by Maeve Binchy
‘Yes, I remember. But, honestly, I think it’s the love bit that people want, that’s what all the songs are about and the films and the poems, not all this other thing.’
‘But the other thing is lovely!’ Joannie said.
‘How do you know, you’re only going on what people say.’
‘Well, David’s done it.’
‘He never has.’
‘He says he has.’
This was electrifying news.
‘What did he say it was like?’ Aisling was so excited she nearly fell off the bed.
‘He says it was perfect pleasure … and that I’d love it,’ Joannie said smugly.
‘That’s no description. Perfect pleasure, sure that’s no help at all, and of course he wants you to think you’d love it, then you would go all the way with him. …’
‘Well, then we’d know anyway … we’d not be sitting round and talking about it and guessing,’ said Joannie mutinously.
‘That’s true mind you,’ said Aisling. ‘But would you mind?’
‘I’d love it,’ said Joannie.
They both whooped with laughter.
‘Then you must. That’s definite,’ said Aisling.
‘Well, why won’t you?’ Joannie was anxious at being thrust into the role of trail-blazer.
‘Well, use your head! How can I? You can’t go off and knock at someone’s door. Hallo I’m Aisling O’Connor and my friend Joannie Murray would like me to sample sexual intercourse with someone to give her courage before she does it with David Gray, so may I come in and shall we take our clothes off now?’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘But what else could I do? You’re the one who has a fellow and you’re the one whose fellow says it would be pure pleasure for you, and you’re the one who’s mad to try it. I’m only just being a supporter that’s all.’
‘I’d never do it, I’m only talking about it. I’d be terrified of having a baby. Anyway, David’s only asking me because he expects me to say no. Nobody with any sense would say yes.’
‘Because he’d leave you once he had got his way do you mean?’
‘Well, yes, and anyway he wouldn’t be able to trust me would he? You see if I did it with him, then what’s to stop him thinking I’d do it with anyone else?’
‘There has to be a flaw in that, somewhere,’ said Aisling. ‘How does anyone ever get together with anyone else if that’s what they all think?’
‘They get married first silly, then it’s all right,’ said Joannie confidently.
‘But what about the pure pleasure one, the one who did go the whole way?’
‘That was in south Gloucestershire, when he was on holiday. They all do, there, apparently it’s a different kind of way of going on, it’s not like here.’
‘Well, why didn’t he do it with lots of people if it was going on all around him?’
‘Aisling O’Connor, you deliberately pick holes in what people say. It’s impossible to talk to you,’ said Joannie.
‘I’m just interested, that’s all,’ said Aisling. ‘Everyone else seems to think being interested in things is unhealthy. I’ll never know why.’
Joannie’s family liked having Aisling around the house; she was so bright and funny, they thought. Everything Aisling said seemed witty and entertaining when she said it at the Murrays’ table. It seemed self-centred and showing-off according to Mam, Eamonn and Maureen when she said it at home. For the first time, she began to realise that in the Murrays’ house she was a treat, but at home they had had enough of her. Perhaps that was why everyone liked Elizabeth so much in Kilgarret. Because she was a treat. When she went back to her own place it had been awful. Anyway it was just as well that the Murrays did like her because things at home were very depressing. Donal’s illness had left a shadow of terror on Mam. Every time he coughed she would glance at him, while pretending not to.
The day that Father Kearney had come with the extreme unction had been dreadful. One of the nuns had come first to prepare the room and Donal for the sacrament. Da had been very annoyed at that and said that nuns were interfering busybodies and how could a child like Donal need to be prepared for anything? Mam had held Donal’s hand all the time and smiled. Peggy had been crying at the door and Mam had thought she had a cold and said she should go down and sit at the fire rather than stand there in the draught. Father Kearney said that the sacrament worked in one of two ways: it brought back health and strength, or it gave comfort to the sick person to make a happy death. Eamonn had said something under his breath about covering your bets and Mam had nearly murdered him afterwards. Told him to keep his heathen beliefs out of a sick child’s bedroom.
Anyway, Donal was better; he had to be careful never to catch pneumonia again and Mam seemed to think that pneumonia was like an enemy outside the door waiting to come in. Aisling felt it was very peculiar of God to keep sending bad fortune to people who could bear it least. After all, Sean hadn’t been a bad person, he had been a good person who had believed in a cause, and God had let him be blown up, and Donal was by far the nicest of the whole family and God kept giving him whistling chests and bouts of pneumonia on top of his weak lungs. Maureen and Eamonn were awful and they were both as healthy as bullocks. God had no sense of fair play. Mam worked hard and was up till all hours and did she get any holiday or nice clothes? No, she didn’t. Aisling herself had worked like a slave at school this year and what had she got? Any reward? Any thanks? Just a grudging admission that she had come to her senses at last and made an attempt to catch up on lost time. Mrs Murray said that there was a line about ‘Whom the Lord loveth He persecuteth’. They found it eventually and Aisling said that the Lord must be simply mad about her because He persecuted her from morning to night with awful hair, straight eyelashes and demon nuns. Mrs Murray and John, who was Joannie’s brother, a clerical student, thought that was very funny. Aisling repeated the remark at home in case Mam might find it funny and it would make her laugh. Mam said it was blasphemous and that there was great danger that Aisling was becoming a show-off.
Aisling liked talking to John Murray when he was home on occasional weekends from the seminary. He told them things about their trainings which were meant to be secrets. He told the enthralled Joannie and Aisling that sometimes they had lessons in manners so that when they were priests they wouldn’t make eejits of themselves and bring down the respect of the clergy by eating with their knives and shovelling the food into their mouths with their hands. Aisling thought this was uproarious, but as usual got no enthusiasm when she told the tales at home.
‘If that young Murray is cracked enough to go joining the priests when he has all that big family business to have a share in then he’s even more cracked to be telling tales about how daft they’re all inside there,’ said Dad.
Mam was naturally annoyed at the disrespect Dad showed for the church, but she was also annoyed with John Murray. ‘That place is like his family now, you don’t go round telling secrets about the family. It’s disloyal.’
Aisling remembered a few small acts of disloyalty when she had made the Murrays rock with laughter by imitating Dad coming in from work and being like a sultan asking for water to wash himself, a clean towel, his slippers, and the best chair … without words. He didn’t have to speak, so well were his little impatient gestures known; and whoever was handy – Peggy, Niamh or Aisling herself – would run to fill the needs. He never made these little signs at Mam. It was like a pantomime and Aisling had caught it very well. She reddened thinking how cross they would be if ever they knew how she had parodied the nightly routine. But she didn’t feel disloyal spending most of the summer in the Murrays’ house. It was so sunny and it had a big garden that went down to the river. If you wanted to sit in the sun you took out a deck-chair, not a folded rug or one of the kitchen cushions to put on the step of the yard like at home. There were always cakes and biscuits in the Murrays’ house that went back into tins after meals, not like at home where once a thing w
as out it was eaten and that was that.
Joannie’s romance with David Gray came to a head when school started. He didn’t have anything to do until October and he begged her to skip school, so they could go off for the whole day together. Joannie, tempted and almost weakening, realised the dangers, even though Aisling agreed to cover for her.
‘I could say to Sister Catherine that you were taken bad on the way to school, and I had to take you home.’
‘She’d not believe the daylight from you,’ said Joannie honestly if ungratefully.
‘Well anyone she would believe the daylight from wouldn’t do it, that’s the whole problem,’ said Aisling.
David’s blandishments proved too much. He was going to pack a picnic hamper he said, and some cider. He had a loan of a car they could have the whole day, go off to some place in the mountains or by the sea. Joannie decided to risk it. She thought her best chance of success was to leave Aisling out of it. Reluctantly Aisling agreed. She was still considered – grossly unfairly – to be a trouble-maker; there was no point in creating suspicion for Joannie.
It was by great luck a day when the Murray house would be empty. Mrs Murray was going to Dublin, shopping, John would not be back from the seminary; nobody was likely to call; Tony, the other brother, was in Limerick learning the trade in a wine merchant’s, he would not be back. Noreen, the Murrays’ maid, was on holiday, she had gone to her people in Wexford. It was the one day in the whole year that Joannie would have an alibi.
Twenty minutes into the first lesson, which was Christian doctrine, Joannie stood up and said she felt sick; after some time in the cloakroom she came back and said she felt awful, and could she go home? Sister Catherine looked round the class for a girl to accompany her; her eye didn’t rest for a second on Aisling, who was amongst those waving an enthusiastic hand to be the companion. ‘Mary Brady, you go with Joannie, and when you have her safely delivered there, come straight back.’ Sister Catherine had chosen the class goody-goody, the Child of Mary, the most reliable and honest girl in the school, whose intention of becoming a nun and joining the order the day she left school was known to everyone. Wistfully Aisling looked out of the window and saw Joannie Murray setting off on her adventure. She found it very hard to concentrate on the Acts of the Apostles.
When Mary Brady came back, eyes virtuously downcast, Sister Catherine asked was everything all right.
The innocent accomplice explained that Joannie had seen her mother and waved to her at the window and she had gone in and was fine. Sister Catherine thanked Mary for her help, Mary smiled, and Aisling O’Connor sighed a sigh of pure envy.
A mystery always hung over the details of that day. Like how the whole idea of the picnic came to be abandoned so early and what the cider had tasted like, and why they decided to drink it in Mrs Murray’s bedroom. And it was never clearly explained why Tony, who lived with cousins in Limerick, had come home unexpectedly, and why he had been so upset. The combination of all these things had been a confusion Aisling had never known.
David Gray was forbidden to come near the house again by Tony. There had been great threats about how the Grays would react if they had been told the circumstances. Joannie spent what she always called the worst hours of her life begging Tony to believe that it would not help if Mummy were informed. Mummy went mad over things, and she would never go to Dublin for the day and shop again if she was given a confused account. Tony had said, ‘In Mummy’s bedroom, of all places, of all places. On Mummy’s bed.’
Aisling only heard it in fits and starts. She had called round to the Murrays’ as arranged at seven that evening when the picnic should have been finished and shortly before Joannie’s mother was meant to return from Dublin. Instead of exciting details and perhaps a glimpse of David fleeing into the distance … Joannie sat red-faced at the kitchen table with Tony. Lord, he must have seem them coming back from the picnic. Oh Lord, what a desperate bit of luck. Joannie sounded funny and distant.
‘Oh Aisling, it’s not such a good time, I’m having this sort of chat with Tony. …’
‘Sure. …’ Aisling was puzzled. But she took the message. ‘Hallo Tony, you back for a holiday?’
‘Sort of,’ Tony grunted. He was the one of the family she knew least. He was the eldest, nearly twenty-eight now. He seemed to have got good-looking since she had seen him some months ago, or maybe he was good-looking because he was obviously in a very bad temper. People got good-looking when their eyes flashed and their jaws got grim. Aisling had discovered this from reading and from the films.
‘Right, I’ll be off, will you come round to my place later or … what?’ she asked Joannie.
‘Aren’t you going to ask her how she feels, or was the whole school in on this?’ Tony enquired.
‘Yeah, sure, that’s what I came round for, to know are you all right? Maybe it’s flu, Sister Catherine was. …’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Joannie said.
‘Right,’ Aisling said huffily, and swung out. Next day at school, Joannie, still red-eyed, had given substance to the belief that she hadn’t been well. In fact, Sister Catherine was moved to wonder should she have taken another day to make sure she had recovered. Apparently she was saved by the skin of her teeth; Tony had seen sense, she had promised not to get involved with anyone, least of all the Grays. She had tried to explain to Tony that they were doing nothing only fooling around, but he had got into a worse humour at everything she said.
‘And were you only fooling around?’ Aisling asked eagerly. Joannie was distant.
‘That’s not the point, the point is that he came back.’ She had a look of such disappointment on her face that Aisling decided not to pursue the technical details, they could wait.
‘Why did he come back anyway?’ she asked.
‘He’s got fed up of Limerick, he came back to ask Mummy could he start working in our business here, you know take over himself sort of. He says he knows everything, and he got restless yesterday and drove back to talk to Mummy about it. Oh dear God, why couldn’t he have got restless today instead of yesterday? Tell me God, why did you let him get restless yesterday?’
‘I suppose to prevent you from committing a mortal sin,’ Aisling said seriously. When you thought about it, God was very devious.
Tony Murray moved back to Kilgarret that autumn. It seemed to take him a long time to forget what he regarded as a great transgression, and a sign of his little sister’s weak moral character. Since Aisling had cunningly been freed from any complicity in what had happened, she was not regarded with suspicion and she could come and go as she wished. Aisling wondered would Sean have felt the same and been so difficult about it if he had been alive. But then the thought of being with anyone on Mam and Dad’s bed was so unlikely, and the house being empty ever was so unlikely, you couldn’t really compare it. Anyway, the thought of going all the way seemed even less likely than ever now that Joannie, who would have been her only companion in that field, was virtually under lock and key.
The nuns had given Mam and Dad the depressing opinion that Aisling was not of a scholarly frame of mind. Like Maureen, she would probably be more successful in work where no great further study was required.
‘Don’t ever let Maureen know they said that about it not being a studying kind of a life,’ Mam had said. ‘The poor girl is demented by all those books on anatomy and physiology. She’d go up to the school and go for them if she were to know that. …’
Aisling didn’t mind one way or the other. The school suggested that she went to the local commercial college also run by their nuns. Here she could learn shorthand, typing, commercial English and book-keeping. It sounded better than going back to do the sixth year and study for her Leaving Certificate. Joannie was leaving anyway and going to a school in France for a year. It wasn’t a finishing school, it was a French convent where they would learn to speak French perfectly, and do sewing and cooking. Tony had been very keen on the idea and Mrs Murray thought it seemed sensib
le too. It would make a lady out of her. Mam had smiled when Aisling had told her that.
‘That’s why I was sent to the convent in Liverpool, and look what happened to me. And that’s why poor Violet was sent there too. Ladies indeed.’
‘You’re much more of a lady than Elizabeth’s mother,’ said Aisling loyally.
Mam was pleased but she pretended not to be. ‘We don’t know what’s going on in Violet’s mind,’ she said.
‘Well, at least you didn’t break up your marriage and go off and live with someone in sin and pretend it was all Dad’s fault.’
‘No,’ Mam said thoughtfully, ‘at least I didn’t do that.’
Dad wasn’t pleased that the nuns had said Aisling was not academic. He had been in a bad humour anyway and the news made him worse. While the door was still open Aisling heard him complaining bitterly.
‘Fine lot of children we reared. The one couldn’t wait to go and throw his life away for the British, another is meant to be in a job that doesn’t need much brain work. We were told at the time that it was the devil and all getting her into that hospital.’
‘Will you stop that…’ Mam interrupted.
‘I will not stop. I’ve Eamonn standing like a corner boy in the shop with a crowd of thick louts in and out looking for him, Donal is so sickly the Lord knows what we’ll make out of him, Niamh is a spoiled madam and the only one we had any hopes for, those bloody nuns say, “she’s not academic, she’s not the studying type”. Well what was she with them all those bloody years for …?’
‘Sean.’ Mam’s voice was stronger.
‘Now, what are you putting on that face for? Things are not all right. What are you and I breaking our backsides working for, what’s the whole thing for, Eileen, if the children aren’t going to get on, and do better than we did and …?’ Dad’s voice was a bit shaky but he shouted. ‘I mean if there’s any purpose in the whole thing isn’t it that the children will do well …?’ Aisling didn’t hear what Mam said because Mam had banged the door shut very firmly.
