The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (160 page)

She got into her green car and drove away.

“Why were you like that?” Michael asked.

“Like what?”

“You know.”

“I can’t tell you. Not yet.”

“All right.” He looked disappointed, Dara noticed. Perhaps she would tell him in the tunnel.

   Miss Hayes had gone to Dublin. There were a lot of things she had to do. There was the matter of her passport, and her traveler’s checks. There were formalities about her ticket with a travel agency, a meeting with some distant cousins, and she wanted to buy material to make a few nice suitable garments for the journey. Mrs. Fine had been very helpful about the need for pure cotton, and avoiding synthetic fabrics. Mr. O’Neill got her a lift to the town, and she would take the day excursion train from there.

Kerry came to the lodge to see Grace. He looked disheveled and scruffy.

“I wish you wouldn’t behave like this, Kerry, like someone on the run. I know you and Father had some big row again, and nobody even told me. Grace isn’t supposed to know anything upsetting … but he hasn’t thrown you out, it’s you who are making the big drama out of it.”

“It’s sort of complicated. I just have to straighten things out and then it will all be fine. I don’t want to be at home, not until things are settled.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“No, Gracie. Not yet.”

“Kerry, where are you staying?”

“I’ll tell you eventually, honestly.”

“You’re so jumpy, you said you wanted to talk to me about something. What is it?”

“Gracie, you believe that everything’s marvelous. Everyone’s good and all things are going to end happily ever after.”

“I don’t believe that, but I only concentrate on things that make me happy. You concentrate on things that make you miserable, like fighting with Father and only seeing the old fussy side of Miss Hayes. She’d be so pleased to do all your clothes for you …” Grace shook her head in wonder that Kerry couldn’t see the easy route to everything.

“I have to go out, there’s someone I have to meet, then I’ll come back, and you and I will talk about plans and the future and you can lecture me to your heart’s content.”

   They were barely into the tunnel when Dara felt at peace. She had been happy here with Michael like they had been happy when they played in the ruins of Fernscourt.

“You know, there are plenty of these tunnels, we used to think this was the only one in the world,” she said.

“For us it was,” Michael said.

They walked along the narrow passage to their special room. Dara chattered away more easily than she had done for a long time.

“It looks different,” she said.

“Of course we haven’t been here for ages,” said Michael.

They lit the candles in the old rusty candelabra they had found on a dump and polished.

The place was full of shadows and shapes, as it always was.

But Dara saw that there were bunches of grasses tied in a way that they never had them before. She saw there were cushions that they used to keep on the floor as seats all piled up on the broken couch. She knew instantly that this was not the way they had left it.

She knew that Michael had brought Grace to the tunnel. Her heart turned over at the betrayal.

She decided not to make an issue out of it. There had been too much drama. But she wouldn’t tell him about Mrs. Fine and the terrible story that she knew was true. She couldn’t trust him anymore.

So they talked lightly of other things. They talked about school tomorrow. And they talked a little about Mam’s case next Thursday. When they would both be in their classrooms trying to concentrate on their work.

Dara fought down the feeling that her twin brother had been disloyal. She tried not to think of him in this tunnel with Grace. She thought he looked a bit edgy and worried, as if he had seen something that was upsetting him, but since he didn’t say what it was, she didn’t ask him.

   Papers Flynn said to Sergeant Sheehan that it was going to be a cold winter; he had heard that as a fact.

“The winter is months away,” Sergeant Sheehan said, wondering what this was leading up to.

“There’s a very nice kind of a shed behind the presbytery, a place where no wind would come whistling through at all, if a person was to want a bit of shelter.”

“The very thing for a bit of shelter,” the sergeant agreed. “Unless of course you’d be lifted out of it by some housekeeper that isn’t herself a person of the cloth at all.”

“That would be a hard thing if it were to happen. I just mentioned it in case anyone would think of making it their headquarters,” Papers explained.

The sergeant nodded sagely.

Papers was getting old. There was a time when he would take his chances in anyone’s shed. His main priority in life was to avoid being organized. But now he found battles hard to fight. This was his way of asking Sergeant Sheehan to square it with Miss Purcell and the clergy that he could live there when the cold weather came.

   Patrick said that he didn’t mind if the rest of the hotel wasn’t finished for another decade, he wanted his own suite completed and ready to move into this week.

“That wasn’t on the schedule,” Brian Doyle was unwise enough to say.

“Your schedule, Doyle, should be published and bound and sold, it would be the comic best-seller of the year.”

It was totally impossible to insult Brian. “That might well be right but we’ll have to take men off other work to sort it out for you. It’s not just getting it ready, it’s making it so that we don’t have to traipse through it all the time.”

“That would be very acceptable,” Patrick said with heavy irony. “Not to have this army of craftsmen you employ traipsing through my quarters. Yes, that would be a great bonus.”

“When do you want to sleep here?” Brian was practical.

“Tomorrow night.”

He wanted to be resident in the hotel before the compensation case began. He wanted to be well out of his son’s way. It was becoming increasingly obvious he should be in his own place. At once.

He walked around the unfinished set of rooms that were to be his new home. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a sitting room, a study and a small kitchen.

The main rooms faced the Fern and were on the first floor of the house. He hadn’t wanted a kitchen but Rachel had insisted. He wouldn’t always want hotel food. There might be times when Grace would want to cook for the family. It was good to have a place where they could close the door and leave the hotel to get on with itself.

His study was the biggest room. Two walls were lined with shelves. Rachel said they could get antique furniture later, visit auctions in big country houses maybe, but for now he should have space for his papers and his books.

Had she ever seen herself with him there, he wondered. There was no hint ever in her suggestions, that she might join him in this life style. No room for her clothes was ever taken into consideration. Instead she had urged him to fit out rooms for both Kerry and Grace from the outset so that they would always consider it their home.

Grace had been busy throughout, deciding where she wanted her closet, her bureau. Kerry’s room, though it existed, had not been furnished or discussed, it was now an official dressing room.

Brian accompanied Patrick on his tour of inspection.

“Tomorrow night,” he repeated in the tone that he would use to soothe a dangerous drunk or someone who was both soft in the head and violent.

“Good.” Patrick deliberately misunderstood the tone, and averted his eyes from the open floorboards, the electric wires and cables still loose from the wall.

The windows were smeared with squiggles to show that there was glass in them, and there were heaps of wood shavings where the carpentry was still in progress. Furniture in crates stood in the corridors.

Patrick smiled at it beatifically.

“As long as I have my own little place here, Doyle, I’ll be fine,” he said.

“I often think, Mr. O’Neill, God forgive me, that if you’d come home and built yourself a nice bungalow on this site you’d have saved yourself and everyone else a lot of trouble.”

“How unselfish you are, Doyle. Imagine thinking that you could have passed over the entirely disproportionate wealth I have made available to you, not to mention all the extra you made on the side.”

He clasped Brian warmly by the hand and patted him on the back at the same time.

“Tomorrow around six o’clock I’ll move in. Come and have a drink with me here to celebrate.”

“I will, Mr. O’Neill, I look forward to that. I was always a great fan of
Alice in Wonderland
myself.”

   Rachel’s choking feeling in her throat returned as soon as she got into her car and drove away from the twins. Dara had been filled with scorn and hate.

And no wonder. A girl of barely sixteen, in love for the first time with a handsome boy who probably filled her head with lies and false assurances. And then the town is saying everywhere in whispers that he has slept with her mother’s friend.

No wonder those dark eyes blazed with contempt and hurt.

Rachel remembered those days in June when she had gotten very close to the girls. She had loved the elder-sister role. That was all part of a Celtic mist of fantasy now.

But it wasn’t time for self-pity yet; she must get into the hotel, get her business done, and be on the road as soon as possible.

If she were to have any tatters of dignity left over the whole incident, then she must keep calm and workmanlike until she was well out of sight of the cast of interested spectators.

She parked her car and walked purposefully up the hotel steps in search of Jim Costello.

   They had run into a problem over some of the Irish-linen panels. It was proving difficult to get exactly the same shade of dye in each batch. Young Jim Costello had understood the matter at once. It was a question of deciding whether to attempt to get them all the same or to have deliberately different toning shades.

Together they had walked the public rooms, climbing ladders and dropping swathes of material.

Jim wanted this hotel opening to stagger his rivals and quite possibly his future employers or backers. Rachel knew that he was as eager and keen as anyone to get it right.

Eventually they agreed that it would be gradings of color. They had to do this in case some wall panels were to fade in the sunlight and could never be replaced exactly.

It would mean another visit to the small linen mills.

The workmen saluted her on her way out to the car. They had respect for her since she never threw her weight around and had a quick smile, but didn’t stop to bore them with woman’s kind of chat.

Leaning against her small green car was Kerry.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting for you.”

“You’ve waited in vain. I’m just leaving. Excuse me …”

She tried to get past him. He did not move.

She turned around and walked purposefully back up the steps. Kerry ran after her; it was as if he knew that she was heading straight for his father.

“I’m giving you one last chance,” he said.

She didn’t stop. He was beside her now.

“Look at this house, Rachel, this is your one chance to have it all, it’s what you gave your whole damn life for, isn’t it? Don’t throw it away. Write that check out. This minute. Or I tell him everything.”

“Come with me and we’ll tell him together.” She was heading for the staircase.

“I have to have the money. McCann’s people are very angry with you and with me because of you. These guys don’t play around.”

He stood in front of her barring her way up the stairs.

“
Will
you get out of my way?” She raised her voice so significantly that the workmen all stopped whatever they were doing and nudged each other. A barney between O’Neill’s woman and his son in full view of everyone was worth watching.

At that very moment Patrick O’Neill appeared on the landing at the top of the stairway. He took in the scene in a second and saw the gawping faces looking at the unexpected floorshow.

He did the one thing guaranteed to end the excitement and to wound more seriously than any other action he could have taken. He looked at them both dismissively and walked past them without addressing a word to either of them.

   Most of the journey to the weavers was on a good straight road, which was just as well. Rachel drove with minimum concentration. Her eyes blurred over sometimes, and she had to blink hard to clear her vision.

For no reason at all she thought of a little old man who was in the garden of the Hadassah nursing home, a psychiatric home for elderly Jewish clientele. It was the home where Rachel’s mother had died. The old man sat in the garden looking almost unbearably sad. Once Rachel felt compelled to ask him what was upsetting him so much.

“I’m not mad, you see,” he had said to her resignedly. “I’m as sane as you or any other visitor. My nephew put me in here because he wants to steal all my inventions and pass them over as his own. But it
sounds
like such a mad thing to say, that it only gives everybody further proof that I am indeed mad.”

She had been struck at the time by the logic of the old man’s argument. But she had only shaken her head sadly and marveled at how sane the very far from sane could sound.

Today, driving across Ireland in the late summer sun, pausing sometimes for a flock of sheep, a herd of cattle, or on one occasion for a great group of young laughing nuns who were going on some kind of outing, Rachel Fine remembered the old man and wished she had been more sympathetic to him.

   Grace was startled to see Kerry looking so wild when he came back to the Lodge.

“I’ve just seen myself reflected in the window and you are quite right, I do look a wreck. Listen, I’m going to clean up. Grace, can you put all these newfound cooking skills to work and fix me some eggs. Then we’ll talk.”

She heard him singing in the bathroom, and her face brightened as she went happily to the bright sunny kitchen of the lodge.

She would be sorry to leave this little house in the middle of all the trees. She would miss the pleasant company of Miss Hayes, and her bedroom where the small brown rabbits often hopped up on her windowsill and snuffled their noses against the pane.