‘Well tell him to take care of himself and not to get damp out on that river bank.’
‘You’re very nice to be so concerned,’ Marian said.
‘Not at all, how are things?’
‘Things are frightfully busy, what with the lodge and everything . . .’
‘Oh, are you getting involved there? I thought they wanted to be left on their own.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of interfering, but there are some things of course that simply have to be done, and poor Miss Hayes is splendid but she does have her limitations.’ Marian gave a little tinkle.
Judy Byrne banged down the receiver and told herself aloud yet again that she was possibly the most stupid woman on earth. It would serve her right if she were to be invited by that Marian Johnson, whose face was like a meringue, to the wedding of the century at the Grange, with a honeymoon to be spent across the river in the elegant Fernscourt, new home of the bride and groom.
The children of Mountfern could talk of nothing but the O’Neills but they didn’t know how or when they would meet them again. It was solved on the day that Grace was driven by her father to Fernscourt. And left there.
Patrick was engrossed in conversations with surveyors and engineers. Grace wandered around touching the long strands of ivy and holding them up so that they trailed in different directions.
With solemn dark eyes Dara and Michael watched her. After an eternity, Dara made the first move.
‘We’ll ask her would she like an ice cream in Daly’s,’ she said firmly.
‘We don’t have enough money,’ Michael protested.
‘We have enough for two.’
‘But we’d have to buy three.’
‘You can suddenly decide at the last minute you don’t want one.’
‘All right.’
They walked hesitantly up to Grace, who was standing on tiptoe to examine what she thought might be a bird’s nesting place.
‘Would you like to come for an ice cream or something?’ Michael asked gruffly.
Grace’s face broke into a dazzling smile. ‘Can I?’ she asked.
Michael was wordless again.
Dara took over. ‘We’d love you to come down to Daly’s, and show you the rest of the town.’
‘I was longing to see everything, but I didn’t want to . . .’ Grace looked doubtful. ‘You’re all friends already, I didn’t want to get in the way.’
‘Nonsense.’ Dara was brisk. ‘You’re just as much entitled to have an ice cream and walk round Mountfern as anyone else.’
She linked Grace O’Neill’s arm and walked purposefully across the footbridge. Michael followed happily, and Patrick O’Neill watched from a distance with a pleased smile.
Eddie Ryan was escorted home to the family business by an irate Declan Morrissey, the manager of the Classic Cinema. Eddie had drawn moustaches on Audrey Hepburn, and on Doris Day. He had drawn them not with a pencil, nor even a ballpoint pen, but with creosote which could not be removed and which meant that no new poster could be affixed on top of the mutilated ones. Declan Morrissey said he did not want the child to be disembowelled but as near to it as could be done within the law.
‘You’re a thorn in my flesh,’ Kate Ryan told her son as she marched him upstairs to where John was working with papers and notebooks scattered around him.
‘John, I know that Wordsworth and the lads never had this kind of distraction, but I’m going to have to interrupt you and ask you to beat Eddie within an inch of his life.’
‘What has he done now?’ John was weary.
‘According to Declan Morrissey, he has defaced the Classic Cinema in a manner from which it will never recover.’
‘Didn’t Declan do that himself with his rows of coloured lights around it?’
‘John!’
‘I know, that has nothing to do with it. Right, Eddie, before I take my belt to you . . .’
‘Ah no, Dad, please no.’
‘Before I take the belt, have you any reason or explanation? I am a reasonable man. I will listen.’
There was silence.
‘Pure badness, I’m afraid,’ Kate said.
‘There’s nothing else to do. If there was anything at all to do I’d do it, but there isn’t.’ Eddie looked very sad.
Kate and John looked at each other, weakening momentarily.
‘But the others don’t put creosote on Morrissey’s walls,’ Kate said.
‘And have us heart-scalded every day of our lives,’ John said.
‘They’ve got a life of their own,’ Eddie said. ‘A life with people in it.’
For some reason that he never understood the strap was not raised.
He was ordered to go and apologise to Mr Morrissey, to take a scrubbing brush and Vim and do his best. To tell Mr Morrissey that his parents would pay Jimbo Doyle to have a go at it if all else failed.
‘A life of their own with people in it,’ Kate said wonderingly to John. ‘Imagine, that’s all he wants, poor little clown.’
‘I suppose it’s what everyone wants,’ John said and went back to his writing, delighted that he didn’t have to beat his small and very difficult son.
Nineteen sixty-two was the summer of the bicycle.
Mr O’Neill had done an extraordinary deal in the big town. It all happened the time he went to buy a car. Apparently he got friendly with the man who sold it to him, and had gone to have a drink with him. The man’s brother had been trying to emigrate to America, but he had no one to stand for him at the other side, no one to give him a job and to be responsible for him. This was a great pity because the poor fellow had just been crossed in love. A woman he had his eye on for many years had upped and married another man entirely. So the brother had only one hope and that was to start a new life in the New World. He wasn’t a man who was afraid of hard work.
It all evolved in the conversation that Mr O’Neill could get his manager back in the States, a Mr Gerry Power, to sponsor him in, and the thing was arranged in a matter of days. All the man had to do now was to have his medical and get his visa. Nobody could believe the speed at which it was done. How could this benefactor be thanked? Mr O’Neill had seen a load of old bicycles. What about a job lot of those at a knockdown price. A price? Not at all, they were a gift. Thirty-odd bicycles were delivered to Jack Coyne’s for nothing. Jack was to test the brakes and do any re-fitting that was necessary. The bikes were available for all who wanted them. Dara and Michael cycled round in circles on theirs; they were the first to get them. The Whites had bikes already, and so had Tommy Leonard, but Maggie didn’t, so a small one was found for her. Grace and Kerry had theirs and there had been some cans of paint thrown in with the deal. The bicycles were all the colours of the rainbow.
Jack Coyne scratched his head many times as children came to choose their free bicycles and to paint them on his premises. He had a suspicion that Patrick O’Neill had in fact pulled a fast one on him. The man had not bought his car through Jack, that was all right, that was his privilege to go where he wanted to. But this business of unloading all these broken bicycles on him. In theory it looked as if Coyne’s were being given the turn. But in fact it was different. There was no money anyway in fiddly jobs like that, and then added to it was the problem that Jack would have to charge half nothing to Patrick O’Neill anyway to try to show that he had mended his wicked ways. And half the kids in the town painting their bicycles on the premises.
He felt sure that Patrick O’Neill wasn’t so stupid as to think that this was doing him a favour.
‘Who can have bikes? Is it only people of eleven?’ Patrick looked down at the small furious boy with hair sticking out in all directions.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ the child said. ‘I just wanted to know if it was worthwhile or if I’d be belted out of there.’ He jerked his head at Jack Coyne’s.
‘What do people say?’
‘Mr Coyne says he can’t get them out of his sight quick en
ough. Father Hogan said we should give them to those in need first.’
‘But aren’t we all in need?’ Patrick asked him.
‘That’s what I said, but you couldn’t argue with a priest.’
‘I know it.’ Patrick was sympathetic.
The small boy wasn’t prepared to let the conversation wander into philosophical waters.
‘So what are the rules, Mr O’Neill?’
Patrick liked him, he was a little toughie.
‘You know my name, why can’t I know yours?’
‘Because then you’d say there were too many bicycles gone to our family because of the twins,’ Eddie said.
‘Oh it’s young Mr Ryan, I see.’
‘Well it’s no use now.’ Eddie’s hands were deep in his pockets.
‘Are you able to ride a bike?’
‘Everyone is.’ Eddie was scornful.
‘No they’re not. Come on, pick one out. If you can ride it straight up and down here for me without wobbling, you can have it.’
Eddie was back like a flash with a bike and a following of half a dozen children.
Patrick watched him attempt a few false starts and then get going. He came back triumphantly.
‘Well?’ he cried.
‘No,’ Patrick said.
‘What do you mean no. I stayed on, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, but you rode on the wrong side of the road, you young fool. You’d have been killed if anyone was coming towards you.’
‘You didn’t say you were counting things like that.’
‘Sorry, friend. Try again next week, same time, same place, new test.’
Eddie grinned back at him. This was the kind of deal he understood.
Grace O’Neill said she thought that Mountfern was the most beautiful place she have ever been. She said that they were all so lucky to have grown up here, it was like a magic place. The children preened themselves when they heard this. Grace didn’t boast about all the places she had been. She didn’t say that New York was better than Mountfern, and she had been to all kinds of things and places they had only seen in the films. She had been up the Empire State Building, and on Broadway. She had been up the Statue of Liberty and she had been across the Brooklyn Bridge. But this was only revealed when they questioned her. Normally she said little about what had been her home up to now. Her chat was all of the future. They knew that her mother had died. They asked her was it awful. Grace said that the worst part had been knowing somehow for ages that she was never going to be really well. They had stopped making plans for the things they would do when Mother got cured. She didn’t know when it began but that was the worst part. The time she had died was hard to remember, there were so many people coming in and out of the house.
She had looked so sad when she talked about that, they changed the subject. Maggie Daly had asked could they see some of her American clothes and all the girls had got on their bicycles and cycled off to the lodge just like that. Of course Tommy Leonard and Michael Ryan and Liam White were far too grown-up and male to want to do anything stupid like cycling nearly three miles to see clothes. But they felt a bit empty sitting there by the river when all the girls had gone. It wasn’t that they would have gone if they had been asked. But they would like to have been asked. They would have preferred if the girls hadn’t gone at all.
Kerry didn’t come and join in the games. He was far too old for them. He was nearly old enough to be on the bridge with the fellows and girls who were almost grown up. But he didn’t hang around there either.
Grace said he cycled a lot on his own; he had found some ruined abbey he liked. And he used to read too, and he was catching up on some work he had to do before he went to his boarding school, and he had some Latin lessons from Mr Williams the vicar, who had said that life was very droll when you had the Protestant parson teaching the Roman Catholics Latin, even though it was never used in Mr Williams’s church and nothing else was used in Canon Moran’s establishment down the road.
‘O’Neill’s children seem to have taken over the place like the Lords of the Soil,’ Fergus said to Kate.
‘I’m quick to find fault, quicker than you are, and I can’t see anything against them,’ Kate said.
‘Oh, cocky little pair of swaggerers,’ Fergus grunted. ‘Sailing round on their bicycles as if they owned the place. Which they do of course. Own the place.’
‘Ah, come on, Fergus, at least half the place is on wheels now, that can’t be bad.’
‘That’s what the people of Hamelin said to each other about the Pied Piper. At least they’re all dancing, and that can’t be bad.’
‘God, Fergus, nothing would please you about that unfortunate family. Seriously, the children smile and they’re being patronising, they don’t smile and they’re being standoffish. What could they do to please you?’
‘Go back to America,’ he said.
‘You’re worse than Eddie when you have that puss on you. What have you so much against them?’
Kate was bright and fresh-looking in a pink blouse and a red pinafore dress. She had bought the blouse in a sale and the pinafore dress was something she had worn years ago, before Declan was born. With a smart black belt to take the maternity look off it she felt as smart as paint. Fergus looked at her, a long admiring look.
‘The main thing I have against them is that they are going to take your business away.’
‘Oh, Fergus.’ She was touched to the heart.
‘Don’t “Oh, Fergus” me, go on being nice to them, silly little over-dressed vipers in your bosom.’ He blew his nose loudly. ‘Just wait until those children have taken away your children’s inheritance. See how you’ll feel then.’
Kate was totally at a loss.
‘It’s not the children’s fault,’ she began.
He put away his handkerchief. ‘You’re quite right. They make me feel old and grubby and silly. Your children make me feel . . . I don’t know, splendid, fascinating.’
‘Which is what you are,’ Kate said, and then went back to work.
6
Everyone asked Miss Hayes what they were like at home, the Americans. Was there a ton of money spent in the place? What did they talk about? Olive Hayes was never sufficiently forthcoming. They were very nice people, she reported, thoughtful and considerate. She had never worked in a house before, it was all a very new experience for her. People thought Miss Hayes was a poor informant. Soon they didn’t bother to ask her any more. She was a woman with no stories to tell.
Olive Hayes was a woman saving her fare to New Zealand. She was going to keep her position in this small comfortable house with the American family. There would be no tales about the arrogant resentful Kerry, the impatient father who could find nothing to say to his son, but who idolised his beautiful daughter. Nor would Miss Hayes talk about Grace outside the house even though there was nothing but good to report. She was a delightful child, anxious to help, willing to learn. She made her bed and kept her room in perfect order. She always asked permission if she were to invite the other children into the house. She had a ready smile and she soldiered on bravely to keep the peace between her father and brother. Miss Hayes had never felt any yearning to marry and rear a family. But sometimes when she looked at Grace O’Neill in the kitchen, helping her to wipe dishes and tumbling out stories of how the day had been spent, she sighed and a soft look came to her long angular features. It would have been good to have had a daughter like Grace O’Neill.
Kitty Daly had thought that the summer would never end, long endless boring summers with that crowd on the bridge being so dismissive and all Maggie’s friends being so loud and awful. But it all changed when Kerry O’Neill came to town. He came in to Daly’s Dairy from time to time. Kitty hated working in the shop during the summer and was normally so sulky and unhelpful that her parents thought it was counter-productive to have her behind the counter. They had a girl from out the country, and Charlie who hauled and dragged things in and out and did deliveries.
> Kerry held out his hand the first time he called.
‘Hi, I’m Kerry O’Neill,’ he had said, as if Kitty didn’t know. As if everyone for miles around didn’t know.
She shook his hand and mumbled.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked, as if he had expected her to give it.
‘Kitty. Kitty Daly.’
‘Oh this is your place?’ He looked around the clean bright shop in admiration. Its cakes and bread in one section, milk, butter and bacon at another counter and the main body of groceries all together behind the main counter.
‘Yes, it is.’ Kitty wished she could think of something else to say, but she couldn’t. She gave a big shrug to let this gorgeous fellow know that she thought it was all terrible. So that he wouldn’t think of her as a poor country hick. But he didn’t seem to think it was dreadful.
‘It’s a very handsome store,’ he said. ‘You must like working in it, you must feel proud of it.’
Kitty was about to change her stance completely and express great pride in the dairy.
But her mother spoke first. ‘Oh there’d be white blackbirds before Miss Kitty here would do a hand’s turn in the shop.’
A dark red stain came into Kitty’s face, but Kerry seemed to understand at once.
‘I’m just the same,’ he said, looking straight at her, though he spoke lightly. ‘I’m very interested in my father’s hotel but he thinks I’m only fooling around. It’s not just, is it?’
‘No it isn’t.’ Kitty Daly was hoarse with excitement as the bright blue eyes of Kerry O’Neill rested on her for a little longer. Then he had bought a bar of chocolate and was gone. She watched him walk easily down Bridge Street and go into Leonard’s. She resisted the urge to run after him and talk more. She would see him again. He was here for ever. And he liked her. He had made it obvious. Kitty saw her mother looking at her and immediately put on a face.
‘I suppose you’ll go getting notions about him now, that’s the next cross we’ll have to bear,’ Mrs Daly said in tones of great weariness.
‘It’s a pity that older people have such sad, sick minds,’ said Kitty, and resolved to be very nice to Mrs Walsh from the Rosemarie hair salon in case there was a chance she might give her a cheap hair-do.