The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (99 page)

Kerry said nothing for a while, just looked at each side and then straight ahead.

“Why couldn’t it be here?” he asked.

“Here?”

“Yes. Just here, where we are. This is the best view you’ll get of the place with the river in front, and you say it’s going to be facing the river, so why not here?”

“But there isn’t room. People would have to get out of their cars and coaches and haul all their bags way up there. It’s only a footbridge, Kerry.”

“No, make it into a proper bridge and have that part of the drive. Hey, why
don’t
you do that? It would be very impressive.”

His handsome face lit up thinking of it.

“It’s a great idea but there isn’t room. Look how sharp the turning would be. The buses would back into the unfortunate pub, go through the front window.”

“Knock it down,” Kerry said simply.

“I can’t knock it down.”

“You’re going to knock Fernscourt down,” Kerry said, indicating the ruins.

“Yes, but it’s falling down and anyway it’s mine.”

“That pub’s practically falling down, and you could buy it, then it would be yours to do what you wanted with it.”

It was so simple when you were fifteen.

“Where would they go? Kerry, suppose we were to do it, where would the family who live there go?”

“If they’re publicans then they could work for us, just moving across the river from their home,
and
they’d have a nice lump sum.”

“I’ll think about it,” Patrick said. “But as I was going to suggest we have a drink there now, maybe we should sit on this possibility for a while, don’t you think? No point in alarming people or telling them too much.”

“You’re so right,” Kerry said. “Then they’d know we’re interested and they’d raise the price to the roof and stick, knowing they had us over a barrel.”

Patrick looked at his son with a mixture of dismay and pride. It wasn’t hard to know where he had gotten his business sense. But did it always have to be as cold as that? Transplanting a family who had hopes and dreams of their own. He looked back at his site. The boy was quite right, the only possible place to have an entrance was here at this little footbridge. A big wide entrance with lanterns maybe, and should there be old gates or not? It was something he would discuss with Rachel when she arrived. Later on.

   Kate and John had seen them coming and she had run in to change her blouse. She put on her best one, the one with the high neck, and fixed on the cameo brooch. This way she felt she looked more like the lady of the house than someone helping behind the bar. She dusted on a little face powder and added a dab of lipstick.

Carrie saw them as she was slipping out to give the hens a cake of bread that she had burned. The poor hens weren’t at all particular, but Mrs. Ryan was. Very recently she had been rather sharp with Carrie about the late hours spent with Jimbo Doyle and had reminded her tartly that she was responsible for Carrie’s welfare while she lived in the house. When she heard the voices and recognized Mr. O’Neill’s, her heart skipped a beat. Jimbo had taken a four-day job helping a roofer in the big town. Mr. O’Neill thought he was working for him. Oh God, there would be trouble in store.

Eddie and Declan saw them coming and sighed. It meant they would have to wash their faces; they went glumly to the kitchen and took up the facecloths like robots. They had the worst grime removed by the time their mother arrived to do the very same thing for them.

The twins saw them coming and stopped dead in what they were doing, which was playing chess on the landing window seat. Never in their lives had they seen anyone like Mr. O’Neill’s family as they stood in the sun on the footbridge pointing and waving and making a sort of diagram with their hands.

Dara looked at the face of the young man in the grey sweater and white flannels. His head was thrown back and he was laughing. He was the most magnificent boy she had ever seen in her life. And this wasn’t in a magazine, or at the cinema. This was here on their own bridge in Mountfern. She was about to say to Michael that he was gorgeous, but she saw her brother staring at the blonde girl. She wore a short tartan pleated skirt and a lemon-colored sweater. Her curls had a tartan ribbon in them, holding them up in what wasn’t really a pony tail because it wasn’t all tied in but could have been one if she had managed to squeeze in the curls. Michael was looking at her as if he had been blind from birth and had suddenly been given his sight.

   Judy Byrne was furious when she realized that she had not been quick enough. Mr. O’Neill had asked her about what he called her fine cottage. Had she thought of letting it and moving to some smaller place even temporarily? Judy had not seen the drift of his conversation. She had been anxious to make it clear to this handsome and charming American, the first serious bachelor to come their way for a long time, that her roots were firmly planted in Mountfern, that she was a woman of this place who would not be moved.

In fact the little house would have been ideal for the O’Neills. Every time Judy thought of it she raged again at her own blindness. It would have been central; it was just the right size. He would have paid most generously anything she had asked. But the real benefit would have been that Patrick O’Neill and his children would have been living there in her house. There were a million places Judy could have gone for the months that were involved. Sheila Whelan had a spare room. Poor Mrs. Meagher of the jewelry shop was thinking of letting a room. Oh why had she been so foolish as not to see that of course the man would want a place to live while he was building his hotel? She would have had every right to call, to be a family friend. What more natural than that she should return to her own house from time to time?

Judy worked three afternoons in the physiotherapy department of the hospital in the town. But there was plenty of work for her in Mountfern and around. She had come home when her mother was bedridden, and even after her mother’s death she saw no reason to leave the small quiet country practice. Dr. White made sure she had plenty of work. He always said that she was indispensable with patients who were recovering from a stroke or who had broken an arm or a leg. It was a satisfying life in many ways. But she was lonely, and there were so few chances to meet anyone at all suitable in these parts, at her age. And now that she had met one, and he had been very charming, she had sent him right into the arms of that foolish Marian Johnson.

   Marian Johnson had nearly died of delight when she realized why Patrick O’Neill was asking about the gate lodge. In the beginning she had been about to apologize for the place, saying that it was so run down there was hardly anything that could be done with it. In fact it was a perfectly serviceable house where Joe Whelan’s people had once lived. That was long ago; they used to open the gates and take the messages, and lived rent free for years, but the family had all scattered. Even before Joe Whelan hightailed it for Dublin after some peroxide blonde, he had been living in Bridge Street with Sheila in the post office.

There had been vaguely unsatisfactory people in it since then, but the Johnsons had never stirred themselves to arrange a better let. Suddenly she saw unlimited possibilities.

“I was hoping to do it up so that people, nice people, could live there. I can’t think who would like it, though.” She smiled an arch smile, but let it fade suddenly when she got the feeling that Patrick might have seen through it. He spoke quite directly.

“I had been thinking of asking you about it myself. I was wondering, though, if it might be a little too far from town.”

“Not at all,” Marian cried. “Don’t you have a car? Won’t the girl have a bicycle, and won’t the boy be off with the Jesuits or the Benedictines or wherever?”

Patrick had smiled.

“If you’re sure it won’t be too much trouble?” he said.

Marian Johnson said it would be no trouble at all. It would be a pleasure for her.

And indeed it was. Jimbo Doyle was in and instructions were given in crisp barks by Marian. No expense was spared, chimneys were swept, baskets of logs were cut, the best bedding from the Grange Hotel was brought to the Lodge. Some of the antiques that Patrick had admired in the house were also given a new home. Windows were stripped clean of the overhanging ivy; the little garden was dug, a space cleared for Patrick’s car, and he was assured that all would be ready when he came back from America with his children. He would also need someone to look after them.

This, Marian found a bit of a quandary. No young skit of a girl would be any use, it had to be someone responsible. A local widow, perhaps, Patrick had suggested, someone who might be glad of the chance to live with a family for some months. Marian thought deeply. Not Mrs. Meagher in the jeweler’s. She was too recently widowed to think of making any plans, Marian said. She was also a handsome if neurotic red-haired woman who would most certainly cause trouble of some kind. Not poor Loretto Quinn with her little huckster’s shop on River Road. She could hardly cope with her own establishment. Certainly not Mrs. Rita Walsh of the Rosemarie hair salon, whose reputation was widely known.

Marian decided to consult Sheila Whelan, who of course knew exactly the person. Miss Hayes. She was sixty if she was a day; she was efficient. She could cook, she could mend, and she would stand no nonsense if the children were troublesome.

Miss Hayes was an inspired idea. Marian Johnson took all the praise and the thanks.

“And what shall I call you, Miss Hayes?” Patrick said to her on the first evening.

“Miss Hayes would do very well,” she said.

“It’s just that everyone is so friendly around here. I didn’t want to do the wrong thing.”

“Oh I’m sure you would never do that, Mr. O’Neill.”

“I hope the children will settle in well here.” Patrick was not a man who was ever at a loss for a word, but Miss Hayes was proving that his charm was not as irresistible as he had hoped.

“I’m sure they will, Mr. O’Neill. It would be strange children that wouldn’t love a house like this, a room each, their own wireless and a bathroom for themselves and no one else.” Miss Hayes shook her head in awe of the second bathroom.

Grace and Kerry giggled behind Miss Hayes’s back after their first evening meal. But not too loudly; she had an air of authority about her, and also she had just fixed them a truly great meal.

Grace fell asleep almost at once. The door of her room was open and Patrick went in to kiss her forehead with the curls damp from her bath. She looked babyish, younger than her twelve years as she lay asleep there. He stood and looked at her for a long, long moment.

Kerry was not sleepy, he said.

“Do you want to drive over with me and walk in Fernscourt by night?” he asked.

Kerry shrugged. It was as if he had gone back to his old self—the Kerry who had nothing much to say to his father.

“Not really,” he said.

“Sure.” Patrick was easy. He wouldn’t rush the boy. “Go in your own time; see it your own way.”

“Yes, that’s what I’ll do, Father,” Kerry had said. His face, in spite of his golden tan and his piercing blue eyes, looked curiously empty.

   They were the talk of the town. Tommy Leonard said that he had asked Kerry how old he was. He had asked him straight out.

“You spoke to him?” Maggie Daly was over-excited by it all.

“Yeah, that’s the way people ask questions,” Tommy said. “With speech. Words and all.”

“What did he say?” Michael rescued poor Maggie.

“Didn’t you ask him yourself? Wasn’t he inside in your place for ages?” Tommy Leonard was jealous of the time that the two star-like Americans had spent in Ryan’s.

“I couldn’t ask much. Mam asked us to show them the animals. God, imagine asking
anyone
to look at our animals let alone people like that.”

Tommy Leonard was mollified. He was actually in the poor position of not knowing
what
age Kerry O’Neill actually was. He had asked, it was true, but Kerry had just smiled at him knowingly and asked him to guess.

Tommy Leonard had guessed fifteen, and Kerry had just smiled again. As an encounter it hadn’t pleased Tommy, he got no glory in recalling it.

“Wasn’t she beautiful?” Maggie said, in what was almost a whisper.

“She was more than beautiful,” Dara said firmly. “She had classic good looks.”

Dara didn’t know exactly what that meant, but she had heard it said once about some actress. It seemed the highest praise there could be to have good looks that were classic. It gave them a virtue somehow, took them out of the ordinary variety.

“Imagine, she’s going to be at school like the rest of us.” Maggie could hardly take it in.

“I’m sure she’ll hate it.” Dara was sympathetic to Grace and outraged that school wouldn’t live up to her hopes.

“Everyone hates school,” said Jacinta White, who hadn’t met Grace and Kerry personally. She had only waved to them as they passed in the car with Mr. O’Neill. Jacinta and her brother Liam were peeved not to have met the new arrivals; it left them at a disadvantage somehow.

They had planned to go fishing that day; often the six of them waded up the river with their simple fishing rods. They had all been catching fish for as long as they could remember, and they used to laugh at the fishermen who came from Dublin and far-off places with all their expensive tackle. Young Mr. Slattery had once told them that the whole principle of fishing for thousands of years had been some sort of an old hook, some sort of an old stick and a length of thread to connect the two. Only fancy folk who wouldn’t know a pike from a perch, or either of them from a brown trout, went to all this ungodly fuss about rods and tackle. Sometimes young Mr. Slattery came and sat with them and told them things about the river. He always sounded as if he were making some kind of joke about it, or as if he didn’t really believe what he was saying himself. He said that the Fern wasn’t cold enough or fast enough for game fish. You wouldn’t find any salmon leaping around it or refined sort of trout. These were classier fish that needed a load of oxygen. The Fern was a coarse fish for a coarser fisherman. It was low in oxygen, and full of slow ponderous fish like the tench that could live with no oxygen at all. Like the people of Mountfern themselves. Young Mr. Slattery puzzled the children, he was neither one thing nor the other.