The Family on Paradise Pier Read online

  Eva Goold Verschoyle shyly released her hand from Mrs Ffrench’s grip as Art eagerly questioned her husband in the doorway.

  ‘How was Moscow? You have to tell me everything!’

  Mr Ffrench gripped the boy’s shoulder joyously. ‘My dear boy, it is everything we dreamt of, the most just society on this earth. Mankind hasn’t known a fresh start since the Garden of Eden. But in Russia the old rules are gone and the people, not their masters, are shaping the new order. Come inside and I’ll tell you everything. Is there nobody about? I wired for your father to reinstate some servants.’

  ‘You did?’ Art sounded surprised. ‘I fought with Father, saying that he must have misunderstood the telegram. I mean, what would you want servants for?’

  Mr Ffrench laughed. ‘What would I want them for? Dear boy, do you know the size of Bruckless House? It would be an injustice to only have two people living here. The important thing is to fill the house with life. Obviously servants is a reactionary term, but you can imagine what Papist clergy would say if I advertised for worker comrades to share my home.’

  ‘You mean you’re looking for local people to live here with you.’

  ‘Obviously. They will have the full run of their quarters and we shall have the run of ours.’

  Mrs Ffrench watched the boy consider this. In truth he was a boy no longer. Eva’s tiny figure still lent her a girlish look, but Art’s shoulders had broadened out, making him look tough and strikingly good-looking. He reminded her of her brothers lost in the war. Once on a Moscow street she was convinced that she had seen her two brothers side by side ahead of her in the jostling crowd. For a moment she had let herself believe that they had not gone missing in action but simply wandered off from the terrible trenches to find their way to this new land. The hope was ludicrous, but she had been unable to stop herself pushing through the crowd, elbowing strangers and being cursed at until she touched one of their shoulders. Both men turned, neither remotely resembling her brothers now she could see their faces and she had felt their eyes undress her, taking in her manic look and the fact that she was foreign. They had looked hungry, as everyone did in Moscow, but strong and when they addressed her she knew immediately that their remarks were lewd, suggesting that they would be willing to share her body. She had run away and never told her husband what happened.

  Mrs Ffrench entered the hallway of Bruckless House and almost cried to see a wood fire burning in the grate. Art and Eva had been busy, with another fire burning in the study. Returning home as a girl from her first term in boarding school, she could remember how small the rooms in her childhood home seemed, but after Moscow the opposite was true of here. Previously she had paid little attention to the size of this study, but now she realised that it was bigger than the awful room where she had been forced to sleep with the squabbling families. Sitting down on the sofa she surveyed its fantastic dimensions. She almost wished for the Goold Verschoyle children and even her husband to be gone so that she could explore each room and luxuriate in the extraordinary space. This physical greed shocked her. She was never greedy before, dutifully sublimating her needs and dreams to those of her husband. But just now she experienced an almost sexual thrill at the thought of cradling the brass doorknob of each bedroom, at pressing her palms against the huge uncracked windowpanes and placing her cheek to the cold mahogany of her dressing table.

  Eva’s questions about Moscow were discreet enquiries compared to Art’s frenzied interrogation of her husband. The boy had studied Moscow street maps and knew more about the city’s layout than Mrs Ffrench had learnt in seven months of living there. He wanted to know every detail of the crowds at Lenin’s funeral and quizzed her husband about Comrades Zinoviev and Stalin and Trotsky and Kamenev as if Mr Ffrench had spent his days at internal party congresses instead of manufacturing poor-quality tables and chairs.

  ‘The failure of the communist revolt in Germany was a blow to Trotsky’s prestige,’ Mr Ffrench was saying. ‘It shows that the spread of the revolution will be slower than expected because Germany is ripe for change and yet the reactionary forces dug in. If our German comrades had won the day all of Europe would rise with us but there is talk of Russia needing to stand alone for a while longer.’

  ‘But surely Moscow won’t abandon the rest of us?’ Art argued. ‘What is the point in mankind taking one step forward and then simply stopping?’

  ‘Who mentioned stopping?’ Mr Ffrench replied. ‘Moscow cannot be a wet nurse to everyone. It is up to us who live here to fan the flames of revolution.’

  Art went quiet and even Eva ceased to prattle on about the scraps of local gossip that Mrs Ffrench had been enjoying. There was a subtext in her husband’s remark, a Rubicon quietly crossed, a declaration she had not dared to seek from him. Hope surged inside her in direct opposition to Art’s baffled disbelief.

  ‘What do you mean by us?’ he enquired. ‘Surely once you recuperate you will return to Russia. I understand your desire to come back here and recover your strength, but…’

  ‘Desire did not enter into it,’ Mr Ffrench interjected. ‘It was necessity. Because I could seek medical treatment elsewhere it would therefore have been a selfish, counter-revolutionary act to deny a comrade treatment by clogging up a Moscow hospital. Medical supplies are crucial, as are able-bodied workers. My arm will never fully recover. The revolution is no rest home for cripples. Do you think I wish to be a parasite in Moscow, living off the sweat of my fellow workers? Mrs Ffrench and I had no desire to ever return to Donegal. Crossing into Finland was the hardest chore we ever did. I curse my disability for dragging Janet away from an environment where I saw her blossom with such happiness and purpose. But personal feelings cannot be allowed to rule. What is vital is that we each contribute to the maximum of our potential. I was shocked in London to read appalling propaganda in the capitalist newspapers. Janet and I have decided that for now our place in the revolution is here where we can counter lies and bear testament to the amazing society that we were privileged to witness and to which one day we will hopefully return. Here we can serve a purpose which you can help with too. The Irish peasants imagine that they have undergone a revolution, but they’ve just swapped one master on horseback for another. We can show them the truth – and do you know the great thing? They will listen to us because even in my short time back I see that the old respect remains for people who speak with authority. They don’t look up to this new Johnny-Come-Lately Free State government trying to lord it over them. Oh, no doubt there will be fireworks with their priests waving sticks and shouting threats from the far side of the bridge leading onto my property but they can’t stop us telling the truth to those who will listen.’

  Mrs Ffrench saw Art trying to shape a question, but no words came because the boy needed to believe in her husband. What did she believe? She watched her husband grow so animated that soon Art was caught up in his enthusiasm and asking questions again about the factory and the workers’ debates. Both she and Eva stopped talking so that they could listen too, because his version of Moscow was so wonderful that it felt like a poultice on her mental scars. It was simpler not to argue or even contradict him in her mind because maybe he was telling the truth and she had been too preoccupied with her own petty concerns to appreciate the wonder of revolution.

  The children had brought food and it felt like a picnic to share it out by the fire in the study. The mantelpiece clock had long stopped and she had no idea what time it was when the young Goold Verschoyles left. But it was too late to do anything except retire to the main bedroom where the sheets felt damp. Her husband was asleep within minutes and she knew that he would not wake. She slipped from bed and walked from room to room, trying to reclaim all this space and make it feel that it belonged to her. But she felt uneasy, as if hordes of strangers might arrive at any moment to stake a claim to the kitchen or the locked room overlooking Donegal Bay that had been once intended as a nursery. She longed to immerse herself in a bath but knew that she could never s
crub herself clean. Closing her eyes she could still smell in her pores the stink of foul breath and unwashed clothes in that Moscow room. So why was it that she could not hear the voices of the children who had clambered onto her knee to stare at her like a curio? She could not feel their fingers that had gripped hers, hoping that she might produce a morsel to feed them. Why was it that the single experience she treasured seemed to be erased from her mind, so that all she could hear was silence as she wandered from room to room, barefoot in her thin nightgown?

  EIGHT

  The Studio

  Donegal, August 1924

  The more that Eva drew, alone in her studio, the less she could hear of the raised voices from the house. Her fingers shook, giving the elfin figures a slightly blurred outline. She had intended painting in oils today but once the shouting started she reverted to using this sketchpad on her knee, hunching over it to make herself as small as possible. She longed to escape and sketch wild flowers in the hedgerows, but was reluctant to leave her studio and cross the courtyard where the angry clash of voices would be impossible to ignore. Eva hated these arguments and the terse silence that followed them. During the fragile suspension of hostilities her brothers and Cousin George would individually visit the studio, ostensibly to comfort her, but each would start to justify their case, anxious to convert her into an ally.

  Eva had no wish to take sides in the quarrels that had raged all summer. The Free State’s civil war was over, with de Valera’s Diehard Irregulars defeated. But just as an uneasy normality settled over the new nation they found themselves in, a civil war had commenced in the heart of her family. Friends and relations who visited earlier in the summer had helped to paper over the fault lines by dragging them back into a childhood world of tennis and picnics on the strand. These visitors inscribed amusing notes of thanks in the visitors’ book and carefully avoided politics like an unmentionable family illness. So perhaps Father was foolish to invite Cousin George to stay for Eva’s birthday party because Cousin George knew Art and Thomas too well to allow for any pretence. As a true Verschoyle he was as headstrong as they were. To him the family’s reputation was being indelibly eroded by Art’s wilful madness in embracing communism, which he considered to be a cancer gradually infecting them all. Such lunacy might be all right for pagans like the Ffrenches, but his uncle was always too soft in allowing inflammatory discussions at the table.

  If Eva was forced to listen to George she knew that she would be swayed by the power of his argument but Art’s impassioned defence would equally convince her in turn. Her beliefs were more obscure and less dogmatic than either point of view. Although influenced by Mother, Eva found it hard to believe in the occult world as passionately as she did. Seances – with desperate women holding photographs of slain sons – seemed a form of voyeurism, making her as uncomfortable as these political arguments. This was why she locked herself away in her studio when the quarrelling started – not to avoid venturing an opinion, but to avoid favouring one family member over another. Ironically her silence seemed to lend weight to her opinions, with the others frequently appealing to her as if she were a judge who, when she finally spoke, could attest to the rights and wrongs of their dispute.

  The voices grew louder as Eva crouched over her sketchpad, focusing all her attention on the tiny figures she was conjuring. They had wings and asexual bodies, flitting like bees around blooming foxgloves growing in a ditch. Her fingers were steadier now and she sketched the ditch with intense concentration. After some time Eva ceased to hear the arguing voices and initially thought that this was because she had managed to block them out. Then she realised that hostilities had paused. Soon the first petitioner would arrive to solicit support – George or Thomas, who generally sided with Art while maintaining his own slant on things, or Father, weary of trying to see both sides. By now Mother would have retreated to her bedsitting room to read the few books from the Rosicrucian Order in London which made it past the censorial new Irish post office, or some volume sent to her by Madame Despard – the elderly English suffragette who had settled among the Dublin poor and shared Mother’s interest in theosophy. Eva closed her eyes, allowing the sketch to become saturated with colour. She could visualise the ditch she had drawn from memory, with a tumbled-down, dry-stone wall. But, try as she might, she could not believe in the fairy figures. That childhood belief had died in London along with any belief in her ability as an artist. Art school had stripped her of illusions.

  It did not seem like eighteen months ago since she had spent an autumn and winter sleeping in the tiny cubicle of a London hostel for shopgirls, with a sprig of Donegal heather beneath her pillow. Mother had considered London as the ideal tonic to lure Eva down from the ivory tower of this studio where she had locked herself up to secretly mourn the loss of her young New Zealand officer. It was only after Jack left that Eva fully understood her feelings. By then it was too late because no girl could write and ask for such a proposal again: Eva had constantly painted and destroyed portraits of him, grieving alone in this studio. Her obvious distress more than her talent made Mother enrol her in the Slade Art School. Eva had felt like a princess in a fairy tale, forced to plait her hair into a rope and descend into those bustling crowds to try and start a new life.

  Her brief time in London was good in every respect except for painting. What slender spark of talent she possessed was quickly extinguished under the glare of her tutors at the Slade. The more they tried to teach her the less she found that she could paint. She discovered that she had more in common with the shopgirls in the hostel than her chic fellow students. Their cosmopolitan sense of surface gloss and parroting of the tutors’ techniques to create deliberately grotesque compositions made her retreat into herself. By comparison her paintings seemed naive, the childish work of an Irish country simpleton.

  But back then Eva was certain that there had to be a purpose behind her stay in London, beyond avoiding the increasing vicious conflict in Ireland. When Art had visited her in the hostel between university lectures, Eva used to show him her poems urging the rebels to fight, fight, fight for what is right, right, right! But, in truth, at the age of nineteen in London her patriotic bursts were outweighed by her preoccupation with a different search for independence, the struggle to find a religion to which she might truly belong.

  Converting to Catholicism like the Countess did after the Easter Rising was never an option. Instead the Christian Scientists had been Eva’s first port of call. While shopgirls gossiped about boys outside her cubicle she had studied the Christian Scientist bible, absorbing their mantra that no life, truth or intelligence existed in matter alone. Next she spent long afternoons in a High Church where women wore blue robes and their elaborate rituals, though beautiful to watch, made her wary. She needed something simpler and more direct. She tried a Jewish synagogue and, after that, sampled every religion in London for pleasure and interest. Yet no matter how comfortable she felt, an intuitive inner voice warned: ‘Move on, don’t mistake this stepping stone for a summit.’ In the end she felt herself to simply be a child of the universe, blown about like a sycamore sepal at the creator’s will. That wind had carried her back to Donegal as the civil war spluttered to a smouldering halt soon after Michael Collins’s death.

  Eva glanced up from her sketchpad now, having become so absorbed in drawing that she had been unaware of a presence in her doorway. It was Brendan but Eva felt she had stepped back in time because he wore the comical hat that he used to love. At fourteen-and-a-half, it made his face seem younger. His serious expression recalled the days when he would visit her, upset because his brothers kept excluding him from their schemes.

  Eva smiled. ‘Where did you find that hat?’

  ‘In the attic. Mother must have put it away.’

  ‘She was always threatening to burn it,’ Eva said. ‘But I like it on you.’

  ‘I’ll take it with me so.’

  ‘It would give the boys in school a laugh, but I doubt if you’ll be
allowed to wear it.’

  ‘From now on I wear what I like.’ There was no rebellion in Brendan’s voice, just the quiet resoluteness that was in his character. He was not prone to Art’s passionate oratory or a stickler for logic like Thomas. Indeed, he rarely ventured opinions aloud but once he made up his own mind about something nobody could alter his beliefs.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Brendan’s tone was apologetic, anxious not to offend. ‘I’m rather tired of all these rows, aren’t you? The fact is I won’t be returning to school. I have decided to make my own way in life. I just announced the fact and, you know, for the first time I saw both Cousin George and Art lost for words. I can’t see why they are so surprised. Plenty of chaps my age have been earning their keep for years. Art and Thomas talk the good fight, but still cling to the privilege of a university education. Well, wild horses wouldn’t drag me back to Marlborough. Not one chap there knows a thing about life or could manage without ten servants. What’s the point in being educated for a world which, as Mr Ffrench rightly says, will soon be swept away?’

  ‘Does Mother know?’ Eva asked.

  ‘You understand, don’t you?’ Brendan’s voice faltered, anxious for approval.

  ‘Does Mother know?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t rightly know myself until it came to me as I listened to them argue. I want a proper job making something, not pen-pushing in some corner of the Empire. I want to become an engineer. Marlborough doesn’t teach you anything useful like that.’

  ‘Will you go to Dublin?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Brendan smiled to show that he meant no offence. ‘In Dublin I’d still be the youngest Verschoyle brother. I want to be known only for myself. I hardly know a soul in London, so that’s where I’ll go. One cannot wait for life to come to you like a gentleman caller. You must go out and confront it.’