Fools of Fortune (24 page)

‘Your father and I never had a chance to get married. That is something you must know, Imelda.’

Her mother went on talking, about a scene that had taken place in the sitting-room of the orchard wing: how her parents had come to take her back to England. ‘Arrangements had been made for you to be born in a house in Clapham, which is a place in London where a cousin of my father lived. You would have been born and then left with this woman and her husband, and I would have returned to Woodcombe Rectory, as though nothing much had happened.’

Imelda frowned, in bewilderment and surprise. ‘I would not be at Kilneagh?’

‘These people in Clapham would have brought you up as their daughter.’

Imelda thought about this visit to Kilneagh of her mother’s parents, and the fruitless persuading that had taken place in the gaunt, square sitting-room. A light rain had been falling, she imagined, and outside the French windows the hens had been pecking among the gnarled trees of the mulberry orchard. ‘We have made firm arrangements,’ the clergyman announced, ‘for the child to be born in Clapham.’ And Imelda’s mother replied by speaking of Irish martyrs and Irish battles, and of the Easter Rising that years ago had taken place. Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy passed by the windows, bringing the dogs back from their afternoon walk. And then Philomena was in the orchard with a waterproof coat thrown over her head, calling out to the hens. ‘No one could live here!’ the clergyman’s wife cried in Imelda’s imagination. ‘This is a terrible place.’

Imelda smiled although her face remained serious. She was aware that her mother’s voice was continuing about something else: she did not listen. ‘Now, time for tea,’ she made Aunt Fitzeustace say on that rainy afternoon, entering the sitting-room with a sponge-cake on a plate, with Aunt Pansy and Father Kilgarriff and all the dogs behind her.

‘An old colonel he was,’ her mother’s voice was saying. ‘In India.’

They had reached the shale near the summit of the hill. They scrambled over it, conversation difficult for a while. At the top Imelda said:

‘India?’

‘If those two old sticks hadn’t been anxious my mother and I wouldn’t ever have come to Ireland. If they hadn’t written that letter your father and I would never have met, and neither you nor I would be in Kilneagh now.’

‘Was he nice, the colonel?’

‘He was very tall, straight as a die. Oh yes, I always think of them as nice.’

Imelda imagined the tall old colonel sitting down in the Indian heat, in a little Indian pavilion, to write the anxious letter.

‘What I mean, Imelda, is that’s how things happen. The most important things of all happen by chance.’

Imelda nodded. ‘Say we are distinctly worried,’ she made the tall man’s wife say. ‘Tell them to go forthwith to Cork.’ Aunt Pansy sometimes said she was distinctly worried. ‘I’ll do that forthwith,’ Mr Derenzy had promised last Sunday, assuring Aunt Fitzeustace about the sharpening of the blades of her mowing machine. In the pavilion a turbaned Indian waved a palm over the two old people to keep them cool and to drive away the mosquitoes.

‘No, I must say it, Marianne,’ Father Kilgarriff insisted quietly, but with some anger in his voice.

Imelda’s mother did not reply. They were in the sitting-room with one of the French windows open. In the mulberry orchard Imelda listened, which was a habit she’d got into.

‘She’s my child after all, Father.’

‘There is bitterness in what you say to her.’

‘How could there not be bitterness? I cannot be good like you are, Father. You forgive that bishop who deprived you of your vocation. You forgive that man who came here with his thugs and his petrol cans.’

‘That man is dead. In his lifetime I did not forgive him.’

‘And do you forgive Willie, Father?’

‘That is the saddest thing in all my life.’

‘Do you know, my parents have not written me a single word since the day they came here? They have turned their back on me, and do not wish ever even to think of me.’

‘You broke your parents’ hearts, Marianne. There is that too, you know.’

‘I loved my parents, Father.’

‘I know, Marianne. And was there anyone, in this house or outside it, who did not urge you to return to England with them?’

‘To have my child brought up as someone else’s? To have forgotten her existence? To have waited in that rectory until some widower should come along and have me as his housekeeper? I would rather have ended in a work-house.’

‘It isn’t easy for Imelda to be here. But since you have chosen it, Marianne, don’t make it more difficult still. That’s all I’m asking.’

There was a silence in the sitting-room. Then Imelda’s mother said:

‘Destruction casts shadows which are always there: surely you see that, Father? We will never escape the shadows of destruction that pervade Kilneagh.’

‘I only wish that, even now, you would take Imelda away from them.’

Her mother replied in a low voice which Imelda couldn’t hear. Then she became cross and shouted:

‘For God’s sake, what kind of an existence do you think he has? In one Godforsaken town after another?’

‘There’s not much left in anyone’s life after murder has been committed. God insists upon that, you know.’

Her mother’s anger abated: again she spoke in a voice so low that Imelda could hear only the end of what she said.

‘You’ve been in pain yourself, ever since that night. You could have killed yourself, running with that kite.’

There was something else which Imelda could not hear, and then she crept away. She went to a distant corner of the mulberry orchard and sat down in the warmth, with her back to the trunk of a tree. She watched a bee investigating a rotten berry and then humming busily off, in pursuit of something else. She couldn’t understand how Father Kilgarriff might have killed himself flying her kite that day. Again she imagined the boy in the photograph, in one town after another.

‘Oh, just writing,’ Aunt Fitzeustace said one winter’s afternoon, seated at her writing-desk. The grandfather clock wheezed and stuttered before chiming the half-hour. The murky face of Gladstone looked unwell.

‘I wrote a letter to my love,’ Imelda said.

Aunt Fitzeustace laughed. ‘Well, I have no love now.’

‘Once you had. Philomena says -‘

‘Oh, don’t listen to Philomena.’

‘Philomena says you were married once.’

‘Yes, I was married for a very short time.’

‘Father Kilgarriff had a love.’

‘Did Philomena tell you that too?’

‘Teresa Shea did.’

‘Well, it doesn’t concern Teresa Shea.’

‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Mr Derenzy married Aunt Pansy?’

‘People have said so.’

‘Then why doesn’t he?’

‘Mr Derenzy is governed by his sense of order.’

Aunt Fitzeustace rose and left the sitting-room with a stamped envelope in her hand, ready for Mr O’Mara to collect when he came with the newspapers the next morning. Imelda crossed to the writing-desk and stood by it for a moment, listening to Aunt Fitzeustace’s footsteps in the hall. She heard her voice addressing Aunt Pansy and then the sound of the kitchen door closing. She pulled out the two little props that Aunt Fitzeustace had just pushed in. She eased down the heavy mahogany flap and rested it on them. There was a mass of drawers in the desk, horizontal drawers and perpendicular ones, little fluted pillars, and hinged inkwells. There were secret drawers: Imelda had heard Aunt Fitzeustace asking Aunt Pansy to put keys in the one on the right. She had watched, but had not been able to see how it opened.

She pulled out a drawer full of bills, and another with darning cards in it. She read a letter from a shop in Cork, Which said the coats had come in, and another from Mr Lanigan, thanking for the hospitality and the mulberry jam, which all his family had enjoyed. Then there was a letter which interested her greatly. Dated many years ago, it was signed
A.M. Halliwell,
and Imelda knew who that was because her mother had often mentioned the name.
What I have heard cannot be true. I did not know until a week today. I am a stranger writing to you, but I ask for assurance that none of it is so. If it is true, it is my duty to tell you that this child should not be given life. In such a child there is the continuation of the tragedy that made the child’s father what he is. This is the most evil thing I have ever known of.

3

Aunt Pansy knitted Balaclava helmets and sent them to the Red Cross. Aunt Fitzeustace said that Mr Lanigan had reported German spies in Cork, people called Winkelmann who ran the glove factory. Father Kilgarriff read aloud from the
Irish Times
of the fall of France. Imelda, in secret moments, continued to listen.

‘Sometimes I wish I could be more like him,’ her mother said. ‘Every breath he draws is painful, yet he resents nothing.’

‘He’s a man who’s made like that,’ Aunt Fitzeustace replied. ‘I’ve known him a long time. Before he came to live here someone wrote to me and said he’d been unfrocked, and to tell you the truth I wasn’t in the least surprised. It seemed like part of his nature that he should fall foul of some powerful man whose daughter he’d befriended. I remember him as a boy, you know. He used to come out from Lough and do odd jobs for me in the garden. He hated to see anything hurt, even an insect. It was quite natural that he should come back to Kilneagh when everything fell to pieces for him.’

‘I wish he didn’t think I should have gone away. Or indeed still should go.’

‘He can’t help believing that in England you would have a better life ahead of you.’

‘And you?’

There was the sound of a match scraping on the sandpaper of Aunt Fitzeustace’s match-box, and then Aunt Fitzeustace’s sigh of satisfaction as she inhaled the smoke. Imelda imagined it billowing from her mouth and nostrils, one leathery hand stroking the head of a dog, the blind setter it would be since the blind setter was her favourite.

‘I have to agree, my dear,’ the old woman said at length. ‘There has been nothing nicer since the tragedy than having you and the child with us in Kilneagh, but I must be honest, Marianne.’

‘He will come back, you know. One day Willie will come back.’

Hearing that, Imelda drifted into a familiar reverie: her father again stepped off the bus at Driscoll’s, dressed in a suit that was as light-coloured as his hair. ‘In tropical countries a nun wears white,’ Sister Mulcahy had said in a geography class.
Puntarenas is a seaside town in Costa Rica,
Imelda had read in one of her mother’s diaries.
The Bank of Ireland has been transferring money there, but now he’s gone to somewhere else.
Imelda thought of a seaside promenade like the one in Youghal, and of an artist composing pictures on the sand with coloured powders. ‘Jays, will you look at the cut of Quinton?’ Teresa Shea sniggered in the convent whenever Imelda slipped into a reverie, but Imelda couldn’t help herself. More and more her reveries claimed her in the classroom or when she wandered about the fields or during the Sunday-evening anthems, or in bed. It was a habit she’d got into, like reading her mother’s diaries, and listening. ‘Whatever are you doing there, Imelda?’ Aunt Pansy said, coming upon her among the bushes of the old shrubbery as she and Mr Derenzy were setting off down the avenue on their Sunday walk. Mr Derenzy had been talking about something at the mill, nothing of any interest.

Her mother’s diaries were kept in a cupboard in her bedroom, a stack of jotters the same as the ones Imelda did her rough work in at the convent. The pencilled entries on the rough, lined paper were faded now, almost indecipherable.
I had never even heard of the Battle of the Yellow Ford until Father Kilgarriff told me. And now he wishes he hadn’t. The furious Elizabeth cleverly transformed the defeat of Sir Henry Bagenal into victory, ensuring that her Irish battlefield might continue for as long as it was profitable: Father Kilgarriff had told you too, in the scarlet drawing-room with the school-books laid out between you. Just another Irish story it had seemed to you and perhaps, if ever you think of it, it still does. But the battlefield continuing is part of the pattern I see everywhere around me, as your exile is also. How could we in the end have pretended? How could we have rebuilt Kilneagh and watched our children playing among the shadows of destruction? The battlefield has never quietened.

Tidily, Imelda returned the jotter to its place. For some reason a line of the poem she liked came into her head and she carried it with her to the fields and down to the river.
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.
She knew the poem by heart now. She was the best at poetry, Miss Garvey had said, and had told Teresa Shea to leave the room because she smirked.
I
hear it in the deep heart’s core,’
Imelda said aloud, lying down among the daisies on the river bank. She wondered what it had been like for the Blessed Imelda to experience the Sacred Host hovering above her while she knelt in prayer. She’d once asked Sister Rowan, who’d said that no ordinary mortal could know a thing like that. But it interested Imelda and she was curious.

She jumped from one stepping stone to another, crossing the water when it was shallow. She walked by the river for a while and then returned to the cobbled yard between the ruins and the orchard wing. Two geese wandered off towards the ruins and Imelda followed them. She told them they’d find no food among the stones and undergrowth. She shooed them back into the yard and then she ran into the kitchen.

Her mother was angry.

‘It’s horrible, Imelda. Eavesdropping’s horrible. No one likes that kind of thing.’

‘It’s only when there’s nothing to do.’

‘You can bring the dogs for a walk. I often see you going for a walk.’

‘I go to the mill. Or down to the river.’

‘Well, then.’

‘Sometimes it’s boring.’

‘I don’t want you ever, ever again to listen at doors. Promise me now, Imelda.’

Imelda promised, since promises were easy. They were in the dining-room because Philomena was in the kitchen and Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace in the sitting-room. The door was closed.