Fools of Fortune

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.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He said it didn’t matter. He said again it would be better to return to England.

‘Mr Derenzy, Willie is not aware of my plight. He must surely have said something about where he was going. Oh, I do, I assure you, understand that he had to go away. But he must have said something, Mr Derenzy.’

‘Willie left here a few days after you and your mother left, when arrangements had been made with Lanigan and O’Brien about the house in Cork. I came in one morning and Willie was not here.’

His hands, fragile on the ordered surface of his desk, were trembling, and in his eyes there was something that might have been terror. Again he closed them, as if to cloak it.

‘I’d like to walk over to Kilneagh.’

His mouth was pulled down at the corners and I sensed that for a moment he could not speak. Then his eyes opened and he regarded me wildly.

‘Please go back to England. Please, child, I beg you now.’

I shook my head, not knowing how to answer otherwise. I remembered the way to the house, I said, and after a pause he rose and took from a hook on the back of the door a navy-blue overcoat and drew on woollen gloves. He led the way down the wooden stairs that were like the stairs to a loft. A man with a limp, dapper in his working clothes, crossed the yard, whistling. He didn’t see us; you had told me his name on our visit, but I could not remember it now.

‘There,’ Mr Derenzy said. ‘Keep the thorn hedge on your left and then you’ll see the stile. But this is no weather to go walking, Marianne. And Willie is not at the house, you know.’

‘Yes, I do know that.’

I followed his directions, and the tears I had been holding back in the mill office flowed in a torrent on my cheeks. A pathetic creature,

Mr Derenzy had no doubt considered, an immoral girl who had come to make a nuisance of herself because she didn’t know what to do. I thought of the rectory and the kindness it contained, the cosiness and comfort of its rooms. They did their best, my father and my mother, saving to send me to a boarding-school they could not afford, saving to send me to Montreux because they believed that would be advantageous for me. They had always done their best. They had worried when I was upset, they had put things right. Like a tumult shuddering through my body, my weeping continued, its stream of tears warm on my icy face. In the rectory it would be time for morning coffee now, with the oaten biscuits my father liked so. But they would neither of them have the heart for biscuits.

I stood still, waiting for my agitation to calm. I moved on then, passing through the wood of birch trees before the ground rose gently and afterwards more steeply. When I reached its greatest height the burnt-out house lay below me, its stark outline beautiful against the pale landscape. Slowly I descended, clambering over a stone wall and through a gate, into the jungle of rhododendrons. The house, no longer beautiful, loomed grimly above me and around me, black walls exuding such damp bleakness that involuntarily I shivered. The weeds in the hall were less green, less vigorous than they had been that summer, and snow fell in the drawing-room you’d told me had once been scarlet. Lightly it lay on the mantelpiece and on the wreck of the grand piano; lengths of rough timber were nailed across an archway. I found the kitchen, and above it rooms that were undamaged. Nothing was locked, but there was no warmth in any of the rooms, and moisture seeped up the walls.

In the garden a greenhouse had fallen to pieces, its door sagging on rusted hinges, its glass collapsed. High, withered thistles gathered snowflakes where beds for vegetables had been. You had stood here with me, recalling the old gardener, and Tim Paddy who had been in love with Josephine. It was then that the name of the limping man in the mill-yard came to me: Johnny Lacy, whom Josephine had preferred.

‘Marianne!’

Bewildered, your Aunt Pansy was beside me. I took her meekly proffered hand and followed her into the orchard wing, into the chill square sitting-room where that summer we had been given mid-morning scones, where after your mother’s funeral we had awkwardly stood around.

‘I’m very much afraid my sister is not here,’ she said. ‘She and Father Kilgarriff went out early and, really, I’m alarmed because of this snow.’

Again I took off my new fur hat, but did not remove my coat.

‘A cup of tea?’ Aunt Pansy offered.

‘I’ve had some tea with Mr Derenzy. Thank you.’

‘I’m so surprised to see you, Marianne.’

‘I didn’t realize Willie had gone away.’

‘Oh yes, I’m afraid so.’

Nervously playing with a cameo brooch that hung from her neck on a fine silver chain, Aunt Pansy sought to efface herself in the manner I remembered. She pressed herself against the back of the wine-coloured sofa, bundling herself into it as if she did not wish to be seen. Yet she could not prevent an expression of concern from gathering in her ageless, cherubic face. She looked away from me when she spoke.

‘I’m awfully sorry, Marianne.’

‘But where has he gone?’

As Mr Derenzy had, she shook her head. As before, there were several dogs in the sitting-room, on the armchairs and the sofa and sprawled along the hearthrug. Above a mantelpiece cluttered with ornaments and oddments the severe face of Gladstone was darkly framed, dominant between scenes of oxen working on a mountainside. Books were packed untidily into high, glass-fronted bookcases. A grandfather clock, inlaid with black and white marble, ticked solemnly in a corner by the door. The room smelt of soot and of the dogs. Their hairs clung to the sofa and the armchairs.

‘I’m really awfully sorry. But, Marianne, surely you haven’t come here specially?’

‘Yes, I have.’

Aunt Pansy nodded, and for several moments continued to do so. I said:

‘I’m in love, you see, with Willie.’

A further effusion of pink darkened Aunt Pansy’s pink cheeks, a plump small hand played frantically with the cameo brooch. The silver chain was wound around one finger and then the next, the brooch itself rubbed and pressed, cast aside and then attended to again. For a moment or two it was used to trace the outline of her hps, before she opened them and spoke.

‘Well, I think we guessed that. That morning Willie brought you here—yes, we rather guessed. And later Willie talked to Father Kilgarriff and Father Kilgarriff said something to my sister. And Mr Derenzy guessed, I think, and said something to myself. Everyone was pleased. Mrs Driscoll, who keeps the shop, said something to my sister because Mr Derenzy had passed it on to the Sweeneys and they had passed it on to her—or Johnny Lacy’s wife had, or one of the men from the mill, I really can’t remember. The rector knew, I do remember that, because one Sunday he remarked to us that of course we were all rather looking into the future when we spoke of another English wife at Kilneagh. He was thinking of your both being—well, no more than children, and Kilneagh being half a ruin now. Naturally it would be ages before it could possibly be a place to live in again. But it did make us happy, looking into the future like that, it really made us happy.’

Running out of breath, Aunt Pansy gasped, very pink in the face now. I said I was glad that people were happy.

‘Oh, happy when we guessed, I mean. Happy then, I mean.’

The silver chain was tightened yet again around each finger in turn. A lightly marked Dalmatian, asleep on my feet, snored. I said:

‘Before the death of Willie’s mother?’

‘Yes, before her death.’

The subject was unobtrusively dismissed. In the chilly sitting-room the marriage referred to was no more than speculation that had come to nothing. The looking into the future, and the contentment the gossip had inspired among the people of Lough, belonged already to the past.

‘If you’d written to us, my dear, we could have told you Willie was not here. It’s a very great distance to come and find … I mean, at the end of your journey to have to turn round again and go all that way back …’

‘But where is Willie? Does Father Kilgarriff know?’

Again she shook her head. ‘Please let me get you some tea, Marianne.’

‘No, thank you.’

I could not remain there. I stood up, and Aunt Pansy rose also, with an alacrity that betrayed relief.

‘My sister will be disappointed. And Father Kilgarriff, of course.’

‘Yes, I am sorry too.’

‘The truth is we’ve bought a little motor-car. This morning is the first time Father Kilgarriff has driven her out in it. That is why I am alarmed because it has begun to snow.’

She didn’t want to talk about you. I had been foolish, I should have written first, I was no more than a silly lovesick child; all that was in her face, although she did not wish it to be there.

‘I am going to have Willie’s baby,’ I said.

I walked over the frozen fields, watching the birds as they poked for grubs on the riverbank, not caring where I went or how I felt. Sheep huddled beneath a hedge, cows kept close together. I envied them their drear complacency. I prayed and pleaded as I had in Switzerland, I asked for mercy. It was too much that as well as everything else you should not be here: I begged that that at least might be miraculously changed.

It was nearly five o’clock when I arrived back in the village and when I asked in the shop about the Cork train I was told I’d be too late now to catch it. In any case, since it was snowing heavily again the walk to Fermoy looked as though it would not be possible. I might have returned to Kilneagh but I did not wish to do that. I went instead to Sweeney’s public house to enquire about lodgings.

A man with one arm, who warmly shook my hand when I explained to him about the train, told me he was Mr Sweeney. He had recently added to his business, he informed me also, by opening a garage on the empty premises next door to his own. With some pride he led me into it and said it was he who had sold your aunts their new motor-car.

‘D’you know the two women I mean? They live over by the ruins. The motor’s for Kilgarriff to drive them about in. Have you heard tell of Kilgarriff maybe?’

‘Yes.’

‘A benighted man, God help him. Still and all, there’s many a worse one wears a bishop’s ring.’

‘I suppose there is.’

‘I’m surprised you’d have knowledge of him. Aren’t you a stranger yourself, miss?’

‘I’m Willie Quinton’s cousin. I came from England to see him. I didn’t know he’d gone away.’

‘Oh, glory be to God!’

We were still standing in the garage. The snow had melted on my hat and was running down beneath my clothes. My feet were soaking. Mr Sweeney muttered to himself, looking at me for a moment and then looking away. He passed a tongue over his lips, bringing the muttering to an end.

‘Sure, I didn’t know who you were,’ he said. ‘The wife’ll eat the face off me.’

He led the way, through the bar and into a warm, low-ceilinged kitchen.

‘It’s Willie Quinton’s cousin,’ he said to a woman with a piece of meat in her hand. ‘I’m after showing her the garage. Sure, she could’ve been anyone.’

The woman stared at me, her eyes wide, the meat still in her motionless hand. But when she spoke it was to her husband.

‘Will you look at the cut of yourself?’ she shouted shrilly. ‘Smelling like a brewery at four o’clock in the day.’

She busded about me then, unbuttoning my coat and making me take off my shoes. She accused her husband of stupidity for thinking I’d be interested in seeing his garage, a misjudgement that was entirely due to his having drunk a dozen bottles of stout instead of repairing a bent running-board. ‘Sit down at the range,’ she urged me, ‘so you can thaw your little bones out. That old garage would freeze you raw.’

‘Give her rum,’ suggested Mr Sweeney. ‘Heat up a sup of rum in a saucepan for her.’ He stood by the door, pools of water forming on the stone floor by his feet. His wife ignored him.

‘I’ll have a room got ready for you,’ she said when I explained my predicament, ‘and there’s a stew that’ll warm you up only it isn’t cooked yet. Would you like a sup of Bovril?’

‘There’s nothing like hot rum,’ interposed Mr Sweeney. ‘I have a good dark rum I can get you from the bar.’

‘Will you keep out of that bar and go and wash yourself? You’re the laziest man God ever put eyes in.’

There was a maid in the kitchen also, who on our entrance had ceased her task of cleaning potatoes at the sink. She was a shallow-cheeked, squinting girl, wrapped in a green overall that might once have been the property of the larger Mrs Sweeney.

‘Stop loitering about,’ Mrs Sweeney shrieked at her. ‘Get three jars filled and put them into the spare bed.’

‘I’m sorry to be such a nuisance, Mrs Sweeney.’

‘Ah, girl, you’re never a nuisance. It’s only that it’s a while since anyone laid down in that bed.’

‘Is there a train from Fermoy in the mornings? To Cork, I mean.’

‘There is of course. Sit down by that range now.’

I did as I was bidden and a moment later heard Mrs Sweeney upbraiding her husband in the scullery. ‘Are you drunk or what,’ she was expostulating in a loud, furious whisper, ‘bringing that one here? Couldn’t you have told her we were full up?’ Mr Sweeney attempted some reply but his wife cut it short by calling him a fool. ‘God knows the tale she’ll carry back to England with her. Mind what you say to her now.’

I was still trying to warm myself at the range when Mr Derenzy entered the kitchen some time later. He clearly was not pleased to see me there and was unable to disguise his irritation when I said I had missed the train. Later, when I mentioned your name in the course of conversation at the supper table, he dropped his knife with a clatter. Appearing to share this uneasiness, the Sweeneys consumed their food with unnatural interest. They meticulously examined the contents of their plates and did their best to keep a desultory conversation going. There hadn’t been snow in Lough for fifteen years, I was told, and to fill another silence I made a similar effort myself: I said I lived in the same town in Dorset that Anna Quinton had come from. Mr Derenzy, who was aware of that, nodded over his food. Mr Sweeney remarked that he couldn’t quite place the person I was referring to, and I explained that she was the Anna Quinton of the Famine. ‘Haunt Hill is called after her, Mr Sweeney. And it was she who planted the mulberry orchard at Kilneagh.’

‘Would you credit that? Well, that beats Banagher!’

Since this slight interest had been shown, I described the house she had grown up in. It was interesting, I said, that your mother had been connected with the Woodcombe family too. But my voice faltered, for what I was saying suddenly seemed absurd to me. ‘I didn’t realize,’ I said instead, ‘that my cousin had left Kilneagh.’

The shallow-cheeked maid sniffed into the sleeve of her overall and was at once told to be quiet by Mrs Sweeney, who informed me that the girl had a terrible cold.

‘We’re destroyed with colds this winter,’ Mr Sweeney affirmed, but the girl hadn’t a cold. Just for a moment she had wept.

When the meal came to an end Mr Derenzy slipped away and Mr Sweeney went to serve in the bar. After they’d washed up the dishes Mrs Sweeney and the maid put on Wellington boots and left the kitchen to attend to livestock in the yard. I had offered to help with the dishes and the animals, but Mrs Sweeney had been adamant that I shouldn’t lift a finger. I was sitting by the range when the limping man who had passed through the mill-yard entered the kitchen, ‘ whistling the same tune he had been whistling that morning.

‘I’m Johnny Lacy,’ he said. ‘I met you two summers ago. Would you remember?’

‘Yes, of course I do.’

He placed a large glass of dark-coloured beer on the table and drew up a chair beside mine.

‘I married into the Sweeneys. Did Willie tell you that, by any chance? We’re two doors up. The blue-washed cottage.’

‘Willie told me you’d married.’

He reached for his glass and drank a mouthful of the beer. He wiped his lips and whistled again.

‘D’you know that tune?’ he enquired.

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘You can dance “The Rakes of Mallow” to that tune.’

‘I see.’

‘Mallow’s not far from here.’

He drank again. He said:

‘You’ll take the Cork train in the morning?’

I said I would, and he nodded approvingly. I wondered if he had come into the kitchen at the behest of Mr Derenzy or the Sweeneys, in order to ensure that I didn’t decide to dawdle.

‘Where d’you think Willie’s gone to, Mr Lacy?’

He reached again for his glass. Instead of answering he asked if he might fetch me a drink from the bar, but I said I wasn’t thirsty.

‘Willie’s best left,’ he said.

Mrs Sweeney and the maid returned to the kitchen while he was speaking. He stood up at once, and politely insisted that it had been a privilege to meet me again. When he’d gone I asked:

‘Whereabouts in Cork is St Fina’s, Mrs Sweeney? Where Josephine works now?’

She was sitting down at the table, pulling off her Wellington boots. Still wearing her green overall, on which a residue of snow was rapidly dissipating, the shallow-cheeked girl clattered buckets in the sink, washing them out. Instead of immediately answering my question, Mrs Sweeney said that the snow was heavier than ever. She mentioned an abandoned motor-car and said it would need to be towed home by a tractor in the morning.

‘I would like to see Josephine. In case she heard from my cousin.’

‘St Fina’s is on the Bandon road, outside the city. The thing is, miss, I think your cousin would want to be on his own.’

‘But, Mrs Sweeney—’

‘There’s things you wouldn’t want to disturb, girl.’

The early hours of that night passed slowly by.

I lay in a bed that felt faintly damp in spite of Mrs Sweeney’s hot-water bottles. I lay there in a nightdress she had lent me, but I did not sleep. I stared into the darkness, wondering what things were better left undisturbed, and what tale they feared I might carry back to England. Had Mr Derenzy told them I was to have your child? Did all of them know where you were and not wish me to know also because I would trap you into a marriage?

Dwelling upon these doubts and speculations, I wearied myself into an uneasy sleep and dreamed you were showing me the estuary at Cork again. Then suddenly it was different: I was showing you Woodcombe Park. In sunshine, by the mock-Roman summer-house, you put your arms around me, you said you loved me and always would. Among the yew trees there were people in colourful clothes: all over the lawns they were scattered, the Professor and Mrs Gibb-Bachelor, Agnes Brontenby and your friends, Ring and de Courcy. Cynthia was eating a pear and Mavis was with Hopeless Gibbon, and old Dove-White was having his burnt clothes mended by the waiter from the Cafe Bon Accueil. The mullioned windows of the town were beautiful, you said, and when I led you from room to room in Woodcombe Park you said that they were beautiful also.

‘Lemonade!’ your small headmaster cried, hurrying in the garden. ‘You’ve never become a manufacturer of lemonade!’ Your mother laughed, and so did mine; my father said our prayers had been answered. Aunt Pansy took Mr Derenzy’s arm, and Father Kilgarriff said it was only in a dream he’d been unfrocked. ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you,’ you said. ‘I’d never let you cry. It’s only in a dream that you cried in the fields.’ The shadows stretched out before the sun set on the horizon, the shadows of the yew trees and the people in their colourful clothes. ‘It’s heaven here,’ you explained because the pillars and the windows of Woodcombe Park had become golden in the golden sunlight. That’s where you’d been, you explained: wandering in the places I’d told you about, the rectory and the town and the gardens of Woodcombe Park. No point in staying in a ruin, you explained, and we stood in the mulberry orchard that Anna Quinton had copied. ‘How elegant England is!’ you said. ‘Not frightening like Kilneagh!’ Then you took my hand and we walked among the people at the party.

When I awoke, the first flickers of dawn were appearing around the curtain at the room’s single window. It was a shock to find myself there after the vividness of my dream and as the realities of the day before pressed in upon me I felt tired and melancholy, and longed to sleep again, to go on dreaming. I listened to the early-morning noises and finally pulled the curtain back, spreading a weak morning twilight into the room. I washed and dressed, and at a quarter-past eight went down to the kitchen.

Mr Derenzy had already left for the mill. Mr Sweeney exuded an odour of petrol: he had been working with a tractor in an effort to haul out of a ditch the motor-car his wife had mentioned the night before. Consuming sausages and bacon, he informed me that the snow had stopped falling at five minutes past midnight. He’d been in the yard at the time, dumping crates of bottles. The wind had dropped and in no time at all a galaxy of stars had appeared in the sky.

‘We’ll make you up sandwiches for your journey,’ Mrs Sweeney said. ‘A couple of ham and a couple of jam. You’ll be as right as rain for the day then.’

‘You’ll enjoy yourself on the train,’ said Mr Sweeney. ‘Aren’t you the lucky girl to be going back to England?’

Later that morning I said good-bye to both of them. ‘Good-bye so,’ said Mr Sweeney, wiping an oily palm on his trousers. ‘That’s interesting what you told us about the place in England.’

‘Go back on the steamer today, girl,’ Mrs Sweeney urged in a low voice. She clenched my hand and seemed about to say something else, but did not do so. They would accept no money from me.

The shallow-faced maid was given the task of accompanying me to Driscoll’s shop, where a lift to Fermoy on an outside car had been arranged for me. In cold sunlight, which the fallen snow reflected and intensified, we stood together outside the grocer’s shop and in a moment or two a woman who introduced herself as Mrs Driscoll came out and said we’d be warmer waiting inside since the horse was still being harnessed out at the back. She offered us biscuits from a glass-topped tin, one of a number which ran in a row along the counter. She repeated what I had been told already: that there hadn’t been snow in Lough for fifteen years.

The horse and cart rattled over the ice of the yard at the back of the shop, and someone shouted out that it was ready. I said good-bye to Mrs Driscoll and gave the maid a threepenny piece.

‘Oh, miss, miss,’ she cried, her squinting eyes watery with gratitude, and then she hurried me to the car.

‘Hold on to the rail, miss,’ the driver ordered. ‘I don’t want the old horse to go down.’

Obediently, I did as I was bidden and at a very slow pace we made the journey to Fermoy railway station.

5

The nun’s eyes blinked rapidly behind spectacles. The spectacles were so embedded, so tightly held in place, that they might have been there to inflict pain. Her teeth were crowded, jutting from her mouth when she spoke.

‘We don’t know why you’ve come,’ she said. ‘To ask if I might talk to Josephine.’

I stood with the nun in the hall of St Fina’s, a huge expanse of brown and cream tiles, freshly washed, still smelling of Jeyes’ Fluid.

A wide pitchpine staircase, gleaming with linoleum, rose gently and then sharply formed an angle. This linoleum bore a pattern of greens and reds and blues, faded now to a nondescript speckling. The walls were nondescript also, an oatmeal shade that did not catch the eye. The hall was empty of furniture.

Beads jangled as the nun shifted her weight from one foot to the other. ‘Better it would be,’ she said, ‘to write a letter.’

‘There isn’t time to write a letter. It’s very important.’

‘Excuse me then.’

She went away, her black shoes silent on the tiles. She disappeared through a door, which she softly closed behind her. Another nun descended the stairs with rags and a tin of polish in her hand. She smiled at me and said good-morning.

More than twenty minutes went by before Josephine entered the hall. She looked different in her lay sister’s clothes, less pretty than in the uniform she’d worn before. Breathlessly, as if she’d been running, she spoke before I could.

‘I couldn’t think who it was who’d come.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you.’

‘Did someone tell you I was here? Are you in Cork on a visit, miss?’

‘Do you know where my cousin is, Josephine?’

‘Oh no, miss. No, no.’ The worry in her voice was an echo of Aunt Pansy’s and Mr Derenzy’s. I remembered the moment when the Sweeneys’ maid had wept.

‘Do you think he’s in Ireland, Josephine?’

‘He didn’t say to me, miss. He didn’t say he intended to leave the mill.’

She fidgeted with a dish-cloth she held. The cloth was blue and white. It had a damp look, as if she had been drying dishes with it.

‘I came here to find him, Josephine. I came all this way.’

She nodded, and then said she should not have gone to Kilneagh that day, leaving your mother alone. Abruptly she turned and hurried from the hall, and as she did so the nun with glasses descended the stairs, holding out a charity box.

‘If you could help us at St Fina’s,’ she said.

Distractedly, I found a coin and pushed it at the slot in the box. I would have run after Josephine if the nun hadn’t arrived. I still tried to, but she had already disappeared and the nun with the glasses shook her head. She opened the hall door, drawing back bolts which she had secured in place when she’d admitted me. She blinked again and smiled, the crowded teeth bursting from her face.

‘Josephine’s not at peace yet,’ she said.

‘At peace?’

There was no reply. The door closed and I walked away from the sprawling mansion that might once have been the pride of a local family and was now a convent institution. I passed down a long, straight avenue, not at all like the avenue at Kilneagh, being open to fields on either side. An elderly man, poorly dressed, emerged from a gate-lodge. It was a lovely day, he said, touching his cap. ‘Thank God for that, miss.’

I returned to the Shandon Boarding House. Willie will look after me, I had written in the note I had left behind in the rectory. Please do not worry. I wrote a further letter now, as humbly as I could, requesting forgiveness and protesting repentance. But I did not give the address of the boarding house and I didn’t reveal that you had not been at Kilneagh.

I walked about the streets, half hoping that I’d meet you, that suddenly you’d be there. Brooding, not knowing what to do, no longer praying, I wept and often could not cease. The weather remained cold, but it did not snow again.

In Thompson’s Cafe, surrounded by warm-cheeked countrywomen and men gossiping in their sing-song city voices, I dawdled through those two afternoons, preferring to be there than in the dour boarding house. The steaminess and gaslight made the cafe cheerful, and sometimes I would close my eyes and pretend that you were pushing your way through the crowds to where I sat. ‘John Gilbert’s marvellous,’ a woman at my table remarked to her companion when once I pretended so. I opened my eyes and there were bronze chrysanthemums on top of a basket of shopping and a cherry falling from the cake the other woman ate. It was extraordinary that people did not guess at my misery, that the punishment I suffered did not show in my face.

No children played in the playground, but a light shone from the two schoolroom windows. I pushed open the door and walked down a passage. ‘Yes?’ Miss Halliwell called out while my knuckles were still raised to rap on the panels of the door to the schoolroom.

Among the maps and charts, the table she sat at stacked with exercise-books, the schoolteacher was younger than I had imagined. You had given me the impression of a woman in middle age: Miss Halliwell was not yet that.

‘Oh yes, I do so very well remember Willie. Please sit down.’

I sat on the edge of a battered desk. I explained how I had come from England only to find that you had disappeared, that all I could think to do was to ask people you had mentioned if they had news of you.

‘Willie’s no longer at his mill?’

‘No.’

‘Ah …’

The exhalation was soft. Behind the pile of exercise-books there was a daydream in Miss Halliwell’s eyes.

‘I only wondered,’ I began, ‘if perhaps you’d heard something here in Cork. Willie pointed out this schoolroom once. There was just a chance you might have heard something.’

‘Ah, no.’ Miss Halliwell smiled distantly. She ran a thin forefinger around the edge of a text-book, at the same time turning her head away and keeping it quite still, as if posing for a portrait.

‘I used to feel sick at heart,’ she said, ‘when I thought about what had happened to that boy. It made me sick at heart, that fearful tragedy and all it left behind.’

‘Miss Halliwell, is there anyone else you can think of who might know?’

‘His mother was a drunkard. Every day the child would walk home to that. No matter how well he had recovered there was always his mother’s selfishness to remind him.’

‘I feel that no one is telling me the truth. I feel there’s something being hidden. Even Josephine—’

‘Josephine?’

‘The housemaid the Quintons had.’

‘Oh yes, a housemaid brought him up.’ She spoke bitterly, the dreaminess gone from her face. It had been horrible, she said, a child alone with a mother who was given up to drink, with only a housemaid to look after him. ‘Can you blame him for going away?

Can you blame him for leaving this miserable country and starting life afresh? Perhaps we should all do that.’

I stood up. Miss Halliwell had no idea what I was talking about when I said that something was being hidden. She knew nothing about your whereabouts; I apologized for disturbing her.

‘Is there some reason why you should communicate so urgently with your cousin?’

‘Yes, there is.’

‘You haven’t told me.’

‘It doesn’t matter now. I’ve been a nuisance to you. I’m sorry, Miss Halliwell.’

‘I loved him, I dearly loved him. That isn’t easy, you know.’

I didn’t know that; you hadn’t told me; perhaps you hadn’t known yourself. Miss Halliwell said:

‘I met your cousin on the street one day. I invited him to tea, but he did not wish to come. No, don’t go yet.’ Again there was the soft exhalation of her breath. ‘Of course that boy must start afresh. This country has fallen to pieces since they had their revolution. Gunmen run it now.’

‘I don’t know what to do, Miss Halliwell. I am going to have Willie’s baby.’

‘Gunmen,’ Miss Halliwell repeated, and then abruptly stopped.

‘That’s why I came back,’ I said.

A horse and cart went by in Mercier Street. A contortion twisted the features that you had once likened to a wilted flower.

‘Willie’s baby,’ I repeated.

‘My God …’

‘If Josephine had still been in the house in Windsor Terrace I might have stayed there and waited for him.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘I have very little money, Miss Halliwell. I have lodgings in a place where they make me pay every morning before I leave the house. Soon I shall be destitute.’

‘How dare you come here in this manner.’

‘I know I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.’

‘You come here to beg, a child I have never seen before, saying you are Willie Quinton’s cousin—’

‘I am his cousin. And I am not begging.’

‘It’s a lie, what you say about a baby.’ Her hand reached out and grasped my wrist. ‘You speak of other people’s lies but you are telling lies yourself.’

‘No, it isn’t a lie, Miss Halliwell.’

The grip on my wrist tightened. In her faded face the schoolteacher’s lips were drawn back in distaste, and when she spoke a fine mist of saliva moistened my forehead.

‘I’ve seen boys in this schoolroom growing into sniggering louts. Willie was never like that. He was a special child, who was led astray.’

‘Please let me go, Miss Halliwell.’

She withdrew her hand from my wrist. The anger had ebbed from her face, leaving it white and puckered. She looked away, and for a moment held her head quite still, as she had before. I left her, crossing the wooden floor to the door.

‘I hope you suffer,’ Miss Halliwell said. ‘For all your life you deserve to suffer.’

I passed the shop windows we had passed together, the Turkish delight shop, the facade of the Victoria Hotel, brightly lit. I remembered the beggarwoman you had so harshly turned away, and the seagulls above our heads. By the river it was bitterly cold. In the sunshine of that summer we’d watched the men painting the ironwork of their cargo vessels. We’d lingered on all our walks.

Darkly the river slurped now, an oily sheen gleaming in the moonlight. Had I been absurd, when that summer was over, to imagine in the rectory and at school that we might be married? I had imagined so very clearly your mother and your aunts in the church, my father guiding us through the service, my wedding dress with a shade of yellow in it. We would sing Psalm 23, I’d thought, and afterwards we would be together for ever.

Slowly I walked along the quay. What courage your mother had possessed to draw a sleeve back and expose those vulnerable arteries throbbing beneath the skin, to take the blade from the coloured paper that wrapped it, to bear the pain, the sliver of metal slipping home. In a month or so the condition of my body would be apparent to everyone who saw me; I could not melt away as you and Josephine had. I wished you might know that I stood above the cold river, but I knew I would not be granted even that. And then I wished I had your mother’s courage.

I turned and began the journey back to the boarding house. A man almost as small as a dwarf paid me some attention which I shook off, telling him to go away. But he was beside me again before I reached the front door, bobbing his head at me, not quite plucking at the sleeve of my coat, although his fingers made a plucking motion in the air. His eyes were eager, darting over my features.

‘Please go away,’ I repeated, and it was only then that I noticed he was attempting to give me an envelope. I took it from him. The note it contained read:

Mr Lanigan of Lanigan & O’Brien, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, would ask you to call upon him at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. There followed the address of Lanigan and O’Brien’s offices and brief directions as to how to reach them.

‘I’m sorry I spoke like that,’ I said, wearily, to the man. The invitation he brought me in no way raised my hopes or expectations; it seemed impossible that anything good would happen now. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

The man did not reply.

6

‘That was Declan O’Dwyer, Marianne. Without the gift of speech. Willie may perhaps have told you.’

‘Do you know where Willie is, Mr Lanigan?’ ‘No, Marianne, I do not.’

A brown suit draped the shape that had reminded you of a pyramid. A fresh, polka-dotted bow-tie was like a butterfly poised on the incline of Mr Lanigan’s neck. He smiled invitingly, offering me refreshment.

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘No, really, Mr Lanigan.’ ‘We have a fine fruit cordial, or sherry if you should prefer it. Declan O’Dwyer would be honoured to bring us in a tray.’

An ebony ruler, raised to strike the wall as a summons for Declan O’Dwyer, was delicately returned to the solicitor’s blotting-pad.

The blotting paper, as yet hardly marked with ink, was blue. There was sealing-wax on the desk also, long sticks in red and black and green, and rubber bands in a brass container.

‘Dear Marianne, I am glad you did not elude us. You mentioned your boarding house to the good Mrs Sweeney, otherwise we might have had a mischief finding you.’

His tone was sympathetic. His tiny, twinkling eyes moved sympathetically over my features. He was the only person who appeared to like me, or at least to welcome me, since I had made my ill-fated journey back to Ireland. His sympathy, and the concern in his face, caused me to weep. I turned my head away to dry my tears and when I could speak I told him how I had visited Josephine in her convent institution, and Miss Halliwell in her school. No one would talk about you, I said; no one had helped me. I spoke of the rectory and the calamity it would be if I gave birth to a baby among my father’s parishioners. I even told him about how miserable I had been in Switzerland, my unhappiness increased by the Professor’s lecherous pursuit of me. As I finished he rapped on the wall with his ruler and briskly ordered coffee and toasted crumpets when his mute clerk entered the office.

‘You have upset yourself considerably,’ he softly chided me when the man had gone. ‘Dear child, you look exceedingly ill.’

‘I am not ill.’

He nodded ponderously. His smile had faded a little.

‘I have to tell you, Marianne, that a wire has been received in Kilneagh from your parents. They are naturally most concerned.’

Declan O’Dwyer returned with the coffee and the toasted crumpets. Mr Lanigan’s eyes were beadily contemplative, a neat hand still gripped the ebony ruler. When the door had closed behind his clerk he spoke again. He questioned me closely, wishing to know if I could be certain beyond all doubt that my condition was as I had stated; if I had visited a doctor, which I had not; if I had calculated when the child would be born; if I was sure I did not feel unwell.

Impatiently, I brushed all this aside.

‘People are keeping something from me. I know they are and so do you, Mr Lanigan.’

He did not reply. He sipped his coffee and divided a crumpet into quarters. When he spoke he ignored what I had said.

‘A wire has been sent back to the rectory to say you have safely arrived here. Please let me send another to say you are forthwith returning, Marianne. And please do drink that coffee.’

He smiled coaxingly at me, two rows of teeth like pearls decorating his face. I said:

‘I have written them a letter. They will receive that also, in a day or two. I cannot return there.’

I stirred the skin that had formed on the coffee’s surface. I tried to eat part of my crumpet. I felt more confused than I had before our conversation had begun.

‘I do not belong there now,’ I said.

The crumpet had made my fingers sticky. I wiped them on a handkerchief. Mr Lanigan continued to smile at me.

‘Belong, Marianne?’

‘I do not belong in Woodcombe Rectory any more.’

The smile began to fade again, but his voice had not ceased to be concerned and friendly. He said:

‘I have summoned you here so that you may hear a proposition, but before you do so I most earnestly entreat you to return to Woodcombe Rectory. Of course it will be painful for your mother and your father. Of course it will be hard for them to hold their heads up, but even so I would beg you to return to England.’

‘I would like to hear your proposition, Mr Lanigan.’

The smile went completely. The coffee tray was pushed to one side. Mr Lanigan, too, wiped his fingers on a handkerchief. Quietly he said he was disappointed, then drawing a sustaining breath continued:

‘I am an intermediary in what follows, Marianne. I am passing on to you what I have been bidden to pass on. I do not approve the wisdom of this message. You understand, Marianne?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then.’ He paused again. ‘Well then indeed, Marianne.’ He pursed his lips, reluctant to continue, meticulously observing me for any sign that might betray a change of mind. He sighed. ‘Well then, Marianne, I am to say that if you should remain adamant in the position you have adopted, and provided there is no legal objection on the part of your father—who has every right so to object—then without prejudice, and the arrangement being in no way binding, and on the understanding that it may be terminated by your benefactress at will, your cousin’s Aunt Fitzeustace will take you in. I mention his Aunt Fitzeustace since it is she who has communicated with me and who is, I believe, generally in charge in that household at Kilneagh. Neither she nor her sister condones; that is to be made clear. And you would be expected to make a fair contribution, in so far as your condition permits, to the labour involved in various household tasks.’

I did not say anything. I could not because it was during this long speech of the solicitor’s, without warning or relevance to what he was saying, that the truth crept into my mind. With startling abruptness I shared with him, and with Mr Derenzy and the Sweeneys, with Johnny Lacy and Josephine and Aunt Pansy, what they sought to keep from me. Of all the people who knew you only Miss Halliwell and I had been outside that circle and now Miss Halliwell was alone. Until someone told her, you would be the same in her eyes as you had always been: in mine, in a matter of seconds, you had acquired a different identity.

‘So you see, Marianne,’ Mr Lanigan finished up.

I should have been afraid but was not. I should have wept but I had wept enough already. I felt calm, without the desire to exclaim or to make any comment whatsoever. Nor did I seek to question Mr Lanigan: there was no need for that. I was aware only of sensing that my reason for refusing to return to the rectory was not that I would bring disgrace with me. A different reality hung like a weight in the solicitor’s office, and I understood perfectly that for my sake you had sought, as best you could, to destroy our love. I had not permitted you to, but I did not believe you blamed me for that now. Our love was still there, wherever either of us might be. I could feel it all around me in that office, part of the truth that made everything different.

‘Now, there is another matter, Marianne.’

The sharp little eyes again scrutinized my features, perhaps even penetrated these thoughts.

‘It is simply this, Marianne. Your cousin visited me before he went away. Certain documents were drawn up which may or may not have led me to deduce that your cousin intended to be absent from this country for more than a little time. I must, without comment, place the deduction before you. I must also, since such is my duty, reveal to you that should you find yourself in need—and I quote that form of words, Marianne—should find yourself in need, certain monies will be made available to you.’

There was a pause, and further scrutiny.

‘Your cousin made provision for an eventuality of which I myself remained in ignorance. It is clear to me now that he had the possibility of your present circumstances in mind. I am authorized, Marianne, to implement the agreed form of words, and it would seem I must decree that you do clearly find yourself in need.’

Mr Lanigan went on talking. He made a final effort to persuade me to return to England, but after a time I heard no more than the sound of his voice, a rush of words without comprehension. More than ever, Kilneagh was a fearsome place and yet there was nowhere else I wished to be. No matter how grim that half-ruined house was, no matter how much nobody there wanted me, it was where I belonged because you had belonged there also. Every detail of my existence, every vein in my body, every mark, every intimate part of me, loved you with a tenderness that made me want to close my eyes and faint. Every second of my twenty years of life had to do with you, and I thanked God for the anxiety of our grandparents in India when they had worried so about your mother. Their anxiety had given us our summer and our love; it had given us our child. At Kilneagh I would wait for you. I would exist in whatever limbo fate intended, while you wandered the face of the earth. Solitude claimed you: I understood that.

‘I did not read of what occurred,’ I said to Mr Lanigan, surprising him with an interruption unrelated to what he was saying. ‘Because of course I was in Switzerland.’

He nodded slowly, his flow of words abruptly halted, not taken up again. In the rectory that occurrence would have been read about in the newspaper, my father shaking his head over the mystery of it, my mother failing to connect one name with another. ‘Rudkin,’ you had said, and had described the man, a hand cupped round the cigarette he lit, his genial salute as he stood at the street corner.