Echoes (13 page)

Tom O'Brien groaned and sighed as usual over the brown envelopes, the ones with windows in them and the ones without. Then he gave a start. “Well now, Clare, there's a letter here for
you
!”

Clare had never had a letter before, so it created a lot of interest in the O'Brien household.

“I suppose she's got some awful, ugly, scabby lover,” Chrissie said.

“Don't talk like that. Don't be such a loudmouth always,” said Agnes O'Brien crossly to her troublesome daughter.

“Well who is it from? Why don't you ask her? You always ask me everything, where I was, who I talked to. Why can't Saint Clare be asked anything?”

“Don't speak to your mother like that,” said Tom O'Brien, who was already in a bad humor. “Come on, Clare. Tell us who the letter is from and stop all this mystery.”

“It's a list of books for exams,” Clare said simply, producing the roneoed sheet of paper that the nun had sent. She left the letter in the envelope.

“What do you want that for?” Chrissie scoffed.

“So there won't be any mistakes in what I have to study.”

Chrissie looked at the list. “We did all those last year,” she said.

“Good.” Clare was calm. “Then maybe you'd have the books for me to use later.” She knew that Chrissie's books were long torn up, or scribbled on, or lost. It was not a subject her sister would discuss for much longer.

Agnes O'Brien had more on her mind than book lists. She was preparing to send her two firstborn sons to England, where they were going to live in a strange woman's house and go out to work with grown men of every nationality each day. It was a terrible worry. But what was there for them here in Castlebay? If they only had a few fields of land it would have been different, but a small shop like this one, there was hardly a living in it at all.

Clare decided to show the letter to Miss O'Hara after school, but she was careful not to be seen hobnobbing with the teacher in case anyone should suspect that she was favored, getting extra help and advice all the way. She would go to the O'Hara cottage instead. Miss O'Hara never seemed to mind her dropping in, and surely she would be interested in the letter.

Mrs. O'Hara answered the door slowly and painfully. Clare had been tempted to run off again when she heard the scraping of the chair that meant the old woman was beginning her long, aching journey to the door, but that would be worse.

“I'm sorry for getting you up.”

“That's nothing,” the old woman said. “I may have to be getting up to answer the door myself in a short time—that's the way things look.”

“Are you getting better?” Clare was pleased.

“No. But I may be on my own, that's the way the wind is blowing.”

“Miss O'Hara going to move out of the house?” It was incredible.

“And out of Castlebay, by the looks of things.”

“She can't!” Clare was stung with the unfairness of it. Miss O'Hara
had
to stay, until she got her scholarship. She
couldn't
leave now.

“Is she getting married or something?” she asked, full of hostility to the whole notion of it.

“Married? Who'd have that big long string of misery? Of course she's not getting married. Restless, that's what she's getting, restless. Her own words. She's up pacing the house all night long. You couldn't get a wink of sleep with her. What's wrong? you ask her. Restless, she says. Ah well, nobody has any time for you when you're old. Remember that, Clare.”

Miss O'Hara returned just then. She looked very tired. She had been short-tempered at school too for some time, though not with Clare. So Clare didn't expect sharp words.

“
God Almighty,
am I to get no peace, at school, on the street and now at home?”

Clare was shocked.

“You give people an inch and they take a bloody mile. What is it tonight, Clare? Is it the long division or is it the Long Catechism? Tell me quickly and let's be done with it.”

Clare stood up and placed the letter from the distant convent on the O'Hara kitchen table. “I thought you'd like to see the reply they sent me, since you helped me write the letter.” She was at the door now, her face red and furious. “Good night, Mrs. O'Hara,” she called, and was gone.

She marched down the long golf-course road, where more and more people were doing bed and breakfast in the season. Down toward the top of Church Street and straight into the town. She didn't even see Chrissie and Kath sitting on a wall swinging their legs and talking to Gerry Doyle and two of his friends. She didn't notice all the excitement in Dwyers' the butchers, when the mad dog belonging to Dr. Power had run off down the street with a leg of mutton.

At home two suitcases were being packed even though the boys wouldn't leave for a few days yet. It was a rare thing to go on a journey; the packing was always taken very seriously.

Clare's father had found a good leather strap that would hold one case together—the locks had long rusted and wouldn't catch anymore. They would probably use several layers of thick cord to hold the other.

Mam could hardly be seen in the kitchen behind the lines of washing. There were five bars—long wooden slats, and they went up and down over the range on a dangerous pulley system that only Mam could work, everyone else reached up by standing on a chair. But today there seemed to be a crisis of enormous proportions. The range was out. And Mam was standing on it at the back fixing what must have been a row of washing that had fallen, judging by the rage and the pile of ash-covered clothes in the corner of the kitchen.

Mam looked as if nothing would please her, and indeed nothing did.

“Can I do anything to help?” Clare asked after a moment, thinking that was a better approach than asking what had happened.

“It would be nice if
someone
did something to help,” Mam cried. “It would be very nice if
anyone
in this house did something to help. That would be very nice. And very surprising.”

“Well, tell me what you want, and I'll do it. Do you want me to make the tea?” Clare asked.

“How can you make the tea for eight people? Don't be stupid, child.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?” Clare's voice was becoming querulous. What was the point of being nice to Mam if she was going to be so bad-tempered? Clare wished she hadn't come into the kitchen at all but just gone upstairs to the bedroom.

“Why don't you go and stick your nose in a book, isn't that all you ever want to do?” Mam shouted and at that moment the rest of the clothes from the line, all of them damp and some of them almost dripping, fell on top of Clare's head.

There was a silence and then Mam was down ripping the shirts and sheets off Clare and flinging them regardless to the floor. “Are you all right, child? Are you hurt?” Mam was near to tears with the shock. Her hands tore at the clothes until she could see Clare's face. When she found it, it was laughing, from shock more than anything. Mam hugged her, with the damp clothes between them. Then she hugged her again. Normally any thought of pressing wet clothes would make Mam start talking fearfully about rheumatic fever. But not now.

“You poor little thing. Are you all right? Are you all right? That was God punishing me for being cross with you over nothing.”

Clare was bewildered and delighted. The accident seemed to have put Mam into a great temper for some reason.

“Now let me get you out of all this wet swaddling clothes . . . or we'll both have rheumatic fever. And I'll put on the kettle and you and I'll have a cup of tea, just the two of us with some biscuits. Then we'll throw the whole bloody lot of this into the bath, it'll all have to be done again anyway. And we'll get one of those useless men of ours to mend the line.”

Mam looked happier than she had done for a long time.

 

David Power was in great trouble, and because of him so were the rest of the school. Father Kelly had read the letter out to Assembly not once but three times as a living example of how deceitful boys could be.

The letter was from a girl who was called Angela O'Hara and who apparently came from Power's home town. The letter was now almost known by heart throughout the school:

 

The grossness of this letter had never been equaled in the memory of every single member of the Order. Imagine a boy writing to
anyone
else for a teaching aid, when it was known that this was the best school in Ireland and one of the best in the whole of Europe. Imagine describing it as, letting it be believed to be, “a great ugly castle.”

To allow, nay encourage, such slurs on men who were the anointed priests of God, to make remarks about these priests not cooking their own breakfast—as if this is what they had been ordained to do! Worse still, to encourage deception, to ask this girl whoever she was to pretend to be a boy, to sign herself with a false name, to invent details of rugby matches to deceive the innocent guardians in whose care they had been placed. And more, to suggest that this was a common practice. That this had been going on undiscovered in the school before this sickening letter had been exposed. There would be thorough investigations and in the meantime those boys who knew anything were expected to come forward.

David apologized to everyone as best he could. He couldn't have known she would do a thing like this. She had been great altogether before, he appealed to Nolan, who in all honesty had to admit that this was so.

“She must have gone mad, that's the only explanation,” David said.

“Yes, that must be it,” said Nolan who was familiar with madness, if extremely annoyed to have been mentioned by name in the letter that shook the school.

 

The sleeping tablets were very odd. You could feel your legs getting heavy first, then your arms, and your head wouldn't lift from the pillow and suddenly it was eight o'clock in the morning. Angela felt that it took her until noon to wake up properly. Then she felt fine for the afternoon. So at least they bought her some good hours, hours when she could correct exercises, mark tests and try to undo some of the harm she appeared to have done during the first weeks after the letter from Sean, the weeks when she had hardly ever closed her eyes.

Mother Immaculata had said she was looking her old self again, which was irritating beyond words, and Sergeant McCormack, the priest's housekeeper, said she was glad that Angela seemed to have got over whatever it was that had made her so disagreeable. Mrs. Conway asked was there anything in particular that Angela wanted—she kept coming into the post office and leaving again without making any purchase at all. And her mother said she was glad the pacing had stopped and added mysteriously that whenever Angela had any definite plans the fair thing to do was to tell them immediately.

But Clare O'Brien was not won back so easily, not in those alert hours of the afternoon. Angela looked at the small white face and the large dark eyes. It was only a few months ago that there had been those bright yellow ribbons and the big bright hope that she had won a history prize. Now there was nothing of that. There was the watchful look of a dog that has been struck once and won't let it happen again.

Angela had tried to put it right.

“Here's that letter back from Sister Consuelo. It's very encouraging really, isn't it?”

Clare took it with thanks.

“I was a bit hasty that day you came to the house. I had a lot on my mind.”

“Yes, Miss O'Hara.”

“So I'm sorry if I appeared a bit short-tempered. It had nothing to do with you—you know that.”

“Yes, yes, indeed.”

“So why won't you come on back again? And we'll get a bit of work done, any evening you like.”

“No, thank you, Miss O'Hara.”

“
Goddamn it,
Clare O'Brien, what do you want me to do, go down on my bended knees?” There was a silence. “I'm going to tell you something now for your own good. You're a bright child. I would
love
to see you get the bloody scholarship. I don't mind working till midnight every night to help you get it. What better way could I spend my time? But you have a really
sickening
habit of sulking. Oh yes, you have. I remember you were just the same when you didn't win the history prize.
Nobody
likes a sulker, Clare. It's a form of blackmail. I didn't get what I wanted so I'm not going to speak to people. It's about the most objectionable vice anyone could have, so my advice is to get rid of it if you want to have any friends.”

“I haven't many friends,” Clare said.

“Think about it. That might be why.”

“Anyway, you're leaving, so why tell me you'll help me?” She was still mutinous.

“I'm leaving, am I? That's the first I heard of it. Where am I going?”