Chapter 6 Laddy

When Signora was choosing Italian names for people, she tried to make sure they began with the same letter. The big simple man was called Laddy. 'Ah, Lorenzo,' she said.

Laddy liked the name. 'Lorenzo. Mi chiamo Lorenzo' he said. He was very pleased.

•

Laddy had grown up on a farm. Both his parents had died in a train accident when he was eight, and his oldest sister. Rose, had always looked after him. She had hoped that he would one day manage the farm. But Laddy was slow at learning. He was a good boy, he tried hard, but he was slow. By the time he was sixteen, it was clear that Rose would always run the farm.

So Rose married Shay, a strange, silent man who worked on the farm. He did the work and ate and slept on the farm. That was all. It was not a marriage of love. It was simply convenient. They had a son, Gus. Laddy loved little Gus.

Then Shay died suddenly. He fell and hit his head. Some people said that he had always drunk too much. Alone now, Rose made a decision. She would sell the farm and they would go and live in Dublin.

In Dublin, Laddy found work as a porter in a small hotel. There, they soon thought of Laddy as part of the family He was invited to live in the hotel, and this suited everyone.

Rose became a nurse. She had trained as a nurse before her parents died. She was still an attractive woman in her forties, but she didn't want to marry again. One loveless marriage was enough. And she had Gus and Laddy.

The years passed peacefully enough. Gus did well at school and then studied Hotel Management. He loved his work. He was always prepared to work the longest hours and do the hardest jobs to learn the hotel business.

Laddy was very upset when his employers decided to sell their hotel. He was going to lose his job. At about the same time, Gus met the girl of his dreams. She was called Maggie and was full of life and confidence. She had trained as a cook and was perfect for Gus, in Rose's mind. All Gus and Maggie needed now was a hotel job together. It would be great to buy a small place and to slowly improve it.

'Couldn't you buy my hotel?' Laddy suggested. It was perfect, but of course they couldn't afford it.

'If you give me a room in the hotel to live in, I'll give you the money,' Rose said. It would be a home for Laddy and a start in business for Gus and Maggie.

At first it was not easy to make a success of the hotel. They were paying out more money than they were earning.

'I can work harder,' said Laddy, anxious to help.

'Thank you, Laddy, but there aren't many guests.' Maggie was very kind to her husband's Uncle Laddy.

'Don't worry, Laddy,' said Rose. 'Gus and Maggie will have some ideas. Soon it will be very busy, you'll see.'

And she was right. Gus and Maggie worked at it night and day. The number of regular visitors slowly grew, and these visitors told other people about it.

Gus and Maggie had two children, beautiful little girls. And Rose was one of the happiest women in Ireland.

•

One day, something happened that gave Laddy a new interest. One of the hotel guests asked where he could play snooker. When Laddy found a snooker hall, the man asked Laddy to have a game with him.

'I'm afraid I don't play, sir,' said Laddy.

'I'll show you,' the man said.

And then it happened. Laddy was naturally good at the game. The man didn't believe he had never played before. He learned the order of the balls: yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, black. He hit them easily and with style. People stood around to watch.

A few months later, he was winning competitions. He had his picture in the paper and he was invited to join a club. He was famous in a small way.

Rose watched all this with great pleasure. Her brother was a person of importance at last. So when she discovered that she was seriously ill, she didn't worry about Laddy’s future. She knew that he would always live with Gus and Maggie. He was fine.

•

'We'll make sure that there's as little pain as possible,' the doctor said.

'Oh, I know you will,' said Rose. 'Now, I'd really like to go into a hospice, where I can be looked after. My family have a hotel to run. I'd prefer not to be there. They would give me too much time.'

When Rose's family came to visit her in the hospice, she didn't tell them about the pain and sickness. She told them all the good things about the place and the work it was doing. The months passed, and she became very thin. But at least her mind was still working well, she said.

In fact it was working too well for Gus and Maggie. They couldn't hide from her the trouble they had.

'You have to tell me what it is,' she said to Gus and Maggie. 'You cannot leave this room without telling me. I'll only imagine that it's even worse than it is.'

They told her the story. They had taken out insurance with a company that had closed. The owner, Harry Kane, had said on television that nobody would lose their investment, the banks would rescue them. But they were still afraid of losing the hotel, their hopes and dreams and future.

Tears poured down Rose's face.

'I knew it was a mistake to tell you,' Gus said.

'No, of course you had to tell me. And please tell me everything that happens after this.'

As the days passed, they brought her letters from the bank. It seemed that the bank were definitely going to rescue the investors. Rose read everything to make sure she had understood it perfectly.

'Does Laddy understand how nearly we lost everything?' she asked.

'He understands at a level of his own,' said Maggie. And Rose realized that Laddy would always be in understanding hands.

She died peacefully.

•

She never knew that a woman called Siobhan Casey would call at the hotel. Siobhan Casey explained that it was necessary for Gus and Maggie to invest a large amount with Mr Kane's new company. She said that they were lucky, that in similar situations investors had not been rescued. Mr Kane had organized this personally. And now he was being supported by those people whose businesses he had saved.

At first the amount suggested was not large, but then it increased. Gus and Maggie worried about it. But they had been rescued; perhaps in business this was normal. Miss Casey had told them that she worked with very powerful people. It might be silly to annoy them.

Gus and Maggie told Laddy nothing. They just tried to spend less money. But Laddy realized something was wrong. The hotel breakfasts were not quite so big. They couldn't afford fresh flowers now.

•

An Italian businessman, his wife and two sons came to stay in the hotel. The man was busy in offices all day, his wife was busy shopping. Their two sons were bored and so Laddy offered to take them to play snooker. And because of Laddy, the boys' holiday became a great success.

They were a rich 'family called Garaldi and lived in Rome. When they were leaving, they asked someone to take their photograph with Laddy outside the hotel. Then they got into their taxi and went to the airport. But after the taxi had left, Laddy saw bank notes lying in the road. They would never know where they had dropped the notes.They might not even notice it until they got back to Italy. They were rich people. Not like Gus and Maggie, who badly needed the money. He thought about it, then he got the bus out to the airport to give them back their money.

The Italian family all crowded round him. They shouted to everyone around them that the Irish were a generous people. They put some of the notes in Laddy's pockets. They said something again and again to him in Italian.

'They're asking you to go and stay with them in Rome,' translated someone near Laddy.

'I know,' said Laddy, 'and I'll go.' He smiled at everyone.

'I'll need to get a passport, you know,' Laddy said the next day.

'Won't you need to learn to speak Italian first,' Maggie suggested quickly, hoping he would forget the whole thing. The Italians wouldn't really expect Laddy to come to Rome. She didn't want him to be upset.

In his snooker club Laddy asked his friends about Italian lessons. A van driver, Jimmy Sullivan, said there was a woman called Signora who had come to live with them. She was starting Italian lessons up in Mountainview school.

•

Gus and Maggie were worried that Laddy wouldn't manage in the Italian classes, but they were wrong. He loved it. He learnt the phrases that they were given each week. He greeted Italian visitors to the hotel warmly in Italian.

One evening, the Principal of the whole school came and sat beside Laddy. 'How are you?' he asked.

'Bene, benissimo.' Signora had told them to answer every question in Italian.

'Great, and what are you doing today?'

'We're learning parts of the body for when we get ill or have an accident in Italy. The first thing the doctor will say is "Dov'e il dolore?" which means: where is the pain? and you tell him.'

Aidan Dunne had been right to fight for these classes. Tony O'Brien thought. They seemed to be a great success, and all kinds of people were coming there. Harry Kane’s wife, and that man who looked a bit like a criminal. He would tell Grania about it this evening at dinner.

The parts of the body class was great fun. Tony O'Brien had to keep his hand over his face to stop laughing some of the time. But to his surprise they had learnt a lot of language and they were confident about using it. The woman was a good teacher. And these thirty people really thought that they were going on a trip to Rome. Tony O'Brien, who was a strong man, felt slightly weak at the thought.

He saw Aidan and Signora laughing over some boxes that they were changing from hospital beds into seats on a train. They were standing close together, like very good friends. Close, but not touching.

'Dov'e il dolore?' he said to Lorenzo.

'Il gomi'to,' shouted Laddy, holding his elbow.

•

Things were so bad in the hotel that Gus and Maggie found it hard to help Laddy too. It would be difficult to pay all the people who worked in the hotel that week. And there was Laddy, his big face anxious, wanting them to listen to him while he practised his Italian.

And that night was the night he chose to invite Constanza in. She often drove Laddy home after the class. But she had never come in before. Gus and Maggie had just spent three hours looking at their financial position. They would have to sell the hotel. And now they would have to talk politely to this woman.

But they didn't have to be polite. She told them that she was married to Harry Kane, the name on their papers and documents. She took out her chequebook and wrote a large cheque. She said the money was theirs by law. Then she left.

'Was I right to tell Constanza?' Laddy said anxiously.

'Yes, Laddy, you were right,' Gus said. His voice was very quiet but Laddy knew that he was pleased.

He must tell them how well he had done in class. 'It was great tonight. I was afraid I wouldn't remember the words but I did, all of them.'

Maggies eyes were full of tears. They sat together, the three of them. They would always live together, as Rose had understood.