Circle of Friends (53 page)

“What does your mother say?”

“Very little.”

“Benny, will you have a toasted cake?” Heather’s solution for nearly every crisis.

“No. I’m fooling myself that if I don’t eat, this fellow will like me more and stop going off with Welsh floozies.”

Eve sighed heavily. So someone had told her.

They cycled along cheerfully, Eve saluting almost everyone they passed. Heather knew no one. But she knew fields that would have donkeys at the gate, and a gap in the hedge where you could see a mare and two foals. She told Eve about the trees and their leaves and how her Nature Scrap-book was the only thing she was any good at. She wouldn’t mind schoolwork if it was all to do with pressing flowers and leaves and drawing the various stages of a beech tree.

Eve thought how odd it was that two first cousins, with only seven years between them, living only a mile and a half apart, never having met, and one knowing every person who walked the road and the other every animal in every farm.

It was strange to ride up the ill-kept ridge-filled drive of Westlands, with the young woman of the house.

Even though she was no outsider, coming to ask for a handout, Eve still felt odd and out of place.

“We’ll go in through the kitchen.” Heather had thrown her bicycle up against the wall.

“I don’t know …” Eve began. Her voice was an almost exact copy of Heather’s when lunch at the convent was suggested.

“Come on,” Heather said.

Mrs. Walsh and Bee Moore were surprised to see her, and not altogether pleased.

“You should have come in at the front when you had a guest,” Mrs. Walsh said reprovingly.

“It’s only Eve. We had lunch in the kitchen of the convent.”

“Really?” Mrs. Walsh’s face expressed very clearly that Eve had been unwise to receive the daughter of the Big House so poorly. The very least that might have been arranged was lunch in the parlor.

“I told her you made great shortbread,” Heather said hopefully.

“We must make up a nice little box of it sometime.” Mrs. Walsh was polite, but cold.

She definitely didn’t want Eve Malone on her patch.

From inside the house, Eve heard someone playing a piano.

“Oh, good,” Heather said, pleased. “Simon’s home.”

Simon Westward was charming. He came forward with both his hands out to Eve.

“Lovely to see you here again.”

“I didn’t really intend …” She wanted terribly to tell him that she had no intention of being a casual visitor to his house. She must make him understand that she was doing it to please a child, a lonely child who wanted to share the place with her. But those words were hard to find.

Simon probably had no idea of what she was trying to say.

“It’s great you are here now, it’s been far too long!” he said.

She looked around her. This was not the drawing room she had been in on her first visit. It was another, south-facing room, with faded chintz and old furniture, a small desk stuffed with papers stood in the corner, a large piano near the window. Imagine one family having so many rooms and enough furniture to fill them.

Enough pictures for their walls.

Her eyes roamed around the portraits hoping to find the one of her mother.

The one she had not known existed.

Simon had been watching her. “It’s on the stairs,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I know Nan told you. Come, and I’ll show it to you.”

Eve felt her face burn. “It isn’t important.”

“Oh, but it is. A painting of your mother. I didn’t show it to you that first day because, it was all a bit strained. I was hoping you’d come again. But you didn’t, and Nan did, so I showed it to her. I hope you’re not upset.”

“Why should I be?” Her fists were clenched.

“I don’t know, but Nan seemed to think you were.”

How dare they talk about her. How
dare
they, and whether or not she was upset.

With tears stinging at the back of her eyes, Eve walked like a robot to the foot of the stairs where hung a picture of a small dark woman, with eyes and mouth so like her own she felt she was looking in a mirror.

She must have so little of her father about her, if there was so much of Sarah Westward there already.

Sarah had her hand on the back of a chair, but she didn’t look relaxed and at peace. She looked as if she were dying for it all to be over so that she could get away. Somewhere, anywhere.

She had small hands and big eyes. Her dark hair was cut short, like the thirties fashion would have dictated. But looking at her you got the feeling that she might have preferred it shoulder-length and pushed behind her ears. Like Eve’s.

Was she beautiful? It was impossible to know. Nan had only said that she was in order to let Eve know that she had seen the picture.

Nan. Nan had walked around this house, as a guest.

“Has Nan been back here since then?” she asked.

“Why do you say that?”

“I just wondered.”

“No. That was the only day she was at Westlands,” he said.

There was something slightly hesitant about the way he said it, but yet she knew it was the truth.

Out in the kitchen they were getting a grudging afternoon tea ready. Eve thought that the food they were eating this day would never end, but Heather was loving it and it would be a pity to spoil it for her now.

Eve admired the pony and the way Heather had cleaned its tack. She admired Clara’s puppies and refused the offer of one as guard dog.

“It would be good to look after your property,” Heather tried to persuade her.

“I’m not there often enough.”

“That’s all the more reason. Tell her, Simon.”

“It’s up to Eve.”

“I’m hardly ever there. Only the odd weekend. A dog would die of loneliness.”

“But whoever
is
there could walk him.”

Heather held an adorable little male puppy up for inspection. It was seven-eighths Labrador, she explained, all the best, but with a little of the silliness taken out.

“No one but me, and Mother Francis from time to time.”

“Does she sleep there?” Heather asked.

“Heavens no. So you see no need for a guard dog.”

She didn’t think to ask why Heather supposed the nun might sleep in her little cottage. She just assumed it was part of Heather’s continuing ignorance of convent life. And she didn’t notice any change of expression in Simon’s face.

Mrs. Walsh came to tell them that tea was served in the drawing room.

Eve walked in to meet her grandfather for the second time in her life.

The grandfather that Nan Mahon had told everyone was so charming and such a wonderful old man. She felt herself pushing her shoulders back, and taking those deep breaths that Nan said were so helpful if you had to do something that was a bit stressful. As if Nan would know!

He looked about the same. Possibly a bit more alert than on the previous occasion. She had heard that he had been taken ill on Christmas Day, and that Dr. Johnson had been summoned, but that it had all passed.

It was touching to see Heather, the child who had grown up with him and who loved him as part of the only life she knew, sit beside him nestling in to him and helping him with his cup.

“No need to cut up the sandwiches for you today Grandfather. They’re absolutely tiny. It must be to impress Eve.”

The old man looked across at where Eve sat awkwardly in a hard-backed and uncomfortable chair. He looked at her long and hard.

“You remember Eve, don’t you?” Heather tried.

There was no reply.

“You do, of course, Grandfather. I was telling you how good she’s been to Heather, taking her out of school …”

“Yes, yes indeed.” He was cuttingly distant. It was as if someone told him that a beggar on the street had once been a fine hard worker.

She could have just smiled and let it pass. But there was something about the way he spoke which went straight to Eve’s heart. The temper that Mother Francis had always said would be her undoing bubbled to the surface.

“Do you know who I am, Grandfather?” she said in a loud, clear voice. There was a note of challenge in it that
made them all look at her startled, Heather, Simon and the old man. Nobody helped him out.

He would have to answer now or mumble.

“Yes. You are the daughter of Sarah and some man.”

“The daughter of Sarah and her husband Jack Malone.”

“Yes, possibly.”

Eve’s eyes blazed. “Not possibly. Definitely. That was his name. You may not have received him here, but he was Jack Malone. They were married in the parish church.”

He raised his eyes. They were the same dark almond-shaped eyes that they all had, except that Major Westward’s were smaller and narrower.

He looked hard at Eve. “I never doubted that she married the handyman Jack Malone. I was saying that it is possible he was your father. Possible, but not at all as definite as you believe …”

She was numb with shock, the words filled with hate seemed to make no sense. His face, slightly lopsided, was working with the effort of speaking clearly and making himself understood.

“You see, Sarah was a whore,” he said.

Eve could hear the clock ticking.

“She was a whore with an itch, an itch that many handymen around the place found it easy to satisfy. We lost so many good grooms, I remember.”

Simon was on his feet in horror. Heather sat where she had been, on the little footstool, the one with beaded trimming at her grandfather’s feet. Her face was white.

He had not finished speaking.

“But let us not think back over unpleasant times. You may indeed be the child of the handyman Jack Malone. If you wish to believe that then … that is what you must believe …”

He reached for his tea. The effort of speaking had exhausted him. His cup shook and rattled against the saucer.

Eve’s voice was low, and because of that all the more menacing.

“In all my life there has only been one thing I was ashamed of. I was ashamed that my father used a religious occasion, the funeral of my mother, to call down a curse on you. I wished he hadn’t chosen a graveyard by a church. I wished he had more respect for the people who had come down to mourn. I even thought that God might have been angry with him for it. But now I know he didn’t curse you hard enough, and his wish wasn’t answered. You have lived on full of hate and bile. I will never look on your face again. And I will never forgive you for the things you said today.”

She didn’t pause to see how the others took her departure. She walked straight out of the door, and through the big hall into the kitchen. Without speaking to Mrs. Walsh or to Bee Moore she let herself out of the back door. She got on her bicycle and without a backward glance cycled down the rutted avenue that led from her grandfather’s house.

At the window of the drawing room Heather stood, tears pouring down on her face.

When Simon came to comfort her she pummeled him with her fists.

“You let her go. You let her go. You didn’t stop him. Now she’ll never be my friend again.”

When Mossy handed her the note, Benny first thought it was from Sean Walsh, that it was some kind of threat or instruction to back off her investigations.

She was deeply upset to hear of a row bad enough to send Eve away in one of her very black moods. Sorry, too, because that nice child would be caught in the middle of it.

And selfishly she was sorry, because she had hoped to spend the evening telling Eve all about her ever-growing belief that Sean Walsh had been salting away money and to ask her advice about where they should look for it.

When Eve let herself into the house, Kevin Hickey was in the kitchen.

“Not out, wowing the girls on a Saturday night Kevin?” she said.

She had promised herself that she would be a professional. This was her job, this house her place of work. She would not allow her personal anger to rub off on the guests.

Kevin said, “I did have a sort of a plan, but I thought I’d hang around.” He nodded with his head, indicating upstairs toward Kit’s room.

“She’s had some bad news apparently. Her old man died in England. I know she hated him, but it’s a shock all the same.”

Eve came into the dark room with two cups of tea and sat beside the bed. She knew Kit would not be asleep.

Kit lay, head propped up by pillows and cushions, smoking. Through the window the lights of Dun Laoghaire harbor were glinting and shining.

“How did you know I needed you?”