But on the plus side Grace would grow up with the children amongst whom her father intended her to live. She would be at his side, she would make friends of all kinds, which was essential if a family were to live in a small community. She would avoid the princess-in-the-castle role. Patrick had looked with dismay at the shabby building, and particularly what Sister Laura described with pride as the new extension: classrooms thrown together, without thought or design. The finish was shoddy, obviously a local builder doing it for half nothing and knowing that the nuns weren’t going to complain. The library where the small nun lingered so lovingly was a big barren room lined with jerry-built shelves. Soon to contain a couple of hundred books, most of them the lives of saints. But the nun was right, he could see all this. He knew that he would send his child to the convent. What Grace Mary O’Neill might lose on polish and a broader approach to education, she would surely gain in a sense of belonging. And that was what this journey was all about.
Sister Laura had pursed her lips over the thought of Mr O’Neill’s son being educated at Mountfern. Of course the brothers were the best in the world. But . . .
And of course one had to take into consideration that a boy, a young man would have to be prepared to make his way in the world. Especially a young man who would inherit a huge property. So, she didn’t actually say that he should forget the brothers, nor was there a mention of any inadequacies. But there was a veiled hint that only a madman might entrust the son and heir to Brother Keane and his colleagues in the big red-brick school behind the church. Mention was made of Jesuits, of Benedictines and of Holy Ghost Fathers. All known to Mr O’Neill, certainly, in the United States, she was sure, and all running exceptionally good boys’ boarding schools in Ireland, for the sons of gentlemen and people who were going to get on in life. After all, with a boy it was much more important. And with a boy there wouldn’t be the same sense of loss seeing the child go to boarding school.
For courtesy and diplomacy Patrick O’Neill called on Brother Keane too. He went with no sense of apology. Instead he asked the man for advice. He had to send his son as a boarder. He would be most grateful if Brother Keane could mark his card. Would he favour the Jesuits in County Kildare, the Benedictines in Limerick, the Holy Ghost or Vincentians in Dublin?
Brother Keane had never been so flattered in his life. He gave great care to his deliberations and between them the two men came up with the ideal school for Kerry O’Neill.
Patrick O’Neill felt that slowly things were placing themselves together.
He was back in Mountfern, the sale of the land was going through. He had been assured there would be no problems with the licences. The grants towards building a hotel would be even greater than he had thought. The
people were friendly from what he could judge; usual sprinkling of rogues and drunks but basically a solid place. The place his people had come from. He let his mind rest lightly on the images of his children. Grace with the beautiful curls and dimples, Grace almost twelve now, the prettiest girl in her year, the apple of his eye. And Kerry. Handsome distant Kerry. Fifteen and as tall as Patrick. No paddy features in Kerry, his face was chiselled and had classic good looks. Even as a small child.
What would his two striking children make of Mountfern? They had never really believed that he would change their lives so totally. Part of them thought it was a huge adventure, another – perhaps the greater – part would find it a wrench to leave their surroundings, their friends, the memory of the way things had always been when their mother was alive. Patrick squared his shoulders. There was to be no wallowing in the past. This had been his dream, to take his family back to the place they had come from.
This town would be their home now. It had its shortcomings. He was not so blinded with the yearning to return that he couldn’t see that. The untidiness of it irritated him. An Irish village, his Irish village shouldn’t have yards full of rusting, broken machinery, there should be bright paint on all the doors. There should be a fountain or something at the end of Bridge Street instead of just letting it peter out and wind away.
He had called into the local public houses, each one in turn. None of them would be any opposition to him, of course, but even more importantly he didn’t think his hotel would be a threat to any of them. Dunne’s looked as if it were about to do a moonlight flit, Conway’s had three
serious drinkers sitting on high stools behind its grocery. You’d need radar to find out that there was a bar there at all. And in Foley’s he had the distinct impression he had wandered into a private house. Matt Foley had eyed him beadily but the chat died down while he was there. No, there was only that place with the nice old sign, Ryan’s, which was right opposite his new estate. He would need to handle them with tact. If anyone was going to lose by his plans for Fernscourt it would be this little place. While still incognito he had enquired about the family. He heard that the mother went out to work, a rare thing in Irish country towns, and that the business was steady. The rest of the brothers and sisters who had owned the place had all emigrated, so John Ryan had only his own family to support out of it.
Patrick had looked at it often when he had been visiting the site. He had even looked at it by moonlight last night when he was walking around his land. It had been very still with everyone asleep, and nobody knowing that he watched it from across the river.
He walked from the brothers past the church and along in front of the bridge, and looked up Bridge Street. It could be a fine town. He would make so many changes here, give people a bit of pride in their surroundings again. He would walk to Fernscourt now. This was not New York, home of the automobile, this was his place, to walk around, to stop and talk, or just to watch the river if he wanted to. Past Jack Coyne’s, past a shabby little store with the name Quinn in faded lettering, then across a rickety footbridge. He would walk his land before going to introduce himself to the Ryans in that attractive little shebeen.
He heard the sound of children’s voices as he walked through the laurel bushes on the path from the footbridge to the house.
Then he saw them.
A boy and girl obviously twins, dark-eyed, dark-haired and moving in exactly the same way, gestures and smiles utterly identical.
Patrick looked at them fondly.
‘Hey, is it moving day?’ he asked good-naturedly.
They hadn’t seen him arrive. They looked at him, startled. There was no doubt in their eyes. They knew who he was, the man who had come to take away their place for playing in.
He knew he would have to walk warily. His smile was broad but it got nothing in response.
‘You’re packing up. Is that right?’
The dark-eyed twins talked to him alternately, one beginning a sentence and the other finishing it, as if they had always done this.
‘People always come here . . .’ the girl said defensively.
‘Always as far as anyone can remember,’ supported the boy.
‘So it’s not as if it was trespassing . . .’
‘Or being on private property . . .’
Patrick gave a big infectious laugh.
‘But I know that, I
know
. I saw your home last night, it was mighty impressive. I came up to see the place by moonlight. Have you lot ever been here in the moonlight?’ They shook their heads.
‘It’s very strange. It has a life of its own, all the shadows seem to mean something. You’d really like it.’ He spoke as if he were their own age, suggesting they do something as
out of their world as going off on midnight treks across the river. Mammy and Daddy would kill them.
‘Come some evening with me, I’ll square it with your folks, and I’ll go off for a walk by myself and leave you in your . . . in your house?’ He sought for the right word to describe the dismantled room.
‘It’s not going to be knocked down, is it?’
He answered the girl indirectly. ‘Changed a bit,’ he said. ‘You know, roofs and good firm walls.’
‘You mean it
is
to be knocked down.’
He decided not to talk baby talk to the girl with the big dark eyes under her bangs of black hair.
‘That’s it, knocked down to be rebuilt. They tell me a lot of these old walls are dangerous, you could tip them over with your little finger. Not the things to build on, unfortunately.’
She nodded silently. The boy nodded too. It was as though they had both accepted what he said in exactly the same way and were thinking about it.
‘Still, it won’t be for a while. No need to move all your things.’ He indicated with his head their box of possessions.
‘If it’s coming down anyway . . .’ Michael began.
‘There’s really not any point . . .’ Dara took up.
‘In leaving things here . . .’
‘That’ll have to come out anyway.’
‘Sure, everyone’s got to do what they’ve got to do. All I’m saying is that there’s no great rush. It will be weeks before anyone gets as far as this room. What do you call it, by the way?’ He smiled at them, looking from one to the other. They were not to be won over.
‘What do you call what?’ the girl asked.
‘This . . . this room . . . do you have a special name for it or anything?’
‘No. No special name,’ she said.
‘It used to be the morning room,’ the boy said. The first offer.
‘Not by us. We didn’t call it the morning room. Or any name.’ The dark girl was giving nothing away.
‘I guess it was the morning room because it got the morning sun. It faces east, south-east. That’s right, would you say?’
But the boy felt he had been too friendly, and his sister was suggesting they leave.
‘We’ve really got to go now.’
‘Come back again, any time; you’re welcome here always,’ he said. Somehow he knew it was the wrong thing to have said.
‘Well, like you always were. When a place is special you don’t need anyone to welcome you to it. That’s right, isn’t it?’
They nodded at him, shoulders slightly less tense, their stance not so hostile.
‘So we have to be off,’ the boy said, picking up one side of the box that contained their life in this room.
‘So goodbye,’ said the girl, picking up the other side. They walked away from him, two little figures probably the same age as his Grace. Reasonably well cared for, grubby knees and dirty hands from playing . . . or indeed packing all their house things – they must have been covered in clay and dust. He watched them through the open walls of the house. They headed not for the town and the big bridge across into Bridge Street itself, but they went the other way towards River Road. Going to cross that
little footbridge . . . maybe they belonged to that crook Jack Coyne?
Patrick was glad he hadn’t asked them if they were twins. It was obvious they were and yet people always had a habit of asking the obvious. He found it very irritating even when it was well meant, like when people said to him, ‘You’re an American!’ with an air of discovery. They were fine kids, a little prickly, especially the girl. He’d catch up with them again, give them some job maybe, make them a few pounds. Or maybe they might resent that. He’d see. And when Grace came over, she’d charm them to bits anyway.
Now to see the Ryans in the poky little pub and then back to the dark room with the heavy mahogany furniture which had been in the Johnson family for generations, and the picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour which had helped them through some of the bad times. And a long, long sleep.
Kate had come back early. Fergus was right. She couldn’t really concentrate and John would have to be told before anyone else came with the news.
The angelus was ringing as she walked down River Road. She looked across the banks and tried to imagine what it would be like with a huge hotel, a car park, with signs for a pub, with music maybe . . . Americans did things in style. She called into Loretto Quinn’s little shop for a bag of sugar and a dozen candles. She always tried to give Loretto the turn; the small white face behind the counter moved Kate to pity. Loretto and Barney Quinn had saved and saved for a business, any business. They had done any work to get the deposit on the tumbledown place. They could be seen night and day working to make it right. They knew they were no competition to the shops
on Bridge Street, so Barney Quinn had bought a van in which to do deliveries.
A week after the van was delivered, Barney threw it into reverse and went into the river. It happened so quickly that Loretto never even knew. She was still out in the back filling bags of potatoes when the alarm was raised and she realised half the town was outside her front door with ropes and pulleys trying to get her husband, dead now in his van, out of the River Fern. There had never been any colour or much life in her face after that. The child she had been expecting was stillborn, and she kept the shabby little shop as a memory of her young husband and in honour of the way things might have been.
Jack Coyne had been helpful about the unpaid-for van and the insurance and everything. People had been kind at the time. Not everyone continued to be helpful like Mrs Ryan. Loretto knew it would be very easy for her to get things cheaper in Bridge Street where she went to work, or to get them delivered, but nearly every day she called in for something. Today she was early.
‘You’re not taken sick coming home early?’ she asked, concerned.
‘Ah, not at all, Loretto, nothing would make me feel badly, thank God. No, it’s light there this morning and I thought I’d come on back to John to give him a hand. Not that there’s likely to be any custom much for another hour.’
‘Will the place across make any difference to you? Jack Coyne was in earlier. He wondered would it take any of your custom. I said it would be a different class of person entirely . . .’
‘Thanks, Loretto.’ Kate should have left earlier. John
Ryan must know by now that his livelihood was threatened and that the days of Ryan’s, Whiskey Bonder were numbered.
John was sitting on a high stool reading the paper. He put down the newspaper automatically as the door opened.