The Copper Beech (25 page)

‘You’re very welcome to Shancarrig,’ Nora said, the
untruthfulness of the words hidden, she hoped, by the smile she had nailed on her face.

‘My daughter Maria?’ he said.

‘We thought it best that she go to a friend’s house. We will take you to her whenever you like.’ Jim spoke loudly to try and hide the shake in his voice.

‘This house of her friend?’ he asked.

‘It’s ten minutes’ walk, maybe two or three minutes in your car. Don’t worry. She’s there, she knows you’re coming,’ Jim said. He thought he could sense suspicion in Lexi’s voice.

‘We felt it would be more fair on you not to have to tell her in her own home … what she thinks of as her own home.’ Nora looked around the kitchen of the small house where she had spent all her married life.

‘Tell her?’

‘Well, talk to her. Meet her, get to know her. Whatever it is you want to do.’ Jim knew his voice was trailing lamely. These monosyllables from Lexi were hard to cope with. Somehow he had expected something totally different.

‘It is good that she is not here for the moment. May I sit down?’

They rushed to get him a chair, and offer him tea, or whiskey.

‘Do you have poitin?’ he asked.

Nora’s warning bells sounded. She remembered her sister Helen telling of this morose drinking, this silent swallowing of neat alcohol.

‘No. The local teacher has to set a good example, I’m afraid. But I
do
have a bottle of Irish whiskey that I bought in a bar, if that would do.’

He smiled. Lexi, the man who had come to take their daughter, smiled as if he was a friend. ‘I need a drink for what I am to tell you.’

Their hearts were like lead as they poured the three little glasses, lest he think them aloof. They proposed no toast.

‘I am going to marry again,’ Lexi told them. ‘I am to marry a girl, Karina, who is also Polish. Her father owns a butcher’s shop too, and we are going to combine the two. She is much more young than I am, Karina. She is twenty-two years of age.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Nora was holding her breath to know what would come next.

‘I tell you the truth. It would be much more easy for our marriage if Karina and I were to start our own family … to begin like any other couple. To get to know each other, to make our own children …’

Nora felt the breath hissing between her teeth. She gripped her small glass so hard she feared it might shatter in her hands. ‘And you were wondering …?’ she said.

‘And I thought that perhaps, if my daughter Maria is happy here … then perhaps this is where she might like to be … But, you see, it is not fair that I leave her with you … you have your life. You have been so good to her for so long …’

The tears were running down Nora’s face. She didn’t even try to wipe them away.

Lexi continued, ‘I have made many inquiries about the finances because I want you to have the money to do so. But always when I talk of the money you do not reply. I fear there may be no money. I fear to give you money in case you think I am trying to give you a bribe …’

Jim Kelly was on his feet. ‘Oh Lexi, sir, we’d
love
to keep her here. She’ll always be your daughter. Whenever you want her she’ll go on a holiday to you … but it’s our hearts’ desire that she stay with us.’

Nora spoke very calmly. ‘And maybe she would see you
as Uncle Lexi more than Papa Lexi, don’t you think?’ She didn’t know where she found the strength to say the words that Lexi wanted to hear. She didn’t dare to believe that she had got them tight until she saw his face light up.

‘Yes, yes. This would be much better for Karina, that she think of her as a niece, not a daughter. Because, in many ways now, that is what she is.’

Nora saw, out of the corner of her eyes, a shadow move on the beech tree in the school yard. It was Foxy Dunne, hovering. He had seen the car and guessed the driver.

‘Foxy!’ she called. He came swaggering in. This man was an enemy, he wouldn’t be civil to him. ‘Foxy, could you do us a favour? Maria is over at The Glen with Leo Murphy. Would you go over and tell her to come home, and tell her everything’s fine.’

‘It’s a long journey over to The Glen,’ Foxy said unexpectedly.

‘It’s ten minutes, you little pup,’ said Jim Kelly.

‘It’d be easier if you let me drive over for her.’ He looked at the car keys on the table.

‘Hey, how old are you?’ Lexi asked.

‘I’ve driven everything. That’s dead easy.’

‘He’s thirteen and a half,’ said Nora.

‘That’s a grown man,’ said Lexi. ‘But don’t you put a scratch on it. I have to take it back to Shannon airport tonight.’ He threw him the keys.

Tonight. The man was going back to his new life tonight. Without Maria.

The sunlight streamed into the kitchen as they talked, as they sat as friends and spoke of the past and the future, until Maria arrived, white-faced from the journey. Foxy had driven her three times round Shancarrig to get value from the drive, and then spotted Sergeant Keane so had put his foot down to get her back to the schoolhouse.

Nora put her arms around the girl.

‘We’ve had a great chat, my love,’ she said. ‘This is Lexi, maybe even Uncle Lexi. He’ll be going back to America tonight, and he wants to meet you and get to know you a little bit before he goes.’

Maria’s eyes were wide trying to take it in.

‘Before he goes off and leaves you here with us. Which is what we all agreed is where you want to be,’ said Nora Kelly, who had told her daughter Maria that everything would be all right, and had now delivered on her promise.

It was Mrs Ryan who wore the trousers in Ryan’s Commercial Hotel. Everyone knew that. And just as well, because if Conor Ryan had married a mouse the place would have gone to the wall years ago.

Conor Ryan certainly hadn’t married a mouse when he wed Breda O’Connor. A small, thin girl with restless eyes and straight black shiny hair, she was a distant cousin of the Ryans. They met at a family wedding. Conor Ryan told her that he was thinking of going off to England and joining the British army. Anything to get out from under his parents’ feet – they ran this hole-in-the-wall hotel in a real backward town.

‘What do you want going into the army? There might be a war and you’d get killed,’ she said.

Conor Ryan implied that it mightn’t be a huge choice between that and staying put with his parents.

‘They can’t be
that
bad,’ Breda said.

‘They are. The place is like the ark. No, the ark was safe and dry and people wanted to get into it. This is like a morgue.’

‘Why don’t you improve it?’

‘I’m only twenty-three, they’d never let me,’ he said.

Breda O’Connor decided there and then that she would marry him. By the time Britain declared war on Germany they were already engaged.

‘
Now
, aren’t you glad I didn’t let you join the army?’ Breda said.

‘You haven’t lived with my father and mother yet,’ he said, with a look of defeat and resignation that she was determined to take out of him.

‘Nor will I,’ she said with spirit. ‘We’ll build a place of our own.’

Conor Ryan’s father said that he had picked a wastrel, a girl who thought they were made of money, when the outhouse was converted into a small dwelling for the newlyweds.

Conor Ryan’s mother said there would be no interfering from a fancy young one who thought she was the divil and all because she had a domestic science diploma. Conor reported none of these views to the bride-to-be. Breda would find out soon enough what they were like. She had assured him that she had been given fair warning.

As it happened she never really found out how much they had resented her coming to their house, and marrying their only son while he was still a child.

Breda never heard how his parents prophesied that when she had a few children out in that cement hut she was getting built for herself in the yard it would soften her cough.

The Ryan parents fell victim to a bad flu that swept the countryside in the winter of 1939.

Two weeks after the winter wedding of Conor and Breda the same congregation stood in the church for the double funeral of the groom’s parents.

There was a lot of head-shaking. How hard it was for a young girl to step in like that. It would be too much for her. She was only a little bit of a thing. And you’d need to light a bonfire under Conor Ryan to get any kind of action out of him. It was the end of Ryan’s Commercial Hotel for Shancarrig.

Never were people so wrong.

Breda Ryan took control at once. Even on the very day of the funeral. She assured the mourners that they would be very welcome to come back to the hotel bar for drinks rather than going up to Johnny Finn’s pub, as they thought they should do out of some kind of respect.

‘The best respect that you could give my parents-in-law is to come to their hotel,’ Breda Ryan said.

Within a week she made it known that she didn’t like to be referred to as the
young
Mrs Ryan.

‘My husband’s mother has gone to her reward, and the Lord have mercy on her she is no longer here to need her name. I am Mrs Ryan now,’ she said.

And so she was. Mrs Ryan of Shancarrig’s only hotel, a part of the triangle that people called the heart of the town – one side The Terrace where the rich people like the doctor and Mr Hayes the solicitor lived, one side the row of shops – Nellie Dunne’s the grocery, Mr Connors the chemist, the other Dunnes who ran the hardware business, the butcher, the draper – the few small places that got a meagre living from Shancarrig and its outlying farms. The third side of the triangle was Ryan’s Hotel.

Not very prepossessing, dark brown throughout, floors covered in linoleum. The rooms all had heavy oak fireplaces, the pictures on the walls were in dark heavy frames. Most of them were of unlikely romantic scenes with men in frock coats, never seen in Shancarrig or even in the county, offering their arms to ladies in outfits similarly unknown.

There were some religious pictures in the hall … the one of the Sacred Heart had a small red lamp burning in front of it. The sideboards in the hall and dining room were stuffed with glass never used on the table, and Belleek china.

Mrs Ryan had plans to change and improve it all but first she must see that people came to it as it was.

She made sure that the smell of cooking didn’t meet guests at the hall door by putting heavy curtains outside the kitchen doors. She installed a glass-fronted noticeboard near the reception desk and put up details of concerts, hunt balls or other high-class events in neighbouring towns.

She intended to make the hotel the very centre of Shancarrig, the place where people would come to look for information. The bus and train times were there too for all to see, in the hopes that it would encourage travellers to come and have a drink or a coffee as they waited.

Her plans had only just begun when she realised she was pregnant.

Her first child was born in 1940, a little girl, delivered by young Dr Jims because the baby arrived in the middle of the night and Dr Nolan was getting too old to come out at all hours.

‘A lovely daughter,’ he said. ‘Is that what you wanted?’

‘Indeed it’s not. I wanted a strong son to run the hotel for me.’ She was laughing as she held the baby.

‘Well, maybe she’ll run it till she gets a brother.’ Dr Jims had a warm way with him.

‘It’s no life for a woman. We’ll find a better job for Vanessa.’ She held the child close.

‘Vanessa! Now there’s a name.’

‘Oh, think big, Doctor. That’s what I always believed.’

Conor Ryan poured a brandy for the doctor, and the two men sat companionably in the bar at 4.30 a.m. to drink to the new life in Shancarrig.

‘May Vanessa live to see the year two thousand,’ said Dr Jims.

‘Won’t Nessa only be a young one of sixty then! Why
are you wishing her a short life?’ said the new father.

She was Nessa from the start. Even her strong-willed mother was not able to impose her will on the people of Shancarrig on this point. And when her sister was born the baby was Catherine, and the third girl Nuala. There were no strong sons to run the hotel. But by the time they realised there never would be, the women were so well established in Ryan’s that the absence of a boy wasn’t even noticed.

Nessa always thought she had got the worst possible combination of looks from her parents.

She had her mother’s dead-straight hair. No amount of pipe cleaners would put even the hint of a wave or a kink in it. And she inherited her father’s broad shoulders and big feet. Why could she not have got his curly hair and her mother’s tiny proportions? Life was very unfair. Everyone admired people with curly hair.

Like Leo’s hair.

Since Nessa could remember she had been best friends with Leo Murphy. Leo was the girl who lived up at The Glen. She was almost an only child. Lucky thing. Not a real only child like Eddie Barton, the son of the dressmaker, but Leo’s two brothers were very old and didn’t live at home.

Nessa had even known Leo before the day they both started at Shancarrig school. Leo had been invited to come and play with her. Mrs Ryan had said she wanted Vanessa to have a proper friend before she started in there and had to consort with the Dunnes and the Brennans.

‘What’s consorting?’ Nessa asked her mother.

‘Never mind, but you won’t be doing it anyway.’

‘That’s why you’re off to school, to learn things like that,’ said Conor Ryan, folding back the paper at the race
card to see could he pick a likely winner in the afternoon races.

The first day at school Nessa Ryan sat beside Maura Brennan. Together they learned to do pot hooks.

‘Why are they called pot hooks?’ Nessa asked, as the two girls slowly traced the S shapes in their headline copy books.

‘They look a bit like the hooks that hang over the fire. You know … to hold the pots,’ Maura explained.

Nessa told this information proudly to her mother.

‘What! Have they got you sitting next to one of the Brennans from the cottages?’ she said crossly.

‘Don’t be putting notions into her head. Isn’t the poor Brennan child entitled to sit beside someone? Isn’t she a human being?’ Nessa’s father was defending Maura Brennan for something. Her mother was still in a bad temper about it, whatever it was.