Circle of Friends (71 page)

“All right,” Eve conceded, “just so long as I don’t have to talk to her.”

Benny was dancing with Teddy Flood when Eve came into the room. Jack was talking to Johnny and Sean. He was as handsome and assured as ever. He looked delighted to see her.

“Eve!”

“Hallo, Jack.” Unenthusiastic, but not rude. She had made a promise to Aidan. Hospitality must never be abused.

“We brought you a vase, a sort of glass jug. It would be nice for all the daffodils and everything,” he said.

It was a nice jug. How did someone like Jack Foley do the right thing so often? How did he know she had daffodils, he hadn’t been here since Christmas, when there was nothing but holly in bloom.

“Thanks. That’s lovely,” she said. She moved around the room, emptying ashtrays, making spaces where the plates could be put down.

Nan stood on her own on the edge of a group.

Eve couldn’t bring herself to say any words of greeting. She opened her mouth, but she couldn’t find anything to say. She went back to the kitchen and stood at the table leaning on both hands. The rage she felt was a real thing, you could almost take it out of her and see it, like a red mist.

She remembered how Mother Francis, and Kit Hegarty, and many a time Benny, had warned her that this temper wasn’t natural. It would only hurt her in the end.

The door opened, and Nan came in. She stood there in her fresh flowery print, the breeze from the window slightly lifting her blond hair.

“Listen, Eve …”

“I won’t, if you don’t mind. I have a meal to prepare.”

“I don’t want you to hate me.”

“You flatter yourself. Nobody hates you. We despise you. That’s different altogether.”

Nan’s eyes flashed now. She hadn’t expected this.

“That’s a bit petty of you, isn’t it? A bit provincial? Life goes on. Aidan and Jack are friends …”

She looked proud and confident. She knew she held all the winning cards. She had broken all the rules and yet she had won. Not only was she able to take away her only friend’s boyfriend, find somewhere, the Lord knew where, to sleep with him, and then get him to agree to marry her, she was also expecting everything to remain the same as it had been in their social life.

Eve said nothing. She looked at her dumbfounded.

“Well, say something, Eve.” Nan was impatient. “You must be thinking something. Say it.”

“I was thinking that Benny was probably your only friend. That of every one of us she was the only one who just liked you for being you, not just for being glamorous.”

Eve knew that this was pointless. Nan would shrug. If she physically didn’t shrug her shoulders, she would mentally. She would say that these things happened.

Nan would take, she would take everything she saw. She was like a child crawling toward a shining object. She took just by instinct.

“Benny’s better off. She’d have had a lifetime of watching him, of wondering.”

“And you won’t?”

“I’ll cope.”

“I’m sure you will, you’ve coped with everything.”

Eve realized she was shaking. Her hands were trembling as she filled the jug with water and started to arrange a bunch of flowers that someone else had brought.

“I chose that for you,” Nan said.

“What?”

“The vase. You don’t have one.”

Suddenly Eve knew where Jack and Nan had spent their nights together. Here in this house, in her bed.

They had driven to Knockglen, come up the path, taken her key and let themselves in. They had made love in her bed.

She looked at Nan aghast. That was why she had had
the feeling that someone had been in the house. The strange undefined sense of someone else’s presence.

“It was here, wasn’t it?”

Nan shrugged. That awful dismissive shrug. “Yes, sometimes. What does it matter, now …”

“It matters to me.”

“We left the place perfect. No one would ever know.”

“You came to my house, to my bed, to take Benny’s Jack in my bed. In Benny’s town. Jesus Christ, Nan …”

Now Nan lost her temper, utterly.

“By God, I’m sick of this. I am sick of it. This Holy Joe attitude, all of you desperate to do it, playing around the edges, not having the guts or the courage, confessing it, titillating everyone still further …”

Her face was red and angry.

“And don’t talk to me about this cottage … don’t talk as if it was the Palace of Versailles. It’s a damp, falling-down shack … that’s what it is. It hasn’t electricity. It has a stove that we couldn’t light for fear you’d find the traces. It has leaks, drafts, and it’s no wonder they say the place is haunted. It feels haunted. It smells haunted.”

“Nobody says my house is haunted.” There were tears of rage in Eve’s eyes.

Then she stopped. People had said that they heard someone playing the piano here at night.

But that was ages ago. Jack didn’t play the piano. It must have been before Jack.

“You brought Simon here too didn’t you?” she said.

The memory of Simon playing the piano in Westlands came back to her. That day she had gone up there with Heather, the day the old man had cursed at her and called her mother a whore. Nan said nothing.

“You brought Simon Westward to my bed, in my house. You knew I’d never have let him over the doorstep. And you brought him in here. And then, when he wouldn’t marry you, you tricked Jack Foley …” Nan was suddenly
pale. She looked around her at the door to the room where the others were dancing.

The music of Tab Hunter was on the record player.

“Young love, first love …”

“Take it easy …” Nan began.

Eve had picked up the carving knife. She started to move toward her, the words came tumbling out. She couldn’t control them if she tried.

“I will
not
take it easy. What you have done, by Christ, I won’t take it easy.”

Nan wasn’t near enough to reach the handle of the door to the sitting room. She backed away, but Eve was still moving toward her, eyes flashing and the knife in her hand.

“Eve, stop!” she cried, moving as fast as she could out of range. She lurched against the bathroom door so hard that the glass broke.

Nan fell, sliding down on the ground, and the broken glass ripped her arm. Blood spurted everywhere, even on to her face.

The dress with mauve and white print became crimson in a second. Eve dropped the knife on the floor. Her own screams were as loud as Nan’s as she stood there in her kitchen amid the broken glass, the blood and the meal ready to be served, and the sound of everyone joining in the song in the room next door.

“Young love, first love, is filled with deep emotion.”

Eventually someone heard them and the door opened.

Aidan and Fonsie were in first.

“Whose car is nearest?” Fonsie asked.

“Jack’s. It’s outside the door.”

“I’ll drive it. I know the road better.”

“Should we move her?” Aidan asked.

“If we don’t she’ll bleed to death in front of our eyes.”

Bill Dunne was great at keeping everyone back out of
the kitchen. Only Jack. Fonsie and of course Tom, the medical student, in case he knew something the rest of them didn’t, were allowed in. Everyone else should stay where they were, the place was too crowded already.

They had opened the back door. The car was only a few yards away. Clodagh had brought a rug and clean towels from Eve’s bedroom. They wrapped the towel around the arm with the huge, gaping wound.

“Are we pushing the glass further in?” Fonsie asked.

“At least we’re keeping the blood in,” Aidan said.

They looked at each other in admiration. Jokers yes, but when it came to the crunch, they were the ones in charge.

Benny sat motionless in the sitting room, her arm around Heather.

“It’s going to be all right,” she kept saying, over and over. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

Before he got into the car Aidan came over to Eve.

“Don’t let anyone go,” he warned. “I’ll be back very soon.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t let them crawl away because they think it’s expected. Give them something to eat.”

“I can’t …”

“Then get someone else. They need food anyway.”

“Aidan!”

“I mean it. Everyone’s had too much to drink. For God’s sake feed them. We’ve no idea who’ll be in on top of us now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if she dies, we’ll have the Guards.”

“Die! She can’t die.”

“Feed them, Eve.”

“I didn’t … she fell.”

“I know, you fool.”

Then the car with Jack, Fonsie, Aidan and a still hysterical Nan left.

Eve straightened herself up.

“I think it’s ludicrous myself, but Aidan Lynch says we should all have something to eat, so could you clear a little space and I’ll bring it in,” she said.

Stricken, they obeyed her. Even though they would never have suggested it, it was exactly the right thing to do.

Dr. Johnson looked at the arm and phoned the hospital.

“We’re bringing someone in, severed arteries,” he said crisply. The three white faces of the boys looked at him as he hung up.

“I’ll drive her,” he said. “Just one of you. Which one?”

Fonsie and Aidan stood back, and Jack stepped forward. Maurice Johnson looked at him. His face was familiar. A junior rugby player, he had been in Knockglen before. In fact Dr. Johnson had a feeling that he was meant to be Benny Hogan’s boyfriend. There had been talk that she was walking out with a spectacularly handsome young man.

He wasted no time speculating. He nodded to Fonsie and Aidan and drove out of his gate.

It was an endless Sunday. The whole of Knockglen had heard that there had been a terrible accident and an unfortunate girl from Dublin had slipped and fallen, cutting herself on a glass door.

Dr. Johnson had been quick to say that there wasn’t any horseplay and everyone seemed to him to be stone-cold sober. In fact he had no idea whether this was true or not, but he couldn’t bear the tongues to wag, and Eve Malone to get further criticism for things that were beyond her control.

Dr. Johnson also told everyone in sight that the girl would recover.

And recover she did. Nan Mahon was out of danger on the Sunday night. She had received several blood transfusions and there had been a time when her heartbeat had slowed down, causing alarm. But she was young and healthy. It was wonderful, the recuperative powers of the young.

Sometime on the Monday night, she miscarried. But the hospital was very discreet. After all, she wasn’t a married woman.

I
t was summer before Jack Foley and Nan Mahon had the conversation they knew that they would have to have. After her stay in the hospital in Ballylee she had gone back to Dublin.

That was at her insistence. She had seemed so agitated that Dr. Johnson agreed.

Jack still worked in his uncle’s office, but he studied for his first-year examination as well. There was, unspoken, the thought that he might return and do his degree in civil law. Aidan kept the notes from lectures.

Aidan and Jack met a lot, but they never talked about what was uppermost in their minds. Somehow it was easier to chat and be friends if they didn’t mention that.