Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Boy and Caspar, trained by years of watching Barn beatings without being seen to watch, gawped sidelong and beetlebrowed at this permanent and unselfconscious display of calf and ankle; Nick, Thomas, and Albert acquired the skill unawares but fast. Had they been translated into five flies on the wall of the ladies’ bath house, they could not have been happier. All the while, too, one or other of them maintained a lofty and highminded conversation on the quaintness of the low thatched cottages all around, the durability of local customs, the indifference of the inhabitants to external influences—and, to be sure, the quality of the fish on sale at the stalls. They nearly bought more fish in those few hours than their combined families could have eaten in a month of meals; it was a wonder they ended up taking no fish home at all. All five of them dreamed of amazing romps that night with the bare-calved, horny-soled women who, by daylight, had stared at them with the amused incuriosity that all fixed communities reserve for the rootless visitor. Next day their return visit to the Claddagh almost lost them the second and final public car of the day to Clifden.

  The lands immediately west of the city had once been prosperous enough to produce the sort of surpluses that interest marauders. In fact, the west gate still bore the ancient legend: “From the fury of the O’Flaherties Good Lord deliver us.” But the neglect of a remote government (the ultimate marauder), the misrule of a local one, and the consequent unrule of the people had combined to produce the ruin that all the fury of all the O’Flaherties had never been able to achieve. The only increase had been in numbers, thanks to the dependable potato and an equally dependable sequence of soft days. The moment the potato became unreliable, especially in the universal failures of 1846 to 1848, that increase had drastically reversed.

  When they had started coming here for their holidays, the young Stevensons, unaware of the tragedies that each empty home represented, were enchanted by the little hovels and shanties of turf and rough rock, clay, and furze that lined the roads like semi-natural doll’s houses, inviting play and fantasy. But by now the winds and rains had done their work and few vestiges remained. Within a decade the country appeared—and was—more desolate and uncared-for than it had been in a thousand years.

  But the real wildness did not begin until they reached the heart of Connemara late that afternoon, when the Twelve Bens towered over two thousand feet above them to the north of the road. Despite the mathematical promise of the name, none of the children had ever found a map that could actually list more than ten of the “Bens”; moreover, when climbing up to the highest of them, Benbawn, it was possible to count no fewer than twenty-four peaks. These irreconcilables merely added to the magic of the whole area.

  It was a land mottled with lakes, littered with vast granite boulders torn by glaciers from Scottish or Norwegian mountains hundreds of miles away—a land barely touched, let alone tamed, by plough or spade; a land whose air came fresh off three thousand miles of ocean, demanding to be breathed in great gulps; a land awash with light. Finally it was the light that held the eye and sealed the memory. Nowhere else on earth did it play such tricks with the land, giving mountain and lake and bog the most temporary appearance. One moment these features would rise or stretch beneath a clear sky, as massive and placid as sunlight could paint them. Moments later they could turn to the thinnest of silhouettes and surfaces, as faint sea wrack drifted between sun and land. And in a short while this new face, too, could dissolve into an infinitely slowed-down version of that shimmering, mystical world found beneath rippling water when the sun strikes through its surface. You could watch this land all day, and in no two periods of ten minutes, taken together or at random, would you find it the same.

  On the evening of their arrival this great natural theatre performed magnificently. The last few miles of the road to Clifden, south and finally west of the Twelve Bens, lay under a long carpet of cloud that tailed off with a little southward flourish far over the Atlantic beyond Slyne Head. Above this flick-of-the-tail, rearing into the sun, they could see tower upon tower of cloud, like a stack of cauliflowers. Away to the south the sky was all indeterminate streaks of greys and violets, with the odd patch of muted yellow where clouds emerged from the summer mists. To the north the sky was cool, remote, correct—like the most formal classical painting—pale, thin blue glazes over minutely scumbled white clouds. And above was the fleecy grey of cloud bottom seen slantwise.

  But as they drew on beneath it, and the wind carried it inland above them, they began to look directly up into the towers of cumulus, seeing cold gray and warm grey side by side, merging. Between, where the cloud thinned and the sky almost showed, there were patches of a blue that burned. Soon, as the sun began to break beneath the edge of this carpet away to the west, it caught the lowest wisps of cloud and turned them every hot hue from gold to carmine. Then, too, in the thinner towers, the sunlight burned with a lowering, sulphurous yellow that sank beside the blue. It was the sort of scene that makes even those who have never held a paintbrush long to take up painting (and that makes professional painters weep at the unfairness of nature).

  To the children it was like paintings that moved. From the oldest to the youngest, they sat silent and spellbound, risking every kind of neck strain and injury as they leaned backward in the jolting cars and marvelled at this infinite panoply of colour and mood, determined to miss no moment of the fleeting drama as the wind whisked it overhead and inland, down into the rising dark.

  At Clifden, McGinty, the head of the farm stables, was waiting with a dozen of the sturdy, broad-chested ponies they breed in those parts. This was “the bestest part of the journey,” according to Rosalind, the youngest Stevenson. All the youngsters, except Winifred, who considered herself too old, and Araminta Thornton, whose mother thought her too delicate, mounted their ponies and followed the car all the way out to the farm. Arabella considered that her Letty, now fifteen, ought really to be riding sidesaddle; but since none was provided, she made the girl ride at the back. It was a measure of the charm of the place that only five days later Arabella saw Nora galloping up the beach, riding astride, and she laughed at it and called it “great gas and gaiters.”

  The way out to the Keirvaughan peninsula wound south and west over sudden small hills, past a rushing torrent of water penned so long inland and forced to so tortuous a way down to the coast that, now it had reached the final mile, it seemed determined on a white-lathered sprint to the sea. In the gathering darkness its swirling eddies were richly black among the pale glint of the pebbles. All the way the children questioned McGinty mercilessly, determined to discover that the farm had not changed one iota over the past ten months. McGinty, though he was fifty, toothless, and (after his long wait) far from sober, managed to reassure them that nothing had or possibly could be altered.

  After a while the road, though still hilly, began to lead more up than down. The trees became sparser, the hedgerows thinner, and before long, they breasted a rise and saw the whole peninsula stretching westward to the last segment of the setting sun, lapped on both its long flanks by the darkling waters of the ocean. All the land between here and the sea was Quaker Farm. The farmhouse was out of sight beneath the farthest headland, nestling at the inner neck of an awkward little stonewalled harbour; but they could see the lighthouse on Inisharone, its light still pale in the afterglow of the sun.

  “That’s the nearest point to America on the mainland of Britain,” Caspar said.

  A chorus of goodnatured barracking greeted the remark. Everyone knew that Ballyconneely point and Claddaghduff were more westerly. Caspar, when much younger, had hated “his” headland to be so nearly the most westerly and yet to fail by a mere mile or three; he had spent an entire holiday insisting vehemently that the others were undercut by secret channels that really made them islands. Now each year he re-established the point with mock defiance.

  And so, babbling rapidly, reliving what they had relived dozens of times before, ravenous for the g
ame pie, the buttered eggs, the rich oaten doorsteps of bread that waited them, they trekked down into the dusk, lost in their own sense of enchantment.

  And there, waiting to greet them in the farm door, with the warm lamplight spilling out into the garden around her, was dear Mary Coen. In that position she was a mere silhouette, but as soon as all the handshakes and, with the younger children, the hugs were over, she came with them into the light and they saw again the scars that disfigured one half of her face. Nick could not look at her. Boy remembered his fanciful wish to bear such outward marks of his inward impurity—and cancelled the thought at once. To Winifred and Caspar, to all the others, she was just lovely Mary Coen, whose sunny nature and beautiful voice soon made you forget that ugly half of her head.

  Without Mary Coen, Keirvaughan would be just like any other part of Connemara; it would not be special.

  Chapter 20

  Walter, walking back to the farm after a successful morning’s fishing, was the only one to see John’s coach turn off the main road to Ballyconneely. He did not then know John was inside, but anything more than a farm cart or a customs car had to be headed for Quaker Farm, and he was pleased at the prospect of a lift; the dusty road down the spine of the land was beginning to pall.

  “Stevenson!” he cried when he saw John. “We had no message to expect you. How capital!”

  “I sent none,” John said. “The truth is, Thornton, dear fellow, I’m not here on pleasure. An unpleasant bit of family business.”

  “Oh dear,” Walter held open his bag. “Not a bad catch, eh?” he added, seeing that John was not going to prompt him.

  John gave a tolerant shrug. “They soon start to smell, don’t they?”

  “They’ll taste all right. You won’t refuse a dish, I’ll wager.”

  There was a silence.

  “Everyone’s having capital fun here,” Walter said.

  “Good.”

  Another silence. They drew level with a small, off-the-beach island that only moments earlier had seemed to be much larger and to lie about a mile ahead. Walter, by now familiar with—but still not used to—the Connemara magic, drew John’s attention to it. John merely nodded; for a second his grim, blank face became a grim smiling face.

  “Is it something very serious?” Walter asked. “Do you wish us to leave?”

  That forced John to laugh, to help dismiss the idea. “Heavens, no! It’s serious, all right, but nothing like so heavy. It’s just Winifred, as a matter of fact. She appears to have applied for a teaching position at some wretched girls’ school.”

  “Which one?” Walter asked.

  John looked sharply at him, as if that were the least relevant question. But he answered: “Cheltenham.”

  “One of the best in the country!” Walter said.

  “Good God. Thornton!” John exploded. “I don’t give a fig if it’s just this side of the pearly gates. The point is she’s applied for a position. The Honourable Miss Stevenson has been discussing a wage with a headmistress. It’s bound to get out. Lord! You slave all your life for them and they throw it away!”

  Now it was Walter who remained silent. John looked shrewdly at him. “I suppose you think it’s my fault, allowing her all that education?”

  Walter smiled fondly. “No, Stevenson. Never that. I know you too well. I’ve seen you take the most unpromising people and get pure gold out of them. You couldn’t bear to think of anybody’s potential lying idle. Let alone one of your own children.”

  John laughed at the truth of it.

  “And the result is impressive, I must say. She and Young John walk around talking Latin and Greek like the best of ‘saps’—which I’m sure they are. But it’s not much use, is it? Except in the classroom, of course.”

  “Well done, Thornton,” John chuckled. “A neatly turned argument. But it don’t signify.” He sighed. “Well, I shan’t rant and roar, I promise that. But Winifred must come to see that she can’t behave like some penniless girl with no name, no money, and no obligations.”

  ***

  Winifred knew, as soon as she saw the coach on the peninsula road, that it could only contain her father. She left Boy at once and ran to find her mother. She had hoped her father might wait until the end of this holiday before he talked to her about that letter she had written to Miss Beale. He must be very angry about it for him to have come directly to Connemara like this.

  Nora heard her out, then took her by the shoulders and gave one vigorous shake. A gesture of despair. “You goose!” she complained. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? Why didn’t you discuss it with me first?”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Of me?”

  “No! I was afraid Miss Beale might turn me down.”

  “You wouldn’t draw a salary, of course,” Nora said, thinking quickly.

  “I intended not to, but I’ve been speaking to Aunt Arabella and I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Well, for the love of peace, go back to your first idea: no salary.”

  Winifred looked frantic. “I can’t, Mumsie. If people like us don’t set the tone, women will never…”

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” Nora interrupted. “If you turn it into a branch line of the Woman Question, you will make no impression on your father. I fear you will make no impression anyway. Is your heart really set on this, popsie?”

  The question made Winifred feel deserted. Trapped, she blurted out: “Well, you didn’t do exactly what Papa wanted, either. He wanted you to be the usual sort of society lady.”

  Nora smiled absently. Most of her mind was trying to grapple with Winifred’s problem in a losing fight against time. “Your father will always find it in him to forgive success,” she said.

  “That’s all I’m asking for,” Winifred said. “The chance to do something that Papa dislikes—and make a success at it, too. Like your salon.”

  Nora pointed a finger at her. “Mustn’t be so sharp, dear. That isn’t the way at all. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Well…” she said unwillingly, “if Papa really stops me from teaching now, I wouldn’t mind going to university instead.”

  “In the land where all the pigs fly, no doubt.”

  “No. I could go to Bedford College. I needn’t board—I could stay with you at Hamilton Place. Several of the professors from University College give lectures there. It’s as good as university.”

  They could hear the coach slowing for the final bend and the sharp descent to the farm gate. Nora looked at Winifred—handsome, brilliant, careless girl—and clenched her fists in frustration. “You’ve left me so little time! You deserve nothing.”

  “I’d still rather go to Cheltenham. I think I already know more than they’d teach at Bedford.”

  “Especially if humility’s on the curriculum,” Nora snapped.

  “I’ve still got all the humility I inherited,” Winifred told her with a cold-eyed smile, unabashed.

  Nora, hard put to avoid smiling back, turned away. “At least I know which battles I can and cannot win. I don’t blindfold myself and blunder onward, telling no one.” She gave a sharp sigh and faced her daughter again. “You must prepare to lose this one, Winifred. Perhaps it could never have been won, but you certainly haven’t helped.”

  The coach was in the yard now. They could hear John and Walter talking. John laughed.

  “That’s a good sign,” Winifred said.

  “Is it? I’d say it means his mind is set and he’s not even rehearsing arguments or looking at alternatives,” Nora answered as she went out to greet him.

  Later, however, she was less sure; for John, most uncharacteristically, did not at once come to the point. Instead, he behaved as if this visit were the merest whim, an inspiration for filling a few blank days. He romped on the beach with the younger children and timed their pony races. It was not until afte
r tea that he went out with Nora for a stroll on the firm sand above the falling tide. Winifred, filing a thumbnail with her teeth (“biting her nails without biting them,” she called it), watched them go, half wishing she was beside them, half glad she was not.

  Around the headland and all along the sandy straight he spoke of the business, of friends, and of a commission of inquiry he had been asked to conduct in India, which would mean leaving in six weeks’ time and being away for possibly four months. He almost convinced her he had really come down to tell her all these things, even though she would in any case be back in London in five days.

  “There’s just one little cloud on the horizon,” he said as they reached the rocks and sat awhile.

  “Winifred.”

  He looked sharply at her.

  “She came running to me the moment she saw your coach,” Nora explained.

  John stirred the sand between the rocks with his cane. “I don’t want to make a mistake,” he said. “I’m not very good at judging the females of this family.” He snorted a laugh and she knew he was avoiding her eye. “I made a mistake with you once…insisting you should follow a certain course…and you went your own ways, and proved me wrong.”

  Nora thought it odd that they should always talk like people who had once known each other rather well; it was becoming almost comfortable to keep that distance. For three or four years now John had behaved like that; at first it was with a sort of guilty reluctance, but now it seemed second nature.