The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (91 page)

“You should have been writing your poetry.”

“It’s not like making things in a factory, Kate, you can’t sit down in front of a conveyor belt and turn out bits of writing and in the end a poem emerges.” He spoke quietly and with dignity.

“I know, I know.” She was contrite.

“So when it didn’t seem to come, I thought I’d do something for you and plan you a garden.”

“That’s lovely.”

“I’ll have a word with Jimbo Doyle and he could do a couple of days and build up a few beds. Now wouldn’t that be nice?”

“It would.” She was touched, she couldn’t deliver her attack now. It would be ingratitude, flying in the face of God, to attack a husband who was so kind.

“I was over in Fernscourt today, there’s heaps of stones lying around the place. We could get some nice big rocks, Jimbo could wheel them across the footbridge.”

“I don’t suppose they belong to anyone.” Kate didn’t want her voice to sound grudging … “That would be grand,” she added.

“And this thing about the tortoise, I wouldn’t countermand your orders. God, what would be the point? What I was wondering was now that the hens have a place of their own someone will have to feed them properly you know, mix up the scraps with the bran …”

“Yes.”

“So suppose we made those two scallywaggers do that? They’d be well able for it, and they’d give the hens a feed twice a day … and to encourage them maybe they could have some kind of access to that tortoise, maybe take him out of your way in the mudroom, not have him looking up at you like a prehistoric monster. What do you think?”

Kate tried to hide her smile. Unsuccessfully.

“What do I think?” she said, laughing in spite of herself. “I think I might be persuaded … but …”

“But it would have to come from you. If you think it would be a good idea, then you should suggest it.” He was adamant about this.

“I suppose you sorted Dara out too,” Kate said gently and with admiration. “They should have you up on the platform in Geneva sorting things out for everyone.”

“Ah, the poor child was very upset, it’s giving up a bit of fairyland. None of us like doing that.”

“People like you didn’t have to, it’s still all there in your heads,” Kate said, but she said it with a hint of envy in her voice, and she kissed his lips softly so that he tasted the port wine.

Chapter III

That night Michael sat on the landing window seat and looked across at Fernscourt in the moonlight.

The curtains of ivy waved over the hummocks of moss. It was easier than ever to see the ruins since some of the big straggly trees and bushes had been cut down.

Eddie and Declan were long asleep in their bunk beds. Michael had been reading with a torch, but his mind had strayed from the knight who had rescued the Lady Araminta with the golden tresses. He wanted to look at real life, which was Fernscourt. For a long time he looked at the shadows over the moon and the patterns they made on the soft green banks up from the river toward the house.

Then he saw a figure moving in the moonlight. Nobody
ever
walked there at night. Michael knelt up and opened the window to have a better view. It was a man, an old man even older than Daddy. He was wandering around with his hands in his pockets looking up at the walls. Sometimes he touched the moss, sometimes he pushed aside the ivy. Michael was kneeling on the window seat now, peering and straining to see as the figure disappeared and emerged again behind the ruined walls. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and there was his father in his pajamas.

“Dad, I think he’s come. I think he’s here.”

“Who?”

“The American. I think that’s him in our house.” The boy’s face was white even on the shadowy landing with moonlight coming in irregular darts through the window.

John Ryan looked out and saw a figure walking around touching walls and almost patting the bits of building that still stood. John felt he was spying somehow. The man was as if naked over there, in that he didn’t know he was being observed.

Michael was wriggling off the seat. “I’ll have to wake Dara,” he said, his face working anxiously.

“Wait, Michael.”

“But it’s our house, he’s here, he came after all. People said he might not be going to live here. But look at him, he
is
going to live in it, isn’t he? Isn’t he?”

John sat down on the window seat, and lifted his feet a little off the cold linoleum floor covering. “Michael, don’t wake the child up.”

“She’s not a child, she’s twenty minutes older than I am.”

“That’s true. She’s not a child any more than you are.”

Michael’s face was troubled. “She’ll need to know, Dad.”

“Nobody needs to know.”

“It’s partly her house.”

“It’s
his
house Michael.” John indicated the man across the river.

“I know, I know.” The boy’s thin shoulders were raised, tense. He was troubled and unsure what to do.

“Give me something to put my feet on so they’re not like two big blocks of ice when I get back into the bed with your mother.”

Michael rooted around under the comics and books that were on the window seat and found a raggedy cushion.

“Will this do?”

“That’s fine, thank you son.”

Some of the quivering tension had left the boy. He sat down, still looking out of the window, but prepared to talk rather than wake his sister and the whole house in his grief.

“Do you know, when I was a lad your age we used to go over there and play too. Your Uncle Barry, now, he was a great climber, there was nothing he couldn’t get right up on, and there were more bits of wall then than now.”

Michael was interested.

“And then your Aunt Nuala; my heavens wouldn’t those little Australian boys and girls be surprised to know that their Mother Superior used to climb trees like a boy? She used to tie her skirts up around her waist and climb with Barry.”

“What did you do, Daddy?”

“Sure I was only like poor Eddie, looking at them,” John sighed. “They usually wanted me to go away, if I remember rightly.”

Michael took this as a criticism of the twins’ own attitude to their younger brother.

“I’m sure you were fine when you were young, Dad. But God, you couldn’t have Eddie hanging around with you, I mean really and truly.”

“Oh I know that, I’m not disputing it, Eddie would have your heart scalded. But I was only talking about the old days across there … and the kind of things we used to do …”

He talked on gently, his voice low enough that it wouldn’t wake Kate and have her storming out onto the landing. Yet raised enough for Michael to think it was a normal conversation and that these were normal times.

John dug deep into his memory of games played, and accidents averted, of guards on bicycles, of two young bullocks that ran wild, away from someone’s secure field up the hill. He talked until he saw the lids begin to droop on his son’s thin white face, and knew that sleep was going to come at last, that Michael wouldn’t wake Dara and sit all night watching in helpless despair as this stranger walked through what they still wanted to think their home.

   That night old Mr. Slattery couldn’t sleep and he came down to get himself some warm milk. He dozed off at the kitchen table as the milk boiled and didn’t smell the burning until Fergus appeared, wild-eyed with shock.

“Don’t put me away, don’t put me in the county home,” wept the old man. “I’ll take milk to bed in a flask. I’ll never try to boil it again. Please.”

Fergus had been filling the blackened saucepan with water and opening the windows.

“Are you going mad altogether, Father? Would I put you in the county home? Would I?”

“If I were mad altogether you’d have to,” Mr. Slattery said reasonably.

“Yes, but you’re not, and even if you were I don’t think I would.”

“Why not? It would be the right thing to do, we’ve often advised clients ourselves.”

“You’re not a client. You’re my father.”

“You’ve got to get on with your own life.”

“But I
do
get on with my own life, for God’s sake. I was out getting on with it this evening and I’d only just gotten to bed. That’s why it was my nose that caught the milk, not Miss Purcell’s.”

“I’m a burden, I don’t do much work in the office.”

“You’re not a burden, we don’t
have
much work in the office.”

“I’ve let the place run down, why else didn’t we get the business for Fernscourt?”

“Oh is
that
what’s worrying you? I’ll tell you why. Your man O’Neill is in business in a big way over there, really big, owns at least half a dozen restaurants or bars or whatever they are. He has other business too, he pays accountants and lawyers big fees. Now he’s opening here, the big lawyers look up a map … Ireland they say, Ireland, where’s that? Then they find it. What’s the capital they say, what’s the capital? Then someone tells them and they get Dublin solicitors. That’s all.”

“You make it sound so simple. I suppose it will be good when he arrives, this American. He’s given work in the place already.”

“Here’s some fresh milk.” Fergus had boiled another saucepan. “We’ll tell Miss Purcell that I was drunk and burned the arse out of the saucepan. The American? It has to be good for the place. I suppose the poor devil will be full of nonsense and trying to hunt and shoot and fish. We’ll have great sport with him. Imagine worrying about the American! It’ll be the best sport we ever had. I can’t wait for him to arrive.”

   That night Sergeant Sheehan found somebody lying in a very awkward position, legs splayed, head lolling, and stretched right across the footbridge at the end of the town. Sergeant Sheehan was a thickset man who used to be a great hurler in his day, a man with ferocious eyebrows which made him look very frightening when he had to. But he was running to fat now, with slow and undemanding life in a country town. He felt his uniform was constantly tight around his neck, and rolls of fat gathered when he buttoned his top collar.

He loosened the collar now by opening several buttons, and looked at the sleeping woman. It was Miss Barry, the canon’s housekeeper. A fine place for her to have passed out and to be snoring at 1
A.M.
Sergeant Sheehan went back to the station to think the matter over, having tidied her legs into a more respectable position. He wasn’t quite sure what his next move would be. To wake the canon with such bad news would be unwise. To allow Miss Barry to be found by someone else, asleep and obviously the worse for wear, would hardly be wise either. To wake Miss Barry might be the least wise course of all. What a pity Mrs. Whelan wasn’t around. He walked up Bridge Street. There was still a light on.

He tapped gently. She came to the door fully dressed.

“Do you ever sleep, Sheila?” he asked, full of relief to see her.

“Not so much these days. Telegrams come in at funny times too. They don’t know what time we wake or sleep,” she said.

He told her; she pondered. She decided it was best left, even another three or four hours would mean she had slept the worst off. Had she anything to support her head? No, but the sergeant would arrange it.

“I get up early,” Mrs. Whelan said. “I could throw some water over her at around six, and then we could pretend she had been out early to pick mushrooms for His Reverence’s breakfast and fallen into the river.”

This way face was saved. He couldn’t thank her enough. Mrs. Whelan said they would speak no more of it; she was flattered to be asked for her advice. She would sleep now for a couple of hours.

   It was years since Patrick O’Neill had stayed up all night. He tried to think back. In the 1930s during the Depression often, very often, hardly a week went by when nights were not spent hauling boxes and crates, doing favors here, moving goods that had to be out of warehouses there. Counting, taking note, proving himself reliable. Telling Italians and fellows with long Polish names that they could always rely on Patrick O’Neill. He used to say his own name with pride to these men, roll it around as if it were an incantation. He spoke of himself in the third person to these business associates in the early days: “Patrick O’Neill won’t let you down. You can always rely on Patrick O’Neill.”

They could rely on him and his truck at first, and then on his fleet of truck drivers who didn’t ask questions but just shifted what had to be shifted.

And then Patrick O’Neill’s name was over neighborhood bars. He was one of the first to welcome the end of Prohibition, just as he had enjoyed the income and lifestyle which Prohibition had created for him, and those Italians and Poles who had given him early jobs were not forgotten. When life became less risky Patrick O’Neill invited them and their wives to his bar-restaurants and treated them with respect. Flowers for the wives, discreet smiles when they brought girlfriends instead. They appreciated it; they sent him custom. But it had meant a lot of staying up all night. There had been the night when he had gone through the books over and over again. It was dawn when he had to admit that it was a fellow Irishman who had been cheating him. He called to Tom Brady’s house at seven, shirt open and eyes red.

Tom Brady realized what had happened and tried to run.

“Mrs. Brady,” Patrick O’Neill had said quietly, “take the children out, maybe for the day. To family perhaps? Don’t let them come back before nightfall. Oh and move any really good ornaments and pieces from your front parlor.”

“This isn’t a movie, Patrick,” Tom started to bluster.

“Sure it isn’t, otherwise you’d be dead on your floor for what you’ve done to me.”

Tom Brady’s wife gasped.

“Take the children,” Tom had said, “and do what he says. He’s not going to kill me.”

Patrick beat him with a violence he didn’t even know he possessed. With every blow he grunted and spat out more rage.
This
was for the false smiles and the drinks after a day spent cheating.
This
was for letting Patrick fire an innocent Italian two months back.
This
was for the sleazy shabby way the goods were stolen, taking them out in trash cans and coming back later to root among the garbage and remove the good bottles of liquor.
This
was for taking a bonus last Christmas, and
this
, the hardest blow of all, had been for being an Irishman and doing it all to another Irishman. He had been up all that night all right. And on the night he had met Kathleen.

He had never intended to marry, or fall in love. There wouldn’t be time. Work was scarce first and then it was too plentiful, and then came responsibility and long hours. There wouldn’t be time for a wife and family. But Kathleen had looked so lovely and she was so lively then, eyes dancing, long fair hair swept up into a top knot of some sort. She had been so excited about his bars and restaurants, and so enthusiastic. She said over and over that America was so alive and so full of hope she pitied anyone who lived anywhere else.