The Copper Beech (30 page)

‘He doesn’t look very reliable,’ whispered Niall.

‘Jesus, Mary and Holy Saint Joseph, who do you think
is
reliable these days?’ Nessa hissed.

‘
I
am, for what it’s worth.’ He looked at her and suddenly she saw that he did like her, much more than in the sort of hang-dog dependent way she had thought. Niall Hayes was keen on her. It didn’t give her the kind of boost that she had thought it might. In the days when nobody fancied her she would love to have had a few notches on her gun, affections to play with, hearts to break.

But Niall was too much of a friend for that.

‘Thank you,’ she said very simply in a whisper.

Maura was delighted with the present they bought her, a little glass-fronted cabinet. Leo had remembered Maura saying that she would love to collect treasures and display them in a cabinet. There were tears of joy in her eyes when they delivered it to the cottage where she would be living – only a stone’s throw from where her father still fell home drunk every night.

‘You’re great friends,’ she said, her voice choked.

Nessa felt a blanket of guilt almost suffocate her. For years Maura had been working in Ryan’s Hotel and hardly a sentence exchanged between them. If only she had the courage of a Leo Murphy she would have taken no heed of offending her mother, of crossing boundaries of familiarity between staff and owners.

But she
did
have courage these days and she would show it, use it. When she got back to the hotel her mother asked where the festivities were going to be held.

‘You know that it will be a few drinks in Johnny Finn’s and whatever bit of cold chicken poor Maura managed to
put out on plates for those that will drag themselves back to her cottage for it.’

‘Well, she should have thought of all that …’ her mother began.

‘No she shouldn’t, she should be having a reception here by right. She was my schoolfriend, she and Gerry both work here. Anyone with a bit of decency would have given them that at least.’

Breda Ryan was taken aback.

‘You don’t understand …’

‘I don’t like what I do understand. It’s so snobby, so ludicrous. Does it make us better people to be seen to be superior to Maura Brennan from the cottages? Is this what you always wanted, a place on some kind of ladder?’

‘No. That’s not what I always wanted.’ Her mother was calm and didn’t show the expected anger at being shouted at in the front hall of the hotel.

‘Well, what did you want then?’

‘I’ll tell you if you take that puss off your face … and stop shouting like a fishwife. Come on.’ Her mother was talking to her like an equal. They walked into the bar.

‘Conor, why don’t you take a fiver from the till and go up to Johnny Finn’s to buy a few drinks for Gerry and Maura?’

Nessa’s father looked up, pleased.

‘Didn’t I only suggest …?’

‘And you were right. Go on now while they’re still sober enough to know you’re treating them. Nessa and I’ll look after the bar.’

They watched as Conor Ryan moved eagerly across to the festivities, hardly daring to believe his good luck. Nessa sat still and waited to be told. Mrs Ryan poured two small glasses of cream sherry, something that had never
happened before. Nessa decided to make no comment; she raised the glass to her lips as if she and her mother had been knocking back drinks for years.

‘People want things at different times. I wanted a man called Teddy Burke. I wanted him from the moment I saw him when I was sixteen until I was twenty-one. Five long years.’ Nessa looked at this stranger sipping the sherry; she was afraid to speak. ‘Teddy Burke had a word for everyone, but that’s all it was … a word … I thought it was more. I thought I was special. I built a life of dreams on it. I couldn’t eat. I lost my health and my looks, such as they were. They sent me away to do a domestic economy course.

‘Do you know, I can’t really remember those years. I suppose I must have followed the course – I got my exams and certificates – but I only thought of Teddy Burke.’ She paused for such a long time that Nessa felt able to speak.

She spoke as a friend, as an equal. ‘And did he know, did he have any idea …?’

‘I don’t think so, truly. He was so used to everyone admiring, I was just one more.’ Her mother’s eyes were far away as she sat there in the empty hotel bar, her dark hair back in a loose coil with a mother-of-pearl clasp on it. Her pale pink blouse had its neat collar out over her dark pink cardigan – she looked every inch the successful businesswoman. This story of a thin frightened girl loving a man for five years – a man who didn’t know she existed – was hard to believe.

‘So anyway, one day I was told that Teddy Burke was going to marry Annie Lynch, the plainest girl for three parishes, with a bad temper and a cast in her eye. Everything changed. He was marrying her for her land, for her great acres running down to the lakes and over green
valleys, for the fishing rights, for the stock. A man as handsome and loving as Teddy Burke could trade everything for land.

‘It made me wonder what I really wanted.

‘And I went to a cousin’s wedding and met your father and I decided that I wanted to go far from where I lived, where I would remember Teddy Burke’s laugh and his way with people. I decided that I wanted to make your father strong and confident like Teddy was when he got the land, like Annie Lynch always was because she had the land … I put my mind to it.’

There was a long silence. Nessa was taking it in.

‘Were you ever sorry?’

‘Not a day, not once I decided. And hasn’t it turned out well? The hotel has survived, the pair out in the pictures in the hall would have let it run into the ground, and they’d have let your father go off to the British army.’

‘Why are you telling me this now?’

‘Because you thought that all I wanted was to put ourselves above other people. I may have done that by accident but it wasn’t what I set out to do.’

‘Does Dad know about Teddy Burke?’

‘There was nothing for him to know but a young girl’s silliness and dreams.’

Mattie came in, his sack of letters delivered.

‘This town is going to hell, Mrs Ryan,’ he said. ‘A wedding party bawling “Bless this House” above in Johnny Finn’s and the women of the house sipping sherry in Ryan’s.’

‘And no one to pour a pint for the postman,’ laughed Nessa’s mother.

The moment was over, it might never come again.

Nessa began to look at other people in a new light after this. Perhaps everyone had a huge love in their life, or
something they thought was a huge love. Maybe Mr Kelly up at the school had fancied a night-club singer before he settled for Mrs Kelly. Maybe Nellie Dunne had once been head over heels in love with some travelling salesman who had come many years ago to Ryan’s Commercial Hotel, but who had married someone else. Maybe one of those old men in the commercial room had been Nellie’s heart’s desire.

It wasn’t so impossible.

Look at Eddie Barton, falling in love with someone in Scotland. It had never been exactly clear how he had got in touch with her in the first place, but apparently he had been writing to Christine Taylor for ages, and phoning her from the hotel.

And then she had arrived over and was living with his mother. Nessa was amazed at the change in Eddie. He was speaking to the Dunnes, cousins of Foxy, as if he was their equal. He was in the hotel with Christine discussing improvements and ways to decorate the bedrooms.

Love did extraordinary things to people.

Eileen Blake from The Terrace said that she was stopping for a coffee in Portlaoise on her way back from Dublin and who was there but Richard Hayes and a girl, and they were booking in. As man and wife.

Young Maria Kelly from Shancarrig schoolhouse was reported to have been at a dance with him in the big town, but her parents didn’t know because she had climbed in and out her window through the branches of the old copper beech tree that grew in the yard.

Nessa Ryan heard both these facts in the space of three days. She came across them accidentally, they were not brought in as deliberate bad news to her door.

She felt, not as she had feared she might – no sense of
cold betrayal, no rage that a man should tell her she was special and he wanted her to be his girl, and yet behave the same way with half the country. Very clearly and deliberately she felt her infatuation with him end. Perhaps she
was
her mother’s daughter much more than she had ever believed. She was not ready to give him up but she would have him in her life under different terms.

Richard came into the commercial room of the hotel. There were no travellers staying and so Nessa was using the room to do her shorthand homework.

‘I have to go into town tomorrow. I could pick you up outside your college,’ he offered.

She could imagine the eyes of her classmates when Richard Hayes leant across to open the door of the car for her.

‘And where would we go then?’ she asked.

‘I’m sure we’d find somewhere,’ he said.

Nessa looked back into the bar where her mother and father were standing, well out of earshot.

‘They’re not listening.’ Richard was impatient. But that wasn’t what concerned Nessa. She looked at them and saw her mother stroke Dad’s face gently, lovingly.

She saw that it really never mattered who talked to the men from the brewery, the biscuit salesmen, who hired or fired the barmen. It wasn’t important that Sergeant Keane dealt with her mother over the licensing laws, not her father. Mother had forgotten Teddy whatever he was, he’d have been no good to her. She had found what she really wanted, someone she could share her own strength with. Nessa saw for the first time that her mother had got what she wanted. It wasn’t a case of settling for second best.

And with a shock of recognition she felt that she was going to follow exactly the same path. It wouldn’t be a question of aiming high and searching for fireworks.
There might be an entirely different way to live your life. Unbidden, Niall’s worried face came to mind. She longed to calm him and tell him it would all be all right.

She looked straight at Richard, right into his eyes.

‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘No to everything. Thank you all the same.’

It wasn’t at all easy to do.

But she would not live in fear of him and how he would react. Nothing was worth that.

‘Well, well, well.’ He looked around the room scornfully. ‘So
this
is all you are ever going to amount to. A second-rate shabby hotel … a grown woman still a prisoner to her mother.’ He looked very angry and put out. People didn’t usually speak to Richard Hayes like this. Girls certainly didn’t.

Nessa was furious.

‘It is
not
a shabby hotel. It’s my home.
My
home. I live here and I choose to live here. You can’t even live where you want to because they run you out of town. Don’t come down here and start criticising us. It doesn’t sit well on you. And answer me one thing: how would I amount to any more if I were to go off to the glen with you and roll around for five minutes on the ground?’

‘It would be longer than five minutes,’ he said mischievously. She hadn’t lost him. He fancied her all the more because she was refusing him.

What a wonderful power.

It was the making of Nessa Ryan.

She didn’t flirt with him like every other woman within a hundred-mile radius seemed to. She did not want to be known as his girl.

It was as if she had turned around the relationship,
made it businesslike, affectionate but in no way exclusive. She teased him about his latest conquests, real and supposed, she knew that her very lack of jealousy was driving him wild. She was happy in the knowledge that he desired her. When she met him it was always with other people.

She finished her course at the college and went to work full time for her mother and father.

It was she who decided to lift the hotel on to a higher level. She contacted the tourist board about grants, and organised that they got money advanced to improve their facilities. She asked visiting Americans to write letters to their local papers praising Ryan’s so as to get them further custom.

She told her mother to drop the word Commercial from the title.

‘Ryan’s makes it sound like a pub,’ her mother complained.

‘Call it Ryan’s Shancarrig Hotel,’ said Nessa.

A few eyebrows were raised. Nellie Dunne presided over several conversations about the Ryans having notions.

‘That young one is the cut of her mother,’ said Nellie. ‘I remember when Breda O’Connor came in and took the whole establishment from Conor’s mother and father. That Nessa will do the same.’

But Nessa Ryan showed no signs of friction with her mother and father. She would laugh with her mother about the Sainted Grandparents who glared from the picture on the wall. She told her father that he looked handsome in a jacket and begged him to have nice framed pictures of racehorses on the wall, so that they might attract a few of the horsey set and give some legitimacy to her father’s constant topic of conversation.

Catherine and Nuala were mystified by her. The most handsome man around seemed to be waiting on their sister
Nessa and she barely gave him the time of day. They watched uncomprehending as Nessa became more and more attractive-looking, her dark shiny hair always loose and cut with a fringe. A style that owed nothing to the hairdresser but a lot to a picture in a children’s book she had seen, a picture of Diana the huntress.

Nessa got on well with her mother. The two of them often drove to Dublin to look for fittings and fabrics. At an early age she seemed to have their trust, and to be allowed a lot of freedom that was later denied to the more spirited Catherine and Nuala.

‘Why can’t we go to Galway on our own? Nessa did,’ Catherine complained.

‘Because you’re both so unreliable and untrustworthy you’d probably go under a hedge with the first pair of tinker boys you met,’ Nessa said cheerfully to them. They felt it a great betrayal, there should be
some
solidarity between sisters. Imagine mentioning going under hedges in front of their mother, putting ideas in her mind.