by Maeve Binchy
“You don’t need to go up to Dinny O’Hara’s cottage,” Molly Power said.
“Dinny O’Hara has been in the churchyard for five years, he’s unlikely to come out and corrupt the boy now,” said Paddy Power, and David saw his mother’s face get that tight-lipped look again.
Nellie helped him to wrap up a book about Irish place names. They took the torn paper cover off it and it was lovely underneath. Nellie looked at the small print in admiration.
“Imagine Angela O’Hara being able to read all this and understand it. Ah well, that’s what comes of keeping to your books.” She had been at school up at the convent with Angela herself, and had been there the day the news came of Angela’s scholarship to the big town. In those days the nuns had been so proud that one of their girls had won the scholarship they used to make the uniform themselves with their own hands. They had kitted out the young Angela for her secondary school because they knew that anything Dinny O’Hara would get into his hand went straight across a bar counter and he wouldn’t do much to help his little girl get on.
“She deserved to do well,” Nellie said unexpectedly, as she was making a nice neat corner on the parcel and tying the string tightly. “She never crowed about all her successes and her high marks and all. Nobody could say that it all went to her head.”
David didn’t think that Miss O’Hara had all that much to crow about. To be teaching in that awful convent, to be here in Castlebay with her old mother—when she must have wanted to get far away. Why else did she go in for all those scholarships? He didn’t think she had the huge success that Nellie seemed to think. But of course compared to Nellie it must be fine, she didn’t have to clear out grates and ranges and scrub floors and make beds and cook meals and wash up and wash clothes and go out in the cold and see they weren’t bashed down by the wind. Being a teacher must seem like a nice cushy job to Nellie.
He turned left outside the gate and went along the road toward the golf course. It was longer than he remembered, no wonder Miss O’Hara always flew round the place on her bicycle. There was a light downstairs in the O’Hara cottage: he hoped that her old mother wouldn’t answer the door bent over the two sticks.
But the door was opened by Clare O’Brien. Clare was thin and alert, big brown eyes and fair hair tied in bunches. She always looked as if she was about to ask a question. He remembered meeting her in the Echo Cave and she had said that it would be like heaven on earth to have lessons from Miss O’Hara without the rest of the class. Maybe that’s what she was doing now.
Clare seemed pleased to see him. “She’s putting her mother to bed, she’s got awful pains altogether today, she can neither sit nor stand. Miss O’Hara said she’d be back in a few minutes. Will you come in and sit down?”
David was a bit put out that she was there; he had wanted to make a flowery speech to Miss O’Hara without an audience. But he could hardly order the O’Brien girl to go home or say that his conversation was private. He looked around the kitchen.
“Isn’t it like Aladdin’s Cave?” whispered Clare in awe.
It was a typical kitchen for a cottage in this area. The fire had been replaced by a small range. That must have come from Angela O’Hara’s salary—it never came when Dinny O’Hara was alive nor from the widow’s pension that the arthritic old woman got every week. Perhaps the brother and sisters abroad sent money, David wouldn’t know. Miss O’Hara was very private, she never told you all about herself and her family like everyone else in Castlebay did all the time, that’s why you were interested to know more. David looked up at the walls. Everywhere there were shelves. Each alcove had shelves from ceiling to floor, and there were ornaments and books and biscuit boxes and more books and sewing baskets and statues. Clare was right. Almost like a toyshop on a Christmas card. There was no inch of wall without a shelf, and no inch of shelf without an object. Most of the objects were books.
“She knows where every single thing is, would you credit that?” Clare’s big brown eyes looked larger than ever in the semidark of the room. There was a table with writing paper and a bottle of Quink ink and blotting paper. Miss O’Hara must have been writing letters with Clare when her mother took a turn.
“Are you getting lessons?” he asked. There was a touch of envy in his voice. He would have preferred to learn in this funny enclosed place where everything had a story and every item was known in its little place. It was a much better place to study than his mother’s sitting room with the copies of Tatler and Sketch, and Social and Personal laid out beside The Housewife which came every month by post from England. When the copies were a couple of months old they went to the surgery, and of course there were all the encyclopedias and big leather-bound books. But they weren’t read and touched and loved like things were here.
“Oh no, I wish I could, no, I’d like that more than anything. I’d be a genius if I had Miss O’Hara to teach me on her own.” She spoke with no intention of making him laugh. She was utterly serious.
He was sorry for her. It must be desperate not to have enough money for education. You always felt that came automatically.
“Maybe you could do things for her, you know, do the messages or cook or something in exchange.”
“I thought of that,” Clare said solemnly. “But I think it’s a bit unfair, she’d have to be looking round for things for me to do. It would be like asking for charity.”
“I see.” He did see.
“But I came up tonight because Miss O’Hara is going to help me, I’m to write to the convent in the town, a kind of letter that would make them think well of me, and inquiring about their scholarships in two years’ time.” Her eyes were shining over the very thought of it.
“Miss O’Hara got a scholarship there herself, years and years ago. She says you have to be dead cunning, and look on it as a war.”
Angela O’Hara came into the room then. “Don’t give away all our secrets, Clare. Maybe College Boy here might be disguising himself and trying to get into the convent ahead of you.”
Nolan would have made a witty remark. David couldn’t think of one, he just laughed. “I’m in your way. You’re writing letters,” he said awkwardly.
“Don’t worry about that, David. Clare’s writing her own letter actually, and I am meant to be writing one to my brother. I find it so hard to know what will interest him about here. You know: got up, went to school, did not strangle Immaculata . . . every day it becomes a bit repetitive.”
“What does he write? I suppose his days are a bit samey too,” David said.
Angela took out an airmail envelope with the stamp neatly removed for the school collection. “I was just thinking that very thing. . . . My mother keeps all Sean’s letters, every single one of them—look at the boxes of them—and he does seem to be saying the same thing over and over. But it’s nice to hear.”
“When you get older I expect there’s not much to write about,” Clare said helpfully.
“Or more when you don’t really share the same kind of life,” David said. “That’s why I never had a penfriend in India or anything, once you’d described your life and he’d described his that would be it.”
“It is a bit like that,” Angela agreed. She picked up a thin piece of airmail paper and read to them:
Dear Mother and dear Angela,
Thank you so much for your letter which arrived here yesterday. We are in the middle of a rainy season which makes things very difficult but still it is thanks to all the great and good support that we get from home that God’s work can be done.
I wish you could see the little Japanese children, they are really beautiful. I suppose I didn’t have all that much to do with children before I came out here, on the missions. Perhaps little Irish children are even more beautiful . . .
Angela broke off and said it was easy known that he never had to pass one day of his lifetime teaching little Irish children in a convent or he would think otherwise.
“It’s a bit like the letter he wrote to the sch
ool, isn’t it?” Clare said.
“It’s a bit like every letter he writes,” Angela said, putting it back in the envelope. “There’s nothing for him to say, I suppose, that we’d understand. I do ask him things myself sometimes, like do they ordain many Japanese priests out there, and what happened to all the Chinese they had converted before they left China, did they go back to their old religion or what? But he never answers those kind of things.”
She was silent in thought for a while. David coughed.
“I came to say goodbye and thank you,” he said. “And to give you this book to tell you how grateful I am.”
Angela sat down and reached for her cigarettes without saying anything. When she spoke it was with a softer voice than either Clare or David had ever heard her use. “That’s very good of you,” she said and bent her head over the twine, fiddling with the knots.
“It’s only old twine. You can cut it if you like,” David said helpfully and Clare found a knife. Miss O’Hara sawed through the string, and they all bent over the book. Time passed easily as they read why places they knew were called what they were called, and they were all enraged that Castlebay wasn’t in it and said that the man who wrote the book hadn’t traveled at all if he couldn’t include a fine place like this. From the other room there were sounds of moaning but Miss O’Hara said not to take any notice, it was her mother trying to get into a comfortable position to settle for the night, it wasn’t really sharp pain. They had a cup of tea and a bit of soda bread and eventually Miss O’Hara shooed them out into the night lest people think they had been kidnapped.
Angela told herself not to be so sentimental over David’s present. It was very thoughtful of the boy certainly, but he came from a nice peaceful home where there was time to be thoughtful and there was ease and comfort. And his father was one of the most generous men that ever walked. It was in the boy’s nature to be bright and generous. But it was so different to what she could expect from the children she taught up in the convent. Half of them would never do any kind of an exam, almost none of them would ever open a book again after they left her, except a novel or a magazine.
Not Clare of course. She was the one that would keep you going. Imagine teaching a class full of Clare O’Briens or of David Powers for that matter. She sighed. It was a pity as David had said that she hadn’t been born a man. She could have become a priest and taught bright boys in a school where the principal would not go into shock if she asked for a globe.
She wondered did Sean ever regret his choice in teaching the children of Chinese and Japanese workers in pidgin English. Would he have liked the days spent in an ivy-covered college like the one that David and young Nolan went to? Would Sean have liked the evenings in study and chapel and walking reading a breviary in cloisters or discussing philosophy in a dining hall? It was a question that couldn’t really make sense, since her brother Sean had never shown interest in any other life except the missions. He had followed the road that got him there without pausing to think or to wonder did people miss him. She missed him from time to time, his letters were no way of knowing him, and recently they had become very static.
You couldn’t even hint at that to her mother. Every letter was kept in a box with the date it was received written laboriously on the envelope. As if someone was going to check them some time. The stamps were neatly cut off to add to the school stamp collection, they were never reread but Mrs. O’Hara knew almost by heart the names of the villages and the settlements and the places up country and down country. She knew them better than she knew the countryside around Castlebay, for it had been a long time since she could walk and see it. Angela wondered sometimes what her mother would think about all day if she hadn’t a fine son who was a missionary priest to fill her mind.
Back at school Nolan told everyone that Power was a dark horse. They should see the great place he lived in, a big house on a cliff with its own private way down to the sea. They had a maid and a Labrador and every single person in the place knew them by name and saluted them. David felt it was going a bit far to call Bones a Labrador, but he agreed that the rest was mainly true. He also found himself the center of attention because of having taken Nolan to a party where real sex games were played. This was the cause of a lot of questioning and David wished he knew how much Nolan had elaborated on the innocent kissing games they had played by the firelight before the drink had taken over and everyone had been too dizzy and confused to play any games at all. But it was good to be a hero, and he laughed knowingly about it all.
He was pleased too when Father Kelly said that he was an exemplary pupil and had kept up meticulously with the suggested course of study which had been handed out to all pupils on the day the school had closed because of the scarlet fever. The essays had been written, the poems had been learned, history questions had been written out and illustrated with neat maps and family trees, the maths and geography were completed, and the Irish and Latin exercises done in full.
“You got private tuition? Well, he was a good man whoever he was,” Father Kelly said in one of his rare moments of approval.
“It was a she actually, Father,” David said apologetically.
Father Kelly’s brow darkened: he had been too swift with his praise. “Ah, some of them are competent enough I suppose,” he said, struggling to be fair, but losing interest.
David told Nolan that Gerry Doyle had a smashing-looking sister, really beautiful, but that he wouldn’t take her to the cave that night.
Nolan was very positive about this, as he was about everything. “Of course he couldn’t bring his sister,” he said as if it were obvious to a blind fool, “I mean I wouldn’t have let my sister go. We couldn’t have taken Caroline to a party like that, where people would be . . . well you couldn’t take Caroline there. Gerry Doyle was quite right. Is she going to write to you?”
“I didn’t ask her.”
“Right, Power, you’ve got the technique. Don’t be too easy to get. Don’t be a pushover. Leave them wondering. That’s what I always do.”
“Will Alice be writing again this term?”
“No, I think I’ve grown out of Alice,” said Nolan in a voice which revealed that Alice had grown out of him.
Nolan said his mother had got a bit better about things and that she had agreed to go away next summer for a holiday by the sea. Nolan’s whole family had been wanting to do this for ages but his mother had always said the seaside was full of rats and beetles and sea snakes. St. Patrick had only got rid of the land snakes according to Nolan’s mother, but he had no power over the huge snakes calling themselves eels which came in on beaches all over the country. But now the tablets she was taking had made her forget, and they were going to inquire about renting one of those cliff houses in Castlebay. Because Nolan had come home with such glowing reports they were going to try there first. David was delighted: the summer would be full of adventure if Nolan and his family came to Castlebay.
Angela said that Clare must write the letter herself, it was no use putting grown-up words into a ten-year-old head. But she would monitor it for spelling, and style. She found Clare a writing pad that had no lines on it, but with a heavily lined sheet you put under the page you were writing on. Clare should ask the convent whether there was any particular course of study she should concentrate on, since she was very anxious to prepare herself as diligently as possible for the open scholarship in 1952. Clare tried to remember the words diligent, concentrate, but Angela said no, she must use her own words, and she must sound like a real person, someone they would remember when the time came. She said to tell the nuns that her parents were business people. Clare wondered was that true; but Angela said, years ago she had told them her father was a substantial farmer who had fallen on hard times because of the Troubles, and since that was way back in 1932 it sounded reasonable. It would have done her no good to say she was the daughter of the town drunk and she was burning to get herself on in the world.
“Do you think there’s an
y hope I might get it? You see, I don’t want to get myself all excited like I did . . . well . . .”
“Over the history essay.” Miss O’Hara nodded. “No, I think you have a chance, a good chance if you work like the hammers of hell. Oh and don’t tell anyone. It’s easier somehow if you don’t.”
“But David Power knows.”
That didn’t matter, Miss O’Hara thought, he’d have it long forgotten. But Clare shouldn’t mention it at school, or at home, it only got people into a state. Clare had thought there was too much going on at home without letting them get into another state over a scholarship in the distant future.
Tommy and Ned had been for interviews and they couldn’t wait to go to England. They had heard that there was massive reconstruction being done over there since the war, the place was full of bombed sites only waiting to be built up again, and roads from one place to another planned for, and housing for all those who lost their places during the raids.
The man who had come to Dillon’s Hotel for two hours had taken their names and addresses. He had asked them very little but said they should report to him when they got there; they should wait till the fine weather until they came over. There’d be no trouble at all finding digs; the roads around Kilburn and Cricklewood were filled with Irish households only delighted to have lads from home in to stay. They’d be like mothers to them, they wouldn’t need to go near English strangers at all. The man said he was a businessman who could get a good deal for his own countrymen; he didn’t like to see Irish lads being made fools of, he’d see them right when they came over.
Clare’s father wondered could the man be a chancer. Why would he be doing all this for love? Why wasn’t he an agency like any other agency that took fees? That way made sense, a person could understand that, but this way was hard to fathom. A man with an open shirt coming to Dillon’s Hotel and giving them all a piece of paper with his name on it and saying he could be found any Friday night in one of two pubs in Kilburn—it sounded a bit suspicious.