The Copper Beech (18 page)

‘Declan will do,’ said Jims Blake.

Maisie, her face red from crying, her voice almost
inaudible from a heavy chest cold, made the vows together with Bill Hayes, the local solicitor – they would look after the spiritual welfare of this child.

Bill Hayes, the local solicitor in Shancarrig, had children the same age as Jims Blake’s, including a newly born baby girl, safely delivered from a living wife not four weeks previously.

Never short of the right word in terms of the law, Bill Hayes found himself totally unable to give any meaningful sympathy at a time like this.

‘If you were a drinking man I’d get you drunk, Jims,’ he said.

‘But you’re not a drinking man either, Bill.’

‘Still, I could become one if it would help you.’

The doctor shook his head.

He had seen too many people opting for this solution.

‘Would I sit with you downstairs by the fire?’

Poor Bill Hayes was truly at a loss for the comforting small talk that came to him so easily in his office when consoling those who had been cut out of wills or who had lost a court case. Nothing seemed appropriate to say.

‘No. Go home, Bill. I beg you. I’ll sit by myself. There’s a doctor coming in from the town. He’ll be staying in the spare room tonight … in case I get a call-out. He’ll do it for me tonight. I wouldn’t be much good to anyone.’

‘Did Frances know she had a son?’ Bill Hayes asked. He knew his wife would want to know – it wasn’t the kind of question he would normally ask.

‘No. She knew nothing at all.’

‘Well, well. He’ll grow up a credit to you both. I know that.’

Jims tried to remember that he had a son, a boy who would grow in this house, as the girls had grown. A baby
who would be fed with a bottle, and who would cry in the night. A baby who would smile and flail with little fists. A baby boy who would sit in a dressing gown and want to hear stories read aloud to him.

Suddenly it was all too much for him. He could see other pictures crowding in. A little boy with a school satchel, struggling along the road to Shancarrig school. A boy with a hurley going to a match. He almost felt dizzy with the responsibility of it all.

A wave of loneliness swept over him. There would be no Frances ever again. No Frances so proud of the girls in their little powder-blue coats, going up the church with them at mass. No Frances to talk to in the evening. She was lying ice-cold already. Tomorrow she would be taken to the church and then the whole of Shancarrig would process to the churchyard.

His father and mother would come, his sisters and his brother, rosary beads dangling from their hands, nudging each other, whispering. No help or support to anyone.

The Fitzgeralds would come, the women in hats looking down at the Blake women in headscarves. There would be stiff and stilted conversation in the house.

Not one of them knew how terrible it was that his wife had died, and that he felt responsible. If it hadn’t been for that time … the time they must have conceived the child … Frances would be alive and well tonight.

He said goodbye to Bill Hayes, who left with some relief. And then Jims Blake sat down at his fire and tried to count his blessings, like he always urged his patients to do.

He listed a good marriage with Frances as a blessing. Nearly seven years of it. Great passion, great friendship, a happy time full of hope.

He listed his little girls, he listed the big house in The Terrace, left to him by his good, kind partner. And a big steady doctor’s practice. He counted in having escaped from his own family as a blessing, and he added his own good health. He did not include his son, the baby not yet one day old.

Everyone said that it was the worst funeral they were ever at – the rain lashing against the church, the traces of old snow slippery on the ground, a freezing east wind as they walked to the cemetery.

Jims Blake insisted that the girls be taken home after the mass. In fact, as he stood shaking hands with the congregation of sympathisers, many of them with heavy colds and flu, he begged them not to come to the grave.

‘Things are bad enough already, don’t get pneumonia,’ he urged them.

But in Shancarrig people felt it was only right and respectful to accompany a funeral to the final resting place. They stood, a wretched group, as the wind caught the coats of the grave diggers and blew the few flowers away from the top of the coffin, hurtling them in a macabre sort of dance around the gravestones.

Back in The Terrace they asked in hushed tones how he would manage. What was he going to do? The loss of Frances wasn’t just that of a wife, it was the loss of the person who managed the home. Three little children. Every time they said three he got a shock.

He thought of Eileen and Sheila with their little faces. He had forgotten about the baby.

This wasn’t at all healthy, he told himself. And as his relations and friends drank sherry and ate plates of
sandwiches in the rooms downstairs he went up wearily to look at his son.

The child was sleeping as he went into the room.

Tiny and red as all children, he seemed swamped and smothered by the bedding, his tiny perfect little fists with their minuscule nails on the pillow. Was it his imagination or did the baby look more helpless and alone than any other child? As if he knew he was motherless from the moment he had come on earth.

‘I’ll do my best for you, Declan,’ he promised aloud. It was curiously formal and he felt himself remote as he said it. It was like a contract or a bargain between strangers, not a father to his infant son.

He hadn’t heard anyone come into the room they called the nursery, but turned to find Nora Kelly, the young schoolmistress married to the master.

‘Can I pick him up?’ she whispered softly, as if she were in a sickroom.

‘Of course, Nora.’

He saw the woman who had been aching to have her own child lift the tiny baby and hold him to her breast.

She said nothing, just walked around the room.

Her stance was that of a woman who had always nursed a child. Her hold on the baby was sure, her love obvious. No one except Jims Blake would know the amount of examination she had undergone to try and discover why she could not conceive.

He watched, almost mesmerised, as she walked to and fro crooning a very soft sound to the baby boy.

He didn’t know how long they were there – the strange tableau of the doctor, the teacher and child. But he felt this slow urge coming over him to give away his baby son. He wanted more than anything in the world
to say to Nora Kelly: ‘Take him home, you have none, you never will have any. I don’t want this child that killed Frances … Bring him back home and rear him as your own.’

In a more civilised society that’s what people would have done. Why would it be the scandal of Shancarrig, the talk of the county and, moreover, a crime against the law of the land, for someone to walk out of this room with the child they so desperately wanted, taking him from a home where he wasn’t needed?

Then he pulled himself together.

‘I’ll go on down, Nora. Stay here a bit if you want to.’

‘No, I’d better come down too, Doctor,’ she said.

He knew that the same solution had crossed her mind, and she was banishing it, as he had.

It was on occasions like this that Mrs Kennedy, the mournful bleak-looking housekeeper to Father Gunn, came into her own. She slid almost invisibly into the house of the bereaved, suggesting, helping and organising. She would arrive with a supply of gleaming white table cloths to hand them, then in a trice sum up what the house would need in order to give hospitality to those who would come to sympathise. A quick word with the hotel across the road from The Terrace about extra cups, glasses and plates while Maisie listened to it all wringing her hands. Mrs Kennedy had the authority of the clergy because she had worked with them for so long.

She never interfered, she just guided.

Maisie wouldn’t have known about the need for good hot soup to serve with the sandwiches, nor that a room should be cleared for people’s coats and umbrellas. Mrs Kennedy managed to imply that she was the voice of order and sanity in sad circumstances like these. And in houses rich and poor all over Shancarrig people had gone
along with her, feeling a sense of overpowering relief that someone was taking charge.

Jims Blake greeted people, accepted their condolences, poured them more drinks, inquired about their health, but he did so with only part of his brain. He was working out what arrangements he was going to make. He did so by elimination. He would not have either of his unmarried sisters to live in the house, and he must make that clear before any offer was made. He would not have anyone from the Fitzgerald side of the family either, though they were less likely to present themselves.

Maisie couldn’t manage a baby. It would be too expensive to have a live-in nurse. What was he to do?

As he had done so often, he asked himself what old Charles Nolan would have done. Again the voice came to him, booming as it would have been. ‘Isn’t the countryside crawling with young girls dying to get out from under their parents? Any one of them will have brought up a rake of brothers and sisters. They’ll be well able to look after one small baby.’

He felt better then, and was even able to smile at Foxy Dunne, one of the boldest of the entire Dunne clan from the cottages – a red-haired boy in raggy trousers who had come to the door to sympathise.

‘I’m sorry for your trouble,’ Foxy had said, standing confidently in the cold outside Number Three The Terrace.

‘Thank you, Foxy. It was good of you to call.’

The boy was looking past him to the table where there was food and orange squash.

‘Well then …’ Foxy said.

‘Would you like to come in and … sympathise inside?’

‘That’s very good of you, Sir,’ said Foxy, and was past him and at the table in two seconds.

Maisie looked disapproving and was on the point of ejecting him. Mrs Kennedy frowned heavily.

Dr Jims shook his head.

‘Mr Dunne has come to sympathise, Maisie. Mrs Kennedy, can you please give him a slice of cake?’

The nurse was booked to stay for a month and Jims Blake began his search for the girl who would bring up his son. It didn’t take long.

He found Carrie, a big-boned, dark-haired girl of twenty-four, living on the side of a hill, deeply discontented with a life that involved cooking for six unappreciative brothers. He had been to the house on several occasions, usually to deal with injuries from threshing machines or otherwise around the farm. He had never treated the girl, but when he was called to their place to stitch the father’s head after yet another violent altercation with some farm machinery, it occurred to Jims Blake that Carrie might be glad of the offer of a place, and a better situation.

They walked to the farmyard gate and he told her what he had in mind.

‘Why me, Doctor? I’d be a bit ignorant for the kind of house you run.’

‘You’d be kind. You could manage a child. You managed all this lot.’ He jerked his head back at the house where she had looked after brothers, older and younger than herself, since her own mother died.

‘I’m not very smart,’ she said.

‘You’re fine. But here’s a few pounds anyway, in case you want to buy yourself some clothes to travel in.’

It was a nice way to put it. He knew the travelling which meant taking a few belongings on the next lift she could get to the town wasn’t important, but it covered the fact that she hadn’t an outfit to wear.

Maisie sniffed a bit at the news of the new arrival, but not too much. After all, the poor young doctor was still in mourning, and mustn’t be upset. And it had been very clear from the outset that Carrie would help Maisie in the house. There would be no question of meals on a tray for a fancy nurse.

Declan Blake was only ten days old when Carrie took him in her arms.

‘He’s a bit like my own,’ she said quietly to Dr Blake.

‘You had one of your own?’ The world was full of surprises. She had never consulted him about the pregnancy.

‘Up in Dublin. He’s given away, it was for the best. He’s three now, somewhere.’

‘As you say, it would have been hard to have reared him.’ His voice held its usual gentle sympathetic tone, but it came from the heart. This gawky girl wouldn’t think it was at all for the best that her three-year-old had been given away.

‘I’ll do a good job minding this little fellow, Dr Jims,’ she said.

It reminded him of his own vow to the child. Everyone was promising this tiny baby some kind of care, as if the baby feared he wouldn’t get any.

The summer eventually came that year, and Dr Jims took his little daughters by the hand up to Shancarrig school.

He walked around the three classrooms with them, and showed them the globe and the map of the world. He pointed out the ink wells in the desks and told them that soon they’d be dipping their own pens in there and doing their exercises. Solemnly they all studied the charts showing the Irish lettering for the alphabet.

‘You’ll be able to speak Irish when you leave here,’ he promised them.

‘Who would we speak it to?’ Eileen asked.

Mrs Kelly was standing at the door and gave one of her rare smiles.

‘It’s a good question,’ she said ruefully.

Dr Jims had sent her to Dublin again for further tests, none of the results being remotely helpful. There was no reason that specialists could find why the Kellys were not conceiving a child. He remembered his strange urge to bundle the baby into her arms on that unreal day back at The Terrace. He knew how near he had been to saying something so unsettling that it could never have been unsaid.

Again, this time she seemed to be thinking along the same lines.

‘How is Declan?’ she asked the children. ‘It won’t be long now until you’ll be bringing him along to school with you.’

‘Oh, he’d be useless. He never says anything at all,’ Eileen said.

‘And he’d wet the floor,’ Sheila added, in case there was any question of enrolling the baby.

‘Not now. The child’s only ten weeks old on Friday. You were the same at that age.’ Mrs Kelly spoke in her stern teacher’s voice. Eileen and Sheila drew back in awe.