Whitethorn Woods (20 page)

   "Or a little selfish, maybe?" I suggested. Wrong way to go, Chester.

   Hannah Harty defended him. He had worked tirelessly for this place. Nobody could think he was selfish.

   I said I was just an outsider; I didn't really know. But I did know. And he was selfish. I saw this more and more.

   He would accept a drink from me in the hotel, but never buy the other half. I heard from Hannah how she would make him a steak-and-kidney pie or cook him a roast chicken because men were so hopeless. But the hotel had a perfectly good dining room where he could have entertained her and yet he never did. He was certainly very arrogant to young Jimmy White, so much so that the young man told me he would have to fold his tent and steal away. There was no living for him here.

   Meanwhile my own plans were going ahead. Finn the building foreman now loved me like a brother and had recruited people from all over the country to build the Danny O'Neill Health Center in Doon. It was growing like a mushroom every day before our eyes.

   The people could hardly believe that there would be X-ray facilities and heart monitoring machines and a therapeutic swimming pool, all on their own doorsteps, with a dozen or more treatment rooms planned for those who might want to rent them. It was the medicine of the future, the newspapers said. Already there had been inquiries from a dental practice, a Pilates class and a yoga class, as well as several specialists interested in the possibility of hav ing a clinic there twice a week. It was all a matter of bringing health care to the people rather than letting patients travel great distances, adding to their distress. I had been hoping Jimmy White would be part of it, but no, he was gone before it was up and running.

   Hannah Harty had obviously handed over the bulk of my work to a firm of accountants by now but she still did my own personal books for me. I enjoyed our sessions together.

   Finn would come for a Friday drink at the hotel around six and bring me up to date with what had happened during the week, then Hannah Harty would join us, countersign some checks for Finn, and then she and I would have dinner.

   She always had her hair nicely done at the beauty parlor for our meetings. She liked to talk about Dr. Dermot, and because I'm basically easygoing I let her chatter on. She used to meet him on Saturday, so I think the fancy hairdo was really in his honor. But I noticed that there were more and more occasions when Dr. Dermot wasn't going to be able to make their Saturday meetings.

   He had a case conference about a patient. He had a golf game where they were depending on him. He had friends from overseas passing through. Friends who were never named or introduced.

   Hannah had begun to wonder whether Dr. Dermot might be avoiding her. I tutted and said I was sure that wasn't true, which was just what she wanted to hear.

   "And of course you still do his books for him?"

   "Well, yes, but he just leaves the material there in a tray nowadays, he's not there himself." She was very troubled.

   "Maybe he's busy, on urgent cases."

   "Ah, Chester, you know Dermot," she said. "There's never anything very urgent. I think he's afraid our names are being linked."

   "But he should be proud of that!" I said.

   She bit her lip, her eyes filled with tears and she shook her head sadly. I wanted to go down and take that annoying Dr. Dermot by his thin shoulders and shake the life out of him. Why should he upset a decent woman like Hannah Harty? A woman that any normal man would be proud to escort around the place. And maybe share a life with.

   And as that thought went across my mind, it was followed by another thought. H
annah Harty is much too good for that little
weasel. She's the kind of woman that I personally would be happy to
spend much more time with.
I wondered why I hadn't seen this before.

   I hoped that she didn't think she had confided too much in me and therefore could never learn to see me as a person. Well, I would never know unless I moved things forward a little. So I suggested that after she picked up Dr. Dermot's papers tomorrow, she and I take a drive together.

   "That's if he's not there of course," Hannah said.

   He wasn't there, so we drove off to see an old castle that had a waterfall on the grounds. And the next week we went to an art exhibition, and the week after that we went together to the wedding of Finn Ferguson's daughter. By now she was talking a lot less of Dr. Dermot, and her name was most definitely up with mine or linked with mine or whatever the expression they used around here.

   The three-month visit had turned into six months. And despite the best efforts of Finn the foreman, the building seemed to take forever. I thought less and less about going back to Kovac's in America. Lots of things were keeping me here. The need to make our grandpa's name connected to a center of excellence, a place that would be at the heart of the community he had loved so much and mourned so long in America.

   I told my brothers that I probably saw this as a permanent position. They were pleased for me and assured me that they could manage well without me and they had already realized that I had found a life that involved me deeply back in Ireland. They didn't realize how much I was involved.

And they hadn't heard of Hannah Harty.

   She was such a help to me in so many ways: she found a designer to do a restful decor for the Danny O'Neill Health Center, she got Finn's new son-in-law to do the landscaping, she gave little dinner parties and invited Ciaran Brown from the bank and his wife, and the lawyer Sean Kenny and his wife. And Maggie Kiernan and her husband when they could get a babysitter.

   She did ask Dr. Dermot from time to time but he never was free to accept. And then she didn't ask him anymore.

   One day he cornered me about the new center. He hadn't changed at all, he was still very pleased with himself. He had heard it was going to be opened by a government minister. He was laughing at the thought. Hadn't they little to do with their time?

   I reminded him that on several occasions I had invited him to take space there. I thought that if he had all the referral places on the premises, he finally might actually start sending people for the tests and scans they needed. But he hadn't listened.

   He had even ridiculed the idea, saying that he had his own perfectly good office, thank you very much.

   I explained that I would then be offering the space to other doctors, and he said he wished me luck taking money from eejits and losers. But of course I hadn't done that. The Danny O'Neill Health Center was going to make sure that the people of this place got proper medical treatment, not like my grandpa and his great number of brothers and sisters scattered all over the globe, each one of them in poor health as they headed for a new life in a new land.

   But it was only now, when he realized that a real live government minister was going to come and open the premises, that Dr. Dermot showed any interest in it.

   "I suppose that place will be a license to print money for you, Chester," he said to me with his usual sneer.

   It was hardly worth arguing with him. He wasn't the kind of man who would understand that I had put my own money into it, invited others to contribute and gathered a team. The notion that I wasn't in it for a profit would have been beyond his grasp.

   "Oh, you know the way it is." I shrugged. I had learned a few of these meaningless phrases since coming to this land.

   "I don't at all know the way it is, I'm the last to know anything around here," the doctor snapped. "And a patient told me this morning that you have notions about Miss Harty, that was news to me too."

   "I am a great admirer of Hannah Harty, that is true, your patient was not wrongly informed," I said pompously.

   "Well, as long as it's only admiring from afar, no one would quarrel with that."

   He was actually warning me off, staking his claim to a woman whom he had ignored and humiliated. I felt bile rise in my throat. But I had got as far as this in life by keeping my temper. I wouldn't risk everything now. And I realized that I really did feel a primeval rage against this man as a rival.

   But I have seen too many people lose things over rage. I would not give anger its head.

   "I have to go now, Dr. Dermot," I said in a voice that I knew sounded choked.

   He smiled his superior and hugely irritating smile. "Well, sure you do," he said, raising his glass at me. "Sure you do."

   I walked across the square, shaking. Zloty came with me to keep me company or to give me courage—I didn't know which. I had never felt so hostile toward a man before. Not ever. So that meant that I had never felt so strongly about a woman either. But I had no idea whether she felt anything remotely similar. Calm, gentle, ladylike Hannah, maybe she thought of me just as a pleasant acquaintance.

   What a poor specimen of a man I must be. No idea whether this woman liked me, even a little bit.

   I found myself walking straight toward the elegant ivy-covered house where she lived alone. Her grandparents would have lived in that house when my poor grandpa was packing his few belongings and leaving the wretched hovel that would now be a tiny part of the Danny O'Neill Health Center.

   She was surprised to see me. I had never come unannounced before. But she welcomed me in and poured me a glass of wine. She looked pleased rather than annoyed to see me. So that was good.

   "I was wondering, Hannah . . ." I began.

   "What were you wondering now?" She held her head on one side.

   I'm just
hopeless
at this sort of thing. There are men who just know what to say, who have words at will. But then Hannah wasn't used to men like that, I mean, she had fancied that poisonous doctor. I must just be honest, straightforward.

   "I was wondering if you would ever see a future with a person like me." I said it straight out.

   "Someone
like
you, Chester—or you?" She was teasing me now.

   "Me, Hannah," I said simply.

   She walked away from me in her elegant drawing room. "I'm much too old for you," she said sadly.

   "You're two and a half years older than me," I said.

   She smiled as if I were a toddler who had made an endearing remark.

   "Ah yes, but before you were born I was waddling around here taking notice."

   "Maybe you were waiting for me to come and join you?" I said hopefully.

   "Well, if I was waiting for you, Chester, then I waited a long time," she said.

   And then I knew it was going to be all right. And the rage I had for Dr. Dermot died down in me. What had I to be enraged about?

   If it hadn't been for him I might never have crossed the street and spoken aloud to Hannah, I might have let it slip away as other possible relationships had slipped away in the past.

   "Will I have to go and live in America?" she asked.

   "No, I'd prefer to live here. I'd like to see the Center up and running, I want to know if the big road around Rossmore ever gets built, if the well to St. Ann is taken down. I'm fascinated by this place now, and to live here with you would be . . . well, it would be better than I ever dreamed."

   She seemed very pleased.

   "But I hope you'll come over and meet my family," I said.

   "They'll be horrified with me," she said, nervously patting her hair.

   "They'll love you and my mom will be so pleased. She said that maybe I'd find a colleen over here," I admitted.

   "Oh, a bit of an aging colleen," she said.

   "Please, Hannah . . ." I began and she went to draw the curtains of her big bay window that looked out on the square.

   Before she closed them I saw Dr. Dermot coming out of the hotel. He paused and looked at Hannah's house and then turned and went back to his own lonely place. He had only a short working life ahead of him. Once the Danny O'Neill Health Center opened in Doon, there would be little demand for Dr. Dermot's old-fashioned, blundering medicine. And now he had lost the woman who might have made his last years bearable.

   I know that everyone always said about me that I was too goodnatured, and always thought the best of everyone.

   But truly I felt sorry for the guy.

the Woods
 

F
ather Brian Flynn went to the station to meet his sister, Judy. She hadn't been home for ten years and the time showed very definitely on her face. He was shocked at how pale and drawn she looked. Judy was only thirty-nine. She could have been in her late fifties.

   She saw him and waved. "Aren't you very good to come and meet me!" She gave him a hug.

   "I'm only sorry that I can't offer you somewhere to stay. It seems terrible for you to have to pay for a hotel when you have a mother and two brothers in Rossmore."