Free The Copper Beech by Maeve Binchy Page B

Paudie Brennan believed that schools and all that were women’s work and not things a man got involved with. And since Paudie Brennan was not a man ever continuously in work he couldn’t be expected to take an interest financially and every other way in each and every one of his nine living children, and Maura came near the end of the trail. Paudie Brennan had too much on his mind what with a leaking roof missing a dozen slates, and a very different and worrying kind of slate altogether above in Johnny Finn Noted for Best Drinks, so what time was there to be wondering about young Maura and her book learning?
    Maura had never expected there to be an interest. School was for books, home was for fights. The older brothers and sisters had gone to England – the really grown-upones. They went as soon as they were seventeen or eighteen. They came home for holidays and it was great at first, but after a day it would wear off, the niceness, and there would be shouting again as if the returned sister or brother was an ordinary part of the family, not a visitor.
    One day, Maura knew, she would be the eldest one at home – just herself and Geraldine left. But Maura wasn’t going to England to work in a shoe factory like Margaret, or a fish shop like Deirdre. No, she was going to stay here in Shancarrig. She wouldn’t get married but she would live like Miss Ross, who was very old and could do what she liked and stay up all night without anyone giving out or groaning at her. Of course, Miss Ross was a school teacher and must earn pots of money, but Maura would save whenever she started to work, and keep the money in the post office until she could have a house and freedom to go to bed at two in the morning if the notion took her.
    Maura Brennan often stayed on late at school to talk to Miss Ross, to try to find out more about this magnificent lifestyle in the small house with the lilac bushes and the tall hollyhocks, where Miss Ross lived. She would ask endless questions about the dog or the cat. She knew their names and ages, which nobody else at school did. She would hope that one day Miss Ross might drop another hint or two about her life. Miss Ross seemed puzzled by her interest. The child was in no way bright. Even taking into account her loutish father and timid uneducated mother, young Maura must still be called one of the slower learners in the school. Even the youngest of that Brennan string of children, Geraldine, with the permanent cold and her hair in her eyes, was quicker. But Maura was the one who hung about, who found excuses to have meaningless little conversations.
    One day Miss Ross let slip that she hated ironing.
    ‘I love ironing,’ Maura said. ‘I love it, I’d do it all day but the one we have is broke, and my da won’t pay to have it mended.’
    ‘What do you like about it?’ Miss Ross seemed genuinely interested.
    ‘The way your hand goes on and on … it’s like music almost … and the clothes get lovely and smooth, and it all smells nice and clean,’ Maura said.
    ‘You make it sound great. I wish you’d come and do mine.’
    ‘Of course I will,’ said Maura.
    She was eleven then, a square girl with her hair clipped back by a brown slide, a high forehead and clear eyes. In a different family in another place she might have had a better chance, a start that would have brought her further along some kind of road.
    ‘No, Maura, you can’t, child. I don’t want the other children to see you rating yourself as only fit to do my ironing. I don’t want you making little of yourself before you have to.’
    ‘How could that be making little of myself?’ The question was without guile. Maura Brennan saw no lack of dignity in coming to the teacher’s house to do household chores.
    ‘The others … they don’t have to know, Miss Ross.’
    ‘But they do, they will. You know this place.’
    ‘They don’t know lots of things, like that my sister Margaret had a baby in Northampton. Geraldine and