The Copper Beech (31 page)

‘I have no solidarity with you,’ Nessa said. ‘You steal my make-up, you wear my nylons, you spray yourself with
my
perfume. You don’t wash the bath, you do nothing to help in the hotel, you can’t wait to get away from here.
Why
should I help you?’

Put like that it was hard to know why.

‘Flesh and blood,’ Catherine suggested.

‘Overrated,’ Nessa told her.

‘Would you try for hotel management, do you think?’ her mother suggested. ‘It would teach you so much. There’s a great course in Dublin.’

‘I’m happy here,’ Nessa said.

‘I don’t ask you about Richard …’ her mother began.

‘I know, Mother. It’s one of the things I love about you.’ Nessa headed her off before she could start.

She wondered how long would be his exile in Shancarrig, and on Niall’s behalf she worried lest he had made too permanent and important a niche for himself with his Uncle Bill.

Mr Hayes came in to drink in Ryan’s Shancarrig Bar with Major Murphy, Leo’s father, sometimes. Nessa served behind the bar from time to time. She said it helped her to know what the customers wanted. Mr Hayes dropped no hint of how long his nephew would stay, but to Nessa’s distress he showed little enthusiasm about his son’s return.

‘Hard to know what he learned up there, you couldn’t get a word out of him,’ she heard him say to Dr Jims Blake one evening. She didn’t want to join in the conversation but later she brought up the subject.

‘Niall seems to be enjoying university and studying hard,’ she said.

‘Divil a bit of a sign he gives of either.’

‘Oh now. All fathers are the same. Still, business is good. There’ll be plenty for Niall to take on when he comes back.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. What with Richard …’ He let his voice trail away.

‘But Richard won’t be here for ever?’ Her voice was clear and without guile.

Bill Hayes looked at her directly. ‘There’s something keeping him here. I had a notion it might be yourself?’ he said.

‘No, Mr Hayes, I’m not the girl for Richard.’ There was no play-acting, nothing wistful – she seemed to be stating a fact.

‘Well, something’s keeping him here, Nessa. It’s not the pay, and it’s not the social life.’

‘I expect he’ll move on one day, like he moved in.’ Her voice was bland, expressionless.

‘I expect so.’ He sounded troubled.

Niall was home the following week.

‘I hear they’re giving you a car for your twenty-first birthday,’ he said to Nessa.

‘It’s meant to be a surprise, shut up about it,’ she hissed.

‘I didn’t know it was a secret. Isn’t it great though? A car of your own.’

‘You could have one too.’

‘How, might I ask? I’m not the doted-on daughter of the house.’

‘No, but you’re the eldest son of the house, and you never show the slightest interest in your father’s business.’

‘I’m only qualifying as a bloody solicitor, that’s all.’ Niall was offended.

‘But what kind of a solicitor? You don’t even ask him what’s going on. You don’t know about the competition.’

‘Richard, I suppose.’

‘No, you fool. He’s the family, he’s on your team. The competition. You know Gerry O’Neill the auctioneer in the town? Well, he has a brother who’s taking a lot of the conveyancing, even out this way. You have to fight back.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘You don’t ask.’

‘When I do ask can I help I’m told to tear up files and put labels on envelopes.’

‘That was three years ago, silly.’ She put her arm around his shoulder. ‘Bring your father in here for a pint, treat him as an equal.’

‘He wouldn’t like that.’

‘I used to be like that, I spent my whole childhood thinking my mother wouldn’t like this or that. I was wrong. They want us to have minds of our own.’

‘No. They want us to be reliable,’ Niall insisted.

‘Yes, well. You and I
are
reliable, so they’ve got that much. Now they want us to have views, opinions, be out for the common good.’

He looked at her with great admiration.

‘Have you …?’ he began.

She knew he wanted to say something about Richard.

‘Yes?’ Her voice stopped him asking.

‘Nothing,’ Niall said.

‘See you and your father tonight.’

When Nessa Ryan got her car for her twenty-first birthday she first took her mother and father for a drive around Shancarrig, waving to everyone they passed. She caught her mother’s eye in the driving mirror more than once and they smiled. Friends. People who understood each other. She was doing the right thing. Thanking them publicly, showing Shancarrig that Breda O’Connor had come here twenty-two years ago and made a triumph of her life.

It was six o’clock and the angelus was ringing as she headed back home. People would be coming in to Ryan’s Shancarrig now for a drink. There would be autumn tourists to check in – the coach buses arrived in the evening.

As they passed Eddie Barton’s house Eddie and his Scottish Christine were in the garden. Nessa screeched to a halt.

‘I’ll come back for you later. I’ll pick up Leo, Niall and Maura and take you all for a spin,’ she called.

‘Just Eddie,’ Christine said. ‘So it will be like old times.’

‘You too.’

‘No. Thanks, but no.’

‘She knows what she’s doing,’ Nessa’s mother said approvingly.

‘Like all women, it seems to me,’ Conor Ryan said. His sigh was happy, not resigned. Nessa knew this now. Once she thought he was yearning to be free, now she believed that her father had the life he wanted.

Maura wouldn’t come, Nessa knew that, but she would love to be asked. She would be so pleased for the car to pull up at her cottage and for a group of the nobs, as Mrs Brennan would call them, to get out and beg her to join them.

But she would stay and mind Michael – her little boy, two-and-a-half-years old, a loving child, a child who never knew his father. Gerry O’Sullivan the handsome barman had been reliable enough to marry Maura, but not reliable enough to stay when the child had been born handicapped.

Nessa ran up the steps of Number Five The Terrace. The door was never locked.

‘Hello, Mr Hayes. I’ve come to take your right-hand man out for a drive in my new car,’ she said.

‘Congratulations, Nessa. I heard of the birthday and the car. Richard should be with you in a minute,’ he said.

‘I meant Niall,’ she answered.

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

‘I don’t know
why
you’re not out playing golf yourself, Mr Hayes, with all the help you have in here.’ She was playful, confident, she knew he liked her. Three years ago she wouldn’t have raised her glance to him, let alone her voice.

‘Oh, my wife wouldn’t like that,’ he said.

Nessa thought of Niall’s mother, a solid glum-looking woman, dressed always in browns or olive green. No spark, no life. Mr Hayes would have been better with a woman like Nessa’s mother, or Nessa herself.

Niall had heard her voice. ‘Did the car arrive?’

‘It did. And I’ve come to drive you off in it’ She linked
her arm in his and appeared not to notice as Richard arrived out of the other door, straightening his tie and assuming that all the fuss in the hall meant someone had called for him.

Richard Hayes was standing at the top of the steps as Nessa ushered Niall into the front seat.

‘Didn’t you want …?’ Niall began.

‘Yeah. I wanted you but I waited till after six not to annoy your father. Let’s pick up Eddie.’

If Niall had been going to say anything about Richard he didn’t now. He settled back happily in the front seat. Eddie came, on his own. Chris had things to discuss with his mother. They drove up the long drive of The Glen. Leo was at the door waiting to meet them.

‘Will I show the car to your parents?’ Nessa asked.

‘No. No, I’d rather not,’ Leo said.

Possibly Leo’s mother and father might not have been able to afford a car for her. Or maybe her mother wasn’t well. Nobody had seen Mrs Murphy in ages, and Leo’s brothers, Harry and James, never came home from wherever they were. Biddy their maid was as silent as the grave, as if she were defending the family. Perhaps they had their secrets. Nessa didn’t mind.

Not nowadays.

And she was right about Maura. Maura wouldn’t come out with them, but she had a cake and they ate it together companionably in her cottage. The glass-fronted cabinet had a few items in it – a spoon in a purple velvet box, a piece of Connemara marble, and one of Eddie’s pressed flowers that he had done under glass as a christening present for the baby Michael.

There was a picture of Gerry O’Sullivan in a small frame on the mantelpiece.

‘Isn’t it great how we all stuck together,’ said Maura.
And they nodded, unable to speak. ‘All we need is Foxy to come home and we’d be complete.’

‘He’s doing very well,’ Leo said unexpectedly. ‘He’ll be able to buy the town the way things are going.’

‘Does he want to buy the town?’ Niall asked.

‘Well, he’d like to be a person of importance here, that’s for certain,’ Leo said.

‘Wouldn’t we all?’ Niall said.

‘You
are
, Niall. You’re a solicitor. If ever I have any business I’ll bring it to you,’ Maura said.

They laughed good-naturedly, Maura most of all.

‘But remember when we did our fortunes
you
were going to be the one who was going to be wealthy, not Foxy. Maybe you
will
have business,’ Eddie Barton said. They all remembered the day they left Shancarrig school. It was seven years ago – it seemed a lifetime.

Nessa drove them up to the base of the Old Rock. They left the car and scampered up as they had done so often before.

It was hard to read their faces, but Nessa thought that Eddie’s future seemed certain, bound up with the Scottish Chris who had come in some unexplained way into his life.

She knew that Maura would never consider herself unlucky. She would like a better house, maybe she was saving for one – there was no sign of her hard-earned wages in the cottage they had visited.

Leo would always be unfathomable but it was Niall, good dependable Niall, that Nessa was thinking about today. Leo and Eddie wandered off to stand on the stone where you were meant to be able to view four counties. Sometimes it was easier in this evening light. You could see a steeple that was in one county, a mountain that was in another.

Niall sat beside her, his jacket too small for him, his shirt crumpled. His hair was the same soft brown-black as his cousin Richard’s, but jagged and not lying right. His eyes were troubled as he looked at her.

‘We’ll be very happy, Niall,’ she said to him, patting his hand.

‘I hope you will.’ His voice was gruff with generosity and wishing her well, and loneliness. She could hear it, as her mother must have heard the eagerness in Conor Ryan’s voice all those years ago, and coped with it.

‘You and I,’ Nessa said. ‘We will get married, won’t we? You will ask me eventually?’

‘Don’t make fun of me, Nessa.’

‘I was never more serious in my life.’

‘But Richard?’

‘What about him?’

‘Don’t you …?’

‘No.’

‘Well, didn’t you …?’

‘No.’

‘I thought that you didn’t even
see
me,’ he said.

‘I’ve always seen you. Since the day you told me my hair was nice, the day we left Shancarrig school.’

‘I wrote your name on the tree,’ he said.

‘You what?’

‘I wrote JNH loves VR, very low down near a root. I did then, and I do now.’

‘John Niall Hayes, Vanessa Ryan. You never did!’

‘Will we go and see it?’ he said. ‘As proof.’

They had their first kiss in the sunset on her twenty-first birthday, on the hill that looked down over the town. Nessa knew that there would be a lot of work ahead. She would have to fight the apathy of his glum mother, the refusal to relinquish power by his father. She would have
to decide where they would live and how they would live. Richard would move on sooner or later. Possibly sooner, now that this had all been planned.

Over the years she would reassure Niall Hayes that there had never been anything to fear from Richard, he was not a lover, nor even a love. He was someone who came in when she needed it and gave her the surge of confidence that her mother had never been given.

And yet, the reason that she felt so sure had a lot to do with being her mother’s daughter.

Richard hated the sight of the Old Rock. It meant that they were back in Shancarrig for their miserable summer holiday. Back in Uncle Bill and Aunt Ethel’s dark gloomy house, with the solicitor’s office on the ground floor and the living quarters upstairs. Bedrooms with heavy furniture, nothing to see, nothing to do. A one-horse town and a pretty poor horse at that.

For as long as he could remember they had come here for a week in July. All through the war years, or the Emergency as it was called, they had travelled down from Dublin on a train fuelled by turf. If the weather was anyway bad the turf was bad and the journey was endless.

Richard’s father would walk every night for miles with Uncle Bill. They both carried blackthorn sticks and pointed happily to places they had played when they were children – the gravelly shallows of the River Grane where they had caught their fish, the great Barna Woods which had got so small since they were young, the huge ugly heap of stones they called the Old Rock.

They would stand outside Shancarrig school and marvel at the old copper beech where they had carved their initials in 1914, twin boys aged fourteen, KH and WH – Kevin and William. It made Richard sick to see them so full of happy memories over nothing.

He was a handsome boy and a restless one. He thought this week of enforced idleness in his father’s old village a
waste of time. Even when he was very young he had asked if they really needed to go.

‘Yes of course, we need to go. It’s only one week out of fifty-two,’ his mother had said.

It gave him hope that she didn’t like it either. But she wasn’t the soft touch on this as she was on other things. She was adamant.

‘Your father doesn’t ask much from us. Just this one week. We will do it and do it with a good grace.’