The Mistletoe Matchmaker

by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  ‘Cool. I’ll call again in a twenty minutes or so and he can say hi as well . . . Or, no, hang on, that won’t work, we’re going to Carrick.’

  Pat took a hold of herself and interrupted: ‘Give my love to Jim, Son, won’t you? And the kids. We won’t go bothering you with phone calls if you’re going to work. It’s lovely to see your face, though. God bless, now.’ She turned away from the phone and found herself holding the tea cosy, so she went to the table and put it on the pot.

  Cassie followed her with the camera before turning it back to her own face, smiling and saying goodbye.

  Pat had recognised the guilty note in Sonny’s voice perfectly. It was how he’d sounded when they were over there and she’d wanted him and Jim to spend time with Ger. All the time they were growing up she’d watched them feeding an angry kind of resentment, and she’d never known what to do to make it stop. And it wasn’t just Ger’s behaviour they resented. They blamed her for not standing up more and taking their side against him. Slipping them money and trying to keep the peace hadn’t been good enough. She’d known that even then.

  Pouring the tea, she told herself that she’d coped the best way she could. The lads knew that, too, of course, which was why they felt bad as well as angry. It was a fierce mess, though, that she’d let the family get into. Even the sight of the kitchen just now had made poor Sonny look sick.

  24

  On Couneen Pier, under a rain-washed sky, Dan was working on his shed. It was chilly enough these days but, what with the exercise and his cheerful state of mind, he could hardly feel the cold.

  Everything was proceeding in the right direction. Fury had come up with a load of timber and said he’d see him later for the price of it, and now Dan had finished the work, the shed was twice its former size. It had a decent heavy door, too, and new windows, set high, so messers wouldn’t be peering in and thinking of stealing his gear. And, before long, there’d be plenty of new gear to put in it. Equipment that would allow him to offer really spectacular eco-tours.

  It was Dekko who’d suggested extending the shed. As soon as he’d seen the pier he’d been full of enthusiasm. Screwing on the final hinge, and testing the new door, Dan could still feel the rush of relief he’d felt when they’d talked. Just the idea that he’d need to expand – even if it was only his shed space – had made him feel great.

  Back in Australia, he’d described the pier and the sea coast to Dekko. The marine life around Finfarran was fabulous, he’d told him, and all he’d ever wanted was to find a way of making people appreciate it. A couple of drinks later, and he’d been confiding in Dekko as if he’d known him for years. Dekko was a great listener. He’d sat there nodding and getting another round in, while Dan talked about Couneen.

  Then the next day, in a beach café, they’d banged into each other again. That was when Dan had found out that Dekko, who came from a big family on the north side of Dublin, was an investor. He wasn’t the kind of guy to show off, but Dan had picked up a few hints from their conversation and, in the end, he’d asked him about it.

  It turned out that Dekko’s dad and his uncle were some kind of property developers. According to Dekko, they were the heart of the rowl, ordinary working-class guys who’d left school at sixteen and didn’t mind getting their hands dirty. Dekko had begun working for them when he was only a kid.

  Dan reckoned you could tell by the way he talked that he’d been around a bit. Not like the kind of poncy investor you’d imagine, with a posh education and a daddy who was a banker. It was bankers, he’d told Dekko, that were the ruin of poor bloody Ireland. They had the place raped and pillaged, and half the government crawling to them. Between that and the shower of pen-pushers, with their rules and regulations, ordinary guys like himself didn’t stand a chance.

  Dekko had agreed with him. It was guys like Dan that impressed investors like him and his family, he’d told him. People with passion and an idea, who just needed a leg up. People who went for their dream instead of being bogged down by bureaucracy. Decent people who never really got a fair crack of the whip. ‘Because – do you know what it is, Dan? Bureaucrats are cut from the same cloth as them bloody bankers. And politicians. They sit there with their safe jobs, taking your money and making sure that you’ll never get off your knees.’

  That was exactly what Dan thought too.

  Now, having screwed a heavy bolt to the shed door, he sat with his back to the stone wall, looking out to sea. There’d been an iffy few days a couple of weeks ago, when Dekko went off to Dublin and stopped answering his phone. Dan hadn’t let Bríd or anyone else know that had happened – he’d just said Dekko was away and that he’d be coming back soon. Watching a couple of shearwaters skimming over the waves, he told himself that his confidence must have taken a fierce knock. There was no reason at all to think that Dekko mightn’t come back. But, all the same, he’d found himself getting jumpy. Especially when the phone was dead, and your man stayed away much longer than he’d said he would. Dan hadn’t opened his beak to complain when he did come back, though, which was just as well, because it turned out that Dekko had got caught up doing some favour for his uncle.

  Family was a big thing with him. Like he’d said himself, that was the thing about Ireland – Irish families looked after each other and had each other’s backs.

  In Australia Dan had stayed with cousins of his father’s, who were happy to let him bunk down in their huge spare room. He’d heard you could go in on a working-holiday visa, but he hadn’t realised that, for that kind, you had to be a graduate so, at the last minute, he’d taken the tourist route. Getting work turned out to be hard because he hadn’t had the proper papers, and he didn’t want the relations to know, in case they thought he was a gawm.

  In the end he’d done a bit of backpacking, and picked up jobs on the black wherever he could. And he’d been wrestling with the idea of the complications of coming out and going back in again, with a view to staying there permanently, when he’d bumped into Dekko and everything changed. Things just came into focus. Life in Australia was great and he’d had good craic there. A few of the jobs he’d picked up were things you certainly couldn’t be doing here in Finfarran. But getting your pecs sprayed with oil while you posed in designer beachwear wasn’t proper work. At least, not for him. As soon as Dekko showed interest in putting money in the marine eco-tours, Dan had known for certain that he was going home. Couneen was his place, and this was his pier.

  But the truth was that it wasn’t his. It belonged to the bloody government. And the chances were that they’d make a fuss if they knew that he’d even built the shed. They wouldn’t give a toss about the fact that he’d always kept the place clean and cared-for or that, when the path down to it had been washed away, he’d borrowed a mini digger and got it back into shape. You’d be waiting for months to get that done by the council, and they’d probably send some eejit from Carrick who hadn’t a clue what to do. He’d told that to Dekko when he’d described the pier to him. The fact was, he’d said bitterly, that the pen-pushers probably didn’t even know it was there.

  The shearwaters skimmed across the inlet, their backs and undersides flashing like black and white traffic lights, and Dan told himself things were going to be fine. He and Dekko were going to open a proper joint business account. Then, once the money was in there, he could start buying equipment. And he wasn’t a complete eejit who’d go throwing money at anything. There was plenty of good gear you could get second hand.

  He wasn’t daft enough to ignore health and safety regulations either. Some of their requirements were over the top but, all the same, it was better to be safe than sorry. You couldn’t know the seas round here without knowing you had to be careful. And that was the unique thing he could bring to this business. What some bloody loan manager had called his USP. A runty little guy behind a desk who probably wouldn’t know how to climb a ladder.

  ‘What would you say your USP is, Mr Cafferky?’

  ‘Knowledge and experi
ence, Dickhead.’ That was what he should have said. The fact that, while he mightn’t have a degree in marine biology, he knew the winds and the currents round Couneen, and could name every rock out at sea. He’d seen things in the world below the waves that that guy couldn’t even dream about.

  But, apparently, the fact that he knew what he was talking about didn’t count as an answer. He didn’t have a business plan in a folder, so that had been the end of that.

  And things were getting worse, not better. If you went to a bank, these days, you wouldn’t even find a runt behind a desk. Everything was automated and you couldn’t find someone to talk to. You’d get letters in the Inquirer saying that automated banking wasn’t fair to oul fellas, but no one ever said that people like himself might do with a bit of a chat.

  But that didn’t matter now that he’d found Dekko. Dekko was different. He didn’t ask stupid questions, and he got things when you explained them. And then he just shook you by the hand and said it was time to start getting things done.

  25

  When Hanna arrived home Brian’s car was parked in the pull-in by the gate. Walking down the narrow path between the gable end of the house and a row of leafless ash trees, she turned towards her front door and saw him sitting on the wall at the end of the field.

  When she’d first come to live here, the field had been a graveyard for washing machines and old fish boxes: it seemed that half the parish had used it as a dump. Before that again, when Hanna was a child, Maggie had dug it over each year and set it to spuds. For the last year, Hanna had been turning it into a combination of flower garden and vegetable patch, with herbs and flowers close to the house and a well-drained kitchen garden dropping away towards the clifftop edge. Her potato beds looked ragged now: the last of the late crop had been lifted, and the precise edges of the ridges had crumbled under frost and fork.

  Brian reached the door when she was still struggling with her latch key. The hood of his parka was pulled close around his face. ‘The seagulls are going mad today. I’d say we’ll have another gale tonight.’

  ‘Well, come in before you freeze. You should have stayed in the car.’

  ‘I did for a while, but the great outdoors called me. I’ve spent most of the week stuck behind a desk.’

  Inside, Hanna dumped her bag and went to stir the fire. She had covered it with ashes the night before, and now, raking the poker through the embers, she exposed the glowing ends of smouldering turf. Crouching down, she built a cat’s cradle of twigs on the embers. Then she set three sods of turf on end, forming a tripod shape to encourage the crackling flames to rise.

  Brian, who had shed his parka, hunkered down beside her. ‘Looks like you had a long week yourself.’

  ‘I’m knackered, actually. No particular reason. Well, I did have rather a fraught first session with my creative-writing group.’

  ‘Is that “fraught” as in “chaotic”?’

  ‘Oh, thanks for the vote of confidence!’

  ‘Well, you mentioned Darina Kelly had signed up.’

  Hanna stood up to return the poker to its niche by the fireside. ‘Actually, I think it was my fault. I sort of dropped them in at the deep end. Anyway, they now have a rigidly defined task to complete for the next session.’

  ‘Because nothing says “creative” like “rigid definition”.’

  ‘Look, whatever it takes to keep Darina Kelly from singing the Welsh national anthem.’

  ‘Seriously? How did you arrive at that?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’ Hanna yawned. ‘Would it be an awful waste of a Saturday afternoon if we just stayed in by the fire?

  ‘Why don’t you take a shower and let me organise dinner? If I hurl something together now, we can eat it later on.’

  Twenty minutes later, when she came out of the shower in her dressing gown, he was chopping onions by the sink. There was a heavy shawl on the back of the fireside chair, and, as she sat down, she threw it round her shoulders over her silk kimono. Looking up, she saw Brian smiling.

  ‘You look wonderful. A kind of exotic version of Peig Sayers.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘Gold brocade chrysanthemums and creamy-brown homespun. It’s very effective.’

  ‘Easy seen you didn’t suffer the hell of reading Peig when you were at school.’

  ‘Mm. I’m not sure how she would have gone down in a boys’ school in Sussex.’ Brian’s Wicklow childhood had been followed by boarding school in England because his dad had worked in the Gulf.

  Hanna laughed. ‘The thing is, you know, I’ve got three copies of the translation of Peig on my shelves in the library. And two in the original Irish. And they’re always out. Back when it was a compulsory school text, that wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘Well, I read it at some stage and thought it was rather wonderful. What’s not to like about a memoir set on a wild, romantic Irish island?’

  ‘Quite a lot, if it was forced down your neck by snuffling nuns.’

  ‘They probably avoided the subliminals. I think Peig could well have had golden chrysanthemums peeking out under her shawl.’

  ‘There’s certainly a lot of nonsense talked about her generation. They weren’t all rattling rosary beads and doing what they were told. Even the nuns.’ Suddenly she had a vision of her great-aunt Maggie, stumping down the field with a spade in her hand. ‘You know, my dad gave Maggie a silk scarf for Christmas once. A head square printed with abstract splashes of colour on a scarlet ground. I think she wore it every day from then to the day she died.’

  ‘Summer and winter?’

  ‘Well, when she was out of doors, yes. With an old sack thrown over it, when she’d be digging spuds in the rain.’

  ‘Hence the homespun shawl and the silk kimono. What’s bred in the bone will out in the blood.’ Putting down the vegetable knife, Brian came to kneel in front of her. ‘You do know I love you, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Good. Well, in that case, I’d better get on with the onions.’

  As he worked, Hanna leaned back and watched the dancing flames. Saturday was always a busy shift in the library, with people turning up at the last minute, complaining about it being a half-day. Not only that, but she’d had an early start this morning because she’d had to be in before opening time to turn the next page of the psalter.

  When she’d hurried into the library courtyard, Charles Aukin and Fury O’Shea were waiting on the step. Charles, it turned out, had taken a notion to come and visit the psalter; and Fury, who’d been doing some work for him up at Castle Lancy, had offered to give him a lift into town. Fury had worked for Hanna, too, when she’d been doing up Maggie’s house, so they knew each other of old.

  Dressed in a large overcoat and a fur-lined lumberjack’s cap, Charles had held out his hand. ‘Morning, Miss Casey. The word is, you’ve decided to turn pages at random.’

  For a split second Hanna had panicked, thinking that Charles was complaining. Then she’d noticed the glint in Fury’s eye. Standing there with their takeaway cups of coffee, they’d obviously invented a tease and, like a fool, she’d risen to it. Without deigning to answer, she unlocked the door and turned off the alarm system, hearing them chortling behind her, like a couple of schoolboys.

  Inevitably it was Charles who’d offered an olive branch. Fury, as Hanna knew all too well, was made of sterner stuff. He’d propped himself against the wall with his hands in his pockets, as Charles, beaming mildly through gold-rimmed spectacles, had praised the Advent idea. ‘It’s exactly the sort of thing I’d hoped for. I mean, of course the exhibit’s going to attract tourists. That was inevitable. But I wanted it to be a Lissbeg thing as well.’

  ‘Well, lots of people have said they’ll make a point of coming by each week. I think they like the idea that it’s a bit like a lucky dip.’

  ‘See, I love that. It’s how I always felt myself, whenever I flipped through the psalter.’

  Suppressing her instinctive reaction to the idea of cas
ually flipping through a medieval treasure, Hanna ushered him up to the book in its case. ‘Would you like to do the page turn?’

  ‘No, go ahead, Miss Casey. You’ve got the professional touch.’

  Clearly her suppressed reaction hadn’t gone unnoticed. In fact, she suspected that Charles might have chosen to provoke it, but his quizzical manner always made it hard to take offence.

  The double-page spread she chose at random wasn’t highly coloured like the last one. Here the closely written words filled almost the entire space between the margins, which were blank. But illustrations had been marvellously incorporated into the written text. Facing each other on either page were two cloaked and barefoot warriors, waving swords. On their streaming cloaks were blocks of words, following the flowing shapes enclosed by the artist’s pen-strokes. It was a symphony in two colours, with the body text in black and the words incorporated into the drawings inked in rusty red, giving the warriors’ cloaks the appearance of tweed.

  Pushing his gold-rimmed glasses onto his forehead, Charles had leaned in to look at it. ‘I don’t remember this one, though I thought I’d seen them all. Psalm One Hundred and Forty-nine. And these are the guys singing God’s praises with two-edged swords in their hands.’ Stepping back, he resumed his glasses and turned to Fury and Hanna. ‘By the look of it, whoever designed that page had seen a copy of the Qur’an. Or maybe heard someone describing one. You don’t get figurative illustration in a Qur’an, but you do get blocks of text used decoratively.’ He glanced back at the psalter. ‘You know what? I’ve always wondered if each psalm had a different committee deciding how it would look.’

  Fury had snorted derisively. ‘I’d say that’s more than likely, given it was made round here. God, you couldn’t pick your nose in this place without a committee being set up to tell you how it’s done.’