Fools of Fortune (8 page)

‘No, Josephine,’ my mother said as I entered her bedroom one evening to say good-night. ‘You have a life of your own to live.’

‘I want to stay with you, ma’am.’

‘I’ll soon be myself again.’

‘I couldn’t marry him now, ma’am. I couldn’t settle in that neighbourhood.’

‘A little drink?’ my mother suggested.

‘No thank you, Mrs Quinton.’

I said good-night but my mother did not hear me. She spoke of parties at Kilneagh before her marriage, of decorating the church for the Harvest Festival, and how my father used to pick his Christmas presents for her from Cash’s Christmas catalogue: bottles of scent and lavender water, talcum powder and bath oil. ‘There now,’ Josephine murmured because my mother had become agitated, speaking now of the damp lawn and its coolness soothing the pain. ‘I didn’t want to live,’ she sometimes said.

I remembered her when Josephine and I had returned from the hospital in Fermoy. She had been wearing a green overcoat, standing with Aunt Fitzeustace in the garden. The overcoat had been my father’s and had hung, hardly ever worn by him, in one of the kitchen passages. ‘No, it cannot be believed,’ Aunt Fitzeustace had been saying, tears dripping on to her blouse and her tweed tie.

‘Good-night,’ I said again.

‘Ah, Willie, I did not see you there. Yes, of course it’s time for your bed.’

She did not kiss me, as she had at Kilneagh. I closed her bedroom door and climbed up another half flight of stairs. Often I dreamed of that moment in the garden, of Aunt Fitzeustace’s weeping, and my mother in the green overcoat.

‘Mr Derenzy is coming today,’ Josephine reminded me one morning, and when I returned from school there was a fire in the dining-room and my mother had dressed and come downstairs. The dining-room door was ajar, and with some excitement Josephine said: ‘You are to go in at once, Willie. Just comb your hair.’

She combed it herself with a comb that had been ready on the kitchen draining-board. She made me wash my hands, and damped the comb beneath the tap. ‘Look up at me,’ she said, and then hurried me to the dining-room, where a mass of papers and ledgers was spread out on the table. My mother, in a black and red striped dress, had a tray of tea things in front of her. The room smelt of her scent, the first time I’d noticed it since we’d come to the house in Windsor Terrace. She had touched her cheeks with rouge and had piled her hair up, the way she used to for a party at Kilneagh. ‘Willie’ll be better at understanding,’ she said, smiling and pouring tea.

I shook hands with Mr Derenzy, who hadn’t changed in any way whatsoever. He wore the same blue serge suit, the same pens and pencils clipped to its top pocket. His red hair still gave the impression of sustaining a life of its own, the hand that gripped mine felt more like bones than flesh.

‘Ah, Willie, it’s good to see you.’

‘The poor man’s having a terrible time explaining to me, Willie.’

‘Ah no, no,’ Mr Derenzy protested, sitting down again.

My mother offered me a piece of Swiss roll, and when Mr Derenzy began to talk about sales and purchases at the mill I realized that my task was simply to listen. The sums and subtractions were a formality, but once Mr Derenzy paused and, addressing me rather than my mother, explained that a legal agreement necessitated this long report of the continued management of the mill. I had not even thought about any of it before, or wondered what was happening there. That afternoon I realized Mr Derenzy was now in charge of everything, no longer a clerk but the mill’s manager.

‘Coal, £12,’ he said. ‘Carpenter’s repairs to the chute supports, £3. 4s., Midleton Sacks and Company Limited, £14. 12s.’ He took from his pocket the tin that once had contained catarrh pastilles and now held snuff. As I listened to his fluty voice I reflected that the container couldn’t always have been that same one: the words
Potter’s, the Remedy
would not still have been as easy to read across the table if he had carried the tin about with him for years. It was odd that Geraldine and Deirdre, so interested in everything about Mr Derenzy, had never wondered if he suffered from catarrh and bought these pastilles regularly.

‘Wicks,’ he said, ‘half a crown. I’m thinking,’ he added apologetically, ‘would the mat inside the office door have had its time? Mr Quinton didn’t say order a new one, but it’s gone threadbare and only a while ago the traveller from Midleton Sacks got his foot caught in it. I had Johnny Lacy take a look at it, only he said there’s nothing can be done with the fibre the way it’s manufactured. And if we don’t replace it at all—’

‘Oh, replace it, Mr Derenzy,’ interrupted my mother, as if waking from sleep. ‘Simply replace it.’

‘That’s nice of you, Mrs Quinton. Only I don’t think that mat could be repaired. But then again I wouldn’t want you to think there’s an extravagance in buying a new one.’

‘An office has to have a mat.’ My mother smiled, but the strain of the afternoon was showing beneath the powder and the rouge. ‘Mr Derenzy,’ she suggested, ‘I think we might have a little drink.’

She rose as she spoke and approached a decanter on the sideboard. Glasses had been arranged in a row in front of it, as if other guests were expected. Neither the glasses nor the liquid in the decanter had been there when I’d last entered the dining-room.

‘Ah no, not whiskey for me, Mrs Quinton. No, thanks all the same.’

‘There’s gin somewhere. There’s sherry.’

‘I never touch a drop, Mrs Quinton.’

‘You don’t drink? I never knew that.’

‘It’s not on temperance grounds, Mrs Quinton. It’s only I have no head at all for it.’

‘Oh, but surely a little thimbleful?’

‘I’d be on my bed for three days, Mrs Quinton.’

Not properly listening even though she managed to conduct the conversation, my mother had poured herself a measure of whiskey and now added water to it from a cut-glass jug. With this she returned to where she’d been sitting.

‘Is there anything, Mr Derenzy? Soda water? There might be lemonade. Willie, go and ask Josephine if she has lemonade for Mr Derenzy. Or maybe that ginger stuff.’

‘Ah no, don’t bother.’ Wrenching his face apart, a skeleton’s smile was full of apology for the trouble this disinclination to drink whiskey was causing.

But my mother nodded at me in a way I remembered from Kilneagh, indicating that I should do as she had bidden me. ‘And ask Josephine to make up the fire.’

There was no lemonade, nor any ginger stuff, so Josephine sent me out to Hayes’s while she went herself to the dining-room to put coals on the fire and to say I wouldn’t be long. When I returned with two bottles of soda water Josephine put them on a tray, with glasses that were larger than the ones on the sideboard, and in the dining-room I poured some for myself and some for Mr Derenzy. The conversation, clearly no longer about accounts and office replacements, had ceased when I entered. As he received his glass from me, Mr Derenzy attempted to guide my mother’s attention back to the business of the mill but she at once interrupted him.

‘You know the facts,’ she said sharply. ‘You are a person, Mr Derenzy, who knows everything. About Kilneagh and Lough, indeed about Fermoy. You have told Willie and myself that an office mat is threadbare and we have been attentive; Willie has gone out for soda water. The mill is running profitably, that is clear to see. But there is something more important.’

‘I wonder in front of Willie, Mrs Quinton? If you recall, you said you would prefer to have this private between us.’

‘I have changed my mind.’

In my absence the decanter had been removed from the sideboard and was now beside my mother’s glass. So was the jug of water.

Mr Derenzy shifted his feet about and repeatedly swallowed. He was here at the request of Lanigan and O’Brien, he said; it was a legal requirement that he should regularly make the report he was endeavouring to make.

‘Was it Sergeant Rudkin?’ enquired my mother, and in my mind’s eye I instantly saw the man in soldier’s uniform lighting a cigarette at the street corner in Fermoy. ‘Rudkin?’ my mother repeated.

The fluffy halo nodded, and for a moment there was agitation in the mill manager’s eyes. His lips had begun to quiver, anger grated in his voice.

‘Rudkin walked about Fermoy,’ he said, ‘as if nothing had occurred. The only thing that happened was the woman he was after closed her door to him.’

‘What woman, Mr Derenzy?’ My mother sprawled over the papers on the table, her glass held in the air.

‘He was attempting to associate with a Fermoy woman. The widow of McBirney, the bicycle-shop man.’

‘I didn’t ever know that.’

‘McBirney was killed in the Munster Fusiliers.’

‘I don’t think that matters, you know.’

‘No, no, it doesn’t at all. It was only that you enquired about the woman—’

‘Are people in Fermoy certain about the other thing? How do people know?’

‘Oh, they know all right, Mrs Quinton. One of the young fellows with Rudkin that night ended up in a terrible state. He deserted from the barracks and was gone for two days until they found him near the Mitchelstown Caves. He couldn’t stop talking about Rudkin and the petrol tins. He was unhinged by the whole affair: a finger wasn’t laid on him because everyone knew the Tans would do it for them when they heard he’d talked.’

‘In the circumstances isn’t it surprising that no one had the courage to shoot Sergeant Rudkin? Wouldn’t you say that, Mr Derenzy?’

‘Rudkin slipped the net. As soon as he saw the lie of the land with McBirney’s widow he got himself shifted up to a barracks in Dundalk.’

It was difficult to believe now that the Sergeant Rudkin they spoke of had waved genially at my father and on some previous occasion had told him he owned a vegetable shop in Liverpool. He might even have shaken my father’s hand, the way a bleary farmer had often done in the Grand Hotel.

‘It’s still surprising,’ my mother insisted, ‘that nobody shot Rudkin.’

She leaned back in her chair again, her glazed manner returning, not listening when Mr Derenzy said that he had heard of stories in which revenge had been planned. Sergeant Rudkin would have suffered, he said, if he hadn’t slipped the net.

‘He did what he did,’ my mother whispered, speaking more to herself than to either of us, ‘because Doyle was hanged on our land. That’s all the reason there was. It had nothing to do with Collins.’

‘There’s a portion of slating to be seen to,’ Mr Derenzy said after a moment of silence. ‘The roof of the right-hand loft. A matter of say two dozen new slates, Mrs Quinton.’

‘I cannot understand why nobody shot him. I cannot understand that. He’d be back in Liverpool now, selling people vegetables. If I’ve followed you, that would be right, would it, Mr Derenzy?’

‘Mrs Quinton—’

‘Does nobody think we’re worth it? Well, perhaps we’re not.’

‘Oh now, that’s not the way of it at all.’

‘Do you still go over to Kilneagh on Sundays, Mr Derenzy?’

‘Well, yes, I do.’

‘I would be grateful if you would explain to my sisters-in-law that we are not ready for visitors yet.’

‘They’re only concerned at not having had a line from you, Mrs Quinton.’

‘That has to be, Mr Derenzy. I would ask you to say also that I would prefer not to receive letters.’

My mother rose. She shook hands with Mr Derenzy and abruptly left the room. Her scent was more noticeable when she moved, and her red and black dress made a pleasant swishing sound.

‘Ah now, I hope I haven’t tired her,’ Mr Derenzy worriedly remarked. He reached under the table for a brown leather suitcase and carefully placed in it his ledgers and bundles of papers. He had not drunk any of his soda water.

‘And have you settled in, Willie?’ he enquired, ending the silence he had evoked in order to mark his concern for my mother.

‘At school d’you mean, Mr Derenzy?’

‘Well, at school certainly. But in general terms, Willie. Isn’t Cork a great place now?’

‘Cork’s all right.’

‘More to do, Willie. More than in Lough, you could say. And d’you like the school you’re talking about?’

I shook my head, but Mr Derenzy didn’t notice.

‘Do your lessons well, Willie, and pay good attention to what the teacher says. I’m keeping the mill going for you, until the moment’s right for you to take over.’

‘Thank you, Mr Derenzy.’

‘Your mother’ll be getting better, Willie. All the time she’ll be getting better.’

A few weeks after Mr Derenzy’s visit my mother requested that she and I should meet in the Victoria Hotel on my way home from school one afternoon. We were then to proceed to the offices of Lanigan and O’Brien, who had been the Quinton family’s solicitors for many generations. In the hotel she ordered tea but didn’t have any herself, none of the triangular ham sandwiches nor the little iced sponge-cakes. She whispered to the waiter and received instead what might have been a glass of water.

‘Would this place remind you of the Grand in Fermoy, Willie?’

She was doing her best, endeavouring to make conversation. She was thinner than she’d been at Kilneagh, but in the hotel her undiminished beauty caused people to glance at her a second time.

‘A bit it reminds me,’ I said. ‘Only a bit.’

‘Maybe we’ll go to the Opera House one night, Willie.’

‘That would be nice.’

‘Did Josephine take you? My memory’s gone to pieces, you know.’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘Of course she did. I remember now. And what was it you saw, Willie?’

‘Paddy the Next Best Thing.’

Catching the waiter’s eye, she waved her hand at him and a moment later he arrived with another glass for her.

‘The first time I came to Kilneagh, Willie, I knew I’d end up living there. “You can’t go marrying a Quinton,” my father said to me. Wasn’t that ridiculous? D’you remember your grandfather, Willie? Very tall and thin.’

‘Yes, I remember him.’

‘He’s keeping the flag flying in India now, since it’s not permitted to fly here any more. He and your grandmother.’

‘Yes, I know they’re in India.’

‘You’ll write to them for me, Willie? Just say we’re all right.’

I nodded, finishing a raspberry-flavoured cake.