Fools of Fortune

*

One Saturday evening during that same heatwave our parents and Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy went to dine with people called D’arcy who lived in a house not unlike our own on the other side of Lough. I couldn’t sleep because of the heat and went along to my sisters’ room to pass the time. We played cards on Geraldine’s bed and then, to our very great surprise, were aware of the sound of music. Since it appeared to come from the kitchen, we crept down the back stairs in our nightdresses. Unfortunately we ran into Mrs Flynn, who happened to be crossing the kitchen passage just as we entered it. We were noisily reprimanded, but after much pleading on the part of my sisters were eventually led into the kitchen itself. A bizarre sight at once silenced the giggling that had begun to twitch Geraldine and Deirdre’s lips; it stunned me also. Seated at the big oak table and looking no less grumpy than usual, O’Neill was playing an accordion. Johnny Lacy was teaching Josephine a dance step, Tim Paddy and a red-cheeked girl we’d never seen before were smoking Woodbines at the table. Mrs Flynn was flushed; the others were laughing. In a high-backed chair, close to the range, my aunts’ maid, Philomena, was drinking a cup of tea. It was extraordinary beyond belief that old O’Neill should be performing on an accordion, the kind of instrument that beggar-men played on the streets of Fermoy. No one had ever told us that he possessed such a thing, we had never heard a note of it coming from the gate-lodge. And who on earth was the girl with the red cheeks?

‘That’s Bridie Sweeney,’ Mrs Flynn whispered. As she spoke Tim Paddy saw us and waved across the kitchen, not in the least woebegone or sorry for himself any more.

The tune came to an end, and another began. This one had a different rhythm, and the two couples spun about the kitchen, Tim Paddy and the girl still smoking their Woodbines, Johnny Lacy whisking Josephine as if she were a feather. When he danced you’d never guess he had a short leg.

‘Well, how’s the three of you?’ he said to us, coming over when the music ceased. ‘Will you take a turn with me, Deirdre?’

O’Neill, as usual, did not acknowledge our presence: intent on his accordion, I don’t believe he looked up once while we were in the kitchen. Johnny Lacy danced with Deirdre and then with Geraldine, and Josephine tried to show me how to waltz. Tim Paddy introduced Bridie Sweeney to us, saying she was one of the

Sweeneys from the public house. The way he spoke it seemed as if he had never been in love with Josephine. He stuck his chin out and smiled as proudly as a sultan. All of it puzzled me very much.

‘You’ll break chaps’ hearts,’ Johnny Lacy told my sisters, the smell of carnations potent in his hair. He laughed and gave each of us a halfpenny. ‘What’s the news, what’s the news?’ he suddenly began to sing, and O’Neill picked up the tune of Kelly the Boy from Kilanne.

‘Ah, they’re lovely children,’ Bridie Sweeney said. Tim Paddy was holding her hand and she was pressed up close to him, with an arm around his waist. ‘I s’pose it’s lessons for yez the entire time,’ she said. ‘God, I couldn’t abide lessons.’ She asked us a riddle, something about skinning a rabbit, and then Johnny Lacy broke off in his singing and took a mouth-organ from his pocket. He played it skilfully, making it screech above the lilt of the accordion, and I could see the Sweeney girl eyeing him, even though she still had her arm around Tim Paddy’s waist. He winked at her, and I looked quickly over to where Josephine was sitting by the range, but she hadn’t noticed.’Enniscorthy’s in flames and old Wexford is won,’ sang Johnny Lacy, and I noticed then that Father Kilgarriff had entered the kitchen.

He stood by the door, not saying anything, slightly smiling. The festivities were taking place because advantage had been taken of my parents’ and my aunts’ absence; Father Kilgarriff didn’t matter because he had no position in the household. Had he been a real priest the music and the dancing would have ceased on his entrance and only commenced again when it was clear that his approval had been gained. Had he been a Quinton relative or a friend of my parents there would have been embarrassment in the kitchen. Tim Paddy slanted his head at him in his particular way; Johnny Lacy saluted him familiarly. I realized it was the first time I had been in the main kitchen when he had been there also, if indeed he had ever been there before. He stood for a moment longer by the door, still smiling, seeming pleased because of the music and the dancing. Then he went away.

‘Up you go now,’ Mrs Flynn said, and all the way up the back stairs we could hear Johnny Lacy singing another song. I wondered if Father Kilgarriff could hear it too, in his bedroom in the orchard wing. My aunts’ stray dogs had begun to bark, and it was perhaps more likely that he had shut the windows in order to protect them from the unexpected disturbance. I didn’t know why I went on thinking about him, his Spanish looks vivid in my mind, his voice insisting softly that argument and persuasion were the only way. I had never been in his room, but I supposed it would have the red glow of a holy light and a statue of the Virgin, and a crucifix on the wall. It was odd to think of him there, dwelling upon Daniel O’Connell and the compassion of my great-grandmother, when but for a convent girl he might be esteemed and respected in Co. Limerick. And then, quite strongly, I sensed that Tim Paddy was right when he’d hinted that Johnny Lacy’s love of a story had resulted in a confusion of the truth: knowing Father Kilgarriff, there was something about his romance with a convent girl that did not quite make sense. I saw the girl’s teeth glistening in the confessional and heard the tap of her feet on the tiled floor: I wondered if she’d ever even existed.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I went on thinking about Father Kilgarriff, and then I thought about Josephine and Johnny Lacy and Tim Paddy and Bridie Sweeney. I kept seeing the wink that had caused that look to come into Bridie Sweeney’s eyes, and remembering how Josephine hadn’t noticed any of it. If Johnny Lacy began to go for walks with the Sweeney girl instead of Josephine Tim Paddy would be miserable all over again, and so of course would Josephine. Eventually I got out of bed and gazed from my window out over the garden. Even though it was after ten o’clock it was still light. I pretended that a Black and Tan was lurking among the mass of rhododendrons and that I crept downstairs and crossed the lawn with my father’s shotgun. I led him into the kitchen, with his hands above his head, and everyone was astonished.

The music of the accordion floated up to my window, and then abruptly ceased. It did not begin again. Tim Paddy and the Sweeney girl crept into the garden and while I still watched they kissed one another, thinking they were hidden by the rhododendrons. Through the gloom that was gathering I saw a flash of something white and realized that it was the Sweeney girl’s petticoat. Her flowered skirt was on the grass, and as I watched she lay down beside it and Tim Paddy lay down also. They had not ceased to kiss and their arms were still around one another; I could see her bare flesh where the petticoat had been bundled up to her waist and Tim Paddy’s hands pulling at her underclothes, and her own hands pulling at them also. Then, from the far distance, came the rattle of the dog-cart on the avenue and the lovers vanished.

The next day, after mass, Josephine told my mother she wanted to marry Johnny Lacy. ‘He’s been home with me last week to Fermoy, ma’am,’ she said. ‘They know he’s all right.’ My mother gave us this news on the way to church, and my father shook his head in mock disapproval, saying that Josephine was the quietest maid we’d had in the house for many a year. ‘Fools of fortune,’ he murmured. ‘We’ll be having to say our Protestant prayers for them.’ And after church, as Mr Derenzy fell into step beside Aunt Pansy for the walk to Sweeney’s, my father called out loudly: ‘Did you hear that news, Derenzy? There’s talk of a wedding.’

Aunt Pansy went the colour of a sunset and Mr Derenzy agitatedly pinched snuff from his tin box. Aunt Fitzeustace, who always remained silent when the union of Mr Derenzy and Aunt Pansy was raised by my father, groped in her large handbag for her cigarettes and matches. Aunt Fitzeustace smoked constantly but never on the village street. With a huge, grateful sigh she would light her first cigarette when the basket-trap left Sweeney’s yard.

‘Everything’s parched with the heat,’ Mr Derenzy said, as if he hadn’t heard my father. ‘I was noticing that.’

He and Aunt Pansy walked ahead, and my mother told Aunt Fitzeustace that she was concerned about the match because Josephine was a singular girl.

‘Will he lead her a dance?’ Geraldine asked. ‘Like the beery fellow and Kitty?’

But nobody answered that. Aunt Fitzeustace, who could look most severe at times, played with her packet of cigarettes.

‘Yes,’ she said at length. ‘A singular girl.’

‘And he, of course, is flirtatious.’

‘You’ll have them in the divorce courts before they’ve started.’ My father laughed rumbustiously. He walked with Geraldine and Deirdre on either side of him, holding their hands. I brought up the rear, behind my mother and Aunt Fitzeustace.

‘I wish you’d take it seriously,’ my mother upbraided crossly.

‘Sure, they can only try it and see.’

‘Yes, they can only try it,’ Aunt Fitzeustace said.

*

Father Kilgarriff was saying something uninteresting about the Gulf Stream when through the drawing-room window I saw my father hurrying beneath the rhododendrons in a way that was unusual for him. ‘Evie!’ he called loudly, somewhere in the house. ‘Evie! Evie!’ And that was unusual too.

‘Something’s happened,’ I said, and we both listened. There were hasty footsteps on the stairs, and ten minutes later Tim Paddy led the dog-cart past the window and my parents drove off in it. Father Kilgarriff attempted to continue with the geography lesson, but neither of us had any concentration left. It was Josephine, coming in with the mid-morning tea, who told us that the grey-faced Doyle had been murdered.

Father Kilgarriff crossed himself; Josephine had been weeping.

‘He was hanged from a tree,’ she said. ‘His tongue was cut out.’

There was a long silence after she left the drawing-room. The tray of tea and biscuits remained untouched on the oval table. I remembered my father saying he shouldn’t have taken Doyle back. I began to say something about that but Father Kilgarriff spoke at the same time.

‘How can people be at peace with themselves after doing a thing like that?’

‘Who would have done it, Father?’

‘I don’t know, Willie.’

He read to me for the rest of the morning from The Old Curiosity Shop, but instead of the adventures of Nell and her grandfather I saw Doyle’s crooked grey face and the blood rushing from his mouth. When Father Kilgarriff began his journey back to the orchard wing my sisters pulled at me in the hall. ‘What did they do with Doyle’s tongue?’ Geraldine kept asking. ‘Did they take it away?’

All three of us went to the kitchen, but Mrs Flynn knew as little as Josephine, so went to look for Tim Paddy. ‘The poor bloody bugger,’ he said, but didn’t say much else. We even dared to ask O’Neill, tracking him down to his onion beds. He actually spoke to us. He told us to go away.

My father and mother didn’t return at lunchtime. Geraldine, Deirdre and I sat around the dining-room table in a way that seemed very strange to us. Geraldine had been in the room with my mother when my father began to call her name in the hall below. ‘They’ve hanged Doyle,’ was what he had said when they stood together on the landing. ‘He was missing all night.’ I explained to my sisters about death by hanging because I’d asked Father Kilgarriff and he’d told me that the weight of the body snapped something in the neck. Deirdre began to cry. Tears dripped into her cold rice pudding; Geraldine scolded her.

‘Doyle was involved with the Black and Tans,’ my father told me later that afternoon, and did not say more except that the murdered man had sold information in the neighbourhood, to a Sergeant Rudkin. He had had no political leanings himself, neither Republican nor imperialist. ‘They’d have regarded his tongue as the instrument of his treachery,’ my father explained.

Deirdre had a dream about the body hanging from the branch of a tree, the bloody tongue picked up by a magpie. Geraldine drew a picture that included this magpie, in which Doyle was represented as a devilish-looking creature with staring black eyes. But when my mother found the drawing she furiously burned it, saying that a dead person must be respected no matter how despicable he had been in life.

‘Ah now, it’s best forgotten,’ Mr Derenzy replied when I asked him about the murder. He shook his head, causing the red fluff of his hair to spring up and down. He began to talk about something else, and it wasn’t until our conversation had come to an end that I realized he was afraid. When I asked Johnny Lacy he told me that the Black and Tans were loyal to their spies and rarely failed to avenge a death, justly or unjustly finding another victim. ‘I wouldn’t cross the yard in the dark,’ Mrs Flynn announced.

Yet life settled down again and when I think of that hot summer at Kilneagh I still hear the whisper of Josephine’s singing as she dusts and polishes. Aunt Fitzeustace cuts the grass, old Hannah arrives from the village to scrub the floors and do the washing, Tim Paddy leaves spinach for Mrs Flynn at the back door, O’Neill is hunched among his high delphiniums. The mill-yard bakes in the afternoon sun, my father walks the length of the avenue, his labradors slouching with him.’/ am old, but let me drink,’ my mother prompts in the scarlet drawing-room and adds in the silence that follows: ‘Bring me spices, bring me wine.’ Even while she speaks the shadow of Doyle hovers in the drawing-room, as it hovers everywhere else. The magpie from Deirdre’s dream swoops for the tongue, flies settle on the blood as I had seen them settle on the carcass of a sheep. One of these days it will all be all right, my mother says again; and my father assures me that it can’t be long now before the Black and Tans are recalled to England.

In early September Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy went to the sea for their summer fortnight. Their many suitcases were loaded into the basket-trap one Friday morning and Tim Paddy stood ready to accompany them to the railway station at Fermoy. They stayed in Miss Meade’s boarding house in Youghal, and my father used to urge Mr Derenzy to take his holidays at the same time in order to accompany them. He swore that Aunt Pansy would come back engaged, but Mr Derenzy could never be persuaded, no doubt considering the suggestion improper.

‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ we shouted after the basket-trap, and Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy waved. Their dogs barked in the orchard wing and Father Kilgarriff hurried to calm them, an extra duty in the absence of my aunts. Philomena went to stay with her twin sister in Rathcormack.

Later that same day, when my father and I were in Fermoy ourselves, we saw a soldier whom my father identified as Doyle’s friend Sergeant Rudkin. The man was lighting a cigarette at a street corner, one hand cupped against the wind. Noticing my father, he raised that same hand in greeting.

‘He’s just inherited a greengrocer’s shop,’ my father said quietly. ‘In Liverpool.’

He watched Rudkin turning a corner and then said he’d once met him, here in Fermoy one night. ‘Oh, very agreeable, he was. He had a drop too much taken when he told me that about his shop.’

I enjoyed these Friday outings to Fermoy, collecting groceries that had been ordered the week before, buying household items for my mother and Mrs Flynn, and sometimes for my aunts. We always went for tea and sandwiches to the Grand Hotel, where my father talked to people I did not know. “Well, fellow-me-lad,’ a man would say and, finding it difficult to continue, would laugh and tap me on the head. Others would remark on my growth, or notice that I had the Quinton eyes. I liked it best when we went early to the hotel so that I could have my tea and then do what shopping remained, rather than wait in the hallway while my father conversed with his friends in the bar. The shop people always asked after my mother and my aunts, and occasionally after Mrs Flynn.

On the Friday when we saw Sergeant Rudkin there was green knitting wool to be matched and an order placed for oilcloth. There was a set of bolts to be collected from Dwyer’s hardware, and a cough remedy from the Medical Hall. I did all that while my father was in the hotel and at six o’clock we set out for Kilneagh. The Black and Tan sergeant was on my mind because it seemed strange to me that a member of a force which my father spoke of with revulsion should greet him on the street.

‘He was with poor Doyle the night I met him,’ he explained when I asked. ‘It would never have done to walk past your own employee, Willie.’

I accepted-that, and understood it. My father said:

‘Doyle, you see, was in a difficult position. He’d fought beside that man in Belgium.’

I asked if Doyle had been married. He shook his head. A moment later he added:

‘It should never have happened, Willie. That hanging was a terrible thing.’

He spoke deliberately, with an unusual firmness that reminded me of his saying that Collins’s men would not be invited to drill at Kilneagh. We sat together in the dog-cart, stopping in Lough so that he could call in at Sweeney’s for a drink and further conversation. I waited in the yard and Mrs Sweeney brought me out a plate of biscuits. We made our way then, slowly, through the village, between the two rows of colour-washed cottages, past Driscoll’s shop and the Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven. We turned eventually into the avenue of Kilneagh, my father humming beneath his breath as he often did on our Friday journey home.

‘I hate having to go away to the school,’ I said without looking at him, dropping the confidence into the euphoria which appeared to be there between us. He continued to hum during the lengthy pause which occurred before he replied.

‘Oh, we can’t have you uneducated, Willie. We couldn’t have that, you know.’

The words were precise, with a ring of finality about them, yet my father’s tone was as lazy as ever. It matched our unhurried progress as we passed through the white gates of Kilneagh and proceeded up the avenue between the two lines of beech trees. The labradors made a fuss on the gravel in front of the house, jumping up at both of us, and the stray dogs rushed round the side of the house. My father had presents for Geraldine and Deirdre and as I watched him giving them their parcels I knew I was going to have to go to the school he thought so much of. Perhaps it was the inevitability of it that caused me, for the first time, to feel that further dwelling on the matter would be something to be ashamed of, that further reference to it would belittle myself in my own eyes as much as in his. I was my father’s favourite, though he tried to hide the fact by paying extra attention to my sisters. For my part, I was fonder of him than of anyone else.

I awoke with a tickling in my nostrils. I lay there, knowing that something was different, not sure what it was. There was a noise, like the distant rushing of wind in trees.

Too drowsy to wonder properly, I slept again. There were voices calling out, and the screaming of my sisters, and the barking of the dogs. The rushing noise was closer. ‘Willie! Willie!’ Tim Paddy shouted.

I was in Tim Paddy’s arms, and then there was the dampness of the grass before the pain began, all over my legs and back. The ponies and my mother’s horse snorted and neighed. I could hear their hooves banging at the stable doors.

There were stars in the sky. An orange glow crept over the edges of my vision. The noise there’d been had changed, becoming a kind of crackling, with crashes that sounded like thunder. I couldn’t move. I thought: We are all like this, Geraldine and Deirdre, my mother and father, Josephine and Mrs Flynn; we are all lying on the wet grass, in pain. Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy would be asleep in Miss Meade’s boarding house in Youghal; Philomena would be asleep in Rathcormack; for all I knew Father Kilgarriff was dead.

Through the fever of this nightmare floated the two portraits in the drawing-room, my dog-faced great-grandfather and plain, merciful Anna Quinton. I seemed to be in the drawing-room myself, gathering up my school books and placing them in the corner cupboard. After that I was in the dog-cart, asking my father why Father Kilgarriff had been unfrocked. I saw that the teeth glistening in the confessional were Anna Quinton’s, which was why Father Kilgarriff read her letters. I would understand such things, my father said, when I went away to school: that was why I had to. I would understand the love of Mr Derenzy and Aunt Pansy, and the different love of Tim Paddy and the Sweeney girl.

‘Don’t move, Willie. Don’tmove. Just he there.’ Itwas Josephine who whispered to me, and then there were other voices. There were men shouting, asking questions. ‘Who are you?’ one question was, and someone else said: ‘He’s O’Neill. He’s a gardener in this place. That fellow’s his son.’ There was a gunshot and then another. They seemed like part of the crackling noise, but I knew they weren’t because they were closer to where I lay. ‘Oh, Mother of God,’ Josephine whispered.

Men walked by me. ‘Is there a bottle in the car?’ a voice asked. ‘Christ, I need a drop.’ Another voice said: ‘Hold on to your nerves, hero.’

There were further gunshots and one by one the dogs stopped barking. The horse and the ponies must have been released because I heard them galloping somewhere. Something touched my leg, the edge of a boot, I thought. It grazed the pain, but I knew that I must not call out. I knew what Josephine had implied when she’d whispered to be still. The men who were walking away must not be seen; they had been seen by O’Neill and Tim Paddy, who must have come up from the gate-lodge. My eyes were closed, and what I saw in the darkness was Geraldine’s drawing of Doyle hanging from the tree, the flames of the drawing-room fire making a harmless black crinkle of it.

4

Kisses it says, scratched on the varnish of a table. Big Lily with her tits bare it says on the whitewash of the lavatory, the third cubicle of the row. Initials and dates decorate a doorway, and once used to fascinate me. The doorway is in the mill, the table in a schoolroom in the city of Cork, the whitewashed lavatories in the school my father had gone to also. Kisses was a girl’s nickname. Big Lily was the wife of the night watchman. The initials belonged to the men who, down the generations, had worked the mill.

The schoolroom was in Mercier Street, across the city from Windsor Terrace at the top of St Patrick’s Hill, where my mother and I lived with Josephine. I didn’t know why this school had been chosen for me, only that I was still too young to go to the one in the Dublin mountains. Mercier Street Model School had twenty-three pupils, boys and girls, all of them Protestants. It was run by Miss Halliwell.

‘Willie Quinton,’ she said the morning I arrived. ‘Children, this is Willie Quinton.’

Josephine had walked across the city with me, and I thought of her making the journey back, shopping as she had said she would. I wished I was with her. I wished I was sitting in my mother’s bedroom, on the chair she said was specially mine, beside her bed. The children in the schoolroom had the sharp features and the unfriendly eye of town children. A girl had giggled when Miss Halliwell repeated my name.

‘Well, dear,’ Miss Halliwell said now, ‘and which class shall receive you, I wonder? Children, I believe Willie has a scholarly look about him.’

Miss Halliwell was lean, with the look of a wilted cowslip. I had heard my mother describe her as a girl, but she did not seem like a girl to me.

‘Geometry?’ she enquired. ‘Algebra? You’ve made a start with both? And French likewise? So, too, with history and geography? Arithmetic, with Latin, we take for granted.’

She smiled at me, the tired petals of her face reviving for a moment. She was being sympathetic, but in the schoolroom you could tell that this was not her usual mood, that strictly speaking she was cross.

‘I haven’t learned any French,’ I said.

‘Ah.’

She sat at a large table, around which were spread the members of her most senior class. At the smaller tables sat the junior classes, in twos and threes. The walls of the schoolroom were green, covered with shiny maps and charts. I was soon to learn that while the senior class grappled with parsing and analysis or the elaborations of a

French verb, Miss Halliwell’s voice would follow the movements of her cane over a reading chart with pictured objects on it: A for Apple, B for Boot, C for Cat.

‘That’s a pity about French, dear.’

‘Father Kilgarriff didn’t know French. My mother was going to teach me.’

‘Ah.’

She smiled again. She said:

‘Kilgarriff? That’s a funny name. A priest, Willie?’

Father Kilgarriff had been shot when he’d appeared in’the yard, but unlike O’Neill and Tim Paddy he had survived his wounds. Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy, returning from Youghal as soon as they heard the news, had nursed him in the orchard wing, which was the only part of Kilneagh that had not been destroyed. The gate-lodge had been burnt to the ground, a final gesture as the Black and Tans hastened away in their motor-car.

I didn’t say anything when Miss Halliwell remarked that Kilgarriff was a funny name. Amusement passed from face to face in the schoolroom. There was more giggling.

‘Stop that unpleasant noise,’ she snapped, anger flaming her cheeks. ‘If there is something to snigger at, one of you can put a hand up and say so. A priest, dear?’

‘Father Kilgarriff is a priest.’

‘It’s perhaps not surprising then that he didn’t know French.’

Laughter followed this remark, obedient and noisy, not like the sniggering. Miss Halliwell paused, waiting for silence before she said:

‘The priests of Ireland are not well-travelled. Not renowned for travel, Willie.’

I moved my head, half nodding it. I felt disloyal to Father Kilgarriff. ‘I thought the monks,’ I began, about to repeat what he had told me: that the Irish monks of many centuries ago had travelled endlessly, bringing to a heathen Europe the Christian faith.

Miss Halliwell interrupted by shaking her head. Her eyes glistened, and to my horror I realized that the tears which were gathering had to do with her concern for me. ‘Sit there, my dear,’ she softly commanded, gesturing towards a table at which the children were younger than I was. ‘Poor Willie,’ she whispered later that morning when she inspected a piece of work she had set me. She did not blame me for being backward because a priest had taught me. She did not blame me for anything. Her fingers touched my head in passing, her eyes were lurid with compassion. ‘We’ll do our best,’ she whispered at the end of that day. ‘Together we’ll do our best, dear.’

More than anything I didn’t want sympathy. The scarlet drawing-room no longer existed. Never again would Tim Paddy lean on his brush handle, nor Mrs Flynn set off to mass in her Sunday clothes. Never again would I walk to the mill with my father, up the sloping pasture, down through the birch wood. Yet at night in bed I no longer sobbed before I went to sleep. I could think about my father and my sisters without involuntarily tearing at the palm of one hand with the fingernails of the other. I could even imagine Geraldine and Deirdre in the heaven I had heard so much about, a territory that remained vague even though I now had greater reason to wonder about it. I imagined Mrs Flynn and Tim Paddy and O’Neill there also, and of course my father.

‘Together we’ll do our best, dear,’ Miss Halliwell whispered. ‘I am here to be your friend, Willie.’

My mother and I might have lived in the orchard wing with my aunts and Father Kilgarriff, but my mother had said she could not. Father Kilgarriff looked after the cows on his own now. My mother’s horse and the ponies had been given away. My father’s labradors had been shot that night with the other dogs.

‘I’m really quite all right, Miss Halliwell.’

‘Dear Willie, of course you are.’

After that first day I made the journey on my own from the house in Windsor Terrace to Mercier Street Model, and back again each afternoon. The city had been badly damaged in the fighting; half of Patrick Street was gone, shops and buildings blown apart by the Black and Tans. I hurried by them, always preferring the quays and docks. Often I stopped to watch the cargo ships unloading, wondering what it would be like to be a seaman. I wandered slowly home by roundabout routes, past the warehouses of Tedcastle, McCormick and Company, past Sutton’s Mills. I learnt the names of the streets: Anglesea Street, where the drunk woman stormed abuse at her reflection in a shop window, Cove Street, where the burnt-down laundry was, Lavitt’s Quay and Fapp’s Quay and Kyrl’s Quay.

Often I found myself miles out of my way, lost in the slums. Other children shouted at me, ragged creatures, dirty and barefooted. Shawled women begged, but I had nothing to give them. I watched pitch and toss being played, and once a man who trailed a greyhound on a string told me this animal could race faster than any dog in Ireland. ‘Blarney Boy’s the name we’ve given him. You’ll tell people yet, son, you saw Blarney Boy on the streets of Cork.’ But I never did.

During that time peace came hesitantly to Ireland. The fighting which had succeeded the revolution eventually ceased; Michael Collins was dead, killed in an ambush during that civil war. Josephine had read me a piece from the Cork Examiner which stated that a treaty with England recognized the sovereign state of twenty-six Irish counties. The red letter-boxes were painted green; statues of imperial figures were removed; the Irish language was to be revived. My mother mentioned none of it, having lost all interest in matters of that kind.

‘A grand time to be growing up,’ an old man assured me as I lingered one afternoon in Merchant’s Quay. ‘I’d rather have your time than mine.’ But the strangeness of the city streets and shops impinged more upon me than the national freedom or the future that was there for growing up in. The city’s weather mattered also, as weather had not before: there was wind and cold to journey back and forth through, or dozy, pleasant heat. On wet days the rainwater gushed like a torrent down St Patrick’s Hill, tumbling over the steps in the pavement, overflowing from the gutters. Lilac fluttered in spring, tumbling over the red stone walls. ‘Then what’s your name?’ wizened Mrs Hayes asked me the first time I entered her shop at the corner of Rathbone Place, sent by Josephine for rashers and a Bermaline loaf. This shop was the nearest one to us, cramped and busy, the goods it sold piled up in a jumble, sawdust on the floor. Flies settled on the wire-mesh covers that protected butter and cheese, wasps buzzed near the sticky strips of paper that hung from the ceiling. A brown cat slept on the counter, curled in close to itself, never moving. ‘Young Hayes is wanted,’ Josephine had enigmatically remarked, and in time he returned from wherever he had been, a bespectacled young man in a brown shop-coat like his mother’s, with a cap pulled low on his forehead. ‘The Amnesty,’ Josephine said, but I wasn’t curious about what that meant.

My sisters would have delighted in Mrs Hayes’s shop, in Mrs Hayes herself and in her son. They would have sucked their cheeks in and imitated the particular way the old woman picked at the cheese when she was cutting it, and the way her son looked at you intently through his cracked, wire-rimmed glasses. I could never prevent myself from thinking about my sisters when I entered the shop, and I continued to miss them because I made no friends in Mercier Street. I was not disliked, but Miss Halliwell’s excessive pitying of me, and the allowances she subsequently made for my shortcomings, generated in my classmates a degree of suspicion and unease. ‘Adamant?’ she said in a spelling lesson and the smile I dreaded crept into her faded countenance. The word she uttered dangled in front of me, yet in my confusion I could not distinguish the letters that formed its composition.

‘I didn’t know we had to learn that one,’ I stammered back, knowing that already I had been forgiven.

‘It’s one of the ten, dear.’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Halliwell.’

‘Spell oyster, Willie. Was oyster one of the words you learnt?’

I spelt the word incorrectly, and Miss Halliwell came to the table where I sat and put her hand on my head. I could feel her fingers caressing my hair. They touched my ear and then the nape of my neck. ‘O-y-s-t-e-r.’ Slowly, drawing her lips back and rounding them about each letter, she spelt the word and I repeated what she had said. I was aware of an intimacy in all this and did not care for it, the twin formation of our lips, the twin sounds following one another.

She returned to her table. A boy called Elmer Dunne had a habit of dropping his pencil and then poking about on the floor looking for it. In the playground he would report that he had managed to catch a glimpse of Miss Halliwell’s underclothes and the flesh at the top of her stockings. ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’ he would moan, and then describe how, given a chance, he would unbutton her long brown cardigan and slowly remove her long brown skirt.

‘Now try again, dear,’ she said.

‘O-y-s-t-e-r.’

‘Very good, Willie.’

I spelt other words too, my face like red-hot coal, and then laughter gurgled in the schoolroom because Elmer Dunne had appeared from beneath the table, rolling his eyes to indicate his indelicate desires. Savagely Miss Halliwell scolded the miscreants, among whom I longed to be. I longed to shout out what Elmer Dunne wanted to do to her lean body, to linger over each obscenity.

‘You are slow and ignorant,’ she furiously upbraided the others. ‘Poor Willie has been taught by an uncouth country priest and already he is passing you by. You will end up behind the counters of low-class Catholic shops, while Willie makes good his progress.’

Every day her sympathy lingered with me, long after I’d left the schoolroom. It accompanied me on my travels about the city and was still there when I examined the goods in the window of the pawnbroker’s shop at the bottom of St Patrick’s Hill: old racing binoculars and umbrellas, knives and forks and crockery, occasionally a pair of boots. While it hovered around me I would begin the steep ascent to Windsor Terrace, to our narrow house painted a shade of grey, tightly pressed between two others.

I couldn’t tell my mother about the awfulness of the schoolroom because it would be upsetting, and the doctor who sometimes came to see her said that upsets should be avoided. When I sat with her in her bedroom I told her instead about the ships that were docked at the quays or how I’d seen a milk-cart toppling over on its side when its horse slipped on an icy street. I described the people I’d noticed, the tramps and drunks and foreign seamen, anyone who had appeared to be exotic. I brought her reports of actors and singers I had imagined in the Opera House, culling their names from the play-bills that decorated the city’s hoardings: I made up quite a lot in order to keep our conversations going.

She listened vaguely, occasionally making the effort to smile. The letters which came from India, from my English grandparents, remained unopened in her bedroom, as did the letters from Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy. ‘Write to your aunts,’ she commanded in the same vague way. ‘Tell them you are well. But add please that I am not quite up to visitors yet.’ She did not venture out of the house for many weeks on end and then would very slowly make her way down the hill to the city, sitting for an hour or so in the Victoria Hotel. ‘I thought it cold today,’ she’d say. ‘The first day it’s warm again I’ll have another walk.’

On several occasions I tried to explain to Josephine about Miss

Halliwell’s disturbing sentiments. But it wasn’t easy to conjure up the atmosphere of the schoolroom and I felt shy of revealing that Miss Halliwell stroked the nape of my neck or that Elmer Dunne said Miss Halliwell had a passion for me. He was not teasing or mocking me in any way, but simply stating what he believed to be the truth. ‘It’s not that at all,’ I protested, walking one day along the quayside with him. ‘It’s just that she’s sorry for me. I wish she wasn’t.’ But Elmer Dunne laughed, and spoke again of unbuttoning our teacher’s clothes.

‘Oh, Willie, she’s only being kind,’ Josephine said in the kitchen when finally I presented her with an approximation of my worry. I pretended to accept that opinion, for as soon as I’d brought the subject up I didn’t wish to pursue it. The kitchen was small, but I liked its cosy warmth and the smell of Brasso when Josephine laid out for cleaning the brass pieces that had come from Kilneagh. When I finished my homework she would talk about her childhood in Fermoy, and it was then that she told me about her first days at Kilneagh and how strange its world had seemed to her—as strange as the world of the city now was to me. Sometimes the bell in the passage would jangle and she would remain with my mother for an hour or so while I sat alone, close to the heat of the range. Now and again I wandered into the dank sitting-room or dining-room, both of them noticeably narrow, as everything about the house was. There was room for only one person at a time on the stairs, and you had to wait on a half-landing in order to permit someone else to pass. Each of these half-landings had a long rectangular window, the bottom half of which comprised a pattern of green and red panes in a variety of shapes. The two main landings had similar windows, though rather larger, and the patterned motif was repeated on either side of the hall door and in the hall door itself, through which sunlight cast coloured beams, red tinged with green and green with red. Incongruous on the stairway walls were the gilt-framed canvases that had been saved from the fire. In the narrow sitting-room and dining-room familiar furniture loomed awkwardly now, and on the landing outside my mother’s room the tall oak cupboard that had held my sisters’ dolls in the nursery took up almost all the space there was. I opened it once and saw what appeared to be a hundred maps of Ireland: the trade-mark of Paddy Whiskey on a mass of labels, the bottles arrayed like an army on the shelves.

‘No, Josephine,’ my mother said as I entered her bedroom one evening to say good-night. ‘You have a life of your own to live.’

‘I want to stay with you, ma’am.’

‘I’ll soon be myself again.’

‘I couldn’t marry him now, ma’am. I couldn’t settle in that neighbourhood.’

‘A little drink?’ my mother suggested.

‘No thank you, Mrs Quinton.’

I said good-night but my mother did not hear me. She spoke of parties at Kilneagh before her marriage, of decorating the church for the Harvest Festival, and how my father used to pick his Christmas presents for her from Cash’s Christmas catalogue: bottles of scent and lavender water, talcum powder and bath oil. ‘There now,’ Josephine murmured because my mother had become agitated, speaking now of the damp lawn and its coolness soothing the pain. ‘I didn’t want to live,’ she sometimes said.

I remembered her when Josephine and I had returned from the hospital in Fermoy. She had been wearing a green overcoat, standing with Aunt Fitzeustace in the garden. The overcoat had been my father’s and had hung, hardly ever worn by him, in one of the kitchen passages. ‘No, it cannot be believed,’ Aunt Fitzeustace had been saying, tears dripping on to her blouse and her tweed tie.

‘Good-night,’ I said again.

‘Ah, Willie, I did not see you there. Yes, of course it’s time for your bed.’

She did not kiss me, as she had at Kilneagh. I closed her bedroom door and climbed up another half flight of stairs. Often I dreamed of that moment in the garden, of Aunt Fitzeustace’s weeping, and my mother in the green overcoat.

‘Mr Derenzy is coming today,’ Josephine reminded me one morning, and when I returned from school there was a fire in the dining-room and my mother had dressed and come downstairs. The dining-room door was ajar, and with some excitement Josephine said: ‘You are to go in at once, Willie. Just comb your hair.’

She combed it herself with a comb that had been ready on the kitchen draining-board. She made me wash my hands, and damped the comb beneath the tap. ‘Look up at me,’ she said, and then hurried me to the dining-room, where a mass of papers and ledgers was spread out on the table. My mother, in a black and red striped dress, had a tray of tea things in front of her. The room smelt of her scent, the first time I’d noticed it since we’d come to the house in Windsor Terrace. She had touched her cheeks with rouge and had piled her hair up, the way she used to for a party at Kilneagh. ‘Willie’ll be better at understanding,’ she said, smiling and pouring tea.

I shook hands with Mr Derenzy, who hadn’t changed in any way whatsoever. He wore the same blue serge suit, the same pens and pencils clipped to its top pocket. His red hair still gave the impression of sustaining a life of its own, the hand that gripped mine felt more like bones than flesh.

‘Ah, Willie, it’s good to see you.’

‘The poor man’s having a terrible time explaining to me, Willie.’

‘Ah no, no,’ Mr Derenzy protested, sitting down again.

My mother offered me a piece of Swiss roll, and when Mr Derenzy began to talk about sales and purchases at the mill I realized that my task was simply to listen. The sums and subtractions were a formality, but once Mr Derenzy paused and, addressing me rather than my mother, explained that a legal agreement necessitated this long report of the continued management of the mill. I had not even thought about any of it before, or wondered what was happening there. That afternoon I realized Mr Derenzy was now in charge of everything, no longer a clerk but the mill’s manager.

‘Coal, £12,’ he said. ‘Carpenter’s repairs to the chute supports, £3. 4s., Midleton Sacks and Company Limited, £14. 12s.’ He took from his pocket the tin that once had contained catarrh pastilles and now held snuff. As I listened to his fluty voice I reflected that the container couldn’t always have been that same one: the words Potter’s, the Remedy would not still have been as easy to read across the table if he had carried the tin about with him for years. It was odd that Geraldine and Deirdre, so interested in everything about Mr Derenzy, had never wondered if he suffered from catarrh and bought these pastilles regularly.

‘Wicks,’ he said, ‘half a crown. I’m thinking,’ he added apologetically, ‘would the mat inside the office door have had its time? Mr Quinton didn’t say order a new one, but it’s gone threadbare and only a while ago the traveller from Midleton Sacks got his foot caught in it. I had Johnny Lacy take a look at it, only he said there’s nothing can be done with the fibre the way it’s manufactured. And if we don’t replace it at all—’

‘Oh, replace it, Mr Derenzy,’ interrupted my mother, as if waking from sleep. ‘Simply replace it.’

‘That’s nice of you, Mrs Quinton. Only I don’t think that mat could be repaired. But then again I wouldn’t want you to think there’s an extravagance in buying a new one.’

‘An office has to have a mat.’ My mother smiled, but the strain of the afternoon was showing beneath the powder and the rouge. ‘Mr Derenzy,’ she suggested, ‘I think we might have a little drink.’

She rose as she spoke and approached a decanter on the sideboard. Glasses had been arranged in a row in front of it, as if other guests were expected. Neither the glasses nor the liquid in the decanter had been there when I’d last entered the dining-room.

‘Ah no, not whiskey for me, Mrs Quinton. No, thanks all the same.’

‘There’s gin somewhere. There’s sherry.’

‘I never touch a drop, Mrs Quinton.’

‘You don’t drink? I never knew that.’

‘It’s not on temperance grounds, Mrs Quinton. It’s only I have no head at all for it.’

‘Oh, but surely a little thimbleful?’

‘I’d be on my bed for three days, Mrs Quinton.’

Not properly listening even though she managed to conduct the conversation, my mother had poured herself a measure of whiskey and now added water to it from a cut-glass jug. With this she returned to where she’d been sitting.

‘Is there anything, Mr Derenzy? Soda water? There might be lemonade. Willie, go and ask Josephine if she has lemonade for Mr Derenzy. Or maybe that ginger stuff.’

‘Ah no, don’t bother.’ Wrenching his face apart, a skeleton’s smile was full of apology for the trouble this disinclination to drink whiskey was causing.

But my mother nodded at me in a way I remembered from Kilneagh, indicating that I should do as she had bidden me. ‘And ask Josephine to make up the fire.’

There was no lemonade, nor any ginger stuff, so Josephine sent me out to Hayes’s while she went herself to the dining-room to put coals on the fire and to say I wouldn’t be long. When I returned with two bottles of soda water Josephine put them on a tray, with glasses that were larger than the ones on the sideboard, and in the dining-room I poured some for myself and some for Mr Derenzy. The conversation, clearly no longer about accounts and office replacements, had ceased when I entered. As he received his glass from me, Mr Derenzy attempted to guide my mother’s attention back to the business of the mill but she at once interrupted him.

‘You know the facts,’ she said sharply. ‘You are a person, Mr Derenzy, who knows everything. About Kilneagh and Lough, indeed about Fermoy. You have told Willie and myself that an office mat is threadbare and we have been attentive; Willie has gone out for soda water. The mill is running profitably, that is clear to see. But there is something more important.’

‘I wonder in front of Willie, Mrs Quinton? If you recall, you said you would prefer to have this private between us.’

‘I have changed my mind.’

In my absence the decanter had been removed from the sideboard and was now beside my mother’s glass. So was the jug of water.

Mr Derenzy shifted his feet about and repeatedly swallowed. He was here at the request of Lanigan and O’Brien, he said; it was a legal requirement that he should regularly make the report he was endeavouring to make.

‘Was it Sergeant Rudkin?’ enquired my mother, and in my mind’s eye I instantly saw the man in soldier’s uniform lighting a cigarette at the street corner in Fermoy. ‘Rudkin?’ my mother repeated.

The fluffy halo nodded, and for a moment there was agitation in the mill manager’s eyes. His lips had begun to quiver, anger grated in his voice.

‘Rudkin walked about Fermoy,’ he said, ‘as if nothing had occurred. The only thing that happened was the woman he was after closed her door to him.’

‘What woman, Mr Derenzy?’ My mother sprawled over the papers on the table, her glass held in the air.

‘He was attempting to associate with a Fermoy woman. The widow of McBirney, the bicycle-shop man.’

‘I didn’t ever know that.’

‘McBirney was killed in the Munster Fusiliers.’

‘I don’t think that matters, you know.’

‘No, no, it doesn’t at all. It was only that you enquired about the woman—’

‘Are people in Fermoy certain about the other thing? How do people know?’

‘Oh, they know all right, Mrs Quinton. One of the young fellows with Rudkin that night ended up in a terrible state. He deserted from the barracks and was gone for two days until they found him near the Mitchelstown Caves. He couldn’t stop talking about Rudkin and the petrol tins. He was unhinged by the whole affair: a finger wasn’t laid on him because everyone knew the Tans would do it for them when they heard he’d talked.’

‘In the circumstances isn’t it surprising that no one had the courage to shoot Sergeant Rudkin? Wouldn’t you say that, Mr Derenzy?’

‘Rudkin slipped the net. As soon as he saw the lie of the land with McBirney’s widow he got himself shifted up to a barracks in Dundalk.’

It was difficult to believe now that the Sergeant Rudkin they spoke of had waved genially at my father and on some previous occasion had told him he owned a vegetable shop in Liverpool. He might even have shaken my father’s hand, the way a bleary farmer had often done in the Grand Hotel.

‘It’s still surprising,’ my mother insisted, ‘that nobody shot Rudkin.’

She leaned back in her chair again, her glazed manner returning, not listening when Mr Derenzy said that he had heard of stories in which revenge had been planned. Sergeant Rudkin would have suffered, he said, if he hadn’t slipped the net.

‘He did what he did,’ my mother whispered, speaking more to herself than to either of us, ‘because Doyle was hanged on our land. That’s all the reason there was. It had nothing to do with Collins.’

‘There’s a portion of slating to be seen to,’ Mr Derenzy said after a moment of silence. ‘The roof of the right-hand loft. A matter of say two dozen new slates, Mrs Quinton.’

‘I cannot understand why nobody shot him. I cannot understand that. He’d be back in Liverpool now, selling people vegetables. If I’ve followed you, that would be right, would it, Mr Derenzy?’

‘Mrs Quinton—’

‘Does nobody think we’re worth it? Well, perhaps we’re not.’

‘Oh now, that’s not the way of it at all.’

‘Do you still go over to Kilneagh on Sundays, Mr Derenzy?’

‘Well, yes, I do.’

‘I would be grateful if you would explain to my sisters-in-law that we are not ready for visitors yet.’

‘They’re only concerned at not having had a line from you, Mrs Quinton.’

‘That has to be, Mr Derenzy. I would ask you to say also that I would prefer not to receive letters.’

My mother rose. She shook hands with Mr Derenzy and abruptly left the room. Her scent was more noticeable when she moved, and her red and black dress made a pleasant swishing sound.

‘Ah now, I hope I haven’t tired her,’ Mr Derenzy worriedly remarked. He reached under the table for a brown leather suitcase and carefully placed in it his ledgers and bundles of papers. He had not drunk any of his soda water.

‘And have you settled in, Willie?’ he enquired, ending the silence he had evoked in order to mark his concern for my mother.

‘At school d’you mean, Mr Derenzy?’

‘Well, at school certainly. But in general terms, Willie. Isn’t Cork a great place now?’

‘Cork’s all right.’

‘More to do, Willie. More than in Lough, you could say. And d’you like the school you’re talking about?’

I shook my head, but Mr Derenzy didn’t notice.

‘Do your lessons well, Willie, and pay good attention to what the teacher says. I’m keeping the mill going for you, until the moment’s right for you to take over.’

‘Thank you, Mr Derenzy.’

‘Your mother’ll be getting better, Willie. All the time she’ll be getting better.’

A few weeks after Mr Derenzy’s visit my mother requested that she and I should meet in the Victoria Hotel on my way home from school one afternoon. We were then to proceed to the offices of Lanigan and O’Brien, who had been the Quinton family’s solicitors for many generations. In the hotel she ordered tea but didn’t have any herself, none of the triangular ham sandwiches nor the little iced sponge-cakes. She whispered to the waiter and received instead what might have been a glass of water.

‘Would this place remind you of the Grand in Fermoy, Willie?’

She was doing her best, endeavouring to make conversation. She was thinner than she’d been at Kilneagh, but in the hotel her undiminished beauty caused people to glance at her a second time.

‘A bit it reminds me,’ I said. ‘Only a bit.’

‘Maybe we’ll go to the Opera House one night, Willie.’

‘That would be nice.’

‘Did Josephine take you? My memory’s gone to pieces, you know.’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘Of course she did. I remember now. And what was it you saw, Willie?’

‘Paddy the Next Best Thing.’

Catching the waiter’s eye, she waved her hand at him and a moment later he arrived with another glass for her.

‘The first time I came to Kilneagh, Willie, I knew I’d end up living there. “You can’t go marrying a Quinton,” my father said to me. Wasn’t that ridiculous? D’you remember your grandfather, Willie? Very tall and thin.’

‘Yes, I remember him.’

‘He’s keeping the flag flying in India now, since it’s not permitted to fly here any more. He and your grandmother.’

‘Yes, I know they’re in India.’

‘You’ll write to them for me, Willie? Just say we’re all right.’

I nodded, finishing a raspberry-flavoured cake.

‘Tell them not to worry, Willie.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll pay the next time,’ my mother said suddenly, rising before I had finished and waving the waiter away. The man didn’t demur. No hurry whatsoever about paying, he said.

‘What I’m anxious about,’ my mother said without preamble in the offices of Lanigan and O’Brien, ‘is all this business with Mr Derenzy and the mill. I’ve brought Willie with me because my memory’s poor these days. We’ll make a new arrangement about the mill, Willie, which you’ll have to remember because I’m certain I shan’t.’

The solicitors’ offices were in the South Mall, heralded by a shiny

brass plate among many similar ones, all of them drawing attention to the services of legal or medical practitioners. Mr O’Brien was long since dead, but Mr Lanigan’s presence made up for the loss. He was a person of pyramidal shape, a small head sloping into the slope of his shoulders, arms sloping again as he spread them over his desk. A chalk-striped brown suit imposed a secondary shape of its own, with a heavy watch-chain slung across a waistcoat so tightly fastened over the slope of Mr Lanigan’s stomach that it appeared to be perpetually on the point of bouncing a dozen tiny buttons all over his office. Two beady eyes, not dissimilar to these buttons, were almost lost in the smooth inclines of his face, and artificial chins, created by a stern celluloid collar, all but obscured the flamboyance of a polka-dotted brown bow-tie. Mr Lanigan’s smile perpetually twinkled.

‘I would have come to the house, Mrs Quinton, for it’s more than a shame to have you walking to the South Mall. The next time there’s anything, Willie, let you leave a message in here with Declan O’Dwyer and I’ll travel at once to your mother’s bidding.’

With a hint of impatience my mother said it did her good to get out. She was always being told that, she pointed out to Mr Lanigan: by the doctor and by Josephine, even by Mr Derenzy. ‘Now, concerning Mr Derenzy,’ she said.

‘And how is our dear friend? Would that name derive from the French, d’you think? I often say, do you know, the French have left their mark on Ireland. And if they have, Mrs Quinton, we mustn’t complain about it. Willie, do you speak French well?’

I shook my head. I said I was only beginning to learn French with Miss Halliwell.

‘Ah, good Miss Halliwell! A born teacher, a privilege to have her in Cork.’ While speaking, Mr Lanigan reached behind him and struck the wall with an ebony ruler. Almost at once a small man in a frock coat entered the office. He had a nervous, quizzical expression, eyes busily darting behind pince-nez.

‘Declan O’Dwyer,’ said Mr Lanigan, ‘I believe refreshment would be in order. Mrs Quinton, there is wine or there is tea. Willie, there is a good fruit cordial.’

My mother asked for wine; I agreed to sample a glass of fruit cordial. Declan O’Dwyer’s hands, held chest-high like the paws of an expectant dog, were abruptly pressed together as if in prayer. His grey head shot rapidly up and down. He hurried from the room.

‘Our clerk these forty years,’ Mr Lanigan said. ‘Now tell me this, Willie: would you guess our good friend was without the blessing of speech?’

I shook my head. My mother shuffled in her chair.

‘It has never made the smallest difference, Willie, and I would say there is a moral in that. Declan O’Dwyer is the sharpest solicitor’s clerk in these two islands. If the good Lord taketh away, Willie, He also giveth. If it is a privilege for this city to have Miss Halliwell in charge of Protestant children in Mercier Street, it is a privilege also for Lanigan and O’Brien to retain the services of Declan O’Dwyer.’

At that appropriate moment a tray containing two glasses of red wine and one of pinkish cordial was carried into the office by the mute solicitor’s clerk.

‘Good man, good man,’ said Mr Lanigan, his entire being seeming now to be consumed by the radiance of his smile. ‘Mrs Quinton, your health. As Voltaire has so eloquently put it—’

‘I have come to ask if it is necessary for Mr Derenzy to bring all those papers and accounts to the house every six months. Mr Derenzy is the most trustworthy of men, and as regards the management of the mill Willie and I are perfectly happy to leave matters to him.’

Mr Lanigan, before replying, commented upon the wine. It was a fine burgundy, he said, a delicate French burgundy and a privilege to drink. Cork was a fortunate city, he said, to have received a shipment of such wine. ‘And the cordial, Willie? Is the cordial to your liking? Declan O’Dwyer purchases it for me in the London and Newcastle Tea Company. As to the matter you raise, Mrs Quinton, the difficulty would be the circumvention of the wishes expressed in the late Mr Quinton’s will. It is a fact of life, borne out by so many of the intricacies of my profession, that the wishes of the departed take precedence over those of the quick. As Voltaire might indeed have put it—’

‘I do not wish to hear about Voltaire. Mr Derenzy’s visits are a nuisance to me. If my husband had been aware of that he would most certainly have ordered matters differently.’

My mother had stood up, having first drunk her wine in one or two gulps. A little had spilt and now stained the frill of her bodice; small beads of perspiration had broken out on her forehead; she swayed in front of Mr Lanigan’s desk.

‘I am excessively sorry, Mrs Quinton. We are unfortunately up against the letter of the law. But after all, Mr Derenzy comes only twice a year—’

‘I wish him not to come at all. I wish to be left in peace, and not reminded.’

‘I understand, I understand. But the law—’

‘I am simply requesting that Mr Derenzy’s visits might be made to yourself or not made at all. There is no need for them, no need whatsoever.’

Mr Lanigan ponderously shook his head and heaved the slopes of his shoulders. He regretted, he stated, more than he could say; it grieved him to be unable to accede to the most reasonable request that had been put to him. My mother brushed these sentiments aside.

‘You are not being helpful to me, Mr Lanigan. You are not being kind. It is not easy for me, you know.’

‘I assure you I do know that, Mrs Quinton.’

‘I receive letters from my sisters-in-law which I do not open. I have requested Mr Derenzy to inform them that I do not wish to receive them. Another arrived this morning.’

‘I could send a message—’

‘And to India. I would like a message sent to India.’

‘India, Mrs Quinton?’

‘Letters come from my father and mother in a place called Masulipatam. I cannot be doing with them.’

‘People are perhaps concerned for you and Willie. It is only that.’

‘Willie is kindness itself. He has agreed to inform his grandparents that we are well, but please understand that it is difficult for poor Willie to say more.’

‘What message would you wish passed on, Mrs Quinton?’

‘That I do not care for being bombarded with communications from this Masulipatam. That I wish the letters would cease.’

‘Oh, I do not believe I could put it quite like that—’

‘Why not? Why are you being obstructive, Mr Lanigan? You are a gross and unfeeling man.’

‘Mrs Quinton, I do assure you—’

‘Please request your clerk to show us out.’

Panting a little and deprived at last of his smile, Mr Lanigan struck weakly at the wall with his ruler and Declan O’Dwyer arrived in the office. I knew my mother was drunk; and I wished I might have told Mr Lanigan that. It was clear to me that my father’s wishes were the law.

‘What did I say to that man?’ she asked when we reached Windsor Terrace. As we entered the house I told her that she had called him gross and unfeeling. She shook her head, saying she had not meant it. She stared at me in a puzzled way. ‘Why did we go there, Willie? Did that man send for us?’

I didn’t reply. She frowned in even greater bewilderment, swaying on the stairway. I walked away to write the letter she had asked me to write.

‘Oh, don’t be cross with me, Willie,’ my mother cried after me, but I didn’t reply to that either.

I wrote to Father Kilgarriff as well, who in his reply quoted from a letter of Anna Quinton’s which he had not before known of. November 15th, 1846. Corpses in the ditches lie as they have fallen. The people of the cottages eat grass and bramble leaves, and the roots of ferns. At the barracks they were offended when I would not stay to lunch. For God’s sake, bring your persuasion to bear on this most monstrous of governments. Her black horse had been called Folly, Father Kilgarriff recalled, and after that she came into the dreams I had about Kilneagh, seeming to be there with my sisters and my father. ‘That’s Anna,’ my great-grandfather said, pointing across the landscape at Haunt Hill, and clearly I saw the troubled, unpretty Englishwoman on her horse. The family was titled in Dorset, Father Kilgarriff had told me: she might have been Lady Anna, but never chose to call herself so.

‘Eschew the company of Elmer Dunne,’ Miss Halliwell warned me, but in the playground I continued to laugh with the others when he talked to us about her undergarments. ‘Would you never think of slipping a hand up under her skirt?’ he said on the day he left the school for ever. I knew Miss Halliwell was watching from the schoolroom window and had seen him drawing me aside. ‘I swear to Jesus she’s on for it, Quinton. She’d love a touch, that one.’

I felt proud that Elmer Dunne, who was big and heavy and stupid, several years older than I was and a real chancer, should seek my company, calling me Quinton in that manly way. Slowly he gestured with his head and I followed him behind the lavatories, out of Miss Halliwell’s line of vision. He took a packet of cigarettes from his trouser pocket and casually offered me one. He was going to become a clerk’s assistant in the new woollen goods factory, and as he held a match to my cigarette he said that some of the girls who worked there would knock spots off the ones at school.

‘D’you know what it is, Quinton? Catholic girls are the best for a ride.’ He laughed noisily. Drawing unwelcome smoke into my lungs, I replied that I’d always heard that to be true.

‘If ever you get a feel of her, Quinton, will you tell me what it was like?’

He was the nearest thing to a friend I had made in Mercier Street and I was sorry he was leaving, although I knew I would never be able to oblige him in the way he wished me to. ‘OK so, Quinton,’ he said, and crossed the playground with the cigarette in his mouth. He waved at Miss Halliwell, who was still watching from her window.

‘Good riddance,’ she snapped after she had rung the handbell and the clamour had quietened in the schoolroom. ‘A boy nine years in this school and nothing to show for it. With uncouthness like that he’ll not last an hour in the post he’s got.’

That day, when all the others had gone, Miss Halliwell did not even open the French grammar book she was to teach me from. She sat at her table gazing in front of her at nothing at all. ‘A boy like that,’ she whispered again. ‘Nine years in my school, Willie.’ Once when she had asked Elmer Dunne to recite the second verse of ‘The Brook’ he had stood up and recited instead:

‘Paddy from Ireland, Paddy from Cork,

With a hole in his britches as big as New York.’

He had remained standing, taller than Miss Halliwell herself. Defiantly he had waited for her to approach him with her ruler, holding out the palm of his hand for the punishment that must inevitably follow. ‘Thanks, Miss Halliwell,’ he had said when she’d finished.

‘I am sorry you associated with him,’ she upbraided me now, ‘when I asked you not to. You especially, Willie.’

I felt the familiar burning in my face, spreading from my cheeks into my forehead and my neck, an embarrassed flushing which I associated entirely with Miss Halliwell, for it was in this schoolroom that it had begun.

‘I’m all right, you know, Miss Halliwell.’ My mouth was parched, my lips suddenly so dry they were almost sore. ‘Really, Miss Halliwell.’

‘No child should be harmed as you have been.’

‘I don’t feel harmed.’

‘I will always have a place in my heart for you, Willie.’

I looked down at the ink-stained surface of the table, at the blue cover of my French text-book. Miss Halliwell repeated what she had just said, and a lean hand reached out for one of mine. Then, for the first time, she kissed me. Her lips left a moist coolness on the side of my face, her fingers stroked my wrist.

‘He gave you a cigarette, didn’t he? He made you smell of smoke just to offend me. Ever since I began’to teach in this city there have been boys like that, Willie.’

‘It’s embarrassing when you favour me, Miss Halliwell.’

‘We will always be friends, Willie, you and I. Together we have found comfort in our tribulations.’

Again she kissed me, and a feeling of desperation rushed somewhere inside me, making me dizzy. I wanted to say anything that would make her stop, to protest that I didn’t like it when she came so close, to say I knew she was wearing violet-coloured underclothes. But in the midst of my panic what I heard myself saying was:

‘Should we get on with our French now, Miss Halliwell?’

‘I will always be here. When you leave this school please don’t forget that. Will you write me letters? Promise me, Willie. Promise you’ll write me letters.’

‘Yes, Miss Halliwell.’

A hair curled from a mole on her chin, and I thought if I asked her why she didn’t cut it off she would weep. Her tears would fall like rain on to my blue French book. The faded flowers of her face would become as ugly as Aunt Fitzeustace’s when she had wept in the garden.

‘When they told me about you, when they told me what had happened, I knew there would never be another child in this schoolroom who could mean as much to me as you have.’

‘I’ve learnt the Passe Compose. J’ai commence.’

‘Do you like me, Willie?’

I said I did, but it was not the truth. I hated her mole and her moist lips and her talk of comfort in our tribulations. I was glad she’d smelt the tobacco on my lips, I was glad Elmer Dunne had coarsely said she was on for it. I couldn’t imagine myself ever writing to her and certainly didn’t intend to. In my dislike of her I felt calm again, and without emotion I said:

‘Please don’t favour me, Miss Halliwell. Please don’t touch the back of my neck in class.’

‘Willie, dear—’

‘Elmer Dunne used to drop his pencil on the floor so that he could look up your skirts.’

She did not say anything. Her face was slightly turned away from me. Beneath the blush that now suffused it there was a sudden prettiness. I said:

‘Tu as commence, il a commence, nous avons commence, vous avez commence, ils ont commence.’

When I had finished Miss Halliwell still didn’t speak. I stood up and gathered my books together, buckling them into my satchel. I left the schoolroom, not looking again in her direction, not saying good-bye as I usually did.

After that I was never again kept back when school was over, and on my last day in the schoolroom I imitated Elmer Dunne: knowing that Miss Halliwell was watching me from her window, I walked across the playground with a cigarette in my mouth. Someone cheered and then the bell rang out, but I continued on my way. I left my satchel and my books and my pencil-case in the schoolroom, and went on walking, through the city and up the hill to our house.

That day was a Wednesday and Mr Derenzy had come to make the half-yearly report my mother had attempted to dispense with. From the hall I could hear his voice in the dining-room, with a few monosyllables from my mother. I opened the dining-room door and took my place at the table. Miss Halliwell would be weeping in the schoolroom by now, alone after her pupils had gone.

‘There’s a bill I have to question from Midleton Sacks,’ Mr Derenzy said. ‘There’s a charge for a gross we didn’t receive, so I’ll be writing a complaint concerning that.’

The afternoon dragged. Josephine brought in tea. My mother drank whiskey, saying it was good for a toothache she had developed. I was glad I had been cruel to Miss Halliwell.

‘Johnny Lacy’s getting married,’ Mr Derenzy said. ‘One of the Sweeney girls.’

‘Johnny Lacy?’ My mother’s lips remained parted after she spoke. She stared, frowning, at Mr Derenzy. ‘Johnny Lacy?’ she said again, with greater emphasis. ‘Johnny Lacy?’

‘He’s been courting Bridie Sweeney for a long while now.’

‘But Josephine—’

‘Oh, I’d say all that was over, Mrs Quinton.’

My mother slowly shook her head. In her bewildered way she said she had kept urging Josephine to return to Lough.

‘Well, there you are,’ said Mr Derenzy.

‘Now, someone’s on my mind,’ my mother said from her bed later that same evening. She had poured herself a little whiskey, she explained, because she was still suffering from toothache. Her face puckered in irritation while she endeavoured to establish who it was that hovered mysteriously behind her thoughts. I thought it might be Miss Halliwell, that somehow or other Miss Halliwell had been in touch with her, to complain of my behaviour. But after a moment’s consideration I knew that of course it wasn’t. More likely to be Josephine, I thought, but did not say so.

My mother frowned and shook her head, appearing to dismiss the subject. She said that when she was first married she used to wait at the mill every afternoon so that she and my father could walk back together to the house. ‘I remember the day you were born, Willie. I remember the broken veins in Dr Hogan’s face and how his shiny boots reminded me of a huntsman. “Now, now, Mrs Quinton,” he said, “make your effort when I tell you.”’

She poured herself more whiskey. She told me I had been creased and red, my eyes squeezed tight. And then, abruptly, she exclaimed, interrupting what she was saying:

‘It’s that man who’s on my mind. You know how that kind of thing is, Willie? Suddenly, when you’re not thinking at all it comes to you. That horrible Sergeant Rudkin, Willie.’

She went on talking about him, asking me if I could visualize him in his vegetable shop in Liverpool, selling produce to people who didn’t know he had been responsible for a massacre. Would they have eaten the parsnips and cabbages if they knew? Would they have laughed and joked with him if they knew he had ordered the shooting of the dogs? She described his vegetable shop to me so minutely that she might have visited it herself, potatoes in sacks, tinned fruit on a shelf, bananas hanging from hooks.

‘The Devil incarnate,’ my mother said.

5

Woodcombe Rectory it says on the writing-paper and I see that rectory clearly, although I’ve never visited Dorset. Do please come to Woodcombe: regularly the invitation was repeated, but like the pleas from my aunts and from India the letters from the rectory lay about my mother’s bedroom unacknowledged, sometimes unread except in idle moments by myself. One mentioned you: in the September when first I went to the school I had so dreaded in the Dublin mountains you were to leave the rectory for a boarding-school in Hampshire. You were aware of my existence then; and I, without interest, of yours.

My father’s name is on a board here, I wrote to Father Kilgarriff, because he was in the rugby team, although I don’t think he ever told me that. I have made friends with two boys in particular, Ring who comes from Dublin and de Courcy from Westmeath. The day is like this:

At a quarter past seven the rising bell is rung, and then the ten-minute bell. After the second one if you’re caught in bed you are punished. Breakfast is at five to eight, and Chapel afterwards. Chapel is the centre of school life, so the headmaster says. He’s an English clergyman, as round as a ball, with a crimson complexion. His wife wears blue stockings and has grey hair that bushes out from the sides of her head. Their butler is called Fukes. He looks like an assistant at a funeral, de Courcy says, with his black clothes and deathly face.

Classes go on all morning, with a break at eleven o’clock for milk. Buckets of it are placed on a table outside Dining Hall and you dip your mug in. Thafs a tradition here. So is flicking butter on to the wooden ceiling of Dining Hall, which is something my father told me about. Classes continue after lunch and then there are games, tea and Preparation. Cloister cricket is a tradition too, but that’s only played in the summer term. In class and Chapel and Dining Hall we have to wear gowns. On Sundays we wear surplices in Chapel, and the masters have academic hoods, all different colours.

The chaplain was a good-hearted man with a stutter, keen on rugby. Old Dove-White, who was my housemaster, sought a quiet life, never minding when we read books during his Latin lessons, or played cards or dice. Mad Mack, the mathematics master, had a ginger moustache and ginger hair and twisted the lobes of your ears. There was a man in a white coat who dealt in scientific subjects, and bald Monsieur Bertain who liked to talk about the part he’d played in the German war. Hopeless Gibbon, younger than one of the prefects, couldn’t keep order. Dove-White’s pipe tobacco had burnt holes all over his clothes.

Exposed to the winds that swept across the gorse-laden hillsides, the school that contained these people was a cloistered world of its own, different in every way from Mercier Street Model. None of my new mentors resembled the two teachers I had previously experienced, and the sexual obsessions of Elmer Dunne paled to ordinariness when related to the exploration of that same subject by my classroom companions. The headmaster was known as the Scrotum and his wife as Mrs Scrotum.

In my letters to my mother I did not repeat that nickname, nor say that Mr Mack was violent or that Hopeless Gibbon had difficulties in the classroom. The Chaplain has a tin of biscuits, I wrote, like the tins there used to be along the counter of Driscoll’s in Lough, with glass over them .A boy whose name I don’t know has got into trouble because of the mice he keeps, and his jackdaw pecked poor Fukes and had to be given its freedom, even though the boy had taught it to say ‘Amen’. In reply there was a letter that was difficult to read. Some of the ink had been smudged, and the sentences rambled on, often remaining unconcluded. My mother’s handwriting was jagged and unfemi-nine, sprawling as if a spider had trailed its way from the inkwell across the page. She described a walk she had taken, and how she’d sat on a low wall and a cat had crept into her lap. Vaguely she said she missed me.

Ring and de Courcy and I used to smuggle bread out of Dining Hall beneath our gowns and toast it in the furnace-room on the end of a length of wire. On Sundays we had tea with Dove-White, who invited a few other boys as well. He always had Fuller’s cakes, which he had sent up specially from Dublin, and he let us make toast at his fire, a less difficult operation than poking slices of bread into the coke furnace. We sat for hours in his cluttered room, full of the belongings of boys who had long since left the school. Stacked away in corners, filthy with dust by now, were cricket bats and tennis racquets, books, overnight cases, deflated rugby balls, rugs, canes, caps, scarves, hats, hockey sticks, and a useful supply of gowns, surplices, blazers and House ties. ‘Oh, now, now,’ Dove-White would protest with a half-hearted sigh when the conversation touched upon Big Lily the nightwatchman’s wife, who was the source of the graffiti in the school’s whitewashed lavatory cubicles. Big Lily worked in the kitchens, returning in the late evening to a cottage halfway down the back drive. Her husband, O’Toole, would then get up and prepare himself for his night’s duty in the furnace-room. It wasn’t until he was safely ensconced in a chair among the piles of coke that surreptitious journeys were made to the windows of his cottage, where the culminating excitement was the sight of Big Lily washing herself at the kitchen sink. I made the journey myself, since to do so had long since become a ritual experience for all new boys.

‘Blood Major knocked on the door,’ de Courcy said in Dove-White’s room, and Dove-White gave his sigh. Blood Major was no longer at the school, but the night he had knocked on the door while Big Lily was washing herself was one of the most repeated of all Sunday-afternoon stories. No one tired of retelling it, with variations from week to week.

‘ “Is that you, Blood?” she says. “Come in, Blood, I can’t see you in the dark.”’ De Courcy paused, allowing expectation to rise: de Courcy’s versions were always good. ‘“Evening, Mrs O’Toole,” Blood says, “I was passing and I saw the light. Is this penknife Mr O’Toole’s?” He holds out his own penknife and Big Lily shakes her head. She had covered herself up with a sheet she’d pulled off the line above the range. “Someone said it was Mr O’Toole’s,” Blood says. “I’m sorry to trouble you, Mrs O’Toole.” The next thing is he’s sitting down having a cup of tea and Big Lily is putting safety-pins in the sheet to keep it around her. “You’re a fine big boy, Blood,” she says. “You have lovely strong arms. Will I sit on your knee, Blood?” The next thing is she’s up on his knee and he has two of the safety-pins taken out of the sheet. “God, you’re a terrible boy, Blood,” she says, and in steps O’Toole, back for his tobacco. “Poor Blood got a fly in his eye,” she says, “I’m trying to lift it out with a corner of this sheet.” O’Toole gives a jerk of his head and says you have to be careful with anything in the eye. “Ah, there’s me tobacco,” he says, and as soon as he’s gone Big Lily has Blood down on the table.’

‘She’s a most respectable woman,’ Dove-White protested, as he always did, when de Courcy had finished. ‘It’s sheer nonsense, de Courcy.’

‘She spends four hours in Confession every Tuesday, sir. The priests go mad with excitement.’

‘I doubt that very much.’

There were other accounts drawn from the private life of the nightwatchman’s wife, and many adventures concerning the legendary Blood Major. One in particular told how he had cycled down to Dublin one night and had been approached by a heavily made-up woman in Bachelor’s Walk. ‘Are you game for a drink?’ she suggested to him. ‘Will we go to Mooney’s?’ With alacrity Blood Major agreed and in the brighter light of the public house he noticed that the woman was a good deal older than his mother. Her coat was of worn fur, her hair a shade of brass. Each time she laughed the sound ended in a bout of coughing which caused her several chins to wobble. ‘They have good-class mahogany in here,’ she said after Blood Major had bought her a glass of Smithwick’s. ‘Spanish mahogany, the best you can get.’ She was particularly fond of mahogany, she revealed, and a desultory conversation about the timber then commenced, during which Blood Major edged a knee closer to one of his companion’s. On her recommendation, he examined the mahogany counter and the drinking cubicles, and the frames of the mirrors which advertised different brands of spirits. You’d never find better mahogany than that, the woman assured him. ‘Will we try another glass, dear? Isn’t it lovely and warming?’ As she spoke, she returned the pressure on her knee and placed a hand on Blood Major’s thigh, saying he was a fine big boy. ‘Take care with that one,’ a man in a bowler hat warned him at the bar. ‘She’s up to her neck in the pox.’

It was stories such as these, and the use of improper language and obscene references, that inspired the crusade of Mad Mack, whose avowed intention was to cleanse the school of verbal grime. He had a band of minions, stern-faced youths whom he’d imbued with his puritan zeal and invested with the authority of prefects.

‘Abominable man,’ was Dove-White’s unvarying opinion of the mathematics master. They had not addressed one another for fourteen years, Mad Mack in turn considering Dove-White ludicrous and ineffectual.

‘Take yourself to the back,’ Mad Mack had ordered during my first mathematics lesson, and I joined the row of farmers’ sons, whom daily he referred to as peasants. In Chapel he occupied one of the throne-like seats behind the choir, strands of his ginger hair plastered across his head, lips hidden by his ginger moustache. Gowns draped the differently disposed figures of his colleagues among the carved oak gargoyles that lent distinction to this special area, an arm raised here and there, fingers gripping a chin or touching a cheek-bone. But Mad Mack always sat bolt upright, as if in pain.

‘Trench reported Mrs Scrotum to him,’ de Courcy remarked to Dove-White, ‘for eyeing Hopeless Gibbon. She likes being friends with the young ones, doesn’t she, sir?’

‘Abominable woman.’

Unfailingly Dove-White emerged from his sleepiness to condemn these people. The headmaster himself was his most particular bete noire and if we could get him going on a Sunday afternoon he would hold forth for hours about the red-fleshed clergyman’s undergraduate days at Keble College, Oxford. These mysteriously acquired recollections—for Dove-White himself had not been to that university—appeared to belong in the same category as the sagas of Blood Major, and reminded me also of the stories Johnny Lacy had told me about the circus dwarf’s wife who ate nails and the soldier who’d ridden a horse through Phelan’s shop window in Fermoy. We Irish were intrigued, my father used to say, by stories with a degree of unreality in them.

‘D’you think Mad Mack should be given the sack, sir?’ de Courcy would regularly enquire. ‘I mean, since he’s depraved?’

‘A man like Mack shouldn’t be allowed in any school. Heaven knows why they can’t see that.’

‘The headmaster’s not intelligent, sir.’

De Courcy was thin and jumpy, always moving about. He had hair that was paler than my own, white almost, and smooth as a pebble. Beneath the neat curve of his fringe a sallow face perpetually changed expression, eyes flickering nervously, lips chattering or laughing. Ring was the opposite, a massive boy with a sledgehammer head, slow of thought and speech. They’d been at the same preparatory school in Co. Wicklow but some element was missing in their friendship which I, to my surprise, apparently supplied. We sat next to one another in Dining Hall and in Chapel and in class. We roamed together over the hills at the back of the school, we smoked cigarettes together, and on exeat Sundays we all three walked down to Ring’s house in Rathfarnham and spent the day there. Ring’s father was a manufacturer of lemonade who’d been at the school at the same time as my own, a big man with a chunky bald head. Ring was proposing to manufacture lemonade as well; de Courcy wanted to become an actor.

‘No, that ridiculous man’s not intelligent,’ Dove-White would thoughtfully agree, the conversation following a pattern. Burning tobacco would fall from his pipe on to his waistcoat, to be followed by a smell of singeing, which he ignored. At Keble, he would invariably add, the headmaster had been considered mentally deficient.

‘Let’s go over to Bolger’s,’ de Courcy suggested one Saturday afternoon in the furnace-room, and after some calculations we agreed that between the three of us we had enough money for the outing. Bolger’s was a house about a mile across the hills, where tea—with fried eggs and bacon—might be purchased at a modest cost. Afterwards, funds permitting, a call might be made to Lamb Doyle’s public house.

We thrashed our way through the gorse, Ring singing a lugubriously indecent ballad, de Courcy enthusing about his future in the theatre. They both knew a little of my history, but I did not often talk about the past and they did not ask. I never mentioned my mother.

‘Have you sausages today?’ Ring asked the waitress at Bolger’s in his drawling, lazy voice. ‘Six sausages each, and fried bread, black puddings and potato cakes.’

‘Isn’t she a lovely creature?’ de Courcy whispered while the girl laid out knives and forks for us. Freckled and stout, she blushed in confusion.

‘What’s your name?’ Ring demanded.

‘Noreen.’

‘And where are you from, Noreen?’

‘Mullingar.’

‘Noreen of the wild ways,’ de Courcy murmured when she’d gone, a remark which Ring repeated to her as soon as she returned.

‘Errah, get on with you,’ said the girl.

We drank cups of tea with the fried food, and ate slices of soda bread smeared with blackberry jelly. ‘I wonder have we enough for a jar in Lamb’s?’ Ring suggested when we’d finished, and de Courcy and I placed what remained of our money on the table.

‘Are you doing anything this minute, Noreen?’ Ring enquired of the waitress. ‘Would you wet your whistle with us in the Lamb’s?’

‘Sure, amn’t I up to my neck?’

‘Slip out the back, Noreen. Your man here has an eye for you.’

De Courcy kept his head bent during this exchange. Although he talked a great deal about girls, he was excessively shy in their presence and found it difficult to converse normally with the maids at school, several of whom he had declared he would lay down his life for.

‘D’you get any time off, Noreen?’ Ring persisted. ‘Would you be free in the evenings ever?’

As he spoke, he placed one of his huge arms round the girl’s waist, causing her to jump backwards as if stung by a wasp. ‘Lay off that stuff,’ she cried, glaring at all three of us from a distance. ‘Keep your hands to yourself now.’ Cautiously she approached the table again in order to stack the plates on to a tray.

‘It’s your man here who’s keen for you, Noreen. It’s not me at all.’

‘I haven’t a fancy for schoolboys.’

‘As a matter of fact, Noreen, we’re sailors off a ship.’

The girl did not reply. She carried the tray away, and since she did not return we set out for Lamb Doyle’s. We occupied a table near a window which afforded a wide view of the approach to the public house, for it was not unknown for Mad Mack or his proselytes to come snooping.

‘Did you ever in all your days see a more graceful creature?’ de Courcy demanded as we lit our cigarettes. ‘Wouldn’t you lay down your life for her, Quinton?’

I replied that I didn’t think I would, but de Courcy continued to speak with some extravagance of the waitress’s beauty, lending emphasis to his romantic mood by declaiming the poetry of W. B. Yeats. Ring laughed coarsely.

‘You’d do better than that skivvy in the first kip-shop you’d come to,’ he said. ‘An uglier lump I never laid eyes on.’

‘You are without a soul, Ring.’

‘You’d need a soul and a half to see anything in that one.’

As he spoke, the only other drinker in the bar approached us. He was a man in a stained Donegal suit and a stained hat. He had broken front teeth.

‘Excuse me.’ Blear-eyed, he looked down at the three of us. ‘Are you from the college?’

‘We’re sailors off a ship,’ Ring said.

‘I was at the college myself one time.’

He paused while politely we acknowledged this fact. We’d never seen the man before.

‘Thirteen years ago. I used to teach geography.’

He turned and walked away. We drank what remained in our glasses and mechanically hid our cigarettes in the cups of our hands. It was never a good idea to drop into conversations with strangers in a public house. Even the most genial of them had been known to contact the headmaster a day or two later, sobered by conscience and anxious for our welfare. We were actually on our feet, about to go, when the tweeded man addressed us from the bar.

‘I’ve got you one for the road.’ He pulled a chair in to the table so that we might drink together. ‘You’re right enough for an hour,’ he said. ‘If you’re back there for Chapel they’ll not notice anything else.’

He gave us fresh cigarettes and made us clink our glasses against his. He asked us who we were and we gave him the names of three other boys. He didn’t reveal his own.

‘Is Mack still in action?’ he enquired. ‘Is he back on speaking terms with Dove-White?’

The amount he knew about the school convinced us that he was speaking the truth when he claimed a connection with it in the past. Nor did his grubbiness seem entirely out of place, or preclude him from the schoolmastering profession: there was nothing particularly prepossessing about the gingery appearance of Mad Mack or Dove-White’s burnt clothes.

We sipped the porter we’d been bought and smoked the cigarettes. De Courcy inaccurately described the waitress in Bolger’s, informing the man that if he could see her he’d wish to lay down his life for her. ‘In that case we’ll take another glassful,’ said the man and again approached the bar.

With his eyes closed, de Courcy continued his eulogy of the waitress, referring to her as an exquisite sea-bird. ‘Frail blessed bird,’ he murmured, but Ring told him to give over immediately or he’d frighten our benefactor off.

The man returned, laden with drink and further cigarettes. He handed us a packet each and made us again raise our glasses.

‘We could get into terrible trouble, sir,’ Ring said, ‘if any of this leaked out.’

‘How could it leak out?’

‘As long as you realize we’d be in trouble, sir.’

‘I was sacked for sodomy,’ the man said.

Slowly, admiringly, Ring moved his head from side to side. It could happen to a bishop, he said in his slow voice.

‘After that I went to England. I was in a school near Nottingham only I had a bad bit of luck there too.’

‘That girl has started a storm in me,’ de Courcy suddenly exclaimed, standing up and swaying.

The man laughed pleasantly. ‘I have a small proposition,’ he went on, ‘which could earn you a pound, boys.’

Recalling the reference to sodomy, I hastily rose to my feet also. We would have to go now, I explained, otherwise we’d be late for Chapel. We’d see him some other time, Ring promised, we’d definitely be back.

De Courcy said nothing, intent on making an unsteady course across the bar. We followed him, and when the tweeded man called after us Ring assured him we’d listen to any proposition he had to make the next time we had a drink with him. De Courcy staggered in the yard, before covering its grey cement with sausage and fried bread.

‘Hills of the North, rejoice,’ we sang in Chapel. ‘Valley and lowland, sing.’ The boys around us glanced in our direction, attracted by the loudness of our voices and the stench of porter. The good-natured chaplain stuttered his way through a sermon about St Simon, and all during it I thought to myself that the tragedy at Kilneagh was over and done with. There was no Miss Halliwell daily to remind me of it, nor was there my mother every evening to say good-night to. According to Father Kilgarriff, my aunts had taken in another collection of dogs; the rhododendrons still flowered; Mr Derenzy had assured us that little had changed at the mill. One day I would be back there. It was not impossible that one day Kilneagh would be as it had been.

‘A most dangerous person,’ Dove-White said in the course of a Latin lesson. ‘Incredible impertinence that he should be anywhere near this place.’

‘He’s a homosexual, is he, sir?’ de Courcy politely suggested. ‘That’s what he said anyway.’

‘Keep well away from him, de Courcy.’

‘He offered us money, sir. He mentioned a proposition.’

‘Where’ve we got to, Tuthill?’

‘… omnemGalliam ab injuria Ariovisti, sir.’

Ring was playing patience. With a piece of broken mirror propped up on his desk, a boy known as Lout MacCarthy was squeezing his blackheads. A. McC. P. Jackson was reading an Arsene Lupin book. Thynne Minor was asleep.

‘Continue on then,’ Dove-White commanded Tuthill. ‘Hac oratione habita ab Divitiaco.’

‘The thing is, sir,’ de Courcy interrupted again, ‘it’s interesting your friend coming back like this. As you say, sir, you’d think he’d keep away.’

‘He was no friend of mine, de Courcy. Hac oratione—’

‘I think the boys should know what he got up to, sir. If he’s a danger, sir, shouldn’t the boys know what to beware of? Did he have a name, sir?’

‘Of course he had a name, de Courcy. Don’t be silly now. Hac oratione, Tuthill?’

‘When this speech—’

‘I think you should tell us, sir. I mean, if he’s going round offering money—’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, de Courcy! The wretched man was sacked because he took boys out on a picnic. He gave them cider laced with gin.’

‘Is that all, sir?’

‘There are parents who scrimp and save, de Courcy, so that they can send their sons to this school. They hardly do so in order to place them at the disposal of the sexually perverted.’ Dove-White’s voice was tired. He closed Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War and pulled his burnt, chalky gown more cosily about him. He asked for silence and then, like Thynne Minor, he drifted into sleep.

That afternoon we crossed the hillside to Lamb Doyle’s, hoping to find the sacked geography master there, and in this we were not disappointed. He approached us as we entered and at once bought us drink and cigarettes, which we accepted without demur. Now that we knew the extent of his crime we felt we could cope with whatever attentions he plied us with, although we resolved to keep a watchful eye on him when he was having our glasses refilled at the bar.

‘It was Mad Mack who did for me,’ he confided. ‘It was Mad Mack reported the thing.’

‘The picnic, sir?’

‘Ah, they told you, did they?’

‘Dove-White told us.’

‘Sure, where was the harm in having a picnic with a few lads?’

‘No harm at all, sir,’ de Courcy agreed smoothly. Ring guffawed, striking his knee with his fist, as his habit was when amused.

‘Tell me this, lads, does Mad Mack still occupy the same old bedroom?’

None of us was able to answer this question, since none of us knew which bedroom Mad Mack had slept in thirteen years ago, but it was soon established that his sleeping arrangements had in fact changed. The mathematics master now slept in a downstairs room in the masters’ house, the room next to his study: he had been elsewhere before.

‘I was afraid of that,’ the man said. He remained lost for a moment in thought, his eyes screwed up against the smoke from his cigarette. Ring clattered his empty glass suggestively on the table, and our companion obediently crossed to the bar for more porter. When he had delivered it to us he spoke again of the mathematics master. He then astonished us by weeping. He turned his face away so that we should not see how it had contorted; his hands shook so much that for a moment he was unable to light his cigarette. ‘Christ,’ Ring muttered.

Eventually recovering himself, the man said:

‘I have begged for threepenny pieces on O’Connell’s Bridge. I have cleaned out the latrines of the gaol where I was in England. Mack brought all that on me. If Mack was humane I would still be your geography master and no harm done.’

Alarmed by this display of emotion, Ring said we should be getting back now. But de Courcy shook his head. He displayed concern for our companion by deploring the misplaced zeal of the mathematics master. ‘The trouble is, sir,’ he said, ‘Mack’s insane.’

The man placed a pound note on the table. It was ours, he said, if we would agree to lead him, in the middle of the night, to the window of Mad Mack’s bedroom.

‘We’d be delighted, sir,’ de Courcy responded immediately. It was the least we could do, he pointed out, after all the drink and cigarettes we’d been bought.

‘We could get into terrible trouble,’ Ring began. ‘Appalling trouble—’

‘There’ll be no trouble whatsoever, boy, if you keep your mouth shut. We might need the loan of a ladder, though.’

‘There’s a fire escape running up by those windows,’ de Courcy said. ‘But we’ll get hold of a ladder if it’s better.’

‘The fire escape might do the job for us. I think I remember it now.’

‘It’s great to have met you, sir,’ enthused de Courcy.

Shortly after that wt left the public house, Ring and myself considerably apprehensive, de Courcy jubilant. The arrangement was that we were to meet behind the chapel at two o’clock on a Sunday morning a week later. ‘We’ll never stay awake,’ Ring objected, and on the night in question he fell heavily asleep soon after lights-out. De Courcy and I, however, managed not to. We roused Ring when a distant church clock chimed half-past one.

The man arrived promptly at our rendezvous. He didn’t speak, and in the continuing silence we led the way to the masters’ house and pointed to the black fire escape that ended its descent beside Mad Mack’s bedroom window. As always, the top half of the window was open, an element in Mad Mack’s puritan zeal being his devotion to fresh air. The sacked geography master climbed to a height of six feet or so. He paused before pressing the lower half of his body against the opening, above the sleeping mathematics master. A faint sound disturbed the still night.

‘My God,’ whispered Ring, ‘he’s having a slash on him.’

Sunday-morning breakfast was a leisurely, if somewhat formal, occasion. Standing in our gowns in the darkly panelled dining hall, we waited in silence while the Scrotum and Mrs Scrotum led the small procession of masters to the high table, where the funereal Fukes awaited them with a silver-plated coffee-pot. ‘Benedictus benedicat,’ intoned a prefect known as Bamboo Jones because of his upright stance, ‘per Christum Dominum nostrum.” Mad Mack sat down next to Mrs Scrotum, with Monsieur Bertain on the other side of him and the chaplain next to Dove-White. Hopeless Gibbon hurried in late, red-faced and whispering an apology. The science man lived out, as did the other masters who were now absent.

Mad Mack appeared not to have suffered from the attention paid to him while he slept. Certainly he had not woken up at the time: we knew that because we had remained where we stood until the geography master had adjusted his clothes and descended to the ground. Without addressing a word to us, he had marched off into the darkness.

While the butler now hovered behind him with the coffee-pot, Mad Mack’s harsh voice rang out, deploring the fact that his shaving water had been tepid. And from boy to boy, from table to table, word went round the dining hall that he had been urinated upon during the night. Sniggering swelled into laughter. Heads turned towards the high table, eyes searching the gingery countenance of the mathematics master. Mrs Scrotum chattered across him to Hopeless Gibbon. Sleepily, Dove-White reached for the toast.

‘Why is there this laughter?’ The Scrotum was on his feet, the crimson orb of his face pushed out at us, his little knuckles resting on the table-cloth. He turned to Bamboo Jones, who was seated at the head of the table nearest to him, as by dining-hall tradition the duty prefect should be.

‘Why are we being treated to laughter, Jones?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Cease this unpleasantness at once,’ commanded the Scrotum noisily, and then sat down.

Mad Mack would have thought it was raining, Ring said, poking at the lumps in his porridge. He would have woken up and shut the window, wiping a few drops off his moustache. The laughter had dribbled away, but eyes still glanced in the direction of the high table and again the word went round: that it was the sacked geography master, already known by repute because of what we had reported, who had done the deed.

Again the Scrotum rose. ‘Why are you boys looking at Mr Mack? Why are they, Jones?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know, sir.’

A boy called FitzPayne, at a table not far from where the Scrotum stood, was selected as a source of possible elucidation.

‘FitzPayne, why is Mr Mack the object of your interest?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘I’m not looking at Mr Mack, sir.’

‘Are you telling me lies by default, sir? Remember what we agreed between us about lies, FitzPayne. Less than half a minute ago you were staring at Mr Mack with an impertinent grin on your face. We are waiting to hear why that was so, FitzPayne.’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Step up to High Table, sir. Mr Dove-White, move your chair to one side so that FitzPayne may the better stare at Mr Mack.’

The maids, still handing round plates of porridge, had stopped in their tracks. Fukes, in the shadows of a recess behind the headmaster, was investigating the condition of his teeth with a forefinger. The matron’s ladle was poised dramatically above the enormous white enamel porridge container. Her assistant, placing thick slices of bread on plates, paused also. ‘Well now, FitzPayne,’ the headmaster urged, and FitzPayne, a youth ravaged by acne, said he begged the headmaster’s pardon.

‘You will please tell us why your attention was drawn towards Mr Mack.’

The silence was so complete and so intense that it felt like a sudden presence—as if God, de Courcy afterwards suggested, had chosen to pass through the dining hall on some minor mission. Mad Mack registered bewilderment, the chaplain looked concerned. Mrs Scrotum, the growth of her grey hair more horizontal than usual on a Sunday morning due to her Saturday-night washing of it, was impatient to return to her conversation with Hopeless Gibbon.

‘Did you once,’ pursued the Scrotum, ‘have a nursemaid, FitzPayne?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Had you once had a nursemaid, she might have informed you that it is distasteful to stare.’

‘Yes, I know, sir.’

‘It is gratifying that you know something.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We are still waiting to hear from you, FitzPayne. Mr Mack, can you throw any light on FitzPayne’s conceit of staring at you?’

‘I most certainly can not, Headmaster.’

‘In that case it must be left to you, FitzPayne. We have heard the view of Mr Mack, we have heard the view of the duty prefect. If you and I have to stand here all day, FitzPayne, we shall do so. The inconvenience to staff and boys is of course to be regretted. Fukes, I would have another cup of coffee.’

The probing of the butler’s cavities ceased, the forefinger wiped on the napkin he carried. Coffee was poured, the silence continued. Eventually FitzPayne broke it.

‘It had to do with a story that’s going round, sir.’

‘What story is this, FitzPayne?’

‘That something happened to Mr Mack in the night, sir.’

‘Did something happen to you in the night, Mr Mack?’

The mathematics master, who smiled rarely, permitted himself that relaxation now. A row of even false teeth appeared beneath the ginger moustache and then was gone again.

‘As a matter of fact, I dreamed I was teaching Shell B, Headmaster.’

Laughter, too long held in check, was gratefully released.

‘Well, FitzPayne? Mr Mack states he adventured no further than the land of dreams. Are you implying it was in a dream that something untoward occurred?’

There was further laughter. The porridge plates nursed by the maids were eased on to the serving table. FitzPayne said:

‘In the night, sir, a man passed water on Mr Mack.’

The Scrotum’s eyes bulged, and even over the distance that separated us I believed I could see the flushed flesh whiten. The lower half of his face twitched; Dove-White told us afterwards that he moaned. FitzPayne spoke again.

‘Through the window, sir, that Mr Mack keeps open.’

Mad Mack was standing up. Dove-White told us that the vein in the centre of his forehead had begun to throb, always a danger signal.

‘Headmaster,’ he began, and was ignored.

‘You will come at once to my study, FitzPayne.’

‘Headmaster—’

‘I’d be obliged if you would kindly accompany us, Mr Mack. FitzPayne, you will apologize to my wife. You will apologize to Matron and to her lady assistant. You will apologize to the maids.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Mr Dove-White, no one is to leave this room until we have returned. Breakfast will naturally not be taken today.’ He turned to his wife and his voice lost the quiver it had developed when he lowered it to address her. ‘My dear, I think it better that you accompany us also.’

He led the way. Mrs Scrotum, who had a way of holding her arms stiffly elongated, with her hands clasped in front of her, marched next in line. Then came Mad Mack, fury enlivening every aspect of him. FitzPayne was grinning through his acne.

Bamboo Jones crossed to the high table and spoke to Dove-White, who nodded. Bamboo Jones said we might sit down but must not converse. The head prefect, Wiltshire Major, bustled up to him and then bustled up to Dove-White. Whispering broke out among the masters, Wiltshire Major spoke to the matron and the undermatron, both of whom immediately rose and left the dining hall, taking the maids with them. Bamboo Jones stationed himself by the door, alert for the headmaster’s return. From time to time he ordered us to be quiet and when eventually he heard the headmaster’s footfall he hurried to the serving table and struck it repeatedly with a soup-spoon, another dining-hall tradition.

Obediently, we stood up. Mrs Scrotum did not return, nor did Mad Mack. FitzPayne went straight to his place. The Scrotum said:

‘We are going to pray. You will please kneel.’

Deliverance was asked for. ‘O Lord, to cleanse us,’ is a phrase that was quoted, and afterwards de Courcy remarked that though boys and masters might be cleansed of the distastefulness FitzPayne had exposed us to, the same might possibly not be true of the women who had left the dining hall, nor indeed of Mad Mack himself.

‘To Thy honour and Thy glory again we dedicate our miserable lives.’

‘Amen,’ said Dove-White.

‘Amen,’ said we, and rose from our knees.

‘We have heard a lie this morning.’ The Scrotum paused, the scarlet flesh of his neck bulging above his clerical collar. ‘A lie,’ he repeated, ‘which this unfortunate boy saw fit to perpetuate. Stand out, FitzPayne. Approach High Table, please.’

For the second time FitzPayne left his place and did as he was bidden.

‘Turn around. Face your peers, FitzPayne.’

Obeying this instruction placed FitzPayne at an advantage. With his back to the Scrotum, he at once allowed his mouth to drop open, drawing back his lips in a squinting grimace. Heads were bent, laughter stifled. Bamboo Jones started forward, then changed his mind. Wiltshire Major glared threateningly at FitzPayne.

‘This boy,’ pronounced the Scrotum, ‘has been misled by evil gossip. This boy has apologized to Mr Mack for the distasteful nature of the lie he saw fit to repeat, knowing it must needs be a lie. Mr Mack and I have accepted that this boy did not himself invent the lie, which indicates that its source is among you still. Whomsoever is responsible I would wish to converse with before an hour has passed.’

His gown flapped as he strode from the dais which raised the high table above the other tables. He clutched a mortar-board to his chest and looked neither to the right nor the left. Hopeless Gibbon brought up the rear of the procession that passed from the dining hall.

‘Stay!’ shouted Wiltshire Major. He closed the door and stood with his back to it. He told us to sit down.

‘I want to see you, FitzPayne,’ he said, ‘immediately after this. As to what the headmaster has just requested, will whoever started the ridiculous tale about Mr Mack report to him without delay. I have to warn you that if there is no owning up the entire school will be punished.’

During this speech Fukes clattered the high-table breakfast dishes, gathering them on to a tray. Wiltshire Major, who liked making speeches, continued:

‘If ever again there is anything like a repetition of such a stupid and pointless rumour it will be a most serious matter, I can assure you.’

It was difficult to know what to do. Wiltshire Major meant what he said, and already there were those who must have guessed where the story had begun. ‘I’d say we’re stumped,’ Ring suggested. ‘I’d say it’s a cop all right.’

But de Courcy was more sanguine. ‘We didn’t do much when it comes down to it.’

‘We took money from the man,’ I reminded him, ‘and we got up in the middle of the night.’

‘We could say we saw a stranger prowling.’

We hurriedly discussed the matter with Dove-White, who advised confession. He approved of de Courcy’s suggestion that, on the way to or from the lavatory, he had glanced from a window and seen a suspicious figure in the moonlight. Out of a sense of responsibility, he had woken Ring and myself and a decision had been reached: concerned about the school’s valuables, we had decided to investigate.

‘I see,’ said the Scrotum.

‘After which, sir, we hastily dressed. We followed the man to the masters’ house, sir, thinking he might be going to break in.’

‘I had one of MacCarthy’s golf sticks, sir,’ Ring put in. ‘I picked it up when we passed through the locker-room. In the circumstances, I didn’t think he’d mind, sir.’

The headmaster’s study was large and gracious, as impressive as the drawing-room next door, which featured two water-colours by Turner. Both rooms, richly carpeted, were full of knick-knacks and occasional tables. I stood beside the chair over which one bent when receiving punishment. It was tapestry-covered, yellow and blue, the same chair that had been there in my father’s day. ‘You’ll get to know it,’ my father had said.

‘The man climbed four steps up the fire escape, sir, and then he unbuttoned his trousers—’

‘That’ll do, de Courcy.’ The Scrotum spoke snappishly, as he often did. His English voice had a nasal quality, sharply accented. His origins were low, Dove-White had told us, pointing out that though the headmaster’s ‘h’s‘ were all carefully in place, words like ‘house’ and ‘noun’ acquired an extra dimension beneath his tongue and that, apparently, was not quite the thing.

‘What I mean is, sir,’ de Courcy went on, ‘we were in a quandary because it wasn’t clear immediately what was happening. There was this sound, sir, and the window being open at the top and the man being on a level with it—’

‘Will you kindly cease, de Courcy?’ Tetchy impatience snapped at us again. Some internal struggle took place because the Scrotum’s small white knuckles, clenched to rap the surface of the desk, did not do so. His temper was as unreliable as Mad Mack’s, but his position in the school forbade resource to casual physical attack. For him the only reward for anger was the calm formality involving the tapestry-covered chair, and as if in recognition of this fact his nasal voice now acquired the churchman’s cadences so familiar to us in Chapel.

‘Mr Mack reports that he shut his window during the night because of a shower of rain.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So what you are saying is invented.’

‘We didn’t like to go too close, sir. All we were concerned for was Mr Mack’s safety.’

‘I see.’ The anger cooled a little more, the voice dropped further. ‘I accept what you say concerning a trespasser on School property, and I would suggest to you that this man was unsober. I would suggest to you that he climbed up the fire escape when he wasn’t in command of himself. Drink is the curse of this country.’

‘We said afterwards he mightn’t have been sober. Didn’t I say that, Quinton?’

‘We all said it.’

‘I would suggest to you that in the poor light of the night you could have been mistaken in what you imagined occurred.’

‘It’s possible we were, sir,’ Ring agreed. ‘It was just that it looked like that. The sound we heard could have been anything. Maybe a bird.’

‘A bird?’

‘I think there’s a bird makes a sound like that, sir. When it’s flying by, sir.’

‘It was a terrible thing, sir,’ de Courcy said, ‘for boys of our age to see a man drunk. He was definitely unsteady on the fire escape, sir.’

‘There is still no excuse for irresponsibly repeating all this. Why did you not wake a prefect? Or come straight to me?’

Ring proceeded to offer an explanation, but de Courcy interrupted him.

‘We were intending to, sir. Quinton was all for waking you up, sir, only Ring said you mightn’t like it. We were discussing at breakfast about coming in here straight afterwards, only the unfortunate thing was that someone must have heard what we were saying.’

‘Even though we were keeping our voices down, sir.’

‘And you, Quinton? You haven’t said much to me about this unhappy incident.’

‘I’m very sorry about it, sir.’

‘How do you imagine poor Mr Mack feels?’

‘It was Mr Mack’s safety, sir—’

‘I know, I know, boy.’ The knuckles again became impatient. Another struggle waged in the crimson face; again the Christian spirit prevailed. ‘When I came to this school, Quinton, the chapel was not the centre of school life, as it has since become. The kind of unpleasantness you have had the misfortune to witness was not uncommon. Bullying, for instance, was rampant.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The bullies would take the new boys up the hillside and beat their legs with bramble sticks. A boy was branded once with the point of a white-hot poker.’

‘We’ve heard of that, sir. We’re grateful to you, sir, for all you’ve done.’

‘I shall be asking Wiltshire Major to make an announcement before lunch in the presence of Matron and the maids, to the effect that the man in his confusion simply climbed up the fire-escape steps and immediately came down again. Drink is a great scourge. It is fortunate that we weren’t burnt in our beds.’

‘Burnt, sir?’ Ring repeated in a startled voice. ‘Burnt?’ he said again, but de Courcy swiftly intervened.

‘It’s that we were concerned about, sir. Ring was all for hitting at the man with MacCarthy’s golf stick to see if he maybe had a box of matches on him.’

Ring essayed a slow smile as the value of this variation dawned on him. ‘And maybe,’ he chattily added, ‘if he was intoxicated, sir, he could have imagined he’d started up a fire already. Maybe what he got up to, sir, was an effort to quench it.’

‘That’s a disgusting suggestion, Ring. We have agreed between us that nothing of that nature took place. And why are you laughing in that distasteful manner? Is there some joke I have missed? Do you share Ring’s joke, Quinton?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You are the stupidest boy, Ring, I have ever encountered. You are dense to a degree I would not have believed humanly possible.’

‘All I meant, sir—’

‘What vocation have you, Ring?’

‘Vocation, sir?’

‘The future, boy, the future. How do you see yourself?’

‘My father makes lemonade down in Dublin, sir.’

‘I am aware that your father makes lemonade. I asked you about yourself.’

‘I’ll be doing the same, sir.’

‘All I can say, Ring, is that I wouldn’t care to drink it.’

‘It’s not bad stuff at all, sir.’

‘Do not be impertinent to me, Ring. You shall be punished for that.’ The crimson face was turned towards mine and the conversation more lightly continued. ‘Quinton, what vocation have you? You are becoming a veterinary surgeon?’

‘I think that’s Dunraven, sir.’

‘Ah yes, yes. A flour mill, is it? Near Fermoy?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Be careful how you choose your friends, Quinton. Do not bend as the wind takes you. De Courcy?’

‘Sir?’

‘What vocation have you, de Courcy?’

‘The stage, sir. The theatre.’

The Scrotum briefly shook his head. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, de Courcy, to enter schoolmastering?’

‘I don’t think I would be good at it, sir.’

‘That may not be for you to say, sir. Duty is not silent, remember. Duty speaks. I am glad we have had this conversation.’

‘So are we, sir.’

‘Wiltshire Major will give out his notice, the contents of which we have agreed between the four of us in this room. You will apply to Mr Dove-White for a suitable punishment for leaving your dormitory in the night. You will apologize to Mr Mack and offer to make amends in any way he suggests.You will apologize to my wife. You will stand beside Wiltshire Major when he makes the explanation and when he has finished you will apologize to him for the inconvenience you have caused. You will apologize to Matron and her lady assistant, a very young girl who may well be upset by the distasteful nature of what was said. You will apologize to the maids, some of whom are young also, and you will apologize to the duty prefect. You, Quinton, will be the spokesman. You, Ring, will request further punishment from Mr Dove-White for being impertinent. This matter is now closed. I am glad we have disposed of it in a sensible manner.’

A small blue bulb on the wall above the Scrotum’s door, controlled by a switch near his desk, was extinguished as we passed beneath it. When glowing, it indicated that serious matters were on hand in the study, and that no disturbance would be tolerated. Beatings called for the ignition of the bulb, as did confirmation classes, which the Scrotum liked to conduct at the deskside. We hurried through the great flagged hall that lay between the headmaster’s house and the rest of the school, feeling lucky that the bulb had been extinguished after so brief an incarceration in the study. We had assumed our concocted story would be brushed aside and, Sunday notwithstanding, had anticipated severe chastisement.

‘He said you were to punish us, sir,’ Ring reported in Dove-White’s room.

‘What on earth for?’

‘Witnessing the distasteful occurrence, sir. Drink’s a scourge, sir.’

Tea was brewed from a kettle of water on a gas-ring. Dove-White said the treatment meted out to Mad Mack was probably the best thing that had happened since the school was founded in 1843, even though the act had been performed by a man he had sternly warned us against. While he was speaking, a boy came in and announced that Mr Mack wanted to see us. ‘Oh holy Jesus,’ said Ring, and we made our way without enthusiasm to the mathematics master’s study.

‘The headmaster has spoken to me of your revelations.’ Furious already, Mad Mack shouted at us as soon as we appeared. ‘Not a word of that is the truth, de Courcy.’

‘The headmaster—’ ‘There was no man on that fire escape. Isn’t that so, Quinton? Answer me, Quinton.’

‘There was a man in a Donegal suit, sir.’

‘That’s a filthy lie, Quinton.’

‘De Courcy looked out the window, sir, on his way back from the lavatory—’

‘The three of you climbed on to that fire escape and committed an act of filthy indecency.’

‘We’d never do that, sir,’ de Courcy protested.

‘We told the truth, Mr Mack,’ Ring said, ‘and we’ve received our punishment from Mr Dove-White for leaving our dormitory under shadow of darkness.’

‘You’ll end up in the Dublin sewers, Ring.’

‘Actually, sir,’ de Courcy corrected, ‘Ring’s going to make lemonade. The headmaster is taking an interest in Ring’s future, sir.’

A scrawny hand darted through the air. Its fingers lashed twice at de Courcy’s cheeks, a swift, expert action that immediately drew blood. Mad Mack looked away and when he spoke again there was a croaking in his voice.

‘Who was it,’ he asked, ‘if it wasn’t you?’

‘A geography master who was sacked,’ de Courcy said.

The truth hung there, unchallenged and at last accepted, as it never could have been in the Scrotum’s study.

‘That man was horrible,’ Mad Mack said at last, his voice still croaking.

‘He was in gaol for a while,’ de Courcy said.

‘I’m glad he was in gaol.’

With his back to us he told us to go away and in the course of that day, humiliated by what had occurred, he left the school. He went without saying good-bye to anyone, and his defection shocked us. For three weeks we were without a mathematics master, before the arrival of a brisk man with a bow-tie whom the Scrotum had found somewhere in Lincolnshire.

Terms went by. My correspondence with Father Kilgarriff continued; at school there were letters from Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy, and one from my grandparents in India, which requested information about my mother. We have suggested that you and she might like to live with us, here in Masulipatam, the letter ended, far away from what has happened. But in my reply I did not refer to that, knowing that neither my mother nor I would ever wish to live in India. Josephine wrote regularly, my mother not again. In the dormitory after lights-out one night I found myself retailing the story of the tragedy.

Every Christmas and again at Easter I returned for three weeks to Cork; and for two months every summer. I read Dickens and George Eliot and Emily Bronte; I continued to shop for Josephine in Mrs Hayes’s grocery, reflecting less poignantly now on how my sisters would have appreciated her and her son. I walked about the streets and docks, as I had always done.

‘You have never written,’ Miss Halliwell said. ‘You promised to write.’ She had emerged from the Munster Arcade as I passed it and we stood together on the crowded street, the first time we had met since the days of Mercier Street Model.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Halliwell.’

‘Years have passed and you have not written. Your mother, Willie—’

‘My mother’s all right.’

‘You still live in Windsor Terrace, Willie? You haven’t returned to the place near Fermoy?’

‘We still live in Cork.’

‘Don’t go back there, Willie. Don’t hurt yourself by going back.’

‘I’m quite all right, Miss Halliwell.’

‘Don’t ever visit it. Have you visited it since that night, Willie?’

‘No.’

‘Stay here in Cork. I often think of you, you know.’

‘Miss Halliwell—’

‘Willie, I would like to give you tea. In Thompson’s perhaps?’

‘I have to get back home.’

I left her standing there, dressed in her familiar brown, the hair still curling from the mole on her chin. In my letters I had continued to apologize to Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace for my mother’s refusal to receive them. Two nights ago I had dreamed of the rhododendrons and the walk to the mill, and had woken up longing to be back at Kilneagh. ‘Willie,’ Miss Halliwell called after me, her voice shrill, strangely floating above the bustle of the street. But I did not turn my head.

On the day after that meeting I tidied the garden because I hoped to persuade my mother to sit outside. I bought a hoe and cleared the flowerbeds of weeds. I borrowed a lawnmower from the house next door, but the grass was too long and coarse for it. ‘You need a hook,’ the man who’d lent me the lawnmower said, and he came into the garden himself and cut the grass with a scythe. He knew about my mother. By now everyone did.

‘Because it’s sunny,’ I said to her. ‘The sun’s good for you.’ She smiled from her bed at me. It was early in the day, but I knew that already she had been drinking whiskey. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said, as if I hadn’t mentioned the garden. ‘Let’s go and have lunch in the Victoria Hotel.’

She put on her red and black dress, with a hat that perfectly matched it. She wore a cameo brooch at her throat. She carried a parasol, and all the time she smiled.

‘You’re quite good-looking, Willie,’ she said, taking my arm on the street.

We walked in the sunshine down St Patrick’s Hill and over St Patrick’s Bridge. I hadn’t been in the Victoria Hotel since the day we’d had tea there together, but nothing had changed. My mother ordered drinks for us, and after that we had lunch. She touched her sole with a fork, eating very little. She ordered hock and burgundy.

‘I love this dining-room,’ she said.

Increasingly I found it difficult to know what to say to her. On this occasion I repeated a version of some incident or other at school. I spoke of Ring and de Courcy, but she didn’t appear to know who they were.

‘That school was what your father wanted,’ she said.

‘I know.’ And to prevent her continuing about my father I said: ‘I met Miss Halliwell the other day.’

‘Who’s that, dear?’

‘Miss Halliwell from the Model School.’

‘You will not have to be a teacher, Willie.’

‘No, I wasn’t thinking that.’

I ate. My mother played again with her fish. The silence went on. Then she said:

‘I often think about Sergeant Rudkin. Well, I suppose you do too.’

I shook my head. By now the image of the man, lighting his cigarette at the corner of a street, had faded away almost to nothing.

‘He comes into my thoughts,’ my mother said.

She reached for her glass and drank the white wine that remained in it. A waiter poured her some burgundy. I said:

‘I quite liked doing the garden.’

‘O’Neill did the garden surely? And Tim Paddy. Poor little Tim Paddy.’

‘No, no. The garden here I mean. I’ve cleared it all up.’

‘That’s lovely, my dear.’

‘Will we have tea in the garden? Josephine has found the deck-chairs.’

‘Don’t you think it odd, Willie, that that man perpetually comes into my thoughts? I try to forgive him, Willie. I try to say it was an act of war.’

‘It’s best to forget.’

‘I try to say he is an ignorant vegetable merchant. I try to say he belongs in the back streets of Liverpool.’ She paused for a moment, sighing a little but smiling also. ‘Your father ordered those deck-chairs from Dublin.’

‘We could sit and read. There’s shade from the bay tree if the sun’s too strong.’

‘That would be lovely, darling.’

But when we returned home she went upstairs and took her dress off and got into bed. It was Josephine and I who occupied the deck-chairs.

‘D’you think she’ll ever be herself again, Josephine?’

‘Ah, of course she will.’

‘It’s taking years.’

‘Poor soul, Willie.’

‘I know.’

Every day Josephine carried the empty bottles from the bedside table, neither she nor my mother referring to this chore any more than they referred to the weekly arrival of the wine-merchant’s delivery man.

‘Don’t you ever get lonesome, Josephine?’

‘No, of course I don’t.’

She had a friend whom she had met one evening years ago at Women’s Confraternity, who came now and again to the kitchen. There was also the woman next door, the wife of the man who’d helped me with the grass, and Mrs Hayes of the shop. Josephine conversed with these women and presumably discussed with them my mother’s state. ‘And how’s your mother, Willie?’ Mrs Hayes used always to enquire while she made up the grocery order, and I imagined Josephine’s priest enquiring in the same way. Prayers might even have been said for my mother, a plea made for some quality to return to her which would rescue from their continuing decay her beauty and her elegance.

‘Don’t you ever go back to see your parents, Josephine?’

‘Oh, it’s a long way to Fermoy.’

Her fingers smoothed the frill of her apron, a curl of her fair hair crept from beneath her cap. We didn’t mention Johnny Lacy or the girl from Sweeney’s public house whom he’d married. We didn’t mention what might have been or what would be. After I’d left school I presumed I would five with my aunts and Father Kilgarriff in the orchard wing, but my mother would never be able to do that. My mother was not going to recover, and somehow I guessed that Josephine would never leave her now.

We sat for a while longer in the sunshine, and when we returned to the house we found that the afternoon post had come. There was a letter with the blue head of the English King on it, which I brought up to my mother, wondering if she would open it.

‘They wish to come here,’ she said the next morning. ‘Your aunt and your cousin Marianne.’

‘To visit us?’

‘Now, why ever do they wish to come to Godforsaken Ireland? Write to my sister, Willie, and say we are not ready for visitors yet.’

But I wrote instead that the visit which had been proposed might do my mother good. Well, you know, of course, about that letter.

6

Two rooms, never before used, were prepared for your arrival. A man came to freshen them up with paint and to replace some wallpaper. Both chimneys were swept in case the August weather turned chilly, and in the kitchen I helped Josephine to air the mattresses by placing them near the range.

‘So you are Willie!’ your mother cried, stepping down the gangway from the steamer. ‘Oh, Willie, it’s so very nice for us to meet you!’

Her cream-coloured blouse was buttoned all the way up to where her chins began, each button a tiny pearl. ‘Such a treat for us to visit you in Ireland!’ she exclaimed in that same excited manner, and you reddened when she went on about Woodcombe Rectory and the tastes and aspirations of your father, and how she had been urged to visit my mother by my grandparents in India, who were, of course, your grandparents also. ‘Oh, most awfully anxious they are,’ your mother said. ‘Poor dears.’ You wore a straw hat with a pink rose in its band. Your dress was blue, the rose was artificial. Tiny you seemed, dwarfed by your mother’s plumpness.

That summer, that last week of July and all of August, three days of September: I have loved that summer all my life. Your dark brown eyes, darker than my mother’s, your oval face, your smile that brought a dimple to one cheek, your long brown hair, soft as a mist it seemed. I stole glances at you while we stood near Mrs Hayes’s shop and looked down at the city, at spires and roofs and water, at the distant green hills that had always reminded me of Kilneagh. ‘The bells of Shandon,’ I explained when those bells rang out. I showed you the Opera House and Mercier Street Model School, the Turkish delight shop and the woollen goods factory where Elmer Dunne was now a clerk’s assistant. We strolled by the river and the railway track, we watched the cargo boats from St

Patrick’s Bridge. Further and further from the city we walked, and all the time I wanted to take your hand. Across the estuary, among the leafy trees, the windows of Montenotte stared inquisitively down at us. ‘How nice your Ireland is!’ you said.

At school you were my secret when that summer was over, during the tedium of lessons and sermons, in private moments after lights-out. When I spoke of you to Ring and de Courcy I simply said you were a cousin I had forgotten I possessed, and as the days of that autumn shortened into an icy November I continued to keep you jealously to myself. You did not belong in conversations that touched upon Big Lily at her kitchen sink or the woman Blood Major had met in Bachelor’s Walk, and school itself was different because of you. ‘Marianne,’ I whispered, ‘dear little Marianne.’ I told no one else your name.

‘There’s a fellow from Tipperary in his grave after that stuff,’ Ring would loudly state in the public houses we frequented: an attempt to improve the sales of his father’s lemonade by slandering all other brands. But often I hardly heard him. Greedily I saw you in the grey and blue uniform of your boarding-school. You had described your dormitory to me, all the beds with blue covers on them, and Agnes Brontenby, the head girl, striding through it.

‘God, there’s a real beauty here,’ de Courcy whispered in Byrne’s Provisions and Bar, screwing his neck around the partition that separated the bar from the grocery. Obediently Ring and I stood up to examine the girl over the frosted glass, but her back was turned to us. A threadbare red coat hung from narrow shoulders; hair was obscured by a tattered headshawl. She was asking Mr Byrne for a Olivers’ jelly and a quarter-pound of rashers.

It would be safer to put acid down your throat, Ring warned the publican, than some of the proprietary brands of lemonade currently on the market. And when Mr Byrne had finished serving us de Courcy developed his familiar fantasy about the girl in the red coat, his voice raving in the theatre of his invention. But I kept thinking of our sitting together in the August sunshine, occupying the deck-chairs I had resurrected in order to entice my mother to the garden. On our walks you had told me about the rectory and the town of Woodcombe, and the undulating Dorset countryside. The grey and blue school uniform was hideous, you said, and Agnes Brontenby tiresome.

‘Listen,’ Ring said when he and I were alone after Chapel one evening. ‘I saw the mott in the red coat again.’

In his slow way he outlined a joke he had already instigated. All three of us were to walk into Byrne’s Provisions and Bar and a moment later the girl in the red coat would be there also. ‘I told her de Courcy was desperate for her and she was interested all right. She saw him in the John Jameson mirror when he looked round the casement at her.’

Had you been too polite to say you were bored as we trailed about on our walks? I wondered that. ‘We might go to Kilneagh,’ I had suggested. ‘It would be nice to show you Kilneagh.’ You smiled and said you’d like that, but wouldn’t it be sad for me? Nothing could be sad with you, I thought, but did not say it.

‘The hard man,’ Ring greeted Mr Byrne on the day we were to meet the girl. ‘Are you stocking Ring’s yet, Mr Byrne? Did you ever note the legal statement they have on the label? “No Better Drink”, Mr Byrne.’

Mr Byrne, a dour man, once a champion wrestler, did not reply. His premises were decorated with photographs of greyhounds, which matched his cheerless presence. Lugubriously surveying the racing information of a morning newspaper, he reached for his glass of porter before raising a single bloodshot eye and surveying us. A second eye, injured in the wrestling ring fifteen years ago, was permanently cloaked behind a drooping lid.

‘We’ll take three bottles of stout, Mr Byrne,’ Ring ordered, unperturbed by the lack of welcome. ‘I hear there’s a woman in Enniscorthy with her kidneys gone after a glass of Mansor’s.’

Heifers had crowded the single street of Lough because it was a Monday. Pigs arrived in carts; dung and muck were everywhere. I wished it hadn’t been like that, that the great white gates of Kilneagh’s avenue hadn’t been rusty, or the roof of the burnt-out gate-lodge all tumbled in. The cool avenue of beeches had not changed, but the windowless house rose blackly from weeds and undergrowth, corrugated iron nailed over the pillared doorway. ‘This is Marianne,’ I said in the orchard wing, and at least Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace were exactly as they had been, even if Father Kilgarriff was thinner than I remembered him. The dogs did not seem different from the dogs of the past.

I pointed out Haunt Hill on the way to the mill and you described the grandeur of Woodcombe Park. We imagined Anna Quinton in its palatial rooms, lingering in its yew walks by the mock-Roman summer-house. You’d seen the mulberry orchard at Woodcombe Park, the one ours had been planted in memory of.

‘The trouble is,’ Ring said, ‘they don’t wash the empties. The empties come back and they fill them up again.’

Withdrawing a cork, Mr Byrne made a slight sound. His large, shaven head moved in a kind of circle as the stout was poured. Disdain entered his one good eye, reflecting a poor opinion of his three customers.

‘God, will you look who’s here?’ Ring suddenly shouted, thumping the counter with the palm of his hand.

Quick to assess the situation, de Courcy stared blankly at the girl in the red coat. ‘Is she your sister?’ he asked Ring, dropping his voice to a whisper and appearing to be considerably discomfited.

The girl’s face had a woebegone look that was not much lightened by a display of darkened teeth when she smiled. She wore a white cloche hat instead of her headscarf.

‘It’s Mary Fahy,’ Ring said. ‘The girl you’re mad for, de Courcy. Wouldn’t she knock spots off Noreen of Mullingar?’

The girl blushed, bending her head away from us, hiding beneath her hat. De Courcy looked away also. ‘There’s an error here,’ he said.

‘Mary came in that day for rashers and a jelly. Your man said he’d lay down his life for you, Mary.’

‘Ah, no, no. It was a different girl that came in for the jelly. A big girl she was. Big heavy legs on her.’

‘It was me all right,’ Mary Fahy said. ‘I seen you in the whiskey mirror when you peeped round the casement at me.’

‘Oh, mistaken identity,’ muttered de Courcy, still addressing Ring, not looking at any of us. ‘When she walked in that door I thought she was your sister. Haven’t you a sister that’s similar to this one, Ring, with the bones sticking out of her?’

The girl went, scuttling out of the public house like a scrawny, frightened sparrow.

‘Cripes, I don’t know where you scraped that from,’ de Courcy said, his manner changing dramatically. ‘A right doxy you picked up there.’

I left also, the first time I had ever walked away from my friends. I felt annoyed with both of them and wanted to let my thoughts return to you. I had not shivered as we stood on the lawn at Kilneagh or as we passed through the vegetable garden that had become a wilderness. It seemed like a dream when Johnny Lacy and the other men came out to the mill-yard and when Mr Derenzy shook hands with you.

‘What’s eating you?’ Ring demanded when he and de Courcy arrived back from Byrne’s. ‘Did you have a fancy for the mott yourself?’

I shook my head and then made some excuse, not wanting to admit that my feeling for you had caused me to consider the episode with the girl cruel. While we waited at Fermoy railway station and on the train back to Cork I had longed to say I’d fallen in love with you. The tips of my fingers had brushed your arm as we climbed up St Patrick’s Hill in the dark, and for a moment I had had to close my eyes. I wanted to put my arms around you, as Tim Paddy had put his around the girl who had afterwards married Johnny Lacy. But still I had not the courage even to take your hand.

At school I wished there was someone I could talk to, who would understand my feelings and my diffidence. I thought of bringing up the subject of love when the chaplain next invited me to have coffee and biscuits with him, but his stutter always made it difficult to get a word in. Hopeless Gibbon did not inspire such confidences, Dove-White would not have stayed awake. Surprisingly it was the headmaster’s butler who became my confessor.

I had been summoned one morning to the study, but had discovered the blue light burning above the door. In his funereal attire Fukes was polishing the various brass knobs and handles in the stone-flagged hall, where I now loitered. He jerked his head towards the study and told me that one of the barbers who regularly came up from Dublin for a day’s professional services throughout the school was cutting the headmaster’s hair. Fukes had an unnaturally hoarse voice, a sound that travelled laboriously from his chest and was often difficult to understand. Calling upon this phlegmy rattle, he remarked to me now:

‘I knew your father in the old days.’

Although his considerable length of service had established him as a school institution, it had never occurred to me that he must have been at the school when my father was a boy. When he made his revelation I expressed considerable surprise, of which Fukes took no notice. His haggard face was just a little below the level of my own, for he was not a tall man. It displayed no emotion as he said:

‘I was sorry to hear about what happened.’

‘Thank you, Fukes.’

‘Of course a number of old boys were killed in the war. But this was different.’

‘Yes.’

‘A terrible thing.’

‘Yes.’

That was the first of many conversations. On subsequent occasions Fukes revealed his memories of my father as a prefect, for he had mainly come across him when in their different capacities both of them were on duty in Dining Hall. These later conversations took place in Fukes’s pantry, where he performed a variety of tasks while occupying a sagging armchair drawn close to a radiator. I would sit on the edge of a stained marble dressing-table which, like the armchair, some previous headmaster had abandoned.

‘And yourself?’ he asked one afternoon. ‘Will you be taking up where your father left off down in Fermoy?’

I was reminded of the Scrotum enquiring about my vocation on the occasion when I had been confused with Dunraven. Fukes would have made a better headmaster. He did not address himself to many boys, but he had acquired information about everyone who passed through the school. He explained that he never ceased to eavesdrop while he served dinner in the masters’ common room and in the private dining-room of the headmaster and his wife; and during Chapel services he read whatever letters and documents there were on the Scrotum’s desk. He possessed a remarkable memory: the boys of the past remained as vividly with him as the faces of those he daily observed from behind the dining hall’s high table. Loving the school as nobody else did, he never left it and was inordinately proud both of his servant status and his loyalty.

‘Yes,’ I said in answer to his question. ‘That’s what I hope to do.’ In the evenings you would wait for me at the mill and in the different seasons we would walk together back to the house, up through the birch wood and down the sloping pasture. Fukes was polishing the glass globe of a lamp, so intent on his work that I didn’t have to avoid his eye when I said:

‘I have an English cousin I’ve fallen in love with.’

His head, spiky with short grey hairs, slightly nodded. The polishing of the glass continued.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said, ‘about all that.’

Fukes smiled, and no longer looked like a funeral mute. He mentioned other boys who had sat in his pantry with him, unburdening themselves of this and that. He told me not to be dismal.

‘Write that girl a letter,’ he suggested. ‘Enquire how she’s keeping for herself.’

‘D’you think so, Fukes?’

‘Why wouldn’t you write her a letter? What harm would it do?’

No harm at all, I thought as I lay awake that night, remembering your blue dress and your straw hat with a rose on it. Dear Marianne, I composed, I hope you had a safe journey back to England. Nothing has changed much here. Ring has developed a business sense where the selling of lemonade is concerned. I wondered if it would interest you to learn about the public thrashing of Lout MacCarthy or the theft of the communion wine. Is Agnes Brontenby still tiresome? I planned to ask, but when the next day came I did not write the letter.

‘Oh now, that’s foolish.’ Fukes shook his spiky head in disappointment. No girl could be put out by a simple letter, he said.

‘Yes, I know.’

Patiently he listened while I told him how we had walked about Cork and of our visit to Kilneagh. I described you in greater detail than I had to Ring and de Courcy, I explained that you lived near the house my great-grandmother had come from. I mentioned the rose and your straw hat. I told him your name.

Fukes punctuated each statement I made with a nod, devouring everything. It sometimes seemed as if he derived what nourishment he needed from such confidences, and from his eavesdroppings. Gossip hung like dust in his pantry.

‘Your father would be delighted,’ he said at length, and I thought that somehow that might be so.

A Christmas card came from your mother. There was a stagecoach and snow on it, with sprigs of holly around the edge. I thought of you being in the room when your mother wrote her greeting in it and wondered if for a moment you’d thought of me. I lay down on the bed you’d slept in, pressing my face into the pillow even though the pillowslip had ages ago been washed and ironed.

For my last two terms at school you continued to possess me. Fukes asked me again if I’d written to you and I lied and said I had, ashamed of my timidity. ‘Good man yourself,’ he said approvingly and added that one day he’d Open the Irish Times and read of our engagement.

‘I am always here,’ promised the Scrotum, a slippery smile emerging from the red bag of his face. ‘I always like to see an old boy.’ I had never, during all my time at the school, been addressed by his blue-stockinged wife, but she spoke to me now, vaguely wishing me well. ‘In life,’ she added, and turned to the next boy in the line which had formed to shake hands and say good-bye. The hand of the good-hearted chaplain was shaken also, and Hopeless Gibbon’s and old Dove-White’s.

‘I’m in love with my cousin,’ I said, at last confessing to Ring and de Courcy the truth that had come to matter more than anything else to me. They knew, they said.

‘Yes, I realize you have to return there,’ my mother said the night before I set out to begin my career at the mill. ‘Of course I understand that, Willie.’

A long time had passed since the sunny day of our lunch in the Victoria Hotel, and we had never done anything like that since. We had not once sat in the garden as I had planned. We had never gone for a walk together, as you and I so often had.

‘I’ll be back here at the weekends,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back on the train every Friday.’

‘You are good to me, Willie.’

Another Paddy bottle stood uncorked on her bedside table, her glass was half full. Her white nightdress was unbuttoned, the smell of whiskey was pungent in the room.

‘What was that man’s name? Rudkin, was it?’

She made a noise, a laugh perhaps, or a whimper. Her eyes did not appear to focus and when she spoke she did not directly address me. Nobody had trusted Doyle, she said.

‘Mr Lanigan says no provision has been made for the rebuilding of the house. Until I am twenty-one I cannot authorize it.’

‘The house, Willie?’

‘Kilneagh. I want to rebuild it.’

‘Ah, dear Kilneagh …’ She reached for her glass and drank a little. ‘Tins of peaches on the shelves, and newspaper in sheaves for wrapping. Cabbages and cauliflowers, probably even flowers—sweet-peas and bunches of asters. Children come into his shop and he may even give them toffee-apples for nothing.’

I could not help myself. My cheeks and forehead burned with the crossness I felt. I raised my voice.

‘Do you have to drink like this? For God’s sake, why can you not forget? Why can’t you even try?’

The moment after I had spoken it was hard to believe I had addressed her so, and yet I was glad I had. But she, as if I had spoken mildly, replied:

‘I sometimes have a toothache, Willie. I do really dislike the taste of this horrid whiskey, dear.’

I left her there, her voice still feebly rambling. I thought I maybe hated her. Why could I not tell her about my love for you? Why could I tell a butler and not her? Why had she never been a help to me? ‘Marianne?’ she would have said. ‘Now, who is Marianne?’

The following morning I caught the train to Fermoy. A room had been prepared for me in the orchard wing and as the first few days went by I gradually became used to the strangeness and familiarity of Kilneagh. At the same slow pace I began to learn a miller’s trade, every detail meticulously explained by Mr Derenzy. I found the work agreeable enough, but no day ever passed during which I did not long that you might be here with me, and one evening I confided my passion to Father Kilgarriff. It was then, as if he had waited for this suitable moment, that he told me about his unfrocking.

He had not loved the convent girl who had been sent to Chicago: it was she who had loved him. Unaware of that, he’d made a friend of her since she, more than anyone else in his Co. Limerick parish, shared his pacifist opinions. God’s greatest gift, he preached, was the life He entrusted to us: neither war nor revolution could be just since both permitted violence and casual death. The girl’s father, who vehemently detested the imperialism that had ruled in our island for so long, was a man of some note in the locality and retorted harshly to the discovery of his daughter’s love of a priest whom he regarded as heretical. Charges were trumped up, the girl dispatched, the priest brought low. ‘Ah well, it’s over now,’ was Father Kilgarriff’s single wry comment.

But I wondered if it was. I wondered if the girl was still infatuated in Chicago and I wondered if I myself would end up lonely and infatuated also. I climbed to the top of Haunt Hill, from where there was a view for many miles around, the curling river, the cottages of Lough spread out below, in the greater distance the town of Fermoy. Father Kilgarriff’s peace reigned at last in Ireland; I was back at Kilneagh; Wm Quinton it said on the sacks and the lorries, my name and my father’s and my grandfather’s. Yet none of it was any good unless I could share it with you.

‘I’d like to see Kilneagh again,’ Josephine had said, and came one Friday so that we might travel back together on the evening train. We walked together in the garden and the ruins, and in the kitchen of the orchard wing she was shy. She sat on the edge of a chair sipping at a cup of tea while Aunt Fitzeustace worriedly questioned her about my mother, and Aunt Pansy offered currant scones around. Father Kilgarriff said it was great to see her again. That day, for the first time, I noticed a tired look about him, as well as the thinness that hadn’t been there in the past. Mr Derenzy had told me he suffered sometimes from the bullet wounds in his chest.

Afterwards, making our way to the mill, Josephine said:

‘It’s all right here now, Willie.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Thanks be to God.’

She blessed herself. One hand slipped into a pocket of her coat and I knew she was fingering the beads of her rosary. ‘God’s good, Willie,’ she said.

In the mill-yard Johnny Lacy greeted her, smiling, saying she was looking tip-top. I went to the office for a moment and after that we returned to the orchard wing and were driven back to Lough in my aunts’ trap. Josephine didn’t say much and I could tell that her meeting with Johnny Lacy had been as ordinary as she had anticipated. We sat for a while in the kitchen of Sweeney’s public house and Mrs Sweeney gave us tea. There was a warm smell of bacon fat and chicken meal, and before we left to catch the train in Fermoy Johnny Lacy’s wife brought in her children for Josephine to see. ’It’s great,’ Mrs Sweeney said. ‘It’s great you’re back with us, Willie.’

It was nice that Josephine could be there like that, in the kitchen with those children and their mother, and that she could smile and laugh with them. I felt she had come back in order to forgive Johnny Lacy, or at least to reassure him that she was content. On the train I told her how I felt about you. She listened and then she said:

‘Don’t lose it, Willie.’

‘Lose it?’

‘The love you have. It’s like a gift, loving someone.’

‘But I don’t know if Marianne even likes me. It’s no good if she doesn’t.’

‘Oh, of course she does. Write to her, Willie. Please now.’

She spoke urgently and for a moment placed her hand on my arm. For all her contentment in the presence of Johnny Lacy and her smiles for his wife and children, there had been some sadness that had not reached the surface, a private, lonely sadness that made me think again of the girl banished to Chicago.

‘Promise me, Willie.’

And so I promised. I would write that very night; I would write simply and plainly, telling you I loved you. If you did not care for me I would understand, and bear as best I could the disappointment.

‘But she is fond of you, Willie. I could have told you that ages ago.’

We left the subject then, and Josephine spoke of my mother. Her voice was quiet and concerned, so sympathetic that I felt ashamed of my resentment: it was my mother who had been the victim among the three survivors of Kilneagh, and if whiskey helped to blunt the hurt it would seem to have a purpose. My mother had made an effort that Josephine had appreciated and I had not: it couldn’t have been easy to put on her red and black dress and walk with me down to the city, a smile clenched into place.

We entered the house and before the lamps were lit I had resolved that I would tell her about you, and how I had at last plucked up the courage to write to you. I would not mind when she could not remember who you were; I would tell her again in the morning before she’d had too much to drink. I called to her on the stairs, but in the moment before I entered her bedroom I knew that everything was different. I knew that my mother was dead.