The Library at the Edge of the World

by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  “We’re lucky here because Gunther’s cousin in Stuttgart has a travel agency and sends people on to us. And we get groups of hikers who always come back once they’ve found us. But half the B&Bs back here have given up trying.”

  Hanna gave Susan the book she’d ordered and helped her choose a Billy Goats Gruff picture book for Holly, her five-year-old daughter. Then, having served the small line of people who had been sitting on the wall waiting for her, she drove on to her next stop at Cafferky’s shop and post office. Like her own family shop in Crossarra thirty years ago, it was run by a couple who lived upstairs and tended a garden out back. The same basic groceries that Hanna remembered from her youth were stacked on the shelves but she often wondered what Tom would have thought of the sandwiches and smoothies that Fidelma Cafferky made to order, or the little Internet café, which consisted of a computer and a couple of tables in the back room. She had mentioned it to Mary once, who had tossed her head and sniffed.

  “Sure, wasn’t Tom Casey the first man for miles around to put in the electric bacon slicer? There wasn’t one of us in those days that was backwards in coming forwards when it came to innovation. We’d never have survived if we’d been stuck in the Ark!”

  Looking at the Cafferky’s tidy shop and the Internet café with its clearly written list of instructions and charges on the wall, Hanna could see that her mother was right. The people of Finfarran had always been resourceful. Many of them now worked two or three jobs to make a living, sometimes alternating between summer and winter, and often keeping a small farm going as well. Mentally reproaching herself for not being more grateful for her own safe job in the library, Hanna asked Fidelma how Dan’s eco-trips were going. Fidelma shrugged and made a face.

  “He’s hanging on by the skin of his teeth, if the truth be told. We keep hoping for a bit of investment in the roads to bring more visitors round this side of the peninsula. And we keep being promised it. But you wouldn’t know. And, of course, if they come up with some big motorway like the road to Ballyfin they’ll have the place destroyed altogether.”

  Her husband was sick to death writing letters to the council about it.

  “He’s written so often that at this stage they think he’s a right crank. And the trouble is, Miss Casey, that he’s getting terribly bitter. And he has Dan almost as cynical as himself.”

  Fidelma forced a smile and turned to go into the shop.

  “You’ll have a cup of tea in your hand anyway, while you’re here?”

  She brought it out on a tray with a scone hot from the oven and a second cup for herself. After drinking it and serving an old man who had come to return Heart of Darkness, Hanna was about to get back in the cab when a car drew up and a young woman with tousled red hair got out, followed by a toddler in paint-spattered dungarees. The woman, who was wearing an oversized t-shirt, leggings, and quantities of amber beads, approached the van with a pile of books, raising her voice while she was still several yards away.

  “Morning, Miss Casey. I think some of these are late.”

  Hanna stiffened. “When you say ‘some of them,’ Mrs. Kelly, I assume you know which they are? You’ll find the proper return date clearly stamped on the panel inside the cover.”

  “Oh, I’d say it’s only a few of them. Actually, they might all be fine. Though we may have left poor Peter Rabbit in the garden. It was just a case of grab them and go when I realized what day it was.” She beamed. “We’re so lucky, aren’t we, to have the mobile library. I mean, it’s such a community thing. Brings people together. And far better than chucking out a fortune on the Internet on books that you’ll only read once.”

  Grabbing her toddler, Darina pulled a children’s book from the bib of his dungarees. It had been rolled up like a scroll and the pages were scribbled on. The child opened his mouth and roared. Then, staggering over to Hanna, he thumped her on the leg. His mother laughed. “Isn’t he sweet? Such a little bookworm. He doesn’t want to give it back.”

  She picked him up and perched him on her hip where he pushed out his lower lip, stuck his finger up his nose, and glowered at Hanna. Darina joggled him up and down, laughing.

  “Bad, Miss Casey! Naughty, naughty library!”

  This was too much for Hanna. With her back as straight as a ramrod, she marched to the van, placed the books in the proper receptacle, and turned on Darina Kelly.

  “As you can see, Mrs. Kelly, the book has been destroyed. It will have to be replaced and you’ll receive an invoice in the post. There will be an administration charge added and I would appreciate prompt payment. No fines are payable for late returns of children’s books, but there are four fines outstanding on the books that you borrowed from the adult collection. Three of them are in a disgraceful state. I am a librarian, Mrs. Kelly, it is not my job to remove sticky marks from the covers of the books in my charge. I suggest that, if you wish to avail of the public library’s services in the future, you control your child and return your books on time in good order!”

  Later, swinging off the cliff road and entering the shade of the forest, Hanna told herself that losing one’s temper with a woman like Darina Kelly was just pathetic. But what else could you do with someone who raised her child to make a pig’s ear of The Gruffalo?

  20

  Hanna’s mornings now began with a visit to the goat. It was quite relaxing to get up an hour early and drive over to the house between ditches laced with dew-spangled cobwebs to hitch his long tether to the various bits of rubbish newly exposed by his munching. Though it was depressing to discover just how much rubbish there actually was, it reassured her to see how effectively he was clearing the field. In places the length of the grass or the thickness of the undergrowth defeated him, but on the whole he seemed to be content to keep eating as long as there was something he could consume. And, since Hanna’s arrival signaled a move to fresh grazing, he was always pleased to see her.

  This morning she scratched the short wiry hair on his forehead as she untied him from an old clothes wringer and retied him to a dilapidated milk churn full of earth. Then she wandered down the field toward the fallen wall, planning to sit for a while and look out at the ocean. As she crossed the patch from which she had just removed the goat, she stumbled and lost her footing. A moment later, kneeling on the roughly cropped grass, she realized why. This rutted corner toward the bottom of the field was where Maggie had once grown potatoes.

  Closing her eyes, Hanna breathed in the scent of the torn grass and the salt smell of the ocean. She could almost hear Maggie’s voice calling to her, the clatter of the handle of the galvanized iron bucket and the braying of the donkey that once lived in the next field. Her hands explored the earth, recalling the annual excitement of scrabbling at the side of a potato drill and exposing the first of the crop. Grown-ups usually disapproved of lifting spuds while they still had some growth in them. But Maggie, who accepted no diktats but her own, had a love of the little new potatoes she called poreens. So, armed with the bucket, and with strict instructions to use her hands, not the fork, Hanna would be sent out each year to tease out the smallest spuds from the sides of the ridges, leaving the rest to mature for a few weeks longer. When the bucket was half full she’d wash the poreens in running water before Maggie shook them into the black pot that hung from the iron crane and swung them over the fire. In no time at all they’d be done, tipped into a sieve, left to dry by the hearth for a while, and turned out on the kitchen table. Then, sitting on stools on either side of the table under the window, Hanna and Maggie would share them, dipping each mouthful of potato into a bowl of buttermilk. Often that was all the flavoring they had; but sometimes they’d eat them with white pepper or a lump of butter, yellow as cheese, made by one of the few neighbors that Maggie hadn’t fallen out with. It would turn up occasionally, left on the step, wrapped in a green cabbage leaf. Hanna remembered the strong, salty taste of it, the melting texture of the potatoes and the sunlight falling through the small window onto the scrubbed wooden tabl
e. In summer, with the door open and the smell of paraffin lost in the breeze from the ocean, those meals had been wonderful. Of course, part of the pleasure lay in the knowledge that Mary Casey would have disapproved. According to Maggie, God made spuds to be eaten in the hand. According to Mary, God, who made the world, knew all about germs and bacteria, which was why he also made cutlery. Nothing would have made them agree, so Hanna had learned to eat what she was given at Maggie’s and keep quiet about it at home. And now, kneeling between the ridges that she had once explored for hidden treasures, her mouth watered at the thought of those bygone meals.

  Later, sitting at her desk in the library, she wondered if she ought to phone Fury. She had extracted his cell-phone number from Conor, though she hadn’t yet used it. Her budget for Maggie’s house was miniscule compared to what she had spent on the English properties, but she’d impressed on Fury that she wanted things done properly. Naturally, he’d need time to work out the cost of labor and materials and to provide her with information about planning procedures required by the council. But the last time she’d heard from him had been a week ago, when the goat arrived, so it might be worth giving him a ring.

  It was a quiet morning in the library. A couple of young mums stuck their heads round the door at ten o’clock, evidently hoping to see Conor, not Hanna. Realizing that they’d chosen the wrong day, they backed out again, bumped their strollers down the step, and clattered off to find someplace else for a chat. Conor had recently suggested that Hanna might hold a book club in the library one morning a week, specially tailored for mums with small babies. You wouldn’t want toddlers that’d be running round the place, he said, but small babies would be asleep most of the time.

  “And screaming the rest of it.”

  “Yeah, but mostly they’re not. Anyway, they go back to sleep again if you feed them.” Seeing Hanna’s face, he had hurried on. “Not in public, obviously. We could put a screen up in the corner, leave a couple of chairs in there, and maybe one of the tables with a few flowers on it.”

  Even though she had a shrewd suspicion that something similar and far less orderly might already be happening on the days when she wasn’t there, Hanna had been adamant. A library, she told Conor, was a library, not a social club. And certainly not a crèche. For days she was haunted by Conor’s deflated expression but all the same she had managed to stick to her guns. The truth was that having been forced into a job that made her a public figure, she was determined not to go around courting more attention. If she countenanced Conor’s book club, she told herself, there’d be no end to the talk and the gossip, and instead of being in a position to hush it, she’d be expected to join in. And then, with the floodgates opened, she’d be expected to chair committees, organize outings, and initiate all sorts of ghastly projects that would only make matters worse.

  Banishing what she knew was an absurd vision of sitting in a creative writing group sharing the story of her life, Hanna made sure that the door was properly closed behind the departing mums before taking out her phone to ring Fury. Given what he’d already told her, she wasn’t surprised when he didn’t pick up, but she hung on, expecting to get through to his answering service. After a long wait, the line went dead, so she pushed her phone back into her bag and turned her attention elsewhere. Moments later there was a bleep, signaling a text. Hanna reached into her bag, anticipating a response to the missed call. Flipping open her phone she looked at the screen.

  I GOT A LIFT IN FOR RASHERS ARE YOU GOING HOME DIRECT

  With a deep breath, she closed her eyes and resigned herself to driving Mary Casey home from a shopping trip in Lissbeg.

  Having been instructed by text to arrive at one o’clock, Mary bustled in at a quarter to with an oilcloth shopping bag over her arm and her best friend Pat Fitzgerald at her heels. Hanna saw at once that this was a setup. Mary hadn’t cadged a lift into Lissbeg from her long-suffering neighbor Johnny Hennessy just to buy rashers. She’d been dropping hints all week about how she was dying to have a look at Maggie’s house and now, with Pat Fitz by her side, she was daring her daughter to refuse her. Pat, who was wearing a tweed skirt, Velcro strap shoes, and a bright yellow anorak, beamed confidingly at Hanna.

  “Do you know what it is, I’d love to drop in to have a look at your new project on the way out to Mary’s?”

  Mary’s face was the picture of innocence. She’d asked Pat back for a chat, she said. Ger was at some meeting in Carrick so he’d pick her up later and drive her home. But since Hanna was driving them to the bungalow now, wouldn’t it be a great thing altogether if they took a detour round by Maggie’s place?

  Short of having a stand-up fight with her mother with Pat as a spectator, Hanna could see no way out. It was a half-day at the library, so she took minor revenge by instructing them to sit on a bench until one o’clock, which was her official closing time, and then spending a further ten minutes tidying up. Then she led them to the parking lot and moved her car forward to allow them to climb in the back. Pat was highly impressed by the yellow letters stenciled on her parking space.

  “Will you look at that now, Mary, I never noticed it before. I’d say they think a lot of her at the County Library if they did that for her.”

  Glancing in the mirror, Hanna could see them settling down into the backseat as if they were off on an outing. For a mad moment she expected soggy sandwiches and a thermos of tea to emerge from her mother’s shopping bag. Casey family outings in the past had always involved heated arguments about where to have the picnic. Back then, half the fun for Hanna lay in finding a suitable place to have the sandwiches and Tom, who agreed with her, was always up for a bit of a walk to find the right spot. Mary Casey knew better: food was made to be eaten in comfort, not out on some godforsaken rock where you’d be tormented by insects. Whenever she won the argument—which she usually did—their marmite and tomato sandwiches were consumed in the car with the windows up to foil the flies, and old tea towels over their knees to catch the crumbs.

  Pat and Mary chatted cheerfully all the way to Maggie’s place. Looking at the set of Hanna’s shoulders, Mary could see that she was furious about having to take them there but, sure, what matter? Nothing came to you in this life unless you went out and got it and Mary was sick to death of dropping hints and being ignored. Ever since Fury O’Shea had been seen driving his van back toward Maggie Casey’s old house, half the parish had been speculating about Hanna’s daft notion, and the other half had been dropping in to the bungalow and pumping Mary for answers. Not that she’d have said a word, mind, even if she had anything to say. But you felt a right fool sitting there with an air of discretion when you hadn’t a clue yourself what was going on. And hadn’t a mother got a perfect right to know what her own daughter was doing?

  As the car turned off the main road, the two in the back were lost in reminiscence. Weren’t the hedges much better kept in the old days and the trees far shorter? But sure, trees grow a hell of a lot in thirty years. That field there had been Dinny Cassidy’s, or was it Bob Murtagh’s? Anyway, there used to be a couple of sheds up there at the end of it. Unless they were somewhere else. As Hanna slowed down to approach the bend before the house, Mary leaned forward and poked her in the arm. Wasn’t this the best place to park, where the road was wider? Irritated and distracted by her mother’s bony finger, Hanna drove round the bend, parked, and switched off the ignition before looking out at the house. Then, as she turned to open the car door, her jaw dropped in astonishment. The extension was gone. So were the roof slates. At the back of the house, which faced the road, there was a boarded-up doorway and a visible outline where the sagging extension had been keyed into the wall. But the extension’s corrugated roof and the blocks of which it was built had simply vanished. And the pitched roof of the house was just a network of slateless lumber.

  Hanna’s reeling brain fastened on a single fact: since Pat and Mary had no idea what to expect, there was no reason for them to know that she was gobsmacked. So the important
thing was not to look surprised. In the backseat, teeth were being clicked and heads shaken.

  “God, it’s in a bad state all the same, isn’t it?” Pat Fitz squinted out the window looking dubious. “It’s going to take a fair bit of money to set this place to rights, I’d say, Mary.”

  Mary Casey reached briskly for the door handle. “Let’s have a look at it anyway, now that we’re here.”

  Hanna panicked. God alone knew what might have happened round the other side of the house, or in the interior. Mary heaved herself out of the car and stood staring at the house. Pat, who had scrambled out on the other side, wrinkled her nose at the mud. Spotting her opportunity, Hanna spoke quickly.

  “The garden’s a bog at the moment, I’m afraid. I ruined a grand pair of shoes here myself before I got Wellingtons.”

  On the far side of the car, Mary Casey tossed her head. “Garden? What garden? You’ve a muddy mess on this side of the place and an old field at the back.”

  “I know. Look, why don’t we come back another day when it’s less like a building site?”

  This cut no ice with Mary Casey.

  “If this is what you call a building site, girl, you must be raving. Isn’t it a broken-down shed left open to the wind? I thought you said there was a roof on it?”

  With a peremptory wave, Mary simultaneously dismissed Hanna and summoned Pat, who was clearly concerned for her Velcro-strapped shoes. For a moment it looked as if Pat might falter but Mary, who had shod herself for the occasion in large gardening boots, was already lumbering purposefully toward the gate. Realizing that there was no stopping her, Hanna managed to reach it first. At least if she was in front she had a chance of remaining in control. Squaring her shoulders, she opened the gate and led them along the side of the house on what by now had become a well-trodden path. Then, taking a deep breath, she turned the corner at the gable end, stepping from shadow into sunlight. The field above the ocean looked much as it had when she left it that morning. There was no sign of Fury. But tied to the handle of a rusty garden roller there was a second, even larger, grazing goat.