The Copper Beech (7 page)

‘I most certainly do take offence at it,’ Maddy blazed. ‘How dare he insinuate that there has been anything improper between us. How
dare
he!’

‘No, he didn’t. He was very anxious that I should know he wasn’t suggesting that.’ He walked up and down as he talked, agitated, and anxious to get over the mildness of the message, the lack of blame and the motive behind it. It was just that Father Gunn wanted to protect them both from evil minds and idle wagging tongues. In a place this size when people had little real news to speculate about they made up their own. It would be better for Father Barry not to be seen so obviously sharing the same interests as Miss Ross, for both of them to make other friends.

‘And what did you say, Brian?’ Her pale eyes had flecks of light in them tonight.

‘I said that he had a very poor opinion of people if he thought they would give such low motives to what was an obvious and proper friendship.’

But it was clear that Brian Barry had not found his own answer satisfactory. He looked confused and bewildered. She had never loved him more. ‘I am sorry, Maddy, I couldn’t think of what else to say.’ He had never called her Maddy before, always Madeleine like her mother did.

She moved over to him and closed her arms around his neck. He smelled still of cigarette smoke, but his soap was Imperial Leather now, and he hadn’t been eating the winegums. It was the chocolate cake given to him, Maddy realised, by her mother.

‘It was perfect,’ she whispered.

He looked very startled and moved as if to get away.

‘What was perfect?’ he asked, his eyes large and alarmed.

‘What you said. It is a proper friendship and a proper love …’

‘Yes … well …’ He hadn’t raised his arms to hold her.

She moved nearer to him and pressed herself towards him. ‘Brian, hold me. Please hold me.’

‘I can’t, Maddy. I can’t. I’m a priest.’

‘I held you years ago when you had no friend. Hold me now; now that I have no friend and they are trying to take you away.’ Her eyes filled with tears.

‘No, no, no.’ He soothed her as she had stroked him all that time ago. He held her head to his shoulder and comforted her. ‘No, it’s not a question of being taken away … it’s just … well, you know what it is.’

She snuggled closer to him. Again she could hear his heart beat in the way she had remembered so often from that first time. He was about to release her so she allowed sobs to shake her body again. He was so clumsy, and tender at the same time. Maddy knew that this was her man, and her one chance to take what life was presenting.

‘I love you so much, Brian,’ she whispered.

The answering words were not there. She changed direction slightly.

‘You are the only person who understands me, who knows what I want to do in the world, and I think I’m the only person who knows what is best for you.’ She gulped as she spoke so that he wouldn’t think the storm was over, the need for consolation at an end. In the seven years since they had first held each other in these woods times had changed; when he offered her a handkerchief now it was a paper tissue, when he sat down beside her on their log to smoke it wasn’t the flaky old Gold Flake, it was a tipped cigarette.

‘You’ve been better to me than anyone in the world. I mean that.’ His voice was sincere. He
did
mean it. She
could see his brain clicking through all the people who had been good to him, his mother, some kind superior in the seminary possibly. She was the best of this pathetic little list. That was all. Why was she not his great love? She would have to walk very warily.

‘I have wanted the best for you since the day I met you,’ she said simply.

‘And I for you. Truly.’

This was probably true, Maddy thought. Like he wanted the best for the people of Vieja Piedra, wanted it in his heart but wasn’t able to do anything real and lasting about it.

‘You must go there,’ she said.

‘Go where?’

‘To Peru. To Father Cormac.’

He looked at her as if she was suggesting he fly to the moon. ‘How can I go, Maddy? They’ll never let me.’

‘Don’t ask them. Just go. You’ve often said that God isn’t worried about some pecking order and lines of obedience. Our Lord didn’t ask permission when he wanted to heal people.’

He still looked doubtful. Maddy got up and paced up and down beside him. With all the powers of persuasion she could gather she told him why he must go. She played back to him all his own thoughts and phrases about the small village where people had died waiting for someone to come and help them, where they looked up to the mountain pass each day hoping that a man of God would come, not just to visit but to stay amongst them and give them the sacraments. She could see the light coming to his eye: the magic was working.

‘How would I get the fare to go there?’ he asked.

‘You can take it from the collection.’ To her it was simple.

‘I couldn’t do that. It’s for Vieja Piedra.’

‘But isn’t that exactly where you would be going? Isn’t that why we’re raising this money, so that they’d have someone to help them?’

‘No, I don’t believe that would be right. I’ve never been sure about the end justifying the means … remember we often discussed that.’ They had, here in this wood, sitting in her classroom, having coffee after the rehearsals for the plays.

She looked at him, flushed and eager in the middle of yet another moral dilemma, but not moved by the fact that he had held her close to him and felt her heart beat, her hair against his face, her eyelashes on his cheek. Was he an ordinary man or had he managed to quell that side of himself so satisfactorily that it didn’t respond any more? She had to know.

‘And when you go you can write and tell me about it … until I come there too.’

His eyes were dark circles of amazement now. ‘You come out there, Maddy? You couldn’t. You couldn’t come all that far and you can’t be with me. I’m a priest.’

‘We have only one life.’ She spoke calmly.

‘And I chose mine as a priest. You know I can’t change that. Nothing will change that.’

‘You can change it if you want to. Just like you can change the place you live.’ There was something in the direct simple way she spoke that seemed to alarm him. This was not the over-excitable intense Maddy Ross he had known, it was a serious young woman going after what she wanted.

‘Sit down, Maddy.’ He too was calm. He squatted in front of her, holding both her hands in his. ‘If I ever gave you the impression that I might leave the priesthood then I must spend the rest of my days making up for such a
terrible misunderstanding …’ His face was troubled as he sought some response in hers. ‘Maddy, I am a priest for ever. It’s the one thing that means anything to me. I’ve been selfish and impatient and critical of those around me, I don’t have the understanding and generosity of a Father Gunn, but I do have this belief that God chose me and called me.’

‘You also have the belief that the people of Vieja Piedra are calling you.’

‘Yes, I do. If there was a way to go there I
would
go. You have given me that courage. I won’t take the money that the people of Shancarrig raised. They didn’t raise it for their priest to run away with.’

The moon came up as they talked. They saw a badger quite near by, but it wasn’t important enough for either of them to comment on. Brian Barry told Madeleine Ross that he would never leave his ministry. He had a few certainties in life. This was one of them. In vain did Maddy tell him that clerical celibacy was only something introduced long after Our Lord’s time, it was more or less a Civil Service ruling, not part of the Constitution. The first apostles had wives and children.

‘Children.’ She stroked his hand as she said the word.

He pulled both hands away from her and stood up. This was something he was never going to think about. It was the sacrifice he had made for God, the one thing God wanted from his priests: to give up the happiness and love of a wife and family. Not that it had been hard to give up because he had never known it, and now he was heading for forty years of age so it wasn’t something he would be thinking of, even if he weren’t a priest.

‘A lot of men marry around forty,’ Maddy said.

‘Not priests.’

‘You can do anything. Anything.’

‘I won’t do this.’

‘But you love me, Brian. You’re not going to be frightened into some kind of cringing life for the rest of your days by a silly warning from Father Gunn, by Mrs Kennedy spying, by a promise made when you were a child … when you didn’t know what love was … or anything about it.’

‘I still don’t really know.’

‘You know.’

He shook his head and Maddy could bear it no more. She reached out for him and kissed him directly on the lips. She moved herself into his arms and opened her mouth to his. She felt his arms tighten around her … He stroked her back and then because she pulled away from his clasp a little he stroked the outline of her breasts. She peeped through her closed eyes and saw that his eyes were closed too.

They stood locked like this for a time. Eventually he pulled away.

They looked at each other for moments before he spoke. ‘You’ve given me everything, Maddy Ross,’ he said.

‘I haven’t begun to give you anything,’ she said.

‘No but you have, believe me. You’ve given me such bravery, such faith. Without you I’d be nothing. You’ve given me the courage to go. Now you must give me one more thing … the freedom.’

She looked at him with disbelief. ‘You could hold me like that and ask me never to be in your arms again?’

‘That is what I’m begging you.
Begging
you, Maddy. It was my only sure centre. The only thing I knew … that I was to be a priest of God. Don’t take that away from me or all the other things you have given will totter like a house of cards.’

This man had been her best friend, her soul mate. Now
he was asking her permission and her encouragement to leave her life entirely, to step out of it and away from Shancarrig to the village that they had both dreamed about and prayed for and saved for all these years.

Such monstrous selfishness couldn’t be part of God’s plan. It couldn’t be part of any dream of taking your chance in life. Maddy looked at him, confused. It was all going wrong, very very wrong.

He saw her shock, he didn’t run away from it. He spoke very gently.

‘Since I came to Shancarrig and even before it I’ve known that women are stronger than men. We could list them in this town. And I know more than you because I hear them in the Confessional. I’m there at their deathbeds when they worry not about their own pain but about how a husband will manage or whether a son will go to the bad. I’ve been there when their babies have died at birth, when they bury a man who was not only a husband but their means of living. Women are very strong. Can you be strong and let me go with your blessing?’

She looked at him dumbly. The words would not come, the torrent of words welling up inside her. She must be able to explain that he could not be bound by these tired old rules, these empty vows made at another time by another person. Brian Barry was different now, he had come into his kingdom, he was a man who could love and give. But she said none of these things. Which was just as well because he looked at her and the dark blue of his eyes was hard.

‘You see, I want to go with your blessing, because I’m
going
to go anyway.’

They didn’t meet again in Shancarrig without other people being present.

There were no more walks in the woods, no visits to the classroom. The rehearsals had to do without the kind help of Father Barry, Shancarrig Dramatic Society was told. He had been advised to take it easy. Somehow that was the hardest place, the place she missed him most. They had started these plays together; she didn’t know how she would have the heart to continue. In fact, she feared the whole organisation would fall apart without him.

The Shancarrig Dramatic Society continued to thrive without Father Barry. In many ways his leaving gave them greater scope. They were able to do more comedies. They had never liked to suggest anything too light-hearted when Father Barry was there, he was so soulful and good it seemed like being too flippant in his presence.

In the weeks that seemed endless to Maddy the society decided to enter the All Ireland contest for the humorous one-act play.

‘Poor Father Barry. He’d have loved this,’ said Biddy from The Glen, who was going to play a dancing washroom woman in the piece.

‘Go on out of that,’ said Sergeant Keane’s wife, ‘we’d be doing a tragedy if poor Father Barry was here. Not that I wish the man any harm, and I hope whatever’s bothering him gets better.’

The rumour was that he had a spot on his lung. Heads nodded. Yes, it was true he did have that colour, the very pale complexion with occasional spots of high colour that could spell out TB. Still, the sanatorium was wonderful and anyway it hadn’t been confirmed yet.

He didn’t avoid her eye, Maddy realised. He was totally at peace with himself, and grateful to her that she had nodded her head that night in Barna Woods and left without trusting herself to speak a word.

He thought she had seen his way was the only way.

The days were endless as she waited to hear that he had gone. It was three whole months before she heard what she had been waiting for. Father Gunn, visiting the school in his usual way, had asked her pleasantly if she could drop in at the presbytery that evening. Nothing in his face had given a hint of what was to be said.

When she arrived she was startled to see Brian sitting in one of the chairs. Father Gunn motioned her to the other.

‘Maddy, you know that Father Barry is going to Peru?’

‘I knew he wanted to.’ She spoke carefully, but smiled at Brian. His face was alive and happy. ‘You mean, it’s settled? You’re going to be able to go, officially?’

‘I’m going with everyone’s blessing,’ Brian said. His face was full of love, love and gratitude.

‘The Bishop is very understanding and when he saw such missionary zeal he said it would be hard not to encourage it,’ said Father Gunn.

It had always been impossible to see Father Gunn’s eyes through those glasses, but they seemed more opaque than ever. Maddy wondered had Father Gunn told the Bishop that Vieja Piedra alone and on Church business was infinitely preferable to another alternative.