‘You know they say they come in threes,’ said Kate absently, as she began to read a letter which had been delivered by hand. It was a request from Patrick O’Neill that Slattery and Slattery should act for him in his application to build a hotel and apply for a pub licence as well. He thought that since he was going to live in the area he would very much like the local man to act on his behalf.
‘God Almighty, he’s going to build a hotel,’ Kate said, standing up.
Fergus had come to read the letter over her shoulder. ‘I won’t act for him – he can find his own attorney and counsellors and whatever they call them over there,’ he said after a long silence.
She looked at him blankly. ‘Why won’t you act for him?’
‘Because if his application is granted and he gets his licence, then he’ll open a pub . . .’
‘You have to take his business . . .’ Kate was pale.
‘I do not have to take his business, thank you. I can accept or refuse any work I like. I am not going to accept anything which is going to take the bread and butter out of your mouth.’ He looked angry and upset as he stood beside her and she found herself weeping on his shoulder. ‘Do you want to go home, and tell John?’
‘No, not yet.’ Kate shook her head and sat down purposefully at her desk. ‘Not for a while. If our bread and butter’s going to disappear in the pub I’d better make sure I don’t lose the job in the office as well.’ She gave a smile to show that the emotional bit was over.
‘You’d never lose a job here,’ Fergus said gently. ‘I just wish it paid better. Maybe you should tell John now, before someone else does.’
‘Nobody else will. It’s silly but last night he was saying, when we were sitting out in the side garden bit . . . he was saying that nothing bad was ever going to happen to us. Maybe this isn’t very bad. I want to have a think before I tell him. That’s all.’ There were no words to say. It was about as bad as it could be. Fergus didn’t say anything. He took off his glasses and polished them. He saw Kate looking at him gratefully.
‘All right. All right, I know I have a weak face without them, I’m putting them back on. Let’s open more mail, shall we? Who knows what other little surprises may be lurking in these nice brown envelopes?’
Patrick O’Neill drove to the Grange, some three miles from Mountfern. It was a big, gracious house that had always been in the Johnson family. It had known good days and bad, and just now was going through a fairly prosperous phase. Marian Johnson had discovered that there was a business in offering riding holidays. City people and English visitors like to come and stay in the vaguely country house atmosphere. The Johnsons always left a decanter of sherry out instead of charging people by the glass, it gave them a feeling that they were guests on a country weekend. Last summer Marian had quite a few Americans, who usually came in groups. This big, handsome O’Neill man was different.
He said he would like to ride, but since he had not sat on a horse’s back for years he wondered if it was foolish to begin again at the age of forty-eight.
Marian Johnson aged thirty-nine looked into his blue eyes with the crinkly laugh lines coming away from them at the sides. No, she thought that was the perfect age to start again. She would take him riding herself.
Marian was fair-haired, but no one would ever have called her a blonde; her hair was wispy and flyaway, and no style ever seemed to tame it. She had a big soft bosom and often wore twinsets, mauves or pale green light jumpers with a matching cardigan. She looked her best when her hair was tidied into a net and under a bowler hat, and her soft drooping bosom gathered into the mannish coat of the hunt. The Johnsons were people who considered themselves of importance in the neighbourhood; normally Marian would never have shown the slightest interest in any American visitor. A man passing through, a man with no family, no background or stake in the area. Marian would have little time to waste. Yet there was something about Patrick O’Neill that attracted her.
‘Does your wife like the idea of riding?’ Marian asked.
‘My wife passed away this year,’ Patrick said.
‘Oh, I am most awfully sorry.’
‘She had been in poor health for a long time,’ murmured Patrick.
Marian said no more; she arranged for the horses and assured Patrick that there would be no broken bones.
Companionably they walked the horses over to a stile where she advised Patrick to mount his animal.
‘Go on,’ she laughed. ‘It’s more dignified than all this getting a leg up by putting your foot in someone’s hand. It’s like stepping on.’
‘It’s too easy,’ Patrick complained. ‘I don’t mind the undignified way.’
Astride their horses, they rode down the quiet lane with the fuchsia-filled hedges. Marian pointed out landmarks, towers on small hills and when they came to the corner she said, ‘And that’s Fernscourt . . . they say it’s going to be . . .’
‘I bought it. It’s mine,’ he said quickly.
‘Of
course
, they said you’d be here soon. How stupid of me not to recognise it must have been you, I thought you were another tourist. Well, well, what a beautiful place you’ve got for yourself, Mr O’Neill, and will you be making a home of it, or what?’
‘I’m going to be the opposition, Miss Johnson,’ he said simply. ‘I’m going to build a hotel. I don’t know whether we will be exactly in competition or not; I feel sure that we will be going for different markets. But what I was hoping was that we might be able to cooperate . . . If you wanted to expand your riding school say, and incorporate some of the guests from Fernscourt . . . ?’ He looked at her openly and eagerly.
It was very honest of him to come right out and say it straight, she thought. Another man might have sniffed around her hotel to steal a few ideas before declaring his hand.
‘Do you know anything about the hotel business?’ she asked.
‘I have one small motel in New Jersey. I bought it really for tax purposes, so I’m not what you’d call experienced. But I have bars and restaurants, so I guess you could say I know something about what the public wants. Only the New York public mind you, but New York is pretty cosmopolitan, and it might be a good sample of what all kinds of people want.’ He wasn’t only after the American
package-tour business, he explained, he wanted local people to feel involved. It was to be their place too. Too long the walls of Fernscourt had kept them out. For nearly a hundred and fifty years the real Irish people of the parish had been refused access to places that rightly belonged to them. That wouldn’t be the way any more.
‘I don’t think people were refused access,’ Marian said. ‘It’s been a ruin for years. It belonged to the Land Commission, didn’t it? We used to go there on picnics when I was a girl.’
‘No, I mean before that, when the Ferns were there, barring everyone from their door.’
Marian was cheerfully vague about that side of things. ‘Did they? How stupid of them. They were gone long before my time, of course, but I think my father remembers them. He used to play bridge with someone called Fern. But it mightn’t have been them, the people from the house. It could have been a cousin or something.’
Patrick was slightly irritated by this affectionate view. He thought that perhaps Marian had been overprotected and didn’t really know the story of the big house. After all, the Johnsons were Catholics, Patrick had seen the Infant of Prague in the hall and there was a picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in the bedroom where he had laid his case. Suddenly the tiredness of last night began to reach him. His eyes felt heavy.
‘Do you think it’s a possibility . . . our getting together over some aspects of the tourist trade?’ he asked Marian.
‘I see unlimited possibilities,’ said Marian, running her tongue lightly across her lower lip and thinking that life was looking up.
Now that he was here they all claimed to have been the first to meet him and the one who knew him best. Those who had been telling stories only hours ago about the certainty of the nuns or the agricultural research institute were now eager to tell how they had known all along that it was going to be a hotel. The possibilities of a big tourist undertaking were legion. Patrick O’Neill was said to have told people that this was going to be his home, and his home would be open three hundred and sixty-five days a year, no closing down in the winter leaving the boys and girls to find some other jobs for the long harsh wet months from September to Easter.
Judy Byrne was peeved to note that he had been spotted riding horses with Marian Johnson in the morning light. That was fast moving of a spectacular nature. Kate Ryan had heard that he was seen in Conway’s and Dunne’s, and she was sure he must have been in Foley’s too. Rita Walsh, who ran the Rosemarie hair salon, had seen what she thought must have been him in the moonlight over at the ruin. Hard to see at that distance but he had looked a fine cut of a man.
Tommy Leonard’s mother said that Tommy was under
no circumstances to be seen running wild with that gang of young criminals he called his friends. This was a chance sent from heaven for him to better himself. Maybe his whole future could be assured if he were seen by the new owner of Fernscourt to be a sensible boy. Tommy wondered how could it sort out his future if he turned his back on his friends? But Mrs Leonard said there were a million ways if Tommy would put his mind to it. That hotel was going to need a shop on the very premises to sell things to its visitors who mightn’t want to walk the whole way to Mountfern. What more sensible than to offer the concession to the local existing stationers and booksellers? Tommy must be ready to seize the chance.
‘But I’m only twelve,’ Tommy wailed. ‘How could I seize a shop in a hotel?’ He saw his whole youth and adolescence trickling away standing behind counters of one sort or another.
‘By the time that hotel is up and ready to have a shop you’ll be well old enough to work in it,’ his mother said firmly.
Maggie Daly’s mother couldn’t understand how it was that they hadn’t seen him. He was meant to have been in Sheila Whelan’s, and in all three pubs on Bridge Street; he had been seen standing looking at the Stations of the Cross in the church, but Canon Moran hadn’t focused on him properly and didn’t want to interrupt a man at prayer, so he was no use as an informant.
Then he had been observed driving up past Coyne’s wood. Could he have been going to the convent maybe? The whole thing might still have something to do with an order of enclosed nuns. The only people who knew for
sure were Sheila Whelan, because he had been in the post office for an age, but of course it was hopeless trying to get anything out of Sheila. And Marian Johnson, she didn’t talk to everyone easily in Mountfern, so there would be no news from that quarter.
Jack Coyne was very anxious for a description of the American who had bought Fernscourt and was going to turn it into a hotel. Very anxious indeed. Yesterday he had got a call from the railway station in the big town: an American wanting to hire a car. Jack had driven in to him.
‘Why did a well-heeled person like yourself not hire a car from Avis or Hertz?’ Jack enquired.
‘Always believe in supporting the local industry,’ the Yank had said.
‘Here for the fishing?’
‘Yup,’ the man said.
Jack Coyne had too much on his mind to make conversation with a taciturn foreign visitor whom he would never see again. He charged the American two and a half times the normal price and gave him a poor rate for his dollar. Jack was ashen-faced trying to get a proper account of the Patrick O’Neill who had bought Fernscourt. He had an uneasy feeling that he might have cheated the man who was going to live across the river from him. The man who could have brought him the kind of wealth he never dreamed of.
Miss Barry was quite unaware that she had met Mr O’Neill. She had been struggling under the weight of two heavy shopping bags when a man stopped to give her a lift. She had climbed clumsily into the car, opening the window with that native cunning she had when she smelled of drink. Fresh air was an ally, closed spaces were a giveaway. She
told this man about the saintly Canon Moran, the angelic young Father Hogan and even sang a few bars of a song.
‘Tell me, does your poor wife take a drink?’ she asked him suddenly. She got the reply that the late Mrs O’Neill had not in fact been partial to liquor.
‘Best way to be,’ Miss Barry said approvingly. ‘She’ll live to be a hundred, God spare her.’
She rattled her plastic bags which contained bottles and smiled at him beatifically.
But none of this remained in any part of her consciousness.
Patrick had indeed gone to the convent when he had been sighted driving towards Coyne’s wood. He left the car at Coyne’s garage and walked up the shabby ill-kept avenue to the school. Sister Laura greeted him, a small shrew-like woman, eyes dark and bright in her round face, like two currants in a bun. She saw within minutes why he was there. He was trying to work out whether this country school would in any way approach his hopes and plans for his only daughter’s education.
Sister Laura was a sensible woman. She knew that it would be counterproductive to encourage this American to believe that hers was the finest educational establishment in Ireland. She spoke praisingly of the Sacred Heart Convent, the Loretto nuns, the Holy Child Order, the FCJ (Faithful Companions of Jesus), all of them excellent sisters running very highly thought of boarding schools for girls. But that was just the point. They would be boarding schools. And if Mr O’Neill wanted his child with him, then this was the only game in town.
She didn’t put it as racily as that, but Patrick realised that if she had known the phrase she would have.
She listed the disadvantages. Grace would be much more sophisticated than the simple girls who came from smallholdings over the fields to this school each day. Grace would have to learn Irish: it was compulsory in schools, and they wouldn’t have any facility for her to study something else at the time Irish-language lessons were taking place. It would be fairly rough and ready; sports would not be as she had known them in the United States, the girls played camogie, a form of hockey. Sister Laura said it was the female equivalent of hurling for boys.