The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (105 page)

“It’s pointless, can’t see any reason to drag all that stuff miles up the bank and miles back,” Michael said.

“Lovely! When did this happen, this road to Damascus? Just when I was assuring my father that there was no better, healthier way of spending the afternoon.”

“I don’t know,” Michael said.

“Listen Michael, you are a pain, and a big pain. What
is
it? Why was fishing what we did yesterday, and suddenly today it’s what we don’t do? I don’t mind, I just want to know.”

Michael punched Tommy to show that there was no personal ill-will involved.

“You know the way it is sometimes. There seems no point in anything. Anything at all,” Michael said.

“Do I know how it is? Of course I know how it is. I feel that way most of the time. But why today? Now I’ll have to go on my own or go back to the shop and say to my father he was right, I am a selfish pleasure-seeking lout …”

“Oh all right, I’ll come with you.”

“What about Dara and Grace and the others? Where are they? Did they all give up fishing too, suddenly? Did everybody except me?” Tommy wondered.

“Oh, who knows where they are? The Whites have gone to Dublin with their mother for the day; Dara and Grace are giggling somewhere, you can be sure of that.”

“Where’s Maggie?”

“I don’t know. I think she’s as angry with all this giggling as we are. Come on then Tommy, if we’re going to spend the day getting pneumonia for no fish, let’s go and catch it.”

“The sun is shining, you clown,” Tommy said.

   The sun had come out and Miss Hayes was planting some pansies that Kate Ryan had given her. Mrs. Ryan was very good about all kinds of flowers and Miss Hayes had heard some disparaging remarks that Judy Byrne had made about the appearance of the gate lodge of the Grange. Miss Hayes was feeling personally slighted. She had called at Ryan’s merely for advice. Mrs. Ryan had given her the pansies and gotten her a lift back too from a passing customer. It was too far to walk in the sun, she had said.

Olive Hayes watered them well in, just as she had been advised. She would make a macaroni and cheese for the tea, that little Ryan girl was coming this evening. She and Grace O’Neill were very thick with each other. They never stopped talking and laughing. It would do your heart good to see them.

   Grace and Dara left the graveyard hastily when they saw Eddie being instructed in the details of grave-tending.

“It’s more than flesh and blood could bear, we’ll have to leave,” Dara said as soon as she saw her small brother.

“He’s not that bad,” Grace laughed.

“You don’t know how bad he is, he’ll probably dig up half the bodies in the graveyard. We’re well out of it before he gets at it.”

They scrambled to the wall where they had left their bicycles.

“We’ll walk home through Coyne’s wood. That way we won’t get drawn into the fishing,” Dara said.

“Yes, sure. Or else we could just say that we’re not going fishing today.” Everything was simple to Grace.

They wheeled their bikes through the woods which looked beautiful in the Easter sunshine. They heard pigeons and cuckoos, and small rabbits ran across their path as they walked.

“It’s like fairyland here,” Grace said happily.

“Is your father glad he came?” Dara asked.

“Oh yes, of course he is. Why?”

“He was in our pub the other night. I thought he looked kind of tired and upset.”

“He gets upset over Kerry. Remember at Christmas I was telling you; and there’s been something on his mind at the moment. I don’t know what it is, he won’t tell me. That means it’s either about Kerry or about women.”

“Women?” Dara’s eyes were round.

“Yes, women falling in love with him. You know, I told you yucky Marian Johnson has.”

“Oh yes, but you wouldn’t mind that,” Dara dismissed Marian.

“And I think Miss Byrne, you know, the chiropractor.”

“Physio.”

“Yes, whatever. And there’s this woman in America.” Grace looked troubled.

“Lord he
does
collect them,” Dara said in mystification.

“I know, he’s very old and everything, but he’s very nice,” Grace said defensively. “And rich of course,” she added, in order to be strictly fair.

“Who’s the woman in America?”

“A Mrs. Fine.”

“Do you think it’s serious? Isn’t she married to someone else, if she’s a missus?”

“No, he’s dead or separated. There’s no Mister Fine around.”

“Do you like her?”

“She’s OK. I don’t want Father to marry anyone else. That’s all.”

“I know, but maybe he’s not going to. Wouldn’t she be here or he be over there if they were getting married? After all they’re pretty old. They wouldn’t want to be wasting time.”

“He calls her a lot. He called her twice on Christmas Day.”

“Oh that means nothing. Mrs. Whelan says people are always telephoning each other on Christmas Day and putting the heart across everyone else.”

“I don’t know.” Grace was doubtful. “I had this friend in the States, Brigid Anne Moriarty. Well, she told me that her mother said Father was going to marry again, that everybody knew it, that he had a lady friend he worked with, and that they were going to get married quietly in New York.”

“How did Brigid Anne know all this, and you and Kerry didn’t?”

“Who would tell us? Anyway I told Kerry this on the day of mother’s funeral.”

“You mean Brigid Anne knew your father had a lady friend
before
your mother died?” Dara’s face was horrified.

“But you see it wasn’t true; obviously it wasn’t. It was only a tale people told because Father was so well known among all these people, and because Mother was an invalid for so long.”

Grace looked wretched as she went over this. Impulsively Dara threw her arm around her friend’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry about it, Grace,
please
. It’s not happened. It’s not going to happen. We can head off the awful Marians and awful Judys, and Mrs. Fine can’t be any threat, otherwise she’d be here.”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s right.”

“So why are you still sad?”

“Because I’m thinking about the day of the funeral and how upset Kerry was when I told him about what people were saying. But you’re right. It’s not going to happen: I won’t think about it anymore.”

They came out of the wood and cycled to the lodge. Miss Hayes said that Mr. O’Neill had been on the telephone to say he would not be back for tea. He had gone to Kerry’s school. The boys had spent some of the Easter holidays there to take part in the Easter vigil and church services. They were meant to be getting holidays in a week. But Kerry was coming back tonight.

All through their macaroni and cheese they chattered excitedly about Kerry coming home. They cleared the table and washed the dishes with Miss Hayes. Dara marveled at the peace and quiet in this house, no Carrie clattering pans in the kitchen, no bar on the other side of the green door, no Leopold howling, no Declan complaining that he was going to be the baby in this family until he was an old-age-pensioner, no Eddie bringing some new doom and destruction down on them. No bustle. It must be lonely for Grace sometimes too, of course, so far from everyone.

They sat in Grace’s room, and Dara tried on all her clothes. The shoes were a little too small, which was a pity since Grace had so many she could have given Dara any amount without missing them.

“Does your father ever fight with Michael?” Grace asked.

“No, no he doesn’t.”

Grace sighed heavily. “No, I think it’s just my father and Kerry. It’s something in them that doesn’t mix.”

“Of course Daddy gets very irate with Eddie, almost every day of our lives,” Dara offered, in the hope of reassuring her friend.

“Eddie’s different, as you said yourself.”

“Yes,” Dara agreed. “Eddie’s very different, nobody could mix with him.”

Dara cycled home and saw a man slipping into the Rosemarie hair salon, having looked up and down River Road nervously first. Could the unlikely rumor they had heard at school
possibly
be true? She must tell Grace tomorrow morning. She hoped Grace wouldn’t be lonely as she waited for Kerry and her father to come home.

Grace wished she had never told Kerry about that stupid thing that Brigid Anne had said, about the gossip that Father had some other lady in mind to marry. Obviously it hadn’t been true. It was nearly two years since Mother had died, and Father had no intention of marrying again. Father Devine had introduced him to several likely people, awful women from the parish, widows and terrible people. But Father used to laugh about them with her so Grace had no worries.

Kerry had a picture of Mother in his billfold, and also in the plastic folder at the back of his assignment book. Grace had seen him taking it out to look at it one day when he thought nobody was watching. And the picture of Mother that stood on the piano … Kerry was always adjusting it and making sure it stood right where it was best lit.

There was a portrait of Mother hanging in the hall. Mother had never liked it, she thought it made her look as if she had been dressed up to play the part of a fine lady. Father had laughed and told her that she
was
a fine lady. Kerry didn’t like that picture, he never stopped to look at it. Once Grace asked him why he didn’t like it, and he had said that Father had only dressed Mother up in jewelry and silks and paid a society painter to do the portrait, to show what a big man
he
was. It had nothing to do with Mother herself.

Kerry had said that when things were his to do what he liked with, he would take the picture outside and burn it. Then Mother would know how well he had understood her. Kerry said some very odd things from time to time.

Grace wished she knew why her father had driven all the way up to his school to collect him. Perhaps it was a sign that Father was going to be warmer to Kerry, but somehow she didn’t think so.

   Father Minehan was a fussy man. Anything that could be said directly and simply, he managed to dress up and obscure. Patrick had been fifteen minutes in the dean’s study and still didn’t know why he was being asked to take Kerry away. That very day.

“So, when all aspects are considered, and taking everything into account, very often, the greater good is achieved by the simpler option,” Father Minehan said.

Patrick looked at the priest with disgust. His blue eyes were hard and unsmiling.

“Briefly, what did he do?” he asked again, but his tone was more curt.

“There are so many explanations and ways of looking at what we do and why we do it …” Father Minehan was beginning again.

“In two or three sentences, Father.” Patrick had never been so ill-mannered to a man of the cloth. His old training made him feel a thrill of wrongdoing because he was interrupting a priest with a bark of command.

“If it were as easy as that …”

“It is as easy as that. I have driven for two hours to a school where I thought you were educating my son, a school to which I have given generous contributions I may add, and I hear, or think I hear that you want him to leave. Now. Why?”

Father Minehan was at a loss to answer a question so directly put. He remained silent.

“Come on, Father, I can’t stay all week playing guessing games. What did he do?”

“Let’s take it slowly, Mr. O’Neill.”

“Let’s take it at a nice brisk pace, Father Minehan. Did he bugger one of the other boys?”

“Mr. O’Neill,
please!
”

Now, for the first time, the priest was shaken into a direct response.

“He’s a fifteen-year-old boy, Father, almost sixteen. Eventually, I suppose, if I ask enough questions we might get an answer. Was he drunk? Did he hit one of the masters? Did he miss mass? What in God’s name prompted all these letters and phone calls that the FBI couldn’t work out?”

“I’m trying to explain.”

“God damn it, you are not trying to explain. Did he screw one of the maids? Did he deny the infallibility of the pope? If I drive here and take him away with me leaving behind buildings I’m goddamn paying to erect, I would like to know why.”

“He took a great deal of money.”

Patrick felt an ice-cold pool in the base of his stomach.

“That’s not possible.”

“I assure you …”

“How much?”

“Two hundred pounds.”

“Have you any proof of this?”

“Oh yes”

“Perhaps you would be good enough to let me have it.”

“Do you want your son here?”

“Not immediately. Let me hear it from you first, then we’ll ask Kerry his side of things. Right?”

The old Patrick had returned on the outside. A brisk smile, the kind he used in his business deals … a charm not fulsome, just there. He composed his face to listen.

It was a tale of a charity football match in aid of deprived children. Patrick held his mask face with difficulty. The priest was so unctuous. He spoke of deprived children as if they were another species of life. The rugby match had attracted a lot of attention People came from all over to attend it. There were three Irish internationals playing on each side. It wasn’t often that you saw such talent gathered on one afternoon on the playing fields of an Irish school. The entrance fee had been two shillings.

The boys in the school all attended, of course, people from the neighborhood and rugby fans from all over Ireland, as well as some people from the newspapers. Father Minehan’s voice lowered again, in case someone from the newspaper might be in the room with them. It was all highly unfortunate. Over fourteen hundred people attended the match, many of them being men of property and generosity who gave much more than the two-shilling entrance fee.

Over two hundred pounds had been collected at the small tables placed near the school gate. It was taken into the school in leather bags, each with the amount it contained neatly written on a label attached to it. The money was in Father Bursar’s office ready to be checked into a bank account next day. It disappeared. There was a search. The search revealed among other things that some of the senior boys were not in their dormitory; they came in later over the wall. They were met by a reception committee.