The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (138 page)

“It’s in my nature, I expect.” Patrick smiled broadly.

He pulled up the small rickety chair close to the counter. “About those salvers that my son brought in, the ones that are in the window.”

“He said he had full authority …”

“Oh yes, no problem like that at all …”

“And if you want them back, Mr. O’Neill … I did think that maybe it wasn’t a good enough price but your lad seemed very pleased …”

“Not at all, nothing like that … no no.” Patrick’s voice was soothing.

“So I hope I didn’t do anything out of turn …”

“You know the way children are, Mrs. Meagher, you do your best and then you wonder
what
was the right thing to do …”

Mrs. Meagher sat down on the other side of the counter and leaned across to Patrick.

“Mr. O’Neill, you don’t know the truth you’re saying …”

   Patrick O’Neill drove himself slowly back to the lodge to wait for his son. In his briefcase he carried the two silver salvers.

“I’ll give them a little polish, will I?” Olive Hayes had suggested.

“That would be lovely, Miss Hayes.”

The evening shadows lengthened, he sat alone looking in front of him. He had telephoned Loretto Quinn’s. No, there was no sign of Rachel and she had not said where she would be.

He had telephoned Ryan’s and she was not there. The ridiculous harridan who looked after the bar for them said that Mrs. Ryan was not to be disturbed.

There was no sign of his daughter either.

The key turned in the lock.

Kerry came in.

He was surprised to find his father sitting alone and with no work in front of him.

Surprised but not alarmed.

“This is all very peaceful,” Kerry said slightly mockingly.

“I’d like to go out, Kerry.” Patrick’s voice was very calm.

Kerry decided to be flip. “Well then you
must
go out, Father, don’t let me stop you,” he said.

“We’ll go right away.”

Something in his tone made Kerry follow his father’s look, and on the sideboard he saw the two gleaming silver salvers.

His face did not change. “I see,” he said.

“Good.” Patrick looked dangerously quiet.

They left the house without words.

Miss Hayes watched them from the kitchen window. They walked toward the woods.

   “Why did you do it?” Patrick asked his son.

“I needed the money.”

“You are a fool as well as a thief. Do you have any idea how much they were worth?”

“A great deal more than that woman gave me, but that wasn’t the point.”

“What was the point?”

“The point was that I needed that amount and she could give it to me, so it couldn’t matter less what the real value of those trays was. They only represented to me a way to get what I needed.”

“So if you are going to steal from my house and make us a public exhibition in my town, my place, it doesn’t even matter that you get a fraction of what these items were worth.”

“No. Their worth is not important.”

Patrick’s hand went into a fist without his having any control over it.

Kerry saw. “Don’t forget all you spent on that orthodontal work, Father. I mean, if you’re talking about value for money, why smash it all up? It cost you a fortune to get me all this bridge work.”

The spasm of white anger passed; it was replaced with something much deeper. Something; Patrick felt, that was going to be with him for a long time.

“Do you hate me, Kerry?”

“Of course I don’t, Father.”

“Then why?”

“I told you, I needed money. Why do you have to be so Italian about everything? Love, hate—life isn’t like that.”

“What is it like then? Tell me, I’d love to know what life
is
like.”

Kerry leaned against a tree. He looked impossibly beautiful in the evening light. He looked like a painting of a young hero, not a cheat and liar who had stolen from his own father and showed not an ounce of remorse.

“Life is about excitement, Father, it’s not about the past and the old days and the old order and righting wrongs that were done centuries ago—if they were done at all.”

“Excitement?” Patrick said.

“Yes, that’s about the best I can do to explain.” Kerry seemed bored.

“Is there not sufficient
excitement
, as you call it, in Donegal? Why did you have to come to that center of excitement—Mountfern—and humiliate me in my own place?”

“You are not humiliated, Father, I’m sure you got out of it.”

“You’re goddamn right I did. I bought Meagher’s shop.”

“Hey,” Kerry laughed. He gave a natural, amused little laugh. The boy was not even remotely touched by what he had done.

“I told Mrs. Meagher that there had been a misunderstanding, she told me that children were all the same. I listened to her woes, one of them being that she couldn’t find a buyer. We need a place in Bridge Street. She’s leaving almost at once. She will say nothing about your misunderstanding. I will say nothing about some of her circumstances.”

“Like her daughter being a teeny bit pregnant.” He laughed again.

“We don’t have you to thank for that, do we?”

“Teresa Meagher, Father. Please. You must think I’m hard up!”

“Why did you need the money?”

“My business, Father.”

“No, Kerry. My business now.”

“Are you going to beat me again?”

“No, of course not.”

“There’s no of course about it, you want to.”

“No, I want you to tell me. Tell me why.”

“You’re such a man of the world, you have this sixth sense, you tell me, Father. You always say you have a feel for things.”

“Cards?” Patrick said.

Kerry paused. “Yes,” he said.

“Was that it at school all that time ago?”

“Sort of. Betting, big talk.”

“Aren’t you a fool.”

“No, sometimes I win.”

“I’m sure you do. At the start of every game in the sucker’s buildup.”

Now it was Kerry’s turn to look scornful. “How would you know, Father? You’re much too cagey, too cautious to play a hand of cards.”

“I did once. For long enough to know I hadn’t the time to invest in it.”

“Very praiseworthy,” Kerry mocked.

“No. Very practical. That’s what it was. If I wanted to play cards I’d have learned how to do it, not get taken by every half-assed two-bit man around, like what seems to be happening to you.”

“I was unlucky one night, that’s all.”

“Unlucky? Do you even know the odds?”

“It all depends, Father.”

“It does not depend. There are odds on filling a straight, there are odds, you fool, on getting a house if you have two pairs. Actual odds—you don’t know them and you expect to steal my silver to pay for your idiocy.”

“Yes, I can see that from where you stand, it’s hard.”

“No it’s not hard. It’s easy.”

“How do you mean?”

“You get taught, taught to play properly. If that’s what you want.”

“It’s not like that. You can’t enroll in night classes.”

“You can if you want to.”

“How on earth?”

“Brian Doyle’s brother is a card player, deals in a club somewhere out the Galway Road. One of the best, they tell me.”

“He can’t be great if he’s dealing cards in a club near Galway.”

“He liked the liquor as well. That’s what slowed him down. Go to him next time you’re home, bring him a bottle of Powers, say you’d like to learn a few fancy deals, waterfalls, that kind of thing. He’ll straighten you out.”

Kerry’s mouth was open.

“He doesn’t deal from the bottom, he doesn’t have marked cards. He’d be the first to tell you of people who have no fingers to play with if they do that sort of thing.”

“This is Ireland, Father, not Chicago in Prohibition.”

“This is card playing all over the world, Kerry.”

“Do you mean that I should go to this guy? You’ll set it up?”

“I won’t set it up, you set it up. You heard of him, turn up there. Meanwhile get your ass back to Dennis Hill. I suppose you told him some lie.”

“I had to. They were pushing me a bit for the money, these guys.”

“Are they in the hotel?”

“God no, the hotel’s as dead as a dodo. They’re over the border, in Derry.”

“That should be excitement enough for you.”

“They’re good people, it’s just that someone else was pushing them.”

Kerry got a feeling that his father wasn’t interested.

“How did you find out, Father? About Meagher’s?”

“My business.”

“And you don’t seem to have … well, too many hard feelings.”

“I don’t have any feelings. That’s what is so strange. I have no feelings at all. Maybe you always felt that toward me so you know what it’s like. But it’s new to me. When I got up this morning I suppose if anyone asked me how I felt about you, I’d have said I loved you. When I saw those salvers in Meagher’s and had to negotiate with that stupid woman, and saw you leaning against the tree there … I might have said I hated you. But now. Nothing. Nothing at all.” Patrick seemed mildly regretful.

Kerry knew that his father was speaking from the heart.

“What happens to me now, Father?”

“As I said, you go back to Dennis. After the opening you and I talk again, it could be you want to go to the Shannon school. You could go abroad to a hotel in France, Germany, Switzerland. We’ll have visitors from there too, and that seems to be the way of the future.

“Of course you might want to go to university. I don’t know, Kerry, let’s not look too far into the future.”

“And this … this business?”

“It’s over now, isn’t it? I mean there’s nothing else gone in the house, I won’t go into the church and see our candlesticks on the altar?”

“No, Father.”

“Well that’s it. Twice. Anyone’s allowed two mistakes. The third time is it.”

“How do you mean, it’s it?”

“It’s goodbye, it’s notice in the paper time, I am not responsible for the debts of … That sort of thing.”

Kerry was silent.

Patrick rattled his car keys. “I don’t expect you to stop playing cards—that would be childish of me—and anyway if you’re going to talk to Francis Doyle, you may get quite good and make a nice living. I don’t expect you to stay clear of debt. If you do get into debt again come to me, come back and we’ll discuss it. Within reason, and in return for work or whatever, I will try to help you, and you must come home here for the holidays and stand by my side at the opening and all of that. But if you steal from me or from anyone else, then it’s over, it’s as if you were never my son.”

No emotion in his voice. No pleas no hate. No wishing for love.

For the first time in his life Kerry felt a chill of fear.

   Rachel and Patrick missed each other by minutes. She went to walk along the towpath in the evening light. He went into Ryan’s for a drink. There was always company there, he thought, always a welcome.

It was odd that the only people who should make him feel really welcome were the very people whose business would suffer most by his coming to Mountfern in the first place. He looked at John and Kate Ryan and how they seemed to sparkle so well at each other. As if they were still very much in love. After all these years. After that terrible accident.

He wished that Rachel were at home. He had seen that there were no lights, and there was no car outside Loretto’s.

He would have liked more than anything else to talk to her tonight and to have slept with her, to have laid his head on her breast while she stroked his hair and soothed away his worries. She knew him so well, and he had hurt her so badly.

Rachel walked alone on the towpath past bushes and brambles and briars. She couldn’t understand why they hadn’t been cut back to give the guests a better walk to the town. But there had been some story about a fairy ring which it would have been bad luck to cut down.

She met Maggie Daly walking along.

“All on your own?” she asked. A foolish question, she thought, just as she said it.

“Just like you, Mrs. Fine,” the child said with no hint of insolence. She was only stating a fact.

“Where’s everyone?” Rachel persisted.

“I think Grace went for a cycle ride with Michael, and Tommy’s been playing football with John Joe Conway and Liam White, and Jacinta’s gone to get a new coat, and Dara’s … I don’t know where Dara is. So I came for a walk on my own.”

“I don’t know whether it’s a great idea or not. I do that sometimes.”

“What else is there to do?” Maggie asked simply.

“What would you like to do? Now, this minute.”

“I think I’d like a gorgeous new dress in just the right color that would make everyone notice me and people say, ‘Would you look at Maggie Daly?’ That’s what I’d like.”

“Well come on home with me and we’ll look through some books and magazines and we’ll see what might suit you.”

Maggie hesitated for a moment. Her mother had been a bit disparaging about Mrs. Fine, something to do with her not being baptized, and leading an immoral life. But her mother didn’t know where she was, and wouldn’t it be lovely to have Mrs. Fine give her ideas like she had with that beautiful ribbon that everyone had admired?

“I’d love that,” she said, and they went across the footbridge, away from the sound of Ryan’s and up to Rachel’s rooms.

   Mary Donnelly was glad the row had blown over. In fact it must have ended in some kind of reconciliation. They kept smiling at each other that evening in the bar. At one stage she even saw them holding hands.

It was probably about that business of John going to be reciting poetry in the bar. He had been dead against it at the time, but tonight he had books of old Irish poems out on the table and was busy marking some of them as if he were a boy back at school. And talking about boys back at school, Michael had recovered his good temper and even apologized to her for being short with her earlier. A misunderstanding, he had said humbly.

She saw John take his wife’s hand and bring it to his lips when he thought nobody was looking. The way they smiled at each other gave her a lump in her throat. For the first time for a long while she thought of the man who had let her down and wondered what it would have been like to have him take her hand like that. Then she put the thought out of her mind and concentrated on being charming, which frightened the farmers more than anything she had done so far.