The Family on Paradise Pier

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘The frogs were croaking in the dusk;

  The grass was wet.

  We talked together, and I laughed:

  I hear it yet.

  ‘I thought that I would be your wife;

  I had your word.

  And so I took the road with you,

  And crossed the ford.’

  ‘It’s the last verse that confuses me.’ Donnelly turned the page as Gralton softly bemoaned his tight shoes.

  ‘I do not know when first it was

  Your eyes looked cold.

  But all this was three years ago

  And I am old.’

  He closed the book and handed it back. ‘You’ll never be old,’ he said quietly, ‘even should you live to be a hundred.’

  Eva liked his honest gaze, with the belligerence gone. She smiled, closing her dressing gown tighter.

  ‘God knows why I marked that poem,’ she lied. ‘Keep the book. Bring it back when you next pass this way.’

  ‘It’s yours. I couldn’t.’

  ‘I thought all property was a form of theft,’ she teased.

  ‘Books will be exempt from the revolution.’

  Footsteps passed along the corridor. The room went silent till they faded away.

  ‘That’s the maid going to stoke the range,’ Eva told Art. ‘She’ll be confused to find it blazing. You must be quick.’

  There was no time for proper farewells or for the questions that Eva longed to ask Art. She glanced out of the back door to ensure the yard was deserted, then kissed Art. Charlie Donnelly held the book.

  ‘Are you sure I can borrow it?’ he asked shyly.

  ‘Yes. Now mind yourself.’

  ‘You’ll get it back. I promise.’

  Art hissed at him to hurry and suddenly both men had disappeared through the trees. The kitchen door opened at the end of the corridor and Mary stood there.

  ‘Did I hear something, Mrs Fitzgerald?’

  ‘Just me letting in the air.’

  ‘The range is blazing like the fires of hell.’

  ‘A guest arrived very late. A Yank. Must be still keeping American time.’

  ‘That would be the Yanks for you, Mrs Fitzgerald.’ The girl threw up her eyes knowingly, though Eva doubted if she had ever glimpsed an American except on a cinema screen. ‘What brings him here at all?’

  ‘The same as the others I suppose,’ Eva replied. ‘Hunting and shooting.’

  ‘I’ve tea brewing, mam. Will I bring a cup to your room?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Eva said quickly. ‘The new guest took my room. I made a bed for myself on the nursery floor. It’s rather hard which is why I couldn’t sleep.’

  Eva didn’t like the maid’s sly look. In her six months here Mary had never fitted in. Perhaps it was because, as she kept boasting, her older sisters in New York almost had enough dollars saved for her fare. Her American wake had not yet occurred, but from her attitude Eva suspected that these final months before emigrating were like a posthumous existence where she need only pay lip service to normal behaviour. Even parading to Blueshirt meetings in her uniform seemed part of a charade.

  Eva didn’t trust Mary and waited until she closed the kitchen door before slipping into the basement bedroom. Jim Gralton examined himself in the small mirror.

  ‘I’m not vain but I’m darned uncomfortable dickied up like a gander. I don’t want to hide here any more than you want me, Missus. But your brother is persuasive and in truth I couldn’t take another night on the bogs. My arthritis is bad.’

  ‘I know. My mother suffers from it.’

  ‘It wasn’t from damp cabins she got it.’

  ‘Does it matter how she got it? She suffers the same.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Gralton replied. ‘The nerves are making me snappy. What do your guests discuss?’

  ‘Shooting, some barrack-room humour when they think I’m beyond earshot. Politics and religion are generally banned – a rule my husband says works well in the Masons. The suit fits you well. How are the shoes?’

  ‘I’ll survive.’ Gralton shuffled forward in obvious discomfort, his gait reminding her of stories about the ghostly butler. ‘I’ve not shown my gratitude well, Missus. I’ll try to be no trouble. I could use some shut-eye though.’

  ‘Take that bed.’ Eva pointed towards Freddie’s bunk. To avoid scandal it was vital to create signs of a makeshift bed in the nursery. Realising that it was too risky to chance a second trip for her clothes, Eva asked Gralton to turn his back and dressed hurriedly. She noticed how, in his interest in the poems, Donnelly had forgotten the sandwiches. She imagined him and Art keeping to the fields until beyond the village, probably aware by now of the journey ahead with no food. As she did up her buttons, more footsteps entered the passageway. Eva wondered what Freddie would think if he returned early and walked in. Aware that she looked a sight with her hair uncombed, she checked that the corridor was empty, then gathered up her blankets and ran. The kitchen door opened just as she reached the stairs. Eva raced up, praying that Mary hadn’t seen the trailing bedclothes. Reaching the nursery, Eva threw the blankets onto the floor. Hazel looked up sleepily.

  ‘What’s happening, Mummy?’

  ‘Nothing, darling,’ Eva told her daughter. ‘More guests arrived than we had room for.’

  ‘Why is this house always cold, even in summer? My feet are like ice.’

  ‘I’ll rub them.’ Eva sat on her daughter’s bed to take Hazel’s bare soles on her lap. Hazel got cross if Eva tickled her toes but always allowed them to be kissed.

  ‘Francis says he’ll build jumps on the avenue for my pony. Miss Crossan thinks I’m too young but Francis says he’ll do it when her back is turned. Please let him.’

  Eva glanced at her sleeping son who reminded her of Art at his age. Minding his sister, building things for her. She had not shown Art his sleeping nephew and niece in case he found it painful with a son growing up in Moscow without him. Francis had something of his features, yet she could not imagine him shouting at political meetings or living with dockers. Francis had a softness that she loved and worried about.

  Eva stroked her daughter’s feet until she heard the cart belonging to Mr Tyrrell, the farmer to whom Freddie had already sold land adjoining the wood. These days he hovered like a shadow, supplying milk and butter on credit and giving lifts to staff as he patiently waited for these final acres that he felt sure would soon be sold to him. Through the shutters Eva watched him survey the wood with a proprietary eye, then help Mrs McGrory down with bags of provisions – a sign, Eva saw with relief, that their credit had not stretched beyond breaking point in Mr Devlin’s shop in Castlebar. The cook clutched her copy of the Catholic Bulletin, along with the Capuchin Annual, which Miss Crossan had made a show of splashing out 2s.3d for. On sufferance she would have also collected Mary’s copy of Tit-Bits which Mr Devlin never displayed on the counter. Eva didn’t wish to leave the nursery but knew that Mrs McGrory would be waiting with the news from town. She turned from the window to kiss Francis who was stirring.

  ‘Miss Crossan will get you up in a few minutes,’ she said.

  ‘Will not. Cross Ears will let us lie on for hours yet.’

  ‘Don’t call her that name, Francis. It’s not nice.’

  ‘Cross Ears doesn’t mind. She often lies on in bed until nine.’

  ‘You know that you must be up, washed and dressed before breakfast,’ Eva scolded.

  ‘All week we’ve had breakfast here in our dressing gowns.’

  Generally Eva was too involved with guests to check the children until much later, but she suspected that what Francis said was true. Miss Crossan was so concerned to establish her position as someone who lived in with the family, instead of being a mere servant, that the children were becoming neglected. The governess spent her afternoons off having her hair done in Castlebar so that she could try to blend in and converse with guests late into the night, finding little tasks as if to invent a role as a surrogate lady of the house.
Not that Eva cared about social position, but there was something manic about the woman’s efforts to belong to the drawing room. Learned manners would never suffice. Miss Crossan would have been happier downstairs had she not alienated the staff who secretly mocked her. Francis and Hazel were becoming undisciplined due to her inability to control them. But Eva had no time to worry about this now, with breakfast for the guests to supervise.

  ‘I want you both up and dressed,’ she said firmly. ‘You can’t dawdle for hours in your dressing gowns.’

  ‘Miss Crossan does,’ Hazel informed her primly. ‘She never gets dressed before the maid brings her up tea at eleven.’

  Francis never referred to Mary or Brigid as ‘the maid’. But Hazel had Fitzgerald eyes that expected to be waited on. ‘I hate her,’ she added.

  ‘That’s not nice, Hazel.’

  ‘I know, Mummy, but it’s true. She lets Francis do anything he wants.’

  ‘Little fibber,’ Francis shot back.

  ‘Stop it, both of you. I shall speak to Miss Crossan myself.’

  Eva tried to fix her hair at the mirror before going downstairs where Mrs McGrory and Brigid fussed over the breakfast. Mary leaned against the table, scoffing as she read aloud from the pastoral letter in Mrs McGrory’s magazine: ‘Company keeping under the stars has taken over from the good Irish custom of visiting and storytelling from one house to another, with the rosary to bring all home in due time.’

  ‘Better for you to be lending a hand than mocking the bishops, you heathen,’ Mrs McGrory snapped.

  Mary laughed, savouring her ability to rouse the cook.

  ‘The evil one is forever setting snares for unwary feet in the dance hall, the motion picture, the immodest fashion in female dress…’

  Sensing her employer’s presence, Mary quickly lowered the paper. Yet Eva wondered if the words were mockingly aimed at her after being caught in her dressing gown at dawn. ‘I’m just fetching milk for the table, Mrs Fitzgerald.’ Mary picked up two silver jugs and brushed past an unfamiliar girl in a faded frock with no stockings who could have been seventeen but her bare feet made her look younger. She returned Eva’s gaze.

  ‘Mr Fitzgerald told my dada you wanted someone to scrub the flagstones once a week, mam,’ she said. ‘Mr Tyrrell gave me a lift on his cart, but I jumped off on the avenue. It was so lovely I wanted to walk up through the woods.’

  ‘The flagstones are backbreaking work,’ Eva warned.

  ‘Work never killed a body yet, mam.’

  Eva liked her instantly and even more so when she noticed the small sack of good clothes beside her. This was how Eva liked to think that she herself would dress if going to work in a new house, unafraid to wear dirty clothes for dirty work, not trying to make an impression or pretend to be anything she was not. The girl saw Eva glance at her bare legs.

  ‘I figured my stockings would only be ruined, mam.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Eva replied. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Maureen.’

  ‘Mrs McGrory will give you breakfast and show you where everything is kept. Did my husband mention money?’

  ‘My dada and him made some class of deal, mam. Mary showed me where the scrubbing brush is, so I’ll make a start before breakfast if you don’t mind.’

  Male voices boomed from the dining room above, the hearty laughter of confident men.

  ‘How was Mr Devlin?’ she asked the cook when the girl had gone.

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough, Mrs Fitzgerald. Hasn’t he only just gone and asked himself here for lunch.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He says to me, “Mr Fitzgerald is killed asking would I like a day’s shooting and I’ve a distinguished guest coming down that he would enjoy meeting.”’

  ‘He said that?’ Eva was shocked at the shopkeeper’s presumptuousness.

  ‘Bellowed it loud enough for the whole shop to hear.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘What I always say to him, Mrs Fitzgerald – “Up de Valera” – when I’m safely out of his hearing.’

  ‘Up de Valera on a rope,’ Mary opined, re-entering the kitchen.

  Both women ignored her as they mulled over the grocer’s remark. Eva had grown used to indignity but the notion of a tradesman casually inviting himself to their house – even if they owed him a considerable sum – was humiliating. Mr Devlin hadn’t just invited himself, he had flaunted the fact so all of Castlebar could discuss how the Fitzgeralds had fallen.

  ‘Who is his guest?’ she asked.

  ‘Devlin muttered about “a dignitary from Dublin”. Probably some carthorse sent down by the Blueshirts to crank up their oul’ movement that is falling apart.’

  ‘It’s Mr Patrick Belton, TD,’ Mary announced, delighted to know something they didn’t. ‘My boyfriend says he’s addressing a meeting in Castlebar tonight. The Dublin big nobs may have sacked General O’Duffy, but he is starting a new movement called the National Corporate Party, which only decent fascists will be allowed to join. Il Duce showed the way in Abyssinia and it will be up de Valera…with a rope round his neck.’

  ‘That will do, Mary.’ Eva nodded for the girl to carry up the first two breakfast plates that Mrs McGrory had laid out. Mrs McGrory watched her go.

  ‘That strumpet won’t be happy till she’s married Mussolini himself, strutting around in her blue blouse. Cardinal McRory wouldn’t be so keen on O’Duffy’s crew if he knew how half the unmarried girls of Ireland are trouser-chasing inside it.’

  ‘We’d better set the lunch table for two more,’ Eva said as casually as possible.

  ‘Mr Devlin says he doesn’t know the going rate but he’ll fix up when he has a quiet word. He said you might be glad of the business.’

  Eva nodded, knowing there was no question of payment. After all Devlin would be eating his own food. He was not a bad man, especially now that his exuberant young followers had started to drift away. For all the Blueshirts’ talk of a new world order, she knew that the only way Devlin could think to impress his guest was by grafting himself onto life in this Big House.

  Mary returned to take up two more breakfasts as Eva knocked at the basement bedroom. When she entered, Gralton was staring wishfully up through the window.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep a wink. Maybe it’s something about this room or else I can’t get warm after all my time on the bogs. Did your brother give me a name?’

  Eva pondered the question, realising how little she knew about Americans. ‘Fortune,’ she said. ‘Max Fortune.’ She did not know where the name came from, just that it would impress the guests. ‘Go up for breakfast, Mr Fortune.’

  ‘In all my years there, mam, I never met a Yank called Fortune.’ He glanced in the mirror and brushed back his hair. ‘It’s a goddamn funny place to meet one now.’

  He walked upstairs in his uncomfortable shoes. Eva checked the kitchen before going up to take her place as hostess. Gralton sat beside Mr O’Sullivan, the Dublin Roman Catholic who was reciting a litany of American place names to which his relations had emigrated. Gralton’s American accent was perfect. She noticed how the Englishmen and the Tyrone Protestant kept their distance.

  ‘Did you come over on a Cunard liner?’ Mr O’Sullivan asked, convinced that only someone rich would possess the audacity to dress so unconventionally. ‘That Queen Mary is a ship I’d like to see around. They say the interior is based on the Dorchester Hotel…’

  Staring out the window, Eva was startled to see Freddie’s car appear and park at the front steps. In the midst of her panic at not having formulated a story to explain Gralton’s presence, she was relieved to see that Freddie didn’t look too bad with no outward symptoms of a hangover. He stepped out and addressed someone in the passenger seat. Her heart froze as Mr Clements emerged. He brushed down his clothes and stared at the vista beyond the daffodil lawn, reminding her of the first time they spied on him from this window. Mr Clements, the unobtrusive constant in their marriage. He must have cut short his
business or simply fled London for the sanctuary of this wood with his routine and his books. Freddie laughed with him as they mounted the steps in the sunshine, two men with nothing in common who had learnt to accommodate each other’s presence. Eva heard their footsteps echo down the hall, then both men entered the open doorway. Freddie took in the extra guest and walked hospitably over to welcome Gralton. She was relieved that he was too much of a gentleman to ask questions there and then. Mr Clements remained in the doorway, with eyes not on Gralton’s suit but on her. Eva looked back, her smile unchanging, but her eyes pleading that he say nothing.

  ‘Fortune, eh?’ Freddie crackled. ‘Let’s hope your name carries over onto the bog, what. We’ll have some capital shooting this afternoon. I had a spot of good fortune myself last night. Didn’t fancy another night in Dublin so I walked down to Kingsbridge and slipped the guard a few shillings to get on the night mail train, with my old pal Major McCourt who jumped ship at Athlone. We thought we’d be the only hobos sitting on mail sacks, but who was there? Only Commander Clements to bless us with his excellent company and a full hip-flask.’

  Eva rose, telling Freddie that she would organise more breakfast. She paused in the doorway beside Mr Clements. ‘I was not expecting you back so soon,’ she whispered.

  ‘So I see.’ His mild tone betrayed nothing. ‘Mr Fortune has a unique dress sense.’

  ‘Please…’

  ‘My dear Mrs Fitzgerald, don’t trouble yourself to say more.’

  Eva went downstairs where the new girl, Maureen, looked up and smiled, vigorously scrubbing the basement flagstones. She gave Mrs McGrory instructions, then busied herself in the pantry, hoping that Freddie would not seek her there. She heard his step in the kitchen however, with Mrs McGrory addressing him differently from how she addressed Eva. Freddie stooped his head to enter the pantry.

  ‘There you are, old girl, I was looking for you.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘You look tired. Who is our mystery guest?’

  ‘He arrived very late. I was locking up, with the others in bed. I had to put him down in our room.’