Circle of Friends (59 page)

“You think you were good to me. Is that what you think?”

“Yes. In a word.”

Sean’s face was working. Benny realized she had never remotely suspected that he could feel so much.

He told a tale of being banished upstairs to servants’ quarters, being patronized and invited to break bread from time to time with the air of being summoned to a palace. He said that he had run the business single-handed for a pittance of a wage and a regular pat on the head. The cry that they would be lost without Sean Walsh, said often enough to render it meaningless. He said that his genuine and respectful admiration for Benny, the daughter of the house, was a matter of mockery, and had been thrown back in his face. He had been honorable and would have been proud to escort her to places even when she was not a physically beautiful specimen.

Neither Annabel nor Benny allowed a muscle to move in the face of the insults.

He had not intruded, imposed or in any way traded on his position. He had been discreet and loyal. And this was the thanks he was getting for it.

Benny felt a great sadness sweep over her. There was some sincerity in the way Sean spoke. If this was his version of his life, then this was his life.

“Will you stay in Knockglen?” she asked unexpectedly.

“What?”

“After you leave here?”

Something clicked then. Sean knew they meant it. He looked at them, as if he had never seen either of them before.

“I might,” he said. “It’s the only place I’ve really known you see.” They saw.

They knew there would be talk. A lot of talk. But on Monday the shop would open with Annabel in charge. They had only thirty-six hours to learn the business.

Mrs. Healy agreed to see Sean in her office. Even given his usual pallor, she thought he looked bad, as if he had just had a shock.

“May I arrange to have a room here for a week?”

“Of course. But might I ask why?”

He told her that he would be leaving Hogan’s. As of now. That he would therefore be leaving his accommodation there. He was vague in the extreme. He parried questions about the partnership, denied that there had been any fight or unpleasantness. He said that he would like to transfer his belongings across the road at a time when half the town wouldn’t be watching, like when they were gone home to their tea.

Fonsie saw him of course, saw him carrying one by one the four cardboard boxes that made up his possessions.

“Good evening, Sean,” Fonsie said gravely.

Sean ignored him.

Fonsie went straight back to tell Clodagh.

“I think I see a love nest starting. Sean Walsh was bringing twigs and leaves and starting to build it across in Healy’s.”

“Was he moving across, really?” Clodagh didn’t seem as surprised as she should be.

“In stealth and with lust written all over him for Dorothy,” Fonsie said.

“Well done, Benny,” said Clodagh, closing her eyes and smiling.

Maire Carroll had come up to the convent to ask for a reference. She was going to apply for a job in a shop in Dublin. As Mother Francis struggled to think of something to say about Maire Carroll that was both truthful and flattering, Maire revealed that Sean Walsh had been seen taking all his belongings and going to live in the hotel.

“Thank God, Benny,” Mother Francis breathed to herself.

Sunday was the longest day that any of them had worked. It had an air of unreality because the shutters were closed so that nobody should know they were there.

They would have looked a very strange crew to anyone who saw them. Patsy in her overalls scrubbing out the small room which had been filled with the results of a thousand cups of ill-made tea. Old Mike said that they took it in turns to make the tea and open the biscuits. The place had all the signs of it. The electric ministove had been brought down from Sean’s quarters upstairs. From now on there would be proper tea, and even soup or toast made.

Hogan’s was going to change.

And to help it change, Peggy Pine and Clodagh were there, as was Teddy Flood.

To none of them had any explanation been given apart from the fact that Sean Walsh had left, and they were in need of some advice. Clodagh said one business was the same as another. If you could run one you could run the lot, and she always hoped she might be seconded to get a steel works or a car plant on its feet.

Mike, who had never been the center of such attention, was asked respectful questions. It was the general opinion that Mike must be addressed slowly, and his answers weighed with the same deliberation that he gave them.

To fuss Mike would be counterproductive. Let him think there was all the time in the world.

Let him wander down no lanes of regret about Mr. Eddie and no tight-lipped mutterings about that Sean Walsh who wanted to be called Mister.

Slowly they pieced it together, the way the business was run. The people who had credit, and those who didn’t. The way the bills had been sent out, the reminders. The salesmen who came with their books for orders. The mills, the factories.

Haltingly Mike told it all. They listened and worked out the system, such as it was.

A thousand times Annabel Hogan cursed herself for not taking an interest and forming a part of the company when her husband was alive. Perhaps he would have liked it? It was only her own hidebound feelings that had kept her at home.

Benny wished that she had come to help her father. If only she could have had the time over again, then she would have spent Saturday afternoons here with him, learning about his life at work.

Would he have been proud of her and pleased that she was taking such an interest? Or would he have thought that she was a distraction in the all-male world of a gentleman’s outfitters? It was impossible to know. And anyway she had avoided the shop a lot because of Sean Walsh.

As they toiled on working out which bales of material were which, Benny let her mind wander. Could her parents seriously have expected her to marry Sean just because he had been helpful in the business? And even worse, suppose she had gone along with their views? Promised herself to him, allowed his disgusting advances and been engaged to him now? Think then how impossible it would have been once they discovered his theft. The mean, grubbing, regular stealing from a kind employer who had wished him nothing but well.

Patsy had heated up the soup and served the sandwiches. They sat companionably and ate them.

“Is it wrong of us, do you think, to work on a Sunday?” Mike was fearful about the whole thing.

“
Laborare est orare
,” Peggy Pine said suddenly.

“Could you translate for those of us without the classical education, Aunt?” Clodagh asked.

“It means that the Lord thinks working is a form of prayer,” Peggy said, wiping away the crumbs and settling down to writing out proper sales tickets which Annabel could understand.

They had opened up the back door of the shop late on Saturday night so they could come and go by the lane at the rear of the premises.

The sun shone on the disused backyard with its rubbish and clutter.

“You could make a lovely conservatory here,” Clodagh said, admiringly.

“What for?” Benny asked.

“To sit in, you clown.”

“Customers wouldn’t want to sit down, would they?”

“Your mother and you.”

Benny looked blank.

“Well, you are going to live here, aren’t you?”

“Lord no. We’ll be living in Lisbeg. We couldn’t live over the shop.”

“Some of us do, and manage fine,” Clodagh said huffily.

Benny could have bitten off her tongue. But there was no point in trying to take it back now.

Clodagh didn’t seem a bit upset.

“Good for you if you can,” she said. “I thought the object of all this was to try and turn this place round. You won’t do that if you don’t put some money into it. I assumed you were going to sell your house.”

Benny wiped her forehead. Was there ever going to be
any end to all this? When could she get back to living an ordinary life again?

Jack Foley telephoned Benny from nine in the morning until noon.

“She can’t be at mass
all
bloody morning,” he grumbled.

Benny telephoned Jack at home.

She got his mother.

“Is that you, Sheila?” she asked.

“No, Mrs. Foley. It’s Benny Hogan.”

She heard that Jack was out and not expected back until late. He had left quite early.

“I thought he was down in your neck of the woods, actually,” Mrs. Foley said.

She made it sound like a swamp with alligators in it. Like the film Benny hadn’t seen.

She forced her voice to be light and casual. No message. Just to say that she had rung for a chat.

Mrs. Foley said that she’d write it down straightaway. She managed to make it sound as if the name of Benny Hogan would be added to a long list of those who had already telephoned.

It was over, and she longed to celebrate. Everything she had wanted for the shop since the day Father had died had been achieved. They had had huge support from their friends in Knockglen. Sean had been rendered unimportant.

It was a night of triumph, she wanted to tell Jack all about it. The awful bits and the funny bits, the look on Sean’s face, Patsy making more and more tea, and sandwiches. Old Mike getting surges of energy like Frankenstein’s monster. Peggy Pine showing her mother how to ring up a sale. She wanted to tell him that from now on she
wouldn’t be needed so desperately at home. She would be free to spend several nights a week in Dublin.

She had a terrible foreboding that she had left it all too late. That she had been away too long.

B
rian Mahon said that it was great to be spending all that money paying fees for a university student when she didn’t get up for her bloody lectures.

Emily said he should hush. That was unfair. Nan worked very hard, and it was rare the girl had a lie-in.

“When she
is
in the house it would be nice to see her, just now and again,” he said.

Nan told them that she stayed with Eve out in Dun Laoghaire, on the occasions when she didn’t come home. Her father said it was a pity that woman in the guesthouse didn’t pay her fees and buy her clothes for her.

But he had to meet a man who had come in on the boat to the North Wall. He’d be down in a dockers’ pub. There was a deal about a consignment.

Emily sighed. There might be a deal about a consignment, but there would also be a day’s drinking. When he had gone she went upstairs.

Nan was lying on her bed with her arms folded behind her head.

“Aren’t you well?”

“I’m fine, Em. Honestly.”

Emily sat down on the stool opposite the dressing table.

There was something troubled in Nan’s face, some look
she had never seen before. It was surprise mixed with indecision.

Nan had never known either, not since she was a little girl.

“Is it … Simon?”

Normally Emily never mentioned his name. It was almost like tempting fate.

Nan shook her head. She told her mother that Simon was most devoted and attentive. He was down in Knockglen. She’d be seeing him for dinner tomorrow night. Emily was not convinced. She shook her head as she went downstairs, tidied away the breakfast things, put on her smart blouse and set out for work.

As she stood at the bus stop she wondered what was wrong with her daughter.

Back in her bedroom Nan lay and looked ahead of her. She knew there was no need to have sent the specimen to Holles Street Maternity Hospital. Her period was seventeen days late. She was pregnant.

Eve and Kit were up early. They had builders arriving and they wanted to show them from the beginning that this was a house with rules, a house like they had never known before.

They had left bags of cement and sand in the backyard the night before. The name on the sacks was Mahon.

“You must tell Nan that we’re putting a few shillings into her father’s pocket,” Kit said.

“No, Nan wouldn’t like to hear that. She doesn’t want to be reminded of her father and his trade.”

Kit was surprised.

Nan always seemed remarkably unpretentious for such an attractive girl. You never caught her stealing a look at herself in the mirror, or blowing about the people she had been out with.