The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (107 page)

Dara made a few pronouncements that if you were a true friend you could tell
everything
and any holding back meant that it wasn’t friendship at all. But Dara bore her no ill-will, and organized Irish classes for Grace which worked so well that soon Grace O’Neill was getting better marks in class than the rest of them. Maggie’s wish had come true, they were a gang, with Jacinta on the fringes of it.

They were all very disappointed when the summer holidays were approaching and Grace announced out of the blue that she was going to go on a trip with her father and brother. It was meant to be a familiarization tour of Ireland, she confided, but really it was a spying mission. They were going to spend a night in lots of different hotels and see what they were doing right or doing wrong. They would get ideas for their own hotel. A friend of Grace’s father, who used to work with him back in the States, had suggested this would be a good thing to do. They were off as soon as term ended, just after Kerry came back from his boarding school.

   Kerry had liked his new school very well, he said. No, he didn’t want to ask anyone back during the holiday; it wasn’t a place like that. You got to know everyone a bit, rather than a few people a lot. He was very enthusiastic about the voyage of inspection.

Once more Patrick O’Neill marveled at the wisdom of Rachel Fine. Even at three thousand miles she seemed to know what was best both for him and his troubled son. He would call her and say that she must come to Ireland this summer. After all, if John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President of the United States, was coming to Ireland, why shouldn’t Rachel Fine do the same?

   It wasn’t only the O’Neills who went away. Suddenly their whole gang started to disintegrate. The twins looked at each other in dismay.

Tommy Leonard was told that he was a grown man now, thirteen and a half going on fourteen, no less. He could stand in the paper shop this summer and work to build up the business that was going to be his one day. And he would like it. There would be a smile on his face, and none of his scruffy friends trick-acting in and out of the shop.

The Whites were sent to Irish College. Their father said it was pointless half learning a language, and they were both packed off to learn Irish dancing, to a place where they fined you if you were heard to speak in English and the man who ran it, An Fear Mor, was a person of great power and authority.

Maggie Daly had to work in Daly’s Dairy, just like Tommy had to be in Leonard’s. They both envied Dara and Michael for living in a business that didn’t allow them to be behind a counter.

The twins were on their own again. They never actually admitted that they had grown apart in the last year or so. But they knew it. They missed golden-haired Grace with her plans and her excitement; they missed Tommy with his good humor, and the two Whites who argued with each other about everything and had outlandish views on almost every subject. They missed Maggie, who never dreamed anything up, but who always, after a little hanging back, would join in whatever they suggested.

The only problem was getting rid of Eddie.

Eddie wrongly thought that because Dara and Michael were now without their usual group, they would be delighted to have his company. More than once he got ready to go out with them and was bitterly disappointed when he was not allowed to go.

“I’d be better than no one,” he said.

“No you wouldn’t,” Dara replied.

“You’d be much worse than no one, actually,” Michael said.

“Why can’t I come?”

“Because you’re not our generation. You’re a different generation to us. We are going to be thirteen in September, teenagers. You are only a very juvenile person.”

“How will I ever grow up, unless I am with older people?”

Eddie was stung by the lack of avenues.

“Listen Eddie, enough is enough; it doesn’t matter if you ever grow up, it couldn’t matter less. You begin all nice and please this and please that, but by the time we’d have gone twenty paces with you, there’d be some row.”

“No Dara, there wouldn’t.”

“Look at the past,” Michael said mildly. “It’s always happened.”

“Now we must be off.” And they were gone. Eddie kicked the stones around the back yard in disappointment.

“I can find you plenty to do if you like,” Kate said. “And stop kicking. You’re taking the top off your new shoes.”

“They’re not new,” Eddie said mulishly. “Nothing is new, they’re only Michael’s shoes.”

“And we’d like to have them for your brother Declan too, please, so kindly stop kicking with them or you’ll have them taken away for the day, and you won’t go far in your bare feet.”

John had watched sympathetically. He waited till Kate had gone, and then called Eddie into the bar.

“Come here, I want to show you something.”

“I don’t want to do any work,” Eddie said.

“Not at all, why should you, haven’t you done the crates?”

“Yes.”

“Well come on then. I’ll show you something funny.”

This was better than anything that had been offered so far. Eddie went suspiciously into the bar, his hair standing up in spikes that no amount of combing, brushing or even dampening would ever change. His father had an old, faded chocolate box out on the counter. Eddie scrambled onto a high stool to see.

“Look at this, Eddie, come on, it’s funny.”

“What is it? It’s only an old picture.”

“It’s me years ago.”

“Why are you wearing women’s knickers?”

“Those aren’t knickers; that was trousers.”

“Go on.”

“Yes, that was the day your Auntie Nuala went to Australia with the nuns, there was a picture taken here outside the door. That’s your Aunt Nuala all dressed in black.”

“She’s very young-looking to be a nun.”

“Ah she was too; they gave them a school education you see, and then in turn she became a nun and educated children out there.”

“It seems daft to me,” said Eddie, who was not a great scholar.

“There’s a bit of daftness in it, certainly,” his father agreed. “Wouldn’t she be better up with Sister Laura in her own home town? Still, what I was going to tell you was this: look at my feet.”

“You’ve no shoes on.”

“Didn’t I kick the front of my shoes out just like you were … No, no, not giving out to you. Shoes are your mother’s province. I wanted to tell you the whole front came away, and I couldn’t go with them all to see her off in the town. That was the last I ever saw of her, that day in 1930. Imagine. And I was so put out that I didn’t get the trip to the town, I went for a walk up to Coyne’s wood, and in my poor bare feet I spent the whole day building myself a house in a tree. I was covered in scratches and cuts, and when they all came back sobbing and crying from seeing Nuala off, they nearly murdered me, but the house was there. It’s still there. I went past it the other day.”

“It couldn’t be.”

“It is, bits of it, thirty-three years in the wood where it’s very hard to find. Anyone could have a house that’s easy to find. I thought having a secret one was better.”

“You never told anyone?”

“No, not until now.”

Eddie believed his father absolutely, but he was suspicious.

“So why are you telling me?”

“I’ve been having all kinds of old rheumatic aches; I don’t think I’ll climb into it again. I thought you might go and keep an eye on it for me.”

“How would I find it?”

“Good question. When you go into Coyne’s wood from this side, you go up the path; you know, the one that has all the rowan trees.”

“The red ones, is it?”

“Yes, the mountain ash trees. Anyway where they end you go in to the right, you’ll have to bend down a bit and then it’s in there. You’ll find it. Maybe you could even build it up a bit.”

Eddie was looking enthusiastic at last. “It’d be better than having a place of my own,” he said eventually.

“Much better.”

“You won’t tell Dara and Michael, and have them spoiling it? They’d come and take it over and turn me out of it.”

“Not at all. Not a word.”

“Right.” Eddie gave a last look at the box of photographs. “Were we desperately poor in those days that they couldn’t get you a new pair of shoes?”

“We’d be hard pushed to get
you
a new pair of shoes these days, so will you wear your old ones when you go up to Coyne’s wood?” his father said. “And for the love of God, will you make sure you’ve done your jobs before you go.”

They all had chores to do each day before they were free to play. Michael had to polish the brass and shine up the counter in the pub. The ashtrays would have been emptied, and the glasses washed the night before, but he had to air the place and see that there were no grease stains or dust where the customers would sit.

Dara had to feed the hens, now moved to the backyard, as their coop had become very smelly and messy in the side garden and completely spoiled the classy look of the place.

The hens clucked enthusiastically over household scraps mixed with bran. She also collected the eggs they laid in their nesting boxes; she gave Jaffa her breakfast; took Leopold for a run up as far as the Rosemarie hair salon and back; and inspected the whereabouts of Maurice the tortoise, in case he had got stuck under a stone, or in case Eddie and Declan had broken their vow and started to play with him again.

Of all these jobs, Dara hated most being seen out with Leopold. Whenever another human being approached, Leopold would cower and shiver and whine piteously, rolling his eyes as if expecting a further beating. Never had a dog been lavished with such love, never did a dog give the impression of being whipped by his masters to within an inch of his life every evening.

In the Rosemarie hair salon, Rita Walsh, who sometimes had an overnight guest leaving in the morning, didn’t like the regular appearance of the Ryan girl with that awful dog racing up to her doorstep and turning around again every morning.

“Why don’t you take him down toward the bridge?”

“I’m too ashamed to be seen with him, Mrs. Walsh,” Dara said truthfully. “Up this way I don’t ever meet anyone except you, or maybe Mr. Coyne, so I don’t have to explain.”

The child probably never noticed anyone leaving at an early hour. That was a relief.

Eddie and Declan had to stack boxes neatly for the distributors and collectors who picked them up when they brought new supplies. All four young Ryans had to bring in vegetables from the back field: potatoes that had to be washed at the yard sink, cabbages or cauliflowers, carrots or turnips. Then they were free for the day, lunch at one sharp.

Patrick wanted a history of Fernscourt written, and who better to ask, he had said, than the local scribe literally on the very doorstep. Of course there were people in Dublin who would do it, and do a professional job on it. Later indeed some aspects of their expertise might be used in editing and layout and even some of their hints in how to express parts of it. But there could be nobody who would do the job with such local knowledge and in such personal terms as John Ryan.

“You’re never going to do it for him?” Kate was astounded.

“Why on earth not? It’s a job, a writing job, there’ll be something at the end of it, not just a few pages of a child’s notebook scribbled on. That’s what
you’ve
always looked for, something to show for it.”

“But not this. Not glorifying him and what he’s doing.”

“It’s not glorifying, and he’s doing it whether I write the history of Fernscourt or some Ph.D. up in Dublin writes it. It’s a professional job, there’s a fee, whoever does it.”

“I don’t know.” Kate was troubled.

“Well I do. My only problem is, will I do it right? Maybe he has too much faith in me; I could have sold myself too well.”

Kate changed immediately.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Won’t you do it as well as anyone? Better, because you’re from these parts. You’re the obvious one to do it.”

John smiled quietly. The battle had been won. First it meant he had to do a lot of reading and research. His head was ever now in books about Georgian houses, antiquarian journals and the records of archaeological and historical societies. He became a familiar figure in the library in the big town where he went once a week, and they bent the rules in order to let him take some of the reference books back to his pub. It was different when a man was writing a book. He wasn’t an ordinary borrower.

He discovered that Fernscourt was only one of many houses built at the time and all over the country. That year 1780 seemed to have been a great year altogether. He told that to Brian Doyle one day, and Brian said that it was always a feast or a famine in the building trade. You either sat on your backside for three years eating crusts or you had them screaming at you to dig the foundations for almighty jobs in three counties. It was interesting to know that the lads in 1780 had the same kind of aggravation.

Of course it was the time when Grattan’s Parliament was sitting; it was the eighteen years when there was an Irish Parliament in College Green in Dublin, before it was snuffed out and the Act of Union was passed. Those parliamentarians needed big houses all over the place. But the Ferns didn’t sit in Parliament, they were farmers with estates in the north of England. They had bought the land here in the 1770s for one of their sons. The house itself had been built in the same style as many others.

John Ryan was affronted to read in one journal that Fernscourt was considered a minor and rather inferior example of the art. He had shown it to Kate in disbelief.

“The wise man would forget that piece of information,” Kate advised. “Patrick O’Neill is not paying for any reference to minor and inferior houses: you should pretend you didn’t uncover that particular bit of lore.”

“I’m meant to be doing serious research.” John’s face was very red.

“Of course, and you are, but that’s only one person’s opinion. You don’t have to give some crackpot’s view, do you? I mean if I met someone up in Bridge Street who said that you were no good to man or beast would I believe them?”

“What?”

“Of course I wouldn’t anymore than you have to believe that fellow. Just get on to the facts, the things that can’t be challenged, how many windows there were, what kind of people worked on it. Oh, Fergus said to tell you that he’ll help you get documents from the land registry if you want; he says that once you translate legal documents into English instead of fusty old law you get great information out of them. I don’t agree with him myself, typing them as I do all day. But Fergus would understand anything you put in front of him. He could make sense of the Dead Sea Scrolls at a glance.”