Free The Copper Beech by Maeve Binchy Page A

know how she could sense that Deirdre was already pregnant.
    ‘Eventually,’ he told her, which meant imminently.
    He was going to leave Vieja Piedra, and they were going to a place further down the coast of Peru. He would teach in a town, there was just as much work needed there, but they had found a native born priest, a real Peruvian, to look after the valley of Vieja Piedra. He talked on. Nothing would be said to Father Gunn. The fund-raising would take a different style. Nothing would be said to anyone really. In today’s world you didn’t need to explain or to be intense. It was a matter of seizing what good there was and creating more good. It was taking your chance when it was offered.
    The only person who
had
to be told face to face was Maddy. That’s why he had taken Deirdre’s savings to come back and tell her, to thank her in the way that a letter could never do for having put him on this road to happiness.
    ‘And did Deirdre not feel afraid that once you saw your old love you might never return to her?’ Maddy’s tone was light, her question deadly serious.
    But Brian hastened to put her anxieties at rest. ‘Lord no. Deirdre knew that what
we
had wasn’t love. It was childlike fumblings, it was heavy meaning-of-life conversation, it was part of growth, and for me a very important part.’ He wanted to reassure her about that.
    The train back to Shancarrig left in fifteen minutes. Maddy said she thought she should take it.
    ‘But you can’t go
now
. You’ve only been here an hour.’ His dismay was enormous.
    ‘But you’ve told me everything.’
    ‘No, I haven’t told you anything really. I have only skimmed the surface.’
    ‘I have to go back, Brian. I would have, anyway, no matter what you told me. My mother hasn’t been well.’
    ‘I didn’t know that.’
    ‘Of course you didn’t. You didn’t know a great many things, like Mrs Murphy in The Glen died, and that Maura Brennan brings her poor son around with her and he sits in every house in Shancarrig while she cleans floors and does washing. There are many things you don’t know.’
    ‘Well, they don’t tell me.
You
don’t tell me. You don’t write at all.’
    ‘I was ordered not to. Don’t you remember?’
    ‘Not ordered, just advised.’
    ‘To you it was the same once.’
    ‘If you’d wanted to write to me enough you would have,’ he said, head on one side, roguish again.
    She closed her mind to his disbelief that she would return on the next train. He had thought she would spend the whole day, if not the weekend, in Dublin with him. What was he to do now? No relations were meant to know he was back.
    ‘Did I do the wrong thing coming back to tell you?’ He was a child again, confused, uncertain.
    She was gentle. She could afford to be. She had a lifetime ahead of her with little to contemplate except why her one stab at living life had failed. She reached out and held his hand.
    ‘No, you did the right thing,’ she lied straight into his face. ‘Tell Deirdre that I wish you well, all of you. Tell her I went back to Shancarrig on the train with my heart brimming over.’
    It was the only wedding present she could give him.
    And she held the tears until the train had turned the bend and until she could no longer see his eager hand waving her goodbye.

MAURA
    When the time came for Maura to go to school any small enthusiasm that there had ever been in the Brennan family for education had died down. Maura’s mother was worn out with all the demands that were made on her to dress them up for this May Procession and that visit from the Bishop. Not to mention communion and confirmations. Mrs Brennan had been heard to say that the Shancarrig school had notions about itself being some kind of private college for the sons and daughters of the land-owning gentry rather than the National School it was, and that nature had always intended it to be.
    And the young Maura didn’t get much encouragement from her father either.