Sweeney for a long while now.’
‘But Josephine—’
‘Oh, I’d say all that was over, Mrs Quinton.’
My mother slowly shook her head. In her bewildered way she said she had kept urging Josephine to return to Lough.
‘Well, there you are,’ said Mr Derenzy.
‘Now, someone’s on my mind,’ my mother said from her bed later that same evening. She had poured herself a little whiskey, she explained, because she was still suffering from toothache. Her face puckered in irritation while she endeavoured to establish who it was that hovered mysteriously behind her thoughts. I thought it might be Miss Halliwell, that somehow or other Miss Halliwell had been in touch with her, to complain of my behaviour. But after a moment’s consideration I knew that of course it wasn’t. More likely to be Josephine, I thought, but did not say so.
My mother frowned and shook her head, appearing to dismiss the subject. She said that when she was first married she used to wait at the mill every afternoon so that she and my father could walk back together to the house. ‘I remember the day you were born, Willie. I remember the broken veins in Dr Hogan’s face and how his shiny boots reminded me of a huntsman. “Now, now, Mrs Quinton,” he said, “make your effort when I tell you.”’
She poured herself more whiskey. She told me I had been creased and red, my eyes squeezed tight. And then, abruptly, she exclaimed, interrupting what she was saying:
‘It’s that man who’s on my mind. You know how that kind of thing is, Willie? Suddenly, when you’re not thinking at all it comes to you. That horrible Sergeant Rudkin, Willie.’
She went on talking about him, asking me if I could visualize him in his vegetable shop in Liverpool, selling produce to people who didn’t know he had been responsible for a massacre. Would they have eaten the parsnips and cabbages if they knew? Would they have laughed and joked with him if they knew he had ordered the shooting of the dogs? She described his vegetable shop to me so minutely that she might have visited it herself, potatoes in sacks, tinned fruit on a shelf, bananas hanging from hooks.
‘The Devil incarnate,’ my mother said.
5
Woodcombe Rectory it says on the writing-paper and I see that rectory clearly, although I’ve never visited Dorset. Do please come to Woodcombe: regularly the invitation was repeated, but like the pleas from my aunts and from India the letters from the rectory lay about my mother’s bedroom unacknowledged, sometimes unread except in idle moments by myself. One mentioned you: in the September when first I went to the school I had so dreaded in the Dublin mountains you were to leave the rectory for a boarding-school in Hampshire. You were aware of my existence then; and I, without interest, of yours.
My father’s name is on a board here , I wrote to Father Kilgarriff, because he was in the rugby team, although I don’t think he ever told me that. I have made friends with two boys in particular, Ring who comes from Dublin and de Courcy from Westmeath. The day is like this:
At a quarter past seven the rising bell is rung, and then the ten-minute bell. After the second one if you’re caught in bed you are punished. Breakfast is at five to eight, and Chapel afterwards. Chapel is the centre of school life, so the headmaster says. He’s an English clergyman, as round as a ball, with a crimson complexion. His wife wears blue stockings and has grey hair that bushes out from the sides of her head. Their butler is called Fukes. He looks like an assistant at a funeral, de Courcy says, with his black clothes and deathly face.
Classes go on all morning, with a break at eleven o’clock for milk. Buckets of it are placed on a table outside Dining Hall and you dip your mug in. Thafs a tradition here. So is flicking butter on to the wooden ceiling of Dining Hall, which is something my father told me about. Classes continue after lunch and then there are games, tea
‘But Josephine—’
‘Oh, I’d say all that was over, Mrs Quinton.’
My mother slowly shook her head. In her bewildered way she said she had kept urging Josephine to return to Lough.
‘Well, there you are,’ said Mr Derenzy.
‘Now, someone’s on my mind,’ my mother said from her bed later that same evening. She had poured herself a little whiskey, she explained, because she was still suffering from toothache. Her face puckered in irritation while she endeavoured to establish who it was that hovered mysteriously behind her thoughts. I thought it might be Miss Halliwell, that somehow or other Miss Halliwell had been in touch with her, to complain of my behaviour. But after a moment’s consideration I knew that of course it wasn’t. More likely to be Josephine, I thought, but did not say so.
My mother frowned and shook her head, appearing to dismiss the subject. She said that when she was first married she used to wait at the mill every afternoon so that she and my father could walk back together to the house. ‘I remember the day you were born, Willie. I remember the broken veins in Dr Hogan’s face and how his shiny boots reminded me of a huntsman. “Now, now, Mrs Quinton,” he said, “make your effort when I tell you.”’
She poured herself more whiskey. She told me I had been creased and red, my eyes squeezed tight. And then, abruptly, she exclaimed, interrupting what she was saying:
‘It’s that man who’s on my mind. You know how that kind of thing is, Willie? Suddenly, when you’re not thinking at all it comes to you. That horrible Sergeant Rudkin, Willie.’
She went on talking about him, asking me if I could visualize him in his vegetable shop in Liverpool, selling produce to people who didn’t know he had been responsible for a massacre. Would they have eaten the parsnips and cabbages if they knew? Would they have laughed and joked with him if they knew he had ordered the shooting of the dogs? She described his vegetable shop to me so minutely that she might have visited it herself, potatoes in sacks, tinned fruit on a shelf, bananas hanging from hooks.
‘The Devil incarnate,’ my mother said.
5
Woodcombe Rectory it says on the writing-paper and I see that rectory clearly, although I’ve never visited Dorset. Do please come to Woodcombe: regularly the invitation was repeated, but like the pleas from my aunts and from India the letters from the rectory lay about my mother’s bedroom unacknowledged, sometimes unread except in idle moments by myself. One mentioned you: in the September when first I went to the school I had so dreaded in the Dublin mountains you were to leave the rectory for a boarding-school in Hampshire. You were aware of my existence then; and I, without interest, of yours.
My father’s name is on a board here , I wrote to Father Kilgarriff, because he was in the rugby team, although I don’t think he ever told me that. I have made friends with two boys in particular, Ring who comes from Dublin and de Courcy from Westmeath. The day is like this:
At a quarter past seven the rising bell is rung, and then the ten-minute bell. After the second one if you’re caught in bed you are punished. Breakfast is at five to eight, and Chapel afterwards. Chapel is the centre of school life, so the headmaster says. He’s an English clergyman, as round as a ball, with a crimson complexion. His wife wears blue stockings and has grey hair that bushes out from the sides of her head. Their butler is called Fukes. He looks like an assistant at a funeral, de Courcy says, with his black clothes and deathly face.
Classes go on all morning, with a break at eleven o’clock for milk. Buckets of it are placed on a table outside Dining Hall and you dip your mug in. Thafs a tradition here. So is flicking butter on to the wooden ceiling of Dining Hall, which is something my father told me about. Classes continue after lunch and then there are games, tea
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