The Copper Beech (23 page)

By accident she did have a child, a child of her own.

A child who had a fifth birthday party with a cake and candles. A child who had her first Christmas in Shancarrig and sang carols by the crib in the church.

‘Do you remember the church back in Chicago at Christmas?’ Nora asked, as she wrapped the child up in a warm scarf before taking her back up the road home from the church.

Maria shook her curly head. ‘I can’t think,’ she said, and Nora smiled in the dark. The less Maria thought, the greater seemed the likelihood of her remaining with them.

Mr Hayes, father of Niall, an easy-going boy often put upon by the others, came to see her.

‘My wife says he’s being bullied by the other boys. Your husband will probably say it’ll make a man of him. I wonder would you and I be better able to reach some kind of consensus?’ he asked.

Nora Kelly smiled at him. It was typical of the way he did things, seeing was there a gentle way around things before you went in guns blazing.

‘I think he needs to make a friend of Foxy Dunne,’ she said after some thought.

‘Foxy? That little divil from the cottages?’

‘He’s as smart as paint, that Foxy. He’ll get himself out of that place, and away from the mess he’s growing up in.’

‘How should he make a friend of this fellow, so? Ethel would be afraid he’d lift the silver.’ Bill Hayes looked rueful.

‘He won’t. He’d be a good ally for Niall. Niall’s gentle. He doesn’t need another gentle friend like Eddie, he needs a fighter in his court.’

‘You can solve it all, Mrs Kelly.’

‘I wish I could. I wish I knew how to keep my sister’s child. I wish I believed that possession is nine tenths of the law.’

‘You’re too honourable for that.’

‘I think my sister was going to leave her husband. I have letters from a solicitor … They don’t say much, though.’

‘They never do,’ Bill Hayes admitted ruefully.

She sighed. He was telling her what Father Gunn and Dr Jims were telling her. Do nothing. Live in hope. If the man hadn’t come over in six months it was a good sign.

When a year had passed it was even better.

When the time came for the Holy Year ceremonies at the school and the big dedication ceremony, Maria Kelly was part of their family and part of Shancarrig. She called Jim Daddy and she called Nora Mama No.

‘It sounds like something from Japan, or from
Madam Butterfly
!’ Jim said to Nora. He was always good-natured these days.

‘She can’t call me Mother, she remembers her mother,’ Nora said.

‘She seems to have forgotten her father though.’ Jim spoke in a whisper.

At night Maria’s prayers included a litany of friends at school, and the chickens – now hens – that Mrs Barton had given her. She prayed for all kinds of unlikely people, like little Declan Blake, who was pushed in his pram by that strange, abstracted maid, Carrie. Maria loved Carrie and Declan, and often asked Mama No if they could have a baby like Declan to play with. She prayed for Leo Murphy’s dog, Jessica, which had broken its paw, and she prayed that Foxy Dunne would give her one of his worms
in a jam jar. But the Polish names and her father’s name had gone from the list.

It didn’t take her long to realise she was in a privileged position being the daughter of the school.

‘What would happen if you didn’t know your tables?’ Geraldine Brennan asked with great interest. ‘Would you get your hand slapped like the rest of us?’

‘No, she wouldn’t.’ Catherine Ryan from the hotel knew everything. ‘She can grow up knowing nothing if she likes.’

‘That’s very unfair,’ Geraldine Brennan complained. ‘Just because my mam and dad aren’t teachers I can get belted to bits, but you can do what you like.’

Marie Kelly didn’t like Dad and Mama No being criticised. She worked harder than ever.

‘Go to bed, child. You’ll hurt your eyes,’ Jim Kelly said, as Maria was learning her poem by the light of the oil lamp.

‘I have to know it, I
have
to. It’s much worse on me than any of the others. If I’m not word perfect I
must
be beaten, or else they’ll be giving out about you and Mama No.’

Jim and Nora Kelly spoke in whispers that night. No child of their own could have brought them greater pleasure and happiness. It was as if she had been given to them as a gift from God in 1948, five long years ago.

Mattie, the postman, had delivered good and bad news to every house in Shancarrig. He knew when the emigrants’ remittances arrived, he knew when a letter was unwelcome. He always hesitated slightly before handing Mrs Kelly any letter with a Chicago postmark.

When he was delivering an envelope with American stamps that was bigger and bulkier than usual, and looked
more serious than the short scrappy-looking ones which had come before, Mattie asked if he could come in for a drop of water. Mrs Kelly poured him a cup of tea.

‘I don’t want to be in the way or anything … it’s just in case it was bad news. I know that you’re on your own today. Hasn’t the master taken the children up to the Old Rock?’

It was true. Early in each summer term Jim organised an outing. The whole school would go – all fifty-six children. Father Gunn used to go too, and bring the elderly Monsignor O’Toole when he felt able. The old Monsignor liked to know that the children didn’t think of the Old Rock as some kind of pagan place. That was the trouble with ancient monuments that dated back to before St Patrick … people didn’t relate them to God.

Nora Kelly had decided not to go today, and here, as ill luck would have it, was the news from Chicago. Could they be legal papers? Her hand trembled. She opened it. There were newspaper cuttings, a description of how Maria’s father Lexi, had opened his own shop, his own butcher’s place, a beautiful meat shop. He wanted his daughter to know this, to be proud of him.

Would Nora please show them to Maria? And perhaps she might write. ‘She is a big girl now, it is strange that she does not write.’ Nora Kelly put her head in her hands and wept at her kitchen table.

Mattie, who bitterly regretted not dropping the letter on the table as he would have done ordinarily, reached out and patted her heaving shoulders.

‘It’ll be all right, Mrs Kelly. You were meant to have her,’ he kept saying, over and over.

Nora Kelly pulled herself together, washed her face and combed her hair. She put on her summer hat, a black straw one, and set off down the road to The Terrace, the
row of houses in Shancarrig where Dr Jim Blake and Mr Bill Hayes, the solicitor, lived.

Nellie Dunne, looking out her open door over her counter, saw the school mistress walking briskly, cheeks flushed, face determined. Maybe she was heading for the doctor’s? She might have news for him. They often said when you stopped worrying about having a child of your own that was the very time you conceived.

But Nora Kelly went up the steps to the Hayes household. Her business was legal, not medical.

Mr Hayes seemed to notice a change in her, a determination to have the compensation settled and done with.

‘Has anything happened, Mrs Kelly?’ he asked gently. ‘It’s just that up to now you were the one to put it on the long finger, saying that money couldn’t bring your sister back and that the child lacked for nothing.’ He was polite but questioning.

‘I know,’ Nora Kelly agreed. ‘That’s what I did think. But now I think my only hope is to get the compensation, whatever it is, and give it to him.’

‘Him?’

‘Her father. He’s not interested in anything else, believe me.’

‘But the compensation is for Maria as well as for him.’

‘We’ll give it all to him if he’ll let us keep the child.’

‘Ah Nora, Nora …’ Normally Niall Hayes’ father didn’t call her by her first name. He seemed upset.

‘What are you trying to say to me, Mr Hayes?’

‘I suppose I’m saying that you can’t buy the child.’

‘And I’m saying that that’s exactly what I’m going to do,’ she said, face flushed and eyes bright, much too bright.

Wearily Bill Hayes took out the file and together they went through the letters from CIE – the transport company – the solicitors for the insurance, and copies of
his own to them. There was a sum. It would be agreed eventually. At most it would be
£
2,000, at the least
£
1,200. If they agreed to take something nearer the lower figure it would be sooner rather than later. But perhaps, after all this time, they should hold out for more.

‘Take whatever you can get, Mr Hayes.’

‘Forgive me, but should your husband perhaps …?’

‘Jim is as desperate to keep her as I am. More so, if that’s possible.’

‘There is absolutely no guarantee …’

‘I know, but I have to have
something
to offer him. He’s written to say he owns a shop. He’s as proud as punch of it. Now he’s started wanting her to write to him …’ Her lip was trembling.

‘Perhaps this is the first time he feels able to. You know Americans, they set a lot of store on having their own business …’

‘Please don’t stand up for him. I could have borne it if he had come over and taken her away at once. Not now. Not all those years of ignoring and neglect and now …’

‘She might come for holidays …’

Nora Kelly’s mouth was a thin line. ‘You mean very well, Mr Hayes, but it’s not a help.’

‘Fine, Mrs Kelly. I’ll get it moving, inasmuch as anything ever moves in the law.’ Bill Hayes waved his hand around shelves filled with envelopes and documents tied up in pale pink tape.

‘Will you write a little note to your father?’ Nora asked Maria that night.

‘What for? To thank him for the day up at the Old Rock?’ She looked surprised.

Nora swallowed, and could hardly speak. Maria thought of Jim as her father. The man who was so proud of the
new shop selling best meats in Chicago didn’t even exist for her.

A few days later she brought it up again.

‘We’ve had a letter from your Papa Lexi in Chicago. He wanted you to see the pictures of his new meat shop.’

Maria took the newspaper cutting.

‘Ugh! Look at the dead animals hanging there,’ she said, handing it back.

‘That’s his job. Like Jimmy Morrissey’s father.’ Nora wished she could leave it, but she knew that she dare not. ‘Anyway Maria, it would be good to write him a letter and say the shop looks very nice.’

‘It doesn’t!’ Maria said, giggling her infectious laugh.

Her hair, long now but still curly, was tied with a coloured ribbon. She always had her head in a book – the early years of long bedtime story sessions had paid off. She was tall and suntanned and strong. She was nearly ten years old, a girl that anyone would love to claim as a daughter.

‘But he’d like to hear,’ Nora insisted.

‘It would only be pretending.’ She pulled the newspaper cutting towards her again and looked, as Nora knew she must, at the picture of the tall, handsome man standing beside his shop.

‘Is this him?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

She looked uneasy, her dark blue eyes seeming troubled.

‘What will I say?’

‘Oh. Whatever you think. Whatever comes into your mind to say. I can’t be dictating it for you.’

‘But, nothing comes into my mind to say. I don’t know. I don’t feel safe when I think about … all this.’

Nora Kelly put her arms around Maria. ‘We’ll make you safe, pet. Believe me, we will.’

Maria wriggled away. It was too emotional.

‘Yes. Fine. Okay, I’ll say something. Will I say “you look fine and rich”?’

‘
No
, Maria. Whatever else you say, I beg you not to say that.’

‘Ah Mama No, I don’t know what to say. I think you are going to have to dictate it to me.’

‘I think I am,’ agreed Nora.

They kept the letters respectful and distant, telling little about life in Shancarrig, mentioning nothing of the Kellys who were her real parents, but giving vague sentiments of goodwill to a stranger in Chicago.

Nora noticed with delight how briefly and casually Maria read the stilted letters which came back, each one beginning ‘My dear daughter Maria’.

The man had little to say, and said it badly.

‘He’s not much at spelling, is Papa Lexi,’ Maria said.

‘Now, now!’ Jim corrected her.

‘Is he a secret? Do people know about him?’

‘Of course he’s not a secret, love. Why do you think that?’

‘Because we don’t talk about him. And nobody else has another papa miles away.’

‘We do talk about him, and you write to him. Of course he’s not a secret.’ Nora was very anxious to take any glamour or mystery away.

‘Do you write to him, Mama No?’

‘I do, love. But about business.’

‘The meat business?’ She was genuinely puzzled.

‘No. Legal things, you know, after your mother’s accident …’

‘Why do you have to write about that?’

‘Oh, you know. Red Tape. Formalities. All that’ Nora was vague.

Maria lost interest Instead she wanted to tell Mama No about Miss Ross.

‘I saw her climbing the tree this morning,’ she said, giggling at the thought of the elegant Miss Ross actually getting her leg up on the lower branch and hauling herself up into the higher parts of the tree.

‘Nonsense! You imagined it.’

‘No, I didn’t. I was looking out my window at six o’clock this morning, and she came into the school yard. I swear she did.’

‘What on earth could she have been doing at that hour?’

‘Well, I saw her. She’d been up all night. She was coming back from Barna Woods.’

‘I think you’ve been reading too many stories – you can’t tell what’s true from what’s made up.’

Nora shook her head. The very idea of Miss Ross climbing the beech tree. Really.

‘Miss Ross?’

‘Yes, Maria.’

‘Miss Ross, did you climb the beech tree yesterday morning?’

Miss Ross’s face was red. ‘Did I what, child?’

‘It’s just … it’s just, I told Mama No, and she said “nonsense”.’

‘That’s what it is too, Maria. Nonsense.’

Miss Ross turned and walked away.

Nora heard the conversation. There was something about the way the young teacher spoke that didn’t ring true.

‘I was wrong about Miss Ross,’ Maria said.