Circle of Friends

by Maeve Binchy

  The sitting room had shabby chintz furniture, and faded curtains in the long window alcove. It could have been a very smart room, Sean thought, mentally ticking off the changes he would make. He hardly noticed Patsy, who had come back in.

  “She says you’re to come out to her.”

  “Mrs. Hogan isn’t coming in here?” He didn’t want to be telling the news in the territory where the maid could be involved, but followed obediently to the shabby breakfast room.

  “Ah, Sean.” Annabel Hogan was polite to him even if her maid wasn’t.

  “I’m very sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s been an accident,” he said in the sepulchral tones of an undertaker.

  “I know, poor Eve, Mother Francis was on to me about it.”

  “But Mrs. Hogan … Benny was involved in it …”

  “Yes, but she’s not hurt at all, she was talking to Mother Francis and to her father. There was some fault on the phone here or else I was on the phone myself talking to Father Rooney about the Station.”

  “She got scratches and a sprained ankle.” Sean couldn’t believe this calm acceptance. He had expected to be the deliverer of the news and then the great consoler, but Mrs. Hogan was making light of it. It was incomprehensible.

  “Yes, but she’s perfectly all right. She’s going to sit there in the hospital, and they’ll keep an eye on her and someone will put her on the evening bus, just as she planned. It’s only the shock Mother Francis says. Better to let her sit calmly there with people who know all about it.”

  Sean felt all his thunder being stolen from him.

  “I had thought I would drive to Dublin and collect her,” he said.

  “Ah, Sean, we couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “She might not like hanging around the hospital, you know, sick people, smells of disinfectant … it’s early closing and I was going to ask Mr. Hogan for a loan of the car.”

  Annabel Hogan looked at Sean Walsh’s concerned face and at a stroke all the careful, calming work of Mother Francis was destroyed.

  “You’re very kind Sean, but maybe if it’s as bad as that my husband would want to go himself.…”

  “But Mrs. Hogan, if I might presume, it’s very hard to find a place to park the car in the center of Dublin. Mr. Hogan hasn’t been used to driving in the city traffic of recent years, and I had planned to go to Dublin to collect the samples of material. You could ask them till kingdom come to put them on the bus, but they never do …”

  “Will I come with you, do you think?”

  Sean Walsh’s mind did a slow, careful calculation, then he came to a decision.

  “I’ll go on my own, Mrs. Hogan, if that’s all right. Then you can make all the preparations here.”

  It had been the right thing to say. Annabel saw herself in the role of getting ready to welcome the invalid home.

  Sean smiled as he left the house. This time he didn’t run up the main street of Knockglen. He walked on the other side of the road. He nodded to Dr. Johnson, who was coming out of his surgery. He glanced in the window of Peggy Pine’s women’s outfitters and saw with distaste the pastel colors that Benny had admired last night. Benny was such a big girl, she could hardly have wanted them for herself. Still, it was good that she sought his advice.

  He saw that Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday was coming to the cinema this weekend. That was good. Benny wouldn’t be well enough, and Sean didn’t like foreign language films. They put him at a disadvantage.

  He held his shoulders back. There was no reason for him to feel at a disadvantage. Things were working out fine.

  All he had to do now was to let Mr. Hogan know how distressed Mrs. Hogan was and how he had saved the day.

  Dr. Foley said he’d just go in and see how that child was in casualty before he left.

  “They’ve canceled my appointments for this morning … Maybe you’d walk me down to the Shelbourne for a taxi,” he asked Jack.

  “I could get one here, and come home with you.”

  “No, no, you know I don’t want that. Stay here in the waiting room will you, Jack?”

  Jack moved into the overbright room with the yellow walls. Two girls sat at a table. One of them was a spectacularly pretty blonde; the other, a big girl with long chestnut hair tied back in a bow, had a bandage on her foot. He realized they must have been in the accident.

  “Was it terrible?” he asked, looking questioningly at the empty chair, as if asking their permission to sit down. They pulled the chair forward and told him about it. They told him they had heard that the doctor had managed to avoid them all by driving into the lamppost. Only Eve, who had been hit by the moving car, was seriously hurt and even Eve would be out of hospital in a week.

  They talked easily. Benny stumbled from time to time, and became tongue-tied when she looked at the handsome boy sitting beside them. Never before had she held a conversation with anyone like this, and she would begin a sentence and not know how to finish it.

  Jack Foley’s eyes rarely left Nan’s face, but she seemed to be unaware of this and talked as if all three of them were equal partners in the conversation. Jack explained that it had been his father driving the car. Nan said that both she and Benny were busy trying to play down their bruises and scratches because it would cause such almighty upheavals in both their homes.

  “I don’t feel like going in to College now. Do you?” She looked from one to the other. It was as if she knew a solution would be proposed.

  “Why don’t I take the pair of you for a plate of chips?” Jack asked.

  Benny clapped her hands like a child. “I didn’t know that’s what my soul cried out for, well possibly not my soul, but there was a cry there definitely,” she said. They both smiled at her.

  “I’ll just see my father to a taxi and come back for you.” He was looking straight into Nan’s eyes.

  “Where would we go? It’s the best offer we’ve had all day,” Nan said.

  “He’s very nice,” Benny said, when Jack had gone.

  “He’s the College hero before he even gets there,” said Nan.

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw him play in the Schools Cup.”

  “Play what?”

  “He was on the wing.” Nan saw Benny’s mystification and explained. “Rugby. He really is very good.”

  “How did you go to a rugby match?”

  “Everyone does. It’s a kind of social event.”

  Benny realized that there were going to be a great many areas where she would be at a loss. Rugby matches would only be a very small part of them, and none of these gaps in her knowledge would be helped by continuing to live in Knockglen all her life.

  She wished suddenly that she were someone totally different, that she were much smaller and had a small face and tiny feet like Nan had. That she could look up at men rather than over or down at them. She wished her parents lived in the Aran Islands and that there could be no question of her having to go home every night. She felt a sudden desire to dye her hair blond and keep dyeing it every day so that the roots would never show. There was nothing she could do about her size. Even if she were thinner she would still have huge shoulders and great big feet. No operation had been invented to give you small feet.

  She looked at them with distaste in their sensible shoes and thick bandage. Her mother had normal feet, her father had, why did Benny’s have to be the way they were. At school they had once heard of some, animal which had become extinct because of its huge fiat feet. Benny hadn’t known whether to envy it or be sorry for it.

  “Is it hurting much?” Nan had seen Benny studying her foot and thought it must be paining her.

  Jack came back at that moment.

  “Well,” he said to Nan.

  She stood up. “I think Benny’s foot is hurting her.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” He looked at her briefly with a sympathetic smile.

  “No, it’s fine,” she said.

  “If you’re sure?” He was polite.
Perhaps he wanted to go off with Nan on his own. She didn’t know. But it would always be like this anyway so there was no point in getting upset about it.

  “You were looking at it and frowning,” Nan said.

  “No, I was only thinking about all those prayers we say for the conversion of China. Do you put three Hail Marys on to the Rosary for it?”

  “I think it was the conversion of Russia in ours,” Jack said. “But I’m not sure. Just shows you how well I’m able to escape it.”

  “Well, I can’t think why we should be praying for them,” Benny said with mock indignation. “They have lovely habits out there. They bind everyone’s feet.”

  “What?”

  “Oh yes, as soon as they’re born, so there’s no problem about people falling over them. Everyone has tiny feet and nice squashed-up bones. So elegant-looking.”

  Jack seemed to realize she was there for the first time.

  “And now chips,” he said, looking straight at her. “Four plates, one plate each and one to pick off. And lashings of tomato ketchup.”

  Then she heard the nurse tell someone that Miss Hogan was out in the waiting room, and there was Sean Walsh coming toward them. Her face fell.

  “I’ve come to drive you home, Benny,” he said.

  “I told Father I was coming home on the bus,” she said, coldly.

  “But he gave me the car …”

  Jack let her hands go and looked politely from the thin-faced boy to the big girl with the red-brown hair.

  No introductions were made.

  Benny spoke with an authority she didn’t know that anyone could have, let alone herself.

  “Well, I hope you had some other work to do in Dublin, Sean. That you didn’t come up specially, because I have to leave now. And I will be home on the bus as arranged.”

  “What do you have to do? You’re to come home. Now. With me.” Sean sounded petulant.

  “She has to go for some more treatment,” Jack Foley said. “I’m just taking her there. You wouldn’t want her to miss that.”

  FIVE

  Benny knew they would come to meet her off the bus. But she hadn’t expected all three of them, not Patsy as well, and not the car. Sean must have driven home with dire tales to have brought such a gathering to the bus stop. Before Mikey had swung the bus around and brought it to a stop she had seen their pale faces in the wet night, the two umbrellas. She felt the familiar surge of irritation mixed with guilt. No one on earth had such a loving family, no one on earth felt so cooped up and smothered.

  She walked with a heavy heart to the front of the bus.

  “Good night, Mikey.”

  “Good girl, Benny. Something wrong with your foot?”

  “I hurt it,” she said, realizing his wife would probably have the tale already.

  “It’s all this drunken life as a student. That’s what it is,” he said, roaring with laughter at his wit.

  “That’s what it is,” she repeated in a dull, polite way.

  “There she is!” cried her father, as if there had ever been any doubt about her arrival.

  “Oh, Benny, are you all right?” Her mother’s eyes were wide with anxiety.

  “Mother, I told Father on the phone. I’m fine. Fine.”

  “Then why did you have to go back for treatment?” Annabel Hogan had the face of someone who thought that very bad news was being kept from her. “We were very alarmed when Sean told us that they needed to look at you again, and you didn’t ring a second time … so we were afraid …”

  Her father’s face had lines of worry.

  “Sean had no business coming up there for me, interfering and giving orders and upsetting everyone here and there.” Benny’s voice was calm, but a little louder than normal.

  She saw Mrs. Kennedy from the chemist’s turn and look at her. That would be a subject for discussion in their house tonight, a scene, no less, at the bus stop with the Hogan family of all people. Well, well, well. Hadn’t it been a mistake to let that Benny go to Dublin on her own after all?

  “He went to set our minds at ease,” Benny’s father said. “We were very worried.”

  “No, Father, you weren’t. You were quite happy for me to come home on the bus. I talked to you and you were grand, and you said Mother would be grand and then suddenly Sean manages to spoil everything.”

  “The boy drove the whole way to Dublin on his half day to bring you home and then drove straight back and said you had to see another doctor. Do you blame us for being worried?” Eddie Hogan’s face was working with distress; beside him Annabel raked her face for more information. Even Patsy didn’t seem convinced that all was well.

  “I didn’t want him to come for me. You never said he was coming. There was nothing wrong with me, for God’s sake. You must see that. I was perfectly all right, but a boy was killed. He was killed in front of my eyes. He was alive one minute and then he was dead with his neck broken. And Eve’s in a hospital ward with broken ribs and concussion and all kinds of things. And all Sean Walsh can do is stand like a stuffed dummy in that hospital and talk about me!”

  To her horror Benny realized that there were tears pouring down her face, and that a small circle of people was watching her in concern. Two schoolgirls from the convent who had been in Dublin to buy books with one of the young nuns turned to see what was happening. It would be all around the convent before bedtime.

  Benny’s father decided to act. “I’ll get her into the car,” he said. “Patsy, will you run down to Dr. Johnson’s like a good girl and ask him to come over as soon as he can. Now, Benny, it’s all right. It’s all right. It’s natural, just shock.”

  Benny wondered was there a condition which might be known as Rage. Because that was definitely what she felt her condition to be. Helpless rage.

  Everyone in Knockglen heard about it in record time, but what they heard bore little relation to the facts. Mrs. Healy said that she heard the girls were running and laughing like they had done in Knockglen and they were hit by a car. As a precaution they had both been admitted to hospital, but Sean Walsh had driven up and got Benny discharged. It was a lesson on how to conduct yourself in huge menacing Dublin traffic if you came from a small place like Knockglen.

  Mr. Flood was silent and blessed himself a great deal when he heard the news. He said that it was obviously meant as some kind of warning. What kind of a warning he couldn’t say, but his family noticed with alarm that he had gone out to consult the tree again. They had hoped that this little habit had died down.

  Mrs. Carroll said it was a waste of good money sending girls to university. Not if the grocery was three times the size of Findlaters in Dublin would they send Maire and her sisters there. You might as well take money and shovel it down the drain. What did they do on the very first day except walk under the first vehicle they saw? Maire Carroll, serving in the shop and hating it, felt a firm and vicious sense of satisfaction over the fate of Eve and Benny, but of course she pretended great care and concern.

  Bee Moore, who worked in Westlands and was a sister of Paccy Moore the shoemaker, had heard that Eve was dead from horrible injuries and that Benny was in such shock she couldn’t be told. The nuns would all be going up to Dublin to collect her body shortly.

  Birdie Mac in the sweetshop told people that it took a great amount of faith these days to realize that God was fair-minded. Wasn’t it hard enough on that poor child to know no parents, to be totally disowned by her relations up in Westlands, to be brought up an orphan in the convent in secondhand clothes, and sent to a secretarial course when she had her heart set on going to university without being mown down by a car on her first week. Birdie sometimes questioned the fairness of life, having spent overlong looking after an ailing mother and missing her chances with a very suitable man from Ballylee who married another, who wasn’t bound to an ailing parent.

  Dessie Burns said that there was a lot of truth in the theory that if you fell down drunk, you never hurt yourself, a theory he had tested only
too often. It was a girl like Eve Malone, a little pikasheen who wouldn’t have had a drink on her at all, that would end up in hospital.

  Father Ross said that Mother Francis would take it badly. She felt as much for that girl as if she had been her own flesh and blood. No mother could ever have done more for the girl. He hoped Mother Francis wouldn’t get too great a shock.

  Mother Francis had acted swiftly when she heard about Eve. She had gone straight to Peggy Pine and waited demurely until the shop was free of customers.

  “Do me a great favor, Peg.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Could you close the shop and drive me to Dublin?”

  “When?”

  “As soon as you can, really, Peg.”

  Peggy pulled down the orange sheets of plastic intended to keep the glare off her goods in the window, both in summer when there might have been sunshine and in winter when it was unnecessary.

  “Off we go,” she said.

  “But the business?”

  “One thing about you, Bunty, you have the good sense to ask a favor at the right time. You decide to leap over the convent wall and hightail it to England to a new life, and you have the wit to do it on early closing day.” She picked up her handbag, rooted for her keys and then put on her tweed coat and closed the door behind her. There were advantages about the Single State. You didn’t need to tell anyone what you were doing. Or why.

  You didn’t even need to ask why.

  “Mother Francis!” Eve’s voice was weak.

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  “What happened to me? Please, Mother. The other people just say ‘Hush’ and ‘Rest.’ ”

  “Not much point in saying either of those words to you.” The nun was holding Eve’s thin hand. “Broken ribs, but they’ll knit together. A wrist that’s going to be painful for a while, but it will heal. A few stitches. Truly I never lied to you in my life. You’re going to be fine.”

  “Oh, Mother, I’m so sorry.”

  “Child, you couldn’t have stopped it.”