The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (126 page)

“Just tell me straight out, Maggie, no dithering, did Kitty get a card from Kerry O’Neill too? Just a yes or a no would do.”

“No. There was no card from Kerry for Kitty. I can tell you that.”

Maggie spoke firmly. Because what she said was true. There had been no postcard for her sister. But Kitty had been looking very cheerful, and there were letters from time to time, which were not discussed. And they did have a postmark of the county where Kerry’s school was. But it would be foolish to enter into that kind of speculation. Maggie never wanted to draw things on them. And she had been asked specifically about postcards, nothing else.

Maggie was glad when Dara took her arm. It would have been stupid to upset Dara over something that might not even be true. Kitty could have been getting letters from anyone.

   “I hope Mrs. Ryan will like the way I run things,” Mary Donnelly said doubtfully.

“Why wouldn’t she?” John was unused to Mary in an insecure role.

“She’s the mistress of this house, it will be hard for her coming back after five months and seeing another woman in her place.”

“But hasn’t she told you over and over how delighted she is with you, and all you’ve done for us?” John was bewildered. Mary had been a visitor several times to Kate in the hospital. They had gotten on very well.

“But her coming home, and to that grand room, it will be hard for her not being in total charge again. If you’d like me to go I’d quite understand.”

“Mary, we’d die if you went.” John was alarmed. “You couldn’t go, not now that she’s coming back at last. Please don’t think of leaving. Is it that you think she’d be giving you orders? Because Kate’s not like that. She’ll be only too glad for things to go on the way they are. You’ll be happy here. Please don’t go.”

“I’m very happy here, Mr. Ryan. It’s very nice, it’s the first place I ever thought of as home, and it’s a place where people don’t make your life a torture for you.”

“But who would make your life a torture for you. Ever?”

“My mother did, my colleagues at the school. The other women around where I lived.”

John was at a loss for words.

“Well,” he said eventually, aware that it wasn’t enough.

“So what I say is that Mrs. Kate Ryan, if she had to be married and evidently she had, could have done far worse for herself with the husband and three sons that she found.”

John knew he would never hear such praise again.

“Thank you,” he said very seriously. “I hope we will always be able to have your trust, my sons and I.”

   Fergus had found Mary a surprising ally when he was trying to teach John to drive. She had urged the two of them to go out as often as possible, saying that she could well keep an eye on the bar. It never occurred to her that Fergus might have any work to do himself, so she was always putting forward unlikely hours like 11 a.m. as good for a quick lesson.

As it happened the little girl Deirdre he had gotten for the office was every bit as reliable as Kate said she would be. She was always able to tell a caller that Mr. Slattery had gone out on urgent business with a client, and she would take all the details. Somehow, like her father, she gave off a look of utter secrecy. You felt that she would survive well under torture, rather than reveal the most trivial of business.

And she wasn’t telling lies, she explained to Fergus. After all, Mr. Ryan was a client, and teaching him to drive was important business.

It took twenty lessons, and then John felt confident enough to drive all on his own into the hospital. This, too, was a secret and a surprise for Kate. Several times he nearly blurted it out, and Rachel Fine nearly let it slip as well.

Then together Fergus and John went to Jack Coyne and put it to him squarely: he was to supply the soundest second-hand car in the world. Not just the country, but the world.

It was to be ready and roadworthy and shining clean on the morning of Friday November 23, for that was the day it would be driven into the town by John Ryan, and he was going to pick up his wife and bring her home to Mountfern.

   They all wanted to go, all the children. John said there would be no room in the car. But they wanted to see her face when she saw him driving, that was part of the fun.

Very well, they went with Paudie Doyle as usual, they drove in convoy. Fergus first with Sheila Whelan, then John in the Vauxhall, and then the four Ryan children speechless with excitement in Paudie Doyle’s Austin.

There were a lot of tears in the hospital, and Geraldine the nurse said she would miss Kate more than any other patient.

People in wheelchairs came out to say goodbye, and in her own wheelchair she went to say a word to people who weren’t even able to move.

She said she’d be in and out of the hospital for treatment.

All the time she thought she was going to be in Paudie Doyle’s Austin.

“Where will all the children fit?” she asked Rachel.

“Hush, wait, wait.”

Kate knew something was up but she could never have believed anything as splendid as the sight of her husband drawing up in the big black Vauxhall.

Both her hands went up to her mouth as she saw him at the wheel. “Glory be to God, he’ll kill himself,” she said, and then they all cheered.

John Ryan got out with a flourish. “Here’s your coach, Katy Ryan, and your coachman come to take you home and anywhere in the world you want to go.”

In a blur she saw the children’s faces in front of her. The twins were struggling with what looked like a banner and Kate saw it had a welcome-home message on it. Eddie and Declan looked faintly mutinous as if they had wanted to share in the banner but had not been allowed to have any part of it.

John had learned to drive, this was their car, he kept saying it. In the confusion it was hard to take in, they had a family car now. The children were racing around it in excitement, Rachel Fine was trying to line them up so that she could take a picture.

John had learned how to drive a car! They could maybe go off for a day without having to ask Jack Coyne or Fergus or Paudie Doyle.
How
had he learned to do that? Were there any more surprises and could she cope with them?

“I’m only crying because I’m so happy,” she said into Declan’s tousled head. He had run to throw his arms around her when he saw the tears.

“
I
wanted to have a welcome home,” he snuffled.

“But you have a welcome home for me,” she protested. “Isn’t all this lovely? It’s the best welcome I could have.”

“I wanted to put
my
name,” he said, fists digging into his eyes still. “They wouldn’t let me”—a hate-filled glance at the twins.

“But you can do your own when we get back, when we’re back in Mountfern. Tell me, Declan, Eddie, am I really going back or is it a dream?”

Eddie took it on himself to explain the realities of the situation. “It’s real enough,” he said grudgingly, pleased to have been singled out to define things.

Kate put her hands out to the twins and their banner. “Let you both hold it high up there so that Rachel can get it into the picture,” she said.

Her eyes told the twins that the banner was something that had touched her so much she hardly dared speak. She sat with her hands holding theirs tightly as the picture was taken.

And then they moved her to the car. She was near to hysteria as they lifted her into the front seat.

“Don’t tell me you can really drive this, John Ryan,” she gasped. And then out the window to the nurses: “Listen, don’t give my room away, I’ll be back with more injuries in half an hour.”

But the pride as she sat beside her husband in their own car was shining out like a beacon.

The entourage would follow them, Fergus with Sheila as his passenger, Rachel in her own car, and the Ryan children traveling for the last time in Paudie Doyle’s car.

A rug had been placed over Kate’s knees, and she sat straight and proud like a queen in the front of the second-hand Vauxhall that Jack Coyne had found as the bargain of the century.

When Rachel turned aside so that nobody would see her brushing away the tears, she saw that the nice nurse and the lawyer were doing the very same thing, wiping their eyes at the sight of so much delight.

   Mountfern never forgot the day that Kate Ryan came home from the hospital. Years later they could remember every detail of that evening.

It had been arranged that the bar remain open as usual, with Mary Donnelly serving. Sheila Whelan was brought in as well, in case there would be extra people there pretending to be having a drink but in reality waiting to see the return of the invalid.

There was a great cry that they were coming when the car was reported to have come in view of the Rosemarie hair salon, and Rita Walsh was out waving from the salon doorstep. Loretto Quinn ran up from her shop, and Brian Doyle ran over the bridge to be there too.

The procession went through the bar, where old men got off stools and shook hands, unable to say the words. They were relieved she was back, and stricken to see her still so pale and sitting awkwardly in a wheelchair.

Carrie was excited, in a new navy dress with a white collar, and she ran in and out of the kitchen a dozen times asking Mary when would she serve the tea. A dozen times Mary replied that she should ask Mrs. Ryan.

But Kate was beyond listening to any subtleties like this. There was so much to admire.

Why had nobody told her that the whole place had been repainted? And the steps, all those steps—one down here and one up there—had gone. That must have been huge work, leveling everything.

It
was
a big undertaking, John Ryan agreed, as if he had done it himself. All they had done was stand back and use the back doors while Patrick’s men were withdrawn from work on the hotel to do a job on it.

Then there was the room. Kate couldn’t believe it. Walls of light green, huge glass doors framed by green flowery curtains. The big bed was white, with a green and white cover. All around the room there was a broad white shelf like a counter, almost. The wheelchair would fit under it, and there were magazines, sewing things, books, files laid out at intervals to suggest activities for Kate. One section of the shelf was a dressing table. It had a mirror and lights around it like a film star would have in a dressing room.

The bathroom was huge. Rachel called it the dressing room. It had huge presses for Kate’s clothes, on rails that could be lowered so that she could reach them and choose what to wear. There were drawers that moved in and out silently, effortlessly. Not like the drawers that stuck and had to be pushed and pulled. The bath had a seat, and a shower, the lavatory had rails. But it wasn’t like the hospital bathroom, all white and clinical. It was soft green colors, with big fluffy green towels and bath salts in a big green glass jar.

In her life Kate had never seen anything so elegant. And it was hers. It wasn’t something she was looking idly at in a magazine.

They crowded around, Fergus and Brian Doyle, Rachel and Loretto, John in the middle and the children on the edges pushing in and out to see her face.

And that’s how they all remembered it because that was when the news came in from the bar where the wireless was on. The news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

They all went slowly toward the bar to wait for more news. The phone kept ringing, people wanted to tell other people. There was television up in the Grange and some of those with cars said they would drive there and see if they could find out any more. Anything was better than not knowing what had happened to him—the president who had waved at them all in Dublin only five months ago.

“It’d be better for him if he died, poor bastard,” Brian Doyle said in the middle of a silence. “Young man like that stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He couldn’t take it, he’d go off his head.”

It was a long minute before anyone realized what he had said. They were all thinking of John F. Kennedy, not about Mrs. Ryan, a younger woman stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Then Brian Doyle noticed a couple of faces crumpling up and remembered.

“But of course they can do great things now,” he said desperately. Nobody helped him out.

“Great things altogether,” said Brian, wishing he were dead and six feet under the clay.

Chapter XV

The spring of 1964 was a wet one in Mountfern. The river flooded its banks twice, and there were even photographers sent from Dublin to take a picture of the Fern in flood. The trees hung heavy over River Road and let loose what felt like waterfalls when anyone shook them.

The children’s raft broke loose from its moorings and bobbed down to the big bridge in the town, where it remained battering itself against the side.

The schools smelled of wet clothes and everyone had colds.

People still managed to go out for a drink, however, and often the wet weather meant that there was more custom than ever in Ryan’s bar.

In her light room with its soft green colors Kate Ryan sat and spent the first spring in a wheelchair.

She would have gone mad, she realized, if she had not got the side garden to look out on through the big glass doors. She was the first to know when snowdrops came, when crocuses started to open and when the primroses and cowslips began in a yellow corner that she had never noticed before.

Jaffa the big orange cat looked out longingly, waiting for the days to come when the sun would shine and she could sit and sleep on the old stone walls. Sitting still in her chair, Kate Ryan scratched the cat’s ears and told Jaffa that for her the day would come. She sighed a lot and wondered had it rained like this always but because she had been so busy she had never noticed it?

Little by little the people of Mountfern came to accept that this would be Kate Ryan’s life. They ceased to shake their heads over the sudden accident, the one quick blow that would leave her forever paralyzed. Once people had seen the bright attractive room and the handsome dark woman in her chair, laughing and cheerful for their visit … then that was how she remained in their minds. They didn’t tell each other any more about how swift she had been, and how light running up and down the steps of Mr. Slattery’s office. They talked no longer of the way she ran down River Road like a young girl.

   Rachel had found a great roll of green rush matting. She said they should cut it off in lengths and spread it out to make a path over Kate’s new carpet. Otherwise people would be afraid to visit her in the room for fear of bringing in mud with them.

Rachel came every day; she had become adept at helping to lift the two white, wasted-looking legs out of the bed and on to the wheelchair. Then she would bend while Kate pulled herself out of bed by putting her arms around Rachel’s neck.

She wasn’t able to do it with Carrie; the girl was too nervous and might move away. She didn’t want to ask Mary Donnelly to help her. It would place too much of an emotional burden on Dara. And she didn’t want John to see her like that
every
day. On the mornings when he came in and found her dressed and sitting at some part of the giant desk that went three sides of the room, he could almost believe that things were normal.

The two women had tea and a chat, as if they had been neighbors for many years, as if they had been young married women together and shared all the years of childbirth and watching toddlers. Neither of them ever felt it was odd that they had only met on one day before they were in the roles of hospital patient and visitor. It was as if they had always known the easy companionship and the undemanding shorthand of friendship.

Kate could tell of her unreasonable dislike of Mary Donnelly, Rachel of her irritation with Marian Johnson.

“He has no interest in Marian Johnson,” Kate assured her friend.

“She’s much more suitable for this life … the life he wants.”

“Oh, but no, you mustn’t think that. Can you imagine him loving her? Even loving her a little bit?” Kate shook her head at the idea of it.

“He can’t love
me
much, either. One day I’ll accept that I’m not part of his plan. Then I’ll be free.”

“But you’d be very lonely,” Kate said.

Rachel smiled, relieved. This was the counsel she had wanted to hear.

   “Will Mrs. Fine be here for long?” Dara asked.

She had gotten into the habit of sitting with her mother as soon as she came back from school, and the others agreed without ever saying it that this was Dara’s time.

“I don’t know, my love, I don’t ask her. Do you mind if we ask her for meals now and then? It’s terrible for her up in that awful hotel all the time.”

Dara agreed immediately. “Oh we must ask her as much as possible, she’d start talking to herself if she had to stay in the Slieve Sunset all the time.”

Kate laughed. Dara had become so grown up, she was able to talk to her much more freely than before. The months must have made a huge difference to the girl, living here in the pub without her mother, unsure of what was going to happen and if Kate would ever come home. It was a very noticeable change Before the accident Dara had been a tomboy, dying to get away from the house, to escape any kind of involvement or conversation, sighing at grown-up conversation, and flinching away from any confidences. And now, that was all gone. She seemed older than Michael too, while once she had waited for his every move before she decided what to do herself. She was technically a woman, and Dara already felt the stirrings of … well if not love … at least hero worship. Kate had noticed how her face changed when she spoke of Kerry. That little crush must have developed since the previous summer.

Kate felt she could tell Dara things that sometimes might seem a bit petty when she told them to John. Maybe it was a conspiracy kind of thing between women … she hoped she didn’t overdo it. Dara seemed to approve of Rachel coming to the house. Her connection with Patrick O’Neill was never mentioned; Kate was far too loyal to bring up the matter herself, but she felt that Dara instinctively had some understanding of it.

“Will Mary Donnelly be here for much longer?”

Kate tried to look concerned and kind. “I’ve no idea, she must suit herself.” A sharp note had come into her voice.

“Why don’t you like her, Mam? She’s very helpful.”

“I know, I know. What do you mean I don’t like her? Don’t be silly, Dara.”

“But you don’t. Why? It’s not as if she’s after Dad or anything. She hates men, she even hates them when they’re only Michael’s age.”

“She’s so childish to be going on with all that kind of rambling out of her,” Kate snapped.

“Is that why you don’t like her, because she’s against men?”

“No, I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t like her because she’s doing what I should be doing, she’s standing there serving people in the bar and not talking to them when I would be talking to them pleasantly, she’s going down to Loretto Quinn and beating her down over the price of this and that instead of paying her. She has the kitchen clean and tidy, better maybe than I’d keep it. She has Leopold changed beyond recognition. But she has Carrie terrified of her, and crying if she breaks a saucer. She has the sheets clean on the beds but she has a smell of boiling in the house from Monday to Saturday.”

Dara looked at her mother open-mouthed.

“And mostly I don’t like her because she has two good legs that start at the top and go down to her feet and she can put one of them in front of the other and walk. If she’s in a hurry she can put one in front of the other quickly and she can run. She doesn’t have to drag herself by her arms and strain and stretch and pull and at the end of it be just a few inches toward the edge of the bed. I suppose
that’s
why I don’t like her.”

Dara still couldn’t speak.

“Because I’m a mean old pig,” Kate added as an explanation.

Dara flew into her arms, literally hurled herself at Kate.

“You’re
not
a mean old pig, it’s the unfairest thing in the world that you should be like this. I told Sister Laura that God must have a very cruel streak in him to let you be just in the path of that machine.”

Dara sobbed into her mother’s shoulder as Kate patted the dark hair and the heaving slender body.

“What did Sister Laura say about God’s mean streak?” she asked gently.

Dara drew away from her for a moment and looked at her with a tear-stained face.

“She said that Almighty God had a purpose in everything, and that we couldn’t see it now. In years to come we’ll see it. Do you think we will?”

Kate held the hands of her daughter and spoke slowly “I don’t know. That’s the truth. I don’t know. If it was something that might be cured,
then
perhaps all these months and even a couple of years in a wheelchair might have a purpose”

“But …” Dara waited anxiously.

“But because it’s
not
going to be cured, and I will never walk again, I find it hard to believe that God has a purpose. God
can’t
believe that I’m a better citizen, a better Christian to him stuck in this chair. Maybe it’s just that he knew I might be a desperate sinner if I was out of the chair so he keeps me in it. That could be his purpose, I suppose.” She half smiled.

“But you wouldn’t have any sins would you, Mam, in or out of the wheelchair?” Dara could never imagine that grown-ups committed sin anyway, they were allowed to do everything just because they were grown up, it seemed impossible to know what was left except murder and worshipping idols which Mam wouldn’t be likely to be at.

“I suppose the biggest sin I have is not accepting what God has sent me. That
is
a sin, you know, Dara. I’m going to have to confess it to Father Hogan when he comes today, and I’m going to tell him also that I don’t want to go to Lourdes. That’s going to be even harder.”

Dara’s eyes were filled with tears again “You
must
go to Lourdes, Mam, you must, it’s the only hope. That’s what Michael and I say all the time. There have been miracles and you could be one of them.”

“No, darling Dara, I’m not going, there’s no miracle for me there. If Our Lady wants to cure my spine she can do it in Mountfern, I am not going to spend all those people’s money going there, and have all their hopes disappointed That’s it. I didn’t mean to tell you so suddenly, I was going to put it gently, maybe even differently. But you’re such a joy to me and such a comfort, I treat you like a grown-up daughter instead of a child.”

The tears had dried and Dara was as pleased as anything. “Well, I’m going to have to look after you properly if I’m a grown-up. If you get your way about Lourdes can we have your word that you’ll be sensible about Mary Donnelly and be civil to her in case she packs her bags and leaves?”

Kate burst into peals of laughter. Dara’s voice was such a good imitation of her own when she was being bossy. Even her face had the same look.

“I’ll be so civil, it will frighten you,” she laughed.

“There’s no need to over-do it, Mam,” Dara said disapprovingly.

   John was taking a stroll with his daughter along the river bank.

“I’m glad that Rachel is here,” he said. “Your mam likes her a lot. It will take her mind off things.”

“Do you think her mind’s on things a lot?” Dara wanted to know.

“It’s so hard to know. She says she’s almost forgotten her life before the wheelchair. She doesn’t even dream of herself as being able to walk anymore.” He sounded sad.

“Don’t get all depressed, Daddy, she hates that more than anything.”