The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (104 page)

“Now Fergus, it’s Christmas time. Stop talking about him. And wasn’t John Ryan right, as he is in so many things? For all his great chat and plans there isn’t a sod turned on that site yet. It’s going to take longer than he thinks to get his hotel going in a place that moves as slowly as Mountfern.”

   Kerry came home from school on a day when Patrick had to be in Dublin for further talks with the Tourist Board. The train would need to be met. Marian Johnson was only too happy to oblige. She had heard that Patrick was trying to arrange that Brian Doyle the builder see to it, and Brian had replied with spirit that he was a building contractor, not a chauffeur. He would be quite happy to do anyone a favor, but would not be asked to do a driving job as if it were part of his terms in getting the Fernscourt contract.

Patrick had admired this viewpoint and apologized. Many another man would have had less pride and courage than Brian Doyle, and would not have jeopardized their chance of the biggest building job in these parts in years. But Brian was not one to sit back and allow anyone to assume he was what he was not. He did himself more good by his truculent attitude with Patrick than he ever knew.

Marian was pleased too, although she thought Brian Doyle was insane. She stood on the platform raking the crowd of passengers who got off, looking for Kerry.

He seemed to have gotten taller or thinner somehow at school. Very handsome in his school blazer, and carrying his sports bag as well as his suitcase. He smiled pleasantly at Marian, and looked around for Grace.

“She’s busy decorating the lodge for Christmas,” said Marian, who had told the child there was no room in the car. “She’ll see you back at home. Your father has to be in Dublin. He said to tell you he’s very sorry.”

“I’m sure he is,” Kerry was polite and cold.

“So I thought we might have a little lunch, you and I in the hotel … to get to know each other.” She twinkled at him, but Kerry didn’t twinkle back.

“We do know each other don’t we …?” he said, bewildered. “You’re Miss Johnson … from the Grange.”

“Marian,” she said.

“Yes, well.”

It was most unsatisfactory. Marian had wanted to lean her elbows on the table of the Grand or the Central and have a lunch with this handsome blond son of Patrick’s Now it was all falling to pieces.

Kerry looked at her carefully and long It was as if he were deciding what to do. And then it was as if he had decided to turn on the electric light of his charm.

“Well Marian … if you’re sure I may call you that, I’d love to have lunch with you even though we do know each other already. That would be very nice”

They went to the Central. Marian waved at the people she knew whose heads went close together to discuss what she could possibly be doing with this teenage boy. They had tomato soup, boiled bacon and cabbage followed by apple pie and ice cream. Kerry told her little about school, less about his father and nothing about their life as it used to be in America However he did learn about what had been going on in Mountfern, and that Grace seemed to love her school, had plenty of nice little girls as friends. Grace and his father had been taking riding lessons and both were progressing very well. There had been endless delays about clearing the title for the final land purchase in Fernscourt.

Marian prattled on in what she had hoped would be their lunch of getting to know each other, and she managed to present herself to Kerry as three different ages during the space of half an hour. She was getting younger as the lunch continued. She said that she was quite demented trying to get the O’Neills to give up this ridiculous idea of having Christmas lunch on their own, as a family. They should join her and her father, and there would be four other guests, charming people whom they would like, one of them was actually the Honorable and was terribly natural and unassuming, as if she were like everyone else.

On the journey back Marian had the vague feeling that she had gotten to know Kerry O’Neill not at all, but he had gotten to know almost all there was to be known about her.

“I’ll call in later when your father gets back from Dublin,” she said as she dropped him at the lodge and he was thanking her courteously.

“Why will you do that?” He was perfectly polite.

“Well. Gosh. Well, to see if he got back all right and to tell him that I met you safely.”

Kerry looked at her, a clear unflinching look.

“Or maybe I’ll drop in tomorrow … or sometime,” Marian said foolishly.

She saw Grace racing out of the lodge to throw her arms around Kerry.

“Where
were
you? Miss Johnson said I couldn’t come. I’ve been looking out for you for ages. Come in and tell me all about it, I’ve been dying for you to get here …”

The door of the lodge closed behind them. Marian saw the long stern face of Olive Hayes who was washing up at the kitchen sink. Marian told herself, as she had done many times before, that she mustn’t rush it. Patrick O’Neill was a man not long a widower, a busy man with a million things on his mind. He had a tight self-sufficient little family. It would be foolish to try to break into it until they were ready.

That was the silly mistake Judy Byrne was making all the time, with her little invitations to a drink, and then fluttering in and out of Foley’s instead of realizing that any man likes a woman with a good Waterford glass decanter on the sideboard.

   They had a tradition in Mountfern that there was only one mass on Christmas Day. It meant that one priest was then free to go around and take holy communion to the people who weren’t able to leave home. The mass was at nine o’clock. And the whole parish was there.

Judy Byrne wore a mantilla to communion, which looked very well on her. Miss Purcell, who really would have preferred a seven-thirty mass but would never criticize the clergy, wore a nice blue scarf that Kate Ryan had knitted for her, because she knew Miss Purcell had a blue coat.

Sheila Whelan had had a tiring night: young Teresa Meagher had had yet another row with her mother and wanted to leave home. There were no buses on Christmas Eve. Sheila had spent a great deal of time making cups of hot chocolate and taking further bars of Kit Kat out of the shelves. She cajoled and soothed. She told Teresa that if somebody left home at Christmas it had a terrible effect because it didn’t just destroy
that
Christmas, but every other Christmas afterwards for both sides. She knew this, she told Teresa, very very well. She didn’t go into details about how Joe Whelan had left her at Christmas, and how the big row over the road many years ago with Rosemary Slattery had been at Christmastime also. There was something about the season and all its expectations. Sheila talked long and gently about Teresa’s mother feeling sad and lonely this Christmas, the first since her husband died; she must be given some little extra understanding; no of course, not over things that were totally unfair, but just an overall understanding.

Eventually the troubled child went to sleep on the sofa. Sheila put a rug over her, and a cushion under her head. Then she crossed the road and heard the whole story again from Teresa’s mother, the insolence, the selfishness … Again she tried to talk of a daughter who had lost her father, and eventually Mrs. Meagher’s red puffy eyes began to close, so Sheila left her.

She had urged them for form’s sake to dress properly and go to mass as if nothing had happened. They were all going to Christmas lunch with the Whites. Judy Byrne was going too. Sheila would have preferred to have spent the day stock-taking, or sitting and listening to Radio Eireann. They had lovely programs on Christmas Day for people at home. It would be a real treat not to have to leave the house at all.

Patrick O’Neill walked his son and daughter up the church for their first Christmas Day in Mountfern. They had given Miss Hayes a lift from the lodge, but she didn’t sit with them. She said she had friends to meet, and Christmas greetings to exchange. Everyone looked at the trio. Patrick in his camel-haired overcoat, stocky and handsome, smiling at this one, at that. Kerry taller definitely, he must have grown another two inches during his first term at boarding school. He wore a belted tweed coat, the kind many a youth of his age might wear, but it looked impossibly stylish because of the way the collar was turned up. Grace had a new outfit brought back from New York. It was a soft pale pink, a dusty pink coat with big velvet cuffs and collar in a darker pink. She had a velvet beret, a sort of tam o’shanter perched on top of all those golden curls as well. People turned to each other to smile at the beautiful child. Grace saw Dara and Michael and gave a little wave; they both stared at her open-mouthed.

Her father must have given this to her this morning already. She hadn’t mentioned it yesterday. Maggie Daly sat in her brown coat which used to belong to Kitty. She felt like a colorless blob. Canon Moran was blessing everyone and wishing that the spirit of the Holy Child be with them now and always, and all Maggie Daly could think of was her own awful coat. No wonder Our Lord wasn’t kinder to her, if she couldn’t even drag her mind to think of him on his birthday of all days. Maggie gloomily accepted that she didn’t deserve golden hair and a pink coat, or to be Dara Ryan’s best friend.

The children all went for a walk in Coyne’s wood on Christmas afternoon. It was a lovely clear, crisp day, and they wrapped up well and set out.

Kerry O’Neill came too. He told them about his school and spoke as if he were exactly the same age as everyone else, instead of being fifteen. Grace hung on to his arm a lot, and encouraged him to tell more tales, like the night the boy in the dormitory was listening to a transistor radio on an earphone and forgot where he was, and kept singing along with the Beatles. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah … and all the time Father Minehan was standing at the end of the bed watching him.

Kerry O’Neill remembered everyone’s names. He was interested in everything they did. Tommy Leonard did one of his great imitations of Miss Barry the priest’s housekeeper when she was on a tear. Michael explained to Kerry the best parts of the river, and told him a great hint about always noting a place where the cattle went to drink from. The cows stirred up mud, and also disturbed the water plants as they came to drink, so this meant fish would find it a good area for feeding, and you should position yourself about ten or twenty yards downstream and wait for them there. Kerry took all this in gravely and agreed with Jacinta White that Christmas wasn’t Christmas without mistletoe, and at the same time agreed with her brother Liam that too much palaver could go on about it, just let it be there was the best solution. He asked Maggie Daly if all their family had that nice auburn hair. Did her sisters who were away nursing in Wales have it too? And Maggie pinked up happily and said that nobody had ever called it auburn before. Kerry said he heard that Dara was a demon fisherwoman, great at threading the maggots on the hooks and had caught a huge pike that struggled and fought. He said he thought Mountfern was the greatest place in the world, and as dark fell and they all went back to their homes, there wasn’t one of the children who had come to Coyne’s wood that would have remembered the day six months ago when they thought it was the end of the world because somebody had bought Fernscourt.

PART TWO

Chapter VII

Old Mr. Slattery died in the spring. He died exactly as he would have liked, sitting on his fishing stool and leaning back against a tree. Many people must have passed him by that afternoon thinking he was asleep. Miss Purcell’s back was like a ramrod at the funeral mass. Her little wine-colored hat was replaced by a precisely similar one in black, and her disapproving face was set in harder lines than ever.

Fergus had felt achingly sorry for her.

She had mothered and bossed and bullied the old man for years. In return she had received a courteous fearful attention from him. What would she find as a replacement? He was very swift to tell her that he wanted no change in the situation.

“Oh indeed, and then when you up and marry, Master Fergus, when I’m an old woman, what will happen to me then?”

“I don’t think I’ll up and marry, I’m nearly thirty, and anyway if I do, won’t she be a lucky woman to get the both of us?” He didn’t say that Miss Purcell was an old woman already.

Fergus had one sister, Rosemary, married and living in Manchester. She came home for the funeral but she and he were like strangers. Rosemary was ten years older, she had been headstrong, he believed, and impatient. There had been rows, he remembered, when he was only six or seven and then she had left home. It had been made up of course but only in a fashion. Not properly. Letters at Christmas and cards on birthdays. No visits, no phone calls. There had been no rows with her little brother, but somehow Fergus hadn’t expected his sister to come home. She came without her husband James, and without her sons. There was little mention of her family during the preparations for the funeral. She wore smart black and smoked the moment they were outside the church. Miss Purcell, who had been with the family at the time she left, hated her and barely disguised it.

“Back for the money,” she hissed at Fergus, who only laughed. There was very little money, he had read his father’s will. A legacy for Miss Purcell, a couple of hundred pounds to the church for masses, a small insurance policy whose small proceeds went to his grandsons in Manchester. There was nothing for the long-gone Rosemary. She would know that too. The business and the house were for Fergus. There was a touching personal note of gratitude that the young man had come back to Mountfern to keep the business going. Fergus had blinked a bit over that, he hadn’t known how much his father had appreciated it. Rosemary sat and drank a whiskey with him; the conversation was brittle. He had the feeling that this was the last time he would ever see her, and he was determined for both their sakes that he would be pleasant and allow no recriminations to come into the conversation.

“Does it seem strange to be back home again?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “It’s not home to me, never was really.”

He hid his irritation. “I know. I forget. Well, people were glad to see you again.”

“Did you think so? I think most of them had forgotten I ever existed. Real country bumpkins most of them.”

“I suppose they must seem that way to you.”

“And to you?”

“Oh I’m jes’ an ole country bumpkin myself … like to sit in me ole rockin’ chair and talk about the times gone by.” He smiled at her, expecting some kind of an answering laugh.

Rosemary frowned at him. “You’re turning into an old man, Fergus. It’s a fact. You walk in small steps as if you were wearing slippers, and a sweater …”

Fergus felt the smile die on his face. He had been playacting to entertain her.

“Good Lord, I must watch that,” he said, deliberately taking giant steps across the room “Is that any better?” He took her glass to refill it and strode across the room as if he were playing grandmother’s footsteps. This time it worked. She laughed at him affectionately.

“You’re much too smart for here, Fergus. This is a dead-end town. Quit while you can, get to Dublin, even if you haven’t the guts to sell up entirely. Drop it before it’s too late and you turn into a vegetable or an alcoholic, or both.”

He didn’t comment on the fact that it was she who had had three whiskies while he had not finished his first.

“And what would I do that would be so exciting in … say Manchester?” he asked, hoping he kept the sarcasm out of his voice.

“You’d meet real people, not just the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. You’d find someone for yourself, instead of having to be like a eunuch here.”

“Is that what they say I am?” He was very angry indeed. But there must be no more screaming matches with Rosemary in this house. History must not repeat itself.

“It’s what I can see you are,” she said, her eyes too bright, her hair slipping from the coil at the back of her neck. “What else could you be in a place like this, making sheep’s eyes at that woman from the pub who does your typing? And never doing a thing about it.”

“Sorry, Rosemary, hold on a minute, I’ve got to get us more water,” he said.

He went into the kitchen and filled the jug, which he gripped with both hands to the sink until his knuckles were thin and white. How
dare
she speak of Kate like that? He would like to have hit her across the side of her silly drunken head. But it was a matter of hours. They would talk for another short while, then tomorrow she would have breakfast and he would drive her to the train in the big town. He would offer her something from the house as a souvenir. He had been going to suggest an old Victorian sewing box that had belonged to their mother. But, God damn it, no. It was too good for her, and Rosemary didn’t look like anyone who would ever sew. Just keep the peace for a few more hours. That wasn’t a weak thing to do, surely; it was a strong thing. He came back in smiling.

“Sorry, I was waiting for it to run cold. Where were we? I was making sheep’s eyes at Kate Ryan. Who would I be making sheep’s eyes at in Manchester?”

“I didn’t say you were to come to Manchester.” She sounded sulky now.

“But I will someday, surely. Not to work but to visit. I’d love to see my nephews. They must have nearly left school by now. Tell me about them.”

He settled himself in his chair, his smile of interest and concern masking his rage.

“They’ve left,” she said gruffly.

“Surely not? Hugh can only be barely sixteen?”

“Headstrong, impatient, won’t wait, won’t get an education.” She looked into the fire.

“And what does James say about it?”

“He’s hardly ever there to say anything. He’s not around much.”

Rosemary still looked into the fire.

Fergus poured them both a last drink, and moved to less troubled waters. He suggested that Rosemary take a silver cigarette box back with her as a memento. Awkwardly she accepted it, and before she went to bed she gave him what passed for a kiss on the cheek. A sort of lunge.

“You’re not the worst, Fergus, even though you’re a bit of an eejit,” she said, and her tones were those of love and praise, inasmuch as she could give either.

He lay awake for a long time and wondered about sheep’s eyes. What way did one sheep look at another that the world regarded as foolish?

   Eddie Ryan asked Mr. Williams the vicar if he could become a Protestant and be accepted into the Church of Ireland faith. Mr. Williams listened to him gravely and said it was a very big step and perhaps he should think more about it, maybe even discuss it with his priest or his parents. Mr. Williams was a kind man; never for a moment did he betray his knowledge of Eddie’s latest deed, which involved breaking the little shutter in the confessional, something that had never been done since the church was built and had hardly ever been done in Christendom according to Canon Moran and Father Hogan. Eddie explained that the church was empty at the time, and he wondered what it felt like to sit where the priest did, pushing the shutters back and forth to listen to the penitents. He got a bit excited and kept whizzing them to see which one would close quickest, and that was when one came away from its moorings entirely.

Jimbo Doyle had to be summoned, and it was all very serious and high level. Canon Moran said he couldn’t believe that the child would say the church was empty. Wasn’t our Blessed Lord in the church in the tabernacle, watching Eddie Ryan desecrate church property and disassemble the place where the holy sacrament of penance took place?

Father Hogan kept saying, “What Cromwell left undone Eddie Ryan will finish,” and pretending to panic when he saw him coming near the church.

It would be easier for him to be a Protestant.

“I have thought about it,” he assured Mr. Williams. “I’m dead certain. Would I need an admission card to start coming here on Sunday?”

“Of course not, Eddie, but …”

“And if there’s any questions, trouble like, you’ll tell them I asked to join. That it’s all above board. If they come hounding me?”

“Who would come hounding you, Eddie?”

“Almost everyone in the place, Mr. Williams, you wouldn’t credit it. My mother said if she set eyes on me again today she wouldn’t be responsible for what she’d do. Sergeant Sheehan said he has a room in the barracks with a lock on it and he’s thinking of putting my name on it because it’s where I’ll end up. I couldn’t tell you what the priests are like, because we’re all meant to be … whatever it’s called these days, you know loving all other religions … so it wouldn’t do you any good to know what they’re like down at the presbytery just now.”

“Life can be very difficult.” Mr. Williams was trying hard not to smile.

“You wouldn’t know the half of it up here, with no flock so to speak of, and pots of money.”

The impoverished Mr. Williams listened to this wryly.

“I don’t have all that much, Eddie.”

“I bet you have four pounds though,” Eddie said.

“Well, I do, but I need it. I can’t give it to you, no matter how great your need.”

“No, my need isn’t great. If I join your church I won’t have to pay it.”

“How, exactly?”

“I can say I’m a different faith, a different crowd altogether. I can’t be responsible for some sum of money they say I owe in the last faith. For repairs. I’d never make four pounds. Never.”

Mr. Williams was very kind. He could see that Eddie Ryan was not trying to put a touch on him; the sum was too huge to be possible even for the wildly optimistic.

“Why don’t you weed a few graves for me, Eddie, tidy up the graveyard. I could pay you say, five shillings. If you did a good job, then after several five-shilling days you could return to your old faith and pay your debts, and everyone would be happier.”

“I thought you were supposed to be looking for converts, and snatching people away from the true faith.”

“Oh no, we don’t do much snatching here, more patting people down; that’s what it seems to be about these days. Will I give you a sack for the grass and the weeds?”

   Dara and Grace were in the graveyard looking after James Edward Gray. They had brought cowslips and primroses and had made an unsuccessful attempt to remove some of the moss and lichen from his stone with Vim. It had looked much better before their efforts, they realized. Maggie had been a bit funny about James Edward Gray, claiming that she found him and
she
was the one to look after him. Grace and Dara had agreed and gone to look for someone else who was pretty neglected. But Maggie had come after them in tears and said they could have James Edward Gray and keep him, she didn’t care. Then she had stormed off home. She had been a bit like that lately, maybe it was trouble at home.

Maggie’s elder sister Kitty was a bit bossy, and she had two sisters who were nursing in Wales. They could have lost their religion or not written home, or something. Mrs. Daly was an awful one for doing the right thing and the trimmings on the Dalys’ rosary at night were as long as the rosary itself. Maggie must be getting some kind of trouble from her mother. That could be the only explanation of why she was so touchy these days.

   Tommy Leonard came to collect Michael.

“There’s no fish. What’s the point?” Michael said.

“There’s often no fish. As far as I’m concerned there’s nearly always no fish. What are you after, some kind of record catch?”

Tommy was indignant. He had spent half an hour explaining to his father why a boy of thirteen should be allowed to go and fish with his friend, and now Michael didn’t want to come.