Fools of Fortune Page 11

  ‘That man was horrible,’ Mad Mack said at last, his voice still croaking.

  ‘He was in gaol for a while,’ de Courcy said.

  ‘I’m glad he was in gaol.’

  With his back to us he told us to go away and in the course of that day, humiliated by what had occurred, he left the school. He went without saying good-bye to anyone, and his defection shocked us. For three weeks we were without a mathematics master, before the arrival of a brisk man with a bow-tie whom the Scrotum had found somewhere in Lincolnshire.

  Terms went by. My correspondence with Father Kilgarriff continued; at school there were letters from Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy, and one from my grandparents in India, which requested information about my mother. We have suggested that you and she might like to live with us, here in Masulipatam, the letter ended, far away from what has happened. But in my reply I did not refer to that, knowing that neither my mother nor I would ever wish to live in India. Josephine wrote regularly, my mother not again. In the dormitory after lights-out one night I found myself retailing the story of the tragedy.

  Every Christmas and again at Easter I returned for three weeks to Cork; and for two months every summer. I read Dickens and George Eliot and Emily Bronte; I continued to shop for Josephine in Mrs Hayes’s grocery, reflecting less poignantly now on how my sisters would have appreciated her and her son. I walked about the streets and docks, as I had always done.

  ‘You have never written,’ Miss Halliwell said. ‘You promised to write.’ She had emerged from the Munster Arcade as I passed it and we stood together on the crowded street, the first time we had met since the days of Mercier Street Model.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Halliwell.’

  ‘Years have passed and you have not written. Your mother, Willie—’

  ‘My mother’s all right.’

  ‘You still live in Windsor Terrace, Willie? You haven’t returned to the place near Fermoy?’

  ‘We still live in Cork.’

  ‘Don’t go back there, Willie. Don’t hurt yourself by going back.’

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

  ‘Don’t ever visit it. Have you visited it since that night, Willie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Stay here in Cork. I often think of you, you know.’

  ‘Miss Halliwell—’

  ‘Willie, I would like to give you tea. In Thompson’s perhaps?’

  ‘I have to get back home.’

  I left her standing there, dressed in her familiar brown, the hair still curling from the mole on her chin. In my letters I had continued to apologize to Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace for my mother’s refusal to receive them. Two nights ago I had dreamed of the rhododendrons and the walk to the mill, and had woken up longing to be back at Kilneagh. ‘Willie,’ Miss Halliwell called after me, her voice shrill, strangely floating above the bustle of the street. But I did not turn my head.

  On the day after that meeting I tidied the garden because I hoped to persuade my mother to sit outside. I bought a hoe and cleared the flowerbeds of weeds. I borrowed a lawnmower from the house next door, but the grass was too long and coarse for it. ‘You need a hook,’ the man who’d lent me the lawnmower said, and he came into the garden himself and cut the grass with a scythe. He knew about my mother. By now everyone did.

  ‘Because it’s sunny,’ I said to her. ‘The sun’s good for you.’ She smiled from her bed at me. It was early in the day, but I knew that already she had been drinking whiskey. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said, as if I hadn’t mentioned the garden. ‘Let’s go and have lunch in the Victoria Hotel.’

  She put on her red and black dress, with a hat that perfectly matched it. She wore a cameo brooch at her throat. She carried a parasol, and all the time she smiled.

  ‘You’re quite good-looking, Willie,’ she said, taking my arm on the street.

  We walked in the sunshine down St Patrick’s Hill and over St Patrick’s Bridge. I hadn’t been in the Victoria Hotel since the day we’d had tea there together, but nothing had changed. My mother ordered drinks for us, and after that we had lunch. She touched her sole with a fork, eating very little. She ordered hock and burgundy.

  ‘I love this dining-room,’ she said.

  Increasingly I found it difficult to know what to say to her. On this occasion I repeated a version of some incident or other at school. I spoke of Ring and de Courcy, but she didn’t appear to know who they were.

  ‘That school was what your father wanted,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’ And to prevent her continuing about my father I said: ‘I met Miss Halliwell the other day.’

  ‘Who’s that, dear?’

  ‘Miss Halliwell from the Model School.’

  ‘You will not have to be a teacher, Willie.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t thinking that.’

  I ate. My mother played again with her fish. The silence went on. Then she said:

  ‘I often think about Sergeant Rudkin. Well, I suppose you do too.’

  I shook my head. By now the image of the man, lighting his cigarette at the corner of a street, had faded away almost to nothing.

  ‘He comes into my thoughts,’ my mother said.

  She reached for her glass and drank the white wine that remained in it. A waiter poured her some burgundy. I said:

  ‘I quite liked doing the garden.’

  ‘O’Neill did the garden surely? And Tim Paddy. Poor little Tim Paddy.’

  ‘No, no. The garden here I mean. I’ve cleared it all up.’

  ‘That’s lovely, my dear.’

  ‘Will we have tea in the garden? Josephine has found the deck-chairs.’

  ‘Don’t you think it odd, Willie, that that man perpetually comes into my thoughts? I try to forgive him, Willie. I try to say it was an act of war.’

  ‘It’s best to forget.’

  ‘I try to say he is an ignorant vegetable merchant. I try to say he belongs in the back streets of Liverpool.’ She paused for a moment, sighing a little but smiling also. ‘Your father ordered those deck-chairs from Dublin.’

  ‘We could sit and read. There’s shade from the bay tree if the sun’s too strong.’

  ‘That would be lovely, darling.’

  But when we returned home she went upstairs and took her dress off and got into bed. It was Josephine and I who occupied the deck-chairs.

  ‘D’you think she’ll ever be herself again, Josephine?’

  ‘Ah, of course she will.’

  ‘It’s taking years.’

  ‘Poor soul, Willie.’

  ‘I know.’

  Every day Josephine carried the empty bottles from the bedside table, neither she nor my mother referring to this chore any more than they referred to the weekly arrival of the wine-merchant’s delivery man.

  ‘Don’t you ever get lonesome, Josephine?’

  ‘No, of course I don’t.’

  She had a friend whom she had met one evening years ago at Women’s Confraternity, who came now and again to the kitchen. There was also the woman next door, the wife of the man who’d helped me with the grass, and Mrs Hayes of the shop. Josephine conversed with these women and presumably discussed with them my mother’s state. ‘And how’s your mother, Willie?’ Mrs Hayes used always to enquire while she made up the grocery order, and I imagined Josephine’s priest enquiring in the same way. Prayers might even have been said for my mother, a plea made for some quality to return to her which would rescue from their continuing decay her beauty and her elegance.

  ‘Don’t you ever go back to see your parents, Josephine?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a long way to Fermoy.’

  Her fingers smoothed the frill of her apron, a curl of her fair hair crept from beneath her cap. We didn’t mention Johnny Lacy or the girl from Sweeney’s public house whom he’d married. We didn’t mention what might have been or what would be. After I’d left school I presumed I would five with my aunts and Father Kilgarriff in the orchard wing, but my mother would never be
able to do that. My mother was not going to recover, and somehow I guessed that Josephine would never leave her now.

  We sat for a while longer in the sunshine, and when we returned to the house we found that the afternoon post had come. There was a letter with the blue head of the English King on it, which I brought up to my mother, wondering if she would open it.

  ‘They wish to come here,’ she said the next morning. ‘Your aunt and your cousin Marianne.’

  ‘To visit us?’

  ‘Now, why ever do they wish to come to Godforsaken Ireland? Write to my sister, Willie, and say we are not ready for visitors yet.’

  But I wrote instead that the visit which had been proposed might do my mother good. Well, you know, of course, about that letter.

  6

  Two rooms, never before used, were prepared for your arrival. A man came to freshen them up with paint and to replace some wallpaper. Both chimneys were swept in case the August weather turned chilly, and in the kitchen I helped Josephine to air the mattresses by placing them near the range.

  ‘So you are Willie!’ your mother cried, stepping down the gangway from the steamer. ‘Oh, Willie, it’s so very nice for us to meet you!’

  Her cream-coloured blouse was buttoned all the way up to where her chins began, each button a tiny pearl. ‘Such a treat for us to visit you in Ireland!’ she exclaimed in that same excited manner, and you reddened when she went on about Woodcombe Rectory and the tastes and aspirations of your father, and how she had been urged to visit my mother by my grandparents in India, who were, of course, your grandparents also. ‘Oh, most awfully anxious they are,’ your mother said. ‘Poor dears.’ You wore a straw hat with a pink rose in its band. Your dress was blue, the rose was artificial. Tiny you seemed, dwarfed by your mother’s plumpness.

  That summer, that last week of July and all of August, three days of September: I have loved that summer all my life. Your dark brown eyes, darker than my mother’s, your oval face, your smile that brought a dimple to one cheek, your long brown hair, soft as a mist it seemed. I stole glances at you while we stood near Mrs Hayes’s shop and looked down at the city, at spires and roofs and water, at the distant green hills that had always reminded me of Kilneagh. ‘The bells of Shandon,’ I explained when those bells rang out. I showed you the Opera House and Mercier Street Model School, the Turkish delight shop and the woollen goods factory where Elmer Dunne was now a clerk’s assistant. We strolled by the river and the railway track, we watched the cargo boats from St

  Patrick’s Bridge. Further and further from the city we walked, and all the time I wanted to take your hand. Across the estuary, among the leafy trees, the windows of Montenotte stared inquisitively down at us. ‘How nice your Ireland is!’ you said.

  At school you were my secret when that summer was over, during the tedium of lessons and sermons, in private moments after lights-out. When I spoke of you to Ring and de Courcy I simply said you were a cousin I had forgotten I possessed, and as the days of that autumn shortened into an icy November I continued to keep you jealously to myself. You did not belong in conversations that touched upon Big Lily at her kitchen sink or the woman Blood Major had met in Bachelor’s Walk, and school itself was different because of you. ‘Marianne,’ I whispered, ‘dear little Marianne.’ I told no one else your name.

  ‘There’s a fellow from Tipperary in his grave after that stuff,’ Ring would loudly state in the public houses we frequented: an attempt to improve the sales of his father’s lemonade by slandering all other brands. But often I hardly heard him. Greedily I saw you in the grey and blue uniform of your boarding-school. You had described your dormitory to me, all the beds with blue covers on them, and Agnes Brontenby, the head girl, striding through it.

  ‘God, there’s a real beauty here,’ de Courcy whispered in Byrne’s Provisions and Bar, screwing his neck around the partition that separated the bar from the grocery. Obediently Ring and I stood up to examine the girl over the frosted glass, but her back was turned to us. A threadbare red coat hung from narrow shoulders; hair was obscured by a tattered headshawl. She was asking Mr Byrne for a Olivers’ jelly and a quarter-pound of rashers.

  It would be safer to put acid down your throat, Ring warned the publican, than some of the proprietary brands of lemonade currently on the market. And when Mr Byrne had finished serving us de Courcy developed his familiar fantasy about the girl in the red coat, his voice raving in the theatre of his invention. But I kept thinking of our sitting together in the August sunshine, occupying the deck-chairs I had resurrected in order to entice my mother to the garden. On our walks you had told me about the rectory and the town of Woodcombe, and the undulating Dorset countryside. The grey and blue school uniform was hideous, you said, and Agnes Brontenby tiresome.

  ‘Listen,’ Ring said when he and I were alone after Chapel one evening. ‘I saw the mott in the red coat again.’

  In his slow way he outlined a joke he had already instigated. All three of us were to walk into Byrne’s Provisions and Bar and a moment later the girl in the red coat would be there also. ‘I told her de Courcy was desperate for her and she was interested all right. She saw him in the John Jameson mirror when he looked round the casement at her.’

  Had you been too polite to say you were bored as we trailed about on our walks? I wondered that. ‘We might go to Kilneagh,’ I had suggested. ‘It would be nice to show you Kilneagh.’ You smiled and said you’d like that, but wouldn’t it be sad for me? Nothing could be sad with you, I thought, but did not say it.

  ‘The hard man,’ Ring greeted Mr Byrne on the day we were to meet the girl. ‘Are you stocking Ring’s yet, Mr Byrne? Did you ever note the legal statement they have on the label? “No Better Drink”, Mr Byrne.’

  Mr Byrne, a dour man, once a champion wrestler, did not reply. His premises were decorated with photographs of greyhounds, which matched his cheerless presence. Lugubriously surveying the racing information of a morning newspaper, he reached for his glass of porter before raising a single bloodshot eye and surveying us. A second eye, injured in the wrestling ring fifteen years ago, was permanently cloaked behind a drooping lid.

  ‘We’ll take three bottles of stout, Mr Byrne,’ Ring ordered, unperturbed by the lack of welcome. ‘I hear there’s a woman in Enniscorthy with her kidneys gone after a glass of Mansor’s.’

  Heifers had crowded the single street of Lough because it was a Monday. Pigs arrived in carts; dung and muck were everywhere. I wished it hadn’t been like that, that the great white gates of Kilneagh’s avenue hadn’t been rusty, or the roof of the burnt-out gate-lodge all tumbled in. The cool avenue of beeches had not changed, but the windowless house rose blackly from weeds and undergrowth, corrugated iron nailed over the pillared doorway. ‘This is Marianne,’ I said in the orchard wing, and at least Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace were exactly as they had been, even if Father Kilgarriff was thinner than I remembered him. The dogs did not seem different from the dogs of the past.

  I pointed out Haunt Hill on the way to the mill and you described the grandeur of Woodcombe Park. We imagined Anna Quinton in its palatial rooms, lingering in its yew walks by the mock-Roman summer-house. You’d seen the mulberry orchard at Woodcombe Park, the one ours had been planted in memory of.

  ‘The trouble is,’ Ring said, ‘they don’t wash the empties. The empties come back and they fill them up again.’

  Withdrawing a cork, Mr Byrne made a slight sound. His large, shaven head moved in a kind of circle as the stout was poured. Disdain entered his one good eye, reflecting a poor opinion of his three customers.

  ‘God, will you look who’s here?’ Ring suddenly shouted, thumping the counter with the palm of his hand.

  Quick to assess the situation, de Courcy stared blankly at the girl in the red coat. ‘Is she your sister?’ he asked Ring, dropping his voice to a whisper and appearing to be considerably discomfited.

  The girl’s face had a woebegone look that was not much lightened by a display of darkened t
eeth when she smiled. She wore a white cloche hat instead of her headscarf.

  ‘It’s Mary Fahy,’ Ring said. ‘The girl you’re mad for, de Courcy. Wouldn’t she knock spots off Noreen of Mullingar?’

  The girl blushed, bending her head away from us, hiding beneath her hat. De Courcy looked away also. ‘There’s an error here,’ he said.

  ‘Mary came in that day for rashers and a jelly. Your man said he’d lay down his life for you, Mary.’

  ‘Ah, no, no. It was a different girl that came in for the jelly. A big girl she was. Big heavy legs on her.’

  ‘It was me all right,’ Mary Fahy said. ‘I seen you in the whiskey mirror when you peeped round the casement at me.’

  ‘Oh, mistaken identity,’ muttered de Courcy, still addressing Ring, not looking at any of us. ‘When she walked in that door I thought she was your sister. Haven’t you a sister that’s similar to this one, Ring, with the bones sticking out of her?’

  The girl went, scuttling out of the public house like a scrawny, frightened sparrow.

  ‘Cripes, I don’t know where you scraped that from,’ de Courcy said, his manner changing dramatically. ‘A right doxy you picked up there.’

  I left also, the first time I had ever walked away from my friends. I felt annoyed with both of them and wanted to let my thoughts return to you. I had not shivered as we stood on the lawn at Kilneagh or as we passed through the vegetable garden that had become a wilderness. It seemed like a dream when Johnny Lacy and the other men came out to the mill-yard and when Mr Derenzy shook hands with you.

  ‘What’s eating you?’ Ring demanded when he and de Courcy arrived back from Byrne’s. ‘Did you have a fancy for the mott yourself?’

  I shook my head and then made some excuse, not wanting to admit that my feeling for you had caused me to consider the episode with the girl cruel. While we waited at Fermoy railway station and on the train back to Cork I had longed to say I’d fallen in love with you. The tips of my fingers had brushed your arm as we climbed up St Patrick’s Hill in the dark, and for a moment I had had to close my eyes. I wanted to put my arms around you, as Tim Paddy had put his around the girl who had afterwards married Johnny Lacy. But still I had not the courage even to take your hand.