The Copper Beech (21 page)

‘Invite Ruth to The Terrace some time, won’t you?’ Jims asked his son.

He could see that Declan was very attracted to the dark-eyed girl in his new family.

‘I don’t think so …’

‘I’m not asking you to live there, I’m just asking you to bring the girl to Sunday lunch, for God’s sake.’ Again, the harsh ungracious words that he didn’t mean to speak. His son looked taken aback.

‘Yes, well. Of course … some time.’

Jims Blake contemplated getting an assistant. He realised now how the lonely old Charles Nolan must have relished him coming to stay in that house all those years ago. How he had felt able to will him the place, as well as the practice. Jims had thought the same thing would have happened with Declan. He had foreseen evenings like he had had with Charles, discussing articles in the
Lancet
and
the
Irish Medical Times
, wondering about a new cure-all cream with apparently magical qualities that had come from one of the drug firms.

There was a phone call every week from Sheila in her Dublin hospital, and a letter every week from Eileen, now working in an architect’s practice in England.

He had almost forgotten what Frances had looked like, or felt like in his arms. He should not have felt like an old man, after all he was only in his late fifties, yet he had the distinct feeling that his life, such as it was, was over.

Declan did bring Ruth to lunch eventually. And the girl chattered easily and eagerly, as she did in her own home. She asked questions, seemed interested in the answers. She asked Maisie about doing the flowers for the altar. Maisie said she was a girl of great breeding, and that Declan was very lucky to have met her and not some foolish fast girl, like he might well have met in the town.

On her third visit she took the initiative and leaned over to kiss him goodbye.

‘Thank you, Dr Jims,’ she said. She smelled of Knight’s Castile soap, fresh and lovely. He was not surprised his son was so taken by her.

He was horrified when he saw Declan some weeks later. The boy arrived on a Thursday afternoon, Maisie’s half day. He was ashen white, but the circles under his eyes were deep purple shadows.

He paced the house until the last patient left. ‘Will there be any more?’

‘I have to go out the country. One of Carrie’s brothers. Do you remember Carrie?’

‘Of course I do. Can I come with you?’

Somehow Jims Blake found the right silences and didn’t
choose the wrong words. He didn’t ask what had the boy out on a working day, and looking so terrible. Instead he smiled and opened the hall door for him. They walked together to the car, father and son, down the steps of Number Three The Terrace, as he had always wanted to walk with a son.

They talked of nothing during the drive out to the farm where one of Carrie’s brothers had impaled himself on yet another piece of rusting machinery. Declan watched wordlessly as his father cleaned the wound and stitched it.

The talk came on the way back.

They stopped under the shadow of the Old Rock, the big craggy monument from which Shancarrig took its name. They walked a little in the crisp afternoon with the shadows of the trees lengthening.

Jims Blake heard the story. The terrible tale of a boy invited into a good man’s house. How Gerry O’Neill would lie down dead when he knew Ruth was pregnant. How her brother Vinnie, studying to be a priest, would never forgive such a betrayal.

The boy had not slept or eaten for a week, and presumably neither had the girl. It was the end of the road. Declan wanted them to run away, but Ruth wouldn’t go, and in his saner moments he realised that she was right.

‘You realise how bad things are, if I had to tell you,’ he said to his father.

Jims Blake bit back the retort. At another time he might have made the remark that would drive the boy back into the shell from which he had painfully dragged himself. He didn’t ask what Declan wanted of him. He knew that Declan himself barely knew. So instead he did what he had been intending to do all his life, he put his arm around his son’s shoulder.

He pretended not to notice the flinching in surprise. ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he said. His voice was calm, almost cheerful. He could feel his son’s shoulders relaxing under his arm. ‘I have this friend up in Dublin, we did our training together. He’s in gynaecology and obstetrics. A specialist now. Quite a well-known man … I’ll recommend that young Ruth go to see him for a D and C … Oh, don’t worry, these names are always very alarming. It’s called a dilatation and curettage, just an examination under anaesthetic of the neck of the womb. Clears up any disorders. A lot of girls have them …’

Declan turned to look at him.

‘Is that …? I mean is that the same as …?’

Jims Blake had decided how to play it. ‘As I was saying to you, there’s no knowing what names all these things go by, the main thing is that Ruth will go in there and be out in a day or two and it can all go through this house and this address without having to bother anyone else.’

They walked back to the car and drove to Shancarrig. The mood was not broken.

His son came in to Number Three The Terrace and sat with him as they lit a fire, because the evening was getting chilly. Declan had a small brandy and some of the colour had returned to his face.

Jims Blake remembered how old Dr Nolan had often said to him that the ways of the world were stranger than anyone would ever believe. Dr Jims Blake agreed with him as he sat there and realised that the only companionable evening he had ever had with his son was the evening he had arranged to abort his own grandchild.

Nora and Jim Kelly had no pictures of their wedding. The cousin with the camera had been unreliable. There was something wrong with the film, he told them afterwards.

It didn’t matter, they told him.

But to Nora it did. There was nothing to mark the day their marriage began. It hadn’t been a very fancy wedding. During the Emergency of course people didn’t go in for big flashy do’s, not even people with more class and style than Nora and Jim. But theirs had been particularly quiet.

It took place in Lent, because they wanted to have a honeymoon in the Easter Holidays, the two young teachers starting out life together. Nora’s mother had been tight-lipped. A Lenten wedding often meant one thing and one thing only, that the privileges of matrimony had been anticipated and that an unexpected pregnancy had resulted.

But this was not the case, Nora and Jim had anticipated nothing. And the pregnancy that her mother feared might disgrace the whole family did not result, even after many years of marriage.

Month after month Nora Kelly reported to her husband that there was no reason to hope for a conception this time either. They shrugged and said it would happen sooner or later. That was for the first three years. Then they consoled each other in a brittle way. Why should two school teachers who had the entire child population of
Shancarrig to cope with want to bring any more children into the world?

Then they decided to ask for help.

It was not easy for Nora Kelly to approach Dr Jims. He was a courteous man and kind to everyone. She knew that he would not be coy, or too inquisitive. He would reach for his pad and write, as he nodded thoughtfully.

Nora Kelly was pale at the best of times and this was not the best of times. She was a slight young woman with flyaway fair hair. She did it in a braid, which she rolled loosely at the back of her neck.

Nobody in Shancarrig had seen her with hair loose and flowing. They thought her expression a little stern, but that was appropriate for the school mistress. Her big husband looked more like a local farmer than the master – it was good to have some authority written on the face of the family.

Someone who had known Nora before she married said she was one of three young girls always dashing about and riding precarious bicycles, in a town some sixty miles away. They were three young harum-scarums, it was said. But it didn’t sound likely.

She had no relations there now, she had no identity or past. She was just the school mistress – a sensible woman, not given to fancy dressing or notions. Not too fancy a cook either, to judge by what she bought in the butcher’s, but a perfectly qualified woman to be teaching their children. It was of course a terrible cross to bear that the Lord hadn’t given her children, but who ever knew the full story in these cases?

As she had expected, Dr Jims was kindness itself. The examination was swift and impersonal, the advice gentle and practical – some very simple, maybe even folk, remedies.
Dr Jims said that he never despised wisdom handed down through the generations. He had got a cure from the tinkers once, he told her. They knew a lot of things that modern medicine hadn’t discovered yet. But they were a people who kept their ways to themselves.

The old wives’ advice hadn’t worked. There were tests in the hospital in the big town. Jim had to give samples of his sperm. It was wearying, embarrassing, and ultimately depressing. The Kellys were told that, as far as medical science could determine in 1946, there was no reason why they should not conceive. They must live in hope.

Nora Kelly knew that Dr Jims found it hard to deliver this news to her, in an autumn where his own wife was pregnant again. Their little girls were already up at the school, this was another family starting. She saw his sympathy and appreciated it all the more because he didn’t speak it aloud. It wasn’t easy to be a childless woman in a small town; she had been aware of the sideways glances for a long time. Nora knew that the ways of God were strange and past understanding by ordinary people, but it did seem hard to understand why he kept giving more and more children to the Brennans and the Dunnes in the cottages, families who couldn’t feed or care for the children they already had, and passing her by.

Sometimes when she saw the little round faces coming in to start a new life at school the pain she felt in her heart was as real as if it had been a physical one. She watched their little wobbly legs and the way the poorest of them came in shoes that were too big and clothes that were too long. If she and Jim had a child of their own they would look after it so well. It seemed every other woman in the village only had to think about conception to become pregnant – women who claimed to have enough already, women who sighed and said, ‘Here we go again.’

When the doctor’s baby son was born, in the coldest winter that Shancarrig ever knew, the year that the River Grane had frozen solid for three long months, his wife died at the birth.

Nora Kelly held the infant child in her arms and wished that she could take the little boy home. She and Jim would rear him so well. They would take out the baby clothes, bought and made many years ago, now smelling of mothballs. He would grow up in their school. He would not be over-favoured in front of the others just because he was the teachers’ son.

For a wild moment that day in the doctor’s nursery, when she had come to sympathise at the funeral, she thought that the doctor was going to give her the baby. But of course it was fantasy.

Nora had heard that couples who didn’t have children often grew very close to each other. It was as if the disappointment had united them and the shared lifestyle, without the distractions of a family, made it easier for them to establish an intimacy.

She wished it had happened in her case, but in honesty she couldn’t say that it had.

Jim grew more aloof. His walks of an evening became longer and longer. She found herself sitting alone by the fire, or even returning to the schoolroom to draw maps for the next day.

By the time she was twenty-eight years old her husband reached towards her to make love very rarely.

‘Sure what’s the point?’ he said to her one night as she snuggled up to him. And after that she kept very much to her own side of the bed.

They had agreed not to say it was anyone’s fault, but
Nora looked to her side of the family. Her own two sisters had given birth to small families; one had only two, the other had an only child, while the sisters and sisters-in-law of Jim Kelly seemed to breed like rabbits.

Her sister Kay, who lived in Dublin, had two little boys. Sometimes they came to stay. Nora would feel her heart lurch when she saw how eagerly Jim reached for them and how happily he took them on walks. It was different entirely to the way he taught the children in the school. In the classroom he was patient and fair, but he was formal; there was no happy wildness like with her nephews. He used to take the small boys by the hand, and let them wade through the shallows of the River Grane and bring them to pick mushrooms up near the Old Rock, or to prowl through Barna Woods looking for bears and tigers.

Nora’s sister never failed to say: ‘He’s a born father, isn’t he?’ Nora’s teeth never failed to be set on edge.

She had more contact with her twin sister Helen, even though Helen lived on the other side of the world in Chicago.

She had sent grainy photographs of the baby, little Maria. Helen had gone to Chicago when Nora went to the training college. She didn’t have the brains, she said, and she wanted no more studying. She wanted to see the world and make sure she didn’t end up in some one-horse town like the one they’d come from.

In fact, Shancarrig was a much smaller one-horse town than their native place. Nora was sure that Helen must pity her. What had she got with all her brains? Marriage, to the increasingly silent Jim, school mistress in a tiny backwater, and no children.

Helen’s life had been much more exciting. She had worked as a waitress in Stouffers. It was a coffee house – one of the many coffee houses of that name – and they
had restaurants as well. She met Lexi when he was delivering the meat from the yards.

Big, blond, handsome Lexi, Polish Catholic, silent, whose dark blue eyes followed her everywhere she went. Helen had written about how he asked her out, how she had been taken to meet his family. They spoke Polish in the home, but in broken English told Helen she was welcome.

When they married in one of the big Polish churches in Chicago no one of Helen’s family was there to give her courage. Who could afford a journey halfway across the world in 1942, when that world was at war?