This was the deal. They both knew it.
‘I’ll be going to the big town next week, Mrs Darcy.’
‘Yes, for your Christmas shopping. Of course.’
‘I get this envelope from Michael’s father, through Father Gunn. I’ll be spending whatever there is …’
‘I know.’
‘And I was thinking, suppose I found the lost jewels by then, I’d be able to sell the emerald on the chain and I could give you back the diamonds, on account of you taking me straight to the right place, and that way…’ She let the sentence hang there.
‘That way would be better, I suppose, than any other way.’ Gloria’s face was grim.
Niall Hayes was surprised when he heard that a Mrs O’Sullivan wanted to see him particularly. People usually wanted to see his father, Mr Hayes Senior, the real solicitor as he had heard him described.
He was more surprised when he discovered that it was Maura Brennan from the cottages. He welcomed the two of them into his office – hardly anyone in Shancarrig had ever seen them apart.
‘How have you been keeping, Maura?’ he said, always a kind open fellow, despite his sharp snobby mother.
‘I couldn’t be better, Niall,’ she said. ‘We’ve had a bit of good luck. Michael’s father always sends a bit to help out at Christmas time, and this year he was able to send a lot more.’
‘Well, that’s good, very good.’ Niall couldn’t see where the conversation was leading.
‘And I’ll tell you what we’d love, Niall… You know the cottage at the gate of The Glen?’
‘I do, indeed. And they’re putting it up for sale.’
‘I’d like to buy it for Michael and myself. Would you act for us?’
Niall paused. How could Maura have enough to buy and renovate a place like that?
‘I’ll talk to Leo,’ he said.
‘No, talk to me. Tell me what’s fair to offer her. Fair to her, fair to me.’
That was the way Niall Hayes liked to do business. There wasn’t enough of it around. People were changing, attitudes were different. They wanted sharp dealings here and there.
He patted Maura’s hand. It would be done.
Maura told Father Gunn that Michael’s father had given them a great deal of money this year, much more than other times. If the priest was surprised he didn’t show it.
‘I think that’s the last payment, Father.’ She looked into the priest’s eyes behind the thick round glasses. ‘I don’t think you’ll be getting any more envelopes to give out at Christmas.’
He looked after them as they went down the road – Maura and Michael, soon to be householders, soon to go into a place of dreams, and paint it and tidy it and fill it with treasures.
He knew that the longer he lived in this parish the less he would understand.
EDDIE
Eddie Barton only had a birthday once every four years, which was highly unusual. In fact, he thought he was the only person in the world in this situation. It came as a shock to him that other children had been born on this day. He was ten before he accepted it properly. Up to that he had thought he was unique.
Miss Ross, who was so nice at school, had told them all about Leap Year. Mr Kelly had frightened the wits out of him by saying that if a woman proposed to you on February twenty-ninth you had to say yes, even if she was the most terrifyingly awful person in the world. Mr Kelly had laughed as he said it but Eddie wasn’t sure if it was a real laugh or not. Mr Kelly often looked sad.
‘Did Mrs Kelly propose to you on my birthday?’ Eddie asked fearfully. If the answer was yes then this indeed was another bad aspect of growing up.
But Mr Kelly had put his finger on his lips in a jokey sort of way and said, ‘Nonsense and don’t let Mrs Kelly hear a whisper of this or there’d be trouble.’ It was to be a secret between them.
‘I thought you said it was a well-known fact?’ Eddie was confused.
‘I did,’ the teacher sighed. ‘I did but I keep forgetting, even after all my years in a classroom, how dangerous it is to say anything, anything at all, to children.’
When Eddie’s tenth birthday was coming up, his mother said he could be ten on the day before or the day after.
‘I’d better wait until the day after,’ he told Leo Murphy, who walked home after school with him because she lived in the big house, The Glen, up the hill, and Eddie lived in the small pink house halfway up the road. Leo had said that Eddie’s house reminded her of a child’s drawing of a house. It had windows that looked as if they were painted on. Eddie didn’t know whether this was praise or not.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ he had asked ferociously.
‘Nothing. It’s nice. It looks safe and normal, not like a jungle,’ Leo had replied.
That meant she liked it. He was pleased.
Eddie liked Leo Murphy. If she were to ask him to marry her when he had a real birthday he wouldn’t say no. The Glen would be a great place to live, orchards and an old tennis court. Fantastic.
Leo took things seriously.
‘Why wait until March first?’ she asked Eddie about his birthday. ‘Suppose you died on the night of the twenty-eighth then you’d have missed your birthday altogether.’
It was unanswerable.
Eddie’s mother said she didn’t mind which day he had it just so long as he knew there’d be a cake and an apple tart and no more. He could have ten people or he could have two.
Eddie measured the cake plate carefully. He’d have three and himself. That way they’d have lots. He invited Leo Murphy and Nessa Ryan and Maura Brennan. They were the people he sat beside at class and liked.
‘No boys at all?’ Eddie’s mother was a dressmaker. She was rarely seen without pins in her mouth or a frown of concentration on her face.
‘I don’t sit near any boys,’ Eddie said.
His mother seemed to accept this. Una Barton was a small dark woman with worried eyes. She always walked very quickly, as if she feared people might stop her and detain her in conversation. She had a kind heart and a good eye for colour and dress fabrics in the clothes she made for the women of Shancarrig and the farmers’ wives from out the country. They said that Una Barton lived for her son Eddie and for him alone.
Eddie had hair that grew upwards from his head. Foxy Dunne had said he looked like a lavatory brush. Eddie didn’t know what a lavatory brush was. They didn’t have one in their house, but when he saw one in Ryan’s Hotel he was very annoyed. His hair wasn’t as bad as that.
He liked doing things that the other boys didn’t like doing at all. He liked going up to Barna Woods and collecting flowers. He sometimes pressed them and wrote their names underneath, and then stuck them on a card. His mother said that he was a real artist.
‘Was my father artistic?’ Eddie asked.
‘The less said about your father’s artistry the better.’ His mother’s face was in that sharp straight line again. There would be no more said.
He had to make a wish when he cut the cake. He closed his eyes and wished that his father would come back, like he had wished last year and the year before.
Maybe if you wished it three times it happened.
Ted Barton had left when his son was five. He had left in some spectacular manner, because Eddie had heard it mentioned several times when people didn’t know he was listening. People would say about something, ‘There was nearly as much noise as the night Ted Barton was thrown out.’
And once he heard the Dunnes in their shop say that if someone didn’t mind himself it would be another case of Ted Barton, with the suitcase flung down the stairs after him. Eddie couldn’t imagine his mother shouting or throwing a suitcase. But then again she must have.
She told him everything else he asked, but never told him about his father. ‘Let’s just agree that he didn’t keep his part of the bargain. He didn’t look after his wife and son. He doesn’t deserve our interest.’
It was easy for her to say that but hard for Eddie to agree. Every
boy wanted to know where his father was, even if it was a terrible father like the Brennans’ or a fierce one like Leo Murphy’s, with his moustache and being called a Major and everything.
Sometimes Eddie saw people getting off the bus and dreamed that maybe it was his father coming for him – coming to take him on a long holiday, just the two of them, walking all round Ireland, staying where they felt like. And then he’d imagine his father saying, with his head on one side, ‘How about it, Eddie son, will I come home?’ In the daydream Eddie’s mother would always be smiling and welcoming and there would be less work to make her tired because his father would be looking after them now.
After tea they played games. They had to play on the floor of Eddie’s bedroom, because Mrs Barton needed to bring her sewing machine back on to the table downstairs.
They said if only Eddie had a birthday in the summer they could all have gone up to Barna Woods. Eddie showed them some of the pressed flowers.
‘They’re beautiful,’ Nessa Ryan said.
Nessa never said anything nice just to please you. If Nessa Ryan said they were good then they must be.
‘You could even do that for a living,’ she added.
At ten they usually didn’t think as far ahead as that, but today there had been a talk on careers in school and an encouragement to think ahead and try to get trained for something rather than just gazing out the window and letting the time pass by.
‘How could I get trained to press flowers?’ Eddie was interested, but Nessa’s momentary enthusiasm had passed.
‘We’ll have another go at blow football,’ she said.
It had been Eddie’s birthday present. His one gift. He hadn’t really wanted it but his mother had heard from the Dunnes in the shop that it was what every child wanted this year and she had paid it off over five weeks. She was pleased the game was being used. Eddie secretly thought it was silly and tiring and that there was too much spit trying to blow a paper ball through paper tubes that got chewy and soggy.
When the party was over he stood at the door of the pink house in the moonlight and watched Leo skipping up the hill to her home. You could see the walls of The Glen from here. She waved when she reached the gate.
Nessa and Maura went downhill, Maura to the row of cottages where she lived. Eddie hoped that her father wouldn’t be drunk tonight. Sometimes Paudie Brennan fell around the town shouting and insulting people.
Nessa Ryan had run on ahead. She lived in Ryan’s Hotel. She could have anything she wanted to eat any time. She had told that to Eddie when he had explained about the cake and the apple tart. But there must have been something of an apology in his face because Nessa had said quickly that she didn’t get as much cake as she liked. It was really only chips and sandwiches.
The moon was shining brightly, even though it was only seven o’clock. His mother’s sewing machine was already whirring away. There she would sit surrounded by paper patterns and the big dummy which used to frighten him when he was a child, always draped with some nearly finished garment, as she listened to the radio. She would smile at him a lot, but when he came upon her alone he thought her face looked sad and tired. He wished she didn’t have to work so hard. And it would keep whirring until he slept. It had been like that as long as he remembered. Eddie wondered was his father looking at the moon somewhere. Did he remember his son was ten-years-old today?
That night Eddie wrote a letter to his father.
He told him about the day and the pressed flowers that Nessa Ryan had admired so much. Then he wondered would his father think that bit was sissy so he crossed it out. He told his father that there was a big wedding in the next town and that his mother had been asked to do not only the bride’s dress but the two bridesmaids and the mother and aunt of the bride as well. The whole church nearly would be dressed by Mrs Barton. And that his mother had said it came just in the nick of time because something needed to be done to the roof and there wasn’t enough money to pay for it.
Then he read that last bit again and wondered would his father think it was a complaint. He didn’t want to annoy him now that he had just found him.
With a jolt Eddie realised that he hadn’t found his father, he was only making it up. Still, it was kind of comforting. He crossed out the bit about the roof costing money and left in the good news about the wedding dresses. He told his father about the careers lecture at school and about there being lots of jobs for hard-working young fellows over in England when he got old enough. He thought that maybe his father might be in England. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if he met him by accident over there in a good job with prospects.
He wrote often that year. He told his father that Bernard Shaw had died, in case he might be somewhere where they didn’t get that kind of news. Mr Kelly at school had said he was a great writer but he had been a bit against the church. Eddie asked his father why people would be against the church.
His father didn’t answer, of course, because the letters were never sent. There was nowhere to send them to.
It wasn’t that Eddie was all that lonely and friendless. He did have friends, of course he did. He often went up to The Glen to play with Leo Murphy. They used to hit the ball across the net to each other on the tennis court, and Leo had a great swing on a big oak tree. She hadn’t known it was an oak tree until he told her and showed her the leaves and the acorns. It was extraordinary to have all those trees and still not know what they were.
Eddie often took oak leaves and traced around them. He loved the shape – there were so many more zig-zags than in the leaves of the plane trees, or the poplar. He liked the chestnut leaves too, and he never played the silly game that the others did at school – peeling away the green bits to see who could have the most perfect fillet, like a fish with no flesh, only bones. Eddie liked the texture of the leaves.
He didn’t write any of this to his father, but he did tell him when de Valera got back again and Nessa Ryan had said there had been a terrible shouting match one night in the hotel and they had to send for the guards because some people didn’t agree that it was great he was back. He went on writing and told a lot of fairly private things.
Still, he didn’t mention that he was afraid of someone proposing to him on his birthday when he was twelve. It seemed such a stupid thing to be afraid of. But Eddie had great fears of Eileen Dunne at school, who had a terribly loud laugh and about five brothers who would deal with him if he refused her.
‘You weren’t thinking of asking me to marry you on Friday, were you?’ he asked Leo hopefully. She had just raised her head from a book.
‘No,’ Leo said. ‘I was thinking about the King of England being dead and my father being all upset about it’
‘Would you?’ he asked.
‘Would I what? Be all upset?’
‘No. Ask me to marry you.’
‘Why should I? You never asked me to marry you.’
‘It’s the day, you see. It’s the day women can.’
‘Men can every other day of the year.’
Eddie had worked that out. ‘Suppose I asked you now, and we were engaged, then if anyone asked me on Friday I could say that I wasn’t free.’
He looked very worried. Leo wasn’t concentrating one bit. She was reading her book. She always had a book with her. This time it was Good Wives. It seemed a fine coincidence to Eddie.
‘What is it, Eddie?’
‘Just say yes. You don’t have to.’
‘Yes, then.’
Eddie was flooded with relief. He wasn’t having a party for his twelfth birthday, he was too old. He was getting a bicycle, a second-hand bicycle. His mother had told him he could cycle to school on the day. He thought he’d keep it until next day, he said. His mother looked at him affectionately. He was such a funny little thing, quirky and complicated but never a moment’s trouble to her, which was more than she could have hoped the day that bastard had left her doorstep.
People sometimes said it must be hard for her to bring a boy up
all on her own. But Una Barton thought they had a reasonable life together. Her son told her long rambling tales, he was interested in helping her cook what they ate and would dry the dishes dutifully. She wished there was more money or time to take him to the seaside or to Dublin to the zoo. But that wasn’t for their kind. That was for boys who had fathers that didn’t run away.
Eddie didn’t want to remind anyone it was his birthday, just in case Eileen Dunne might get it into her head, or Maura Brennan’s young sister Geraldine. But nobody seemed to have realised the opportunity they had of proposing to Eddie, or to anyone. They were far more interested in Father Barry, who had come to give them a talk about the missions and to show them a Missionary magazine which had competitions in it and a Pen-Friends Corner. There were people in every part of the world who wanted to exchange ideas with young Irish people, he said. They could have a great time writing to youngsters in different lands.
Father Barry was very nice. He seemed kind of dreamy when he spoke and he sometimes closed his eyes as if the place he was talking about was somehow nearer than the place where he was. Eddie liked that. He often thought about being out with trees and flowers when he should have been thinking about the sums on the blackboard. Father Barry pinned up the page with names of the boys and girls who wanted pen-friends. They could all speak English. They lived in far lands. One of them said he liked botany, flowers and plants. His name was Chris and he lived in Glasgow, Scotland.
‘That’s not very far to be writing,’ Niall Hayes said dismissively. He had picked a boy in Argentina.
‘There’s more chance he might write back if he’s not too far away,’ Eddie said.
‘That’s stupid,’ said Niall.
In his heart Eddie agreed that it was. Maybe the boy in Scotland wanted someone more exotic, not from a small town in Ireland. But the real reason he had picked Chris Taylor was that Scotland wouldn’t be too dear a stamp and because he had said he liked plant life. Eddie had always thought botany was a kind of wool. He checked with Miss Ross. He didn’t want to get involved in writing about knitting or sheep or anything. Not that a boy would like knitting. Miss Ross said botany was plants and things that grew.