Fools of Fortune Read Free

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