Firefly Summer (20 page)

Kate was totally at a loss.

‘It’s not the children’s fault,’ she began.

He put away his handkerchief. ‘You’re quite right. They make me feel old and grubby and silly. Your children make me feel . . . I don’t know, splendid, fascinating.’

‘Which is what you are,’ Kate said, and then went back to work.

Everyone asked Miss Hayes what they were like at home, the Americans. Was there a ton of money spent in the place? What did they talk about? Olive Hayes was never sufficiently forthcoming. They were very nice people, she reported, thoughtful and considerate. She had never worked in a house before, it was all a very new experience for her. People thought Miss Hayes was a poor informant. Soon they didn’t bother to ask her any more. She was a woman with no stories to tell.

Olive Hayes was a woman saving her fare to New Zealand. She was going to keep her position in this small comfortable house with the American family. There would be no tales about the arrogant resentful Kerry, the impatient father who could find nothing to say to his son, but who idolised his beautiful daughter. Nor would Miss Hayes talk about Grace outside the house even though there was nothing but good to report. She was a delightful child, anxious to help, willing to learn. She made her bed and kept her room in perfect order. She always asked permission if she were to invite the other children into the house. She had a ready smile and she soldiered on bravely to keep the peace between her father and brother. Miss
Hayes had never felt any yearning to marry and rear a family. But sometimes when she looked at Grace O’Neill in the kitchen, helping her to wipe dishes and tumbling out stories of how the day had been spent, she sighed and a soft look came to her long angular features. It would have been good to have had a daughter like Grace O’Neill.

Kitty Daly had thought that the summer would never end, long endless boring summers with that crowd on the bridge being so dismissive and all Maggie’s friends being so loud and awful. But it all changed when Kerry O’Neill came to town. He came in to Daly’s Dairy from time to time. Kitty hated working in the shop during the summer and was normally so sulky and unhelpful that her parents thought it was counter-productive to have her behind the counter. They had a girl from out the country, and Charlie who hauled and dragged things in and out and did deliveries.

Kerry held out his hand the first time he called.

‘Hi, I’m Kerry O’Neill,’ he had said, as if Kitty didn’t know. As if everyone for miles around didn’t know.

She shook his hand and mumbled.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, as if he had expected her to give it.

‘Kitty. Kitty Daly.’

‘Oh this is your place?’ He looked around the clean bright shop in admiration. Its cakes and bread in one section, milk, butter and bacon at another counter and the main body of groceries all together behind the main counter.

‘Yes, it is.’ Kitty wished she could think of something else to say, but she couldn’t. She gave a big shrug to let this
gorgeous fellow know that she thought it was all terrible. So that he wouldn’t think of her as a poor country hick. But he didn’t seem to think it was dreadful.

‘It’s a very handsome store,’ he said. ‘You must like working in it, you must feel proud of it.’

Kitty was about to change her stance completely and express great pride in the dairy.

But her mother spoke first. ‘Oh there’d be white blackbirds before Miss Kitty here would do a hand’s turn in the shop.’

A dark red stain came into Kitty’s face, but Kerry seemed to understand at once.

‘I’m just the same,’ he said, looking straight at her, though he spoke lightly. ‘I’m very interested in my father’s hotel but he thinks I’m only fooling around. It’s not just, is it?’

‘No it isn’t.’ Kitty Daly was hoarse with excitement as the bright blue eyes of Kerry O’Neill rested on her for a little longer. Then he had bought a bar of chocolate and was gone. She watched him walk easily down Bridge Street and go into Leonard’s. She resisted the urge to run after him and talk more. She would see him again. He was here for ever. And he liked her. He had made it obvious. Kitty saw her mother looking at her and immediately put on a face.

‘I suppose you’ll go getting notions about him now, that’s the next cross we’ll have to bear,’ Mrs Daly said in tones of great weariness.

‘It’s a pity that older people have such sad, sick minds,’ said Kitty, and resolved to be very nice to Mrs Walsh from the Rosemarie hair salon in case there was a chance she might give her a cheap hair-do.

Grace O’Neill said that she would love to catch a fish. A real fish herself, and then she would cook it and eat it. Nobody she ever knew before had done anything like this. She made life seem much more exciting than it was for the children of Mountfern. She loved everything. She thought it was wonderful that they had a river all for them, not in a park or anything, but in their own town. And she thought it was great to know everyone’s names. Grace made a point of saying, ‘Good morning, Mrs Williams; Hi, Mr Slattery; Good day, Father Hogan.’ She said that in the United States you never met anyone you knew or who knew you. Reluctantly the others agreed that it was all right. Before Grace’s arrival they had always thought it tiresome to be under the ever-watchful eyes of the whole town no matter what you did or where you were going. It was hard to see it as a positive asset.

But fishing. That was something the girls hadn’t been involved in.

‘You won’t like it, the fish look terrible when you do get them out of the water,’ said Maggie Daly.

‘They have all blood by the side of their mouths,’ Jacinta White said.

‘And their eyes look terrified,’ said Maggie, maybe with fellow feeling. Her own eyes often looked big and frightened.

‘And they wriggle and twitch and you’d be dying to throw them back in,’ Jacinta said.

‘Except that the poor mouth is tore off them.’ Maggie was perplexed by the enormity of the decision. ‘So you wouldn’t know what would be the best, to kill them
quickly and get it over with or let them back with half their jaw gone.’

Dara hadn’t joined in, which was unusual.

Then she spoke.

‘I think that’s a lot of sentimental rubbish. If Grace says she would like to fish then we should. After all we’ve lived beside the river for all our lives and we’ve never objected before . . .’

Grace flashed her a grateful and admiring look.

‘But we never did it ourselves . . .’ Maggie began.

‘Because we’ve no guts,’ Dara said firmly, and with that female fishing was on. They were going to get rods and hooks. Michael was terrific, he’d show them.

‘Michael won’t want us hanging along with them,’ Jacinta said.

‘I’m sure he won’t mind showing us how it’s done,’ Grace said, with a sunny confident smile.

Michael didn’t mind showing Grace how it was done, and he was pleased that his twin had suddenly developed an interest in fishing. Tommy Leonard was helpful too, and Liam White. They bent over hooks and bait. Maggie Daly forced herself to look into jars of maggots, even though it made her stomach heave. Michael explained that you had to just nick the edge of the maggot with the hook so that the maggot still wriggled about in the water and the fish would believe it was a live grub and snap at it. There was other bait too: bread made into a paste, or bits of crust. Maggie wondered could they stick to this, but Michael and Tommy and Liam said you had to use maggots and worms as well.

Jacinta said she felt sick watching the hook going
through the worm. But Grace and Dara looked on steadfastly. Taking a deep breath, Maggie looked on too and said nothing about the nausea rising in her, together with the feeling that this was all a silly phase. They would get over it soon, and go back to being as they were. She hoped Grace would like looking at the tombstones in the Protestant graveyard, but it was probably wiser not to suggest it too soon.

Grace wanted to know could she try out some of the rods which Michael said they had back at the pub. It was nearly teatime. There was indecision. Suddenly the twins looked at each other in the way they often did, as an idea seemed to come to them at exactly the same time.

‘We’ll ask can you come to tea,’ Dara said.

‘Just what I was thinking.’

‘Oh no,’ Grace protested. ‘Yes, then we can look at the rods.’

Grace was firm. ‘Miss Hayes will have my tea ready. No, I can’t call her, that would be very high-handed. But maybe I could ask Father if I can cycle back again tonight.’

That was agreed, and they scattered to go back to their houses as the six o’clock bell pealing out the angelus was heard all over Mountfern.

Maggie walked along River Road with her hands in her pockets. Dara hadn’t asked her to come back after tea. Michael hadn’t been keen to show her any rods. Tommy Leonard and the Whites were chatting on cheerfully. They didn’t notice that Maggie hung behind and was very quiet.

But next day Maggie was called by her mother. ‘Come down quickly, Maggie, your friend is here.’ Something about the way she said friend was unusual.

Usually Mrs Daly said that Jacinta or Dara was there, in a way that you knew she was casting her eyes up to heaven. Maggie ran down the stairs of Daly’s and into the shop.

There was Grace, full of chat to everyone, asking questions about what kind of pastry this was on the cream cakes, and what kind of filling was in the eclairs.

‘Would you like to taste one?’ Mrs Daly asked her.

‘Heavens no, thank you, Mrs Daly, thank you so much; I was only interested, that’s all. I ask too many questions, I’m afraid.’

‘Nice to see someone awake and not half dozy all the time.’ Maggie’s father was full of approval.

Maggie stood there, feeling very shabby in her beige shirt and brown shorts. Grace was in a yellow and white dress with a big white collar, she had little yellow shoes. She must have a dozen pairs of shoes, Maggie thought enviously, always something to go with her outfit.

Grace took her arm. ‘Is it all right if we go off now?’ she asked to nobody in particular but to everybody at the same time. Grace forced other people to be charming too. Mrs Daly was nodding and smiling, Mr Daly was wishing them good weather, Charlie looked up from the boxes he was collecting, to grin at them.

Out on Bridge Street Grace looked at Maggie anxiously. ‘It was all right to come, wasn’t it? I wanted you to show me the tombstones you were talking about.’

‘Yes, but . . . ?’ Maggie was bewildered. Surely Grace wouldn’t want to go off with her, with just Maggie when there was so much else to do, so many other people to meet and such an amount of revolting wriggling maggots to be threaded on to those hooks.

But apparently that was what Grace did want.

‘Please, Maggie,’ she said. ‘I’d love to see the names and the things people said.’

Maggie was still hesitant.

‘The fishing . . .’ she began.

‘Oh we can join them later, I met Liam on my way here. I said we’d be along in about an hour or more.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said “fine” or something.’ Grace was unconcerned.

She left her bicycle parked at the back of Daly’s, and arm in arm, they went up Bridge Street to the top of the town. Grace peeped into the Garda barracks just to see what it looked like, she said.

Sergeant Sheehan told her to come in and have a look around.

‘Do you have prison cells here?’ Grace asked with interest.

‘Not here, child.’ He looked at her affectionately.

Seamus Sheehan had only sons; this was a beautiful sunny girl. The little one of the Dalys seemed dazzled by her almost.

‘What do you do with criminals?’

‘They go to gaol in the big town. I’ve a room back there with a big padlock on it if you’d like to be kept in detention.’

Grace giggled. ‘No, I was only getting to know the place.’

‘Quite right too.’ Sergeant Sheehan seemed much more cheerful today, Maggie thought, like her father was, and her mother, and like Miss Byrne the physiotherapist who made it her business to come over and ask Grace how they were settling into the lodge, and hoping it wasn’t too damp for them.

Grace was fascinated with the graves and the tomb-stones. She said she would bring a notebook the next time so that she could write them all down.

‘We won’t be buried here, of course,’ Grace said conversationally.

‘No, we’ll be laid in the Catholic graveyard. Well
we
will, anyway,’ Maggie explained. ‘If you stay then I suppose you will too.’

‘Of course we’ll stay, why would we not stay?’ Grace sat on the edge of an untended grave. ‘Hey, we should do something for this poor James Edward Gray, nobody’s weeded round him for years. Of course we’re going to stay.’

Maggie was helping to remove some of the bigger dandelions from James Edward Gray’s resting place.

‘People were wondering would you not find it all too dull for you here,’ she said in a small voice.

‘Heavens no, it’s fantastic. You want us to stay, Maggie? You don’t want us to go away, do you?’ Grace’s beautiful face was troubled. She looked really anxious.

Maggie couldn’t remember why she had felt so upset yesterday evening as she had walked home along by the Fern, and how she had wished that the O’Neills had never come here.