Echoes Read Online Free PDF Page A

they heard from the sister in Canada. She’d giggle with Nellie about something new that Father O’Dwyer’s housekeeper had said. The woman’s name was Miss McCormack, but everyone called her Sergeant McCormack because she tried to run not only Father O’Dwyer and the church but the whole of Castlebay too.
    Miss O’Hara came in now, her hands cold from clenching the handlebars in the wind, and she held them out to the fire.
    â€œGod, Nellie, isn’t it a sin having a great fire like this banked up just for David and myself? We could work in the kitchen, you know, beside the range.”
    â€œOh, that wouldn’t do at all!” Nellie was horrified.
    â€œYou wouldn’t mind, David?” she began . . . and then suddenly changed her mind. “No, don’t take any notice of me. I always want to change the world—that’s my problem. Aren’t we lucky to have this grand place in here? Let’s make the most of it. Nellie, tell me what are they building on the side of Dillon’s? It looks like an aerodrome.”
    â€œOh, that’s going to be a sun lounge, I hear,” Nellie said, full of importance. “They’re going to have chairs and card tables maybe in the summer, and tea served there too.”
    â€œThey’d need to have rugs and hot-water bottles if it turns out anything like last summer. Come on, college boy, get out your geography book. We’re going to make you a world expert on trade winds. You’re going to make them green and yellow striped with jealousy when you get back to that palace of a school of yours. We’ll show them what a real scholar is, the way we breed them in Castlebay.”
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    Paddy Power was tall and thickset, with a weather-beaten face. His face was beaten by weather of all kinds, but mainly the sharp wind that came in from the sea as he walked up lanes to people’s houses, lanes where his big battered car wouldn’t go. He had a shock of hair that grew in all directions as if he had three crowns on his head; it had been brown and then it was speckled but now it was mainly gray. Because of his bulk and his alarming hair he sometimes looked fierce, but that was before people got to know him. He had a great way of talking, a kind of good-natured bantering until he could see what was wrong; his talk was merely to relax the patient until he could see where the piece of grit in the eyes was, or the splinter in the hand, the glass in the sole of the foot or feel for the pain in the base of the stomach without too much tensing and alarm.
    He was a burly man who never found clothes to fit him and never cared about them either. Life was far too short, he said, to spend time in a tailor’s talking rubbish about lines and cuts and lapels. But for all his bulk and his haphazard attitude to his appearance, he was a healthy man and he was able to go down the path from his own garden to the sea and swim for nearly six months of the year and to get a game of golf a week as well. But Paddy Power was tired today; it had been a very long day and he had driven seventeen miles out to see a young woman who would be dead by Christmas but who talked cheerfully of how she knew she’d be better when the fine weather came. Her five children had played noisily and unconcerned around the feet of the doctor and the pale young husband just sat looking emptily into the fire. He had also had to have an unpleasing chat with one of the Dillon brothers from the hotel and speak seriously about liver damage. No matter how carefully he tried to phrase it, he had ended up with a blank wall and a great deal of resentment. Today it had ended with Dick Dillon telling him to mind his own bloody business, and that Paddy Power was a fine one to talk, half the county could tell you that he was drunk as a lord three years ago at the races, so he was in a poor position to cast stones. There were two bad cases of flu in old people, where it