William Trevor - Fools of Fortune

‘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.’