‘Why are you teaching the little fellows?’ Carrie asked, mystified.
‘Because there might be some hope for these as the young men of the next decade if we teach them to be normal and share in women’s work,’ Mary said.
Eddie was quite good at darning as it happened and said he regarded it as a puzzle where you had to fit all the
pieces in. He threatened to knock Declan’s head off his neck if he ever told anyone at the brothers’ that they were being taught darning at home.
Mary had no time for Michael. At first Michael was very pleased about this. He considered himself well off to be away from this bossy woman. But as the days went by and she had become part of their lives it was somewhat galling to be dismissed so summarily. He was never asked to clear or serve as he used to do, his role as a shoe polisher was laughed out of the way. Mary said she would prefer to be in charge of the shoes herself so that she would know for certain that they would be done. She didn’t like leaving things to a young man to do.
She said the words ‘young man’ as others might say ‘village drunk’ or ‘known criminal’. Sometimes Michael felt that there was no need for him in the home – everyone else had their little jobs to do, only he stood there useless and idle.
He offered to help Dara and Carrie clean some candlesticks. They seemed to be enjoying the Brasso, it got all over their hands and they were laughing companionably. But Mary Donnelly refused him. She was courteous but firm. Thank you, but she would really prefer the job to be done properly without any trick-acting or distraction.
Moodily Michael left the kitchen. Kicking a stone all round the back yard, he was spotted by his father.
‘Would you have a moment, son?’
Michael was pleased. His father had a great box of papers out on the table in the breakfast room. Since the accident he hadn’t opened any of the research he was meant to be doing on the book for Mr O’Neill.
‘Michael, I have to do something about this, even if it’s
only tidy it up and let Patrick give it to someone else to finish. He must have his book, that’s only fair.’
‘I suppose he’d wait a bit, with everything.’ Michael sounded very down.
‘Oh of course he’d wait, but that’s not the point. I must leave it in some kind of state that another writer – well, that a real writer – could see what I’ve done. Could you help me here for a minute?’
‘What am I to do?’
‘Suppose I were to fill this folder with what has already been written . . . not very much of it, I’m afraid. Then this one for under way, and that one we could call “still to look at”.’
Michael separated the three piles on the table and his father called out what category the pages and the scribbled notes were to go to. In spite of his low form Michael became interested.
‘Look at those drawings. Is
that
what it looked like?’
‘No, that was a much grander house. It’s in the style, though, so we could point out the feature that would have been the same.’
‘Is that what his hotel is going to look like?’
‘No, no, it’s going to have the middle bit the same. He’s building up the old house more or less like it would have been, then there’s going to be a wing back on each side from the main house, that’s where the bedrooms will be.’
‘I wish he hadn’t come here.’
‘Michael.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. It’s so hard, you see.’
‘Ah, don’t I know myself,’ John sighed. ‘Look, that’s an old engraving of what the river used to look like years and years ago.’ He was deliberately changing the subject,
trying to steer them both away from the fruitless wishing for the impossible. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary to think that’s the same river, that’s our Fern, all those years ago. Lord, George the Third was still the king of England then. Do you know anything about him?’
‘Was he the one who was always half cracked, in and out of mental homes most of the time?’ Michael asked.
‘I don’t think there was a question of mental homes, but he was certainly wandering in mind. Not that the Ferns of Fernscourt probably ever knew anything about that, they’d have been snug there in their grand house and no news of the royal goings-on would get to them for months and by that time it would all be changed . . .’
Michael wasn’t listening to him . . . he was looking at one of the line engravings that had come from an old journal.
His father followed his gaze. It was a drawing that showed a barge delivering goods to what looked like a flat landing place behind which there was the mouth of a cave.
It was just like their tunnel even though it was a picture of some other county entirely. Michael studied it intensely, turning it round and drinking in every detail. He raked through the text to see if there was any mention of it.
John Ryan broke in on his thoughts. ‘Oh, I see you’re getting interested in it now! That’s the whole problem I find, anyway. You start reading little bits and they make you interested and you read more little bits and you travel far from what you were meant to be writing in the first place. What’s that you’re looking at?’
His voice was deliberately casual – he had seen the boy find a prosaic explanation for the magic tunnel.
Michael’s face was red and white alternately.
‘Nothing. I mean it’s not anything.’
‘Oh, that’s one of those ways they had of getting deliveries up to the grand houses without offending the eyes of the quality. You know, like a tradesman’s entrance.’ John was light but not dismissive.
‘Oh, is that all they are?’ The disappointment was huge.
‘Well, that’s one use for them of course, those kind of tunnels, but like anything they could have a million other uses.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, like whatever was needed, I mean a tunnel’s a tunnel, isn’t it? It could be used for anything – smuggling, for lovers meeting, for secret societies, kidnappings, escapes . . . Come on, Michael, it doesn’t matter what it was built for, it’s what happens to it that’s important.’
The boy was greatly cheered. ‘Do you think there might be one across there?’ He nodded towards the river.
‘There might well be.’ John was mild. ‘Kind of thing that could be left unearthed for years and years. Even with all the big hotel coming.’
‘I don’t mind helping you whenever you need a bit of a hand,’ Michael offered. ‘I have a bit of time on my hands these days, Mary doesn’t think I can do anything.’
‘Ah, be tolerant of her, will you, she has a mad figario in her head about men, that’s all.’
‘But it’s very unfair. I’d do as much as anyone to make things a bit better, or keep things going . . .’ His lip trembled.
‘Listen to me, Michael, I’ll tell you a secret. Not for anyone else – is that all right?’
‘Dara?’
‘Yes, if you tell it properly, but not to be talked about
outside of you two. Poor Mary was all ready to get married, she had saved all her money and given up her job, she was making her wedding dress, even sewing things on it so as to look lovely on the day . . .’
‘Mary Donnelly married? Looking lovely on her wedding day, you must be joking,’ Michael interrupted.
‘No, shush or I won’t finish it.’
‘All right . . .’
‘So anyway this fellow was a rat, he didn’t love Mary Donnelly at all, he only loved her money, and she had given him everything she saved for to put a deposit on a house . . .’
‘And he ran off with it?’ Michael’s eyes were bright and he was rushing ahead in the story.
‘It’s easy known you’re so young you can see anything in it except black treachery. Think of it, every week – or every month I suppose, teachers get paid by the month – she put so much away for the great day, and this boyo took the lot . . .’ John Ryan’s kind face was misty at the thought of it.
‘Yeah, well it wasn’t fair.’
‘It was worse than just taking her money, you see, he took everything else, he took away any pride she had, and made a fool of her in front of everyone in her place . . . Like she’d always be remembering how she had talked of her plans, saying we’re doing this and we’re doing that, and all the time he had no plans for anything except to separate her from her bit of money.’
‘Maybe he didn’t always intend to steal her money, he could have loved her and then went off her,’ Michael said as if it were only too possible to go off Mary Donnelly.
‘I don’t know whether that would be better for her to believe or worse.’ John spoke thoughtfully.
‘Anyway she’s sure taking it out on the rest of us,’ Michael grumbled.
‘But big strong men like yourself and myself can cope with it surely?’
‘We’ve a lot to cope with these days.’
‘Indeed we have, son.’ The sigh was very deep.
‘Dad? I don’t ask you this in front of people, but . . .’
‘Ask away.’
‘Will Mam ever be able to walk again? Nobody ever says.’
‘That’s the problem, they don’t ever say. Not to me either.’
‘But what do you
think
, Dad?’
‘I think there’s a possibility that she may not. And that it’s going to be very hard for her, Michael. The hardest thing in the world.’
Fergus invited Mary Donnelly to the pictures.
‘Why?’ she asked him.
The real reason was because Fergus, hearing how good she was in the Ryan household, feared that Mary Donnelly might leave unless some little diversion was planned for her.
He could hardly say that.
‘Because I like you and would like to get to know you more,’ he said.
‘How would you get to know me at the pictures?’ she asked.
Fergus felt sorry he had started on this course.
‘Well it’s a way to go out, isn’t it? Perhaps you
would prefer just to go for a drive if you don’t like the cinema.’
‘I never said I didn’t like the cinema. I just wondered what way two people would get to know each other if they sat in silence watching a film.’
‘I suppose it would be a matter of talking about it afterwards,’ Fergus said desperately.
Mary thought about this.
‘Usually it’s a matter of taking liberties during the film, that’s what I’ve noticed,’ she said.
Fergus had never got such a shock in his life.
‘I assure you nothing would be further from my mind,’ he began, horrified. ‘I am a solicitor, a grown man.’
‘What a pompous thing to say, Mr Slattery, as if desire were confined only to the lower orders. It is there in men of every class and breeding.’
‘Yes, well,’ Fergus said, totally at a loss. ‘If there’s ever anything.’
‘I doubt if there will be, but thank you for raising the matter,’ Mary said.
‘How in the name of God do you get on with that one?’ Fergus asked John when they had some privacy.
‘She’s a godsend, that’s what she is. It’s the one thing that keeps Kate any way calm in there, the thought that we’ve got a cousin of Mrs Whelan looking after us. It’s the next best thing to having Sheila.’
‘But Sheila’s normal, John, she’s not a nutcase like this one.’
‘Ah, she has her ways like everyone has their ways. She’s a bit off men, that’s all.’
‘That’s a bit steep, to be off half the human race, and
isn’t she living in a family of four men and a girl, for God’s sake?’
‘I think she prays for us.’ John was tolerant.
‘I’m surprised she hasn’t taken a pike to you, and the day might well come when she does.’ Fergus was still smarting.
‘She’s certainly taking no chances, she got Jimbo to fit a lock to her door. I suppose she was afraid I’d lose the run of myself and come in and savage her.’
‘Do you tell that to Kate?’ Fergus asked wistfully.
‘I do, she doesn’t believe me.’
‘I’d love to go and see her,’ Fergus said.
‘She’ll tell you when. You know Kate, she’s very proud. She hates people seeing her the way she is, with all the tubes and the bags.’
‘As if I’d mind.’
‘She minds.’
‘Tell her . . . well, just tell her.’
‘Sure, Fergus, I’ll tell her.’
Dara and Michael had finished their work. Mary had made them sandwiches and a flask of soup. They weren’t normally given a flask. This was an honour.
‘I understand that you can go off on your own.’
It had been cleared with their father. The twins nodded. They were nervous. This was their first day going back to the tunnel since the day of the accident. They were almost afraid it would be bad luck to go back there again. They might come out and find the whole of Mountfern waiting to tell them more bad news.
Without saying it they both remembered that it hadn’t even been much fun in the tunnel that day, even before they learned of Mam’s accident.
They had almost forgotten how much earth and rubble there was around the place and how dirty it made everything. Still, in the new system that Mary Donnelly had set up they all had to steep their own clothes in a big zinc bath of detergent. Twice a week all the shorts and shirts and underwear and pyjamas went in. That way extra grime wasn’t really noticed.
They pushed forward and there it was, with the tables and chairs they had been arranging at the very time that Mam was having her accident overhead. It was strange and almost frightening to think about.
They went round the tunnel as they had often done before, stroking its sides and marvelling at how well made it was and how long it had lasted.
‘They must have been desperate in those days to keep their groceries hidden from the public if they went to all this trouble to hide them, building a whole tunnel just so the neighbours wouldn’t see,’ Dara said in wonder.
‘They didn’t
have
neighbours,’ Michael was more authoritative. ‘It was so that they wouldn’t have to look at them themselves.’
‘What was so bad about groceries?’
‘I don’t think it was just a few brown-paper bags like we’d get in Loretto Quinn’s, it was barrels and boxes.’
‘Well that’s even more posh, they must have been half cracked, the Ferns,’ Dara said.
‘Apparently it’s all over the country, I read it in all that research Daddy’s doing. Mr O’Neill says that the book will be on display at the hotel with Dad’s name on it.’
‘Do you think the hotel will ever get built?’ Dara asked suddenly.
‘I don’t know, I suppose it will. Why?’