The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (155 page)

“Can I have a look at the Parisienne?” he asked John.

“She’s within, chattering to her mother, saying ‘oui’ instead of yes half the time. The boys are giving her a desperate teasing over it. Take your pint and go in to see them.”

“Ah no, I’ll let them talk. I’ll see her plenty in the next few days.” Fergus knew how much Kate had been looking forward to the daughter’s return.

“Wasn’t it a great chance for her, Fergus?” John was very pleased with the way it had all turned out. “We didn’t know what we were sending the child to, really, it was just that …” He let the sentence trail away.

“Well, didn’t it all work out very well when you consider …” Fergus Slattery didn’t finish his sentence either.

He thought that this particular conversation was better left untold in this house. He hoped that the handsome young Dara Ryan had her head well turned by Frenchmen and that she would forget O’Neill’s dangerous-looking son.

   It was so good to have Dara home. Kate wondered how she had survived without her daughter. With Dara there was no need to pretend, with Dara there was a feeling of hope all around her. Kate knew that Dara could hear the true plans and the true worries about the Shamrock Café.

“It’s not what we had planned, like, for our lives,” Dara had complained.

“A lot of things weren’t what we had planned,” Kate said, touching the sides of the wheelchair.

Dara had noticed how much Kate hated the chair. Since the very first day she had been in it, it represented the prison bars to her. She could not make herself see it as a liberation, a way of getting about. Instead she regarded the chair as a hated object and put all her anger toward it, as if it were the cause of all her incapacity. She wanted it out of her sight when she was in bed, no matter that she might need it in the night. She disguised it by draping rugs and scarves over it.

Dara seemed to understand. Once she had written a notice on it: “I’m only a chair for God’s sake, Mrs. Ryan” Kate had pealed with laughter when she woke and saw it.

They could talk easily now, the trip to France had been an inspired idea.

Dara gave her mind eagerly to the problems of survival when the new regime arrived.

“There’s only one thing I don’t like, Mam.”

“Tell it then.”

“I don’t like you going up to the hotel to give cookery lessons.”

“Aha,” Kate said.

“What do you mean, aha?”

“I have a little plan about that, I can’t tell you yet, but let’s say it’s not going to be a problem.”

“Tell me, I tell
you
everything.”

“I’ll only go for a very very short time.”

“What’s the point in it, then?”

“This is the point, once I’ve gotten myself established, then Dr. White will tell me, and indeed tell Patrick, that the strain is too much, and I can’t do it anymore, so … so I’ll have to continue the lessons here. Do you understand?”

“Mam!”

Impulsively Kate opened her arms and Dara rushed to her.

“It’s so good to have you home, child. I missed you so much. What do people do if they don’t have a daughter? Tell me that.”

“Oh Mam, it’s great to be back. They were nice in their way and they went to endless trouble over things but they’d have you starved half the time and they were riddled with sin.”

Kate laughed until she nearly cried; her pale face looked more colorful now.

Dara felt happier but she still resolved to ask Mrs. Fine if Mam had been having any bad turns. She would ask her tomorrow. She half listened to Mam as she wondered whether Kerry might be home for the weekend. Grace was useless for any information. But of course he would come home this weekend. Now that he knew both from her postcard and from Grace on the phone that Dara was back.

Kate looked at Dara’s face, lightly tanned from the hot French sunshine. She knew how Rachel would admire her, and indeed make further representations about getting Dara’s ears pierced for her and giving her little gold studs.

It was odd that Rachel wasn’t here. She hadn’t been in all day.

   Rachel Fine stayed in her room all day.

She crouched like an animal in the forest that is afraid to move because it doesn’t know if it has been too badly injured. She heard the noises of Mountfern on a late summer morning. The carts that went by, the delivery vans, the sounds of hammering from across the river. She heard voices too in and out of Loretto’s shop and children calling to each other as they chased along River Road.

Kerry had gone as light-heartedly as she had ever seen him. He had kissed her affectionately on the nose; he had been teasing and flirtatious. As he would have been after a night in bed with any woman.

They hadn’t been together in that way. But she had no way of proving it.

A hundred times she told herself that no one would believe she could have opened her body to Kerry O’Neill, who was a boy, who had been a child when she first met and loved his father.

It would have been like an act of incest.

“So I’ll head for the hills of Donegal now before anyone knows I’ve been here. And thanks, Rachel, thanks for everything,” he had said.

What was he thanking her for?

“But people do know, they’ll think … You said you spoke to Loretto, to Jack Coyne …” she croaked.

“That’s not what I mean. They don’t count. I don’t want to meet my father, I’m going to have to tell him about some money I owe, sooner or later. No point in getting him steamed up before I ask him.”

Rachel looked at Kerry and fought back waves of dizziness and nausea.

And when he was gone she felt a coldness through her bones that made a mockery of the sunny summer day outside.

She didn’t answer when Loretto called up to know if she should bring up a parcel of materials that had just been delivered. So Loretto, more confused than ever, just left the parcel on the stairs and shook her head from side to side.

Rachel didn’t go to see Dara, newly returned. She didn’t call to collect mail at the post office, nor did she touch the parcel on the stairs.

When Brian Doyle sent round to know had some fabrics arrived, because young Costello was behaving like a pregnant cat over them, Loretto said there was no point in trying to get any answer from upstairs.

Brian said that he had always known it would happen, most people in the place had now gone clinically insane and the place for them all was the asylum on the hill.

He had been told that Kerry O’Neill was in Donegal and yet he had nearly been killed by the little bastard reversing his car at top speed this morning.

He had been told that Rachel Fine was waiting night and day for some swatches of material and now they had arrived she had apparently gone to ground like a broody hen.

O’Neill was like a lighting devil, and that leggy young Ryan child from the pub had snapped the head off him when he had addressed a civil word to her.

It was time to ring the asylum and tell them to come down with the straitjackets and take the people of Mountfern away.

   As soon as he got to Fernscourt, Patrick was called to the phone in Brian Doyle’s hut.

“Dennis Hill here, Patrick. I just rang to know if everything’s all right?”

“That’s good of you Dennis. It’s crawling along, crawling, but we might have hot water to make them a cup of coffee at the opening. You will come, I hope?”

“I meant about your little girl.”

“Grace?” Patrick was alarmed.

“Is she recovering?”

“Recovering?”

“The accident. The accident on the bridge.”

“Grace didn’t have an accident.” Patrick’s heart was beating very fast. Could something have happened to Grace this morning that he didn’t know about? He shouted to Costello. “Was there any accident on the bridge this morning, did anything happen? Answer me!”

Costello was quick. “Nothing at all,” he said crisply.

“And Grace, is she all right?”

“I saw her cycling by not five minutes ago with Michael Ryan.”

“Thanks, Costello.”

Patrick’s breathing had changed its pace now.

“Sorry, Dennis. I was away from the phone for a moment. What did you hear?”

Mr. Hill’s voice was cold. “I heard what your son told me yesterday, he had a call saying his sister had an accident in a fall from a bridge, she had been playing jumping and diving games with other children. He said that he had to go to Mountfern at once. Naturally I gave him permission.”

“There was no accident,” Patrick said dully.

“And I am delighted to hear it,” Dennis Hill said courteously. There was a pause.

Mr. Hill spoke again: “He’s a difficult lad, your son.”

“Come to the point. Did he steal anything?”

“No, nothing like that!” Mr. Hill was surprised.

“Well you’d better check before you fire him. You
are
going to fire him, aren’t you?”

Another pause.

“Yes, yes I think it’s better to send him back to you. There’s something there that attracts him.”

“Well I’m damned if I know what it is.” Patrick’s voice was weary.

“Could be a girl. He’s a handsome fellow.”

“The only one he spends any time with is an under-age schoolgirl. But that would figure. He’s never done anything that you’d hope he would.”

“They don’t, you know, children. I’ve got sons here in the business, and sons-in-law. They think I’m an old fool, they want me to clear out of it. That’s the thanks you get for building up a business and handing it to them on a plate.”

“Thanks Dennis.”

“What for? I’m letting your boy go, that’s not much to thank me for.”

“I mean for letting me know about your sons. It’s less lonely somehow.”

“You’ll survive. The girl’s good, isn’t she?”

“Ah yes, the best.”

“I’ve got one good fellow in my brood, wants nothing to do with the hotel, works out on a headland on a small farm. Best of the lot of them, it’s a pleasure to sit and talk to him for hours. You’ll find that with the girl.”

“When I see Kerry should I tell him to call you?”

“Why prolong it all? Speeches, lies, excuses. Tell him to pick up his things when he wants to.”

As Patrick replaced the receiver, he hoped he wouldn’t see Kerry for a while. Like a day anyway. He might lose control completely. A boy who could use the circumstances of Maggie Daly’s death, graft them on to his own sister. And all as an excuse to go to some gambling game or other. He might very possibly kill him.

Kerry looked across the Fern. His father’s car wasn’t outside the hotel. That meant he must be at home. He would set out for the lodge. Easier to talk to him there anyway. He would go by River Road—he would meet too many people on Bridge Street. This way he only had to pass Coyne’s, Ryan’s and the Rosemarie hair salon. Jack Coyne he had already met; Kerry smiled to think how the story would be reported. Jack would find a dozen excuses to talk to people that he would not normally have any business with.

He wondered if Rachel would offer any version of events. Probably not. He would hear soon.

He turned on the car radio and they were playing “Pretty Flamingo.” He turned the volume up high, pulled down the visor to keep the sun out of his eyes, and took a corner very fast.

The car that he pushed off the road was his father’s. The sound of Manfred Mann was silenced by the screeching of brakes.

Kerry stopped the car and let out a sigh of relief. It had been close and it had of course been his fault. He ran his hand through his hair as he watched his father climb out of the car that was half in the ditch. His father walked toward him slowly and flung open the door.

“Get out of that fucking car,” he said in a voice that Kerry had never heard before. It was as if he were being held back by two strong men. Kerry could almost see them straining to pull him back.

While all the time his father wanted to tear him limb from limb.

He got out. “I’m sorry. I was over too far …”

His father said nothing.

“And going a little fast, I guess.”

Silence.

“Still, no real harm’s done. Can we get it out, do you think, or should we walk back for Jack Coyne?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was coming to see you. I wanted to talk to you urgently and then I was going to head for Donegal. I said I’d be back at lunchtime.”

“You don’t have to be back by lunch or at all.”

“But I said to Mr. Hill that I’d do my best to get back today, he trusts me, and I think I should—”

“Hill doesn’t trust you as far as he can throw you, Kerry, he’s just fired you.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“He has done that. Just that.”

Kerry thought for a moment.

“He suddenly made up his mind and called you to tell you, rather than tell me. That’s unlikely.”

He was cool still, not blustering or defending himself with excuses and lies.

“You probably find it unlikely because you forget that some people have generous human impulses. Dennis Hill didn’t like thinking of a girl falling off a bridge in a terrible accident, and her brother having to hotfoot it to her bedside. He called to learn how she was.”

“I see.” Kerry’s face was impassive.

“No you don’t see. You’ll never understand that it would turn anyone’s stomach, what you did.”