The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (86 page)

Father Hogan thought Mountfern was a warm, kind place to live, and though it didn’t perhaps offer as much of a challenge as he had dreamed about in the seminary, he followed his canon’s belief that there were souls to be saved everywhere, and that running a concert for the people of this place might have equal value in the great scheme of things to working in the missions or running a boys’ club for delinquents in a tough city parish.

Miss Lynch was more or less walking out with young Mr. Slattery so he had to come to the concert as moral support. He sat beside Kate Ryan and the two chastened small boys, and the girl with reddened eyes called Carrie.

“And how does the master of your house escape this great cultural event?” Fergus Slattery asked with envy.

“Someone has to run the bar. I know it looks as if half the county is here, but you’d be surprised how many men find the excuse for a drink when their children are up here on the stage,” Kate said.

“Well for him, then.” Fergus was genuinely admiring. “I can’t say that I have to work on a Saturday evening, they don’t think solicitors work at all, but my office is too near. I’d actually have to be in the window in my shirt sleeves before they’d believe me.”

Fergus grinned boyishly. He was very like a tall gangly boy, Kate thought, though he must be in his mid or late twenties now. She had always thought of him as a kind of irrepressible student home for the holidays. Even though he ran his father’s office almost entirely on his own now, it was hard for her to think of him as a grown-up. Maybe it was because he looked untidy; his hair was sort of jutting out at an angle no matter whether he had been to the barber or not. His shirts were perfectly and lovingly ironed by the Slatterys’ faithful housekeeper, Miss Purcell, yet the collars sometimes stood at an angle away from his neck. Kate wouldn’t be at all surprised if he bought the wrong size or had the button in the wrong place. He had dark eyes and if he had held himself differently and worn long smooth dark coats he might have been thought very handsome and elegant indeed.

But part of his charm was that he would never be elegant; he was totally unaware of his tall, dark and almost handsome looks, and that he had caused many a flutter and several specific hopes around Mountfern.

“You mean you wouldn’t want to come—what with that Nora Lynch killing herself to impress you?” Kate was disbelieving.

“Impress
me
!”

“Of course. Why else would that young girl kill herself and show herself to be part of a small backwater like this unless it was to prove to you that she could fit in and be part of it?”

“But why would she prove that to me?”

“Aren’t you and she going out?” Kate wondered about men a lot. They couldn’t all be as dim as they often seemed.

“Yes, sure, we go out to the pictures and we go to a dance, but there’s nothing in it.” Fergus looked baffled and honest.

“What do you mean there’s nothing in it, aren’t you a right beast to be leading her on and then tell me there’s nothing in it? You know, the older I get the more I believe the nuns were right; men are basically wild animals at heart.”

“But there
is
nothing in it,” Fergus pleaded. “I mean we don’t love each other or anything, or have the same plans or the same hopes. Nothing’s been said or agreed. Truly.”

“I believe you.” Kate was cynical. “O Lord, protect me or mine from ever falling for a lawyer. You’ll have yourself covered from every angle.”

“But she doesn’t think …” Fergus began, but at that moment Nora Lynch, resplendent in a new hair do from the Rosemarie salon, in a new yellow dress short enough to be fashionable but not so short as to cause adverse comment from the canon, the nuns and the brothers, appeared on stage. She said she hoped everyone would enjoy this show, the first combined effort; she thanked the canon, the brothers, the convent and the sponsors, the children and the parents, and knew that everyone would have a wonderful evening. She said that as an outsider she felt very privileged to be allowed to get involved in something as much a part of the community as this was. But then in many ways she felt that she had always been part of this place and always would.

“How old are you, Fergus Slattery?” Kate whispered suddenly.

“I’m twenty-seven,” he replied, confused.

“Twenty-seven years in the world and you try to tell me that young woman has no hopes of you. May God forgive you, I mean it, Fergus, may he forgive you and send you some kind of sense.”

“Thanks, Kate,” said Fergus, not knowing whether he was being attacked or pitied, and not liking it whichever it was.

Dara Ryan felt as if she had swallowed an ice cream whole; her stomach was cold and heavy and she wondered if she might be sick.

“I’ll never be able to say it,” she told Maggie Daly.

Maggie believed Dara could do anything. “You’re great, Dara, you never minded saying it at school in front of everyone there.”

“That’s different.” Dara hopped around on one leg and looked through the door that they were meant to keep firmly closed, to see how big the audience was.

“Lord, it’s full of people,” she said theatrically.

“They’ll love it.” Maggie was loyal.

Dara would have fought with her shadow at this stage. “No, they’ll hate it, it’s in Irish, they won’t understand a word of it.”

“But it will
sound
terrific.”

“Why don’t I just go and make sounds then, nice sounds, or better still take up a gong and just bang it for three minutes and bow to the applause?”

Maggie giggled. Things were all right once Dara started making up outlandish things.

Maggie was not doing any solo piece. She was in the girls’ choir which would sing Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” and later on come back and sing “I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree.” But Dara would stand in front of the whole of Mountfern and recite “Cill Cais” which Miss Lynch had told them was a lament for an old house, a ruin like Fernscourt, except that it had been a different kind of household who had lived there, an Old Catholic family who used to have mass said in the stately home and everyone would come from far and near to attend it.

“Dara, you’re on.”

Crossing her fingers and giving Dara a squeeze for luck, Maggie Daly stood and watched her friend walk up on the stage.

Miss Lynch, knowing very well that hardly anyone would get even the vaguest glimmer of what the poem was about without some kind of translation, said that of course everyone knew the story of “Cill Cais,” and told it without appearing to. The audience, flattered to be thought of as people who would know this, nodded at each other sagely and waited for the young Ryan girl to tell it to them again in Irish. Dara’s voice sounded confident and she fixed her eyes on the back of the hall as Miss Lynch had told her to do. There was a storm of clapping and people told each other that she made a very good fist of it, then she was off and it was time for the choir from the brothers.

Brother Keane had chosen three of Moore’s finest Irish melodies. He announced that the boys would sing them in the same magnificent spirit that Thomas Moore had brought to bear when he was writing them. Brother Keane had calculated without the enormously humorous content that the songs seemed to hold for his choir of twelve-year-olds, depleted as it was by six whose voices chose the time of the concert to break.

“Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy water,
Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose.”

   Brother Keane loved this above all other of Moore’s melodies. He could see none of the allusions to breaking wind, pulling chains and passing water that the entire group in front of him seemed to see written in letters of fire on their song sheets. He glared at them ferociously as with the most enormous difficulty the forty boys tried to stifle their mirth, and led them into the next song called, unhappily, “The Meeting of the Waters.” The entire choir seemed to choke with the daring double entendre of the name and Brother Keane resolved to deal with them very sternly in a less public place.

The admission price had included tea, sandwiches and cakes. The sandwiches had been supervised by Mrs. Whelan who ran the Post Office and was generally accepted to be the nicest person in Mountfern. A small wiry woman with a skin that seemed to have been tanned by whatever sun shone intermittently in the Irish midlands or beaten by the winds that blew more regularly from one coast across to the other, Sheila Whelan had three cameo brooches she had bought from a tinker; a pink one, a green one and a beige. She wore them at the neck of her white blouses and had done for as long as anyone could remember. She owned about three skirts which she must have worn forever and a series of soft knitted cardigans which she must have made herself. Usually she was knitting for someone else, for the new babies that were arriving with great regularity around Mountfern, or shawls for the old, even school jumpers for the children who might need them. She always managed to have an extra bit of wool which she said it would be a pity to waste. She had a kind, dreamy face and far-away pale blue eyes that were never known to concentrate inquisitively on anything that might not bear too much scrutiny.

She seemed to have no interest in the private lives of the rest of the parish: she never appeared to notice, let alone comment on the emigrants’ remittances that came home or didn’t come home; nor did she seem to notice the disability pensions for people who were perfectly well, or the dole for those who were obviously working. She was able to discuss the most direct questioning about the where-abouts of Mr. Whelan with calm and even with interest, but without ever revealing that he had left her for a married woman in Dublin, and that the two of them now had four children. If anyone asked whether he was coming back, Mrs. Whelan was always able to get into the same interrogative mood and say it was very hard to know, wasn’t it? She found that some things were almost impossible to work out, weren’t they? And somehow the questioner found himself or herself enmeshed in the Meaning of Life instead of the specific whereabouts of Mrs. Whelan’s husband.

She was the kind of woman you’d go to if you had committed a murder, Fergus Slattery had always said. And oddly, there was one killing near Mountfern. A farmer’s son had attacked his father in a drunken fight and killed him. It was to the post office, not the presbytery or the Garda station that he had come, carrying the murder weapon, a pitchfork.

Mrs. Whelan had involved the presbytery and the Garda station, but gently and in her own time. Nobody had thought it even remotely unusual that the demented man had come to Mrs. Whelan nor had she made anything of the incident; she said she supposed he was on his way to the canon and her light had been on.

Nobody knew, either, that it was Mrs. Whelan who had encouraged the sandwich makers to cut the crusts off and to do just one plate each. That way she was sure of getting what everyone had promised, though it meant much more work for her. Fergus knew, because Miss Purcell had been fussing about whether to have chicken salad or egg and mayonnaise in her offering and this had meant at least three calls to Mrs. Whelan for discussion.

“You are the only sensible woman in this town, Mrs. Whelan,” he began.

“What can I do for you, Fergus?” she asked simply.

“You mean I wouldn’t say it unless I wanted something?”

“Not at all.” But she waited.

“Is my name up with Nora Lynch?” he asked.

“Why do you ask?” she said.

“Because Kate Ryan, a woman I like and respect, told me it was, and as true as the day is long I didn’t mean it to be.”

“Well if there’s any misunderstanding I’m sure you’ll sort it out.”

“But
is
there any misunderstanding, Mrs. Whelan? That’s what I’m asking you. I don’t want to go sorting things out if there’s nothing to sort out.”

“Ah, nobody tells me anything, Fergus.”

“But I’m only asking you about
me
, not about other people.”

“As I said, I’ve not got an idea in the wide world, but I know if you think that there’s some confusion you’d be the man to clear it up. One way or another.”

“By saying something out straight, you mean? Like ‘I don’t want to marry you’?”

Mrs. Whelan’s eyes were shuttered. Open but closed at the same time. They told him he had gone too far in his revelations. That she expected a solicitor to be even more discreet than a postmistress.

“Other people go to you with their business, Fergus, you’re as much in demand now as your father, and that’s your job after all. If there’s a need for the right words you’ll find them.”

“You’d have been great as a prisoner of war, Mrs. Whelan,” said Fergus. “The secrets would have been safe with you all right.”

   Fergus and Nora went for a drive after the concert. The last thank yous and congratulations had been said; people walked home in the sunny early summer evening. The older children had gone to sit on the bridge. The cinema had a special late start, so many of them headed to the pictures. Fergus had the car out ready and waiting. Nora Lynch came running over to join him.

Small and slightly plump, she had the perfect skin and apple cheeks of a picture poster. Her fair hair was curled carefully, and she wore a little lipstick but not enough to do any damage.

“I thought we might go up on the hill,” he said as Nora put on her white jacket with the little yellow trim which matched her dress so well.

“The hill?” She was surprised.

“It’s a nice quiet place to talk, and I have something I want to say to you.”

Nora’s eyes lit up with pleasure and her face was pink. “I’d love that,” she said in a sort of husky way, not in her usual voice at all.

With a sickening lurch of his stomach Fergus realized that this pleasant, empty-headed, chirruping little teacher whom he had kissed a dozen times thought that he was about to propose marriage to her.

Slowly he started the car and headed for the hills.

Chapter II

Ryan’s Licensed Premises, like any other pub in Ireland in 1962, had a steady clientele that would never desert it. There never seemed to be any need to do renovations to attract new trade. The trade was there, like it had been in John’s father’s time; the people who lived on that side of Mountfern found it handy to call in rather than walk all the way down to the center. Ryan’s had the great advantage, some thought, of being on the outskirts. The whole place didn’t see you going in and coming out as they would if you visited Foley’s, Conway’s or Dunne’s.

When John’s father was alive the place still sold groceries but though the big old chest of tea drawers still stood there they held no stock now. There was a little huckster’s shop run by Loretto Quinn, whose husband had been killed in a terrible accident. It wouldn’t have been right for the Ryans to take the bread from her mouth even if they wanted to get back into the grocery business. And anyway most people liked going into Mountfern proper and walking along Bridge Street to see what was going on. Ryan’s was a bit out of the way in terms of doing your weekly shopping.

John Ryan was glad that Kate agreed with him on this. For a Dublin woman she had adapted extraordinarily well to Mountfern; she knew better than he did all that went on, who was speaking and who not. It was Kate who helped the children with their homework, found and trained the girls from the country who would leave for brighter lights and noisier towns once they knew the way to run a house. Kate served behind the bar as if she had been born to do it. She knew when to join in the conversation and when to stay far from it.

She polished glasses and cleaned the big ashtrays with Gold Flake printed around the rim. She loved the words Whiskey Bonder on the sign over the door, even though it wasn’t true anymore. John’s father, like many a publican, used to buy whiskey in a cask from the distiller, lodge it in a bonded warehouse and pay the excise duty when he took it from the warehouse for bottling and sale. In those days the name James Ryan was on the bottle, but nowadays distillers discouraged such fancy and old-fashioned notions. They preferred to sell whiskey already bottled. But Kate would still polish the sign lovingly, getting up on a ladder early in the morning with a soapy cloth, a wet cloth and a dry cloth.

She was the same behind the bar, she shined the bar decorations as if they were precious ornaments. A lot of pubs had the mock Staffordshire figures of a hurler and a footballer standing on a plinth, dressed in the colors of the particular county. Underneath it said, “On all grounds, Players Please.” Kate had explained the puns to the twins as John had marveled. He had looked at the thing a thousand times and never even noticed the words and what they meant. Fine that for a man who thought himself a poet.

And Kate had been great about that too. She never came up with any talk about what did a fat, country pub owner think he was doing rambling away in verse. Far from it, she would sit at his knee and ask him to read what he had written. Sometimes her head rested on his lap, and she would sigh in appreciation or else she might question it and ask what image was in his mind. She had long dark curly hair and very dark brown eyes, almost black. She never grudged the time he spent up in their bedroom trying to write—and trying it often was. She minded the bar happily, only suggesting that John should be there at set times like for the lunchtime trade and for the time when they had the half-past-six news on Radio Eireann, and the customers would expect the man of the house to be present to serve their pints and comment on the day’s events.

John Ryan was not a great man for formal prayers. Mass time was spent as near the back of the church as possible; in summertime right out in the open air and in thoughts not connected with the actual liturgy taking place. But he did offer prayers of thanks to somewhere, that he had met Kate. He could so easily have not met her. Suppose Jack Coyne’s had not been closed that time when she came in with the puncture, suppose the puncture had happened eleven miles on down the road—they’d have gone to the big town instead. Suppose she had been traveling with a girl who could mend a puncture instead of that giggling friend of hers, who could hardly ride a bike.

All these things were too much to think about. Like the really black bit after John had seized his chance and arranged to meet Kate again and again, and his mother had said that he was to bring no flighty Dublin girl into this pub, the business belonged to the whole family. John had nearly upped and off at that stage, but Kate had begged him to be understanding. What did the poor old mother mean except that she was afraid of losing him like she had lost her husband and all the rest of her family, two sons priests and far away, two daughters nuns and even farther away in Australia, and the other two sons in America without a notion of coming back.

Kate said he should be patient, sit it out. Old Mrs. Ryan would come around in time: in the meantime Kate would learn the bar trade in Dublin. And learn it she did, dropping her good salary as a secretary in a firm of solicitors and becoming a maid of all work in a small hotel so that she could become accustomed to working the bar.

By the time Mrs. Ryan had mellowed, Kate knew all she would need to know about serving a ball of malt, a half one, a black and tan, and a half. She knew when a customer had too much and when to cash a check or start a tab. They had been married quietly. It was 1948, there wasn’t much money about and not many relations either. John’s mother was there, face sour, clothes black, but at least she was there.

Kate had no family at all. Her mother had died after a life of martyrdom and self-pity. Her father had married again and believed that his new wife had been slighted by everyone, so went nowhere. No amount of persuasion would make them come to her wedding, so Kate O’Connell stood with four friends including Lucy, the girl who couldn’t mend punctures either, and married John Francis Ryan, sandy-haired, plump poet who had to run his family pub to please his mother and then to continue running it after his mother’s time to keep his wife and four children.

Kate told him that she thanked God for him too. Yes, seriously, when she prayed at night as she always did on her knees for three or four minutes no matter how great his need and desire for her.

“You can say your prayers afterwards,” he used to beg.

“Not at all, I’ll fall asleep in your arms afterwards,” she would reply.

But she assured him she thanked God for his honesty and his kindness and the marvelous way he had of looking at things, and for the four marvelous children. She, who had nobody for so long, had everybody who mattered now. Outsiders said they were well matched but they had no idea how well.

Nobody watching the quick Kate and the slower John as they smiled at each other across their busy public house would know how much they needed each other and relied one on the other for the qualities that they each lacked. Probably the men might have thought that the youngest of old Ryan’s sons did well for himself getting this handsome city girl to liven up his business. Possibly the women in Mountfern might have said that Kate O’Connell, who came in one day on a bicycle and seemed to have no people to speak of, fell on her feet marrying into Ryan’s pub. But this was to miss the point.

Kate, uncertain of herself in so many ways, unsure that she had a place anywhere, was more aware than anyone would suspect of how she had found a home and a base and an anchor in the reliable John Ryan. She knew he would never change and cease to love her, as her father had. She knew she didn’t have to act out a role to please and entertain him as she had done to everyone else in the world since she was fourteen. She had got by through being brisk—and sometimes she knew that she was too brisk, she left the children bewildered and bothered, and only John could make the world seem sensible to them again.

Kate marveled at the time and patience John had with their children, how he could sit for what seemed like forever on the bank of the river with them, making them as still as he was himself to lure the fish out of the water. Only the other day he had them all—even Declan, who never stopped moving around—transfixed over the workings of the old clock which he had taken to bits and put back together. He told them stories of the Fern family who lived over the river, tales of long ago, since John Ryan never knew the house when it stood. The twins would listen forever to how the provisions might come up the river by boat.

“How would they get them up to the house?” Dara had asked and her father had led the children out to the footbridge and they had all stood speculating what way the great boxes would have been carried up to the mansion. All this when he should have been seeing to the barrels and getting the pub ready for opening.

But Kate loved him for it, and sometimes she wanted to go over and put her arms around his neck and kiss him full on the lips to tell him how much she loved him and how good he was. Not only to his children and to her, but to the old farmer who would tell the same story twice a day. John could nod and polish a glass and hear it again and again. Kate sometimes got a lump in her throat as she watched his patience and his respect for people, for all kinds of people.

She felt a tenderness and love for him that was just as strong as any love you saw in the pictures where she sometimes went on a little outing with Sheila Whelan as a treat. But she didn’t show that love too openly. Mountfern wasn’t a place where endearments were used openly. There were no darlings or loves or dears used in Ryan’s pub. They accused each other good-humoredly of all kinds of failings.…

“My wife would spend the takings of the year if you didn’t watch her … all women are exactly the same.”

“John, would you ask Mrs. Connolly there would she like a drop more lemonade in her port? A man wouldn’t notice your drink, Mrs. Connolly. If it wasn’t a pint or a glass of whiskey he wouldn’t know how to handle it.”

But together, alone together, they knew they had something that a lot of people didn’t have. That their own parents certainly didn’t come anywhere near having. And they determined on the day that the twins were born that no child of this new family would grow up in a house of uncertainty and loneliness like the young John and the young Kate in the dark days. Money was not important to either of them but recently they had realized that four children did not live off the air and neither were shoes, schoolbags, dentists’ bills, notebooks, winter coats, more shoes, text books, to be found growing in the rushes along the river bank.

One of the reasons they had gotten the young country girl to come in was because Kate was going to get a job. She had discussed it with Fergus Slattery last night after the concert and he had said there was no reason she couldn’t start right away. With office experience in Dublin, with day-to-day experience of balancing the books in a business, she would be perfectly qualified to help in the solicitor’s office. Kate Ryan was known not to be a teller of other people’s business. This was most important of all.

She was looking forward to the whole business of going out to work. The children did not share her enthusiasm.

“Does this mean we’re poor?” Dara wanted to know.

“Of course, we’re not poor,” Kate snapped. It was hard enough to find something that would look smart for going out to an office from all her shabby clothes in the bedroom cupboard without having to answer questions like this.

“Well why are you going out to work for a living then?”

“In order to keep you and your brothers in leather shoes which you will kick to bits, to buy nice schoolbags that you’ll lose and a few things like that.” Kate looked without any pleasure at what she had always thought of as a smart green two-piece and which now turned out to be a crumpled, faded rag.

“Will we have to sell the pub?” Michael was behind her, always the more anxious of the two. His eyes seemed troubled.

“Lord, not at all, what has the pair of you so worried?” Kate softened her tone.

“You look very upset, you keep frowning,” Michael said.

“Oh that’s only because my clothes look like a lot of jumble.”

The other two children had come to join in. It wasn’t usual to find a council of war upstairs on a summer evening; Eddie and Declan had come to investigate.