Fools of Fortune by William Trevor

Author:William Trevor [Trevor, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143039624
Google: uzVmPgAACAAJ
Amazon: 0143039628
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1983-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

6

Two rooms, never before used, were prepared for your arrival. A man came to freshen them up with paint and to replace some wallpaper. Both chimneys were swept in case the August weather turned chilly, and in the kitchen I helped Josephine to air the mattresses by placing them near the range.

‘So you are Willie!’ your mother cried, stepping down the gangway from the steamer. ‘Oh, Willie, it’s so very nice for us to meet you!’

Her cream-coloured blouse was buttoned all the way up to where her chins began, each button a tiny pearl. ‘Such a treat for us to visit you in Ireland!’ she exclaimed in that same excited manner, and you reddened when she went on about Woodcombe Rectory and the tastes and aspirations of your father, and how she had been urged to visit my mother by my grandparents in India, who were, of course, your grandparents also. ‘Oh, most awfully anxious they are,’ your mother said. ‘Poor dears.’ You wore a straw hat with a pink rose in its band. Your dress was blue, the rose was artificial. Tiny you seemed, dwarfed by your mother’s plumpness.

That summer, that last week of July and all of August, three days of September: I have loved that summer all my life. Your dark brown eyes, darker than my mother’s, your oval face, your smile that brought a dimple to one cheek, your long brown hair, soft as a mist it seemed. I stole glances at you while we stood near Mrs Hayes’s shop and looked down at the city, at spires and roofs and water, at the distant green hills that had always reminded me of Kilneagh. ‘The bells of Shandon,’ I explained when those bells rang out. I showed you the Opera House and Mercier Street Model School, the Turkish delight shop and the woollen goods factory where Elmer Dunne was now a clerk’s assistant. We strolled by the river and the railway track, we watched the cargo boats from St

Patrick’s Bridge. Further and further from the city we walked, and all the time I wanted to take your hand. Across the estuary, among the leafy trees, the windows of Montenotte stared inquisitively down at us. ‘How nice your Ireland is!’ you said.

At school you were my secret when that summer was over, during the tedium of lessons and sermons, in private moments after lights-out. When I spoke of you to Ring and de Courcy I simply said you were a cousin I had forgotten I possessed, and as the days of that autumn shortened into an icy November I continued to keep you jealously to myself. You did not belong in conversations that touched upon Big Lily at her kitchen sink or the woman Blood Major had met in Bachelor’s Walk, and school itself was different because of you. ‘Marianne,’ I whispered, ‘dear little Marianne.’ I told no one else your name.

‘There’s a fellow from Tipperary in his grave after that stuff,’ Ring would loudly state in

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