Mayo, 17 November 1939
Francis’s hand-painted sign remained in place above the front door where he had nailed it up two years previously, with the boy refusing to climb into the dicky seat of his father’s motor until certain that any intruder into Glanmire Wood would spot it. He had grown tall in the intervening period – as Delia O’Donnell from the small shop and the Durcan women had exclaimed, clucking around in delight when the Castlebar bus deposited Eva and her children in Turlough an hour ago. Yet as Eva watched him stand on the twilit overgrown lawn, she knew he was still the same child who had painted in white letters: Please keep out. This is my home.
All three of them were finally home. Twelve-year-old boys were not meant to cry but Eva knew that tears were not far from Francis’s eyes. Hazel looked sullen, though Eva suspected that the girl was simply exhausted after their journey from England. Two full days of travelling had left Eva worn out as well.
A noise made Eva turn. Mr Durcan was unloading their cases. His headlights casually illuminating the lawn seemed extravagant after the blackout darkness of England. She knew he would be insulted if she offered him money: he was no hackney man. He picked up a heavy case with an ease that belied his years and carried it up the steps to the door. ‘Stand yourself up on that yoke,’ he told Francis, his gruffness belying an instinctive understanding of the boy’s emotions. ‘You won’t be needing that old sign to frighten the crows away now.’
Straining on his tiptoes, Francis stretched high enough to prise the wooden sign from the wall. He stared at it in silent triumph, then stepped down, nodding to Mr Durcan. The nod was a perfect replica of the almost imperceptible gestures through which local men communicated. Hazel plucked at Eva’s sleeve.
‘When is the man leaving?’ she whispered.
Mr Durcan looked back, though Eva felt certain he could not have heard.
‘You’ll be wanting to get warm inside, Miss Hazel. If you’ll unlock the door, mam, Francis and myself will shift these cases into the hall.’
Eva knew Mr Durcan was not being sly in the different way he referred to each child. Hazel was instinctively a Fitzgerald, fitting in more at Turlough Park than here. She was recognised as such locally, whereas Francis was allowed to belong, in so far as a Protestant could, to the closed fist of village life. It meant a great deal to the Durcan women that Francis had written to them each Christmas from England.
The house – although freezing – did not smell as musty as Eva had feared. But when she pulled back the shutters the last vestige of twilight outside took on a green tinge because of ivy colonising the windowpanes. The icy drawing room – with its few remaining pieces of furniture draped in dustsheets – had a curious echo. She knew that the children would find everything smaller than they remembered.
Mr Durcan carried in the last case and joked with Francis while Hazel sat, holding her rag doll, beside the cold fireplace. Eva thanked him and the two adults walked outside.
‘You’ll be grand entirely here, mam, but be careful in the times they are in it. Some class of a tramp was mooching about over the weekend.’
‘Up here?’
‘Aye. My wife ran him from the shop on Saturday evening. She felt he was a young blackguard on the lookout for anything to rob, but from the window he looked harmless enough to me. Still he wouldn’t be the best paying guest if you were thinking of opening the guesthouse again.’
Perhaps there was no tramp and this was the man’s subtle attempt to extract the gossip that his wife and daughter would plague him for.
‘I’ve no plans,’ she replied. ‘Just for now we’ll live in one or two rooms and see.’
‘Still you got away home in time, judging by the news from Scapa Flow.’
‘What news?’ Eva asked. ‘I’ve been travelling all day.’
‘Herr Hitler has just sank the Royal Oak at anchor. Hundreds of young sailors are dead without ever seeing the ocean. This could be a short war.’
‘My husband is enlisting,’ she said quietly. ‘The Territorials.’
‘Aye.’ Mr Durcan’s tone was neutral, his opinion kept to himself, though all of Turlough would know the news by morning.
‘Who do you think will win?’ she asked quietly.
‘There’s a question, mam.’ Mr Durcan shrugged. When the IRA Diehards raided his shop during the civil war he had refused them supplies, even when they stood him against his gable to stage a mock execution. Eva could imagine him staring down the barrels of British or German guns with equal stubbornness. He got into his car and the children waved with her as he edged down the overgrown avenue. They kept waving until he was gone from sight, dreading the moment when they had to confront this desolate and rapidly darkening house.
Hazel lowered her hand first. ‘I’m cold,’ she complained. ‘Why is this place always so cold?’
‘We’ll get it warm,’ Eva promised. ‘And maybe Maureen got my letter and will cycle over to visit soon.’
While Eva lit a candle, Hazel entered the drawing room and gazed at the empty grate. Eva remembered how she used to rub Hazel’s bare soles here to get them warm and wondered would her daughter still allow her to do so. ‘Are you glad to be home?’ Eva asked and Hazel placed her rag doll on the dustsheet covering the sofa.
‘The flat in Winchester never seemed like a home, did it, Mummy?’
‘No.’
‘Not when you’re used to space. I always loved the silence here at night and the stars are brighter in Mayo. The other girls bored me anyway, droning on about how much money their fathers have. We don’t have any, do we?’
‘Daddy will send some every week.’
‘Will Hitler come here?’
‘Ireland’s not at war with Germany.’
‘Why not?’
‘It just isn’t. Not yet anyway.’
‘Can I go out to the stables? I want to check they’re okay. I have this silly fear that the roof will have caved in and we won’t be able to keep a horse there.’
The girl glanced sharply at Eva as she spoke. Hazel knew in her heart that Eva barely had money to feed a horse let alone buy one. Their only hope lay in begging Freddie’s uncle for the loan of a mare, but relations with Turlough Park had been strained by the disgrace of the bailiffs two years ago. Freddie entering trade as a shopkeeper hardly helped. His nephew would redeem himself by enlisting, but Eva’s pride meant that she dreaded making the trip to Turlough Park.
‘Come on,’ she told Hazel, picking up the candle. ‘Let’s ensure we have a roof to keep the poor horse dry.’
Hazel took her hand as they entered the dark hall. A light shone from Mr Clements’s old room. Eva pushed the door open. Having found a paraffin lamp, Francis knelt on a rug beside an open trunk of books. A horsehair mattress was neatly folded on the bed. On top of an empty chest of drawers lined with dusty newspaper the Commander had left his gramophone and two records, The Moonlight Sonata and Handel’s Water Music. Francis looked up.
‘Mr Clements left these behind, Mummy. Do you think he’s coming back?’
Eva shook her head. That old sailor was probably back in uniform somewhere. Maybe he had trained some of the young sailors who lost their lives on the Royal Oak. Mr Clements had remained here for some days after the family left in 1937, awaiting the men due to ferry his possessions to London. Perhaps there had been no room for this last trunk, but she suspected that he deliberately left part of himself behind, to remind her of him when she returned. She wondered if he sometimes lay awake, in whatever quiet hotel he had secreted himself away, to imagine this moonlit room with the door ajar for mice and his silent gramophone like a faithful dog patiently anticipating its dead master’s return?
‘Perhaps he left the books for you to read one day.’ Eva longed to escape from the unbearable sadness of his absence. ‘We’re going to the stables. Will you light the way?’
The hall had grown pitch-dark in the few moments they were in the Commander’s room. Hearing a branch knock against a window they stopped and moved closer together. Then Hazel laughed slightly, unable to bear the unspoken anxiety. ‘I wonder what the girls in school are doing now?’
‘Writing French essays on how to be little pests,’ Francis replied.
‘I should write one this weekend,’ Hazel sniped. ‘Called “My cowardly brother, the weakling who cried at school”.’
‘Stop bickering,’ Eva ordered, anxious for Francis not to be reminded of the unhappy letters he had sent them all. They went quiet as she opened the door because the basement stairs looked forbidding. Francis shone the lantern down and hesitated. Then, mindful of Hazel’s taunt, he walked ahead with Eva following and her daughter close behind.
They had grown up hearing stories about the ghost in the cellar and Eva suspected that they had embroidered them into elaborate sightings when whispering after lights out in school. She did not know what she expected to encounter after two years away but if any presence emanated from the wine cellar it almost seemed to be welcoming them. She stopped to stare into that cramped vault as Francis moved on and Hazel anxiously brushed past her to join him. The atmosphere in Glanmire House had never seemed as cold after the night she stood here to pray with the trapped spirit. Eva raised a hand to the empty cellar as if in greeting, then saw her children back away from the kitchen.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘Someone’s been in there,’ Francis replied. ‘The range is lit.’
Eva took the lamp from him and entered the kitchen. The range was low but had obviously been stoked up earlier. On the table a loaf of soda bread was wrapped in a towel beside some homemade butter in a twist of newspaper.
‘Has anyone been living here?’ Hazel asked anxiously.
Eva realised how isolated she was with two children and not a soul for a mile. Previously there were always dogs and people. She missed the dogs more than servants or guests. The house seemed soulless without them padding about. She remembered Mr Durcan’s warning. It was important not to betray fear. ‘Maybe Maureen called in,’ she said.
Mr Devlin had arranged a shop job for Maureen as a last favour to Eva, but, as the girl never replied to letters, Eva didn’t know if she remained in Castlebar or had emigrated like her older siblings. Eva had written to Maureen last week, not because she could offer the girl work but because she longed to confide in somebody. When she told Freddie she was leaving, he had understood her to refer to England and not to him. But Eva wasn’t merely fleeing the war, she was fleeing the strictures of an unwise marriage. Truly she had been ‘in the ether’ when imagining that their polar opposites could live in harmony. She still loved Freddie and respected him for pulling himself together after his dream of a life in Glanmire died. His drinking had moderated since moving to England, never affecting his work in Culpepers. He had created a new life for them, knuckling down to learn the herbal trade – even if he believed that many products, based on Nicholas Culpeper’s seventeenth-century remedies, were poppycock. He often joked that they only stopped short of recommending customers to cover their bodies with leeches. Life in Winchester had been peaceable, without the terror of being confronted by final demands each time the postman arrived. But it was dangerous for the soul to slip into the routine of thinking that a day had been good simply because it wasn’t bad. Only when Mr Durcan’s car bumped its way up the tree-lined avenue this evening did Eva realise how free her spirit felt at being alone.
Except that it seemed they were not alone. At any moment a tramp might intrude upon them. Perhaps the stranger had heard them arrive and left the untouched bread as a parting gift. Eva unwrapped it, knowing the children were hungry. ‘It wasn’t baked by a ghost anyway,’ she joked. ‘I’m sure it’s safe to eat.’
The old cutlery remained in the drawer. Eva deliberately used the sharpest carving knife to cut the bread and kept it beside her while Francis and Hazel ate slice after slice. She should have checked the rooms upstairs for signs of inhabitation. Her courage failed her now as she kept imagining noises in the creaking house. She didn’t know what she wanted to find. A vague flicker of hope was gnawing at the edge of her consciousness since Mr Durcan mentioned a tramp. Eva didn’t want to extinguish that hope just yet. Instead she watched Hazel take the torn copy of Sovietland from Francis’s coat. The girl glanced through it incredulously.
‘Russia has the world’s stupidest children,’ she said. ‘In this questionnaire the average French girl’s ambition is to own a bicycle, but for a Russian girl it’s to…’ Hazel glanced down. ‘…overthrow capitalist oppression and build communism. French girls hate doing homework and Russians hate the bourgeoisie.’
‘Are we the bourgeoisie, Mummy?’ Francis asked.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Hazel snorted, sounding old beyond her years. ‘We’re Fitzgeralds. I’m going out to the stables. Who’s coming?’
They all went in the end, having only one lamp. The bolt on the stable door opened smoothly for one that should have been untouched for two years. Hazel held the lantern high. The roof beams were solid and the ladder still in place up to the loft where Freddie had sometimes slept. But Eva was gazing at a heap of straw in the stall nearest the wall. Blackened stones were arranged in a ring where a fire had been lit. Francis went to investigate.
‘Somebody has slept here,’ he said. ‘This ash is cold but fresh.’ He looked up, fearful that an intruder could be lurking in the loft. Eva realised that if anyone outside pushed the door shut and bolted it, they could be locked in the stable for days until villagers came to investigate. Trying not to show panic she hurried the children out and dragged the door shut.
‘Let’s go inside,’ she said.
It was only twenty yards to the house, but the overgrown path never seemed so dark. Francis stumbled and cried out, unnerving them further. They pushed in through the open back door, which Eva quickly bolted. She leaned back, breathing a sigh of relief, while the children hugged her for comfort. Then the sound of footsteps crossed the kitchen flagstones. Eva tightened her grip on the children, but Hazel broke free to call: ‘Who’s there? Show yourself!’
The kitchen door opened and a voice spoke. ‘I would if I could find a light.’
‘Maureen!’
The children ran towards their former maid, while Eva raised the lantern to make out the young woman’s features.
‘The back door was open…I didn’t know where yous had gone. My goodness, how you’ve grown.’ Maureen released the children and smiled at Eva. ‘I called earlier, Mrs Fitzgerald. I’ve a key these years back. You got the soda bread?’
‘We didn’t know who brought it.’
‘I was never one for writing notes. I lit the stove. If I’d had more time I could have done more.’
‘You have your own life, Maureen. Are you still working for Mr Devlin?’
‘God save us from harm, mam, but if I slice another rasher for that skinflint I’ll go crazy. I wasn’t cut out for shop work.’
‘I haven’t the money to employ anyone, Maureen.’
‘Don’t I know it, mam. Still I thought I’d spend the night here if you wanted and get you settled in. I can cycle into work in the morning.’
‘And come back tomorrow evening,’ Francis urged. ‘I mean it’s not half the cycle from here to Castlebar as it would be from Ballavary.’
‘I’m sure Maureen wants to be with her own family,’ Eva said, attempting to cushion his expectation.
‘She wants to be with us,’ Hazel insisted. ‘Don’t you, Maureen? It will be like old times, only you could be the guest and have the Commander’s old room. Say she can stay, Mummy, say it!’
Eva watched Maureen laugh at the children’s enthusiasm. The young woman glanced at her.
‘Well, my sister Cait would welcome a bit of space in the bed for a night or two.’
‘You’d be more welcome than you could ever know,’ Eva said. ‘But you’ll freeze here in winter.’
‘Sure we can all freeze together so.’
Thrilled, the children sat Maureen down at the table, competing to tell her about England. Eva’s pleasure was tempered by knowing that someone had slept in the stables. A tramp might have thought the house deserted, but Mr Durcan’s warning made her uneasy. Maureen was suggesting that they sleep on mattresses in the kitchen for tonight, as it was the only warm room. The children loved the sense of anarchy and adventure in this idea. Eva unpacked more candles and arranged them around the room. She gave the children the lantern, ostensibly for them to check if the mattresses in the nursery were damp, but really so that she could speak to Maureen alone.
‘Was there anyone around here when you cycled over earlier?’
‘There was and he gave me a fright,’ the girl replied. ‘I didn’t see him until he stepped out from the woods as I was leaving. A stranger. I think he’d been sleeping rough.’
‘A tramp?’
‘I don’t rightly know, mam. A quiet-spoken class of man. Something odd about him, like maybe he’d been in jail. It was his half-starved face and his skin burnt like he’d been somewhere foreign. I didn’t think him Irish until he spoke.’
‘What age was he?’ Eva couldn’t prevent a desperate hope from overwhelming her.
‘Not old, mam, but he looked old.’
‘And his accent?’
Eva’s agitation made the girl nervous. ‘He spoke like a man not much used to speaking English any more. Hoarse like he’d been ill. He asked for you by name and when I said you were across the water but due home he said nothing but went on his way. I felt desperately sorry for him, mam. Did I do right to say you were coming back?’
‘I need you to look at a photograph, Maureen,’ Eva said. ‘This is very important.’
Francis barged in and was surprised by the brusque manner in which Eva sent him away. But she had no time for her son now. She was remembering another boy his age in a funny hat holding her hand on the Bunlacky road at night. A boy everyone adored who had vanished off this earth. How often in Winchester had she sat up in bed, convinced that a knock had woken her, with Brendan outside, having found his way to her? But he would not have known her English address. With the Dunkineely house lying empty like a cursed palace, if Brendan had reached Ireland then Mayo was the only place where he could come for help.
Eva led Maureen to the basement bedroom where she had stored any personal possessions they could not take to England. There were pictures of Brendan as a boy in an album here. But pressed between the pages of Goethe’s poems she had kept the last photograph received from him, taken by a London street photographer in 1936. She showed it to Maureen.
‘Take a good look.’ She tried to stay calm and not scare the girl. ‘Take as long as you want. Then tell me if this could be the man you saw in the woods.’
The girl held the candle so close to the photograph that Eva was afraid it would become stained with wax. She seemed to take an eternity to make up her mind.
‘He’s good-looking in this photograph,’ she said, ‘but he’s gaunt in real life now – if it was him. Mam, I can’t tell. He’s lost so much weight and his hair…there was grey in it despite him being so young. And his teeth were like an old man’s whereas in this photo he’s a picture of health. I can’t say if this is him or not. It’s your brother’s picture, isn’t it?’
Eva did not reply, as if any articulation of her hope would see it wither. The children were calling from the kitchen. Their anxiety had vanished with Maureen’s appearance and they were giddy, the best of friends. Maureen knew better than to question Eva further. The girl returned to the kitchen and Eva heard her scold them playfully, sending them to fetch pots as she prepared supper with the provisions Eva had purchased in Mr Durcan’s shop. Eva was glad that Maureen could distract them and give her time alone to think and pray.
There were more candles in her bag upstairs in the hall. Eva collected an assortment of empty bottles from the cellar and, using them as holders, set a lighted candle in every window. This was how she remembered Dunkineely at Christmas, with candles in windows and doors ajar to offer shelter if Mary and Joseph should pass. Bruckless House was also once festooned with candles, but – although Eva loved the Ffrenches – to recall those lit windows reminded her of the false beacons with which shipwreckers lured unwary sailors onto the rocks. But perhaps Brendan had survived this voyage that Mr Ffrench had inspired. She opened the front door to stand out in the freezing night with three candles spluttering on the hall floor behind her as she scanned the dark trees.
Her mind was strangely calm. She had placed herself at God’s mercy and was waiting for his pattern to be revealed. Prayer would be superfluous in the rich silence. She would wait until dawn if necessary. She was no Thomas needing to put her hands into the wounds. Perhaps this was the reason why she had chosen to return home tonight.
Making no effort to stay warm, she waited, so lost in meditation that she did not hear Maureen and the children calling until they came upstairs to find her.
‘Whatever are you doing, Mummy?’ Hazel asked, exasperated.
‘I’m waiting, dear.’
‘For what?’
‘Whoever is out there.’
Both children peered anxiously into the dark, unnerved by her behaviour.
‘There’s nobody out there,’ Hazel said decidedly.
‘You’d best come in, Mrs Fitzgerald,’ Maureen urged. ‘You’ll catch your death on such a night.’
‘You know who’s sleeping in the stable, don’t you?’ Francis said. ‘Why are you just standing here, Mummy?’
‘Because I’m scared to move.’
‘What do you mean?’ The boy was near tears, finding her behaviour unsettling, but she could not reply because she herself didn’t know what she meant. As long as she stood here in silence, Eva had felt that she could keep alive the dream but the children’s presence allowed reality to intrude. A candle went out behind her. She turned to blow out the others so that there was just the distant candlelight from the drawing room window and the lantern Maureen was carrying. Eva became aware of how cold she was. Maureen saw her shiver.
‘We’d best be having some supper downstairs, Mrs Fitzgerald.’
Eva allowed herself to be led away and Maureen beckoned for Francis to close the door. When they reached the stairs to the cellar Maureen told him to hurry on, but the boy remained in the spot where Eva had stood.
‘There is somebody out there,’ he said quietly. ‘By the chestnut tree at the start of the avenue.’
Eva started forward and Francis stepped back, looking like he wished to bolt the door and keep whoever was out there at bay. But he let his mother run down the steps onto the gravel that was choked with weeds. A lank figure stood beneath the tree, a hand raised to his eyes as if the distant candles were blinding him. He began to approach, like a ghost arisen from a battlefield. He was Brendan’s height, with Brendan’s gait. Only his gaunt face seemed older, his hair prematurely grey. Eva ran towards him in the moonlight, afraid that if she averted her eyes the apparition would disappear. He seemed surprised by her eagerness, unsure of how to respond. He stopped to let her approach. Her baby brother, the laughing boy she had pushed in his pram, carried on her shoulders, lain beside in hayricks at night to teach him the names of stars.
For several seconds she surrendered to a feeling of bliss, as if willpower and longing could transform his features into those she yearned for. Then she stopped running and her hands gripped her stomach to block out the surge of grief. Silently she cursed her naivety and cursed this stranger. Because wherever Brendan was, he was not standing before her.
‘I thought you were someone else,’ she said feebly.
‘I’m sorry.’ The voice was hoarse, the words hard to make out.
‘Somebody who went to Spain.’
‘That’s where I’ve come from.’
The tiniest flicker of hope stirred.
‘Which side?’
Scornfully he looked down to emphasise the state of his clothing. ‘I was among the Irish who actually fought. I wasn’t led by a cowardly buffoon who ran away at the first shot. When I was released from the hellhole of Franco’s jail, where warders would half-hang men for amusement, my father shut the door in my face. You tell me which side.’
‘What brought you here?’
‘You are Eva Fitzgerald?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name is Peadar Bourke. I’ve something for you. From a comrade.’
Eva stepped forward, desperate hope fanning up again inside her. ‘When did you see him last? Please God, tell me he’s all right.’
The stranger shook his head. ‘I wish I could. We tried to stop the fascists capturing the Madrid road at Jarama. But our only training was firing a few shots at rocks to get the feel of our guns. Frank Ryan was wounded there and poor Kit Conway killed. There was no shelter except a few scraggly olive trees in the valley. The firing stopped for a second and I saw him pick some fallen fruit from the dirt. He said, “Even the olives are bleeding.” Then the fascists advanced and Charlie tried to cover our retreat. He copped three bullets, one in the head. Poor bastard, it took us ten days to retrieve his body.’
‘Charlie who?’ Eva said, caught between conflicting emotions.
‘Charlie Donnelly,’ Bourke replied angrily. ‘Who do you think we’re discussing?’
Eva recalled the young poet whom Art had brought here once. Impassioned, dogmatic, barely out of his teens. A cattle dealer’s son whose voice mellowed when he recited his terse verses. His young face scarred by a bullet hole, baked for ten days under a merciless Spanish sun. Eva should have felt grief for him, but instead was overcome with guilt-ridden relief because it was not Brendan mown down by machine-gun fire. Her hope could live on.
‘I found this in his kit bag.’ The gaunt stranger reached into his coat pocket. ‘Several times Charlie mentioned his promise to give it back to a woman. I thought it must be important, but you don’t even remember him.’
Eva stared at the book, Lyrics from the Ancient Chinese, with her name and address inside it. She accepted it back, wondering at what journeys this slender volume had undergone in the three years since the poet slipped away from here at dawn.
‘I do remember him,’ she said. ‘It’s just that somebody else I love is missing in Spain.’ She paused, afraid to mention Brendan’s name in case all hope was extinguished. ‘Have you eaten?’
‘I bought bread in the village. You’d swear I was a black man from the way the women in the shop looked at me.’
‘Not many people pass through here,’ she said apologetically.
‘That’s all I’m doing, mam. Passing through from Westport. Charlie made this sound like a place where a man might seek shelter. This past week I’ve slept in your outhouse. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘We can offer you a blanket on the floor.’
‘I’d sooner be on my way. I just wanted to return your book so I could feel I’d done something on my visit home.’
‘Did your father really turn you away?’
‘I think he would have taken me back in only he claimed that the peelers have their eyes skinned for me. De Valera is locking up anyone he dislikes while Hitler and Chamberlain fight it out.’
‘I know. My brother, Art Goold, has been interned in the Curragh camp.’
‘That lunatic? I’m sorry…no offence. Charlie never mentioned the connection. I knew Art in Dublin, on the fringe of everything. You couldn’t hold a conversation without Art deciding it was a public meeting and shouting “Long Live Comrade Stalin.” They put him in the Curragh, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s where they’ll put me unless I get a boat to Liverpool.’ He paused. ‘If your Art’s sister that makes you…’
‘What?’
He went silent.
‘Did you know my younger brother in Spain?’
‘Sweet Christ, that’s who you thought I was.’
‘Is he alive? Please tell me. Does Franco have him?’
‘You know that Franco doesn’t have him.’
‘We know nothing.’
‘Surely Art told you? I heard he was crazy with worry. He almost doubted his God.’
‘Art doesn’t have a God,’ she said.
‘He has. A cobbler’s son with a peasant moustache and a smile that would turn your blood to ice.’ He looked past her towards Hazel and Francis in the doorway with Maureen watching over them. ‘Are they your children?’
‘Yes.’
‘In Dublin they say that Art has no chance of ever seeing his wife and son again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In Spain there was an invisible line between the Russians and the rest of us. In theory we were each fighting Franco but really it was two separate wars. Stalin didn’t give a toss for the Spanish people. If Franco is Hitler’s puppet, then Stalin wanted to install his own. Pretty soon we all knew where we stood but your brother’s problem was trying to have a foot in both camps.’
‘What happened?’ Eva asked in dread.
‘It shouldn’t be me telling you this. I don’t know what’s true or false. Brendan wasn’t really one of us. I was only in his company once, on a long afternoon in Barcelona. He accompanied me on a journey I might never have taken alone. I can’t be sure what happened. With the Russians you never know.’
‘What do people say?’
‘That he was tricked on board a Soviet ship. He told a friend of mine that the Russians were letting him go home, he just had to fix a radio as a favour. He seemed to genuinely trust them. Typical Protestant – not knowing when it was wiser to make a sly run for it. Once he stepped on board, the gangplank was raised and the Russians in the radio station shrugged their shoulders at any mention of him like he had never existed.’
‘But he was on their side?’
‘That makes it worse. It means he’s no prisoner of war, he’s a traitor. Some said that Goold wasn’t taken prisoner at all but had been spying on us for the Russians who stagemanaged his mock disappearance. Others said they saw him later in the war under a different name. But mostly people said nothing, afraid of suffering a similar fate. It was hard enough being target practice for Hitler’s pilots, without having to worry about being shot in the back. After a while I was only interested in saving my own skin.’
Eva shivered, with coldness pervading every vein in her body. Images rushed through her mind so forcefully that she had to struggle to remain standing. Brendan as a boy in a comical hat. Brendan smiling in that last photo from London. Shaven-headed boys gathered around the piano on the cover of Sovietland and how it was obvious that none had ever held a violin before. ‘On the basis of new principles of education, thousands of former criminals are rehabilitated in the Bolsheov Corrective Labour Commune for Juvenile Delinquents, in conditions of absolute freedom, to a new life of labour as fully-fledged members of the socialist society.’ Lies and more lies. If Brendan’s body had not been thrown overboard with ropes binding his wrists, he was probably caged in some Soviet camp, as desperate to return to Ireland as Art – in an Irish camp – was desperate to reach Russia.
‘Are you all right?’ Bourke put out a hand to steady her.
‘I’m not all right. I want my brother.’
‘Don’t give up hope. The Russians have nothing to gain by holding him. No volunteer I’ve met since my return wants to talk about him. They’re building their own legends and have no room for messy loose ends. If he’s alive he needs someone to speak out. But just don’t expect help. With one Goold under lock and key, de Valera won’t exert himself to get his hands on another.’
‘You’re cold,’ Eva said. ‘Come inside. Have some supper. We can give you a bed.’
‘No.’
‘Please.’ Eva was desperate to do the things for this man that she could not do for Brendan, as if he could somehow be a proxy. He was the last person she knew who had seen him, the only link. She looked at the book. ‘You have nothing belonging to Brendan?’
‘I barely knew him. But Charlie Donnelly was my pal. He wanted you to have your book back. I have to go now.’
‘Where?’
‘I’ve thought things through in the woods here. I never imagined that England’s fight could be my own. The IRA think that if we help defeat the British, Hitler will benignly hand over the Six Counties. But I saw his planes above Spain and knew that I was looking at evil.’
‘My husband has enlisted.’
‘He’s a Protestant so people will expect no less, but when I don a British uniform it won’t be just my father’s door that will close on my face. Still, maybe between the pair of us your husband and I will keep Mayo out of this war. Go back to your kids, mam, they’re worried for you.’
He turned to walk down the avenue without looking back. Eva wanted to return to the house, but her limbs were so cold that she couldn’t move. It was the children who came to wrap their arms around her, besieging her with questions.
‘Who was he, Mummy? What did he give you?’
She allowed them to escort her back to the kitchen. Maureen asked no questions as she sat Eva down by the range and placed another log inside it. But Eva felt that she would never be warm again. Maureen began organising the children, arranging makeshift beds on the flagstones until the mattresses were aired. Francis and Hazel kissed their mother before climbing into bed but Eva barely registered their presence. Maureen went upstairs and soon the exhausted children fell asleep, leaving Eva alone. More alone than she had ever felt. The copy of Sovietland lay on a chair. She picked it up, opened the range and watched the flames consume the picture of the shaven-headed boys. She closed over the range. Her untouched supper was on the table but Eva could not bear to eat it when Brendan – if alive – was probably starving at this moment.
Maureen came back downstairs to quietly get undressed, knowing that Eva would confide in her in time. The girl began to wash at the sink and Eva walked out along the haunted corridor and up the stairs to enter every room and blow out the candles. She paused in the drawing room and thought of poor Freddie alone on Winchester’s blacked-out streets. The skies were dark across Europe, waiting for the drone of planes. War seemed so remote from this Mayo wood, yet she knew there was no guarantee of sanctuary here. She would try to make for her children an ark in this old house but some force of evil, which she could not name, held the world balanced on his palm. It was raised to his lips so that all he had to do was blow and their lives and hopes and dreams would scatter like cigarette ash.
She had so much to pray for. Her frail parents in Oxford, her brothers, her husband too crippled to fight, Peadar Bourke trudging through the Mayo night, her two precious children downstairs. What prayer could be powerful enough to protect them all, what incantation or spell? Eva stared out into the darkness and offered God the only gift she could proffer, her silence like an empty vessel aching to be filled.