William Trevor: Fools of Fortune

That spring afternoon I loitered in the part of the mill where the men were working, as I often did. Mr Derenzy hurried in twice with invoices, his clerkly Protestant voice pitched high above the rush of water and machinery. It wasn’t a busy time of year. The chutes were being repaired, sacks sorted out. Johnny Lacy and the man whose moustache was like a hedge were working a scales, and for half an hour or so I moved the weights for them. Then I began to walk back to the house, not waiting for my father because he wouldn’t be ready until much later. There were Mr Derenzy’s figures to look through and then he would answer any letters that had come, the labradors sprawled by his feet in front of the fire. He would walk about the mill, having a word with the men: all of it took time and usually I preferred to return home on my own, running down the slope of the pasture to the gate in the rhododendron shrubbery, my feet crunching a moment later on the gravel that was spread in a semicircle around the house. I still think of approaching Kilneagh like that. The beech-lined avenue with the tall white-painted iron gates at the end of it was as impressive as my father ever claimed, but in my childhood I liked best of all the walk through the birch wood and the fields.

As I entered the house I was still thinking about the school in the Dublin mountains. My father’s good-natured efforts to ease me into its traditions had become a source of mild terror and I regularly lay awake at night wondering about being savaged with a bamboo cane. ‘Ah, no, no,’ I would make Dr Hogan from Fermoy pronounce. ‘No, Mr Quinton, I’d say Willie’s too delicate for a place like that.’ But I also knew that my delicate appearance was misleading. ‘Healthy as a nut,’ Dr Hogan had stated more than once.

‘We didn’t see that tinker,’ Deirdre remarked at teatime. ‘Did you see the poor old fellow, Willie?’

I shook my head, my glumness not quite slipping away, as usually it did when I was no longer alone. My father’s school trunk would be taken from the attic, where he had told me it still was. Our initials were the same: we could have the white paint that marked them freshened up, he had said, and the brass lock cleaned.

‘No, I didn’t see him,’ I replied.

We sat, spaced far apart, around the big mahogany dining-table that was always covered at teatime with a white linen tablecloth. There were egg sandwiches, and brown bread and soda bread and bread with raisins in it. There were scones that were still hot, and coffee cake. My mother asked me if everything had been all right at the mill. I said it had, and she told me about their ride through the bluebell spinney near Haunt Hill, over country that had once been Quinton country, home by the old quarry. Sometimes I went on that ride myself, on Geraldine’s pony, Boy.

‘The new maid’s called Josephine,’ my mother said, cutting the coffee cake. ‘Tim Paddy’s gone to Fermoy for her.’

‘Was Kitty sacked because she broke the chrysanthemum vase?’ Geraldine enquired.

‘Well, actually, Kitty’s getting married.’ ‘I told you,’ Deirdre cried, dramatically flashing her eyes, a habit that moments of triumph brought out in both my sisters.

‘Oh, I know she’s marrying that beery fellow.’ Geraldine disdainfully sniffed. ‘I only wish she wouldn’t.’

‘I don’t think we should call him beery,’ my mother protested. ‘A red complexion doesn’t always mean a person drinks too much.’

‘Mrs Flynn says he drinks like a bottle. She says he’ll lead Kitty a right old dance. Actually, I’m never going to marry anyone.’

‘Will Kitty and the beery fellow have a honeymoon?’ Deirdre asked, and Geraldine said she could just imagine them, drinking like bottles on a strand somewhere. Pretending they were unable to control their laughter, they pressed their fists against their mouths until my mother said that was enough now.

When the giggling had subsided and each of us had eaten the single slice of coffee cake we were allowed, Geraldine asked me what Mr Derenzy had said when I’d seen him, for the utterances of Mr Derenzy were of great interest to my sisters.

‘Only “good afternoon”.’

‘Did he ask after Aunt Pansy?’

‘He never does.’

‘Did he offer you a pinch of snuff?’

‘No, not today.’

‘I wish he’d marry Aunt Pansy and come and live in the house. Wouldn’t it be lovely, having Mr Derenzy walking about the garden?’

‘If I had to marry anyone,’ Deirdre said, ‘I’d marry Mr Derenzy.’

‘Oh, so would I.’

Soon after that my sisters went off to the stables and my mother said she’d help me with my homework, if I should need any help. I said I would because I enjoyed it when we sat together at the oval table in the drawing-room, working out the cost of five dozen clothes-pegs at three-farthings each, or learning about the continental shelf.

That day we investigated the conflict which Father Kilgarriff considered so important, the Irish victory which the clever English had later turned into defeat. ‘ August 15, 1598 ,’ I read aloud. ‘Sir Henry Bagenal, marching out of Newry, was defeated on the River Blackwater by Hugh O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell. The victory was a total one, and the disaffected throughout the land everywhere took up arms.’

In a moment we put the history book aside and my mother spoke of the long English occupation which had succeeded that famous battle, and of how advantage was at present being taken, as it had been taken in the past, of England’s foreign war, even though Irish soldiers were helping to win it. ‘I wish the rising had succeeded that Easter,’ she said. ‘The whole thing would be over by now.’

But at some point while she was speaking my mind had drifted away, to the school in the Dublin mountains. I knew that when the moment came to mention it to her my mother would be sympathetic. It was she who really made the decisions, she who was more in touch with things. She spoke French and German, she understood the intricacies of mathematics: far more than my father, she would appreciate that Father Kilgarriff’s teaching was perfectly adequate, that boarding-school was quite unnecessary.

‘Well, that Josephine’ll be here.’ She smiled at me as she stood up, lightening the mood which the talk of war and revolution had inspired in her and which my gloomy face no doubt suggested she had inspired in me. ‘One of these days it’ll all be all right,’ she added.

I puzzled my way through algebraic equations and pages of tedious fact about natural resources in Lancashire. I learnt part of ‘The Deserted Village’, and then I took my books and the two inkwells from the oval table and placed them in a drawer of the big corner cupboard with my pens and pencils and blotting paper. My father insisted that all signs of my lessons should be removed from the drawing-room by the evening of every day.

I made my way to the cobbled yard between the two wings at the back of the house, over which Tim Paddy was brushing water. He was smoking a Wild Woodbine cigarette and as a greeting he slanted his head at me in a way he had. It was pleasant in the yard or the big old dairy at that time of day, everything clean again after the milking of the cows, the buckets laid out, upside down in a row, hens and ducks waiting in the doorway for Tim Paddy to finish. Sometimes he would lean on his brush handle and his ferrety face would bristle with excitement as he told me how he intended to enlist in the Munster Fusiliers the very minute he was old enough. He had heard talk in the village of adventure and companionship in foreign parts, of cities rich with wine and scented women. ‘You’re the biggest eejit this side of Cork,’ his old father used snappishly to grumble at him. ‘Can’t you stay where you are and not go looking for destruction?’ But he might be washing the cobbles of our yard for ever, Tim Paddy pointed out, while the whole world passed him by.