Fools of Fortune Read online

  ‘Well, what’s the way of it this afternoon?’ my father asked that lunch time, and my mother said that she and the girls were going to ride. ‘And Willie? Walk over to the mill?’

  ‘Don’t forget your homework, Willie.’

  ‘Oh, after tea,’ my father said.

  A new maid was to arrive that afternoon and because the previous maid had already left Mrs Flynn brought in the tapioca pudding herself. Geraldine and Deirdre ate it with dollops of raspberry jam but my father and mother added cream and I followed this grownup example, although I would much have preferred the jam. My father told us about an occurrence at the mill that morning, how an old tinker had arrived there, claiming he was dying. When everyone’s back was turned he had helped himself to an ounce of Mr Derenzy’s snuff and various documents that were valueless to him.

  ‘Oh, poor old fellow!’ Geraldine cried.

  ‘Poor Mr Derenzy, you mean,’ Deirdre corrected. ‘Dear Mr Derenzy.’

  They giggled through their mouthfuls of tapioca and were told not to by my mother. My sisters laughed inordinately at anything that was even faintly humorous. For the rest of the day they would talk about this lone tinker, wondering if he slept with the rain beating down on his face, as the tinkers who wandered the countryside on their own were said to. On our walk to the mill I asked my father if the story was true or if he’d made it up to amuse the girls. He smiled, and I knew he’d just been having fun.

  After that we proceeded in silence for a while, the labradors obediently at our heels. The path from the house began in a shrubbery of towering rhododendrons, continuing through a gate that neither my father nor I ever opened, choosing instead to climb over it. Cows grazed in the sloping pasture beyond, and at the top of this there was a spot from which the mill and the house could both be seen, and the distant Haunt Hill, so called because of its haunting by my great-grandmother. We descended steeply then, through a birch wood and by the edge of a field that was ploughed in March and thick with growth by June, a mass of corn in August. Before we reached the mill my father said:

  ‘You’ll enjoy it, you know. You know you’ll enjoy it, Willie.’

  He spoke of my going away to the school he’d been at himself, in the Dublin mountains. He worried sometimes in case Father Kilgarriff was not preparing me well enough, which was why he had wanted to send me to a preparatory school.

  ‘You’ll play rugby, Willie, and cricket maybe. You’d never find games like that in Lough.’

  My father laughed, amused at the sophistication of cricketers in our village. I had never seen the games he spoke of played, but on our walks to and from the mill the rules of both had been explained to me and I had pretended to understand.

  ‘The teaching’s famous there, Willie. Pakenham-Moore became a circuit judge, you know.’

  I nodded, endeavouring to display enthusiasm. He had also told me about a game called cock-fighting, a boy perched on another boy’s shoulders and smacking with his fists at a third boy, similarly mounted. There was fagging, and the tradition of flicking pats of butter on to the wooden ceiling of the dining hall. Prefects could beat you with a cane.

  We reached the mill and I accompanied my father to his office, where Mr Derenzy was copying figures into a ledger. A fire was blazing in the grate, its coal recently renewed, the hearthTswept. Mr Derenzy brought sandwiches every day and ate them at his desk during the lunchtime break. Afterwards, if the weather was to his liking, he went for a walk and was often to be seen staring down into the water of the leat, a man devoted to Kilneagh Mill and to my father—and in a different kind of way to Aunt Pansy. Red hair fluffed into a halo about Mr Derenzy’s skull-like head and his blue serge suit shone here and there, polished where his bones protruded. Clipped to the top pocket of this suit was a row of pens and pencils, their neat presence a reflection of his pernickety nature. He disliked rain and heatwaves and warned Aunt Pansy against drinking from a cup with a crack in it. He carried a supply of snuff with him at all times, in a tin that had originally contained catarrh pastilles: Potter’s, the Remedy it said, red letters on a blue ground.

  Unlike the other men at the mill, Mr Derenzy was a Protestant, which allowed him to have pretensions in the direction of my aunt. But considering himself socially inferior, he had never thought it proper to propose marriage. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, man,’ my father used to urge him, ‘say the word to her and have done with it.’ But Mr Derenzy would look away in excessive embarrassment. Every Sunday afternoon he arrived at the orchard wing to take Aunt Pansy for a walk and afterwards returned to Sweeney’s public house in Lough, where he lodged. According to Johnny Lacy, who appeared to know everything that went on in Sweeney’s, he spent Sunday evening drinking cups of weak tea and worriedly dwelling upon his presumption.

  ‘I’m getting the February overheads in, Mr Quinton,’ he said now. ‘Afternoon to you, Willie.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Derenzy.’

  ‘Liver and tapioca pudding,’ my father reported. ‘Were Mrs Sweeney’s sandwiches up to scratch?’

  ‘Oh, never better, Mr Quinton.’

  I knew that one day I would inherit this mill. I liked the thought of that, of going to work there, of learning what my father had had to learn about grain and the machinery that ground it. I liked the mill itself, its grey stone softened with Virginia creeper, the doors of lofts and stores a reddish brown, paint that over the years had lost its shine due to the sun; in a central gable the green-faced clock was always a minute fast. I loved the smell of the place, the warm dry smell of corn, the cleanness even though there was dust in the air. I enjoyed watching the huge wheel turning in the mill-race, one cog engaging the next. The timber of the chutes was smooth with wear, leather flaps opening and falling back, then opening again. The sacks had Quinton on them, the letters of our name arranged in a circle.

  Memory fails me when I think about the men of the mill: names are forgotten, except for Mr Derenzy and Johnny Lacy. Faces return instead, and arguments about the revolution that had exploded in Ireland in 1916 and was not over yet. ‘I wouldn’t drink a bottle of stout with de Valera,’ a voice protests scathingly. ‘I wouldn’t stand beside him at a crossroads.’ And a cool reply comes, that Dev was above the drinking of stout with anyone.

  One man was tall and thin, another’s face was half obscured by a hedge of moustache, a third wore a black hat that never left his head. Johnny Lacy had a way with him and was always laughing, his face crinkling up with merriment when he told his stories. These had mainly to do with the people of our own household and the men of the mill, but there was also the one about the dwarf’s wife, late of Fermoy, who could eat French nails, and the one about the soldier at the barracks who had ridden a horse through Phelan’s shop window to win a bet. There was the deranged man from Mitchels-town who claimed to be the King of Ireland and the woman who bred fleas because she liked them. Johnny Lacy had a reputation as a rake and was a star turn on the dance-floor in spite of his short leg. He was particularly fond of the fox-trot and would often demonstrate the step for me, clasping in his arms an imaginary girl. The round shape of Haunt Hill with its little jagged tip was like a woman’s breast, he told me, wagging a neat, oiled head which smelt of carnations. A suave devil, my father called him.

  That spring afternoon I loitered in the part of the mill where the men were working, as I often did. Mr Derenzy hurried in twice with invoices, his clerkly Protestant voice pitched high above the rush of water and machinery. It wasn’t a busy time of year. The chutes were being repaired, sacks sorted out. Johnny Lacy and the man whose moustache was like a hedge were working a scales, and for half an hour or so I moved the weights for them. Then I began to walk back to the house, not waiting for my father because he wouldn’t be ready until much later. There were Mr Derenzy’s figures to look through and then he would answer any letters that had come, the labradors sprawled by his feet in front of the fire. He would walk about the mill, having a word with the men: all of it took time and usually I p
referred to return home on my own, running down the slope of the pasture to the gate in the rhododendron shrubbery, my feet crunching a moment later on the gravel that was spread in a semicircle around the house. I still think of approaching Kilneagh like that. The beech-lined avenue with the tall white-painted iron gates at the end of it was as impressive as my father ever claimed, but in my childhood I liked best of all the walk through the birch wood and the fields.

  As I entered the house I was still thinking about the school in the Dublin mountains. My father’s good-natured efforts to ease me into its traditions had become a source of mild terror and I regularly lay awake at night wondering about being savaged with a bamboo cane. ‘Ah, no, no,’ I would make Dr Hogan from Fermoy pronounce. ‘No, Mr Quinton, I’d say Willie’s too delicate for a place like that.’ But I also knew that my delicate appearance was misleading. ‘Healthy as a nut,’ Dr Hogan had stated more than once.

  ‘We didn’t see that tinker,’ Deirdre remarked at teatime. ‘Did you see the poor old fellow, Willie?’

  I shook my head, my glumness not quite slipping away, as usually it did when I was no longer alone. My father’s school trunk would be taken from the attic, where he had told me it still was. Our initials were the same: we could have the white paint that marked them freshened up, he had said, and the brass lock cleaned.

  ‘No, I didn’t see him,’ I replied.

  We sat, spaced far apart, around the big mahogany dining-table that was always covered at teatime with a white linen tablecloth. There were egg sandwiches, and brown bread and soda bread and bread with raisins in it. There were scones that were still hot, and coffee cake. My mother asked me if everything had been all right at the mill. I said it had, and she told me about their ride through the bluebell spinney near Haunt Hill, over country that had once been Quinton country, home by the old quarry. Sometimes I went on that ride myself, on Geraldine’s pony, Boy.

  ‘The new maid’s called Josephine,’ my mother said, cutting the coffee cake. ‘Tim Paddy’s gone to Fermoy for her.’

  ‘Was Kitty sacked because she broke the chrysanthemum vase?’ Geraldine enquired.

  ‘Well, actually, Kitty’s getting married.’ ‘I told you,’ Deirdre cried, dramatically flashing her eyes, a habit that moments of triumph brought out in both my sisters.

  ‘Oh, I know she’s marrying that beery fellow.’ Geraldine disdainfully sniffed. ‘I only wish she wouldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t think we should call him beery,’ my mother protested. ‘A red complexion doesn’t always mean a person drinks too much.’

  ‘Mrs Flynn says he drinks like a bottle. She says he’ll lead Kitty a right old dance. Actually, I’m never going to marry anyone.’

  ‘Will Kitty and the beery fellow have a honeymoon?’ Deirdre asked, and Geraldine said she could just imagine them, drinking like bottles on a strand somewhere. Pretending they were unable to control their laughter, they pressed their fists against their mouths until my mother said that was enough now.

  When the giggling had subsided and each of us had eaten the single slice of coffee cake we were allowed, Geraldine asked me what Mr Derenzy had said when I’d seen him, for the utterances of Mr Derenzy were of great interest to my sisters.

  ‘Only “good afternoon”.’

  ‘Did he ask after Aunt Pansy?’

  ‘He never does.’

  ‘Did he offer you a pinch of snuff?’

  ‘No, not today.’

  ‘I wish he’d marry Aunt Pansy and come and live in the house. Wouldn’t it be lovely, having Mr Derenzy walking about the garden?’

  ‘If I had to marry anyone,’ Deirdre said, ‘I’d marry Mr Derenzy.’

  ‘Oh, so would I.’

  Soon after that my sisters went off to the stables and my mother said she’d help me with my homework, if I should need any help. I said I would because I enjoyed it when we sat together at the oval table in the drawing-room, working out the cost of five dozen clothes-pegs at three-farthings each, or learning about the continental shelf.

  That day we investigated the conflict which Father Kilgarriff considered so important, the Irish victory which the clever English had later turned into defeat. ‘August 15, 1598,’ I read aloud. ‘Sir Henry Bagenal, marching out of Newry, was defeated on the River Blackwater by Hugh O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell. The victory was a total one, and the disaffected throughout the land everywhere took up arms.’

  In a moment we put the history book aside and my mother spoke of the long English occupation which had succeeded that famous battle, and of how advantage was at present being taken, as it had been taken in the past, of England’s foreign war, even though Irish soldiers were helping to win it. ‘I wish the rising had succeeded that Easter,’ she said. ‘The whole thing would be over by now.’

  But at some point while she was speaking my mind had drifted away, to the school in the Dublin mountains. I knew that when the moment came to mention it to her my mother would be sympathetic. It was she who really made the decisions, she who was more in touch with things. She spoke French and German, she understood the intricacies of mathematics: far more than my father, she would appreciate that Father Kilgarriff’s teaching was perfectly adequate, that boarding-school was quite unnecessary.

  ‘Well, that Josephine’ll be here.’ She smiled at me as she stood up, lightening the mood which the talk of war and revolution had inspired in her and which my gloomy face no doubt suggested she had inspired in me. ‘One of these days it’ll all be all right,’ she added.

  I puzzled my way through algebraic equations and pages of tedious fact about natural resources in Lancashire. I learnt part of ‘The Deserted Village’, and then I took my books and the two inkwells from the oval table and placed them in a drawer of the big corner cupboard with my pens and pencils and blotting paper. My father insisted that all signs of my lessons should be removed from the drawing-room by the evening of every day.

  I made my way to the cobbled yard between the two wings at the back of the house, over which Tim Paddy was brushing water. He was smoking a Wild Woodbine cigarette and as a greeting he slanted his head at me in a way he had. It was pleasant in the yard or the big old dairy at that time of day, everything clean again after the milking of the cows, the buckets laid out, upside down in a row, hens and ducks waiting in the doorway for Tim Paddy to finish. Sometimes he would lean on his brush handle and his ferrety face would bristle with excitement as he told me how he intended to enlist in the Munster Fusiliers the very minute he was old enough. He had heard talk in the village of adventure and companionship in foreign parts, of cities rich with wine and scented women. ‘You’re the biggest eejit this side of Cork,’ his old father used snappishly to grumble at him. ‘Can’t you stay where you are and not go looking for destruction?’ But he might be washing the cobbles of our yard for ever, Tim Paddy pointed out, while the whole world passed him by.

  That evening, when he saw me, he didn’t remove the Wild Woodbine from his mouth in order to settle himself for leisurely conversation. ‘The new maid’s prettier than Kitty,’ Geraldine called out, passing through the yard with Deirdre, who added that the new maid had lovely hair.

  I pretended to be not much interested, although I was. I watched while Tim Paddy finished his task and threw away the butt of his cigarette. ‘Wouldn’t you go and take a look at her?’ he eventually suggested. ‘She’s nice all right.’

  I remembered my mother showing Kitty where O’Neill’s vegetable garden was when Kitty was new, but when I went to look there O’Neill was on his own, crouched among drills he had dug, planting potatoes. He didn’t reply when I spoke to him; he rarely addressed either my sisters or myself.

  I left the vegetable garden by a door in its high brick wall. The door was set in a narrow arch and was painted the same colour as the woodwork of the mill. Mr Derenzy had once told me that a large supply of this brown-red paint had been on sale at the Admiralty supply stores in Cork, cheaply priced at the end of the reign of Queen Victoria
. I remembered his saying it as I stood by the door hoping for a sight of the new maid. My father ambled through the high rhododendrons, returning from the mill with his labradors dawdling behind him. He would go straight to the dining-room and pour himself a glass of whiskey, as he did every evening. Then he would settle himself down in one of the leather armchairs with the Irish Times.

  Daisies were beginning to shower the lawns, where there had been snowdrops not long ago. The sound of the Angelus bell carried through the clear evening from Lough, and I imagined O’Neill crossing himself among his potato rows, and Tim Paddy doing the same in the yard, and stout Mrs Flynn pausing for a moment in the kitchen, and my aunts’ maid pausing also. From the distance came the barking of their stray dogs, out for an evening run through the fields.

  ‘This is Josephine,’ my mother said, stepping through the French windows of the morning-room, on to the grass. Already the new maid had changed into her uniform: the hair Deirdre had spoken of was fair and smooth beneath the same white cap that Kitty had worn, her lips had a pretty pout. The fragility of her face might have been reflected in her hands but, like Kitty’s, they were chapped and coarse. For some reason I noticed that at once.

  ‘How d’you do?’ I said, and Josephine made some shy reply.

  My mother led her away, into the morning-room again, to begin her duties. I did not know then that our household was complete, that Kilneagh was as I’ve always since remembered it.

  3

  Would we have loved one another then in whatever way it is that children love? You might have lived at Rathcormack or Castletown-roche, even in Lough itself. During all the years that have passed I’ve often pretended that you did. I’ve closed my eyes and seen you in church on Sundays, your blue dress, that artificial rose in the band of your hat. I’ve glanced across the pews at you, unable to prevent myself, as Mr Derenzy could not prevent himself from glancing at Aunt Pansy.