‘No, darling Dara, I’m not going, there’s no miracles for me there. If Our Lady wants to cure my spine she can do it in Mountfern, I am not going to spend all those people’s money going there, and have all their hopes disappointed. That’s it. I didn’t mean to tell you so suddenly, I was going to put it gently, maybe even differently. But you’re such a joy to me and such a comfort, I treat you like a grown-up daughter instead of a child.’
The tears had dried and Dara was as pleased as anything. ‘Well, I’m going to have to look after you properly if I’m a grown-up. If you get your way about Lourdes can we have your word that you’ll be sensible about Mary Donnelly and be civil to her in case she packs her bags and leaves?’
Kate burst into peals of laughter. Dara’s voice was such a good imitation of her own when she was being bossy. Even her face had the same look.
‘I’ll be so civil, it will frighten you,’ she laughed.
‘There’s no need to over-do it, Mam,’ Dara said disapprovingly.
John was taking a stroll with his daughter along the river bank.
‘I’m glad that Rachel is here,’ he said. ‘Your mam likes her a lot. It will take her mind off things.’
‘Do you think her mind’s on things a lot?’ Dara wanted to know.
‘It’s so hard to know. She says she’s almost forgotten her life before the wheelchair. She doesn’t even dream of herself as being able to walk any more.’ He sounded sad.
‘Don’t get all depressed, Daddy, she hates that more than anything.’
‘I wouldn’t be depressed in front of her, Dara. But, Lord, on my own or with you, can’t I let the mask drop a bit?’
They walked on companionably past the people fishing, careful not to disturb them by idle chatter. They were both remembering some of the scenes when a red-faced and furious Kate would shout and cry that she wanted no sympathy, no sad faces around her. She had even thrown a jug of milk and broken plates and saucers, flinging them at John when he was in what he considered a gentle and concerned mood. Kate had taken it as defeatist and said it made her worse.
‘I can’t even bloody walk, you can all do everything, so for Christ’s sake stop moaning and saying, “Poor Mam, Poor Kate.” What is the point of that? I’d prefer to be dead. Dead, dead and buried long ago than to be poor Kate, poor Mam.’
She had frightened them so much they had rung for Dr White. He came to see her, and the family waiting outside got little consolation from him as he came out.
‘Nothing wrong with Mrs Ryan except that she is paralysed,’ he said bluntly. ‘And that she is surrounded by people who don’t give her any reason or point in living. They call the doctor if she shows any bit of fire and life, and their way of supporting her is to offer her pity. Good evening.’
They never forgot it. Even Declan and Eddie knew that the mood was to be optimistic. Mam wanted to believe that things were getting better all the time. That’s what gave her the energy to drag herself from bed to chair, from chair to lavatory or bath stool, and to push herself to the garden or the kitchen or the pub. If she didn’t believe that things were getting better all the time, she wouldn’t even sit up in the mornings.
Dara linked her father as they turned to come back along the road. ‘What do you think really, Dad, about the hotel? Is it going to take away all our business? Mary Donnelly says it could be the ruination of us.’
‘Mary, for all that we are blessed to have her, is wrong about almost everything.’
Dara looked at her father affectionately. ‘It would be a terrible thing to hate men, not to see them as friends.’
‘I think it would be a pity all right,’ John agreed. ‘I think you’d lose out on it in the long run. And on the same subject, what’s a beautiful girl like you doing on a summer evening walking the river bank with her old father? Why aren’t the Tommy Leonards and the Liam Whites and the others of Mountfern beating me out of the way? Tell me that.’
‘Because they’re all eejits, Daddy, and you’re not.’
‘That’s nice to hear. But isn’t there anybody who isn’t an eejit? Anybody at all?’
‘Not a one.’ Dara was airy about it. It was just a fact. ‘I might be hard to please, like Mary Donnelly, or just a bit slow in seeing my chances. I keep dreaming of course, that something marvellous would happen, like that beautiful Kerry O’Neill would notice me.’
‘Would you like that?’
‘I’d love it, but I’d have to fight the whole town for him. Grace says he and his father don’t get on.’
‘Nobody gets on with their father,’ said John, patting Dara’s arm.
‘Stop fishing, Daddy,’ she said.
‘I think Declan’s turning into a proper hooligan,’ John said to Kate.
‘God, he must be really bad if you say a word against him.’ Kate was surprised to hear such criticism. ‘What has he done now?’
‘He hasn’t done anything, it’s just that he has the instincts of a gangster. He goes round punching things for no reason.’
‘What kind of things?’ Kate was alarmed.
‘I don’t know, the hen house for one thing, he nearly knocked it down.’
‘I could knock that down myself even in this thing.’ Kate gave a disgusted wave at her wheelchair.
‘You could knock the house down in that chair, you look so terrifying when you head for us,’ John laughed. ‘No, he just seems to tear things apart automatically without even knowing he’s doing it.’
‘He’s upset.’
‘We’re all upset,’ her husband said.
‘No we’re not, we’re fine. He’s just a baby. Send him in to me when he gets back. I’ll play with him for a bit.’
‘He’ll probably have you on the floor.’
‘It’s just being the youngest . . . poor little fellow.’
‘I was the youngest, I’ll have you remember, and look at how well I turned out.’
‘You did, too.’ She looked at him admiringly. John Ryan had lost some of his beer belly, he stood more erect and, despite new lines on his face, he looked a younger man than he had been at the beginning of the summer.
Kate found herself turning to him for a lot more than just physical assistance. He had been able to manage in some kind of fashion without her for almost half a year. There were a lot of areas where she had to look to him now for advice.
‘Do you think it’s going to affect them all?’ She spoke in a small voice. ‘You know, will it change their lives altogether . . . all this?’ Again she waved in exasperation at her legs and the chair.
‘No, I think they’ll be less affected by it than we expect. You know how adaptable children are, they get used to any old thing after a while.’ He spoke gently and lovingly to take the possible hint of indifference out of his words. ‘I think that now you’re home they’ll all get on with their lives. Normally – almost embarrassingly normally.’
‘I hope so.’ She closed her eyes.
‘Kate, we’ve been through all this before. What makes you start worrying now?’
‘I expect hearing that Declan’s going round kicking things, and I think maybe I treat Dara as too much of a grown-up. I’ve taken her childhood away from her.’
‘No, no.’ He was soothing. ‘She’s flattered that you talk to her as an equal. No, don’t worry about that.’
‘And Eddie?’
‘He’s with a gang of toughies, he hasn’t time to think about anything except walls to be climbed, orchards to be robbed, jam jars to be discovered in far places so that he’ll collect enough to go to the pictures.’
‘So that leaves Michael. He’s too quiet these days, isn’t he?’
‘He is, and I was going to say that if you don’t think it’s the act of a madman I was going to ask him to go off fishing for a day with me. We keep telling people the Fern is full of pike. Why don’t we go and see is it true?’
She reached over and touched his hand. ‘Do, of course, and tell Michael I love him.’
‘I
won’t tell him anything of the sort, he’d knock me into the river.’
‘No, I mean say it without saying it.’
‘He knows, but I’ll say it without saying it anyway.’
‘Will you come out fishing with me on Saturday?’
‘Fishing! In this weather? We’d be frozen, and what would we catch?’
‘We spend our time telling people that the Fern is alive with pike all year round. Shouldn’t we see are we right?’
‘God, Dad, it’d be miserable out there. Why would you never ask me a thing like that in the summer? I’d love it in the summer.’
‘I’d love it in the summer, too, son, but the pub wouldn’t be half empty like it is this weather.’
‘But why, why now?’
‘I wanted us to have a day out, a chat even.’
‘What have I done?’
‘Oh Jesus God, you haven’t done anything. It’s great when your son thinks the only reason you’re going to ask him out for a treat is to attack him, punish him.’
‘But you never ask me out,’ Michael complained with what John had to admit was some justification.
‘And I don’t seem to make too good a fist of it when I do. All right, if it’s not fishing what would you like to do on Saturday after lunch?’
‘I suppose the pictures are out?’
‘You suppose correctly.’
‘Could we do the book?’ His eyes lit up.
John genuinely didn’t know what he meant.
‘The book, Dad, Mr O’Neill’s book, you haven’t done it for ages. I mean, take out the boxes of papers and things . . .’ His voice trailed away. John was just standing there with a blank expression. ‘I mean, you are going to do it . . . to finish it?’
‘What? Oh yes. Yes.’
Michael looked relieved. ‘Well then, could we look at some of the research and I could help you like I did before?’
‘Yes. Certainly.’
‘Is anything wrong, would you prefer to go fishing? I suppose if we wrapped up . . .’
‘No. No, you’re a very good fellow . . . no.’
‘So have you been thinking about doing the book . . . or maybe after everything . . . you sort of didn’t want to?’
‘I think you’re a genius, that’s the very thing we’ll do on Saturday. We’ll take the boxes upstairs out of everyone’s way and you can indeed help me. What with everything that happened I never found a moment to get down to it again, and it’s been there at the back of my mind . . .’
He beamed at Michael, but the boy had the feeling that there was some sort of struggle taking place. His father had been deciding there in front of him whether to go on writing the story of Fernscourt for Grace’s father.
‘It’s not as if it would make Mam any better by not doing it,’ he said suddenly, and his father gripped him on the shoulder.
‘That’s the truth, Michael. We must never forget that.’
‘Well, how much purgatory did he give you?’ Rachel asked when Father Hogan had left and she was allowed to come in to see Kate.
‘It’s not purgatory he gives me, you heathen, it’s penance, it’s to keep me out of purgatory.’
‘It’s all nonsense, you’re a saint already. Did you tell him about Lourdes?’
‘Yes, he hated it, poor man, but he’s going to help me. He said to put it a different way, say that I’d like it to go to a parish fund to send others there, get even more money, and not to dwell too much on the fact that I’m not going to take it up myself. It might hurt people or offend them.’
Rachel nodded.
‘You look restless. Is anything wrong?’
‘Hard to hide anything from you, Kate. I’ve been thinking, I should go back. Back to the States.’
‘You don’t call it home, you don’t say back home.’
‘It doesn’t feel like home, not this year.’
‘Maybe because you are in the middle of moving . . . all these plans about the hotel, and what it will look like and what will be here. No wonder the office in New York doesn’t seem real. But your flat – think of that. It’s going to be like paradise compared to the Slieve Sunset.’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t have to go, you could stay here with us.’
‘No, I have to go. I’m only inventing work here . . . and . . .’
‘But isn’t he glad that you like the place so much, and feel so at home here in Mountfern? I’d have thought he’d have been delighted with you.’
‘I thought that too.’
‘Whyever not? What did he say?’
‘He just wondered why I was spending so long here. I stupidly said something about getting the feel of the place. He was very short with me. Very short indeed.’
Kate reached for Rachel’s hand. It was hardly credible that this elegant woman with the wine suit trimmed with suede, with a silk blouse which must have cost a fortune – a cream silk with a floppy bow – should be as awkward as a child when it came to the great Patrick O’Neill. No sixteen-year-old could have been more distraught.
‘You’ll come back here again, it’s not just a job.’ Kate soothed her as she had soothed her daughter earlier in the day.
‘But the message is loud and clear. It will never be my home.’
Rachel had never been so careless of her make-up, her silk blouse or the fine wool rug that lay on Kate’s lap. She cried as she had cried in Yiddish to her mother years and years ago when the children on the block had called her a little Jew girl.
Each time Kate got a letter from Rachel she wrote back that very day. That way their letters stayed in order. They weren’t crossing in the post, they could ask and reply.
Rachel must have written just as quickly.
They learned to depend on each other in a way they would never have believed possible. Rachel wrote about working for O’Neill Enterprises in New York, though finding that the heart had gone from the business since Patrick O’Neill was many miles away in an Irish village.
Kate found it a great ease to be able to tell someone how boringly well Mary Donnelly ran the house, and how irritating it was to be told a dozen times a day, perfectly accurately, that they were blessed to have found her. It was true, which made it worse! Kate said it was a sneaky relief to be able to tell Rachel that if she heard one more Mountfern person say that Mary Donnelly was a genius she would go berserk and race round the pub in her wheelchair knocking over tables and pouring drinks on to the floor.
Rachel wrote that she had to put up with the insults and veiled triumph of Gerry Power, who had said in one hundred different ways that he was sorry it didn’t work out for Rachel in Ireland. In one hundred different ways she had deliberately misunderstood him and said with a broad smile that it had all worked out magnificently and he must go over some day himself and see the wonderful place that Patrick had bought for himself.
Kate could admit that her new-found all-girls-together relationship with Dara was becoming very rocky, and Rachel could admit that sometimes weeks went by without Patrick telephoning her, even though she stayed in to wait for his calls.
Week after week the two women wrote of their lives, month after month they told of the changes that were happening. Neither really noticed things changing, it was only by looking back over the old letters that each realised how the other’s life was moving from one direction to another.
Kate wrote of John more and more as the man who made the decisions, not as the man who was trying to cope. She never said it in so many words but Rachel could read it like a thread in the letters. There was the tale about John and the rough crowd of tinkers who came into the pub. Everyone had feared a fight if he were to throw them out, and a worse one if he were to let them stay. But there had been no fight in Ryan’s, the tinkers were served as pleasantly as they could have wished. It was just the number of times that John said how heart-scalded he was from Sergeant Sheehan dropping in that sent the band on their way. John had leaned conspiratorially over the counter and said that a ma
n wasn’t free to breathe in this day and age without that sergeant coming and poking his nose into what people had in the boots of their cars or on the crossbars of their bicycles. The tinkers, who were practically festooned with pheasants they had taken illegally from Coyne’s wood, were on their way, with grateful glances at John and vaguely dispiriting promises that they would return.
Rachel read how John Ryan now had poems published by two newspapers, to a total of seven published works, and there was the distinct possibility of an anthology. The history of Fernscourt and its surroundings was proving long and complicated, but there were no pleas to hasten it from the man who had commissioned it, so it was taking its time.
There was the story of John and the man trying to sell him an insurance policy: John had refused it and the man had turned ugly. He had said that John must be expecting to come into a big windfall from the Fernscourt insurance people. John had been icy in his dismissal, but the man had retorted that he was only saying what half of Mountfern was saying behind his back. Kate had been upset but John had shrugged and said that a village had to have something to talk about, and since they hadn’t had a two-headed calf born recently, nor a cure at the May bush, nor even a visit from a politician, they had to fill in the long winter evenings somehow.
Kate read about art galleries that Rachel had visited, and a course of ten lectures that she had been attending. She heard of trips taken by train to cities in the United States which were further apart than the whole width of Ireland. She knew that Rachel had seen a lot of movies and heard too little from Patrick, and that she was now considered a world authority on Ireland by the people in her circle.
Without Rachel having to write it, Kate knew there were a lot of empty nights.
Without Kate having to put it down on paper, Rachel knew that Kate sometimes found the imprisonment in her chair almost more than she could bear. The frustration seeped across the Atlantic in spite of herself. The days when it seemed to rain and rain and her lovely side garden with all the plants that she was meant to admire from her green room had turned into a mire of mud.
There were the times when it was obvious that Kate Ryan might in fact explode if she hadn’t this safety valve, this marvellous friend she could write to and explain everything as it was.