Free Fools of Fortune by William Trevor

day her sympathy lingered with me, long after I’d left the schoolroom. It accompanied me on my travels about the city and was still there when I examined the goods in the window of the pawnbroker’s shop at the bottom of St Patrick’s Hill: old racing binoculars and umbrellas, knives and forks and crockery, occasionally a pair of boots. While it hovered around me I would begin the steep ascent to Windsor Terrace, to our narrow house painted a shade of grey, tightly pressed between two others.
    I couldn’t tell my mother about the awfulness of the schoolroom because it would be upsetting, and the doctor who sometimes came to see her said that upsets should be avoided. When I sat with her in her bedroom I told her instead about the ships that were docked at the quays or how I’d seen a milk-cart toppling over on its side when its horse slipped on an icy street. I described the people I’d noticed, the tramps and drunks and foreign seamen, anyone who had appeared to be exotic. I brought her reports of actors and singers I had imagined in the Opera House, culling their names from the play-bills that decorated the city’s hoardings: I made up quite a lot in order to keep our conversations going.
    She listened vaguely, occasionally making the effort to smile. The letters which came from India, from my English grandparents, remained unopened in her bedroom, as did the letters from Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy. ‘Write to your aunts,’ she commanded in the same vague way. ‘Tell them you are well. But add please that I am not quite up to visitors yet.’ She did not venture out of the house for many weeks on end and then would very slowly make her way down the hill to the city, sitting for an hour or so in the Victoria Hotel. ‘I thought it cold today,’ she’d say. ‘The first day it’s warm again I’ll have another walk.’
    On several occasions I tried to explain to Josephine about Miss
    Halliwell’s disturbing sentiments. But it wasn’t easy to conjure up the atmosphere of the schoolroom and I felt shy of revealing that Miss Halliwell stroked the nape of my neck or that Elmer Dunne said Miss Halliwell had a passion for me. He was not teasing or mocking me in any way, but simply stating what he believed to be the truth. ‘It’s not that at all,’ I protested, walking one day along the quayside with him. ‘It’s just that she’s sorry for me. I wish she wasn’t.’ But Elmer Dunne laughed, and spoke again of unbuttoning our teacher’s clothes.
    ‘Oh, Willie, she’s only being kind,’ Josephine said in the kitchen when finally I presented her with an approximation of my worry. I pretended to accept that opinion, for as soon as I’d brought the subject up I didn’t wish to pursue it. The kitchen was small, but I liked its cosy warmth and the smell of Brasso when Josephine laid out for cleaning the brass pieces that had come from Kilneagh. When I finished my homework she would talk about her childhood in Fermoy, and it was then that she told me about her first days at Kilneagh and how strange its world had seemed to her—as strange as the world of the city now was to me. Sometimes the bell in the passage would jangle and she would remain with my mother for an hour or so while I sat alone, close to the heat of the range. Now and again I wandered into the dank sitting-room or dining-room, both of them noticeably narrow, as everything about the house was. There was room for only one person at a time on the stairs, and you had to wait on a half-landing in order to permit someone else to pass. Each of these half-landings had a long rectangular window, the bottom half of which comprised a pattern of green and red panes in a variety of shapes. The two main landings had similar windows, though rather larger, and the patterned motif was repeated on either side of the hall door and in the hall door itself, through which sunlight cast coloured beams, red tinged with green and green with red. Incongruous on the