William Trevor - Fools of Fortune

‘Well then, count the mulberry trees,’ Aunt Fitzeustace had also adjured. ‘Start in the west corner, close your eyes and each tree will come into your mind.’ But Aunt Pansy advised that the best thing was just to think of something nice. Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace were so different that when she was younger Imelda had not guessed they were sisters: it was her mother who had explained to her that they were. Aunt Pansy was forever passing the jam and butter to Father Kilgarriff or to Imelda’s mother or to her sister. She was forever slipping away from the dining-table to pick up Philomena’s frilled cap when it fell to the floor or on to the roast meat on the sideboard. Aunt Fitzeustace never noticed such things. Her lips were tobacco-stained, her dog’s head tie-pin was often upside down, and the grey hair beneath her old tweed hat was untidily grasped together. She cut the grass and manured the shrubs, and had a passion for looking after the motor-car, hosing it down or polishing the upholstery and the paintwork.

‘Thirteen,’ Imelda said, and could not continue. There was the mulberry tree that was shaped like a crow and the lopsided one and the one that never bore fruit. There was the one with its roots coming out of the ground and the one with sour berries; there was the ragged one, like something tattered in the wind, and the nine that were all the same, in a row down the side of the orchard. But it was too difficult to try to see the others.

Imelda Quintan is my name, Ireland is my nation. A burnt house is my dwelling place, Heaven’s my destination. At the new convent in Lough, a cement building with a white statue of the Virgin Mary in front of it, there had been a craze for the rhyme. She had written it on the inside of the cover of her transcription book, the words sloping neatly on the orange surface. ‘Heaven?’ Teresa Shea had said. ‘You’ll not be going to heaven, Imelda Quinton. How could you?’ Teresa Shea was big and awkward and stupid, well known at the convent for the tartness of her tongue: Sister Mulcahy said to take no notice.

Imelda tried not to think about Teresa Shea. Successfully, she pushed the girl’s face out of her mind and saw instead the kite soaring in the sky and everyone gazing up at it. In time she slept.

She had a nightmare and her mother came to comfort her. It was the same nightmare as always, the children and the flames. ‘Now, now, now, Imelda,’ her mother comforted. ‘Shh now, pet.’

Long multiplication was taught. Imelda found it difficult and was grateful when the bell rang. The lay teacher, Miss Garvey, hooked up her skirt, for in search of relief it was her habit to loosen it at the beginning of each lesson. Chattering began in the classroom, and fell away to nothing as the girls strapped their satchels and left the convent. Eating liquorice outside Mrs Driscoll’s shop when school was over, Teresa Shea remarked:

‘There’s people says you shouldn’t be at the convent, Imelda.’

‘Don’t be unpleasant, Teresa,’ another girl said.

‘I’m not being unpleasant.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be in the convent?’ Imelda asked.

‘Because you’re not a Catholic. Imelda Quinton! God, the nerve of that!’

Teresa Shea laughed and went away, banging her satchel against her legs. The worst thing she’d ever said was to tell little Maevie Cullen that her mother had died on the way to America, where she’d gone to visit an uncle. In fact, it had been true.

‘Take no notice of her,’ the girl who’d called her unpleasant said.

But as Imelda walked through the village the difficulties with her long multiplication homework, which she’d been anticipating all day, were overshadowed by what had been said. She loved going to the convent and hated it when anything spoiled it for her. She had watched the convent being built, and she had always known she would go there because the Protestant school in the village no longer existed. Everyone was kind to her, the Reverend Mother and Sister Mulcahy and Sister Hennessy, Miss Garvey and the lay sisters. During prayers and Catechism she practised the piano or watched Sister Rowan making bread in the kitchen. Nobody except Teresa Shea minded that she was different because she wasn’t a Catholic.

She didn’t mind being different herself, not having a First Communion dress, nor rosary beads, not being able to walk in the Corpus Christi procession in Fermoy. She asked forgiveness if she stepped on a snail because Sister Mulcahy had once explained that a snail was just as much God’s creature as anything else was. But Imelda knew that a Protestant asking forgiveness, and never being required to say Hail Marys as a penance, was different also. ‘Proddy-woddy green-guts,’ Teresa Shea had whispered on Imelda’s first day at the convent, and once she’d muttered beneath a laugh that Aunt Fitzeustace was peculiar, and had muttered something also about Father Kilgarriff. Imelda knew that strictly speaking he should not be called Father Kilgarriff since he had not been a priest for ages. But that didn’t seem important and she didn’t consider Aunt Fitzeustace peculiar. ‘Heretics,’ Teresa Shea muttered beneath her laugh. ‘Crowd of bloody heretics.’

Her mother tried to explain. She said that for ever so long, for centuries, the Catholics had been prevented from practising their faith: no wonder there were people like Teresa Shea now. Father Kilgarriff told her about Daniel O’Connell, who had achieved religious freedom for the Catholics without resort to the gun or the sword. Her mother talked about the Mitchelstown Martyrs and the skirmish there had been at Cappoquin in 1915. Once when they were all out for a drive in the car they passed the place where a famous revolutionary had been shot in an ambush: Michael Collins he’d been called. When they went to the seaside at Youghal her mother told her about the priest who had been executed there in 1602 for refusing to renounce his faith. She told her about the English major who had wished to rest his horses at Kilneagh but had been ordered to go away. Her mother said that the revolutionary who’d been killed in the ambush used to visit Kilneagh and that the Quintons had given him money for his revolutionary cause. Her mother had shown her the tree the other man had been hanged from, the man whose tongue was cut out because of his traitorous talk. It was good to see the ivy growing over imperial Ireland, her mother used to say, and on their drives would point at ivied ruins like Kilneagh’s and sometimes at houses that were still intact but had become training schools for priests or insane asylums. The pacific Daniel O’Connell was not her mother’s hero: she spoke instead of Ireland’s fighting men, of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell who centuries ago had fled into exile, as the survivors of Ireland’s lost battles had always fled. Imelda’s own father had to remain in a foreign country, unable to return to his mill, and often Imelda tried to imagine him, wondering if he was like the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell. The nuns at the convent spoke of him as a hero, even as somebody from a legend, Finn Mac Cool or the warrior Cuchulainn. ‘You’re my special Imelda,’ Sister Rowan had announced when Imelda first watched her making bread, and she knew that had been said because of her father. ‘He will never be forgotten,’ Sister Mulcahy had assured her. ‘Your father will never be forgotten, Imelda, in Lough or in Fermoy, in all County Cork. He is every day in our prayers. Our Lady will intercede.’

There was a photograph of her father in her mother’s bedroom, standing among rows of other boys. It was hard to make out what he looked like, except that his hair was light-coloured, as her own was. He was smiling a little in the photograph, but when she tried to look more closely at his face it became misty. ‘Teresa Shea’s only jealous,’ a girl at the convent had said. ‘A father like you have.’