by Maeve Binchy
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
About the Author
Praise for Maeve Binchy
“Binchy is a grand storyteller in the finest Irish tradition. . . . She writes from the heart.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A remarkably gifted writer . . . a wonderful student of human nature.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Reading one of Maeve Binchy’s novels is like coming home.” —The Washington Post
“Binchy’s genius is transforming storytelling into art.” —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
“For my money, any story told by Maeve Binchy is worth a hearing.” —Charlotte News & Observer
“Binchy’s tales combine warmth and spunk in a quintessentially Celtic way. . . . In the field of women’s popular fiction, the Dublin storyteller sticks out like a faultless solitaire on a Woolworth’s jewelry counter.” —Chicago Tribune
“Maeve Binchy’s novels of contemporary Ireland are pure pleasure to read.”—The Anniston Star
“An eloquent storyteller.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“[Binchy] is a generous writer—generous in her pages, generous with incidents, generous with laughter, generous with tears.” —The Dallas Morning News
“Binchy is a first-class storyteller.”—Cosmopolitan
AlSO BY MAEVE BINCHY
Light a Penny Candle
London Transport
The Lilac Bus
Firefly Summer
Silver Wedding
Circle of Friends
The Copper Beech
The Glass Lake
Evening Class
Tara Road
Scarlet Feather
Quentins
Nights of Rain and Stars
Whitethorn Woods
Aches and Pains (Nonfiction)
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Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in Viking,
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First New American Library Printing, November 2008
eISBN : 978-1-440-65366-7
Copyright © Maeve Binchy, 1985
All rights reserved
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For dearest Gordon with all my love
Prologue
PEOPLE SEEMED TO KNOW WITHOUT BEING TOLD. THEY CAME out of their houses and began to run down the main street. The murmur became louder, and almost without knowing they were doing it they started to check where their own families were. It was still just a figure, facedown in the water. They didn’t know for sure whether it was a man or a woman.
“Perhaps it’s a sailor from a ship,” they said. But they knew it wasn’t anyone who had gone overboard. No nice anonymous death of someone they didn’t know. No informing the authorities and saying a few prayers for the deceased unknown sailor. This was someone from Castlebay.
They stood in silent groups on the cliff top and watched the first people getting to the water’s edge: the boy who had first seen the waves leaving something frightening on the shore; other men too; people from the shops nearby and young men who were quick to run down the path. Then they saw the figures coming down the other path near the doctor’s house, kneeling by the body in case, just in case there was something in a black bag that could bring it back to life.
By the time Father O’Dwyer arrived with his soutane flapping in the wind the murmur had turned into a unified sound. The people of Castlebay were saying a decade of the rosary for the repose of the soul which had left the body that lay facedown on their beach.
Part One
1950~1952
IT WAS SOMETIMES CALLED BRIGID’S CAVE, THE ECHO CAVE, AND if you shouted your question loud enough in the right direction you got an answer instead of an echo. In the summer it was full of girls calling out questions, girls who had come for the summer to Castlebay. Girls who wanted to know would they get a fellow, or if Gerry Doyle would have eyes for them this summer. Clare thought they were mad to tell the cave their secrets. Specially since people like her sister Chrissie and that crowd would go and listen for private things being asked and then they’d scream with laughter about them and tell everyone. Clare said she’d never ask the echo anything no matter how desperate she was, because it wouldn’t be a secret anymore. But she did go in to ask about the history prize. That was different.
It was different because it was winter anyway, and there was hardly anyone except themselves in Castlebay in winter; and it was different because it had nothing to do with love. And it was a nice way to come home from school that way down the Cliff Road; you didn’t have to talk to everyone in the town, you could look at the sea instead. And suppose she did go down that crooked path with all the Danger notices on it, then she could go into the cave for a quick word, walk along the beach and up the real steps and be home in the same time as if she had come down the street talking to this person and that. In winter there was hardly any business so people waved you into shops and gave you a biscuit or asked you to do a message for them. She’d be just as quick going by Brigid’s Cave and the beach.
It had been dry, so the Danger bits weren’t so dangerous. Clare slid easily down the cliff on to the sand. It was firm and hard, the tide had not long gone out. The mouth of the cave looked black and a bit fright
ening. But she squared her shoulders; it looked just the same in summer yet people went in there in droves. She shifted her schoolbag to her back so that she could have both hands free to guide herself and once she got used to the light there was no difficulty seeing the little ridge where you were meant to stand.
Clare took a deep breath: “Will I win the history prize?” she called.
“Ize ize ize ize,” called the echo.
“It’s saying yes,” said a voice just beside her. Clare jumped with the fright. It was David Power.
“You shouldn’t listen to anyone else, it’s like listening in to confession,” Clare said crossly.
“I thought you saw me,” David said simply. “I wasn’t hiding.”
“How could I see you? Didn’t I come in out of the light? You were lurking in here.” She was full of indignation.
“It’s not a private cave. You don’t have to keep shouting Cave Occupied,” David retorted loudly.
“Pied pied pied pied,” said the cave.
They both laughed.
He was nice, really, David Power, he was the same age as her brother Ned—fifteen. They had been in Mixed Infants together, she remembered Ned telling someone proudly, wanting to share some experience with the doctor’s son.
He wore a tie and suit when he came home from school, all the time, not just when he went to Mass on Sundays. He was tall and he had freckles on his nose. His hair was a bit spiky and used to stick up in funny directions, one big bit of it fell over his forehead. He had a nice smile and he always looked as if he were ready to talk except that something was dragging him away. Sometimes he wore a blazer with a badge on it, and he looked very smart in that. He used to wrinkle his nose and tell people that it only looked smart when you didn’t see a hundred and eighty blazers like that every day at his school. He’d been at a boarding school for over a year but now it was closed because of scarlet fever. Only the Dillon girls from the hotel went to boarding school and of course the Wests and the Greens, but they were Protestants and they had to go to a boarding school because there wasn’t one of their own.
“I didn’t think it would answer really, I only tried it as a joke,” she said.
“I know. I tried it once as a joke too,” he confessed.
“What did you ask it as a joke?” she inquired.
“I forget now,” he said.
“That’s not fair—you heard mine.”
“I didn’t, I only heard eyes eyes eyes.” He shouted it and it called back the three words to him over and over.
Clare was satisfied. “Well I’d best be off now, I have homework. I don’t suppose you’ve had homework for weeks.” She was envious and inquiring.
“I do. Miss O’Hara comes every day to give me lessons. She’s coming . . . oh soon now.” They walked out onto the wet hard sand.
“Lessons all by yourself with Miss O’Hara—isn’t that great?”
“It is. She’s great at explaining things, isn’t she? For a woman teacher I mean.”
“Yes, well we only have women teachers and nuns,” Clare explained.
“I forgot,” David said sympathetically. “Still she’s terrific, and she’s very easy to talk to, like a real person.”
Clare agreed. They walked companionably along to the main steps up from the beach. It would have been quicker for David to climb the path with Danger written on it, it led almost into his own garden, but he said he wanted to buy some sweets at Clare’s shop anyway. They talked about things the other had never heard of. David told her about the sanitorium being fumigated after two pupils got scarlet fever; but all the time she thought that he was talking about the big hospital on the hill where people went when they had TB. She didn’t know it was a room in his school. She told him a long and complicated tale about Mother Immaculata asking one of the girls to leave the exercise books in one place and she thought that it was somewhere else and the girl went by accident into the nuns’ side of the convent. This was all lost on David, who didn’t know that you never under pain of terrible things went to the nuns’ side of the convent. It didn’t really matter to either of them, they were no strain on each other, and life in Castlebay could be full of strains so this was a nice change. He came into the shop and, as there was nobody serving, she took off her coat, hung it up and found the jar of Clove Rock. She counted out the six for a penny that he was buying and before she put the lid on the jar she offered him one courteously and took one herself.
He looked at her enviously. It was great power to be able to stand up on a chair in a sweetshop, take down a jar and be free to offer one to a customer. David sighed as he went home. He’d have loved to live in a shop like Clare O’Brien, he’d have loved brothers and sisters, and to be allowed to go up to the yard and collect milk in a can when the cows were being milked, or gather seaweed to sell to the hot sea baths in bundles. It was very dull going back to his own house now, to his mother saying he should really have some sense of what was what. It was the most irritating thing he had ever heard, especially since it seemed to mean anything and everything and never the same thing twice. Still, Miss O’Hara was coming tonight, and Miss O’Hara made lessons much more interesting than at school, he had once been unwise enough to explain to his mother. He thought she would be pleased but she said that Miss O’Hara was fine for a country primary school but did not compare with the Jesuits who were on a different level entirely.
Clare was sighing too, she thought it must be great altogether to go back to a house like David Power’s where there were bookcases of books in the house, and a fire on in that front room whether there was anyone sitting in it or not. And there was no wireless on, and nobody making noise. You could do your homework there for hours without anyone coming in and telling you to move. She remembered the inside of the house from when she had been up to Dr. Power for the stitches the time she had caught her leg on the rusty bit of machinery. To distract her Dr. Power had asked her to count the volumes of the encyclopedia up on the shelf and Clare had been so startled to see all those books in one house for one family that she had forgotten about the stitches and Dr. Power had told her mother she was as brave as a lion. They had walked home after the stitches with Clare leaning on her mother. They stopped at the church to thank St. Anne that there hadn’t been any infection in the leg and as Clare saw her mother bent in prayer and gratitude in front of the St. Anne grotto she let her mind wander on how great it would be to have a big peaceful house full of books like that instead of being on top of each other and no room for anything—no time for anything either. She thought about it again tonight as David Power went up the street home to that house where the carpet went right into the window, not stopping in a square like ordinary carpets. There would be a fire and there’d be peace. His mother might be in the kitchen and Dr. Power would be curing people and later Miss O’Hara would be coming to give him lessons all on his own without the rest of a class to distract her. What could be better than that? She wished for a moment that she had been his sister, but then she felt guilty. To wish that would be to want to lose Mammy and Daddy and Tommy and Ned and Ben and Jimmy. Oh and Chrissie. But she didn’t care how wrong it was, she wouldn’t mind losing Chrissie any day of the week.
The calm of the shop was only temporary. Daddy had been painting out in the back and he came in holding his hands up in front of him and asking someone to reach out a bottle of white spirit and open it up this minute. There was an awful lot of painting going on in the wintertime in Castlebay. The sea air just ripped the coats off again and the place looked very shabby unless it was touched up all the time. Mammy came in at the same moment; she had been up to the post office and she had discovered terrible things. Chrissie and her two tinkers of friends had climbed on the roof of Miss O’Flaherty’s shop and poked a long wet piece of seaweed through to frighten Miss O’Flaherty. They could have given the unfortunate woman a heart attack; she could, God save us all, have dropped stone dead on the floor of her own shop and then Chrissie O’Brien and her two f
ine friends would have the sin of murder on their souls until the Last Day and after. Chrissie had been dragged home by the shoulder, the plait and the ear. She was red-faced and annoyed. Clare thought that it was a good thing to have frightened Miss O’Flaherty who was horrible, and sold copy books and school supplies but hated school-children. Clare thought it was real bad luck that Mammy happened to be passing. She smiled sympathetically at Chrissie but it was not well received.
“Stop looking so superior,” Chrissie cried out. “Look at Clare gloating at it all. Goody-goody Clare, stupid boring Clare.”
She got a cuff on the side of her head for this performance and it made her madder still.
“Look, she’s delighted,” Chrissie went on, “delighted to see anyone in trouble. That’s all that ever makes Clare happy, to see others brought down.”
“There’ll be no tea for you, Chrissie O’Brien, and that’s not the end of it either. Get up to your room this minute—do you hear? This minute. ” Agnes O’Brien’s thin voice was like a whistle with anger, as she banished the bold Chrissie, wiped the worst paint off her husband’s hands with a rag that she had wet with white spirit, and managed at the same time to point to Clare’s coat on the hook.
“This isn’t a hand-me-down shop,” she said. “Take that coat and put it where it’s meant to be.”