Читать книгу The Family on Paradise Pier - Dermot Bolger - Страница 13

Donegal, Easter 1924

There were no lamps in the windows of Bruckless House when the horse and cart bumped over the small stone bridge leading onto their property. Since arriving back in Ireland yesterday Mrs Ffrench had grappled with the wild hope that somebody – the Goold Verschoyle girls or one of the servants who had been laid off a year ago – might have placed eleven lamps in eleven windows to welcome them. But there was no such illumination, merely the damp rain that so frequently settled around this isolated house which she had been longing to see for weeks – or months if she was truly honest.

She could not tell when her husband’s zeal had begun to weaken. Perhaps only in the cramped Moscow hospital where they realised there was little likelihood of him receiving proper medical attention for the terrible arm wound received in a factory accident. Poor medical conditions were not the fault of the Soviet authorities but of the belligerent European capitalist powers still trying to blockade the revolution into submission. The Moscow doctors were heroic in the loaves and fishes miracles they performed with such limited supplies – not that the medical orderly who took her husband’s details would have appreciated this metaphor from a discredited religion. Every comrade citizen had been heroic even when they did not appear to be so and violent squabbles broke out between families trying to commandeer every inch of space in the room where they all ate and slept. Even the children’s heroism was undiminished by their inability to stop crying with hunger. Heroism existed in the very air on the streets, in revolutionary banners and endless workplace meetings, in the orchestra which entertained her fellow workers in the furniture factory by playing a new style of music, composed collectively instead of being imposed by the tyrannical will of a single conductor.

If heroism alone could have healed the gash in her husband’s arm that threatened to turn septic they would still be in Moscow, walking through crowded streets at dawn to commence long factory shifts, whispering in English at night so that people sleeping nearby could not understand their intimate endearments. Their Russian was poor, but had slowly improved. They did not understand what the medical orderly had said to them until he made the shape of a saw through the air and they realised he was warning them that Mr Ffrench’s arm might be amputated. That was the first time she cried in Moscow, although she had wished to cry on many nights when the noise and cold and hard floor kept her awake, when she was forced to overhear strangers break wind or furtively make love despite having too many children already huddled like rats beneath piles of rags. When she had watched a husband beat his wife while other families ate supper as if this monstrous behaviour was unworthy of comment or intervention. When the Secret Police came to take one father away for reasons that nobody knew and were careful not to speculate about. When she woke some nights longing to be back in her old bed in Ireland with clean sheets and the other decadent bourgeois trappings they had rejected. Yet throughout all this she had been strong and supported her husband in his enthusiasm to embrace this new order.

But it had been too much to contemplate the notion of a half-qualified foreigner sawing through her husband’s arm with a dirty implement and the pair of them returning to that crowded room where she would need to physically fight for the space to nurse him and make bandages by tearing up whatever small amount of her clothes had not mysteriously vanished. Mrs Ffrench had cried that day on a dirty bench in the hospital and nothing Mr Ffrench could say had been able to penetrate the terrible grief that opened up inside her. Perhaps she had been a bad wife to show her feelings like that and was weak in not supporting her husband and the revolution. But behind the tears was the terrible fear that he would die during the operation, leaving her alone in that city which stank of hunger and terror, with nobody to protect her except the God whom she could no longer even mention.

Lenin had died in January but her god was not dead. She could not have uttered such blasphemy in Moscow, but she knew it was true because here at last was Bruckless House and her husband still had both arms intact – even if his left hand would never regain full power. God had steered them safely back home. It was God’s voice she had heard in the hospital when her husband announced quietly over her tears that his wound was a job for his old naval surgeon friend, Geoffrey. When she reminded him that Geoffrey would hardly leave his Harley Street practice for Moscow, Mr Ffrench had patted her arm with his one good hand and said that if Harley Street refused to come to them, they would simply have to go to Harley Street.

The driver stopped the cart at the front door of Bruckless House. Two figures stood there whom Mrs Ffrench had despaired of ever seeing again. Art Goold Verschoyle stepped forward with Eva. Mr Ffrench shouted a greeting and suddenly there was laughter and welcoming smiles and the driver was helping her down onto the overgrown lawn and she did not mind the rain or cold but longed to kneel and kiss the damp earth. She hugged Eva. How could she ever have found Donegal dull? How could she have been so eager to pack up and start again in Russia with nothing but the unuttered hope that a fresh start might make her body finally yield to her husband’s seed?

The cases unloaded by the driver contained nothing from Moscow but new clothes purchased by her in London while the Harley Street doctor treated her husband. Not that Geoffrey had done more than merely examine the job done by a doctor in a private Helsinki hospital after they managed to get themselves onto a train to Petrograd and cross into Finland. Mr Ffrench had kept assuring her that, having freely entered Russia, they were equally free to leave for a short time. She had tried to believe him and not seem scared by the constant inspection of their papers and how soldiers patrolling the railway system shouted at them. But her husband’s arm had oozed pus and he was in such distress that the patrols had let them proceed – less for humanitarian reasons, she suspected, than because they didn’t want to be responsible for an invalid.

In Helsinki they wired their bank in London and contacted the British attaché. Soon Mr Ffrench was in hospital and a new fear replaced Mrs Ffrench’s previous concerns. She had started to dread her husband’s recovery. Helsinki felt strange but it had no slogans on walls or agents of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage seeking out class enemies. On her first night alone in her hotel bedroom she realised that she had been constantly terrified during the previous six months. Now that she had escaped from Russia she did not know if she would have the courage to ever go back.

She had dreaded Mr Ffrench announcing his intention to return to Moscow and reclaim their corner of that pigsty room. However he had kept postponing this decision because it was vital to be able to fully contribute to the new order and he feared being a dead weight who would drag down production targets for their comrades in the furniture factory. Besides he had affairs in Britain to put in order and people should be told at first hand about how exhilarating life was in the new Bolshevik state. Mrs Ffrench had agreed with everything her husband said, unable to decode what was going on in his head. All she could do was trust that, unbeknownst to him, her spiritual master, Abdul-Baha, was guiding her husband’s hand. She had decided it prudent not to force him into confronting any decision. Such careful passivity on her part got them to London and now to Donegal where the mayhem of the Irish Civil War seemed halted and tonight at least everything seemed like it had always been.

Eva Goold Verschoyle shyly released her hand from Mrs Ffrench’s grip as Art eagerly questioned her husband in the doorway.

‘How was Moscow? You have to tell me everything!’

Mr Ffrench gripped the boy’s shoulder joyously. ‘My dear boy, it is everything we dreamt of, the most just society on this earth. Mankind hasn’t known a fresh start since the Garden of Eden. But in Russia the old rules are gone and the people, not their masters, are shaping the new order. Come inside and I’ll tell you everything. Is there nobody about? I wired for your father to reinstate some servants.’

‘You did?’ Art sounded surprised. ‘I fought with Father, saying that he must have misunderstood the telegram. I mean, what would you want servants for?’

Mr Ffrench laughed. ‘What would I want them for? Dear boy, do you know the size of Bruckless House? It would be an injustice to only have two people living here. The important thing is to fill the house with life. Obviously servants is a reactionary term, but you can imagine what Papist clergy would say if I advertised for worker comrades to share my home.’

‘You mean you’re looking for local people to live here with you.’

‘Obviously. They will have the full run of their quarters and we shall have the run of ours.’

Mrs Ffrench watched the boy consider this. In truth he was a boy no longer. Eva’s tiny figure still lent her a girlish look, but Art’s shoulders had broadened out, making him look tough and strikingly good-looking. He reminded her of her brothers lost in the war. Once on a Moscow street she was convinced that she had seen her two brothers side by side ahead of her in the jostling crowd. For a moment she had let herself believe that they had not gone missing in action but simply wandered off from the terrible trenches to find their way to this new land. The hope was ludicrous, but she had been unable to stop herself pushing through the crowd, elbowing strangers and being cursed at until she touched one of their shoulders. Both men turned, neither remotely resembling her brothers now she could see their faces and she had felt their eyes undress her, taking in her manic look and the fact that she was foreign. They had looked hungry, as everyone did in Moscow, but strong and when they addressed her she knew immediately that their remarks were lewd, suggesting that they would be willing to share her body. She had run away and never told her husband what happened.

Mrs Ffrench entered the hallway of Bruckless House and almost cried to see a wood fire burning in the grate. Art and Eva had been busy, with another fire burning in the study. Returning home as a girl from her first term in boarding school, she could remember how small the rooms in her childhood home seemed, but after Moscow the opposite was true of here. Previously she had paid little attention to the size of this study, but now she realised that it was bigger than the awful room where she had been forced to sleep with the squabbling families. Sitting down on the sofa she surveyed its fantastic dimensions. She almost wished for the Goold Verschoyle children and even her husband to be gone so that she could explore each room and luxuriate in the extraordinary space. This physical greed shocked her. She was never greedy before, dutifully sublimating her needs and dreams to those of her husband. But just now she experienced an almost sexual thrill at the thought of cradling the brass doorknob of each bedroom, at pressing her palms against the huge uncracked windowpanes and placing her cheek to the cold mahogany of her dressing table.

Eva’s questions about Moscow were discreet enquiries compared to Art’s frenzied interrogation of her husband. The boy had studied Moscow street maps and knew more about the city’s layout than Mrs Ffrench had learnt in seven months of living there. He wanted to know every detail of the crowds at Lenin’s funeral and quizzed her husband about Comrades Zinoviev and Stalin and Trotsky and Kamenev as if Mr Ffrench had spent his days at internal party congresses instead of manufacturing poor-quality tables and chairs.

‘The failure of the communist revolt in Germany was a blow to Trotsky’s prestige,’ Mr Ffrench was saying. ‘It shows that the spread of the revolution will be slower than expected because Germany is ripe for change and yet the reactionary forces dug in. If our German comrades had won the day all of Europe would rise with us but there is talk of Russia needing to stand alone for a while longer.’

‘But surely Moscow won’t abandon the rest of us?’ Art argued. ‘What is the point in mankind taking one step forward and then simply stopping?’

‘Who mentioned stopping?’ Mr Ffrench replied. ‘Moscow cannot be a wet nurse to everyone. It is up to us who live here to fan the flames of revolution.’

Art went quiet and even Eva ceased to prattle on about the scraps of local gossip that Mrs Ffrench had been enjoying. There was a subtext in her husband’s remark, a Rubicon quietly crossed, a declaration she had not dared to seek from him. Hope surged inside her in direct opposition to Art’s baffled disbelief.

‘What do you mean by us?’ he enquired. ‘Surely once you recuperate you will return to Russia. I understand your desire to come back here and recover your strength, but…’

‘Desire did not enter into it,’ Mr Ffrench interjected. ‘It was necessity. Because I could seek medical treatment elsewhere it would therefore have been a selfish, counter-revolutionary act to deny a comrade treatment by clogging up a Moscow hospital. Medical supplies are crucial, as are able-bodied workers. My arm will never fully recover. The revolution is no rest home for cripples. Do you think I wish to be a parasite in Moscow, living off the sweat of my fellow workers? Mrs Ffrench and I had no desire to ever return to Donegal. Crossing into Finland was the hardest chore we ever did. I curse my disability for dragging Janet away from an environment where I saw her blossom with such happiness and purpose. But personal feelings cannot be allowed to rule. What is vital is that we each contribute to the maximum of our potential. I was shocked in London to read appalling propaganda in the capitalist newspapers. Janet and I have decided that for now our place in the revolution is here where we can counter lies and bear testament to the amazing society that we were privileged to witness and to which one day we will hopefully return. Here we can serve a purpose which you can help with too. The Irish peasants imagine that they have undergone a revolution, but they’ve just swapped one master on horseback for another. We can show them the truth – and do you know the great thing? They will listen to us because even in my short time back I see that the old respect remains for people who speak with authority. They don’t look up to this new Johnny-Come-Lately Free State government trying to lord it over them. Oh, no doubt there will be fireworks with their priests waving sticks and shouting threats from the far side of the bridge leading onto my property but they can’t stop us telling the truth to those who will listen.’

Mrs Ffrench saw Art trying to shape a question, but no words came because the boy needed to believe in her husband. What did she believe? She watched her husband grow so animated that soon Art was caught up in his enthusiasm and asking questions again about the factory and the workers’ debates. Both she and Eva stopped talking so that they could listen too, because his version of Moscow was so wonderful that it felt like a poultice on her mental scars. It was simpler not to argue or even contradict him in her mind because maybe he was telling the truth and she had been too preoccupied with her own petty concerns to appreciate the wonder of revolution.

The children had brought food and it felt like a picnic to share it out by the fire in the study. The mantelpiece clock had long stopped and she had no idea what time it was when the young Goold Verschoyles left. But it was too late to do anything except retire to the main bedroom where the sheets felt damp. Her husband was asleep within minutes and she knew that he would not wake. She slipped from bed and walked from room to room, trying to reclaim all this space and make it feel that it belonged to her. But she felt uneasy, as if hordes of strangers might arrive at any moment to stake a claim to the kitchen or the locked room overlooking Donegal Bay that had been once intended as a nursery. She longed to immerse herself in a bath but knew that she could never scrub herself clean. Closing her eyes she could still smell in her pores the stink of foul breath and unwashed clothes in that Moscow room. So why was it that she could not hear the voices of the children who had clambered onto her knee to stare at her like a curio? She could not feel their fingers that had gripped hers, hoping that she might produce a morsel to feed them. Why was it that the single experience she treasured seemed to be erased from her mind, so that all she could hear was silence as she wandered from room to room, barefoot in her thin nightgown?