Fools of Fortune (7 page)

The schoolroom was in Mercier Street, across the city from Windsor Terrace at the top of St Patrick’s Hill, where my mother and I lived with Josephine. I didn’t know why this school had been chosen for me, only that I was still too young to go to the one in the Dublin mountains. Mercier Street Model School had twenty-three pupils, boys and girls, all of them Protestants. It was run by Miss Halliwell.

‘Willie Quinton,’ she said the morning I arrived. ‘Children, this is Willie Quinton.’

Josephine had walked across the city with me, and I thought of her making the journey back, shopping as she had said she would. I wished I was with her. I wished I was sitting in my mother’s bedroom, on the chair she said was specially mine, beside her bed. The children in the schoolroom had the sharp features and the unfriendly eye of town children. A girl had giggled when Miss Halliwell repeated my name.

‘Well, dear,’ Miss Halliwell said now, ‘and which class shall receive you, I wonder? Children, I believe Willie has a scholarly look about him.’

Miss Halliwell was lean, with the look of a wilted cowslip. I had heard my mother describe her as a girl, but she did not seem like a girl to me.

‘Geometry?’ she enquired. ‘Algebra? You’ve made a start with both? And French likewise? So, too, with history and geography? Arithmetic, with Latin, we take for granted.’

She smiled at me, the tired petals of her face reviving for a moment. She was being sympathetic, but in the schoolroom you could tell that this was not her usual mood, that strictly speaking she was cross.

‘I haven’t learned any French,’ I said.

‘Ah.’

She sat at a large table, around which were spread the members of her most senior class. At the smaller tables sat the junior classes, in twos and threes. The walls of the schoolroom were green, covered with shiny maps and charts. I was soon to learn that while the senior class grappled with parsing and analysis or the elaborations of a

French verb, Miss Halliwell’s voice would follow the movements of her cane over a reading chart with pictured objects on it:
A for Apple, B for Boot, C for Cat.

‘That’s a pity about French, dear.’

‘Father Kilgarriff didn’t know French. My mother was going to teach me.’

‘Ah.’

She smiled again. She said:

‘Kilgarriff? That’s a funny name. A priest, Willie?’

Father Kilgarriff had been shot when he’d appeared in’the yard, but unlike O’Neill and Tim Paddy he had survived his wounds. Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy, returning from Youghal as soon as they heard the news, had nursed him in the orchard wing, which was the only part of Kilneagh that had not been destroyed. The gate-lodge had been burnt to the ground, a final gesture as the Black and Tans hastened away in their motor-car.

I didn’t say anything when Miss Halliwell remarked that Kilgarriff was a funny name. Amusement passed from face to face in the schoolroom. There was more giggling.

‘Stop that unpleasant noise,’ she snapped, anger flaming her cheeks. ‘If there is something to snigger at, one of you can put a hand up and say so. A priest, dear?’

‘Father Kilgarriff is a priest.’

‘It’s perhaps not surprising then that he didn’t know French.’

Laughter followed this remark, obedient and noisy, not like the sniggering. Miss Halliwell paused, waiting for silence before she said:

‘The priests of Ireland are not well-travelled. Not renowned for travel, Willie.’

I moved my head, half nodding it. I felt disloyal to Father Kilgarriff. ‘I thought the monks,’ I began, about to repeat what he had told me: that the Irish monks of many centuries ago had travelled endlessly, bringing to a heathen Europe the Christian faith.

Miss Halliwell interrupted by shaking her head. Her eyes glistened, and to my horror I realized that the tears which were gathering had to do with her concern for me. ‘Sit there, my dear,’ she softly commanded, gesturing towards a table at which the children were younger than I was. ‘Poor Willie,’ she whispered later that morning when she inspected a piece of work she had set me. She did not blame me for being backward because a priest had taught me. She did not blame me for anything. Her fingers touched my head in passing, her eyes were lurid with compassion. ‘We’ll do our best,’ she whispered at the end of that day. ‘Together we’ll do our best, dear.’

More than anything I didn’t want sympathy. The scarlet drawing-room no longer existed. Never again would Tim Paddy lean on his brush handle, nor Mrs Flynn set off to mass in her Sunday clothes. Never again would I walk to the mill with my father, up the sloping pasture, down through the birch wood. Yet at night in bed I no longer sobbed before I went to sleep. I could think about my father and my sisters without involuntarily tearing at the palm of one hand with the fingernails of the other. I could even imagine Geraldine and Deirdre in the heaven I had heard so much about, a territory that remained vague even though I now had greater reason to wonder about it. I imagined Mrs Flynn and Tim Paddy and O’Neill there also, and of course my father.

‘Together we’ll do our best, dear,’ Miss Halliwell whispered. ‘I am here to be your friend, Willie.’

My mother and I might have lived in the orchard wing with my aunts and Father Kilgarriff, but my mother had said she could not. Father Kilgarriff looked after the cows on his own now. My mother’s horse and the ponies had been given away. My father’s labradors had been shot that night with the other dogs.

‘I’m really quite all right, Miss Halliwell.’

‘Dear Willie, of course you are.’

After that first day I made the journey on my own from the house in Windsor Terrace to Mercier Street Model, and back again each afternoon. The city had been badly damaged in the fighting; half of Patrick Street was gone, shops and buildings blown apart by the Black and Tans. I hurried by them, always preferring the quays and docks. Often I stopped to watch the cargo ships unloading, wondering what it would be like to be a seaman. I wandered slowly home by roundabout routes, past the warehouses of Tedcastle, McCormick and Company, past Sutton’s Mills. I learnt the names of the streets: Anglesea Street, where the drunk woman stormed abuse at her reflection in a shop window, Cove Street, where the burnt-down laundry was, Lavitt’s Quay and Fapp’s Quay and Kyrl’s Quay.

Often I found myself miles out of my way, lost in the slums. Other children shouted at me, ragged creatures, dirty and barefooted. Shawled women begged, but I had nothing to give them. I watched pitch and toss being played, and once a man who trailed a greyhound on a string told me this animal could race faster than any dog in Ireland. ‘Blarney Boy’s the name we’ve given him. You’ll tell people yet, son, you saw Blarney Boy on the streets of Cork.’ But I never did.

During that time peace came hesitantly to Ireland. The fighting which had succeeded the revolution eventually ceased; Michael Collins was dead, killed in an ambush during that civil war. Josephine had read me a piece from the
Cork Examiner
which stated that a treaty with England recognized the sovereign state of twenty-six Irish counties. The red letter-boxes were painted green; statues of imperial figures were removed; the Irish language was to be revived. My mother mentioned none of it, having lost all interest in matters of that kind.

‘A grand time to be growing up,’ an old man assured me as I lingered one afternoon in Merchant’s Quay. ‘I’d rather have your time than mine.’ But the strangeness of the city streets and shops impinged more upon me than the national freedom or the future that was there for growing up in. The city’s weather mattered also, as weather had not before: there was wind and cold to journey back and forth through, or dozy, pleasant heat. On wet days the rainwater gushed like a torrent down St Patrick’s Hill, tumbling over the steps in the pavement, overflowing from the gutters. Lilac fluttered in spring, tumbling over the red stone walls. ‘Then what’s your name?’ wizened Mrs Hayes asked me the first time I entered her shop at the corner of Rathbone Place, sent by Josephine for rashers and a Bermaline loaf. This shop was the nearest one to us, cramped and busy, the goods it sold piled up in a jumble, sawdust on the floor. Flies settled on the wire-mesh covers that protected butter and cheese, wasps buzzed near the sticky strips of paper that hung from the ceiling. A brown cat slept on the counter, curled in close to itself, never moving. ‘Young Hayes is wanted,’ Josephine had enigmatically remarked, and in time he returned from wherever he had been, a bespectacled young man in a brown shop-coat like his mother’s, with a cap pulled low on his forehead. ‘The Amnesty,’ Josephine said, but I wasn’t curious about what that meant.

My sisters would have delighted in Mrs Hayes’s shop, in Mrs Hayes herself and in her son. They would have sucked their cheeks in and imitated the particular way the old woman picked at the cheese when she was cutting it, and the way her son looked at you intently through his cracked, wire-rimmed glasses. I could never prevent myself from thinking about my sisters when I entered the shop, and I continued to miss them because I made no friends in Mercier Street. I was not disliked, but Miss Halliwell’s excessive pitying of me, and the allowances she subsequently made for my shortcomings, generated in my classmates a degree of suspicion and unease. ‘Adamant?’ she said in a spelling lesson and the smile I dreaded crept into her faded countenance. The word she uttered dangled in front of me, yet in my confusion I could not distinguish the letters that formed its composition.

‘I didn’t know we had to learn that one,’ I stammered back, knowing that already I had been forgiven.

‘It’s one of the ten, dear.’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Halliwell.’

‘Spell
oyster,
Willie. Was oyster one of the words you learnt?’

I spelt the word incorrectly, and Miss Halliwell came to the table where I sat and put her hand on my head. I could feel her fingers caressing my hair. They touched my ear and then the nape of my neck. ‘O-y-s-t-e-r.’ Slowly, drawing her lips back and rounding them about each letter, she spelt the word and I repeated what she had said. I was aware of an intimacy in all this and did not care for it, the twin formation of our lips, the twin sounds following one another.

She returned to her table. A boy called Elmer Dunne had a habit of dropping his pencil and then poking about on the floor looking for it. In the playground he would report that he had managed to catch a glimpse of Miss Halliwell’s underclothes and the flesh at the top of her stockings. ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’ he would moan, and then describe how, given a chance, he would unbutton her long brown cardigan and slowly remove her long brown skirt.

‘Now try again, dear,’ she said.

‘O-y-s-t-e-r.’

‘Very good, Willie.’

I spelt other words too, my face like red-hot coal, and then laughter gurgled in the schoolroom because Elmer Dunne had appeared from beneath the table, rolling his eyes to indicate his indelicate desires. Savagely Miss Halliwell scolded the miscreants, among whom I longed to be. I longed to shout out what Elmer Dunne wanted to do to her lean body, to linger over each obscenity.

‘You are slow and ignorant,’ she furiously upbraided the others. ‘Poor Willie has been taught by an uncouth country priest and already he is passing you by. You will end up behind the counters of low-class Catholic shops, while Willie makes good his progress.’

Every day her sympathy lingered with me, long after I’d left the schoolroom. It accompanied me on my travels about the city and was still there when I examined the goods in the window of the pawnbroker’s shop at the bottom of St Patrick’s Hill: old racing binoculars and umbrellas, knives and forks and crockery, occasionally a pair of boots. While it hovered around me I would begin the steep ascent to Windsor Terrace, to our narrow house painted a shade of grey, tightly pressed between two others.

I couldn’t tell my mother about the awfulness of the schoolroom because it would be upsetting, and the doctor who sometimes came to see her said that upsets should be avoided. When I sat with her in her bedroom I told her instead about the ships that were docked at the quays or how I’d seen a milk-cart toppling over on its side when its horse slipped on an icy street. I described the people I’d noticed, the tramps and drunks and foreign seamen, anyone who had appeared to be exotic. I brought her reports of actors and singers I had imagined in the Opera House, culling their names from the play-bills that decorated the city’s hoardings: I made up quite a lot in order to keep our conversations going.

She listened vaguely, occasionally making the effort to smile. The letters which came from India, from my English grandparents, remained unopened in her bedroom, as did the letters from Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy. ‘Write to your aunts,’ she commanded in the same vague way. ‘Tell them you are well. But add please that I am not quite up to visitors yet.’ She did not venture out of the house for many weeks on end and then would very slowly make her way down the hill to the city, sitting for an hour or so in the Victoria Hotel. ‘I thought it cold today,’ she’d say. ‘The first day it’s warm again I’ll have another walk.’

On several occasions I tried to explain to Josephine about Miss

Halliwell’s disturbing sentiments. But it wasn’t easy to conjure up the atmosphere of the schoolroom and I felt shy of revealing that Miss Halliwell stroked the nape of my neck or that Elmer Dunne said Miss Halliwell had a passion for me. He was not teasing or mocking me in any way, but simply stating what he believed to be the truth. ‘It’s not that at all,’ I protested, walking one day along the quayside with him. ‘It’s just that she’s sorry for me. I wish she wasn’t.’ But Elmer Dunne laughed, and spoke again of unbuttoning our teacher’s clothes.

‘Oh, Willie, she’s only being kind,’ Josephine said in the kitchen when finally I presented her with an approximation of my worry. I pretended to accept that opinion, for as soon as I’d brought the subject up I didn’t wish to pursue it. The kitchen was small, but I liked its cosy warmth and the smell of Brasso when Josephine laid out for cleaning the brass pieces that had come from Kilneagh. When I finished my homework she would talk about her childhood in Fermoy, and it was then that she told me about her first days at Kilneagh and how strange its world had seemed to her—as strange as the world of the city now was to me. Sometimes the bell in the passage would jangle and she would remain with my mother for an hour or so while I sat alone, close to the heat of the range. Now and again I wandered into the dank sitting-room or dining-room, both of them noticeably narrow, as everything about the house was. There was room for only one person at a time on the stairs, and you had to wait on a half-landing in order to permit someone else to pass. Each of these half-landings had a long rectangular window, the bottom half of which comprised a pattern of green and red panes in a variety of shapes. The two main landings had similar windows, though rather larger, and the patterned motif was repeated on either side of the hall door and in the hall door itself, through which sunlight cast coloured beams, red tinged with green and green with red. Incongruous on the stairway walls were the gilt-framed canvases that had been saved from the fire. In the narrow sitting-room and dining-room familiar furniture loomed awkwardly now, and on the landing outside my mother’s room the tall oak cupboard that had held my sisters’ dolls in the nursery took up almost all the space there was. I opened it once and saw what appeared to be a hundred maps of Ireland: the trade-mark of Paddy Whiskey on a mass of labels, the bottles arrayed like an army on the shelves.