Whitethorn Woods Read online

  I explained that we were from the other side of the lakes, from near Rossmore, and we’d all be going home together. In a van.

  I couldn’t work out whether she was relieved or disappointed.

  The others were slagging me in the van.

  ‘Neddy’s in love,’ they kept singing all the way home.

  There was very little singing four months later when Nora and her dad turned up at our place and said that I was the father of the baby she was carrying.

  I could not have been more shocked.

  Nora didn’t look at me, she just looked at the floor. All I could see was the top of her head. Her sad frizzy perm. I felt a great wave of pity for her. Even more pity when Kit and my other brothers laid into Nora and her dad.

  There was no way, they said, that their Neddy had spent ten seconds alone with Nora. They had a hundred witnesses for this. They were going to get Canon Cassidy to come to the house as a character witness. Red-faced, they confronted Nora’s dad and swore that I hadn’t even kissed the girl goodbye when they were bundling me into the van. This was the greatest scam they had ever heard.

  ‘I never made love with anyone,’ I said to Nora’s dad. ‘But if I had, and it resulted in a child being conceived, then I’d certainly live up to my responsibilities and I would be honoured to marry your daughter, but you see … that’s not the way things happened.’ And for some reason everyone believed me. Everyone. And the situation was over.

  And poor Nora raised her red, tear-stained face and looked at me through her thick glasses.

  ‘I’m sorry, Neddy,’ she said.

  I never knew what happened to her.

  Somebody once said that it was all the fault of her grandfather, but because he was the money of the family, nothing had been done about him. I didn’t know if her child got born and if she brought it up. Her family lived so far away from Rossmore, there was never anyone to ask. And our family didn’t encourage me to enquire.

  They were very scathing about it all.

  ‘A bold rossie,’ my mam said.

  ‘Palming off someone else’s bastard on our Neddy,’ my granny said.

  ‘Sure, not even Soft Neddy could fancy that poor ibex,’ my dad said.

  And I felt a lump in my throat for the poor young woman, who had said so proudly that at least she had got one dance out of the night and offered herself to me in abject thanks for having had the luxury of fourteen dances.

  It was all very sad.

  Not long after this, I left Rossmore and went off to London in England to work on the buildings with my eldest brother Kit. He had found a flat over a shop, there were three of them there already and I made the fourth. It wasn’t very clean or tidy or anything but it was near the Tube station and in London that’s all that mattered.

  At first I just made the tea and carried things for people on the site, and they had such cracked, broken old mugs that on the day I got my first wages I went to a market and got a dozen grand new ones. And they were all a bit surprised at how I washed the mugs properly and got a jug for the milk and a bowl for the sugar.

  ‘A real gent is Neddy,’ they said about me.

  I’m never quite sure whether people are praising me or not. I think not. But it’s not important anyway.

  But there was this way they had of doing things on the site, like every sixth dustbin wasn’t filled with rubbish at all – there were bags of cement and bricks and spare tools. Apparently it was some kind of system, an arrangement, but nobody told me, so naturally I pointed out to the foreman that perfectly good stuff was being thrown away and I thought everyone would be pleased.

  But they weren’t.

  Far from it.

  And Kit was the most annoyed of all. I was ordered to stay in the flat next day.

  ‘But I’ll be sacked if I don’t go into work,’ I begged him.

  ‘You’ll be flayed alive by the other fellows if you do go in.’ Kit was very tight-lipped. It was better not to argue with him.

  ‘What will I do here all day?’ I asked.

  Kit always knew what everyone should do. Not this time.

  ‘Jesus, I don’t know, Neddy, do some bloody thing, clean the place up a bit. Anything. Just don’t come near the site.’

  The other lads didn’t speak to me at all which made me realise how serious this whole dustbin thing had been. I sat down to think. It wasn’t working out nearly as well as I had thought it would.

  I had been planning to save lots of money in London. So that I could get my mam a holiday and my dad a good overcoat with a leather trim. And here I was being ordered not to go into work.

  Clean the place up a bit, they said. But with what? We had no cleaning stuff. No bleach for the sink or the bath. No polish for the furniture. No detergent to wash any sheets. And I only had nine English pounds left.

  I got an idea and I went down to the shop where the Patels worked hard day and night.

  I picked out cleaning stuff and a tin of white paint worth ten pounds in all and put them in a box. Then I spoke to Mr Patel.

  ‘Suppose I was to clear up your yard there for you, sweep it, stack all your boxes and crates. Would you give me those cleaning things as a wage?’

  He looked at me thoughtfully as if adding up and weighing the cost and the amount of work I would do.

  ‘And would you clean the shop window as well?’ he bargained.

  ‘Certainly, Mr Patel,’ I said with a big smile.

  And Mr Patel smiled too. A slow unexpected smile.

  Then I went to the launderette and asked them if I could paint their door which looked a bit scruffy.

  ‘How much?’ Mrs Price, the woman who ran the place and, they said, had many gentlemen friends, was wise in the ways of the world.

  ‘I want to have two loads of washing and extra drying,’ I said.

  It was a done deal.

  When Kit and the lads came back from the site they couldn’t believe the transformation.

  They had clean beds, the shabby linoleum on the floor was polished, the steel sink was gleaming. I had painted the cupboards in the kitchen and the bathroom.

  There were more jobs I could do for the Patels next day, I told them, and they would give me a thing that restored the enamel on baths. And there was more painting to be done in the launderette and that meant we could have loads of things washed there – shirts, jeans, anything – and I’d take the bags of stuff and pick them up again, what with not being able to go to the site and everything.

  And because they all seemed to have calmed down and become so admiring of the nice new clean flat, I felt I could dare to ask them about the other business. Had the foreman cooled off any?

  ‘Well, he has apparently,’ Kit said. ‘He can’t believe that you would shop me, your own brother! I put it to him that no one would do a thing like that, nor the lads you lived with. That he’d have to look elsewhere for the culprits. So now he is looking elsewhere.’

  ‘And do you think he’ll find them?’ I asked, excited.

  It was like living in a thriller.

  They looked at each other confused. There was a silence.

  ‘Probably not,’ Kit said after a time.

  ‘And will I come back to work next week?’ I wondered.

  Another silence.

  ‘You know, you’re doing such a great job here, Neddy, making this a real smart place for us to live, maybe this is what you should do. Do you know?’

  I was very disappointed. I thought I’d be going out to work with them every day like mates.

  ‘But how will I earn my living, my deposit on a house, if I don’t have a job at all?’ I asked in a low voice.

  Kit leaned towards me and spoke to me man to man.

  ‘I think we should regard ourselves as a company, Neddy, and you could be our manager.’

  ‘Manager?’ I said, feeling overawed.

  ‘Yeah, suppose if you were to cook us a breakfast, even make us a packed lunch and keep this place looking shipshape. And of cou
rse handle our finances, put our money in the post office for us. Then you’d be taking a load off our backs and we’d all kick in with a wage for you. What do you think, lads? Nice clean place for us to live in, we could even bring people back here once Neddy puts his mark on the place.’

  And they all thought it was a great idea and Kit ran out for fish and chips for everyone to celebrate the day I became their manager.

  It was a great job altogether and much less confusing really than working on the site because I made my own arrangements and knew what I was doing. I wrote all this on my weekly letter home and I thought Dad and my mam would be pleased. But they sent me warning letters telling me to be sure that Kit and the others didn’t work me too hard and make use of me.

  ‘You’re such a decent, gentle boy, Neddy,’ my mam wrote, ‘you must look out for yourself in this life. You’ll promise me that, won’t you?’

  But actually it wasn’t hard at all because everyone was so nice and I could make everything fit in. After serving a good, cooked breakfast for the lads, I’d take the Patel children to their school. Then I’d open up the launderette because Mrs Price who had a lot of men friends wasn’t good in the early morning.

  Then I’d go back to the Patels and help them stack shelves and take their rubbish down to a dump. Then I’d get to work on the flat, clean it all up, and every day I tried to do something new for them, like put up a new shelf or do a bit of cleaning in the television repair shop in exchange for a second-hand telly. Then Kit found a video that had fallen off a lorry but hadn’t got broken so it was like having our own cinema in the kitchen-sitting room.

  I’d pick up the Patel children from school; do the shopping for Christina, an old Greek lady who made our curtains in return.

  And every year I would organise the tickets back to Ireland. Kit and I went back home to the little farm outside Rossmore to see the family.

  The place changed all the time, the town was growing and spreading out very far. There was even a bus now that came to the corner of our road. I never heard a word about that poor girl Nora and her problems. Kit said it was wiser not to ask.

  I always did a bit of work in the house when we came home for the two weeks. Well, Kit would be out at dances, and he didn’t really notice anything wrong, like the place getting shabby and needing a coat of paint here, a few shelves there. Dad was out with the cattle and he hadn’t the time or the energy to do it.

  I would suggest to Kit that we get them a nice television set or maybe even a washing machine, but Kit said we weren’t made of money and to stop pretending we were returned millionaires, which was enough to give everyone the sick.

  I used to worry about our mam. She had been delicate always, but she always said that St Ann had given her those extra years to watch her family grow up and she was very grateful. One summer I thought she looked very frail, but she said that I was not to worry about her as everything was fine and they lived comfortably now that Dad had sold off a field and had fewer cattle so he was at home more often to hand her a cup of tea. She had no worries about anything except would Dad be all right when she eventually did go.

  And then Kit and I went back for Mam’s funeral.

  And all our friends in London sent flowers because I had told them about Mam. People said that Kit must be very well thought of over in London to have so many friends. Actually they were my friends, but it didn’t matter anyway.

  Poor Dad looked like a bloodhound. His face was all set in lines of sadness as he waved us goodbye.

  ‘You look after young Neddy now,’ he instructed Kit at the railway station. Which was odd really as I did all the looking after.

  ‘Wouldn’t you think he’d have given us our fare,’ Kit grumbled. But I had our fare so it didn’t matter.

  And then because I fixed up all Mr Patel’s outhouses for him to give him more storage, the Patels let us have another entire room included in the same rent, and one of the lads had moved out and got a girlfriend and a real shacked-up relationship so now we were only three in the flat and we had a room each.

  The others brought girls back sometimes, nice girls all of them, and they’d have breakfast and be very nice to me.

  And honestly it was all so very busy that the time just passed by and I was thirty-seven years old but I’d been saving for nearly twenty years so I had a fortune in the building society. I mean, if you’re putting away twenty pounds a week at first and then that goes up to thirty and fifty, well, it all adds up to a huge sum.

  I managed to get Kit to come back home with me every year, which wasn’t always easy. He said being in Rossmore was like spending time with the living dead. So this particular year, anyway, when we went back home our dad really wasn’t well. He hadn’t mended the fences of the chicken run and the fox had all the hens. He wasn’t able to go to the market any more and relied on people coming to him and making an offer for the beasts, which broke his heart.

  He’d grown very in on himself and wasn’t keeping the place right at all. I said to Kit that he couldn’t live much more on his own like this. Kit said that he’d hate to be sent to the County Home. As if I’d send our dad to the County Home!

  No, I said, I thought I should come back and mind him. Try to run the place for him.

  ‘And take all our inheritance for yourself?’ Kit said in a horrible voice.

  ‘Oh no, Kit, I’d get someone to value the place, maybe Myles Barry the solicitor in town, and then give you and the others your share. Wouldn’t that be fair?’

  ‘You’d live here with Dad?’ Kit was open-mouthed.

  ‘Someone has to,’ I explained, ‘and anyway, I might get married soon if I could find a nice girl.’

  ‘Buy this house? Give us all a share? In your dreams,’ Kit laughed.

  But I could buy it and I did, the very next day, and my dad was delighted but Kit wasn’t pleased at all.

  He had no savings, he said, and yet I, who had never done a day’s work in my life, was able to put my hand in my pocket and draw out enough to buy a small farm and a gentleman’s residence. It was a strange state of affairs.

  ‘But what do you mean I’ve never done a day’s work in my life, wasn’t I your manager?’ I cried, very upset at the false accusation.

  He didn’t seem to accept that explanation.

  ‘I was your manager,’ I insisted. Because I was. I had been a great manager, made a smashing flat for them all to live in. I would have put their money away every week like I put my own, if they’d only have given it to me. It had to go into post office accounts with a whole lot of different names, something to do with accounting apparently. But I couldn’t snatch the money from them on a Friday if they were going up west to clubs or taking girls out or buying classy gear.

  The reason I was able to save was because I didn’t drink. I bought my clothes in Oxfam and anyway I worked so many hours that I didn’t have time to go out and spend money – so I saved it for a house.

  And I told all this to Kit patiently and explained it to him carefully in case he hadn’t understood. I watched his face and he stopped being angry. You could see it. His face got all soft and kind like it was the night he had made me manager. The night he had gone out for the fish and chips. And he put out his big hand and laid it over mine.

  ‘I’m sorry, Neddy, I spoke out of turn. Of course you were our manager and a very good one. And I don’t know how we’ll replace you if you come back here. But then we’ll have a lump sum from this place and we’ll know Dad’s being looked after and that will be a great relief in itself.’

  I smiled with relief. It was all going to be all right again.

  ‘You know, the getting married bit might be harder, Neddy, you won’t get upset if that isn’t as easy for you as everything else. Women are very difficult to understand. Hard to work out. You’re a great fellow but you’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer and you wouldn’t be up to what women want these days.’

  He was being kind so I thanked him as I always thanked pe
ople for advice whether I understood it or not. And I set about finding a girl to marry.

  It took seven months. Then I met Clare.

  She was a schoolteacher. I met her when she came home to our parish church outside Rossmore for her father’s funeral. I thought she was very nice indeed.

  ‘She’s too bright for you,’ they all said.

  Well, my dad didn’t say that because he loved living with me, and he didn’t want to say anything that would annoy me. I made him porridge every morning, and I employed a man to look after the few cows we had. I minded the chickens and the ducks. I went for walks with him up to the woods to keep his legs mobile. Sometimes he went to the well to thank St Ann for all those extra years he had with my mam. And I brought him to the pub every day to meet his friends and have a pint and a hot lunch.

  Dad used to say about me, ‘Neddy’s not as soft as you all think …’

  And Dad thought Clare would be fine for me. He said I should spend money on a few nice shirts and get my hair properly cut in the salon in Rossmore. Imagine Dad knowing words like ‘salon’.

  Clare was ambitious, she told me this from the start. She wanted to get on in teaching and maybe become a principal sometime, and I said that would be fine because the way I saw it I could be the manager in the house and have everything done when she got home. And suppose, just suppose, we had a little baby, I could look after the baby while Clare went out to work. And to my delight she said it all sounded very good and very restful and she’d be honoured to be my wife.

  Kit wasn’t able to come to the wedding, because he was in jail in England over some misunderstanding. The real culprits weren’t found this time either.

  And Dad was much stronger and better now. All it had been really was loneliness and neglect that had him feeling so low.

  So we got in a great builder and fixed a price and he did a marvellous job dividing up the house so that Clare could feel that, when she came to live here when we were married, she would have her own home for herself and myself and not that she had come to live with Dad and me. And this way everybody would be happy.

  I encouraged Dad’s friends to come and see him of an evening. And I bought him a great big television which they all loved when the sport was on.