by Maeve Binchy
“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.
Jack brightened. He had been afraid that he was being selfish. No, Nan told him, it was a sign of how much he liked Benny around that he missed her.
He warmed to this view. Take tonight for example. There was a club dance. Everyone brought a partner. And here would he be, Jack Foley, yet again with no partner.
He looked across at her suddenly.
“Unless, of course …?”
“I wouldn’t like to. Benny might …?”
“Oh, come on. Benny won’t mind. Didn’t she ask us to go to the pictures together?”
Nan looked doubtful.
“You’re not worried about your old pal Cavalry Twill are you?”
“I told you, that’s long forgotten. He’s no part of my life.”
“Well then.” Jack was easy and somewhat cheered. “Will we meet at the club?”
Carmel was on the Ladies’ Committee. It involved helping to prepare the supper for the functions. Sean liked her to be involved. He was Treasurer, of course, and very important. She was buying bread for the sandwiches, when she met Benny, who was trying to turn her back on the sweet counter and make do with an apple.
“It’s the Tiffin Bar that’s almost reaching out its arms at me from the shelf,” Benny said. “Thank God you came in. I was nearly going to buy it.”
“It’d be a shame to go back on the Tiffin now,” Carmel said.
Benny didn’t like the feeling that seemed to hang unspoken that there had been years of wedging chocolate bars down her throat. She bought the apple unenthusiastically.
“It’s a pity you’re not going to be here tonight,” Carmel said. “The party’s going to be great. They’ve given us much more money than usual. We’re going to have sponge flans filled with whipped cream and decorated with chocolate flake. Oh, sorry, Benny, but you’re not here, so you won’t be tempted anyway.”
“I am here as it happens. I’m staying with Eve,” Benny said.
“Great,” said Carmel warmly. “See you tonight.”
“Ring him,” Eve said. “Ring him and tell him you’re in town.”
“He knows. He must know. I told him.”
“They never listen. Ring him.”
Benny said she’d have to talk to that woman, Jack’s mother, who always made people sound as if they were looking for aut
ographs instead of trying to speak to her son. Eve said that was nonsense. Benny had only phoned the house once. She must ring now. Jack would be delighted.
From the house in Dun Laoghaire Benny eventually did phone.
“I’m sorry, but he’s gone out to the rugby club. They’re having some kind of party tonight. He said he’d be late back.”
“He can’t have known you were in town,” Eve said.
“No.”
They sat at the kitchen table. Neither of them suggested that Benny should just dress up and go into the club anyway.
Neither of them said it had all been the forgetfulness of men, and that Jack would be delighted to see her.
They concentrated instead on Kit Hegarty, who was going out with Kevin Hickey’s father.
“Don’t cheapen yourself now, remember,” Eve warned.
“He won’t respect you,” said Benny.
Kit said that it was wonderful to see the high moral tone of the younger generation. She was relieved to know that this was their attitude.
“It’s not our attitude for ourselves. We have no restraint at all,” Eve assured her. “It’s only for you.”
“I wish we had no restraint,” Benny said gloomily. “We might be better off.”
Annabel Hogan had brightened up the shop considerably by taking away some of the wooden panels and surrounds in the window. It did not look nearly so sepulchral and solemn. She had several V-necked jumpers in several colors displayed on stands. For the first time a man coming into Hogan’s might be able to browse and choose rather than knowing what he wanted before he came in the door.
It also meant that she could see out much more clearly, without having to peer.
She saw Sean Walsh walk into Healy’s Hotel without a backward glance at the business where he had worked for so long.
She knew that he had left his belongings there while he went away to make his plans. Perhaps he had got a job somewhere and he had returned to collect his belongings. Peggy Pine had said that Sean had hopes of Mrs. Healy. Annabel doubted it. Dorothy Healy was no fool. She would know quicker than most that Sean would not have left Hogan’s as he did unless there had been an incident. He was no longer an aspiring merchant in the town.
“I’m no longer a person of substance in this town,” Sean Walsh said to Mrs. Healy.
She inclined her head graciously. There had been a time when he thought he would have more to offer, something to bring to the request he was going to make. But circumstances had changed.
Her head was angled like a bird considering its options. Sean spoke of his admiration for her. The respect in which she was held. The potential in Healy’s Hotel, a potential as yet not fully realized.
He said there was a need for an overseer, someone to look after the daily business, the nuts and bolts, while Mrs. Healy’s own flair was used where it was of most use in greeting the customers, and being a presence.
Dorothy Healy waited.
He spoke of his admiration, his gratitude for her interest in him and his career, the affection that he hoped he was correct in thinking had grown between them. He was sorrier than he could ever say that things had not worked out as he would have liked. He had always envisaged himself making this speech, when he was a partner in a business and the owner of a small property on the quarry road.
He spoke a lot of the time with his head hanging, and addressed many of his remarks to Mrs. Healy’s knees. She looked at his dead-looking hair, which would be perfectly all right if he used a good shampoo and went to a proper barber. When he looked up at her anxiously, his pale face working with the anxiety of his proposal, she smiled at him encouragingly.
“Yes, Sean?”
“Will you accept my proposal of matrimony?” he said.
“I shall be happy to accept,” said Dorothy Healy.
She saw some color flood into his face and join the look of disbelief.
He reached out and touched her hand.
He didn’t realize that he was a far likelier prospect now than he had been before.
Mrs. Healy wanted no refurbished cottage up on a path by the quarry.
She wanted no connections with a dying clothing business across the road. She needed a man who could manage the heavy and duller side of the hotel for her. And she knew that since Sean Walsh must have been thrown out because he was found with his hand in the till across the road that he would have to be careful in his new employ.
She had him where she wanted him now.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said.
But as the afternoon became evening they found a lot to say. Plans were made, big plans and little plans. A jeweler in Ballylee would be visited for a ring. Father Ross would be consulted about a date. Sean would visit Dublin and buy three suits off the peg since he was a stock size. Sean would be declared the manager as of Monday. He would live in the new building which had been erected at the back. Sean hadn’t been aware of its purpose. He had thought it some kind of storehouse. Together they looked at it. It had all the makings of a fine family house.
As if Mrs. Healy had known that this would happen one day.
Paddy Hickey was a fine dancer. And he said Kit was light as a feather.
“It was the hand of God that directed my son to your house,” he said.
“That and the notice I have up in the University,” Kit replied.
“Will you come down to Kerry with me?” he asked.
She looked at his big square handsome face. He was an honorable man, who wouldn’t run away from her.
“I might, one day, go down and see the place you’re from,” she said.
He had told her that his family was reared. That Kevin was the youngest lad. That his place was grand and modern, the kitchen had the best Formica in it, and you could eat your dinner off the tiled floor.
He said he had nice neighbors and relatives who knew all about Mrs. Hegarty the widow in Dublin who had given such a home to Kevin.
“I’m only a recent widow,” Kit said.
“Well, I didn’t know that, until you told me, and they need never know it, and I suppose Joe Hegarty would be pleased to know that someone was looking after you.”
“I never called him Joe, in all the years. I never called him that,” she said almost wonderingly.
“Maybe that was part of it all,” said Kevin Hickey’s father, who had every intention of making this woman his wife.
The mournful sound of the foghorn boomed around Dun Laoghaire Harbor. Eve was so used to it now that she hardly heard it anymore.
But she stirred and looked at her clock with the luminous hands. It was half-past three.
She listened. Benny didn’t seem to be breathing the way a sleeping person does. She must be lying there awake.
“Benny?”
“It’s all right. Go back to sleep.”
Eve turned on the light. Benny was propped up against her pillows in the small camp bed. Her face was tearstained.
Eve swung her legs out of the bed and reached for her cigarettes.
“It’s just that I love him so much,” wept Benny.
“I know, I know.”
“And he must have gone off me. Just like that.”
“It’s a misunderstanding. For God’s sake, if he was going with anyone else we’d know.”
“Would we?”
“Of course we would. You should have rung earlier. You’d have saved yourself all this. You’d be out somewhere in a steamy car trying to keep your clothes on you.”
“Maybe I kept them on me too much.”
“Stop blaming yourself. You always think it’s your fault.”
“Would you tell me if you know? Really and truly would you tell me? You’d not keep it from me to be kind?”
“I swear I’d tell you,” Eve said. “I swear I’d not let you be made a fool of.”
The party was great. Carmel was in the kitchen most of the time and so didn’t see the way Jack Foley and Nan Mahon danced together. And how they found
everything funny, and hardly talked to anyone else.
Carmel was busy washing plates when Jack Foley got Nan’s coat and took her home.
“I’m honored to be allowed to take you home. Bill Dunne and the boys say you never tell them where you live.”
“Maybe I don’t want them to know,” Nan said.
They sat outside the door of Maple Gardens and talked. The light of the streetlamp on Nan’s face made her look very beautiful. Jack leaned across and kissed her.
She didn’t move away when he bent over to kiss her. Instead she clung to him eagerly.
It was very easy to kiss and hold Nan Mahon. She didn’t move away and pull back just as you were feeling aroused. He stroked her breast through the lilac silky dress she wore under her coat.
His voice was husky. There was no other sensation outside this car.
When she did pull away she spoke to him, cool and unruffled and different to the woman he had held in his arms, pliant, eager and wrapping herself close to him.
“Jack, don’t you think we should talk about Benny?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“She’s not here.” He realized that it sounded too harsh, too dismissive. “What I mean is that anything between Benny and me has nothing to do with this.” He reached for her again.
She leaned over and kissed him on the nose.
“Good night, Jack,” she said, and vanished. He saw her let herself into the house and the door close behind her.
It was the same ritual of hanging up the clothes, sponging them and brushing them.
Cleaning her face with cream and doing her stretching exercises. Though she might have to change those exercises. Nan lay in her bed and thought about the events of the day. She laid her two hands on her stomach where a lab report had proved what she knew already. That a child was beginning to grow. She did not think about Simon Westward. She would never think about him again, no matter what happened.
She lay in the bedroom that she and her mother had decorated over the years, the years when they had told each other Nan was like a princess, and that she would leave Maple Gardens and find a prince.
Her first attempt had not been very successful.
Nan stared ahead of her unseeingly and thought out the options.