The Copper Beech (39 page)

‘Sergeant Keane’s very gentle. He’ll make it as quick as possible. It’s just the formalities.’

‘I won’t
have
the formalities. There’s no point in asking me to.’

‘A man tried to kill you, he had one of my guns. He
could
have killed you.’ Father’s voice broke with emotion at the thought of it.

Mother became even more icily calm.

‘But he didn’t. What happened was that I killed him.’

‘You defended yourself against him … the gun went off. He killed himself.’

‘No. I picked up the gun and shot him.’

‘You don’t know
what
happened. You’re in shock.’

Major Murphy made a move as if to go out to the hall to the telephone.

Mother didn’t even need to raise her voice to make her seriousness felt.

‘If you ring him, Frank, I’m walking out of that door and you’ll never see me again. Either of you.’

He put out his arms as if to hold her again, support her as he had up the drive, console her as he had done when he was holding her, telling her it was over.

Mother really seemed to believe that it
was
over.

Leo kept moving the glass around between her hands as she listened to her parents talking about the man who lay dead in their gate lodge.

Her mother’s voice was strange and unnatural. It didn’t sound like a voice, it sounded like a noise, a thin even noise, with no highs and lows.

She spoke as one who is being perfectly reasonable.

Frank had told her it was over, finished. So let it be forgotten. Why drag heavy-footed policemen in, and go over it and over it, and ask questions and give answers? The man had threatened her. He had got killed himself. It was an eye for an eye. Justice had been done. Let it be left as it was.

At every interruption she gave her strange disembodied threat: ‘Or else I will disappear from this house and you will never see me again.’

It was as if they had forgotten she was here. Leo watched mesmerised as her mother, by sheer force of repetition, began to beat down the rational arguments. She saw her father change from the strong man comforting his wife caught in a terrible accident and become someone hunted and unsure. She saw him bite his lip and watched his eyes widen with fear at every repeated threat that
Miriam Murphy would walk out the door and never be seen again.

She wanted to interrupt, to ask Mother where she would go. Why she would leave them, her home and her family?

But she didn’t dare to move.

It was when her father had said, ‘I couldn’t
live
without you, Miriam, you couldn’t leave knowing that …’

‘Please …’ She looked across at her fourteen-year-old daughter, as if a lapse of taste had been committed. A man shouldn’t speak of his need, of his weakness, not in front of a child.

Major Murphy came over to the window seat where Leo was sitting.

‘Leo, dearest child.’

‘What’s going to happen, Daddy?’

‘It’s going to be all right. As your mother says, it’s over, it’s over. We mustn’t …’

‘Will we get Dr Jims? Father Gunn …?’

‘Leo, come with me. I’ll bring you up to bed.’

‘I want to stay here, Daddy, please …’

‘You want to help us, you want to be big and brave and do the right thing …’

‘No. I want to stay here. I’m afraid.’

Outside in the big garden darkness had fallen. The bushes were big shapes, not colours as they had been when the three of them walked back up, huddled together from the horrors they had left in the gate lodge.

He propelled her out of the door and to the kitchen where he warmed some milk in a saucepan. He took the big silver pepperpot and sprinkled some over the top of the milk when it was poured into a mug.

He walked up the stairs with her and led her to the room.

‘Put on your nightie, like a good girl,’ he said.

He turned his back as Leo slipped out of her green cotton dress and her summer vest and knickers, and pulled on the pink winceyette nightdress from the nightdress case shaped like a rabbit. Leo remembered with a shock that when she stuffed her nightie in there this morning nothing had happened. None of this nightmare had begun.

She got into bed and sipped the milk.

Her father sat on the bed and stroked her forehead. ‘It will be all right, Leo,’ he said.

‘How can it be all right, Daddy?’

‘I don’t know. I used to wonder that in the War, but it was.’

‘It wasn’t really. You got wounded and you can’t walk properly.’

‘Yes, I can.’ He stood up.

His face was so sad Leo wanted to cry aloud. She wanted to open the window in her room, kneel up on the window seat and cry out for someone in Shancarrig to help them all.

But she bit her lip.

‘I have to go down now, Leo,’ he said.

It was as if they were allies. Allies to protect a strange silent mother downstairs who wasn’t speaking in her ordinary voice.

She used to play that game of ‘if ’. If I get up the stairs before the grandfather clock in the hall stops striking then Mrs Kelly won’t be in a bad mood tomorrow. If the crocuses come up in front of the house by Tuesday I’ll get a letter from Harry and James.

Now she sat in the dark bedroom with her arms around her knees. If I don’t get out of bed it will be all right. Dr Jims will come and say he wasn’t dead at all. If he is
really dead then Father Gunn will say it wasn’t Mother’s fault.

If I don’t get out of bed at all and if I sit like this all night without moving then it’ll turn out not to have happened at all.

She woke in the morning stiff and awkward. She hadn’t managed to stay awake. Now the charm wouldn’t work. It
had
happened, all of it.

There was no point in holding her knees any more. None of it was going to work.

How could it be an ordinary day? A sunny day with Lance and Jessie rushing around outside, with Mattie the postman cycling up the drive, with smells of breakfast coming from downstairs.

Leo got out of bed and looked at her face in the wardrobe mirror. It was grey white and there were shadows under her frightened grey-green eyes. Her curly hair stood upright over her head.

She pulled on the clothes she had thrown on the floor last night, last night when Daddy had been standing with his frightened face.

At that moment the door opened and Mother came in. A different Mother from last night. Mother was dressed in a blue linen suit, her hair was combed, she wore her pink lipstick and she looked bright and enthusiastic.

‘I have the most wonderful news,’ she said.

Leo felt the colour rushing to her cheeks. The man wasn’t dead. Dr Jims had cured him.

Before she could speak Mother had opened the wardrobe door and started to take out some of Leo’s frocks.

‘We’re going on a holiday, all three of us,’ she said. ‘Your father and I suddenly decided that this was what we all needed. Now, isn’t that a lovely surprise?’

‘But …’ Leo’s voice dried in her throat.

‘But we have to get going just after breakfast, it’s a long drive.’

‘Are we running away?’ Leo’s voice was a whisper.

‘For a whole week we are … now, where are your bathing togs? We’re going to a lovely hotel on a cliff, and we’ll be able to run down and have a swim before breakfast every day. Imagine.’

Her father didn’t catch her eye at breakfast, and Leo knew that she must not mention the events of last night. Her father had somehow bought the right for both of them to run away with Mother. That’s what was happening.

They heard a knock at the back door. All three of them looked at each other in alarm, but it was Ned, who did the garden. Leo heard her father explaining about the sudden holiday … and giving instructions.

The glasshouses were in a terrible state – if Ned could concentrate entirely on clearing them, and sorting out what was to be done….

‘And what about the rockery, Major, sir?’

‘It’s very important that you leave that. There’s a man coming down from the Botanic Gardens in Dublin to have a look at it. He said nothing was to be touched until he came.’

‘I’m glad of that.’ Ned sounded relieved. ‘Will I fill in the hole we dug?’

‘Oh, we’ve done that already …’

If Ned was surprised that a man with war injuries, and his frail wife, had covered in a pit that it had taken him two days to dig, he showed no sign of it.

‘I’ll leave it as it is then, Major, sir?’

‘Just as it is, Ned. No disturbing it at all.’

Leo felt a cold horror spread all over her.

The memory of last night, hugging her knees in the dark. The sound of footsteps, of low urgent voices, of dragging and pulling. But her mother was calm as she listened to the conversation at the back door, and even laughed when Daddy came back into the room.

‘Well, I expect that was welcome news for our Ned. Anything that he hasn’t to do must come as a pleasant surprise.’

Leo beat back the wild fears.

Often her dreams seemed real to her … more real than ordinary life. This is what must be happening now. There was another knock at the door. Again the look of alarm was exchanged.

This time it was Foxy Dunne.

‘Yes, Foxy?’ Leo’s father was unenthusiastic.

‘How are you?’ Foxy never addressed people by title. He wouldn’t greet the priest as Father and he certainly wouldn’t call Leo’s father Major.

‘I’m fine thank you, Foxy. How are you?’

‘Great altogether. I came to say goodbye to Leo.’

Suddenly her father’s voice sounded wary. ‘And how, might I ask, did you know that she was going away?’

‘I didn’t.’ Foxy was cheerful. ‘I’m going away myself, that’s why I came to say goodbye.’

‘Well, I suppose you’d better come in.’

Foxy walked easily through the scullery and the kitchen and into the breakfast room.

‘How’re ya?’ he said, nodding easily at Leo’s mother.

She smiled at the small boy with the freckles and the red hair, the one Dunne boy that poverty and neglect had never managed to defeat.

‘And where are you off to?’ she asked politely.

Foxy ignored her and addressed Leo. ‘I’m off to London, Leo. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do it. I thought I’d
be hanging around here like an eejit, dragging a brush around someone’s shop.’

‘You’re too young to go to England.’

‘They won’t ask. All they want is someone to make tea on a site.’

‘Will you be frightened?’

‘After my old fellow and Maura Brennan’s old fellow? Both of them coming home drunk and both of them trying to beat me up … how could I be frightened?’

He talked as if Leo’s parents weren’t there. It wasn’t deliberately rude, it was just that he didn’t see them.

‘Will you ever come back to Shancarrig again?’

‘I’ll come home every Christmas with fistfuls of pound notes, like everyone else on the buildings.’

Major Murphy asked whether Foxy would learn a trade.

‘I’ll learn everything,’ Foxy told him.

‘No, I mean a skilled trade, you know, an honourable trade, like a bricklayer … It would be very good to serve your time, to do an apprenticeship.’

‘It’ll be that all right.’ Foxy didn’t even look at the man, let alone heed him.

‘Will you write and tell what it’s like?’ Leo knew her voice sounded shaky and not full of interest as Foxy would have liked.

‘I was never one for the writing, but as I say, I’ll see you every Christmas. I’ll tell you then.’

‘Good luck to you over there.’ Leo’s mother was standing up from the breakfast table. She was bringing the conversation to a close.

Foxy gave her a long look.

‘Yeah. I suppose I’ll need a bit of luck all right. But it’s more a matter of working and letting them know you can work.’

‘You’re only a child. Don’t let them ruin your health, tell them you’re not able for heavy work.’ The Major was kind.

But Foxy was having none of it. ‘I’ll tell them I’m seventeen. That’s how I’ll get on. Seventeen, and a bit stunted.’ He was going in his own time, not in Mrs Murphy’s. ‘I’ll see you at Christmas, Leo,’ he said, and went.

Leo saw him fondling the ears of Lance, and throwing a stick for Jessie.

Other people were in awe of the two loudly barking labradors. Not Foxy Dunne.

She thought of him a few times during their holiday, that strange time in a faraway hotel, where there was nothing whatsoever for her to do except read the books that were in the library. Sometimes she walked with her father and mother along the sandy beaches, collecting cowrie shells. But usually she left Mother and Father to walk alone, with the dogs. They seemed very close together, sometimes even holding hands as Father limped along, and Mother sometimes bent to pick up some driftwood and throw it out into the sea so that Lance and Jessie could struggle to bring it back.

She didn’t sleep too well at night in the small room with the diamond-shaped panes of glass in the window. The roar of the Atlantic Ocean down below the cliffs was very insistent. The stars looked different here from the way they looked in Shancarrig when she’d sit on her window seat and watch at night – the familiar garden of The Glen, the lilacs, the shrubbery down to the big iron gates and the gate lodge.

She shivered when she thought of the gate lodge. She had not been able to look at it as they had driven past on
the morning they had left home. She dreaded seeing it again when she went back, but she wanted to be away from this strange dreamlike place too, this holiday that never should have been.

Biddy would be at home now in The Glen. What might have happened? What might she have found? Yet neither Father nor Mother telephoned her or seemed remotely worried.

Leo felt a constriction in her throat. She couldn’t eat the food that was put in front of her.

‘My daughter hasn’t been well. It has nothing to do with your lovely food.’

Leo looked at her mother in disbelief. How could she lie so easily and in such a matter-of-fact voice? If she could do that she could lie about anything. Nothing was as it used to be any more.

Leo was very afraid. She wanted a friend. Not Nessa whose eyes would widen in horror. Not Eddie Barton who would retreat into his woods, and his flowers, and his drawings. Not Niall Hayes who would say it was typical of grown-ups – they never did anything you could rely on.