The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (164 page)

The classroom was airless. A dying wasp beat uselessly against the window. Even if it got out, it wouldn’t last another hour. Michael wondered if he should finish it off now with his ruler.

Brother Keane was looking at him. Did he imagine it or was there some sympathy in the teacher’s swollen face?

Today they were doing an exercise which the class hated more than anything. Brother Keane would ask them to speak on any topic for one minute. There were to be no ems or ahs. There was to be no fooling around or imitating the speaker. The brothers hoped it would make the boys more articulate and able to express themselves. The boys hated it, and though never short of a word in the playground, they were struck dumb when asked to speak in front of the class.

“Michael Ryan. Give us the benefit of your knowledge and experience of the pike, a fish which abounds in our River Fern.”

There was a snort around the room. Either this was a trick question of Brother Keane’s or else he was going soft. The pike was dead easy to talk about; they’d all been fishing for pike since they were old enough to be allowed near the water.

“What would you want to know about it, Brother?” Michael’s face was anxious. “There’s so many ways to start.”

“Well, kindly choose one, and don’t hold up the class anymore.” Brother Keane’s hand was on his face.

“Well, like any fish the pike needs oxygen, not for its lungs because they don’t have human lungs or animal lungs even; they don’t have any lungs to speak of. Not lungs as we’d know them.”

“Could you tell us what they do have instead of what they don’t, please. Start again.”

“Pike have to take in water through their mouths, and in that water there’s a bit of oxygen like there is in the air. And they let it out the gills. But that’s what all fish do. So what’s different about the pike? The pike has a bad reputation like a wolf has in the animal kingdom. They say he preys on the other fish and lies in wait for them in the reeds on the river bank. But in a way that’s all to the good because a pike is carrying out a function; he’s making the river bed a cleaner better place. It’s his nature to go for what he can. It’s only ignorance, really, to condemn the pike; we’d all be pike if we could, and the world might be a better place if there were more pike in it ready to go out and scavenge for themselves.”

The boy’s face was red and angry. Nobody had said a word against the pike. Not ever, to Brother Keane’s knowledge.

Out in the yard earlier, Brother Keane had heard voices raised about the court case which was being decided at this very moment.

The boy was said to be very friendly with the daughter of the house, and it was probably a question of divided loyalties.

Brother Keane liked Michael Ryan. Compared to his younger brother, Eddie, he was like the Archangel Gabriel.

“That’s very informative and well explained,” he said, to the mystification of the class. “Now Tommy Leonard, may we have your discourse please on the benefits of the Rural Electrification Scheme.”

“Ah, God, Brother, that’s much harder than pike,” said Tommy Leonard, who had been discovering that life was very far from fair.

   Mrs. Daly asked Rita Walsh when there would be any news from the court house.

But Marian Johnson answered first, she said that it could be anytime from eleven in the morning on. It might be settled outside without their having to go in. She knew this from the highest authority. A Mr. Kennedy, who was representing the Ryans, had stayed in the Grange last night. A very pleasant man, from Dublin. He was going to spend a second night there no matter what the outcome. He said it was too far to drive back to Dublin, and the Grange was exactly the kind of place he had always wanted to stay in but never come across.

Marian patted her hair reflectively and Rita Walsh sensed another reason to bring Miss Johnson and her thin flyaway hair back on a regular basis to the Rosemarie hair salon.

Canon Moran and Father Hogan had been asked by several parishioners to pray for a special intention. And indeed to offer Mass for that intention. Nowhere had the intention been defined.

The priests agreed that it must have to do with the court case, and that one side definitely wanted the Ryans to get a great deal of money and the others wanted them to get very little in case it would somehow offend O’Neill.

“It’s a poser, isn’t it?” Young Father Hogan had said.

“Not at all, we will just pray that justice will be done in the courts today. That covers it all,” said Canon Moran, who had lived a very long time and understood almost everything.

   “I’d better leave you and stop hiding here in this nice quiet place.” Sheila Whelan had drained the teapot.

“It
is
a nice quiet place. You were very good to settle me here.” Mary Donnelly spoke gruffly in her gratitude.

“Wasn’t it lucky they got you, just when they needed someone? They’d never have survived without you.”

Mary hardly remembered that summer and its shock and sadness now. She rarely thought of the man who had let her down so badly. Even when she was condemning men in general, the face of this one did not come easily to mind.

Sergeant Sheehan passed by as the women came out into the sunshine.

“Starting early, Sheila,” he said jokily.

“Lord, I’ve been discovered,” she laughed.

She looked thoughtful when he had gone.

“What is it?” Mary noticed her face.

“I don’t know, I was tempted to talk to him there about something, but I can see I’m getting as bad as the rest of them.”

“What was it?”

“Probably nothing, but I saw a lot of activity over on the towpath. You know, beyond the bridge on the other side of the river. Lights in the middle of the night over there, and banging about.”

“What on earth were
you
doing on the towpath in the middle of the night?”

Sheila had been walking because she couldn’t sleep.

She had heard that Joe had died. The nurse had let her know quietly, as she had asked.

She would go to no funeral in Dublin, nor would she tell anyone but Kate Ryan of his death.

Still, it had been impossible to close her own eyes, knowing that Joe Whelan was lying in the mortuary of that Dublin hospital where they had all been so kind to him, and where presumably his woman would recover enough to go and pay her respects, and three of his four children would be with her. The fourth mightn’t dare come back from England in case he faced charges.

It had been too hard to try to sleep, so she had walked instead.

“Oh, you know me, Mary, I’m as odd as two left shoes.”

“Maybe you imagined it,” Mary said.

“Maybe I did,” said Sheila.

   Fergus felt his hands shaking when he started to shave, so he had put down the razor immediately. He didn’t need to come to the court spattered with blood. He wondered what would make them steadier. He thought absently of a small brandy and port; his father used to take that concoction sometimes when he had what was called a chill.

But Fergus rejected it. Warming and steadying it might be, but very soon he might need one every day before shaving, even before getting out of bed.

By the time he was ready to leave the house, his hands had calmed down. He’d done a magnificent job on his face, he thought, not a nick anywhere, and he tied a firm knot on his dark gray tie.

He knew that Kevin Kennedy would barely comb his hair, and yet here was he—the poor country solicitor, an unimportant figure—titivating himself like a peacock. Like a medieval champion going to battle wearing his lady’s favors.

God, let him be right, urging them to go on. Kevin Kennedy had said to him a dozen times that it was impossible to know with country juries, but then Kevin was a city man who always feared the country and was never at ease when milk didn’t come from bottles and when land didn’t mean small manicured gardens.

Fergus gave a wan wave across the street to Sheila Whelan before he climbed into his car and drove to the town. He knew she was the one person in Mountfern who would have the tact not to wish him luck as if it was all a bet on the two-thirty.

Please God let them get twelve thousand pounds. A sum that would see them right for the next fifteen years, until the 1980s. Let them get that. Let Kate know no more anxiety and fear.

Kate sat in the car looking out calmly left and right as they drove the straight road into the town. The September countryside was beautiful this year, it had been a good summer but not too dry. They passed through villages as small as Mountfern, but places with somehow more importance because they were on the main road. Of course, that would all change soon. Already there were new signposts; they wouldn’t be a little Midlands outpost for much longer.

“I should come out driving with you more,” she said to John, who frowned furiously at the road. “You went to all that trouble to learn to drive for me, and I hardly ever get into the car with you. From now on we’re going to have grand drives together, the two of us.”

Martin White said gruffly that he hoped they’d be able to afford a better car than this one when the day’s work was finished.

“I never thought of getting a new car, did you, John?” Kate was startled at the very idea.

“Lord, not at all, isn’t this one fine for us and whatever we want to do in it?”

“Well, what will you do with the money?” Martin White had known them long enough and well enough to ask that question.

“The future, the children …”

“Shore the place up a bit …”

“Try to keep the business we have …”

“And maybe attract a few of the nobs that come to the place across the river.”

Suddenly they both laughed.

“We’re like the twins,” Kate said, wiping her eyes.

They were driving up to the steps of the courthouse.

It was a big ugly building. Neither John nor Kate had ever been in it. Dr. White said he had, a few times, and it was the most disappointing place you ever saw. From outside it was all pillars and steps and looked very imposing. But inside you wouldn’t give it the time of day.

The Garda station was attached to one end, and the library to the other, so most people had some kind of knowledge of bits of the building anyway.

It was right slap in the middle of the town, otherwise, they might have been able to pull it down and build something more suitable. Nobody would regret its passing; it was no national monument. It came from a time when justice was administered by the English anyway, so nobody would have any sentimental attachment to it.

But to take down the courthouse would mean dismantling the town. It would also mean losing the only landmark. “I’ll meet you on the courthouse steps” was as good a way of making sure you’d find someone in the crowded narrow streets as any other. The bus stop was opposite the courthouse. There were always a few people gathered on its steps, most of them having nothing at all to do with the business of law and justice.

But today they recognized a few people who had to do with their own case.

Mike Coyne, a cousin of Jack who worked on the local newspaper. Two of the hospital staff who would have been called as witnesses. And parked right at the bus stop where he was certain to be moved on was Fergus.

Fergus stood beside his car like a soldier on point duty. He could hardly believe it when John Ryan drove Kate and Dr. White into his sight and all three of them were laughing aloud, as if they hadn’t a care or a worry in the world.

   People stood around in little clusters. Kate’s wheelchair was taken without fuss from the back of the car and moved up to where she was sitting. Gracefully and without making any big production out of it, she slid from one seat to the other. She looked at ease in her chair.

She had been told that there were seventeen steps up to the courthouse door, and there were two choices: either two strong men lifted the chair with her in it—Dr. White and John would do that—or else she could go in a back way through damp long corridors.

She said she preferred the back way. It would be too nerve racking for those carrying and those watching. And she said that somebody should write a letter to the local paper on the lack of facilities for wheelchairs.