Firefly Summer

  By anyone’s standards, including Jack Coyne’s, £8,000 was a lot of money.

  Sheila Whelan was one of the first to visit Kate.

  ‘You must be so glad it’s all over,’ she said. As always she had said exactly the right thing and struck the note that Kate wanted to hear. There were no congratulations offered, nor curious questions on how the huge sum of money was going to be spent. Kate was grateful to sit and talk to her.

  ‘There’ll be a procession through shortly, I’ll leave you alone,’ Sheila said. ‘You’ll want to talk to everyone else.’

  ‘No I will not. I feel like issuing a bulletin and sticking it up outside over the fuchsias there, saying Mrs Ryan would like to thank all the enquirers . . .’

  ‘Sit out in the pub, I’d advise, then you won’t have to have heart-to-hearts with people, and if anyone you really want to talk to comes, you can come back in here.’ There was a look of strain around the postmistress’s eyes.

  ‘Did anything happen?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Not now, I’ll tell you all about it again.’

  ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘No, it’s all over now.’

  ‘Oh, Sheila.’ They sat in silence. The sympathy was so great there were no words for it. A man who walked out and who only wanted to come back when he was on his deathbed. Such things couldn’t be mourned in formal ways. They had to remain unsaid.

  Sheila had been right; the procession did go on all day. Rita Walsh was in, delighted at the news, overjoyed that it was all over, wondering should they invest it in something that a gentleman friend of hers had told her about. It was like a syndicate and you all put in so much and there was hardly any risk, and people had been known to double their investment in a year, Rita could get the details. Kate told her that she herself would like nothing better but unfortunately John was an old stick in the mud. Rita sympathised over the dullness of husbands in general and said that the offer of advice was always there if Kate needed it. A woman has to look to herself, Rita advised sagely. Kate couldn’t meet John’s eye as he pretended not to be listening, she was terrified they would break out laughing.

  Canon Moran and Father Hogan came in together. They said they were out taking a little constitutional and good news of the happy outcome had reached them. They wanted to say how very pleased they were that God’s justice had been done, and it was a wonderful example of how patience and resignation to the will of the Lord was often rewarded, even on this earth.

  At least, Canon Moran did all the speaking. Father Hogan looked in disbelief at the trays of currant bread and scones that he saw on the counter. The rehearsals for the Shamrock Café were well under way. There were tables and chairs already in position, and any day now it would be ready to go. John had decided on no big opening ceremony, just let it creep on people.

  Father Hogan’s pink round face was alight with excitement. ‘We’ll be able to come by here regularly on our constitutional, Canon,’ he said, as Kate was murmuring that out of their very generous compensation she and John were most anxious to make a small contribution to the needs of the parish. It had been a highly satisfactory visit for the clergy.

  Dara heard on the way out of the convent. Jacinta White told her.

  ‘Eight thousand pounds. You’ll be the quality now.’ Jacinta sniffed.

  ‘Don’t make jokes like that.’ Dara could hardly take in the amount.

  ‘It’s not really a joke, you’ll be as good as anyone.’

  ‘We were always as good as anyone already.’

  Jimbo Doyle rang Carrie to tell her.

  ‘I know already, they’re all here celebrating,’ she said.

  ‘Will I come and bring my guitar?’ asked Jimbo.

  ‘I don’t think they’re celebrating that much,’ Carrie said firmly.

  Miss Purcell, who was now happily installed in the presbytery looking after the canon and Father Hogan, dropped a note into her old employer Fergus Slattery. She said that she was delighted that he had been able to get so much money for Mrs Ryan and her family, and that his late father would have been proud of him. Miss Purcell added primly that money wasn’t everything, but she was sure that the Ryans would use what they got wisely, and perhaps Fergus could tell them about the damp that was seeping through at the Sacred Heart Altar since good people to whom much had been given were often anxious to give some of it back to God at the earliest opportunity.

  Michael and Tommy were walking out of the schoolyard when they heard. Tommy was still complaining about the unfairness of teachers. Brother Keane had now in fact succumbed and been taken to the town to visit the dentist by the delivery man who thought he had been bringing boxes of copy books, pens and other stationery supplies to the brothers, not taking one of the brothers with a swollen face off to a dentist.

  One of the younger lads came running up.

  ‘Your ma got a fortune,’ he shouted.

  Michael felt his stomach constrict.

  ‘Eight thousand pounds,’ shouted the young fellow, delighted to be the one who brought the news.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Tommy said. ‘That’s about what they said would be fair – in our house.’

  Patrick had told the Ryans that he would come in later for a drink, he had a few things to attend to in the hotel first. He had clasped their hands warmly and any reserve that might have been between them was now gone.

  Back in his office, he sat with a curiously empty feeling at his desk. For once there were no interruptions; most times he had never been able to have a full five minutes without some crisis. But today nobody came near him. Brian Doyle had said that he heard it was a fair settlement and Patrick had agreed.

  The sour taste in his mouth just wouldn’t go. Last night he had wanted to offer £12,000 and had been told very sharply that it wasn’t up to him to offer anything.

  ‘Let me add to it, secretly,’ he had asked.

  They wouldn’t hear of it. A claim had to be settled and be seen to be settled. It was not fair on other insurers if Patrick was going to play Father Christmas with awards.

  If the Ryans were known to have received something way above what they would expect and were about to accept, then would not all other claimants have similar expectations?

  There was nothing to stop Patrick O’Neill making any ex gratia payments himself, out of his own funds. But it must not come with the name of the insurance company.

  But Patrick knew that if it came from him it would be charity.

  He sat at his desk and wished that his daughter was back from Dublin and that she would walk in the grounds with him talking to him as she once had, before she had become coquettish and head-turning.

  He wished that Kerry was different. That was it, just different. Like another person. He could see hardly any way now that he and his son would have any warmth and understanding between them. A gambler, a liar, a callous boy caring nothing for anyone. And quite possibly Kerry had been with Rachel. The thought of his son in an intimate embrace with Rachel was a thought he had tried to keep far from his mind.

  Rachel lying back on the bed, confused with unaccustomed drink, laughing maybe, in a silly way. Her thick hair spread out on the pillow and Kerry, his own son, leaning over her. It was not believable. He hit his desk with his fist. He would not believe it.

  He had always been able to cope before, or if there was something that he couldn’t deal with he had put it out of his mind. He had decided not to think about Kathleen’s illness when he was not with her, and so never in his long drives to work or in his business day had he let it come into his mind. After he had beaten and fired his first dishonest manager he had allowed no thoughts of the man, no regrets to come back to him at any stage. Kerry’s expulsion from school, his stealing the silver, these he had managed to banish. But the image of his son and Rachel was too horrifying to get rid of.

  Everything was turning out like a nightmare, just a few short weeks before the day he had dreamed about since he was a boy. The day he would open his own
huge palace on the spot where the landlords had once driven his grandfather to an emigrant ship.

  Fergus Slattery sat alone in his office too. Deirdre Dunne with her usual discreet face, pursed lips and habit of looking left and right before she delivered any utterance had said that it was an excellent result and he must be very satisfied.

  Now as he sat by himself and tried to give time to the other files that were on his desk Fergus let his mind go back over it all.

  He still wished that O’Neill had never come to Mountfern. There was nothing the man could do which made Fergus glad that he had invested the savings of a life’s work and investment into changing the face of the village his grandfather left.

  Why couldn’t he have just come back for holidays, like these people he was hoping to find to fill his hotel? He could have worn a shirt with shamrocks on it, bought a fake shillelagh, had his picture taken beside the tinkers with their donkeys, or at a cottage where he might conceivably have roots.

  But O’Neill had to do it his way, no matter who got hurt. And to Fergus’s mind a lot of people had. Not just Kate Ryan.

  People had changed and become greedy. Everyone seemed to be doing things for the wrong reason. Look at his own poor Miss Purcell for instance, talking about having to do up the Sacred Heart Altar in the church and get rid of all the damp to smarten the place up for the visitors. If it was important to spend all that money getting rid of damp around the small side altar, and Fergus didn’t think it was one of life’s essentials, then it should be done for God surely, or for the people who were going to pray in the church, Mountfern people, so they wouldn’t have to see weeping walls and fungus around the statue of the Sacred Heart and drips coming down to endanger the altar lamp. The visitors in Fernscourt might not even be Catholics, and if they were they would probably go off to mass at the old abbey fourteen miles away and take in a bit of history as well. And the vicar was busy getting his graveyard weeded and cleared up before the visitors came. This had to be the wrong approach too, Fergus thought. If old Protestant graves and tombstones were to be honoured then why wait till some Americans, possibly of Episcopalian stock, came to see them?

  But Fergus wasn’t going to get anyone to agree with him. Kate had often warned him against becoming an old eccentric before his time. He was thirty-one. Could his time have come now, by any chance?

  Loretto Quinn heard the news from Rita Walsh. She was dying to run up and say a few words of congratulation to Kate but she couldn’t leave the shop. At that moment Jack Coyne came in.

  ‘Would you mind the place for me, just ten minutes? I’ll be back by then.’

  ‘God, what am I, messenger boy?’

  The man who owned Coyne’s Motor Works and thought of himself as a substantial businessman did not like being thought suitable to fill in behind the counter in what he would always think of as a huckster’s shop.

  Loretto was struggling out of her shopcoat, one of the smart coats that Rachel had got her months back. Rachel had said it was always a good idea to have something to wear to show you were working, and to take it off when work was over. Loretto had agreed eagerly and also it happened that everyone said how smart she looked in the shopcoats anyway, so it had been a great suggestion.

  Jack Coyne grumbled but agreed to hold the fort for ten minutes.

  ‘One minute later now and I’ll leave and pull the door after me.’

  Loretto was gone flying up to Ryan’s to add her good wishes.

  ‘Who’s minding the shop?’ Mary Donnelly wanted to know. Mary was beaming like a sunrise and couldn’t do enough for people.

  ‘Jack Coyne said he’d keep an eye on it,’ Loretto said.

  ‘He has his eye on you,’ Mary said in a doomed voice.

  ‘Never in a million years. He hasn’t said a word of it,’ Loretto tossed her head. She had wondered why Jack Coyne came so often to call. And perhaps in his narrow mean face there were the traces of interest.

  ‘Oh certainly he has,’ Mary said. ‘Wouldn’t it be a nice tidy little business to add to his own?’

  ‘Yes. Well.’ Loretto seemed a bit put out. And yet again Kate and John Ryan exchanged glances across their pub.

  Happy to be on the same wave length and happy that the ordeal was over and their future was secure.

  Jim Costello was glad the court case was out of the way because now his boss could give undivided attention to the hotel opening. It had all been full of problems, and there was a pressing need for Patrick to call everything to order. Jim suggested a meeting with an agenda.

  Patrick was scornful. This was ninnies’ work – agendas, and ‘it was agreed’ and ‘it was decided’ – that was the stuff for nobodies. He hadn’t made his fortune by sitting on his butt attending meetings.

  ‘There are areas which have to be sorted out in the presence of other people,’ Jim said, rather prissily Patrick thought.

  ‘Like what and like which people?’

  ‘Like line authority and what position you want your son to hold in the hotel, and that must be discussed in his presence. That’s one thing.

  ‘Like what penalty clauses you have arranged with Brian Doyle about what he calls the last little finishing touches and I regard as work still left undone. Like whether Mrs Fine is or is not in charge of the decor and the arrangements for the presentation on the opening day.’

  Patrick felt stopped in his tracks. These were three punches he hadn’t expected to be hit with. He took the easiest one first.

  ‘There’s never any problem with Rachel,’ he said. ‘Give her complete charge. She’s had years of knowing how to get on with people, she doesn’t stand on their feet like I do. What’s the fuss anyway? Who’s objecting?’

  ‘No, that’s not the point. Mrs Fine says that you don’t want her to make the arrangements for the opening. She says that she won’t be here for it, and you want the public relations people from Dublin to make the arrangements. They’ve been on the phone twice wanting to know the brief. Mrs Fine just smiles at me and says she won’t be here, you just say, “Rachel will sort it out.” I’m sorry, Mr O’Neill, I know it sounds like whingeing and whining and running to you with every little problem. But can you see how hard it is to decide what is and what is not my responsibility? They’re all quite major things and rather sensitive areas.’

  Patrick looked at him. Costello was unflinching, he didn’t sound like a moaner. The man had right on his side.

  ‘I take your point. First tell Doyle that I’ll kick his ass from here to Galway tomorrow morning and then from Galway right across to Dublin unless he has all those shithouses or whatever they are moved tonight. Do you hear me? Tonight.’

  ‘The things he calls offices or store rooms.’

  ‘I don’t care if he calls them the Pro-Cathedral, they’re shithouses and they are not to be here tomorrow morning. But he is, and eight a.m.’

  ‘Yes. Will I arrange . . .?’

  ‘Just tell him I’ll see him here at eight a.m. And, Costello?’

  ‘Mr O’Neill?’

  ‘If you see my son tell him to fuck off. If he cares to turn up properly attired on the day of the opening then I shall of course be pleased to see him. Not otherwise.’

  Jim Costello’s eyes flashed. ‘No, I’m afraid I can’t give any message like that for you. That is family business. I will not be put in the position of delivering one kind of ultimatum and then delivering back the news of another kind of shrug. I’m sorry, but no.’

  Patrick looked at him in admiration. ‘I was right to pick you. Right, I’ll deal with Kerry, but your side of it is clear. He has no position in this hotel.’

  ‘And the other . . . ?’

  ‘I’m going to find Rachel myself. Do you have any idea where she might be?’

  Jim shook his head and seemed about to say it wasn’t any of his business. But Patrick forestalled him with a laugh.

  ‘Hey, relax. If you’re not going to do my dirty work for me with my son then I don’t suppose I have any hope
of getting you to patch up a lovers’ quarrel for me, do I?’

  He punched his manager genially on the arm and went out through the door of his hotel to stand on his steps and glare at the offending prefab huts that Brian Doyle would be asked to remove the next instant. He noted that Jim Costello had had the good sense not to acknowledge even by a glance that Patrick had just let slip to him that the dispute with Rachel Fine was a lovers’ tiff. Jim Costello had been a very good choice indeed.

  Where was Rachel?

  Kate had expected her at any moment, but she knew now that she need not doubt her friend. Rachel would be here, at some time, it didn’t matter when. She would be so glad to share the good news, and to know that a whole day and even more did not have to be spent arguing in open court.

  She would be delighted too that Patrick was so pleased and thought it was a fair sum.

  Kate looked at the door more than once. She was anxious to go back into her cool green room and talk to Rachel Fine.

  Rachel walked alone along the river bank. She walked from the landing stage upriver, on a path that was overgrown still but not as covered with briars and brambles as the stretch from Fernscourt downriver to the bridge.

  It was quiet here and she would meet nobody. She walked, a small woman in her flat-heeled stylish brogues. Rachel had hardly walked without high heels since she was seventeen years of age, but in Mountfern she had learned to change so many of her ways that changing her footwear seemed minor. She had her hands in the pockets of her suede jacket, her Hermès scarf tied jauntily around her neck.

  To anyone watching she looked an elegant woman enjoying a stroll by the river. Over the years she had learned to keep her feelings well away from the public view. Her face was in a pleasant half smile. But her thoughts were very different from the gentle expression on her face.

  Patrick O’Neill had said that Kate would get at least £12,000 and the insurance company was quite prepared to pay £14,000 without any great quibble. How had it come out at so little in comparison to that? And why had Patrick said or done nothing to show that he thought it had not been adequate?