The Copper Beech (11 page)

Maura hoped that Geraldine would come home from England. She even offered her the fare, but there was no reply. It would have been nice to have had her standing as a bridesmaid, but instead she had Eileen Dunne, who said she loved weddings and she’d be anyone’s bridesmaid for them. And with a great nudge that nearly knocked Maura over she said she’d do godmother as well, and laughed a lot.

Gerry’s brother came to do the best man bit. His parents were old and didn’t travel, he said.

Maura saw nothing sad or shabby about her wedding day.

When she turned around in the church she saw Nessa Ryan, Leo Murphy, Niall Hayes and Eddie Barton sitting smiling at her. She was the first of their class to get married. They seemed to think this was like winning some
kind of race rather than having been caught in a teenage pregnancy. When they went to Johnny Finn’s for drinks Mr Ryan from the hotel came running in with a fistful of money to buy them all a drink. He said he came to wish them well from everyone in Ryan’s Commercial Hotel.

There was no word of the haste or the disgrace or anything. Maura’s father behaved in a way that, for Paudie Brennan, could be called respectable. This week he happened to be friendly with Foxy Dunne’s father, so the two of them had their arms around each other as they sang tunelessly together in a corner. If it had been one of the weeks when they were fighting, things would have been terrible – insults hurling across Johnny Finn’s all afternoon.

And Father Gunn and Father Barry were there smiling and talking to people as if it were a real wedding.

Maura didn’t see anything less than the kind of wedding day she had dreamed about when she was at school, or when reading the women’s magazines. All she saw was Gerry O’Sullivan beside her, smiling and saying everything would be grand.

And everything
was
grand for a while.

Maura left her job in the hotel. Mrs Ryan seemed to want it that way. Possibly there would be social differences now that Maura was the wife of the popular barman, instead of just the girl from the cottages cleaning the floors and washing potatoes. But Maura found plenty of work, hours here and hours there. When it was obvious that she was expecting a child many of her employers said they would be lost without her. Mrs Hayes, who hadn’t wanted her in the start, was particularly keen to keep her.

‘Maybe your mother could look after the child, and you’d still want to go out and work?’ she said hopefully.

Maura had no intention of letting any child grow up in the same house as she had herself, with the lack of interest
and love. But she had learned to be very circumspect in her life. ‘Maybe indeed,’ she said to Mrs Hayes and the others. ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’

It seemed a long time to wait for the baby, all those evenings on her own in the little cottage, sometimes hearing her father going home drunk, as she had when she was a child. She polished the little cabinet, took out the doll and patted the bump of her stomach.

‘Soon you’ll be admiring this,’ she said to the unborn baby.

It was Dr Jims Blake who told her about the baby boy. The child had Down’s syndrome. The boy, who was what was called a mongol, would still be healthy and loving and live a full and happy life.

It was Father Gunn who told her about Gerry, and how he had come from the cottage to the church and told the priest he was going. He took the wages owing to him from the hotel, saying his father had died and he needed time off for the funeral. But he told Father Gunn that he was getting the boat to England.

No entreaties would make him stay.

Maura remembered always the way that Father Gunn’s thick round glasses seemed to sparkle as he was telling her. She didn’t know if there were tears behind them, or if it was only a trick of the light.

People were kind, very kind. Maura often told herself that she had been lucky to have stayed in Shancarrig. Suppose all this had happened to her in some big city in England where she had known nobody. Here she had a friendly face everywhere she turned.

And of course she had Michael.

Nobody had told her how much she would love him because nobody could have known. She had never known
a child as loving. She watched him grow with a heart that nearly burst with pride. Everything he learned, every new skill – like being able to do up his buttons – was a huge hurdle for the child, and soon everyone in Shancarrig got used to seeing them hand in hand walking around.

‘Who’s this?’ people would ask affectionately, even though they knew well.

‘This is Michael O’Sullivan,’ Maura would say proudly.

‘I’m Michael O’Sullivan,’ he would say and, as often as not, hug the person who had asked.

If you wanted Maura to come and clean your house you took Michael as well. And as they walked from job to job each day Maura used to point out the houses that she loved to her son – the little gate lodge, ever more covered with ivy and choked with nettles, that stood at the end of the long avenue up to The Glen, and there was the one near Miss Ross which she was going to paint pink if she ever bought it.

At night she would take the doll with the china hands and face out from its cabinet and the two cups and saucers she had been given by Mrs Ryan. There was a little silver plate, which had EPNS on the back, that Eileen Dunne had given when she stood as godmother to Michael. She said that this meant it wasn’t real silver, but since the S stood for silver Maura thought it deserved a place in the cabinet. There was a watch too, one that belonged to Gerry. A watch that didn’t go, but might go one day if it were seen to, and would hang on a chain. When Michael got to be a man he could call it his father’s watch.

Most people forgot that Michael ever had a father; the memory of Gerry O’Sullivan faded. And for Maura the memory began to fade too. Days passed when she didn’t think of the handsome fellow with the dark eyes who had
cared enough to marry her, but hadn’t got the strength to stay when he knew his child was handicapped. She had never hated him, sometimes she even pitied him that he didn’t know the great hugs and devotion of Michael his son, who grew in size but not greatly in achievement.

Maura had got glances and serious invitations out from other men in the town, but she had always told them simply that she wasn’t free to accept any invitation. She had a husband living in England and really there could be no question of anything else.

Her dream remained constant. A proper little home, not the broken-down cottage where only the hopeless and the helpless lived, where she had grown up and wanted to escape.

Then the Darcys came to Shancarrig. They bought a small grocery shop like the one Nellie Dunne ran, and they put in all kinds of newfangled things. The world was changing, even in places like Shancarrig. Mike and Gloria Darcy were new people who livened the place up. No one had ever met anyone called Gloria before and she lived up to her name. Lots of black curly hair like a gypsy, and she must have known this because she often wore a red scarf knotted around her neck and a full coloured skirt, as if she was going to break into a gypsy dance any moment.

Mike Darcy was easy-going and got on with everyone. Even old Nellie Dunne who looked on them as rivals liked Mike Darcy. He had a laugh and a word for anyone he met on the road. Mrs Ryan in the Commercial Hotel felt they were a bit brash for the town, but when Mike said he’d buy for her at the market as well as for himself she began to change her tune.

It was good to see such energy about the place, she said, and it wasn’t long before she had the front of the
hotel painted to make it the equal of the new shopfront in Darcy’s. Mike’s brother, Jimmy Darcy, had come with them. He was a great house-painter and Mrs Ryan claimed that even the dozy fellows from down in the cottages, who used to paint a bit when the humour took them, seemed to think Jimmy did a good job. Mike and Gloria had children, two tough dark little boys who used to get up to all kinds of devilment in the school.

Maura didn’t wait to see whether the town liked the Darcys or not; she presented herself on the doorstep the moment they arrived.

‘You’ll be needing someone to work for you,’ she said to Gloria.

Gloria glanced at the round eager face of Michael, who stood holding his mother’s hand. ‘Will you be able to make yourself free?’ she asked.

‘Michael would come with me. He’s the greatest help you could imagine,’ she said, and Michael beamed at the praise.

‘I’m not sure if we really
do
need anyone …’ Gloria was polite but unsure.

‘You do need someone, but take your time. Ask around a bit about me. Maura O’Sullivan is the name, Mrs Maura O’Sullivan.’

‘Well, yes, Mrs O’Sullivan …’

‘No, I just wanted you to know, because you’re new. Michael’s daddy had to go and live in England. You’d call me Maura if you had me in the house.’

‘And you’d call me Michael,’ the boy said, putting both his arms around Gloria’s small waist.

‘I don’t need to ask around. When will you start?’

The Darcys were better payers than anyone else in the town. They seemed to have no end of money. The children’s clothes were all good quality, their shoes were
new, not mended. The furniture they had was expensive, not lovely old wood which Maura would have enjoyed polishing, but dear modern furniture. She knew the prices of all these things from her trips to the big town, and her dreams of furnishing the house that she’d buy.

Back in the cottage she had hardly anything worth speaking of. The small slow savings were being kept for the day she moved into the place she wanted. Only the glass-fronted cabinet with its small trove of treasures showed any sign of the gracious living that Maura yearned for. Otherwise it was converted boxes and broken secondhand furniture.

The Darcys had been in lots of places. Maura marvelled at how quickly the children could adapt.

They were warm-hearted too. They didn’t like to come across Michael cleaning their shoes. ‘He doesn’t have to do that, Missus,’ said Kevin Darcy, who was nine.

‘I’m doing them great,’ Michael protested.

‘Don’t worry, Kevin, that’s Michael’s and my job. All we ask you to do is not to leave everything on the floor of your bedroom so as we have to bend and pick it up.’

It worked. Gloria Darcy said that Maura and her son had managed to put manners on her children, something no one in any house had ever done before.

‘Don’t you find it hard, Mam, all the moving from place to place?’

Gloria looked at her. ‘No, it’s interesting. You meet new people, and in each place we better ourselves. We sell the place at a profit and then move on.’

‘And will you be moving on from here too, do you think?’ Maura was disappointed. She wouldn’t ever get the kind of hours and payments that the Darcys gave her from anyone else. Gloria Darcy said not for a while. She thought
they would stay in Shancarrig until the children got a bit of an education before uprooting them.

And their business prospered. They built on a whole new section to the original building they had bought and they expanded their range of goods. Soon people didn’t need to go into the big town for their shopping trips. You could buy nearly everything you needed in Darcy’s.

‘I don’t know where they get the money,’ Mrs Hayes said one day to Maura. ‘They can’t be doing that much business, nothing that would warrant the kind of showing off they’re doing.’

Maura said nothing. She thought that Mrs Hayes was the kind of wife who might well disapprove of Gloria’s low-cut blouses and winning ways with the men of Shancarrig.

It was around this time that Maura became aware of financial problems in the Darcy household. There were bills that were being presented over and over to them. She could hear Mike Darcy’s voice raised on the phone. But at the same time he had bought Gloria some marvellous jewellery that was the talk of Shancarrig.

‘She has me broke,’ he’d say to anyone who came into the shop. ‘Go on Gloria, show them that emerald.’

And laughing, Gloria would wave the emerald on the chain. It had been bought in the big town in the jeweller’s. She had always wanted one. And it was the same with the little diamond earrings. They were so small they were only specks really, but the thought that they were real diamonds made her shiver with excitement.

Shancarrig looked on with admiration. And the Darcys weren’t blowing or boasting either. Nessa Ryan had been in the big town and checked. They were the real thing. The Darcys were new rich, courageous and not afraid to spend. With varying degrees of envy the people of Shancarrig wished them good luck.

The tinkers came every year on the way to the Galway races. They didn’t stay in Shancarrig. They stayed nearby. Maura was struck with how Gloria looked like the Hollywood version of a gypsy, not the real thing. The real women of the travelling people looked tired and weather-beaten, not the flashing eyes and colourful garb of Gloria Darcy, and certainly not the real diamonds in the ears and the real emerald around her neck.

But this particular year people said some tinker woman must be wearing the jewels because, at the very time they were encamped outside Shancarrig, Gloria Darcy’s jewellery case was stolen.

All hell broke loose. It could only be the tinkers.

Sergeant Keane was in charge of the search, and the ill will created was enormous. Nothing was found. No one was charged. Everyone was upset. Even Michael was interrogated and asked about what he had seen and what he had touched in his visits to the Darcy house. It was a frightening time in Shancarrig; there had never been a robbery like this before.

There had never been anything like this to steal before.

A lot of tut-tutting and head-shaking went on. It was vulgar of the Darcys to have displayed that jewellery; it made people envious. It put temptation in the way of others. But then, how had the gypsies known about it? They had only just come to camp. They hadn’t been given dazzling displays of the glinting emerald on the chain around Gloria’s throat.

‘I’m sorry if the guards frightened Michael,’ Gloria said to Maura.

‘I don’t mind about that. Sergeant Keane has known Michael since he was in a pram, he wouldn’t frighten him,’ Maura said. ‘But I’m sorry for you, Mrs Darcy. You put
a lot of store by those jewels. It won’t be the same without them.’