Fools of Fortune Read online

  ‘Willie …’ I said.

  ‘Willie?’

  He frowned at me, grimacing just a little. I was wearing a brown fur hat which my mother and father had given me for Christmas. I took it off and placed it on a chair. I shook the snow from my coat.

  ‘I’ve come to see my cousin, Mr Derenzy.’

  The furrows on his forehead deepened. ‘But Willie isn’t here, Marianne. Willie left Kilneagh, you know. He hasn’t been here for months.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know.’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed.’

  I did not say anything. I could not for a moment.

  ‘Anyone might want to go away, Marianne, after what had happened.’

  ‘Where is he, Mr Derenzy? Where has he gone?’

  Slowly he shook his head.

  ‘Please tell me, Mr Derenzy.’

  ‘No one has had a line from Willie. The house in Cork is to be sold.’

  A silence gathered in the small office. I stared at the leather spines of a row of ledgers and at wooden cabinets with shallow, labelled drawers. In the corner there was a pile of sacks, and in another some kind of cog-wheel. I said I had been to the house, hoping to find Josephine there. Mr Derenzy nodded, another silence began. It crept into the corners of the office, over the drawers and the ledgers and the neatly arranged papers on Mr Derenzy’s desk. He offered me a pinch of snuff from a blue tin box, and when I shook my head he took some himself. A kettle on the coals in the grate began to boil. Reaching for a teapot on a shelf behind him, he said:

  ‘I remember the day Willie was born. I’ve known him all his life.’

  What you had called his skeleton’s face looked up at me from the hearth where he was spooning tea into the teapot. No smile lit his bony features, his springy red hair was still. The teapot was well-used, its brown enamel chipped around the spout and on the lid.

  ‘If you left a message I would put it straight into Willie’s hand.’ He spoke with a finality that sounded almost grim. He poured the tea and offered me a cup with roses on it, on a saucer that matched it.

  ‘Do you think Josephine has been in touch?’

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘Where is Josephine, Mr Derenzy?’

  ‘She is working in St Fina’s. An institution in Cork, run by the nuns.’

  I left the chair which he had placed close to the hearth for me, and stood by the window. The sky was grey and heavy. I watched the softly falling snow, gathering already on the roofs and the cobbles of the mill-yard. The green-faced clock gave the time as twenty past eleven. Mechanically, I remembered your saying that it was always fast, and in the same mechanical way I wondered if the snow would affect it. Would the big hand, travelling upwards after the half-hour, come to an untimely halt because of what had accumulated on it? I turned from the window, endeavouring to hold the mill manager’s glance with my own but not succeeding.

  ‘Are you keeping something back from me, Mr Derenzy? Has something happened?’

  ‘Ah no, no, Marianne.’

  There was little conviction in his voice. As if to lend it more, he shook his head, floating his hair about. I said:

  ‘I must know where he is.’

  He did not reply. He drank some tea, then very faintly sighed. I said:

  ‘I am going to have Willie’s child.’

  His eyes closed, the lids dropping down as though he could not bear to look upon me. A sound came from him, like the whimper of a creature in distress.

  ‘I cannot be at home, Mr Derenzy. I cannot disgrace my parents. That is why I’ve come here.’

  As if I had not spoken, he said:

  ‘It would be better to go back to England, Marianne.’

  ‘I don’t believe it would be better. Mr Derenzy, when do you imagine Willie will return?’ ‘As soon as he does he shall know immediately that you came here.’

  ‘Do you think it terrible, what I have told you?’

  ‘I’m the manager of this mill, Marianne. I’ve been a bachelor all my life. I don’t know about these matters.’

  ‘But you and Willie’s aunt —’

  ‘That is a private friendship, Marianne.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He said it didn’t matter. He said again it would be better to return to England.

  ‘Mr Derenzy, Willie is not aware of my plight. He must surely have said something about where he was going. Oh, I do, I assure you, understand that he had to go away. But he must have said something, Mr Derenzy.’

  ‘Willie left here a few days after you and your mother left, when arrangements had been made with Lanigan and O’Brien about the house in Cork. I came in one morning and Willie was not here.’

  His hands, fragile on the ordered surface of his desk, were trembling, and in his eyes there was something that might have been terror. Again he closed them, as if to cloak it.

  ‘I’d like to walk over to Kilneagh.’

  His mouth was pulled down at the corners and I sensed that for a moment he could not speak. Then his eyes opened and he regarded me wildly.

  ‘Please go back to England. Please, child, I beg you now.’

  I shook my head, not knowing how to answer otherwise. I remembered the way to the house, I said, and after a pause he rose and took from a hook on the back of the door a navy-blue overcoat and drew on woollen gloves. He led the way down the wooden stairs that were like the stairs to a loft. A man with a limp, dapper in his working clothes, crossed the yard, whistling. He didn’t see us; you had told me his name on our visit, but I could not remember it now.

  ‘There,’ Mr Derenzy said. ‘Keep the thorn hedge on your left and then you’ll see the stile. But this is no weather to go walking, Marianne. And Willie is not at the house, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I do know that.’

  I followed his directions, and the tears I had been holding back in the mill office flowed in a torrent on my cheeks. A pathetic creature,

  Mr Derenzy had no doubt considered, an immoral girl who had come to make a nuisance of herself because she didn’t know what to do. I thought of the rectory and the kindness it contained, the cosiness and comfort of its rooms. They did their best, my father and my mother, saving to send me to a boarding-school they could not afford, saving to send me to Montreux because they believed that would be advantageous for me. They had always done their best. They had worried when I was upset, they had put things right. Like a tumult shuddering through my body, my weeping continued, its stream of tears warm on my icy face. In the rectory it would be time for morning coffee now, with the oaten biscuits my father liked so. But they would neither of them have the heart for biscuits.

  I stood still, waiting for my agitation to calm. I moved on then, passing through the wood of birch trees before the ground rose gently and afterwards more steeply. When I reached its greatest height the burnt-out house lay below me, its stark outline beautiful against the pale landscape. Slowly I descended, clambering over a stone wall and through a gate, into the jungle of rhododendrons. The house, no longer beautiful, loomed grimly above me and around me, black walls exuding such damp bleakness that involuntarily I shivered. The weeds in the hall were less green, less vigorous than they had been that summer, and snow fell in the drawing-room you’d told me had once been scarlet. Lightly it lay on the mantelpiece and on the wreck of the grand piano; lengths of rough timber were nailed across an archway. I found the kitchen, and above it rooms that were undamaged. Nothing was locked, but there was no warmth in any of the rooms, and moisture seeped up the walls.

  In the garden a greenhouse had fallen to pieces, its door sagging on rusted hinges, its glass collapsed. High, withered thistles gathered snowflakes where beds for vegetables had been. You had stood here with me, recalling the old gardener, and Tim Paddy who had been in love with Josephine. It was then that the name of the limping man in the mill-yard came to me: Johnny Lacy, whom Josephine had preferred.

  ‘Marianne!’

  Bewildered, your Aunt Pansy was beside me. I took her
meekly proffered hand and followed her into the orchard wing, into the chill square sitting-room where that summer we had been given mid-morning scones, where after your mother’s funeral we had awkwardly stood around.

  ‘I’m very much afraid my sister is not here,’ she said. ‘She and Father Kilgarriff went out early and, really, I’m alarmed because of this snow.’

  Again I took off my new fur hat, but did not remove my coat.

  ‘A cup of tea?’ Aunt Pansy offered.

  ‘I’ve had some tea with Mr Derenzy. Thank you.’

  ‘I’m so surprised to see you, Marianne.’

  ‘I didn’t realize Willie had gone away.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m afraid so.’

  Nervously playing with a cameo brooch that hung from her neck on a fine silver chain, Aunt Pansy sought to efface herself in the manner I remembered. She pressed herself against the back of the wine-coloured sofa, bundling herself into it as if she did not wish to be seen. Yet she could not prevent an expression of concern from gathering in her ageless, cherubic face. She looked away from me when she spoke.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry, Marianne.’

  ‘But where has he gone?’

  As Mr Derenzy had, she shook her head. As before, there were several dogs in the sitting-room, on the armchairs and the sofa and sprawled along the hearthrug. Above a mantelpiece cluttered with ornaments and oddments the severe face of Gladstone was darkly framed, dominant between scenes of oxen working on a mountainside. Books were packed untidily into high, glass-fronted bookcases. A grandfather clock, inlaid with black and white marble, ticked solemnly in a corner by the door. The room smelt of soot and of the dogs. Their hairs clung to the sofa and the armchairs.

  ‘I’m really awfully sorry. But, Marianne, surely you haven’t come here specially?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  Aunt Pansy nodded, and for several moments continued to do so. I said:

  ‘I’m in love, you see, with Willie.’

  A further effusion of pink darkened Aunt Pansy’s pink cheeks, a plump small hand played frantically with the cameo brooch. The silver chain was wound around one finger and then the next, the brooch itself rubbed and pressed, cast aside and then attended to again. For a moment or two it was used to trace the outline of her hps, before she opened them and spoke.

  ‘Well, I think we guessed that. That morning Willie brought you here—yes, we rather guessed. And later Willie talked to Father Kilgarriff and Father Kilgarriff said something to my sister. And Mr Derenzy guessed, I think, and said something to myself. Everyone was pleased. Mrs Driscoll, who keeps the shop, said something to my sister because Mr Derenzy had passed it on to the Sweeneys and they had passed it on to her—or Johnny Lacy’s wife had, or one of the men from the mill, I really can’t remember. The rector knew, I do remember that, because one Sunday he remarked to us that of course we were all rather looking into the future when we spoke of another English wife at Kilneagh. He was thinking of your both being—well, no more than children, and Kilneagh being half a ruin now. Naturally it would be ages before it could possibly be a place to live in again. But it did make us happy, looking into the future like that, it really made us happy.’

  Running out of breath, Aunt Pansy gasped, very pink in the face now. I said I was glad that people were happy.

  ‘Oh, happy when we guessed, I mean. Happy then, I mean.’

  The silver chain was tightened yet again around each finger in turn. A lightly marked Dalmatian, asleep on my feet, snored. I said:

  ‘Before the death of Willie’s mother?’

  ‘Yes, before her death.’

  The subject was unobtrusively dismissed. In the chilly sitting-room the marriage referred to was no more than speculation that had come to nothing. The looking into the future, and the contentment the gossip had inspired among the people of Lough, belonged already to the past.

  ‘If you’d written to us, my dear, we could have told you Willie was not here. It’s a very great distance to come and find … I mean, at the end of your journey to have to turn round again and go all that way back …’

  ‘But where is Willie? Does Father Kilgarriff know?’

  Again she shook her head. ‘Please let me get you some tea, Marianne.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  I could not remain there. I stood up, and Aunt Pansy rose also, with an alacrity that betrayed relief.

  ‘My sister will be disappointed. And Father Kilgarriff, of course.’

  ‘Yes, I am sorry too.’

  ‘The truth is we’ve bought a little motor-car. This morning is the first time Father Kilgarriff has driven her out in it. That is why I am alarmed because it has begun to snow.’

  She didn’t want to talk about you. I had been foolish, I should have written first, I was no more than a silly lovesick child; all that was in her face, although she did not wish it to be there.

  ‘I am going to have Willie’s baby,’ I said.

  I walked over the frozen fields, watching the birds as they poked for grubs on the riverbank, not caring where I went or how I felt. Sheep huddled beneath a hedge, cows kept close together. I envied them their drear complacency. I prayed and pleaded as I had in Switzerland, I asked for mercy. It was too much that as well as everything else you should not be here: I begged that that at least might be miraculously changed.

  It was nearly five o’clock when I arrived back in the village and when I asked in the shop about the Cork train I was told I’d be too late now to catch it. In any case, since it was snowing heavily again the walk to Fermoy looked as though it would not be possible. I might have returned to Kilneagh but I did not wish to do that. I went instead to Sweeney’s public house to enquire about lodgings.

  A man with one arm, who warmly shook my hand when I explained to him about the train, told me he was Mr Sweeney. He had recently added to his business, he informed me also, by opening a garage on the empty premises next door to his own. With some pride he led me into it and said it was he who had sold your aunts their new motor-car.

  ‘D’you know the two women I mean? They live over by the ruins. The motor’s for Kilgarriff to drive them about in. Have you heard tell of Kilgarriff maybe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A benighted man, God help him. Still and all, there’s many a worse one wears a bishop’s ring.’

  ‘I suppose there is.’

  ‘I’m surprised you’d have knowledge of him. Aren’t you a stranger yourself, miss?’

  ‘I’m Willie Quinton’s cousin. I came from England to see him. I didn’t know he’d gone away.’

  ‘Oh, glory be to God!’

  We were still standing in the garage. The snow had melted on my hat and was running down beneath my clothes. My feet were soaking. Mr Sweeney muttered to himself, looking at me for a moment and then looking away. He passed a tongue over his lips, bringing the muttering to an end.

  ‘Sure, I didn’t know who you were,’ he said. ‘The wife’ll eat the face off me.’

  He led the way, through the bar and into a warm, low-ceilinged kitchen.

  ‘It’s Willie Quinton’s cousin,’ he said to a woman with a piece of meat in her hand. ‘I’m after showing her the garage. Sure, she could’ve been anyone.’

  The woman stared at me, her eyes wide, the meat still in her motionless hand. But when she spoke it was to her husband.

  ‘Will you look at the cut of yourself?’ she shouted shrilly. ‘Smelling like a brewery at four o’clock in the day.’

  She busded about me then, unbuttoning my coat and making me take off my shoes. She accused her husband of stupidity for thinking I’d be interested in seeing his garage, a misjudgement that was entirely due to his having drunk a dozen bottles of stout instead of repairing a bent running-board. ‘Sit down at the range,’ she urged me, ‘so you can thaw your little bones out. That old garage would freeze you raw.’

  ‘Give her rum,’ suggested Mr Sweeney. ‘Heat up a sup of rum in a saucepan for her.’ He stood by the door, pools
of water forming on the stone floor by his feet. His wife ignored him.

  ‘I’ll have a room got ready for you,’ she said when I explained my predicament, ‘and there’s a stew that’ll warm you up only it isn’t cooked yet. Would you like a sup of Bovril?’

  ‘There’s nothing like hot rum,’ interposed Mr Sweeney. ‘I have a good dark rum I can get you from the bar.’

  ‘Will you keep out of that bar and go and wash yourself? You’re the laziest man God ever put eyes in.’

  There was a maid in the kitchen also, who on our entrance had ceased her task of cleaning potatoes at the sink. She was a shallow-cheeked, squinting girl, wrapped in a green overall that might once have been the property of the larger Mrs Sweeney.

  ‘Stop loitering about,’ Mrs Sweeney shrieked at her. ‘Get three jars filled and put them into the spare bed.’

  ‘I’m sorry to be such a nuisance, Mrs Sweeney.’

  ‘Ah, girl, you’re never a nuisance. It’s only that it’s a while since anyone laid down in that bed.’

  ‘Is there a train from Fermoy in the mornings? To Cork, I mean.’

  ‘There is of course. Sit down by that range now.’

  I did as I was bidden and a moment later heard Mrs Sweeney upbraiding her husband in the scullery. ‘Are you drunk or what,’ she was expostulating in a loud, furious whisper, ‘bringing that one here? Couldn’t you have told her we were full up?’ Mr Sweeney attempted some reply but his wife cut it short by calling him a fool. ‘God knows the tale she’ll carry back to England with her. Mind what you say to her now.’

  I was still trying to warm myself at the range when Mr Derenzy entered the kitchen some time later. He clearly was not pleased to see me there and was unable to disguise his irritation when I said I had missed the train. Later, when I mentioned your name in the course of conversation at the supper table, he dropped his knife with a clatter. Appearing to share this uneasiness, the Sweeneys consumed their food with unnatural interest. They meticulously examined the contents of their plates and did their best to keep a desultory conversation going. There hadn’t been snow in Lough for fifteen years, I was told, and to fill another silence I made a similar effort myself: I said I lived in the same town in Dorset that Anna Quinton had come from. Mr Derenzy, who was aware of that, nodded over his food. Mr Sweeney remarked that he couldn’t quite place the person I was referring to, and I explained that she was the Anna Quinton of the Famine. ‘Haunt Hill is called after her, Mr Sweeney. And it was she who planted the mulberry orchard at Kilneagh.’