Fools of Fortune

I

It is 1983. In Dorset the great house at Woodcombe Park bustles with life. In Ireland the more modest Kilneagh is as quiet as a grave.

To inspect the splendours of Woodcombe Park and to stroll about its gardens, visitors pay fifty pence at the turnstiles, children twenty-five. The descendants of the family who built the house at the end of the sixteenth century still occupy it and are determined to sustain it. They do not care for the visitors, the car parks they have had to make, the litter left behind. But naturally they do not say so.

Near by, the small town of Woodcombe—to which the family gave their name and where, traditionally, military ribbons and puttees are manufactured—is famous for the delicacy of its mullioned windows. After an inspection of the manor showpiece the visitors like to linger there, consuming in the Copper Kettle and Deborah’s Pantry the butter-scones and shortbread for which the town is famous also in 1983. They do not know that nearly a hundred and sixty years ago an Anna Woodcombe, then a girl of seventeen, married an Irishman called William Quinton who took her to live in Go. Cork, in the house called Kilneagh, not far from the village of Lough, not far in turn from the town of Fermoy. They do not know that two generations later an army colonel who was a poor relation of the Woodcombes of Woodcombe Park found himself stationed with his regiment in Fermoy; his daughter, too, married a Quinton and became mistress of Kilneagh. His second daughter married an English curate, a fortunate marriage for the young man, since the Woodcombes of the manor had in their gift the living of the town. This couple’s only child was brought up in Woodcombe Rectory and later caused history again to repeat itself, as in Anglo-Irish relationships it has a way of doing: she fell in love with a Quinton cousin and became, in time, the third English girl to come and live at Kilneagh.

It is the voices of these cousins that are heard there now. In 1983 no one pays fifty pence to see Kilneagh or to stroll about its gardens. No one points out to tourists that it was the Anna Woodcombe of the nineteenth century who planted the Kilneagh mulberry orchard, remembering the one at Woodcombe Park; or that the name Kilneagh might possibly mean the place of the church, perhaps even a foundation of St Fiach. No one suggests that the family name of Quinton must derive from St Quentin, a name originally of Normandy.

A mile and a half away, the village of Lough is without attractions, its concrete convent dominating the single street, with agricultural machinery displayed next door to it. There are no teashops, only Sweeney’s garage and public house, where a cup of tea might possibly be had, and Driscoll’s all-purpose store, where it would not occur to visitors to linger. The sense of the past, so well preserved in the great house and the town in Dorset, is only to be found in echoes at Kilneagh, in the voices of the cousins.

2

I wish that somehow you might have shared my childhood, for I would love to remember you in the scarlet drawing-room, so fragrant in summer with the scent of roses, warmed in winter by the wood Tim Paddy gathered. Arithmetic and grammar books were laid out every morning on an oval table, red ink in one glass inkwell, black in the other. In that distant past I didn’t even know that you existed.

‘Agricola,’ Father Kilgarriff said on the day I began to learn Latin. ‘Now there’s a word for you.’

On the sides of the brass log-box there were embossed scenes, and the one I liked best was of a farmhouse supper. Men sat around a table while a woman served, one of them reaching behind him to seize her hand. You could tell from the way he had twisted his arm behind him that it was a secret between them. Was the woman another farmer’s wife? Was this man coveting her, or were they taken in adultery? The brass people were almost faceless because the working of the metal didn’t allow for much detail of feature. It was odd that the men wore their old-fashioned caps while having supper.

‘In Latin we decline the noun, Willie. Nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative. Agricola, agricola, agri-colam, agricolae, agricolae, agricola. Do you follow that, Willie?’

I shook my head.

‘Farmer,’ said Father Kilgarriff. ‘O farmer, farmer, of the farmer, to the farmer, by with or from the farmer. Have you caught the idea of it, Willie?’

‘I don’t think I have, Father.’

‘Oh, Willie, Willie.’

Father Kilgarriff always laughed when he said that. He was unfrocked, but in our Protestant household he continued to wear the clerical black and the collar that marked his calling. It suited him: he was as dark as a Spaniard, and said himself that he must have Spanish blood. His laugh was soft and in his sallow, handsome face his eyes were without bitterness, in no way reflecting the disgrace in his life. He lived in the orchard wing with Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy, having been taken in by them as their lodger after his misfortune. According to Johnny Lacy, who worked at our mill, Father Kilgarriff was able to pay only very little for the food he ate, which was why he looked after the cows and taught me my lessons. He came originally from the village, but it was in a parish in Co. Limerick that he’d been unfrocked. He would have crept into a Limerick slum room, so Johnny Lacy said, if he hadn’t been taken in at Kilneagh. I thought of him as old but I don’t imagine he could have been more than thirty at that time. He was the gentlest man I’ve ever known.

‘Does agricola mean farmer, Father?’

‘You’re getting it now, Willie.’

Carved into the white marble of the mantelpiece were one hundred and eight leaves, in clusters of six. Four tall brass lamps had glass globes shaped like onions; the Chinese carpet was patterned with seven shades of blue. My great-grandfather, framed in gilt above the mantelpiece, had most of his hair on the right-hand side of his head and looked like a spaniel. Born in the year of the French Revolution, he was the most extraordinary of all my Quinton ancestors. He had planted two lines of beech trees on either side of the avenue to celebrate the victory at Waterloo; and thirty years later he made himself famous through his eccentric memorial to his wife, whose portrait hung above the mantelpiece also. Anna Quinton had travelled the neighbourhood during the Famine of 1846, doing what she could for the starving and the dying, her carriage so heavy with grain and flour that once its axle broke in half. The meat goes bad in the heat, she wrote, but even so they grab it from my hands. When she died of famine fever her dog-faced husband shut himself into Kilneagh for eleven years, not seeing anyone. It was said that she haunted him: looking from his bedroom window one morning he saw her on a distant hill—an apparition like the Virgin Mary. She told him that he must give away the greater part of his estate to those who had suffered loss and deprivation in the famine, and in his continuing love of her he did so. His son, my grandfather, who was twenty-five at the time and should have inherited these acres, looked wryly on. According to Johnny Lacy, he hadn’t had the heart to bother much with what was left: it was my father who had pulled everything together again.

‘We decline the noun, Willie. We conjugate the verb.’

‘I see, Father.’

It was the spring of 1918 and my father wanted to send me away to a boarding-school, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it until I was older. That time would come soon enough, she used to say in a way I found ominous, for I had no wish ever to leave Kilneagh. I was eight in 1918, a straw-haired boy with the family’s blue eyes and a face that caused strangers to enquire if I were delicate.

‘Will we tackle a bit of history?’ Father Kilgarriff suggested, pushing aside the green Latin grammar. History excited him, but he was suspicious of the victory that followed battles, and of war as a means to an end. His hero was Daniel O’Connell, who had brought freedom to the Catholics of both Ireland and England and had not cared for violence either. Father Kilgarriff spoke of him often, but also dwelt on the long gallery of men and women who had enlivened the story of our rebellious island: Queen Maeve and the Kings of Munster, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmet who had loved Sarah Curran, Thomas Davis who had written poetry. England was always the enemy: at the great battles the blood of the contenders mingled in a torrent, and the greatest encounter of all was the Battle of the Yellow Ford.

‘It should have been the end of everything,’ Father Kilgarriff stated. ‘The beginning of a whole new Ireland, but of course it wasn’t. You can’t put your trust in battles.’

I didn’t quite know what he meant, but I did know that victory had somehow been turned into defeat, for even as I learnt about that new beginning in 1598 Irish soldiers were fighting for England in the German war. The village was empty of men, and so was Fermoy, where the army barracks were. ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary,’ the soldiers sang together, whether they came from Lough or from Sheffield. Johnny Lacy used to sing that song for me, explaining that he hadn’t gone to the war himself because of his short leg.

O’Neill, who was the gardener at Kilneagh, had been too old to go, his son, Tim Paddy, too young. But I could remember two or three of the men who worked in the mill showing off their uniforms and their haircut. They’d been delighted with themselves, but later had perished with other men of the Munster Fusiliers at Sedd-el-Bahr. And before that, in the first few days of the war apparently, Aunt Fitzeustace’s husband, an Englishman to whom she’d been married for only a month, had been killed in France. Soon afterwards she returned to live again at Kilneagh, although all that is outside my memory.

Every day at half-past twelve Father Kilgarriff left the drawing-room and returned to the orchard wing, so called because of the mulberry orchard that stretched behind it. Kilneagh had been built in 1770, its gardens laid out at the same date, the orchard added later. Ten white-framed windows dominated a stone facade; there were pillars and steps and urns, and a white hall door; some clever piece of architecture had arranged the chimneys so that they were not visible above the slated roof. The house itself was shaped like an E with its middle prong missing, the two wings protruding at the back, with a cobbled yard between them. The kitchen wing, containing the kitchen of the main house, had a long, cool dairy that opened on to the yard, and a warren of upstairs rooms, only a few of which were used; behind it was O’Neill’s vegetable garden. In the orchard wing there was a smaller kitchen, so that my aunts, with their maid Philomena and Father Kilgarriff, were independent of the workings of the main house. Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy were my father’s sisters, Aunt Fitzeustace of strong, muscular appearance and with a notable jaw, given to wearing tie-pins and tweed hats, Aunt Pansy meek, with apple-pink cheeks. They were often to be found in the garden, Aunt Pansy looking for flowers to press, Aunt Fitzeustace cutting areas of grass which crusty old O’Neill said did not require cutting, or manuring shrubs which he said would not benefit from manure. They had their own pony and basket-trap to bring them to Lough or Fermoy, and they had collected a large number of stray dogs which my father objected to but did not forbid.

‘Well, how did you improve the morning?’ he enquired at lunch on the day I began to learn Latin, and when I told him about agricola and how you had to think of it in six different ways he hastened to change the subject. He touched his forehead with the tips of his fingers, a gesture which reflected a claustrophobic affliction aggravated by too much, or too rapid, talk. My father liked a tranquil pace in all things, and time for thought. With his two black labradors nosing the backs of his legs his favourite walk was down the avenue, wrapped in the silence induced by the beech trees that celebrated Napoleon’s defeat. Their branches looped and interwove overhead, their leaves held off the sky: in spring and summer the avenue of Kilneagh was as silent as a cave, which was when my father liked it best. He would listen for ages to O’Neill or Father Kilgarriff provided they didn’t rush at him with speech, which both of them had learnt not to do. My mother didn’t either, but sometimes it was difficult for Tim Paddy to remember because he was young, and it was difficult for me and for my sisters. At table my mother made quietening gestures with her hands, and in the kitchen Mrs Flynn, the cook, would warn a new maid that my father disliked noise or voices raised. He always smiled when touching his forehead with the tips of his fingers, as if he considered his weakness a little silly. Nor did he ever himself insist that tranquillity was his due: that wasn’t, as my mother would have put it, his style. He was a bulky, lazy-looking man in tweeds, with a weathered brown face, very much the Irish seigneur. He said himself that his chief characteristic was a Cork man’s failing: he could never make up his mind or come to a decision on his own. ‘I don’t know what I’ll wear today,’ he’d say at breakfast, sitting there in his pyjamas and a teddy-bear dressing-gown, waiting for my mother to advise him.

My mother Was tall, with a delicate oval face and eyes that reminded me of chestnuts. She had black hair, parted in the middle, and below it her nose was delicate and straight and her lips like a dark red rosebud. She presided over the household with untroubled authority, over my father and myself and my sisters, Geraldine who was seven at that time and Deirdre who was six. My grandparents on my father’s side of the family had lived with us in the main house but they had both died a year ago, in the same month. Besides Mrs Flynn in the kitchen there was a single housemaid at Kilneagh, and Hannah who came from Lough on Mondays and Thursdays to scrub the floors and do the washing. O’Neill and Tim Paddy lived in the gate-lodge, its tidy little garden colourful with hollyhocks and herbaceous borders. Because Mrs O’Neill was no longer alive they had their meals in the main kitchen and sat there for a while in the evenings. Both of them were stunted, O’Neill completely bald, Tim Paddy with a ferrety look.

‘Well, what’s the way of it this afternoon?’ my father asked that lunch time, and my mother said that she and the girls were going to ride. ‘And Willie? Walk over to the mill?’

‘Don’t forget your homework, Willie.’

‘Oh, after tea,’ my father said.

A new maid was to arrive that afternoon and because the previous maid had already left Mrs Flynn brought in the tapioca pudding herself. Geraldine and Deirdre ate it with dollops of raspberry jam but my father and mother added cream and I followed this grownup example, although I would much have preferred the jam. My father told us about an occurrence at the mill that morning, how an old tinker had arrived there, claiming he was dying. When everyone’s back was turned he had helped himself to an ounce of Mr Derenzy’s snuff and various documents that were valueless to him.

‘Oh, poor old fellow!’ Geraldine cried.

‘Poor Mr Derenzy, you mean,’ Deirdre corrected. ‘Dear Mr Derenzy.’

They giggled through their mouthfuls of tapioca and were told not to by my mother. My sisters laughed inordinately at anything that was even faintly humorous. For the rest of the day they would talk about this lone tinker, wondering if he slept with the rain beating down on his face, as the tinkers who wandered the countryside on their own were said to. On our walk to the mill I asked my father if the story was true or if he’d made it up to amuse the girls. He smiled, and I knew he’d just been having fun.

After that we proceeded in silence for a while, the labradors obediently at our heels. The path from the house began in a shrubbery of towering rhododendrons, continuing through a gate that neither my father nor I ever opened, choosing instead to climb over it. Cows grazed in the sloping pasture beyond, and at the top of this there was a spot from which the mill and the house could both be seen, and the distant Haunt Hill, so called because of its haunting by my great-grandmother. We descended steeply then, through a birch wood and by the edge of a field that was ploughed in March and thick with growth by June, a mass of corn in August. Before we reached the mill my father said:

‘You’ll enjoy it, you know. You know you’ll enjoy it, Willie.’

He spoke of my going away to the school he’d been at himself, in the Dublin mountains. He worried sometimes in case Father Kilgarriff was not preparing me well enough, which was why he had wanted to send me to a preparatory school.

‘You’ll play rugby, Willie, and cricket maybe. You’d never find games like that in Lough.’

My father laughed, amused at the sophistication of cricketers in our village. I had never seen the games he spoke of played, but on our walks to and from the mill the rules of both had been explained to me and I had pretended to understand.

‘The teaching’s famous there, Willie. Pakenham-Moore became a circuit judge, you know.’

I nodded, endeavouring to display enthusiasm. He had also told me about a game called cock-fighting, a boy perched on another boy’s shoulders and smacking with his fists at a third boy, similarly mounted. There was fagging, and the tradition of flicking pats of butter on to the wooden ceiling of the dining hall. Prefects could beat you with a cane.

We reached the mill and I accompanied my father to his office, where Mr Derenzy was copying figures into a ledger. A fire was blazing in the grate, its coal recently renewed, the hearthTswept. Mr Derenzy brought sandwiches every day and ate them at his desk during the lunchtime break. Afterwards, if the weather was to his liking, he went for a walk and was often to be seen staring down into the water of the leat, a man devoted to Kilneagh Mill and to my father—and in a different kind of way to Aunt Pansy. Red hair fluffed into a halo about Mr Derenzy’s skull-like head and his blue serge suit shone here and there, polished where his bones protruded. Clipped to the top pocket of this suit was a row of pens and pencils, their neat presence a reflection of his pernickety nature. He disliked rain and heatwaves and warned Aunt Pansy against drinking from a cup with a crack in it. He carried a supply of snuff with him at all times, in a tin that had originally contained catarrh pastilles: Potter’s, the Remedy it said, red letters on a blue ground.

Unlike the other men at the mill, Mr Derenzy was a Protestant, which allowed him to have pretensions in the direction of my aunt. But considering himself socially inferior, he had never thought it proper to propose marriage. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, man,’ my father used to urge him, ‘say the word to her and have done with it.’ But Mr Derenzy would look away in excessive embarrassment. Every Sunday afternoon he arrived at the orchard wing to take Aunt Pansy for a walk and afterwards returned to Sweeney’s public house in Lough, where he lodged. According to Johnny Lacy, who appeared to know everything that went on in Sweeney’s, he spent Sunday evening drinking cups of weak tea and worriedly dwelling upon his presumption.

‘I’m getting the February overheads in, Mr Quinton,’ he said now. ‘Afternoon to you, Willie.’

‘Good afternoon, Mr Derenzy.’

‘Liver and tapioca pudding,’ my father reported. ‘Were Mrs Sweeney’s sandwiches up to scratch?’

‘Oh, never better, Mr Quinton.’

I knew that one day I would inherit this mill. I liked the thought of that, of going to work there, of learning what my father had had to learn about grain and the machinery that ground it. I liked the mill itself, its grey stone softened with Virginia creeper, the doors of lofts and stores a reddish brown, paint that over the years had lost its shine due to the sun; in a central gable the green-faced clock was always a minute fast. I loved the smell of the place, the warm dry smell of corn, the cleanness even though there was dust in the air. I enjoyed watching the huge wheel turning in the mill-race, one cog engaging the next. The timber of the chutes was smooth with wear, leather flaps opening and falling back, then opening again. The sacks had Quinton on them, the letters of our name arranged in a circle.

Memory fails me when I think about the men of the mill: names are forgotten, except for Mr Derenzy and Johnny Lacy. Faces return instead, and arguments about the revolution that had exploded in Ireland in 1916 and was not over yet. ‘I wouldn’t drink a bottle of stout with de Valera,’ a voice protests scathingly. ‘I wouldn’t stand beside him at a crossroads.’ And a cool reply comes, that Dev was above the drinking of stout with anyone.

One man was tall and thin, another’s face was half obscured by a hedge of moustache, a third wore a black hat that never left his head. Johnny Lacy had a way with him and was always laughing, his face crinkling up with merriment when he told his stories. These had mainly to do with the people of our own household and the men of the mill, but there was also the one about the dwarf’s wife, late of Fermoy, who could eat French nails, and the one about the soldier at the barracks who had ridden a horse through Phelan’s shop window to win a bet. There was the deranged man from Mitchels-town who claimed to be the King of Ireland and the woman who bred fleas because she liked them. Johnny Lacy had a reputation as a rake and was a star turn on the dance-floor in spite of his short leg. He was particularly fond of the fox-trot and would often demonstrate the step for me, clasping in his arms an imaginary girl. The round shape of Haunt Hill with its little jagged tip was like a woman’s breast, he told me, wagging a neat, oiled head which smelt of carnations. A suave devil, my father called him.

That spring afternoon I loitered in the part of the mill where the men were working, as I often did. Mr Derenzy hurried in twice with invoices, his clerkly Protestant voice pitched high above the rush of water and machinery. It wasn’t a busy time of year. The chutes were being repaired, sacks sorted out. Johnny Lacy and the man whose moustache was like a hedge were working a scales, and for half an hour or so I moved the weights for them. Then I began to walk back to the house, not waiting for my father because he wouldn’t be ready until much later. There were Mr Derenzy’s figures to look through and then he would answer any letters that had come, the labradors sprawled by his feet in front of the fire. He would walk about the mill, having a word with the men: all of it took time and usually I preferred to return home on my own, running down the slope of the pasture to the gate in the rhododendron shrubbery, my feet crunching a moment later on the gravel that was spread in a semicircle around the house. I still think of approaching Kilneagh like that. The beech-lined avenue with the tall white-painted iron gates at the end of it was as impressive as my father ever claimed, but in my childhood I liked best of all the walk through the birch wood and the fields.

As I entered the house I was still thinking about the school in the Dublin mountains. My father’s good-natured efforts to ease me into its traditions had become a source of mild terror and I regularly lay awake at night wondering about being savaged with a bamboo cane. ‘Ah, no, no,’ I would make Dr Hogan from Fermoy pronounce. ‘No, Mr Quinton, I’d say Willie’s too delicate for a place like that.’ But I also knew that my delicate appearance was misleading. ‘Healthy as a nut,’ Dr Hogan had stated more than once.

‘We didn’t see that tinker,’ Deirdre remarked at teatime. ‘Did you see the poor old fellow, Willie?’

I shook my head, my glumness not quite slipping away, as usually it did when I was no longer alone. My father’s school trunk would be taken from the attic, where he had told me it still was. Our initials were the same: we could have the white paint that marked them freshened up, he had said, and the brass lock cleaned.

‘No, I didn’t see him,’ I replied.

We sat, spaced far apart, around the big mahogany dining-table that was always covered at teatime with a white linen tablecloth. There were egg sandwiches, and brown bread and soda bread and bread with raisins in it. There were scones that were still hot, and coffee cake. My mother asked me if everything had been all right at the mill. I said it had, and she told me about their ride through the bluebell spinney near Haunt Hill, over country that had once been Quinton country, home by the old quarry. Sometimes I went on that ride myself, on Geraldine’s pony, Boy.

‘The new maid’s called Josephine,’ my mother said, cutting the coffee cake. ‘Tim Paddy’s gone to Fermoy for her.’

‘Was Kitty sacked because she broke the chrysanthemum vase?’ Geraldine enquired.

‘Well, actually, Kitty’s getting married.’ ‘I told you,’ Deirdre cried, dramatically flashing her eyes, a habit that moments of triumph brought out in both my sisters.

‘Oh, I know she’s marrying that beery fellow.’ Geraldine disdainfully sniffed. ‘I only wish she wouldn’t.’

‘I don’t think we should call him beery,’ my mother protested. ‘A red complexion doesn’t always mean a person drinks too much.’

‘Mrs Flynn says he drinks like a bottle. She says he’ll lead Kitty a right old dance. Actually, I’m never going to marry anyone.’

‘Will Kitty and the beery fellow have a honeymoon?’ Deirdre asked, and Geraldine said she could just imagine them, drinking like bottles on a strand somewhere. Pretending they were unable to control their laughter, they pressed their fists against their mouths until my mother said that was enough now.

When the giggling had subsided and each of us had eaten the single slice of coffee cake we were allowed, Geraldine asked me what Mr Derenzy had said when I’d seen him, for the utterances of Mr Derenzy were of great interest to my sisters.

‘Only “good afternoon”.’

‘Did he ask after Aunt Pansy?’

‘He never does.’

‘Did he offer you a pinch of snuff?’

‘No, not today.’

‘I wish he’d marry Aunt Pansy and come and live in the house. Wouldn’t it be lovely, having Mr Derenzy walking about the garden?’

‘If I had to marry anyone,’ Deirdre said, ‘I’d marry Mr Derenzy.’

‘Oh, so would I.’

Soon after that my sisters went off to the stables and my mother said she’d help me with my homework, if I should need any help. I said I would because I enjoyed it when we sat together at the oval table in the drawing-room, working out the cost of five dozen clothes-pegs at three-farthings each, or learning about the continental shelf.

That day we investigated the conflict which Father Kilgarriff considered so important, the Irish victory which the clever English had later turned into defeat. ‘August 15, 1598,’ I read aloud. ‘Sir Henry Bagenal, marching out of Newry, was defeated on the River Blackwater by Hugh O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell. The victory was a total one, and the disaffected throughout the land everywhere took up arms.’

In a moment we put the history book aside and my mother spoke of the long English occupation which had succeeded that famous battle, and of how advantage was at present being taken, as it had been taken in the past, of England’s foreign war, even though Irish soldiers were helping to win it. ‘I wish the rising had succeeded that Easter,’ she said. ‘The whole thing would be over by now.’

But at some point while she was speaking my mind had drifted away, to the school in the Dublin mountains. I knew that when the moment came to mention it to her my mother would be sympathetic. It was she who really made the decisions, she who was more in touch with things. She spoke French and German, she understood the intricacies of mathematics: far more than my father, she would appreciate that Father Kilgarriff’s teaching was perfectly adequate, that boarding-school was quite unnecessary.

‘Well, that Josephine’ll be here.’ She smiled at me as she stood up, lightening the mood which the talk of war and revolution had inspired in her and which my gloomy face no doubt suggested she had inspired in me. ‘One of these days it’ll all be all right,’ she added.

I puzzled my way through algebraic equations and pages of tedious fact about natural resources in Lancashire. I learnt part of ‘The Deserted Village’, and then I took my books and the two inkwells from the oval table and placed them in a drawer of the big corner cupboard with my pens and pencils and blotting paper. My father insisted that all signs of my lessons should be removed from the drawing-room by the evening of every day.

I made my way to the cobbled yard between the two wings at the back of the house, over which Tim Paddy was brushing water. He was smoking a Wild Woodbine cigarette and as a greeting he slanted his head at me in a way he had. It was pleasant in the yard or the big old dairy at that time of day, everything clean again after the milking of the cows, the buckets laid out, upside down in a row, hens and ducks waiting in the doorway for Tim Paddy to finish. Sometimes he would lean on his brush handle and his ferrety face would bristle with excitement as he told me how he intended to enlist in the Munster Fusiliers the very minute he was old enough. He had heard talk in the village of adventure and companionship in foreign parts, of cities rich with wine and scented women. ‘You’re the biggest eejit this side of Cork,’ his old father used snappishly to grumble at him. ‘Can’t you stay where you are and not go looking for destruction?’ But he might be washing the cobbles of our yard for ever, Tim Paddy pointed out, while the whole world passed him by.

That evening, when he saw me, he didn’t remove the Wild Woodbine from his mouth in order to settle himself for leisurely conversation. ‘The new maid’s prettier than Kitty,’ Geraldine called out, passing through the yard with Deirdre, who added that the new maid had lovely hair.

I pretended to be not much interested, although I was. I watched while Tim Paddy finished his task and threw away the butt of his cigarette. ‘Wouldn’t you go and take a look at her?’ he eventually suggested. ‘She’s nice all right.’

I remembered my mother showing Kitty where O’Neill’s vegetable garden was when Kitty was new, but when I went to look there O’Neill was on his own, crouched among drills he had dug, planting potatoes. He didn’t reply when I spoke to him; he rarely addressed either my sisters or myself.

I left the vegetable garden by a door in its high brick wall. The door was set in a narrow arch and was painted the same colour as the woodwork of the mill. Mr Derenzy had once told me that a large supply of this brown-red paint had been on sale at the Admiralty supply stores in Cork, cheaply priced at the end of the reign of Queen Victoria. I remembered his saying it as I stood by the door hoping for a sight of the new maid. My father ambled through the high rhododendrons, returning from the mill with his labradors dawdling behind him. He would go straight to the dining-room and pour himself a glass of whiskey, as he did every evening. Then he would settle himself down in one of the leather armchairs with the Irish Times.

Daisies were beginning to shower the lawns, where there had been snowdrops not long ago. The sound of the Angelus bell carried through the clear evening from Lough, and I imagined O’Neill crossing himself among his potato rows, and Tim Paddy doing the same in the yard, and stout Mrs Flynn pausing for a moment in the kitchen, and my aunts’ maid pausing also. From the distance came the barking of their stray dogs, out for an evening run through the fields.

‘This is Josephine,’ my mother said, stepping through the French windows of the morning-room, on to the grass. Already the new maid had changed into her uniform: the hair Deirdre had spoken of was fair and smooth beneath the same white cap that Kitty had worn, her lips had a pretty pout. The fragility of her face might have been reflected in her hands but, like Kitty’s, they were chapped and coarse. For some reason I noticed that at once.

‘How d’you do?’ I said, and Josephine made some shy reply.

My mother led her away, into the morning-room again, to begin her duties. I did not know then that our household was complete, that Kilneagh was as I’ve always since remembered it.

3

Would we have loved one another then in whatever way it is that children love? You might have lived at Rathcormack or Castletown-roche, even in Lough itself. During all the years that have passed I’ve often pretended that you did. I’ve closed my eyes and seen you in church on Sundays, your blue dress, that artificial rose in the band of your hat. I’ve glanced across the pews at you, unable to prevent myself, as Mr Derenzy could not prevent himself from glancing at Aunt Pansy.

‘O Lord, correct me, but with judgement,’ old Canon Flewett pleaded every Sunday morning; ‘not in Thine anger, lest Thou bring me to nothing.’ Mrs Flewett played the organ, the psalm of the day was said, the Te Deum and the Creed; my father read both lessons. Geraldine and Deirdre observed Mr Derenzy’s admiration of our aunt, nudging one another with their elbows. When they became bored they blew through their teeth and my mother frowned at them.

Mr Derenzy collected the money, a moment of great excitement for my sisters because it was Aunt Pansy’s turn to admire her admirer, which with discretion she did. She gazed straight ahead of her, permitting a glow of pride to suffuse her apple-like features when he offered the wooden plate to Canon Flewett, who placed it on a larger one, of polished brass, and offered this in turn to the Almighty.

‘Well, thank you so much, Mr Quinton,’ Canon Flewett invariably said in the churchyard, and then thanked Mr Derenzy for going round with the plate. The other Protestant families of the neighbourhood stood around, conversing about agriculture or the weather. Many of them were related, cousin marrying cousin, as-the local habit was. In a procession we would pass through the lich-gate, its black ironwork arching above us. Mr Derenzy walked the length of the village street with Aunt Pansy, and my father and Aunt Fitzeustace were occasionally put in mind of some incident in the past. ‘Who’s that woman in the purple?’ I remember his once enquiring, and Aunt Fitzeustace reminded him that she was a distant relative of the Quintons over whom he had upset a blackberry ice cream when he was five. One way or another, there were quite a number of distant Quinton relatives.

During church our dog-cart and Aunt Fitzeustace’s basket-trap were left in Sweeney’s yard, the horse and pony munching oats from their nosebags. ‘Safe journey home,’ Mr Derenzy wished us, helping Aunt Pansy and then Aunt Fitzeustace into the basket-trap. He would be over as usual in the afternoon, he promised Aunt Pansy, and as the trap and the dog-cart left the yard his hand reached into his pocket for the tin that contained his snuff. It was a gesture that caused Geraldine and Deirdre to giggle delightedly, Geraldine saying that Aunt Pansy was the luckiest person in the world to have Mr Derenzy after her. ‘Now, don’t be unkind,’ my mother would chide but the girls insisted they meant every word of it, that Mr Derenzy was gallant.

There was another love story at Kilneagh, or at least talk of one: Johnny Lacy told me that Father Kilgarriff had been unfrocked in Co. Limerick because of his love of a convent girl who was now in Chicago. It didn’t occur to me to question this account of the unfrocking, not even when Johnny Lacy described the convent girl’s teeth glistening in the dark confessional, and the tap of her heels on the tiles when she walked, her black-stockinged ankles slim and shapely. As if he’d been there he described how Father Kilgarriff had been on his knees for an hour in the bishop’s palace and how the ringed finger had been snatched away from his pleading grasp.

Greatly intrigued by all this, I walked to Lough one afternoon and went into the Catholic chapel. Mrs Flynn referred to it as the Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven, a title I considered more pleasing than St Anthony’s Church of Ireland, which was what our own place of worship was called. The pews were of varnished pine; there were holy pictures on the walls and a cross on the altar. Lighted candles surrounded a Sacred Heart effigy, and the confessional smelt of dust, as if its green curtains needed airing. In the vestry there were more candles, locked away behind the two glass doors of a dresser. A red bulb gleamed beneath an image of Christ as a child, one hand raised in blessing, a puffy crown on the figure’s head. A surplice hung from a hook on the wall and in a corner there was a sweeping brush. I wondered if Father Kilgarriff and the convent girl had stood together in such a vestry. I wondered if his hand had reached out to touch her, as the man on the log-box reached out towards the woman. ‘A grievous sin,’ Johnny Lacy had said in a sombre voice. ‘That’s what the bishop would have called it, Willie, a most grievous sin.’

But Tim Paddy hinted that this story should be taken with a pinch of salt. Tim Paddy was known to be jealous of Johnny Lacy, to envy him his easy ways and his success in Fermoy’s dance-hall. He gloomily described to me the girls Johnny Lacy used to buy biscuits and sweets for, the prettiest girls of the night’s dancing. ‘Like Josephine,’ he added one day.

Tim Paddy was painting a greenhouse when he said that and he slanted his head as he spoke, drawing his white-coated brush along a line of putty. Inside the greenhouse his father was pricking out seeds and I knew that if he had not been there Tim Paddy would have lit a cigarette and settled down for a conversation.

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

‘I thought you liked Kitty, Tim Paddy.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, I am English.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You have to go to school, Willie.’

‘It’s awful, that place.’

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

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

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

‘Then why’s he want to send me?’

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

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

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

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