Circle of Friends (33 page)

“I’m sure,” Benny said gloomily.

“It must be coming from the country,” Rosemary said, still with the look of mock admiration. “I expect they drink a lot there don’t they?”

“Oh, they do,” Benny said. “But differently. I mean when I drink gin in the country it’s usually by the neck out
of a bottle. It’s a rare treat to get it in a glass and mixed with Club Orange.”

They laughed as she had known they would.

It was never hard to make them laugh. It was very hard to make them look at you with different eyes though.

Benny looked at Jack, relaxed and happy, leaning back in his chair surveying the scene both around him and down on the tables near the dance floor. He would be the perfect host. He would ask every girl at the table to dance.

She felt an extraordinary urge to reach across and stroke his face, just touch his cheek gently. She wondered was she going mad? She had never known an urge like that before.

He would ask her to dance soon. Maybe now, perhaps the very next dance, he would lean across the table and smile. He would put out his hand toward her and smile with a slight questioning look. She could see it happening so clearly, she almost believed it had happened already.

“Benny?” he might say, just like that, and she’d get up and walk down the stairs with him, hands touching lightly. And then they would just move toward each other.

The bandleader had said that their vocalist would knock strips off Tab Hunter in any singing contest and he would now sing “Young Love” to prove it.

Benny willed Jack to catch her eye and dance three soft slow numbers with her, beginning with “Young Love.”

But Rosemary caught his eye first. Benny didn’t know how she did it, it might have been something to do with some awful beating of her eyelashes, but she managed to drag his glance over to her.

“Rosemary?” he said in that voice which he should have used to say “Benny?”

Her heart was like a lump of lead.

“Will you risk it Benny?” Aidan Lynch was at her elbow.

“Lovely, Aidan, thank you.”

She stood up and went downstairs to the floor where Jack Foley and Rosemary were dancing and Rosemary had put both her arms around Jack’s neck and was leaning back a bit away from him as if to study him better.

The dance was a success every year. This year the organizers seemed to think it was better than ever. They measured these things by enthusiasm. The spot prizes went very well.

“First gentleman up with a hole in his sock.”

Aidan Lynch won that easily. He pointed out that the part you put your foot in was a hole. They had to give it to him. He got a huge cheer.

“How did you know that?” Benny was impressed.

“A friend of mine was a waiter here once. He told me all the spots.”

“What are the other questions?” Benny asked.

“There’s one which says ‘The first lady up with a picture of a rabbit.’ That’s easy too.”

“It is? Who’d have a picture of a rabbit?”

“Anyone with a threepence. There’s a rabbit on the thruppeny piece.”

“So there is. Aren’t you a genius Aidan?”

“I am Benny, I am, but not everyone apart from yourself and myself recognizes this.”

They were welcomed as heroes back to the table and the wine they had won was opened.

“More drink. Aren’t you marvelous, Benny,” Rosemary said. She had somehow managed to nestle her body into Jack’s by leaning against him. Benny wanted to get up and smack her face hard. But fortunately Jack had moved away and the need that she felt to separate them passed.

Some waltzes were announced. Benny didn’t want to dance this set with Jack. Waltzes were too twirly, too active. No time to lean against him, to touch his face even accidentally.

The others were starting to go downstairs as the music soared up at them. “Che sarà, sarà, whatever will be, will be.”

A tall, handsome boy came over to the table and asked courteously, “May I ask Nan for just one dance please, you have her all evening … is that all right? Nan, will you?”

Nan looked up, everyone else seemed to be occupied.

“Of course,” she said, and went smiling to the dance floor.

Benny remembered at school when you were picked for teams the awful bit about being the last one to be chosen. Or worse when there was an uneven number and Mother Francis would say “All right Benny you go with that team” at the very end. She remembered the musical chairs and being the first one out. She had an uneasy feeling that it was all going to happen again.

Jack was with Rosemary again! She saw Bill Dunne and another boy, Nick Hayes, talking at the end of the table, miles from where she was. If they had noticed her and come to sit with her or asked her to join them that would have been all right.

Benny sat with a fixed smile on her face, fiddling with the menu which said they would have melon soup, chicken and trifle. She wondered absently had they forgotten it was a Friday. She poured out a fizzy orange drink into her glass and drank it. From the corner of her eye she saw a waiter approaching with a large metal jug about to refill the water jugs on the table.

Benny stood up. “No,” she said. “No, they don’t want any.”

The waiter looked an old man. He looked tired. He had seen too many of these student dances, and danced at none of them.

“Excuse me, miss, let me fill it.”

“No.” Benny was adamant.

“Even if you don’t want any, the ones that did get to dance might want it when they come back,” he said.

There was something in the mixed pity and scorn of his speech that brought a sharp sting of tears to her eyes. “They said they didn’t
like
any more water. Before they went off to dance. Truly.”

She must not make him suspicious either. Suppose he reported something odd about their table.

A great weariness came over her. “Listen,” she said to him. “I don’t give a damn. They told me they didn’t want any more but I don’t care. Fill it up if you’re set on it. What the hell.”

He looked at her uneasily. He obviously thought she was slightly mad, and that it was kind of somebody to have given her an outing.

“I’ll go on to the next table,” he said hastily.

“Great,” Benny said.

She felt awkward sitting on her own. She would go to the ladies’. There was no one to excuse herself to. Nick and Bill were having an animated discussion at the far end of the table; they didn’t see her go.

In the lavatory she sat and planned. The next dance would probably be rock and roll. That wasn’t what she wanted for her dance with Jack either. She wouldn’t catch his eye for this one. She’d wait until it was something lovely and slow again. Maybe they’d have “Unchained Melody.” She loved that. Or “Stranger in Paradise.” That was nice too. “Softly, Softly” was a bit too sentimental. But it would do.

To her surprise she heard Rosemary’s voice at the handbasins outside.

The waltzes couldn’t be over yet surely. They normally had three of them.

“He is utterly gorgeous isn’t he?” Rosemary was saying to someone. “And he’s nice too, not full of himself like a lot of those sporty fellows are if they’re any way good-looking.”

Benny didn’t recognize the other girl’s voice. Whoever she was she thought that Jack and Rosemary were together.

“Have you been going with him long?” she asked wistfully.

“No, I’m not going out with him at all.
Yet
, that is,” she added menacingly.

“He looked pretty keen out there.”

Benny’s heart lurched.

“He’s a good dancer as well as everything else. The waltz isn’t my strong point. I pretended I had turned my ankle. I just wanted to come in here for a rest.”

“That was clever.”

“Well, you have to use every trick in the book. I said to him that I’d grab him for another dance later because we didn’t finish this one.”

“You’ve got no competition.”

“I don’t like the look of Nan Mahon. Did you see her dress?”

“It’s out of this world. But you look just as good.”

“Thanks.” Rosemary was pleased.

“Where is he now?”

“He said he’d finish off the waltzes with Benny.”

Benny’s face burned. He had
known
she was a wallflower. He had bloody known. He hadn’t deigned to ask her for a full dance, but when ravishing Rosemary walked out on him, he’d get good old Benny for the rest of it.

“Who’s Benny?”

“She’s that huge girl—from way down the country. He knows her through her family or something. She’s always turning up at these things.”

“No competition there then?”

Rosemary laughed. “No, I don’t think so. Whoever she is, her people must have money. They know the Foleys somehow and she’s wearing a very expensive dress. I don’t know where she got it, but it’s fabulous, brocade and beautifully
cut. It takes stones off her. She says she got it in Knockflash or wherever she lives.”

“Knockflash?”

“Somewhere, real hick town. She no more got it there than she got it in the Bog of Allen.”

Their voices faded. They had freshened themselves up, resprayed their hair, put on more perfume. They were ready to go out again, full of confidence, and face it all.

Benny sat on the lavatory. Ice cold. She was huge. She was no competition for anyone. She was the kind of person someone would come and finish off a dance with but not choose in the first place.

She looked at the small wristwatch her mother and father had given her for her seventeenth birthday. It was five to ten.

More than anywhere in the world she wanted to be sitting by the fire in Lisbeg. Her mother in one chair, her father in another and Shep looking at pictures in the flames and wondering what it was all about.

She would like to be hearing the kitchen door latch go and Patsy come in from her walk with Mossy and make them all a cup of drinking chocolate. She didn’t want to be in a place where people said she was huge and no competition and must have lots of money and be a family friend of the Foleys to be invited anywhere. She didn’t want to be fighting to save jugs of gin on tables for people who wouldn’t dance with her.

But wishing wouldn’t get her home out of this humiliating place. Benny decided that she would take the good out of what she had overheard. It was good that her dress looked expensive and well cut. It was good though sad that it was necessary to hear that it took stones off her. It was good that Rosemary wasn’t any way sure of Jack. And it was good that he hadn’t found her sitting at the table, lonely and abandoned, and now he couldn’t feel he had fulfilled his obligation to dance with her. There were lots of good things,
Benny Hogan told herself as she took the little piece of cotton wool that Nan’s mother had soaked in Joy perfume for them and rubbed it behind her ears.

She would go back and Rosemary would never know that her cruel dismissive remarks had only served to make Benny feel more positive and confident than ever.

They were making an announcement from the stage that the meal would be served shortly, and thanks to a special dispensation from the Archbishop’s House the Friday abstinence need not be observed. There was a huge cheer.

“How did they get that?” Eve asked.

“The Archbishop knows we’ve all been so good he wants to reward us,” Jack suggested.

“No, it’s just that chicken’s the easiest to serve. You know everyone gets a wing. They breed special chickens for functions, with ten wings,” Aidan said.

“But why would the Archbishop want us to have chicken seriously?” Benny asked.

“It’s a deal,” Aidan explained. “The dance organizers promise not to have dances on Saturday night that might run into the Sabbath day and the Church lets them eat chicken on Fridays.”

“You ran away on me.” Jack leaned over to Benny just as the soup was being served.

“I what?”

“You ran off. I was looking for you to waltz with me.”

“No, I didn’t,” Benny said smiling. “That was Rosemary that ran off on you. She hurt her ankle. I expect you mix us all up, we all look the same to you.”

The people around laughed. Rosemary didn’t. She looked at Benny suspiciously. How did she know about the ankle.

Jack used the chance to make a flowery compliment. “You don’t all look the same. But you all look marvelous. I
mean it.” And he was looking straight at Benny when he said it. She smiled back and managed not to make a joke or a smart remark.

There was a raffle during the meal, and the organizers came around to invite Rosemary and Nan to go and sell tickets.

“Why us?” Rosemary said. She didn’t want to leave her post. The committee didn’t want to explain that it was easier to force people to buy tickets if beautiful women were doing the asking. Nan had stood up already.

“It’s for charity,” she said. “I certainly don’t mind.”

Rosemary Ryan looked very annoyed. Nothing had been going her way this evening. Nan had won all the honors in this little incident and that big Benny across the table seemed to be smiling at her in some awful smug knowing way.

“Of course I’ll come too,” she said, jumping to her feet.

“Mind your ankle,” Jack said, and she looked at him sharply. He was probably just being concerned, but there was something about Benny’s eyes she didn’t like.

The man who thought he was streets ahead of Tab Hunter but just hadn’t got the breaks also thought he was a pretty good Tennessee Ernie Ford and went down to great depths in his version of “Sixteen Tons,” a song Benny had detested since it had been popular when they were studying for the Leaving Certificate and Maire Carroll had always managed to be singing it when she was near Benny.

Benny was dancing with Nick Hayes.

“You’re very light to dance with. It’s like holding a feather,” he said in some surprise.

“It’s easy to dance if someone leads well.” She was polite.

He was all right, Nick Hayes, but only all right.

Jack was dancing with Nan.

Somehow it was more disturbing than watching him dance with Rosemary.

Nan didn’t make those very obvious little efforts. She really made no play for him at all and that must be maddening to someone like Jack Foley who was used to everyone adoring him. In fact they were very much alike those two. She hadn’t really noticed it before.