William Trevor - Fools of Fortune

‘The income would not cease,’ Mr Lanigan was saying when Imelda listened at the sitting-room door, ‘if you returned to England, Marianne.’

Her mother said something strange: that when you looked at the map Ireland and England seemed like lovers. ‘Don’t you think so, Mr Lanigan? Does the map remind you curiously of an embrace? A most extraordinary embrace to throw up all this.’

‘Embrace?’

‘You think I’m extravagant in my Irish fancies? Father Kilgarriff thinks so, and the others too. Yet I am part of all this now. I cannot help my fervour.’

Imelda moved away from the sitting-room door. In the kitchen she drank some water and played for a moment with the terriers and a sheepdog. She thought of the Blessed Imelda because Mr Lanigan had put her in mind of her namesake. She had told Sister Rowan about the miracle of the Sacred Host and Sister Rowan had listened attentively but had revealed in the end that every Irish nun was familiar with the details of the marvel. In the kitchen Imelda imagined the Host as a wispy outline, no more than a shred of mist. Then she forgot about it and copied out a headline: Insects have neither lungs nor gills. Just as she’d finished she heard the voices of Mr Lanigan and her mother in the hall.

‘A town called Puntarenas,’ Mr Lanigan said, but later when Imelda looked in her atlas for somewhere that sounded like that she was not successful. She knew the conversation had turned to the subject of her father and guessed this town was where he lived. ‘I’d say the old Jerries have given him the works by now,’ Teresa Shea had ages ago suggested, with a smirk. Imelda had wondered about that, but now she wondered about the town that had been mentioned. She didn’t want to ask her mother because her mother would know she’d been listening. She asked Aunt Pansy and Philomena but they said they’d never heard of anywhere that sounded like that. So in the end she did ask her mother, ready to explain that she had overheard by accident, which in a way was true. Her mother didn’t reply. Instead she suggested a walk, and at the end of it she pointed at the tree the man had been hanged from, as though her answer lay in that.

‘Just an ordinary tree, Imelda. You could pass it by and not know a thing.’

After the hanging there had been the fire and years later, Imelda’s mother had explained, there had been the woman who had taken her life in Cork. Imelda had once been shown the house, at the top of the very steep hill. A dentist lived there now: a brass plate outside the hall door said so.

‘You can pass by anything and not know, Imelda. I never knew when I walked in the gardens of that great house in England that a girl had gone from there to Kilneagh. She pleaded with her family, but what was it to them that ignorant peasants were dying in another country? There has been too much wretched death in Ireland.’

They walked across the fields together and climbed up Haunt Hiil, and her mother told her about how she’d come to Ireland with a single suitcase and stayed in a boarding house she’d been told about by a woman on the street. On another occasion, climbing the hill, her mother said:

‘Your father and I never had a chance to get married. That is something you must know, Imelda.’

Her mother went on talking, about a scene that had taken place in the sitting-room of the orchard wing: how her parents had come to take her back to England. ‘Arrangements had been made for you to be born in a house in Clapham, which is a place in London where a cousin of my father lived. You would have been born and then left with this woman and her husband, and I would have returned to Woodcombe Rectory, as though nothing much had happened.’

Imelda frowned, in bewilderment and surprise. ‘I would not be at Kilneagh?’

‘These people in Clapham would have brought you up as their daughter.’

Imelda thought about this visit to Kilneagh of her mother’s parents, and the fruitless persuading that had taken place in the gaunt, square sitting-room. A light rain had been falling, she imagined, and outside the French windows the hens had been pecking among the gnarled trees of the mulberry orchard. ‘We have made firm arrangements,’ the clergyman announced, ‘for the child to be born in Clapham.’ And Imelda’s mother replied by speaking of Irish martyrs and Irish battles, and of the Easter Rising that years ago had taken place. Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy passed by the windows, bringing the dogs back from their afternoon walk. And then Philomena was in the orchard with a waterproof coat thrown over her head, calling out to the hens. ‘No one could live here!’ the clergyman’s wife cried in Imelda’s imagination. ‘This is a terrible place.’

Imelda smiled although her face remained serious. She was aware that her mother’s voice was continuing about something else: she did not listen. ‘Now, time for tea,’ she made Aunt Fitzeustace say on that rainy afternoon, entering the sitting-room with a sponge-cake on a plate, with Aunt Pansy and Father Kilgarriff and all the dogs behind her.

‘An old colonel he was,’ her mother’s voice was saying. ‘In India.’

They had reached the shale near the summit of the hill. They scrambled over it, conversation difficult for a while. At the top Imelda said:

‘India?’

‘If those two old sticks hadn’t been anxious my mother and I wouldn’t ever have come to Ireland. If they hadn’t written that letter your father and I would never have met, and neither you nor I would be in Kilneagh now.’

‘Was he nice, the colonel?’

‘He was very tall, straight as a die. Oh yes, I always think of them as nice.’

Imelda imagined the tall old colonel sitting down in the Indian heat, in a little Indian pavilion, to write the anxious letter.

‘What I mean, Imelda, is that’s how things happen. The most important things of all happen by chance.’

Imelda nodded. ‘Say we are distinctly worried,’ she made the tall man’s wife say. ‘Tell them to go forthwith to Cork.’ Aunt Pansy sometimes said she was distinctly worried. ‘I’ll do that forthwith,’ Mr Derenzy had promised last Sunday, assuring Aunt Fitzeustace about the sharpening of the blades of her mowing machine. In the pavilion a turbaned Indian waved a palm over the two old people to keep them cool and to drive away the mosquitoes.

‘No, I must say it, Marianne,’ Father Kilgarriff insisted quietly, but with some anger in his voice.

Imelda’s mother did not reply. They were in the sitting-room with one of the French windows open. In the mulberry orchard Imelda listened, which was a habit she’d got into.

‘She’s my child after all, Father.’

‘There is bitterness in what you say to her.’

‘How could there not be bitterness? I cannot be good like you are, Father. You forgive that bishop who deprived you of your vocation. You forgive that man who came here with his thugs and his petrol cans.’

‘That man is dead. In his lifetime I did not forgive him.’

‘And do you forgive Willie, Father?’

‘That is the saddest thing in all my life.’

‘Do you know, my parents have not written me a single word since the day they came here? They have turned their back on me, and do not wish ever even to think of me.’

‘You broke your parents’ hearts, Marianne. There is that too, you know.’

‘I loved my parents, Father.’

‘I know, Marianne. And was there anyone, in this house or outside it, who did not urge you to return to England with them?’

‘To have my child brought up as someone else’s? To have forgotten her existence? To have waited in that rectory until some widower should come along and have me as his housekeeper? I would rather have ended in a work-house.’