Firefly Summer (63 page)

Kerry got up lithely from his sitting position without putting his hands on the ground.

‘That was clever,’ Dara admired.

‘Oh come on, anyone can do that,’ Kerry challenged.

‘Maybe, but you had your legs crossed.’

‘Go on, try it.’

Dara sat down on the mossy ground and crossed her legs. ‘Let me see, what did you do?’ She automatically kept trying to put her hands on the ground.

Kerry stood looking at her, laughing.

‘It’s not nearly as easy as you make it look.’ Dara was cross.

‘Here I’ll sit down beside you and show you.’

But when Kerry sat down beside her they were very close.

He looked at her flushed face.

He bent a bit closer to her.

Dara bit her lip with indecision.

‘It’s very easy,’ Kerry said. He put his head slightly to one side and smiled at her.

‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it . . .’ Dara said.

‘Oh, I think you are,’ Kerry said. His face was closer still but he made no move to hold her.

She moved towards him. Their lips brushed lightly.

Kerry pulled back slightly. ‘No hands,’ he said triumphantly, showing both hands as he had done before.

But it didn’t matter now. Their lips were together and nobody was working out technical details like that.

Kate was impatient that evening.

‘Dara, where on earth were you? You look as if you rolled around on the ground, you’re so full of leaves and dirt.’

It was so precisely what Dara had been doing that she got a shock, but she realised her mother was on a different track.

‘Really and truly you twins are like tinkers. When you see how neat and clean Grace looks, and even Maggie has smartened herself up a lot. I don’t know what we’re all working our fingers to the bone earning money to dress you pair for, we might as well buy the clothes and just rub them in the ground.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Dara said automatically.

‘No you’re not. Where were you anyway?’

This was the question she had been trying to avoid.

‘Oh, Michael will explain, I’d better go and have a wash,’ she said, and ran off.

Minutes later Michael burst into her room. ‘That was beautiful,’ he said furiously. ‘Why did you have to do that?’

Dara giggled. ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t think of anything else. What did you say?’

‘I said we were down playing on the towpath. Where all
the brambles were. You should have warned me.’

Dara was sitting on her bed hugging her knees.

‘I think that if we’re going to spend the summer with the O’Neill family in different parts of the forest we should think up a story and stick to it,’ she said.

‘Were you with Kerry?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’ She looked triumphant.

‘Gosh, Dara. What were you doing?’

‘Never mind!’

‘You’d better be careful. Kerry’s very old, and experienced.’

‘I know.’

‘You’re awfully silly when you put on that face. You think you sound grown-up and clever, but in fact you sound silly. Like Jacinta when she’s having one of her awful moods.’

‘You should hear what
you
sound like sometimes – Grace says, Grace thinks, Grace always believes, Grace was wondering . . . Like a record stuck and going on over and over.’

‘I don’t,’ Michael said. ‘Do I?’ he asked anxiously after a minute.

‘A bit. Listen, let’s not have a fight about it. Mam’s on the warpath. The main thing is to keep the peace.’

‘Sure.’ Michael was distracted. ‘Does everyone else notice, about my mentioning Grace I mean?’

‘No.’

‘Grace always says that I believe people too easily, I get taken in,’ Michael said.

Miss Purcell had a problem. Old Mr Slattery had once said there was no problem that could not be solved by walking along by the river. Canon Moran said that God often
spoke to the heart in peaceful riverside surroundings more clearly than he spoke in the midst of rush and bustle.

Miss Purcell took a riverside walk to try to work out her worry. Should she leave Fergus Slattery and go to work at the presbytery? To leave your post was an act of desertion. That was true. To work for the priests of God was a high calling. That too was true.

To forget the Slattery family who had been good to her for many years would be base ingratitude. To replace Miss Barry would mean that Miss Barry would definitely have to go for treatment to the county home. Would that be a good or a bad thing?

Miss Purcell walked on long and purposefully, hoping to hear some voice that would make things seem clear.

What she did hear among the reeds and rushes was some giggling and laughing. She craned her neck to see what was going on and stepped up to her ankles in water.

She saw two fleeing figures, children she thought. One of them was almost definitely that little O’Neill girl, she couldn’t identify the boy. When she came back bad-tempered, with soaking feet and no decision made, she met Fergus in the hall.

‘Really, Miss Purcell, if you go paddling the point is to take off your shoes and stockings,’ he said in a mock-reproving voice.

Miss Purcell was in no mood for light-hearted banter. ‘I don’t know what this place is coming to,’ she said. ‘I saw that young O’Neill girl and she’s only a child, up to no good at all, keeping company up in the reeds. She can only be fourteen or fifteen. It’s disgraceful.’ Two red spots burned in Miss Purcell’s face.

‘Oh a chip off the old block, her father’s the greatest whoremaster for a hundred miles,’ Fergus said casually.

‘Mr SLATTERY, please.’ Miss Purcell had never listened to this kind of conversation before and she didn’t intend to now. Unwittingly Fergus had made the decision that no voice had made for her on the river bank. Miss Purcell would spent the autumn of her life with the clergy. Where she wouldn’t hear words or sentiments like that.

Kerry had a long weekend, he didn’t have to go back until Monday night, he told Dara. He would be able to see her on Sunday AND on Monday.

‘Don’t call to the pub . . . I’ll go out and meet you,’ Dara said.

‘I’m trying to be respectable,’ Kerry said. ‘Do the right thing, ask your parents’ permission and everything. Is that not the way to go?’

‘Of course it’s not,’ Dara said. ‘They’d never give their permission for what we do.’

Kerry smiled. ‘They wouldn’t know.’

‘They’d guess. I’ll say I’m going up to the lodge.’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘And where will I meet you?’

‘I’ll come and find you in the wood.’

He did. But only late in the evening. Dara had been waiting, she was upset and annoyed.

‘We didn’t make a time,’ Kerry said. ‘We didn’t fix a date and a place, you wouldn’t let me come and pick you up. So what’s all the drama?’

‘There’s no drama,’ Dara said.

‘Good, I hate girls that make a fuss over nothing,’ Kerry said.

Dara heard two warnings in that.

One warning. There had been and probably still were plenty of other girls. And also the warning that fussy girls mightn’t last long in the picture.

Dara gave a watery smile.

‘Sure, anyway it was nice here. I love this wood, I always have.’

‘It’s beautiful in the evening,’ Kerry said. ‘I think it’s one of the loveliest places ever. Imagine Jack Coyne having a wood called after him. I wish we had an O’Neill’s wood.’

‘It’s not really Jack’s wood, there have always been Coynes in this part.’ Dara didn’t want to give the ferret-faced man from the motor works any part of the mossy, flower-filled place.

Kerry seemed restless. Edgy almost.

‘What did you do today?’

He looked at her in surprise. Dara swallowed. It hadn’t been such a terrible question, had it?

‘I beg your pardon?’ he asked.

‘I was just wondering what kind of things you did.’ She bit her lip and wished she had let the silence be. It was so hard to talk to him today, yesterday he had been like an angel.

‘If you must know I went to a bar way out on the Galway road.’

‘A bar. But you don’t drink?’

‘No, Miss Curiosity 1966, you are right. I do not drink. But I do play cards and that’s what they were doing there.’

‘Cards in a pub on a Sunday?’

‘In a back room. A brother of Brian Doyle works there – well, sort of deals cards there. It was great.’

‘Did you play for money?’

He paused. As if he were debating something.

‘No. Not this time.’

‘Will you another time?’

‘Yes, no point in it otherwise.’

‘Why didn’t you put money on the cards today, then?’

‘Francis said not to, just to watch, watch him dealing. It was great.’

‘Could I come with you next time?’

‘No way. I’m even a bit young for this place, they’d think you were a baby in a cradle.’

‘I’m pretty grown up.’

‘You are very pretty, and very grown up,’ Kerry said, slipping an arm around Dara. ‘So I won’t let them clap eyes on you.’

Dara smiled happily. She wriggled out of his arm for a moment as Sheila Whelan walked past, greeting them both briefly.

‘I hope she won’t tell,’ Dara said.

‘What can she tell?’ Kerry sounded bored.

She changed the subject. ‘Did you have woods like this back in America?’

‘Not like this. We had trees of course on our property . . . but it was different to here.’

‘Did you walk under the trees?’

‘Yes. With my mother, when she was well.’

Even Grace hardly talked about their mother. Dara held her breath a little.

‘What was it like?’ she asked tentatively.

‘It was good. We used to walk in the evenings, and watch the fireflies. You don’t have them here?’

‘Fireflies?’ asked Dara.

‘I’ve never seen any. I wonder why that is.’

‘What are they like?’

‘Like little points of light, like a million tiny stars.’

‘They must be lovely,’ Dara breathed.

‘It was lovely then, but it all changed. Anyway, it’s silly wanting fireflies when we have so much else here.’

‘What have we here?’

‘We have some beautiful girls for one thing.’

‘Oh, lots of them, is it?’ Dara pretended a sense of outrage and started to run off down the slope.

‘Yes, thousands, but you’re the most beautiful. By far.’ He ran after her and caught her easily.

Because Dara wasn’t running very fast.

Dara Ryan is too young for Kerry O’Neill, Sheila Whelan thought to herself. Far too young. She shouldn’t be up in Coyne’s wood alone with him at this time of the evening.

But Sheila had never told anyone anything about anyone else’s business. And even though it was a fifteen-year-old girl, she felt this sense that she must not interfere.

She wondered, if she had a daughter of her own, what would she like a good friend to do? It was impossible to know.

Fergus Slattery had a distressing case to cope with. The parents of a fifteen-year-old boy came to him saying that their son had been named as the father of a girl’s baby. It was a matter of a paternity order.

They were stern unblinking people who did not believe such a thing to be possible.

‘It couldn’t be done, a child of fifteen to father another child,’ the farmer said in bewilderment.

‘It could be done all right,’ Fergus said. Even though he was twice the boy’s age and had fathered nobody he knew it could indeed be done.

‘The girl’s a dirty tramp who lay with half the country,’ said the farmer’s wife.

Fergus had already spoken to the terrified schoolboy.

‘We’ll get nowhere talking like that. Your son is too young to marry, it’s a simple case of finance. We have to work out what can be fairly paid.’

‘You’re not saying that our child is responsible for this girl’s bastard?’

‘I’m saying that we’ll save ourselves a heap of trouble if we try to bring it down to pounds, shillings and pence, and keep all the recriminations for your own kitchen around the fire, or even better not have them at all.’

‘God knows what you can be thinking about, Mr Slattery, you mustn’t be of this world at all.’

‘I’m probably not of this world,’ Fergus agreed. His face was grim, what he had been thinking of was Michael Ryan. Suppose by some horrendous ill chance Michael were to father a child of Grace O’Neill’s. What in God’s earth would happen then?

He wondered should he warn Kate Ryan or was it the action of a mad maiden aunt?

Dr White called to see Kate as a matter of course and courtesy rather than because he could do anything for her.

He never referred again to her enquiry about whether sexual intercourse would be wise or indeed possible. He was a dour man without great charm but Kate liked him. She trusted him because he never gave her false hopes, and he had always been able to interpret the more flowery
pronouncements of consultant doctors at the hospitals, and the specialists she had seen.

‘Nothing wrong with you these days except a broken back,’ Martin White said in a manner that some would have found offensively direct.

‘No, not a thing. That and being the mother of teenagers. It’s a hard old station, isn’t it?’

‘Ah, don’t talk to me. We have Jacinta around the house day and night now, a fit of the sulks. Some awful slight or row or something, she has us demented.’

‘Oh dear. Who with?’ Kate hadn’t heard any of this.

‘Your lot, I think, and that little one of the Dalys and Tommy Leonard. Never mind, it’ll pass, that’s what we keep telling ourselves. The only thing is, will
we
survive it?’

‘Oh, I hope Dara and Michael weren’t out of turn with her . . .’

‘You wouldn’t know what it was all about. Jealousy, I think, mainly. Jacinta complains that Dara and Michael have fallen in love with the O’Neill children and are wandering around starry-eyed hand in hand, and the old gang as they knew it isn’t the same. Fat lot of time we had for that sort of thing or indeed talking about it, at their age.’

‘I thought they all played together still.’ Kate’s voice was tinny.

‘God, Kate, they may well do. Jacinta would remind you of one of those circular saws when she gets started. I don’t listen half the time.’

Kate allowed him to change the subject.

At supper the children’s father spoke sternly.