The Copper Beech (37 page)

That was the day that Leo had watched stony-faced as her father drowned them in the rain barrel.

‘It’s for the best,’ her father said. ‘Life is about doing things for the best, things you don’t like.’

Leo’s father was Major Murphy. He had been in the British army. In fact, he had been away at the War when Leo was born. She knew that because every birthday he told her how he had been at Dunkirk and hadn’t known if the new baby was a boy or a girl. Since there had been two boys already the news, when it did arrive, was great news.

Leo’s brothers were away at school. They didn’t go to Shancarrig school like other boys did, they were sent to a boarding school from the time they were very young. The school was in England, where Grandfather lived. Grandfather wanted some of his family near him and he paid the school fees, which were enormous. It was a famous school, where prime ministers had gone.

Leo knew that it wasn’t a Catholic school, but that Harry and James did go to mass on Sundays. She also knew that, for some reason, she wasn’t to talk about this to her friend Nessa Ryan, or to Miss Ross, or Mrs Kelly, or especially not to Father Gunn. It was all perfectly right and good, but not something you went on about.

She knew there were other ways in which she was different. Major Murphy didn’t go out to work like other people’s fathers did. He didn’t have a business or a farm, just The Glen. He didn’t go down to Ryan’s Hotel in the evening like other men, or pop into Johnny Finn Noted for Best Drinks. He sometimes went for a walk with Niall Hayes’s father, and he went to Dublin on the train for the day. But he didn’t have a job.

Her mother didn’t go shopping every morning. She
didn’t call to Dunne’s or to the butcher’s. She didn’t get a blouse and skirt made with Eddie Barton’s mother. She didn’t get involved with arranging flowers on the altar for Father Gunn, or helping with the sale of work at the school. Leo’s mother was very beautiful and gave the air of having a lot to do as she floated from room to room. She really was a very beautiful woman, everyone always said so. Mrs Murphy had red-gold hair like her daughter, but not those unruly curls. It was smooth and shiny and turned in naturally, as if it had always been like that. Once a month Mother went to Dublin and she had it trimmed then, in a place in St Stephen’s Green.

Somehow Leo knew that Harry and James weren’t going to come back to Shancarrig when they left school. They had been talking about Sandhurst for as long as she could remember. They were both accepted. Her father was delighted.

‘We must tell everyone,’ he said when the letter arrived.

‘Who can we tell?’ His wife looked at him almost dreamily across the breakfast table.

Father looked disappointed. ‘Hayes will be pleased.’

‘Your friend Bill Hayes is the only one who’s heard of Sandhurst.’ Miriam Murphy spoke sharply.

‘Ah come on. They’re not as bad as that.’

‘They are, Frank. I’ve been the one who’s always lived here, you’re only the newcomer.’

‘Eighteen years, and still a newcomer …’ He smiled at her affectionately.

Leo’s mother had been born in The Glen, and had played as a child in Barna Woods herself. She had gone fishing down to the River Grane, and taken picnics up to the Old Rock, from which Shancarrig got its name. She had been
here all through the troubles after the Easter Rising, and through the Civil War. In fact, because there were so many upheavals at that time, her parents had sent her off to a convent school in England.

Shortly after she had left it she had met Frank Murphy and, as two Irish amid the croquet and tennis parties of the south of England in the early 1930s, they had been drawn together. Frank’s knowledge of Ireland was sketchy, but romantic. He always hoped to settle there one day. Miriam Moore had been more practical. She had a falling down home, she said. It needed much more money than they would ever have to turn it into a dream.

Miriam’s parents were old. They welcomed the bright son-in-law with open arms. They hoped he would be able to manage their beautiful but neglected house and estate. They hoped he would be able to keep their beautiful but restless daughter contented.

They died before they could judge whether he had been able to do either.

‘Is Sandhurst on the sea?’ Leo asked interestedly. If Harry and James were going to a beach next year, instead of back to school, she was very jealous indeed.

Her parents smiled indulgently at her. They told her it was in Surrey, nothing to do with sand as in Sandycove or Sandymount or any other seaside place she had been to. It was a great honour to get in there. They would be officers of the highest kind.

‘Will they be a higher rank than Daddy if there’s another war?’ Leo asked.

‘There won’t be another war, not after the last one.’

He looked sad when he said that. Leo wished she hadn’t brought the subject up. Her father walked with a stick and he had a lot of pain. She knew this because she could
hear him groaning sometimes if he thought he was alone. Perhaps he didn’t like being reminded of the War, which had damaged his spine.

‘You should write to them, Leo,’ her mother said. ‘They’d like to get a letter from their little sister.’

It was like writing to strangers, but she wrote. She told them that she was sitting in the drawing room, and that Lance and Jessie were stretched in front of the fire. She told them about the school concert where they all wanted to sing ‘I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts’ and Mrs Kelly had said it was a filthy song. She told them how Eddie Barton had taught her how to draw different kinds of leaves, fishes and birds, and said she might do them a special drawing for Christmas if they ordered it.

She said she was glad they were going to be high-class officers in the army, even if there was never going to be another war. She said they would be glad to know that Daddy was walking a bit better and Mother looking a lot less sad.

To her surprise they both wrote almost by return and said that they loved her news. It was strange not being one thing or the other, they wrote.

Leo had a big bedroom that looked out over the garden. It was one of four large rooms around the big square landing. Nessa Ryan was always admiring the upstairs.

‘It’s like a room in itself, this landing,’ she said in admiration. ‘It’s so poky in the hotel, all the rooms have numbers on them.’

Leo said that when her mother was young in The Glen there was breakfast on the landing. Imagine, people bringing all the food upstairs to save the family going
down. Sometimes they used to eat in their dressing-gowns, Mother had told her.

Nessa was very interested that Major and Mrs Murphy had different bedrooms; her parents slept in the same bed.

‘Do they really?’ Leo was fascinated. She broached the subject with Biddy.

Somehow, it didn’t seem right to ask directly.

‘Don’t go inquiring about where and how people sleep. Nothing but trouble comes out of that.’

‘But
why
, Biddy?’

‘Ah, people sleep where they want to sleep. Your parents sleep at each end of the house, that’s what they want. Leave it at that.’

‘But where did your parents sleep?’

‘With all of us, in one room.’ So it wasn’t much help.

When Harry and James came home for a very quick visit she decided to ask them. They looked at each other.

‘Well, you see. With Papa being wounded and everything…’

‘All that sort of thing changed,’ James finished.

‘What sort of thing?’ Leo asked.

They looked at each other in despair.

‘All sorts of things. No sorts of things,’ Harry said. And she knew the subject was over.

Mother never told Leo anything about the facts of life. If it hadn’t been for Biddy and Nessa she would have been astonished by her first period. Although she knew how kittens, puppies and rabbits, and therefore babies, were born, she had no idea how they were conceived. She very much hoped that it was nothing to do with the behaviour of the dogs and cats at certain times. She didn’t see how such a thing would be possible for humans anyway, even if any of them would agree to do it. She
hated Nessa Ryan being so knowing so she didn’t ask her, and she knew that Biddy in the kitchen flushed a dark red when the matter was mentioned …

When Leo Murphy was fourteen such matters had been sorted out, if not exactly satisfactorily, at least she felt that she had mastered whatever technical information there was about it from reading pamphlets and magazines.

She had agreed with Nessa and Maura Brennan that it was quite impossible to believe that your own parents could ever have done it, but then the living proof that they must have was all around.

Maura Brennan was able to add the information that a lot of it happened when the man was drunk, and Leo said it was very unfair that the woman shouldn’t be allowed to get drunk as well, because it was bound to be so awful.

Maura was very nice. She never pushed herself on anyone. In ways Leo liked her better than she liked Nessa Ryan, who could be moody if she didn’t get her own way. But Maura lived in the poorest of the cottages. Her father Paudie was often to be seen sitting on someone’s steps with a bottle in his hand, having been out drinking all night.

Maura wouldn’t go on to the convent with them next year when she and Nessa went into town on the bus to secondary school. And yet at fourteen Maura seemed to know a lot more about life than the rest of them did.

It seemed very unfair to Leo that families like Maura Brennan’s and Foxy Dunne’s had to live in the falling down cottages by the river and had such shabby clothes. Foxy Dunne was much brighter than Niall Hayes, much quicker when it came to giving answers in school, but Foxy had no bicycle, no proper clothes, and had never
been known to wear shoes that fitted him. Maura Brennan was much kinder and more gentle than Nessa Ryan but she never got a dress like Nessa got for her birthday and she hadn’t a winter coat.

Leo knew she wasn’t meant to go into the cottages and so she didn’t. No one ever said not to, but it was something that was unspoken.

Only Foxy ever challenged it.

‘Aren’t you coming in to see the Dunne family at leisure…?’ he asked.

They had learned the word leisure at school today. Mrs Kelly had written it on the board and talked about what it meant.

‘No thanks. I’ve got to go home today,’ Leo would say.

‘But
I’m
allowed to come and see the Murphy family at leisure,’ he would say.

Leo was well able for him. ‘Yes you are, and very welcome too, when you want to …’

It was a stand-off.

They admired each other … it had always been like that, since they were in Mixed Infants together …

After the end of the summer term Leo and Nessa travelled on the bus to the convent school. They would meet the Reverend Mother, get a list of books and other items they would need, details of the school uniform and probably a string of rules as well. They thought that they would also be shown around the convent, but this did not materialise. They were tempted to spend the time idling round and sampling the pleasures of freedom of a place ten times the size of Shancarrig, but they felt that somehow they would be found out. It would be told back in Ryan’s Hotel that they had been skitting and laughing on a corner with an idling lad, or licking ice creams in the street.

Better by far to get the early bus home and be shown to be reliable.

Nessa went into the hotel where she felt they weren’t nearly grateful enough to see her.

‘Are you back already?’ Mrs Ryan said without enthusiasm.

‘I hope you did everything you were meant to do,’ her father said.

Leo grinned at her. ‘It’ll be the same in my place,’ she said companionably. ‘They’ll have fed the dogs and won’t have kept anything for me.’

She strolled up the hill, pausing to talk to Eddie Barton and tell him about the convent. He would be going to the Brothers. He said he wasn’t looking forward to it. It was only games they cared about.

‘In this place it’s only prayers they care about,’ Leo grumbled. ‘There’s statues leaping at you out of every wall.’

She trailed her shoulder bag behind her as she passed the old gate lodge that had been let once to people, who had left it like a pigsty. Now it was all boarded up in case any intruders got in.

It was a Thursday, and as soon as she was home Leo remembered that it was, of course, Biddy’s half day. There would be food left under the meat safe. They usually had something cold for supper on a night when Biddy wasn’t there. Leo knew that she should help herself because there was no one to greet her. Major Murphy had gone to Dublin that morning. He had caught the early train. Her mother must have gone walking in Barna Woods. Leo planned to take her food up to her bedroom and listen to her gramophone. She had written to James and Harry about the song ‘I Love Paris in zee Springtime’. She could play it over and over. Some day she would go to Paris in
‘zee Springtime or zee Fall’ with someone who would sing that to her. She thought it would never go out of fashion. She closed herself into her room and before she even started on her milk and chicken sandwich she put on the record.

She threw herself on her window seat and was singing along with it when, to her surprise, she heard a door bang and footsteps running up or down the stairs, she couldn’t tell which.

Thinking she might be playing it too loudly, she went to take off the handle of the machine and as she did so her eye caught sight of a young man fleeing across the grass and into the shrubbery. As he ran he was pulling on a shirt.

Leo was very frightened. It must have been a robber. Could there be more of them downstairs? She didn’t know whether to shout for help or pretend that she wasn’t there.

Her mind raced. They must know she was there if they had heard the music playing. Perhaps one was waiting for her outside her bedroom door. She could feel her heart thumping. In the silence of the house she heard a door creak open. She had been right. There
was
someone else lying in wait for her. She prayed as she had never prayed before.

As if in direct answer to her, God had managed to make her mother’s voice call out, ‘Leo? Leo? Is that you?’