Firefly Summer by Maeve Binchy Page A

should suggest it.’ He was adamant about this.
    ‘I suppose you sorted Dara out too,’ Kate said gently and with admiration. ‘They should have you up on the platform in Geneva sorting things out for everyone.’
    ‘Ah, the poor child was very upset, it’s giving up a bit of fairyland. None of us like doing that.’
    ‘People like you didn’t have to, it’s still all there in your heads,’ Kate said, but she said it with a hint of envy in her voice, and she kissed his lips softly so that he tasted the port wine.

3
    That night Michael sat on the landing window seat and looked across at Fernscourt in the moonlight.
    The curtains of ivy waved over the hummocks of moss. It was easier than ever to see the ruins since some of the big straggly trees and bushes had been cut down.
    Eddie and Declan were long asleep in their bunk beds. Michael had been reading with a torch, but his mind had strayed from the knight who had rescued the Lady Araminta with the golden tresses. He wanted to look at real life, which was Fernscourt. For a long time he looked at the shadows over the moon and the patterns they made on the soft green banks up from the river towards the house.
    Then he saw a figure moving in the moonlight. Nobody
ever
walked there at night. Michael knelt up and opened the window to have a better view. It was a man, an old man even older than Daddy. He was wandering around with his hands in his pockets looking up at the walls. Sometimes he touched the moss, sometimes he pushed aside the ivy. Michael was kneeling on the window seat now, peering and straining to see as the figure disappeared and emerged again behind the ruined walls. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and there was his father in his pyjamas.
    ‘Dad, I think he’s come. I think he’s here.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The American. I think that’s him in our house.’ The boy’s face was white even on the shadowy landing with moonlight coming in irregular darts through the window.
    John Ryan looked out and saw a figure walking round touching walls and almost patting the bits of building that still stood. John felt he was spying somehow. The man was as if naked over there, in that he didn’t know he was being observed.
    Michael was wriggling off the seat. ‘I’ll have to wake Dara,’ he said, his face working anxiously.
    ‘Wait, Michael.’
    ‘But it’s our house, he’s here, he came after all. People said he might not be going to live here. But look at him, he
is
going to live in it, isn’t he? Isn’t he?’
    John sat down on the window seat, and lifted his feet a little off the cold lino floor covering. ‘Michael, don’t wake the child up.’
    ‘She’s not a child, she’s twenty minutes older than I am.’
    ‘That’s true. She’s not a child any more than you are.’
    Michael’s face was troubled. ‘She’ll need to know, Dad.’
    ‘Nobody needs to know.’
    ‘It’s partly her house.’
    ‘It’s
his
house Michael.’ John indicated the man across the river.
    ‘I know, I know.’ The boy’s thin shoulders were raised, tense. He was troubled and unsure what to do.
    ‘Give me something to put my feet on so they’re not like two big blocks of ice when I get back into the bed with your mother.’
    Michael rooted round under the comics and books that were on the window seat and found a raggedy cushion.
    ‘Will this do?’
    ‘That’s fine, thank you, son.’
    Some of the quivering tension had left the boy. He sat down, still looking out of the window, but prepared to talk rather than wake his sister and the whole house in his grief.
    ‘Do you know, when I was a lad your age we used to go over there and play too. Your Uncle Barry, now, he was a great climber, there was nothing he couldn’t get right up on, and there were more bits of wall then than now.’
    Michael was interested.
    ‘And then your Aunt Nuala; my heavens wouldn’t those little Australian boys and girls be surprised to know that their Mother Superior used to climb trees