The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (94 page)

He heard the sound of children’s voices as he walked through the laurel bushes on the path from the footbridge to the house.

Then he saw them.

A boy and girl obviously twins, dark-eyed, dark-haired and moving in exactly the same way, gestures and smiles utterly identical.

Patrick looked at them fondly.

“Hey, is it moving day?” he asked good-naturedly.

They hadn’t seen him arrive. They looked at him, startled. There was no doubt in their eyes. They knew who he was, the man who had come to take away their place for playing in.

He knew he would have to walk warily. His smile was broad but it got nothing in response.

“You’re packing up. Is that right?”

The dark-eyed twins talked to him alternately, one beginning a sentence and the other finishing it, as if they had always done this.

“People always come here …” the girl said defensively.

“Always as far as
anyone
can remember,” supported the boy.

“So it’s not as if it was trespassing …”

“Or being on private property …”

Patrick gave a big infectious laugh.

“But I know that, I
know
. I saw your home last night, it was mighty impressive. I came up to see the place by moonlight. Have you lot ever been here in the moonlight?” They shook their heads.

“It’s very strange. It has a life of its own, all the shadows seem to mean something. You’d really like it.” He spoke as if he were their own age, suggesting they do something as out of their world as going off on midnight treks across the river. Mammy and Daddy would kill them.

“Come some evening with me, I’ll square it with your folks, and I’ll go off for a walk by myself and leave you in your … in your house?” He sought for the right word to describe the dismantled room.

“It’s not going to be knocked down, is it?”

He answered the girl indirectly. “Changed a bit,” he said. “You know, roofs and good firm walls.”

“You mean it
is
to be knocked down.”

He decided not to talk baby talk to the girl with the big dark eyes under her bangs of black hair.

“That’s it, knocked down to be rebuilt. They tell me a lot of these old walls are dangerous, you could tip them over with your little finger. Not the things to build on, unfortunately.”

She nodded silently. The boy nodded too. It was as though they had both accepted what he said in exactly the same way and were thinking about it.

“Still, it won’t be for a while. No need to move all your things.” He indicated with his head their box of possessions.

“If it’s coming down anyway …” Michael began.

“There’s really not any point …” Dara took up.

“In leaving things here …”

“That’ll have to come out anyway.”

“Sure, everyone’s got to do what they’ve got to do. All I’m saying is that there’s no great rush. It will be weeks before anyone gets as far as this room. What do you call it, by the way?” He smiled at them, looking from one to the other. They were not to be won over.

“What do you call what?” the girl asked.

“This … this room … do you have a special name for it or anything?”

“No. No special name,” she said.

“It used to be the morning room,” the boy said. The first offer.

“Not by us. We didn’t call it the morning room. Or any name.” The dark girl was giving nothing away.

“I guess it was the morning room because it got the morning sun. It faces east, southeast. That’s right, would you say?”

But the boy felt he had been too friendly, and his sister was suggesting they leave.

“We’ve really got to go now.”

“Come back again, anytime; you’re welcome here always,” he said Somehow he knew it was the wrong thing to have said.

“Well, like you always were. When a place is special you don’t need anyone to welcome you to it. That’s right, isn’t it?”

They nodded at him, shoulders slightly less tense, their stance not so hostile.

“So we have to be off,” the boy said, picking up one side of the box that contained their life in this room.

“So goodbye,” said the girl, picking up the other side. They walked away from him, two little figures probably the same age as his Grace. Reasonably well cared for, grubby knees and dirty hands from playing … or indeed packing all their house things—they must have been covered in clay and dust. He watched them through the open walls of the house. They headed not for the town and the big bridge across into Bridge Street itself, but they went the other way toward River Road. Going to cross that little footbridge … maybe they belonged to that crook Jack Coyne?

Patrick was glad he hadn’t asked them if they were twins. It was obvious they were and yet people always had a habit of asking the obvious. He found it very irritating even when it was well meant, like when people said to him “You’re an American!” with an air of discovery. They were fine kids, a little prickly, especially the girl. He’d catch up with them again, give them some job maybe, make them a few pounds. Or maybe they might resent that. He’d see. And when Grace came over, she’d charm them to bits anyway.

Now to see the Ryans in the poky little pub and then back to the dark room with the heavy mahogany furniture which had been in the Johnson family for generations, and the picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Succor which had helped them through some of the bad times. And a long, long sleep.

Kate had come back early. Fergus was right. She couldn’t really concentrate and John would have to be told before anyone else came with the news.

The angelus was ringing as she walked down River Road. She looked across the banks and tried to imagine what it would be like with a huge hotel, a car park, with signs for a pub, with music maybe … Americans did things in style. She called into Loretto Quinn’s little shop for a bag of sugar and a dozen candles. She always tried to give Loretto the turn; the small white face behind the counter moved Kate to pity. Loretto and Barney Quinn had saved and saved for a business, any business. They had done any work to get the deposit on the tumbledown place. They could be seen night and day working to make it right. They knew they were no competition to the shops on Bridge Street, so Barney Quinn had bought a van in which to do deliveries.

A week after the van was delivered, Barney threw it into reverse and went into the river. It happened so quickly that Loretto never even knew. She was still out in the back filling bags of potatoes when the alarm was raised and she realized half the town was outside her front door with ropes and pulleys trying to get her husband, dead now in his van, out of the River Fern. There had never been any color or much life in her face after that. The child she had been expecting was stillborn, and she kept the shabby little shop as a memory of her young husband and in honor of the way things might have been.

Jack Coyne had been helpful about the unpaid-for van and the insurance and everything. People had been kind at the time. Not everyone continued to be helpful like Mrs. Ryan. Loretto knew it would be very easy for her to get things cheaper in Bridge Street where she went to work, or to get them delivered, but nearly every day she called in for something. Today she was early.

“You’re not taken sick coming home early?” she asked, concerned.

“Ah, not at all Loretto, nothing would make me feel badly, thank God. No, it’s light there this morning and I thought I’d come on back to John to give him a hand. Not that there’s likely to be any custom much for another hour.”

“Will the place across make any difference to you? Jack Coyne was in earlier. He wondered would it take any of your custom. I said it would be a different class of person entirely …”

“Thanks, Loretto,” Kate should have left earlier. John Ryan must know by now that his livelihood was threatened and that the days of Ryan’s, Whiskey Bonder, were numbered.

John was sitting on a high stool reading the paper. He put down the newspaper automatically as the door opened.

“That’s never the time!” he said, amazed, looking up at the old clock and back at his watch trying to work it out.

“No. I came home a bit early.” Kate put down her parcels and sat up as if she were a customer.

“Couldn’t wait for a ball of malt?” he teased her.

“John.”

“What is it?” His face showed that he knew something was wrong. “Are you all right, do you feel all right?”

“I’m fine.” Suddenly she was weary; she knew it would be an uphill struggle trying to make him realize how serious things were going to be.

“What
is
it then?”

“Did you hear what’s happening to Fernscourt? They’re going to make it into a hotel, have a bar. Americans are going to stay there, and there’ll be a bar the size of a football field. He’s put in for planning permission.”

“I heard that it was going to be a hotel all right. Tommy was round with the mineral water deliveries. Oh, he left the invoice there on the shelf, by the way, it’s behind the—”

“Will you stop bleating on about invoices? It’s mighty few of those we’ll be seeing in the future. Did you hear what I said?”

“I heard you, Kate. There’s no need to shout like a fishwife.”

“Like a what?”

“A fishwife, look at you; you have your hands on your hips even. Stop being so impatient, and let’s discuss this thing properly.”

“I’m the one who ran the whole way back from Fergus as soon as I heard about it. Don’t you think I want to discuss it properly?”

“Yes, Kate. But not in public. Not in the middle of the bar.”

Kate looked around at the empty room.

“God Almighty, have you lost your mind? Who’s here except Leopold, are you afraid the dog’s going to start gossiping about us and our business around town?”

“Don’t let’s start something that we’ll have to cut off as soon as someone comes in that door.”

“All right, all right.” She made a gesture with her hands as if calming things down. “Very well, but in the meantime do you mind if we talk about what’s going to become of us, or would you rather read me Curly Wee out of the paper, or have a discussion about the weather?”

“We can’t know what to think, until we know what’s going to happen. How many times do I tell you not to go off at half cock about every single thing? We’ll hear in good time what he’s going to do. It might be the making of us for all we know. A whole lot of new people coming to the place, a lot of business we never had before. How many times have we wished that we were a tourist area where the people came on holidays? Now we will be, if what Tommy said is true.”

“The making of us; the making of us. How could it be anything except the end of us? For as many times as we said we’d like tourists, haven’t we been thanking the stars that they’re all so dozy in there in Foley’s and Conway’s and half packed to leave in Dunne’s? We never had any competition, and even then we barely make a living. How can you be so blind?”

A flash of annoyance crossed John’s big, good-natured face.

“Listen to me, I know you work hard, I know you put in all the hours that God gives you making a life for us, but answer me this, why am I being blind? What should I have done? Should I have bought the place myself? Or killed the fellow who did? Come on now, tell me. I’m standing here minding what I agree is at the moment a very slow business, some would say non-existent … and hoping that there’s going to be some kind of good spin-off instead of doom and disaster for us, and you come rushing in the door shouting at me like a tinker’s woman and saying I’m blind. That’s a lot of help, Kate, thank you very much.”

Before she could reply the door opened and in came Marian Johnson, face flushed and wispy hair blowing all directions. Rita Walsh of the Rosemarie hair salon said that she had often known people with two crowns in their head of hair, but Marian Johnson had three. The woman couldn’t be blamed for looking like a refined haystack. Marian was anxious to know if John Ryan could oblige her with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

John Ryan couldn’t. He had Scotch all right, but nothing else except Irish whiskey. They might have it in the town, he supposed.

“Very fancy tastes you’re getting above at the Grange,” he said companionably. He couldn’t have said anything more welcome. Marian was dying to release the news. It was for the American, the man who was going to buy Fernscourt, or who had bought it in fact, but was going to open a hotel there. She went on and on, words falling over each other in excitement. There were going to be fishermen, not people like from here, not just the visitors from England who stayed in guest houses, but rich Americans with their own rods going to come and fish the Fern for pike and rudd, for bream and perch. And there were going to be Americans who would want to ride horses, they would even come in winter so they could hunt. They’d be here the whole year round. She was unaware of the silence that she spoke to. But eventually even Marian ran out of wind.

“Isn’t it great?” she said, looking from one to the other.

“I’d have thought you’d be very put out. Isn’t that all your kind of business that he’s going to be taking?” Kate said, avoiding the look of caution that her husband was trying to beam at her.

Marian tossed her head. “Heavens no, isn’t it all to the good, isn’t it going to build the whole thing up for all of us? They’re going to want horses. Apparently I’ll be expanding all that side of our business. It’s going to change the whole place.” Marian hugged herself almost girlishly at the thought of it.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Kate said “That it’s going to change the whole place.”

“Oh, Kate Ryan, you’re as young as I am,” tinkled Marian, who was most definitely the older of the two. “Don’t be an old stick-in-the-mud. It’s going to transform your lives. Think of all the people that’ll come tripping across that footbridge there to have a drink in your place. It will be just what you need.”

John seized her words as if they were a lifeline. “That’s just what I was saying to Kate when you came in the door. It could be the making of us. It could be the bit of luck we were always hoping for.” His face was bright with enthusiasm.

Kate watched, wordless, as her husband and Marian Johnson made plans for the future. They never talked about all the people who would like to go and have a drink in the big hotel, who would trip across the footbridge in the other direction. She looked at John and tried to work out whether he really believed this optimistic line of chat, or if he was only trying to buoy up the Ryan family. She decided that he really believed it; he wanted so much for things to turn out well that he refused to look at any other possibility. She felt a mixture of annoyance that he should be so naïve, and a protective, almost maternal anxiety because she had this cold fear that things were indeed going to change, and that something very bad was about to happen.