The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (100 page)

Today, somehow, the fishing had lost its appeal. And they didn’t play in Fernscourt anymore. It was not the same now that they knew the bulldozers were coming to take it down. They were all restless and unsettled. They wanted Grace O’Neill and her big brother Kerry to be there again. Like they had been yesterday. But nobody said it. Jacinta White said it in a sort of way.

“Will we go up to the lodge and ask them if they want to come fishing?” she suggested.

They all looked at each other doubtfully.

The mood was against it. Grace and Kerry O’Neill were the kind of people who made the running. You didn’t go knocking on their door. They came to join you when they were ready.

   Jack Coyne made one attempt to regain the lost business. He called to the lodge formally. He was met by Miss Hayes, a quiet woman who did dressmaking and who lived in a couple of rooms in Bridge Street.

“What has you ending up here?” he asked ungraciously.

“Did you wish to see Mr. O’Neill?”

“Yes, I wished that, please.” He was mocking her now.

“Would you like to come into the sitting room? The family are at breakfast at the moment.”

“Who’s that, Miss Hayes?” Patrick’s voice called out good-naturedly.

“It’s Mr. Coyne, a car dealer.” Miss Hayes was disapproving.

“Oh, Mr. Coyne, I had the pleasure of doing business with you once. Do come in and join us for coffee. Another cup if you’d be so kind please, Miss Hayes?”

Jack Coyne was distinctly wrong-footed now. He came into a sunny alcove where two smartly dressed children were having breakfast, at a table by a big window. The children stood up politely at his approach. Jack Coyne wished he had dressed more smartly for the occasion. He had thought he would find them unpacking and confused.

“I didn’t want to disturb you but I was going to inquire if you wanted a car.” Jack decided to come straight to the point. He nodded at the two children who sat down again, realizing that there would be no further greeting. Patrick made a great play out of pouring the coffee and was extremely anxious that Jack Coyne had the right amount of sugar and cream. Then he turned his blue eyes and his crinkly smile directly on Jack.

“A car?” he said, interested and amused, as if he had been offered a flying saucer.

“Yes, you won’t want to be hiring that car-rental job outside for any longer than you have to.”

“No indeed.” Patrick still looked amused.

“And since I’m the local man, a businessman too, in my own small way, I thought I’d put it on the line for you, Mr. O’Neill, ask you to come down to Coyne’s Motor Works and tell me what you had in mind, and I could go and look for it for you.”

Patrick looked at him blankly. As if he didn’t understand “You mean
you
would go and get
me
a car from a third party? Is this what you are proposing?”

“Yes, well that’s what getting a car for someone is.” Jack was confused now.

“But why would you do that, Mr. Coyne?”

“Why? Well so that you would get a good deal, a proper car from someone you could trust.”

“Who would that be, this person I could trust?” Patrick’s eyes were innocent and blue.

Jack Coyne shuffled and stumbled over his words. “Like I’m here, I’d know the people, I’d be in the way of knowing who would give you a fair price and who would … well … who would be the kind of fellow who would see you coming as it were.”

Patrick looked at him directly. “I’d have to avoid those, wouldn’t you say?”

“You would too, and sometimes it’s hard to tell one from another; the man who would look to your interests and serve you well, and the man who would just try to make a quick few quid out of you.”

“Yes.” Patrick was grave.

“And we’re all in business, as I say, Mr. O’Neill, and there are those of us who might make a quick few quid always from passing trade as it were, people who had more money than sense, but when it comes down to a good working relationship …”

Patrick O’Neill beamed all over his face.

“I think that’s very neighborly of you, Mr. Coyne, and I will take your point about the kind of sharks who would fleece the passing trade for a few quick bucks … It’s that kind of thing that can destroy a place. One visitor leaving with one story like that could kill tourism stone dead. I agree with you so much. So thanks again for marking my card. I’ll be on the look out.”

Jack Coyne heard the goodbye in the tone. He stood up.

“So you might call in to Coyne’s Motor Works?”

“I’ll sure as anything see you around these parts, Mr. Coyne.”

In the hall Jack Coyne got the feeling that the wordless Miss Hayes had heard everything, and realized he was getting the bum’s rush.

“Haven’t you a good enough living below in the town making clothes for people without cleaning up after this lot?” he said to her.

“Like yourself, Jack Coyne, I’m always willing to see a business opportunity,” she said with a smile.

Olive Hayes had no relations left except a sister who was a nun in New Zealand. She had always dreamed of going out to spend a winter in the South Island. If she worked for Mr. O’Neill, if she let her little place behind Meagher’s jewelry to this building fellow who needed a place in Mountfern, if she continued her making of curtains and any other dressmaking she could manage, then she would have the fare in a year.

Mr. O’Neill thought he would be out of the lodge and into his new castle in a year but he didn’t understand about the way things were done here. It would be several years. And in that time Olive Hayes could gather a small fortune, enough to take her to New Zealand, and to give her sister’s order a financial contribution which would make her a welcome visitor for as long as she wanted to stay. Indeed she thought sometimes that if the weather was as good as her sister wrote it was, and if she liked it there, she might stay altogether. But these were only half-formed plans. And nobody except Sheila Whelan in the post office had any inkling of them. She hadn’t told that bossy Marian Johnson who hired her, and she certainly wouldn’t tell that crook Jack Coyne. She closed the door after him and went to refill the coffee pot.

The girl was a lovely little thing; the boy looked as if he could be a great deal of trouble.

   Judy Byrne called the Grange. She said it was about old Mr. Johnson’s arthritis.

“You said yourself there was nothing more you could do for him,” Marian said.

“Yes, I know, but in this fine weather he should be feeling a lot better. I was wondering did he want to go over the exercises I tried with him before.”

“He said they weren’t worth a curse. You can neither lead him nor drive him. It’s always been the same.”

“Oh I don’t know, sometimes the right word at the right time … I have to be over that way, will I call in and have a chat with him?”

“No point, Judy, he’s gone fishing.”

“Well tell him to take care of himself and not to get damp out on that river bank.”

“You’re very nice to be so concerned,” Marian said.

“Not at all. How are things?”

“Things are frightfully busy, what with the lodge and everything …”

“Oh, are you getting involved there? I thought they wanted to be left on their own.”

“I wouldn’t dream of interfering, but there are some things of course that simply have to be done, and poor Miss Hayes is splendid but she does have her limitations.” Marian gave a little tinkle.

Judy Byrne banged down the receiver and told herself aloud yet again that she was possibly the most stupid woman on earth. It would serve her right if she were to be invited by that Marian Johnson, whose face was like a meringue, to the wedding of the century at the Grange, with a honeymoon to be spent across the river in the elegant Fernscourt, new home of the bride and groom.

   The children of Mountfern could talk of nothing but the O’Neills but they didn’t know how or when they would meet them again. It was solved on the day that Grace was driven by her father to Fernscourt. And left there.

Patrick was engrossed in conversations with surveyors and engineers. Grace wandered around touching the long strands of ivy and holding them up so that they trailed in different directions.

With solemn dark eyes Dara and Michael watched her. After an eternity, Dara made the first move.

“We’ll ask her would she like an ice cream in Daly’s,” she said firmly.

“We don’t have enough money,” Michael protested.

“We have enough for two.”

“But we’d have to buy three.”

“You can suddenly decide at the last minute you don’t want one.”

“All right.”

They walked hesitantly up to Grace, who was standing on tiptoe to examine what she thought might be a bird’s nesting place.

“Would you like to come for an ice cream or something?” Michael asked gruffly.

Grace’s face broke into a dazzling smile. “Can I?” she asked.

Michael was wordless again.

Dara took over. “We’d love you to come down to Daly’s, and show you the rest of the town.”

“I was longing to see everything, but I didn’t want to …” Grace looked doubtful. “You’re all friends already, I didn’t want to get in the way.”

“Nonsense.” Dara was brisk. “You’re just as much entitled to have an ice cream and walk around Mountfern as anyone else.”

She linked Grace O’Neill’s arm and walked purposefully across the footbridge. Michael followed happily, and Patrick O’Neill watched from a distance with a pleased smile.

   Eddie Ryan was escorted home to the family business by an irate Declan Morrissey, the manager of the Classic Cinema. Eddie had drawn mustaches on Audrey Hepburn, and on Doris Day. He had drawn them not with a pencil, nor even a ballpoint pen, but with creosote which could not be removed and which meant that no new poster could be affixed on top of the mutilated ones. Declan Morrissey said he did not want the child to be disemboweled but as near to it as could be done within the law.

“You are a thorn in my flesh,” Kate Ryan told her son as she marched him upstairs to where John was working with papers and notebooks scattered around him.

“John, I know that Wordsworth and the lads never had this kind of distraction, but I’m going to have to interrupt you and ask you to beat Eddie within an inch of his life.”

“What has he done now?” John was weary.

“According to Declan Morrissey, he has defaced the Classic Cinema in a manner from which it will never recover.”

“Didn’t Declan do that himself with his rows of colored lights around it?”

“
John!
”

“I know, that has nothing to do with it. Right, Eddie, before I take my belt to you …”

“Ah no, Dad, please no.”

“Before I take the belt, have you
any
reason or explanation? I am a reasonable man. I will listen.”

There was silence.

“Pure badness, I’m afraid,” Kate said.

“There’s nothing else to do. If there was anything at all to do I’d do it, but there isn’t.” Eddie looked very sad.

Kate and John looked at each other, weakening momentarily.

“But the others don’t put creosote on Morrissey’s walls,” Kate said.

“And have us heart-broken every day of our lives,” John said.

“They’ve got a life of their own,” Eddie said. “A life with people in it.”

For some reason that he never understood the strap was not raised.

He was ordered to go and apologize to Mr. Morrissey, to take a scrubbing brush and Vim and do his best. To tell Mr. Morrissey that his parents would pay Jimbo Doyle to have a go at it if all else failed.

“A life of their own with people in it,” Kate said wonderingly to John. “Imagine, that’s all he wants, poor little clown.”

“I suppose it’s what everyone wants,” John said and went back to his writing, delighted that he didn’t have to beat his small and very difficult son.

   Nineteen sixty-two was the summer of the bicycle.

Mr. O’Neill had done an extraordinary deal in the big town. It all happened the time he went to buy a car. Apparently he got friendly with the man who sold it to him, and had gone to have a drink with him. The man’s brother had been trying to emigrate to America, but he had no one to stand for him at the other side, no one to give him a job and to be responsible for him. This was a great pity because the poor fellow had just been crossed in love. A woman he had his eye on for many years had upped and married another man entirely. So the brother had only one hope and that was to start a new life in the New World. He wasn’t a man who was afraid of hard work.

It all evolved in the conversation that Mr. O’Neill could get his manager back in the States, a Mr. Gerry Power, to sponsor him in, and the thing was arranged in a matter of days. All the man had to do now was to have his medical and get his visa. Nobody could believe the speed at which it was done. How could this benefactor be thanked? Mr. O’Neill had seen a load of old bicycles. What about a job lot of those at a knockdown price. A price? Not at all, they were a gift. Thirty-odd bicycles were delivered to Jack Coyne’s for nothing. Jack was to test the brakes and do any re-fitting that was necessary. The bikes were available for all who wanted them. Dara and Michael cycled around in circles on theirs; they were the first to get them. The Whites had bikes already, and so had Tommy Leonard, but Maggie didn’t, so a small one was found for her. Grace and Kerry had theirs and there had been some cans of paint thrown in with the deal. The bicycles were all the colors of the rainbow.

Jack Coyne scratched his head many times as children came to choose their free bicycles and to paint them on his premises. He had a suspicion that Patrick O’Neill had in fact pulled a fast one on him. The man had not bought his car through Jack, that was all right, that was his privilege to go where he wanted to. But this business of unloading all these broken bicycles on him. In theory it looked as if Coyne’s were being given the turn. But in fact it was different. There was no money anyway in fiddly jobs like that, and then added to it was the problem that Jack would have to charge half nothing to Patrick O’Neill anyway to try to show that he had mended his wicked ways. And half the kids in the town painting their bicycles on the premises.