Fools of Fortune

Murmuring to one another, the elderly couple rise and make their way outside, into the warmth of an autumn mid-day. Her tininess is wizened by old age. Pleasanter to be here, he reflects, than seeing out his days in the Ospedale Geriatrico. Blotches freckle his forehead, matching in colour the tweed of his suit. The skin of his hairless head feels tight, like a shell: limping old crab, he calls himself, since his walk is assisted by a gold-capped cane. There is a slight, anchor-shaped scar near his right cheek-bone, a reminder of Puntarenas, one of the many towns where he has lived. A tram there knocked him down in 1942: he has had the scar since.

They walk beneath the mulberry trees. A favourite wonder is again mulled over: that anxiety in India should have brought them together. Fingers touch. One hand grasps another, awkwardly in elderliness. She tells of the dream she had once, when so many people from their lives congregated in sunshine on a lawn. They wonder if Mavis still has rashes, if Cynthia is still alive. They wonder about Ring and de Courcy and Agnes Brontenby. Somewhere he’d heard that de Courcy had not become an actor but had taken over a laundry in Singapore. Could it be true, the rumour there was, that Miss Halliwell had married a man in a bank and had blossomed in contentment?

They say the mulberries should soon be picked, a bumper crop this year. Odd that the summer’s drought should have urged the fruit on so.

They do not speak of other matters.

Imelda does not speak at all, nor ever wishes to. Her smooth blonde hair has a burnished look where the sunlight catches it; in her middle age she is both elegant and beautiful, her face meticulously made up. She walks by the river and the derelict mill. She imagines the bones of Father Kilgarriff resting gently in the cemetery, and the bones of the Quintons in the Protestant churchyard, at the other end of the village. The children of the fire flank their father, their mother is a yard away. Anna Quinton and her dog-faced husband are close again, Aunt Pansy lies far from Mr Derenzy, Aunt Fitzeustace is alone. The family as it was is reflected in the arrangement of the Quintons’ bones; tranquillity is there, no matter how death came. ‘O Lord, nowlettest Thou Thy servant,’ intones the voice on Sundays and it is pleasant then in the musty church, no matter what the season.

Imelda is gifted, so the local people say, and bring the afflicted to her. A woman has been rid of dementia, a man cured of a cataract. Her happiness is like a shroud miraculously about her, its source mysterious except to her. No one but Imelda knows that in the scarlet drawing-room wood blazes in the fireplace while the man of the brass log-box reaches behind him for the hand of the serving girl. Within globes like onions, lights dimly gleam, and carved on the marble of the mantelpiece the clustered leaves are as delicate as the flicker of the flames. No one knows that she is happiest of all when she stands in the centre of the Chinese carpet, able to see in the same moment the garden and the furniture of the room, and to sense that yet another evening is full of the linnet’s wings.

They sit, all three of them, in the kitchen of the orchard wing. A meal has been cooked, a stew of chicken and vegetables which the local people brought. In a day or two the local people will come again with groceries. Even Teresa Shea, married to Driscoll of the shop, sees to it that milk for the Quintons is not forgotten.

‘We cannot wait beyond tomorrow,’ he says. ‘We must pick the mulberries tomorrow.’

He smiles the smile of the photograph, and in the band of her straw hat the girl he loves wears an artificial rose. They are aware that they exist so in the idyll of their daughter’s crazy thought. They are aware that there is a miracle in this end, as remarkable as the Host which hung above the head of the child in Bologna. They are grateful for what they have been allowed, and for the mercy of their daughter’s quiet world, in which there is no ugliness.

‘No, we must not wait beyond tomorrow,’ he repeats, and Imelda listens while there is talk of how chip baskets will be put ready tonight, and a chair to stand on brought to the orchard in the early morning. Almost a week it will take to pick the fruit, longer if rain interrupts.