Trespassers Page 2

  Her first book used one of my favourite legends: the one about a fairy mansion which rises from the bog after dark, aglow with light and throbbing with music. Wise travellers avoid being lured inside or, if lured, refuse to eat anything they are offered. Those who do will never escape, but be carried off to Tír na nÓg when the mansion sinks back into the bog at dawn. The pooka, a fairy horse, which tries to get tired travellers to accept a ride on his back, and the empty coach, which pauses invitingly, play the same trick. Allegorical, or lending themselves to allegory, such tales draw force from their vagueness.

  Once or twice Eileen took me with her into the Radio Éireann studio while she made a live broadcast. Perhaps this was a test – I had to stay utterly quiet – or, it strikes me now, her aim may have been to show me that women like herself were as capable as men. That was something she was keen for me to know.

  She confided snippets of her personal history, too, some of which went back to the Troubles, which had petered out a year or so before first Seán, then she herself, left for Boston. One related an incident from her college days in University College Cork, UCC, when, at the time of the Anglo-Irish War, she and some friends hired a barge so as to have a picnic on the River Lee. Before setting off, men from their group went into a pub where Black and Tans in civvies overheard them make rash, incendiary remarks. That evening, when the barge returned from the picnic, the Tans were waiting and opened fire. Everyone on board dropped flat, but she, who craned her neck to look, got a bullet in it. She showed me the trace: a puckered hollow the size of a hazelnut which never disappeared. Later, during the Civil War, when Seán was Director of Publicity for the Irregulars and in hiding, she, who was his courier, was caught and jailed, and worse would have followed if an old UCC classmate on the winning side hadn’t spotted her name on a list, crossed it off, and let her go. In those days, she said, fear kept you from sleeping, but also from getting fat or bored.

  ‘You missed them!’ she teased, while shoving a spoonful of lumpy porridge into my open mouth. ‘All of them! The bad times and the good! And don’t dare spit that out!’

  *

  Her moods had grown capricious, and Seán said that this was because her father had recently died. I was nearly five. I know because by my fifth birthday we had left Wicklow, but on that day we were still there. I can tell this by the shadows flinching and flickering in my mental motion picture of her, as she mentions Boston and an old fear lest Seán, whom she had gone there to marry, be having second thoughts: pre-nuptial doubts to which she would not again allude for fifty years. Maybe she had brought them up now as cover for a new fret. What kind of fret? All I knew was that it was as fitful as the draughts which whistled through that old house and on windy days could flatten candle flames and make an oil lamp smoke. Though the place was too remote for connection to electricity, we did have a wireless. It ran on batteries, and Eileen would sometimes sing along with the old songs that floated from it, then turn it off, with a brisk ‘Ráiméish’, which is Gaelic for ‘rubbish’. When they first met, she and Seán had entwined their feelings for each other with those they cherished for the national cause. It was a heady bond. But bonds can chafe or fray, and back in 1922 theirs did both.

  First the IRA split, and Seán, trusting de Valera’s pledge to hold out for a thirty-two-county Republic, promptly joined his die-hard faction whose members fought, lost, retreated to the West Cork hills then, finding that they were now a burden to the people who fed and hid them, felt a shamed relief when the order came in April 1923 to dump arms. Seán himself has written about how by then he was demoralised, filthy, lice-infested and embittered by reports of summary executions and even torture being inflicted by one group of old comrades on the other. He turned for home. It was not the first time defeat left young men with a sour taste in their mouths, but the taste in his was as styptic as a sloe.

  Even after the ceasefire a propaganda war limped on, and it was only in early 1924 that he, who had meanwhile been appointed Acting Director of Publicity for the whole imaginary Republic, received an order to give up even that. After the Civil War Seán went back to UCC, from which he had graduated three years before, worked for an MA, then got a job as a teacher in the small town of Ennis which – a shock – had neither a cinema, a library nor a bookshop. In the light of this, his elevation was dizzying when, on the strength of having published some short fiction in Irish and English, he was recommended for the Commonwealth fellowship which took him to Harvard.

  He was happy there, as he would later be in London, where he taught at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, then a teacher training college, whose fairy-tale architecture must have suited his and Eileen’s mood as they began to pine for an Ireland which was never going to be the one they had imagined. Yet back they went in 1933.

  Did they suppose that de Valera’s ratting on his principles and taking the Oath of Allegiance to England’s king, which he had sworn never to do, would be a sound basis for exercising the power he had finally won in 1932? Did Dev himself? Well, clearly – and correctly – he did. The choice was between doing that or skulking, for who knew how much longer, in the wilderness with neither salaries nor influence, as he and his followers had been doing until he ate his words, took the hated oath, led the followers into the Dáil and, once there, wrested power from his rivals.

  Just as well, perhaps. Faced with a similar dilemma in 1924, Mussolini’s opponents, whose leader had been murdered by Fascist thugs, chose the high-minded route, boycotted parliament – and ushered in twenty years of Fascism. Dev’s choice was cannier.

  The times, though, were censorious, as Seán found when his book of stories was banned in Ireland, and a group claiming to represent the Cork IRA, displeased by his having written it, summoned him to come and be court-martialled.

  He ignored them, while possibly wondering why he had come back to his increasingly juvenile country. Hope was why. Hope and dream. In 1933 he published an adoring biography of Dev; then, six years later, a second one which took a revised view. The prologue to the first one opens like this:

  Tall as a spear, commanding, enigmatic, his eyes so dark and deep that it is difficult to see their expression, his face deeply lined as with many cares, the face of a thoughtful man … this is the first impression one gets of Eamon de Valera …

  Seán’s magnificat may have embarrassed him even as he was writing it, for, two pages on, he cast a cooler eye, noting that Dev ‘was the best loved and best hated man in Ireland’. Like many Irish republicans Seán, too, had reasons to love and hate the man whose courage in 1916 had dazzled his boyhood, but who, later, ruthlessly interned hard-liners for sticking to principles which had once been his. Dev’s Oath of Allegiance had stuck in many craws, but what stuck most uncomfortably was his plea that an oath taken under duress was no oath at all. To cut the Gordian knot Dev needed to get into the Dáil, but, under the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty with Britain, couldn’t get in until he had taken it – hence the casuistry about duress. Since he could have tried this shifty manoeuvre as early as 1922, and forestalled the Civil War, his delays were hard to forgive. But perhaps he learned cunning as he matured?

  Another bone of contention was the power he gave to RC bishops whose arrogance, though he had defied them during the Civil War, he later condoned. Here is what Seán’s second biography had to say about that:

  Furthermore the Catholic Church, and the Church of Ireland, are both notoriously ‘low church’, puritanical and narrow-minded. To say this, naturally, will anger most Irish readers.

  It is nonetheless a regrettable fact. Its effects may be seen daily in such things as the inhuman treatment of unmarried mothers, in the unimaginative control of juvenile houses of detention, in a stupid censorship … in the fanatical way in which such innocent amusements as dancing … are controlled … Etc.

  These comments enraged Dev’s followers who, on reading them, refused to have anything more to do with our family. As we were already on their opponents’ black list,
this meant, claimed Eileen, that we now had no friends at all.

  *

  The about-face had consequences even for me, whose godmother, Molly Fitz, had, in the early Twenties, become Seán’s courier after Eileen’s arrest. She too was caught, jailed, eventually released and subsequently married a man who was part of Dev’s establishment, which was by then in office and presumably enjoying its fruits, since my most dazzling childhood memory is of a gift she gave me of two dolls, each – at a guess – fourteen inches tall. One was male, one female, so I called them ‘the prince and princess’, because they wore silky eighteenth-century costumes, and I say this not because I could have had such a thought then, but because even now I can picture the prince’s taut stockings, smart breeches and waisted jacket.

  Dressed as if for a white wedding, the sort Seán and Eileen didn’t have when they married so quietly in Boston’s Holy Cross Cathedral that they had to ask the sacristan and an assistant to be witnesses, the dolls made a perfect couple. Nobody I knew had a pair like that: a perfect image of married bliss. Molly had been a close friend, but, once Seán attacked de Valera, she had to break with us. ‘Fraternising’ with opponents was strictly forbidden after the Civil War.

  ‘She was a generous godmother,’ I remember Eileen sighing. ‘She gave you lovely presents. You’d best look after them, for there won’t be any more.’

  And indeed I don’t remember other presents, only the dolls, which someone said were French. In my memory they look French, like small aristos who could end up on the guillotine, a thought which may have been prompted by another memory. This is of my own hands twisting off one of their heads so as to get at its blue china eyes, then failing to fit these back behind their eye holes. They are attached to a wire which is hidden when they are in place. But I can’t get it in. I hold on to the eyes. Whose are they? The prince’s? I can’t be sure. All I clearly recall is myself sitting on the ground outside our new Dublin house on a later birthday which, just as Eileen predicted, brought no gifts from Molly. Lying next to me in the long June grass are the mutilated dolls. I must hide them before anyone sees what I did for reasons I no longer understand. It’s as if I had felt challenged to cock a snook at the godmother who has thrown me over and will not be back.

  Why won’t she? I am baffled. As I sit there fretting, it strikes me that lately there has been a lot of talk about something else I don’t understand: treachery. Dev’s, Seán’s, Molly’s and that of both sides in the Civil War. People keep using the word, which, as far as I can tell, has to do with people turning against their friends. So perhaps I too am treacherous, because the dolls now disappear. Perhaps they have been given to someone more deserving, like Kitty’s nieces who have few toys and to whom Eileen has been threatening to give some of mine.

  Has she done it? With the dolls? Better not ask. Perhaps they were so badly injured that she had to hide them from Seán.

  I don’t always grasp what is happening. Maybe I don’t listen, or maybe my parents explain things confusingly. My mother’s Aunt Kate certainly does. She has come to live with us but is unused to our ways. She used to live in Cork with Eileen’s father, but, now that he has died, will live with us. Our first meeting starts out on the wrong foot.

  Almost the first thing she does is scold me because I have gathered the hems of the new, short, poppy-red dress I am wearing, and raised them above my head. That way the dress works like a lantern, except that the light – it is a sunny day – pours in instead of out. As long as I hold up the dress, all I can see is redness, so I walk out our gate and along the road, feeling as if I were in the middle of a harmless but thrilling fire which has blotted out the world. I am too happy to give any thought to how I look.

  Then I hear a scolding voice. ‘Cover yourself,’ snaps the aunt, and she says something about knickers. She is bossy but, Seán assures me later, has many weaknesses.

  ‘Be kind to her,’ he tells me. ‘She’s old and lonely. She needs you to like her.’

  This flatters me.

  *

  Meanwhile, our time in Wicklow is almost over. We are shuttling between Killough and a house so new it is not yet finished. It is being built for us, just outside a village called Killiney, by an architect called John O’Gorman, and has been being planned for most of my lifetime – which is not, of course, very long, although it seems immensely so to me.

  We have made countless trips in my parents’ black Ford car to watch its progress, and its modern conveniences astound both Aunt Kate and myself, who have been looking forward in a delirium of joy to moving into it for good. None of the four of us has ever lived in a house so new that nobody lived there before us, a house painted white on the outside and primrose within. A house without ghosts.

  Killiney, being in South County Dublin, is supplied with telephone lines, gas and electricity. This means that I shall no longer be left in the dark once my candle is blown out at night – an enormous relief which my parents pretend not to appreciate. They pretend not to because, while we’re still in the old house, they are afraid to leave me a lit candle or matches or even an oil lamp lest I knock it over and burn the house down. I don’t argue about this now. Why bother, since, once we finally move to the new house, there will be an electric switch in the wall next to my bed which, at the touch of a finger, will flood the room with light? The old, creaky, earwig-ridden room where I still sleep and where I cannot be quite sure that a family of witches doesn’t live too will then be no more than a memory. Alleluia! Electricity is like having your own sun. I could worship it.

  Kitty, who is not coming with us, is to take all the oil lamps when we leave, though not the candles. Eileen says we may need a store of those since sometimes electricity can break down. This shocks me. The sun doesn’t break down. Why should electricity?

  Until recently I was afraid to come out from under the bedclothes after dark, and have been known to wet the bed rather than grope under it in search of a chamber pot. I manage to forget such lapses and, though ashamed, am addicted to the terror which provokes them.

  Addicted! Eileen has told me this wonderful new word. Being addicted is like being under a spell so that bad things which happen aren’t my fault. They are hers because she has made me too fond of the frightening tales she likes to tell before I go to sleep. That is because she is addicted too. Worse, when she and I go trespassing in the deserted estates which are now overgrown and have been taken over by owls, weasels, ravens and the like, we play a game which Seán has forbidden, but to which she and I are irresistibly drawn. This is how it works. First, Eileen hides in the bushes, leaving me to work up anxiety, then, having taken off her coat and pulled it over her head, she will suddenly appear in the middle of a yew or a laurel walk whose top branches have knit together so that, even at midday, it is as dark as a railway tunnel. Pretending not to be herself, she makes weird noises and mimes our joint idea of a witch. I run away. She chases me and sometimes I trip and fall. When this happens she, her face half hidden by the coat which she has turned into a hood, looms above me, still half playing at being a witch, and reduces me to thrilled, gibbering terror. The glass eyes of the fox fur which she normally wears around her neck now look down from the top of her head. Its teeth grin. When she pulls it forward, its jaws snap.

  Don’t I know it is she? Well, yes and no. After all, she may have a second, dangerous self which sometimes takes over. Maybe a demon has entered her? There are stories like this. She performs a sort of dance. Sliding out from under the coat, her pale fingers mimic tentacles and I both do and don’t want to be more frightened still.

  ‘Let’s stop,’ she says. ‘You’re getting too excited.’

  ‘No, no, don’t stop. Please, Mummy.’ I am like a drunk worried about hangovers but unable to give up the booze. ‘I promise not to have a nightmare.’

  ‘You always promise.’

  We are trespassing in an estate called Monks’s whose owners have been absent for years. Perhaps they haven’t the money to keep it up. We
tell each other that they have forfeited their rights. Pinned crookedly to the jungly greenery are faded notices saying ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’. I mix up words. Execution? Persecution. With which are we being threatened? I think of the broken doll. Persecution is what the English did to Catholic priests at the time of Queen Elizabeth which, according to Aunt Kate, was worse than guillotining. Disembowelling. The rack. Being hanged, drawn and quartered. She has described these processes in detail and Eileen has told her to stop filling my head with such stories. But meanwhile she herself tells me about witches. That’s different, she says, because witches don’t exist. Don’t they? I both do and don’t want them to. What is prosecution? I don’t know. And now, anyway, Eileen, tired of being a witch, is once again using her coat as a coat and, seated on a stone bench, is unwrapping a small snack.

  As we eat it, she reminds me that we must say goodbye to our Wicklow neighbours before we leave for good: to the two Miss Griffiths, old ladies who sometimes invite us to their big, old house for afternoon tea with hot buttered potato cakes, and other treats; to the Dennehys who sell milk just a stone’s throw from our house and sometimes give us a lift in their pony and trap; to Paul Henry and Michael Farrell and, most importantly, to Garret FitzGerald whose family – he has three older brothers – lives not far away.