People in Shancarrig had long grown accustomed to the fact that Mrs Murphy never came down to the shops. There were accounts in the shops and the delivery boys who called on bicycles always got a friendly wave from the mistress of The Glen. They would deal with Biddy the maid, or with the Major himself.
But this summer there was something different about Miriam. A vacancy in her eyes that was more than disturbing. And a cautious protective look in Frank’s that hadn’t been there before. Charles Nolan had told him often enough about families who guarded their secrets, who kept their unstable people hidden. Often it was better not to pry.
Jims Blake wondered what old Charles would have made of the situation in The Glen. Not only was the Major in a state of distress, but their daughter Leo, who had been such a close friend of his daughters, had also begun to show signs of strain. He met the girl when driving past Barna Woods.
‘Do you want a lift back up to the house, Leo?’
‘Are you going that way?’
‘A car goes whatever way you point it.’
‘Thanks, Doctor.’
‘Have you lots of new friends for yourself this summer, Leo?’
She was surprised. No, it turned out she hadn’t any. Why did he ask? Without putting his own children in the role of complainers he hinted that she hadn’t been around.
‘We went on a bit of a holiday, you see, to the seaside.’
That was true. He had heard Bill Hayes say that the Major had packed dogs and all into the car and driven off without warning.
‘Ah, but you’re back now, and still no one ever sees you. I thought you’d gone off with the gypsies.’ They had just driven in the gate of The Glen as he said this. She looked at him, as white as a sheet. ‘It’s all right, Leo. I was only joking.’
‘I hate jokes about the gypsies,’ she said.
He wondered had they frightened her in the woods. Dark, suspicious and always on guard, they had given him a pheasant once, when he had delivered a child for them. Unsmiling and proud they had handed him the bird, wrapped in grass, to thank him for the skill they hadn’t sought, but had used because he was passing near during a difficult birth.
The Major appeared at the door. ‘I won’t ask you in,’ he said.
‘No, no.’ His reputation as a discreet man who could be told anything rested on ending conversations when others wanted to. He never probed a step further, but his face was always open and ready to hear when others wanted to tell.
His son Declan never wanted to tell anything.
‘Will you like being at the school do you think, Declan?’
‘I won’t know, not really, until I get there.’
Had there ever been a boy so pedantic, so unwilling to talk?
Maisie wanted to know had he settled in? Was the bed aired? Were there any other boys from this part of the world there?
Dr Jims Blake could answer none of this. His only memory was his son’s hand waving goodbye. He wasn’t clinging, like one or two other lads were, loath to leave mothers go. Nor was he chatting and making friends as some of the more outgoing boys seemed to be doing.
They had to write letters home every Sunday. Declan wrote of saints’ days, and walks, and doing a play, making a relief map. Jims Blake knew that these letters were supervised by the priests, that they were intended to give a good impression of the school and all its activities. Sometimes the letter lay unopened on the hall table along with the advertising literature from pharmaceutical companies that was sent to all doctors on a mailing list.
Declan didn’t write to Eileen, now in a hostel in Dublin while she studied architecture in University College. He didn’t write to Sheila, now nursing in one of Dublin’s best hospitals. He sent a birthday card to Maisie, but they knew very little about his world at school.
The reports said that he was satisfactory, his marks were average, his place in the class was in the top end of the lower half.
His school holidays seemed long and formless. The doctor got the impression that he was dying to be back at school.
‘Would you like to ask any of your friends to stay?’
‘Here?’ Declan had been surprised.
‘Well, there’s plenty of room. They might like it.’
‘What would they do, Daddy?’
‘I don’t know. Whatever they do, whatever you do anywhere.’ He was irritated now. It was this habit of answering one question with another that he found hard to take.
It never came to anything, that suggestion. Nor the invitation to go to Dublin.
‘What would I do in Dublin for two days?’
‘What does anyone do in Dublin? We could see your sisters, take them out to lunch. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’ He realised he sounded as if he was talking to a five-year-old, not a boy of fifteen. A boy who had grown apart from Eileen, now nearly qualified as an architect, from Sheila, now almost a qualified nurse.
The visit never happened. Neither did the outing to the Galway races, which had been long spoken of as a reward when Declan’s Leaving Certificate was over.
Jims Blake said he could put his hand on his heart and swear that he had made every move to try and get close to his son, and that at every turn he was repelled.
It wasn’t a thing that he would normally talk to another man about, but he did mention it to Bill Hayes. ‘Do you find it like ploughing a hard field trying to get a word out of your fellow, Niall, or does he talk to you?’
‘Niall would talk to the birds in the trees if he thought they’d listen. He has a yarn for every moment of the day. Not much knack of dealing with clients, though.’
Bill Hayes shook his head gloomily. His son too seemed a slight disappointment to him. Although a qualified solicitor he showed no signs of being able to attract new business or, indeed, cope with the business that was already there.
‘And does he talk to you?’ Dr Jims persisted.
‘When he can get me to listen, which isn’t often. I don’t want to hear rambling tales about the mountains and the lakes when he goes out to make some farmer’s will for him. I want to hear that it’s been done properly, the man’s affairs are settled and everything’s in order.’
Dr Jims sighed. ‘With me it’s just the opposite. I can’t even get him to talk about enrolling up at the university. He keeps making excuses.’
‘Talk to him at a meal. Don’t serve him until he answers your question … That’ll get an answer out of him. Boys love their food.’
Jims Blake was ashamed to say why this wouldn’t work, to admit that his son still ate meals in the kitchen with Maisie, out of habit, out of tradition. No point in laying up two places in the dining room. Who knew when the poor doctor would have to be called out?
But the summer of 1964 was moving on. Arrangements would have to be made, fees must be paid, places in the Medical School reserved, living quarters booked.
‘Declan? No one would ever think we lived in the same house, lad …’
‘I’m always here,’ the boy said. It wasn’t mutinous or defensive, it was said as a simple fact.
Jims Blake was annoyed by it.
‘I’m always here too,’ he said. ‘Except when I’m out working, as you will be.’
‘I’m not going to do medicine, Dad.’
Somehow, it came as no surprise. He must have been expecting it.
‘When did you decide against it?’ His voice was cold.
‘I never decided for it, it was only in your mind. It wasn’t in mine.’
They talked like strangers, polite but firm.
Declan would like to join an auctioneering firm. His friend Vinnie O’Neill’s father would take him on. He’d like the life. It was the kind of thing that appealed to him, looking at places, showing them to customers. He was good at talking to people, telling them the good points of a place. There’d be a very good living in it for him. Vinnie was going off to be a priest. There was no other boy in the family, only girls. Mr O’Neill liked him, got on well with him.
/> Jims Blake listened bleakly to the story of a man he didn’t know, a man called Gerry O’Neill, whose estate agent’s signs he had seen around the place. A man who got on well with Declan Blake and regarded him as a kind of son now that his own was going to enter the priesthood. Silently he accepted the plans, plans that involved Declan going to live in the big town. He could have Vinnie’s room, apparently. It would be easier to have him on the spot, and the sooner the better.
Vinnie was going to the seminary next week. Declan thought he’d move in at the weekend.
Jims Blake heard that Maisie wouldn’t miss him because so much of her life was now centred around the church. And she had got used to him being away at school.
‘And what about me?’ Jims Blake said. ‘What about my missing you?’
‘Aw, Dad, you’re your own person. You wouldn’t miss me.’
It was said with total sincerity, and when the boy realised that there actually was loneliness in his father’s face, he seemed distressed.
‘But even if I were going to be doing medicine wouldn’t I be away all the time?’
‘You’d be coming back to help me in the practice, and take over. That’s what I thought.’
There was a silence. A long silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ Declan said.
Later Jims wondered should he have put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. Should he have made some gesture to apologise for the coldness and distance of eighteen years, to hope that the next years would be better. But he shrugged. ‘You must do as you want to,’ he said. And then he heard himself saying, ‘It’s what you’ve always done.’
He knew it was the most final goodbye he could ever have said.
Sometimes when he was in the town Jims Blake called in to O’Neill’s. Like someone probing a sore tooth he was anxious to see the man and the home where Declan Blake felt he belonged. Gerry O’Neill, a florid man with a fund of anecdotes about people and places, regarded himself as a great raconteur. Jims Blake found him boring and opinionated. He sat and watched unbelievingly while the man’s wife and daughters and Declan laughed and encouraged him in these tales.
The eldest girl was Ruth, a good-looking girl, her Daddy’s pet. She was doing a commercial course in the local secretarial college so that she could help in the business. They talked of O’Neill’s Auctioneers as if it was a long-established and widely respected family firm, instead of a Mickey Mouse operation set up by Gerry O’Neill himself on the basis of being a fast talker.
‘Invite Ruth to The Terrace some time, won’t you?’ Jims asked his son.
He could see that Declan was very attracted to the dark-eyed girl in his new family.
‘I don’t think so …’
‘I’m not asking you to live there, I’m just asking you to bring the girl to Sunday lunch, for God’s sake.’ Again, the harsh ungracious words that he didn’t mean to speak. His son looked taken aback.
‘Yes, well. Of course … some time.’
Jims Blake contemplated getting an assistant. He realised now how the lonely old Charles Nolan must have relished him coming to stay in that house all those years ago. How he had felt able to will him the place, as well as the practice. Jims had thought the same thing would have happened with Declan. He had foreseen evenings like he had had with Charles, discussing articles in the Lancet and the Irish Medical Times, wondering about a new cure-all cream with apparently magical qualities that had come from one of the drug firms.
There was a phone call every week from Sheila in her Dublin hospital, and a letter every week from Eileen, now working in an architect’s practice in England.
He had almost forgotten what Frances had looked like, or felt like in his arms. He should not have felt like an old man, after all he was only in his late fifties, yet he had the distinct feeling that his life, such as it was, was over.
Declan did bring Ruth to lunch eventually. And the girl chattered easily and eagerly, as she did in her own home. She asked questions, seemed interested in the answers. She asked Maisie about doing the flowers for the altar. Maisie said she was a girl of great breeding, and that Declan was very lucky to have met her and not some foolish fast girl, like he might well have met in the town.
On her third visit she took the initiative and leaned over to kiss him goodbye.
‘Thank you, Dr Jims,’ she said. She smelled of Knight’s Castile soap, fresh and lovely. He was not surprised his son was so taken by her.
He was horrified when he saw Declan some weeks later. The boy arrived on a Thursday afternoon, Maisie’s half day. He was ashen white, but the circles under his eyes were deep purple shadows.
He paced the house until the last patient left. ‘Will there be any more?’
‘I have to go out the country. One of Carrie’s brothers. Do you remember Carrie?’
‘Of course I do. Can I come with you?’
Somehow Jims Blake found the right silences and didn’t choose the wrong words. He didn’t ask what had the boy out on a working day, and looking so terrible. Instead he smiled and opened the hall door for him. They walked together to the car, father and son, down the steps of Number Three The Terrace, as he had always wanted to walk with a son.
They talked of nothing during the drive out to the farm where one of Carrie’s brothers had impaled himself on yet another piece of rusting machinery. Declan watched wordlessly as his father cleaned the wound and stitched it.
The talk came on the way back.
They stopped under the shadow of the Old Rock, the big craggy monument from which Shancarrig took its name. They walked a little in the crisp afternoon with the shadows of the trees lengthening.
Jims Blake heard the story. The terrible tale of a boy invited into a good man’s house. How Gerry O’Neill would lie down dead when he knew Ruth was pregnant. How her brother Vinnie, studying to be a priest, would never forgive such a betrayal.
The boy had not slept or eaten for a week, and presumably neither had the girl. It was the end of the road. Declan wanted them to run away, but Ruth wouldn’t go, and in his saner moments he realised that she was right.
‘You realise how bad things are, if I had to tell you,’ he said to his father.
Jims Blake bit back the retort. At another time he might have made the remark that would drive the boy back into the shell from which he had painfully dragged himself. He didn’t ask what Declan wanted of him. He knew that Declan himself barely knew. So instead he did what he had been intending to do all his life, he put his arm around his son’s shoulder.
He pretended not to notice the flinching in surprise. ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he said. His voice was calm, almost cheerful. He could feel his son’s shoulders relaxing under his arm. ‘I have this friend up in Dublin, we did our training together. He’s in gynaecology and obstetrics. A specialist now. Quite a well-known man … I’ll recommend that young Ruth go to see him for a D and C … Oh, don’t worry, these names are always very alarming. It’s called a dilatation and curettage, just an examination under anaesthetic of the neck of the womb. Clears up any disorders. A lot of girls have them …’
Declan turned to look at him.
‘Is that …? I mean is that the same as …?’
Jims Blake had decided how to play it. ‘As I was saying to you, there’s no knowing what names all these things go by, the main thing is that Ruth will go in there and be out in a day or two and it can all go through this house and this address without having to bother anyone else.’
They walked back to the car and drove to Shancarrig. The mood was not broken.
His son came in to Number Three The Terrace and sat with him as they lit a fire, because the evening was getting chilly. Declan had a small brandy and some of the colour had returned to his face.
Jims Blake remembered how old Dr Nolan had often said to him that the ways of the world were stranger than anyone would ever believe. Dr Jims Blake agreed with him as he sat there and realised that the only companionable evening he had ever had
with his son was the evening he had arranged to abort his own grandchild.
NORA KELLY
Nora and Jim Kelly had no pictures of their wedding. The cousin with the camera had been unreliable. There was something wrong with the film, he told them afterwards.
It didn’t matter, they told him.
But to Nora it did. There was nothing to mark the day their marriage began. It hadn’t been a very fancy wedding. During the Emergency of course people didn’t go in for big flashy do’s, not even people with more class and style than Nora and Jim. But theirs had been particularly quiet.
It took place in Lent, because they wanted to have a honeymoon in the Easter Holidays, the two young teachers starting out life together. Nora’s mother had been tight-lipped. A Lenten wedding often meant one thing and one thing only, that the privileges of matrimony had been anticipated and that an unexpected pregnancy had resulted.
But this was not the case, Nora and Jim had anticipated nothing. And the pregnancy that her mother feared might disgrace the whole family did not result, even after many years of marriage.
Month after month Nora Kelly reported to her husband that there was no reason to hope for a conception this time either. They shrugged and said it would happen sooner or later. That was for the first three years. Then they consoled each other in a brittle way. Why should two school teachers who had the entire child population of Shancarrig to cope with want to bring any more children into the world?
Then they decided to ask for help.
It was not easy for Nora Kelly to approach Dr Jims. He was a courteous man and kind to everyone. She knew that he would not be coy, or too inquisitive. He would reach for his pad and write, as he nodded thoughtfully.
Nora Kelly was pale at the best of times and this was not the best of times. She was a slight young woman with flyaway fair hair. She did it in a braid, which she rolled loosely at the back of her neck.
Nobody in Shancarrig had seen her with hair loose and flowing. They thought her expression a little stern, but that was appropriate for the school mistress. Her big husband looked more like a local farmer than the master – it was good to have some authority written on the face of the family.