The Family on Paradise Pier. Dermot Bolger
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trained to bayonet German soldiers. Jack never uttered such a yell again as if his leap off the pier had exorcised some terrible vision trapped in his heart. But afterwards Eva never used her nickname for the pier again as if the sight of his muscular body had altered her innocent vision of paradise.
Indeed, Eva never really thought of him as a British soldier until the night, soon after his arrival, when loud knocking disturbed the house. Father was away. Eva and Maud had looked down to see armed men outside. The IRA guerrilla campaign was ongoing, with hardened British auxiliaries ransacking villages and shooting bystanders in reprisals. Little of this had filtered into Dunkineely since their motor was stolen, but Maud understood the danger and had whispered for Eva to wake Jack and smuggle him out the back door. Eva had often visited the spare room when Cousin George slept there, but to enter it with a stranger in the bed felt different. Jack’s shoulders had been bare and for a terrible moment Eva feared that he was naked. Jack woke once she touched his arm. His hand covered her fingers as he gazed up in a cryptic way she could not understand. He seemed unsurprised at her presence.
‘Armed men are here,’ Eva had whispered. ‘They may have come for you.’
‘Turn your back.’ Eva heard him slip into his trousers.
He went to his window to look down at the coach house and she touched his sheets that retained a warm scent of sleep and dangerous masculinity. Jack had reached back for her hand, his touch exciting and excusable in the context of leading her onto the dark landing. She had wanted him to hurry down the back stairs but he leaned over the banisters to watch Maud open the door and Mother exclaim: ‘Oh, do put those guns down, I can’t stand guns.’
‘Sorry, mam,’ Eva had heard a man reply. ‘Lower the guns, lads. We’re after bicycles. We need two.’
‘Then only two of you come through,’ Maud had said with such authority that only two men entered the hallway and were led by Maud down towards the kitchen. Jack drew Eva back into his room to watch the men remove bicycles from the coach house and mount up with rifles on their backs before cycling beyond a ring of light cast by the paraffin lamp which Maud held aloft. Eva had detached her hand from Jack’s grasp as her sister re-entered the house.
‘That was a spot of excitement, what?’ Jack had said quietly. ‘Was your bicycle taken?’
‘No.’
‘If it ever is I’ll happily carry you around on my shoulders. Good night, Eva.’
For one moment they had stood so close in the moonlit bedroom that Eva half-feared and half-hoped Jack would kiss her. He might have done so had she not turned to run barefoot back to the safety of her childhood bedroom.
No such sanctuary was now available on this rock-strewn track however as Eva remounted her bicycle, checking that none of the eggs wrapped in newspaper was broken. Jack was behind her, so close that her back was colonised by goosepimples. Eva was intently aware of his breath and could almost feel his fingers though his hand was inches away. She knew that he was about to touch her shoulder and couldn’t decide if she wished him to. She was used to school pals of Art who played tennis in white flannels and brought her for bicycle rides. But their prime focus had always been Maud who was prettier and more mature, well versed in accepting and deflecting their attentions with a confidence Eva felt that she could never master. At twenty, Maud had fully supplanted Mother as head of the household. She trained the maids and issued instructions, while Mother gardened and attended to her bees in an enormous black-veiled straw hat. Eva would understand Jack being besotted with Maud, but he seemed to have chosen her instead, to Maud’s thinly concealed surprise. Eva turned to face him, suddenly bold.
‘Slowcoach,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll race you to the crest of the hill and beat you too.’
Eva began to pedal furiously, knowing that with his limp he might have trouble catching her at first but would soon gain ground. She glanced behind and slowed down, for the sake of the eggs. Jack was laughing, straining in the effort to catch her and Eva realised with a shock that she loved him. Yet she loved him most at moments like this, when she could feel Jack’s love without him being able to reach her, when his love made her feel grown-up without forcing her to fully become an adult. Eva waited till their wheels nearly touched, then pedalled faster, loving the wind in her hair, the scent of heather and distant view of Donegal Bay. Mother had insisted that Art wait for them where the track rejoined the Killybegs road, but just now Art seemed as far away as New Zealand. Everything felt distant in the exhilaration of this chase – the regatta they had left, this evening’s house party, the unrest in Ireland and the aftermath of war that brought Jack into her life.
Since the night the bicycles were taken, the IRA never returned and even die-hard Republican villagers accepted that Jack had nothing in common with the Black and Tans in Crossley Tenders who often invaded the main street. Indeed Jack had even allowed himself to be lined up and roughly frisked by drunken British soldiers without revealing his former military rank. His only contact with any ex-officer was with Mr Ffrench, who steadfastly refused to answer to his naval title when dealing with British squaddies, though he seemed to enjoy it when local people affectionately addressed him as ‘Commodore’.
War had changed the Ffrenches. Mr Ffrench’s favourite topic at dinner now concerned how the White Russians were a decadent dictatorial class and his pride at having done everything short of being court-martialled to aid the revolutionary Bolshevik victory. But such dinner parties were infrequent, because relations between Father and Mr Ffrench seemed strained compared to the days when they wandered for miles on his aeroplane cart. The Verschoyle children still enjoyed the run of Bruckless House and pier, often helping Mr Ffrench in his new passion for making handcrafted wooden cabinets. But Father argued with seventeen-year-old Art over all the time he spent in Ffrench’s study, lined with maps of Russia and where a tame jackdaw flew freely about since having his wing mended by Mrs Ffrench. Father never criticised the communist tracts that Art and Thomas often brought home from Bruckless because he believed in open discussion. But Eva sensed his difficulty in dealing with some of the assertions Art had started raising.
Not that Eva paid attention to their political arguments, because lately all her attention was focused on Jack and most of his attention on her. As they cycled now she knew that she would not be able to keep ahead of Jack for much longer. This chase that she had initiated worried her because it had to lead somewhere. Jack was riding abreast suddenly, both bicycles wobbling dangerously on the narrow track. He reached across to grasp her handlebars and she had to brake, slipping slightly in the dust. She halted, suspecting that several eggs had cracked. He was beside her, his hand gripping her bicycle. Eva wondered what acts that hand had committed during the war and what it might do alone with her now.
‘You caught me,’ she said.
‘Have I?’
Eva knew suddenly that he was not going to kiss her. Jack’s eyes were serious. She wanted to kiss him, purely to stop him saying whatever he meant to say because Eva sensed that it was about to change everything.
‘I’m going away,’ he announced soberly.
‘Where?’
‘New Zealand obviously. At least I have written to my doctor to say that I’m ready for the voyage…if I wish to go…if there’s nothing to keep me in Ireland. That is what I need to know. Is there?’
‘Of course,’ Eva replied blindly. ‘We all love having you.’
‘Do you?’
Eva blushed, not wanting to admit what she felt, even to herself, because it meant having to leave so much behind. ‘Yes. I only ever had younger brothers before.’
She knew that the words were wrong, not what Jack wished to hear or she wanted to say in her heart. Maud would know the right words.
‘I’m not – I don’t want to be – your brother,’ Jack said firmly. ‘Is that all you’re seeking? A big brother?’
‘It’s more than that,’ Eva insisted. ‘I like us being together. I love when we lie in hayricks and you read me poems like Father, only different.’