Fools of Fortune

3

Aunt Pansy knitted Balaclava helmets and sent them to the Red Cross. Aunt Fitzeustace said that Mr Lanigan had reported German spies in Cork, people called Winkelmann who ran the glove factory. Father Kilgarriff read aloud from the Irish Times of the fall of France. Imelda, in secret moments, continued to listen.

‘Sometimes I wish I could be more like him,’ her mother said. ‘Every breath he draws is painful, yet he resents nothing.’

‘He’s a man who’s made like that,’ Aunt Fitzeustace replied. ‘I’ve known him a long time. Before he came to live here someone wrote to me and said he’d been unfrocked, and to tell you the truth I wasn’t in the least surprised. It seemed like part of his nature that he should fall foul of some powerful man whose daughter he’d befriended. I remember him as a boy, you know. He used to come out from Lough and do odd jobs for me in the garden. He hated to see anything hurt, even an insect. It was quite natural that he should come back to Kilneagh when everything fell to pieces for him.’

‘I wish he didn’t think I should have gone away. Or indeed still should go.’

‘He can’t help believing that in England you would have a better life ahead of you.’

‘And you?’

There was the sound of a match scraping on the sandpaper of Aunt Fitzeustace’s match-box, and then Aunt Fitzeustace’s sigh of satisfaction as she inhaled the smoke. Imelda imagined it billowing from her mouth and nostrils, one leathery hand stroking the head of a dog, the blind setter it would be since the blind setter was her favourite.

‘I have to agree, my dear,’ the old woman said at length. ‘There has been nothing nicer since the tragedy than having you and the child with us in Kilneagh, but I must be honest, Marianne.’

‘He will come back, you know. One day Willie will come back.’

Hearing that, Imelda drifted into a familiar reverie: her father again stepped off the bus at Driscoll’s, dressed in a suit that was as light-coloured as his hair. ‘In tropical countries a nun wears white,’ Sister Mulcahy had said in a geography class. Puntarenas is a seaside town in Costa Rica, Imelda had read in one of her mother’s diaries. The Bank of Ireland has been transferring money there, but now he’s gone to somewhere else. Imelda thought of a seaside promenade like the one in Youghal, and of an artist composing pictures on the sand with coloured powders. ‘Jays, will you look at the cut of Quinton?’ Teresa Shea sniggered in the convent whenever Imelda slipped into a reverie, but Imelda couldn’t help herself. More and more her reveries claimed her in the classroom or when she wandered about the fields or during the Sunday-evening anthems, or in bed. It was a habit she’d got into, like reading her mother’s diaries, and listening. ‘Whatever are you doing there, Imelda?’ Aunt Pansy said, coming upon her among the bushes of the old shrubbery as she and Mr Derenzy were setting off down the avenue on their Sunday walk. Mr Derenzy had been talking about something at the mill, nothing of any interest.

Her mother’s diaries were kept in a cupboard in her bedroom, a stack of jotters the same as the ones Imelda did her rough work in at the convent. The pencilled entries on the rough, lined paper were faded now, almost indecipherable. I had never even heard of the Battle of the Yellow Ford until Father Kilgarriff told me. And now he wishes he hadn’t. The furious Elizabeth cleverly transformed the defeat of Sir Henry Bagenal into victory, ensuring that her Irish battlefield might continue for as long as it was profitable: Father Kilgarriff had told you too, in the scarlet drawing-room with the school-books laid out between you. Just another Irish story it had seemed to you and perhaps, if ever you think of it, it still does. But the battlefield continuing is part of the pattern I see everywhere around me, as your exile is also. How could we in the end have pretended? How could we have rebuilt Kilneagh and watched our children playing among the shadows of destruction? The battlefield has never quietened.

Tidily, Imelda returned the jotter to its place. For some reason a line of the poem she liked came into her head and she carried it with her to the fields and down to the river. I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. She knew the poem by heart now. She was the best at poetry, Miss Garvey had said, and had told Teresa Shea to leave the room because she smirked. I hear it in the deep heart’s core,’ Imelda said aloud, lying down among the daisies on the river bank. She wondered what it had been like for the Blessed Imelda to experience the Sacred Host hovering above her while she knelt in prayer. She’d once asked Sister Rowan, who’d said that no ordinary mortal could know a thing like that. But it interested Imelda and she was curious.

She jumped from one stepping stone to another, crossing the water when it was shallow. She walked by the river for a while and then returned to the cobbled yard between the ruins and the orchard wing. Two geese wandered off towards the ruins and Imelda followed them. She told them they’d find no food among the stones and undergrowth. She shooed them back into the yard and then she ran into the kitchen.

Her mother was angry.

‘It’s horrible, Imelda. Eavesdropping’s horrible. No one likes that kind of thing.’

‘It’s only when there’s nothing to do.’

‘You can bring the dogs for a walk. I often see you going for a walk.’

‘I go to the mill. Or down to the river.’

‘Well, then.’

‘Sometimes it’s boring.’

‘I don’t want you ever, ever again to listen at doors. Promise me now, Imelda.’

Imelda promised, since promises were easy. They were in the dining-room because Philomena was in the kitchen and Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace in the sitting-room. The door was closed.

‘You like it at the convent, don’t you, Imelda? Teresa Shea can’t help herself and after all everyone else is nice to you. All the nuns are, aren’t they?’

Imelda did not speak. She watched a fly on the wax fruit in the centre of the table. How disappointed it would be, she thought, when it discovered that the fruit had no juice. Yes, everyone was nice to her, she agreed.

‘And everyone at Kilneagh’s nice to you. No one could be nicer than Aunt Pansy. And so’s Aunt Fitzeustace and Philomena, and Father Kilgarriff. So is Mr Derenzy when he comes.’

The fly left the fruit and circled the glass of the lamp on the sideboard. It settled on the stopper of a decanter where another fly already was. The stopper of the! decanter was cracked, a deep, discoloured fissure that spoilt its appearance.

‘Yes,’ Imelda said.

‘Would you rather not five at Kilneagh, Imelda?’

Both flies ceased their interest in the decanter. One disappeared into the shadows of the ceiling, the other crept along the mahogany surface of the sideboard. The gondola in the green picture of Venice seemed, just for an instant, to give the slightest of shivers, as if about to begin its journey. But the figures outside the church by the bridge remained motionless. Imelda said, not looking at her mother: ‘Is he really going to come back?’

‘One day he will.’

‘Sometimes I think it could be all a mistake about what happened. Sometimes I think maybe everyone is wrong.’

‘Mistake?’

‘Like it mightn’t be true that Cuchulainn sent the bodies in a chariot to his enemy. Like it mightn’t be true about the Mitchels-town Martyrs or that priest in Youghal.’

‘But it is true, Imelda,’ her mother said gently. ‘We mustn’t pretend it isn’t.’

Again it seemed to Imelda that the gondola moved very slightly and this time she could have sworn that one of the figures outside the church raised a hand.

‘That lady thought I shouldn’t have been given life.’

‘What lady? What on earth are you talking about, Imelda?’

‘You told me about her: Miss Halliwell.’

‘But I never said anything about—’

‘There is a letter in Aunt Fitzeustace’s writing-desk.’

‘You mean you opened that writing-desk? Imelda, you shouldn’t have done that. Don’t you see you shouldn’t? It’s like listening at doors. It’s horrible. It’s a dreadful thing to read other people’s letters.’

‘I know.’

Philomena’s voice called from the back door, attracting the attention of the hens. It reminded Imelda of how, listening to her mother telling her about the time her parents had come to Kilneagh to persuade her to return to England, she had imagined Philomena passing by the French windows with a raincoat thrown over her head. She repeated that to her mother now, hoping to please her because she was still angry, but her mother regarded her with surprise. As far as she could remember, she said, Philomena had not passed by the windows on that occasion.

‘Oh, I think she did,’ Imelda contradicted. ‘I’m sure she did.’

Greater bewilderment gathered in her mother’s face. Imelda said that Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy had come in from their afternoon outing with the dogs, Aunt Fitzeustace with a spongecake on a plate. Father Kilgarriff had entered the sitting-room also.

‘He put a bit of turf on the fire and blew it with the bellows. He said a day like that would drive the damp into your bones.’

She smiled at her mother, her smile suggesting that there had been no difficulty in the conversation they’d had. It was nicer if they could agree that there had been no difficulty, if they could forget any awkwardness. But her mother didn’t appear to be aware of that. She continued to frown for a moment and then went on with the conversation as it had been. Imelda had to promise all over again that she would not eavesdrop and would not go poking in Aunt Fitzeustace’s writing-desk. She was glad at least that the conversation had not obliged her to reveal that she’d also read the jotter diaries.

In bed that night Imelda thought about the conversation, wishing it had ended in a different manner. She didn’t quite know how it might have ended, only that everything would not have been quite such a jumble. Then she thought about the scarlet drawing-room and the school-books laid out upon the table, and the fair-haired boy, just the same age as she was, being bad at Latin. The scent of sweet-peas wafted in from the garden and the next thing was she was in the garden herself, watching Tim Paddy while he raked the gravel.

It is considered that a butcher’s knife was most likely to have been the type of weapon employed.

Imelda replaced the neatly cut-out piece of paper in the secret drawer and snapped the drawer back into place. In the end it hadn’t really turned out to be very secret: all you had to do was to run your fingers along the little pillar.

Soundlessly she closed the flap of the writing-desk and pushed in the two little supports. The head was partially hacked from the neck, the body stabbed in seventeen places.

‘The head,’ Imelda said aloud, standing with her back to the writing-desk and leaning against it. She imagined the head, its weight tearing the flesh that still attached it to the body. She imagined the eyes and the mouth, and the body twitching the way she’d seen a turkey’s once, for nearly a minute after death.

4

‘Hullo, Imelda,’ Mr Derenzy said.

‘Hullo, Imelda,’ Johnny Lacy said.

She wondered if she liked the mill. She wondered if she liked the green-faced clock or the sound of water, or the autumn russet of the creeper that covered the stone. She thought she didn’t. Abruptly she thought that none of it was nice.

‘We’re busy today, Imelda,’ Johnny Lacy said. ‘Or else I’d tell you a story.’

‘Hurry up now, Johnny,’ Mr Derenzy called.

She sat for a while on the cobbles of the yard, her thin legs stuck out in front of her. ‘Thin shanks,’ Teresa Shea called them. Teresa Shea said they’d never stop getting longer, but Aunt Pansy dismissed that as nonsense. ‘You’ll grow up beautiful, Imelda,’ she’d promised. ‘There’s no doubt about that.’

Funny the way her mother said it so often: one day he will, they only had to wait. Funny the way she wrote things down in an old jotter so’s you could hardly read it. Imelda clambered to her feet and went to talk to Mr Derenzy in the office.

‘Do you like the mill?’ she asked him. ‘D’you think it’s nice?’

‘Oh, I dare say I’m well enough used to the place.’

‘Will it always be here, Mr Derenzy?’

‘I’d say it would be.’

She walked through the birch wood and the fields. It was best to go up to the tree and lean against it like she had the day before yesterday. Best to put her arms around it because it wasn’t its fault; horrid to blame a poor old oak tree, silly being frightened of it. ‘Silly-billy Quinton,’ Teresa Shea used to say, but she hadn’t said it for ages now.

She sat down and closed her eyes and when he stepped off the bus at Driscoll’s she felt like she did when she made herself lean against the tree. ‘Imelda,’ he said. ‘What a lovely name!’ And she told him about the Blessed Imelda and how the Host had come to her. He smiled and stroked her hair.

She jumped up and ran by the edge of the field she was in. Sometimes when she ran what she imagined fell to pieces, shattering into fragments. But this time that didn’t happen. He went on stroking her hair and he told her how he’d stood in a shop where there was dust everywhere, a shop like the pawnbroker’s at the bottom of the steep hill in Cork. An old woman with bad eyes lifted three knives tied together from the shop window, and he undid the hairy string. He had to go to a place like that, he explained: he was no more than a shadow for all the half-blind old woman knew.

Imelda climbed a stone wall and lay on the grass on the other side of it, too breathless to go on running. On the deck of the ship there were people who had been at a wedding, people singing, with confetti on their clothes. A child in white satin had chocolate marks around her mouth, two men danced and drank from bottles. All the time on the journey he kept feeling the blade of the knife in his pocket.

‘And evening,’ Imelda whispered to herself, running again through the fields, ‘full of the linnet’s wings.’ Sometimes it helped when she said the poetry. She crouched in a corner of the ruins, hidden by the nettles that had grown. ‘And noon a purple glow,’ she whispered.

Water dripped beside her, and Imelda watched it falling on to stones and plaster. She searched in her mind for the poetry but she could not remember the order of the words. She closed her eyes and in the room above the vegetable shop blood spurted in a torrent, splashing on to the wallpaper that was torn and hung loosely down. The blood was sticky, running over the backs of her hands and splashing on to her hair. It soaked through her clothes, warm when it reached her skin.

Imelda pressed her face into the nettles and did not feel their stinging. She pressed her fists into her ears. She closed her eyes as tightly as she could.

But nothing went away.

The screaming of the children began, and the torment of the flames on their flesh. The dogs were laid out dead in the yard, and the body of the man in the teddy-bear dressing-gown lay smouldering on the stairs. The blood kept running on her hands, and was tacky in her hair.

In the classroom Miss Garvey began to hook up her skirt, for the lesson was almost over. ‘On Thursday we’ll take a look at “The Ballad of Father Gilligan”,’ she said.

She asked for the blackboard to be cleaned and then, to her astonishment, she saw that Imelda Quinton had raised both her arms in front of her and was slowly moving away from the desk she shared with Lottie Reilly, as if walking in her sleep. With hesitant steps, occasionally stumbling, the child walked to a corner of the classroom. She huddled herself into it, crouching on the floor, pressed hard against the two walls that met there. She made a whimpering sound and then was silent.