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run his family pub to please his mother and then to continuerunning it after his mother’s time to keep his wife and four children.
    Kate told him that she thanked God for him too. Yes, seriously, when she prayed at night as she always did on her knees for three or four minutes no matter how great his need and desire for her.
    ‘You can say your prayers afterwards,’ he used to beg.
    ‘Not at all, I’ll fall asleep in your arms afterwards,’ she would reply.
    But she assured him she thanked God for his honesty and his kindness and the marvellous way he had of looking at things, and for the four marvellous children. She, who had nobody for so long, had everybody who mattered now. Outsiders said they were well matched but they had no idea how well.
    Nobody watching the quick Kate and the slower John as they smiled at each other across their busy public house would know how much they needed each other and relied one on the other for the qualities that they each lacked. Probably the men might have thought that the youngest of old Ryan’s sons did well for himself getting this handsome city girl to liven up his business. Possibly the women in Mountfern might have said that Kate O’Connell, who came in one day on a bicycle and seemed to have no people to speak of, fell on her feet marrying into Ryan’s pub. But this was to miss the point.
    Kate, uncertain of herself in so many ways, unsure that she had a place anywhere, was more aware than anyone would suspect of how she had found a home and a base and an anchor in the reliable John Ryan. She knew he would never change and cease to love her, as her father had. She knew she didn’t have to act out a role to pleaseand entertain him as she had done to everyone else in the world since she was fourteen. She had got by through being brisk – and sometimes she knew that she was too brisk, she left the children bewildered and bothered, and only John could make the world seem sensible to them again.
    Kate marvelled at the time and patience John had with their children, how he could sit for what seemed like for ever on the bank of the river with them, making them as still as he was himself to lure the fish out of the water. Only the other day he had them all – even Declan, who never stopped moving around – transfixed over the workings of the old clock which he had taken to bits and put back together. He told them stories of the Fern family who lived over the river, tales of long ago, since John Ryan never knew the house when it stood. The twins would listen for ever to how the provisions might come up the river by boat.
    ‘How would they get them up to the house?’ Dara had asked and her father had led the children out to the footbridge and they had all stood speculating what way the great boxes would have been carried up to the mansion. All this when he should have been seeing to the barrels and getting the pub ready for opening.
    But Kate loved him for it, and sometimes she wanted to go over and put her arms around his neck and kiss him full on the lips and tell him how much she loved him and how good he was. Not only to his children and to her, but to the old farmer who would tell the same story twice a day. John could nod and polish a glass and hear it again and again. Kate sometimes got a lump in her throat as she watched his patience and his respect for people, for all kinds of people.
    She felt a tenderness and love for him that was just as strong as any love you saw in the pictures where she sometimes went on a little outing with Sheila Whelan as a treat. But she didn’t show that love too openly. Mountfern wasn’t a place where endearments were used openly. There were no darlings or loves or dears used in Ryan’s pub. They accused each other good-humouredly of all kinds of failings . . .
    ‘My wife would spend the takings of the year if you didn’t watch her . . . all women are the same.’
    ‘John, would you ask Mrs Connolly there would she like a drop more