The Transatlantic Book Club by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

Author:Felicity Hayes-McCoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

Mary’s visit extended into the evening. When she left, Pat called Cassie down and they chatted. According to Cassie, Brad was surprised by what he’d seen in Lissbeg. It wasn’t the kind of St Patrick’s Day parade that he’d envisaged, and Cassie, too, had found it different from what she’d expected. ‘I guess I’d imagined the sorts of things you see on TV. Majorettes and police bands and fountains spouting green water.’

‘Well, no, love, we wouldn’t go in for that.’

‘And the mayor and politicians glad-handing. And multicultural stuff. In Toronto last year we had a dancing green dragon.’

‘You’d get the odd politician out here, all right, but there wouldn’t be much call for dragons. I’d say they’d be more St George’s thing than St Patrick’s. Snakes, now. You might get snakes in a Patrick’s Day parade. Did you and Brad not enjoy yourselves?’

‘God, no, we loved it. Well, I know I did, and he had a ball.’

Mary would have been sure to ask if Cassie had plans to see Brad again, but Pat had a feeling the question wouldn’t be welcome. She decided to leave it at that. He’d looked like a decent fellow, very cheerful and charming but, like Mary said, there was something reserved about him. A kind of smoothness that seemed to keep you at bay. Pat wondered if Cassie wasn’t aware of it, or if she simply had no reason to care.

Later, when Cassie had gone out again, and Pat watched the Dublin parade on the evening news, she told herself she was getting as nosy as Mary. Cassie’s life was her own and she didn’t need her granny sticking her oar in. On the other hand, there were times when she seemed terribly young and vulnerable. She was a girl who’d struck out on her own far too young, perhaps, and had missed having a mother she could talk to. Sonny’s wife, Annette, was nice enough but, like Cassie’s siblings, she was a full-on businesswoman. When the children were young she’d left them to a nanny, descending in a guilty whirl if they were ill or did badly at school, and otherwise being absent or unavailable. Cassie’s career choice had made no sense to her mother, who saw her freewheeling lifestyle as irresponsible. If Cassie were in love, Pat was sure that Annette wouldn’t notice, and if she’d fallen for a lad who worked on cruise ships he wouldn’t be deemed good enough for her upwardly mobile family.

As she turned off the news before going to bed, Pat reflected that she’d been younger than Cassie was now when she’d spent that summer in Resolve. Ger had proposed to her on the beach where the four of them had gone to celebrate Mary and Tom’s engagement. They’d planned a night at the pictures in Carrick after a drink in the pub, but the news of the engagement had put paid to that. Instead they’d taken a bottle of Blue Nun down to the beach near Lissbeg.

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