John knew only when the third person rushing away from the site to get help refused to look him in the eye and tell him what had happened. Roaring like a bull, he ran across the footbridge and had to be held back from the scene by three men. White-faced Brian Doyle begged him not to go near her.
‘Jesus, the only thing we do know, John, is not to move her. For God’s sake believe that. Stand back from her, don’t touch her. You could make it worse.’
John sat down like a child and put his big face into his hands. Strong men who had known him and had drunk pints in his pub for twenty years couldn’t find the words or the gestures to touch him. They stood awkwardly around, eyes averted from the crumpled body on the ground.
Patrick O’Neill knew when there was a great hammering on the door of Rachel Fine’s room in the Slieve Sunset hotel.
‘No, of course Mr O’Neill is not here,’ Rachel called through the door. ‘What on earth makes you think he is?’
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ the young girl called. ‘We’ve had a message from Brian Doyle, he said he’s trying everywhere in the country to find Mr O’Neill, there’s been a terrible accident . . . a terrible accident and Mr O’Neill’s got to come at once.’
Patrick was out of bed and had pulled his trousers on.
‘What kind of an accident?’ he shouted through the door.
‘On the site of the new hotel in Mountfern.’
‘What happened?’ Patrick had opened the door now; Rachel was cowering behind it. Patrick had pulled his shirt on at the same electrifying speed.
‘Someone’s been killed, I think. Some woman.’
‘A woman, killed on the site?’ Patrick’s shoes were on and he had picked up his car keys.
‘Did he say what woman? What was a woman doing there? Did he say how it happened?’
‘No, he said if we found you to get you over there as quick as possible.’
Patrick was down the corridor by this stage and the girl was round-eyed at the thought of the American millionaire who was building the big hotel five miles away being in bed in the middle of the afternoon with a strange American woman and not being a bit ashamed of it. Weren’t things going to liven up a bit here when the Yanks started coming over in force?
Mrs Whelan in the post office knew fairly early on because Dr White stopped his car outside her door and ran in to collect her.
‘Put some kind of sign on the door, do anything, but come with me, Sheila. They’re going to need someone sensible at the pub to look after them.’
She didn’t question whether she was the right person or not, she just closed the door behind her and stepped quietly into his car.
‘Have you told the canon?’
‘Someone has. Father Hogan will be there in a minute, he’s got his own car.’
‘Do you know is she bad?’ Mrs Whelan’s voice was calm.
‘No, all I know is that they’ve had the sense not to move her. I’ve got the ambulance coming anyway. I didn’t wait to see her, we can always send it back if it’s not needed.’ His face was set hard as he headed for the accident.
The twins were the last to know. They had been in their tunnel all afternoon. Grace had gone to the big town with Marian Johnson to get some more summer clothes. The invitation had not included Dara and Michael, pleasant but scruffy children from that pub. Anyway Marian wanted to get to know Grace, make an ally of her.
So for the first time in days they had a chance to play again in their home. They had been happy to note from the Fernscourt end of the tunnel that there seemed to be no intention of clearing the undergrowth and bramble which disguised the tunnel’s mouth. The new gardens would end well over two hundred yards further on. The string had already been stretched over the part where the high hedges were going to be planted and the stone walls were to be built.
All they had to worry about now was whether the entrance would be down by the towpath.
They had torches with batteries, and an old bicycle lamp up high on a ledge. They had rescued a torn tablecloth that Mammy had said was beyond mending. There were two boxes filled with hay which were sofas, and would double up as beds when they came to live here permanently. The day’s play had seemed long for the first time. The kind of games they used to invent in the ruins seemed suddenly rather childish. But neither wanted to admit it to the other. Nor even to admit it in the heart. If the game was over, what was there?
In the hot tunnel, which for the first time seemed a bit close and smelly today, they played and hoped it was soon going to be evening.
They came out and pulled across the fuchsia bush as they always had done. Not twenty yards down the towpath they heard the people calling them. There must have been a search party out for them.
It was Loretto Quinn who saw them from across the river. She waved and shouted. ‘Where on earth have you been?’ she cried.
Dara and Michael looked at each other in dismay.
‘Nowhere.’
‘Just playing.’
But by this time the children from the bridge had come towards them in a group, and then suddenly hung back as if not wanting to be the first to say the words.
‘You’ve got to go home now,’ Tommy Leonard said eventually. ‘They’ve been looking for you for hours.’
‘We’ve only been just around . . .’
‘Just around here and there . . .’
Tommy’s face was serious. ‘Something very bad’s happened.’
The other children held back.
Loretto Quinn was there by now, she was kneeling down on the ground in front of them to be nearer to their height, but that made her much too low and then they had to bend to hear what she was saying.
‘You have to be as brave as two little lions now. Do you hear me? They all need you to be brave.’
‘What happened?’ They spoke together, faces calm, timing precise.
‘Your Mammy got hit by a machine up in the site, she hurt herself very badly. They’ve taken her to the hospital in an ambulance.’
The children crowded closer to hear. Now that someone else was telling the twins, now that a grown-up had taken the burden off them, they wanted to be part of it.
‘Is she dead?’ Dara asked.
‘No, she’s not dead,’ said Loretto Quinn.
‘Is she going to die?’ Michael asked, equally calmly.
Loretto remembered the people who had given her false hope and told her that her Barney might recover when they took his lifeless body from the River Fern all those years ago. They had meant well, but they had been no help.
‘They think she might die, yes,’ she said. The group of children drew back suddenly and Loretto held the twins in her arms and supported them from the towpath, across the bridge in the eyes of dozens of people, and back to the pub.
Mrs Whelan took them into the kitchen. ‘Your daddy’s in hospital now. Do you think your place is in there with him, or is it here with me looking after the children?’
Eddie and Declan’s faces were swollen from crying. They sat in unaccustomed stillness on kitchen chairs while Carrie made bread at Mrs Whelan’s suggestion.
Dara thought for a minute. ‘I suppose she’d want us to keep an eye on Dad in case he’d get too upset at the hospital.’
‘Right,’ said Mrs Whelan and she sent someone in the bar for Jack Coyne who would drive them into the town.
PART THREE
11
The church was crowded at eleven o’clock mass on Sunday. The two priests, who were faced with getting their own lunch due to the non-appearance of Miss Barry, had answered many requests to say masses for Mrs Ryan. Young Father Hogan became impatient when a poor old tramp called Papers Flynn came with half a crown to have a mass said for the poor woman in the pub.
‘No need to give an offering, Papers,’ Father Hogan had said gruffly. ‘We’ll be saying mass for her anyway.’
‘I want my mass said for her,’ Papers insisted. She had been very good to him always, he said, given him a yellow blank
et to wrap round him under all the newspapers he normally wore when sleeping in a ditch. She had never given him a lecture about sleeping out. It was as if she understood somehow.
The young American girl had come with five dollars.
‘I guess this might not be the way to do it, but when my mother was alive she used to give an offering for a mass. Could you write Mrs Ryan’s name in your book, Father? And could you say a mass for her?’
Tramps and children. Father Hogan had never thought it was going to be like this. Tramps, children, drunken housekeepers, kind if doddering parish priests. And trying to explain why it was God’s will that a young woman, mother of a family, should be struck by a huge earthmover as she walked unheeding on a summer’s day. They never told you in the seminary that it was going to be like this. But maybe, of course, they didn’t know.
It was Canon Moran who would say eleven o’clock mass; Father Hogan would go and struggle with the range. He sighed as he folded his own vestments from the earlier mass in the vestry and watched Canon Moran take tottering steps out towards the altar. He had arranged sensible altar boys like Tommy Leonard and Liam White. With the canon you couldn’t have any possible troublemakers.
The canon turned to face the congregation and in his thin reedy voice he said, ‘Your prayers are asked for the happy death or speedy recovery of Katherine Mary Ryan of River Road.’
Fergus put a finger in his collar to loosen it. He wondered what he was doing sitting here listening to this mumbo jumbo. Happy death! Should it not be speedy death rather than lying there paralysed, in traction, so heavily sedated because of the pain that she didn’t even know her own family or where she was? What did this old fool mean? Praying for happy deaths and speedy recoveries, that’s what you said about old people lingering on and on, it was a way of announcing to the parish that old Jimmy this or Michael that was on the way out. Like the old fellow he had made the will for a few days back. It wasn’t for Kate Ryan, a young woman. A young woman who had been killed – or almost killed – by a machine on that man’s land.
Fergus felt himself getting a hot flush of anger and loosened his collar and tie still further.
He thanked God for the wisdom of Sheila Whelan who had phoned him the night it had happened. She had simply said that she knew he would want to know, rather than come back a week or two later from his holiday and find out what had happened in his absence.
Miss Purcell had sniffed, of course, and said that Mrs Whelan had a deal of impertinence interrupting the man on his holiday. But Miss Purcell knew nothing, and Sheila Whelan knew everything. She knew that he would have come back from the ends of the earth.
Loretto Quinn was not following the mass; she was saying the thirty days’ prayer. She had promised Our Lady that she would start the prayer immediately. She knew that Our Lady would realise how important Kate Ryan was to her family, and spare her. She prayed determinedly, trying to mean the words, and never once thinking that Our Lady might also have known how important Barney Quinn had been.
Sheila Whelan wasn’t following the mass either. She was trying to work out a plan in her head. The Ryans hadn’t thought a day ahead of the day they were living. Someone had to think for them. They couldn’t live on the way they were. They needed a woman in the house, someone who could serve in the bar, someone who could keep an eye on the children, and see to it that Carrie did what she was meant to do. She had a cousin.
She wondered would it work. The cousin had been disappointed. A man had given her an engagement ring and there were plans for the wedding. Mary Donnelly had given up her fine job teaching and drew out her savings to put a deposit on a house. The man had disappeared, with the savings.
In fact Sheila Whelan was the only member of the family to know anything. Mary Donnelly felt that Sheila, having been abandoned by her own husband, might understand. She had told her everything only six weeks ago.
Mrs Whelan decided to ring her and suggest it anyway. No harm could come from suggesting something and for poor Mary, bruised and betrayed, anything would be better than staying where she was and enduring the pitying glances of friends and relations.
John Ryan was not at mass, he was at his wife’s bedside. Kate’s face was very white, her breathing was troubled and she gave little snores and half-choking sounds. Kate had never snored although she claimed that John would raise the roof unless she nudged him and pinched him to change his position in bed. There was a tube attached to her arm and another to her bladder. She didn’t look like Kate, she looked like a picture of Kate that had been given to medical students to experiment on.
Once or twice she seemed to know him.
‘John,’ she said once.
‘I’m here, love.’
‘I’m sorry, John.’
Then nothing more for a long time.
‘The children?’ she asked quite clearly.
‘Fine, not a worry about them, in great form.’
‘Who . . . who?’
‘Carrie’s coping very well, Loretto’s in and out, Sheila Whelan came in all three days. We’re fine, they’re fine.’
‘Three days?’ She seemed mystified.
‘Since it happened,’ John said.
‘My God, three days.’
‘Don’t think about it, you’re getting better, they say you’re on the mend.’ His face was red with exertion.
Kate had slipped away into unconsciousness again.
Dara had washed Eddie’s neck and Declan’s ears before they went to mass. She had refused their protestations.
‘Mammy says she could plant rows of potatoes in your neck, Eddie. Stand still and let me scrub it.’
‘Put some soap and water on the facecloth,’ roared Eddie.
‘There’s plenty on it. It’s just that you’re so filthy.’
Declan stood waiting for his turn. ‘Maybe I’d do my own ears to save you the trouble,’ he offered.
‘No,’ Dara said. ‘I’ll do them.’
Michael sat saying nothing. Carrie had come back from early mass and was standing unhappily wondering about the lunch.
‘Are you clean, Michael?’ Dara asked.
He shrugged.
‘Ah, come on, Michael, it’s the only thing we can do for Mammy, not to be like tinkers. That’s what she’d say.’
‘We don’t know what she’d say.’ He was mutinous.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You have half of Mountfern saying “Your mother would say this”, and the other half saying “She’d say that” . . . When will she be able to say something for herself, not have us all listening to other people saying it for her?’
‘When she is able to say something I’m sure she’d prefer you to stop moping and do something.’
‘All right.’ Michael went at Declan’s ears with such savagery that the boy roared for mercy.
‘Isn’t it disgusting to think that our mother has to look at such awful things as necks and ears,’ Michael said.
‘I bet yours were just as bad and maybe still are, for all we know.’
‘Stay still, Declan. It hurts less if you don’t move, you clown.’
Michael thought he’d like to skip mass; he felt sure that God would understand that he could pray better for Mam if he were to walk up the bank a bit. He remembered a great day he had walked off for miles up the Fern and met old Mr Slattery who was deep in conversation with a Dutchman. The Dutchman was telling him all the names they would call the fish if they were in Holland. A perch was a baars, and a pike was a snoek. Old Mr Slattery had been delighted with that word and had said that if ever Michael went to foreign places like Amsterdam or The Hague he could talk about snoek with the best of them.
Michael had often thought that he and Dara might take trips to foreign parts when they lived in Fernscourt. They would travel once or twice a year. How stupid and babyish they had been. He should have known that good things never happened really. Everyone said that Mam was going to get better, and they said she’d be running in th
e door again like she always did in no time. But Michael didn’t believe it. People were saying it the way they said that it was going to be a great summer or that they were going to beat Offaly in the match. Just a hope. Not something real. Michael wished he could tell God about this on the river bank, and explain without being all mopey and dismal-sounding that it couldn’t help anyone to keep Mam sick in hospital, but it would help everyone to make her better. He was sure that God would listen better on the banks of the Fern than in the church with everyone coughing and fidgeting. But there was no way you could explain that to anyone.
Only a madman or a heretic would suggest not going to mass on a Sunday when his mother was lying with a broken back.
Mrs Daly caught sight of Maggie leaving the house. ‘Where are you going, Maggie? It’s too early for mass.’
‘I was going down to collect Dara and Michael to walk them to the church,’ Maggie said.
‘Don’t be going in there on top of them all, they’ll have the house filled with people.’
‘No, their Dad’s gone in to the town, they’ll have nobody,’ Maggie said.
‘You can see them in the church. Don’t be dragging up there and living in their pockets at a time like this.’
‘But isn’t this the time they would like people round?’ Maggie asked simply.
‘Stop contradicting me at every hand’s turn. Comb that mop of hair of yours, will you, Maggie, and wait till the bell rings before going to mass.’
Mrs Daly’s mouth was in a thin disapproving line.
In the lodge Olive Hayes was sitting at the kitchen table writing a long letter to Sister Bernadette on the other side of the world. Miss Hayes had put a breakfast on the table but none of the O’Neills had been able to eat. There had been yet another row between Mr O’Neill and his son. And Grace had wanted to go and stay in the Ryan’s pub after the terrible accident. But her father had said no. You could have cut the atmosphere at breakfast with a knife. As Olive Hayes wrote page after page she paused now and then to think how true it was that riches did not automatically bring happiness. This very morning she had seen the O’Neills sit white-faced around their table leaving the scrambled eggs, crispy bacon and home-made bread untouched. She had seen Marian Johnson go by in a ridiculous hat that must have cost a fortune and looked like a bird’s nest. Marian’s face was tense and anxious.