Firefly Summer (9 page)

But Kate would not let her tone betray her rage, otherwise he would just walk away from it saying that the last thing on earth he wanted was a fight. It was infuriating. The only way she could convince him of how badly he was behaving was to speak in a reasonable tone as if she were the most contented woman on earth.

For a wild moment she wondered how the Mother of God would have coped, and then realised that Mary wouldn’t have had nearly as many problems in Nazareth. There was never any mention of her running Joseph’s carpentry business almost single-handed and doing another job for a local lawyer as well. Kate’s resentment knew no bounds.

The last straggler finally went home. The glasses were washed, the windows opened to air the place, two clean dishcloths lay out to dry on the counter. Kate felt sweaty and weary, not in the mood to list her wrongs.

Her husband smiled at her across the counter. ‘Will I pour you a port wine?’ he asked.

‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph isn’t that all I’d need tomorrow, a roaring port hangover.’

‘Just one glass each, we’ll bring it out to the side garden and I’ll tell you my plans for it.’

She bit her lip. He was like a big child.

‘Well?’ He had the glass and the port bottle ready.

She was too tired.

‘Hold on till I rinse this blouse out,’ she said, and took off the blue and white cotton blouse that was sticking to her back. Standing in her slip top and dark blue skirt, she looked flushed and very beautiful, John thought. He touched her neck where the long dark curly hair was loosely tied with a narrow blue ribbon.

‘That’s lovely for them to see that kind of carry on if they pass the window,’ she said shaking his hand away.

‘Well you’re the one who’s half-dressed, I’m quite respectable,’ he laughed.

The blouse was left to hang on the back of a chair, it would be dry in the morning. Kate gave herself a quick sluice with the water in the sink that was meant to wash only glasses.

‘If we’re going to go to the side garden, let’s go then,’ she said more ungraciously than she felt; she was glad at any rate that he was calling it a garden rather than a yard. That was an advance.

The moonlight made it look a great deal better than it seemed by day. Jaffa sat still as a statue on the wall. Leopold was dreaming of beatings and his hard life. He gave a gentle whimper now and then in his sleep. From the hen house there was a soft cluck.

John folded a sack and left it on an upturned barrel. ‘I was to ask you about the tortoise.’

‘No, no.’ Her eyes flashed with rage. ‘It’s not fair, John, really it isn’t. You’re always the lovey dovey one, ask poor old Daddy, he’s so soft, he’d melt as soon as he looks at you. Mammy’s the nagging old shrew . . . It’s not fair to let them grow up thinking that.’

‘They do not think that.’

‘They do, and they will more if you say they can have the tortoise back. Do you think I want the smelly old thing in the turf room looking at me like something out of one of those horror pictures they have in the picture house? I’ve wished a hundred times it would die one day and we could have a funeral and it would all be over, and all the fighting.’

‘They live for years, you know, you’re on a loser there,’ he grinned.

She wouldn’t give in. ‘No, they can’t have it back, they broke all the rules coming into the pub like pictures of children you’d see when they’re collecting for charity. They’re worse than Leopold, they pretend they never got a meal or a bath in their lives.’

Kate Ryan was very aggrieved.

‘Did I ever try to countermand any of your decisions?’ John asked.

‘No, but you try to get round me. We’ve got to be consistent, John, otherwise how do they know where they are?’

‘I couldn’t agree more.’

‘But?’

‘But nothing. I couldn’t agree more.’

‘So what about the bloody tortoise? What were you going to suggest?’

‘Come here, I want to show you something . . .’ He took her by the hand and pointed out where they should build a long hen run, with netting over it. The hens would have freedom, but within frontiers. The rest was going to be a garden. He showed where they could have a rockery. And how they would build a raised flower bed maybe and she could grow the flowers she had always said she would like.

‘You should have been writing your poetry.’

‘It’s not like making things in a factory, Kate, you can’t sit down in front of a conveyor belt and turn out bits of writing and in the end a poem emerges.’ He spoke quietly and with dignity.

‘I know, I know.’ She was contrite.

‘So when it didn’t seem to come, I thought I’d do something for you and plan you a garden.’

‘That’s lovely.’

‘I’ll have a word with Jimbo Doyle and he could do a couple of days and build up a few beds. Now wouldn’t that be nice?’

‘It would.’ She was touched, she couldn’t deliver her attack now. It would be ingratitude, flying in the face of God, to attack a husband who was so kind.

‘I was over in Fernscourt today, there’s heaps of stones lying round the place. We could get some nice big rocks, Jimbo could wheel them across the footbridge.’

‘I don’t suppose they belong to anyone.’ Kate didn’t
want her voice to sound grudging . . . ‘That would be grand,’ she added.

‘And this thing about the tortoise, I wouldn’t counter-mand your orders. God, what would be the point? What I was wondering was now that the hens have a place of their own someone will have to feed them properly you know, mix up scraps with the bran . . .’

‘Yes.’

‘So suppose we made those two scallywaggers do that? They’d be well able for it, and they’d give the hens a feed twice a day . . . and to encourage them maybe they could have some kind of access to that tortoise, maybe take him out of your way in the turf room, not have him looking up at you like a prehistoric monster. What do you think?’

Kate tried to hide her smile. Unsuccessfully.

‘What do I think?’ she said, laughing in spite of herself. ‘I think I might be persuaded . . . but . . .’

‘But it would have to come from you. If you think it would be a good idea, then you should suggest it.’ He was adamant about this.

‘I suppose you sorted Dara out too,’ Kate said gently and with admiration. ‘They should have you up on the platform in Geneva sorting things out for everyone.’

‘Ah, the poor child was very upset, it’s giving up a bit of fairyland. None of us like doing that.’

‘People like you didn’t have to, it’s still all there in your heads,’ Kate said, but she said it with a hint of envy in her voice, and she kissed his lips softly so that he tasted the port wine.

That night Michael sat on the landing window seat and looked across at Fernscourt in the moonlight.

The curtains of ivy waved over the hummocks of moss. It was easier than ever to see the ruins since some of the big straggly trees and bushes had been cut down.

Eddie and Declan were long asleep in their bunk beds. Michael had been reading with a torch, but his mind had strayed from the knight who had rescued the Lady Araminta with the golden tresses. He wanted to look at real life, which was Fernscourt. For a long time he looked at the shadows over the moon and the patterns they made on the soft green banks up from the river towards the house.

Then he saw a figure moving in the moonlight. Nobody
ever
walked there at night. Michael knelt up and opened the window to have a better view. It was a man, an old man even older than Daddy. He was wandering around with his hands in his pockets looking up at the walls. Sometimes he touched the moss, sometimes he pushed aside the ivy. Michael was kneeling on the window seat now, peering and straining to see as the figure disappeared and emerged again behind the ruined walls. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and there was his father in his pyjamas.

‘Dad, I think he’s come. I think he’s here.’

‘Who?’

‘The American. I think that’s him in our house.’ The boy’s face was white even on the shadowy landing with moonlight coming in irregular darts through the window.

John Ryan looked out and saw a figure walking round touching walls and almost patting the bits of building that still stood. John felt he was spying somehow. The man was as if naked over there, in that he didn’t know he was being observed.

Michael was wriggling off the seat. ‘I’ll have to wake Dara,’ he said, his face working anxiously.

‘Wait, Michael.’

‘But it’s our house, he’s here, he came after all. People said he might not be going to live here. But look at him, he
is
going to live in it, isn’t he? Isn’t he?’

John sat down on the window seat, and lifted his feet a little off the cold lino floor covering. ‘Michael, don’t wake the child up.’

‘She’s not a child, she’s twenty minutes older than I am.’

‘That’s true. She’s not a child any more than you are.’

Michael’s face was troubled. ‘She’ll need to know, Dad.’

‘Nobody needs to know.’

‘It’s partly her house.’

‘It’s
his
house Michael.’ John indicated the man across the river.

‘I know, I know.’ The boy’s thin shoulders were raised, tense. He was troubled and unsure what to do.

‘Give me something to put my feet on so they’re not like two big blocks of ice when I get back into the bed with your mother.’

Michael rooted round under the comics and books that were on the window seat and found a raggedy cushion.

‘Will this do?’

‘That’s fine, thank you, son.’

Some of the quivering tension had left the boy. He sat down, still looking out of the window, but prepared to talk rather than wake his sister and the whole house in his grief.

‘Do you know, when I was a lad your age we used to go over there and play too. Your Uncle Barry, now, he was a great climber, there was nothing he couldn’t get right up on, and there were more bits of wall then than now.’

Michael was interested.

‘And then your Aunt Nuala; my heavens wouldn’t those little Australian boys and girls be surprised to know that their Mother Superior used to climb trees like a boy? She used to tie her skirts up around her waist and climb with Barry.’

‘What did you do, Daddy?’

‘Sure I was only like poor Eddie, looking at them,’ John sighed. ‘They usually wanted me to go away, if I remember rightly.’

Michael took this as a criticism of the twins’ own attitude to their younger brother.

‘I’m sure you were fine when you were young, Dad. But God, you couldn’t have Eddie hanging round with you, I mean really and truly.’

‘Oh I know that, I’m not disputing it, Eddie would have your heart scalded. But I was only talking about the old days across there . . . and the kind of things we used to do . . .’

He talked on gently, his voice low enough that it
wouldn’t wake Kate and have her storming out on to the landing. Yet raised enough for Michael to think it was a normal conversation and that these were normal times.

John dug deep into his memory of games played, and accidents averted, of guards on bicycles, of two young bullocks that ran wild, away from someone’s secure field up the hill. He talked until he saw the lids begin to droop on his son’s thin white face, and knew that sleep was going to come at last, that Michael wouldn’t wake Dara and sit all night watching in helpless despair as this stranger walked through what they still wanted to think their home.

That night old Mr Slattery couldn’t sleep and he came down to get himself some warm milk. He dozed off at the kitchen table as the milk boiled and didn’t smell the burning until Fergus appeared, wild-eyed with shock.

‘Don’t put me away, don’t put me in the county home,’ wept the old man. ‘I’ll take milk to bed in a flask. I’ll never try to boil it again. Please.’

Fergus had been filling the blackened saucepan with water and opening the windows.

‘Are you going mad altogether, Father? Would I put you in the county home? Would I?’

‘If I were mad altogether you’d have to,’ Mr Slattery said reasonably.

‘Yes, but you’re not, and even if you were I don’t think I would.’

‘Why not? It would be the right thing to do, we’ve often advised clients ourselves.’

‘You’re not a client. You’re my father.’

‘You’ve got to get on with your own life.’

‘But I
do
get on with my own life, for God’s sake. I was
out getting on with it this evening and I’d only just got to bed. That’s why it was my nose that caught the milk, not Miss Purcell’s.’

‘I’m a burden, I don’t do much work in the office.’

‘You’re not a burden, we don’t
have
much work in the office.’

‘I’ve let the place run down, why else didn’t we get the business for Fernscourt?’

‘Oh is
that
what’s worrying you? I’ll tell you why. Your man O’Neill is in business in a big way over there, really big, owns at least half a dozen restaurants or bars or whatever they are. He has other business too, he pays accountants and lawyers big fees. Now he’s opening here, the big lawyers look up a map . . . Ireland they say, Ireland, where’s that? Then they find it. What’s the capital they say, what’s the capital? Then someone tells them and they get Dublin solicitors. That’s all.’

‘You make it sound so simple. I suppose it will be good when he arrives, this American. He’s given work in the place already.’

‘Here’s some fresh milk.’ Fergus had boiled another saucepan. ‘We’ll tell Miss Purcell that I was drunk and burned the arse out of the saucepan. The American? It has to be good for the place. I suppose the poor devil will be full of nonsense and trying to hunt and shoot and fish. We’ll have great sport with him. Imagine worrying about the American! It’ll be the best sport we ever had. I can’t wait for him to arrive.’

That night Sergeant Sheehan found somebody lying in a very awkward position, legs splayed, head lolling, and stretched right across the footbridge at the end of the
town. Sergeant Sheehan was a thickset man who used to be a great hurler in his day, a man with ferocious eyebrows which made him look very frightening when he had to. But he was running to fat now, with slow and undemanding life in a country town. He felt his uniform was constantly tight around his neck, and rolls of fat gathered when he buttoned his top collar.