Fools of Fortune

by William Trevor

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  FOOLS OF FORTUNE

  William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, in 1928, and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He attended a number of Irish schools and later Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters.

  Among his books are The Old Boys (1964), winner of the Hawthornden Prize, The Boarding House (1965), The Love Department (1966), The Day We Got Drunk on Cake (1967), Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971), The Ballroom of Romance (1972), Elizabeth Alone (1973), Angels at the Ritz (1975), winner of the Royal Society of Literature Award, The Children of Dynmouth (1976), winner of the Whitbread Award, Lovers of Their Time (1978), The Distant Past (1979), Other People’s Worlds (1980), Beyond the Pale (1981), Fools of Fortune (1983), winner of the Whitbread Award, A Writer’s Ireland (1984), The News from Ireland (1986), The Silence in the Garden (1988), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, Family Sins (1989) and Two Lives (1991), which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and includes the Booker shortlisted novella Reading Turgenev. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989), and has also written many plays for the stage and for radio and television. Several of his television plays have been based on his short stories. Many of his books are published by Penguin, including an omnibus, The Stories of William Trevor, containing five collections of stories. In 1976 William Trevor received the Allied Irish Banks’ Prize, and in 1977 was awarded an honorary CBE in recognition of his valuable services to literature.

  Fools of Fortune won the Whitbread Award for the Best Novel of 1983. It has received considerable critical acclaim: the Daily Telegraph called it ‘a sad book … written with wisdom, delicate comedy, and a sweet, beguiling nostalgia for what could have been. And throughout, a sense of gentle, philosophical resignation eases the sadness’; Philip Howard in The Times wrote, ‘a beautiful, affectionate and humorous, as well as a terrible story … William Trevor at his best’; the New Statesman commented, ‘a fine piece of work … it communicates something authentic: a sense of melancholy; yet a complicated one, not without hope—a view of real people in a real world’; Melvyn Bragg in Punch thought it a ‘supremely well achieved and absorbing novel’—and Molly Keane, author of Good Behaviour, called it ‘a wonderfully moving and important book’.

  WILLIAM TREVOR

  Fools of Fortune

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  To Jane

  and in memory of

  my father

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by The Bodley Head 1983 Published in Penguin Books 1984 13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14

  Copyright © William Trevor, 1983 All rights reserved

  Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Contents

  Willie

  Marianne

  Imelda

  Willie

  Marianne

  Imelda

  WILLIE

  I

  It is 1983. In Dorset the great house at Woodcombe Park bustles with life. In Ireland the more modest Kilneagh is as quiet as a grave.

  To inspect the splendours of Woodcombe Park and to stroll about its gardens, visitors pay fifty pence at the turnstiles, children twenty-five. The descendants of the family who built the house at the end of the sixteenth century still occupy it and are determined to sustain it. They do not care for the visitors, the car parks they have had to make, the litter left behind. But naturally they do not say so.

  Near by, the small town of Woodcombe—to which the family gave their name and where, traditionally, military ribbons and puttees are manufactured—is famous for the delicacy of its mullioned windows. After an inspection of the manor showpiece the visitors like to linger there, consuming in the Copper Kettle and Deborah’s Pantry the butter-scones and shortbread for which the town is famous also in 1983. They do not know that nearly a hundred and sixty years ago an Anna Woodcombe, then a girl of seventeen, married an Irishman called William Quinton who took her to live in Go. Cork, in the house called Kilneagh, not far from the village of Lough, not far in turn from the town of Fermoy. They do not know that two generations later an army colonel who was a poor relation of the Woodcombes of Woodcombe Park found himself stationed with his regiment in Fermoy; his daughter, too, married a Quinton and became mistress of Kilneagh. His second daughter married an English curate, a fortunate marriage for the young man, since the Woodcombes of the manor had in their gift the living of the town. This couple’s only child was brought up in Woodcombe Rectory and later caused history again to repeat itself, as in Anglo-Irish relationships it has a way of doing: she fell in love with a Quinton cousin and became, in time, the third English girl to come and live at Kilneagh.

  It is the voices of these cousins that are heard there now. In 1983 no one pays fifty pence to see Kilneagh or to stroll about its gardens. No one points out to tourists that it was the Anna Woodcombe of the nineteenth century who planted the Kilneagh mulberry orchard, remembering the one at Woodcombe Park; or that the name Kilneagh might possibly mean the place of the church, perhaps even a foundation of St Fiach. No one suggests that the family name of Quinton must derive from St Quentin, a name originally of Normandy.

  A mile and a half away, the village of Lough is without attractions, its concrete convent dominating the single street, with agricultural machinery displayed next door to it. There are no teashops, only Sweeney’s garage and public house, where a cup of tea might possibly be had, and Driscoll’s all-purpose store, where it would not occur to visitors to linger. The sense of the past, so well preserved in the great house and the town in Dorset, is only to be found in echoes at Kilneagh, in the voices of the cousins.

  2

  I wish that somehow you might have shared my childhood, for I would love to remember you in the scarlet drawing-room, so fragrant in summer with the scent of roses, warmed in winter by the wood Tim Paddy gathered. Arithmetic and grammar books were laid out every morning on an oval table, red ink in one glass inkwell, black in the other. In that distant past I didn’t even know that you existed.

  ‘Agricola,’ Father Kilgarriff said on the day I began to learn Latin. ‘Now there’s a word for you.’

  On the sides of the brass log-box there were embossed scenes, and the one I liked best was of a farmhouse supper. Men sat around a table while a woman served, one of them reaching behind him to seize her hand. You could tell from the way he had twisted his arm behind him that it was a secret between them. Was the woman another farmer’s wife? Was this man coveting her, or were they taken in adultery? The brass people were almost faceless because the working of the metal didn’t allow for much detail of feature. It was odd that the men wore their old-fashioned caps while having supper.

  ‘In Latin we decline the noun, Willie. Nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative. Agricola, agricola, agri-colam, agricolae, agricolae, agricola. Do you follow that, Wi
llie?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Farmer,’ said Father Kilgarriff. ‘O farmer, farmer, of the farmer, to the farmer, by with or from the farmer. Have you caught the idea of it, Willie?’

  ‘I don’t think I have, Father.’

  ‘Oh, Willie, Willie.’

  Father Kilgarriff always laughed when he said that. He was unfrocked, but in our Protestant household he continued to wear the clerical black and the collar that marked his calling. It suited him: he was as dark as a Spaniard, and said himself that he must have Spanish blood. His laugh was soft and in his sallow, handsome face his eyes were without bitterness, in no way reflecting the disgrace in his life. He lived in the orchard wing with Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy, having been taken in by them as their lodger after his misfortune. According to Johnny Lacy, who worked at our mill, Father Kilgarriff was able to pay only very little for the food he ate, which was why he looked after the cows and taught me my lessons. He came originally from the village, but it was in a parish in Co. Limerick that he’d been unfrocked. He would have crept into a Limerick slum room, so Johnny Lacy said, if he hadn’t been taken in at Kilneagh. I thought of him as old but I don’t imagine he could have been more than thirty at that time. He was the gentlest man I’ve ever known.

  ‘Does agricola mean farmer, Father?’

  ‘You’re getting it now, Willie.’

  Carved into the white marble of the mantelpiece were one hundred and eight leaves, in clusters of six. Four tall brass lamps had glass globes shaped like onions; the Chinese carpet was patterned with seven shades of blue. My great-grandfather, framed in gilt above the mantelpiece, had most of his hair on the right-hand side of his head and looked like a spaniel. Born in the year of the French Revolution, he was the most extraordinary of all my Quinton ancestors. He had planted two lines of beech trees on either side of the avenue to celebrate the victory at Waterloo; and thirty years later he made himself famous through his eccentric memorial to his wife, whose portrait hung above the mantelpiece also. Anna Quinton had travelled the neighbourhood during the Famine of 1846, doing what she could for the starving and the dying, her carriage so heavy with grain and flour that once its axle broke in half. The meat goes bad in the heat, she wrote, but even so they grab it from my hands. When she died of famine fever her dog-faced husband shut himself into Kilneagh for eleven years, not seeing anyone. It was said that she haunted him: looking from his bedroom window one morning he saw her on a distant hill—an apparition like the Virgin Mary. She told him that he must give away the greater part of his estate to those who had suffered loss and deprivation in the famine, and in his continuing love of her he did so. His son, my grandfather, who was twenty-five at the time and should have inherited these acres, looked wryly on. According to Johnny Lacy, he hadn’t had the heart to bother much with what was left: it was my father who had pulled everything together again.

  ‘We decline the noun, Willie. We conjugate the verb.’

  ‘I see, Father.’

  It was the spring of 1918 and my father wanted to send me away to a boarding-school, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it until I was older. That time would come soon enough, she used to say in a way I found ominous, for I had no wish ever to leave Kilneagh. I was eight in 1918, a straw-haired boy with the family’s blue eyes and a face that caused strangers to enquire if I were delicate.

  ‘Will we tackle a bit of history?’ Father Kilgarriff suggested, pushing aside the green Latin grammar. History excited him, but he was suspicious of the victory that followed battles, and of war as a means to an end. His hero was Daniel O’Connell, who had brought freedom to the Catholics of both Ireland and England and had not cared for violence either. Father Kilgarriff spoke of him often, but also dwelt on the long gallery of men and women who had enlivened the story of our rebellious island: Queen Maeve and the Kings of Munster, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmet who had loved Sarah Curran, Thomas Davis who had written poetry. England was always the enemy: at the great battles the blood of the contenders mingled in a torrent, and the greatest encounter of all was the Battle of the Yellow Ford.

  ‘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.