Fools of Fortune (9 page)

‘Tell them not to worry, Willie.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll pay the next time,’ my mother said suddenly, rising before I had finished and waving the waiter away. The man didn’t demur. No hurry whatsoever about paying, he said.

‘What I’m anxious about,’ my mother said without preamble in the offices of Lanigan and O’Brien, ‘is all this business with Mr Derenzy and the mill. I’ve brought Willie with me because my memory’s poor these days. We’ll make a new arrangement about the mill, Willie, which you’ll have to remember because I’m certain I shan’t.’

The solicitors’ offices were in the South Mall, heralded by a shiny

brass plate among many similar ones, all of them drawing attention to the services of legal or medical practitioners. Mr O’Brien was long since dead, but Mr Lanigan’s presence made up for the loss. He was a person of pyramidal shape, a small head sloping into the slope of his shoulders, arms sloping again as he spread them over his desk. A chalk-striped brown suit imposed a secondary shape of its own, with a heavy watch-chain slung across a waistcoat so tightly fastened over the slope of Mr Lanigan’s stomach that it appeared to be perpetually on the point of bouncing a dozen tiny buttons all over his office. Two beady eyes, not dissimilar to these buttons, were almost lost in the smooth inclines of his face, and artificial chins, created by a stern celluloid collar, all but obscured the flamboyance of a polka-dotted brown bow-tie. Mr Lanigan’s smile perpetually twinkled.

‘I would have come to the house, Mrs Quinton, for it’s more than a shame to have you walking to the South Mall. The next time there’s anything, Willie, let you leave a message in here with Declan O’Dwyer and I’ll travel at once to your mother’s bidding.’

With a hint of impatience my mother said it did her good to get out. She was always being told that, she pointed out to Mr Lanigan: by the doctor and by Josephine, even by Mr Derenzy. ‘Now, concerning Mr Derenzy,’ she said.

‘And how is our dear friend? Would that name derive from the French, d’you think? I often say, do you know, the French have left their mark on Ireland. And if they have, Mrs Quinton, we mustn’t complain about it. Willie, do you speak French well?’

I shook my head. I said I was only beginning to learn French with Miss Halliwell.

‘Ah, good Miss Halliwell! A born teacher, a privilege to have her in Cork.’ While speaking, Mr Lanigan reached behind him and struck the wall with an ebony ruler. Almost at once a small man in a frock coat entered the office. He had a nervous, quizzical expression, eyes busily darting behind pince-nez.

‘Declan O’Dwyer,’ said Mr Lanigan, ‘I believe refreshment would be in order. Mrs Quinton, there is wine or there is tea. Willie, there is a good fruit cordial.’

My mother asked for wine; I agreed to sample a glass of fruit cordial. Declan O’Dwyer’s hands, held chest-high like the paws of an expectant dog, were abruptly pressed together as if in prayer. His grey head shot rapidly up and down. He hurried from the room.

‘Our clerk these forty years,’ Mr Lanigan said. ‘Now tell me this, Willie: would you guess our good friend was without the blessing of speech?’

I shook my head. My mother shuffled in her chair.

‘It has never made the smallest difference, Willie, and I would say there is a moral in that. Declan O’Dwyer is the sharpest solicitor’s clerk in these two islands. If the good Lord taketh away, Willie, He also giveth. If it is a privilege for this city to have Miss Halliwell in charge of Protestant children in Mercier Street, it is a privilege also for Lanigan and O’Brien to retain the services of Declan O’Dwyer.’

At that appropriate moment a tray containing two glasses of red wine and one of pinkish cordial was carried into the office by the mute solicitor’s clerk.

‘Good man, good man,’ said Mr Lanigan, his entire being seeming now to be consumed by the radiance of his smile. ‘Mrs Quinton, your health. As Voltaire has so eloquently put it—’

‘I have come to ask if it is necessary for Mr Derenzy to bring all those papers and accounts to the house every six months. Mr Derenzy is the most trustworthy of men, and as regards the management of the mill Willie and I are perfectly happy to leave matters to him.’

Mr Lanigan, before replying, commented upon the wine. It was a fine burgundy, he said, a delicate French burgundy and a privilege to drink. Cork was a fortunate city, he said, to have received a shipment of such wine. ‘And the cordial, Willie? Is the cordial to your liking? Declan O’Dwyer purchases it for me in the London and Newcastle Tea Company. As to the matter you raise, Mrs Quinton, the difficulty would be the circumvention of the wishes expressed in the late Mr Quinton’s will. It is a fact of life, borne out by so many of the intricacies of my profession, that the wishes of the departed take precedence over those of the quick. As Voltaire might indeed have put it—’

‘I do not wish to hear about Voltaire. Mr Derenzy’s visits are a nuisance to me. If my husband had been aware of that he would most certainly have ordered matters differently.’

My mother had stood up, having first drunk her wine in one or two gulps. A little had spilt and now stained the frill of her bodice; small beads of perspiration had broken out on her forehead; she swayed in front of Mr Lanigan’s desk.

‘I am excessively sorry, Mrs Quinton. We are unfortunately up against the letter of the law. But after all, Mr Derenzy comes only twice a year—’

‘I wish him not to come at all. I wish to be left in peace, and not reminded.’

‘I understand, I understand. But the law—’

‘I am simply requesting that Mr Derenzy’s visits might be made to yourself or not made at all. There is no need for them, no need whatsoever.’

Mr Lanigan ponderously shook his head and heaved the slopes of his shoulders. He regretted, he stated, more than he could say; it grieved him to be unable to accede to the most reasonable request that had been put to him. My mother brushed these sentiments aside.

‘You are not being helpful to me, Mr Lanigan. You are not being kind. It is not easy for me, you know.’

‘I assure you I do know that, Mrs Quinton.’

‘I receive letters from my sisters-in-law which I do not open. I have requested Mr Derenzy to inform them that I do not wish to receive them. Another arrived this morning.’

‘I could send a message—’

‘And to India. I would like a message sent to India.’

‘India, Mrs Quinton?’

‘Letters come from my father and mother in a place called Masulipatam. I cannot be doing with them.’

‘People are perhaps concerned for you and Willie. It is only that.’

‘Willie is kindness itself. He has agreed to inform his grandparents that we are well, but please understand that it is difficult for poor Willie to say more.’

‘What message would you wish passed on, Mrs Quinton?’

‘That I do not care for being bombarded with communications from this Masulipatam. That I wish the letters would cease.’

‘Oh, I do not believe I could put it quite like that—’

‘Why not? Why are you being obstructive, Mr Lanigan? You are a gross and unfeeling man.’

‘Mrs Quinton, I do assure you—’

‘Please request your clerk to show us out.’

Panting a little and deprived at last of his smile, Mr Lanigan struck weakly at the wall with his ruler and Declan O’Dwyer arrived in the office. I knew my mother was drunk; and I wished I might have told Mr Lanigan that. It was clear to me that my father’s wishes were the law.

‘What did I say to that man?’ she asked when we reached Windsor Terrace. As we entered the house I told her that she had called him gross and unfeeling. She shook her head, saying she had not meant it. She stared at me in a puzzled way. ‘Why did we go there, Willie? Did that man send for us?’

I didn’t reply. She frowned in even greater bewilderment, swaying on the stairway. I walked away to write the letter she had asked me to write.

‘Oh, don’t be cross with me, Willie,’ my mother cried after me, but I didn’t reply to that either.

I wrote to Father Kilgarriff as well, who in his reply quoted from a letter of Anna Quinton’s which he had not before known of. 
November 15th, 1846. Corpses in the ditches lie as they have fallen. The people of the cottages eat grass and bramble leaves, and the roots of ferns. At the barracks they were offended when I would not stay to lunch. For God’s sake, bring your persuasion to bear on this most monstrous of governments.
Her black horse had been called Folly, Father Kilgarriff recalled, and after that she came into the dreams I had about Kilneagh, seeming to be there with my sisters and my father. ‘That’s Anna,’ my great-grandfather said, pointing across the landscape at Haunt Hill, and clearly I saw the troubled, unpretty Englishwoman on her horse. The family was titled in Dorset, Father Kilgarriff had told me: she might have been Lady Anna, but never chose to call herself so.

‘Eschew the company of Elmer Dunne,’ Miss Halliwell warned me, but in the playground I continued to laugh with the others when he talked to us about her undergarments. ‘Would you never think of slipping a hand up under her skirt?’ he said on the day he left the school for ever. I knew Miss Halliwell was watching from the schoolroom window and had seen him drawing me aside. ‘I swear to Jesus she’s on for it, Quinton. She’d love a touch, that one.’

I felt proud that Elmer Dunne, who was big and heavy and stupid, several years older than I was and a real chancer, should seek my company, calling me Quinton in that manly way. Slowly he gestured with his head and I followed him behind the lavatories, out of Miss Halliwell’s line of vision. He took a packet of cigarettes from his trouser pocket and casually offered me one. He was going to become a clerk’s assistant in the new woollen goods factory, and as he held a match to my cigarette he said that some of the girls who worked there would knock spots off the ones at school.

‘D’you know what it is, Quinton? Catholic girls are the best for a ride.’ He laughed noisily. Drawing unwelcome smoke into my lungs, I replied that I’d always heard that to be true.

‘If ever you get a feel of her, Quinton, will you tell me what it was like?’

He was the nearest thing to a friend I had made in Mercier Street and I was sorry he was leaving, although I knew I would never be able to oblige him in the way he wished me to. ‘OK so, Quinton,’ he said, and crossed the playground with the cigarette in his mouth. He waved at Miss Halliwell, who was still watching from her window.

‘Good riddance,’ she snapped after she had rung the handbell and the clamour had quietened in the schoolroom. ‘A boy nine years in this school and nothing to show for it. With uncouthness like that he’ll not last an hour in the post he’s got.’

That day, when all the others had gone, Miss Halliwell did not even open the French grammar book she was to teach me from. She sat at her table gazing in front of her at nothing at all. ‘A boy like that,’ she whispered again. ‘Nine years in my school, Willie.’ Once when she had asked Elmer Dunne to recite the second verse of ‘The Brook’ he had stood up and recited instead:

‘Paddy from Ireland, Paddy from Cork,

With a hole in his britches as big as New York.’

He had remained standing, taller than Miss Halliwell herself. Defiantly he had waited for her to approach him with her ruler, holding out the palm of his hand for the punishment that must inevitably follow. ‘Thanks, Miss Halliwell,’ he had said when she’d finished.

‘I am sorry you associated with him,’ she upbraided me now, ‘when I asked you not to. You especially, Willie.’

I felt the familiar burning in my face, spreading from my cheeks into my forehead and my neck, an embarrassed flushing which I associated entirely with Miss Halliwell, for it was in this schoolroom that it had begun.

‘I’m all right, you know, Miss Halliwell.’ My mouth was parched, my lips suddenly so dry they were almost sore. ‘Really, Miss Halliwell.’

‘No child should be harmed as you have been.’

‘I don’t feel harmed.’

‘I will always have a place in my heart for you, Willie.’

I looked down at the ink-stained surface of the table, at the blue cover of my French text-book. Miss Halliwell repeated what she had just said, and a lean hand reached out for one of mine. Then, for the first time, she kissed me. Her lips left a moist coolness on the side of my face, her fingers stroked my wrist.

‘He gave you a cigarette, didn’t he? He made you smell of smoke just to offend me. Ever since I began’to teach in this city there have been boys like that, Willie.’

‘It’s embarrassing when you favour me, Miss Halliwell.’

‘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: