by Maeve Binchy
Patsy asked Mrs. Hogan if she’d like her to wet another pot of tea.
“Ah, go on, mam, you’d need tea on a bad day like this,” Patsy said encouragingly.
“That would be nice, Patsy.” She sank back into her chair relieved.
It hadn’t been so wet earlier, when Benny had left for her first day at College. Benny in her navy jumper and white blouse with the navy and gray checked skirt.
“You’ll be the belle of the ball,” Eddie had said to her, bursting with pride.
“Oh, Father, I won’t. I’m so big and drab-looking,” Benny had said suddenly. “I’m like some kind of hearse. I caught sight of myself in the mirror.”
Eddie’s eyes had filled with tears. “Child, you’re beautiful,” he had said. “Don’t talk about yourself like that. Please. Don’t upset your mother and me.”
Annabel had wanted to hug her and tell her that she looked lovely. Big, certainly, but with that lovely glowing skin and all that chestnut hair tied back in a navy and white ribbon, she looked what she was: a girl from a nice family, from a house in the country, whose father ran an established business.
But it wasn’t a morning for hugging. Instead she had reached out her hand.
“You are a handsome, lovely girl, and they’ll all see that,” she said softly.
“Thank you, Mother,” Benny said dutifully.
“And what’s more, you’ll be very, very happy there. You won’t be going back to dreary little bed-sitters like a lot of girls have to do, or being half starved in some digs …” Annabel sighed with pleasure. “You’ll be coming home to your own good home every night.”
Benny had smiled at her but again it had seemed a little as if it were expected.
The girl was nervous, as any girl would be starting out in a new place, with strangers.
“It’ll be a quiet house from now on, mam.” Patsy arrived with the teapot and put it on the stand. She placed the quilted cozy on it and patted it approvingly.
“I expect she’ll make friends.” Annabel was doubtful. There had always been Eve and only Eve; it was going to be a big wrench.
“And will she be bringing them down here to stay do you think?” Patsy’s eyes shone at the excitement. She loved speculating.
“I hadn’t thought of that. But I’m sure she will. After all she can’t possibly stay up in Dublin with people we don’t know or have never heard of. She knows that.”
Mother Francis in the convent at Knockglen was thinking about Eve as she watched the rain fall steadily on the convent grounds. She would miss her. Obviously she had to go to Dublin and stay in the convent there; this was the only way she could train for a career. Mother Francis hoped that the community in Dublin would understand the need to make Eve feel important and part of the place as they had always done here in Knockglen. Eve had never felt remotely like a charity child, nor had there been any pressure on her to join the Order.
Her father had worked long hours for the convent in his time, he had paid many times over in advance for his child to be housed and educated, had he but known it. Mother Francis sighed and prayed silently that the Lord would look after the soul of Jack Malone.
At times there had been other options. Mother Francis and her old school friend of years ago, Peggy Pine, discussed it long and often.
“I could let her serve her time to me, and make her fit for a job in any shop in Ireland, but we want more than that for her don’t we?”
“Not that it isn’t a very worthwhile career, Peggy,” Mother Francis had said diplomatically.
“You’d love the few letters after her name though, wouldn’t you now, Bunty?” Few people on earth called Mother Francis that and got away with it.
And what Peggy said was true. Mother Francis did want everything that might help to push Eve up some kind of ladder. She had been such an innocent victim from the start, it seemed only fair to help her all they could now.
There had never been enough money to dress the child properly and even if there had been they didn’t have the style or the know-how. Peggy had advised from the wings, but Eve didn’t want outside charity. Anything that came from the convent she regarded as her right. St. Mary’s was her home.
It was certainly the only place she thought of as home. The three-room cottage where she had been born had lost its interest for Eve as her dislike of the Westwards had grown. When she was a youngster she was forever going up the long path through the convent kitchen gardens, past the briars and brambles, and peering in its windows.
When she was about ten she had even started to plant flowers outside it. Mother Francis had nurtured them behind the scenes, just as she had taken cuttings from the various bushes and plants in the convent garden and made a garden around the stony waste ground, the ugly edge of the cliff where Jack Malone had ended his life.
It was hard to know when this hatred of her mother’s family had begun. But Mother Francis supposed it was only natural. A girl brought up in a convent with the whole town knowing her circumstances could not be expected to feel any warmth toward the people who lived in splendor over in Westlands. The man who used to ride around Knockglen as if it were all part of his estate; that was Eve’s grandfather, Major Charles Westward. A man who had shown no wish to know his daughter’s child. He had not been seen much in recent years, and Peggy Pine—who was Mother Francis’s line of communication with the outer world—said that he was now in a wheelchair as a result of a stroke. And that small, dark young man Simon Westward, who was seen from time to time around Knockglen, he was Eve’s first cousin. He looked very like her, Mother Francis thought, or maybe she was being fanciful. There was another child, too, a girl, but at some fancy Protestant school up in Dublin, hardly ever seen around the place here.
As Eve’s resentment of the family had grown, so had her interest in the cottage dwindled. It stood empty. Mother Francis had never given up hope that Eve would live there one day, with a family maybe, and bring back some happiness to the little house that had known only confusion and tragedy.
And it was such a comforting little place. Mother Francis often sat there herself when she came up to tidy up. It had always been the custom in St. Mary’s for the nuns to go anywhere in the grounds to read their daily Office. You were as close to God in the gardens, under the big beech tree, or in the walled garden with its smell of rosemary and lemon balm, as you were in the chapel.
Nobody thought it odd that Mother Francis often went up the path past the blackberries to read her Office up by the cottage. She kept a watchful eye on any leaks that might have sprung. If there was anything she couldn’t cope with herself she would ask Mossy Rooney, a man of such silence and discretion that he found it hard to reveal his own name in case it might incriminate someone.
If anyone were to ask whether the cottage was for sale or rent, Mother Francis was always ready with a helpless shrug of the shoulders to say that things hadn’t been fully sorted out yet, but that it was in Eve’s name and nothing could be done until she was twenty-one. Nobody ever brought the matter up with Eve; and as for Mossy Rooney, who had replaced some of the window frames and the guttering, it would have been pointless asking him for information. The whole town knew he was silent as the tomb, a man of deep thoughts, none of them revealed; or possibly a man of no thoughts at all.
Mother Francis would have loved that old cottage to be Eve’s home; she could see in her mind’s eye a kind of life where Eve would bring her student friends home from university to stay there for weekends, and they would call to the convent and have tea in the parlor.
It was such a waste of a little stone house with a wooden porch and a view across the county as well as down the craggy rocks of the stone quarry. The cottage had no name. And the way things were it might never have a name or a life of its own.
Perhaps she should have approached the Westwards directly. But the reply to her letter had been so cold. Mother Francis had deliberately written on plain paper, not on the heavily embossed convent paper with O
ur Lady’s name all over it. She had spent sleepless nights composing the right words, words that would sound neither sleeveen nor grasping. Evidently she hadn’t found them. The letter from Simon Westward had been courteous, but firm and dismissive. His aunt’s family had raised no objections to her daughter being brought up in a Roman Catholic convent, and that was where their interest in the matter ended.
Mother Francis had not told Eve about the letter. The girl had hardened her heart so much; there was no point in giving her further cause.
The nun sighed heavily as she looked back at her sixth-year class, heads bent over their composition books all intent on their essay “The Evils of Emigration.” She wished she could believe that Mother Clare in Dublin would welcome Eve and tell her that the Dublin convent would be her new home for the next year.
It wasn’t Mother Clare’s style, but God was good, and perhaps she had, for once, been openhearted and generous.
She might have been generous; but on the other hand she probably hadn’t been. There had been no word from Eve for a week, which was not a good sign.
Eve’s room in the Dublin convent had no bedside table with a small radio on it. There was no candlewick bedspread. A small neat iron bed with a shabby well-washed coverlet, and one lumpy pillow and sheets which were hard to the touch. There was a narrow, poky cupboard and a jug and basin from earlier times but possibly necessary still today since the bathroom was a long way away.
It wasn’t like a prison cell, it was like a maid’s room, Eve told herself firmly. And in a sense that was how they must view her, a difficult prickly maid up from the country. Worst of all, a maid with airs and graces.
Eve sat on her bed and looked around the room. She could hear the regretful, gentle voice of Mother Francis telling her that life was never meant to be easy and that her best course was to work very hard now and get out of this place in record time. Study her grammalogues in the shorthand, take sharp interest in the bookkeeping, flex her fingers for the typing, practicing over and over. Listen and take notes on office procedure. In a year’s time or less she would land herself a good job, and a place to live.
Never again would anyone offer her an iron bed in a dark poky little room.
The Wise Woman would grit her teeth and get on with it, Eve told herself. That was a phrase she and Benny used all the time. What would the Wise Woman do about Sean Walsh? The Wise Woman would pretend that he did not exist. The Wise Woman wouldn’t buy another half pound of toffees in Birdie Mac’s because she’d get spots. The Wise Woman would do her homework because Mother Francis was on the warpath.
After a week Eve realized that the Wise Woman would also need to be a canonized saint to adapt to the new surroundings.
Mother Clare had suggested a regime of light housework, “to cover all your obligations my dear.”
And Eve would admit that she did have obligations. She was getting a free residential course for which others paid handsomely. There was no history of association with this convent as there was with St. Mary’s in Knockglen. She would have been eager to help from a sense of justice and also to do Mother Francis credit. But this was different.
Mother Clare’s idea of covering obligations centered around the kitchen. She thought perhaps that Eve might like to serve the breakfast in the refectory and clear away, and that she should also leave classes ten minutes before lunch and be back in the refectory to serve soup to the other students when they came in.
In all her years at St. Mary’s Eve Malone had never been seen by the other girls to perform one menial task. She had been asked to help behind the scenes as would any girl in her own home. But in front of the other pupils Mother Francis had made an iron-hard rule that Eve must never be seen to do anything which would give her a different status.
Mother Clare had no such qualms. “But my dear girl, you don’t know these other pupils,” she had said when Eve had politely requested that she should not be put in a public position of a non-fee-paying student.
“And I hardly will get to know them if they think I’m there on some different basis to themselves,” she had said.
Mother Clare’s eyes had narrowed. She sensed trouble in this girl, who seemed to have taken in the entire community below in Knockglen.
“But isn’t that the case, Eve? You are here on a different basis,” she had said, smiling very sweetly all the while.
Eve knew the battle had to be fought and won there and then before the other students arrived.
“I am happy to cover my obligations in whatever way you suggest Mother, but not in view of my fellow students. Can I ask you to rethink your plans for me.”
Two spots of red appeared on Mother Clare’s cheeks. This was pure insolence. But Mother Clare had fought many battles since she had taken her vows and she always realized when she was on poor ground. Like now. The community in Knockglen would defend Eve vociferously. Even some of the Sisters here in Dublin might see that the girl had a point.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she had said, and turned to swish her long black skirts and veil down the polished corridor.
Eve had spent the day wandering around Dublin with a heavy heart. She knew she had visited heavy housework upon herself because of her attitude.
She looked in shop windows and willed herself to think of the days when she would be able to afford clothes like she saw there.
Imagine if you could go in and buy maybe four of the pencil-slim skirts in different colors. They were only twelve shillings and eleven pence each. It didn’t matter that they were not great quality, you could have all those colors. And there was cotton gingham at two shillings a yard, you’d have a smashing blouse out of that at six shillings, maybe four of them to go with each of the skirts.
Eve dismissed the swagger coats. She was too short, they were too sweeping, they’d envelop her, but she’d love six pairs of the fully fashioned very sheer nylons just under five shillings each. And tapered slacks in wine or navy; she saw those everywhere. They varied in price, but usually around a pound a pair.
If she had a wallet of money, she’d go and buy them now. This minute.
But it wasn’t money for clothes that she wanted. Eve knew that only too well. She wanted a different kind of life entirely. She wanted to study, to spend three, even five, years at university. She was prepared to make sacrifices for it, but there seemed to be no way she could even begin.
There were stories of people putting themselves through college by working during the day and studying at night. But that would still mean the year with the terrible Mother Clare to qualify herself for any kind of work. Eve noticed that almost without realizing it her journey had taken her up through St. Stephen’s Green toward the big gray buildings of University College. It was still empty and she wandered at will around the main hall seeing only those involved in administration moving about.
The term would start next week. Lucky Benny would arrive as would hundreds of first-year students from all over Ireland.
Eve realized that there were thousands like herself who would never get there. But their expectations hadn’t been raised. They hadn’t been encouraged and treated well and led to believe that they had brains and insights like she had. That’s what made it so hard.
Eve knew that through these doors next week would come girls who only intended to use university as part of their social life. There would be unwilling students, who didn’t want to be here at all, who had other plans and other dreams, but came to satisfy the wishes of parents. There would be those who drifted in and would use the time to make up their minds. She felt a boiling rage about the Westwards, the family who cut off their own flesh and blood, who let her be raised by the charity of the nuns and never bothered themselves to think that she was now of university age.
There was no fairness on earth if someone who would appreciate it and work hard was kept out just because of a greedy, uncaring family who would prefer to forget the child of an unsuitable union rather than make a generous gesture and ensure
that some Right was done at the end of the day.
She looked in the glass-fronted noticeboards and read of the societies that would be re-forming when term started, and the new committees and the sports arrangements and the practice times, and the appeals for people to join this group and that club.
And she saw the big staircases leading up to the libraries and the lecture halls. She saw the red plush benches which would be filled with students next week, and she ached to be amongst them. To spend her days reading and writing and finding out more and talking to people, and to spend no time at all trying to outwit awful people like Mother Clare.
The Wise Woman would get on with her life and stop dreaming. Then she thought how tiring it was going to be for the rest of her life trying to be the Wise Woman all the time. It would be great to be the very Unwise Woman on occasion.
Benny took the bus to Dublin on the first day of term with more trepidation than she would ever have expected. At home they had behaved as if she were a toddler going to a first party in a party frock rather than a huge ungainly student eighteen years of age going to university dressed from head to toe in dark clothes.
She could still see the tableau this morning; her father with tears of pride in his eyes—she knew he would go to the business and bore everyone to death with tales about how his wonderful daughter was going to university. Benny could see her mother sitting there stretching her hand out full of what she had been full of for months now: the huge advantages of being able to come home every night by bus. Patsy, looking like the faithful old black mammy slave in a film except that she was white and she was only twenty-five. It had made Benny want to scream and scream.
And she had other worries, too, as she sat on the bus and started her university career. Mother Francis had told her that the bold Eve hadn’t written or telephoned, and that all the Sisters were dying to hear from her. Yet Eve had phoned Benny twice in the last week to say that life in the Dublin convent was intolerable and she would have to meet her in Dublin because otherwise she would go mad.