Donegal, January 1937
Mrs Ffrench did not know what time it was when she woke, but the cold sensation inside her was so intense that she had to slip out of bed and onto the freezing landing so as not to disturb her sleeping husband. Crouching beside the banisters she shivered in her nightdress. The only sounds were the grandfather clock in the dark hallway below and a desolate wind howling in from St John’s Point. Stones on the driveway would be whitened by hoarfrost, with dew transforming the lawn into a brittle glistening sheet. Yet although the house was perishing, the chill within her was deeper as if she had witnessed a hideous deed in her sleep. If she could explain this sensation she might have woken her husband and sought comfort. But the feeling was so illogical that she could confess it to no one. It felt similar to the guilt she experienced last month after the kitchen cat gave birth to more kittens and she discovered a covered bucket of water in the yard. From the desperate cries emanating from the bucket she realised that the newborn kittens were drowning inside it. The mother cat had frantically tried to claw at the bucket and kept glancing at Mrs Ffrench, like one mother pleading to another. Mrs Ffrench had not helped but returned indoors to where the cries could not be heard. Yet for nights afterwards she heard the kittens in her sleep and woke convinced that she had sinned by doing nothing and not questioning her husband’s perceived wisdom about what was best.
Crouching on the landing Mrs Ffrench knew that she had spent too much of her life like this. Things were simpler before the Great War when they were newly wed and her husband allowed himself to be consumed by her Baha’i faith. It had felt like she was guiding him, opening up his mind to Prophet Baha’ullah’s predictions of a new era for mankind devoid of prejudice and extremes of poverty and wealth. Was this the first step in his embrace of communism? Back then Mrs Ffrench had imagined them equally mixing the colours on the palette of their lives. But at some stage she fell into step, dutifully letting his beliefs and passions become hers. Not all his passions though. Rumours of one passion had been whispered in this lonely place for years. She knew it from the pitying way that other wives looked at her.
The religion she was born into and the one she adopted both made her used to feeling an outsider in Ireland. The godlessness of Marxism merely reinforced her sense of difference. She could cope with these badges of isolation, but what she could not bear was having to compete against the fragile beauty of the sole remaining neighbour with whom she shared anything in common. Now in the past week even that neighbour had abandoned Donegal.
Not that anything untoward ever occurred between her husband and Mrs Goold Verschoyle, who was ill at ease with Mr Ffrench’s unspoken infatuation. But the entire district knew of his puppy eyes since the day when Mr Goold Verschoyle, in a rare lapse of manners, dressed down her husband before a police sergeant on the mountainside. Mrs Ffrench should have been glad to see the back of this woman who had always possessed some indefinable ailment, yet still managed to hold the admiration of every man in the district. But all week she had mourned her departure like a sister with the Manor House now empty and the Goold Verschoyles gone to Oxford.
There had been a sale of wine and old port from their cellars with local farmers gawping mistrustfully at the dusty bottles as if they contained a dubious fairground elixir. Her husband, along with the few other remaining Protestants, had purchased the wine. Catholic interest only arose when the sale of spirits came up. Watching this auction had saddened her, with most onlookers present to merely gawk at the possessions of the departing gentry, and Mr and Mrs Goold Verschoyle mutely observing proceedings from an upstairs window. They had not emptied their cellar for financial reasons, which was just as well because the auction raised precious little, but Mr Goold Verschoyle considered it prudent not to leave alcohol or valuables in the boarded-up house. Most items of real value had been transported to Oxford, though the family silver was missing – presumably having been purloined by Art and donated to some communist cause. Only the curtains and heavy furniture remained, like a baited trap to try and lure back their eldest son.
Art had only visited Donegal once since his return from Russia, possessing such a haunted look that Mrs Ffrench had wanted to take his hand and confess how she too hated Moscow. But his stiff shoulders hinted that he would brook no criticism of the state that expelled him.
Little remained of the intense wide-eyed boy she first knew. He had been replaced by a cipher whose only language was rhetoric. For him to utter a single criticism of Stalin would be to shatter the foundation on which he’d built his adult life.
On that visit she heard that Mr Goold Verschoyle had again pleaded with him to take an interest in the Manor House, but Art declared his intention to let the house rot rather than allow himself to be contaminated by the evil of inherited wealth in having any dealings with the cursed business, now or after his father’s death.
Yet during that short visit Mrs Ffrench had also seen Art strip to the waist to spend an entire day lovingly repairing a section of roof where the tiles had come loose. It was plain that the boy still loved the house and this irrational love tormented him. Mr Goold Verschoyle’s final act in Dunkineely had been to write to Art, saying that he was leaving the key with Mr Barnes, their old bank manager in Donegal town. He had left for Oxford because the Irish winters were too wet for his wife’s acute arthritis and they would have more company in an hour’s walk in Oxford than in a day’s drive in Donegal. But she also knew that Mr Goold Verschoyle was departing because he no longer had the heart for the struggle to maintain a house with nobody to pass it on to. She knew this weariness herself because in time Bruckless House would pass, if not to strangers, then to distant relations. This made it harder for her to care about the gardens or rooms filled with unread Soviet magazines that her husband had imported in bulk until the post office refused to deliver them. On some nights this home felt like a mausoleum, but even the grave surely felt warmer than the way she was feeling now.
She should fetch a robe for her shoulders or venture into the kitchen to make hot milk and honey. But it felt like her legs would not move. She sat on the top step to stare down into the dark hall and then, for some irrational reason, sensed that a child stood behind her. She did not know who the child was and knew there was no point in turning because she would not be able to see him, just as he could not see her. But she could feel his lonely terror and knew that he was staring down at an unseen menace lurking at the bottom of the stairs. She also sensed this evil and wondered if she might now still be dreaming. Because the evil had a calm inaudible adult voice – almost like her husband’s – coaxing the child down. She wanted to say, ‘Wait here with me, I won’t let you come to harm like those kittens in the bucket. Trust me, I’ll mind you.’ But she was no mother and this was why the child could not sense her presence, why he stepped forward, one step, two step, slowly descending the stairs. She wanted to follow. But all she could do was sit shivering in her thin nightdress and rock herself back and forth, like a mother whose child had drowned while she failed to hear him cry out in great distress.