Circle of Friends (58 page)

Eve said she’d come down herself and help to search for the money.

“But we can’t go into his rooms. And if we were to get the Guards he’d hide it.”

“And he’s such a fox,” Eve added. “You’ll have to be very, very careful.”

There was now a Saturday lunchtime trade at Mario’s, toasted cheese slices and a fudge cake with cream. The place was almost full as Benny walked past.

She went in to admire Clodagh’s drastic changes. There were half a dozen people examining the rails and maybe four more in the fitting rooms.

Between them Clodagh and Fonsie had brought all the business in the town to their doorsteps. There were even people who might well have gone to Dublin on a shopping trip browsing happily.

“Your mother’s in great form altogether. She’s talking of shortening her skirts, and smartening herself up.”

“Mother of God, who’ll shorten her skirts for her? You’re too busy.”

“You
must
be able to take up a simple hem. Didn’t you say you had a sewing machine somewhere?”

“Yes, but I don’t know where it is in the lumber and rubble up in the shop.”

“Up in the Honourable Sean Walsh’s territory?”

“No, he’s right upstairs. The first floor.”

“Ah, get it out Benny. Get someone to drag it down to your house. I’ll come round for ten minutes and start you off.”

“It mightn’t be working,” Benny said hopefully. “Then your mother’ll have to look streelish won’t she?”

Benny decided she’d go back to the shop and see if the machine really was there and looked in workable condition before she asked Teddy Flood or Dekko Moore or someone with a handcart to help her home with it.

Sean wasn’t in sight in the shop. Only old Mike saw her go upstairs.

She saw the sewing machine behind an old sofa with the springs falling out. It couldn’t have been used for nearly twenty years.

It looked like a little table. The machine part was down in it. Benny pulled, and up it came, shiny and new-looking as well it might be, considering how little use it had had. It was quite well made she thought, with those little drawers on each side, probably for spools of thread and buttons and all the things that sewing people filled their lives with.

She opened one of the little drawers. It was stuffed with small brown envelopes, pushed up one against the other. It seemed an extraordinary way to keep buttons and thread. She opened one idly and saw the green pound notes, and the pink ten-shilling notes squeezed together. There were dozens and dozens of envelopes, old ones addressed to the shop, originally with invoices, each with its postmark. With a feeling of ice water going right through her body, Benny realized that she had found the money Sean Walsh had been stealing from her father for years.

She didn’t remember walking home. She must have passed Carroll’s and Dessie Burns’ and the cinema as well as Pine’s and Paccy’s and Mario’s. Maybe she even saluted people. She didn’t know.

In the kitchen Patsy was grumbling.

“Your mother thought you must have missed the bus,” she said. Benny saw her preparing to put the meal on the table.

“Could you wait a few minutes, Patsy? I want to talk to Mother about something.”

“Can’t you talk and eat?”

“No.”

Patsy shrugged. “She’s above in the bedroom trying on clothes that stink of mothballs. She’ll run them out of the shop with the smell of camphor.”

Benny grabbed the sherry bottle and two glasses and went upstairs.

Patsy looked up in alarm.

In all her years in this house she had never been excluded from a conversation with the mistress and Benny. And never would she have believed that there was any subject that needed a drink being brought to the bedroom.

She said three quick Hail Marys that Benny wasn’t pregnant. It was just the kind of thing that would happen to
a nice big soft girl like Benny. Fall for a baby from a fellow who wouldn’t marry her.

Annabel listened white-faced.

“It would have killed your father.”

Benny sat on the side of the bed. She chewed her lip as she did when she was worried. Nan had said she must try to get out of the habit. It would make her mouth crooked eventually. She thought about Nan for a quick few seconds.

Nan wouldn’t pause to care about her father’s business. Not if it was being robbed blind by everyone in it. It was both terrible and wonderful to be so free.

“I wonder if Father knew,” Benny said.

It was quite possible that he had his suspicions, but that being Eddie Hogan he had put them away. He wouldn’t have opened his mouth unless he had positive proof. But it was odd that he had delayed the partnership deal. Mr. Green had said he was surprised that it had not been signed. Could Father have had second thoughts about going into partnership with a man who had his hand in the till over the years?

“Your father would not have been able to bear the disgrace of it all. The Guards coming in, a prosecution, the talk.”

“I know,” Benny agreed. “He’d never have stood for that.”

They talked as equals sitting in the bedroom that was strewn with the clothes Annabel had been trying on to wear on her first day in the shop. Benny didn’t urge her to make decisions and Annabel didn’t hang back.

Because they were equals they gave each other strength.

“We could tell him we know?” Annabel said.

“He’d deny it.”

They couldn’t call the Guards, they knew that. There
was no way that they could ask Mr. Green to come in, climb the stairs to the first floor and inspect the contents of the sewing machine. Mr. Green wasn’t the kind of lawyer you saw in movies who did this sort of thing. He was the most quiet and respectable of country solicitors.

“We could ask someone else to witness it. To come and see it.”

“What good would that do?” Annabel asked.

“I don’t know,” Benny admitted. “But it would prove it was there in case Sean were to shift it and hide it somewhere else. You know, when we speak to him.”

“
When
we speak to him?”

“We have to, Mother. When you go in there on Monday morning, he has to be gone.”

Annabel looked at her for a long time. She said nothing. But Benny felt there was some courage there, a new spirit. She believed that her mother would face what lay ahead. Benny must find the right words to encourage her.

“If Father can see us, it’s what he’d want. He’d want no scandal, no prosecution. But he wouldn’t want you to stand beside Sean Walsh as a partner knowing what we know now.”

“We’ll ask Dr. Johnson to witness the find,” Annabel Hogan said, with a voice steadier than Benny would ever have believed.

Patsy said to Bee Moore that evening that you’d want to have the patience of a saint to work in Lisbeg these days. There was that much coming and going, and doors being closed, and secrets, and bottles of sherry and no food being eaten and then food being called for at cracked times.

If this is what it was going to be like when the mistress went up into the shop then maybe it was just as well she was going to marry Mossy Rooney and his battle-ax of a mother and be out of it.

Patsy remembered Bee’s former interest in Mossy and altered her remarks slightly. She said she knew she was very lucky to have been chosen by Mossy and was honored to be a part of his family. Bee Moore sniffed, wondered again how she had lost him to Patsy. She said that things were equally confusing in her house. Everyone in Westlands seemed to have gone mad. Heather had started in St. Mary’s and was bringing what Mrs. Walsh called every ragtag and bobtail of Knockglen back up to the house to ride her pony. The old man had taken to his bed, and Mr. Simon was not to be seen, though it was reliably reported that he had been in Knockglen at least two nights without coming home. Where on earth could he have stayed in Knockglen if he hadn’t come home to his own bed in Westlands. It was a mystery.

Maurice Johnson said that he was a man whom nothing would surprise. But the visit of Annabel Hogan and her daughter, and its reason, caught him on the hop.

He listened to their request.

“Why me?” he asked.

“It’s you or Father Ross. We don’t want to bring the Church into it. It’s involving sin and punishment. All we need is someone reliable.”

“Let’s not delay,” he said. “Let’s go this minute.”

There were two customers in the shop when they went in. Sean looked up from the boxes of V-necked jumpers that he had opened on the counter.

There was something about the deputation that alarmed him. His eyes followed them as they went to the back of the shop toward the stairs.

“Is there anything …” he began.

Benny paused on the stairs and looked at him. She had disliked him ever since she had first met him, and yet at this
moment she felt a surge of pity for him. She took in his thin greasy hair and his long white narrow face.

He had not enjoyed his life or enriched it with the money he had taken.

But she must not falter now.

“We’re just going to the first floor,” she said. “Mother and I want Dr. Johnson to see something.”

She saw the fear in his eyes.

“To witness something,” she added, so that he would know.

Dr. Johnson went down the stairs quietly. He walked through the shop, his eyes firmly on the floor. He didn’t return Mike’s greeting. Nor did he acknowledge the figure of Sean standing there immobile with a box in his hands. He had said to the Hogans that he would confirm that in his presence they had removed upward of two hundred envelopes each containing sums of money varying from five to ten pounds.

There had been no gloating in the downfall of a man he had never liked. He looked at the little hoard in tightly screwed-up brown envelopes. The man was buying himself some kind of life, he supposed. Had he thought of wine, or women, or song when he had stashed Eddie Hogan’s money away? It was impossible to know. He didn’t envy the two women and their confrontation, but he admired them for agreeing to do it at once.

They sat in the room and waited. They knew he would come upstairs. And both of them were weak with the shock of their discovery and the shame that they would have to face when Sean came up to meet them.

Neither of them feared that he would bluster or attempt to deny that it was he who had put the money there. There was no way now for him to say they had made it up. Dr. Johnson’s word would be believed.

They heard his step on the stair.

“Did you close the shop?” Annabel Hogan asked.

“Mike will manage.”

“He’ll have to a lot of the time from now on,” she said.

“Have you something to say? Is there some kind of accusation?” he began.

“Let’s make it easy,” Annabel began.

“I can explain,” Sean said.

They could hear the Saturday afternoon noises of Knockglen, people tooting their car horns, children laughing and running by, free from school since lunchtime. There was a dog barking excitedly, and somewhere a horse drawing a cart had been frightened. They sat, the three of them, and heard him whinnying until someone calmed him down.

Then Sean began to explain. It was a method of saving, and Mr. Hogan had understood, not exactly agreed, but acknowledged. The wages had not been great. It was known that Sean did the lion’s share of the work. It had always been expected that he should build a little nest egg for himself.

Annabel sat in the high-backed chair, a wooden one they had never thought of bringing to Lisbeg. Benny sat in the broken sofa, the one she had pulled out to find the sewing machine. They hadn’t rehearsed it, but they acted as a team, neither of them said a word. There were no interruptions or denials. No nods of agreement or shaking of the head in disbelief. They sat there and let him form the noose around his neck. Eventually his voice grew slower, his hand movements less exaggerated. His arms fell beside his sides, and soon his head began to hang as if it were a great weight.

Then he stopped altogether.

Benny waited for her mother to speak.

“You can go tonight Sean.”

It was more decisive even than Benny would have been. She looked at her mother in admiration. There was no hate,
no revenge, in her tone. Just a simple statement of the position. It startled Sean Walsh just as much.

“There’s no question of that, Mrs. Hogan,” he said.

His face was white, but he was not now going to ask for mercy, or understanding, or a second chance.

They waited, to hear what he had to say.

“It’s not what your husband would have wanted. He said in writing that he wanted me to become a partner. You have agreed that with Mr. Green.”

Annabel’s glance fell on the table full of envelopes.

“And there is no one to confirm or deny that this was an agreement.”

Benny spoke then. “Father would not have liked the police, Sean. I know you would agree with that. So Mother and I are going along with what we are sure would be his wishes. We have discussed this for a long time. We think he would have liked you to leave this evening. And that he would like us to speak to no person of what has happened here today. Dr. Johnson, as you need hardly say, is silent as the grave. We only asked him here to give substance to our request that you leave, without any fuss.”

“And what’ll happen to your fine business when I leave?” His face had become crooked now. “What’s to become of Hogan’s, laughingstock of the outfitting business? Will it have its big closing-down sale in June or in October? That’s the only question.”

Agitated and with his features in the form of a smile he walked around rubbing his hands.

“You have no idea how hopeless this place is. How its days are numbered. What do you think you’ll do without me? Have old Mike, who hasn’t two brains to rub together, talking to the customers and God blessing them, and God saving them, like Barry Fitzgerald in a film? Have you, Mrs. Hogan, who don’t know one end of a bale of material from another? Have some greenhorn of an eejit serving his time
from some other one-horse town? Is this what you want for your great family business? Is it? Tell me, is it?”

His tone was becoming hysterical.

“What did we ever do to you that makes you turn on us like this?” Annabel Hogan asked, her voice calm.