Firefly Summer (8 page)

Fergus had told her that it wasn’t a big practice and that normally he was well able to deal with the clerical side. He could type like the wind with two fingers and he had a fairly reasonable filing system but he wanted his father to take more time off, now people really did trust him with their affairs rather than thinking of him as a boy in short trousers. So Kate would be a godsend. And indeed she was. It took her about three days to see that his reasonable filing system was hopeless, and to set up a better one.

‘Come here till I show you what we do with these papers now,’ she ordered him.

‘No, no, that’s your work, that’s what we pay you inordinate sums of money for, so that I don’t have to look at things like that.’

‘Wrong,’ Kate cried. ‘You have to understand it, otherwise it’s useless to any of us. You won’t know where to put back a letter, find a counsel’s brief, where the deeds
are, anything. Suppose I get flu or you sack me, or you’re working late at night. Come on now, it will only take ten minutes a day.’

‘Do you run the pub like this too?’ Fergus asked.

‘Of course not, but I do the accounts, and I’ve insisted that John does them with me otherwise he’d have to leave them till the wife gets back and it would just double the work.’

‘I’m surprised the place isn’t a gold mine with your organisational skills.’

‘Come out our way one evening and have a pint in it and you’ll see what a gold mine it is. Would I be in here setting up filing systems for beautiful idle professional men too lazy to look at them if it was a gold mine? Now suppose you had this query from the town agent’s clerk about the fee in that workman’s compensation case which was appealed, where would you look first?’

‘In the bad old days I’d look on the table at the window.’

‘But in the good days that have now come?’

‘I’ve forgotten, young Mrs Ryan, show me, show me.’

‘Oh thank God I’m happily married. You’d break my heart.’

‘You’re sure you’re happily married?’

‘Very sure. And isn’t it time you had a romance yourself? Now that Nora Lynch has gone off to fresh fields and better chances we hear nothing about your activities.’

‘Listen to me, after that business with Nora I’m afraid to lay my hand or eye on anyone. There’s no activities to hear about. It was all a terrible misunderstanding.’

‘You lost us a fine schoolteacher over it all. My Dara loved her. She hates the new woman, about a hundred she
says, and a habit of hitting them accidentally on the knuckles with a ruler.’

‘Poor Dara, maybe I should have given Miss Lynch an engagement ring to keep her in the town, and keep all the little girls like Dara happy.’

‘I don’t think anything’s going to make my Dara happy for a long time, but no stories about children. This workman was called Burke, Fergus, in the name of God where are you going to look for this file?’

‘Under the Bs, miss?’

‘We have a child prodigy,’ said Kate Ryan and went back to her typewriter.

‘What are you doing, Daddy?’ John jumped guiltily at Dara’s voice.

What he should have been doing was writing. This was the time that Kate stood minding the bar, tired already from her morning in the office. But there was just so long you could look at blank paper without it beginning to drive you mad. John Ryan had nothing to say and no way of saying it. He had come out to what Kate called the garden and everyone else called the yard to do a little experiment. Ryan’s Licensed Premises was flush on the road. Its front door opened straight on to River Road. It would have been unheard of to have a pub with a garden in front. The supplies came to the back yard and the barrels took up most of it . . . a place of half-used out-houses and sheds. That was where the back door of the house was, that was the only way the children were ever allowed to enter their home. But beside the house there was what they called the side yard. Here the hens wandered, and Jaffa sat like a buddha in calm control,
purring and lazily washing her big orange face. Leopold didn’t sit much in the yard, there wasn’t an audience sufficiently sympathetic to his whimperings and cringings. He liked to cower in the pub. Maurice was still in the turf room after the ugly river-bank incident. John had devised a marvellous way to avoid working on his poems: he was going to build a large hen coop, a wired-off area for the hens to live in, so that they could scratch and wander but be away from the few pathetic attempts that Kate had started in the line of making a real garden. Once the hens were corralled life would be easier. But John Ryan had wanted to do it quietly and undisturbed by his family. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, that he was shirking his writing work, and mitching from his desk. Dara stood with a mutinous look on her face. Her eyes were dark and cross under her fringe of black hair . . . her hands thrust into the pockets of her shorts.

‘Are you changing things, is that it?’ she said in the tones of someone looking for a fight and determined to find one.

‘I have a bit of a plan. I was working it out, that’s all,’ her father said, looking guilty and shifty.

‘I bet it’s something new and desperate,’ Dara said.

‘It was just a plan to gather the hens all together in a run, that’s all it was,’ John said mildly.

‘They’re perfectly all right the way they are, they don’t want to be gathered, they don’t want to be changed, they love things just as they are.’ Her eyes were suspiciously bright as if she could start to cry any minute. Dara had never expressed any view about the hens up to this. The hens were like the river bank and the crates in the yard, they were just part of the background.

John Ryan sat back on his hunkers and put an arm round his daughter’s knees. ‘Come here and give your old father a hug.’

‘There’s no point in hugs,’ Dara said.

‘Right.’ He stood up. ‘I know exactly. It’s the same with me. I don’t feel like writing now so I came down to play with the chickens.’

Dara couldn’t help laughing at the thought of her father playing with chickens. She managed a snort but John Ryan wisely didn’t build on it. He knew she was upset and it would all come out. He supposed it was a row with Kate. But he was wrong.

‘Daddy, are we poor?’

‘No we’re not poor. You know that.’

‘But we’re not rich, are we?’

‘You don’t have to be one or the other, you can be in between, like most of us are round here.’

‘Will we ever be rich?’

‘We’ll be all right. What’s this worry about money?’

‘We’re going to need it to buy our house.’ Her face was very determined.

‘But we have our house, silly old thing, this is our house.’ He indicated the pub and the whitewashed walls of the house with a wave of his hand.

‘Not here, our house across in Fernscourt. You know where they have the diggers. They’re clearing it for someone to live there, some American, he’ll live there unless we can buy it.’

‘Now, now, Dara,’ John began soothingly.

But she was on her feet full of anger and wouldn’t be soothed.

‘It’s our house, Michael’s and mine, and everyone’s.’

John sighed.

‘Will you come for a bit of a walk with me?’

‘I don’t feel like a walk.’

‘I don’t feel like a walk with such a disagreeable weasel as you, but it might help.’

‘Where will we go?’

‘We could go to Fernscourt.’

‘All right then.’

Kate Ryan was in the bar talking to Jimbo Doyle and Jack Coyne, who were not her idea of the best of company, when she saw through the window the two figures crossing the footbridge. Her husband who was meant to be working on his poetry and her daughter who had been like a bag of hedgehogs all week. Her knuckles ached to rap on the window, but she wouldn’t give that sharp-faced Jack Coyne the satisfaction of seeing her act the bossy wife.

Kate had always spoken impetuously, and not long ago in confession had told Canon Moran that she was quick-tempered. Canon Moran had suggested that she think of Our Lord’s Blessed Mother whenever she was tempted to say something sharp. She should think what Our Lady might have said. She needn’t actually say what Our Lady would have said, but thinking it might delay the caustic response or the hurtful crack.

Looking at the man and girl hand in hand walking across the footbridge Kate Ryan thought that the Mother of God might have blessed them and wished them well and happiness and thanked God for her good fortune. Right, Kate Ryan would think similar noble thoughts. She turned round and faced Jack Coyne and Jimbo Doyle with what she thought was a saintly smile.

‘Jaysus, Kate, have you a toothache?’ asked Jimbo Doyle in alarm.

‘And Michael and I planned to live here when we grew up. Everyone knew that we’d get a proper roof made over this bit, and probably build windows and a door.’ Dara was pointing out the extent of the house.

‘But it was only a dream.’ John was gentle.

‘No it wasn’t.’

‘Yes, of course it was . . . and is. Like going to see the man in the moon. Do you remember when you were very young we used to take you out to have a look at the man in the moon before you went to bed? Now you don’t think it’s a man up there, you’re quite happy to look at the moon for itself, as something beautiful lighting up the sky over Mountfern.’

‘Yes but . . .’

‘And when you were very young altogether you and Michael used to be staring up the chimney in the kitchen, didn’t you, at Christmas time, the way Declan did last Christmas? You thought that if the chimney was too old and too awkward you wouldn’t get any presents. But they came all the same, didn’t they, and you don’t mind now where they come from?’

‘That’s not the same . . .’

‘I know it’s not the same . . . but I was just saying that the way we look at things changes as life goes on, it couldn’t always stay the same, otherwise we’d all be still living in caves with clubs or if we didn’t grow up in some kind of way wouldn’t we all be in nappies waddling round the place in playpens . . . ?’

‘You don’t understand . . .’ she wailed.

‘I don’t understand completely, but I understand a bit. Don’t I?’ She looked up at him, her face softening.

‘I know, Dara, it’ll always be here in some way for you, not the same way, remember the man in the moon. The moon didn’t go, and it still looks beautiful, doesn’t it, when you can see all the cattle over on the hills, and the spire of the church and the woods and . . . and Fernscourt . . .’

‘Will it be the same when this awful man comes, him with all his American money?’

‘He’s not going to be awful. He has children, we hear, you’ll love them as sure as anything.’

‘I won’t, I won’t.’

‘Well you’ll meet them anyway, and you
might
like them. Would that be reasonable?’

‘And we’d never be able to afford to buy it ourselves.’

‘No, that isn’t a thing you should think about, that’s not a possible thing, that’s like imagining a square circle, or imagining that Jaffa grew a long neck like a giraffe in the picture books. Cats don’t grow long necks, this isn’t a
real
home for you and Michael, it was a home for last summer and before that.’

‘And now?’ Her lip had stopped trembling.

‘It’s still special but it isn’t anything you start getting all het up about and start saving your pocket money to buy. That’s like the days when you used to want to know if the man in the moon had to wash his neck.’

‘Will you explain that to Michael, Daddy? I’m not great at explaining.’

‘I’m not great at it either.’

‘Well, you’re better than me,’ Dara said in the matter-of-fact voice which meant that he had sorted this one out anyway.

John Ryan hadn’t written a poem or built a hen run, but he had convinced his angry little daughter that the world wasn’t going to come to an end. Now all he had to do was to get into the house without his wife knowing he had played hookey from his poetry writing.

It was a busy night in the bar, they had hardly time for a word of any kind let alone the attack that John feared was brewing. Kate moved so quickly around the place, she had glasses swept up, and washed or refilled quicker than he would have decided whether to move the glass in the first place. Yet she didn’t give the customers the impression that they were being rushed, only that there was an urgency in getting their pint in front of them.

Kate had decided to say nothing until everyone was gone, then she was going to force her voice to stay low, not to get high and excited, and she would not allow herself to speak too quickly until it became a gabble. She was going to point out – in tones that no one could find offence in – that she got up every morning and saw the children off to school, then she went and did what amounted to a day’s work in an office, and not that she was complaining but she spent the afternoon listening to almighty bores rawmeishing out of them instead of getting on with her own work of which she had plenty, but she had stood in the bar to let her husband work . . . She would keep her voice very calm as she told him how she would like to take a cleaver to him and split him in two.

Her humour was not helped by the behaviour of Eddie and Declan who had come into the pub, despite all the strictures against this, to know could they take possession
of the tortoise again. They had burst into the pub, mouths stained with the jam which Carrie had been making a very poor fist of setting. They looked like the children of tinkers both of them in the most torn clothes that they could have found. In front of the drinking population of Mountfern – who probably had looked at her askance because she was an outsider from the first day and had now committed the crime of going outside the family home to work – she had been guilty of the worst sin of all . . . neglecting her children. And had John supported her, had he removed them with an authoritative wave and a thunderous warning? He had
like hell
!

John Ryan had put an arm around the shoulder of each small furious son and he chose with a slow deliberation for each of them a chocolate biscuit from the shelf behind the bar and he had walked them out as if they had been honoured guests instead of his own children who had broken his own most strict rule of coming into the family pub.