Echoes (47 page)

“No, no. Nothing like that.”

“But it's desperately late. What else were you doing?”

“Talking. Just talking.”

“God, that's serious,” Mary Catherine said, waking up.

“Don't be silly. Go back to sleep. I've hung up your dress. It's not too sweaty.”

“What is it?” Valerie was awake now.

“Clare's back. She
talked
to him all night. They're in love.”

“Great,” Valerie snorted and settled down again.

“I'm
not
in love. Even if I wanted to be in love with David Power I couldn't. So there.”

“Why? Is he in fact your long-lost brother? Why not?”

“Because his mother would throw a cordon of Guards around the big house on the cliff if she thought that any of the O'Briens from the huckster's shop had notions about her son. That's why.”

Clare had snuggled down in her bed and pulled the sheets to her chin. Mary Catherine was wide awake and concerned. “You can't let that kind of crap stand in your way! You're not going to tell me that . . .”

“I'm not going to tell you anything till tomorrow.
Good night
, Mary Catherine.”

 

Ned's letter was short. Tommy had left Mr. Carroll's greengrocery shop on a Friday. He had said that he wouldn't take his week's wages. He had got another job and it wasn't fair to ask to be paid for the last week. The Carrolls had telephoned Father Flynn, but no one could find Tommy. Until the following Wednesday, when the police found him. In a stolen car which had crashed during a police chase. The car was being chased because it was seen leaving the scene of a robbery with violence. Tommy had ended up with a dislocated shoulder, a broken jaw and a nine-year sentence. Ned just wanted to ask Clare whether someone should tell Mam and Dad now or was the pretense to go on forever.

Poor, stupid,
stupid
Tommy. She couldn't think of him as bad Tommy, dangerous Tommy, in with a gang of thugs and joining in their violence. She could hardly remember him, but he had seemed nice like Ned was last summer when he came home.

She would tell them. But not by letter. And not making a special visit.

She would tell them when she went home for Christmas.

 

It was hard to choose the moment to begin. There never seemed to be any time when they were all together. Mam was thin and tired, but she was always on the move, from range to table, from kitchen out to shop, from shop to storeroom. Dad was always fiddling with things, and Jim and Ben were coming in one door and out another.

After tea, the first night home, she thought she had them all in one room, at least.

“I have some bad news about Tommy,” she said loudly, to get their attention. “He's not injured, or sick, or anything. But it
is
bad news.”

They all stopped what they were doing. She certainly had their attention.

“So will you sit down, and I'll tell you,” she said.

“Stop acting like a judge and jury. What is it? If you've something to say, say it.” Her father was annoyed.

“I wanted to tell it to you from the start. Jim, why don't you put the sign up on the door?”

“How long is this going to take, for God's sake?” Tom O'Brien was now worried.

“Tommy . . . Tommy . . .” The tears were already starting to form in Mam's eyes.

One by one, they sat down round the table and she could hedge no more.

“I had a letter from Ned. Tommy's in jail. He's going to be there for . . . for a long time.”

“How long?” Mam's voice was almost steady. She didn't ask what he had done, or why he was there. Just how long.

“This is hard, Mam. Very long. Nine years.”

She looked at the table. She couldn't bear to see the shock round her. They had all thought that Tommy was living an ordinary life until twenty seconds ago. Now they had to try to understand all this at one go. She
should
have told them ages ago.

“You can't mean nine
years,
” Agnes said. “You can't mean
years.
”

Clare told them what Tommy had done. She told them what he had done before. It seemed like a story about somebody else's brother as she was telling it. She looked at her mother's face, and realized that it certainly sounded like the story of someone else's son.

Gerry Doyle came in while she was telling them.

Mam was crying. Dad was throwing back his head and saying what would you expect. Jim and Ben were round-eyed, and teetering between a grudging admiration of their brother for doing something as brave as running with a gang and a sense of horror about the disgrace that was going to fall on the family.

“I didn't think
Closed
meant me,” Gerry smiled around the kitchen door.

“It does tonight.” Clare gave him a smile that wasn't a smile, and to her relief he understood.

“Sure. It was only a packet of fags. I'll take one and run. Pay you tomorrow. All right?”

He was gone. Clare settled down again for the abuse. How dare she play God and decide to hold the first bit of news back from them? What did she and Ned think they were playing at, telling packs of lies? How could anyone know now if
this
was the whole truth? And who was this priest that none of them knew, fiddling in their affairs? And did Ned's fiancée know all about it too? Was she in on the whole deception?

Clare soldiered on. Already it was getting easier. The more they knew, the less frightening it became. She wished that she had told them ages ago, she admitted this to them, but she said truthfully that since she had hoped that Tommy might have just had that one phase, it would be a pity to damn him in their eyes forever.

Mam wondered did anyone else in Castlebay know. And Clare looked her straight in the eye and said that nobody knew. She decided that she could trust Angela and Gerry. They had kept it to themselves so far; there was no reason for them to speak now.

The news made them look older. All of them. Clare wondered had it done that to her too when she got the first letter from Ned. Mam's thin shoulders stooped more under the navy cardigan she wore, and Dad's face looked gray and set while he painted the new extension that would never bring him a day's happiness now that he knew it was built with stolen money. Jim and Ben lost a bit of their good spirits. Clare saw that they stayed in the house more than usual, rather than roaming the town looking for divilment with their friends from school.

Chrissie arrived on visits, the size of a mountain now, and said that it was like going to visit a graveyard instead of your own family at Christmastime. If this was the cheer that Clare brought home with her she might as well have stayed in Dublin.

Clare said she was going to spend a day with Angela. They were going to go over a lot of work Clare had to do for her finals.

“Don't be telling her our business now,” Agnes warned.

“Why would I tell her anything of the sort?” asked Clare. She had planned to spend hours discussing it, if Angela had the time.

She lost the sense of time there. They must have had tea, or a meal. There was certainly drink, a bottle of port wine was on the table.

At one stage Dick called, and Angela asked him to go away.

It wasn't all Clare's tale.

The story of Father Sean O'Hara was told too. Not only had he left the priesthood years and years ago, but he had a grown-up family nearly. And they were all coming to Castlebay for the summer. They had booked a caravan. Father Sean O'Hara was coming back to show his home to his Japanese lady friend, and to show his children their roots.

 

In Dublin Clare could meet David anywhere she liked. He could come to the hostel to collect her, she could take a bus up to his hospital and they could have coffee in the canteen. They could go to the pictures or to have a drink. Nobody took any notice. In Castlebay it was almost impossible to do any such thing. Without even saying it they knew they were going to be further apart for the two weeks they spent in Castlebay than if they were on different sides of the Atlantic. They didn't have to tell each other that it would be awkward to invite the other home. They knew. Like they knew about spring tides, and about Father O'Dwyer's sermons. Clare would not be invited to the Powers' for supper. David could chat easily with the O'Briens across the counter, but they wouldn't let him in to see their kitchen with its old rusty range, its torn lino and its boxes of supplies all round the place, an inelegant overflowing storeroom for the shop which had never been properly organized.

They couldn't go and sit in Dillon's Hotel for hours on end, or the whole town would know about it. Clare didn't play golf, and Castlebay would have mocked her if she had learned. It wasn't for the likes of Clare O'Brien. That meant the golf course and its rolling dunes were out. If they went to the pictures together there would be talk.

And they didn't want talk. It wasn't worth it. They weren't in love with each other. They were friends. They were great friends. But such a concept didn't exist in Castlebay, and if it were going to exist it was very unlikely it would develop between the handsome, eligible son of the doctor and the bright perky little girl from the store.

 

They went for a long walk with Bones. David had had a bad row with his mother that morning and was not going to apologize in order to keep the peace. He had said he was going to the pictures that night and he was thinking of asking Clare. Molly had said very sweetly that it wouldn't
do
at all. It would be unfair on the girl. It would give her ideas. Raise her hopes. Furious, he had said this was rubbish, that he often met Clare in Dublin and neither of them had any hopes, just a good friendship. Molly had raised her eyebrows very high and said she thought David could have done better for himself, a professional man, than to be going out with the sister of Mogsy Byrne and Chrissie O'Brien. He had laughed in his mother's face and said that since she couldn't find anything to blame Tom and Agnes for, she had to draw in the least respectable member of the family and her eejit of a husband to complain about. Molly Power, with two bright spots of red on her face, had stormed out of the room and upstairs. His father had already gone out on his rounds but the whole thing would be aired again this evening. He almost told Clare but stopped. She might take it as a slight, even though she was always making jokes herself about confusing the rank and file of Castlebay.

Clare nearly told David about Tommy. He was so nice and understanding, so solid and unshockable, he might well reveal that both his mother's and father's parents had been in jail for years. But she didn't want him to have more things to apologize for when he met her. Nellie had told Chrissie that there had been an almighty row this morning already about David meeting Clare at all. Better not let him know she was the sister of a criminal in an English prison as well as being one of the poor O'Briens, God help us.

 

There were New Year's Eve celebrations in Dillon's Hotel but Clare didn't feel any heart for going. She suggested to her mother that they ask Angela O'Hara for supper.

“We're not the kind of people that have people to supper,” her mother said.

“Maybe we should be,” Clare said. Her father said he didn't mind, it was no concern of his what the women did or didn't do.

The evening was a surprising success. Angela taught them to play rummy and even Agnes began to enjoy it. She had been hesitant at the start and wanted to stay out of it. Angela said more than once that it was very nice to spend New Year's Eve with a family.

“Oh, you wouldn't call this much of a family,” Tom said disparagingly.

“Why ever not? One daughter married and going to give a grandchild this spring. Another, the town genius. Two lads in England making their own way, two here, and please God there'll be work for them when they leave school. A good business . . . what more of a family could you want than that?”

Agnes said when you looked at it like that it was true, they had a lot to be thankful for. But she sighed a sigh that went down to her feet almost as she said it.

“Everything isn't as it seems,” Tom O'Brien said darkly, shaking his head.

Angela nodded enthusiastically at him. He was absolutely right, nothing
was
as it seemed, there wasn't a family in Castlebay without its own sadnesses and worries and confusions. She often thought that at Mass on a Sunday, people kneeling there so calm-looking and only the Lord knew what was in their hearts. Every one of them had a worry. She had hit it just right. This gloomy-sounding old soothsaying cheered up the O'Brien family greatly. They weren't alone in their cross. In fact Clare's father was so cheered that he thought it was time for everyone to have a glass of something to see the sixties in. They wished each other Happy New Year and shortly afterward Angela left: she had promised Dick Dillon to look in on him in the hotel and wish him the compliments of the season.

Clare walked her up the road. She felt very wide awake and restless. She went to the seat that the Committee had put up last summer, the big green seat just at the top of the steps. A perfect vantage point for surveying the beach on a crowded summer day. Tonight you could just sit and look at the stars and the bright clear night. The sea looked navy somehow, and the cliffs like cardboard cutouts.

Gerry arrived, silently, and sat beside her.

“You pad around like a leopard or a cat,” she said. “You frightened the life out of me.”

“Happy New Year,” he said taking a half bottle of brandy and two little metal cups out of the pocket of his leather jacket.