by Maeve Binchy
“I will write a proper letter to Angela O’Hara every single week.”
She found some nice cowries and put them in the box she had in her pocket. She heard a shout and there was David.
“I hoped I’d find you here. You and I are the only people who use the amenities out of season.”
“Or in season. They’re all too busy to come down on the beach. My father can’t even swim.”
“Anyway, here you are.” He looked pleased to see her, she felt suddenly a little embarrassed.
“Where’s Bones? You don’t look fully dressed without him.”
“Poor Bones, he has a cough. Believe it or not, he’s coughing like an old man. My father has him dosed better than if he were the president but Bones is whooping and hacking away. Nellie has an old jumper tied round his neck, you never saw the cut of him.”
Clare laughed at the idea of it but said it was rotten to think of Bones not being well.
“Will you do me a favor?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“I want to go back the day after tomorrow . . .”
“But term doesn’t start until . . .”
“Exactly. That’s the point. I have to say it does—will you back me up?”
“Certainly, but I can’t go back the day after tomorrow.”
His face fell. “No, I suppose you can’t.”
“No, I don’t mean leaving here or anything, they wouldn’t mind. It’s just I’ve nowhere to stay. The hostel doesn’t open for us till the first day of term.”
“Oh.”
“We could say medical school opens earlier. I could say that to anyone, but anyway what does it matter what I say? I don’t meet your parents.”
“No, but if you’d gone back they’d know. Everyone knows everything here, every single thing.” He sounded annoyed.
“I’m sorry,” Clare said. “I know what you feel, and I wouldn’t mind at all going back myself, but you do see . . .”
“You could always stay in our flat, my flat,” he said.
“No, I could not.”
“I don’t mean any funny business. You’d have your own room. One of the fellows won’t be back until term starts.”
“We’d be killed if I was caught, and I’m damn well not going to risk getting caught for something I haven’t done, or putting myself in danger unless I’m getting value out of it.” She was full of conviction and quite unaware how vehement she looked.
“All right, calm down. I see your point of view.”
“Did you have a nice Christmas?” she asked suddenly.
“Not very. Did you?”
“Not very.”
“Are you missing lover boy Gerry Doyle? I hear he went off to the bright lights of London.”
“No, I’m not missing him. I don’t suppose I gave him a thought. I must be the only woman in the western hemisphere that isn’t.”
“Aha, then he’ll go after you all the more,” David said.
“Have you a lover girl in Dublin that you want to be back to meet?” she asked.
“Yes and no. Yes, there is a girl, but it’s not only that. I feel a bit too important in the house. I’m all they’ve got. Do you know what I mean? I think they pay too much attention to me.”
“It’s the reverse in my house. They don’t pay enough attention to me. I’m not nearly important enough.”
He laughed. “Nobody ever gets what they want, do they? Will I see you at all in Dublin? I could ring you in the hostel some evening.”
“Great,” she said.
He never rang, but that was no surprise.
Clare thought about it, and decided that David had never meant it. It was just the way the Powers had of saying goodbye. They couldn’t actually say the word, it seemed too final, so they said something insincere instead, like promising to ring you at the hostel.
Perhaps it was just as well, she thought, making the best of it. There were thousands and thousands of men in UCD; she shouldn’t try to get a date with someone from Castlebay who was on the other side of the cliffs so to speak.
Valerie had had a fairly uneventful Christmas, all things considered. She had nearly come to blows with her mother when they were playing Scrabble: her mother said Quorn was a word, and Valerie had claimed it was a proper noun and the name of a hunt somewhere. Her mother had flung things on the ground and said she wouldn’t be patronized. They had an adventurous time with a cookbook, each taking it in turns to make a dish, one more exotic than the other; apparently Valerie’s father in England had refused to pay any actual money but would pay bills in the local grocery so they only chose dishes with very highly priced ingredients.
Mary Catherine had an adventurous Christmas too; James Nolan invited her to his house three times. She had thought Caroline was a pain. Caroline was finishing her thesis for her M.A. about Spencer and Ireland and thought almost everyone in the world was illiterate and that Americans were more illiterate than most. James Nolan showed a very unhealthy desire to go to the States in the summer: he said he would be sure to look up Mary Catherine and her family, and perhaps he could come to stay? She had agreed, and made sure not to give him her home address. Her mailman father told her when she married a man who owned a castle to keep her American side of things under wraps until the deal was done. James Nolan wasn’t exactly a castle owner but he was an attorney almost, and that couldn’t be bad. No, of course she didn’t love him. But she wasn’t going to pitch him overboard yet. Clare thought of Josie back home typing away in the hotel, organizing bridge conferences with Uncle Dick, fighting off her two jealous sisters Rosie and Emily. She sighed. It wouldn’t be reasonable to tell Mary Catherine to hold her horses, because James Nolan couldn’t remember Josie Dillon from a hole in the ground.
Mary Catherine came running up the stairs two at a time. “There is a dee-vine young man downstairs asking for you, Clare. I said I would see if I could find you.”
“You mean thing! Why didn’t you say I’d be down in two ticks?”
“Because I’m your friend. I wanted you to put on something good and to comb your hair and put on some makeup. I’m too good a friend—that’s what I am.”
“Oh, it must be Gerry Doyle. He’s the one who always gets that reaction.” Still, she did put on a little lipstick.
She picked up her duffle coat.
“Very confident he’s going to ask you out,” Mary Catherine said.
“You should play hard to get,” Valerie suggested. “He’ll think it’s too eager if you go down ready for the off.”
“That fellow only knows people who are too eager, that’s the style he’s used to. Anyway, we’ll just go out for coffee, I imagine.”
“I think we should leave the window unlocked. You may need to climb the rungs tonight from the sound of it.” Valerie was pleased.
“He’s not strictly good-looking. He’s got an aura,” said Mary Catherine.
“You and your auras, you learned that word a week ago, everything has an aura.” Clare was gone before they could retaliate. She ran lightly down the stairs. Gerry was standing in the hall as relaxed as if he had been a regular visitor.
“This is a great surprise,” she said with genuine and unaffected pleasure. “I didn’t know you were in Dublin.”
“I’m not. I mean not in Dublin itself if you know what I mean, I’m passing through, on my way back from London. I got a longing to talk to you.”
She was going to say something jokey—but his face looked tired.
“Great,” she said simply. “Let me take you away from here before they devour you.” She tucked her arm companionably in his and they went out of the hostel and down the steps. “Coffee or a drink?”
“A drink would be very nice. Do you know a pub?”
“There’s two here, just round the corner. Shows you my virtuous life, though. I don’t know what they’re like. Have a look into the first one and tell me what you think.”
He came back in seconds, grinning. “How many people are there in Dublin—half a
million maybe?”
“More, much more, I think. Why?”
“In that pub, who do I see but David Power and Caroline Nolan looking into each other’s eyes?”
“Go on. Well, we could have a Castlebay reunion, if you’d like that.”
“No. I wouldn’t like that. I’d like to talk to you, that’s why I came to find you.”
They went into the second pub. There was a mixed collection of drinkers: students in college scarves, workmen from a building site nearby, a few red-nosed old regulars.
“This is paradise,” Gerry said. “No one from home. Is it still bitter lemon or have you got more adventurous?”
“Still bitter lemon,” she said, pleased that he had remembered.
He told her about Fiona. The baby was a boy, born the day after Christmas. She called him Stephen. The old nuns had been very kind—disapproving of course, and thought Fiona was a great sinner—but kind in the end; and they had arranged the adoption when the baby was three weeks old. Fiona had a sort of depression apparently. That’s why he had gone over again, to cheer her up, to reassure her that she had done the right thing. There was no other course open to her if she wanted to live her life in Castlebay. She had to pretend it had never happened. She had to keep it a secret.
Clare didn’t want to hear about the baby’s father, but Gerry wanted to tell her. He was a married man. Wouldn’t you know? One of the crowd that came down golfing last year. He had told Fiona he was single; he had also told her when she wrote to him about the pregnancy that there was no question of his becoming involved; and that if she made any trouble all his friends had agreed to say that they had had her too. What options did she have? If this were known at home she would be a slut and a fool—what a combination . . .
He talked on about the business. Times were hard and getting harder. It hadn’t been as easy as he had thought: there were all the expenses. If Clare could only see what he had to lash out on equipment—the new modern machines were so expensive, and of course they would eventually pay for themselves, but the trouble was when.
Even doing the place up had cost a lot of money. There had been some good commissions, but not enough.
“What are you going to do?” she asked sympathetically.
“Survive. Isn’t that the only thing to do? What you and I have always been doing.”
He looked as if it might be quite an effort to survive. Shadows under his eyes, and his face pale. She felt very protective toward him suddenly, almost as if she would like to put her arm round his shoulder and draw him toward her soothingly. She had never felt like that about Gerry Doyle before, and had been rather relieved. It was as if she were the only girl in town who hadn’t caught the measles. But this was different. This wasn’t being keen on him like Chrissie and everyone else. This was wanting to look after him, he seemed defenseless and vulnerable sitting there in front of his pint glass.
She reached out and took his hand.
“So I thought I’d come and tell you about it. If there’s anyone who’d understand, it’s you.”
Pleased and surprised she asked, “Why me?”
“Lord, it hasn’t been easy for you to get where you’ve got. No one to help you on—just Clare do this do that, iron that shirt Clare, sort those potatoes Clare, when they should be so proud of you and helping you to study.”
He had noticed, all those years. He understood.
She was trying to lessen the intensity of his stare: he was looking at her as if his eyes were boring through her.
“You’re different, Clare. I’ve always said that to you. You and I are the same type. We’re the only two they produced in Castlebay. We belong together.”
She was startled now and not quite sure how to handle it.
“Look at that couple over there,” she said suddenly as a girl student, somewhat the worse for drink, started climbing on the lap of her companion. “That’s belonging together in a rather public way. How long before they’re thrown out?”
She turned her bright smile back to him but his glance hadn’t changed.
He grasped her hand. “Stop talking about things that don’t matter. It’s true. We are the same. And I know every thought you have, as you know mine.”
“I don’t know yours, Gerry. Really I don’t.”
“Well, you will.”
“When will I? I have so much work to do here in this university I’ll never have time to get round to reading people’s thoughts?”
“Not people’s thoughts. Mine. I’ll wait for you.”
“It will be a long wait. I’m going to get a list of letters after my name, you know.”
“Stop trying to avoid it. I’ll wait for you, no matter how long I have to wait. In your heart you know that.”
She looked at his troubled face, never so handsome as now, and wondered what he meant by all this. It had a very solemn air about it. Like a vow.
She met David Power not at all during the term, and got over her pique that he had promised to ring her. She went on one date to the Abbey Theater. The serious history student who had asked her said he hoped she didn’t mind being in the gods. By the time they got there they were nearly ready for a hospital bed. He told her that he didn’t believe in spending money foolishly; and when they had a cup of coffee afterward and he said, “You don’t want anything to eat, do you?” Clare agreed in her mind that indeed he was not someone to spend money foolishly. Or even at all. He asked her to go to the National Gallery with him on the following Saturday afternoon. But she didn’t like him enough; and she preferred going there on her own anyway. And it was honestly too mean to ask someone on a date to a place that was free. She wrote about it to Josie, deliberately making it worse than it was. She didn’t want Josie to know how much fun it was in Dublin. She didn’t want Josie to know that she had met James Nolan either.
James always looked deliberately well-dressed, as if he were posing as a very elegant man at the races.
“Is your nice American friend Mary Catherine loaded?” James had asked her unexpectedly in the Annexe one morning when she was having coffee and reading an article in History Today at the same time.
“Loaded?” She pretended she hadn’t understood.
“Loaded with money, weighed down with wealth.”
“I have no idea,” Clare said, looking at him with her big dark eyes opened wide in innocence. “What a strange thing to ask.”
“Well, I can hardly ask her,” he complained.
“But why not? If you want to know, isn’t she the one you should ask?”
“It looks odd. And anyway women are so apt to take things the wrong way.”
“I know,” Clare said sympathetically. “Isn’t it sickening?”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“I am not. I’m horrified by you if you must know.”
“It’s just that I was half thinking of going to the States this summer—see how American I’ve become? I don’t say ‘going to America’ I said ‘going to the States’—and if I could stay with Mary Catherine’s family for a bit it would cut down the cost.”
“Sure, but why would it matter if they were loaded or not? Couldn’t you stay with them, if she asked you, even if they were just ordinary, and not wealthy? Wouldn’t it be a bed wherever it was?”
James looked down into his coffee cup. “Yes, but it is my last summer holiday before I settle down to work. I’d like to go somewhere where they have a bit of style. A swimming pool, a ranch or a big apartment on Fifth Avenue . . . She’s very secretive about where she lives. That’s why I asked you.”
“Why don’t you just come back to Castlebay as usual? I think the complications about America are wearing you out.”
“You don’t understand anything, Clare. That’s your problem.”
“I know.” Clare grinned at him. “It’s always been my problem. I’m as thick as the wall.”
They parted friends, and yet Clare felt guilty. This pompous man was being a real heel toward two of her frien
ds. It was disloyal sitting in the Annexe and giggling with him.
Emer and Kevin said they would be delighted if Clare came to stay for Easter. She had offered them a deal: she would babysit, wash up every single thing that went into the sink and do two hours a day digging the garden. In return could she have a place to stay and a little food? She had written to Angela and said she couldn’t bear to go back to Castlebay: this was just the period when she had to revise and prepare for her First Arts. She’d try to square David Power too. She left a note for him at the medical faculty. He rang her that night at the hostel.
“Why should I help you?” he asked in a mock temper. “You never helped me at Christmas.”
“Your romance didn’t suffer as a result of it,” she said sharply.
“Do you have a fleet of detectives?” he inquired.
“Please, David, it’s just that I really do have to work. I’m the scholarship girl, don’t forget. I don’t get chances to repeat things. And I don’t get any time at home. It’s not like your house.”
“OK. I’ll go along with your lies.”
It annoyed her. “Thanks very much, David. I’ll see you in the summer, I’m sure,” she said curtly.
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll have thought up something else by then,” he said.
She hung up immediately before she could lose her temper with him. Spoiled, self-important pig.
“They don’t resent it.”
“They do, Clare. They mightn’t even realize it, but you’ve grown in ways that they never will. You speak better than they do, than you used to. You look better. It’s not just the book learning.”
Clare twisted her glass in her hand. She and Angela were having a drink in the corner of Dillon’s Hotel lounge. There was a beautiful view of the beach. Shortly, Josie would be putting her cover on the typewriter and would come for the game of tennis. Some things hadn’t changed over the years. But Clare realized that Angela was right. She did have much more confidence. Her own mother would never dream of coming into the hotel and sitting down in the cushioned chair looking out over Castlebay. That wasn’t for the likes of them, she would say. Her father wouldn’t stand at the bar and drink his pint in the hotel either, it would be Craig’s or nowhere. Jim and Ben would be tongue-tied and shoving at each other. And as for Chrissie! She and Mogsy wouldn’t be caught dead inside a stuffy place like that, she had said on more than one occasion. Clare sighed. Lord knew that Dillon’s Hotel was hardly the sophistication capital of the world, but wasn’t it maddening to think that she was the only member of her family who would feel comfortable there having a glass of shandy.