Fools of Fortune (4 page)

‘Your sister’s right,’ he said. ‘She has better looks than that Kitty had.’

‘I thought you liked Kitty, Tim Paddy.’

He wrinkled his ferret’s nose, dipping the brush into the paint. ‘I wouldn’t give you twopence for her.’ Again he drew his paint-brush along the edge of the putty, one eye on his father’s bent head. ‘Josephine’s different,’ he said.

O’Neill came out of the greenhouse and told Tim Paddy to be sure to remove any splashes of paint from the glass. It was his arthritis that caused the old man’s cantankerousness: when his affliction was particularly bad he used to crawl about on his hands and knees among the vegetables and flowerbeds, like some creature from the woods. That and his hairless head made him seem old enough to be Tim Paddy’s grandfather.

‘Don’t be idling with the boy,’ he muttered before re-entering the greenhouse. ‘Get on with your work now.’

Tim Paddy made a face, continuing to paint the narrow surfaces of wood and putty. I went away and stared at the rows of sprouting peas, and the twigs that had been stuck into the soil to attract their tendrils. Traps had been set among the beans to catch fieldmice.

Tim Paddy was in love with Josephine, I said to myself, and that was the third of the Kilneagh love stories. I went in to tea and there she was in her afternoon black. She was eighteen years old, although I did not know it at the time: ages afterwards, when I was no longer shy with her, nor she with me, she told me her eighteenth birthday had taken place the week before she arrived at Kilneagh. She told me that it was her father, a farrier in Fermoy, who had arranged for her to go into service. He had received a letter from my mother, who had heard of Josephine’s existence from Mr Derenzy, he having heard of it through Mrs Sweeney of the public house. My mother had gone to Fermoy to interview the family. ‘She’s quick to learn,’ Josephine’s father assured her, and having asked a question or two my mother declared herself satisfied.

Three weeks later, on the morning of her leaving home, her father talked to her for an hour and then sent her to see their priest, who told her to take care in a Protestant household. ‘If there’s no fish served on a Friday,’ he said, ‘see if they’d supply you with an egg.’ But this predicament never arose because everyone in Kilneagh had fish on Fridays, that being the simplest arrangement: Mrs Flynn and O’Neill and Tim Paddy could not eat Friday meat either.

Josephine had liked Kilneagh from the start. She hadn’t minded Geraldine and Deirdre giggling at teatime and she considered my father easygoing, even though she wasn’t allowed to rattle the crockery in his presence. He was nice, she thought, sitting there at the breakfast table wondering how he should dress himself for the day. But it was my mother who made her feel at home in a world she did not know and in a house that seemed enormous to her. Its landings and half-landings, front staircase and back one, the kitchen passages, the Chinese carpet in the scarlet drawing-room, the Waterford vases in the hall, endless porcelain figures in the morning-room, the silver pheasants, the rosewood trays: all this was a strangeness that whirled about her, like colours in a kaleidoscope. Soup-spoons were round, dessert-spoons oval, the larger fork must be placed on the left, the smaller accompanied the dessertspoon at the top. Kindling was kept near the range, gravy boats and soup tureens on the first shelf of the cupboard in the wall. Meat must be covered in the larder, milk jugs placed on the cold slate slab.

Wash both night and morning, Mrs Flynn commanded, rise at six-fifteen. Do not speak in the dining-room unless invited to, carry the vegetable dishes to the left of the person being served. She warned Josephine against Johnny Lacy, who had upset Kilneagh girls before and was older than he looked, besides having a short leg. ‘Yes, Mrs Flynn,’ Josephine endlessly repeated during her first few days of awkwardness and bewilderment. She blacked grates and shone brass, and seemed for ever to be sweeping floors. Her own small attic room, with its white enamel bowl and pitcher, was as strange as anywhere else.

On Josephine’s first Sunday afternoon Tim Paddy took her down to the mill, allocated this duty by Mrs Flynn, who presumably considered him too much of a youth to be a nuisance in the way Johnny Lacy might have been. The water tumbled in the mill-race, the Virginia creeper on the walls was dotted with specks of springtime growth. Tim Paddy drew attention to the green-faced clock of the central gable, one minute fast, the date on it 1801. Together they peered through the bars of the office windows, and Tim Paddy pointed out Mr Derenzy’s stool and my father’s desk and his swivel chair. They returned to Kilneagh the long way, round by the road, through the tall white gates and up the avenue of beeches. They took a path to the right before they reached the gravel sweep, ending up at the back of the house. ‘On a day off you don’t walk in front of the windows,’ Tim Paddy explained, ‘although I go by them maybe a hundred times on an ordinary day.’ Josephine understood that. It was like my mother showing her the garden on the afternoon she arrived: for a quarter of an hour she had been a visitor at Kilneagh, and she knew she would never feel so again. On that Sunday evening she and Mrs Flynn and O’Neill and Tim Paddy sat down to their six o’clock tea in the kitchen and then she went upstairs to put on her uniform.

Years afterwards, when Josephine related all that, we tried to establish between us when it was that Michael Collins had first come to Kilneagh and decided it must have been a few months after she came to the house herself, in the early summer of 1918. She remembered my father saying in the hall: ‘I’m honoured to meet you, Mr Collins.’ She remembered being puzzled because Michael Collins didn’t seem the kind of man for someone like my father to make such a fuss of: she didn’t know then that he was a revolutionary leader. He and my father remained in the study for more than two hours, and when she brought in warm water for the whiskey they ceased to speak. Two other men waited in a motor-car on the gravel in front of the house. ‘Josephine,’ my father said, ‘bring out bottles of stout to those fellows.’

By that summer the war in Europe had been won, but this was not apparent at the time and in Ireland everything was unsettled and on edge. De Valera was in Lincoln Gaol, and Collins was increasingly in disagreement with him about Ireland’s eventual status. I know that now, but even in retrospect it is impossible to guess how my father’s acquaintanceship with Collins had begun, though it must in some way have been related to the Quintons’ longstanding identification with Irish Home Rule. For this, we were seen by many as traitors to our class and to the Anglo-Irish tradition. The eccentricity of my great-grandfather in giving away his lands had never ceased to be remembered in the big houses of Co. Cork and beyond it. And one of Johnny Lacy’s stories retailed an incident in 1797, when a Major Atkinson of the militia at Fermoy had ridden over to Rathcormack at the head of a band of soldiers and shot six men in the village street. On the way back he had called in at Kilneagh, hoping to rest his horses there, but had been angrily turned away. In the barracks at Fermoy that display of inhospitality had not been forgotten either.

‘You are English, Mrs Quinton?’ I heard Collins politely enquire as he left the house after that first visit.

‘Yes, I am English.’

My mother’s voice conveyed no note of apology. I could not see her from where I stood in the shadows of the hall, but I guessed that as she returned his stare the eyes that in calmer moments reminded me of chestnuts had gleamed fierily, as they always did when she was challenged or angry. There was injustice in Ireland was what my mother maintained: you didn’t have to be Irish to wish to expunge it. She told Michael Collins that she was the daughter of an army colonel and did not add that her marriage had taken place in an atmosphere of disapproval and distrust, just before her father’s regiment had been recalled to England. She had told me also, but the years that had passed must have calmed that atmosphere away for I remembered my grandfather and grandmother visiting us quite often in Kilneagh and seeming happy to be there. ‘I could stay for ever,’ my grandfather used to say. ‘There’s nowhere to touch Kilneagh.’ He was tall, like my mother, and stood very straight. I liked his voice, and was sorry when he and my grandmother left England for military duty in India. They did not ever visit Ireland again.

‘I’m much obliged to the both of you,’ Michael Collins said in the hall. ‘God bless you, sir.’

Seasons changed; time slipped by at a dawdling pace, or that at least is how it seems. Incidents remain, isolated in my memory for reasons of their own. Moments and the mood of moments make up that distant childhood. A monkey puzzle died; new dogs were added to my aunts’ collection.

In his unemphatic way Father Kilgarriff pursued in our history lessons his theme of warfare’s folly, still illustrating the absurdity of it with reference to the Battle of the Yellow Ford. ‘That bald English queen,’ he softly murmured, ‘answered defeat by dispatching Robert Devereux, who paved the way for yet another fateful battle. When she decided to behead him the destiny of Ireland hung on a thread again: at Kinsale this time.’

Neither the mildness of his manner nor his even, handsome features were ever disturbed by agitation. I mentioned Michael Collins to him, but he displayed no interest or curiosity in the revolutionary leader’s visits. If only people would remember Daniel O’Connell, he murmured, if only they honoured his pacific spirit. He spoke also of my great-grandmother, Anna Quinton of the Famine. In the drawing-room portrait she was shown to be plain but Father Kilgarriff, extolling her mercy, granted her beauty as well. He knew a lot about her tribulations. She had begged the officers at the nearby barracks to retail the misery and starvation they saw around them to the London government. She had begged her own family, in Woodcombe Park in England, to seek to influence that government. So passionate did she become in her condemnation of the authorities that in the end her letters were returned unopened.
You spread calumny over our name
, her irate father wrote.
Since you will not cease in your absurd charges against this country, I have no choice left but to disown you.
The returned letters were in my father’s possession, kept in the safe at the mill. Because he was interested, Father Kilgarriff had read them all. I don’t believe my father had ever bothered to.

Occasionally I wondered if Father Kilgarriff was content, helping Tim Paddy with the cattle and teaching me in the drawing-room. I didn’t know what to think about the girl in Chicago, but he spoke so warmly of my great-grandmother’s compassion and drew my attention so often to the sadness of her eyes in the portrait that I came to feel she was almost alive for him—surely as alive as the girl in his confessional now was.

‘Oh, fool of fortune,’ my father commented when I tried to make him talk to me about Father Kilgarriff on one of our walks to the mill. He would say no more, and I had known him to apply that assessment to almost everyone at Kilneagh. It was his favourite expression, and one which at that particular time probably better defined Tim Paddy. ‘Does she ever mention me?’ Tim Paddy humbly asked, and I lied and said I’d heard Josephine say he was amusing. But it was the suave Johnny Lacy, with his dance-hall fox-trotting and his stories, who amused her more.

In spite of Mrs Flynn’s disapproval he often now arrived in the kitchen. He and Josephine would go for walks in the evening, while Tim Paddy went off on his own and miserably set rabbit snares. In the end he didn’t speak to either Josephine or Johnny Lacy and would savagely brush water over the cobbles in the yard, not pausing once to take the Woodbine out of his mouth. ‘Oh, he does love her so!’ Deirdre cried after she and Geraldine had spent a whole morning following the unhappy youth about the garden. They said they’d seen him hitting his head against an apple tree, and that he’d cried, a wailing sound like a banshee’s howl. One Saturday night Johnny Lacy took Josephine to a dance in Fermoy and Tim Paddy got drunk in Sweeney’s and was found sprawled out in the backyard by Mr Derenzy. In spite of the anguish they claimed on his behalf my sisters delighted in enacting that moonlit scene: the prone Tim

Paddy, Mr Derenzy bending over him, enquiring if he would care for a pinch of snuff.

All around us there seemed to be this unsettling love, for even his polite courting of Aunt Pansy left Mr Derenzy occasionally looking wan. He was not made for love, I’d heard my father say, as Johnny Lacy so clearly was. Mr Derenzy had been borrowed from his ledgers and his invoices, from the solitary Protestant world of his upstairs room at Sweeney’s. Yet it was said that he had loved Aunt Pansy for thirty years.

I didn’t want Tim Paddy to be unhappy, any more than I wanted Father Kilgarriff or Mr Derenzy and Aunt Pansy to be: I wanted everything, somehow and in the end, to be all right. Nothing could be done about O’Neill’s aching joints, or Mrs Flynn’s widowed state. But in spite of the old gardener’s shortness of temper and Mrs Flynn’s severity over the rules she laid down in her kitchen, they neither of them appeared to be discontented. Josephine sometimes sang very softly while she worked and my sisters said it was because she was in love. She at least was happy and I was happy myself, apart from my single nagging trepidation.

‘It’s just that I don’t see the sense of it,’ I said to my mother.

‘You have to go to school, Willie.’

‘It’s awful, that place.’

‘Your father wouldn’t send you to an awful place.’

‘Does he think Father Kilgarriff isn’t any good?’

‘No, of course he doesn’t think that.’

‘Then why’s he want to send me?’

‘You have to meet other boys. Play games and take part in things. Kilneagh isn’t the world, you know.’

‘But I’ll live in Kilneagh when I’m grown up. I’ll always be here.’

‘Yes, I know, Willie, but that’s all the more reason to see what other places are like.’

I did not reply. I had realized as soon as I’d spoken that my efforts would be useless. All I could do now was confess my feelings to my father, which I’d been nervous of doing in case they belittled me in his eyes. My mother pointed out that several years had yet to pass before the grim establishment could claim me. She offered that as the only consolation there was.