The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (132 page)

Patrick had suspected he saw Rachel’s hand in the transformed shop.

“Yes, I’m sure that’s true, Mrs. Quinn, it’s just that I expected her here to give me a report on everything.”

“Did she know you were coming here, Mr. O’Neill? She couldn’t have surely?”

“No, well it was a last-minute thing.”

“There you are.” Loretto was triumphant that her new friend Mrs. Fine hadn’t been at fault.

“I’ll take a look at her rooms while I’m here,” Patrick said grumpily.

Loretto looked embarrassed. “I don’t think … I mean …”

“Oh, Mrs. Fine wouldn’t mind, Rachel would like me to see that she had a nice place to stay.”

“It’s just that … you see. If I let rooms to one person I can’t be responsible to let other people in. You do see that, Mr. O’Neill. I can’t be letting people traipse through.”

“I’m not other people, I’m not traipsing through …” Patrick was very annoyed now.

“But you do see. Perhaps when Mrs. Fine gets back, if
she
would like to show you her rooms, it would be different.”

Patrick banged out of the shop.

The woman was right, of course, but for God’s sake the last time he had been here she was like a bag lady shoveling potatoes out of dirty old bags. Now she was all dressed up, the potatoes were in big clean containers, Loretto was taking attitudes and striking poses about showing the rooms upstairs. It was too much.

   Patrick didn’t risk going into Ryan’s Licensed Premises. He had managed to fight with everyone he met since getting back, so he decided to put off the possibility of taking John by the lapels or entering into a screaming match with Kate in her wheelchair. He parked his car out of sight of them, and walked across the footbridge. The mansion gave him scant pleasure this morning. All he could see were the faults—the ugly angle of the drive for one thing. How much better it would have been to have come straight down in one long tree-lined sweep to the river. But how could he have suggested that when, the very day he was going to propose buying their property, Kate was crippled for life on his own building site? Then he didn’t like the huge forecourt, either. It was too bare, too like a parking lot. Which was what it was. Rachel had urged him to leave three trees there but he had thought they would hide the house too much and they would be just further objects to negotiate for buses and cars. He had been wrong and Rachel had been right.

Where
was
she for God’s sake?

Brian Doyle was glad to see him anyway. That made a nice change, Patrick thought grimly. He took off his jacket and sat down in Brian’s site office.

“Tell me why you’re glad to see me, Brian, is it because I am such a good kind employer responsible for the livelihood of at least two hundred people give or take, responsible for your own inflated lifestyle and yet another new car which I see parked outside? Is that why my presence makes you glad? Or is it because I’m the first peasant within five hundred miles who bought the Big House and made it live the way we want it to live? Or is it because of my curly brown hair and twinkling blue eyes?”

Brian looked at Patrick in alarm. He supposed the man must have been drinking, it could be the only explanation.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” he began.

“This may come as a shock to you, Brian, but I would not like a cup of coffee. I have never, since all this began, liked any cup of coffee I have had here. It has become an interesting guessing game to know whether it
is
coffee, or tea or Postum or the water that all these things have been washed up in.”

“Oh well then, forget it.” Brian wasn’t at all offended at the insult to the coffee made on site, he took it that Mr. O’Neill was beyond coffee, and wanted a drink fast.

“Will we go down to Ryan’s and talk then?” he said agreeably.

“We will
not
go down to Ryan’s, we will talk here. It may have escaped your notice that it is ten-fifty in the morning, not a time for adjourning to a pub even by your standards.”

“Jesus Christ, nothing would please you today.”

“You may be right. Why were you glad to see me?”

“There’s been a lot of messages for one thing, people wanting to get in touch with you. The phone’s not stopped all morning.”

“Right,” Patrick grunted. “Where’s Rachel?”

“Who?”

“Rachel Fine. Has it escaped your notice that she has been working with me since 1963 in the design and interior decoration of this hotel which has made you a millionaire ten times over?”

You couldn’t insult Brian Doyle, which was one of his great strengths.

“Oh, Mrs. Fine? I’ve no idea where she is, she’s been in and out, but you know what she’s like, a very helpful lady—never gets in the way, does her work, leaves a note about it and is gone.”

“Yes, well what note did she leave?”

“It was measurements, someone here gave her the wrong figures for the dining room, they’d got it all wrong, the shop was going to send twice too much material. Mrs. Fine headed them off. She’s saving you a packet that lady, I tell you. A packet.”

“I’m glad somebody’s saving me a packet, with the way that other people throw it around.”

“Maybe when you feel more yourself,” said Brian in the tone that you’d use to talk to a drunk about to fall off a bar stool.

“I
am
myself, you idiot,” said Patrick. “I just want you to
ring
these guys as you call it.
Ring
them on that phone, as you call it, and tell them I’m not here.”

“Everyone calls it
ring
, it’s not a word I made up,” cried Brian, stung at last to some kind of response. “And you told me yourself that you always grasped the nettle, Mr. O’Neill, you always took the bull by the horns, you said that was the one sure road to success. I’ve been following your example, I’ve been doing it myself, and it does seem to work. I’ve been doing much better.”

“You’ve been doing much better because I handed you the job of a lifetime on a plate and you are taking a lifetime to complete it!” Patrick was aware that his bad temper was doing him no good but he wasn’t ready to stop yet.

“Now Brian, listen to me. You do what I say, and do it now. I’m getting the hell out of here before I have a heart attack and the litigation about the hotel becomes legal history and with any luck you’d never get paid the last bit.”

“And when do I say you’re going to be here?”

“You don’t know. You haven’t a goddamn clue.”

Patrick grabbed his jacket and got up to head for the footbridge.

“But Mr. O’Neill, can’t I show you what we’ve done …”

“I see what you’ve done, the front is like a tarmac in an airport.”

“Shit, Mr. O’Neill, everything was in the plans …”

“Don’t you say shit to me …”

“But don’t you want a tour of the site as usual?”

“How can I if I’m not here?”

Patrick was half way down to the footbridge when he saw Dara Ryan running toward him excitedly.

“Hallo, Mr. O’Neill,” she called, pleased to see him.

“Well Dara, good to see you.” He noticed that she was becoming a striking-looking girl, tall, dark, in a white tee shirt, jeans and a red flower tucked behind her ear—or maybe it was a bit of jewelry.

“When did you get back?” she asked.

“A little while ago. Everyone I’ve met has fought with me so far. You’re not going to have a fight are you?”

“Lord, no.” She seemed eager to talk. “Did you have a good time?”

“In Dublin. No, not really, not at all in fact. Nothing but meetings and more meetings and nothing much at the end of it. Despite what you may think I actually don’t enjoy fighting.”

“I never thought you enjoyed fighting,” Dara said. She was anxious to ask him something. He wondered what it was.

“Well, you’re right.” He smiled warmly at her. It was true, he didn’t enjoy a fight. He had not enjoyed the scenes some weeks back after a demarcation dispute between two sets of workers. In front of fifty men he had told Brian Doyle that they had three hours in which to decide which men did what work. If it were not agreed then every single man would be paid off that afternoon. There had been something in his face that sorted out the dispute in far less than the three hours he had given them.

It was a victory but he hadn’t enjoyed it.

“And what are you doing here on the footbridge? Were you lying in wait for me?” he asked.

“Not really, I was wondering when you’d be back, there’s a folk concert up in the grounds of the ruined abbey, lots of quite well-known singers, and I was wondering …”

“I think I’m a bit old for it, Dara,” he teased.

“No, I meant if Kerry was interested in going. I wasn’t sure when you were both coming back so I kept an eye out.”

He looked at her and sighed. “Kerry won’t be back for the concert,” he said.

“He’s not with you?”

“No, he wasn’t in Dublin, he went straight to Donegal, did he not tell you?”

“I must have gotten it wrong,” said Dara Ryan. The light had gone out of her big dark eyes.

   “Can we go out for a walk?” Rachel said. It was a very sunny afternoon but with a nice breeze.

“Sure, hold on a moment until I get some gum and stick my spine together, then I’ll leap up and come with you,” Kate said without rancor.

“I meant me going for a walk, you going for a push.”

“It’s boring,” Kate said. “You have to shout over my shoulder, I have to crane my neck. I wish I had a pram, people can talk
to
babies, not over their heads.”

“We can talk when we get there,” Rachel said.

“Get where?”

“Mystery tour.”

“Why not? Let me drape one of your scarves elegantly around me so that I’ll knock the eyes out of anyone we meet.”

They went first to Loretto Quinn’s. Kate couldn’t believe the changes that had been made. Normally Loretto was so indecisive she couldn’t decide whether to wrap your potatoes in newspaper, put them into a paper bag or feed them straight into your shopping bag. Now it appeared that in under two weeks her entire shop had been refurbished. There was even a man redoing the sign over the door.

Two men in the shop lifted Kate’s wheelchair inside so that she could see. She propelled herself around touching this and stroking that. There was so much room here now. The place looked an entirely different
class
of a shop. Much more upper-class or something. Yet her prices were the same. Kate was full of praise.

“But it’s all Mrs. Fine, Kate, she’s a walking saint—a bit like yourself. I don’t know why she did all this for me, I really don’t. I’d never in a month of Sundays have been able to think of it all myself, or if I thought of it, I’d never have been able to do it.”

Loretto looked taller, Kate thought, suddenly, which was nonsense. But maybe she was standing up more straight now, and she had tidied herself up. It wouldn’t do to be the old wishy-washy Loretto with pale hair falling into her eyes and a grubby pink overall. She wore a smart brown shopcoat, with a white blouse underneath. Her hair was clipped back with a smart red barrette, undoubtedly a gift from Rachel.

Kate sighed. “You’re a sort of magician, you know, you’ve changed Loretto’s life,” she said to Rachel as they went back along River Road.

“It’s easy to change other people’s lives, it’s your own that’s the problem,” Rachel laughed.

“Hey, is the tour over? That was very short as a mystery tour—up to Loretto’s and back.”

“No, no, it hasn’t begun. I thought we’d go across the footbridge and look at the hotel.”

It was said lightly, but they both knew it wasn’t light. Kate hadn’t been across the Fern for more than two years. Not since the day she had walked across the footbridge herself and been carried out of the site unconscious in an ambulance.

“Oh I don’t think so, Rachel.”

They were at the footbridge. Rachel came around to the front of the wheelchair and squatted down in front of Kate. Her perfectly arranged hair in its short natural looking curls that took her thirty minutes to arrange every morning hadn’t been disturbed. Her make-up made her look like a young girl. Her big dark eyes were troubled and fixed on Kate.

She spoke very seriously.

“I’m not some kind of psychologist trying to get you over the shock of where you had your accident. Lord, Kate, why would I want to do that? You could live for the rest of your life without going back to the spot where your back was broken. What good on earth would it do you to see the place? Not that you
will
be able to see the place now anyway.”

“So why do you want me to go over there?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Can’t we talk here or go back to my green room and talk?”

Kate sounded upset but Rachel pretended not to notice.

“Please, Kate, I want to talk to you about the hotel. We might as well talk about it in Brooklyn if you don’t come with me and see what I mean.”

“I know what it’s like, I’ve heard.”

“Please.”

“You’re the one with the legs, I might as well give in graciously.”

“This is giving in graciously?” Rachel laughed.

The little path that Rachel hadn’t been able to walk on that summer day because of her high heels and flimsy shoes was now a tarmacadamed all-weather pathway. With little seats placed here and there, often set into rocks or under trees. It wasn’t neat and orderly like a public park, it was more as if someone had decided here would be a good place to sit and talk. The ground had been turned and dug and planted, with evergreen bushes here and lawns there. The steep slopes were planted in terraces.

“I had no idea there was so much work done here,” Kate breathed as they paused to look at shrubs and rock gardens.

“It cost a fine penny I can tell you, fleets of gardeners still working on it, but it’s destined not to need too much maintenance once it’s finished.”

On and up they went toward the house.

Although she had seen it many times from her own home across the river, Kate was unprepared for the sheer size of it. This was a huge place. She looked at the big sweep up to the front door. A dozen tour buses could come in and turn here, and perhaps fifty cars park as well, but this wasn’t the real car park, that was around the side. The three-story house faced across the river. It was a reproduction of a classic Georgian house, with its high windows, its fanlight over the door. Plain and clean-lined and already, Kate noticed, at least twenty well-watered plants of virginia creeper. In five years the place would look as if it had always stood there. Patrick had been given very good advice.