Echoes

by Maeve Binchy

  “How can you help him now?” Fiona cried.

  Clare spoke quickly. “There are some pictures, here somewhere or in a private file or somewhere, that I don’t think he’d want people to see.”

  “What sort of pictures?”

  “Does it matter what kind of pictures if you believe me? If you believe that Gerry wouldn’t have wanted them found?”

  “Is it very important?”

  “I think it is.”

  “But why wouldn’t Gerry have sorted it out before he . . . before he . . .”

  “He didn’t drown himself, Fiona.”

  Fiona looked left and right. Nobody had said this aloud in front of her but everyone had thought it.

  “But . . .”

  “He couldn’t have Fiona. He wasn’t that kind of a person—you know that.”

  “I didn’t think he would but how else . . . ?”

  “Because he was upset. He must have been upset and just went climbing around the rocks. He was always doing that.” Of course it wasn’t possible but it would be good for Fiona to think this, and she was beginning to believe it.

  “I suppose . . .”

  “And it would give a lot of people a better chance if the pictures weren’t seen. I just know this, like I know I got a second chance and you probably did too . . .”

  Fiona’s big troubled eyes filled with tears. “Gerry did give me a second chance years ago. I wanted to do one thing and he wanted me to do another, he was quite right as it turned out.” Almost unconsciously she stroked her stomach as if thinking of the other child Stephen, now in somebody else’s family.

  “Well, this is what I mean.” Clare didn’t want her to confess. “If I could just . . .”

  Fiona handed her a key. “If they’re anywhere they’ll be in his room in that steel cabinet. By the window.”

  “Thank you, Fiona.”

  She found them at once. There was hardly anything else there except the cheerful postcard she had sent him once from Dublin, the letter asking him to find her post office savings book and another note thanking him when he had.

  It was the same brown envelope that he had showed her on the kitchen table back in her house. But there was an invoice note on it saying that there were copies being sent to Miss Caroline Nolan and David Power as well. So she was too late after all. With leaden movements she placed the contents of the drawer into her big briefcase, the letters she had written him, harmless little notes. Why had he kept them? She put it in and left the drawer open.

  She leaned her head against the window.

  Should she tell Fiona there was nothing, or should she say that she had found them? Which would cause less worry?

  As it happened she needn’t have worried, there was no decision to make. Fiona knocked on the door.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Yes.” Clare was still looking out the window at Church Street, at the people going about their lives in an ordinary way.

  “I’m glad you came,” Fiona said.

  “Why?”

  “Because now I do believe for the first time that it was an accident. If Gerry was going to end it himself, he’d have left nothing to get him into trouble . . . or you, Clare. He worshipped you. Now I think it must have been an accident.”

  “Yes, it must have been.” Clare’s gaze was still on the road.

  “And so he’ll not have gone to hell. I couldn’t bear Gerry to go to hell for taking his own life, that’s what I’ve been thinking since Monday morning.”

  Clare put her arms awkwardly around Fiona and looked over her shoulder, out of the window at the view that Gerry Doyle must have seen every day as he sat in this ridiculous, overdecorated office and ran his father’s steady little business into the ground.

  David was looking at an X-ray with his father.

  “That poor hip’s worn away a lot on her, hasn’t it?” Dr. Paddy Power was full of sympathy for an elderly woman out on the Far Cliff Road. “She must be in great pain with that, all right.”

  “She doesn’t complain very much, but she’s limping a lot.”

  “Ah well, nothing for it. It’s terrible to have to tell them it’ll just get worse.”

  “But you don’t tell them that, do you, Dad?”

  “No, I tell them they’re lucky it isn’t malignant or anything, try to look on all the positive side of it, no point in being negative and saying it’s arthritis and it just gets worse and worse . . . David? What is it?”

  David had jumped up as if he were shot.

  “I’ve just remembered something. I have to go.”

  “Hey . . . come back here. Leave me the notes. You’ve got poor Mrs. Connolly’s whole life story with you.”

  “What? Yes. Sorry.”

  “Are you all right, son?”

  “I have to go out for a bit. I’ll be back shortly.”

  The negatives. Why hadn’t he remembered them? They were probably in a drawer in Doyle’s Photographics, unless of course the little bastard had sent them to someone else like the solicitor’s firm where Caroline worked, or to Clare’s parents.

  He walked around clenching and unclenching his hands in the dark afternoon.

  He would have to do it. He walked determinedly down Church Street.

  Fiona was by herself in the shop. She looked very young and innocent. Too young for the great curve under her gray smock with its white collar.

  “Oh, David,” she said, “aren’t you nice to call?”

  He swallowed a bit. “I don’t have the right words to say. My father seems to know exactly what to say that helps people. I don’t. Maybe when I’m older and have seen a lot of awful things I will.”

  “At least you came in—that was very kind of you,” she said.

  Now it was more difficult than ever.

  “I’m sure a lot of people have been to say how shocked they are, how upset.”

  “No. It’s a bit awkward, you see.”

  “Why?”

  “I think a lot of them think he may have . . . that he may have meant to do it.”

  It was impossible to stand talking to this beautiful serene girl who thought her little monster of a brother might have been swept away by some tide.

  “Well, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know . . .” he began.

  “But I do know. I know he couldn’t have meant to do it, take his own life. I know that.”

  “No, no.” He was soothing.

  “I just know.”

  “Of course.”

  He couldn’t broach it. He couldn’t say that he had really come not to express sympathy but to know if he could rummage through her dead brother’s private files.

  “What are you doing here? You should be at home resting,” he said in his professional voice.

  Fiona looked at him gratefully. “No, I’m better to keep busy.”

  What an end to the Doyles. The bright glittery Doyles of long ago.

  “That’s good,” he said uselessly.

  This was going to be the last time he would talk to Fiona normally. She was going through the picture orders methodically, she would come across prints or negatives, she would scream when she saw them possibly, or feel faint. She might be so revolted she would show them to someone in authority like Father O’Dwyer and ask him what she should do. She was a simple girl, simple and inexperienced, she would be so shocked by all it would mean, for Gerry as well as for him and Caroline. Could he dare?

  “Fiona. I was wondering,” he began.

  She raised her eyes and he saw the dark shadows underneath for the first time.

  “I was wondering . . .” he began. But he couldn’t do it. There weren’t the words.

  “Nothing,” he said, turning to go.

  “Clare left her scarf here earlier. Can you give it to her?”

  “Clare was here?”

  “Yes. About an hour ago.”

  “What on earth for?” He said it without thinking.

  Fiona looked at him thoughtfully. “Nothing in particu
lar. She just came in.”

  “Of course.”

  He left with a stooping walk.

  Clare had come for the photographs; she hadn’t come just to sympathize. If she had, Fiona would have said so.

  David didn’t notice anyone who spoke to him as he walked back up Church Street and turned left to go home.

  Chrissie shouted something at him out of Dwyers’ but he didn’t hear it. He didn’t notice Rose Dillon from the hotel hooting the horn of her scooter at him. Nor did he see Ben O’Brien his brother-in-law waving at him from a pickup truck.

  He turned up his collar and paused at the crossroads. Should he go up to see her now? Should he ask Angela and Dick for a few minutes to talk? What would he say? “I believe you’ve got the pictures. I’m sorry.”

  No, there was nothing to say. He turned and went back to the big house. He walked past it and on to the Lodge. How had he never noticed how silent the place was? And sad.

  Clare sat in the car, motionless. She must burn them. Now. But it was much easier said than done to burn something if you hadn’t a house of your own. And at the moment she didn’t feel she had a house. She could hardly go to the shop: “Oh. Hallo, Mam, Dad. Excuse me. I’m just going in to the range to burn a few things. I like a nice fire . . .”

  And she had behaved quite madly enough with Dick Dillon and Angela already to ask them did they mind if she burned a few papers in their range.

  What about Josie? Would she be able to accept Clare coming in and saying that she’d like a few moments on her own poking around at the Aga in the hotel kitchen? It was nonsensical. Her mind churned. But she would not leave them somewhere where they could be found. They were so awful, those pictures and their negatives, she wanted the satisfaction of seeing them burn in flames. Only that way could she begin to get them out of her mind.

  There should be a public burning place, somewhere that people could go and get rid of the things that depressed them or frightened them. A public burning place in the middle of every town.

  She remembered suddenly that Dr. Power had made a great fuss once about there being no incinerator up at the caravan park. How were the unfortunate campers meant to keep the place hygienic he had thundered unless there were proper rubbish collections and somewhere for them to burn things? The proper rubbish collections had never been set up but the brick incinerator had. It used to burn during the summer getting rid of the worst of the campers’ litter.

  The caravan park. That would be a nice bit of irony, go up and burn the evidence at the scene of the crime. There wouldn’t be a fire in the incinerator now, but she could make one. She had her matches in her handbag, there was a can of petrol in the back of Dick Dillon’s car. The more she thought of it the more she liked the idea. She drove slowly down Church Street, past O’Brien’s shop, past the bench that looked out over the cliff to the sea, and turned left down the Far Cliff Road to the caravan park.

  David rang Caroline again. He had been so relieved the first time when the woman with the bad cold at the solicitor’s office had said she was not there. No other explanation. She wasn’t at her house either. Now he had rung her office and her house three times and had found her at neither of them. He was no longer relieved, he was worried. He hadn’t wanted to talk to her, and presumably she had felt the same at the beginning. But now it was Wednesday evening—two days after the discovery of the pictures. They should talk.

  “If Miss Nolan isn’t in do you know when and where I could find her?” he asked the woman with the streaming cold.

  “In Dublin,” the voice said.

  “Has she gone on holiday?” David asked.

  “No, she’s gone and left. All of a sudden. Gone for good.” The sniff was full of disapproval for the flashy irresponsible ways of a young solicitor from Dublin who didn’t know how things were done.

  David didn’t know whether he was relieved or upset. Relieved, he thought. At least in Dublin Caroline would have people to look after her, people to talk to. In the town here she had nobody. He clenched the kitchen table as he thought of it.

  He seemed to spend a lot of time at this table. Sitting here while the time passed. They had thought it would be nice to have a kitchen which was also a living room, that had been the plan, but they had never really done it up or chosen any furniture for it properly. It must have been a kind of prison for Clare.

  He thought of Caroline going back to Dublin, her chin raised with that determined look, driving through rain and fog in her little car. He thought of Caroline saying that Gerry Doyle couldn’t have had any hopeless unrequited love for her. “He had me.” Those were her words. Did Gerry Doyle have Caroline in the caravan park, did he share all the same things? God, God. At least David had been spared pictures of it. He only had his imagination.

  It was windy and exposed up in the caravan park. It was impossible to see why so many people headed from all over Ireland and England to come here in the summer. It seemed like a different planet.

  Clare knew which was Caroline’s caravan. She had listened wordlessly when David had said what a good idea it was to get one, she could always spend the summertime in it fully, or in the winter it provided a place to have a change of clothes or an overnight stop when it was too late to drive back to the town. She had forced it out of her mind then. She had refused to think of it.

  The same way that she had refused to think of David and Caroline making love. She had blocked it from her mind. Even on the nights that she knew with every instinct that they had she did not acknowledge it. It made things safer, like not stepping on cracks in the pavement. She had never admitted it to herself until she saw those pictures. God, but Gerry Doyle was clever. In a few more days she might well have thought he was a possible alternative to such a cheating husband. It wasn’t likely but she hadn’t known just how bitter and resentful she would feel. Those pictures that she had in her hand had gone a great way toward doing what Gerry, mad insane Gerry, had wanted them to do. She must burn them. Now.

  Maybe she would feel a bit better.

  The wind whipped her hair as she took the can of petrol out of the boot. You couldn’t light a fire on a day like this without a rag soaked in something that would leap up in flames.

  The gray anonymous caravan that Caroline Nolan had rented for six months stood like a big menacing shape, not far from where Clare was standing. This was where her husband came when he was meant to be playing golf. Those pictures had been taken on a bright afternoon; Gerry must have followed them, on his light little feet. They hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains. Who would look in at them? The caravan looked out to sea . . .

  She was drawn to see it. Looking left and right as if anyone else would be in this wild place, she tiptoed up to it. It was stripped bare of any possessions, there were no lamps, rugs, little ornaments in it. She remembered her mother-in-law giving Caroline some cushions, two rather nice ones. They were still there, oddly. But none of the tartan rugs that had figured in the pictures, nothing at all.

  Perhaps she had gone. Caroline. Perhaps when she saw the pictures she had run for it. Perhaps she was just trying to hide the evidence. She was so clever that one, you’d never know what she was up to.

  She took the big envelope out and laid it down on the cold iron bars of the incinerator, she shook some petrol over a cleaning rag and watched the pictures and the negatives and the letters she had written to Gerry Doyle burn. It was a small fire. She poked and poked, they were gone, there was no way that anyone, not a fleet of detectives, could know what they were.

  She breathed in the salty air. She still felt restless and jumpy, somehow she had thought that burning the pictures would help but it hadn’t. It was all still here, the memory, the caravan. The knowledge of what they had done and might still do, the caravan. The loneliness, the lies he had told her. The caravan.

  Almost without realizing it she was walking toward it. It was set far away from the others. She still had the petrol in her hand, the matches were in her pocket.
<
br />   She paused for one long moment and acknowledged what she was doing. “Yes,” Clare said aloud. “Yes, I bloody will.”

  The petrol soaked the bed, she put most of it there, and then more near the door. She lit the rag, threw it in and ran as fast as she could away. By the time she reached Dick Dillon’s car, parked on the road outside, the flames were coming from the windows.

  She drove excitedly back toward town, and stopped the car not far from her parents’ shop. She could see the blaze in the winter evening . . .

  She felt better than she had for a long time. She called in to her mother.

  “What are you driving Dick’s car for?”

  “God, you were always great with the greeting, Mam, I’ll say that for you.”

  “I’ve never been able to understand you Clare, never.”

  “You didn’t do too badly, Mam. Do you think I might have a cup of tea or is it only abuse I’m going to get?”

  “Make it for yourself then. Some of us have work to do.”

  “Are you cross over something in particular or what, Mam?”

  “I don’t know what you’re up to, that’s all.” Agnes had her mouth in a hard line.

  “I don’t really know myself. Mam, I’m meant to be going up to Dublin to see about sitting this exam again. I’m sort of on the way there—Liffey and I.”

  “You’re never taking that baby up to Dublin, away from her home.”

  “Not forever, Mam. Just to give her a taste of city life. Look what it did for me.” Clare’s eyes were bright, too bright.

  She was still sitting on the counter sipping a mug of tea when the shouts went up that there was a fire in the caravan park.

  “What’s all the fuss and excitement?” Clare asked giddily.

  “Lord God, child, someone might be burned to death.” Agnes was white with anxiety.

  “Who’d be up there in the middle of winter?” Clare said.

  “How could a caravan catch fire unless some poor unfortunate turned over a stove or an oil lamp on themselves?”