Eddie and Declan saw them coming and sighed. It meant they would have to wash their faces; they went glumly to the kitchen and took up the facecloth like robots. They had the worst grime removed by the time their mother arrived to do the very same thing for them.
The twins saw them coming and stopped dead in what they were doing, which was playing chess on the landing window seat. Never in their lives had they seen anyone like Mr O’Neill’s family as they stood in the sun on the footbridge pointing and waving and making a sort of diagram with their hands.
Dara looked at the face of the young man in the grey sweater and white flannels. His head was thrown back and he was laughing. He was the most magnificent boy she had ever seen in her life. And this wasn’t in a magazine, or at the cinema. This was here on their own bridge in Mount-fern. She was about to say to Michael that he was gorgeous, but she saw her brother staring at the blonde girl. She wore a short tartan pleated skirt and a lemon-coloured sweater. Her curls had a tartan ribbon in them, holding them up in what wasn’t really a pony tail because it wasn’t all tied in but could have been one if she had managed to squeeze in the curls. Michael was looking at her as if he had been blind from birth and had suddenly been given his sight.
Judy Byrne was furious when she realised that she had not been quick enough. Mr O’Neill had asked her about what he called her fine cottage. Had she thought of letting it and moving to some smaller place even temporarily? Judy had not seen the drift of his conversation. She had been anxious to make it clear to this handsome and charming American, the first serious bachelor to come their way for a long time, that her roots were firmly planted in Mountfern, that she was a woman of this place who would not be moved.
In fact the little house would have been ideal for the O’Neills. Every time Judy thought of it she raged again at her own blindness. It would have been central; it was just the right size. He would have paid most generously anything she had asked. But the real benefit would have been that Patrick O’Neill and his children would have been living there in her house. There were a million places Judy could have gone for the months that were involved. Sheila Whelan had a spare room. Poor Mrs Meagher of the jewellery shop was thinking of letting a room. Oh why had she been so foolish as not to see that of course the man would want a place to live while he was building his hotel? She would have had every right to call, to be a family friend. What more natural than that she should return to her own house from time to time?
Judy worked three afternoons in the physiotherapy department of the hospital in the town. But there was plenty of work for her in Mountfern and around. She had come home when her mother was bedridden, and even after her mother’s death she saw no reason to leave the small quiet country practice. Dr White made sure she had plenty of work. He always said that she was indispensable with patients who were recovering from a stroke or who had broken an arm or a leg. It was a satisfying life in many ways. But she was lonely, and there were so few chances to meet anyone at all suitable in these parts, at her age. And now that she had met one, and he had been very charming, she had sent him right into the arms of that foolish Marian Johnson.
Marian Johnson had nearly died of delight when she realised why Patrick O’Neill was asking about the gate lodge. In the beginning she had been about to apologise for the place, saying that it was so run down there was hardly anything that could be done with it. In fact it was a perfectly serviceable house where Joe Whelan’s people had once lived. That was long ago; they used to open the gates and take the messages, and lived rent free for years, but the family had all scattered. Even before Joe Whelan hightailed it for Dublin after some peroxide blonde, he had been living in Bridge Street with Sheila in the post office.
There had been vaguely unsatisfactory people in it since then, but the Johnsons had never stirred themselves to arrange a better let. Suddenly she saw unlimited possibilities.
‘I was hoping to do it up so that people, nice people, could live there. I can’t think who would like it, though.’ She smiled an arch smile, but let it fade suddenly when she got the feeling that Patrick might have seen through it. He spoke quite directly.
‘I had been thinking of asking you about it myself. I was wondering, though, if it might be a little too far from town.’
‘Not at all,’ Marian cried. ‘Don’t you have a car? Won’t the girl have a bicycle, and won’t the boy be off with the Jesuits or the Benedictines or wherever?’
Patrick had smiled.
‘If you’re sure it won’t be too much trouble?’ he said.
Marian Johnson said it would be no trouble at all. It would be a pleasure for her.
And indeed it was. Jimbo Doyle was in and instructions were given in crisp barks by Marian. No expense was spared, chimneys were swept, baskets of logs were cut, the best bedding from the Grange Hotel was brought to the lodge. Some of the antiques that Patrick had admired in the house were also given a new home. Windows were stripped clear of the overhanging ivy; the little garden was dug; a space cleared for Patrick’s car, and he was assured that all would be ready when he came back from America with his children. He would also need someone to look after them.
This, Marian found a bit of a poser. No young skit of a girl would be any use, it had to be someone responsible. A local widow, perhaps, Patrick had suggested, someone who might be glad of the chance to live with a family for some months. Marian thought deeply. Not Mrs Meagher in the jeweller’s. She was too recently widowed to think of making any plans, Marian said. She was also a handsome if neurotic red-haired woman who would most certainly cause trouble of some kind. Not poor Loretto Quinn with her little huckster’s shop on River Road. She could hardly cope with her own establishment. Certainly not Mrs Rita Walsh of the Rosemarie hair salon, whose reputation was widely known. Marian decided to consult Sheila Whelan, who of course knew exactly the person. Miss Hayes. She was sixty if she was a day; she was efficient. She could cook, she could mend, and she would stand no nonsense if the children were troublesome.
Miss Hayes was an inspired idea. Marian Johnson took all the praise and the thanks.
‘And what shall I call you, Miss Hayes?’ Patrick said to her on the first evening.
‘Miss Hayes would do very well,’ she said.
‘It’s just that everyone is so friendly around here. I didn’t want to do the wrong thing.’
‘Oh I’m sure you would never do that, Mr O’Neill.’
‘I hope the children will settle in well here.’ Patrick was not a man who was ever at a loss for a word, but Miss Hayes was proving that his charm was not as irresistible as he had hoped.
‘I’m sure they will, Mr O’Neill. It would be strange children that wouldn’t love a house like this, a room each, their own wireless and a bathroom for themselves and no one else.’ Miss Hayes shook her head in awe of the second bathroom.
Grace and Kerry giggled behind Miss Hayes’s back after their first evening meal. But not too loudly; she had an air of authority about her, and also she had just fixed them a truly great meal.
Grace fell asleep almost at once. The door of her room was open and Patrick went in to kiss her forehead with the curls damp from her bath. She looked babyish, younger than her twelve years as she lay asleep there. He stood and looked at her for a long, long moment.
Kerry was not sleepy, he said.
‘Do you want to drive over with me and walk in Fernscourt by night?’ he asked.
Kerry shrugged. It was as if he had gone back to his old self – the Kerry who had nothing much to say to his father.
‘Not really,’ he said.
‘Sure.’ Patrick was easy. He wouldn’t rush the boy. ‘Go in your own time; see it your own way.’
‘Yes, that’s what I’ll do, Father,’ Kerry had said. His face, in spite of his golden tan and his piercing blue eyes, looked curiously empty.
They were the talk of the town. Tommy Leonard said that he had asked Kerry how old he was. He had asked him straight out.
‘Y
ou spoke to him?’ Maggie Daly was over-excited by it all.
‘Yeah, that’s the way people ask questions,’ Tommy said. ‘With speech. Words and all.’
‘What did he say?’ Michael rescued poor Maggie.
‘Didn’t you ask him yourself? Wasn’t he inside in your place for ages?’ Tommy Leonard was jealous of the time that the two star-like Americans had spent in Ryan’s.
‘I couldn’t ask much. Mam asked us to show them the animals. God, imagine asking anyone to look at our animals let alone people like that.’
Tommy Leonard was mollified. He was actually in the poor position of not knowing what age Kerry O’Neill actually was. He had asked, it was true, but Kerry had just smiled at him knowingly and asked him to guess.
Tommy Leonard had guessed fifteen, and Kerry had just smiled again. As an encounter it hadn’t pleased Tommy, he got no glory in recalling it.
‘Wasn’t she beautiful?’ Maggie said, in what was almost a whisper.
‘She was more than beautiful,’ Dara said firmly. ‘She had classic good looks.’
Dara didn’t know exactly what that meant, but she had heard it said once about some actress. It seemed the highest praise there could be to have good looks that were classic. It gave them a virtue somehow, took them out of the ordinary variety.
‘Imagine, she’s going to be at school like the rest of us.’ Maggie could hardly take it in.
‘I’m sure she’ll hate it.’ Dara was sympathetic to Grace and outraged that school wouldn’t live up to her hopes.
‘Everyone hates school,’ said Jacinta White, who hadn’t met Grace and Kerry personally. She had only waved to them as they passed in the car with Mr O’Neill. Jacinta and her brother Liam were peeved not to have met the new arrivals; it left them at a disadvantage somehow.
They had planned to go fishing that day; often the six of them waded up the river with their simple fishing rods. They had all been catching fish for as long as they could remember, and they used to laugh at the fishermen who came from Dublin and far-off places with all their expensive tackle. Young Mr Slattery had once told them that the whole principle of fishing for thousands of years had been some sort of an old hook, some sort of an old stick and a length of thread to connect the two. Only fancy folk who wouldn’t know a pike from a perch, or either of them from a brown trout, went to all this ungodly fuss about rods and tackle. Sometimes young Mr Slattery came and sat with them and told them things about the river. He always sounded as if he were making some kind of joke about it, or as if he didn’t really believe what he was saying himself. He said that the Fern wasn’t cold enough or fast enough for game fish. You wouldn’t find any salmon leaping around it or refined sort of trout. These were classier fish that needed a load of oxygen. The Fern was a coarse fish for a coarser fisherman. It was low in oxygen, and full of slow ponderous fish like the tench that could live with no oxygen at all. Like the people of Mountfern themselves. Young Mr Slattery puzzled the children, he was neither one thing nor the other.
Today, somehow, the fishing had lost its appeal. And they didn’t play in Fernscourt any more. It was not the same now that they knew the bulldozers were coming to take it down. They were all restless and unsettled. They wanted Grace O’Neill and her big brother Kerry to be there again. Like they had been yesterday. But nobody said it. Jacinta White said it in a sort of way.
‘Will we go up to the lodge and ask them if they want to come fishing?’ she suggested.
They all looked at each other doubtfully.
The mood was against it. Grace and Kerry O’Neill were the kind of people who made the running. You didn’t go knocking on their door. They came to join you when they were ready.
Jack Coyne made one attempt to regain the lost business. He called to the lodge formally. He was met by Miss Hayes, a quiet woman who did dressmaking and who lived in a couple of rooms in Bridge Street.
‘What has you ending up here?’ he asked ungraciously.
‘Did you wish to see Mr O’Neill?’
‘Yes, I wished that, please.’ He was mocking her now.
‘Would you like to come in to the sitting room? The family are at breakfast at the moment.’
‘Who’s that, Miss Hayes?’ Patrick’s voice called out good-naturedly.
‘It’s Mr Coyne, a car dealer.’ Miss Hayes was disapproving.
‘Oh, Mr Coyne, I had the pleasure of doing business with you once. Do come in and join us for coffee. Another cup if you’d be so kind, please, Miss Hayes?’
Jack Coyne was distinctly wrong-footed now. He came into a sunny alcove where two smartly dressed children were having breakfast, at a table by a big window. The children stood up politely at his approach. Jack Coyne wished he had dressed more smartly for the occasion. He had thought he would find them unpacking and confused.
‘I didn’t want to disturb you but I was going to enquire if you wanted a car.’ Jack decided to come straight to the point. He nodded at the two children who sat down again, realising that there would be no further greeting. Patrick made a great play out of pouring the coffee and was extremely anxious that Jack Coyne had the right amount of sugar and cream. Then he turned his blue eyes and his crinkly smile directly on Jack.
‘A car?’ he said, interested and amused, as if he had been offered a flying saucer.
‘Yes, you won’t want to be hiring that car-rental job outside for any longer than you have to.’
‘No indeed.’ Patrick still looked amused.
‘And since I’m the local man, a businessman too, in my own small way, I thought I’d put it on the line for you, Mr O’Neill, ask you to come down to Coyne’s Motor Works and tell me what you had in mind, and I could go and look at it for you.’
Patrick looked at him blankly. As if he didn’t understand. ‘You mean you would go and get me a car from a third party? Is this what you are proposing?’
‘Yes, well that’s what getting a car for someone is.’ Jack was confused now.
‘But why would you do that, Mr Coyne?’
‘Why? Well so that you would get a good deal, a proper car from someone you could trust.’
‘Who would that be, this person I could trust?’ Patrick’s eyes were innocent and blue.
Jack Coyne shuffled and stumbled over his words. ‘Like I’m here, I’d know the people, I’d be in the way of knowing who would give you a fair price and who would . . . well . . . who would be the kind of fellow who would see you coming as it were.’
Patrick looked at him directly. ‘I’d have to avoid those, wouldn’t you say?’
‘You would too, and sometimes it’s hard to tell one from another; the man who would look to your interests and serve you well, and the man who would just try to make a quick few quid out of you.’
‘Yes.’ Patrick was grave.
‘And we’re all in business, as I say, Mr O’Neill, and there are those of us who might make a quick few quid always from passing trade as it were, people who had more money than sense, but when it comes down to a good working relationship . . .’
Patrick O’Neill beamed all over his face.
‘I think that’s very neighbourly of you, Mr Coyne, and I will take your point about the kind of sharks who would fleece the passing trade for a few quick bucks . . . It’s that kind of thing that can destroy a place. One visitor leaving with one story like that could kill tourism stone dead. I agree with you so much. So thanks again for marking my card. I’ll be on the look-out.’
Jack Coyne heard the goodbye in the tone. He stood up.
‘So you might call in to Coyne’s Motor Works?’
‘I’ll sure as anything see you around these parts, Mr Coyne.’
In the hall Jack Coyne got the feeling that the wordless Miss Hayes had heard everything, and realised he was getting the bum’s rush.
‘Haven’t you a good enough living below in the town making clothes for people without cleaning up after this lot?’ he said to her.
‘Like yourself, Jack Coyne, I’m a
lways willing to see a business opportunity,’ she said with a smile.
Olive Hayes had no relations left except a sister who was a nun in New Zealand. She had always dreamed of going out to spend a winter in the South Island. If she worked for Mr O’Neill, if she let her little place behind Meagher’s jewellery to this building fellow who needed a place in Mountfern, if she continued her making of curtains and any other dressmaking she could manage, then she would have the fare in a year.
Mr O’Neill thought he would be out of the lodge and into his new castle in a year but he didn’t understand about the way things were done here. It would be several years. And in that time Olive Hayes could gather a small fortune, enough to take her to New Zealand, and to give her sister’s order a financial contribution which would make her a welcome visitor for as long as she wanted to stay. Indeed she thought sometimes that if the weather was as good as her sister wrote it was, and if she liked it there, she might stay altogether. But these were only half-formed plans. And nobody except Sheila Whelan in the post office had any inkling of them. She hadn’t told that bossy Marian Johnson who hired her, and she certainly wouldn’t tell that crook Jack Coyne. She closed the door after him and went to refill the coffee pot.
The girl was a lovely little thing; the boy looked as if he could be a great deal of trouble.
Judy Byrne rang the Grange. She said it was about old Mr Johnson’s arthritis.
‘You said yourself there was nothing more you could do for him,’ Marian said.
‘Yes, I know, but in this fine weather he should be feeling a lot better. I was wondering did he want to go over the exercises I tried with him before.’
‘He said they weren’t worth a curse. You can neither lead him nor drive him. It’s always been the same.’
‘Oh I don’t know, sometimes the right word at the right time . . . I have to be over that way, will I call in and have a chat with him?’
‘No point, Judy, he’s gone fishing.’