Circle of Friends (7 page)

“No, come on in, come in just to see my room,” Eve begged.

“Mother Francis? Wouldn’t they think …?”

“It’s my home, they’ve always told me that. Anyway, you’re not a pupil anymore.”

They went through a side door; there was a smell of baking, a warm kitchen smell through the corridors, then a smell of polish on the big stairway, and the wide dark hall hung with pictures of Mother Foundress and Our Lady, and lit only by the Sacred Heart lamp.

“Isn’t it desperately quiet in the holidays?”

“You should be here at night. Sometimes when I’ve come home from the pictures and I let myself in, it’s so quiet I’d nearly talk to the statues for company.”

They went up to the small room where Eve had lived for as long as she could remember. Benny looked around with interest.

“Look at your wireless, right beside your bed!” The brown Bakelite electric radio, where, like very other girl in the country, Eve listened at night to Radio Luxembourg, was on her night table. In Benny’s house, where she was considered a very pampered only child, she had to borrow the kitchen radio and then perch it on a chair because there wasn’t any socket near enough to her bed to plug it in.

There was a neat candlewick bedspread and a funny nightdress case shaped like a rabbit.

“Mother Francis gave me that when I was ten. Isn’t it awful?”

“Better than holy pictures,” Benny said.

Eve opened a drawer in which there were piles of holy pictures, each one bound up with a rubber band.

Benny looked at them fascinated. “You never threw them away!”

“Not here. I couldn’t.”

The small round window looked down over Knockglen, along the tree-lined drive of the convent through the big gates and down the broad main street of the town.

They could see Mr. Flood fussing round the window of his shop as if he were still worried about what they could have found so amusing in its contents. They saw small children with noses pressed against the window of Birdie Mac’s, and men with caps pulled well down over their faces coming out of Shea’s pub.

They saw a black Ford Prefect pull up in front of Hogan’s and knew it was Dr. Johnson. They saw two men walking into Healy’s Hotel, rubbing their hands. These would be commercial travelers, wanting to write up their order books in peace. They could see a man with a ladder up against the cinema putting up the new poster, and the small round figure of Peggy Pine coming out of her dress shop to stand and look admiringly at her window display. Peggy’s idea of art was to put as much in the window as could possibly fit without falling over.

“You can see everything!” Benny was amazed. “It’s like being God.”

“Not really, God can see around corners. I can’t see your house, I can’t see who’s having chips in Mario’s; I can’t see over the hill to Westlands. Not that I’d want to, but I can’t.”

Her voice was tight when she spoke of her mother’s people in the big house. Benny knew from old that it was a thorny subject.

“I suppose they wouldn’t …”

“They wouldn’t.” Eve was firm.

They both knew what Benny was going to say: that
there was no chance of the wealthy Westwards paying for a university education for Eve.

“Do you think Mother Francis might have approached them?”

“I’m sure she did, lots of times over the years, and she always got the door slammed in her face.”

“You can’t be certain,” Benny said soothingly.

Eve looked out of the window down the town, standing as she must often have done over the years.

“She did every single thing to help me that anyone could. She
must
have asked them, and they must have said no. She didn’t tell me because she didn’t want me to feel worse about them. As if I could.”

“In a fairy story one of them would ride up the avenue here on a white horse and say they’d been wanting you as part of their lives for years,” Benny said.

“And in a fairy story I’d tell him to get lost,” Eve said, laughing.

“No, I wouldn’t let you, you’d say thank you very much, the fees are this price, and I’d like a nice flat of my own with carpets going right up to the wall and no counting how much electric fire we use.” Benny was gleeful.

“Oh yes, and a dress allowance of course, so much a month put into Switzer’s and Brown Thomas for me.”

“And a holiday abroad each year to make up for not seeing you much over the past while!”

“And a huge contribution to the convent building fund for the new chapel to thank the nuns for doing the needful.”

Benny sighed. “I suppose things like that
could
happen.”

“As you said, in a fairy story,” Eve said. “And what would be the best happening for you?”

“Two men to get out of a van down there in a minute’s time and tell my father that Sean Walsh is a criminal wanted for six murders in Dublin and that he has to be handcuffed and out of there this instant.”

“It still leaves the business of you having to come home from Dublin on the bus every night,” Eve said.

“Listen, don’t go on at me. For all that you’ve been in and out of our house a thousand times you don’t know the way they are.”

“I do,” Eve said. “They idolize you.”

“Which means I get the six-ten bus back every night to Knockglen. That’s what being idolized does for you.”

“There’ll be the odd night surely in Dublin. They can’t expect you home every single night.”

“Where will I stay? Let’s be practical—there’ll be no nights in Dublin. I’ll be like bloody Cinderella.”

“You’ll make friends, you’ll have friends with houses, families, you know, normal kinds of things.”

“When did you and I have anything approaching a normal life, Eve Malone?” Benny was laughing to cheer them up and raise the mood again.

“It’ll soon be time for us to take control, seriously.” Eve refused to laugh at all.

Benny could be equally serious.

“Sure it will. But what does it mean? You’re not going to hurt Mother Francis by refusing to go to this place she’s sending you. I’m not going to bring the whole world down on us by telling my mother and father that I feel like a big spancelled goat going to College and having to come back here every night as if I were some kind of simpleton. And anyway, you’ll be out of there in a year and you’ll get a great job and be able to do what you like.”

Eve smiled at her friend. “And we’ll come back to this room someday and laugh at the days when we all thought it would be so dreadful.”

“We will, we will, and Sean Walsh will be doing penal servitude …”

“And the Westwards will have lost all their money and their land.”

“And Mrs. Healy will have thrown away her corsets and be wearing a short skirt.”

“And Paccy Moore will own a fleet of shoe shops throughout the country.”

“And Dr. Johnson will have learned to smile.”

“And Mother Francis will be the Reverend Mother General of the whole Order and can do what she likes, and go to see the Pope, and everything.”

They laughed, delighted at the thought of such wonders.

E
mily Mahon stood in front of the gas cooker and grilled the ten rashers that she served every morning except Friday. Her white blouse hung neatly in the corner of the room. She wore a nylon jacket to make the breakfast lest her clothes get spattered before she went out to work.

She knew that Brian was in a mood this morning. He hadn’t a word to throw to a dog. Emily sighed as she stood in the shabby kitchen. Theirs must be the least improved house in Maple Gardens. It was always the same, they say that the shoemaker’s children are never shod. So it was logical that the builder’s wife would be the only one in the road without a decent kitchen to work in. She had seen the jobs that were done on other people’s houses. Kitchens that were tiled so that they only needed a wipe down the walls and a quick mop of the floor. There were units that all fitted together like a continuous counter rather than the cupboards and tables of different sizes that Emily had lived with for twenty-five years. It was useless trying to change him. “Who sees it but us?” was the reply.

Very few visitors came into 23 Maple Gardens. Brian’s builder’s yard was the center of his social activities, such as they were. The boys, Paul and Nasey, had never brought their friends home, and now they too worked with their
father in the yard. That’s where fellows called to pick them up, or to take them over to a pub for a pint.

And Nan, the baby of the family, eighteen years old and about to start at university today, Nan had not been one for inviting friends home either.

Emily knew that her beautiful daughter had a dozen friends at school, she had seen her walking down the street when classes were over, surrounded by other girls. She went to the houses of friends, she was invited everywhere, but not one of her schoolmates had crossed the door of Maple Gardens.

Nan was not just beautiful in Emily’s eyes. This was the opinion of everyone. When she was a small child people had stopped in the street asking why this little girl with the blond, almost white curls had never been chosen for the Pears soap advertisement … the one where it said “Growing up to be a beautiful lady.” In truth Emily did have dreams that one day in a park or on the street a talent scout would stop and see the perfect features and flawless skin of this child and come to the house begging on bended knees to transform her life.

Because if there was anything that Emily Mahon wanted for her little princess, it was a transformed life.

Emily wanted Nan to have everything that she had never had. She didn’t want the girl to marry a bullying drunk like her mother had done. She didn’t want a life of isolation stuck out here in a housing estate, only allowed to go out to work as a favor. Emily had read a lot of magazines, she knew that it was perfectly possible for a girl with Nan’s looks to rise to be the highest in the land. You saw the very beautiful wives of rich businessmen, and the really good-looking women photographed at the races on the arms of well-known people from important families. It was obvious that not all these people could have come from the upper classes.
Their
women were often plain and horsey. Nan
was in the running for that kind of life, and Emily would do everything in her power to get it for her.

It had not been hard to persuade Brian to come up with the fees for university. In his sober moods he was inordinately proud of his beautiful daughter. Nothing was too good for her. But that was when he was sober.

And then, during this last summer, Nan had said, “You know, one day he’ll break your jaw and then it’ll be too late.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“He hit you last night, while I was out, when the boys weren’t here. I know he did.”

“Now you know nothing of the sort.”

“Your face, Em. What will you tell them today?”

“The truth. That I got up in the night and walked into an open press.”

“Is it going to be like that always? Will he get away with it for the rest of his life?”

“You know how sorry he is Nan. You must know how he’d give any of us the moon after he’s been—not himself.”

“It’s too high a price to pay for the moon,” Nan had said.

And now today she was going to start out as a student, this lovely girl that Emily still looked on with awe. Brian had been handsome before alcohol had thickened his face, and she herself had good features, high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. Their daughter seemed to have taken the best features and left the bad ones. Nan had no trace of the coarseness that was in her father’s face. Nor did she have any of the pale and slightly apologetic stance of her mother.

As Emily Mahon stood in the kitchen she hoped that Nan would be warm and pleasant to her father this morning. Brian had been drunk last night, certainly, but there had been no dog’s abuse out of him.

Emily turned the rashers expertly. There were three for Paul, three for Nasey, and four for Brian. Neither she nor
Nan ate a cooked breakfast. Just a cup of tea and a slice of toast each. Emily filled the washing-up bowl with hot soapy water. She would collect their plates to steep when they had finished. Usually everyone left the house around the same time; she liked to have the table cleared before she closed the door behind her, so the place looked respectable when they came in again in the evenings. That way nobody would raise too many objections about Emily going out to work. It had been a battle hard fought.

Nan had been so supportive during the long war waged with Brian. She had listened wordlessly to her father saying, “No wife of mine is going out to work. I want a meal on the table. I want a clean shirt …” She had heard her mother say that she could provide these things, but that the days were long and lonely on her own and she would like to meet people and to earn her own money, no matter how small.

The boys, Paul and Nasey, had not been interested, but played the game to win and stuck with their father in the need to have a nice warm house and meals.

Nan had been twelve then, and it was she who had tipped the balance.

“I don’t know what you’re all talking about,” she had said suddenly. “None of you are ever in before six, winter or summer, and so there
will
be a meal. And if Em wants more money and will do all your washing and clearing as well, then I can’t see what the fuss is about.”