The Family on Paradise Pier

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘What else is in the will?’ Art asked.

  ‘Can you not wait until your father is buried?’

  ‘You’re the one placing responsibilities on my shoulders. Surely you’re pleased that I am not shirking them?’

  ‘I don’t have the will with me,’ Mr Barnes replied. ‘There is a settlement naturally on your mother – the house in Oxford goes to her. There are bequests to your siblings – you will hardly begrudge them that. Brendan’s share will be put in trust, I made sure that you would not get your hands on it. There is cash and some shares and finally a property on Raglan Road in Dublin that your father inherited from his cousin. He left it to you, against my advice I may add. Still that was your father, to the last he refused to judge you.’

  ‘What’s that house worth?’

  ‘It’s a handsome property. Worth more than enough to get you out of this squalor, more than I would leave you if you were my son. I can arrange its sale, have the cash paid to you. After that I will have done my duty to your father and can wash my hands of you and the whole affair.’

  Art touched one of the damp stains like obscure maps on the wall. His fingertips were black when he showed them to the retired banker. ‘This squalor is how thousands of Irish people live. I possess a room to myself, therefore I am rich compared to some of my neighbours. I am sorry if the sight of reality offends you.’

  Mr Barnes rose. ‘I have lived longer than you. I was born ten years after a famine. People don’t recover from famine, their faces never fill out again. Squalor offends my sense of justice, but a man unnecessarily wallowing in it offends my sense of decency. People here would sell their souls for a fraction of what you will receive after probate. You mock your neighbours by pretending to be like them. They are here through lack of opportunity while you are here by choice. You cannot earn their respect like that. I imagine they think you a fool. Remember Madame Despard. Half of Dublin fleeced her until her money ran out, then they burnt the roof over her head. A fool and their cash are easily parted.’

  ‘Have you the deeds of Raglan Road?’ Art asked.

  ‘It cannot be sold until after probate.’

  ‘I wish to give it away.’

  ‘At least bury your father before starting to mock him.’

  ‘I always respected my father.’

  ‘What sort of respect is it to scatter his possessions to the four winds?’

  ‘I will use each possession wisely. I know people who need them.’

  ‘Your sister in Mayo is one,’ Mr Barnes insisted. ‘Your brother in South Africa…’

  ‘Do you understand nothing?’ Art asked. ‘Where would be the justice in that? I begrudge them nothing but in all conscience how can I give them what they have not earned?’

  ‘That was their father’s money, their grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s.’ Mr Barnes was animated, consumed by a passion Art had not seen in him before – the naked self-preserving instincts of the bourgeoisie.

  ‘It was stolen from ordinary people in rack rents and cheap wages,’ Art replied. ‘I will honour my father by returning it to its rightful owners. Naturally I shall pay you the standard commission for administering this.’

  ‘You go too far in insulting me!’ The old man donned his hat. ‘Your father was my friend. I want no fee. I came here for his sake and because I remember you as a compassionate boy. Something terrible happened to you.’

  ‘I grew up.’

  Mr Barnes produced an envelope. ‘I am advancing you enough money to get some decent clothes en route to Oxford. You will go, won’t you?’ He looked anxiously at Art. ‘At least do this one kindness for your mother.’

  Art counted the money in the envelope and tried to return half of it. ‘I will go, but in the clothes of the common man. I cannot change who I am. Father understood that.’

  Mr Barnes ignored the money Art held out. One candle on the table was so low that its flame flickered wildly, slowly being snuffed out by molten wax. It cast distorting shadows on the ceiling.

  ‘I have done my duty to an old friend. I can do no more.’ He reached into his pocket again. ‘The key of the Manor House.’

  He placed it on the table and left. Art did not follow him out onto the dark stairwell, but stood at the window to watch the old man emerge and walk slowly away. Art kept staring down at the street because he did not want to turn and face the key on the table. He felt small and lost, a fatherless son. It was good that Eva was with Mother. They shared much in common. He would be the outsider when he took the boat in the morning.

  Art wanted to pray but did not believe in any God. Even atheists could believe in ghosts however. He knew why he was afraid to turn. Father’s ghost was standing beside the table, watching Art not with his own eyes but with the eyes of Martin Luther. Grandpappy’s ghost was there too and others in the list of ancestors which Father had traced for him as a boy. All of them gazed at him, all waiting. Art trembled. This room had never felt so cold. He was not sure how long it took him, but eventually he turned to survey the emptiness lit by a single candle flame.

  ‘I refuse,’ he said, repeatedly. ‘I refuse my place in your line.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  The Grave

  Donegal, May 1943

  She was always fond of tea. This was one fact that the four men digging her grave all agreed on. The war ration of just half an ounce a week hurt her badly, but it would have been against Mrs Ffrench’s principles to buy extra supplies from the smugglers who plied their trade across the border. She had been a great woman for principles, but in hard times ordinary people needed to survive by any means possible. So when they first set to work, the diggers – who were all once employed by Mr Ffrench – kept up a lively conversation about the growing list of commodities that could be smuggled across the nearby border. Potatoes and meat were being secreted out from the Free State, while precious white bread, petrol, bicycle tyres and black market tea were brought in from the North. Ironically the original owners of Bruckless House had made their fortune through smuggling. But, when found dead in the kitchen three days ago Mrs Ffrench had been trying to concoct a tea substitute by boiling up a potion of common ash and hawthorn leaves, exactly like the poorest farm labourers used to do. The pot had boiled dry on the range, leaving an overpowering stench of burning. But thankfully the fire in the range had gone out or Bruckless House might have burnt down.

  The young fish-seller who found her body had not really known Mrs Ffrench. That was another fact the workmen agreed upon as they walked slowly up towards Bruckless House after the grave was dug. Mrs Ffrench had lived amongst them for decades, yet nobody really knew her as anything except the communist’s wife. Before the Ffrenches became communists there were rumours of some queer class of religion she was supposed to belong to. If Mr Goold Verschoyle was still walking the boreens with his hawthorn stick and a book in his pocket he would have been able to explain what it was called. Anyway, it was the sort of queer Protestant sect that a foreigner might belong to. Not that Mrs Ffrench had wanted the Protestant minister at her burial. Entering the library now where her unadorned coffin rested, the workmen fervently wished that she had. Obviously, as Catholics they could not have risked their souls by setting foot in Killaghtee Protestant church to attend such a service, but it would have felt less desolate than this.

  There again, when they thought of her as anything except the master’s wife, she had always cut a lonely figure even when throwing curious tea parties for local children in her young days. Seamus, the eldest workman, remembered talk about a short-lived fascination with lamps. At one time nothing would do Mrs Ffrench but to set lamps burning in every window of the house. She had made a skivvy out of herself by insisting on personally attending to each one, to the mortification of the serving girls who felt that she did not trust them with this simple task. Her lamps were the talk of the parish but then she stopped lighting them or people stopped noticing them because the gentry often got up to strange antics to pass the time. Still,
for all their peculiarities, the Ffrenches treated people fair, unlike some local farmers like Henderson who were terrors to work under. Bruckless had been a good house to work in where the master never shouted, but instead called you comrade. The one thing to be wary of was that he had always been dying for a chance to make a speech. Indeed, as the youngest man present joked, he had died trying to make one, cycling into Killybegs on a stormy night determined to confront de Valera.

  The three others lifting up Mrs Ffrench’s coffin had been among those left with the queer task of burying him on unconsecrated ground at the end of the garden two years ago, like a suicide or an unbaptised child condemned to limbo. But Mrs Ffrench had been insistent that his last wish be carried out. It had seemed the queerest funeral any man there ever attended. But now, as they carefully manoeuvred her coffin through the door, each realised that today was worse because there was nobody present to be a mourner. Not that the whole district didn’t wish to pay their respects, but it would be a mortal sin for any Christian to attend such a pagan act. Indeed the four men had only felt able to dig her grave after the priest gave his permission, saying that the poor creature could not be left lying alone in the house.

  Since the master died she had been alone in the house, heartbroken, with people seeing her walk abroad some evenings as far as the empty Manor House in Dunkineely. Sometimes she stood outside it, staring up at the unlit windows. It was said that she had loved the Goold Verschoyle children like she would have loved her own had she been blessed by any. Nobody had known who to contact when she was found with the back door wide open to the wind and rain. Likewise the four men didn’t quite know what to do now as they crossed the sloping lawn and came to the open grave beside the small pier.

  Very gently they placed the coffin on the grass. The three older men were silent because it didn’t seem right to speak. But the youngest man started to blabber on about the first funeral he ever attended. His hands shook and the others knew how he had downed two whiskeys for courage. It was the queerest loneliest feeling to pass two ropes underneath the coffin and lower it down until it rested with a bump on the exposed wood of the master’s coffin. There was not a word from the youngest man now and none of them looked at the others as they let the ropes fall. But every man was praying for the soul of this lonely woman and that God would forgive her heresy.

  With uneasy haste they begin to fill in the grave and, when that job was done, turned to go. But it didn’t seem proper to leave without some words being spoken. The others looked towards the oldest man who broke the silence.

  ‘This is what the master would have wanted,’ he declared softly. ‘’Tis the least we could do for him. It would be better if she was buried with her own kind if any of her own were left.’ Glancing furtively over his shoulder, he knelt on one knee. ‘But seeing as there isn’t, she’d not take offence if we recited the sorrowful mysteries, would she now?’

  The others didn’t reply, but one by one they slowly knelt to pray for this stranger’s soul.

  THIRTY-THREE

  A Tutor Comes

  Mayo, April 1944

  Francis and his twenty-one-year-old tutor were walking in the woods with the dog – ostensibly to give Eva time alone with her husband before he commenced the trek back to London, but more so because she knew that Freddie made them both uncomfortable in different ways. Even Maureen had contrived to disappear after breakfast so that – with Hazel in boarding school – only Eva and Freddie remained in the crumbling house they still officially called their home. But during Freddie’s four-day furlough it had not felt like a shared home. It certainly radiated a sense of belonging for Eva when Freddie was absent, and she suspected that Freddie would experience the same sensation if he returned to find all trace of her gone. But it had taken these four nights together for Eva to realise how far apart they had grown.

  She could not tell what Freddie thought beneath his brusque exterior. His British army uniform – defiantly donned, against instructions, for the long train journey across Ireland – made him look like a stranger, with its various braids and insignia denoting his elevation to the rank of lieutenant colonel. But even yesterday when he entered the kitchen in his old corduroy trousers after going shooting on the bogs, he had resembled the ghost of someone she once knew rather than the person she was now familiar with. Eva heard the whiskey decanter clink against his glass as she stared out the window.

  ‘I’m worried about the boy,’ Freddie repeated, unable to drop the subject.

  ‘Francis is fine again,’ Eva replied.

  ‘Fine when hiding in this blasted wood. But he can’t hide here for ever.’

  ‘He’s studying hard.’

  ‘Dreaming, you mean, while supposedly being taught by someone who transpires to be dreamier than he is. They could both use a haircut. When I engaged Harry Bennett I thought he would whip Francis into shape. But the reverse is true. Francis has reduced him to his own marshmallow level. I can’t imagine how Harry served as a officer.’

  ‘Harry was a classics student before donning a uniform.’ Eva turned. ‘You hired him as a tutor, not a drill instructor.’

  ‘Still, I hoped he might put some backbone into Francis.’ Freddie fingered his whiskey glass. ‘Where the hell have they gone anyway?’

  ‘Walking.’

  ‘And is this how he teaches Francis his lessons?’

  ‘It’s their routine. They converse in Latin on the way out and French on the way back. It’s better to be out of doors rather than stuck in some damp room that’s caving in. This house is collapsing around us, Freddie, even you can see that.’

  ‘It needs work. But nothing that can’t be fixed after we give Jerry his beating.’ He placed his glass on the table, steeling himself to speak with his fingers drumming softly on the surface. This was the moment he had been building towards, the question they could no longer avoid. This house had shrunk since he entered it, with Eva forced to share her bed for the first time in six months. Husband and wife and yet strangers. The alien feel of his body or any body against hers after so long. Eva was glad that Freddie had not been able to see her panicked face in the dark when he touched her on his first night home. It was his right and her duty, yet Eva had not known how she would get through it. The price of being married, the price of a crumbling sanctuary for her son. But then as Freddie’s lips touched hers, the most shockingly unimaginable thing occurred. She might have cried out had his tongue not entered her mouth. Before then it had been a secret, even unto herself, and she had refused to allow the fantasy to enter her mind in their dutiful lovemaking since then. But the confusion caused by this unexpected image would not abate until Freddie returned to England.

  ‘Do you propose returning to take your place beside me this September?’ Freddie asked quietly. ‘I know you hated London last year because of the difficulties surrounding the boy, but that is where our new home will be when the war is won. I could never sell Glanmire, but with my salary this could be our summer house. There’s no company for you here anyhow, with half the houses gone. De Valera is using high rates to drive the rest of us out. Soon there’ll only be peasant cabins and roofless Big Houses. My future lies in the army and we should plan ahead.’

  Eva stared back out the window, knowing that Freddie was too proud to suspect her secret. He was right about the lack of neighbours. This current conflict had not caused the same devastating cull as the Great War, but that was only because so few Protestants remained anyway. Some had followed a path of assimilation, marrying Catholics in muted ceremonies behind closed sacristy doors with the disapproving priest’s sermon consisting of a reiteration of the Ne Temere decree. But most had packed up for the colonies or for England. Last month she had seen Hazelwood Castle advertised for sale by the Land Commission on the stipulation that the new owners level the site. The advertisement had ignored its beautiful rooms, stressing instead the quantity of reusable lead to be scavenged off the roof. Glanmire House barely had a roof, so what excuse could she u
se to cling on here?

  ‘Another English boarding school would destroy Francis,’ she said.

  ‘I have said that you can let him board in the soft Quaker place you picked in Waterford. So stop hiding behind the boy.’

  ‘He needs me to be close for him.’

  ‘What if I need you?’ This expression of need was so unlike Freddie that Eva didn’t know which of them was more shocked. She felt guilty, as if her unexpected passion on their first night had led him on.

  ‘Do you need me?’ She faced him.

  Freddie sipped his whiskey uneasily. ‘All I’m saying is that Francis must toughen up. Your Waterford Quakers won’t do that for him. How do you expect him to cope with university?’

  ‘University will be different. There’ll be no bullying.’ Eva didn’t mean to sound so accusatory.

  ‘There was not bullying in the last school,’ Freddie snapped. ‘Just some character-building ragging. I drill boys barely older than Francis to sail across the Empire on ships that could be torpedoed at any moment. Do you expect me to tell them that my own son cannot cope with some harmless traditions?’

  ‘Those pranks were not harmless,’ Eva protested. ‘They were carried out by ruthless bullies. But the moment you became a lieutenant colonel nothing would stop you from packing him off to an upper-class school just so that you could feel as good as your fellow officers.’