Everything about Shancarrig depressed him.
The small fat beady-eyed priest welcoming him, and saying it would be a pleasure to have him in the congregation – what could he mean? And the wraith-like priests’ housekeeper with a face like the Queen of Spades – a sour woman called Mrs Kennedy who looked straight through him and seemed to read his inner soul. She nodded dryly on being introduced, as if to say she knew his type and didn’t like it.
His uncle’s home offered little joy to him. Although Uncle Bill was a pleasant enough man and an efficient solicitor he had managed to encumber himself with such a mournful wife. Aunt Ethel saw little to celebrate in the world. And the children were not going to rate high on any ladder of companionship.
Niall was now about eighteen and at an age when he should have been full of the joys of spring, but he appeared disconsolate and without any fire. It didn’t occur to Richard that his cousin Niall might merely be lacking in self-confidence; Richard had never known that state. He wondered why the boy didn’t ask to borrow his father’s Ford which was parked outside The Terrace. That way he could have toured the countryside and found wider horizons. There must be some social life for a boy in this place, but Niall had seemingly never found it; he stayed around the house, moving between The Terrace and Ryan’s Hotel.
Richard looked at the bedroom he had been given – a huge heavy dark mahogany wardrobe which despite its great size found it difficult to hold the suits and coats of the young solicitor down from the city. His Aunt Ethel had proudly shown him the hot and cold running water; he had the only room with a hand-basin. The bed would never welcome a companion. To manoeuvre a girl up those stairs past offices, kitchens, sitting rooms and bedrooms would be a feat that few would undertake. It would be celibacy, or else find someone else with a place of their own, which didn’t look at all likely in Shancarrig.
There were, of course, pretty children.
Like Nessa from the hotel. He saw the huge interest in her eyes, the eagerness and shyness, the trying to please, the fear she was boring him.
He was not arrogant, he was realistic about this kind of response. If you were nice to girls, if you smiled at them and listened to them, just liked them, they opened up like flowers.
He supposed it helped being reasonably good-looking, but he truly thought it was a matter of liking them. Many a man in Dublin who had envied Richard’s success had been so anxious for the conquest that he forgot to enjoy the chase. That must be where the secret, if there were a secret, lay.
He spent a lot of time wooing Vanessa Ryan. She was the best in town. He had been on an exploratory mission.
There was Madeleine Ross the school teacher, very intense and spiritual, deeply caught up in this attempt to convert some Spanish-named place that apparently meant Shancarrig in Peruvian or whatever. He suspected that she might harbour longings for the rather feylooking priest, but he was very sure that neither of them had done anything about this hothouse passion if it existed.
There was a tough little girl who came from a falling-down Georgian mansion called The Glen, frizzy hair, good legs, strong face. There was some secret there too. Money, maybe, or a mad relative. He had called and been discouraged from calling again.
There were a few others, unsatisfactory.
Nessa with her clear eyes and dark good looks was the only one. To his surprise he didn’t wear her down. He must be losing his touch, he thought. His winning Dublin ways didn’t work here.
He threatened her that they wouldn’t see each other any more … gentle loving threats of course, but she got the message … She said no.
And continued to say no.
It was a constant irritant to see her across the road in her parents’ hotel, growing more attractive and confident by the week. Her dark hair shining as it hung framing her face, she wore clear yellows and reds that set off her colouring. She laughed and joked with the customers; he had even seen American men look at her approvingly.
The years passed slowly.
They were not as bad as he feared his years of exile would be, but still he yearned to be back in Dublin.
Elaine came to visit him.
‘I’m getting married,’ she told him.
‘Do you love him?’ he asked.
‘You’d never have asked that question a few years ago. You didn’t think love existed.’
‘I know it exists. I haven’t come across it, that’s all.’
‘You will.’ She was gentle.
‘About the baby …?’
‘There never was a baby,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘There never was. I made it up.’
The colour drained from his face.
‘You sent me here, you got me drummed out of Dublin on a lie.’
‘There could have been a child, and your response would have been exactly the same. “Oh shit.” That’s all you would have said if we created a child between us.’
‘But you … why did you let yourself be seen in that light by everyone … tell your father and your uncle … and let people think …?’
‘It seemed worth it at the time. It’s a long time ago.’
‘And why are you telling me now? Is the interdict lifted? Is the barring order called off? Can I crawl back to Dublin and they’ll give me a job?’
‘No, it’s much more selfish. I wanted to tell you so that you’d know there never had been a child, no child born, no child aborted. I wanted you to know that in case …’
‘In case what?’
‘In case …’ She seemed lost for words. He thought she was going to tell him that she worried lest he was thinking about this child, in case he felt ashamed. He had never thought of it as a child, real or imaginary as it now proved to be.
‘In case Gerald ever heard. In case you might ever say …’
He realised she was more frightened of Gerald knowing about her past than anything to do with him.
‘Tell Gerald you’re white as the driven snow,’ he said. He had been so right not to marry this devious lady.
It was around this time that his young cousin Niall asked him for advice.
‘You sort of know everything, Richard.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Well, I know you’re good-looking and everything but you know how to be nice to people and make them like you. Is there a trick?’
Richard looked at him, his hair unkempt, the jacket expensive but out of fashion, the trousers baggy. Mainly the boy’s stance was what held him back: his shoulders were rounded, he looked down and not at the people he was talking to; it came from a natural diffidence but it made him look feeble and untrustworthy.
At another time and in another place Richard might have given the boy some brotherly advice; after all Niall had asked, which could not have been easy.
But this was the wrong time.
The business with Elaine had ruffled him. He began to doubt his own success with women, and there was also the fact that that little madam, Nessa Ryan across the road in the hotel, had become altogether too pert and self-confident. Richard Hayes didn’t feel in the mood to give out advice.
‘There’s no trick,’ he said gruffly. ‘People either like you or they don’t. That’s the way it goes through life.’ He looked away from the naked disappointment on the boy’s face.
‘You mean people can’t get better, more popular, or successful?’
Richard shrugged. ‘I never saw anyone change, did you?’
Niall had said nothing.
He looked increasingly mopey at meals in The Terrace. Richard wondered what work they would find for the lad to do when he came back to Shancarrig full time, as he undoubtedly would. It might make more sense for him to cut his teeth in a solicitor’s office somewhere else. But this was his father’s firm. He should come back and claim his inheritance lest Richard take it over from him. Not that Richard was going to stay here for ever. After Elaine’s revelations he thought that it might well be time for him to go back to Dublin.
*
But that was when he got to know Gloria Darcy.
The Darcys were newcomers. This meant they hadn’t been born and raised here for three generations like everyone else. They had been considered fly-by-nights when they came first, but that was before their small grocery shop became a larger grocery shop, and before they started selling light bulbs, saucepans and cutlery and began to bite into the profits of Dunne’s Hardware. Mike and Gloria Darcy always smiled cheerfully in the face of any muttering.
‘Isn’t there plenty for everyone?’ Mike would say with his big broad smile.
‘This place is only starting out, it’ll be a boom town in the middle sixties,’ Gloria would say with a toss of her long dark curly hair and her gypsy smile.
She often wore a handkerchief tied around her neck so that she looked like a picture of a gypsy girl – not like the tall silent tinker girls who came into Shancarrig when they camped each year at Barna Woods, more like an illustration from a child’s story book.
Bit by bit they were accepted.
Gloria was flashy, the women all agreed this. Richard heard his Aunt Ethel tut-tutting about her to Nellie Dunne and to Mrs Ryan, but there was nothing they could put their finger on. Her neckline wasn’t so low as to raise a comment nor were her skirts too short. It was just that she walked with a swish and a certainty. Her eyes roamed around and lit up when they caught other eyes. There was nothing demure about Mrs Gloria Darcy.
Richard met her first when he bought a packet of razor blades. He didn’t like the fussy Mr Connors the chemist – a small man with bad breath who was inclined to keep you half the day. When he saw packets of razor blades in the window of Darcy’s he regarded it as a merciful escape.
‘Anything else?’ Gloria asked him, her smile wide and generous, her tongue moving slightly over her lower lip.
If it weren’t for the fact that her husband stood not a foot away Richard would have thought she was flirting, being suggestive.
‘Not for the moment,’ he said in exactly the same tone, and their eyes met.
He warned himself not to be stupid as he walked back to The Terrace. This would be the silliest thing that a human could do.
What he must do now was sort out a new job in Dublin, and leave this town without having committed any major misdemeanour. He had been saving his salary quite methodically over the three years of his exile in the sticks. There was no point in buying finery to be paraded here, there were no places for meals, no going to the races. He had learned a lot about the rural practice, for all the use it would be to him in the future. But human nature was the same everywhere: perhaps his stay here might have been a better apprenticeship than he had ever thought possible.
It was early closing, the day his Uncle Bill usually walked up to The Glen and went for a stroll with the old Major Murphy. What the two of them talked about it would be hard to know. But today Bill Hayes was still in his office.
‘I’m in a quandary,’ he said to Richard.
‘Tell me about it.’ Richard sat down, legs stretched, face enthusiastic and receptive. He knew his uncle was pleased to be able to talk.
There was no one else in the house, not dour Aunt Ethel nor sulky Niall.
‘It’s up at The Glen. Miriam Murphy keeps telephoning me, saying she wants to set her affairs in order.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, Frank says not to take any notice of her – she’s rambling.’
‘She is a bit daft, isn’t she?’ Richard encouraged his uncle to speak.
‘I suppose so, I mean it’s not the kind of thing you’d ask a man. Not something that you’d talk about to a friend.’ Bill Hayes looked troubled.
Richard thought that it should be the most important thing you might talk to a friend about, whether your wife was going off her head or not, but the more he heard of marriage the less likely anyone seemed to do anything normal within its bonds.
‘So what do you think you should do?’ he asked, expert as always in finding out what the other man wanted before giving his own view.
‘You see, I think she has something pressing on her mind, some crime, even … imaginary, of course.’
‘Well, if it’s imaginary …’
‘But suppose it’s not, suppose it’s something she wants to make restitution for?’
‘You’re not Father Gunn, Uncle Bill. You’re not Sergeant Keane. All you have to do is make her will, or not be free to make it if that’s what you’d prefer for Major Frank’s sake.’
‘It’s worrying me.’
‘Why don’t I go and see her? Then you won’t have failed either of them.’
‘Would you, Richard?’
‘I’ll go today while you and Major Murphy take your constitutional.’ His smile was bright.
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Richard.’
‘You’ll have a son of your own to help you in no time. You won’t need me, I’ll head off to Dublin soon.’
‘Not too soon.’
‘All right, not too soon, but soonish.’ He stood up and clapped his uncle on the shoulder.
What was one more mad old bat of a woman confessing to the Lord knew what!
He had his lunch in the dark dining room of The Terrace; they talked of other things and he waited until his uncle and the Major would be well clear before he went to The Glen.
He didn’t even have to go into the house to find her. Mrs Miriam Murphy half lay, half sat across the rockery. She was wearing a long white dress, possibly a nightgown; her hair streaked with grey was loose on her shoulders.
She was crying.
There was some garden furniture strewn about. Richard Hayes pulled up a chair for himself.
‘I’m from Bill Hayes’s office, I’m his nephew. He says you’re anxious for us to sort something out for you.’
‘You’re too young,’ she said.
‘Ah no, Mrs Murphy, I’m older than I look. I’m twenty-eight, well on my way to thirty.’ His smile would have broken down the reserve of any woman in Ireland, but Miriam Murphy’s mind was miles away.
‘That’s what he was, twenty-eight, if you could believe him,’ she said.
Richard was nonplussed. ‘Well, what do you think we should do?’ he said.
He knew his uncle wanted the woman to say that she had changed her mind, that she wanted no will made, no affairs sorted out. He must try to lead her in that direction.
‘It’s too late to do anything. It was done,’ she said. He nodded uncomprehendingly.
There was a long silence between them. She seemed quite at ease lounging, half lying over the rock plants and the jagged edges of the stones that made up the rockery. He didn’t suggest that she sit somewhere more comfortable – he knew that this was irrelevant.
‘So perhaps we should leave things as they are?’ He looked at her, pouring out reassurance.
‘Is that enough?’ she asked.
‘I think it is.’
‘You don’t think we should leave them the place, The Glen, for themselves whenever they come this way?’
‘Leave it to who exactly?’
‘The gypsies.’
‘No, no. Definitely not. People are always trying to leave them places. They want to be free,’ he said.
‘Free?’
‘Yes, that’s what they like best.’ He stood up, anxious to be away from the mad staring eyes. It wasn’t healthy for that girl Leo to stay here all the time. Why didn’t she get a training, a job?
‘If you think so.’ Mrs Miriam Murphy didn’t look relieved, she looked only resigned.
He walked down the long drive and was about to head down the hill to Shancarrig. God, the sooner he was out of a place like this the better. Walking along the road towards him was Gloria Darcy.
‘Well, well, well. You have had a shave, I see.’ She looked directly at his face.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I sold you razor blades this morning, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me alre
ady?’ She was most definitely leading him on. Her laugh was unaffected, she could see the impression that she was making on him.
‘No, Mrs Darcy, I imagine that very few people forget you,’ he said. He was being equally gallant and flattering, giving as good as he got.
‘And were you going to walk straight home down the hill or go the better way through the woods?’
He knew he stood at a crossroads. He could have said that he was needed back at the office, that he had work to catch up with, that he had to make a phone call to Dublin. He might have said anything.
But he said, ‘I was hoping to find some attractive company to walk me through Barna Woods, and now I have.’
They laughed as they walked. She teased him about his city suit, he said she was dressing deliberately like a pantomime gypsy. She asked what he had been doing at The Glen, he said that there was a secrecy like the seal of Confession about matters between lawyer and client. He asked if the Darcy’s had a proper title to their shop, they hadn’t bought it through his uncle’s firm … She said the same seal of Confession applied to business deals.
By the time they came out into the sunshine again, and walked by the cottages to the bridge, they were well aware of each other. Much more than attractive faces and winning ways. They were people who could talk and play. They were a match for each other.
So when he went to buy things there he went knowing that it was a move, a degree of courtship. He bought more razor blades.
‘My, what a strong beard we must have,’ she said. Again within her husband’s hearing.
When he bought a pound of tomatoes she asked him was he going on a picnic in the woods. Mike Darcy was serving another customer.
‘No, my aunt wants some more, that’s all.’
‘No, she was in this morning and bought plenty,’ said Gloria, eyes dancing and full of mischief.
The teasing visits and banter went on for some days.
‘It’s lovely of you to come and see me so often,’ she said, pressing her body towards the counter. She wore a chain around her neck, the pendant was between her breasts, the eye followed it down as it was intended to.
‘Yes, it’s lovely of me, you never come to call on me,’ Richard said.