Echoes (16 page)

“I'm very sorry, Mrs. Power.” Tom pushed his daughter away from the drawer where they kept the money. He started rummaging for notes and coins.

“Look, Daddy, there isn't a five-pound note there. Mrs. Power took it out but she put it back in her bag when she was talking to those people. . . .”

Everyone in the shop was looking on with interest.

Two spots of red appeared on Molly's face. “In all my life . . .” she began.

“Please forgive this, Mrs. Power . . .” Tom O'Brien was mortified. He kicked the door into the back open so that Agnes could come out and help with the ever-growing group of spectators.

Molly had opened her bag and there on top of it for anyone to see was a five-pound note, hastily stuffed back there. She wouldn't have hidden it anyway, she told herself, but now there was no opportunity to do so. It was far too obvious to everyone. The flush deepened on her face.

“It's
perfectly
all right, Mr. O'Brien. Your daughter is totally correct. I did indeed put it back into my bag in error. How good that you have such a watchdog.” Graciously she handed over the note, waving Tom away and giving it deliberately to Clare.

Clare took it calmly and gave the change. She joined in none of the mumblings of her father, nor the assurances of how it could happen to anyone.

“Thank you, Mrs. Power,” Clare said.

“Thank you, Clare,” said Molly Power.

The door pinged behind her.

“She'll never shop here again,” Tom O'Brien said to his wife.

 

It was a long day. Clare never got back to the chapter on clouds in her geography book. There was never a moment for her parents to speak alone with her or for her to explain the misunderstanding with Mrs. Power. As the hours went by she became less repentant and more angry with Mrs. Power. It was
her
fault after all, and she hadn't apologized, not in the smallest way. Clare hated her father for having humbled himself, she could have killed him for being all upset and sorry over something which was that woman's fault, not hers, not his.

The shop was empty for a couple of lovely minutes. Clare reached her hand out to her geography book and took it back. She looked across at her mother.

“It's all right, he'll forget it, it will all be forgiven and forgotten by tomorrow,” Agnes said soothingly.

“There's nothing to forgive! She didn't give me the money. Was I meant to give her three pounds sixteen shillings
and
her shopping? Was I?”

“Hush, Clare. Don't be difficult.”

“I'm not being difficult. I just want to know. If I am meant to do that, then tell me and I'll do it. I just didn't know.”

Agnes looked at her affectionately. “I don't know where we got you. You're brighter than the lot of us put together.”

Clare still looked mutinous.

“There are some things that are neither right nor wrong. You can't have rules laid down for. Would you understand that?”

“Yes,” Clare said immediately, “I would. Like the Holy Ghost.”

“Like what?”

“Like the Holy Ghost. We have to believe in Him without understanding Him. He's not a bird and He's not a great wind. He's something though, and that should be enough without understanding it.”

“I don't think that's the same at all,” said Agnes, troubled. “But if it helps you to understand the problems of trade in a small town, then for heaven's sake, use it.”

 

It was eleven o'clock before they closed the door in O'Brien's. Tom O'Brien had a pain across his back from bending and stretching and lifting. He had forgotten the summer pain and the constant tiredness. This was just the first week: there would be another ten like it, please God, if they were to make a living at all. He was behind in paying one of the creameries and the bacon factory always allowed people a bit of credit until the summer pickings were in. He sighed deeply, it was so hard to know about things. Last year everyone had wanted those shop cakes with the hard icing, this year he had only sold two of them and the rest were growing stale under his eyes.

Everything was so precarious nowadays, and a man with a wife and six children had nothing but worries morning, noon and night.

He worried about the two lads gone to England, particularly Tommy. He was so easily led, so slow to work things out. How would he survive at all in England where people were so smart and knew everything? And Ned, though he was a brighter boy, he was still very young, not sixteen until the summer. Tom O'Brien wished that he had a big business, one where his boys could have come in to work with him, gone to other towns and served their time in big groceries and then come home to Castlebay. But it was only a dream. This was an outpost and it wouldn't be here at all, the community would have broken up and scattered long ago if it weren't for the yearly influx of visitors that began in the first week of June and ended sharply on September first. Eleven weeks to make sense of the other forty-one weeks in the year. He called out to Agnes, wanting to know if there was any hot water.

“What do you want with hot water at this time of night?”

“There's these bath salts we sell and there's a picture of a man with an aching back on the front and its says he gets great relief by putting these in his bath,” he said simply.

Agnes read the packet too. “We'll boil up some. Clare child, before you go to bed will you fill a couple of saucepans, and Chrissie. Chrissie?”

“I think she was doing some holiday work with Kath and Peggy,” Clare said automatically. She knew that the amusements had started for the summer and the three were dolled up to the nines with their painted toenails freed from summer socks.

“That one should be running the country with all the homework and holiday work she does,” grumbled Tom O'Brien. “Why is it that she gets these bad reports every term, I might ask.”

“They're fierce strict up in the convent now, it's not like the Brothers. They say awful things about everyone.” Clare was struggling with the saucepans. One way to buy an easy life was to keep Chrissie's cover, that way she got to stay out later and she tortured Clare a bit less.

Clare's mother was opening the packet of bath salts. “It's hard to think that it would work,” she said doubtfully. “Go on into the bathroom, Tom, and we'll see if it's any good.”

Clare was still there; the youngsters were asleep a long time; Chrissie would come home when the amusements had closed down, when she had won something on the roll a halfpenny table and maybe had a ride on the bumpers. Tommy and Ned were asleep in their digs in Kilburn.

“Go on up to bed, Clare child. You've been a great help today,” her mother said. “I've got to fire a bit of energy into your father, we can't have him getting pains and aches in the first week of the summer season.”

Clare heard them laughing in the bathroom and it sounded comforting to Clare as she got ready for bed. She looked out the window and saw Gerry Doyle walking down toward the beach with a very pretty girl, a visitor.
That
would annoy Chrissie if she were to hear of it. She saw a crowd who had been in Craig's Bar carrying brown bags of bottles with them, they were heading off the Far Cliff Road on the other side of the bay; they had probably rented a house there. In the distance the music of the dance could be heard. That's where everyone was. Chrissie was dying to go, but not until she was sixteen; it was two years and five months away. The moon made a pointed path out over the sea, Castlebay was coming alive for the summer.

 

The Nolans arrived on the train from Dublin and the Powers had driven to the station in the town twenty miles from Castlebay to meet them. Dr. Power called a porter immediately when he saw the amount of luggage that was assembling beside them. There would be two cars, the Powers' own Ford and a taxi. Sheila and Jim Nolan looked around them with interest and then spotted David running toward them. There were a lot of handshakes and much giggling from Caroline Nolan and her school friend Hilary.

Mrs. Nolan wore a very flowing sort of dress with huge red and green flowers on it as if she were going to a garden party of some type. She glanced around, sniffing the air as if suspecting it might be germ laden.

Dr. Power took both of her hands in his and his face was wide with welcome, then he shook the hands of Jim and said what a pleasure it had been having their son to stay, and how everyone in Castlebay was waiting to welcome the whole family; he said his wife was organizing tea in the rented house for them, otherwise she would be here too.

Jim Nolan was a thin, fair-haired man of a slightly distracted appearance. He also had a role in watching out for the eccentricities of his wife. Sheila had a face which must have been that of a beauty when she was younger. Even now approaching her late forties she was handsome, with pale eyes and a disconcerting stare. She looked long and hard at Paddy Power.

“You are a good man. You are a man we could trust,” she said after a pause.

Dr. Power was well used to intense stares like this. In his line of work he came across them regularly.

“I very much hope so, because you'll need to rely on me, on us for a bit until you get used to the ways of our strange country parts.”

With that, he shooed them gently into his car with most of the luggage. David was to organize the taxi for the young people and Breeda, the Nolans' maid. There was a lot of waving and goodbyeing, until they would meet again in twenty miles' time in Castlebay.

It seemed to David that Caroline and Hilary seemed a bit scornful of everything they saw. They wanted to know where was the nearest big town to Castlebay, and giggled when they were told that they were in it. They asked when would they be on the main road and giggled even more when they learned they had been on it for three miles. They asked about tennis and were very disappointed to know that there wasn't a proper club, but they could play at the hotel. How did you meet people if there wasn't a club? they wondered, and David found himself apologizing almost. Eventually, the taxi driver who also drove a hearse and had a half share in a pub, took over from him and explained Castlebay in much more attractive terms, talking about the quality who came every year and how the place was much sought after. English couples came too, often middle-aged people with a car and a dog and golf clubs. Fancy them coming all the way to Castlebay when they had the whole of their own country and Scotland and Wales to choose from. David realized that this was a much better way to go than his own style of excusing things. He brightened up and told them about the golf club and how this year he and Nolan were thinking of learning. You could hire clubs there.

Caroline and Hilary giggled and thought this was great, they might learn too.

You didn't really get a good view of the sea until you came over Ben-nett's Hill and David looked at them eagerly to see if it pleased them. Their faces seemed to say it all, so he sat back happily and exchanged conspiratorial winks with the taxi driver.

The girls were silenced for once as the whole coast spread before them . . . the tide was out so the beach spread out like a huge silver carpet, the headlands at each end looked a sharp purple and as they came to where the roads divided there was no need to explain anymore, Castlebay explained itself. They drove down the main street—Church Street—with the big church on the right, past all the shops, well-painted and decorated for the summer, some of them with low whitewashed walls where holiday-makers sat and chatted in the sun. People were eating ice creams and carrying beach balls and children had rubber rings and fishing nets. You could smell the sea. It was like paradise.

The taxi driver drove slowly down Church Street so that they could savor it all; the girls looked excitedly from the front of the big dance hall, to the entrance of Dillon's Hotel. They saw Dwyers' the butchers with a big notice saying “Get your holiday meat here.” Everyone seemed to be talking to each other or waving or calling, it was as if all the people on the street going down to the sea knew each other.

Majestically the taxi turned right at the Cliff Road so that they could have a good view of the beach.

“There's Gerry Doyle!” cried Nolan, delighted to recognize him. “Who is that he's with?”

“That's his sister. I told you about her, Fiona,” David said.

The Doyles waved and James Nolan let out all his breath in a great rush. “She's
gorgeous,
” he said.

The girls in the back were annoyed. They didn't have to say anything, you could just sense it in the way they rustled.

“How are we going to become great golfers if you're going to sigh like that over the first girl you see in Castlebay?” David said.

“Quite right.” Caroline was approving. “We don't want the holiday spoiled by silliness and falling in love.”

“No indeed,” said Hilary very vehemently.

It was totally unconvincing but there wasn't time to debate it because everyone was getting out of the taxi and there was a joyous reunion on the lawn. David noticed that his mother had had her hair done, and was wearing her best dress. Bones was not there; he must be tied up at home on the very accurate assumption that he would not lend any tone to the gathering. The sun was shining down on the garden and Molly had brought Nellie with her in order to help serve a welcoming tea. There were canvas chairs and stools out in the garden, the cups were arranged on a tray in the porch and there were sandwiches and bridge rolls cut in half with egg on some and ham on others. There was apple tart too, on two large plates. Nellie had a small white hat on as well as her apron. James introduced her to Breeda who immediately took off her hat and coat and went into the kitchen to help.