The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (175 page)

She stood aside, hands still clasped.

“God, she’s worse than I thought,” John muttered as he wheeled Kate swiftly across the bridge.

“She might be right,” Kate said grimly as they came to the pub.

Dara thought they looked very formal somehow, like a picture. A man standing, a woman sitting, both staring at something. Something impossible to believe.

Kate put her hand up on her shoulder to cover John’s hand which was resting there.

“How in the name of God did it start?” Kate asked.

“It’ll be all right,” he soothed. “Look, it’s less than before, it’s much less. They’ve got it under control.”

Dara came to stand beside them.

“Where’s Eddie?” Kate asked.

“He’s here, and there’s Declan coming across the bridge now.”

Eddie came up to his mother. “I was over here when it happened, talking to Dara and Mary and Papers. I had nothing to do with it, Mam,” he began.

Kate drew him close to her. “Of course you didn’t Eddie, darling Eddie,” she said into his hair.

Eddie pulled away and looked at her. Nobody had ever called him darling Eddie in his life.

“In fact I was the first to spot it,” he said.

“Of course you were.” She held his hand very tight and her eyes were full of tears.

Michael caught up with Declan on the bridge.

“Come on, Mam will want to make sure we’re all safe,” he said.

“Now we’re all here, I’m going back across,” John said.

“You’re going in that door behind the counter,” said Mary.

“I can’t sell a drink while the place is burning down across the way, I have to help.”

“Aren’t there plenty of big strong men huffing and puffing and playing fire engines over there? People want to buy drinks to calm their nerves. You’re a publican, it’s your duty to sell them.”

The Ryan family smiled, all together. The same smile. John went back into his pub.

   Patrick O’Neill had been quick to organize as well.

No standing dumbstruck at the awful and unexpected happening. Like Jim Costello, he was quick to see the frail and the feeble and get them organized.

“Colonel Harris, I wonder if I can ask you to help the canon out that way. That’s very good of you. Liam, it would be a great help if you could get a chair for Mrs. Daly; she wants to do a bit of praying but I think she should do it sitting down. Jimbo, get the drivers to get back into their cars and move them way down the drive.”

And all the time, with his dream burning before his very eyes, he kept assuring people it was under control, and that the brigades were coming, and there would be order restored in no time.

Carrie stood with a tear-stained face in a straw hat which had gotten very crushed by people trampling on it, but she had put it back on for some kind of comfort.

“Don’t worry now, Carrie,” he said. “We’ll all be in the Thatch Bar this evening laughing over this.”

It was then he saw that part of the roof on the Thatch Bar had caught.

Kerry worked with the rest on the fire line. Beside him Tommy Leonard and Jack Coyne passed buckets.

The hose was taken to deal with the straw roof on the bar. So they were relying on the human chain to keep the first fire under control.

“Well at least it’s only a hotel,” Jack Coyne said, panting. “Think what it would be like if it was an army barracks or something, with all those guns and explosives in it. Everyone here would be blown sky high.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Kerry, dropping his bucket.

“Kerry?” The people near him looked at him in alarm.

“Oh my God!” Kerry shouted. “Get back. Costello, get them back, get everyone away from it, get them away from it. Get back.”

They thought he was hysterical. They pushed him out of the way in their efforts to fight the fire.

They would pause to wipe their foreheads and look to the main road, hoping for the comforting sound of many fire engines.

But it was a long way from the town.

Jim Costello didn’t like Kerry’s manner.

“Will somebody get O’Neill’s son away from here?” he called in his cool voice, the voice that was used to being obeyed.

But Kerry had run onto the steps.

“There’s guns,” he shouted, “guns and gelignite! The whole place is going to blow up.”

“Don’t mind him.”

“It’s under control, we’re winning, we’ve beaten it.”

All around him were the soothing sounds of people who thought it was a brainstorm.

“I beg you, Costello.” Kerry was grabbing wildly at Jim’s coat. “They’re in the conservatory.”

Jim remembered the boxes. The boxes and crates.

“They’re whiskey, you madman,” he said.

“The top ones are. The others are ammunition.”

   At the pub they couldn’t understand it. Why everyone had started to run down to the river.

At first people protested, what was it about, they were winning, the fire was beaten. When they heard what it was about they ran too, helping others, and looking over their shoulders in the panic of disbelief.

Grace had been looking for Michael when the cry went up that everyone was to abandon the firefighting. There was something in the hotel that was about to explode.

She looked around wildly for Michael but there was no sign of him.

“Get Grace back over the river,” Patrick shouted to Jim Costello as he rounded others toward the footbridge.

“Come on, Grace.” Jim ran with her for a few yards, then he left her at the laurels. “Go
on!
” he shouted as she paused.

“I don’t want to be on my own …”

“You’re not on your own, stupid. Look, there are all your friends up by the pub.”

“Did Michael go without me?” Grace’s lip trembled.

“Go on, please, Grace. That’s my job, to get you over the river. Please, just go.”

“And you?”

“I’ll see you later on. I’ll come and look for you.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” he shouted over his shoulder and ran back to the crowd trying to hold Kerry O’Neill back from the flames.

   The boy’s face was wild.

“I put it there, I have to take it out”

Jim Costello felt Patrick O’Neill standing beside him.

“What’s in it, Kerry?” Patrick asked.

“I don’t know. Guns, ammunition of some kind.”

“Of what kind?”

“I don’t know, I tell you.”

“Was it set to explode?” Jim looked at Patrick with new respect.

“No, Father, it wasn’t meant to be here, it was McCann’s friends.”

“What were they trying to do with it?”

“I was storing it for them in the tunnel until they collected it.”

Seamus Sheehan was beside them, and Dr. White.

The sergeant spoke. “Is it gelignite?”

“I don’t
know
, I tell you. How do I know what gelignite looks like?”

“Were there detonators with it?” The sergeant was quiet.

No tempers, no lack of control, and here they were, five men standing beside a possible inferno.

“What do they look like?” Kerry was piteous now.

“Were there separate containers, boxes?”

“Yes. Yes, I think so.”

“And you’ve put them all together. In there?” The sergeant indicated the burning building.

“Yes, I didn’t look, I didn’t have the time.”

“We’d better not risk it,” said Sergeant Sheehan, and they turned to leave.

“I’ll go down the driveway to tell the fire brigade.” Jim Costello was a quick thinker.

“Get any drivers, anyone in the buses far away down the drive,” Patrick called.

He looked at neither his son nor the doctor, neither his hotel manager nor the local sergeant as he began to walk away toward the footbridge.

“Father … Father, they’re in the conservatory, the fire hasn’t gotten there yet, we could get them out,” Kerry cried.

Seamus Sheehan shook his head. “It’s too hot, they could go any minute, flames or no flames.”

Kerry broke away and ran toward the house.

The sergeant made a move to run after him. Jim Costello was already half way down the drive toward the main garages of the hotel.

“Don’t die saving him, Sheehan,” called Martin White. “Let him go, he put the stuff there, let him go up with it.”

They heard the sound of the fire engines about five seconds before the explosion.

It wasn’t as huge as they had thought it would be. But it was huge enough to blow the back out of Fernscourt, and the fire now raged so that they knew it would never stop even if the fire engines dared come near it.

Nobody knew if there would be another explosion. To go anywhere nearer than they were would be suicide. And as it was they weren’t sure what had happened to Kerry.

   It seemed like slow motion as they watched it from the bridge. Hands to their mouths, stifling cries, and the sound of Mrs. Daly’s prayers as a low drone in the background.

Then they saw the figure of Patrick O’Neill walk slowly up the steps of Fernscourt.

It could only have been seconds, but time stood still before he came out dragging Kerry with him.

Kerry was walking, his face was in his hands.

The crowd saw Martin White take off his jacket and put it around Kerry’s shoulders. They couldn’t see what had happened when the doctor took Kerry’s hands away from his face but they did see Patrick and Sergeant Sheehan turn away in pain from Kerry O’Neill’s burns.

   They had to let some of it burn itself out. It looked stark and terrifying, the Thatch Bar naked apart from a scattering of scratchy burned straw.

Patrick had been handed a brandy of a size that nobody had ever drunk and survived. He stood in the very spot where the entrance to his hotel might have been.

If things had been different.

If Kate Ryan had not had her accident that day.

If things had all been quite different.

The son who had been sharp enough to see where the entrance to their hotel should be had not been sharp enough for anything else. He was heading into the hospital in the big town in the back of an ambulance.

   All around him Patrick heard the consolations and the encouragements. It would rise again.

The insurance would pay for everything, wasn’t it a miracle that nobody had gotten killed or seriously injured?

They clutched at his arm, he even felt himself being hugged by people too full of emotion to trust themselves to speak.

   All around him, he saw people finding each other, exclaiming they thought the other was lost.

He saw Jimbo wiping big tears out of Carrie’s eyes with a green table napkin that said “Ryan’s Shamrock Café.”

He saw the lawyer Slattery who had always hated him and the O’Neills taking off his coat to put it around the shivering Grace. The coat looked enormous on her and it hid her silly pink and white dress.

Slattery had gotten her a cup of coffee and was speaking to her soothingly.

Sheila Whelan was of course beside Patrick. Knowing that he wanted to say something rather than platitudes.

“My God, Sheila, look at the misery I brought to people,” he said. “Look at the sheer waste and misery.”

“You didn’t bring it, Patrick. It came all on its own.”

“Jesus, who brought it if I didn’t bring it?”

“You could say I did. I told Seamus Sheehan about the tunnel.”

“What in the name of God took him in with that gang?” Patrick asked.

“Seamus heard it was because he owed them money.” Sheila spoke gently.

“Yes. I wouldn’t give it to him.” Patrick’s heart lurched and he looked at his ruined hotel. “I expect he had to get it somewhere. My God, if I had known the price we’d have to pay.”

“You’d have had to call a halt somewhere,” she consoled him. “You couldn’t have gone on paying for everything all his life, that would have been worse than your father paying for nothing all of his.”

“Oh God, how am I going to tell Rachel?”

   The sun shone down as mockery on the smoldering ruins of Ireland’s finest hotel. Its light played on the remains of what had been described as the dream of international cooperation come true.

In groups they stood and ran it over in their minds, the causes and the possible outcomes.

As usual, because it was Mountfern there were as many theories as there were people speaking.

The electricity was faulty, the chimneys had never been right. It was a cigarette, it was an attempt to assassinate some of the VIPs. It was a bottled-gas cooker, it was a bonfire to get rid of the rubbish.