Fools of Fortune – William Trevor (1983)

This post comes to you several days later than it should have done, I had intended to write it one day after work, but then the week exploded and that didn’t happen. Never mind, better late than never. This book picked up to read for #ReadingIreland month – and I think I have probably had it a while.

Fools of Fortune was William Trevor’s eleventh novel – he was a prolific writer of novels and stories, and I have many still to read. This is an extraordinarily beautiful novel; one the great Molly Keane called a moving and important book. It is told mainly in two first person narratives, spanning a period from just after the First World War to the 1980s. It is a beautiful, complex novel, haunting and tender and always compelling.

The novel opens with Willie growing up on the Irish, Kilneagh estate of the wealthy Quinton family in County Cork. Willie has two older sisters, and alongside his parents, two aunts also live with the family. His father is a mill owner, a protestant like his English wife, though they both have some sympathy with the republican cause. Michael Collins makes a visit to their home, and Willie is taught by Father Kilgarriff an unfrocked Catholic priest. They live a fairly perfect life; they are happy and successful. Everything changes however when the body of an informer is found on the Quintons land.

The Black and Tans, led by a particularly zealous sergeant sets fire to the Quinton home one night. It is an act of unbelievable savagery, from which only Willie and his mother escape (the aunts were away on holiday). The legacy of this dreadful crime just after the First World War will be felt for decades – feelings of trauma, loss and vengeance, not allowing the wounds of the past to ever properly heal.

“I was in Tim Paddy’s arms, and then there was the dampness of the grass before the pain began, all over my legs and back. The ponies and my mother’s horse snorted and neighed. I could hear their hooves banging at the stable doors.

There were stars in the sky. An orange glow crept over the edges of my vision. The noise there’d been had changed, becoming a kind of crackling, with crashes that sounded like thunder. I couldn’t move. I thought: We are all like this, Geraldine, Deirdre, my mother and father, Josephine and Mrs Flynn; we are all lying on the wet grass, in pain.”

Following the loss of his home, father, and sisters, as well as several servants, Willie and his mother move to a house in Cork. The aunts and Father Kilgarriff remain behind at Kilneagh, living in the Orchard Wing that was unaffected by the fire, Willie’s father’s clerk taking over as manager of the mill. With Willie and his mother, goes Josephine, the young maid who had only just come to the Quinton estate, and also survived the fire. Willie must begin attending a school in the city, his teacher Miss Halliwell feels a peculiar tenderness and pity for Willie, which Willie finds embarrassing, and is rather glad when it’s time for him to leave for boarding school.

Meanwhile Willie’s mother has been unable to recover from the trauma and shock of the night their house was set ablaze. Cared for faithfully by Josephine, she turns more and more to alcohol – until her addiction is all too obvious. She won’t permit the aunts back in Kilneagh to write to her, can’t tolerate the twice yearly visit from Mr Derenzy who manages the mill, and won’t even permit letters from her own parents in India. Willie has to write the letters for her. Willie’s mother is haunted by the image of the sergeant who led the Black and Tans, and who has now returned home to Liverpool to run a greengrocers.

“‘I’d like to see Kilneagh again’ Josephine had said, and came one Friday so that we might travel back together on the evening train. We walked together in the garden and the ruins, and in the kitchen of the orchard wing she was shy. She sat on the edge of a chair sipping at a cup of tea while Aunt Fitzeustace worriedly questioned her about my mother, and Aunt Pansy offered currant scones around. Father Kilgarriff said it was great to see her again. That day, for the first time, I noticed a tired look about him, as well as the thinness that hadn’t been there in the past. Mr Derenzy had told me he suffered sometimes from the bullet wounds in his chest.”

The second part of the novel is narrated by Marianne, Willie’s cousin from England. When the two meet they are inevitably drawn to one another, but there seems too much in the way. The love they find is very brief – Marianne leaves for a finishing school in Switzerland, where she has a horrible experience. She decides to return to Ireland to find Willie, and tell him she is having his child, but Willie has disappeared. 

Marianne decides to stay in Ireland and raise her daughter at Kilneagh – living in the Orchard Wing with Willie’s aunts, firm in her belief that one day he will return. The third part of the novel is told from the perspective of Imelda, Marianne and Willie’s daughter, another child growing up at Kilneagh, but one who grows up with a terrible legacy in the past. A legacy not even she, born years later can escape.

A novel of under two hundred pages, and yet the scope and the power of it really does belie its size. William Trevor’s writing is always so visual – leaving the reader with a myriad of images, as good as any film.