The Copper Beech (36 page)

‘Well, you never go anywhere, you only have a shabby car. You don’t buy jazzy suits.’

‘That’s right,’ Richard admitted. ‘I’m saving.’ This was his cover, he realised. He was putting together a stake to buy a practice in Dublin.

The months went on. Gloria bought him a silk tie.

‘You said no presents.’ He fingered the cream and gold tie lovingly.

‘I said you weren’t to buy
me
any, that’s all.’

‘I want to buy you a piece of jewellery. Not an emerald,
a ruby – a very small ruby. Let me,’ he begged.

‘No, Richard. Seriously, when could I wear it? Be sensible.’

He bought it anyway. He gave it to her in the gate lodge.

Their Wednesday afternoons there were totally secure. Major Murphy walked with his uncle rain or shine, and Leo had got a job working in the office of one of the building contractors’ firms in the town. It seemed an unlikely job, but Gloria told him that she heard Leo was still in touch with that mad Foxy Dunne, who was going from strength to strength on the building sites in England. The word was that he would come back and set up his own firm. The word was that he and Leo had an understanding.

‘Foxy Dunne, son of Dinny Dunne?’

‘Oh, Foxy Dunne is like the papal nuncio in terms of respectability compared to his father. You know him falling out of Johnny Finn’s most nights.’

‘Well, well, well.’ He realised he was getting a small-town mentality; he was finding serious difficulty in believing that Major Murphy of The Glen would let his daughter contemplate one of the Dunnes from the cottages. He was glad however that it meant Leo worked far away. It left the coast much more clear.

Gloria looked at the ruby for a long time.

‘You’re not angry?’

‘How could I be angry that you spent so much on me? I’m touched, but I’ll never wear it.’

‘Couldn’t you say …?’

‘We both know there’s nothing I could say.’

‘You could wear it here with me.’

‘Yes, I will.’

She took the ruby away and had it made into a tie pin,
then she gave it back to him. ‘I’ll put on a chain to wear it when I am with you, but for the rest of the time you keep it. Wear it on the tie that I gave you, then you’ll think of me.’

‘I think of you always,’ he said.

Too much perhaps.

It was the beginning of the withdrawal. He saw it and blinded himself to it. He feared that someone else had come to town, but he knew there could be no one. She didn’t dream up schemes to meet him for five minutes any more, and although she lay and took his loving she didn’t implore him to love her as she once had, begging, encouraging and exciting him to performances that he had thought impossible.

He felt it was the place, it was getting too much for them. There had been endless complications about builders’ suppliers, and the building of the extension, and the hostility of the Dunnes who said that they weren’t anxious to build the place that was going to be direct competition with them. There had been delays over the insurance money for the jewellery. There was a problem about the newspaper delivery they planned, Nellie Dunne had created difficulties.

In his uncle’s office Niall was restless and urging that he be involved in more cases, have consultations with clients and barristers, and in general learn his trade. Richard felt he was putting him off at every turn.

It was time to take Gloria away.

He began to explain it and for once he wouldn’t listen when she tried to stop him. ‘No, I’ve shushed enough. We have to think. It’s been nearly two years. We must have our own home, our own life together. I don’t wish Mike any harm but he has to know, he has to be told. He’s a decent man, he’ll agree to whatever we suggest.
Whatever’s for the best … he can come to Dublin to see the boys, we’ll never hide from them who their real father is … he’d prefer to be taken into our confidence from the start … well, not exactly from the start but from now …’ His voice trailed away as he looked at her face.

They sat in the gate lodge. They hadn’t undressed. Their cigarettes and the little tin they used as an ashtray and cleaned after each visit sat between them on the table. It was an odd place to be talking about their future. It was an odd expression on her face as she listened. It showed utter bewilderment and shock.

He thought first it was the enormity of what they were about to do … coupled with the disruption for the children. He must reassure her. ‘I’ve been looking at houses in Dublin, a little out of the city so that we could have privacy and so that Kevin and Sean would have a local-type school, not somewhere huge like the big Christian Brothers in the city …’ He stopped. He had not read her look right.

She didn’t want reassurance, she wanted him to stop talking straight away. ‘None of this is going to happen, you must know this. Richard, you
must
know.’

‘But you love me …’

‘Not like this, not to run away with you …’

‘Why have we been doing all this …?’ He waved his hand wildly around the room where they had made love so often.

‘It had nothing whatsoever to do with my leaving here. That was never promised, never on the cards.’

He was the one bewildered now, and confused. ‘What was it all about?’ he asked, begging to be told.

She stood up and walked around the room as she spoke. She had never looked more beautiful. She spoke of a happy time with Richard, how he had made her feel
wonderful and needed, how she had given him no undertaking, no looking ahead.

She said that her future was here in Shancarrig or very possibly another small town. They might sell up to the Dunnes and move. She and Mike liked starting a place from scratch. They had done that in other places. It was a challenge, it kept everything exciting, new.

Richard Hayes listened amazed as she spoke of Mike with this respect and love.

She was totally enmeshed with Mike in a way Richard had never understood. Her concern had nothing to do with a fear that Mike might be hurt or made to suffer. It was much more an involvement, a caring what he would do and decide and where he would want to go.

‘But you don’t love him!’ he gasped.

‘Of course I love him, I’ve never loved anyone else.’

‘But why …?’ He couldn’t even finish the sentence.

‘He couldn’t give me everything I wanted. No one can do that for anybody. I love him because he lets me be free.’

Richard realised she spoke the truth. ‘And does he know…?’

‘Know what?’

‘About me, about us. Do you tell him?’ His voice grew angry and loud. ‘Is this what gets him excited, your coming home and telling him what you and I did together?’

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ she said.

‘You’re the one who is disgusting, out like an alley cat and then pretending that you’re the model wife and mother.’

She looked at him reproachfully. He knew it was over.

In the years when he had wriggled out of relationships and escaped from affairs he had not been as honest as she was being, he had been devious and avoided face-to-face contact except when it was utterly necessary. His heart
was heavy when he thought of Olive Kennedy, and the way he had disowned her in front of her parents.

If only he could have his time all over again. He hung his head.

‘Richard?’ she said.

‘I didn’t mean it about the alley cat.’

‘I know you didn’t.’

‘I don’t know what to do, darling Gloria. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Go away and leave this place, have a good life in Dublin. One day I’ll meet you there, we will talk in a civilised way like you and the girl in Baggot Street, the one who was having the baby.’

‘No.’

‘That’s what you’ll do.’ She spoke soothingly.

‘And if you go to another town will you find someone new?’

‘I won’t go out looking for anyone, that I assure you.’

‘And will he … will he put up with it, turn the other way …?’ He couldn’t even bear to speak Mike Darcy’s name.

‘He’ll know I love him and will never leave him.’

There was nothing more to say.

There was a lot to be done.

He would go back to the office and telephone some solicitors’ offices in Dublin. He would ask his mother if he could go back to the basement flat in Waterloo Road. He would work day and night to clear his files, and leave everything ship-shape for Niall. He could shake off his years here and start again.

They tidied up the little house that they were visiting for the last time. As usual they emptied the cigarette butts and ash into an envelope. They straightened the furniture to the way it had been when they first found the place.
They left by the window as they had always done. They rearranged the branches that hung to hide it.

She wouldn’t bring anyone else here after he had gone, he felt sure of that. With a little lurch he wondered had she ever brought anyone before.

But that was useless speculation.

‘Now that we’re legitimate we can walk home together,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ She was easy and affectionate, as she was with everyone.

‘The long way or the short way?’ He offered her the choice.

‘The scenic route,’ she decided.

They went up past the open ground that led to the Old Rock, and back through the woods, past Maddy Ross’s house where she sat at her little desk, maybe writing letters to that priest who had gone to the missions, the one that she might have fancied. Richard felt a huge wave of sympathy for her. What a wasted love that must have been. Compared to his own great passion.

They came to the bridge, children still playing there as they had been the day Richard Hayes had come to town five long years ago.

Different children, same game.

Imagine, only an hour ago he had been planning for Gloria’s children to go to school in Dublin. He thought he had taken over a family.

And now everything was over.

Now they were free to talk to each other there was nothing to say. His thoughts went up the road to the old schoolhouse, to the big beech tree which was covered with people’s initials and their names.

In the first weeks of loving Gloria he had gone there secretly and carved ‘
Gloria in Excelsis
’.

It didn’t seem blasphemous, it seemed a celebration. If anyone saw it in years to come they would think it was a hymn of praise to God. They might think a priest had put it there. He would not go and score it out. That would be childish. He could finish the story, of course. He could say that the glory of the world passed by;
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
. Only a few would understand it and when they did they would never connect it with Gloria Darcy, loving wife of Mike Darcy, shopkeeper.

But that would be childish too.

Maura O’Sullivan and her son Michael passed them by as they stood on the bridge, Gloria and Richard who would never speak again.

‘Good day Mrs Darcy, Mr Hayes,’ she said.

‘My daddy?’ Michael ran up to him and hugged his leg.

Richard knelt down to return the hug properly.

‘Go home, Gloria,’ he said.

She went without a word. He could hear the sound of her high red heels tapping down the road towards the centre of Shancarrig.

‘How are you, Michael? You’re getting to be a very big fellow altogether,’ he said and buried his head in the boy’s shoulder so that no one would see his tears.

When Leonora Murphy was a toddler, her father used to sit her on his knee and tell her about the little girl who had a little curl
right
in the middle of her forehead. He would poke Leo’s forehead on the word
right
to show her where the curl was. Then he would go on,
And when she was good she was very very good, but when she was bad she was HORRID
. At the last word he would make a terrible face and roar at her,
HORRID
,
HORRID
. It was always frightening, even though Leo knew it would end well with a big hug, and sometimes his throwing her up in the air.

She wasn’t frightened of Daddy, just the rhyme. It seemed menacing, as if someone else was saying it.

Anyway it wasn’t even suitable for her because she was a girl with much more than one little curl. She had a head full of them, red-gold curls. They got tangled when anyone tried to brush her hair. Her mother gave up in despair several times. ‘Like a furze bush, like something you’d see on a tinker child.’ Leo knew this was an insult. People were half afraid of the tinkers, who camped behind Barna Woods sometimes when they were on the way to the Galway races.

If Leo ever was bad and wouldn’t eat her rice or fasten her shoes properly, Biddy would say that she’d be given to the tinkers next time one of them passed the door. It seemed a terrible fate.

But later when she was older, when she could go exploring,
Leo Murphy thought that it might be exciting to go and live with the tinkers. They had open fires. The children ran around half dressed. They went through the woods finding rabbits.

She used to creep around with her friends from school, Nessa Ryan and Niall Hayes and Eddie Barton. Not daring to move they’d peep through the trees and the bushes and watch the marvellous free lifestyle of people who had no rules or no laws to tie them down.

Leo couldn’t remember why she had been so afraid.

But then, that was when she was a child. Once she was eleven and grown up things could be viewed differently. She realised that there were a lot of things she hadn’t understood properly while she was young.

She hadn’t realised that she lived in the biggest house in Shancarrig, for one thing. The Glen was a Georgian house, with a wide hall leading back to the kitchen and pantry. On either side of the hall door were big beautifully proportioned rooms – the dining room where the table was covered with papers and books, since they rarely had anyone to dine – the drawing room where the old piano had not been tuned for many a year, and where the dogs slept on cushions behind the big baskets of logs for the fire.

There was a breakfast room behind where they ate their meals, and a sports room which had wellingtons and guns, and fishing tackle. This is where Leo kept her bicycle when she remembered, but often she left it outside the kitchen door. Sometimes the wild cats that Biddy loved to feed at the kitchen window came and perched on the bicycle. There was a time when a cat brought all her little kittens one by one and left them in the bicycle basket, thinking it might be a safe haven for them.