The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (119 page)

“I never knew running a house was like this,” Dara wailed.

“I don’t know what anyone gets married for,” Michael said with feeling.

“But it needn’t be like this, I suppose.” Grace meant if you had enough money to pay someone to do it properly.

Like Miss Hayes was being paid to keep things right in the lodge. There was always bread in the bread bin, cake in the cake tin. There were clean towels and sheets. Why were things so confused in the Ryans’ household?

“We used to think that we’d live in Fernscourt once,” Michael said unexpectedly. “Dara and I had a section of it all planned. And we’d have no proper mealtimes or bedtimes, or sheets or cleaning shoes … I think it would have worked.”

He sounded very wistful.

Grace patted his hand. “It’s terrible for you being the eldest,” she said.

“Yes, well, joint eldest,” Michael said, struggling to be fair.

“But it’s harder on boys, I remember—” She stopped suddenly.

“What?” The twins spoke together.

“Nothing.”

“Go on, Grace, what do you remember?” Dara was insistent.

“I don’t want to remember it, I can’t remember it.”

“Please, Grace.” Michael had a better way with him, obviously.

“Okay, the reason I didn’t want to finish it was because … well, I remember when my mother was ill, Kerry said it was harder being a boy because you wanted to cry just as much as a girl wanted to cry but the world didn’t let you cry, you had to pretend somehow that it didn’t matter so much to you. Kerry said that was the hardest bit because he couldn’t show Mother how much he loved her by crying with her.”

The twins were silent.

Grace looked apologetic. “So now, so you see why I didn’t want to finish it, I didn’t want to talk about my mother who
did
die in the same breath as talking about your mother who is
not
going to die. Do you see?”

Dara gave her a great hug and Michael squeezed her hand.

Grace lost her troubled look and smiled with them both. “Let’s finish these goddamned apples and then we’ll go for a swim.”

They peeled and cored the apples in the gloomy knowledge that somehow Carrie would make a brown unappetizing mess from all their hard work.

   Mrs. Whelan was quiet and to the point, it would be doing everyone a great favor if John could see his way to providing a busy life and home for her cousin Mary Donnelly. There was no need to go into details but the girl had a bit of a crisis in her private life and the last thing she needed was to be left alone brooding. She was extremely capable, she would not want a large salary—just a change for the few weeks, months, whatever it was until Kate was home.

John was never so relieved. He had been shattered by the events of the day: Kate wrestling with her pain and shouting at him that he couldn’t take the initiative, ever; Fergus and Patrick almost coming to blows and then both walking out of the pub; Carrie having retired to bed in hysterics and the kitchen looking as if a bomb had hit it. Opening time in another half an hour. He was never so relieved as to hear of this efficient Mary Donnelly who could come on the bus in two days if called for. Where would she sleep?

Mrs. Whelan had thought of that too. There was an outhouse at the back and it didn’t need a great deal of work. They could get a couple of men off the site to fix it up, run an electric wire through it, a coat of paint.

There would be plenty of beds up in the Grange and Marian Johnson had offered any kind of help, a small second-hand bed would be great.

John didn’t know if he could accept all this. Sheila was adamant that he should.

“When something awful happens people feel helpless, the one thing they want to do is to be of assistance. Let them help, John, it will make them feel much better if nothing else.”

John held her hand gratefully. Only this morning he had been thinking, when young Paudie Doyle had said that people wanted to help, that he didn’t know what to ask them. And now Mrs. Whelan was making it possible.

Once she got the green light from John, Sheila went to Brian Doyle.

“You said you wondered what you could do,” she began.

And it was done in a trice. Men and materials were arranged. The old outhouse was stripped of its rubble, broken wood and boxes were carted away. Other things which most certainly were rubbish but should not be thrown out without reference to Kate were transferred into an even older outhouse which was around at one side of the pub. They were stacked neatly there waiting the verdict of the mistress on her return.

The whitewash on the walls was done three times to make sure it looked presentable.

The new house became the focal point for all the children.

Jacinta and Liam White were back from their Irish College, even more at loggerheads with each other than usual and according to themselves still unable to speak a word of Irish.

Liam said that Jacinta had been tiresome and in love with the boy who taught dancing. Jacinta said that Liam had been embarrassing and was caught smoking first and then caught being sick later as a result of the earlier smoking. They told the twins that their father had said Mrs. Ryan was most definitely not going to die, but he said that nobody knew when she’d be home. They had asked him would it be days or months or years and he still couldn’t say.

“I suppose it must be months anyway; this is why we’re doing the place up,” Dara said gloomily.

Maggie Daly wanted a more cheerful view. “Listen, it could be tomorrow for all we know, but she’ll still need someone to help her. Didn’t you say yourself it’s non stop?”

Dara brightened. “That’s what it is, non stop. As soon as one meal’s finished and washed up it’s time for the next. People eat far too much, you know.”

Maggie burst out laughing.

Brian Doyle who had come to supervise, gave them a shout. “If you two girls have come to be entertained by all this and to giggle would you think of putting on a kettle and getting some tea for these men here? All right?”

This reduced Maggie and Dara to further hysterics.

“Non stop, a woman’s work, non bloody stop,” Dara said as they headed for the kitchen.

“Dara, you’d better mind your language, your mother’d make a swipe at you if she heard you saying bloody,” said Carrie, shocked.

Dara paused a moment thinking how great it would be to have Mam running around the place like she used to and able to make a swipe at anyone instead of lying on her back in the hospital.

   Grace told Marian Johnson about the new room and she sent down a bed from the Grange. Fergus Slattery brought a wardrobe he said he didn’t need. He drove it up in his car and carried it in himself. Maggie’s mother sent Charlie with a small table, a blue cloth and a statue of Our Lady with a little blue glass that held a night light which you could put in front of the statue. The Leonards sent a rug for the floor and a brand-new unopened pad of writing paper and envelopes, in case the new lady wanted to write home. Loretto Quinn gave a chair. The Williamses said they had a roll of linoleum which they had bought by mistake and the shop wouldn’t take it back; they had been hoping to hear of a place that might need it.

John looked in from time to time and said that as far as he could see it was better by far than any other room in Ryan’s Licensed Premises and private house.

When Mary Donnelly got off the bus on Tuesday her new home was ready for her.

She was given a short briefing by Mrs. Whelan in the post office and then she walked purposefully down River Road carrying her small grip bag. She had left her big case with Sheila Whelan so that the family would not realize how long she was coming to stay.

She knew the most important place to head for, and went straight to the kitchen.

“I’m Mary,” she said to Carrie. “It must have been an awful shock for you and nobody telling you what’s expected and what’s not.”

Carrie looked at her gratefully. “That’s just it, Miss,” she said. “If only I knew what they all want …”

“We’ll have to sort it out,” Mary Donnelly said, hanging up her coat on the back of the door.

   “Why didn’t you come to me, Sheila? I’d have gotten a better job done, anything you wanted,” Patrick said.

“I thought it was better not to deal with you directly.” Her voice was bland.

“Whyever not?” But he knew. He knew exactly why.

“Better let others do it, I thought.”

“I feel responsible, yes, that Kate hurt herself on my property, but I don’t feel guilty about it, for Christ’s sake.”

“Of course not.”

“And everyone else must feel the same. They do, don’t they?”

“Not really. People take sides easily in a thing like this. For one reason or another.”

“I thought it was that crackpot attorney that was the only one, and that he was upset because he’s got the hots for her.”

“Really!”

“No, sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, but you know …”

“I don’t know, and you should not have said it, and it is
not
true.”

“Sheila, don’t turn against me, you were the first person who welcomed me to this place, don’t turn on me.”

She patted his hand. “Don’t be so dramatic,” she said “I’m just marking your card a little like I did at the start, and you were glad then. Maybe I’ve stepped over the limit.”

“Do they really think it’s my fault?”

“Some of them do.”

“But it’s so unfair,” he cried out.

“Who said life was fair?”

He remembered her own personal circumstances and nodded in silence.

“You see …” she began.

“Yes?”

“You see, logical or illogical, this is what they think. If you had never come here, there would have been no machines and no bulldozer on that site. None of this would ever have happened.”

“If I hadn’t come here, everything would have been all right?” he asked quietly.

“Well, for the Ryans it would,” Sheila said simply.

   Dr. White didn’t like the American. It had nothing to do with his importing a Yank specialist. That rather pleased White because it got up the noses of the hospital consultants, always an arrogant bunch.

But the American felt that money or business was the universal answer.

Once he had commented that Dr. White’s practice would expand considerably when the hotel was built.

“I hope that your guests will have scant need of my professional services. It would spoil their holidays,” Dr. White had said politely.

“Yes, but when they do get a bellyache they’ll be people of substance, you can charge them properly.”

“I’ll charge them what I charge everyone, I won’t fleece sick people just because they happen to be rich and American,” Dr. White had said haughtily.

He knew Patrick called him a stuffed shirt.

The doctor was surprised to see him calling at the office.

“Can you give me something to make me sleep, knock me out for eight hours at a time?” Patrick asked.

“No. Not just like that I can’t.”

“What do you want, my life story?”

“Why didn’t you ask that Yank doctor who treated the entire Kennedy family? He could have given you something.”

“Goddammit man, he’s an orthopedic surgeon.” Patrick’s annoyance was so great that Dr. White smiled, and the American smiled too.

“Sorry, I’m very edgy, a proof of lack of sleep.”

“Tension, I suppose. Strain. Do you have a prescription already?”

“Never needed them in my life, thought they were the tool of a weak man. But if you’re lame you use a walking stick. I guess I’m lame as regards sleep.”

“Fine, whatever you say.”

“You’ll give them to me?”

“Mr. O’Neill, you are a grown-up man, you could buy and sell everyone in this town and probably will. Who am I to deny you a prescription for two weeks of non-addictive sleeping pills?”

“What do you mean, buy and sell?”

“It’s an expression, Mr. O’Neill. If you meet a bright child, you say, ‘That boy would buy and sell you.’ It’s a term of high praise.”

“Why are you mocking me, Doctor?”

“I beg you not to think that. Will two weeks be sufficient? One a night, warm milk. Keep warm, don’t try to go to sleep. It will come, I assure you, with these.”

He signed his name with a flourish and handed Patrick the small piece of paper.

“Do you think I’m responsible for Kate Ryan’s accident?”

“No, of course not.”

“You don’t?”

“No, how could you be? Weren’t you miles away, they say, at the time?”

“But morally responsible?”

“I suppose we could argue that since no man is an island, we are all involved in everyone’s life and death and success or injury. No more than that.”

“I’m so sorry it happened, if you knew.”

“I know. Most people do know. Aren’t you moving heaven and earth to get her better?” The doctor’s voice sounded kind.

“But she’s not going to get better, that’s what they say.”

“They say it will be long.”

“They say she’ll never walk again. Your doctors say that, my doctor says that.”

“They say long useful life.”

“In a fucking wheelchair.”

“Alive not dead.”

“It’s like talking to the priests talking to you, Dr. White.”

“I hope you use better language talking to the priests.”

“I hope so, I’m sure I forget sometimes.”

“Listen, it was great that your man from Cape Cod or wherever said they were doing things right in the hospital. Now everyone’s happy.”

“Up to a point,” Patrick said.

“Sure, I know, but if you see as much difficult birth, hard life and rotten death as I do you’d realize that a wheelchair isn’t the end of the world.”

“No,” said Patrick. “It’s not. Thank you, Doctor. Your bill?”

“Forget it.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I don’t see why not. I only wrote my name.”

“It has a price, your years of training, remember?”

“No, it has no price if I wish it to have none. Believe me, there are things without a price on them.”

“And you believe me too, Dr. White.” Patrick’s eyes blazed with anger. “I know there are things that have no price. If I was out for a return on my money do you think I would be building this folly here? That’s what my manager back in the States calls it, O’Neill’s Folly. There’s no price on this that anyone could recognize. It’s an act of love. Of faith. It’s not the act of a businessman who wants to make a quick buck, or indeed any bucks for a very long time.”