Circle of Friends (10 page)

The term would start next week. Lucky Benny would arrive as would hundreds of first-year students from all over Ireland.

Eve realized that there were thousands like herself who would never get there. But their expectations hadn’t been raised. They hadn’t been encouraged and treated well and led to believe that they had brains and insights like she had. That’s what made it so hard.

Eve knew that through these doors next week would come girls who only intended to use university as part of their social life. There would be unwilling students, who didn’t want to be here at all, who had other plans and other dreams, but came to satisfy the wishes of parents. There would be those who drifted in and would use the time to make up their minds. She felt a boiling rage about the Westwards, the family who cut off their own flesh and blood, who let her be raised by the charity of the nuns and never bothered themselves to think that she was now of university age.

There was no fairness on earth if someone who would appreciate it and work hard was kept out just because of a greedy, uncaring family who would prefer to forget the child
of an unsuitable union rather than make a generous gesture and ensure that some Right was done at the end of the day.

She looked in the glass-fronted noticeboards and read of the societies that would be re-forming when term started, and the new committees and the sports arrangements and the practice times, and the appeals for people to join this group and that club.

And she saw the big staircases leading up to the libraries and the lecture halls. She saw the red plush benches which would be filled with students next week, and she ached to be amongst them. To spend her days reading and writing and finding out more and talking to people, and to spend no time at all trying to outwit awful people like Mother Clare.

The Wise Woman would get on with her life and stop dreaming. Then she thought how tiring it was going to be for the rest of her life trying to be the Wise Woman all the time. It would be great to be the very Unwise Woman on occasion.

Benny took the bus to Dublin on the first day of term with more trepidation than she would ever have expected. At home they had behaved as if she were a toddler going to a first party in a party frock rather than a huge ungainly student eighteen years of age going to university dressed from head to toe in dark clothes.

She could still see the tableau this morning; her father with tears of pride in his eyes—she knew he would go to the business and bore everyone to death with tales about how his wonderful daughter was going to university. Benny could see her mother sitting there stretching her hand out full of what she had been full of for months now: the huge advantages of being able to come home every night by bus. Patsy, looking like the faithful old black mammy slave in a
film except that she was white and she was only twenty-five. It had made Benny want to scream and scream.

And she had other worries, too, as she sat on the bus and started her university career. Mother Francis had told her that the bold Eve hadn’t written or telephoned, and that all the Sisters were dying to hear from her. Yet Eve had phoned Benny twice in the last week to say that life in the Dublin convent was intolerable and she would have to meet her in Dublin because otherwise she would go mad.

“But how can we meet? Don’t you have to stay in that place for lunch?” Benny had asked.

“I’ve told them I have to go to hospital for tests.”

As long as she had known her Eve had hardly ever told a lie Benny had to tell a lot of little lies in order to be followed out late or indeed at all. But Eve had been resolute about never lying to the nuns. Things must be very bad in Dublin if she had gone this far.

And then there was Sean Walsh. Naturally she had not wanted to go out with him, but both her mother and father stressed how nice it was of him to take such an interest in the fact that she was going off to university and wanted to take her to the pictures as a treat. She had decided to take what might be the easiest way out and accept. After all, if it were to be something to mark the beginning of a new stage in her life, then she could make it clear that this new life wouldn’t involve any further outings with him.

Last night they had gone to the film
Genevieve
. Almost everyone else in the world must have loved it, Benny thought grimly, all over the place people left cinemas humming the tune and wishing they looked like either Kay Kendall or Kenneth More. But not Benny. She had left in a black fury.

All through the film Sean Walsh had put his thin bony arm around her shoulder or on her knee or even on one particularly unpleasant occasion, managed to get his hand sort of around her back under her arm and around her
breast. All of these she had wriggled out of, and as they were leaving the cinema he had the nerve to say, “You know, I really respect you for saying no, Benny. It makes you even more special, if you know what I mean.”

Respected
her! For saying no to
him
? That was the easiest thing she had ever done, but Sean was the type who thought that she enjoyed it.

“I’ll go home now, Sean,” she had said.

“No, I told your father we’d have a cup of coffee in Mario’s. They won’t be expecting you.”

She was trapped again. If she
did
go home they would ask why the coffee hadn’t materialized.

Next to the cinema, Peggy Pine’s shop had some new autumn stock. Benny had looked at the cream-colored blouses and soft pink angora sweaters. In order to talk about something that did not have to do with fondling and stroking she spoke of the garments.

“They’re pretty, aren’t they, Sean,” she had said, her mind barely on them. She was thinking instead that once she got to University she would never need to see him again.

“Well, they are, but not on
you
. You’re much wiser not to draw attention to yourself. Wear dark colors. Nothing flashy.”

There had been tears in her eyes as she crossed the road with him to Mario’s and he brought two cups of coffee and two Club milk chocolate biscuits to the plastic-topped table where she waited for him.

“It’s an ill wind,” he had said.

“What do you mean exactly?”

“Well, that brought Eve off to Dublin and out of your life.”

“Not out of my life. I’m going to be in Dublin.”

“But not in her world. Anyway, you’re grown up now, it’s not for you to be as thick as thieves with the likes of
her.”

“I like being as thick as thieves with her. She’s my
friend.” Why do I have to explain this to him, Benny had thought.

“Yes, but it’s not seemly. Not anymore.”

“I don’t like talking about Eve behind her back.”

“No, I’m just saying, it’s an ill wind. Now that she’s gone you won’t always be saying that you’re off to the pictures with her. I can take you.”

“I won’t have much time for the pictures anymore. Not with study.”

“You won’t be studying every night.” He had smiled at her complacently. “And don’t forget, there’s always weekends.”

She had felt a terrible weariness.

“There’s always weekends,” she repeated. It seemed easier somehow.

But Sean had felt like making a statement. “Don’t think that it’s going to come between us, you having a university education,” he had said.

“Not come between us?”

“Exactly. Why should it? There are some men that might let it but I’m not one. I tell you something, Benny, I’ve always modeled myself a lot on your father. I don’t know whether you know this or not.”

“I know you work with him, so I’m sure you must learn from him.”

“Much more than that. I could learn from any outfitters in the country. I could learn tailoring by sitting at a bench. No, I watch the way Mr. Hogan has faced the world, and I try to learn from that.”

“What have you learned in particular?”

“Well, not to be proud for one thing. Your father married an older woman, a woman with money. He wasn’t ashamed to put that money into his business, it’s what she wanted and he wanted. It would have been a foolish, bull-necked man who would have looked a gift horse in the
mouth … so I like to see myself in a small way as following in his footsteps.”

Benny had stared at him as if she had never seen him before.

“What exactly are you trying to say Sean?” she had asked.

“I’m trying to say that none of it means anything to me. I’m above all that sort of thing,” he had said loftily.

There was a silence.

“Just to make my point clear,” he had ended.

That had been last night.

Mother and Father had seemed pleased that she had spent time having coffee with Sean.

If that’s what they want for me, Benny asked herself, why on God’s earth are they allowing me to go to university. If they want to take it all away in the end and match me up with that slimy half-wit, why then take me up to the mountain and show me the world? It was too hard to answer, as was Eve’s problem. Eve had said not only was she going to be free for lunch, she would meet Benny off the bus and walk her up to University College. Hanged for a sheep was what Eve had said on the phone.

Jack Foley woke with a start. He had been dreaming that he and his friend Aidan Lynch were on Death Row in some American prison and they were about to die in the electric chair. Their crime seemed to be that they had sung the song “Hernando’s Hideaway” too loudly.

It was a huge relief to find himself in the big bedroom with its heavy mahogany furniture. Jack said you could hide a small army in the various wardrobes around the house. His mother had said that it was all very well to mock but she had stood many long hours at auctions all over the city finding the right pieces.

The Foleys lived in a large Victorian house with a garden
in Donnybrook, a couple of miles from the center of Dublin. It was a leafy place, professional people, merchants, senior civil servants had lived around here for a long time.

The houses on the road didn’t have numbers; they all had names, and the postman knew where everyone lived. People didn’t move much once they got to a road like this one. Jack was the eldest of the family and he had been born in a smaller house, but he didn’t remember it. By the time he was a toddler his parents had arrived here.

He noticed that in the photographs of his childhood the rooms looked a lot less furnished.

“We were building up our home,” his mother had told him. “No point in rushing and getting the wrong type of thing entirely.”

Not that Jack or any of his brothers really noticed the house much. It was there for them as it had always been. Like Doreen had always been putting the food on the table, like the old dog Oswald had been there for as long as they could recall.

Jack shook off his dream about Death Row and remembered that all over Dublin today there would be people waking to the first day of term.

The first day of term in the Foley household meant that Jack would put on a college scarf and head into UCD for the first time. In the dining room of the big Donnybrook house there was a sense of excitement. Dr. John Foley sat at the head of the table, and looked at his five sons. He had assumed they would all enter medicine as he had, so it had been a shock when Jack had chosen law. Perhaps the same thing would happen with the others. Dr. Foley looked at Kevin and Gerry. He had always seen them somewhere in the medical field as well as on a rugby pitch. His eyes fell on Ronan. Already he seemed to have the reassuring kind of manner one associated with being a doctor. That boy Ronan could convince even his own mother that the wounds he got in a playground were superficial, that the dirt on his clothes
would easily wash out. That was the personality you needed in a good family doctor. Then there was Aengus, the youngest: his owlish glasses made him look studious and he was the only Foley boy not to be chosen for some kind of team in the school. Dr. Foley had always seen his son Aengus as going into medical research when the time came. A bit too frail and woolly for the rough-and-tumble of ordinary practice.

But then he had been wrong about his eldest son. Jack said he had no wish to study physics and chemistry. The term he had spent at school trying to understand the first thing about physics had been wasted. Nor did he want botany and zoology, he’d be no good at them.

In vain Dr. Foley had pleaded that the pre-med year was a necessary Term of Purgatory before you started the real business of medicine.

Jack had been adamant. He would prefer law.

Not the bar either, but being apprenticed as a solicitor. What he would really and truly like was to do this new degree course for Bachelor of Civil Law. It was like doing a B.A. but all in law subjects. He had discussed it with his father seriously and with all the information to hand. He could be apprenticed to his mother’s brother, surely. Uncle Kevin was in a big solicitors’ practice: they’d find a place for him. He timed his request well. Jack knew that his father’s head was buried as deeply in the world of rugby as the world of medicine. Jack was a shining schoolboy player. He was on the pitch for his school in the Senior Cup final. He scored two tries and converted one of them. His father was in no position to fight him. Anyway it would have been foolish to force someone into a life so demeaning. Dr. Foley shrugged. There were plenty of other boys to follow him down the good physician’s route to Fitzwilliam Square.

Jack’s mother, Lilly, sat at the far end of the table opposite her husband. Jack could never remember a breakfast when she had not presided over the cups of tea, the bowls of
cornflakes, the slices of grilled bacon and half tomato which was the start to the day every morning except Fridays and in Lent.

His mother always looked as if she had dressed up for the occasion, which indeed she had. She wore a smart Gor-Ray skirt, always with either a twinset or a wool blouse. Her hair was always perfectly done, and there was a dusting of powder on her face as well as a slight touch of lipstick. When Jack had spent the night in friends’ houses after a match he realized that their mothers were not like his. Often women in dressing gowns with cigarettes put food on kitchen tables for them. The formal breakfast at eight o’clock in a high-ceilinged dining room with heavy mahogany sideboards and floor-to-ceiling windows wasn’t everyone else’s way of life.