The Copper Beech (19 page)

Jims Blake noted that Nora Kelly remembered the exact age of the baby boy he had wanted to give her.

If he had been asked he couldn’t have said without counting back to the April day when Frances had died.

‘Come on now, girls. We mustn’t delay Mrs Kelly.’ He began to shepherd them home.

‘I’m sure you’re dying to be back to him,’ she said.

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ His voice sounded false and he knew it.

As they closed the school gate he wondered was he unnatural not to hurry home to see a sleeping infant? He didn’t think so. When Eileen and Sheila were babies he didn’t see them for hours on end, and then only when presented with them by Frances after bathtime. Surely that was the way most men felt?

He mustn’t dwell on that one highly charged moment on the day of his wife’s funeral. Rationally of course he had no intention of giving away the baby that she had died bringing into the world. It was foolish to keep harking back to it with guilt.

He had perfectly normal feelings towards this child, and the hiring of Carrie had been inspired. She had indeed a natural instinct of motherhood, and she seemed to know that they wanted as little sign of a baby about the house as possible.

The girls went to the nursery each evening to play with him and to hear stories of Carrie’s wild brothers, and the desperate injuries they had endured. She told them nothing of the child born in Dublin and given away. She sat rocking the substitute baby Declan in her arms.

Jims Blake called in from time to time. Not every day.

He knew that Mrs Kelly at the school would find this unbelievable.

That evening he went into the nursery.

Carrie was sitting at a table with pen and ink and several sheets of screwed-up paper.

‘I was never one for writing, Doctor,’ she said.

‘We’re all good at different things. Aren’t you marvellous with the child?’

‘Anyone would love a baby.’ She shrugged it off.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Something in his voice made her look up. ‘Well, it’s different in your case … I mean, being a man and everything, and your poor wife dying giving birth to him.’

‘I don’t blame him for that.’ It was true. Jims Blake blamed himself, not his son, for the death of Frances.

‘You’ll grow to love him. Wait till he starts to call you Daddy … and clings to your legs. They’re lovely at that age.’

She must have been thinking about her brothers, he realised. She didn’t see her own child grow.

He changed the subject. ‘Could I help you at all with the writing … or is it private?’ He saw Carrie look at him. In many ways he had the same status as Father Gunn, a man who knew secrets, a man who could be told things.

Carrie had a brother in gaol. None of the rest of the family wrote to him. She wanted him to feel that he wasn’t forgotten, that there’d be a place for him when he got out. It was told trustingly and simply.

He sat down at the table and took out his pen.

He wrote a letter to the boy, whose head he had stitched some years back, as if the letter came from Carrie. He told of the changes in the farm, the new barn, the way they had let the lower field go to grass. He told how Jacky Noone had got a new truck, and how Cissy had married. He said that Shancarrig looked fine in the summer sunshine and would be waiting to greet him when he came home.

Haltingly Carrie read it aloud, and tears came to her eyes. ‘You’re such a good man, Doctor. You knew what I wanted to say, even though I didn’t know myself.’

‘Here. You can have my fountain pen as a present. You’ll get into less of a mess with it than trying to dip
that thing there.’ The baby began to cry and the doctor stood up. He walked to the door without going to see the child. ‘Copy that out, Carrie, yourself. It’s no use sending the boy my letter. You copy it and next time I’ll give you more ideas.’

She picked the child up and looked at him with a face confused. A man so kind as to spend time writing a letter to her gaol-bird brother, a man who would give her his own good pen, but wouldn’t pick up his son who was ten weeks old.

When Declan Blake was three Carrie had a cake for him with three candles and there was a party in the nursery. Maisie made special drop scones for the occasion. The girls got him presents of sweets and they all sang ‘Happy Birthday’ before he blew the candles out.

Jims Blake looked at the small excited face of his son, the snub nose and the straight shiny hair washed especially for the day. He was wearing a new yellow jumper which Carrie must have bought in the town. He left money for the children’s clothes with Carrie and for the food with Maisie. Together they ran his house very well for him.

He had a curious empty feeling when the birthday song was over, as if something were expected of him.

It was only ten years ago in this house that Charles Nolan had urged him to marry. Ten years of visiting people and hearing their troubles and learning their hopes, realistic or wildly beyond their reach. He didn’t know what his own hopes were. He had never had time to work them out, he told himself.

The children were still looking at him.

In his mind he asked old Charles Nolan what to do and he heard himself saying …

‘Why don’t we sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” …?’

Their eyes lit up, Carrie’s face softened, the girls shouted the chorus and Declan clapped his hands to be the centre of such attention. Jims Blake felt the moment frozen for a long time.

The day came sooner than he ever thought it would when Declan should be brought to school.

‘A great day for you, Doctor, to see your son setting out with a satchel,’ Carrie had said.

Jims Blake looked at the child. ‘It’s a great day all right. Isn’t it, Declan?’

Declan looked up at him solemnly, as if he were a stranger. ‘It is, yes.’ He spoke shyly, and half hid himself behind Carrie, scuffing his new shoes a little on the ground, and seeming awkward.

Probably all children that age are awkward with their fathers, the doctor told himself. He watched from the window as his son went off to school on wobbly legs.

The doctor meant to ask how the day went, but he was out on calls when Declan came home, and the next morning there wasn’t time to talk either. It was a week before he even knew that there was a problem about Carrie delivering Declan to the school.

‘The other children call him a baby,’ Carrie explained.

‘He’s too young at five to walk all that way by himself,’ his father protested.

‘Other children do. All the young Dunnes come up from the cottages on their own …’

‘Those Dunnes aren’t children at all, they’re like monkeys. They were climbing trees barefoot when they were two years old.’

Jims Blake was indignant that there should be any comparison.

‘But it’s terrible to have him made a jeer of. Maybe he could go with the girls …?’

‘The girls say they don’t want him traipsing after them. They have their own friends …’

Carrie looked at him as if he had let her down. Jims Blake felt a wave of self-pity sweep over him. Why was he always made out to be in the wrong? He thought he was doing his best for all of them, not loading Eileen and Sheila down with dragging their baby brother, and now he was the worst in the world as a result.

None of his patients challenged what he said. They took their tablets, drank their medicine bottles, changed poultices and dressings, made journeys into hospitals for tests, without ever doubting him.

Only at home did his every action seem suspect.

Later, when he was helping Carrie with her letters, as he did every week, underlining a spelling mistake lightly in pencil, she looked at him, troubled.

‘You’re a very good man, Doctor.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘You correct me without insulting me. I write “yez” meaning “you all” and you just say, “Wouldn’t it be better to put you all, it might be clearer” … You don’t say I’m pig ignorant!’

‘But you’re
not
pig ignorant.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t be teaching me all the time. Maybe you should be doing pot hooks with Declan.’

‘Pot hooks?’

‘It’s how they teach them to write.’

‘I don’t want to be cutting across Mrs Kelly and her ways.’

He did look at Declan’s copy book though, and asked him knowledgeably, ‘Are these pot hooks, then?’

‘Yes, Daddy.’

‘Very good. Very good, keep at them,’ he said. There was the familiar feeling that it hadn’t been the right thing to say.

Since he had organised them all to sing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ when Declan was three, there had hardly been a time when he was sure that the right thing had been said.

Eileen and Sheila always asked about his patients, ever since they had been very young.

‘Is Mrs Barton going to die?’ They liked the quiet dressmaker who lived with her only son in the pink house on the hill.

‘No, of course not. She’s only got the flu.’

‘Is Miss Ross going to have a baby?’ They had seen her knitting and thought the two went together.

‘Was there much blood in the car crash?’

He parried their questions, kept the secrecy and diffused the sense of drama, and always he was aware that his son never asked him questions.

As the years went by he was even more aware of it. The girls left Shancarrig school and went to be boarders at a good convent school fifty miles away. There was now only the doctor and Maisie and Declan left in the house.

Carrie had given her own notice when Declan made his first communion.

‘He’s seven now, Doctor. He’s a grown lad. He can dress himself, keep his room tidy, do his homework and all. You don’t need me.’

‘And maybe you’re thinking of getting married?’ There was nothing Dr Jims didn’t see or know.

‘I’m not going to say much about it.’

‘And is it the father of the little lad?’

‘Yes, it is. Thanks to you, Doctor, I was able to write to him a bit, tell him things, speak my mind. You’re a great man for getting people to say things out. There’s far too many round here who bottle it all up.’

He was pleased at her praise. ‘You’ll have another child. I know you’ll never forget the first one, but you’ll be a family now.’ He was full of happiness for this dark-haired angular girl, who had such a poor start in life.

‘And you’ll have a chance to get to know your son more, maybe, when I’m gone.’

‘Ah, that will come, that will come. I was thinking of getting a desk up here for him to do his homework.’

‘The girls always did it downstairs, you know, more in the hub of things.’

‘But he’d like it here. More independent. Wouldn’t he?’

‘He might feel a bit shut away.’ Her eyes were troubled.

‘Not a bit of it, it would let him concentrate. Anyway, enough of such things. You’ll come back and see us?’

‘Of course I will. It was the best seven years of my life. I grew up properly in this house. I was very privileged.’ He tried to brush it away. ‘I mean it, Doctor Jims. I wouldn’t even have been able to use a word like privileged when I came here. Isn’t that living proof?’

When she was gone he made deliberate efforts to get involved in his son’s world.

Always he seemed choked off.

Declan did his homework silently up in the room that used to be called the nursery, then he would come down and sit with Maisie in the kitchen while she prepared the supper. Dr Jims was out so often it seemed only sensible for the boy to eat with Maisie, after all he had eaten his meals with Carrie when she was there to look after him.

He tried to think of things to interest Declan. ‘Are you on to fractions yet, lad?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must know. Either you are or you aren’t.’ His voice was suddenly impatient.

‘We might be. Sometimes you call things one thing and they call it another at school.’

‘And how’s your friend, Dinnie?’

‘Vinnie.’

‘Yes, Vinnie. How is he?’

‘He’s all right, I think, Dad.’

‘Well, surely you know whether he’s all right or not?’ Again the impatience arising without control, the tone of his voice changing.

‘I mean, I haven’t seen him for ages.’

‘Aren’t you friends any more?’

‘I don’t know. We might be. He’s living in the town, I’m here.’

Guilt then. Had he not listened? Had he ever been told? Surely other parents had this confusion about their children’s friends.

And of course, girls were easier too, anyone knew that. There had never been any trouble about Eileen and Sheila. He knew who their friends were. They talked about them, they brought them to The Terrace. When they came home from boarding school they always sought out Nessa Ryan from the hotel, and Leo Murphy, the daughter of Major Murphy up at The Glen.

Boys were hard to fathom. They lived in a secretive world of their own, it seemed. Jims Blake looked back on his own childhood, on the small bleak farm with the dour uncommunicative father who had hardly ever thrown him a word. He was behaving so differently from that silent man, and still meeting rebuff, it seemed.

The girls talked to him very easily. Eileen came and sat on a footstool in his study, hugging her knees. ‘Leo Murphy’s got all odd and snooty this year,’ she complained.

‘Is that a fact?’ Jims Blake had his own worries about the mental health of Miriam Murphy, the girl’s mother.

‘Yes. She wouldn’t let me in when I went up to The Glen, just said she couldn’t play today.
Play
, as if I was a child or she was a child.’

‘I know, I know.’ He was soothing.

‘And Nessa Ryan says the same thing about her, snooty as anything. She won’t let you into her house, as if anyone wanted to go.’

‘Maybe Maisie could make you a nice tea here …’

‘She doesn’t want to go to anyone else’s house either, Nessa says.’

‘At least you have Nessa,’ he said consolingly.

Eileen flounced. ‘Yes, and who needs Leo Murphy and her big house? Ours is much smarter than theirs anyway.’

‘Don’t be boasting about our good fortune in having a nice house,’ he said.

He had tried to tell them all about the good fortune in being given a house of such quality by the late Dr Nolan, but his loyal daughters dismissed it. They thought their father was worth it and more, they said.