The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (87 page)

“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
Quiet 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.

There were some houses that didn’t have coats of paint on them. Like old Mr. Slattery’s tall house with the steps going up to it, which was covered with ivy. And the Garda barracks was just stone, as was the presbytery. The Classic Cinema had once been a smart beige color but it had gotten very shabby-looking, with paint peeling off. Mr. Williams, who was the rector-in-charge of the small Protestant church, had a cottage that was all covered with climbing roses—his wife spent from dawn to dusk gardening. To the outsider Mountfern looked a slow sleepy place, badly planned, straggling toward a river, but not having any real purpose.

It had been an estate village, of course, a collection of small holdings which all depended on the big house. The days of a community depending on one family seat for livelihood and living quarters were long gone. But Mountfern had not died with the house.

The farmers would always need somewhere to send their children to school, and shops where their wives could sell vegetables, eggs and poultry, where they could buy the essentials without having to travel to the big town, sixteen miles down the main road.

The visitor might have thought Mountfern a backwater but there were few visitors to have such thoughts. It hadn’t anything to offer to the sightseer; you had to have some reason to come to Mountfern, otherwise you would think it was a place where nothing happened at all.

Dara and Michael Ryan never thought of Mountfern like that. It was the center of their world and always had been. They hardly ever left it except to go to the town maybe four times a year. They had been to Dublin of course, with the school on educational tours, and once with Dad and Mam when they were very young and there had been an excursion to see Santa Claus in the various Dublin shops. Eddie always resented hearing about this excursion and wanted to know why it hadn’t been repeated for the rest of the family.

“Because Santa Claus would vomit if he saw you,” Dara had explained.

This evening, however, they had forgotten what a thorn in the flesh their younger brother Eddie was. They were setting out with a purpose. To find out what was happening to Fernscourt. They had seen the men with the measuring instruments but had not wanted to ask them straight out—it was almost too direct. They felt without actually saying it to each other that they would find out what was the collective view first. Then armed with this knowledge they would face the people that Loretto thought were making a version of
The Quiet Man
(a tamer version, the scenery in this part of the Irish midlands wasn’t spectacular and there were very few Maureen O’Haras around the place).

They passed Coyne’s Motor Works before they got to the bridge. Jack was working as he always seemed to be, day and night, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

The twins had heard their father say that it was the mercy of God that Jack Coyne hadn’t set himself alight with all the petrol and oil around the place, and that one day he could well blow the whole of Mountfern sky high with his dangerous practices. Dara and Michael didn’t like Mr. Coyne much, he always looked as if he were about to have a fight with someone. He was old of course, nearly as old as Mam and Dad, small and pointed looking. He wasn’t married, and he always said that a man who voluntarily took on a wife to nag the life out of him, and spend all he earned, was a man on whom no sympathy should be wasted. Dara had once said to him that if everyone had felt the way he did, the world would have come to an end long ago. Jack Coyne said that everyone might have been better off if it had, and let Dara remember that when she grew up and her head got full of nonsense about love and the like.

“Good evening Mr. Coyne.” It didn’t matter that he might be an old grouch, they still had to be polite and salute him.

“Out gallivanting,” he said disapprovingly. “Still I hear that they’ve big plans for Fernscourt. That’ll put a halt to your gallop, the lot of you.”

“What plans?” The twins ignored the gratuitous offense; they had never done anything to irritate Jack Coyne.

To his own immense annoyance Jack Coyne didn’t know what plans were afoot. Those fellows doing a survey had been far from forthcoming. But he had his own views.

“A big religious house I hear, so that’s the end of all the trick-playing by the children of this parish, I’m glad to say. You’ll have to start to do a day’s work for a change and be like we were at your age.”

“Is it brothers or nuns would you say?”

“That would be telling,” said Jack Coyne, who didn’t know.

“Isn’t he a pig?” Dara said cheerfully when they had left him. “A small dark offensive-looking pig.”

“Imagine him young,” Michael said, as they passed the bag of toffees between them. It was a feat of imagination too difficult for either of them.

“An offensive piglet,” Michael said, and they were in a fit of giggles by the time they reached the bridge and turned left up the main street.

There would be no place for Dara and Michael on the bridge, even Kitty Daly was a bit too young for the small group that met there in the evenings. They saw fellows sitting up on the stone parapet clowning, and a group of girls laughing. There was Teresa Meagher whose mother and father were always fighting. If you went past Meagher’s any night when the shop was closed you always heard voices raised. Teresa was going to get a job in Dublin it was always being said, but then her parents would cry and cling on to her so she had to relent and stay. Nobody on the bridge was courting. If you were courting you were down the river bank, or in Coyne’s wood, or at the pictures.