Firefly Summer

  Kate didn’t remember meeting Rachel Fine before. She was dark and exotic-looking, with a beautiful suit that must have cost a fortune. She wore a scarf in such an elegant way too. Usually you only saw people in photographs wearing scarves like that; when they moved it would go into a rag.

  She came towards the bed. ‘Your husband says you have a very sketchy memory of the day.’

  ‘Very.’ Kate felt at a loss with this elegant woman.

  ‘Perhaps that’s good, it means you won’t remember too much about the shock and the pain.’

  ‘No, I can’t remember that at all. I can only remember waking up here and someone telling me it was three days before.’ Kate’s face closed up in pain at the memory.

  ‘I believe there are some wonderful surgeons here, Patrick tells me that his hotshot from New York was highly impressed.’

  Patrick. She called him Patrick. Nobody else who worked with him did. It was coming back to her. John had told her that Rachel Fine was some kind of decorator or designer, she had been staying out in the Slieve Sunset, and then she went on a tour to see about ordering Irish fabrics and things. John had been very vague.

  ‘You’re very good to come and see me. Especially as I’ve been a bit like a madam and saying I didn’t want people to come.’

  ‘No way should you have people gaping at you if you don’t feel like it.’

  Rachel was gentle and easy, she was no effort to talk to. She explained that she had brought glossy magazines, the kind of thing you wouldn’t dream of buying for yourself or reading when you were well. Kate, who had read nothing in the weeks she lay here, was pleased. Those magazines she could just about manage, she felt.

  ‘Why did you come?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Because . . . when I had just arrived in Mountfern you made me welcome. I was sitting in that pub waiting for Patrick to come in, I was anxious and tense and you were kind to me. I liked you.’

  It was a flowery speech. Kate paused for a moment. Then it came back to her the way it had before. She was Patrick O’Neill’s woman!

  Perhaps the woman saw the recognition in her eyes. Anyway she went on to speak of it.

  ‘I thought you were someone I could talk to. I can’t tell you how distressed I was. How unreal it seemed when you were so lively and laughing . . .’ Her eyes filled with tears.

  Something in Kate responded to her warmly. Here was someone who was not afraid to say it was a bloody tragedy. For the first time since it happened, she looked into the face of another human being who was prepared to admit that Kate was very, very unlucky, someone to be pitied rather than jollied along. It was a huge relief.

  ‘Thank you,’ Kate began, and found to her horror that she was beginning to sob. ‘Thank you. I was lively and laughing, wasn’t I? I wasn’t always like this. I was able to run and move and grab things up rather than lie here while people rub oil and powder on me like a giant baby. I used to decide what to do and where to go myself. I did, I did.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the way you were.’ She was matter of fact.

  Kate waited for the cheery sentence saying that she’d be like that again some day. But it didn’t come.

  ‘It’s so unfair,’ Rachel said instead. ‘I’d be able to cope with life if it wasn’t so terribly unjust. All you were doing is looking. Standing looking and thinking about what the place was going to be like, and you end up with your back broken, lying here.’

  Such warmth and sympathy meant that Kate didn’t have to put on any act in return, she didn’t have to bite her lip and be stoic like she did for John, nor pretend a jolly getting-better-every-day role as she did with the children.

  She cried and cried and Rachel held her face to her and didn’t mind about the tears all over her good suit, and didn’t call the nurse. After a while the crying stopped as unexpectedly as it had begun. Kate looked tired.

  ‘Can I come and see you again?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Please. Please.’

  Patrick wasn’t pleased.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going to see her?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you everything.’

  ‘It was sneaky and underhand.’

  ‘I honestly think you can’t be well to say something like that. What on earth could be underhand about going to see someone in hospital?’

  ‘You didn’t ask me should you go.’

  ‘I am not your servant, nor your ten-year-old child. You have told me often enough that you want us to lead separate lives here. I am trying to do that, and now that doesn’t seem to please you either.’ Rachel’s eyes flashed in an unaccustomed display of anger.

  ‘No, but you wouldn’t have mentioned it, I would never have known if Grace hadn’t told me.’

  ‘Grace. Yes.’

  ‘Oh, don’t take that tone, Grace was full of how much Mrs Ryan loved you and how nice you were, she got it all from the twins. She told me in innocence, not full of tittletattle as you are trying to imply.’

  ‘This conversation is getting nowhere. Shall we talk about something else? Work perhaps. I have some samples to discuss with you for wall hangings.’

  ‘To hell with wall hangings . . . What did she say?’

  ‘Kate Ryan? Not much really. She cried a lot. But that was between us.’ Rachel stood up and walked restlessly around the plastic and formica lobby of the Slieve Sunset. Since the incident of their discovery in Rachel’s bedroom on the day of the accident Patrick had been most anxious that all meetings should take place in the public eye and that they be known as colleagues.

  ‘It’s just that it wouldn’t be a good idea to say anything,’ Patrick began. He looked troubled and not like his usual decisive self.

  ‘Say anything?’ Rachel was nonplussed.

  ‘Yeah, well I know this sounds a bit odd, but the lawyers said not to say anything, anything that might admit liability.’

  ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘I know, that’s what I said, but they say you’re not dealing with decent people like the Ryans, there’s always a load of gangsters waiting to get on the bandwagon if they can. Urging people on to litigation.’

  ‘But what litigation? You said you’d pay?’

  ‘Yes I did and I will, but there’s a danger that people could take you for all you had if you admit too much, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t understand you at all. You told me that you had made several attempts to see her. So why are you going? Isn’t it much more likely that you would commit yourself or whatever?’

  ‘No, because I’m a careful man. I guess I was just afraid you might have said something like Patrick will look after everything.’

  ‘I didn’t say it because I assume she knows it, and so does everyone.’

  ‘Let’s stop this, Rachel,’ he said wearily.

  ‘Yes, let’s.’ She was back in her passive role of pleasing him now. She didn’t remind him that it was he who had started the conversation and refused to let it go.

  He looked old and worried.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be great if Mary Donnelly would smile sometimes?’ Fergus said confidentially to Sheila Whelan. ‘She’s not a bad-looking woman, but there’s a terrible ferocity about her.’

  ‘She puts that on. Underneath she’s as nice as anything.’

  ‘Well, life is short. You wouldn’t have the energy to dig down for it,’ Fergus said.

  ‘She’s doing well enough above in the pub, I think?’ Mrs Whelan’s voice was anxious. ‘She’s not putting people off by glowering at them, is she?’

  ‘It would take more than a glower to put a thirsty man off his drink. Not at all, she’s part of the furniture there now, and John is delighted with her. He says she’s the most efficient person he ever had working in a bar in his life.’

  ‘She’s grand if she has plenty to do.’

  ‘There’s plenty in that house all right. How poor Kate ever managed and did my work as well I’ll never know.’

  ‘You speak of her as if she were dead,
Fergus. She’ll be home in a matter of weeks.’

  ‘She might as well be dead for all her life can give her now.’

  ‘Lord Almighty, I hope you don’t go saying that to her.’

  ‘I haven’t been allowed near her to say anything.’ He sounded bitter.

  ‘Well, she just wanted the family for a while.’

  ‘Oh, but I think I’ll be allowed to go next week. After all, O’Neill’s tart has been in so that should open the floodgates.’

  ‘That is not only unlike you, it’s disgusting.’

  Fergus said nothing.

  ‘We’re all upset by what happened, you’re not the only one to feel it. You’d be a very unwise man to talk like that. I mean it.’

  He had never known her so sharp.

  He nodded. ‘Right.’

  ‘If you know how much I mean it. We need people like you of good sense, people who are right about things and know what to do. Half the people have gone mad in Mountfern since Patrick O’Neill came, and Kate’s accident is only one of the big changes we’ll have to see here. Fergus, let you not change too, I beg you.’

  ‘It was a cheap, vulgar thing to say. I’m glad I have a good friend like you to put me right from time to time.’

  ‘That’s the only time I ever tried to put you right in my life,’ Sheila said simply. She patted his hand. They were indeed friends.

  The traction was over. They were moving her into a chair. Everyone spoke about it as if it were a huge breakthrough, as if she were going to be able to fly.

  Kate felt leaden. She’d had a low feeling since she woke but she tried to take part in all the enthusiasm around her. After all it would be ungracious and mulish not to show pleasure at a step forward.

  It didn’t hurt, the moving, they were able to lift her and anticipate what would give a stab of pain and what would be fine, and really there was a lot of her that didn’t ache at all.

  There was a little team around her, the nice young nurse Geraldine and the staff nurse, there was Sister Winston, and two of the hospital porters who seemed to be on call for everything that involved movement, from ambulance stretchers to windows that were stuck with paint. The great Mr Brown the surgeon was there, and so were two physiotherapists.

  She got her first shock when she saw the chair. It was a wheelchair.

  ‘I didn’t think . . .’ Her hand was at her throat.

  Sister Winston was quick. She must have been used to this reaction. ‘Why be in a chair that can just face one way when you can face any way in this?’

  ‘But an ordinary chair would do . . .’

  ‘It would do, certainly, but you wouldn’t be able to go to the window and back to your bed or to the handbasin.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to any of those places, I just want to sit in a chair like an ordinary person.’

  ‘This one’s been prepared for you; tomorrow we can discuss an ordinary chair.’

  There were so many people looking and hoping for her to be well and upright in the chair, Kate could say no more.

  ‘Of course,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The lifting was surprisingly easy, just a gradual movement. After those weeks of lying down and thinking it was normal to wake looking at the ceiling and that people always talked bending over you slightly, it was going to be hard to readjust to sitting up again.

  They had eased her into the chair, her legs wrapped well in a rug. The family would be so pleased to see her sitting up, the nurses said. The porters who had brought the chair smiled their pleasure. Mr Brown said she was making great progress, the two physiotherapists moved here and there to settle her. And that was it. She sat and tried to smile back at all the good humour around. But the smile wouldn’t come.

  She felt faint, and a roaring in her ears.

  They saw it at once, and her head was pushed down. A glass of water, medication was discussed and waved away. It often happened. Sister Winston had seen it all before. That’s why she never let the friends and relatives in until much later.

  Kate Ryan’s mouth was in an O of horror, her hands gripped the sides of the chair.

  ‘I can’t feel . . .’ she cried. ‘I can’t feel it.’

  ‘What can’t you feel?’ Geraldine was on her knees beside the chair, holding Kate’s hand. ‘Shush now, you’re grand altogether, everyone’s delighted with you . . .’

  ‘I can’t feel my bottom, I have no bottom, no legs, nothing. There’s only emptiness where I’m sitting in the chair.’

  Mr Brown was gentle. ‘You’ve known always . . . you’ve known about the paralysis. The realisation comes and goes. You’ve adapted so well in traction, now it’s just a new adapting.’

  ‘It’s like air, it’s not real. I can’t be going to live like this till I die, can I?’ Kate looked around piteously at the semi-circle.

  ‘No, no,’ said Geraldine soothingly.

  ‘I couldn’t stand years of this, I couldn’t stand it. There’s nothing there,’ Kate cried.

  The silence of sympathy broken by clucks of encouragement frightened her even more. Perhaps there weren’t going to be years ahead. Perhaps her life might be nearly over already.

  They put the family off. It seemed the wisest thing. They said there was no cause for alarm but she needed sedation and it would be tiring for Mrs Ryan rather than comforting to have to cope with visitors.

  They didn’t tell John that his wife sat for her first day in a wheelchair staring ahead of her and thinking of a life of dependancy on others. Thinking of the fears she would have . . . or they all would have if she got any infection and she might not have the strength to fight it.

  She thought about the children having to push an old mother around in a wheelchair; because she would be an old mother, she might as well be their grandmother for all the say she was going to have in things, for all the fun and companionship she could give them.

  She thought about the bar and what would happen if Patrick’s hotel took away all their business from them as she had been afraid it would. They couldn’t go on living on his charity as they already were, a private room, a car at John’s beck and call, and anything she said she’d like she knew he would give her.

  It wasn’t his fault that she had walked past those notices saying danger, and men at work. It wasn’t Patrick’s fault that she had walked across the line of a man with a digger who had not expected there to be another human on that part of the site.

  But Kate wept as she had never wept lying flat on her bed. This was the best she could hope for. This terrible dependent sitting posture worse altogether than lying down, which everyone knew was only temporary.

  And when she had learned how to propel the bloody thing with her weak arms and learned how to lift her wasted legs out of it and on to some hideous-looking lavatory bowl, they would say she was cured and send her home. Cured! Cured to go home a cripple and watch this Mary Donnelly, whoever she was, taking Kate’s place.

  Mary Donnelly didn’t want to speak to the men from the brewery or the men from the distillery who called to the pub.

  ‘I’ve had quite enough huggermugger with men since I came to this establishment,’ she said to John. ‘And in any event you are the man of the house, whatever that expression means. You should talk to them yourself.’

  John sighed. Every day he realised more how much of the running of the household Kate had done. Had he been properly grateful? No of course he had not. He had taken it for granted. Now there was no time to go and write his poems, there was no time to take a walk to clear his head after the smoke and noise in the bar. The days fell into a pattern.

  As August became September and Mary got the children ready to go back to school, John began to think he had known no other life than the one where he was picked up at two o’clock in the afternoon and driven in to see his invalid wife in a hospital bed. Like any life, some days were better than others. Sometimes Kate was tired and impatient after long sessions trying to use the wheelchair and manoeuvre he
rself from bed to chair, with failure all the way. Some days she was elated. There were times when he was tired and depressed and picked a row, there were good afternoons where he sat and talked to her easily without either of them thinking how the situation had changed and would still be changed when he got her home.

  He was glad that she seemed friendly with Rachel. He couldn’t quite see what they had to talk about and giggle at, but it was undoubtedly good for her.

  She didn’t want too many visitors, she said, it tired her, so it was rationed to one a day apart from the family and Rachel. John was pleased that she now saw Fergus Slattery, the poor fellow seemed to be most upset about her and very black about apportioning blame and responsibility. He even kept trying to make appointments with John to talk about the case, and the compensation.

  ‘What case?’ John had wanted to know. ‘There’s no case, surely. It was a terrible accident.’

  Fergus had become more impatient than ever about it. And finally Kate said that John should agree to talk about it. Just to calm Fergus down.

  ‘You don’t know the way he is, John. I worked for him, remember? He’s up to his eyes in the letter of the law, not what things people are really involved in. You should see the small prints, and the clauses about this and about that, and the whereases. It’s a different world. Just do me a favour and go to see him in his office, tell him how good Patrick has been, tell him we’re not the kind of people who sue over things, it would be flying in the face of God.’

  ‘The office? But that would be like as if I’d gone in order to take him on.’

  ‘You’re not going to get much talked about in the pub, are you? The door opening every time you’re getting somewhere?’