The Family on Paradise Pier

by Dermot Bolger

  An hour passed before Harry excused himself for a moment and opened the door out into the night air to cross the gravel. She could imagine him in shirtsleeves and braces, relieving himself at the forest’s edge. A noise made her turn. Francis had opened his bedroom door and stood there, his face pale in the candlelight.

  ‘Did our voices wake you, darling? I’m sorry.’

  ‘I haven’t been asleep, Mummy. But I’m exhausted.’

  ‘What’s stopping you going asleep?’

  The boy swallowed, choosing his words carefully.

  ‘Waiting for Harry.’ He paused. ‘I don’t think Harry will ever marry, Mummy. He told me he never intends to.’ Eva sensed that he was trying to convey something she had not yet grasped. Francis glanced towards the open door. ‘The thing is, Harry is not really interested in women.’

  ‘I’m already married,’ Eva sounded like a guilty schoolgirl. ‘You don’t think I…?’

  ‘I think…’ Francis searched for the right words. ‘He would sooner not have me lying awake so long for him.’

  His gaze was patient, knowing how her brain was slow to grasp things. But she was piecing together clues she had never understood. Mother’s unease on the night Francis dressed up to dance in her room. Freddie’s discomfiture at the length of Harry’s stay, a displeasure she had interpreted as relating to herself. Francis telling her how the boys in Castlebridge mocked him because he didn’t want to swap picture cards of women in suspenders. But girls flocked to Francis and he loved their company, so he couldn’t be…Eva didn’t even know the correct term, just vulgar expressions overheard from men swapping jokes when they thought she wasn’t listening.

  Harry’s footsteps began to cross the gravel. Eva stared at her son who had never kept secrets from her. The fear on his face showed that he knew she now understood.

  ‘You won’t tell Father?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Her voice was barely a whisper as Harry’s footsteps drew near. ‘Go back to bed, son.’

  Francis closed his door. Harry entered and went to sit down, but something about Eva made him stop.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘Are you tired?’

  ‘I think…’ She paused. What did she think? Eva thought of asking him to fetch her a brandy from the bottle Freddie hadn’t finished. She considered ordering him to leave the house immediately. She thought of her own innocence and all the missed signs during these months. Did Maureen know? She doubted if Maureen knew that such men existed. What attracted her to Harry was the exact gentle quality that existed in Francis, the sensibility that made Freddie bristle. There was something deeply alike in them. They had been lovers, perhaps from the night he arrived. Eva didn’t know how such men recognised this quality in each other, who made the first move or who did what. She had never needed to consider such things before. She had thought to create an ark here for Francis, a safe miniature universe. But at night in their room they had created a smaller world within her world, a galaxy of male love where she knew instinctively that Francis felt happy and secure.

  Harry looked concerned, his face betraying an anxiety she sometimes glimpsed when Freddie addressed him. The terror of being exposed, dragged into the dock or down a lane for a beating. Bugger boy – that was the phrase Freddie once used to refer to a young soldier drummed out of the army and into prison. Would he use it about her darling son, his son? Did he suspect or simply not want to know? How long had it taken Francis to find the courage to tell her? He had done so partly to protect her, sensing her growing interest in Harry, just like she sensed Maureen’s similar interest. Subconsciously, all three of them had been competing for the same man. The notion of Francis and her as rivals was too bizarre. Besides Francis was only a child. But he wasn’t any more. Eva thought of how mature he had looked in that doorway, how he lay awake now. Children did not belong to you. They grew beyond you and could not be caged by your expectations. Her hands shook as she stared up at Harry’s concerned face.

  ‘I think I’ll sit here for a while.’ She struggled to keep her voice steady. ‘But maybe it’s time you went to bed.’

  She held his gaze, knowing how he could sense a change between them. Eva picked up the Evelyn Waugh novel and pretended to read. Harry watched her for a moment longer.

  ‘Good night then,’ he said.

  ‘Good night, Harry.’

  Eva waited until his door was closed before lowering the book. She blew the candles out and stood in the dying firelight listening to the silence from the other room. She knew that she should go to bed but seemed unable to move. It had been such a long day and there would be other long days ahead. Her perpetual fear for Francis. The secret she could never share. Art’s communism would seem a minor scandal compared to this. Despite the fire she felt cold and desperately alone. But another sensation was growing within her. A curious relief amidst her fear, a faint inkling of joy. Her son had been lost, cast adrift in boarding school with his secret burden, terrified and imagining himself to be one of a kind. Yet here in the midst of this wood, he had found happiness with a lover who made him sane again.

  Eva ran her fingers down the blistered paintwork of the bedroom door behind which her two young men lay entwined, then took away her hand, knowing she could not intrude into that world where he was safe. Bolting the front door against the world, she went alone to her bed.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Make Room

  Russia, 1944

  The original rail track here had been destroyed during the initial retreat under Stalin’s scorched earth policy. The advancing Germans had repaired it when they imagined themselves rulers from the Baltic to the Black Sea. But the remnants of the occupying German armies were now fragmented, no longer connected by this railroad since the Red Army’s advances at Nevel and Ovruch. For months the fascists had been on the run, surrendering Zhmerinka and Vinnitsa and Kamenets Podolskiy in disarray. Odessa had been taken without a fight and soon the Crimea would be fully in Soviet hands again. The fascists were retreating so fast that this small company of fascist soldiers had become isolated here or else had been left behind on a suicide mission to try and briefly slow the Red Army. If so they were unfortunate in encountering Savinkov’s unit. The generals in Moscow could focus on the overall battle, but Savinkov’s expertise – built on three years of slaughter – was to attack, regroup and attack again in a succession of constant local actions that hounded the Germans. Therefore his unit was well blooded for this short combat during which they encircled and then annihilated the German soldiers who refused to surrender. Savinkov lost five men before the final fascist was killed. He was used to the smell of death and the wide-eyed stares of the slain. Even so, something shocked him now as he stalked through the corpses searching for telltale signs of men faking death. This war had aged him. Last winter his hair turned grey, not as a result of the wounds he received but upon hearing of the deaths of both his sons.

  It was their faces he kept expecting to glimpse as he turned over each body with his boot, because almost every boy here was the same age as them. Their faces were young, yet each had the eyes of a wizened man. His own baby-faced soldiers who were now starting to dig a mass grave had the air of veterans, though few were out of their teens. Their hands were hard. At times their hearts terrified him.

  No movement came from the young German whose body he turned over but even without kneeling Savinkov knew that he was alive. The boy’s eyes were tightly closed, his uniform soaked in blood. It was impossible to tell if he was conscious. Savinkov knelt and touched his smooth unmarked face. He wondered if either of his sons had ever learnt to shave, or kiss a woman. They were sixteen and seventeen when they died but, as it was three years since he was last home, he found it hard to envisage them being that old. This German boy had never shaved. Savinkov now knew that he was conscious, terrified to open his eyes. Even if he were a Russian, Savinkov could not save him with those wounds. The least he could do was ensure that
he was not buried alive because that was the fear which haunted Savinkov’s dreams, that his sons had been tossed in a grave while still breathing, unable to speak but forced to mutely watch the clay being shovelled in as they lay among the corpses. A shout from one of his men made him look up.

  ‘Comrade Savinkov, we can’t dig any deeper. There’s a mass grave here from before.’

  ‘Who is in it?’

  ‘Impossible to say. Zeks maybe, by the look of the uniforms. There are dozens of adults and children or what’s left of them.’

  The German boy gave an involuntary twitch as the pistol gently touched his forehead. Savinkov hoped that the eyes would not open because he knew that he would recognise them. ‘Keep digging, comrades,’ he ordered. ‘We haven’t time to start again. Why should only the living suffer? We’ve endured enough.’ Looking away, he pulled the trigger once. ‘The dead will simply have to make room.’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Home

  January 1945

  The stationmaster in Donegal town was unsure if any service could be provided this evening, because, as he phrased it, an engine that had chugged out into the blue this afternoon had stayed out in the blue, unable to scavenge sufficient fuel to complete its return journey. When Art was finally summoned from the freezing waiting room an ancient carriage had been rigged up so that a single horse could pull it along the track. The only other passengers were an old couple travelling to Killybegs, the man bereft of teeth and with such a thick mumble that Art could not decide if he was addressing his wife in Irish or English until he finally made out a few words about the state funeral for the fascist leader, O’Duffy, in Dublin. The carriage was unlit, with the driver, wrapped in a greatcoat, sucking on an empty pipe on the open platform at the front. On their slow journey out from Donegal town Art convinced himself that the key in his wallet would not fit. He had been carrying it on him since that night in 1942 when Mr Barnes sought out his Wexford Street flat. On a dozen occasions he came close to flinging it away, but at other times found himself waking in an irrational panic and needing to check his wallet to ensure that it remained safely there. The key to the Manor House was like a curse he could not escape from and finally, after years of prevarication, it was leading him back to face the ghosts.

  It appeared as if all that was left to face was ghosts because when they eventually reached Dunkineely, nobody was present in the station, lit by a single oil lamp suspended from a hook above the deserted platform. Art wondered if news of his arrival in Donegal had reached the village in advance.

  The driver looked back, expecting Art to leave the freezing carriage. But although he opened the door for a moment, a foreboding prevented him from stepping down. He shouted out that he would continue on to Bruckless. The driver shrugged and made a soft clicking noise to the horse before the carriage lurched forward again.

  The smell of the sea in Donegal was different from anywhere he had ever visited. Art remembered trying to describe that special aroma of seaweed, salt, heather and poverty to his wife in their Moscow flat. As the horse lumbered on he realised how much he loved this coastline. The memory of every outcrop of rock and crooked ditch was implanted in his brain. Such irrational love was indulgent. The only love worthy of respect was love for one’s fellow man, the love that made him slave every day in the face of ignorance and greed. Leave your home, Christ, the first true Marxist, had said. Give up your family and your possessions, put away childish things and follow me. Art had tried to follow this call. He would never have set foot here again were it not for the key in his wallet.

  Donegal was poor when he left and this war had not helped. A quarter-century of alleged freedom had yielded nothing for the disorganised serfs clinging to smallholdings and superstition in these glens. The only money ever spent was whenever American GIs stationed in Northern Ireland clandestinely crossed the border on drinking expeditions.

  Bruckless station was in total darkness. Art dismounted with his suitcase. The carriage wheels creaked as the horse plodded away. It was late, with frost starting to form. He crossed the small hump-backed bridge leading to the gates of Bruckless House. A light burned in the library window as Art walked up the dark avenue. He did not know who lived here now – some distant relation of Ffrench’s. Art felt tempted to creep up to the window and gaze in at the fireside where he had first learned the truths that sustained him in the decades since. But he kept to the shadow of the trees because he had come here not to visit the living but the dead. He knew the location, by the small pier he had loved as a boy. Ffrench had often discussed his plans, laughing in advance at the outrage that his burial would cause. Here it stood in the moonlight, a plain stone slab unadorned by religious shibboleths or the comfort of pious untruths. Mrs Ffrench had chosen to share this unconsecrated grave, close to the water and within sight of their old home. Art traced the inscription with his fingers, then lit a match to read it: ‘Thomas Roderick Ffrench: The Immortality of the Dead Exists Only in the Minds of the Living.’ The match spluttered out and Art hunched down, aware of how cold he was. He had not anticipated such grief. He had felt differently at Father’s funeral, mainly because of the need to steel himself against the unspoken hostility of many mourners who gazed at Art as if he had personally killed him. But here in the dark, grief ambushed him with no witnesses. For Father, for the Ffrenches, for those whom he did not know to be alive or dead. Among the living only Mother refused to judge him. She understood that he had not chosen this path: it had chosen Art to do penance for the sins of previous generations.

  Walking out onto the pier, he recalled the sound of laughing bodies running down these stones in swimsuits. It had been wrong not to get off at Dunkineely, wrong to allow nostalgia to distract him from the work to be done. Art had come here not to remember the past but to help build the future. Finding it impossible to ignore his legacy, he must confront it. Picking up his suitcase he left the grave and commenced the long walk to Dunkineely. By next spring the Manor House would echo again with young laughter. It would not be a home for one family, but a home from home for dozens of families who, in the past, had only ever entered such houses through the servants’ door. Whole generations born in the Dublin slums had never known a holiday, but Art would ensure that at least some of them would enjoy the same privileges enshrined for honest workers under Soviet law. Western saboteurs had managed to prevent this system from functioning fully while Art was in Russia. But he had once visited a workers’ rest home on the Baltic Sea and Brendan had spoken about even finer sanatoria, run by the NKVD, where the traitor Polevoy had taken him to stay.

  This final solution to the Manor House problem had occurred to him while studying an appraisal of the extraordinary success of rest homes in a Soviet magazine he procured for the library of the newly established Irish Workers’ League. It had taken time over the past two years to re-establish contact with loyal communists in Dublin who, like him, were outraged at the liquidation of the Irish Communist Party by Trotskyite opportunists. But the newly formed Irish Workers’ League was the true voice of Irish communism, resolutely obedient to the wisdom of Moscow. Without the Raglan Road house which Art had inherited from Father it might have been difficult to provide a forum for this party. But once word spread that Art possessed such a large house on an exclusive Dublin thoroughfare which he wanted to give away to be used as a headquarters, comrades had emerged to form a committee to assume responsibility for the property once Art signed over the deeds. For the past year Art had lived in an attic flat in that house, working on the renovations to turn it into offices and lecture rooms. Jim Gralton had been deported from Ireland for trying to give ordinary people in Leitrim such a meeting place. Art had arranged for the committee to pay him the wages of an ordinary Dublin carpenter, with a deduction for his rent. Funds were low and they could only pay him this wage when he also donated most of the small bequests that Father left him.

  Still it had been his own fault not to clarify in advance his exact position within the
Workers’ League once the building work was completed. He had imagined being employed as a caretaker, somebody who modestly excluded himself from power but was on hand to offer guidance when complex ideological issues arose. In retrospect he realised that his expectation had been a reactionary stance, because it implied that the Workers’ League owed him something. To stake any claim on the Raglan Road headquarters would be to validate the bourgeois concept of inherited wealth. Perhaps he might have tried harder to make small talk with his new comrades, but he utterly disputed the contention that he – of all people – was overtly dogmatic. He had simply exercised the freedom to speak his mind, whether people liked it or not. Similarly they had now exercised their freedom to employ a different caretaker, making it clear that while they were not evicting Art from his attic flat, there were better ways in which his room could be utilised to the maximum benefit of the party.

  Two days ago while packing to leave, he remembered a story that Madame Despard once told him. Before she bought Eccles Street, she had owned a house in Dublin, which she invited Maud Gonne MacBride to share. Maud Gonne in turn had invited other Diehard Republicans until every room was packed. One day, sensing an atmosphere of discord within the house, she asked Maud Gonne if there might be anyone present who did not belong. Gently Maud Gonne had explained that indeed there was, but people had been too polite to tell Madame Despard how she in fact was the intruder. Art had left Raglan Road, aware that some comrades were relieved to see him go. But he had achieved his ambition and defeated the traitors by helping to start a new party. Budapest and Warsaw were in Soviet hands, with the Red Army nearing the German border. They would reach Berlin before the imperialists, with this new clandestine Irish communist party positioned to reap the avalanche of recruits unleashed by a Soviet victory.