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

by Tyler, Anne

  He had been mad to let Rachel come here in the first place. He saw her then, surrounded by local people and laughing. But she looked wrong, she could never be part of this place. He must make that clear soon. Sweet Lord, how had it all turned into this, making things clear to people, speaking his mind?

  Rachel looked up and waved at him nice and casually, as she would have done back home.

  “Well Mr. O’Neill, I made it to Ireland. Isn’t it a great place?” she said, and his heart softened toward her again.

  Things were getting very complicated indeed.

  By three o’clock the bar was empty. John and Kate were exhausted. The glasses were washed; two clean cloths, washed through after the polishing, lay across the beer and stout pumps. The place was ready for any afternoon visitor who might stray in, and for the teatime trade.

  “God, if we were to have a crowd like that again we’d have to hire a young lad,” John said.

  “There speaks the man with the second income,” Kate teased.

  “Wasn’t it great when Patrick read it out?” John said.

  Kate had thought Patrick’s mind was miles away but she didn’t say that.

  “I’m very, very proud of you,” she said.

  “Would we risk it and go up to bed for a while?” he said.

  “Are you mad?”

  “Ah go on, we could ask Carrie to step in here.”

  “And what would she think?”

  “Does it matter what she thinks?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, John, the children could come home.”

  The twins had gone for a picnic with Grace, Eddie was out with his gang of toughs, Declan could be anywhere.

  “Let them, the door would be locked.”

  “We’ll lock it tonight instead,” she said.

  “And what am I going to do here, mad with desire for you?”

  “Why don’t you look through your other poems, the ones we liked, and you could maybe give me some of them. I’ll type them and you can always say I have had work published already, I enclose an example …”

  “But there’s only one example …”

  “You don’t have to tell them that,” Kate said.

  “God, you’re a fox, Kate. Between yourself and Patrick O’Neill you could rule the world. There’s a pair of you in it.”

  “I hope not,” Kate said, shivering slightly.

  “And what are you going to do if you’re not going to fulfil your marital duties?” John asked sulkily.

  “I’m going to have a little walk. I’m restless and over-excited … but no I do not see a way to cure all that. I’m not going to let us become the talk of the neighborhood by abandoning our pub and going off to bed in the middle of the afternoon.” She skipped out of his way and took her cardigan off the back of a chair.

  “Go on, John, get your poems down, truly now … I love the one about the nun looking into the river, the nun with the very sad face.”

  She walked out and stretched in the sunshine. She had said the truth, she was restless and over-excited. She was happy for John in a way she had never expected to be, but everywhere around her, like a big black cloud, she felt a sense of danger. Even when Patrick had said he wanted to talk to them she had thought it was going to be something bad, and was glad that the crowds and the circumstances had meant he couldn’t bring up whatever it was. It was like a reprieve.

  She felt there was something odd about Kerry. It wasn’t that he never smiled—his face was one big smile, for God’s sake, with those perfect white teeth. And he couldn’t be more polite. It wasn’t anything to do with Grace. The twins seemed to love her, and she was a warm little thing, all smiles too.

  She really couldn’t say that the work on Fernscourt had harmed their business. When else had they been full on a Tuesday at lunchtime? And perhaps these people would keep coming back even when the building works were over. So why then was she restless? Was it the holidays and knowing that young Fergus was off to find himself a woman? Surely not. She wanted Fergus to find himself a woman.

  She crossed the footbridge and looked up at the site. Patrick would not be there now, he had told Rachel that he would drive out to the Slieve Sunset with her and see if they could make any improvements. Kate wondered why on earth she hadn’t been allowed to go to the Grange and then remembered that Grace was at the lodge and might suspect something. Could that be it?

  It would be very hard to be in love with Patrick O’Neill, hard to come first in his life. There would always be business, or the children, or travel or long-distance telephone calls. Kate sighed thinking of it all, and wished Rachel Fine luck in her uphill struggle. She remembered how warm and nice Patrick had been that day last week when they had gone to see President Kennedy arrive in Dublin. He had been so anxious to please them all with drinks and sandwiches in the big Dublin hotel. He had hardly ever stopped smiling and laughing. It would be easy to fall in love with him. She walked up the slope that the twins used to think of as their own private path at one time, now more open and exposed with a lot of the brambles and briars cut away. She hadn’t been in to look at the site since the foundations were dug and already the walls were showing, so that you could see the shape it would be.

  Kate felt she must know what it was going to be like, no point in being like an ostrich anymore. She was going to go right up there and look, and ask Brian Doyle which room was which, and talk about it to Patrick O’Neill, and ask Rachel Fine what kind of colors it was going to be. She quickened her step and threw back her head with confidence. There’s a time for everything, she thought. I wasn’t ready to know about it before, but I’m ready now.

  She saw Brian Doyle waving at her frantically as she approached the site. He had both hands in the air and was shouting something. But she hadn’t heard what it was by the time she felt the terrifying sharp pain. It was so sudden and worse than anything she had ever known, like the terror in a dream or a nightmare. And it only lasted seconds, because that was all it took for Kate Ryan to be hit sideways by the huge bulldozer, flung up in the air and crashed to the ground. It only took a few seconds to break her spine.

  John knew only when the third person rushing away from the site to get help refused to look him in the eye and tell him what had happened. Roaring like a bull, he ran across the footbridge and had to be held back from the scene by three men. White-faced Brian Doyle begged him not to go near her.

  “Jesus, the only thing we do know, John, is not to move her. For God’s sake believe that. Stand back from her, don’t touch her. You could make it worse.”

  John sat down like a child and put his big face into his hands. Strong men who had known him and had drunk pints in his pub for twenty years couldn’t find the words or the gestures to touch him. They stood awkwardly around, eyes averted from the crumpled body on the ground.

  Patrick O’Neill knew when there was a great hammering on the door of Rachel Fine’s room in the Slieve Sunset hotel.

  “No, of course Mr. O’Neill is not here,” Rachel called through the door. “What on earth makes you think he is?”

  “Sorry ma’am,” the young girl called. “We’ve had a message from Brian Doyle, he said he’s trying everywhere in the country to find Mr. O’Neill, there’s been a terrible accident … a terrible accident and Mr. O’Neill’s got to come at once.”

  Patrick was out of bed and had pulled his trousers on.

  “What kind of an accident?” He shouted through the door.

  “On the site of the new hotel in Mountfern.”

  “What happened?” Patrick had opened the door now; Rachel was cowering behind it. Patrick had pulled his shirt on at the same electrifying speed.

  “Someone’s been killed, I think. Some woman.”

  “A woman, killed on the site?” Patrick’s shoes were on and he had picked up his car keys.

  “Did he say what woman? What was a woman doing there? Did he say how it happened?”

  “No, he said if we found you to get you over there as q
uick as possible.”

  Patrick was down the corridor by this stage and the girl was round-eyed at the thought of the American millionaire who was building the big hotel five miles away being in bed in the middle of the afternoon with a strange American woman and not being a bit ashamed of it. Weren’t things going to liven up a bit here when the Yanks started coming over in force?

  Mrs. Whelan in the post office knew fairly early on because Dr. White stopped his car outside her door and ran in to collect her.

  “Put some kind of sign on the door, do anything but come with me, Sheila. They’re going to need someone sensible at the pub to look after them.”

  She didn’t question whether she was the right person or not, she just closed the door behind her and stepped quietly into his car.

  “Have you told the canon?”

  “Someone has. Father Hogan will be there in a minute, he’s got his own car.”

  “Do you know is she bad?” Mrs. Whelan’s voice was calm.

  “No, all I know is that they’ve had the sense not to move her. I’ve got the ambulance coming anyway. I didn’t wait to see her, we can always send it back if it’s not needed.” His face was set hard as he headed for the accident.

  The twins were the last to know. They had been in their tunnel all afternoon. Grace had gone to the big town with Marian Johnson to get some more summer clothes. The invitation had not included Dara and Michael, pleasant but scruffy children from that pub. Anyway Marian wanted to get to know Grace, make an ally of her.

  So for the first time in days they had a chance to play again in their home. They had been happy to note from the Fernscourt end of the tunnel that there seemed to be no intention of clearing the undergrowth and bramble which disguised the tunnel’s mouth. The new gardens would end well over two hundred yards further on. The string had already been stretched over the part where the high hedges were going to be planted and the stone walls were to be built.

  All they had to worry about now was whether the entrance would be down by the towpath.

  They had torches with batteries, and an old bicycle lamp up high on a ledge. They had rescued a torn tablecloth that Mammy had said was beyond mending. There were two boxes filled with hay which were sofas and would double up as beds when they came to live here permanently. The day’s play had seemed long for the first time. The kind of games they used to invent in the ruins seemed suddenly rather childish. But neither wanted to admit it to the other. Nor even to admit it in the heart. If the game was over, what was there?

  In the hot tunnel, which for the first time seemed a bit close and smelly today, they played and hoped it was soon going to be evening.

  They came out and pulled across the fuchsia bush as they always had done. Not twenty yards down the towpath they heard the people calling them. There must have been a search party out for them.

  It was Loretto Quinn who saw them from across the river. She waved and shouted. “Where on earth have you been?” she cried.

  Dara and Michael looked at each other in dismay.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Just playing.”

  But by this time the children from the bridge had come toward them in a group, and then suddenly hung back as if not wanting to be the first to say the words.

  “You’ve got to go home now,” Tommy Leonard said eventually. “They’ve been looking for you for hours.”

  “We’ve only been just around …”

  “Just around here and there …”

  Tommy’s face was serious. “Something very bad’s happened.”

  The other children held back.

  Loretto Quinn was there by now, she was kneeling down on the ground in front of them to be nearer to their height, but that made her much too low and then they had to bend to hear what she was saying.

  “You have to be as brave as two little lions now. Do you hear me? They all need you to be brave.”

  “What happened?” They spoke together, faces calm, timing precise.

  “Your Mammy got hit by a machine up in the site, she hurt herself very badly. They’ve taken her to the hospital in an ambulance.”

  The children crowded closer to hear. Now that someone else was telling the twins, now that a grown-up had taken the burden off them, they wanted to be part of it.

  “Is she dead?” Dara asked.

  “No, she’s not dead,” said Loretto Quinn.

  “Is she going to die?” Michael asked, equally calmly.

  Loretto remembered the people who had given her false hope and told her that her Barney might recover when they took his lifeless body from the River Fern all those years ago. They had meant well, but they had been no help.

  “They think she might die, yes,” she said. The group of children drew back suddenly and Loretto held the twins in her arms and supported them from the towpath, across the bridge in the eyes of dozens of people, and back to the pub.

  Mrs. Whelan took them into the kitchen. “Your daddy’s in hospital now. Do you think your place is in there with him, or is it here with me looking after the children?”

  Eddie and Declan’s faces were swollen from crying. They sat in unaccustomed stillness on kitchen chairs while Carrie made bread at Mrs. Whelan’s suggestion.

  Dara thought for a minute. “I suppose she’d want us to keep an eye on Dad in case he’d get too upset at the hospital.”

  “Right,” said Mrs. Whelan and she sent someone in the bar for Jack Coyne who would drive them into the town.

  PART THREE

  Chapter XI

  The church was crowded at eleven o’clock mass on Sunday. The two priests, who were faced with getting their own lunch due to the non appearance of Miss Barry, had answered many requests to say masses for Mrs. Ryan. Young Father Hogan became impatient when a poor old tramp called Papers Flynn came with half a crown to have a mass said for the poor woman in the pub.

  “No need to give an offering, Papers,” Father Hogan had said gruffly. “We’ll be saying mass for her anyway.”

  “I want my mass said for her,” Papers insisted. She had been very good to him always, he said, given him a yellow blanket to wrap around him under all the newspapers he normally wore when sleeping in a ditch. She had never given him a lecture about sleeping out. It was as if she understood somehow.

  The young American girl had come with five dollars.

  “I guess this might not be the way to do it, but when my Mother was alive she used to give an offering for a mass. Could you write Mrs. Ryan’s name in your book, Father? And could you say a mass for her?”

  Tramps and children. Father Hogan had never thought it was going to be like this. Tramps, children, drunken housekeepers, kind if doddering parish priests. And trying to explain why it was God’s will that a young woman, mother of a family, should be struck by a huge bulldozer as she walked unheeding on a summer’s day. They never told you in the seminary that it was going to be like this. But maybe, of course, they didn’t know.

  It was Canon Moran who would say eleven o’clock mass; Father Hogan would go and struggle with the range. He sighed as he folded his own vestments from the earlier mass in the vestry and watched Canon Moran take tottering steps out toward the altar. He had arranged sensible altar boys like Tommy Leonard and Liam White. With the canon you couldn’t have any possible troublemakers.

  The canon turned to face the congregation and in his thin reedy voice he said, “Your prayers are asked for the happy death or speedy recovery of Katherine Mary Ryan of River Road.”

  Fergus put a finger in his collar to loosen it. He wondered what he was doing sitting here listening to this mumbo jumbo. Happy death! Should it not be speedy death rather than lying there paralyzed, in traction, so heavily sedated because of the pain that she didn’t even know her own family or where she was? What did this old fool mean? Praying for happy deaths and speedy recoveries, that’s what you said about old people lingering on and on, it was a way of announcing to the parish that old Jimmy this or Michael that was on the wa
y out. Like the old fellow he had made the will for a few days back. It wasn’t for Kate Ryan, a young woman. A young woman who had been killed—or almost killed—by a machine on that man’s land.

  Fergus felt himself getting a hot flush of anger and loosened his collar and tie still further.

  He thanked God for the wisdom of Sheila Whelan who had phoned him the night it had happened. She had simply said that she knew he would want to know, rather than come back a week or two later from his holiday and find out what had happened in his absence.

  Miss Purcell had sniffed, of course, and said that Mrs. Whelan had a deal of impertinence interrupting the man on his holiday. But Miss Purcell knew nothing, and Sheila Whelan knew everything. She knew that he would have come back from the ends of the earth.

  Loretto Quinn was not following the mass; she was saying the thirty days’ prayer. She had promised Our Lady that she would start the prayer immediately. She knew that Our Lady would realize how important Kate Ryan was to her family, and spare her. She prayed determinedly, trying to mean the words, and never once thinking that Our Lady might also have known how important Barney Quinn had been.

  Sheila Whelan wasn’t following the mass either. She was trying to work out a plan in her head. The Ryans hadn’t thought a day ahead of the day they were living. Someone had to think for them. They couldn’t live on the way they were. They needed a woman in the house, someone who could serve in the bar, someone who could keep an eye on the children, and see to it that Carrie did what she was meant to do. She had a cousin.

  She wondered would it work. The cousin had been disappointed. A man had given her an engagement ring and there were plans for the wedding. Mary Donnelly had given up her fine job teaching and drew out her savings to put a deposit on a house. The man had disappeared, with the savings.