The Copper Beech (34 page)

He knew he stood at a crossroads. He could have said that he was needed back at the office, that he had work to catch up with, that he had to make a phone call to Dublin. He might have said anything.

But he said, ‘I was hoping to find some attractive company to walk me through Barna Woods, and now I have.’

They laughed as they walked. She teased him about his city suit, he said she was dressing deliberately like a pantomime gypsy. She asked what he had been doing at The Glen, he said that there was a secrecy like the seal of Confession about matters between lawyer and client. He asked if the Darcy’s had a proper title to their shop, they hadn’t bought it through his uncle’s firm … She said the same seal of Confession applied to business deals.

By the time they came out into the sunshine again, and walked by the cottages to the bridge, they were well aware of each other. Much more than attractive faces and winning ways. They were people who could talk and play. They were a match for each other.

So when he went to buy things there he went knowing that it was a move, a degree of courtship. He bought more razor blades.

‘My, what a strong beard we must have,’ she said. Again within her husband’s hearing.

When he bought a pound of tomatoes she asked him was he going on a picnic in the woods. Mike Darcy was serving another customer.

‘No, my aunt wants some more, that’s all.’

‘No, she was in this morning and bought plenty,’ said Gloria, eyes dancing and full of mischief.

The teasing visits and banter went on for some days.

‘It’s lovely of you to come and see me so often,’ she said, pressing her body towards the counter. She wore a chain around her neck, the pendant was between her breasts, the eye followed it down as it was intended to.

‘Yes, it’s lovely of me, you never come to call on me,’ Richard said.

‘Ah, but I can’t make excuses about civil bills and statements of claim,’ she said. ‘You can invent all the tomatoes and razor blades in the world.’

‘So we’ll have to meet on neutral ground,’ he suggested.

They met two days later at the church when they both attended the funeral of Mrs Miriam Murphy.

It was pneumonia, Dr Jims Blake had said. Brought on by exposure, someone else had said, Mrs Murphy had taken to sleeping out on the rockery of their garden. It was a sure fact that money and position didn’t bring you happiness.

Richard Hayes looked at the small wiry Leo as she walked down the church supporting her father. Two strange men, the brothers from abroad, had come for the funeral. They looked military, they knew hardly anyone.

There was a gathering in Ryan’s Hotel. Young Nessa had done up one of the downstairs rooms as a special function room. It was exactly what was needed for this occasion. Coffee and sandwiches and some drinks. Those who wished to adjourn to the bar could do so. It had never been done before in Shancarrig; you either went back to someone’s house or you went to the pub. This was a new respectability.

‘Very clever of you to have thought this up, Nessa,’ he said admiringly. Genuinely so.

‘Leo is my friend. It’s not easy for her to have people at the house.’ Nessa hadn’t time to talk to him – these days she was great with young Niall, and already the boy was beginning to look the better for it. His hair was smarter, he had got a new jacket. Somehow he even seemed to walk taller.

Gloria and Mike Darcy were in the gathering though somehow Richard wondered had they been invited in the strict sense of the word.

As people moved around offering sympathy and trying to place Harry and James who had long left Shancarrig, Gloria found herself next to Richard.

‘So now we’re on neutral ground,’ she said.

‘Yes, but very crowded neutral ground,’ he said, shaking his head in exaggerated sorrow.

‘Have you any suggestions for somewhere that’s not crowded?’ She couldn’t have been more direct. Had she asked him to make love to her she could not have said it more clearly.

‘Well, since your place, my place and this hotel are out of the question, let’s think of somewhere that might be deserted at this moment.’ He wasn’t serious. There was nowhere they could go in Shancarrig, literally nowhere.

‘There’s The Glen,’ she said. She saw the look of revulsion on his face. They were sympathising over the death of the woman who had lived all her life in The Glen; Gloria could not possibly be considering going there to use the empty house. ‘Not the house, the gate lodge,’ she said.

‘How would we get in?’ Already he had bypassed any moral objections to a place in the grounds. That was different.

‘The back window is open, I checked.’

‘Twenty minutes?’ he asked. It would take him ten to
say his goodbyes, two to go back to his room for condoms.

‘Fifteen,’ she said, and again she ran her tongue along her lower lip. His goodbyes were courteous and very swift.

There was a crotchety old farmer who lived out that direction. If he was asked he could say he got a message to visit him but then he had turned out not to be there. But why was he taking these kind of precautions? No one would ask him. Nobody would dream he was about to do what he was about to do.

She was there before him, lying on a divan covered with a rug. The place smelled musty but not of damp.

‘Did you bring anything?’

‘Yes, that’s what delayed me. I had to go back to my room for them. I don’t carry them always just in case,’ he laughed, patting his pocket.

‘Now don’t be so unromantic. I meant champagne, something like that.’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’ He looked crestfallen.

‘Never mind, I did.’ Her white teeth flashed as she bit the foil from the top of the bottle, there were cups on the dresser. They laughed as they drank it too quickly so that the fizzy liquid went up their noses. And they kissed.

‘Did you go back to the shop for this?’ He marvelled at her speed.

‘No. I had it with me in my big shoulder bag.’ She laughed at her own wickedness and the confidence that it would have needed.

‘Let me take off these dark respectable clothes. They don’t suit you,’ he said.

‘Well, it was a funeral. I couldn’t wear my red skirt but …’ She was wearing a red petticoat, trimmed with white lace, she wore no brassiere, just a gold chain around her
throat. She looked so abandoned and wild as she lay there laughing up at him he could scarcely bear the moments of waiting.

‘I’ve longed for you, Richard Hayes,’ she said. And he sank into her as if he had known her all his life.

After that it was always urgent and never easy. If only the Murphys lived a more regular life, Richard groaned to himself. If he could know they would stay in the big house, or stay out of it, then the gate lodge would have been the ideal place for his meetings with Gloria. But they could never be sure; they would have no excuse if they were seen going in and out of the window.

It took them weeks to work out some kind of a pattern to the curious ways of Leo and her father.

Leo eventually started a secretarial course which involved going to the town on the bus. This gave her day a shape. The Major, who walked the long avenue with his old dogs, that he kept calling Lance and Jessie, was less predictable. Richard tried to find out more of his movements by asking his uncle, but it seemed that a friendship of twenty-five years was based on Bill Hayes knowing nothing whatsoever about Frank Murphy. It was hard to believe, but that was the way it was.

And there was the time that Hayes and Son, Solicitors, were asked to see to a property. Richard and Gloria had many happy meetings there in the guise of showing it to clients.

Gloria could get away so easily it was almost frightening.

‘Does Mike never ask where you’re going?’

‘Lord no. Why should he?’

‘Well, if I had a beautiful wife like you I wouldn’t let her wander off … to do the devil knows what …’ He squeezed her and held her to him again.

‘Then you wouldn’t be a husband, you’d be a gaoler,’ she laughed. He thought about it.

There was some truth in what she said. If you married someone just to guard her like a possession it was like an imprisonment. But look at it the other way, if Mike was more careful and caring about his wife then surely Gloria wouldn’t wander free as she was.

Sometimes he spoke about her children, her little boys, Kevin and Sean.

‘What is there to say?’

‘Aren’t you afraid they’ll find out, that they’d hate you for this?’

‘Darling Richard, you are riddled with guilt. I think we should make a regular thing of visiting Father Gunn together after we meet.’

‘Don’t tease me. I only say these things because I love you.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘I do. I never said it to anyone before.’

‘We say it at the moment we make love, because at that moment everyone loves. But you don’t love me in an everyday sort of way.’

‘I could.’

‘No, Richard.’ She put her fingers on his lips and then into his mouth, and then she kissed him and soon the words were forgotten.

She was the ideal lover. He could never have dreamed of anyone so passionate and responsive, a beautiful woman who found him desirable and wasn’t afraid to say so. A witty, flowing, secret love whose dark eyes flashed at him when they met in Ryan’s Hotel, in the shops or at the church.

After years of girls wanting more from Richard here
was someone who wanted no more at all. Not public recognition, not a commitment, and obviously because of the heavy band she already wore on her finger, not an engagement ring. For quite a time it was the perfect romance.

And then he began to notice small changes in his own attitude. He couldn’t say that Gloria had changed, she had always been light-hearted in their daring and the fear of discovery … and enthusiastic about the pleasure they gave each other.

No. It was Richard who changed.

He couldn’t bear to see her holding her little boys by the hand. He thought back to his own mother and father, the respectable Dublin doctor and his busy bridge-playing wife. Theirs had been a house of stability as he grew up in Waterloo Road. His mother had always been there for them. Suppose she had been someone who sneaked out to the arms of a lover while his father worked? He dismissed the thought as some kind of guilty fantasy.

There had been no way in which he had compared his life with that of his parents before, why was he holding up their staid and plodding existence as some kind of example now? Gloria was a wonderful mother to Kevin and Sean. What she had with Richard was something totally different, something separate entirely.

Then Richard found himself uneasy about Mike, big handsome Mike Darcy with his teeth as white and even as his wife’s, who stood long hours in the grocery shop they were so busy building up together. Mike, who would go to endless trouble to find something Richard ordered, furrowing his brow to think where they might get that particular chamois leather Richard wanted. He didn’t like the man being so generous with his time and help for
him. Mike’s innocent face was a reproach to Richard Hayes.

Gloria only laughed when he mentioned it. ‘What Mike and I have is different to what you and I have … Let’s keep them separate,’ she said.

‘But I know about him, he doesn’t know about me.’

‘Why do men have to think everything’s a game, with rules?’ she laughed.

And then there were times when he wondered if he
did
know about Mike and Gloria and what they had together. He would see the way they leant towards each other in the shop when they thought no one was looking. He saw the way Mike Darcy sometimes stroked his wife’s body.

A very unfamiliar feeling of raging jealousy came over him when he saw them touch.

‘You don’t do this with Mike, do you?’ he begged her one afternoon in their gate lodge.

‘Nobody could do what you and I do. This is ours.’

‘But does he want to …? I mean do you and he …?’

‘You’re so handsome when you look worried, Richard,’ she said.

‘I must know.’

Suddenly she sat up, eyes flashing. ‘No, you must not know. There is no must about it. We are not master and slave … you have no right to know anything that I do not wish to tell you. Do I ask you any such questions …?’

‘But there’s nothing to know about me.’ He was wretched.

‘That’s because this is the way I choose to see things. I am not curious, suspicious, asking where I should ask nothing.’ Her voice held an ultimatum.

Accept things as they were or there would be no more to accept. He longed to know if she had known other
men since her marriage to Mike, if they failed at this test and had been sent away.

He would have killed any man, any traveller who walked into Ryan’s Hotel, if he had said he shared a bed with Gloria Darcy. Yes, he would have taken this man by the throat and shaken him to squeeze out his life, uncaring about what onlookers or the law would say or do. Why then was Mike able to stand and fill bags with sugar and other bags with potatoes and not wonder where his beautiful wife went to in the afternoons?

It was becoming more difficult too for Richard to be free in the afternoons since young Niall had joined the firm. The boy had definitely gained a new confidence, which Richard suspected was due to the blossoming of a friendship and even courtship with the glossy young Nessa Ryan from the hotel.

Gone were the days when Niall Hayes was happy with the menial jobs, the work of a glorified clerk. Now he wanted to learn, to share, to study Richard’s ways with clients. ‘Can I come with you to the place that there’s all the fuss about the title?’ he would ask.

This was one of Richard’s mythical excuses for being out of the office. He had described a difficult old farmer set in his ways who had to be cajoled and flattered into revealing his documents.

‘No, Niall. It wouldn’t work out … this fellow is as mad as a wasps’ nest. You wouldn’t know what he’d do if I brought anyone else. I’ve only got as far as I have because I go on my own and put in endless bloody hours with him.’

‘Well, can I see the file on him?’ Niall asked.

‘Why? What do you want to bother yourself with that old fart for, there’s plenty of other work to do …’