Circle of Friends (69 page)

Jack Foley was just himself.

When told that a child was his, he accepted that it was. And when it was born, it would be theirs. She could leave university. She had made a good impression on the Foley parents. She could see that. There was a small mews at the end of their garden. In time it would be done up, in more time they would live in a house similar to his parents’. They would entertain, they would have dinner parties, she would keep in touch with her mother.

It would all be a great sense of peace compared to the never-ending contest. The game where the goalposts kept moving, and the rules changing.

Nan Mahon was going to marry Jack Foley, not just because she was pregnant, but because at the age of almost twenty she was tired.

Kit Hegarty had a lemon-colored suit and a white blouse for her trip to Kerry.

“You need some color to go with it. I keep forgetting we can’t ask Nan.”

“Have you spoken to her at all?” Kit asked.

“Nope.”

“God, you’re a tough girl. I’d hate to make you my enemy.”

The Hayeses next door had come in to wish Kit well. Ann Hayes said what she needed was a big copper-colored brooch and she had the very thing at home.

Mr. Hayes looked at Kit admiringly.

“Lord bless us Kit, but you’re like a bride,” he said.

“Stop putting so much hope in this. It’s only an outing.”

“Your Joseph would have been glad for you to meet another fellow. He often said.”

Kit looked at him startled. Joseph Hegarty would have said little to the Hayeses, he hardly knew them.

She thanked him, but said as much.

“You’re wrong Kit. He did know us. He sent us letters for his son.”

Eve’s heart chilled. Why did this man have to tell Kit now.

“He wanted to keep in touch with his boy. He wrote every month, giving his address as he moved on from place to place.”

“And Francis read these.”

“Frank read them all. He went to see him last summer when he was canning peas in England.”

“Why did he never say, why did neither of them ever say?”

“They didn’t want to hurt you. The time wasn’t right to tell you.”

“And why is the time right now?”

“Because Joe Hegarty wrote to me before he died. He wrote to say that if you met a good man I was to explain that you must never worry about having deprived your son of his father. Because you didn’t.”

“Did he know he was going to die?”

“Sure, we’re all going to die,” said Mr. Hayes, as his wife came back in and pinned the brooch on Kit Hegarty’s lapel.

Kit smiled, unable to speak. It was something she had been worrying a lot about lately. When she saw how close Paddy Hickey was to his sons, she wondered had she done wrong letting Francis grow up without knowing a father.

She was glad that it had been explained in front of Eve. It showed how much Eve was part of the family.

The Hayeses were going to keep an eye on the house for two weeks. The outing was going to be much longer than Kit had first thought when it had been described as a weekend. And Eve would be down in Knockglen. Kit was delighted they had decided to go ahead with their party. It would be a further betrayal to admit that there could be no party now. That the stars had gone.

When Carmel’s Sean had been organizing the finances, he had given some money to Jack as an advance. Jack was the one with most access to a car. Jack could get them a reduction through a wine merchant. He had been the one who was going to bring the drink. But obviously everything had changed now. And no one liked to remind Jack that he was already in possession of eleven pounds of the communal money.

Carmel’s Sean suggested they should forget it. The other boys agreed. Jack had quite enough on his plate without reminding him that he owed the kitty eleven pounds.

Heather was wonderful in the pageant.

Aidan, Eve and Benny were enormously proud of her. She was a stockier, more solid Simon of Cyrene than was normally shown by artists, but then surely they would have pulled from the crowd someone strong to help in the journey up the hill of Calvary.

Mother Francis had always urged the children to make up their own words.

Heather had been adept at this.

“Let me help you, with that cross, Jesus, dear,” she said to Fiona Carroll, who was playing Our Lord with a sanctimonious face.

“It’s a difficult thing to carry going uphill,” Heather added. “It would be much easier on the flat, but then they wouldn’t see the Crucifixion so well you see.”

There were tea and biscuits in the school hall afterward and Heather was greatly congratulated.

“It’s the best Easter ever,” she said, with her eyes shining. “And Eve says I can be a waitress at her party, next week, so long as I go home before the necking starts.”

Eve looked at Mother Francis sadly. A grown-up look of collusion, of admitting how children would hang you. Heather was unaware of anything amiss.

“Will your friend be here again?” she asked Benny.

“Which one?”

“The man that took to fancying Welsh girls for a bit, but came back.”

“He went off again,” Benny said.

“Better leave him to go then,” Heather advised. “He sounds a bit unreliable.”

Standing there in her sheet, in the middle of the party,
Heather had no idea why Eve, Aidan and Benny got such a fit of hysterical laughter, and had to wipe the tears out of their eyes. She wished she knew what she had said that was so funny, but she was glad anyway that it had pleased them all so much.

Everyone was delighted to be going to Knockglen. Not for just a party, but for a series of outings.

They would arrive on the Friday after six o’clock, when there would be drinks in Hogan’s, and then they would all adjourn to Mario’s for the evening. There were bunk beds and sofas and sleeping bags for the boys in Hogan’s shop; the girls were going to stay in Eve’s and Benny’s houses. Then there would be a great trek to Ballylee for lunch and a walk in the woods on Saturday and back for the main event, the proper party in Eve’s cottage.

They all said that the one at Christmas would take some beating. Eve said it would be better than ever now. An April moon, and the blossom out on the hedges and grass instead of mud around. There would be wild flowers all over the disused quarry, it would look less like a bomb site than it had done in winter. No one would slip on the mucky paths this time. They wouldn’t need to huddle by the fire.

Sister Imelda was as usual aching to be asked to help with the cooking.

“It’s no fun for you Sister if you can’t see them enjoying it,” Eve pleaded.

“It’s probably just as well I don’t see all that goes on up there. It’s enough for me to be told they like it.”

“If Simon and the woman from Hampshire come home that weekend, are you going to ask them?” Heather asked.

“No,” said Eve.

“I thought you only hated Grandfather. I thought you and Simon got on well enough.”

“We do.” Eve was dry.

“If he had married Nan, would you have come to the wedding?”

“You ask an awful lot of questions.”

“Mother Francis says we should have inquiring minds,” Heather said primly.

Eve laughed heartily. That was true. Mother Francis
had
always said it.

“I might have, if I’d been asked. But I don’t think your brother would ever have married Nan.”

Heather said it would all depend whether Nan had money or not. Simon couldn’t marry anyone poor because of the drainage and the fencing.

He had thought that Nan’s father was a wealthy builder in the beginning. She heard a lot of this from Bee Moore, but Bee always had to stop when Mrs. Walsh came in because Mrs. Walsh didn’t like gossip.

Heather was helping to tidy up the cottage garden. They had a big sack, which they were filling with weeds. Mossy would take it away later.

They worked easily, the unlikely friends and cousins, side by side.

Eve said that maybe they shouldn’t talk too much about Nan over the weekend. She was going to marry Jack Foley shortly. Neither of them would be here. There was nothing hush-hush, just better not to bring the subject up.

“Why?” Heather asked. Eve was a respecter of the inquiring mind. As they dug the dandelions and slashed back the nettles, she told an edited version of the story. Heather listened gravely.

“I think you’re taking it worse than Benny,” she said eventually.

“I think I am,” Eve agreed. “Benny fought all my battles for me at school. And now there’s nothing I can do for her. If I had my way, I’d kill Nan Mahon. I’d kill her with my bare hands.”

The night before they were all due to arrive Benny lay in bed and couldn’t sleep.

She would close her eyes and think that a lot of time had passed, but when she saw the luminous hands of the little pink clock she realized that it had only been ten minutes.

She got up and sat by her window. Out in the moonlight she saw the shape of Dr. Johnson’s house opposite, and the edge of Dekko Moore’s, where young Heather said she was going to work as a harness maker.

What had Benny wanted when she was Heather’s age, twelve? She had grown out of the wish for pink velvet dresses and pointed shoes with pom-poms. What had she wanted? Maybe a crowd of friends, people that she and Eve could play with without having to be home at a special time. It wasn’t very much.

And they had got it, hadn’t they. A whole crowd coming down from Dublin to herself and Eve. How little you knew when you were twelve. Heather Westward wouldn’t want to be a harness maker when she was twenty. She’d forget that this is what she had wanted now.

She couldn’t get Jack out of her mind tonight. The weeks in between had passed by without touching her. His face was just as dear as it always was, and never more dear than when he had cried on the canal banks and told her he still loved her and that he wouldn’t have had this happen for all the world.

She wondered what he and Nan talked about. Did Nan ever tell him how she had helped Benny to put on makeup, and to use good perfume. How Nan had advised Benny to hold in her tummy and push out her chest.

But it was madness to suppose that they ever talked about her at all.

Or to suppose that either of them even remembered
that they had been intending to spend this weekend in Knockglen.

“What are you going to wear?” Clodagh asked her next morning.

“I don’t know. I’ve forgotten. I can’t get interested. Please, Clodagh, don’t nag me.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. See you at Mario’s tonight then.”

“What about up above the shop first, that’s where we’re starting.”

“If you can’t be bothered to get dressed for it, why should I be bothered to go.”

“Damn you to hell, Clodagh. What’ll I wear?”

“Come into the shop and we’ll see,” said Clodagh, smiling from ear to ear.

By six o’clock they were coming up the stairs, exclaiming and praising. The huge rooms, the high ceilings, the lovely old windows, the davenport, the marvelous frames on the old pictures.

It was like Aladdin’s cave.

“I’d live here if I were you,” Bill Dunne said to Benny’s mother. “Not that your own house isn’t terrific …”

“I’m half thinking about it,” Annabel Hogan said to him.

Benny felt her heart soar. The groundwork was beginning to pay off. She was afraid to smile too much. Clodagh had sewed her into a very tight country-and-western-type bodice. She looked as if she were going to take out a guitar and give them a song. Johnny O’Brien said that she looked utterly fantastic. Fabulous figure, out-and-out, he said, showing her with his hands. Jack must be mad, he said helpfully.

They were all in high form to cross the street to rock the night away in Mario’s.

Eve nudged Benny as Sean Walsh, Mrs. Healy and the two Jack Russells went for an evening constitutional around the town.

Mario was delighted to see them, rather overwelcoming, Fonsie thought, until he heard that Mr. Flood had been in with a message from the nun in the tree saying that his cafe was a den of vice and must not only be closed down, but should be exorcised as well.

Any company other than Mr. Flood looked good to Mario at the moment.

Fonsie’s new jukebox, which Mario secretly thought looked like the product of a diseased mind, spat out the music. The tables were pushed back and those who couldn’t fit in the cafe watched and cheered from outside.

With a mixture of regret and amazement Mario looked back on the days before his sister’s son had come to work with him. The peaceful poverty-stricken days when his till hardly ever rang and most people couldn’t have told you there was a chip shop and a cafe in Knockglen.

On Saturday Benny and Patsy fried a breakfast for Sheila, Rosemary and Carmel. Then they went up to the shop and did the same for Aidan, Bill, Johnny and the man who was always called Carmel’s Sean.

“I do have an identity of my own,” he grumbled when Benny called out to know if Carmel’s Sean would like one egg or two.

“In this town if your name is Sean, you’d be wise to give yourself some other handle,” Benny said. Patsy got a fit of the giggles. It was magical to be able to mock Sean Walsh in these very premises.