Circle of Friends (39 page)

“Which you didn’t.”

“I was cold.”

“Did you tell him who you were?”

“Just that my name happened to be Hegarty. Sit down, Kit. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

“You’ll make me nothing in my kitchen,” she said.

But she did sit down and looked at him across the table. He was fifteen years older than he was the day he had taken the mail boat out of their lives.

How long had she cried herself to sleep at night wanting him to return. How often had she played the scene where he would come back and she would forgive him. But always in that version Francis would be young and would run toward them both, arms outstretched, crying out that he had a Daddy and a real home again.

He was still handsome. His hair had only little bits of gray, but he looked shabbier than she remembered, as if he were down on his luck. His shoes weren’t well polished. They needed to be taken to a cobbler’s. His cuffs were not frayed exactly, but thin.

“Did you hear about Francis?” she said.

“Yes.”

The silence hung long between them.

“I came to tell you how sorry I was,” he said.

“Not sorry enough to see him ever, to care to be involved in his life when he had a life.”

She looked at him without hate, the man who had abandoned them. She had been told that he had gone to live with a barmaid. At the time somehow that had made it worse, more humiliating that the woman was a barmaid. It was such an obvious kind of thing to do. Now she wondered why the woman’s job had been remotely important.

She thought of all the questions she had parried and eventually answered while her son grew up asking about his father, and wondering why he didn’t have what everyone else at the Christian Brothers’ school had in their homes.

She thought of the day Francis had got his Leaving Certificate and run home with the results, and how she had an urge to find her long-lost husband that day—only a few months ago—and tell him that the child they had produced together would go to university.

In those long nights when she had not been able to find any sleep and thoughts had run scampering around in her head, she remembered with relief that she hadn’t raised the hopes of this philandering husband and led him to believe that he had fathered a university student.

She thought of all this as she looked at him sitting in her kitchen.

“I’ll make you tea,” she said.

“Whatever you think.”

“Did she throw you out?” Kit asked. She asked because he hadn’t the look of a man who was cared for by a woman, not even a woman who had been brassy and taken him, even though she must have known he had a wife and child in Ireland.

“Oh, that all ended a long time ago. Years and years ago.”

It had ended. But he had not come back. Once gone he was truly gone. Somehow that was sadder than the other.
For years she had seen him in some kind of domesticity with this woman. But in fact he might have been living alone, or in digs or bed-sitters.

That was worse than leaving her for a grand passion, however ill-advised. She looked at him with a look of great sadness.

“I was wondering …” he said. She looked at him, kettle in one hand and teapot in the other.

He was going to ask, could he come back.

Nan wanted to know if Eve had taken Heather out at the weekend. She often inquired about Heather, Eve noticed, rarely about the digs and Kit or the convent and Mother Francis.

She said they went to Wicklow and it had been wet and misty, and they went to a hotel where tea and sandwiches cost twice what real food like ice cream and butterscotch sauce would cost.

“You must have gone in a car to a place like that,” Nan said.

“Yes.” Eve looked at her.

“Did Aidan drive you?”

“Lord, I couldn’t let Aidan near her. He’s quite frightening enough for our age. He’d give a child nightmares.”

Nan left the subject of Aidan Lynch.

“So who did?”

Eve knew it was ridiculous not to tell her. She’d get to know someday. It was like being an eight-year-old, having secrets at school. Anyway it was making too much of it all.

“Her brother Simon drove us,” she said.

“The one we saw in my mother’s shop at the dance, and you didn’t introduce me.”

“The very one.”

Nan pealed with laughter. “You’re marvelous, Eve,”
she said. “I’m so glad I’m your friend. I’d really hate to be your enemy.”

Most of the cottages on the road up by the quarry behind the convent were fairly dilapidated. It was never a place that anyone would really seek out to live. It had been different when the quarry was operating, in those days there had been plenty of people wanting to live there. Now there were very few lights burning in windows. Mossy Rooney lived in a small house there with his mother. There had been rumors that Mossy had been seen with building materials and a consequent speculation that he might intend building an extra room at the back. Could this mean that he had plans to marry?

Mossy was not a man to do things in a hurry. People said that Patsy shouldn’t count her chickens too soon.

Sean Walsh sometimes went for a walk up that way on a Sunday. Mother Francis would nod to him gravely and he always returned the greeting very formally.

If he ever wondered what the nun was doing pushing her way past the dark green leaves of the wild fuchsia and rolling up her sleeves to polish and clean he never gave any sign of his curiosity. Neither did she pause to think why he walked there. He was a lonely young man, not very attractive to speak to. She knew that Eve had always disliked him. But that might just have been a childish thing, a loyalty to Benny Hogan, who had some kind of antipathy toward her father’s assistant.

She was surprised when he addressed her. With a long preamble of apology he asked if she knew who owned the cottages and whether they might perhaps belong to the convent. Mother Francis explained that they had once belonged to the Westlands estate, and had devolved somehow to various quarry workers and others. Politely with her head on
one side in her inquiring manner she wondered why he wanted to know.

Equally courteously Sean told her that it had been an idle inquiry but the nature of small towns being what it was, perhaps an inquiry that might remain confidential between the two of them.

Mother Francis sighed. She supposed the poor fellow who had scant hope of making much of a living in Hogan’s might be looking to the day when he could buy a house for himself and start a family, and that he was realistic enough to start looking up on this wild craggy road where nobody would really live by choice.

Benny hated going into the Coffee Inn. The tables were always so small. She was afraid that her skirt or her shoulder bag would swoop someone’s frothy coffee off onto the floor.

Jack’s face lit up when he saw her. He had been holding a seat with some difficulty.

“These awful country thicks wanted to take your stool,” he hissed at her.

“Less running down the country people,” Benny said. She glanced up and saw with a shock that the three students who had lost the battle for the seat were Kit Hegarty’s students, the boys who lived where Eve worked. And one of them, a big fellow with freckles, was wearing his lovely emerald-green sweater.

Aidan Lynch asked Eve to come home and meet his parents.

“I’ve met them,” Eve said ungraciously, handing him another dinner plate to dry.

“Well, you could meet them again.”

Eve didn’t want to meet them again; it was rushing things. It was saying things that weren’t ready to be said like that Eve was Aidan’s girl friend, which she wasn’t.

“How is this relationship going to progress any further?” Aidan asked the ceiling. “She won’t get to know my family. She won’t let me near her body. She won’t go on a date with me unless I come out to Dun Laoghaire and do the washing up after all the culchies first.” He sounded very sorry for himself.

Eve’s mind was on other things. Aidan could amuse himself for hours when he was in one of his rhetorical moods. She smiled at him absently.

Kit was out. For the very first time since Eve had been in the house, what was more, there was no message.

Kevin, the nice freckled vet student whose jumper had been purloined for Benny’s date, had said that Mrs. Hegarty had gone out with a man.

“Everyone goes out with men,” Aidan had interrupted. “It’s the law of nature. Female canaries go out with male canaries. Sheep go out with rams. Women tortoises go out with men tortoises. Only Eve seems to have reservations.”

Eve took no notice. She was also thinking about Benny. Almost every day for a week now Benny had met Jack Foley, either in the Annexe or the Coffee Inn or a bar. She said he was very easy to talk to. She hadn’t put a foot wrong yet. Benny’s face had looked as if someone had turned on a light inside when she talked about Jack Foley.

“And of course this Eve that I have the misfortune to be besotted with … she won’t even stay in Dublin for the Christmas parties. She’s leaving me on my own for other women to have their way with, and do sinful things with my body.”

“I have to go to Knockglen, you idiot,” she said.

“Where there will be no parties, where people will go out and watch the grass grow and see the rain fall and moo cows will walk down the main street swishing their foul tails.”

“You’ve got it so wrong,” Eve cried. “We’ll be having a
great
time in Knockglen, down in Mario’s every evening, and of course there’ll be parties there.”

“Name me one,” Aidan countered.

“Well, I’ll be having one for a start,” Eve said, stung.

Then she stood motionless with a dinner plate in her hands.

Oh God, she thought. Now I have to.

Nan rang
The Irish Times
, and asked for the Sports Department. When she was put through she asked them to tell her what race meetings would be held before Christmas.

Not many, she was told. Things slackened off coming up to the festive season. There’d be a meeting every Saturday, of course, Navan, Punchestown, run-of-the-mill things. But on St. Stephen’s Day it would all get going again. The day after Christmas there’d be Leopardstown and Limerick. She could take her pick of those. Nan asked them what did people who usually went racing do when the season slackened off. In a newspaper people are accustomed to being asked odd questions on the phone. They gave it some consideration. It depended on what kind of people. Some might be saving their pennies, some might be out hunting. It depended.

Nan thanked them in the pleasant unaffected voice that had never tried to imitate the tones of another class she wanted to join. An elocution teacher at school had once told them that there was nothing more pathetic than people with perfectly good Irish accents trying to say “Fratefully naice.” Nothing would mark you out as a social climber as much as adopting that kind of accent.

They sat in a cafe in Dun Laoghaire, Mr. and Mrs. Hegarty. Around them other people were doing ordinary things, like
having a coffee before going to an evening class in typing, or waiting for the pictures to start.

Ordinary people with ordinary lives and nothing bigger to discuss than whether the electric fire would eat up electricity or if they could have two chickens instead of a turkey for Christmas Day.

Joseph Hegarty fiddled with his spoon. She noticed that he didn’t take sugar in his coffee now. Perhaps the woman had put him off that. Perhaps his travels had taken him to places where there were no sugar bowls on the table. He had left one insurance company and gone to another. He had moved from that to working with a broker, to having a book himself, to working with another agent. Insurance wasn’t the same, he told her.

She looked at him with eyes that were not hard, or cold. She saw him objectively. He was kindly and soft spoken as he had always been. In those first agonized months after he had left that was what she had missed above all.

“You wouldn’t know anyone here anymore,” she said haltingly.

“I’d get to know them again.”

“It’d be harder to find insurance work here than there. Things are very tight in Ireland.”

“I wouldn’t go back on that. I thought maybe I could help you … build up the business.”

She thought about it, sitting very still and with her eyes down so that she wouldn’t meet the hope in his. She thought of the way he would preside over the table, make the place seem like it was run by a family. She could almost see him giving second helpings, making boys like Kevin Hickey laugh, being interested in their studies and their social lives.

But why had he not done that for his own son? For Francis Hegarty who might still be alive this day if he had had a firm father who would brook no nonsense about a motorbike.

“No, Joseph,” she said, without looking up. “It wouldn’t work.”

He sat there very silent. He thought about his son, the son who had written to him all these years. The son who had come to see him during the summer, on a weekend from canning peas. Frank, the boy who had drunk three pints with his father and told him all about the home in Dun Laoghaire and how maybe his mother’s heart was softening. But he had never told his mother about the visit or the letters. Joseph Hegarty would keep faith with the dead boy. Frank must have had his reasons, his father would not betray him now or change his mother’s memory of him.

“Very well, Kit,” he said. “It’s your decision. I just thought I’d ask.”

The Westwards were in the telephone book. The phone was answered by an elderly woman.

“It’s a personal call for Mr. Simon Westward from Sir Victor Cavendish.” Nan spoke in the impersonal voice of a secretary. She had taken the name from
Social and Personal
.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Westward isn’t here.”

“Where can Sir Victor find him, please?”

Mrs. Walsh responded immediately to the confident tone that expected an answer.

“He’s going to have lunch in the Hibernian I believe,” she said. “Perhaps Sir Victor could telephone him there.”

“Thank you so much,” Nan said, and hung up.

“I want to give you your Christmas present today,” Nan said to Benny in the Main Hall.

“Lord, Nan, I didn’t bring anything in for you.” Benny looked stricken.