Firefly Summer Read online

  FIREFLY

  SUMMER

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Also by Maeve Binchy

  Praise for Firefly Summer

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409049166

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2006

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Maeve Binchy, 1987

  Maeve Binchy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1988 by Century Hutchinson Ltd.

  First published by Arrow Books in 1997

  Arrow Books The Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

  Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, New South Wales 2061, Australia

  Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Random House (Pty) Limited Isle of Houghton, Corner of Boundary Road & Carse O’Gowrie, Houghton 2198, South Africa

  Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  ISBN 9780099498667 (from Jan 2007)

  ISBN 0 09 949866 9

  Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

  I want to thank all my friends for their support and encouragement, particularly Rosie Cheetham and Chris Green. And to Gordon Snell, who has made my life so good and so happy, I would like to dedicate Firefly Summer with all my gratitude and all my love.

  London and Dublin, summer 1987

  FIREFLY

  SUMMER

  Maeve Binchy was born in County Dublin and was educated at the Holy Child Convent in Killiney and at University College Dublin. After a spell as a teacher in various girls’ schools, she joined the Irish Times, for which she wrote feature articles and columns. Her first novel, Light a Penny Candle, was published in 1982, and since then she has written more than a dozen novels and short-story collections, each one of them a bestseller. Several have been adapted for cinema and television, most notably Circle of Friends in 1995. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award at the British Book Awards in 1999. She is married to the writer and broadcaster Gordon Snell.

  Visit her website at www.maevebinchy.com

  Also by Maeve Binchy

  Fiction

  Light a Penny Candle

  Circle of Friends

  Victoria Line, Central Line

  Dublin 4

  The Lilac Bus

  Echoes

  Silver Wedding

  The Copper Beech

  The Glass Lake

  Evening Class

  Tara Road

  Scarlet Feather

  Quentins

  Nights of Rain and Stars

  Non-fiction

  Aches & Pains

  Praise for Firefly Summer

  ‘Firefly Summer is warm, humorous, sad and happy. Reading it is a joy’

  Irish Independent

  ‘Binchy’s novels are never less than entertaining. They are, without exception, repositories of common sense and good humour . . . chronicled with tenderness and wit’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Maeve Binchy is one of the few writers who can pull at your heartstrings . . . reading her books is like gossiping with old friends’

  Daily Express

  PART ONE

  1

  The sun came in at a slant and hit all the rings and marks on the bar counter. Kate Ryan managed to take a cloth to them at the same time as she was kicking off her house shoes and pulling on her wellington boots. She tucked her handbag under the counter and in almost the same movement opened the kitchen door to make sure that Eddie and Declan weren’t torturing the new girl. The new girl had red eyes and a sad face and was missing her farm home. She might run back to it if Eddie and Declan were at their worst. But mercifully the appeal of the tortoise was still very strong even after three weeks. They lay on their stomachs and fed it stalks of cabbage, screaming with delight when it accepted them.

  ‘John,’ she shouted, ‘will you come down to the bar, I have to go across the river and see what’s keeping the twins. They have to be polished and smartened up for the concert and there isn’t a sign of them.’

  John Ryan groaned. His train of thought was gone again. He had thought he would manage an hour or two on his own, struggling with his poetry. ‘Give me a minute,’ he called, hoping to catch the idea before it was gone.

  ‘No, they’ll be late as it is. Listen, bring your paper and pencil down, there’s likely to be no one in, but there has to be someone behind the counter.’

  The door banged behind her and John Ryan saw, through the bedroom window, his wife run across the small footbridge opposite the pub. She climbed over the gate like a girl instead of a woman in her thirties. She looked altogether like a girl in her summer dress and her boots as she ran lightly across to the ruined house, Fernscourt, to find the twins.

  He sighed and went down to the pub. He knew there were poet publicans, he knew there were men who wrote the poetry of angels in the middle of the stinking trenches of war. But he wasn’t like that.

  John Ryan moved slowly, a big man with a beer belly that had grown on him sneakily during the years standing behind a bar, jowls that had become flabby at the same trade. His wedding picture showed a different person, a thinner more eager-looking figure, yet the boyish looks hadn’t completely gone. He had a head of sandy brown hair only flecked with grey and big eyebrows that ne
ver managed to look ferocious even when he willed them to, like at closing time or when he was trying to deal with some outrage that the children were reported to have committed.

  Kate had hardly changed at all since their wedding day, he often said, which pleased her, but she said it was just a bit of old plamas to get out of having to stand at the bar. It was true, though; he looked at the girl with the long, curly dark hair tied back in a cream ribbon that matched her cream dress and coat. She looked very smart on that wet day in Dublin, he could hardly believe she was going to come and live with him in Mountfern. Kate hadn’t developed a pot belly from serving drinks to others, as she often told him sharply. She said that there was no law saying you must have a drink with everyone who offered you one or pull a half pint for yourself to correspond with every half-dozen pints you pulled for others.

  But then it was different for women.

  John was the youngest of the seven Ryan children and the indulged pet of a mother who had been amazed and delighted at his arrival when she had been sure that her family was complete. He had been overfed and given fizzy drinks with sweet cake as long as he could remember. As a lad the running and leaping and cycling miles to a dance had kept him trimmer. Now, between sessions of writing his poetry and serving in his bar, it was a sedentary life.

  He didn’t know if he wanted it for his sons; he had such hopes for them – that they might see the world a bit, study maybe and go on for the university. That had been beyond the dreams of his parents’ generation. Their main concern had been to see their children well settled into emigration; the church had helped of course, educating two nuns and two priests out of the Ryan family. John didn’t see any vocation amongst his own offspring. Michael was dreamy and thoughtful: maybe a hermit? Or Dara a resourceful Reverend Mother somewhere? Eddie was a practical child, possibly a missionary brother teaching pagan tribes to build huts and dig canals. Declan the baby. Maybe they could make a curate out of him near home where they could keep an eye on him.

  This was all nonsense, of course. None of them would end up within an ass’s roar of a religious life. Still, John Ryan never saw the future standing surrounded by three sons and possibly his daughter all in the trade.

  There would never be enough business, for one thing. Like many Irish towns Mountfern had the appearance of having far too many pubs already. If you went down the main street, Bridge Street, there were no less than three public houses. Foley’s at the top of the town, but that was hardly a pub at all these days, just a counter really and a few friends of old Matt Foley drinking at night, they’d hardly know how to serve a real customer. Then there was Conway’s which was more a grocery but it had the bar at the back. Conway’s had a clientele of secret drinkers, people who didn’t admit to any kind of drinking, who were always going out for a packet of cornflakes or a pound of flour and would toss back a brandy for their health. Often too, it had a funeral business since old Barry Conway was the undertaker as well. It seemed only right to come back to his place to drink when someone had been buried up on the hill. And Dunne’s was always on the verge of closing. Paddy Dunne never knew whether to reorder supplies, he always said that it would hardly be worth it since any day now he’d be going to join his brother who ran a pub in Liverpool. But then either there would be a downturn in the fortunes of the Liverpool pub or an upswing in the drinking patterns of Mountfern. There was an unsettled air about his place and constant speculation about how much he would get if he were to sell his licence.

  John Ryan’s pub had its rivals then, three of them in a small place like Mountfern. Yet he had all the business that came from the River Road side of the place. He had the farmers on this side of the town. It was a bigger and better bar than any of the other three, it had not only more space but it had more stock. And there were many who liked the walk out along the river bank.

  John Ryan knew that he was a man who had been given a great deal by fate. Nobody had gathered him up to swoop him off to a religious order when he was a young impressionable boy. Neither had he been sponsored out to a life of hard graft in America like two of his elder brothers. By all their standards he had a life of ease and peace where he should well have been able to run his business and write his poetry.

  But he was a man who did one thing at a time, almost overmethodically, too predictable sometimes for his wife who felt that people should be able to fire on several cylinders at the same time.

  John wanted time to write or time to serve drink, he couldn’t switch from one mode to another like lightning. Like Kate. He couldn’t switch towards the children like she could as well. Either they were good or they weren’t. He wasn’t able to see the swift changes of mood like Kate was. He would not be cross and then smile minutes later. If he was cross he was very cross indeed. It was rare but it was all-embracing when it happened. One of Daddy’s great angers was remembered long, whereas Mammy had a dozen quick and easily forgotten angers in a week.

  John sighed again at his wife’s swiftness and the annoyance at having to leave his work, his real work, just at that time. He knew that in this pub fate had handed him something that many a man in Ireland would envy mightily. It didn’t bring in enough money for them to employ another pair of hands, but it wasn’t so slack that a man could sit at the counter and write undisturbed. John Ryan hadn’t brought his paper and pencil with him, any more than his thoughts. If customers saw you with paper and pencil they thought you were doing the accounts and making a small fortune. Anyway what would have been the point? There was Jack Coyne from the garage who had just sold a heap of rusty metal to some unsuspecting farmer and they were in to seal the bargain with a pint.

  Jack Coyne had a face like a ferret and two sharp eyes looking round him for a bargain or a business deal. He was a small wiry man equally at home underneath a car, covered in grease and shouting out about the extent of the repairs, or in a suit showing off his newly acquired vehicles which was what he called his second-hand stock. Everything about him seemed to be moving, he never stood still, even now at the bar he was shifting, moving from foot to foot.

  ‘Great day, John,’ said Jack Coyne.

  ‘It’s been a great day all the time,’ said John, preparing to pull the pints.

  ‘Bad for the crops,’ the farmer said.

  ‘When were you lot ever pleased with the weather?’ Jack Coyne laughed, the happy sound of a man who could sell second-hand cars no matter what the weather did.

  The children of Mountfern had a place to play like no other children in the land. It was Fernscourt, the ruined house on the bank of the River Fern. It had been burned down one day forty years ago in 1922 during the Troubles. The Fern family had not been there on the day of the fire, they had been gone for many months before.

  The children often asked their grandfathers about the fire but found a strange lapse of memory. The passions that had run so high in those years had settled down as time went by. The Ferns and all they symbolised had been forgotten. Their house stood as a beautiful ruin, where once it had stood as a beautiful big empty shell anyway. Now as a place to spend the long summer days it was quite simply perfect.

  The orchards that the Ferns had asked their gardeners to plant all those years ago still grew wild and plentiful. The apple trees didn’t know that the Ferns had gone. Their old gnarled branches bent to the ground, sometimes making even more places for the children to play.

  There was thick trailing ivy everywhere over the walls that remained of the house. The outhouses which had once been the stableyard had survived better than the main house. Here there were still rooms with roofs to run through, here there were limestone arches and well-made stone walls. In the days when Fernscourt had been built people saw the stables as being very important; guests would expect them to be of the same high standard as the rest of the house.

  As Kate Ryan marched through the laurels that grew wild now on each side of the path up from the river she could hear the cries and the laughter. She thought back on her own childhood in a
small silent house in Dublin, her mother always an invalid. She had not had brothers and sisters to play with; friends were frowned on and kept well away from the home.

  These children had a wild, free life by comparison.

  Fernscourt belonged to the group that were here today. Those who were the right age for it. It had always been like that. You were too young if you were Eddie and Declan’s age, you were hunted away and sent about your business, which was anywhere but here. Then the older boys and girls went to the bridge and showed off to each other. Where boys dived from the ledge to oohs and ahhs, where girls were sometimes pushed in horseplay and had to climb up the bank with wet dresses clinging.

  But if you were in Fernscourt, no other world existed. It had been a fine summer and as soon as any work that had to be done in the various homes in Mountfern was finished they gathered, coming in dribs and drabs across the fields, up the River Road and across the footbridge in front of Ryan’s, or some of them braving the brambles and briars on the towpath at the other side of the river, a disused way that saw no traffic these days.

  Fernscourt belonged to all the children but it was Dara and Michael’s special home. The twins had their own place, a pretend-house. They played there even when none of the others came up to join them. They had an old table and two broken stools from the bar. There was cutlery too, a twisted fork and a rusty knife, and some chipped plates. These were for private feasts. Ever since they had been old enough to go across to Fernscourt alone the twins had said that this is where they would live when they were grown up.

  It would be nice and near home, they said reassuringly, but it would be theirs. They would buy the whole place and have a boat and go everywhere by river instead of by road.

  It would be their palace, their castle, their home.

  It was because they lived so close to the place, because they could see it from their windows over the pub, and they could go there every day winter and summer, that they felt it was their own.