The Copper Beech (41 page)

Leo told Father Gunn that Mother wasn’t all that well, and that if they didn’t see her at mass he wasn’t to take any wrong meaning out of it.

Father Gunn asked would she like the sacraments brought up to The Glen.

‘I’m not too sure, Father.’ Leo bit her lip.

Father Gunn also knew the ways of the world.

‘Why don’t we leave it for the moment?’ he suggested. ‘And if there’s any change in that department then all you have to do is ask me.’

Leo thought to herself that in Shancarrig it was really quite easy to hide anything from anybody.

Or maybe it was only if you happened to live in The Glen, a big house surrounded by high walls, with its own gardens and shrubberies and gate lodge.

It might be different trying to keep your secrets if you lived in the cottages down by the river, or in The Terrace with everyone seeing your front entrance, or in the hotel with half of Shancarrig in and out of your doors every day.

She felt watchful about her mother, but not always on edge. No long-term anxiety like that can be felt at the pain
level all the time. There were many hours when Leo didn’t even think about her mother’s telling and re-telling the story. There were the school outings, there were the parties, the times when Niall Hayes kissed her and their noses kept bumping, and later when quite suddenly Richard Hayes, who was Niall’s older cousin, kissed her and there was no nose-bumping at all.

Richard Hayes was very handsome, he had stirred the place up since he arrived. Leo felt sorry for Niall because deep in her heart she thought Niall still had a very soft spot for Nessa, and Nessa was of course crazy about the new arrival in town.

And it had to be said that Richard was paying a lot of attention to Nessa. There were walks, drives and trips to the pictures in the town. Leo thought he was rather dangerous, but then she shrugged. Who was she to know? Her views on love and attraction were extremely suspect.

Some of the girls at school were going to be nurses; they had applied to hospitals in Dublin and in Britain for places.

‘Should I be a nurse, Daddy?’ she asked.

They were walking, as they often did in the evening. Mother was safely talking to the rockery, and if you counted Biddy as the silent rock she had been for three long years, then there was no one around to hear the chant that had begun again.

‘Would you
like
to be a nurse?’

‘Only if it would help.’

Her father looked old and grey. Much of his time was spent persuading his sons not to come back to Shancarrig, and telling them that their mother was in poor mental health.

Naturally they had written and asked why was nothing being done about this. They had written to Dr Jims, which
Major Murphy thought an outrageous interference. But fortunately Jims Blake had agreed with him that arrogant young men thought they knew everything. If Frank Murphy said there was nothing wrong with Miriam, then that was that. The doctor had seen the thin pale face and the over-brilliant eyes of Miriam Murphy, always a fairly obsessional person he would have thought, checking light switches, refusing to throw out old papers. This is what he had noticed on his visits to The Glen, and assumed that like many a nervy woman there was nothing asked and therefore nothing that could be answered. This was not a household where he would be asked to refer her to a psychiatrist in order to work out the cause of the unease. At least he wasn’t being asked for ever-increasing prescriptions of tranquillisers or sleeping pills. This in itself was something to be thankful for.

Foxy Dunne came home every Christmas as he had promised. When he arrived on his first visit home, wearing a new zippered jacket with a tartan lining, at the back door of The Glen, he was surprised at the frostiness of his reception. Not that he had ever been warmly welcomed there, but this was out of that league … ‘Well, tell my friend Leo. She knows where I live,’ he said haughtily to Biddy.

‘And I’m sure, like everyone, she knows only too well where the Dunnes live and would want to avoid it,’ Biddy said.

Leo had heard. She called to the Dunnes’ cottage that afternoon.

‘I came to ask if you’d like to go for a walk in Barna Woods,’ she said.

Foxy looked very pleased. He was at a loss for words.
The quick shrugging reaction or the smart joke deserted him.

‘Well, I won’t ask you into my house either,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and be babes in the wood.’

He told her of living in a house with eleven men from their own country. He told her of the drinking and how so many of them spent everything they had nearly killed themselves earning.

‘Why do you stay there?’ she asked.

‘To learn … to save. But mainly to learn.’

‘What can you learn from old men like that drinking their lives away?’

‘I can learn what not to do, I suppose, or how it could have been done right.’

Foxy sat on a fallen tree and told her about the chances, the men who had made it, the small contractors who did things right and did them quickly. He told her how you had to watch out for the fellow who was a great electrician, a good plumber, a couple of bright brickies, a class carpenter. Then all you needed was someone to get them together and you had your own team – someone who had a head for figures, someone who could cost a job and make the contacts.

‘And who would you get to do that?’ She was genuinely interested.

‘God, Leo, that’s what
I’m
going to do. That’s what it’s all about,’ he said.

She felt ashamed that she hadn’t the confidence in him.

‘Did you know my father was in gaol?’ he asked defensively.

‘I heard. I think Biddy told me.’

‘She would have.’

She was torn between being sympathetic and telling him it didn’t matter.

‘Did he hate it?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know, he doesn’t talk to me. He should have been there longer. He hit a fellow with a plank that had nails in it. He’s dangerous.’

‘You’re not like that,’ she said suddenly.

‘I know, but I didn’t want you to forget where I come from.’

‘You are what you are, so am I.’

‘And do you have any tales to tell me?’ he asked.

‘No. Why?’ Her voice was clipped.

He shrugged. It was as if he had been offering her the chance to trade confessions.

But he didn’t know they were not equal confessions. What his father had done was known the length and breadth of the county. What her mother had done was known by only three people.

He looked at her for a while, as if waiting.

Then he said, ‘No reason, no reason at all.’

She saw him looking at her, with her belted raincoat, hands stuck deep in her pockets. The wind made her cheeks red. Her red-gold curls stood out around her head like a furze. She felt he was looking straight through her, that he could see everything, knew everything.

‘I hate my hair,’ she said suddenly.

‘It’s like a halo,’ he said.

And she grinned.

Every Christmas he came home. He called to The Glen and she would take him walking. For the week that he was home they would meet every day.

Nessa Ryan was very disapproving. ‘You
do
know his father was in gaol,’ she told Leo.

‘I do,’ Leo sighed. She had heard it all from Biddy, over and over.

‘I’d be surprised you’d go walking with him, then.’

‘I know you would.’ Leo had heard the same thing from her father. But that particular time she had answered back. ‘Well, if everyone knew about us, Daddy, maybe people wouldn’t want to go walking with us either.’ Her father looked as if she had struck him. Immediately she had repented. ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it … I just think that Foxy is lonely when he comes home. I don’t ask him in here. I’m seventeen, nearly eighteen, Daddy. Why can’t we let people alone? We, of all people?’

Her father had tears in his eyes. ‘Go and walk with whoever you like in the woods,’ he had said, his voice choked.

That was the Christmas when Foxy told her that he was on the way to the big time. He was working with two others. They were setting up their own contracts, they would hire men, get a team together. No more working for cheats and fellows who took all the profit.

‘I’ll soon have enough saved to come back a rich man,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll drive up your avenue in a big car, hand my coat and gloves to Biddy, and ask your father for your hand in marriage. Your mother will take out the sherry and plan your wedding dress.’

‘I’ll never marry,’ Leo told him.

‘You sure as anything didn’t take my advice about getting trained for a career or a job,’ he said.

‘I can’t leave The Glen.’

‘Will you tell me why?’ His eyes still had that power to look as if they could see right through her, and know everything.

‘I will, one day,’ she promised, and she knew she would.

This year at least she had an address for Foxy. She wrote to him, he sent a very short note back.

‘Why don’t you learn to type, Leo? Your writing is worse than my own. We can’t have that when we’re in the big time, neither of us able to write a letter.’

She laughed.

She didn’t tell Nessa Ryan that she had just got a sort of proposal from Foxy Dunne.

She didn’t tell her parents.

Her mother died on an autumn night. They said it was of exposure. Her lungs filled up with the damp night air and, added to a chest infection … There was no hope for a woman whose health had always been so frail.

She had been found in her nightdress, lying over the rockery in the garden.

The church was crowded. Major Murphy asked people to come back to Ryan’s Hotel for a drink and some sandwiches afterwards. This was very unusual and had never been known in Shancarrig. But he said that The Glen was too sad for him and for Leo just now. He was sure people would understand.

Then Leo went to the town every day on the bus and learned to type in the big secretarial college where Nessa had done a course.

‘Why couldn’t you have done it with me?’ Nessa grumbled.

‘It wasn’t the right time.’

There had been no note from Foxy Dunne about her mother’s death.

She didn’t write to tell him. Surely some member of his awful family was in touch, surely there would have been a mention that Mrs Murphy of The Glen had been found
dead in her nightdress, and that her wits must have been astray. Everyone else knew about it.

When he came back at Christmas it was clear that he hadn’t known. He was sympathetic and sad.

She asked him in, not to the breakfast room but the drawing room. Together they lit the fire.

The old dogs lay down, pleased that the room was being opened up.

Biddy was beyond complaining now. Too much had happened in this house. That Foxy Dunne be invited into the Major’s drawing room seemed minor these days.

He told Leo of his plans. He had seen so much in England of how places could be developed. Take The Glen. They could sell off most of the land, build maybe eight houses, and still keep their own home.

‘I expect your father would like that,’ he said.

Outside they could see the sad lonely figure of Major Murphy walking up and down to the gate and back in the darkening evening.

‘We can never sell the land,’ Leo said.

‘Is this part of what you told me you’d tell me one day?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you ready to tell me now?’

‘No. Not yet, Foxy.’

‘Does your mother’s death not make it different?’ Again that feeling that he knew everything.

‘No. You see, Daddy still lives here. Nothing could be … interfered with.’

She thought of the big diggers, the excavators, the rockery going, as it would one day, when The Glen would disappear like so much of Ireland, and make way for houses for the Irish who were coming back to live in their own land, having worked hard in other countries.

People like Foxy coming back to their inheritances.

The body of Danny McDonagh which had lain so long under its mausoleum of flowers would be disturbed. The questions would be asked.

‘We’re over twenty-one. We can do what we like,’ he said.

‘I could always do what I liked, for all the good it did me.’

‘So could I,’ he answered her with spirit. ‘And it did me a lot of good. I never wanted anyone else but you, not since we were children. What did you want?’

‘I wanted to be safe,’ she said.

He promised her that was exactly what he would do for her. They talked a little that night, and more the next day in Barna Woods. He left her at the gate of The Glen, and saw her look away from the gate house.

‘Something happened here,’ he said.

‘I always knew you had second sight.’

‘Tell me, Leo. We’re not people to have secrets from each other.’

Through the window of The Glen they could see her father sitting at the drawing-room fire. He must have got the idea of sitting in that room after seeing them there yesterday. She told Foxy the story.

‘Let’s get the key,’ he said.

She went through the kitchen and took it from the rack in the hall. Together, with candles, they walked through the gate lodge, a blameless place that didn’t know what had happened there.

He raised her face towards him and looked into her eyes.

‘Your hair is like a halo again. You’re doing it to drive me mad,’ he said.

‘Don’t you see all the problems, all the terrible problems?’

‘I see nothing that won’t be solved by a load of concrete on where that rockery stands now,’ Foxy Dunne said.

The decision to close the school was known in 1969; National Schools all over Ireland were giving way to Community Schools in the towns. But still it was a shock to see the building advertised for sale in the summer of 1970.

Nessa and Niall Hayes read it over breakfast.