William Trevor: Fools of Fortune

‘Yes, I am English.’

My mother’s voice conveyed no note of apology. I could not see her from where I stood in the shadows of the hall, but I guessed that as she returned his stare the eyes that in calmer moments reminded me of chestnuts had gleamed fierily, as they always did when she was challenged or angry. There was injustice in Ireland was what my mother maintained: you didn’t have to be Irish to wish to expunge it. She told Michael Collins that she was the daughter of an army colonel and did not add that her marriage had taken place in an atmosphere of disapproval and distrust, just before her father’s regiment had been recalled to England. She had told me also, but the years that had passed must have calmed that atmosphere away for I remembered my grandfather and grandmother visiting us quite often in Kilneagh and seeming happy to be there. ‘I could stay for ever,’ my grandfather used to say. ‘There’s nowhere to touch Kilneagh.’ He was tall, like my mother, and stood very straight. I liked his voice, and was sorry when he and my grandmother left England for military duty in India. They did not ever visit Ireland again.

‘I’m much obliged to the both of you,’ Michael Collins said in the hall. ‘God bless you, sir.’

Seasons changed; time slipped by at a dawdling pace, or that at least is how it seems. Incidents remain, isolated in my memory for reasons of their own. Moments and the mood of moments make up that distant childhood. A monkey puzzle died; new dogs were added to my aunts’ collection.

In his unemphatic way Father Kilgarriff pursued in our history lessons his theme of warfare’s folly, still illustrating the absurdity of it with reference to the Battle of the Yellow Ford. ‘That bald English queen,’ he softly murmured, ‘answered defeat by dispatching Robert Devereux, who paved the way for yet another fateful battle. When she decided to behead him the destiny of Ireland hung on a thread again: at Kinsale this time.’

Neither the mildness of his manner nor his even, handsome features were ever disturbed by agitation. I mentioned Michael Collins to him, but he displayed no interest or curiosity in the revolutionary leader’s visits. If only people would remember Daniel O’Connell, he murmured, if only they honoured his pacific spirit. He spoke also of my great-grandmother, Anna Quinton of the Famine. In the drawing-room portrait she was shown to be plain but Father Kilgarriff, extolling her mercy, granted her beauty as well. He knew a lot about her tribulations. She had begged the officers at the nearby barracks to retail the misery and starvation they saw around them to the London government. She had begged her own family, in Woodcombe Park in England, to seek to influence that government. So passionate did she become in her condemnation of the authorities that in the end her letters were returned unopened. You spread calumny over our name , her irate father wrote. Since you will not cease in your absurd charges against this country, I have no choice left but to disown you. The returned letters were in my father’s possession, kept in the safe at the mill. Because he was interested, Father Kilgarriff had read them all. I don’t believe my father had ever bothered to.

Occasionally I wondered if Father Kilgarriff was content, helping Tim Paddy with the cattle and teaching me in the drawing-room. I didn’t know what to think about the girl in Chicago, but he spoke so warmly of my great-grandmother’s compassion and drew my attention so often to the sadness of her eyes in the portrait that I came to feel she was almost alive for him—surely as alive as the girl in his confessional now was.

‘Oh, fool of fortune,’ my father commented when I tried to make him talk to me about Father Kilgarriff on one of our walks to the mill. He would say no more, and I had known him to apply that assessment to almost everyone at Kilneagh. It was his favourite expression, and one which at that particular time probably better defined Tim Paddy. ‘Does she ever mention me?’ Tim Paddy humbly asked, and I lied and said I’d heard Josephine say he was amusing. But it was the suave Johnny Lacy, with his dance-hall fox-trotting and his stories, who amused her more.

In spite of Mrs Flynn’s disapproval he often now arrived in the kitchen. He and Josephine would go for walks in the evening, while Tim Paddy went off on his own and miserably set rabbit snares. In the end he didn’t speak to either Josephine or Johnny Lacy and would savagely brush water over the cobbles in the yard, not pausing once to take the Woodbine out of his mouth. ‘Oh, he does love her so!’ Deirdre cried after she and Geraldine had spent a whole morning following the unhappy youth about the garden. They said they’d seen him hitting his head against an apple tree, and that he’d cried, a wailing sound like a banshee’s howl. One Saturday night Johnny Lacy took Josephine to a dance in Fermoy and Tim Paddy got drunk in Sweeney’s and was found sprawled out in the backyard by Mr Derenzy. In spite of the anguish they claimed on his behalf my sisters delighted in enacting that moonlit scene: the prone Tim

Paddy, Mr Derenzy bending over him, enquiring if he would care for a pinch of snuff.

All around us there seemed to be this unsettling love, for even his polite courting of Aunt Pansy left Mr Derenzy occasionally looking wan. He was not made for love, I’d heard my father say, as Johnny Lacy so clearly was. Mr Derenzy had been borrowed from his ledgers and his invoices, from the solitary Protestant world of his upstairs room at Sweeney’s. Yet it was said that he had loved Aunt Pansy for thirty years.

I didn’t want Tim Paddy to be unhappy, any more than I wanted Father Kilgarriff or Mr Derenzy and Aunt Pansy to be: I wanted everything, somehow and in the end, to be all right. Nothing could be done about O’Neill’s aching joints, or Mrs Flynn’s widowed state. But in spite of the old gardener’s shortness of temper and Mrs Flynn’s severity over the rules she laid down in her kitchen, they neither of them appeared to be discontented. Josephine sometimes sang very softly while she worked and my sisters said it was because she was in love. She at least was happy and I was happy myself, apart from my single nagging trepidation.

‘It’s just that I don’t see the sense of it,’ I said to my mother.

‘You have to go to school, Willie.’

‘It’s awful, that place.’

‘Your father wouldn’t send you to an awful place.’

‘Does he think Father Kilgarriff isn’t any good?’

‘No, of course he doesn’t think that.’

‘Then why’s he want to send me?’

‘You have to meet other boys. Play games and take part in things. Kilneagh isn’t the world, you know.’

‘But I’ll live in Kilneagh when I’m grown up. I’ll always be here.’

‘Yes, I know, Willie, but that’s all the more reason to see what other places are like.’

I did not reply. I had realized as soon as I’d spoken that my efforts would be useless. All I could do now was confess my feelings to my father, which I’d been nervous of doing in case they belittled me in his eyes. My mother pointed out that several years had yet to pass before the grim establishment could claim me. She offered that as the only consolation there was.

*

The men of the village came back from the war. Only one of them returned to the mill, a man called Doyle with a grey, slightly crooked face, who for some reason was unpopular with the others. Johnny Lacy told me my father had taken him back reluctantly, feeling obliged to since the mill was a man short. A suspicion of some sort hung about him; I never came to know him. I continued instead to listen to the other men’s conversation about the confusion in the country and whether or not de Valera was right, although what about I was not precisely certain. I knew that an alternative government had been set up in Dublin and that fighting continued between the imperial and the revolutionary regimes. I heard names that had a ring to them: Cathal Brugha, the Countess Markievicz, Terence MacSwiney, but I didn’t know who these people were. The escape of de Valera from Lincoln Gaol had been arranged by Michael Collins, and at least I knew about him.