It hadn’t been a happy encounter.
‘I told him that other boys had fathers who could pay for this kind of thing, but that we weren’t in the lucky position to know where your father is or has been for the last dozen years.’ Her face had that old bitter look which Eddie hated.
‘Ma, you threw him out. You asked him to go. You can’t keep blaming him for everything after he went, only for what he did before he went.’
‘And that was plenty for one lifetime, let me assure you.’
‘You always assure me these things but you never explain them.’
‘Oh, you’ve words at will, just like him.’
‘And was Brother O’Brien sympathetic? I bet he wasn’t. He couldn’t care about anyone’s father, or mother, or anyone at all.’
His mother gave him an odd look.
‘He wasn’t sympathetic. Neither to you nor to me. But I think he does care about people. He said there was no point in my lamenting the absence of a husband, that it was mainly women who did all the consulting whether their husbands were alive or around or whatever.’
‘And what else?’
‘He said that you had got it into your head you were too good for the school, above them and their plain ways. And that would have been fine if you were a real artist burning to paint or to write, but the way things were he didn’t know what would become of you. He sounded sorry.’
To Eddie it had the ring of truth. That was exactly the way Brother O’Brien would speak, and there was some truth in it. He could see the big man with his red face regretting that he couldn’t find a place for the boy. Brother O’Brien loved his boys to get into banks and insurance offices, the Civil Service, and the very odd time even into a university.
There would be nowhere for Eddie Barton.
If he hadn’t had his lifeline of letters to hold him together as support and strength Eddie would have been very depressed that summer. But Chris wrote every day. She said they must get themselves out of this situation. She would not work in a factory like her mother, nor would she train to be a florist.
They had begun to talk of love now, they ended each letter with more and more yearning and wishes that they could meet. Eddie said that perhaps he had made Shancarrig sound too attractive. Maybe they could meet in some foreign land where there would be warm winds and palm trees. Chris said that nobody could love anybody if they met in the grey streets around her home. She was all for somewhere exotic too.
The world of fantasy became an important part of their letter-writing. It almost took over from the practical side. Chris Taylor went to work in a department store in Glasgow. She hated it, she said. It was very tiring. Her legs ached more than usual. Eddie wrote and asked did her legs usually ache, she had never mentioned it before. But she didn’t mention it again so he thought it must have been just a phrase.
Eddie Barton went to work in Dunne’s Hardware. He hated it. He wrote to Chris about the days talking to farmers who came in to buy chicken wire and plough parts. He said he was sick of harrows and rakes and if he had to talk about linseed oil or red oxide for painting a barn again he thought he might actually lie down and die. He wrote about how ignorant the Dunnes were. Their aunt, Nellie Dunne, ran a small grocery shop and she gave people credit which was the only reason why anyone shopped there. Eddie worked for old Mr Dunne and his sons Brian and Liam. Eileen, who was his own age, worked in Ryan’s Hotel, but was always giving him the eye when she came in.
‘I tell you this …’ he wrote to Chris, ‘not to make myself sound great or to make you jealous, but to remind myself how lucky I am that stupid girls like Eileen with her forward pushy ways form no part of my life now that I know what love is. Now that I have you.’
Sometimes she wrote about going to a dance, but she said she sat in a seat on the balcony most of the time and thought about what he had said in his last letter.
Sometimes Nessa Ryan and Leo Murphy came into the shop to talk to him. The Dunnes never minded him talking to them because they were as near to the Quality as Shancarrig possessed. If Maura Brennan came in, or anyone else from the cottages, it would be different. But old Mr Dunne seemed to take positive pleasure out of a visit from young Miss Ryan of the hotel and young Miss Murphy from The Glen.
‘And how goes the good Major?’ he would ask Leo about her father.
‘Talking to himself as usual,’ Leo muttered once and they all giggled.
Mr Dunne didn’t like such disrespect.
‘And how are they all in Ireland’s leading hostelry?’ he would ask Nessa Ryan about her family’s hotel.
Nessa always said it was doing fine thank you.
Eddie wrote to Chris about how strained and worried Leo Murphy looked when she should have had no worries in the world. She had got six honours in her Leaving Certificate. She had all the money in the world; she could have gone to university in Cork or Galway or Dublin, yet she always seemed to be biting her lip.
Chris wrote back and said you never knew what worries people had. Perhaps Leo wasn’t well, maybe it was her health. What did she look like? In shame Eddie wrote and said that Leo looked like him, or rather, the pictures he had sent of him when he was meant to be a girl were of Leo.
‘She’s very good-looking,’ Chris wrote back anxiously.
‘I never noticed it,’ he wrote. ‘Perhaps I should have stayed a girl.’
‘No. You’re lovely as you are,’ she said in the next letter.
They knew that they must talk. Neither household had a phone but Chris could use the public phone and Eddie could be in Ryan’s Hotel waiting for the call. They rehearsed it in letters for some weeks.
‘We mightn’t like each other’s voices,’ Chris wrote. ‘But it’s important to remember that we like each other so the voice doesn’t matter.’
‘What do you mean we like each other?’ wrote Eddie. ‘We love each other. That’s what we must remember on Saturday night.’
They made it Saturday so that they could look forward to it all week.
He dressed himself up and put on a clean shirt.
‘On the town again I suppose.’ His mother hardly seemed to look up but she had taken in that he was smartly turned out.
‘Aw, no, Mam. There’s nowhere much to go on the town in Shancarrig.’
‘Well, where are you going if I might ask?’ Her tone wasn’t as sharp as the words. She was aching to know.
‘Just down to Ryan’s Hotel, Mam, for a cup of coffee.’
‘Eddie …?’
‘Yes, Mam.’
‘Eddie, I know I’m nagging you but you won’t …’
‘Mam, I told you I don’t drink. I didn’t like the smell of it or the taste of it the once I tried.’
‘I don’t mean drink.’ She looked him up and down, a boy setting out for a date, for romance.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You wouldn’t get involved with that Eileen Dunne, now would you? They’d be bad people to get on the wrong side of …’
‘Who are you telling! Don’t I work for them?’
‘But Eileen …?’
He knelt beside his mother and looked up into her face.
‘If she were the last woman in Ireland I wouldn’t want her.’
Anyone would have known that he was speaking the truth. Eddie’s mother waved him off with a lighter heart.
Chris was to ring at eight. Eddie positioned himself in the hall. The telephone would ring at the reception desk, then whoever was on duty would look around and say, ‘Eddie Barton, I don’t know … oh yes, there he is,’ and she’d motion Eddie to go into the booth. Then he would speak to her. To the girl he loved.
Another good thing about it being a Saturday was that awful Eileen Dunne wouldn’t be working at the desk. She was in the dining room on Saturdays, her dress tight across the bottom and the bosom, and a small white apron making no attempt to cover her at all.
Eddie’s heart was beating so strongly it reminded him of the big clock in Shancarrig school an
d the thudding sounds it made as the seconds ticked on.
Soon, soon. Ten minutes. Nine.
He jumped a foot in the air when he heard the phone ring. He hadn’t noticed that Eileen Dunne was working at Reception tonight. Please may she not make any remark, may she not say something stupid that Chris would hear all the way away in Scotland.
‘Yes, he’s here. Hold on. Edd … ie?’
He was at the desk.
‘Yes?’
‘There’s someone on the phone for you. Will you take it here at the desk? God, you’re looking like a dog’s dinner tonight.’
‘I’ll go into the box,’ he said, his face red with fury.
‘Right. Hold on till I get this bloody thing through. There’s more plugs and wires than a hedgehog’s backside. Are you going in to town to the dance?’
He ran in to the dark phone booth, his hands trembling. Damn Eileen Dunne to hell. Please may Chris not have heard.
‘Hello?’ he said tentatively.
It must be the Scottish telephone operator on the line. He could hardly understand her. She was saying something about difficulty in getting through.
‘Can you put me on to Chris, please?’ He knew his voice was shaky but it had been a bit of luck that she hadn’t come straight through. She wouldn’t have heard that stupid stupid Eileen. Any moment she’d talk to him.
‘This is Chris,’ he managed to decipher from the strange speech. ‘Do you mean you canna hear me?’
It wasn’t Chris’s voice. It was like someone imitating a Scottish comedian. Every word was canna and wouldna.
‘That’s never you, not you yourself, Chris?’ he said. She must be playing a joke.
‘Och, Eddie, stop putting on that Irish blarney bit. You’re like the fellows they have at Christmas concerts in the church, with their afther doing this and afther doing that.’
There was silence. They realised that neither of them was putting on an act. This is the way they were. The silence was broken by their laughter.
‘Oh God, Eddie … I forgot. I had you talking normally in my mind.’
His heart was full of love. This strange way she spoke didn’t matter a bit. ‘I thought you’d be like a real person too,’ he said.
Then it was back to the way they were in letters. Until the three minutes ran out.
‘I love you, Chris, more than ever.’
‘And I love you too,’ she said.
*
They lived for Saturdays, and yet as they wrote to each other the phone calls were never as good as they expected. Sometimes they literally didn’t understand what the other was saying and they wasted precious time explaining.
They were desperate to meet. The time was very long.
‘We’d better meet soon before we’re too old to recognise each other,’ she wrote.
‘While we still remember what we wrote to each other.’
They each kept their letters in shoe boxes. It seemed a small thing but a bond … another bond. Yet they hesitated each to ask the other to their town. Eddie couldn’t bear the explanations, the doing up of the spare room, the questioning from his mother, the eyes of Shancarrig.
Chris said that if he had found it hard to understand her voice then her family and her neighbours in Glasgow would be incomprehensible.
She obviously yearned for Barna Woods and the hill with the big rock on it, the rock that gave its name to the town. She wanted to see Eddie’s pink house and meet his mother.
He wanted her here and he didn’t want her. He wanted to leave Shancarrig for ever, and yet he couldn’t. One man had left his mother already, Eddie couldn’t go.
Then at last he heard himself inviting her. He didn’t really intend to, it just came out.
It had been a long hard day in Dunne’s when nothing had gone right. Old Mr Dunne was like a devil, Liam had been scornful, Brian had been giving him orders, and to make matters worse their cousin Foxy who had been in Eddie’s class at school had come back for a visit.
Foxy worked on the buildings in England. He was doing well by all accounts. He had started by making billycans of tea for Irishmen working on the lump, building the big roads over in Britain. He came home every year, eyes bright and darting around him as usual.
Normally Eddie was pleased to see Foxy, he had a quick wit and was always ready with a joke.
Today it hadn’t been like that. ‘Don’t let him speak to you like that,’ Foxy said to Eddie when Mr Dunne had called him an ignorant bosthoon.
‘Fine words, Foxy. He’s only an uncle to you, but he pays my week’s wages.’
‘Still and all, you’re letting him walk over you. You’ll be here for the rest of your life with a shop coat on you stuck behind a counter.’
‘And what are you going to be?’ Eddie had flared back.
‘I’ve got the hell out of here. I wouldn’t sit here listening to my uncle mumbling and bumbling, and my Aunt Nellie letting people run up bad debts because they’re Quality. I’m in England and I’ll make a pile of money. And then I’ll come back and marry Leo Murphy.’
It was the longest speech that Foxy had ever made. Eddie had been surprised.
‘And will Leo marry you?’
‘Not now, she won’t. Not the way I am. No one would marry either of us, Eddie. We’re eejits. We have only one good suit each with an arse in the trousers of it. We have to do something with our lives instead of standing round here like fools. What class of a woman would want the likes of us?’
‘I don’t know. We might have a charm of our own.’ Eddie was being light-hearted but he felt that Foxy was right.
Foxy turned away impatiently. ‘I can see you in twenty years still saying that, Eddie. This place makes us all slow and stupid. It’s like a muddy river dragging us down.’
Eddie had been thinking about it all day. He didn’t dress up for the phone call that night. It was his turn to call the Glasgow phone box.
‘Come over to Ireland. Come to Shancarrig,’ he said when Chris answered the phone.
‘When? When will I come?’
‘As soon as you can. I’m sick of being without you,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing at all else in my life except you.’
Their letters changed tone. It was confident now. It was ‘when’ not ‘if’. It was definite. The love was there, the need, the surprise that one other person could feel exactly the same about everything as another.
There were the details.
Chris would take her two weeks’ holidays from the flower shop. Eddie could take his two weeks off from Dunne’s. She would get the boat from Stranraer to Larne, and the train to Belfast maybe?
‘Will I come to meet you there? I’ve never been to the North of Ireland. It’ll be familiar to you, red buses, red pillar boxes. Like England.’
‘Like Scotland,’ she corrected him. She had never been to England in her life.
Or would she take a train to Wales, and get the boat from Holyhead? Maybe that would be a nicer way to go. She could see Dun Laoghaire and a bit of Dublin before taking the train to Shancarrig.
‘I don’t want you wandering around on your own, meeting Dublin fellows. I’ll come and meet you off the boat,’ he suggested.
Chris said no, she wanted to arrive in Shancarrig on the train herself. She knew about the station, and the flowers that now spelt out the word Shancarrig. He had written that long ago to her.
Eddie could be on the platform.
He prayed that it would be a fine fortnight, that the sun would shine into Barna Woods between the branches, that there would be a sparkle on the River Grane. He knew you shouldn’t pray for something bad to happen to another human but he hoped that somehow Eileen Dunne would be in hospital when Chris arrived, and that Nessa Ryan wouldn’t be superior towards him, and that he’d be free of Brian and Liam Dunne and their bad-tempered father because he was on holidays.
He hoped most of all that his mother would be nice to Chris. They had never had anyone to stay, and Eddie had distempered the wall
s, and painted the woodwork in the small stuffy room they had called a box room up to now. His mother had been curiously quiet.
‘What kind of a girl is she?’ was all she had asked.
‘A girl I write to, I write to her a lot. I like her through the post and on the telephone. I’ve asked her to come over here so that … well, so that I wouldn’t be the one going off on you.’
His mother looked away so that he wouldn’t see the look of gratitude in her face. But he saw all the same.
‘I’ll make curtains for the room,’ she said.
Please let them like each other.
They had got ham for tea, cooked ham and tomatoes, and a Fullers chocolate cake with four chocolate buttons on the top.
His mother had cleared the sewing away so that the place would look like a normal house. There were blue curtains on the window of the box room, and a matching bedspread. On the makeshift dressing table there was a little blue cloth and Eddie had gathered a bunch of flowers.
It was nearly time. The train would be in at three. Only four hours. Three. Two. It was time.
Liam Dunne was on the platform; there was a delivery coming down with the guard on the train.
‘What are you doing?’ Liam asked. ‘Aren’t you meant to be on your holidays? If you’re doing nothing you could give me a hand …?’
‘I most definitely am on my holidays and I’m meeting a friend,’ Eddie said firmly.
The train whistled and came around the corner. She got off. She carried a big suitcase, square with little firm bits over the corners like leather triangles to preserve it.
She had a red jacket and a navy skirt, a navy shoulder bag and a huge bright smile.
He had been afraid for a moment that she might think Liam Dunne was him. Liam was taller and good-looking in a rangy sort of way. Eddie felt like a barrel. He wished his spine would shoot up and make him willowy.
He started to walk towards her and saw her foot. Chris Taylor had a big built-up shoe. He willed his eyes away from it, and on to her smiling eager face.
Liam was busy with the guard, hauling things from the luggage van, and nobody was watching them.