William Trevor - Fools of Fortune

‘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.