The Library at the Edge of the World

by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  Aideen’s coffee was as good as ever, hot and fresh with an expertly feathered design in the foam on top. As she sipped it, Hanna wondered if the consultation meeting announced on the poster that she’d hung up that morning might indeed be a cynical cover for a fait accompli. If so, with the county’s entire development budget plowed into Carrick and Ballyfin, businesses in other parts of the peninsula would find it hard to survive. Which, despite Aideen and Bríd’s efforts and energy, didn’t bode well for HabberDashery.

  Thinking about Aideen and Bríd made her think about Jazz, whose next long stopover would be spent with Malcolm. Each time Jazz visited the London house Hanna wanted to ask her if the wallpaper had been changed, and if Tessa had uprooted the pear trees or moved the furniture. But to discuss Tessa at all was to risk Jazz discovering the true length of Malcolm and Tessa’s relationship. And to discuss the London house would release memories of a past so corrupted by deceit that Hanna doubted her own ability to continue to endorse Malcolm’s lies. Now, still troubled by his accusations in that idiotic hotel room, she reminded herself that she had to be responsible: her feelings were irrelevant in comparison to her daughter’s peace of mind. Yet standing in the kitchen in the back of Lissbeg Library, her own mind still wandered up a curved mahogany staircase polished with beeswax to a room hung with hand-printed paper, where soft gray fabrics complemented sage-green walls.

  But that narrow London house belonged to the past. Her future lay in Maggie’s house with its huge view of the ocean. Crumpling the paper that had held her almond cake, Hanna dropped it into her empty coffee cup and went to turn the sign on the library door. Her job might bore her but at least it was secure. And now the time had come for a new leap of faith, a perilous investment of love and creativity, which would transform a hollow stone shell into a sanctuary. Her choice was made, her money committed, and nothing could stop her now.

  34

  With the library meeting still ahead of him, Conor spent half the day imagining disasters. What if hundreds of people turned up and they started to riot? What if his mind went blank? What if Miss Casey kept the library open and no one turned up at all? To make things worse, the tractor was still giving him trouble and Joe pointed out pretty sharply that this was the second night in a row that he’d disappeared for the evening.

  To give himself confidence, Conor took great care over his appearance, which didn’t help the mood as he set off. Joe made his usual sniffy remark about hair product, and, feeling pressured, Conor couldn’t laugh it off. Instead he aimed a smack at Joe’s head and his dad let out a roar at him. So the last thing he heard as he went to start the Vespa was his mum’s anxious voice trying to keep the peace.

  When he arrived the library was empty except for Oliver the dog man and Aideen, who was setting out chairs. Apparently Miss Casey had rung over to the council offices and arranged to borrow some more so, dumping his crash helmet in the kitchen, Conor crossed the courtyard to collect them. The door was locked but he rapped on the window and the guy let him in. Conor recognized him as Liam Ryan, whose people kept a garage on the outskirts of Lissbeg. The entrance hall still felt a bit convent-like with its dark paneling, tiled floor, and gloomy holy pictures that had never got taken down. Liam led him through to a waiting area between two offices.

  “Miss Casey said you’d want about eight chairs.”

  Conor had no idea how many they’d want. At one stage he’d been feverishly imagining sixty or even six hundred. But he nodded and began to stack them.

  Liam gave him a hand. “I’ll be here for a while yet, so I’ll drop over and collect them when you’re done.”

  By the time Dan arrived with Bríd, Miss Casey had set up a lectern and Aideen and Conor had arranged the chairs in a semicircle by the Biography section. At seven o’clock the gathering consisted of Conor himself, Dan, Bríd, Aideen, two of Dan’s friends, a girl chewing gum, Miss Casey, and Oliver the dog man. As soon as Dan’s crowd arrived they spread out across six seats, and one of the lads put his arm round the girl and his feet on the chair in front of him. Within seconds Miss Casey had pounced, fixing him with a cold eye till his feet were on the floor and pointedly offering the waste bin and a box of tissues to his girlfriend. Chewing gum was not permitted in the library, she said, and they all looked away discreetly while the girl took a lump of pink gum out of her mouth, wrapped it in a tissue, and dropped it in the bin. This was followed by an excruciating few minutes when nothing happened at all, after which Fury O’Shea drifted in and went to lean against the wall. Then Miss Casey went to the lectern and told them all they were welcome. At the back of his mind Conor had vaguely hoped that at the last minute she might run the event herself. Instead she introduced him to the audience as their chairman for the evening and walked back to her desk. So, with his tie feeling strangely tight and his feet feeling way too big, Conor went up to the lectern and started to talk.

  Looking back later, it all felt like a dream. He did exactly as Miss Casey had advised, waving his hand at the poster on the wall and saying that the purpose of the gathering was to alert the people of the peninsula to the upcoming consultation meeting. Then he busked his way through a few generalizations while Aideen sat at the front looking encouraging, Bríd surreptitiously checked the photos on Dan’s phone, and a lanky guy in a leather jacket repeatedly interrupted to say that the council and all who worked there were a shower of mangy chancers.

  “Don’t the dogs in the street know that it’s just a case of brown envelopes? Cozy backhanders! You’d never get a word of truth out of that lot if they talked from here to next year!”

  Conor threw a series of increasingly anguished glances at Miss Casey, but it was clear from the look on her face that he was on his own. So, grasping the lectern with both hands, he announced that this was neither the time nor the place for unsubstantiated allegations. What was needed, he said, was public engagement in a democratic process established for the express purpose of information-sharing and feedback. He, for one, was glad of an opportunity not just to hold his elected representatives accountable for their expenditure of taxpayers’ money, but also to work with them responsibly for the benefit of the whole community. Aideen clapped but the guy in the leather jacket flipped a crumpled ball of paper across the room at him, mouthing “brown envelopes.” Fortunately, though, Conor didn’t need to come up with any more gobbledygook because, before anything else could happen, the girl with the chewing gum thumped her boyfriend and told him not to be a bore. At that point the door opened and The Divil shot into the room barking, followed by Liam Ryan. Fury immediately scooped the dog up and closed a fist round his muzzle but, seizing the moment, Conor announced that he wanted to thank everyone for coming, Miss Casey for the use of the library, and the council for the chairs they were sitting on, which Liam had now come to collect. Then, ignoring Liam’s mild protest, he leapt from the lectern, grabbed a chair, and started to stack them. As people began to stand up and help, he could still hear the guy in the leather jacket spouting out stuff about brown envelopes. But at least the meeting was over and no one had started a riot.

  35

  After the meeting in the library Fury O’Shea drove home in the dusk with The Divil beside him on the passenger seat. From time out of mind Fury’s family had owned the ancient forest in the center of the peninsula where the house he had grown up in now stood derelict. The house where he lived now was the first that he had built when he came home twenty years ago, having spent twenty years before that on the building sites in London, unable to bring himself to come home.

  Fury had always known that his elder brother Paudie was a waster. He had known, too, for as long as he could remember, that Paudie would inherit the land and the house, and that that would be a disaster. Their father, a taciturn man with a deep love of the forest, was equally aware of what would happen when his eldest son came into his inheritance. If his wife had still been alive she might have talked sense into him, but she had died when Fury was six. Some of the old man’s
friends did try to reason with him, but he was adamant. Paudie was the heir and the house and the trees were his birthright. There was money set by for Fury’s sister and a few acres of land as a site for Fury if he wanted them, but everything else was for Paudie, though they all knew that he’d drink it away within months of the old man dying.

  And so it had happened. At sixteen Fury had left school and gone to work for his father. By then Paudie was already in the pub six days out of seven and lying in his bed when he wasn’t on a barstool. When their father died a year later Fury decided to emigrate. His sister had gone to America and Fury had no intention of staying to watch Paudie neglect the land that the family had always cherished. It took him three months to raise the price of a ticket to London and a bit of money to keep him afloat till he settled. He wasn’t a builder by trade but he knew lumber, and, like any Finfarran man of his generation, he had grown up knowing how to raise a stone wall and to turn his hand to anything. The better part of the money for his fare to England came from the walls he built for Maggie Casey. Finding Maggie had been a real stroke of luck. The O’Sheas were a well-respected family, and people had sympathy for the orphaned seventeen-year-old Fury, but the early 1970s were a hard time on the peninsula when the weak were often cheated by the strong. Maggie Casey had paid his wages into his hand without docking money for invented misdemeanors, unlike some of the builders he’d worked for in the months before leaving Finfarran.

  In London he settled to the life of an itinerant laborer, knowing that he’d never go home until Paudie died. He had his share of walking the streets and sitting in public libraries to keep warm, but each job he got taught him more about his trade, which meant he was more in demand. News from home reached him through the emigrant grapevine; lads from Finfarran would turn up in pubs in Hammersmith or Cricklewood with stories of how his brother was selling off parcels of woodland for no more than beer money. Then came the day when Fury was sitting in the Empire Café in Kilburn reading the Finfarran Inquirer and saw that the whole forest was up for auction. Knowing what Paudie was capable of, he had rung the auctioneer in Ballyfin and confirmed that his own site was excluded from the deal; though, judging by the auctioneer’s voice at the end of the line, it was just as well that he’d had the sense to call. Then, a few weeks later, on the third stage of scaffolding round a factory out in Croydon, a young fellow from Knockmore had told him that the forest was gone, sold to a man from Dublin who had later gone off to Australia.

  By the time Fury returned to Finfarran, Paudie was dead, having drunk every penny he’d made at the auction, and the huge tract of woodland once managed by the O’Sheas had become a wilderness. The land their father had left to Fury was no more than a few acres of trees and a plot near the crossroads where Gunther and Susan now ran The Old Forge Guesthouse. Susan and Gunther were nice, hardworking people who were no bother at all if Fury wanted to borrow a couple of goats, as he’d done for Hanna Casey. It was a grand guesthouse. But Fury could remember the days of the working forge, when men’s voices could hardly be heard over the clash of iron, and the smith’s furnace had burned red and gold, making sparks in the cavernous darkness. And he could remember days spent among the trees, learning the pathways between them, the shapes of their limbs and their leaves, and the nature of the wood they yielded; hard or soft; straight or knotted; fit to make floorboards or joists, fine furniture or delicate inlay. When he first came home, in the spring of 1993, he had thought that he couldn’t live on the plot that was left to him, looking out at the untended forest and missing the world of his childhood. But in the end, since his site was all he had, he built himself a house.

  In the next year or so he had watched the smith die and the forge fall into decay while a stream of emigrants from the peninsula still moved eastward, making for the boats and the airports. After that he had seen the bubble that was the Celtic Tiger swell and burst, leaving families that had overextended themselves struggling with debt and the legacy of unreal expectations. In those years of boom and bust, builders were asking silly money for badly done work and people were fool enough to pay for it. In Ballyfin, men that Fury had known without a seat to their trousers bought sites when they were cheap and sold them on for a fortune. Some speculators who had arrived back from England were stupid enough to hang on too long watching the prices rise, and had burned their fingers. Others, like old Ger Fitz, who had stayed at home and seen the way the wind was blowing, played a cuter game and came out laughing. Fury himself had bought little and saved enough, and remained beholden to no one.

  Now he turned his van off the road and onto his own land, crunching down the gravel driveway and pulling up by his house. He had set it at right angles to the road with the trees on three sides of it. At the rear was a series of sheds, against one of which he’d built a kennel for The Divil. From the outside, the house had nothing to recommend it but its authoritative proportions. Inside it was sparsely furnished and suited Fury well.

  Entering the living room with The Divil at his heels, he went to a table by the bookshelves and removed a sheet of newspaper from the de Lancy lectern he was working on for Charles Aukin. There was a collection of tools spread out on the table and Fury had already removed the split batten of wood and selected a replacement. The two leaf-shaped pieces of brass were laid aside, wrapped in a cotton rag, and the new screws on which they would pivot were ready and waiting in the upturned lid of an old coffee jar. He had made the screws himself and drilled new holes in the shelf at the front of the lectern to receive them; because of Charles’s ham-fisted DIY job the leaf-shaped pieces of brass designed to hold open the leaves of a book would have to be set farther apart than before. But they would still do their work, and Fury was confident that with subtle changes to the flow of the carving on the original batten, he could achieve a balanced effect on the new one.

  It had been clear to him when he removed the split wood that it was an alteration to the original. At some stage, perhaps three hundred years ago, someone else had replaced or added the batten with its design of carved ash leaves and berries. Perhaps the medieval manuscript books that had first stood on the lectern had been held open by weighted leather bookmarks and the pivoting leaf-shaped pieces of brass had been added later as a high-tech innovation. The lectern was made of ash wood, but Fury could tell that the tree that produced the split batten had hardly been a sapling when the wood used for the rest of the piece had been cut. Centuries of sunlight and beeswax had darkened both the new wood and the old, and now the strip that Fury was carving would almost appear to be gilded in comparison to the shelf he would fix it to. But it, too, would darken with time, telling its own story to those who had eyes to see.

  Pulling a bench up to the table, he picked up the new batten of ash with its half-carved ribbon of berries and leaves. He had countersunk the screw holes among the carved foliage so that as the wood darkened the screws would appear like golden berries. He would be long dead before the effect would show. But sure that didn’t bother him. In fact it was half the pleasure of creating it. Selecting a chisel from those on the table, he reached for his glasses and set to work.

  Fury was a man who liked to know what was happening. He had had no particular reason for attending young Conor McCarthy’s event in Lissbeg Library, for example, but, seeing that something was going on, he had simply wandered in. It was the same impulse that took him to the back of the church on Sundays, and into the corridors of the council building in Carrick if he happened to be passing. Forty years ago, he remembered, Maggie Casey had accused him of having a spying eye. She had handed him a cup of tea by the fire after a day’s work and seen him looking fixedly at the dresser that stood in the alcove by her fireplace. At the time, the dresser had had open shelves above, a broader one at waist height to act as a work surface, and an open space below, originally intended as a coop for hens. Maggie hated hens in the house and spent her life hunting them out of the kitchen, so Fury had offered to put shelves and solid doors at the bottom of it and gl
azed doors above, to keep dust off the glasses and ware. He built them of ash wood and the piece he was carving now was left over from that job—stored with other offcuts in a tin box in a shed, it had kept its golden color for over forty years.

  The year he came home to Finfarran, Fury had taken a crowbar to the locks on the outbuildings behind his old home and removed the tools, lumber, and other oddments accumulated by his father and grandfather before him; in theory they belonged to the man to whom Paudie had sold the buildings, but he had had no compunction about taking them. He knew that his neighbors on the peninsula said that he was a law unto himself, and he supposed that was true. He believed in acting in accordance with the laws of common sense, and, above all, he hated waste.

  As a cluster of ash berries formed in the ash wood under his chisel he remembered a moment in the council building in Carrick a while back, when Joe Furlong, the owner of the largest hotel in Ballyfin, had emerged from an office in the planning department and dodged into an elevator, clearly hoping he hadn’t been spotted. Knowing that Joe had been dabbling in property development for years, and having heard rumors about the council’s impending plan, common sense had suggested to Fury what was going on. Then a few days later he noticed Joe Furlong and Ger Fitzgerald with their heads together in a Ballyfin pub. Tonight at Conor’s event in the library the usual accusations about councillors taking bribes in brown envelopes had been thrown about by a lad in a leather jacket. But Fury thought it unlikely that anything so crude had occurred. The councillors didn’t need bribing; the proposed plan incorporated a new, high-tech complex that would add hugely to the kudos and comfort of their jobs, and, to be fair, there must be those among them who believed it would also improve the service that the council provided to the community. Still, in order for the plan to get support and approval in government circles in Dublin it needed quiet words in the right places, which the rich businessmen in Carrick would be able to provide.