The Copper Beech (28 page)

‘What about in five years?’ Nessa said.

‘Don’t mind her,’ Leo interrupted. ‘She looks so great now they’ll have her up every week.’

‘Do I really?’ Nessa asked.

‘Do you really what?’

‘Look great? Were you just saying it to be polite to her?’

‘But you’re terrific-looking. You
must
know that. You’re like Jean Simmons or someone.’ Leo said this as if it was as obvious as that it was day rather than night.

‘How would I know? No one ever told me.’

‘I’m telling you.’

‘You’re just my friend. You could be telling me just to keep me quiet,’ Nessa complained.

‘Ah God, Nessa. You can be very tiresome sometimes,’ Leo said.

It was the same word as her mother had used. She had better watch it.

It was an up and down relationship with her mother all the years that Nessa Ryan went to school every day in the big town.

It was no use talking to Leo because Leo didn’t seem to consider her own mother as any part of her life. If Nessa couldn’t go to the pictures it was because her mother wanted her to clean the silver. If Leo couldn’t go to the pictures it was only because Lance and Jessica – the dogs – needed to go for a run, or because her father wanted help with something.

Mrs Murphy was never mentioned.

Nessa heard that Mrs Murphy of The Glen was not a strong woman and possibly suffered from her nerves, but this wasn’t talked about much in front of children. Leo seemed very distracted, as if there was something wrong at home, but even in the cosiest of chats she couldn’t be persuaded to talk about it.

And there were so few other people to talk to.

She wasn’t encouraged to talk to Maura Brennan who worked as a chambermaid in the hotel. Every time she
stopped in a corridor to speak to Maura, Maura looked around nervously.

‘No, Nessa. Your mother wouldn’t like us to be chatting.’

‘That’s bull, Maura. Anyway, I don’t care what she wants.’

‘I do. It’s my bread and butter.’

And there was no answer to that.

Sometimes Mrs Ryan was terrific, like when she got them all dancing lessons – Leo, Nessa and her young sisters Catherine and Nuala, the two Blake girls. It had been the greatest of fun.

Sometimes Mother was horrible – when she had asked Father to leave the bar the night he won eighty-five pounds on a greyhound. ‘I just didn’t want to lose
two hundred
and eighty-five pounds, Nessa,’ she had explained afterwards. ‘He was going out in to the streets looking for greyhounds, or anything that approached them in shape, to buy them drinks.’

Nessa had fumed over it. Her father should have been allowed his dignity. He should have had his night of celebration.

Her mother had been wonderful about the record player, and Nessa built up her own collection – ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’, ‘Rock Around the Clock’, ‘Whatever Will Be Will Be’. But by the time she bought Tab Hunter’s ‘Young Love’ her mother had become horrible again, saying that Nessa was now leaving school with a very poor Leaving Certificate.

There was no question of university, no plan for a career, nothing except the usual refuge of those who couldn’t think what to do – the secretarial course in the town.

Nessa became very mulish that summer. Several times her father asked her for the sake of peace to try and ensure they had a happy house.

‘You’re so weak, Daddy,’ she snapped at him one day. She was sorry instantly. It was so like something she felt her mother would have said.

‘No, I’m not weak actually. I just like a quiet life without the people I love fighting like tinkers, that’s all.’ He spoke mildly.

‘Why do you nag me so much?’ she asked her mother. ‘I mean, it’s not going to make either of us happier, and it’s upsetting Daddy.’

‘I don’t think of it as nagging. I think of it as giving you courage and strength to live your own life. To be full of courage. Honestly.’ She believed her mother too when she said that.

‘Did you always have courage?’

‘No I did not. I learned it when I came to this house. When I had to cope with the pair on the wall.’

‘The what?’

‘Your sainted grandparents,’ her mother said crisply.

Nessa looked up in shock at the elderly Ryans who had always been spoken of with such admiration and respect in this house.

‘Why did it need courage to cope with them?’ she asked.

‘They would have liked your father to have lived in a glass case and they could have thrown sugar at him,’ Mrs Ryan said.

When she said things like this she seemed very normal, like someone you could talk to, but she didn’t say them often enough.

So, the summer she was eighteen Nessa began her course in shorthand and typewriting with a very bad grace.

Leo Murphy wouldn’t come with her, a series of vague and unsatisfactory excuses about being needed up at The Glen. It was a confused time in Shancarrig.

Eddie Barton was so depressed working in Dunne’s that he could hardly raise his eyes when you went in to talk to him. Niall Hayes was in Dublin setting up his plans to study law. Foxy was in England on the building sites. The Blake girls were studying in Dublin. She wasn’t meant to talk to Maura. Her mother asked so many questions about who she went to the pictures with in the big town it sometimes seemed hardly worth the whole business of going.

She was ready for something exciting to happen the weekend Richard Hayes came to town.

He was very handsome, not square like Niall. He was tall and slim and very grown up, seven or eight years older than Nessa – twenty-five or twenty-six. He had been sent away from Dublin because of some disgrace with a girl.

Everyone knew that.

He had been banished to Shancarrig. Where apparently there would be no girls. Or no girls worth looking at.

Nessa dressed herself very very carefully until she caught his eye.

‘Things
are
looking up,’ he said. ‘I’m Richard Hayes.’

‘Hello, Richard,’ Nessa said in a voice she had been practising for weeks.

His smile was warm but it made her nervous. She longed to run away and ask someone for advice, and as it happened at that very moment her mother called for her.

‘Now I know your name,’ he said.

‘Only my mother calls me Vanessa,’ she said.

But she was glad to escape.

Her mother had seen it all. ‘What a handsome young man,’ she said.

‘Yes.’ Nessa bit her lip.

‘You have absolutely no competition,’ her mother assured her. ‘That’s a man who likes pretty girls, and you are the prettiest girl in Shancarrig.’

The next time he met her he suggested that she take him for a walk.

‘I’d love to do that but I’m practising my awful grammalogues,’ said Nessa.

‘Shorthand is going out of fashion, it’ll all be machines soon,’ he said.

‘You may very well be right, but not before I do my Certificate exams. So maybe I’ll see you later in the evening,’ she said. She could see by his eyes that she had done the right thing. He was more interested than ever before.

‘Absolutely, Vanessa,’ he said with a mock bow.

She took him for long walks around her country.

She brought him up to the Old Rock and told him all its legends. She brought him to the school and showed him the tree where they had carved their names. She took him to the graveyard and pointed out the oldest tombstones to him. She showed him the children fishing in the river, and explained how you caught little fish with your hands if you could trap them in the stones.

She told him about Mattie the postman, who didn’t go to mass but could deliver any letter to anyone if it just had their name and Shancarrig on it. She brought him to meet Father Gunn and Father Barry, saying that she was being a guide. Mrs Kennedy, the priests’ housekeeper, looked very disapproving so Nessa just laughed and sat up on her table, saying that she had brought Richard Hayes here especially to taste one of Mrs Kennedy’s scones. They were legendary.

Privately she told Richard they were legendary because they were as heavy as stones.

Nessa took Richard Hayes to visit Miss Ross in her house, she brought him to Nellie Dunne’s shop, she took him to every nook and cranny in about three days.

‘It’s your introduction,’ she said to him cheerfully. ‘So that you’ll never say you weren’t shown the place properly.’ She could sense that he was delighted with her, that he thought her a confident, bright young woman.

And indeed, that is what she was.

She was proud of her dark thick hair, her clear skin, her bright yellow and red blouses, and most proud of all that she wasn’t silly and giggling like so many others were with him. Her mother had given her this gift, this belief that she was the equal of any Adonis who came to Shancarrig.

But Nessa would not settle for a weaker man like her mother had done. She wouldn’t take second best, which was obviously how her mother must regard her father. There would be no dull, plodding, average fellow for Nessa. Not now. Not now that she had seen the admiring glance of a man like Richard.

He was the kind of man who came through a town like this once every fifty years. She was lucky to have caught his eye, she must be absolutely certain not to lose it again. This was the kind of man you could dream about night and day, someone who would occupy all your thoughts. But for some reason she didn’t really allow herself to think about what she felt for him, this charming attentive Richard Hayes, who seemed to want to spend every free minute he had in her company. Yes of course she wanted to think that he really liked her, but some warning voice made her think that she could only keep his attention if she didn’t seem to care.

It was an act.

Life shouldn’t be an act. Yet she felt that they were unequal somehow. She must play this one very carefully.

Of course she heard a lot of stories about why he had come to help his Uncle Bill in the office. Some people said that Mr Hayes was getting too busy to manage on his own and that he had little hopes of his son Niall ever learning enough about the business. Niall was off to University in Dublin where he would serve his time in a solicitor’s office as well. It would be four or five years before he’d qualify – old Bill Hayes was quite right to take this bright young man into his firm.

There were others who said that Richard had been sent to Shancarrig to cool his heels – there had been talk of an incident in Dublin, an incident involving a judge’s daughter. There was another story about a broken engagement and a breach of promise action settled at the last moment.

In the stories Richard Hayes, cousin of the solid Niall, was always shown as a playboy.

The feeling was that Shancarrig would be very small potatoes indeed for someone who had seen and done as much as this handsome young man of twenty-five or so who had taken the place by storm.

‘Isn’t he fantastic?’ Leo had said when she saw him for the first time.

‘He’s very easy to talk to.’ Nessa was quick to let her best friend know just how far she was ahead in the race which every woman in Shancarrig seemed to have joined.

‘I wish he’d come into the bar more,’ Nessa’s mother said. ‘He’s such an attractive kind of fellow he’d be a great draw.’

‘I’d say that boyo has been asked to leave more bars
than a few,’ Conor Ryan said with the voice of a man who has seen it all and knew it all.

Unexpectedly Gerry O’Sullivan, their personable young barman, agreed.

‘Real lady killer,’ he said. ‘The kind they’d go for each other’s throats over.’

‘That’s what we don’t need,’ Mrs Ryan said firmly. ‘Maybe it’s just as well he’s not in here every night.’

‘Who is there in Shancarrig that would cut anyone’s throat over a fellow? There’s not that kind of passion and spark around the place at all.’ Conor Ryan was back reading the forecasts for race meetings in towns he would never visit, on courses he would never walk.

Breda Ryan looked thoughtfully out at the front desk where Nessa was painstakingly practising her typing. They were meant to do an hour a day homework, and she had covered up the keys of the hotel machine with Elastoplast so that she couldn’t see the letters.

Nessa’s hair was shiny, her eyes were bright, her neckline low. They didn’t have to look far for any passion and spark as far as Richard Hayes was concerned.

Nessa fought off three attempts by her mother to talk about sex.

‘I
know
all that, didn’t you tell me that years ago when I got my periods first.’

‘It’s different kind of telling now, there are other things to be taken into consideration … please, Nessa.’

‘There are no other things, I don’t want to talk about it.’ She wriggled away.

She didn’t want to hear her mother say anything coarse or frightening. She was terrified enough already. These were problems that no mother could solve.

Richard Hayes told Nessa that she was beautiful. He called into the hotel and sat up on the reception desk to talk to her. It was the middle of the afternoon, a time when hotel business was slack and when Richard very probably should have been in his uncle’s office.

He told Nessa that she had wonderful dark looks and she reminded him of Diana the huntress.

‘Was she good or bad?’

‘She was beautiful. Don’t you know about her?’

‘No, the nuns sort of dwelt more on the New Testament. She was the one that was extremely chaste, wasn’t she?’

‘That’s her story and she’s sticking to it,’ he laughed, and she reddened. It seemed to her that he was eyeing her as if he was thinking along those lines himself.

He stroked her cheek thoughtfully.

‘What happens if a girl is less than extremely chaste here?’ he asked.

‘They go to their grannies or to England.’ She hoped that her cheeks didn’t still look so red. It was just that he was looking at her breasts and appreciating her in a way that a man might if he wanted to make love.

Or maybe she was just fancying it. Nessa didn’t know these days if anything was real or whether she was imagining a whole series of looks and gestures and feelings that didn’t exist at all.

‘I’d be very careful if we were … to do anything that might cause a trip to your Granny’s,’ he said. ‘You know, really careful. There would be no danger at all.’