The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (167 page)

Fergus was a different kind of listener. There was no stony impassive face, he reacted angrily and loudly to every sentence.

She gave him all the details of the various meetings, the strategy, the decision to offer six but to expect a strenuous refusal, the decision to go to ten the moment that eight had been refused and to settle at anything up to fourteen even as the case was about to begin. Then it was over and they sat in silence for a full minute.

“I suppose you wonder why I’m telling you all this.”

“No, it’s very natural that you should tell me, you’re Kate’s friend, you are hurt on her behalf.” He was gentle.

“But I’m also Patrick’s friend. You must know that.”

“Yes, of course I know that.”

“It’s not just because it’s over, and because Patrick doesn’t want me here anymore …” She saw him raise his eyebrows in surprise, and went on hurriedly. “No, it has nothing to do with that, surprisingly.”

“Of course,” he said, but she wondered whether he believed her.

“It’s because it’s not fair. Patrick has always been fair. And recently some madness has entered into him, and he’s not being fair at all.”

She looked very troubled. He saw what a very beautiful woman she was in this afternoon light, huge dark eyes moving restlessly about her.

“You do know that nothing can be done now?” Fergus said. “We have taken their offer and accepted it willingly. I thought it was enough, and so did Kennedy. But more important than that, Kate and John were perfectly satisfied.”

“I know.” Rachel’s voice was small.

“And everyone in this place thinks it was enough, so they have their pride, and people don’t say it was too much, so the Ryans won’t become objects of hate and envy.”

She looked at the tall gangling young man with the white face and the hair that would never sit in any order or style. Rachel could see that he had always loved Kate Ryan in a hopeless, ineffectual sort of way. His face was stricken to think how poorly he must have represented her on this, the only occasion he had ever had a chance to ride out to battle for her. Perhaps he was trying to justify the small award by saying that it was what the village would tolerate.

“She could have had so much more if she only would have listened to me this morning. I tried to tell her but she wouldn’t hear.”

“No, that’s Kate for you,” he sighed.

“But we were friends. It couldn’t have been unethical between friends.”

“What do you want me to do, Rachel?”

She looked at him, surprised.

“No, I mean it. What should I do now? My own instinct is to put it out of my mind, pretend we never had this conversation. Do you think I should do anything different?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Most certainly not.” He leaned across his desk and took her hand to reassure her on this. “You have always been a great friend to Kate, I have to say that sometimes I thought she spent too much time with you, seeing that you were so close to O’Neill, and that O’Neill is in many ways her adversary.”

“He
is
her adversary, even though he doesn’t intend to be,” Rachel said. “He will close their business, and eight thousand pounds is not enough to compensate them for that.” She was agitated and distressed.

Fergus let a little silence fall between them.

“Fergus, would
you
have listened if I had told you, instead of trying to tell Kate?”

Again a little silence, but eventually he spoke.

“Truthfully, yes. I think I would have listened. It would be unethical and if anyone heard me saying this, I would be in danger of being struck off the rolls, but I would have listened.”

Rachel warmed to his honesty. “I don’t think it’s unethical to help a friend.”

“The Incorporated Law Society might not see it that way.” He smiled ruefully. “They mightn’t be so understanding about how fond I am of Kate.”

“You sort of love her, don’t you?”

“Yes, that’s it, sort of.” He spoke without embarrassment, but he looked out the window onto Bridge Street not at Rachel as he spoke.

“She has everything, you know, life and common sense, and a quick lively mind which I don’t, and … oh, a lot of things. But you’re right, it’s only a sort of love, not real love. I don’t want to take her away from John, I don’t want to go to bed with her. I suppose in ways I avoid getting involved with people, and this type of feeling I have for Kate does as a substitute. Very silly, really.”

“I had to tell you, Fergus. It’s up to you what you do now that you know. If you want to go along with this charade that it was the greatest award since Lord knows when, then do. I won’t be here. I’m going home.”

“Isn’t this your home?”

“I thought it was, but it’s not.”

“We’ll miss you. I wish you were not going away.”

   Eddie Ryan avoided Jack Coyne very deliberately. But Eddie couldn’t avoid trouble. He had been so used to playing around Coyne’s Motor Works that vehicles of every sort fascinated him now.

Mr. Williams had an old battered station wagon. He left it outside the graveyard where he was busy tending the graves. Eddie couldn’t see anyone around. The grass in the graveyard was high. Mr. Williams was bent low.

Eddie looked left and right and slipped into the driving seat. He would drive the car to the end of the road where there was a farmhouse with two gates. He could drive in one and out the other, and back to where the car was now.

He had reckoned without the herd of cows which were coming out one entrance on their way back to the fields after milking. They seemed to be coming in the windows, and his grasp of driving was not as sound as he would like to have thought.

The cows were delighted with a break in the normal milking routine and were prepared to stand chewing the cud and dribbling until the last day dawned. At that moment a tractor came around the corner. Eddie knew the explanations of what he was doing in the vicar’s station wagon would be difficult, not to say impossible. He left the car rapidly and slipped past the staring cows. He heard the tractor hit the car, and kept running until he got to Bridge Street.

His face was innocent when the story got to Ryan’s pub, the tale of poor Mr. Williams’s car, and poor Brigid Kenny’s cows, and Brigid Kenny’s poor son on the tractor, who was somehow held to blame for it all.

To his shock and outrage he heard Mrs. Whelan from the post office coming in and telling his father and mother that Brigid Kenny had seen young Eddie running away from the farm. Mrs. Whelan, of all people. She had always been so nice.

Eddie’s father was furious.

Eddie was asked to come out to the backyard.

That could only mean one thing.

   Kate was furious too. The danger, the stupidity, the downright disregard for human life.

“You’d think that in this house of all houses there would be some attention paid to what can happen when people get hit by vehicles,” she stormed at him as Eddie had slunk back into the house with his hands, legs and bottom aching from the hiding he had been given in the backyard. He looked miserable and wretched, and a tiny grain of sympathy stirred in her.

“Why are you so awful?” she asked him, interested genuinely. And he could detect the change in her tone.

“I don’t feel awful inside,” he said, his tears not far away. Tears that had not come during the beating.

“What do you feel inside?”

“I feel it’s all very boring,” he said truthfully. “I’d love to be somewhere else, somewhere that I’d be important, and that people would talk about me.”

“They’re talking about you tonight.”

She tried not to let her voice sound as if he had been forgiven in any way. Terrible things lay ahead, like the apology to Mr. Williams, like asking Jack Coyne to give an estimate on how much it would cost to repair the damage to the station wagon, like trying to explain to Brigid Kenny (a sour woman at the best of times) and to her son (who was slow by any standards, even among the Kenny family), what exactly Eddie Ryan had been doing on their property running amok.

“I suppose I’d like to be important to someone,” Eddie said simply.

Kate looked at him, and to his amazement she had tears in her eyes. “You’re very important to me.”

“Only to be giving out to and telling people you’re sorry about me.” He wasn’t complaining, that’s just the way he saw things.

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, when I asked was I getting anything to wear at the opening, they all laughed. Nobody even thought I’d be
at
that opening. That’s not being very important.”

He was totally unprepared for her to lean forward from her wheelchair and take him in her arms.

“I know what you mean, Eddie. It’s hard not being important enough to go to Dublin to get an outfit. I’d like to go too. I’d love to go in and out of the shops, in Grafton Street, and down Wicklow Street. Not to buy there, it would be too dear. Then I’d go to George’s Street, and I’d buy something there, and a bit of other shopping—oh, stuff that would bore you, household things. And maybe into a bookshop, get a present for your dad, and then give myself plenty of time and walk down the quays with all my parcels and get the train home. And your father would meet us in the town and drive us home, and I’d try on whatever I’d gotten, and turn around on my own two good legs and show it off, and you’d all say what you thought, and people would take notice of me, and I’d be important again.”

She was still holding him to her as she spoke. When she released him and held him away from her, she saw that the boy was biting his lip.

“I never knew, Mam … I never knew,” he said.

“It’s all right, Eddie,” she said. “We’ll survive.”

“If I had the money, Mam, I’d take you to Dublin for the day,” he said.

“I know you would.”

She was silent now, so Eddie crept away.

Things were very odd at the moment; there were no two ways about it. Mrs. Whelan shopping him, Dad belting the life out of him, and Mam throwing her arms around him and saying she’d love to have two proper legs again.

And there were more peculiar things happening at every turn. Mr. Coyne, who was a hundred if he was a day, had brought a bunch of flowers to Mrs. Quinn, who was nearly a hundred, and the two of them were carrying on like something out of a musical. And Kerry O’Neill had told him to fuck off when he had asked him what was he doing with a boat going up and down between the bridge and the dock. Marty Leonard, who was Tommy’s younger brother, said that Tommy had four pictures of Dara stuck up in his room and he kissed each one good night before he went to bed. And Father Hogan had asked him what were the opening hours going to be in the Shamrock Café and was there any chance that he could buy some of the potato cakes to eat walking along the road.

Eddie thought that everyone in Mountfern was going mad.

   Dara found that her mother seemed withdrawn and somehow wistful these days. She sat and looked out into her garden where the summer flowers were coming to an end.

“Will I bring you the trowel and fork?” Dara asked.

“No. Let’s leave it for a while. Who sees it?”

“You do, we do.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Well, we were always the ones who saw it, it hasn’t been on Telefis Eireann or anything,” Dara replied with some spirit.

“Are you happy with your linen dress for the opening?” Kate asked suddenly.

“Happy isn’t the right word, it looks what it is, a boring linen dress that gets a huge balloony bottom in it if you sit down. It’s a nice blue color, and Mrs. Fine gave me that necklace. I suppose it’s all right, and for all that will be looking at me over there, it’s fine. Why?”

“You can have a new dress if you like,” Kate said.

“What kind of dress, Mam?”

“Whatever you like.”

This had never been said in the history of their lives together. Dara’s mouth was open. There had been a long lecture on thinking that they were millionaires because of the compensation. They had been warned against false expectations and a change of lifestyle. Now out of the blue she was being offered any kind of dress she liked.

“Do you mean something from a shop in Dublin?” she said in disbelief.

“Certainly.”

“But why, Mam? We’re meant to be saving the money for the day we might need to expand the Shamrock Café. And the fees for university.”

“It’s my money, it’s mine, I got it by breaking
my
back. If I say you can have a new dress you can have one. Do you hear me?”

Kate’s eyes were full of tears. Dara rushed to her and threw her arms around the woman in the chair.

“Mam, I’m sorry, of course I want a dress, I just didn’t want you to be spending all your money on me. That’s all.”

She could feel Kate’s body heaving.

“I’d
love
a dress. I’ll go to Dublin on the excursion train on Saturday. I’d
love
it.”

“And Michael, he can go and get a jacket. Will you go with him and see he doesn’t buy an old rag or anything?”

“I will, Mam.”

“You’re going to be dressed like the finest in the land. I’ll get you both off school mid-week one day. If Princess Grace can go to Dublin for her clothes, so can the Ryans take time off from their studies to do the same thing.”

   Sergeant Sheehan was tired. It had been a day when nothing that could have been straightforward was straightforward, everything had more turns in it than a corkscrew. Even the relatively simple business of organizing extra guards for the hotel opening had turned out to be a minefield of petty politics. Was there nobody who would talk straight left in the town? His face creased into a smile when he saw Sheila coming out of the church.

“What were you praying for? Let me guess. You were praying not to have to walk into one more person asking you eejity questions like I do.”

She looked at him affectionately. She had known Seamus and Mary Sheehan for years, she had been with Mary sometimes to see their unfortunate son in the home over on the hill. Seamus was usually too upset to go with his wife, and it was a long lonely journey for the woman to go on her own.

“No, Seamus, I wasn’t praying at all.”

“Well, God, you’ve enough to do. I hope that mad Miss Purcell hasn’t roped you in to clean the church and take the damp out of the Sacred Heart Altar.”