Echoes (6 page)

“Well, aren't you going to look at it?”

“I'll open it later,” she said. It was as near to being rude as she dared to go, and in case it had been just that bit too much she added, “Thank you very much.”

“Stop sulking, Clare, and open it.” Miss O'Hara's voice was firm.

“I'm not sulking.”

“Of course, you are, and it's a horrible habit. Stop it this minute and open up the present I bought you so generously out of my own money.” It was an order. It also made Clare feel mean. Whatever it was she would be very polite.

It was a book of poetry, a book with a soft leather cover that had fancy flowers painted on it with gold-leaf paint. It was called
The Golden Treasury of Verse.
It was beautiful.

Some of the sparkle had come back into the small face with the big eyes. “Open the book now and see what I wrote.” Angela was still very teacherish.

Clare read the inscription aloud.

“ ‘That's the first book for your library. One day when you have a big library of books you'll remember this one, and you'll take it out and show it to someone, and you'll say it was your first book, and you won it when you were ten.' ”

“Will I have a library?” Clare asked excitedly.

“You will if you want to. You can have anything if you want to.”

“Is that true?” Clare felt Miss O'Hara was being a bit jokey, her voice had a tinny ring to it.

“No, not really. I wanted to give you this in front of the whole school, I wanted Immaculata to give it to you, but she wouldn't. Make you too uppity or something. No, there's a lot of things I want and don't get, but that's not the point, the point is you must go out and try for it, if you don't try you can't get anything.”

“It's beautiful.” Clare stroked the book.

“It's a grand collection, much nicer than your poetry book in class.”

Clare felt very grown-up: Miss O'Hara saying “Immaculata” without “Mother” before it. Miss O'Hara saying their poetry textbook wasn't great! “I'd have bought a book anyway if I'd won the guinea,” she said forgivingly.

“I know you would, and that eejit of a Bernie Conway will probably buy a handbag or a whole lot of hairbands. What happened to those nice yellow ribbons you were wearing this morning?”

“I took them off, and put them in my schoolbag. They seemed wrong.”

“Yes, well maybe they'll seem right later on, you know.”

“Oh, they will, Miss O'Hara. Thank you for the beautiful book. Thank you,
really.
”

Miss O'Hara seemed to understand. Then she said suddenly, “You
could
get anywhere you wanted, Clare, you know, if you didn't give up and say it's all hopeless. You don't have to turn out like the rest of them.”

“I'd love to . . . well, to get on you know,” Clare admitted. It was out, this thing that had been inside for so long and never said in case it would be laughed at. “But it would be very hard, wouldn't it?”

“Of course, it would, but that's what makes it worth doing. If it were easy, then every divil and dirt could do it. It's because it's hard it's special.”

“Like being a saint,” Clare said, eyes shining.

“Yes, but that's a different road to go down. Let's see if you can get you an education first. Be a mature saint, not a child saint, will you?”

The bell rang, deafening them for a moment.

“I'd prefer not to be a child saint all right. They're usually martyred for their faith, aren't they?”

“Almost invariably,” Miss O'Hara said, nearly sweeping the statue of the Sacred Heart with her as she gathered her books for class.

 

Chrissie and her two desperate friends Peggy and Kath had planned a visit to Miss O'Flaherty's to apologize. Gerry Doyle had apparently told Chrissie last night that this was the best thing to do by far. After all, she knew it was them, they'd all been caught and punished by their parents, why not go in and say sorry, then Miss O'Flaherty would have to forgive them or else everyone would say she was a mean old bag who held a grudge. Chrissie hadn't gone along with this in the beginning but Gerry had been very persuasive. What could they lose? he argued. They didn't need to
mean
they were sorry, they only needed to say it, and then it would take the heat off them all so that they could get on with the plans for the party in the cave, otherwise they would all be under house arrest. Do it soon, and put your heart and soul into it, had been Gerry's advice. Grown-ups loved what they thought were reformed characters. Lay it on good and thick.

Clare was surprised to see the threesome stop outside Miss O'Flaherty's shop. She was sure they'd have scurried past but they were marching in bold as brass. She pretended to be looking at the flyblown window display that had never changed as long as she knew it, but she wanted to hear what was coming from inside the shop.

The bits that she heard were astonishing. Chrissie was saying something about not being able to sleep last night on account of it all, Peg was hanging her head and saying she thought it was a joke at the time but the more she thought of it, it wasn't a bit funny to frighten anyone. And Kath said that she'd be happy to do any messages for Miss O'Flaherty to make up for it.

Miss O'Flaherty was a big confused woman with hair like a bird's nest. She was flabbergasted by the apology and had no idea how to cope.

“So, anyway, there it is,” Chrissie had said, trying to finish it up. “We're all as sorry as can be.”

“And, of course, we're well punished at home,” added Kath. “But that's no help to you, Miss O'Flaherty.”

“And maybe if our mothers come in you might say that we . . .”

Miss O'Flaherty had a jar of biscuits out. There would be no more said about it. They were harmless skitters of girls when all was said and done, and they had the good grace to come and admit their wrongdoing. They were totally forgiven. She would tell all their mothers. They skipped out of the shop free souls again. Clare was disgusted with them. Miss O'Flaherty was horrible and she deserved to be terrified with bits of seaweed. Why were they saying sorry now at this late stage? It was a mystery.

She didn't get much enlightenment from Chrissie, who was annoyed to see her.

“I'm sorry, Peg and Kath, but my boring sister seems to be following us around.”

“I'm not following you. I'm coming home from school,” Clare said. “I have to come home this way. It's too windy to walk on the cliff road.”

“Huh,” said Kath.

“Listening,” said Peg.

“You're so
lucky
that you don't have any sisters younger than you,” Chrissie said. “It's like having a knife stuck into you to have a younger sister.”

“I don't see why. We don't think Ben and Jimmy are like knives,” Clare argued.

“They're normal,” Chrissie said. “Not following you round with whinges and whines day in day out.” The other two nodded sympathetically.

Clare dawdled and looked into the drapery. She knew everything off by heart in that window too. The green cardigan on the bust had been there forever, and the boxes of hankies slightly faded from the summer sun were still on show. Clare waited there until the others had rounded the corner. Then she walked slowly on down the street toward the big gap in the cliffs where the steps went down to the beach, back home to O'Brien's shop which everyone said should be a little gold mine since it was perched on the road going down to the sea. It was the last shop you saw before you got to the beach so people bought their oranges and sweets there, it was the first shop you met on the way back with your tongue hanging out for an ice cream or a fizzy drink. It was the nearest place if you sent a child back up the cliff for reinforcements on a sunny day. Tom O'Brien should be making a small fortune there people said, nodding their heads. Clare wondered why people thought that. The summer was the same length for the O'Briens as for everyone else. Eleven weeks. And the winter was even longer and colder because they were so exposed to the wind and weren't as sheltered as people all along Church Street.

 

Molly Power said that it was lonely for David having no friends of his own and perhaps they should let him ask a friend to stay. The doctor thought that there were plenty of young lads in the town, boys he had played with before he went off to boarding school. But Molly said it wasn't the same at all, and shouldn't they let him ring his friend James Nolan in Dublin and invite him for a few days? His family could put him on the train and they could meet him. David was delighted, it would be great to have Nolan to stay, Nolan had sounded very pleased on the phone. He said it would be good to get away from home, he hadn't realized how mad his relations were. They must have got worse since he'd gone to boarding school and he hadn't noticed. David told him it would be very quiet after the bright lights of Dublin. Nolan said the lights of Dublin weren't as bright as that, and his mother wouldn't let him go to the pictures in case he got fleas. He couldn't wait to get to the seaside.

“And will my class increase by a hundred percent?” Angela O'Hara asked him when she heard that Nolan was coming to stay.

David hadn't thought of that. He didn't know. It was something he hadn't given any thought to.

“Never mind.” Angela had been brisk. “I'll sort it out with your parents. But we had a plan for twenty days' work to cover the time you were at home, if Mr. Nolan arrives that will cut six days out of it. What are you going to do? Abandon it or try to do the work anyway?”

He was awkward and she rescued him.

“I think you'd rather not have Nolan seeing you taught lessons by a woman. It's a bit like a governess, a country schoolteacher coming to the house.”

“Oh, no, heavens, nothing like that.” David's open face was distressed. “Honestly, if you knew how much I've learned since working with you, I'd be afraid to let on in case they'd never send me back to the school again, they'd put me into the convent here.”

He was a mixture of charm and awkwardness. It was very appealing. The image of his bluff kind father and yet with a bit of polish that must have come from his mother thrown in.

“Why don't I set out a bit of work for you and Mr. Nolan to do each day? Say an hour and a half or two hours. I'll correct it, without coming in on top of you at all, and that way there's no embarrassment.”

The relief flooded his face.

“Is Mr. Nolan as bad at Latin as you are?” she asked.

“A bit better, I think. He's going to need it too you see, he's going to do Law.”

“Is his father a barrister?”

“A solicitor,” David said.

“That makes it nice and easy,” she said with a bitter little laugh.

David was puzzled, but she changed the subject. It wasn't David Power's fault that the system was the way it was. A system that made it natural that David Power should be a doctor like his father, and James Nolan of Dublin a solicitor like
his
father, but made it very hard for Clare O'Brien to be anything at all. Angela squared her shoulders: hard, but not impossible. Hadn't Clare the best example in the land sitting teaching her? Angela, youngest daughter of Dinny O'Hara, the drunk, the ne'er-do-well, the man looking for every handout in Castlebay. And she had got the Call to Training, and higher marks in the college than any other student, and they had scrimped to send her brother to the missions, and she had nieces and nephews in comfortable homes in England. Nobody in the town could pity them when they walked behind her father's coffin five years ago. If Angela could do it with a drunken father and a crippled mother, then Clare could do it. If she cared enough, and today it looked as if she cared almost too much.

“So, College Boy,” she said to David, “let's get on with the hedge school before the gentry come down from Dublin and catch us with our love for books!”

“You're great, Miss O'Hara,” David said admiringly. “Wasn't it a pity you weren't a man? You could have been a priest and taught us properly.”

 

Molly Power was very anxious that things should be done right for David's young friend, and there were endless instructions to Nellie about breakfast on trays and getting out the best silverware until David begged that they just come downstairs as usual. Then they'd have to do their homework for Miss O'Hara before they felt free, but what a long day stretched ahead. Nolan loved the beach being so near, it was almost like having your own private swimming place, he said enviously, to be able to climb over a stile at the end of the garden and have a path going down to the sand and the caves. A path with
Danger
written all over it. Nolan tried out the Echo Cave and the other smaller caves. He wore Wellington boots and slid and scrambled over the rock pools, he picked up unusual shells, he walked out to the end of the cliff road to see if the Puffing Hole was blowing. He walked the course on the golf links and planned that he and David should take lessons next summer. He couldn't believe they were allowed to go to the cinema at night. In Dublin he had only been to matinees and that was before his mother had heard of all the fleas.

Nolan was very popular in Castlebay. He was so handsome for one thing, small, with pointed features and hair that didn't stick out in angles like David's but fell in a sort of wave across the front of his forehead. He had very sharp eyes which seemed to see everything, and he wore his clothes with style, turning up his collars and striding round with his hands buried deep in his pockets. He used to joke about being short and said that he suffered from a small-man complex like Napoleon and Hitler.