The Copper Beech (38 page)

Mother was standing outside her bedroom door, flushed-looking and confused.

Leo ran to her. ‘Mother. There were robbers … are you all right?’

‘Shush, shush. Of course I am … what are you talking about?’

‘I heard them running down the stairs … they went through the garden.’

‘Nonsense, Leo. There were no robbers.’

‘There
were
, Mother. I heard them, I saw them … I saw one of them.’

‘What did you see?’

‘I saw him pulling off or putting on a shirt Mother, he ran over there behind the lilacs, over the back fence.’

‘What on earth are you doing home anyway … weren’t you meant to be on a tour of that school?’

‘Yes, but they didn’t show us. I saw him, Mother. There might be others in the house.’

Leo had never seen her mother so full of purpose. ‘Come downstairs with me this moment and we’ll put an end to this foolishness.’ She flung open the doors of all the rooms. ‘What burglar was here if he didn’t take the silver, the glass? Or here, in the sports room, all your father’s guns. Each one intact. Look, they didn’t even take our supper, so let’s have no chats about burglars and robbers.’

‘But the feet on the stairs?’ She was less sure of the figure now.

‘I went downstairs myself and came back up to my room. I didn’t know you were back …’

‘But I was playing the record player …’

‘Yes. That’s what made me come out and look for you. To know what you were doing blasting it out and then turning it off.’

Mother looked excited. Different from the way she was normally.

Leo didn’t know what made her think it was dangerous, but that is exactly what she felt it was. She had to walk just as delicately here as if there really were a robber hiding in the house.

She spoke nothing of the incident to her father, nor to Biddy. When Nessa Ryan asked whether Leo’s welcome home had been any more cordial than the one that Nessa had got herself in the hotel, Leo said that she had made a sandwich and listened to ‘I Love Paris’.

Nessa Ryan said that life was very unfair. She had been roped in to help polish silver, since she was back.

Imagine having all the freedom in the world in a big house like that.

Imagine. She didn’t notice Leo shiver as she realised that she had denied the fright, and that somehow made the fright much bigger than it had been before.

Foxy Dunne came up the drive next day. His swagger showed a confidence that many of those twice his age might not have felt approaching The Glen.

But Foxy didn’t push his luck; he went to the back door.

Biddy was most disapproving.

‘Yes?’ she said coldly.

‘Ah, thank you, Biddy. It’s good to get a real traditional Irish welcome everywhere, that’s what I always say.’

‘You and your breed never say anything except to make a jeer of other people who put their minds to work.’

Foxy looked without flinching.

‘
I’m
different from my breed, as you call it, Biddy. I have every intention of putting my mind to work.’

‘You’ll be the first of the Dunnes who did, then.’ She was still annoyed to see him sitting so confidently in her kitchen.

‘There always has to be the first of some family who does. Where’s Leo?’

‘What’s that to you?’

At that moment Leo came into the kitchen. She was
pleased to see Foxy Dunne. She offered him one of Biddy’s scones that were cooling on a wire tray.

‘Will you like the place inside?’ He was speaking about the secondary school.

‘I think so. A bit Holy Mary, but you know.’

‘A lot of people around here could do with being Holy Mary,’ Biddy said.

Leo laughed. Everything seemed to be back to normal again.

‘You’ll work hard, won’t you?’ Foxy was concerned.

‘Imagine one of Dinny Dunne’s lads laying down the law on working hard,’ Biddy snorted.

Foxy ignored her. ‘It’s important that you work as hard as I do,’ he said to Leo. ‘I have to, because I come from nothing. You have to because you come from everything.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Leo said.

‘It would be dead easy for you to do nothing, for you to just drift about without doing anything, and end up just marrying someone.’

‘Not for ages.’ Leo was indignant.

‘Not any time. You should get a job.’

‘I might
want
to marry someone.’

‘Yes, yes. But you’d be better off with a job, whether you married anyone or not.’

‘I never heard such nonsensical talk.’ Biddy was banging the saucepans around to show her disapproval.

‘Come on, Foxy. We’ll go out to the orchard,’ Leo said.

They picked small gooseberries and put them in a basket that Leo’s mother had left under a tree.

‘It won’t always be like this here, you know,’ Foxy said.

‘No. It’ll be term time, and a list of books as long as your arm.’

‘I meant this house, this way of going on.’

She looked at him, alarmed. The anxiety of the other
night came back; things changing, not being safe any more.

‘What do you mean?’

She looked very startled suddenly, and he didn’t like the way her face got so alarmed, so he reassured her. He told her that if he could pretend to be sixteen or over he could get taken on by a man who was raising a crew for a builder in England – all fellows from round here, fellow countrymen … he’d start just doing odd jobs, but he’d work his way up.

‘I wish you weren’t going away,’ Leo said. ‘I know it’s crazy, but I have this stupid feeling that something awful is going to happen.’

It was three weeks later that it happened. On a warm summer evening. The house was quiet. Biddy had gone on her annual summer holidays back to her family’s farm. Leo had finished her letter to Harry and James, she had written how Daddy’s back seemed much better and that Dr Jims had said that walking couldn’t do him any harm – it couldn’t hurt him any more than he had been hurt in the War – and that if he sat in a chair like an old man with a rug over his knees then he’d turn into one.

So he went off for long walks with Mr Hayes, even up as far as the Old Rock. That’s where they had gone today. Leo decided to walk down to the town to post the letter. Once it was written she liked it to be on its way. It could sit on the hall table for days, with Biddy dusting around it. She found a stamp and headed off. Mrs Barton was ironing, Leo could see her through the window. She never went out to sit in her little garden. Surely she could have brought some of her sewing out of doors on a beautiful evening like this. Leo looked up to see if she could see Eddie’s face at his window. He wrote almost as many letters as she did. She met him sometimes at the post
office and Katty Morrissey said that between them they kept the whole of P&T going.

But there was no sign of Eddie. Maybe he was off finding odd shapes of wood and clumps of flowers to draw. She did meet Niall Hayes, however, walking disconsolately up and down The Terrace.

‘God, that school I’m going to is like a prison,’ Niall said. ‘It’s like
The Count of Monte Cristo
’.

‘The convent’s all right. It’s choked with statues, though, all of them with cross faces.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind if it was only the statues. You should see the faces on these fellows. All of them in long black dresses, and looking desperate.’

‘Sure doesn’t Father Gunn wear a long dress, and Father Barry. You’re used to them.’ Leo thought Niall Hayes was making heavy weather out of it all.

‘They don’t have faces like lighting devils.’

‘Did your father go to school there?’

‘Of course he did, and all my uncles. And they’ve forgotten how awful it is. They keep telling me of all the fun they had there.’

‘Your father’s gone for a walk with my father.’ Leo was tired of all the gloom.

‘Well, it must have been a short one then. My father’s back in the house there, making some farmer’s will. Leo, I don’t think I could
bear
to be a solicitor here in Shancarrig.’

‘You could always go somewhere else,’ Leo said. There seemed to be no cheering Niall today.

She was sorry her father’s walk had been cancelled, but maybe he was sitting with Mother in the orchard. She had seen sometimes they had a big jug of homemade lemonade, and they looked as if they were a bit happy.

She met Father Gunn, who said wasn’t it amazing the
way the time raced by. There was another whole class ready to leave Shancarrig and go out into the wide world. It was extraordinary how grown-ups thought time raced by. Leo found it went very slowly indeed.

As she came in the gate of The Glen she heard cries coming from the gate lodge, and at the same moment she saw her father hastening as fast as he was able down the drive. Leo shrank away from the sound of crashing furniture and screams.

But she knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was her mother’s voice she heard screaming, ‘No, no! You can’t! No,’ and a great long wail.

‘Oh, my God, my God. Miriam.
Miriam
.’

Her father was stumbling. He had dropped his stick, and had to bend down for it.

Leo watched as if it was slow motion.

Then they heard the shots. Three of them. And at that moment Leo’s mother came staggering to the door. Her blouse was covered with blood. Her hair and eyes were wild.

‘My God … he tried to … he was trying to … he would have killed me,’ she cried. She kept looking behind her where they could see a shape on the ground.

‘Frank!’ screamed Leo’s mother. ‘Oh, do something, Frank. For God’s sake! He would have killed me.’

Leo shrank still further away from the scene which she could see unfolding, but yet could not take in.

Her father walked in exaggeratedly slow motion towards the door and took her mother in his arms.

He soothed her like a baby.

‘It’s over, Miriam, it’s over,’ he said.

‘Is he dead?’ Leo’s mother didn’t want to look.

Horrified, Leo saw her father bend to the shape on the floor and turn it over. Leo could see a man with dark hair,
lying on the floor of the gate lodge. There was a big red stain all over the front of his shirt.

It was the man she had seen running towards the lilacs in the shrubbery three weeks ago, the day that she thought there had been robbers.

And now both her father and mother were crying.

‘It’s all right, Miriam darling. It’s over. He’s dead.’ Her father was saying this over and over again.

Later they gave Leo a brandy too. With a little water in it. But that was well after they had come back to the house.

The door of the gate lodge had been closed. They all walked up the drive arm in arm and Mother had gone up to wash herself.

‘You might need to, you know, not change anything,’ Leo heard Daddy say, but Mother looked at him wildly.

‘You mean … wear this? Wear
this
on my body? All this blood? What for? Frank, use your head. What for?’ She was near hysteria.

‘I’ll wash you,’ he offered.

‘No. Please let me be on my own for a few moments.’

Mother had a wash basin in her room, with a mirror and a light over it, and little pink floral curtains.

Leo didn’t want to be alone, so she followed her mother into the room. Their eyes met in the mirror.

‘Are you all right, Mummy?’ She rarely used that word.

Mother’s face softened. ‘It’s all right, Leo. It’s over.’ She said Father’s words like a parrot.

‘What are we going to do? What’s going to happen?’

‘Shush. Let me get rid of all this. We’ll put it out of our minds. It’ll be like a bad dream.’

‘But …’

‘That’s for the best, Leo, believe me.’ Mother looked
very young as she stood there just in her slip and skirt. She rubbed her neck and arms with a soapy flannel and warm water, even though there was no trace of blood. That was all streaked and hardening on the yellow blouse she had thrown into the wastepaper basket.

Mother was brushing her teeth, and she shook her tin of Tweed talcum powder into her hand and rubbed it into her skin.

‘Go on, darling. Go down to your father. I want to finish dressing.’

Leo thought Mother only had to put on a blouse. And of course a brassiere. She had only just realised that for some reason Mother hadn’t been wearing one as she stood beside the hand basin. Just the slip. Her silky peach-coloured one.

Everything was so strange and unreal. The fact that Mother had asked her to leave the room now was only one tiny fragment more in the whole thing.

Leo went into the drawing room. She felt something like this should not be discussed in the breakfast room where they lived on ordinary days. Her father must have felt the same thing. He had put a match to the fire and the two dogs, Lance and Jessie, seemed pleased. They stretched their big cream limbs in front of the grate.

Leo thought suddenly that Lance and Jessie didn’t know what had happened. Then she remembered that nobody knew – not Niall Hayes, whom she had been talking to half an hour ago – nor Mrs Barton, who had waved from her ironing – nor Father Gunn, who had said that time passed so quickly.

Father Gunn? Why wasn’t he here?

The moment someone died you sent for the priest. And Dr Jims, Eileen and Sheila’s father, he should be here.
That’s what happened when people got sick or died, Father Gunn and Dr Jims arrived in their cars.

Mother was at the door. She shivered and hugged herself.

‘That’s lovely of you to light the fire,’ she said.

They both looked up, Leo and her father. Mother sounded so ordinary – so normal. As if it all hadn’t happened out there. Down in the gate lodge.

That was when Father poured the brandy for the two of them.

‘Give Leo a little, too.’ Mother sounded as if she was offering more soup at lunchtime.

‘Come up here to the fire. Warm your hands. I’ll phone Sergeant Keane. He’ll be up in five minutes.’

‘No.’ It was like a whiplash.

‘We have to call him, we should have phoned immediately.’

Leo was sipping the horrible and unfamiliar brandy. She didn’t know how people like Maura Brennan’s father wanted to drink alcohol all the time. It was disgusting.

‘My nerves won’t stand it, Frank. I’ve been through enough already.’