Fools of Fortune (6 page)

Aunt Pansy went the colour of a sunset and Mr Derenzy agitatedly pinched snuff from his tin box. Aunt Fitzeustace, who always remained silent when the union of Mr Derenzy and Aunt Pansy was raised by my father, groped in her large handbag for her cigarettes and matches. Aunt Fitzeustace smoked constantly but never on the village street. With a huge, grateful sigh she would light her first cigarette when the basket-trap left Sweeney’s yard.

‘Everything’s parched with the heat,’ Mr Derenzy said, as if he hadn’t heard my father. ‘I was noticing that.’

He and Aunt Pansy walked ahead, and my mother told Aunt Fitzeustace that she was concerned about the match because Josephine was a singular girl.

‘Will he lead her a dance?’ Geraldine asked. ‘Like the beery fellow and Kitty?’

But nobody answered that. Aunt Fitzeustace, who could look most severe at times, played with her packet of cigarettes.

‘Yes,’ she said at length. ‘A singular girl.’

‘And he, of course, is flirtatious.’

‘You’ll have them in the divorce courts before they’ve started.’ My father laughed rumbustiously. He walked with Geraldine and Deirdre on either side of him, holding their hands. I brought up the rear, behind my mother and Aunt Fitzeustace.

‘I wish you’d take it seriously,’ my mother upbraided crossly.

‘Sure, they can only try it and see.’

‘Yes, they can only try it,’ Aunt Fitzeustace said.

*

Father Kilgarriff was saying something uninteresting about the Gulf Stream when through the drawing-room window I saw my father hurrying beneath the rhododendrons in a way that was unusual for him. ‘Evie!’ he called loudly, somewhere in the house. ‘Evie! Evie!’ And that was unusual too.

‘Something’s happened,’ I said, and we both listened. There were hasty footsteps on the stairs, and ten minutes later Tim Paddy led the dog-cart past the window and my parents drove off in it. Father Kilgarriff attempted to continue with the geography lesson, but neither of us had any concentration left. It was Josephine, coming in with the mid-morning tea, who told us that the grey-faced Doyle had been murdered.

Father Kilgarriff crossed himself; Josephine had been weeping.

‘He was hanged from a tree,’ she said. ‘His tongue was cut out.’

There was a long silence after she left the drawing-room. The tray of tea and biscuits remained untouched on the oval table. I remembered my father saying he shouldn’t have taken Doyle back. I began to say something about that but Father Kilgarriff spoke at the same time.

‘How can people be at peace with themselves after doing a thing like that?’

‘Who would have done it, Father?’

‘I don’t know, Willie.’

He read to me for the rest of the morning from
The Old Curiosity Shop,
but instead of the adventures of Nell and her grandfather I saw Doyle’s crooked grey face and the blood rushing from his mouth. When Father Kilgarriff began his journey back to the orchard wing my sisters pulled at me in the hall. ‘What did they do with Doyle’s tongue?’ Geraldine kept asking. ‘Did they take it away?’

All three of us went to the kitchen, but Mrs Flynn knew as little as Josephine, so went to look for Tim Paddy. ‘The poor bloody bugger,’ he said, but didn’t say much else. We even dared to ask O’Neill, tracking him down to his onion beds. He actually spoke to us. He told us to go away.

My father and mother didn’t return at lunchtime. Geraldine, Deirdre and I sat around the dining-room table in a way that seemed very strange to us. Geraldine had been in the room with my mother when my father began to call her name in the hall below. ‘They’ve hanged Doyle,’ was what he had said when they stood together on the landing. ‘He was missing all night.’ I explained to my sisters about death by hanging because I’d asked Father Kilgarriff and he’d told me that the weight of the body snapped something in the neck. Deirdre began to cry. Tears dripped into her cold rice pudding; Geraldine scolded her.

‘Doyle was involved with the Black and Tans,’ my father told me later that afternoon, and did not say more except that the murdered man had sold information in the neighbourhood, to a Sergeant Rudkin. He had had no political leanings himself, neither Republican nor imperialist. ‘They’d have regarded his tongue as the instrument of his treachery,’ my father explained.

Deirdre had a dream about the body hanging from the branch of a tree, the bloody tongue picked up by a magpie. Geraldine drew a picture that included this magpie, in which Doyle was represented as a devilish-looking creature with staring black eyes. But when my mother found the drawing she furiously burned it, saying that a dead person must be respected no matter how despicable he had been in life.

‘Ah now, it’s best forgotten,’ Mr Derenzy replied when I asked him about the murder. He shook his head, causing the red fluff of his hair to spring up and down. He began to talk about something else, and it wasn’t until our conversation had come to an end that I realized he was afraid. When I asked Johnny Lacy he told me that the Black and Tans were loyal to their spies and rarely failed to avenge a death, justly or unjustly finding another victim. ‘I wouldn’t cross the yard in the dark,’ Mrs Flynn announced.

Yet life settled down again and when I think of that hot summer at Kilneagh I still hear the whisper of Josephine’s singing as she dusts and polishes. Aunt Fitzeustace cuts the grass, old Hannah arrives from the village to scrub the floors and do the washing, Tim Paddy leaves spinach for Mrs Flynn at the back door, O’Neill is hunched among his high delphiniums. The mill-yard bakes in the afternoon sun, my father walks the length of the avenue, his labradors slouching with him.’/
am old, but let me drink,’
my mother prompts in the scarlet drawing-room and adds in the silence that follows:
‘Bring me spices, bring me wine
.’ Even while she speaks the shadow of Doyle hovers in the drawing-room, as it hovers everywhere else. The magpie from Deirdre’s dream swoops for the tongue, flies settle on the blood as I had seen them settle on the carcass of a sheep. One of these days it will all be all right, my mother says again; and my father assures me that it can’t be long now before the Black and Tans are recalled to England.

In early September Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy went to the sea for their summer fortnight. Their many suitcases were loaded into the basket-trap one Friday morning and Tim Paddy stood ready to accompany them to the railway station at Fermoy. They stayed in Miss Meade’s boarding house in Youghal, and my father used to urge Mr Derenzy to take his holidays at the same time in order to accompany them. He swore that Aunt Pansy would come back engaged, but Mr Derenzy could never be persuaded, no doubt considering the suggestion improper.

‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ we shouted after the basket-trap, and Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy waved. Their dogs barked in the orchard wing and Father Kilgarriff hurried to calm them, an extra duty in the absence of my aunts. Philomena went to stay with her twin sister in Rathcormack.

Later that same day, when my father and I were in Fermoy ourselves, we saw a soldier whom my father identified as Doyle’s friend Sergeant Rudkin. The man was lighting a cigarette at a street corner, one hand cupped against the wind. Noticing my father, he raised that same hand in greeting.

‘He’s just inherited a greengrocer’s shop,’ my father said quietly. ‘In Liverpool.’

He watched Rudkin turning a corner and then said he’d once met him, here in Fermoy one night. ‘Oh, very agreeable, he was. He had a drop too much taken when he told me that about his shop.’

I enjoyed these Friday outings to Fermoy, collecting groceries that had been ordered the week before, buying household items for my mother and Mrs Flynn, and sometimes for my aunts. We always went for tea and sandwiches to the Grand Hotel, where my father talked to people I did not know. “Well, fellow-me-lad,’ a man would say and, finding it difficult to continue, would laugh and tap me on the head. Others would remark on my growth, or notice that I had the Quinton eyes. I liked it best when we went early to the hotel so that I could have my tea and then do what shopping remained, rather than wait in the hallway while my father conversed with his friends in the bar. The shop people always asked after my mother and my aunts, and occasionally after Mrs Flynn.

On the Friday when we saw Sergeant Rudkin there was green knitting wool to be matched and an order placed for oilcloth. There was a set of bolts to be collected from Dwyer’s hardware, and a cough remedy from the Medical Hall. I did all that while my father was in the hotel and at six o’clock we set out for Kilneagh. The Black and Tan sergeant was on my mind because it seemed strange to me that a member of a force which my father spoke of with revulsion should greet him on the street.

‘He was with poor Doyle the night I met him,’ he explained when I asked. ‘It would never have done to walk past your own employee, Willie.’

I accepted-that, and understood it. My father said:

‘Doyle, you see, was in a difficult position. He’d fought beside that man in Belgium.’

I asked if Doyle had been married. He shook his head. A moment later he added:

‘It should never have happened, Willie. That hanging was a terrible thing.’

He spoke deliberately, with an unusual firmness that reminded me of his saying that Collins’s men would not be invited to drill at Kilneagh. We sat together in the dog-cart, stopping in Lough so that he could call in at Sweeney’s for a drink and further conversation. I waited in the yard and Mrs Sweeney brought me out a plate of biscuits. We made our way then, slowly, through the village, between the two rows of colour-washed cottages, past Driscoll’s shop and the Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven. We turned eventually into the avenue of Kilneagh, my father humming beneath his breath as he often did on our Friday journey home.

‘I hate having to go away to the school,’ I said without looking at him, dropping the confidence into the euphoria which appeared to be there between us. He continued to hum during the lengthy pause which occurred before he replied.

‘Oh, we can’t have you uneducated, Willie. We couldn’t have that, you know.’

The words were precise, with a ring of finality about them, yet my father’s tone was as lazy as ever. It matched our unhurried progress as we passed through the white gates of Kilneagh and proceeded up the avenue between the two lines of beech trees. The labradors made a fuss on the gravel in front of the house, jumping up at both of us, and the stray dogs rushed round the side of the house. My father had presents for Geraldine and Deirdre and as I watched him giving them their parcels I knew I was going to have to go to the school he thought so much of. Perhaps it was the inevitability of it that caused me, for the first time, to feel that further dwelling on the matter would be something to be ashamed of, that further reference to it would belittle myself in my own eyes as much as in his. I was my father’s favourite, though he tried to hide the fact by paying extra attention to my sisters. For my part, I was fonder of him than of anyone else.

I awoke with a tickling in my nostrils. I lay there, knowing that something was different, not sure what it was. There was a noise, like the distant rushing of wind in trees.

Too drowsy to wonder properly, I slept again. There were voices calling out, and the screaming of my sisters, and the barking of the dogs. The rushing noise was closer. ‘Willie! Willie!’ Tim Paddy shouted.

I was in Tim Paddy’s arms, and then there was the dampness of the grass before the pain began, all over my legs and back. The ponies and my mother’s horse snorted and neighed. I could hear their hooves banging at the stable doors.

There were stars in the sky. An orange glow crept over the edges of my vision. The noise there’d been had changed, becoming a kind of crackling, with crashes that sounded like thunder. I couldn’t move. I thought: We are all like this, Geraldine and Deirdre, my mother and father, Josephine and Mrs Flynn; we are all lying on the wet grass, in pain. Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy would be asleep in Miss Meade’s boarding house in Youghal; Philomena would be asleep in Rathcormack; for all I knew Father Kilgarriff was dead.

Through the fever of this nightmare floated the two portraits in the drawing-room, my dog-faced great-grandfather and plain, merciful Anna Quinton. I seemed to be in the drawing-room myself, gathering up my school books and placing them in the corner cupboard. After that I was in the dog-cart, asking my father why Father Kilgarriff had been unfrocked. I saw that the teeth glistening in the confessional were Anna Quinton’s, which was why Father Kilgarriff read her letters. I would understand such things, my father said, when I went away to school: that was why I had to. I would understand the love of Mr Derenzy and Aunt Pansy, and the different love of Tim Paddy and the Sweeney girl.

‘Don’t move, Willie. Don’tmove. Just he there.’ Itwas Josephine who whispered to me, and then there were other voices. There were men shouting, asking questions. ‘Who are you?’ one question was, and someone else said: ‘He’s O’Neill. He’s a gardener in this place. That fellow’s his son.’ There was a gunshot and then another. They seemed like part of the crackling noise, but I knew they weren’t because they were closer to where I lay. ‘Oh, Mother of God,’ Josephine whispered.

Men walked by me. ‘Is there a bottle in the car?’ a voice asked. ‘Christ, I need a drop.’ Another voice said: ‘Hold on to your nerves, hero.’

There were further gunshots and one by one the dogs stopped barking. The horse and the ponies must have been released because I heard them galloping somewhere. Something touched my leg, the edge of a boot, I thought. It grazed the pain, but I knew that I must not call out. I knew what Josephine had implied when she’d whispered to be still. The men who were walking away must not be seen; they had been seen by O’Neill and Tim Paddy, who must have come up from the gate-lodge. My eyes were closed, and what I saw in the darkness was Geraldine’s drawing of Doyle hanging from the tree, the flames of the drawing-room fire making a harmless black crinkle of it.

4

Kisses
it says, scratched on the varnish of a table.
Big Lily with her tits bare
it says on the whitewash of the lavatory, the third cubicle of the row. Initials and dates decorate a doorway, and once used to fascinate me. The doorway is in the mill, the table in a schoolroom in the city of Cork, the whitewashed lavatories in the school my father had gone to also. Kisses was a girl’s nickname. Big Lily was the wife of the night watchman. The initials belonged to the men who, down the generations, had worked the mill.