Circle of Friends (51 page)

With Simon she was determined to play it cool and distant. To ask little and seem to know little of his family and home life, so that he would not feel justified in prying into hers. Later, when she had really captivated him, then it would be time for him to get answers to his questions.

And by then he would know her well enough to realize that a drunken father and a messy family would form no part of the life that she led.

She believed that she had flirted with him for long enough and that she was timing it right to go to this hotel with him tonight.

She had looked the hotel up in a guidebook, and knew all about it. Nan Mahon would not arrive anywhere, even at a hotel to lose her virginity, unprepared and uninformed about the social background of the place.

He smiled at her a crooked lopsided smile. He really was most attractive, Nan thought, even though he was smaller than she would have chosen. She didn’t wear her really good high-heeled shoes when she was out with him. He was very confident of her, as if he had known that this day would come sooner rather than later.

In fact that thought must have been on his mind.

“I was very glad when you agreed to come to dinner and let us spend a whole evening together instead of rushing away at a taxi rank,” he said.

“Yes, it’s a lovely place, I believe. It has marvelous portraits and old hunting prints.”

“Yes. How do you know that?”

“I can’t remember. Someone told me.”

“You haven’t been there with any of your previous boyfriends.”

“I’ve never been to a hotel with
anyone
.”

“Come on now.”

“True.”

He looked slightly alarmed. As if the thought of what lay ahead was now more arduous and complicated than he had supposed. But a girl like Nan would not go ahead with something like this unless she intended it.

And when she said she had never been to a hotel with a chap, she might be speaking the literal truth. But a girl like this must have had some kind of experience, whether it was in a hotel bedroom or a sand dune. He would not face that problem until he had to.

There were candles on the table, and they sat in a dark dining room with heavy oil paintings of the hotelier’s stern ancestors.

The waiter spoke respectfully like an old retainer, and they seemed to recognize Simon, and treat him with respect.

At the next table sat a couple. The waiter addressed the man as “Sir Michael.” Nan closed her eyes for an instant. In many ways being here was better than being in Westlands. He had been right.

It was like a stately home, and they were being treated like the aristocracy. Not bad for the daughter of Brian Mahon, builders’ provider and drunk.

Nan had not been telling him any lies, Simon realized with surprise and some mild guilt. He was indeed the first man she had gone to a hotel with in any sense of the word. She lay there with the moonlight coming through the curtains and catching her perfect sleeping face. She really was a very beautiful girl, and she seemed to like him a lot. He drew her toward him again.

Benny knew that Sean Walsh’s partnership could not be postponed forever. If only she could get her mother to take an interest in the matter. Annabel woke heavy and leaden from a sleep that had been gained through tablets. It took her several hours to shake off the feeling of torpor.

And when she did the loneliness of her position came back to her. Her husband dead before his time, her daughter gone all day in Dublin and her maid about to announce an engagement to Mossy Rooney, and only holding up the actual date out of deference to the bereavement in the family.

Dr. Johnson told Benny that these things took time. Sometimes a lot of time, but eventually, like Mrs. Kennedy in the chemist’s, if the wife could be persuaded to take an interest in the business they would recover.

Dr. Johnson looked as if he were about to say something and thought better of it.

He had always hated Sean Walsh. Benny wondered could it have been about him.

“The problem is Sean, you see,” she began tentatively.

“When was it not?” Dr. Johnson asked.

“If only Mother was in the shop and properly there, taking notice …”

“Yes, I know.”

“Do you think she’ll ever be able to do that? Or am I just running after a pipe dream.”

He looked affectionately at the girl with the chestnut hair, the girl that he had watched grow from the chubby toddler into the big awkward schoolgirl and now fined down a bit he thought, but still by anyone’s standards a big woman. Benny Hogan may have had more comforts than some of the other children in Knockglen whose tonsillitis and chicken pox and measles he had cured, but she had never had as much freedom.

Now it looked as if the chains that bound her to home were growing even stronger.

“You have your own life to live,” he said gruffly.

“That’s not much help, Dr. Johnson.”

To his own surprise he heard himself agreeing with her.

“You’re right. It isn’t much help. And it wasn’t much help saying to your mother stop grieving and try living. She won’t listen to me. And it was no help at all, all those years ago, telling Birdie Mac to put her mother into a home, or telling Dessie Burns to go to the monk in Mount Mellary who gets people off the jar. But you have to keep saying these things. Just to stay sane.”

As long as she had known him Benny had never known Dr. Johnson to make such a speech. She stared at him openmouthed.

He pulled himself together. “If I thought it would get that long drink of water Sean Walsh out of your business and miles from here, I’d give Annabel some kind of stimulant to keep her working in there twelve hours a day.”

“My father had an undertaking to make Sean a partner. We’ll have to honor it.”

“I suppose so.” Dr. Johnson knew that this was so.

“Unless there was any reason my father didn’t sign the deed.” She looked at him beseechingly. It was the smallest hope in the world that Eddie Hogan might have confided his suspicions to his old friend Maurice Johnson. But no. With a heavy heart she heard Dr. Johnson say gloomily that he didn’t know any reason.

“It’s not as if he was the kind of fellow who’d ever be caught with his hand in the till. He hasn’t spent tuppence on himself since the day he arrived.”

Sean Walsh was having his morning coffee in Healy’s. From the window he could see if anyone entered Hogan’s.

Mike could cope with an easy sale, or measuring a regular customer. Anything more difficult would have to be monitored.

Mrs. Healy sat beside him. “Any word of the partnership?”

“They’re going to honor it. They said so in front of the solicitor.”

“So they might. It should be done already. Your name should be above the shop, for all to see.”

“You’re very good to have such a high opinion of me … um … Dorothy.” He still thought of her as Mrs. Healy.

“Nothing of the sort Sean. You deserve to make more of yourself. And be seen to be what you are.”

“I will. One day people will see. I move slowly. That’s my way.”

“Just as long as you’re moving, not standing still.”

“I’m not standing still,” Sean Walsh assured her.

“When can I see you again?” Simon said as he dropped Nan off outside University College. “What do you suggest?”

“Well, I’d suggest tonight, but where could we go?”

“We could go for a drink anywhere.”

“But afterward?”

“I’m sure you know some other lovely hotels.” She smiled at him.

He did, but he couldn’t afford them. And he couldn’t take her to Buffy and Frank’s place where he stayed when he was in Dublin. And she wasn’t going to take him to her home. A car seemed out of the question, and Westlands was off-limits as far as he was concerned.

“We’ll think of something,” he promised.

“Good-bye,” Nan said.

He looked after her with admiration. He hadn’t met a girl like this in a long time.

“Benny, you look awful. You haven’t even combed your hair,” Nan said.

“Thanks a bundle, that’s all I need.”

“It
is
what you need, actually,” Nan said. “You’ve got the most handsome man in college panting after you. You can’t turn up looking like a mess.”

“I’ll comb my hair then,” Benny said ungraciously.

The most handsome man in College was not panting after her. He was looking like a guilty sheep, every time he met her he apologized for the whole Wales thing. Benny had said he must forget it, these things happened. And she wasn’t making an issue of it, so why should he:

She had even arranged to stay in town this Friday, and suggested they have an evening together. She had asked Eve if she could stay in Dun Laoghaire. She had told Patsy that she would be gone and she had explained to her mother that she needed one night a week in Dublin. That everyone got over a loss in their own way, and her way had to be spending time with her friends.

Her mother’s eyes, dull and listless, had clouded as if this was one further blow.

Worst of all, Jack said that Friday wasn’t a good night for him. They had a meeting in the rugby club, and then they’d all go for a drink afterward.

“Make it another night,” he said casually. Benny had wanted to smack him very hard. He was as thoughtless as any child.

Why did he not realize how hard it was for her to arrange anything at all? Now she had to go and unpick everything she had arranged. Eve, Kit, Patsy, her mother. Bloody hell, she wouldn’t. She’d stay in Dublin anyway that night and maybe go to the pictures with Eve and Aidan. They had asked her often enough, and to have a curry afterward.

They were still whistling the theme tune of
Bridge on the River Kwai
when they arrived at the Golden Orient in Leeson Street. They met Bill Dunne coming out of Hartigan’s, and he joined them for the meal.

Aidan took them through the menu as an expert.

Everyone was to order something different, then they could taste four dishes and become curry bores.

“But we all like koftsa,” Eve complained.

“Too bad. The mother of my children is not going to be a one-dish lady,” Aidan said.

“Where’s Jack?” Bill Dunne inquired.

“At a rugby club meeting.” Benny spoke casually.

She thought she saw the boys exchange glances, but decided that she was imagining it. All that watching Sean Walsh made her see glances and looks where none existed.

Jack Foley rang, very cross, on Saturday.

“I believe there was a great outing last night. The only night of the week I couldn’t get away,” he said.

“You never told me. You always said Fridays were marvelous nights in Dublin.” Benny was stung by the injustice of it all.

“And so they were for some, Bill Dunne was telling me.”

“What night
are
you free next week, Jack? I’ll arrange to stay in town.”

“You’re sulking,” he said. “You’re sulking over the Wales thing.”

“I told you, I understand that you didn’t have time to ring me. I am
not
sulking over a phone call.”

“Not the phone call,” he said. “The other thing.”

“What other thing?” asked Benny.