The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (151 page)

“So?”

“So, I wanted to say this, just between the two of us. You’ve had a terrible injury, nothing will make you walk again. You must get something, the
only
thing, that can make life a bit better. You must get as much money as you can.”

Kate looked at him, startled.

“This is just us. For three days I’ve been trying to get you alone, and then we nearly messed it up by having a fight. You only have one chance, Kate.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“So that you will get what is fair.”

“Still, it’s not right of you to talk to me about it. Fergus said that if you did then I was to …”

“Fergus said, Fergus said, don’t talk to me about Attorney Slattery, he makes me sick, that fellow with his calf’s face—”

“You will
not
say that about Fergus.” Kate flashed again.

“Sorry, sorry. Peace, peace.” Patrick spread out his hands. “Look, I’m just trying so hard and I seem to fall every step of the way …”

“But Fergus said that if you came and offered …”

“And for once he was right, the attorney Slattery. If I
was
such a bastard as to come and offer you a deal then of course you should not talk to me. But I’m not, Kate, I’m offering you a warning: They will try to make you accept a low offer out of court. If it goes to court they’ll try to trip you up, try to make you take less, try to prove to the jury, who are ordinary people without great wealth, that you live a fine life and that since your little pub would never have been a gold mine, and since you’re a woman who should be damn grateful to have a roof over your wheelchair, then the least compensation should have you on your poor broken knees with gratitude.”

“Why …?” she began.

“Why? Because I know you, I know your pride which is a great strength but also a weakness. The ‘I’m fine thank you’ air you wear around you like a cape … nobody is to dare offer a word of sympathy to Kate Ryan or if they do they’ll bear the consequences.”

“I cope the way that suits me,” Kate said.

“You cope brilliantly, and it’s not just to suit
you
, it’s to help your husband and your family and everyone. Nobody feels you’re a cripple, but in three weeks’ time if it goes to court you have to drop it, you have to lose this brave way of going on. You’ve
got
to tell them what it’s really like, otherwise you’ll get nothing.”

“You mean, lie? Act?”

“I do
not
mean lie and act, you stupid woman, I mean tell them the plans you had for this place and how you can’t damn well see them happening now. The life you had with your husband, how you wanted another child and that’s over.”

“Why do you want me to stand up and spin these self-pitying tales, make a public exhibition of myself, tell a tissue of lies just to get money in the bank? How little you understand anything.”

“Jesus Christ, how little
you
understand anything. I didn’t break your back, if I did I could pay for it. Sometimes I wish I
had
broken it, gone out with a cleaver and broken it. That way I could have gone to jail.” His face was working and he was close to tears.

She looked at him wordlessly.

“What kind of pride is this that means you are denying your family what is rightfully theirs?”

“You sound just like Fergus,” she said.

Patrick stood up. He shrugged helplessly.

“I’ll leave you, Kate, before we start again.” He smiled and his face was transformed as it always was. He looked at her sitting so still in the chair.

“It’s no wonder half the town is in love with you,” he said. “I could fall in love with you myself.”

“Oho, it’s a well-known thing that, to say you could fall in love with the unattainable. That’s very Irish, Patrick, you’ve inherited a lot of your forefathers’ little ways of going on. That’s the kind of thing all those mountainy old bachelors would say.”

“I’m a mountainy old bachelor too—by nature, I guess.”

“That will certainly disappoint the gossips here.”

His eyes were cold. “What do they say, the gossips?”

“That you intend to ask Rachel to marry you someday.”

He was startled. For Kate who was Rachel’s close confidante to speak like this.

“Well,” he said.

“However it’s not something Rachel and I talk about,” she said.

“You don’t, like hell.”

“You mustn’t flatter yourself too much. We
used
to talk about you certainly, but not nowadays.”

There was an unsettling truth in the way she spoke. There was a little silence.

“I don’t handle things very well sometimes,” he said eventually.

“There are some things that it isn’t a matter of handling, or coping with or sorting out like business deals.”

“I know.”

They sat companionably for a few moments.

Kate was a much more still person than she had been before. There was a time when Kate Ryan could not have allowed a silence of longer than two seconds.

Patrick was not a man much given to sitting and musing either. But here he sat and looked ahead of him into the flower-filled garden where the big orange cat sunned herself and the soft cluck of the hens in the distance was soothing. There was no sign of the terrible dog, perhaps someone had been dispatched to take it on a far-distant walk so that its baying could upset another parish.

“I must go now,” he said.

“You were very good to come and see me. Thank you for what you said. No matter what happens I’ll remember that and appreciate it.”

He leaned over lightly and kissed her on the forehead. He had never done that before.

“And you promise me you’ll remember what I said? It doesn’t make you weak, it makes you strong.”

“I’ll remember,” she said.

And he left.

Kate sat still for a long while. She could understand why Rachel was so enmeshed with this man. He was alive and aware and reacting all the time.

It must have been a heady thing for Rachel to realize how essential she was to him and how much he needed her.

No wonder she felt bereft now that he most likely didn’t need her anymore. Kate’s fists beat on her useless legs. The only point in living was to be needed, to be an inspiration, to be the power in something. Nobody understood that, nobody.

Fergus, with all his childish spite against the O’Neills didn’t have the glimmerings of an understanding. He didn’t know
why
she was a person who needed compensation. It didn’t have all that much to do with paralysis. It had to do with having no role.

John Ryan in a million years would not understand. He would say she was being hysterical, and that of course she was important, more than important … but essential to all of them.

But Kate Ryan knew she wasn’t essential anymore. They didn’t need her like they had once needed her. John was stronger and more his own man, he made decisions with certainty, he coped with the pub as she had once wished and prayed that he would. He still found time to write his poems. He was not as gullible as she had once thought him to be. He was firm with the children, he drove a car, their own car, around Mountfern. He was a slimmer, fitter man than the man of three years ago, more confident in every way.

But he didn’t lean on Kate as he once had. He didn’t need her at every turn of the day.

That was why she needed some goddamn compensation. Not that money was any good, but the reason she should get anything was because her husband didn’t depend on her anymore.

And the only man who had the faintest understanding of this was the man who was
meant
to be their great enemy. Patrick O’Neill.

   “I can’t like that young Costello,” Fergus said to Kate.

“You can’t like anyone with hand, act or part in Fernscourt.”

“Wrong. There’s a lot of decent people working for him. Don’t make me out to be unreasonable.”

“Lord, you’re the most reasonable man in the world usually; this is your only blind spot. What has poor Jim Costello done now?”

“I heard him talking to Canon Moran, meant to be a sort of private chat. But I could see what he was getting at.”

“You listened to his confession!”

“No, it was in the open air out in the church grounds. You know, beside the garden that O’Neill’s workmen built up for them. He was telling the poor doddery old canon how great it would be if the bishop came to the opening.”

“Well the bishop
is
coming to the opening, surely?”

“Yes, but Jim wanted him to speak at the blessing bit and he was explaining this awful insincere way to the canon that Mr. O’Neill wouldn’t like to suggest it, and Mr. O’Neill wanted it to be the canon who spoke, but wouldn’t it be great if the bishop were to say a few words too. You know, a lot of devious bullshit.”

“And you’re the one always giving out about Patrick’s language!”

“The poor old canon thinks he’s the one now who thought of asking the bishop, he’s back up at the presbytery trying to word the letter.”

Kate changed the subject. Fergus was getting moody.

“And how is your Miss Purcell up there with the clergy?”

“As happy as anything.”

“Well it leaves you a bit freer, anyway. Whatever you want to do you don’t have to take her future into consideration.”

“I don’t want to do much, Kate. I just want things to stay the same.”

To his surprise she leaned across from the wheelchair and patted his hand. “I know. I know just what you mean,” she said.

“Are you going to the hotel opening, Mary?” Fergus was civil.

“It’s very kind of you to be so interested but the answer is no. Some one person should be here to keep the door open in case in the Republic of Ireland there happens to be one or two souls who are
not
going to the opening and think they might be served a drink in a wayside pub.”

Mary’s face was flushed with anger and loyalty to her stance about the rightness of everything the Ryans did and the wrongness of the O’Neills.

Fergus blinked wearily. He had brought this attack upon himself and there were many ways that he supported her entirely. But she was a trying woman.

He had only broached the subject of the opening to her on instructions from Sheila Whelan.

“Say the odd kind word to Mary when you’re passing,” Sheila had asked.

“Have you a suit of chain mail for me to put on when I’m talking to her?”

Fergus had been bitten too often to feel easy about saying anything to Mary Donnelly.

“She’s a great woman when you get to know her. She has all the qualities of a good wife—loyalty, determination, everything.” Sheila sighed.

“Are you trying to make a match for her by any chance?”

“Oh, I think it would be a brave soul who would attempt to make a match for Mary these days.”

“Or for me?” Fergus teased.

“Oh, we’re dying to marry
you
off, Fergus,” Sheila said.

“Who’s we?”

“Kate and myself, we’d love to settle you down. But I’m only giving you a big head. Listen, when you see that cousin of mine, Mary, will you tell her she’s to go to the opening of the hotel. It’s only a false kind of loyalty to the Ryans saying she is going to boycott. Use your charms.”

“My charms haven’t much of a track record,” Fergus had said gloomily.

And indeed he felt he was right, Mary Donnelly showed no reaction to his charming manner except to reject the notion of going near the new hotel. She sniffed and said that the Ryans were going not to show offense, and because they had a standard of manners much higher and more generous than the O’Neill family.

Fergus sighed again. Talking to Mary was like trying to climb up a waterfall.

“Can I talk to Kate? I have to get her to see Kevin Kennedy, that’s the barrister. I want to fix up a proper consultation but Kate’s always too busy making potato cakes, or hemming serviettes or some other nonsense. If the woman could only understand that she must give her whole heart and mind to Kevin Kennedy and the court case, then she won’t
have
to hem all those table napkins.”

“Will you be able to get her a great compensation do you think?” Mary looked eager and excited. “I’d love more than anything for her to take a fortune off that man. I’d really love it.”

“That’s not the way it’s going to be, he’ll pay nothing, it’s the insurance company. I don’t know, I really don’t. These cases are like throwing a dice. It could be any figure that comes up.”

“There must be some system.”

“There is a sort of system, but it depends what way it’s presented. It’s very practical you know, very matter of fact. What were her earnings, what could be said to have been lost in terms of money? There’s something built in for pain and suffering, and then there’s a category called mental distress. But it all depends on judges and juries in the end, and they’re often cautious men, careful with other people’s money even if it’s insurance companies. Oh God, I wish I knew.”

“You sound very worried.” Mary’s face looked quite pleasant when she wasn’t making some strong point, she had a softness about her that wasn’t in her normal style.

“I am worried, Mary, I’m worried that Kate and John are turning down their only chance of getting what they deserve and are owed. They don’t seem to grasp that this is the one and only time they’ll ever get any stake together for any kind of life.”

“And show that bastard what the courts of Ireland think of him.”

“Yes, but with respect, Mary, mightn’t we do better if we played down that side of it?”

“I know what you mean, I’m as bright as the next man. I’ll sing low on the revenge bit—is that what you mean?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I’ll feel it in my heart though,” Mary said.

“So will I,” said Fergus.

   “Oh bring him along, certainly,” Kate said when Fergus suggested a consultation with Kevin Kennedy.

“He’s quite important, Kate, you won’t just play along and joke and make eejity remarks about it being half your own fault?”

“I never make eejity remarks. Remember when I was your righthand woman in the office, don’t say I make eejity remarks.”

“I remember. I remember well,” Fergus sighed.

“So, I’ll be polite and use long words. But isn’t he on our side, is he not our lawyer, why do I have to be impressing him and putting on an act for our own counsel? Isn’t it the judge and the jury I have to do the tragic queen act for?”