Fools of Fortune (26 page)

‘I’m not too late, Sister?’

‘No, you’re not too late.’

Josephine was in a dusky room with rosary beads on the table close to her. She was propped up on pillows with her eyes closed, a crucifix on the wall above her. A young nun sat by her bed.

‘I’ll leave you with Sister Power,’ the nun who’d brought me whispered, and Sister Power rose from the bedside. Without making a sound except for the rustle of her habit she crossed the room to where I was standing and led me out into the corridor again. We stood a foot or two from the door, speaking in murmurs.

‘She was brought in a week ago,’ she said. ‘They thought at St Fina’s she might have pneumonia and would need our care.’

‘And has she?’

‘No, just a little cold. But she’s sinking all the time. I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to ask you to do something. It could upset her when she wakes up if you smell of drink. I’m going to ask you to take a mouth-wash.’

She returned to her duty at the bedside, and I accompanied another nun to a small room where medicines were kept. ‘Don’t mind,’ she said, as if what was happening was quite usual.

I washed my mouth out and spat into a basin, and then drank some water. When Josephine came into the dining-room at Kilneagh to clear away the dinner dishes no one stopped talking, no matter what was being said. First thing every morning she lit the range. After that there was the fire in the drawing-room and then the one in the breakfast-room.

‘Thank you,’ the nun said, and led me back to where Josephine was propped up. I sat down and for the first time I examined her face. All the prettiness had gone. It was a thin face, thinner and more wrinkled than my own, lifeless because her eyes were still closed. The grey hair was scanty, brown blotches marked the skin of the forehead. But on the white candlewick bedspread her hands were not as I remembered them: the skin was marked with elderly freckles also, but the rawness caused by work had gone.

‘Well,’ she said, her eyes abruptly opening. ‘Well.’

Behind a glaze of weariness the same softness lurked in the depths of them. Her fingers twitched on the candlewick, her lips slightly parted.

‘You have a visitor, Josephine.’

The eyes closed, and after a moment opened again. They stared ahead of her, between the nun and myself, at the blank wall opposite her bed.

‘A visitor,’ Sister Power repeated, making her nun’s gesture in my direction.

‘Kilneagh,’ Josephine said. Tears oozed from the corners of her eyes. ‘Dear Mary, console them,’ she whispered.

Sister Power placed the rosary beads between the bent fingers, but Josephine didn’t notice. ‘Console them everywhere,’ she said. ‘Console them.’

Her eyes closed again.

‘She’s asleep,’ Sister Power said.

She pressed a bell beside the bed and after a minute or so another nun came in. Sister Power asked her to take her place by the bedside and then nodded to me. I followed her down the corridor to an office that had another crucifix in it, small and black, hanging between two windows. There was a picture of the Sacred Heart as well, and a plaster image of the Virgin.

‘I’m going to have some coffee myself,’ Sister Power said, plugging in an electric kettle. ‘I hope we did right with that telegram?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Would you like some coffee yourself?’

‘Yes, I would please.’

She opened a cupboard and took a tin containing biscuits from it. She placed blue cups and saucers on the desk, among papers and wire trays. She found sugar and a tin of instant milk in the cupboard also.

‘We didn’t know to send for you or not. She mentioned you repeatedly one day, all day long, and then they discovered your address from the solicitors. Italy must be lovely, is it?’

‘I’m fond of it.’

‘I don’t think she was unhappy at St Fina’s. They speak of her with great affection. They ring up every day now that she’s here.’

‘St Fina’s?’

‘The place she worked. An institution for old nuns.’

The kettle boiled. In silence Sister Power made the instant coffee. She didn’t seem to mind these silences that occurred. She said:

‘She hardly ever ceased to pray towards the end. She asks the same thing all the time: that the survivors may be comforted in their mourning. She requests God’s word in Ireland.’

I did not say anything. I was offered another biscuit but did not accept one. Sister Power rose and I followed her back to the room where the old woman was dying.

‘Josephine,’ I said, as softly as I could.

‘ “Bring out a drink to those men,” your father said. He never forgot the needs of anyone.’

‘Yes, he was kind.’

‘ “I want a blackness,” your mother said. All the wallpaper I put up for her she didn’t care about. The new house meant nothing to her.’

Her eyes closed and opened at once again. ‘Imelda,’ she said. ‘The Blessed Imelda.’ She died just after she spoke, the rosary beads idle in her hands.

A stout grey-haired priest murmured the burial words with a display of feeling, and I guessed he must have known Josephine and have felt affection for her humility and her piety. Nuns from St Fina’s stood in a bunch, their lips moving in a whisper when they were required to. As soon as the little crowd eventually began to disperse two gravediggers appeared with shovels.

‘Excuse me,’ the priest said, behind me somewhere. I turned and waited for him. ‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘You’ve come from Italy.’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s at peace now.’

‘Yes, she is.’

He walked with me. The wind blew his surplice about. It was bitterly cold that day.

‘You could safely remain in Ireland, sir. Enough years have passed.’

‘Is that why she sent for me?’

‘No one would bother with you now. If you’ll forgive me, Mr Quinton, for saying that.’

I returned to Italy, to my world of Ghirlandaio, to my Canary roses and my irises, to the saints that Italy honours so: the Blessed Imelda of Bologna whom Josephine mentioned, whose day my daughter shared; St Clare who saved the city of Assisi; St Catherine who cut her hair off so that no one would wish to marry her. St Crispin was a shoemaker. St Paul made tents. A spring gushed in the desert when St Euthymius prayed. The dead body of St Zenobius revived a withered tree. Late in my life I had grown to admire the saints.

At the railway station in Florence a mass of azaleas bloomed in huge terracotta pots, marvellous elaborations of brilliant flowers, reds and yellows and creams, elegantly grouped: I travelled by way of Florence especially to see them. ‘If you study the lives of the saints,’ the nun in the hospital had said after Josephine had mentioned the Blessed Imelda, ‘you’ll find that it is horror and tragedy that make them what they are. Reflecting the life of Our Lord.’ Josephine was a go-between, a servant even as she died. At Kilneagh my daughter was insane, yet Josephine had wished me to return: in Ireland it happens sometimes that the insane are taken to be saints of a kind. Legends in Ireland are born almost every day.

April 4th 1971

In the cemetery he did not see me, nor even look around for me. Have all of them been right: should I have years ago returned to Dorset, to that pretty town? Have I been nonsensical and silly, all this talk about a battlefield continuing?

Time stopped instead. The child, the priest, the faces of the aunts, the hands of the clock recording time that has no meaning. Days, hours, months, years: a jumble while I wait.

In the darkness I come downstairs, I cannot sleep. The letters we might have written would not communicate: I understand, of course I understand.

January 12th 1976

I close my eyes and I am safe again in Woodcombe Rectory. A tiredness floats away from me, and then returns.

She might be married and have children. She might, somewhere in Wiltshire or Somerset, in London or Southampton, be a doctor’s wife or an architecfs wife. She might be a doctor or an architect herself. How very strange that seems!

June 22nd 1979

Father Kilgarriff died today, no trouble in his great old age. He was right when he said that there’s not much left in a life when murder has been committed. That moment when I guessed the truth in Mr Lanigan’s office; that moment when she opened the secret drawer; that moment when he stood at his mothers bedroom door and saw her dead. After each brief moment there was as little chance for any one of us as there was for Kilneagh after the soldiers’ wrath. Truncated lives, creatures of the shadows. Fools of fortune, as his father would have said; ghosts we became.

August 6th 1982

Today he has returned.

Murmuring to one another, the elderly couple rise and make their way outside, into the warmth of an autumn mid-day. Her tininess is wizened by old age. Pleasanter to be here, he reflects, than seeing out his days in the Ospedale Geriatrico. Blotches freckle his forehead, matching in colour the tweed of his suit. The skin of his hairless head feels tight, like a shell: limping old crab, he calls himself, since his walk is assisted by a gold-capped cane. There is a slight, anchor-shaped scar near his right cheek-bone, a reminder of Puntarenas, one of the many towns where he has lived. A tram there knocked him down in 1942: he has had the scar since.

They walk beneath the mulberry trees. A favourite wonder is again mulled over: that anxiety in India should have brought them together. Fingers touch. One hand grasps another, awkwardly in elderliness. She tells of the dream she had once, when so many people from their lives congregated in sunshine on a lawn. They wonder if Mavis still has rashes, if Cynthia is still alive. They wonder about Ring and de Courcy and Agnes Brontenby. Somewhere he’d heard that de Courcy had not become an actor but had taken over a laundry in Singapore. Could it be true, the rumour there was, that Miss Halliwell had married a man in a bank and had blossomed in contentment?

They say the mulberries should soon be picked, a bumper crop this year. Odd that the summer’s drought should have urged the fruit on so.

They do not speak of other matters.

Imelda does not speak at all, nor ever wishes to. Her smooth blonde hair has a burnished look where the sunlight catches it; in her middle age she is both elegant and beautiful, her face meticulously made up. She walks by the river and the derelict mill. She imagines the bones of Father Kilgarriff resting gently in the cemetery, and the bones of the Quintons in the Protestant churchyard, at the other end of the village. The children of the fire flank their father, their mother is a yard away. Anna Quinton and her dog-faced husband are close again, Aunt Pansy lies far from Mr Derenzy, Aunt Fitzeustace is alone. The family as it was is reflected in the arrangement of the Quintons’ bones; tranquillity is there, no matter how death came. ‘O Lord, nowlettest Thou Thy servant,’ intones the voice on Sundays and it is pleasant then in the musty church, no matter what the season.

Imelda is gifted, so the local people say, and bring the afflicted to her. A woman has been rid of dementia, a man cured of a cataract. Her happiness is like a shroud miraculously about her, its source mysterious except to her. No one but Imelda knows that in the scarlet drawing-room wood blazes in the fireplace while the man of the brass log-box reaches behind him for the hand of the serving girl. Within globes like onions, lights dimly gleam, and carved on the marble of the mantelpiece the clustered leaves are as delicate as the flicker of the flames. No one knows that she is happiest of all when she stands in the centre of the Chinese carpet, able to see in the same moment the garden and the furniture of the room, and to sense that yet another evening is full of the linnet’s wings.

They sit, all three of them, in the kitchen of the orchard wing. A meal has been cooked, a stew of chicken and vegetables which the local people brought. In a day or two the local people will come again with groceries. Even Teresa Shea, married to Driscoll of the shop, sees to it that milk for the Quintons is not forgotten.

‘We cannot wait beyond tomorrow,’ he says. ‘We must pick the mulberries tomorrow.’

He smiles the smile of the photograph, and in the band of her straw hat the girl he loves wears an artificial rose. They are aware that they exist so in the idyll of their daughter’s crazy thought. They are aware that there is a miracle in this end, as remarkable as the Host which hung above the head of the child in Bologna. They are grateful for what they have been allowed, and for the mercy of their daughter’s quiet world, in which there is no ugliness.

‘No, we must not wait beyond tomorrow,’ he repeats, and Imelda listens while there is talk of how chip baskets will be put ready tonight, and a chair to stand on brought to the orchard in the early morning. Almost a week it will take to pick the fruit, longer if rain interrupts.