by Maeve Binchy
The photo that he had looked at for a long time as Clare slept in his arms in the big bed that belonged to Kevin and Emer.
Mary Catherine didn’t like David’s mother one bit. She thought that Clare was going to have a hard time of it with this one.
“Tell me about Castlebay,” she said brightly, smiling her perfect smile and pretending an interest she didn’t feel. “I hear it’s one lively town.”
“You hear wrong,” Mrs. Power said definitely. “It’s a small community—very, very small, swollen to about twenty times its size in the summer. A lot of riffraff been coming recently, and loud people. It used to be a wonderful family resort. Remember, Sheila, when you all came down . . . ?”
Molly caught David’s eye and realized she mustn’t run down the place she was trying to get him to come home to. “. . . But I think that’s just my age, really. For young people, for young professional people, working there, for the doctor or the young solicitor, or the people in the hotel, it’s a wonderful life. And a lot of very nice people a few miles back from the coast. Very nice indeed. Wonderful big estates and everything.” She nodded owlishly.
David raged within. She had never been invited to any of the big estates nor did she even know anyone who had. Why did she try to impress people with a line of chat which was just making her pathetic?
“I was thinking of spending a few days there this summer. When I do my degree I’ll have to go back to the States, so best see a bit of Ireland while I can.”
Molly was a little nonplussed. On the one hand the girl had been talking about her father being a postman and her mother working in a clothes factory of some sort, hanging garments on rails. On the other hand, the Nolans seemed to think that James was serious about her. Who knew what way to jump?
“Well, that would be very nice, dear,” she said noncommittally. “Be sure to let us know when you arrive, and come to see us.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Power.”
“Will you stay in Dillon’s Hotel?”
Mary Catherine spoke without thinking. “I guess Clare will find me a bed. . . .”
“Clare?”
It was too late. Clare had asked her not to bring up her name at all, but it was done now.
“Clare O’Brien. I share a room. I’ve been sharing a room with her.”
Molly Power sniffed. “I doubt if there’s going to be any room for you with the poor O’Briens—but maybe Clare didn’t describe it to you properly. It’s not a place that anyone could stay in.”
David’s face flushed a dark red.
Mary Catherine spoke quickly. “I explained it badly. I meant to say that Clare said she would book me in somewhere. But, heavens, who knows if I’ll ever get there? There’s so much work to do. . . . Was your last year full of frights and horrors, Caroline?”
“Dreadful. I didn’t know you shared a room with Clare O’Brien.”
“You never asked,” Mary Catherine said with spirit.
“I know Clare O’Brien,” said the small priest. “A very bright girl. She won that scholarship for three years from your county, didn’t she? I always think it must be the most terrible pressure on young people when they get that kind of bursary . . .” He chattered on lightly, knowing there was some tension in the air but not knowing where it came from.
“So you know Clare O’Brien too, Father? My goodness, doesn’t she get about?” She turned to Sheila Nolan. “Remember them, Sheila? Big, straggling family, not a penny to bless themselves with?”
“I don’t think so.” Sheila Nolan’s vacant blue eyes were vaguer than ever.
“Oh, you must remember them. We used to go in to buy ice creams there. Though I never particularly liked dealing there. Not terribly clean.”
“Why did we buy ice creams there, then?” Mrs. Nolan was bewildered.
“It was near the beach—that’s why, I think.”
“I would never have bought ice creams there, had I known it wasn’t clean.” Mrs. Nolan’s thin hand went to her throat as if regretting the possible germs that might still lurk there.
“No, no. That’s not the point. I was just telling you who the family were. One of them put her mind to her books and she’s come a long way. Everyone here is on calling terms with her except you and me . . .” Molly Power looked fussed and annoyed. Sheila Nolan looked confused and worried about possibly unhygienic ice creams eaten in the past.
Father Flynn thought he saw the lay of the land. He asked his colleague Father Kennedy, who was the new curate in the Nolan’s parish, to tell them all the story of the archbishop’s garden. It was a harmless little tale but it distracted them.
Father Flynn looked at David levelly. “People often sound much more cruel than they are. In their hearts they’re probably very kind.”
“Yes,” David mumbled.
“Eat up. That’s lovely beef. I bet you don’t get food like that in the hospital.”
David didn’t respond.
“And there’s nothing for concentrating the mind like eating.”
David had to smile. “I knew the clergy were dangerous,” he laughed.
“That’s better. Give Clare my love.”
“Were you the priest who was so helpful about her brother?”
“You must be a good friend if she told you all that. Yes. Not that I was all that much help as it turned out.”
“Clare said you were great.”
“Is she going to get a First? She was very eager about that.”
“I think so. I’ll keep her at it.”
They spoke low and stopped when Caroline turned to join the conversation.
At the other end of the table Molly whispered behind her hand to Sheila. “I can’t explain it, but I never liked that girl. She didn’t ever do anything against me, but I don’t trust her. Do you know the feeling?”
“I do.” Sheila was equally conspiratorial. Her glance rested on Mary Catherine. “That American girl is going back where she belongs,” she said.
“The pity of it is, that it’s hard to say where Clare O’Brien belongs now and where she should go back to,” Molly whispered.
She was lying on the bed reading the verses in the Memoriam column. “Listen, David. Listen to this one: ‘Now every year upon this day/We ask just why you went away.’ ”
Clare pealed with laughter. “They couldn’t could they? Each year on her anniversary, they sit down and say, ‘What could have happened to her?’ ”
He sat beside her. “Why aren’t you studying? You said you’d have a full day without me, what are you doing reading this rubbish? Where are your books?” He looked around, there was no sign of study.
“Don’t give out to me. What was it like?”
“Oh, very Nolanish, you know.”
“I don’t know.”
“Men are hopeless at describing things. You’re always saying that. There was too much to eat.”
“I know. You smell of food.” She nuzzled him.
“Oh, and your friend Father Flynn was there. He’s over for a few days holiday.”
Her face was bright at the thought of him; then it looked puzzled. “How did he know you knew me?”
“Castlebay and everything.”
“Yes.” She looked at him. “David. Was there any more?”
“I nearly lost my temper with my mother and walked out . . .”
“Tell me the whole thing.”
It wasn’t so bad. Nothing they hadn’t known already: that David’s mother did not think the sun and moon and stars shone from Clare. That was all. Why was David so upset?
“I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be here.”
“You’re here now.”
Much later they did the boldest thing they had ever done. They ate a tin of pears, with spoons, straight from the tin, and bits of the juice kept falling on their bodies and they had to lick it off their shoulders—or wherever it fell. Toward the end of the tin they were covered in the sweet pear syrup and so was the bed. They laughed until they both ac
hed. They dropped the pear tin down on the floor, and put their sticky arms around each other again.
“Is this squalor? Is this what we live in?” Clare asked.
“It’s lovely, whatever it is,” David said.
Father Flynn decided to go to Castlebay to see it for himself. He booked himself into Dillon’s Hotel, made a courtesy call on Father O’Dwyer, and told Sergeant McCormack that he had heard her highly spoken of, which inspired her to make scones for his tea. Choosing his time well, he went to O’Brien’s shop and told them that Tommy was getting on well, with a prison visitor who was bringing him picture books of wildflowers and he sometimes drew them. They marveled at some Englishwoman who would take the time to go to visit an Irish boy with no teeth in jail for robbery with violence. Father Flynn said he knew it was hard, but the odd letter, with no criticism or abuse but just descriptions of what life at home was like, would work wonders. Clare had been unfailing in her letters. Agnes was proud to hear that. Clare had never got uppity despite her great success and advances, she told Father Flynn.
“You must be hoping she’ll find a good man and marry him and settle down,” the little priest said.
“That one? Marry and settle down? She’s going to be a professor, no less. She never had much of an interest in boys when she was young, and I used to think that was a mercy. Chrissie had far too great an interest in them. But not Clare. I suppose in a few years she might meet a professor somewhere, but she’ll be gone from us in Castlebay, I knew that the day she got into the secondary school.”
“Suppose she were to marry and come back here?”
“But who would she marry here, Father? Hasn’t she more book learning than anyone in the parish?”
He called on the Powers too, because deep in his heart he was a man filled with curiosity. A big, square house, built to withstand the gales and spray from the sea. Father Flynn noted that it must have to be painted every year. There was a large garden, part of it obviously leading to a cliff path down to the sea. It wasn’t an elegant house, but it was sturdy and substantial.
Inside too it was comfortable. No antiques, nothing very old, but nice furniture and good carpets, big arrangements of flowers and greenery on window sills and surfaces. A pleasant maid with wispy hair and a broad smile showed him into the drawing room while she went to get the mistress. Molly was delighted to meet him again, and flattered that he should have come to call.
Father Flynn liked David’s father enormously: a bluff, kind man who was an old-style adviser to his patients. Probably does a lot of the work that dry stick Father O’Dwyer should be doing, Father Flynn thought ruefully. Over a drink, a lot of admiration for their magnificent view of the sea and some words of sympathy to an elderly mad dog, half-shaved, half-particles of red paint, he talked to the big warm man. He told him about the work with the emigrants in Britain, some of its lighter side as well as its gloomy overtones; that it was often the weakest and the least prepared who were the ones who had to emigrate.
Dr. Power told him of the good and bad things in Castlebay. People would never die of loneliness, as they might in a big English city; but attitudes could be cruel, and tolerance was low. In nearly forty years of practice here he had seen a lot of intolerance: families couldn’t cope with what they called “shame and disgrace.” He was sure Father Flynn knew well what he meant. You didn’t stamp out young love and young desire by refusing to face up to the consequences.
Dr. Power said it was great to have lived through the years that saw TB being wiped out. When he started off, people still hid the fact that they had tuberculosis in the family. It was denied, and if anyone had a spot on the lung it was considered a disgrace and something that would prevent other members of the family being able to marry well.
Father Flynn said he had had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Power’s son, a fine boy, in Dublin. What were his plans?
Dr. Power didn’t know, precisely. If the boy were going to work back home then the sooner he came back the better. He would want to find a wife for himself; and it would be wiser for him to be installed here, and choose from here, rather than starting off a life with some girl in a big place with lots of life in it and then asking the poor woman to come back here with him. There was a slight sadness which Father Flynn thought must be harking back to his own situation.
“And do you think he’s met anyone that suits him yet?” he asked.
“Divil a fear of it. He’s having too good a time with all those nurses up in the hospital,” said Dr. Power with a laugh.
Father Flynn talked about it with Angela too.
“Aren’t you a terrible old woman?” she teased him.
“Terrible. That’s why I’m so good in confession. I’m never bored and I like to meddle in other people’s lives.”
“Are you meddling with David Power and Clare O’Brien?” she asked.
“It worries me a bit, and I only know the fringes of it,” he said. “I don’t know why I feel that it’s so doomed. But that’s the word that keeps coming to me.”
“It could just be First Love.”
“It could.” He was doubtful. “But I must get over this tendency to play God. Are you going to let this brother of yours come here and upset everyone?”
“I promised him in Rome. Those were my words. That’s how I bought him off from doing it years ago. I can’t go back on that now. He’s like a child, you can’t go back on a promise to a child.”
“Children can do dangerous things. Sometimes promises needn’t be kept.”
“Is it dangerous for him to come home? He’s had his heart set on it. I don’t have children—you don’t. We don’t know all this about showing them their roots. I mean, I don’t think it matters, and you don’t. But suppose it’s everything? Then he should do it. I’ll survive it if I have to.”
There was a silence. He drank his tea, and looked admiringly around the book-lined room. When he spoke, it was with the voice of one introducing an entirely new subject.
“That’s a very civilized fellow in the hotel, Dick Dillon—brother of the man running it, I think. Very pleasant sort of a man altogether. Someone you could always rely on, I’d imagine, if there was a crisis.”
“I’m sure you imagine right, Father Flynn. Such a pity that you got over this tendency to play God, isn’t it? You could have had a field day there.”
Before he left Castlebay Father Flynn decided to buy a few postcards of the place: not the garish ones which looked like everywhere else, but those nice black-and-white ones full of outlines which Angela often used to send him.
He asked Josie Dillon where they were on sale.
“We haven’t had them for ages. I used to put them up just to please Gerry Doyle—that’s the photographer—he took them, you see. But visitors mainly preferred the colored ones. But now you mention it, he never brought any replacements. You could ask in Doyle’s—it’s the place with the big bright sign, Doyle’s Photographics. You can’t miss it.”
You couldn’t miss it. Josie Dillon was right.
There was a small, dark-haired man inside.
“Father? What can I do for you?”
He was a likeable fellow, with an easy smile.
“This is a very grand place.” Father Flynn looked round in admiration. “I’d not have thought Castlebay would have something as fine as this.”
“Don’t let my mother hear you, or my sister, or, Lord rest him, my father. They would all agree with you.”
“Well, I’m not a businessman—what would I know? Is it too small an order to ask do you have those nice pictures of the place, the black-and-white ones. They were very good. I kept the ones people sent me.”
Gerry flushed with pleasure. “Go on, is that a fact?”
“I can’t find them in the shops.”
“I didn’t bother. Hold on till I see where they are.” He pulled out drawers here and there, and called to an assistant. There was difficulty in finding them.
“It doesn’t look as though I�
�m much of a businessman either,” Gerry grinned.
“If it’s too much trouble . . .” Father Flynn began.
“No. It’s a matter of honor now.” He found them. “Here they are.”
“Could I have . . . er . . . a dozen, please, assorted views?” Father Flynn had been going to buy three cards, but after all this trouble on his behalf he felt it would seem piffling.
Gerry had made a bundle and thrust them at him.
“There’s more than twelve there.”
“Nobody else ever praised them before. I’d like you to have them. As a present.”
“That’s extraordinarily kind of you . . . Mr. Doyle,” Father Flynn said in some embarrassment.
“Not at all. You keep sending them to bishops and priests and tell them to get their ordinations and enthronements recorded by me.”
“You’re a very fine photographer. I’d be delighted to put any work in your way. But I’m sure you hardly need it.”
Father Flynn looked around again at the big counter, the carpeted floor, the large framed photographs on the wall. It had all the appearances of a studio in a large city. He recognized a picture of Clare on the wall—taken a few years ago, but very recognizable as the same face.
“Is that Clare?” he asked.
“Do you know Clare?” Gerry was pleased. “That was when she got the Murray Prize, a scholarship to UCD. They sent me to take the winner. I never believed it was going to be Clare. I hadn’t enough faith. Fortunately she did.”
“She works very hard, certainly. I met her with friends in Dublin.” Something made him uneasy about the way Gerry was looking at the picture.
“She’s very unusual. For Castlebay, that is. I don’t think she’s from here at all. I think she’s a changeling. I’ve always thought that. Like myself.” He laughed to take the oddness away from the statement. “That’s why I’ll marry her. When she’s ready. When she’s got all this studying out of her system.”