January 1945
The stationmaster in Donegal town was unsure if any service could be provided this evening, because, as he phrased it, an engine that had chugged out into the blue this afternoon had stayed out in the blue, unable to scavenge sufficient fuel to complete its return journey. When Art was finally summoned from the freezing waiting room an ancient carriage had been rigged up so that a single horse could pull it along the track. The only other passengers were an old couple travelling to Killybegs, the man bereft of teeth and with such a thick mumble that Art could not decide if he was addressing his wife in Irish or English until he finally made out a few words about the state funeral for the fascist leader, O’Duffy, in Dublin. The carriage was unlit, with the driver, wrapped in a greatcoat, sucking on an empty pipe on the open platform at the front. On their slow journey out from Donegal town Art convinced himself that the key in his wallet would not fit. He had been carrying it on him since that night in 1942 when Mr Barnes sought out his Wexford Street flat. On a dozen occasions he came close to flinging it away, but at other times found himself waking in an irrational panic and needing to check his wallet to ensure that it remained safely there. The key to the Manor House was like a curse he could not escape from and finally, after years of prevarication, it was leading him back to face the ghosts.
It appeared as if all that was left to face was ghosts because when they eventually reached Dunkineely, nobody was present in the station, lit by a single oil lamp suspended from a hook above the deserted platform. Art wondered if news of his arrival in Donegal had reached the village in advance.
The driver looked back, expecting Art to leave the freezing carriage. But although he opened the door for a moment, a foreboding prevented him from stepping down. He shouted out that he would continue on to Bruckless. The driver shrugged and made a soft clicking noise to the horse before the carriage lurched forward again.
The smell of the sea in Donegal was different from anywhere he had ever visited. Art remembered trying to describe that special aroma of seaweed, salt, heather and poverty to his wife in their Moscow flat. As the horse lumbered on he realised how much he loved this coastline. The memory of every outcrop of rock and crooked ditch was implanted in his brain. Such irrational love was indulgent. The only love worthy of respect was love for one’s fellow man, the love that made him slave every day in the face of ignorance and greed. Leave your home, Christ, the first true Marxist, had said. Give up your family and your possessions, put away childish things and follow me. Art had tried to follow this call. He would never have set foot here again were it not for the key in his wallet.
Donegal was poor when he left and this war had not helped. A quarter-century of alleged freedom had yielded nothing for the disorganised serfs clinging to smallholdings and superstition in these glens. The only money ever spent was whenever American GIs stationed in Northern Ireland clandestinely crossed the border on drinking expeditions.
Bruckless station was in total darkness. Art dismounted with his suitcase. The carriage wheels creaked as the horse plodded away. It was late, with frost starting to form. He crossed the small hump-backed bridge leading to the gates of Bruckless House. A light burned in the library window as Art walked up the dark avenue. He did not know who lived here now – some distant relation of Ffrench’s. Art felt tempted to creep up to the window and gaze in at the fireside where he had first learned the truths that sustained him in the decades since. But he kept to the shadow of the trees because he had come here not to visit the living but the dead. He knew the location, by the small pier he had loved as a boy. Ffrench had often discussed his plans, laughing in advance at the outrage that his burial would cause. Here it stood in the moonlight, a plain stone slab unadorned by religious shibboleths or the comfort of pious untruths. Mrs Ffrench had chosen to share this unconsecrated grave, close to the water and within sight of their old home. Art traced the inscription with his fingers, then lit a match to read it: ‘Thomas Roderick Ffrench: The Immortality of the Dead Exists Only in the Minds of the Living.’ The match spluttered out and Art hunched down, aware of how cold he was. He had not anticipated such grief. He had felt differently at Father’s funeral, mainly because of the need to steel himself against the unspoken hostility of many mourners who gazed at Art as if he had personally killed him. But here in the dark, grief ambushed him with no witnesses. For Father, for the Ffrenches, for those whom he did not know to be alive or dead. Among the living only Mother refused to judge him. She understood that he had not chosen this path: it had chosen Art to do penance for the sins of previous generations.
Walking out onto the pier, he recalled the sound of laughing bodies running down these stones in swimsuits. It had been wrong not to get off at Dunkineely, wrong to allow nostalgia to distract him from the work to be done. Art had come here not to remember the past but to help build the future. Finding it impossible to ignore his legacy, he must confront it. Picking up his suitcase he left the grave and commenced the long walk to Dunkineely. By next spring the Manor House would echo again with young laughter. It would not be a home for one family, but a home from home for dozens of families who, in the past, had only ever entered such houses through the servants’ door. Whole generations born in the Dublin slums had never known a holiday, but Art would ensure that at least some of them would enjoy the same privileges enshrined for honest workers under Soviet law. Western saboteurs had managed to prevent this system from functioning fully while Art was in Russia. But he had once visited a workers’ rest home on the Baltic Sea and Brendan had spoken about even finer sanatoria, run by the NKVD, where the traitor Polevoy had taken him to stay.
This final solution to the Manor House problem had occurred to him while studying an appraisal of the extraordinary success of rest homes in a Soviet magazine he procured for the library of the newly established Irish Workers’ League. It had taken time over the past two years to re-establish contact with loyal communists in Dublin who, like him, were outraged at the liquidation of the Irish Communist Party by Trotskyite opportunists. But the newly formed Irish Workers’ League was the true voice of Irish communism, resolutely obedient to the wisdom of Moscow. Without the Raglan Road house which Art had inherited from Father it might have been difficult to provide a forum for this party. But once word spread that Art possessed such a large house on an exclusive Dublin thoroughfare which he wanted to give away to be used as a headquarters, comrades had emerged to form a committee to assume responsibility for the property once Art signed over the deeds. For the past year Art had lived in an attic flat in that house, working on the renovations to turn it into offices and lecture rooms. Jim Gralton had been deported from Ireland for trying to give ordinary people in Leitrim such a meeting place. Art had arranged for the committee to pay him the wages of an ordinary Dublin carpenter, with a deduction for his rent. Funds were low and they could only pay him this wage when he also donated most of the small bequests that Father left him.
Still it had been his own fault not to clarify in advance his exact position within the Workers’ League once the building work was completed. He had imagined being employed as a caretaker, somebody who modestly excluded himself from power but was on hand to offer guidance when complex ideological issues arose. In retrospect he realised that his expectation had been a reactionary stance, because it implied that the Workers’ League owed him something. To stake any claim on the Raglan Road headquarters would be to validate the bourgeois concept of inherited wealth. Perhaps he might have tried harder to make small talk with his new comrades, but he utterly disputed the contention that he – of all people – was overtly dogmatic. He had simply exercised the freedom to speak his mind, whether people liked it or not. Similarly they had now exercised their freedom to employ a different caretaker, making it clear that while they were not evicting Art from his attic flat, there were better ways in which his room could be utilised to the maximum benefit of the party.
Two days ago while packing to leave, he remembered a story that Madame Despard once told him. Before she bought Eccles Street, she had owned a house in Dublin, which she invited Maud Gonne MacBride to share. Maud Gonne in turn had invited other Diehard Republicans until every room was packed. One day, sensing an atmosphere of discord within the house, she asked Maud Gonne if there might be anyone present who did not belong. Gently Maud Gonne had explained that indeed there was, but people had been too polite to tell Madame Despard how she in fact was the intruder. Art had left Raglan Road, aware that some comrades were relieved to see him go. But he had achieved his ambition and defeated the traitors by helping to start a new party. Budapest and Warsaw were in Soviet hands, with the Red Army nearing the German border. They would reach Berlin before the imperialists, with this new clandestine Irish communist party positioned to reap the avalanche of recruits unleashed by a Soviet victory.
All that remained in Ireland for him to do was liberate the Manor House from its past. Having sold Father’s final two bequests he would need to be frugal in his personal needs and do all the physical labour himself. But by Easter the house would be packed with Dublin slum families. This would also be good for Dunkineely, with outsiders spending money and spreading ideas.
Eventually he reached the main street of Dunkineely. There was no street lighting, but here and there lights shone in windows. Some bicycles were parked outside MacShane’s pub. A man emerged from the doorway and stared at Art, then ducked back inside. Art walked on, guessing that a small knot of drinkers would come to the door to stare after him. Passing the Methodist Hall he reached his old home. But he could not look up because he was convinced that figures stood in the darkness at every unlit window, staring down.
Art was freezing. For a moment he panicked, thinking that he had misplaced the key. He did not know if Father had left any furniture behind or if the house had been looted during the years when it stood empty. The sense of being watched was overwhelming. Slowly he inserted the key and slowly it turned.
Pushing open the door he stared into the dark hall before he entered. It smelt of damp and stale air. He needed to brush aside cobwebs. A boy in a comic hat was watching from the top of the stairs. Art knew that he was there, although he could not see him. The door to Father’s study was open. Art walked in and stared at the accusatorial eyes of Martin Luther. For ten minutes he remained frozen, forced to appraise every deed in his life since he last stood there. Then finally, breaking the spell, he crossed the room and removed that portrait from the wall.