Echoes

by Maeve Binchy

  Clare slept, to her great surprise. She slept well in the strange white bed with its clean hard sheets and its hot-water bottle. Liffey slept in a cot. Clare had been surprised when Angela said there was a cot, she had forgotten that Angela kept summer visitors, and had thought it wise to invest in two cots years ago when her mother was still alive.

  Liffey too had slept. Maybe it was being away from the roar and crash of the sea, or from all the anxiety.

  Clare only woke because Angela had come in with a cup of tea. To her surprise, Angela had drawn up a chair beside the bed and sat down. Surely she wasn’t going to give a lecture or want a heart-to-heart chat at this time in the morning.

  Certainly Angela’s face looked drawn and strained.

  Clare thanked her for the tea and waited.

  “Take a big sip.”

  This was different; there was bad news of some kind. She put down the cup and looked almost on reflex at Liffey as if to make sure that she was all right. “What is it?”

  “There’s been an accident. Gerry Doyle was drowned. They’ve just carried his body up from the beach.”

  Total silence. Only the sounds from Liffey’s cot where she played happily with the red satin rabbit whose ears had been torn off long ago.

  “Clare?”

  “He’s dead. Is he dead?”

  “Yes, it doesn’t seem possible. Gerry of all people. There was no one as full of life.”

  Angela broke off as she looked at Clare’s face. It was expressionless. She just sat in the white bed with her long hair tied loosely behind her pale face, staring straight ahead of her. Her hands were clasped around her knees.

  It wasn’t natural to react like that. Angela was alarmed.

  Clare had been friendly with Gerry of course, very friendly maybe. Perhaps even now when Clare’s marriage seemed to be going so disastrously wrong, Gerry had been on hand to give consolation. Could that be the explanation of this sense of shock and disbelief? Angela reached out her hand, hoping that if she patted Clare’s arm or did something warm the girl might come out of this trance.

  She was totally unprepared for Clare to throw herself into Angela’s arms, sobbing and shaking. And the only words she could distinguish over and over were, “He’s really dead. Thank God. Thank God.”

  They said it was accidental death. That had to be said. Otherwise he couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. And things were bad enough for the poor Doyles without that.

  They said he must have been out for a walk and slipped, his face and side had been very lacerated so he could have been walking on the rock pools, everyone knew that Gerry Doyle loved to balance there. That’s what they said but nobody believed it, not for a moment. They knew it was suicide.

  It had to be suicide, his business was in ruins, it was a matter of weeks before it would have been taken from him, there was a farmer out in the country who had been making very open threats to come after Gerry on account of the farmer’s daughter being pregnant and Gerry Doyle taking no interest in this state of affairs. Fiona Conway, pregnant and heartbroken, told how he had said he wouldn’t be in Castlebay for much longer, but she had thought he meant he was going to England. Mary Doyle his mother said that only two days previously he had sent her £20 in an envelope with no explanation, just the words From Gerry. Agnes O’Brien said that she had been saying for months that the boy was in trouble of some kind but nobody had ever listened to her. Josie Dillon said he had cashed two checks at the hotel which had bounced but they had kept it quiet, and Gerry had thanked her and said when he went to another land and made his fortune he would think of her. She had thought he was going to emigrate, how could anyone have thought he would do something like this?

  As quickly as they could the formalities were organized and the body was released for burial.

  Gerry Doyle would be laid to rest after ten o’clock Mass on Thursday, Father O’Dwyer announced from the pulpit, and blew his nose loudly because he still couldn’t take it in.

  David went through his work automatically, everywhere he went they talked about the tragedy. A woman with chest pains pointed to the pictures on the walls, framed photographs of the First Communions and Confirmations. He was a lovely boy, always a laugh, never took anything too seriously. In the next house the old man who had hardening of the arteries was more interested in what could have happened to poor young Doyle than he was about his own imminent departure to the county home which David was trying to introduce.

  “He was practically born in the water that young lad, which is unusual in these parts. Half of Castlebay never takes to the sea at all, but the young Doyle fellow, he swam like a fish.”

  In the room of a ten-year-old girl with jaundice they talked as much of Gerry Doyle as of the patient. He told them not to be worried by the color of her urine, it was quite natural that it would turn the color of port wine. They nodded and said that they had heard Gerry Doyle’s business was in a bad way but surely he wouldn’t drown himself over a thing like that? There had to be more to it than that.

  “If people drowned themselves when their businesses went wrong, wouldn’t the sea be full of bodies?” asked the child’s father.

  David agreed absently and looked at the little girl’s eyes. They were yellow and he told her that her skin would go a little bit yellow like a Chinese.

  “Are the Chinese yellow?” the girl asked. “Really yellow?”

  “Come to think of it, they’re not—any I saw aren’t yellow at all.”

  “Have you seen a Chinese?” The girl was very excited.

  “In Dublin, yes. There were Chinese students at University and there was a Chinese restaurant we went to.”

  She could have talked to him forever about it. He wondered would Liffey want to know things like that too. His heart sank again when he thought of Liffey. And Clare.

  The day ended somehow and he went back to the surgery. Quickly David retrieved the envelope and brought it back to the Lodge. He saw his mother pretending not to look through the curtains at him, but he went on as if he hadn’t seen.

  The kitchen was tidy. He looked around hopefully for a note. Clare had been in during the day, he could see that. The dishes and cups he had left after his breakfast were washed up and put away. He noticed that she had done some shopping: a packet of tea, a pound of butter, a loaf of bread and some sliced rashers of bacon were placed on the table near the range. The bed upstairs was made and although some of her clothes were hanging in the wardrobe she must have taken others. Most of Liffey’s things seemed to have gone, and one of their two suitcases had disappeared. He looked around to see if she had taken all her books. It would be good in a way if she had, that would mean she had gone through with her plan of going to Dublin for a while.

  Please may she have gone to Dublin. Let her not be here for the funeral. Please.

  He sat down in the kitchen, having locked the door first, and he took out the pictures. He looked at them again. Exactly the same as he had seen last night at Caroline’s. Last night? Is that all it was? There was the same list in the small handwriting naming the three people to whom they were being sent. He must have given them to Clare. He must have come to this house, that’s why his car was there, his big ugly van with the name of the business, parked in the lane beside their house. David’s father had phoned the Guards to report it being there, they had come to collect it but it had told them nothing. But it told David everything, he must have called on Clare. That was what had frightened her so much, that was why she had wanted him to come home. But had he come in and spoken to her, shown the pictures to her personally? Or had he just pushed them through the door and said he would be back?

  David opened the front of the range and one by one he put them in. There was nothing exciting about these pictures taken through a caravan window. They were not the kind of pictures that would do anything except destroy the three people they were sent to. That was what Gerry Doyle had done before he destroyed himself.

  Why? David allowed
his brain to start on that again. All day he had pushed the thought out of sight while he attended to his work. But now as the flames burned up the record of his time with Caroline, time that he had convinced himself was not evil because nobody was losing and nobody was being hurt . . . he wondered again why Gerry had bothered. It couldn’t have been blackmail. Caroline and David didn’t have the kind of money it turned out that was needed by Doyle’s Photographics, they would only have been able to pay a few pounds a week at the very most. He didn’t hate David, in fact they always got on very well when they were children, and of late, well David had been a bit scathing about how easily women fell for Gerry but he would never have known that. Or if he had, he couldn’t have cared enough to hound David in this way.

  David had assumed that it must have been Caroline, but she had been adamant, she had said with an unattractive honesty that had revolted him that she was Gerry Doyle’s for the asking, and had been—and, no doubt, would be again—so it could not have been unrequited passion that made him take the pictures.

  What did that leave?

  It only left Clare.

  Clare.

  He remembered the time he had come across them kissing on the bench over the beach, and how annoyed he had been. He remembered Clare running up from the National Library back to her hostel to see if Gerry Doyle had rung. He remembered the easy way Gerry Doyle danced with Clare in the ballroom with the glittery revolving light sparkling over them as they smiled at each other.

  It was Gerry Doyle she had asked to get her post office savings book that time. Then, only weeks ago, he remembered Gerry complaining that Clare wouldn’t let him come and photograph Liffey. “She’s afraid that if I take the picture, I somehow steal the child,” he had laughed. And Clare had said nothing.

  The photographs were all burned. He poked around and the ashes were gone, mixed into the other ashes of the range. He closed the little gate and looked around. The clock was ticking and below the sea was crashing. Those were the only sounds. Those were the sounds that gifted bright Clare O’Brien heard all day, and all evening. That was the life he had given her.

  She was too smart now for Chrissie and her mother to feel easy with her. She wasn’t smart enough for her mother-in-law to make her welcome. And Gerry Doyle had loved her and wanted her to come away. He had taken the pictures to prove that there was nothing to keep her anymore. He had wanted Liffey as well, she must have sensed that at the time he wanted to photograph the child.

  Had he come to the house and asked her to go away?

  Did he drown himself because she wouldn’t go?

  After all, as the father of that sick child had said this afternoon, if everyone whose business was in a bad way swam out to sea then the beach would be littered with bodies. Gerry Doyle didn’t kill himself over checks that bounced and bills that would not be paid. But if he was prepared to go to such lengths and take such photographs to incriminate her husband then he really must have wanted Clare, and wanted her enough to end his life if she wouldn’t come with him.

  The clock ticked on and the waves crashed on. He walked around the small house restlessly. There was no sign of Clare in this house. No pictures she had chosen on the wall. No books. There were some in the spare room but they had always looked as if they were in transit, not as if they had come to stay. On the window sill was a cookery book and inside in Clare’s big bold writing were the instructions for the dinner party that had been such a disaster. That was the only evidence that this woman had lived here.

  David Power put his head in his hands at the kitchen table and cried.

  For all that had happened.

  Tuesday evening. It was only twenty-four hours ago that he had come to the house sure that she would pack her things and leave in his van. Would he have killed them all? Would he have driven Liffey and Clare into the sea? Clare didn’t know. He might have been sane, and really meant them to go to England as he said. But that in itself wasn’t sane. She had been over it a thousand times, there was no way she had led him on. A few kisses years ago, a few dances holding him close. But Gerry Doyle had that and much much more from every girl he met. He couldn’t have seen it as some kind of attraction or involvement. So, he knew that she wasn’t very happy with David, that her life had not turned out to be the dream she once thought . . . but still.

  Angela and Dick had been wonderful, but to say that, to think that was just to let the record go into a groove where it said the same thing over and over. They had always been wonderful. For as long as she could remember.

  “Take the car,” Dick had said. “I don’t need it just now. If you want to go and collect anything.”

  She took his car, and went back to the Lodge, she knew that both Molly and Nellie were looking out of different windows trying to see what she was up to. She didn’t care. She didn’t even know what she was up to herself.

  Methodically she went through the house, tidying it for David. She made the bed and put all the washing together in a pillowcase, none of her own things, only his. She left the place so that it wouldn’t offend anyone if Molly and Nellie came in to look after poor David. She even cleaned out a particularly grubby corner of the food press she had been meaning to do for ages, and lined it with fresh paper.

  She made a big rubbish bag out of one of the pillowcases, and into that she threw all the torn stockings, almost-empty marmalade jars. She sat in the unusually tidy kitchen for fifteen minutes trying to think of something to say to David in a note, and then decided there was nothing to say.

  He had left her no note, after all. He had been here all night, and then they said he had been called down to the beach when Gerry had been found. Perhaps there had been no time.

  With her head in her hands she sat there. Could Gerry really have sent those pictures to David? Could he have left them in the van? No, the Guards had said there was nothing in the van, Angela had told her that, no photographic things even. It had been empty as if he had been clearing out.

  Suppose Gerry had dropped the pictures into the surgery. Suppose Dr. Power had opened them. Her heart gave a jump thinking of that nice old man seeing such indecent evidence of his son’s adultery with a family friend. Then she hardened her feelings. Why should she care now? The pictures were not of Clare. She had been here minding the child and the house while all this was going on. She was not going to let herself feel sympathetic when she was the one who deserved a great great deal of sympathy.

  She stood up, arranged the things she had bought for his supper where he could see them, and then loaded the car with the suitcase she had packed. She put the pillowcase of rubbish in the back, she shook more anthracite into the range, and pulled the door behind her.

  “I won’t stay here forever,” Clare said to Angela.

  “You haven’t been here two days yet. Stop being so dramatic. Aren’t you company for us?”

  “Not really. Not at the moment.”

  Liffey asked to get up on Clare’s lap and then she wanted to get down again. She waddled over to Angela with the same request.

  “It’s a pity Gerry didn’t see Fiona’s child born.”

  “What?”

  “Fiona’s having a child anytime now—you know that.”

  “Oh, of course, I was thinking of . . . Why do you say that?”

  “He loved children. He was very good with them too. He often talked about Liffey here. Did you know that?”

  “No.” Clare shivered.

  Angela decided to change the subject. “I was talking to Fiona on my way back from school. I went down Church Street. She was going in to Doyle’s Photographics to sort things out. . . . Clare? What is it?”

  “Oh, my God, my God, I forgot that entirely. Can I take the car again Angela—please, five minutes.”

  “Of course you can but what . . .”

  Clare was out the door and into the front seat. The keys were always left in the ignition. Dick Dillon looked out the window upstairs to know who was driving his car off, crashing the gear
s like that.

  Fiona wore a gray smock with a big white collar attached to it. She hadn’t any mourning clothes in maternity wear. They probably didn’t make them, Clare thought.

  Fiona was sorting through the brown envelopes with their codes and dates.

  “I’m very sorry,” Clare said.

  “I know.” Fiona went on sorting. “It sort of helps to do this—it makes things more normal in a way.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a silence.

  Clare had acted on such an impulse when she remembered the photographs that she hadn’t paused to think how she would ask for them. Now she was here and she must speak. She couldn’t let anyone discover them; nobody should open an envelope and see what she had seen on Sunday night. Nobody should be allowed to look at what she had had to look at.

  “Fiona?” she began hesitantly.

  The perfect oval face, pale with dark circles under the big, dark eyes, looked at her inquiringly.

  Clare swallowed and began to speak. “Do you know the way just when you think there’s no way out of something . . . you know there’s no way out and when somebody helps you, it can change your life?”

  Fiona looked at her, confused.

  “Surely in your life, ages ago, there must have been some problem, some big worry, and maybe Gerry helped you, just said nothing, asked nothing, but gave help.”

  Fiona looked at Clare, trying to read in her face whether she could have known about that first pregnancy, and how Gerry had come to England to look after her. Clare felt she was walking on very thin ice.

  “I suppose all of us have something like that in our lives, and if someone agrees to sort it out then it can be solved.”

  “Yes.” Fiona was still doubtful.

  “Well, I know Gerry did a lot of that for people. You probably don’t know how he helped a lot of people when they were in trouble, and I’d like to help him now.”