The Family on Paradise Pier

by Dermot Bolger

  Last week he had left Dunkineely, two days after communist partisans strung up Mussolini’s corpse from the façade of a Milan petrol station. Ignorance and prejudice had thwarted Art’s plans for a Workers’ Rest Home after the first Dublin families left early. Because of whatever slander they spread on their return, the second consignment of families never arrived in Donegal, despite Art sending money for their fares. He had spent days keeping the empty Manor House spotless while awaiting them. Long nights walking from room to room, unable to surrender his dream even though he sensed the whole village laughing at him. All that arrived were poorly written cancellations from families who had booked free holidays for the summer, so similarly worded that he wondered if Trotskyites had poisoned their minds. He had lost the will to cook for himself as the vegetables stored up for his guests began to rot in the kitchen. Art might not have eaten except that Samuel Trench’s daughter, now married, had taken pity and sent over her daughter with hot stews each evening which Art ate alone in Father’s study. On the evening when reports were announced on his wireless about the Americans liberating Dachau, Art was so sickened by the details that he had been unable to touch his stew. When the child called back for the plate, Art had returned it along with the key to the Manor House. Telling the child to instruct her mother to do whatever she wished with the house, he had closed the door behind him and walked through the night towards Donegal town, knowing that, once he caught a train next morning, he would never return.

  There was a stir now among the College Green crowd as a party of students from the nearby National University marched down Grafton Street. Art had noticed them an hour ago for being the most vociferous hecklers of the Trinity students. He climbed onto the railings to wave the Red Flag, but few people noticed at first because their attention was focused on this group of students. Two students at the very rear had acquired Nazi swastikas, which they waved defiantly at the Trinity students on the roof. Some people among the crowd roared their approval at this bravado while others shouted for the swastikas to be torn up. The cultivated ignorance and tomfoolery of the Catholic students sickened Art. Millions of deaths meant nothing to them compared to the chance to taunt a few Anglophiles on the roof of Trinity.

  Art lifted the Red Flag higher and shouted: ‘Long live Comrade Stalin. Salute the victorious Red Army.’ But nobody turned because a young Nationalist student at the front of the group had stopped outside the closed gates to make a speech. He seemed a natural public speaker, conveying his indignation at this affront to Irish sensibilities by Trinity College with an aura of self-possessed mocking braggadocio.

  ‘Good man, Charlie!’ a fellow student shouted. ‘If there’s one man to show the Brits, it’s Charlie Haughey.’

  ‘Do it, Haughey, do it!’ others urged and Art watched the young Haughey fellow produce a Union Jack which he hung from the college gates and proceeded to set alight. A cheer arose with other students urging people to storm the British Embassy. Dissenting voices shouted back and fistfights broke out. Scanning the crowd Art recognised two of the committee to whom he had ceded control of the Raglan Road house. To his amazement they were cheering the burning flag when they had a duty to show example by publicly celebrating Stalin’s victory. Art shouted in their direction and waved the Red Flag higher, but although he was sure they spied him they made no effort to join his demonstration. Instead they pushed further back into the crowd as people started to take notice of his flag.

  ‘Get that rag down, you godless communist bastard,’ a man shouted.

  Art ignored him and shouted: ‘Long live Comrade Stalin. Rejoice at the victory of Comrade Stalin!’

  People were torn between wishing to watch the Union Jack burn and wanting to attack Art. A hand grabbed his elbow and, looking down, he recognised Kathleen Behan’s son Brendan, the one who had gone to borstal for trying to bomb Liverpool.

  ‘Goold, you daft fucker, get down out of that or they’ll kill you altogether,’ Behan urged.

  ‘I’m celebrating,’ Art replied. ‘Tomorrow I leave for London, and Ireland can go to hell. But my country has won a victory costing millions of lives and I defy any man to stop me celebrating.’

  ‘Listen,’ Behan coaxed, ‘the best way to enjoy celebrations is to be fecking alive for them. Get down from there and we’ll have a drink. My ma thinks you’re a saint, but she’d sooner not be praying to you in heaven just yet.’

  However, even if Art wanted to move there was no escape from the hostile crowd. Two men grabbed the Red Flag from Art’s hand although he struggled to hold on, losing his grip on the railings. Others joined in, spitting on the flag and spitting at him. Art saw it being tossed further into the mob where a man managed to set it alight. Behan was trying to drag him away, kicking out at people to clear a path. There was commotion at the college gates as riot police arrived with batons. One man threw a punch at Art who squared up to him, raising his fists in a classic fighting stance. Behan climbed onto the railings from where he could kick out at people.

  ‘Jaysus, Goold,’ he shouted, ‘you’re not in a boxing ring in Marlborough College. Never mind your fists. Fuck the Marquess of Queensberry. Remember poor Oscar Wilde and kick them in the balls.’

  There was a flash of raised batons and the crowd scattered, with Behan jumping down to grab Art as he tried to retrieve the burning Red Flag. Dragging Art down Dame Street, Behan ducked into a cobbled alley, raising a finger to the blood on his face.

  ‘Where are you bleeding from?’ Art asked.

  ‘Russell Street. But at least I know where I’m bleeding from.’ Behan laughed and scrutinised Art. ‘Are you really heading for the Big Smoke?’

  ‘There’s nothing to keep me here.’

  ‘The Ma will miss you. You should go back to Russia.’

  ‘I will one day, if it’s the last thing I ever do.’

  ‘We’ll have a jar on the strength of that and see you onto the boat in style.’ Behan wiped the blood from his face with his sleeve. ‘I’ve been going to American wakes since I was a chisler, sure it’s about time I attended a Russian one.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  A Darkened Room in Oxfordshire

  September 1946

  Heavy full-length drapes drawn across the window gave the bedroom an appearance of twilight, though it was only early afternoon. The door was ajar and Eva knew that Mother was patiently waiting to say goodbye in the bed by the window. Leaving her bag in the hall, Eva walked back upstairs, stung by an aching familiarity. This might be Donegal except that their roles were reversed. Back then Eva had been the figure in bed, the aftertaste of hot milk staining her tongue as she waited for Mother to stroke her hair. Now at forty-three, Eva realised that she was older than Mother had been on those childhood nights when even the crickets outside the window seemed hushed in expectation of her arrival. And Mother…? For a moment Eva half expected a nine-year-old girl to greet her when she entered the room.

  The hired nurse crept out onto the landing and placed one finger to her lips to indicate that Mother had drifted off to sleep. She held open the door, anxious to slip downstairs and savour more of the butter that Eva had brought over from Ireland two weeks ago. Mother’s tea ration in the kitchen was unused and Eva had told the nurse to take it for her children. Since Father’s death Mother had gradually lost interest in everything except the fate of her youngest son.

  The nurse’s cigarette smoke lingered in the sick room but could not cloak the musty odours surrounding a dying woman. Eva approached the bed on tiptoes. Mother had shrunk even in the last few days, leaving Eva with severe reservations about venturing into London. Her features were creased with pain but her hair was soft and fine like a child’s. Through the open wardrobe door Eva glimpsed the scarves that Francis had once dressed up in. They were folded beside the dusty hatboxes and mothballed dresses Mother used to wear in Donegal. Maud had inherited Mother’s fashion sense, which had bypassed Eva. Yet Maud – who, home at last from her family’s enforced exile in South Africa, wo
uld arrive this evening to take over this vigil – was like their brothers in being immersed in politics.

  It was Eva who inherited many of Mother’s ‘beliefs’ – though ‘intimations’ might be a better word. The sense that there might be other states and truths, tantalisingly close yet impossible to grasp, revelations you had to patiently await in the hope that one day they might reveal themselves, those signposts that Mother had sought through spirit messages during planchette. Eva had sought them too as a child by spinning around until dizzy, half expecting – as the shaky world sorted itself to rights – to glimpse a minute crack in reality, a peep into a parallel existence.

  However, despite what people termed her unworldliness, Mother had managed her life well, perpetually keeping one foot in reality. Finding a perfect partner in love, maintaining a fine house until her son destroyed it, being always able to hold up her head. This thought increased Eva’s sense of failure. So much of Eva’s life had already occurred, yet there was a sense that she was still only waiting for it to start. Eva moved softly about the sickroom, disturbed by the pervasive odour of oncoming death. The Great Outlaw – Mother’s favourite book about Christ – lay on the bedside locker beside Sir Arthur Eddington’s The Expanding Universe. Opening the drawer she examined the small bottles of perfume that Mother had nursed through the war. But she could not find the hand lotion which Mother had always used after gardening, a fragrance that summoned up the certainty of childhood nights.

  How long was it since Mother had been able to garden? Her arthritis had grown so acute that even holding a pen was torture. Eva could sense the first canker of it within her own bones, a legacy of the damp basement in Glanmire House. It was a mystery how Mother had managed to keep writing to British and Russian officials since Father died. Every line must have represented physical agony, yet she had been kept going by the need to quench the greater anguish in her heart. Years of curt replies were filed in the bedside drawer, expressing regret at being unable to supply information. Eva picked up Mother’s most precious perfume and spilt several drops on the pillow. The scent roused her. Mother’s head twitched, a small moan escaping her lips before she opened her eyes to look at her daughter.

  ‘I thought you were someone else.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I dreamt he came to see me…only he was an old man like Grandpappy. A white beard and dead eyes…but I knew him…my baby…trying to tell me something.’ Mother lips were so cracked she could barely talk. Eva soaked a face cloth to moisten them and took her hand that felt cold and bony, the fingers permanently contorted.

  ‘I won’t go to London,’ Eva said. ‘It’s more important to stay with you.’

  ‘You will go, like we agreed.’ Mother’s eyes were determined. ‘It’s the biggest night of your husband’s life. He needs you beside him when he gets his MBE. Do this for him, then afterwards you must tell him your plans.’

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘Of what?’ Mother closed her eyes and Eva knew that the pain had come for her. ‘I’ll still be here when you get back.’

  ‘Maud will arrive soon. She can phone…if I’m needed.’

  ‘I need you to see this through.’ Every word was difficult, with the doctor’s injection still two hours away. ‘I should never have let you marry that man. You have the right to be happy. Am I leaving you enough money?’

  ‘Don’t talk about money.’

  ‘I have to. I must at least set one thing right. The auctioneer…he’ll wait for the balance until after probate?’

  ‘Yes. Now try to rest and don’t stress yourself.’

  ‘How can I rest?’ Mother pulled her hand away and closed her eyes, drained by the effort to talk. The uncharacteristic anger in her whisper surprised Eva. But, as this vigil was unfolding it felt as if a buried seam of pain was gradually seeping out from Mother. She gave a muffled groan, though Eva couldn’t tell if her distress arose from a dream or from the physical pain that she was enduring. These two worlds seemed blurred. Some afternoons with her pain at its apex and the doctor trying to fathom how much of the precious ration of painkiller he could afford to give her, Mother called out to people no longer living. Not just to Father but to her own parents and others whose names Eva barely knew. The one name she never called for was Art who – as Freddie phrased it – was still playing at being Christ in the desert. Mother never criticised Art, but Eva felt that he should be given the chance to be here.

  Eva picked up her handbag, undid the clasp and fingered the envelope inside. Mother’s breathing settled into a regular pattern, allowing Eva time to ponder her dilemma. Mother had a right to know about this envelope addressed to her, but only if Eva could be sure that the contents were true. On paper it appeared to answer the question that had plagued their lives for years. This perfunctory death certificate had arrived from the Soviet authorities yesterday without explanation. Brendan did not merit a first name. He was listed as Prisoner Verschoyle B., with a long identification number. The certificate indicated that he had been killed in a Nazi bombing raid on a prisoner train. At one time Eva would have believed the official document and succumbed to grief, mingled with relief that at least they could no longer hurt her brother. But the newsreels of liberated concentration camps made her doubt everything now. There seemed no cruelty or duplicity that mankind was incapable of.

  The euphoria of VE Day had dissipated on these Oxford streets where women queued outside shops all night if a delivery of potatoes was rumoured while their half-starved children played in bomb craters. The Allies had splintered apart, with stories appearing about Soviet prison camps that no paper would have printed a year ago. Truth was lost in a fog of propaganda, with nobody sure what words meant any more. Eva had joined the campaign for the release of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews until he disappeared at a checkpoint manned by the advancing Soviet army. With the furore over Wallenberg, it might suit the Soviets to fob off minor cases with a bogus death certificate.

  The nurse re-entered the room and sat by the window, moving the curtain slightly to gaze out at the distant view of Magdalen College, while awaiting the doctor whose magic injection would get Mother through another night of muted pain. Being able to lift a curtain without a shout from an air raid warden still felt strange. Eva wondered what the nurse made of Mother. How could you explain the totality of a life to someone who encounters a patient only when she is dying? The nurse had lost her husband at Aden and an eight-year-old daughter in a bombing raid. She had four other children, the eldest girl minding the others now while she worked shifts to let Eva sleep. She once told Eva about her daughter’s death, an account made more harrowing for being focused on the factual problems of queuing to get her ration book altered, then walking miles to procure a death certificate in a makeshift office.

  Eva examined the date on Brendan’s death certificate again, trying to recall what she had been doing on that day in 1941. She possessed no definite recollection of it amid the seamless blur of an Irish summer. The children had probably explored the woods, with the dog barking and Eva reading poetry on the lawn while Brendan was penned in a burning railway carriage. Skeletal figures fighting to claw their way out to where bombs were falling. Afterwards, when the plane moved away, the dead eyes would have gazed up like slaughtered mackerel. Would Eva ever know if this was another Soviet lie? Replacing the envelope in her bag, Eva touched her mother’s hand, then tiptoed from the room.

  This morning Hazel and Francis had made the crossing from Dublin with Maud. While Maud travelled on to Oxford, they would meet Eva in Paddington Station. Hazel loved Dublin where she was in her final year as a day girl in the school she had previously attended as a boarder and Francis had just entered Trinity. They had occasionally met Maud’s children before the war, but there was great excitement in starting friendships anew after six years of enforced separation from their cousins. Hazel had talked so openly about her trip to London that Eva had needed to warn her how not everyone in
Dublin might approve of her father being made a Member of the Order of the British Empire. Hazel dismissed such caution as another of Eva’s eccentricities, replying ‘Obviously not everyone, but everybody important will be chuffed.’ Every important young Dublin man already seemed to know Hazel who relished the freedom of being a day girl able to cycle everywhere. Every Saturday she bicycled to a riding stables near the Dublin mountains to rub down horses, then freewheeled back at dusk to their rented house to meet some young man waiting to take her to a rugby club dance. She could hardly wait to discard her school uniform and embrace the new world which Eva could not hold her back from. Freddie might not approve of such freedom, but Hazel was more than a match for the young men who flocked around. Her tempestuousness scared most of them. She had the looks of a young Ingrid Bergman but would never pass for an innocent Swedish milkmaid, possessing an inherent poise and sophistication that had bypassed Eva.

  When the Oxford train pulled into Paddington the children were already waiting, having found her platform with ease. They would stay in the married quarters at the barracks, but neither wished to go there yet. They had deposited their cases at the left luggage hatch and, after enquiring about their grandmother, Hazel was desperate to drag Eva around the shops. Eva wished to avoid the barracks too, which seemed deserted with so many soldiers demobbed. Freddie was currently among the officers supervising security at Buckingham Palace while the damaged wings were rebuilt, but Eva knew that his duties were mainly illusory. The war had been good for him, but lately his bloodshot eyes suggested that the limbo of peace was more dangerous. Eva suggested that the children might have more fun visiting the shops without her. They arranged to meet at six-thirty and as she watched them stroll off to catch a tube to Oxford Circus, Eva felt an inexpressible grief. In the last year they had grown up so fast. They still needed her but not like before. She had surrendered her own happiness to be their mother and now her role was almost finished.