by Maeve Binchy
Benny took off her coat and laid it down for them to sit on.
“No, no we’ll ruin it.”
“It’s only clay. It’ll brush off. You’re as bad as Nan,” she teased him.
“It’s Nan,” he said.
“What is?”
“She’s pregnant. She found out yesterday.”
Benny felt a jolt of shock for her friend. At the same time she felt the sense of surprise that Nan of all people had been going all the way with Simon Westward. Nan. So cool and distant. How had she made love properly? Benny would have thought that she would have been the last person on earth to have found herself in this position.
“Poor Nan,” she said. “Is she very upset?”
“She’s out of her mind with worry,” he said.
They sat in silence.
Benny went over the whole awfulness of it in her mind. A university career in ruins, a baby by the age of twenty. And possibly from the look of sympathy on Jack’s face a problem about Simon Westward.
Eve would have been right about him.
He would never marry Nan Mahon from the north side of Dublin, a builder’s daughter. And beautiful though she was, the fact that she had given in to him would make him less respectful of her than ever.
“What’s she going to do? I suppose she’s not going to get married?”
She looked at Jack.
His face was working with emotion. He seemed to be struggling for words.
“She is getting married.”
Benny looked at him alarmed. This wasn’t normal speech.
He took her hand, and held it to his face. There were tears on his face. Jack Foley was crying.
“She’s getting married … to me,” he said.
She looked at him in disbelief.
She said absolutely nothing. She knew her mouth was open and her face red with fright.
He was still holding her hand to his face.
His body was shaking with sobs.
“We have to get married, Benny,” he said. “It’s my baby.”
NINETEEN
Eve was in the Singing Kettle when she saw Benny at the door. At first she thought that Benny was going to join them and was about to pull up another chair.
Then she saw her face.
“See you later,” she said hastily to the group.
“You haven’t finished your chips.” Aidan was amazed. Nothing could be that pressing.
But Eve was out in Leeson Street.
She drew Benny away from the doorway where they were in the main path of almost everyone they knew.
Then, leaning against the iron railings of a house, Benny began to tell her the tale. Sometimes it was hard to hear the words, and sometimes she said the same words over, and over and over again.
Like that he said he loved her, he loved Benny. He really did and he wouldn’t have had this happen for the world. But there was nothing else that could be done. The announcement would be in The Irish Times on Saturday.
Eve looked across the road and saw a taxi letting someone off at St. Vincent’s Private Nursing Home. She dragged Benny through the traffic and pushed her into the back of it.
“Dun Laoghaire,” she said briskly.
“Are you girls all right?” The taxi driver watched them in the mirror. The big girl look particularly poorly, as if she might get sick all over his car.
“We have the fare,” Eve said.
“I didn’t mean that,” he began.
“You did a bit.” They both grinned.
Eve said to Benny that she should rest. There’d be plenty of time to talk when they got home.
Kit was out. She was shopping for a new outfit for Easter when she was going to Kerry as a guest of Kevin Hickey and his father.
They had the kitchen to themselves. Benny sat at the table and through a blur saw Eve prepare a meal for them. She noticed her small thin hands cut deftly through the cold cooked potatoes and trim the rinds from rashers of bacon. She saw thin fingers of bread dipped in a beaten egg.
“I don’t want any of this,” Benny said.
“No, but I do. I left my whole lunch in the Kettle, remember?”
Eve took a bottle of sherry from inside a cornflakes packet.
“It’s to hide it from the drinky students,” she explained.
“I’m not having any.”
“Medicinal,” Eve said, and poured out two huge tumblers-for them as she placed the big white plates of comfort food in front of them.
“Now start at the very beginning and tell me slowly. Start from when you sat down on the coat by the canal, and don’t tell me that he loves you or I’ll get up and throw every single thing that’s on this table on the floor and you’ll have to clear it up.”
“Eve, please. I know you mean to help.”
“Oh, I mean to help all right,” said Eve. Benny had never seen her face looking so grim. Not in all that long war she had waged with the Westwards, not in the fight with Mother Clare or in her hospital bed had she seen Eve Malone’s face so hard and unforgiving.
They talked until the shadows got longer. Benny heard Kit let herself in. She looked around at the untidy kitchen and the half-finished sherry bottle.
“It’s all right,” Eve said gently, “she’ll understand. I’ll do a quick clear-up.”
“I should be going for my bus.”
“You’re staying here. Ring your mother. And Benny … she’ll ask are you seeing Jack. Tell her you don’t see Jack anymore. Prepare her for it being over.”
“It needn’t be over. He doesn’t want it to be over. He says that we have to talk.”
Kit came to the door and looked around her in surprise. Before she could make any protest Eve spoke.
“Benny’s had a bit of a shock. We’re coping with it the best we can, by eating most of tomorrow’s breakfast. I’ll go up to the huckster’s shop and replace it later.”
Kit knew a crisis when she saw one.
“I have to hang up my finery. See you in half an hour to prepare supper. That’s if there’s any of that left?”
She nodded encouragingly and disappeared.
Annabel Hogan said that was fine. She had a lot of work to do in the shop. It would save them making a supper. She and Patsy would just get something from Mario’s. Benny thought bitterly of all the nights she had left Jack Foley to his own devices in Dublin while she had trundled wearily home to keep her mother company. Now she was less in the way staying in Dublin.
“Are you going out with Jack?” Mother asked.
Despite Eve’s warning, Benny couldn’t do it. She couldn’t tell her mother that it was over. Even to say it meant it might be true.
“Not tonight,” she said brightly. “No, tonight I’m just going out with Eve.”
Benny lay on Eve’s bed and bathed her eyes with cold water while Eve served the supper downstairs. The curtains were drawn and she could hear the clatter of plates and cutlery below. Kit had looked in briefly with a cup of tea. She had made no attempt to cheer her or sympathize. Benny could see why she must be such a restful person to live with.
She dreaded the bucketfuls of sympathy that Mother would pour on her, the endless wondering, and speculating and ludicrous little suggestions. Maybe if you wore paler colors or darker colors, perhaps if you went round to his house to talk to his mother. Men like girls who get on well with their mothers.
She wouldn’t tell Mother that Nan was pregnant. It demeaned them all somehow.
It put everything on a different level.
They walked, Benny and Eve, for what seemed and felt like hours and miles.
Sometimes they argued, sometimes Benny stopped to cry again. To say that Eve wouldn’t be so harsh if only she could have seen Jack’s face, and Eve would tighten her lips and say nothing. As they walked up the Burma Road and into Killiney Park, Benny said that it was all her fault. She hadn’t understood how a man needs to make love. It’s a biological thing, and when they sat by the obelisk and looked down on the bay she
said that Jack Foley was the most dishonest cheating man in the whole world, and why in God’s name did he keep saying he loved her if he didn’t.
“Because he did love you. Or thought he did,” Eve said. “That’s the whole bloody problem.”
It cheered Benny that Eve could find some ray of hope and sincerity in the whole thing. She thought that Eve had set her heart against him.
“I’m not against him,” Eve said softly. “I’m only against the idea of your thinking that somehow you’ll get him back.”
“But if he still loves me …”
“He loves the idea of you, and hates hurting you. That’s totally different.”
Eve put her small hand over Benny’s. She wished she had better words, softer ones. But she knew that Benny mustn’t sleep a night in false hopes. She pointed out that there was very little hope in a situation where one party was explaining things to an unbelieving family in Donnybrook and another in Maple Gardens.
“Why didn’t I sleep with him? Then we’d be explaining things tonight in Knockglen.”
When it was dark and they got back to Dun Laoghaire, Eve said Benny should have a bath.
“I don’t feel like going to bed.”
“Who said anything about that? We’re going out, on the town.”
Benny looked at her friend as if she were mad. After these hours of listening and appearing to understand she must have had no realization of how Benny felt, if she suggested going out.
“I don’t want to meet anyone now. I don’t want to be taken out of myself.”
Eve said that wasn’t the object of the outing. They were going to go everywhere and meet everyone. They were going to talk about Jack and Nan before it became gossip, and long before it appeared as an engagement announcement in the papers. Eve said that it was the only thing that could be done now. Benny must be seen to hold her head high. She didn’t want to live with the sympathy vote for the rest of her life. She didn’t want to be written off as someone who was let down. Let nobody be the one to tell Benny the news. Let Benny be the one to tell it everywhere.
“What you are asking is ridiculous,” Benny said. “Even if I could do it, everyone would still see through me. They’d know I was upset.”
“But they would never think you had been made a fool of,” Eve said, eyes burning. “The one good thing about Jack that came out of all this is that he told you first. He told you before he told his mates and asked them for advice. He gave you the story before he gave it to his parents, to the chaplain. You must use that advantage.”
“I don’t like to … and I suppose I keep hoping that his parents won’t let him.”
“They will. When they hear the sound of shotguns coming from Nan’s family and moral responsibility from the clergy. And he’s a man of twenty. In a few months he won’t even have had to ask them.”
It was a shadowy night. She only remembered patches of it. Bill Dunne asking was it an April Fool? He couldn’t believe that Jack was going to marry Nan Mahon. If he was going to marry anyone it should have been Benny. He said that three times in front of Benny.
Three times she answered brightly that she was far too busy becoming a tycoon in Knockglen and trying to get an honors B.A. to get married.
Carmel held her hand too tightly and too sympathetically. Benny wanted to snatch it away, but she knew Carmel meant well.
“It could be all for the best, and we’ll still be seeing lots of you won’t we?”
Sean said that he could be knocked over with a feather. And how was Jack going to manage as a married man, with all those years ahead of him? Perhaps he was going to give up his degree and go straight into his uncle’s firm as an apprentice. And where were they going to live? The whole thing was startling in the extreme. Had Jack given any indication of what he was going to live on? And presumably a family was planned. Fairly imminently. Hence the haste. Had Jack given Benny any idea of what he was going to live on? Through clenched teeth Benny said that he hadn’t.
Johnny O’Brien said he wondered where they’d done it. It gave the lie to the fact that you couldn’t get pregnant in a Morris Minor.
When they lay exhausted in their beds in Dun Laoghaire, Benny said sarcastically that she hoped that Eve had found the evening worthwhile, and that it had served her purposes.
“Most certainly it has,” Eve said cheerfully. “Firstly, you’re so tired that you’d sleep standing up, and secondly you’ve nothing to dread going in tomorrow. They know you’ve survived the news. They’ve seen you surviving.”
Aengus Foley had a toothache. He had been given whiskey on a piece of cotton wool. But not much sympathy and no attention. His mother’s voice had been sharp as she asked him to go to bed, close the door and realize that pain had to be borne in this life. It wasn’t permanent, it would go, probably at the precise moment they took him to Uncle Dermot the dentist.
They seemed to want to talk to Jack interminably in the sitting room. Twice he had come down to hear what it was all about, but the voices were low and urgent, and even the phrases that he could hear he couldn’t understand.
John and Lilly Foley were both white with fury as they stood in their drawing room listening to their eldest son describe how he had ruined his life.
“How could you have been so stupid?” his father said over and over again.
“You can’t possibly be a father, Jack, you’re only a child yourself,” said his mother with tears coming down her face. They begged, they pleaded, they cajoled. They would visit Nan’s parents, they would explain about his career. How it couldn’t be ruined before it had begun.
“What about her career? That has been ruined no matter what happens.” Jack’s voice was flat.
“Do you want to marry her?” his father asked, exasperated.
“I don’t want to marry her now, in three weeks time, obviously I don’t. But she’s a wonderful girl. We made love. I was the one who wanted to, and now we have no other option.”
The pleas began again. She might like to go to England, and give the child for adoption. A lot of people did that.
“It is my child. I’m not going to give it to strangers.”
“Forgive me Jack, but do we know that it is your child? I have to ask you this.”
“No, you don’t have to ask me, but I’ll answer you. Yes, I’m absolutely certain that it’s my child. She was a virgin the first night I slept with her.”
Jack’s mother looked away in disgust.
“And are we also absolutely sure that she is pregnant? It’s not just a false alarm? A frightened young girl. These things can happen, believe me.”
“I’m sure they can, but not this time. She showed me the report from Holles Street. The lab test was positive.”
“I don’t think you should marry her. Truly I don’t. She’s not even someone you’ve been going out with for a long time. Someone you’ve known, that we’ve all known, for years.”
“I met her on the first day in College. She’s been in this house.”
“I’m not saying that she’s not a very lovely girl …” Jack’s father shook his head. “You’re shocked now and frightened. Leave it. Leave it for a few weeks.”
“No, it’s not fair on her. If we leave it, she’ll think I’m going to change my mind. That I’ll be persuaded to …”
“And what do her parents think of all this mess …?”
“She’s telling them tonight.”
Brian Mahon was sober. He sat at his kitchen table wordless as Nan in an even tone explained to her father, mother and two brothers that she would be getting married to Jack Foley, a law student, in three weeks time.
She saw her mother twist her hands and bite her lip. Em’s dream lay broken into a thousand pieces.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Brian Mahon roared.
“I think it would be better for everyone if I did.”
“If you think … I’m going to let you …” he began, but stopped. It was all bluster anyway. The damage had been done
.
Nan sat looking at him cool and unflustered, as if she were telling him that she was going to the cinema.
“I suppose you knew all about this.” He looked at his wife.
“I deliberately didn’t tell Em, so that you couldn’t accuse her of covering things up,” Nan said.
“And by God there’s plenty to cover. He’s put you up the pole I suppose.”
“Brian!” Emily cried.
“Well, if he has, he’ll pay, he’ll pay good and proper, for whatever we decide to do.” He looked foolish as he sat there angry and red-faced, trying to be the big man in a situation over which he had no control.
“You’ll decide nothing,” Nan said to him coldly. “I decide. And our engagement will be in The Irish Times on Saturday morning.”
“Janey Mac, The Irish Times,” Nasey said. It was the poshest of the three papers, not often seen in the Mahon household.
“While you’re living in my house … I tell you that I make decisions.”
“Well, that’s just it. I won’t be living here much longer.”
“Nan, are you sure that this is what you want to do?”
Nan looked at her mother, faded and frightened. Always living her life in the shadow of someone else, a loud drunken husband, a mean-spirited employer at the hotel, a beautiful daughter whose fantasies she had built up.
Emily would never change.
“It is, Em. And it’s what I’m going to do.”
“But University … your degree.”
“I never wanted one. You know that. We both know that. I was only going there to meet people.”
They talked, mother and daughter, as if the men didn’t exist. They spoke to each other across the kitchen, across the broken dream, without any of the accusations or excuses that would be the conversation of most girls in this situation.
“But it wasn’t a student you were going to meet. Not this way.”
“The other didn’t work, Em. The gap was too wide.”
“And what do you expect us to do, coming home with this kind of news …” Brian wanted to put a stop to the conversation that he didn’t even understand.
“I want to ask you a question. Are you prepared to put on a good suit and behave well for four hours at a wedding, without a drink in your hand, or are you not?”