The Copper Beech (40 page)

She couldn’t tell Father Gunn, not even in confession. Maura Brennan would be more frightened than she was herself.

For a moment she thought of Foxy Dunne, but even if he were at home he wasn’t the kind of person you could tell. She wondered how he was standing up to life on a big building site in London. Did he seriously think that people would believe he was seventeen? But he was always so cocky, so confident, maybe they would.

She looked away to the other side of the car as they drove back in through the gates of The Glen. It was as if she was afraid that the door of the gate lodge would be
swinging wide open and that Sergeant Keane and a lot of guards would be there waiting for them.

But everything was as it always had been. The dogs raced around, happy to be home and no longer cooped up in the station wagon. Biddy was bustling around full of interest in their sudden holiday. Old Ned, who was sitting smoking in the glasshouse, busied himself suddenly.

There had been no news, Biddy said. Everything had gone fine. There was a letter from Master Harry and Master James, and some other parcel that didn’t have enough stamps on it and Mattie wanted money paid.

There had been cross words with the butcher because they had delivered the Sunday joint of beef as usual and been annoyed when told that the family were on holidays. Sergeant Keane had been up to know if there was any word of one of the tinkers who had gone missing.

Biddy had given them all short shrift.

She had told Mattie that enough money had been spent on stamps to and from this house for him to feel embarrassed even mentioning the question of underpayment. He had slunk away, as well he might. The butcher had felt the lash of Biddy’s tongue as she told them that the new frontage on the shop had been paid for with money that Major Murphy and his family had spent on the best of meat, they should be ashamed to grumble.

She asked Sergeant Keane what he could have been thinking of to imagine that a tinker boy could even have crossed the lawns of The Glen.

At first Leo didn’t want to meet anyone. She wanted to stay half sitting, half kneeling on her window seat, looking out to where the dogs played, and old Ned made feeble attempts at hoeing, to where her father walked with his halting movements out to meet Mr Hayes, and where
Mother drifted, her straw hat in her hand, through the shrubbery and past the lilacs.

No man came from the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin to deal with the rockery that they had planned on top of the great pit that had been filled in.

When Mr O’Neill, the auctioneer from the big town, came to inquire whether they would be interested in letting the gate lodge, Leo’s father and mother said not just now, some time certainly, but at the moment everything was quite undecided – perhaps one of the boys might come home and live in it.

There had never been any question of Harry or James coming back. Leo realised it was one more of these easy lies her mother told, like when she had told the people at the hotel that Leo had been unwell and that was why she hadn’t been able to eat her meals.

One day Maura Brennan from school came and asked for a job as a maid in the house. She said she had to work somewhere and why not for someone like Leo, whom she liked. Leo had been awkward and frightened that day. It seemed another example of the world going mad: Maura, who had sat beside her at school, wanting to come and scrub floors in their house because that was the way things were.

But as the days turned into weeks Leo got the courage to leave The Glen. She called on Eddie Barton and his mother. They spoke to her as if things were normal. She began to believe they were. There was an ill-written postcard from London saying ‘Wish you were here’. She knew it was from Foxy, though it didn’t say. And one Saturday at Confession Father Gunn had asked her was there anything troubling her.

Leo’s heart leapt into her throat.

‘Why do you ask that, Father?’ she said in a whisper.

‘You seem nervous, my child. If there’s anything you want to say to me, remember you’re saying it to God through me.’

‘I know, Father.’

‘So, if there is any worry …’

‘I am worried about something, but it’s not my worry, it’s someone else’s worry.’

‘Is it your sin, my child?’

‘No, Father. No. Not at all. It’s just that I can’t understand it. You see, it has to do with grown-ups.’

There was a silence.

Father Gunn was digesting this. He assumed that it was to do with a child’s perception of adult sexuality and all the loathing and embarrassment that this could bring.

‘Perhaps all these things will become clear later,’ he said soothingly.

‘So, I shouldn’t worry, do you think, Father?’

‘Not if it’s something you have no control over, my child, something where it would not be appropriate for you to be involved,’ said the priest.

Leo felt much better. She said her three Hail Marys, penance for her other small sins, and put the biggest thing as far to the back of her mind as possible. After all, the priest said that God would make it clear later; now was not the appropriate time to worry about it.

As she prepared for her years in the convent school in the town she tried to make life in The Glen seem normal. She had joined their game. She was pretending that nothing had ever happened on that summer evening when the world stopped.

Leo started to go down the hill to meet the people she had been at school with once more – her friend Nessa Ryan in the hotel, whose mother always found work for idle hands – Sheila and Eileen Blake, who were home from a posh boarding school and kept asking could they come and play tennis at The Glen. Leo told them the court needed a lot of work. She realised she was lying as smoothly as her mother these days. She met Niall Hayes, who told her that he thought he was in love.

‘Everyone’s doing everything too young,’ Leo said reprovingly. ‘Foxy’s too young to be going to England to work, you’re too young to be in love. Who is it anyway?’

He didn’t say. Leo thought it might be Nessa. But no, surely not? He lived across the road from Nessa, he had known her all his life. That couldn’t be what falling in love was like. It was too confusing.

She met Nancy Finn from the pub. Nancy was what they called a bold strap in Shancarrig. She was fifteen and had been accused of being forward and giving people the eye. Sometimes she helped serve behind the counter. It was a rough sort of place.

Nancy said she’d really love to go to America and work as a cocktail waitress. That was her goal but her father said it was lunacy. Nancy said her father, Johnny Finn Noted for Best Drinks, was fed up. The guards had been in every night for three weeks asking was there any brawl between tinkers and anyone, and her father said he wouldn’t let a bloody tinker in the door. Sergeant Keane said that was a very unchristian attitude, and Nancy’s father had said the guards would have another tune to play if he
did
let the tinkers in and took their money, so there had been hard words and the upshot was that the guards were watching Johnny Finn’s pub night after night,
ready to pounce if anyone was left with a drink in front of them for thirty seconds beyond the licensing hours.

The summer ended and a new life began, a life of getting the bus every day into school in the big town. The bus bounced along the roads through villages and woods, and stopped at junctions and crossroads where people came down long narrow tracks to the main road. Leo and Nessa Ryan learned their homework to the rhythm of the bus crossing the countryside. They heard each other’s poems, they puzzled out theorems and algebra. Often they didn’t even look out the window at the countryside passing by.

Sometimes Leo seemed as if she was looking out at the scenery. Anyone watching her would think that there was a dreamy schoolgirl looking out at the fields with the cattle grazing, the colours changing from season to season in the hedges and clusters of bushes that they passed.

But Leo Murphy’s eyes might not have been focusing on these things at all. Her thoughts were often on her mother. Her pale delicate mother, who wandered more often through the gardens of The Glen no matter what the weather, with empty eyes, talking softly to herself.

Leo had seen her mother sit under the lilac tree picking the great purple flowers apart absently in her lap and crooning to herself, ‘You had lilac eyes, Danny. Your eyes were like deep lilac. Your eyes are closed now.’

She spoke of Danny too when she half sat and half lay over the rockery. Every day, rain or shine, she tended it, and a weed could hardly put its head out before Mrs Murphy had snapped it away.

‘At least I kept your grave for you, Danny boy,’ she
would cry. ‘You can never say I didn’t put flowers on your grave. No man in Ireland got more flowers.’

The first time Leo heard her mother speak like this she was frozen with horror. It was a known fact that the missing tinker was Danny. His family had told people that he must have a girl in Shancarrig. He used to be gone from the camp for long periods, and when he’d come back he was always smiling and saying nothing. There was the question he might have run off with someone from the locality. Sergeant Keane had assured the travellers that there were no unexplained disappearances of any of the girls of the village; he had made inquiries and there was no one missing from the area.

‘No one except Danny,’ said Mrs McDonagh, the sad-looking woman with the dark, lined face who was Danny’s mother.

Leo heard all this from other people. Nessa Ryan heard it discussed a lot in the hotel, and reported it word for word. It was the only exciting thing that had happened in their lives. She couldn’t understand why her friend Leo wasn’t interested in it, and wouldn’t speculate like everyone else about what might have happened.

The months went by and Leo’s mother became less in touch with reality.

Leo had stopped trying to talk to her about school, and everyday things. Instead she spoke as if her mother was an invalid.

‘How do you feel today, Mother?’

‘Well … I don’t know, I really don’t know.’ She spoke in a dull voice. The woman who used to be so elegant and graceful, the mother who would plan a picnic, correct bad grammar or a mispronounced word with cries of horror … that had all gone.

She barely touched her food, just smiled vaguely at
Father, and Leo, and at Biddy as if they were people she used to know. She spoke to the dogs, Lance and Jessie, no longer the big gambolling pups, but more stately with years. She reminded them of how they had known Danny, and they would stand guard over his grave.

Biddy
must
have heard it. She would have had to be deaf not to have known what she was talking about.

But the conspiracy continued.

Mrs Murphy had been feeling under the weather, surely now the longer days, or the bright weather, or the good crisp winter without any damp … whichever season … she would show an improvement.

Old Ned had been pensioned off. Eddie Barton came and cut the grass sometimes, but there was nobody coming to do the gardens as they should have been done. Sometimes Leo and her father would struggle, but it was beyond them. Only the rockery bloomed. Mrs Murphy wandered outside The Glen with her secateurs in her pocket and took cuttings for it, or even dug up little plants that she thought might flourish.

In the increasingly jungle-like gardens of The Glen the rockery bloomed as a monument, as a memorial.

In her efforts to keep her mother out of anyone else’s sight and hearing, Leo pieced together the story of horror, of what had happened in those weeks when she was fourteen and had understood nothing of the world. Those weeks before her world changed.

Mother remembered not only Danny’s lilac eyes but his strong arms, and his young body. She remembered his laughter and his impatience and greed to have her, over and over. With a sick stomach Leo listened to her mother remembering and crying for a lost love. She hated the childlike coquettish enthusiasm in her mother’s face when she spoke of the man she had welcomed on the mossy
earth, in her bedroom on the rug, under the lilac trees, and in the gate lodge.

But it was when she mentioned the gate lodge that her face would harden and her questioning take a different turn. Why did he have to be so greedy? What did he need with silver? Why had he demanded to take their treasures? What did he mean that he needed something to trade, some goods to deal in as they went towards Galway? Had he not taken her, was that not the greatest treasure of all? Miriam Murphy’s eyes were like stone when she went through that part of the story of the last time they had met … of the silver he had wrapped in a tablecloth as he had roamed through the house, touching things, taking this, leaving that. She had begged him and pleaded.

‘Say there was a robbery … say you came back and found it all gone.’ His lilac eyes had laughed at her.

‘I told him he must not go, he had been sent to me, and he could not leave.’

Leo knew the chant off by heart, she could say it with her mother as the woman stroked the earth of the rockery.

‘You wouldn’t listen, Danny. You called me old. You said you had given me my fun and my loving and that I should be grateful.

‘You said you’d take some guns, that we had no need of them, but in your life you’d need to hunt in the forest … I asked you to take me with you … and you laughed, and you called me old. I couldn’t let you leave, I had to keep you here, and that was why …’ Her mother would smile then, and stroke the earth again. ‘And you are here, Danny Boy. You’ll never leave me now.’

Leo had known for years why her father had struggled that night, dragging and pulling with his wounds aching and his useless leg trailing behind. He knew why this
woman had to be protected from telling this sing-song tale to the law. And Leo knew too.

At school they thought her a tense child. They spoke to her father about her since Mrs Murphy, the mother, never made any appearance.

Mother Dorothy, who was wise in the ways of the world, decided that the mother might have a drink problem. It had to be. Otherwise she’d have come in some time. Very tough on the child, a nice girl, but with a shell on her as hard as rock.