Nora put her arms around the girl.
‘We’ve had a great chat, my love,’ she said. ‘This is Lexi, maybe even Uncle Lexi. He’ll be going back to America tonight, and he wants to meet you and get to know you a little bit before he goes.’
Maria’s eyes were wide trying to take it in.
‘Before he goes off and leaves you here with us. Which is what we all agreed is where you want to be,’ said Nora Kelly, who had told her daughter Maria that everything would be all right, and had now delivered on her promise.
NESSA
It was Mrs Ryan who wore the trousers in Ryan’s Commercial Hotel. Everyone knew that. And just as well, because if Conor Ryan had married a mouse the place would have gone to the wall years ago.
Conor Ryan certainly hadn’t married a mouse when he wed Breda O’Connor. A small, thin girl with restless eyes and straight black shiny hair, she was a distant cousin of the Ryans. They met at a family wedding. Conor Ryan told her that he was thinking of going off to England and joining the British army. Anything to get out from under his parents’ feet – they ran this hole-in-the-wall hotel in a real backward town.
‘What do you want going into the army? There might be a war and you’d get killed,’ she said.
Conor Ryan implied that it mightn’t be a huge choice between that and staying put with his parents.
‘They can’t be that bad,’ Breda said.
‘They are. The place is like the ark. No, the ark was safe and dry and people wanted to get into it. This is like a morgue.’
‘Why don’t you improve it?’
‘I’m only twenty-three, they’d never let me,’ he said.
Breda O’Connor decided there and then that she would marry him. By the time Britain declared war on Germany they were already engaged.
‘Now, aren’t you glad I didn’t let you join the army?’ Breda said.
‘You haven’t lived with my father and mother yet,’ he said, with a look of defeat and resignation that she was determined to take out of him.
‘Nor will I,’ she said with spirit. ‘We’ll build a place of our own.’
Conor Ryan’s father said that he had picked a wastrel, a girl who thought they were made of money, when the outhouse was converted into a small dwelling for the newlyweds.
Conor Ryan’s mother said there would be no interfering from a fancy young one who thought she was the divil and all because she had a domestic science diploma. Conor reported none of these views to the bride-to-be. Breda would find out soon enough what they were like. She had assured him that she had been given fair warning.
As it happened she never really found out how much they had resented her coming to their house, and marrying their only son while he was still a child.
Breda never heard how his parents prophesied that when she had a few children out in that cement hut she was getting built for herself in the yard it would soften her cough.
The Ryan parents fell victim to a bad flu that swept the countryside in the winter of 1939.
Two weeks after the winter wedding of Conor and Breda the same congregation stood in the church for the double funeral of the groom’s parents.
There was a lot of head-shaking. How hard it was for a young girl to step in like that. It would be too much for her. She was only a little bit of a thing. And you’d need to light a bonfire under Conor Ryan to get any kind of action out of him. It was the end of Ryan’s Commercial Hotel for Shancarrig.
Never were people so wrong.
Breda Ryan took control at once. Even on the very day of the funeral. She assured the mourners that they would be very welcome to come back to the hotel bar for drinks rather than going up to Johnny Finn’s pub, as they thought they should do out of some kind of respect.
‘The best respect that you could give my parents-in-law is to come to their hotel,’ Breda Ryan said.
Within a week she made it known that she didn’t like to be referred to as the young Mrs Ryan.
‘My husband’s mother has gone to her reward, and the Lord have mercy on her she is no longer here to need her name. I am Mrs Ryan now,’ she said.
And so she was. Mrs Ryan of Shancarrig’s only hotel, a part of the triangle that people called the heart of the town – one side The Terrace where the rich people like the doctor and Mr Hayes the solicitor lived, one side the row of shops – Nellie Dunne’s the grocery, Mr Connors the chemist, the other Dunnes who ran the hardware business, the butcher, the draper – the few small places that got a meagre living from Shancarrig and its outlying farms. The third side of the triangle was Ryan’s Hotel.
Not very prepossessing, dark brown throughout, floors covered in linoleum. The rooms all had heavy oak fireplaces, the pictures on the walls were in dark heavy frames. Most of them were of unlikely romantic scenes with men in frock coats, never seen in Shancarrig or even in the county, offering their arms to ladies in outfits similarly unknown.
There were some religious pictures in the hall … the one of the Sacred Heart had a small red lamp burning in front of it. The sideboards in the hall and dining room were stuffed with glass never used on the table, and Belleek china.
Mrs Ryan had plans to change and improve it all but first she must see that people came to it as it was.
She made sure that the smell of cooking didn’t meet guests at the hall door by putting heavy curtains outside the kitchen doors. She installed a glass-fronted noticeboard near the reception desk and put up details of concerts, hunt balls or other high-class events in neighbouring towns.
She intended to make the hotel the very centre of Shancarrig, the place where people would come to look for information. The bus and train times were there too for all to see, in the hopes that it would encourage travellers to come and have a drink or a coffee as they waited.
Her plans had only just begun when she realised she was pregnant.
Her first child was born in 1940, a little girl, delivered by young Dr Jims because the baby arrived in the middle of the night and Dr Nolan was getting too old to come out at all hours.
‘A lovely daughter,’ he said. ‘Is that what you wanted?’
‘Indeed it’s not. I wanted a strong son to run the hotel for me.’ She was laughing as she held the baby.
‘Well, maybe she’ll run it till she gets a brother.’ Dr Jims had a warm way with him.
‘It’s no life for a woman. We’ll find a better job for Vanessa.’ She held the child close.
‘Vanessa! Now there’s a name.’
‘Oh, think big, Doctor. That’s what I always believed.’
Conor Ryan poured a brandy for the doctor, and the two men sat companionably in the bar at 4.30 a.m. to drink to the new life in Shancarrig.
‘May Vanessa live to see the year two thousand,’ said Dr Jims.
‘Won’t Nessa only be a young one of sixty then! Why are you wishing her a short life?’ said the new father.
She was Nessa from the start. Even her strong-willed mother was not able to impose her will on the people of Shancarrig on this point. And when her sister was born the baby was Catherine, and the third girl Nuala. There were no strong sons to run the hotel. But by the time they realised there never would be, the women were so well established in Ryan’s that the absence of a boy wasn’t even noticed.
Nessa always thought she had got the worst possible combination of looks from her parents.
She had her mother’s dead-straight hair. No amount of pipe cleaners would put even the hint of a wave or a kink in it. And she inherited her father’s broad shoulders and big feet. Why could she not have got his curly hair and her mother’s tiny proportions? Life was very unfair. Everyone admired people with curly hair.
Like Leo’s hair.
Since Nessa could remember she had been best friends with Leo Murphy. Leo was the girl who lived up at The Glen. She was almost an only child. Lucky thing. Not a real only child like Eddie Barton, the son of the dressmaker, but Leo’s two brothers were very old and didn’t live at home.
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Nessa had even known Leo before the day they both started at Shancarrig school. Leo had been invited to come and play with her. Mrs Ryan had said she wanted Vanessa to have a proper friend before she started in there and had to consort with the Dunnes and the Brennans.
‘What’s consorting?’ Nessa asked her mother.
‘Never mind, but you won’t be doing it anyway.’
‘That’s why you’re off to school, to learn things like that,’ said Conor Ryan, folding back the paper at the race card to see could he pick a likely winner in the afternoon races.
The first day at school Nessa Ryan sat beside Maura Brennan. Together they learned to do pot hooks.
‘Why are they called pot hooks?’ Nessa asked, as the two girls slowly traced the S shapes in their headline copy books.
‘They look a bit like the hooks that hang over the fire. You know … to hold the pots,’ Maura explained.
Nessa told this information proudly to her mother.
‘What! Have they got you sitting next to one of the Brennans from the cottages?’ she said crossly.
‘Don’t be putting notions into her head. Isn’t the poor Brennan child entitled to sit beside someone? Isn’t she a human being?’ Nessa’s father was defending Maura Brennan for something. Her mother was still in a bad temper about it, whatever it was.
‘That’s not what you say when her father comes in here breaking all before him, and swearing like a soldier.’
‘He takes his trade to Johnny Finn’s after what you said to him that time …’
‘You sound as if you’re sorry, as if you miss that good-for-nothing drunk. It was a fine day for this house when I shifted him out. You agreed yourself.’
‘I did, I did.’
‘So what are you going on about?’
‘I don’t know, Breda …’ He shook his head. Nessa realised whatever it was … her Daddy really didn’t know. He didn’t know about things like her mother did. About running a hotel, and being in charge.
‘Will I not sit beside her?’ Nessa asked.
Her mother’s face softened. ‘Don’t mind me, your father is right. The child’s not to be blamed.’
‘We don’t have pot hooks, do we?’
‘No. We have a range, like any normal person would. The Brennans cook over an open fire, I expect. Did you not see Leo Murphy at school today?’
‘She was sitting beside Eddie. They got told off for talking.’
‘What else happened? Tell me all about it.’
‘We played a game around the tree, you know, like a big ring o’ roses.’
‘I did that myself,’ said her father.
She saw her mother going over and putting her arm around his shoulder. They were smiling. She felt safe. Maybe her mother did love her father even if he didn’t know how to run a hotel. When anyone came to the hotel they asked for Mrs Ryan, not for Mr, that’s if they knew the place. Otherwise it was a delay while Mr Ryan sent for his wife.
Nessa grew up knowing that she should get her mother, not her father, in any crisis. At the start she thought this was the same in all families.
But she learned it wasn’t always the case. She discovered that Leo Murphy’s mother didn’t know where anything was, that Major Murphy and Biddy the maid ran The Glen between them. Leo never had to consult her mother about anything. It was a huge freedom.
She learned that Maura Brennan’s mother had to go out begging because Mr Brennan drank whatever money he got. When Nessa wondered why Mrs Brennan didn’t stop him with a word or a glance as her mother would have, Maura shrugged. Women weren’t like that, she said.
Niall Hayes said that his mother didn’t have any say in the house. His father paid all the bills, and dealt with things that happened. Foxy Dunne said that his mother hadn’t been known to open her mouth on any subject, but of course his father had never been known to close his, so that made up a pair of them.
Only Eddie, whose father was dead or had gone away or something, said that his mother was in charge. But she didn’t like being in charge, he said. She kept thinking there should be a man around the place.
Sometimes they even made jokes about Nessa’s mother, about how different she was from the other women in Shancarrig. Nessa didn’t like that very much but in her heart she had to admit it was true. Her mother was rather too interested in her for her liking. She wanted to know everything that happened.
‘Why do you want to know so much?’ Nessa asked her once.
‘I want to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes that I made. I want to try and help your childhood.’ Her mother had seemed very simple and direct in that answer, as if she was talking to someone her own age, not talking down.
‘Leave the child alone,’ her father said, as he said so often. ‘Aren’t they only children for a very short time? Let them enjoy it.’
‘I don’t know about the very short time,’ Nessa’s mother said. ‘There are quite a few people around here who never grew up.’
When people stopped to admire young Nessa Ryan on the street they often asked, ‘And whose pet are you?’ It was only a greeting, not a question, but Nessa took it seriously.
‘Nobody’s,’ she would say firmly. ‘There’s so much work in a hotel there’s no time to have pets.’ People laughed at the solemn way the child spoke, in the parrot fashion she must have heard at home.
Her mother didn’t approve. ‘You’re the most petted child in the country. Stop telling people that there’s no one spoiling you,’ she said.
But Nessa didn’t think this was so. She wondered was she a foundling. Had the dark gypsies, the families who came through every year, left her on the hotel doorstep? Had she been found up at the Old Rock, left there by a wonderful kind noblewoman with long hair – someone who was in great secret trouble and left her baby while she escaped?
Nessa didn’t know exactly what she wanted but she knew very definitely that it was something different from what she had got. She would never be able to please her mother, no matter what she did, and her father was too soft and easy-going for his views to count.
Sometimes when she was feeling particularly religious and near to God she used to ask him to make her popular and loved.
‘I’m not asking to be pretty, God, I know we’re not meant to pray for good looks. But I am asking to be liked more. People that are popular are very very happy. They can go around doing good all the time. Honestly God, even children. I’d be a great child and a great grown-up. Just try it and see.’
The years of Nessa Ryan’s childhood saw a great change in Ryan’s Commercial Hotel.
After endless rationing and petrol shortages brought about by the war in Europe, suddenly cars appeared on the road again. Instead of the hotel’s visitors arriving at Shancarrig railway station and walking across to where Ryan’s stood taking up one side of the three-cornered green that formed the centre and heart of the place, they now drew up outside the door. Most people were loath to leave their cars in the street, even though this was the best part of Shancarrig. Visitors didn’t know that The Terrace where Dr Nolan and then Dr Jims lived in Number Three and where the Hayes family lived in Number Five was about the best address in the county. They wanted safe parking for their cars.
The hotel was no longer dark brown. The dark colours had been replaced by cream and what Breda called a lovely restful eau de nil. She had toured other smarter hotels and discovered that this pale greenish shade was high fashion.
The more sober of the heavy-framed pictures had been relegated to the master bedroom, out of view of any visitors.
More bathrooms had been installed, chamber pots were hidden discreetly in bedside cupboards rather than being placed expectantly under beds.
The women who served in the dining room of Ryan’s Commercial Hotel wore smart green dresses now, with their white aprons and little white half caps. The days of black outfits were over. There were comfortable chairs in the entrance hall encouraging guests to think of it as it used to be.
When Nessa and her sisters, Catherine and Nuala, were young they were kept well out of sight of the hotel visitors, but were trained to say good morning or good evening to anyone they encountered, even scarlet-faced drunks who might not be able to reply.
Nessa’s mother had cleared up the hotel yard. Old and broken machinery was removed, outhouses were painted. No longer was the place used as a dumping ground. Guests were told that ample parking facilities existed.
And the visitors changed too.
A trickle of American servicemen who had got to know Europe during the days of war, returned again in peacetime bringing their wives, particularly if there was any Irish heritage in the family tree. They would stay in hotels around the country and try to find it out. They became a familiar sight, sometimes still in uniform, and looking very dashing as they would book into Ryan’s Commercial Hotel.
Father Gunn said he was worn out tracing roots from old church records.
There were the commercial travellers too. The same people coming regularly, once a month – once a fortnight sometimes. Usually two or three rooms would be booked by the various representatives coming to take orders in Shancarrig and outlying areas.
Nessa’s mother treated them with great respect. They would be the backbone of their business, she told her husband. Conor Ryan shrugged. He often thought them a dull crowd, abstemious too, no bar profit from them. Pale, tired men, anxious about their sales, restless, uneasy.
It was Nessa’s mother who insisted on the commercial room, and lighting a fire there. There were a few tables strewn around, they could fill their order books and smoke there. They could bring in a cup of tea or coffee.
Conor Ryan thought it a waste. Why couldn’t they sit in the bar like any other person? He had noted that few of them followed either horses or dogs, there was little conversation with them at the best of times.
At school everyone was always interested in the hotel and its goings on. They always asked about what the farmers ate for breakfast on the fair days once a month, and whether any of the beasts had ever backed into the windows and broken them, as happened once down in Nellie Dunne’s grocery when she forgot to put up the barriers.