Echoes

by Maeve Binchy

  The unfairness of this stung Clare deeply. “We always leave our coats there. That is where it’s meant to be.”

  “Do you hear her?” Agnes looked in appeal to her husband, did not wait for an answer but headed for the stairs. Chrissie up there was for it.

  “Can’t you stop tormenting your mother and move your coat?” he asked. “Is it too much to ask for a bit of peace?”

  Clare took her coat down from the hook. She couldn’t go up to the bedroom she shared with Chrissie because that would be like stepping straight into the battlefield. She stayed idling in the shop.

  Her father’s face was weary. It was so wrong of him to say she was tormenting Mammy, she wasn’t, but you couldn’t explain that to him. He was bent over in a kind of a stoop and he looked very old, like someone’s grandfather, not a father. Daddy was all gray, his face and his hair and his cardigan. Only his hands were white from the paint. Daddy had grown more stooped since her First Communion three years ago, Clare thought; then he had seemed very tall. His face had grown hairy too—there were bits of hair in his nose and his ears. He always looked a bit harassed as if there wasn’t enough time or space or money. And, indeed, there usually wasn’t enough of any of these things. The O’Brien household lived on the profits of the summer season which was short and unpredictable. It could be killed by rain, by the popularity of some new resort, by people overcharging for houses along the cliff road. There was no steady living to be gained over the winter months, it was merely a matter of keeping afloat.

  The shop was oddly shaped when you came in: there were corners and nooks in it which should have been shelved or walled off but nobody had ever got round to it, the ceiling was low and even with three customers the place looked crowded. Nobody could see any order on the shelves but the O’Briens knew where everything was. They didn’t change it for fear they wouldn’t find things, even though there were many more logical ways of stocking the small grocery-confectioner’s. It all looked cramped and awkward and though the customers couldn’t see behind the door into the living quarters it was exactly the same in there. The kitchen had a range, with a clothesline over it, and the table took up most of the space in the room. A small scullery at the back was so poky and dark that it was almost impossible to see the dishes you washed. There was one light in the middle of the room with a yellow light shade which had a crack in it. Recently Tom O’Brien had been holding his paper up nearer to the light in order to read it.

  Agnes came downstairs with the air of someone who has just finished an unpleasant task satisfactorily. “That girl will end on the gallows,” she said.

  She was a thin small woman, who used to smile a lot once; but now she seemed set in the face of the cold Castlebay wind, and even when she was indoors she seemed to be grimacing against the icy blast, eyes narrow and mouth in a hard line. In the shop she wore a yellow overall to protect her clothes, she said, but in fact there were hardly any clothes to protect. She had four outfits for going to Mass, and otherwise it had been the same old cardigans and frocks and skirts for years. There were always medals and relics pinned inside the cardigan; they had to be taken off before it was washed. Once she had forgotten, and a relic of the Little Flower which had been in a red satin covering had become all pink and the pale blue cardigan was tinged pink too. Agnes O’Brien had her hair in a bun which was made by pulling it through a thing that looked like a doughnut, a squashy round device, and then the hair was clipped in. They never saw her doing this, but once they had seen the bun by itself and it had alarmed Clare greatly because she hadn’t known what it was.

  The dark and very angry eyes of her mother landed on her. “Have you decided that you would like to belong to this family and do what’s required of you? Would it be too much to ask you to take that coat out of my way before I open the range and burn it down to its buttons?”

  She would never do that, Clare knew. She had hoped her mother might have forgotten it during the sojourn upstairs. But the coat was still going to be a cause of war.

  “I told her, Agnes—my God, I told her—but children nowadays . . .” Tom sounded defeated and apologetic.

  Clare stuffed her school coat into a crowded cupboard under the stairs and took a few potatoes out of the big sack on the floor. Each evening she and Chrissie had to get the potatoes ready for tea, and tonight, thanks to Chrissie’s disgrace, it looked as if Clare was going to have to do it on her own. In the kitchen sat her younger brothers Ben and Jim; they were reading a comic. The older boys Tommy and Ned would be in from the Brothers shortly, but none of this would be any help. Boys didn’t help with the food or the washing up. Everyone knew that.

  Clare had a lot to do after tea. She wanted to iron her yellow ribbons for tomorrow. Just in case she won the history essay she’d better be looking smart. She would polish her indoor shoes, she had brought them home specially, and she would make another attempt to get the two stains off her tunic. Mother Immaculata might make a comment about smartening yourself up for the good name of the school. She must be sure not to let them down. Miss O’Hara had said that she had never been so pleased in all her years teaching as when she read Clare’s essay, it gave her the strength to go on. Those were her very words. She would never have stopped Clare in the corridor and said that, if she hadn’t won the prize. Imagine beating all the ones of fifteen. All those Bernie Conways and Anna Murphys. They’d look at Clare with new interest from now on. And indeed they’d have to think a bit differently at home too. She longed to tell them tonight, but decided it was better to wait. Tonight they were all like weasels and anyway it might look worse for Chrissie; after all she was two and a half years older. Chrissie would murder her too if she chose to reveal it tonight. She took upstairs a big thick sandwich of cheese, a bit of cold cooked bacon and a cup of cocoa.

  Chrissie was sitting on her bed, examining her face in a mirror. She had two very thick plaits in her hair; the bits at the ends after the rubber bands were bushy and didn’t just hang there like other people’s; they looked as if they were trying to escape. She had a fringe which she cut herself so badly that she had to be taken to the hairdresser to get a proper job done on it, and at night she put pipe cleaners into the fringe so that it would curl properly.

  She was fatter than Clare, much, and she had a real bust that you could see even in her school tunic.

  Chrissie was very interested in her nose, Clare couldn’t understand why but she was always examining it. Even now in all the disgrace and no meal and the sheer fury over what she had done to Miss O’Flaherty she was still peering at it looking for spots to squeeze. She had a round face and always looked surprised. Not happily surprised, not even when someone was delivering her an unexpected supper.

  “I don’t want it,” she said.

  “Don’t eat it then,” Clare returned with some spirit.

  She went back downstairs and tried to find a corner where she could learn the poem for tomorrow; and she had to do four sums. She often asked herself how was it that with six people living in that house who were all going to school, why was she the only one who ever needed to do any homework?

  Gerry Doyle came in as she was ironing her yellow ribbons.

  “Where’s Chrissie?” he asked Clare in a whisper.

  “She’s upstairs. There was murder here. She gave Miss O’Flaherty some desperate fright with seaweed. Don’t ask for her. They’ll all go mad if you even mention her name.”

  “Listen, would you tell her . . .” He stopped, deciding against it. “No, you’re too young.”

  “I’m not too young,” Clare said, stung by the unfairness of it. “But young or old, I don’t care—I’m not giving your soppy messages to Chrissie. She’ll only be annoyed with me, and you’ll be annoyed with me, and Mammy will beat the legs off me, so I’d much prefer you kept them to yourself.” She went back to the ribbons with vigor. They were flat gleaming bands now, they would fluff up gorgeously tomorrow. She couldn’t get herself up to the neck in Chrissie’s doings because th
ere would be trouble at every turn. She must keep nice and quiet and get ready for tomorrow, for the look of surprise on Mother Immaculata’s face, and the horror on Bernie Conway’s and Anna Murphy’s.

  Gerry Doyle laughed good-naturedly. “You’re quite right—let people do their own dirty work,” he said.

  The words “dirty work” somehow cut through all the rest of the noise in the O’Brien kitchen and reached Agnes O’Brien as she pulled the entire contents of the dresser’s bottom cupboard onto the floor. Tom had said that she must have thrown out the length of flex he was going to use to put up a light outside the back door. She was sure she had seen it somewhere and was determined that the project should not be postponed.

  Tommy and Ned were going through the paper for jobs as they did every week, marking things with a stubby purple pencil; Ben and Jimmy were playing a game that began quietly every few minutes until it became a slapping match and one of them would start to cry. Tom was busy mending the wireless which crackled over all the activity.

  “What dirty work?” Agnes called: a grand fellow, that Gerry Doyle, but you had to watch him like a hawk. Whatever devilment was planned he had a hand in it.

  “I was saying to Clare that I’m no good at any housework, or anything that needs a lot of care. I’m only good at dirty work.” He smiled across, and the woman on her knees in front of a pile of tins, boxes, paper bags, knitting wool, toasting forks and rusted baking trays, smiled back.

  Clare looked up at him in surprise. Imagine being able to tell a lie as quickly and as well as that. And over nothing.

  Gerry had gone over to the job consultation, saying he heard there was going to be a man from a big employment agency in England coming round and holding interviews in the hotel.

  “Wouldn’t that be for big kind of jobs, for people with qualifications?” Ned asked, unwilling to think anyone would come to Castlebay to seek out him or his like.

  “Have sense Ned, who is there in this place with any qualifications? Won’t it save you shoe leather and the cost of writing off to these places if you wait till this fellow arrives and he’ll tell all there’s to be told?”

  “It’s easy on you to say that.” Tommy, the eldest, was troubled. “You don’t have to go away for a job. You’ve got your business.”

  “So have you.” Gerry pointed to the shop.

  But it wasn’t the same. Gerry’s father was the photographer; during the winter he survived on dances, and the odd function that was held. In summer, he walked the length of the beach three times a day taking family groups and then out again at night into the dance hall where the holiday business was brisk and where there would be a great demand to buy prints of the romantic twosomes that he would snap. Girls were his biggest customers, they loved to bring back holiday memories in the form of something that they could pass around the office and sigh over when the dance was long over. Gerry’s mother and sister did the developing and printing, or they helped with it, which was the way it was described. Gerry’s father expected the only son to take an active part, and since he had been a youngster, Gerry had tagged along learning the psychology as well as the mechanics of the camera.

  You must never annoy people, his father had taught him, be polite and a little distant even, click the camera when they aren’t at all posed or prepared and then if they show interest and start to pose take a proper snap. The first plate was only a blank to get their attention. Remind them gently that there’s no need to buy, the proofs will be available for inspection in twenty-four hours. Move on and don’t waste any time chatting when the picture is taken, have a pleasant smile but not a greasy sort of a one. Never plead with people to pose, and when gaggles of girls want six or seven shots taken of them remember they’re only going to buy one at the most so pretend to take the snap more often than taking it.

  Gerry’s beautiful sister Fiona had long, dark ringlets; when she wasn’t working in the darkroom in their house during the summer she sat in the wooden shack up over the beach selling the snaps. Gerry’s father had said that a town like Castlebay was so small you could never have a business if you tried to get big and expand and hire people. But keep it small and run it just with the family and there would be a great inheritance for Gerard Anthony Doyle.

  But Gerry never had the air of a boy about to step into a secure future. He examined the paper with the O’Brien boys as eagerly as if he would be having to take the emigrant ship with them.

  How did he know whether there’d be a living for him here? His father was always saying that all it needed was a smart-alec firm to come in for the summer and they’d be ruined. Who knew what the future would bring? Maybe people would want colored photography, there could be newfangled cameras, it was living on a cliff edge his father always said. At least in O’Brien’s they could be sure that people would always want bread and butter and milk. They’d want groceries until the end of the world and as long as the trippers kept coming wouldn’t they be selling ice creams and sweets and oranges until the last day as well?

  Gerry always made everything sound more exciting than it was. He saw a future for Tommy and Ned where they’d work in England and then, just when all the English would be wondering what to do and where to go for the summer holidays, Ned and Tommy would come back home to Castlebay, get behind the counter, help out with the shop and have a great holiday as well. And they’d be fine fellows at the dance because they’d be so well up in everything after being in England. Tommy complained that it wouldn’t be much of a holiday coming home to work like dogs in the really tough part of the year when O’Brien’s was open from eight o’clock in the morning until midnight. But Gerry just laughed and said that would be their investment, that was the only time of the year that there’d be work for all hands. The rest of the year they’d be falling over each other with no one to serve, but in the summer the whole family should be there to make sure that everyone got a bit of sleep anyway and to keep the thing going. It was like that in all seaside towns. Gerry was very convincing. Tommy and Ned saw it all very rosily, and really and truly Gerry was right, shouldn’t they wait till the man came and had a list of jobs for them instead of scanning all the ads which told them nothing when all was said and done?

  Clare had turned the iron on its end by the range; she was folding the blanket and the scorch sheet and wondering where to replace them since everything from the dresser seemed to be on the floor. Gerry Doyle was sitting on the table swinging his legs and she got a sudden feeling that he was giving her brothers wrong advice. They weren’t capable and sure like he was, they were the kind of people who agreed with everyone else.

  “Would this man who came offering jobs in the hotel, would he be offering the kind of jobs where you could get on or jobs you’d just have to work hard at?”

  They were surprised that she spoke. Her father took his head out of the shell of the wireless.

  “It’s the same thing, Clare girl, if you work hard you get on. If you don’t, you don’t.”

  “But trained like, that’s what I mean,” Clare said. “You remember when that Order came and the girls were all going to be taken off to do their Leaving Certificate and learn a skill if they became postulant nuns.”

  Ned roared with scorn. “A postulant nun! Is that what you’d like us to be? Wouldn’t we look fine in the habit and the veil?”

  “No that’s not what I meant . . .” she began.

  “I don’t think the Reverend Mother would take us,” Tommy said.

  “Sister Thomas, I really think we’re going to have to do something about your voice in the choir,” Ned said in mincing tones.

  “Oh, I’m doing my best, Sister Edward, but what about your hob-nailed boots?”

  “Sister Thomas, you can talk. What about your hairy legs?”

  Benny and Jimmy were interested now.

  “And you’ve got to give up kicking football round the convent,” said Ben.

  “Nuns kicking football,” screamed Jimmy with enthusiasm. Even Mammy on her knee
s and having triumphantly found the bit of flex was laughing and Dad was smiling too. Clare was rescued unexpectedly.

  “Very funny, ha ha,” Gerry Doyle said. “Very funny Mother Edward and Mother Thomas, but Clare’s right. What’s the point of getting a job on a building site without any training as a brickie or a carpenter? No, the real thing to ask this fellow is nothing to do with how much, but what kind of a job.”

  Clare flushed with pleasure. They were all nodding now.

  “I nearly forgot why I came,” Gerry said. “The father asked me to have a look at the view from different places. He’s half thinking of making a postcard of Castlebay, and he wondered where’s the best angle to take the picture from. He wondered would there be a good view from your upstairs. Do you mind if I run up and have a look?”

  “At night?” Clare’s father asked.

  “You’d get a good idea of the outlines at night,” Gerry said, his foot on the stairs.

  “Go on up, lad.”

  They were all back at their activities and nobody except Clare had the slightest idea that Gerry Doyle, aged fifteen and a half, had gone upstairs to see Chrissie O’Brien, aged thirteen.

  Nellie was on her knees with the bellows when David came in. “I’m building up a nice fire for your lessons,” she told him.

  Her face was red with the exertion and her hair was escaping from the cap she wore. She never seemed comfortable in the cap, it was always at the wrong angle somehow on her hair and her head seemed to be full of hairpins. Nellie was old, not as old as Mummy but about thirty, and she was fat and cheerful and she had been there always. She had a lot of married brothers and an old father. When David was a young fellow she used to tell him that she was better off than any of them, in a nice clean house and great comfort and all the food she could eat. David used to think it was lonely for her in the kitchen when they were all inside but Nellie’s round face would crack into a smile and she assured him that she was as well off as if she’d married a Guard, or even better off. Her money was her own, she had the best of everything and every Thursday afternoon and every second Sunday afternoon off.