Fools of Fortune (22 page)

‘I did not read of what occurred,’ I said to Mr Lanigan, surprising him with an interruption unrelated to what he was saying. ‘Because of course I was in Switzerland.’

He nodded slowly, his flow of words abruptly halted, not taken up again. In the rectory that occurrence would have been read about in the newspaper, my father shaking his head over the mystery of it, my mother failing to connect one name with another. ‘Rudkin,’ you had said, and had described the man, a hand cupped round the cigarette he lit, his genial salute as he stood at the street corner.

I

Beside the ruins a picnic was spread out on a tablecloth. There were Marmite sandwiches and strawberry-and-cream cake and little iced scones decorated with hundreds and thousands. A fire had been made to boil the tea kettle, and there was milk in a corked bottle that had to be kept in the shade. There was lemonade which Imelda had helped Father Kilgarriff to make from yellow crystals that morning. Her mother wore her new flowery dress. It was Imelda’s ninth birthday.

Aunt Fitzeustace had given her a dragon brooch with a broken pin, which had been in the Quinton family for donkey’s years, so she said; and Aunt Pansy had given her two bars of Fry’s chocolate, each composed of brightly coloured creams of different flavours. Mr Derenzy, who had walked over to the ruins from his office in the mill, had given her sixpence, and Father Kilgarriff a green wooden top.

When the picnic was over the remains of the cake and the iced scones were left on the tablecloth and everyone stood around, endeavouring to fly the kite that had been the gift of Imelda’s mother. It was Father Kilgarriff who eventually got it to catch in the wind, running with it above his head while Aunt Pansy paid out the string from the short stick it was wound around. The red and blue triangle rose high above the trees and the ruins, swooping and diving in the sky while Father Kilgarriff showed Imelda how to jerk the string and keep it taut. The pull of the wind was like something alive between her fingers.

Two of the spaniels lazed on the grass, displaying no interest in the excitement engendered by the flying of the kite. The other dogs had preferred to remain in the cool of the old dairy. Strictly speaking, there had been no need to make a fire to boil the kettle on since the teapot could easily have been carried from the orchard wing, but Imelda had specially asked for it. Picnics always had fires, she’d said, and milk in a corked bottle instead of a milk jug. No one had disagreed.

In a whispering, private voice Mr Derenzy spoke to Aunt Pansy about some trouble he was experiencing with the new young traveller from Midleton Sacks. ‘Insolent,’ he reported. ‘And soil enough behind his fingernails to grow potatoes in.’ Aunt Fitzeustace delved into her commodious handbag, searching for her cigarettes.

The kite lost height. The string that had been pulling so excitingly through Imelda’s grasp slackened and went limp. Father Kilgarriff took the white stick from Aunt Pansy and as swiftly as he could wound the string on to it. He tried to jerk the kite this way and that, but it wouldn’t obey him. It drooped and plunged. It fell into a tree.

‘Will it be broken?’ Imelda asked. ‘It’s only made of little rods.’

‘Ah, no, no.’

Nor was it. When Father Kilgarriff had coaxed it down they could find no damage of any kind, and when it flew again it soared so far away that soon it was hardly even a dot in the sky. Mr Derenzy and Aunt Pansy took a turn at guiding it and feeling the tug of the wind through the string, and then Imelda’s mother ran with it, her new dress pretty in the sunlight, her hair tidy in its bun. ‘No, I’ll not bother, dear,’ Aunt Fitzeustace said.

‘A kite’s probably the nicest thing a person can have,’ Imelda said when the string was wound up for the last time.

She drank more lemonade and the others drank more tea. She had woken up in the early morning and found the kite, wrapped in brown paper, at the foot of her bed. She hadn’t guessed what it was because it was just a long, bundly parcel, none of the parts put together yet. It was Father Kilgarriff who had done that, after breakfast at the kitchen table.

As she drank her lemonade, Imelda could still see the kite vividly in her mind’s eye, its sudden swirling movement, and the faces gazing up at it, hands slanting as a shade against the sun. The fuzzy grey-red hair of Mr Derenzy, Father Kilgarriff’s anxious eyes as he guided the string, her mother’s tiny figure in her flowery dress: together with the faraway kite and the clear blue sky they made a picture, with Aunt Fitzeustace and the spaniels as still as ornaments.

They sat in the dwindling heat of the day telling stories, which Imelda loved, and it was nearly seven o’clock before everything was gathered up. ‘You’re a big girl now,’ Mr Derenzy said, a form of leave-taking. Mr O’Mara the postman had said the same thing when he’d come into the kitchen with the
Cork Examiner
and the
Irish Times
that morning; and Father Kilgarriff had said it, and so had Philomena, Aunt Fitzeustace’s and Aunt Pansy’s maid, who had forgotten what age she was herself but guessed it might be seventy-eight. ‘It’s nice to be nine,’ Aunt Pansy had said. ‘I remember it was nice being nine.’

Imelda said good-bye to Mr Derenzy and thanked him for coming to her birthday. Then she returned with her mother and the others to the orchard wing, each of them carrying something from the picnic, the spaniels trailing behind. They did not pass through the ruins but made a semicircle around them, arriving in the cobbled yard through the archway at the back. Immediately a commotion began: barking and snarling, the dogs rushed from the old dairy; hens scurried out of their path, geese screeched. Father Kilgarriff beat the dogs off and made his way to the orchard to drive in for milking the household’s single cow. ‘Oh, do behave yourselves!’ cried Aunt Fitzeustace, beating at the dogs also, with her handbag. ‘Do tell them to behave themselves, Pansy.’ Aunt Pansy did as she was bidden, mildly addressing the obstreperous animals, telling them they were terrible.

‘I wish it could have lasted for ever,’ Imelda said a little later in her bedroom, after she’d repeated the Lord’s Prayer to her mother. ‘It was a lovely day.’

‘Yes, it was.’

Her mother bent to kiss her, and then pulled the curtains to, excluding the evening light.

‘It’s nice having a birthday in summertime,’ Imelda said. She searched for other things to say, not wanting the conversation to cease. Sometimes her mother told her about the time before the fire, what the house and the garden had been like then, even though she’d never known it herself. She spoke of a scarlet drawing-room and the scent of sweet-peas wafting into it in summer, and of the portraits of a man and his wife, Quintons who belonged to the past. But tonight her mother did not seem inclined to linger.

‘You go to sleep now,’ she urged, and kissed her again.

Lying with her eyes open, Imelda wondered about the portraits for a moment, trying to imagine them. Then she thought about the two pictures of Venice in the dining-room, the faded green gondola drawn up by a quayside, the domed church near a bridge. It was Aunt Pansy who had told her the boat was called a gondola, and Father Kilgarriff had explained that Venice had canals instead of streets. ‘I’d love to go there,’ she’d said, and he had said who knows, one day she might.

She thought about the bowl of wax fruit on the sideboard, and the silver teapots that did not gleam, the empty decanters, the nutcrackers that were used at Christmas. There were eleven mahogany chairs in the dining-room, with tapestry on them that was as worn as the carpet. The pattern on the wallpaper had disappeared but if you very slightly pushed to one side the little picture by the door you could see that the pattern had been of lilies, bunches tied with ribbon. There was a mirror, too heavy to push, between the windows, and another picture, of a waterfall. There were yellow vases, and plates and candlesticks; the clock on the mantelpiece had always been stopped at five to six. On the staircase wall the pictures were all uninteresting, none of them coloured; the stuffed peacock in the hall should have been thrown out years ago, Aunt Fitzeustace said.

Sleep did not come. ‘Count the dogs,’ was Aunt Fitzeustace’s advice. ‘That’s what I do.’ Dandy and Rifleman, Brigid the blind setter, Ginger and Pickles the spaniels, Murphy the greyhound, Achilles, Clonakilty, Blackguard and Sam and Maisie Jane. Murphy had been left in Lough by the tinkers, the priest who’d owned Maisie Jane had died, Clonakilty was the name of a town. In the past there’d been others: a Pomeranian and a Kerry Blue, terriers called Spratts and Bee, and Ludwig, a three-legged elk-hound. Imelda counted them all, and then the fourteen hens, and the geese.

A week ago, when it had thundered, the dogs had barked in fear but the hens hadn’t seemed to mind, objecting only to the rain. Philomena had sought refuge from the lightning beneath her bed. Father Kilgarriff had attempted to calm the dogs and Aunt Pansy had several times crawled in to where the maid had hidden herself, with cups of milky tea. ‘You go, Imelda,’ she’d said the last time.

It was because of the lingering excitement of her birthday that she could not sleep: at suppertime Aunt Fitzeustace had said she was still excited, and Father Kilgarriff that that was only to be expected. Aunt Pansy had added she’d never been able to sleep herself on Christmas Eve. They would all be in the sitting-room now, a fire lit because no matter what time of year it was Aunt Fitzeustace said the orchard wing was draughty. Aunt Pansy would be pressing flowers, Father Kilgarriff reading. Imelda’s mother, still in her new dress, would be making an entry in her diary, something about the picnic. Aunt Fitzeustace would be smoking cigarette after cigarette and throwing the burnt-out matches into the fire. Sometimes Aunt Fitzeustace read a seed catalogue but usually she just smoked. In the twilight of the gaunt sitting-room the whiskered countenance of William Gladstone would seem grimmer than it did by day, and the ticking of the grandfather clock more solemn.

‘Well then, count the mulberry trees,’ Aunt Fitzeustace had also adjured. ‘Start in the west corner, close your eyes and each tree will come into your mind.’ But Aunt Pansy advised that the best thing was just to think of something nice. Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace were so different that when she was younger Imelda had not guessed they were sisters: it was her mother who had explained to her that they were. Aunt Pansy was forever passing the jam and butter to Father Kilgarriff or to Imelda’s mother or to her sister. She was forever slipping away from the dining-table to pick up Philomena’s frilled cap when it fell to the floor or on to the roast meat on the sideboard. Aunt Fitzeustace never noticed such things. Her lips were tobacco-stained, her dog’s head tie-pin was often upside down, and the grey hair beneath her old tweed hat was untidily grasped together. She cut the grass and manured the shrubs, and had a passion for looking after the motor-car, hosing it down or polishing the upholstery and the paintwork.

‘Thirteen,’ Imelda said, and could not continue. There was the mulberry tree that was shaped like a crow and the lopsided one and the one that never bore fruit. There was the one with its roots coming out of the ground and the one with sour berries; there was the ragged one, like something tattered in the wind, and the nine that were all the same, in a row down the side of the orchard. But it was too difficult to try to see the others.

Imelda Quintan is my name, Ireland is my nation. A burnt house is my dwelling place, Heaven’s my destination.
At the new convent in Lough, a cement building with a white statue of the Virgin Mary in front of it, there had been a craze for the rhyme. She had written it on the inside of the cover of her transcription book, the words sloping neatly on the orange surface. ‘Heaven?’ Teresa Shea had said. ‘You’ll not be going to heaven, Imelda Quinton. How could you?’ Teresa Shea was big and awkward and stupid, well known at the convent for the tartness of her tongue: Sister Mulcahy said to take no notice.

Imelda tried not to think about Teresa Shea. Successfully, she pushed the girl’s face out of her mind and saw instead the kite soaring in the sky and everyone gazing up at it. In time she slept.

She had a nightmare and her mother came to comfort her. It was the same nightmare as always, the children and the flames. ‘Now, now, now, Imelda,’ her mother comforted. ‘Shh now, pet.’

Long multiplication was taught. Imelda found it difficult and was grateful when the bell rang. The lay teacher, Miss Garvey, hooked up her skirt, for in search of relief it was her habit to loosen it at the beginning of each lesson. Chattering began in the classroom, and fell away to nothing as the girls strapped their satchels and left the convent. Eating liquorice outside Mrs Driscoll’s shop when school was over, Teresa Shea remarked:

‘There’s people says you shouldn’t be at the convent, Imelda.’

‘Don’t be unpleasant, Teresa,’ another girl said.

‘I’m not being unpleasant.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be in the convent?’ Imelda asked.

‘Because you’re not a Catholic. Imelda Quinton! God, the nerve of that!’

Teresa Shea laughed and went away, banging her satchel against her legs. The worst thing she’d ever said was to tell little Maevie Cullen that her mother had died on the way to America, where she’d gone to visit an uncle. In fact, it had been true.

‘Take no notice of her,’ the girl who’d called her unpleasant said.

But as Imelda walked through the village the difficulties with her long multiplication homework, which she’d been anticipating all day, were overshadowed by what had been said. She loved going to the convent and hated it when anything spoiled it for her. She had watched the convent being built, and she had always known she would go there because the Protestant school in the village no longer existed. Everyone was kind to her, the Reverend Mother and Sister Mulcahy and Sister Hennessy, Miss Garvey and the lay sisters. During prayers and Catechism she practised the piano or watched Sister Rowan making bread in the kitchen. Nobody except Teresa Shea minded that she was different because she wasn’t a Catholic.