by Maeve Binchy
She gave him a look full of gratitude. “Would we say it was in my womb? That should embarrass Immaculata so much she’d shut up about it.”
“Yes, but there’s no reason why you wouldn’t go into the County Hospital if it were just a D and C,” he objected. “It would have to be something that needed going to a specialist for or some kind of specialist hospital. A skin disease?” he suggested brightly.
Angela was doubtful. “She might keep moving away from me and telling people not to use the same cups at our tea break.”
“Blood test. You’re a bit anemic and I want it checked further.”
“You’re a great sport,” she said. “I was hoping I could rely on you.”
“I’m not doing it because I’m a sport. I’m doing it because you do need a break. I’d feel quite justified signing a certificate saying you are under great pressure and you need a change and a rest, but of course, if you wrote that to any of that lot of beauties up in the convent, they’d think you were having a nervous breakdown and they wouldn’t let you back again. Blood tests it will have to be.”
Emer and Kevin were delighted to see them.
They had to fight the nuns and nurses off to get baby Daniel home from the nursing home without having him baptized. They explained that the godmother had to come from the country but there had been terror that the baby’s immortal soul would be lost during the delay. Anyway it was all settled now. Martin, the shy best man, was going to be the godfather, and best surprise of all, Father Flynn was going to perform the baptism. Wasn’t that something! To gather the cast of the wedding in another city five years later!
They hadn’t noticed the color go from Clare’s face when the priest’s name was mentioned. She sat silently. She had been pleased to be invited to this warm, friendly house, to meet the laughing, undemanding friends of Miss O’Hara’s. She had been delighted to be included in the christening party the next day, but she didn’t want to meet this priest who knew all about her family and had been to see Tommy in prison. She would ask Miss O’Hara could she get out of it.
As they got the house ready on the evening before the christening Angela felt wistful as she often did in the presence of Emer and Kevin, they were so utterly complete as a pair, they hardly needed the rest of the world at all. And their delight in this funny, creased, red-faced baby was so touching it would bring tears to your eyes. When they peered at him in his cot Angela thought she had never seen anything so happy.
She wished them so well that she didn’t like the little feelings of envy that came to her unwillingly when she was with them. Nowhere else did she wish so strongly that she had found a Kevin of her own, someone she could share everything with. Someone she could laugh with about Dr. Power and his kindness. Someone she could talk to at night about Sean and Shuya. She remembered, returning from her last visit to her brother’s family: she had longed to take off her shoes and sit down by the fire and tell Emer and Kevin all about it. But it wasn’t the same telling a story to a couple. When the evening was over they would go to bed, she in the neat guest bedroom with the gingham curtains and bedspread, they in their big double bed where they would lie in each other’s arms and whisper low how terrible it was for Angela. She didn’t want that sympathy, however loving and generous. She wanted a sharing. It was lonely holding Sean’s secret for seven years.
She looked over at Clare, who was on a chair helping to put up the silver and white decorations they had organized for the sitting room. She had been rather short with the child there earlier on. She had no business being short with her; after all, she refused to talk to Father Flynn about Sean even though it was Father Flynn who had found the school in England for Sean to teach in.
She was just as much an ostrich as Clare, burying her head in the sand, refusing to accept someone’s help and thank them for it in a simple straightforward way. It was uncanny how alike their lives had been. Scholarships, first to the convent and then to college; neither of them came from scholarly families, and both of them had brothers in trouble. And Father Flynn was being a lifeline to both brothers—one despairing in an English school and waiting for a voice from Rome that would never come, the other reading comics in an English jail.
The day was winding down, and Clare found herself near Father Flynn. “Thank you very much for all you do for my brother Tommy,” she said, forcing the words out. “And for Ned too, getting him a job and seeing that he writes home. It’s very good of you.”
Father Flynn looked at her. “Oh, then you’re Clare O’Brien, of course, that writes the letters to Tommy. He looks forward to them, and sometimes I read them to him—so don’t say anything bad about me in the next one or I might find myself reading it aloud!”
Clare warmed to him. He hadn’t shaken his head sadly and said it was a Dreadful Situation; Miss O’Hara was right.
“There’s not really anything for him in Castlebay, you know, Father. I was thinking about it. He’d only be hanging around.”
“There’s plenty of time to think yet. Maybe he’d be better hanging round there than where he was hanging around.”
“Yes, that’s probably true. Maybe I was just trying to keep him away, out of sight, out of mind.”
“But that’s not true of you,” he smiled. “He’s not out of your mind. You’re a generous girl. I hope you have a very successful career at university and that you meet a lot of people and read a great deal and have years that you’ll always remember.”
Nobody had wished her well in such terms. Nobody had spoken aloud all her own hopes and dreams. She did want to read a great deal, and have time to read, and she wanted people to talk to, people who would talk about the things they read. This funny, fat little priest with the beady eyes knew just what she wanted.
She went to see Miss O’Hara off at the station. They had inspected the hostel where she was going to live, and Angela had said it wouldn’t be bad at all because in a week it would be filled with girls from all over the country, united in their hatred of the nuns who ran the place and all as nervous as Clare, but none of them as clever. Miss O’Hara had walked the legs off her round the city, and they now knew which side of Stephen’s Green was which, and where the Physics Theater was, which oddly was where a lot of the first Arts lectures would be held. She had registered and got her student’s card.
Clare felt very experienced, catching a bus back from the station to O’Connell Bridge, she looked out eagerly at the city which was to be her home for three years. It was so bright—that was what she was going to find most hard to get used to. In Castlebay in winter there were hardly any lights on Church Street, none at all on Cliff Road or the golf-course road, but in Dublin even side streets, even lanes were lit up. And shops had their lights on in windows all night so that you could go and look at what they had for sale any hour at all. As the bus went up the Quays to the center of Dublin the buildings were reflected in the river Liffey: the Four Courts, the big churches and the rows of tall buildings shimmered in the dark water. It was all so enormous, after home.
She had walked through the grand stores with Angela O’Hara, and looked at the rings and bracelets in the windows of jewelers’. She had been to the secondhand bookshops and bought all her texts for the first year. Angela had even climbed up on ladders in order to get better or cheaper editions for her. She had made herself known at the big redbrick hostel where she would stay. Angela had come with her and informed the nuns that this was no ordinary pupil, it was a Murray Prize winner, and that her fees would be paid by the committee. The nuns were impressed. It reminded Clare a little of her secondary school, and she was disappointed that it had no garden or cloisters. It was part of a big terrace of Georgian houses, and the convent was in fact four of them all joined together. Angela had said she wouldn’t have time for gardens. There was always Stephen’s Green in the summer, and the fact that the hostel was so near the university meant it was worth its weight in gold. She could get out of bed literally minutes before lectures while other students
had to cross the city.
Clare got off the bus at O’Connell Bridge and leaned across the parapet looking below to where two swans went by. They looked confident, even arrogant. They felt no unease about being swans in a place where everyone else seemed to be human beings. Clare smiled at the thought. She owed Miss O’Hara so much—or Angela as she must now call her. She owed her everything, including these last days, this great preparation.
She knew which bus would take her back to the hostel but she decided to walk. She would walk almost everywhere anyway, why not start now? She went up Grafton Street, pausing to look at fur coats, at household equipment, at pictures and frames, at a chemist’s window full of perfumes and soaps and talcum powders. She saw books on display and furniture, big deep leather chairs in shops. She read the tariffs in hairdressers’, she saw the sign to the little church in Clarendon Street. At the top of Grafton Street she wouldn’t need to pause like so many new students, she knew to walk along a side of Stephen’s Green and on to her hostel. She had left her luggage there earlier, and they said that the young ladies would be arriving after six p.m. She had discovered that there wouldn’t be supper, so she was that much ahead of all the rest who thought that there would. She looked up at its slightly forbidding outside, took a deep breath and walked into her new home.
There were going to be three in a room. She was the first so she could choose her bed. It was unlikely that there would be much study done here: it was too small, there wasn’t much light, and anyway the libraries were meant for study. Clare took the bed by the window. It was the one where she would get most fresh air and she had checked, there didn’t seem to be drafts. She thought of Chrissie alone in the bedroom at home, puzzling out her relationship with Mogsy Byrne.
The first roommate arrived. Mary Catherine was American, her father wanted her to have an Irish education, she had never been so cold in her whole life, she couldn’t believe that they didn’t have a bathroom attached to the room, she couldn’t understand why there hadn’t been a reception down there to welcome them, she was going to study English, she had majored in English Literature at her college, she was very confused, and where were the closets? Clare sat on the bed wondering how she was going to live with this voice for a year, when the door opened and in came a girl with short curly hair and tears streaming down her face.
“Isn’t it awful,” she sobbed. “It smells just like school. There’s no supper or dinner or anything tonight. There’s a list of rules as long as your arm. How are we going to survive it?”
She threw herself on the empty bed and sobbed into her pillow. Her luggage had the name Valerie painted on the end of each case.
Clare decided to take control. “Of course it’s awful Valerie—if that’s your name—it smells even worse than school. I’m Clare and this is Mary Catherine and she’s from America and she hates it because it’s cold and it’s not got a bath each and no closets, whatever they are. And of course there’s no supper and no welcoming party because they don’t know we’re all expecting a bit of a fuss of it, but for God Almighty’s sake let’s not start moaning and groaning before we even start. Why don’t we go out and have some chips and think what could make the place better?”
She could hardly believe that it was Clare O’Brien, the scholarship girl from Castlebay, speaking. She’d never really shouted at two totally strange girls, had she? But it had worked like magic.
The chips cheered them up so much they had apple pie and ice cream. Clare told them about the Murray scholarship. Mary Catherine said that her father was a mailman in the States, but he had told her to tell everyone in Ireland he was in government work—which in a sense was vaguely true. She was the only child. He had dreams of her marrying someone who owned a castle in Ireland. Valerie said her parents were separated. Her father lived in England with a fancy woman, and he had to pay for her education. Valerie didn’t want to go to university but her mother said she must, and she must stay there for years in order to get as much out of that rat as possible.
They were immensely cheered by each other’s life stories, and they learned what they would have expected: that none of them had any experience with men. Mary Catherine knew a girl in the States who went the whole way with four boys before she left school. No, amazingly, she didn’t have a baby, but she didn’t have a friend either. A girl in Valerie’s school left hurriedly in the middle of Fifth Year but it had been a great mystery because she didn’t have a boyfriend. There was a whisper round the school that it was someone in her family, her father or her brother. Clare offered some tales from Castlebay of things that had happened down the sandhills, but they were all secondhand and thirdhand. She was going to say that she had her doubts about Chrissie and Mogsy at times; but Mogsy and Chrissie were such nonglamorous people she decided she wouldn’t embark on it.
Full of food and confidences and friendship they stood up to go back to the room they were going to transform. They were going to buy a secondhand bookshelf on the Quays, they were going to buy coat hooks and screw them into the wall so that there would be more space for their clothes. They were going to price cheap reading lamps and buy one between them.
Just as they were leaving the restaurant, someone called from a crowded table. “Hey, it’s Clare, Clare O’Brien!”
She was startled. All she could see was a sea of young men in duffle coats and scarves. One was waving. It was James Nolan. He stood up and came over to them.
“Well, well, well,” he said.
It seemed to be very little to say after coming all the way across the restaurant.
She introduced him to Mary Catherine and Valerie, smiling at him politely as if to assure him that she wasn’t claiming any friendship.
“Well, well,” he said again. “Is the rest of Castlebay up in Dublin too?” His eyes roamed over Mary Catherine and Valerie, assessing them.
“Josie Dillon might be coming up for a few days,” Clare said eagerly.
Josie had begged her to find out James Nolan’s haunts, and said that she would love to come to Dublin if Clare could track him down. Imagine meeting him on the very first night!
“Josie?” He looked blank.
“Josie Dillon from the hotel.”
James Nolan shook his head absently.
“You must remember her, you were often with her in the summer,” Clare blurted out, and could have kicked herself.
“I don’t think I do.” James was polite but bored by the subject. Clare would have liked to hit him hard.
“It’s my mistake. I’m sure she doesn’t remember you either.” Her eyes flashed a bit and he looked at her with surprise.
“No. Well. Listen, it’s nice to see you girls. Oh, and there’s a party on Saturday. All three of you of course. Here, I’ll write it down.” He scribbled an address and tune on a piece of paper.
“Ten o’clock! We have to be back at that place we’re staying by eleven o’clock,” Valerie said, disappointed.
“Late pass. Ask them for a late pass. Cousin invited all three of you to twenty-first. The nuns love cousins. They think they’re safe, sign of a big united family. They love twenty-firsts. It gives them a sense of continuity.”
They promised to be there and they linked arms, giggling as they went down the dark unfamiliar streets, and said that they’d all be lost if it had not been for Clare to guide them and tell them where they were and get them invited to a party on their very very first night in Dublin.
It was a great alliance. When other girls were lonely and self-conscious, they often looked with envy at the three girls; the tall fair one from the back of beyond with the dark brown eyes, the American with her outlandish clothes, and Valerie, the curly-headed terror. It was Valerie who made friends with a workman doing some building work on the outside of the hostel wall. She pointed out that if he were to put three very sturdy bars jutting at intervals they could climb back into their room at night.
He was very nervous about it. “You might get fellas climbing in to attack you,
” he had protested. Nonsense. Valerie explained that there were three of them in the room, and any fellow climbing in uninvited would meet his match. She supervised the placing of the rungs carefully, and also their disguise. No passing nun could see them and realize what they were, a stairway to freedom. Valerie very cunningly asked that one or two extra rungs leading nowhere be hammered in as well. That way the purpose would never be discovered. And indeed it wasn’t. They allowed very good friends to know the route, and regularly the light step of a girl was heard to fall into their room and someone, shoes in hand, would creep through, whispering a sorry or a thank you, but giving no explanations.
Clare and Mary Catherine didn’t really use their escape route all that often but it kept them sane just knowing it was there. Only Valerie got real value from the contraption. She went dancing and to parties, and needed the footholds she had so cleverly organized at least three or four times a week. Valerie usually lay with her curls barely peeping from above the sheets when Clare and Mary Catherine were heading off to lectures. It was always kept as a polite fiction in front of nuns and other girls that Valerie was very lucky to have late lectures. Valerie rarely attended any of them anyway, no matter what time of the day they were held. As she told Clare and Mary Catherine, her mother had said nothing about passing exams, only about using up the money for fees at university.
At Christmas, Valerie went home to her mother, who was going to sit and curse her father all the time; Mary Catherine went to stay with American friends. Clare caught the train home. Her mother had asked Gerry Doyle to pick her up; he sent her a postcard, saying:
Passion wagon will be parked in darkest side of yard outside station. See you then. Love, Gerry.
The other girls were intrigued. Even more when they heard that he was the heartbreaker of the country who had twice invited Clare to his caravan.
