Fools of Fortune Read online

  ‘I blame myself,’ my mother said. ‘In a way I blame myself for not being firm about the drinking. Yet what could anyone do? My own dear sister, and what could anyone do?’

  She dabbed at her eyes with her black-trimmed handkerchief and then she went away. ‘I don’t think I’ll lie down,’ I said,

  Without speaking, we walked down the hill and still in silence we crossed the bridge and made our way into the city.

  ‘My mother killed herself,’ you said at last. ‘She cut her wrists with a razor blade.’

  You didn’t pause in your walk. You led me by shop windows full of clothes and china, past Woolworth’s and a chemist’s shop. Wind swirled the litter about on the pavement, seagulls screamed above our heads. A storm was getting up, you muttered in that same empty voice.

  ‘I didn’t know that about your mother, Willie.’

  Two women with filthy children begged and clung on to me, saying they’d offer up Hail Marys for me, pulling at my sleeve. ‘Get off to hell,’ you shouted at them, hitting away their grasping hands. And later you said:

  ‘It’s not permitted for a suicide to receive a normal burial. I had to beg for that.’

  We passed by the school you had gone to. Miss A. M. Halliwell, Principal, it said on a black plaque beside a closed blue door. ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might.‘ You had described Miss Halliwell to me. You had hoped we might meet her on the street.

  ‘We should not have left my mother alone that day. We should have known.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Willie.’

  ‘We could have a drink in the Victoria Hotel. My mother’s only rendezvous.’

  You spoke bitterly, and it seemed callous to visit a hotel which she had chosen to visit also. You were different in every way from the person you had been. Even the way you moved and walked seemed different.

  ‘Well, a glass of lemonade,’ I requested in a corner of the hotel lounge. My head had begun to ache. I wished I’d agreed when you’d suggested I might want to lie down. I watched you making your way across the empty lounge, my lemonade in a tall glass, your own amber-coloured drink in a smaller one. You sat down and there was a silence that felt as if you wished to punish me. I didn’t know what to say, but anything was better than the silence.

  ‘I’m going to be in Switzerland for the next few months.’ ‘Switzerland?’

  ‘An English professor and his wife take in a few girls every year. In Montreux.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I don’t know what it’ll be like.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Unfortunately, the girl I told you about, the head girl at school, is going also.’

  You didn’t reply.

  ‘Agnes Brontenby,’ I added miserably.

  You gazed into your drink, still not replying.

  ‘I know it’s awful for you, Willie.’

  You turned your head away. I felt a blush of shame creeping into my cheeks. Were you thinking that I was a mingy little creature, ugly in my black clothes, silly to go on so about Switzerland? Had it sounded frivolous even to mention a professor and his wife at a time like this? It was selfish to want to share with you the mood we’d shared before, selfish when your mother was lying dead, when you’d had to persuade some clergyman to give her a decent burial. Miserably I lifted the glass of lemonade. It tasted sweet and horrible. I wondered if it had been manufactured by the father of the friend you’d told me about, and felt immediately that I should not have wondered so, since that was frivolous also. You despised me for being English. Over and over again the thought hammered at me, refusing to go away. Englishmen had burnt down your house and destroyed your family, and your mother’s self-inflicted death was part of the same thing.

  ‘Oh, don’t drink it,’ you muttered impatiently. ‘Don’t have it if you don’t like it.’

  ‘I wish I could be a help to you, Willie.’

  ‘She was tedious and embarrassing. She was unhappy: I should be glad she’s dead.’

  It rained. A pebble rattled on the polished wood of the coffin. I watched while you remained with your head bowed, your chin pressed hard upon your chest. Once or twice you raised a hand to your face. I knew you wept; and anguish, like pain, possessed me too. I could not offer the comfort that passionately I longed to, I could not take your hand or honestly shed tears, except on your behalf. We turned, all of us, and walked from the grave, umbrellas held against the rain.

  I shall for ever remember this day, I said to myself in the porch of the church, where pale distemper flaked from the walls and rust-marked notices were attached to the baize stretched over a board. The clergyman who had permitted your mother’s burial wiped raindrops from his spectacles. You held yourself apart, rain dripping from your black coat and your fair hair. There was stoicism in your Aunt Fitzeustace’s face, tears on your Aunt Pansy’s. ‘Poor boy,’ my mother whispered, ‘do please remember there’ll always be a welcome for you in Dorset.’

  You were not present at the lunch provided by your aunts in the undamaged part of the house, and no one remarked upon your absence. Mr Derenzy and Father Kilgarriff were there; my mother kept the conversation going. I guessed you were somewhere in the garden or walking in the fields, not caring about the rain.

  ‘She never did recover,’ your Aunt Fitzeustace said. ‘Poor beautiful Evie.’

  My mother repeated what she’d said to you: that our grandparents would have attended the funeral had the distance not been so great. ‘I blame myself,’ she repeated also, ‘for not being firmer about the drinking.’

  Firmness might have had little effect, Father Kilgarriff softly pointed out; there was often nothing that could be done, no consolation for so grievous a loss. They spoke of you. At least you had the mill to occupy your thoughts, Mr Derenzy said. At least, your Aunt Fitzeustace said, you were no longer a child.

  Still seated around the lunch table, we were given cups of tea and when eventually you appeared you drank some. Two dogs jumped up on you, others barked ferociously, as if alarmed because you were so drenched. You took no notice, and still you hardly spoke.

  ‘If there’s a shortage, Willie,’ my mother said on the journey back to Cork, ‘or if money’s tied up—’

  ‘There’s ample money, thank you.’

  ‘We’re there at the rectory, Willie. We’re always there, dear.’

  I wished she would not go on so. I wished she could see that you did not want to have a conversation.

  ‘Take it step by step, Willie.’

  ‘Yes.’ ‘And what step shall you take first? What next, I mean?’

  ‘Next?’

  Perspiration broke on the palms of my hands. I drew attention to some aspects of the landscape, feeling a warmth that spread from my face into my neck and shoulders.

  ‘Don’t let yourself brood, Willie.’

  ‘I’ll just go on at the mill.’

  ‘That’s very sensible, Willie.’

  When we reached the house I sat alone for a while in the narrow bedroom I had so happily slept in during the weeks of our holiday a year ago. Vividly I recalled the details of the funeral service, hearing again the words that had been spoken, wondering what their meaning had been like for you. I longed to comfort you. I longed to be alone with you again, even though it had been so awkward on our walk and in the lounge of that hotel.

  ‘It was terrible for him, miss,’ Josephine said when I went to talk to her in the kitchen. ‘To find her like that was terrible.’

  ‘Yes, I know it must have been.’

  ‘He was going to write to you that evening.’

  ‘Write to me? To me?’

  ‘To say he was fond of you, miss. He was intending to send a letter.’

  ‘Fond of me?’

  ‘He has been fond of you ever since the summer you were here. He told me the afternoon of Mrs Quinton’s death.’

  I went away to lay the table in the cheerless dining-room, but at suppertime you did not appear: you had gone out somewhere on your own. My mother a
nd I ate more of the ham, and put some aside for you. ‘He had no lunch either,’ she sighed. ‘Marianne dear, you should have stayed with him.’

  ‘I think he prefers to be alone.’

  All I could think of was what Josephine had told me in the kitchen. It seemed fateful that on that night of all nights you had intended to write to me. Many times I had wanted to write to you also, to attempt to continue the conversations we had had. But when I tried to a clumsiness overtook me and I found I could not properly express what I wanted to say in letters.

  In the early morning we would begin our journey back to England. We could stay no longer because of my going to Switzerland, and as it was I would be late arriving there. I waited downstairs for an hour or so, but it was much later, when I was undressing in my bedroom, that I heard your footfall on the stairs, which seemed like fate also. I pulled my nightdress over my head and slipped into the cold bed. I wept immediately. Had we been together now, would I have put my arms about you, and drawn your head on to my breast to kiss away your suffering? And would you have forgiven me for the accident of my English birth? For an hour or more I lay there wretchedly, and then I rose and lifted the paraffin lamp from its shelf.

  I did not knock, even lightly, on the panels of your door but opened it instead. All judgement had gone from me, all fear and rectitude. I cared about nothing except that you should know I loved you, that you might find at least some comfort in knowing it. I placed the lamp on your dressing-table and spoke your name.

  3

  ‘Ah, Marianne, my dear.’

  He always liked to meet new arrivals at the railway station, Professor Gibb-Bachelor explained. He was a man in his sixties, tall and exceedingly thin. His beard was grey and sparse, his wig jet-black, with a light wave in it.

  ‘You are a little late,’ he remarked, unchidingly, ‘arriving today, my dear.’

  ‘There was a funeral. My father sent a telegram.’ ‘Ah yes, of course. “I am going to meet the telegram girl,” I said to my wife before I left the villa.’ A conspiratorial laugh was slyly issued. ‘I shall call you that, little Marianne. My telegram girl. Welcome to Montreux.’

  ‘I hope my lateness hasn’t been inconvenient.’

  ‘Heavens, of course it has not! But I worried personally in case the funeral upset your travel bookings, and that the journey might be uncomfortable because of that.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t in the least.’

  ‘A parson, your father? Dorset, if memory serves?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dorset is delightful. And the funeral. Not someone close, I hope?’

  ‘An aunt. In Ireland.’

  ‘Ah, Ireland …’

  Whenever he spoke he perused me closely, apparently seeking my eyes. A perpetual smile was not quite hidden by his beard.

  ‘No one dislikes Montreux,’ he confided as we drove off. ‘We become a family, my wife and I, with the girls who visit us. No one has ever been unhappy in our house.’

  We passed by a great expanse of water, which Professor Gibb-Bachelor said was Lac Leman. All around us the Alps were capped with snow.

  ‘A troublesome country, Ireland. You felt quite safe, Marianne?’

  ‘Oh yes, quite safe.’

  The car passed through open gates and drew up by a house with iron balconies in front of its windows, each of which was flanked by wooden shutters hooked back against a brown wall. A verandah stretched the length of this facade, containing the wide pine doors through which we now passed.

  ‘Gervaise!’ the Professor called in the hall while I waited with my luggage. He inclined his head in a way that was becoming familiar to me, sticking it out a little as he listened for his wife’s reply.

  ‘The telephone rang,’ a lank girl with spectacles informed him.

  ‘Ah, thank you, Cynthia.’

  I was aware of garish colours on the walls: in the hall an excess of murals had all the appearance of being the work of the Gibb-Bachelors’ charges over the years. There was a lakeland scene, and an alp, and halfway up the stairs a castle with birds.

  ‘How d’you do, Marianne?’ Firm and jaunty, much shorter than her husband, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor was suddenly there. She was neatly dressed in different shades of mauve, her salt and pepper hair permanently waved. ‘Come please with me, Marianne.’

  She led the way back to the room she had just emerged from.

  ‘Please sit down,’ she invited, placing herself behind a table and gesturing at a chair. There had been chairs of the same kind in the hall and in the verandah: cushionless, a loop of canvas for seat and back. Bare boards, I had noticed also, were the order of the day, with here and there a woven rug.

  ‘I am delighted to welcome you to Montreux,’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor continued briskly, in a throaty Scottish voice. ‘Culture is the byword in our villa, but otherwise we live in the local manner. Classes are given daily by our friend Mademoiselle Florence, and my husband instructs in the history of the cantons and of the country. The regime is not arduous, but we do like an early start to the day and all conversation with Mademoiselle Florence is of course conducted in French. Thank you, Marianne.’

  I rose and in turn thanked Mrs Gibb-Bachelor.

  ‘The other girl from your school…’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor poked through papers on her desk.

  ‘Agnes Brontenby.’

  ‘Ah, Agnes Brontenby. Of course. Agnes is quite delightful. We have as well, this autumn, Mavis and Cynthia.’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor paused. ‘Are you quite healthy, Marianne?’

  ‘Yes, I believe so.’

  ‘You’re a wee little creature, but you mustn’t let that worry you, you know. Any disadvantage is better than gawkiness.’

  I said I had become used to my diminutive size, but Mrs Gibb-Bachelor appeared not to hear me and continued with her theme.

  ‘It doesn’t mean you are unhealthy, Marianne. Your teeth look sound, eh? Well, that is excellent. Your mother will probably have told you that artificial teeth have ill-bred connotations.’

  ‘I don’t think my mother did, actually.’

  ‘Ah, well.’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor paused again. Her head slipped a little to one side. ‘In our Swiss home we do not ignore the manners of the past. You understand, Marianne?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor.’

  ‘Excellent. You will share with Mavis. She suffers a little from rashes, but I do not believe the trouble is in the least way infectious. Your time here will be happy, Marianne. No girl has ever been unhappy in our home.’

  ‘So the Professor said.’

  ‘I can see the Professor has taken to you already. Now that is excellent.’

  Following Mrs Gibb-Bachelor, I carried my suitcases upstairs. We crossed a landing which featured further murals, and entered a cell-like chamber containing two beds, one unmade. Mrs Gibb-Bachelor gestured at the room’s window, stretching to the floor and draped with net. She crossed the room to it, undid a latch and pushed the two curtained frames outwards: below us in the twilight lay Lac Leman and the twinkling lights of Montreux, towering above us the snow-peaked Alps. ‘One of the finest views in Switzerland,’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor stated with confidence, and went away.

  I closed the window and sat down on the edge of the bed, not yet unpacking. Ever since I had left Ireland I had found it difficult to be with other people. On the journey back to the rectory, and after we’d arrived there, I had longed to be alone, to escape from my mother’s worry about leaving you, and my father’s sympathetic murmur. ‘We must pray for his peace of mind’: more than once my father had bent his head over clasped hands, closing his eyes. When eventually I left the rectory to set out on my second journey the sense of relief made me feel ungrateful.

  ‘Hullo,’ a voice said. ‘Are you Marianne? My name is Mavis.’

  ‘Yes, I am Marianne.’ I stared back at the speckled face that stared at mine. I asked about letters, but when I went to the letter-rack in the hall it was empty. I didn’t know why I’d asked or had gone to look. Of course there wouldn’t
be a letter yet.

  The bosom of Agnes Brontenby was more shapely than it had been beneath a gymslip, her beautiful blue eyes more liquid even than I remembered them at school. In the dining-room she sat across the table from me, with the bespectacled Cynthia beside her and Mavis next to me. The Gibb-Bachelors ate privately, at some different time.

  Free of murals, the dining-room was on the gloomy side. Its walls were a shade of gravy, as were the velvet curtains that all but obscured the windows. The pine boards of the floor were sprinkled with French chalk.

  ‘The food’s inedible,’ Cynthia informed me, and Mavis said that lastyear a girl had run away. But the sweetness of Agnes Brontenby already pervaded this gathering atmosphere; already, I guessed, she had stifled gossip on its utterance and discovered silver linings. She scooped up pale soup with vermicelli in it and said it was delicious. Only that afternoon Mrs Gibb-Bachelor had confided to her that the girl’s running away last year had been due to a misunderstanding. ‘Oh look, let’s not be horrid,’ she protested when Cynthia said she doubted if Mrs Gibb-Bachelor had ever told the truth in her life.

  ‘He’s awful,’ Mavis said.

  ‘Oh, quite beyond the pale,’ Cynthia agreed. She added that Mrs Gibb-Bachelor’s letter to her parents had categorically stated that each girl had a room to herself and that Mademoiselle Florence instructed in German as well as French. ‘Then why are we suddenly sharing?’ she demanded. ‘Have they mislaid some rooms or something? And how is it that Mademoiselle Florence can miraculously teach German since she says herself she can’t speak a word of it?’

  ‘Oh, you are funny, Cynthia!’ cried Agnes. ‘Mislaid some rooms!’

  She tinkled with laughter and then became serious. She insisted that there had clearly been another silly misunderstanding. She couldn’t remember how Mrs Gibb-Bachelor had written to her own parents, but wasn’t it in any case best to be cheerful?

  Mavis and I did not contribute to the argument that followed. Duties in the dining-room were to be shared among us: it was mine, that evening, to clear away, and Mavis’s to give us each a plate of sliced apple and cheese.