The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (122 page)

“Neither am I, Kerry. I’m not at all stupid no matter what you might believe.”

Kerry shrugged as if it were a matter of indifference to him what his father thought or was.

“I do know all about the collection, Grace.” His remarks were now addressed to his daughter. Patrick didn’t trust himself to speak to Kerry.

“I think it’s a great idea. I don’t believe it will cure her but they do say, and I’ve heard all kinds of people say this, even people who would scorn the whole idea of miracles … They say that nobody ever comes back from Lourdes the worse for having been there, they all come back better in some way. Happier, more resigned, feeling that compared to what they saw there then they aren’t too badly off.”

Kerry smiled. “That’s well put,” he said admiringly. “Send people off there so they see what terrible things other people have, they come home resigned … I never heard that line.”

Patrick ignored him. “I could have given Kate Ryan a check to take her to Lourdes, Gracie, but I didn’t, I felt it had to come from her own people here. Not from us.”

“Like Mary Donnelly?”

“Exactly. So of course I’ve contributed to the fund, but nothing excessive.”

“You know, I misjudged you, Father.” Kerry seemed genuinely admiring now But with Kerry it was often hard to know.

There was no time to discuss it. A shadow passed the window.

“Oh Jesus,” Patrick said, “it’s Marian.”

Marian was full of chat. She had come to invite them all to be her guests at an upcoming angling festival.

Patrick would simply love it, she said, it was tailor-made for him, he would get the entire atmosphere of one of these occasions at first hand, he would know how to describe it to those Americans who were keen fishermen. There would be an excellent buffet lunch in a tent to which they would be invited.

It would be frightfully boring for the young people of course, lots of standing around talking and drinking. But possibly they would love it too. Or it might even be that they would prefer to be with their own friends that day. They must do whichever they pleased, come with her to the lake or stay here in Mountfern and have a great time. Their decision entirely.

Covering the snuffles and giggles of his children, Patrick said graciously and firmly that he would let her know tomorrow. He hadn’t yet been able to work out their plans next week.

Patrick thought that it was no mean achievement that he had managed to conduct the entire conversation extremely courteously but without allowing Marian to sit down. In what was after all her own house.

   Brian Doyle telephoned Patrick to say that it was probably unimportant but there was some paint daubed on the wooden fences around some of the digging on the site. They’d have it removed but he thought Patrick should know.

“What does it say?”

“It says Yanks Go Home, but I wouldn’t take a blind bit of notice of that,” said Brian Doyle.

   Marian Johnson was extremely put out when her offer to show Patrick the lake and introduce him to the people who ran angling in the country was so suddenly and almost curtly refused.

Patrick had been apologetic but had given no real explanation. Marian had the bad luck to run into Jack Coyne who had said that it was devoutly to be hoped that Patrick O’Neill hadn’t any plans to build a monstrosity like the Slieve Sunset, because that was the place he was seen hurrying in and out of at all hours of the day and night, and that he was there at this moment with that foreign-looking woman, the one with the beautiful hair.

Marian Johnson patted her own sparse hair, newly arranged in the Rosemarie hair salon for an outing which was not now going to take place.

It was impossible to make sense of Patrick O’Neill. He had spent his entire life getting ready to come home, to mix with the best in the land. She had been ready to introduce him to people from Prosperous and Belturbet, from Boyle and Ballinasloe. She knew the families who owned the fishing rights from Lough Ree to Lough Allen, from the Erne to the Lee. She had already made sure he had met the Master socially so that he would not be considered an outsider when it came to foxhunting. And what was the thanks she got, his sneaking away to see that woman in the Slieve Sunset. But there couldn’t be anything in it. Not after all his hopes of coming home and being Irish, properly Irish. He could never get involved with a foreign woman, not at this stage.

   Kate didn’t remember meeting Rachel Fine before. She was dark and exotic-looking, with a beautiful suit that must have cost a fortune. She wore a scarf in such an elegant way too. Usually you only saw people in photographs wearing scarves like that; when they moved it would go into a rag.

She came toward the bed. “Your husband says you have a very sketchy memory of the day.”

“Very.” Kate felt at a loss with this elegant woman.

“Perhaps that’s good, it means you won’t remember too much about the shock and the pain.”

“No, I can’t remember that at all. I can only remember waking up here and someone telling me it was three days before.” Kate’s face closed up in pain at the memory.

“I believe there are some wonderful surgeons here, Patrick tells me that his hotshot from New York was highly impressed.”

Patrick. She called him Patrick Nobody else who worked with him did. It was coming back to her. John had told her that Rachel Fine was some kind of decorator or designer, she had been staying out in the Slieve Sunset, and then she went on a tour to see about ordering Irish fabrics and things. John had been very vague.

“You’re very good to come and see me. Especially as I’ve been a bit like a madam and saying I didn’t want people to come.”

“No way should you have people gaping at you if you don’t feel like it.”

Rachel was gentle and easy, she was no effort to talk to. She explained that she had brought glossy magazines, the kind of thing you wouldn’t dream of buying for yourself or reading when you were well. Kate, who had read nothing in the weeks she lay here, was pleased Those magazines she could just about manage, she felt.

“Why
did
you come?” she asked suddenly.

“Because … when I had just arrived in Mountfern you made me welcome. I was sitting in that pub waiting for Patrick to come in, I was anxious and tense and you were kind to me. I liked you.”

It was a flowery speech. Kate paused for a moment. Then it came back to her the way it had before. She was Patrick O’Neill’s woman!

Perhaps the woman saw the recognition in her eyes. Anyway she went on to speak of it.

“I thought you were someone I could talk to. I can’t tell you how distressed I was. How unreal it seemed when you were so lively and laughing …” Her eyes filled with tears.

Something in Kate responded to her warmly. Here was someone who was not afraid to say it was a bloody tragedy. For the first time since it happened, she looked into the face of another human being who was prepared to admit that Kate was very very unlucky, someone to be pitied rather than jollied along. It was a huge relief.

“Thank you,” Kate began, and found to her horror that she was beginning to sob. “Thank you. I
was
lively and laughing, wasn’t I? I wasn’t always like this. I
was
able to run and move and grab things up rather than lie here while people rub oil and powder on me like a giant baby. I used to decide what to do and where to go myself. I did, I did.”

“Yes, that’s the way you were.” She was matter of fact.

Kate waited for the cheery sentence saying that she’d be like that again someday. But it didn’t come.

“It’s so unfair,” Rachel said instead. “I’d be able to cope with life if it wasn’t so terribly unjust. All you were doing is looking. Standing looking and thinking about what the place was going to be like, and you end up with your back broken, lying here.”

Such warmth and sympathy meant that Kate didn’t have to put on any act in return, she didn’t have to bite her lip and be stoic like she did for John, nor pretend a jolly getting-better-every-day role as she did with the children.

She cried and cried and Rachel held her face to her and didn’t mind about the tears all over her good suit, and didn’t call the nurse. After a while the crying stopped as unexpectedly as it had begun. Kate looked tired.

“Can I come and see you again?” Rachel asked.

“Please. Please.”

   Patrick wasn’t pleased.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to see her?”

“I don’t have to tell you everything.”

“It was sneaky and underhanded.”

“I honestly think you can’t be well to say something like that. What on earth could be underhanded about going to see someone in the hospital?”

“You didn’t ask me if you should go.”

“I am not your servant, nor your ten-year-old child. You have told me often enough that you want us to lead separate lives here. I am trying to do that, and now that doesn’t seem to please you either.” Rachel’s eyes flashed in an unaccustomed display of anger.

“No, but you wouldn’t have mentioned it, I would never have known if Grace hadn’t told me.”

“Grace. Yes.”

“Oh, don’t take that tone, Grace was full of how much Mrs. Ryan loved you and how nice you were, she got it all from the twins. She told me in innocence, not tattling as you are trying to imply.”

“This conversation is getting nowhere. Shall we talk about something else? Work perhaps. I have some samples to discuss with you for wall hangings.”

“To hell with wall hangings … What did she say?”

“Kate Ryan? Not much really. She cried a lot. But that was between us.” Rachel stood up and walked restlessly around the plastic and formica lobby of Slieve Sunset. Since the incident of their discovery in Rachel’s bedroom on the day of the accident Patrick had been most anxious that all meetings should take place in the public eye and that they be known as colleagues.

“It’s just that it wouldn’t be a good idea to say anything,” Patrick began. He looked troubled and not like his usual decisive self.

“Say anything?” Rachel was nonplussed.

“Yeah, well I know this sounds a bit odd, but the lawyers said not to say anything, anything that might admit liability.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I know, that’s what I said, but they say you’re not dealing with decent people like the Ryans, there’s always a load of gangsters waiting to get on the bandwagon if they can. Urging people on to litigation.”

“But what litigation? You said you’d pay?”

“Yes I did and I will, but there’s a danger that people could take you for all you had if you admit too much, that’s all.”

“I don’t understand you at all. You told me that you had made several attempts to see her. So why are
you
going? Isn’t it much more likely that
you
would commit yourself or whatever?”

“No, because I’m a careful man. I guess I was just afraid you might have said something like Patrick will look after everything.”

“I didn’t say it because I assume she knows it, and so does everyone.”

“Let’s stop this, Rachel,” he said wearily.

“Yes, let’s.” She was back in her passive role of pleasing him now. She didn’t remind him that it was he who had started the conversation and refused to let it go.

He looked old and worried.

“Wouldn’t it be great if Mary Donnelly would smile sometimes?” Fergus said confidentially to Sheila Whelan. “She’s not a bad-looking woman, but there’s a terrible ferocity about her.”

“She puts that on. Underneath she’s as nice as anything.”

“Well, life is short. You wouldn’t have the energy to dig down for it,” Fergus said.

“She’s doing well enough above in the pub, I think?” Mrs. Whelan’s voice was anxious. “She’s not putting people off by glowering at them, is she?”

“It would take more than a glower to put a thirsty man off his drink. Not at all, she’s part of the furniture there now, and John is delighted with her. He says she’s the most efficient person he ever had working in a bar in his life.”

“She’s grand if she has plenty to do.”

“There’s plenty in that house all right. How poor Kate ever managed
and
did my work as well I’ll never know.”

“You speak of her as if she were dead, Fergus. She’ll be home in a matter of weeks.”

“She might as well be dead for all her life can give her now.”

“Lord Almighty, I hope you don’t go saying that to her.”

“I haven’t been allowed near her to say anything.” He sounded bitter.

“Well, she just wanted the family for a while.”

“Oh, but I think I’ll be allowed to go next week. After all, O’Neill’s tart has been in so that should open the floodgates.”

“That is not only unlike you, it’s disgusting.”

Fergus said nothing.

“We’re all upset by what happened, you’re not the only one to feel it. You’d be a very unwise man to talk like that. I mean it.”

He had never known her so sharp.

He nodded. “Right.”

“If you know how much I mean it. We need people like you of good sense, people who are right about things and know what to do. Half the people have gone mad in Mountfern since Patrick O’Neill came, and Kate’s accident is only one of the big changes we’ll have to see here. Fergus, let you not change too, I beg you.”