Part of these arrangements meant that – after wondering if she would ever share a bedroom with a man again – the face she now observed gently snoring was not that of a passionate follower of Martin Buber, but of the man whom she had given up her security to separate from. In fairness to Freddie, he made no attempt to physically share her bed last night. He even declined her offer to take down the spare single mattress from the attic in Frankfort Avenue, which could have been discreetly made up on the bedroom floor. All he had sought was the right to share her bedroom one last time so that, on the morning of their daughter’s wedding, both could emerge from the same bedroom, maintaining the illusion of still functioning as a family. He had only requested one blanket to place on the floorboards under him and one blanket to cover him, telling Eva that this was how he always slept beside the kitchen fire in Glanmire House on some weekends when he took the train to Mayo to be alone in his crumbling childhood home.
This dawn light showed her that Freddie was not ageing well. His love of the outdoors still leant him a robust appearance, but as he slept now she saw how the broken capillaries around his nose were far worse than five years ago. His complexion looked flushed: a yellow tint around his eyelids suggesting that his liver was struggling with his alcohol consumption. During the night he must have grown cold because Eva saw how he had risen to spread his greatcoat on top of his blanket for warmth. But she felt certain he had not ventured downstairs to where a well-stocked ornate burr walnut drinks cabinet with cabriole legs, borrowed from Esther O’Malley, occupied pride of place in the redecorated front room which once served as her art studio. Knowing how difficult it would be to resist the temptation if he woke, Freddie had asked Eva to lock the drinks cabinet and hide the key. She wondered how long it was since he had last gone forty-eight hours without alcohol. But Freddie knew that Hazel’s great fear was of him being drunk when walking her up the aisle of St Ann’s Church in Dawson Street. Staying dry was a private fight he would not shirk from. Although every nerve ending must have been screaming for alcohol, he had remained sober for two days to ensure there would be no shakes in his fingers when he linked his daughter’s arm and walked Hazel up the aisle to ceremonially give her away into the care of the man she was to wed.
Sitting on a Wicklow hillside three years ago, Eva had watched Max and Hazel begin an affair that had lasted eighteen months. Max had been good for Hazel. Eva recalled the headmistress of her Winchester school warning that Hazel’s weakness lay in how, behind her stubborn, iron-willed appearance, she was vulnerably impressionable, susceptible to having her opinions disproportionately influenced by whatever company she mixed within. Max soon broadened her horizons beyond hunt balls and automobile rallies, with Hazel revealing an unexpectedly sharp eye for comprehending the concepts behind modern art while still retaining a no-nonsense disdain for whatever felt bogus or unnecessarily esoteric. Hazel in turn gave Max a sense of self-assurance and maturity, with them making such a striking couple that photographs of them had regularly appeared in the newspapers when social diarists reported on the openings of exhibitions.
But Eva always sensed that Hazel needed an older man, supremely confident, with a spark of danger and an imperious glamour to equal her own. These were qualities that Geoffrey Llewellyn possessed. He made the men whom Hazel had previously dated seem like boys. Geoffrey was studying in Trinity at the same time as Francis, but while their paths never crossed Francis did remember complaints about the rattle of Geoffrey’s two-seater MG Morris TF Midget across the Trinity cobbles late at night when Geoffrey occupied rooms in the Rubrics. His summers were spent back on the Kenyan coffee plantation which he had recently inherited from his father, who had left Ireland amid a flight of landed gentry after the Irish Civil War. His upbringing in the Kenyan outback gave Geoffrey a muscular exuberance and a capacity for hard living which Hazel’s vivacity fed off.
They met the previous summer when both separately attended one of the parties thrown by the socialite Oonagh Guinness in her Luggala castle in the Wicklow Mountains: riotous soirees that could last for days, the only thing banned being clocks to let guests keep track of time. Geoffrey, whose tendency was to drive too fast, had misjudged a bend on a steep twisting road when returning to Dublin at dawn and busted his radiator when colliding with the dry stone wall. Hazel – a passenger in a next car – got out to inspect the damage, telling her friends to go ahead as she took charge of the situation by purchasing two freshly laid eggs and a mug of warm buttermilk at a nearby farmhouse. They shared the buttermilk while she cracked open the eggs and poured them into the leaking radiator, knowing that, as they bubbled in the heat, they would congeal over the crack, forming a coating that would hold long enough to get the MG Morris down the mountain to Roundwood village, with Hazel insisting on driving at a speed that even unnerved Geoffrey. While a local mechanic repaired the car, Geoffrey had inveigled a publican to open early and find a dusty bottle of champagne, so tepid that Hazel only agreed to share it if the publican added a double measure of brandy to each glass. While the publican served customers in the grocery half of his premises, Geoffrey had raised his glass as they sat on stools behind the wooden partition to toast Hazel as his saviour, joking about having finally found an Irish woman capable of thriving in the Kenyan outback.
He had not been joking: since then their romance was a whirlwind, with the engagement announced in the Trinity Times college paper last September – Hazel’s first time to get into Trinity, as she wryly remarked. Today’s wedding was arranged to facilitate his return to Kenya after dallying long enough to be conferred with his degree. Freddie – to his credit – was insisting on paying all the wedding costs, though Eva didn’t know where he had borrowed the money. She was helping to keep the costs down by hosting the wedding party here, after Hazel had supervised the redecoration of her house. Eva tried to discuss Freddie’s finances with him, suggesting that perhaps he sell a few acres of Glanmire Wood. But Freddie would not entertain this idea. Glanmire was Francis’s birthright, he explained, just like today’s wedding was Hazel’s due.
Freddie claimed to have always put aside money for the day he gave away his daughter: for the church and photographer; for the dresses and flowers and the honeymoon in Wexford; for today’s food and drink and last night’s lavish meal at the Shelbourne Hotel, where Fitzgerald relations assembled to meet their future in-laws and Freddie stoically endured the torment of watching everyone drink their fill. But Eva knew he was lying for her sake. He must have swallowed his pride and approached every acquaintance to borrow this money. The wedding notice in The Irish Times social column stated how ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Fitzgerald, M.B.E., of Glanmire House, Turlough, County Mayo was delighted to announce his daughter’s engagement’. But thankfully no Llewellyn visitors had time to visit Hazel’s childhood home, where such thick creepers lay siege to the dwelling that Francis told her he had needed a machete to reach the back door on his last visit. A shared passion for the solitude of that decaying house was perhaps the only thing still uniting Francis and Freddie – although thankfully the occasional weekend trips that each took to camp out in the basement never overlapped.
Putting on her dressing gown, Eva stepped over Freddie’s sleeping body to open the bedroom door and slip down the two flights of stairs to the kitchen. She made tea and toast and boiled an egg the way she remembered him liking it done. Carrying the tray upstairs, she knelt beside him, studying his ageing features again. Perhaps his hunter instinct made him stir, instantly aware of being closely observed. He sat up awkwardly in his vest, his back resting against the wall beneath the window as he let her settle the tray on his lap. He gestured as if to signify annoyance at her having gone to this fuss, yet was unable to disguise how touched he was. His expression hinted that it was a long time since anyone had done him such a human kindness. Eva felt slightly ashamed of her prime motivation, which was to prevent the awkwardness of Francis and his father needing to share a breakfast table.
‘You s
houldn’t have,’ he scolded.
‘It’s only a small thing.’
‘As you get older it’s the small things that matter.’ His tone mellowed, as if he felt able to relax his guard despite the awkward sleeping arrangements. Pouring a cup of tea, he spilled some onto the saucer so it could cool quickly before he raised the saucer to his mouth and swallowed, then smacked his lips in relief. ‘I was parched all night. There’s a dryness in the air.’
‘I can add more water to the pot and bring it back up,’ Eva offered.
‘No, no. I can’t stand weak tea. Back in the army the tea in the Officers’ Mess was always thick enough to trot a mouse across.’
‘You miss the army,’ she observed quietly.
He smiled ruefully. ‘There are a lot of things I miss.’ For a moment she thought him about to reach out and lightly brush her bare arm. She didn’t know how she would respond. Perhaps he thought better of such an acknowledgement of past affection. ‘There again, there are a damnable awful lot of things I don’t miss.’
She sensed it was time to go downstairs and give him space to shave and dress.
‘Is your back stiff? Those floorboards are hard.’
He used the teaspoon to open the egg with a brisk tap. ‘I’ve a perfect trick to ensure that I never endure back pain. It’s called a dicky leg. Lately this leg gives me so much gyp that I never have time to feel pain anywhere else. Are any stray Llewellyns mooching about downstairs, calling in with their tongues hanging out?’
‘It’s too early for callers,’ she assured him.
‘Still and all you’d better run down and open the drinks cabinet. The wine merchant thought I was a Name in Lloyds when he saw my order, but we’ll give nobody an excuse to say they called in to a dry house. I’ll finish this and be down shortly. He waved a hand airily to terminate the conversation, seemingly unaware of how this gesture came across as utterly dismissive. ‘If anyone calls, pour them a stiff measure and say I’m donning my finery in the master bedroom.’
Eva went downstairs to find that Hazel had risen from bed and was pacing anxiously about in the kitchen. She gave her mother a quizzical glance.
‘Is he…?’
‘Sober as a judge.’
Hazel smiled. ‘As against drunk as a lord.’
‘Freddie is not finding this easy.’
‘Nor are you, I’m sure. Carpetbaggers sleeping where there isn’t even a carpet.’ Hazel touched Eva’s shoulder in appreciation and laughed at this absurdity of playing at happy families. ‘I don’t know why Daddy is being such a stickler for the appearance of respectability. Geoffrey’s parents drank with the Happy Valley set in Kenya. Things can get so louche in Kenya that Oonagh Guinness’s parties look like Temperance Society meetings.’
‘He just wants to give you a good send off.’
‘I know. It just feels odd having him here. Make sure to kick him out the moment Geoffrey points his car towards Greystones. He has a boarding school to return to, though I hear he’s in the last chance saloon there, mainly because he spends his time drinking in every other saloon within ten miles of Bray.’
‘Freddie won’t linger,’ Eva assured her. ‘He just wants everything done properly for you.’
‘I appreciate all he’s doing. But you can’t rewrite the past just to make appearances look right. I remember riding my pony around the daffodil lawn in front of Glanmire House, freezing with cold but not wanting to go indoors. I was talking nonsense to my pony so my voice would drown out him hectoring you in the drawing room. I was only eight, but I remember thinking I had a duty to love him because he was my father, but you should have a choice: being only his wife. Be honest, Mummy, was there ever a time when you loved him?’
‘Today isn’t about Freddie or him.’ Eva was anxious to change the subject. ‘It’s about you.’
‘In a few hours I’ll be a married woman,’ Hazel said. ‘When our honeymoon ends it will be the boat train to England and a liner from Southampton to Africa. You and I may not get too many more chances to talk, woman to woman. So answer me.’
‘I love how he gave me two precious children. How could one part of me not still love someone who gave me such a gift?’
Hazel threw up her eyes impatiently. ‘That’s typical of you, Mummy, to avoid answering a straight question. If he hadn’t given you children, could you have loved him?’
‘Love is an odd thing,’ Eva said. ‘Both simple and complex. I did love a man once but I hadn’t the words to articulate what I felt to myself, let alone know how to tell him.’
‘Are we talking about Daddy?’
Eva shook her head. ‘Woman to woman, this was long before Freddie.’
‘You never mentioned any other man before.’
‘I hadn’t thought about him for a long time. Not until I saw you and Geoffrey together. Geoffrey reminds me of him.’
‘Physically?’
‘No. And the resemblance isn’t in temperament either.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘When I was seventeen a young officer challenged me to step into the unknown. But to admit that I loved him would mean leaving behind everything I knew. He wanted to bring me to the other side of the world, like the journey Geoffrey is bringing you on. In my case, not Kenya, but New Zealand. A cattle reach on the North Island, with a lake where he promised to build a studio with huge windows where I could paint.’
‘It sounds wonderful.’
‘I’ll never know because I didn’t find the courage to go. New Zealand just seemed too far away from Donegal and I was too young and scared to want to grow up. Sometimes we let life’s big moments pass by, thinking they’ll come around again.’
‘But they don’t.’
‘No. The officer asked me to go out alone on a boat with him one night, to prise me away from the cocoon of my family. I stood outside my house, holding my bathing suit and a towel because we planned to go swimming together. I kept looking back at the drawing room window where my family and our guests were gathered around the piano, people singing the party pieces they always sang. My mother who was tone deaf saying ‘that’s lovely, Tim’, like she always did whether Father played Chopin or ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. And I was paralysed with fright, torn between wanting to be a child back in that drawing room and a young woman meeting a handsome officer who was waiting by a pier to propose marriage to me.’
‘What did you do?’ Hazel asked.
Eva took her hand in hers.
‘I didn’t do what you’re finding the courage to do. I wasn’t brave enough to walk down that lane on my own. My brother Brendan found me standing outside and I took him with me, pretending it was a midnight adventure. I can still hear his twelve-year-old voice singing as we walked through the dark. When the officer saw me arrive holding Brendan’s hand he knew I wasn’t ready to be anyone’s wife. But the thing is that it was his hand I wanted to hold. I wanted it so badly when it was safely out of reach. I hadn’t the courage of my convictions when I was young. But even before you took your first step, from the determined way you moved your mouth to seek my breast at just two weeks old I could see you had steel inside you – not in any bad way – but you knew what you wanted and I knew that when your chance came you’d take it. I’m not telling you about the New Zealand officer to make you feel sorry for me but so you’ll understand how overjoyed I am for you. You always had sheet-lightening courage. Even as a girl riding to hounds with riders three times your age, there was no ditch you shied away from jumping, and whenever you fell off you wiped off the mud and clambered back on. Maybe there are times when you and I sparked each other up wrong, maybe because I had a sense that you’d never accept help from me or from anyone. But even though I hate fox-hunting, I want you to know that I stood in the fields in Ballyvary and Behola to watch you gallop past: my heart filled with fear for you but also bursting with pride. Geoffrey is a good man, and I’m overjoyed at this voyage you’re embarking on.’
‘That’s the nicest thing you ever s
aid.’ Eva saw that Hazel needed to blink back tears. She looked away, knowing that this was not the moment to be overcome. Neither of them felt comfortable with fuss. Hazel leaned forward to kiss her forehead.
‘You were a poor little chick who wasn’t ready to fly,’ she said. ‘You know there’s always a place for you in Kenya if you ever want to come. I can’t promise you a view over a lake but we would happily build you your own small house and studio. It’s the least I could do, seeing as my wedding plans destroyed your old studio in the front room.’
‘There is a season for everything,’ Eva replied. ‘My studio was wonderful while it lasted but that chapter is closed.’
A knock on the front door disturbed them.
‘Your bridesmaid,’ Eva said. ‘You need to get ready. Isn’t life exciting? This is going to be a great day and it’s your day.’
‘If that’s Valerie, she’s early,’ Hazel said. ‘It took us days to hunt down her blue grosgrain dress. I have it hanging in my room so we can get changed together.’ She paused, listening to footsteps crossing the hall overhead and opening the front door. ‘That’s hardly Daddy up and about, is it?’
‘Freddie won’t appear until he’s as spick and span as a new penny. He’s convinced we’re going to be invaded by Llewellyns, attracted like bees to honey by the drinks cabinet.’
An Ark of Light Page 9