking football on the green in front of her Council bungalow. At first the children ignored her, then some started waving back in exag
gerated gestures of ridicule. The tightknit instinct of people born within that community was strong and Eva was an outsider – albeit one who could rarely venture outside. On the last occasion when she tried to leave food for the birds on the bird table in her garden, she fell and lay on her path for twenty minutes. Her suspicion that some neighbours, reluctant to get involved, might possibly have watched her sprawled there, hurt worse than the physical pain she remembered when lying in nettles in that isolated field in Kilmore. But two men had eventually emerged from a nearby bungalow and very kindly picked her up. After settling her into a chair and satisfying themselves that no bones were broken, Eva had seen them glance askance at the books on her kitchen table about the occult and animal rights. They left, with Eva sensing that they seemed anxious not to get trapped in conversation with her.

  Nobody in that estate ever meant any unkindness: she just needed to accept that they thought differently to her. Some neighbours disliked her leaving out bread for the birds, claiming it attracted rats. People there watched television ceaselessly and gossiped about soap opera characters as if they were living people. But this did not make them peculiar: the longer that Eva lived there, the more she was made to feel that she was the peculiar one, living her life to the rhythm of an ancient unwound clock on the mantelpiece from which she had removed the hands and simply scrawled the word ‘NOW’ across its face. After decades of independent living, it had been perturbing to see herself being reflected back through the wary looks of people in this small community into whose midst she was parachuted. If ten years younger, she might have gradually been able to mix properly, slowly coming to understand her neighbours and make them understood her. But the increasing infirmity of old age hindered any such intimacy. When Eva once described a childhood tennis party to a neighbour and told the woman how she still respected her brother Art for giving away the family’s land to support communist causes, Eva slowly realised that the woman did not believe her story, finding the childhood world which Eva described so bizarre that she obviously imagined herself to be listening to the ramblings of a senile old woman. But when Eva’s once-privileged background became known, it increased her sense of feeling an outsider: people seemingly unable to grasp how Eva rejected her social caste. While some neighbours were baffled, others went out of their way to be truly considerate: none more so than one busy young mother whom Eva called ‘her guardian angel’, who found time to call in each evening to help sort out Eva’s bills and problems.