Mayo, September 1928
It was not the fact that Art had left for Russia which hurt her, but that he never said goodbye to any of them. Even a noviciate entering a monastery rarely denied himself a last farewell to those he loved. Because Eva knew that Art loved his family although he had never returned to Donegal after her wedding. Mother only learnt that he was in Moscow when Mr Ffrench received a letter last week from a friend there who had met him.
Freddie gently prised Mother’s letter from Eva’s hand and read the news for himself whilst his heavily pregnant wife gazed out of the drawing room window of Glanmire House to where Mikey, Freddie’s man, stood by the car, patiently waiting to accompany his master to the station. Eva knew that Freddie would wet his lips in the select lounge of the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar before boarding the Dublin train.
‘It’s for the best for all of you,’ Freddie announced. ‘At least now he won’t be able to disgrace you, or if he does he’ll be so far away that it will not be in front of anyone who counts. And, you know, with Art gone, the young chap may buck up. It’s not too late for Brendan to get into some decent college. Oxford will hardly take him now, but only a fool judges a man by the colour of his school tie.’
Eva had often heard her husband repeat this line, carefully watching the company for any perceived slight about how he had lacked the money to attend a top public school.
Freddie was relieved by this news about Art, though they had only met briefly at the wedding, an awkward encounter between two men whom Eva loved. It now felt like years since Thomas had played the bagpipes in his kilt as Eva’s wedding party wound through Dunkineely. Locals had cheered as barefoot children raced after the Wolseley that bore her away to Mayo, with bonfires marking her arrival in Turlough where the Fitzgeralds had reigned for centuries. Her books were still stored in a trunk with her canvasses and easel. They were things she seemed unable to unpack, being too busy trying to appear like a young Protestant wife of social standing. She fretted over invitations to tennis parties and dinners at Turlough Park held by Freddie’s uncle on one of his trips back home. He found it cheaper to maintain his family in a rented French villa rather than upkeep his Irish mansion. An avenging mob had ransacked the original house after ‘Mad’ George Robert Fitzgerald’s public hanging in 1786, leading to the hasty erection of Glanmire House as a stopgap family home until the grandiose splendour of a new house at Turlough Park was completed. Glanmire House was as large as the Manor House in Dunkineely, but it was impossible to live so close to Turlough Park without feeling in every way the poor relation.
Freddie handed her back the letter, too much of a gentleman to read beyond Mother’s news about Art. ‘Let’s see if he lasts longer in Moscow than the other lunatic.’
‘Mr Ffrench is nice,’ Eva protested.
Freddie laughed, downing the dregs of whiskey in his glass. ‘Your brother may be mad,’ he said, ‘but at least he sticks to his beliefs. Ffrench has four times more servants than we could ever afford. Surely a good communist can fetch in his own logs.’
‘He was an ordinary factory worker in Russia.’
‘He was play-acting. At the first sign of trouble he ran home to his servants. What do you think they make of him? A man must set an example for servants to look up to. Your father should have taken a whip to him, like the Marquess of Queensberry did to that bugger boy. Ffrench is a laughing stock, even almost the madness infecting Donegal.’
Despite his imminent departure to Dublin, Freddie could not leave this festering sore alone. His conversation frequently returned to her family’s perceived madness. It was a blame game he played whenever his monthly accounts refused to add up. Eva forgave him, knowing the financial stress he tried to shield her from. Besides, their life together was not all accusation and counter-accusation. Great tenderness had peppered the previous thirteen months, moments when Eva felt truly fulfilled. Glanmire House had been burgled several times during the years it lay unoccupied. The carpets were rotting with damp on the night they consummated their marriage here, with the house unnaturally cold despite Freddie having fires blazing in the front hall and their bedroom. Later he had taken her on a lamp-lit tour of the single-storey Georgian-style villa with its meandering basement, proudly detailing his plans to install a hand pump to harness the water collected from a huge tank suspended on two masonry piers outside.
Over the past year there had been the excitement of seeing each refurbished room take shape. She remembered her anxiety before presiding over their first dinner for paying guests and her exhilaration afterwards. The morning when their heads touched, leaning over the blank ledger as Freddie recorded their first ever income received. There had been the planting of four thousand new trees to mark their marriage, with them both covered in muck, delighted to find an outdoor task in which they took equal pleasure. There were her solitary walks in the woods at dusk when no more shots were fired and she was torn between a fraternising desire to befriend the shy rabbits and an impulse to throw stones and teach them to mistrust humans before the insatiable hunter came with his gun. In Freddie’s favour, he never used traps and she was glad because she could not have borne them. He was humane in his own way, which was just not a way she understood. But the most tender sensation of all was his seed inside her, this child whom they could share and love, who would bind any slight fissures starting to appear as they began to see each other clearly.
Freddie checked his watch, resisting the temptation for another whiskey. ‘I’d best be off. The train will hardly wait for me, though God knows it would be a first if it left on time. You’ll be okay, won’t you?’
‘The baby isn’t due for three weeks.’
‘I know. Just don’t do anything silly. My first port of call will be the nursing home. We’ll ensure that their best bed is reserved for when you come up at the weekend.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Eva smiled. ‘Do your business and I’ll join you on Friday.’
She could have travelled with him now but Eva knew that Freddie needed time alone in Dublin before the birth of his child. He would attend the Freemasons and go drinking with old chums, spending money they could ill afford. But even if his eyes were bloodshot on Friday he would be sober and solicitous when escorting her to their lodgings close to the nursing home which he had chosen for her to give birth in. He eyed the whiskey again and restrained himself. ‘Mind yourself, old thing, and I’ll be waiting at Kingsbridge station on Friday.’ Taking the leatherbound Book of Common Prayer from a bookshelf he tucked it under his arm. ‘We mustn’t forget this!’
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 and 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.’