The Copper Beech (13 page)

That meant she liked it. He was pleased.

Eddie liked Leo Murphy. If
she
were to ask him to marry her when he had a real birthday he wouldn’t say no. The Glen would be a great place to live, orchards and an old tennis court. Fantastic.

Leo took things seriously.

‘Why wait until March first?’ she asked Eddie about his birthday. ‘Suppose you died on the night of the twenty-eighth then you’d have missed your birthday altogether.’

It was unanswerable.

Eddie’s mother said she didn’t mind which day he had it just so long as he knew there’d be a cake and an apple tart and no more. He could have ten people or he could have two.

Eddie measured the cake plate carefully. He’d have three and himself. That way they’d have lots. He invited Leo Murphy and Nessa Ryan and Maura Brennan. They were the people he sat beside at class and liked.

‘No boys at all?’ Eddie’s mother was a dressmaker. She was rarely seen without pins in her mouth or a frown of concentration on her face.

‘I don’t sit near any boys,’ Eddie said.

His mother seemed to accept this. Una Barton was a small dark woman with worried eyes. She always walked
very quickly, as if she feared people might stop her and detain her in conversation. She had a kind heart and a good eye for colour and dress fabrics in the clothes she made for the women of Shancarrig and the farmers’ wives from out the country. They said that Una Barton lived for her son Eddie and for him alone.

Eddie had hair that grew upwards from his head. Foxy Dunne had said he looked like a lavatory brush. Eddie didn’t know what a lavatory brush was. They didn’t have one in their house, but when he saw one in Ryan’s Hotel he was very annoyed. His hair wasn’t as bad as that.

He liked doing things that the other boys didn’t like doing at all. He liked going up to Barna Woods and collecting flowers. He sometimes pressed them and wrote their names underneath, and then stuck them on a card. His mother said that he was a real artist.

‘Was my father artistic?’ Eddie asked.

‘The less said about your father’s artistry the better.’ His mother’s face was in that sharp straight line again. There would be no more said.

He had to make a wish when he cut the cake. He closed his eyes and wished that his father would come back, like he had wished last year and the year before.

Maybe if you wished it three times it happened.

Ted Barton had left when his son was five. He had left in some spectacular manner, because Eddie had heard it mentioned several times when people didn’t know he was listening. People would say about something, ‘There was nearly as much noise as the night Ted Barton was thrown out.’

And once he heard the Dunnes in their shop say that if someone didn’t mind himself it would be another case of Ted Barton, with the suitcase flung down the stairs
after him. Eddie couldn’t imagine his mother shouting or throwing a suitcase. But then again she must have.

She told him everything else he asked, but never told him about his father. ‘Let’s just agree that he didn’t keep his part of the bargain. He didn’t look after his wife and son. He doesn’t deserve our interest.’

It was easy for her to say that but hard for Eddie to agree. Every boy wanted to know where his father was, even if it was a terrible father like the Brennans’ or a fierce one like Leo Murphy’s, with his moustache and being called a Major and everything.

Sometimes Eddie saw people getting off the bus and dreamed that maybe it was his father coming for him – coming to take him on a long holiday, just the two of them, walking all round Ireland, staying where they felt like. And then he’d imagine his father saying, with his head on one side, ‘How about it, Eddie son, will I come home?’ In the daydream Eddie’s mother would always be smiling and welcoming and there would be less work to make her tired because his father would be looking after them now.

After tea they played games. They had to play on the floor of Eddie’s bedroom, because Mrs Barton needed to bring her sewing machine back on to the table downstairs.

They said if only Eddie had a birthday in the summer they could all have gone up to Barna Woods. Eddie showed them some of the pressed flowers.

‘They’re beautiful,’ Nessa Ryan said.

Nessa never said anything nice just to please you. If Nessa Ryan said they were good then they must be.

‘You could even do that for a living,’ she added.

At ten they usually didn’t think as far ahead as that, but today there had been a talk on careers in school and an encouragement to think ahead and try to get trained for
something rather than just gazing out the window and letting the time pass by.

‘How could I get trained to press flowers?’ Eddie was interested, but Nessa’s momentary enthusiasm had passed.

‘We’ll have another go at blow football,’ she said.

It had been Eddie’s birthday present. His one gift. He hadn’t really wanted it but his mother had heard from the Dunnes in the shop that it was what every child wanted this year and she had paid it off over five weeks. She was pleased the game was being used. Eddie secretly thought it was silly and tiring and that there was too much spit trying to blow a paper ball through paper tubes that got chewy and soggy.

When the party was over he stood at the door of the pink house in the moonlight and watched Leo skipping up the hill to her home. You could see the walls of The Glen from here. She waved when she reached the gate.

Nessa and Maura went downhill, Maura to the row of cottages where she lived. Eddie hoped that her father wouldn’t be drunk tonight. Sometimes Paudie Brennan fell around the town shouting and insulting people.

Nessa Ryan had run on ahead. She lived in Ryan’s Hotel. She could have anything she wanted to eat any time. She had told that to Eddie when he had explained about the cake and the apple tart. But there must have been something of an apology in his face because Nessa had said quickly that she didn’t get as much
cake
as she liked. It was really only chips and sandwiches.

The moon was shining brightly, even though it was only seven o’clock. His mother’s sewing machine was already whirring away. There she would sit surrounded by paper patterns and the big dummy which used to frighten him when he was a child, always draped with some nearly finished garment, as she listened to the radio. She would
smile at him a lot, but when he came upon her alone he thought her face looked sad and tired. He wished she didn’t have to work so hard. And it would keep whirring until he slept. It had been like that as long as he remembered. Eddie wondered was his father looking at the moon somewhere. Did he remember his son was ten-years-old today?

That night Eddie wrote a letter to his father.

He told him about the day and the pressed flowers that Nessa Ryan had admired so much. Then he wondered would his father think that bit was sissy so he crossed it out. He told his father that there was a big wedding in the next town and that his mother had been asked to do not only the bride’s dress but the two bridesmaids and the mother and aunt of the bride as well. The whole church nearly would be dressed by Mrs Barton. And that his mother had said it came just in the nick of time because something needed to be done to the roof and there wasn’t enough money to pay for it.

Then he read that last bit again and wondered would his father think it was a complaint. He didn’t want to annoy him now that he had just found him.

With a jolt Eddie realised that he hadn’t found his father, he was only making it up. Still, it was kind of comforting. He crossed out the bit about the roof costing money and left in the good news about the wedding dresses. He told his father about the careers lecture at school and about there being lots of jobs for hard-working young fellows over in England when he got old enough. He thought that maybe his father might be in England. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if he met him by accident over there in a good job with prospects.

He wrote often that year. He told his father that Bernard Shaw had died, in case he might be somewhere where
they didn’t get that kind of news. Mr Kelly at school had said he was a great writer but he had been a bit against the church. Eddie asked his father why people would be against the church.

His father didn’t answer, of course, because the letters were never sent. There was nowhere to send them to.

It wasn’t that Eddie was all
that
lonely and friendless. He did have friends, of course he did. He often went up to The Glen to play with Leo Murphy. They used to hit the ball across the net to each other on the tennis court, and Leo had a great swing on a big oak tree. She hadn’t known it was an oak tree until he told her and showed her the leaves and the acorns. It was extraordinary to have all those trees and still not know what they were.

Eddie often took oak leaves and traced around them. He loved the shape – there were so many more zig-zags than in the leaves of the plane trees, or the poplar. He liked the chestnut leaves too, and he never played the silly game that the others did at school – peeling away the green bits to see who could have the most perfect fillet, like a fish with no flesh, only bones. Eddie liked the texture of the leaves.

He didn’t write any of this to his father, but he did tell him when de Valera got back again and Nessa Ryan had said there had been a terrible shouting match one night in the hotel and they had to send for the guards because some people didn’t agree that it was great he was back. He went on writing and told a lot of fairly private things.

Still, he didn’t mention that he was afraid of someone proposing to him on his birthday when he was twelve. It seemed such a stupid thing to be afraid of. But Eddie had great fears of Eileen Dunne at school, who had a terribly
loud laugh and about five brothers who would deal with him if he refused her.

‘You weren’t thinking of asking me to marry you on Friday, were you?’ he asked Leo hopefully. She had just raised her head from a book.

‘No,’ Leo said. ‘I was thinking about the King of England being dead and my father being all upset about it’

‘Would you?’ he asked.

‘Would I what? Be all upset?’

‘No. Ask me to marry you.’

‘Why should I? You never asked
me
to marry you.’

‘It’s the day, you see. It’s the day women can.’

‘Men can every other day of the year.’

Eddie had worked that out. ‘Suppose I asked you now, and we were engaged, then if anyone asked me on Friday I could say that I wasn’t free.’

He looked very worried. Leo wasn’t concentrating one bit. She was reading her book. She always had a book with her. This time it was
Good Wives
. It seemed a fine coincidence to Eddie.

‘What
is
it, Eddie?’

‘Just say yes. You don’t have to.’

‘Yes, then.’

Eddie was flooded with relief. He wasn’t having a party for his twelfth birthday, he was too old. He was getting a bicycle, a second-hand bicycle. His mother had told him he could cycle to school on the day. He thought he’d keep it until next day, he said. His mother looked at him affectionately. He was such a funny little thing, quirky and complicated but never a moment’s trouble to her, which was more than she could have hoped the day that bastard had left her doorstep.

People sometimes said it must be hard for her to bring
a boy up all on her own. But Una Barton thought they had a reasonable life together. Her son told her long rambling tales, he was interested in helping her cook what they ate and would dry the dishes dutifully. She wished there was more money or time to take him to the seaside or to Dublin to the zoo. But that wasn’t for their kind. That was for boys who had fathers that didn’t run away.

Eddie didn’t want to remind anyone it was his birthday, just in case Eileen Dunne might get it into her head, or Maura Brennan’s young sister Geraldine. But nobody seemed to have realised the opportunity they had of proposing to Eddie, or to anyone. They were far more interested in Father Barry, who had come to give them a talk about the missions and to show them a Missionary magazine which had competitions in it and a Pen-Friends Corner. There were people in every part of the world who wanted to exchange ideas with young Irish people, he said. They could have a great time writing to youngsters in different lands.

Father Barry was very nice. He seemed kind of dreamy when he spoke and he sometimes closed his eyes as if the place he was talking about was somehow nearer than the place where he was. Eddie liked that. He often thought about being out with trees and flowers when he should have been thinking about the sums on the blackboard. Father Barry pinned up the page with names of the boys and girls who wanted pen-friends. They could all speak English. They lived in far lands. One of them said he liked botany, flowers and plants. His name was Chris and he lived in Glasgow, Scotland.

‘That’s not very far to be writing,’ Niall Hayes said dismissively. He had picked a boy in Argentina.

‘There’s more chance he might write back if he’s not too far away,’ Eddie said.

‘That’s stupid,’ said Niall.

In his heart Eddie agreed that it was. Maybe the boy in Scotland wanted someone more exotic, not from a small town in Ireland. But the real reason he had picked Chris Taylor was that Scotland wouldn’t be too dear a stamp and because he had said he liked plant life. Eddie had always thought botany was a kind of wool. He checked with Miss Ross. He didn’t want to get involved in writing about knitting or sheep or anything. Not that a boy would like knitting. Miss Ross said botany was plants and things that grew.

He wrote to Chris, a long letter. It was extraordinary to be writing one that would actually go into the post box. Other twelve-year-olds might have had to suck their pens and think of something more to say to use up another sheet of paper, but not Eddie Barton. He was well used to writing long letters about the state of the world in general and Shancarrig in particular.

The letter came back very quickly but it came addressed to Miss E. Barton. It had a Glasgow postmark on it. Eddie looked at it for a long time. It must be for him. His mother’s name was Una. But why had Chris Taylor called him Miss? Burning with shame he opened the letter.