The Family on Paradise Pier. Dermot Bolger
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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