Circle of Friends

by Maeve Binchy

  It was a marvelous night in Knockglen.

  Peggy Pine absolutely loved the changes in the shop. The new lighting, the fitting rooms, and the low music in the background.

  Annabel Hogan had called on Sean Walsh and said that she hoped to come and join him in the shop on Monday and that he would be patient with her and explain things simply. She mistook his protestations as expressions of courtesy and insisted that she turn up at 9:00 A.M. on the first day of the week.

  Mossy Rooney said that his mother thought that Patsy was a fine person and would be very happy for them to go to Father Ross and fix a day.

  And best of all Nan Mahon telephoned Benny and said that Swamp Women was the worst film she had ever seen, but that Jack Foley obviously adored Benny and wanted nothing but to talk about her.

  Tears of gratitude sprang to Benny’s eyes.

  “You’re so good, Nan. Thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  “What else are friends for?” asked Nan as she packed her little overnight bag and prepared to meet Simon for their visit to Wicklow.

  Sean Walsh was in Healy’s Hotel. “What am I going to do?”

  “Let her come in. She’ll tire of it in a week.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “You’ll have someone to help you do the errands. It makes it harder for her to refuse you the partnership. She can’t be avoiding your eye and the issue if she’s working beside you.”

  “You’re very intelligent … um … Dorothy,” he said.

  Rosemary Ryan knew what was going on everywhere. Eve said she was like those people during the war who had a map of where their troops were and their submarines and they kept moving them about like pieces on a board.

  Rosemary knew Jack had been to the pictures with Nan. She was checking that Benny knew.

  “Aren’t you the silly-billy to go off and leave your young man wandering around unescorted,” Rosemary said.

  “He wasn’t unescorted for long. I sent him to the pictures with Nan.”

  “Oh, you did. That’s all right.” Rosemary seemed genuinely relieved.

  “Yes, I had to go back to Knockglen and he had declared an afternoon off for himself.”

  “You spend too long down there.” Rosemary was trying to warn her about something.

  “Yes, well, I’m staying in town tonight. We’re all going to the dance at the Palmerston rugby club. Are you coming?”

  “I might. I have ferocious designs on a medical student. I’ll send out a few inquiries to know whether he’ll be there or not.”

  What could Rosemary be warning her about? Not Nan, that was clear. Everyone knew that Nan was besotted with Simon Westward. Sheila had given up on him. There was nobody else. Perhaps it was just that he was getting used to being on his own at social occasions. Perhaps by staying so long in Knockglen Benny was letting Jack think that he was free to ramble, and there might have been a bit of rambling, possibly the Welsh type of rambling … that she didn’t know about. Benny dragged her mind back to Tudor policy in Ireland. The lecturer said that it was often complicated and hard to pin down since it seemed to change according to the mood of the time. What else is new, Benny wondered. Jack, who had been so loving about her when talking to Nan, was annoyed again now.

  He had thought she was going to stay in town for the weekend apparently and had made plans for Saturday and Sunday too. But Benny had to go back to prepare her mother for work on Monday. If he couldn’t understand that, what kind of friend was he? Eve would say he wasn’t meant to be a friend. He was meant to be a big handsome hunk who happened to fancy Benny. But there had to be more to it than that.

  Eve and Kit discussed plans.

  They would put a handbasin in each bedroom, and build an extra lavatory and shower. That would stop the congestion on the landings in the morning.

  They would have a woman to come in and wash on Mondays. They would have the house rewired, some of those electrical installations didn’t bear thinking about.

  They would be able to charge a little more if the facilities were that much better. But the real benefit would be they needn’t keep students they didn’t like. The boy who never opened his bedroom window, who had Guinness bottles under the bed and who had left three cigarette burns in the furniture would be given notice to mend his ways or leave. Nice fellows like Kevin Hickey could stay forever.

  For the first time in her life Kit Hegarty would have some freedom.

  “Where does that leave me?” Eve asked lightly. “You won’t need me now.”

  But she knew Kit did need her. So she spoke from a position of safety.

  They had decided after reflection that the money would not be cast back on the drawing room floor of Westlands. It would be put for Eve in a post office account. Ready to be taken out and thrown, the moment Eve wanted to.

  They danced at the rugby club and Benny realized there were people who came here every Friday night and that all of them knew Jack.

  “I love you,” he said suddenly as they sat sipping Club Oranges from bottles with straws. He pushed a damp piece of hair out of her eyes.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Lord, I don’t know. It would be much easier to love someone who didn’t keep disappearing.”

  “I love you too,” she said. “You delight me.”

  “That’s a lovely thing to say.”

  “It’s true. I love everything about you. I often think about you and I get a great warm feeling all over me.”

  “Talking about great feelings all over us, I have my father’s car.”

  Her heart sank. Once in the car it was going to be very, very hard to say no. Everything they had been told at school, and at the Mission, and in all those sermons on Purity, made it seem like a simple choice. Between Sin and Virtue. You were told that Virtue was rewarded, that Sin was punished, not only hereafter, but in this life. That boys had no respect for the girls who gave in to their demands.

  But nobody had ever told anybody about how nice it felt, and how easy it would be to go on, and how cheap you felt stopping.

  And about how you feared greatly that if you didn’t go ahead with what you both wanted to do, then there would be plenty more who would.

  People of the temperament and lack of scruples up to now only discovered in Wales.

  “I hope we didn’t drag you away from each other too early.” Eve spoke dryly as they settled down to sleep in Kit Hegarty’s.

  “No, just in time I think,” Benny said.

  It had been the opportune demands of Aidan and Eve to let them into the car before they froze to death out of discretion.

  “Why can’t you stay the weekend?” Eve, too, seemed to be warning her about something. It was like a message that she was getting from everyone. She should stay around.

  But there was no way that she could stay, no matter how great the danger. Things were at a crossroads in Knockglen.

  “Have you a cigarette?” she asked Eve.

  “But you don’t smoke.”

  “No, but you do. And I want you to listen while I tell you about Sean Walsh.”

  They turned on the light again, and Eve sat horrified as the tale of the money and the suspicions and the partnership was unfolded.

  The hopes that Benny’s mother might find a life of her own in the shop, the support that would be needed. Eve listened and understood. She said that it didn’t matter how much temptation was thrown into Jack Foley’s path, some things were more important than others, and Benny had to nail Sean Walsh, no matter what.

  Eve said she’d come down herself and help to search for the money.

  “But we can’t go into his rooms. And if we were to get the Guards he’d hide it.”

  “And he’s such a fox,” Eve added. “You’ll have to be very, very careful.”

  There was now a Saturday lunchtime trade at Mario’s, toasted cheese slices and a fudge cake with cream. The place was almost full as Benny walked past.

  She went in to admire Cl
odagh’s drastic changes. There were half a dozen people examining the rails and maybe four more in the fitting rooms.

  Between them Clodagh and Fonsie had brought all the business in the town to their doorsteps. There were even people who might well have gone to Dublin on a shopping trip browsing happily.

  “Your mother’s in great form altogether. She’s talking of shortening her skirts, and smartening herself up.”

  “Mother of God, who’ll shorten her skirts for her? You’re too busy.”

  “You must be able to take up a simple hem. Didn’t you say you had a sewing machine somewhere?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know where it is in the lumber and rubble up in the shop.”

  “Up in the Honourable Sean Walsh’s territory?”

  “No, he’s right upstairs. The first floor.”

  “Ah, get it out Benny. Get someone to drag it down to your house. I’ll come round for ten minutes and start you off.”

  “It mightn’t be working,” Benny said hopefully. “Then your mother’ll have to look streelish won’t she?”

  Benny decided she’d go back to the shop and see if the machine really was there and looked in workable condition before she asked Teddy Flood or Dekko Moore or someone with a handcart to help her home with it.

  Sean wasn’t in sight in the shop. Only old Mike saw her go upstairs.

  She saw the sewing machine behind an old sofa with the springs falling out. It couldn’t have been used for nearly twenty years.

  It looked like a little table. The machine part was down in it. Benny pulled, and up it came, shiny and new-looking as well it might be, considering how little use it had had. It was quite well made she thought, with those little drawers on each side, probably for spools of thread and buttons and all the things that sewing people filled their lives with.

  She opened one of the little drawers. It was stuffed with small brown envelopes, pushed up one against the other. It seemed an extraordinary way to keep buttons and thread. She opened one idly and saw the green pound notes, and the pink ten-shilling notes squeezed together. There were dozens and dozens of envelopes, old ones addressed to the shop, originally with invoices, each with its postmark. With a feeling of ice water going right through her body, Benny realized that she had found the money Sean Walsh had been stealing from her father for years.

  She didn’t remember walking home. She must have passed Carroll’s and Dessie Burns’ and the cinema as well as Pine’s and Paccy’s and Mario’s. Maybe she even saluted people. She didn’t know.

  In the kitchen Patsy was grumbling.

  “Your mother thought you must have missed the bus,” she said. Benny saw her preparing to put the meal on the table.

  “Could you wait a few minutes, Patsy? I want to talk to Mother about something.”

  “Can’t you talk and eat?”

  “No.”

  Patsy shrugged. “She’s above in the bedroom trying on clothes that stink of mothballs. She’ll run them out of the shop with the smell of camphor.”

  Benny grabbed the sherry bottle and two glasses and went upstairs.

  Patsy looked up in alarm.

  In all her years in this house she had never been excluded from a conversation with the mistress and Benny. And never would she have believed that there was any subject that needed a drink being brought to the bedroom.

  She said three quick Hail Marys that Benny wasn’t pregnant. It was just the kind of thing that would happen to a nice big soft girl like Benny. Fall for a baby from a fellow who wouldn’t marry her.

  Annabel listened white-faced.

  “It would have killed your father.”

  Benny sat on the side of the bed. She chewed her lip as she did when she was worried. Nan had said she must try to get out of the habit. It would make her mouth crooked eventually. She thought about Nan for a quick few seconds.

  Nan wouldn’t pause to care about her father’s business. Not if it was being robbed blind by everyone in it. It was both terrible and wonderful to be so free.

  “I wonder if Father knew,” Benny said.

  It was quite possible that he had his suspicions, but that being Eddie Hogan he had put them away. He wouldn’t have opened his mouth unless he had positive proof. But it was odd that he had delayed the partnership deal. Mr. Green had said he was surprised that it had not been signed. Could Father have had second thoughts about going into partnership with a man who had his hand in the till over the years?

  “Your father would not have been able to bear the disgrace of it all. The Guards coming in, a prosecution, the talk.”

  “I know,” Benny agreed. “He’d never have stood for that.”

  They talked as equals sitting in the bedroom that was strewn with the clothes Annabel had been trying on to wear on her first day in the shop. Benny didn’t urge her to make decisions and Annabel didn’t hang back.

  Because they were equals they gave each other strength.

  “We could tell him we know?” Annabel said.

  “He’d deny it.”

  They couldn’t call the Guards, they knew that. There was no way that they could ask Mr. Green to come in, climb the stairs to the first floor and inspect the contents of the sewing machine. Mr. Green wasn’t the kind of lawyer you saw in movies who did this sort of thing. He was the most quiet and respectable of country solicitors.

  “We could ask someone else to witness it. To come and see it.”

  “What good would that do?” Annabel asked.

  “I don’t know,” Benny admitted. “But it would prove it was there in case Sean were to shift it and hide it somewhere else. You know, when we speak to him.”

  “When we speak to him?”

  “We have to, Mother. When you go in there on Monday morning, he has to be gone.”

  Annabel looked at her for a long time. She said nothing. But Benny felt there was some courage there, a new spirit. She believed that her mother would face what lay ahead. Benny must find the right words to encourage her.

  “If Father can see us, it’s what he’d want. He’d want no scandal, no prosecution. But he wouldn’t want you to stand beside Sean Walsh as a partner knowing what we know now.”

  “We’ll ask Dr. Johnson to witness the find,” Annabel Hogan said, with a voice steadier than Benny would ever have believed.

  Patsy said to Bee Moore that evening that you’d want to have the patience of a saint to work in Lisbeg these days. There was that much coming and going, and doors being closed, and secrets, and bottles of sherry and no food being eaten and then food being called for at cracked times.

  If this is what it was going to be like when the mistress went up into the shop then maybe it was just as well she was going to marry Mossy Rooney and his battle-ax of a mother and be out of it.

  Patsy remembered Bee’s former interest in Mossy and altered her remarks slightly. She said she knew she was very lucky to have been chosen by Mossy and was honored to be a part of his family. Bee Moore sniffed, wondered again how she had lost him to Patsy. She said that things were equally confusing in her house. Everyone in Westlands seemed to have gone mad. Heather had started in St. Mary’s and was bringing what Mrs. Walsh called every ragtag and bobtail of Knockglen back up to the house to ride her pony. The old man had taken to his bed, and Mr. Simon was not to be seen, though it was reliably reported that he had been in Knockglen at least two nights without coming home. Where on earth could he have stayed in Knockglen if he hadn’t come home to his own bed in Westlands. It was a mystery.

  Maurice Johnson said that he was a man whom nothing would surprise. But the visit of Annabel Hogan and her daughter, and its reason, caught him on the hop.

  He listened to their request.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  “It’s you or Father Ross. We don’t want to bring the Church into it. It’s involving sin and punishment. All we need is someone reliable.”

  “Let’s not delay,” he said. “Let’s go this minute.”

  There were two c
ustomers in the shop when they went in. Sean looked up from the boxes of V-necked jumpers that he had opened on the counter.

  There was something about the deputation that alarmed him. His eyes followed them as they went to the back of the shop toward the stairs.

  “Is there anything …” he began.

  Benny paused on the stairs and looked at him. She had disliked him ever since she had first met him, and yet at this moment she felt a surge of pity for him. She took in his thin greasy hair and his long white narrow face.

  He had not enjoyed his life or enriched it with the money he had taken.

  But she must not falter now.

  “We’re just going to the first floor,” she said. “Mother and I want Dr. Johnson to see something.”

  She saw the fear in his eyes.

  “To witness something,” she added, so that he would know.

  Dr. Johnson went down the stairs quietly. He walked through the shop, his eyes firmly on the floor. He didn’t return Mike’s greeting. Nor did he acknowledge the figure of Sean standing there immobile with a box in his hands. He had said to the Hogans that he would confirm that in his presence they had removed upward of two hundred envelopes each containing sums of money varying from five to ten pounds.

  There had been no gloating in the downfall of a man he had never liked. He looked at the little hoard in tightly screwed-up brown envelopes. The man was buying himself some kind of life, he supposed. Had he thought of wine, or women, or song when he had stashed Eddie Hogan’s money away? It was impossible to know. He didn’t envy the two women and their confrontation, but he admired them for agreeing to do it at once.

  They sat in the room and waited. They knew he would come upstairs. And both of them were weak with the shock of their discovery and the shame that they would have to face when Sean came up to meet them.

  Neither of them feared that he would bluster or attempt to deny that it was he who had put the money there. There was no way now for him to say they had made it up. Dr. Johnson’s word would be believed.

  They heard his step on the stair.

  “Did you close the shop?” Annabel Hogan asked.

  “Mike will manage.”

  “He’ll have to a lot of the time from now on,” she said.