The Copper Beech (9 page)

Maura Brennan often stayed on late at school to talk to Miss Ross, to try to find out more about this magnificent lifestyle in the small house with the lilac bushes and the tall hollyhocks, where Miss Ross lived. She would ask endless questions about the dog or the cat. She knew their names and ages, which nobody else at school did. She would hope that one day Miss Ross might drop another hint or two about her life. Miss Ross seemed puzzled by her interest. The child was in no way bright. Even taking into account her loutish father and timid uneducated mother, young Maura must still be called one of the slower learners in the school. Even the youngest of that Brennan string of children, Geraldine, with the permanent cold and her hair in her eyes, was quicker. But Maura was the one who hung about, who found excuses to have meaningless little conversations.

One day Miss Ross let slip that she hated ironing.

‘I love ironing,’ Maura said. ‘I love it, I’d do it all day but the one we have is broke, and my da won’t pay to have it mended.’

‘What do you like about it?’ Miss Ross seemed genuinely interested.

‘The way your hand goes on and on … it’s like music almost … and the clothes get lovely and smooth, and it all smells nice and clean,’ Maura said.

‘You make it sound great. I wish you’d come and do mine.’

‘Of course I will,’ said Maura.

She was eleven then, a square girl with her hair clipped back by a brown slide, a high forehead and clear eyes. In a different family in another place she might have had a better chance, a start that would have brought her further along some kind of road.

‘No, Maura, you can’t, child. I don’t want the other children to see you rating yourself as only fit to do my ironing. I don’t want you making little of yourself before you have to.’

‘How could that be making little of myself?’ The question was without guile. Maura Brennan saw no lack of dignity in coming to the teacher’s house to do household chores.

‘The others … they don’t have to know, Miss Ross.’

‘But they do, they will. You know this place.’

‘They don’t know lots of things, like that my sister Margaret had a baby in Northampton. Geraldine and I are aunts, Miss Ross. Imagine!’ Maura had told the family secret easily, as if she knew that there was no danger that Miss Ross would pass on this titbit. There was the same simplicity as when she had spoken of ironing.

‘Once a week, and I’ll pay you properly,’ Miss Ross had said.

‘Thank you, Miss Ross, I’ll put it in the post office.’ It was the beginning for Maura Brennan. She warned young Geraldine not to tell anyone. It would be their secret.

‘Why has it to be a secret?’ Geraldine wanted to know.

‘I don’t know.’ Maura was truthful. ‘But it has.’

So if ever Mrs Brennan asked what was keeping Maura above at the school, Geraldine said she didn’t know. It seemed daft to her, all this sucking up to Miss Ross. It wasn’t as if Maura ever got anywhere at her books. She was slow and was always asking people to help her, Leo Murphy or Nessa Ryan, girls from important families, big houses. Geraldine would know better than to talk to them or their like. Maura was half daft a lot of the time.

When Maura started doing the ironing Miss Ross gave her a doll as well as the money. She said she had seen Maura admiring it and even taking off its crushed pink dress and giving it a good press. Anyone who thought that much of a doll should have it. Maura always told Geraldine that it was on loan. Miss Ross had lent it to her until the time Miss Ross married someone and had children of her own.

‘Sure Miss Ross is a hundred. She’ll never marry and have children,’ Geraldine cried.

‘People have them at all ages. Look at Mammy, look at St Elizabeth.’

Geraldine wasn’t so sure about her ground on St Elizabeth, but she knew all about their mother. ‘Mammy started having them and she couldn’t stop. I heard her telling Mrs Barton. But after me she stopped all of a sudden.’ Geraldine was nine and she knew everything.

Maura wished she had those kind of certainties.

The doll sat on a shelf in their bedroom. It had a china face and little china hands. When Geraldine wasn’t there
to laugh at her Maura would hug it and speak reassuring woras, saying the doll was very much loved. Sometimes Miss Ross gave Maura things to wear, a nice coloured belt once, a scarf with a tassel.

‘I never wore them in the school, Maura, no one will know they’re mine.’

‘But what would I mind if they knew?’ Again the question was so honest and without guile that Miss Ross seemed taken aback.

‘I wish I could help you with your lessons, Maura. I wish I could, but you don’t really have the will to concentrate.’

Maura was eager to reassure her. ‘I’ll be fine, Miss Ross. There’s no point in trying to put things into my head that won’t go in, and what would I need with all those sums and knowing poems off by heart? It wouldn’t be any use to me at all.’

‘What’s to become of you, though … off to England like Deirdre and Margaret with no qualifications …?’

‘No, I’m staying here. I’m going to get a house like this one, and have it the way you do, lovely and shiny and clean, and coloured china on a dresser and a smell of lavender polish everywhere.’

‘It’ll be some lucky man if you are going to do all that for him.’

‘I won’t be getting married, Miss Ross.’ It was one of the few things she had ever said with conviction.

Her sister Geraldine believed her too, over this.

‘Why don’t you go the whole hog and be a nun?’ Geraldine wanted to know. ‘If you’re so sure you’re not going to get a fellow, hadn’t you better be in a convent, singing hymns and getting three meals a day?’

‘I can still pray in a house of my own. I’ll have a Sacred Heart lamp on a small wooden shelf, and I’ll have a picture
of Our Lady, Queen of May on a small round table with a blue table cloth and a vase of flowers in front of it.’

She didn’t say that she was going to buy a chair for the doll too.

Geraldine shrugged. She was twelve now, and much more grown up than her sister of fourteen, who would be leaving school this year. Geraldine’s confirmation was coming up and between wheedling and complaining she and her mother had managed to get Paudie Brennan to put up money for a lovely confirmation dress. This was the first item of clothing that had ever been bought new to celebrate the confirmation of any of his nine children. The dress hung on the back of the bedroom door and had been tried on a dozen times. Maura had managed to persuade Geraldine to keep the hair from hanging over her eyes.

Geraldine was going to look gorgeous on her confirmation day. She had written to her sisters and brothers in England telling them of this event and, getting the hint, they had sent a pound note or a ten-shilling note in an envelope with a couple of lines scrawled to wish her well. Maura hadn’t done that and she looked with envy at the riches coming in. It took a lot of ironing in Miss Ross’s house to make anything like that amount of money.

Three days before confirmation Paudie Brennan, on a serious drinking bout, found himself short of ready cash and, deciding that the Lord couldn’t possibly be concerned what clothes young Christians decked themselves in for confirmation ceremonies, managed to take the new dress to a pawnbroker in the big town and raise the sum of two pounds on it.

The consternation was terrible. In the middle of the shouting, tears and accusations being hurled backwards and forwards, Maura realised that this was all that would
happen. Bluster and hurt, disappointment and recriminations. There was no question of anyone getting the dress back for Geraldine. That kind of money could not appear by magic. Credit had been arranged in the first place to buy it. There was no possibility of more funds being made available.

‘I’ll get it for you,’ Maura said simply to a red-eyed, near hysterical Geraldine who lay on her bed railing at the unfairness of life and the meanness of her father.

‘How can you get it? Don’t be stupid.’

‘I have that saved. Just get the ticket from him. We’ll go on the bus, but you must never tell them, never never.’

‘Where will they think we got the money? They might say we stole it.’ Geraldine didn’t care to believe that there was a way out.

‘Da’s not going to be able to say much one way or the other after what he did,’ said Maura.

On the day, Paudie Brennan was dressed and shaved and his neck squeezed into a proper shirt and collar for the visit of the Bishop. It was a sunlit day, and the children from Shancarrig looked a credit to their school, people said, as they gathered for the group photograph outside the cathedral in the big town. Geraldine Brennan, resplendent with her shiny blonde hair and her frilly white dress, caught the eye of a lot of people.

‘You have dressed her up like a picture. She’s a credit to you,’ said Mrs Ryan, of Ryan’s Hotel. Her own daughter Catherine looked far less resplendent. It was easy to see that she was mystified and even put out that the young Brennan girl, daughter of a known layabout and drunk, should look so well.

‘Ah, sure, you have to do your best, Mrs Ryan, Ma’am,’ Maura’s mother said. Maura felt her heart harden. If her mam had been the one in charge Geraldine would have
stood there in some limp handout dress that had been begged from a family who might not have used all its castoffs. There had been no word of apology from her father, no question of any promised repayment from Geraldine. No questions, no interest.

Any more than anyone had asked what Maura would do when she left school in a few short weeks’ time. She wouldn’t be going to the convent in the town like Leo Murphy and Nessa Ryan. There were no plans for her to go into the technical school. She wasn’t smart enough to be taken on as a trainee in one of the shops, or the hairdressing salon.

Maura was going to work as a maid, the only question was where – and this, she realised, was something she would have to work out for herself as well as everything else. Maura would really have liked a job where she could live in. In a lovely big house, with beautiful furniture in it. Somewhere like The Glen, where Leo Murphy lived.

She would call and ask them had they a place. It wasn’t fair to ask Leo at school and embarrass her in case the answer was no. Or she could possibly get a place in the kitchens of Ryan’s Commercial Hotel, or as a chambermaid. She wouldn’t like that as much. There was nothing beautiful to touch and polish.

‘Are you thinking about your own confirmation, Maura?’ Father Gunn from Shancarrig was standing beside her.

‘Not really, I’m afraid, Father. I was thinking about where I’d go to work.’

‘Is it time for you to leave school already?’ He was a kindly man with very thick glasses that made him look vaguer and more confused than he was. It seemed impossible for him to believe that another of Paudie Brennan’s brood was ready for the emigrant ship.

‘It is. I’ll be fifteen soon,’ Maura said proudly. Father
Gunn looked at her. She was a pleasant open-faced child. Not a pretty face like the one being confirmed today, but still easy enough on the eye. He hoped she wouldn’t fall for a child the way the elder sister had in Northampton. There were few secrets kept from a priest in a small community.

‘You’ll be needing a reference I suppose,’ he sighed, thinking of the numbers of young people that he had written about, praising their honesty and integrity to anonymous English employers.

‘I suppose they’ll all know me in Shancarrig,’ she said. ‘I’ll be looking for a job as a maid, Father. If you hear of anyone, I’m great at cleaning altogether.’

‘I will, Maura, I’ll keep my eyes open for you.’ He turned away, feeling unexpectedly sad.

Maura went first to the back door of The Glen and waited patiently as the dogs raced around her, barking the news of her arrival, but nobody came to see what was her business. She had seen two figures sitting in the front room. Surely they must have heard. After a lot of thought she went around to the front and Leo, tall and confident, came running down the stairs.

‘Maura, what on earth are you doing?’ she asked.

‘I came wondering do your parents want anyone to work for them in the house, Leo,’ she said to the girl who had been sitting beside her in school for eight years.

‘Work?’ Leo seemed startled.

‘Yes, like I have to have a job working somewhere, and this is a big house. I wondered …?’

‘No, Maura.’

‘But, I know how to turn out a room …’

‘There’s Biddy here already.’

‘I meant as well as Biddy, under her of course.’

Leo had always been nice at school. Maura couldn’t understand why she spoke so brusquely. ‘It wouldn’t work. You couldn’t come here and clear up after me.’

‘I have to clear up after someone. Wouldn’t your family be as nice as anyone else’s? Let me ask them, Leo.’ She didn’t say the place could do with a clean. She didn’t plead. She had always been quick to recognise when something was impossible. And a look at Leo Murphy’s face told her that this was now the case.

‘Right then,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I had to ask.’

She knew Leo was standing at the door with the dogs as she walked down the avenue. Maura thought that she should have been allowed to talk to the people of the house, rather than being sent off by her own schoolfriend. Still, Leo had the air of being the one who made the decisions in that house. They mightn’t have hired her if they knew Leo disapproved.

Imagine being able to make the decisions at nearly fifteen. But then Maura told herself that that’s what she was doing herself. There were very few decisions made in Brennans’ by anyone except herself.

Maura went then to Mrs Hayes. Mr Hayes was a solicitor so the Hayes family were very wealthy. They had a big house covered with virginia creeper, and a lovely piano in the drawing room. Maura knew this because Niall Hayes went to the same school. He was very nice. He told her one day how much he hated the piano lessons that his mother arranged for him twice a week, and Maura told him how much she hated going to the pub to tell her father his dinner was ready on Saturday and Sunday lunchtimes. It was a kind of bond between them.

But Mrs Hayes didn’t want a young girl, she told Maura. She’d need someone older, someone trained.