Circle of Friends (11 page)

But the Foley boys weren’t pampered either; their mother had seen to that. Each of them had a job to do in the mornings before they left for school. Jack had to fill the coal scuttles, Kevin to bring in the logs, Aengus had to roll yesterday’s papers into sausage-like shapes which would be used for lighting the fires later, Gerry, who was meant to be the animal lover, had to take Oswald for a run in the park, and see that there was something on the bird table in the garden, and Ronan had to open the big heavy curtains in the front rooms, take the milk in from the steps and place it in the big fridge, and brush whatever had to be brushed from the big granite steps leading up to the house. It could be cherry blossom petals, or autumn leaves or slush and snow.

When breakfast was finished the Foley boys placed their plates and cutlery neatly on the hatch into the kitchen before going to the big room where all their coats, boots, shoes, schoolbags and often rugby gear had to be left.

People marveled at the way Lilly Foley ran such an elegant home when she had five rugby-playing lads to deal with, and marveled even more that she had kept the handsome John Foley at her side. A man not thought to be easy
to handle. Dr. Foley had had a wandering eye as a young man. Lilly had not been more beautiful than the other women who sought him, just more clever. She realized that he would want an easy uncomplicated life where everything ran smoothly and he was not troubled by domestic difficulties.

She had found Doreen at an early stage, and paid her over the odds to keep the house running smoothly. Lilly Foley never missed her weekly hairdo and manicure.

She seemed to regard her life with the handsome doctor as a game with rules. She kept an elegant attractive home. She put on not an ounce of fat, and always appeared well groomed at Golf Club or restaurant, as well as at home. This way he didn’t wander.

Today when the four younger boys left for school, Jack helped himself to another cup of tea.

“I’ll know what you two talk about when you’re alone now.” He grinned. He looked very handsome when he smiled, his mother thought fondly. Despite reddish-brown hair which wouldn’t stay flat, those freckles on his nose, he really was classically good-looking, and when Jack Foley smiled he would break any heart. Lilly Foley wondered would he fall in love easily, or did the rugby take so much time that he would just be satisfied with the distant adulation of the girls who watched and cheered the games.

She wondered would he be as hard to catch as his father had been. What would some wily girl see in him that he would respond to? She had captured his father by promising an elegant uncluttered life-style very different from the neglected unhappy home he had come from. But this would not be the way to lure away her Jack. He was happy and well looked after in this home. He wouldn’t want to flee the nest for a long time yet.

“Are you sure you won’t take a lift?” Dr. John Foley would have been proud to drive his eldest son up to Earlsfort Terrace and wave him into his first day at University.

“No, Dad, I told a few of the lads …”

His mother seemed to understand. “It’s not like school, it’s sort of more gradual isn’t it. There’s no bell saying you all have to be there at such a time.”

“I know, I know. I’ve been there, remember.” Dr. Foley was testy.

“It’s just that I said …”

“No, your mother is right, you want to be with your own friends on a day like this, and the best of luck to you son, may it turn out for you just as well as you ever hoped. Even if you’re not doing medicine.”

“Ah, go on, you’re relieved. Think of all the malpractice suits.”

“You can get those in law just as well as medicine. Anyway, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t pick a law student for the rugby first fifteen.”

“Give me a bit of time, Dad.”

“After the way you played in the Schools Cup? They’re not blind in there. You’ll be playing in the Colors match in December.”

“They never have freshers for that.”

“They’ll have you, Jack.”

Jack stood up. “I’ll be on it next year. Will that do you?”

“All right, if you play for UCD in 1958 that’ll do me. I’m a very reasonable, undemanding man,” said Dr. Foley.

When Benny got off the bus on the quays, she saw Eve waiting, with her raincoat collar turned up against the rain. She looked cold and pale.

“God, you really will end up in hospital this way,” Benny said. She was alarmed by the look in Eve’s eyes and the uncertainty of the future.

“Oh, shut up will you. Do you have an umbrella?”

“Do I have an umbrella? We’re lucky that I don’t have
a plastic bubble encasing me, the weather was tested all night, I think. I have a folding mac that makes me look like a haystack in the rain, I have an umbrella that would fit most of Dublin under it.”

“Well, put it up then,” Eve said, shivering. They crossed O’Connell Bridge together.

“What are you going to do?” Benny asked.

“Anything. I can’t stay there. I tried.”

“You didn’t try very hard, less than a week.”

“If you saw it, if you
saw
Mother Clare!”

“You’re the one who’s always telling me that things will pass, and to make the best of them. You’re the one who says we can stick anything if we know where we’re going.”

“That was before I met Mother Clare, and anyway I don’t know where I am going.”

“This is Trinity. We just keep following the railings, and up one of the streets to the Green …” Benny explained.

“No, I don’t mean here. I mean, where I’m going really.”

“You’re going to get a job and get shot of them as quick as possible. Wasn’t that the plan?”

Eve made no reply. Benny had never seen her friend so low.

“Isn’t there anyone nice there? I’d have thought you’d have made lots of friends.”

“There’s a nice lay Sister in the kitchen. Sister Joan, she’s got chapped hands and a streaming cold, but she’s very kind. She makes me cocoa in a jug while I’m washing up. It has to be in a jug in case Mother Clare comes in and thinks I’m being treated like someone normal. I just drink it straight from the jug you see, no cup.”

“I meant among the others, the other girls.”

“No, no friends.”

“You’re not trying, Eve.”

“You’re damn right I’m not trying. I’m not staying either, that’s for good and certain.”

“But what will you
do?
Eve, you can’t do this to Mother Francis and everyone.”

“In a few days I’ll have some plan. I won’t live in that place. I won’t do it.” Her voice had a slightly hysterical ring about it.

“All right, all right.” Benny was different now. “Will you come home on the bus tonight, back to Knockglen, back to the convent?”

“I can’t do that. It would be letting them down.”

“Well, what would it be standing shivering round the streets here, telling lies about being in hospital? What’ll they say when they hear that? Will we walk through the Green? It’s nice, even though it’s wet.” Benny’s face looked glum.

Eve felt guilty. “I’m sorry, I’m really making a mess of your first day of term. This is not what you need.”

They had reached the corner of St. Stephen’s Green. The traffic lights were green and they started to cross the road.

“Look at the style,” Benny said wistfully. Already they could see students in duffel coats, laughing and talking. They could see girls with ponytails and college scarves walking in easy friendship with boys along the damp slippery footpaths up toward Earlsfort Terrace. Some did walk on their own, but they had great confidence. Just beside them Benny noticed a blond girl in a smart navy coat; despite the rain, she still looked elegant.

They were all crossing together when they saw the skid, the boy on the motorbike, out of control and plowing toward the sedate black Morris Minor. It all seemed like slow motion, the way the boy fell and the bike swerved and skidded. How the car tried to avoid it and how both motorbike and car came sideways into the group of pedestrians crossing the wet street.

Eve heard Benny cry out, and then she saw the faces
frozen as the car came toward her. She didn’t hear the screams because there was a roaring in her ears as she lost consciousness, pinned by the car to the lamppost. Beside her lay the body of the boy Francis Joseph Hegarty, who was already dead.

E
veryone said afterward that it was a miracle that more people hadn’t been killed or injured. It was another miracle that it was so near the hospital, and that the driver of the car, who had been able to step out of it without any aid, had in fact been a Fitzwilliam Square doctor himself, who had known exactly what to do. Clutching a handkerchief to his face, he felt blood over his eye but he assured them it was superficial, he gave instructions which were followed to the letter. Someone was to hold up the traffic, another to get the guards, but first someone was sent down the side lane toward St. Vincent’s Hospital to alert casualty and summon help. Dr. Foley knelt beside the body of the boy whose motorbike had lost control. He closed his own eyes to give a silent prayer of relief that his own son had never wanted to ride a machine like this.

Then he closed the eyes of the boy with the broken neck, and placed a coat over him to keep him from the eyes of the students he would never get to know. The small girl with the wound in her temple had a slightly slow pulse and could well be concussed. But he did not think her condition critical. Two other girls had been grazed and bruised, and were obviously suffering from shock. He himself had bitten his tongue from what he could feel in his mouth, probably loosened a couple of teeth and had a flesh wound over his
eye. His task now was to get things into the hands of the professionals before he asked anyone to take his blood pressure for him.

One of the injured girls, a big, soft-faced girl with chestnut-colored hair and dark, sensible clothes, seemed very agitated about the one lying unconscious on the ground.

“She’s not dead is she?” The eyes were round in horror.

“No, no, I’ve felt her pulse. She’s going to be fine,” he soothed her.

“It’s just that she didn’t have any life.” The girl’s eyes were full of tears.

“None of you have yet, child.” He averted his glance from the dead boy.

“No. Eve in particular. It would be terrible if she weren’t all right.” She bit her lip.

“I’ve told you. You must believe me, and here they are …” The stretchers had been brought the couple of hundred yards from the hospital. There wasn’t even a need for an ambulance.

Then the guards were there, and the people directing the traffic properly and the little procession moved toward the hospital. Benny was limping slightly and she paused to lean on the girl with the blond curly hair that she had noticed seconds before the accident.

“Sorry,” said Benny, “I didn’t know if I could walk or not.”

“That’s all right. Did you hurt your leg?”

She tested it, leaning on it. “No, it’s not much. What about you?”

“I don’t know. I feel all right, really. Maybe too all right. Perhaps we’ll keel over in a moment.”

Ahead of them on the stretcher was Eve, her face white. Benny had picked up Eve’s handbag, a small cheap plastic one which Mother Francis had bought for her in Peggy Pine’s shop as a Going to Dublin present a few weeks ago.

“She’s going to be fine, I think,” Benny explained in a shaky voice. “The man with all the blood on him, the man driving the car, he says she’s breathing and her pulse is all right.”

Benny looked so worried that anyone would have wanted to take her in their arms and stroke her, even though she was bigger than most people around.

The girl with the beautiful face, now grazed and muddy, the girl in the well-cut navy coat, now streaked with blood and wet mud, looked at Benny kindly.

“That man’s a doctor. He
knows
these things. My name is Nan Mahon, what’s yours?”

It was the longest day they had ever known.

The hospital machinery moved into action, but slowly. The guards took charge of the dead boy as regards telling his family. They had been through his things. His address was on a lot of his belongings. They had deputed two young guards to go out to Dun Laoghaire.

“Can you tell her it was instantaneous?” John Foley said.

“I don’t know,” said the young officer. “Can we tell her that?”

“It’s true, and it might be some comfort to her,” John Foley said mildly.

The older Garda sergeant had a different view.

“You never know, Doctor, many a mother might like to think their son had time to whisper an Act of Contrition.”

John Foley turned his head away lest his annoyance be seen.

“And it wasn’t his fault, be sure to tell her that,” he tried.

“I’m afraid my men can’t …” the sergeant began.

“I know, I know.” The doctor sounded weary.