But in the end, after two years of struggling to survive there, Eva had been simply unable to cope any longer. She deeply appreciated the efforts made by her friends to raise funds to get her into this nursing home, but nonetheless she had her own plans to escape and find a new sanctuary when the weather turned warm again next spring. Matron understood this and had promised to help Eva pack as soon as the forthcoming winter ended. Matron argued that spring would be the best time to move. Since Eva arrived here eighteen months ago, Matron was always encouraging Eva to stay on for just another three months, to gain enough strength for her next move. But next spring she would refuse to be fobbed off any longer in her determination to find a vegan nursing home somewhere, where only homeopathic doctors were allowed to attend patients, using acupuncture and herbal and Chinese medicine. Such a vegan nursing home would be a stubbornly independent institution and therefore not plagued by the curse of interfering health inspectors.
Eva tried to stay calm now, but the thought of these health inspectors made her long to rise and defiantly force open her window. She had been asked to keep this shut after Matron discovered Eva secretly leaving out bread for birds on her windowsill and grew alarmed that a Health Board inspection would close down the nursing home if the bread crumbs attracted mice.
From the outside, this nursing home, located on a bend on a remote country road, resembled two ordinary bungalows knocked into one. It was not luxurious but Eva liked its simple intimacy. Her fellow patients spent their time mostly dozing in the dayroom that Eva refused to enter. As Eva disliked communal activities such as bingo, she knew little about them. This caused her some guilt because she so deeply enjoyed meeting all of their visitors, who now knew Eva by name and always lingered in the hall to chat to her. Each afternoon, after being dressed in layers of old cardigans and a woollen hat, the nurses brought Eva out to lie on the sofa in the entrance hall. She had commandeered this sofa as her unofficial office, as it allowed her to greet everyone who arrived. Whenever Matron scolded her with gentle exasperation because of the voluminous quantity of documents which the nurses needed to bring out before Eva felt fully settled on her sofa, Eva always quoted in reply the Austrian Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, Vicktor Frankl: ‘Without a sense of meaning and purpose, a man will either be despairing or dangerous to himself and others.’ At ninety-six, Eva possessed so little time left that each day needed to be given a purpose. Today she managed to scrawl a protest card to the Irish Minister for Agriculture about the live export of cattle and to British Nuclear Fuels about their MOX facility in Sellafield. These two relatively simple tasks took hours because she got distracted talking to other people’s visitors or regularly lost her thick black pen among the blankets covering her. But eventually she had succeeded in having the postcards ready for Matron to post and therefore earned the right to feel this exhausted now at nightfall.
Her longest chat today was with a new priest who came to say Mass in the common dayroom and initially seemed perturbed by Eva’s disinclination to join in. After the nurse whispered to him, he apologised and offered to bring his Church of Ireland counterpart next time to pray with Eva. She had declined, explaining how she preferred to reflect in silence on Socrates’s belief that we must constantly strive for the virtues to perfect our souls. The priest seemed so genuinely nonplussed by her reply that Eva recited lines composed eight decades ago by her father in Donegal:
‘You can abolish God,
You can crucify Christ
But you will never smother
The Holy Ghost.’
Eva’s plans for her death did not include letting her body fall into the hands of any clergyman. She wanted no grandiose hearse or impersonal undertakers, just a plain unvarnished wooden box that David had promised to make for her when the time came. Last year she got David to measure her carefully from head to toe, allowing space for the curvature of her spine with age, and asked him to promise to transport her to Dublin in the back of his lorry for her cremation. When he explained that he had sold his lorry, she offered to pay for him to purchase a roof rack to strap her to the top of his car. David had laughed at this image, saying how perhaps it was not either legal or wise, but he would ensure that her body was quietly brought to Dublin with no false note of affectation or ostentation which might take away from the natural simplicity of her death. Jacquie had promised in turn to paint this box containing her body in the most joyous of swirling colours. Eva envisaged her cremation as being like a Quaker meeting with no formal religious service, but just the space for people to pray in silence or speak aloud in their own unadorned words if moved to do so. She only had two other wishes. The first was to have the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Ode to Joy, played – those wonderful notes composed by Beethoven late in his life amid a deafness so acute that people needed to pluck at his sleeve before he turned to witness the crowd’s rapturous ovation at the symphony’s premiere. Her second wish was to have her friend Donal read her mother’s favourite poem, Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’:
‘Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark.’
Eva planned to die exactly as she had tried to live: all artifice and veneer stripped away. Yet despite her calm preparations, on certain nights like this, death’s looming closeness scared her because she had so much left still to do. Eva sighed now, frustrated at the night nurse’s delay in coming into the room to turn out her light. Did the nurse not realise that Eva needed to get asleep before intruders started to sneak in and out of her room? They were probably health inspectors, seeking to hunt down and kill harmless spiders and other defenceless creatures. But there was no point in complaining when there was always something to look forward to. Tomorrow Jacquie or Brenda or one of her other friends had promised to take her out in her wheelchair. This expectation of being wheeled out into the fresh air was exhilarating. And even if it rained and no one came, then George Bernard Shaw’s humour would sustain her as she used her magnifying glass to painstakingly reread the enormous volume of the Collected Prefaces to his plays, which she had once skimped on food for weeks to save up and purchase in Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road decades ago.
But now her mind was becoming muddled as she tried to remember clearly if it was tomorrow when this friend was due to take her out. The days were growing more confusing and often she didn’t know who was due to come. Last week a man came to visit, who – when she lived in Curracloe twenty years ago – borrowed a book from her as a boy, which he now wanted to return. His young wife had breast-fed the most beautiful baby while they sat in Eva’s room and Eva laughed so much with joy at seeing him again that she felt like a girl. Then, when he mentioned his memories of watching her and Alex happily walk along Curracloe Beach, Eva had started to talk about the deaths of Francis and Hazel and Alex. There was nothing in her story she had not told other people a hundred times before, but when Eva caught sight of sudden tears in his wife’s eyes at the details of Alex’s death, Eva unexpectedly started to cry inconsolably as well. This was the strangest thing about living to be ninety-six. Her grieving should be long over, but recently her children’s deaths were starting to hurt more with every passing day. For decades Eva had imagined that her grief was slowly dissipating, but instead it felt as if all that anguish and anger was secretly festering inside her, waiting to ambush her one final time. Perhaps Hazel had been right to complain that Eva buried each heartache behind her quest to be happy, as if the state of happiness itself could act as an opiate and panacea against every loss endured in life. But maybe
happiness was just like one of the pharmaceutical concoctions that Eva had spent her life warning people against, claiming that such drugs never cured the illness but just suppressed the symptoms. For years, had she imagined that she was over the anguish of cradling Francis’s dead body in that London basement or the ache of never truly understanding the circumstances of Hazel’s death? But maybe all this time that grief had remained lodged inside the hidden, spiteful Scorpio aspect of her soul, which now desperately needed to expel all this torment before her body succumbed to death.
Could this explain the impulsive, uncontrollable rage that sometimes overtook her now, vanishing as quickly as it came: a pent-up fury at the unfairness of life? Her long years of philosophical study and reflection were rendered helpless before the unquenchable wrath she felt at such moments. Thankfully tonight she felt calm: beyond longing for the night nurse to come and allow Eva to escape into sleep before she started to have angry thoughts again about the hatred which health inspectors must feel for the small birds that Eva was no longer allowed to feed. Tonight she would not think about the tragedies of her life. Tonight ‘the ship’ – as Eva liked to refer to this nursing home – would sail nobly on: its staff doing their best to keep every passenger safe. Despite her complaints life here was good. Nobody tried to force-feed her milk or eggs. The cook puréed the vegetables she liked and, because she resisted all attempts to let a doctor near her, she still possessed her wits, unlike the other patients on their concoctions of drugs.
The noise of her bedroom door opening disturbed her thoughts. Eva felt a surge of relief as her great friend, the night nurse, appeared. This young mother – with two young children at home being minded by her husband – did not look as tired as on some nights. Eva was always the last patient she looked in on. With the other patients asleep, the nurse might even find time to talk.
‘How was your day, Eva?’ she asked, leaning down to pick up the various papers and books which had fallen from where they had been spread out on Eva’s bed.
Eva reflected for a moment on the day’s trials and frustrations, the tiny tasks accomplished and decisions taken. ‘It was good,’ she admitted. ‘I met some lovely visitors out in the hallway. I like watching all the comings and goings. Isn’t life here exciting?’
‘It is, but I hear you’re still planning to leave us.’
‘I am. Once spring comes.’
‘Off on your travels again. You’ve had a few travels, haven’t you? I envy you. I was never outside Ireland, beyond two charter holidays to Tenerife where every second pub is Irish.’ She paused. ‘You had that poor priest perplexed today until he realised you are Anglo-Irish.’
‘I’m not Anglo-anything,’ Eva protested. ‘My father once traced our ancestors back to Niall of the Nine Hostages. He raised us up to be Irish, but to also be true to ourselves and live according to our own conscience, recognising any act as being noble if inspired by love.’
‘Lucky you.’ The nurse laughed and sat down on Eva’s bed. ‘The only advice my father ever gave me was to be wary around fellows and twice as wary around flyboys who hail from Wexford town. Anyway, whatever you are, the new priest took off like a scalded cat.’ She smiled at Eva and lightly brushed her hand. ‘You do know that we’d all miss you if you took off on your travels.’
‘Would you?’ Eva felt humbled and touched.
‘Truly. You’re a wee dote except when you get into your moods.’ She glanced at the wall behind Eva’s bed. ‘Where on earth did you get that odd poster?’
Eva looked up at a photograph of an impoverished young man seated at a bare wooden table: a pile of roughly cut sandwiches on one side and a heap of books on the other. He was ravenously eating while devouring a book at the same time.
‘A friend saw it in a bookshop in Holland and sent it to me. I laughed when I saw it because it so reminds me of a young Glaswegian bricklayer I knew when I was caretaker of a Quaker hostel in 1960s London. He was a Buddhist.’
‘I thought you said he was a bricklayer from Glasgow.’
Eva nodded. ‘You can be a bricklayer and also a Buddhist, even in Glasgow. We used to catch a train and go hiking on Sunday afternoons. He’d bring me off to a cave in the hills.’
‘Did he now?’ the nurse teased. ‘And what did your handsome Buddhist bricklayer do in this cave?’
‘He’d light a fire to keep us warm while he read me Buddhist poetry and I would share a vegan picnic with him.’
‘Merciful hour!’ The nurse stood up. ‘You’ve ruined my illusions about London in the swinging sixties, but I obviously haven’t lived. Here, let me tuck you in for the night so that you’re snug as a bug in a rug.’
Eva allowed her to adjust the bedclothes. ‘You were gardening earlier.’
‘How did you know?’ The nurse checked her fingers. ‘Are my nails still dirty?’
‘Not in the least, but I can smell the hand lotion you used afterwards. My mother always used that exact same lotion after gardening.’
‘You’re surely cracking up now.’ The nurse laughed. ‘All I ever use is soap and water. Don’t tell me you’re going to start on again about people disturbing your sleep.’
‘They come in at every hour, like they’re checking on me,’ Eva protested. ‘I can’t imagine why. I can hardly run off, can I? Inside I may still long to leap over the moon but I can barely walk. Do me one favour, open the window.’
The nurse tutted in mild reproach. ‘Now you know well, Eva, you can’t be leaving out bread for the birds.’
‘I do know. But open it just for a minute. There’s something I want to hear.’
The nurse shook her head with the same good-humoured, exasperated look she used to see on Freddie’s face in the first years of their marriage, the look used by Hazel and by various other people whom Eva had tried to live among. But the nurse opened the window all the same, then stood back to listen before shaking her head.
‘You see? There’s nothing to hear.’
‘Oh, there is.’ Eva closed her eyes to listen to the night’s luxuriant silence, to the infinite possibilities of the unheard – to the silence out of which the deaf Beethoven had plucked his marvellous Ode to Joy. ‘There’s an entire symphony playing out there.’
The night nurse listened also, then shivered and closed the window. ‘Maybe you’re right and the rest of us are daft. I don’t know. Goodnight, Eva.’
Eva didn’t reply or open her eyes even after the door closed. She wanted to lie still and hold on to the majestic chords of the earth at peace, on to a silence so vast that it took on the true voice of prayer.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Cleaner’s Daughter
Co. Wexford, 2000
Who but who was going to come and rescue her from this God-forsaken prison of a new nursing home, where staff could not be trusted and most patients were sexually frustrated widows who had sold their houses after losing their husbands and got their hair done before booking themselves in here in pursuit of men? These woman resented Eva for revealing this truth aloud to visitors but, at ninety-seven, Eva was beyond bothering with lies. Therefore her fellow patients – except for one kindly old man who sometimes sat and calmed her with his quiet fortitude – kept their distance.
It was too late tonight to place a long distance call that would need to go through numerous operators with headsets and switchboards before eventually getting through to someone in Dublin. But if she did not die tonight then Eva was determined to telephone her family’s old firm of solicitors tomorrow and instruct them to sue everyone: the small group of friends who had made these arrangements for her care without understanding her needs; the architect who had converted this old convent into a nursing home gulag; the cook whom she accused of secretly adding meat stock to the special vegan dishes that Eva felt too suspicious about to eat, despite the fact that Eva always insisted on being wheeled down to the dining hall early to make sure that nobody tampered with her vegan food – because Brendan himself had come all this way b
ack from the dead to tell her that, if you wanted to survive in the gulag, you must fight your way into the dining hall on time or there would be no vegan food left. And who would any sensible person believe: their own dead brother or the staff who told her that she didn’t need to be wheeled downstairs at all if she was too tired and she was welcome to have her meals in her room? But Eva couldn’t be sure if the staff were telling the truth – if anyone was telling the truth – and even if they were, it still left the biggest worry of all which was that, if she somehow managed to live through yet another of these indescribably long nights, then who but who would come here to rescue her?
Eva had felt utterly different about life this afternoon when she was calm and lucid, able to tell the two local women who came to visit her about the kindness of the staff in this new nursing home and her contentment here. This afternoon the sun had been shining as Eva sat in her wheelchair in the orchard behind the nursing home, shaded under the leaves of apple trees that magically dappled the warm summer sunlight. This afternoon she had laughed and chatted for two hours while the nursing home cat purred in her lap. Eva had known the names of her two visitors, unlike on some days when she grew confused, and was able to savour their local gossip. She even delighted in being able to add her own titbit to the conversation by revealing how one of the cleaners, who worked at night in the nursing home, was starting to occasionally smuggle her young daughter into her workplace because there must be nobody at home to mind the child.
An Ark of Light Page 39
