by Tyler, Anne
There were some houses that didn’t have coats of paint on them. Like old Mr. Slattery’s tall house with the steps going up to it, which was covered with ivy. And the Garda barracks was just stone, as was the presbytery. The Classic Cinema had once been a smart beige color but it had gotten very shabby-looking, with paint peeling off. Mr. Williams, who was the rector-in-charge of the small Protestant church, had a cottage that was all covered with climbing roses—his wife spent from dawn to dusk gardening. To the outsider Mountfern looked a slow sleepy place, badly planned, straggling toward a river, but not having any real purpose.
It had been an estate village, of course, a collection of small holdings which all depended on the big house. The days of a community depending on one family seat for livelihood and living quarters were long gone. But Mountfern had not died with the house.
The farmers would always need somewhere to send their children to school, and shops where their wives could sell vegetables, eggs and poultry, where they could buy the essentials without having to travel to the big town, sixteen miles down the main road.
The visitor might have thought Mountfern a backwater but there were few visitors to have such thoughts. It hadn’t anything to offer to the sightseer; you had to have some reason to come to Mountfern, otherwise you would think it was a place where nothing happened at all.
Dara and Michael Ryan never thought of Mountfern like that. It was the center of their world and always had been. They hardly ever left it except to go to the town maybe four times a year. They had been to Dublin of course, with the school on educational tours, and once with Dad and Mam when they were very young and there had been an excursion to see Santa Claus in the various Dublin shops. Eddie always resented hearing about this excursion and wanted to know why it hadn’t been repeated for the rest of the family.
“Because Santa Claus would vomit if he saw you,” Dara had explained.
This evening, however, they had forgotten what a thorn in the flesh their younger brother Eddie was. They were setting out with a purpose. To find out what was happening to Fernscourt. They had seen the men with the measuring instruments but had not wanted to ask them straight out—it was almost too direct. They felt without actually saying it to each other that they would find out what was the collective view first. Then armed with this knowledge they would face the people that Loretto thought were making a version of The Quiet Man (a tamer version, the scenery in this part of the Irish midlands wasn’t spectacular and there were very few Maureen O’Haras around the place).
They passed Coyne’s Motor Works before they got to the bridge. Jack was working as he always seemed to be, day and night, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
The twins had heard their father say that it was the mercy of God that Jack Coyne hadn’t set himself alight with all the petrol and oil around the place, and that one day he could well blow the whole of Mountfern sky high with his dangerous practices. Dara and Michael didn’t like Mr. Coyne much, he always looked as if he were about to have a fight with someone. He was old of course, nearly as old as Mam and Dad, small and pointed looking. He wasn’t married, and he always said that a man who voluntarily took on a wife to nag the life out of him, and spend all he earned, was a man on whom no sympathy should be wasted. Dara had once said to him that if everyone had felt the way he did, the world would have come to an end long ago. Jack Coyne said that everyone might have been better off if it had, and let Dara remember that when she grew up and her head got full of nonsense about love and the like.
“Good evening Mr. Coyne.” It didn’t matter that he might be an old grouch, they still had to be polite and salute him.
“Out gallivanting,” he said disapprovingly. “Still I hear that they’ve big plans for Fernscourt. That’ll put a halt to your gallop, the lot of you.”
“What plans?” The twins ignored the gratuitous offense; they had never done anything to irritate Jack Coyne.
To his own immense annoyance Jack Coyne didn’t know what plans were afoot. Those fellows doing a survey had been far from forthcoming. But he had his own views.
“A big religious house I hear, so that’s the end of all the trick-playing by the children of this parish, I’m glad to say. You’ll have to start to do a day’s work for a change and be like we were at your age.”
“Is it brothers or nuns would you say?”
“That would be telling,” said Jack Coyne, who didn’t know.
“Isn’t he a pig?” Dara said cheerfully when they had left him. “A small dark offensive-looking pig.”
“Imagine him young,” Michael said, as they passed the bag of toffees between them. It was a feat of imagination too difficult for either of them.
“An offensive piglet,” Michael said, and they were in a fit of giggles by the time they reached the bridge and turned left up the main street.
There would be no place for Dara and Michael on the bridge, even Kitty Daly was a bit too young for the small group that met there in the evenings. They saw fellows sitting up on the stone parapet clowning, and a group of girls laughing. There was Teresa Meagher whose mother and father were always fighting. If you went past Meagher’s any night when the shop was closed you always heard voices raised. Teresa was going to get a job in Dublin it was always being said, but then her parents would cry and cling on to her so she had to relent and stay. Nobody on the bridge was courting. If you were courting you were down the river bank, or in Coyne’s wood, or at the pictures.
Devotions were over and Father Hogan was closing up the church. He waved at Michael.
“Any hope you’d be able to sing Panis Angelicus?” he said without much confidence.
“No Father, sorry Father, I haven’t a note in my head,” Michael said.
“Come on out of that, you were in the choir at the concert. Why don’t you …”
“No Father, I can’t sing, and anyway you’d never know what might happen to my voice.” Michael had been dying for his voice to break like Tommy Leonard’s had. Every morning he tried it out and was disappointed that it still sounded the same.
Dara was no help. “You should hear him singing from the bathroom, Father, he’d have the tears in your eyes.”
“I’ll kill you,” Michael said.
“Well I’m certainly not going to beg and cajole you.” Father Hogan was huffy now. “I didn’t think a Catholic boy would have to be flattered and pleaded with to sing in the House of God.”
Dara realized she had gone too far.
“I was only saying that to tease him, Father. Really and truly he’d be no good, he’d embarrass you, it’s like an old tin can. I know he would sing if he could, but he’s just in the choir to make up the numbers for Brother Keane, to sort of fill the stage up a bit.”
Father Hogan said that was all right then.
“Now.” Dara was triumphant. “Didn’t I rescue you?”
“You needn’t have gone on so much.” Michael hadn’t enjoyed being described as an old tin can that would embarrass you. There were times when Dara felt the need to give far too many explanations. They had reached Tommy Leonard’s house. The stationery shop was closed for business so the twins knocked at the door beside the shop. Tommy was there to greet them, his finger on his lips. Behind him a voice called.
“Where are you going, Thomas?”
“Just out for a bit of a walk.”
“All right, but be back at nine o’clock, and no giggling and playing with all that crowd of hooligans.”
“Right oh.” Tommy was good-natured. It was easier not to bring the whole thing down around your ears with a catechism of questions. That was Tommy Leonard’s view. Just say yes and no, don’t get involved in long explanations. Michael thought he was dead right; if he had desperate parents like Tommy’s he would be exactly the same. Dara thought that this was entirely the wrong way to handle things, and if she were Tommy she would make it all clear from the word go, instead of giving in to all the cracked notions. That only made them come up with more cra
cked notions still.
Maggie Daly said they were to wait until she showed Dara the gorgeous yellow dress that had arrived in the parcel from America. There were often parcels from America for all of them. Not as many as years back, when Mountfern was poorer maybe, and American uncles and aunts more generous, or postage cheaper. An American parcel was a rarity nowadays. Mrs. Daly probably would say nothing about it and its contents, but Maggie was so excited by the yellow net that she couldn’t wait to show it off.
The bad thing was that Kitty was in the bedroom.
Kitty yawned when Dara came in. “Going to try on the yellow are you?”
“Well look at it anyway,” Dara said. Kitty was a pain.
“Not at all, you’re coming to try it on. Half of Mountfern will pass through here trying it on, I can see that. The room will be full of people in vests and knickers bursting into the yellow dress.”
“Are you going to wear it?” Dara asked Maggie, deliberately ignoring the elder girl.
“I don’t think so.” Maggie was pleased to be consulted.
“You see it’s a bit low-necked, and it’s a bit big, I’m kind of lost in it. And it’s so gorgeous it would be a pity to cut it down for me. Wasting so much material, you see.” Her face showed her longing for the yellow satin with an overskirt of yellow net, and with yellow embroidery and sequins on the bodice. It was like something you’d see in the pictures; it was far too old for them in one way, and yet it was a girlish-looking dress with big puff sleeves. Dara was dying to put it on but she wouldn’t give Kitty the satisfaction of watching her.
“You wouldn’t have to get much taken out of it, Maggie, wouldn’t Miss Hayes do a great job on it?” Miss Hayes did some dressmaking in Mountfern but had never been let loose on exotic fabric like this, to their knowledge.
Kitty was lying on her bed reading the life story of Helen Shapiro who had managed to escape from childhood by having a voice that took her into the hit parade. She’d never have escaped if she had been born in Mountfern, Kitty Daly thought darkly.
“It would look ridiculous on Maggie, no matter what Miss Hayes did to it. That’s a dress that needs a chest. Maggie hasn’t got a chest to put into it.”
“None of us has a chest to put into it yet,” Dara cried with spirit. “While we’re waiting we could put a rolled-up pair of socks. Like you often do, Kitty Daly.”
“You told her!” Kitty’s face was dark red with rage, and she looked menacingly at Maggie.
“I didn’t know!” Maggie was transparently honest and terrified.
“Come on, Maggie, let’s leave Kitty the room to herself, we’re only in the way.” Dara felt it was time to escape. They hung up the yellow dress carefully and pulled back the transparent plastic cover that came with it. It was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. They envied the cousin of the Dalys somewhere in America who had worn it to her Junior Prom. Whatever a Junior Prom might be.
They were going to the Protestant graveyard at the top of the town. Nobody would disturb them there. Mr. Williams the vicar had realized that the children didn’t tear around playing hide and seek among the headstones, there was no disrespect to the graves of the various members of the Fern family and the rest of the small Protestant community hereabouts.
It was a peaceful place for the children to come and talk. Mr. and Mrs. Williams had no children of their own, they were indulgent with the children of others.
Up Bridge Street the little band walked slowly. They looked wistfully at the Classic which was showing The Glass Mountain. Imagine having the money and freedom just to drop in to the pictures whenever you wanted to.
“We’ll be able to do that when we’re old,” Dara said.
Tommy Leonard didn’t think so; he thought being old was going to be more of the same.
They looked into Conway’s grocery and pub. At the back, hidden away, they saw the feet of three drinkers in the discreet bar area. They often had a game guessing whose feet they were.
They never tried to play this game in any other pub since anyone who drank in Foley’s or Dunne’s, or indeed in Ryan’s itself, did so openly. It was only in Conway’s that they pretended not to be there.
Beyond Conway’s was Dr. White’s and they called there for Liam and Jacinta. That was it for tonight; some of the other children they played with lived out in the countryside, and others weren’t allowed out to wander in the evenings. There were some boys who were up at the brothers’ in the football field and there were some girls who had to help in their houses, or who had been bad and therefore denied the night’s outing.
The six went to the graveyard and sat on a tombstone which they particularly liked.
It was the memorial for a William James Fern who had died in 1881 at Majuba Hill in the Transvaal, aged eighteen. It was during the Boer War they knew that, and he had been fighting for the British against the Dutch in South Africa.
“It was a long way to go,” Maggie Daly often said.
“I suppose he wanted to get away.” Tommy Leonard could understand it only too well.
Dara had never understood it.
“What did he want to go off and fight in other people’s wars for? If he was a Mountfern man then, why wasn’t he here having a great time? And if he was eighteen he could have done what he liked. Think of it, he could have gone to the Classic every night.” She looked at their faces. “That is if the Classic was there in the 1880s, which I don’t think it was.”
But tonight they didn’t talk long about the dead William James who fell at Majuba Hill. Tonight they talked about what was going to happen to William James’s old home. What was happening in Fernscourt.
They were not alone, this little group, in their speculations. If they could have seen into every house down Bridge Street and along River Road they would have come across conversations on the same theme.
Over in Foley’s Bar at the top of the town old Matt Foley and his friends said that there was oil sighted there. Some fellow had pulled a pike from the fern and his gills were full of oil. So the drilling would start any day now.
Next door to Foley’s, in her neat little house, Judy Byrne the physiotherapist sat with Marian Johnson whose family owned the Grange, a country house which took guests of a superior type and even arranged hunting for them. They were women of around the same age, one side or the other of forty, not married and not likely to find any husbands at this stage of their lives in this part of the country. Neither ever admitted that to the other.
They had heard that Fernscourt was going to be an agricultural college, which would be very good news indeed as it would mean lectures and all kinds of talent not seen in these parts before. While saying that the people would probably be quite unspeakable they were having a small sherry to celebrate.
Seamus Sheehan in the Garda barracks was taking a lot of abuse from his wife. Why had he heard nothing about Fernscourt? Everyone else in the place had some view on what was happening. There was no point in being married to the sergeant if he was the one man in the whole country who seemed to be too remote as to inquire what was going on in his own back yard.
Next to the barracks Jimbo Doyle lived with his mother. Jimbo’s mother had heard that the new place had been bought by an order of contemplative nuns. They would have a grille on the window and pull it back so that one nun, the Reverend Mother, would be able to address the outside world. When it was necessary, which would not be often.
Jimbo’s mother told him that they would need a reliable man around the place, and that he should get in quick before someone else did.
Jimbo, whose idea of opportunities in life did not include being a reliable handyman to an order of contemplative nuns, asked what his mother expected him to do. Write to the pope, or just the bishop saying he was the man? His mother said he should be glad that someone in the family was looking to the practical side of things instead of singing raucous songs and laughing loud laughs.
In Paddy Dunne’s pub all talk of emigration to Liverpoo
l to the brother’s pub had stopped. This was now the hub of the universe. Paddy Dunne had it from one of the traveling salesmen who came in trying to get him to take biscuits. Biscuits in a pub! Anyway this man knew all about Fernscourt: it was an agricultural research place. Foreigners were going to come and test soil and plants and the place was going to be a boom town as a result of it. The smart man would expand now or expand a little and then sell when prices were going up. It provided hours of speculation.
Sheila Whelan sat in the comfortable sitting room behind the post office and listened to a concert on Radio Eireann. She loved all that Strauss music and it didn’t sweep her into a world of people waltzing in Vienna; instead it reminded her for some reason of the first time she had come to Mountfern with Joe Whelan. He had taken her to Coyne’s wood which was full of bluebells. Literally carpeted with them. They had picked armfuls of them and Joe had told her that he loved music and that he would take her to concerts. He told her lots of things. Sheila lay back in her chair, tired. She knew a bit more about Fernscourt than the others because the telegrams all came through her post office. But she didn’t know it all. She sighed and wondered what the changes would mean.
Across the road in the Whites’, the doctor was telling his wife all the theories he had heard. It was mainly nuns, he reported, but there was a considerable weight of opinion behind a college, and a strong vocal minority thought it was going to be a development of twelve luxury bungalows each with a quarter acre of garden and a river view.
“What would be the best?” Mrs. White wondered.
“It depends where you stand.” Dr. White was philosophical. “If Jacinta were going to join the Poor Clares or whatever, it would be nice to have her down the road; on the other hand if she were to land a millionaire let’s hope she might buy one of the new bungalows.”
“It’s going to make everyone look out for themselves,” said Mrs. White suddenly, as if the thought had just hit her.