The Copper Beech (15 page)

‘If we ever meet I must show you the ferns of Barna Woods,’ he wrote once.

‘What do you mean “if we ever meet”? It’s “when we meet”!’ she wrote back, and his heart felt leaden because he knew he had made Shancarrig sound too beautiful, too exciting, too romantic for Christine Taylor.

‘That boy must have nothing to do but write letters,’ his mother said one day when the usual fat envelope arrived from Scotland.

‘It’s not a boy, it’s a girl.’ Eddie knew he’d have to explain some time.

‘What do you mean? Did he turn into a girl all of a sudden?’ Mrs Barton didn’t like the sound of it being a girl.

‘No, it’s a different one.’ Eddie didn’t feel that any further explanation would help.

‘Why Scotland?’ his mother said.

‘It’s nice and far away,’ he grinned. ‘If I have to be writing to a girl, Ma, isn’t it better that I write to one in a far off country?’

‘At your age you shouldn’t be writing to a girl at all. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Too much time if you’re your father’s son.’

There had been much mention over the years of Ted Barton’s interest in women, always vague and generalised, never specific and detailed. Eddie had long given up the
hope of getting any more information than the sketchy amount he already had. His father had been thrown out because of a known association with another woman. When he had left Shancarrig that night the woman had not gone with him. She might even be someone he knew. Someone he had spoken to. If only it was someone nice like Miss Ross then maybe she could have told him more about the man who had left their lives.

‘Did my father ever like Miss Ross?’ he asked his mother suddenly.

‘Maddy Ross?’ His mother looked at him in surprise.

‘Yes. Could she have been his love?’

‘Well, given that she was about twelve or thirteen when he left town it isn’t entirely likely, but that doesn’t say it should be ruled out either.’ His mother had even managed a wry smile as she said this.

Eddie thought she was less bitter. He must remember to tell this to Chris when he wrote; they had no secrets. She told him about her father being laid off in the shipyard and her mother getting an extra shift in the factory. Chris was doing Saturdays in the local flower shop. It wasn’t like she thought it would be, working with flowers. It was very mechanical, stiff little arrangements and awful cheaty ways of making flowers look alive when they were almost dead.

They wrote to each other when they should have been trying a last desperate effort at their books. Christine said that they were snobby in her convent and didn’t like the girls whose mothers worked in factories. Eddie wrote that the Brothers had a down on anyone with a bit of soul at all and that they had him written off as a no-hoper. The results of the exams were a foregone conclusion to them both.

In the summer of 1957 they wrote and told each other of poor results, bad marks and limited futures.

‘I had a word with Brother O’Brien. He doesn’t think it worth trying to repeat the year,’ Eddie’s mother said glumly. She had taken the bus into the big town to buy materials, threads, zip fasteners and spare pieces for the sewing machine. She had used the opportunity to visit the school.

It hadn’t been a happy encounter.

‘I told him that other boys had fathers who could pay for this kind of thing, but that we weren’t in the lucky position to know where your father is or has been for the last dozen years.’ Her face had that old bitter look which Eddie hated.

‘Ma, you threw him out. You asked him to go. You can’t keep blaming him for everything after he went, only for what he did before he went.’

‘And that was plenty for one lifetime, let me assure you.’

‘You always
assure
me these things but you never explain them.’

‘Oh, you’ve words at will, just like him.’

‘And was Brother O’Brien sympathetic? I bet he wasn’t. He couldn’t care about anyone’s father, or mother, or anyone at all.’

His mother gave him an odd look.

‘He wasn’t sympathetic. Neither to you nor to me. But I think he does care about people. He said there was no point in my lamenting the absence of a husband, that it was mainly women who did all the consulting whether their husbands were alive or around or whatever.’

‘And what else?’

‘He said that you had got it into your head you were too good for the school, above them and their plain ways. And that would have been fine if you were a real artist burning to paint or to write, but the way things were he
didn’t know what would become of you. He sounded sorry.’

To Eddie it had the ring of truth. That was exactly the way Brother O’Brien would speak, and there was some truth in it. He could see the big man with his red face regretting that he couldn’t find a place for the boy. Brother O’Brien loved his boys to get into banks and insurance offices, the Civil Service, and the very odd time even into a university.

There would be nowhere for Eddie Barton.

If he hadn’t had his lifeline of letters to hold him together as support and strength Eddie would have been very depressed that summer. But Chris wrote every day. She said they must get themselves out of this situation. She would not work in a factory like her mother, nor would she train to be a florist.

They had begun to talk of love now, they ended each letter with more and more yearning and wishes that they could meet. Eddie said that perhaps he had made Shancarrig sound too attractive. Maybe they could meet in some foreign land where there would be warm winds and palm trees. Chris said that nobody could love anybody if they met in the grey streets around her home. She was all for somewhere exotic too.

The world of fantasy became an important part of their letter-writing. It almost took over from the practical side. Chris Taylor went to work in a department store in Glasgow. She hated it, she said. It was very tiring. Her legs ached more than usual. Eddie wrote and asked did her legs usually ache, she had never mentioned it before. But she didn’t mention it again so he thought it must have been just a phrase.

Eddie Barton went to work in Dunne’s Hardware. He hated it. He wrote to Chris about the days talking to
farmers who came in to buy chicken wire and plough parts. He said he was sick of harrows and rakes and if he had to talk about linseed oil or red oxide for painting a barn again he thought he might actually lie down and die. He wrote about how ignorant the Dunnes were. Their aunt, Nellie Dunne, ran a small grocery shop and she gave people credit which was the only reason why anyone shopped there. Eddie worked for old Mr Dunne and his sons Brian and Liam. Eileen, who was his own age, worked in Ryan’s Hotel, but was always giving him the eye when she came in.

‘I tell you this …’ he wrote to Chris, ‘not to make myself sound great or to make you jealous, but to remind myself how lucky I am that stupid girls like Eileen with her forward pushy ways form no part of my life now that I know what love is. Now that I have you.’

Sometimes she wrote about going to a dance, but she said she sat in a seat on the balcony most of the time and thought about what he had said in his last letter.

Sometimes Nessa Ryan and Leo Murphy came into the shop to talk to him. The Dunnes never minded him talking to them because they were as near to the Quality as Shancarrig possessed. If Maura Brennan came in, or anyone else from the cottages, it would be different. But old Mr Dunne seemed to take positive pleasure out of a visit from young Miss Ryan of the hotel and young Miss Murphy from The Glen.

‘And how goes the good Major?’ he would ask Leo about her father.

‘Talking to himself as usual,’ Leo muttered once and they all giggled.

Mr Dunne didn’t like such disrespect.

‘And how are they all in Ireland’s leading hostelry?’ he would ask Nessa Ryan about her family’s hotel.

Nessa always said it was doing fine thank you.

Eddie wrote to Chris about how strained and worried Leo Murphy looked when she should have had no worries in the world. She had got six honours in her Leaving Certificate. She had all the money in the world; she could have gone to university in Cork or Galway or Dublin, yet she always seemed to be biting her lip.

Chris wrote back and said you never knew what worries people had. Perhaps Leo wasn’t well, maybe it was her health. What did she look like? In shame Eddie wrote and said that Leo looked like him, or rather, the pictures he had sent of him when he was meant to be a girl were of Leo.

‘She’s very good-looking,’ Chris wrote back anxiously.

‘I never noticed it,’ he wrote. ‘Perhaps I should have stayed a girl.’

‘No. You’re lovely as you are,’ she said in the next letter.

They knew that they must talk. Neither household had a phone but Chris could use the public phone and Eddie could be in Ryan’s Hotel waiting for the call. They rehearsed it in letters for some weeks.

‘We mightn’t like each other’s voices,’ Chris wrote. ‘But it’s important to remember that we like each other so the voice doesn’t matter.’

‘What do you mean we
like
each other?’ wrote Eddie. ‘We love each other. That’s what we must remember on Saturday night.’

They made it Saturday so that they could look forward to it all week.

He dressed himself up and put on a clean shirt.

‘On the town again I suppose.’ His mother hardly seemed to look up but she had taken in that he was smartly turned out.

‘Aw, no, Mam. There’s nowhere much to go on the town in Shancarrig.’

‘Well, where are you going if I might ask?’ Her tone wasn’t as sharp as the words. She was aching to know.

‘Just down to Ryan’s Hotel, Mam, for a cup of coffee.’

‘Eddie …?’

‘Yes, Mam.’

‘Eddie, I know I’m nagging you but you won’t …’

‘Mam, I told you I don’t drink. I didn’t like the smell of it or the taste of it the once I tried.’

‘I don’t mean drink.’ She looked him up and down, a boy setting out for a date, for romance.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You wouldn’t get involved with that Eileen Dunne, now would you? They’d be bad people to get on the wrong side of …’

‘Who are you telling! Don’t I work for them?’

‘But Eileen …?’

He knelt beside his mother and looked up into her face.

‘If she were the last woman in Ireland I wouldn’t want her.’

Anyone would have known that he was speaking the truth. Eddie’s mother waved him off with a lighter heart.

Chris was to ring at eight. Eddie positioned himself in the hall. The telephone would ring at the reception desk, then whoever was on duty would look around and say, ‘Eddie Barton, I don’t know … oh yes,
there
he is,’ and she’d motion Eddie to go into the booth. Then he would speak to her. To the girl he loved.

Another good thing about it being a Saturday was that awful Eileen Dunne wouldn’t be working at the desk. She was in the dining room on Saturdays, her dress tight across the bottom and the bosom, and a small white apron making no attempt to cover her at all.

Eddie’s heart was beating so strongly it reminded him of the big clock in Shancarrig school and the thudding sounds it made as the seconds ticked on.

Soon, soon. Ten minutes. Nine.

He jumped a foot in the air when he heard the phone ring. He hadn’t noticed that Eileen Dunne
was
working at Reception tonight. Please may she not make any remark, may she not say something stupid that Chris would hear all the way away in Scotland.

‘Yes, he’s here. Hold on.
Edd … ie
?’

He was at the desk.

‘Yes?’

‘There’s someone on the phone for you. Will you take it here at the desk? God, you’re looking like a dog’s dinner tonight.’

‘I’ll go into the box,’ he said, his face red with fury.

‘Right. Hold on till I get this bloody thing through. There’s more plugs and wires than a hedgehog’s backside. Are you going in to town to the dance?’

He ran in to the dark phone booth, his hands trembling. Damn Eileen Dunne to hell. Please may Chris not have heard.

‘Hello?’ he said tentatively.

It must be the Scottish telephone operator on the line. He could hardly understand her. She was saying something about difficulty in getting through.

‘Can you put me on to Chris, please?’ He knew his voice was shaky but it had been a bit of luck that she hadn’t come straight through. She wouldn’t have heard that stupid stupid Eileen. Any moment she’d talk to him.

‘This
is
Chris,’ he managed to decipher from the strange speech. ‘Do you mean you canna hear me?’

It wasn’t Chris’s voice. It was like someone imitating a Scottish comedian. Every word was canna and wouldna.

‘That’s never you, not you yourself, Chris?’ he said. She must be playing a joke.

‘Och, Eddie, stop putting on that Irish blarney bit. You’re like the fellows they have at Christmas concerts in the church, with their afther doing this and afther doing that.’

There was silence. They realised that neither of them was putting on an act. This is the way they were. The silence was broken by their laughter.

‘Oh God, Eddie … I forgot. I had you talking normally in my mind.’

His heart was full of love. This strange way she spoke didn’t matter a bit. ‘I thought you’d be like a real person too,’ he said.

Then it was back to the way they were in letters. Until the three minutes ran out.

‘I love you, Chris, more than ever.’

‘And I love you too,’ she said.

They lived for Saturdays, and yet as they wrote to each other the phone calls were never as good as they expected. Sometimes they literally didn’t understand what the other was saying and they wasted precious time explaining.

They were desperate to meet. The time was very long.

‘We’d better meet soon before we’re too old to recognise each other,’ she wrote.

‘While we still remember what we wrote to each other.’

They each kept their letters in shoe boxes. It seemed a small thing but a bond … another bond. Yet they hesitated each to ask the other to their town. Eddie couldn’t bear the explanations, the doing up of the spare room, the questioning from his mother, the eyes of Shancarrig.