The Family on Paradise Pier

by Dermot Bolger

  A shout arose as Sheehy-Skeffington entered the hall. ‘Bastard! Enemy of Christ! Look at him step on the host!’

  A stone caused Thomas to turn as the others entered amid outraged jeers. ‘Decide, comrade,’ Hennessy hissed. ‘Do you want to come in or not?’

  Thomas stepped inside. ‘I want to come in, but I’m not your comrade. Why are they shouting?’

  ‘A priest said that we had put a consecrated host under the doormat so that everybody entering must step on the body of Christ. As if anything under a mat here would last two seconds. When the slum shawlies are not screeching for the old dame’s blood they’re queuing up to wheedle every penny from her. Head upstairs. There’s twenty of us now. She expected more support but cold feet is a contagious disease.’

  A printing press occupied the front room, beside stacked copies of The Hammer and Plough. People at the windows surveyed the crowd. Outside, the chanting stopped as marchers knelt for the rosary. Sheehy-Skeffington leaned over Madame Despard, a tiny frail figure dressed in black who sat with ramrod-straight shoulders and milky half-blind eyes. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked. ‘Come closer, young man.’

  ‘I’m Thomas Goold Verschoyle.’

  She nodded. ‘Donegal. Your mother and I used to correspond about Theosophy. Such an interesting woman.’

  ‘Might it not be wise, Madame,’ Thomas said, ‘to slip away and let us guard your house?’

  ‘It might be wiser for you to slip away, young man.’ Her voice was so weak that it was hard to catch each word, but the resolve, which made her one of Britain’s most famous suffragettes, remained evident. ‘It’s me those misguided souls want to burn as a witch. But I shall build this world for them, even if it means my having to leave it. I am not afraid of the last great adventure.’

  Thomas joined Grimes and Hennessy at the window. Locals attracted from the nearby slums were swelling the crowd. The murmured prayers could not disguise an impending sense of trouble. The bareheaded man knelt on the pavement to face the mob, leading the rosary with beads entwined between his fingers. Thomas sensed that he was no natural leader. Without one, it was impossible to judge how far this mob would go. Then Thomas saw a black-clad figure push through the throng with purposeful strides. He lacked the aura of a priest, but seemed like some sort of Christian Brother. Hennessy watched the figure approach.

  ‘It wouldn’t be much of a circus without a ringmaster,’ he remarked.

  ‘Who is he?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘I can’t see his collar, mate.’ Hennessy called back, ‘Roddy, who’s this geezer coming to drown us in holy water?’

  James Connolly’s son joined them, staring down as the crowd parted respectfully to let the cleric through. However one man who examined the cleric more closely rose to place a hand on his shoulder that was angrily shrugged off. Connolly laughed.

  ‘Mother of God,’ he said, ‘that’s Goold.’

  ‘Who?’ Thomas asked, with sudden foreboding.

  ‘He used to hang around some of our political meetings. My sister and I thought he was a tramp at first. I think he slept rough in Mountjoy Square. Only when he started to heckle the speakers did we spot his educated accent. He occasionally sold copies of The Hammer and Plough for us. He turned up at a meeting I addressed last week looking worse than ever. I told him if he wanted to join the party he’d have to clean himself up. But where did he buy that outfit? He’s from Sligo, I think.’

  ‘Donegal,’ Thomas said.

  Connolly looked surprised. ‘You know him?’

  ‘He’s Thomas’s brother.’ Sheehy-Skeffington joined the company. ‘And that mob will lynch him if you don’t let him in.’

  Several men were attempting to rip Art’s jacket. Thomas realised that it was an old postman’s uniform, too small for his brother. A combination of bad light and a black collarless shirt inadvertently lent him a religious appearance.

  Hennessy ran down to open the front door and after a scuffle, Art was pulled inside. The incensed mob started a new chant: Burn the Communists! while several authoritative figures stepped forward, judging the situation sufficiently inflamed for them to seize control.

  Hennessy led Art upstairs. He stopped upon entering the room, more shaken by Thomas’s presence than by the mob outside.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.

  ‘You don’t get to inherit the franchise on civil rights too,’ Thomas retorted. ‘Some of us came to defend free speech. Can we not at least agree that freedom is being strangled in this city? I may not belong in here, but I will never belong out there.’ He glanced out of the window, with sudden anxiety. ‘Good grief! It couldn’t be?’

  ‘Who?’

  Thomas pointed to a well-dressed figure pushing through the crowd. ‘Our big sister.’

  ‘Maud?’ Art looked out, like a disappointed child whose party was being gatecrashed. ‘Maud is a married woman.’

  ‘She has as much right to enter my house as you have.’ The voice was feeble, but when the brothers turned, the tiny figure confronting them looked resolute and fiery.

  ‘Forgive me, Madame Despard,’ Art apologised. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. It just feels like I will never be free of my family following me.’

  Thomas glared at him. ‘I assure you, if I’d suspected you were coming I’d have stayed in college.’

  ‘I know you,’ Madame Despard said. ‘I’ve seen you surrounded by children in Mountjoy Square only for a priest to scatter them with a stick and threaten you.’

  ‘I set up a hedge school,’ Art explained. ‘I’d sit on a park bench writing letters on behalf of people who can’t write themselves. I was teaching the three Rs and history and politics to anyone who’d sit with me but the priests put a halt to that.’

  Maud’s manner was granting her a passage through the crowd, convinced that nobody so well dressed could be a subversive. She strode up the steps past the ringleaders to bang on the knocker, disconcerting the crowd who realised that she had not come to join them after all. Thomas shouted at Hennessy.

  ‘For God’s sake, man, let my sister in.’

  When they opened the front door several black-clad shawlies were clawing at Maud who had lost her hat but stood her ground, hectoring them. Art and Thomas reeled her in. She spun around, defiant, a fleck of blood on her lip where a nail had scratched her.

  ‘Well, here we all are,’ she said, unflappable as ever. ‘One big happy family.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have come,’ Art complained. ‘You’re not a communist.’

  ‘A walk through these slums would make anyone consider becoming one. I never saw such squalor. Nobody should be forced to live like this, let alone attack an old woman trying to educate them. The conductor on the Kingstown tram boasted about the fire being planned by the Catholic Young Men’s Society. I gave him a piece of my mind, then got off and walked here.’ She inspected Art. ‘You look ridiculous. Still I steadfastly defend the right of people to make fools of themselves. If that mob have their way anyone different will be swept into the Irish Sea. Is Madame Despard still here?’

  Several stones struck the front door, with one crashing through the fanlight overhead.

  ‘We can’t persuade her to leave.’ Hennessy made for the sanctuary of the stairs.

  Maud followed Hennessy upstairs. ‘I’ll talk to her provided Art doesn’t introduce my husband to his tailor.’

  Grimes and Foster were busy gathering buckets of sand with other volunteers. Connolly moved quietly about preparing for the onslaught, as commanding as his wounded father must have been when rallying Dublin workers amid flames in the GPO.

  ‘Stay back from the windows when the stones start to really fly,’ he said. ‘The important thing is to get fires under control quickly to try and save the building.’

  The chanting was more frenzied outside: Bless the Pope! One man screamed himself hoarse trying to be heard over the noise: ‘Go back to Russia, you poxy atheist Protestant English bitch!’

  Thomas joined
his siblings around Madame Despard’s chair, as Maud pleaded with her to leave.

  ‘Leave?’ The old lady laughed. ‘Why, dear, I like being at the centre of things. Your brother is such a fine man. I’ve seen him in Mountjoy Square.’ She addressed Art. ‘Go to Russia while you have your youth. You will be appreciated there. I have seen it with my own eyes, factories run by elected committees, schools where punishment is taboo. It is not just the dream of Marx come true, but the words of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam. Shaw went, but, being a man, never asked the hard questions. I made them show me the collective farms which the peasant proprietors are starting to embrace.’ Stones crashed through the downstairs windows without making her lose her flow. ‘And there is no crime nor punishment. Those unfit to be good citizens are briefly isolated on self-governing archipelagos. But no ideas are forced on them: they are gently encouraged to think for themselves. Go there and learn what it is like to live in a land ruled by love.’

  There was a whooshing sound of flame. Volunteers with buckets rushed down the stairs. Hennessy and Connolly each took one leg of her chair, telling Grimes and Foster to lift the others. ‘We’re bringing you out the back way, Charlotte, whether you like it or not,’ Connolly said.

  ‘But I wanted to address them. I assure you I’ve faced hostile crowds all my life.’

  ‘I’ll face them for you.’ Maud turned to Connolly. ‘I’ll keep them focused on the front and give you time to get her out.’ She patted the old lady’s hand. ‘I’ll give them a song.’

  ‘Would you, dear?’ Madame Despard’s chair was hoisted in the air. ‘Isn’t life exciting?’ She grasped Art’s hand. ‘See Russia for yourself.’

  Maud strode towards the window. Thomas gripped her shoulder.

  ‘Are you crazy? You can’t go out there.’

  Ignoring him as she used to ignore everyone once she got a notion into her head in Donegal, Maud stepped out onto the small wrought-iron balcony. She got her balance, then began to sing:

  ‘The Workers’ Flag is deeply red,

  It covered oft our martyred dead,

  And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold

  Their hearts’ blood dyed its every fold.’

  The crowd could not hear the words but this did not stop some screaming that she was a whore while others chanted Bless the Pope more fervently. Smoke billowed from the smashed windows below in the rooms where fires were blazing. Art and Thomas tried to pull her back inside and she hissed fiercely, ‘Don’t you dare.’

  Thomas looked down at the mob, hungry for blood and hungry for food. At the barefoot children staring up as if they were devils. At the ignorance and superstition and malnutrition and stunted growth and those protesters who were fervent and others swept up by the occasion who would just as easily join any other mob. He clambered out to be beside Maud and, with a laugh, she interlocked her fingers with his and took Art’s fingers in her other hand. The three never arranged to meet in Dublin, knowing that they would each bring a baggage of grievance and accusation with them but this balcony was neutral ground, where they could briefly be united by their collective difference from the baying mob. Thomas raised his voice defiantly and Art joined in too, the three of them singing with the sweet harmony that had once been praised in Killaghtee church.

  ‘Then raise the scarlet banner high,

  Beneath its folds we’ll live or die,

  Though cowards flinch

  And traitors sneer,

  We’ll keep the red flag flying here.’

  THIRTEEN

  Deep in the Woods

  Mayo, September 1928

  It was not the fact that Art had left for Russia which hurt her, but that he never said goodbye to any of them. Even a noviciate entering a monastery rarely denied himself a last farewell to those he loved. Because Eva knew that Art loved his family although he had never returned to Donegal after her wedding. Mother only learnt that he was in Moscow when Mr Ffrench received a letter last week from a friend there who had met him.

  Freddie gently prised Mother’s letter from Eva’s hand and read the news for himself whilst his heavily pregnant wife gazed out of the drawing room window of Glanmire House to where Mikey, Freddie’s man, stood by the car, patiently waiting to accompany his master to the station. Eva knew that Freddie would wet his lips in the select lounge of the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar before boarding the Dublin train.

  ‘It’s for the best for all of you,’ Freddie announced. ‘At least now he won’t be able to disgrace you, or if he does he’ll be so far away that it will not be in front of anyone who counts. And, you know, with Art gone, the young chap may buck up. It’s not too late for Brendan to get into some decent college. Oxford will hardly take him now, but only a fool judges a man by the colour of his school tie.’

  Eva had often heard her husband repeat this line, carefully watching the company for any perceived slight about how he had lacked the money to attend a top public school.

  Freddie was relieved by this news about Art, though they had only met briefly at the wedding, an awkward encounter between two men whom Eva loved. It now felt like years since Thomas had played the bagpipes in his kilt as Eva’s wedding party wound through Dunkineely. Locals had cheered as barefoot children raced after the Wolseley that bore her away to Mayo, with bonfires marking her arrival in Turlough where the Fitzgeralds had reigned for centuries. Her books were still stored in a trunk with her canvasses and easel. They were things she seemed unable to unpack, being too busy trying to appear like a young Protestant wife of social standing. She fretted over invitations to tennis parties and dinners at Turlough Park held by Freddie’s uncle on one of his trips back home. He found it cheaper to maintain his family in a rented French villa rather than upkeep his Irish mansion. An avenging mob had ransacked the original house after ‘Mad’ George Robert Fitzgerald’s public hanging in 1786, leading to the hasty erection of Glanmire House as a stopgap family home until the grandiose splendour of a new house at Turlough Park was completed. Glanmire House was as large as the Manor House in Dunkineely, but it was impossible to live so close to Turlough Park without feeling in every way the poor relation.

  Freddie handed her back the letter, too much of a gentleman to read beyond Mother’s news about Art. ‘Let’s see if he lasts longer in Moscow than the other lunatic.’

  ‘Mr Ffrench is nice,’ Eva protested.

  Freddie laughed, downing the dregs of whiskey in his glass. ‘Your brother may be mad,’ he said, ‘but at least he sticks to his beliefs. Ffrench has four times more servants than we could ever afford. Surely a good communist can fetch in his own logs.’

  ‘He was an ordinary factory worker in Russia.’

  ‘He was play-acting. At the first sign of trouble he ran home to his servants. What do you think they make of him? A man must set an example for servants to look up to. Your father should have taken a whip to him, like the Marquess of Queensberry did to that bugger boy. Ffrench is a laughing stock, even almost the madness infecting Donegal.’

  Despite his imminent departure to Dublin, Freddie could not leave this festering sore alone. His conversation frequently returned to her family’s perceived madness. It was a blame game he played whenever his monthly accounts refused to add up. Eva forgave him, knowing the financial stress he tried to shield her from. Besides, their life together was not all accusation and counter-accusation. Great tenderness had peppered the previous thirteen months, moments when Eva felt truly fulfilled. Glanmire House had been burgled several times during the years it lay unoccupied. The carpets were rotting with damp on the night they consummated their marriage here, with the house unnaturally cold despite Freddie having fires blazing in the front hall and their bedroom. Later he had taken her on a lamp-lit tour of the single-storey Georgian-style villa with its meandering basement, proudly detailing his plans to install a hand pump to harness the water collected from a huge tank suspended on two masonry piers outside.

  Over the past year there had been the excitement of seeing e
ach refurbished room take shape. She remembered her anxiety before presiding over their first dinner for paying guests and her exhilaration afterwards. The morning when their heads touched, leaning over the blank ledger as Freddie recorded their first ever income received. There had been the planting of four thousand new trees to mark their marriage, with them both covered in muck, delighted to find an outdoor task in which they took equal pleasure. There were her solitary walks in the woods at dusk when no more shots were fired and she was torn between a fraternising desire to befriend the shy rabbits and an impulse to throw stones and teach them to mistrust humans before the insatiable hunter came with his gun. In Freddie’s favour, he never used traps and she was glad because she could not have borne them. He was humane in his own way, which was just not a way she understood. But the most tender sensation of all was his seed inside her, this child whom they could share and love, who would bind any slight fissures starting to appear as they began to see each other clearly.

  Freddie checked his watch, resisting the temptation for another whiskey. ‘I’d best be off. The train will hardly wait for me, though God knows it would be a first if it left on time. You’ll be okay, won’t you?’

  ‘The baby isn’t due for three weeks.’

  ‘I know. Just don’t do anything silly. My first port of call will be the nursing home. We’ll ensure that their best bed is reserved for when you come up at the weekend.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Eva smiled. ‘Do your business and I’ll join you on Friday.’

  She could have travelled with him now but Eva knew that Freddie needed time alone in Dublin before the birth of his child. He would attend the Freemasons and go drinking with old chums, spending money they could ill afford. But even if his eyes were bloodshot on Friday he would be sober and solicitous when escorting her to their lodgings close to the nursing home which he had chosen for her to give birth in. He eyed the whiskey again and restrained himself. ‘Mind yourself, old thing, and I’ll be waiting at Kingsbridge station on Friday.’ Taking the leatherbound Book of Common Prayer from a bookshelf he tucked it under his arm. ‘We mustn’t forget this!’