Free Fools of Fortune by William Trevor Page B

any of it before, or wondered what was happening there. That afternoon I realized Mr Derenzy was now in charge of everything, no longer a clerk but the mill’s manager.
    ‘Coal, £12,’ he said. ‘Carpenter’s repairs to the chute supports, £3. 4s., Midleton Sacks and Company Limited, £14. 12s.’ He took from his pocket the tin that once had contained catarrh pastilles and now held snuff. As I listened to his fluty voice I reflected that the container couldn’t always have been that same one: the words Potter’s, the Remedy would not still have been as easy to read across the table if he had carried the tin about with him for years. It was odd that Geraldine and Deirdre, so interested in everything about Mr Derenzy, had never wondered if he suffered from catarrh and bought these pastilles regularly.
    ‘Wicks,’ he said, ‘half a crown. I’m thinking,’ he added apologetically, ‘would the mat inside the office door have had its time? Mr Quinton didn’t say order a new one, but it’s gone threadbare and only a while ago the traveller from Midleton Sacks got his foot caught in it. I had Johnny Lacy take a look at it, only he said there’s nothing can be done with the fibre the way it’s manufactured. And if we don’t replace it at all—’
    ‘Oh, replace it, Mr Derenzy,’ interrupted my mother, as if waking from sleep. ‘Simply replace it.’
    ‘That’s nice of you, Mrs Quinton. Only I don’t think that mat could be repaired. But then again I wouldn’t want you to think there’s an extravagance in buying a new one.’
    ‘An office has to have a mat.’ My mother smiled, but the strain of the afternoon was showing beneath the powder and the rouge. ‘Mr Derenzy,’ she suggested, ‘I think we might have a little drink.’
    She rose as she spoke and approached a decanter on the sideboard. Glasses had been arranged in a row in front of it, as if other guests were expected. Neither the glasses nor the liquid in the decanter had been there when I’d last entered the dining-room.
    ‘Ah no, not whiskey for me, Mrs Quinton. No, thanks all the same.’
    ‘There’s gin somewhere. There’s sherry.’
    ‘I never touch a drop, Mrs Quinton.’
    ‘You don’t drink? I never knew that.’
    ‘It’s not on temperance grounds, Mrs Quinton. It’s only I have no head at all for it.’
    ‘Oh, but surely a little thimbleful?’
    ‘I’d be on my bed for three days, Mrs Quinton.’
    Not properly listening even though she managed to conduct the conversation, my mother had poured herself a measure of whiskey and now added water to it from a cut-glass jug. With this she returned to where she’d been sitting.
    ‘Is there anything, Mr Derenzy? Soda water? There might be lemonade. Willie, go and ask Josephine if she has lemonade for Mr Derenzy. Or maybe that ginger stuff.’
    ‘Ah no, don’t bother.’ Wrenching his face apart, a skeleton’s smile was full of apology for the trouble this disinclination to drink whiskey was causing.
    But my mother nodded at me in a way I remembered from Kilneagh, indicating that I should do as she had bidden me. ‘And ask Josephine to make up the fire.’
    There was no lemonade, nor any ginger stuff, so Josephine sent me out to Hayes’s while she went herself to the dining-room to put coals on the fire and to say I wouldn’t be long. When I returned with two bottles of soda water Josephine put them on a tray, with glasses that were larger than the ones on the sideboard, and in the dining-room I poured some for myself and some for Mr Derenzy. The conversation, clearly no longer about accounts and office replacements, had ceased when I entered. As he received his glass from me, Mr Derenzy attempted to guide my mother’s attention back to the business of the mill but she at once interrupted him.
    ‘You know the facts,’ she said sharply. ‘You are a person, Mr Derenzy, who knows everything. About Kilneagh and Lough, indeed about Fermoy. You have told Willie and myself that