‘Any hope you’d be able to sing “Panis Angelicus”? he said without much confidence.
‘No, Father, sorry, Father, I haven’t a note in my head,’ Michael said.
‘Come on out of that, you were in the choir at the concert. Why don’t you . . . ?’
‘No, Father, I can’t sing, and anyway you’d never know what might happen to my voice.’ Michael had been dying for his voice to break like Tommy Leonard’s had. Every morning he tried it out and was disappointed that it still sounded the same.
Dara was no help. ‘You should hear him singing from the bathroom, Father, he’d have the tears in your eyes.’
‘I’ll kill you,’ Michael said.
‘Well I’m certainly not going to beg and cajole you.’ Father Hogan was huffy now. ‘I didn’t think a Catholic boy would have to be flattered and pleaded with to sing in the House of God.’
Dara realised she had gone too far.
‘I was only saying that to tease him, Father. Really and truly he’d be no good, he’d embarrass you, it’s like an old tin can. I know he would sing if he could, but he’s just in the choir to make up the numbers for Brother Keane, to sort of fill the stage up a bit.’
Father Hogan said that was all right then.
‘Now.’ Dara was triumphant. ‘Didn’t I rescue you?’
‘You needn’t have gone on so much.’ Michael hadn’t enjoyed being described as an old tin can that would embarrass you. There were times when Dara felt the need to give far too many explanations. They had reached Tommy Leonard’s house. The stationery shop was closed for business so the twins knocked at the door beside the shop. Tommy was there to greet them, his finger on his lips. Behind him a voice called.
‘Where are you going, Thomas?’
‘Just out for a bit of a walk.’
‘All right, but be back at nine o’clock, and no skitting and playing with all that crowd of hooligans.’
‘Right oh.’ Tommy was good-natured. It was easier not to bring the whole thing down round your ears with a catechism of questions. That was Tommy Leonard’s view. Just say yes and no, don’t get involved in long explanations. Michael thought he was dead right; if he had desperate parents like Tommy’s he would be exactly the same. Dara thought that this was entirely the wrong way to handle things, and if she were Tommy she would make it all clear from the word go, instead of giving in to all the cracked notions. That only made them come up with more cracked notions still.
Maggie Daly said they were to wait until she showed Dara the gorgeous yellow dress that had arrived in the parcel from America. There were often parcels from America for all of them. Not as many as years back, when Mountfern was poorer maybe, and American uncles and aunts more generous, or postage cheaper. An American parcel was a rarity nowadays. Mrs Daly probably would say nothing about it and its contents, but Maggie was so excited by the yellow net that she couldn’t wait to show it off.
The bad thing was that Kitty was in the bedroom.
Kitty yawned when Dara came in. ‘Going to try on the yellow, are you?’
‘Well look at it anyway,’ Dara said. Kitty was a pain.
‘Not at all, you’re coming to try it on. Half of Mountfern will pass through here trying it on, I can see that. The room will be full of people in vests and knickers bursting into the yellow dress.’
‘Are you going to wear it?’ Dara asked Maggie, deliberately ignoring the elder girl.
‘I don’t think so.’ Maggie was pleased to be consulted.
‘You see it’s a bit low-necked, and it’s a bit big, I’m kind of lost in it. And it’s so gorgeous it would be a pity to cut it down for me. Wasting so much material, you see.’ Her face showed her longing for the yellow satin with an overskirt of yellow net, and with yellow embroidery and sequins on the bodice. It was like something you’d see in the pictures; it was far too old for them in one way, and yet it was a girlish-looking dress with big puff sleeves. Dara was dying to put it on but she wouldn’t give Kitty the satisfaction of watching her.
‘You wouldn’t have to get much taken out of it, Maggie, wouldn’t Miss Hayes do a great job on it?’ Miss Hayes did some dressmaking in Mountfern but had never been let loose on exotic fabric like this, to their knowledge.
Kitty was lying on her bed reading the life story of Helen Shapiro who had managed to escape from childhood by having a voice that took her into the hit parade. She’d never have escaped if she had been born in Mountfern, Kitty Daly thought darkly.
‘It would look ridiculous on Maggie, no matter what Miss Hayes did to it. That’s a dress that needs a chest. Maggie hasn’t got a chest to put into it.’
‘None of us has a chest to put into it yet,’ Dara cried with spirit. ‘While we’re waiting we could put a rolled-up pair of socks. Like you often do, Kitty Daly.’
‘You told her!’ Kitty’s face was dark red with rage, and she looked menacingly at Maggie.
‘I didn’t know!’ Maggie was transparently honest and terrified.
‘Come on, Maggie, let’s leave Kitty the room to herself, we’re only in the way.’ Dara felt it was time to escape. They hung up the yellow dress carefully and pulled back the transparent plastic cover that came with it. It was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. They envied the cousin of the Dalys somewhere in America who had worn it to her Junior Prom. Whatever a Junior Prom might be.
They were going to the Protestant graveyard at the top of the town. Nobody would disturb them there. Mr Williams the vicar had realised that the children didn’t tear around playing hide and seek among the headstones, there was no disrespect to the graves of the various members of the Fern family and the rest of the small Protestant community hereabouts.
It was a peaceful place for the children to come and talk. Mr and Mrs Williams had no children of their own, they were indulgent with the children of others.
Up Bridge Street the little band walked slowly. They looked wistfully at the Classic which was showing The Glass Mountain. Imagine having the money and freedom just to drop in to the pictures whenever you wanted to.
‘We’ll be able to do that when we’re old,’ Dara said.
Tommy Leonard didn’t think so; he thought being old was going to be more of the same.
They looked into Conway’s grocery and pub. At the back, hidden away, they saw the feet of three drinkers in the discreet bar area. They often had a game guessing whose feet they were.
They never tried to play this game in any other pub since anyone who drank in Foley’s or Dunne’s, or indeed in Ryan’s itself, did so openly. It was only in Conway’s that they pretended not to be there.
Beyond Conway’s was Doctor White’s and they called there for Liam and Jacinta. That was it for tonight; some of the other children they played with lived out in the countryside, and others weren’t allowed out to wander in the evenings. There were some boys who were up at the brothers’ in the football field and there were some girls who had to help in their houses, or who had been bad and therefore denied the night’s outing.
The six went to the graveyard and sat on a tombstone which they particularly liked.
It was the memorial for a William James Fern who had died in 1881 at Majuba Hill in the Transvaal, aged eighteen. It was during the Boer War they knew that, and he had been fighting for the British against the Dutch in South Africa.
‘It was a long way to go,’ Maggie Daly often said.
‘I suppose he wanted to get away.’ Tommy Leonard could understand it only too well.
Dara had never understood it.
‘What did he want to go off and fight in other people’s wars for? If he was a Mountfern man, then why wasn’t he here having a great time? And if he was eighteen he could have done what he liked. Think of it, he could have gone to the Classic every night.’ She looked at their faces. ‘That is if the Classic was there in the 1880s, which I don’t think it was.’
But tonight they didn’t talk long about the dead William James who fell at Majuba Hill.
Tonight they talked about what was going to happen to William James’s old home. What was happening in Fernscourt.
They were not alone, this little group, in their speculations. If they could have seen into every house down Bridge Street and along River Road they would have come across conversations on the same theme.
Over in Foley’s bar at the top of the town old Matt Foley and his friends said that there was oil sighted there. Some fellow had pulled a pike from the Fern and his gills were full of oil. So the drilling would start any day now.
Next door to Foley’s, in her neat little house, Judy Byrne the physiotherapist sat with Marian Johnson whose family owned the Grange, a country house which took guests of a superior type and even arranged hunting for them. They were women of around the same age, one side or the other of forty, not married and not likely to find any husbands at this stage of their lives in this part of the country. Neither ever admitted that to the other.
They had heard that Fernscourt was going to be an agricultural college, which would be very good news indeed as it would mean lectures and all kinds of talent not seen in these parts before. While saying that the people would probably be quite unspeakable they were having a small sherry to celebrate.
Seamus Sheehan in the Garda barracks was taking a lot of abuse from his wife. Why had he heard nothing about Fernscourt? Everyone else in the place had some view on what was happening. There was no point in being married to the sergeant if he was the one man in the whole country who seemed to be too remote as to enquire what was going on in his own back yard.
Next to the barracks Jimbo Doyle lived with his mother. Jimbo’s mother had heard that the new place had been bought by an order of contemplative nuns. They would have a grille on the window and pull it back so that one nun, the Reverend Mother, would be able to address the outside world. When it was necessary, which would not be often.
Jimbo’s mother told him that they would need a reliable man around the place, and that he should get in quick before someone else did.
Jimbo, whose idea of opportunities in life did not include being a reliable handyman to an order of contemplative nuns, asked what his mother expected him to do. Write to the pope, or just the bishop saying he was the man? His mother said he should be glad that someone in the family was looking to the practical side of things instead of singing raucous songs and laughing loud laughs.
In Paddy Dunne’s pub all talk of emigration to Liverpool to the brother’s pub had stopped. This was now the hub of the universe. Paddy Dunne had it from one of the travelling salesmen who came in trying to get him to take biscuits. Biscuits in a pub! Anyway this man knew all about Fernscourt: it was an agricultural research place. Foreigners were going to come and test soil and plants and the place was going to be a boom town as a result of it. The smart man would expand now or expand a little and then sell when prices were going up. It provided hours of speculation.
Sheila Whelan sat in the comfortable sitting room behind the post office and listened to a concert on Radio Eireann. She loved all that Strauss music and it didn’t sweep her into a world of people waltzing in Vienna; instead it reminded her for some reason of the first time she had come to Mountfern with Joe Whelan. He had taken her to Coyne’s wood which was full of bluebells. Literally carpeted with them. They had picked armfuls of them and Joe had told her that he loved music and that he would take her to concerts. He told her lots of things. Sheila lay back in her chair, tired. She knew a bit more about Fernscourt than the others because the telegrams all came through her post office. But she didn’t know it all. She sighed and wondered what the changes would mean.
Across the road in the Whites’, the doctor was telling his wife all the theories he had heard. It was mainly nuns, he reported, but there was a considerable weight of opinion behind a college, and a strong vocal minority thought it was going to be a development of twelve luxury bungalows each with a quarter acre of garden and a river view.
‘What would be the best?’ Mrs White wondered.
‘It depends where you stand.’ Dr White was philosophical. ‘If Jacinta were going to join the Poor Clares or whatever, it would be nice to have her down the road; on the other hand if she were to land a millionaire let’s hope she might buy one of the new bungalows.’
‘It’s going to make everyone look out for themselves,’ said Mrs White suddenly, as if the thought had just hit her.
Close to Dr White’s house, in Conway’s, Miss Barry was having a small port for her stomach. She sat fearfully on a high stool. The Conways wished she would buy a bottle of port and take it home with her, she made everyone uneasy by looking around nervously and protesting that she had a cramp which meant that her body was crying out to be warmed.
Miss Barry had heard that there was definitely oil in the ground, that a research organisation was going to come and test it, but they were going to install an order of silent enclosed nuns there as a disguise to keep people away – three theories rolled comfortably into one. She found a ready and unexpected audience in Conway’s. They looked at her as if there might be some truth in it; they had all heard elements of this story and this explanation would at last tie it all together.
In the Classic Cinema twenty-three people sat and watched the romantic tale of The Glass Mountain unfold itself on the screen, while Declan Morrissey who ran the place sat in the projection room and read an article he had cut out of a Sunday newspaper. Are the days of the cinema numbered? He wondered should he get out now or wait and see if these daft rumours about half the civil service being transplanted from Dublin to the midlands were true. Wouldn’t it be a very stupid thing to sell the Classic just as the horde of possible cinema viewers were about to arrive?
In Meagher’s, the watch-menders and small jewellers, Teresa’s parents fought on bitterly. Mrs Meagher said it didn’t matter if the Prince of Wales had left and that Mrs Simpson was coming to live in Mountfern and give parties, life still wouldn’t be any way good for her. It had been a vale of tears since she had married Mr Meagher.
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 barney 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. Minimising 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 realised 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.<
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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 Slattery 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.