Echoes

by Maeve Binchy

  “I’m not going to tell you anything till tomorrow. Good night, Mary Catherine.”

  Ned’s letter was short. Tommy had left Mr. Carroll’s greengrocery shop on a Friday. He had said that he wouldn’t take his week’s wages. He had got another job and it wasn’t fair to ask to be paid for the last week. The Carrolls had telephoned Father Flynn, but no one could find Tommy. Until the following Wednesday, when the police found him. In a stolen car which had crashed during a police chase. The car was being chased because it was seen leaving the scene of a robbery with violence. Tommy had ended up with a dislocated shoulder, a broken jaw and a nine-year sentence. Ned just wanted to ask Clare whether someone should tell Mam and Dad now or was the pretense to go on forever.

  Poor, stupid, stupid Tommy. She couldn’t think of him as bad Tommy, dangerous Tommy, in with a gang of thugs and joining in their violence. She could hardly remember him, but he had seemed nice like Ned was last summer when he came home.

  She would tell them. But not by letter. And not making a special visit.

  She would tell them when she went home for Christmas.

  It was hard to choose the moment to begin. There never seemed to be any time when they were all together. Mam was thin and tired, but she was always on the move, from range to table, from kitchen out to shop, from shop to storeroom. Dad was always fiddling with things, and Jim and Ben were coming in one door and out another.

  After tea, the first night home, she thought she had them all in one room, at least.

  “I have some bad news about Tommy,” she said loudly, to get their attention. “He’s not injured, or sick, or anything. But it is bad news.”

  They all stopped what they were doing. She certainly had their attention.

  “So will you sit down, and I’ll tell you,” she said.

  “Stop acting like a judge and jury. What is it? If you’ve something to say, say it.” Her father was annoyed.

  “I wanted to tell it to you from the start. Jim, why don’t you put the sign up on the door?”

  “How long is this going to take, for God’s sake?” Tom O’Brien was now worried.

  “Tommy . . . Tommy . . .” The tears were already starting to form in Mam’s eyes.

  One by one, they sat down round the table and she could hedge no more.

  “I had a letter from Ned. Tommy’s in jail. He’s going to be there for . . . for a long time.”

  “How long?” Mam’s voice was almost steady. She didn’t ask what he had done, or why he was there. Just how long.

  “This is hard, Mam. Very long. Nine years.”

  She looked at the table. She couldn’t bear to see the shock round her. They had all thought that Tommy was living an ordinary life until twenty seconds ago. Now they had to try to understand all this at one go. She should have told them ages ago.

  “You can’t mean nine years,” Agnes said. “You can’t mean years.”

  Clare told them what Tommy had done. She told them what he had done before. It seemed like a story about somebody else’s brother as she was telling it. She looked at her mother’s face, and realized that it certainly sounded like the story of someone else’s son.

  Gerry Doyle came in while she was telling them.

  Mam was crying. Dad was throwing back his head and saying what would you expect. Jim and Ben were round-eyed, and teetering between a grudging admiration of their brother for doing something as brave as running with a gang and a sense of horror about the disgrace that was going to fall on the family.

  “I didn’t think Closed meant me,” Gerry smiled around the kitchen door.

  “It does tonight.” Clare gave him a smile that wasn’t a smile, and to her relief he understood.

  “Sure. It was only a packet of fags. I’ll take one and run. Pay you tomorrow. All right?”

  He was gone. Clare settled down again for the abuse. How dare she play God and decide to hold the first bit of news back from them? What did she and Ned think they were playing at, telling packs of lies? How could anyone know now if this was the whole truth? And who was this priest that none of them knew, fiddling in their affairs? And did Ned’s fiancée know all about it too? Was she in on the whole deception?

  Clare soldiered on. Already it was getting easier. The more they knew, the less frightening it became. She wished that she had told them ages ago, she admitted this to them, but she said truthfully that since she had hoped that Tommy might have just had that one phase, it would be a pity to damn him in their eyes forever.

  Mam wondered did anyone else in Castlebay know. And Clare looked her straight in the eye and said that nobody knew. She decided that she could trust Angela and Gerry. They had kept it to themselves so far; there was no reason for them to speak now.

  The news made them look older. All of them. Clare wondered had it done that to her too when she got the first letter from Ned. Mam’s thin shoulders stooped more under the navy cardigan she wore, and Dad’s face looked gray and set while he painted the new extension that would never bring him a day’s happiness now that he knew it was built with stolen money. Jim and Ben lost a bit of their good spirits. Clare saw that they stayed in the house more than usual, rather than roaming the town looking for divilment with their friends from school.

  Chrissie arrived on visits, the size of a mountain now, and said that it was like going to visit a graveyard instead of your own family at Christmastime. If this was the cheer that Clare brought home with her she might as well have stayed in Dublin.

  Clare said she was going to spend a day with Angela. They were going to go over a lot of work Clare had to do for her finals.

  “Don’t be telling her our business now,” Agnes warned.

  “Why would I tell her anything of the sort?” asked Clare. She had planned to spend hours discussing it, if Angela had the time.

  She lost the sense of time there. They must have had tea, or a meal. There was certainly drink, a bottle of port wine was on the table.

  At one stage Dick called, and Angela asked him to go away.

  It wasn’t all Clare’s tale.

  The story of Father Sean O’Hara was told too. Not only had he left the priesthood years and years ago, but he had a grown-up family nearly. And they were all coming to Castlebay for the summer. They had booked a caravan. Father Sean O’Hara was coming back to show his home to his Japanese lady friend, and to show his children their roots.

  In Dublin Clare could meet David anywhere she liked. He could come to the hostel to collect her, she could take a bus up to his hospital and they could have coffee in the canteen. They could go to the pictures or to have a drink. Nobody took any notice. In Castlebay it was almost impossible to do any such thing. Without even saying it they knew they were going to be further apart for the two weeks they spent in Castlebay than if they were on different sides of the Atlantic. They didn’t have to tell each other that it would be awkward to invite the other home. They knew. Like they knew about spring tides, and about Father O’Dwyer’s sermons. Clare would not be invited to the Powers’ for supper. David could chat easily with the O’Briens across the counter, but they wouldn’t let him in to see their kitchen with its old rusty range, its torn lino and its boxes of supplies all round the place, an inelegant overflowing storeroom for the shop which had never been properly organized.

  They couldn’t go and sit in Dillon’s Hotel for hours on end, or the whole town would know about it. Clare didn’t play golf, and Castlebay would have mocked her if she had learned. It wasn’t for the likes of Clare O’Brien. That meant the golf course and its rolling dunes were out. If they went to the pictures together there would be talk.

  And they didn’t want talk. It wasn’t worth it. They weren’t in love with each other. They were friends. They were great friends. But such a concept didn’t exist in Castlebay, and if it were going to exist it was very unlikely it would develop between the handsome, eligible son of the doctor and the bright perky little girl from the store.

  They went for a long walk
with Bones. David had had a bad row with his mother that morning and was not going to apologize in order to keep the peace. He had said he was going to the pictures that night and he was thinking of asking Clare. Molly had said very sweetly that it wouldn’t do at all. It would be unfair on the girl. It would give her ideas. Raise her hopes. Furious, he had said this was rubbish, that he often met Clare in Dublin and neither of them had any hopes, just a good friendship. Molly had raised her eyebrows very high and said she thought David could have done better for himself, a professional man, than to be going out with the sister of Mogsy Byrne and Chrissie O’Brien. He had laughed in his mother’s face and said that since she couldn’t find anything to blame Tom and Agnes for, she had to draw in the least respectable member of the family and her eejit of a husband to complain about. Molly Power, with two bright spots of red on her face, had stormed out of the room and upstairs. His father had already gone out on his rounds but the whole thing would be aired again this evening. He almost told Clare but stopped. She might take it as a slight, even though she was always making jokes herself about confusing the rank and file of Castlebay.

  Clare nearly told David about Tommy. He was so nice and understanding, so solid and unshockable, he might well reveal that both his mother’s and father’s parents had been in jail for years. But she didn’t want him to have more things to apologize for when he met her. Nellie had told Chrissie that there had been an almighty row this morning already about David meeting Clare at all. Better not let him know she was the sister of a criminal in an English prison as well as being one of the poor O’Briens, God help us.

  There were New Year’s Eve celebrations in Dillon’s Hotel but Clare didn’t feel any heart for going. She suggested to her mother that they ask Angela O’Hara for supper.

  “We’re not the kind of people that have people to supper,” her mother said.

  “Maybe we should be,” Clare said. Her father said he didn’t mind, it was no concern of his what the women did or didn’t do.

  The evening was a surprising success. Angela taught them to play rummy and even Agnes began to enjoy it. She had been hesitant at the start and wanted to stay out of it. Angela said more than once that it was very nice to spend New Year’s Eve with a family.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t call this much of a family,” Tom said disparagingly.

  “Why ever not? One daughter married and going to give a grandchild this spring. Another, the town genius. Two lads in England making their own way, two here, and please God there’ll be work for them when they leave school. A good business . . . what more of a family could you want than that?”

  Agnes said when you looked at it like that it was true, they had a lot to be thankful for. But she sighed a sigh that went down to her feet almost as she said it.

  “Everything isn’t as it seems,” Tom O’Brien said darkly, shaking his head.

  Angela nodded enthusiastically at him. He was absolutely right, nothing was as it seemed, there wasn’t a family in Castlebay without its own sadnesses and worries and confusions. She often thought that at Mass on a Sunday, people kneeling there so calm-looking and only the Lord knew what was in their hearts. Every one of them had a worry. She had hit it just right. This gloomy-sounding old soothsaying cheered up the O’Brien family greatly. They weren’t alone in their cross. In fact Clare’s father was so cheered that he thought it was time for everyone to have a glass of something to see the sixties in. They wished each other Happy New Year and shortly afterward Angela left: she had promised Dick Dillon to look in on him in the hotel and wish him the compliments of the season.

  Clare walked her up the road. She felt very wide awake and restless. She went to the seat that the Committee had put up last summer, the big green seat just at the top of the steps. A perfect vantage point for surveying the beach on a crowded summer day. Tonight you could just sit and look at the stars and the bright clear night. The sea looked navy somehow, and the cliffs like cardboard cutouts.

  Gerry arrived, silently, and sat beside her.

  “You pad around like a leopard or a cat,” she said. “You frightened the life out of me.”

  “Happy New Year,” he said taking a half bottle of brandy and two little metal cups out of the pocket of his leather jacket.

  Clare clapped her hands in delight.

  “Aren’t you one of the wonders of the world? Do you go round with mobile picnics and parties in your pocket all the time, or is it only on festivals?”

  “It’s only when I see you on your own. I was coming out of the hotel. I saw you coming down here, and raced home for the supplies.”

  They toasted each other and looked out to sea.

  “This is the year, isn’t it? The finals, the big degree?”

  “Yes, Lord I’ll have to work when I get back. I’m doing nothing here. I thought I was going to get lots of reading done, but I haven’t opened a book.”

  “I’m sorry for intruding the other night. Was it a family conference?”

  “It was about Tommy.”

  “Don’t tell me. It’s not my business.”

  “Oh, no, it’s all right. You know anyway. But he did it again, and this time they wounded a man so badly he’ll be in a wheelchair and Tommy’s gone to jail for nine years.”

  Gerry let out his breath like a whistle. “Nine years. Lord.”

  “So this time I decided I would tell them at home. They have a right to know. They were very low as you can imagine. Angela cheered them up a lot tonight. But they think nobody knows, so I swore that nobody did.”

  “Sure.”

  He was easy and her restless feeling was fading fast. Or maybe it was the brandy. He had put his jacket around both of them. It kept out the wind, and it was companionable. He kissed her, a long gentle kiss. She didn’t pull away. He put his arms inside her duffle coat and held her to him as he kissed her again.

  She felt something touch her leg and jumped.

  It was Bones looking at her eagerly, waiting for her to disentangle herself from Gerry. Behind Bones, a dozen yards away, was David.

  “I was just going to say Happy New Year,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  He turned very quickly and walked along the Cliff Road home.

  Bones looked hopefully at Gerry and Clare, in case there was going to be any fun and games for him. But deciding there wasn’t, he cantered off after David who was walking unnaturally quickly through the bright starry night.

  His parents were still at the hotel. Nellie had gone to her family. The house was empty. David nearly took the door from its hinges with the bang he gave it.

  He was going to sit down in the sitting room where the fire was still warm and have a drink to calm him down but the fear that his parents would come back and that he would have to talk to them civilly was too great. He poured himself a large whiskey and went up to his bedroom. He pulled back the curtains and looked out at the sea. Years ago, when Gerry Doyle had first seen this room, he had said in admiration that it was like a ship. You could see no land unless you turned your head or leaned out to see the garden beneath.

  There were two big rooms with bay windows upstairs, and his parents slept in the one next door. David had a window seat running round the three windows of the bay. His toys had been kept inside it when he was young. He looked to see were they still there and indeed, there was a small cricket set, a blackboard and easel, there were boxes of soldiers and boxes of playing bricks. His Meccano set was still there and there was a box which said David’s Coloring Things.

  It annoyed him to see them still there. And yet what should his mother have done with them? Given them away? They were his after all, and one day he might want them for his children . . .

  But anything would annoy him tonight.

  It had been a very boring evening. He had made a very tactless mistake with Josie Dillon. Apparently Clare had never mentioned that Mary Catherine had been an off-and-on girlfriend of James Nolan since the Lord knew when. Josie had been
distressed by the news but even more by the fact that Clare hadn’t told her. She had become quite weepy and had gone off to bed before the singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” so that would have to be sorted out.

  But nothing had prepared him for the strength of his feelings when he saw Clare in Gerry Doyle’s arms like that. He felt sick all over until he was nearly shaking to think of it again. Him, with his arms around her, inside her coat, fondling her, and kissing her, there on the bench in the dark, with a cheap half-bottle of brandy at their feet. David had walked up to them because he recognized Clare’s duffle coat, and the moonlight was shining on her fair hair. It was quite obvious who she was. He hadn’t really seen Gerry; it was dark that side of the bench, and they weren’t kissing when he started to walk over. If only Bones hadn’t rushed across he might have been able to escape without speaking to them.

  But even so it was churning his stomach to think of Gerry Doyle’s mean, small, dark face pressed on Clare’s. To think of him giving her brandy and forcing himself on her. And to imagine that bright Clare, lovely, bright, sunny Clare, could be so stupid as to fall for it. Why was she letting him crawl all over her?

  David felt so sick he couldn’t finish his whiskey. He poured it down the wash basin, and lay back on his bed.

  He was pale at breakfast and his mother asked him whether he might be getting flu.

  “There are two doctors in this house, Mother. Leave the diagnosis to us,” he snapped.

  Dr. Power looked up in alarm. “I heard a kind, courteous inquiry after your health from your mother, who is concerned about you,” he said quietly.

  “Yes. I’m very sorry. That’s what I heard too. I apologize, Mother.”

  “That’s all right.” Molly was gracious. At least he was able to say sorry now. A few days ago, when she had said something perfectly harmless about the young O’Brien girl, he had leaped down her throat and he had not apologized on that occasion.