Fools of Fortune (15 page)

‘I knew your father in the old days.’

Although his considerable length of service had established him as a school institution, it had never occurred to me that he must have been at the school when my father was a boy. When he made his revelation I expressed considerable surprise, of which Fukes took no notice. His haggard face was just a little below the level of my own, for he was not a tall man. It displayed no emotion as he said:

‘I was sorry to hear about what happened.’

‘Thank you, Fukes.’

‘Of course a number of old boys were killed in the war. But this was different.’

‘Yes.’

‘A terrible thing.’

‘Yes.’

That was the first of many conversations. On subsequent occasions Fukes revealed his memories of my father as a prefect, for he had mainly come across him when in their different capacities both of them were on duty in Dining Hall. These later conversations took place in Fukes’s pantry, where he performed a variety of tasks while occupying a sagging armchair drawn close to a radiator. I would sit on the edge of a stained marble dressing-table which, like the armchair, some previous headmaster had abandoned.

‘And yourself?’ he asked one afternoon. ‘Will you be taking up where your father left off down in Fermoy?’

I was reminded of the Scrotum enquiring about my vocation on the occasion when I had been confused with Dunraven. Fukes would have made a better headmaster. He did not address himself to many boys, but he had acquired information about everyone who passed through the school. He explained that he never ceased to eavesdrop while he served dinner in the masters’ common room and in the private dining-room of the headmaster and his wife; and during Chapel services he read whatever letters and documents there were on the Scrotum’s desk. He possessed a remarkable memory: the boys of the past remained as vividly with him as the faces of those he daily observed from behind the dining hall’s high table. Loving the school as nobody else did, he never left it and was inordinately proud both of his servant status and his loyalty.

‘Yes,’ I said in answer to his question. ‘That’s what I hope to do.’ In the evenings you would wait for me at the mill and in the different seasons we would walk together back to the house, up through the birch wood and down the sloping pasture. Fukes was polishing the glass globe of a lamp, so intent on his work that I didn’t have to avoid his eye when I said:

‘I have an English cousin I’ve fallen in love with.’

His head, spiky with short grey hairs, slightly nodded. The polishing of the glass continued.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said, ‘about all that.’

Fukes smiled, and no longer looked like a funeral mute. He mentioned other boys who had sat in his pantry with him, unburdening themselves of this and that. He told me not to be dismal.

‘Write that girl a letter,’ he suggested. ‘Enquire how she’s keeping for herself.’

‘D’you think so, Fukes?’

‘Why wouldn’t you write her a letter? What harm would it do?’

No harm at all, I thought as I lay awake that night, remembering your blue dress and your straw hat with a rose on it.
Dear Marianne,
I composed,
I hope you had a safe journey back to England. Nothing has changed much here. Ring has developed a business sense where the selling of lemonade is concerned.
I wondered if it would interest you to learn about the public thrashing of Lout MacCarthy or the theft of the communion wine.
Is Agnes Brontenby still tiresome?
I planned to ask, but when the next day came I did not write the letter.

‘Oh now, that’s foolish.’ Fukes shook his spiky head in disappointment. No girl could be put out by a simple letter, he said.

‘Yes, I know.’

Patiently he listened while I told him how we had walked about Cork and of our visit to Kilneagh. I described you in greater detail than I had to Ring and de Courcy, I explained that you lived near the house my great-grandmother had come from. I mentioned the rose and your straw hat. I told him your name.

Fukes punctuated each statement I made with a nod, devouring everything. It sometimes seemed as if he derived what nourishment he needed from such confidences, and from his eavesdroppings. Gossip hung like dust in his pantry.

‘Your father would be delighted,’ he said at length, and I thought that somehow that might be so.

A Christmas card came from your mother. There was a stagecoach and snow on it, with sprigs of holly around the edge. I thought of you being in the room when your mother wrote her greeting in it and wondered if for a moment you’d thought of me. I lay down on the bed you’d slept in, pressing my face into the pillow even though the pillowslip had ages ago been washed and ironed.

For my last two terms at school you continued to possess me. Fukes asked me again if I’d written to you and I lied and said I had, ashamed of my timidity. ‘Good man yourself,’ he said approvingly and added that one day he’d Open the
Irish Times
and read of our engagement.

‘I am always here,’ promised the Scrotum, a slippery smile emerging from the red bag of his face. ‘I always like to see an old boy.’ I had never, during all my time at the school, been addressed by his blue-stockinged wife, but she spoke to me now, vaguely wishing me well. ‘In life,’ she added, and turned to the next boy in the line which had formed to shake hands and say good-bye. The hand of the good-hearted chaplain was shaken also, and Hopeless Gibbon’s and old Dove-White’s.

‘I’m in love with my cousin,’ I said, at last confessing to Ring and de Courcy the truth that had come to matter more than anything else to me. They knew, they said.

‘Yes, I realize you have to return there,’ my mother said the night before I set out to begin my career at the mill. ‘Of course I understand that, Willie.’

A long time had passed since the sunny day of our lunch in the Victoria Hotel, and we had never done anything like that since. We had not once sat in the garden as I had planned. We had never gone for a walk together, as you and I so often had.

‘I’ll be back here at the weekends,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back on the train every Friday.’

‘You are good to me, Willie.’

Another Paddy bottle stood uncorked on her bedside table, her glass was half full. Her white nightdress was unbuttoned, the smell of whiskey was pungent in the room.

‘What was that man’s name? Rudkin, was it?’

She made a noise, a laugh perhaps, or a whimper. Her eyes did not appear to focus and when she spoke she did not directly address me. Nobody had trusted Doyle, she said.

‘Mr Lanigan says no provision has been made for the rebuilding of the house. Until I am twenty-one I cannot authorize it.’

‘The house, Willie?’

‘Kilneagh. I want to rebuild it.’

‘Ah, dear Kilneagh …’ She reached for her glass and drank a little. ‘Tins of peaches on the shelves, and newspaper in sheaves for wrapping. Cabbages and cauliflowers, probably even flowers—sweet-peas and bunches of asters. Children come into his shop and he may even give them toffee-apples for nothing.’

I could not help myself. My cheeks and forehead burned with the crossness I felt. I raised my voice.

‘Do you have to drink like this? For God’s sake, why can you not forget? Why can’t you even try?’

The moment after I had spoken it was hard to believe I had addressed her so, and yet I was glad I had. But she, as if I had spoken mildly, replied:

‘I sometimes have a toothache, Willie. I do really dislike the taste of this horrid whiskey, dear.’

I left her there, her voice still feebly rambling. I thought I maybe hated her. Why could I not tell her about my love for you? Why could I tell a butler and not her? Why had she never been a help to me? ‘Marianne?’ she would have said. ‘Now, who is Marianne?’

The following morning I caught the train to Fermoy. A room had been prepared for me in the orchard wing and as the first few days went by I gradually became used to the strangeness and familiarity of Kilneagh. At the same slow pace I began to learn a miller’s trade, every detail meticulously explained by Mr Derenzy. I found the work agreeable enough, but no day ever passed during which I did not long that you might be here with me, and one evening I confided my passion to Father Kilgarriff. It was then, as if he had waited for this suitable moment, that he told me about his unfrocking.

He had not loved the convent girl who had been sent to Chicago: it was she who had loved him. Unaware of that, he’d made a friend of her since she, more than anyone else in his Co. Limerick parish, shared his pacifist opinions. God’s greatest gift, he preached, was the life He entrusted to us: neither war nor revolution could be just since both permitted violence and casual death. The girl’s father, who vehemently detested the imperialism that had ruled in our island for so long, was a man of some note in the locality and retorted harshly to the discovery of his daughter’s love of a priest whom he regarded as heretical. Charges were trumped up, the girl dispatched, the priest brought low. ‘Ah well, it’s over now,’ was Father Kilgarriff’s single wry comment.

But I wondered if it was. I wondered if the girl was still infatuated in Chicago and I wondered if I myself would end up lonely and infatuated also. I climbed to the top of Haunt Hill, from where there was a view for many miles around, the curling river, the cottages of Lough spread out below, in the greater distance the town of Fermoy. Father Kilgarriff’s peace reigned at last in Ireland; I was back at Kilneagh;
Wm Quinton
it said on the sacks and the lorries, my name and my father’s and my grandfather’s. Yet none of it was any good unless I could share it with you.

‘I’d like to see Kilneagh again,’ Josephine had said, and came one Friday so that we might travel back together on the evening train. We walked together in the garden and the ruins, and in the kitchen of the orchard wing she was shy. She sat on the edge of a chair sipping at a cup of tea while Aunt Fitzeustace worriedly questioned her about my mother, and Aunt Pansy offered currant scones around. Father Kilgarriff said it was great to see her again. That day, for the first time, I noticed a tired look about him, as well as the thinness that hadn’t been there in the past. Mr Derenzy had told me he suffered sometimes from the bullet wounds in his chest.

Afterwards, making our way to the mill, Josephine said:

‘It’s all right here now, Willie.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Thanks be to God.’

She blessed herself. One hand slipped into a pocket of her coat and I knew she was fingering the beads of her rosary. ‘God’s good, Willie,’ she said.

In the mill-yard Johnny Lacy greeted her, smiling, saying she was looking tip-top. I went to the office for a moment and after that we returned to the orchard wing and were driven back to Lough in my aunts’ trap. Josephine didn’t say much and I could tell that her meeting with Johnny Lacy had been as ordinary as she had anticipated. We sat for a while in the kitchen of Sweeney’s public house and Mrs Sweeney gave us tea. There was a warm smell of bacon fat and chicken meal, and before we left to catch the train in Fermoy Johnny Lacy’s wife brought in her children for Josephine to see. ’It’s great,’ Mrs Sweeney said. ‘It’s great you’re back with us, Willie.’

It was nice that Josephine could be there like that, in the kitchen with those children and their mother, and that she could smile and laugh with them. I felt she had come back in order to forgive Johnny Lacy, or at least to reassure him that she was content. On the train I told her how I felt about you. She listened and then she said:

‘Don’t lose it, Willie.’

‘Lose it?’

‘The love you have. It’s like a gift, loving someone.’

‘But I don’t know if Marianne even likes me. It’s no good if she doesn’t.’

‘Oh, of course she does. Write to her, Willie. Please now.’

She spoke urgently and for a moment placed her hand on my arm. For all her contentment in the presence of Johnny Lacy and her smiles for his wife and children, there had been some sadness that had not reached the surface, a private, lonely sadness that made me think again of the girl banished to Chicago.

‘Promise me, Willie.’

And so I promised. I would write that very night; I would write simply and plainly, telling you I loved you. If you did not care for me I would understand, and bear as best I could the disappointment.

‘But she
is
fond of you, Willie. I could have told you that ages ago.’

We left the subject then, and Josephine spoke of my mother. Her voice was quiet and concerned, so sympathetic that I felt ashamed of my resentment: it was my mother who had been the victim among the three survivors of Kilneagh, and if whiskey helped to blunt the hurt it would seem to have a purpose. My mother had made an effort that Josephine had appreciated and I had not: it couldn’t have been easy to put on her red and black dress and walk with me down to the city, a smile clenched into place.

We entered the house and before the lamps were lit I had resolved that I would tell her about you, and how I had at last plucked up the courage to write to you. I would not mind when she could not remember who you were; I would tell her again in the morning before she’d had too much to drink. I called to her on the stairs, but in the moment before I entered her bedroom I knew that everything was different. I knew that my mother was dead.

I

In Dorset in 1983, in Woodcombe Rectory, a bright young clergyman goes about his duties. For him the times are alien, as they are for the family at Woodcombe Park, obliged to lay down car parks and pick up litter. But busying himself with a roneoed letter, the clergyman comes to terms with the present, as the family does. He does not even know about the telegram that arrived, two generations ago, in bis pretty rectory on a Saturday afternoon, or how it lay on the hall-stand all afternoon, only a maid being at home until nearly five o’clock.
Mrs Quinton died.
When the shock of the message was arrested a second telegram had to be sent, from Dorset to the town of Masulipatam in India:
Evie has sadly died.
Mourning clothes were aired, remorse and guilt lay heavily on the rectory’s mood.