The Copper Beech (8 page)

‘I hope it’s every bit as rewarding for you as you and I have always believed it would be.’ Her voice choked slightly.

‘I wanted to thank you, Maddy, for all your help and encouragement. Father Gunn has been so wise and understanding about everything. When I told him that I wanted you to be the first to know he insisted that we invite you here, to tell you that it has all finally gone through.’

Maddy looked at Father Gunn. She knew exactly
why she had been invited to the presbytery, so that there could be no tearful farewells, implorings and highly charged emotion in Barna Woods, or anywhere on their own.

‘That’s very kind of you, Father,’ she said to the small square priest, in a very cold tone.

‘No, no, and I must just get some papers. I’ll leave the two of you for a few minutes.’ He fussed out of the room.

Brian didn’t move from his chair. ‘I owe it all to you, Maddy,’ he said.

‘Will you write?’ she asked, her voice dull.

‘To everyone, a general letter in response to whatever marvellous fund-raising you do for me …’ He smiled at her winningly as he had smiled at so many people. As he would smile at the poor Peruvians in the dry valley, who had been calling out for him. She said nothing.

And for the first time in seven years they sat in silence. They willed the time to pass when Father Gunn would have found his letters and returned to the sitting room of the presbytery. The sitting-room door had been left open.

The farewells were endless. Father Barry wanted no present, he insisted. He didn’t need any goodbye gift to remind him of Shancarrig, its great people and the wonderful years he had spent here. He said he would try to describe what the place was like, their namesake on the other side of the world.

He cried when they came to see him off at the station. Maddy was in the back of the crowd. She wanted to be sure he was actually going. She wanted to see it with her own eyes. He waved with one hand and dabbed his eyes with the other. Maddy heard Dr Jims saying to Mr Hayes that he was always a very emotional and intense young
man. He hoped he would fare all right in that hot climate over there.

And the time went by, but it was like a summer garden when the sun has gone, and although there’s daylight there’s no point in sitting out in it. More children came and went in Mixed Infants. They left Miss Ross and went up to Mrs Kelly. They still learned how to say
bonjour
and
buenos dias
in their own time. Maddy Ross had won that victory hard from Mrs Kelly – she was not going to give it up.

The fund-raising continued, but Ireland was changing in the sixties. There was television for one thing … people heard about other parts of the world where there was famine and disaster. Suddenly Vieja Piedra was not the only place that called to them. Sometimes the collections were small that went in the money order to the Reverend Brian Barry at his post office in a hill town some sixty-seven miles from Vieja Piedra.

Yet his letters were always grateful and warm, and there were stories of the church being built, a small building. It looked like a shed with a cross on top, but Father Barry was desperately proud of it. Pictures were sent of it, badly focused snapshots taken from different angles.

And then there was the wonderful help of Viatores Christi, some lay Christians who were coming out to help. They were invaluable, as committed in every way as were the clergy.

Maddy heard the letters read aloud, and wondered why could Brian Barry not have become a lay missionary. Then there would have been the same dream and the same hope but no terrible promise about celibacy.

But she cheered herself up. If he had not been ordained as a priest he would never have come to Shancarrig, she would never have known him, never had her chance in life.

There had been five years of walking alone in Barna Woods, five plays in Shancarrig Dramatic Society, five Christmas concerts, there had been five sales of work, whist drives, beetle drives, treasure hunts. There had been five years of raffles, bingo, house to house collections. And then, one day, Brian Barry telephoned Maddy Ross.

‘I thought you’d be home from school by now.’ He sounded as if he were down the road. He couldn’t be telephoning her from Peru!

‘I’m in Dublin,’ he said.

Her heart gave an uncomfortable lurch. Something was happening. Why had the communication not been through Father Gunn?

‘I want to see you. Nobody knows I’m home.’

‘Brian.’ Her voice was only a whisper.

‘Don’t tell anyone at all. Just come tomorrow.’

‘But why? What’s happened?’

‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow? All the way to Dublin, just like that?’

‘I’ve come all the way from Peru.’

‘Is anything wrong? Is there any trouble?’

‘No no. Oh Maddy, it’s good to talk to you.’

‘I haven’t talked to you for five years, Brian. You have to tell me why are you home? Are you going to leave the priesthood?’

‘Please, Maddy. Trust me. I want to tell you personally. That’s why I came the whole way back. Just get the early train, will you? I’ll meet you.’

‘Brian?’

‘I’ll be on the platform.’ He hung up.

She had to cash a cheque at the hotel. Mrs Ryan was interested as usual in everything. Maddy gave her no information. Her mind was too confused. She knew there would be no sleep tonight.

For five years she had slept seven hours a night.

But tonight she would not close her eyes. No matter how tired and old she might look next morning Maddy knew that there was no point in lying in that same bed where she had lain for years, seeking sleep.

Instead she examined everything in her wardrobe.

She chose a cream blouse and a blue skirt. She wore a soft blue woollen scarf around her neck. It wasn’t girlish but it was youthful. It didn’t look like the ageing school teacher grown old in her love for the faraway priest.

Maddy smiled. At least she had kept her sense of humour. Whatever he was going to tell her he would like that.

He didn’t seem to have got a day older. He was boyish, even at forty-five. His coat collar was up so she couldn’t see whether he still wore his roman collar, but she had told herself not to read anything into that. Out in the missions priests wore no clerical garb and yet they were as firmly priests as ever they had been.

He saw her and ran to her. They hugged like a long-separated brother and sister, like old friends parted unwillingly, which is probably what they were. She pulled away from him to see his face, but still he hugged her. You can’t kiss someone who is hugging the life out of you.

The crowd had thinned on the platform. Some caution seemed to seep back into him.

‘There was no one from home on the train, was there?’

‘Where’s home?’ She laughed at him. ‘In all your letters you say Vieja Piedra is home.’

‘And so it is.’ He seemed satisfied that they weren’t under surveillance. He tucked her arm into his and they walked to a nearby hotel. The lounge was small and dark, the coffee strong and scalding. Maddy Ross would remember for ever
the way it stuck to the roof of her mouth when Brian Barry told her that he was going to leave the priesthood and marry Deirdre, one of the volunteers. It was like a patch of red-hot tar in her mouth. It wouldn’t go away as she nodded and listened and forced her face to smile through tales of growth, and understanding and love and the emptiness of vows taken at an early age before a boy was a man, and about a loving God not holding people to meaningless promises.

And she heard how there was still a lot to be decided. Deirdre and he had realised that laicisation took such a long time, and brought so much grief, destroying the relationships of those who waited.

But in South America the clergy had understood the core values. They had gone straight to the heart of things. They knew that a blessing could be given to a union of which God would patently approve. What was the expression that Maddy herself had used so many years ago? Something about thinking in terms of the Constitution rather than in petty Civil Service bye-laws.

And he owed it all to Maddy. So often he had told that to Deirdre, who wanted to send her gratitude. If Maddy hadn’t proven to him that he could be courageous and open up his heart to the world and to love, this might never have happened.

‘Did you ever love me?’ Maddy asked him.

‘Of course I love you. I love you with all my heart. Nothing will destroy our love, not my marrying Deirdre or you marrying whoever you will. Maybe you have someone in mind?’ He was roguish now, playful even. She wanted to knock him down.

‘No. No plans as yet.’

‘Well you should, Maddy.’ Gone was the light-hearted banter, now he was being serious and caring. ‘A woman
should get married, and have children. That’s what a woman should do.’

‘And have you and Deirdre decided to have children?’ She tried to put the smile back in her voice. It was so easy to let a sneer creep in instead, to let him know how she could sense that Deirdre was already pregnant.

‘Eventually,’ he told her, which meant imminently.

He was going to leave Vieja Piedra, and they were going to a place further down the coast of Peru. He would teach in a town, there was just as much work needed there, but they had found a native born priest, a real Peruvian, to look after the valley of Vieja Piedra. He talked on. Nothing would be said to Father Gunn. The fund-raising would take a different style. Nothing would be said to anyone really. In today’s world you didn’t need to explain or to be intense. It was a matter of seizing what good there was and creating more good. It was taking your chance when it was offered.

The only person who
had
to be told face to face was Maddy. That’s why he had taken Deirdre’s savings to come back and tell her, to thank her in the way that a letter could never do for having put him on this road to happiness.

‘And did Deirdre not feel afraid that once you saw your old love you might never return to her?’ Maddy’s tone was light, her question deadly serious.

But Brian hastened to put her anxieties at rest. ‘Lord no. Deirdre knew that what
we
had wasn’t love. It was childlike fumblings, it was heavy meaning-of-life conversation, it was part of growth, and for me a very important part.’ He wanted to reassure her about that.

The train back to Shancarrig left in fifteen minutes. Maddy said she thought she should take it.

‘But you can’t go
now
. You’ve only been here an hour.’ His dismay was enormous.

‘But you’ve told me everything.’

‘No, I haven’t told you anything really. I have only skimmed the surface.’

‘I have to go back, Brian. I would have, anyway, no matter what you told me. My mother hasn’t been well.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Of course you didn’t. You didn’t know a great many things, like Mrs Murphy in The Glen died, and that Maura Brennan brings her poor son around with her and he sits in every house in Shancarrig while she cleans floors and does washing. There are many things you don’t know.’

‘Well, they don’t tell me.
You
don’t tell me. You don’t write at all.’

‘I was ordered not to. Don’t you remember?’

‘Not ordered, just advised.’

‘To you it was the same once.’

‘If you’d wanted to write to me enough you would have,’ he said, head on one side, roguish again.

She closed her mind to his disbelief that she would return on the next train. He had thought she would spend the whole day, if not the weekend, in Dublin with him. What was he to do now? No relations were meant to know he was back.

‘Did I do the wrong thing coming back to tell you?’ He was a child again, confused, uncertain.

She was gentle. She could afford to be. She had a lifetime ahead of her with little to contemplate except why her one stab at living life had failed. She reached out and held his hand.

‘No, you did the right thing,’ she lied straight into his face. ‘Tell Deirdre that I wish you well, all of you. Tell her I went back to Shancarrig on the train with my heart brimming over.’

It was the only wedding present she could give him.

And she held the tears until the train had turned the bend and until she could no longer see his eager hand waving her goodbye.

When the time came for Maura to go to school any small enthusiasm that there had ever been in the Brennan family for education had died down. Maura’s mother was worn out with all the demands that were made on her to dress them up for this May Procession and that visit from the Bishop. Not to mention communion and confirmations. Mrs Brennan had been heard to say that the Shancarrig school had notions about itself being some kind of private college for the sons and daughters of the land-owning gentry rather than the National School it was, and that nature had always intended it to be.

And the young Maura didn’t get much encouragement from her father either. Paudie Brennan believed that schools and all that were women’s work and not things a man got involved with. And since Paudie Brennan was not a man ever continuously in work he couldn’t be expected to take an interest financially and every other way in each and every one of his nine living children, and Maura came near the end of the trail. Paudie Brennan had too much on his mind what with a leaking roof missing a dozen slates, and a very different and worrying kind of slate altogether above in Johnny Finn Noted for Best Drinks, so what time was there to be wondering about young Maura and her book learning?

Maura had never expected there to be an interest. School was for books, home was for fights. The older brothers and sisters had gone to England – the really grown-up
ones. They went as soon as they were seventeen or eighteen. They came home for holidays and it was great at first, but after a day it would wear off, the niceness, and there would be shouting again as if the returned sister or brother was an ordinary part of the family, not a visitor.

One day, Maura knew, she would be the eldest one at home – just herself and Geraldine left. But Maura wasn’t going to England to work in a shoe factory like Margaret, or a fish shop like Deirdre. No, she was going to stay here in Shancarrig. She wouldn’t get married but she would live like Miss Ross, who was very old and could do what she liked and stay up all night without anyone giving out or groaning at her. Of course, Miss Ross was a school teacher and must earn pots of money, but Maura would save whenever she started to work, and keep the money in the post office until she could have a house and freedom to go to bed at two in the morning if the notion took her.