by Maeve Binchy
She went on to explain to them the kind of ceremony that she would like to provide and for which her father would pay. A lunch for perhaps twenty or thirty people in one of the better hotels. Very possibly the one where her mother worked in the hotel shop.
There would be minimum speech-making because her father was not a natural orator, and she thought that she would wear an oyster satin coat and dress instead of a long white dress. She would hope that some of Jack’s and her friends would attend. On her side she would provide two parents, two brothers, two business associates of her father and one aunt.
When Jack took her away on their journey for afternoon tea in Maple Gardens, John and Lilley Foley exchanged glances.
“Well?” she said.
“Well?” he answered.
He filled the silence by pouring them a small brandy each. It was never their custom to have a drink like this in the afternoon, but the circumstances seemed to call for it.
“She’s very presentable,” said Jack’s mother grudgingly.
“And very practical. She had the Holles Street report in her handbag, left open for us to see in case we were going to question it.”
“And very truthful about her own background.”
“But she never said one word about loving Jack,” Dr. Foley said, with a worried frown.
In Maple Gardens the table was set for tea. A plate of biscuits with sardines on them, another with an egg mayonnaise. There was a bought Swiss roll and a plate of Jacob’s USA assortment. Nasey and Paul were in navy suits and shirts. Brian Mahon wore his new brown suit. It hadn’t cost as much as it should have because he had been able to give the man in the shop a few cans of paint for his own house. Cans of paint that hadn’t cost anything in the first place.
“There’s no need to tell all that to Jack Foley when he arrives,” Emily had warned.
“Jesus Christ, will you stop nagging at me. I’ve agreed to stay away from the jar until after they’ve been and gone, which is a fine imposition to put on a man who’s going to lash out for a fancy society wedding. But still, give you lot an inch and you take a bloody mile …”
Jack Foley was a handsome young fellow. He sat beside Nan during afternoon tea. He tried a little of everything. He thanked Mr. Mahon for the generous plans for the wedding. He thanked Mrs. Mahon for all her support. He hoped Paul and Nasey would be ushers in the church.
“You’d hardly need ushers for that size of a crowd,” said Nasey, who thought twenty people was the meanest he ever heard of.
“Who’s going to be your best man?” Paul asked.
Jack was vague. He hadn’t thought. One of his brothers possibly.
He felt awkward asking Aidan, what with the whole Eve and Nan friendship. And Bill Dunne or Johnny … it was all a bit awkward to be honest.
He turned to Nan. “Who’ll be the bridesmaid?” he asked.
“Secret,” Nan said.
They talked about places to live, and flats. Brian Mahon said that he’d be able to give them the name of builders who did good conversion jobs if they found an old place and wanted to do it up.
Jack said that he would be working in his uncle’s office, first as a clerk, and then as an apprentice. He was going to take lessons in bookkeeping almost at once, in order to be of some use in there.
Several times he felt Nan’s mother’s eyes on him, with a look of regret.
Obviously she was upset about her daughter being pregnant, but he felt it was something more than that.
As Nan talked on cheerfully of basements in South Circular Road, or top-story landings in Rathmines, Emily Mahon’s eyes filled with tears. She tried to brush them away unseen, but Jack felt that there was some terrible sorrow there, as if she had wanted something very different for her beautiful daughter.
When they had gone Brian Mahon loosened his collar.
“You can’t say too much against him.”
“I never said anything against him,” Emily said.
“He had his fun and he’s paying for it. At least that’s to his credit.” Brian was grudging.
Emily Mahon took off her good blouse and put on her old one automatically. She tied an apron around her waist and began to clear the table. She could puzzle for a thousand years and never understand why Nan was settling for this.
Nan and she had never wanted cheap bed-sitters, student flats, cobwebby conversion jobs. For years they had turned the pages of the magazines and looked at the places where Nan might live. There was never a moment when they planned a shotgun marriage to a student.
And Nan was adamant about saying that her relationship with Simon Westward was long over. And had never been serious. She was almost too adamant when she was telling her mother how long it had been over.
Brian changed into his normal clothes for going to the pub.
“Come on, lads, we’ll get a pint and talk normally for a while.”
Emily filled the sink with hot water and did the washing up. She was very worried indeed.
Jack and Nan sat in his father’s car.
“That’s the worst over,” she said.
“It’ll be fine,” he assured her.
She didn’t believe the worst was over, and he didn’t believe everything would be fine.
But they couldn’t admit it.
After all, it was there in black and white in the paper. And the chaplain would be able to give them a date very shortly.
Aidan Lynch said that Sundays weren’t the same without Heather.
Eve said that he had been invited to watch Heather in a sheet helping Our Lord to carry his burden. Next week, on Holy Thursday, could he bear to come? Aidan said he’d love it, it would count as his Easter duty. Would they bring a First Night present for Heather?
Eve said that he was worse than Heather. The thing was meant to be some kind of religious outpouring, not a song-and-dance act. Still it was great that he’d come down, and he could even stay the night in the cottage.
“It’ll make up for us not having the party,” Eve said.
“Why won’t we have the party?” Aidan asked.
Rosemary was sitting in the Annexe with Bill and Johnny. She was telling them that Tom, her medical boyfriend, had very healing hands. She refused to listen to ribald jokes on the subject. She said that she had an unmerciful headache and he had massaged it right away.
“I’m very sorry that there’ll be no party now, down in Knockglen,” she said. “I was looking forward to Tom coming and meeting you all properly.”
“Why won’t there be a party?” asked Bill Dunne.
“I never heard anything about it being off,” said Johnny O’Brien.
Jack was not at his lectures now. He hadn’t officially given up, but he was in his uncle’s office all day. Learning the ropes. Aidan was going to meet him at six o’clock.
“He has time to go out and drink pints, has he?” Eve said disapprovingly.
“Listen, he hasn’t been sent to Coventry. He’s not in disgrace. He’s just getting married. That’s not the end of the earth,” Aidan said.
Eve shrugged.
“And what’s more, I’m going to be his best man, if he asks me.”
“You’re not!” She was aghast.
“He’s my friend. He can rely on me. Anyone can rely on a friend.”
Nan made an appearance in College. She went to a ten o’clock lecture and then joined the crowds streaming down the stairs to the Annexe.
There was a rustle as they saw her coming to join the queue.
“Well, I’m off now,” Rosemary said under her breath to Carmel. “If there’s one thing I can’t bear, it’s the sight of bloodshed.”
“Benny won’t say anything,” Carmel whispered back.
“Yes, but have you seen Eve’s face.”
Benny was trying to calm Eve down. It was ridiculous to say that Nan didn’t have a right to show her face in College. Benny begged Eve not to make a scene. What had been the point of urging her to get over everything publicly if E
ve was going to ruin it all now.
“That’s quite right,” Eve said suddenly. “It was just a surge of bad temper.”
“Well, why don’t you go now, in case it surges again.”
“I can’t Benny. I’d be afraid you’d be so bloody nice and ask her all about the wedding dress and offer to knit bootees.”
Benny squeezed her friend’s hand.
“Go on, Eve, please. I’m better on my own. I won’t do any of that. And anyway she won’t join us.”
Nan went to another table. She drank her coffee with a group she knew from another class.
She looked across at Benny, who looked back.
Neither of them made a gesture or mouthed a word. Nan looked away first.
Nan lay on her bed. Jack was going out with Aidan, which surprised her. She thought that there would be a heavy boycott from Eve’s side of things.
But men were easier, more generous at forgiving. Men were more generous in everything. She lay with her feet raised on two cushions.
If Em had been a different kind of mother, she would have pursued the question she had been skirting around. Emily Mahon knew that her daughter was carrying Simon Westward’s child. What she didn’t know was why she, the Princess, was going to let this one mistake spoil a lifetime of planning. Emily would suggest going to England, having the child adopted, and starting all over again.
The pursuit, the quest, the path to a better life. But Em didn’t know that Nan was tired. Tired and weary of pretending. And that for once she had met someone, a good and honest person, who didn’t have a life plan … a system of passing black as white. That’s what she had been doing. Like Simon had been passing as rich.
Jack Foley was just himself.
When told that a child was his, he accepted that it was. And when it was born, it would be theirs. She could leave university. She had made a good impression on the Foley parents. She could see that. There was a small mews at the end of their garden. In time it would be done up, in more time they would live in a house similar to his parents’. They would entertain, they would have dinner parties, she would keep in touch with her mother.
It would all be a great sense of peace compared to the never-ending contest. The game where the goalposts kept moving, and the rules changing.
Nan Mahon was going to marry Jack Foley, not just because she was pregnant, but because at the age of almost twenty she was tired.
Kit Hegarty had a lemon-colored suit and a white blouse for her trip to Kerry.
“You need some color to go with it. I keep forgetting we can’t ask Nan.”
“Have you spoken to her at all?” Kit asked.
“Nope.”
“God, you’re a tough girl. I’d hate to make you my enemy.”
The Hayeses next door had come in to wish Kit well. Ann Hayes said what she needed was a big copper-colored brooch and she had the very thing at home.
Mr. Hayes looked at Kit admiringly.
“Lord bless us Kit, but you’re like a bride,” he said.
“Stop putting so much hope in this. It’s only an outing.”
“Your Joseph would have been glad for you to meet another fellow. He often said.”
Kit looked at him startled. Joseph Hegarty would have said little to the Hayeses, he hardly knew them.
She thanked him, but said as much.
“You’re wrong Kit. He did know us. He sent us letters for his son.”
Eve’s heart chilled. Why did this man have to tell Kit now.
“He wanted to keep in touch with his boy. He wrote every month, giving his address as he moved on from place to place.”
“And Francis read these.”
“Frank read them all. He went to see him last summer when he was canning peas in England.”
“Why did he never say, why did neither of them ever say?”
“They didn’t want to hurt you. The time wasn’t right to tell you.”
“And why is the time right now?”
“Because Joe Hegarty wrote to me before he died. He wrote to say that if you met a good man I was to explain that you must never worry about having deprived your son of his father. Because you didn’t.”
“Did he know he was going to die?”
“Sure, we’re all going to die,” said Mr. Hayes, as his wife came back in and pinned the brooch on Kit Hegarty’s lapel.
Kit smiled, unable to speak. It was something she had been worrying a lot about lately. When she saw how close Paddy Hickey was to his sons, she wondered had she done wrong letting Francis grow up without knowing a father.
She was glad that it had been explained in front of Eve. It showed how much Eve was part of the family.
The Hayeses were going to keep an eye on the house for two weeks. The outing was going to be much longer than Kit had first thought when it had been described as a weekend. And Eve would be down in Knockglen. Kit was delighted they had decided to go ahead with their party. It would be a further betrayal to admit that there could be no party now. That the stars had gone.
When Carmel’s Sean had been organizing the finances, he had given some money to Jack as an advance. Jack was the one with most access to a car. Jack could get them a reduction through a wine merchant. He had been the one who was going to bring the drink. But obviously everything had changed now. And no one liked to remind Jack that he was already in possession of eleven pounds of the communal money.
Carmel’s Sean suggested they should forget it. The other boys agreed. Jack had quite enough on his plate without reminding him that he owed the kitty eleven pounds.
Heather was wonderful in the pageant.
Aidan, Eve and Benny were enormously proud of her. She was a stockier, more solid Simon of Cyrene than was normally shown by artists, but then surely they would have pulled from the crowd someone strong to help in the journey up the hill of Calvary.
Mother Francis had always urged the children to make up their own words.
Heather had been adept at this.
“Let me help you, with that cross, Jesus, dear,” she said to Fiona Carroll, who was playing Our Lord with a sanctimonious face.
“It’s a difficult thing to carry going uphill,” Heather added. “It would be much easier on the flat, but then they wouldn’t see the Crucifixion so well you see.”
There were tea and biscuits in the school hall afterward and Heather was greatly congratulated.
“It’s the best Easter ever,” she said, with her eyes shining. “And Eve says I can be a waitress at her party, next week, so long as I go home before the necking starts.”
Eve looked at Mother Francis sadly. A grown-up look of collusion, of admitting how children would hang you. Heather was unaware of anything amiss.
“Will your friend be here again?” she asked Benny.
“Which one?”
“The man that took to fancying Welsh girls for a bit, but came back.”
“He went off again,” Benny said.
“Better leave him to go then,” Heather advised. “He sounds a bit unreliable.”
Standing there in her sheet, in the middle of the party, Heather had no idea why Eve, Aidan and Benny got such a fit of hysterical laughter, and had to wipe the tears out of their eyes. She wished she knew what she had said that was so funny, but she was glad anyway that it had pleased them all so much.
Everyone was delighted to be going to Knockglen. Not for just a party, but for a series of outings.
They would arrive on the Friday after six o’clock, when there would be drinks in Hogan’s, and then they would all adjourn to Mario’s for the evening. There were bunk beds and sofas and sleeping bags for the boys in Hogan’s shop; the girls were going to stay in Eve’s and Benny’s houses. Then there would be a great trek to Ballylee for lunch and a walk in the woods on Saturday and back for the main event, the proper party in Eve’s cottage.
They all said that the one at Christmas would take some beating. Eve said it would be better than ever now. An April moon, and the b
lossom out on the hedges and grass instead of mud around. There would be wild flowers all over the disused quarry, it would look less like a bomb site than it had done in winter. No one would slip on the mucky paths this time. They wouldn’t need to huddle by the fire.
Sister Imelda was as usual aching to be asked to help with the cooking.
“It’s no fun for you Sister if you can’t see them enjoying it,” Eve pleaded.
“It’s probably just as well I don’t see all that goes on up there. It’s enough for me to be told they like it.”
“If Simon and the woman from Hampshire come home that weekend, are you going to ask them?” Heather asked.
“No,” said Eve.
“I thought you only hated Grandfather. I thought you and Simon got on well enough.”
“We do.” Eve was dry.
“If he had married Nan, would you have come to the wedding?”
“You ask an awful lot of questions.”
“Mother Francis says we should have inquiring minds,” Heather said primly.
Eve laughed heartily. That was true. Mother Francis had always said it.
“I might have, if I’d been asked. But I don’t think your brother would ever have married Nan.”
Heather said it would all depend whether Nan had money or not. Simon couldn’t marry anyone poor because of the drainage and the fencing.
He had thought that Nan’s father was a wealthy builder in the beginning. She heard a lot of this from Bee Moore, but Bee always had to stop when Mrs. Walsh came in because Mrs. Walsh didn’t like gossip.
Heather was helping to tidy up the cottage garden. They had a big sack, which they were filling with weeds. Mossy would take it away later.
They worked easily, the unlikely friends and cousins, side by side.
Eve said that maybe they shouldn’t talk too much about Nan over the weekend. She was going to marry Jack Foley shortly. Neither of them would be here. There was nothing hush-hush, just better not to bring the subject up.
“Why?” Heather asked. Eve was a respecter of the inquiring mind. As they dug the dandelions and slashed back the nettles, she told an edited version of the story. Heather listened gravely.
