Circle of Friends (14 page)

Dessie Burns said that there was a lot of truth in the theory that if you fell down drunk, you never hurt yourself, a theory he had tested only too often. It was a girl like Eve Malone, a little pikasheen who wouldn’t have had a drink on her at all, that would end up in hospital.

Father Ross said that Mother Francis would take it badly. She felt as much for that girl as if she had been her own flesh
and blood. No mother could ever have done more for the girl. He hoped Mother Francis wouldn’t get too great a shock.

Mother Francis had acted swiftly when she heard about Eve. She had gone straight to Peggy Pine and waited demurely until the shop was free of customers.

“Do me a great favor, Peg.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Could you close the shop and drive me to Dublin?”

“When?”

“As soon as you can, really, Peg.”

Peggy pulled down the orange sheets of plastic intended to keep the glare off her goods in the window, both in summer when there might have been sunshine and in winter when it was unnecessary.

“Off we go,” she said.

“But the business?”

“One thing about you, Bunty, you have the good sense to ask a favor at the right time. You decide to leap over the convent wall and hightail it to England to a new life, and you have the wit to do it on early closing day.” She picked up her handbag, rooted for her keys and then put on her tweed coat and closed the door behind her. There were advantages about the Single State. You didn’t need to tell anyone what you were doing. Or why.

You didn’t even need to ask why.

“Mother Francis!” Eve’s voice was weak.

“You’re going to be fine.”

“What happened to me? Please, Mother. The other people just say ‘Hush’ and ‘Rest.’ ”

“Not much point in saying either of those words to you.” The nun was holding Eve’s thin hand. “Broken ribs,
but they’ll knit together. A wrist that’s going to be painful for a while, but it will heal. A few stitches. Truly I never lied to you in my life. You’re going to be fine.”

“Oh, Mother, I’m so sorry.”

“Child, you couldn’t have stopped it.”

“No. About you. Having to find out about me this way.”

“I know you were
going
to ring me. Benny told me that. She said you were about to phone.”

“I never lied to you, either, Mother. I wasn’t going to phone.”

“Not immediately, perhaps, but you would have sometime.”

“Do you still think any question must be answered?”

“Of course.”

“What’ll I do Mother, what on earth will I do when I get out of here?”

“You’ll come home to get well and then we’ll think of something else for you.”

“And Mother Clare?”

“Leave her to me.”

Jack came in the side door and found Aengus sitting in the cloakroom studying his glasses.

“Oh, Jesus, not
again
.”

“It’s not my fault, Jack, I don’t do anything, I swear I don’t. I just went past these fellows and one of them shouted, ‘Hey, speccy four-eyes,’ and I ignored them like you told me and then they came and took them off and stamped on them.”

“So, it’s my fault.” Jack looked at the glasses; they were beyond repair. Sometimes he had been able to fit the frames back and push in the lenses; not this time.

“Listen, Aengus, don’t make a big thing out of it. They’ve had enough here today.”

“Well, what will I say?” Aengus looked naked and defenseless without his spectacles. “I mean I can’t say I stamped on them myself.”

“No, I know. Listen, I’ll go in tomorrow and kick the shit of the fellows who did it.”

“No, no, Jack, please. That would make it worse.”

“Not if I beat them to a pulp it won’t. They won’t try anything again. They’d be afraid they’d have to deal with me again.”

“But they’ll know you won’t be there all the time.”

“I can be there at odd times. You know, just happen to be passing when they’re going out of school.”

“Wouldn’t they think I was a telltale?”

“Nope.” Jack was casual. “You’re smaller. You have to wear glasses to see, if they don’t respect that then you have to bring in reinforcements … that’s the system.”

There was no need for a gong in their household, Lilly Foley said that Holy Mother Church looked after all that for them. As soon as they heard the Angelus ring they gathered from all over the big house to the supper table. Jack’s father had asked him not to mention the accident in front of the younger children. He didn’t want to go into the fact that someone had died. His father looked pale, Jack thought, his eye slightly swollen; but maybe he wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been involved. Certainly none of his brothers saw anything amiss. Ronan was entertaining them; he was a good mimic and this time he was doing a fussy brother in the school trying to get everyone to sit still in the big hall for a lecture. Then he went on to a merciless performance as an inarticulate Garda, who had called to the school to deliver the annual lecture on road safety.

Ronan had picked the wrong day for this story.

Another time his father might have laughed or mildly remonstrated about the cruelty of the imitation. But today Dr. Foley’s face was gray and set.

“And whatever his accent or his defects, I don’t suppose
one of those blockheads making a jeer of him listened to a word he was saying.” The voice was harsh.

“But, Daddy …” Ronan was bewildered.

“Oh, you can ‘But, Daddy’ at me all you like—it’s not going to bring you, or any of those amadans mocking the poor guard, back to life when they walk out under a ten-ton truck.”

There was a silence. Jack watched his brothers look at each other in alarm, and saw his mother frown slightly down the table at his father.

For no reason Jack remembered something that girl Benny had said earlier in the day. It was something about wishing she had the power to control conversations. If you could do that you could rule the world, she had laughed.

“You mean like Hitler?” he had teased her.

“I mean the reverse of Hitler. I mean sort of patting things down, not stirring them up.”

That was the moment when the fabulous Nan Mahon had flashed her eyes. Anyone could pat things down, she had said with a toss of all that blond curly hair. The point was to liven things up. She had looked straight at Jack when she said it.

Nan Mahon turned the key in number 23 Maple Gardens. She had no idea whether there would be anyone home yet. It was six-fifteen. Whoever came in first turned on the electric heater in the hall to take the chill off the house, and then lit the gas fire in the kitchen. They had all their meals at a big kitchen table; there was never any company, so it didn’t matter.

The hall was already slightly warm so somebody was home.

“Hallo,” Nan shouted.

Her father came out of the kitchen.

“That was a fine message you left. That was a great day’s work, frightening the bloody lives out of us.”

“What is it?”

“What is it? What is it? Meek as milk! God Almighty, Nan, I’ve been here for the past two hours without knowing hair nor hide of you.”

“I left a message. I said there had been an accident. I wouldn’t have, but the hospital said we had to. I left a message at the yard. I told Paul to tell you I was all right. Isn’t that what he said?”

“Who’d believe the daylight out of that fool, reading magazines with one hand, stuffing his face with another …”

“Well, you were out.” Nan had taken her coat off and was examining the mud stains. She hung it up carefully on a big wooden coat hanger and began to brush hard at the dried mud.

“Someone was killed, Nan. A boy died.”

“I know.” She spoke slowly. “We saw it.”

“And why didn’t you come straight home?”

“To an empty house?”

“It wouldn’t have
been
empty. I’d have come back. We’d have got your mother back out of that place.”

“I didn’t want to get her back, disturbing her when there was nothing she could do.”

“She’s worried sick too. You’d better ring her. She said she’d stay put in case you came by the hotel.”

“No,
you’d
better ring her. I didn’t get her worried.”

“I can’t understand why you’re being so callous …” He looked at her, bewildered.

Nan’s eyes were blazing. “You haven’t even begun to
try
to understand … you haven’t a notion what it was like, all the cars and the blood and the glass and the boy with the blanket over him, and a girl breaking her ribs, and all the hanging about and waiting … it was … it was
 … just awful.” He carne toward her, arms outstretched, but she avoided him.

“Oh, Nan, my poor baby,” he was saying.

“That is precisely why I didn’t want you to come to the hospital. I’m not anyone’s poor baby. I only had scratches. I didn’t want you making an exhibition of yourself. And of me.”

He flinched.

Nan continued. “
And
I didn’t ring Em because it’s hard enough to get a job in any place as a married woman without having hysterical daughters ringing up crying for Mamma. Em’s been working in that kip for six years, since I was twelve. And there
have
been days I’d have liked her at home when I had a headache or one of the nuns had roared at me at school. But I thought of her. You, you never give anyone a thought but yourself. You’d ring her if you couldn’t find your socks where you thought they should be.”

Brian Mahon’s hand was in a fist. He moved closer to where his daughter was starting again to brush the mud from the coat that hung on the side of the kitchen dresser.

“By God, you won’t speak to me like that. You may well be upset, but you’re not going to get away with treating me like dirt. Your own father out slaving day and night so that you’d have a College education. By God, you’re going to take that back or you’re going to get out of this house.”

Not a muscle of Nan’s face moved, her stroke never faltered as she brushed and watched the flakes fall down on the newspaper she had spread beneath. She said nothing.

“Then you’ll not stay under my roof.”

“Oh, but I will,” said Nan. “For the moment anyway.”

Mother Francis had been putting off her visit to Mother Clare as long as possible. There had been a deliberately vague telephone call. But it became clear that she would soon have to go out in the rain and get a bus to their sister
convent. She had sent Peggy home. It was not a visit she relished making.

Still, she thought, bracing her shoulders, if she had been a real mother she would have had to endure many such problems with a teenage daughter. As a schoolteacher she knew only too well the dance they led their parents. Natural mothers had to put up with a great deal. This was the very thought in her head as she turned the corner of the corridor and back into the waiting room and saw the weeping figure of a woman hunched over and hugging herself in grief.

Beside her stood a pleasant-looking, round, gray-haired woman, unsure of what to do, hesitating about whether to hush the weeping figure or let her cry.

“Frank,” the woman sobbed. “Frank, tell me it’s not true. Tell me it’s someone else, tell me it was just someone that looked like you.”

“They’re going to get the nurse again,” said her companion. “She was fine a minute ago. We have a taxi ordered. I was taking her home with me …”

“Was it her son …?” Mother Francis asked.

“Her only child.” The woman’s eyes were eager but anxious. “I’m her neighbor. She’s going to spend the night with me. I’ve sent my sister in to look after the other lads.”

“Lads?”

“She keeps students you see. This was her boy’s first day at College.”

The nun’s face was sad. Beside them, the anguished figure of Kit Hegarty rocked to and fro.

“You see Sister, Mother, I’m the worst one for her. I have everything. A husband, and a family, and Kit has nothing now. She doesn’t want to be with the likes of us. She doesn’t want anything nice and normal and safe. It’s only reminding her of what she hasn’t got.”

Mother Francis looked at the woman with appreciative eyes. “You’re obviously a very good friend Mrs.…?”

“Hayes, Ann Hayes.”

Mother Francis was kneeling down beside Frank Hegarty’s mother.

She reached out and held the woman’s hand. Kit looked up, startled.

“In a few days, when the funeral’s over, I want you to come and stay with me,” she said softly.

The ravaged face looked at her. “What do you mean? Who are you?”

“I’m someone like you. I’ve lost my child in a sense. I could tell you about it, maybe you could advise me. You see, I’m not a real mother. You are.”

“I was.” Kit smiled a terrible twisted grimace.

“No, you are, you still are, you’ll always be his mother, nobody can take that away from you. And all you gave him, all you did for him.”

“I didn’t give him much. I didn’t do much for him. I let him have that bike.” She clawed at Mother Francis’s hand as she spoke.

“But you had to. You had to give him freedom. That was the greatest gift, that was what he would have wanted most. You gave him the best he could want.”

Nobody had said anything like this to Kit all day. Somehow she managed to take a proper breath, not the little shallow gasps she had been giving up to now.

Mother Francis spoke again. “I live in the convent in Knockglen. It’s simple and peaceful. And you could spend a few days there. It’s different, you see, that’s the main thing. It wouldn’t have memories.”

“I couldn’t go. I can’t leave the house.”

“Not immediately, of course, but whenever you’re ready. Ann will look after things for a few days. Ann Hayes and her sister.”

Somehow her voice had a hypnotic effect. The woman had become less agitated.

“Why are you offering me this?”

“Because my heart goes out to you. And because my
girl was hurt in the same crash … she’s going to be all right, but it’s a shock seeing her so pale in a hospital bed …”

“She’s going to be all right.” Kit’s voice was flat.

“Yes, I know. I know you would accept your son to have any injury if you thought he was going to come out.”

“Your girl, what do you mean …?”

“She was brought up in our convent. I love her every bit as much as if she were my natural daughter. But I’m no use as a mother. I’m not out in the world.”