‘Whereas if the Irish landlords deserve to be extinguished for any one thing,’ Anna spoke up with some energy, ‘it is for their treatment of their own women.’
Davitt heard the rage. He understood it. He knew from Anna that each of the three Parnell sons had got a fine house and lands in their father’s will – the five daughters nothing. They were living on the charity of their brothers and their mother’s American family. In a way Anna and Fanny Parnell were as poor as he was.
‘And now, with this idea of yours, Miss Parnell,’ he said, bowing in a theatrical manner to Fanny, ‘when we have united the manhood and the beauty of Ireland, surely we will be both invincible and irresistible.’ Around him people laughed and applauded some more.
It was only then that Fanny saw, underneath all the gallantry and the force of his being, that Davitt was struggling against something deep. The flickering and shimmering may not have been a character trait after all, but the presence of grief. It was perhaps that force which had threatened to overpower her at the beginning.
Fearing she was being clumsy again, she asked quietly, ‘Are you unwell Mr Davitt?’
He looked a little startled.
‘I am often unwell myself,’ she said, apologetically, to soften her observation. ‘It makes me quite sensitive to others. Your mother -’
‘Yes I am thinking of my mother,’ he admitted. ‘She would have loved your idea. A women’s political organisation. And not just national, but international! And now she cannot join you.’ His voice broke just a little.
‘Come and sit down and tell me about her,’ Fanny said, drawing him away, nodding silent instructions to the others to leave them alone. Anna took the others back to sit in the hotel foyer while Davitt, strangely unresisting, came with Fanny to her quiet corner.
He sat down beside her on a plush blue couch, pushing the cushions aside, as if oblivious to their woven finery. He stroked distractedly at his beard. She saw how it was flecked with gray.
‘Two years ago, when I was released from prison, I promised my mother I would take her back to Ireland, to see her old places again,’ he said, moving straight into his need, ‘and I did not. I put the cause of Ireland first. What sort of a son was I, when she had suffered so much already for me.’ He stopped speaking. There were tears in his darkened eyes.
Fanny felt truly honoured to be in the presence of a man’s grief, honoured and thrilled, but yet a little surprised. She had expected Michael Davitt to be tougher, somehow. But then people expected her to be more serious, or wiser. Like a ‘real’ poetess. What Anna had not said, was that the famous land agitator was human.
‘You know my mother got us out of the workhouse,’ he said.
Fanny drew in her breath but he shook his head against her sympathy. ‘We were one family amongst thousands, Miss Parnell. I tell this story not for your pity but to honour my mother with you today.’
He told how after being evicted from their destroyed home, his parents, being utterly without hope, had brought their children to the local workhouse – some miles away. It took them over four hours to walk that terrible grieving road.
Davitt told her that his father felt such shame about this destination that he never once afterwards referred to it. His father was a shanachie, a storyteller, in both the languages, and he could read and write in both of them too. Yet he never once spoke or wrote of that day, in public or in private, neither in Irish nor in English.
‘But my mother felt,’ Davitt said, ‘and I believe rightly, that there was no shame in our family having reached the zero of adversity. She loved truth, my mother, and she taught me to love it too.’ He paused for a while. Fanny sat, breathing with him. She frowned at anyone coming close. But Davitt saw nothing. He had gone back to Swinford Workhouse.
‘And so we came to that dreadful place, with its dark walls, its tiny slits of windows. You could feel its cold cruelty just from standing outside on the road. When we finally got inside, the authorities said I was too old to stay with my mother and sisters and must go to the men’s quarters. I was ready to do what was necessary. I was practically a man. I was four years old.’ He smiled, and squared his shoulders, in mimicry of his boyish self. Fanny smiled with him.
‘And they were about to take me away, when my mother grabbed hold of me. She said she would die by the roadside rather than submit to such an unnatural condition, a mother being separated from her children, and she marched us all then and there out of that workhouse.’ He grinned, and Fanny laughed, and brought her hands together in a clap.
‘And as you can see, Miss Parnell, we did not die by the roadside. My mother entreated another family to squeeze us in on their cart, and we all took the road to Dublin – with their poor old donkey trying to make a break for it every now and then.’ He was smiling now. ‘I suppose there were too many of us in that old cart. The poor beast was affronted. But we children made a joke out of it, we said that the old mule was running for Ireland.’ He laughed softly at the memory.
‘And from Dublin we sailed to England. Got off at Liverpool. Both those cities were astounding to us. My father had been to England for work, but we children had never seen so many people in one place. And then we all walked, that other family and ours, we walked for about two days to Lancashire, because that was where the work was. My parents paid that kind family back as soon as they could. Though my mother had no English, she hawked fruit in the streets of Haslingden in order to do so.’ He looked up and smiled at her. ‘Now you know, Miss Parnell, why I have no difficulties in accepting a woman’s helping hand.’
Fanny thought of her own errant mother. ‘Your mother sounds like she was a wonderful woman.’
Davitt nodded. ‘She never lost hope in God or confidence in her ability to meet misfortune. She never allowed herself to be conquered.’ He spoke with a great pride in his voice. ‘She met every reverse and beat down despair, even in the darkest hours. After my father died, while I was in prison in England, I made her go to America, to be out of the way, safe. I told her that one day I would take her back to Ireland. I promised her that. And now she lies here forever – here in this foreign soil. Far away from her own people. Far from Mayo.’
Fanny saw he had slumped back into his terrible guilt. ‘But you saw her, Michael,’ she said, reaching over and laying her hand on his arm, quite unable to use his surname now, ‘you saw her before she died, and what’s more, she saw you!’
‘It was not enough’ he said, shaking his head.
‘For any mother, it would be enough.’ Fanny spoke with authority. ‘To see her son so fine, so powerful, so useful. Michael Davitt, you are the hope of millions.’
‘It was not enough’ he said, but more quietly.
And Fanny thought she might have given him something of comfort.
Chapter 11 - The enchanted garden by the sea
Walking down Brook St in the winter dark, Hilary heard the party well before she saw it. A satisfying sound of people - laughing and talking, the clinking of glass, as in movies and ads. Adult cocktail party sounds. Not the roar of bellicose youth or the scream of drunken girls – but the sound of an old Cointreau ad. When alcohol meant, or at least was presented as sophisticated, European, rich. Not the semi tragic or was it semi-comic blear and smear of the Coogee Bay Hotel. But of course this would be a party of the beautiful people. With Claudia in charge, Lolly’s party would have to be a social success. An adult success. However much all the adult children of the family might dread it.
And then the faerie lights came into view, wreathing the balcony of Claudia and Lolly’s large flat, framing the shadowy drinkers, and smokers, whose conversation had floated up the street to her. She did not recognise any of the shadows on the balcony and for a moment she thought, idiotically, am I at the right place? There