The Copper Beech (16 page)

Chris said that if he had found it hard to understand her voice then her family and her neighbours in Glasgow would be incomprehensible.

She obviously yearned for Barna Woods and the hill with the big rock on it, the rock that gave its name to the town. She wanted to see Eddie’s pink house and meet his mother.

He wanted her here and he didn’t want her. He wanted to leave Shancarrig for ever, and yet he couldn’t. One man had left his mother already, Eddie couldn’t go.

Then at last he heard himself inviting her. He didn’t really intend to, it just came out.

It had been a long hard day in Dunne’s when nothing had gone right. Old Mr Dunne was like a devil, Liam had been scornful, Brian had been giving him orders, and to make matters worse their cousin Foxy who had been in Eddie’s class at school had come back for a visit.

Foxy worked on the buildings in England. He was doing well by all accounts. He had started by making billycans of tea for Irishmen working on the lump, building the big roads over in Britain. He came home every year, eyes bright and darting around him as usual.

Normally Eddie was pleased to see Foxy, he had a quick wit and was always ready with a joke.

Today it hadn’t been like that. ‘Don’t let him speak to you like that,’ Foxy said to Eddie when Mr Dunne had called him an ignorant bosthoon.

‘Fine words, Foxy. He’s only an uncle to you, but he pays my week’s wages.’

‘Still and all, you’re letting him walk over you. You’ll be here for the rest of your life with a shop coat on you stuck behind a counter.’

‘And what are you going to be?’ Eddie had flared back.

‘I’ve got the hell out of here. I wouldn’t sit here listening to my uncle mumbling and bumbling, and my Aunt Nellie
letting people run up bad debts because they’re Quality. I’m in England and I’ll make a pile of money. And then I’ll come back and marry Leo Murphy.’

It was the longest speech that Foxy had ever made. Eddie had been surprised.

‘And will Leo marry
you
?’

‘Not now, she won’t. Not the way I am. No one would marry either of us, Eddie. We’re eejits. We have only one good suit each with an arse in the trousers of it. We have to
do
something with our lives instead of standing round here like fools. What class of a woman would want the likes of us?’

‘I don’t know. We might have a charm of our own.’ Eddie was being light-hearted but he felt that Foxy was right.

Foxy turned away impatiently. ‘I can see you in twenty years still saying that, Eddie. This place makes us all slow and stupid. It’s like a muddy river dragging us down.’

Eddie had been thinking about it all day. He didn’t dress up for the phone call that night. It was his turn to call the Glasgow phone box.

‘Come over to Ireland. Come to Shancarrig,’ he said when Chris answered the phone.

‘When? When will I come?’

‘As soon as you can. I’m sick of being without you,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing at all else in my life except you.’

Their letters changed tone. It was confident now. It was ‘when’ not ‘if’. It was definite. The love was there, the need, the surprise that one other person could feel exactly the same about everything as another.

There were the details.

Chris would take her two weeks’ holidays from the flower shop. Eddie could take his two weeks off from
Dunne’s. She would get the boat from Stranraer to Larne, and the train to Belfast maybe?

‘Will I come to meet you there? I’ve never been to the North of Ireland. It’ll be familiar to you, red buses, red pillar boxes. Like England.’

‘Like Scotland,’ she corrected him. She had never been to England in her life.

Or would she take a train to Wales, and get the boat from Holyhead? Maybe that would be a nicer way to go. She could see Dun Laoghaire and a bit of Dublin before taking the train to Shancarrig.

‘I don’t want you wandering around on your own, meeting Dublin fellows. I’ll come and meet you off the boat,’ he suggested.

Chris said no, she wanted to arrive in Shancarrig on the train herself. She knew about the station, and the flowers that now spelt out the word Shancarrig. He had written that long ago to her.

Eddie could be on the platform.

He prayed that it would be a fine fortnight, that the sun would shine into Barna Woods between the branches, that there would be a sparkle on the River Grane. He knew you shouldn’t pray for something bad to happen to another human but he hoped that somehow Eileen Dunne would be in hospital when Chris arrived, and that Nessa Ryan wouldn’t be superior towards him, and that he’d be free of Brian and Liam Dunne and their bad-tempered father because he was on holidays.

He hoped most of all that his mother would be nice to Chris. They had never had anyone to stay, and Eddie had distempered the walls, and painted the woodwork in the small stuffy room they had called a box room up to now. His mother had been curiously quiet.

‘What kind of a girl is she?’ was all she had asked.

‘A girl I write to, I write to her a lot. I like her through the post and on the telephone. I’ve asked her to come over here so that … well, so that I wouldn’t be the one going off on you.’

His mother looked away so that he wouldn’t see the look of gratitude in her face. But he saw all the same.

‘I’ll make curtains for the room,’ she said.

Please let them like each other.

They had got ham for tea, cooked ham and tomatoes, and a Fullers chocolate cake with four chocolate buttons on the top.

His mother had cleared the sewing away so that the place would look like a normal house. There were blue curtains on the window of the box room, and a matching bedspread. On the makeshift dressing table there was a little blue cloth and Eddie had gathered a bunch of flowers.

It was nearly time. The train would be in at three. Only four hours. Three. Two. It was time.

Liam Dunne was on the platform; there was a delivery coming down with the guard on the train.

‘What are you doing?’ Liam asked. ‘Aren’t you meant to be on your holidays? If you’re doing nothing you could give me a hand …?’

‘I most definitely
am
on my holidays and I’m meeting a friend,’ Eddie said firmly.

The train whistled and came around the corner. She got off. She carried a big suitcase, square with little firm bits over the corners like leather triangles to preserve it.

She had a red jacket and a navy skirt, a navy shoulder bag and a huge bright smile.

He had been afraid for a moment that she might think Liam Dunne was him. Liam was taller and good-looking
in a rangy sort of way. Eddie felt like a barrel. He wished his spine would shoot up and make him willowy.

He started to walk towards her and saw her foot. Chris Taylor had a big built-up shoe. He willed his eyes away from it, and on to her smiling eager face.

Liam was busy with the guard, hauling things from the luggage van, and nobody was watching them.

Eddie had never kissed anyone in his life apart from fumbles at dances. He put his arms around Chris.

‘Welcome to Shancarrig,’ he said first, then he kissed her very gently. She clung to him.

‘I didn’t tell you about my foot,’ she said, her face working anxiously.

‘What about your foot?’ He forced himself not to look at it again to see how bad it was. Could she walk? Did it drag? His head was whirling.

‘I didn’t want you to pity me,’ she said.

‘Me? Pity
you
? You must be mad,’ he said.

‘I can walk and everything, and I can keep up. I’ll be able to see every bit of Barna Woods with you after tea.’

She looked very young and frightened. She must have been worried about this for ages, like he worried about the place not being as nice as he described.

‘I don’t know what you’re going on about,’ he tried to reassure her, but he knew it wasn’t working.

‘My leg, Eddie. I’ve got one shorter than the other, you see. I wear a special shoe.’

He could read how hard it was for her to say this. How often she must have rehearsed it. He urged himself to find the right words.

He looked down at her foot in its black shoe with the big thick raised sole and heel.

‘Does it hurt?’ he asked.

‘No, of course not, but it’s the way it looks.’

He took both her hands in his. ‘Chris, are you mad?’ he asked her. ‘Are you off your head? It’s me. It’s Eddie, your best friend. Your love. Do you think for a moment that it’s part of the bargain that our legs had to be the same length?’

It was, as it happened, exactly the right thing to say. Chris Taylor burst into tears and hugged Eddie to her as if she was never going to leave him go. ‘I love you, Eddie.’

‘I love you too. Come on, let’s go home.’ He carried her case and they walked to the gate of the station.

Chris was still wiping her eyes. Liam Dunne stood watching them.

‘Don’t mind him.’ He nodded in Eddie’s direction. ‘That fellow’s as thick as the wall. He’s always upsetting people and making them cry. There’s plenty of real men in Shancarrig.’

She gave him a bright smile.

‘I bet there are. I’ve come all the way from Scotland to investigate them.’ She tucked her arm into Eddie’s and they went out the gate.

Eddie felt ten feet tall.

‘Who was that?’ she whispered.

‘Liam Dunne. Desperate …’

‘Don’t tell me. I know all about him. The younger son, the one that’ll take over if Brian goes to England and the old man dies.’

‘You know it all,’ he said in wonder.

‘I feel like I’m coming home.’

As they walked up the road and he pointed out Ryan’s Hotel where he had sat waiting for the phone calls, and the church where Father Gunn waved to him cheerfully, the pubs and Nellie Dunne’s grocery, he knew that in many ways she had come home. He knew that he had
been right, she was the centre of his life. It would be fine when he brought her home to his mother.

Afterwards nobody could ever tell you exactly how and why Chris Taylor came to live in Shancarrig. One day she had never been heard of and then the next there she was, as if she had been part of the place all her life.

If people asked Mrs Barton about her they were told that she was a marvellous girl altogether and a dab hand at the sewing. There was nothing she couldn’t turn her hand to. Look at the way she had made them go into furnishings, for example. Chris Taylor had loved the curtains and bedspread in her little room the day she arrived. Her praise was unstinting. Mrs Barton was a genius.

Eddie never thought of his mother’s dressmaking as anything except a way to make a living; he knew she didn’t particularly like some of the women whose dresses she made. He hadn’t realised that the work was artistic in itself.

Chris opened his eyes for him. ‘Look at the way the ribbon falls, look at the colours she’s put together … Eddie, it’s easy to see where you got your artistic sense from …’

His mother reddened with pleasure. There were no derisory remarks about his father. In fact, Chris was able to introduce the first reasonable conversation about the long-departed Ted Barton that had ever been held in this house.

‘I suppose he was a restless kind of a man. Better for him to be gone in a lot of ways.’

And to his surprise Eddie heard his mother agreeing. Things had really begun to change around here.

Chris was part of Shancarrig.

They knew her coming in and out of Dunnes to see Eddie or to give him a message, they knew her in the hotel where she became friendly with Nessa Ryan. No one ever spoke dismissively to Chris Taylor as people had been known to do to Eddie Barton. She talked furnishings and fabrics to Nessa’s mother. There was going to be a grant for the hotel to make it smarter, the kind of a place where tourist visitors might stay as well as commercial travellers.

They couldn’t stay in Ryan’s the way it was. Chris seemed to know the way it should be – pelmets, nice wooden pelmets covered in fabric, she had seen it all in an American magazine, you stuck the fabric to the plywood, and then the curtains draped properly down below. And, of course, bed covers to match.

Nessa Ryan and her mother were very excited.

‘How would we get it started? Would we need to call someone in from Dublin? Who’d do it?’

‘We would,’ Chris said simply.

‘We?’

‘Mrs Barton and I. Let us do one room as a sample and see.’

‘Wooden pelmets …? You couldn’t do that …?’

‘Eddie could, he could get the plywood. Liam Dunne could help him …’

The room was a huge success. The whole hotel would be done the same way. They had chosen a fabric which would tone in with Eddie’s pressed flowers, with his large bold designs, flowers from Barna Woods, a place in the locality, especially commissioned from a local artist.

‘You can’t call me a local artist,’ Eddie had protested.

‘You are local. You live here, don’t you?’ she said simply.

The plans were afoot. Chris and Eddie’s mother would
be able to do it between them, but they needed someone to organise it, someone who would go and choose the right fabrics, someone with an eye for colour, someone whose pictures were already on the wall.

Flushed and happy Chris told Eddie the plan.

‘You can leave Dunne’s. We’ll have a business, all of us …’

‘I can’t leave … if we get married I have to support you.’

‘What’s this
if
? Are you changing your mind? I’ve come over here and lived with you, set myself up shamelessly in your house and you say “if”?’

‘I want to ask you something properly.’

‘Not here, Eddie. Let’s go up to the woods.’

Eddie’s mother stood by the window and watched the two of them walk together, the limping figure of this strange strong Scottish girl, the stocky figure of her own son, who had grown taller since Chris had arrived.

She knew nothing about the kind of family over in Scotland who let their daughter wander away to another land without seeming to care.

She cared little now about the past. Once she had lived in it and felt burdened by it, now she thought only about the future, the proposal that was going to be made in Barna Woods and accepted, the new life that was ahead of all of them.