The next morning Hanna drove straight to Maggie’s place. It was all very well for Sister Michael to sound so confident but, in the face of an uncertain financial future, hanging on to her expensive roof slates now seemed stupid. But how would Fury respond to her change of mind? In the end she decided to make a brisk announcement and ignore his reaction. A small voice at the back of her mind told her she’d have a lot less to worry about if she hadn’t been so high-handed in the first place.
She arrived to find Conor’s friend Dan Cafferky up on the slateless roof. The Divil was asleep on the doorstep and Fury came out to meet her, bursting with energy. Everything was going grand, he said, and now that he had young Dan on the job he’d be flying.
When Hanna made her announcement he simply laughed.
“We did the swap yesterday. The new tiles are round the back.”
“But I said . . .”
“I know what you said. But did you not notice when you said it that I said nothing? And wasn’t it just as well?”
Biting her tongue, Hanna abandoned the subject of the tiles and said that, after careful consideration, she might rework her budget. Fury just shrugged. In that case she might have to change her approach a bit, but what matter? They’d go with the flow and see what happened. Sure budgets always got shifted, so trying to set them in stone was a waste of time.
Later, driving the mobile library van between puddles on the road to Knockmore, Hanna turned her mind to Sister Michael again. The drive from Carrick to the convent last night had turned into a sort of strategy meeting. What was needed, Sister Michael declared, was a focal point for operations. And, given its position, its public function, and the threat of its closure, the obvious choice for that was Lissbeg Library. Furthermore, she said, Hanna’s reputation for churlish behavior could be used to their advantage.
The word ‘churlish’ took Hanna aback but she’d come to see the force of the argument. Sitting beside her in the passenger seat, Sister Michael had patted her knee. “You’re the last person people would suspect of trying to pull the community together, so it’ll all appear to happen of its own accord.”
“What will?”
“Establishing proper lines of communication.”
That would be the first stage. Drawing people together, putting them in touch with each other and showing them their strength. Then, with all their ducks in a row, she and Hanna would go public—call a meeting in the library, propose an alternative to the council’s mega plan, and harness the whole community to develop a detailed submission.
“But how long will it take? And how do we achieve the first stage, let alone the second?”
“It’ll take as long as it takes, girl, so all we can do is get on and prepare the ground.”
It had been a long day and Hanna was getting tired of agricultural metaphors. Flashing a sideways glance at her, Sister Michael folded her hands in her lap and explained.
“We find a reason to bring people to Lissbeg Library.”
“You mean like a book club?”
“No, I don’t mean like a book club. We haven’t a hope in hell if we’re going to think small. I mean a Big Thing that’ll catch their imagination.”
Hanna blinked. Having consistently repressed Conor’s hopes of a book club, she was now being presented with a course of action that sounded a great deal worse. Pulling up her car at the nuns’ entrance to the convent, she looked suspiciously at Sister Michael.
“So what kind of ‘Big Thing’ might that be?”
Sister Michael said she hadn’t got a clue.
“Something will turn up, though. You’ll recognize it when it does.”
“What do you mean I’ll recognize it?”
“Well, you’re the one who drives up and down the peninsula. I’m the one that’s stuck behind convent walls.”