Fools of Fortune (23 page)

She didn’t mind being different herself, not having a First Communion dress, nor rosary beads, not being able to walk in the Corpus Christi procession in Fermoy. She asked forgiveness if she stepped on a snail because Sister Mulcahy had once explained that a snail was just as much God’s creature as anything else was. But Imelda knew that a Protestant asking forgiveness, and never being required to say Hail Marys as a penance, was different also. ‘Proddy-woddy green-guts,’ Teresa Shea had whispered on Imelda’s first day at the convent, and once she’d muttered beneath a laugh that Aunt Fitzeustace was peculiar, and had muttered something also about Father Kilgarriff. Imelda knew that strictly speaking he should not be called Father Kilgarriff since he had not been a priest for ages. But that didn’t seem important and she didn’t consider Aunt Fitzeustace peculiar. ‘Heretics,’ Teresa Shea muttered beneath her laugh. ‘Crowd of bloody heretics.’

Her mother tried to explain. She said that for ever so long, for centuries, the Catholics had been prevented from practising their faith: no wonder there were people like Teresa Shea now. Father Kilgarriff told her about Daniel O’Connell, who had achieved religious freedom for the Catholics without resort to the gun or the sword. Her mother talked about the Mitchelstown Martyrs and the skirmish there had been at Cappoquin in 1915. Once when they were all out for a drive in the car they passed the place where a famous revolutionary had been shot in an ambush: Michael Collins he’d been called. When they went to the seaside at Youghal her mother told her about the priest who had been executed there in 1602 for refusing to renounce his faith. She told her about the English major who had wished to rest his horses at Kilneagh but had been ordered to go away. Her mother said that the revolutionary who’d been killed in the ambush used to visit Kilneagh and that the Quintons had given him money for his revolutionary cause. Her mother had shown her the tree the other man had been hanged from, the man whose tongue was cut out because of his traitorous talk. It was good to see the ivy growing over imperial Ireland, her mother used to say, and on their drives would point at ivied ruins like Kilneagh’s and sometimes at houses that were still intact but had become training schools for priests or insane asylums. The pacific Daniel O’Connell was not her mother’s hero: she spoke instead of Ireland’s fighting men, of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell who centuries ago had fled into exile, as the survivors of Ireland’s lost battles had always fled. Imelda’s own father had to remain in a foreign country, unable to return to his mill, and often Imelda tried to imagine him, wondering if he was like the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell. The nuns at the convent spoke of him as a hero, even as somebody from a legend, Finn Mac Cool or the warrior Cuchulainn. ‘You’re my special Imelda,’ Sister Rowan had announced when Imelda first watched her making bread, and she knew that had been said because of her father. ‘He will never be forgotten,’ Sister Mulcahy had assured her. ‘Your father will never be forgotten, Imelda, in Lough or in Fermoy, in all County Cork. He is every day in our prayers. Our Lady will intercede.’

There was a photograph of her father in her mother’s bedroom, standing among rows of other boys. It was hard to make out what he looked like, except that his hair was light-coloured, as her own was. He was smiling a little in the photograph, but when she tried to look more closely at his face it became misty. ‘Teresa Shea’s only jealous,’ a girl at the convent had said. ‘A father like you have.’

Imelda picked mulberries in the orchard, thinking about a poem Miss Garvey had read out,
The Lake Isle of Innisfree.
It was beautiful, just as beautiful as the lines Father Kilgarriff sometimes quoted from William Shakespeare.
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.
Softly she repeated the words to herself.
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow.

In the mulberry orchard the midges began to bite. Fallen apples from the single apple tree lay among the long grass, green cooking apples, too bitter to eat. Was it Jerusalem Sister Mulcahy had said the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell had gone to? Was it Cuchulainn who had sent the headless bodies galloping to his enemy’s camp in chariots?

She’d become curious about her father because everyone made such a fuss, Sister Rowan saying Our Lady would intercede and Teresa Shea being jealous. He had very blue eyes, her mother said, and sometimes, just for fun, Imelda pretended he stepped off the bus at Driscoll’s shop and she ran up to him because she recognized him. All the girls outside Driscoll’s, eating liquorice or Rainbow toffees, went silent. Then Mr Sweeney came out of his garage and Mrs Sweeney appeared at the door of the public house. They waved delightedly, and Imelda walked with her father along the road to Kilneagh and he told her about the places he had travelled to.

He was a hero because his courage and his honour insisted that he should do what he had done: her mother had explained all that. No one, not even Teresa Shea, said it was wrong to get revenge on the Black and Tan who had burnt down Kilneagh. It was not even the beginning of a crime, her mother explained, not when you thought of the massacres and the martyrs, and the cold-blooded murder of the Quintons in the middle of the night.

Because she was curious Imelda went often to her mother’s bedroom to look at the photograph. She examined the eyes that were apparently very blue. She wondered what he’d been smiling at. ‘Oh, he was the most ordinary little boy when he was your age,’ Aunt Fitzeustace said, and Father Kilgarriff remembered that he’d been bad at Latin.

Imelda closed her eyes. Pictures slipped about. The flames devoured the flesh of the children’s faces and the flesh of their arms and of their legs, of their stomachs and their backs. Trapped in her bedroom, fat Mrs Flynn wept in panic; smoke filled her lungs, her eyes streamed. The man in the teddy-bear dressing-gown carried his wife down the burning stairs and went in search of his children. Frightened in case they’d been recognized, the soldiers returned. In the yard the gardeners who had come from the gate-lodge quickly died, and then the labradors died and then the stray dogs. The empty gate-lodge became a furnace also. The sound of the motor-car engine died away.

2

Imelda watched while the wheels of the motor-car were taken off and the car itself placed on wooden blocks in the old dairy. Mr Sweeney had come to do it and stayed all morning in the kitchen talking to Philomena. He said he had lost his arm near the Somme in 1916. ‘This time round it’s up to Russia,’ he predicted. ‘You’ll never subject the might of Russia, Philomena, whichever side she comes down on.’

She watched while Father Kilgarriff and a man from Fermoy put up an aerial for the wireless Aunt Fitzeustace had bought. It had to be attached to a chimney, and the earth wire had to be attached to a metal rod which the man from Fermoy sank into the ground outside the French windows of the sitting-room. The man explained to Father Kilgarriff about the wet battery and the dry battery and how the wet battery would have to be charged, maybe once a week.

On Sunday evenings there were the national anthems on the wireless and Mr Derenzy remained to hear them after he had taken Aunt Pansy for her Sunday-afternoon walk. Imelda was allowed to stay up to hear them also, but she noticed that her mother didn’t take the same interest in the European war as the others did. Aunt Pansy and Mr Derenzy sat in the window alcove and Father Kilgarriff beside the wireless in case it began to crackle or fade. Aunt Fitzeustace, in her usual position among the dogs on the sofa, smoked and beat time with her hand.
Flow gently, Sweet Afton,
it said on her brown and cream-coloured cigarette packets.

‘Were you here in the times before the fire, Philomena?’ Imelda asked, and Philomena said she had been. Previous to that she’d been Canon Connolly’s housekeeper, and when Canon Connolly had died and she’d nowhere to go Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy had taken her in. Imelda listened. She’d never heard of Canon Connolly before, and Philomena told her that he had liked to eat an apple in bed and couldn’t bear to wear vests. Philomena had a way of laughing whenever she spoke, throwing her head back and displaying her almost toothless mouth.

‘Do you remember my father, Philomena?’

‘Ah of course I do, child.’

‘Did he shoot the Black and Tan? Was that how it was done?’

Philomena inappropriately laughed. She didn’t know anything about things like that, she said. She crossed herself.

‘Did you know it was Liverpool where the man was, Philomena? It’s a harbour town up in the North of England. Ships come in there from all over the world.’

‘What’s that, child?’ Busy with a cabbage, washing it beneath the kitchen tap, Philomena laughed again. She poked a grub out of the cabbage. You wouldn’t want to find yourself eating a creature the like of that, she said.

‘I think maybe that was how it was done,’ Imelda said.

Again Philomena crossed herself. The fire had been terrible, she said. All over Co. Cork people knew about the fire there’d been at Kilneagh, come to that, all over Ireland. She’d heard about it herself the next morning, staying with her sister at Rathcormack.

‘No better than ruffians, half them Tans was. Sure, wasn’t it an extraordinary thing, that no one took a knife to that scoundrel before?’

‘A
knife
? Was the Black and Tan killed with a knife?’

Philomena was vague in her reply, still rinsing the cabbage leaves. The face from the photograph came into Imelda’s mind again. She wondered if it had been a knife like the one on the draining-board, Philomena’s favourite because it was so sharp, her ‘little brown knife’ as she called it because of its discoloured handle. Yet it didn’t seem quite the right implement because the end of its blade was rounded, not pointed the way it would have to be if you were planning to stick it in someone. It would go into the heart, she supposed, the way you’d aim for the heart with a bullet. But the revolutionary leader who used to visit Kilneagh had been shot through the skull. She could remember her mother saying that.

‘Oh, there’s a pretty little party,’ Mr Lanigan said, arriving in the orchard wing with business to conduct. Whenever he visited Kilneagh Aunt Pansy packed jars of mulberry jam into a cardboard box for him to take back to his family in Cork, and wrapped eggs in newspaper before placing them in the squares of the egg-box. The eggs were for Declan O’Dwyer, his deaf and dumb clerk who Aunt Fitzeustace said was an angel, causing Imelda to imagine a creature with wings. ‘And isn’t Imelda a most beautiful name?’ Mr Lanigan always said. ‘Aren’t you glad to’ve been given it?’

According to Father Kilgarriff, she shared the day with the Blessed Imelda Lambertini of Bologna, May 13th. She’d been born more than a month before she was expected and so apparently had the saintly child of Bologna. While not yet twelve years old the Blessed Imelda had experienced a Sacred Host hovering above her head while she knelt in prayer in a Dominican convent. And as that miracle occurred so had her death.

‘The income would not cease,’ Mr Lanigan was saying when Imelda listened at the sitting-room door, ‘if you returned to England, Marianne.’

Her mother said something strange: that when you looked at the map Ireland and England seemed like lovers. ‘Don’t you think so, Mr Lanigan? Does the map remind you curiously of an embrace? A most extraordinary embrace to throw up all this.’

‘Embrace?’

‘You think I’m extravagant in my Irish fancies? Father Kilgarriff thinks so, and the others too. Yet I am part of all this now. I cannot help my fervour.’

Imelda moved away from the sitting-room door. In the kitchen she drank some water and played for a moment with the terriers and a sheepdog. She thought of the Blessed Imelda because Mr Lanigan had put her in mind of her namesake. She had told Sister Rowan about the miracle of the Sacred Host and Sister Rowan had listened attentively but had revealed in the end that every Irish nun was familiar with the details of the marvel. In the kitchen Imelda imagined the Host as a wispy outline, no more than a shred of mist. Then she forgot about it and copied out a headline:
Insects have neither lungs nor gills.
Just as she’d finished she heard the voices of Mr Lanigan and her mother in the hall.

‘A town called Puntarenas,’ Mr Lanigan said, but later when Imelda looked in her atlas for somewhere that sounded like that she was not successful. She knew the conversation had turned to the subject of her father and guessed this town was where he lived. ‘I’d say the old Jerries have given him the works by now,’ Teresa Shea had ages ago suggested, with a smirk. Imelda had wondered about that, but now she wondered about the town that had been mentioned. She didn’t want to ask her mother because her mother would know she’d been listening. She asked Aunt Pansy and Philomena but they said they’d never heard of anywhere that sounded like that. So in the end she did ask her mother, ready to explain that she had overheard by accident, which in a way was true. Her mother didn’t reply. Instead she suggested a walk, and at the end of it she pointed at the tree the man had been hanged from, as though her answer lay in that.

‘Just an ordinary tree, Imelda. You could pass it by and not know a thing.’

After the hanging there had been the fire and years later, Imelda’s mother had explained, there had been the woman who had taken her life in Cork. Imelda had once been shown the house, at the top of the very steep hill. A dentist lived there now: a brass plate outside the hall door said so.

‘You can pass by anything and not know, Imelda. I never knew when I walked in the gardens of that great house in England that a girl had gone from there to Kilneagh. She pleaded with her family, but what was it to them that ignorant peasants were dying in another country? There has been too much wretched death in Ireland.’

They walked across the fields together and climbed up Haunt Hiil, and her mother told her about how she’d come to Ireland with a single suitcase and stayed in a boarding house she’d been told about by a woman on the street. On another occasion, climbing the hill, her mother said: