Fools of Fortune

I

Beside the ruins a picnic was spread out on a tablecloth. There were Marmite sandwiches and strawberry-and-cream cake and little iced scones decorated with hundreds and thousands. A fire had been made to boil the tea kettle, and there was milk in a corked bottle that had to be kept in the shade. There was lemonade which Imelda had helped Father Kilgarriff to make from yellow crystals that morning. Her mother wore her new flowery dress. It was Imelda’s ninth birthday.

Aunt Fitzeustace had given her a dragon brooch with a broken pin, which had been in the Quinton family for donkey’s years, so she said; and Aunt Pansy had given her two bars of Fry’s chocolate, each composed of brightly coloured creams of different flavours. Mr Derenzy, who had walked over to the ruins from his office in the mill, had given her sixpence, and Father Kilgarriff a green wooden top.

When the picnic was over the remains of the cake and the iced scones were left on the tablecloth and everyone stood around, endeavouring to fly the kite that had been the gift of Imelda’s mother. It was Father Kilgarriff who eventually got it to catch in the wind, running with it above his head while Aunt Pansy paid out the string from the short stick it was wound around. The red and blue triangle rose high above the trees and the ruins, swooping and diving in the sky while Father Kilgarriff showed Imelda how to jerk the string and keep it taut. The pull of the wind was like something alive between her fingers.

Two of the spaniels lazed on the grass, displaying no interest in the excitement engendered by the flying of the kite. The other dogs had preferred to remain in the cool of the old dairy. Strictly speaking, there had been no need to make a fire to boil the kettle on since the teapot could easily have been carried from the orchard wing, but Imelda had specially asked for it. Picnics always had fires, she’d said, and milk in a corked bottle instead of a milk jug. No one had disagreed.

In a whispering, private voice Mr Derenzy spoke to Aunt Pansy about some trouble he was experiencing with the new young traveller from Midleton Sacks. ‘Insolent,’ he reported. ‘And soil enough behind his fingernails to grow potatoes in.’ Aunt Fitzeustace delved into her commodious handbag, searching for her cigarettes.

The kite lost height. The string that had been pulling so excitingly through Imelda’s grasp slackened and went limp. Father Kilgarriff took the white stick from Aunt Pansy and as swiftly as he could wound the string on to it. He tried to jerk the kite this way and that, but it wouldn’t obey him. It drooped and plunged. It fell into a tree.

‘Will it be broken?’ Imelda asked. ‘It’s only made of little rods.’

‘Ah, no, no.’

Nor was it. When Father Kilgarriff had coaxed it down they could find no damage of any kind, and when it flew again it soared so far away that soon it was hardly even a dot in the sky. Mr Derenzy and Aunt Pansy took a turn at guiding it and feeling the tug of the wind through the string, and then Imelda’s mother ran with it, her new dress pretty in the sunlight, her hair tidy in its bun. ‘No, I’ll not bother, dear,’ Aunt Fitzeustace said.

‘A kite’s probably the nicest thing a person can have,’ Imelda said when the string was wound up for the last time.

She drank more lemonade and the others drank more tea. She had woken up in the early morning and found the kite, wrapped in brown paper, at the foot of her bed. She hadn’t guessed what it was because it was just a long, bundly parcel, none of the parts put together yet. It was Father Kilgarriff who had done that, after breakfast at the kitchen table.

As she drank her lemonade, Imelda could still see the kite vividly in her mind’s eye, its sudden swirling movement, and the faces gazing up at it, hands slanting as a shade against the sun. The fuzzy grey-red hair of Mr Derenzy, Father Kilgarriff’s anxious eyes as he guided the string, her mother’s tiny figure in her flowery dress: together with the faraway kite and the clear blue sky they made a picture, with Aunt Fitzeustace and the spaniels as still as ornaments.

They sat in the dwindling heat of the day telling stories, which Imelda loved, and it was nearly seven o’clock before everything was gathered up. ‘You’re a big girl now,’ Mr Derenzy said, a form of leave-taking. Mr O’Mara the postman had said the same thing when he’d come into the kitchen with the Cork Examiner and the Irish Times that morning; and Father Kilgarriff had said it, and so had Philomena, Aunt Fitzeustace’s and Aunt Pansy’s maid, who had forgotten what age she was herself but guessed it might be seventy-eight. ‘It’s nice to be nine,’ Aunt Pansy had said. ‘I remember it was nice being nine.’

Imelda said good-bye to Mr Derenzy and thanked him for coming to her birthday. Then she returned with her mother and the others to the orchard wing, each of them carrying something from the picnic, the spaniels trailing behind. They did not pass through the ruins but made a semicircle around them, arriving in the cobbled yard through the archway at the back. Immediately a commotion began: barking and snarling, the dogs rushed from the old dairy; hens scurried out of their path, geese screeched. Father Kilgarriff beat the dogs off and made his way to the orchard to drive in for milking the household’s single cow. ‘Oh, do behave yourselves!’ cried Aunt Fitzeustace, beating at the dogs also, with her handbag. ‘Do tell them to behave themselves, Pansy.’ Aunt Pansy did as she was bidden, mildly addressing the obstreperous animals, telling them they were terrible.

‘I wish it could have lasted for ever,’ Imelda said a little later in her bedroom, after she’d repeated the Lord’s Prayer to her mother. ‘It was a lovely day.’

‘Yes, it was.’

Her mother bent to kiss her, and then pulled the curtains to, excluding the evening light.

‘It’s nice having a birthday in summertime,’ Imelda said. She searched for other things to say, not wanting the conversation to cease. Sometimes her mother told her about the time before the fire, what the house and the garden had been like then, even though she’d never known it herself. She spoke of a scarlet drawing-room and the scent of sweet-peas wafting into it in summer, and of the portraits of a man and his wife, Quintons who belonged to the past. But tonight her mother did not seem inclined to linger.

‘You go to sleep now,’ she urged, and kissed her again.

Lying with her eyes open, Imelda wondered about the portraits for a moment, trying to imagine them. Then she thought about the two pictures of Venice in the dining-room, the faded green gondola drawn up by a quayside, the domed church near a bridge. It was Aunt Pansy who had told her the boat was called a gondola, and Father Kilgarriff had explained that Venice had canals instead of streets. ‘I’d love to go there,’ she’d said, and he had said who knows, one day she might.

She thought about the bowl of wax fruit on the sideboard, and the silver teapots that did not gleam, the empty decanters, the nutcrackers that were used at Christmas. There were eleven mahogany chairs in the dining-room, with tapestry on them that was as worn as the carpet. The pattern on the wallpaper had disappeared but if you very slightly pushed to one side the little picture by the door you could see that the pattern had been of lilies, bunches tied with ribbon. There was a mirror, too heavy to push, between the windows, and another picture, of a waterfall. There were yellow vases, and plates and candlesticks; the clock on the mantelpiece had always been stopped at five to six. On the staircase wall the pictures were all uninteresting, none of them coloured; the stuffed peacock in the hall should have been thrown out years ago, Aunt Fitzeustace said.

Sleep did not come. ‘Count the dogs,’ was Aunt Fitzeustace’s advice. ‘That’s what I do.’ Dandy and Rifleman, Brigid the blind setter, Ginger and Pickles the spaniels, Murphy the greyhound, Achilles, Clonakilty, Blackguard and Sam and Maisie Jane. Murphy had been left in Lough by the tinkers, the priest who’d owned Maisie Jane had died, Clonakilty was the name of a town. In the past there’d been others: a Pomeranian and a Kerry Blue, terriers called Spratts and Bee, and Ludwig, a three-legged elk-hound. Imelda counted them all, and then the fourteen hens, and the geese.

A week ago, when it had thundered, the dogs had barked in fear but the hens hadn’t seemed to mind, objecting only to the rain. Philomena had sought refuge from the lightning beneath her bed. Father Kilgarriff had attempted to calm the dogs and Aunt Pansy had several times crawled in to where the maid had hidden herself, with cups of milky tea. ‘You go, Imelda,’ she’d said the last time.

It was because of the lingering excitement of her birthday that she could not sleep: at suppertime Aunt Fitzeustace had said she was still excited, and Father Kilgarriff that that was only to be expected. Aunt Pansy had added she’d never been able to sleep herself on Christmas Eve. They would all be in the sitting-room now, a fire lit because no matter what time of year it was Aunt Fitzeustace said the orchard wing was draughty. Aunt Pansy would be pressing flowers, Father Kilgarriff reading. Imelda’s mother, still in her new dress, would be making an entry in her diary, something about the picnic. Aunt Fitzeustace would be smoking cigarette after cigarette and throwing the burnt-out matches into the fire. Sometimes Aunt Fitzeustace read a seed catalogue but usually she just smoked. In the twilight of the gaunt sitting-room the whiskered countenance of William Gladstone would seem grimmer than it did by day, and the ticking of the grandfather clock more solemn.

‘Well then, count the mulberry trees,’ Aunt Fitzeustace had also adjured. ‘Start in the west corner, close your eyes and each tree will come into your mind.’ But Aunt Pansy advised that the best thing was just to think of something nice. Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace were so different that when she was younger Imelda had not guessed they were sisters: it was her mother who had explained to her that they were. Aunt Pansy was forever passing the jam and butter to Father Kilgarriff or to Imelda’s mother or to her sister. She was forever slipping away from the dining-table to pick up Philomena’s frilled cap when it fell to the floor or on to the roast meat on the sideboard. Aunt Fitzeustace never noticed such things. Her lips were tobacco-stained, her dog’s head tie-pin was often upside down, and the grey hair beneath her old tweed hat was untidily grasped together. She cut the grass and manured the shrubs, and had a passion for looking after the motor-car, hosing it down or polishing the upholstery and the paintwork.

‘Thirteen,’ Imelda said, and could not continue. There was the mulberry tree that was shaped like a crow and the lopsided one and the one that never bore fruit. There was the one with its roots coming out of the ground and the one with sour berries; there was the ragged one, like something tattered in the wind, and the nine that were all the same, in a row down the side of the orchard. But it was too difficult to try to see the others.

Imelda Quintan is my name, Ireland is my nation. A burnt house is my dwelling place, Heaven’s my destination. At the new convent in Lough, a cement building with a white statue of the Virgin Mary in front of it, there had been a craze for the rhyme. She had written it on the inside of the cover of her transcription book, the words sloping neatly on the orange surface. ‘Heaven?’ Teresa Shea had said. ‘You’ll not be going to heaven, Imelda Quinton. How could you?’ Teresa Shea was big and awkward and stupid, well known at the convent for the tartness of her tongue: Sister Mulcahy said to take no notice.

Imelda tried not to think about Teresa Shea. Successfully, she pushed the girl’s face out of her mind and saw instead the kite soaring in the sky and everyone gazing up at it. In time she slept.

She had a nightmare and her mother came to comfort her. It was the same nightmare as always, the children and the flames. ‘Now, now, now, Imelda,’ her mother comforted. ‘Shh now, pet.’

Long multiplication was taught. Imelda found it difficult and was grateful when the bell rang. The lay teacher, Miss Garvey, hooked up her skirt, for in search of relief it was her habit to loosen it at the beginning of each lesson. Chattering began in the classroom, and fell away to nothing as the girls strapped their satchels and left the convent. Eating liquorice outside Mrs Driscoll’s shop when school was over, Teresa Shea remarked:

‘There’s people says you shouldn’t be at the convent, Imelda.’

‘Don’t be unpleasant, Teresa,’ another girl said.

‘I’m not being unpleasant.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be in the convent?’ Imelda asked.

‘Because you’re not a Catholic. Imelda Quinton! God, the nerve of that!’

Teresa Shea laughed and went away, banging her satchel against her legs. The worst thing she’d ever said was to tell little Maevie Cullen that her mother had died on the way to America, where she’d gone to visit an uncle. In fact, it had been true.

‘Take no notice of her,’ the girl who’d called her unpleasant said.

But as Imelda walked through the village the difficulties with her long multiplication homework, which she’d been anticipating all day, were overshadowed by what had been said. She loved going to the convent and hated it when anything spoiled it for her. She had watched the convent being built, and she had always known she would go there because the Protestant school in the village no longer existed. Everyone was kind to her, the Reverend Mother and Sister Mulcahy and Sister Hennessy, Miss Garvey and the lay sisters. During prayers and Catechism she practised the piano or watched Sister Rowan making bread in the kitchen. Nobody except Teresa Shea minded that she was different because she wasn’t a Catholic.

She didn’t mind being different herself, not having a First Communion dress, nor rosary beads, not being able to walk in the Corpus Christi procession in Fermoy. She asked forgiveness if she stepped on a snail because Sister Mulcahy had once explained that a snail was just as much God’s creature as anything else was. But Imelda knew that a Protestant asking forgiveness, and never being required to say Hail Marys as a penance, was different also. ‘Proddy-woddy green-guts,’ Teresa Shea had whispered on Imelda’s first day at the convent, and once she’d muttered beneath a laugh that Aunt Fitzeustace was peculiar, and had muttered something also about Father Kilgarriff. Imelda knew that strictly speaking he should not be called Father Kilgarriff since he had not been a priest for ages. But that didn’t seem important and she didn’t consider Aunt Fitzeustace peculiar. ‘Heretics,’ Teresa Shea muttered beneath her laugh. ‘Crowd of bloody heretics.’

Her mother tried to explain. She said that for ever so long, for centuries, the Catholics had been prevented from practising their faith: no wonder there were people like Teresa Shea now. Father Kilgarriff told her about Daniel O’Connell, who had achieved religious freedom for the Catholics without resort to the gun or the sword. Her mother talked about the Mitchelstown Martyrs and the skirmish there had been at Cappoquin in 1915. Once when they were all out for a drive in the car they passed the place where a famous revolutionary had been shot in an ambush: Michael Collins he’d been called. When they went to the seaside at Youghal her mother told her about the priest who had been executed there in 1602 for refusing to renounce his faith. She told her about the English major who had wished to rest his horses at Kilneagh but had been ordered to go away. Her mother said that the revolutionary who’d been killed in the ambush used to visit Kilneagh and that the Quintons had given him money for his revolutionary cause. Her mother had shown her the tree the other man had been hanged from, the man whose tongue was cut out because of his traitorous talk. It was good to see the ivy growing over imperial Ireland, her mother used to say, and on their drives would point at ivied ruins like Kilneagh’s and sometimes at houses that were still intact but had become training schools for priests or insane asylums. The pacific Daniel O’Connell was not her mother’s hero: she spoke instead of Ireland’s fighting men, of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell who centuries ago had fled into exile, as the survivors of Ireland’s lost battles had always fled. Imelda’s own father had to remain in a foreign country, unable to return to his mill, and often Imelda tried to imagine him, wondering if he was like the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell. The nuns at the convent spoke of him as a hero, even as somebody from a legend, Finn Mac Cool or the warrior Cuchulainn. ‘You’re my special Imelda,’ Sister Rowan had announced when Imelda first watched her making bread, and she knew that had been said because of her father. ‘He will never be forgotten,’ Sister Mulcahy had assured her. ‘Your father will never be forgotten, Imelda, in Lough or in Fermoy, in all County Cork. He is every day in our prayers. Our Lady will intercede.’

There was a photograph of her father in her mother’s bedroom, standing among rows of other boys. It was hard to make out what he looked like, except that his hair was light-coloured, as her own was. He was smiling a little in the photograph, but when she tried to look more closely at his face it became misty. ‘Teresa Shea’s only jealous,’ a girl at the convent had said. ‘A father like you have.’

Imelda picked mulberries in the orchard, thinking about a poem Miss Garvey had read out, The Lake Isle of Innisfree. It was beautiful, just as beautiful as the lines Father Kilgarriff sometimes quoted from William Shakespeare. Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings. Softly she repeated the words to herself. There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow.

In the mulberry orchard the midges began to bite. Fallen apples from the single apple tree lay among the long grass, green cooking apples, too bitter to eat. Was it Jerusalem Sister Mulcahy had said the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell had gone to? Was it Cuchulainn who had sent the headless bodies galloping to his enemy’s camp in chariots?

She’d become curious about her father because everyone made such a fuss, Sister Rowan saying Our Lady would intercede and Teresa Shea being jealous. He had very blue eyes, her mother said, and sometimes, just for fun, Imelda pretended he stepped off the bus at Driscoll’s shop and she ran up to him because she recognized him. All the girls outside Driscoll’s, eating liquorice or Rainbow toffees, went silent. Then Mr Sweeney came out of his garage and Mrs Sweeney appeared at the door of the public house. They waved delightedly, and Imelda walked with her father along the road to Kilneagh and he told her about the places he had travelled to.

He was a hero because his courage and his honour insisted that he should do what he had done: her mother had explained all that. No one, not even Teresa Shea, said it was wrong to get revenge on the Black and Tan who had burnt down Kilneagh. It was not even the beginning of a crime, her mother explained, not when you thought of the massacres and the martyrs, and the cold-blooded murder of the Quintons in the middle of the night.

Because she was curious Imelda went often to her mother’s bedroom to look at the photograph. She examined the eyes that were apparently very blue. She wondered what he’d been smiling at. ‘Oh, he was the most ordinary little boy when he was your age,’ Aunt Fitzeustace said, and Father Kilgarriff remembered that he’d been bad at Latin.

Imelda closed her eyes. Pictures slipped about. The flames devoured the flesh of the children’s faces and the flesh of their arms and of their legs, of their stomachs and their backs. Trapped in her bedroom, fat Mrs Flynn wept in panic; smoke filled her lungs, her eyes streamed. The man in the teddy-bear dressing-gown carried his wife down the burning stairs and went in search of his children. Frightened in case they’d been recognized, the soldiers returned. In the yard the gardeners who had come from the gate-lodge quickly died, and then the labradors died and then the stray dogs. The empty gate-lodge became a furnace also. The sound of the motor-car engine died away.

2

Imelda watched while the wheels of the motor-car were taken off and the car itself placed on wooden blocks in the old dairy. Mr Sweeney had come to do it and stayed all morning in the kitchen talking to Philomena. He said he had lost his arm near the Somme in 1916. ‘This time round it’s up to Russia,’ he predicted. ‘You’ll never subject the might of Russia, Philomena, whichever side she comes down on.’

She watched while Father Kilgarriff and a man from Fermoy put up an aerial for the wireless Aunt Fitzeustace had bought. It had to be attached to a chimney, and the earth wire had to be attached to a metal rod which the man from Fermoy sank into the ground outside the French windows of the sitting-room. The man explained to Father Kilgarriff about the wet battery and the dry battery and how the wet battery would have to be charged, maybe once a week.

On Sunday evenings there were the national anthems on the wireless and Mr Derenzy remained to hear them after he had taken Aunt Pansy for her Sunday-afternoon walk. Imelda was allowed to stay up to hear them also, but she noticed that her mother didn’t take the same interest in the European war as the others did. Aunt Pansy and Mr Derenzy sat in the window alcove and Father Kilgarriff beside the wireless in case it began to crackle or fade. Aunt Fitzeustace, in her usual position among the dogs on the sofa, smoked and beat time with her hand. Flow gently, Sweet Afton, it said on her brown and cream-coloured cigarette packets.

‘Were you here in the times before the fire, Philomena?’ Imelda asked, and Philomena said she had been. Previous to that she’d been Canon Connolly’s housekeeper, and when Canon Connolly had died and she’d nowhere to go Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy had taken her in. Imelda listened. She’d never heard of Canon Connolly before, and Philomena told her that he had liked to eat an apple in bed and couldn’t bear to wear vests. Philomena had a way of laughing whenever she spoke, throwing her head back and displaying her almost toothless mouth.

‘Do you remember my father, Philomena?’

‘Ah of course I do, child.’

‘Did he shoot the Black and Tan? Was that how it was done?’

Philomena inappropriately laughed. She didn’t know anything about things like that, she said. She crossed herself.

‘Did you know it was Liverpool where the man was, Philomena? It’s a harbour town up in the North of England. Ships come in there from all over the world.’

‘What’s that, child?’ Busy with a cabbage, washing it beneath the kitchen tap, Philomena laughed again. She poked a grub out of the cabbage. You wouldn’t want to find yourself eating a creature the like of that, she said.

‘I think maybe that was how it was done,’ Imelda said.

Again Philomena crossed herself. The fire had been terrible, she said. All over Co. Cork people knew about the fire there’d been at Kilneagh, come to that, all over Ireland. She’d heard about it herself the next morning, staying with her sister at Rathcormack.

‘No better than ruffians, half them Tans was. Sure, wasn’t it an extraordinary thing, that no one took a knife to that scoundrel before?’

‘A knife? Was the Black and Tan killed with a knife?’

Philomena was vague in her reply, still rinsing the cabbage leaves. The face from the photograph came into Imelda’s mind again. She wondered if it had been a knife like the one on the draining-board, Philomena’s favourite because it was so sharp, her ‘little brown knife’ as she called it because of its discoloured handle. Yet it didn’t seem quite the right implement because the end of its blade was rounded, not pointed the way it would have to be if you were planning to stick it in someone. It would go into the heart, she supposed, the way you’d aim for the heart with a bullet. But the revolutionary leader who used to visit Kilneagh had been shot through the skull. She could remember her mother saying that.

‘Oh, there’s a pretty little party,’ Mr Lanigan said, arriving in the orchard wing with business to conduct. Whenever he visited Kilneagh Aunt Pansy packed jars of mulberry jam into a cardboard box for him to take back to his family in Cork, and wrapped eggs in newspaper before placing them in the squares of the egg-box. The eggs were for Declan O’Dwyer, his deaf and dumb clerk who Aunt Fitzeustace said was an angel, causing Imelda to imagine a creature with wings. ‘And isn’t Imelda a most beautiful name?’ Mr Lanigan always said. ‘Aren’t you glad to’ve been given it?’

According to Father Kilgarriff, she shared the day with the Blessed Imelda Lambertini of Bologna, May 13th. She’d been born more than a month before she was expected and so apparently had the saintly child of Bologna. While not yet twelve years old the Blessed Imelda had experienced a Sacred Host hovering above her head while she knelt in prayer in a Dominican convent. And as that miracle occurred so had her death.

‘The income would not cease,’ Mr Lanigan was saying when Imelda listened at the sitting-room door, ‘if you returned to England, Marianne.’

Her mother said something strange: that when you looked at the map Ireland and England seemed like lovers. ‘Don’t you think so, Mr Lanigan? Does the map remind you curiously of an embrace? A most extraordinary embrace to throw up all this.’

‘Embrace?’

‘You think I’m extravagant in my Irish fancies? Father Kilgarriff thinks so, and the others too. Yet I am part of all this now. I cannot help my fervour.’

Imelda moved away from the sitting-room door. In the kitchen she drank some water and played for a moment with the terriers and a sheepdog. She thought of the Blessed Imelda because Mr Lanigan had put her in mind of her namesake. She had told Sister Rowan about the miracle of the Sacred Host and Sister Rowan had listened attentively but had revealed in the end that every Irish nun was familiar with the details of the marvel. In the kitchen Imelda imagined the Host as a wispy outline, no more than a shred of mist. Then she forgot about it and copied out a headline: Insects have neither lungs nor gills. Just as she’d finished she heard the voices of Mr Lanigan and her mother in the hall.

‘A town called Puntarenas,’ Mr Lanigan said, but later when Imelda looked in her atlas for somewhere that sounded like that she was not successful. She knew the conversation had turned to the subject of her father and guessed this town was where he lived. ‘I’d say the old Jerries have given him the works by now,’ Teresa Shea had ages ago suggested, with a smirk. Imelda had wondered about that, but now she wondered about the town that had been mentioned. She didn’t want to ask her mother because her mother would know she’d been listening. She asked Aunt Pansy and Philomena but they said they’d never heard of anywhere that sounded like that. So in the end she did ask her mother, ready to explain that she had overheard by accident, which in a way was true. Her mother didn’t reply. Instead she suggested a walk, and at the end of it she pointed at the tree the man had been hanged from, as though her answer lay in that.

‘Just an ordinary tree, Imelda. You could pass it by and not know a thing.’

After the hanging there had been the fire and years later, Imelda’s mother had explained, there had been the woman who had taken her life in Cork. Imelda had once been shown the house, at the top of the very steep hill. A dentist lived there now: a brass plate outside the hall door said so.

‘You can pass by anything and not know, Imelda. I never knew when I walked in the gardens of that great house in England that a girl had gone from there to Kilneagh. She pleaded with her family, but what was it to them that ignorant peasants were dying in another country? There has been too much wretched death in Ireland.’

They walked across the fields together and climbed up Haunt Hiil, and her mother told her about how she’d come to Ireland with a single suitcase and stayed in a boarding house she’d been told about by a woman on the street. On another occasion, climbing the hill, her mother said:

‘Your father and I never had a chance to get married. That is something you must know, Imelda.’

Her mother went on talking, about a scene that had taken place in the sitting-room of the orchard wing: how her parents had come to take her back to England. ‘Arrangements had been made for you to be born in a house in Clapham, which is a place in London where a cousin of my father lived. You would have been born and then left with this woman and her husband, and I would have returned to Woodcombe Rectory, as though nothing much had happened.’

Imelda frowned, in bewilderment and surprise. ‘I would not be at Kilneagh?’

‘These people in Clapham would have brought you up as their daughter.’

Imelda thought about this visit to Kilneagh of her mother’s parents, and the fruitless persuading that had taken place in the gaunt, square sitting-room. A light rain had been falling, she imagined, and outside the French windows the hens had been pecking among the gnarled trees of the mulberry orchard. ‘We have made firm arrangements,’ the clergyman announced, ‘for the child to be born in Clapham.’ And Imelda’s mother replied by speaking of Irish martyrs and Irish battles, and of the Easter Rising that years ago had taken place. Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy passed by the windows, bringing the dogs back from their afternoon walk. And then Philomena was in the orchard with a waterproof coat thrown over her head, calling out to the hens. ‘No one could live here!’ the clergyman’s wife cried in Imelda’s imagination. ‘This is a terrible place.’

Imelda smiled although her face remained serious. She was aware that her mother’s voice was continuing about something else: she did not listen. ‘Now, time for tea,’ she made Aunt Fitzeustace say on that rainy afternoon, entering the sitting-room with a sponge-cake on a plate, with Aunt Pansy and Father Kilgarriff and all the dogs behind her.

‘An old colonel he was,’ her mother’s voice was saying. ‘In India.’

They had reached the shale near the summit of the hill. They scrambled over it, conversation difficult for a while. At the top Imelda said:

‘India?’

‘If those two old sticks hadn’t been anxious my mother and I wouldn’t ever have come to Ireland. If they hadn’t written that letter your father and I would never have met, and neither you nor I would be in Kilneagh now.’

‘Was he nice, the colonel?’

‘He was very tall, straight as a die. Oh yes, I always think of them as nice.’

Imelda imagined the tall old colonel sitting down in the Indian heat, in a little Indian pavilion, to write the anxious letter.

‘What I mean, Imelda, is that’s how things happen. The most important things of all happen by chance.’

Imelda nodded. ‘Say we are distinctly worried,’ she made the tall man’s wife say. ‘Tell them to go forthwith to Cork.’ Aunt Pansy sometimes said she was distinctly worried. ‘I’ll do that forthwith,’ Mr Derenzy had promised last Sunday, assuring Aunt Fitzeustace about the sharpening of the blades of her mowing machine. In the pavilion a turbaned Indian waved a palm over the two old people to keep them cool and to drive away the mosquitoes.

‘No, I must say it, Marianne,’ Father Kilgarriff insisted quietly, but with some anger in his voice.

Imelda’s mother did not reply. They were in the sitting-room with one of the French windows open. In the mulberry orchard Imelda listened, which was a habit she’d got into.

‘She’s my child after all, Father.’

‘There is bitterness in what you say to her.’

‘How could there not be bitterness? I cannot be good like you are, Father. You forgive that bishop who deprived you of your vocation. You forgive that man who came here with his thugs and his petrol cans.’

‘That man is dead. In his lifetime I did not forgive him.’

‘And do you forgive Willie, Father?’

‘That is the saddest thing in all my life.’

‘Do you know, my parents have not written me a single word since the day they came here? They have turned their back on me, and do not wish ever even to think of me.’

‘You broke your parents’ hearts, Marianne. There is that too, you know.’

‘I loved my parents, Father.’

‘I know, Marianne. And was there anyone, in this house or outside it, who did not urge you to return to England with them?’

‘To have my child brought up as someone else’s? To have forgotten her existence? To have waited in that rectory until some widower should come along and have me as his housekeeper? I would rather have ended in a work-house.’

‘It isn’t easy for Imelda to be here. But since you have chosen it, Marianne, don’t make it more difficult still. That’s all I’m asking.’

There was a silence in the sitting-room. Then Imelda’s mother said:

‘Destruction casts shadows which are always there: surely you see that, Father? We will never escape the shadows of destruction that pervade Kilneagh.’

‘I only wish that, even now, you would take Imelda away from them.’

Her mother replied in a low voice which Imelda couldn’t hear. Then she became cross and shouted:

‘For God’s sake, what kind of an existence do you think he has? In one Godforsaken town after another?’

‘There’s not much left in anyone’s life after murder has been committed. God insists upon that, you know.’

Her mother’s anger abated: again she spoke in a voice so low that Imelda could hear only the end of what she said.

‘You’ve been in pain yourself, ever since that night. You could have killed yourself, running with that kite.’

There was something else which Imelda could not hear, and then she crept away. She went to a distant corner of the mulberry orchard and sat down in the warmth, with her back to the trunk of a tree. She watched a bee investigating a rotten berry and then humming busily off, in pursuit of something else. She couldn’t understand how Father Kilgarriff might have killed himself flying her kite that day. Again she imagined the boy in the photograph, in one town after another.

‘Oh, just writing,’ Aunt Fitzeustace said one winter’s afternoon, seated at her writing-desk. The grandfather clock wheezed and stuttered before chiming the half-hour. The murky face of Gladstone looked unwell.

‘I wrote a letter to my love,’ Imelda said.

Aunt Fitzeustace laughed. ‘Well, I have no love now.’

‘Once you had. Philomena says -‘

‘Oh, don’t listen to Philomena.’

‘Philomena says you were married once.’

‘Yes, I was married for a very short time.’

‘Father Kilgarriff had a love.’

‘Did Philomena tell you that too?’

‘Teresa Shea did.’

‘Well, it doesn’t concern Teresa Shea.’

‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Mr Derenzy married Aunt Pansy?’

‘People have said so.’

‘Then why doesn’t he?’

‘Mr Derenzy is governed by his sense of order.’

Aunt Fitzeustace rose and left the sitting-room with a stamped envelope in her hand, ready for Mr O’Mara to collect when he came with the newspapers the next morning. Imelda crossed to the writing-desk and stood by it for a moment, listening to Aunt Fitzeustace’s footsteps in the hall. She heard her voice addressing Aunt Pansy and then the sound of the kitchen door closing. She pulled out the two little props that Aunt Fitzeustace had just pushed in. She eased down the heavy mahogany flap and rested it on them. There was a mass of drawers in the desk, horizontal drawers and perpendicular ones, little fluted pillars, and hinged inkwells. There were secret drawers: Imelda had heard Aunt Fitzeustace asking Aunt Pansy to put keys in the one on the right. She had watched, but had not been able to see how it opened.

She pulled out a drawer full of bills, and another with darning cards in it. She read a letter from a shop in Cork, Which said the coats had come in, and another from Mr Lanigan, thanking for the hospitality and the mulberry jam, which all his family had enjoyed. Then there was a letter which interested her greatly. Dated many years ago, it was signed A.M. Halliwell, and Imelda knew who that was because her mother had often mentioned the name. What I have heard cannot be true. I did not know until a week today. I am a stranger writing to you, but I ask for assurance that none of it is so. If it is true, it is my duty to tell you that this child should not be given life. In such a child there is the continuation of the tragedy that made the child’s father what he is. This is the most evil thing I have ever known of.