The Family on Paradise Pier

The IRA and the communists were not natural allies but the persuasiveness of his argument was starting to gain converts. Art had previously agreed with the IRA leadership that Ireland stay neutral. However – since Hitler’s attack on Russia – Art had no option but to call on Ireland to join the fight against German fascism now that Comrade Stalin had strategically aligned himself with the imperialists. Blinded by misguided nationalist shibboleths and petty hatred of Britain, the camp leadership had grown scared of his speeches in recent weeks. But it was not about collaboration with Britain, it was about using the Allies as a vehicle to crush fascism before uniting behind Stalin to create a new world order. That was a greater prize than the steeples of Fermanagh.

This was the moment for all revolutionaries to unite and, while the IRA might find it hard to adjust, Art had shown how radical change was possible. It had not been easy. Christ only endured forty nights in the desert, but Art had spent two decades working on the docks, kipping in tenements and police cells. He had been his own judge, serving every day of his sentence with hard labour and was strong and cleansed of his former class now. But the confusing thing was that last night he dreamt about his family bathing off Ffrench’s private pier and had felt no guilt in re-experiencing that life of idle privilege. Instead he had known a sense of belonging, a dangerous wave of love all the more disturbing for emanating from those he was forced to repudiate.

Art left the hut, anxious to be on time for the few internees not intimidated away from his Russian language class. But soon he realised that two men were walking alongside him. He glanced at them as they pinned his arms. They belonged to the primitive Catholic element of Republican. He was strong enough to take them on but as they turned into a space between the huts he saw a deputation awaiting him. Taking a long knife from his pocket the camp IRA commander held it to Art’s throat.

‘You’ve been court-martialled, Goold, and sentenced in absentia.’

‘You can’t court-martial me. I’m not a member of any Republican organisation.’

‘You’re a Protestant crackpot.’

‘I’m an atheist.’

‘Either way you go to hell. You’re just going there sooner than expected. I’ve had enough. We told the governor that unless you were gone by today you’d be found with a hundred knife wounds tomorrow morning. You’re his responsibility now.’

The men pinning back Art’s arms shoved him forward and he started walking. Then for some unknown reason, he remembered his brother Brendan in that dream last night, swimming alongside him, trying to keep up. Art stopped, not through fear but after being overcome by déjà vu and an inescapable guilt. He lifted his head, almost as if willing for retribution to finally come through a bullet or a knife.

Mrs Ffrench crossed the lawn from Bruckless House, and reached the gravel path that led to the small pier. Years ago on a picnic there when the Goold Verschoyle family argued about whether they should call it Bruckless Pier or Mr Ffrench’s Pier, Eva had insisted that it should really be christened Paradise Pier because that was what it was. But with the Goold Verschoyles gone, nobody called it Paradise Pier any more. Indeed no one ever came here, though locals knew that she never objected to people swimming there. But superstition was strong, despite everyone in Bruckless and Dunkineely being kind to her in her grief. Perhaps nothing summed up her husband’s failure more than their affection for him. He had seen himself as a radical orator, a progressive torch of truth amidst their fog of ignorance. But she realised that locals had just considered him a colourful eccentric – not even regarding him as Irish. Local priests had frequently railed against the Red Menace without bothering to mention her husband, despite his years of standing up on the running board of his Rolls-Royce at public meetings to heckle the speakers and beseech people to read the communist pamphlets that she had patiently held out.

Locally their crusade had been considered so laughable that it counted for nothing. The only converts they ever made came from their own class – those marvellous Goold Verschoyle boys. Not that class would count for anything after the revolution, but it still counted for something now. This was evident from the respectful way that people had carried her husband’s body home last month after he collapsed while bicycling to Killybegs to heckle de Valera at a political rally. She had warned him it was too far to cycle but petrol was impossible to obtain. Mrs Ffrench had laid him out in the study, with his maps and books and his tame birds that flew about, soiling everywhere, disturbed by all the visitors. For three days the most unlikely people came to pay their respects, farm labourers who had never previously set foot in the house. Any trouble he had caused with Art Goold Verschoyle was forgotten. But all the neighbourhood could whisper about was his funeral arrangements.

No one attended the interment but she had sensed eyes watching from across the inlet as four workmen laid her husband’s body in this sheltered corner of the garden beside the pier. In Donegal only unbaptised babies and suicides were buried on unconsecrated ground. But this had been Mrs Ffrench’s wish and where she would lie when her time came. There had been no prayers or speeches; just L’ Internationale played on the wind-up gramophone. Mrs Ffrench reached the headstone and knelt to lay wild flowers. The local stonemason had gone to his priest for advice before chiselling the stark inscription her husband chose as his epitaph: Thomas Roderick Ffrench: The Immortality of the Dead Exists Only in the Minds of the Living.

The silence outside the prison train was broken by indistinct sounds: the barking of released dogs, guards shouting in panic, a scramble of boots across the ground.

‘The bastards,’ an old zek muttered behind Brendan. ‘They’re more concerned with saving the dogs than saving us. Come back, you cowards, unlock these doors.’

The entire wagon was on its feet now, banging at the roof and wooden walls. Bursts of machine-gun fire came from above, interspersed with cries.

‘Aim well, Germans,’ a woman said. ‘Kill every guard.’

‘That’s who they want,’ a young man added. ‘I mean, why would the Germans want to destroy us?’

‘They don’t,’ replied the old zek. ‘We count for nothing. They want to destroy the carriages, this rolling stock.’

Noise of frantic hammering came from inside every wagon. Brendan heard the crush of timber and knew that one set of prisoners had broken free. Their shouts turned to screams amid a burst of gunfire, but he could not tell if the bullets came from the plane or if the guards might have set up their machine guns in the undergrowth. Two men beside him hammered at the roof, being lifted up by other prisoners. They broke away a wooden slat, yielding a dazzling glimpse of blue sky. Everyone was screaming now. But Brendan was utterly still, mesmerised by the blueness above him. It was the blue of an Irish summer and crossing that patch of light was a small aircraft, departing or wheeling around for another assault. It resembled a child’s plaything, a sparkling gleam in the bright air that made him catch his breath as it turned in a slow loop. Others saw it too and began to scream louder. But Brendan said nothing because he had become a boy again, standing on Bruckless Pier to draw in the bright kite that his eldest brother had made for him.

Eva looked up from her husband’s letter as Hazel waltzed out from the kitchen onto the lawn in her bare feet. The girl stirred a mixture in the jug she carried, then tossed back her hair to blow the first bubble skyward, laughing as it rose and burst. Francis briefly watched, then lay back with the dog beside him.

Eva laid down Freddie’s letter and, feeling a sliver of guilt at her idleness, purposefully picked up her pencil to start making the list of tasks planned for this afternoon. But Hazel’s laugh made her glance up at the extraordinary way the child twisted her supple body to keep the bubbles aloft. The girl was totally immersed in this game, enjoying her triumph whenever a bubble stayed intact, laughing at the silent plop of its extinction, then starting anew with a fresh bubble stream. Nothing else existed for Hazel at this moment: no war, no bombers circling Europe’s skies, no threat of invasion or nerve gas, no future complicated by adult decisions. Just these weightless globes to be savoured for the brief totality of their existence.

Eva stared down at the jotting pad, the list of tasks banished from her thoughts. It was years since she last held a pencil for any reason except to scribble down lists. Her childhood instinct to draw – dormant for so long – had unconsciously taken over. She discovered a swirling sketch of her daughter already half finished. Eva examined it with a quickening of the heart. She could draw again if she didn’t think about it. Let the pen do the thinking. A second image shaped itself on the page. Of Hazel stationary this time, back arched and head held back to blow a bubble upward. Eva could see her own reflection within the girl, as if she was the same age, experiencing the same joy. The second sketch was barely finished before her fingers commenced a third. If the girl looked over, the magic would be ruined. Hazel would demand to see what Eva was doing, minutely examining each sketch. But these drawings felt as light as bubbles. At the slightest pressure her ability would burst asunder. It was like a sixth sense returning to her fingers, with the tension of adulthood banished.

Francis spied Maureen’s bicycle beside the front steps. He mounted it and freewheeled deftly across the lawn. Two quarrelling birds chased each other among the trees. There was so much that Eva could add to her sketch: their crumbling house, cattle in the fields below, the crooked stable door. But there was no need to include these because Eva merely wanted to draw happiness. As Hazel spun in giddy circles she seemed like an axis, a fulcrum, a whirlpool of happiness, drawing the whole world into her on invisible threads.

The dog barked, chasing the weaving bicycle. Maureen came from the kitchen to say that tea was ready. But nobody moved as if nobody could hear. Hazel scooped into the jar to unleash a final stream of bubbles. They soared above her, rainbow-coloured in the light. This was how her family had been in Donegal, Eva realised, diving into the waters at Bruckless Pier, beautiful, impractical, living in the moment with no awareness of how short-lived that paradise would be. Hazel danced beneath the last bubble, throwing her head so far back that it seemed impossible she would not fall. Borne by her breath, the bubble rose so high that Eva had trouble following it. Maureen stopped calling and even Francis halted the bicycle to watch. The bubble balanced in midair and Hazel balanced on the grass, equally poised and beautiful until, without warning, it burst and there was nothing left. Hazel toppled backwards, rolled over to gaze at her mother and laughed.

PART ONE 1915–1935

ONE The Picnic

August 1915

Eva thought it was glorious to wake up with this sense of expectation. The entire day would be spent outoors, with her family chattering away on the back of Mr Ffrench’s aeroplane cart as Eva dangled her legs over the swaying side and held down her wide-brimmed hat with one hand in the breeze. Surely no other bliss to equal this.

Her older sister Maud was asleep in the other bed in the room. Dust particles glistened in the early sunlight, creeping through a slat in the wooden shutters, the thin beam making the white washbowl beside the water jug even whiter.

It was barely six o’clock but thirteen-year-old Eva could not stay in bed a moment longer. Nobody else was yet awake in Dunkineely. Soon the endless clank of the village pump would commence, but until then Eva had paradise to herself. If she rose quietly she could go walking and be home again before the Goold Verschoyle household rose to prepare for today’s picnic.

Dressing on tiptoes so as not to wake Maud, Eva slipped downstairs. An old white cat beside the kitchen range lifted his head to regard Eva with a secretive look as she lifted the latch and escaped into the garden. The clarity of light enraptured her, with spider webs sketched by dew. Eva followed a trail of fox pawmarks along the curving path leading to the deserted main street, then took the lane that meandered down to the rocky Bunlacky shore. The sea breeze coming off St John’s Point swept away her breath, filling Eva with a desire to shout in praise. She closed her eyes and formal hymns took flight in her mind like a flock of startled crows, with new words like white birds swooping down to replace them. The prayers that meant most were the ones which came unbidden at such moments:

‘O Lord whom I cannot hope to understand or see, maker of song thrush and skylark and linnet. Do with my life what you will. Bring me whatever love or torment will unleash my heart. Just let me be the person I could become if my soul was stretched to its limits.’

Eva opened her eyes, half-expecting white birds to populate the empty sky. Instead a few bushes bowed to the wind’s majesty.

As son of a Church of Ireland bishop, Father took his task seriously of instructing the boys in religion but Mother claimed that secretly he only went to church to sing. It was Mother’s responsibility to instruct the girls. Yet even without Mother’s Rosicrucian beliefs and indifference to organised religion, Eva knew that she would have outgrown their local church in Killaghtee, where sermons were more concerned with elocution than any love of Christ. She needed a ceremony which encompassed her joy at being alive. But if Eva did not belong with her family in the reserved top pew in Killaghtee church, where did she belong? Neither in the Roman Catholic chapel which Cook and Nurse attended nor with the Methodists in their meeting hall next door to her home. Right now this lane felt like a true church, filled with the hymn of the wind. Freedom existed in this blasphemous thought, a closeness to God that might have heralded the sin of vanity had it also not made her feel tiny and lost. Eva closed her eyes and slowly started to spin around, feeling as if she were at the axis of a torrent of colour. Behind her eyelids the earth split into every shade of green and brown that God ever created. The sky was streaked in indigo and azure, sapphire and turquoise. Prisms of colour mesmerised her like phrases in the psalms: jade and olive and beryl, rust and vermilion. At any moment she might take off and whirl through the air like a chestnut sepal. Her breath came faster, her head dizzy.

‘Can you see your child, Lord, dancing her way back to you?’

A sound broke through her reverie, a suppressed laugh. Eva opened her eyes but the earth declined to stop spinning. A young barefoot girl grasped her hand with a firm grip, steadying her. The girl looked alarmed.

‘I’m sent for the cows, miss,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes.’ The world still swayed dangerously but Eva let go her hand, able to stand unaided.

‘Was it a fit? My sister has fits. She’s epil…’ The girl struggled with the word. ‘Epileptic. They took her to the madhouse in Donegal Town. Are you mad too?’

‘No. I’m just happy.’

The girl mused on the word suspiciously.

‘Your father defended my Uncle Shamie in court for fighting a peeler, miss. They say you’re a fierce dreamer, and your father is for the birds. Why don’t you go to boarding school like your sister?’

‘Mother says I am not strong enough.’

‘They say your mother is a right dreamer too, miss.’

‘What’s your name?’

Deciding that she had already revealed too much to one of the gentry, the girl veered past Eva and moved on, viciously whipping the heads off nettles with a hazel switch. Eva felt embarrassed at being seen.

Where the lane bent to the left the sea came into view. A small sailing ship was firmly anchored in the bay, never changing position despite the buffeting it received from the waves. It was time to go home but Eva could not stop watching the boat. More than anything she wished to be like it, firmly anchored despite the wild seas of emotion she constantly found herself in.

A queue was forming at the village pump by the time Eva returned up the main street. People greeted her respectfully and she talked to everyone. Possibly because she had never gone away to school for long, the whole village had adopted her.

Eva’s miserable few months in boarding school last year had convinced Mother that she was not strong enough for sports or other girls. But sometimes Eva wondered if she was kept at home to afford Mother company during the winter when Mother was affected by illnesses that Dr O’Donnell seemed unable to pinpoint. The front door of the Manor House was open and her five-year-old brother, Brendan, ran out half-dressed to chase the ducks splashing in pools along the deeply rutted street. Eva swept him up in her arms and handed him back to Nurse. The clang of the pump followed her as she walked around by the side of the house. Visitors sometimes asked how the family tolerated this constant clank, but Eva only really noticed the pump when it stopped. For her it represented the creaking heart of Dunkineely.

Her family would be up, chattering away over breakfast, but Eva’s first responsibility was to feed her rabbit in the hutch near the tennis court. Crickets communicated with each other along the grassy bank in an indecipherable bush code as Eva cradled the rabbit to her breast, savouring the special shade of pink within the white of his ears. Sitting on the grass beside the rabbit as he ate, she spied Father through the drawing-room window. His few briefs as a barrister were mainly the unpaid defence of locals in trouble. His real passion was music and Father had left the breakfast table early to work. A black cat – whom he christened ‘Guaranteed to Purr in Any Position’ – sat motionless on his piano as he composed. The cat loved Father, not with a dog’s adoring servitude but as an equal with whom she condescended to share her space. She would sit for hours when he played – her head cocked like a discerning, slightly quizzical, music critic.

All the house cats belonged to Father. Mother’s pleasure arose from holding any baby in her arms. Eva was the only baby she ever rejected, just for a brief moment after Eva was born. Take her away, she had ordered Nurse because – having already borne one daughter – she was convinced that she had been carrying that all-important son and heir. Mother herself had told Eva this story and though Eva never sensed any trace of rejection within Mother’s unequivocal love since then, it still caused unease. Returning the rabbit to the hutch, Eva plucked some daisies from the grass bank and held them to her nostrils. The scent always conjured her earliest memory of sitting on this slope at toddling age, picking a bunch of daisies to breathe in their smell that swamped her with happiness. In her memory, Nurse sat knitting nearby, her white apron hiding a plump, inviting lap. Eva could remember longing to be on Nurse’s lap and suddenly it had felt like she was already there, as if Nurse’s essence – her warm skin and laughing breath – was reaching Eva through the ecstasy of inhaling the fragrance of daisies. Even now she could still recall racing towards Nurse’s arms, holding out the bunch of daisies to be savoured.

‘Eva, quit dreaming and come and have some breakfast! The Ffrenches are calling for us at eight o’clock.’

Maud’s voice had an exasperated big sister tone as she summoned Eva from the doorway. Eva waved and went to join her family in the breakfast room. In Father’s absence, Art sat in the top chair. Sixteen months younger than Eva, he was the heir whom Mother had longed for, being groomed already to take over the Goold Verschoyle lineage. Thomas sat beside him, a year younger and two inches smaller, focusing on eating his egg with the exact concentration that he brought to every task. Being the middle brother made him weigh the value of everything. Brendan was too small to care about such matters. As the youngest he took it as his right to be spoiled by everyone. Maud was organising the hamper with the cook, having baked the cakes herself last night. The servants looked to fifteen-year-old Maud for instructions, finding Mother frequently too unwell to oversee the running of the house. But this was one of Mother’s good weeks and, spurred by the presence of her Cousin George, she would accompany them on today’s picnic.

Everyone at the table talked about their plans for the day. All were good swimmers, though Art was by far the strongest – being nearly as fast as Oliver Hawkins who was seventeen. The Hawkins family from Herefordshire had spent all this summer at Bruckless House, two miles away. Last year a young couple, the Ffrenches, bought this isolated mansion, built by two local brothers on the proceeds of selling guns to Napoleon and pickled herring to Wellington’s army. Mrs Hawkins was related to Mr Ffrench who after being commissioned into the Royal Navy had been away since January. But Mr Ffrench had returned home two weeks ago, claiming that he had insisted on his naval shore leave coinciding with Eva’s end-of-summer birthday party.

Eva had laughed along with everyone else when he said this, but secretly she believed him. This final week of summer was always the most exciting, culminating in Chinese lanterns being hung in the garden for her birthday party, with charades and fancy dress costumes and singers gathering around Father at the piano. After Eva’s birthday the farewells would start at the train station, with the Hawkins family returning to England, Art, Thomas and Maud going away to school and Mr Ffrench rejoining his frigate currently moored in Killybegs Harbour. But Eva refused to let this thought sour her mood as the maid ran in to announce that Mr Ffrench’s cart had arrived and, within seconds, the breakfast room was full of laughing voices.

Mother entered the room with Cousin George to greet the new arrivals. Cousin George was a wise chameleon, secretly in tune with Mother when discussing the occult and yet indistinguishable from any other Church of Ireland curate when a guest preacher in the pulpit at Killaghtee church before their neighbours. His sermons were the only ones that Eva still enjoyed, although the Ffrenches never attended church to hear them – being of a religious persuasion, the Baha’is – that not even Mother had heard of. No locals minded the Ffrenches’ eccentricity because nobody understood it. Grandpappy, now on his annual summer visit, declared that no such religion existed except among a handful of demented Arabs driven from Iran, and the Ffrenches would forget such nonsense once they began to procreate like decent Christians. But since Father invited them along to a picnic last autumn, the Ffrenches had become part of the family, opening up their house and shoreline garden to the Goold Verschoyle children.

The ceaseless chatter made Eva fear that today’s picnic might never start. But Maud coaxed everyone out onto the street where people started to lift picnic baskets up onto Mr Ffrench’s open-backed float, christened the Aeroplane Cart. Maud sat at the back with the Hawkins twins, who were the same age as her, dangling their legs and bending their heads together to gossip beneath wide-brimmed hats. Somehow twelve-year-old Beatrice Hawkins managed to perch between Art and Eva, unable to address either of them. Until ten days ago Eva and Beatrice had been the closest chums, left to fend for themselves when Maud and the twins disappeared to whisper about grown-up secrets. They had searched for nests without disturbing the eggs, taken turns to push Brendan on his scooter along the street with anxious ducks scattering or had gone walking along the shore with Art minding them. But recently Eva could not explain the friction between them, as if Beatrice was jealous of Eva having a brother so wonderful as Art and wanted to push in and play at being his sister also.