ECHOES

Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2006

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Copyright © Maeve Binchy, 1985

Maeve Binchy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

First published in the United Kingdom in 1985 by Century

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ISBN 9780099498650 (from Jan 2007)
ISBN 0 09 949865 0

Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd., Reading, Berkshire

For dearest Gordon
with all my love

ECHOES

Maeve Binchy was born in County Dublin and was educated at the Holy Child Convent in Killiney and at University College Dublin. After a spell as a teacher in various girls’ schools, she joined the Irish Times, for which she wrote feature articles and columns. Her first novel, Light a Penny Candle, was published in 1982, and since then she has written more than a dozen novels and short-story collections, each one of them a bestseller. Several have been adapted for cinema and television, most notably Circle of Friends in 1995. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award at the British Book Awards in 1999. She is married to the writer and broadcaster Gordon Snell.

Visit her website at www.maevebinchy.com

Praise for Echoes

‘A powerful story of love and jealousy’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Warm, witty and with a deep understanding of what makes us tick, it’s little wonder that Maeve Binchy’s bewitching stories have become world beaters’ OK Magazine

‘Another joyful, absorbing Binchy read with lots of heart’ Irish Times

Also by Maeve Binchy

Fiction

Light a Penny Candle

Circle of Friends

Victoria Line, Central Line

Dublin 4

The Lilac Bus

Firefly Summer

Silver Wedding

The Copper Beech

The Glass Lake

Evening Class

Tara Road

Scarlet Feather

Quentins

Nights of Rain and Stars

Non-fiction

Aches & Pains

PROLOGUE

People seemed to know without being told. They came out of their houses and began to run down the main street. The murmur became louder, and almost without knowing they were doing it they started to check where their own families were. It was still just a figure, face down in the water. They didn’t know for sure whether it was a man or a woman.

‘Perhaps it’s a sailor from a ship,’ they said. But they knew it wasn’t anyone who had gone overboard. No nice anonymous death of someone they didn’t know. No informing the authorities and saying a few prayers for the deceased unknown sailor. This was someone from Castlebay.

They stood in silent groups on the cliff top and watched the first people getting to the water’s edge: the boy who had first seen the waves leaving something frightening on the shore; other men too; people from the shops nearby and young men who were quick to run down the path. Then they saw the figures coming down the other path near the doctor’s house, kneeling by the body in case, just in case there was something in a black bag that could bring it back to life.

By the time Father O’Dwyer arrived with his soutane flapping in the wind the murmur had turned into a unified sound. The people of Castlebay were saying a decade of the rosary for the repose of the soul which had left the body that lay face down on their beach.

PART ONE

1950–1952

It was sometimes called Brigid’s Cave, the echo cave, and if you shouted your question loud enough in the right direction you got an answer instead of an echo. In the summer it was full of girls calling out questions, girls who had come for the summer to Castlebay. Girls who wanted to know would they get a fellow, or if Gerry Doyle would have eyes for them this summer. Clare thought they were mad to tell the cave their secrets. Specially since people like her sister Chrissie and that crowd would go and listen for private things being asked and then they’d scream with laughter about them and tell everyone. Clare said she’d never ask the echo anything no matter how desperate she was, because it wouldn’t be a secret any more. But she did go in to ask about the history prize. That was different.

It was different because it was winter anyway, and there was hardly anyone except themselves in Castlebay in winter; and it was different because it had nothing to do with love. And it was a nice way to come home from school that way down the cliff road: you didn’t have to talk to everyone in the town, you could look at the sea instead. And suppose she did go down that crooked path with all the Danger notices on it, then she could go into the cave for a quick word, walk along the beach and up the real steps and be home in the same time as if she had come down the street talking to this person and that. In winter there was hardly any business so people waved you into shops and gave you a biscuit or asked you to do a message for them. She’d be just as quick going by Brigid’s cave and the beach.

It had been dry, so the Danger bits weren’t so dangerous. Clare slid easily down the cliff on to the sand. It was firm and hard, the tide had not long gone out. The mouth of the cave looked black and a bit frightening. But she squared her shoulders; it looked just the same in summer yet people went in there in droves. She shifted her schoolbag to her back so that she could have both hands free to guide herself and once she got used to the light there was no difficulty seeing the little ridge where you were meant to stand.

Clare took a deep breath: ‘Will I win the history prize?’ she called.

‘Ize ize ize ize,’ called the echo.

‘It’s saying yes,’ said a voice just beside her. Clare jumped with the fright. It was David Power.

‘You shouldn’t listen to anyone else, it’s like listening in to confession,’ Clare said crossly.

‘I thought you saw me,’ David said simply. ‘I wasn’t hiding.’

‘How could I see you, didn’t I come in out of the light, you were lurking in here.’ She was full of indignation.

‘It’s not a private cave, you don’t have to keep shouting Cave Occupied,’ David retorted loudly.

‘Pied pied pied pied,’ said the cave.

They both laughed.

He was nice, really, David Power, he was the same age as her brother Ned – fifteen. They had been in Mixed Infants together, she remembered Ned telling someone proudly, wanting to share some experience with the doctor’s son.

He wore a tie and suit when he came home from school, all the time, not just when he went to Mass on Sundays. He was tall and he had freckles on his nose. His hair was a bit spiky and used to stick up in funny directions, one big bit of it fell over his forehead. He had a nice smile and he always looked as if he were ready to talk except that something was dragging him away. Sometimes he wore a blazer with a badge on it, and he looked very smart in that. He used to wrinkle his nose and tell people that it only looked smart when you didn’t see a hundred and eighty blazers like that every day at his school. He’d been at a boarding school for over a year but now it was closed because of scarlet fever. Only the Dillon girls from the hotel went to boarding school and of course the Wests and the Greens, but they were Protestants and they had to go to a boarding school because there wasn’t one of their own.

‘I didn’t think it would answer really, I only tried it as a joke,’ she said.

‘I know, I tried it once as a joke too,’ he confessed.

‘What did you ask it as a joke?’ she inquired.

‘I forget now,’ he said.

‘That’s not fair – you heard mine.’

‘I didn’t, I only heard eyes eyes eyes.’ He shouted it and it called back the three words to him over and over.

Clare was satisfied. ‘Well I’d best be off now, I have homework. I don’t suppose you’ve had homework for weeks.’ She was envious and inquiring.

‘I do. Miss O’Hara comes every day to give me lessons. She’s coming . . . oh soon now.’ They walked out on to the wet hard sand.

‘Lessons all by yourself with Miss O’Hara – isn’t that great?’

‘It is, she’s great at explaining things, isn’t she, for a woman teacher I mean.’

‘Yes, well we only have women teachers and nuns,’ Clare explained.

‘I forgot,’ David said sympathetically. ‘Still she’s terrific, and she’s very easy to talk to, like a real person.’

Clare agreed. They walked companionably along to the main steps up from the beach. It would have been quicker for David to climb the path with Danger written on it, it led almost into his own garden, but he said he wanted to buy some sweets at Clare’s shop anyway. They talked about things the other had never heard of. David told her about the sanitorium being fumigated after the two pupils got scarlet fever; but all the time she thought that he was talking about the big hospital on the hill where people went when they had TB. She didn’t know it was a room in his school. She told him a long and complicated tale about Mother Immaculata asking one of the girls to leave the exercise books in one place and she thought that it was somewhere else and the girl went by accident into the nuns’ side of the convent. This was all lost on David, who didn’t know that you never under pain of terrible things went to the nuns’ side of the convent. It didn’t really matter to either of them, they were no strain on each other, and life in Castlebay could be full of strains so this was a nice change. He came into the shop and, as there was nobody serving, she took off her coat, hung it up and found the jar of Clove Rock. She counted out the six for a penny that he was buying and before she put the lid on the jar she offered him one courteously and took one herself.

He looked at her enviously. It was great power to be able to stand up on a chair in a sweetshop, take down a jar and be free to offer one to a customer. David sighed as he went home. He’d have loved to live in a shop like Clare O’Brien, he’d have loved brothers and sisters, and to be allowed to go up to the yard and collect milk in a can when the cows were being milked, or gather seaweed to sell to the hot sea baths in bundles. It was very dull going back to his own house now to his mother saying he should really have some sense of what was what. It was the most irritating thing he had ever heard, especially since it seemed to mean anything and everything and never the same thing twice. Still, Miss O’Hara was coming tonight, and Miss O’Hara made lessons much more interesting than at school, he had once been unwise enough to explain to his mother. He thought she would be pleased but she said that Miss O’Hara was fine for a country primary school but did not compare with the Jesuits who were on a different level entirely.

Clare was sighing too, she thought it must be great altogether to go back to a house like David Power’s where there were bookcases of books in the house, and a fire on in that front room whether there was anyone sitting in it or not. And there was no wireless on, and nobody making noise. You could do your homework there for hours without anyone coming in and telling you to move. She remembered the inside of the house from when she had been up to Dr Power for the stitches the time she had caught her leg on the rusty bit of machinery. To distract her Dr Power had asked her to count the volumes of the encyclopedia up on the shelf and Clare had been so startled to see all those books in one house for one family that she had forgotten about the stitches and Dr Power had told her mother she was as brave as a lion. They had walked home after the stitches with Clare leaning on her mother. They stopped at the church to thank St Anne that there hadn’t been any infection in the leg and as Clare saw her mother bent in prayer and gratitude in front of the St Anne grotto she let her mind wander on how great it would be to have a big peaceful house full of books like that instead of being on top of each other and no room for anything – no time for anything either. She thought about it again tonight as David Power went up the street home to that house where the carpet went right into the window, not stopping in a square like ordinary carpets. There would be a fire and there’d be peace. His mother might be in the kitchen and Dr Power would be curing people and later Miss O’Hara would be coming to give him lessons all on his own without the rest of a class to distract her. What could be better than that? She wished for a moment that she had been his sister, but then she felt guilty. To wish that would be to want to lose Mammy and Daddy and Tommy and Ned and Ben and Jimmy. Oh and Chrissie. But she didn’t care how wrong it was, she wouldn’t mind losing Chrissie any day of the week.

The calm of the shop was only temporary. Daddy had been painting out in the back and he came in holding his hands up in front of him and asking someone to reach out a bottle of white spirit and open it up this minute. There was an awful lot of painting going on in the wintertime in Castlebay, the sea air just ripped the coats off again and the place looked very shabby unless it was touched up all the time. Mammy came in at the same moment; she had been up to the post office and she had discovered terrible things. Chrissie and her two tinkers of friends had climbed on the roof of Miss O’Flaherty’s shop and poked a long wet piece of seaweed through to frighten Miss O’Flaherty. They could have given the unfortunate woman a heart attack; she could, God save us all, have dropped stone dead on the floor of her own shop and then Chrissie O’Brien and her two fine friends would have the sin of murder on their souls until the Last Day and after. Chrissie had been dragged home by the shoulder, the plait and the ear. She was red-faced and annoyed. Clare thought that it was a good thing to have frightened Miss O’Flaherty who was horrible, and sold copy books and school supplies but hated schoolchildren. Clare thought it was real bad luck that Mammy happened to be passing. She smiled sympathetically at Chrissie but it was not well received,

‘Stop looking so superior,’ Chrissie cried out. ‘Look at Clare gloating at it all. Goody-goody Clare, stupid boring Clare.’

She got a cuff on the side of her head for this performance and it made her madder still.

‘Look, she’s delighted,’ Chrissie went on, ‘delighted to see anyone in trouble. That’s all that ever makes Clare happy, to see others brought down.’

‘There’ll be no tea for you, Chrissie O’Brien, and that’s not the end of it either. Get up to your room this minute, do you hear. This minute.’ Agnes O’Brien’s thin voice was like a whistle with anger, as she banished the bold Chrissie, wiped the worst paint off her husband’s hands with a rag that she had wet with white spirit, and managed at the same time to point to Clare’s coat on the hook.

‘This isn’t a hand-me-down shop,’ she said. ‘Take that coat and put it where it’s meant to be.’

The unfairness of this stung Clare deeply. ‘We always leave our coats there. That is where it’s meant to be.’

‘Do you hear her?’ Agnes looked in appeal to her husband, did not wait for an answer but headed for the stairs. Chrissie up there was for it.

‘Can’t you stop tormenting your mother and move your coat?’ he asked. ‘Is it too much to ask for a bit of peace?’

Clare took her coat down from the hook. She couldn’t go up to the bedroom she shared with Chrissie because that would be like stepping straight into the battlefield. She stayed idling in the shop.

Her father’s face was weary. It was so wrong of him to say she was tormenting Mammy, she wasn’t, but you couldn’t explain that to him. He was bent over in a kind of a stoop and he looked very old, like someone’s grandfather, not a father. Daddy was all grey, his face and his hair and his cardigan. Only his hands were white from the paint. Daddy had grown more stooped since her First Communion three years ago, Clare thought; then he had seemed very tall. His face had grown hairy too – there were bits of hair in his nose and his ears. He always looked a bit harassed as if there wasn’t enough time or space or money. And, indeed, there usually wasn’t enough of any of these things. The O’Brien household lived on the profits of the summer season which was short and unpredictable. It could be killed by rain, by the popularity of some new resort, by people overcharging for houses along the cliff road. There was no steady living to be gained over the winter months, it was merely a matter of keeping afloat.

The shop was oddly-shaped when you came in: there were corners and nooks in it which should have been shelved or walled off but nobody had ever got round to it, the ceiling was low and even with three customers the place looked crowded. Nobody could see any order on the shelves but the O’Briens knew where everything was. They didn’t change it for fear they wouldn’t find things, even though there were many more logical ways of stocking the small grocery-confectioner’s. It all looked cramped and awkward and though the customers couldn’t see behind the door into the living quarters it was exactly the same in there. The kitchen had a range, with a clothes line over it, and the table took up most of the space in the room. A small scullery at the back was so poky and dark that it was almost impossible to see the dishes you washed. There was one light in the middle of the room with a yellow light shade which had a crack in it. Recently Tom O’Brien had been holding his paper up nearer to the light in order to read it.

Agnes came downstairs with the air of someone who has just finished an unpleasant task satisfactorily. ‘That girl will end on the gallows,’ she said.

She was a thin small woman, who used to smile a lot once; but now she seemed set in the face of the cold Castlebay wind, and even when she was indoors she seemed to be grimacing against the icy blast, eyes narrow and mouth in a hard line. In the shop she wore a yellow overall to protect her clothes, she said, but in fact there were hardly any clothes to protect. She had four outfits for going to Mass, and otherwise it had been the same old cardigans and frocks and skirts for years. There were always medals and relics pinned inside the cardigan; they had to be taken off before it was washed. Once she had forgotten, and a relic of the Little Flower which had been in a red satin covering had become all pink and the pale blue cardigan was tinged pink too. Agnes O’Brien had her hair in a bun which was made by pulling it through a thing that looked like a doughnut, a squashy round device, and then the hair was clipped in. They never saw her doing this, but once they had seen the bun by itself and it had alarmed Clare greatly because she hadn’t known what it was.

The dark and very angry eyes of her mother landed on her. ‘Have you decided that you would like to belong to this family and do what’s required of you? Would it be too much to ask you to take that coat out of my way before I open the range and burn it down to its buttons?’

She would never do that, Clare knew. She had hoped her mother might have forgotten it during the sojourn upstairs. But the coat was still going to be a cause of war.

‘I told her, Agnes, my God I told her, but children nowadays . . .’ Tom sounded defeated and apologetic.

Clare stuffed her school coat into a crowded cupboard under the stairs and took a few potatoes out of the big sack on the floor. Each evening she and Chrissie had to get the potatoes ready for tea, and tonight, thanks to Chrissie’s disgrace, it looked as if Clare was going to have to do it on her own. In the kitchen sat her younger brothers Ben and Jim; they were reading a comic. The older boys Tommy and Ned would be in from the Brothers shortly, but none of this would be any help. Boys didn’t help with the food or the washing up. Everyone knew that.

Clare had a lot to do after tea. She wanted to iron her yellow ribbons for tomorrow. Just in case she won the history essay she’d better be looking smart. She would polish her indoor shoes, she had brought them home specially, and she would make another attempt to get the two stains off her tunic. Mother Immaculata might make a comment about smartening yourself up for the good name of the school. She must be sure not to let them down. Miss O’Hara had said that she had never been so pleased in all her years teaching as when she read Clare’s essay, it gave her the strength to go on. Those were her very words. She would never have stopped Clare in the corridor and said that, if she hadn’t won the prize. Imagine beating all the ones of fifteen. All those Bernie Conways and Anna Murphys. They’d look at Clare with new interest from now on. And indeed they’d have to think a bit differently at home too. She longed to tell them tonight, but decided it was better to wait. Tonight they were all like weasels and anyway it might look worse for Chrissie; after all she was two years and a half older. Chrissie would murder her too if she chose to reveal it tonight. She took upstairs a big thick sandwich of cheese, a bit of cold cooked bacon and a cup of cocoa.

Chrissie was sitting on her bed, examining her face in a mirror. She had two very thick plaits in her hair; the bits at the ends after the rubber bands were bushy and didn’t just hang there like other people’s, they looked as if they were trying to escape. She had a fringe which she cut herself so badly that she had to be taken to the hairdresser to get a proper job done on it, and at night she put pipe cleaners into the fringe so that it would curl properly.

She was fatter than Clare, much, and she had a real bust that you could see even in her school tunic.

Chrissie was very interested in her nose, Clare couldn’t understand why but she was always examining it. Even now in all the disgrace and no meal and the sheer fury over what she had done to Miss O’Flaherty she was still peering at it looking for spots to squeeze. She had a round face and always looked surprised. Not happily surprised, not even when someone was delivering her an unexpected supper.

‘I don’t want it,’ she said.

‘Don’t eat it then,’ Clare returned with some spirit.

She went back downstairs and tried to find a corner where she could learn the poem for tomorrow; and she had to do four sums. She often asked herself how was it that with six people living in that house who were all going to school, why was she the only one who ever needed to do any homework?

Gerry Doyle came in as she was ironing her yellow ribbons.

‘Where’s Chrissie?’ he asked Clare in a whisper.

‘She’s upstairs, there was murder here, she gave Miss O’Flaherty some desperate fright with seaweed. Don’t ask for her, they’ll all go mad if you even mention her name.’

‘Listen, would you tell her . . .’ He stopped, deciding against it. ‘No, you’re too young.’

‘I’m not too young,’ Clare said, stung by the unfairness of it. ‘But young or old, I don’t care, I’m not giving your soppy messages to Chrissie, she’ll only be annoyed with me, and you’ll be annoyed with me, and Mammy will beat the legs off me, so I’d much prefer you kept them to yourself.’ She went back to the ribbons with vigour. They were flat gleaming bands now, they would fluff up gorgeously tomorrow. She couldn’t get herself up to the neck in Chrissie’s doings because there would be trouble at every turn. She must keep nice and quiet and get ready for tomorrow, for the look of surprise on Mother Immaculata’s face, and the horror on Bernie Conway’s and Anna Murphy’s.

Gerry Doyle laughed good-naturedly. ‘You’re quite right, let people do their own dirty work,’ he said.

The words ‘dirty work’ somehow cut through all the rest of the noise in the O’Brien kitchen and reached Agnes O’Brien as she pulled the entire contents of the dresser’s bottom cupboard on to the floor. Tom had said that she must have thrown out the length of flex he was going to use to put up a light outside the back door. She was sure she had seen it somewhere and was determined that the project should not be postponed.

Tommy and Ned were going through the paper for jobs as they did every week, marking things with a stubby purple pencil; Ben and Jimmy were playing a game that began quietly every few minutes until it became a slapping match and one of them would start to cry. Tom was busy mending the wireless which crackled over all the activity.

‘What dirty work?’ Agnes called: a grand fellow, that Gerry Doyle, but you had to watch him like a hawk. Whatever devilment was planned he had a hand in it.

‘I was saying to Clare that I’m no good at any housework, or anything that needs a lot of care. I’m only good at dirty work.’ He smiled across, and the woman on her knees in front of a pile of tins, boxes, paper bags, knitting wool, toasting forks and rusted baking trays, smiled back.

Clare looked up at him with surprise. Imagine being able to tell a lie as quickly and as well as that. And over nothing.

Gerry had gone over to the job consultation, saying he heard there was going to be a man from a big employment agency in England coming round and holding interviews in the hotel.

‘Wouldn’t that be for big kind of jobs, for people with qualifications?’ Ned asked, unwilling to think anyone would come to Castlebay to seek out him or his like.

‘Have sense Ned, who is there in this place with any qualifications? Won’t it save you shoe leather and the cost of writing off to these places if you wait till this fellow arrives and he’ll tell all there’s to be told?’

‘It’s easy on you to say that.’ Tommy, the eldest, was troubled. ‘You don’t have to go away for a job. You’ve got your business.’

‘So have you,’ Gerry pointed to the shop.

But it wasn’t the same. Gerry’s father was the photographer; during the winter he survived on dances, and the odd function that was held. In summer, he walked the length of the beach three times a day taking family groups and then out again at night into the dance hall where the holiday business was brisk and where there would be a great demand to buy prints of the romantic twosomes that he would snap. Girls were his biggest customers, they loved to bring back holiday memories in the form of something that they could pass around the office and sigh over when the dance was long over. Gerry’s mother and sister did the developing and printing, or they helped with it, which was the way it was described. Gerry’s father expected the only son to take an active part, and since he had been a youngster, Gerry had tagged along learning the psychology as well as the mechanics of the camera.

You must never annoy people, his father had taught him, be polite and a little distant even, click the camera when they aren’t at all posed or prepared and then if they show interest and start to pose take a proper snap. The first plate was only a blank to get their attention. Remind them gently that there’s no need to buy, the proofs will be available for inspection in twenty-four hours. Move on and don’t waste any time chatting when the picture is taken, have a pleasant smile but not a greasy sort of a one. Never plead with people to pose, and when gaggles of girls want six or seven shots taken of them remember they’re only going to buy one at the most so pretend to take the snap more often than taking it.

Gerry’s beautiful sister Fiona had long dark ringlets; when she wasn’t working in the darkroom in their house during the summer she sat in the wooden shack up over the beach selling the snaps. Gerry’s father had said that a town like Castlebay was so small you could never have a business if you tried to get big and expand and hire people. But keep it small and run it just with the family and there would be a great inheritance for Gerard Anthony Doyle.

But Gerry never had the air of a boy about to step into a secure future. He examined the paper with the O’Brien boys as eagerly as if he would be having to take the emigrant ship with them.

How did he know whether there’d be a living for him here? His father was always saying that all it needed was a smart-alec firm to come in for the summer and they’d be ruined. Who knew what the future would bring? Maybe people would want coloured photography, there could be newfangled cameras, it was living on a cliff edge his father always said. At least in O’Brien’s they could be sure that people would always want bread and butter and milk. They’d want groceries until the end of the world and as long as the trippers kept coming wouldn’t they be selling ice creams and sweets and oranges until the Last Day as well?

Gerry always made everything sound more exciting than it was. He saw a future for Tommy and Ned where they’d work in England and then, just when all the English would be wondering what to do and where to go for the summer holidays, Ned and Tommy would come back home to Castlebay, get behind the counter, help out with the shop and have a great holiday as well. And they’d be fine fellows at the dance because they’d be so well up in everything after being in England. Tommy complained that it wouldn’t be much of a holiday coming home to work like dogs in the really tough part of the year when O’Brien’s was open from eight o’clock in the morning until midnight. But Gerry just laughed and said that would be their investment, that was the only time of the year that there’d be work for all hands. The rest of the year they’d be falling over each other with no one to serve, but in the summer the whole family should be there to make sure that everyone got a bit of sleep anyway and to keep the thing going. It was like that in all seaside towns. Gerry was very convincing. Tommy and Ned saw it all very rosily, and really and truly Gerry was right, shouldn’t they wait till the man came and had a list of jobs for them instead of scanning all the ads which told them nothing when all was said and done?

Clare had turned the iron on its end by the range; she was folding the blanket and the scorch sheet and wondering where to replace them since everything from the dresser seemed to be on the floor. Gerry Doyle was sitting on the table swinging his legs and she got a sudden feeling that he was giving her brothers wrong advice. They weren’t capable and sure like he was, they were the kind of people who agreed with everyone else.

‘Would this man who came offering jobs in the hotel, would he be offering the kind of jobs where you could get on or jobs you’d just have to work hard at?’

They were surprised that she spoke. Her father took his head out of the shell of the wireless.

‘It’s the same thing, Clare girl, if you work hard you get on. If you don’t, you don’t.’

‘But trained like, that’s what I mean,’ Clare said. ‘You remember when that Order came and the girls were all going to be taken off to do their Leaving Certificate and learn a skill if they became postulant nuns.’

Ned roared with scorn. ‘A postulant nun! Is that what you’d like us to be, wouldn’t we look fine in the habit and the veil?’

‘No that’s not what I meant. . .’ she began.

‘I don’t think the Reverend Mother would take us,’ Tommy said.

‘Sister Thomas, I really think we’re going to have to do something about your voice in the choir,’ Ned said in mincing tones.

‘Oh I’m doing my best, Sister Edward, but what about your hobnailed boots?’

‘Sister Thomas, you can talk, what about your hairy legs?’

Benny and Jimmy were interested now.

‘And you’ve got to give up kicking football round the convent,’ said Ben.

‘Nuns kicking football,’ screamed Jimmy with enthusiasm. Even Mammy on her knees and having triumphantly found the bit of flex was laughing and Dad was smiling too. Clare was rescued unexpectedly.

‘Very funny, ha ha,’ Gerry Doyle said. ‘Very funny Mother Edward and Mother Thomas, but Clare’s right. What’s the point of getting a job on a building site without any training as a brickie or a carpenter? No, the real thing to ask this fellow is nothing to do with how much, but what kind of a job.’

Clare flushed with pleasure. They were all nodding now. ‘I nearly forgot why I came,’ Gerry said. ‘The father asked me to have a look at the view from different places, he’s half thinking of making a postcard of Castlebay, and he wondered where’s the best angle to take the picture from. He wondered would there be a good view from your upstairs. Do you mind if I run up and have a look?’

‘At night?’ Clare’s father asked.

‘You’d get a good idea of the outlines at night,’ Gerry said, his foot on the stairs.

‘Go on up lad.’

They were all back at their activities and nobody except Clare had the slightest idea that Gerry Doyle aged fifteen and a half had gone upstairs to see Chrissie O’Brien aged thirteen.

Nellie was on her knees with the bellows when David came in. ‘I’m building up a nice fire for your lessons,’ she told him.

Her face was red with the exertion and her hair was escaping from the cap she wore. She never seemed comfortable in the cap, it was always at the wrong angle somehow on her hair and her head seemed to be full of hairpins. Nellie was old, not as old as Mummy but about thirty, and she was fat and cheerful and she had been there always. She had a lot of married brothers and an old father. When David was a young fellow she used to tell him that she was better off than any of them, in a nice clean house and great comfort and all the food she could eat. David used to think it was lonely for her in the kitchen when they were all inside but Nellie’s round face would crack into a smile and she assured him that she was as well off as if she’d married a Guard, or even better off. Her money was her own, she had the best of everything and every Thursday afternoon and every second Sunday afternoon off.

David started to help with the fire but Nellie stood up, creaking, and said it was going fine and wasn’t that his teacher coming in the gate.

Angela O’Hara’s red bicycle was indeed coming up the gravel path. She was tall and slim, and she always wore belts on her coats as if it were the only way they’d stay on. Other people had buttons, but of course other people didn’t fly around on the bike so much. She had red-brown hair that was sort of tied back but with such a loose ribbon or piece of cord that it might as well not be tied back at all. She had big greenish eyes and she used to throw her head back when she laughed.

Miss O’Hara wasn’t at all like other grown-ups. She wanted to know did they all get a refund of fees because the school had to close for the scarlet fever. David didn’t know, he said he’d ask, but Miss O’Hara said it didn’t matter, and not to ask because it might seem as if she was looking for more money, which she wasn’t. David had forgotten that she was being paid to teach him, it wasn’t the kind of thing you’d think about, he sort of believed that Miss O’Hara did it for interest. She had found that very funny. She said in many ways she would well do it for interest but the labourer was worthy of his hire as it said somewhere in the gospels, and if she were to do it for free what about the fancy order of priests he was with – they certainly didn’t do it for free. David said he thought the main cost was the food and the beds in the dormitories, he couldn’t imagine that the actual lessons would cost anything.

She came for an hour every evening, after she had finished up at the school and called in on her mother. Mrs O’Hara was all crooked from arthritis and David thought that she looked like an illustration of an old tree in one of the children’s books he used to read. A book probably tidied away neatly by his mother for when it would be needed again. Miss O’Hara had two sisters married in England and a brother, a priest, in the Far East. She was the only one who had never travelled, she told him. He asked what would have happened if she had travelled and her mother had got all crippled living by herself.

‘Then I’d have come back,’ Miss O’Hara had said cheerfully. Since her sisters were married and her brother was a priest she would have been the one to look after her mother anyway.

The O’Hara house was out a bit on the road towards the golf course, and Miss O’Hara cycled everywhere on her big red bicycle with the basket of exercise books in the front. There were always copy books and when it rained she had them covered with a waterproof sheet. She wore a long scarf wound round her in winter and if there was a wind sometimes her long hair stood out behind her in a straight line. David’s mother once said she looked like a witch heading for the cliffroad and you’d expect her and the bicycle to take flight over the seas. But his father had refused to let a word of criticism be spoken of her. He said that nobody knew how much she did for that crippled mother of hers, morning noon and night, and wasn’t it proof to note that when poor Angela O’Hara went on her two weeks holiday a year somewhere they had to have three people in and out of that house to mind the mother and it was never done satisfactorily even then. His mother didn’t like Miss O’Hara, it had something to do with her not admiring things or not being excited enough about his mother going to Dublin for outings. It had never been said, it was just a feeling he had.

The table with his books on it was near the fire and Nellie would bring in a pot of tea and a slice of cake or apple tart.

Miss O’Hara always talked to Nellie more than she talked to his mother, she’d ask about Nellie’s old father out in the country and the row with the brothers and had they heard from the sister in Canada. She’d giggle with Nellie about something new that Father O’Dwyer’s housekeeper had said. The woman’s name was Miss McCormack, but everyone called her Sergeant McCormack because she tried to run not only Father O’Dwyer and the church but the whole of Castlebay too.

Miss O’Hara came in now, her hands cold from clenching the handlebars in the wind, and she held them out to the fire.

‘God, Nellie, isn’t it a sin having a great fire like this banked up just for David and myself. We could work in the kitchen, you know, beside the range.’

‘Oh, that wouldn’t do at all!’ Nellie was horrified.

‘You wouldn’t mind, David?’ she began . . . and then suddenly changed her mind. ‘No, don’t take any notice of me, I always want to change the world, that’s my problem. Aren’t we lucky to have this grand place in here, let’s make the most of it. Nellie, tell me what are they building on the side of Dillon’s? It looks like an aerodrome.’

‘Oh, that’s going to be a sun lounge, I hear,’ Nellie said, full of importance. ‘They’re going to have chairs and card tables maybe in the summer, and tea served there too.’

‘They’d need to have rugs and hot-water bottles if it turns out anything like last summer. Come on, college boy, get out your geography book, we’re going to make you a world expert on trade winds, you’re going to make them green and yellow striped with jealousy when you get back to that palace of a school of yours. We’ll show them what a real scholar is, the way we breed them in Castlebay.’

Paddy Power was tall and thick-set, with a weather-beaten face. His face was beaten by weather of all kinds, but mainly the sharp wind that came in from the sea as he walked up lanes to people’s houses, lanes where his big battered car wouldn’t go. He had a shock of hair that grew in all directions as if he had three crowns on his head; it had been brown and then it was speckled but now it was mainly grey. Because of his bulk and his alarming hair he sometimes looked fierce, but that was before people got to know him. He had a great way of talking, a kind of good-natured bantering until he could see what was wrong; his talk was merely to relax the patient until he could see where the piece of grit in the eyes was, or the splinter in the hand, the glass in the sole of the foot or feel for the pain in the base of the stomach without too much tensing and alarm.

He was a burly man who never found clothes to fit him and never cared about them either. Life was far too short, he said, to spend time in a tailor’s talking rubbish about lines and cuts and lapels. But for all his bulk and his haphazard attitude to his appearance, he was a healthy man and he was able to go down the path from his own garden to the sea and swim for nearly six months of the year and to get a game of golf a week as well. But Paddy Power was tired today; it had been a very long day and he had driven seventeen miles out to see a young woman who would be dead by Christmas but who talked cheerfully of how she knew she’d be better when the fine weather came. Her five children had played noisily and unconcerned around the feet of the doctor and the pale young husband just sat looking emptily into the fire. He had also had to have an unpleasing chat with one of the Dillon brothers from the hotel and speak seriously about liver damage. No matter how carefully he tried to phrase it, he had ended up with a blank wall and a great deal of resentment. Today it had ended with Dick Dillon telling him to mind his own bloody business, and that Paddy Power was a fine one to talk, half the county could tell you that he was drunk as a lord three years ago at the races, so he was in a poor position to cast stones. There were two bad cases of flu in old people, where it was settling in on chests that were never strong, he could see both of them turning into pneumonia before long. People talked about the good seaside air, and the bracing breezes. They should be here in a doctor’s surgery in winter, Paddy Power thought gloomily, there’d be less of the folksy chat then.

Molly said that David was getting on like a house on fire with his lessons, and that he did two hours on his own each morning.

‘She’s a fine scholar Angela, isn’t it a pity that she never got the recognition for it,’ Paddy said, wearily taking off his boots and putting on his slippers.

‘Never got any recognition? Isn’t she a teacher above in the school with a big salary, hasn’t she all her qualifications, that’s not bad for Dinny O’Hara’s daughter.’ Molly sniffed.

‘You miss the point, Moll. That’s a bright girl and she’s stuck here in Castlebay teaching children to be waitresses and to serve their time in shops. And what kind of a life does she have in that house? I mean the Little Sisters wouldn’t do as much for their flock as Angela does for her mother.’

‘Oh I know, I know.’ Molly was anxious to leave it now.

‘Still, a man on a white horse may ride into town one day for her yet.’ He smiled at the thought.

‘I’d say she’s a bit past that now,’ Molly said.

‘She’s only twenty-eight years of age, a year older than you were when we got married, that’s what she is.’

Molly hated when he spoke about things like that in front of Nellie. Molly hadn’t grown up here, she came from a big town and she had been at school in Dublin. She didn’t like anyone knowing her business nor indeed her age.

She looked at herself in the mirror, no longer young but not too bad. She had made a friend of the buyer in that shop in Dublin and now there was no problem in getting clothes. Nice wool two-pieces, loose enough so that you could wear a warm vest and maybe even a thin jumper under them. You needed a lot of layers in Castlebay. And Paddy had given her nice brooches over the years so that she always looked smart. No matter who came to the house, Molly Power looked well-dressed and ready to receive them, her hair was always neat and well-groomed (she had a perm every three months in the town) and she always used a little make-up.

She examined her face. She had been afraid that the climate in this place might have made her lined or leathery like a lot of the women, but then they probably didn’t use any face cream even.

She smiled at herself, turning her head slightly so that she’d see the nice clip-on earrings she had got recently to match the green brooch on her green and grey wool two-piece. Paddy saw her smiling and came and stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders.

‘You’re right about yourself, you’re gorgeous,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ she said indignantly.

‘Well, you should have been,’ he said. ‘A glamorous thing, not like a mother and wife.’

She thought about being a mother for a moment. She had believed it would be impossible. So many false alarms. The weeks of delight followed by the miscarriages at three months. Three times. Then two babies born dead. And then when she hardly dared to believe it, David. Exactly the child she wanted. Exactly.

Angela thought David was a grand little fellow. He looked like an illustration from those Just William books, with his hair sticking up, his shoelaces undone and his tie crooked. When he worked he sort of came apart.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to teach bright children all the time without having to pause for ever for the others to catch up. She looked at him as he worked out a chart of the winds and gave it to her triumphantly.

‘Why are you smiling?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘I don’t know. I could be losing my mind. I’ve noticed myself smiling nowadays whenever any child gets anything right, it’s such a shock you see.’

He laughed. ‘Are they all hopeless at the school here?’

‘No, not all, some are as smart as paint. But what’s the point? Where will it get them?’

‘Won’t it get them their exams?’

‘Yes, yes it will.’ She stood up a bit like a grown-up who wasn’t going to follow the conversation on with him. He was disappointed.

Angela cycled home from Dr Power’s house into the wind. Her face was whipped by it and the salt of the sea stung her eyes. Any journey in winter seemed like a voyage to the South Pole, and she wondered for the millionth time would they be better if she moved her mother to a town. Surely this wet wind coming in through every crack in the cottage must be hard on her, surely it couldn’t be healthy living in a place that was only right for seals and gulls for three quarters of the year. But then she mustn’t fool herself: if they moved to a town it would be for herself, so that she could have some life. Let’s not pretend it would be for her mother’s poor old misshapen bones. And anyway what more life would there be for her in a town? She’d come in as a schoolmarm with an ailing mother, that’s if she were to get a job at all. A schoolmarm who was freewheeling down to thirty. Not something that was going to light many fireworks. Stop dreaming, Angela, head down, foot down, pedal on, only a few more minutes now, the worst bit is over, you’re past the blasts of wind from the gap in the cliff. You can see the light in the window.

People called it a cottage because it looked small from the front but in fact there was an upstairs. It was whitewashed and had the formal little garden with its boxed hedge and tiny path up to the door.