William Trevor - Fools of Fortune

Funny the way her mother said it so often: one day he will, they only had to wait. Funny the way she wrote things down in an old jotter so’s you could hardly read it. Imelda clambered to her feet and went to talk to Mr Derenzy in the office.

‘Do you like the mill?’ she asked him. ‘D’you think it’s nice?’

‘Oh, I dare say I’m well enough used to the place.’

‘Will it always be here, Mr Derenzy?’

‘I’d say it would be.’

She walked through the birch wood and the fields. It was best to go up to the tree and lean against it like she had the day before yesterday. Best to put her arms around it because it wasn’t its fault; horrid to blame a poor old oak tree, silly being frightened of it. ‘Silly-billy Quinton,’ Teresa Shea used to say, but she hadn’t said it for ages now.

She sat down and closed her eyes and when he stepped off the bus at Driscoll’s she felt like she did when she made herself lean against the tree. ‘Imelda,’ he said. ‘What a lovely name!’ And she told him about the Blessed Imelda and how the Host had come to her. He smiled and stroked her hair.

She jumped up and ran by the edge of the field she was in. Sometimes when she ran what she imagined fell to pieces, shattering into fragments. But this time that didn’t happen. He went on stroking her hair and he told her how he’d stood in a shop where there was dust everywhere, a shop like the pawnbroker’s at the bottom of the steep hill in Cork. An old woman with bad eyes lifted three knives tied together from the shop window, and he undid the hairy string. He had to go to a place like that, he explained: he was no more than a shadow for all the half-blind old woman knew.

Imelda climbed a stone wall and lay on the grass on the other side of it, too breathless to go on running. On the deck of the ship there were people who had been at a wedding, people singing, with confetti on their clothes. A child in white satin had chocolate marks around her mouth, two men danced and drank from bottles. All the time on the journey he kept feeling the blade of the knife in his pocket.

‘And evening,’ Imelda whispered to herself, running again through the fields, ‘full of the linnet’s wings.’ Sometimes it helped when she said the poetry. She crouched in a corner of the ruins, hidden by the nettles that had grown. ‘And noon a purple glow,’ she whispered.

Water dripped beside her, and Imelda watched it falling on to stones and plaster. She searched in her mind for the poetry but she could not remember the order of the words. She closed her eyes and in the room above the vegetable shop blood spurted in a torrent, splashing on to the wallpaper that was torn and hung loosely down. The blood was sticky, running over the backs of her hands and splashing on to her hair. It soaked through her clothes, warm when it reached her skin.

Imelda pressed her face into the nettles and did not feel their stinging. She pressed her fists into her ears. She closed her eyes as tightly as she could.

But nothing went away.

The screaming of the children began, and the torment of the flames on their flesh. The dogs were laid out dead in the yard, and the body of the man in the teddy-bear dressing-gown lay smouldering on the stairs. The blood kept running on her hands, and was tacky in her hair.

In the classroom Miss Garvey began to hook up her skirt, for the lesson was almost over. ‘On Thursday we’ll take a look at “The Ballad of Father Gilligan”,’ she said.

She asked for the blackboard to be cleaned and then, to her astonishment, she saw that Imelda Quinton had raised both her arms in front of her and was slowly moving away from the desk she shared with Lottie Reilly, as if walking in her sleep. With hesitant steps, occasionally stumbling, the child walked to a corner of the classroom. She huddled herself into it, crouching on the floor, pressed hard against the two walls that met there. She made a whimpering sound and then was silent.

WILLIE

I received a telegram which simply said, Josephine is dying. Hospital of St Bemadette , it was signed. The nun who sent the message must have known it wouldn’t be necessary to be more precise, and she was right: when I tried to recall Josephine’s other name I could not.

I went immediately when the telegram came. I packed a small white suitcase and from Sansepolcro, where I lived at that time, I took the Arezzo bus, not even pausing to look up the trains from Arezzo to Pisa. ‘This is Josephine’: my mother had stepped ahead of her through the French windows of the morning-room, on to the grass.

The bus moved slowly through sunshine and the soft spring landscape of Umbria. The first green shoots decorated the vines on either side of the road; new growth freshened the olive branches. It seemed preposterous to be leaving behind my Canary roses, my irises and wistaria, I who was so lost in the world of Bellini and Ghirlandaio. Yet even more urgently as I progressed on it I wanted to make the journey.

At Pisa the airport was on strike. I took the Rome Express to Paris and on it at t pasta in brodo and scallopine, staring out at orange-tiled roofs and ochre walls. I drank a litre of Brolio and ordered grappa with my coffee. She would be humble in old age, I thought, and felt ashamed that I did not know her other name. I knew nothing of her life since last I’d seen her, so very long ago, how she had spent it, where she had been. I had not said good-bye, which perhaps was why I so determinedly made the journey now.

On the plane the pretty stewardess was attentive, smart in her green uniform. Her voice reminded me of Ireland. ‘Yes please,’ I said. ‘Yes, I think a little whiskey.’ She smiled a soothing, airline smile. ‘Jameson?’ she murmured, caressing me with the familiar name.

In Cork there was a wait before a taxi was available. I drank more whiskey, for how could I soberly arrive at a strange hospital, in this city again after so long?

‘Ah, the traffic’s shocking these days,’ the taxi-driver said. ‘Shocking altogether.’ I had asked him to be as quick about the journey as he could. ‘I understand,’ he replied, and I could feel him guessing what was at stake, since we were going to a hospital. Involuntarily he crossed himself.

‘I haven’t been to Cork for forty years,’ I said.

‘You’d find it changed, sir.’

‘I used to live here.’

‘Is that so, sir? You don’t sound like a Corkman. I took you for a stranger, sir.’

‘I’ve become a stranger.’

‘It wasn’t much of a place, I’d say, forty years ago?’

‘I remember it as thriving. The docks were always busy.’

‘It’s thriving now all right. The Yanks love Cork.’

‘I can imagine that.’

‘There’s a few, sir, put off by the trouble up in the North. There’s a confusion that we might be affected down here. But there’s not so many like that.’

‘I’ve read about the trouble.’

‘Where’re you living now, sir?’

‘In a town called Sansepolcro. In Italy.’

‘I was never in Italy.’

The hospital was of grey, unpainted concrete, dominated by a white cross. In a car-park grotto there was a statue of the Virgin, with flowers in jam-jars on a ledge by her feet. An old woman knelt in prayer.

‘Good luck so, sir,’ the taxi-driver said as I paid him, and I carried my white suitcase through swing-doors and spoke to a nun at a reception desk. The surface beneath my feet was highly polished parquet that stretched away to other swing-doors and beyond them, becoming a corridor. The reception area was enormous, with chairs against cream-coloured walls, and a cross on the wall above the nun’s desk.

‘Please wait a moment,’ she said, smiling with practised, hospital sensitivity: a consoling or a joyful smile, you could take it as circumstances dictated. ‘Take a seat now till I find out.’