Echoes (45 page)

“But I'm no good,” David protested. “Clare, can't you play?” he beseeched.

“No. In my education, there was never time for it. But a renaissance man like yourself now. Every social skill . . .”

“I
hate
you, Clare O'Brien,” he said good-naturedly.

Josie thanked him profusely and led him to the piano. Haltingly, he got into a version of “There Is a Tavern in the Town.” Dick Dillon, who was planted amongst the guests, began to sing and in no time they were all joining in. It was obvious after about three songs that he would be there all night. Dick got him a pint and left it on the piano. Bones, who had been sitting patiently in the hall, hoping that the music would stop soon, was taken into the kitchen and given a plate of soup. He fell asleep beside the Aga and dreamed of sandhills full of rabbits and big firm beaches when the tide was out, where people would throw sticks for him hour after hour.

 

In the summer of 1959 some people said that the world was going to end: it was the hottest weather ever known. Tom O'Brien cursed his cowardice as he saw people troop past his door to go to Fergus Murphy's soft ice-cream machine. Fergus built up a lot of business because people bought sweets and magazines and groceries while they waited for the ice cream queue to file by. The Castlebay Committee congratulated themselves on their foresight in organizing a booking register so that visitors could be directed to the available rooms in the resort rather than having to knock on doors. There were two full-time lifeguards and when the tides were high people had to bathe between two flags. Nobody drowned that summer in Castlebay, and nobody fell and hurt themselves on the paths up the cliffs because they were all finally built properly with rails to hold on to. People still went into the Echo Cave and asked it questions. The Dillons were very distressed to hear of plans for a new and huge hotel but were subsequently overjoyed to discover that two of the five businessmen who were going to start it were undisclosed bankrupts at the time, so that plan never got off the ground. Dr. Power said he was getting old and slow and he was so proud that his big handsome son had passed Final Med with flying colors. He would do an intern year in Dublin and then who knew what would happen.

James Nolan was called to the Bar and did his first case in court. He said he thought he was never going to get another brief but he carried a great many papers tied with pink tape.

Fiona Doyle announced her engagement to Frank Conway, the pride and joy of Mrs. Conway. Mrs. Conway had never been anxious for her Frank to marry anyone, and she had her doubts about the Doyles in general. Gerry was as wild as anything and should be kept in a zoo if half of what you heard about him was true. And the mother was odd—some kind of phobia they said. She hardly ever went out. But you couldn't say a word against Fiona—a good-looking girl, great self-respect. She'd never let a man near her, even in the days when a girl was silly and could have her head turned. Mrs. Conway sighed. Frank could have done a lot worse, she supposed. She gave them her blessing. And then that pup Gerry Doyle had the impudence to say he'd like a
talk
with Frank, since Fiona had no father. Mrs. Conway never found out what the chat was about, but it had impressed Frank no end.

Chrissie Byrne discovered on her second visit to Dr. Power that she was indeed pregnant, and bought a maternity smock on the way back from the surgery to the butcher's shop. Ned O'Hara came back for a flying visit to Castlebay with his fiancée, Dorothy. Dorothy thought everything in Castlebay was terrif. When she and her Neddy got old, like about thirty, they would come back here and start a restaurant. Dorothy thought the O'Briens' house was terrif. Dorothy's mother was Irish, and she wished that her mum had taken her to Ireland before—it was simply gorgeous.

That summer, a registered envelope arrived for Agnes O'Brien. There were twenty-five ten-pound notes in it and an ill-written note from Tommy saying he had been saving for years to get a present for his ma, and now he had.

Tom said immediately that they must tell nobody outside the house about it. They discussed long and secretly that summer what Mammy would do with the money. Chrissie was left out of the discussion because she was a Byrne now and if Bumper, Bid and Mogsy knew about it they'd be down like a flash.

In the end it was spent on a new coat for Agnes and the long and often discussed extension on the side of the shop. It was Tom O'Brien's one concession to the magnificent site of his business: he wanted a Perspex roof on an extra room where they could put a couple of tables and chairs. This way they could serve those who wanted to sit down for their Club Orange or their tub of ice cream. And they were even going to add sandwiches and tea next summer. Tommy's gift made it possible.

In the summer of 1959, Mother Immaculata asked Angela O'Hara whether she intended to stay on in the school or, now that she was free to see the world, if she planned to travel. Angela, seeing that Immaculata would love Miss O'Hara to roam off around the world, said firmly that she was going to stay in Castlebay. It was also the summer that Dick Dillon asked Angela O'Hara to marry him and she said very gently that she thought they would drive each other mad within months, and the ambulance would be arriving from the town and they'd both be locked up in the asylum on the hill. Dick had smiled bravely and she had patted his knee and invited him to the Committee dance so that he would know she liked him greatly.

 

Clare's professors said she would get a First: they were all in agreement.
Clare O'Brien to get a First
—she said it to herself, not caring to believe it. Any student with a First was worth looking at. From then on she would never have to apologize again. Clare went off into one of her rare little daydreams in the National Library. Imagine it. Never would she have to tell people she was only a scholarship girl or she had to do this because of some Committee or other, she would be her own person. And a scholar. She tore a page from her ring file and decided to write to Angela O'Hara there and then. She wrote as she hadn't been able to write before, she said that somehow for the very first time she believed that it was actually happening. Only now did she feel it had worked, all that praying up in the church, and all the shouting in the Echo Cave and all the learning and learning, the disciplines that Angela had taught her.

Angela replied by return of post. She said that it was the most wonderful letter she had ever received in her life. It made everything—and everything included the seagull-faced Immaculata—all worth while. She said it was a letter written on the crest of happiness, and from that heady standpoint the world was there for the taking. She hoped that that would last forever.

It was a warm and generous letter. Clare folded it in four and put it in the little flap at the back of her big, black leather notebook. The book, which she carried everywhere, had been a gift from the nuns in the secondary school when she won the Murray Prize. Immaculata had sent her a picture of Maria Goretti, with a big padded frame of coral pink velvet. Fortunately her mother had liked it, and it hung in the back of the shop getting grimier and dirtier as the years went by. Gerry Doyle had given her a fountain pen. He had insisted. He had only been asked to do the pictures he said because there was a candidate from Castlebay. She knew this wasn't true but it was nice of him to say it. She still had the pen. She never lent it to anyone and she always put the cap on very carefully, clipped it to her notebook and then put a rubber band around the whole thing. She had so few possessions that she valued them all. She thought about Gerry. She could never write to him like she did to Angela but somehow she did want to talk to him. It would be nice if he came to Dublin again and they could walk by the canal maybe, or she could show him off to the girls. She sighed. She'd never get any kind of degree if she spent time daydreaming like this.

Still, she bought a postcard of O'Connell Street and sent it to him—a cheerful card saying it would be nice to see him if ever he passed through Dublin.

She heard nothing for ages.

She was annoyed.

Thank God, she wasn't in love with him.

 

It was neither one thing nor another, being an intern; David discovered that very early on. Some people thought he was a fully-fledged doctor, who knew
everything;
others thought he was a schoolboy dressing up in a white coat and wouldn't ask him the time of day in case he got it wrong. And the hours! There was the solidarity of a prisoner-of-war camp in the Res, where bewildered young doctors coped with the unfamiliar and the frightening without any sustained sleep. They told each other that they would never sleep again. That their metabolisms would never recover from the strange hours and speeds at which they had to grab food. And even more immediate and urgent—their social lives were now finished forever.

James Nolan, handsome, well-dressed young barrister, carrying his black bag that contained wig and gown casually slung over his shoulder, said he despaired ever of seeing David anymore.

David was paged urgently, and rushed to the phone. “Dr. Power speaking.”

“Dr. Power, this is Mr. Nolan, barrister at law. I wondered if you would like to come and have a long boozy lunch with me. I got a check for seven guineas.”

“A lunch?” said David in disbelief.

“You
know.
You've heard of them. They're what people have in the middle of the day. Food and wine. You sit at tables.”

“You bloody don't do that here,” David said.

“Well, can you come? It's a gorgeous autumn day. Walk a bit toward me and I'll walk a bit toward you.”

A wave of impatience came over David. How could James be so insensitive? He had no idea of what David's life was like. He had been up all through the night—but that made no difference to today's schedule. The ward round went ahead as usual. Blood tests here, a drip there, organizing an X-ray for another. The ward Sister—a poisonous woman—never gave him any information about the patients: she confided all that only to the consultants. The housemen were made to look fools as a result.

This morning a difficult patient had pulled the drip out three times, and so three times it had to be set up again. Then there was the teaching round with the consultant. And now he was in outpatients. He had been examining a man's swollen foot when James had rung.

As politely as he could, David told James that he would have to find someone else to celebrate the seven guineas and to lunch with. David's own lunch would be something very quick and not very nice. If he ate at all. Then it would be dealing with admissions, seeing the patients, getting the preliminaries sorted out before greater men came to deal with them. And he was on call after that. Barristers? Lunches? Guineas? Bloody parasites.

He returned to the man with the swollen foot. “I don't know,” he said honestly. “I'd like to see the other foot. Can you take off your shoe and sock?”

The man was hesitant.

“So that I'll be able to compare,” David explained.

Reluctantly the man took off the other shoe and sock. The foot that he knew would be examined was nice and clean. The foot that he hadn't expected to be asked to bare was filthy. It was a foot that had not been washed in a long time. David stood slightly back from it to see if there was a similar swelling. His eyes met the eyes of the foot's owner.

“I didn't think, you see . . .” the man said.

“I know,” David said sadly. “That's the trouble. We hardly ever do.”

 

He was on his own. He had never felt that Dublin was lonely when he was in the medical school, but now, isolated in hospital, it was different. That was your life. You didn't escape from it—or if you could you found nobody to escape with.

Full of self-pity in the darkening evening air, he walked up Kildare Street. People were going in and out of the National Library and the College of Art. The Dail had its guards at the gate, and that seemed to be bustling too. Everyone except David Power had something to do.

Suddenly he saw Clare leaving the library with her bunch of books. She looked lovely in the evening light.

“Clare! Clare, I was hoping to catch you,” he lied.

She was pleased to see him. He tucked his arm into hers. “Will we go and have a coffee?”

“Sure. What were you hoping to see me for?”

“To ask you if you'd come out tonight. I know it's ridiculous short notice and everything but we never know in the hospital when we'll be on or off.”

She didn't seem put out by the shortness of notice. She'd love to. But first she had to go back to the hostel and see was there a message. Someone had said he was going to be in Dublin, possibly tonight, and if so she and her two friends were going to go out with him. If not then she'd go with David.

“I can't say fairer than that,” she said.

He grumbled as they walked toward the hostel: why three girls and one man? What kind of superman was this?

“It's Gerry Doyle,” she said simply, as if that explained everything.

A great and unexpected surge of annoyance swept over David. Gerry was so
cheap.
His line was so
obvious.
When he was a kid he had thought Gerry was good company, there was always a touch of the dangerous, the daredevil about him. But not now. Gerry was too slick. And too
much.

“I thought you'd have outgrown him,” he said in a very superior voice.

Clare was surprised. David Power didn't usually talk like this. “Nobody outgrows Gerry,” she said. It was an echo of what Caroline Nolan had said to him. A flash of anger came over him.

“What's so great about him? Has he some new technique as a lover or something?”