The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (109 page)

   Judy Byrne ran into Marian Johnson in Meagher’s jewelers. Mrs. Meagher had to send out the repairs and she was most apologetic that the clock wasn’t ready.

“I did want it for the lodge by the time they came back,” Marian was saying.

“Oh, when will that be?” Judy Byrne had come in to buy a brooch for her niece’s birthday. She was looking without much pleasure at Mrs. Meagher’s selection.

“Hard to say. Any day now, I imagine,” Marian said airily.

“He doesn’t keep in touch, then?”

Marian was furious.

“Heavens, Judy, it’s their house to come and go as they please. I’m not a boarding house landlady type, you know, Judy. They’ve just rented our gate lodge, that’s all.”

“So he doesn’t write. Well, I expect we’ll know they’re back when we see them.” Judy thanked Mrs. Meagher for letting her see the brooches and said she would think about them and come back later.

   Sheila Whelan knew exactly where the O’Neills were, and when they would be back. She had telegrams from America and messages that didn’t go through to Brian Doyle the builder. Patrick rang her every second day.

Brian Doyle had the demolition men ready; he was surprised that O’Neill said they could go ahead and make the arrangements to take down the walls without him. He thought the man would have been on the crane that swung the great ball himself.

Brian Doyle didn’t know that Patrick O’Neill and Rachel Fine had discussed this lengthily on the phone. They agreed that it would be wiser for him to stay away from the tearing down. Be there for the building up, not the pulling down.

Chapter IX

Patrick O’Neill had discovered that few Irish hotels stayed open in the winter time. Very few of them. They said that nobody would come to Ireland in the bad weather, and it cost a fortune heating a place up and paying staff all through the lean months when there would be no business.

Patrick thought that this was short-sighted. Nobody ever came to Ireland for the weather anyway. When you thought of sunshine, you didn’t immediately think of Ireland. It was the people who brought visitors to Ireland, the people and the scenery and the activities. Those things were there in the winter too, and cheaper to get to.

Charter flights in winter from the United States would be very reasonably priced. But there was no point in telling that to these hotel owners. They saw their season as beginning in May and ending in September. Some of the more adventurous opened as early as the Easter weekend.

Patrick O’Neill sighed at the waste of it all. But then he sighed a lot these days. It had been much harder than he would have believed possible to get this far in his attempts to rebuild Fernscourt. It had been a year since he had bought the place. Twelve months of delays and impediments, and only now was he able to get the ruins knocked down so that the building proper could begin.

It was the biggest test of Patrick O’Neill’s character that he had ever known. A vein began to jut out on his forehead with anger and frustration. He found himself standing up, sitting down, taking long deep breaths in the middle of ruinously expensive transatlantic phone calls.

Twice he decided to abandon it, but slept on the decision, and the following morning decided that he would go ahead. Three times he was on the point of firing Brian Doyle and shouting that any builder in the goddamn Western world would be on his knees for a lifetime, begging for such a job. Three times he restrained himself. He did bawl out an architect, a mild man who said that it was always the same with Americans. They came over here like God Almighty and expected the people to change their ways for them. Patrick didn’t see himself in that role; he liked to think of the O’Neills as the sons of the soil coming back, not the overlords giving orders. He apologized to the architect, who told him not to think of it again. Everyone knew that the pressure in New York drove most people mad most of the time.

He had been back to America twice. At the end of that time not one stone had been laid on another. But he kept his smile.

And he convinced the conservationists that he wasn’t destroying anything valuable. That had been a stroke of luck, sighing over it in Ryan’s pub one day, and then John Ryan discovering a quote from some archaeological journal to back up his claim that the house was of minor importance architecturally.

He found himself telling genial lies in two continents. Standing on the bridge with Fergus Slattery: Was he disappointed at the length of time things took? No, no, this was the pace, this was the way it had to be done. He would not have the town typecast him as a rushing, bustling Yank. And then back in the other home, in his New York headquarters talking to Gerry Power: Sure, sure, things didn’t get done at the same speed. They hadn’t the technology; no of course he didn’t have second thoughts. No, he wasn’t mad at them.

And to Rachel Fine, sipping a brandy in her red-gold apartment, which always looked so soft and restful compared with the rest of New York, he told more truth than to anyone. He told her that at times he thought he would blow up into a million pieces with frustration over it all. He could see now why his countrymen back home had achieved nothing,
nothing
. No wonder their economy was so pathetic, so shabby. He knew now why they stood toothless and laughing with their hats on back to front, because they had never bloody learned to work. They knew nothing of the actual ache that work brings, and they didn’t want to know it. No goal was high enough to force them to do more than the very minimum. He could rail like this to Rachel because he knew she would never agree with him. She would smooth his forehead and tell him that Irish people rose in every walk of life … they had their own country … well almost … Look at her people, the Latvians … they had let the Soviets take over and Latvia would never rise again. All the Latvian Jews who could escape had come to America, but there would be no going back and building castles there nowadays.

Rachel would encourage him softly, remind him of all he had achieved so far, tell him that no other grandson of a cottage dweller had gone back to buy the big house and make it into a great business that would employ his own far and wide. He liked to hear that; it gave some reason to all the work and the endless delays and complications. One evening he asked Rachel why she encouraged him. She had been against it at the start, and wanted him to make his life in New York.

“Only a very foolish woman wouldn’t encourage a dream. What would you be if your dream were to be taken away, or people talked you out of it? You would lose your fire and enthusiasm. You would only be a shell.”

He held her closely to him. She was a wonderful woman. What a shame, what a bloody great shame that she was who she was, a divorced Jewess. Even if everyone else would let him, he could never marry her. It just wasn’t possible.

   But the day came, and the machinery moved in, huge cranes and a great ball that swung backward and forward, and the stone walls of Fernscourt came down. Rachel Fine had advised at long distance that the stones should be kept to form any walls or rock gardens. There must be a place to store them and surely big stones dating from the days when America was still a fledgling must be attractive and beautiful in themselves. Brian Doyle had said it was a cracked idea, but then he had been hoping to use the stones himself in other building work if they had been thrown out, so he secretly admired the Yank with the big notions and the belief that everything could be done in five minutes.

   Grace linked arms with Kerry happily as they walked in the Irish countryside. This was the first real holiday they had taken together. She chattered on about the convent in Mountfern and told him tales of the girls and the tricks they played on the nuns. She begged him for stories of his school. Did he like being away at boarding school? Was he lonely? Was he glad it was holidays now? Grace wanted Kerry to be glad about everything. Like she was.

“It’s a shame we can’t be there,” Grace said for the tenth time, as the O’Neills walked along a cliff path in Donegal. “I’d love to see it.”

“Yes.” Patrick was absent-minded. He looked out at the ocean. Had his father seen these hills when he was leaving Ireland, or were they too far north? He could never discover whether it had been from Galway or way down in Cork from the harbor at Cobh that those earlier O’Neills had taken a ship for the United States. None of the family knew or ever wanted to find out. John Ryan said it might have been Galway. It would have been a likelier place to have started from rather than all the way down in Cobh. Ships used to go from Galway all the time in those long-ago days.

“It wouldn’t take us all that long to go back. Why didn’t we leave last night?” Grace was insistent.

“Oh, I don’t know, Gracie. We’ll see it in a few days when we get back there. Aren’t you having a good time?”

“Oh yes, but …” It was such a big thing, why were they missing it? She wished he would explain.

“Father doesn’t want us to be there for the demolition, it would be better not to associate ourselves with destroying … with knocking down what’s there.” Kerry spoke without blame or praise, just as if he were giving directions from a map.

Patrick looked at him sharply. “Hey, what makes you say that?” He half laughed.

“Well it’s true, isn’t it? That’s the way I’d feel.”

“Yes, it
is
true in a way.” Patrick was very surprised.

“We’re the good guys, the ones who ride into town when all the shooting’s over. Right?”

“Right in a sort of a way.”

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Grace argued. “Everyone’s delighted we’re building a new hotel; they love us for being there. Why all this running away and hiding for the best bit, the big machine going boom boom? I’d
love
to see that.”

“So would I,” Patrick said simply.

He was going to call Brian Doyle and find out how it all went. He wished that Brian had the gift of explaining things in style, with some description, a little color. Doyle would be likely to tell him about the overtime, the breakages, the need to revise this figure and that, and leave out completely any of the symbolism about the old order changing.

“I wonder what they’re doing at this very moment?” he said as he led his son and daughter down a sandy path onto a magnificent beach and they ran along beside the waves like any ordinary family.

Not like a man who watched his son nervously, wondering what could have made the boy step so out of character and remain so adamant about not discussing it again. Not like a man who had arranged the demolition of a huge house and planned to build his own monument on the spot where his father and grandfather had been turned out onto the roads.

   Half the town came by and watched the demolition machinery getting into action. The best view was from Ryan’s pub on River Road and many of them watched with a glass in their hands.

Jack Coyne stood with a look of false cheer. He cursed that day long back when he had shortchanged Patrick O’Neill. The man had always been perfectly courteous to him since, but not one bit of business had he thrown his way. Jack Coyne’s small pointed face glanced from one to another. Everyone else had benefited from the Yank. Look at the trade that John Ryan had, and it was the same in the town; there wasn’t a business that hadn’t been promised or already received some profit. Why on that day of all bloody days in the world had he taken the quiet American for a fool who didn’t understand the rate he would get for a dollar? Why had he not seen that those blue eyes were the sharp eyes of a businessman?

Jack Coyne stood, hands in pockets, looking across the river at all the machinery which could all have been hired through him. Coyne’s could have gotten the demolition people in and taken a legitimate ten per cent. He shook his head and told himself that in this life you never knew. You never bloody knew.

“Big day this,” Jack Leonard said to no one in particular.

“Nearly as big as the day we burned it down,” said Tom Daly, and there was an uneasy laugh. Nobody talked much about those times now, the days and nights when big houses all over the country were burned as a symbol of all they represented.

It was forty-one years since Tom Daly, Jack Leonard and a dozen more had joined hastily organized groups from the big town to go out on their mission. Old Mr. Leonard and old Mr. Daly were so respectable now, such pillars of Mountfern with their dairy and their newsagent businesses, it was quite impossible to imagine them as twenty-year-old firebrands. It was a different time, a different culture. Neither Tom Daly nor Jack Leonard had a good word to say for those young fellows who had been going up north on the border campaign blowing up electrical installations, taking pot shots at sentry posts and considering themselves national heroes. No, the 1920s had been a proper war.

John and Kate pulled pints, filled small glasses of whiskey, and even dragged a few chairs out into the sunshine. Leopold stood shivering with terror at the noise across the river and recoiled from every attempt to stroke or reassure him.

“You’re such a kind woman, Kate, why don’t you have that animal put to sleep?” Fergus asked as Leopold turned two anguished eyes on him and bayed to the skies.

“That animal is healthier than most people here, and much better looked after,” snapped Kate. “I can’t bear people who make superficial judgments about things they know nothing about.”

“Don’t bite the nose off the man,” John laughed. “Leopold’s a great actor, Fergus, he plays to the gallery. He goes and lies outside Reidy’s the butchers every day after he’s had a good meal here and they give him a bone, every single day. And he howls at Loretto Quinn until she gives him half a pound of biscuits. Wherever the unfortunate cat sits he goes and wails at it, until Jaffa has to get up and let him sit there.”