Fools of Fortune (2 page)

‘It should have been the end of everything,’ Father Kilgarriff stated. ‘The beginning of a whole new Ireland, but of course it wasn’t. You can’t put your trust in battles.’

I didn’t quite know what he meant, but I did know that victory had somehow been turned into defeat, for even as I learnt about that new beginning in 1598 Irish soldiers were fighting for England in the German war. The village was empty of men, and so was Fermoy, where the army barracks were. ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary,’ the soldiers sang together, whether they came from Lough or from Sheffield. Johnny Lacy used to sing that song for me, explaining that he hadn’t gone to the war himself because of his short leg.

O’Neill, who was the gardener at Kilneagh, had been too old to go, his son, Tim Paddy, too young. But I could remember two or three of the men who worked in the mill showing off their uniforms and their haircut. They’d been delighted with themselves, but later had perished with other men of the Munster Fusiliers at Sedd-el-Bahr. And before that, in the first few days of the war apparently, Aunt Fitzeustace’s husband, an Englishman to whom she’d been married for only a month, had been killed in France. Soon afterwards she returned to live again at Kilneagh, although all that is outside my memory.

Every day at half-past twelve Father Kilgarriff left the drawing-room and returned to the orchard wing, so called because of the mulberry orchard that stretched behind it. Kilneagh had been built in 1770, its gardens laid out at the same date, the orchard added later. Ten white-framed windows dominated a stone facade; there were pillars and steps and urns, and a white hall door; some clever piece of architecture had arranged the chimneys so that they were not visible above the slated roof. The house itself was shaped like an E with its middle prong missing, the two wings protruding at the back, with a cobbled yard between them. The kitchen wing, containing the kitchen of the main house, had a long, cool dairy that opened on to the yard, and a warren of upstairs rooms, only a few of which were used; behind it was O’Neill’s vegetable garden. In the orchard wing there was a smaller kitchen, so that my aunts, with their maid Philomena and Father Kilgarriff, were independent of the workings of the main house. Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy were my father’s sisters, Aunt Fitzeustace of strong, muscular appearance and with a notable jaw, given to wearing tie-pins and tweed hats, Aunt Pansy meek, with apple-pink cheeks. They were often to be found in the garden, Aunt Pansy looking for flowers to press, Aunt Fitzeustace cutting areas of grass which crusty old O’Neill said did not require cutting, or manuring shrubs which he said would not benefit from manure. They had their own pony and basket-trap to bring them to Lough or Fermoy, and they had collected a large number of stray dogs which my father objected to but did not forbid.

‘Well, how did you improve the morning?’ he enquired at lunch on the day I began to learn Latin, and when I told him about
agricola
and how you had to think of it in six different ways he hastened to change the subject. He touched his forehead with the tips of his fingers, a gesture which reflected a claustrophobic affliction aggravated by too much, or too rapid, talk. My father liked a tranquil pace in all things, and time for thought. With his two black labradors nosing the backs of his legs his favourite walk was down the avenue, wrapped in the silence induced by the beech trees that celebrated Napoleon’s defeat. Their branches looped and interwove overhead, their leaves held off the sky: in spring and summer the avenue of Kilneagh was as silent as a cave, which was when my father liked it best. He would listen for ages to O’Neill or Father Kilgarriff provided they didn’t rush at him with speech, which both of them had learnt not to do. My mother didn’t either, but sometimes it was difficult for Tim Paddy to remember because he was young, and it was difficult for me and for my sisters. At table my mother made quietening gestures with her hands, and in the kitchen Mrs Flynn, the cook, would warn a new maid that my father disliked noise or voices raised. He always smiled when touching his forehead with the tips of his fingers, as if he considered his weakness a little silly. Nor did he ever himself insist that tranquillity was his due: that wasn’t, as my mother would have put it, his style. He was a bulky, lazy-looking man in tweeds, with a weathered brown face, very much the Irish seigneur. He said himself that his chief characteristic was a Cork man’s failing: he could never make up his mind or come to a decision on his own. ‘I don’t know what I’ll wear today,’ he’d say at breakfast, sitting there in his pyjamas and a teddy-bear dressing-gown, waiting for my mother to advise him.

My mother Was tall, with a delicate oval face and eyes that reminded me of chestnuts. She had black hair, parted in the middle, and below it her nose was delicate and straight and her lips like a dark red rosebud. She presided over the household with untroubled authority, over my father and myself and my sisters, Geraldine who was seven at that time and Deirdre who was six. My grandparents on my father’s side of the family had lived with us in the main house but they had both died a year ago, in the same month. Besides Mrs Flynn in the kitchen there was a single housemaid at Kilneagh, and Hannah who came from Lough on Mondays and Thursdays to scrub the floors and do the washing. O’Neill and Tim Paddy lived in the gate-lodge, its tidy little garden colourful with hollyhocks and herbaceous borders. Because Mrs O’Neill was no longer alive they had their meals in the main kitchen and sat there for a while in the evenings. Both of them were stunted, O’Neill completely bald, Tim Paddy with a ferrety look.

‘Well, what’s the way of it this afternoon?’ my father asked that lunch time, and my mother said that she and the girls were going to ride. ‘And Willie? Walk over to the mill?’

‘Don’t forget your homework, Willie.’

‘Oh, after tea,’ my father said.

A new maid was to arrive that afternoon and because the previous maid had already left Mrs Flynn brought in the tapioca pudding herself. Geraldine and Deirdre ate it with dollops of raspberry jam but my father and mother added cream and I followed this grownup example, although I would much have preferred the jam. My father told us about an occurrence at the mill that morning, how an old tinker had arrived there, claiming he was dying. When everyone’s back was turned he had helped himself to an ounce of Mr Derenzy’s snuff and various documents that were valueless to him.

‘Oh, poor old fellow!’ Geraldine cried.

‘Poor Mr Derenzy, you mean,’ Deirdre corrected. ‘
Dear
Mr Derenzy.’

They giggled through their mouthfuls of tapioca and were told not to by my mother. My sisters laughed inordinately at anything that was even faintly humorous. For the rest of the day they would talk about this lone tinker, wondering if he slept with the rain beating down on his face, as the tinkers who wandered the countryside on their own were said to. On our walk to the mill I asked my father if the story was true or if he’d made it up to amuse the girls. He smiled, and I knew he’d just been having fun.

After that we proceeded in silence for a while, the labradors obediently at our heels. The path from the house began in a shrubbery of towering rhododendrons, continuing through a gate that neither my father nor I ever opened, choosing instead to climb over it. Cows grazed in the sloping pasture beyond, and at the top of this there was a spot from which the mill and the house could both be seen, and the distant Haunt Hill, so called because of its haunting by my great-grandmother. We descended steeply then, through a birch wood and by the edge of a field that was ploughed in March and thick with growth by June, a mass of corn in August. Before we reached the mill my father said:

‘You’ll enjoy it, you know. You know you’ll enjoy it, Willie.’

He spoke of my going away to the school he’d been at himself, in the Dublin mountains. He worried sometimes in case Father Kilgarriff was not preparing me well enough, which was why he had wanted to send me to a preparatory school.

‘You’ll play rugby, Willie, and cricket maybe. You’d never find games like that in Lough.’

My father laughed, amused at the sophistication of cricketers in our village. I had never seen the games he spoke of played, but on our walks to and from the mill the rules of both had been explained to me and I had pretended to understand.

‘The teaching’s famous there, Willie. Pakenham-Moore became a circuit judge, you know.’

I nodded, endeavouring to display enthusiasm. He had also told me about a game called cock-fighting, a boy perched on another boy’s shoulders and smacking with his fists at a third boy, similarly mounted. There was fagging, and the tradition of flicking pats of butter on to the wooden ceiling of the dining hall. Prefects could beat you with a cane.

We reached the mill and I accompanied my father to his office, where Mr Derenzy was copying figures into a ledger. A fire was blazing in the grate, its coal recently renewed, the hearthTswept. Mr Derenzy brought sandwiches every day and ate them at his desk during the lunchtime break. Afterwards, if the weather was to his liking, he went for a walk and was often to be seen staring down into the water of the leat, a man devoted to Kilneagh Mill and to my father—and in a different kind of way to Aunt Pansy. Red hair fluffed into a halo about Mr Derenzy’s skull-like head and his blue serge suit shone here and there, polished where his bones protruded. Clipped to the top pocket of this suit was a row of pens and pencils, their neat presence a reflection of his pernickety nature. He disliked rain and heatwaves and warned Aunt Pansy against drinking from a cup with a crack in it. He carried a supply of snuff with him at all times, in a tin that had originally contained catarrh pastilles:
Potter’s, the Remedy
it said, red letters on a blue ground.

Unlike the other men at the mill, Mr Derenzy was a Protestant, which allowed him to have pretensions in the direction of my aunt. But considering himself socially inferior, he had never thought it proper to propose marriage. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, man,’ my father used to urge him, ‘say the word to her and have done with it.’ But Mr Derenzy would look away in excessive embarrassment. Every Sunday afternoon he arrived at the orchard wing to take Aunt Pansy for a walk and afterwards returned to Sweeney’s public house in Lough, where he lodged. According to Johnny Lacy, who appeared to know everything that went on in Sweeney’s, he spent Sunday evening drinking cups of weak tea and worriedly dwelling upon his presumption.

‘I’m getting the February overheads in, Mr Quinton,’ he said now. ‘Afternoon to you, Willie.’

‘Good afternoon, Mr Derenzy.’

‘Liver and tapioca pudding,’ my father reported. ‘Were Mrs Sweeney’s sandwiches up to scratch?’

‘Oh, never better, Mr Quinton.’

I knew that one day I would inherit this mill. I liked the thought of that, of going to work there, of learning what my father had had to learn about grain and the machinery that ground it. I liked the mill itself, its grey stone softened with Virginia creeper, the doors of lofts and stores a reddish brown, paint that over the years had lost its shine due to the sun; in a central gable the green-faced clock was always a minute fast. I loved the smell of the place, the warm dry smell of corn, the cleanness even though there was dust in the air. I enjoyed watching the huge wheel turning in the mill-race, one cog engaging the next. The timber of the chutes was smooth with wear, leather flaps opening and falling back, then opening again. The sacks had
Quinton
on them, the letters of our name arranged in a circle.

Memory fails me when I think about the men of the mill: names are forgotten, except for Mr Derenzy and Johnny Lacy. Faces return instead, and arguments about the revolution that had exploded in Ireland in 1916 and was not over yet. ‘I wouldn’t drink a bottle of stout with de Valera,’ a voice protests scathingly. ‘I wouldn’t stand beside him at a crossroads.’ And a cool reply comes, that Dev was above the drinking of stout with anyone.

One man was tall and thin, another’s face was half obscured by a hedge of moustache, a third wore a black hat that never left his head. Johnny Lacy had a way with him and was always laughing, his face crinkling up with merriment when he told his stories. These had mainly to do with the people of our own household and the men of the mill, but there was also the one about the dwarf’s wife, late of Fermoy, who could eat French nails, and the one about the soldier at the barracks who had ridden a horse through Phelan’s shop window to win a bet. There was the deranged man from Mitchels-town who claimed to be the King of Ireland and the woman who bred fleas because she liked them. Johnny Lacy had a reputation as a rake and was a star turn on the dance-floor in spite of his short leg. He was particularly fond of the fox-trot and would often demonstrate the step for me, clasping in his arms an imaginary girl. The round shape of Haunt Hill with its little jagged tip was like a woman’s breast, he told me, wagging a neat, oiled head which smelt of carnations. A suave devil, my father called him.

That spring afternoon I loitered in the part of the mill where the men were working, as I often did. Mr Derenzy hurried in twice with invoices, his clerkly Protestant voice pitched high above the rush of water and machinery. It wasn’t a busy time of year. The chutes were being repaired, sacks sorted out. Johnny Lacy and the man whose moustache was like a hedge were working a scales, and for half an hour or so I moved the weights for them. Then I began to walk back to the house, not waiting for my father because he wouldn’t be ready until much later. There were Mr Derenzy’s figures to look through and then he would answer any letters that had come, the labradors sprawled by his feet in front of the fire. He would walk about the mill, having a word with the men: all of it took time and usually I preferred to return home on my own, running down the slope of the pasture to the gate in the rhododendron shrubbery, my feet crunching a moment later on the gravel that was spread in a semicircle around the house. I still think of approaching Kilneagh like that. The beech-lined avenue with the tall white-painted iron gates at the end of it was as impressive as my father ever claimed, but in my childhood I liked best of all the walk through the birch wood and the fields.