by Maeve Binchy
Bill decided to invite her.
Nan said no, she didn’t really like the cinema. She was regretful, and Bill didn’t think she had closed the door.
“Is there anything you would like to go to?” he asked, hoping he wasn’t making himself too humble, too pathetic.
“Well, there is … but I don’t know.” Nan sounded doubtful.
“Yes? What?”
“There’s a rather posh cocktail party at the Russell. It’s a sort of pre-wedding do. I’d like to go to that.”
“But we weren’t invited.” Bill was shocked.
“I know.” Nan’s eyes danced with excitement.
“Bill Dunne and Nan are going to crash a party,” Aidan said to Eve.
“Why?”
“Search me.”
They thought about it for a while. Why go to a place where you might be unwelcome? There were so many places where Nan Mahon could just walk in and everyone would be delighted. She looked like Grace Kelly, people said, confident and beautiful without being flashy. It was a great art.
“Maybe it’s the excitement,” Aidan suggested.
It could be the fear of being caught, the danger element like gambling.
Why else would you want to go to a wedding party with a whole lot of horsey people from the country, neighing and whinnying, Aidan asked.
Once Eve knew it was that kind of party she knew immediately why Nan Mahon wanted to go. And why she needed someone very respectable and solid like Bill Dunne to go with her.
Jack Foley thought it was a marvelous idea.
“That’s only because you don’t have to do it,” Bill grumbled.
“Oh, go on. It’s easy. Just keep smiling at everyone.”
“That would be all right if we all had your matinee idol looks. Advertising toothpaste all over the place.”
Jack just laughed at him.
“I wish she’d asked me to escort her. I think it’s a great gas.”
Bill was doubtful. He should have known there would be trouble involved once he had dared to ask out someone with looks like Nan Mahon’s. Nothing came easy in life.
And it was all so mysterious. Who on earth would want to go to a thing like that, where they’d know nobody and everyone else knew everyone.
Nan wouldn’t explain. She just said that she had a new outfit and thought it would be a bit of fun.
Bill offered to pick her up at home, but she said no, they’d meet in the foyer of the hotel.
The new outfit was stunning. A pale pink sheath dress with pink lace sleeves. Nan carried a small silver handbag with a silk pink rose attached to it.
She came in without a coat.
“Better in case we have to make a quick getaway,” she giggled.
She looked high and excited, like she had looked when she came into Eve’s party in Knockglen. As if she knew something nobody else did.
Bill Dunne was highly uneasy going up the stairs loosening his collar with a nervous finger. His father would be furious if there was any trouble.
There was no trouble. The bride’s people thought they were friends of the groom’s, the groom’s thought they were on the bride’s side. They gave their real names. They smiled and waved, and because Nan was undoubtedly the most glamorous girl in the room it wasn’t long before she was surrounded by a group of men.
She didn’t talk very much, Bill noticed. She laughed and smiled and agreed, and looked interested. Even when asked a direct question she managed to put it back to the questioner. Bill Dunne talked awkwardly to a dull girl in a tweed dress who looked over at Nan sadly.
“I didn’t know it was meant to be dressy-uppy,” she said.
“Ah. Yes, well.” Bill was trying to imitate Nan’s method of saying almost nothing.
“We were told it was a bit low-key,” the tweed girl complained. “Because of everything, you know.”
“Ah yes, everything,” Bill mumbled desperately.
“Well, it’s obvious isn’t it? Why else wouldn’t they wait until spring?”
“Spring. Indeed.”
He looked over her head. A small dark-haired man was talking to Nan. They looked very animated, and they hardly seemed to notice that anyone else in the room existed.
Lilly Foley looked at herself in the mirror. It was hard to believe that those lines would not go away. Not ever.
She had been used to little lines when she was tired, or strained. But they always smoothed out after a rest. In the old days.
In the old days, too, she didn’t have to worry about the tops of her arms, whether they looked a little crepey and even a small bit flabby.
Lilly Foley had been careful about what she ate since the day her glance had first fallen on John Foley. She had been thoughtful, too, about what she wore, and even, if she were honest, about what she said.
You didn’t win the prize and keep it unless you lived up to the role.
That’s why it was heartbreaking to think that that big overgrown puppy dog of a girl Benny Hogan should think that she had a chance with Jack. Jack was so nice to her, he had his father’s manners and charm. But obviously he couldn’t have serious notions about a girl like that.
He had driven her down to Knockglen and gone to the funeral out of natural courtesy and concern. It would be sad if the child got ideas.
Lilly had been startled to hear Aidan Lynch talking of Benny and Jack as if they were a couple.
At least Benny had the sense not to keep telephoning him like other girls did.
She must realize that there could be nothing in it.
Benny sat at the kitchen table and willed the phone to ring. She was surrounded by papers and books.
She intended to understand all about the business before talking to Sean and Mr. Green at the end of the week. She could ask no help and advice from old Mike in the shop and her mother was not likely to be any help either. Benny had bought a box of black-bordered writing paper. She had listed the people who sent flowers, hoping that her mother would write a short personal note to each of them. She had even addressed the envelopes.
But Annabel’s hand seemed to feel heavy and her heart listless. She never managed more than two letters a day. Benny did them herself eventually. She ordered the Mortuary Cards, with little pictures of her father, and prayers on them which people would keep in their missals to remind them to pray for his soul. It was Benny, too, who had ordered the black-rimmed cards printed with a message of gratitude for the sympathies offered.
Benny paid the undertaker, and the gravediggers, and the priest, and the bill in Shea’s. She paid everyone in cash as she had drawn a large sum from the bank in Ballylee. Fonsie had driven her there in his van.
“Wait till we get Knockglen on the map,” Fonsie had said. “Then we’ll have a bank of our own, not having to wait till the bank comes on Thursdays as if we were some one-horse Wild West outpost.”
The man in the bank in Ballylee had been most sympathetic, but also slightly uneasy about advancing the sum.
“I’m meeting Mr. Green the solicitor on Friday,” Benny reassured him. “Everything will be put on a proper footing then.”
She hadn’t imagined the look of relief on the banker’s face.
She realized that she hadn’t the first idea about how her father had run his business all these years, and she had only had a few days to find out.
As far as she could see it was a matter of two big books and a till full of pink slips.
There was the Takings Book. Every item was entered in that as it was received. Some of them were pitiably small. The sale of collar studs, sock braces, shoehorns, shoe-polishing brushes.
And then there was the Lodgement Book, a big brown leather volume with a kind of window in the front of it. It was ruled in three columns: Checks, Cash and Other. “Other” could mean postal orders or in one case dollars from a passing American.
Each Thursday her father had queued up with others when the bank came to town. The bank signature at the end of each week’s lodge
ment was the receipt and acknowledgment that the money had been put in the account.
In the till there were always pink raffle tickets, books that had been sent on spec by Foreign Missions, ideal for tearing off to write out what had been taken out. Each time there was a sum listed and a reason. “Ten shillings: petrol.”
It was Wednesday, early closing day. She had lifted both books from the shop and put them into a large carrier bag.
Sean had remonstrated with her, saying that the books never left the premises.
Benny had said nonsense. Her father had often pored over the ledgers at home, and her mother wanted to see them. It seemed a small comfort at a time like this.
Sean had been unable to refuse.
Benny didn’t even know what she was looking for. She just wanted to work out why the business was doing so badly. She knew that there would be seasonal highs and lows. After the harvest when the farmers got paid for the corn they all came and bought new suits.
She wasn’t looking for discrepancies, or falsification.
Which was why she was so surprised when she realized that the Takings Book and the Lodgement Book didn’t match up. If they took so much a week, then that much should have been lodged, apart from the small pink tickets called Drawings from the Till, which were very insignificant.
But as far as she could see by reading it and adding everything laboriously, there was a difference between what was taken and what was lodged, every single week. Sometimes a difference of as much as ten pounds.
She sat looking at it with a feeling of shock and despair. Much as she disliked him and wished him a million miles away from Knockglen, she did not even want to think for a moment that Sean Walsh had been taking money from her father’s business. It was so unlikely for one thing. He was such an overrespectable person. And for another, if he was to be made a partner why steal from his own business? And most important of all, if this had been going on for months and months, and maybe years, why was Sean Walsh living in threadbare suits in a cramped room two floors above the shop. She sat numbed by the discovery, and hardly heard the telephone ring.
Patsy answered it and said that a young man was looking for Benny.
“How are you?” Jack was concerned. “How’s everything?”
“Fine. We’re fine.” Her voice sounded far away.
“Good. You didn’t ring.”
“I didn’t want to be bothering you.” It was still unreal. Her eyes were on the books.
“I’d like to come down.” He sounded regretful, as if he were going to say he couldn’t. She didn’t want him here anyway. This was too huge.
“No, heavens no. Please.” She was insistent, and he knew it. He seemed cheered.
“And when will you come back up to me?”
She told him she should have things sorted out in some way by next week. Maybe they could meet for coffee in the Annexe on Monday.
Her lack of pursuit was rewarded. He really did seem sorry not to see her.
“That’s a long time away. I miss you, you see,” he explained.
“And I miss you. You were wonderful, all of you, to come to the funeral.”
When he was gone from the phone he went from her mind too.
There was nobody she could ask about the books.
She knew that Peggy, Clodagh, Fonsie and Mario would understand. As would Mrs. Kennedy, and many other businesspeople in the town.
But she owed it to the memory of her father not to reveal him as an incompetent bungler, and she owed it to Sean Walsh not to mention a word of her suspicion until she knew it was true.
“Why won’t you let me take you home?” Simon asked Nan after dinner.
It was the second time they had met that week after the extraordinary coincidence of their meeting at the cocktail party.
Nan looked at him and spoke truthfully.
“I don’t invite anyone home with me. I never did.”
She sounded neither apologetic nor defiant. She was saying it as a fact.
“Might one ask why?”
She smiled at him mockingly. “One might, if one was rather pushing and curious.”
“One is.” He leaned across the table and patted her hand.
“What you see is the way I am, the way I see myself. And how I feel and the way that I am always going to be. Were you, or anyone to come home with me, it would be different.”
For Nan it was a long speech about herself. He looked at her with surprise and some admiration.
He realized that she was from somewhere in north Dublin. He knew her father was in building. He had thought that perhaps they lived in a big nouveau riche house somewhere. They must have money. Her clothes were impeccable. She was always at the best places. He felt quite protective about her wish to keep her home life to herself, and her honesty in saying that this was what she was doing.
He told her gently that she was a silly. He didn’t feel ashamed of his home, a falling-down, crumbling mansion in Knockglen, a place that had seen better days, where he lived with underpaid retainers, a senile grandfather and a pony-mad little sister. It was a pretty weird background to introduce anyone into. Yet he had invited her there after Christmas. He held his head on the side quizzically.
Nan was not to be moved. It was not a pleasure for her to bring her friends home. If Simon felt uneasy about this, then perhaps they had better not see each other again.
As she had known he would, he agreed to dismiss the matter from their conversation and their minds.
In a way he was actually relieved. It was better by far than being paraded at a Sunday lunch and having expectations raised.
Heather was very bad at needlework at school. But after a conversation with Dekko Moore, the harness maker in Knockglen, she had decided that she should try to be good at it. He said that she might have a future for herself making hunting attire for ladies, and that they could be sold through Pine’s or Hogan’s.
It was Heather’s project for the new term to learn to sew properly.
“It’s awful things like cross-stitch, not real things like clothes,” she grumbled to Eve. It was Heather’s twelfth birthday and the school allowed her to spend the evening out with a relation just as long as she was back by eight.
They had a birthday cake for her in Kit’s house and everyone clapped when she blew out the candles. The students liked Heather, and her overwhelming interest in food.
They discussed the teaching of sewing in schools and how unfair it was that boys never had to learn cross-stitch.
“At least you don’t have to make big green knickers with gussets in them like we did at school,” Eve said cheerfully.
“Why did you have to make those?” Heather was fascinated by tales of the convent.
Eve couldn’t remember. She thought it might have had something to do with wearing them over their ordinary knickers and under their tunics when they were doing handstands. Or maybe she was only making that up. She really didn’t know. She was annoyed with Simon for not taking his sister out on her birthday and only sending her a feeble card with a picture of a crinoline lady on it. There were hundreds of nice horsey birthday cards around that he could have got.
But more than that, she was worried about Benny. There was some problem, some worry about the business. Benny had said she couldn’t talk about it on the phone, but she’d tell all next week.
It was something she had said at the end that wouldn’t go out of Eve’s mind.
“If you ever say any prayers, Eve, prepare to say them now.”
“What am I to pray for?”
“Oh, that things will turn out all right.”
“But we’ve been praying for that for years,” Eve said indignantly. She wasn’t going to start praying for unspecified things, she told Benny.
“The Wise Woman would leave them unspecified for a bit,” Benny had said.
Benny didn’t sound very wise or very happy.
“Simon’s got a new girl friend,” Heather said chattily. She knew Eve
was always interested in such tales.
“Really? What happened to the lady from Hampshire?”
“I think she’s too far away. Anyway this one’s in Dublin, so Bee Moore told me.”
Ah, Eve thought, that’s going to be one in the eye for our friend Nan Mahon and her notions.
Then the thought came to her suddenly. Unless of course it is Nan Mahon.
FIFTEEN
Benny returned the account books to the shop very early on the following morning. She took Shep with her for the outing. The dog looked around hopefully in case Eddie might come out of the back room beaming and clapping his hands, delighted to see his dear old dog arriving for a visit.
She heard a footstep on the stair and realized that she had not been early enough. Sean Walsh was up and dressed.
“Ah, Benny,” he said.
“I should hope so too. We wouldn’t want anyone else letting themselves in. Where’ll I leave these for you, Sean?”
Was she imagining it or did he eye her very closely? He took both books and laid them in their places. It was a good three quarters of an hour before the shop opened.
The place smelled musty and heavy. There was nothing about it that would encourage you to spend. Nothing that would make a man feel puckish and buy a bright tie or a colored shirt when he had always worn white. She looked at the dark interior and wondered why she had never taken the time to notice these things when her father was alive, less than a week ago, and talk to him about them.
But she knew why. Almost immediately she answered her own question. Her father would have been so pleased to see her taking an interest, it would have raised his hopes again. The whole subject of a union with Sean Walsh would have been aired once more.
Sean watched her looking around her.
“Was there anything in particular …”
“Just looking, Sean.”
