The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (120 page)

Dr. White shook his head sadly and said nothing.

“Well, go on, say it whatever it is?”

“But of
course
there’s a price. The price is your wish to be home, and to be a person of importance in these parts where your grandfather came from, not just one of a few million Irish in America. That’s what you want—isn’t it?—much more than money. I was just saying there are some people who want nothing or very little.”

“Like the Ryans,” Patrick said sadly. “They wanted very little indeed, and look at what they have now.”

   “It will be better for you now that you’ve got someone to look after things,” Grace said.

“She looks a bit fierce,” Dara complained.

“It doesn’t matter, she’s going to run things, that’s what it’s about.”

Grace was always so sunny. Dara wondered did she ever have great times of doubt and worry? Was it only Dara? Maybe if you were as beautiful as Grace was, there was no need to worry about things. Everyone loved you.

“Are things okay at your home now? You remember you asked me not to talk about that row ages ago between your father and Kerry, so I didn’t, I didn’t even think about it until now …”

Grace was full of understanding. “I know you didn’t tell anyone. You’re a great friend.”

They were sitting in Dara’s bedroom. Grace got up to walk about, she seemed restless.

“No, things are not great at home. But I don’t know whether that’s because of Kerry and Father, or because of Father being so worried about everything, your mother and all that.”

She looked terribly young somehow. Those curls could make her look like a toddler sometimes, otherwise they made her like a film star.

“Do they fight?”

“No, that’s just it, they hardly talk at all. They sort of talk through me, if I weren’t there I think not a word would be said.”

“It’s hard to believe that with Kerry, he’s so nice and such fun.”

Dara was wistful for those carefree days which seemed so long ago now. Kerry was one of the few people within miles who had not come to the pub to say how sorry he was, but perhaps he had not been able to think of anything to say.

“He’s definitely no fun with Father,” Grace said. Then she deliberately forced herself into a good humor again. “But I think it will all blow over, you know, this Mrs. Fine. I think Kerry was very uptight that she came to Ireland. You know, in case she and Father … Well, I told you.”

“Yes, but it’s not true, is it?”

“No, not true at all.” Grace was her sunny self again. “No, she’s staying miles away and she doesn’t see Father at all, it was all a false alarm. Kerry must realize that now, and things will be back to normal again.”

   Maggie Daly wished that her mother wouldn’t see things in such black and white ways. Her mother had this fear now that if everyone made too much of Mrs. Ryan’s accident it would look as if they were criticizing all the progress Mr. O’Neill brought to Mountfern. This was the biggest and best thing that had ever happened to their town and they must be sure that no foolish sentimentality was allowed to intrude.

Whenever Maggie said she was going up to Ryan’s, her mother said that she should watch her step and not make herself into a camp follower on one side or the other. Yet when Grace asked Maggie to come to the lodge Mrs. Daly was delighted. She spent ages hunting for a nice white collar to sew on Maggie’s dress and gave her a cream cake free to present to Miss Hayes with her compliments.

Mrs. Daly had not said anything about it being camp following to go to tea at the lodge.

   Judy Byrne was delighted to see Patrick O’Neill at her door.

“This is a professional call, and I must ask you to keep it very much to yourself,” he said.

“Certainly.” Judy’s eyes sparkled with interest and anticipation.

“We don’t have the same medical schemes in the States as here. Can you tell me how you work? Are you attached to the hospital?”

“Only in a part-time capacity Sometimes I do a day here and there when some of their staff are away. And I cover for people’s holidays.”

“But mainly you are in private practice, is that it?”

“Yes.” Judy wondered where this was leading.

“But you don’t have a clinic, an office here. Is your work mainly done at people’s homes?”

“I do go to people’s homes, or I can go to Dr. White’s office if I am needed. If it’s a matter of teaching people exercises or movements they can come here.” She looked defensively around her small sitting room with its desk and her shelf of text books. She didn’t like him dismissing it so casually.

“And who pays you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Judy’s eyes were round in disbelief.

“I am sorry. I did say it was a business call. I must learn to speak less crassly.” The famous O’Neill smile was there now. Lines radiating out from his eyes, head on one side, half contrite, half mischievous. It was the little-boy look that Patrick O’Neill had been wearing for so many years he did not even realize when it was on his face. Not until he saw Judy smiling back. Then he pressed on.

“You see, I’m just a poor hick from the States, I don’t understand the way things work here. The hospital is free … for one thing. I didn’t know that.”

“Well, the county hospital is free if you go through the dispensary doctor, certainly,” Judy said. “If you are a person of means then of course you would go to the nuns in the nursing home, or perhaps to one of the private rooms that the consultants have for their patients in the hospital.” She thought she was explaining what he wanted to know clearly but she couldn’t see the drift of his conversation.

“Yes, I see that now.” Patrick had endless patience.

He knew the system now. Kate was in intensive care, when she left it she would go to a ward. Unless he got her a private room. This he had arranged to do. But she would also need physiotherapy both in the hospital and when she returned home This was the knotty problem he had come to discuss with Judy and had wrongly thought that it could be done crisply and quickly if he designated it a business call. He must learn—he would learn eventually—that in Mountfern the dividing line between business and socializing was a minefield.

“And in your own case?” he tried delicately. “Are you reimbursed by hospital, patient, or is there someone else like the doctor that one goes through?”

He thought that if he said “reimbursed” she might find it less offensive than using the word “paid.”

Finally, like drawing teeth, Patrick O’Neill extracted the information he needed.

Judy Byrne was indeed a private physiotherapist. She did not make what anyone could call a living wage by her work. She had come back to live in Mountfern when her mother was elderly. Her mother had died leaving her this small attractive house, a car and a small undisclosed sum of money in the bank.

It was possible for Judy Byrne to live comfortably on the fairly limited amount of work that came her way through Dr. White, through part-time work in the hospital, and anything else that consultants recommended her for.

She was fully qualified; she would be ideally placed to give Kate Ryan the physiotherapy she would need. Her rates were, to Patrick, very reasonable, and he thought that others would think so too. But he reminded himself yet again how different were his circumstances from anyone else’s in Mountfern.

If he were to book Judy Byrne to come three times a week to Kate Ryan on her return, surely it would suit everyone? Kate, Judy and himself. But perhaps it would humiliate everyone and be the worst thing to do.

   “You’re doing very well, Mrs. Ryan,” the nurse said.

“Did they tell you it was going to be like this?” Kate asked wearily.

“Like what, Mrs. Ryan?”

“Like wiping bottoms and pulling soiled sheets out from under people?” Kate said.

“That’s only a small part of it, the main part of it is people getting better.”

“It’s not much better if I can’t decide when to go to the lavatory. It’s not better if I’m going to relieve myself over anyone and everyone who comes near me.”

“Tut tut, it’s not like that.”

“It
is
like that, Nurse, for God’s sake, that’s the second time this morning. If I had ten seconds’ warning I’d shout for you, but it just comes out.”

“It doesn’t matter to anyone but you.”

“I hope it will
always
matter to me; I don’t want to get to a stage where I expect people to wipe up after me.”

“I’ve told you it won’t always be like this.”

“But when? When will it get better? Last week you said it would be better this week. The week before you said it would be better last week.”

“If you knew how well you’re doing, Mrs. Ryan, you’d be pleased instead of worrying about things that honestly don’t worry us. You’d be rejoicing like we are that you’ve made so much progress.”

“That’s a load of nonsense and you know it, Nurse.”

“Now Mrs. Ryan, please.”

“What’s your name, Nurse?”

“Geraldine.”

“Right, Geraldine, and you call me Kate. We’re obviously going to be together for years and years, let’s not have any formalities.”

“It’s not going to be years and years, Mrs.… er, Kate.”

“Will I be home by Christmas? Answer me that.”

“I can’t. I don’t know.”

“It’s only July and you don’t know if I’ll be home by Christmas. Oh God, oh God, what am I going to do?” Kate began a low moan.

“I only said I don’t know. I’m only a nurse, I’m not a doctor or a surgeon.”

“Stop apologizing for yourself. What do you mean
only
a nurse?”

Geraldine grinned.

“Stop laughing at me,” Kate snapped.

“You’re marvelous, no wonder they’re all mad about you back there in Mountfern,” the girl said.

“They’re not mad about me, they’ve forgotten me.”

“Well they don’t sound as if they have, we get a ton of requests from people wanting to see you, but we say only the family.”

“Requests. Who in the name of God would want to come and see someone who might have diarrhea all over the bed in front of them?”

“There’s a Mr. Slattery telephones two or three times a day, a Mr. O’Neill telephones every day over and over, and others—Coynes, Walshes, Quinns, Dalys—and there’s a foreign woman called twice to see you, she was the one who left the plant.”

“I don’t know anyone foreign, she can’t have been for me.”

“Mrs. Fine.”

“No.”

“Well I’ll check again, she thinks she knows you—small dark American but foreign at the same time.”

Something stirred. But the events of the day she had met Rachel Fine were still blurred. It was the day John had his poem published, so he had told her. And the day that Patrick O’Neill had come into the bar urgently saying he wanted a consultation with the pair of them. John had told her that too but she couldn’t remember it. Was there a Mrs. Fine? It seemed familiar and the memory was good rather than bad.

“If she comes back I’ll see that Mrs. Fine,” Kate said.

“And what about these other men—the Slattery man and the O’Neill man?”

“No. Not yet. I’d cry with one and I might fight with the other.”

“Right. That’s understood. Now.”

“Oh God,” Kate said. “I know what ‘Now’ means.”

Now meant more of the same. The endless round. Changing her position in the bed every four hours to avoid the bed sores that she felt sure were going to come anyway, so great was the pressure where she touched the bedclothes under her. Now meant the physiotherapy. So far she only had to lie there but they told her that soon she would be taking part herself and strengthening her own muscles.

There were the hopeless attempts to make her control her bladder and her bowels. It was useless trying to go at certain times, the body didn’t work like that. It betrayed you. There was the painful business of putting in the catheter and taking it out. Lord, had she ever valued the whole business of being able to run into a bathroom and close the door behind you with no agony and pulling of flesh?

Had she ever given one minute of thought or sympathy to all the people she heard having records played for them on Hospital Requests? People having catheters and bedsores and drips all the time. Did they ever learn to accept it as normal? Would Kate ever learn?

Chapter XIII

On the day that Mary Donnelly arrived in Ryan’s, Leopold got ready to give her one of his traditional welcomes. He cowered against the wall shivering from his large misshapen head to his long awkward-looking tail. Then he rolled his eyes, flinched and gave a whimper of terror.

“Oh for goodness sake dog, will you stop that?” Mary Donnelly said to him firmly.

Leopold looked at her doubtfully. Usually he got a different reaction: people said, “Poor dog,” “Nice dog,” or “What has him so frightened?” There was nothing of this in the new woman’s tone.

“I saw you, dog, not half an hour ago up in the main street of this town and you had a bone the size of a hurling stick.”

Leopold hung his head as if he had been discovered.

“Now I’m not against that, it’s good that a butcher gives a bone to a dog instead of burning it, but all I want is you to quit putting on the poor mouth, there’s no call for that.”

The children stood open-mouthed as Leopold almost nodded in agreement.

“We’ll get on fine once we realize that there is no point in either of us feeling sorry for ourselves,” she said.

Her eyes moved around the watching group.

“What is this fine animal called?” she asked.

Eddie was the only one with enough breath to deliver the dog’s name.

Mary pronounced it several times, rolling it around to see if she liked it. She decided she did.

“Leopold,” she said loudly. Just hearing his name was usually enough to set Leopold baying to the moon as if he were being tortured. He began, but stopped in mid yowl.

Mary smiled. “That’s better,” she said. “Any other animals?”

“Jaffa and Maurice,” said Eddie, an unaccustomed spokesman for the family.

“Can I see them?”

Gravely she inspected Maurice in the mudroom and Jaffa on the wall.

On her first day she toured the house, asking the role of this and that.

Everywhere she nodded with instant understanding and convinced them that she knew the place had been run magnificently before the accident. This way they didn’t feel they had to keep explaining or apologizing.

   When the pub closed the first night she asked John to give her a quick instruction in her pub duties.

“It’s not a thing that can be done quickly,” John smiled. “A pint must be poured lovingly, slowly. No, a lot of bar work is the complete reverse of speed.”

“You may or may not be right,” Mary said, “and in the matter of the slowly poured pint, I have to believe you because there can be no other reason why men would sit in a bar and wait interminable lengths for froth to settle. But there are other aspects of the pub business which must be swift. Can you explain the measures to me, and what people call them, naggins and noggins and jorums and the like.”

“There’d be a month of explaining in that,” John said.

He saw a frown of impatience cross her face. “But we can make a start on it anyway,” he added hastily.

   Mary Donnelly seemed to settle in immediately. She introduced herself to the local women Loretto and Rita Walsh as the cousin of Mrs. Whelan who had come to help out until Mrs. Ryan was home. Nobody felt threatened by her. She was a small woman in her thirties, with curly brown hair and freckles. She might have been attractive with a little effort, but she wore brown jumpers and skirts and brown laced shoes. Around her neck she wore a gold chain with a cross on it, and she never put on any make-up.

Because she had been a teacher she was able to make everyone listen to her without even raising her voice. The house became much more quiet with Mary Donnelly’s arrival. If anyone shrieked for each other as they had been accustomed to do she would walk purposefully over to them and say, “I wonder why you had to raise your voice like that?” It was very effective.

Because she had been a teacher she knew exactly what they should all be doing at school, and prepared a small amount of holiday work for them. This was badly received, and the children appealed to their father for a judgment against it. However, Mary had presented her case so well that they found him firmly on her side.

“She says it’s only a matter of half an hour a day. It will keep you well up with your books, she’ll correct it like a teacher above in the school. It’ll distract you a bit in the mornings not to be thinking about your mother, and best of all your mother will be delighted with you for it.”

Mary Donnelly gave most of her attention to Dara. “You’ll need it in this world,” she said gloomily.

“Why will I need it more than anyone else?” Dara was alarmed.

“What life is there for a woman unless she equips herself and trains herself and gets on? Women have to fight in this world. Better believe it and know it now, and don’t let any soft soap about love and marriage get into your soul and start to rot it.”

It seemed a bit far fetched as a reason for doing fractions and parsing sentences.

At the start she hadn’t wanted Mary Donnelly at all. They could manage, she had said, she was nearly thirteen. It was grown up. In some countries you could be married at that age. But everyone had insisted and it was true that Mary did make things easier.

After the homework, she gave them their jobs like Mam used to. The hen feeding, the box stacking and the pub sweeping went on, and she was just as adamant as Mam was about being home in time for lunch. Then there was the journey in to see Mam in the hospital and the instructions to bring all the news and information. And there were books provided for them to read as they sat in the waiting room while Dad was in with Mam alone.

Mary served the bar for the afternoon. She fixed all the clients with a baleful glare, filled their pints and gave their change, but would be drawn into no conversation. If any of them dared to pass her a compliment she would say that she had no time for fancy talk, which came cheaply to an Irishman. She would ask them cuttingly if they gave such praise to their wives and indeed if they ever favored their wives with an invitation out to share a drink with them. No. No indeed. And they really thought the wives would not want to join them? How very interesting. How fascinating a mind which thought that a wife
liked
being at home sweeping floors, cleaning boots, minding children, cooking, serving and washing up meals. How hysterically funny to think that men assumed women
liked
that sort of thing.

The men in Ryan’s took no more notice of her than they did of Leopold cringing and whining by the wall. Mary Donnelly was obviously cracked in the head over some imagined slight or wrong that some man must have done to her in the past. But she poured a pint properly and she was a great help to poor John Ryan and his family in their time of need.

At night Mary Donnelly helped in the bar by washing glasses, joining not at all in the conversation. John gave up trying to make her feel part of the place. Without being actually rude she made it clear that she thought his clientele were the scum of humanity. She would withdraw to the kitchen and tell Carrie that she was setting up a store of trouble by painting and preening herself for the weekly dance, or else attempt to teach Declan and Eddie to darn.

“Why are you teaching the little fellows?” Carrie asked, mystified.

“Because there might be some hope for these as the young men of the next decade if we teach them to be normal and share in women’s work,” Mary said.

Eddie was quite good at darning as it happened and said he regarded it as a puzzle where you had to fit all the pieces in. He threatened to knock Declan’s head off his neck if he ever told anyone at the brothers that they were being taught darning at home.

Mary had no time for Michael. At first Michael was very pleased about this. He considered himself well off to be away from this bossy woman. But as the days went by and she had become part of their lives it was somewhat galling to be dismissed so summarily. He was never asked to clear or serve as he used to do, his role as a shoe polisher was laughed out of the way. Mary said she would prefer to be in charge of the shoes herself so that she would know for certain that they would be done. She didn’t like leaving things to a young man to do.

She said the words “young man” as others might say “village drunk” or “known criminal”. Sometimes Michael felt that there was no need for him in the home—everyone else had their little jobs to do, only he stood there useless and idle.

He offered to help Dara and Carrie clean some candlesticks. They seemed to be enjoying the Brasso, it got all over their hands and they were laughing companionably. But Mary Donnelly refused him. She was courteous but firm. Thank you, but she would really prefer the job to be done properly without any trick-acting or distraction.

Moodily Michael left the kitchen. Kicking a stone all around the back yard, he was spotted by his father.

“Would you have a moment, son?”

Michael was pleased. His father had a great box of papers out on the table in the breakfast room. Since the accident he hadn’t opened any of the research he was meant to be doing on the book for Mr. O’Neill.

“Michael, I have to do something about this, even if it’s only tidy it up and let Patrick give it to someone else to finish. He must have his book, that’s only fair.”

“I suppose he’d wait a bit, with everything.” Michael sounded very down.

“Oh of course he’d wait, but that’s not the point. I must leave it in some kind of state that another writer—well, that a real writer—could see what I’ve done. Could you help me here for a minute?”

“What am I to do?”

“Suppose I were to fill this folder with what has already been written … not very much of it, I’m afraid. Then this one for under way, and that one we could call ‘still to look at.’ ”

Michael separated the three piles on the table and his father called out which category the pages and the scribbled notes were to go to. In spite of his low form Michael became interested.

“Look at those drawings. Is
that
what it looked like?”

“No, that was a much grander house. It’s in the style, though, so we could point out the feature that would have been the same.”

“Is that what his hotel is going to look like?”

“No, no, it’s going to have the middle bit the same. He’s building up the old house more or less like it would have been, then there’s going to be a wing back on each side from the main house, that’s where the bedrooms will be.”

“I wish he hadn’t come here.”

“Michael.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s so hard, you see.”

“Ah, don’t I know myself,” John sighed. “Look, that’s an old engraving of what the river used to look like years and years ago.” He was deliberately changing the subject, trying to steer them both away from the fruitless wishing for the impossible. “Isn’t it extraordinary to think that’s the same river, that’s our Fern, all those years ago. Lord, George the third was still the king of England then. Do you know anything about him?”

“Was he the one who was always half cracked, in and out of mental homes most of the time?” Michael asked.

“I don’t think there was a question of mental homes, but he was certainly wandering in mind. Not that the Ferns of Fernscourt probably ever knew anything about that, they’d have been snug there in their grand house and no news of the royal goings-on would get to them for months and by that time it would all be changed …”

Michael wasn’t listening to him … he was looking at one of the line engravings that had come from an old journal.

His father followed his gaze. It was a drawing that showed a barge delivering goods to what looked like a flat landing place behind which there was the mouth of a cave.

It was just like their tunnel even though it was a picture of some other county entirely. Michael studied it intensely, turning it around and drinking in every detail. He raked through the text to see if there was any mention of it.

John Ryan broke in on his thoughts. “Oh, I see you’re getting interested in it now! That’s the whole problem I find, anyway. You start reading little bits and they make you interested and you read more little bits and you travel far from what you were meant to be writing in the first place. What’s that you’re looking at?”