by Maeve Binchy
There was never a greater demand for space than this summer. Somehow the word had spread that there was fun galore in Castlebay. Not all the visitors were desirable of course; this would be discussed by the Castlebay Committee during the winter. There had been a very noisy element with tents, and the dirt of the caravan people had to be seen to be believed. Dr. Power said they weren’t to be blamed until somebody put up lavatories and washbasins for them, and arranged proper bins and a rubbish collection.
There was hardly a day that Angela and her mother weren’t approached by passing visitors asking for a night’s lodging.
To her surprise her mother had said they should do it. Everyone else in the town made a profit out of the summer, why shouldn’t they?
Angela washed sheets and tidied up the back room. Why not? It would be a few quid, and people were so grateful. She would point out that she had a mother who wasn’t well and couldn’t have anyone noisy. But it had been fine. First a couple of girls who had crept in like mice after the dance, stayed four days and had both said that Gerry Doyle was the most gorgeous thing they had ever seen in real life. Up to now they had only seen his likes on the cinema screen. Then there had been a married couple, a quiet pair in their forties, dull, nothing to say to anyone or each other, Angela pitied them, and was puzzled when they said it had been a lovely visit and they would come back next year. Then two lads from Dublin, with accents you could cut, roaring laughing at nothing and saying it was the best fun they’d had in years. The night they had got very drunk they had the decency to sleep in the shed rather than trying to find their room. Angela told them they were marvelous and refused to charge them for the night’s accommodation.
“You won’t suffer for that, Missus,” one of them said. “We’ll send you our mates.”
And indeed there was a never-ending supply of Dubliners, lads from building sites, from factories, and then the two housepainters, Paddy and Con. God, they’d never seen the like of the place, they were going to have a swim immediately, they were sticking to themselves with the sweat after the train and the bus, and the sea looked a treat.
“Be careful,” Angela called automatically. “There’s a very high tide. It’s treacherous at the end of August. They call it a spring tide.”
“Oh, you couldn’t drown us,” called Paddy and Con.
She heard the cry about half an hour later. It was like a wail growing and fading, louder and softer. And she knew there was someone drowning down on the strand. She had been buying the bacon and eggs for their tea in O’Brien’s. She had her bicycle with its carrier basket parked outside. Automatically she found her feet heading for the cliff top and there saw everyone clustered and pointing out beyond the caves and the fishing rocks. The waves were enormous.
On the edge of the water there was a commotion. Five or six men were trying to hold back the struggling figure of Simon. Ropes and life-belts had been thrown, to no avail. Angela’s stomach lurched when she saw a hand raised desperately, far, far out, and beside it the head of someone else. There were two of them. She dropped the bacon out of her hands, and she knew that it was her lodgers, Paddy and Con.
They were shouting at Simon on the beach. “You’ve been out twice, you’ve been battered, you can’t do any more, it’s suicide. You’ve done all you can. Simon, have sense.”
Simon’s side was bleeding from where he had been scratched against the rocks.
“Let me go! Let me go!” His face was working and his eyes were full of tears. Gerry Doyle was gripping him, holding his arm behind him in a lock.
“What’s the point in getting you killed? Look at your back. You’ve been thrown on the rocks twice. What are you trying to prove? You’ve done all you can, for Christ’s sake. You warned them—you went out after them once and brought them back in.”
“They’re new. They were all white,” Simon wailed. “Let me go.”
There was a great cry from the people who could see the figures.
“One’s holding on to a rock. He’ll be all right. Look! Look!”
But in seconds a huge wave pulled the small figure, its white arms flailing, down into the sea.
Helplessly the crowd watched. There was no boat, no swimmer, no throw of a lifebelt that would reach Paddy and Con. They would die in front of a thousand people.
Father O’Dwyer had been sent for, and as if by reflex, the people standing near him went down on their knees.
Father O’Dwyer called out the rosary and the swell of Holy Marys increased. Simon stopped struggling eventually and sat with his head in his hands, sobbing. Gerry Doyle sat beside him with an arm protectively around his shoulder.
There was no sign of the figures now, the waves kept crashing as if they were unaware of what they had done. Men went for strong drinks, women gathered up their children and issued useless, angry warnings about the need to stay in shallow waters.
Clare had come out too. She felt a hand reaching for hers and to her surprise, it was David Power.
“Would it have been quick, do you think?” she asked.
David shook his head.
“Oh,” she said in a small voice.
“I don’t know. Not the first bit, not the being swept out—they’d have known what was going to happen.”
“I suppose so.”
“I have to go down there,” he said. “With my father.”
“When?”
“When the tide comes in tonight, they’ll be washed up.”
She was full of pity, and warmth, and she squeezed his hand.
“I don’t have to, but I will. He just said that he’d like me to, and anyway I’ll be a doctor soon myself. I’ll have to then. It’s just . . . it’s just . . .”
“I know. It’s just when its your own beach.”
He smiled at her gratefully. “They might come in sooner.” He was full of dread.
“Would that mean they’d get battered up more?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a great sound from the beach again and people were shouting and pointing. On the side of the beach near the caves, where it seemed calm, there was something that looked like a person. And near it was something similar. There was no movement, no waving or swimming. Then you could see they were facedown. Bobbing on the water like the airbeds that they sold up at the top of Church Street. They didn’t look like people: they looked like a bad joke.
Clare turned away, suddenly feeling a bit faint. This is what being dead looked like. She had almost forgotten she was still holding David Power’s hand and when she turned it was toward him. She put her head on his chest. He put his arm round her shoulder. Then she pulled away a little.
“You’ve got to go down,” she said.
Gerry Doyle and two other fellows passed, helping Simon up the steps. The lifeguard’s side had been examined on the beach by Dr. Power, who had asked Gerry to get him away as soon as possible. Dr. Power didn’t want Simon there when the bodies came in. They would float in with the last minutes of the incoming tide.
Gerry Doyle looked at Clare evenly. “If you’ve finished canoodling, you might go to your friend Miss O’Hara—she’s the one who’s going to have to cope with it all and go through their things.”
“Why?” Clare cried, shocked. “Why on earth will she have to do that?”
“Because they were staying with her. They’re from her house—that’s why.” Gerry put his arm under Simon’s and continued to shove and push him along the street.
Clare saw Angela, standing by herself with her hands over her mouth in disbelief. Her hair blowing loose behind her, she was looking down on the beach while the crowds stepped into the shallow water and pulled the bodies of Paddy and Con on to the sand. Father O’Dwyer was there with his holy water, and his soutane, his long black skirt flapping in the breeze. Dr. Power was urging people to keep the children well away and leaning on the chests of the dead men in the futile hope that there would be any life left in them. And in a minute beside him was his tall fair-haired
son, helping too, looking calm and in control—not the trembling boy who had been standing moments earlier with his hand in Clare’s.
Clare turned away from the scene on the beach. Gerry was quite right. If she was to do anything to help it should be for Miss O’Hara.
They talked about nothing else for days. The dance was canceled that night as a mark of respect, and so was the cinema. They didn’t know what to do at the amusements so they compromised by not playing the jukebox. Clare and Angela had found an address amongst the few shabby belongings of Paddy and Con, and the Guards in Dublin were asked to go around and inform the families.
It had been strangely unreal for everyone and the greatest sympathy in the place was given to Simon. Nobody knew the families of Paddy and Con, any more than anyone had really met the lads in the short couple of hours they had spent in Castlebay between getting off the bus and being taken out of the sea. Simon’s easy laughter had disappeared now. He was a very serious young man. He didn’t go to the dance in the evenings and he had little time for high jinks on the beach. He sat nervously on a high stool that he had made himself from boxes, and he shouted angrily at children who played ball in his line of vision. One night in Craig’s Bar he lost his temper and said that the Castlebay Committee were totally irresponsible encouraging people to come there with their plans for fairy lights and big car parks. They should build a pier and breakwater, they should enclose a swimming pool and only permit people who were known to be strong swimmers to venture beyond it. You wouldn’t let people play with matches and jump through bonfires would you, he had said in a high nervous voice. They forgave him over and over, they told him of the children he had saved, of the cramp victim he had rescued, of the artificial respiration to the girl who swallowed so much water. They praised him for the countless others he had made safe by his daily parades up and down the beach edge. But his eyes got darker and they knew they would never see him again when the summer was over.
Angela and Clare didn’t talk about it, not after the first night when they had found the address and folded all the clothes neatly into the two shabby grip bags. Talking about it only made things worse. Instead they rehearsed feverishly the kind of questions that Clare might face on the first Thursday in September when she had to meet the Murray Prize Committee.
They planned her appearance down to the last detail. She must look in need of their gift but not too needy. She must look quiet enough to be studious but not so quiet that she looked dull. Neat enough to be thought respectable but not so drab as to be thought dreary. Her good marks would impress them automatically. Her grasp of current affairs was masterly. Her simple direct explanation about coming from a family anxious for her success but not in itself academic was so patently honest it would have to convince them. She was not a fly-by-night either, she had always been ambitious, hadn’t she got the scholarship to secondary school at the age of twelve?
In the end Angela said she was satisfied. There was literally no more they could do to prepare for this event. They would end up making her so nervous that she would not be able to speak at all.
Angela lent her a navy jumper and the good silk scarf that James Nolan’s mother had given her all those years ago. It had lain idly in a drawer and this was an ideal opportunity to give it an outing. She wore her good blue skirt and a pair of Josie’s shoes. Her hair was to be shining and in a ponytail, only the barest hint of makeup, like a trace of Sari Peach lipstick, rubbed on and rubbed off again.
If school hadn’t started, Angela said, she would have gone into the town and waited nearby until Clare came out. It would have made it better for both of them.
But term would have started. Angela’s twelfth year in the convent. For a woman who was going to stay twelve months, things had escalated. She felt no bitterness toward Sean about that now. It had been her own decision for a long, long time. She didn’t even rebel at the thought of his unctuously clerical tones when he gave that advice. She had no more hate for Sean and the differences between what he preached and what he did. It had been a long time, teaching beside Mother Immaculata, certainly. But it had been a longer time for Sean in waiting for a laicization that never came.
Gerry Doyle called to the O’Brien house the night before.
“I have a job tomorrow, so I’ll be going to town. I can give you a lift.”
“That’s very nice, but I was getting the bus. The timing’s all right for once, and even if it’s a bit late, I’ll be fine.”
“I’m going to the door,” he said. “The Committee have asked me to photograph them and the shortlist of candidates. So go on the bus if you like but the lift is there.”
There were two girls and five boys. Gerry arranged them according to height and took several shots. He was able to relax them without having to clown around. It was a gift, Clare thought as she watched him. He never called her by her name. He was professional. It mightn’t look good for her to know him, he was making sure she had nothing special about her one way or the other. He left her free to examine the competition. The girl was taller than Clare; she looked older and very studious. She had bushy, badly combed hair and glasses. She could have been quite nice-looking but she had made no effort at all. There was a tear in her tunic—she wore a school uniform, for heaven’s sake—and her shoes were down at heel. Anxiously Clare looked down at Josie’s smart shoes and the neat cuffs of Miss O’Hara’s good cardigan. Maybe she looked cheap and superficial?
“Makes us feel a bit like cattle,” said a small boy, who didn’t look old enough to have done his Intermediate Certificate let alone his Leaving. But Clare was not deceived: this was the most dangerous one, she felt sure. Two of the others were clerical students: they wore black jerseys and were more reserved. There was a nervy boy who would irritate the committee and one who spoke after such a long pause each time, the interview would surely be over by the time he had answered anything.
The girl was nice. She had been at a convent about fifty miles away. She asked Clare how many honors she had got in her Leaving. Angela had prepared her for that and told her not to boast, and if at all possible to keep her great score to herself.
“I don’t think they go on that anymore,” she said. “That’s what I’ve heard, anyway. Nowadays it’s not the number you have—it’s what they think of you.”
The boy who kept drumming his fingers looked up startled at this. “Is that right? Then I’ll be lost. I got six honors. I thought that was what was going to sail me through.” He laughed nervously, showing some broken teeth.
Clare thanked Miss O’Hara again and again in her mind. Miss O’Hara had beaten this nervous laugh out of her long ago.
They talked easily enough until the lady chairman came to address them. She was a self-important woman in a tweed suit; she had a huge chest and looked so like a pigeon, Clare was not afraid of her resounding voice. They were to be taken in alphabetical order. Clare was second last; the nervy boy was O’Sullivan, and he would be last.
She kept her mind calm. She refused to get up and go to the lavatory even when the others did suddenly. She knew she had eaten or drunk nothing that would make her need to go; she had eaten barley sugar sweets just as she had done when she was twelve and Miss O’Hara had been training her to get the scholarship to school. That had not been terrifying; neither would this. She had eight honors in her Leaving Certificate. She was the equal of any child in Ireland.
Gerry Doyle was told he would be needed in two hours. They would have come to their decision then. That surprised him. He’d thought they wouldn’t decide there and then on the day. But it was better that she knew today. He didn’t think she’d make it. Just from looking at them he thought the big untidy girl or the small boy who looked like a child prodigy were the most likely. Those were the kind of faces you saw in a newspaper with a paragraph underneath saying what they had won.
He came back in good time and sat in his van reading the local paper. There were three of his pictures in it this week: a wedding, a sandcastle c
ompetition and the foundation stone for the new wing of the Brothers’ school in Castlebay.
The awful bossy woman with the big chest rapped on the window for him as if he were the gardener and called him in to photograph the winner of the Murray Scholarship to University College, Dublin, Clare O’Brien.
Angela O’Hara asked Dr. Power if she could have a word with him in his car. He was practically home and suggested she come into the surgery. She didn’t want to. The house then, and have a sherry? No. It was something a bit unethical she wanted to ask, better to ask him on neutral ground. Unethical? His big bushy eyebrows rose. Angela? Nothing desperately unethical, she assured him, a fake doctor’s cert, that was all.
“Get into the car,” he said. “This is serious. If I’m going to be struck off, we’d better make sure it’s worthwhile.”
She laughed at his kind, worried face and told him what she wanted. She’d like to go to Dublin for a few days. Her best friend Emer had just had a baby, and now they wanted her to be godmother to the baby. Young Clare was going up to Dublin to start life at university, and it was a great opportunity to show her round a bit—not be a mother hen but just show her a few things so that she wasn’t a total gobdaw when term started. It would be lovely to have a few days off school, but she couldn’t ask for it. It was unheard of. Immaculata would have a blue fit. Was it possible that Dr. Power could say she had something which meant going to Dublin?
He looked at her over his glasses, doubtfully.
“I never asked you before. I never in all my years up in that place asked for one day off.”
“You misunderstand me. Of course, I’ll do it. I think you should have a fortnight in Dublin . . . I’m only trying to think what you might have.”
