Echoes

by Maeve Binchy

  She left a note on the table in case David called in, and marched out nearly taking the door from its hinges. She walked first to Bumper Byrne’s lean-to shed that he called his office, and spoke to him sharply about their gate. It was meant to be a proper entrance, with a gate, and tarmacadamed path. What was it but a hole in the hedge? No. It was not perfectly adequate for the moment. She would like it done. This week. Could he tell her which day? No? Well, then, she’d wait here till he could tell her which day. No. She didn’t mind waiting at all. In desperation Bumper said he’d have someone up there on Thursday, and she thanked him warmly.

  Then she went to Peter O’Connor who had a saw and used to cut down trees. He’d be about the only person in Castlebay who could advise her on how to build a hedge.

  “I want to plant a hedge that looks small and harmless now but will grow up like a flash and make a big forest,” she said to him.

  He knew why she wanted the hedge.

  “I’m not great on the pronunciation but I think it’s called Cupressors that you want.”

  “That’s the Latin for a cypress tree—is that what you mean?”

  “The very thing. I could get you a set of nice young plants . . .”

  “Not too young, Mr. O’Connor.”

  “When do you want them in?”

  “This afternoon. And I’d like them to grow twenty feet tall by next week.”

  “Come on, now. She’s not as bad as all that?”

  Clare laughed. “Of course not. Just as long as it’s grown fairly soon.”

  She called to see her mother. The shop was full.

  “Do you want me to get behind the counter and give you a hand?”

  “Are you out of your mind? The doctor’s wife? Serving? Have some sense.”

  She went into the hotel.

  “Will you have lunch with me, Josie? A real lunch in the dining room? I’ll pay. . . .”

  “I can’t, Clare, not in the middle of the season. Mummy’d go mad and Rose would make another scene. We’re meant to leave those tables for the paying customers.”

  “I would be a paying customer,” Clare said crossly.

  “No, real people. Not us. It’s ages since I’ve seen you. How are you, anyway?”

  “Like a weasel,” said Clare and left with a wave.

  She thought she would go up to Angela’s cottage. She bought a bottle of sherry in Costello’s, and snapped the head off Teddy Costello who called her Mrs. Power.

  “God Almighty, Teddy, we were in mixed infants together—you called me Clare until a few months ago. Am I to start calling you Mr. Costello?”

  He stammered, he thought it was what she’d like, what Mrs. Power senior would like. He was sorry.

  “You know what they say in the films: ‘You’re beautiful when you’re angry, Miss Jones.’ ” It was Gerry. He had been behind her, and she hadn’t noticed.

  She laughed, in spite of herself. “No, really, Gerry, this Mrs. bit is the last straw.”

  “Fiona likes it. She says it makes her feel grown-up.”

  “It doesn’t do that for me. It makes me feel we’re all in some school play or other.”

  “You see, I told you,” he sighed. “You should never have married him. Go off and abuse the rest of the town. You’ve demolished Teddy fairly successfully,” he added good-naturedly, and disappeared.

  Just as she was leaving the shop she saw Angela carrying fruit and a big bottle of orange over to the back of Dick Dillon’s car.

  “Are you going on a picnic?” she asked enviously.

  “Just a few miles down the coast. Dick has a day off, we thought we’d explore a bit.”

  “Great.”

  “Why aren’t you at your work by the way?”

  “I came out for a bit of air.”

  “And a something to keep you going?” Angela eyed the bottle-shaped parcel.

  “Yes. Well.”

  “I hope it helps the studying,” Angela said cheerfully and waved goodbye.

  Disconsolately Clare walked back to the Lodge. Her anger with her mother-in-law was gone. But so was a lot of her good spirits. She hoped that David had been in and out while she was on her travels. She didn’t feel like talking to him now, she wouldn’t be able to get the despondent note out of her voice. There was a note on the table beside her books.

  Glad you went out—it’s the best day of summer. Why don’t we take a day off together and go down the coast a bit? I was in seeing Peter O’Connor’s child who got burned and he told me you’d ordered little saplings for the garden. That’s a great idea, he’s going to look them out for us and bring them tomorrow which is very speedy for Castlebay!

  I love you my darling, and I’ll see you this evening.

  He wrote his name with a heart round it.

  She sat down at her table and cried till the tears showered down on her big handwriting in all the files of notes.

  He was the most generous and loving man in the whole world and here she was marching around the town trying to build a drawbridge and moat between him and his family. She felt wretched and shabby: maybe some of the things that Dracula believed about her were right? She just wasn’t good enough for David.

  They had their picnic down the coast. There were gulls and two small seals, and a school of porpoises too. They lay in the sun, happy and rested; they ran in and out of the sea; they drank their bottle of wine and their flask of coffee and ate their hard-boiled eggs and brown bread and butter. And the ice cream, which hadn’t melted, wrapped up in six newspapers.

  They kissed and laughed, and David accused her of having given Peter O’Connor unmentionable favors in order to make him do the hedge so quickly, and even more favors to Bumper Byrne and his gang, who had suddenly produced a very presentable entrance, having promised it since last April.

  Clare said all his female patients were in love with him and that Rose Dillon at the hotel was definitely out to get him, married man or not. They wished they had taken old Bones with them; he would have loved this beach but he was getting a bit creaky now and he might have found the walk down and back too much for him.

  They were as happy as they ever had been.

  On September first she went to Dublin on the train. She had fourteen days before her exams began. David was going to come up for two weekends, and then to collect her and take her home when the exams were finished. She said it would be a waste for him to come with her now.

  “I wish you all the luck in the world, my girl,” Dr. Power had said, “but you’ve never done anything except come in the top league in every examination you ever did. Do you remember my driving you into the town all those years ago, to do your scholarship? I remember it as if it were yesterday . . .” Dr. Power beamed at her, and sighed at the way the years had flashed by.

  Molly had decided to be charming. “I hope you get all the questions you’re looking for,” she said. “Maybe that’s not a very intellectual way of putting it but you know what I mean . . .”

  They drove round by O’Brien’s and she went in to kiss her mother goodbye.

  “Lord, child, it’s not the ends of the earth you’re going to,” Agnes said.

  “I know, Mam, but this is it, this is the B.A., the degree.”

  “Well I know, Clare, and we all hope you’ll do very well, but that’s all behind you now, isn’t it?”

  Her mother came to the door and waved, puzzled at the exasperation that had come into Clare’s face. After all, she had only said what was true. A lot of people didn’t think that Clare should have bothered to go back to college to do that exam after getting married.

  It was somehow like showing off.

  “Will we have to learn first aid?” Val asked fearfully as Clare took off her shoes and eased her back with a cushion.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In case your man gets born here, what do we do? I know you need a watch to time things.”

  “Not a chance. Week beginning October fifteenth. David’s father hopes it’
s going to be the eighteenth, that’s the feast of St. Luke apparently, and Luke was a doctor in his time. What is it?” she asked suddenly as she saw Mary Catherine looking at a diary.

  “Oh, dear. You’ll miss Conferring,” she said.

  “I will not miss Conferring. I will bloody not. If Patrick Thomas is three days old, I’d be well enough to travel, wouldn’t I? I can’t miss Conferring. Maybe he’ll come early. . . .” Clare addressed her stomach. “Be a good boy now and please your Mammy. . . . Arrive around the end of September, maybe the twenty-ninth, so that Mammy will be ready to come back up to Dublin and get Conferred.”

  Mary Catherine was still looking at her diary. “That would be quite a good day, actually. Feast of St. Michael and all the angels.”

  Clare clapped her hands. “Right! Did you hear that? Be here on September twenty-ninth and we’ll add Michael to your names.”

  “I thought this yucky mumsy stuff only started after they were born,” said Valerie.

  It was just as she had dreamed it would be. Plenty of room, books all around the place, cups of coffee being made all day and all night, friends dropping in. Down to the National Library where people noticed her condition and smiled congratulations. In to UCD where people noticed her condition and were surprised. She had been a quiet student, and only the people in her own group knew her well.

  She paid her examination fee, and got her number. It made it seem very close when she had the card with her own number.

  She went to see Emer and Kevin and she noticed from their faces they were surprised to see how pregnant she now looked. Perhaps she had been holding herself in at home: everyone here seemed more aware of it.

  Clare discussed the work she had done with her tutor.

  “I didn’t think we’d ever hear from you again,” he said.

  “Why on earth did you think that?” Clare asked furiously.

  “Well, married bliss, and a summer in Castlebay, a summer there, mind, not a week. I thought you wouldn’t open a book again.”

  “My only worry is the B.A.” Clare smiled at him. “I suppose I sound a bit intense, and off my rocker to a lot of people. But when it’s so hard, you get a kind of Holy Grail thing about it.”

  “I know, I wish they all found it as important as you do.”

  “Wish me luck then.”

  “You don’t need luck, Clare O’Brien . . . or whatever your name is now. You’re the grade. Everyone in the department knows it.”

  They knew. Now all she had to do was prove it to them. She smiled as she went to sleep that night.

  She had phoned David. He had just returned home after his second visit to Dublin. The Lodge was lonely without her, but in under ten days she would be back and they would wait. Together.

  He wished her courage and energy and confidence. He couldn’t say he loved her because he was standing in the hall, but he did say, “And everything,” which was their code word.

  She turned over and went to sleep happily.

  Mary Catherine woke up in alarm.

  “Come quickly! She’s groaning, and shouting!”

  “What? Who?”

  “Clare. She’s doubled over. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I think she’s having the baby. After all our joking about it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It couldn’t be. It’s not for weeks yet.”

  “Shut up. It could be a miscarriage. No, it couldn’t. It’s much too late. . . . I don’t know. Get an ambulance.”

  “She keeps saying no.”

  Clare was white-faced, with sweat coming down her forehead. “It’s all right,” she gasped. “I couldn’t be having it. I couldn’t. These aren’t those pains you have. No downward pull or whatever they said.”

  “We don’t know any doctors here. We’re not on anyone’s list. We’re calling an ambulance, Valerie’s phoning it this minute.” Mary Catherine was trying to be calm.

  “Please don’t. I can’t go to hospital. The exam . . . There’s nothing wrong.”

  “Please, Clare. Just go in and be a false alarm, will you? Just for us? Please. Then you can come out twenty minutes later, and we’ll all laugh at it. Please.”

  She kicked the door closed with her foot so that Clare couldn’t hear Valerie explaining down the phone how bad the patient was. “Then we’ll all go in and do the exams calmly.”

  “I don’t want you to be up half the night,” Clare cried.

  Valerie came in, looking pale. “We’ll get dressed. We’ll go with her.”

  “No!” screamed Clare.

  The ambulance was there in ten minutes. The girls had packed Clare’s things quietly, and out of her line of vision.

  The ambulance men were reassurance itself.

  “It’s all a false alarm,” Clare said with a tearstained face. “I’m so sorry and you see we’re all starting our exams tomorrow. Our finals.”

  She bent over with pain.

  The ambulance men exchanged glances, and the driver leaped smartly into the driving seat and switched on the siren.

  The pain was beyond anything she could possibly have imagined; nothing helped—not panting like a dog as they had taught her, nor reciting poetry very fast in an undertone, nor writhing and wriggling into different positions. A lugubrious student midwife kept telling her to relax. Clare wanted to kill her.

  She was in labor for two hours before they told her that something was wrong. The midwife, listening for the third time to the fetal heartbeat, straightened up with more than usual gloom.

  “The baby’s in some distress.”

  “Oh my God,” cried Clare wildly. “What’s wrong? Can you tell what’s wrong?”

  “The heart’s not standing up to the contractions.”

  “But will it be all right? The baby, I mean.”

  “I can’t say,” said the midwife. “I shall have to report it.”

  It seemed like hours. Clare felt pure terror and the most intense longing for David. It had never occurred to her that the birth would be anything but straightforward; now it appeared that the baby was being killed by something uncontrollable inside her own body. Before she had held it, kissed it or even looked upon its face, her baby would die; and there was nothing she could do about it.

  She was holding her breath as though that might ease the baby’s distress when the door swung open to admit Bar, the redheaded doctor whom David disliked so much. The examination took seconds.

  “Cord’s dropped,” he said. “I’m very sorry. I know how disappointed you will be. We shall have to do a cesarean. We’ll also have to ask you to sign a piece of paper giving your consent.”

  “A cesarean,” said Clare, high-voiced with joy. “Oh, thank God. Thank God. I’d forgotten all about cesareans.”

  Later she knew that a dropped cord was the worst emergency after a hemorrhage. Then she was only aware of Bar, now in a white mask and a green overall, giving clipped instructions. His face, which before had seemed rather heartless, now looked blessedly confident and know-it-all. Sister McClusky, summoned because she was an “expert at cords,” was an enormous, jovial woman who stuck her hand inside and gave Clare a running commentary on how well the baby was coping, all the way to the operating theater.

  “I love you,” she said, then they put her under. She felt the first violent pain of the knife, heard someone say it was a beautiful baby girl, before the anesthetic took effect and she knew no more.

  She woke up in the recovery room where the first person she saw was David holding their baby in his arms.

  “She grinned,” he said. “I’ve been holding her for an hour, waiting for you to come round, and she gave me the biggest grin you’ve ever seen.”

  “She’s not normal, is she?” said Clare.

  “Darling, she’s perfect.”

  “You’re lying to me. She’s a mongol.”

  “Here, see for yourself. She’s beautiful.”

  “Babies don’t grin until they’re six weeks old.”

  At this point the baby began to cry, ste
adily, angrily; and Clare, taking her in her arms for the first time, made two extraordinary discoveries. The first was that on contact with her mother the baby instantly stopped crying; and the second was that she was indeed utterly, perfectly beautiful. True, the nose was a bit squashed, but her eyes were big and clear, and she had masses of hair. Her fingers looked as if they’d been soaked too long in washing-up liquid, but they were slender and graceful with long, pointed nails—almost as if they’d been specially manicured for her debut. Round one minute wrist and one ankle were plastic bands stating that she was Girl Power, and the date and time of birth.

  With a flash of insight, Clare suddenly wished that they could all stay here forever, the baby safely cradled in her arms, protected by the hospital staff. For with this new love came also a new and terrible vulnerability, from which there would never be an escape. How shall I endure chicken pox, and tree climbing, and reading about children dying in fires? she thought. Life stretched away in an infinity of dangers and she felt afraid.

  Part Four

  1960~1962

  THERE WERE All THE EXPLANATIONS : NOBODY GOT THEIR ARITHMETIC wrong, but it was the strain and the stress of the exam that brought the baby on; or she was genuinely a baby that was kicking and screaming to be born and would not wait the time; or Clare had been eating all the wrong food and not taking enough rest.

  She had a very small face, but it wasn’t nearly as red as the faces of other babies in the hospital; and her eyelashes were longer than any they had ever seen. She was so delicate and fine, that suddenly John Fitzgerald Byrne became a huge, hulking monster in comparison, and any other baby was crabbed and ugly.