The Copper Beech (44 page)

‘There could be a conflict of interests,’ Niall Hayes said.

‘If you want to buy it then why is the board still up?’ asked Mr Dixon.

‘Good afternoon,’ Niall Hayes said.

‘Terrifying, these country bumpkins,’ said Mrs Dixon, well within his hearing.

‘We’ve never fought about anything, Foxy, have we?’ Leo said to him in bed.

‘What do you mean? Our life is one long fight!’ he said.

‘I don’t want us to buy the school.’

‘Give me one good reason.’

‘We don’t need it, Foxy. Truly we don’t. It’d be a hassle.’

He stroked her face, but she got up and sat on the edge of the bed.

‘Things are always a hassle, love. That’s the fun. That’s what it was always about.
You
know that.’

‘No. This time it’s different. Lots of others want it too.’

‘So? We
get
it.’

‘No, not just rivals, real people. Chris and Eddie, Nessa and Niall, Miss Ross, and I think Maura has hopes of it.’

‘Miss Ross!’ He laughed and rolled around the bed. ‘Miss Ross is away with the fairies. It would be a
kindness
not to let her have it.’

‘But the others! I’m serious.’

‘Look. Niall and Nessa are business people, they know about deals. That’s what Niall does all day. Same with Chris and Eddie, they’d understand. Some things you go for, some you get.’

Leo began to pace around the room. She reminded herself of her parents. They had paced in this house too.

She shivered at the thought. He was out of bed,
concerned. He put a dressing-gown around her shoulders.

‘I told you. Give me one good reason, one
real
reason, and I’ll stop.’

‘Maura.’

‘Aw, come on, Leo, give me a break! Maura hasn’t a penny. We practically
gave
her the gate lodge. Where would she get the money? What would she want it for?’

‘I don’t know, but she has Michael up there every evening, the two of them staring at it. She wants it for something.’

‘Nessa, come in to me a moment, will you?’

‘Why do I always feel like a child, instead of the best help you ever had in this hotel, when you use that tone of voice?’ Nessa laughed at her mother.

Brenda Ryan poured them a glass of sherry each, always a sign of something significant.

‘Has Daddy gone on the tear?’

‘No, cynical child.’ They sat companionably. Nessa waited. She knew her mother had something to say.

She was right. Her mother said she was going to give her one piece of advice and then withdraw and let Nessa think about it. She had heard that Nessa and Niall were thinking of buying the schoolhouse as a place to live. Now, there was no way she was going to say how she had heard, nor any need for Nessa to bridle and say it was her own business. But all Breda Ryan wanted to put on the table, for what it was worth, was the following:

It would be an act of singular folly to leave The Terrace, to abandon that beautiful house just because old Ethel was a lighting devil and Nessa didn’t feel mistress of her own home. The solution was a simple matter of relocation, banishing both parents to the basement.

But not, of course, describing it as that. Describing it
in fact as Foxy Dunne and his architect having come up with this amazing idea about making a self-contained flat for the older folk.

Nessa fidgeted as she listened.

‘It’s only a matter of time,’ her mother told her. ‘Suppose you went up to the schoolhouse and his parents were dead next year, think how cross you’d be. Losing the high ground like that. Keep the place, don’t let them divide it up with his sisters. It’s the best house in the town.’

‘I wonder are you right.’ Nessa spoke thoughtfully, as to an equal.

‘I’m right,’ said her mother.

Eddie came back from his travels. He had found enough people to make the whole centre work. Exactly the kind of people they had always wanted to work with, some of whom had known their work too. It was flattering how well Chris and Eddie Barton were becoming known in Ireland.

The next thing was to visit the bank manager.

And the projections.

Eddie had asked the potential tenants to write their stories so that he and Chris could work out the costings. He also asked them to tell what had been successful or unsatisfactory in the previous places they had been.

He and Chris together read their reports.

They read of places where no visitors came because it wasn’t near enough to the town, places that the tour buses passed by because there was no time on the itinerary. They learned that it was best to be part of a community, not outside it. They sat together and realised that in many ways the schoolhouse was not the dream location they had thought.

‘That’s if we take notice of them,’ Chris said.

‘We
have
to take notice of them. That’s our research.’ Eddie’s face was sad.

‘Aren’t we better to know now than after?’ Chris said. ‘Though it’s awful to see a dream go up like that.’

‘What do you mean a dream go up like that? Haven’t we our eye on Nellie Dunne’s place after her time? That place is like a warren at the back.’

She saw Eddie smile again and that pleased her. ‘Come on, let’s tell Una.’ She leapt up and went to Eddie’s mother’s quarters.

‘I don’t mind
where
I am as long as I’m with the pair of you,’ said Mrs Barton. She also told them that she heard that both Foxy Dunne
and
Niall Hayes were said to have their eye on the school.

‘Then we’re better off not alienating good friends who happen to be good customers as well,’ said Chris. The two women laughed happily, like conspirators.

Father Gunn twisted and turned in his narrow bed. In his mind he was trying to write the letter to the Bishop, the letter that would get him a ruling about the Family of Hope. It now seemed definite that Madeleine Ross had given these sinister people the money to set up a centre in Shancarrig schoolhouse. They would be here in the midst of his parish, taking away his flock, preaching to them, in long robes, by the river.

Please let the Bishop know what to do.

Why had he made all those moves years ago to prevent a scandal? Wouldn’t God and the parish have been far better served if that half-cracked Father Brian Barry and that entirely cracked Maddy Ross had been encouraged to run away with each other? None of this desperate mess about the Family of Bloody Hope would ever have happened.

Terry and Nancy Dixon called in on Vera and Richard Hayes’s house on their way back home after their ramble.

‘We saw the most perfect schoolhouse. I think we should buy it together,’ Terry said. ‘It’s in that place you worked for a while, Shancarrig.’

‘We saw it advertised,’ Vera said, glancing at Richard.

‘And?’ The Dixons looked from one to the other. Richard’s eyes were far away.

‘Richard said he wasn’t happy in Shancarrig.’ Vera spoke for him.

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Nancy Dixon. ‘But you wouldn’t have to mix all that much. It would be just the perfect place to get away from it all. There’s a really marvellous tree.’

‘A copper beech,’ Richard said.

‘Yes, that’s right. It should go for a song. We talked to the solicitor but he wasn’t very forthcoming.’

‘That’s my uncle,’ Richard said.

The Dixons looked embarrassed. They said it was a younger man, must have been his son. Not someone who was going to set the world on fire? they ventured.

Richard wasn’t responding. ‘They all wrote their names on that tree,’ he said.

‘Aha! Perhaps you wrote
your
name on the tree, that’s why we can’t go back there.’ Vera was coquettish.

‘No. I never wrote my name there,’ Richard said. His eyes were still very far away.

‘Is there much interest from Dublin?’ Dr Jims asked his son.

‘No, I thought there’d be more. Maybe if we advertised it again.’

The two men walked regularly together in Shancarrig. Declan and Ruth were having a house built there now.
They didn’t want the place in The Terrace. They wanted somewhere with more space, space for rabbits and a donkey, for the children they would have. Ruth was pregnant. They also felt that it was time to have a sub-office of O’Neill and Blake Estate Agents in Shancarrig. Many of the visitors who came to Ryan’s Shancarrig Hotel now wanted to buy sites. Foxy Dunne was only too ready to build on them.

‘What will it go for?’ Dr Jims had the school on his mind a lot.

‘We’ve had an offer of five. You know that.’ Declan Blake jerked his head across at Maddy Ross’s cottage.

‘We don’t want them, Declan.’

‘I can’t play God, Dad. I have to get the best price for my client.’

‘Your client is only the old Department of Education, son. They’re being done left, right and centre, or making killings all over the place. They don’t count.’

‘You’re honourable in your trade. I have to be in mine.’

‘I’m also human in mine.’ There was a silence.

If either of them was remembering how Dr Jims had bent the rules to help his son all those years ago neither of them said it.

‘Perhaps they’ll get outbidden.’ Declan didn’t seem very hopeful.

‘Has Niall Hayes dropped out?’

‘Yes. And Foxy Dunne – that’s a relief in a way. And so has Eddie. I wouldn’t want them raising the price on each other.’

‘There. You do have a heart.’ Dr Jims seemed pleased.

‘And nobody else?’

‘Nobody serious.’

‘Who knows what’s serious?’

‘All right, Dad. Maura. Michael’s mother. She says that
she wants the place to be a home, a home for children like Michael, with someone to run it. And she’d help in it too. People like Michael who have no mothers … that’s what she wants.’

‘Well, isn’t that what we’d all want?’ said Dr Jims. ‘And if we want it, it can be done.’

Nobody ever knew what negotiation went on behind the scenes, how the Family of Hope were persuaded that it would be very damaging publicity to cross swords with a community which wanted to provide a home for Down’s syndrome children – and had raised the money for it. Maddy Ross was heard to say that she was just as glad that Sister Judith hadn’t been forced to meet the collective ignorance, superstition and bigotry of Shancarrig.

Foxy and Leo had provided a sister for Moore and Frances – Chris and Eddie a brother for the twins – Nessa and Niall a brother for Danny and Breda – Mr and Mrs Hayes had decided of their own volition to move downstairs to the basement of The Terrace and had their own front door by which they came and went – Declan and Ruth Blake had built their house and called their son James – the Kellys’ granddaughter Nora was walking – when the Shancarrig Home was opened.

There were photographs of it in all the papers and nice little pieces describing it.

But it was hard to do it justice, because all anyone could see was a stone house and a big tree.

Katie Finglas was coming to the end of a tiring day in the salon. Anything bad that could happen had happened. A woman had not told them about an allergy and had come out with lumps and a rash on her forehead. A bride’s mother had thrown a tantrum and said that she looked like a laughing stock. A man who had wanted streaks of blond in his hair became apoplectic when halfway through the process he had enquired what they would cost. Katie’s husband Garry had placed both his hands innocently on the shoulders of a sixty-year-old female client who had told him that she was going to sue him for sexual harassment and assault.

She looked at the man standing opposite her, a big priest with sandy hair mixed with grey.

‘You’re Katie Finglas and I gather you run this establishment,’ the priest said, looking around the innocent salon nervously as if it were a high-class brothel.

‘That’s right, Father,’ Katie said with a sigh. What could be happening now?

‘It’s just that I was talking to some of the girls who work here, down at the centre on the quays, you know, and they were telling me …’

Katie felt very tired. She employed a couple of school-leavers; she paid them properly, trained them.
What
could they have been complaining about to a priest?

‘Yes, Father, what exactly is the problem?’ she asked.

‘Well, it
is
a bit of a problem. I thought I should come to you directly as it were.’ He seemed a little awkward.

‘Very right, Father,’ Katie said, ‘So tell me what it is.’

‘It’s this woman, Stella Dixon. She’s in hospital you see …’

‘Hospital?’

Katie’s head reeled. What
could
this involve? Someone who had inhaled the peroxide?

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ She tried for a level voice.

‘Yes, but she wants a hairdo.’

‘You mean she trusts us again?’

Sometimes life was extraordinary.

‘No, I don’t think she was ever here before …’ He looked bewildered.

‘And your interest in all this, Father?’

‘I am Brian Flynn and I am acting chaplain at St Brigid’s Hospital at the moment while the real chaplain is in Rome on a pilgrimage. Apart from being asked to bring in cigarettes and drink for the patients, this is the only serious request I’ve had.’

‘You want me to go and do someone’s hair in hospital?’

‘She’s seriously ill. She’s dying. I thought she needed a senior person to talk to. Not, of course, that you look very senior. You’re only a girl yourself,’ the priest said.

‘God, weren’t you a sad loss to the women of Ireland when you went for the priesthood,’ Katie said. ‘Give me her details and I’ll bring my magic bag of tricks in to see her.’

‘Thank you so much, Ms Kelly. I have it all written out here.’

Father Flynn handed her a note.

A middle-aged woman approached the desk. She had
glasses on the tip of her nose and an anxious expression.

‘I gather you teach people the tricks of hairdressing,’ she said.

‘Yes, or more the
art
of hairdressing, as we like to call it,’ Katie said.