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

by Tyler, Anne

It was a courtesy, a little personal remark to show that Sister Laura cared about Grace and her family. The girl’s face flushed a bit.

  “He liked it very much, but the place was a bit damp so they decided because he has a weak chest … they thought … they said it would be better if he went to another school. Which isn’t damp. More modern. So he’s going there.”

  “Very wise, you can’t be too careful with chests,” Sister Laura said.

  It was an odd thing to move the boy at the beginning of the summer term, very upsetting to child and school to have changes in the middle of the academic year. And surely the place couldn’t be all that damp in the summer.

  Still it was no business of hers. Sister Laura put her mind to the business of keeping the children’s minds on school when everything outside was tempting them out of the classroom and on to the river bank, into the woods and over the springy green fields around Mountfern.

  Patrick and Kerry sat at the breakfast table in the lodge. Miss Hayes left the refilled coffee pot on the table and explained that she was about to cycle into Mountfern for the messages. She wished Kerry good luck at his new school and said she hoped it wouldn’t be damp like the last place. There was nothing as bad as a chill that settled on the chest. And she was gone.

  She knew of course that there had been hell to pay between father and son.

  Mr. O’Neill had said to her on that evening when he came back with the boy, looking as if he’d been in a fight with a crowd of thugs, that there were a few things the family wanted to discuss in confidence and they would probably go away for some days to do so in privacy. Olive Hayes had given it a little thought and said that it would be much better if she were to go away and let them have the house on their own. She had stocked up the larder and gone to a cousin in Galway without either giving or getting any further explanations. She knew that she had done the right thing; Mr. O’Neill had gripped her hand firmly when she returned and said that they had been greatly blessed to have found someone like her. He had also added that there would always be a place and role for her when the new hotel was built. If it was ever built. Life was full of obstacles, he had said with his engaging smile.

  And so now she left them alone once more so that the father and son could say goodbye in whatever way they wanted to without having to lower their voices for fear of her overhearing them.

  In fact they sat in silence for some minutes after they heard her bicycle creak out through the big iron gates of the Grange.

  “I’ve done a lot of thinking, Kerry.”

  Kerry looked at him politely.

  “We seem to have discovered that it wasn’t for drugs, or for alcohol. It was not for anyone else … you do not appear to have made any friends. It was hardly for a woman, and at your age you are unlikely to have done anything for which you could be blackmailed. There was no race meeting where you could have lost it, and you aren’t known in the bookies near the school, so it couldn’t have been that. If you bought anything with it then that item was not delivered. You will not tell me and I have not been able to find out.”

  Kerry said nothing.

  “Is that a summary of what has happened?”

  “Yes, you left out a bit here and there.” Kerry rubbed his bruised jaw.

  “I wish that I hadn’t beaten you. I’ve said that.”

  “I don’t mind. It makes us quits.”

  “It does not make us quits. In no way does it make us anything like quits.”

  Patrick stood up and walked toward the window.

  “It leaves me knowing that I can’t control my temper; that’s a weak position to be in. I am also left with the knowledge that you stole an enormous sum of money for a purpose which you cannot or will not explain, which leaves me in an even weaker position. How am I to continue in this way of life that I am trying to build for us if I cannot trust you? You may take money from Miss Hayes’s purse; you may reach over the counter in Daly’s and put your hand in the till. I may have to drive to this new school and hear a similar story.

  “All that’s happened to you is that you got beaten. Your life goes on exactly the same—new school, clean slate, reputation totally unsullied even to your little sister.”

  Kerry remained very still.

  “In five minutes Marian is coming to drive you into the town, and you are getting the train to a school I have not seen. The principal has had a lying letter from that death’s head Minehan. I’ve seen a copy of it. He will not have gone behind my back, so you start here with nothing on your record. This is your last chance, Kerry, your only chance.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “No, I mean it. We’ve done a cosmetic job on it; we’ve papered it over. The last school was damp, you had a wheeze in your chest, medical advice … even Grace more or less believes it now. You’ve been given a new start. I’d like to embrace you and come with you to the school, and tell this new head priest, whoever he is, that I’m proud of my son and I want him to do well, like I did last time, but I don’t have the stomach for it. So Marian is taking you to the train. And we agreed that in front of anyone around here we act as normal, as if we were the best of friends.”

  “Sure.”

  They heard the wheels of Marian’s car.

  “And maybe we can be the best of friends again someday.”

  “I hope so, Father.”

  He looked so handsome and straightforward standing there. Patrick really did believe that it was going to be all right. He had gripped Kerry’s hand and put his other hand on the boy’s shoulder when Marian came in.

  “Yoo hoo! I’m not too early am I? I always think it’s best to leave plenty of time, that way nobody’s rushing too much.” She glanced eagerly, like a bright fluffy bird, from one to the other. Patrick felt a sense of shame at using her like this. She was an honorable if boring and fussy woman. It was not fair to keep involving her like this when he had no intention of involving her more permanently. Marian would be useless in a crisis. She was perfect for domestic trivia. But she would have no idea what to do in any important area of life. Unlike Rachel Fine.

  Patrick had telephoned her immediately after he had gotten his son cleaned up, seen by the doctor, and sedated. After he had reassured Grace with bland words, he had asked Rachel what to do. Rachel said that since he hadn’t beaten it out of the boy, he was unlikely to discover it by any further force. She said that if she might draw on a metaphor taken from her own trade, the design and decor business … he should paper over the cracks. Pretend that everything underneath was as elegant as the surface, and make sure he created a believable surface. He had waited long enough to get back to his roots and realize his dream. Surely he wasn’t going to let it all disintegrate into a public dog fight that would entertain the locals and people for miles around. Dignity had to be kept, position maintained. Give Kerry one more chance.

  For a week Patrick had worked on her advice; it seemed the natural thing to do. He had almost forgotten how practical Rachel was, and how well she knew the right thing for him.

  He wished Rachel were here in Mountfern.

  He wished he had encouraged her to come with him.

  After the first day of term Grace seemed to be all right again. Not as cheerful as last term but still more like her old self.

  “Do you mind if we don’t talk about it?” she asked Dara.

  “That’s all right.” Dara was a bit huffy.

  “It would be the same if there was a problem in your family, you wouldn’t want to tell an outsider …”

  Dara agreed grudgingly.

  Maggie was much more understanding.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been a bit … I don’t know … recently, Maggie. I was just worried about something. Do you know the way it is?”

  Maggie knew. She said so clearly. Grace was pleased.

  Arm in arm with Maggie she went off to the graveyard, and they finished the tomb of James Edward Gray to everyone’s satisfaction.

  Mr. Williams said it was wonderful to see you
ng people be so helpful. Not far away Eddie Ryan gloomily chopped nettles and gathered up sacks of grass and groundsel and dandelions. Grace discovered that Maggie took the same-size shoes and said she must come along to the lodge some evening and see if she wanted any that were there. Maggie never asked Grace what it was she had worried about. From time to time she wondered but still didn’t ask.

  Dara made a few pronouncements that if you were a true friend you could tell everything and any holding back meant that it wasn’t friendship at all. But Dara bore her no ill-will, and organized Irish classes for Grace which worked so well that soon Grace O’Neill was getting better marks in class than the rest of them. Maggie’s wish had come true, they were a gang, with Jacinta on the fringes of it.

  They were all very disappointed when the summer holidays were approaching and Grace announced out of the blue that she was going to go on a trip with her father and brother. It was meant to be a familiarization tour of Ireland, she confided, but really it was a spying mission. They were going to spend a night in lots of different hotels and see what they were doing right or doing wrong. They would get ideas for their own hotel. A friend of Grace’s father, who used to work with him back in the States, had suggested this would be a good thing to do. They were off as soon as term ended, just after Kerry came back from his boarding school.

  Kerry had liked his new school very well, he said. No, he didn’t want to ask anyone back during the holiday; it wasn’t a place like that. You got to know everyone a bit, rather than a few people a lot. He was very enthusiastic about the voyage of inspection.

  Once more Patrick O’Neill marveled at the wisdom of Rachel Fine. Even at three thousand miles she seemed to know what was best both for him and his troubled son. He would call her and say that she must come to Ireland this summer. After all, if John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President of the United States, was coming to Ireland, why shouldn’t Rachel Fine do the same?

  It wasn’t only the O’Neills who went away. Suddenly their whole gang started to disintegrate. The twins looked at each other in dismay.

  Tommy Leonard was told that he was a grown man now, thirteen and a half going on fourteen, no less. He could stand in the paper shop this summer and work to build up the business that was going to be his one day. And he would like it. There would be a smile on his face, and none of his scruffy friends trick-acting in and out of the shop.

  The Whites were sent to Irish College. Their father said it was pointless half learning a language, and they were both packed off to learn Irish dancing, to a place where they fined you if you were heard to speak in English and the man who ran it, An Fear Mor, was a person of great power and authority.

  Maggie Daly had to work in Daly’s Dairy, just like Tommy had to be in Leonard’s. They both envied Dara and Michael for living in a business that didn’t allow them to be behind a counter.

  The twins were on their own again. They never actually admitted that they had grown apart in the last year or so. But they knew it. They missed golden-haired Grace with her plans and her excitement; they missed Tommy with his good humor, and the two Whites who argued with each other about everything and had outlandish views on almost every subject. They missed Maggie, who never dreamed anything up, but who always, after a little hanging back, would join in whatever they suggested.

  The only problem was getting rid of Eddie.

  Eddie wrongly thought that because Dara and Michael were now without their usual group, they would be delighted to have his company. More than once he got ready to go out with them and was bitterly disappointed when he was not allowed to go.

  “I’d be better than no one,” he said.

  “No you wouldn’t,” Dara replied.

  “You’d be much worse than no one, actually,” Michael said.

  “Why can’t I come?”

  “Because you’re not our generation. You’re a different generation to us. We are going to be thirteen in September, teenagers. You are only a very juvenile person.”

  “How will I ever grow up, unless I am with older people?”

  Eddie was stung by the lack of avenues.

  “Listen Eddie, enough is enough; it doesn’t matter if you ever grow up, it couldn’t matter less. You begin all nice and please this and please that, but by the time we’d have gone twenty paces with you, there’d be some row.”

  “No Dara, there wouldn’t.”

  “Look at the past,” Michael said mildly. “It’s always happened.”

  “Now we must be off.” And they were gone. Eddie kicked the stones around the back yard in disappointment.

  “I can find you plenty to do if you like,” Kate said. “And stop kicking. You’re taking the top off your new shoes.”

  “They’re not new,” Eddie said mulishly. “Nothing is new, they’re only Michael’s shoes.”

  “And we’d like to have them for your brother Declan too, please, so kindly stop kicking with them or you’ll have them taken away for the day, and you won’t go far in your bare feet.”

  John had watched sympathetically. He waited till Kate had gone, and then called Eddie into the bar.

  “Come here, I want to show you something.”

  “I don’t want to do any work,” Eddie said.

  “Not at all, why should you, haven’t you done the crates?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well come on then. I’ll show you something funny.”

  This was better than anything that had been offered so far. Eddie went suspiciously into the bar, his hair standing up in spikes that no amount of combing, brushing or even dampening would ever change. His father had an old, faded chocolate box out on the counter. Eddie scrambled onto a high stool to see.

  “Look at this, Eddie, come on, it’s funny.”

  “What is it? It’s only an old picture.”

  “It’s me years ago.”

  “Why are you wearing women’s knickers?”

  “Those aren’t knickers; that was trousers.”

  “Go on.”

  “Yes, that was the day your Auntie Nuala went to Australia with the nuns, there was a picture taken here outside the door. That’s your Aunt Nuala all dressed in black.”

  “She’s very young-looking to be a nun.”

  “Ah she was too; they gave them a school education you see, and then in turn she became a nun and educated children out there.”

  “It seems daft to me,” said Eddie, who was not a great scholar.

  “There’s a bit of daftness in it, certainly,” his father agreed. “Wouldn’t she be better up with Sister Laura in her own home town? Still, what I was going to tell you was this: look at my feet.”

  “You’ve no shoes on.”

  “Didn’t I kick the front of my shoes out just like you were … No, no, not giving out to you. Shoes are your mother’s province. I wanted to tell you the whole front came away, and I couldn’t go with them all to see her off in the town. That was the last I ever saw of her, that day in 1930. Imagine. And I was so put out that I didn’t get the trip to the town, I went for a walk up to Coyne’s wood, and in my poor bare feet I spent the whole day building myself a house in a tree. I was covered in scratches and cuts, and when they all came back sobbing and crying from seeing Nuala off, they nearly murdered me, but the house was there. It’s still there. I went past it the other day.”

  “It couldn’t be.”

  “It is, bits of it, thirty-three years in the wood where it’s very hard to find. Anyone could have a house that’s easy to find. I thought having a secret one was better.”

  “You never told anyone?”

  “No, not until now.”

  Eddie believed his father absolutely, but he was suspicious.

  “So why are you telling me?”

  “I’ve been having all kinds of old rheumatic aches; I don’t think I’ll climb into it again. I thought you might go and keep an eye on it for me.”

  “How would I find it?”

  “Good question. When you go into Coyne’s wo
od from this side, you go up the path; you know, the one that has all the rowan trees.”

  “The red ones, is it?”

  “Yes, the mountain ash trees. Anyway where they end you go in to the right, you’ll have to bend down a bit and then it’s in there. You’ll find it. Maybe you could even build it up a bit.”

  Eddie was looking enthusiastic at last. “It’d be better than having a place of my own,” he said eventually.

  “Much better.”

  “You won’t tell Dara and Michael, and have them spoiling it? They’d come and take it over and turn me out of it.”

  “Not at all. Not a word.”

  “Right.” Eddie gave a last look at the box of photographs. “Were we desperately poor in those days that they couldn’t get you a new pair of shoes?”

  “We’d be hard pushed to get you a new pair of shoes these days, so will you wear your old ones when you go up to Coyne’s wood?” his father said. “And for the love of God, will you make sure you’ve done your jobs before you go.”

  They all had chores to do each day before they were free to play. Michael had to polish the brass and shine up the counter in the pub. The ashtrays would have been emptied, and the glasses washed the night before, but he had to air the place and see that there were no grease stains or dust where the customers would sit.

  Dara had to feed the hens, now moved to the backyard, as their coop had become very smelly and messy in the side garden and completely spoiled the classy look of the place.

  The hens clucked enthusiastically over household scraps mixed with bran. She also collected the eggs they laid in their nesting boxes; she gave Jaffa her breakfast; took Leopold for a run up as far as the Rosemarie hair salon and back; and inspected the whereabouts of Maurice the tortoise, in case he had got stuck under a stone, or in case Eddie and Declan had broken their vow and started to play with him again.

  Of all these jobs, Dara hated most being seen out with Leopold. Whenever another human being approached, Leopold would cower and shiver and whine piteously, rolling his eyes as if expecting a further beating. Never had a dog been lavished with such love, never did a dog give the impression of being whipped by his masters to within an inch of his life every evening.