Firefly Summer (76 page)

‘Nothing yet.’

‘Will you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You
said
you would.’

‘No, I said I would discuss it, we are discussing it. How much?’

‘A thousand pounds.’

Patrick was shocked. Literally shocked. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘I am.’

‘Well find it then.’

‘We made a deal.’

‘We made no deal, I said I’d discuss it. I will not hand out a year’s wages to an insolent young pup who rings up and demands it as of right.’

‘Father, this is serious.’

‘You bet your fucking life it’s serious,’ Patrick said.

‘I thought you were going to . . .’

‘I thought my father was going to do a lot of things for me too, like getting me enough to eat and shoes to wear. But it didn’t happen. Learn the hard way, Kerry.’

‘Aren’t you going to discuss it?’

‘Yes I will discuss it. When you come back.’ Patrick’s anger was ebbing a little.

‘I could come back today.’

‘No you could not. You can stay there and do the work you are meant to be doing. I will discuss it in a few weeks’ time, when you’re back here for the opening. Meanwhile get out of it the best you can, and if you steal from Hill like you stole from me, I’ll have you in gaol.’

There was a silence.

‘Life isn’t easy, Kerry, it’s a matter of finding ways round things; and if one thing doesn’t work, try something else. You’ll discover that.’

‘Yes, I probably will,’ Kerry said slowly.

Rachel Fine sat in her sitting room and watched the evening fall on Fernscourt.

She felt very tired. The game was too arduous. She blew cold, he ran after her – she showed some response, he ran away. It was so immature, so unsatisfying. Somehow tonight, for the very first time, Rachel was prepared to
stop the struggle, the never-ending spiral of hope, the belief that things were going well.

He was a man who hadn’t enough room in his heart for a full-time loving relationship. He never had time for it with his wife Kathleen either. Whether she had been frail or not he would still have wandered, and it was not without importance to note that he had wandered to a business colleague rather than find a sheerly social relationship.

She sighed, thinking of the years behind and the years ahead. The music on her record player was low so as not to disturb Loretto below. Chopin, soothing and familiar. Perhaps even at this late stage of her life she might even take up the piano again. When she was back in New York.

Would she be back in New York . . .?

Yes, sooner or later. Why not make it sooner, go at her own time? See the opening just because she had worked so hard for it. Give him one ultimatum so that he would never say he didn’t know, and then go. But she had to be prepared to go, not to give herself nine lives like a cat, otherwise what was the point of giving ultimatums.

There was a soft knock on her door. Loretto would never have let him upstairs, and yet who else could it be?

She walked wearily over to the door and opened it.

There stood Kerry O’Neill, the boy she had always hoped would be her stepson one day.

He leaned against the jamb of the door. ‘Hi, Rachel.’

‘Hallo, Kerry.’

She made no move to ask him in.

‘How you been?’

‘Fine, and you?’ They still stood there.

‘Reasonably fine, I’d be better with a drink inside me, to be very frank.’

‘Well you know me, Kerry, a non-drinking lady. But I’m sure if you were to go to Ryan’s . . .’

‘I don’t want to go to Ryan’s,’ he said sharply.

She shrugged.

‘Surely my pa keeps some drink here.’

‘Your pa lives in the lodge, Kerry. I live here.’

‘So you never see him?’

‘At work.’

‘I want to talk to you, not him.’

‘I told you I don’t have any drink.’

‘I know. It doesn’t matter, I have.’ He waved a bottle of whiskey. ‘Now can I come in?’

Mary thought she had seen the blond figure of young Kerry O’Neill slip quietly across the footbridge earlier, but since he hadn’t come into the pub and there was nowhere else he could be heading, she must have been mistaken.

Rachel stood back and let Kerry come into her sitting room. He stood looking at it with his cool objective eye.

‘Lovely,’ he said at last.

‘Thank you.’

‘I mean it, you have wonderful ways, Rachel. Anyone else would have ruined this place and filled it with clutter.’

He sat in the chair by the window where Patrick always sat and looked across in the darkening evening at Fernscourt.

‘I can provide a glass and water,’ Rachel said.

‘Great, this is far too elegant a place for a man to sit drinking a bottle by the neck.’

He was so engaging, just like his father. His compliments were not so frequent and lavish that they sounded
automatic. Instead they made people feel very touched and grateful to be praised.

She brought a tray to the little low table – Irish crystal glasses and a jug. A pretty china bowl with ice in it, a tray of cheese biscuits and for herself an orange drink. She sat down opposite him. She had not invited him, but since he was here she would be gracious. Being a hostess was second nature to Rachel Fine, she had waited on Kerry’s father for many years in the same elegant way.

‘Your health,’ she said politely, raising her glass of orange.

‘And yours.’ His eyes were bright, he raised the very large goblet of neat Irish whiskey and looked at the patterns of the glass admiringly.

Rachel was very good at not being the first to speak. She had learned that first from her mother, who said that the men in the family were the ones to be considered, and then from many, many nights waiting to assess Patrick’s mood before she spoke. She knew how to leave a perfectly agreeable silence that would encourage the other person to begin.

Kerry smiled as if he could see into her mind. It was a knowing smile full of confidence.

‘And how long are you going to be with us?’ he asked genially.

Rachel was shocked by the insolence of his tone. So shocked that it made her speak sharply.

‘I was just going to ask
you
the same question. Are you with us for long or do you have to get back to Donegal?’

Kerry smiled even more broadly; he sensed a fight and he welcomed it.

‘Oh,
I’m
here for the duration, Rachel, this is my home.’

She controlled herself with difficulty. ‘Well of course,
and has your father decided what part you will play in the hotel?’ Polite interest, but letting him know that everyone realised it was Patrick who called the shots.

‘I’m sure you’re much more aware of what my father has decided or has not decided than anyone.’

She smiled coldly but made no reply. From years of training herself not to over-react, not to fly off the handle, Rachel had perfected a calm and measured response even to situations that were outside the bounds of any manners or fairness.

‘My involvement is always in ideas for design, and sometimes it’s an uphill job.’ She forced a little laugh that she did not feel. ‘I can tell you the designer is the one who always ends up carrying the can – it’s too stark, it’s too cold, it’s not Irish enough – my, but you need extraordinary patience in this job. Lucky I have it!’ Again her tinkle was very false and again she felt that Kerry recognised this.

‘Perhaps you’ve been too patient.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You know, hanging around too long, hoping that when this is over – when that is over – the world will settle down as
you
would like it, as
you
design it.’

She wondered how much more of this she could take, this pretence of deliberately misunderstanding his discourtesy.

‘At least the day of the opening is in sight,’ she said. ‘We’ll see then if it works.’

‘And what will you do then? Go back to Brooklyn?’

‘I live in Manhattan.’

‘Sure, but you
do
live in New York, will you go directly back there? After the hotel opens?’

His question echoed so much her own bitter thoughts
and decisions of earlier that evening that it brought a heavy, weary feeling to Rachel. It was as if she suddenly decided to give up the bright sunny response.

‘I don’t know,’ she said simply. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Rachel!’ He was teasing. ‘Not sure? Of course you are, you’ve every step planned out, haven’t you?’

‘No. Not every step.’

‘Most of them then. You’ve been part of my father’s life for a very long time. A lot of people didn’t rate your chances very highly.’

‘I don’t know how you could know any of this. You were a child.’

‘Sure I was a child, I didn’t know really, not for certain, not until my mother’s last illness. That’s when I knew.’

Rachel looked at him impassively.

Kerry poured another large goblet of whiskey, his hand trembling slightly.

‘Those nights when she was alone in the house, and he was with you – in Manhattan, as you remind me. Out until the early hours of the morning. Sometimes I stood on the landing and watched him come in, go into the cloakroom and rinse his mouth, freshen himself up before he came up to her bedroom. She was always awake, always waiting for him to come back from you. From your apartment in Manhattan.’

Rachel looked at his white and angry face.

‘He sat in a chair drinking whiskey, that’s why he used a mouth rinse, it was not to hide traces of me. He sat talking about her illness, about you all. That’s what I gave him in those months, just a chair, a whiskey and an ear for his troubles.’

‘He had plenty of ears at home if he had come there.’

‘Sure he had, but you were so young, your mother was so frail, he couldn’t . . .’

Kerry’s eyes blazed at her suddenly.

‘Don’t you dare to talk of my mother, don’t bring her in casually like that . . . don’t speak of her.’

‘Kerry, this is absurd.
You
mentioned your mother, you mentioned something that has upset you in the past, I was merely telling you what it was really like . . .’

‘I don’t want your version of what things were really like. If it were a true version it would be fairly sordid.’

‘You are unfair to your father and to everyone if you persist in believing all this . . .’

‘Oh, it was all hand-holding and platonic. Don’t be pathetic, Rachel.’

‘I am
not
pathetic. I am telling you what is true. During the time of Kathleen’s last . . .’

‘I told you not to mention her name.’

Her eyes filled with sudden unexpected tears. She turned her head away in a vain attempt to hide them.

Kerry put his glass down on the table. ‘I’m sorry.’

She didn’t trust herself to speak.

‘I mean it. I am sorry. I guess I’m upset. I shouldn’t take it out on you.’

She stood up wordlessly as if to say that his visit was over. But Kerry decided that it was not over yet.

‘Please, I said I spoke out of turn. Please?’

He had such a persuasive way, she noticed almost dispassionately. Kerry believed that if you were charming enough in sufficient doses it would open every door. And he had usually been right.

‘I didn’t intend to come here and harangue you, I intended . . .’

‘What did you intend?’

‘I guess I wanted to know what was happening. Is that so bad? Things are fairly unsettled. Father has me up at the other end of the country, he’s so unapproachable, he tells me none of his plans, I hear from this side one set of things, from another side a different . . . It sure is a rumour factory here, isn’t it?’ He grinned companionably, the shouting put well behind.

‘And what do they say on all these different sides?’

‘Oh, some say that my father is the object of a hate campaign, vandalism, slogans, mysterious happenings; others say that since the prophet Elijah there hasn’t been such a welcome appearance. Then they say that the hotel will be open on time and that it hasn’t a chance of opening; that Father’s going to marry Marian Johnson and she’s going to change her hairstyle and get some new clothes, or that he’s going to marry you and you’re going to keep all your nice clothes the way they are but change your religion . . . And I hear that he has hundreds of bookings from the States and that he has no bookings . . . So do you see why I came to have a talk in case you could set me straight on some of these issues, anyway?’

She looked at him, and realised that he was making it all up, there was no way that people in Mountfern would confide such things to the son of Patrick O’Neill. But he was right in his summing up of the different viewpoints.

Kerry patted the chair beside him. ‘Come on, Rachel, sit down and talk to me. I won’t speak out of turn again. Promise.’

She sat down, knowing it was a very dangerous thing to do.

‘There, that’s better. And now have a drink. Come
on
,
Rachel, if you’re going to be an honorary Irish person you’ll have to learn to drink.’

It was easy and comforting to sit there with him instead of sitting on her own.

He had admitted his temper and his feelings. It was only natural that a boy should love his mother and want to keep his memories of her almost frozen in the viewpoint of the troubled teenager that he was at the time.

Rachel sipped the drink that he mixed for her, a whiskey and dry ginger. It tasted sweet and warming, not like the wine she sometimes sipped at functions, which was bitter and alien. Here in the sunset looking across the river with the handsome boy admitting his petulant temper and smiling at her like a conspirator it was easy to sit and talk and drink the sweet, fizzy harmless liquor.

Kerry talked of the hotel in Donegal, how lonely he was up there and how the place seemed so remote. He often went to Derry across the border, it was exciting somehow to be in a place that was ruled by another country, to see other flags flying. Most of the people in Derry were basically Irish, he explained to Rachel, and they felt much more at home in the republic. He had met a few guys who were easy to rub along with there. Rough guys, not the kind who would be welcomed with open arms in the front doors of Fernscourt, he said scathingly. Still, they were alive all through, which was more than you could say for many of the people you met in this country, north or south. Rachel took this to mean that they were able to play cards with him or point him to some kind of game down town.