She met Nancy Finn from the pub. Nancy was what they called a bold strap in Shancarrig. She was fifteen and had been accused of being forward and giving people the eye. Sometimes she helped serve behind the counter. It was a rough sort of place.
Nancy said she’d really love to go to America and work as a cocktail waitress. That was her goal but her father said it was lunacy. Nancy said her father, Johnny Finn Noted for Best Drinks, was fed up. The guards had been in every night for three weeks asking was there any brawl between tinkers and anyone, and her father said he wouldn’t let a bloody tinker in the door. Sergeant Keane said that was a very unchristian attitude, and Nancy’s father had said the guards would have another tune to play if he did let the tinkers in and took their money, so there had been hard words and the upshot was that the guards were watching Johnny Finn’s pub night after night, ready to pounce if anyone was left with a drink in front of them for thirty seconds beyond the licensing hours.
The summer ended and a new life began, a life of getting the bus every day into school in the big town. The bus bounced along the roads through villages and woods, and stopped at junctions and crossroads where people came down long narrow tracks to the main road. Leo and Nessa Ryan learned their homework to the rhythm of the bus crossing the countryside. They heard each other’s poems, they puzzled out theorems and algebra. Often they didn’t even look out the window at the countryside passing by.
Sometimes Leo seemed as if she was looking out at the scenery. Anyone watching her would think that there was a dreamy schoolgirl looking out at the fields with the cattle grazing, the colours changing from season to season in the hedges and clusters of bushes that they passed.
But Leo Murphy’s eyes might not have been focusing on these things at all. Her thoughts were often on her mother. Her pale delicate mother, who wandered more often through the gardens of The Glen no matter what the weather, with empty eyes, talking softly to herself.
Leo had seen her mother sit under the lilac tree picking the great purple flowers apart absently in her lap and crooning to herself, ‘You had lilac eyes, Danny. Your eyes were like deep lilac. Your eyes are closed now.’
She spoke of Danny too when she half sat and half lay over the rockery. Every day, rain or shine, she tended it, and a weed could hardly put its head out before Mrs Murphy had snapped it away.
‘At least I kept your grave for you, Danny boy,’ she would cry. ‘You can never say I didn’t put flowers on your grave. No man in Ireland got more flowers.’
The first time Leo heard her mother speak like this she was frozen with horror. It was a known fact that the missing tinker was Danny. His family had told people that he must have a girl in Shancarrig. He used to be gone from the camp for long periods, and when he’d come back he was always smiling and saying nothing. There was the question he might have run off with someone from the locality. Sergeant Keane had assured the travellers that there were no unexplained disappearances of any of the girls of the village; he had made inquiries and there was no one missing from the area.
‘No one except Danny,’ said Mrs McDonagh, the sad-looking woman with the dark, lined face who was Danny’s mother.
Leo heard all this from other people. Nessa Ryan heard it discussed a lot in the hotel, and reported it word for word. It was the only exciting thing that had happened in their lives. She couldn’t understand why her friend Leo wasn’t interested in it, and wouldn’t speculate like everyone else about what might have happened.
The months went by and Leo’s mother became less in touch with reality.
Leo had stopped trying to talk to her about school, and everyday things. Instead she spoke as if her mother was an invalid.
‘How do you feel today, Mother?’
‘Well … I don’t know, I really don’t know.’ She spoke in a dull voice. The woman who used to be so elegant and graceful, the mother who would plan a picnic, correct bad grammar or a mispronounced word with cries of horror … that had all gone.
She barely touched her food, just smiled vaguely at Father, and Leo, and at Biddy as if they were people she used to know. She spoke to the dogs, Lance and Jessie, no longer the big gambolling pups, but more stately with years. She reminded them of how they had known Danny, and they would stand guard over his grave.
Biddy must have heard it. She would have had to be deaf not to have known what she was talking about.
But the conspiracy continued.
Mrs Murphy had been feeling under the weather, surely now the longer days, or the bright weather, or the good crisp winter without any damp … whichever season … she would show an improvement.
Old Ned had been pensioned off. Eddie Barton came and cut the grass sometimes, but there was nobody coming to do the gardens as they should have been done. Sometimes Leo and her father would struggle, but it was beyond them. Only the rockery bloomed. Mrs Murphy wandered outside The Glen with her secateurs in her pocket and took cuttings for it, or even dug up little plants that she thought might flourish.
In the increasingly jungle-like gardens of The Glen the rockery bloomed as a monument, as a memorial.
In her efforts to keep her mother out of anyone else’s sight and hearing, Leo pieced together the story of horror, of what had happened in those weeks when she was fourteen and had understood nothing of the world. Those weeks before her world changed.
Mother remembered not only Danny’s lilac eyes but his strong arms, and his young body. She remembered his laughter and his impatience and greed to have her, over and over. With a sick stomach Leo listened to her mother remembering and crying for a lost love. She hated the childlike coquettish enthusiasm in her mother’s face when she spoke of the man she had welcomed on the mossy earth, in her bedroom on the rug, under the lilac trees, and in the gate lodge.
But it was when she mentioned the gate lodge that her face would harden and her questioning take a different turn. Why did he have to be so greedy? What did he need with silver? Why had he demanded to take their treasures? What did he mean that he needed something to trade, some goods to deal in as they went towards Galway? Had he not taken her, was that not the greatest treasure of all? Miriam Murphy’s eyes were like stone when she went through that part of the story of the last time they had met … of the silver he had wrapped in a tablecloth as he had roamed through the house, touching things, taking this, leaving that. She had begged him and pleaded.
‘Say there was a robbery … say you came back and found it all gone.’ His lilac eyes had laughed at her.
‘I told him he must not go, he had been sent to me, and he could not leave.’
Leo knew the chant off by heart, she could say it with her mother as the woman stroked the earth of the rockery.
‘You wouldn’t listen, Danny. You called me old. You said you had given me my fun and my loving and that I should be grateful.
‘You said you’d take some guns, that we had no need of them, but in your life you’d need to hunt in the forest … I asked you to take me with you … and you laughed, and you called me old. I couldn’t let you leave, I had to keep you here, and that was why …’ Her mother would smile then, and stroke the earth again. ‘And you are here, Danny Boy. You’ll never leave me now.’
Leo had known for years why her father had struggled that night, dragging and pulling with his wounds aching and his useless leg trailing behind. He knew why this woman had to be protected from telling this sing-song tale to the law. And Leo knew too.
At school they thought her a tense child. They spoke to her father about her since Mrs Murphy, the mother, never made any appearance.
Mother Dorothy, who was wise in the ways of the world, decided that the mother might have a drink problem. It had to be. Otherwise she’d have come in some time. Very tough on the child, a nice girl, but with a shell on her as hard as rock.
Leo told Father Gunn that Mother wasn’t all that well, and that if they didn’t see her at mass he wasn’t to take any wrong meaning out of it.
Father Gunn asked would sh
e like the sacraments brought up to The Glen.
‘I’m not too sure, Father.’ Leo bit her lip.
Father Gunn also knew the ways of the world.
‘Why don’t we leave it for the moment?’ he suggested. ‘And if there’s any change in that department then all you have to do is ask me.’
Leo thought to herself that in Shancarrig it was really quite easy to hide anything from anybody.
Or maybe it was only if you happened to live in The Glen, a big house surrounded by high walls, with its own gardens and shrubberies and gate lodge.
It might be different trying to keep your secrets if you lived in the cottages down by the river, or in The Terrace with everyone seeing your front entrance, or in the hotel with half of Shancarrig in and out of your doors every day.
She felt watchful about her mother, but not always on edge. No long-term anxiety like that can be felt at the pain level all the time. There were many hours when Leo didn’t even think about her mother’s telling and re-telling the story. There were the school outings, there were the parties, the times when Niall Hayes kissed her and their noses kept bumping, and later when quite suddenly Richard Hayes, who was Niall’s older cousin, kissed her and there was no nose-bumping at all.
Richard Hayes was very handsome, he had stirred the place up since he arrived. Leo felt sorry for Niall because deep in her heart she thought Niall still had a very soft spot for Nessa, and Nessa was of course crazy about the new arrival in town.
And it had to be said that Richard was paying a lot of attention to Nessa. There were walks, drives and trips to the pictures in the town. Leo thought he was rather dangerous, but then she shrugged. Who was she to know? Her views on love and attraction were extremely suspect.
Some of the girls at school were going to be nurses; they had applied to hospitals in Dublin and in Britain for places.
‘Should I be a nurse, Daddy?’ she asked.
They were walking, as they often did in the evening. Mother was safely talking to the rockery, and if you counted Biddy as the silent rock she had been for three long years, then there was no one around to hear the chant that had begun again.
‘Would you like to be a nurse?’
‘Only if it would help.’
Her father looked old and grey. Much of his time was spent persuading his sons not to come back to Shancarrig, and telling them that their mother was in poor mental health.
Naturally they had written and asked why was nothing being done about this. They had written to Dr Jims, which Major Murphy thought an outrageous interference. But fortunately Jims Blake had agreed with him that arrogant young men thought they knew everything. If Frank Murphy said there was nothing wrong with Miriam, then that was that. The doctor had seen the thin pale face and the over-brilliant eyes of Miriam Murphy, always a fairly obsessional person he would have thought, checking light switches, refusing to throw out old papers. This is what he had noticed on his visits to The Glen, and assumed that like many a nervy woman there was nothing asked and therefore nothing that could be answered. This was not a household where he would be asked to refer her to a psychiatrist in order to work out the cause of the unease. At least he wasn’t being asked for ever-increasing prescriptions of tranquillisers or sleeping pills. This in itself was something to be thankful for.
Foxy Dunne came home every Christmas as he had promised. When he arrived on his first visit home, wearing a new zippered jacket with a tartan lining, at the back door of The Glen, he was surprised at the frostiness of his reception. Not that he had ever been warmly welcomed there, but this was out of that league … ‘Well, tell my friend Leo. She knows where I live,’ he said haughtily to Biddy.
‘And I’m sure, like everyone, she knows only too well where the Dunnes live and would want to avoid it,’ Biddy said.
Leo had heard. She called to the Dunnes’ cottage that afternoon.
‘I came to ask if you’d like to go for a walk in Barna Woods,’ she said.
Foxy looked very pleased. He was at a loss for words. The quick shrugging reaction or the smart joke deserted him.
‘Well, I won’t ask you into my house either,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and be babes in the wood.’
He told her of living in a house with eleven men from their own country. He told her of the drinking and how so many of them spent everything they had nearly killed themselves earning.
‘Why do you stay there?’ she asked.
‘To learn … to save. But mainly to learn.’
‘What can you learn from old men like that drinking their lives away?’
‘I can learn what not to do, I suppose, or how it could have been done right.’
Foxy sat on a fallen tree and told her about the chances, the men who had made it, the small contractors who did things right and did them quickly. He told her how you had to watch out for the fellow who was a great electrician, a good plumber, a couple of bright brickies, a class carpenter. Then all you needed was someone to get them together and you had your own team – someone who had a head for figures, someone who could cost a job and make the contacts.
‘And who would you get to do that?’ She was genuinely interested.
‘God, Leo, that’s what I’m going to do. That’s what it’s all about,’ he said.
She felt ashamed that she hadn’t the confidence in him.
‘Did you know my father was in gaol?’ he asked defensively.
‘I heard. I think Biddy told me.’
‘She would have.’
She was torn between being sympathetic and telling him it didn’t matter.
‘Did he hate it?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know, he doesn’t talk to me. He should have been there longer. He hit a fellow with a plank that had nails in it. He’s dangerous.’
‘You’re not like that,’ she said suddenly.
‘I know, but I didn’t want you to forget where I come from.’
‘You are what you are, so am I.’
‘And do you have any tales to tell me?’ he asked.
‘No. Why?’ Her voice was clipped.
He shrugged. It was as if he had been offering her the chance to trade confessions.
But he didn’t know they were not equal confessions. What his father had done was known the length and breadth of the county. What her mother had done was known by only three people.
He looked at her for a while, as if waiting.
Then he said, ‘No reason, no reason at all.’
She saw him looking at her, with her belted raincoat, hands stuck deep in her pockets. The wind made her cheeks red. Her red-gold curls stood out around her head like a furze. She felt he was looking straight through her, that he could see everything, knew everything.
‘I hate my hair,’ she said suddenly.
‘It’s like a halo,’ he said.
And she grinned.
Every Christmas he came home. He called to The Glen and she would take him walking. For the week that he was home they would meet every day.
Nessa Ryan was very disapproving. ‘You do know his father was in gaol,’ she told Leo.
‘I do,’ Leo sighed. She had heard it all from Biddy, over and over.
‘I’d be surprised you’d go walking with him, then.’
‘I know you would.’ Leo had heard the same thing from her father. But that particular time she had answered back. ‘Well, if everyone knew about us, Daddy, maybe people wouldn’t want to go walking with us either.’ Her father looked as if she had struck him. Immediately she had repented. ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it … I just think that Foxy is lonely when he comes home. I don’t ask him in here. I’m seventeen, nearly eighteen, Daddy. Why can’t we let people alone? We, of all people?’
Her father had tears in his eyes. ‘Go and walk with whoever you like in the woods,’ he had said, his voice choked.
That was the Christmas when Foxy told her that he was on the way to the big time. He was working with two others. They were setting up their own con
tracts, they would hire men, get a team together. No more working for cheats and fellows who took all the profit.
‘I’ll soon have enough saved to come back a rich man,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll drive up your avenue in a big car, hand my coat and gloves to Biddy, and ask your father for your hand in marriage. Your mother will take out the sherry and plan your wedding dress.’
‘I’ll never marry,’ Leo told him.
‘You sure as anything didn’t take my advice about getting trained for a career or a job,’ he said.
‘I can’t leave The Glen.’
‘Will you tell me why?’ His eyes still had that power to look as if they could see right through her, and know everything.
‘I will, one day,’ she promised, and she knew she would.
This year at least she had an address for Foxy. She wrote to him, he sent a very short note back.
‘Why don’t you learn to type, Leo? Your writing is worse than my own. We can’t have that when we’re in the big time, neither of us able to write a letter.’
She laughed.
She didn’t tell Nessa Ryan that she had just got a sort of proposal from Foxy Dunne.
She didn’t tell her parents.
Her mother died on an autumn night. They said it was of exposure. Her lungs filled up with the damp night air and, added to a chest infection … There was no hope for a woman whose health had always been so frail.
She had been found in her nightdress, lying over the rockery in the garden.
The church was crowded. Major Murphy asked people to come back to Ryan’s Hotel for a drink and some sandwiches afterwards. This was very unusual and had never been known in Shancarrig. But he said that The Glen was too sad for him and for Leo just now. He was sure people would understand.
Then Leo went to the town every day on the bus and learned to type in the big secretarial college where Nessa had done a course.
‘Why couldn’t you have done it with me?’ Nessa grumbled.
‘It wasn’t the right time.’
There had been no note from Foxy Dunne about her mother’s death.
She didn’t write to tell him. Surely some member of his awful family was in touch, surely there would have been a mention that Mrs Murphy of The Glen had been found dead in her nightdress, and that her wits must have been astray. Everyone else knew about it.