The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer

by Tyler, Anne

  John Ryan was not a great man for formal prayers. Mass time was spent as near the back of the church as possible; in summertime right out in the open air and in thoughts not connected with the actual liturgy taking place. But he did offer prayers of thanks to somewhere, that he had met Kate. He could so easily have not met her. Suppose Jack Coyne’s had not been closed that time when she came in with the puncture, suppose the puncture had happened eleven miles on down the road—they’d have gone to the big town instead. Suppose she had been traveling with a girl who could mend a puncture instead of that giggling friend of hers, who could hardly ride a bike.

  All these things were too much to think about. Like the really black bit after John had seized his chance and arranged to meet Kate again and again, and his mother had said that he was to bring no flighty Dublin girl into this pub, the business belonged to the whole family. John had nearly upped and off at that stage, but Kate had begged him to be understanding. What did the poor old mother mean except that she was afraid of losing him like she had lost her husband and all the rest of her family, two sons priests and far away, two daughters nuns and even farther away in Australia, and the other two sons in America without a notion of coming back.

  Kate said he should be patient, sit it out. Old Mrs. Ryan would come around in time: in the meantime Kate would learn the bar trade in Dublin. And learn it she did, dropping her good salary as a secretary in a firm of solicitors and becoming a maid of all work in a small hotel so that she could become accustomed to working the bar.

  By the time Mrs. Ryan had mellowed, Kate knew all she would need to know about serving a ball of malt, a half one, a black and tan, and a half. She knew when a customer had too much and when to cash a check or start a tab. They had been married quietly. It was 1948, there wasn’t much money about and not many relations either. John’s mother was there, face sour, clothes black, but at least she was there.

  Kate had no family at all. Her mother had died after a life of martyrdom and self-pity. Her father had married again and believed that his new wife had been slighted by everyone, so went nowhere. No amount of persuasion would make them come to her wedding, so Kate O’Connell stood with four friends including Lucy, the girl who couldn’t mend punctures either, and married John Francis Ryan, sandy-haired, plump poet who had to run his family pub to please his mother and then to continue running it after his mother’s time to keep his wife and four children.

  Kate told him that she thanked God for him too. Yes, seriously, when she prayed at night as she always did on her knees for three or four minutes no matter how great his need and desire for her.

  “You can say your prayers afterwards,” he used to beg.

  “Not at all, I’ll fall asleep in your arms afterwards,” she would reply.

  But she assured him she thanked God for his honesty and his kindness and the marvelous way he had of looking at things, and for the four marvelous children. She, who had nobody for so long, had everybody who mattered now. Outsiders said they were well matched but they had no idea how well.

  Nobody watching the quick Kate and the slower John as they smiled at each other across their busy public house would know how much they needed each other and relied one on the other for the qualities that they each lacked. Probably the men might have thought that the youngest of old Ryan’s sons did well for himself getting this handsome city girl to liven up his business. Possibly the women in Mountfern might have said that Kate O’Connell, who came in one day on a bicycle and seemed to have no people to speak of, fell on her feet marrying into Ryan’s pub. But this was to miss the point.

  Kate, uncertain of herself in so many ways, unsure that she had a place anywhere, was more aware than anyone would suspect of how she had found a home and a base and an anchor in the reliable John Ryan. She knew he would never change and cease to love her, as her father had. She knew she didn’t have to act out a role to please and entertain him as she had done to everyone else in the world since she was fourteen. She had got by through being brisk—and sometimes she knew that she was too brisk, she left the children bewildered and bothered, and only John could make the world seem sensible to them again.

  Kate marveled at the time and patience John had with their children, how he could sit for what seemed like forever on the bank of the river with them, making them as still as he was himself to lure the fish out of the water. Only the other day he had them all—even Declan, who never stopped moving around—transfixed over the workings of the old clock which he had taken to bits and put back together. He told them stories of the Fern family who lived over the river, tales of long ago, since John Ryan never knew the house when it stood. The twins would listen forever to how the provisions might come up the river by boat.

  “How would they get them up to the house?” Dara had asked and her father had led the children out to the footbridge and they had all stood speculating what way the great boxes would have been carried up to the mansion. All this when he should have been seeing to the barrels and getting the pub ready for opening.

  But Kate loved him for it, and sometimes she wanted to go over and put her arms around his neck and kiss him full on the lips to tell him how much she loved him and how good he was. Not only to his children and to her, but to the old farmer who would tell the same story twice a day. John could nod and polish a glass and hear it again and again. Kate sometimes got a lump in her throat as she watched his patience and his respect for people, for all kinds of people.

  She felt a tenderness and love for him that was just as strong as any love you saw in the pictures where she sometimes went on a little outing with Sheila Whelan as a treat. But she didn’t show that love too openly. Mountfern wasn’t a place where endearments were used openly. There were no darlings or loves or dears used in Ryan’s pub. They accused each other good-humoredly of all kinds of failings.…

  “My wife would spend the takings of the year if you didn’t watch her … all women are exactly the same.”

  “John, would you ask Mrs. Connolly there would she like a drop more lemonade in her port? A man wouldn’t notice your drink, Mrs. Connolly. If it wasn’t a pint or a glass of whiskey he wouldn’t know how to handle it.”

  But together, alone together, they knew they had something that a lot of people didn’t have. That their own parents certainly didn’t come anywhere near having. And they determined on the day that the twins were born that no child of this new family would grow up in a house of uncertainty and loneliness like the young John and the young Kate in the dark days. Money was not important to either of them but recently they had realized that four children did not live off the air and neither were shoes, schoolbags, dentists’ bills, notebooks, winter coats, more shoes, text books, to be found growing in the rushes along the river bank.

  One of the reasons they had gotten the young country girl to come in was because Kate was going to get a job. She had discussed it with Fergus Slattery last night after the concert and he had said there was no reason she couldn’t start right away. With office experience in Dublin, with day-to-day experience of balancing the books in a business, she would be perfectly qualified to help in the solicitor’s office. Kate Ryan was known not to be a teller of other people’s business. This was most important of all.

  She was looking forward to the whole business of going out to work. The children did not share her enthusiasm.

  “Does this mean we’re poor?” Dara wanted to know.

  “Of course, we’re not poor,” Kate snapped. It was hard enough to find something that would look smart for going out to an office from all her shabby clothes in the bedroom cupboard without having to answer questions like this.

  “Well why are you going out to work for a living then?”

  “In order to keep you and your brothers in leather shoes which you will kick to bits, to buy nice schoolbags that you’ll lose and a few things like that.” Kate looked without any pleasure at what she had always thought of as a smart green two-piece and which now turned out to b
e a crumpled, faded rag.

  “Will we have to sell the pub?” Michael was behind her, always the more anxious of the two. His eyes seemed troubled.

  “Lord, not at all, what has the pair of you so worried?” Kate softened her tone.

  “You look very upset, you keep frowning,” Michael said.

  “Oh that’s only because my clothes look like a lot of jumble.”

  The other two children had come to join in. It wasn’t usual to find a council of war upstairs on a summer evening; Eddie and Declan had come to investigate.

  “Are you afraid of looking like Miss Barry?” Eddie asked. Kate looked at him. Miss Barry was the elderly alcoholic who lived in the presbytery and passed by the dignified title of Priest’s Housekeeper. In fact she was there because of the goodness of the canon, who couldn’t bear to turn her out on the roads. For long periods of time Miss Barry didn’t touch a drop and was a sober if rather erratic worker, cooking and cleaning for the two priests. When she did go on a tear it was an almighty one. At no stage did she ever look like anyone Kate would wish to be compared to.

  “Thank you, Edward,” she said.

  “What have I said?” Eddie wailed.

  The twins felt the conversation was degenerating, as it usually did when Eddie came into it.

  “We’ll be off now.” Dara was lofty.

  “We’ll leave Eddie with you, Mam,” Michael said. He could see an awful clinging look in Eddie’s face that meant he wanted to come with them.

  “The last thing I want is any of you with me.” Kate rummaged deeper. She had to have something that looked like what a person wore in an office.

  “It’s a free country,” Eddie said, his face red with fury. “I can go anywhere I like in Mountfern, anywhere. You can’t stop me.”

  “It shouldn’t be a free country,” Dara said, “not if it means Eddie’s free to go wherever he likes.”

  “Go away from me,” Kate cried. “And Declan, if you set one foot outside this door you are not going to like what happens to you.”

  “Why isn’t it a free country for me?” Declan asked. Not very hopefully.

  “Because you’re the baby,” Dara said.

  “Not that so much. It’s because you’re six. Six-year-olds, in places with rivers in them, stay at home at night.” Kate smiled at his round cross face.

  “Will we have another baby?” he suggested.

  “We will not, thank you,” Kate said firmly.

  Dara and Michael giggled at this, and Eddie was put out because he felt there was something else he was being kept out of.

  “What am I going to do? It’s ages before it gets dark,” Declan complained.

  Kate was going to give in over the tortoise and let him have visiting rights to the mudroom where the tortoise was going to live under her sole control. But it was too soon, they wouldn’t realize the seriousness of the near drowning if she weakened so quickly.

  “Why don’t you go and teach Leopold some tricks?” she suggested, not very hopefully. You couldn’t teach Leopold any tricks. He had joined the household when he was found with a broken leg and a poor bark by Jack Coyne in the back of a truck, and when nobody had claimed him, the Ryans saved him from being put in a sack by Jack Coyne and meeting a watery death.

  Leopold’s bark had never improved significantly, he did have a plaintive yowl, but Jaffa, the huge orange cat who had a purr like thunder, would have been a greater source of alarm to any burglar than the lame and silent Leopold. But there weren’t burglaries or crimes like that in Mountfern. Sergeant Sheehan was always proud to say that people in his place didn’t have to lock their doors at night.

  Leopold was more of an indulgence than a watchdog.

  “Teach him some tricks?” Declan was astounded.

  “You couldn’t even teach Leopold to walk straight, Mam.” This was undeniable.

  “You could exercise Jaffa in the garden,” she offered.

  “We don’t have a garden.”

  “We do. I call it a garden, you call it a yard. Go on, Jaffa would love a bit of exercise.”

  “Will I make her do handstands?” Declan was interested now. Kate realized this had been a wrong road to travel down. She would never find anything to wear, she would spend the rest of the evening wondering if the big orange cat’s back would be broken.

  “Sit in the garden until it’s dark … tell Jaffa to come toward you and then go to the other end of the garden and ask her to come back,” she told Declan.

  “That’s a very dull thing to do. There’s no point in spending the evening doing that,” Declan complained.

  “You’ll find as you grow older there’s a lot of things you’ll spend morning, noon and night doing that there’s no point in,” Kate said, holding a blue houndstooth skirt up to the light. It looked so respectable there must be a reason why it was not to the fore in her meager selection.

  “When I’m old I’ll have a great time,” Declan said wistfully. “I’ll have bags of potato chips for every meal and I’ll stay out all night until even eleven o’clock if I feel like it.”

  His small round face looked sadly out the window at Dara and Michael racing off down River Road, and at Eddie, hands in pockets, striding across the footbridge.

  Kate Ryan had discovered the fatal flaw, a broken zipper and a triangular rip where she had caught it on a door handle.

  “Maybe half-past eleven,” Declan said, looking at her sideways to show that he was a person of no half measures when it came to long-term plans for the future.

  It was a bright warm evening. Eddie looked at the men with the clipboards and instruments.

  “What are you doing?” he asked them.

  “A survey.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Making a measurement of the land.”

  “Why haven’t you got a ruler, then?”

  They looked at each other. Eddie was small and sandy and tousled-looking. He was like a caricature of a Troublesome Boy.

  “We managed without one,” one of the men said.

  “Is it a game, like guessing the weight of a cake?”

  “A bit more scientific I hope.”

  “Who wants to know how wide it is?”

  “The fellow who’s going to buy it.”

  “There’s someone going to live in there?” Eddie looked up at the ruined Fernscourt in amazement.

  “That would appear to be what it’s about all right.”

  “God, isn’t he lucky,” Eddie said with feeling. “I’d love to live in a place like that with no roof, and no floors and no wiping your feet.”

  Dara and Michael went first to Loretto Quinn’s for sweets. Mam had always said to give Loretto the turn, toffees were the same price there as everywhere, but Loretto would appreciate it.

  The twins thought they must be her only customers for Scots Clan. The jar showed no signs of any other takers. She weighed out the two ounces and gave them an apple each free.

  “We couldn’t,” Dara said. A polite and meaningless protest since Michael had already sunk his teeth in his.

  “Ah go on, don’t I get them for nothing,” Loretto said.

  This was not strictly true; she got them from an old man, Papers Flynn, a tramp of sorts who had encircled Mountfern all his life. He lived by picking fruit from low-hanging boughs or feeling gently into the soft nesting places that contrary hens used to find for themselves far from their rightful quarters. Sometimes he offered these as gifts to shopkeepers, who gave him a cheese sandwich or a mug of tea in return.

  “Fierce activity across the river: fellows with cameras on long stilts,” Loretto said conversationally.

  She liked the twins, full of chat without being cheeky. Their young brother Eddie was a different kettle of fish.

  “They’re theologists,” Dara said confidently.

  “Or something a bit like that.” Michael was a stickler for getting things right.

  “Maybe they’re going to make a film.” Loretto was hopeful. “Like Qui
et Man all over again, wouldn’t it be great?”

  Dara didn’t smile. “I think it’s something to do with changing it all over there, someone buying it and making it different.”

  “We’ll let you know if we find out anything,” Michael said.

  Loretto stood at the doorway of her shabby little shop and watched the twins as they headed for the bridge and the heart of Mountfern.

  People used to say that if you bent your head to light a cigarette on the main road you’d miss the two signs to Mountfern and that even if you did see one of the signs and drive off the road through the semi-circle that led down Bridge Street to the River Fern and then back up River Road to the main road again you would wonder what kind of a place it was that you had been through.

  One street, Bridge Street, more or less petered out at the bridge where the church was. The road got narrow across the bridge, and went off meandering to the various townlands and small farms. Bridge Street looked well when the sun shone on the different pastel colors of the houses and shops that fronted right onto the road. Some of them were whitewashed still like Judy Byrne’s house and Conway’s, the place that was both undertaker and pub. Others were pink like Leonard’s the stationers and paper shop, like Meagher’s the small jewelry shop where watches and clocks were mended and gifts were displayed in boxes with cellophane fronts. Daly’s Dairy was a very bright lime green. Mrs. Daly had been very pleased with the color, and was flattered when Fergus Slattery said they would all have to wear sunglasses now to cope with the sudden brightness that radiated from its walls.