The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (150 page)

“Grace, we don’t have all that much time together, why are you wasting it?”

“It’s not wasting it, we’ll know how to ride horses,” she said unanswerably. “Your way we just sit and talk and whatever.”

“But remember, before, they sort of split us up, didn’t want us going off on our own. Do you remember, that’s why we all went to the bridge.” He gave a shiver.

“I remember.” Grace patted his hand soothingly. “But then isn’t this all to the good? If they know we’re all together with Jacinta and Liam and Amanda, they’ll be pleased. They won’t start breaking things up?” She looked at him with her big clear eyes as if it were the most obvious thing in the world and he was the only one not to see it.

“Don’t you want to be with me?” he asked nakedly.

“Oh, Michael, of course I do, but we have all the time in the world to be together. Can’t you enjoy this? It’s new, it’s fun.”

Jim Costello took about five minutes to sum up Kerry O’Neill as trouble. And he spent a further five minutes working out how he was going to cope with him. This job at Fernscourt was the prize; it was up to him to make sure that nothing ruined it for him. If he made a success of Fernscourt, then in five to seven years there wasn’t a bank in the country that wouldn’t advance him money for his own hotel. And in the meantime he would meet exactly the kind of tourists and have just the right way to entertain them as he could have dreamed. His last hotel had been a trifle stuffy, still concentrated on the business-lunch trade which was only a status thing. Jim Costello knew that you made nothing by serving unimaginative and underpriced set luncheons to the local solicitors and bank managers and insurance brokers, but in a small place, that was what kept the image of a hotel high. Here in Fernscourt it was different.

He liked Patrick O’Neill and admired him. But the son. Jim Costello had been in the hotel business all his life. Since he could remember he had been in his father’s small hotel, then in the Shannon training school and in France and Switzerland; he was twenty-four and he knew how to spot trouble. The man at the bar who was going to be troublesome, the customer who might not pay his bill. The respectable woman who was using a hotel foyer as a pick-up place. One of Jim’s strengths was that he always saw it in time, just
before
the incident happened, and managed to head it off.

With Kerry he spotted it the very first time he met him. When he sauntered into the hotel with Tony McCann from Derry.

There was something about Tony McCann that seemed like a challenge. He greeted Jim as if he expected to be thrown out.

Kerry on the other hand was full of charm. “My father tells me there’s nothing you don’t know about the hotel business,” he began.

“Let’s hope he still says that when his hotel is open,” Jim laughed back easily.

“Bit of a backwater this—for a hotshot like you,” said Tony McCann.

“I don’t think so, it’s a friendly place and we hope to be so busy that I won’t have much time for the bright lights myself.”

Tony McCann looked at Jim Costello without much pleasure. “One of these ambitious fellows, all work and up a ladder, I suppose.”

“That’s me, the fellows at school used to hate me too—study study, creep, teacher’s pet. Are you in the hotel business too, Mr. McCann?”

“No.”

“You’re in what?”

“This and that.”

Kerry stepped in smoothly. “Tony’s a friend of mine up in the far north, just brought him in to see the ancestral home rise again.”

“Are you pleased with it?” Jim spoke directly to Kerry.

He shrugged. “It’s my father’s dream, I guess he’s really got what he wanted. It’s looking good.”

“But you’ll be coming back …”

“Relax, Jim, there’s going to be no fatted calf killed for me, not for a long time. No, you’re safe here for a few years yet.”

Jim flushed with annoyance. He had to decide now how to handle Kerry. Did he remain poker-faced and remote, loyal entirely to his employer? This way he would build a wall of resentment between him and the boy, who was only a few years younger. Or did he make Kerry an ally of sorts? Wouldn’t that be easier? He decided to go the friendship way.

“I’d say there’s plenty to keep us both occupied if you
do
come back. Your father has some very grand plans.”

“Do you think they’ll work out?”

“Not all of them by any means, but enough of them will and I’d say he’s a man who would learn by mistakes. Am I right?”

Kerry seemed amused to be consulted. “Yes, that’s true in most areas. He’s extraordinarily practical, but I’m not sure about this one. He wants so much for it to succeed it could blind him.”

“As I said, let’s hope it will and the problem won’t arise.” Jim had decided how to play it: friendly but not servile, discreet but not what the Americans called tight-assed. He would always repeat pleasantly to Patrick any conversation he had with the son. With Kerry you’d need to cover your back.

He hoped McCann would clear off out of the place too. He was pleased to see Kerry’s car drive off to the big town with McCann and then come back without him. The fellow had obviously gone back north. What on earth had brought him down for such a flying visit? There was something watchful about him as if he hadn’t believed Kerry O’Neill came from this kind of set-up and had come down to check.

He reminded Jim of a very tough Guard he had once known who came on Saturdays for a steak and a few whiskies to thank him for being lenient about closing time during the week. That Guard had a swagger when he came in to collect. Tony McCann had the same kind of swagger, as if he had come to Mountfern to collect.

   It wasn’t easy to find Kate alone. Patrick made three tries. Finally he hit a morning when Mary seemed occupied with deliveries in the yard, when John had driven to the town and the guard seemed to be relaxed.

Kate was sitting by her big french window, studying the typing manual from which she intended to teach Dara. He had tapped lightly on the door, and she hadn’t looked up when he came in.

“I’d have thought you knew all about typing,” he said.

Kate looked up surprised. “It’s you Patrick, sit down won’t you? I didn’t know you were in the place at all.”

She smiled at him encouragingly but she got little response. He sighed deeply.

“Did you come in to draw big heavy breaths at me?” Kate asked.

“No. I’m just low, that’s all.”

“What has you low?” She was sympathetic but not totally sure that he was serious.

“I
am
low, Kate. I feel everything’s gone wrong. So many terrible things have happened. That child, that poor child dead and buried.”

“Ah, sure, Patrick, that has us all low. There’s neither rhyme nor reason in it.”

“It was never meant to be like this. Pointless tragedy, and confusion everywhere.”

Kate looked at him. It seemed out of character, this type of talk. She waited to hear what it was about.

“You see, I got everything I wanted—the land, the permission to build—and God knows how, I’ve actually built the thing.”

“So what’s wrong?”

He went on with his catalog of what was right first. “The children like the place. That’s not saying it as it is, they love it. This is a real bonus, I thought they would be pleading for brighter lights, but no. That’s largely due to your children, by the way.”

“I know, my twins have formed a welcome-the-O’Neill-family movement, haven’t they?” Kate was polite and almost hid her anxiety about just how warmly they were welcoming them.

“No, don’t worry about that, Kate. Grace and Michael are a couple of kids still, and you got Dara well away out of Kerry’s clutches.”

So he had realized! She laughed guiltily.

But he had moved on. “I worry now all the time. About the way it all happened, it’s as if it weren’t the right thing to do somehow …”

“Coming back?”

“Yes, or coming back in this way. Nothing’s gone right since …”

“That’s not like you—not the Patrick we know.”

“Shit, Kate, can’t you quit acting like someone’s li’l old grandmother? Every time I look at you in that bloody chair, I think to myself that if I’d stayed where I was, you’d be on your two feet. When I see all the signs being put up on the road, when I have to meet the people from the tourist board and talk about projections and over views and market share, I wonder what the hell it’s all about. Why I’m not out on the freeway in New Jersey buying up a couple more neighborhood bars. What am I
doing
changing every single thing I touch here, getting the priests and the parson to tidy up their graveyards? Christ, that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to be welcomed here, but nobody remembered anyone belonging to me—”

“Oh, stop all this self-pity, for God’s sake,” Kate interrupted. “You knew that on day one, nobody remembered the O’Neills from a hole in the ground, so stop saying it’s come as a surprise to you now. Four long years ago you knew that. You wanted a life here where you came from, and you’ve got it. Stop bellyaching about changing things and being remembered …” Her face was flushed with anger at him.

He reached over and took her hand. “I suppose you don’t believe me, but it’s looking at you that gives me the worst feeling of regret. Honestly and truthfully if I could turn it all back I’d never have come if it meant doing this to you.”

“You
didn’t
do it to me, you big loud-mouthed clown. I did it. I walked under the bloody bulldozer. You had signs, I didn’t see them. How many times do I have to say to you and to Fergus, to everyone. I’m
not
looking at you every day and saying ‘Why oh why didn’t he stay in New Jersey, and I’d be able to walk?’ ”

Her eyes blazed and she had flung his hand away.

“If I say I wish you had stayed in New Jersey—and I do, believe me, I do say it many times a day—it’s not because of that … not because of my being in this chair … oh no.”

“Then what …?” Patrick was alarmed.

“I wish you had stayed in your precious America because if you had then there would have been a living for us here, for John who never really wanted it in the first place but who worked so hard at it for us, for his wife and children, and a living for the children themselves if they want to stay here. It’s been in John’s family for years, it’s not easy to see it go up in smoke because of some Yank looking for his roots.”

Patrick’s mouth was open.

“I mean it, I knew I shouldn’t have started but since I have I won’t suddenly clam up like you do, I’m not cunning and watching what I say.
That’s
the reason I wish you hadn’t come here, not because I had an accident. I have to think of this whole bloody business as an accident otherwise I’d go insane.”

Patrick was shocked. “But we’ve been over this a dozen times, all of us. You’re not going to lose business, you’re going to gain it. You’ll have the customers from the hotel … We’ve been through this.”

“Yes, we’ll have them buying musical shillelaghs and leprechauns, that’s what we’ll have. They won’t come in to drink here, neither will anyone with an ounce of sense in their head when they can have your Thatch Bar.”

“You never said …”

“Why
should
I say anything to you? You never say anything real. You always work out where the advantage lies and then you speak. I was damned if I was going to tell you how I felt, specially since we didn’t put in any objections in the beginning. Like Fergus said we should.”

“Please, please let me assure you, let me promise …”

“I don’t want any charity, I just want us to be able to make our own way as we always did. Surely you’d understand that.”

“I understand that better than anyone would. Jesus Christ, I know about dignity and having your place somewhere. I was raised by a man who was a wino, a bum, we had no place anywhere, I wanted to be called Mr. O’Neill, I wanted to make my own way more than anything in the goddamn world …”

“You never said that about your father before …”

“Why
should
I tell you, or tell anyone? It’s my business, and it’s a part of my life I don’t boast about.”

“Oh no, you wouldn’t mention anything unless there was some purpose …”

“What do you mean? What are you saying?”

“Nothing much, just showing how bad-tempered I can be, I expect.” Kate seemed to have run out of steam suddenly.

“There’s enough for us both here, Kate.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Do I really only say things that are for my own gain?”

“I never said that,” Kate insisted. “I said you didn’t speak without thinking—like the rest of us do.”

“I suppose you’re right, but you’ve got to cover your back in my world,” Patrick said. His tone changed.

“I came to say something to you, something quite serious.”

“What is it?” There was alarm in her eyes.

“No, serious, as opposed to trivial,” he reassured her. “I wanted to warn you about the case.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Fergus said it wasn’t proper to talk about it at all, that we must remember not to speak of it even to the children because of … well, because of Michael and Grace I suppose.”

“Yes, my lawyers said the same thing. Talk about covering their backs …”