Firefly Summer (81 page)

‘Sophisticated is the word,’ Dara said. She was alarmed if Jack Coyne thought she was flash. She must have gone too far with the lipstick.

‘Like a dog’s dinner, anyway.’ He was admiring.

‘Considering what Leo’s dinners look like, that’s not much of a compliment.’

‘Leopold’s not a dog, he’s a freak,’ Jack Coyne said. ‘You should have let me drown him instead of having him there turning away custom.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. People love him.’

‘Well, that’s debatable. Any sign of Kerry O’Neill, by the way?’

‘No, why do you ask
me
?’ Dara was suspicious.

‘I thought you might have heard from him. Specially seeing you’re all dolled up.’

‘Lord no.’ She was over-casual. ‘Kerry O’Neill isn’t my type, nor me his, I’m certain.’

‘Well, they say his tastes run to the maturer lady all right, but you’d never know.’

‘Maturer?’

‘Much maturer. Old even, some would say. Still if you
do
see him tell him I have that poker game in mind. He mentioned one the last time he was here a few days ago.’

‘Then he
was
here the other night.’

‘He was certainly here at breakfast time in the morning getting aspirins and orange juice for his lady love upstairs.’

‘His what?’

‘No, I’m saying nothing, but I’m surprised Loretto hasn’t passed it on to your mother. Still, what with herself being your mother’s friend and everything I suppose it’s a bit complicated. Forget I said anything, will you.’

He was gone, leaving Dara fuming on River Road. She bent down and pulled up a handful of dried grass from the river bank to wipe off her lipstick.

Jack Coyne was always a pain and she knew that Mam and Dad didn’t like Eddie and Declan hanging around his yard. But surely not even Jack Coyne could make up something like that about Kerry and Mrs Fine unless he had some reason.

Mrs Fine. She was older than Mam, surely. It was disgusting.

‘Oh, Patrick, this
is
a surprise!’ Marian Johnson patted her hair with pleasure.

‘Hardly a surprise,’ Patrick growled. ‘It is my office.’

‘No, I heard you were going to Dublin.’

‘No.’ Patrick was unforthcoming. ‘What can I do for you . . . ?’

‘Nothing really, I just came down to have a look around
the place, to see the coach house and stables.’

‘They’re outside, Marian,’ Patrick said dryly. ‘They often are in houses like this.’

He realised he had been over-sharp.

‘Come on, I’ll take you out to have a tour,’ he said good-naturedly. ‘Not that there’s anything to see of course, we’re only playing at ponies and horses here, the guests will all be taken up to the Grange.’

‘I know.’ She patted his arm gratefully. ‘I don’t know what we’d do without you. You’ve changed the whole face of Mountfern.’

That’s not what I set out to do,’ he sighed.

‘All for the better, of course. You’ve improved the place out of all recognition. I mean, look at poor little Loretto’s place across the river there . . .’ Marian waved a dismissive arm at the bright shop frontage of Quinn’s grocery and greengrocery. ‘That used to be a real huckster’s shop, and now it’s grand enough for Kerry O’Neill to be seen coming and going at all hours of the day and night.’ She smiled what she hoped was a mischievous smile.

Patrick looked at her almost pityingly. ‘I know, Marian. I know. Don’t wear yourself out trying to think up ways of telling me what half the town has told me already.’

‘I don’t know
what
you mean.’ She flushed angrily.

As Dara passed Loretto Quinn’s she saw Mrs Fine standing at the upper window. She was looking out over the river. She hadn’t seen Dara.

For a moment Dara hesitated. Jack Coyne had been very definite. Then she shook herself. It was ludicrous. Mrs Fine looked a hundred.

On a sudden impulse Dara decided to go up and tell her that Mam was upset. It might do some good and it couldn’t do any harm.

Loretto was out the back somewhere, so Dara ran straight upstairs.

‘Mrs Fine?’ She tapped lightly on the door and went in.

Rachel Fine turned round from the window. However badly she looked from down below she looked worse now. Dara could hardly hide her shock.

‘Sorry, Dara. I wasn’t expecting you. You look very nice.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Fine . . . um . . . Are you all right and everything?’

‘I’ve had a bit of a cold, I think. Flu perhaps.’

‘Oh, I see. Mam was wondering where you were.’

There was a silence.

‘Well, I’ll be off then, I suppose,’ Dara said awkwardly.

‘You enjoyed France? It . . . it must have made you grow up a lot.’

‘Yes, I got lonely a bit of course, I didn’t really expect that. I missed everyone here. All the time.’

Another silence.

‘Mam’s very fond of you, Mrs Fine, she wouldn’t be afraid you’d give her an old cold.’

To Dara’s fright, big tears came into Rachel Fine’s eyes.

Rachel went to her bedroom and sat in front of the dressing-table mirror. She looked old and tense, she looked lined and pathetic. Methodically she removed her make-up, cleansed her skin, applied a gel that was meant to restore the cells and carefully put on her make-up again.

As she did the feathery strokes around her eyes, Rachel
Fine began to wonder was she going mad. First avoiding her friend for days and then making herself up like a call girl to go and see a kind woman in a wheelchair who wouldn’t notice if she arrived dressed in a pillow case.

Kate was a little prickly at first.

‘I must say it’s nice to see you. Dara will be glad to know you called.’

‘I’ve seen Dara. She told me you were wondering why I hadn’t been in.’

‘I didn’t send her with that message.’ Kate’s eyes flashed.

‘I know,’ Rachel said wearily.

The first silence they had ever known fell between them. Eventually Rachel spoke.

‘It’s no use, Kate, I’m empty, drained, there’s no me to talk to. I’ll go away, you’ve nothing to say to me, nobody has.’

Kate’s eyes blazed with anger. ‘I have nothing to say to you! Don’t give me that. Take offence if you bloody want to, sulk, imagine yourself wronged, insulted in some way but don’t give me that about my having nothing to say, I have a million things to say, to ask, to tell, to share. I’m not the one who slides past the door, I’m not the one doing the avoiding. I can’t avoid anybody for God’s sake. I don’t have that little luxury any more.’

‘I didn’t think you’d be upset.’

‘No of course not, what right has a vegetable to be upset? Poor old Kate, she’s lucky she had anyone come and visit her at all.’

‘Kate, you know . . .’

‘I know nothing. I’m scared sick about this café I’ve
talked them all into doing. I don’t want to make John into some kind of gligeen doing party pieces for Americans, the next thing we’ll have his cap on the floor and ask them to throw dimes into it. I don’t want the boys to be serving cakes and potato bread in case their friends call them sissies. I don’t want Michael to be besotted by Grace with her honeyed words and smiles. I don’t want that bloody Kerry O’Neill raising his little finger and taking the clothes off my daughter, my beautiful Dara, and then throwing her aside . . . So now tell me about the wonderful trouble-free family life I have.’

‘What’s the worst bit?’ Rachel asked suddenly.

‘I think it’s Kerry. He’s playing her like a fish on a line. He’ll have her as soon as he wants to, he’s the kind that gets everything he wants, and doesn’t care about who he hurts on the way.’

‘You’re right.’

‘I’m so frightened, and I wanted to talk to you, and now you’ve turned against me too. I’m sorry to be such a fool.’ Kate groped round ineffectually for her handkerchief and cried salt tears down her newly powdered face.

Rachel’s eyes were full of tears. ‘I couldn’t come near you because I didn’t want you to know how stupid I’ve been. I’ve done something so stupid you wouldn’t believe it, I was too ashamed . . .’

‘You don’t have to tell . . .’

‘It’s Kerry . . . I’ve done something so stupid . . . so terribly stupid . . .’

Hand in hand the two women sat in the darkening evening and Kate patted the beautifully ringed hands of Rachel Fine, who told her how she had put herself in Kerry’s power.

Tony McCann did not have a bank account. But he had been in and out of this particular branch so often to get change, to cash cheques made out to him by other people, that he always regarded it as his bank. He had missed it during the strike.

He handed over the cheque for a thousand pounds.

‘In the money, I see?’ the cashier had said to him pleasantly.

‘If it were all mine I’d be hundreds of miles from here on a beach sipping rum and Coca Cola,’ said Tony McCann.

The cashier sighed and thought about it for a moment. ‘How do you want the money?’

‘Ten-pound notes, a hundred of them,’ McCann said. He looked idly round the bank as she went away to verify the cheque. How did people work here five days a week for forty years? Surely they must all have been tempted to take a carrier bag of wads of fivers and run. It was remarkable that so few of them did when you came to think of it.

‘Mr McCann?’ It was a man now, a senior man in a suit, with a pinched-looking face.

‘Yes?’

‘There seems to be a problem about the cheque.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘I’m afraid so. It has been cancelled and reported stolen.’

‘It’s me. McCann.’

‘Yes?’ Kerry O’Neill’s voice was anxious suddenly. ‘The cheque doesn’t work.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘You’d better believe me.’

‘The bitch. The stupid bitch.’

‘You’ll sort it out, then?’

‘I’ll sort it out.’

‘Mr O’Neill?’

Brian Doyle was hesitant. Patrick O’Neill was like a devil these days, even the most mild request was met by a bout of bad temper.

‘Doyle?’ He was curt.

‘Mrs Fine wants to have a word with you.’

Once Brian had called Rachel by her first name, and that had not found favour either with his boss.

‘Good, then I’m sure she will,’ Patrick said.

‘On the telephone,’ Brian explained, as if he were talking to a child.

It had been as much as Patrick could do to stay sane when faced with the Irish telephone system. He had been assured that it was a European thing, not just Irish, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. He said he would make a mental note not to open a chain of hotels on the continent of Europe, and people had smiled at him indulgently. The eager American, hustle bustle. He knew what they said.

But if Rachel was on the telephone for him that meant he had to leave his office and walk across to Brian Doyle’s headquarters, that was where the only phone link so far had managed to be installed.

Patrick moved quickly. He would not let Doyle see how annoyed he was to be summoned by Rachel, whom they all knew to be his fancy woman, to walk across the
courtyard, through the Thatch Bar and over to those excrescences that Doyle called his headquarters.

‘Yes?’ he said curtly, watching Brian pretend to busy himself elsewhere in the cramped space.

‘Can we talk?’

‘Here?’ He couldn’t believe it.

‘No. Anywhere. It’s important.’

‘Why didn’t you come up here in the first place instead of having me walk halfway round the country to tell me you were coming?’

‘I don’t want to come there.’

‘I haven’t time to go over to Loretto’s.’

‘No, I don’t want you to come here either.’

‘Is this a game of hide and seek, by any chance?’

‘Please.’

‘Where then?’

‘Coyne’s wood. At the far end up by the old ruined church on the small back road that leads to the Grange. There’s a stile.’

‘Jesus,’ Patrick said.

‘I’ll leave now, I’ll wait. You get away when you can.’

He held the receiver in his hand for a while and out of the window of Doyle’s headquarters, through the clutter of the ledge, he saw across the Fern in the distance a figure come out of the door of Loretto Quinn’s shop and get into a small green car.

‘Thanks, Brian,’ he said as he replaced the receiver.

‘Lovely day for a bit of a spin out into the country,’ Brian said.

Patrick gave him a look that told Brian that the wise man addressed no words at all to the great O’Neill these days.