Eddie had never kissed anyone in his life apart from fumbles at dances. He put his arms around Chris.
‘Welcome to Shancarrig,’ he said first, then he kissed her very gently. She clung to him.
‘I didn’t tell you about my foot,’ she said, her face working anxiously.
‘What about your foot?’ He forced himself not to look at it again to see how bad it was. Could she walk? Did it drag? His head was whirling.
‘I didn’t want you to pity me,’ she said.
‘Me? Pity you? You must be mad,’ he said.
‘I can walk and everything, and I can keep up. I’ll be able to see every bit of Barna Woods with you after tea.’
She looked very young and frightened. She must have been worried about this for ages, like he worried about the place not being as nice as he described.
‘I don’t know what you’re going on about,’ he tried to reassure her, but he knew it wasn’t working.
‘My leg, Eddie. I’ve got one shorter than the other, you see. I wear a special shoe.’
He could read how hard it was for her to say this. How often she must have rehearsed it. He urged himself to find the right words.
He looked down at her foot in its black shoe with the big thick raised sole and heel.
‘Does it hurt?’ he asked.
‘No, of course not, but it’s the way it looks.’
He took both her hands in his. ‘Chris, are you mad?’ he asked her. ‘Are you off your head? It’s me. It’s Eddie, your best friend. Your love. Do you think for a moment that it’s part of the bargain that our legs had to be the same length?’
It was, as it happened, exactly the right thing to say. Chris Taylor burst into tears and hugged Eddie to her as if she was never going to leave him go. ‘I love you, Eddie.’
‘I love you too. Come on, let’s go home.’ He carried her case and they walked to the gate of the station.
Chris was still wiping her eyes. Liam Dunne stood watching them.
‘Don’t mind him.’ He nodded in Eddie’s direction. ‘That fellow’s as thick as the wall. He’s always upsetting people and making them cry. There’s plenty of real men in Shancarrig.’
She gave him a bright smile.
‘I bet there are. I’ve come all the way from Scotland to investigate them.’ She tucked her arm into Eddie’s and they went out the gate.
Eddie felt ten feet tall.
‘Who was that?’ she whispered.
‘Liam Dunne. Desperate …’
‘Don’t tell me. I know all about him. The younger son, the one that’ll take over if Brian goes to England and the old man dies.’
‘You know it all,’ he said in wonder.
‘I feel like I’m coming home.’
As they walked up the road and he pointed out Ryan’s Hotel where he had sat waiting for the phone calls, and the church where Father Gunn waved to him cheerfully, the pubs and Nellie Dunne’s grocery, he knew that in many ways she had come home. He knew that he had been right, she was the centre of his life. It would be fine when he brought her home to his mother.
Afterwards nobody could ever tell you exactly how and why Chris Taylor came to live in Shancarrig. One day she had never been heard of and then the next there she was, as if she had been part of the place all her life.
If people asked Mrs Barton about her they were told that she was a marvellous girl altogether and a dab hand at the sewing. There was nothing she couldn’t turn her hand to. Look at the way she had made them go into furnishings, for example. Chris Taylor had loved the curtains and bedspread in her little room the day she arrived. Her praise was unstinting. Mrs Barton was a genius.
Eddie never thought of his mother’s dressmaking as anything except a way to make a living; he knew she didn’t particularly like some of the women whose dresses she made. He hadn’t realised that the work was artistic in itself.
Chris opened his eyes for him. ‘Look at the way the ribbon falls, look at the colours she’s put together … Eddie, it’s easy to see where you got your artistic sense from …’
His mother reddened with pleasure. There were no derisory remarks about his father. In fact, Chris was able to introduce the first reasonable conversation about the long-departed Ted Barton that had ever been held in this house.
‘I suppose he was a restless kind of a man. Better for him to be gone in a lot of ways.’
And to his surprise Eddie heard his mother agreeing. Things had really begun to change around here.
*
Chris was part of Shancarrig.
They knew her coming in and out of Dunnes to see Eddie or to give him a message, they knew her in the hotel where she became friendly with Nessa Ryan. No one ever spoke dismissively to Chris Taylor as people had been known to do to Eddie Barton. She talked furnishings and fabrics to Nessa’s mother. There was going to be a grant for the hotel to make it smarter, the kind of a place where tourist visitors might stay as well as commercial travellers.
They couldn’t stay in Ryan’s the way it was. Chris seemed to know the way it should be – pelmets, nice wooden pelmets covered in fabric, she had seen it all in an American magazine, you stuck the fabric to the plywood, and then the curtains draped properly down below. And, of course, bed covers to match.
Nessa Ryan and her mother were very excited.
‘How would we get it started? Would we need to call someone in from Dublin? Who’d do it?’
‘We would,’ Chris said simply.
‘We?’
‘Mrs Barton and I. Let us do one room as a sample and see.’
‘Wooden pelmets …? You couldn’t do that …?’
‘Eddie could, he could get the plywood. Liam Dunne could help him …’
The room was a huge success. The whole hotel would be done the same way. They had chosen a fabric which would tone in with Eddie’s pressed flowers, with his large bold designs, flowers from Barna Woods, a place in the locality, especially commissioned from a local artist.
‘You can’t call me a local artist,’ Eddie had protested.
‘You are local. You live here, don’t you?’ she said simply.
The plans were afoot. Chris and Eddie’s mother would be able to do it between them, but they needed someone to organise it, someone who would go and choose the right fabrics, someone with an eye for colour, someone whose pictures were already on the wall.
Flushed and happy Chris told Eddie the plan.
‘You can leave Dunne’s. We’ll have a business, all of us …’
‘I can’t leave … if we get married I have to support you.’
‘What’s this if? Are you changing your mind? I’ve come over here and lived with you, set myself up shamelessly in your house and you say “if”?’
‘I want to ask you something properly.’
‘Not here, Eddie. Let’s go up to the woods.’
Eddie’s mother stood by the window and watched the two of them walk together, the limping figure of this strange strong Scottish girl, the stocky figure of her own son, who had grown taller since Chris had arrived.
She knew nothing about the kind of family over in Scotland who let their daughter wander away to another land without seeming to care.
She cared little now about the past. Once she had lived in it and felt burdened by it, now she thought only about the future, the proposal that was going to be made in Barna Woods and accepted, the new life that was ahead of all of them.
DR JIMS
In Shancarrig they only knew him as Dr Blake for about six weeks. Then they all started to call him Dr Jims. It had to do with Maisie, of course. Maisie who couldn’t pronounce any name properly, not even one as ordinary as James. She had been asked to call Dr James to the telephone and in front of the whole waiting room she had said that Dr Jims was wanted. Somehow, the name had stuck. James Blake was too young a man to be given a full title, not while the great Dr Nolan held sway in Shancarrig.
Jims Blake got very accustomed to people asking for the real doctor when they
came to The Terrace, and if a call came in the night which Dr Jims answered, the gravest doubts were expressed. He learned to say that he was only holding the fort for the real doctor, and Dr Nolan would be along at a more convenient hour to give his approval.
But it was a good partnership – the wise old man who knew all the secrets of Shancarrig and the thin eager young man, son of a small farmer out the country. The old man who drank more brandy at night than was good for him and the young man who stayed up late reading the journals and reports … they lived together peaceably. They had Maisie doting on both of them and resenting the fact that people kept getting sick and needing to disturb the two men in her life, the great Dr Nolan and poor young Dr Jims.
*
Dr Nolan was always saying that Jims Blake should find a wife for himself and Maisie was always saying that there was plenty of time.
Matters came to a head in 1940 when Dr Nolan was seventy and Dr Jims was thirty. It had been a busy time. There was a baby to be delivered in almost every house around them. A little girl Leonora up at The Glen, a first daughter to the Ryans at the hotel, another Dunne to the cottages, a son for the wife of wild Ted Barton, another Brennan to add to Paudie’s brood.
Dr Jims would come back tired to the big house in The Terrace – the tall house, one of a line facing the hotel. It formed the centre of the town in a triangle with the row of shops. The bus stopped nearby and the movement of Shancarrig could be charted from any of the windows. Dr Jims’ work took him to the far outlying districts as well, but the centre of life remained this small area around the place where he lived.
Even though it was comfortable there were ways in which it was not a real life. Dr Nolan was able to put it into words. ‘I’m not going to let you make the same mistake as I did,’ the old man said. ‘A doctor needs a wife, really and truly. I had my chances and my choices in the old days, like you do now. But I was both too set and too easy in my ways. I didn’t want to disrupt everything by bringing a woman in. I didn’t really need a woman, I thought.’
‘And you didn’t either,’ Dr Jims encouraged him. ‘Didn’t you have a full life … where was there room for a wife? I’ve seen too many doctors’ wives neglected, left out … maybe the medical profession should take a vow of celibacy, like the clerics. It might be something we could bring up at the Irish Medical Association.’
‘Don’t make a jeer out of it, Jims. I’m serious.’
‘So am I. How could I marry? Where would I get the stake for a house? I still send a bit home to the farm. You know that. I have to be averting my eyes for a bit, in case I think I might want a wife.’
‘And who are you averting them from?’ The old man drank his brandy, looking deep into the glass and not at his partner.
‘Not anybody in particular.’
‘But Frances Fitzgerald, maybe?’
‘Ah, come on out of that. What could I offer Frances Fitzgerald?’
But Jims Blake knew that the old man had seen through him. He most desperately wanted to advance things with Frances, to go further than the games of tennis with other people present, the card evenings at The Glen or in Ryan’s Hotel.
He’d hoped it hadn’t been as transparent to other people.
Yet again Dr Nolan seemed to read his mind.
‘Nobody would know but myself,’ he said reassuringly. ‘And you could offer her half a house here.’
‘It’s your house.’
‘I won’t be here for ever. It’s taking more of this stuff to ease the pain in my gut.’ He raised his brandy glass to show what he was referring to.
‘The pain in your gut would be less if you had less of that stuff.’
‘So you say, with the arrogance of youth … We’ll get the top two floors done up for you. The Dunnes can come in on Monday and lean on their picks and shovels and we’ll see what they can do. Frances will want her own kitchen … she won’t want Maisie traipsing around after her.’
‘Charles, I can’t … we don’t even know if Frances is interested …’
‘We do,’ said Dr Nolan.
Jims Blake didn’t even wait to let that sink in.
‘But I can’t afford …’ he began.
Charles Nolan’s face winced with pain and anger. ‘Stop being such a defeatist, such a sniveller … I can’t this, I can’t that … Is that how you made yourself a doctor …?’
His face was red now proving his point.
‘Listen here to me, Jims Blake, why do you think I took you on here? Think about it. It wasn’t for your great moneyed connections and class. No. I took you on because you were a fighter, and a dogged little fellow. I liked your thin white face and your determination. I liked the way you forced them to let you study, and took jobs to make up the extra money that they couldn’t give you. That’s what people need in a doctor – someone who won’t quit.’
‘I could pay you so much a month for it, I suppose. I could take on more of the work.’
‘Boy, aren’t you doing almost all the work already. I’m only giving you what’s fair …’
And it was settled like that. Dr Jims was to have the upstairs part of the house. Everyone said it was very sensible. After all, Dr Nolan wasn’t getting any younger. Wasn’t it sensible that a bedroom be built for him on the ground floor?
Maisie sniffed a bit, especially since it became known that Dr Jims was now courting Miss Fitzgerald.
The Dunne brothers were in regularly, wondering should the kitchen be facing the front or the back of the house. It might be good to have it looking out on the town. There was a nice view of Shancarrig from upstairs in The Terrace. But then, traditionally a kitchen was at the back. They puzzled at it.
Before they came to any solution their work was rendered unnecessary. Dr Charles Nolan died of the liver complaint he had been ignoring for some years, and he willed his house to his partner Dr Blake.
Before he died he spoke of it to Jims. ‘You’re a good lad. You’ll keep it all going fine here, if only you’d learn to …’
‘You’ve got years yet. Stop making a farewell speech,’ Jims Blake said to the dying man.
‘What I was going to say, if only you’d learn that there are people, myself included, who are quite glad to be coming to the end of their lives, who don’t want to be told that there are years of pain and confusion ahead of them …’
Jims held his partner’s hand – it was a simple gesture of solidarity where no words would have worked.
‘That’s more like it,’ said Dr Nolan. ‘Now, will you promise me to have a family and a real life for yourself? Don’t be forced to leave this place to some whippersnapper of a junior partner, like I am!’
‘You can’t leave it all to me …’ He was aghast.
‘I was hoping to leave it to Frances as well. Tell me you’ve made some move in that direction …’
‘Yes. We were hoping to marry …’ His voice choked, realising that his benefactor wouldn’t now be at the wedding.
‘That’s good, very good. I’m tired now. Get me into hospital tomorrow, Jims. I don’t want to die in the house where she’s coming as a bride.’
‘It’s your house. Die wherever you want to,’ Jims blazed at him.
The old man smiled. ‘I like to hear you talk that way. And where I would like to die is the hospital. Tell that young Father Gunn to come up there to me, not to be upsetting Maisie by coming here. And move that brandy bottle back to my reach.’
It didn’t take Shancarrig long to recognise Dr Jims as the real doctor. Everything had changed. There was no old Dr Nolan any more to know their secrets so they told them to Dr Jims instead. He was a married man now, of course, and his wife a very gentle person – one of the Fitzgeralds who owned a big milling business.
It had been a good match – that’s what outsiders thought. But they only knew the surface. They didn’t know about passion and love and understanding. Frances, with her gentle solemn face transformed so often with a quick smile that lit up her whole being, was a wife
that he never dreamed possible.
She would creep up behind him and lock her arms around his neck. She would feed him pieces of food from her plate when Maisie wasn’t looking. When he was called out at night Frances sometimes left a note on his pillow saying, ‘Wake me up. I want to welcome you home properly.’ In every way she made him grow in confidence. Jims Blake walked with a lighter step and a smile in his eyes.
The fact that Dr Nolan had left him the house made Dr Jims even more respected in the community. If the old doctor had thought so much of him then this must be a good man. Sometimes Jims Blake felt unworthy of all the respect he got in Shancarrig.
When he visited his dour family on their small bleak farm and saw the lifestyle that he would have been condemned to had he not fought so hard to study medicine, he felt guilty. He was saddened that they had so little, and even the money he gave them was stored under a mattress, not used to buy his mother and father a better standard of life.
He had tried to explain this guilt to Frances but she calmed him down. He had done everything he could for the family. Surely that was as much as anyone was expected to do – he couldn’t do any more.
Frances said that they were a family now she and Jims and the baby they were expecting. There was no tie that bound them to the bleak family of Blakes in the small wet farm, or the distant, undemonstrative Fitzgeralds wrapped up in their business affairs. They were a little unit in themselves.
And so it was for a while.
Jims often thought that the spirit of old Dr Nolan would have been pleased to hear the way that Number Three The Terrace rang with laughter. First Eileen was born, then Sheila. No son and heir yet, but as people said, God would send the boy in his own good time.
There were many attempts for the boy – all ending in miscarriage.
Frances Blake was a frail woman – the efforts to hold a child to full term were taking a great toll on her health.
Several times Jims asked himself what would the old doctor have advised if he had been involved in a family where this had been the situation. He could almost hear Dr Nolan’s voice.