The Copper Beech by Maeve Binchy Page A

class to get married. They seemed to think this was like winning somekind of race rather than having been caught in a teenage pregnancy. When they went to Johnny Finn’s for drinks Mr Ryan from the hotel came running in with a fistful of money to buy them all a drink. He said he came to wish them well from everyone in Ryan’s Commercial Hotel.
    There was no word of the haste or the disgrace or anything. Maura’s father behaved in a way that, for Paudie Brennan, could be called respectable. This week he happened to be friendly with Foxy Dunne’s father, so the two of them had their arms around each other as they sang tunelessly together in a corner. If it had been one of the weeks when they were fighting, things would have been terrible – insults hurling across Johnny Finn’s all afternoon.
    And Father Gunn and Father Barry were there smiling and talking to people as if it were a real wedding.
    Maura didn’t see anything less than the kind of wedding day she had dreamed about when she was at school, or when reading the women’s magazines. All she saw was Gerry O’Sullivan beside her, smiling and saying everything would be grand.
    And everything
was
grand for a while.
    Maura left her job in the hotel. Mrs Ryan seemed to want it that way. Possibly there would be social differences now that Maura was the wife of the popular barman, instead of just the girl from the cottages cleaning the floors and washing potatoes. But Maura found plenty of work, hours here and hours there. When it was obvious that she was expecting a child many of her employers said they would be lost without her. Mrs Hayes, who hadn’t wanted her in the start, was particularly keen to keep her.
    ‘Maybe your mother could look after the child, and you’d still want to go out and work?’ she said hopefully.
    Maura had no intention of letting any child grow up in the same house as she had herself, with the lack of interestand love. But she had learned to be very circumspect in her life. ‘Maybe indeed,’ she said to Mrs Hayes and the others. ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’
    It seemed a long time to wait for the baby, all those evenings on her own in the little cottage, sometimes hearing her father going home drunk, as she had when she was a child. She polished the little cabinet, took out the doll and patted the bump of her stomach.
    ‘Soon you’ll be admiring this,’ she said to the unborn baby.
    It was Dr Jims Blake who told her about the baby boy. The child had Down’s syndrome. The boy, who was what was called a mongol, would still be healthy and loving and live a full and happy life.
    It was Father Gunn who told her about Gerry, and how he had come from the cottage to the church and told the priest he was going. He took the wages owing to him from the hotel, saying his father had died and he needed time off for the funeral. But he told Father Gunn that he was getting the boat to England.
    No entreaties would make him stay.
    Maura remembered always the way that Father Gunn’s thick round glasses seemed to sparkle as he was telling her. She didn’t know if there were tears behind them, or if it was only a trick of the light.
    People were kind, very kind. Maura often told herself that she had been lucky to have stayed in Shancarrig. Suppose all this had happened to her in some big city in England where she had known nobody. Here she had a friendly face everywhere she turned.
    And of course she had Michael.
    Nobody had told her how much she would love him because nobody could have known. She had never knowna child as loving. She watched him grow with a heart that nearly burst with pride. Everything he learned, every new skill – like being able to do up his buttons – was a huge hurdle for the child, and soon everyone in Shancarrig got used to seeing them hand in hand walking around.
    ‘Who’s this?’ people would ask affectionately, even though they knew well.
    ‘This is Michael O’Sullivan,’ Maura would say proudly.
    ‘I’m