Circle of Friends

by Maeve Binchy

  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 su
bject 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.

  “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 frien
ds, 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.

  THREE

  Emily 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.