The Family on Paradise Pier. Dermot Bolger

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СКАЧАТЬ the youngest he took it as his right to be spoiled by everyone. Maud was organising the hamper with the cook, having baked the cakes herself last night. The servants looked to fifteen-year-old Maud for instructions, finding Mother frequently too unwell to oversee the running of the house. But this was one of Mother’s good weeks and, spurred by the presence of her Cousin George, she would accompany them on today’s picnic.

      Everyone at the table talked about their plans for the day. All were good swimmers, though Art was by far the strongest – being nearly as fast as Oliver Hawkins who was seventeen. The Hawkins family from Herefordshire had spent all this summer at Bruckless House, two miles away. Last year a young couple, the Ffrenches, bought this isolated mansion, built by two local brothers on the proceeds of selling guns to Napoleon and pickled herring to Wellington’s army. Mrs Hawkins was related to Mr Ffrench who after being commissioned into the Royal Navy had been away since January. But Mr Ffrench had returned home two weeks ago, claiming that he had insisted on his naval shore leave coinciding with Eva’s end-of-summer birthday party.

      Eva had laughed along with everyone else when he said this, but secretly she believed him. This final week of summer was always the most exciting, culminating in Chinese lanterns being hung in the garden for her birthday party, with charades and fancy dress costumes and singers gathering around Father at the piano. After Eva’s birthday the farewells would start at the train station, with the Hawkins family returning to England, Art, Thomas and Maud going away to school and Mr Ffrench rejoining his frigate currently moored in Killybegs Harbour. But Eva refused to let this thought sour her mood as the maid ran in to announce that Mr Ffrench’s cart had arrived and, within seconds, the breakfast room was full of laughing voices.

      Mother entered the room with Cousin George to greet the new arrivals. Cousin George was a wise chameleon, secretly in tune with Mother when discussing the occult and yet indistinguishable from any other Church of Ireland curate when a guest preacher in the pulpit at Killaghtee church before their neighbours. His sermons were the only ones that Eva still enjoyed, although the Ffrenches never attended church to hear them – being of a religious persuasion, the Baha’is – that not even Mother had heard of. No locals minded the Ffrenches’ eccentricity because nobody understood it. Grandpappy, now on his annual summer visit, declared that no such religion existed except among a handful of demented Arabs driven from Iran, and the Ffrenches would forget such nonsense once they began to procreate like decent Christians. But since Father invited them along to a picnic last autumn, the Ffrenches had become part of the family, opening up their house and shoreline garden to the Goold Verschoyle children.

      The ceaseless chatter made Eva fear that today’s picnic might never start. But Maud coaxed everyone out onto the street where people started to lift picnic baskets up onto Mr Ffrench’s open-backed float, christened the Aeroplane Cart. Maud sat at the back with the Hawkins twins, who were the same age as her, dangling their legs and bending their heads together to gossip beneath wide-brimmed hats. Somehow twelve-year-old Beatrice Hawkins managed to perch between Art and Eva, unable to address either of them. Until ten days ago Eva and Beatrice had been the closest chums, left to fend for themselves when Maud and the twins disappeared to whisper about grown-up secrets. They had searched for nests without disturbing the eggs, taken turns to push Brendan on his scooter along the street with anxious ducks scattering or had gone walking along the shore with Art minding them. But recently Eva could not explain the friction between them, as if Beatrice was jealous of Eva having a brother so wonderful as Art and wanted to push in and play at being his sister also.

      Beatrice’s brother, Oliver, held the reins as the cart left Dunkineely behind. Eva saw Maud watching him furtively and knew that she had fallen in love. When they reached Bruckless village, Oliver gave Thomas the reins and went to sit among the grown-ups. Cousin George had Brendan on his knee, teaching him to shout the responses to a music hall rhyme:

      ‘Who goes there?’

      ‘A grenadier.’

      ‘What do you want?’

      ‘A pint of beer.’

      ‘Where’s your money?’

      ‘In my pocket.’

      ‘Where’s your pocket?’

      ‘I forgot it.’

      The adults laughed, demanding an encore as the horse jangled along the Killybegs road. The Donegal hills rose to the right, arrayed in purple, with the sea to their left and beyond it Ben Bulbin screening the distant Mayo mountains. Sunlight lit the gorse, with foxgloves peeping from hedgerows. Father was maintaining that idle moments like this brought us closer to the truths of the universe, while Mr Hawkins countered that the Irish were sufficiently lazy without being given a philosophy to excuse their idleness.

      Eva was relieved to hear the adults not discussing the war because today was too perfect for outside intrusions. The morning passed in a babble of voices that died away as they neared the sea, leaving just the jangle of the harness and the noise of hooves on the dusty road.

      The view from the rocks beside the beach was so striking that Mother had to sketch it at once. Eva climbed up with a sketchpad to keep her company. Both looked out to sea, drawing quietly. Behind them, rugs were spread out on the sand and Maud arranged plates from the hamper as the Hawkins twins poured homemade lemonade. Father sat talking to Art while Beatrice Hawkins lay beside Art in the very spot where Eva wanted to lie when the sketching was finished. Brendan kept pestering Art by presenting seashells to the big brother he worshipped and, although Beatrice Hawkins was normally too quiet to merit notice, Eva saw that she also kept bothering Art by shyly brushing sand with her bare foot over his.

      They had forgotten to bring drinking water, but Mr Ffrench climbed up towards the caves with a copper kettle to collect water from the streamlet trickling down over the glistening rocks. Father went to assist him and suddenly Beatrice Hawkins found the courage to lob a handful of sand over Art’s hair. She shrieked as Art rolled over to trap her in a wrestling hold, gathering up sand that he playfully threatened to make her swallow. Then just as quickly Art rolled off the girl and picked up Father’s book, pretending to ignore her.

      ‘Oh,’ Mother said quietly, distracting Eva. Her pencil went still as she stared across the waves. Thirty seconds passed before she looked at Eva with an air of casual curiosity. ‘How strange. I’ve just seen something interesting.’

      ‘What?’ Eva asked.

      ‘I don’t know,’ Mother replied matter-of-factly. ‘A stone statue rose slowly from the sea to block the horizon.’

      ‘What did it do?’

      ‘Why nothing, dear, obviously. It was just a statue. It rose as far as its navel, then sank slowly without a sound.’ Mother resumed sketching, her seascape bereft of any figure. ‘It looked rather like Neptune,’ she added as an afterthought. ‘Or Manannán Mac Lir, the Celtic God of the Sea, the way that AE draws him in visions. Not that AE is a good draughtsman, of course. How is your sketch coming on?’

      ‘Fine,’ Eva replied, accustomed to Mother’s psychic visions. They sketched away with nothing further to say. The stone figure would be their secret. It had no place in the boisterous picnic taking shape on the sands where Mr Ffrench clambered down to applause, jumping the last few feet without spilling a drop from the kettle. Eva was anxious to help Art deal with the pest which Beatrice Hawkins had become for him and, once the kettle was boiled over a fire of twigs, Mother was also happy to join the main picnic.

      The meal was gloriously protracted, with interruptions as shapes in the changing clouds diverted people’s attention or when they paused to hear each other’s favourite quotations. Father, СКАЧАТЬ