Echoes

by Maeve Binchy

  Angela watched him as he felt the swollen joints of her mother’s legs. And then he took the twisted lumpy hands in his own.

  “It hasn’t got much worse to the outside eye,” he said cheerfully, “but I know that’s not much help inside where it’s all aches and pains.” He made it easy for them to complain a bit; Dr. Power’s patients didn’t have to bite back their fears and their telling the tale of their illness. He had all the time in the world.

  She walked him back to the car.

  “Mind you, I think you put on a clean blouse and a clean face for me yourself,” he said, teasing her. “Did you want to consult me too?”

  “No, I’m fine,” she laughed.

  “If you were fine you’d sleep at night,” he said.

  “I nearly do now. I only take half one, not a whole tablet like I did in the beginning.”

  “Is it any better whatever it is that’s worrying you?” He was on one side of his car. She leaned over with her elbows on the roof of the car.

  “It is a bit better, I suppose. It hasn’t gone away but I’ve got used to it.”

  “It’s not any kind of sickness or health worry. You needn’t tell me: I could tell you the name of a very nice doctor, someone strange to you?”

  “No. It’s not that, thank you all the same.”

  “And if it’s a man, we’re not worth it. Not one of us is worth a woman staying awake one hour over us.”

  “Stop fishing.” She laughed. “You’re fishing for information, and for compliments. Half the town is sleepless over you, Dr. Power. I was only thinking that this evening in the house there, wasn’t it an awful pity I wasn’t around ten years earlier and I might have caught you?”

  “Oh, you’d have had to be around long before that. I’m an old dog. A dull old dog.”

  He got into the car and wound down the window. “If you find a fellow you want to go off with, go now. Do you hear me? Don’t be thinking you have to grow old in that house there. I’ll sort your mother out. I’ll see she gets looked after. You live your life.”

  “No, it’s not that, honestly.” She smiled at him affectionately.

  “Or a nun or anything,” he said suddenly.

  “Oh, it’s definitely not that.” She pealed with laughter.

  “No, well, I suppose one in the family’s enough,” he said and he was gone.

  One was more than enough, Angela thought as she went back into the house.

  Gerry Doyle had taken two smashing photographs during the summer. One was of David and Caroline playing with a beach ball and the big waves rolling in behind them. David thought it looked great, like an advertisement for Come to Sunny Somewhere, like you saw for English seaside resorts. The other picture was of Nolan sitting eating an ice cream on the wall outside O’Brien’s shop. He was surrounded by girls: Hilary was sitting on one side, and Gerry’s own sister Fiona on the other, and at his feet sat Chrissie O’Brien and her two henchwomen Kath and Peggy. He looked like a sultan, tanned and powerful and surrounded by women, all he needed was the headgear. These pictures did Nolan and Power a great deal of good at school. In fact David began to wonder if half the pupils and their parents might turn up there next summer. The Seal Cave had become a legend for night adventures, the sand dunes for even more excitement, Brigid’s Cave where you shouted a question and the echo answered. The tennis in the hotel and up on high stools at the bar afterwards for a lemonade, the lessons up at the golf club and the junior tournaments. Not only did they have the stories, they had the proof in these photographs. David kept the picture of Caroline under a piece of paper in the back of his atlas. It was awkward being in love with your friend’s sister because you couldn’t talk to him about it freely. You couldn’t say that you had kissed her at the pictures and she hadn’t asked you to stop. He couldn’t tell Nolan that he had kissed Caroline in the sea and in the Echo Cave. He did tell Nolan that Caroline was going to write to him at school and call herself Charles, but Nolan was only mildly interested. Fiona Doyle, Gerry’s sister, was going to write to Nolan calling herself Fred and Hilary was going to sign herself Henry. If Chrissie O’Brien could write she would probably have written too and signed herself Christopher, but it was deeply suspected however, that Chrissie was illiterate and so the question didn’t arise. David Power and James Nolan decided that since she had Gerry Doyle right there in Castlebay she would be too occupied even to consider writing to people in boarding school. Gerry Doyle seemed to win all the girls without ever making the slightest effort.

  They didn’t know that Chrissie was growing more sure every day that Gerry Doyle didn’t fancy her as much as he had at one time. She discussed it at length with Kath and Peggy, but they reached no conclusion. She had gone as far as she could go without going the whole way, or without even doing things that would embarrass them seriously in the broad daylight when they remembered it. What else were you supposed to do? Her spots had gone, her hair had got blonder, and, thanks to the pipe cleaners, was much curlier. She had a big bust and a tight red belt around her waist. She never plagued Gerry or bothered him or asked him to go steady. And still he seemed to have gone off her. It was a mystery. Kath and Peggy agreed, all fellows were a mystery.

  “We must take up photography seriously. It seems to make you very popular,” Nolan suggested to David one day.

  “I’ve a feeling it’s more than that,” David said. He liked Gerry but he wished that Caroline didn’t think he was so great. It was irritating to be in the middle of saying something to her and then to see her face light up and her hand go up waving. He knew that could only mean Gerry Doyle had been spotted again. And Gerry would just wave back with a friendly smile, he never came panting up eagerly like Bones did, shaking with enthusiasm and pleasure to be noticed. Less like Bones, more like Gerry Doyle, that seemed to be the motto as far as success with women was concerned.

  Success at school was easier. David came first in the class at the Christmas tests and Nolan came second. Nolan hated being second and the following Easter it was Nolan first and Power second. They made a pact not to work hard during the summer term and to spend all the time getting really good at tennis. Tennis was about the only game that Gerry Doyle didn’t play and excel at. And that’s because it was the only one he hadn’t tried.

  Chrissie said she wanted to leave school and learn something useful. Like what, they had asked her. She shrugged, anything, anything except boring school lessons. Nobody knew how time was wasted up in that convent she assured them, the nuns had no control and the children just sat there doing nothing all day. It was pointed out that Clare seemed to get on all right, but Chrissie said that proved nothing, Clare was distinctly odd, she had no friends, she was driven to study her books out of sheer despair that the rest of her life was so awful. This line of argument did not go down as well as Chrissie had hoped, there was no question of her leaving school at fourteen she was told, she would stay on another year and mind her manners too. Anyway it was wrong to say Clare hadn’t a friend, hadn’t she Josie Dillon?

  Miss O’Hara had been very pleased with Clare’s work over the months, she said that by any standards she would have to win the scholarship. She’d nearly get it this year while she was eleven, so next year she should have no problems at all.

  “Sometimes I feel guilty teaching you, Clare,” Miss O’Hara had said one evening. “You are able to read on your own now, and you actually enjoy it. All I’m really doing is sitting here praising you.”

  “You won’t stop?” Clare was terrified.

  “No, of course not. I just meant that people like Josie Dillon or the young Murphy girl might benefit more—at least they might leave school knowing how to read. That would be nice for them.”

  “Josie can read,” Clare said. “Of course she can.”

  “But she doesn’t, does she? I can’t ask her to read aloud from the history book in class or the English book. She can’t take any part in the plays we read aloud or we’d be all day and all night in the classroom. You kno
w that.”

  “She’s not very interested, that’s all.”

  “What is she interested in? Her sisters were all right, you know, not genius standard but reasonable. Josie’ll never get a chance to go away to school like they did. It just won’t be worth it.”

  “Yes, she knows that.”

  “Is it settled? I was only guessing. Does she mind?”

  “No, I think she’s quite glad. You know, she doesn’t really want to leave home. She’s nervous. She doesn’t want things to change.”

  “You should give her a hand if you’re a friend of hers. Why don’t you help her to get on a bit? And it would be good practice for you too.”

  “Practice for what?”

  “Practice for being a teacher. Hey, have you forgotten that’s what all this is about? We’re making a teacher out of you, Clare O’Brien.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, of course.”

  She hadn’t realized that this is what Miss O’Hara saw as the end of the road. Being a teacher in a convent, either here in Castlebay and cycling home every afternoon, or somewhere else somewhere like this. She didn’t know that Clare wanted to see the world, she wanted to be an ambassador or the head of a big company or an interpreter, not just a teacher. But of course it would be very tactless to say anything like that. It would be saying that Miss O’Hara hadn’t done well enough for herself.

  “So? Are you going to give her a bit of help? Not doing it for her, you know, explaining it a bit.”

  “She’d wonder what the point was.”

  “Well, if she likes staying here, why not tell her that she should work hard enough to get herself into some kind of commercial college? Then she could learn bookkeeping and typing and shorthand and she could work in the office of the hotel when that old dragon of a grandmother of hers dies and lets any of them into the office.”

  Clare was never so happy as when she was allowed in on grown-up viciousness like this. It made her feel very important. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  “It’s better coming from you,” Miss O’Hara said. “Most people think that any advice given by a teacher is bound to work out to their doom in the end.”

  Josie had her twelfth birthday when all her sisters and brothers were away at school. Her mother, who was always called Young Mrs. Dillon, said that they should put off the celebrations until the rest of the family came home on their holidays. Surprisingly Josie didn’t agree, that’s what had been said when she was ten and when she was eleven she said, it was not happening this year. This year she would like to invite Clare O’Brien to tea and then for them both to go to the pictures.

  The pictures! At night, and during the week. It was unheard of.

  Clare O’Brien said that her mother said it would be all right if Josie’s mother said it was all right. Young Mrs. Dillon looked at the large pasty face of her youngest daughter and was moved. It would be all right, she said. At least from what she could see the young Clare wasn’t as much of a tinker as her sister Chrissie was, and perhaps it was good that poor Josie should have some friend even if it was a child from a huckster’s shop.

  While they were waiting for the picture to start Clare told Josie that she was so lucky to have a bedroom of her own and that was something Clare would like almost more than anything in the world.

  “It’s all right for you,” Josie said. “You like studying.”

  “I don’t really like it. Nobody could like learning things off by heart and nobody could like long division and fractions and problems. I just do them so that I’ll get what I want afterwards.”

  “What do you want?” Josie looked at her with a dull face.

  Clare wondered whether to risk it. “Well, I sort of hoped that since we don’t have any money or anything, not for secondary school, I wondered if I worked hard maybe they’d take me on free like, to encourage other people to work hard.”

  “Who would?”

  “Some secondary school.”

  “I don’t see why not. They should be glad to have hardworking people like you instead of lazy people who pay.”

  Clare was heartened. “So that’s why I do it—you should too.”

  “But we have money to send me to a school. There’s no point. I don’t want to go to one.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Stay here.”

  “In the hotel?”

  “Of course, where else would I go?”

  “But you’d better learn to do something Josie. Otherwise you’ll be making beds and serving on tables there. The boys will all serve the time as hoteliers, won’t they?”

  “I suppose so.” Josie had never thought about it.

  “And Rose and Emily, they’ll do something I bet, like a hotel management course or something.”

  “Yes, well, they might.”

  “So to make sure they don’t push you out of it, you should do something.”

  “What could I do, Clare?” Josie looked at her pathetically.

  Clare didn’t want to come up with a solution too quickly. “You could get trained for something they haven’t done, so that you’d always be needed.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well suppose you did a commercial course, would you have anyone to stay with in the town so that you could live with them and come back home at weekends?” She knew that the Dillons had at least three sets of cousins in the town.

  Josie remembered that slowly too. Yes, it was possible. “But I’d be all on my own there.”

  “Isn’t it attached to the convent, the secondary school?”

  It turned out that it was, and after all if Clare’s plans went right she would be in the secondary school herself. They could barely concentrate on the film when it came on, real-life plans were more exciting.

  “They’d only laugh at me. I’m no good at spelling and everything. I’d never learn all that stuff.”

  “I could give you a hand if you like.”

  “Why would you do that?” Josie was almost ungracious in her disbelief.

  “Because you’re my friend,” said Clare awkwardly, and Josie smiled from ear to ear.

  It began then: the working in Dillon’s Hotel rather than at home. It was much easier, and nobody seemed to mind. Clare wasn’t one to be up to any devilment, not like Chrissie. If you passed the hotel you could even see the two of them working at an upper window with their books out. Clare helped her with the spellings first and Josie thought that it was a marvelous coincidence that Miss O’Hara announced a spelling bee at the very same time. The handwriting became neater, the exercise books were clean and orderly, and Josie even stooped less and seemed more alert. She once asked a question in class and Mother Brendan had nearly fainted. Clare frowned across at Josie, they had agreed the improvement must be gradual, and that she mustn’t look so smart that they would decide to send her off to her boarding school and spoil everything.

  The nuns had a rule that they never walked anywhere outside the convent alone, so it was common practice for a nun to ask a lay teacher or an older girl to accompany her to the post office, to Miss O’Flaherty’s stationery shop or whatever errand it was. So Angela was not surprised when Mother Immaculata asked if she would accompany her down the town.

  Together they walked out the convent gates and down the hill. It was never easy to find idle chat for Mother Immaculata at the best of times, and this was not the best of times for Angela. She had slept very badly despite the half pill taken with warm milk. She had a letter from Emer in Dublin with the great news for Emer that the engagement ring was being bought on the following Saturday. She wanted to know if Angela would come to Dublin and be her bridesmaid. Angela’s mother had been very very stiff this morning and dressing her had been like bending painful wood to pull on stockings and to twist aching arms into garments. The children’s voices had been shrill all morning, a child had been sick during religious instruction in First Year and despite open windows and Dettol the smell seemed to permeate the school. Now when she had been h
oping for a cigarette and a look at the paper she had to waltz this ridiculous nun downtown to buy a postcard or whatever it was she wanted.

  “Why don’t they allow you out on your own, Mother? I’m delighted to accompany you of course, but I’ve often wondered.”

  “It’s part of our Rule,” Immaculata said smugly. Angela felt like punching her in the face.

  “Are they afraid you’ll make a run for it?” she asked.

  “Hardly, Miss O’Hara.”

  “Well there must be some reason but I suppose we’ll never know.”

  “We rarely question the Rule.”

  “No, I suppose you don’t. That’s where you have my wholehearted admiration. I’d question it from morning to night.”

  The nun gave a tinny little laugh. “Oh, I’m sure you would, Miss O’Hara.”

  Angela wondered again how old she was—possibly only ten years older than herself. This white-faced, superior woman was quite likely to be below forty. Wasn’t it extraordinary? The children probably thought she was ninety, but on the other hand the children thought every teacher was ninety, so that was no guideline.

  “I wanted to talk to you actually—that’s why I seized this opportunity.”

  “Oh yes?” Angela was wary. What was so urgent it couldn’t be discussed within the confines of school? Could Immaculata possibly have heard Angela talking about the stink of the school being quite bad enough without having the children puking all over the place?

  “It’s about your brother, Father O’Hara.”

  Hot bile in her throat and a feeling like a hen’s wing of feathers in her chest.

  “Oh yes?” She said it again, willing her face to look normal, reminding herself that this stupid, mannered nun paused for effect after every single phrase she uttered. There was nothing sinister in the way she waited.

  “There’s a sort of mystery, you see,” Mother Immaculata said.

  “Mystery, Mother?” Angela played the game by the rules: the more quickly she spoke the quicker would be the response.