William Trevor: Fools of Fortune

I sat among other people, all of them silent, men and women of different ages, two small children. The nun spoke into a telephone but I couldn’t hear what she said. The man beside me took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and then remembered there were signs requesting you not to smoke.

‘Please come with me,’ another nun said, and I followed her through the second set of doors, down the long corridor.

‘I’m not too late, Sister?’

‘No, you’re not too late.’

Josephine was in a dusky room with rosary beads on the table close to her. She was propped up on pillows with her eyes closed, a crucifix on the wall above her. A young nun sat by her bed.

‘I’ll leave you with Sister Power,’ the nun who’d brought me whispered, and Sister Power rose from the bedside. Without making a sound except for the rustle of her habit she crossed the room to where I was standing and led me out into the corridor again. We stood a foot or two from the door, speaking in murmurs.

‘She was brought in a week ago,’ she said. ‘They thought at St Fina’s she might have pneumonia and would need our care.’

‘And has she?’

‘No, just a little cold. But she’s sinking all the time. I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to ask you to do something. It could upset her when she wakes up if you smell of drink. I’m going to ask you to take a mouth-wash.’

She returned to her duty at the bedside, and I accompanied another nun to a small room where medicines were kept. ‘Don’t mind,’ she said, as if what was happening was quite usual.

I washed my mouth out and spat into a basin, and then drank some water. When Josephine came into the dining-room at Kilneagh to clear away the dinner dishes no one stopped talking, no matter what was being said. First thing every morning she lit the range. After that there was the fire in the drawing-room and then the one in the breakfast-room.

‘Thank you,’ the nun said, and led me back to where Josephine was propped up. I sat down and for the first time I examined her face. All the prettiness had gone. It was a thin face, thinner and more wrinkled than my own, lifeless because her eyes were still closed. The grey hair was scanty, brown blotches marked the skin of the forehead. But on the white candlewick bedspread her hands were not as I remembered them: the skin was marked with elderly freckles also, but the rawness caused by work had gone.

‘Well,’ she said, her eyes abruptly opening. ‘Well.’

Behind a glaze of weariness the same softness lurked in the depths of them. Her fingers twitched on the candlewick, her lips slightly parted.

‘You have a visitor, Josephine.’

The eyes closed, and after a moment opened again. They stared ahead of her, between the nun and myself, at the blank wall opposite her bed.

‘A visitor,’ Sister Power repeated, making her nun’s gesture in my direction.

‘Kilneagh,’ Josephine said. Tears oozed from the corners of her eyes. ‘Dear Mary, console them,’ she whispered.

Sister Power placed the rosary beads between the bent fingers, but Josephine didn’t notice. ‘Console them everywhere,’ she said. ‘Console them.’

Her eyes closed again.

‘She’s asleep,’ Sister Power said.

She pressed a bell beside the bed and after a minute or so another nun came in. Sister Power asked her to take her place by the bedside and then nodded to me. I followed her down the corridor to an office that had another crucifix in it, small and black, hanging between two windows. There was a picture of the Sacred Heart as well, and a plaster image of the Virgin.

‘I’m going to have some coffee myself,’ Sister Power said, plugging in an electric kettle. ‘I hope we did right with that telegram?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Would you like some coffee yourself?’

‘Yes, I would please.’

She opened a cupboard and took a tin containing biscuits from it. She placed blue cups and saucers on the desk, among papers and wire trays. She found sugar and a tin of instant milk in the cupboard also.

‘We didn’t know to send for you or not. She mentioned you repeatedly one day, all day long, and then they discovered your address from the solicitors. Italy must be lovely, is it?’

‘I’m fond of it.’

‘I don’t think she was unhappy at St Fina’s. They speak of her with great affection. They ring up every day now that she’s here.’

‘St Fina’s?’

‘The place she worked. An institution for old nuns.’

The kettle boiled. In silence Sister Power made the instant coffee. She didn’t seem to mind these silences that occurred. She said:

‘She hardly ever ceased to pray towards the end. She asks the same thing all the time: that the survivors may be comforted in their mourning. She requests God’s word in Ireland.’

I did not say anything. I was offered another biscuit but did not accept one. Sister Power rose and I followed her back to the room where the old woman was dying.

‘Josephine,’ I said, as softly as I could.

‘ “Bring out a drink to those men,” your father said. He never forgot the needs of anyone.’

‘Yes, he was kind.’

‘ “I want a blackness,” your mother said. All the wallpaper I put up for her she didn’t care about. The new house meant nothing to her.’

Her eyes closed and opened at once again. ‘Imelda,’ she said. ‘The Blessed Imelda.’ She died just after she spoke, the rosary beads idle in her hands.

A stout grey-haired priest murmured the burial words with a display of feeling, and I guessed he must have known Josephine and have felt affection for her humility and her piety. Nuns from St Fina’s stood in a bunch, their lips moving in a whisper when they were required to. As soon as the little crowd eventually began to disperse two gravediggers appeared with shovels.

‘Excuse me,’ the priest said, behind me somewhere. I turned and waited for him. ‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘You’ve come from Italy.’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s at peace now.’

‘Yes, she is.’

He walked with me. The wind blew his surplice about. It was bitterly cold that day.

‘You could safely remain in Ireland, sir. Enough years have passed.’

‘Is that why she sent for me?’

‘No one would bother with you now. If you’ll forgive me, Mr Quinton, for saying that.’

I returned to Italy, to my world of Ghirlandaio, to my Canary roses and my irises, to the saints that Italy honours so: the Blessed Imelda of Bologna whom Josephine mentioned, whose day my daughter shared; St Clare who saved the city of Assisi; St Catherine who cut her hair off so that no one would wish to marry her. St Crispin was a shoemaker. St Paul made tents. A spring gushed in the desert when St Euthymius prayed. The dead body of St Zenobius revived a withered tree. Late in my life I had grown to admire the saints.

At the railway station in Florence a mass of azaleas bloomed in huge terracotta pots, marvellous elaborations of brilliant flowers, reds and yellows and creams, elegantly grouped: I travelled by way of Florence especially to see them. ‘If you study the lives of the saints,’ the nun in the hospital had said after Josephine had mentioned the Blessed Imelda, ‘you’ll find that it is horror and tragedy that make them what they are. Reflecting the life of Our Lord.’ Josephine was a go-between, a servant even as she died. At Kilneagh my daughter was insane, yet Josephine had wished me to return: in Ireland it happens sometimes that the insane are taken to be saints of a kind. Legends in Ireland are born almost every day.

MARIANNE

April 4th 1971

In the cemetery he did not see me, nor even look around for me. Have all of them been right: should I have years ago returned to Dorset, to that pretty town? Have I been nonsensical and silly, all this talk about a battlefield continuing?