The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (89 page)

Mr. Meagher tired suddenly of the arguments; he had a pain in his chest and down his arm. He said he would call a halt to the fight and go to bed. He might feel better in the morning. He said that his wife was probably right. Life was a vale of tears and perhaps he had contributed to it. In the morning he would try to consider what could be done about it.

   Next morning Teresa Meagher was sent running for Dr. White but it was too late. Mr. Meagher had not recovered from his heart attack. Dr. White knew that he was dead but still arranged for him to be taken to the hospital in the town. It would be less distressing for the family. That’s what a lot of his work was about. Minimizing the distress. There was little he could have done to prevent Frank Meagher’s heart attack. The man ate like a fat man in a circus, smoked four packets of cigarettes a day and existed on a level of tension that should have finished him off years ago. Dr. White left Mrs. Meagher weeping to the canon, whose faded blue eyes clouded further with the memory of the happy family life the two Meaghers had led, and before long Mrs. Meagher began to believe it herself.

The news of Frank Meagher’s death did not take long to travel around Mountfern. In Leonard’s stationers, Tommy’s mother and father discreetly moved the Deepest Sympathy cards to the front of the stand. They hunted in the drawers for the black-edged Mass cards and flowery Spiritual Bouquet cards as well. People would want to pay their respects.

In Conway’s they realized that a coffin would be needed. Discreetly they set about getting one ready. Frank Meagher was a big man. It would be a big coffin. His wife would be as guilty as hell about the life she had led him, it could be an expensive one. But they probably didn’t have much insurance, maybe standard was the right thing to suggest.

At seven o’clock mass that morning he was prayed for. The religious bent their heads. Miss Purcell, Miss Hayes and Jimbo Doyle’s mother exchanged glances. They could have said a lot about the Meaghers, but they would say no more now, not after a bereavement like this.

   Miss Purcell looked after the Slattery household with an unsmiling face and unstinting effort. Old Mr. Slattery’s clothes were clean, ironed and mended, his shoes were polished and his newspaper laid in front of his well-served breakfast at eight-thirty every morning. Miss Purcell would already have been to seven o’clock mass, she was a daily communicant; she would have collected fresh milk at Daly’s and the newspaper at Leonard’s. His son Fergus was equally well looked after. His shirts were ironed for him, and left hanging on the big heavy wardrobe in his room. Miss Purcell always took the one he was going to wear next day to give it a little warm in the hot press. She had a horror of the damp.

Fergus had a series of sleeveless vee-necked knitted pullovers, almost all of them in a grey to blue shade. In the long evenings when others went out looking for diversion Miss Purcell knitted fresh supplies and darned the existing force. Though old-fashioned and obviously home-made, they gave him an even more boyish charm than he had already. Many a girl’s heart turned over to see him sitting at his desk in his shirt sleeves with the light on of an evening, reading through papers with hair tousled and glasses often pushed back into his thick dark hair.

If someone had offered Fergus a thousand pounds to strike attitudes or adopt a pose he wouldn’t have been able to do it. Like his father he was a pleasure to work for, Miss Purcell told her few cronies, a courteous and considerate man, always opening doors, carrying buckets of coal for her, and saying how much he liked whatever she put on the table. It would be hard to find his equal in three counties or more. Miss Purcell never understood any of his jokes but Fergus seemed to be very witty and make clients laugh. Often when they were leaving she heard them say that he was too human to be a lawyer. She had been worried about this and made two novenas that he should become less human in case he endangered the practice. Sometimes Fergus cleaned his own shoes—he didn’t think it was right to let a woman polish the black laced shoes that had been on his feet all day—but Miss Purcell didn’t like any changes in routine. She sniffed disapprovingly at his efforts and said she would prefer if he wouldn’t disgrace her in the town by going about with such ill-kept feet.

It was said that Canon Moran had often looked with envy at the Slatterys and wished they would give him their housekeeper. The purse-faced Miss Purcell who kept such a good house would be indeed a delight compared to poor Miss Barry, but she had been there so long and had no other home to go to, so in Christian kindness Canon Moran couldn’t, and made no efforts to replace her.

Miss Purcell was tall, thin and had a small face with two deceptively cheery-looking spots of red on her cheeks. These were not jolly ruddy cheeks, they were in fact two spots of color whose redness increased according to how disapproving she was. At breakfast that morning they were very red indeed: a sure sign that something was about to blow up. Father and son avoided recognizing this for as long as they could.

“Do you want a bit of the
Independent
?” Fergus’s father offered him the middle pages.

“I wish we’d get the
Times
, it’s a better paper altogether,” Fergus said. They were both avoiding the eye of Miss Purcell who stood ready to sound off.

“Well it is and it isn’t, but nobody dies in the
Irish Times
. You don’t get the list of deaths in it like the
Independent
. A country solicitor needs to know who has died.”

“Couldn’t we go into Leonard’s and sort of race down the deaths without buying the paper at all?” Fergus suggested.

“Fine thing that would be to do in a small town, depriving the Leonards of their income. Couldn’t the whole town do that? Couldn’t they come in here and look at our law books? Where’s the sense in that?” Mr. Slattery rattled his half of the paper in annoyance.

Miss Purcell cleared her throat.

“Miss Ryan is here. A bit early I said to her but she seemed to think that you expected her before nine.”

“Is that Marian Ryan come to make her will again?” Old Mr. Slattery looked over his glasses.

“No, it’s Kate, Kate Ryan from the pub up the River Road,” said Fergus. “Isn’t it, Miss Purcell?”

“Oh yes, Mr. Fergus, that’s the Mrs. Ryan it is, all right. And if I might say …”

“Yes, Miss Purcell?” Fergus decided to take it manfully, whatever it was.

“Mrs. Ryan arrived five minutes ago with the information that she is going to be working here.”

“That’s right,” Fergus said cheerfully. “She’s going to start this morning. Well she’s nice and punctual, that makes a change from the rest of Mountfern.”

“I can’t recall any occasion anything was late in this house …” Miss Purcell began to bristle.

“Oh not you, Miss Purcell, for heaven’s sake, everyone else.”

“And what work will Kate Ryan from the pub be doing here, and why wasn’t I consulted?” The spots on the cheeks were dangerously red now. Even old Mr. Slattery had put down his paper and was looking anxiously like an old bird from one to the other.

“Well, lots of things, I hope.” Fergus was still bewildered by this storm, and the sudden dropping of the Mrs. Ryan, and changing it to Kate from the pub.

“In nineteen years working in this house I have never had such treatment.” Miss Purcell looked ten feet tall; she had drawn herself up into a long thin stick quivering with rage. “If my work was not to your satisfaction, the very least I would have expected was to be told. Instead of allowing me to be humiliated by seeing that Kate Ryan from the pub, come along with her apron and things in a basket prepared to do my work for me.”

The eyes were very bright. Old Mr. Slattery’s glasses had fallen off his nose with shock.

Fergus was on his feet. “Miss Purcell, Miss Purcell! What an idea, what a thought that we would dream of improving on your housework! Don’t you keep the best house in the town? Aren’t we the envy of the whole of Mountfern, including I might say the canon himself? You can’t have thought for a moment that we’d as much as contemplate getting anyone else, let alone doing it without telling you.…”

“But Kate from the pub out there with her basket?”

“I don’t know what she has in the basket but Mrs. Ryan is going to work in the office. She was trained in a solicitor’s office in Dublin, you know. She’ll be doing the files and typing letters.”

“Oh,” Miss Purcell had to spend a moment doing some social adjustment.

“So you see you were quite wrong to think we have anything except the highest regard for you, isn’t that right, Dad?”

“Heavens yes. Oh Miss Purcell, the house would fall down without you,” said Mr. Slattery anxiously.

“But that would mean Kate … that Mrs. Ryan and her family would know all your business, confidential business of the town.” Miss Purcell wasn’t going to give in.

“We wouldn’t take her on if we didn’t know she could be trusted. It’s not easy to find the kind of discretion and loyalty that you have, Miss Purcell. You are, as my father has said, the mainstay of this house, but we think we have found someone who will be able to keep our business private, as you do. It’s very good of you to be worried about it.”

There was no more to be said. Miss Purcell had to go back to the hall where she had left Kate standing, and usher her into the office, asking the while whether she took sugar in her tea and if she would like a plain biscuit, a sweet biscuit or a slice of home-made currant bread. Kate wisely chose the home-made bread and disclosed four pints of raspberries which she had brought as a gift because she had heard it said that Miss Purcell made the best jam in the county. The pink spots began to lose their ferocity and the “Mrs. Ryan” was pronounced without the sarcastic overtones. Kate was in, she was starting a new career. There was hardly any trade in the pub in the mornings, and John was in agreement with her that the few pounds the Slatterys paid would be helpful. Young Declan was off at school, so they were all out of the house, and Carrie knew how to put a lunch on the table at the stroke of one. It would be nice to be behind a typewriter again for a change rather than behind a bar. Mr. Slattery was such a gentleman, a real old-fashioned man who was spending more and more time fishing; and Fergus was the best company in the world, self-mocking and droll, full of compassion for some of the people who came to see him, slow to send a bill where it would be a hardship to pay it, but also quick with his tongue to abuse anyone who wanted to work a fiddle or hide an income.

Fergus had told her that it wasn’t a big practice and that normally he was well able to deal with the clerical side. He could type like the wind with two fingers and he had a fairly reasonable filing system but he wanted his father to take more time off; now people really did trust him with their affairs rather than thinking of him as a boy in short trousers. So Kate would be a godsend. And indeed she was. It took her about three days to see that his reasonable filing system was hopeless, and to set up a better one.

“Come here till I show you what we do with these papers now,” she ordered him.

“No, no, that’s your work, that’s what we pay you inordinate sums of money for, so that I don’t have to look at things like that.”

“Wrong,” Kate cried. “You have to understand it, otherwise it’s useless to any of us. You won’t know where to put back a letter, find a counsel’s brief, where the deeds are, anything. Suppose I get flu or you sack me, or you’re working late at night. Come on now, it will only take ten minutes a day.”

“Do you run the pub like this too?” Fergus asked.

“Of course not, but I do the accounts, and I’ve insisted that John does them with me otherwise he’d have to leave them till the wife gets back and it would just double the work.”

“I’m surprised the place isn’t a gold mine with your organizational skills.”

“Come out our way one evening and have a pint in it and you’ll see what a gold mine it is. Would I be in here setting up filing systems for beautiful idle professional men too lazy to look at them if it was a gold mine? Now suppose you had this query from the town agent’s clerk about the fee in that workman’s compensation case which was appealed, where would you look first?”

“In the bad old days I’d look on the table at the window.”

“But in the good days that have now come?”

“I’ve forgotten, young Mrs. Ryan, show me, show me.”

“Oh thank God I’m happily married. You’d break my heart.”

“You’re sure you’re happily married?”

“Very sure. And isn’t it time you had a romance yourself? Now that Nora Lynch has gone off to fresh fields and better chances we hear nothing about your activities.”

“Listen to me, after that business with Nora I’m afraid to lay my hand or eye on anyone. There’s no activities to hear about. It was all a terrible misunderstanding.”

“You lost us a fine schoolteacher over it all. My Dara loved her. She hates the new woman, about a hundred she says, and a habit of hitting them accidentally on the knuckles with a ruler.”

“Poor Dara, maybe I should have given Miss Lynch an engagement ring to keep her in the town, and keep all the little girls like Dara happy.”

“I don’t think anything’s going to make my Dara happy for a long time, but no stories about children. This workman was called Burke, Fergus, in the name of God where are you going to look for this file?”

“Under the Bs, Miss?”

“We have a child prodigy,” said Kate Ryan and went back to her typewriter.

   “What are you doing, Daddy?” John jumped guiltily at Dara’s voice.

What he should have been doing was writing. This was the time that Kate stood minding the bar, tired already from her morning in the office. But there was just so long you could look at blank paper without it beginning to drive you mad. John Ryan had nothing to say and no way of saying it. He had come out to what Kate called the garden and everyone else called the yard to do a little experiment. Ryan’s licensed premises was flush on the road. Its front door opened straight onto River Road. It would have been unheard of to have a pub with a garden in front. The supplies came to the back yard and the barrels took up most of it … a place of half-used outhouses and sheds. That was where the back door of the house was, that was the only way the children were ever allowed to enter their home. But beside the house there was what they called the side yard. Here the hens wandered, and Jaffa sat like a buddha in calm control, purring and lazily washing her big orange face. Leopold didn’t sit much in the yard, there wasn’t an audience sufficiently sympathetic to his whimperings and cringings. He liked to cower in the pub. Maurice was still in the mudroom after the ugly river-bank incident. John had devised a marvelous way to avoid working on his poems: he was going to build a large hen coop, a wired-off area for the hens to live in, so that they could scratch and wander but be away from the few pathetic attempts that Kate had started in the line of making a real garden. Once the hens were corraled life would be easier. But John Ryan had wanted to do it quietly and undisturbed by his family. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, that he was shirking his writing work, and playing hooky. Dara stood with a mutinous look on her face. Her eyes were dark and cross under her fringe of black hair … her hands thrust into the pockets of her shorts.