‘Wouldn’t Donal be cross?’
‘He’d have more sense. Besides, the pearls are mine to do what I like with, and I like to be good to my friends.’
It really was as simple as that. Josie was kindness through and through, and Donal, whom she’d married a few years later, was the easiest-going lad you could ever meet.
Josie and the Shamrock Club had made Pat feel safe. The club was smaller then, and Denis Brennan, the president, had been almost like the father of a family. Most of Resolve’s Irish-American community worked either in construction or the clothing industry, and Brennan was the largest developer in town. It was he who’d provided the site the clubhouse was built on, and many of the members worked for him and rented houses he’d built.
Having turned off the television news, Pat locked up and climbed the stairs to bed. As she switched off her bedside light, she remembered buying Ger’s blue pullover in Toronto. Cassie had driven her out to the mall and walked round the shops with her patiently, but Pat had found herself wishing that Josie was there to help her choose. It was strange, considering she hadn’t seen Josie for over fifty years. Then, only a few months later, Ger had been dead and she herself had been back in Resolve again, and, instead of wearing a white petal hat, Josie had been using a walker. She’d always moved like a dancer, running lightly down the stairs in Mrs Quinn’s rooming house, and whirling down to the bus stop in the mornings, her feet in their cork-soled strappy sandals hardly seeming to touch the hot, dusty sidewalk. Everything in Resolve that summer had seemed hot and dusty and very far away from Finfarran. And everything about Resolve last month had felt like a surreal dream.
At some point during the farewell party Cassie had introduced Pat to Jack Shanahan. He was the same height as his grandfather, with the same quiet assurance in his stance. The background music had been very loud and Cassie had had to shout his name. But she didn’t need to. Pat would have known that lopsided smile anywhere.
Chapter Twenty-Four
To Cassie’s surprise, though the salon was fun, the library job was her favourite, especially the solitary hours she spent driving up and down the peninsula. When she mentioned this, Hanna said she knew what she meant. ‘I drove the van myself before Conor took over, and I do miss those days out in the countryside.’
‘I’ve never spent so much time alone.’
‘What do you enjoy about it?’
‘Space to think, I suppose. And the scenery. It’s fantastic to watch the landscape coming alive again in spring.’
Now, bowling along on her southern route, she decided just to enjoy herself without trying to explain it. Lowering the window, she took a deep breath and realised how strongly the air smelt of salt. The ocean wasn’t visible from the road she was currently driving along, yet the salty tang was a constant reminder of its presence. It was the same wherever you went on the narrow peninsula: even on the stillest of days, there was a hint of a breeze from the Atlantic.
Hereabouts the roads were bounded by hedgerows, not ditches, and all around her they were starting to bloom. It was too early yet for many new flowers, but tender leaves were budding and unfurling on trees and bushes. Two weeks ago, talking to Erin, Cassie had described them as a green haze. Now they grew thickly, hiding the briar’s dark brown stems and softening the hard edges of stone walls. A speckled thrush called from a tree by the roadside as Cassie approached, and as she passed a house where flowerbeds edged the driveway, daffodils were poking through the soil, like green beaks.
Up ahead was the curve in the road that would take her down to a village. It was one of the library van’s regular stops, home to half a dozen families with many more dependent on its presence. There was a shop that was also a post office, a pub, with a couple of petrol pumps, and a two-room school, which local children attended until they were twelve. Many of the kids walked to school, loitering in the lanes and running races, as their parents and grandparents had before them. Later, when they transferred to the secondary school in Lissbeg, they were picked up by a bus, which, like the library van, had stopping places all along the peninsula. In Pat’s childhood, before the days of the school bus service, many families from outlying villages couldn’t afford to send kids to secondary school. The cost of travel or of boarding in Lissbeg had been too high. Cassie thought of the woman she’d met on her first solo trip in the van. She was a pensioner who remembered Erin’s gran, Josie, because her dad and Josie’s used to take turns driving their daughters to the convent school in Lissbeg. Pat and Mary had met in the same way: Pat’s father, who worked in Lissbeg, had driven them to school each morning and a friend’s dad had collected them sharp at four in his Morris Minor.
As Cassie pulled in, the door of the village shop opened and a girl waved at her. ‘Hi, I thought you were the post van.’
Cassie called to her through the window: ‘I passed him a few miles back. He’d parked up to deliver boxes.’
‘Ah, right. He won’t be long, so.’
The girl waved again and went back indoors and, having opened her van, Cassie, who was ten minutes ahead of schedule, sat in the cab waiting for people to arrive. The village shop had a painted façade with the post-office sign prominently displayed. It was a modern building with a well-laid-out interior, selling an array of groceries and hardware products, and an alcove with a computer from which you could go online and print screengrabs and files. Signs in the window offered a photocopying service and takeaway coffee, and there was a delicatessen counter with freshly made salads and sandwiches. Mentally, Cassie contrasted its modernity with the fittings in the butcher’s shop in Lissbeg. You could imagine Fitzgerald’s interior being produced by a designer who’d label it ‘vintage’ but, according to Pat, it was all the real deal. The tiles covering its walls from floor to ceiling were original, and their designs had already been old-fashioned at the turn of the twentieth century.
Ger’s granddad had bought the business as a going concern sometime in the 1930s and seen no reason to make changes to the building. The tiles in the shop were cream, with a green-embossed band all around the walls at waist height. Above this, on the wall opposite the counter, was a series of rural scenes – a milkmaid with a wooden yoke and pails, her skirt looped up and her dark hair in ringlets, a group of men resting under a haystack, and a rosy-cheeked shepherd trudging home with a very clean lamb in his arms. From the wall behind the counter, framed in wreaths of buttercups, a cow with her calf, a large pig, and a herd of sheep stared out at the customers, relics of a time when no one had been bothered by the thought of their dinner grazing in flowery fields. Ger had installed electronic scales and tills and a cooler display unit, but the walls, the marble-topped counter, and the butcher’s blocks, with their hollowed, scarred surfaces, were just as they’d been in his father’s day.
Cassie had asked Pat if that was because Ger thought the place looked pretty cool as it was. But no, according to Pat, it was more that he didn’t like change. ‘I suppose it’s the height of fashion now but I can tell you that years ago it got laughed at. No one wanted the old shop fittings then.’
‘I bet they’d cost a fortune if you wanted to buy them now.’
The conversation had taken place in the kitchen over tea and cake with Frankie, who’d appeared, as Pat had said, ‘as if he’d heard the oven door’. Apparently he was a sucker for his mom’s baking. Cassie wasn’t crazy about the way he walked in and out of the flat without warning but, of course, he had his own latch key. After all, it had been his childhood home. When she’d mentioned the cost of the tiles he’d turned and looked at her, his heavy jaw working on the cake, like a bull chewing the cud. Lately, most things about Frankie had creeped Cassie out. It felt like he was always staring at her. But maybe that was just stupid. Or mean. The fact was that Frankie was unattractive, much like Ger had been. But before Ger had died Cassie had got to know him a bit. She’d seen how he’d tried to protect Pat from his illness. Instead of improving on acquaintance, though, Frankie got worse.
/> The first person to arrive at the van was a farmer who’d promised to pick up a book for his wife. As Cassie scanned the copy of P. D. James’s Devices and Desires he asked if he could order The Case of the Late Pig.
‘I think most of the copies are out but I can put your wife’s name on the list. Is she a member of the Transatlantic Book Club?’
‘No, but she’s heard of it. The word is that it’s great craic altogether.’
Cassie was pleased. The book-reading bit hadn’t even started but already the club had had word-of-mouth reviews. And the waiting list for The Case of the Late Pig was getting long. They’d agreed to discuss the book in a fortnight, to give people time to find copies. Though, apparently, the chances were that many members wouldn’t read it at all. Hanna had told Cassie that always happened with book clubs. ‘And with this one it’s likely to be worse, since most people really just want to chat, not discuss books.’
‘Oh, wow. Then maybe the library wasn’t the right place to host it.’
‘Not at all. It’s a perfectly valid use of the facility. Things will settle down. We’ll end up with a core group that enjoys reading, and others who drop in and out just to touch base with friends.’
Cassie added the farmer’s wife’s name to the waiting list, served two more arrivals, and sat on the step of the van to enjoy an unexpected burst of sunshine. A buzz from her phone alerted her to an incoming message, and she hesitated before unzipping her bag. Hanna had issued strict instructions about the use of her phone when she was on the road. ‘It’s no different from being here in the library, okay? You don’t use your phone during working hours. Checking it when you’re driving is illegal, anyway. You can keep it on for use in an emergency but, otherwise, remember you’re at work.’
It made sense, so Cassie hadn’t argued, but now, glancing down at the screen, she saw the message was from Erin. The street was empty and there was no sound of any car approaching so, keeping the phone tucked into the bag beside her, she took a quick look. The message that appeared beside Erin’s latest drop-dead-I’m-a-free-woman avatar made her heart leap.
Jack wants to give you a Skype call sometime this evening.
He says when you see it will you accept?
* * *
By seven p.m. Cassie was sitting in her bedroom with her laptop open on her knee. Her last hour at work had been torture. Few people had visited the library van, and she was itching to get it back to Carrick before the rush-hour traffic held her up. But she stayed put, knowing it wasn’t fair to do otherwise and feeling pretty certain that Hanna would hear of it if she left early. In any event, the roads hadn’t been crowded and she’d dropped off the van, picked up her car, and driven home to Lissbeg in record time. But what had Jack meant by ‘sometime this evening’? Standing up, she walked round the room telling herself there was no need to sit staring at her Skype screen. The volume on her laptop was set to max so she’d hear Jack’s alert as soon as it came. But taking a shower and changing was out of the question, and what if she was stuck in her bedroom for hours and needed to cross the landing to go to the loo?
As soon as the thought occurred, she found herself dying for a pee. But that was ridiculous. She’d been to the loo as soon as she’d got home. Deliberately, she set the laptop on her dressing-table and went to look out of the window. It was dumb, she thought, to allow herself to get wound up like a spring. There was a cat creeping along a wall below in the backyard. Would Jack call from the Shamrock Club’s library, where Pangur slept under the range? It didn’t seem likely. From his home, then? From his bedroom? How odd that their first date might happen in such an intimate space. But it wasn’t a date. Of course it wasn’t. It was probably just some question about the club. But, if so, why would he call her directly instead of getting in touch with the library? Swinging round, Cassie stared at her screen. She could have sworn she’d heard something. But she hadn’t. For a minute she worked hard at not going to check the volume control. Then she gave up and made a rush for the laptop, picking it up and throwing herself onto the bed.
At that precise moment, the call from Jack came through. Certain that it would cut off if she didn’t take it immediately, she stabbed repeatedly at the keypad and found herself looking at his face.
She couldn’t tell where he was but it wasn’t the Shamrock Club library. Cassie scooted backwards and propped herself up against her bedhead. Jack smiled. ‘Hey, you.’
Hastily, Cassie lowered the volume control. ‘Hi.’
‘Have I mistaken the time difference? Are you in bed?’
‘No, I just thought – well, I thought I’d take the call here. I mean, it’s private.’ Her eyes flicked to the image of herself in the corner of the screen to see how she looked. Not great. Even if she hadn’t had time to change her clothes, she might have fixed her hair. And she was sitting up in a bed with polished brass knobs, like something on a film set. To her horror, she realised she’d left a bra hanging from one of the bedposts. Oh, God, would he think she was some kind of weirdo expecting phone sex? Changing the angle of the laptop, she pulled herself together. ‘So, what’s up?’
In an attempt to avoid sounding sexy, she could hear herself sounding spiky. Jack’s voice, which had been relaxed and intimate, became brisk. ‘Just a question, is all. I’ve cut together a video of Pat’s farewell party. If I put it up online could she access it? Or should I mail her a disk?’
‘Wow. That’s kind of you. Sure. Put it online – she’s fine with the internet.’
‘Okay. You got it. I’ll send you the link.’
There was an awkward pause in which Cassie panicked, afraid that he’d end the call. Casting round for something to say, she told him she’d been to Mullafrack.
‘Really? That’s cool. How come?’
‘Well, I saw a sign when I was driving the library van, and I went back later to have a closer look. The village is gone but there’s this big tower up on the side of the hill.’
‘Does someone live there?’
‘No, it’s ancient, Hanna says medieval. Brad’s planning to take tourists up to see it.’ Wishing she hadn’t mentioned him, she rushed on, explaining that Brad was just a guy she’d met. ‘I cut his hair at the salon.’
‘And you met him in Mullafrack?’
‘Yeah. Just – you know – coincidence.’
‘Right. Well, it sounds exciting.’
‘No, really, I mean . . . he’s just a guy.’
Jack looked taken aback. Then he laughed. ‘I meant that finding the tower must have been exciting.’
‘Oh, God, well, yes, yes, it was. Maybe your ancestors lived there.’
‘It sounds a bit grand for the Shanahans.’
‘I guess. But I was thinking of you – I mean your family – when I was there.’
It was Jack who broke the pause that followed, asking her how she’d enjoyed St Patrick’s Day.
‘It was good. How was the Shamrock Club do?’
His eyes crinkled. ‘Well, I videoed the ceremonial presentation of Grandma’s banner.’
This was better. This was just ordinary chat, like you’d have on a date. Cassie relaxed and smiled back. ‘Over here they dispense with ceremonial. There’s just lots of marching and music in the street. And farmers parading on tractors. Brad thought it was weird.’
As soon as she’d spoken, her eyes widened in dismay. Jack had shown no negative reaction but, instinctively, she wanted to reach through the screen and grab his hand. Whatever about phone sex, Skype dating was horrible. And now they’d hit another stupid silence. Cassie contrived to keep calm, but in her head she was howling like a dog. How could anyone be so completely asinine? Why had she mentioned Brad’s name again?
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Divil was always welcome at the building suppliers in Sheep Street, to the extent that Colm, the manager, kept him a special tin of custard creams. In the circumstances, The Divil felt that sticking to his diet when he was there would be embarrassing, and Fury, being a reas
onable man, agreed. They were sitting in the office, a shed at the yard entrance, and while Fury and Colm drank tea out of chipped mugs, The Divil was crunching a biscuit under the desk.
Colm looked down and nudged him with his foot. ‘Will you have another?’
The Divil looked up at Fury, who shook his head. With a deep sigh, the little dog licked his whiskers and Colm gave Fury a shove that nearly upended his mug of tea. ‘Ah, for God’s sake, Fury, a bird never flew on one wing!’
‘Fair enough so. Give him another, and you can come and catch my rats when all his teeth fall out.’
‘You’re a terrible hard man, do you know that?’
‘I do. And while we’re on the subject, you won’t get round me on the price of that load of timber, so don’t even try.’
‘I’ve told you before, if you don’t like my prices you’re free to go elsewhere.’
‘And I’ve told you there’s no point in trying to call my bluff. And for why? Because I’m not bluffing, Colm. You can hike your prices once a year and you won’t find me complaining . . .’
‘I will!’
‘All right, fair point, you will. But I’ll still pay. But snaking them up in mid-March isn’t on.’
‘It’s not me, man, it’s the suppliers.’
‘Well, tell them where to stick their badly cured pitch pine.’
‘If I did that you’d be in here complaining I didn’t stock it.’
‘No. If you did that they wouldn’t waste their time trying to cheat you. They’d give you the stuff at a decent price and feck off and cheat somebody else.’
‘You’ve no notion how this Brexit thing’s been affecting suppliers.’
‘No, nor I don’t want to hear of it either, not with The Divil under the desk. The B word does terrible things to his blood pressure.’
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