The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (110 page)

“He’s just making up for having had a desperate childhood,” Dara said. She was nearly thirteen now, tall and strong. Her thick dark hair went in slightly underneath as a result of heavy hair-grip work at night. She would have loved a perm in the Rosemarie salon, and Mrs. Walsh said she would do a light natural perm, but Dara’s mother wouldn’t hear of it. A perm at twelve? Who would permit such extravagance? It was all very well for her mother, who had curly hair anyway, to speak like that. Dara was full of resentment. To make matters worse Michael, who didn’t need curls, had a great sort of wavy fit in his hair.
And
he had longer eyelashes. Much. It was so unfair, like almost everything.

“Tell me about Leopold’s childhood.” Fergus liked the leggy girl who was so like her mother in looks, and in that independent streak.

“He was found in one of Jack Coyne’s trucks.”

“That’s a poor start,” agreed Fergus.

“And someone had squeezed his throat, and hurt his hind leg,” Michael finished for her.

Fergus often thought they could make a good double act on stage.

“And for ages after we got his poor back leg mended, he used to hold it out to people to shake hands with them,” Dara said.

“Oh all right, you’ve convinced me, he had a rotten childhood, puppydom wasn’t the best time of his life. Let him live, let him grow older and madder like the rest of us.”

The twins giggled.

“I thought you two would be very upset to see it all come down.” He indicated across the river.

“No, one time maybe …” Michael said.

“But not now, not now …”

“Not now that we’re more grown up …”

“And have our own life. It used to be a bit of pretend life there, you see.”

“Oh well, it’s different now that you’ve grown up. I see what you mean.” He could have been laughing at them, but they didn’t think so. “And have you found somewhere else to live when you grow old, really old like me? Now that you won’t be living across there?”

“We have our plans …” said Dara.

“Nothing definite of course …”

“That could be spelled out …”

Fergus hastened to agree. “No, no, much better not. Spell out as little as possible, I always say.”

“There is one thing, Mr. Slattery …” Dara said.

“Yes …”

“It’s sort of advice we might need …”

Michael flashed her a warning look.

“No, it’s all right, I’m only going to speak sort of generally.”

“Best way to start,” Fergus agreed encouragingly.

“Yes, well, it’s like this. Does every bit of land have to be owned by someone?”

“I beg your pardon?” They had never taught him how to answer questions like this when he was up in Dublin at the Incorporated Law Society.

“I mean, is the whole of Ireland all divided up and parceled up? You own your house, we own this place, Mr. O’Neill owns Fernscourt now. Are there bits nobody owns?”

“That’s a bit difficult to answer in general terms. There
are
bits, I suppose, that nobody really owns, like say the Curragh. You know, in Kildare. If you have land near it you can graze your sheep there, and it’s the same with some bogs. A lot of people can cut turf there without actually owning it. Is that what you mean?”

“Not quite. You know, would all fields and ditches and boreens be owned by some one person? You couldn’t say suddenly, I own this ditch because I found it.”

Fergus scratched his head.

“But you couldn’t really
find
a ditch, could you? It would be there all the time. You couldn’t look at it one day and claim it?”

“But suppose you couldn’t see it?” Dara persisted.

Michael didn’t want her to say any more.

“God, Dara, you have me foxed,” Fergus said. “But as your mother will tell you, I’m no good at all as a solicitor. I ask stupid questions like how in the name of the Lord could you try to own something you can’t see? I only irritate clients. I’ll be struck off the rolls any day and be left wandering around with straws in my hair.”

Dara looked alarmed. “No, please, it’s our fault. You see, it’s that we have to ask these questions so that you won’t actually know what we’re talking about … No, shut up, Michael. It’s all
right
. Mr. Slattery’s not going to tell anyone, he’s like Canon Moran.”

“The image of him,” Fergus said ruefully.

“No, you can’t tell people’s business, like he can’t tell their sins,” Dara insisted.

“That’s a fact. They’d strike me off the rolls.”

“Would they hit you?” Michael asked interested.

“I think it might mean rolls, like the rolls at school. You know, for roll call,” Dara said helpfully. “But anyway, it won’t happen, because you won’t tell anybody what we’ve been discussing.”

“I most certainly will not,” he said solemnly, not that he had any idea of what they
had
been discussing.

   “Wouldn’t you think Patrick would have been here to see his day of triumph?” John Ryan said as a great cheer went up when the last bit of wall fell down.

Kate neatly scooped the froth off the top of five pints of stout with a wooden spatula.

“He knows all about it, you can be sure. He’ll be on the phone to Brian Doyle in ten minutes’ time.”

“I was sure he’d have been here. He hates that house and all it stood for. He doesn’t want me to say a good word about the Ferns, he hates the bit about them being fairly decent in the Famine. He would be delighted to see the stones going down.”

“No, Patrick O’Neill is more interested in what’s going up there instead,” Kate said, putting the pints on a tray and coming around the counter to take them outside. “He’s forward-looking like all the Americans.”

“Would we have been better if we had gone to America, do you think?” John asked, half seriously.

“I don’t know, maybe now isn’t the time to debate it.” Kate laughed good-naturedly as she swept out with the tray of pints to the people outside.

   Rita Walsh wondered if the arrival of the hotel might mean that there would be a proper living out of hairdressing after all. It would make a nice change. She had heard a great deal about the plans for Fernscourt from Marian Johnson who now had her hair done regularly and had even sought advice about skin creams and manicures. Rita thought it unlikely that a man like Patrick O’Neill would think seriously about Marian Johnson, whose dry scalp and flyaway hair were getting so much attention these days. Yet it was hard to know. A man like that might be keen to ally himself with old money, and the quality. The Johnsons knew everyone in the hunting set.

Rita surveyed her little salon without much pleasure. American women or rich Dublin women might not find it to their liking, but it would be madness to spend good money on new equipment. Rita had a fair bit saved for the days when she would no longer be able to stand on her feet and give perms. And indeed earn money from a position that didn’t at all involve standing on her feet. Both of these sources would end eventually. She kept all her savings in Sheila Whelan’s discreet post office. There was no bank in Mountfern and Sheila often acted as an unofficial adviser on people’s finances.

Rita decided to be swayed by the advice of the postmistress. Sheila was not one to inquire why the earnings were large sometimes, and irregular. She would answer only the questions that were asked, never raising any others.

Sheila Whelan said that her advice would be to hold on a while until the building of the hotel got under way, then when it really did look as if Fernscourt were rising from the ground and about to bring new life into the town, that was the time to buy new hairdressing equipment. And chairs and anything else that would make the Rosemarie hair salon attractive to visitors. There was no sense of irony in any of this, no hint of what might be the present attractions of the establishment. Just wait until the hotel got under way, then everyone could make their plans.

   In Rachel Fine’s New York apartment the small travel clock on the table beside her bed said that it was six-thirty in the morning. In Mountfern it would be lunchtime and the ruins might well be down by now. Rachel had not slept well. All night she had dreamed that there had been some terrible incident at this demolition ceremony.

That a body had risen from the ruins calling out, “I am the spirit who will not be mocked … you shall not build here in peace.”

She had gotten up twice in the night and sat beside the window, looking out on the moonlit city to reassure herself that everything was normal. She wished this part was all over. Perhaps when this part was finished, then things might go well. He might send for her and she would come to Ireland and make herself part of the place, so that he would never send her away.

   Patrick found the afternoon went very slowly. He didn’t want to call until he was absolutely certain that it had actually happened. Later that evening he would talk to the States, tell Gerry Power that it had been done, and tell Rachel. Already it was a picture in his mind …

He could imagine it. Even before he called Brian Doyle, he could see knots of children coming onto the bank to watch. He hadn’t realized that the rest of the town would come too and that they would drink pints in John and Kate Ryan’s during the day, and cheer when the walls fell. He made Brian tell him every detail. At first Doyle thought he wanted proof that the job had been done properly, and had been full of huffing and shrugging, but when he realized that the man only wanted a description of the day, he became most lyrical.

Patrick couldn’t believe it when he heard that the people had cheered the walls coming down.

“What did they say … did they call for three cheers or what?”

“Well, it was just a big cheer went up,” Brian said.

“Like what? Did they say ‘Hurrah,’ or ‘More, more,’ or what?”

Brian was beginning to wish he had never mentioned the cheer. “You know, a big shout. No words, just a shout.”

“There
have
to be words in a shout.”

“No there don’t, Mr. O’Neill. It was like, let me say a great
Waaah!
Now do you know what I mean?”

Patrick said he did. He was very pleased.

   “Do you know they gave a great cheer when the last walls of Fernscourt went down?” he said when he called Gerry Power.

“Is that a fact?” Gerry was a man who was quite happy to go back to Ireland sometime in the future for St. Patrick’s Day and maybe ten days there. He thought Patrick was insane to plow all his fortune into this venture.

“I wonder why they cheered,” Patrick said.

“So shocked to see a proper day’s work done for once, they couldn’t help cheering, I guess,” said Gerry.

   He told Rachel that evening. “A big cheer, Brian Doyle said. Like a great
Waaahh!
sound. Oh God, I
wish
I had been there I would have given anything to be there, to have heard it.”

“I think you were quite right not to go,” Rachel said. “Your instinct is always right for that sort of thing. Don’t associate yourself with the knocking down, only with the building up. You’ve always done it here.”

Rachel knew why they had let out a cheer. It was something to do, something to see on a dull morning in a one-horse town. It all meant a bit of work here and there and the promise of more work for the people who stood around, apparently, if the story was to be believed, with great double glasses of beer in their hands in the middle of the morning. No wonder they cheered.

“They cheered because the dream is coming true,” she said. “Because the old house is gone and the new life is about to start.”

   The site had been excavated, the foundations were ready to start. Brian Doyle had already had four major rows with the architects. The Irish architects had refused to work with the American architects unless guarantees were received that there would be no more last minute interference. The Irish Tourist Board had revised its grant, the situation on charter groups was still not clear from Aer Lingus. Two farmers whose land had not been bought up by Patrick O’Neill tried to get Fergus Slattery to claim they had been victimized. Two small tenant farmers, who had willingly sold him half an acre each a year ago, now felt they hadn’t gotten enough for it, and wanted Fergus to represent them. Fergus refused to have anything to do with any of them.

“Greed. That’s what this man has brought to Mountfern, inordinate greed. Those men never thought of profits on their miserable bits of land before, they were bloody glad to have it.”

“I don’t think you can go around preaching to them like that, Fergus,” Kate Ryan said disapprovingly. “You should shrug and say that it’s a pity but there isn’t really a case. Pretend to be on their side, be clever.”

“Like Hereford bullock O’Neill,” Fergus growled.

Kate laughed. “He
has
got curls but that’s no nickname for him. Yes, like him. He’s great at being tactful. That’s what’s got him so far, I suppose.”

“Or telling downright lies,” Fergus said.

“He hasn’t really, has he? I know you don’t trust him, and neither do I. I don’t trust him because I think he knows he’ll ruin us if his business ever gets off the ground. I don’t know why you care about him.”

“Because he’s hurting you … all of you,” Fergus said.

Kate looked up, startled, and Fergus remembered his sister’s drunken slurred accusation … he was good for nothing except making sheep’s eyes at the local publican’s wife. Was that so?

No, in truth, hand on heart, it wasn’t just Kate, it was the whole household. That stupid dog with the terrified eyes trying to shake hands with you by raising its twisted back paw. That John Ryan scribbling his poetry in a child’s exercise book and thinking that Patrick O’Neill was a great fellow. Those two small lads with a face on each of them that spelled out devilment. Those dark handsome twins, entirely self-contained, speaking half a sentence each, suntanned and energetic as wild monkeys; he used to see them scrambling in those brambled hills on the other side of the Fern … There was something about the whole family that touched him in a way it was hard to understand. Truthfully, it was not the handsome mother with her quick wit. No, eunuch or no eunuch, he was making no sheep’s eyes at her.