by Maeve Binchy
Gerry Doyle’s father told him at breakfast that there had been terrible caterwauling in the middle of the night and did he know anything about it? It sounded like a whole lot of women or girls crying on the doorstep. Gerry looked at him across the table and said that he thought he had heard that mad dog of the doctor’s wailing and baying around the town during the night—could that have been it? It could, his father thought doubtfully and sniffed around him. “This place smells like Craig’s Bar,” he said to his wife and stamped off to what they all called his office, the front room beside the main bedroom. Gerry’s mother got annoyed and started to slam out the breakfast dishes in a temper.
“Brush your teeth for heaven’s sake, Gerry, and eat an orange or something before you go to school.” Fiona was not only kind—she was practical.
Gerry looked at her gratefully. “I had a feeling there might be a bit of a trace,” he grinned.
“Trace?” said Fiona. “You nearly knocked us all out. Was it great fun?”
“It was in a way.”
“I wish you’d have let me . . .”
“No.” He was very firm.
“But I’m older even than some of them who were there.”
“That’s not the point. You’re not that type. No one must ever say that anyone was messing around with you. You are all I’ve got. I’ve to look after you.”
He was serious. Fiona looked taken aback.
“You’ve got all of us . . . like we all have . . .” she said uncertainly.
“What have we got? We’ve got Dad, who lives in his own world. When did Dad say anything that wasn’t about the business?”
“He just mentioned Craig’s Bar, didn’t he?” Fiona laughed.
“Yes.” Absentmindedly he took a peppermint out of his pocket and unwrapped it.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, her big, dark eyes troubled.
“I don’t know. It’s just he’s so dull and unadventurous. How are we ever going to get on if we stay as timid as he is? And Mam . . . Well, honestly.”
“She’s a bit better, I think,” Fiona said softly. They had not talked about this before.
“She’s not. You say that because she went out to the garden and hung out the clothes. You think that’s some kind of success. She hasn’t been out of the house for six months. Six months. Tell me if that’s normal or not normal.”
“I know. But what can we do? They don’t want to tell Dr. Power.”
“It’s all his fault, he thinks that if we tell Dr. Power there’s going to be some kind of trouble.”
At that moment, Mr. Doyle reappeared, small and dark like his son, with the same quick smile and almost elfin face. “I’m only wondering does anyone in this house intend to go to school or have we all graduated without my knowing about it?”
“I’m just off. Dad, I may be going past David Power’s house. Will I ask his father to come and have a word with . . . ?”
“If anyone needs a doctor, they’ll go and see Dr. Power, and if they’re not able to go, Dr. Power will be brought to them,” said his father sternly. That was that. Gerry went to brush his teeth as had been suggested, and met his mother creeping along by the wall, alarmed by the word “doctor.”
“Don’t worry, Mary. Go back into the kitchen. There’s no need for a doctor,” his father said.
He called at the surgery that evening.
“Well, Gerry?”
“I don’t know, Dr. Power.”
“It can’t be too serious an ailment if you’ve forgotten it already.” The old doctor was cheerful.
“It wasn’t an ailment at all.”
“Good, good. Was it something wrong with someone else?” The man’s eyes were sharp.
Gerry seemed to hesitate. “No, I suppose people have to look after their own illnesses, don’t they?”
“It depends. If you saw a wounded man lying on the road you wouldn’t say he’d better look after his own illness.”
“No, it’s not like that.”
“Would you like to tell me what it is like?”
Gerry made up his mind. “No, no. Not now. I came to know if David and James Nolan would like to go out this evening? For a bit of a laugh like?”
Dr. Power was thoughtful. “I think there’s been enough laughs for the moment. I think it’s time the laughing died down for those two and they got a bit of work done.”
Gerry looked him in the eye. “Does that mean they can’t come out? Is that what you’re saying?”
“You’re as bright as the next man, Gerry. You know what I’m saying and not saying.”
“Right. Tell them I called and was sorry they weren’t allowed out.”
“No, I won’t, because that’s not the message. Tell them yourself if you want to.”
Gerry Doyle’s great skill was knowing when not to push it any further. “You’re a hard man, Dr. Power,” he said with a grin, and he was off.
Paddy Power wondered whether he had been going to ask about his anxiety-ridden father or his withdrawn, possibly phobic mother. Maybe the boy hadn’t noticed anything wrong with either of them. He was a funny lad.
A parcel arrived for Angela, a small flat box. It was a beautiful headscarf from the parents of James Nolan. “Thank you so very much for all the help with tuition, your pupils in Castlebay must be very lucky to have such a gifted teacher.” It was a square with a very rich-looking pattern on it, the kind of thing a much classier woman would wear. Angela was delighted with it. She showed it and the letter to her mother but it was a bad day and the old woman’s joints were aching all over.
“Why shouldn’t they be grateful to you? Why shouldn’t they send you something? It’s money they should have sent. Doesn’t the postman get paid for delivering letters?”
Angela sighed. She told David about it that evening. “Wasn’t it very thoughtful of them?” she said.
“They have great polite ways up in Dublin,” David said wistfully. “We’d never have thought of giving you a thing like that, and we should have.”
“Don’t be silly, College Boy. I was only telling you so that you’d know your friend appreciated the lessons and all that.”
“He thought you were very good-looking,” David said suddenly.
“I thought he wasn’t bad himself, but a bit small for me. How old is he, about fifteen?”
“Yes, just.”
“Oh, well, that’s no difference at all. Tell him I’ll see him when he’s about twenty-five. I’ll be coming into my prime about then.”
“I think that would suit him fine,” David laughed.
It was shortly before the school reopened that David met Gerry Doyle again.
“Have you had any good drinking nights since the cave?” Gerry asked.
“I think I’m going to be a Pioneer. I was never so sick. I was sick eleven times the next day,” David said truthfully.
“Well at least you held on to it until you got home,” Gerry said. “Which was more than some people managed. Still, it was a bit of a laugh.”
“Great altogether. Nolan said he’d never had such a night.”
“He was telling me you’ve got a record player of your own, a radiogram in your own bedroom—is that right?”
“Not a radiogram with doors on it, but a record player—yes, you plug it in.”
“How much would they be?” Gerry was envious.
“I’m afraid I don’t know. It was a present, but I could ask.”
“I’d love to see it,” Gerry Doyle said.
David’s hesitation was only for a second. His mother had never said he wasn’t to have Gerry Doyle into the house but he knew she wouldn’t approve. “Come on, I’ll show you,” he said.
Any other lad in Castlebay might have held back but not Gerry Doyle. He swung along the cliff road companionably with David as if he had been a lifetime calling on the doctor’s house socially.
The summer houses looked dead, as they passed, like ghost houses, and it was hard to imagine them full of families with
children racing in and out carrying buckets and spades, and people putting deckchairs up in the front gardens.
“Wouldn’t you need to be cracked to rent one of those for the summer?” Gerry nodded his head at the higgledy-piggledy line of homes.
“I don’t know. Suppose you didn’t live beside the sea?” David was being more tolerant.
“But if you had the money to rent one of those for a couple of months what would you spend it on that for, why wouldn’t you go abroad to Spain or to far places like Greece even?” Gerry was beyond believing that anyone could pay good money for a place in his own Castlebay.
“But if you were married with children you wouldn’t be able to take all of them abroad,” David argued reasonably.
“Ah well, I wouldn’t be married, so I suppose that’s the difference.”
“Not now, but later.”
“Not ever. Do you want to?”
“I thought I would,” David said.
“You’re off your head, David Power,” said Gerry Doyle agreeably.
Mrs. Power was in the hall arranging some winter branches in a vase.
“Hallo,” she said when the hall door opened. “Oh hallo, Gerry, do you want to see the doctor?” She looked slightly quizzical. Her head had inclined toward the surgery entrance. Patients didn’t come in the front door, they went in by the porch on the side.
“No, thanks, Mrs. Power. I’m coming to look at David’s record player,” he said confidently.
“I beg your pardon?” She was polite, but frosty.
“Oh, I’m going to show Gerry the record player. . . . How much was it, by the way?” David didn’t feel as brave as he sounded.
“It was a present, David dear,” his mother said with a smile that wasn’t in her eyes. “We don’t ask how much a present cost.”
“No, but maybe you could tell Gerry then. He was wondering if he might buy one.”
“I think it’s a little beyond Gerry,” said David’s mother in that tone he really hated. But Gerry didn’t seem to notice in the slightest.
“You might well be right,” he said cheerfully. “It wouldn’t be until the end of the summer anyway, I work for pocket money but there’s nothing really for me to do that’s useful until the trippers come. Still it’ll be nice to see it anyway.” He smiled straight into the disapproving face of David’s mother and with his arm on the banister and his foot on the first step he called to David. “Is it up here?”
David followed him without looking back to see the grim expression that he knew had settled on his mother’s face.
At lunch Mrs. Power waited until Nellie had left the room. “Paddy, could you ask David not to bring Gerry Doyle back here to the house.”
Dr. Power looked up mildly from his newspaper. “Well, he’s sitting beside you, Molly. Can’t you ask him yourself?” he said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Is this some kind of row?” The doctor looked from his wife to his son.
“Not on my part,” David said.
“See what I mean,” said Molly Power.
“Well, it seems you are being off-hand with your mother. Don’t be like that.” Dr. Power went back into the paper.
“Paddy. Please. Explain to David that Gerry Doyle’s perfectly all right but he is not a guest in this house.”
Wearily he put down the paper. “What’s it about?” he said, looking from one to another.
There was no reply.
“Well, what did young Doyle do that caused the upset?” Again he looked from his wife’s flushed face to his son’s mutinous one.
“Nothing,” David shrugged. “He came upstairs. I showed him my record player. He admired it. He went home.”
“Molly?”
“That’s not the point, as you know very well. You’re not an infant, David. You know well what I’m talking about.”
David looked blank.
“Your mother is saying that she goes to a lot of trouble to keep this house nice and she doesn’t want people tramping all over it. That’s a reasonable request, isn’t it?”
David paused, deciding whether or not to buy this explanation. Then he saw its flaws. “Oh sure, sorry, Mummy, I didn’t know that was what it was about. I thought you had something against Gerry Doyle himself. You know, like Nolan’s mother went through that bit of thinking everyone had fleas. No, that’s fine. Of course I won’t ask people back without asking you first.”
Molly smiled uneasily. She wasn’t at all sure that she had won.
“And I’ll be going down to his house later on today, he said he’d show me the darkroom and let me help to develop some of the pictures his father took at a wedding.”
He smiled brightly from one parent to the other and helped himself to a glass of orange squash.
Gerry Doyle’s sister was gorgeous looking. She wore an overall, which was like an artist’s smock, and she looked like an illustration in a book. She seemed a bit shy and answered yes and no when David asked her about anything. But she was very polite and helpful. She offered to go and make cocoa and said she’d run over to O’Brien’s for a quarter of a pound of broken biscuits as well.
“Why didn’t you ask her to the Seal Cave?” David wanted to know.
“Oh, you couldn’t ask your sister to a thing like that. It’s all right for Chrissie and Kath and Peggy and those—they’re the kind of girls you’d expect to have at a thing like that—but not Fiona.”
David felt he had overstepped some limit he didn’t know about. He felt awkward. He felt too that it was hard on the girls who had been there. They had all had great fun and played spin the bottle; and the boys had given them cider and beer and encouraged them like mad. Then the girls had got a bit silly and one or two of them were crying and Kath had been sick and they had fallen and everything. But it was all part of the night. It was a bit cruel somehow to think that Fiona was a different type of girl, one you wouldn’t bring to a party like that, but it was true. When she came back with the tray of cocoa and biscuits David knew that he would not like Fiona to have been to a party like that either.
He would have liked to ask her to write to him at school. Nolan had a girl who wrote him long letters. But he thought it was too complicated to set it all up. Firstly if Fiona had said yes he would have had to explain the whole system where the letters were read by the priests and so the girl who was writing had to pretend to be another boy. Nolan’s friend who was called Alice used to sign her name Anthony. She had to remember not to talk about hockey matches but say rugby instead, in fact the letter was in so heavy a code or disguise none of them could really work out what it meant. Still it was nice for Nolan to be able to get the letter and tell everyone how good-looking Alice was. It would be nice to do the same with Fiona. But if Gerry wouldn’t let her come to a party in a cave down the road he would almost certainly be very much against her writing letters in code to a boy in a boarding school. That would be fast, and Fiona Doyle was not going to be thought of as fast. David noticed that he kept thinking of them as orphans even though they lived with their mother and father. That was odd.
“Your parents don’t take much part in things, do they?” he said enviously.
“They work too hard,” Gerry said. “It was always like that. It’s a dog’s life, and Mam hates the work but what else is there?”
“What would she prefer to be doing?”
“Arranging flowers on a hall table in a house like yours,” Gerry laughed. “But isn’t that what every woman would want?”
The roof didn’t fall in and the skies didn’t flash with lightning when David got back home that evening. He sensed that his parents had had a little chat. His mother was sewing the Cash’s name tapes on some new socks and pajamas for him. She seemed to have forgotten the row at lunchtime totally.
“I suppose in a way it will be hard to settle into all that studying again,” she said.
David was determined to be equally pleasant. “Yes, but I’m very glad that I had Miss O’Hara, ver
y glad. Nolan said we were dead lucky down here to be able to get someone like that, up in Dublin teachers are sharks, he said, they ask for a fortune for grinds and they smell of drink.”
David’s father laughed from the other side of the fire. “Your friend James is full of nonsense. You can’t make generalizations about any job no more than you can about mine or his father’s. Dear dear.”
“You know the way Nolan goes on,” David said.
“Of course I do. He’s a very bright young fellow. We liked him, your mother and I did. Ask him down any time, or any of your other friends, the house is big and there’s plenty of room. And it’s nice to hear a bit of noise around the place.”
That’s a different tune to the one they were playing at lunch, David thought to himself. Then I was invading the privacy of the house. He heard himself saying that he’d love to ask Nolan again, and he was very grateful to be allowed to invite people home. Nolan’s mother was still fussing apparently and when she wasn’t worrying about fleas she was worrying about ceilings falling down. Nolan said she was having a tonic for her nerves but it didn’t seem to be doing much good.
On the last evening before he went back he said he’d like to go and say a proper thank you to Miss O’Hara, and maybe give her a small present. David’s mother said that Angela O’Hara wouldn’t like that at all, she had been paid adequately, but Dr. Power said no, David was right, why not give her a book of some kind from the shelf, she always admired the books when she came to the house.