Freddie looked boyish as he smiled and Eva knew that his proudest moment would come when recording his child’s birth among the family births listed there. The tradition had started with his own father, born at sea in 1865, with the latitude and longitude carefully recorded.
Eva accompanied him out onto the steps. Mikey nodded and climbed into the passenger seat. He would drive the car back and take any unexpected guests out shooting in his master’s absence.
Eva waved as the car disappeared down the long driveway. She should have felt alone, but instead had an inexplicable sense of relief. Descending the steps, she walked around by the side of the house and up into the dense woods. The slope was steep but it felt good to be alone. The maids would be chatting among themselves with the master gone. The sole guest at present, Mr Clements, was not the sort of man to make demands on their time.
The only thing moving was smoke from the chimneys. Eva began to climb, feeling like a child again. Running this guesthouse was proving harder than imagined. By now Freddie had exhausted his contacts who might enjoy the local shooting rights retained by his uncle after the Land Commission broke up the Fitzgerald estates. Eva had brought few potential customers to the business. She hardly knew anyone who shot. Her few friends who had come to sample their hospitality generally sketched by day and felt out of place amid the constant shooting talk at night, with men priding themselves on the quantity of tufted duck and woodcock slaughtered.
Being a good Fitzgerald was different from being a Goold Verschoyle. Familiarity was not encouraged. Her Protestant neighbours clubbed together, uncomfortable with – and, where possible, ignoring – the changing world beyond their gates. Ladies played tennis while the men drank whiskey and considered their options. Eva sometimes wondered if their best option as newlyweds might have been to live in Dublin on Freddie’s teaching salary. Not that she minded any hardship during the early months when married life was dangerously exciting. Freddie had made her feel that here at last was reality, as shockingly new as his thrusts into her body at night. One thing she realised was that it wasn’t just Freddie’s quick temper that had made Mother wary of him. In Mayo, his name still carried allure, and the locals saluted his vehicle as respectfully as if he had emerged from the ornate gates of Turlough Park. But beyond his gruff exterior he was as much a dreamer as Eva, obsessed with starting a new life here where the only thing they were never short of was firewood. Still, he assured her that Mayo was a wildfowler’s paradise and once their reputation spread people would flock from what he termed the ‘mainland’.
As they could not afford a housekeeper, Eva’s job was to supervise the menus with Mrs McGrory, the cook, and run the house, while Freddie took out the guests in search of woodcock, snipe and duck. Three months after their wedding Freddie had inserted the first small advertisement in the Shooting Times in England. Yet the first guest to walk up the avenue – lured by Eva’s small hand-painted sign – was the retired English naval commander, Mr Clements, who abhorred shooting. Freddie and Eva had hidden like schoolchildren behind the drawing room curtains to study him – unsure if he would ring the bell or depart – as he stood on the daffodil lawn, gradually seduced by the vista of bog with Croagh Patrick rising in the distance. A man without roots – or anxious to escape them – the Commander had explained that he was on a walking tour of the West of Ireland. He booked in for one night, sent for his trunks a month later and ever since had not got around to leaving.
Despite Mr Clements’s protestations, Freddie had insisted on taking him shooting on his first morning here. That evening after they returned Eva had excused herself and slipped into the woods to be sick out of sight of the cook and the kitchen maid. Returning to face the feathers soaked with congealed blood, the innards to be scraped out and the teethmarks made by Freddie’s red setter, Eva had realised that her expectation of marriage was another illusion. But she had little time for conscientiousness about dead birds, because within weeks Eva felt nauseated for a different reason. This child was starting inside her. Neighbours had flocked in when the news spread, taking it as a portent that the Fitzgerald line was being carried on in these trying times. Elderly majors, whose accents betrayed a mixture of Connaught and Calcutta, sipped whiskey in the timber-panelled bow window. Their benign gratitude made her feel incidental, as if she was merely the vehicle through which another male Fitzgerald would be delivered to Mayo. They urged her to rest, then joked with Freddie about the madness of the voting age for women being lowered to twenty-one.
Beyond the baize door denoting the servants’ territory, Mrs McGrory had grown comfortable enough with Eva’s non-Fitzgerald ways to confide how she was saying a novena that the child would be a boy. Eva had retained her own counsel, but felt common ground with her visitors on only one issue – the child would definitely be a boy.
Climbing on now she reached three oak trees in a small clearing. It was while resting against the middle one that she felt the first stab of pain. The child wasn’t due for three weeks, yet instinctively Eva knew that he was choosing his moment, waiting until the proud Fitzgerald was not here to take charge.
Where was the way back? Momentarily Eva lost her bearings, trapped in this wood owned by a family to which she felt she would never truly belong. But she would have to make herself belong, because she was bearing a Fitzgerald who was now trying to force his way out as if determined to be born amongst these trees. There was no point in calling because nobody could hear. All she could do was clutch her stomach and run, trusting that Mrs McGrory was still in the house. Why had she gone walking alone, after Freddie warned her to do nothing silly? He would be boarding the Dublin train now, glowing with affability after the Imperial Hotel. If she had gone with him she knew that the baby would have waited to be delivered by midwives in a warm room in Dublin. Freddie’s best-laid plans were going the way of all their best-laid plans. It was not her fault, but Eva knew that in his heart Freddie would blame her again. Not that he was cruel, but his exasperation at her slow thought-processes was becoming more apparent. But a child would change that because here finally was something she could do right. However there was no more time to worry about Freddie, because this terror gripping her allowed for no other thought than that she must reach the house and find Mrs McGrory.
She stumbled on her swollen ankles and tried not to fall, then saw Mr Clements with his walking stick and a book strolling along the avenue below. He reminded her of Father and Eva remembered how Mother had said to think of her in times of trouble. A sound must have emerged when she tried to scream because Mr Clements peered up through the foliage. He clambered up to put his arm around her as she sat panting, then coaxing her on, calling out loudly as they neared the house. The pain was so great that she could not stop herself crying and suddenly Mrs McGrory was in the doorway, taking command.
Eva lay on her bed, with Mr Clements outside, pacing as anxiously as if it were his own child. The pains were intense now and so quick that there was almost no pause. When you became a wife you gave away so much – your name, your family, the sense of who you were. She was no longer Eva Goold Verschoyle. She was Mrs Freddie Fitzgerald. Eva no longer possessed anything that was truly hers, but suddenly she knew – though she tried to prevent the thought – that this child would belong to her and not to Freddie. The pain was overwhelming, but Eva pushed and prayed that whatever God looked over her would bring her through this ordeal. Her dreaming-time was over and there was just pain and a desperate love for the child torturing her. She and the child were one, united in this act where he hurt her for the sake of life and she willingly ached.
Eva thought of the Commander pacing the lawn and poor Freddie on the train with events bypassing him. But she couldn’t wait for Freddie. She knew that her fingers hurt Mrs McGrory, digging into the woman’s flesh, but the cook did not complain, just urged her to give one last push, one final desperate effort. When Eva looked up she could see nothing because her vision was blurred, but she heard the baby’s first cry an
d did not want him cleaned because she wanted to hold him as he had emerged, coated in her blood and definitely a boy.
Mrs McGrory was in tears, saying, ‘I said a novena for a boy and God never let me down,’ and Eva’s body ached as she pushed out the afterbirth. But she knew that her soul was rooted now. She was no longer a sycamore sepal blown about at will. She belonged in this wood, as the mother of this extraordinary gift. Everything else seemed distant. Her true life seemed to be only starting in the heartbeat of this boy whom Mrs McGrory coaxed back from her, anxious to attend to his needs.
‘You’ll give him back,’ Eva pleaded, ‘as soon as you can.’
‘Let me wash the poor creature and wrap him up. Isn’t he just the darling?’
‘He is.’ Eva smiled. ‘Francis. My darling.’
FOURTEEN
Chelsea
London, 1930
‘Am I your first?’ the baronet’s daughter asked afterwards, as they lay between silk sheets in her Chelsea townhouse.
‘Yes,’ Brendan replied, because this was what older women liked to hear. To be made to feel special and young again by taking a man’s virginity. Lillian was not far from the desert of middle age. She was approaching thirty at least. She reached over to insert a cigarette in her holder and lit it.
‘My husband is progressive,’ she said. ‘He believes in free love. All the same I’d sooner say nothing to him. You see, he just doesn’t believe in free love for women.’
Brendan was not sure whether to believe her. ‘What would Gordon do if he walked in now?’
‘What would you do?’ She watched him closely.
‘Reason with him. Confront him with his own speeches about overthrowing outdated nineteenth-century notions of what constitutes morality.’
Lillian laughed. ‘How very rational. You think you can talk your way out of everything. But what happens when you reach the primitive bedrock within him? It’s inside all men, buried in you too. It’s one thing to surrender your property in the name of revolution, but quite another to surrender your woman. Gordon would kill you if he knew.’
‘Then why invite me back here after the party meeting?’ Brendan reached over to kiss her shoulder. ‘Why seduce me?’
‘Because I enjoy risks. And so do you, dear boy.’ She ran a finger lightly down his chest, the cigarette holder poised as if about to tip the hot ash on his naked flesh. Then she stubbed out the cigarette into a marble ashtray after just two puffs, unlike the people he generally mixed with who would drag on a cigarette until their fingers were scorched. ‘Besides at this very moment the bastard is screwing that Cockney bitch from the Plebs League who kept raising her hand like a schoolgirl to ask questions.’
Brendan turned over, upset at hearing this. Ruth Davis was the first girl he had gone out with in London. He had seen her tonight at the party meeting and intended to go over afterwards until Lillian waylaid him, seeking help to pack away unsold copies of the Daily Worker. Lillian sensed his discomfort and leaned her breasts into his back.
‘You think me a snob, don’t you? I’m not. No doubt the little tart is a good comrade. I just think that you have to draw a distinction between those whom you fight side by side with and those whom you sleep side by side with. But Gordon was always intimidated by intelligent women. That’s what I like about you. You’re not scared of us. I wasn’t your first. I can tell.’
‘You were my most beautiful,’ he replied.
‘You’re sweet.’ She rolled over to stretch beneath the bed, with her buttocks and elegant white back on display, reminding him of Ruth on their first night together when Ruth had reached under her bed for a chamber pot. Lillian didn’t look like she ever sat on a chamber pot, even in her father’s country house which apparently had electricity and good plumbing long before any other house in Devon. ‘A sweet boy who likes risks. Here’s a little present.’
She wiggled her bum and looked back, knowing that he was hooked and already erect again. Settling back beside him, she laid a cheaply printed small volume on his pillow. ‘Take it with you. Those mechanical parrots fresh from the Lenin School in Moscow ordered me to burn every copy. They’re like Catholic peasants with a catechism, the way they trot out party doctrine by rote. It’s funny how the Party insists that all recruits are taught to think for themselves, yet at the same time they must all reach the same conclusion.’
‘Why are you still in the Party then?’ Brendan fingered the now illicit copy of Where is Britain Going? by Leon Trotsky.
Lillian ran her hand slowly down his chest, pausing teasingly above his groin. ‘Because it’s rather thrilling or at least it used to be. And because I genuinely believe in it, in the same way that I believe in heaven without wishing to actually become a nun or a saint. Gordon however is an enthusiast who swallows everything. Not so long ago he could quote all of Trotsky’s book and thunder about how the Communist Party needed to enter into an implacable conflict with the conservative bureaucracy of the trade unions and the Labour Party. Back then it was all about revolution in England. Then after Trotsky was expelled from Russia and the Party voted complete allegiance to Stalin it was like this book never existed. That’s what I find frightening. I used to love honest arguments at party meetings. It was primitive and exciting, with people shouting and taking sides. It was about England and the here and now and I would join in and argue with the best. But now we’re like a naive rabble kneeling before a foreign deity, awaiting the latest commandment from the Kremlin.’ Lillian kissed his stomach. ‘The Party will swallow anything now, whereas – being a well-brought-up girl – I’m highly selective about what I swallow.’
Her lips moved downward and Brendan closed his eyes because this really was a first time. Yet despite his pleasure he did not feel close to her because he knew that she would never have committed such an act if he was born among the working class. Like many who drifted into the Party, she was here on safari because communism seemed rather bohemian and she could briefly pretend not to belong among the oppressive reactionary class. Maybe the Ffrenches were contradictory too but they were sincere people about whom he could not think badly. They would never alter their beliefs, whereas on the day when Gordon came into his title and seat in the House of Lords, he and Lillian would shed their radicalism like a snakeskin.
Lillian surfaced for air and Brendan gripped her hips to position her on top of him. He knew that he was being used and there was callousness in the way that he entered her. This seemed to excite her.
‘You’re making love to a heretic,’ she mocked. ‘If you let them brainwash you, you’ll want to burn me at a stake instead. But promise me you’ll never become a mechanical parrot. Read Trotsky. No man can be a hero one day and a villain the next. You can give your allegiance to the workers without becoming Stalin’s poodle. When the revolution comes I will gladly give away everything. But the one thing I refuse to surrender is my independence of mind.’
Lillian leant forward and gripped his shoulders so that her breasts hung down, swaying and trickling with sweat. He lay back to let her take control for now and knew that he would rather be with Ruth Davis who was giving herself to this woman’s husband.
What would his life have been like if he had stayed on at Marlborough, never meeting these people and tasting such freedom? Other lads studying electrical engineering at night sometimes teased him about his accent, but they accepted him as himself. They mocked his zeal for study, but Brendan could do nothing unless it was wholehearted. That was why Lillian fascinated him, in how she could both be and seem to be, how she could position herself half in and half out of things. From the look on her face she could easily be in love with him at this moment but she would just as easily forget him moments after he left, settling down on the sofa with a whisky and soda to dutifully await her husband. Brendan had to either believe completely or not at all. The party was correct to distance itself from the soft-Left enemies of the revolution and unite behind Stalin so that the spread of revolution was centrally guided. Lil
lian was too English at heart not to see the Home Counties as the centre of the universe. Being stateless, Brendan was not impeded by reactionary petty nationalism. Still he would read Trotsky’s book because the moment you ran away from words like a coward you lost your soul. His body was lost inside her now and he did not want to come too soon. Closing his eyes, he tried to focus on whatever images arose. He could see Bruckless Pier, with Art and Thomas and Maud and Eva and him charging down it in bathing costumes, ready to jump together out into the waters of Donegal Bay. Their joined hands were spread wide as they jumped, but once in the air they had to let go of one another and focus on their own fall. Their bodies twisted as they hit the water with huge separate splashes, like pieces of Humpty Dumpty that could never be put back together. Brendan gasped as his body suddenly buckled and he came.
FIFTEEN
The Visit
Moscow, 1932
An instinct told Art that something was wrong before he pushed open the front door into the building where he lived in the Sokolniki District. This sixth sense came from four years of living in Moscow. The hallway was silent with no children’s voices or sounds of marital strife from behind closed doors. Officers from the United State Political Directorate, the OGPU, must be operating within this building. By now Art could recognise the special smell that the presence of this secret police force always managed to unearth among the other odours emanating from these crowded rooms: the stink of sabotage and treachery. After his long shift in the truck factory he had stopped at the banya as was his right as an udarnik. But now his body felt robbed of its cleanliness after that steam bath with the select band of other workers similarly rewarded for exceeding their quotas.
The Family on Paradise Pier Page 17