Fools of Fortune (16 page)

In Co. Cork in 1983 all that is vividly remembered.

2

We both wore black, a fact that had been noted by our fellow-travellers. The consideration for our mourning implied that it rendered us delicate: people had stood aside from our path, a woman had crossed herself, men touched their caps or hats. ‘The Irish are like that,’ my mother had explained.

At the harbour she embraced you. She dabbed at her eyes with a black-trimmed handkerchief. ‘Poor boy,’ she whispered. ‘Poor boy, poor boy.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m very sorry, Willie.’

You did not reply.

A car drove us to the house and you said we must be hungry, that there was ham and salad. You led us to the dining-room where there was the same closed-in smell I remembered, not exactly fusty but suggesting a lack of use. A fire blazed in the small grate; silence hung awkwardly. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to eat and to listen to my mother talking.

‘All that terrible drinking. Well, of course, Willie, we did what we could. I mean, I said it, over and over again, Willie. When we were here last summer I pleaded with her every day.’

I asked if my room was the one it had been before. You answered brusquely, not looking at me. My mother had begun to talk again.

I left the dining-room and went upstairs. The house had remained fondly in my memory during the time that had passed, the stained glass in the hall door and the landing windows, the clutter of furniture that had escaped the fire at the other house. My bedroom was narrow, with dark walls and a single paraffin lamp: nothing had altered in it. I poured water into a flowered basin and washed myself, delaying over the task.

The funeral, you were saying when I returned to the dining-room, was to be at half-past eleven the next morning; your mother would be buried in Lough. Josephine came in, with teacups and a teapot on a tray. She arranged them on the white tablecloth and then left the room again, softly closing the door.

‘It’s only a pity,’ my mother said, ‘that they cannot come from India. They’d want to, of course. You understand, Willie? Your grandparents would wish to.’

You said you understood. My mother ate the ham and the salad, seeming to be hungry. You cut slices of fruit cake, slowly sinking the knife into the mass of raisins and sultanas, slowly withdrawing it. You poured tea and offered the cake. You didn’t look at me once.

‘I’ll rest for an hour or two,’ my mother announced when she had drunk two cups of tea. ‘Why don’t you two go for one of your walks? The fresh air’ll do you good.’

But you quickly replied that you imagined I’d want to lie down also. You were upset, I told myself, you couldn’t help sounding brusque.

‘I blame myself,’ my mother said. ‘In a way I blame myself for not being firm about the drinking. Yet what could anyone do? My own dear sister, and what could anyone do?’

She dabbed at her eyes with her black-trimmed handkerchief and then she went away. ‘I don’t think I’ll lie down,’ I said,

Without speaking, we walked down the hill and still in silence we crossed the bridge and made our way into the city.

‘My mother killed herself,’ you said at last. ‘She cut her wrists with a razor blade.’

You didn’t pause in your walk. You led me by shop windows full of clothes and china, past Woolworth’s and a chemist’s shop. Wind swirled the litter about on the pavement, seagulls screamed above our heads. A storm was getting up, you muttered in that same empty voice.

‘I didn’t know that about your mother, Willie.’

Two women with filthy children begged and clung on to me, saying they’d offer up Hail Marys for me, pulling at my sleeve. ‘Get off to hell,’ you shouted at them, hitting away their grasping hands. And later you said:

‘It’s not permitted for a suicide to receive a normal burial. I had to beg for that.’

We passed by the school you had gone to.
Miss A. M. Halliwell, Principal,
it said on a black plaque beside a closed blue door.
‘Fight the good fight with all thy might.
‘ You had described Miss Halliwell to me. You had hoped we might meet her on the street.

‘We should not have left my mother alone that day. We should have known.’

‘I’m very sorry, Willie.’

‘We could have a drink in the Victoria Hotel. My mother’s only rendezvous.’

You spoke bitterly, and it seemed callous to visit a hotel which she had chosen to visit also. You were different in every way from the person you had been. Even the way you moved and walked seemed different.

‘Well, a glass of lemonade,’ I requested in a corner of the hotel lounge. My head had begun to ache. I wished I’d agreed when you’d suggested I might want to lie down. I watched you making your way across the empty lounge, my lemonade in a tall glass, your own amber-coloured drink in a smaller one. You sat down and there was a silence that felt as if you wished to punish me. I didn’t know what to say, but anything was better than the silence.

‘I’m going to be in Switzerland for the next few months.’ ‘Switzerland?’

‘An English professor and his wife take in a few girls every year. In Montreux.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t know what it’ll be like.’

‘No.’

‘Unfortunately, the girl I told you about, the head girl at school, is going also.’

You didn’t reply.

‘Agnes Brontenby,’ I added miserably.

You gazed into your drink, still not replying.

‘I know it’s awful for you, Willie.’

You turned your head away. I felt a blush of shame creeping into my cheeks. Were you thinking that I was a mingy little creature, ugly in my black clothes, silly to go on so about Switzerland? Had it sounded frivolous even to mention a professor and his wife at a time like this? It was selfish to want to share with you the mood we’d shared before, selfish when your mother was lying dead, when you’d had to persuade some clergyman to give her a decent burial. Miserably I lifted the glass of lemonade. It tasted sweet and horrible. I wondered if it had been manufactured by the father of the friend you’d told me about, and felt immediately that I should not have wondered so, since that was frivolous also. You despised me for being English. Over and over again the thought hammered at me, refusing to go away. Englishmen had burnt down your house and destroyed your family, and your mother’s self-inflicted death was part of the same thing.

‘Oh, don’t drink it,’ you muttered impatiently. ‘Don’t have it if you don’t like it.’

‘I wish I could be a help to you, Willie.’

‘She was tedious and embarrassing. She was unhappy: I should be glad she’s dead.’

It rained. A pebble rattled on the polished wood of the coffin. I watched while you remained with your head bowed, your chin pressed hard upon your chest. Once or twice you raised a hand to your face. I knew you wept; and anguish, like pain, possessed me too. I could not offer the comfort that passionately I longed to, I could not take your hand or honestly shed tears, except on your behalf. We turned, all of us, and walked from the grave, umbrellas held against the rain.

I shall for ever remember this day, I said to myself in the porch of the church, where pale distemper flaked from the walls and rust-marked notices were attached to the baize stretched over a board. The clergyman who had permitted your mother’s burial wiped raindrops from his spectacles. You held yourself apart, rain dripping from your black coat and your fair hair. There was stoicism in your Aunt Fitzeustace’s face, tears on your Aunt Pansy’s. ‘Poor boy,’ my mother whispered, ‘do please remember there’ll always be a welcome for you in Dorset.’

You were not present at the lunch provided by your aunts in the undamaged part of the house, and no one remarked upon your absence. Mr Derenzy and Father Kilgarriff were there; my mother kept the conversation going. I guessed you were somewhere in the garden or walking in the fields, not caring about the rain.

‘She never did recover,’ your Aunt Fitzeustace said. ‘Poor beautiful Evie.’

My mother repeated what she’d said to you: that our grandparents would have attended the funeral had the distance not been so great. ‘I blame myself,’ she repeated also, ‘for not being firmer about the drinking.’

Firmness might have had little effect, Father Kilgarriff softly pointed out; there was often nothing that could be done, no consolation for so grievous a loss. They spoke of you. At least you had the mill to occupy your thoughts, Mr Derenzy said. At least, your Aunt Fitzeustace said, you were no longer a child.

Still seated around the lunch table, we were given cups of tea and when eventually you appeared you drank some. Two dogs jumped up on you, others barked ferociously, as if alarmed because you were so drenched. You took no notice, and still you hardly spoke.

‘If there’s a shortage, Willie,’ my mother said on the journey back to Cork, ‘or if money’s tied up—’

‘There’s ample money, thank you.’

‘We’re there at the rectory, Willie. We’re always there, dear.’

I wished she would not go on so. I wished she could see that you did not want to have a conversation.

‘Take it step by step, Willie.’

‘Yes.’ ‘And what step shall you take first? What next, I mean?’

‘Next?’

Perspiration broke on the palms of my hands. I drew attention to some aspects of the landscape, feeling a warmth that spread from my face into my neck and shoulders.

‘Don’t let yourself brood, Willie.’

‘I’ll just go on at the mill.’

‘That’s very sensible, Willie.’

When we reached the house I sat alone for a while in the narrow bedroom I had so happily slept in during the weeks of our holiday a year ago. Vividly I recalled the details of the funeral service, hearing again the words that had been spoken, wondering what their meaning had been like for you. I longed to comfort you. I longed to be alone with you again, even though it had been so awkward on our walk and in the lounge of that hotel.

‘It was terrible for him, miss,’ Josephine said when I went to talk to her in the kitchen. ‘To find her like that was terrible.’

‘Yes, I know it must have been.’

‘He was going to write to you that evening.’

‘Write to me? To me?’

‘To say he was fond of you, miss. He was intending to send a letter.’

‘Fond of me?’

‘He has been fond of you ever since the summer you were here. He told me the afternoon of Mrs Quinton’s death.’

I went away to lay the table in the cheerless dining-room, but at suppertime you did not appear: you had gone out somewhere on your own. My mother and I ate more of the ham, and put some aside for you. ‘He had no lunch either,’ she sighed. ‘Marianne dear, you should have stayed with him.’

‘I think he prefers to be alone.’

All I could think of was what Josephine had told me in the kitchen. It seemed fateful that on that night of all nights you had intended to write to me. Many times I had wanted to write to you also, to attempt to continue the conversations we had had. But when I tried to a clumsiness overtook me and I found I could not properly express what I wanted to say in letters.

In the early morning we would begin our journey back to England. We could stay no longer because of my going to Switzerland, and as it was I would be late arriving there. I waited downstairs for an hour or so, but it was much later, when I was undressing in my bedroom, that I heard your footfall on the stairs, which seemed like fate also. I pulled my nightdress over my head and slipped into the cold bed. I wept immediately. Had we been together now, would I have put my arms about you, and drawn your head on to my breast to kiss away your suffering? And would you have forgiven me for the accident of my English birth? For an hour or more I lay there wretchedly, and then I rose and lifted the paraffin lamp from its shelf.

I did not knock, even lightly, on the panels of your door but opened it instead. All judgement had gone from me, all fear and rectitude. I cared about nothing except that you should know I loved you, that you might find at least some comfort in knowing it. I placed the lamp on your dressing-table and spoke your name.

3

‘Ah, Marianne, my dear.’

He always liked to meet new arrivals at the railway station, Professor Gibb-Bachelor explained. He was a man in his sixties, tall and exceedingly thin. His beard was grey and sparse, his wig jet-black, with a light wave in it.

‘You are a little late,’ he remarked, unchidingly, ‘arriving today, my dear.’

‘There was a funeral. My father sent a telegram.’ ‘Ah yes, of course. “I am going to meet the telegram girl,” I said to my wife before I left the villa.’ A conspiratorial laugh was slyly issued. ‘I shall call you that, little Marianne. My telegram girl. Welcome to Montreux.’

‘I hope my lateness hasn’t been inconvenient.’

‘Heavens, of course it has not! But I worried personally in case the funeral upset your travel bookings, and that the journey might be uncomfortable because of that.’

‘No, it wasn’t in the least.’

‘A parson, your father? Dorset, if memory serves?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dorset is delightful. And the funeral. Not someone close, I hope?’

‘An aunt. In Ireland.’

‘Ah, Ireland …’

Whenever he spoke he perused me closely, apparently seeking my eyes. A perpetual smile was not quite hidden by his beard.

‘No one dislikes Montreux,’ he confided as we drove off. ‘We become a family, my wife and I, with the girls who visit us. No one has ever been unhappy in our house.’

We passed by a great expanse of water, which Professor Gibb-Bachelor said was Lac Leman. All around us the Alps were capped with snow.

‘A troublesome country, Ireland. You felt quite safe, Marianne?’

‘Oh yes, quite safe.’

The car passed through open gates and drew up by a house with iron balconies in front of its windows, each of which was flanked by wooden shutters hooked back against a brown wall. A verandah stretched the length of this facade, containing the wide pine doors through which we now passed.

‘Gervaise!’ the Professor called in the hall while I waited with my luggage. He inclined his head in a way that was becoming familiar to me, sticking it out a little as he listened for his wife’s reply.