Firefly Summer (82 page)

Canon Moran was picking flowers near the stile up in Coyne’s wood. That was all Patrick needed.

The old man looked up with pleasure as the American approached. This was a bonus for him, he liked a good chat.

Patrick looked at him thoughtfully. It was a good life being a country priest in Ireland. Canon Moran had all the respect and none of the work in the parish. He had baptised and married and buried people from the place for as long as anyone could remember. There was no way he would be sent away nor his honours stripped from him.

He could wander in a second childhood, collecting summer flowers.

‘You know what you were asking me, about marriage to those who had never been baptised?’

Patrick tried to keep the maddened irritation out of his face.

‘Yes, Canon Moran. It was just something I wondered about in the abstract. Like I sometimes wonder about the angels. You know, thrones and dominations and seraphim. I wonder why they’d have a VIP system in heaven.’

Canon Moran had often wondered about angels too, and particularly about guardian angels. He couldn’t ever see on what basis the poor angels were given mortals to look after. Some angels must have had a very easy time and others a desperate job altogether.

Patrick wondered was he going to spend the entire morning debating guardian angels with an almost senile cleric who had held an armful of daisies and heathers and some prickly yellow gorse. Still it was better than
discussing marriages to infidels. He looked round wildly for any trace of Rachel.

The canon’s old eyes may have been sharper than Patrick thought.

‘Well, I won’t hold you up, you’re a busy man, Mr O’Neill, a busy man, a good man and a generous man. It’s very heartening to know that men like you with all your worldly wealth still keep the laws of God.’

Patrick was rarely at a loss. But now he had no idea what to say.

Canon Moran filled the gap for him. ‘And if ever you should need any further talk – just in the abstract of course – about the marriage of unbaptised persons who convert to the Catholic faith, then I know just the man in Archbishop’s House. We were in the seminary together. He didn’t end up in a quiet place like Mountfern, he’s a big expert in canon law and there’s nothing he doesn’t understand about previous marriages contracted outside the Church or any other church which would be recognised as solemnising a Christian marriage according to their own lights . . .’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘They would be entirely null and void and wouldn’t need to be taken into consideration,’ Canon Moran finished triumphantly.

‘Well yes, that’s good. I’ll remember that if I need to think about it,’ Patrick said.

‘It would be good if you needed to think about it, Mr O’Neill. Life can be lonely at times, and we’re all very pleased here that you’ve come back to the land of your fathers. We wouldn’t want you to feel . . . well to feel a bit alone back there in that big place.’

For a second time Patrick was without words. He was touched by the old man, he felt a lump in his throat.

Again Canon Moran filled the pause. ‘So I expect you’ll want to be off for a bit to wander down there by the trees with all the climbing roses on them. They look so beautiful at this time of year, someone should make them into a calendar, I always think.’

The old man walked back towards the road and Patrick went slowly down to the trees where the roses did indeed wind around the big heavy trunks and the branches, and where Rachel sat on a fallen tree.

‘How’s Jimbo’s singing career these days?’ Kate asked Carrie.

‘He’s doing very well, he’s going to cut a record,’ Carrie said proudly.

‘Is that a single or an LP?’ Kate was well up on records from hearing the children talk.

‘It’s going to be an EP, ma’am. You know, the middle kind of one.’ Carrie’s face was shining.

‘And does he like all this travelling around? I hear he was as far afield as Donegal.’

‘Oh he likes it all right, Mrs Ryan, it’s grand for him. But I don’t like it all that much, to tell you the truth.’

Kate was sympathetic. ‘And does he not suggest you go along with him?’

‘He’s always suggesting it, but how can I?’

‘It’s hard all right.’

‘Well it is. You see he’s never suggesting I go along as Mrs Jimbo Doyle, if you know what I mean. Just as Carrie.’ She looked very glum.

‘Suppose he got work round here, wouldn’t that keep him at home?’

‘But that’s the point, there’s plenty of work round here, with the hotel he could be working seven days a week. But he has his heart set on being a star, you see, so the work is only interfering with it.’

‘But if he got singing work, I mean. When the hotel opened.’

Carrie’s face lit up. ‘Wouldn’t that be the makings of us. But Mr O’Neill thinks of Jimbo as a handyman, he wouldn’t employ him as a singer.’

‘I could have a word, maybe.’

‘Oh, ma’am, and if you were to say it to Mrs Fine, maybe Mr O’Neill would listen to her, too.’

‘We’ll see what we can do.’ Kate promised, and Carrie went out to the kitchen and made a big dinner for Leopold in order to have somebody to celebrate with.

‘Wouldn’t it be great if poor Jimbo got a chance to do a turn over in Fernscourt when it opens?’ Kate said to John.

‘Less of the poor Jimbo, there was a bit about him in the papers on Sunday. He’s doing fine.’

‘Well then, it shouldn’t be hard to get him taken on now and then in the Thatch Bar.’

‘I wouldn’t say he’d have time for that,’ John said.

‘What do you mean?’ Kate couldn’t follow the reasoning.

‘We’ll offer him a job singing in Ryan’s Shamrock Café. If he’s good then let him sing here, not have him across the river.’

Kate got a sudden cold feeling. There was a time when she was the one who would have thought up that plan.

‘That’s a better idea altogether,’ she said dully.

‘Of course it is.’ He patted her hand.

‘Dara, will you give me a hand with these table napkins?’

‘
No
, Mammy,
no
,
no
,
no
.’

‘That’s lovely, I must say.’

‘I’ll do anything but that, I hate hemming bloody napkins.’

‘Do you think I like it?’

‘Well, you’ve got nothing . . .’ She stopped.

‘Nothing better to do. How right you are. Sit in a wheelchair, give her some napkins to hem, stop her hands from becoming paralysed as well as everything else . . .’

‘Oh, Mam, really . . .’

‘What do you mean, really? Really nothing. That’s what you were saying, wasn’t it?’

‘It’s not like you to be so sorry for yourself.’

‘It’s not like you to be such a selfish little madam.’

A pause. ‘I’m sorry, and that
wasn’t
what I was going to say . . .’

‘What were you going to say?’

‘I stopped but I’ll have to say it now because the way you finished it is worse.’

‘Well what was it . . .?’

‘I was going to say you’ve got nothing more important to do like I have, I want to . . . well, I want to be around a bit . . .’

Kate looked at her blankly.

‘Sort of outside, you know, not in here putting hems on squares.’

‘I’d like to be outside a bit too.’

‘I know, Mammy, I know, but you’ve sort of had your
life.
Oh God
, I don’t mean that. It’s so easy to say the wrong thing. I mean you’ve had this bit, the bit of hunting and deciding and doing things that matter.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘I do. I’ve had the bit that matters. You haven’t. Off you go, find the bit that matters.’

‘Sometimes there’s no pleasing you, Mam, do you know that? You get annoyed if we don’t tell you what’s going on, you get more annoyed if we do tell you. It’s not just that you have all this . . .’ Dara waved at the chair. They never used words like cripple or paralysed or invalid in the house. Sometimes, not often they spoke of the ‘accident’.

Kate looked thoughtful, not annoyed, and not so sad either.

‘I will do a bit of hemming, Mam, but not now, I want to be around, if you could know what I mean at all.’

Kate seemed to have recovered her humour.

‘No, I do see what you mean. You must be around. But, Dara, he may not be back for fun and games this time, he may have other things on his mind.’

‘Oh, him?’ Dara flushed and flounced a bit. ‘I wasn’t thinking of him.’

‘Of course not, and even if you were why should you listen to me about him? It’s just that I think he’s here for a purpose this time.’

‘God, you’re very dramatic at times.’ Dara was gone, mascara and lipstick in the pocket of her white jacket ready to put on when well out of sight of Ryan’s Licensed Premises.

Patrick sat down on the fallen tree beside Rachel.

For a moment neither of them said anything. The wood smelled fresh and flowery. Canon Moran had tottered away, there was nothing to disturb them. Butterflies went in and out of the trees, and sometimes a bird rustling in some kind of activity. It was a peaceful place.

‘We should have spent more time here,’ Patrick said.

She smiled at him. Perhaps this might be a bit easier than she had feared. He had sounded so forbidding on the phone.

She twisted her hands together. ‘It’s so difficult to tell you this.’

He moved his cuff slightly so that he could see his watch. ‘But I am going to hear it. Right, Rachel?’ he said.

He had the smile she had known for so many years. It was the smile when someone was going to waste his time. But he owed them. So he would listen.

It was to that smile that she would have to tell her tale.

‘Give me a large brandy, will you, John.’

‘Things must be bad over there if you’re having large brandies before lunch,’ John Ryan said mildly, putting the glass in front of Brian Doyle.

‘I’ll be hiding it in a tea flask, I tell you.’

‘Any one thing or things in general?’

‘Who knows? Nothing would please him. He went off to meet your one up in Coyne’s wood as if they were a pair of kids. That didn’t last long, he’s back inside there now with a face on him that would stop a clock.’

‘It can’t have gone well, the outing,’ John agreed. ‘Did Rachel come back with him or what?’

‘Did she come back with him? Indeed she did not. Those two are like the things you see – you know, kind of statues of a man and a woman. When one comes out the other goes in, one means sun, one means rain. I saw them once somewhere. Blackpool I think it was.’

John laughed. ‘Are they as bad as that?’

‘Oh, God, John, the older people are the worse it hits them, this love carry-on. I think I’m too old for it myself and I’m years younger than O’Neill.’

‘You’d better hurry up and marry that girl of yours in the town before someone else does,’ John advised him.

‘I don’t want to be tied down. Men are miserable when they’re tied down, they’re meant to roam free, wild like nature intended.’

‘It’s easy known Mary Donnelly’s over in the post office today,’ John said.

‘She is too, I went in to send off some forms for O’Neill that had been lying on his desk for a month and he wouldn’t look at, but today he took the face off me about them, and there was the hatchet face standing behind the grille, snapping and barking at poor Fergus Slattery because there was too much sealing wax or something on his parcels. God, wouldn’t a man want to be free, not tied to a woman who’d yap the arse off him.’

John was mild. ‘I don’t know, look at the people round here who are not tied to women – Jack Coyne, Fergus Slattery, Papers Flynn, O’Neill himself . . . You can’t say that makes a flight of free birds, now can you?’

‘Go on out of that. You’ve one of the few happy marriages around, and look at the thanks you got for that. I’ll have the other half of that brandy now, if you don’t mind.’

‘It’s just as well you weren’t laying into the booze like this when the structure was going up,’ John commented. ‘Nobody would dare go into the place at all for fear of it coming down on top of them.’

‘You could do yourself a favour, Eddie,’ Jack Coyne said.

‘What’s that, Mr Coyne?’ Eddie was suspicious now. He saw in his mind the shadow of Sergeant Sheehan at every turn.

‘You know where they’re digging out the road for the new entrance up on the road beyond. Where all the vehicles are parked?’

‘Yes, I know it.’

‘I was just thinking that if someone was to let the brakes off a couple of those vehicles, well there’d be an unholy mess when they started to move them again in the morning, there’d be people skating into each other and falling over . . . It would be great sport altogether.’

Eddie looked at Jack Coyne and remembered what his father had said about him. ‘There’d been enough accidents up in that place,’ he said in a voice more courageous than he felt.

This was unanswerable. Jack was taken aback, but he rallied.

‘It wouldn’t have anything to do with anything like that, and wouldn’t that make you of all people anxious to make sure that O’Neill doesn’t get away with everything and ride roughshod over the whole place?’

‘I’m out of it now, Mr Coyne.’

Eddie spoke in a cloak and dagger voice.