The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (123 page)

“It was a cheap, vulgar thing to say. I’m glad I have a good friend like you to put me right from time to time.”

“That’s the only time I ever tried to put you right in my life,” Sheila said simply. She patted his hand. They were indeed friends.

The traction was over. They were moving her into a chair. Everyone spoke about it as if it were a huge breakthrough, as if she were going to be able to fly.

Kate felt leaden. She’d had a low feeling since she woke but she tried to take part in all the enthusiasm around her. After all it would be ungracious and mulish not to show pleasure at a step forward.

It didn’t hurt, the moving, they were able to lift her and anticipate what would give a stab of pain and what would be fine, and really there was a lot of her that didn’t ache at all.

There was a little team around her, the nice young nurse Geraldine and the staff nurse, there was Sister Winston, and two of the hospital porters who seemed to be on call for everything that involved movement, from ambulance stretchers to windows that were stuck with paint. The great Mr. Brown the surgeon was there, and so were two physiotherapists.

She got her first shock when she saw the chair. It was a wheelchair.

“I didn’t think …” Her hand was at her throat.

Sister Winston was quick. She must have been used to this reaction. “Why be in a chair that can just face one way when you can face any way in this?”

“But an ordinary chair would do …”

“It would
do
, certainly, but you wouldn’t be able to go to the window and back to your bed or to the handbasin.”

“I don’t
want
to go to any of those places, I just want to sit in a chair like an ordinary person.”

“This one’s been prepared for you; tomorrow we can discuss an ordinary chair.”

There were so many people looking and hoping for her to be well and upright in the chair, Kate could say no more.

“Of course,” she said in a small voice. “I’m sorry.”

The lifting was surprisingly easy, just a gradual movement. After those weeks of lying down and thinking it was normal to wake looking at the ceiling and that people always talked bending over you slightly, it was going to be hard to readjust to sitting up again.

They had eased her into the chair, her legs wrapped well in a rug. The family would be so pleased to see her sitting up, the nurses said. The porters who had brought the chair smiled their pleasure. Mr. Brown said she was making great progress, the two physiotherapists moved here and there to settle her. And that was it. She sat and tried to smile back at all the good humor around. But the smile wouldn’t come.

She felt faint, and a roaring in her ears.

They saw it at once, and her head was pushed down. A glass of water, medication was discussed and waved away. It often happened. Sister Winston had seen it all before. That’s why she never let the friends and relatives in until much later.

Kate Ryan’s mouth was in an O of horror, her hands gripped the sides of the chair.

“I can’t feel …” she cried “I can’t feel it.”

“What can’t you feel?” Geraldine was on her knees beside the chair, holding Kate’s hand. “Shush now, you’re grand altogether, everyone’s delighted with you …”

“I can’t feel my bottom, I have no bottom, no legs, nothing. There’s only emptiness where I’m sitting in the chair.”

Mr. Brown was gentle. “You’ve known always … you’ve known about the paralysis. The realization comes and goes. You’ve adapted so well in traction, now it’s just a new adapting.”

“It’s like air, it’s not real. I can’t be going to live like this till I die, can I?” Kate looked around piteously at the semi-circle.

“No, no,” said Geraldine soothingly.

“I couldn’t stand years of this, I couldn’t stand it. There’s nothing
there
,” Kate cried.

The silence of sympathy broken by clucks of encouragement frightened her even more. Perhaps there weren’t going to
be
years ahead. Perhaps her life might be nearly over already.

They put the family off. It seemed the wisest thing. They said there was no cause for alarm, but she needed sedation and it would be tiring for Mrs. Ryan rather than comforting to have to cope with visitors.

They didn’t tell John that his wife sat for her first day in a wheelchair staring ahead of her and thinking of a life of dependency on others. Thinking of the fears she would have … or they all would have if she got any infection and she might not have the strength to fight it.

She thought about the children having to push an old mother around in a wheelchair; because she would be an old mother, she might as well be their grandmother for all the say she was going to have in things, for all the fun and companionship she could give them.

She thought about the bar and what would happen if Patrick’s hotel took away all their business from them as she had been afraid it would. They couldn’t go on living on his charity as they already were, a private room, a car at John’s beck and call, and anything she said she’d like she knew he would give her.

It wasn’t his fault that she had walked past those notices saying danger, and men at work. It wasn’t Patrick’s fault that she had walked across the line of a man with a digger who had not expected there to be another human on that part of the site.

But Kate wept as she had never wept lying flat on her bed. This was the best she could hope for. This terrible dependent sitting posture worse altogether than lying down, which everyone knew was only temporary.

And when she had learned how to propel the bloody thing with her weak arms and learned how to lift her wasted legs out of it and onto some hideous-looking lavatory bowl, they would say she was cured and send her home. Cured! Cured to go home a cripple and watch this Mary Donnelly, whoever she was, taking Kate’s place.

   Mary Donnelly didn’t want to speak to the men from the brewery or the men from the distillery who called to the pub.

“I’ve had quite enough huggermugger with men since I came to this establishment,” she said to John. “And in any event you are the man of the house, whatever that expression means. You should talk to them yourself.”

John sighed. Every day he realized more how much of the running of the household Kate had done. Had he been properly grateful? No of course he had not. He had taken it for granted. Now there was no time to go and write his poems, there was no time to take a walk to clear his head after the smoke and noise in the bar. The days fell into a pattern.

As August became September and Mary got the children ready to go back to school, John began to think he had known no other life than the one where he was picked up at two o’clock in the afternoon and driven in to see his invalid wife in a hospital bed. Like any life, some days were better than others. Sometimes Kate was tired and impatient after long sessions trying to use the wheelchair and maneuver herself from bed to chair, with failure all the way. Some days she was elated. There were times when he was tired and depressed and picked a row, there were good afternoons where he sat and talked to her easily without either of them thinking how the situation had changed and would still be changed when he got her home.

He was glad that she seemed friendly with Rachel. He couldn’t quite see what they had to talk about and giggle at, but it was undoubtedly good for her.

She didn’t want too many visitors, she said, it tired her, so it was rationed to one a day apart from the family and Rachel. John was pleased that she now saw Fergus Slattery, the poor fellow seemed to be most upset about her and very black about apportioning blame and responsibility. He even kept trying to make appointments with John to talk about the case and the compensation.

“What case?” John had wanted to know. “There’s no case, surely. It was a terrible accident.”

Fergus had become more impatient than ever about it. And finally Kate said that John should agree to talk about it. Just to calm Fergus down.

“You don’t know the way he is, John. I worked for him, remember? He’s up to his eyes in the letter of the law, not what things people are really involved in. You should see the small prints, and the clauses about this and about that, and the whereases. It’s a different world. Just do me a favor and go to see him in his office, tell him how good Patrick has been, tell him we’re not the kind of people who sue over things, it would be flying in the face of God.”

“The office? But that would be like as if I’d gone in order to take him on.”

“You’re not going to get much talked about in the pub, are you? The door opening every time you’re getting somewhere?”

He agreed. Unwillingly. And went to Fergus on a bright September morning.

Miss Purcell had told him of a novena that was being done for Kate, and a bouquet of masses which would be offered on the first Tuesday of the month. She wondered when would poor Mrs. Ryan be able to travel to Lourdes, the fund had been generously subscribed. Eventually John got away from her and sat down in the room where his wife used to work every morning.

“Haven’t you got anyone yet?” he asked kindly, knowing that Fergus Slattery had put off getting any permanent help out of loyalty to Kate and to the belief that she might work again.

“Your wife told me off about that too. I’ll have to, I will. Soon.”

“Right.” John didn’t nag him, he knew how irritating it was to be told to do something if you didn’t want to. Jack Coyne was always urging him to get a new roof or a light-up sign over the pub. Things that sounded sensible, things that he might do one day, but not immediately.

“I’ll speak as simply and quickly as I can, John. I know you don’t want to be here in case it looks as if you’re going to take Patrick O’Neill to court, so I’ll try to put you in the picture as best I can.”

“I know you will, Fergus.” John nodded politely like an obedient child.

Fergus felt his collar a bit tight around his neck and loosened it with his finger. He seemed almost reluctant to begin now that he had the undivided attention of the man who was usually moving away to pull pints or to greet those who came in the door.

“Well, it’s a matter of just spelling it out,” he said.

John looked at him and waited.

“And if there’s anything you don’t agree with you’ll say … of course.”

“Of course,” John agreed.

“Well, obviously it
wasn’t
the time before, with everything being so upset and on top of us, but now we have to think in terms of practicalities. Like what happens when Kate comes home.”

John was silent. He was looking around the room thoughtfully as if imagining Kate working here, moving quickly from typewriter to cupboard, from big scales where she would have weighed the long narrow envelopes of documents before they were taken to Sheila Whelan’s to mail.

“John,” Fergus said.

“Yes, I know, practicalities. Well, those are being thought of in most ways. Judy Byrne will come in three times a week at first to keep Kate doing the exercises. And Patrick’s getting his builders to even out the floor levels so that she can come into the pub on the chair without anyone having to lift it. He’s been very generous, Patrick has, generous and thoughtful.” John’s glance went around the lawyer’s office again, slowly and deliberately.

Fergus could barely conceal his irritation.

“I don’t doubt that.
No
, look at me, John, I know you’ve heard me giving out about the man, I don’t doubt that he has been generosity itself, but can I beg you to listen? Now two years ago there was this act passed, the Civil Liability Act of 1961, and up to this there were just three kinds of person who were deemed to exist on your land: an invitee, a licensee and a trespasser. There were no other people. So if anyone got injured the decision was, which kind of person were they? If they were an invitee they got one kind of compensation, a licensee got another—a licensee would be somebody, say, who had permission to be there in some category or other—and the trespasser got another.”

He saw John fidgeting.

“Please listen John, I’m making it very short and you’ll see why it is important in a minute. There used to be lots of innocent trespassers, people who weren’t intending trespass …”

“But Kate wasn’t …”

“
Listen
, will you, like children or like Kate, say, who was a neighbor and friend. So the law was changed making the landowner more liable than he used to be in the old days. So Patrick or his insurance company has a legal liability to pay compensation …”

“But he has, I tell you, we don’t want to be blackmailing him …”

“The law; God Almighty, the law of the land we live in says he has to pay it, he knows he has to pay it, he doesn’t live in some cloud-bloody-cuckoo-land like you do.”

“Why are you shouting at me, Fergus?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I think it’s because I’m being so long winded and you won’t wait till I get to the point.”

“All right.”

“So the system is you have to sue Patrick. Kate has to sue him. That’s the machinery, that’s the way it’s done. His insurance company won’t pay, can’t pay until there’s a case set up, until the proper requirements of the law are complied with.”