Circle of Friends (6 page)

Annabel Hogan walked around her house: there was always some little thing to be done. Patsy was in the big, warm kitchen, the table covered with flour and crockery, but it would all be swept away and scrubbed by mealtime.

Lisbeg was not a big house, but there was plenty to do in it. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. The master bedroom looked out over one side of the front door and Benny’s bedroom was on the other. At the back of the house, the dark spare room and the big, old-fashioned bathroom with its noisy pipes and its huge wood-surrounded bath.

Downstairs if you came in the front door (which people rarely did) you would find a large room on each side. They were hardly ever used. The Hogans lived in the back of the house, in the big shabby breakfast room that opened off the kitchen. There was hardly ever a need to light a fire in the breakfast room because the great heat of the range came through. There was a big double door kept permanently open between the two rooms, and it was as comfortable a place as you could imagine.

They rarely had visitors, and if ever anyone was expected the front drawing room in its pale greens and pinks with damp spots over the wall could be aired and dusted. But in the main, the breakfast room was their home.

It had three big red plush armchairs, and the table against the wall had three dining chairs with plush seats as well. A huge radio stood on the big sideboard, and shelves of
ornaments, and good china and old books, were fixed precariously to the wall.

Now that young Eve had become such a regular guest in the household, a fourth chair had been found, a cane chair rescued from one of the sheds. Patsy had tied a nice red cushion to it.

Patsy herself slept in a small room beyond the kitchen. It was dark and had a tiny window. Patsy had always told Mrs. Hogan that it was like being dead and going to heaven to have a room of your own. She had always had to share with at least two other people until the day she came to Lisbeg.

When Patsy had walked up the short avenue and looked at the square house with its creeper and its shabby garden, it seemed to her like a house on the front of a calendar. Her small room looked out on the backyard, and she had a window box. Things didn’t grow very well in it because it was in shadow and Patsy wasn’t much of a gardener, but it was her own, and nobody ever touched it, any more than they ever went into her room.

Patsy was excited as any of them about Benny going to university. Every year on her annual holidays, Patsy paid a dutiful visit of one half day to the orphanage which had reared her, and then she went to stay with a friend who had married in Dublin. She had asked her friend to take her to see where Benny would be a student. She had stood outside the huge pillars of University College, Dublin, and looked at it all with satisfaction. Now she would know where Benny went and studied; she would know the look of the place.

And indeed it was a big step for Benny, Annabel Hogan realized. No more safe trotting to and fro from the convent. It was life in the big city with several thousand other students from all kinds of places, with different ways and no one to force you to study like Mother Francis. It was not surprising that Benny had been as excited as a hen walking
on hot coals all summer long, never able to keep still, always jumping up with some further excitement.

It was a relief to know that she was with Eve Malone for the morning, those two could talk until the cows came home. Annabel wished that there had been some way young Eve could have been sent to university too. It would have made things more fair somehow. But things rarely turned out nice and neatly in this life. Annabel had said as much to Father Ross the last time he had come to tea, and Father Ross had looked at her sternly over his glasses saying that if we all understood the way the Universe was run what would there be left for God to tell us on the Last Day.

To herself Annabel thought that it wouldn’t interfere with the running of the Universe if enough money could be found somewhere for the university fees and accommodation for Eve Malone, the child that had no home except the big bleak convent with the heavy iron gates.

Mother Francis had asked God very often for a way to send Eve Malone to university, but so far God had not seen fit to show her one. Mother Francis knew it must be part of His divine plan, but at times she wondered had she prayed hard enough, had she examined every possibility. She had certainly been up every road as far as the Order were concerned. She had written to the Mother General, she had put Eve’s case as persuasively as she could. The girl’s father, Jack Malone, had worked all his life for the convent as handyman and gardener.

Jack had married the daughter of the Westward family, as unlikely a match as was ever known in the country, but necessary since a child was on the way. There had been no problem in having Eve brought up as a Catholic, since the Westwards had never wanted to know about her at all, and didn’t care what faith she was raised in just as long as they never had to hear her name.

Mother General’s view was that enough had been done for the child already. To provide a university education for her might mark her out as a favored pupil. Would not others from needy backgrounds expect the same?

It had not stopped there. Mother Francis had taken the bus to their convent in Dublin and spoken to the very difficult Mother Clare who held sway there. With so many young nuns starting university education in the autumn and lodging in the Dublin convent, was there not a chance that Eve might join them? The girl would be happy to do housework to earn her place among the students.

Mother Clare wouldn’t even consider it. What an extraordinary suggestion, to put forward a girl—a charity child who was not a Sister, a novice, a postulant, nor anyone with the remotest intention of becoming a nun—and raise her up above the many Sisters in the community who were all hoping and praying for a chance of higher education … what would they feel if a girl who had already been pampered, it seemed, by the convent in Knockglen, were put in to study, over their heads? It would be an outrage.

And perhaps it was outrageous of her, Mother Francis thought sometimes. It was just that she loved Eve as much as any mother could love a daughter. Mother Francis, the celibate nun who had never thought she could know the joy of seeing a child grow up in her care, had loved Eve in a way that might well have made her blind to the feelings and sensitivities of other people. Mother General and Mother Clare were indeed right, it would have been preferential treatment to have financed Eve’s university education from the convent funds.

But when all was said and done, Mother Francis wished she could be sure that they would treat Eve well up in Mother Clare’s convent. St. Mary’s had always been home for Eve; the fear was that she might find the sister house in Dublin more like an institution, and worse still she
might find her own role there not that of an honored daughter, but more that of a maid.

When Benny and Eve came out of Healy’s Hotel, they saw Sean Walsh watching them from the doorway of Hogan’s across the street.

“If you keep talking to me, he might think we haven’t seen him,” Benny hissed out of the corner of her mouth.

“Not a chance. Look at him standing there with his thumbs in behind his braces, copying the way your father stands.”

Eve knew only too well Sean Walsh’s expectations: he had a long-term career plan, to marry the daughter of the house, the heir to Hogan’s Gentleman’s Outfitters, and inherit the lot.

They had never been able to like Sean Walsh, not since the very first day he had turned up at Benny’s tenth birthday party. He had never smiled. Not once in all those years had they seen a real smile on his face. There were a lot of grimaces, and a little dry bark sometimes, but never a laugh.

He didn’t throw his head back like Peggy Pine did when she laughed, or giggle into his fist like Paccy Moore; he didn’t make big gestures like Mario in the fish-and-chip shop, or even get wheezing and coughing fits like Dessie Burns often did. Sean Walsh seemed watchful the whole time. Only when he saw others smiling and laughing did he give the little barks.

They could never get him to tell anything about the life he had lived before he came to Knockglen. He didn’t tell long stories like Patsy did, or wistful tales like Dekko Moore about the time he made harnesses for the Lords of the Soil somewhere down in Meath. Sean Walsh would not be drawn.

“Oh, dear, you don’t want to hear my stories,” he
would say when Benny and Eve plagued him for some information.

The years had not improved him: he was still secretive and insincerely anxious to please. Even his appearance annoyed Benny, although she knew this was unreasonable. He wore a suit that had seen a lot of pressing, and was obviously carefully looked after. Benny and Eve used to tell each other in fits of laughter that he spent hours in his little room above the shop pressing all his ambitions into the suit with a damp cloth.

Benny didn’t really believe Eve about Sean having ambitions to marry into the shop, but there was something deeply unsettling all right about the way he looked at her. She had so much wanted to be fancied, it seemed a cruel blow to think that if it ever happened it might only be by someone as awful as Sean Walsh.

“Good morning, ladies.” He made an exaggerated bow. There was an insult in his voice, a sneer that he hadn’t intended them to notice. Other people had called them “ladies,” even that very morning and had done so without any offense. It was a way of acknowledging that they had left school and would shortly start a more grown-up life. When they had been in the chemist’s buying shampoo, Mr. Kennedy had asked what he could do for the two young ladies and they had been pleased. Paccy Moore had said they were two fine ladies when they had gone to have heels put on Benny’s good shoes. But with Sean Walsh it was different.

“Hallo Sean.” Benny’s voice was lackluster.

“Surveying the Metropolis, I see,” he said loftily. He always spoke slightly disparagingly of Knockglen, even though the place he came from himself was smaller and even less like a metropolis. Benny felt a violent surge of annoyance.

“Well, you’re a free agent,” she said suddenly. “If you don’t like Knockglen you could always go somewhere else.”

“Did I say I didn’t like it?” His eyes were narrower
than ever, almost slits. He had gauged this wrong, he must not allow her to report his having slighted the place. “I was only making a pleasant remark comparing this place to the big city. Meaning that you’ll have no time for us here at all soon.”

That had been the wrong thing too.

“I’ll have little chance of forgetting all about Knockglen considering I’ll be coming home every night,” said Benny glumly.

“And we wouldn’t want to anyway,” Eve said with her chin stuck out. Sean Walsh would never know how often she and Eve bemoaned their fate living in such a small town which had the worst characteristic any town could have: It was actually within striking distance of Dublin.

Sean hardly ever let his glance fall on Eve, for she held no interest for him. All his remarks were directed to Benny. “Your father is so proud of you, there’s hardly a customer that he hasn’t told about your great success.”

Benny hated his smile and his knowing ways. He must know how much she hated being told this, reminded about how she was the apple of their eye, and the center of simple boastful conversation. And if he knew, why did he tell her and annoy her still further? If he did have designs on her, and a plan to marry Mr. Eddie Hogan’s daughter and thereby marry into the business, then why was he saying all the things that would irritate and upset her?

Perhaps he thought that her own wishes would hardly be considered in the matter. That the biddable daughter of the house would give in on this as she had on everything else.

Benny realized she must fight Sean Walsh. “Does he tell everyone I’m going to College?” she asked, with a smile of pleasure on her face.

“Only subject of conversation.” Sean was smug to be the source of information but somehow disconcerted that Benny didn’t get embarrassed as he had thought she would.

Benny turned to Eve. “Aren’t I lucky?”

Eve understood. “Oh, spoiled rotten,” she agreed.

They didn’t laugh until they were out of his sight. They had to walk down the long straight street past Shea’s pub with its sour smell of drink coming out onto the street from behind its dark windows, past Birdie Mac’s sweetshop where they had spent so much time choosing from jars all their school life. Across the road to the butcher’s where they looked in the window to see back at the reflection of Hogan’s Outfitters and realize that Sean Walsh had gone back inside to the empire that would one day be his.

Only then could they let themselves go and laugh properly.

Mr. Flood, of Flood’s Quality Meat Killed On The Premises, didn’t appreciate their laughter.

“What’s so funny about a row of gigot chops?” he asked the two laughing girls outside his window. It only made them laugh more.

“Get on with you then, do your laughing somewhere else,” he growled at them. “Stop making a mock and a jeer out of other people’s business.”

His face was severely troubled and he went out into the street to look up at the tree which overhung his house.

Mr. Flood had been staring into that tree a lot lately, and worse still having conversations with someone he saw in its branches. The general thinking was that Mr. Flood had seen some kind of vision, but was not ready to reveal it to the town. His words to the tree seemed to be respectful and thoughtful, and he addressed whatever he saw as “Sister.”

Benny and Eve watched fascinated as he shook his head sorrowfully and seemed to agree with something that had been said to him.

“It’s the same the whole world over, Sister,” he said, “but it’s sad it should come to Ireland as well.”

He listened respectfully to what he was hearing from
the tree, and took his leave. Vision or no vision, there was work to be done in the shop.

The girls only stopped laughing by the time they had reached the convent gates. Benny turned to go back home as usual. She never presumed on their friendship with Eve by expecting to be let into the inner sanctum. The convent in holidays was off-limits.