The Copper Beech by Maeve Binchy

Author:Maeve Binchy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Christian, Villagers, 26NEWBIE, General, Literary, Ireland, Secrecy, Country Life, Pastoral Fiction, Fiction, Religious
ISBN: 9780754019145
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1992-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

NESSA

It was Mrs Ryan who wore the trousers in Ryan’s Commercial Hotel. Everyone knew that. And just as well, because if Conor Ryan had married a mouse the place would have gone to the wall years ago.

Conor Ryan certainly hadn’t married a mouse when he wed Breda O’Connor. A small, thin girl with restless eyes and straight black shiny hair, she was a distant cousin of the Ryans. They met at a family wedding. Conor Ryan told her that he was thinking of going off to England and joining the British army. Anything to get out from under his parents’ feet – they ran this hole-in-the-wall hotel in a real backward town.

‘What do you want going into the army? There might be a war and you’d get killed,’ she said.

Conor Ryan implied that it mightn’t be a huge choice between that and staying put with his parents.

‘They can’t be that bad,’ Breda said.

‘They are. The place is like the ark. No, the ark was safe and dry and people wanted to get into it. This is like a morgue.’

‘Why don’t you improve it?’

‘I’m only twenty-three, they’d never let me,’ he said.

Breda O’Connor decided there and then that she would marry him. By the time Britain declared war on Germany they were already engaged.

‘Now, aren’t you glad I didn’t let you join the army?’ Breda said.

‘You haven’t lived with my father and mother yet,’ he said, with a look of defeat and resignation that she was determined to take out of him.

‘Nor will I,’ she said with spirit. ‘We’ll build a place of our own.’

Conor Ryan’s father said that he had picked a wastrel, a girl who thought they were made of money, when the outhouse was converted into a small dwelling for the newlyweds.

Conor Ryan’s mother said there would be no interfering from a fancy young one who thought she was the divil and all because she had a domestic science diploma. Conor reported none of these views to the bride-to-be. Breda would find out soon enough what they were like. She had assured him that she had been given fair warning.

As it happened she never really found out how much they had resented her coming to their house, and marrying their only son while he was still a child.

Breda never heard how his parents prophesied that when she had a few children out in that cement hut she was getting built for herself in the yard it would soften her cough.

The Ryan parents fell victim to a bad flu that swept the countryside in the winter of 1939.

Two weeks after the winter wedding of Conor and Breda the same congregation stood in the church for the double funeral of the groom’s parents.

There was a lot of head-shaking. How hard it was for a young girl to step in like that. It would be too much for her. She was only a little bit of a thing. And you’d need to light a bonfire under Conor Ryan to get any kind of action out of him.

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