Echoes

by Maeve Binchy

  This morning a difficult patient had pulled the drip out three times, and so three times it had to be set up again. Then there was the teaching round with the consultant. And now he was in outpatients. He had been examining a man’s swollen foot when James had rung.

  As politely as he could, David told James that he would have to find someone else to celebrate the seven guineas and to lunch with. David’s own lunch would be something very quick and not very nice. If he ate at all. Then it would be dealing with admissions, seeing the patients, getting the preliminaries sorted out before greater men came to deal with them. And he was on call after that. Barristers? Lunches? Guineas? Bloody parasites.

  He returned to the man with the swollen foot. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’d like to see the other foot. Can you take off your shoe and sock?”

  The man was hesitant.

  “So that I’ll be able to compare,” David explained.

  Reluctantly the man took off the other shoe and sock. The foot that he knew would be examined was nice and clean. The foot that he hadn’t expected to be asked to bare was filthy. It was a foot that had not been washed in a long time. David stood slightly back from it to see if there was a similar swelling. His eyes met the eyes of the foot’s owner.

  “I didn’t think, you see . . .” the man said.

  “I know,” David said sadly. “That’s the trouble. We hardly ever do.”

  He was on his own. He had never felt that Dublin was lonely when he was in the medical school, but now, isolated in hospital, it was different. That was your life. You didn’t escape from it—or if you could you found nobody to escape with.

  Full of self-pity in the darkening evening air, he walked up Kildare Street. People were going in and out of the National Library and the College of Art. The Dail had its guards at the gate, and that seemed to be bustling too. Everyone except David Power had something to do.

  Suddenly he saw Clare leaving the library with her bunch of books. She looked lovely in the evening light.

  “Clare! Clare, I was hoping to catch you,” he lied.

  She was pleased to see him. He tucked his arm into hers. “Will we go and have a coffee?”

  “Sure. What were you hoping to see me for?”

  “To ask you if you’d come out tonight. I know it’s ridiculous short notice and everything but we never know in the hospital when we’ll be on or off.”

  She didn’t seem put out by the shortness of notice. She’d love to. But first she had to go back to the hostel and see was there a message. Someone had said he was going to be in Dublin, possibly tonight, and if so she and her two friends were going to go out with him. If not then she’d go with David.

  “I can’t say fairer than that,” she said.

  He grumbled as they walked toward the hostel: why three girls and one man? What kind of superman was this?

  “It’s Gerry Doyle,” she said simply, as if that explained everything.

  A great and unexpected surge of annoyance swept over David. Gerry was so cheap. His line was so obvious. When he was a kid he had thought Gerry was good company, there was always a touch of the dangerous, the daredevil about him. But not now. Gerry was too slick. And too much.

  “I thought you’d have outgrown him,” he said in a very superior voice.

  Clare was surprised. David Power didn’t usually talk like this. “Nobody outgrows Gerry,” she said. It was an echo of what Caroline Nolan had said to him. A flash of anger came over him.

  “What’s so great about him? Has he some new technique as a lover or something?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Clare was cool.

  “Well, what is it then? It’s not his intellectual conversation is it? Surely Gerry Doyle isn’t a rough diamond concealing a poetic soul?” His face was twisted in a way she had never seen before.

  “Why are you so cross?”

  “I’m not cross. I’m just disappointed with you for making yourself so cheap. You’ve always been different. Why be so bloody predictable? Following as soon as Gerry Doyle raises his little finger. Gerry’s a nobody, Clare. He’s just trashy, you deserve better.”

  She was unaware of the crowds moving up and down the street and even the people who had to move off the footpath because they couldn’t get past the angry young couple.

  “You keep your disappointment to yourself, David Power. Don’t come bleating it out to me. You can take yourself off with your insults and your jeers. You’re the one that’s cheap, not me. I’ve been working here all day, and now I’ve finished. I’m going back to my friends and if Gerry’s around he’ll cheer us all up and make us laugh. He’ll make no comments about whether we’re predictable or not. He’ll be nice to us. That’s what you’ll never understand in a million years. Gerry is nice to people. He’s glad to see them. He smiles and he asks them questions and he listens. He likes people. And I’m glad he’s coming to Dublin tonight, and Val will be glad, and Mary Catherine will be glad.”

  “I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Oh, go away and leave me alone. I’m tired.”

  “I’m tired too. I’ve been on duty since I don’t know how long. I’m cross-eyed with tiredness.”

  “Yes,” she said briefly. “I see that.”

  “Can I still come along with you, if he’s there. Or . . .”

  “No. You cannot. I’m not going on an outing with you both knowing that you’ve said he’s cheap and flashy and what was it . . . trashy. I’m not going to sit in a pub with you and know that you mocked at him and his lack of education, and made fun of his intellectual conversation. You can find your own company tonight. And whoever it is, she has my sympathy.”

  Clare turned away. David watched her as she walked in a rage along Stephen’s Green.

  Clare had a letter from David a week later.

  People often make jokes about medics being illiterate and now I see why. It’s so long since I wrote anything that wasn’t an examination answer, a report on a case, or notes at a lecture, I’m not sure how to begin. But I want to say I was in an extremely bad mood the other day when we met and I am very sorry indeed for taking it out on you. I really do apologize. You were minding your own business, you were loyal to a friend. I just behaved like a boor. I don’t know why I said all those things about Gerry Doyle. Reluctantly, I have to put it down to simple, unattractive jealousy. I’ve always envied him his easy charm. I envied his reputation as a ladies’ man. And that night in particular I envied him because he was going to go out with you when I wanted to. It’s hard to say all this, and I’m sure I’m saying it very badly but I want you to know I regret it all very much. There’s a Halloween dance in the hospital. I’d love you to come as my partner . . .

  Clare sent him a postcard. David turned up at the hostel, in James Nolan’s car, to collect her. She wore the same yellow and red dress that Mary Catherine had worn to the dance with James.

  “Same dress, same car. Only the cast has changed,” Mary Catherine said as she looked out the window.

  “Don’t they breed them handsome in Castlebay,” said Valerie watching David in his dark overcoat and white silk scarf, tucking Clare into the car.

  They had decorated the Res up with funny faces cut into turnips and little nightlights burning inside. There were pictures of witches on the wall, and the lights were covered in red or black paper. They had apples hanging from a string and you had to bob for apples too. Everywhere there were basins and baths and the fronts of shirts were wet as heads were pushed far into the water. The hilarity was more important than the actual trapping of the apple. They had a big selection of records; and a lively nurse with her leg in a plaster cast was responsible for playing them three at a time, saying after the third, “Thank you very much, end of dance, thank you.”

  David was very popular, and much in demand for the Ladies’ Choice. Clare was nearly knocked down in the rush of nurses toward Dr. Power. It was funny to hear him called that. She kept expecting to see his father.

  He int
roduced her to other doctors, interns and even registrars.

  “Who’s looking after the sick tonight?” she asked.

  There was a system of call, and about a third of the people there couldn’t drink in case they were needed.

  “Those are the ones to watch out for,” a bearded doctor told Clare. “If they can’t drink, their minds are very definitely set in other directions.”

  “I’d better stay with the winos then, if I want to keep my virtue,” she laughed. David seemed proud of her, and she saw him with new eyes. In this world he was relaxed and funny. She never thought of David Power as someone you laughed with. In fact, when his face came to her mind, she used to think of him as being a bit solemn. Either with his parents when he was young, or walking with Bones along the beach in winter.

  Of course when the Nolans had come to Castlebay he had been fairly excited and laughing during those summers when she had been stuck behind the counter in the shop . . .

  “What are you thinking about?” He was dancing close to her.

  “About you,” she said truthfully.

  “Good. Were they happy positive thoughts?”

  “Yes, I suppose they were. I was thinking how well you fit in here, how happy you seem.”

  “I think that about you too. You always disapproved of me in Castlebay.” He was half teasing.

  “Jealous, I suppose. You had more freedom. You could have such a good time.”

  David smiled. “I used to envy all of you. A sweetshop, you could come and go as you liked, they weren’t sitting waiting for you to come in, hanging on your every word . . .”

  “No one’s ever satisfied with what they have. I told you that. Do you remember?”

  “I remember. I didn’t think you would,” he said. “I remember it because I thought it was a sad sort of thing to say and to mean.” His smile said he wanted her to cheer up.

  She laughed at him, and at that point the music changed to a faster beat, and Mary Catherine’s red and yellow dress was swung into a very energetic version of “Down by the Riverside.” It was actually a Ladies’ Choice but David and Clare hadn’t noticed. Several nurses retreated in defeat.

  The supper was magnificent. Real Halloween food: colcannon, mounds of mashed potatoes with chopped-up onion and kale in it as well as threepences and rings. There were plates of sausages, and afterward huge amounts of toasted barm brack, with extra rings pushed in so that there could be a lot of happy screaming at the thought of a marriage within a year.

  Clare got a ring, which she nearly swallowed. “Lord above, how frightening,” she said.

  “Did you nearly choke?” David asked.

  “No, the thought that I’d be married in a year.”

  They were sitting in an alcove of the big room, a window seat away from the crowd. They had brought their glasses of red wine, and the noise was away in the background.

  “Would that be the end of the world?” he asked.

  “Yes. It would. The end of my world.” She explained her plans, the M.A., the Ph.D., the terms in the United States, in Oxford or Cambridge and finally the history professorship. She felt he was smiling inside.

  “I will, you know. I really will. If I got this far I can get to the moon.”

  “I know.” He was gentle.

  “You don’t know, David. You really don’t. For all that you were brought up beside me, you don’t know how hard it was to get here. I don’t want to go on and on about it. But, you see, it’s not just like saying I want to be a film star, or I want to be the Pope, for me to say I want to be a professor of history. When I was ten I wanted to be an Honours university student. And who would have believed then that I could?”

  “You give me very little credit. I do know. Of course I do. It’s you knows nothing about me. What do you think I want for my career? Tell me. Go on.”

  She paused. “I suppose you’ll go home and be a doctor with your father,” she said.

  “See, you don’t know a thing. I’m not going back to Castlebay for ages. If at all. Being a doctor like that in a small place . . . You choose it. You can’t have it chosen for you.”

  “But everyone thinks . . .”

  “Everyone thought when you were a small girl in the convent that you’d leave school and marry someone from up the road. Like Chrissie. But you didn’t.”

  “It’s not the same. If you didn’t want to be a doctor why did you become one?”

  “I do want to be a doctor. But I haven’t become one yet. I have years more to do, at least four or five in different hospitals learning under specialists, seeing the new developments . . . There’s much more to being a doctor than saying tut-tut-poor-thing and knowing when to call the ambulance.”

  “So will you be a specialist?”

  “I don’t know. I think I would like to be a GP, like my father. But not yet. And not in Castlebay. Can you see anything so stupid as sitting down with my mummy and daddy, like I did when I was a young boy, coming home from school, and describing How I Spent My Day?”

  She giggled. “I know. It does sound silly. But perhaps you’ll marry someone and then it won’t be like that. It will be more normal.”

  “Not yet. And if I’m going to wait for you to be thirty-four, I’ll be nearly forty.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go back to Castlebay even when I’m thirty-four. You’d better not marry me,” Clare said, anxious that there should be no misunderstandings. “I just said I’d be ready to marry then, not give anything up like my Chair of History.”

  “I think you’d be too complicated for me. I think I’d better marry someone else all right.”

  “Caroline Nolan? Would she be suitable?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. My mother thinks she’d be suitable. Her mother thinks she’d be suitable. Her brother thinks it too. That’s probably why.”

  “Does she think she’d be suitable?”

  “I don’t know,” David laughed. “Let’s dance.”

  A red-haired doctor with a Cork accent asked David if he would lend him the lovely lady in the red-and-yellow dress for one dance. He was called Bar. He said most people in Cork were called some form of the name Finbarr, with his being the patron saint. Bar said that he was a registrar and very important in the hospital and that David’s whole career would depend on Clare being nice and willing and cooperative and giving herself in every way to Bar. Clare pealed with laughter at this and asked whether this line of chat ever worked.

  “Sometimes,” Bar said gloomily. “But less often than you’d hope. Women seem to be brighter these days. They have minds and things.” Was she David’s girlfriend? No. Good. Just a girl next door from Castlebay, that was nice. Clare said it wasn’t exactly next door, but this was never a concept you could explain to anyone in Dublin; they all thought that you were rewriting Cinderella if you explained the gulf of difference between the O’Brien and Power families.

  Bar was holding her very tight and saying that he was on call so he couldn’t have a drink, which made the party a bit of a bore—but on the other hand it did sharpen his awareness of who were the best-looking girls.

  Diplomatically, Clare released herself in order to help him choose the best-looking girls. Bar found this irritating but he couldn’t fault her. They were discussing the attributes of a group of girls in the corner when David rescued her.

  “Thank God,” she said as she danced with David again. “That fellow’s like an octopus.”

  “I’m disappointed that groping is out,” he said.

  “David! You’d never grope. You’d make sophisticated gestures when you knew the feelings were returned. Aren’t I right?”

  “You are. God you are,” David said, holding her close to him but not allowing his hands to roam like those of Registrar Bar, the octopus as he would be known forevermore.

  On the way home he parked the car. Clare looked up in alarm.

  “It’s all right. I haven’t turned into an octopus.
I just wanted to talk for a bit. It’s one of the few nights I’m not crashing to the ground with sleep. James says I’m the most boring friend to have. I have no time off, and I can’t stay awake when I do.”

  They talked on easily, happily, like old friends.

  “We should go out together, sometimes . . . you know, the pictures or a coffee. What do you think?” He looked enthusiastic and casual at the same time. He didn’t sound as if he were asking her for a date, or a commitment, just friendship.

  “I’d like that, certainly. Of course I would,” she said.

  “There’d be nobody to bother us here,” David said. He didn’t need to mention that there would be plenty of people to bother them in Castlebay. He gave her a kiss on the cheek to settle it and drove her back to the hostel. He watched in alarm as she climbed up the iron rungs and disappeared through a window.

  “Was he nice?” Mary Catherine asked sleepily as Clare climbed in the window.

  “Very.”

  “Did he jump on you?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that.”

  “But it’s desperately late. What else were you doing?”

  “Talking. Just talking.”

  “God, that’s serious,” Mary Catherine said, waking up.

  “Don’t be silly. Go back to sleep. I’ve hung up your dress. It’s not too sweaty.”

  “What is it?” Valerie was awake now.

  “Clare’s back. She talked to him all night. They’re in love.”

  “Great,” Valerie snorted and settled down again.

  “I’m not in love. Even if I wanted to be in love with David Power I couldn’t. So there.”

  “Why? Is he in fact your long-lost brother? Why not?”

  “Because his mother would throw a cordon of Guards around the big house on the cliff if she thought that any of the O’Briens from the huckster’s shop had notions about her son. That’s why.”

  Clare had snuggled down in her bed and pulled the sheets to her chin. Mary Catherine was wide awake and concerned. “You can’t let that kind of crap stand in your way! You’re not going to tell me that . . .”