by Maeve Binchy
“But how can we meet? Don’t you have to stay in that place for lunch?” Benny had asked.
“I’ve told them I have to go to hospital for tests.”
As long as she had known her Eve had hardly ever told a lie Benny had to tell a lot of little lies in order to be followed out late or indeed at all. But Eve had been resolute about never lying to the nuns. Things must be very bad in Dublin if she had gone this far.
And then there was Sean Walsh. Naturally she had not wanted to go out with him, but both her mother and father stressed how nice it was of him to take such an interest in the fact that she was going off to university and wanted to take her to the pictures as a treat. She had decided to take what might be the easiest way out and accept. After all, if it were to be something to mark the beginning of a new stage in her life, then she could make it clear that this new life wouldn’t involve any further outings with him.
Last night they had gone to the film Genevieve. Almost everyone else in the world must have loved it, Benny thought grimly, all over the place people left cinemas humming the tune and wishing they looked like either Kay Kendall or Kenneth More. But not Benny. She had left in a black fury.
All through the film Sean Walsh had put his thin bony arm around her shoulder or on her knee or even on one particularly unpleasant occasion, managed to get his hand sort of around her back under her arm and around her breast. All of these she had wriggled out of, and as they were leaving the cinema he had the nerve to say, “You know, I really respect you for saying no, Benny. It makes you even more special, if you know what I mean.”
Respected her! For saying no to him? That was the easiest thing she had ever done, but Sean was the type who thought that she enjoyed it.
“I’ll go home now, Sean,” she had said.
“No, I told your father we’d have a cup of coffee in Mario’s. They won’t be expecting you.”
She was trapped again. If she did go home they would ask why the coffee hadn’t materialized.
Next to the cinema, Peggy Pine’s shop had some new autumn stock. Benny had looked at the cream-colored blouses and soft pink angora sweaters. In order to talk about something that did not have to do with fondling and stroking she spoke of the garments.
“They’re pretty, aren’t they, Sean,” she had said, her mind barely on them. She was thinking instead that once she got to University she would never need to see him again.
“Well, they are, but not on you. You’re much wiser not to draw attention to yourself. Wear dark colors. Nothing flashy.”
There had been tears in her eyes as she crossed the road with him to Mario’s and he brought two cups of coffee and two Club milk chocolate biscuits to the plastic-topped table where she waited for him.
“It’s an ill wind,” he had said.
“What do you mean exactly?”
“Well, that brought Eve off to Dublin and out of your life.”
“Not out of my life. I’m going to be in Dublin.”
“But not in her world. Anyway, you’re grown up now, it’s not for you to be as thick as thieves with the likes of her.”
“I like being as thick as thieves with her. She’s my friend.” Why do I have to explain this to him, Benny had thought.
“Yes, but it’s not seemly. Not anymore.”
“I don’t like talking about Eve behind her back.”
“No, I’m just saying, it’s an ill wind. Now that she’s gone you won’t always be saying that you’re off to the pictures with her. I can take you.”
“I won’t have much time for the pictures anymore. Not with study.”
“You won’t be studying every night.” He had smiled at her complacently. “And don’t forget, there’s always weekends.”
She had felt a terrible weariness.
“There’s always weekends,” she repeated. It seemed easier somehow.
But Sean had felt like making a statement. “Don’t think that it’s going to come between us, you having a university education,” he had said.
“Not come between us?”
“Exactly. Why should it? There are some men that might let it but I’m not one. I tell you something, Benny, I’ve always modeled myself a lot on your father. I don’t know whether you know this or not.”
“I know you work with him, so I’m sure you must learn from him.”
“Much more than that. I could learn from any outfitters in the country. I could learn tailoring by sitting at a bench. No, I watch the way Mr. Hogan has faced the world, and I try to learn from that.”
“What have you learned in particular?”
“Well, not to be proud for one thing. Your father married an older woman, a woman with money. He wasn’t ashamed to put that money into his business, it’s what she wanted and he wanted. It would have been a foolish, bull-necked man who would have looked a gift horse in the mouth … so I like to see myself in a small way as following in his footsteps.”
Benny had stared at him as if she had never seen him before.
“What exactly are you trying to say Sean?” she had asked.
“I’m trying to say that none of it means anything to me. I’m above all that sort of thing,” he had said loftily.
There was a silence.
“Just to make my point clear,” he had ended.
That had been last night.
Mother and Father had seemed pleased that she had spent time having coffee with Sean.
If that’s what they want for me, Benny asked herself, why on God’s earth are they allowing me to go to university. If they want to take it all away in the end and match me up with that slimy half-wit, why then take me up to the mountain and show me the world? It was too hard to answer, as was Eve’s problem. Eve had said not only was she going to be free for lunch, she would meet Benny off the bus and walk her up to University College. Hanged for a sheep was what Eve had said on the phone.
Jack Foley woke with a start. He had been dreaming that he and his friend Aidan Lynch were on Death Row in some American prison and they were about to die in the electric chair. Their crime seemed to be that they had sung the song “Hernando’s Hideaway” too loudly.
It was a huge relief to find himself in the big bedroom with its heavy mahogany furniture. Jack said you could hide a small army in the various wardrobes around the house. His mother had said that it was all very well to mock but she had stood many long hours at auctions all over the city finding the right pieces.
The Foleys lived in a large Victorian house with a garden in Donnybrook, a couple of miles from the center of Dublin. It was a leafy place, professional people, merchants, senior civil servants had lived around here for a long time.
The houses on the road didn’t have numbers; they all had names, and the postman knew where everyone lived. People didn’t move much once they got to a road like this one. Jack was the eldest of the family and he had been born in a smaller house, but he didn’t remember it. By the time he was a toddler his parents had arrived here.
He noticed that in the photographs of his childhood the rooms looked a lot less furnished.
“We were building up our home,” his mother had told him. “No point in rushing and getting the wrong type of thing entirely.”
Not that Jack or any of his brothers really noticed the house much. It was there for them as it had always been. Like Doreen had always been putting the food on the table, like the old dog Oswald had been there for as long as they could recall.
Jack shook off his dream about Death Row and remembered that all over Dublin today there would be people waking to the first day of term.
The first day of term in the Foley household meant that Jack would put on a college scarf and head into UCD for the first time. In the dining room of the big Donnybrook house there was a sense of excitement. Dr. John Foley sat at the head of the table, and looked at his five sons. He had assumed they would all enter medicine as he had, so it had been a shock when Jack had chosen law. Perhaps the same thing would happen with the
others. Dr. Foley looked at Kevin and Gerry. He had always seen them somewhere in the medical field as well as on a rugby pitch. His eyes fell on Ronan. Already he seemed to have the reassuring kind of manner one associated with being a doctor. That boy Ronan could convince even his own mother that the wounds he got in a playground were superficial, that the dirt on his clothes would easily wash out. That was the personality you needed in a good family doctor. Then there was Aengus, the youngest: his owlish glasses made him look studious and he was the only Foley boy not to be chosen for some kind of team in the school. Dr. Foley had always seen his son Aengus as going into medical research when the time came. A bit too frail and woolly for the rough-and-tumble of ordinary practice.
But then he had been wrong about his eldest son. Jack said he had no wish to study physics and chemistry. The term he had spent at school trying to understand the first thing about physics had been wasted. Nor did he want botany and zoology, he’d be no good at them.
In vain Dr. Foley had pleaded that the pre-med year was a necessary Term of Purgatory before you started the real business of medicine.
Jack had been adamant. He would prefer law.
Not the bar either, but being apprenticed as a solicitor. What he would really and truly like was to do this new degree course for Bachelor of Civil Law. It was like doing a B.A. but all in law subjects. He had discussed it with his father seriously and with all the information to hand. He could be apprenticed to his mother’s brother, surely. Uncle Kevin was in a big solicitors’ practice: they’d find a place for him. He timed his request well. Jack knew that his father’s head was buried as deeply in the world of rugby as the world of medicine. Jack was a shining schoolboy player. He was on the pitch for his school in the Senior Cup final. He scored two tries and converted one of them. His father was in no position to fight him. Anyway it would have been foolish to force someone into a life so demeaning. Dr. Foley shrugged. There were plenty of other boys to follow him down the good physician’s route to Fitzwilliam Square.
Jack’s mother, Lilly, sat at the far end of the table opposite her husband. Jack could never remember a breakfast when she had not presided over the cups of tea, the bowls of cornflakes, the slices of grilled bacon and half tomato which was the start to the day every morning except Fridays and in Lent.
His mother always looked as if she had dressed up for the occasion, which indeed she had. She wore a smart Gor-Ray skirt, always with either a twinset or a wool blouse. Her hair was always perfectly done, and there was a dusting of powder on her face as well as a slight touch of lipstick. When Jack had spent the night in friends’ houses after a match he realized that their mothers were not like his. Often women in dressing gowns with cigarettes put food on kitchen tables for them. The formal breakfast at eight o’clock in a high-ceilinged dining room with heavy mahogany sideboards and floor-to-ceiling windows wasn’t everyone else’s way of life.
But the Foley boys weren’t pampered either; their mother had seen to that. Each of them had a job to do in the mornings before they left for school. Jack had to fill the coal scuttles, Kevin to bring in the logs, Aengus had to roll yesterday’s papers into sausage-like shapes which would be used for lighting the fires later, Gerry, who was meant to be the animal lover, had to take Oswald for a run in the park, and see that there was something on the bird table in the garden, and Ronan had to open the big heavy curtains in the front rooms, take the milk in from the steps and place it in the big fridge, and brush whatever had to be brushed from the big granite steps leading up to the house. It could be cherry blossom petals, or autumn leaves or slush and snow.
When breakfast was finished the Foley boys placed their plates and cutlery neatly on the hatch into the kitchen before going to the big room where all their coats, boots, shoes, schoolbags and often rugby gear had to be left.
People marveled at the way Lilly Foley ran such an elegant home when she had five rugby-playing lads to deal with, and marveled even more that she had kept the handsome John Foley at her side. A man not thought to be easy to handle. Dr. Foley had had a wandering eye as a young man. Lilly had not been more beautiful than the other women who sought him, just more clever. She realized that he would want an easy uncomplicated life where everything ran smoothly and he was not troubled by domestic difficulties.
She had found Doreen at an early stage, and paid her over the odds to keep the house running smoothly. Lilly Foley never missed her weekly hairdo and manicure.
She seemed to regard her life with the handsome doctor as a game with rules. She kept an elegant attractive home. She put on not an ounce of fat, and always appeared well groomed at Golf Club or restaurant, as well as at home. This way he didn’t wander.
Today when the four younger boys left for school, Jack helped himself to another cup of tea.
“I’ll know what you two talk about when you’re alone now.” He grinned. He looked very handsome when he smiled, his mother thought fondly. Despite reddish-brown hair which wouldn’t stay flat, those freckles on his nose, he really was classically good-looking, and when Jack Foley smiled he would break any heart. Lilly Foley wondered would he fall in love easily, or did the rugby take so much time that he would just be satisfied with the distant adulation of the girls who watched and cheered the games.
She wondered would he be as hard to catch as his father had been. What would some wily girl see in him that he would respond to? She had captured his father by promising an elegant uncluttered life-style very different from the neglected unhappy home he had come from. But this would not be the way to lure away her Jack. He was happy and well looked after in this home. He wouldn’t want to flee the nest for a long time yet.
“Are you sure you won’t take a lift?” Dr. John Foley would have been proud to drive his eldest son up to Earlsfort Terrace and wave him into his first day at University.
“No, Dad, I told a few of the lads …”
His mother seemed to understand. “It’s not like school, it’s sort of more gradual isn’t it. There’s no bell saying you all have to be there at such a time.”
“I know, I know. I’ve been there, remember.” Dr. Foley was testy.
“It’s just that I said …”
“No, your mother is right, you want to be with your own friends on a day like this, and the best of luck to you son, may it turn out for you just as well as you ever hoped. Even if you’re not doing medicine.”
“Ah, go on, you’re relieved. Think of all the malpractice suits.”
“You can get those in law just as well as medicine. Anyway, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t pick a law student for the rugby first fifteen.”
“Give me a bit of time, Dad.”
“After the way you played in the Schools Cup? They’re not blind in there. You’ll be playing in the Colors match in December.”
“They never have freshers for that.”
“They’ll have you, Jack.”
Jack stood up. “I’ll be on it next year. Will that do you?”
“All right, if you play for UCD in 1958 that’ll do me. I’m a very reasonable, undemanding man,” said Dr. Foley.
When Benny got off the bus on the quays, she saw Eve waiting, with her raincoat collar turned up against the rain. She looked cold and pale.
“God, you really will end up in hospital this way,” Benny said. She was alarmed by the look in Eve’s eyes and the uncertainty of the future.
“Oh, shut up will you. Do you have an umbrella?”
“Do I have an umbrella? We’re lucky that I don’t have a plastic bubble encasing me, the weather was tested all night, I think. I have a folding mac that makes me look like a haystack in the rain, I have an umbrella that would fit most of Dublin under it.”
“Well, put it up then,” Eve said, shivering. They crossed O’Connell Bridge together.
“What are you going to do?” Benny asked.
“Anything. I can’t stay there. I tried.”
“You didn’t try very hard, less than a week.�
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“If you saw it, if you saw Mother Clare!”
“You’re the one who’s always telling me that things will pass, and to make the best of them. You’re the one who says we can stick anything if we know where we’re going.”
“That was before I met Mother Clare, and anyway I don’t know where I am going.”
“This is Trinity. We just keep following the railings, and up one of the streets to the Green …” Benny explained.
“No, I don’t mean here. I mean, where I’m going really.”
“You’re going to get a job and get shot of them as quick as possible. Wasn’t that the plan?”
Eve made no reply. Benny had never seen her friend so low.
“Isn’t there anyone nice there? I’d have thought you’d have made lots of friends.”
“There’s a nice lay Sister in the kitchen. Sister Joan, she’s got chapped hands and a streaming cold, but she’s very kind. She makes me cocoa in a jug while I’m washing up. It has to be in a jug in case Mother Clare comes in and thinks I’m being treated like someone normal. I just drink it straight from the jug you see, no cup.”
“I meant among the others, the other girls.”
“No, no friends.”
“You’re not trying, Eve.”
“You’re damn right I’m not trying. I’m not staying either, that’s for good and certain.”
“But what will you do? Eve, you can’t do this to Mother Francis and everyone.”
“In a few days I’ll have some plan. I won’t live in that place. I won’t do it.” Her voice had a slightly hysterical ring about it.
“All right, all right.” Benny was different now. “Will you come home on the bus tonight, back to Knockglen, back to the convent?”
“I can’t do that. It would be letting them down.”
“Well, what would it be standing shivering round the streets here, telling lies about being in hospital? What’ll they say when they hear that? Will we walk through the Green? It’s nice, even though it’s wet.” Benny’s face looked glum.
