William Trevor - Fools of Fortune

Tidily, Imelda returned the jotter to its place. For some reason a line of the poem she liked came into her head and she carried it with her to the fields and down to the river. I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. She knew the poem by heart now. She was the best at poetry, Miss Garvey had said, and had told Teresa Shea to leave the room because she smirked. I hear it in the deep heart’s core,’ Imelda said aloud, lying down among the daisies on the river bank. She wondered what it had been like for the Blessed Imelda to experience the Sacred Host hovering above her while she knelt in prayer. She’d once asked Sister Rowan, who’d said that no ordinary mortal could know a thing like that. But it interested Imelda and she was curious.

She jumped from one stepping stone to another, crossing the water when it was shallow. She walked by the river for a while and then returned to the cobbled yard between the ruins and the orchard wing. Two geese wandered off towards the ruins and Imelda followed them. She told them they’d find no food among the stones and undergrowth. She shooed them back into the yard and then she ran into the kitchen.

Her mother was angry.

‘It’s horrible, Imelda. Eavesdropping’s horrible. No one likes that kind of thing.’

‘It’s only when there’s nothing to do.’

‘You can bring the dogs for a walk. I often see you going for a walk.’

‘I go to the mill. Or down to the river.’

‘Well, then.’

‘Sometimes it’s boring.’

‘I don’t want you ever, ever again to listen at doors. Promise me now, Imelda.’

Imelda promised, since promises were easy. They were in the dining-room because Philomena was in the kitchen and Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace in the sitting-room. The door was closed.

‘You like it at the convent, don’t you, Imelda? Teresa Shea can’t help herself and after all everyone else is nice to you. All the nuns are, aren’t they?’

Imelda did not speak. She watched a fly on the wax fruit in the centre of the table. How disappointed it would be, she thought, when it discovered that the fruit had no juice. Yes, everyone was nice to her, she agreed.

‘And everyone at Kilneagh’s nice to you. No one could be nicer than Aunt Pansy. And so’s Aunt Fitzeustace and Philomena, and Father Kilgarriff. So is Mr Derenzy when he comes.’

The fly left the fruit and circled the glass of the lamp on the sideboard. It settled on the stopper of a decanter where another fly already was. The stopper of the! decanter was cracked, a deep, discoloured fissure that spoilt its appearance.

‘Yes,’ Imelda said.

‘Would you rather not five at Kilneagh, Imelda?’

Both flies ceased their interest in the decanter. One disappeared into the shadows of the ceiling, the other crept along the mahogany surface of the sideboard. The gondola in the green picture of Venice seemed, just for an instant, to give the slightest of shivers, as if about to begin its journey. But the figures outside the church by the bridge remained motionless. Imelda said, not looking at her mother: ‘Is he really going to come back?’

‘One day he will.’

‘Sometimes I think it could be all a mistake about what happened. Sometimes I think maybe everyone is wrong.’

‘Mistake?’

‘Like it mightn’t be true that Cuchulainn sent the bodies in a chariot to his enemy. Like it mightn’t be true about the Mitchels-town Martyrs or that priest in Youghal.’

‘But it is true, Imelda,’ her mother said gently. ‘We mustn’t pretend it isn’t.’

Again it seemed to Imelda that the gondola moved very slightly and this time she could have sworn that one of the figures outside the church raised a hand.

‘That lady thought I shouldn’t have been given life.’

‘What lady? What on earth are you talking about, Imelda?’

‘You told me about her: Miss Halliwell.’

‘But I never said anything about—’

‘There is a letter in Aunt Fitzeustace’s writing-desk.’

‘You mean you opened that writing-desk? Imelda, you shouldn’t have done that. Don’t you see you shouldn’t? It’s like listening at doors. It’s horrible. It’s a dreadful thing to read other people’s letters.’

‘I know.’

Philomena’s voice called from the back door, attracting the attention of the hens. It reminded Imelda of how, listening to her mother telling her about the time her parents had come to Kilneagh to persuade her to return to England, she had imagined Philomena passing by the French windows with a raincoat thrown over her head. She repeated that to her mother now, hoping to please her because she was still angry, but her mother regarded her with surprise. As far as she could remember, she said, Philomena had not passed by the windows on that occasion.

‘Oh, I think she did,’ Imelda contradicted. ‘I’m sure she did.’

Greater bewilderment gathered in her mother’s face. Imelda said that Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy had come in from their afternoon outing with the dogs, Aunt Fitzeustace with a spongecake on a plate. Father Kilgarriff had entered the sitting-room also.

‘He put a bit of turf on the fire and blew it with the bellows. He said a day like that would drive the damp into your bones.’

She smiled at her mother, her smile suggesting that there had been no difficulty in the conversation they’d had. It was nicer if they could agree that there had been no difficulty, if they could forget any awkwardness. But her mother didn’t appear to be aware of that. She continued to frown for a moment and then went on with the conversation as it had been. Imelda had to promise all over again that she would not eavesdrop and would not go poking in Aunt Fitzeustace’s writing-desk. She was glad at least that the conversation had not obliged her to reveal that she’d also read the jotter diaries.

In bed that night Imelda thought about the conversation, wishing it had ended in a different manner. She didn’t quite know how it might have ended, only that everything would not have been quite such a jumble. Then she thought about the scarlet drawing-room and the school-books laid out upon the table, and the fair-haired boy, just the same age as she was, being bad at Latin. The scent of sweet-peas wafted in from the garden and the next thing was she was in the garden herself, watching Tim Paddy while he raked the gravel.

It is considered that a butcher’s knife was most likely to have been the type of weapon employed.

Imelda replaced the neatly cut-out piece of paper in the secret drawer and snapped the drawer back into place. In the end it hadn’t really turned out to be very secret: all you had to do was to run your fingers along the little pillar.

Soundlessly she closed the flap of the writing-desk and pushed in the two little supports. The head was partially hacked from the neck, the body stabbed in seventeen places.

‘The head,’ Imelda said aloud, standing with her back to the writing-desk and leaning against it. She imagined the head, its weight tearing the flesh that still attached it to the body. She imagined the eyes and the mouth, and the body twitching the way she’d seen a turkey’s once, for nearly a minute after death.

4

‘Hullo, Imelda,’ Mr Derenzy said.

‘Hullo, Imelda,’ Johnny Lacy said.

She wondered if she liked the mill. She wondered if she liked the green-faced clock or the sound of water, or the autumn russet of the creeper that covered the stone. She thought she didn’t. Abruptly she thought that none of it was nice.

‘We’re busy today, Imelda,’ Johnny Lacy said. ‘Or else I’d tell you a story.’

‘Hurry up now, Johnny,’ Mr Derenzy called.

She sat for a while on the cobbles of the yard, her thin legs stuck out in front of her. ‘Thin shanks,’ Teresa Shea called them. Teresa Shea said they’d never stop getting longer, but Aunt Pansy dismissed that as nonsense. ‘You’ll grow up beautiful, Imelda,’ she’d promised. ‘There’s no doubt about that.’