The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (148 page)

“I don’t know. I’ll talk to John about it. We have to stop pretending it isn’t happening.”

“Of course we don’t know if anything
is
happening.” Fergus began to backtrack.

“We have an educated guess,” Kate said grimly.

   They sat in the side yard. The whitewashed walls of the big outhouse which had been where the twins had their party now had clematis and honeysuckle growing up and winding around. The front of that building out on River Road looked well too, bright-colored windowboxes getting ready for the day it would open as Ryan’s Shamrock Café.

John and Kate often sat for a while in the side yard. After a night in a room that smelled of cigarette smoke and porter it was like a cool waterfall to sit here where the flowers took over. The night-scented stock and the jasmine were everywhere.

“What will we do with Dara?” Kate’s voice was heavy and sad.

“I’ve been thinking,” John said slowly.

“I knew you would.” She looked at him hopefully.

“Do you remember what Sister Laura wanted us to do in the first place? Why don’t we send her to France?”

Chapter XIX

Madame Vartin looked like the Mother of Sorrows. She had a long white face and a thin mouth that trembled as if on the verge of tears constantly. She had pale blue eyes swimming in sadness. Monsieur Vartin was quite different—he was small and round and laughed like a machine gun firing in continuous rattles and blasts. Neither of them spoke a word of English. Mademoiselle Stephanie, who was a cousin of Madame Vartin, spoke enough to explain Dara’s duties to her.

She was to prepare breakfast for the three small Vartin children, she was to take them for a walk and teach them five phrases in English each day. Then she was to play with them till their lunch; after that she was free to study. At dinner she was to help serve at table and to clear afterward.

She got pocket money which worked out at about £3 a week and there was nothing to spend it on as they were miles from anywhere in the middle of the country. The children were horrible and Monsieur was inclined to touch her a lot, pressing up against her when he passed by. Madame’s eyes brimmed with such sadness Dara felt almost afraid to talk to her at all. If it had not been for Stephanie, Dara felt she would have gone mad. It was hard to know what Stephanie did in the house. She was often to be seen folding linen or gathering flowers. She made curtains for one of the rooms, a job that took her almost all the summer. Sometimes she took the small car and drove off in the afternoons, sometimes she picked fruit. Dara couldn’t make it out at all.

“
Avez-vous un vrai
job, Mademoiselle Stephanie?” she asked one day. Stephanie laughed at her and quite unexpectedly gave Dara a kiss on each cheek.

“
Je t’adore, mon petit chou
,” she said, still pealing with laughter.

Dara was confused. Why did Stephanie adore her? Why didn’t she say whether she had a job or not? Why did she use the familiar
tu
form? Ever since she had arrived she had known that she must be formal and call everyone except the children
vous
. It was a mystery. For a couple of days Stephanie would keep repeating
un vrai job
and shake her head with laughter each time.

Dara could hardly believe how quickly she had managed to find herself transported to France. She, Dara Ryan, who had never even been to London or Belfast had been through Paris in a car and had seen the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. Then she had been driven by Mademoiselle Stephanie to this far-away falling down house in the French countryside.

Mademoiselle Stephanie, blonde and curvy, said she liked the opportunity to practice her English; one day she would visit Ireland and meet all the great and famous people in Ireland. Dara wondered fearfully if Sister Laura had exaggerated the attractions of Mountfern or the connections of the Ryan household.

But mainly she wondered why she was here. It had been so sudden, the explanations all quite unsatisfactory.

Mam had been no help. She had been all excited and said it was wonderful, that Dad had found the money, and what a great, wonderful chance for Dara. Michael had said it was a pity they didn’t take boy au pairs, Grace said it was the most exciting thing she had heard of in her life. Tommy Leonard had said he would write to her every few days in case she was lonely. Mary Donnelly told her that of all men, Frenchmen were known to be the lowest.

Kerry had said nothing.

She had rushed to tell him in Coyne’s wood and he had shrugged.

“Well if you
want
to go, that’s great.”

“I don’t want to go and leave you.”

“Why don’t you do what you want to do, Dara?”

It was a frightening echo of the way she had spoken to Maggie. She remembered the way she had spoken to Maggie the night before the accident.

“You don’t ever know what you want.” She had shouted that as an accusation, and Kerry was saying the same thing to her. She looked at him aghast.

He relented a little. “Have a lovely summer,” he said, and kissed her on the nose.

“Will you write to me?” she asked.

“I’ll send you a card.”

“Will you?”

“I said I would.” He sounded impatient.

“Will you stay here now that I’m going back or do you think you should go back to Donegal?”

“Who knows, little Dara? Who knows?” He had kissed her again on the nose.

She had gone to the lodge twice in the hope of seeing him. But he had been out both times.

Grace thought he might have gone to some place he liked miles out on the Galway road. Miss Hayes said that she hoped he had not. It was a place with a bad name, full of drunks and layabouts.

“No it’s not, it’s just shabby and dirty,” Dara had said and they looked at her with surprise.

She longed to ask Grace to write and tell her about Kerry. She longed to tell Grace how much she yearned to hear of him. But it would be useless, Grace had no idea how much Dara envied her the easy access, the nearness and the closeness to Kerry.

She nearly asked Michael, but she couldn’t do that either.

“I’ll miss you a lot,” Michael said the night before she left.

“No you won’t, you have Grace.”

“That’s different, I’ll still miss you, Dara,” he said, surprised. “You’re my twin, for heaven’s sake.”

“So I am,” she said emptily.

“Is anything wrong?”

“Everything’s all changed.”

“We’re just getting older.”

“Maggie didn’t,” she said.

   And suddenly here she was in the French countryside taking children for walks down strange kinds of country roads that had no character in them at all. The fields didn’t have proper walls, they went on for miles and miles without any fences even. The farmhouse was terribly shabby on the outside, but very rich and full of huge furniture on the inside.

There was Maria, an Italian maid who had great tufts of long black hair at her armpits and who seemed almost as miserable as Madame. Only Madame, Maria and Dara went to mass on Sundays, which seemed to make nonsense of the nuns saying they were Catholic families looking for equally good Catholics to come and stay. Monsieur had been to the church five times he told her, for his christening, his first communion, his wedding, and the christening of two of his three children; the third managed without him. At least that’s what Dara thought he was saying; he seemed to be counting out the occasions proudly on the fingers of one hand for her. She shuddered to think what Canon Moran, or anyone at school would think if she told them, and for some reason she didn’t quite understand, she felt that she wouldn’t tell them.

Madame’s visit to Lourdes involved a lot of preparation. An open suitcase sat on the landing and there was a lot of folding and refolding of clothes, and placing and replacing of missals and small prayer books. There was never a smile or an eagerness, just a more determined business than ever Dara wondered what the woman could be going so far to pray for.

“
Desirez-vous un miracle
, Madame Vartin?” she asked boldly on the morning of the departure.

The thin dark woman stopped and looked at her as if she had never seen Dara before.

“
Un miracle!
” she repeated. “
Un miracle. Tiens!
”

And suddenly and totally unexpectedly, she took Dara by the shoulders and kissed her on each cheek. There were tears in her eyes.

Dara felt terrible. Perhaps Madame Vartin was very sick. How stupid to ask her if she was seeking a miracle! Dara wished she could have bitten back the words, but strangely Madame’s softness remained, and when she was being waved off by the entire family at the door she had a special pat for Dara. It was impossible to understand the French.

Dara went for her usual walk in the orchard to find apples that would stave off hunger until the impossibly late meal that evening. She decided to write a long letter to her mother and went upstairs to get her writing paper.

There was summer lightning out over the strange unwalled fields of France. She ate the green apples, and she wrote about Madame going to Lourdes and her own tactless remarks. Dara had gotten into the habit of writing to her mother just like she talked. She knew that the letters were not read out at home, but that her mother gave edited extracts.

“I wonder why she’s so sad,” Dara wrote. “I mean she doesn’t have any awful things to put up with like you do, not being able to walk, and getting stuck behind the counter listening to old bores drinking and chattering on for hours. I can’t understand why Monsieur married her really, he must have known she would be a misery. She looks like a disaster area even in their wedding picture. But I think you’d need to live here for a lifetime to know what any of them are at.”

Next morning she knocked on Mademoiselle Stephanie’s door to ask for a stamp. They gave their letters to the mailman when he arrived with the incoming mail.

Mademoiselle Stephanie was still in bed, which was odd. Beside her was Monsieur Vartin, which was so unexpected that the letter fell from Dara’s hand.

“I’m terribly sorry …” she began.

Mademoiselle Stephanie didn’t seem in the slightest put out. She indicated the middle drawer of the desk for the stamps, and asked Dara to remember to give the mailman some other letters which were on the hall table.

   Now that Dara had gone to France it was a little more difficult for Michael to meet Grace without calling attention to himself. Eddie and Declan were particularly revolting this summer; they made kissing sounds when he said he was going fishing with Grace. Admittedly Dad and Mam shushed them up, but it was very annoying.

Grace didn’t seem to care, which was a relief. She came into the pub as regularly as when Dara had been around. She asked to see Dara’s letters but Mam said that letters were only for the people they were sent to. If Grace wrote to Dara then she would get letters back, and so would Michael.

   Dara felt tears of homesickness fall down her face. Madame Vartin found her reading her letter, and put her bony thin arm around the girl’s shoulder. She said soothing things in French and Dara said cheerful things between noseblows, things like she wasn’t really lonely, and she was just being silly.

Then she looked at Madame Vartin’s long sad face and she became more weepy than ever.

She had tried to tell Madame Vartin about Maggie. It was so hard to explain, she had looked up words in the dictionary but even then it was too complicated. Sometimes she had to abandon the story in the middle. And anyway she was more sorry for Madame Vartin than she was for herself. It became almost unbearable when she saw Monsieur give Madame a little peck on the cheek as if nothing untoward had ever gone on in her absence.

Dara sighed. Perhaps men were by nature faithless. Sister Laura had more or less implied it, said that it came from nature where a male animal was used to servicing several female animals. Mary Donnelly never said anything else. Dara thought sadly of the world of men. Starting with Kerry.

There had been letters from everyone, even a card from nice Fergus Slattery. Pages from the Whites, and almost daily something from Tommy Leonard. But from Kerry nothing at all.

He couldn’t have found somebody else already. He
couldn’t
have. Why say all those things, and want to be so close to her if he could forget her so quickly?

But then Dara thought gloomily of Mrs. Whelan’s husband who had gone away, of Kerry’s father who wouldn’t make up his mind between Mrs. Fine, Miss Johnson and quite possibly Miss Byrne the physio-therapist. And Brain Doyle had a girlfriend in the town that he hardly paid any attention to.

And those men who called on Rita Walsh in the Rosemarie hair salon. Dara knew now they hadn’t come to fix hair dryers or to see to the hot water. No, now that she was a sophisticated woman who knew about the world. Now she realized only too well why they went there, and why they looked so secretive when they came out and scuttled off home.

Dara thought about all the men she knew and only her father and brother seemed blameless to her. Her father wouldn’t look at another woman and Michael had put Grace on such a pedestal that he probably just kissed her chastely. She couldn’t imagine Michael doing what Kerry had. She thought about Kerry for a bit and supposed she’d better tell in confession about all that stroking and kissing. Though how to describe it was a mystery.