by Maeve Binchy
Bill Dunne came through the kitchen to go to the bathroom.
“Sorry,” he said as he saw Aidan and Eve in each other’s arms. “You wouldn’t know where to put yourself these days.”
“All right,” Eve conceded, “just so long as I don’t have to talk to her.”
Benny was dancing with Teddy Flood when Eve came into the room. Jack was talking to Johnny and Sean. He was as handsome and assured as ever. He looked delighted to see her.
“Eve!”
“Hallo, Jack.” Unenthusiastic, but not rude. She had made a promise to Aidan. Hospitality must never be abused.
“We brought you a vase, a sort of glass jug. It would be nice for all the daffodils and everything,” he said.
It was a nice jug. How did someone like Jack Foley do the right thing so often? How did he know she had daffodils, he hadn’t been here since Christmas, when there was nothing but holly in bloom.
“Thanks. That’s lovely,” she said. She moved around the room, emptying ashtrays, making spaces where the plates could be put down.
Nan stood on her own on the edge of a group.
Eve couldn’t bring herself to say any words of greeting. She opened her mouth, but she couldn’t find anything to say. She went back to the kitchen and stood at the table leaning on both hands. The rage she felt was a real thing, you could almost take it out of her and see it, like a red mist.
She remembered how Mother Francis, and Kit Hegarty, and many a time Benny, had warned her that this temper wasn’t natural. It would only hurt her in the end.
The door opened, and Nan came in. She stood there in her fresh flowery print, the breeze from the window slightly lifting her blond hair.
“Listen, Eve …”
“I won’t, if you don’t mind. I have a meal to prepare.”
“I don’t want you to hate me.”
“You flatter yourself. Nobody hates you. We despise you. That’s different altogether.”
Nan’s eyes flashed now. She hadn’t expected this.
“That’s a bit petty of you, isn’t it? A bit provincial? Life goes on. Aidan and Jack are friends …”
She looked proud and confident. She knew she held all the winning cards. She had broken all the rules and yet she had won. Not only was she able to take away her only friend’s boyfriend, find somewhere, the Lord knew where, to sleep with him, and then get him to agree to marry her, she was also expecting everything to remain the same as it had been in their social life.
Eve said nothing. She looked at her dumbfounded.
“Well, say something, Eve.” Nan was impatient. “You must be thinking something. Say it.”
“I was thinking that Benny was probably your only friend. That of every one of us she was the only one who just liked you for being you, not just for being glamorous.”
Eve knew that this was pointless. Nan would shrug. If she physically didn’t shrug her shoulders, she would mentally. She would say that these things happened.
Nan would take, she would take everything she saw. She was like a child crawling toward a shining object. She took just by instinct.
“Benny’s better off. She’d have had a lifetime of watching him, of wondering.”
“And you won’t?”
“I’ll cope.”
“I’m sure you will, you’ve coped with everything.”
Eve realized she was shaking. Her hands were trembling as she filled the jug with water and started to arrange a bunch of flowers that someone else had brought.
“I chose that for you,” Nan said.
“What?”
“The vase. You don’t have one.”
Suddenly Eve knew where Jack and Nan had spent their nights together. Here in this house, in her bed.
They had driven to Knockglen, come up the path, taken her key and let themselves in. They had made love in her bed.
She looked at Nan aghast. That was why she had had the feeling that someone had been in the house. The strange undefined sense of someone else’s presence.
“It was here, wasn’t it?”
Nan shrugged. That awful dismissive shrug. “Yes, sometimes. What does it matter, now …”
“It matters to me.”
“We left the place perfect. No one would ever know.”
“You came to my house, to my bed, to take Benny’s Jack in my bed. In Benny’s town. Jesus Christ, Nan …”
Now Nan lost her temper, utterly.
“By God, I’m sick of this. I am sick of it. This Holy Joe attitude, all of you desperate to do it, playing around the edges, not having the guts or the courage, confessing it, titillating everyone still further …”
Her face was red and angry.
“And don’t talk to me about this cottage … don’t talk as if it was the Palace of Versailles. It’s a damp, falling-down shack … that’s what it is. It hasn’t electricity. It has a stove that we couldn’t light for fear you’d find the traces. It has leaks, drafts, and it’s no wonder they say the place is haunted. It feels haunted. It smells haunted.”
“Nobody says my house is haunted.” There were tears of rage in Eve’s eyes.
Then she stopped. People had said that they heard someone playing the piano here at night.
But that was ages ago. Jack didn’t play the piano. It must have been before Jack.
“You brought Simon here too didn’t you?” she said.
The memory of Simon playing the piano in Westlands came back to her. That day she had gone up there with Heather, the day the old man had cursed at her and called her mother a whore. Nan said nothing.
“You brought Simon Westward to my bed, in my house. You knew I’d never have let him over the doorstep. And you brought him in here. And then, when he wouldn’t marry you, you tricked Jack Foley …” Nan was suddenly pale. She looked around her at the door to the room where the others were dancing.
The music of Tab Hunter was on the record player.
“Young love, first love …”
“Take it easy …” Nan began.
Eve had picked up the carving knife. She started to move toward her, the words came tumbling out. She couldn’t control them if she tried.
“I will not take it easy. What you have done, by Christ, I won’t take it easy.”
Nan wasn’t near enough to reach the handle of the door to the sitting room. She backed away, but Eve was still moving toward her, eyes flashing and the knife in her hand.
“Eve, stop!” she cried, moving as fast as she could out of range. She lurched against the bathroom door so hard that the glass broke.
Nan fell, sliding down on the ground, and the broken glass ripped her arm. Blood spurted everywhere, even on to her face.
The dress with mauve and white print became crimson in a second. Eve dropped the knife on the floor. Her own screams were as loud as Nan’s as she stood there in her kitchen amid the broken glass, the blood and the meal ready to be served, and the sound of everyone joining in the song in the room next door.
“Young love, first love, is filled with deep emotion.”
Eventually someone heard them and the door opened.
Aidan and Fonsie were in first.
“Whose car is nearest?” Fonsie asked.
“Jack’s. It’s outside the door.”
“I’ll drive it. I know the road better.”
“Should we move her?” Aidan asked.
“If we don’t she’ll bleed to death in front of our eyes.”
Bill Dunne was great at keeping everyone back out of the kitchen. Only Jack. Fonsie and of course Tom, the medical student, in case he knew something the rest of them didn’t, were allowed in. Everyone else should stay where they were, the place was too crowded already.
They had opened the back door. The car was only a few yards away. Clodagh had brought a rug and clean towels from Eve’s bedroom. They wrapped the towel around the arm with the huge, gaping wound.
“Are we pushing the glass further in?” Fonsie asked.
“
At least we’re keeping the blood in,” Aidan said.
They looked at each other in admiration. Jokers yes, but when it came to the crunch, they were the ones in charge.
Benny sat motionless in the sitting room, her arm around Heather.
“It’s going to be all right,” she kept saying, over and over. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
Before he got into the car Aidan came over to Eve.
“Don’t let anyone go,” he warned. “I’ll be back very soon.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t let them crawl away because they think it’s expected. Give them something to eat.”
“I can’t …”
“Then get someone else. They need food anyway.”
“Aidan!”
“I mean it. Everyone’s had too much to drink. For God’s sake feed them. We’ve no idea who’ll be in on top of us now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if she dies, we’ll have the Guards.”
“Die! She can’t die.”
“Feed them, Eve.”
“I didn’t … she fell.”
“I know, you fool.”
Then the car with Jack, Fonsie, Aidan and a still hysterical Nan left.
Eve straightened herself up.
“I think it’s ludicrous myself, but Aidan Lynch says we should all have something to eat, so could you clear a little space and I’ll bring it in,” she said.
Stricken, they obeyed her. Even though they would never have suggested it, it was exactly the right thing to do.
Dr. Johnson looked at the arm and phoned the hospital.
“We’re bringing someone in, severed arteries,” he said crisply. The three white faces of the boys looked at him as he hung up.
“I’ll drive her,” he said. “Just one of you. Which one?”
Fonsie and Aidan stood back, and Jack stepped forward. Maurice Johnson looked at him. His face was familiar. A junior rugby player, he had been in Knockglen before. In fact Dr. Johnson had a feeling that he was meant to be Benny Hogan’s boyfriend. There had been talk that she was walking out with a spectacularly handsome young man.
He wasted no time speculating. He nodded to Fonsie and Aidan and drove out of his gate.
It was an endless Sunday. The whole of Knockglen had heard that there had been a terrible accident and an unfortunate girl from Dublin had slipped and fallen, cutting herself on a glass door.
Dr. Johnson had been quick to say that there wasn’t any horseplay and everyone seemed to him to be stone-cold sober. In fact he had no idea whether this was true or not, but he couldn’t bear the tongues to wag, and Eve Malone to get further criticism for things that were beyond her control.
Dr. Johnson also told everyone in sight that the girl would recover.
And recover she did. Nan Mahon was out of danger on the Sunday night. She had received several blood transfusions and there had been a time when her heartbeat had slowed down, causing alarm. But she was young and healthy. It was wonderful, the recuperative powers of the young.
Sometime on the Monday night, she miscarried. But the hospital was very discreet. After all, she wasn’t a married woman.
TWENTY
It was summer before Jack Foley and Nan Mahon had the conversation they knew that they would have to have. After her stay in the hospital in Ballylee she had gone back to Dublin.
That was at her insistence. She had seemed so agitated that Dr. Johnson agreed.
Jack still worked in his uncle’s office, but he studied for his first-year examination as well. There was, unspoken, the thought that he might return and do his degree in civil law. Aidan kept the notes from lectures.
Aidan and Jack met a lot, but they never talked about what was uppermost in their minds. Somehow it was easier to chat and be friends if they didn’t mention that.
Brian Mahon wanted to sue. He said that by God people were always suing his customers for harmless jackass incidents. Why shouldn’t they get a few quid out of it? That girl had to have some kind of insurance, surely?
Nan was very weak but her wound was healing, the livid red scar would fade in time.
Since she had never said aloud to her family that she was pregnant she did not have to report that this was no longer the case. She lay long hours in the bed where she had lain full of dreams.
She would not let Jack Foley come to see her.
“Later,” she had told him. “Later, when we are able to talk.”
He had been relieved. She could see that in his eyes. She could also see he wished it to be finished, over, so that he could get on with his life.
But she wasn’t ready yet. And she had had terrible injuries. He owed her all the time she needed to think about things.
“There’s no sign of your fiancé,” Nasey said to her.
“It’s all right.”
“Da says that if he leaves you now because of your injuries, we can sue him for breach of promise,” Nasey said.
She closed her eyes wearily.
Heather told over and over the story about the fall and the blood. She knew she would never have such an audience again. They hung on her every word. Heather aged twelve had been at a grown-ups’ party wearing a chef’s hat, and had seen all the blood. Nobody had taken her home or said she wasn’t to look. She didn’t tell them that she had felt dizzy and had cried into Benny’s chest most of the time. She didn’t tell them that Eve had sat white-faced, saying nothing for hours.
Eve took a long time to get over the night. She told only three people about having had the carving knife in her hand.
She told Benny, and Kit and Aidan. They had all said the same thing. They told her she hadn’t touched Nan, she was only gripping it. They told her that she wouldn’t have, that she would have stopped before she got near her.
Benny said that you couldn’t be someone’s best friend for ten years and not know that about them.
Kit said she wouldn’t have anyone living in the house unless she knew what they were like. Eve would shout and rage. She wouldn’t knife someone.
Aidan said the whole thing was nonsense. She had been gripping that knife all evening. Hadn’t he asked her to put it down himself. He said the future mother of his eight children had many irritating qualities, but she was not a potential murderess.
Gradually she began to believe it.
Little by little she could go into her kitchen and not see in her mind’s eye all that blood and broken glass.
Soon the strained look began to leave her face.
Annabel Hogan said to Peggy Pine that they would never know the full story of the night above in the cottage, no matter how much they asked. Peggy said that it was probably better not to ask any more. To think on more positive things like Patsy’s wedding, like whether she should sell Lisbeg and move in over the shop. Once people heard that it might be for sale there were some very positive inquiries, and figures that would make poor Eddie Hogan turn in his grave.
“He’d turn with pleasure,” Peggy Pine said. “He always wanted the best for the pair of you.”
It was the right thing to say. Annabel Hogan began to look at the offers seriously.
Benny found the summer term at University College was like six weeks in another city. It was so different to everything that had gone before. The days were long and warm. They used to take their books to the gardens at the back of Newman House on St. Stephen’s Green and study.
She always meant to ask about these gardens and who looked after them. They belonged to the University obviously. It was peaceful there and unfamiliar. Not like almost every other square inch of Dublin, which she associated with Jack.
Some nights she stayed with Eve in Dun Laoghaire, other nights they both went home on the bus together. There was a divan couch in Eve’s cottage; sometimes she spent the night up there. Mother, absorbed with plans and redecoration, seemed pleased that Benny had Eve to talk to. They called it studying, but in fact it was talking; as fuchsias started t
o bud, as the old roses began to bloom, the friends sat and talked. They spoke very little about Nan and Jack and what had happened. It was too soon, too raw.
“I wonder where they went,” Benny said once, out of the blue. “A couple of people said they saw them here in Knockglen, but where could they have stayed?”
“They stayed here,” Eve said simply.
She didn’t have to tell Benny that it was without her permission, and that it had broken her heart. She saw tears in Benny’s eyes.
There was a long silence.
“She must have lost the baby,” Benny said.
“I expect so,” Eve said.
She found herself thinking unexpectedly of the curse her father had laid on the Westwards.
And how so many of them had indeed had such bad luck.
Could this have been more of it. A Westward not even to survive till birth?
Mr. Flood was referred to a new young psychiatrist, who was apparently a very kind young man. He listened to Mr. Flood endlessly, and then prescribed medication. There were no more nuns in trees. In fact, Mr. Flood was embarrassed that he should ever have thought there were. It was decided that it should be referred to as a trick of the light. Something that could happen to anyone.
Dessie Burns said that what was wrong with the country was this obsession with drink. Everyone you met was either on the jar or off the jar. What was needed was an attitude of moderation. He himself was going to be a Moderate Drinker from now on, not all this going on tears or going off it totally. The management in Shea’s said that it all depended on your interpretation of the word “moderation,” but at least Mr. Burns had cut out the lunchtime drinking and that could only be to everyone’s advantage.
Knockglen was cheated of the wedding of Mrs. Dorothy Healy and Mr. Sean Walsh. It was decided, they told people, that since the nuptials would be second time around for Mrs. Healy and since Sean Walsh had no close family to speak of, they would marry in Rome. It would be so special, and although they would not be married by the Holy Father they would share in a blessing for several hundred other newly married couples.