‘Their wives?’ said Rachel.
‘They can get their hair fixed, their nails done.’
‘Not every day they can’t.’
‘What do you think, then?’
‘Some activities, maybe cooking classes even. How to make traditional Irish fare.’
‘Not a bad idea,’ Patrick said. ‘Who would we get to do it?’
‘Let’s think nearer the time. There could even be people around here?’
‘Hey,’ said Patrick suddenly. ‘Kate Ryan’s made a good job of teaching Grace, and Grace says she’s very funny and has long stories about the ingredients and everything. Do you think she could do it?’
‘I don’t know where you get your ideas, Patrick,’ Rachel said in admiration.
Jim Costello, the young manager, had not yet met Kerry, son of the house. Jim had been away finding staff and interviewing applicants when Kerry had come home.
He had not been in Mountfern for the tragedy. He knew of the Dalys, of course, and remembered the little girl with the long hair and big eyes as a friend of Grace O’Neill’s. He called to the dairy to sympathise on his return.
He was surprised to see an older girl there. ‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ he said and offered his hand.
‘Mountfern is really looking up now that I’m off nursing in Dublin,’ Kitty Daly said, eyeing him up with unconcealed pleasure. ‘You and Kerry O’Neill. I must say it’s the place to be.’
‘I haven’t met him yet, I hear he’s a matinee idol,’ Jim said.
‘He’s all of that. He’s like something from another world,’ Kitty said.
‘Ah well, no chance for the rest of us then.’ Jim was courteous, admiring and yet distant. He had come to offer his sympathies, it would be crass to let it turn into flirting. And anyway Jim Costello was much too cautious a young man to become too involved with anyone in a small town. His career was of much greater importance than any dalliance with a local girl, even one as pretty as this tall willowy girl with the beautiful crinkly hair.
As he left he said again that he was so sorry about her sister.
‘It’s impossible to believe it happened,’ Kitty said bleakly. ‘This is the first time I’ve been home since, and three times I’ve gone upstairs to call her. I keep expecting all those friends of hers to come traipsing in looking for her.’
‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘No, it’s nice to talk a bit. My dad won’t talk about her at all and my mam has more conversations with her in heaven than she ever had when poor Maggie was on earth.’ She smiled gratefully as Jim Costello went out through the door.
‘Let’s write to Dara,’ Grace said.
‘You always say that when you want to wriggle out of my arms,’ Michael complained.
‘Not true. Anyway I’m much better about remembering your poor sister stuck with all those awful screaming children than you are.’
‘How can she be learning any French if she keeps writing to us and reading our letters?’ Michael grumbled, annoyed to be distracted from his long embraces with the lovely Grace.
But Grace was sitting up and had got out the writing pad. ‘Come on, Michael. Stop fooling around . . . I’ll start. What will I tell her?’
‘Don’t tell her about Declan Morrissey getting drunk and asking Mary Donnelly why she was never married. I want to tell her that.’
‘That’s not fair, that’s the best bit. I can remember nearly all the speech.’
‘No, I thought of it, you say something boring about clothes or something first.’
‘I don’t write about clothes. Hey, I’ll tell her Kerry’s coming back for a weekend.’
‘He’ll probably have told her that himself.’
‘I don’t imagine Kerry writes, he’s bad at letters.’
‘Well, to Dara he would surely?’ Michael thought that it would be very bad of Kerry to be so neglectful.
‘Yes, maybe.’ Grace was doubtful.
‘And I’ll write about Kitty Daly being back.’
‘I don’t know.’ Grace was still more doubtful.
‘Grace, for heaven’s sake, you’re the one who said let’s write, now you don’t want to say anything.’
Eddie Ryan went into Leonard’s. Tommy looked left and right. His father was busy talking to Mr Williams. Swiftly Tommy handed Eddie three aniseed balls from a jar.
‘Thanks,’ Eddie said briefly.
‘Don’t eat them here,’ Tommy hissed.
Tommy paid Eddie protection money of a sort. He fed him a small amount of sweets that would not be missed from giant jars in order to buy some peace and quiet from Eddie’s gang. Eddie swaggered in most days and the arrangement was sweets of Tommy’s choice, otherwise they all came in together and Tommy’s father got into a temper, ordered them out and told Tommy that the young Ryan boy was an out and out hooligan. Tommy didn’t want any guilt to attach to Dara by association.
He wished that she would write. All he had so far was a picture postcard of some château on the Loire with a list of complaints about the food, and the price of ice cream and the price of stamps.
‘Any news of Dara?’ he asked Eddie.
‘You ask me that every time,’ Eddie said.
‘And you usually have a smart answer rather than saying yes or no,’ Tommy snapped.
‘There was a letter this morning, Mam read bits of it at breakfast. What would be in the bits she doesn’t read, do you think?’
‘Maybe how great it is to escape from you, Eddie.’
‘If you’re going to be like everyone else then we will drop our deal?’ Eddie said with menace.
The thought of Eddie’s gang jostling and pushing and creating havoc in the newsagent’s shop made Tommy Leonard feel faint.
‘We’ll go on the way we are,’ he said.
‘I thought that’s what you’d like,’ Eddie Ryan said cheerfully.
Tommy watched him go out of the shop and head for the shop that used to be Meagher’s until Mr O’Neill had bought it. It was a sort of travel agency and tours office. Surely Eddie wasn’t going to terrorise them and be paid off in excursions by coach to the Ring of Kerry?
Tommy found the days very long, and on his half day he found the hours very long. Twice he had headed off up the street to look for Maggie to come and talk to him. He didn’t dare tell anyone that in case they thought he was going mad or that he hadn’t cared about her death.
Tommy woke a lot with his heart beating thinking of Maggie’s fall.
Jacinta and Liam had discovered that the cousin wasn’t too bad after all. Her name was Amanda, which was a bit rich for Mountfern, and she loved horses. She had been very disappointed that they didn’t ride, being in the country and everything. In desperation they asked their father if they could ask Miss Johnson to teach them.
Marian had two tame ponies she said, they were practically geriatric she admitted, nobody could come to any harm on them. She bit her lip when she had said that. The raw grief of the children in Mountfern was still in everyone’s minds.
‘Why don’t they have the ponies and play with them up in the paddock?’ she said to Dr White. ‘There’ll be no fees, no lessons, it will take their minds off things.’
‘You’re a decent woman, Marian,’ Martin White said, and meant it. He used to think that she was a bit uppity and gave herself airs, but he didn’t like her being publicly humiliated by O’Neill either. And it would stop his children from driving him into the asylum on the hill where he had sent so many patients over the years.
Grace saw the activity in the paddock behind the Grange. ‘Would it be in the way if we joined in?’ she asked.
Liam and Jacinta were delighted to see Grace again, at first they were ashamed of Amanda, but Amanda turned out to get on famously with Grace. Like everyone else.
When Marian saw that Patrick’s daughter was interested she brought further and better horses, and a regular little riding school began.
‘Come on, Michael. Get a hat, that’s
all. She insists we wear hard hats.’
‘Don’t be mad, where would I get something like that? It’s like asking me to get a top hat or a bowler.’
‘Please, Michael.’
‘No. I can borrow yours if I’m going to have a go, which I may not, I haven’t decided yet.’ Michael was very disappointed at the turn things were taking.
He had seen a summer ahead of them where he and Grace would sit and talk and fish and hold each other and kiss. He would wander with her, telling her the secrets of his heart as he was starting to do already. He would tell her his plans and hopes for when they were older, and how he would study hard – at accountancy perhaps, he had heard her father say that a man who was trained as an accountant was trained for everything. He would tell her how they would travel together. But Grace wanted to play childish games and walk round in circles sitting on an aged pony.
‘Grace, we don’t have all that much time together, why are you wasting it?’
‘It’s not wasting it, we’ll know how to ride horses,’ she said unanswerably. ‘Your way we just sit and talk and whatever.’
‘But remember, before, they sort of split us up, didn’t want us going off on our own. Do you remember, that’s why we all went to the bridge.’ He gave a shiver.
‘I remember.’ Grace patted his hand soothingly. ‘But then isn’t this all to the good? If they know we’re all together with Jacinta and Liam and Amanda, they’ll be pleased. They won’t start breaking things up.’ She looked at him with her big clear eyes as if it were the most obvious thing in the world and he was the only one not to see it.
‘Don’t you want to be with me?’ he asked nakedly.
‘Oh, Michael, of course I do, but we have all the time in the world to be together. Can’t you enjoy this? It’s new, it’s fun.’
Jim Costello took about five minutes to sum up Kerry O’Neill as trouble. And he spent a further five minutes working out how he was going to cope with him. This job at Fernscourt was the prize, it was up to him to make sure that nothing ruined it for him. If he made a success of Fernscourt then in five to seven years there wasn’t a bank in the country that wouldn’t advance him money for his own hotel. And in the meantime he would meet exactly the kind of tourists and have just the right way to entertain them as he could have dreamed. His last hotel had been a trifle stuffy, still concentrated on the business-lunch trade which was only a status thing. Jim Costello knew that you made nothing by serving unimaginative and underpriced set luncheons to the local solicitors and bank managers and insurance brokers, but in a small place that was what kept the image of a hotel high. Here in Fernscourt it was different.
He liked Patrick O’Neill and admired him. But the son. Jim Costello had been in the hotel business all his life. Since he could remember he had been in his father’s small hotel, then in the Shannon training school and in France and Switzerland; he was twenty-four and he knew how to spot trouble. The man at the bar who was going to be troublesome, the customer who might not pay his bill. The respectable woman who was using a hotel foyer as a pick-up place. One of Jim’s strengths was that he always saw it in time, just before the incident happened, and managed to head it off.
With Kerry he spotted it the very first time he met him. When he sauntered into the hotel with Tony McCann from Derry.
There was something about Tony McCann that seemed like a challenge. He greeted Jim as if he expected to be thrown out.
Kerry on the other hand was full of charm. ‘My father tells me there’s nothing you don’t know about the hotel business,’ he began.
‘Let’s hope he still says that when his hotel is open,’ Jim laughed back easily.
‘Bit of a backwater this for a hotshot like you,’ said Tony McCann.
‘I don’t think so, it’s a friendly place and we hope to be so busy that I won’t have much time for the bright lights myself.’
Tony McCann looked at Jim Costello without much pleasure. ‘One of these ambitious fellows, all work and up a ladder, I suppose.’
‘That’s me, the fellows at school used to hate me too – study, study, creep, teacher’s pet. Are you in the hotel business too, Mr McCann?’
‘No.’
‘You’re in what?’
‘This and that.’
Kerry stepped in smoothly. ‘Tony’s a friend of mine up in the far north, just brought him in to see the ancestral home rise again.’
‘Are you pleased with it?’ Jim spoke directly to Kerry.
He shrugged. ‘It’s my father’s dream, I guess he’s really got what he wanted. It’s looking good.’
‘But you’ll be coming back . . .’
‘Relax, Jim, there’s going to be no fatted calf killed for me, not for a long time. No, you’re safe here for a few years yet.’
Jim flushed with annoyance. He had to decide now how to handle Kerry. Did he remain poker-faced and remote, loyal entirely to his employer? This way he would build a wall of resentment between him and the boy, who was only a few years younger. Or did he make Kerry an ally of sorts? Wouldn’t that be easier? He decided to go the friendship way.
‘I’d say there’s plenty to keep us both occupied if you do come back. Your father has some very grand plans.’
‘Do you think they’ll work out?’
‘Not all of them by any means, but enough of them will and I’d say he’s a man who would learn by mistakes. Am I right?’
Kerry seemed amused to be consulted. ‘Yes, that’s true in most areas. He’s extraordinarily practical, but this one I’m not sure. He wants so much for it to succeed it could blind him.’
‘As I said, let’s hope it will and the problem won’t arise.’ Jim had decided how to play it: friendly but not servile, discreet but not what the Americans called tight-assed. He would always repeat pleasantly to Patrick any conversation he had with the son. With Kerry you’d need to cover your back.
He hoped McCann would clear off out of the place too. He was pleased to see Kerry’s car drive off to the big town with McCann and then come back without him. The fellow had obviously gone back north. What on earth had brought him down for such a flying visit? There was something watchful about him as if he hadn’t believed Kerry O’Neill came from this kind of set-up and had come down to check.
He reminded Jim of a very tough Guard he had once known who came on Saturdays for a steak and a few whiskies to thank him for being lenient about closing time during the week. That Guard had a swagger when he came in to collect. Tony McCann had the same kind of swagger, as if he had come to Mountfern to collect.
It wasn’t easy to find Kate alone. Patrick made three tries. Finally he hit a morning when Mary seemed occupied with deliveries in the yard, when John had driven to the town and the guard seemed to be relaxed.
Kate was sitting by her big French window, studying the typing manual from which she intended to teach Dara. He had tapped lightly on the door, and she hadn’t looked up when he came in.
‘I’d have thought you knew all about typing,’ he said.
Kate looked up surprised. ‘It’s you Patrick, sit down, won’t you? I didn’t know you were in the place at all.’
She smiled at him encouragingly but she got little response. He sighed deeply.
‘Did you come in to draw heavy breaths at me?’ Kate asked.
‘No. I’m just low, that’s all.’
‘What has you low?’ She was sympathetic but not totally sure that he was serious.
‘I am low, Kate. I feel everything’s gone wrong. So many terrible things have happened. That child, that poor child dead and buried.’
‘Ah sure, Patrick, that has us all low. There’s neither rhyme nor reason in it.’
‘It was never meant to be like this. Pointless tragedy, and confusion everywhere.’
Kate looked at him. It seemed out of character, this type of talk. She waited to hear what it was about.
‘You see, I got everything I wanted – the land, the permission to build – and God knows how
, I’ve actually built the thing.’
‘So what’s wrong?’
He went on with his catalogue of what was right first. ‘The children like the place. That’s not saying it as it is, they love it. This is a real bonus, I thought they would be pleading for brighter lights, but no. That’s largely due to your children, by the way.’
‘I know, my twins have formed a welcome-the-O’Neill-family movement, haven’t they?’ Kate was polite and almost hid her anxiety about just how warmly they were welcoming them.
‘No, don’t worry about that, Kate. Grace and Michael are a couple of kids still, and you got Dara well away out of Kerry’s clutches.’
So he had realised! She laughed guiltily.
But he had moved on. ‘I worry now all the time. About the way it all happened, it’s as if it weren’t the right thing to do somehow . . .’
‘Coming back?’
‘Yes, or coming back in this way. Nothing’s gone right since . . .’
‘That’s not like you – not the Patrick we know.’
‘Shit, Kate, can’t you quit acting like someone’s li’l old grandmother? Every time I look at you in that bloody chair, I think to myself that if I’d stayed where I was you’d be on your two feet. When I see all the signs being put up on the road, when I have to meet the people from the Tourist Board and talk about projections and overviews and market share, I wonder what the hell it’s all about. Why I’m not out on the freeway in New Jersey buying up a couple more neighbourhood bars. What am I doing changing every single thing I touch here, getting the priests and the parson to tidy up their graveyards? Christ, that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to be welcomed here, but nobody remembered anyone belonging to me . . .’
‘Oh, stop all this self-pity, for God’s sake,’ Kate interrupted. ‘You knew that on day one, nobody remembered the O’Neills from a hole in the ground, so stop saying it’s come as a surprise to you now. Four long years ago you knew that. You wanted a life here where you came from and you’ve got it. Stop bellyaching about changing things and being remembered . . .’ Her face was flushed with anger at him.