The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (176 page)

They said that he would rebuild it right away, it would open in the spring. That he would take over the Grange and put his guests there, that he would walk out tonight and never come back. And then the roof went in.

It went with a series of cracks and groans as the timber fell and knocked down further stonework, and the shower of slates fell on top.

There was something very final about the way it fell.

The people of Mountfern raised a great roar as it went in. It was a startling sound. A roar went up from all the throats at the same time.

It was neither a shout of triumph nor a great wail of regret.

It was just a roar.

Patrick’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. He didn’t understand these people at all.

He saw Jack Leonard and Tom Daly, who had cheered when they had burned this house down in 1922; they had cheered as the ruins fell, Brian Doyle had told him. Today they cheered again.

How had he thought that this was his place and these were his people? He didn’t even begin to understand why they had made that sound.

   The twins stood together. Very close.

They weren’t exactly touching but you could hardly have put a piece of paper between them. Tommy Leonard envied them their closeness. He had nobody like that. Nobody who would always be there no matter what.

For as long as he could remember they had been like that. Not so much this summer perhaps, but way way back. When they were both his best friends. Before he started to love Dara. He was right beside them but he couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound appalling. He really was getting more and more like Eddie Ryan, he thought to himself grimly. It was an awful fate.

If he had been Kerry O’Neill he would have known the right thing to say. The word or the gesture that would have been what they needed.

He said, “At least we have each other. Everything else has changed and gone, but we’ll always be together in one way or another, won’t we?”

Dara’s eyes filled with tears.

“I don’t mean love or anything, but as great friends. Won’t we?”

Tommy looked from one to the other, anxious that there should be no misunderstanding. Anxious that he wasn’t being seen to presume.

Dara laid her hand against his face. She didn’t even try to wipe away her tears.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Tommy Leonard,” she said.

Although he could hardly believe it, Tommy knew, when he went over it again in his mind, that Dara meant it.

   Mary served, and Sheila had gone behind the bar to help her.

Carrie, face aglow with Jimbo’s delight and pride, ran back and forth with sandwiches and soda bread that they would never be serving now to American visitors.

Brian Doyle said he was glad that Peggy had gotten on her high horse and not come to the opening in the end, because a) she was highly strung and b) she might get very put out by all these weddings in the air—Jimbo Doyle’s and Jack Coyne’s, two of nature’s bachelors.

Brian said that it would be like a sacrilege to discuss who’d get the job of building the place up again, but he wanted it known that it was a heartbreak and an agony from day one and he wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy.

   Kate sat with John in the side yard.

There were no words between them.

She had told him the news in the most natural way.

John had sat with his head in his hands, bemoaning all that had happened.

“I’m weary, Kate, weary and sad. There has been nothing but destruction and death since that place was begun. There’s never any hope, no beginnings.”

“I’ll tell you something about new life and new hope, that you’ll hardly believe,” Kate said.

They sat together in the yard that was filled with flowers. He held her very close, he pressed her to him.

He would take such care of her, he would make sure that it would all be all right.

A new life. Another person. Another Ryan.

   They called Patrick to the phone. Again. He had taken so many calls that Jim Costello had eventually monitored them, standing in Kate’s green room and dealing with whoever called.

But this time he called Patrick. It was long distance. From New York.

“Rachel, Rachel.” His voice choked and he couldn’t speak.

But at last he found the words. The words to tell her about the end of the dream. Then he put down the receiver and walked through the glass doors into the yard filled with flowers where Kate and John Ryan sat in a world of their own.

They looked up at him as he stood there, a big man always filling their place, dominating their lives.

“I came to tell you. I’ll be going home,” he said.

I want to thank all my friends for their support and encouragement, particularly Rosie Cheetham and Chris Green.

And to Gordon Snell, who has made my life so good and so happy, I would like to dedicate
Firefly Summer
with all my gratitude and all my love.

London and Dublin, Summer 1987

Here’s a preview of Maeve Binchy’s

Silver Wedding,

now available from Dell Books.

I

Anna

Anna knew that he was doing his best to be interested. She could read his face so well. This was the same look she saw on his face when older actors would come up and join them in the club and tell old tales about people long gone. Joe tried to be interested then, too, it was a welcoming, courteous, earnest look. Hoping that it passed as genuine interest, hoping that the conversation wouldn’t last too long.

“I’m sorry, I’m going on a bit,” she apologized. She pulled a funny face at him as she sat at the other end of the bed dressed only in one of his shirts, the Sunday papers and a breakfast tray between them.

Joe smiled back, a real smile this time.

“No, it’s nice that you’re so het up about it, it’s good to care about families.”

He meant it, she knew, in his heart he thought it was a Good Thing to care about families, like rescuing kittens from trees and beautiful sunsets and big collie dogs. In principle Joe was in favor of caring about families. But he didn’t care at all about his own. He wouldn’t have known how many years his parents were married. He probably didn’t know how long he had been married himself. Something like a silver anniversary would not trouble Joe Ashe.

Anna looked at him with the familiar feeling of tenderness and fear. Tender and protective—he looked so lovely lying there against the big pillows, his fair hair falling over his face, his thin brown shoulders so relaxed and easy. Fearful in case she would lose him, in case he would move on gently, effortlessly, out of her life, as he had moved into it.

Joe Ashe never fought with people, he told Anna with his big boyish smile, life was much too short for fights. And it was true.

When he was passed over for a part, when he got a bad review, there was the shrug: “Well, so it could have been different but let’s not make a production of it.”

Like his marriage to Janet. It was over, so why go on pretending? He just packed a small bag and left.

Anna feared that one day in this very room he would pack a small bag and leave again. She would rail and plead as Janet had done and it would be no use. Janet had even come around and offered Anna money to go away. She wept about how happy she had been with Joe. She showed pictures of the two small sons. It would all be fine again if only Anna would go away.

“But he didn’t leave you to come to me, he had been in a flat by himself for a year before he even met me,” Anna had explained.

“Yes, and all that time I thought he would come back.”

Anna hated to remember Janet’s tearstained face, and how she had made tea for her, and hated even more to think that her own face would be stained with tears like this one day, and as unexpectedly as it had all happened to Janet. She gave a little shiver as she looked at the handsome easy boy in her bed. Because even if he was twenty-eight years of age, he was still a boy. A gentle cruel boy.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

She didn’t tell him. She never told him how much she thought about him and dreaded the day he would leave.

“I was thinking it’s about time they did another film version of
Romeo and Juliet
. You’re so handsome it would be unfair to the world not to get a chance to look at you,” she said laughingly.

He reached out and put the breakfast tray on the floor. The Sunday paper slid after it.

“Come here to me,” said Joe. “My mind was running on the same lines entirely, entirely at all, ‘at all’ as you Irish say.”

“What a superb imitation,” Anna said dryly, but snuggling up to him all the same. “It’s no wonder that you’re the best actor in the whole wide world and renowned all over the globe for your great command of accents.”

She lay in his arms and didn’t tell him about how worried she was about this silver wedding. She had seen from his face that she had already been going on about it far too long.

In a million years Joe would not understand what it meant in their family. Mother’s and Father’s twenty-fifth anniversary. They celebrated everything in the Doyle household. There were albums of memories, boxes chronicling past celebration. On the wall of the sitting room at home there was a gallery of Major Celebrations. The wedding day itself, the three christenings. There was Grannie O’Hagan’s sixtieth birthday, there was Grandpa Doyle’s visit to London with all of them standing beside a sentry outside Buckingham Palace, a solemn young sentry in a busby who seemed to realize the importance of Grandpa Doyle’s visit.

There were the three first communions, and the three confirmations; there was a small sporting section, Brendan’s school team the year he had been on the Seniors. There was an even smaller academic section, one graduation portrait of Anna herself, very studied and posed, holding her diploma as if it were a ton weight.

Mother and Father always joked about the wall and said it was the most valuable collection in the world. What did they want with Old Masters and famous paintings, hadn’t they gotten something much more valuable, a living wall telling the world what their life was all about?

Anna had winced whenever they said that to people who came in. She winced now lying in Joe’s arms.

“Are you shuddering at me or is that passion?” he asked.

“Unbridled passion,” she said, wondering. Was it normal to lie beside the most attractive man in London and think not of him but of the sitting-room wall back in the family home?

The family home would have to be decorated for the silver wedding. There would be a lot of cardboard bells and silver ribbon. There would be flowers sprayed with a silver paint. They would have a tape of “The Anniversary Waltz” on the player. There would be window-sills full of cards, there might indeed be so many that it would call for an arrangement of streamers with the cards attached as they had for Christmas. The cake would have traditional decorations, the invitations would have silver edges. Inviting people to what? That was what was buzzing around Anna’s head. As a family this was something they should organize for their parents. Anna and her sister, Helen, and her brother, Brendan.

But it really meant Anna.

She would have to do it all.

Anna turned toward Joe and kissed him. She would not think about the anniversary anymore now. She would think about it tomorrow, when she was being paid to stand in a bookshop.

She wouldn’t think of it at this moment when there were far better things to think about.

“That’s more like it. I thought you’d gone to sleep on me,” Joe Ashe said, and held her very close to him.

Anna Doyle worked in Books for People, a small bookshop much patronized by authors and publishers and all kinds of media. They never tired of saying that this was a bookshop with character, not like the big chains which were utterly without soul. Secretly Anna did not altogether agree.

Too many times during her working day she had to refuse people who came in with perfectly normal requests for the latest best-seller, for a train timetable, for a book on freezer cookery. Always she had to direct them to a different shop. Anna felt that a bookshop worthy of the name should in fact stock such things instead of relying on its custom on a heavy psychology section, a detailed travel list, and poetry, sociology, and contemporary satire.

It wasn’t as if they were even proper specialists. She had intended to leave a year ago, but that was just when she met Joe. And when Joe had come to stay, it happened to coincide with Joe not having any work.

Joe did a little here and there, and he was never broke. There was always enough to buy Anna a lovely Indian scarf, or a beautiful paper flower, or find the most glorious wild mushroom in a Soho delicatessen.

There was never any money for paying the rent or for the television, or the phone or the electricity. It would have been foolish of Anna to have left a steady job without having a better one lined up for herself. She stayed in Books for People, even though she hated the name, believing that most of the buyers of books
were
people anyway. The others who worked there were all perfectly pleasant, she never saw any of them outside work but there were occasional book signings, poetry evenings, and even a wine and cheese evening in aid of a small nearby theater. That was when she had met Joe Ashe.

Anna was at work early on Monday morning. If she wanted time to think or to write letters, then to be in before the others was the only hope. There were only four of them who worked there; they each had a key. She switched off the burglar alarm, picked up the carton of milk and the mail from the mat. It was all circulars and handbills. The postman had not arrived yet. As Anna put on the electric kettle to make coffee, she caught sight of herself in the small mirror that was stuck to the wall. Her eyes looked large and anxious, she thought. Anna stroked her face thoughtfully. She looked pale and there were definitely shadows under the big brown eyes. Her hair was tied up with a bright pink ribbon matching exactly her pink T-shirt. She must put on a little makeup, she thought, or she would frighten the others.

She wished she had gone ahead and gotten her hair cut that time. It had been so strange, she had made an appointment in a posh place where some of the Royal Family went to have their hair done. One of the girls who worked there as a stylist came into the bookshop and they had started talking. The girl said she would give Anna a discount. But the night she met Joe at the benefit evening for the theater he had told her that her thick dark hair was beautiful the way it was.

He had asked her, as he so often did still, “What are you thinking?” And in those very early times she told him the truth. That she was thinking about having her hair cut the following day.

“Don’t even consider it,” Joe had said, and then suggested that they go to have a Greek meal and discuss this thing properly.

They had sat together in the warm spring night and he had told her about his acting and she had told him about her family. How she lived in a flat because she had thought she was becoming too dependent on her family, too drawn into everything they did. She went home, of course, on Sundays and one other evening in the week. Joe had looked at her, enthralled. He had never known a life where adults kept going back to the nest.

In days she was visiting his flat, days later he was visiting hers because it was more comfortable. He told Anna briefly and matter-of-factly about Janet and the two little boys. Anna told Joe about the college lecturer she had loved rather unwisely during her final years, resulting in a thrid-class degree and in a great sense of loss.

Joe was surprised that she had told him about the college lecturer. There was no hassle about shared property, shared children. He had only told her about Janet because he was still married to her. Anna had wanted to tell everything, Joe hadn’t really wanted to hear.

It was only logical that he should come to live with her. He didn’t suggest it, and for a while she wondered what she would say if she were invited to take up residence in his flat. It would be so hard to tell Mother and Father. But after one long lovely weekend, she decided to ask Joe would he move in properly to her small ground-floor flat in Shepherd’s Bush.

“Well, I will, if that’s what you’d like,” Joe had said, pleased but not surprised, willing but not overly grateful. He had gone back to his own place, done a deal about the rent, and with two tote bags and a leather jacket over his arm he had come to live with Anna Doyle.

Anna Doyle, who had to keep his arrival very secret indeed from her mother and father, who lived in Pinner and in a world where daughters did not let married men come to spend an evening, let alone a lifetime.

He had been with her since that April Monday a year ago. And now it was May 1985, and by a series of complicated maneuvers Anna had managed to keep the worlds of Pinner and Shepherd’s Bush satisfactorily apart while flitting from one to the other with an ever-increasing sense of guilt.

Joe’s mother was fifty-six but looked years younger. She worked at the food counter of a bar where lots of actors gathered, and they saw her maybe two or three times a week. She was vague and friendly, giving them a wave as if they were just good customers. She hadn’t known for about six months that they lived together. Joe simply hadn’t bothered to tell her. When she heard, she said, “That’s nice dear,” to Anna in exactly the same tone as she would have spoken to a total stranger who had asked for a slice of the veal and ham pie.

Anna had wanted her to come around to the flat.

“What for?” Joe had asked in honest surprise.

Next time she was in the pub Anna went to the counter and asked Joe’s mother herself.

“Would you like to come around and see us in the flat?”

“What for?” she had asked with interest.

Anna was determined. “I don’t know, a drink maybe.”

“Lord, dear, I never drink, seen enough of it in this place to turn you right against it, I tell you.”

“Well, just to see your son,” Anna went on.

“I see him in here, don’t I? He’s a grown-up now, love, he doesn’t want to be looking at his old mom, day in day out.”

Anna had watched them since with a fascination that was half horror and half envy. They were just two people who lived in the same city and who made easy casual conversation when they met.

They never talked of other members of the family. Nothing about Joe’s sister, who had been in a rehabilitation center on account of drugs; or the eldest brother, who was a mercenary soldier of some sort in Africa; or the youngest brother who worked in television as a cameraman.

She never asked about her grandchildren. Joe had told Anna that Janet did take them to see her sometimes, and occasionally he had taken the boys to a park nearby where his mother lived and she had come along for a little while. He never took them to her home.

“I think she has a bloke there, a young fellow, she doesn’t want a lot of grandchildren trailing in to her.” To Joe it was simple and clear.

To Anna it was like something from another planet.