Fools of Fortune (3 page)

As I entered the house I was still thinking about the school in the Dublin mountains. My father’s good-natured efforts to ease me into its traditions had become a source of mild terror and I regularly lay awake at night wondering about being savaged with a bamboo cane. ‘Ah, no, no,’ I would make Dr Hogan from Fermoy pronounce. ‘No, Mr Quinton, I’d say Willie’s too delicate for a place like that.’ But I also knew that my delicate appearance was misleading. ‘Healthy as a nut,’ Dr Hogan had stated more than once.

‘We didn’t see that tinker,’ Deirdre remarked at teatime. ‘Did you see the poor old fellow, Willie?’

I shook my head, my glumness not quite slipping away, as usually it did when I was no longer alone. My father’s school trunk would be taken from the attic, where he had told me it still was. Our initials were the same: we could have the white paint that marked them freshened up, he had said, and the brass lock cleaned.

‘No, I didn’t see him,’ I replied.

We sat, spaced far apart, around the big mahogany dining-table that was always covered at teatime with a white linen tablecloth. There were egg sandwiches, and brown bread and soda bread and bread with raisins in it. There were scones that were still hot, and coffee cake. My mother asked me if everything had been all right at the mill. I said it had, and she told me about their ride through the bluebell spinney near Haunt Hill, over country that had once been Quinton country, home by the old quarry. Sometimes I went on that ride myself, on Geraldine’s pony, Boy.

‘The new maid’s called Josephine,’ my mother said, cutting the coffee cake. ‘Tim Paddy’s gone to Fermoy for her.’

‘Was Kitty sacked because she broke the chrysanthemum vase?’ Geraldine enquired.

‘Well, actually, Kitty’s getting married.’ ‘I told you,’ Deirdre cried, dramatically flashing her eyes, a habit that moments of triumph brought out in both my sisters.

‘Oh, I know she’s marrying that beery fellow.’ Geraldine disdainfully sniffed. ‘I only wish she wouldn’t.’

‘I don’t think we should call him beery,’ my mother protested. ‘A red complexion doesn’t always mean a person drinks too much.’

‘Mrs Flynn says he drinks like a bottle. She says he’ll lead Kitty a right old dance. Actually, I’m never going to marry anyone.’

‘Will Kitty and the beery fellow have a honeymoon?’ Deirdre asked, and Geraldine said she could just imagine them, drinking like bottles on a strand somewhere. Pretending they were unable to control their laughter, they pressed their fists against their mouths until my mother said that was enough now.

When the giggling had subsided and each of us had eaten the single slice of coffee cake we were allowed, Geraldine asked me what Mr Derenzy had said when I’d seen him, for the utterances of Mr Derenzy were of great interest to my sisters.

‘Only “good afternoon”.’

‘Did he ask after Aunt Pansy?’

‘He never does.’

‘Did he offer you a pinch of snuff?’

‘No, not today.’

‘I wish he’d marry Aunt Pansy and come and live in the house. Wouldn’t it be lovely, having Mr Derenzy walking about the garden?’

‘If I had to marry anyone,’ Deirdre said, ‘I’d marry Mr Derenzy.’

‘Oh, so would I.’

Soon after that my sisters went off to the stables and my mother said she’d help me with my homework, if I should need any help. I said I would because I enjoyed it when we sat together at the oval table in the drawing-room, working out the cost of five dozen clothes-pegs at three-farthings each, or learning about the continental shelf.

That day we investigated the conflict which Father Kilgarriff considered so important, the Irish victory which the clever English had later turned into defeat. ‘
August 15, 1598
,’ I read aloud.
‘Sir Henry Bagenal, marching out of Newry, was defeated on the River Blackwater by Hugh O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell. The victory was a total one, and the disaffected throughout the land everywhere took up arms.’

In a moment we put the history book aside and my mother spoke of the long English occupation which had succeeded that famous battle, and of how advantage was at present being taken, as it had been taken in the past, of England’s foreign war, even though Irish soldiers were helping to win it. ‘I wish the rising had succeeded that Easter,’ she said. ‘The whole thing would be over by now.’

But at some point while she was speaking my mind had drifted away, to the school in the Dublin mountains. I knew that when the moment came to mention it to her my mother would be sympathetic. It was she who really made the decisions, she who was more in touch with things. She spoke French and German, she understood the intricacies of mathematics: far more than my father, she would appreciate that Father Kilgarriff’s teaching was perfectly adequate, that boarding-school was quite unnecessary.

‘Well, that Josephine’ll be here.’ She smiled at me as she stood up, lightening the mood which the talk of war and revolution had inspired in her and which my gloomy face no doubt suggested she had inspired in me. ‘One of these days it’ll all be all right,’ she added.

I puzzled my way through algebraic equations and pages of tedious fact about natural resources in Lancashire. I learnt part of ‘The Deserted Village’, and then I took my books and the two inkwells from the oval table and placed them in a drawer of the big corner cupboard with my pens and pencils and blotting paper. My father insisted that all signs of my lessons should be removed from the drawing-room by the evening of every day.

I made my way to the cobbled yard between the two wings at the back of the house, over which Tim Paddy was brushing water. He was smoking a Wild Woodbine cigarette and as a greeting he slanted his head at me in a way he had. It was pleasant in the yard or the big old dairy at that time of day, everything clean again after the milking of the cows, the buckets laid out, upside down in a row, hens and ducks waiting in the doorway for Tim Paddy to finish. Sometimes he would lean on his brush handle and his ferrety face would bristle with excitement as he told me how he intended to enlist in the Munster Fusiliers the very minute he was old enough. He had heard talk in the village of adventure and companionship in foreign parts, of cities rich with wine and scented women. ‘You’re the biggest eejit this side of Cork,’ his old father used snappishly to grumble at him. ‘Can’t you stay where you are and not go looking for destruction?’ But he might be washing the cobbles of our yard for ever, Tim Paddy pointed out, while the whole world passed him by.

That evening, when he saw me, he didn’t remove the Wild Woodbine from his mouth in order to settle himself for leisurely conversation. ‘The new maid’s prettier than Kitty,’ Geraldine called out, passing through the yard with Deirdre, who added that the new maid had lovely hair.

I pretended to be not much interested, although I was. I watched while Tim Paddy finished his task and threw away the butt of his cigarette. ‘Wouldn’t you go and take a look at her?’ he eventually suggested. ‘She’s nice all right.’

I remembered my mother showing Kitty where O’Neill’s vegetable garden was when Kitty was new, but when I went to look there O’Neill was on his own, crouched among drills he had dug, planting potatoes. He didn’t reply when I spoke to him; he rarely addressed either my sisters or myself.

I left the vegetable garden by a door in its high brick wall. The door was set in a narrow arch and was painted the same colour as the woodwork of the mill. Mr Derenzy had once told me that a large supply of this brown-red paint had been on sale at the Admiralty supply stores in Cork, cheaply priced at the end of the reign of Queen Victoria. I remembered his saying it as I stood by the door hoping for a sight of the new maid. My father ambled through the high rhododendrons, returning from the mill with his labradors dawdling behind him. He would go straight to the dining-room and pour himself a glass of whiskey, as he did every evening. Then he would settle himself down in one of the leather armchairs with the
Irish Times.

Daisies were beginning to shower the lawns, where there had been snowdrops not long ago. The sound of the Angelus bell carried through the clear evening from Lough, and I imagined O’Neill crossing himself among his potato rows, and Tim Paddy doing the same in the yard, and stout Mrs Flynn pausing for a moment in the kitchen, and my aunts’ maid pausing also. From the distance came the barking of their stray dogs, out for an evening run through the fields.

‘This is Josephine,’ my mother said, stepping through the French windows of the morning-room, on to the grass. Already the new maid had changed into her uniform: the hair Deirdre had spoken of was fair and smooth beneath the same white cap that Kitty had worn, her lips had a pretty pout. The fragility of her face might have been reflected in her hands but, like Kitty’s, they were chapped and coarse. For some reason I noticed that at once.

‘How d’you do?’ I said, and Josephine made some shy reply.

My mother led her away, into the morning-room again, to begin her duties. I did not know then that our household was complete, that Kilneagh was as I’ve always since remembered it.

3

Would we have loved one another then in whatever way it is that children love? You might have lived at Rathcormack or Castletown-roche, even in Lough itself. During all the years that have passed I’ve often pretended that you did. I’ve closed my eyes and seen you in church on Sundays, your blue dress, that artificial rose in the band of your hat. I’ve glanced across the pews at you, unable to prevent myself, as Mr Derenzy could not prevent himself from glancing at Aunt Pansy.

‘O Lord, correct me, but with judgement,’ old Canon Flewett pleaded every Sunday morning; ‘not in Thine anger, lest Thou bring me to nothing.’ Mrs Flewett played the organ, the psalm of the day was said, the
Te Deum
and the Creed; my father read both lessons. Geraldine and Deirdre observed Mr Derenzy’s admiration of our aunt, nudging one another with their elbows. When they became bored they blew through their teeth and my mother frowned at them.

Mr Derenzy collected the money, a moment of great excitement for my sisters because it was Aunt Pansy’s turn to admire her admirer, which with discretion she did. She gazed straight ahead of her, permitting a glow of pride to suffuse her apple-like features when he offered the wooden plate to Canon Flewett, who placed it on a larger one, of polished brass, and offered this in turn to the Almighty.

‘Well, thank you so much, Mr Quinton,’ Canon Flewett invariably said in the churchyard, and then thanked Mr Derenzy for going round with the plate. The other Protestant families of the neighbourhood stood around, conversing about agriculture or the weather. Many of them were related, cousin marrying cousin, as-the local habit was. In a procession we would pass through the lich-gate, its black ironwork arching above us. Mr Derenzy walked the length of the village street with Aunt Pansy, and my father and Aunt Fitzeustace were occasionally put in mind of some incident in the past. ‘Who’s that woman in the purple?’ I remember his once enquiring, and Aunt Fitzeustace reminded him that she was a distant relative of the Quintons over whom he had upset a blackberry ice cream when he was five. One way or another, there were quite a number of distant Quinton relatives.

During church our dog-cart and Aunt Fitzeustace’s basket-trap were left in Sweeney’s yard, the horse and pony munching oats from their nosebags. ‘Safe journey home,’ Mr Derenzy wished us, helping Aunt Pansy and then Aunt Fitzeustace into the basket-trap. He would be over as usual in the afternoon, he promised Aunt Pansy, and as the trap and the dog-cart left the yard his hand reached into his pocket for the tin that contained his snuff. It was a gesture that caused Geraldine and Deirdre to giggle delightedly, Geraldine saying that Aunt Pansy was the luckiest person in the world to have Mr Derenzy after her. ‘Now, don’t be unkind,’ my mother would chide but the girls insisted they meant every word of it, that Mr Derenzy was gallant.

There was another love story at Kilneagh, or at least talk of one: Johnny Lacy told me that Father Kilgarriff had been unfrocked in Co. Limerick because of his love of a convent girl who was now in Chicago. It didn’t occur to me to question this account of the unfrocking, not even when Johnny Lacy described the convent girl’s teeth glistening in the dark confessional, and the tap of her heels on the tiles when she walked, her black-stockinged ankles slim and shapely. As if he’d been there he described how Father Kilgarriff had been on his knees for an hour in the bishop’s palace and how the ringed finger had been snatched away from his pleading grasp.

Greatly intrigued by all this, I walked to Lough one afternoon and went into the Catholic chapel. Mrs Flynn referred to it as the Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven, a title I considered more pleasing than St Anthony’s Church of Ireland, which was what our own place of worship was called. The pews were of varnished pine; there were holy pictures on the walls and a cross on the altar. Lighted candles surrounded a Sacred Heart effigy, and the confessional smelt of dust, as if its green curtains needed airing. In the vestry there were more candles, locked away behind the two glass doors of a dresser. A red bulb gleamed beneath an image of Christ as a child, one hand raised in blessing, a puffy crown on the figure’s head. A surplice hung from a hook on the wall and in a corner there was a sweeping brush. I wondered if Father Kilgarriff and the convent girl had stood together in such a vestry. I wondered if his hand had reached out to touch her, as the man on the log-box reached out towards the woman. ‘A grievous sin,’ Johnny Lacy had said in a sombre voice. ‘That’s what the bishop would have called it, Willie, a most grievous sin.’

But Tim Paddy hinted that this story should be taken with a pinch of salt. Tim Paddy was known to be jealous of Johnny Lacy, to envy him his easy ways and his success in Fermoy’s dance-hall. He gloomily described to me the girls Johnny Lacy used to buy biscuits and sweets for, the prettiest girls of the night’s dancing. ‘Like Josephine,’ he added one day.

Tim Paddy was painting a greenhouse when he said that and he slanted his head as he spoke, drawing his white-coated brush along a line of putty. Inside the greenhouse his father was pricking out seeds and I knew that if he had not been there Tim Paddy would have lit a cigarette and settled down for a conversation.