The Family on Paradise Pier

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘The records ate into my budget,’ he said. ‘I had to cut back on other things, but music is so important.’

  ‘Do you know how many are coming?’ she asked.

  ‘By Soviet standards this will be quite uncrowded.’

  ‘We’re not in the Soviet Union,’ Hazel reminded him from the doorway.

  Art smiled. ‘We’ve had good discourse,’ he told Eva. ‘You reared them as Father reared us, to be independent thinkers. The important thing is not to agree but to be able to discuss issues openly.’

  ‘And is that what you get in the Soviet Union?’ Hazel taunted. ‘Try discussing something there and you wind up in a salt mine.’

  Art shrugged indulgently. ‘How can I blame you for parroting lies when you only know Western propaganda? Stay another week and you’ll see that to Dublin slum dwellers this is paradise.’

  Hazel snorted and went to help Francis unharness the pony. The visitors would arrive soon, these rooms crammed with people. Eva welcomed life returning to the Manor House, but she coveted one quiet moment to confront each room again. Father’s study had become Art’s makeshift office, with the word Caretaker painted on the door. A picture of Stalin displaced Father’s portrait of Martin Luther.

  Her shoes were loud as she climbed the bare stairs to open her old bedroom door. Only the windowframe looked the same and the slope of the ceiling meeting the eaves. The room was spotlessly clean, but in a militaristic functional way. Art had obviously built the five tightly cramped wooden bunks. Two tiers of rough canvas were tacked across each frame. A child rolling off the top tier would face a terrifying drop. The walls were the same antiseptic colour as the hallway, reminding Eva of an army barracks. She approached the window and heard Art enter behind her. For a moment Eva imagined that he was Mother on that distant evening when mackerel swarmed to their death and her perfect childhood seemed turned upside-down. She could almost feel Mother’s hand inches from her hair.

  ‘It has been difficult,’ Art said. ‘Local people are not keen to co-operate. The priests poison their minds. I should have brought more supplies from Dublin.’

  ‘Are you nervous?’

  ‘Once we co-operate as a collective everything will go smoothly. I don’t mean you, of course. You must go visiting with your children. Those neighbours who speak to me ask always about you and Brendan.’

  ‘What do you tell them?’

  Art was silent. They had learnt not to discuss Brendan. Eva looked down, imagining Mother tending the flowering beds of sweet peas, with the sound of Father’s piano and the thud of tennis balls from the back garden.

  ‘Do you remember a sandy-haired boy herding sheep with bruises down his legs?’ Eva asked.

  ‘What boy?’

  ‘Grandpappy let you drive the trap. We were returning from a picnic when sheep blocked the road. You wanted to give him your shoes.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  Eva turned, shocked. ‘You must remember. That was the moment which led to all this.’

  Art shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ve forgotten. I recall no interest in all this, as you call it, till poor Ffrench educated me. You should visit his grave. He was a good man, stuck to his beliefs, yet people here accepted him in a way they can’t seem to accept me.’

  Eva knew that local people had seen Mr Ffrench more as a likeable eccentric than a threat. Art’s intensity was different and as dangerous as a Christian actually trying to live like Christ.

  ‘Do people ignore you?’

  ‘They’re civil, generally. Two evenings a week I go down to MacShane’s pub for a bottle of Swithwicks and a quiet talk with Mr MacShane about the old days. But mostly I’m too busy with my work.’

  A babble of Dublin voices filled the street below. The pump went silent. Eva knew that every door in the village was closed, with locals standing behind lace curtains to watch the families arrive.

  ‘You should meet your guests,’ Eva suggested.

  Art surveyed the room for dirt and then, as a last touch, hung a silver picture frame from the nail in the wall. It was the same nail that once held Eva’s picture of a girl kneeling in prayer. She recognised the frame as having previously held a family photograph. It now contained a quotation, typed in capital letters.

  ‘WE DEMAND THAT OUR COMRADES BE GUIDED BY THE VITAL FORCE OF THE SOVIET ORDER – ITS POLITICS. ONLY THUS CAN OUR YOUTH BE REARED, NOT IN A DEVIL-MAY-CARE ATTITUDE BUT IN A STRONG AND VIGOROUS REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT.’ ANDREI ZHDANOV

  Eva read the slogan, then had to leave the room. Art’s old bedroom was similarly rigged out as a cramped boys’ dormitory with iron beds set up in the remaining three bedrooms for the adult couples. Eva looked out of the back window. No clue remained that a tennis court ever stood in the mown meadow of the garden. But a tent was pitched beside the slope. Hazel appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Did he not think that the children might want to sleep in with their parents?’ Eva asked.

  ‘Art claims that communal sleeping will foster closer comradeship among the children. He threw out all kinds of old family documents and books before we came. They’re piled in the yard. I don’t know if there’s anything you might want to keep.’

  Eva carried her case down the back stairs to avoid the families crowding into the hall. Children’s boots stomped on the bare floorboards. A child tunelessly banged the piano keys. The kitchen was stark and spotless but contained little food. It was the first time Eva had entered this room without some cat raising its eyes to observe her. Out in the yard Art had dumped what he regarded as rubbish: mildewed novels more likely to be read than the political tracts inside, and gramophone records like Yes, We Have No Bananas – out of date but with more chance of being played than Khrennikov’s symphonies. Old family snapshots had become stuck together among Father’s papers, illegible after the rain. The remnants of Byvshie Liudi, former people.

  Eva wanted to turn away from this ugly rubbish tip. But she kept sifting through the past, searching for something to hold onto. Some books near the bottom were unsoiled, but it was two sheaves of pages typed in crude columns and sewn with thread that she extracted with a surge of excitement. Maud’s photograph was on the cover, with the legend, ‘The Editor at her residence’. Above it was the letterhead that Eva had designed: The Dunkineely News, summer issue. Price 4d. There had only been summer issues. Eva remembered the hours Maud spent compiling this family newspaper. Father had written an essay for each one, with poems coaxed from Brendan and Art. Eva had provided the illustrations while Maud as editor recorded every tiny event:

  The Goold Verschoyle staff reporter has made careful notes about the behaviour of our English visitor, Mr Oliver Hawkins. Reports indicate that he plays tennis smartly and wets his hair on Sundays. He started smoking cigarettes at the age of seven and is rumoured to wear pink pyjamas. While watching the ladies’ tennis, Mr Oliver Hawkins was seen – at a crucial moment – to wipe his nose with his green handkerchief which matches his socks…

  Eva’s hand shook as she read these pages that had somehow survived. No issues were ever as carefree after news of Oliver Hawkins’s death at Ypres. Maud had been changed by her first encounter with death. They all had. A dress rehearsal for the deaths to come.

  Voices were raised inside the house as Art argued with the exhausted travellers.

  ‘If I wanted my son to share a prison cell I’d have stuck him in Mountjoy. St Joseph himself couldn’t stop those bunks collapsing if a child bounced on them.’

  ‘This is no prison,’ Art retorted. ‘Anyone can walk out the door at any time.’

  ‘Walk where?’ a woman said. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  ‘There’s fresh air and sand.’

  ‘If we wanted them we could have walked to Dollymount and got a few chips at least. You promised us things for the kids.’

  ‘There are books and…’

  ‘Fuck your books,’ another man interrupted. ‘You’d want a few amusements. Somewhere like Bray. I mean is there ev
en a bookie’s in this kip?’

  ‘There’s a bookmaker’s in Donegal town.’

  ‘What use is that if I want to stick on a bet? You’d need Hannibal’s shagging elephants to make that trip.’

  ‘Never mind the bookie’s,’ some woman said. ‘I’m not sticking my kids in with strangers we don’t know.’

  ‘I’d mind you not to cast accusations on my kids,’ the man retorted. ‘Especially as your sons nearly wore their fingers to stumps scratching their scalps all the way here.’

  ‘Please, comrades,’ Art interrupted. ‘Nothing is achieved by arguing. We can vote on sleeping arrangements in council. Remember this rest home is a collective. Now I have a rota of duties for us all drawn up.’

  ‘Hold your horses, pal,’ the first man said. ‘My wife is not skivvying for strangers. We look after our own brood and that’s it.’

  Eva moved off, not wanting to hear the arguments. Further down the garden it was possible to ignore the voices. She closed her eyes and recalled holding her pet rabbit while watching Father practise at the window with a black cat motionless on the piano. That was the room where Father had written his essays for The Dunkineely News, delighted when he occasionally managed to later place one as An Irishman’s Diary in the Irish Times. She sat on the slope to read his words in the family newspaper:

  How our idle moments bring us closer to the wider truths of the universe. These truths buried within us all. Take our gardener, a man of few words, yet I have heard him set forth the beauties of cliff and bay with a clarity quite worthy of one trained in word-painting. The pity is that in a country so fair there should be room for fancied differences of caste and creed…

  Perhaps this last line had been a spark to Art’s rebellion. He did not recall encountering the sandy-haired boy on the road, just like Eva in turn could not remember reading this essay before. Maybe Maud and Thomas and Brendan also had completely different memories of childhood in this paradise which none of them had ever recaptured. However perhaps on this trip she might recapture the magic of painting at least. Opening her case she erected the portable easel, pinned up a sheet and took out brushes and paints. She sat on the slope to mix the paints and raised the brush, but an invisible force prevented her touching the sheet. Painting had been instinctive once, a world of lines begging to be drawn. She remembered Father’s phrase about the ever-budding freshness of life and realised that she no longer knew how to capture it.

  A sound made her turn. Theresa and the older girl from the bus were observing her, along with a tiny child whose hands they both held.

  ‘What are you writing?’ Theresa asked.

  ‘I’m painting.’

  ‘We’re going home tomorrow,’ the older girl announced. ‘This is an awful Godforsaken kip. Bundoran looked like a bit of gas but the silence here would drive you daft.’

  Theresa ignored her companion, her eyes fixed on the sheet of paper.

  ‘Well, go on then,’ she said, ‘show us how you do this painting stuff.’

  Eva held out the brush. ‘You have a go.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, missus, sure I can’t paint nothing.’

  ‘Try. It’s fun.’

  Theresa laughed nervously.

  ‘Come away, Theresa,’ her companion urged. ‘She’s making a cod of you.’ The girl went to move off but Theresa held her ground, although still refusing to accept the brush that Eva held out. ‘Stop being thick, Theresa,’ the older girl snapped. ‘They’re all mad Protestants in this dump. I’ll leave you here for them to snatch your soul if you’re not careful.’

  Theresa reached out to take the brush. ‘Can you teach me?’

  ‘I can help you to teach yourself.’

  ‘Jaysus, Theresa!’ The older girl stormed off in disgust, dragging the tiny child behind her. Theresa stared at the sheet, terrified to dirty it.

  ‘Me teacher in school is always jeering that I can’t draw a straight line.’

  ‘You don’t have to only draw what’s outside. Draw what’s inside your mind, draw your emotions. They don’t have straight lines, do they?’

  ‘I don’t know. How much do the sheets cost? Me Ma will kill me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. What were them words you said on the bus?’

  ‘Up the airy mountain…?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘…Down the rushy glen,

  We daren’t go a-hunting,

  For fear of little men.’

  Theresa dipped the brush in the green paint. It came out smeared with too much paint and a blob landed on the grass. Eva showed her how to regulate the amount of paint and create a brush stroke instead of just smudging the paint on. Other than that she remained silent and simply watched. This was where a teacher belonged, not up on a platform but at the child’s shoulder. And even the term teacher was wrong. Rather it should be evoker, someone willing to be a silent instrument drawing out what already resided within the inner radiance of a child’s imagination.

  Theresa progressed laboriously at first but gradually gained confidence. Her eyes were fixed on the sheet, oblivious to the children who came to gape but were reluctant to approach too closely. The adult voices went silent in the house, with a temporary truce negotiated. Smells of cooking came from the kitchen and Eva imagined the two pigs’ heads boiling away. She wanted to ask if people were really leaving tomorrow, but didn’t wish to interrupt her first ever pupil. The thrill she had known as a child, the limitless possibility of every brush stroke, was back – only now Eva was experiencing it through Theresa’s excitement. She didn’t know who was more apprehensive when the girl stepped back with uncertainty in her eyes.

  ‘It’s the airy mountain,’ she explained.

  Eva examined the sheet, saturated from corner to corner with streaks of green paint. She had never seen anything so tangibly and visibly green.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

  The small girl’s eyes shone with pride. ‘Can I do another then? Will you pin up a sheet?’

  ‘Put it up yourself,’ Eva said. ‘That’s what artists do.’

  ‘Am I an artist?’

  ‘You are what you want to be. What will you draw next?’

  ‘The sky over the airy mountain, teacher.’

  Eva taught her how to clean the brush, then watched the child work with renewed energy. She was quicker now, singing as she painted. It was the first time anyone had called Eva ‘teacher’, but Eva knew that the child was teaching her. Not to interfere or judge or suggest. Mother had known this, never trying to improve Eva’s sketches as a child, letting what was inside find its own way out.

  Art stood at the window, looking utterly alone. Francis appeared behind him, talking kindly as Art shook his head. The Dubliners were wrong about the bunks. They were strong and when this experiment collapsed and Art returned to Dublin, one day Eva would hire him to build twelve miniature easels, paying him the daily rate of a jobbing carpenter. Tonight she would cross Dunkineely to visit old friends. But after that she would be glad to return to Dublin and find the courage to start planning her freedom, the chance to live her own life in her own way.

  Theresa stepped back, smearing a thick trail of blue paint down the wooden easel. The child was so excited that Eva knew she wanted to dance. The sheet was soaked in blue, her fingers were blue and there were blue streaks in her hair as she called out in triumph: ‘Would you just have a gawk at the blueness of that blue sky!’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Flag

  Dublin, 8 May 1945

  All evening the mood among much of the crowd had grown more outraged as people stopped in College Green to stare up at the flagpoles above the locked gates of Trinity College. Art sensed that the majority of Dubliners wished to celebrate Victory in Europe Day, but this effrontery was too pronounced. People were annoyed enough that the censorship laws – forbidding any expressed opinion on the war – had been bypassed this morning by the Protestant Irish Times who laid out the censored news o
n its front page in the shape of a massive V for Victory. But an hour ago when Trinity College students climbed onto the roof to raise the Union Jack on the main flagstaff, higher than the nearby Irish tricolour, this had proved too much for ardent nationalists who tried to storm the main gate and remove the flag.

  The Trinity students had either been drunk or dangerously high-spirited because, in response to abuse shouted up from the street, one student had lowered the tricolour and tried to set it alight. His companions remonstrated and quickly stamped out the flames, but by now reports had reached every public house nearby from which angry drinkers were emerging. Ireland had sat out this war, maintaining such a strict code of neutrality that, with the victorious Red Flag already flying over the Reichstag, de Valera had still followed protocol by officially visiting the German Legation to express condolence on Hitler’s death.

  Tonight in London and Moscow and Paris and amidst the ruins of Stalingrad people were cheering, but in Dublin there was a sense that nobody knew how to react. The risk of invasion was gone and with it hopefully a gradual reduction in rationing and censorship. But the Irish were neither victors nor vanquished. Any sense of idealism was dead. Ireland had threaded a safe passage through this war by taking decisions for cold and pragmatic reasons. To de Valera’s credit he remained his own man to the end, not joining the last-minute rush of countries like Saudi Arabia and Argentina who, with the battle won, felt it opportune to declare war on Germany. But during the past hour the crowds in College Green had remained angry and deflated, as if their noses were being rubbed in the dirt by the Trinity students who remained on the roof beside the Union Jack.

  Tomorrow Art was leaving for London where an election would soon be called and he could canvass for communist candidates. But tonight he had one final duty to do because while Irish people wanted to celebrate the end of fascist tyranny, they could not be expected to do so beneath the British flag. Art could see American flags in the crowd and therefore felt it important that the true victors be represented by the Soviet flag he held folded inside his jacket.