William Trevor: Fools of Fortune

Tim Paddy was painting a greenhouse when he said that and he slanted his head as he spoke, drawing his white-coated brush along a line of putty. Inside the greenhouse his father was pricking out seeds and I knew that if he had not been there Tim Paddy would have lit a cigarette and settled down for a conversation.

‘Your sister’s right,’ he said. ‘She has better looks than that Kitty had.’

‘I thought you liked Kitty, Tim Paddy.’

He wrinkled his ferret’s nose, dipping the brush into the paint. ‘I wouldn’t give you twopence for her.’ Again he drew his paint-brush along the edge of the putty, one eye on his father’s bent head. ‘Josephine’s different,’ he said.

O’Neill came out of the greenhouse and told Tim Paddy to be sure to remove any splashes of paint from the glass. It was his arthritis that caused the old man’s cantankerousness: when his affliction was particularly bad he used to crawl about on his hands and knees among the vegetables and flowerbeds, like some creature from the woods. That and his hairless head made him seem old enough to be Tim Paddy’s grandfather.

‘Don’t be idling with the boy,’ he muttered before re-entering the greenhouse. ‘Get on with your work now.’

Tim Paddy made a face, continuing to paint the narrow surfaces of wood and putty. I went away and stared at the rows of sprouting peas, and the twigs that had been stuck into the soil to attract their tendrils. Traps had been set among the beans to catch fieldmice.

Tim Paddy was in love with Josephine, I said to myself, and that was the third of the Kilneagh love stories. I went in to tea and there she was in her afternoon black. She was eighteen years old, although I did not know it at the time: ages afterwards, when I was no longer shy with her, nor she with me, she told me her eighteenth birthday had taken place the week before she arrived at Kilneagh. She told me that it was her father, a farrier in Fermoy, who had arranged for her to go into service. He had received a letter from my mother, who had heard of Josephine’s existence from Mr Derenzy, he having heard of it through Mrs Sweeney of the public house. My mother had gone to Fermoy to interview the family. ‘She’s quick to learn,’ Josephine’s father assured her, and having asked a question or two my mother declared herself satisfied.

Three weeks later, on the morning of her leaving home, her father talked to her for an hour and then sent her to see their priest, who told her to take care in a Protestant household. ‘If there’s no fish served on a Friday,’ he said, ‘see if they’d supply you with an egg.’ But this predicament never arose because everyone in Kilneagh had fish on Fridays, that being the simplest arrangement: Mrs Flynn and O’Neill and Tim Paddy could not eat Friday meat either.

Josephine had liked Kilneagh from the start. She hadn’t minded Geraldine and Deirdre giggling at teatime and she considered my father easygoing, even though she wasn’t allowed to rattle the crockery in his presence. He was nice, she thought, sitting there at the breakfast table wondering how he should dress himself for the day. But it was my mother who made her feel at home in a world she did not know and in a house that seemed enormous to her. Its landings and half-landings, front staircase and back one, the kitchen passages, the Chinese carpet in the scarlet drawing-room, the Waterford vases in the hall, endless porcelain figures in the morning-room, the silver pheasants, the rosewood trays: all this was a strangeness that whirled about her, like colours in a kaleidoscope. Soup-spoons were round, dessert-spoons oval, the larger fork must be placed on the left, the smaller accompanied the dessertspoon at the top. Kindling was kept near the range, gravy boats and soup tureens on the first shelf of the cupboard in the wall. Meat must be covered in the larder, milk jugs placed on the cold slate slab.

Wash both night and morning, Mrs Flynn commanded, rise at six-fifteen. Do not speak in the dining-room unless invited to, carry the vegetable dishes to the left of the person being served. She warned Josephine against Johnny Lacy, who had upset Kilneagh girls before and was older than he looked, besides having a short leg. ‘Yes, Mrs Flynn,’ Josephine endlessly repeated during her first few days of awkwardness and bewilderment. She blacked grates and shone brass, and seemed for ever to be sweeping floors. Her own small attic room, with its white enamel bowl and pitcher, was as strange as anywhere else.

On Josephine’s first Sunday afternoon Tim Paddy took her down to the mill, allocated this duty by Mrs Flynn, who presumably considered him too much of a youth to be a nuisance in the way Johnny Lacy might have been. The water tumbled in the mill-race, the Virginia creeper on the walls was dotted with specks of springtime growth. Tim Paddy drew attention to the green-faced clock of the central gable, one minute fast, the date on it 1801. Together they peered through the bars of the office windows, and Tim Paddy pointed out Mr Derenzy’s stool and my father’s desk and his swivel chair. They returned to Kilneagh the long way, round by the road, through the tall white gates and up the avenue of beeches. They took a path to the right before they reached the gravel sweep, ending up at the back of the house. ‘On a day off you don’t walk in front of the windows,’ Tim Paddy explained, ‘although I go by them maybe a hundred times on an ordinary day.’ Josephine understood that. It was like my mother showing her the garden on the afternoon she arrived: for a quarter of an hour she had been a visitor at Kilneagh, and she knew she would never feel so again. On that Sunday evening she and Mrs Flynn and O’Neill and Tim Paddy sat down to their six o’clock tea in the kitchen and then she went upstairs to put on her uniform.

Years afterwards, when Josephine related all that, we tried to establish between us when it was that Michael Collins had first come to Kilneagh and decided it must have been a few months after she came to the house herself, in the early summer of 1918. She remembered my father saying in the hall: ‘I’m honoured to meet you, Mr Collins.’ She remembered being puzzled because Michael Collins didn’t seem the kind of man for someone like my father to make such a fuss of: she didn’t know then that he was a revolutionary leader. He and my father remained in the study for more than two hours, and when she brought in warm water for the whiskey they ceased to speak. Two other men waited in a motor-car on the gravel in front of the house. ‘Josephine,’ my father said, ‘bring out bottles of stout to those fellows.’

By that summer the war in Europe had been won, but this was not apparent at the time and in Ireland everything was unsettled and on edge. De Valera was in Lincoln Gaol, and Collins was increasingly in disagreement with him about Ireland’s eventual status. I know that now, but even in retrospect it is impossible to guess how my father’s acquaintanceship with Collins had begun, though it must in some way have been related to the Quintons’ longstanding identification with Irish Home Rule. For this, we were seen by many as traitors to our class and to the Anglo-Irish tradition. The eccentricity of my great-grandfather in giving away his lands had never ceased to be remembered in the big houses of Co. Cork and beyond it. And one of Johnny Lacy’s stories retailed an incident in 1797, when a Major Atkinson of the militia at Fermoy had ridden over to Rathcormack at the head of a band of soldiers and shot six men in the village street. On the way back he had called in at Kilneagh, hoping to rest his horses there, but had been angrily turned away. In the barracks at Fermoy that display of inhospitality had not been forgotten either.

‘You are English, Mrs Quinton?’ I heard Collins politely enquire as he left the house after that first visit.