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  However, perhaps it was not a memory of past affection which lured him upstairs to where he now slept on the furthest extremity of their old horsehair mattress, but a forewarning of the loneliness possibly awaiting them both in their separate unknowable futures apart. Whatever Freddie’s flaws (after twenty-three years of marriage Eva could enumerate them as easily as he could enumerate hers), he remained too much of a gentleman to force his unwanted attentions on her. Indeed she suspected that too much history and bad blood existed between them for him to feel any remaining stir of desire. So the disconcerting intimacy that may have occurred as she slept was not some final claiming of conjugal rights but the fact that – after drawing back the bedclothes in whatever moonlight filtered into the bedroom – Eva had no way of knowing how long he had spent staring at her sleeping body, curled up in a white cotton nightgown. Nor had she any sense of the legal status of the woman whom his eyes had studied for one final time.

  For twenty-three years Eva had known who she was in the eyes of the law. But this morning she was seizing the chance to resume her journey to discover just who truly she was in her soul, while accepting that she was ceasing to exist in any officially recognised category in Ireland. Today was not just her independence day. In Dublin crowds would gather in O’Connell Street for official celebrations to mark the Irish state severing of its final tenuous ties with the Commonwealth by formally declaring itself to be a republic. But no matter what new title the state bestowed upon itself, Eva could not imagine a future Ireland prepared to recognise that a woman possessed any status if she willingly – or, some people might say, wilfully – left her husband. Divorce was possible if she and Freddie applied for it in England, but neither lived in England and even if they went through the motions of securing such a divorce it would not be legally recognised in Ireland. Today’s leave-taking would change nothing about the limbo that she was about to enter, of still needing Freddie’s permission to open a bank account or apply for a passport. Yet everything would change in her mind because this morning felt imbued with the possibility of freedom. No row about her decision would ensue when Freddie woke. They had endured enough rows and while there was no prospect of reconciliation, both were reconciled to this separation.

  Eva stretched out a hand, anxious not to touch or wake him, but wanting one last time to feel something of Freddie’s essential, if sometimes obscured, goodness: a quality which once caused Eva to imagine herself in love with him. Her hand hovered inches from his face, close enough to feel his breath on her fingertips and take away some faint resonance of his warmth. Despite their recent history of harsh words and the knowledge of how little value Freddie would place on such a blessing, her outstretched fingers also tried to bestow a tiny benediction of goodwill in this silent room: a wish that would be impossible for her to express if they were both awake. She hoped that perhaps he had expressed a similar silent hope for her when drawing back the bedclothes, but like so much else kept locked in his heart, she would never know his true feelings when studying her body last night.

  Silently she slipped from the bed. Even though Freddie was asleep, she turned her back modestly when stripping from her nightgown to stand naked beside the sensible clothes she had laid out on a chair last night for her journey. Pouring ice-cold water from a tall jug into the china washbowl, Eva paused as she caught sight of herself in the dressing table mirror. At forty-six she could easily pass for a decade younger. Her diminutive size and elfin-like face leant her, in certain light, the appearance of being a girl. Yet an arthritic ache in her wrists on cold mornings like this brought home the actuality of her situation: a grown woman, closer in age to fifty than to forty, even if in her heart she felt childlike with joy at being granted this second chance at life. Forty-six was an age when most married women settled for the sour compromise of safety, retreating behind a protective wall of cigarette smoke, silence and piety. In even the most loveless unions she had seen women cling on grimly to convention and outward respectability, like she had done when her children were growing up. But if she delayed her departure any longer she would grow too cowed to ever take flight.

  For over two decades Eva had given up her own happiness to make other people happy, beginning when she rashly agreed to marry Freddie during the emotionally tempestuous summer of 1927. Throughout that summer a succession of potential suitors had arrived for leisurely stays with her family, the Goold-Verschoyles, in the Manor House in the Donegal village of Dunkineely, seeking to woo Eva and her older sister, Maud. Her parents had hoped for both sisters to find love amid the heady courtship rituals of tennis on the lawn, picnics to Inver Beach and long walks up the cliffs of Slieve League where discreet opportunities presented themselves for young men to grasp Eva’s hand while negotiating the steeper paths to the summit overlooking Donegal Bay. Amid this heady atmosphere her parents’ hopes were realised, but not as they would have wished. While Eva and Maud both fell in love, unfortunately it was with the same young man – a Dubliner who arrived at the same time as Freddie: two rivals amicably competing in the outwardly playful, yet inwardly serious, courtship of the Goold-Verschoyle sisters.

  Eva had admired her future brother-in-law’s easy wit and athleticism, his tacit disinclination to pass judgement on her mother’s unconventional beliefs in spiritualism and his encyclopaedic knowledge of Walt Whitman. This emerged whenever Eva’s father got lost amid some Whitman quotation and discovered that, by glancing towards him for guidance, the young Dubliner could invariably continue the quote and modestly fall silent again, allowing her father to pick up the thread of the poem. She had also admired his Quaker-like moderation on political issues, in contrast to the dogmatic advocating for the communist cause engaged in by her oldest and youngest brothers, Art and Brendan: whose proselyting divided the dinner table whenever they were both present.

  Eva sensed how this young suitor also admired many of her qualities. Unfortunately he admired her sister more. Eva’s impulsive acceptance of Freddie’s unexpected proposal came only after being forced to feign happiness while watching Maud walk up the aisle of Killaghtee Protestant Church to be given away by their father to the suitor Eva secretly yearned for. Afraid of being seen as an old maid left on the shelf at twenty-five, Eva felt sufficiently panicked to let herself fall in love, not so much with Freddie as with the illusion of being in love with him. Freddie’s personality was different: abrupt, plain-spoken and with an explosive temper which Eva and her mother were shocked to witness from an upstairs window when Freddie encountered two local village children playing tennis in the garden and, in a fit of imperious fury, ordered them to clear off and remember their place. Eva had previously overheard her father explain to Freddie how the family allowed the village children to use their tennis court or visit the stables, which Eva had converted into an artist’s studio, if they wished to try their hand at painting. But Freddie had not been listening or was simply unable to conceive of barefoot urchins being allowed such fraternising liberties.

  This was the only time before their marriage when she saw Freddie’s temper. She had let herself focus on his hearty love of the outdoors; his bravery in never allowing the impediment of a club foot prevent him from engaging in any activity and the way in which – as a mathematics teacher in a prep school – his mind seemed able to focus on practical matters in contrast to her own quixotic thoughts. Unlike some richer suitors that summer, with mannerisms groomed by privileged educations in elite boarding schools, she had found something endearing in Freddie’s rough and ready nature, in how his clothes never quite properly fitted and his accent had not lost its provincial Mayo cadence – no matter how haughty his manner at times. Her decision was sealed when she overheard two Dublin visitors mock Freddie’s accent and his club foot. Her heart went out to him, like to any underdog, with Eva mistakenly believing that if he could change her unworldliness, then she might also soften his mannerisms and outlook.

  Accepting his proposal seemed the practical thing to do as that summer came to
an end. Eva hoped that marriage to this seemingly decisive man of action would add a sense of purpose to her dreamy nature. When helping her to dress on her wedding morning, Eva’s mother betrayed her unease by taking Eva’s hands and earnestly whispering: ‘There is one thing you must never lose sight of. No matter what life deals you, promise me that you will strive tooth and nail for the right to be happy.’ Eva had ignored such warnings, anxious to leave behind her impractical yearnings for enlightenment and failed dreams of becoming an artist. At no matter what cost, she had determined to mould herself into a practical, attentive, provincial Protestant wife in Mayo. The problem was that Freddie’s people – the landed Fitzgeralds of Turlough – were not like the free-spirited Goold-Verschoyles. Eva was barely settled into married life before she overheard Freddie declare that one half of the Goold-Verschoyles were daft and the other half dangerously certifiable. Freddie viewed her family as classic examples of the soft Home Rule liberals who let Ireland slip from the Empire’s grasp; hapless idealists too immersed in literature and theosophy to know how to deal firmly with servants. Freddie had held his tongue during the discreet negotiations conducted as part of their courtship, but once back in Mayo he claimed that Eva’s brothers only became communists because her father was too mild-mannered to ban dangerous political arguments at his table.

  Just how dangerous those arguments were only became clear in the 1930s when her older brother Art grew so enthused by Stalin that he moved to Moscow, marrying and fathering a son while working as a propagandist on Izvestia, the official government newspaper. Her father never questioned his son and heir’s political choices: neither of them alluding to their differences in the often delayed postcards exchanged between Dunkineely and Moscow; each card conveying greetings and an instruction for the next move in one final chess match played out over several years on two chess boards set up in two contrasting rooms, each containing the same slowly diminishing alignment of carved chess pieces. Her middle brother Thomas was less forgiving of Art, blaming him for influencing their youngest brother Brendan to proffer his services to the Soviets. While visiting Art in Moscow in 1937, Brendan volunteered to become an English-language wireless operator in a tightly monitored Soviet contingent that was sent by Stalin to assist in the fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Even today Eva did not know his exact fate: only that his Soviet superiors took Brendan prisoner in Spain after he quarrelled with them. He was lured onto a ship in Barcelona Harbour and transported back to Moscow to be imprisoned for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities. Her mother had bombarded the Soviet Embassy in London with pleading letters, but only shortly before her death did she receive a terse Soviet reply. This four-line communiqué claimed that Brendan died during an attack by a Nazi plane on a train taking him and fellow prisoners to a new camp for their own safety, after Germany’s unprovoked invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. If this story were true, then her youngest brother never saw his thirtieth birthday, but truth was never certain in the Soviet Union.

  No dangerous political discussions were tolerated at dinner by the autocratic Fitzgeralds, who once owned seven thousand acres around Turlough. Successive Land Acts had forced them to sell their estate to the Congested District Board to be parcelled out and resold on favourable terms to former tenants. But the Fitzgeralds remained gentry, cognisant of their place in Mayo’s social hierarchy and expected former tenants to know their place also. The fact that Freddie was virtually penniless when he brought her to Mayo as his bride never altered his sense of status as one of the proud Fitzgeralds who drank hard and bargained even harder. Eva still remembered the afternoon – a month before her wedding – when she entered the Manor House in Dunkineely, after spending a blissful afternoon outdoors sketching, to hear raised voices from her father’s study. It was Freddie and their family solicitor haggling over her dowry. At that moment Eva suddenly felt like one of the thirteen-year-old waifs she once saw shivering in thin dresses at the hiring fair in Strabane, their limbs being prodded by farmers seeking cheap agricultural labour. Her dowry needed to be sufficiently generous because Freddie had based his plans for their future on it allowing him to pay for the renovation of his ancestral home, Glanmire House, which Freddie’s father – as younger brother to the main Fitzgerald heir – had been bequeathed, and which was bequeathed to Freddie in turn after his father’s death when Freddie was only fifteen.

  This left Freddie the poor relation in the Fitzgerald family compared to his uncle who owned Turlough Park: a majestically imposing Victorian Gothic limestone mansion with a high-pitched roof whose wrought-iron gates dominated the solitary street in Turlough village, which was little more than a cluster of small shops and pubs. Located in a wood a mile away, Glanmire House – consisting of just one storey over a basement – surely looked small even at its heyday when compared to Turlough Park, which Freddie’s uncle frequently closed up when preferring to live in exile in France, where the weather and politics better suited his temperament and pocket. At least this gave Freddie the status of being the most senior member of the wider Fitzgerald family to live in the locality, when Eva moved into Glanmire House in 1927 to find it already past its prime, with its roof leaking and the bedroom walls prone to mould. Still, back then Freddie was convinced that her dowry could transform Glanmire into a comfortable family home and a profitable business, as he abandoned his teaching career to oversee converting the house into a shooting lodge, with Freddie assuring her that guests from what he termed ‘the mainland’ would flock there for the authentic experience of taking part in a West of Ireland shooting expedition. It had been a revelation to Eva that a man as seemingly practical as her new husband could possess dreams as disconnected from reality as anything conjured up during her mother’s séances.

  Having dressed in silence, Eva was now ready for her journey. With her coat loose over her shoulders she quietly crossed the floorboards to place one hand on the brass bedstead and stare down at her sleeping husband’s face. Even before their marriage, a weathered ruddiness in Freddie’s features had made him look older than his years. While a trace of this former heartiness remained in the leathery complexion of a man happiest outdoors, it was impossible not to observe how years of heavy drinking were catching up with him. It was apparent in the web of spider veins protruding down his neck and the flushed redness around his nose; the enlarged blood vessels giving his face a bloated expression. Eva did not know how Freddie would fare on his own, no more than she knew how she would survive. All she knew was that no matter how bad things got, he would never seek help from her or anyone. Bad things had occurred between them, but if Eva took away any animosity towards him when departing, she would never truly leave her marriage behind: part of her remaining trapped within these walls like the ghost in the wine cellar.

  The Second World War had acted as a buffer, keeping their marriage artificially alive by granting them an excuse to respectably live apart: Freddie serving in the British Army while Eva returned to Mayo to raise their children. But the stark actualities of peace – with Freddie’s rank of Lieutenant Colonel insufficient to save him from being demobbed after one drunken outburst too many in the Officers’ Mess – left them no option but to confront their incompatibility. All last night she had been saying goodbye in her silent way to each room in Glanmire House, storing up the feel of door knobs and sash windows; the touch of the mahogany walnut sideboard that had stood in the same spot since the day she arrived; the oval table where she once loved to sketch at night when the children were small and Freddie was off conducting drinking sprees in the discreet seclusion of the Imperial Hotel on the Mall in Castlebar. Now she touched the bedroom furniture one last time before descending the back stairs and stopping outside the disused wine cellar off the kitchen for one last farewell.

  There was no glass in the tiny window in the cellar because no pane ever survived a night without being found smashed in the morning. The cellar was said to be haunted by the ghost of a butler who hung himself here – after being false
ly accused by Freddie’s grandfather of stealing a five pound note – his flailing legs smashing the window as he swung to his death. Eva had never managed to persuade any local girl working in the house to enter this cellar. In her first winter as a young bride she had felt an overwhelming sense of loneliness emanating from this narrow space and at first mistook it for the loneliness she felt at being separated from her family in Donegal who understood her. But Freddie’s aunt – a kindly woman who tried to help Eva adjust to married life – insisted one night on Freddie telling his new bride the story of the butler, which he had previously avoided mentioning for fear of scaring her. Freddie was right in that it did initially frighten her, especially during the following spring when carrying their first child. Then she realised how she could not bring a child into this house if imprisoned by fear and that the butler’s spirit – if it existed – was more frightened than frightening, trapped here in limbo and any manifestations of coldness were pleas for help amid the depths of his loneliness. Rather than shy away from the cellar, she had taken to standing in this doorway as the spring evenings of 1928 disintegrated into dusk: a young pregnant woman reading aloud from the psalms by the light of a paraffin lamp.

  Finally one evening, soon before her precious first-born, Francis, arrived, Eva had sensed a vast, yet imperceptible heaviness lift from within this cellar and come toward her. Her hands shook as she tried to keep her reading voice steady but the trapped loneliness in that man’s soul had so dissipated that, when passing through her in the doorway, it felt as light as a flutter of butterfly’s wings. After that the same coldness never radiated from this caller where her two children happily hid during games of hide and seek without any apprehension. Yet Eva always sensed that some echo of that ghost remained trapped there and all that she had done was to lighten his burden by showing him he was not alone. She had no book of psalms this morning but she entered the cellar to press her palms against the cobwebbed brickwork in one final gesture of fidelity and farewell to an unseen presence who had come to feel like a companion. She was leaving him behind, along with so much else, because she could not imagine any occasion when she would stand under this roof again, unless she was still alive when the time came for Freddie to bequeath it to the son with whom he shared almost nothing in common beyond their passion for this isolated house and the remaining few acres of woodland surrounding it.