The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (158 page)

“If it were all mine I’d be hundreds of miles from here on a beach sipping rum and Coca Cola,” said Tony McCann.

The cashier sighed and thought about it for a moment. “How do you want the money?”

“Ten-pound notes, a hundred of them,” McCann said. He looked idly around the bank as she went away to verify the check. How did people work here five days a week for forty years? Surely they must all have been tempted to take a carrier bag of wads of fivers and run. It was remarkable that so few of them did when you came to think of it.

“Mr. McCann?” It was a man now, a senior man in a suit, with a pinched-looking face.

“Yes?”

“There seems to be a problem about the check.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I’m afraid so. It has been cancelled and reported stolen.”

   “It’s me. McCann.”

“Yes?” Kerry O’Neill’s voice was anxious suddenly.

“The check doesn’t work.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You’d better believe me.”

“The bitch. The stupid bitch.”

“You’ll sort it out then?”

“I’ll sort it out.”

   “Mr. O’Neill?”

Brian Doyle was hesitant. Patrick O’Neill was like a devil these days, even the most mild request was met by a bout of bad temper.

“Doyle?” He was curt.

“Mrs. Fine wants to have a word with you.”

Once Brian had called Rachel by her first name, and that had not found favor either with his boss.

“Good, then I’m sure she will,” Patrick said.

“On the telephone,” Brian explained, as if he were talking to a child.

It had been as much as Patrick could do to stay sane when faced with the Irish telephone system. He had been assured that it was a European thing, not just Irish, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. He said he would make a mental note not to open a chain of hotels on the continent of Europe, and people had smiled at him indulgently. The eager American, hustle bustle. He knew what they said.

But if Rachel was on the telephone for him that meant he had to leave his office and walk across to Brian Doyle’s headquarters, that was where the only phone link so far had managed to be installed.

Patrick moved quickly. He would not let Doyle see how annoyed he was to be summoned by Rachel, whom they all knew to be his fancy woman, to walk across the courtyard, through the Thatch Bar and over to those excrescences that Doyle called his headquarters.

“Yes?” He said curtly, watching Brian pretend to busy himself elsewhere in the cramped space.

“Can we talk?”

“Here?” He couldn’t believe it.

“No. Anywhere. It’s important.”

“Why didn’t you come up here in the first place instead of having me walk half way around the country to tell me you were coming?”

“I don’t want to come there.”

“I don’t have time to go over to Loretto’s.”

“No, I don’t want you to come here either.”

“Is this a game of hide and seek, by any chance?”

“Please.”

“Where then?”

“Coyne’s wood. At the far end up by the old ruined church on the small back road that leads to the Grange. There’s a gate.”

“Jesus,” Patrick said.

“I’ll leave now, I’ll wait. You get away when you can.”

He held the receiver in his hand for a while and out of the window of Doyle’s headquarters, through the clutter of the ledge, he saw across the Fern in the distance a figure come out of the door of Loretto Quinn’s shop and get into a small green car.

“Thanks, Brian,” he said as he replaced the receiver.

“Lovely day for a bit of a spin out into the country,” Brian said.

Patrick gave him a look that told Brian that the wise man addressed no words at all to the great O’Neill these days.

   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 baptized 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 honors 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 baptized?”

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 held an armful of daisies and heathers and some prickly yellow gorse. Still it was better than discussing marriages to infidels. He looked around 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 worldy 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 unbaptized 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 recognized as solemnizing 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 toward 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 in 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 traveling 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 around here, wouldn’t that keep him at home?”

“But that’s the point, there’s plenty of work around 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 paralyzed 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 paralyzed 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 humor.

“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 rustled 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.