Light a Penny Candle

by Maeve Binchy

She was hesitant. She didn’t want to say that she didn’t want to go back like this. Back as a hustler going into people’s houses and taking away their old treasures, into homes where she had been welcomed as a little refugee during the war. She didn’t want to go now all grown-up and hard and sophisticated and knowing the price of things and making a profit. She could never say to Johnny that it looked shabby somehow to go back to Kilgarret with a chap but no Understanding … when Maureen had been having an Understanding with Brendan Daly, and the hopes that Peggy would have an Understanding with her Christy. But that’s exactly what Elizabeth would like to have now … an Understanding. She would like to know where she stood with Johnny and unless she did she would not like to present him to her other home in Kilgarret.

  *

  Everyone agreed that Aisling was making a totally unexpected success of her new job in O’Connor’s Hardware. Much of it was due to the way that Eileen had paved the way for her … but Aisling never realised that. She assumed it had all been due to her own strength of character. Before she began as an employee, Eileen had insisted that there should be special quarters in the shop for both the children. Sean thought that this was ridiculous nonsense and told her so forcefully.

  ‘But can’t you see that they want to believe there is a real place for them there, that it’s proper work? If Eamonn just thinks he’s your dogsbody and Aisling thinks she’s helping me out … what pride will they have in it?’

  ‘What pride will they have? Won’t they have the pride and satisfaction-of having a business built up for them? That’s what they will have. They won’t be like half the children around here taking the emigrant ship. That’s pride enough. No one asked you or me what pride we needed when we worked like dogs. …’

  ‘Pride is the wrong word,’ Eileen agreed. ‘What I’m trying to do is let them think of home and work as separate, so that they won’t cheek you, or answer me back like they would if we gave them an order here in the house.’

  Gradually she won her way, a corner was cleared, painted and a door put on it and it became Eamonn’s office; it was explained over and over that it was important for local farmers to know where they could find Eamonn, and that he should always be called by his first name since farmers didn’t go for the ‘Mr’ bit. Look at the way they all called Sean ‘Sean’; but Eileen was ‘Mrs O’Connor’, similarly Aisling would be ‘Miss O’Connor’.

  Aisling’s office had a brand new typewriter, a real office chair and proper filing cabinet for the ledgers, the dockets and the paperwork. It wasn’t like Eileen’s eyrie where paper poked from every corner. It was modern and efficient just as she had been taught in the commercial school. In fact one of the commercial college teachers even took her own class of girls to see Aisling’s work place as a model of efficient filing, which delighted Aisling and annoyed every other past pupil deeply.

  Her smart green coats and her bustling air of importance gave her the necessary authority. Poor Jemmy, whose wits had grown no stronger and whose strength had grown less, called her Miss O’Connor.

  ‘I don’t mind Jemmy calling me Aisling, he’s known me since I was a baby,’ Aisling confided to Mam on the first day.

  ‘No, he’s quite happy calling you Miss.’

  ‘But Mam, you know with him being not all there, I don’t want to be putting on airs for poor Jemmy.’

  ‘No child, you’re not. He’s happy to do what everyone else does. Just be polite to him always, and especially in front of people. That’s what really pleases him.’

  Aisling remembered her mother always consulting Jemmy.

  ‘Where do you think we might have put those new lampshades, Jemmy? You remember, the ones that came in last week.’ Jemmy would stop sweeping the floor and say,

  ‘Gor, I don’t know Mam, maybe they’re in the back.’

  ‘I think you’re right Jemmy, thanks a lot, that’s where they must be.’

  For years Aisling had been aware of conversations like these, mildly irritating, mildly mystifying. Why ask poor Jemmy? Now she knew why. Mam was much cleverer than she gave the impression of being.

  For the first few weeks Eileen explained the complicated workings of their credit arrangements. She showed Aisling the wages book, the bank pass book, the ledger for supplies and the income tax arrangements. She listened attentively while Aisling worked out neater, clearer and more efficient ways of recording their daily administration.

  Sometimes the errors, the gaps and the confusions seemed pathetic and elementary to Aisling.

  ‘Oh Mam, can’t you see, you’ve been doubling the work by not having an alphabetical index? It’ll only take half the time to look them up now. I can’t see why you didn’t set one up. It’ll only take a couple of days.’

  Eileen agreed that it had been a serious lapse. She didn’t say that she had little time to set up alphabetical indexes while she was running the shop with Sean, keeping an eye on customers, deciding who to give credit to and who to hurry for bills, pleading with bank managers for further overdrafts, running a house with a wayward maid and six children. Instead of listing all that she had to do, while any fool could have been working out an alphabetical system, she praised Aisling to the skies and said that maybe they should send to Dublin for a proper ledger book with alphabetical indentations.

  ‘Why would we do that, can’t I do one myself at home this evening?’ Aisling said.

  ‘No work home from the office. If you worked in Murray’s or in the hotel we’d be mad with them if they got you to do work at home.’

  ‘Mam you’re great, but sure what else would I be doing?’

  ‘You could be going out and casting a cool eye over the men of this town to see if there’s any of them good enough for you.’

  ‘Mam I’ve told you a dozen times, I’m not cut out for men, and even if I were, there’s nothing in this town, it’s the end of the barrel as regards men.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘Honestly Mam, if I think the time has come, I’ll go up to Dublin and make an assault on the place, but there’s nobody here you’d be seen dead with.’

  Joannie said that there were great men altogether in Dublin. But it was hard to know what Joannie meant these days by great men. She said that they had cars and they wore suits and had coffee in places on Grafton Street and sat in Stephen’s Green and went to the races.

  ‘And what do they do for a living, like where do they go to work?’

  ‘I don’t know that they do,’ Joannie admitted, the thought not having come to her before.

  ‘But how have they got the money? Are they rich men or what?’

  ‘I think a lot of them are students, or they work for their fathers or something.’

  ‘I work for my father,’ said Aisling proudly. ‘And you wouldn’t find me sitting around in coffee shops talking to people all day.’

  That’s because there are no coffee shops and nobody to talk to here,’ said Joannie.

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  Joannie was very unsatisfactory at explaining what she was up to. The days when they could giggle and find interest in the most trivial encounters seemed to have gone. Aisling thought it must all be all Joannie’s fault because she was being so deliberately vague and concealing about her activities. But then she thought Elizabeth too was being distant and wasn’t willing to write openly in the way that they used to talk when she was here in Kilgarret. Perhaps that’s what happened as you got older, you stopped giggling. Mam didn’t have any real friends to talk to. Perhaps when you grew up you had to stop telling people things and begin play-acting. Look at Maureen, for example, stuck out with all those desperate Dalys. She couldn’t really like it. She must hate all Brendan’s awful sisters and aunts and the whole tribe. Friendships must only be for young people. Niamh had a friend now and they’d drive you mad, Niamh and Sheila Moriarty, screaming with laughter at nothing.

  Look at Mam’s friendship with Elizabeth’s mother … that hadn’t lasted and Mam said they were the
best of pals for years at school. It was probably a sign of being grown-up to realise that friendships weren’t important.

  ‘You don’t see so much of Joannie these days. You didn’t fall out?’ Tony Murray asked when he came into the shop to buy a length of flex one day.

  ‘No, heavens no, but she’s busy. She’s got her friends in Dublin you know, and she’ll be going there. I’m tied up here all day working and there’s so little to do at night. It’s a terrible town, isn’t it Tony?’

  ‘You used to come up to our house and make us laugh with your tall stories,’ Tony said.

  ‘I suppose I’ve got a bit more sense than to be telling tall stories now,’ Aisling said.

  ‘That’d be a pity.’

  He dropped in a lot, and always a few words but no dallying with Aisling. Eamonn said one night that he thought Tony Murray must be going half-cracked because he used to come in for lengths of flex or boxes of nails and not care what he got, or remember that he might have got the same thing the day before.

  ‘He’s in a kind of dream half the time I think,’ said Eamonn.

  ‘I think he’s keen on Aisling,’ said Donal.

  Aisling put down her fork and screamed with laughter.

  ‘Tony Murray keen on me? Have a heart, he’s as old as a bush. He couldn’t be fancying me surely.’

  Sean was reading the paper. ‘Quit making fun of the customers and don’t start getting stupid ideas,’ he said without letting his eyes leave the pages.

  ‘I’m not getting any ideas Dad, it’s Donal. Hey come on, what makes you think that, Donal?’

  ‘I saw him looking at you on Sunday at mass, and he looked like people look when they’re keen on someone.’

  ‘What kind of look is that?’ asked Eileen, amused.

  ‘Like a sick bullock,’ suggested Eamonn.

  ‘Like this,’ said Niamh, clasping her hands and closing her eyes in a position of suppliance. ‘Be mine, fair Aisling, be mine.’

  ‘Or just pale and sick with internal anguish,’ proposed Aisling.

  ‘No,’ said Donal. ‘More looking at you during the sermon, and then afterwards when we were all talking outside, laughing at things you said and being over-interested in them.’

  ‘You couldn’t be over-interested in what I say!’ said Aisling. ‘In fact, most people are utterly fascinated by everything I say.’

  ‘Jaysus,’ said Eamonn.

  ‘Stop that blaspheming at the table,’ said Sean.

  ‘And do you see anyone over-interested in what Eamonn’s saying? Maybe you could spot a romance there too?’ teased Aisling.

  Donal took her seriously. ‘No, but I wasn’t really looking. I think some of the shop girls giggle and snatch his cap and run off with it after devotions on a Sunday.’

  ‘Oh, is that why you’re all so keen to go to devotions?’ Eileen said, ‘I thought it was for the love of the Sacred Heart.’

  ‘It is a bit,’ said Aisling, who liked dressing up and going to devotions herself. It was a social occasion, everyone hung around the church and talked afterwards.

  ‘I see I’m demoted to shop girls, but Princess Aisling here has the eye of the merchant prince.’

  Eamonn sounded mock gloomy, and everyone laughed.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be smashing if Tony Murray did fancy Aisling and they got married? We’d have lots more money and a gardener like the Murrays,’ said Niamh.

  ‘What would you want a gardener for? We’ve no garden, you eejit,’ asked Eamonn.

  ‘What do you want fixing me up with Tony Murray of all people?’ wailed Aisling. ‘Isn’t he an old man, he’s nearly thirty for God’s sake. It’s Mam and Dad’s generation.’

  But of course when she saw Tony Murray next night at the pictures she flounced and giggled and gave him come-on glances just to test whether Donal might have a grain of truth in his suspicions. To her surprise Tony Murray seemed to love it.

  ‘Are you going to be here tomorrow night?’ he asked.

  ‘Is that a piece of general conversation, or is it a request?’ she giggled.

  ‘It’s a request,’ he said simply.

  ‘You mean you’re asking me?’

  ‘I’m asking would you like to come to the pictures,’ he said, having been manoeuvred into it.

  ‘Well now, I accept,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll meet you here then?’

  They looked at the poster … National Velvet.

  ‘That’s great.’ There was a silence.

  ‘It should be good,’ Tony said.

  ‘Oh yes, it should indeed.’

  ‘Lucky the programme changed.’

  ‘Well it always does on Thursdays.’

  ‘So it does,’ said Tony Murray and they parted.

  Aisling giggled the whole way home, when she had caught up on Judy Lynch and Annie Fitzpatrick.

  ‘I’ve got a date tomorrow night. Tony Murray’s going to pay for me going in to the pictures.’

  They were very impressed.

  Aisling wondered why he didn’t have friends of his own age, and hoped that he wasn’t abnormal or anything.

  She told Mam about it and said wasn’t it a scream that Donal was right?

  ‘Just because he asked you to the pictures doesn’t mean he’s keen on you, and from the sound of what you said to him it seems to me that it was you who suggested the whole thing,’ said Eileen in an unexpectedly stern voice.

  ‘Mam, what is it? What are you so cross for? I was only having a bit of a laugh.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Eileen very rarely apologised even if she had been sharp. Aisling was amazed by this. ‘Yes, you’re right, I did sound a bit weaselish.’ She took off her glasses. She had been reading when Aisling came in, Sean had gone to bed already. Mam looked tired.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I think that sometimes you don’t realise how attractive you are, Aisling my love. You really are a lovely girl. You could well turn a man’s head, and you’re too silly still, you’d get your name up with his and then make a mess of it all.’

  ‘But Mam, I tell you, it’s only a joke. He’s ancient, he could be my father.’

  ‘Love, he’s eleven years older than you if that. He’s a single man. He’s looking to settle down. He’s not interested in going to balls and dances up in Dublin, he’s drinking with the lads. His mother is very keen indeed for him to be settled – he’s just the right age for it. Now do you see what I mean? For him it may not be a joke, so I’m annoyed with you getting your name up with his, all to no avail.’

  ‘But what’s getting my name up? It’s like as if the banns were being read, Mam. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.’

  ‘It’s such a small town Kilgarret, you don’t know how people love a chance to gloat.’

  ‘But Mam, what’s there to gloat over? They can’t say I’ve been thrown over by him can they, if I’m not the one who’s serious about him?’

  ‘No child. Of course they can’t. Come on, let’s turn out the lights and off to bed and stop all this nonsensical chatter.’

  Dear Aisling,

  Tell me more about Tony Murray. The last time he was mentioned in despatches was some incident where he found Joannie up to something which was never clearly explained either … but I thought he was very old, you know, like an uncle. But you’ve been to the pictures with him twice for six weeks. Is it a romance? Does he Make Suggestions as we used to say? I wish you’d tell me, I can keep a secret anyway, can’t I? I’m miles away in a different country.

  Mrs Ellis, the dreadful woman who has designs on Father, is really doing her best. It’s Father’s fiftieth birthday and she keeps saying that she’d like to organise a little party for ‘your papa’s half century’. In order to put her off, I said that I was organising a quiet family dinner at home and she had to be satisfied with that. Is Uncle Sean fifty? Did you have any do for that? A family dinner isn’t much fun if Father and I are the only family, but maybe when he knows I’ve chased Mrs Ellis away from him he’ll
cheer up.

  I see a lot of Johnny. It’s hard to tell you about it really. I did try but I tore up the page, it sounded a bit like the pages of a mushy love story … when it’s not like that in real life. I just like him a lot and he me … but we don’t say I love you or anything. I could explain it more clearly if we met. You asked what he looks like: I think he looks a bit like Clark Gable but thinner and without the moustache. That sounds ridiculous but what I’m trying to say is that he’s dark and very handsome, and people look at him a lot, but he doesn’t seem to notice them. I’ll tell you what happens about the party for Father. Love to everyone. I write to Aunt Eileen sometimes as you know, not secrets just ordinary letters … but I haven’t for a while, everything’s been so busy and complicated here. I hope she understands.

  Love, Elizabeth

  Dear Elizabeth,

  Like Clark Gable, I don’t believe it! No wonder you’re being quiet about him, you don’t want to share him. I don’t know why it’s hard to tell what it’s like. I know we’re not good at writing, but now I’ll change all that. I’ll try to tell you what Tony is like. He’s very old, he’s thirty and he’ll be thirty-one soon. He’s been at university but he didn’t do his degree. He’s been in Limerick learning the business and now he runs Murray’s here. He seems very keen on me. I don’t know why. He puts his hand on the back of my neck and squeezes it, which is awful and he kisses me in the car and tries to put his tongue between my teeth but I don’t encourage it. I let it happen by accident a bit. I don’t like it much anyway.

  He tells me I’m beautiful which I like to hear, and he comes and talks to Mam and Dad a lot too, so now everyone knows that he’s Interested as they say. Dad doesn’t know what to do, he’s out of his depth. It wasn’t like this with Brendan Daly because Brendan and all the Dalys are all old eejits as everyone knows. Tony Murray is what they call a catch here. Mam is very tight-lipped. She thinks I’m playing with his affections. Me! Aisling O’Connor playing with the affections of a catch who is as old as the hills. Anyway I don’t feel much about him one way or the other. I’d like him better if he didn’t look so silly, and pant and huff and puff so much in the car.