Coming Home to the Four Streets by Nadine Dorries (books that read to you .txt) 📗

‘How are ye, Maura?’ called the man who had soaked her floors, banging both of his palms flat on the bar. Maura’s eyes fixed on the water that ran from the oilskin coat onto her tapestry cushion. If one of the twins had done that, she would have flicked them around the back of the legs with the tea towel that hung from her waistband. She glared at her customer but he was impervious. His face broke into a grin and he removed his cap and shook it, sending water flying across the polished countertop and flopped it back on his head. Ignoring her lack of greeting, he continued unperturbed.

‘God in heaven, it’s mighty fierce out there,’ he said as a chill damp breeze whistled through the bar when the door he had failed to close properly behind him blew open and banged against the wall. Maura flicked the brass tap on the barrel of Guinness and the black velvet liquid began to flow into his favourite pot. ‘Where would Tommy be?’ he asked. ‘Don’t be giving me half measures there now, will ye?’

Maura felt a familiar irritation wash over her. Tommy was over at the Deanes’ farm, helping with the milking, and she had never given anyone half measures since the day they had taken over the inn. ‘He’s away milking,’ she replied as she wiped the foam spilling down over the lip of the pot with the corner of her apron and laid it on the towelling bar mat. She had made a point of overfilling the pot, in order to avoid further criticism but he uttered not a word of thanks, just raised the pot to his lips and slurped away the foam, then took out his pipe and lit it.

Maura picked up the mop that stood permanently in the bucket in the passage behind the bar and wheeled it towards the wet puddles, pointedly slamming the door shut that he had left open. Flames from the peat fire in the huge open grate leapt up the chimney and then settled back down as the door closed.

‘Born in a barn were you?’ she hissed.

‘Aye,’ he replied between puffs on his pipe, ‘as it happens, I was.’

Maura felt no inclination to laugh at his attempt at humour and besides, he was likely speaking the truth. Their only neighbours lived in a long stone barn, with a cow and a pen of pigs at one end, the family at the other.

‘It’s 1966,’ Maura said to Tommy, after the first time they had been invited in, ‘and it’s the same as when we were kids, nothing has changed.’

Tommy had to agree with her. ‘Aye, it’s still a long way from Galway out here on the coast. Every one of their boys gone to America, too. Still, they have the money arriving every week, they aren’t poor.’

Maura was not impressed. ‘I’d rather have my kids by my side than the money,’ she had answered, ‘and you should know better, after losing our Kitty.’

She looked out now through the window next to the door, down over the road and towards the ocean. Raindrops the size of fat pebbles hurled against the thick, opaque glass, worn white with ingrained sea salt that had proved almost impossible to remove. She could count on one hand the number of days she had seen the sun shine since they had arrived and her heart felt so heavy it rooted her to the spot. This was it, the reality. The future she and Tommy had dreamt of and planned for. They had willingly returned from Liverpool to Ireland, heading in the opposite direction to almost everyone else, to run their own business.

The tourists were supposed to be beating a path to their door and although the occasional American, in search of his or her heritage, had found their way here, they hadn’t stopped for long, but returned to seek the hot fresh coffee, afternoon fancies and indoor lavatories in the Hardiman Hotel in Galway. Having sailed first class from America, the search for their heritage took ten minutes to complete. A visit to the church to light a penny candle, a blessing on a grave and a snap with a Canon camera to prove ‘we were here’, sufficed.

Maura very quickly discovered that they were wholly dependent on the small fishing community to keep things turning over. But as much as she hated it, they had no option but to go along with it. Tommy was running from his demons and she would run along with him, at her husband’s side.

‘We’ll make it the best place for miles, Maura, you watch,’ he had said as they opened the front door for the first time. ‘They will be landing at Shannon and telling the taxi drivers to bring them straight to our door.’

But the bedrooms they had lovingly decorated and furnished stood empty and their dreams had turned to dust as their bank balance depleted, so Tommy had no choice but to help out on Liam Deane’s farm to bring in some money. Liam was Jerry’s brother and Kathleen’s son, as good as their own family, and it was in the river that ran through their land where their beloved Kitty had drowned. They were bound together by an invisible bond and a knowledge of deeds that would never be spoken of but would hold fast for a lifetime. Liam and Maeve Deane were their only true friends in Ireland – all of Maura’s own family were long since in America and lost to her and Tommy, an only child, had seen the passing of his parents. They had returned to the country of their childhoods to discover that, without those they had loved around them, it was a hard and miserable place.

The bar began to fill with the smell of pipe smoke, which suppressed that of stale ale and the smell from the jacks at the back of the inn – which Maura discovered was used by