‘You have a very strange way of going on, Master Fergus. It’s not every woman that could stay in this house and put up with it.’
‘Haven’t we always said you are a woman in a million, a woman different to all others?’ Fergus said, and he was gone before she could put another question to him.
He took the car not because he had any idea where he was going, but at least in the car he wouldn’t have to answer half a dozen questions about where he was going in the middle of the afternoon. He waved and nodded as
he drove up Bridge Street to the main road. He saw the signpost to Dublin and parked for a while. Suppose he was in Dublin, he wouldn’t be even slightly affected by a licensing application. He would do it; there was no chance that he would know the people it would hurt, there was no way in Dublin that he might already feel slighted by this applicant. Without meeting Patrick O’Neill, Fergus was somehow prejudiced against him. He had heard about the way he had bought the fishing rights and it was perfectly legal, the way he had organised the searches on the land, and dealt with the Land Commission, was all above board. If in the future he was seen to have had drinks with this politician and with that local councillor nobody was going to cast an aspersion. This was how things were done. The planning permissions and the licence would go through and he would build his monstrosity. After a few years it might be a white elephant and it could be written off as a tax loss. Patrick O’Neill was of the breed who would start again. Somewhere else, different scheme.
Fergus was old-fashioned, he wanted things to remain the same. The same kind of quiet practice, the same kind of food. He didn’t like moving on, cutting losses. He didn’t at all like the notion of a stage-Irish bar across the Fern, and taking all the trade from Kate Ryan. It took a lot to upset that woman, and today she had left early, saying truthfully that she couldn’t concentrate. Perhaps he would call in and see had they any news. A half of Guinness would go down very well on a warm summer afternoon.
He decided to leave the car parked where it was near the main road to the big town in one direction and Dublin in the other. He could walk down that lane which came out
through Jack Coyne’s wood, right on to River Road, not far from Ryan’s. He whistled as he walked. Partly from the sheer freedom of being out among the trees, and partly because he wanted to cheer himself up over this Yank business. The rhododendrons were out in a great purple show, and darker red ones too. In other countries, Fergus thought, this place would be a public park with manicured grass and seats and litter bins. As he was debating to himself whether this would be good or bad he came across four frightened dark eyes.
Kate Ryan’s twins Dara and Michael who were quite obviously meant to be at school, and had no business, any more than himself, wandering the woods on a working afternoon.
‘You see, Mr Slattery . . .’
‘We didn’t exactly say at home . . .’
‘Just we weren’t going back to school . . .’
‘If you see what I mean . . .’
Fergus pretended neither to hear nor see them. He began to talk to himself.
‘Ho hum, what a lovely thing it is to walk in a wood, and see nobody at all. That’s what I like best: a walk where you don’t see another human being. That’s the kind of thing that does me good when I’m on my way to Ryan’s Bar to have a drink. A walk where I don’t meet another sinner.’
He began whistling.
Dara and Michael looked at each other in amazement.
‘Grown-ups are extraordinary,’ said Michael.
‘They seem to be improving all the time.’
That was twice in one day they had been rescued. Dara wondered if it would be possible to leave school entirely.
There seemed to be a great conspiracy working for them at the moment.
Patrick O’Neill declined the invitation of Marian Johnson to dine with her that night. He pleaded great fatigue, and said he would be no company. A glass of milk and a sandwich and bed in the elegant room were what he wanted. He noticed the disappointment on Marian’s face and the fact that she had had her hair fixed since they had been out riding; maybe she had gone to a beauty parlour specially.
‘You look very nice,’ he said tiredly.
Marian’s face lit up. That was compliment enough.
He said that if she were free he would love another ride on that nice mild-mannered horse tomorrow. That brought on further smiles. He could go to bed now without being thought boorish.
He wished there were phones in the bedrooms. He wanted to call Grace back home. It would be great to dial direct and hear the reassurance of Bella and Andy that Grace was at home. It was eight-thirty here in Mountfern: it would be three-thirty in New Jersey, just the time that Andy was driving Grace up the avenue. Patrick’s sister, a fussy woman called Philomena, was in residence as chaperone. Kerry was away at school. Rachel was in her apartment. He really should call her. But not from the hall of the Grange. Not with Marian Johnson listening to every word. There were obviously some calls which were going to be made through that pleasant woman who ran the post office, who had made tea for him this morning. Was it only
this
morning? Lord, why had he stayed up all night in Fernscourt? His bones ached with tiredness.
He took a hot bath and felt much better. Better still after the milk and sandwiches. He lay on his bed and looked out at the green fields leading off to clumps of trees. Behind those trees was the winding River Fern, and his own place. It had been some day. Still he had done almost everything he set out to do. The lawyer chap hadn’t been in, which was rather lackadaisical. Even in a sleepy hollow like this, someone should have been looking after the shop. And Kate Ryan hadn’t been convinced. She was the only real opposition – not that she had said it, of course. That made her smart. A handsome woman too, probably the brains of that business. The dreamy pleasant husband was not a man with much drive. Bright smart children too. Lucky he had been able to get them on his side by shielding them. Little rascals, skipping school.
Canon Moran had been so helpful about looking up records, and the young curate had promised to enquire about burial grounds and possible tombstones. Strangely, that old wino bag lady he had picked up in the car was their housekeeper. She looked extremely ropey today, as if she had just had another night on the tiles.
And the Dalys had been magnificent, and the Leonards, and Jack Coyne – knowing now too late that he had blown it by overcharging Patrick for the car – said that he hoped they would be able to talk man to man about business one day. Patrick had smiled and said of course, but he and Jack Coyne knew that not one cent’s worth of business was ever going to cross the River Fern from Fernscourt to Coyne’s Garage. He talked to Sergeant Sheehan casually, to Dr White who happened to be in Daly’s, to assorted others whose names would come back to him when he was less tired. He had an excellent memory and never had to write
down the names of the people he met through work. To some people today might seem like a leisure day, wandering round talking to folk. But to Patrick O’Neill it was work. His life’s work. And really and truly it had gone very well today. It wouldn’t take long to convince that fine tall Kate Ryan that he didn’t mean her and hers any harm. It was true he did not. And it was always a bit easier convincing people if the thing was actually true.
Rachel Fine applied her throat cream exactly as the label had advised with short upward strokes. She then applied her eye cream in the recommended manner with a feather-light fingertip so as not to damage the delicate tissue around the eye. She sat in her cotton nightdress looking without pleasure at the reflection that stared from the mirror. She looked like any sad Jewish mamma left on her own this night. There must be a thousand of them in this area alone. But she hadn’t even the satisfaction of being a mamma. And her husband Herbert had been in California for eight years. She and he had ended their relationship long before hers with Patrick had begun. Herbert had given her the apartment and a car. The divorce had been genuinely amicable. They sent each other postcards even; they remained casual friends, bewildered that they had ever thought they knew each other well enough to marry and to remain married for so long.
But however lonely, Rachel would not ring Herbert for company. And she had very few friends left. When you devote your life to a man, his business and his limited free time as Rachel had done, it didn’t leave much time for friends. She still had work to do for O’Neill Enterprises even while he was in Ireland, but she did it in a mechanical
way. When there was no Patrick to discuss her ideas with the fire went out of them.
Sure, she was a designer. Sure, sure, everyone realised that she was worth her salary, her ideas had been praised in the newspapers and magazines, and her style had lifted the O’Neill chain way out of the commonplace. Rachel had never wanted to see her own name over the smart corner-bistro-type restaurants, it was quite satisfying enough to know that her choosing of colours and fabrics, her layout and her selection of decor, waitresses’ uniforms and lighting techniques contributed to the O’Neill empire. When Patrick had eight pub-restaurants and the motel in New Jersey he said he had enough. He bought no more until this huge bottomless pit that was Fernscourt, bleeding away his profits in a way that nobody would believe.
Gerry Power, Patrick’s second in command, knew this. He was tight-lipped and disapproving, but not even to Rachel, whose position he knew very well, would he hint that he took anything less than delight in all of Patrick’s schemes.
Rachel looked again at the telephone. It was 10 p.m. here. It was three o’clock tomorrow morning in that god-forsaken place. Perhaps he would call tomorrow. Perhaps he might even call at his lunchtime, which would be getting-up time here. Yes, surely that’s what he would do.
Rachel laid a towel over her pillowcase. The only advantage of not having your man living with you all the time was that you could do your beauty routines adequately. On the nights when Patrick stayed, there was a satin nightgown, not a cheap cotton one, there was no throat cream or eye cream. There were certainly no exercises.
But what was Patrick’s great phrase? ‘It’s always either a feast or a famine.’ Rachel Fine sighed deeply. It had been a famine for her for a very long time, and the worst bit was that she could see long lean years of famine still ahead.
Mrs Whelan understood without being told and without the need for comment that Patrick would need to make calls in privacy. She settled him next day in her own sitting room, two closed doors away from anyone who might be standing in the post office with their ears flapping.
She gave him a table for his papers and said she would add up the charges each time and he could pay at the end. Another cup of strong tea, a cushion to cure his saddle sores.
‘You’re a wonderful woman. Did the late Mr Whelan appreciate you?’
‘He’s not late, he just went off,’ she said simply.
Patrick knew how hard it was for a woman in a small community to admit something like this. She would say it to him once because her common sense would tell her that he would hear it elsewhere, then it would never be mentioned again. He too would acknowledge it once and then forget it.
‘A foolish man. Did he find the happiness he thought he was going to find? Most people who run away don’t.’
She thought about it.
‘At first he did, I’d say. But times aren’t great now, I hear. When I do hear, which isn’t often.’ That meant the subject was closed. ‘I’d better leave you and start to get through to the operator for you.’
Patrick hadn’t been thinking of phoning Kerry in his big school. But why not? They would certainly get him to the
phone. As he settled himself into the chair and cushions provided by Sheila Whelan, Patrick realised that in ways she was a little like Rachel. She knew how to make a man feel welcome and comfortable and important. How strange that Rachel was sitting alone in Brooklyn just as Sheila lived alone in Mountfern. Did it prove that it was a bad thing to make a man comfortable?
Patrick had never been able to understand people who could use the telephone for long chatty conversations. For too many years now he had used it for work to be able to think of it as a way of talking unselfconsciously. Grace could talk for hours on the telephone to friends whom she had just left at school. People told Patrick that it was the same with their daughters, and indeed their wives.
He put the first call through to Gerry Power. At least Gerry felt the same way about telephones. A necessary but unappealing part of business life. He wouldn’t complain that Patrick was not being sufficiently warm or forthcoming over three thousand miles on a piece of machinery.
Gerry Power wasted no time congratulating him or expressing any surprise. If Mr O’Neill had said he was going to go and throw away his fortune on this heap of old stones, then this is what he was going to do. He listened to instructions, and nodded and grunted. At the end of the catalogue he read them back. Patrick smiled; he could almost see Gerry Power in his shirt sleeves, writing with a stubby pencil.
‘And that’s three air tickets you want. Three not four?’
‘You’re very numerate Gerry, three. One each for Kerry, Grace and me.’
‘Just checking.’ Gerry Power was in no way put out. He hated grey areas and wanted to make sure that his boss
hadn’t expected him to book a seat for Mrs Fine, without asking him directly to do so.
Grace was always excited to hear from him. When was he arriving? Good, good. And how long was he staying home? Only a few days, but that was awful! He had been gone so long. He was
what
? Was this true? He was really and truly going to take Kerry and Grace with him to Ireland? And she could go to school there? Grace’s voice disappeared into squeaks of excitement.
Patrick spoke to his sister Philomena. She shared neither Grace’s excitement nor Patrick’s enthusiasm. She listened to the facts in a disapproving silence. Yes she would have clothes organised; and she would explain to the nuns here that Grace would not return in the fall.