Fools of Fortune (18 page)

‘But this isn’t true, Mrs Gibb-Bachelor. In no way is what you’re saying true.’

‘My husband is a fine and sensitive person. No one blames you, Marianne. Indeed, to tell you the very truth, I often think it denotes a fullness of the spirit in a girl—’

‘I do not love the man.’

‘My dear, it is ill-bred to refer to the Professor in that way. It is also ill-bred to interrupt.’

‘Mrs Gibb-Bachelor—’

‘Above all, it is ill-bred to raise our voices. My dear, no blame possibly attaches to you and if our monthly visitation is not quite clockwork we must not worry. Love is its own master, Marianne.’

I shrugged my shoulders and was told that that was ill-bred also. I began a further protest, then abandoned it. After all, what did any of it matter?

‘It will pass,’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor promised. ‘The sentiments that have seized you, Marianne, will pass. Time is the healer, my dear.’

These words dismissed me, and I did not reply.

‘Look, come for a walk,’ Agnes Brontenby invited, waiting for me outside Mrs Gibb-Bachelor’s office.

I shook my head and tried to pass her by, but she touched my arm with a restraining gesture.

‘Dear Marianne, you must be sensible. We have known each other for all these years. I always liked you at school, Marianne, and I am sure I always shall.’

‘Please leave me alone, Agnes.’

‘The Professor—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, it has nothing to do with the wretched Professor.’

I walked away, leaving her astonished that I should use such unpleasant language. She afterwards mentioned that, but I did not say I was sorry.

Day followed day, week succeeded week. Mavis’s rashes did not improve. Cynthia said she’d lost a stone because of the unappetizing food. The waiter in the Cafe Bon Accueil eyed Agnes Brontenby with a pleasure that was undisguised.
‘Dans I’immense salle regnait une ambiance joyeuse,’
dictated Mademoiselle Florence, but I could not understand and did not wish to.
‘Vous etes tres stupide,’
she shrilled at me. ‘Not ever a more
stupide
girl come to Montreux.’

Each morning when I awoke everything came tumbling back at me, the lamp flickering and going out, the smell of paraffin in the darkness. I tried to write to you but could not. I wanted to say I was sorry, but at the same time longed that you would write and tell me you were glad.

‘Ill-health bedevilled me as a younger man. I might have married earlier in my life if it had not been for that.’

Again I was alone with him, by the lake. He had contrived to dispose of the other girls in the Bon Accueil, hurrying them on to order our coffee and Florentines.

‘It is not wrong to feel tenderly for a man who is older than your father. You have been distressed by these feelings, little Marianne, but there is no cause for it.’

I shook my head, staring over the still water of Lac Leman. I felt his arm on my shoulder, and then the coarseness of his beard on my chin and cheek, like mattress hair. His large teeth, seeking my hps, were cold.

‘Please, Professor.’

I pushed at the scrawny body, as I had in the alcove of the library, the palms of my hands spread against his chest. His knees, one on either side of my left leg, grasped it strongly. He whispered that he could not live without me, and did not wish to. ‘You are my little wife,’ he whispered.

‘Please take your hands off me, Professor.’

I broke from his embrace and stood furiously some yards away. I wanted to stamp my foot and then actually did so, my heel making a sharp staccato on the tarmacadamed path.

‘I do not feel tenderly for you,’ I cried, causing two women who were passing with dogs to look discomfited. ‘I have no feelings of any kind whatsoever for you. I am not your wife. It is absurd to say I am.’

‘My little child, I simply wish you were.’

‘You have a wife already. You are a lecherous man, Professor Gibb-Bachelor. Your wife is disgraceful to encourage you.’

‘Please,’ he whispered. ‘I cannot help my feelings for you. You are beautiful, little Marianne, more beautiful than Agnes Brontenby.’

I told him then: I said I was no longer a virgin. ‘I believe you know that. I believe you’ve guessed, Professor Gibb-Bachelor.’

‘My dear sweet child, of course you’re a virgin. Do you not know the meaning of the term?’

I told him how I had left my bedroom and crossed the landing, carrying the lamp with me.I would love you for ever, I said, even if you despised me and were ashamed.

‘Oh, little heart, this is not the kind of talk we like.’

I hit him then. I hit him on the side of the face with my clenched fist. I told him he disgusted me. Without emotion I said:

‘So please in future leave me alone, Professor. Try this on with Agnes if you are tired of your wife. Try it on with Cynthia or Mavis or Mademoiselle Florence. But I would rather you kept your hands off me.’

‘You must not repeat this to Mrs Gibb-Bachelor, Marianne. It is the realm of fantasy, but it may be our secret, all this you like to think about your cousin.’

‘It is true. It occurred.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. But Mrs Gibb-Bachelor must not ever know. My dear, she’d pack you back to England this instant minute.’

‘I have no intention of informing your wife since she does not sensually attack me.’

‘Please, little child, don’t speak so harshly. I only love your prettiness.’

I did not reply, except to say when he addressed me again that if my sinfulness was in some way revealed in my demeanour it did not follow that I would satisfy his lust. He wiped at his cheeks with a handkerchief, pretending, I believe, to cry. But by the time we reached the Cafe Bon Accueil he had recovered his composure.

Conveniently he drifted into a reverie of such intensity that the scene by the lakeside might not have taken place. When later I said his attentions had become so pressing that I’d had to push him away from me and even had hit him Agnes Brontenby assured me I must have been mistaken. ‘Filthy old savage,’ Cynthia said, and was all for reporting the matter to Mrs Gibb-Bachelor. But I knew it wasn’t going to be worth it, for I would have no more trouble with her husband.

Please don’t think badly of me. Oh, Willie, I do still love you so.
The words could not be written; they belonged in conversation, yet conversation was impossible. All of it was punishment, the haunting emptiness, the fear, the unknown in the years that lay ahead. The teeth and the breath of the Professor were punishment also, his knees and fingers. Of course he had smelt out my sin.

I spent that Christmas and the New Year with the Gibb-Bachelors, with Cynthia and Mavis and Agnes Brontenby. In early February all four of us prepared to return to England. ‘You have benefited enormously,’ Mrs Gibb-Bachelor insisted, the same remark to each of us. ‘Everything about you is splendidly improved.’

I could not remain in the rectory. I knew that as soon as I returned. I walked in the gardens of Woodcombe Park, since we, its poor relations, were permitted to: by the mock-Roman summer-house, by the willows and the lakes and the stately yews: so different your Kilneagh was, a poor relation too. Like some uncharted region, fearsome and unknown, Kilneagh repelled me now, yet the pocket money I had saved in Switzerland was added to the modest amount I otherwise possessed and the journey to Ireland planned. For how could my father bless his congregation with the peace of God, knowing no peace himself because of the ugly truth with which I would soon disgrace him? How could my mother bear those cruel glances at her Mothers’ Union meetings?

I fell in love with Willie,
I wrote in the note I left behind for them and then I closed down shutters on my mind, unable to bear their pain as well as my own. I was pregnant with our child, I wrote.

4

The boat was several hours late arriving in Cork, slowed down by a snowstorm at sea. Exhausted and still seasick, I made my way to the house in Windsor Terrace, hoping to spend that night there before continuing my journey. But in several of the windows the blinds were drawn and there was no reply to my knock. I waited for more than an hour in the hope that Josephine might return and then, since she did not, I dragged my suitcase down the pavement steps of St Patrick’s Hill, past the pawnbroker’s shop at the bottom of its steep incline. I asked a woman if she knew where I might find cheap lodgings and she directed me to the Shandon Boarding House, not far away. It was a melancholy place, about which hung an odour of old food and where payment was required in advance. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary on a table in the hall and a picture of her in my room. Long lace curtains were grey with the dust that lay thickly elsewhere as well, on the sideboard in the hall, on the staircase and the windowsills, on the hall-stand with its array of letters addressed to boarders of the past. No other boarder was resident at the moment, I was told by the unprepossessing woman who ran the place, though usually, she assured me, the house was full. I lay down for a while and then returned to Windsor Terrace, but there was no reply to my knocking. I slept poorly that night, haunted by fragments of disjointed dreams in which I was endlessly pursued by my parents’ weeping. In the morning I sat alone for breakfast in the airless dining-room, its tablecloth patterned with stains and crumbs.

I took the train to Fermoy and left my suitcase at the railway station. Feeling doubtful about affording a hackney car, I walked to Lough, three miles you’d said it was, and then a mile to Kilneagh. Snow had begun to fall again and somehow it seemed apt that everything should look so different. I peered through the gates of

Kilneagh at the long, whitening avenue, as beautiful now in frozen landscape as it had been that summer. I walked on to the mill, increasingly apprehensive of how you would greet me.

‘Good Lord above!’ exclaimed Mr Derenzv, regarding me with an astonishment he made no attempt to disguise. I expected to see you after I’d knocked on the door and his voice had called out that I should enter the office. I was determined to remain calm, not even to look at you in Mr Derenzy’s presence. But you were not there.

‘Willie …’ I said.

‘Willie?’

He frowned at me, grimacing just a little. I was wearing a brown fur hat which my mother and father had given me for Christmas. I took it off and placed it on a chair. I shook the snow from my coat.

‘I’ve come to see my cousin, Mr Derenzy.’

The furrows on his forehead deepened. ‘But Willie isn’t here, Marianne. Willie left Kilneagh, you know. He hasn’t been here for months.’

‘No, I didn’t know.’

‘Oh yes, indeed.’

I did not say anything. I could not for a moment.

‘Anyone might want to go away, Marianne, after what had happened.’

‘Where is he, Mr Derenzy? Where has he gone?’

Slowly he shook his head.

‘Please tell me, Mr Derenzy.’

‘No one has had a line from Willie. The house in Cork is to be sold.’

A silence gathered in the small office. I stared at the leather spines of a row of ledgers and at wooden cabinets with shallow, labelled drawers. In the corner there was a pile of sacks, and in another some kind of cog-wheel. I said I had been to the house, hoping to find Josephine there. Mr Derenzy nodded, another silence began. It crept into the corners of the office, over the drawers and the ledgers and the neatly arranged papers on Mr Derenzy’s desk. He offered me a pinch of snuff from a blue tin box, and when I shook my head he took some himself. A kettle on the coals in the grate began to boil. Reaching for a teapot on a shelf behind him, he said:

‘I remember the day Willie was born. I’ve known him all his life.’

What you had called his skeleton’s face looked up at me from the hearth where he was spooning tea into the teapot. No smile lit his bony features, his springy red hair was still. The teapot was well-used, its brown enamel chipped around the spout and on the lid.

‘If you left a message I would put it straight into Willie’s hand.’ He spoke with a finality that sounded almost grim. He poured the tea and offered me a cup with roses on it, on a saucer that matched it.

‘Do you think Josephine has been in touch?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘Where is Josephine, Mr Derenzy?’

‘She is working in St Fina’s. An institution in Cork, run by the nuns.’

I left the chair which he had placed close to the hearth for me, and stood by the window. The sky was grey and heavy. I watched the softly falling snow, gathering already on the roofs and the cobbles of the mill-yard. The green-faced clock gave the time as twenty past eleven. Mechanically, I remembered your saying that it was always fast, and in the same mechanical way I wondered if the snow would affect it. Would the big hand, travelling upwards after the half-hour, come to an untimely halt because of what had accumulated on it? I turned from the window, endeavouring to hold the mill manager’s glance with my own but not succeeding.

‘Are you keeping something back from me, Mr Derenzy? Has something happened?’

‘Ah no, no, Marianne.’

There was little conviction in his voice. As if to lend it more, he shook his head, floating his hair about. I said:

‘I must know where he is.’

He did not reply. He drank some tea, then very faintly sighed. I said:

‘I am going to have Willie’s child.’

His eyes closed, the lids dropping down as though he could not bear to look upon me. A sound came from him, like the whimper of a creature in distress.

‘I cannot be at home, Mr Derenzy. I cannot disgrace my parents. That is why I’ve come here.’

As if I had not spoken, he said:

‘It would be better to go back to England, Marianne.’

‘I don’t believe it would be better. Mr Derenzy, when do you imagine Willie will return?’ ‘As soon as he does he shall know immediately that you came here.’

‘Do you think it terrible, what I have told you?’

‘I’m the manager of this mill, Marianne. I’ve been a bachelor all my life. I don’t know about these matters.’

‘But you and Willie’s aunt —’

‘That is a private friendship, Marianne.’