The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (134 page)

“I forgot, Mrs. Ryan, you said you’d look after the bar for an hour …”

“I forgot too,” Kate said agreeably. “Still, I can do it. No one comes in this early, we’ll have the place to ourselves. You go on about your business, Mary.”

Fergus marveled at the easy graceful way Kate maneuvered the wheelchair into the bar. Up the ramp behind the counter.

He went to his accustomed place on a high stool.

“Would you like a drink since you’re in the right place for it?” She smiled.

“No, even mad country solicitors don’t start this early.” He looked at her. Mary was right, her eyes were very bright, her color high.

“What is it?” He was gentle.

“I hate saying this to you of all people, because I always shut you up about it, but I’m worried. I think that we’re going to be in big trouble when Fernscourt opens.”

“You’re in big trouble already.” He looked at the wheelchair.

“No, we are not going to go over that again. I can’t fight a man on the grounds that I went in despite all those notices and got hurt. I’m talking about something else, about the trade. I think he and the hotel are going to take all our trade.”

Fergus was silent.

“So I just wanted your advice. I was thinking of all kinds of things we might do. I mean I could do anything.
Anything
.”

“Oh Kate.”

“Don’t ‘Oh Kate’ me … I can and will do anything to keep this place in the black, I really will. It’s just that I got a bit frightened. I seem to be the last person in Mountfern to realize how changed everything is going to be.”

“But I tell you.”

“No, don’t go on about how terrible he is and how he should have stayed in America, that’s useless. It’s practical advice I want. Look at everyone else: Loretto is all smartened up, and have you seen Rita Walsh’s place, it’s like something in Grafton Street.”

Fergus smiled bitterly. “I’ve looked at everyone all right. Oh, they were all able to jump at the smell of money. Simple country town, how are you? This lot have their eye to the main chance, they’d be a fair match for the shysters on Broadway or the Bowery or the Bronx, wherever it was your man made his money.”

“Don’t make people out to be grasping, they’re not, they’re just …”

“No, not all of them are, I give you that. There are a few who have their loyalty. Not a lot, but a few.”

“But what loyalty?” Kate was puzzled. “Who are they being loyal to if they don’t want to make a bit of money out of all the changes?”

“To you for one,” Fergus said simply.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” She was really annoyed now. “What has it to do with me? I don’t want to be the cause of any fighting. I was talking about the changes and how we should all be ready for them. Yes, us too. I’ve been thinking about nothing else. How it’s going to change our lives. How everything’s going to be different.”

“It will be different all right.” Fergus was grim. “You were up there yourself, Jimbo told me that Rachel brought you up for a gander at the place. How many bars did you see? Not counting the ones they’ll have in the function rooms whenever there’s a do on. I counted them. I counted four, didn’t you? That’s a fair amount of drinks for a guy to get through before dinner, if he wants a hightail or a screwball.”

“Highball, screwdriver,” she corrected him automatically, as she would Michael.

“I know, I wondered if
you
did.”

Her eyes flashed at him angrily. “All right, Mr. Know-it-all, if you know so much can you tell me what to do?”

“Yes, certainly I can.” He took the file from its big brown envelope and laid it on the bar.

She flinched away from it. “
No
, that is
not
what I want. I don’t want his charity, I don’t want it all to be in court. That’s not what I want at all, a future based on money I got from him by a trick of law. I want to earn a living, be his equal that way.” She was both troubled and annoyed.

So was Fergus. “Stop being a Christian martyr, Kate, it’s too late for all that.”

“I will
not
have this place divided over my accident, I will not have them taking sides, I don’t want the whole of Mountfern getting upset about this and fighting over it …”

“If I have to tell you this once more I will lose what marbles I have left, and I assure you they are not many. It is
not
his charity it is his insurance, and the whole of Mountfern is not fighting about you. Can you get that into your thick skull?”

“Fergus!”

“I mean it. I really have lost patience with you. You pay insurance here, if a man falls off this stool and breaks his head, it’s your insurance that pays for it, Einstein, not you and John. That’s why you pay the bloody thing.”

She laughed and relented. “I suppose you’re right. I’ll talk to John about it tonight. We must stop behaving like ostriches.”

He looked a little mollified.

She reached across and took both his hands in hers. “You are a good true friend to us, I mean that.”

As they sat holding hands the pub door opened silently and in the way nuns have of moving without appearing to take steps Sister Laura rolled silently into the bar.

Kate cursed the greater freedoms that allowed nuns to enter public houses instead of denouncing them.

Fergus wondered was there a law of timing like a law of gravity. Something that almost made people arrive in places at the wrong time.

“I hope I haven’t come at a wrong time, Mrs. Ryan.”

Sister Laura had a great devotion to St. Francis of Assisi which was unfortunate because Leopold sensed an animal lover and opened his great jaws, closed his sad eyes and gave a treble wail drowning any possible explanation that Mrs. Ryan and Mr. Slattery might have been about to make about their untoward conduct.

“There’s no doubt about it, Sister, but your lot are everywhere now,” Fergus said admiringly. “I’ll be off.”

“Well, if you’re sure you’ve finished.” Sister Laura’s eyes were innocent.

“It’s very hard ever to be finished in a pub, Sister, but of course your lifestyle hasn’t as yet led you to explore that side of the human condition.”

He waved from the door. “Kate, I’ll come up with some ideas and when you’ve talked to John I’ll come and discuss them.”

“Thanks.” Kate waved back.

“Very nice young man,” Sister Laura said, sitting down as if she had been used to going into pubs all her life. “Does the most marvelous work for the community for minimal cost. Of course it’s really time he got married and settled down. Bachelors don’t seem to fit into today’s world like they did in previous generations. Steady him down, don’t you think?”

“Well yes …” Kate was at a great disadvantage now. Anything she said would be bound to be taken the wrong way.

“I won’t stay long, Mrs. Ryan, it would turn away trade seeing a nun in here. What I wanted to say was that we’ve had a letter from a convent in France and there are a lot of families there who are very anxious to make contact with Irish Catholic families and have Irish Catholic girls come out there.”

Kate sighed. “You know, that was something I had really hoped for Dara, to do an exchange with a French girl, but we didn’t have the money this year when I was working it out. The cost of having a girl here would not be great, I know, but we’d have to entertain her, take her places. That would cost money.”

“No, this is au pair. You know, doing a little light domestic duties and speaking English to the children.”

“When would that be, Sister?” Kate was interested.

“It was summer they were really thinking about. Two families in particular. We have the highest references. It’s in the Loire country where the châteaux are. It would be a great opportunity.”

“I’ll have to talk to Dara’s father, Sister Laura. There are a lot of things to take into account. The fare, and that. And if she’ll go! She’s very thick with the Americans, she may not want to go off to France in the middle of her summer.”

“She’ll learn no French and very little else from an American girl.” Sister Laura had fairly trenchant views about everything. “I’ll be off anyway and if you do decide, let me know.”

“I will indeed, Sister. Thank you for your interest.”

“She’s a nice bright girl that Dara,” Sister Laura said. “She’s a very bright girl. She lost a lot of ground the year you had your accident, poor child, she was grieving for you a lot.”

“I don’t know how she managed at all,” Kate said.

“Of course she’s probably like a lighting devil nowadays, they all
are
at home.” Sister Laura spoke in a matter-of-fact way that made Kate giggle.

“I don’t seem to be able to do much right, that’s true,” she admitted.

“I think you’d find her a lot more appreciative after a spell in France, they learn to be grateful for home comforts.”

The nun had bright laughing eyes. Kate wondered what life would have been like for Sister Laura if she hadn’t entered the convent. Would she have been an all-wise all-knowing mother of a fifteen-year-old? Very possibly.

   “John?”

“Hold on a minute, I’ll come in to you.” He came in and perched on the edge of the long table that went around the walls. He looked at the pages of notes and files strewn around Kate but didn’t ask her what they were.

“Wasn’t that a great idea, that long table? In a million years I’d never have thought of anything so useful.” He patted the furniture admiringly.

“Is there nobody in the bar?” Kate didn’t want business neglected.

“Divil a one.” He was hamming at her. It annoyed her suddenly, there would be enough call for all that stage Irishry later.

“Well listen, if you have a minute I want to tell you … well to ask you really. To discuss …” She shuffled all the papers with her writing on them together.

“Yes?” He was mild and encouraging. Could he really be so blind to his surroundings, and to the fact that his business was going to the wall?

“We’ll have to change a lot, I was thinking.”

“I know. I know.”

She didn’t want to hear a soothing voice, she wanted some fire, she wanted him to take the initiative.

“I think we’ve been fools sitting here believing that it’s all going to be sunshine and laughter when the place beyond opens …” She paused for a moment, half expecting him to say something in defense of Patrick, but he said nothing.

“I think we’ll have to start up something else, it would be mad to think they’ll leave all the bars they have over in that place to drink in ours.”

“Particularly on a bad day,” John agreed. “And our own crowd will want to be where there’s all the activity. So we’d better offer them something else apart from drink.”

Kate looked at him surprised. “What would you think about a café, you know, traditional sort of teas? I know it’s not what you’re used to, what you expected things would be like.”

John didn’t look at all taken aback by the idea, she realized. He must have come to the same conclusion himself.

“Nothing’s what we were used to,” he said, touching the wheelchair. “Nothing was what we expected things to be like. But we’ve survived, and we’ll go on surviving.”

Chapter XVII

Fergus Slattery told Kate that the case was on the court agenda for next September. That it would now have to be heard, no further delays would be tolerated. Fergus hoped that the case would coincide with the hotel opening. He would love the thought of the great O’Neill missing his party because he was in court hearing a huge award for compensation being given against him. The thought of it made Fergus almost dizzy with delight. He felt his life had become grey and tired; only the thought of Kate’s compensation gave it any fire at all.

Sometimes Deirdre saw Fergus finger the slim pile of documents as he took out a letter or added one to the pile. It was moving very slowly, and even when Counsel had been briefed and it should have gone much further ahead, all kinds of things intervened. There was the delay caused by the courthouse in the big town being declared unfit for use, and so cases were adjourned. Then there was a backlog occasioned by that delay. Then the insurance company changed by merging with another insurance company and all the documents had to be reissued.

Fergus had never failed to refer briskly and efficiently to the delays and adjournments, he was always up to date on the last letter that had been sent backward and forward and you would believe that he had no other case on his files.

Patrick was invariably polite and equally informed; he made it his business to be equally up to date in case he might be accused of not caring what happened.

He had offered on more than one occasion to pay some money on account. It had always been coldly refused. Barely within the bounds of civility, Fergus would hint that by paying any sum now Patrick would be getting himself in well as a philanthropist with the courts later when the assessment came.

“Any sum I paid now would be without prejudice and would be to alleviate hardship.”

“They don’t live in hardship, they don’t need handouts and American food parcels to alleviate poverty,” Fergus had snapped.

“Do you dislike all Americans, or is it only me?” Patrick had asked one day, exasperated.

“I’m interested to note you describe yourself as American, O’Neill. Anytime I’ve heard you speak you always call yourself an Irishman …”

It was never announced that the Ryan compensation case had been listed for hearing, but still everybody knew. Kate and John realized to their alarm that people had begun to take sides. There were those who wished the Ryans to take O’Neill and all belonging to him for as much as they could win in the Irish Sweepstakes. There were, it seemed, as many who said that the whole thing was flying in the face of all the generosity that Patrick O’Neill had shown to this parish. That they hoped the compensation would be insignificant and that somehow by this he would know that nobody in Mountfern or anywhere in the environs wished him anything but good.

“We’ll have to pretend we don’t know what they’re saying, after all they never say it in front of us,” John said.

“But that’s very hard, why don’t we tell people that we have no fight with him, and try to explain all that business about insurance companies and how it’s all a formula?”

“We can’t start explaining our business like that, you’d be the last to want us to air it all.”

“But it’s so unfair,” wailed Kate. “Why should we spend our lives pretending that things are fine.”

“A lot of people do,” John said mildly.

“Not the
whole
time,” she stormed.

“A fair bit of the time.” He spoke so quietly she stopped in her tracks. She picked up his hand and laid it to her face.

Perhaps John was pretending things were fine for a fair bit of the time. And she had never noticed.

   Michael couldn’t see any difficulty ahead about the court case. Several times Jack Coyne had said that the twins shouldn’t be too friendly with Grace O’Neill since one day they were all going to have to face each other across the bar of the court. But that was nonsense. Everyone knew that it was all a matter of what insurance the companies would pay, nothing to do with Mr. O’Neill himself who had been so good to them all.

When Michael talked to Grace they never felt there was any problem between their families. That’s what made it so galling to hear the fellows at school talking about the big battle ahead. And even more infuriating to have those two eejits of younger brothers joining in all the silly antics and writing “Go home O’Neill” on the walls.

In the summery feeling of his first love Michael Ryan was able to brush all these annoyances aside. It was only Grace he thought of.

The lodge was three miles away. He could cycle two and a half miles and she could cycle half a mile and they could meet in that nice clump of trees on the hill which looked down on Mountfern. But it took so long, and then there were the explanations of where he had been. And Grace had to explain.

And all he wanted was to lie with her and stroke her and read her the poems he made up about her, about her eyes and her feet and her soft skin. And recently her beautiful breasts. Oh God, how he yearned for it to be like it had been just after the party, but there was
nowhere
they could see each other now without causing the most immense fuss.

Perhaps Mam understood more than he thought because occasionally she would ruffle his hair and say that it wouldn’t be long now before the hotel was open and Grace would be living across the river from them all. But Mam said it with a shiver too, as if it were going to be somehow very frightening when the hotel opened. Michael was counting every day until his Grace could move from the lodge, which seemed a million miles away.

She had told him she loved him, she told him she had never dreamed it could be so lovely lying beside him as he stroked her from head to toe, and she trusted him and let him linger where he wanted to, she said she liked it too, and she knew he would never force her to do anything she didn’t want to. Which of course he wouldn’t. Never in a million years.

   Kerry was learning a lot about the hotel business in Donegal; old Mr. Hill who had been running a family hotel for years there was a good teacher. He was getting a sizable fee to have O’Neill’s son in his place for a type of apprenticeship, and he was determined to earn it.

The boy would learn the business from every angle. He would work in the kitchens and at the reception desk, he would groom the ponies for the day’s trekking, he would stand by the trolley as the beef was being carved. Dennis Hill said that he could give a better training than the Shannon Hotel School if he was asked to.

“Why don’t you?” Kerry asked him one day. “You could easily set up a sort of training course here.”

“And build up a whole breed of rivals to myself?” Mr. Hill shook his head.

“Well what about us, aren’t we rivals?”

“Not at all, boy, aren’t you down in the midlands there where no one in their right mind would want to spend a holiday, a big turf bog of a place miles from the sea. You’re no rivals to anyone there.”

His eyes were laughing. Dennis Hill was no fool, he knew that O’Neill’s Fernscourt would be no threat to him as it was so far away; he also knew that if he did a good job on this handsome troublesome playboy then O’Neill would send business his way for a long time.

Hills of Donegal was a famous hotel already, its name easily remembered, its clientele faithful, its food vastly superior to almost anything Ireland offered. Dennis Hill had a large family; he kept his hotel open at a loss all winter so that they could practice for the very busy summer season.

He had never taken a foolish step.

Sometimes he looked at Kerry O’Neill’s striking face and cold eyes and wondered what would become of the boy. At the first sign of any trouble here Kerry would be packed off from the Hills of Donegal household back to his father, who seemed a grand fellow all set to make an outstanding success of his venture if reports could be believed.

   Dara got postcards from Kerry, but they were inside envelopes so that anyone and everyone couldn’t read what he wrote. There were things you wouldn’t want anyone to read, like how he wanted to kiss her lovely lips again, and he wanted to smell her beautiful hair and hold her in his arms. And there were things you would want everyone to read, like how much he missed Mountfern and was looking forward to being back.

She wished he realized that he didn’t
have
to write on a postcard, he could have gotten a notepad and written pages and pages to her. Dara wrote pages and pages back.

Tommy Leonard said when she bought the notepad that she must be going to get like St. Paul and write epistles that nobody read.

“What do you mean, that nobody reads, aren’t we demented with St. Paul?” Dara said.

“Yes we are, but the Corinthians and the Ephesians and whoever didn’t take a blind bit of notice of him.”

“They did too. He converted the lot of them.”

“No he did not. Most of them went on their own way.”

Tommy’s father came over and asked through gritted teeth would it be possible for his son and young Miss Ryan to continue this interesting screaming match about the New Testament outside working hours.

   Kitty Daly came home from Dublin for a weekend. She looked very much more grown up, they all thought. Her skirt was very short and she had a lot of make-up. Instead of taming her wild frizzy hair she let it all hang in a long curtain down her back. They nudged each other at mass when she went up to holy communion.

“I’d say she’s up to no good in Dublin,” whispered Dara, who always feared that Kitty had her eye on Kerry O’Neill.

“She can’t be up to that much if she’s going to communion,” said Michael, which settled it.

   Mrs. Meagher told Kate Ryan in great confidence that her bold strap of a daughter Teresa was pregnant at last. It had only been a matter of time. Mrs. Meagher wept. It was bound to happen. What in the name of the Lord was she to do? Kate soothed her, sent for more tea and spoke in low tones. Teresa could stay in Dublin, that was one thing, or she could have the child and they could bring it up in Mountfern together, that would be another. It would be a nine-day wonder and then Mountfern would let them settle down, mother and daughter living together, and then a new life to look after. It might be the making of them. Mrs. Meagher didn’t think so.

There was no question, apparently, of the father being forced to marry Teresa; the girl was vague to the point of confusion about who the father might be. Mrs. Meagher wept again.

Kate said that they were living in 1966, not the dark ages, surely she wouldn’t want to
force
some child to marry another child over this?

Mrs. Meagher said if there was any chance of it that is exactly what she would like.

“Wait for a little while,” Kate begged. “Don’t go around telling everyone, just wait, something will turn up to make it seem clear to you.”

She was so calm, so confident sitting there in her chair, unruffled, and unshocked. Mrs. Meagher really
did
feel better and was glad she had come to see her.

She would have been interested to know that five minutes after she left Kate Ryan had reached out of the wheelchair, and caught Carrie’s arm in a hard grip.

“Listen to me, Carrie, listen to me good. Get some kind of organization into your life with Jimbo, do you hear? Fix a day whenever you like, and don’t get yourself thrown aside.”

“What do you mean?” Carrie was frightened.

“I don’t care if you have a baby, I’d like a baby for God’s sake, I’d love to be playing with it, looking after it. I’m never going to have any more of my own, but it’s going to be no good to
you
. It may well be 1966 but as far as Mountfern is concerned it’s centuries ago and you’d be an outcast.”

“B-but there’d be no question of that …” Carrie began to stammer.

“Of course there would, Carrie. I’m not a fool. And you do like him, don’t you? So put it to him straight. Say you’d like to get married. Give yourself some kind of a chance.”

“But he wouldn’t think I’m good enough. You know he’s doing great as a singer, he’d want someone with a bit more class.”

“Then for Christ’s sake develop a bit more class.”

“Why are you shouting at me, Mrs. Ryan?”