Fools of Fortune Read online

‘We will always be friends, Willie, you and I. Together we have found comfort in our tribulations.’

  Again she kissed me, and a feeling of desperation rushed somewhere inside me, making me dizzy. I wanted to say anything that would make her stop, to protest that I didn’t like it when she came so close, to say I knew she was wearing violet-coloured underclothes. But in the midst of my panic what I heard myself saying was:

  ‘Should we get on with our French now, Miss Halliwell?’

  ‘I will always be here. When you leave this school please don’t forget that. Will you write me letters? Promise me, Willie. Promise you’ll write me letters.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Halliwell.’

  A hair curled from a mole on her chin, and I thought if I asked her why she didn’t cut it off she would weep. Her tears would fall like rain on to my blue French book. The faded flowers of her face would become as ugly as Aunt Fitzeustace’s when she had wept in the garden.

  ‘When they told me about you, when they told me what had happened, I knew there would never be another child in this schoolroom who could mean as much to me as you have.’

  ‘I’ve learnt the Passe Compose. J’ai commence.’

  ‘Do you like me, Willie?’

  I said I did, but it was not the truth. I hated her mole and her moist lips and her talk of comfort in our tribulations. I was glad she’d smelt the tobacco on my lips, I was glad Elmer Dunne had coarsely said she was on for it. I couldn’t imagine myself ever writing to her and certainly didn’t intend to. In my dislike of her I felt calm again, and without emotion I said:

  ‘Please don’t favour me, Miss Halliwell. Please don’t touch the back of my neck in class.’

  ‘Willie, dear—’

  ‘Elmer Dunne used to drop his pencil on the floor so that he could look up your skirts.’

  She did not say anything. Her face was slightly turned away from me. Beneath the blush that now suffused it there was a sudden prettiness. I said:

  ‘Tu as commence, il a commence, nous avons commence, vous avez commence, ils ont commence.’

  When I had finished Miss Halliwell still didn’t speak. I stood up and gathered my books together, buckling them into my satchel. I left the schoolroom, not looking again in her direction, not saying good-bye as I usually did.

  After that I was never again kept back when school was over, and on my last day in the schoolroom I imitated Elmer Dunne: knowing that Miss Halliwell was watching me from her window, I walked across the playground with a cigarette in my mouth. Someone cheered and then the bell rang out, but I continued on my way. I left my satchel and my books and my pencil-case in the schoolroom, and went on walking, through the city and up the hill to our house.

  That day was a Wednesday and Mr Derenzy had come to make the half-yearly report my mother had attempted to dispense with. From the hall I could hear his voice in the dining-room, with a few monosyllables from my mother. I opened the dining-room door and took my place at the table. Miss Halliwell would be weeping in the schoolroom by now, alone after her pupils had gone.

  ‘There’s a bill I have to question from Midleton Sacks,’ Mr Derenzy said. ‘There’s a charge for a gross we didn’t receive, so I’ll be writing a complaint concerning that.’

  The afternoon dragged. Josephine brought in tea. My mother drank whiskey, saying it was good for a toothache she had developed. I was glad I had been cruel to Miss Halliwell.

  ‘Johnny Lacy’s getting married,’ Mr Derenzy said. ‘One of the Sweeney girls.’

  ‘Johnny Lacy?’ My mother’s lips remained parted after she spoke. She stared, frowning, at Mr Derenzy. ‘Johnny Lacy?’ she said again, with greater emphasis. ‘Johnny Lacy?’

  ‘He’s been courting Bridie Sweeney for a long while now.’

  ‘But Josephine—’

  ‘Oh, I’d say all that was over, Mrs Quinton.’

  My mother slowly shook her head. In her bewildered way she said she had kept urging Josephine to return to Lough.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Mr Derenzy.

  ‘Now, someone’s on my mind,’ my mother said from her bed later that same evening. She had poured herself a little whiskey, she explained, because she was still suffering from toothache. Her face puckered in irritation while she endeavoured to establish who it was that hovered mysteriously behind her thoughts. I thought it might be Miss Halliwell, that somehow or other Miss Halliwell had been in touch with her, to complain of my behaviour. But after a moment’s consideration I knew that of course it wasn’t. More likely to be Josephine, I thought, but did not say so.

  My mother frowned and shook her head, appearing to dismiss the subject. She said that when she was first married she used to wait at the mill every afternoon so that she and my father could walk back together to the house. ‘I remember the day you were born, Willie. I remember the broken veins in Dr Hogan’s face and how his shiny boots reminded me of a huntsman. “Now, now, Mrs Quinton,” he said, “make your effort when I tell you.”’

  She poured herself more whiskey. She told me I had been creased and red, my eyes squeezed tight. And then, abruptly, she exclaimed, interrupting what she was saying:

  ‘It’s that man who’s on my mind. You know how that kind of thing is, Willie? Suddenly, when you’re not thinking at all it comes to you. That horrible Sergeant Rudkin, Willie.’

  She went on talking about him, asking me if I could visualize him in his vegetable shop in Liverpool, selling produce to people who didn’t know he had been responsible for a massacre. Would they have eaten the parsnips and cabbages if they knew? Would they have laughed and joked with him if they knew he had ordered the shooting of the dogs? She described his vegetable shop to me so minutely that she might have visited it herself, potatoes in sacks, tinned fruit on a shelf, bananas hanging from hooks.

  ‘The Devil incarnate,’ my mother said.

  5

  Woodcombe Rectory it says on the writing-paper and I see that rectory clearly, although I’ve never visited Dorset. Do please come to Woodcombe: regularly the invitation was repeated, but like the pleas from my aunts and from India the letters from the rectory lay about my mother’s bedroom unacknowledged, sometimes unread except in idle moments by myself. One mentioned you: in the September when first I went to the school I had so dreaded in the Dublin mountains you were to leave the rectory for a boarding-school in Hampshire. You were aware of my existence then; and I, without interest, of yours.

  My father’s name is on a board here, I wrote to Father Kilgarriff, because he was in the rugby team, although I don’t think he ever told me that. I have made friends with two boys in particular, Ring who comes from Dublin and de Courcy from Westmeath. The day is like this:

  At a quarter past seven the rising bell is rung, and then the ten-minute bell. After the second one if you’re caught in bed you are punished. Breakfast is at five to eight, and Chapel afterwards. Chapel is the centre of school life, so the headmaster says. He’s an English clergyman, as round as a ball, with a crimson complexion. His wife wears blue stockings and has grey hair that bushes out from the sides of her head. Their butler is called Fukes. He looks like an assistant at a funeral, de Courcy says, with his black clothes and deathly face.

  Classes go on all morning, with a break at eleven o’clock for milk. Buckets of it are placed on a table outside Dining Hall and you dip your mug in. Thafs a tradition here. So is flicking butter on to the wooden ceiling of Dining Hall, which is something my father told me about. Classes continue after lunch and then there are games, tea and Preparation. Cloister cricket is a tradition too, but that’s only played in the summer term. In class and Chapel and Dining Hall we have to wear gowns. On Sundays we wear surplices in Chapel, and the masters have academic hoods, all different colours.

  The chaplain was a good-hearted man with a stutter, keen on rugby. Old Dove-White, who was my housemaster, sought a quiet life, never minding when we read books during his Latin lessons, or played cards or dice. Mad Mack, the mathematics master, had a ginger
moustache and ginger hair and twisted the lobes of your ears. There was a man in a white coat who dealt in scientific subjects, and bald Monsieur Bertain who liked to talk about the part he’d played in the German war. Hopeless Gibbon, younger than one of the prefects, couldn’t keep order. Dove-White’s pipe tobacco had burnt holes all over his clothes.

  Exposed to the winds that swept across the gorse-laden hillsides, the school that contained these people was a cloistered world of its own, different in every way from Mercier Street Model. None of my new mentors resembled the two teachers I had previously experienced, and the sexual obsessions of Elmer Dunne paled to ordinariness when related to the exploration of that same subject by my classroom companions. The headmaster was known as the Scrotum and his wife as Mrs Scrotum.

  In my letters to my mother I did not repeat that nickname, nor say that Mr Mack was violent or that Hopeless Gibbon had difficulties in the classroom. The Chaplain has a tin of biscuits, I wrote, like the tins there used to be along the counter of Driscoll’s in Lough, with glass over them .A boy whose name I don’t know has got into trouble because of the mice he keeps, and his jackdaw pecked poor Fukes and had to be given its freedom, even though the boy had taught it to say ‘Amen’. In reply there was a letter that was difficult to read. Some of the ink had been smudged, and the sentences rambled on, often remaining unconcluded. My mother’s handwriting was jagged and unfemi-nine, sprawling as if a spider had trailed its way from the inkwell across the page. She described a walk she had taken, and how she’d sat on a low wall and a cat had crept into her lap. Vaguely she said she missed me.

  Ring and de Courcy and I used to smuggle bread out of Dining Hall beneath our gowns and toast it in the furnace-room on the end of a length of wire. On Sundays we had tea with Dove-White, who invited a few other boys as well. He always had Fuller’s cakes, which he had sent up specially from Dublin, and he let us make toast at his fire, a less difficult operation than poking slices of bread into the coke furnace. We sat for hours in his cluttered room, full of the belongings of boys who had long since left the school. Stacked away in corners, filthy with dust by now, were cricket bats and tennis racquets, books, overnight cases, deflated rugby balls, rugs, canes, caps, scarves, hats, hockey sticks, and a useful supply of gowns, surplices, blazers and House ties. ‘Oh, now, now,’ Dove-White would protest with a half-hearted sigh when the conversation touched upon Big Lily the nightwatchman’s wife, who was the source of the graffiti in the school’s whitewashed lavatory cubicles. Big Lily worked in the kitchens, returning in the late evening to a cottage halfway down the back drive. Her husband, O’Toole, would then get up and prepare himself for his night’s duty in the furnace-room. It wasn’t until he was safely ensconced in a chair among the piles of coke that surreptitious journeys were made to the windows of his cottage, where the culminating excitement was the sight of Big Lily washing herself at the kitchen sink. I made the journey myself, since to do so had long since become a ritual experience for all new boys.

  ‘Blood Major knocked on the door,’ de Courcy said in Dove-White’s room, and Dove-White gave his sigh. Blood Major was no longer at the school, but the night he had knocked on the door while Big Lily was washing herself was one of the most repeated of all Sunday-afternoon stories. No one tired of retelling it, with variations from week to week.

  ‘ “Is that you, Blood?” she says. “Come in, Blood, I can’t see you in the dark.”’ De Courcy paused, allowing expectation to rise: de Courcy’s versions were always good. ‘“Evening, Mrs O’Toole,” Blood says, “I was passing and I saw the light. Is this penknife Mr O’Toole’s?” He holds out his own penknife and Big Lily shakes her head. She had covered herself up with a sheet she’d pulled off the line above the range. “Someone said it was Mr O’Toole’s,” Blood says. “I’m sorry to trouble you, Mrs O’Toole.” The next thing is he’s sitting down having a cup of tea and Big Lily is putting safety-pins in the sheet to keep it around her. “You’re a fine big boy, Blood,” she says. “You have lovely strong arms. Will I sit on your knee, Blood?” The next thing is she’s up on his knee and he has two of the safety-pins taken out of the sheet. “God, you’re a terrible boy, Blood,” she says, and in steps O’Toole, back for his tobacco. “Poor Blood got a fly in his eye,” she says, “I’m trying to lift it out with a corner of this sheet.” O’Toole gives a jerk of his head and says you have to be careful with anything in the eye. “Ah, there’s me tobacco,” he says, and as soon as he’s gone Big Lily has Blood down on the table.’

  ‘She’s a most respectable woman,’ Dove-White protested, as he always did, when de Courcy had finished. ‘It’s sheer nonsense, de Courcy.’

  ‘She spends four hours in Confession every Tuesday, sir. The priests go mad with excitement.’

  ‘I doubt that very much.’

  There were other accounts drawn from the private life of the nightwatchman’s wife, and many adventures concerning the legendary Blood Major. One in particular told how he had cycled down to Dublin one night and had been approached by a heavily made-up woman in Bachelor’s Walk. ‘Are you game for a drink?’ she suggested to him. ‘Will we go to Mooney’s?’ With alacrity Blood Major agreed and in the brighter light of the public house he noticed that the woman was a good deal older than his mother. Her coat was of worn fur, her hair a shade of brass. Each time she laughed the sound ended in a bout of coughing which caused her several chins to wobble. ‘They have good-class mahogany in here,’ she said after Blood Major had bought her a glass of Smithwick’s. ‘Spanish mahogany, the best you can get.’ She was particularly fond of mahogany, she revealed, and a desultory conversation about the timber then commenced, during which Blood Major edged a knee closer to one of his companion’s. On her recommendation, he examined the mahogany counter and the drinking cubicles, and the frames of the mirrors which advertised different brands of spirits. You’d never find better mahogany than that, the woman assured him. ‘Will we try another glass, dear? Isn’t it lovely and warming?’ As she spoke, she returned the pressure on her knee and placed a hand on Blood Major’s thigh, saying he was a fine big boy. ‘Take care with that one,’ a man in a bowler hat warned him at the bar. ‘She’s up to her neck in the pox.’

  It was stories such as these, and the use of improper language and obscene references, that inspired the crusade of Mad Mack, whose avowed intention was to cleanse the school of verbal grime. He had a band of minions, stern-faced youths whom he’d imbued with his puritan zeal and invested with the authority of prefects.

  ‘Abominable man,’ was Dove-White’s unvarying opinion of the mathematics master. They had not addressed one another for fourteen years, Mad Mack in turn considering Dove-White ludicrous and ineffectual.

  ‘Take yourself to the back,’ Mad Mack had ordered during my first mathematics lesson, and I joined the row of farmers’ sons, whom daily he referred to as peasants. In Chapel he occupied one of the throne-like seats behind the choir, strands of his ginger hair plastered across his head, lips hidden by his ginger moustache. Gowns draped the differently disposed figures of his colleagues among the carved oak gargoyles that lent distinction to this special area, an arm raised here and there, fingers gripping a chin or touching a cheek-bone. But Mad Mack always sat bolt upright, as if in pain.

  ‘Trench reported Mrs Scrotum to him,’ de Courcy remarked to Dove-White, ‘for eyeing Hopeless Gibbon. She likes being friends with the young ones, doesn’t she, sir?’

  ‘Abominable woman.’

  Unfailingly Dove-White emerged from his sleepiness to condemn these people. The headmaster himself was his most particular bete noire and if we could get him going on a Sunday afternoon he would hold forth for hours about the red-fleshed clergyman’s undergraduate days at Keble College, Oxford. These mysteriously acquired recollections—for Dove-White himself had not been to that university—appeared to belong in the same category as the sagas of Blood Major, and reminded me also of the stories Johnny Lacy had told me about the circus dwarf’s wife who ate nails
and the soldier who’d ridden a horse through Phelan’s shop window in Fermoy. We Irish were intrigued, my father used to say, by stories with a degree of unreality in them.

  ‘D’you think Mad Mack should be given the sack, sir?’ de Courcy would regularly enquire. ‘I mean, since he’s depraved?’

  ‘A man like Mack shouldn’t be allowed in any school. Heaven knows why they can’t see that.’

  ‘The headmaster’s not intelligent, sir.’

  De Courcy was thin and jumpy, always moving about. He had hair that was paler than my own, white almost, and smooth as a pebble. Beneath the neat curve of his fringe a sallow face perpetually changed expression, eyes flickering nervously, lips chattering or laughing. Ring was the opposite, a massive boy with a sledgehammer head, slow of thought and speech. They’d been at the same preparatory school in Co. Wicklow but some element was missing in their friendship which I, to my surprise, apparently supplied. We sat next to one another in Dining Hall and in Chapel and in class. We roamed together over the hills at the back of the school, we smoked cigarettes together, and on exeat Sundays we all three walked down to Ring’s house in Rathfarnham and spent the day there. Ring’s father was a manufacturer of lemonade who’d been at the school at the same time as my own, a big man with a chunky bald head. Ring was proposing to manufacture lemonade as well; de Courcy wanted to become an actor.

  ‘No, that ridiculous man’s not intelligent,’ Dove-White would thoughtfully agree, the conversation following a pattern. Burning tobacco would fall from his pipe on to his waistcoat, to be followed by a smell of singeing, which he ignored. At Keble, he would invariably add, the headmaster had been considered mentally deficient.

  ‘Let’s go over to Bolger’s,’ de Courcy suggested one Saturday afternoon in the furnace-room, and after some calculations we agreed that between the three of us we had enough money for the outing. Bolger’s was a house about a mile across the hills, where tea—with fried eggs and bacon—might be purchased at a modest cost. Afterwards, funds permitting, a call might be made to Lamb Doyle’s public house.