William Trevor - Fools of Fortune

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