Fools of Fortune Read Free Page B

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.
    As I entered the house I was still thinking about the school in the Dublin mountains. My father’s good-natured efforts to ease me into its traditions had become a source of mild terror and I regularly lay awake at night wondering about being savaged with a bamboo cane. ‘Ah, no, no,’ I would make Dr Hogan from Fermoy pronounce. ‘No, Mr Quinton, I’d say Willie’s too delicate for a place like that.’ But I also knew that my delicate appearance was misleading. ‘Healthy as a nut,’ Dr Hogan had stated more than once.
    ‘We didn’t see that