43

At the exit for Knockmore Hanna lessened her speed and turned down the narrow road that snaked between fields and woodland. Each week, driving the same roads up and down the peninsula, she was fascinated by the changing colors of the landscape. Now, as summer advanced, the first of the leaves were feathered with gold. It was a sunny day broken by intervals of rain; and in a windy space between showers, the birds were calling and singing.

Steering the van between puddles, Hanna told herself thoughtfully that Sister Michael was right. The threatened closure of Lissbeg Library was a powerful symbol of a far deeper malaise. This wasn’t just about her own job or Conor’s, though Conor had now undoubtedly joined her on Tim Slattery’s blacklist. It was about a whole community that time had disempowered. Despite what she’d said about people not attending public meetings, Hanna had been surprised by the number of empty seats last night in Carrick. Yet, as soon as Sister Michael had made her see it, the reason was blindingly clear. The peninsula had lost its lines of communication. In the past people had met in local shops and post offices, round the horse trough in Lissbeg’s Broad Street, at village bus stops and forge doors and in the creameries. It was there that they’d swapped stories, shared skills and resources, and kept an eye on each other’s welfare. The crowded supermarkets and streamlined council facilities in Carrick were no substitute for such gathering places, or for the regular rhythms of Sundays and feast days when people congregated in the pub after Mass to discuss the week’s events. Anyway, both the pubs and the chapels were half empty now as churchgoing dwindled and many of the peninsula’s pub owners closed up shop, defeated by cut-rate alcohol in the supermarkets and people’s concerns about drunk driving.

Hanna smiled as she swung the wheel, thinking of her mother and Maggie. There’d been plenty of malice in those gathering places, too, and a hell of a lot of nosiness. But that wasn’t the stuff that counted. What mattered was the web of mutual support that had made people feel self-reliant. And, according to Sister Michael, the loss of that web had produced a current lack of balance. It wasn’t fair, she’d said. And, what was worse, it wasn’t healthy.

Hanna couldn’t fault the argument. What bothered her was the thought that a campaign centered on Lissbeg Library would invade her personal privacy. But, as Sister Michael had also pointed out, this wasn’t about her feelings. Glancing at the clock on the dashboard, Hanna saw she was making good time. There was a passing place just ahead so she pulled in and went to lean on a gate. The field beyond it was planted with potatoes and the dead-straight ridges made her smile. She could remember her father’s friends gathered in the little post office in Crossarra pronouncing about the state of their neighbor’s ridges. So-and-so took it handy and did it right, like his father before him. Some other fellow must have used a corkscrew for a line and dug with a crooked spade. The potatoes Hanna was looking at now were set in perfect parallel lines and the creamy blossom on their green stalks swayed in a warm wind. In the next field a group of cattle had gathered in the shade of an oak tree. As she considered the structure of its interwoven branches, Hanna’s mind drifted back to her last conversation with Fury. He’d drawn her aside so that Dan, on the roof, couldn’t hear him.

“By the way, Miss Casey, who do you think you’re fooling? It isn’t careful consideration that’s changed your mind about them slates. It’s Tim The Time Lord Slattery and the crowd in Carrick.”

Seeing her mortified expression, he’d become unexpectedly kind. It wasn’t that the world and his wife were talking about her, he said. It was just that a builder like himself was always in and out of the planning office, so of course he’d hear how the wind was blowing. Besides, he’d known the seed, breed, and generation of the Slatterys all his life.

“Sure, Tim’s as weak as the rest of them. Show him the chance of a swanky new office, and he’d trample over his granny to get it and dance on her grave when he did.”

At the time Hanna had been as cross as she was embarrassed. Now, staring at the branching oak tree, she realized that if she hadn’t been so aggressively opposed to local gossip she might have picked up that information herself and been a lot more wary of Tim Slattery.

Nell Reily was among the group at the day-care center this week, laughing and chatting with her elderly mother in the line for coffee and tea. As soon as she saw Hanna she came to speak to her. Her mum was much better, she said, though in the end the cold had proved to be the flu.

“This is her first day back at the center so I said I’d stay to lunch in case she wanted to come home early. The doctor says she ought to take things slow.”

Smiling at Hanna, Nell held out a tissue-paper-wrapped package. Inside was a linen handkerchief edged with delicate scalloped lace.

“It was the first thing Mam turned her hand to after the flu, Miss Casey. We were very grateful for those books when she was laid up.”

The handkerchief had Hanna’s initials embroidered in one corner.

“The chances are that you’ll never use it, but you might put it under a vase or something. Anyway, it’s just a token to say thanks.”

Some of the other seniors crowded around to admire the gift and exclaim about Hanna’s willingness to oblige. Hanna listened ruefully. When these men and women were young, had they ever imagined how dependent old age would make them, or how grateful they might feel one day for ordinary acts of kindness? Knowing her own reputation for standoffishness, she blushed, wondering if Nell had had to summon her courage to stop her on the road that day and ask for a book for her mother.

Now Nell sat down beside her and asked after Mary Casey. “It’s a shame we don’t see her here in the center sometimes.”

Maurice, the retired baker, joined them with a plate of doughnuts. He nodded and lowered his voice. “I wouldn’t say a word against Father McGlynn, mind, but it’s a fierce shame that everyone our age down this end of the peninsula has to come here to Knockmore or go nowhere. Wouldn’t it be great to have a Center in Lissbeg?”

There was a chorus of agreement, prefaced by mutual assurances that no one would say a word against Father McGlynn. If it wasn’t for him, they agreed, anyone who wanted so much as their toenails cut would be traipsing all the way to Carrick. Still, it’d be grand if everyone on the peninsula could go somewhere closer to home. Or even somewhere it’d be easier to get a lift to since the buses these days were so bad. A place in Lissbeg, and maybe another in Ballyfin, with different things happening on different days. That way more people could get out and see each other. All the same, they were lucky to have what they did have, and they certainly weren’t complaining.

Beneath the seniors’ appreciation of the parish priest’s efforts on their behalf, Hanna could detect a hidden concern that the facilities he provided might be withdrawn if they failed to show gratitude. It seemed unfair that their lives should feel so precarious, just as it was dreadful to feel that despite her own aloofness they were so willing to be grateful to her. And it was unnerving that she herself now knew that things could get much worse. According to Brian Morton, the Council’s mega plan involved relocating community-care provision for the entire peninsula to the huge new complex in Carrick.

Up to now it hadn’t occurred to Hanna that when you got older having a shared space where you could keep up a lifetime of friendships was important. All right, it wasn’t really that far to Carrick, but surely the council could see that, with bad roads and patchy public transport, it could seem a million miles away to someone with poor mobility?

But as she bit into a doughnut, she told herself that poor mobility didn’t necessarily mean a lack of energy. That was something worth remembering. As was the fact that, unlike kids like Conor or the girls from HabberDashery, seniors had plenty of spare time.