Firefly Summer (4 page)

The admission price had included tea, sandwiches and cakes. The sandwiches had been supervised by Mrs Whelan who ran the post office and was generally accepted to be the nicest person in Mountfern. A small wiry woman with a skin that seemed to have been tanned by whatever sun shone intermittently in the Irish midlands or beaten by the winds that blew more regularly from one coast across to the other, Sheila Whelan had three cameo brooches she had bought from a tinker: a pink one, a green one and a beige. She wore them at the neck of her white blouses and had done for as long as anyone could remember. She owned about three skirts which she must have worn for ever and a series of soft knitted cardigans which she must have made herself. Usually she was knitting for someone else, for the new babies that were arriving with great regularity around Mountfern, or shawls for the old, even school jumpers for the children
who might need them. She always managed to have an extra bit of wool which she said it would be a pity to waste. She had a kind, dreamy face and far-away pale blue eyes that were never known to concentrate inquisitively on anything that might not bear too much scrutiny.

She seemed to have no interest in the private lives of the rest of the parish: she never appeared to notice, let alone comment on the emigrants’ remittances that came home or didn’t come home; nor did she seem to notice the disability pensions for people who were perfectly well, or the dole for those who were obviously working. She was able to discuss the most direct questioning about the whereabouts of Mr Whelan with calm and even with interest, but without ever revealing that he had left her for a married woman in Dublin, and that the two of them now had four children. If anyone asked whether he was coming back, Mrs Whelan was always able to get into the same interrogative mood and say it was very hard to know, wasn’t it? She found that some things were almost impossible to work out, weren’t they? And somehow the questioner found himself or herself enmeshed in the Meaning of Life instead of the specific whereabouts of Mrs Whelan’s husband.

She was the kind of woman you’d go to if you had committed a murder, Fergus Slattery had always said. And oddly, there was one killing near Mountfern. A farmer’s son had attacked his father in a drunken fight and killed him. It was to the post office, not the presbytery or the Garda station that he had come, carrying the murder weapon, a pitchfork.

Mrs Whelan had involved the presbytery and the Garda station, but gently and in her own time. Nobody had thought it even remotely unusual that the demented man
had come to Mrs Whelan nor had she made anything of the incident; she said she supposed he was on his way to the canon and her light had been on.

Nobody knew, either, that it was Mrs Whelan who had encouraged the sandwich makers to cut the crusts off and to do just one plate each. That way she was sure of getting what everyone had promised, though it meant much more work for her. Fergus knew, because Miss Purcell had been fussing about whether to have chicken paste or egg and mayonnaise in her offering and this had meant at least three calls to Mrs Whelan for discussion.

‘You are the only sensible woman in this town, Mrs Whelan,’ he began.

‘What can I do for you, Fergus?’ she asked simply.

‘You mean I wouldn’t say it unless I wanted something?’

‘Not at all.’ But she waited.

‘Is my name up with Nora Lynch?’ he asked.

‘Why do you ask?’ she said.

‘Because Kate Ryan, a woman I like and respect, told me it was, and as true as the day is long I didn’t mean it to be.’

‘Well if there’s any misunderstanding I’m sure you’ll sort it out.’

‘But
is
there any misunderstanding, Mrs Whelan? That’s what I’m asking you. I don’t want to go sorting things out if there’s nothing to sort out.’

‘Ah, nobody tells me anything, Fergus.’

‘But I’m only asking you about
me
, not about other people.’

‘As I said, I’ve not got an idea in the wide world, but I know if you think that there’s some confusion you’d be the man to clear it up. One way or another.’

‘By saying something out straight, you mean? Like “I don’t want to marry you”?’

Mrs Whelan’s eyes were shuttered. Open but closed at the same time. They told him he had gone too far in his revelations. That she expected a solicitor to be even more discreet than a postmistress.

‘Other people go to you with their business, Fergus, you’re as much in demand now as your father, and that’s your job after all. If there’s a need for the right words you’ll find them.’

‘You’d have been great as a prisoner of war, Mrs Whelan,’ said Fergus. ‘The secrets would have been safe with you all right.’

Fergus and Nora went for a drive after the concert. The last thank yous and congratulations had been said; people walked home in the sunny early summer evening. The older children had gone to sit on the bridge. The cinema had a special late start, so many of them headed to the pictures. Fergus had the car out ready and waiting. Nora Lynch came running over to join him.

Small and slightly plump, she had the perfect skin and apple cheeks of a picture poster. Her fair hair was curled carefully, and she wore a little lipstick but not enough to do any damage.

‘I thought we might go up on the hill,’ he said as Nora put on her white jacket with the little yellow trim which matched her dress so well.

‘The hill?’ She was surprised.

‘It’s a nice quiet place to talk, and I have something I want to say to you.’

Nora’s eyes lit up with pleasure and her face was pink.
‘I’d love that,’ she said in a sort of husky way, not in her usual voice at all.

With a sickening lurch of his stomach Fergus realised that this pleasant, empty-headed, chirruping little teacher whom he had kissed a dozen times thought that he was about to propose marriage to her.

Slowly he started the car and headed for the hills.

Ryan’s Licensed Premises, like any other pub in Ireland in 1962, had a steady clientele that would never desert it. There never seemed to be any need to do renovations to attract new trade. The trade was there, like it had been in John’s father’s time; the people who lived on that side of Mountfern found it handy to call in rather than walk all the way down to the centre. Ryan’s had the great advantage, some thought, of being on the outskirts. The whole place didn’t see you going in and coming out as they would if you visited Foley’s, Conway’s or Dunne’s.

When John’s father was alive the place still sold groceries but though the big old chest of tea drawers still stood there they held no stock now. There was a little huckster’s shop run by Loretto Quinn, whose husband had been killed in a terrible accident. It wouldn’t have been right for the Ryans to take the bread from her mouth even if they wanted to get back into the grocery business. And anyway most people liked going into Mountfern proper and walking along Bridge Street to see what was going on. Ryan’s was a bit out of the way in terms of doing your weekly shopping.

John Ryan was glad that Kate agreed with him on this.
For a Dublin woman she had adapted extraordinarily well to Mountfern; she knew better than he did all that went on, who was speaking and who not. It was Kate who helped the children with their homework, found and trained the girls from the country who would leave for brighter lights and noisier towns once they knew the way to run a house. Kate served behind the bar as if she had been born to do it. She knew when to join in the conversation and when to stay far from it.

She polished glasses and cleaned the big ashtrays with Gold Flake printed around the rim. She loved the words Whiskey Bonder on the sign over the door, even though it wasn’t true any more. John’s father, like many a publican, used to buy whiskey in a cask from the distiller, lodge it in a bonded warehouse and pay the excise duty when he took it from the warehouse for bottling and sale. In those days the name James Ryan was on the bottle, but nowadays distillers discouraged such fancy and old-fashioned notions. They preferred to sell whiskey already bottled. But Kate would still polish the sign lovingly, getting up on a ladder early in the morning with a soapy cloth, a wet cloth and a dry cloth.

She was the same behind the bar, she shone up the bar decorations as if they were precious ornaments. A lot of pubs had the mock Staffordshire figures of a hurler and a footballer standing on a plinth, dressed in the colours of the particular county. Underneath it said, ‘On all grounds, Players Please’. Kate had explained the puns to the twins as John had marvelled. He had looked at the thing a thousand times and never even noticed the words and what they meant. Fine that, for a man who thought himself a poet.

And Kate had been great about that too. She never came up with any talk about what did a fat, country pub owner think he was doing rawmeishing away in verse. Far from it, she would sit at his knee and ask him to read what he had written. Sometimes her head rested on his lap, and she would sigh in appreciation or else she might question it and ask what image was in his mind. She had long dark curly hair and very dark brown eyes, almost black. She never grudged the time he spent up in their bedroom trying to write – and trying it often was. She minded the bar happily, only suggesting that John should be there at set times like for the lunchtime trade and for the time when they had the half-past-six news on Radio Eireann, and the customers would expect the man of the house to be present to serve their pints and comment on the day’s events.

John Ryan was not a great man for formal prayers. Mass time was spent as near the back of the church as possible; in summertime right out in the open air and in thoughts not connected with the actual liturgy taking place. But he did offer prayers of thanks to somewhere, that he had met Kate. He could so easily have not met her. Suppose Jack Coyne’s had not been closed that time when she came in with the puncture, suppose the puncture had happened eleven miles on down the road – they’d have gone to the big town instead. Suppose she had been travelling with a girl who could mend a puncture instead of that giggling friend of hers, who could hardly ride a bike.

All these things were too much to think about. Like the really black bit after John had seized his chance and arranged to meet Kate again and again, and his mother
had said that he was to bring no flighty Dublin girl into this pub, the business belonged to the whole family. John had nearly upped and off at that stage, but Kate had begged him to be understanding. What did the poor old mother mean except that she was afraid of losing him like she had lost her husband and all the rest of her family, two sons priests and far away, two daughters nuns and even farther away in Australia, and the other two sons in America without a notion of coming back.

Kate said he should be patient, sit it out. Old Mrs Ryan would come round in time: in the meantime Kate would learn the bar trade in Dublin. And learn it she did, dropping her good salary as a secretary in a firm of solicitors and becoming a maid of all work in a small hotel so that she could become accustomed to working the bar.

By the time Mrs Ryan had mellowed, Kate knew all she would need to know about serving a ball of malt, a half one, a black and tan, and a half. She knew when a customer had too much and when to cash a cheque or start a slate. They had been married quietly. It was 1948, there wasn’t much money about and not many relations either. John’s mother was there, face sour, clothes black, but at least she was there.

Kate had no family at all. Her mother had died after a life of martyrdom and self-pity. Her father had married again and believed that his new wife had been slighted by everyone, so went nowhere. No amount of persuasion would make them come to her wedding, so Kate O’Connell stood with four friends including Lucy, the girl who couldn’t mend punctures either, and married John Francis Ryan, sandy-haired, plump poet who had to run his family pub to please his mother and then to continue
running it after his mother’s time to keep his wife and four children.

Kate told him that she thanked God for him too. Yes, seriously, when she prayed at night as she always did on her knees for three or four minutes no matter how great his need and desire for her.

‘You can say your prayers afterwards,’ he used to beg.

‘Not at all, I’ll fall asleep in your arms afterwards,’ she would reply.

But she assured him she thanked God for his honesty and his kindness and the marvellous way he had of looking at things, and for the four marvellous children. She, who had nobody for so long, had everybody who mattered now. Outsiders said they were well matched but they had no idea how well.

Nobody watching the quick Kate and the slower John as they smiled at each other across their busy public house would know how much they needed each other and relied one on the other for the qualities that they each lacked. Probably the men might have thought that the youngest of old Ryan’s sons did well for himself getting this handsome city girl to liven up his business. Possibly the women in Mountfern might have said that Kate O’Connell, who came in one day on a bicycle and seemed to have no people to speak of, fell on her feet marrying into Ryan’s pub. But this was to miss the point.

Kate, uncertain of herself in so many ways, unsure that she had a place anywhere, was more aware than anyone would suspect of how she had found a home and a base and an anchor in the reliable John Ryan. She knew he would never change and cease to love her, as her father had. She knew she didn’t have to act out a role to please
and entertain him as she had done to everyone else in the world since she was fourteen. She had got by through being brisk – and sometimes she knew that she was too brisk, she left the children bewildered and bothered, and only John could make the world seem sensible to them again.

Kate marvelled at the time and patience John had with their children, how he could sit for what seemed like for ever on the bank of the river with them, making them as still as he was himself to lure the fish out of the water. Only the other day he had them all – even Declan, who never stopped moving around – transfixed over the workings of the old clock which he had taken to bits and put back together. He told them stories of the Fern family who lived over the river, tales of long ago, since John Ryan never knew the house when it stood. The twins would listen for ever to how the provisions might come up the river by boat.