Priscilla came out of the shop laden with parcels which she placed one by one on Frank’s lap.
“Beer and lemonade,” she said. “The beast was out of lemon flavoured soda, so I had to get lemonade instead, but your lager’s all right. You don’t mind drinking out of the bottle, do you, Cousin Frank? You can have the bailing tin of course, if you like, but it’s rather salty. Macaroons and cocoanut creams. They turned out to be the same price, so I thought I might as well get a mixture. The cocoanut creams are lighter, so one gets more of them for the money. Tongue. I told him not to put paper on the tongue. I always think brown paper is rather a nuisance in a boat. It gets so soppy when it’s the least wet. There’s no use having more of it than we can help. Peaches. He hadn’t any of the small one and sixpenny tins, so I had to spend your other shilling to make up the half-crown for the big one. I hope you don’t mind. We shall be able to finish it all right I expect. Oh, bother! I forgot that the peaches require a tin-opener. Have you a knife? If you have we may be able to manage by hammering it along through the lid of the tin with a rowlock.”
Frank had a knife, but he set some value on it He did not want to have it reduced to the condition of a coarse toothed saw by being hammered through a tin with a rowlock. He hesitated.
“All right,” said Priscilla, “if you’d rather not have it used I’ll go and try to stick Brannigan for the loan of a tin-opener. He may not care for lending it, because things like tin-openers generally drop overboard and then of course he wouldn’t get it back. But he’ll hardly be able to refuse it I offer to deposit the safety pin in my tie as a hostage. It looks exactly as if it is gold, and, if it was, would be worth far more than any tin-opener.”
She went into the shop again. It was nearly ten minutes before she came out. Frank was seriously annoyed by a number of small children who crowded round the bath-chair and made remarks about his appearance. He tried to buy them off with macaroons, but the plan failed, as a similar one did in the case of the Anglo-Saxon king and the Danes. The children, like the Norse pirates, returned almost immediately in increased numbers. Then Priscilla appeared.
“I thought I should have had a frightful rag with Brannigan over the tin-opener,” she said, “but he was quite nice about it. He said he’d lend it with pleasure and didn’t care whether I left him the safety pin or not. The only trouble was that he couldn’t find one. He said that he had a gross of them somewhere, but he didn’t know where they’d been put. In the end it was Mrs. Brannigan who found them in an old biscuit tin under some oilskins. That’s what delayed me.”
Peter Walsh was hoisting a sail, a gunter lug, on the Tortoise. He paused in his work now and then to cast a glance ashore at Frank. Priscilla wheeled the bath-chair down to the slip and hailed Peter.
“Hurry up now,” she said, “and get the foresail on her. Don’t keep us here all day.”
Peter pulled on the foresail halyards with some appearance of vigour. He slipped the mooring rope and ran the Tortoise alongside the slip, towing the water logged punt behind her.
“Joseph Antony Kinsella,” said Peter, “was in this morning on the flood tide and he was telling me he came across that young fellow again near Illaunglos.”