Echoes

by Maeve Binchy

  “And will my class increase by a hundred percent?” Angela O’Hara asked him when she heard that Nolan was coming to stay.

  David hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t know. It was something he hadn’t given any thought to.

  “Never mind.” Angela had been brisk. “I’ll sort it out with your parents. But we had a plan for twenty days’ work to cover the time you were at home, if Mr. Nolan arrives that will cut six days out of it. What are you going to do? Abandon it or try to do the work anyway?”

  He was awkward and she rescued him.

  “I think you’d rather not have Nolan seeing you taught lessons by a woman. It’s a bit like a governess, a country schoolteacher coming to the house.”

  “Oh, no, heavens, nothing like that.” David’s open face was distressed. “Honestly, if you knew how much I’ve learned since working with you, I’d be afraid to let on in case they’d never send me back to the school again, they’d put me into the convent here.”

  He was a mixture of charm and awkwardness. It was very appealing. The image of his bluff kind father and yet with a bit of polish that must have come from his mother thrown in.

  “Why don’t I set out a bit of work for you and Mr. Nolan to do each day? Say an hour and a half or two hours. I’ll correct it, without coming in on top of you at all, and that way there’s no embarrassment.”

  The relief flooded his face.

  “Is Mr. Nolan as bad at Latin as you are?” she asked.

  “A bit better, I think. He’s going to need it too you see, he’s going to do Law.”

  “Is his father a barrister?”

  “A solicitor,” David said.

  “That makes it nice and easy,” she said with a bitter little laugh.

  David was puzzled, but she changed the subject. It wasn’t David Power’s fault that the system was the way it was. A system that made it natural that David Power should be a doctor like his father, and James Nolan of Dublin a solicitor like his father, but made it very hard for Clare O’Brien to be anything at all. Angela squared her shoulders: hard, but not impossible. Hadn’t Clare the best example in the land sitting teaching her? Angela, youngest daughter of Dinny O’Hara, the drunk, the ne’er-do-well, the man looking for every handout in Castlebay. And she had got the Call to Training, and higher marks in the college than any other student, and they had scrimped to send her brother to the missions, and she had nieces and nephews in comfortable homes in England. Nobody in the town could pity them when they walked behind her father’s coffin five years ago. If Angela could do it with a drunken father and a crippled mother, then Clare could do it. If she cared enough, and today it looked as if she cared almost too much.

  “So, College Boy,” she said to David, “let’s get on with the hedge school before the gentry come down from Dublin and catch us with our love for books!”

  “You’re great, Miss O’Hara,” David said admiringly. “Wasn’t it a pity you weren’t a man? You could have been a priest and taught us properly.”

  Molly Power was very anxious that things should be done right for David’s young friend, and there were endless instructions to Nellie about breakfast on trays and getting out the best silverware until David begged that they just come downstairs as usual. Then they’d have to do their homework for Miss O’Hara before they felt free, but what a long day stretched ahead. Nolan loved the beach being so near, it was almost like having your own private swimming place, he said enviously, to be able to climb over a stile at the end of the garden and have a path going down to the sand and the caves. A path with Danger written all over it. Nolan tried out the Echo Cave and the other smaller caves. He wore Wellington boots and slid and scrambled over the rock pools, he picked up unusual shells, he walked out to the end of the cliff road to see if the Puffing Hole was blowing. He walked the course on the golf links and planned that he and David should take lessons next summer. He couldn’t believe they were allowed to go to the cinema at night. In Dublin he had only been to matinees and that was before his mother had heard of all the fleas.

  Nolan was very popular in Castlebay. He was so handsome for one thing, small, with pointed features and hair that didn’t stick out in angles like David’s but fell in a sort of wave across the front of his forehead. He had very sharp eyes which seemed to see everything, and he wore his clothes with style, turning up his collars and striding round with his hands buried deep in his pockets. He used to joke about being short and said that he suffered from a small-man complex like Napoleon and Hitler.

  He was polite to Mrs. Power and insatiable for medical details from Dr. Power. He praised Nellie’s cooking and he said that he thought Castlebay was the most beautiful place in Ireland. In no time he was an honored guest. Even Angela O’Hara liked him. He wrote out his preparation dutifully in small neat writing, and Angela had immediately sent him a note on the first batch of corrected work: “Kindly make your writing much less fancy and much more clear. I have no idea whether or not you have written the correct ending on the cases of the nouns. I will not be mocked.”

  “She must be quite a character. Why don’t we meet her?” he asked David.

  David wasn’t really sure, but he knew that it somehow reflected discredit on him. “She’s shy,” he lied, and felt worse.

  Next day they saw a figure like a dervish flying past on a red bicycle. The machine did a dangerous turn and an envelope of papers was thrown from the basket to David.

  “Here you are, College Boy. Save me facing the winds over your way.”

  David caught them neatly.

  “This is the man who doesn’t know the neuter plural from a hole in the ground,” she shouted cheerfully. “You’ve got to make the adjectives plural too, my friend. No use just throwing them there and hoping they’ll decline themselves.”

  “Can’t you come and teach us up at the house?” Nolan called out flirtatiously.

  “Ah, too much to do, but aren’t we doing fine by correspondence course?” Her hair stretched out behind her in the wind, blowing like someone in an open car in a film. She wore a gray coat and a gray and white scarf.

  “She’s gorgeous,” breathed Nolan.

  “Miss O’Hara?” David said in disbelief. “She’s as old as the hills.”

  They were still laughing over what age Miss O’Hara would be when Nolan was twenty-five, the age he thought he might take a bride, when they met Gerry Doyle. He had Wellingtons and a fisherman’s jersey and somehow he seemed much more suitable for the place than they were. Gerry was about the only one who would ever ask him what his boarding school was like, and what they had to eat and what kind of cars fellows’ parents had.

  “I was thinking they might burn that school of yours down if it has the plague,” Gerry said agreeably. He thought it was all more serious than they were being told, plague and pestilence and scarlet fever; otherwise why would they close down a big important school? He suggested too that they should look out for germs when they got back, in stagnant pools or in the curtains.

  David made a mental note to talk to his father about it when he got home.

  “Do you want to come to a midnight feast? Isn’t that the kind of thing you have in your place all the time, before the plague and all?”

  “I was at one and we were caught,” David said sadly.

  “I was at that and another—the other wasn’t caught,” Nolan said as a matter of record.

  “Yes, well, tomorrow night in the Seal Cave starting at eleven thirty. If you could bring a few sausages and your own bottle of orange or even beer.”

  “Can we?” Nolan’s eyes were shining.

  “Why not? This is Castlebay. This isn’t a backwater like Dublin,” David said bravely, and Gerry Doyle told them that there’d be girls and tins of beans and sausages . . .

  Gerry Doyle had told Chrissie not to say a word to Tommy and Ned about the party in the cave. It wasn’t that he had anything against them but they were the kind who could accidentally let something slip. He wasn’t even telling h
is own sister, he said, because she was the same. Chrissie was pleased that Fiona wasn’t coming and so were Peggy and Kath. Fiona looked a bit too attractive for their taste; she was fourteen of course, which would make her look a lot better, just automatically, than the rest of them but still they all felt a bit second best when Fiona was there. And of course Chrissie wouldn’t think for a moment that Tommy and Ned should be invited, they were far too uncertain—they’d wonder aloud for days and in the end they’d all be found out and the picnic in the cave would be stopped. Gerry had said that there’d be about a dozen of them or so, no point in alerting the whole town. They were to meet there at eleven-thirty, and everyone was to try to make their own way in twos and threes at most. So as not to be noticed.

  Clare stirred in her bed when she saw Chrissie’s legs swing to the floor on the other side of the room. To her surprise, Chrissie was fully dressed. She was moving very quietly and feeling round for her shoes. The light of the Sacred Heart lamp fell on her as she was picking up what looked like a great lump of sausages and rashers from the shop! Chrissie was actually wrapping these stealthily in white paper and darting nervous glances at Clare’s bed.

  In a flash Clare understood she was running away. In a way this was great. She would have a bedroom to herself, she wouldn’t be tortured by Chrissie morning noon and night anymore. There would be less rows at home. But in another way it wasn’t great. Mammy and Daddy were going to be very upset and the Guards would be here in the morning and Father O’Dwyer and people would walk along the cliffs when the tide came in looking for a body as they always did whenever anything happened in Castlebay. And there would be prayers for her and Mammy would cry and cry and wonder where she was and how she was faring. No, Clare sighed reluctantly, better not to let her run away, it was going to be more trouble than it was worth.

  Chrissie looked at her suspiciously when she heard the sigh.

  “Are you running away?” Clare asked casually.

  “Oh, God in heaven, what a sorrow it is to have such a stupid sister. I’m going to the toilet, you thick turnip you.” But there was fear in her voice.

  “Why are you dressed up in your clothes and taking sausages and bacon if you’re just going to the toilet?” Clare asked mildly.

  Chrissie sat down on the bed, defeated. “Oh, there’s an awful lot of things I’d like to do to you. You’re a spy. You were born a spy. It was written on you plainly. You’ll never do anything else except follow people round and make their lives a misery. You hate me and so you destroy everything I do.”

  “I don’t hate you, not really hate,” Clare said. “If I hated you properly wouldn’t I let you run away?”

  Chrissie was silent.

  “But Mammy would be desperately upset and Dad too. I mean they’re going to be crying and everything. It’s not that I’m spying, I just thought I’d ask where you were going in case they think you’re dead or something.”

  “I’m not running away. I’m going out for a walk,” Chrissie said.

  Clare sat down in her small iron bed. “A walk?” she said.

  “Shush. Yes, a walk, and we’re going to have a bit of a meal on it.”

  Clare raised herself up and looked out the window behind the Sacred Heart statue and the little red lamp. It was pitch dark outside. Not a thing stirred in Castlebay. “Are Peggy and Kath going too?”

  “Shush. Yes. And Clare . . .”

  “Is it a picnic?”

  “Yes, but you’re not coming. You’re not going to spoil every single thing I’m doing. You’re not going to ruin it for me.”

  “Oh, that’s all right if it’s only a picnic.” Clare had snuggled down under the blankets again. “I just didn’t want the fuss if you ran away. That’s all.”

  There was a small red traveling clock on the kitchen mantelpiece. David took it to bed with him. Nolan said that he’d wake all right in the spare room but David didn’t want to take any chances. The clock was under David’s pillow and its alarm was muted but it woke him from a deep sleep. For a while he couldn’t think what was happening, and then he remembered. He had the bottle of cider and the sausages packed neatly in his school gym and games bag. Nolan had bought four bottles of stout and two packets of marshmallow biscuits which he said were great if you toasted them over a fire. Gerry Doyle had said there would be a bonfire in the back of the Seal Cave and that they knew it would work because they had tried it out already. There was a part of the cave which was perfect for it.

  The only problem was Bones, the dog. David’s father said that Bones would go up and lick the paws of any intruder or assassin but he’d bark the house down if you went in or out yourself. He was more of a liability than a watchdog. David and Nolan had decided to bring Bones with them to the midnight feast. It was either that or drug him and though Nolan preferred the notion of knocking him out for a few hours David had been too strictly brought up, in a house where even aspirins were locked away, to think that this was remotely possible.

  He crept into the spare room and Nolan was indeed dead asleep but woke eagerly.

  “I was only thinking with my eyes shut,” he said.

  “Sure, and snoring with them shut too,” David said.

  They shushed each other and crept down the stairs. Bones jumped up in delight and David closed his hand around the dog’s jaw while stroking his ear at the same time. This usually reduced Bones to a state of foolish happiness and by the time Nolan had eased open the door they were safe. Bones trotted down the garden to the back wall ahead of them, finding nothing unusual in the hour. David and Nolan with their torches in their pockets stumbled. They couldn’t shine a light until they were over the stile, it would surely be the one moment that David’s mother was going to the bathroom and would look out the window and then waken the neighborhood.

  But down the path which said Danger they used their torches, and slipped and slid more than they walked. It was dry now but it had been raining earlier and the twisty path had a lot of mud.

  “This is fantastic,” Nolan said, and David swelled with pride. When they got back to school Nolan would tell everyone of the terrific time he had in Power’s place and the others would look at him with respect. He had always been slow to tell people about Castlebay, it sounded like such a backwater compared to the great places they all came from, but looking at it through Nolan’s eyes he realized there was much more to it than he had thought.

  Down on the beach Bones ran round like a mad thing, up to the edge of the sea and back again, barking excitedly, but he could bark forever down here, the sound of the waves crashing and the wind whistling would carry it far away. Dr. and Mrs. Power wouldn’t even hear it in their dreams.

  The Seal Cave was dark and mysterious looking. David was quite glad he wasn’t on his own. There was a big fire at the back; Gerry was right, there was a part of it that was dry and not dripping with slime. They had begun the cooking and rashers dangled dangerously on long sticks and a couple of toasting forks. There were at least a dozen people around the fire. There were giggling girls nudging each other and breaking into loud laughter. That was Peg and Kath, he knew them to see; and Chrissie O’Brien from the shop. David looked around for Clare but she was too young probably. Chrissie couldn’t be more different to Clare, he thought. Screeching with laughter and knocking the food off other people’s forks. Clare was solemn and much gentler somehow.

  David had never had stout before, but the others were drinking it. It almost made him throw up; it didn’t taste like a drink should taste. Manfully he finished one bottle and began another. Nolan seemed to like it and he didn’t want to look a sissy. Gerry Doyle seemed to notice though.

  “You could have some champagne cider if you like. It’s a different taste, nice sort of drink,” he suggested.

  David sipped some: now this was more like it. Sweet and fizzy, very nice indeed.

  Gerry, small and eager, was hunched up over the fire. He looked very knowledgeable.

  David held his glass up to the lig
ht. “It’s good stuff this,” he said appreciatively.

  Later, when he was getting nowhere after the groping had begun, Gerry marked his card again. No use trying anything with that one; she just laughed all the time. There was the one who would be more cooperative. A manly wink which David returned unsteadily. Gerry Doyle was a good friend to steer you in the right direction.

  There were mystery ailments all over Castlebay next day, but against all the odds nobody broke ranks and the midnight feast was never discovered. Chrissie O’Brien had come back home covered in mud with cuts all down her legs where she had fallen coming up the steps from the strand, and she was sick twice into a chamberpot in the bedroom. Clare said grumpily she hoped that these midnight feasts weren’t going to be going on all the time. Chrissie was too busy plotting the morrow and how she would explain her ripped and mud-covered coat, to answer Clare. In the end she decided she would go out early before anyone saw the state she was in and then she could fall again and be considered too sick to go to school. It worked too, nobody noticed that half the mud had dried and the scabs on her legs had started to heal. Chrissie’s friend Peggy managed to get to school and stick the day but Kath had been sick in the classroom and had to be sent home.

  Up in Power’s house there seemed to be no explanation for the burn that had appeared as if by magic on James Nolan’s mouth. In fact it had come from his eating a sausage directly from the long bit of skewer it was cooked on, but it was announced as being something that had come upon him unexpectedly during the night. Molly Power worried endlessly what his parents would say when he got back and fussed interminably about it when she wasn’t fussing about David who was as white as a sheet and had to go to the bathroom every few minutes. The third peculiar thing in the house was Bones. He had apparently let himself out in the night and was found asleep in the garage with a cooked sausage in his paws. Dr. Power told her that in the long run it was often better not to think too hard and try too earnestly to solve all problems. Sometimes it was better for the brain to let things pass.