Circle of Friends (35 page)

“But look at it, Aunt Peg. When else would people like Birdie Mac be able to come down and look at cardigans? When would Mrs. Kennedy come over and see the new blouses? Mrs. Carroll closes the grocery for lunch. She doesn’t spend the whole lunch hour eating by the look of her, thin string of misery that she is. Wouldn’t she walk down and see what the new skirts are like?”

“It might seem a bit unfair somehow. Unfair on the others.” Peggy knew her thinking was confused.

“Tell me, Aunt Peg, have I missed something in my walks up and down Knockglen? Are there several women’s draperies, open and competing with us? Is there a whole circle of women running shops like ours thinking that we’re a bit sharp opening at lunchtime?”

“Don’t be impertinent,” Peggy said.

“Seriously. Who would object?”

“They might think we were anxious to make money. That’s all.” Peggy was defensive.

“Oh, gosh, wouldn’t that be dreadful. And there you were all those years not trying to make a penny. Trying to
lose it. How could I have been so stupid?” Clodagh put on a clowning face.

“We’ll be dropping off our feet.”

“Not when we get another girl in we won’t.”

“There’d never be the call for it.”

“Go over the books with me today and you’ll see.”

Mrs. Kennedy looked without pleasure on the picture of Fonsie who stood in her shop.

“How’s the drugs business, Mrs. K?” he asked. He always winked slightly at her as if she were engaged in something shady.

“What can I do for you?” she asked in a clipped voice.

“I’m looking for a nice fancy cake of soap.”

“Yes … Well.” She managed to suggest that it was not a moment before time.

“For girls, like,” Fonsie said.

“A gift?” She seemed surprised.

“No, for the new ladies’ room,” Fonsie said proudly.

He had spent a long time persuading Mario that they should do up the two outhouses as toilets. And make the female one look attractive. Girls liked to spend time painting themselves and doing their hair. Fonsie had driven out to an auction and bought a huge mirror. They put a shelf underneath it. All they needed now was a couple of nice towels on a roller and a bit of smart soap to start off with.

“Would Apple Blossom be a bit too good for what you had in mind?” Mrs. Kennedy brought out what was called a gift pack of soap.

Fonsie made a mental note to tell Clodagh to stock soaps and talcs. Sneak them in before Peggy could protest that they were taking business from the chemist. Mrs. Kennedy was an old bat, and a bad old bat at that. She didn’t deserve to have the monopoly on the town’s soap.

She wouldn’t have, not for much longer.

But in the meantime …

“That’s precisely what we need, Mrs. Kennedy, thank you so much,” he said with a great beam, and handed the money across the counter without even wincing at the cost.

Sean Walsh saw from the shop window that Mrs. Healy across the road was polishing the brass sign for the hotel. She was looking at it critically. He wondered had it been defaced, she was frowning so much. There was nobody in Hogan’s so he strolled across the road to see what was happening.

“It’s hard to get in and out of the letters,” Mrs. Healy said. “Bits remain in there clogging them up.”

“You shouldn’t be doing this, Mrs. Healy, it’s not fitting,” he said. “A member of your staff should do the brasses.”

“You do the ones across the road. I’ve seen you,” she countered.

“Ah, that’s different. It’s not my place, across there.”

“Not yet,” said Mrs. Healy.

Sean ignored this. “You must have somebody, Mrs. Healy, one of the kitchen maids.”

“They’re so unreliable. Just standing chatting to people instead of getting on with it.” Mrs. Healy seemed quite unaware that this is what she was doing herself.

“If you like, I’ll do yours when I’m doing ours,” Sean offered. “But early in the morning, before anyone would see.”

“That’s extraordinarily kind of you.” Mrs. Healy looked at him surprised as if wondering why he would do this. She prided herself on being able to understand human nature. Running a hotel you met all sorts and you had to make judgments about people. Sean Walsh was a difficult person to categorize. It was obvious that he had his eye on the daughter of the house. A big strong-willed girl with a
mind of her own. Mrs. Healy thought that Sean Walsh would be wise to make some contingency plans. Just because she was a large girl who might not get many offers, Benny Hogan, once she had her degree from Dublin, might well hightail it off somewhere else. Leaving Sean Walsh’s plans in tatters.

Mother Francis was pleased that it was a nice bright Saturday morning and not drizzling with rain like it had been most mornings in the week.

She would go up to the cottage for an hour when school finished and see what else needed to be done. Sometimes she told herself that she was like a child with a dolls’ house. Perhaps all the aching that a woman out in the world might have for her own home was coming to the surface. She hoped that this wasn’t going to threaten the whole basis of her vocation to the religious life. You were meant to put your own home and family behind you and think only of your calling. But there was nothing in any rules that said you couldn’t help to build up a home for an orphan who had been sent by the intervention of God into your care.

Mother Francis wondered how her orphan had got on at the dance last night. Kit Hegarty had phoned to say that Eve looked splendid. Mother Francis wished it hadn’t been in a borrowed skirt, no matter how elegant and how rich a red.

She wished that class would be over and she could release the girls who were dying to escape anyway and go to Mario’s cafe and look in the very much changed windows of Peggy’s shop. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could just ring the bell now, at eleven-thirty in the morning, and shout, “You’re free.”

The children would remember it all their lives. But undoubtedly it would get to the ears of Mother Clare. Her heart sank again as it always did at the thought of her sister
in religion. If Mother Clare hadn’t been coming they might have invited Kit Hegarty for Christmas. They couldn’t now. Mother Clare would say they were turning a religious house into some kind of boardinghouse.

In two and a half hours she would be taking the key from its place in the wall and going into the cottage, polishing the piano and covering the damp stain on the wall with a lovely gold-colored wall hanging.

One of the missionary Sisters had brought it from Africa. They had all admired it, but it wasn’t a holy picture. It didn’t really seem suitable to put it up in the convent. Mother Francis had kept it carefully. She knew just where it would be useful. And may be she might get some gold-colored material somewhere and Sister Imelda could run up a couple of cushion covers too.

Eve was almost bouncing up and down on her bed when she heard about the invitation to lunch.

“I
told
you, I
told
you,” she kept saying.

“No, you didn’t. You said he
looked
as if he was enjoying dancing with me. That’s all.”

“Well, you thought he looked as if it was Purgatory on earth and that he was making eyes at people over your shoulder to rescue him.”

“I didn’t quite think that,” Benny said. But she had almost thought it.

When she had played the whole thing over in her mind again and again, those six lovely dances they had together, she was torn between believing that they were as enjoyable for him as they were for her, and that they were a simple courteous duty. Now it looked as if he really had liked her. The only problem was what to wear to the lunch.

Only the old castoff clothes of yesterday were available. You couldn’t wear a ball gown and expose your bosom on a November Saturday. So much the pity!

“I have seventeen pounds. I could lend you some if you wanted to buy something,” Eve offered.

But buying was no use. Not for Benny. They simply didn’t have the clothes in her size.

If it had been Eve they could have run up Marine Road in Dun Laoghaire to Lee’s or McCullogh’s and got something in two minutes. If it were Nan all she would have to do was open a cupboard and choose. But Benny’s clothes, such as they were, were fifty miles away in Knockglen.

Knockglen.

She had better ring her parents. And find out where they had been. And tell them it would be the evening bus, and say something to Patsy.

She got the coins and went back down to the phone.

They were delighted to hear from her and pleased that the dance had gone well, and wanted to know what had been served for supper. They were very startled to hear about the dispensation to eat meat. They had been out for a walk when she telephoned last night. It was very good of her. And had the party in the Foleys’ house been nice? And had she explained again how grateful they were to be asked?

Benny felt her eyes misting.

“Tell Patsy I have a pair of stockings for her as a present,” she said suddenly.

“You couldn’t have chosen a better time to give her something,” Benny’s mother said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “She’s been like a weasel all day. A weasel with a head cold if you ask me.”

Eve said that Kit would find a solution to the clothes problem. Kit had an answer for everything.

“Not about huge clothes.” Benny was gloomy.

But she was wrong. Kit said that one of the students who stayed in the house had a gorgeous emerald-green jumper. She’d borrow it off him. Say it needed a stitch or something. Boys never noticed that kind of thing. If he wanted to wear it today he bloody couldn’t. That was all.
Then Kit would sew a nice lacy collar of her own on it and lend Benny her green handbag. She’d be dressed to kill.

Fonsie wanted Clodagh to be the first to see the new ladies’ cloakroom.

“God, it’s lovely.” She was full of admiration. “Pink towels, pink soap, and purple curtains. It’s fabulous.”

He was anxious about the lighting. Was it too bright?

Clodagh thought not. If they were old people, who didn’t want to see wrinkles, then yes, have it subdued. But they’d be young. Let them see the worst in their faces.

Clodagh wished she could get her aunt to install two fitting rooms. Peggy said that it wasn’t needed in somewhere like Knockglen. People could take things home on approval. If they didn’t like them they could bring them back.

This was uneconomic and with the increased volume of stock they carried, hard to organize. There was a storeroom that Clodagh had her eye on. All it needed was light mirrors, carpet and bright curtains. They sighed, Clodagh and Fonsie, at the uphill battles with their relations.

“Will we go and have a drink in Healy’s?” Fonsie said, suddenly.

“I don’t know. I said I’d unpack a whole lot of stuff that came in this morning.”

“To celebrate my new bathrooms and to plan your new fitting rooms,” he pleaded.

They walked companionably up the street, Clodagh in her short white wool dress worn over a pair of baggy mauve trousers and mauve polo-necked jumper. Great white plastic hoops of earrings dangled under a man’s tweed hat with a ribbon of mauve and white on it.

Fonsie’s spongy shoes made no sound on the footpath. His red crushed-velvet jacket was bound in a yellow braid, his shirt neck was open and a red thin string like a tie hung down on each side of the collar. His dark red trousers were
so tight that it appeared every step would cause him pain in most of his body.

On Saturdays at lunchtime the bar in Healy’s Hotel was like a little club. Eddie Hogan would call in for a drink and meet Dr. Johnson coming back from his rounds. Sometimes Father Ross would appear, and if Dessie Burns was off the drink he would sip a Club Orange loudly and know he was welcome in their midst.

Mr. Flood hadn’t been in much recently. The visions he had been seeing were preoccupying him. He had been seen standing in his garden looking thoughtfully up at the tree. Mr. Kennedy when he was alive had been a regular. His wife would not have dreamed of coming in his stead. Sometimes Peggy had gone in for a swift gin and vermouth with Birdie Mac.

Clodagh and Fonsie paused at the entrance to the bar, they didn’t want to join the group of old people and yet it would have been rude to ignore them.

As it happened they didn’t have to make the decision.

Suddenly between them and the room stood the well-corseted figure of Mrs. Healy.

“Can I do anything for you?” She looked from one to the other without hiding her distaste.

“Very probably, but I think we’ll confine it to just having a drink at the moment.” Fonsie laughed and ran his hand through his mop of dark and well-greased hair.

Clodagh giggled and looked down.

“Yes, well, perhaps Shea’s or somewhere might be nice for a drink,” Mrs. Healy said.

They looked at her in disbelief. She could not be refusing them entrance to her hotel?

Their silence unsettled her. Mrs. Healy had been expecting a protest.

“So maybe we could see you, here, when you are … um … more appropriately dressed,” she said, with an insincere smile on her lips, but nowhere near her eyes.

“Are you refusing to serve us a drink, Mrs. Healy?” Fonsie said in a very loud voice, intended to make every head in the place look up.

“I’m suggesting that perhaps you might present yourself for a drink in garb that is more in tune with the standards of a town like this and a hotel of this caliber,” she said.

“Are you refusing us because we are the worse for drink?” Clodagh asked. She looked over to the corner where two farmers were celebrating a small field bought and sold and were distinctly the worse for wear.

“I think out of respect for your aunt, who is one of our most valued customers, you might mind your tongue,” Mrs. Healy said.

“She’s joking Clodagh. Don’t mind her,” Fonsie said, trying to push past.

Two spots of red on Mrs. Healy’s face warned everyone that she most certainly was not joking.

Fonsie said that there were four men in the bar without ties, and he was perfectly willing to close his tie if it meant he could get a half pint of Guinness.

Clodagh said that if any of her garments offended Mrs. Healy she would be very happy to remove them one by one until she was in something acceptable like a vest and knickers.