Free Fools of Fortune by William Trevor Page A

stairway walls were the gilt-framed canvases that had been saved from the fire. In the narrow sitting-room and dining-room familiar furniture loomed awkwardly now, and on the landing outside my mother’s room the tall oak cupboard that had held my sisters’ dolls in the nursery took up almost all the space there was. I opened it once and saw what appeared to be a hundred maps of Ireland: the trade-mark of Paddy Whiskey on a mass of labels, the bottles arrayed like an army on the shelves.
    ‘No, Josephine,’ my mother said as I entered her bedroom one evening to say good-night. ‘You have a life of your own to live.’
    ‘I want to stay with you, ma’am.’
    ‘I’ll soon be myself again.’
    ‘I couldn’t marry him now, ma’am. I couldn’t settle in that neighbourhood.’
    ‘A little drink?’ my mother suggested.
    ‘No thank you, Mrs Quinton.’
    I said good-night but my mother did not hear me. She spoke of parties at Kilneagh before her marriage, of decorating the church for the Harvest Festival, and how my father used to pick his Christmas presents for her from Cash’s Christmas catalogue: bottles of scent and lavender water, talcum powder and bath oil. ‘There now,’ Josephine murmured because my mother had become agitated, speaking now of the damp lawn and its coolness soothing the pain. ‘I didn’t want to live,’ she sometimes said.
    I remembered her when Josephine and I had returned from the hospital in Fermoy. She had been wearing a green overcoat, standing with Aunt Fitzeustace in the garden. The overcoat had been my father’s and had hung, hardly ever worn by him, in one of the kitchen passages. ‘No, it cannot be believed,’ Aunt Fitzeustace had been saying, tears dripping on to her blouse and her tweed tie.
    ‘Good-night,’ I said again.
    ‘Ah, Willie, I did not see you there. Yes, of course it’s time for your bed.’
    She did not kiss me, as she had at Kilneagh. I closed her bedroom door and climbed up another half flight of stairs. Often I dreamed of that moment in the garden, of Aunt Fitzeustace’s weeping, and my mother in the green overcoat.
    ‘Mr Derenzy is coming today,’ Josephine reminded me one morning, and when I returned from school there was a fire in the dining-room and my mother had dressed and come downstairs. The dining-room door was ajar, and with some excitement Josephine said: ‘You are to go in at once, Willie. Just comb your hair.’
    She combed it herself with a comb that had been ready on the kitchen draining-board. She made me wash my hands, and damped the comb beneath the tap. ‘Look up at me,’ she said, and then hurried me to the dining-room, where a mass of papers and ledgers was spread out on the table. My mother, in a black and red striped dress, had a tray of tea things in front of her. The room smelt of her scent, the first time I’d noticed it since we’d come to the house in Windsor Terrace. She had touched her cheeks with rouge and had piled her hair up, the way she used to for a party at Kilneagh. ‘Willie’ll be better at understanding,’ she said, smiling and pouring tea.
    I shook hands with Mr Derenzy, who hadn’t changed in any way whatsoever. He wore the same blue serge suit, the same pens and pencils clipped to its top pocket. His red hair still gave the impression of sustaining a life of its own, the hand that gripped mine felt more like bones than flesh.
    ‘Ah, Willie, it’s good to see you.’
    ‘The poor man’s having a terrible time explaining to me, Willie.’
    ‘Ah no, no,’ Mr Derenzy protested, sitting down again.
    My mother offered me a piece of Swiss roll, and when Mr Derenzy began to talk about sales and purchases at the mill I realized that my task was simply to listen. The sums and subtractions were a formality, but once Mr Derenzy paused and, addressing me rather than my mother, explained that a legal agreement necessitated this long report of the continued management of the mill. I had not even thought about