The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (92 page)

“Except Ireland, of course,” Patrick had said.

“Particularly Ireland.” She had tossed her curls.

It was the one thing they differed on. Huge in ways, and yet it never mattered all that much, because he knew that when he was ready to go back—“to go back” was how he put it, though he himself had never seen Ireland—Kathleen would come too. He wasn’t to know that as her health deteriorated she would become less and less interested in any scheme, be it in New York or in Ireland. Kathleen, who used to sit on the tables in a new bar holding swaths of material up to the light at the window to see which would make the classiest curtains, lost her involvement in anything except the big white house in New Jersey, and in the latter years even that couldn’t hold her frail attention.

He hadn’t spent any night awake over Kathleen’s illness; there was not one night when he knew she wouldn’t get better. He was never given any bad diagnosis, or expectation or time when her illness would run its course. Possibly, the last time he had stayed up all night without going to bed or lying down was the night Kerry was born. In 1947. The child had been born at home and the doctors told Patrick it was going to be long and hard, even though Kathleen was still young and strong in those days. He had spent all night pacing, trying to read, doing anything to distract himself from the cries upstairs. It had been a clear bright dawn when he held his son in his arms and rocked him. Kerry’s tiny, scrunched-up face was so touching, Patrick had swallowed hard and swore that no harm would come to this boy, and that he would go back and walk in his rightful place in Ireland with head held high.

As he clutched the little bundle to him he felt tears in his eyes and wondered how his own father, Michael O’Neill—amiable, drunken, good-for-nothing Michael O’Neill—felt when he had held Patrick in his arms. Did he not wish too that he could take his son back to Mountfern? No, Patrick’s father must have felt no such thing. At the age of twenty Michael O’Neill, his parents, brothers and sisters, had left Mountfern because there was no work and his father had been thrown out on the road. He never went back, nor had he ever thought it possible. He had sung songs about Ireland, and told tales, and filled young Patrick with a hatred of this Fern family whom he had never met.

Patrick was eight when he heard that the Ferns’ house had been burned down. The news came by letter. It was too late to be any good to any of the O’Neills then. There was no O’Neill around to watch the flames lick through the windows of this house, the house which had held the family and brought them down.

Patrick O’Neill touched the moss-covered stones almost religiously; he leaned against the ivy-covered walls and walked by the moonlight into a room which still had its walls. To his surprise there were orange boxes as furniture, and toy tea-sets. Some local children had obviously been playing there. He smiled at the jam jars full of wild flowers. He wondered who the children were. Certainly they wouldn’t have been allowed in the door during the Ferns’ time. He would love to see their faces when they heard his plans for the old ruin.

   Mrs. Whelan was the first to see him. She had just delivered a dripping Miss Barry back to the presbytery while Father Hogan and Canon Moran clucked sympathetically at the mishap that caused their housekeeper to fall into the river. Mrs. Whelan had even provided some mushrooms as a kind of proof that the bewildered woman had been on an errand for her employers. Just as she was walking back to her post office, she saw a man in a crumpled suit, tie loosened, walk up Bridge Street toward a hired car. It could be no one else.

Patrick O’Neill stood handsome and pale in his unaccustomed dark suit. Big and broad-shouldered with a head of dark brown curly hair, he was a man who normally wore tan or beige jackets. Few people in the States ever remembered seeing him in dark colors. Even if there had been a formal occasion he had worn a green tuxedo in deference to his national origins.

His enemies in business had often said that he had the thickset looks of an Irish paddy who should still be shoveling dirt. This pleased Patrick rather than otherwise; he said he was glad to wear the signs of his forefathers so openly, and to be living proof that they had to work hard and that they survived. But he didn’t have the pugilistic face of a man who would like to have a fight, he had no boxer’s scowl, nor the low forehead of a man who found it hard to cope with whatever life dealt him. His face was broad and open, his eyes blue and twinkling. From his eyes lines came out like a star, meaning that they often looked as if he was smiling even when he was far from it.

He was more attractive and younger than Sheila had expected. But then, what should she have expected, just seeing telegrams and telex messages pile up for him? He looked as if he could do with a welcome.

She crossed the street. “And you’re very welcome to these parts, Mr. O’Neill,” she said warmly.

Patrick looked at her gratefully. “How did you know it was me, did you know my people?”

“Who else would it be, Mr. O’Neill? And I have a foot of telegrams and messages for you up at the post office. Would you like a cup of tea and I’ll give them to you?”

“Now that’s what I call efficiency.” He threw back his head and laughed.

Mrs. Whelan led him through the post office to her room behind. She put him sitting down beside a pile of communications and put on the kettle. She said no more till she placed a cup of tea beside each of them, and some buttered soda bread. Yes, a very handsome man, she thought, he was going to cause a bit of a stir. Mrs. Whelan smiled to herself, thinking of all the excitement there would be.

Patrick read the telegrams from Gerry Power, the man who had replaced Tom Brady as his second in command all those years ago. He read the telegrams from Rachel too quickly, and put them into a different pocket. He felt the heat coming back into his body with the strong tea and the thick buttered bread. She was a gracious woman, this Mrs. Whelan. No curiosity about him, no need to talk and chatter like so many women, telling you their business and wanting to know yours. If they were all going to be like this in Mountfern, he had made the best move in his life.

Despite the hard, silent disapproving face of Gerry Power.

Despite the hurt, bewildered eyes of Rachel Fine.

Despite the confused chirrupings of little Grace.

And the stern scornful look of Kerry, the tall golden-haired son. The boy he had promised to take back home. The boy who said so little to him these days that Patrick had no idea what he was thinking about, at all.

   Fergus wondered what it would be like to be a solicitor in a big place where you had no idea what the day would bring. In other places he supposed he could stand on his own doorstep and stretch without four passers-by asking him had he a bad back like his father, and sending messages in to Miss Purcell or advising him on the rather glum-looking window boxes. Still he wouldn’t change it. And he could escape and get on with his life a bit, as he had told his father last night, if he went twenty-five miles to a dance organized by a rugby club. There were grand girls there who wouldn’t expect to be taken to Meagher’s jewelry shop next morning if a kiss and a cuddle had been part of the night’s entertainment.

He saw Kate Ryan walking up River Road and turning into Bridge Street. She waved.

“Are you out with your stopwatch in case I’m a second late?”

“Just waiting for the bells to ring for mass. If there had been one peal you’d have been fired. No, I was having a good stretch actually.”

“Don’t you look like a young Greek god. Did you have a good time in Ballykane last night?”

His arms dropped to his sides mid-stretch. “How did you know where I was …?”

“I was there myself dancing away beside you. You never saw me?”

“No you weren’t, don’t be ridiculous, who said it to you?”

“Jack Coyne. Some fellow couldn’t start his car and rang Jack at all hours in the morning to go and pick him up.”

“God, you can’t do much in this place, can you? And there was I thinking it wasn’t such a bad place. No surprises.”

“It isn’t a bad place. Do you want surprises?”

They were walking companionably in to start the day’s work as the church bells began to peal at ten to nine to let the devout know it was time to put on the hats and pick up the missals for daily mass. The early devout would already have attended seven o’clock mass, said this morning by a perplexed Father Hogan, whose mind was as much on the dripping and drunken housekeeper as it was on the liturgy.

“No I don’t want surprises,” Fergus said. “In the last few hours I’ve found my father nearly burning the house down, and now you tell me Jack Coyne has the entire details of my little escapade last night.”

Kate was at her desk opening mail. It was a job they did together since the invention of the filing system. Kate wanted to check that the young master knew not only where to find everything but where to file it as well. She had arranged a bowl of flowers, a blotter and pens on his famous table by the window where every document used to end up in the old days.

“I think I’ll lay off surprises for a while,” Fergus said, throwing a heap of papers on the floor beside him out of habit, and picking them up sheepishly to place them in the pending tray on the desk.

“You know they say they come in threes,” said Kate absently, as she began to read a letter which had been delivered by hand. It was a request from Patrick J. O’Neill that Slattery and Slattery should act for him in his application to build a hotel and apply for a pub license as well. He thought that since he was going to live in the area he would very much like the local man to act on his behalf.

“God Almighty, he’s going to build a hotel,” Kate said, standing up.

Fergus had come to read the letter over her shoulder. “I won’t act for him—he can find his own attorney and counsellors and whatever they call them over there,” he said after a long silence.

She looked at him blankly. “Why won’t you act for him?”

“Because if his application is granted and he gets his license, then he’ll open a pub …”

“You have to take his business …” Kate was pale.

“I do not have to take his business, thank you. I can accept or refuse any work I like. I am not going to accept anything which is going to take the bread and butter out of your mouth.” He looked angry and upset as he stood beside her and she found herself weeping on his shoulder. “Do you want to go home, and tell John?”

“No, not yet.” Kate shook her head and sat down purposefully at her desk. “Not for a while. If our bread and butter’s going to disappear in the pub I’d better make sure I don’t lose the job in the office as well.” She gave a smile to show that the emotional bit was over.

“You’d never lose a job here,” Fergus said gently. “I just wish it paid better. Maybe you should tell John now, before someone else does.”

“Nobody else will. It’s silly but last night he was saying, when we were sitting out in the side garden bit … he was saying that nothing bad was ever going to happen to us. Maybe this isn’t very bad. I want to have a think before I tell him. That’s all.” There were no words to say. It was about as bad as it could be. Fergus didn’t say anything. He took off his glasses and polished them. He saw Kate looking at him gratefully.

“All right. All right, I know I have a weak face without them, I’m putting them back on. Let’s open more mail, shall we? Who knows what other little surprises may be lurking in these nice brown envelopes?”

   Patrick O’Neill drove to the Grange, some three miles from Mountfern. It was a big, gracious house that had always been in the Johnson family. It had known good days and bad, and just now was going through a fairly prosperous phase. Marian Johnson had discovered that there was a business in offering riding holidays. City people and English visitors liked to come and stay in the vaguely country house atmosphere. The Johnsons always left a decanter of sherry out instead of charging people by the glass, it gave them the feeling that they were guests on a country weekend. Last summer Marian had quite a few Americans, who usually came in groups. This big, handsome O’Neill man was different.

He said he would like to ride, but since he had not sat on a horse’s back for years he wondered if it was foolish to begin again at the age of forty-eight.

Marian Johnson aged thirty-nine looked into his blue eyes with the crinkly laugh lines coming away from them at the sides. No, she thought that was the perfect age to start again. She would take him riding herself.

Marian was fair-haired, but no one would ever have called her a blonde; her hair was wispy and flyaway, and no style ever seemed to tame it. She had a big soft bosom and often wore twinsets, mauves or pale green light jumpers with a matching cardigan. She looked her best when her hair was tidied into a net and under a bowler hat, and her soft drooping bosom gathered into the mannish coat of the hunt. The Johnsons were people who considered themselves of importance in the neighborhood; normally Marian would never have shown the slightest interest in any American visitor. A man passing through, a man with no family, no background or stake in the area. Marian would have little time to waste. Yet there was something about Patrick O’Neill that attracted her.

“Does your wife like the idea of riding?” Marian asked.

“My wife passed away this year,” Patrick said.

“Oh, I am most awfully sorry.”

“She had been in poor health for a long time,” murmured Patrick.

Marian said no more; she arranged for the horses and assured Patrick that there would be no broken bones.

Companionably they walked the horses over to a stile where she advised Patrick to mount his animal.

“Go on,” she laughed. “It’s more dignified than all this getting a leg up by putting your foot in someone’s hand. It’s like stepping on.”

“It’s too easy,” Patrick complained. “I don’t mind the undignified way.”

Astride their horses, they rode down the quiet lane with the fuchsia-filled hedges. Marian pointed out landmarks, towers on small hills and when they came to the corner she said, “And that’s Fernscourt … they say it’s going to be …”