Firefly Summer

  ‘I’ve seen Dara. She told me you were wondering why I hadn’t been in.’

  ‘I didn’t send her with that message.’ Kate’s eyes flashed.

  ‘I know,’ Rachel said wearily.

  The first silence they had ever known fell between them. Eventually Rachel spoke.

  ‘It’s no use, Kate, I’m empty, drained, there’s no me to talk to. I’ll go away, you’ve nothing to say to me, nobody has.’

  Kate’s eyes blazed with anger. ‘I have nothing to say to you! Don’t give me that. Take offence if you bloody want to, sulk, imagine yourself wronged, insulted in some way but don’t give me that about my having nothing to say, I have a million things to say, to ask, to tell, to share. I’m not the one who slides past the door, I’m not the one doing the avoiding. I can’t avoid anybody for God’s sake. I don’t have that little luxury any more.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be upset.’

  ‘No of course not, what right has a vegetable to be upset? Poor old Kate, she’s lucky she had anyone come and visit her at all.’

  ‘Kate, you know . . .’

  ‘I know nothing. I’m scared sick about this café I’ve talked them all into doing. I don’t want to make John into some kind of gligeen doing party pieces for Americans, the next thing we’ll have his cap on the floor and ask them to throw dimes into it. I don’t want the boys to be serving cakes and potato bread in case their friends call them sissies. I don’t want Michael to be besotted by Grace with her honeyed words and smiles. I don’t want that bloody Kerry O’Neill raising his little finger and taking the clothes off my daughter, my beautiful Dara, and then throwing her aside . . . So now tell me about the wonderful trouble-free family life I have.’

  ‘What’s the worst bit?’ Rachel asked suddenly.

  ‘I think it’s Kerry. He’s playing her like a fish on a line. He’ll have her as soon as he wants to, he’s the kind that gets everything he wants, and doesn’t care about who he hurts on the way.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘I’m so frightened, and I wanted to talk to you, and now you’ve turned against me too. I’m sorry to be such a fool.’ Kate groped round ineffectually for her handkerchief and cried salt tears down her newly powdered face.

  Rachel’s eyes were full of tears. ‘I couldn’t come near you because I didn’t want you to know how stupid I’ve been. I’ve done something so stupid you wouldn’t believe it, I was too ashamed . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to tell . . .’

  ‘It’s Kerry . . . I’ve done something so stupid . . . so terribly stupid . . .’

  Hand in hand the two women sat in the darkening evening and Kate patted the beautifully ringed hands of Rachel Fine, who told her how she had put herself in Kerry’s power.

  Tony McCann did not have a bank account. But he had been in and out of this particular branch so often to get change, to cash cheques made out to him by other people, that he always regarded it as his bank. He had missed it during the strike.

  He handed over the cheque for a thousand pounds.

  ‘In the money, I see?’ the cashier had said to him pleasantly.

  ‘If it were all mine I’d be hundreds of miles from here on a beach sipping rum and Coca Cola,’ said Tony McCann.

  The cashier sighed and thought about it for a moment. ‘How do you want the money?’

  ‘Ten-pound notes, a hundred of them,’ McCann said. He looked idly round the bank as she went away to verify the cheque. How did people work here five days a week for forty years? Surely they must all have been tempted to take a carrier bag of wads of fivers and run. It was remarkable that so few of them did when you came to think of it.

  ‘Mr McCann?’ It was a man now, a senior man in a suit, with a pinched-looking face.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There seems to be a problem about the cheque.’

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. It has been cancelled and reported stolen.’

  ‘It’s me. McCann.’

  ‘Yes?’ Kerry O’Neill’s voice was anxious suddenly. ‘The cheque doesn’t work.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘You’d better believe me.’

  ‘The bitch. The stupid bitch.’

  ‘You’ll sort it out, then?’

  ‘I’ll sort it out.’

  ‘Mr O’Neill?’

  Brian Doyle was hesitant. Patrick O’Neill was like a devil these days, even the most mild request was met by a bout of bad temper.

  ‘Doyle?’ He was curt.

  ‘Mrs Fine wants to have a word with you.’

  Once Brian had called Rachel by her first name, and that had not found favour either with his boss.

  ‘Good, then I’m sure she will,’ Patrick said.

  ‘On the telephone,’ Brian explained, as if he were talking to a child.

  It had been as much as Patrick could do to stay sane when faced with the Irish telephone system. He had been assured that it was a European thing, not just Irish, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. He said he would make a mental note not to open a chain of hotels on the continent of Europe, and people had smiled at him indulgently. The eager American, hustle bustle. He knew what they said.

  But if Rachel was on the telephone for him that meant he had to leave his office and walk across to Brian Doyle’s headquarters, that was where the only phone link so far had managed to be installed.

  Patrick moved quickly. He would not let Doyle see how annoyed he was to be summoned by Rachel, whom they all knew to be his fancy woman, to walk across the courtyard, through the Thatch Bar and over to those excrescences that Doyle called his headquarters.

  ‘Yes?’ he said curtly, watching Brian pretend to busy himself elsewhere in the cramped space.

  ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘Here?’ He couldn’t believe it.

  ‘No. Anywhere. It’s important.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come up here in the first place instead of having me walk halfway round the country to tell me you were coming?’

  ‘I don’t want to come there.’

  ‘I haven’t time to go over to Loretto’s.’

  ‘No, I don’t want you to come here either.’

  ‘Is this a game of hide and seek, by any chance?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘Coyne’s wood. At the far end up by the old ruined church on the small back road that leads to the Grange. There’s a stile.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Patrick said.

  ‘I’ll leave now, I’ll wait. You get away when you can.’

  He held the receiver in his hand for a while and out of the window of Doyle’s headquarters, through the clutter of the ledge, he saw across the Fern in the distance a figure come out of the door of Loretto Quinn’s shop and get into a small green car.

  ‘Thanks, Brian,’ he said as he replaced the receiver.

  ‘Lovely day for a bit of a spin out into the country,’ Brian said.

  Patrick gave him a look that told Brian that the wise man addressed no words at all to the great O’Neill these days.

  Canon Moran was picking flowers near the stile up in Coyne’s wood. That was all Patrick needed.

  The old man looked up with pleasure as the American approached. This was a bonus for him, he liked a good chat.

  Patrick looked at him thoughtfully. It was a good life being a country priest in Ireland. Canon Moran had all the respect and none of the work in the parish. He had baptised and married and buried people from the place for as long as anyone could remember. There was no way he would be sent away nor his honours stripped from him.

  He could wander in a second childhood, collecting summer flowers.

  ‘You know what you were asking me, about marriage to those who had never been baptised?’

  Patrick tried to keep the maddened irritation out of his face.

  ‘Yes, Canon Moran. It was just something I wondered about in the abstract. Like I sometimes wo
nder about the angels. You know, thrones and dominations and seraphim. I wonder why they’d have a VIP system in heaven.’

  Canon Moran had often wondered about angels too, and particularly about guardian angels. He couldn’t ever see on what basis the poor angels were given mortals to look after. Some angels must have had a very easy time and others a desperate job altogether.

  Patrick wondered was he going to spend the entire morning debating guardian angels with an almost senile cleric who had held an armful of daisies and heathers and some prickly yellow gorse. Still it was better than discussing marriages to infidels. He looked round wildly for any trace of Rachel.

  The canon’s old eyes may have been sharper than Patrick thought.

  ‘Well, I won’t hold you up, you’re a busy man, Mr O’Neill, a busy man, a good man and a generous man. It’s very heartening to know that men like you with all your worldly wealth still keep the laws of God.’

  Patrick was rarely at a loss. But now he had no idea what to say.

  Canon Moran filled the gap for him. ‘And if ever you should need any further talk – just in the abstract of course – about the marriage of unbaptised persons who convert to the Catholic faith, then I know just the man in Archbishop’s House. We were in the seminary together. He didn’t end up in a quiet place like Mountfern, he’s a big expert in canon law and there’s nothing he doesn’t understand about previous marriages contracted outside the Church or any other church which would be recognised as solemnising a Christian marriage according to their own lights . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘They would be entirely null and void and wouldn’t need to be taken into consideration,’ Canon Moran finished triumphantly.

  ‘Well yes, that’s good. I’ll remember that if I need to think about it,’ Patrick said.

  ‘It would be good if you needed to think about it, Mr O’Neill. Life can be lonely at times, and we’re all very pleased here that you’ve come back to the land of your fathers. We wouldn’t want you to feel . . . well to feel a bit alone back there in that big place.’

  For a second time Patrick was without words. He was touched by the old man, he felt a lump in his throat.

  Again Canon Moran filled the pause. ‘So I expect you’ll want to be off for a bit to wander down there by the trees with all the climbing roses on them. They look so beautiful at this time of year, someone should make them into a calendar, I always think.’

  The old man walked back towards the road and Patrick went slowly down to the trees where the roses did indeed wind around the big heavy trunks and the branches, and where Rachel sat on a fallen tree.

  ‘How’s Jimbo’s singing career these days?’ Kate asked Carrie.

  ‘He’s doing very well, he’s going to cut a record,’ Carrie said proudly.

  ‘Is that a single or an LP?’ Kate was well up on records from hearing the children talk.

  ‘It’s going to be an EP, ma’am. You know, the middle kind of one.’ Carrie’s face was shining.

  ‘And does he like all this travelling around? I hear he was as far afield as Donegal.’

  ‘Oh he likes it all right, Mrs Ryan, it’s grand for him. But I don’t like it all that much, to tell you the truth.’

  Kate was sympathetic. ‘And does he not suggest you go along with him?’

  ‘He’s always suggesting it, but how can I?’

  ‘It’s hard all right.’

  ‘Well it is. You see he’s never suggesting I go along as Mrs Jimbo Doyle, if you know what I mean. Just as Carrie.’ She looked very glum.

  ‘Suppose he got work round here, wouldn’t that keep him at home?’

  ‘But that’s the point, there’s plenty of work round here, with the hotel he could be working seven days a week. But he has his heart set on being a star, you see, so the work is only interfering with it.’

  ‘But if he got singing work, I mean. When the hotel opened.’

  Carrie’s face lit up. ‘Wouldn’t that be the makings of us. But Mr O’Neill thinks of Jimbo as a handyman, he wouldn’t employ him as a singer.’

  ‘I could have a word, maybe.’

  ‘Oh, ma’am, and if you were to say it to Mrs Fine, maybe Mr O’Neill would listen to her, too.’

  ‘We’ll see what we can do.’ Kate promised, and Carrie went out to the kitchen and made a big dinner for Leopold in order to have somebody to celebrate with.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be great if poor Jimbo got a chance to do a turn over in Fernscourt when it opens?’ Kate said to John.

  ‘Less of the poor Jimbo, there was a bit about him in the papers on Sunday. He’s doing fine.’

  ‘Well then, it shouldn’t be hard to get him taken on now and then in the Thatch Bar.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say he’d have time for that,’ John said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Kate couldn’t follow the reasoning.

  ‘We’ll offer him a job singing in Ryan’s Shamrock Café. If he’s good then let him sing here, not have him across the river.’

  Kate got a sudden cold feeling. There was a time when she was the one who would have thought up that plan.

  ‘That’s a better idea altogether,’ she said dully.

  ‘Of course it is.’ He patted her hand.

  ‘Dara, will you give me a hand with these table napkins?’

  ‘No, Mammy, no, no, no.’

  ‘That’s lovely, I must say.’

  ‘I’ll do anything but that, I hate hemming bloody napkins.’

  ‘Do you think I like it?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got nothing . . .’ She stopped.

  ‘Nothing better to do. How right you are. Sit in a wheelchair, give her some napkins to hem, stop her hands from becoming paralysed as well as everything else . . .’

  ‘Oh, Mam, really . . .’

  ‘What do you mean, really? Really nothing. That’s what you were saying, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s not like you to be so sorry for yourself.’

  ‘It’s not like you to be such a selfish little madam.’

  A pause. ‘I’m sorry, and that wasn’t what I was going to say . . .’

  ‘What were you going to say?’

  ‘I stopped but I’ll have to say it now because the way you finished it is worse.’

  ‘Well what was it . . .?’

  ‘I was going to say you’ve got nothing more important to do like I have, I want to . . . well, I want to be around a bit . . .’

  Kate looked at her blankly.

  ‘Sort of outside, you know, not in here putting hems on squares.’

  ‘I’d like to be outside a bit too.’

  ‘I know, Mammy, I know, but you’ve sort of had your life. Oh God, I don’t mean that. It’s so easy to say the wrong thing. I mean you’ve had this bit, the bit of hunting and deciding and doing things that matter.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘I do. I’ve had the bit that matters. You haven’t. Off you go, find the bit that matters.’

  ‘Sometimes there’s no pleasing you, Mam, do you know that? You get annoyed if we don’t tell you what’s going on, you get more annoyed if we do tell you. It’s not just that you have all this . . .’ Dara waved at the chair. They never used words like cripple or paralysed or invalid in the house. Sometimes, not often they spoke of the ‘accident’.

  Kate looked thoughtful, not annoyed, and not so sad either.

  ‘I will do a bit of hemming, Mam, but not now, I want to be around, if you could know what I mean at all.’

  Kate seemed to have recovered her humour.

  ‘No, I do see what you mean. You must be around. But, Dara, he may not be back for fun and games this time, he may have other things on his mind.’

  ‘Oh, him?’ Dara flushed and flounced a bit. ‘I wasn’t thinking of him.’

  ‘Of course not, and even if you were why should you listen to me about him? It’s just that I think he’s here for a purpose this time.’

  ‘God, you’re v
ery dramatic at times.’ Dara was gone, mascara and lipstick in the pocket of her white jacket ready to put on when well out of sight of Ryan’s Licensed Premises.

  Patrick sat down on the fallen tree beside Rachel.

  For a moment neither of them said anything. The wood smelled fresh and flowery. Canon Moran had tottered away, there was nothing to disturb them. Butterflies went in and out of the trees, and sometimes a bird rustling in some kind of activity. It was a peaceful place.

  ‘We should have spent more time here,’ Patrick said.

  She smiled at him. Perhaps this might be a bit easier than she had feared. He had sounded so forbidding on the phone.

  She twisted her hands together. ‘It’s so difficult to tell you this.’

  He moved his cuff slightly so that he could see his watch. ‘But I am going to hear it. Right, Rachel?’ he said.

  He had the smile she had known for so many years. It was the smile when someone was going to waste his time. But he owed them. So he would listen.

  It was to that smile that she would have to tell her tale.

  ‘Give me a large brandy, will you, John.’

  ‘Things must be bad over there if you’re having large brandies before lunch,’ John Ryan said mildly, putting the glass in front of Brian Doyle.

  ‘I’ll be hiding it in a tea flask, I tell you.’

  ‘Any one thing or things in general?’

  ‘Who knows? Nothing would please him. He went off to meet your one up in Coyne’s wood as if they were a pair of kids. That didn’t last long, he’s back inside there now with a face on him that would stop a clock.’

  ‘It can’t have gone well, the outing,’ John agreed. ‘Did Rachel come back with him or what?’

  ‘Did she come back with him? Indeed she did not. Those two are like the things you see – you know, kind of statues of a man and a woman. When one comes out the other goes in, one means sun, one means rain. I saw them once somewhere. Blackpool I think it was.’

  John laughed. ‘Are they as bad as that?’

  ‘Oh, God, John, the older people are the worse it hits them, this love carry-on. I think I’m too old for it myself and I’m years younger than O’Neill.’

  ‘You’d better hurry up and marry that girl of yours in the town before someone else does,’ John advised him.