Bolger Hide Away

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-84840-937-8
Verlag: New Island
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

Hidden behind the walls of Grangegorman Mental Hospital in 1941, four lives collide, all afflicted by the human cost of wars, betrayals and trauma. Gus, a shrewd attendant, is the keeper of everyone's secrets, especially his own. Two War of Independence veterans are reunited. One, Jimmy Nolan, has spent twenty years as a psychiatric patient, unable to recover from his involvement in youthful killings. In contrast, Francis Dillon has prospered as a businessman, until rumours of Civil War atrocities cause his collapse, suffering delusions of enemies seeking to kill him. Doctor Fairfax has fled London after his gay lover's death. Desperate to rekindle a sense of purpose, Fairfax tries to help Dillon recover by getting him to talk about his past. But a code of silence surrounds the traumatic violence Ireland has endured. Is Dillon willing to break his silence to find a way back to his family? In this superb evocation of hidden worlds, master storyteller Dermot Bolger explores the aftershock within people who participate in violence and the fault-lines in all post-conflict societies only held together by collective amnesia.

 Dermot Bolger  is one of Ireland's best-known writers across a range of genres. His fifteen novels include The Journey Home, The Family on Paradise Pier, New Town Soul, Tanglewood and The Lonely Sea and Sky. He is also an accomplished playwright and poet, with his most recent play, Last Orders at the Dockside, having a hugely successful sold-out run at the Abbey Theatre in 2019.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bolger, Dermot

Leseproben

Prologue

Fairfax

25 March 1941: Night Crossing

They met on a voyage from darkness into light. Or so it seemed to Fairfax as he stood on the open deck of the mailboat navigating the night crossing to Dublin. After two years of enforced blackouts in England, Dublin’s lights glittering in the distance looked so unnatural that this might be a journey into a different world. Or a journey back in time – where he often asked his patients to mentally travel – into a lost childhood, when lights could shine bright without a fear of attracting bombers, where the only things that might wake you were a cock crowing or a dog’s bark – not the heart-stopping wail of air-raid sirens or the unearthly whoosh of a falling bomb foretelling the ferocious explosion to come.

He did not know the circumstances of how this woman standing on deck had left London twelve hours earlier. His own journey started in the blacked-out darkness he had grown accustomed to navigating. The headlights of the Wolseley Super Six driven by his friend Christopher, who collected Fairfax from his flat, were cloaked in cardboard with two pinpricks cut into them. This allowed not so much a beam of light as the ghost of a beam, to precariously guide them through unlit streets where even one loose curtain over a window could become a source of consternation and danger.

He didn’t ask where Christopher had acquired the petrol to drive him to the station, and was too distraught to want to know what favours Christopher must have called in to circumnavigate regulations and procure the necessary documents to allow Fairfax to leave Britain.

Some work and travel permits had undoubtedly been procured during hushed conversations in the corridors of White’s Club in St James’s Street, a club steeped in arcane etiquette where gentleman could enjoy the company of fellow gentlemen in the billiards room, as if this Blitzkrieg were just another outside interference to be kept at bay until obsequious servants requested members to adjourn to the relative safety of the wine cellars. Other permits had possibly been acquired from contacts in more secretive clubs like Le Boeuf sur le Toit in Orange Street in Soho, where a different type of gentlemen could risk enjoying the company of other men in a more surreptitious manner.

Fairfax rarely frequented White’s, which he found too stifling, or Le Boeuf sur le Toit, because its decor was too lascivious and its trade a bit too rough for a settled man like himself. But he was known on the fringes of these closeted circles and in other circles too. He frequented meetings of the British Psychoanalytical Society, which, following an influx of members fleeing Vienna, was now beset by schisms between Kleinian and Freudian factions. Since boyhood he had been a member of the local cricket club, where he enjoyed the relative anonymity of being known only for being not as good a medium-pace bowler as his older brother once was and for being considered a disappointment to his ambitious father.

For the past decade Fairfax had been able to partition his life between these different worlds because at heart all he cared about was the unshakable sanctuary that had been at the centre of his existence; the small haven he had created where he could be himself with the man whom he loved; that sanctum in Putney, which he had shared with his lover Charles and which he had thought could only ever be blown apart if a Heinkel had circled overhead and indiscriminately dropped an incendiary bomb on the flat. He could never have expected his world to be shattered by a blast on a shabby side street off the Old Kent Road in Southwark a fortnight ago, which caused two bodies to be found entwined amid the rubble.

When one secret was shattered in the circles in which Fairfax moved, there was always a fear of contamination, of other secrets being exposed among the shards. Therefore, some favours solicited by Christopher on his behalf had been given not only from sympathy for his loss but from self-interest. With his private sanctum destroyed, he might become dangerous to know. Nobody could gauge what secrets a man might inadvertently let slip when trying to make sense not only of a terrible loss but a heartrending sense of betrayal as well.

At the train station, Christopher had paused before getting out to seek a porter for his cases. ‘You do know that Charles loved you?’ he said.

Fairfax shook his head. ‘I’m certain of nothing anymore.’

Christopher turned towards him, but even in the privacy of the Wolseley on a blacked-out street he was too nervous to risk putting a comforting hand on his knee.

‘Charles was always just Charles. He was older than us. You saw in his eyes that he had seen ugly things we never had to see. Maybe he needed to do ugly things too, in Egypt or in Ireland during their damned unrest. I don’t know because a gentleman doesn’t tell. I just know that war was damnable back then and is damnable now. We’re each made up of our contradictions. You know this better than most. You delve into contradictions every day with patients. Few people are just good or evil. Sometimes we yield to temptations that are simply opportunistic; acted out in one moment and forgotten in the next, with no intent to hurt anyone. Charles could show a streak of cruelty, but never towards you. I don’t know how Charles ended up in that flat in Southwark, but from how Charles sometimes gazed at you, I never saw any man so much in love with another. Hold onto that thought and do nothing stupid. Boats have a hypnotic quality. Waves look inviting if you stare long enough. But any poor sod who ever jumped was already regretting the decision before his body entered the freezing waters.’

Fairfax had pondered those words since the train began its cautious journey from London, crawling through dark cities with the blacked-out carriage windows increasing his claustrophobia. There was the brief respite of being let out into the air to queue to board this packed mailboat. The crossing took eight hours longer than before the war, but even at sea some passengers felt apprehensive. Early in the war U-boats had laid mines that caused the MV Munster passenger ship to sink within sight of Liverpool. The Irish Sea was safer since the Royal Navy laid a nest of mines across the St George’s Channel. But magnetic mines could break loose during storms and drift harmlessly until they found a metal hull to latch onto. No stage of this crossing was safe until they caught sight of the neutral, lit-up Irish coastline.

These lights were causing excitement on deck now, beckoning in the dark like the gateway to a luminous funfair. Three well-heeled English passengers paused beside him. Their stance betrayed how – although banned from wearing uniforms in Ireland – they were British army officers, availing of leave to indulge in the pleasures Dublin could offer. Restaurants where they could eat without fretting over ration cards; ballrooms to dance in without fear of air-raid sirens; shops awash with gifts of cosmetics for wives and girlfriends, if guilt required them to atone for any indiscretions during this spree, when pink gin and whiskey were flowing. He heard them make plans: dinner in Jammet’s, then a wager on who could get furthest with any local Judy lining the walls of the Olympia Ballroom. They spoke of Dublin with childlike glee but also with spite, convinced that if they visited local harbours they would spy U-boats surfacing at night to be refuelled, and Kriegsmarine sailors nodding to sly fishermen in pubs, before those German crews disappeared to bring death to honest sailors on the Western Approaches.

‘We’ll gatecrash a dance at the Gresham,’ one man said. ‘It’s easy to sweet-talk your way in and find a better class of Able Grable to ply with gin. If I lure one outside, I won’t take no for an answer. If they’re so free with favours for the Nazis, they can be free with them for us too.’

The others laughed and strode away, leaving him alone in the shadows. Fairfax had frequently travelled by yacht in rough seas, yet a fear of seasickness prevented him from venturing into the bar. Or maybe a fear of getting drawn into conversation with a fellow passenger from his own social class. He lacked the strength to go through the charade of spurious chitchat. Fairfax needed to be alone. Or as alone as one could be with so many passengers traversing this narrow deck, hurrying to join the singsong in the bar or pausing to marvel at the approaching city lights.

In truth, he was in hiding in this semi-darkness, hoping nobody would recognise him. In his early twenties it was the sort of shadowy darkness he had furtively sought out, torn between fear and excitement, between physical needs he tried to suppress and a fear of assault and blackmail, arrest and the disgrace of a court case. Before the war, such clandestine pockets of darkness were hard to find. But, as Charles had recently remarked, the blackout transformed all of London into a vast version of Hampstead Heath, brimming with sexual possibilities. Charles had given him a long glance after saying this, before adding with a laugh, ‘That is, if we still needed to seek such encounters, dear heart, which thankfully we don’t, as we have each other. All I’m seeking these days is a pot of tea stewed with leaves only previously used twice.’

Back then Fairfax hadn’t thought much about Charles’s observation. But now what he recalled most was his long glance. Had Charles been trying to tell him something? Or hoping to lure him into a reply...