The Copper Beech (26 page)

‘That’s not what you say when her father comes in here breaking all before him, and swearing like a soldier.’

‘He takes his trade to Johnny Finn’s after what you said to him that time …’

‘You sound as if you’re sorry, as if you miss that good-for-nothing drunk. It was a fine day for this house when I shifted him out. You agreed yourself.’

‘I did, I did.’

‘So what are you going on about?’

‘I don’t know, Breda …’ He shook his head. Nessa realised whatever it was … her Daddy really didn’t know. He didn’t know about things like her mother did. About running a hotel, and being in charge.

‘Will I not sit beside her?’ Nessa asked.

Her mother’s face softened. ‘Don’t mind me, your father is right. The child’s not to be blamed.’

‘We don’t have pot hooks, do we?’

‘No. We have a range, like any normal person would. The Brennans cook over an open fire, I expect. Did you not see Leo Murphy at school today?’

‘She was sitting beside Eddie. They got told off for talking.’

‘What else happened? Tell me all about it.’

‘We played a game around the tree, you know, like a big ring o’ roses.’

‘I did that myself,’ said her father.

She saw her mother going over and putting her arm around his shoulder. They were smiling. She felt safe. Maybe her mother
did
love her father even if he didn’t know how to run a hotel. When anyone came to the hotel they asked for Mrs Ryan, not for Mr, that’s if they knew the place. Otherwise it was a delay while Mr Ryan sent for his wife.

Nessa grew up knowing that she should get her mother, not her father, in any crisis. At the start she thought this was the same in all families.

But she learned it wasn’t always the case. She discovered that Leo Murphy’s mother didn’t know where anything was, that Major Murphy and Biddy the maid ran The Glen between them. Leo never had to consult her mother about anything. It was a huge freedom.

She learned that Maura Brennan’s mother had to go out begging because Mr Brennan drank whatever money he got. When Nessa wondered why Mrs Brennan didn’t stop him with a word or a glance as her mother would have, Maura shrugged. Women weren’t like that, she said.

Niall Hayes said that his mother didn’t have any say in the house. His father paid all the bills, and dealt with things that happened. Foxy Dunne said that his mother hadn’t been known to open her mouth on any subject,
but of course his father had never been known to close his, so that made up a pair of them.

Only Eddie, whose father was dead or had gone away or something, said that his mother was in charge. But she didn’t like being in charge, he said. She kept thinking there should be a man around the place.

Sometimes they even made jokes about Nessa’s mother, about how different she was from the other women in Shancarrig. Nessa didn’t like that very much but in her heart she had to admit it was true. Her mother was rather too interested in her for her liking. She wanted to know everything that happened.

‘Why do you want to know so much?’ Nessa asked her once.

‘I want to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes that I made. I want to try and help your childhood.’ Her mother had seemed very simple and direct in that answer, as if she was talking to someone her own age, not talking down.

‘Leave the child alone,’ her father said, as he said so often. ‘Aren’t they only children for a very short time? Let them enjoy it.’

‘I don’t know about the very short time,’ Nessa’s mother said. ‘There are quite a few people around here who never grew up.’

When people stopped to admire young Nessa Ryan on the street they often asked, ‘And whose pet are you?’ It was only a greeting, not a question, but Nessa took it seriously.

‘Nobody’s,’ she would say firmly. ‘There’s so much work in a hotel there’s no time to have pets.’ People laughed at the solemn way the child spoke, in the parrot fashion she must have heard at home.

Her mother didn’t approve. ‘You’re the most petted
child in the country. Stop telling people that there’s no one spoiling you,’ she said.

But Nessa didn’t think this was so. She wondered was she a foundling. Had the dark gypsies, the families who came through every year, left her on the hotel doorstep? Had she been found up at the Old Rock, left there by a wonderful kind noblewoman with long hair – someone who was in great secret trouble and left her baby while she escaped?

Nessa didn’t know exactly what she wanted but she knew very definitely that it was something different from what she had got. She would never be able to please her mother, no matter what she did, and her father was too soft and easy-going for his views to count.

Sometimes when she was feeling particularly religious and near to God she used to ask him to make her popular and loved.

‘I’m not asking to be pretty, God, I know we’re not meant to pray for good looks. But I am asking to be liked more. People that are popular are very very happy. They can go around doing good all the time. Honestly God, even children. I’d be a great child and a great grown-up. Just try it and see.’

The years of Nessa Ryan’s childhood saw a great change in Ryan’s Commercial Hotel.

After endless rationing and petrol shortages brought about by the war in Europe, suddenly cars appeared on the road again. Instead of the hotel’s visitors arriving at Shancarrig railway station and walking across to where Ryan’s stood taking up one side of the three-cornered green that formed the centre and heart of the place, they now drew up outside the door. Most people were loath to leave their cars in the street, even though this was the
best part of Shancarrig. Visitors didn’t know that The Terrace where Dr Nolan and then Dr Jims lived in Number Three and where the Hayes family lived in Number Five was about the best address in the county. They wanted safe parking for their cars.

The hotel was no longer dark brown. The dark colours had been replaced by cream and what Breda called a lovely restful
eau de nil
. She had toured other smarter hotels and discovered that this pale greenish shade was high fashion.

The more sober of the heavy-framed pictures had been relegated to the master bedroom, out of view of any visitors.

More bathrooms had been installed, chamber pots were hidden discreetly in bedside cupboards rather than being placed expectantly under beds.

The women who served in the dining room of Ryan’s Commercial Hotel wore smart green dresses now, with their white aprons and little white half caps. The days of black outfits were over. There were comfortable chairs in the entrance hall encouraging guests to think of it as it used to be.

When Nessa and her sisters, Catherine and Nuala, were young they were kept well out of sight of the hotel visitors, but were trained to say good morning or good evening to anyone they encountered, even scarlet-faced drunks who might not be able to reply.

Nessa’s mother had cleared up the hotel yard. Old and broken machinery was removed, outhouses were painted. No longer was the place used as a dumping ground. Guests were told that ample parking facilities existed.

And the visitors changed too.

A trickle of American servicemen who had got to know Europe during the days of war, returned again in peacetime
bringing their wives, particularly if there was any Irish heritage in the family tree. They would stay in hotels around the country and try to find it out. They became a familiar sight, sometimes still in uniform, and looking very dashing as they would book into Ryan’s Commercial Hotel.

Father Gunn said he was worn out tracing roots from old church records.

There were the commercial travellers too. The same people coming regularly, once a month – once a fortnight sometimes. Usually two or three rooms would be booked by the various representatives coming to take orders in Shancarrig and outlying areas.

Nessa’s mother treated them with great respect. They would be the backbone of their business, she told her husband. Conor Ryan shrugged. He often thought them a dull crowd, abstemious too, no bar profit from them. Pale, tired men, anxious about their sales, restless, uneasy.

It was Nessa’s mother who insisted on the commercial room, and lighting a fire there. There were a few tables strewn around, they could fill their order books and smoke there. They could bring in a cup of tea or coffee.

Conor Ryan thought it a waste. Why couldn’t they sit in the bar like any other person? He had noted that few of them followed either horses or dogs, there was little conversation with them at the best of times.

At school everyone was always interested in the hotel and its goings on. They always asked about what the farmers ate for breakfast on the fair days once a month, and whether any of the beasts had ever backed into the windows and broken them, as happened once down in Nellie Dunne’s grocery when she forgot to put up the barriers.

Nessa told of the huge breakfasts served all morning, and of how fathers and sons would take turns, one to
mind the animals while the other would eat bacon and eggs heaped high on plates.

‘Who was your best friend when you were young?’ Nessa asked her mother when Breda Ryan was brushing the dark shiny hair which she persisted in admiring so much despite all Nessa’s complaints.

‘We didn’t have time for best friends then. Stay still, Vanessa.’

‘Why do you call me Vanessa? Nobody else does.’

‘It’s your name. There, that looks great.’

‘I look like the witch in the school play.’

‘Why are you always saying such awful things about yourself, child? If you think these stupid things, other people will too.’

‘That’s funny. That’s what Leo said too.’

‘She’s got her head screwed on her shoulders, that one,’ Mrs Ryan said approvingly.

‘We’ll be going into the convent together next year, every day on the bus. Maybe she’ll be more my friend then.’

In a rare moment of affection Nessa’s mother held her eldest daughter close.

‘You’ll have plenty of friends. Wait and see!’ she said.

‘It had better start soon. I’m nearly fourteen,’ Nessa said glumly.

In magazine stories Nessa had read of girls whose mothers were like friends. She wished she had a mother like that, not one so brisk and so sure of everything. Nessa had never known an occasion when her mother had been wrong, or at a loss for a word. Her father now, that was different, he was always scratching his head and saying he hadn’t a clue about things. But Nessa felt her mother was born knowing all the answers.

On their last day at Shancarrig school Nessa Ryan stood
between Niall Hayes and Foxy Dunne during the school photograph. Mrs Kelly always liked to have a picture taken on that day, and they were urged to dress themselves up well so that future generations could see how respectable had been the classes that had gone through these schoolrooms.

It had become a tradition now. The formal photograph taken under the tree outside the schoolhouse door. The very last moment of the year, organised to calm them down after the other tradition of name carving and the boisterous racing around the classroom collecting the books and pencils while singing:

That there had been no French ever learned in Shancarrig and that there were no stairs in the schoolhouse were details that didn’t concern them. All over the world children sang that song on the last day.

Those who were only thirteen, and would have to return to school after the summer, looked on enviously. This was the day when they wrote their names on the tree. The boys had brought penknives. Everyone was busy digging at the wood of the old beech tree.

Nessa wished she could enjoy this like the others did. They all seemed very intense. Maura Brennan had been planning for weeks where she would put her name. Eddie Barton said he was going to carve his in a drawing of a flower so that it would look special in years to come. Foxy was saying nothing, but looked knowing all the same.

Nessa took the extra knife from Master Kelly and wrote
Vanessa Ryan, June 1954. She felt there was more to say, but she didn’t know what it was.

The sun was in their eyes as they squinted at Mrs Kelly’s camera.

‘Stand up straight! Stop fidgeting there!’ She spoke knowing these were the last commands she would ever give them.

Foxy Dunne stroked Nessa’s hair, which hung loose on her shoulders. ‘Very nice,’ he said.

‘Take your hands off me, Foxy Dunne,’ she snapped.

‘Just admiring, Miss Bossy Boots. Admiring, that’s all.’ He didn’t look the slightest bit put out.

Imagine Foxy, from that desperate house of Dunnes, daring to touch her hair.

‘It is very nice, your hair,’ Niall Hayes said. Square, dependable, dull Niall, who had never had an original thought. He said it as if he were trying to curry favour with Foxy and excuse him for his views.

‘Well,’ she said, at a loss for words. To her surprise she felt her face and neck redden at the praise. Nessa Ryan hadn’t known a compliment from a boy before. She put her hand up to her face so that they wouldn’t see her flush.

‘Smile, everyone. Nessa, take your hand away from your face at once. Leo, if I see you put your tongue out once more there’s going to be trouble. Great trouble.’

Everyone laughed, and it was a happy picture for the schoolhouse wall.

As they walked together for the last time from Shancarrig school, Nessa and Leo were arm in arm and Maura Brennan walked with them. Maura would get a job as a maid or in a factory, she had said she didn’t want to go to England like her sisters. Nessa felt a flash of sympathy for the girl who hadn’t the same chances as she had. Nessa’s father had said about the Brennans and the Dunnes
from the cottages that they had a poor hand dealt to them, very few aces there.

‘Don’t describe everything in terms of cards,’ Mrs Ryan corrected him.

‘Right. Then I’d say that the bookie’s odds against the Brennans and Dunnes were fixed,’ he said, grinning.

But Maura Brennan never complained.