by Maeve Binchy
But Tommy and Ned would have none of it. What had they to lose? If, after one week, he turned out not to be getting them their full wages, they could leave him and go on to one of these agencies that Da was talking about. They weren’t bound to him. He had said he wanted nothing in writing, no complications of any sort. They should be delighted to have his name, and have him as a friendly contact over there instead of making such a fuss about everything.
Tommy had left school. He had no exams, no certificates and, after all his years in the Brothers, he could barely read and write. Clare thought wistfully of David Power that night up in Miss O’Hara’s kitchen and the book he had given to her as a present. Tommy would have thrown it aside. He couldn’t even read what was written on a packet in the shop, if someone asked him. He didn’t read the paper and he never opened a book of any sort now that he had been released from the classroom. He was meant to be helping his father get the shop to rights before he went off to London to seek his fortune. A lot of the time he spent just hanging around.
Clare’s father was rearranging the shop, and that was hard to do while people were still being served. It meant that a lot of it was done in the evening when they were meant to be closed. Of course a place like O’Brien’s could never close properly: if Mrs. Conway came for a pound of sugar, or Miss O’Flaherty decided that she wanted some biscuits with her late night tea, there was no refusing them.
But there was less of a flow after six o’clock, less of the sound of the ping when the door opened and a figure stood letting in the cold sea winds until the door swung closed.
Last summer it had been so crowded trying to sell ice cream in the middle of everything else, that this year he was going to move the ice-cream cabinet down to one side of the little shop. Chocolate and sweets would be high up over it, and fruit beside it, so the beach people could be served all in one area; while the people who had rented houses on the cliff road could ponder and deliberate and finally settle for cooked ham and tomatoes as they always did, on a less cluttered side of the shop. It was all fine in theory but it was hard to do and still keep track of where everything was. Each evening they scrubbed shelves and tacked on new oilcloth. The floor was a constant disappointment to them; the lino needed to be replaced but of course there wouldn’t be funds for that, so instead new bits were nailed down near the door where the wear and tear was most obvious. Boxes that only contained a few things were emptied out and stored neatly in the storeroom. In the summer, visitors were mad for boxes and lots of the suppliers didn’t leave any behind. It was best to have a pile of them ready.
It was worthy work but it ate into homework time. Miss O’Hara had drawn everyone in the class a map of Ireland, a blank map. They were to trace it or copy it and reproduce it every fourth page of their history exercise book. Then, when they learned of the battles and the treaties and the marches and the plantations, they could fill them in on their own maps and they would know what happened where. Clare was lost in the Battle of Kinsale, drawing little Spanish ships and Red Hugh’s army on its way down from the north when she heard the voice calling. Perhaps if she pretended she didn’t hear . . . This was the wrong thing to do. The door was thrown open and her mother stood quivering with annoyance.
“Aren’t you a fine lady thrown on the bed when you’re needed?”
“I’m not thrown. I’m filling in this map, look.”
“I’ve looked at enough of that childish nonsense. You’re a grown girl. Get downstairs and help your father at once. We’ve been calling and calling and not a word out of you.”
“It’s my homework.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody has homework drawing ships and little men. Stop that act and come down at once. Your father wants a hand to clean those top shelves before we put things up there.”
“But how will we reach them—what’s the point of putting things up there?”
“Are you going to debate this from up here or come down like you’re told!”
“Where are you off to, Chrissie? We’ll be taking down all those old notices stuck to the windows this evening . . .”
“Oh, I can’t stay, Mam. I’m going up to Peggy. . . . She’s going to teach me how to make a frock.”
“A frock?”
“Yes, she’s got a pattern. She says it’s easy to cut around it. Soon we’ll be able to make all our own clothes.”
“Well, all right, but don’t be late home.”
“No, I won’t. Bye, Mam.”
“Clare, what are you doing?”
“The trade winds. We’ve got to know all about where they come from and why they blew the fleets of . . .”
“Right, get a bowl of hot soapy water, will you? And come with me. These windows are a disgrace. You can’t see through them in or out.”
“Clare, child, I know you work hard at your books but couldn’t you give your mother a hand with the washing? She’s got very thin on us altogether.”
“The washing, Dad?”
“Washing the clothes. I asked her to sit down and have a cup of tea and she said she couldn’t, there was a pile of washing to do. You’ll have to do washing when you have a home of your own. Why don’t you take a turn now and learn how to do it properly? There’s a good girl.”
“What about Chrissie, Dad, could she do it tonight, and I’ll do it the next time, I’ve this legend to learn. There’s all kinds of desperate names in it.”
“Chrissie’s gone to do her homework with Kath.”
“Uh,” Clare said.
“You could go on saying the names to yourself as you did the washing,” her father said.
“No, the book would get wet. Do I have to, Dad?”
“You don’t have to. I thought you’d be glad to help your mother.”
“Tommy or Ned?” She asked without much hope.
“Well, if that’s the kind of thing you’re going to be saying . . .” He turned away in disgust. To suggest that boys would do the washing! Clare was being very difficult altogether.
“Oh, all right!” Clare slammed closed the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece. She only knew Jason, his father, his two wicked step-uncles and the name of the ship. There was a huge cast still to master, so it would mean waking up early . . . again.
“Clare, come here till I teach you to darn.”
“No, Mammy, I don’t want to learn to darn.”
“You that wants to learn everything? Look, it’s very simple. Do you see this hole, what we have to do is to make a criss cross . . .”
“No, Mam, I’d like not to know how to do it. Ever.”
“Why, child? When you have a home of your own you’ll want to know.”
“But if I know now, I’ll be darning Tommy’s socks, and Ned’s, and Dad’s, and Jim’s, and Ben’s, and maybe even Chrissie’s.”
Agnes put her arm round the thin little figure, and smiled. “Aren’t you the funny little thing?”
“No, Mammy, I’m the sensible little thing. I’ll never learn to darn, never.”
Agnes was annoyed to see her affection rejected. “Have it your own way, and you can go and do the washing up if you’re not going to take advantage of the lessons I was going to give you.”
“But . . .”
“Chrissie won’t be in—their class have a special extra class today.”
“That’s right,” Clare said glumly. “Of course they do.”
“Have you a cold, Clare?”
“No, it’s just a cough, Mam. Dust or something in my throat, I think.”
“Have a drink of water then.”
“Right.”
“Clare, don’t spend all day in the kitchen. Come back and help me with these boxes, and put a scarf or something round your mouth if you’re breathing in all the dust.”
“Mam, when we’ve finished this lot, can I go and do—”
“Do your homework, do your homework. Why is it that you’re the only one in this family who has to make the excuse of doing your homework? Look at the rest of t
hem.”
“I know. Look at them, Mam.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
Often Clare had to do her homework in bed, there was literally no other place and no other time. This made Chrissie very cross. She grumbled loudly if Clare turned on the torch.
“You’re spoiling my sleep and ruining your own eyes. You’ll be blind soon and we’ll have to take you round by the hand and you’ll have a white stick,” Chrissie said with satisfaction.
“Shut up, Chrissie. I’m learning something. I can’t get it into my head if you keep distracting me.”
Chrissie was surprised at the strength of the reply. “I’ll tell on you. If you don’t stop that mumbling and learning and having a light on, I’ll tell. That will put a stop to it.”
There was no reply. With her hands in her ears and eyes closed Clare was repeating under her breath the words, “Do Ghealadh mo chroi nuair chinn Loch Greinne,” over and over.
“You’re as thick as the wall,” said Chrissie. “You mean you don’t even know one line after all that saying of it?”
“I don’t know what Ghealadh means. It’s hard to learn when you don’t know what something means.”
“Ah, will you come on out of that. You don’t know what any of it means. How would people know what Irish poetry meant? It’s just words.”
“It means something happened to my heart when I saw Loch Greinne, but I don’t know what happened. Ghealadh, what would that mean?”
“It might mean Stop. My heart stopped dead when I saw Loch Greinne.” Chrissie laughed at her own wit.
“Didn’t you learn it when you were in our class?”
Chrissie shrugged. “We might have. I forget. I forget all of it. What’s the point?”
Clare had gone back to her book.
“I mean it. I’ll tell, and you’ll be in right trouble then. I’ll say you kept me awake with your caterwauling of poetry pretending you understand it. Wait and see. You’ll suffer for it.”
“No I won’t,” Clare said. “I won’t suffer from it at all, you are the one who’ll suffer. It will be wondered why you do no homework, why you don’t know anything. It might even be wondered what you and Kath and Peggy get up to. You’re not going to say anything, and you know it so will you shut up and let me get this learned so that I can go to sleep.”
Angela waited in the surgery. There was only one other patient, old Mrs. Dillon from the hotel. Angela would have thought that the doctor would have visited her privately, but Mrs. Dillon whispered that she had come to see him secretly. She had pretended to her family that she was going to say the thirty days prayer in the church, but in fact she had come to explain that her daughter-in-law was poisoning her. Angela sighed. Poor Dr. Power. He probably got as much of this as Father O’Dwyer did in the confessional. Angela settled down with an old copy of Tatler and Sketch and began to read about the happenings up in Dublin. She was in for a long wait. But in a few moments, Dr. Power was ushering old Mrs. Dillon out the door, and the woman was smiling ear to ear.
“You’ll have time for the thirty days prayer after all, and say a few Hail Marys for me,” he called out after her.
“Sure you don’t need them, Doctor. Aren’t you a walking saint?” called Mrs. Dillon.
“She’s only saying what’s true.” Angela stood up and walked across the corridor with him.
“No. I’m a walking liar, that’s all.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her I was in there during the week inspecting the place for hygiene and I have instruments that could detect poison a mile off. But there wasn’t a trace of it in Dillon’s Hotel. I said that the cold weather often made people think the taste of food had changed, that it was a common belief, then I gave her a bottle of rose-hip syrup and she’s delighted with herself.”
Angela laughed: he looked like a bold boy who’d been found out telling a fib.
“And who’s poisoning you, Angela? Mother Immaculata up at the convent, maybe?”
“Not a bad guess. I think she’d like to a lot of the time. No, it’s not poison. It’s sleep.”
“Too much of it or too little of it?”
“Hardly any of it.”
“Since when?”
“Three weeks, now.”
“Do you know what’s causing it? A worry, a problem?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And is there anything that can be done about it?”
She shook her head wordlessly.
He waited, but nothing came. He reached for a prescription pad, shaking his head. “I won’t have you lying awake at night. Of course you can have something. But, Angela, child, it’s no use just knocking yourself out with these.”
“I know. Thank you, Doctor.”
“And I’m not always such a blabbermouth, like I was there about old Mrs. Dillon. If it would help to talk about it at all, I could keep it to myself. In fact I usually do.”
“You don’t have to tell me that, Dr. Power. Don’t I remember always how good you were about my father.”
But she was resolute. She thanked him and said she would go straight to the chemist now before they closed. She smiled a tired smile at him and he noticed she did indeed have the dark circles of sleeplessness under her eyes. As far as he knew it wasn’t a man, he’d have heard in a small place like this. It was even more unlikely to be a casual sexual encounter resulting in a pregnancy—and anyway, Angela O’Hara wouldn’t lie awake sleepless over something like that. She had been a Trojan in all that business of the child up in the convent who was pregnant: she had been so practical and down-to-earth when everyone else had been flying about in the air. It was Angela who thought of explaining to the girl how the infant would be born, and it was Angela who suggested that the girl’s uncle should be shipped off to England with a warning delivered from enough tough people to make him believe that his life would not be safe if he were ever to return to Castlebay. That had been about four years ago; surely Angela herself couldn’t have brought such a disaster on herself? He sighed and went in to the sitting room. Molly was reading by the fire.
“Nothing changes. Nothing gets much better,” he sighed.
She looked up surprised. Usually he was an optimistic man, seeing hope where there was any kind of life. “Is anybody dying?” she asked.
“No, nothing like that. Wasn’t it a pity I wasn’t a ship’s doctor?”
“Paddy, don’t be ridiculous, you can’t dance well enough to be a ship’s doctor. That’s all they do. They don’t have anything to do with sickness or curing people.”
She looked nice, he thought, when she was being enthusiastic and cheering him up, she looked young herself. It was when her face was discontented that she developed the pouting, double-chinned look of her mother—a woman who had been born disagreeable and lived to make life disagreeable for everyone round her until last year when she got a coronary right in the middle of complaining that she hadn’t got enough presents for her seventieth birthday.
“I’m very ignorant all right,” he said and went over to the drinks cupboard. His hand hovered for a moment over the sherry but settled round the bottle of Irish. What could be so bad that Angela O’Hara couldn’t tell him?
Angela got the sleeping tablets in the chemist and didn’t correct Mr. Murphy there who thought the pills were for her mother.
“It’s a terrible curse, that arthritis, and you know there’s no cure for it. Years ago people didn’t know what it was; now they know what it is but they can’t cure it. Not a great advance, when you come to think of it. These will give her a good night’s sleep, anyway,” he said.
“Oh yes,” Angela said.
“You’re not looking all that well yourself, Angela. You want to get a bit of rest too you know. Up in that school all day with the voices of those children, I don’t know how you stick it. When we come up to see Anna and Nan in the concert we’re nearly deaf from the shrieking of them all round the school, and
then you have the poor mother . . .”
“I’m as strong as a horse, Mr. Murphy,” said Angela and she dragged herself out of the chemist and into the post office. She had her foot on the doorstep when she realized she couldn’t take Mrs. Conway this evening—the bright artificial voice, the inquiries about how well Bernie was doing, the mention once more of the history prize. Angela would never get an answer to the question she wanted to ask, and today she wasn’t strong enough to take Mrs. Conway head on. Some days she’d be able to deal with ten Mrs. Conways before breakfast. But that was all before she had got the letter.
The letter had arrived three weeks ago, with all the beautiful stamps which she usually cut off and put in the envelope on the mantelpiece at once. They saved stamps for the missions, foreign ones in one section and Irish ones in another. Once a year they got a letter at the school thanking them for their great Missionary Effort. Angela would always pin this up on the wall, knowing that somehow it annoyed Immaculata but there was no way she could fault it. She hadn’t noticed that this letter was different to the others, that it had been addressed to her alone and not to her mother. She hadn’t seen the word Confidential all over it. She could easily have opened it as she sat beside her mother.
The letter began:
Angela, I beg you read this alone. I was going to send it to the school but I thought that would cause more fuss. You’ll think of some reason why I put confidential on it. You’ll think of something, Angela. Please.
And it went on to tell her how Sean had left the religious house three years ago; how he was married to a Japanese girl; and how Father Sean had one child of fourteen months and another on the way.
Sean O’Hara had told the Brothers from an early age that he was going to be a missionary priest. They were pleased with this: it was far preferable to the other ambitions in the school which seemed to be to drive the Dublin train or to own a sweet shop. Occasionally the Brothers tried to divert Sean to their own order; but firmly he said that what he wanted was not the job of teaching schoolboys who were already Catholics in Castlebay, he wanted to go out and meet savages and convert them to Christianity.