Read Online Firefly Summer by Maeve Binchy - Free Book Online Page A

with her apron and things in a basket prepared to do my work for me.’
    The eyes were very bright. Old Mr Slattery’s glasses had fallen off his nose with shock.
    Fergus was on his feet. ‘Miss Purcell, Miss Purcell! What an idea, what a thought that we would dream of improving on your housework! Don’t you keep the best house in the town? Aren’t we the envy of the whole of Mountfern, including I might say the canon himself? You can’t have thought for a moment that we’d as much as contemplate getting anyone else, let alone doing it without telling you . . .’
    ‘But Kate from the pub out there with her basket?’
    ‘I don’t know what she has in the basket but Mrs Ryanis going to work in the office. She was trained in a solicitor’s office in Dublin, you know. She’ll be doing the files and typing letters.’
    ‘Oh.’ Miss Purcell had to spend a moment doing some social adjustment.
    ‘So you see you were quite wrong to think we have anything except the highest regard for you, isn’t that right, Dad?’
    ‘Heavens yes. Oh, Miss Purcell, the house would fall down without you,’ said Mr Slattery anxiously.
    ‘But that would mean Kate . . . that Mrs Ryan and her family would know all your business, confidential business of the town.’ Miss Purcell wasn’t going to give up.
    ‘We wouldn’t take her on if we didn’t know she could be trusted. It’s not easy to find the kind of discretion and loyalty that you have, Miss Purcell. You are, as my father has said, the mainstay of this house, but we think we have found someone who will be able to keep our business private, as you do. It’s very good of you to be worried about it.’
    There was no more to be said. Miss Purcell had to go back to the hall where she had left Kate standing, and usher her into the office, asking the while whether she took sugar in her tea and if she would like a plain biscuit, a sweet biscuit or a slice of home-made currant bread. Kate wisely chose the home-made bread and disclosed four punnets of raspberries which she had brought as a gift because she had heard it said that Miss Purcell made the best jam in the county. The pink spots began to lose their ferocity and the ‘Mrs Ryan’ was pronounced without the sarcastic overtones. Kate was in, she was starting a newcareer. There was hardly any trade in the pub in the mornings, and John was in agreement with her that the few pounds the Slatterys paid would be helpful. Young Declan was off at school, so they were all out of house, and Carrie knew how to put a lunch on the table at the stroke of one. It would be nice to be behind a typewriter again for a change rather than behind a bar. Mr Slattery was such a gentleman, a real old-fashioned man who was spending more and more time fishing; and Fergus was the best company in the world, self-mocking and droll, full of compassion for some of the people who came to see him, slow to send a bill where it would be a hardship to pay it, but also quick with his tongue to abuse anyone who wanted to work a fiddle or hide an income.
    Fergus had told her that it wasn’t a big practice and that normally he was well able to deal with the clerical side. He could type like the wind with two fingers and he had a fairly reasonable filing system but he wanted his father to take more time off, now people really did trust him with their affairs rather than thinking of him as a boy in short trousers. So Kate would be a godsend. And indeed she was. It took her about three days to see that his reasonable filing system was hopeless, and to set up a better one.
    ‘Come here till I show you what we do with these papers now,’ she ordered him.
    ‘No, no, that’s your work, that’s what we pay you inordinate sums of money for, so that I don’t have to look at things like that.’
    ‘Wrong,’ Kate cried. ‘You have to understand it, otherwise it’s useless to any of us. You won’t know where to put back a letter, find a counsel’s brief, where the