William Trevor - Fools of Fortune

I remember being surprised to hear my mother saying she had liked Collins the first time she met him: there had been, after all, that moment of awkwardness in the hall. But my mother was strange in this respect, given to blaming herself for taking offence when offence was not intended, and that may have been so on this occasion. Collins had an honest laugh, she insisted, his blue eyes had tenderness in them. If he ordered assassinations there was justice in what he ordered, for such death was an element in a war that was little different from the war her own countrymen had been waging against the might of the Kaiser. More energetically than my father, she supported the revolutionary cause and it was she who made him contact Collins again after his initial visit to Kilneagh. Dear Mr Collins, my father wrote, in a letter that exists today. Since you called in on us some time ago I have been thinking about many of the matters we discussed. As arranged, I have forwarded what we agreed to the address you left with me, but I am wondering now if more might not be done on my side. It could be to the advantage of the common ground we share if we met again. Except for Fridays, when I go into Fermoy, I am always at home here, if not in the house never less than twenty minutes from it, in the office of my mill. Should you again be passing near I would be delighted to offer you a drink, or lunch or supper. Yours sincerely, W. J. Quinton.

A force of British soldiers known as the Black and Tans because of the colour of their uniform had been sent to Ireland to quell the spreading disobedience. By reputation they were ruthless men, brutalized during the German war, many of them said to have been released from gaols in order to perform this task. The Irish gunmen who rampaged through the countryside had become, in turn, ruthless themselves. They gave no quarter and, knowing the lie of the land, were often more successful in the skirmishes that took place. There was a Black and Tan force at Fermoy, which brought this spasmodic but intense warfare close to us.

It was perhaps brought closer still by the visits of Michael Collins. When he came the second time he was on his own, but on all future occasions there were the men who waited in the motor-car while he and my father talked. And the second occasion was the only one on which he arrived on his motor-cycle.

‘I’m delighted you could find the time for us,’ my mother said, bringing me with her into the drawing-room, where Collins and my father were standing by the French windows on an excessively hot day in June. I remember Collins as being a little ill at ease, tall and heavy in his brown motor-cycling leather, the cast of his features suggesting a simplicity which was contradicted by a snappish gleam that came and went in his eyes. I didn’t know at the time that without a revolution to make him famous he would have been working as a clerk in a post office.

‘I’m pleased to be here again, Mrs Quinton.’

‘And this is Willie,’ my father said.

‘How are you, Willie?’

They talked about the weather, hoping the heatwave we were having would last. ‘Let me fill that up for you,’ my father said, reaching out for the visitor’s glass. ‘No,’ Collins said.

There was tomato soup for lunch, and chops and summer pudding, and wine. The conversation was desultory. My father talked about the mill, Collins listened. When he might have spoken himself, he appeared to prefer silence.

‘I believe you know Glandore, Mr Collins,’ my mother said in one of these lulls.

‘I know it well, Mrs Quinton. I come from round about.’

‘A charming place.’

‘Ah, it is of course.’

My sisters did not have lunch with us that day, and it must have been a Saturday because Father Kilgarriff hadn’t been to the drawing-room that morning. I remember the windows being open and the scent of flowers wafting in. I felt it was an honour to be sitting there with a famous revolutionary in motor-cycling clothes, even though I did not once speak.

‘You’ll remember today,’ my mother said afterwards as we walked together through the garden in search of my sisters. My father and Collins were in the study, drinking coffee. I did not see him again, but heard the roar of his motor-cycle on the avenue. And a fragment from a conversation my parents had that evening remains vividly with me. They talked together in the gathering gloom of the drawing-room, not arguing yet faintly disagreeing.

‘It’s money he came for, Evie.’

‘Maybe, but even so.’

My father sighed, and for a moment nothing was said. Then my father spoke again.

‘Doyle has been threatened. I shouldn’t have taken that man back.’

‘Is Doyle spying for them?’

‘God knows, God knows. Look, I promise you, Evie, the best we can do is to give Collins money. There is no question whatsoever of drilling fellows at Kilneagh. Absolutely not.’

I crept up the dark stairs and afterwards lay awake, astonished at the sternness there had been in my father’s voice. I wondered what Father Kilgarriff would have thought if he’d heard this talk of drilling men at Kilneagh, and I was sorry that my mother’s wish had not prevailed: nothing could surely have been more exciting than revolutionaries on the lawns and in the shrubbery. I dreamed about them, with Michael Collins in his motor-cycling clothes, but when I woke up in the morning the first thing I remembered was the authority of my father’s insistence that Collins should only be given money. Could it be possible that his apparent indecisiveness, his self-claimed lack of resolution, were no more than superficial traits, contrived to make a talking point? I thought about it for a while, but came to no conclusion.

‘No, I didn’t lay eyes on the man,’ Father Kilgarriff replied when I asked him if he’d seen Mr Collins. ‘Wasn’t there hay to be made?’

‘You heard his motor-bike, though, Father?’

‘I don’t think I did. Now, tell me this. New Zealand has a temperate climate. Why would that be?’

*

One Saturday evening during that same heatwave our parents and Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy went to dine with people called D’arcy who lived in a house not unlike our own on the other side of Lough. I couldn’t sleep because of the heat and went along to my sisters’ room to pass the time. We played cards on Geraldine’s bed and then, to our very great surprise, were aware of the sound of music. Since it appeared to come from the kitchen, we crept down the back stairs in our nightdresses. Unfortunately we ran into Mrs Flynn, who happened to be crossing the kitchen passage just as we entered it. We were noisily reprimanded, but after much pleading on the part of my sisters were eventually led into the kitchen itself. A bizarre sight at once silenced the giggling that had begun to twitch Geraldine and Deirdre’s lips; it stunned me also. Seated at the big oak table and looking no less grumpy than usual, O’Neill was playing an accordion. Johnny Lacy was teaching Josephine a dance step, Tim Paddy and a red-cheeked girl we’d never seen before were smoking Woodbines at the table. Mrs Flynn was flushed; the others were laughing. In a high-backed chair, close to the range, my aunts’ maid, Philomena, was drinking a cup of tea. It was extraordinary beyond belief that old O’Neill should be performing on an accordion, the kind of instrument that beggar-men played on the streets of Fermoy. No one had ever told us that he possessed such a thing, we had never heard a note of it coming from the gate-lodge. And who on earth was the girl with the red cheeks?

‘That’s Bridie Sweeney,’ Mrs Flynn whispered. As she spoke Tim Paddy saw us and waved across the kitchen, not in the least woebegone or sorry for himself any more.