Fools of Fortune

  We thrashed our way through the gorse, Ring singing a lugubriously indecent ballad, de Courcy enthusing about his future in the theatre. They both knew a little of my history, but I did not often talk about the past and they did not ask. I never mentioned my mother.

  ‘Have you sausages today?’ Ring asked the waitress at Bolger’s in his drawling, lazy voice. ‘Six sausages each, and fried bread, black puddings and potato cakes.’

  ‘Isn’t she a lovely creature?’ de Courcy whispered while the girl laid out knives and forks for us. Freckled and stout, she blushed in confusion.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Ring demanded.

  ‘Noreen.’

  ‘And where are you from, Noreen?’

  ‘Mullingar.’

  ‘Noreen of the wild ways,’ de Courcy murmured when she’d gone, a remark which Ring repeated to her as soon as she returned.

  ‘Errah, get on with you,’ said the girl.

  We drank cups of tea with the fried food, and ate slices of soda bread smeared with blackberry jelly. ‘I wonder have we enough for a jar in Lamb’s?’ Ring suggested when we’d finished, and de Courcy and I placed what remained of our money on the table.

  ‘Are you doing anything this minute, Noreen?’ Ring enquired of the waitress. ‘Would you wet your whistle with us in the Lamb’s?’

  ‘Sure, amn’t I up to my neck?’

  ‘Slip out the back, Noreen. Your man here has an eye for you.’

  De Courcy kept his head bent during this exchange. Although he talked a great deal about girls, he was excessively shy in their presence and found it difficult to converse normally with the maids at school, several of whom he had declared he would lay down his life for.

  ‘D’you get any time off, Noreen?’ Ring persisted. ‘Would you be free in the evenings ever?’

  As he spoke, he placed one of his huge arms round the girl’s waist, causing her to jump backwards as if stung by a wasp. ‘Lay off that stuff,’ she cried, glaring at all three of us from a distance. ‘Keep your hands to yourself now.’ Cautiously she approached the table again in order to stack the plates on to a tray.

  ‘It’s your man here who’s keen for you, Noreen. It’s not me at all.’

  ‘I haven’t a fancy for schoolboys.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Noreen, we’re sailors off a ship.’

  The girl did not reply. She carried the tray away, and since she did not return we set out for Lamb Doyle’s. We occupied a table near a window which afforded a wide view of the approach to the public house, for it was not unknown for Mad Mack or his proselytes to come snooping.

  ‘Did you ever in all your days see a more graceful creature?’ de Courcy demanded as we lit our cigarettes. ‘Wouldn’t you lay down your life for her, Quinton?’

  I replied that I didn’t think I would, but de Courcy continued to speak with some extravagance of the waitress’s beauty, lending emphasis to his romantic mood by declaiming the poetry of W. B. Yeats. Ring laughed coarsely.

  ‘You’d do better than that skivvy in the first kip-shop you’d come to,’ he said. ‘An uglier lump I never laid eyes on.’

  ‘You are without a soul, Ring.’

  ‘You’d need a soul and a half to see anything in that one.’

  As he spoke, the only other drinker in the bar approached us. He was a man in a stained Donegal suit and a stained hat. He had broken front teeth.

  ‘Excuse me.’ Blear-eyed, he looked down at the three of us. ‘Are you from the college?’

  ‘We’re sailors off a ship,’ Ring said.

  ‘I was at the college myself one time.’

  He paused while politely we acknowledged this fact. We’d never seen the man before.

  ‘Thirteen years ago. I used to teach geography.’

  He turned and walked away. We drank what remained in our glasses and mechanically hid our cigarettes in the cups of our hands. It was never a good idea to drop into conversations with strangers in a public house. Even the most genial of them had been known to contact the headmaster a day or two later, sobered by conscience and anxious for our welfare. We were actually on our feet, about to go, when the tweeded man addressed us from the bar.

  ‘I’ve got you one for the road.’ He pulled a chair in to the table so that we might drink together. ‘You’re right enough for an hour,’ he said. ‘If you’re back there for Chapel they’ll not notice anything else.’

  He gave us fresh cigarettes and made us clink our glasses against his. He asked us who we were and we gave him the names of three other boys. He didn’t reveal his own.

  ‘Is Mack still in action?’ he enquired. ‘Is he back on speaking terms with Dove-White?’

  The amount he knew about the school convinced us that he was speaking the truth when he claimed a connection with it in the past. Nor did his grubbiness seem entirely out of place, or preclude him from the schoolmastering profession: there was nothing particularly prepossessing about the gingery appearance of Mad Mack or Dove-White’s burnt clothes.

  We sipped the porter we’d been bought and smoked the cigarettes. De Courcy inaccurately described the waitress in Bolger’s, informing the man that if he could see her he’d wish to lay down his life for her. ‘In that case we’ll take another glassful,’ said the man and again approached the bar.

  With his eyes closed, de Courcy continued his eulogy of the waitress, referring to her as an exquisite sea-bird. ‘Frail blessed bird,’ he murmured, but Ring told him to give over immediately or he’d frighten our benefactor off.

  The man returned, laden with drink and further cigarettes. He handed us a packet each and made us again raise our glasses.

  ‘We could get into terrible trouble, sir,’ Ring said, ‘if any of this leaked out.’

  ‘How could it leak out?’

  ‘As long as you realize we’d be in trouble, sir.’

  ‘I was sacked for sodomy,’ the man said.

  Slowly, admiringly, Ring moved his head from side to side. It could happen to a bishop, he said in his slow voice.

  ‘After that I went to England. I was in a school near Nottingham only I had a bad bit of luck there too.’

  ‘That girl has started a storm in me,’ de Courcy suddenly exclaimed, standing up and swaying.

  The man laughed pleasantly. ‘I have a small proposition,’ he went on, ‘which could earn you a pound, boys.’

  Recalling the reference to sodomy, I hastily rose to my feet also. We would have to go now, I explained, otherwise we’d be late for Chapel. We’d see him some other time, Ring promised, we’d definitely be back.

  De Courcy said nothing, intent on making an unsteady course across the bar. We followed him, and when the tweeded man called after us Ring assured him we’d listen to any proposition he had to make the next time we had a drink with him. De Courcy staggered in the yard, before covering its grey cement with sausage and fried bread.

  ‘Hills of the North, rejoice,’ we sang in Chapel. ‘Valley and lowland, sing.’ The boys around us glanced in our direction, attracted by the loudness of our voices and the stench of porter. The good-natured chaplain stuttered his way through a sermon about St Simon, and all during it I thought to myself that the tragedy at Kilneagh was over and done with. There was no Miss Halliwell daily to remind me of it, nor was there my mother every evening to say good-night to. According to Father Kilgarriff, my aunts had taken in another collection of dogs; the rhododendrons still flowered; Mr Derenzy had assured us that little had changed at the mill. One day I would be back there. It was not impossible that one day Kilneagh would be as it had been.

  ‘A most dangerous person,’ Dove-White said in the course of a Latin lesson. ‘Incredible impertinence that he should be anywhere near this place.’

  ‘He’s a homosexual, is he, sir?’ de Courcy politely suggested. ‘That’s what he said anyway.’

  ‘Keep well away from him, de Courcy.’

  ‘He offered us money, sir. He mentioned a proposition.’

  ‘Where’ve we got
to, Tuthill?’

  ‘… omnemGalliam ab injuria Ariovisti, sir.’

  Ring was playing patience. With a piece of broken mirror propped up on his desk, a boy known as Lout MacCarthy was squeezing his blackheads. A. McC. P. Jackson was reading an Arsene Lupin book. Thynne Minor was asleep.

  ‘Continue on then,’ Dove-White commanded Tuthill. ‘Hac oratione habita ab Divitiaco.’

  ‘The thing is, sir,’ de Courcy interrupted again, ‘it’s interesting your friend coming back like this. As you say, sir, you’d think he’d keep away.’

  ‘He was no friend of mine, de Courcy. Hac oratione—’

  ‘I think the boys should know what he got up to, sir. If he’s a danger, sir, shouldn’t the boys know what to beware of? Did he have a name, sir?’

  ‘Of course he had a name, de Courcy. Don’t be silly now. Hac oratione, Tuthill?’

  ‘When this speech—’

  ‘I think you should tell us, sir. I mean, if he’s going round offering money—’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, de Courcy! The wretched man was sacked because he took boys out on a picnic. He gave them cider laced with gin.’

  ‘Is that all, sir?’

  ‘There are parents who scrimp and save, de Courcy, so that they can send their sons to this school. They hardly do so in order to place them at the disposal of the sexually perverted.’ Dove-White’s voice was tired. He closed Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War and pulled his burnt, chalky gown more cosily about him. He asked for silence and then, like Thynne Minor, he drifted into sleep.

  That afternoon we crossed the hillside to Lamb Doyle’s, hoping to find the sacked geography master there, and in this we were not disappointed. He approached us as we entered and at once bought us drink and cigarettes, which we accepted without demur. Now that we knew the extent of his crime we felt we could cope with whatever attentions he plied us with, although we resolved to keep a watchful eye on him when he was having our glasses refilled at the bar.

  ‘It was Mad Mack who did for me,’ he confided. ‘It was Mad Mack reported the thing.’

  ‘The picnic, sir?’

  ‘Ah, they told you, did they?’

  ‘Dove-White told us.’

  ‘Sure, where was the harm in having a picnic with a few lads?’

  ‘No harm at all, sir,’ de Courcy agreed smoothly. Ring guffawed, striking his knee with his fist, as his habit was when amused.

  ‘Tell me this, lads, does Mad Mack still occupy the same old bedroom?’

  None of us was able to answer this question, since none of us knew which bedroom Mad Mack had slept in thirteen years ago, but it was soon established that his sleeping arrangements had in fact changed. The mathematics master now slept in a downstairs room in the masters’ house, the room next to his study: he had been elsewhere before.

  ‘I was afraid of that,’ the man said. He remained lost for a moment in thought, his eyes screwed up against the smoke from his cigarette. Ring clattered his empty glass suggestively on the table, and our companion obediently crossed to the bar for more porter. When he had delivered it to us he spoke again of the mathematics master. He then astonished us by weeping. He turned his face away so that we should not see how it had contorted; his hands shook so much that for a moment he was unable to light his cigarette. ‘Christ,’ Ring muttered.

  Eventually recovering himself, the man said:

  ‘I have begged for threepenny pieces on O’Connell’s Bridge. I have cleaned out the latrines of the gaol where I was in England. Mack brought all that on me. If Mack was humane I would still be your geography master and no harm done.’

  Alarmed by this display of emotion, Ring said we should be getting back now. But de Courcy shook his head. He displayed concern for our companion by deploring the misplaced zeal of the mathematics master. ‘The trouble is, sir,’ he said, ‘Mack’s insane.’

  The man placed a pound note on the table. It was ours, he said, if we would agree to lead him, in the middle of the night, to the window of Mad Mack’s bedroom.

  ‘We’d be delighted, sir,’ de Courcy responded immediately. It was the least we could do, he pointed out, after all the drink and cigarettes we’d been bought.

  ‘We could get into terrible trouble,’ Ring began. ‘Appalling trouble—’

  ‘There’ll be no trouble whatsoever, boy, if you keep your mouth shut. We might need the loan of a ladder, though.’

  ‘There’s a fire escape running up by those windows,’ de Courcy said. ‘But we’ll get hold of a ladder if it’s better.’

  ‘The fire escape might do the job for us. I think I remember it now.’

  ‘It’s great to have met you, sir,’ enthused de Courcy.

  Shortly after that wt left the public house, Ring and myself considerably apprehensive, de Courcy jubilant. The arrangement was that we were to meet behind the chapel at two o’clock on a Sunday morning a week later. ‘We’ll never stay awake,’ Ring objected, and on the night in question he fell heavily asleep soon after lights-out. De Courcy and I, however, managed not to. We roused Ring when a distant church clock chimed half-past one.

  The man arrived promptly at our rendezvous. He didn’t speak, and in the continuing silence we led the way to the masters’ house and pointed to the black fire escape that ended its descent beside Mad Mack’s bedroom window. As always, the top half of the window was open, an element in Mad Mack’s puritan zeal being his devotion to fresh air. The sacked geography master climbed to a height of six feet or so. He paused before pressing the lower half of his body against the opening, above the sleeping mathematics master. A faint sound disturbed the still night.

  ‘My God,’ whispered Ring, ‘he’s having a slash on him.’

  Sunday-morning breakfast was a leisurely, if somewhat formal, occasion. Standing in our gowns in the darkly panelled dining hall, we waited in silence while the Scrotum and Mrs Scrotum led the small procession of masters to the high table, where the funereal Fukes awaited them with a silver-plated coffee-pot. ‘Benedictus benedicat,’ intoned a prefect known as Bamboo Jones because of his upright stance, ‘per Christum Dominum nostrum.” Mad Mack sat down next to Mrs Scrotum, with Monsieur Bertain on the other side of him and the chaplain next to Dove-White. Hopeless Gibbon hurried in late, red-faced and whispering an apology. The science man lived out, as did the other masters who were now absent.

  Mad Mack appeared not to have suffered from the attention paid to him while he slept. Certainly he had not woken up at the time: we knew that because we had remained where we stood until the geography master had adjusted his clothes and descended to the ground. Without addressing a word to us, he had marched off into the darkness.

  While the butler now hovered behind him with the coffee-pot, Mad Mack’s harsh voice rang out, deploring the fact that his shaving water had been tepid. And from boy to boy, from table to table, word went round the dining hall that he had been urinated upon during the night. Sniggering swelled into laughter. Heads turned towards the high table, eyes searching the gingery countenance of the mathematics master. Mrs Scrotum chattered across him to Hopeless Gibbon. Sleepily, Dove-White reached for the toast.

  ‘Why is there this laughter?’ The Scrotum was on his feet, the crimson orb of his face pushed out at us, his little knuckles resting on the table-cloth. He turned to Bamboo Jones, who was seated at the head of the table nearest to him, as by dining-hall tradition the duty prefect should be.

  ‘Why are we being treated to laughter, Jones?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Cease this unpleasantness at once,’ commanded the Scrotum noisily, and then sat down.

  Mad Mack would have thought it was raining, Ring said, poking at the lumps in his porridge. He would have woken up and shut the window, wiping a few drops off his moustache. The laughter had dribbled away, but eyes still glanced in the direction of the high table and again the word went round: that it was the sacked geography master, already known by repute because of what we had reported, who h
ad done the deed.

  Again the Scrotum rose. ‘Why are you boys looking at Mr Mack? Why are they, Jones?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know, sir.’

  A boy called FitzPayne, at a table not far from where the Scrotum stood, was selected as a source of possible elucidation.

  ‘FitzPayne, why is Mr Mack the object of your interest?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

  ‘I’m not looking at Mr Mack, sir.’

  ‘Are you telling me lies by default, sir? Remember what we agreed between us about lies, FitzPayne. Less than half a minute ago you were staring at Mr Mack with an impertinent grin on your face. We are waiting to hear why that was so, FitzPayne.’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Step up to High Table, sir. Mr Dove-White, move your chair to one side so that FitzPayne may the better stare at Mr Mack.’

  The maids, still handing round plates of porridge, had stopped in their tracks. Fukes, in the shadows of a recess behind the headmaster, was investigating the condition of his teeth with a forefinger. The matron’s ladle was poised dramatically above the enormous white enamel porridge container. Her assistant, placing thick slices of bread on plates, paused also. ‘Well now, FitzPayne,’ the headmaster urged, and FitzPayne, a youth ravaged by acne, said he begged the headmaster’s pardon.

  ‘You will please tell us why your attention was drawn towards Mr Mack.’

  The silence was so complete and so intense that it felt like a sudden presence—as if God, de Courcy afterwards suggested, had chosen to pass through the dining hall on some minor mission. Mad Mack registered bewilderment, the chaplain looked concerned. Mrs Scrotum, the growth of her grey hair more horizontal than usual on a Sunday morning due to her Saturday-night washing of it, was impatient to return to her conversation with Hopeless Gibbon.

  ‘Did you once,’ pursued the Scrotum, ‘have a nursemaid, FitzPayne?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Had you once had a nursemaid, she might have informed you that it is distasteful to stare.’