His wife had a habit of organising his day for him, which Vince Hogan did not necessarily appreciate. This Saturday he was to take the lady doctor to Dolphin Cottage and settle her in for the week. She was expecting her daughter to arrive and Teresa had seen to the preparations.
‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble,’ Dr Wentworth had said. ‘I can drive myself over there.’
‘No trouble at all,’ said Teresa. ‘Vince will just check you have everything you need.’
She wanted him out from under her feet – that was the truth of it – while she finished her spring cleaning, poking her brush into every corner. Her cleaning was obsessive in any season, in his view. He stowed the lady doctor’s bag in the boot of her hire car and went back for his keys.
‘And another thing,’ Teresa said, as she unhooked his jacket and gave the hook itself a rub with her duster. ‘On the way back you should visit the Farrellys. Find out how Pat’s getting on.’
Vince shuffled his feet. ‘We’ll be seeing them along with everybody else next week, at his birthday do.’
‘All the more reason to get over there in advance. Show you’re a true friend and not a hanger-on. Ronnie will appreciate it too.’
He couldn’t argue when Teresa had her mind set, so he dutifully escorted the English visitor to Dolphin Cottage and showed her how to operate the heating and hot water. ‘There’s provisions in the fridge,’ he said. ‘To keep you going. But you’ll be wanting to get some other shopping in, I daresay.’
‘I’ll pop out later. I’ll probably need more petrol too, if I’m to get to Tralee.’ She had a low husky laugh. ‘I hope I can afford it.’
‘Don’t ye be worrying,’ Vince assured her. ‘Pay a visit to Jimmy at the pumps, tell him I sent you and he’ll let you fill up on credit. No problem.’
At least he hoped it wouldn’t be a problem. She seemed a trustworthy sort and had paid in advance for the cottage rental. She seemed anxious to be rid of him, too, and he toyed with the notion of going for a jar to set him up for the rest of the day. Why was he so bothered about a social visit to an old friend? Teresa would say, and Vince would find it hard to put into words. But what women didn’t realise was the importance of being equal with your fellows. A man likes to keep his dignity: prefers to recall his prime, when his shoulders were wide and his gut tight and full with a good few pints. Pat, diminished by illness, might not want his weakness exposed.
So it was after a fortifying drink and a chat at the bar that Vince turned up the track to the Farrellys’ farm. In the yard a black and white Border collie was napping beneath an unkempt rose bush. Whiskers of straw eddied and bobbed in a gust of wind, which brought also the warm comforting scent of cowhide. Beyond the sloping fields the ocean lay dimpled and burnished like beaten metal.
He pushed open the farmhouse door and called a greeting. In the scullery a large pair of Wellingtons flopped against the side of the freezer. They had a forlorn, redundant air, but soon enough he banished that piece of melancholy from his mind because weren’t there half a dozen empty pairs of boots scattered over the quarry tiles, some so tiny they must belong to the grandchildren?
He went through to the kitchen which, unlike his own, had never been updated: a peat-fired range, an old electric cooker speckled with grease; a hectically patterned oil cloth crooked on the table. Ronnie was on the couch sorting through a heap of wool skeins. She was seldom without her needles or crochet hook these days, churning out little favours for the craft shops in Dingle. Knitted pouches for your spectacles or your loose change, covers for your photo album or your mobile phone, egg cosies in the shape of chicks – things you’d no idea you needed until you were a tourist sauntering the streets of a colourful small town in the south-west of Ireland. It kept her busy, she said.
Ronnie was wearing a lemon yellow jumper the moths had been at; there was a coffee stain too, but she hadn’t noticed it. Years back she’d been such a fine-looking girl all the lads, Vince included, had the eye for her; Pat had won her with his chest-thumping bravado and the shining temptation of his motorbike. She’d since grown stout, as women do (even Teresa, despite the energy she put into running the holiday cottages now they’d sold the pub) but the extra flesh was beginning to hang loose on Ronnie. Her face, above the lemon, was haggard from the worry over Pat. Her hair was a dense steely grey; her eyebrows very black.
‘Vince!’ she exclaimed, jumping up.
‘I don’t want to intrude,’ he said. ‘I happened to be passing.’
‘When I heard the car I thought you were Anna,’ said Ronnie. ‘She’s bringing the kiddies over. But come in, won’t you. Can I get you a cup of tea?’
‘No thank you. I was wondering…’ He cleared his throat. ‘How is your man? Is he up to visitors?’
She moved away from the kettle and patted a fireside chair. ‘Will you sit down? I know he’d be glad to see you, but he often has a little nap in the afternoon.’ She was through the door – he could see the backs of her legs, still in fine shape, disappearing around the bend in the staircase – before he could make any excuses.
It wasn’t that Vince felt threatened by mortality (at least no more than anyone of his age) and you’d evidence of it every minute in the country anyway. No, it was sick rooms that disagreed with him. He wanted to see his old friend in his right place, in the carver chair with the scratched wooden arms, erect and glowing with his fist curled around a shot of Bushmills. Not rotting as limp as the Wellington boots.
After a while Ronnie returned, settling herself on the couch beside her basket, picking up her needles and a ball of deep-dyed purple wool. ‘He’s just surfacing,’ she said. ‘He’ll be down in a moment.’
‘And how are the plans for the party?’ Sixty-eight was not an age you’d make a song and dance about as a general rule but these were special circumstances.
The creases in Ronnie’s face softened. ‘Grand. Nuala’s in charge of the catering of course and the boys are on their way over from England.’
‘The both of them together? That’s good.’
‘They’ve not been home since Christmas,’ she said. ‘Kieran was planning a weekend but something came up. And Tom, well, he’s hard to get hold of, you know…’
The one thing you could never do was predict Tom Farrelly’s behaviour. The boy could be enchanting. Ronnie used to call him her angel, especially in the early days before his voice broke, when the sweetness of it soared above the rest of the choir, when the parishes were fighting over him to accompany their Masses. They were less pleased when money went missing from the collection plate or graffiti appeared behind the choir stalls. Tom might help you out one day, working like a Trojan, shifting barrels, stacking crates, replacing the filter in the fryer; the next he’d be popping at the lemonade bottles with his airgun.
Vince and Teresa had not been blessed with children although they were godparents to a dozen. It had never bothered him (and Teresa very little) and he was more often grateful than not. He could see the pain caused by an errant youngster and the disappointment leaching into a parent’s life. It wasn’t as if you were dealing with cattle where there were accepted procedures and you could always call in the vet. You couldn’t control a human being in the same way at all. Pat Farrelly wasn’t the type of father who beat his kids, but even if he had been, it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference. If anything, those boys would have left sooner.
Ronnie smoothed the band of knitting over her knee and joined two pieces of wool together with a deft tug. Then she glanced up and gave him that look of hers, that green-eyed look that had broken hearts in dance halls from Tralee to Castlemaine. It almost made him envy Pat again, his way with machines, the way he had all the girls lining up to ride pillion. He had loved his bikes and his cars and his tractors more than his cows. Going off to work on those rigs in the North Sea, leaving his wife to manage the farm; if that was the example he set for his sons, how could anyone be surprised they’d upped and left? Although neither of them was an engineer exactly. Kieran, he thought, had something to do with computers and Tom was still waiting to find his vocation.
That was how Ronnie put it. ‘The pity is that Tom hasn’t reached his purpose yet. I worried Pat would die without knowing it.’
It was her belief that God had a plan for him. At first, with his beautiful soprano voice, the notes so clear they pierced the listener, she was convinced singing was his future; this was the way he could bring joy to the world. But puberty arrived to sabotage him and, though the boy could sing well enough, it wasn’t the same; it lacked distinction. So then the lad’s vocation was to be the priesthood itself.
Vince remembered this with some amusement, remembered Pat leaning across the bar over his pint and the racing pages of the Kerryman. ‘There’s not a priest around here who doesn’t want to tan his hide,’ he’d said with a grin. ‘Dirty old perverts. But the lad’s too quick for them. I’ve told her a million times they will never take him on. She’s stubborn, Veronica. She won’t give up on her Holy Grail.’
In the end it was Kieran who’d flirted with religion. As for Tom, no one rightly knew what he did over in London, but if he was searching for the Holy Grail he needed to put his nose outside of a bar once in a while and sniff some clean air.
From the backyard they heard a throaty roar and a crunch. Ronnie abandoned her knitting and jumped up. ‘That’ll be Anna, now. Her little ones are such a delight!’
Anna and her husband had built a house nearby in the boom years and taken over the day-to-day running of the farm. (Nuala, married but childless, managed one of the town’s hotels.) Anna was the spit of Ronnie when she’d been younger, though her boys took after their father, with their pale lashes and their bushy ginger curls. Released from their mother’s grip they careered around the room.
There came a shuffle overhead, a tentative step on the stairs, a shadow in the hall. Pat was gaunt, no doubt about it; his hair fizzed out at odd angles from his skull; his clothes hung baggy on him. He had to lean against the doorframe before he could step over the threshold. Ronnie moved as if to help him, but he gestured her away. Vince half-rose but Pat didn’t look at him until his wife had settled him in the armchair with cushions stacked at his back and his stick in easy reach. Only then did he raise his eyes and although they were a little bleary, he was visibly there, Vince’s old mate. He hadn’t become a different person; his brain was sharp enough.
‘I’ve been meaning to come over,’ said Vince. ‘For I don’t know how long. Have you everything sorted for the party now?’
Pat’s shoulders lifted. ‘I’m leaving it to the women.’
Anna said, ‘And we have it all in hand.’
‘You’re not letting that tiresome Rooney fellow bring his accordion? I value my hearing.’
‘The music’s under control, Dad. I told you. And Nuala’s sorting the menu. It’s going to be a grand night.’
‘I hope so.’
Pat had not been so curmudgeonly before his illness, but Vince understood his reservations. You couldn’t tell how a party would go. Sometimes there’d be too many vested interests, too many lads spoiling for a fight, too many girls upset at the state of their dresses. Or the buffet would get trodden into the floor and the music would be shite. In truth, a wake was often more enjoyable than your average wedding (or even a christening) because it had a spontaneity you couldn’t drum up any other way. Not that he would mention such a thing to his old friend. Instead, he said, ‘I hear the lads are coming home?’
One of Anna’s sons clambered onto his grandfather’s knee and reached up to stroke his face. Pat gave a melancholic smile. Anna said, ‘Yes. We thought they might not make it, on account of the airports being closed, but Kieran has decided to drive so they’ll be staying for the week.’
‘When will they get here?’
Ronnie had her back to them, assembling cups while the tea brewed. She said, ‘Oh later this evening. I have the lamb ready to go in the oven.’
Anna, swinging the child from Pat’s lap onto her hip, mouthed at Vince: ‘Fingers crossed.’