Circle of Friends (67 page)

“And if I’m not?”

“If I even
think
you’re not, we’ll go to Rome and get married there. I will tell everyone that my father wouldn’t have a wedding for us.”

“Go on, do that then,” he taunted her.

“I will if I have to. But I know you, you’d like to blow and blow and boast to your pals and the people you sell supplies to that your daughter’s having a big society wedding. You’d like to hire the clothes, because you’re still a handsome man and you know it.”

Emily Mahon looked at her daughter in amazement. Unerringly she had gone for the right targets. She knew exactly how to make her father give her a wedding.

Brian would think of nothing else. No expense would be spared.

“Go home with her for the weekend,” Kit urged Eve.

“No, she has to do it on her own.”

Knockglen was quick to judge, and it was important who began to spread the story. If Benny was there saying to people that her romance with Jack Foley was a thing of the past, then no serious whispers could begin. Benny was going to have to live with enough this summer without having to live with the pity of Knockglen as well. Eve was an expert on avoiding the pity of Knockglen.

Mother was still in the shop. It was after seven, and Benny had only looked in automatically and seen her there. Benny let herself in with the key she carried on her key ring.

“Glory be to God, you put the heart across me.”

Annabel Hogan was standing on a chair trying to reach something that had slid away on the top of a cupboard. Annabel was hoping that it was some nice rolls of paper with the name Hogan’s on it. Eddie had bought it years ago, but it had proved impractical to cut. It hadn’t been thrown out. It might be up here covered with dust.

Benny looked up at her animated face. Perhaps when people were older they did recover from things. It was impossible to believe that this was the same listless woman
who had sat by the fire with the book falling from her hand. Now she was lively and occupied, her eyes were bright and her tone had light and shade.

Benny said she was bigger, she’d reach. And true there it was, rolls of it. They threw it down on the floor. Tomorrow they would dust it, see if it was usable.

“You look tired. Was it a busy day?” Mother asked. It had been a day of heartache to walk the corridors and sit in lectures while the rumor about Jack and Nan spread like a forest fire. Sheila actually came and offered her sympathy as one would for a bereavement. Several groups had stopped speaking as Benny approached.

But Eve had been right. Better let the other story spread, too, the news that Benny was not wearing mourning. That she had been able to talk about it cheerfully. There had been no sign of either Nan or Jack in College. Benny kept thinking that Jack was going to appear by magic all smiles, tucking his arm into hers, and that the whole thing would have been a bad dream.

Mother knew none of this, of course. But she did realize that Benny looked worn out.

She thought she knew just what would cheer her up.

“Come up and look at what Patsy and I were doing today. We’ve pulled around a lot of the furniture on the first floor. We thought it would be grand for your party before we get the place painted. Then you could make as much mess as you liked without having to worry about it … you could even have some of the boys stay here and the girls stay at Lisbeg …”

Benny’s face was stony. She had forgotten the party. The great gathering planned for the weekend after Easter. She and Jack had talked of little else as they sat with their groups of friends over the last weeks. And all the time, every night possibly, he was saying good-bye to her and making love with Nan.

She gave a little shudder at how she had been deceived,
and how he had said with his eyes full of tears that he couldn’t help himself, and he was sorrier than he could ever say. She walked wordlessly up the stairs behind her mother and listened to the animated conversation about the party that would never be.

Gradually, her mother, noticing no response, let her voice die away.

“They are still coming aren’t they?” she said.

“I’m not sure. A lot of things will have changed by then.” Benny swallowed. “Jack and Nan are going to get married,” she said.

Her mother looked at her openmouthed.

“What did you say?”

“Jack. He’s going to marry Nan you see. So things might change about the party.”

“Jack Foley … your Jack?”

“He’s not my Jack anymore. Hasn’t been for some time.”

“But when did this happen? You never said a word. They can’t get married.”

“They are, Mother. The engagement will be in tomorrow’s
Irish Times
.”

The look on her mother’s face was almost too much to bear. The naked sympathy, the total incomprehension, the struggling for words.

Benny realized that Eve was probably right in this harsh face-saving exercise. Bad as it was now, it would be worse if she had said nothing and her mother had found out through someone else. Like today in College, it was over now, the shock and the pity and the whispering. They couldn’t continue indefinitely if Benny seemed to be in the whole of her senses. What was very hard was this pretense that she and Jack had been just one more casual romance, with no hearts broken at the end of it.

“Benny, I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“That’s all right, Mother. You were always the one to
say that College romances come and go …” The words were fine, but the tone was shaky.

“I suppose she’s …”

“She’s very excited, certainly, and … and … everything.”

If her mother said the wrong thing now she would lose the little control she still held on to Please let Mother not embrace her or say something about the fickleness of men.

Being in business for a few weeks must have taught Annabel a great deal about life.

There were just a few headshakes at the modern generation, and then a suggestion that they go home for tea before Patsy sent a search party out to look for them.

After supper she called on Clodagh. She moved restlessly around, picking things up and putting them down again as they talked. Clodagh sat and stitched, watching her carefully.

“Are you pregnant?” Clodagh asked eventually.

“I’m not the one who is, unfortunately,” Benny said. She told the tale. Clodagh never put down her needle. She nodded, and agreed, and disagreed and asked questions. At no time did she say that Jack Foley was a bastard, and that Nan Mahon was worse to betray her friend. She accepted it as one of the things that happen in life.

Benny grew stronger as she spoke. The prickling of her nose and eyes, the urge to weep, had faded a little.

“I still believe that it’s me he loves,” she said timidly at the end of the saga.

“It might well be.” Clodagh was matter-of-fact. “But that’s not important now. It’s what people do is important, not what they say or feel.”

She sounded so like Eve, so determined, so sure. In the most matter-of-fact way she said that Jack and Nan would probably make no better or no worse a fist of getting married
and having a child than most people did. But that’s what they would be. A couple with a child. And then another and another.

Whether Jack still loved Benny Hogan was irrelevant. He had made his choice. He had done what was called the decent thing.

“It was the right thing,” Benny said, against her will.

Clodagh shrugged. It might have been, or it might not, but whatever it was it was the thing he had done.

“You’ll survive, Benny,” she said comfortingly. “And to give him his due, which I don’t want to do at this moment, he wants you to survive. He wants the best for you. He thinks that’s love.”

Late that night at the kitchen table Patsy said that all men were pigs and that handsome men were out-and-out pigs. She said he had been well received and made welcome in this house, and that he was such a prize pig he didn’t know a lady when he saw one. That Nan wasn’t a lady for all her fine talk. He’d discover that when it was too late.

“I don’t think it was a lady he wanted,” Benny explained. “I think it was more a lover. And I wasn’t any use to him there.”

“Nor should you have been,” Patsy said. “Isn’t it bad enough that we’re going to have to do it over and over when we’re married, and have a roof over our heads. What’s the point in letting them have it for nothing before.”

It seemed to shed a gloomy light on the future that lay ahead for Patsy and Mossy. It was almost impossible to imagine other people having sex, but depressing to think that Patsy was dreading it so much.

Patsy poured them more drinking chocolate and said that she wished Nan not a day of luck for the rest of her life. She hoped that her baby would be born with a deformed back and a cast in its eye.

“I saw
The Irish Times
this morning.” Sean Walsh had made it his business to exercise the two Jack Russells up and down the street until he met Benny.

“Oh yes?”

“That’s a bit of a surprise isn’t it?”

“About Princess Soraya?” she asked innocently. The Shah of Persia was about to divorce his wife. There had been a lot about it in the press. Sean was disappointed. He had hoped for a better reaction, a hanging of the head. An embarrassment even.

“I meant your friend getting married?”

“Nan Mahon? That’s right. You saw it in the paper. We didn’t know when they’d be making it official.”

“But the man … she’s marrying your friend.” Sean was totally confused now.

“Jack? Of course.” Benny was bland and innocent.

“I thought you and he …” Sean was lost for words.

Benny helped him. They had indeed been friends, even walking out … as people might put it. But College life was renowned for all the first-year friendships, people moved around like musical chairs. Sean looked at her long and hard. He would not be cheated of his moment of victory.

“Well, well, well. I’m glad to see that you take it so well, Benny. I must say that when I saw them here, around Knockglen, I thought it was a … well, a little insensitive you know. But I didn’t say anything to you. I didn’t want to upset anybody.”

“I’m sure you didn’t Sean. But they weren’t here. Not here around Knockglen. So you were mistaken.”

“I don’t think so,” said Sean Walsh.

She thought about the way he said it. She thought about Clodagh having seen Jack at Dessie Burns’ petrol pump. She thought about Johnny O’Brien wondering where they did it. But it was beyond belief.
Where
could they have gone? And if Jack loved her, how could he have come back to her hometown to make love to someone else?

Somehow the weekend passed. It was hard to remember that when the phone rang it wouldn’t be Jack. It was hard when Fonsie talked about the party to realize that nobody would come to it. It was hard to believe that he wouldn’t be waiting in the Annexe with eyes dancing, waving her over, delighted to see her.

The hardest thing was to forget that he had said on the banks of the canal that he still loved her.

It was easy for Eve and Clodagh to dismiss that. But Benny knew Jack wouldn’t have said it unless he meant it. And if he did still love her none of the other business made sense.

She didn’t even allow herself to think about meeting Nan. The day would come, probably next week, when she would have to see her.

There had been conflicting stories. Nan was going to continue and finish her degree, while her mother did the baby-sitting. Or that Nan was going to leave immediately. That she was out already flat hunting. She had kept the cutting from the newspaper. She read it over and over to make it have some meaning.

John Anthony. She had known that. And even more like that the name he took at Confirmation was Michael, so
his initals were JAM Foley. She hadn’t known that Nan would have been baptized Ann Elizabeth. Probably Nan had been a pet name when she was a beautiful little baby. A baby who could get what she wanted. All the time.

Perhaps she hadn’t been able to get Simon Westward, and so she had taken Jack instead. How unfair of Simon not to want Nan. That’s what must have happened. Benny raged at him, and his snobbery. Nan was exactly the kind of person that would have livened up Westlands. If only that romance had continued then none of this would have happened.

Benny stood behind the counter in the shop, in order to free her mother and Mike for earnest discussions on new cloth. Heather Westward came in in her St. Mary’s uniform.

She had come in to buy a handkerchief for her grandfather. It was a treat because he was so ill, and it would cheer him up. Was there one for under one and six. Benny found one, and wondered should it be wrapped up for him. Heather thought not. He wouldn’t be able to open the wrapping paper, maybe just a bag.

“He mightn’t even know what it is, but if he does, perhaps it’ll make him feel better.” She looked at Benny for approval.

Benny thought she was right. She handed over the handkerchief for the old man who had shouted at Eve and called Eve’s mother a whore.

He might have done the same if Simon had married Nan.

Suddenly with a jolt Benny wondered if Nan had slept with Simon.

Suppose she had. Just suppose that she had, then this baby might be his, and not Jack’s after all.

Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

The whole thing that looked as if it could never be solved, might in fact have a solution after all.

She looked wild-eyed at the thought of it. She saw Heather watching her in alarm.

She
must
say it to Jack. She had to. He couldn’t be forced to marry someone he didn’t love, when it might not be his child. No matter that he had slept with Nan. Benny would forgive him. Like she had forgiven him over that business in Wales. It wouldn’t matter, just as long as he loved her.

But the feeling of excitement, the ray of hope, died down. Benny realized that she was clutching at straws. That Jack and Nan must have had this discussion. She wished she could remember how long ago it was that Nan had been talking enthusiastically about Simon, but if it was over for ages … then there was no hope.