by Maeve Binchy
Sean Walsh saw from the shop window that Mrs. Healy across the road was polishing the brass sign for the hotel. She was looking at it critically. He wondered had it been defaced, she was frowning so much. There was nobody in Hogan’s so he strolled across the road to see what was happening.
“It’s hard to get in and out of the letters,” Mrs. Healy said. “Bits remain in there clogging them up.”
“You shouldn’t be doing this, Mrs. Healy, it’s not fitting,” he said. “A member of your staff should do the brasses.”
“You do the ones across the road. I’ve seen you,” she countered.
“Ah, that’s different. It’s not my place, across there.”
“Not yet,” said Mrs. Healy.
Sean ignored this. “You must have somebody, Mrs. Healy, one of the kitchen maids.”
“They’re so unreliable. Just standing chatting to people instead of getting on with it.” Mrs. Healy seemed quite unaware that this is what she was doing herself.
“If you like, I’ll do yours when I’m doing ours,” Sean offered. “But early in the morning, before anyone would see.”
“That’s extraordinarily kind of you.” Mrs. Healy looked at him surprised as if wondering why he would do this. She prided herself on being able to understand human nature. Running a hotel you met all sorts and you had to make judgments about people. Sean Walsh was a difficult person to categorize. It was obvious that he had his eye on the daughter of the house. A big strong-willed girl with a mind of her own. Mrs. Healy thought that Sean Walsh would be wise to make some contingency plans. Just because she was a large girl who might not get many offers, Benny Hogan, once she had her degree from Dublin, might well hightail it off somewhere else. Leaving Sean Walsh’s plans in tatters.
Mother Francis was pleased that it was a nice bright Saturday morning and not drizzling with rain like it had been most mornings in the week.
She would go up to the cottage for an hour when school finished and see what else needed to be done. Sometimes she told herself that she was like a child with a dolls’ house. Perhaps all the aching that a woman out in the world might have for her own home was coming to the surface. She hoped that this wasn’t going to threaten the whole basis of her vocation to the religious life. You were meant to put your own home and family behind you and think only of your calling. But there was nothing in any rules that said you couldn’t help to build up a home for an orphan who had been sent by the intervention of God into your care.
Mother Francis wondered how her orphan had got on at the dance last night. Kit Hegarty had phoned to say that Eve looked splendid. Mother Francis wished it hadn’t been in a borrowed skirt, no matter how elegant and how rich a red.
She wished that class would be over and she could release the girls who were dying to escape anyway and go to Mario’s cafe and look in the very much changed windows of Peggy’s shop. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could just ring the bell now, at eleven-thirty in the morning, and shout, “You’re free.”
The children would remember it all their lives. But undoubtedly it would get to the ears of Mother Clare. Her heart sank again as it always did at the thought of her sister in religion. If Mother Clare hadn’t been coming they might have invited Kit Hegarty for Christmas. They couldn’t now. Mother Clare would say they were turning a religious house into some kind of boardinghouse.
In two and a half hours she would be taking the key from its place in the wall and going into the cottage, polishing the piano and covering the damp stain on the wall with a lovely gold-colored wall hanging.
One of the missionary Sisters had brought it from Africa. They had all admired it, but it wasn’t a holy picture. It didn’t really seem suitable to put it up in the convent. Mother Francis had kept it carefully. She knew just where it would be useful. And may be she might get some gold-colored material somewhere and Sister Imelda could run up a couple of cushion covers too.
Eve was almost bouncing up and down on her bed when she heard about the invitation to lunch.
“I told you, I told you,” she kept saying.
“No, you didn’t. You said he looked as if he was enjoying dancing with me. That’s all.”
“Well, you thought he looked as if it was Purgatory on earth and that he was making eyes at people over your shoulder to rescue him.”
“I didn’t quite think that,” Benny said. But she had almost thought it.
When she had played the whole thing over in her mind again and again, those six lovely dances they had together, she was torn between believing that they were as enjoyable for him as they were for her, and that they were a simple courteous duty. Now it looked as if he really had liked her. The only problem was what to wear to the lunch.
Only the old castoff clothes of yesterday were available. You couldn’t wear a ball gown and expose your bosom on a November Saturday. So much the pity!
“I have seventeen pounds. I could lend you some if you wanted to buy something,” Eve offered.
But buying was no use. Not for Benny. They simply didn’t have the clothes in her size.
If it had been Eve they could have run up Marine Road in Dun Laoghaire to Lee’s or McCullogh’s and got something in two minutes. If it were Nan all she would have to do was open a cupboard and choose. But Benny’s clothes, such as they were, were fifty miles away in Knockglen.
Knockglen.
She had better ring her parents. And find out where they had been. And tell them it would be the evening bus, and say something to Patsy.
She got the coins and went back down to the phone.
They were delighted to hear from her and pleased that the dance had gone well, and wanted to know what had been served for supper. They were very startled to hear about the dispensation to eat meat. They had been out for a walk when she telephoned last night. It was very good of her. And had the party in the Foleys’ house been nice? And had she explained again how grateful they were to be asked?
Benny felt her eyes misting.
“Tell Patsy I have a pair of stockings for her as a present,” she said suddenly.
“You couldn’t have chosen a better time to give her something,” Benny’s mother said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “She’s been like a weasel all day. A weasel with a head cold if you ask me.”
Eve said that Kit would find a solution to the clothes problem. Kit had an answer for everything.
“Not about huge clothes.” Benny was gloomy.
But she was wrong. Kit said that one of the students who stayed in the house had a gorgeous emerald-green jumper. She’d borrow it off him. Say it needed a stitch or something. Boys never noticed that kind of thing. If he wanted to wear it today he bloody couldn’t. That was all. Then Kit would sew a nice lacy collar of her own on it and lend Benny her green handbag. She’d be dressed to kill.
Fonsie wanted Clodagh to be the first to see the new ladies’ cloakroom.
“God, it’s lovely.” She was full of admiration. “Pink towels, pink soap, and purple curtains. It’s fabulous.”
He was anxious about the lighting. Was it too bright?
Clodagh thought not. If they were old people, who didn’t want to see wrinkles, then yes, have it subdued. But they’d be young. Let them see the worst in their faces.
Clodagh wished she could get her aunt to install two fitting rooms. Peggy said that it wasn’t needed in somewhere like Knockglen. People could take things home on approval. If they didn’t like them they could bring them back.
This was uneconomic and with the increased volume of stock they carried, hard to organize. There was a storeroom that Clodagh had her eye on. All it needed was light mirrors, carpet and bright curtains. They sighed, Clodagh and Fonsie, at the uphill battles with their relations.
“Will we go and have a drink in Healy’s?” Fonsie said, suddenly.
“I don’t know. I said I’d unpack a whole lot of stuff that came in this morning.”
“To celebrate my new bathrooms and to plan your new fitting
rooms,” he pleaded.
They walked companionably up the street, Clodagh in her short white wool dress worn over a pair of baggy mauve trousers and mauve polo-necked jumper. Great white plastic hoops of earrings dangled under a man’s tweed hat with a ribbon of mauve and white on it.
Fonsie’s spongy shoes made no sound on the footpath. His red crushed-velvet jacket was bound in a yellow braid, his shirt neck was open and a red thin string like a tie hung down on each side of the collar. His dark red trousers were so tight that it appeared every step would cause him pain in most of his body.
On Saturdays at lunchtime the bar in Healy’s Hotel was like a little club. Eddie Hogan would call in for a drink and meet Dr. Johnson coming back from his rounds. Sometimes Father Ross would appear, and if Dessie Burns was off the drink he would sip a Club Orange loudly and know he was welcome in their midst.
Mr. Flood hadn’t been in much recently. The visions he had been seeing were preoccupying him. He had been seen standing in his garden looking thoughtfully up at the tree. Mr. Kennedy when he was alive had been a regular. His wife would not have dreamed of coming in his stead. Sometimes Peggy had gone in for a swift gin and vermouth with Birdie Mac.
Clodagh and Fonsie paused at the entrance to the bar, they didn’t want to join the group of old people and yet it would have been rude to ignore them.
As it happened they didn’t have to make the decision.
Suddenly between them and the room stood the well-corseted figure of Mrs. Healy.
“Can I do anything for you?” She looked from one to the other without hiding her distaste.
“Very probably, but I think we’ll confine it to just having a drink at the moment.” Fonsie laughed and ran his hand through his mop of dark and well-greased hair.
Clodagh giggled and looked down.
“Yes, well, perhaps Shea’s or somewhere might be nice for a drink,” Mrs. Healy said.
They looked at her in disbelief. She could not be refusing them entrance to her hotel?
Their silence unsettled her. Mrs. Healy had been expecting a protest.
“So maybe we could see you, here, when you are … um … more appropriately dressed,” she said, with an insincere smile on her lips, but nowhere near her eyes.
“Are you refusing to serve us a drink, Mrs. Healy?” Fonsie said in a very loud voice, intended to make every head in the place look up.
“I’m suggesting that perhaps you might present yourself for a drink in garb that is more in tune with the standards of a town like this and a hotel of this caliber,” she said.
“Are you refusing us because we are the worse for drink?” Clodagh asked. She looked over to the corner where two farmers were celebrating a small field bought and sold and were distinctly the worse for wear.
“I think out of respect for your aunt, who is one of our most valued customers, you might mind your tongue,” Mrs. Healy said.
“She’s joking Clodagh. Don’t mind her,” Fonsie said, trying to push past.
Two spots of red on Mrs. Healy’s face warned everyone that she most certainly was not joking.
Fonsie said that there were four men in the bar without ties, and he was perfectly willing to close his tie if it meant he could get a half pint of Guinness.
Clodagh said that if any of her garments offended Mrs. Healy she would be very happy to remove them one by one until she was in something acceptable like a vest and knickers.
Eventually they tired of the game. With exaggerated shrugs and put-on bewildered expressions, they left the bar. They both turned at the door with the sad, bloodhound faces of condemned criminals, but their laughter could be heard all the way down the corridor and out into the street.
The group in the corner looked at each other in some alarm. The main problem was Peggy, one of the town’s most respected citizens. How would she take to her niece being refused entrance to the hotel? The little group of people that Mrs. Healy cherished in her hotel looked down furtively.
Mrs. Healy spoke in a steady voice. “One has to draw the line somewhere,” she said.
Lilly Foley said that Aidan Lynch’s terrible parents never knew where to draw the line.
Jack asked why they hadn’t stopped serving drink, then the Lynches would have gone home. That apparently had been done early on. The bottles had been physically taken away from Aengus, but they had still stayed on and boomed.
“It irritated your father,” Lilly told Jack.
“Why didn’t he do something about it then, like saying ‘Good God, is that the time?’ ” Jack saw no problems in the tardy Lynch parents.
“It’s a woman’s place to organize these things. It was left to me. As things always are.” Lilly Foley seemed put out.
“But apart from that it was a great party. Thanks a lot.” Jack grinned at her.
It mollified her a bit. She noted that her son had been on the phone already asking some girl out to lunch. She couldn’t hear which one, but she assumed it was the glamorous Rosemary, who kept boasting of her relations in the Law, or the very beautiful girl, Nan, in the dress with all the little pearls on it. The girl who had said hardly anything, but was still the center of attention.
Lilly looked affectionately at her eldest son. His hair was tousled, he smelled of Knight’s Castille soap, he had eaten a huge breakfast and read the sporting pages of two newspapers. He had given Aengus half a crown for all his help at the party.
Lilly knew that like his father before him Jack Foley was a heartbreaker, and would be one until the day he died.
He had said the name of the restaurant as if everyone knew it. Carlo’s. Benny had heard of it. It was down near the quays, her old stamping ground getting on and off the bus from Knockglen. It was small and Italian, and she had once heard Nan say she had been there in the evening and they had candles in wine bottles like you saw in the pictures.
Much too early as usual, she went into a big store and examined the cosmetics. She found a green eye shadow and smeared some on each lid.
It was exactly the same color as the veterinary student’s enormous jumper that she was wearing. The shop assistant urged her to buy it, insisting that it was often hard to find exactly the right shade when you were looking for it and you should seize the hour.
Benny explained that it wasn’t her sweater. It was borrowed from a fellow. She wondered why she needed to tell so much to strangers.
“Maybe he’ll lend it to you again,” said the girl in the short pink nylon coat whose job was to sell cosmetics.
“I doubt it. I don’t even know who he is. His landlady pinched it for me.”
Benny knew she was sounding very peculiar but conversation of any kind made her feel less anxious. It filled that great empty echo chamber of anxiety she felt about the lunch that lay ahead.
It had been so easy when she smelled of Joy and when she was able to be in his arms. It would be quite different now, in a green sweater across a table. How would she smile and attract him, and hold him. There must have been something about her that appealed to him last night. It couldn’t have been all naked bosom, could it?
“Do you think I could have a spray of Joy perfume without buying any?” she begged the girl.
“We’re not meant to.”
“Please.”
She got a small splash. Enough to remind him of last night.
Carlo’s had a small door. That was a poor start. Benny hoped it wouldn’t have those awful benches, those kinds of church pew seats that were popular now. They were desperately hard to squeeze into. Even though it was bright out on the street, with a cold, wintry sun picking everything out sharply, it was dark and warm inside.
She gave her coat to the waiter.
“I’m to meet someone here,” she said.
“He is here already.”
That meant that Jack must be well known in this place, she thought with a wave of disappointment. Maybe he came every Saturday with a different girl.
“How do you know it’s the right person
?” she asked the waiter anxiously. It would be humiliating to be led to the wrong table in front of everyone and for Jack to have to rescue her.
“There is only one person here,” the waiter said.
He stood up to greet her.
“Don’t you look lovely and well rested considering the night that was in it?” he said admiringly.
“That’s the good bracing air of Dun Laoghaire,” she said.
Why had she said that? There were words like “bracing” you didn’t say. They reminded people of big, jolly girls on hikes. Like the word “strapping.”
But he hadn’t made any unfortunate word associations. He still seemed quite admiring.
“Whatever it is, it works. Our house is full of the-day-after feeling, glasses and ashtrays piled up in the kitchen.”
“It was a lovely party, thank you very much.”
“It was fine. Aengus sends you his regards. He was very taken with you.”
“I think he thought I was mad.”
“No. Why should he think that?”
It had been the wrong thing to say. Why had she said it? Bringing herself down, why couldn’t she have asked about Aengus?
The waiter came and fussed over them. He was a kindly man, like a thinner version of Mario. Benny wondered was he any relation. There couldn’t be that many Italians working in Ireland.
Benny decided to ask him.
“Do you have a relative working in Knockglen?”
He pronounced the name of her home town over and over, rolling it around, but his eyes narrowing suspiciously.
“Why do you think I have relations in Knocka Glenna?”
“There’s an Italian there, called Mario.”
Benny wished the purple and red sunburst carpet would open up at her feet and suck her into it, then close over her head.
Jack rescued her. “It’s probably a bit like, do you know my uncle Mo in Chicago?” he said. “I’m always doing that.”
She couldn’t imagine him ever doing it. Was there any way at all of trying to get back some of the magic of last night.
