Fools of Fortune (13 page)

‘That’ll do, de Courcy.’ The Scrotum spoke snappishly, as he often did. His English voice had a nasal quality, sharply accented. His origins were low, Dove-White had told us, pointing out that though the headmaster’s ‘h’s‘ were all carefully in place, words like ‘house’ and ‘noun’ acquired an extra dimension beneath his tongue and that, apparently, was not quite the thing.

‘What I mean is, sir,’ de Courcy went on, ‘we were in a quandary because it wasn’t clear immediately what was happening. There was this sound, sir, and the window being open at the top and the man being on a level with it—’

‘Will you kindly cease, de Courcy?’ Tetchy impatience snapped at us again. Some internal struggle took place because the Scrotum’s small white knuckles, clenched to rap the surface of the desk, did not do so. His temper was as unreliable as Mad Mack’s, but his position in the school forbade resource to casual physical attack. For him the only reward for anger was the calm formality involving the tapestry-covered chair, and as if in recognition of this fact his nasal voice now acquired the churchman’s cadences so familiar to us in Chapel.

‘Mr Mack reports that he shut his window during the night because of a shower of rain.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So what you are saying is invented.’

‘We didn’t like to go too close, sir. All we were concerned for was Mr Mack’s safety.’

‘I see.’ The anger cooled a little more, the voice dropped further. ‘I accept what you say concerning a trespasser on School property, and I would suggest to you that this man was unsober. I would suggest to you that he climbed up the fire escape when he wasn’t in command of himself. Drink is the curse of this country.’

‘We said afterwards he mightn’t have been sober. Didn’t I say that, Quinton?’

‘We all said it.’

‘I would suggest to you that in the poor light of the night you could have been mistaken in what you imagined occurred.’

‘It’s possible we were, sir,’ Ring agreed. ‘It was just that it looked like that. The sound we heard could have been anything. Maybe a bird.’

‘A bird?’

‘I think there’s a bird makes a sound like that, sir. When it’s flying by, sir.’

‘It was a terrible thing, sir,’ de Courcy said, ‘for boys of our age to see a man drunk. He was definitely unsteady on the fire escape, sir.’

‘There is still no excuse for irresponsibly repeating all this. Why did you not wake a prefect? Or come straight to me?’

Ring proceeded to offer an explanation, but de Courcy interrupted him.

‘We were intending to, sir. Quinton was all for waking you up, sir, only Ring said you mightn’t like it. We were discussing at breakfast about coming in here straight afterwards, only the unfortunate thing was that someone must have heard what we were saying.’

‘Even though we were keeping our voices down, sir.’

‘And you, Quinton? You haven’t said much to me about this unhappy incident.’

‘I’m very sorry about it, sir.’

‘How do you imagine poor Mr Mack feels?’

‘It was Mr Mack’s safety, sir—’

‘I know, I know, boy.’ The knuckles again became impatient. Another struggle waged in the crimson face; again the Christian spirit prevailed. ‘When I came to this school, Quinton, the chapel was not the centre of school life, as it has since become. The kind of unpleasantness you have had the misfortune to witness was not uncommon. Bullying, for instance, was rampant.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The bullies would take the new boys up the hillside and beat their legs with bramble sticks. A boy was branded once with the point of a white-hot poker.’

‘We’ve heard of that, sir. We’re grateful to you, sir, for all you’ve done.’

‘I shall be asking Wiltshire Major to make an announcement before lunch in the presence of Matron and the maids, to the effect that the man in his confusion simply climbed up the fire-escape steps and immediately came down again. Drink is a great scourge. It is fortunate that we weren’t burnt in our beds.’

‘Burnt, sir?’ Ring repeated in a startled voice.
‘Burnt?’
he said again, but de Courcy swiftly intervened.

‘It’s that we were concerned about, sir. Ring was all for hitting at the man with MacCarthy’s golf stick to see if he maybe had a box of matches on him.’

Ring essayed a slow smile as the value of this variation dawned on him. ‘And maybe,’ he chattily added, ‘if he was intoxicated, sir, he could have imagined he’d started up a fire already. Maybe what he got up to, sir, was an effort to quench it.’

‘That’s a disgusting suggestion, Ring. We have agreed between us that nothing of that nature took place. And why are you laughing in that distasteful manner? Is there some joke I have missed? Do you share Ring’s joke, Quinton?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You are the stupidest boy, Ring, I have ever encountered. You are dense to a degree I would not have believed humanly possible.’

‘All I meant, sir—’

‘What vocation have you, Ring?’

‘Vocation, sir?’

‘The future, boy, the future. How do you see yourself?’

‘My father makes lemonade down in Dublin, sir.’

‘I am aware that your father makes lemonade. I asked you about yourself.’

‘I’ll be doing the same, sir.’

‘All I can say, Ring, is that I wouldn’t care to drink it.’

‘It’s not bad stuff at all, sir.’

‘Do not be impertinent to me, Ring. You shall be punished for that.’ The crimson face was turned towards mine and the conversation more lightly continued. ‘Quinton, what vocation have you? You are becoming a veterinary surgeon?’

‘I think that’s Dunraven, sir.’

‘Ah yes, yes. A flour mill, is it? Near Fermoy?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Be careful how you choose your friends, Quinton. Do not bend as the wind takes you. De Courcy?’

‘Sir?’

‘What vocation have you, de Courcy?’

‘The stage, sir. The theatre.’

The Scrotum briefly shook his head. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, de Courcy, to enter schoolmastering?’

‘I don’t think I would be good at it, sir.’

‘That may not be for you to say, sir. Duty is not silent, remember. Duty speaks. I am glad we have had this conversation.’

‘So are we, sir.’

‘Wiltshire Major will give out his notice, the contents of which we have agreed between the four of us in this room. You will apply to Mr Dove-White for a suitable punishment for leaving your dormitory in the night. You will apologize to Mr Mack and offer to make amends in any way he suggests.You will apologize to my wife. You will stand beside Wiltshire Major when he makes the explanation and when he has finished you will apologize to him for the inconvenience you have caused. You will apologize to Matron and her lady assistant, a very young girl who may well be upset by the distasteful nature of what was said. You will apologize to the maids, some of whom are young also, and you will apologize to the duty prefect. You, Quinton, will be the spokesman. You, Ring, will request further punishment from Mr Dove-White for being impertinent. This matter is now closed. I am glad we have disposed of it in a sensible manner.’

A small blue bulb on the wall above the Scrotum’s door, controlled by a switch near his desk, was extinguished as we passed beneath it. When glowing, it indicated that serious matters were on hand in the study, and that no disturbance would be tolerated. Beatings called for the ignition of the bulb, as did confirmation classes, which the Scrotum liked to conduct at the deskside. We hurried through the great flagged hall that lay between the headmaster’s house and the rest of the school, feeling lucky that the bulb had been extinguished after so brief an incarceration in the study. We had assumed our concocted story would be brushed aside and, Sunday notwithstanding, had anticipated severe chastisement.

‘He said you were to punish us, sir,’ Ring reported in Dove-White’s room.

‘What on earth for?’

‘Witnessing the distasteful occurrence, sir. Drink’s a scourge, sir.’

Tea was brewed from a kettle of water on a gas-ring. Dove-White said the treatment meted out to Mad Mack was probably the best thing that had happened since the school was founded in 1843, even though the act had been performed by a man he had sternly warned us against. While he was speaking, a boy came in and announced that Mr Mack wanted to see us. ‘Oh holy Jesus,’ said Ring, and we made our way without enthusiasm to the mathematics master’s study.

‘The headmaster has spoken to me of your revelations.’ Furious already, Mad Mack shouted at us as soon as we appeared. ‘Not a word of that is the truth, de Courcy.’

‘The headmaster—’ ‘There was no man on that fire escape. Isn’t that so, Quinton? Answer me, Quinton.’

‘There was a man in a Donegal suit, sir.’

‘That’s a filthy lie, Quinton.’

‘De Courcy looked out the window, sir, on his way back from the lavatory—’

‘The three of you climbed on to that fire escape and committed an act of filthy indecency.’

‘We’d never do that, sir,’ de Courcy protested.

‘We told the truth, Mr Mack,’ Ring said, ‘and we’ve received our punishment from Mr Dove-White for leaving our dormitory under shadow of darkness.’

‘You’ll end up in the Dublin sewers, Ring.’

‘Actually, sir,’ de Courcy corrected, ‘Ring’s going to make lemonade. The headmaster is taking an interest in Ring’s future, sir.’

A scrawny hand darted through the air. Its fingers lashed twice at de Courcy’s cheeks, a swift, expert action that immediately drew blood. Mad Mack looked away and when he spoke again there was a croaking in his voice.

‘Who was it,’ he asked, ‘if it wasn’t you?’

‘A geography master who was sacked,’ de Courcy said.

The truth hung there, unchallenged and at last accepted, as it never could have been in the Scrotum’s study.

‘That man was horrible,’ Mad Mack said at last, his voice still croaking.

‘He was in gaol for a while,’ de Courcy said.

‘I’m glad he was in gaol.’

With his back to us he told us to go away and in the course of that day, humiliated by what had occurred, he left the school. He went without saying good-bye to anyone, and his defection shocked us. For three weeks we were without a mathematics master, before the arrival of a brisk man with a bow-tie whom the Scrotum had found somewhere in Lincolnshire.

Terms went by. My correspondence with Father Kilgarriff continued; at school there were letters from Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy, and one from my grandparents in India, which requested information about my mother.
We have suggested that you and she might like to live with us, here in Masulipatam,
the letter ended,
far away from what has happened.
But in my reply I did not refer to that, knowing that neither my mother nor I would ever wish to live in India. Josephine wrote regularly, my mother not again. In the dormitory after lights-out one night I found myself retailing the story of the tragedy.

Every Christmas and again at Easter I returned for three weeks to Cork; and for two months every summer. I read Dickens and George Eliot and Emily Bronte; I continued to shop for Josephine in Mrs Hayes’s grocery, reflecting less poignantly now on how my sisters would have appreciated her and her son. I walked about the streets and docks, as I had always done.

‘You have never written,’ Miss Halliwell said. ‘You promised to write.’ She had emerged from the Munster Arcade as I passed it and we stood together on the crowded street, the first time we had met since the days of Mercier Street Model.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Halliwell.’

‘Years have passed and you have not written. Your mother, Willie—’

‘My mother’s all right.’

‘You still live in Windsor Terrace, Willie? You haven’t returned to the place near Fermoy?’

‘We still live in Cork.’

‘Don’t go back there, Willie. Don’t hurt yourself by going back.’

‘I’m quite all right, Miss Halliwell.’

‘Don’t ever visit it. Have you visited it since that night, Willie?’

‘No.’

‘Stay here in Cork. I often think of you, you know.’

‘Miss Halliwell—’

‘Willie, I would like to give you tea. In Thompson’s perhaps?’

‘I have to get back home.’

I left her standing there, dressed in her familiar brown, the hair still curling from the mole on her chin. In my letters I had continued to apologize to Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace for my mother’s refusal to receive them. Two nights ago I had dreamed of the rhododendrons and the walk to the mill, and had woken up longing to be back at Kilneagh. ‘Willie,’ Miss Halliwell called after me, her voice shrill, strangely floating above the bustle of the street. But I did not turn my head.

On the day after that meeting I tidied the garden because I hoped to persuade my mother to sit outside. I bought a hoe and cleared the flowerbeds of weeds. I borrowed a lawnmower from the house next door, but the grass was too long and coarse for it. ‘You need a hook,’ the man who’d lent me the lawnmower said, and he came into the garden himself and cut the grass with a scythe. He knew about my mother. By now everyone did.

‘Because it’s sunny,’ I said to her. ‘The sun’s good for you.’ She smiled from her bed at me. It was early in the day, but I knew that already she had been drinking whiskey. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said, as if I hadn’t mentioned the garden. ‘Let’s go and have lunch in the Victoria Hotel.’

She put on her red and black dress, with a hat that perfectly matched it. She wore a cameo brooch at her throat. She carried a parasol, and all the time she smiled.

‘You’re quite good-looking, Willie,’ she said, taking my arm on the street.

We walked in the sunshine down St Patrick’s Hill and over St Patrick’s Bridge. I hadn’t been in the Victoria Hotel since the day we’d had tea there together, but nothing had changed. My mother ordered drinks for us, and after that we had lunch. She touched her sole with a fork, eating very little. She ordered hock and burgundy.

‘I love this dining-room,’ she said.

Increasingly I found it difficult to know what to say to her. On this occasion I repeated a version of some incident or other at school. I spoke of Ring and de Courcy, but she didn’t appear to know who they were.