Circle of Friends (61 page)

Mikey was turning the bus. He’d be going back to Dublin in five minutes, he told her. She paid her fare.

“You could have got a return, it would have been cheaper.” Mikey was always anxious to give people a bargain.

“I didn’t know I’d be going back,” Nan said.

“Life’s full of surprises,” said Mikey, looking at this blond girl in the cream and red outfit, who looked much too smart for this part of the world anyway.

Bill Dunne saw Benny come into the Annexe. She was looking around, hunting for Jack, but there was no sign of him. She stood in the line with the other students. If Jack had been there he would have kept a table, and she could have gone straight to join him.

Bill waved and said he had an extra coffee. In fact he hadn’t begun his own, but it seemed a way of calling her over. She looked very well today, in a chestnut-colored sweater, the exact color of her hair, and a pale yellow blouse underneath.

Bill and Benny talked easily. If she was glancing around for Jack she never mentioned it. And he never showed that he noticed, Benny was so easy to talk to. They discussed banning the bomb and if it would ever work. Benny said she was afraid it was like asking boxers to tie one hand behind their backs, or like saying we should go back to
bows and arrows once they had invented gunpowder. They wondered would Elvis really join the U.S. Army or was it just a publicity stunt. They talked of Jack Kerouac. Would every single person that he met On the Road have been interesting? Surely some of them must have been deadly bores.

The time flew, and they had to go back to lectures. If Benny was disappointed that Jack Foley hadn’t turned up she showed no sign of it. But then women were known to be very good at hiding their feelings. Most people didn’t know what they were up to half the time.

Rosemary saw everything and noted it all. She watched Bill and Benny chatting animatedly. They seemed like great friends. Perhaps he was consoling her about Jack. Rosemary had often thought that the feeling was unworthy, but she felt that Jack was too handsome for Benny. She thought it was like a mixed marriage. A Black and a White, a Catholic and a non-Catholic. You heard of those that did work. But the usual rule was that they didn’t. It wasn’t a view that anyone would agree with so she didn’t express it. Anyway people might think she was after Jack Foley for herself. Which oddly enough was not true. She had met a very nice medical student called Tom. He wouldn’t be qualified for years, which would give Rosemary time to be an air hostess or something with a bit of glamor in the meantime.

Sean Walsh stood on the quays waiting for the bus back to Knockglen. He had stayed in a men’s hostel in Dublin for five days to think things out. During the daytime he had walked through the menswear shops in Dublin trying to see himself working in any of them.

The prospect began to look less and less likely. He would not come armed with a reference. He would be unlikely to be taken on anywhere.

Little by little he began to realize how his horizons had
narrowed. The idea of buying his own place, renovating a cottage up over the quarry, was now only a fantasy. The notion of standing at the back door of his own business and watching the town walk by was not one he could hold anymore in his dreams. His name would be over no premises in Knockglen, the town where he had lived for ten years, and which, when all was said and done, he thought of as home.

He was going to go back now with a proposition.

He saw a very good-looking girl get off the bus, a blond girl in a cream suit with red trimmings. He recognized her as the friend of Eve and Benny. The girl who had been at Mr. Hogan’s funeral, and had been up at Westlands around Christmastime. She didn’t acknowledge him. She looked as if her mind was set on something else entirely.

Sean got onto the bus and looked without pleasure at Mikey, a man who was overfamiliar and with an unfortunate habit of referring to people’s physical appearance.

“There you are Sean, with a face as long as a wet week. Is it the return of the Prodigal we see?”

“I wish I understood what you meant, Mikey.”

“It’s a reference to a story Our Lord told in the New Testament, Sean. A man like yourself nearly eating the altar in the church should know that.”

“I am well aware of the parable of the Prodigal Son, but since he was a man who spent his life in wrongdoing, I’m afraid I can’t see the similarity.”

Mikey looked at Sean shrewdly. His wife had given him some highly colored speculation about what might or might not have happened in Hogan’s Outfitters. But obviously Sean Walsh had not run away.

“I was only wondering where the Fatted Calf was going to be killed, Sean,” Mikey said. “Maybe they’re basting it already down in Healy’s Hotel.”

Nan let herself into the house that she had left that morning. She took off her cream suit and hung it carefully on a padded hanger. She sponged it lightly with lemon juice and water. She put shoe trees in her red shoes, and she rubbed her red leather bag with some furniture cream, before wrapping it carefully in tissue paper and placing it beside her other four handbags in a drawer. She put on her best College clothes, combed her hair and went out to stand for a second time at the bus stop across the road.

Mrs. Healy had tidied up her office. She placed a big jug of daffodils on the window and two small hyacinths in plastic bowls on the filing cabinet.

She had been to Ballylee to have her hair done.

The new corset was very well fitting. It managed to distribute the flesh very well. So well, in fact, that a tight skirt looked remarkably fine. She wore her high-necked blouse and cameo brooch. The ones reserved for special occasions.

And after all it would be a special occasion this afternoon. She knew that Sean Walsh was coming back today. And that he was going to make a proposal of marriage.

It was lunchtime in the convent, and Mother Francis had her turn on Dinner Duty. That meant she walked up and down keeping order as the girls had their sandwiches. Then she supervised the tidying up of the hall, the careful cleaning and refolding of the greaseproof paper for tomorrow’s packed lunch, the airing of the room and the quick exercise in the yard.

She saw a group of the girls explaining to Heather Westward the nature of rosary beads.

“Why do you call them a pair, there’s only one?” Heather looked at the necklace of beads.

“They’re always called a pair.” Fiona Carroll, the youngest of the badly behaved Carroll children from the grocery was scornful.

“What does it mean ‘Irish Horn’?” Heather was interested.

“That’s just what they’re made from.” Siobhan Flood, the butcher’s granddaughter, dismissed it.

“So what does it
do
?” Heather demanded, looking fearfully at the rosary beads.

She was not at all convinced that it did nothing, that you did things with it, you used it to pray with, that was all. That the spacings on the beads meant that you said ten Hail Marys and then stopped and said a Glory Be and then an Our Father.

“Like the Lord’s Prayer?” Heather asked.

“Yes, but the proper way,” Fiona Carroll said, in case there should be any doubt about it.

They explained that the whole point was not to say one Hail Mary more than was needed. That was why they were made. Mother Francis had an art of listening to one set of conversations while being thought to be in the middle of others. Her heart was heavy when she heard the explanations being given to the unfortunate Heather.

After all her teaching, this is what they thought. They thought the point of this beautiful prayer to Our Lady was never to let yourself say one more Hail Mary than was necessary.

Wouldn’t a teacher be very foolish to think that anything ever got into their heads? Perhaps the Mother of God would be touched and pleased by the innocence of children. Mother Francis would, at this particular lunchtime, have liked to take them out individually and murder them one by one.

Kit answered the phone at lunchtime. It was Eve wanting to know if Benny could stay the night. She knew the answer would be yes, but between them there had always been courtesies like this.

Kit was pleased. She wanted to know was there a dance or an occasion.

“No, there’s not.” Eve sounded worried. “She said she wants her mother to get used to her being away from home.”

“And what about Jack Foley?”

“That’s the question I wanted to ask and didn’t,” Eve said.

Hogan’s had closed for lunch. Annabel, Patsy and Mike adjourned to the back room and ate shepherd’s pie and tinned beans. Mike said he hadn’t felt as well in years. These midday dinners in the shop would build you up for the afternoon. Patsy said it was a grand, handy place to cook. They should move up here altogether.

Nan tried three pubs before she found them. It was nearly closing time. Almost the Holy Hour when the Dublin city pubs closed between half-past two and half-past three.

“Well, look who’s here.” Bill Dunne was pleased.

“Caught you, Nan. You’re on a pub crawl,” said Aidan.

Jack as always said the right thing. He said it was great to see her and what would she like.

Nan said she was sick and tired of studying and she had come out to find a few handsome men to take her mind off her books. They were all flattered to think she had set out to look for them. They sat around her in an admiring circle.

She looked fresh in her pale green jumper with a dark
green skirt and jacket. Her eyes sparkled as she laughed and joked with them.

“How goes the romance with Milord?” Aidan asked.

“Who?”

“Come on, Simon.”

“I haven’t seen him for ages,” she said.

Aidan was surprised. Only last night Eve had been fulminating about it all.

“Did it end in tears?” Aidan knew that Eve would demand the whole story from him, not just half-said, half-understood bits of conversation.

“Not a bit. Nothing could come of it. We knew that. He’s one world, I’m another,” Nan said.

“That’s establishment baloney. Just because he’s part of the crumbling classes,” Bill Dunne said.

“Exactly. And much as I know we should be nice to the crumbling classes, they’re a bit hard to take,” said Nan.

Bill, Jack and Aidan realized immediately that this Simon was besotted with Nan, but that she had thrown him over because she couldn’t go along with all that would be involved if she was to play the game as they wanted to play it at the Big House.

Aidan knew that Eve would be very pleased with this news. Jack knew that Nan was just saying what he knew already. Only a few weeks ago he had seen Simon approach Nan and beg to be taken back into her warmth, while she had been polite and distant. Bill Dunne was pleased that he could report to everyone else that Nan Mahon was in circulation again.

The barman mentioned that drinking-up time had long been exceeded. He looked stern, young law students weren’t going to be much help to him if he got an endorsement on his license.

Bill and Aidan drifted back to the University.

Jack dallied and spoke to Nan.

“I don’t suppose you’d think of being really bad and coming to the pictures with me.”

“Lord, no more Swamp Women!”

“We could look at a paper?”

They bought an
Evening Herald
.

Nan said, “What about Benny?”

“What about her?”

“I mean where is she?”

“Search me,” said Jack. There was nothing they could agree on. They walked slowly through the Green debating this one and that, heads close together inside the pages of the newspaper.

It took them a long time to get to Grafton Street. They still hadn’t made up their minds. The pubs were open again now. The Holy Hour was well over.

“Let’s have a drink and discuss it,” Jack suggested.

He had a Guinness. Nan had a pineapple juice.

Jack told her a long, sad saga about Benny never being there. Jack said he knew things were difficult in Knockglen and that Benny was trying to get her mother started in the shop. But he wondered was she taking it all on her shoulders too much.

“She shouldn’t stay holding her hand.” Nan agreed with him. She explained that she had never felt responsible for her mother, who went out to work every day and didn’t need anyone to mind her.