Fools of Fortune Read online

  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 patt
erned 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.

  ‘No, Josephine,’ my mother said as I entered her bedroom one evening to say good-night. ‘You have a life of your own to live.’

  ‘I want to stay with you, ma’am.’

  ‘I’ll soon be myself again.’

  ‘I couldn’t marry him now, ma’am. I couldn’t settle in that neighbourhood.’

  ‘A little drink?’ my mother suggested.

  ‘No thank you, Mrs Quinton.’

  I said good-night but my mother did not hear me. She spoke of parties at Kilneagh before her marriage, of decorating the church for the Harvest Festival, and how my father used to pick his Christmas presents for her from Cash’s Christmas catalogue: bottles of scent and lavender water, talcum powder and bath oil. ‘There now,’ Josephine murmured because my mother had become agitated, speaking now of the damp lawn and its coolness soothing the pain. ‘I didn’t want to live,’ she sometimes said.

  I remembered her when Josephine and I had returned from the hospital in Fermoy. She had been wearing a green overcoat, standing with Aunt Fitzeustace in the garden. The overcoat had been my father’s and had hung, hardly ever worn by him, in one of the kitchen passages. ‘No, it cannot be believed,’ Aunt Fitzeustace had been saying, tears dripping on to her blouse and her tweed tie.

  ‘Good-night,’ I said again.

  ‘Ah, Willie, I did not see you there. Yes, of course it’s time for your bed.’

  She did not kiss me, as she had at Kilneagh. I closed her bedroom door and climbed up another half flight of stairs. Often I dreamed of that moment in the garden, of Aunt Fitzeustace’s weeping, and my mother in the green overcoat.

  ‘Mr Derenzy is coming today,’ Josephine reminded me one morning, and when I returned from school there was a fire in the dining-room and my mother had dressed and come downstairs. The dining-room door was ajar, and with some excitement Josephine said: ‘You are to go in at once, Willie. Just comb your hair.’

  She combed it herself with a comb that had been ready on the kitchen draining-board. She made me wash my hands, and damped the comb beneath the tap. ‘Look up at me,’ she said, and then hurried me to the dining-room, where a mass of papers and ledgers was spread out on the table. My mother, in a black and red striped dress, had a tray of tea things in front of her. The room smelt of her scent, the first time I’d noticed it since we’d come to the house in Windsor Terrace. She had touched her cheeks with rouge and had piled her hair up, the way she used to for a party at Kilneagh. ‘Willie’ll be better at understanding,’ she said, smiling and pouring tea.

  I shook hands with Mr Derenzy, who hadn’t changed in any way whatsoever. He wore the same blue serge suit, the same pens and pencils clipped to its top pocket. His red hair still gave the impression of sustaining a life of its own, the hand that gripped mine felt more like bones than flesh.

  ‘Ah, Willie, it’s good to see you.’

  ‘The poor man’s having a terrible time explaining to me, Willie.’

  ‘Ah no, no,’ Mr Derenzy protested, sitting down again.

  My mother offered me a piece of Swiss roll, and when Mr Derenzy began to talk about sales and purchases at the mill I realized that my task was simply to listen. The sums and subtractions were a formality, but once Mr Derenzy paused and, addressing me rather than my mother, explained that a legal agreement necessitated this long report of the continued management of the mill. I had not even thought about any of it before, or wondered what was happening there. That afternoon I realized Mr Derenzy was now in charge of everything, no longer a clerk but the mill’s manager.

  ‘Coal, £12,’ he said. ‘Carpenter’s repairs to the chute supports, £3. 4s., Midleton Sacks and Company Limited, £14. 12s.’ He took from his pocket the tin that once had contained catarrh pastilles and now held snuff. As I listened to his fluty voice I reflected that the container couldn’t always have been that same one: the words Potter’s, the Remedy would not still have been as easy to read across the table if he had carried the tin about with him for years. It was odd that Geraldine and Deirdre, so interested in everything about Mr Derenzy, had never wondered if he suffered from catarrh and bought these pastilles regularly.

  ‘Wicks,’ he said, ‘half a crown. I’m thinking,’ he added apologetically, ‘would the mat inside the office door have had its time? Mr Quinton didn’t say order a new one, but it’s gone threadbare and only a while ago the traveller from Midleton Sacks got his foot caught in it. I had Johnny Lacy take a look at it, only he said there’s nothing can be done with the fibre the way it’s manufactured. And if we don’t replace it at all—’

  ‘Oh, replace it, Mr Derenzy,’ interrupted my mother, as if waking from sleep. ‘Simply replace it.’

  ‘That’s nice of you, Mrs Quinton. Only I don’t think that mat could be repaired. But then again I wouldn’t want you to think there’s an extravagance in buying a new one.’

  ‘An office has to have a mat.’ My mother smiled, but the strain of the afternoon was showing beneath the powder and the rouge. ‘Mr Derenzy,’ she suggested, ‘I think we might have a little drink.’

  She rose as she spoke and approached a decanter on the sideboard. Glasses had been arranged in a row in front of it, as if other guests were expected. Neither the glasses nor the liquid in the decanter had been there when I’d last entered the dining-room.

  ‘Ah no, not whiskey for me, Mrs Quinton. No, thanks all the same.’

  ‘There’s gin somewhere. There’s sherry.’

  ‘I never touch a drop, Mrs Quinton.’

  ‘You don’t drink? I never knew that.’

  ‘It’s not on temperance grounds, Mrs Quinton. It’s only I have no head at all for it.’

  ‘Oh, but surely a little thimbleful?’

  ‘I’d be on my bed for three days, Mrs Quinton.’

  Not properly listening even though she managed to conduct the conversation, my mother had poured herself a measure of whiskey and now added water to it from a cut-glass jug. With this she returned to where she’d been sitting.

  ‘Is there anything, Mr Derenzy? Soda water? There might be lemonade. Willie, go and ask Josephine if she has lemonade for Mr Derenzy. Or maybe that ginger stuff.’

  ‘Ah no, don’t bother.’ Wrenching his face apart, a skeleton’s smile was full of apology for the trouble this disinclination to drink whiskey was causing.

  But my mother nodded at me in a way I remembered from Kilneagh, indicating that I should do as she had bidden me. ‘And ask Josephine to make up the fire.’

  There was no lemonade, nor any ginger stuff, so Josephine sent me out to Hayes’s while she went herself to the dining-room to put coals on the fire and to say I wouldn’t be long. When I returned with two bottles of soda water Josephine put them on a tray, with glasses that were larger than the ones on the sideboard, and in the dining-room I poured some for myself and some for Mr Derenzy. The conversation, clearly no longer about accounts and office replacements, had ceased when I entered. As he received his glass from me, Mr Derenzy attempted to guide my mother’s attention back to the business of the mill but she at once interrupted him.

  ‘You know the facts,’ she said sharply. ‘You are a person, Mr Derenzy, who knows everything. About Kilneagh and Lough, indeed about Fermoy. You have told Willie and myself that an office mat is threadbare and we have been attentive; Willie has gone out for soda water. The mill is running profitably, that is clear to see.
But there is something more important.’

  ‘I wonder in front of Willie, Mrs Quinton? If you recall, you said you would prefer to have this private between us.’

  ‘I have changed my mind.’

  In my absence the decanter had been removed from the sideboard and was now beside my mother’s glass. So was the jug of water.

  Mr Derenzy shifted his feet about and repeatedly swallowed. He was here at the request of Lanigan and O’Brien, he said; it was a legal requirement that he should regularly make the report he was endeavouring to make.

  ‘Was it Sergeant Rudkin?’ enquired my mother, and in my mind’s eye I instantly saw the man in soldier’s uniform lighting a cigarette at the street corner in Fermoy. ‘Rudkin?’ my mother repeated.

  The fluffy halo nodded, and for a moment there was agitation in the mill manager’s eyes. His lips had begun to quiver, anger grated in his voice.

  ‘Rudkin walked about Fermoy,’ he said, ‘as if nothing had occurred. The only thing that happened was the woman he was after closed her door to him.’

  ‘What woman, Mr Derenzy?’ My mother sprawled over the papers on the table, her glass held in the air.

  ‘He was attempting to associate with a Fermoy woman. The widow of McBirney, the bicycle-shop man.’

  ‘I didn’t ever know that.’

  ‘McBirney was killed in the Munster Fusiliers.’

  ‘I don’t think that matters, you know.’

  ‘No, no, it doesn’t at all. It was only that you enquired about the woman—’

  ‘Are people in Fermoy certain about the other thing? How do people know?’

  ‘Oh, they know all right, Mrs Quinton. One of the young fellows with Rudkin that night ended up in a terrible state. He deserted from the barracks and was gone for two days until they found him near the Mitchelstown Caves. He couldn’t stop talking about Rudkin and the petrol tins. He was unhinged by the whole affair: a finger wasn’t laid on him because everyone knew the Tans would do it for them when they heard he’d talked.’