Circle of Friends

by Maeve Binchy

  Suddenly he had an inspiration.

  “I know what we’ll do,” he said to Bill Dunne, banging him on the arm enthusiastically. “We’ll ask them all. All the girls we fancy. Tell them to pay for themselves, and then we’ll have our pick.”

  “We couldn’t do that!” Bill gasped at the audaciousness of the plan. “It would be very mean. They wouldn’t say yes. They’d go with fellows who’d pay for them.”

  “We could have a little party first.” Jack was thinking on his feet.

  “Where? You’re not going to get girls in evening dress to go into Dwyer’s or Hartigan’s.”

  “No, in a house.”

  “Whose house?”

  “Mine, I suppose,” Jack said.

  “Why can’t you just take a girl to a dance like every normal boy,” Jack’s father grumbled.

  “I don’t know who to take,” Jack said simply and truthfully.

  “It’s not committing you for life, there won’t be a breach of promise action if you take the wrong girl to a dance in your first term.”

  “I thought that you both might like to use the opportunity …?” Jack looked hopefully from his mother to his father.

  “Use it for what, might one ask?” Lilly Foley asked. “Well, you know, the way you’re always saying that you mean to have people in for drinks …”

  “Yes …?”

  “And you know the way you’re always grousing that you never meet any of my friends …”

  “Yes …?”

  “I thought you could have a sherry party on the night of the dance, and sort of kill two birds …?”

  Jack’s smile was very powerful. In minutes it was all agreed.

  Rosemary Ryan offered Benny a peppermint. She must be about to divulge some information or do some detective work. Benny wondered which it was. It turned out to be both.

  “Jack Foley’s asked me to the big dance,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s nice.” Benny’s heart was like lead.

  “Yes, well I did tell you earlier in the term I was sort of making him my project.”

  “You did indeed.”

  “I think it’s a large party.”

  “Well, they usually are, I hear,” Benny said. She had heard little else in conversations in the Ladies Reading Room and overheard in the cloakrooms and the cafes. People went to the Dress Dances in parties of ten or twelve. The boys decided on the groupings and the girls were their guests. The tickets were about twenty-one shillings, and there was dinner, and everyone danced with everyone else apparently, but with their own special date most of all and at the end.

  She had a vain hope that Aidan Lynch might get up a party for it and include her. But then he couldn’t really unless she had been asked by some other fellow. Those were the rules.

  Rosemary was chewing her pencil as well as the peppermint.

  “It’s a bit odd though. It’s like a big group, and we’re all meeting at Jack’s house first. I was wondering were you going?”

  “Not as far as I know.” Benny was cheery.

  “You weren’t asked?”

  “No, not as yet. When were you asked?”

  “About an hour ago,” Rosemary admitted grumpily.

  “Oh well, then, there’s every hope.” Benny wondered did your face break by putting these false smiles on.

  After the lecture she met Jack Foley in the Main Hall by chance.

  “Just the girl I was looking for. Will you join our group? It’s a sort of dutch party for the big dance.”

  “Lovely,” Benny said. “Will we dress in clogs?”

  “No, I meant like we all sort of get our own tickets.” Jack looked embarrassed.

  “That makes much more sense, then we can all be free as birds,” she said.

  He looked at her surprised.

  “Birds?”

  “Different kinds of birds. Sparrows, emus, but free,” she said, wondering was she actually going mad to be having this stupid conversation.

  “You’ll come, then?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “And we’ll have drinks in my house. I’ll write down the address. My parents are having friends of their own age in. Would your parents like to come do you think?”

  “No.” Her voice was like a machine gun. “No, what I mean is thank you, but they hardly ever come up to Dublin.”

  “This might be the excuse they need.” He was politely courteous. He had no idea how much she would hate them there.

  “It’s very kind of you, but I think not. However, I certainly would love it.”

  “That’s great,” he said, pleased. “We need someone to cheer us up in these dim and dismal days.”

  “Ah, I’m the one for that,” Benny said. “Never short of a word, that’s me.”

  The wind lifted his hair, and his shirt collar stood high around his neck over his navy sweater, coming out over his navy jacket. He looked so handsome she wanted to reach out and stroke him.

  His smile seemed as if he had never smiled for anyone else in the world.

  “I’m really glad you’re going to be there,” he said.

  “Stop looking as if you’re going to your execution,” Kit said to Eve. “She’s only a child.”

  “In a big posh Protestant school,” Eve grumbled.

  “Not at all. It’s shabbier than our own, I can tell you.”

  “Still, full of airs and graces.”

  “She can’t have that many airs and graces. She wouldn’t have begged an old misery boot like you to come and see her.”

  Eve grinned. “That’s true. It’s just we won’t have anything to say to each other.”

  “Why don’t you bring a friend. It might be easier.”

  “Oh God, Kit, who could I bring on an outing like this?”

  “Aidan Lynch?”

  “No, he’d frighten the wits out of her.”

  “Nan?”

  “Not Nan,” Eve said.

  Kit looked up sharply.

  There was something about Eve’s tone that meant the matter was closed. Mother Francis had warned Kit about this. She said that Eve had areas where nobody followed her.

  Eve was now miles away from the conversation. She was thinking about what Nan had said, using the child to get accepted into the life at Westlands.

  It wasn’t a joke either. She had meant it. She had said that she would go down to Knockglen and stay with Benny if there was a chance of meeting the Westward family socially.

  “But they’re a senile old man, a kid and Simon, an uppity fellow with an accent you could cut, who wears riding breeches,” Eve had exclaimed.

  “They’re a start,” Nan had said perfectly seriously.

  It had made Eve shiver to think that someone could be so determined and so cool.

  Also so graceful in defeat. When Eve had said that Nan would never visit Westlands through her introduction, Nan shrugged.

  “Someone else, somewhere else then,” she had said, with her easy smile.

  Heather had her coat and beret on when Eve arrived at the school. She was received by the headmistress, a woman with hair cut so short, it might have been shaved at the back of her head. How could she have thought this looked attractive, Eve wondered. It was such an old style, so like pictures in school stories of the way schoolmistresses looked in the twenties and thirties.

  “Miss Malone. How good of you to arrive so promptly. Heather has been ready since she got up, I do believe.”

  “Good. Well, we said two o’clock.” Eve looked around the parlor. It was so strange to be in a school without pictures of saints everywhere on the walls. No statues, no little Sacred Heart lamps. It didn’t feel like a school at all.

  “And Heather must return for supper at six, so we like the girls to be back at five forty-five.”

  “Of course.” Eve’s heart sank. How could she entertain this child for nearly four hours.

  “As you suggested, we telephoned Mr. Simon Westward, but he wasn’t at home. We spoke to Mrs. Walsh, the hous
ekeeper, who confirmed that you are indeed a cousin.”

  “I just wanted to make sure that they agreed. I haven’t been in close contact with the family for a long time.”

  “I see,” said the headmistress, who saw only too well. A slightly shabby girl with the surname Malone, that was indeed likely to be a relation not in close contact. Still, the housekeeper had said it was all in order.

  “Enjoy yourself, Heather, and don’t be too much trouble for Miss Malone.”

  “Yes, Miss Martin. No, Miss Martin,” Heather said.

  Together they walked down the avenue.

  There were no words and yet the silence didn’t seem uncompanionable.

  Eve said, “I don’t know what you’d like to do. What do you normally do when you go out?”

  “I’ve never been out,” Heather said simply.

  “So what do you think you’d like to do?”

  “I don’t mind. Honestly. Anything. Just to be out, to be away from it all is smashing.”

  She looked back at the school as an escaped prisoner might.

  “Is it awful?”

  “It’s lonely.”

  “Where would you rather be?”

  “At home. At home in Knockglen.”

  “Isn’t that lonely too?”

  “No, it’s lovely. There’s my pony Malcolm and my dog, Clara, and Mrs. Walsh and Bee and of course Grandfather.”

  She sounded enthusiastic when she talked about them all. That big empty house was home. The school full of chattering children her own age and class was prison.

  “Would you like an ice cream in a glass?” Eve said suddenly.

  “I’d love it. At the end of the afternoon if that would be all right. We have it to look forward to … as the crown of the day.”

  Eve smiled a big wide smile. “Right, the crown of the day it will be. In the meantime we’ll have a good walk down to the sea to get up an appetite.”

  “Can we go near it and feel the spray?”

  “Yes, that’s the best bit.”

  Their legs were tired when they reached the Roman Cafe.

  “They always stop us from going near the spray when we’re out on school walks,” Heather said.

  “I’ll have to tidy you up a bit so that they’ll not discover.”

  “Are you going to have a Knickerbocker Glory?” Heather asked, studying the menu.

  “No, I think I’ll just have a coffee.”

  “Is Knickerbocker Glory too dear?” Heather asked.

  Eve took the menu. “It’s on the dear side, but it is the crown of the day so that’s all right.”

  “You’re not just having coffee because of the cost?” Heather was anxious.

  “No, truly. I want a cigarette. It goes better with coffee than ice cream.”

  They sat contentedly. Heather chatted about the games at school, lacrosse and hockey.

  “Which did you play?” she asked Eve.

  “Neither. We played camogie.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well might you ask! It’s a sort of gaelicized version of hockey in a way, or a feminine version of hurley.”

  Heather digested this with some interest.

  “Why didn’t we know you before, Simon and I?” she asked.

  “I’m sure you must have asked Simon that, the day I came to your house.”

  “I did,” Heather said, truthfully. “But he said it was a long story.”

  “He’s right.”

  “But it’s not a mystery or a crime or anything is it?”

  “No,” Eve said thoughtfully. “No. It’s not either of those things. My mother was called Sarah Westward, and I think she may have been wild or a bit odd or something, but whatever caused it she fell in love with a man called Jack Malone. He was the gardener in the convent, and they were mad about each other.”

  “Why was that odd?”

  “Because she was a Westward and he was a gardener. And anyway they got married, and I was born. And when I was being born my mother died. My father carried me down from the cottage to the convent. The nuns went rushing up to the cottage, but it was too late. They sent for Dr. Johnson and there was a terrible commotion.”

  “And what happened then?”

  “Well, apparently there was some kind of row and a lot of shouting at my mother’s funeral.”

  “Who shouted?”

  “My father, I believe.”

  “What did he shout?”

  “Oh, a lot of old rameis … rubbishy stuff about some of the Westwards dying in their beds … because they hadn’t behaved better to Sarah.”

  “And where was the funeral?”

  “In the Protestant church. Your church. She’s buried in your family grave. Under the name Westward, not Malone.”

  “And what happened to the cottage?”

  “It’s still there. It’s mine I suppose. I never use it though.”

  “Oh, I know I wouldn’t either.

  “And was Sarah my aunt?” Heather asked.

  “Yes … your father was her older brother … there were five in the family I believe.”

  “And they’re all dead now,” Heather said factually. “Whatever your father was shouting at that funeral seems to have worked.”

  “What happened to your parents?”

  “They were killed in India, in a car accident. I don’t remember them. Simon does of course, because he’s so old.”

  “How old is he?”

  “He’s nearly thirty. I wonder. Did he know all about the shouting and everything at the funeral? I suppose he was there.”

  “He might have been. He’d have been about eleven.”

  “I’m sure he was.” Heather was scraping the bottom of her glass.

  “I wouldn’t necessarily …” Eve began.

  Heather looked up and their eyes met. “Oh, I wouldn’t tell him all about our conversation,” she said. And changing to something that interested her much more, she leaned across the table eagerly. “Tell me, is it true that nuns put on shrouds and sleep in their coffins at night like vampires?”

  Eddie and Annabel Hogan were pleased that their daughter had been asked to the dance.

  “It’s nice that it will be just a group of friends going to it, isn’t it?” Annabel sought reassurance. “It’s not as if she had a special boy yet that she was keen on or anything.”

  “In my day the men took the women to dances, paid for them and went to their houses to pick them up,” Eddie complained.

  “Yes, yes, yes, but who’s going to come the whole way down to Knockglen to the door and pick Benny up and then deliver her back again. Don’t go saying that now, and making trouble where there isn’t any.”

  “And you’re happy enough to let her stay in this boardinghouse in Dun Laoghaire?” Eddie looked at his wife anxiously.

  “It’s not a boardinghouse. There you go again, getting it all wrong. You remember the woman who was down staying with Mother Francis in St. Mary’s, whose son was killed. That’s where Benny will stay. They’ll put another bed in Eve’s room.”

  “Well, as long as you’re happy.” He patted her on the hand.

  Shep sat between them at the fire, and looked up from one to the other as if pleased to see this touching.

  Benny was out at the pictures with Sean Walsh.

  “I’m happy enough about her going to the dance and staying with Eve, of course I am. I want her to have a great night, something she’ll always remember.”

  “What are you not happy about then?”

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen to her. Afterward.”

  “You said she’d go back to this house that isn’t a real boardinghouse.” Eddie was bewildered.

  “Not after the dance. After … after everything.”

  “None of us knows what will happen in the future.”

  “Maybe we’re wrong sending her up there. Maybe she should have done a bookkeeping course and gone into the shop with you. Forget all these notions of getting a degree.�
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  Annabel was chewing her lip now.

  “Haven’t we been talking about this since she was born?”

  “I know.”

  They sat in silence for a while. The wind whistled around Lisbeg, and even Shep moved closer to the grate. They told each other they were glad to be indoors on a night like this, in and settled, not out in Knockglen where people were still sorting out their lives. Sean and Benny would be leaving the cinema shortly and going for a cup of coffee at Mario’s. Patsy was up with Mrs. Rooney being inspected as a suitable candidate for Mossy. Peggy Pine’s niece Clodagh was going through the order books with her aunt. People said that it was a fallacy nowadays that the young didn’t work. In fact, some young people couldn’t stop working. Look at Clodagh, and Fonsie and Sean Walsh. Between them they would change the face of Knockglen in the next ten years.

  “I hope they’ll change it into a place we’ll like to live in,” Eddie said doubtfully.

  “Yes, but we won’t have all that much longer to live in it. It’s Benny we should be thinking about.”

  They nodded. It was nearly always Benny that they were thinking about anyway, and what the future had in store. They had lived their whole adult lives in a thirty-mile radius of this place. A huge city like Dublin on their doorstep had never affected them.

  They simply couldn’t envisage a life for their daughter that didn’t revolve around Knockglen, and the main street business of Hogan’s Gentleman’s Outfitters. And, though they hardly dared speak of the matter to each other, they thought too that it might best revolve around Sean Walsh.

  Benny looked across the table in Mario’s at Sean Walsh. In the very bright light his face looked thin and pale as always, but she could see the dark circles under his eyes.

  “Is it hard work in the shop?” she asked him.

  “Not hard, exactly, not in terms of physical work … or hours … just trying to know what’s best really.”

  “How do you mean?”

  For the first time ever, Benny was finding it easy to talk to Sean. And it was all thanks to Nan Mahon. Nan, who knew what to do in every situation.

  Nan said that Benny should always be perfectly pleasant to Sean. There was nothing to be gained by scoring points off him. She should let him know in a variety of ways that there was no question of ever sharing any kind of life or plans with him, but that he was highly thought of as her father’s employee. That way he couldn’t fault her, and it would also keep her parents happy.