The Month of Borrowed Dreams Read online

  Dedication

  For Mary in Kilmaley

  and

  Martine in Tralee

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Also by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  Visitors to the west coast of Ireland

  won’t find Finfarran.

  The peninsula and its inhabitants

  exist only in the

  author’s imagination.

  Prologue

  From her seat to one side Hanna could see in two directions. To her right, the front row of faces was tilted upwards, visible in a spill of steel grey light. To her left, the boy walked into silver water. The sound of it moving against his legs could be heard above the music, which pulled and tugged like the sluggish waves that rolled onto the beach. A camera on a tripod stood on the sand, and out to sea a distant ship was waiting, half lost in a shimmering heat haze.

  The sun burned in the sky. The boy was as slender as a birch switch or as gaunt as a famine victim. When the waves reached the tops of his thighs he turned and looked back. You couldn’t see his face. He was only a figure washed with shining light, looking back from a distance, inviting the watcher to follow him. As the music rose and fell like the sea, the words of a folk song hung in Hanna’s mind.

  I wish I was on yonder hill

  ’Tis there I’d sit and cry my fill,

  And every tear would turn a mill . . .

  Her eyes flicked right, towards the audience. Each face had the same rapt expression and wide eyes.

  On the screen, the boy bent one arm and put his hand on his hip. Standing in profile, he slowly raised the other arm and held it out, a dark smudge against the haze. Then, curling his fingers, he cupped the burning eye of the distant sun. The classical music swelled, then ebbed.

  I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,

  I wish I had my heart again,

  And vainly think I’d not complain . . .

  Back on the beach, the watching man slumped sideways. Tugged by a restless wind, figures from earlier scenes came and went about his lifeless body. Then the yearning music took over and the film came to an end.

  The screen went black as a long list of names scrolled upwards. Actors, cameramen and assistants, dressers and makeup artists. People who had told the story from all its different angles: in light and paint and movement; in fabric, music, and sound. In the spaces that were filled and those that had been deliberately left empty. In what was spoken and all that remained unsaid.

  When Conor flicked a switch and the lights came on, the reading room in the library was totally still. Then someone coughed, and people began to turn in their seats or reach into handbags. You could hear phones being switched on, and murmured conversation. And the inevitable sounds of ripped foil and crumpled paper, as Ann Flood from the pharmacy opened a double Chunky KitKat.

  Chapter One

  At first Hanna Casey’s idea for a monthly film club in Lissbeg Library hadn’t worked. She’d decided that the members would see a film at one meeting and discuss the book it was based on at the next, having borrowed it from the library in the weeks between. And, as it turned out, plenty of people were happy to come to the films. The club was a great idea altogether, they told her, the way you could save yourself the cost of something like Netflix. Also, they loved the tea and biscuits.

  But, as time went on, there was a lot of muttering about being too busy to read, and suggestions that, compared to a film, a book could be fierce heavy going. After a while a good many people stopped coming.

  So Hanna put up a notice. ‘Due to popular demand,’ it said, a film would now be screened at each meeting, not every second one. Across the bottom, in smaller writing, members were informed that meetings would begin with a brief discussion of the film shown the previous month.

  Conor, her library assistant, was scathing. ‘God, you’d think they’d manage to read a book when you gave them the full four weeks.’

  ‘Well, some people did and they still will. Others won’t, so they’ll purposely turn up late and miss the discussion. But they’ll come through a library door, and that’s the point, Conor. So don’t go looking at them sideways.’

  She knew he wouldn’t, though. Conor might be in his early twenties but he was absolutely reliable. He just liked things to be organised and expected plans to be followed.

  In hindsight Hanna realised it had been daft to expect much interest in the nuance of adaptation, particularly when there was a great stretch in the evenings and the whole Finfarran Peninsula was gearing up for summer. Easter had come early, and March and April had been chilly enough for her to light a fire each evening when she got in from work. But while May had begun as a blustery month it was now as mild as milk.

  This was the time of year Hanna loved best. Having left Finfarran at nineteen and spent most of her adult life in London, she was intensely aware of new life springing up in the fields. Driving to work between ditches smothered in tangled weeds and flowers, she could feel a sense of potential and promise she’d lost in those long city years. Perhaps it was because she’d moved on at last from a difficult divorce, or because a new relationship, begun in shyness and uncertainty, was now flowering as happily as the primroses up on the ditch.

  And she wasn’t just projecting her own feelings onto the world around her. It truly was a glorious time of year. According to Conor, whose family farm was a few miles beyond the town of Lissbeg, there was grand bite in the grass at last and the lambing was going great guns.

  This month the film club was going to watch the film of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín’s bestselling novel about love, emigration, and choices, set in 1950s Ireland and New York. Hanna locked the library door at five thirty as usual, and went back to her desk. There were always bits and pieces of admin to be dealt with towards the end of a week, and she was glad of the time to catch up with them before the club met at seven. Conor, who had shot off early on his Vespa, would be b
ack soon with very clean hands and damp hair, having helped his older brother, Joe, with the milking and taken a hasty shower.

  After tidying her desk and shutting down her computer, Hanna went to the kitchenette to make a coffee. Often, on film club nights, she’d nip over to the Garden Café for a wrap or a salad, to save herself the trouble of making a meal later on. Tonight her daughter, Jazz, was coming to Brooklyn so they’d planned to eat together after the film. Like many others who’d joined with initial enthusiasm, Jazz had become an erratic club member, more likely to miss a meeting than to turn up, but today she’d sent a text saying she’d be working late in the office and might as well come to the film when she was done.

  As Hanna waited for the kettle to boil, she calculated the number of chairs she’d need. Brooklyn would pull a crowd. With a rural Irish setting, three 2016 Oscar nominations, and a BAFTA Best British Film award, it should appeal to a wider audience than a classic like Death in Venice, which she’d chosen the previous month.

  There’d probably be greater interest in borrowing the book as well. Even though they’d loved the film, more than a few film club members had picked up Mann’s Death in Venice, seen it was a translation from the German, and put it back on the shelf. But Colm Tóibín was a writer everyone had heard of, and the fact that he had a pronounceable name would give him a head start. She’d learned that, if nothing else, from her screening of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

  By a process of osmosis the town had agreed that a brief discussion starting at seven meant the film would begin at seven thirty, though a hard core always came early to get first go at the biscuits. Tonight, long before Conor had set out the chairs, Ann Flood from the pharmacy was hovering near the tea urn, where the plates of digestives and rich teas were augmented by chocolate fingers.

  Among the early arrivals was a knot of readers eager to discuss Death in Venice, and one was determined to make it tête-à-tête. Fixing Hanna with a beady eye, she bore down on her inexorably in a whirl of scent and beads. Avoiding the clawlike clutch at her arm, Hanna smiled brightly. ‘Conor’s about to bring in the cups. Do help yourself as usual.’

  She moved away to greet the next influx, which included a group of pensioners, Conor’s fiancée, Aideen, and a couple of guys who worked in the council offices over the way. As she smiled and shook hands with the newcomers, Hanna could hear the disgruntled enthusiast behind her announcing that cheap tea always turned her stomach.

  The council offices were housed in a block that had once been Lissbeg’s convent school, where the library was accommodated in the former assembly hall. When she’d left her English husband and returned to Ireland, the fact that she herself had been a pupil here had added to Hanna’s sense of disorientation. Working in the dark-panelled room where she’d giggled and whispered as a schoolgirl had somehow brought back a teenage sense of inadequacy, making her prickly and aggressive at a time when she’d badly needed friends. And at first she’d actively disliked her job, not only because of its setting. She had left school with the dream of a career as an art librarian in London, so ending up in Lissbeg local library had felt like failure. But now both the library and her attitude towards it had changed.

  Previously enclosed by a grim grey wall that encompassed the school and the convent, the buildings had been developed to provide offices, low-rent workshops, and studios for start-up businesses, and a public space with a café in the former nuns’ garden. In the process, the library had been extended to include a state-of-the-art exhibition space as well as the airy, modern reading room that Hanna used for the film club.

  Those changes had vastly improved her workplace. The dark-panelled hall had been linked to the new spaces by glass partitions, so the library, which used to rely on ugly strip lighting, was now lit by daylight from two sides. And because the exhibition space displayed a medieval psalter, which had proved a magnet for tourists, the library’s amenities had been improved as well. Along with the digital screens installed in the exhibition space, Hanna’s reading room had been equipped with blackout blinds and a projector, and a screen that still gave her a secret thrill whenever she hit the button to lower it from the ceiling.

  Admittedly, the kitchenette where she and Conor made tea and hung their coats was still the size of a shoebox, but that was nothing compared to all the rest.

  Now she moved to the front of the room. There were plenty of vacant seats at the back; a few couples had gathered in the centre; and a phalanx of pencils and notebooks was twitching in the front row. Dead centre was Mr Maguire, a retired local schoolteacher. And on a chair that had somehow migrated to the right, Ann Flood, with a teacup at her feet, was unwrapping a chocolate finger.

  Hanna was about to kick off the discussion when Mr Maguire sprang to his feet and swivelled to face the audience. In his well-manicured hand a copy of Death in Venice bristled with brightly coloured sticky notes. It was a Knopf hardback edition, Hanna noticed, so he definitely hadn’t borrowed it from the library. She could see the guys from the council offices, who’d known him in their schooldays, looking resigned.

  ‘The first question is why the director perversely chose to make the hero a composer when the author made him a writer. Any meaningful comparative discussion must begin from that starting point. So let’s take it from there.’ With the air of a man who had set out his stall, Mr Maguire sat down again.

  Hanna looked at the faces around her, whose expressions ranged from bafflement to boredom. From his position at the back of the room, Conor flashed her a grin.

  A woman with a gauzy scarf over her dark hair leaned forward, and Hanna heard herself responding rather louder than she’d intended. ‘Yes! Saira! Did you want to say something?’

  There was a gleam of amusement in Saira Khan’s eyes. She was a quiet woman in her forties with a daughter who’d recently gone off to college, leaving her with spare time on her hands. ‘Actually, I thought the film threw new light on the book.’ She turned to Mr Maguire. ‘And it’s good to have one’s assumptions about a work of art challenged. Don’t you think?’

  Mr Maguire was squaring his shoulders when Aideen, Conor’s fiancée, raised her hand. She was sitting in the centre row beside her cousin Bríd. ‘I dunno if I should say this because I haven’t read the book.’

  Several people who clearly hadn’t read it either looked encouraging. Aideen hooked a curl behind her ear. ‘If they hadn’t changed the hero from an author to a composer, would the music in the film have made sense? Because the music was the best bit, I thought. And the costumes. And the light on the water. I mean, I’ve been to Italy – not Venice, Florence. Me and Conor went there. The light’s amazing. And, in the film, the way the music and the pictures work together is fantastic.’

  In a pained voice, Mr Maguire asked Hanna if they weren’t straying from the point. ‘I believe we’re here to discuss a classic work of modern literature.’

  Aideen turned scarlet and Conor immediately spoke from the back of the room. ‘Well, I have read the book and it seems to me that Aideen’s hit the mark. Spot on.’

  Hanna was torn between sympathy and annoyance. Conor hadn’t read Death in Venice – he’d told her so that morning when he’d returned the copy he’d borrowed. He’d had a couple of goes at reading it, he’d said, but he’d been up with the sheep all hours for weeks and kept falling asleep.

  Now his eyes met Hanna’s over the heads of the audience. With his damp spiky hair and sunburned face, he was an unlikely picture of chivalry, but his blazing stare dared her to undermine his stance. She could think of no other circumstance in which he was likely to challenge her, but where Aideen was concerned he was Galahad and Lancelot rolled into one. So, feeling she had no option, she said his point was well made.

  With the arrogance of a man who’d spent forty years in undisputed authority, Mr Maguire ignored the interruption and told Saira Khan that, unlike literature, films weren’t Art. ‘And books are made to be read, not fiddled about with.’

  Hanna
mentally counted to ten and refrained from asking why, in that case, he’d bothered to join the club.

  Saira Khan’s eyes gleamed again, but before anyone else could speak, the door opened to a stream of new arrivals. It was five to eight and Lissbeg had arrived in force to see Brooklyn – a brilliant film, as someone declared loudly, though how come the tea was all gone?

  Chapter Two

  There was still light in the evening sky when Hanna and Jazz left the library. Hanna paused for a moment to check that she’d set the alarm properly, then ran down the steps to the flagged courtyard. Linking arms, she and Jazz went through the arched gateway into Broad Street.

  This gate had been the entrance to the school, though the nuns themselves had never been known to use it. They had moved through private doorways linking the school to the convent, which in those days had been an inviolate sanctum. The idea that Jazz now had an office there was extraordinary to Hanna, but Jazz saw nothing strange in it. Neither, of course, thought Hanna, did any of that generation: the changes that had come to Finfarran in only a few decades were immense.

  Edge of the World Essentials, the organic cosmetics company Jazz worked for, had been one of the first start-ups to rent in The Old Convent Centre. Jewellers and other craft workers, artisan chocolatiers, artists, and picture-framers had followed, filling what had once been classrooms, the nuns’ parlour, and their dormitories. Since then the domestic-science rooms had been refitted for a residential cookery course, and the upper storeys of the two buildings were still being redeveloped.

  Hanna asked what Jazz had thought of the film.

  ‘I liked it. D’you reckon she was right to get on the boat and go back to the guy she’d married over in Brooklyn? Or should she have stayed in Ireland and built a new life?’

  ‘Well, that’s the eternal dilemma, isn’t it?’

  ‘Knowing the right thing to do?’

  ‘Well, yes, but not just that. Actually having the courage to choose.’

  Jazz linked her arm through Hanna’s. ‘So, what are we going to eat?’