The Family on Paradise Pier

by Dermot Bolger

  But perhaps it was Art returning for Gralton. Despite the risks Eva’s heart thrilled at the possibility of seeing her brother again. She glanced back at her sleeping children: at Francis curled up with his face to the dying fire and Hazel who looked cold despite her warm blanket. Then, throwing a dressing gown over her shoulders, she crept into the hall. The latch was loud on the front door as she slipped out in her bare feet onto the cool stone steps. Loose stones bit into her soles as she flitted across the gravel to cautiously approach the woods. She paused behind the tree where she had spied movement. The silence was absolute, gnawing at her nerves until she heard a twig snap. A man cursed in a distressed tone with all the Americanism stripped away.

  ‘Mr Gralton?’ Eva asked. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Stepping forward she spied him huddled there. He sat up, his eyes manic.

  ‘Help me,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t leave me trapped eternally alone.’

  She knelt, perturbed by his visible terror. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘Not me. I didn’t say it.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘You know who.’

  There was no smell of alcohol. Eva wondered if the strain of being on the run had deranged him.

  ‘Whisper please, my husband is in the stables. Who are you talking about?’

  ‘You never warned me.’ Gralton gripped her shoulder so tight that it hurt. His eyes disturbed her. ‘I’d sooner face the cops than go back to that basement. I’d face batons and prison and any Johnny-come-lately Free State warder, but…Holy Mother of God…I’ve not prayed in twenty years, since I saw a baby-faced priest not six weeks docked from Dublin haranguing Boston strikers who wanted a few extra nickels to take the edge off their children’s hunger. But I’ll pray this night and every night to come never to see that sight again.’

  Gralton became aware that his grip hurt. There was froth on his moustache and sweat glistened in his receding hair. ‘I never liked that room from the moment I stepped into it. I woke and sensed something hover above the bed – not a shape, more a presence that I knew was a man. My body…too terrified to move…swamped by his despair like he was trying to suck my soul into the void of his own. “Help me.” His words weren’t said aloud, but I heard them in a Mayo accent. “Don’t leave me trapped eternally alone.”’

  Gralton glanced towards the house as if expecting a figure to emerge.

  ‘As a boy in Leitrim I was walking the road one night near a spot which old people said was a famine grave. From nowhere a family started walking towards me in the dark, the children starved-looking, bones poking through whatever flesh they had left. Half-skeletons. The man carried a tiny corpse, a bag of bones with matted hair. They came closer and closer without a sound and then they were gone, leaving the empty road that I was too afraid to pass. I scrambled through hawthorns into a field, scratched to pieces but didn’t care. I kept running, miles out of my way before doubling back for home. I ate and ate and still the hunger wouldn’t leave me. In the forty years since I was never so scared, but I’d face that road again rather than return to that basement of yours.’

  ‘Did you see his face?’ Eva asked.

  ‘Have you?’

  Eva sat back against the tree, uncomfortably close to Gralton.

  ‘He hung himself in the wine cellar,’ she said. ‘His feet kicked out the glass in the little window as he swung there. They gave up trying to replace that glass: It would always be broken next morning.’

  ‘Poor bastard.’ Gralton looked up apologetically. ‘Excuse the language, mam. I thought to shelter here long enough to recover my wits. Tell Art I went my own way. I left two guineas behind with the borrowed clothes. It’s uncomfortable pretending to be somebody else. You haven’t a cigarette?’

  ‘Only back in the house.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Just now I’m thinking I might be as wise to walk a good way from this place, then hand myself up. They won’t rest till they’re shut of me. We drove out the English for what? To hand power to big farmers and shopkeepers with no room for the likes of me.’

  ‘Or for Art?’ Eva asked.

  ‘Art has land and connections. A safety net to fall back on.’

  ‘I don’t think he will,’ Eva said. ‘He has left us behind.’

  ‘I never needed to seek out injustice, I was born among the evicted, not the evictors. I never had anything to give up.’ Gralton leaned closer. ‘Say you’ll do something for that poor bastard in your cellar.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘How do I know?’ He rose stiffly, using the tree for leverage.

  ‘Have you food?’ she asked. ‘And your train fare? I promised Art…’

  Gralton ignored her, walking off through the trees, shoulders stooped as if he had already journeyed for hours. Eva wanted to wish him luck but knew there could be no happy outcome. After twenty yards he looked back.

  ‘Promise you’ll pray for him.’

  Eva nodded uncertainly and Gralton walked on into the dark. Her legs started to tremble. Previously she could always put the coldness in the cellar down to her imagination, fuelled by the superstition of servants. Now she could no longer escape the sense that some act was expected of her which she did not know how to undertake. She sat on for a time among the trees, reluctant to return to the house with its bills and crises. Back to this struggle to stay afloat for the children’s sake. Back to the bed she had made for herself. New Zealand had never seemed so far away.

  She had not bargained for also having to take on the burden of a trapped soul, but sensed that the ghost was trying to reach her through Gralton. Perhaps he had been unable to approach her directly, knowing his place even in death. She recalled the sensation of footsteps at the nursery door earlier in the night. She did not know if a sense of kinship with Gralton had allowed him to make contact, blunt man to man. But perhaps if his spirit was appeased, this sense of melancholy within the house might lift. Hazel’s feet might cease to be cold, no matter how many blankets on her bed; Francis might stop jumping up from chairs in the kitchen, unable to explain why he did so. And they might know peace here.

  Yet she had no idea of what to do. The dew made her shiver. She crossed the lawn to the back door that Gralton had left unlocked. The passageway was dark and empty. She entered the kitchen, half expecting a ghostly presence to await her. Nothing stirred. She lit a candle and found her small Cambridge Bible on the shelf by the range beside Mrs McGrory’s Tailteann Cookery Book. Eva took it down, unzipped it and read the inscription Father had written on her twentieth-first birthday: Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire, unuttered or unexpressed.

  All her journeys across London in search of revelation seemed like child’s play now. Nothing had prepared her for this task. Miss MacManus’s words returned. ‘Let him know you’re with him. Pray for him because he can no longer pray.’ What use would that do? Eva possessed no powers, and wasn’t sure if she had the courage to face the claustrophobic wine cellar when a man as hardened as Gralton had run away. She longed to return to the nursery, climb into Francis’s bed and lie with her arms around him. For ten minutes she stood in the kitchen doorway, too scared to move, until gradually she became conscious of the sense of another presence emanating from the doorway of the wine cellar at the end of the dark passageway.

  It felt as if he were awaiting her. She forced herself to walk along the flagstones until she reached the step. The sense of his presence was overwhelming, though it had retreated into the darkest corner of the tiny cellar. There was no physical manifestation. Eva could not tell if he was staring at her or cowering. She just knew she had never felt so scared before. But the cold presence contained no menace, just an overwhelming sense of grief. Placing the candle on the flagstones she took one step into the cellar and then another. Barely enough light filtered in for her to distinguish the bible chapter headings as she helplessly scanned the pages of Exodus, Joshua, Samuel, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Matthew.

  Eva’s hands trembled as she
took another step forward. Whatever was there seemed to press tighter into the corner. She wondered had his ghostly eyes witnessed everything that occurred in the nearby bedroom, her lovemaking with Freddie, her exhausted tears and frustrations.

  She should not have been able to read the cramped print in this candlelight, but could just about discern the words that her hand finally stopped at, the story of Jonah inside the Whale. At first no words came when she opened her mouth, she had to swallow hard to find moisture for her throat.

  ‘I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell.’

  If Brigid rose early she would think her mistress crazy. Perhaps she was. Eva might have fled had her legs allowed her to.

  ‘For thou hadst cast me into the deep in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me. Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple…’

  Eva paused to stare into the gloom and risked a step forward. Whatever was there did not draw back. It was only feet away, invisible, translucent, tentatively watching. Horrible images filled her mind: a skeleton or half-decomposed corpse.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Find peace.’

  She took a step back, sensing the presence veer towards her, like a blown cloud. Face to face, she could hardly bear to look into the emptiness. She took another step back, then a third. But she was not retreating from what was there, rather it felt as if she was slowly drawing it forth, like a small tugboat guiding a liner through the mouth of a treacherous harbour. Trying to keep her voice steady, though barely above a whisper, she moved past the flickering candle on the flagstones and read on.

  ‘I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord, my God. When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.’

  Eva almost screamed but managed to remain still as the presence appeared to move through her out into the narrow passageway. During the seconds it took to pass she felt something soar. She closed her eyes, hearing the book fall. The narrow stairs were only feet away. For a moment she thought he had gone up them. She imagined his soul gliding above Glanmire Wood, looking down at Turlough with its round tower and at the desolate bog beyond where Jim Gralton made his lonely way. But on opening her eyes, although she could see nothing, Eva knew that his ghost was still in the basement. Yet the presence felt different, like a weight was lifted from him, an edge shorn from his terrible loneliness. Eva held her hand out in the candlelight and kept it aloft, sensing something inside her lift also.

  A path forward seemed clear. If she suggested to Dermot MacManus that Miss Crossan become his aunt’s companion in Killeaden House, then Maureen, who had washed the flagstones, would not have to leave for some satanic English mill. With Eva supervising the children’s lessons, Maureen would be perfect to mind them, practical and firm, yet brimming with fun. In the evening she could serve at table and that would be one wage saved.

  Eva gazed into the bedroom where Gralton had slept. Tomorrow she would lie there with Freddie as man and wife. But before the morning’s responsibilities claimed her, she had to be outside. She opened the back door and, breathing in the hint of oncoming dawn, began to run past the stables.

  Twigs cut into her soles as she entered the forest’s edge. Goethe’s poem about the erl-king came into her head, but with no sense of terror this time. As long as she ran, nothing could touch her and she would be safe from sirens and harbingers of doom. The trees seemed to welcome her into their midst. Little girl lost. Little girl come home. Red Riding Hood with all the wolves asleep in bushes and barns. Her breath so was loud it drowned every other sound out. The overgrown slope was almost crested, the landscape shrouded in light mist. Eva stopped in front of the oaks Mother had dreamt about, at the spot where she had known that Francis was about to be born. It felt as if they awaited her. She closed her eyes and spun giddily like a child with her arms out, letting the world dissolve into a blur of motion. She imagined Mother’s unconscious soul rising from her sleep in Donegal. A slender band of love radiating across St John’s Point and the blue of Donegal Bay, passing over the isle of Inishmurray, the crags at Roskeeragh Point and the Ox mountains with their small lakes. It dipped down at Foxford where the Moy flowed into Lough Conn, drawing ever closer to the treetops of Glanmire Wood until it touched her when her arms encircled the tree. A scent of hand lotion filled her nostrils. Strength entered her as she was held within the clasp of Mother’s love.

  Eva grew so dizzy she had to grip the oak tight to prevent herself falling. Pressing her body against the trunk she could feel, beneath its gnarled bark, a warm heartbeat. Voices were calling from within the trunk if she only knew how to listen, voices of people who had died and others yet unborn. Her people. Her soulmates on journeys past and to come. Whose lives she would brush against and learn to recognise as having met in previous existences when encountered in this one. Their voices called to her from the core of this oak, though still inaudible to her ear. Her fellow children of the universe floating free of the nets of creeds. Whose thoughts appeared torturously slow to other people, whose perceptions made no sense in a purely rational world.

  Slowly regaining her balance Eva lay against the trunk with her eyes closed, feeling the sun come up. Below her the house would be stirring, with tasks to be done. She could not truly be herself for as long as the children were young. This was the price of their security until she could be free. But she would strive to live in the real world until her time of liberation without starving her spirit, and she would journey within her soul without losing sight of those who needed her. She would strive to be happy, cutting away whatever obscured the simplicity of life, turning every task into an act of prayer to a God unowned by priests or ministers, to a vortex of love both infinite and indefinable. Eva stepped away from the oak and opened her eyes to acclaim the exaltation of dawn, before walking slowly back down the slope to face the tasks of this morning and all the other mornings to come.

  PART THREE

  1937–1946

  TWENTY

  The Volunteer

  Barcelona, January 1937

  ‘You speak English, comrade? Where are you from?’ The young man with an unmistakably Dublin accent took a seat at Brendan’s table outside the café on the Ramblas. His khaki beret was too big but otherwise he had scavenged well in the scramble by new arrivals in the barracks storeroom. His wafer-thin corduroy jacket buttoned up to the neck was a different shade of brown to the equally inadequate trousers, making it hard to regard his outfit as a uniform. But such little sense of military precision existed among the volunteers from across the world who kept arriving in Barcelona that their ill-fitting garb merely fitted into the euphoric anarchy on the streets.

  ‘I’m from Donegal,’ Brendan replied carefully. The Dubliner scrutinised him in that half-suspicious way of all working-class people and Brendan lost the sense of freedom he had known here amongst foreigners who could not distinguish his caste.

  ‘You sound like no bogman,’ the Dubliner said.

  ‘I’m a volunteer, the same as you.’

  ‘Then why aren’t you in with the rest of us Irish lads where you belong? I’ll have a natter with Frank Ryan, our responsable, see if he can squeeze you into our column.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be possible.’

  ‘Needless to say.’

  Brendan resented the Dubliner’s smirk. He had spent his lunchtime with Yuri, an elderly Soviet radio technician, discussing a problem with Yuri’s ship’s transmitter. Yuri had returned to the Soviet ship tied up in the harbour and now Brendan wanted simply to be left alone or at least as alone as a man could feel who knew that his movements were being watched. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Keep your hair on, comrade. It’s just that you university intellectuals make me laugh. I see i
t when the new arrivals are being sorted out in the bullring. The ordinary English lads refuse to be separated while you toffs bugger off to join the Spaniards in POUM to avoid needing to mix with your own lower orders.’

  ‘I’m not an English toff and I’m still among the volunteers I travelled with,’ Brendan replied tersely. ‘I’m with the Russian contingent.’

  ‘Holy shit! Did they invade Killybegs?’ He stopped laughing, seeing that Brendan did not intend to reply, and stuck out his hand. ‘Liam Hennessy. From Dorset Street in Dublin.’

  ‘Brendan.’

  Hennessy managed to summon one of the waiters running the café which was now a collective enterprise since the owners fled. ‘Two mud coffees with a dose of brandy, entiende?’

  The waiter shrugged uncomprehendingly, dressed in a brown boilersuit with an anarchist neckerchief. This outfit was so common that it was hard to tell who were civilians and who were volunteers.

  It had been part of Barcelona’s exhilaration that initially touched Brendan, the sense of being in a true revolutionary city. But the free spirit evident here had made him realise how claustrophobic Moscow always felt. These Catalans had already withstood a major battle and knew that the untrained volunteers they greeted like heroes each day at the station were no match against the warplanes sent by Hitler. But this did not dent the genuine camaraderie infecting everybody except Georgi and the other NKVD officers in the Soviet contingent who viewed such relaxed kinship as a dangerous affront. Moscow and Barcelona abounded with revolutionary banners, but the ones here were not just constant shrines to Lenin and Stalin or to heroic factory workers who exceeded production quotas. The red and black anarchist colours flew freely, with slogans in Spanish composed by the locals instead of dutifully copied from textbooks. Brendan could not translate them all, but loved the way they often clashed in proclaiming different aims – Independence for Catatonia, Fidelity to the Popular Front of the Republic and Support for the Communist Comintern.