by Maeve Binchy
“That fellow, is he still at it?” James Nolan said. “I know I’m a small runt of a thing myself, but he’s a dwarf. What do they see in him?”
“I can’t believe he’s still the Romeo,” David complained. “He was always getting the girls without having to lift a finger. I’d have thought they’d have seen through him by now.”
“Different crop every year of course,” Angela said.
“But seriously, Miss O’Hara, seriously.” David looked lovely when he was trying to be serious. He pushed the long lick of hair on his forehead back so that it stood up like a fan. “Now would you as a woman . . . well, as a female—would you tell us what’s so attractive about him.”
“As a female, I would find it very hard to explain. He’s good company. He has a nice smile. He smiles a lot. He doesn’t try too hard to please, but he does seem to like women, without exactly flirting with them. Is that any help?”
She looked from one handsome student to the other as they sat in her upside-down house. They were both thoughtful.
“That’s a great help, actually,” David said earnestly. “Not trying too hard to please. I think that’s where I fall down.”
“I don’t think I like women like he does. I think I like the idea of women more than I like them as people,” said James Nolan.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a couch free,” Angela laughed. “You could lie down one by one and I could psychoanalyze you. Maybe I could psychoanalyze half of Castlebay, and I’d make a fortune. Your father could send me a few patients, David, and maybe Father O’Dwyer could too. Oh and anyone left roaring and bawling after the dance could always come here for a midnight session, I’d straighten them out.”
She was great at knocking down their pomposity. David had been glad to hear from his father that the old woman was in hospital for the summer, he didn’t like calling to see Miss O’Hara when her mother was there, you felt you should talk to both of them. He remembered why he had come.
“I really wanted to know if you’d like to come with us to the Castlebay Committee dance next week. Mummy and Daddy are going too and the Nolans and we were all going to have a drink in our house first and go together.”
Angela was flattered to have been asked; but she regretted that she had a date already.
They were excited when they learned it was Dick Dillon. A romance? A local love affair possibly? A slow-flowering friendship blossoming into a late romance? Would there be wedding bells pealing out from the church before long?
She said they shouldn’t be so cruel and heartless and tease an old maid, a poor spinster of the parish. David said it was just because she wasn’t an old maid they could tease her. It was the best compliment she had ever got, even though anyone else hearing it might have thought it inexplicable.
Clare came twice a week to rehearse the interview for the Murray Prize. They had found out who sat on the board: an uncle of Josie Dillon on her mother’s side was one of them. He was a bank manager and the Murray money was in his bank so that gave him some kind of right to be there when it was being handed out. According to Josie he was mad and snobbish, and thought that Dillon’s Hotel in Castlebay was rather beneath him. Angela and Clare were still working on their strategy for him. Clare arrived shortly after the boys had gone.
“The place stinks of drink,” she said accusingly.
“It’s my age. At the change of life we women become all funny. We start shifting the furniture around and drinking on our own.”
Clare laughed. “You’re never at the change of life yet, Miss O’Hara?”
“Of course, I’m not! God, remind me never to make jokes talking to children. Please Lord, let me never be ironic again. The drink was a gift from two young gentlemen callers. They came and brought champagne cider and invited me to the Castlebay Committee dance. How about that for a poor, old, decrepit, barren geriatric?”
“Who was it?”
“David Power and James Nolan.”
“And are you going?”
“No, I thought I’d leave the field free for younger, plainer women. I’m going with Josie’s uncle. He did ask me first. Are you going?”
“I suppose I will, Josie and I’ll go together. You don’t need a partner. I think she’d rather like it if James Nolan was around, she fancies him a lot.”
“Tell her to pretend she doesn’t even notice him—that will work. Come on now. Do something to help me. Lift one end of this contraption with me. I’m going to paint it out in the back. If I paint it here I’ll stick to it every time I pass by. It’s not going to rain they say on the wireless, so that should mean we’ll have a nice fine evening—”
She broke off suddenly. Clare hadn’t moved, she was sitting troubled and hadn’t even been listening.
“What is it?” she said. “You surely haven’t got the results yet?”
The only thing that could make Clare’s face so downcast must have to do with the Leaving Certificate results, but they weren’t due for two more weeks.
“Tommy’s in jail,” Clare said simply.
“Tommy. Tommy?” It was so long since she had seen the O’Brien boys she had forgotten their names. It came to her a couple of seconds later. “In jail? In England? What did he do?”
“Housebreaking.”
Angela sat down. “When did you hear? Who told you?”
“Just now. The afternoon post. I’m afraid I came up to you straightaway. I couldn’t bear to stand in the shop thinking about it. Mam will be furious. Still. I’ll cope with that.”
“God Almighty, isn’t that desperate? How do you know?”
“A letter from Ned. So as not to worry Mam and Dad immediately, but so as I could forewarn them in case it gets back to them. What does he want me to do? Tell them or not to tell them? It might appear in a paper he said, then again it might not. Thomas O’Brien is a very ordinary name, he says, but Thomas O’Brien from Castlebay would place him pretty clearly. Here, you can read the letter. . . . See if you know what he wants. See if you know what I’m meant to do.”
Angela didn’t reach out to take the ill-written pages on their lined paper. She sat with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. There was a silence for a while. “I don’t need to read the letter. I know what he wants,” Angela said eventually. “He wants you to make the decisions. He wants you to take on the responsibility.”
Clare was surprised. “Why?”
“Because you’re not Chrissie, who wouldn’t know what day it was, and you’re not your mother who would cry her eyes out, and you’re not your father who would get into a temper and you’re not Ben and Jim who are too young to be taken into account. And because you’re bright and got a scholarship, that’s going to fit you and make you ready for any burden from now on.”
Clare was very startled at her tone. “Miss O’Hara . . .” she began.
“What sentence did he get?” Angela asked crisply.
“Ned says two years.”
“That was more than ordinary housebreaking. He must have had a weapon. The great thick fool.”
“No wonder he never wrote home.”
“Tommy was hardly able to write if I remember rightly. What do you think you’ll do?”
“I don’t know. I’ve no information. If I thought it was going to get into the papers here I’d tell Ma and Da, but if not what’s the point in hurting them?”
“I know. What we need is information, as you say.”
“But I’ve no way of finding out . . .”
“I have. See can you find a writing pad under those newspapers there. I’ll write it now and you can get it into the six o’clock post.”
“Who? What will you say?”
“I have a friend in London. He’s a priest—but not like Father O’Dwyer here or anything. He’d find out for us.”
“But could you ask him? Wouldn’t he . . . ?”
“No, he wouldn’t be shocked, and he’s one of the best men in the world to keep a secret. Have you the paper? I’ll start
straightaway.”
Clare’s eyes filled quickly with tears of gratitude as Miss O’Hara wrote her address across the top of the paper and then wrote: “Dear Father Flynn, I wonder if you can help me. Yet again . . .”
Father Flynn was magnificent. There was a reply in eight days. He had been to see Ned, who was working in a pub now, washing up. It was a rough sort of place, Father Flynn had got him a new job where he was better off—he could live in and the landlord would keep an eye on him. He had heard the details. Tommy had been in with a gang. They had done several jobs and six months ago, Tommy had got probation for his part in the theft of building supplies from a site. This time it had been a smash and grab raid on a small jeweler’s shop. What they hadn’t realized was that the jeweler was still in his shop when the windows were broken with crowbars and the goods seized. The jeweler’s mistake had been to stand up. He had been hit on the side of the head by one of the gang—he could not identify it as being Tommy. But the rest of them escaped and were gone well to ground when the police came looking. Only Tommy was there still with some of the jewelry.
Tommy had said he didn’t know who the others were, and couldn’t give descriptions. He insisted that he had only met them that night and they didn’t give their names. So, according to Ned, the gang were pleased with him and they would make sure he got his share when he came out. He would be out in eighteen months. Father Flynn had visited him in Wormwood Scrubs and reported that he was very pleased to have some contact with home. Since he had been asked to be totally frank, Father Flynn had to report Tommy O’Brien in poor shape, he was missing most of his teeth; he asked for nothing but comics to read from the prison library and he had all the appearance of a loser. Since it was hardly helpful to make such comments without offering anything more positive as well, Father Flynn wondered was there a way Tommy could be brought back to Castlebay when he was released. He did not seem a strong enough character to survive on either side of the tracks in the life he had found for himself in London. If Castlebay was not a realistic solution Father Flynn would try to keep an eye on him, but it would be hard. As soon as Tommy was released he would be given money to show approval that he hadn’t squealed; and within three months he would be inside again, for he would loyally go along with the next job suggested to him, and be the patsy there as well. As regards publicity there would be none. The name T. O’Brien had appeared in a local evening paper in London; it would not be taken up by the Irish newspapers. Unfortunately, the arrest and imprisonment of people with Irish names was only too commonplace now. It didn’t rate as news.
Angela and Clare read this glumly. He had certainly been as frank as they had asked him to be. But he had been exactly the right person to go and see what was happening. He made no judgments and expressed no shock or disapproval.
“I wonder how Tommy lost his teeth. A fight maybe?” Angela said.
“Maybe they just rotted away,” Clare said. “He was very nervous of everything, Tommy. He wouldn’t ever go to the dentist. I can’t think how he was brave enough to get in with a gang of robbers, I’d have thought he would have run a hundred miles in the opposite direction.”
Her face was sad even though her voice was calm. She hadn’t cried or shown any great shock when she read the priest’s letter. She sat very still with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. Clare had the ability to be very still, Angela had noticed. When she was reading only the turning of the pages showed she was awake. When she listened it was the same. Now she heard of her brother’s disgrace without expostulating, or making excuses.
“I don’t suppose he had to be very brave to get in with a gang. Probably need to be brave not to get in with one. Will you write to him in jail?”
Clare hadn’t thought of this. “Is there any point if he can’t read the letters? Would we be better to pretend we didn’t know he was there at all? I think that’s what he’d like best,” she said without conviction.
“Too late for that. Ned wrote to you, remember? You can’t pretend you don’t know. You can keep it from your parents and the rest of them but you can’t go back on what you know.”
“Yes.”
“So, will you write to him?”
“He never wrote to me, not in six years, nor to any of us, it would only be hypocritical, wouldn’t it? And maybe even boasting. Look at me, how well I’m doing. I even have my sights on being a college girl, a graduate, and where are you? You’re a jailbird.”
“I don’t suppose you’d write a letter like that.”
Her immobility had gone, her eyes flashed. “You think I ought to, don’t you? If it were you, you’d be sunny and forgiving and like a saint, the way you are about everything. But the world isn’t full of saints, it’s full of ordinary selfish people like Tommy who go stealing, and me who doesn’t want to write him pious letters.”
Angela said nothing.
“I know I shouldn’t say it’s all right for you, I know you had your share of awful things years ago when your father was . . . but that’s all long past you, people have forgotten that, you’ve no shames and no secrets now. You’re where you want to be, and you’re nice and safe as a teacher here, and your family are all respectable, and you’ve got a brother, a priest, for God’s sake. I’ve got a brother with no teeth who can’t read and who’s in Wormwood Scrubs.”
“Clare,” Angela said sharply.
She looked up.
Angela paused. No, not now. It wasn’t bad enough, it was only a fit of annoyance and self-pity. She wouldn’t tell her.
“Nothing.”
Clare was surprised.
“If you don’t get the Murray Prize remind me that I was going to tell you something this afternoon and I changed my mind.”
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“I won’t, that’s all. Now are we going to waste any more time listening to how sorry you are for yourself? You asked me to find out about Tommy, I have. He’s your brother. Write to him if you want to. Don’t if you don’t want to. I’m not spending one more minute discussing it. If you haven’t the generosity to give some bit of hope and optimism to that poor eejit in there, then you haven’t. I’m not involved in making you a nice person, nobody can do that for you. I’m only helping you to get on academically. Let’s see. Where were we?” She took out a notebook and checked the items they’d covered last time. “Now we’ve been over a lot of current affairs and you’re fine on Eisenhower and the Middle East and the end of Anthony Eden, and King Hussein of Jordan, but there’s a good chance that none of the committee will have ever heard of them. Maybe we should concentrate on what they really know about, the Pope and de Valera. When was Pius XII consecrated as Pope . . . ?”
“I’m sorry. Of course I’ll write to him.”
“Write to who you like. Pius XII. And what was his name?”
“Pacelli, Eugenic Pacelli. He’s eighty-one. He was elected in 1939, the year the war started. He was Papal representative in Germany.”
“Nuncio, nuncio, say it.”
“Nuncio.”
“And don’t come out with it too cocky. Try not to sound as if you know everything. They won’t like that.”
They laughed. Clare wanted to say more about Tommy, but she was headed off.
“De Valera . . . now this is a tricky one. They’ll be bound to love him or hate him, but you’re not expected to have any views . . . just facts. Born?”
“In New York in 1882, of a Spanish father and Irish mother. Brought up in Bruree, County Limerick . . . but I do have views . . .”
“Of course you do, but when you are being tested for the Murray Prize is not the time to express them. If any of this lot are in their fifties or over they’ll remember the Civil War. Not just remember hearing about it, they’ll bloody remember it themselves, so will you go carefully and don’t throw the whole thing away. We could concentrate on what Dev did in the last war, that shouldn’t offend many of them, but if there’s anyone with an Anglo-Irish accent there watch it, the Eng
lish never forgave Dev over our staying neutral. No point in waving a red rag to a bull.”
“Thank you, Miss O’Hara.”
“Stop simpering and keep learning. Talking of simpering, did Gerry Doyle ask you to the Castlebay Committee dance?”
“Yes, he did. I said no, Josie and I were going on our own. We’d see him in there.”
“It’s you who should be teaching me,” sighed Angela.
Dick Dillon looked very cross when he came to collect Angela. She invited him in and offered him a cup of tea or a glass of orange. He looked around in surprise.
“You have it very nice, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“I don’t know, just considering,” he said. Angela wondered why couldn’t she have said to Dick Dillon that she’d see him inside? Why did she have to put up with this groaning and grousing?
“I painted it recently, while mother’s in hospital. Dr. Power said she should go in for observation. She’ll be back soon.”
She heard her own voice, boring, talking trivia to this old man. What did young Clare mean the other day when she said that Angela had got all she wanted? She did not want to be talking to a reformed alcoholic sitting there patronizing her little house. In as grouchy a manner as his own she flung his orange squash in front of him and very deliberately took a bottle of gin out of the press.
“Since I haven’t been put off it yet, I am going to have a drink to get us through this night, Dick Dillon. So will almost everyone around you, so you might as well get used to it now.”
A slow smile of admiration came over his face. “That’s the first time anyone has treated me as a normal human being for seven years,” and he raised his own glass to her. “Good luck,” he said beaming all over his face.