Firefly Summer

  The sergeant nodded sagely.

  Papers was getting old. There was a time when he would take his chances in anyone’s shed. His main priority in life was to avoid being organised. But now he found battles hard to fight. This was his way of asking Sergeant Sheehan to square it with Miss Purcell and the clergy that he could live there when the cold weather came.

  Patrick said that he didn’t mind if the rest of the hotel wasn’t finished for another decade, he wanted his own suite completed and ready to move into this week.

  ‘That wasn’t on the schedule,’ Brian Doyle was unwise enough to say.

  ‘Your schedule, Doyle, should be published and bound and sold, it would be the comic bestseller of the year.’

  It was totally impossible to insult Brian. ‘That might well be right but we’ll have to take men off other work to sort it out for you. It’s not just getting it ready, it’s making it so that we don’t have to traipse through it all the time.’

  ‘That would be very acceptable,’ Patrick said with heavy irony. ‘Not to have this army of craftsmen you employ traipsing through my quarters. Yes, that would be a great bonus.’

  ‘When do you want to sleep here?’ Brian was practical.

  ‘Tomorrow night.’

  He wanted to be resident in the hotel before the compensation case began. He wanted to be well out of his son’s way. It was becoming increasingly obvious he should be in his own place. At once.

  He walked around the unfinished set of rooms that were to be his new home. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a sitting room, a study and a small kitchen.

  The main rooms faced the Fern and were on the first floor of the house. He hadn’t wanted a kitchen but Rachel had insisted. He wouldn’t always want hotel food. There might be times when Grace would want to cook for the family. It was good to have a place where they could close the door and leave the hotel to get on with itself.

  His study was the biggest room. Two walls were lined with shelves. Rachel said they could get antique furniture later, visit auctions in big country houses maybe, but for now he should have space for his papers and his books.

  Had she ever seen herself with him there? he wondered. There was no hint ever in her suggestions that she might join him in this lifestyle. No room for her clothes was ever taken into consideration. Instead she had urged him to fit out rooms for both Kerry and Grace from the outset so that they would always consider it their home.

  Grace had been busy throughout, deciding where she wanted her closet, her bureau. Kerry’s room, though it existed, had not been furnished or discussed, it was now an official dressing room.

  Brian accompanied Patrick on his tour of inspection.

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ he repeated in the tone that he would use to soothe a dangerous drunk or someone who was both soft in the head and violent.

  ‘Good.’ Patrick deliberately misunderstood the tone, and averted his eyes from the open floorboards, the electric wires and cables still loose from the wall.

  The windows were smeared with squiggles to show that there was glass in them, and there were heaps of wood shavings where the carpentry was still in progress. Furniture in crates stood in the corridors.

  Patrick smiled at it beatifically.

  ‘As long as I have my own little place here, Doyle, I’ll be fine,’ he said.

  ‘I often think, Mr O’Neill, God forgive me, that if you’d come home and built yourself a nice bungalow on this site you’d have saved yourself and everyone else a lot of trouble.’

  ‘How unselfish you are, Doyle. Imagine thinking that you could have passed over the entirely disproportionate wealth I have put your way, not to mention all the extra you made on the side.’

  He clasped Brian warmly by the hand and patted him on the back at the same time.

  ‘Tomorrow around six o’clock I’ll move in. Come and have a drink with me here to celebrate.’

  ‘I will, Mr O’Neill, I look forward to that. I was always a great fan of Alice in Wonderland myself.’

  Rachel’s choking feeling in her throat returned as soon as she got into her car and drove away from the twins. Dara had been filled with scorn and hate.

  And no wonder. A girl of barely sixteen, in love for the first time with a handsome boy who probably filled her head with lies and false assurances. And then the town is saying everywhere in whispers that he has slept with her mother’s friend.

  No wonder those dark eyes blazed with contempt and hurt.

  Rachel remembered those days in June when she had got very close to the girls. She had lived the elder-sister role. That was all part of a Celtic mist of fantasy now.

  But it wasn’t time for self-pity yet, she must get into the hotel, get her business done, and be on the road as soon as possible.

  If she were to have any tatters of dignity left over the whole incident then she must keep calm and workmanlike until she was well out of sight of the cast of interested spectators.

  She parked her car and walked purposefully up the hotel steps in search of Jim Costello.

  They had run into a problem over some of the Irish-linen panels. It was proving difficult to get exactly the same shade of dye in each batch. Young Jim Costello had understood the matter at once. It was a question of deciding whether to attempt to get them all the same or to have deliberately different toning shades.

  Together they had walked the public rooms, climbing ladders and dropping swathes of material.

  Jim wanted this hotel opening to stagger his rivals and quite possibly his future employers or backers. Rachel knew that he was as eager and keen as anyone to get it right.

  Eventually they agreed that it would be gradings of colour. They had to do this in case some wall panels were to fade in the sunlight and could never be replaced exactly.

  It would mean another visit to the small linen mills.

  The workmen saluted her on her way out to the car. They had respect for her since she never threw her weight around and had a quick smile, but didn’t stop to bore them with woman’s kind of chat.

  Leaning against her small green car was Kerry.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Waiting for you.’

  ‘You’ve waited in vain. I’m just leaving. Excuse me . . .’

  She tried to get past him. He did not move.

  She turned around and walked purposefully back up the steps. Kerry ran after her; it was as if he knew that she was heading straight for his father.

  ‘I’m giving you one last chance,’ he said.

  She didn’t stop. He was beside her now.

  ‘Look at this house, Rachel, this is your one chance to have it all, it’s what you gave your whole bloody life for, isn’t it? Don’t throw it away. Write that cheque out. This minute. Or I tell him everything.’

  ‘Come with me and we’ll tell him together.’ She was heading for the staircase.

  ‘I have to have the money. McCann’s people are very angry with you and with me because of you. These guys aren’t people you play around with.’

  He stood in front of her barring her way up the stairs.

  ‘Will you get out of my way?’ She raised her voice so significantly that the workmen all stopped whatever they were doing and nudged each other. A barney between O’Neill’s woman and his son in full view of everyone was worth watching.

  At that very moment Patrick O’Neill appeared on the landing at the top of the stairway. He took in the scene in a second and saw the gawping faces looking at the unexpected floorshow.

  He did the one thing guaranteed to end the excitement and to wound more seriously than any other action he could have taken. He looked at them both dismissively and walked past them without addressing a word to either of them.

  Most of the journey to the weavers was on a good straight road, which was just as well. Rachel drove with minimum concentration. Her eyes blurred over sometimes and she had to blink hard to clear her vision.

  For no reason at all she thought of a little old man wh
o was in the garden of the Haddassah nursing home, a psychiatric home for elderly Jewish clientele. It was the home where Rachel’s mother had died. The old man sat in the garden looking almost unbearably sad. Once Rachel felt compelled to ask him what was upsetting him so much.

  ‘I’m not mad, you see,’ he had said to her resignedly. ‘I’m as sane as you or any other visitor. My nephew put me in here because he wants to steal all my inventions and pass them over as his own. But it sounds such a mad thing to say that it only gives everybody further proof that I am indeed mad.’

  She had been struck at the time by the logic of the old man’s argument. But she had only shaken her head sadly and marvelled at how sane the very far from sane could sound.

  Today, driving across Ireland in the late summer sun, pausing sometimes for a flock of sheep, a herd of cattle, or on one occasion for a great group of young laughing nuns who were going on some kind of outing, Rachel Fine remembered the old man and wished she had been more sympathetic to him.

  Grace was startled to see Kerry looking so wild when he came back to the lodge.

  ‘I’ve just seen myself reflected in the window and you are quite right, I do look a wreck. Listen, I’m going to clean up. Grace, can you put all these new-found cooking skills to advantage and fix me some eggs? Then we’ll talk.’

  She heard him singing in the bathroom and her face brightened as she went happily to the bright sunny kitchen of the lodge.

  She would be sorry to leave this little house in the middle of all the trees. She would miss the pleasant company of Miss Hayes, and her bedroom where the small brown rabbits often hopped up on her window sill and snuffled their noses against the pane.

  Still, it would be exciting in the hotel.

  Jim Costello had told her that there was nothing as heady as a successful hotel, the place buzzed with activity and you got the feeling that it was alive twenty-four hours a day. She smiled at the memory.

  He had added that every hotel needed a really beautiful woman to be at the centre of it, and now Fernscourt was going to have that as well as everything else.

  Kerry came out, his hair damp, wearing clean white trousers and a white sweater.

  ‘That’s more like it.’ He grinned at her. ‘Now tell me all that you’ve been doing.’

  Grace felt that it was he who should do the telling. She had been doing nothing, she said.

  ‘Nothing? Every day, all day, off on a bicycle with young Ryan. Don’t tell me you’ve been doing nothing.’ His eyes were very bright.

  ‘Well, you know, we’ve been fishing and talking and just fooling around.’ She giggled apologetically.

  His face looked hard somehow. ‘What kind of fooling around?’

  ‘Oh heavens, you know. Nothing too serious.’

  ‘It had better not be serious, it had bloody better not be.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She was frightened.

  ‘You’re not to be made cheap, you’re not to throw yourself away on some kid from a pub who’s wet behind the ears but who knows like any animal what he wants and will do all he can to take it.’

  Grace jumped up, eyes blazing. ‘Michael is not an animal. I will not have you speak of him like that.’

  ‘Not until I know he has done you no harm, that he hasn’t forced you to do anything you shouldn’t have done.’

  ‘I’ve done plenty of things I shouldn’t have done, like you have as well,’ Grace cried with spirit. ‘Anything I do with Michael I do because I want to.’

  ‘You must not want to, he must not make you want to. You’re so young, you’re my sister, you aren’t to lie down for any country hick.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘It had better not be.’

  ‘And what about you, you and Dara, why is nobody saying anything to you about all this?’

  ‘That’s different.’ He was dismissive.

  ‘But why is it different?’

  ‘I’m a man, it’s different for men.’

  ‘Dara isn’t a man.’

  The phone rang sharply into the silence between them.

  ‘That’s Michael,’ Grace said in relief. But it wasn’t, it was a man with a Northern Ireland accent to speak to Kerry.

  Kate sent Declan away when she heard that the doctor had arrived.

  Martin White smiled at the youngest Ryan, who hadn’t yet turned into a hooligan like his brother Eddie.

  ‘Will you miss them when they go back tomorrow, or will it be a bit of peace for you?’ he asked.

  ‘I suppose I’ll feel they can get up to less trouble inside the walls of the convent and the brothers’ than roaming wild round this place,’ Kate sighed.

  ‘I know, my two have gone cracked on this riding nonsense, hard hats and crops and boots, and God knows what else, you’re lucky you were spared that. You’re pale, any pains and aches?’

  ‘I’ve an upset stomach, I seem a bit nauseous somehow but I think that’s only tasting all this food we’re going to be offering in the café . . . if there’s anyone to offer it to.’

  ‘Do you need to take this on?’

  ‘It’s take this on or go under.’

  ‘The compensation maybe?’ he suggested tentatively.

  ‘It won’t keep a family, Martin. Oh Lord God how I’m dreading Thursday, the palms of my hands start to sweat at the thought.’

  Dr White said that he would give Kate a mild tranquilliser on the day of the case.

  ‘Will it make me dopey and stupid-sounding?’ Kate wanted to know.

  ‘Nothing could do that.’ Dr White was amused.

  ‘Maybe I don’t need any tranquilliser. I’m slow enough already.’ She seemed very down.

  ‘It will take the sharp edge off the anxiety, that’s all. It won’t affect your powers to say yes or no to a million pounds.’

  ‘I’m not the one saying yes or no, it’ll be John, John and Fergus.’

  He looked at her sharply. In the last few weeks she had seemed less alive to him. It was hard to pinpoint exactly what it was.

  ‘I know I don’t have a degree in psychiatry, but is there anything wrong, Kate? Anything you want to talk about?’

  She gave him a brittle smile. ‘Anything wrong apart from being paralysed, in a wheelchair for life, possibly losing all our trade to a bar across the river? No, not much.’

  Dr White was often accused of having a poor bedside manner. He was unsparing of his time and energy to help a patient but he was never at hand with the coaxing and condolences that a lot of the parish felt they needed from time to time.

  He stood up and prepared to leave. He didn’t even acknowledge what Kate had said.

  ‘See you on Thursday,’ he said briefly and was almost out the door when Kate called out.

  ‘Martin, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why should you be sorry?’ He had his hand on the door.

  ‘I mean for being a smart aleck. You were being kind. There is something wrong. But it’s very hard to say it.’

  Dr Martin White stood sympathetically waiting for her to find the words. He would have stood there all day and all night if necessary and Kate knew it.

  ‘I’m not in charge any more. I’m not a person who decides things . . .’ She fumbled with a lace-edged handkerchief. The doctor looked at her, trying to get her to say more.

  ‘It’s just that there’s no me nowadays, as if I’d lost my personality or something.’

  He was blank in his lack of comprehension. ‘I don’t know what to say to you except that you must be half cracked. Aren’t you a legend for miles around, and as for being in charge, wouldn’t you buy and sell the rest of us? They say it was you that thought up that café idea. Bound to be a gold mine.’

  Kate knew when there was no more to be gained. She thanked the doctor, said that it must be just an attack of nerves over the court case, and told herself again that it was a strange irony that the only one in the whole place who understood what she felt was Patrick O’Neill. She had a very strange dream about
Patrick that kept coming back to her because it was so vivid.

  She dreamed that she was in Coyne’s wood with him and he had taken out a huge shovel and started to dig a great hole.

  It was a grave, he said, like one of the mass famine graves and it was for all the people in Mountfern. They should have died over a hundred years back at the time of the Famine but they had gone on living by mistake. That was why he had come back, to finish the job properly.

  In the dream she asked him if anyone would be saved, and he had said only Kate herself could go free. She wasn’t from this place to begin with and so if she ran now she could go back to where she came from. She had tried to run and had woken in terror with none of the usual joy that a dreamer would feel waking from a dream like that. Because asleep or awake Kate Ryan would never run through the wood, and she kept seeing Patrick’s face smiling sympathetically at her. He seemed to be across the room as he smiled. A courtroom.

  Michael and Dara walked quickly across the bridge.

  They told each other they had better hurry to Leonard’s to buy exercise books and pencils for tomorrow. They ran past the presbytery and up Bridge Street. They weren’t really hurrying to buy their stationery, they wanted to be over the bridge before the thoughts started to come as they always did.

  And because in their different ways they wanted to think about the tunnel.

  Dara thought that if Michael had taken Grace there, then she too could have used it. It made her furious to think that this was why she had lost Kerry O’Neill, because she wouldn’t trust him, she wouldn’t love him properly. And she had wanted to so very much. Why hadn’t she told Michael ages ago that she would take Kerry to the tunnel?

  There it would all have been safe and it would have been like a home.

  Grace and Michael obviously thought so, she told herself bitterly, remembering the sofa piled with cushions.

  Michael had thought they would never leave the tunnel. Everywhere he could see signs of Grace and he being there together. It was astonishing that Dara hadn’t noticed. But what was alarming him much more was what he had seen. The cushions on the sofa like that, he and Grace hadn’t put them there, and there was a rug that didn’t belong to them. There were matches and some orange peel.