William Trevor: Fools of Fortune

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

I shook my head.

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

‘I don’t think I have, Father.’

‘Oh, Willie, Willie.’

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

‘Does agricola mean farmer, Father?’

‘You’re getting it now, Willie.’

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

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

‘I see, Father.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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