Read Online Firefly Summer by Maeve Binchy - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Maeve Binchy
Tags: Fiction
Ads: Link
deedsare, anything. Suppose I get flu or you sack me, or you’re working late at night. Come on now, it will only take ten minutes a day.’
‘Do you run the pub like this too?’ Fergus asked.
‘Of course not, but I do the accounts, and I’ve insisted that John does them with me otherwise he’d have to leave them till the wife gets back and it would just double the work.’
‘I’m surprised the place isn’t a gold mine with your organisational skills.’
‘Come out our way one evening and have a pint in it and you’ll see what a gold mine it is. Would I be in here setting up filing systems for beautiful idle professional men too lazy to look at them if it was a gold mine? Now suppose you had this query from the town agent’s clerk about the fee in that workman’s compensation case which was appealed, where would you look first?’
‘In the bad old days I’d look on the table at the window.’
‘But in the good days that have now come?’
‘I’ve forgotten, young Mrs Ryan, show me, show me.’
‘Oh thank God I’m happily married. You’d break my heart.’
‘You’re sure you’re happily married?’
‘Very sure. And isn’t it time you had a romance yourself? Now that Nora Lynch has gone off to fresh fields and better chances we hear nothing about your activities.’
‘Listen to me, after that business with Nora I’m afraid to lay my hand or eye on anyone. There’s no activities to hear about. It was all a terrible misunderstanding.’
‘You lost us a fine schoolteacher over it all. My Dara loved her. She hates the new woman, about a hundred shesays, and a habit of hitting them accidentally on the knuckles with a ruler.’
‘Poor Dara, maybe I should have given Miss Lynch an engagement ring to keep her in the town, and keep all the little girls like Dara happy.’
‘I don’t think anything’s going to make my Dara happy for a long time, but no stories about children. This workman was called Burke, Fergus, in the name of God where are you going to look for this file?’
‘Under the Bs, miss?’
‘We have a child prodigy,’ said Kate Ryan and went back to her typewriter.
‘What are you doing, Daddy?’ John jumped guiltily at Dara’s voice.
What he should have been doing was writing. This was the time that Kate stood minding the bar, tired already from her morning in the office. But there was just so long you could look at blank paper without it beginning to drive you mad. John Ryan had nothing to say and no way of saying it. He had come out to what Kate called the garden and everyone else called the yard to do a little experiment. Ryan’s Licensed Premises was flush on the road. Its front door opened straight on to River Road. It would have been unheard of to have a pub with a garden in front. The supplies came to the back yard and the barrels took up most of it . . . a place of half-used out-houses and sheds. That was where the back door of the house was, that was the only way the children were ever allowed to enter their home. But beside the house there was what they called the side yard. Here the hens wandered, and Jaffa sat like a buddha in calm control,purring and lazily washing her big orange face. Leopold didn’t sit much in the yard, there wasn’t an audience sufficiently sympathetic to his whimperings and cringings. He liked to cower in the pub. Maurice was still in the turf room after the ugly river-bank incident. John had devised a marvellous way to avoid working on his poems: he was going to build a large hen coop, a wired-off area for the hens to live in, so that they could scratch and wander but be away from the few pathetic attempts that Kate had started in the line of making a real garden. Once the hens were corralled life would be easier. But John Ryan had wanted to do it quietly and undisturbed by his family. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, that he was shirking his writing work, and mitching from his desk. Dara stood with a mutinous look on
‘Do you run the pub like this too?’ Fergus asked.
‘Of course not, but I do the accounts, and I’ve insisted that John does them with me otherwise he’d have to leave them till the wife gets back and it would just double the work.’
‘I’m surprised the place isn’t a gold mine with your organisational skills.’
‘Come out our way one evening and have a pint in it and you’ll see what a gold mine it is. Would I be in here setting up filing systems for beautiful idle professional men too lazy to look at them if it was a gold mine? Now suppose you had this query from the town agent’s clerk about the fee in that workman’s compensation case which was appealed, where would you look first?’
‘In the bad old days I’d look on the table at the window.’
‘But in the good days that have now come?’
‘I’ve forgotten, young Mrs Ryan, show me, show me.’
‘Oh thank God I’m happily married. You’d break my heart.’
‘You’re sure you’re happily married?’
‘Very sure. And isn’t it time you had a romance yourself? Now that Nora Lynch has gone off to fresh fields and better chances we hear nothing about your activities.’
‘Listen to me, after that business with Nora I’m afraid to lay my hand or eye on anyone. There’s no activities to hear about. It was all a terrible misunderstanding.’
‘You lost us a fine schoolteacher over it all. My Dara loved her. She hates the new woman, about a hundred shesays, and a habit of hitting them accidentally on the knuckles with a ruler.’
‘Poor Dara, maybe I should have given Miss Lynch an engagement ring to keep her in the town, and keep all the little girls like Dara happy.’
‘I don’t think anything’s going to make my Dara happy for a long time, but no stories about children. This workman was called Burke, Fergus, in the name of God where are you going to look for this file?’
‘Under the Bs, miss?’
‘We have a child prodigy,’ said Kate Ryan and went back to her typewriter.
‘What are you doing, Daddy?’ John jumped guiltily at Dara’s voice.
What he should have been doing was writing. This was the time that Kate stood minding the bar, tired already from her morning in the office. But there was just so long you could look at blank paper without it beginning to drive you mad. John Ryan had nothing to say and no way of saying it. He had come out to what Kate called the garden and everyone else called the yard to do a little experiment. Ryan’s Licensed Premises was flush on the road. Its front door opened straight on to River Road. It would have been unheard of to have a pub with a garden in front. The supplies came to the back yard and the barrels took up most of it . . . a place of half-used out-houses and sheds. That was where the back door of the house was, that was the only way the children were ever allowed to enter their home. But beside the house there was what they called the side yard. Here the hens wandered, and Jaffa sat like a buddha in calm control,purring and lazily washing her big orange face. Leopold didn’t sit much in the yard, there wasn’t an audience sufficiently sympathetic to his whimperings and cringings. He liked to cower in the pub. Maurice was still in the turf room after the ugly river-bank incident. John had devised a marvellous way to avoid working on his poems: he was going to build a large hen coop, a wired-off area for the hens to live in, so that they could scratch and wander but be away from the few pathetic attempts that Kate had started in the line of making a real garden. Once the hens were corralled life would be easier. But John Ryan had wanted to do it quietly and undisturbed by his family. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, that he was shirking his writing work, and mitching from his desk. Dara stood with a mutinous look on
Similar Books
