Echoes (77 page)

She was drawn to see it. Looking left and right as if anyone else would be in this wild place, she tiptoed up to it. It was stripped bare of any possessions, there were no lamps, rugs, little ornaments in it. She remembered her mother-in-law giving Caroline some cushions, two rather nice ones. They were still there, oddly. But none of the tartan rugs that had figured in the pictures, nothing at all.

Perhaps she had gone. Caroline. Perhaps when she saw the pictures she had run for it. Perhaps she was just trying to hide the evidence. She was so clever that one, you'd never know what she was up to.

She took the big envelope out and laid it down on the cold iron bars of the incinerator, she shook some petrol over a cleaning rag and watched the pictures and the negatives and the letters she had written to Gerry Doyle burn. It was a small fire. She poked and poked, they were gone, there was no way that anyone, not a fleet of detectives, could know what they were.

She breathed in the salty air. She still felt restless and jumpy, somehow she had thought that burning the pictures would help but it hadn't. It was all still here, the memory, the caravan. The knowledge of what they had done and might still do, the caravan. The loneliness, the lies he had told her. The caravan.

Almost without realizing it she was walking toward it. It was set far away from the others. She still had the petrol in her hand, the matches were in her pocket.

She paused for one long moment and acknowledged what she was doing. “Yes,” Clare said aloud. “Yes, I bloody will.”

The petrol soaked the bed, she put most of it there, and then more near the door. She lit the rag, threw it in and ran as fast as she could away. By the time she reached Dick Dillon's car, parked on the road outside, the flames were coming from the windows.

She drove excitedly back toward town, and stopped the car not far from her parents' shop. She could see the blaze in the winter evening . . .

She felt better than she had for a long time. She called in to her mother.

“What are you driving Dick's car for?”

“God, you were always great with the greeting, Mam, I'll say that for you.”

“I've never been able to understand you Clare, never.”

“You didn't do too badly, Mam. Do you think I might have a cup of tea or is it only abuse I'm going to get?”

“Make it for yourself then. Some of us have work to do.”

“Are you cross over something in particular or what, Mam?”

“I don't know what you're up to, that's all.” Agnes had her mouth in a hard line.

“I don't really know myself. Mam, I'm meant to be going up to Dublin to see about sitting this exam again. I'm sort of on the way there—Liffey and I.”

“You're never taking that baby up to Dublin, away from her home.”

“Not forever, Mam. Just to give her a taste of city life. Look what it did for me.” Clare's eyes were bright, too bright.

She was still sitting on the counter sipping a mug of tea when the shouts went up that there was a fire in the caravan park.

“What's all the fuss and excitement?” Clare asked giddily.

“Lord God, child, someone might be burned to death.” Agnes was white with anxiety.

“Who'd be up there in the middle of winter?” Clare said.

“How could a caravan catch fire unless some poor unfortunate turned over a stove or an oil lamp on themselves?”

 

They came for David but he wasn't able to move.

“Ask Dad. Take him in your car,” he stammered out to Brian Dillon who had come with the alarm.

David's limbs had stopped coordinating, it took him five whole minutes to pick up the phone.

The post office took what seemed like an hour to connect him to Dublin.

James Nolan answered the phone. He made a pretense that David was a long-lost traveler who had just returned to civilization. “We never thought we'd hear your voice again.”

“Cut that out,” David said roughly.

“What?”

“Is Caroline there? Quickly.”

“Well quickly or slowly I can't tell you. Isn't she meant to live in your neck of the woods?”

“James please. I beg you.”

“Have you two had a lovers' tiff?”

“I said I beg you.”

“Very well, since you beg me so nicely, she is here but I'm not to tell you.”

“Are you sure? Have you seen her? Is she in your house?”

“I don't know where she is this minute but I spoke to her at breakfast and she rang me at the Law Library to arrange something for this evening. But shush. I didn't tell you.”

“No.”

“David? Are you all right?”

He had hung up.

 

The burning of the caravan was a mystery. It must have been youngsters playing with petrol, everything had been soaked in it. Poor Caroline Nolan.

The Guard had rung her in the big town but they couldn't find her. Still wasn't it a mercy that nobody had been hurt?

Clare drove in to the garage where her brother Ben worked. She got Dick Dillon's car filled up and also the petrol can he kept at the back. She drove back to the O'Hara house.

“You said only a minute. I was worried,” Angela said.

“Stop sounding like my mother.”

“Are you all right? You look very flushed.” Angela was concerned.

“No. I'm much better now. There was something I had to do.”

Mrs. Corrigan from the other side of the road came in with the news that there had been a big fire over on the Far Cliff Road, and a caravan burned to a shell.

Angela wanted to know was anyone hurt.

“Who would be there in the middle of winter?” Clare had said, her eyes still too bright.

“People are sometimes,” Angela said cautiously.

“Well, they're up to no good then.”

Angela looked so frightened then, that Clare took pity on her.

“It's all right, Angela. It's all right. There was nobody in it. I did check.”

Clare picked up Liffey and held her tight, she was so big now it was quite a weight.

“Well, Liffey, in a day or two you and I are heading off to the great unknown to seek our fortune—well, to seek Mummy's degree for one thing.”

“I'll never say. You won't, either, I hope.”

“No, of course not, but you're different—you can know everything. The good and the bad.”

“It wasn't all that
very
bad, considering,” Angela said with a smile.

“No, it wasn't, was it?” Clare seemed recovered now.

 

“Did you know that Clare's up in Angela Dillon's house?” Agnes asked Tom O'Brien that night.

“Sure. Hasn't she been living up there since she was ten years of age? What's strange about that?” he asked.

“No, that's just it—she
is
living up there. She's been there three days.”

“Nonsense, Agnes, you must have got the wrong end of the stick. Hasn't she a perfectly good house of her own?”

“I know, but that's what I heard, so I asked her straight out.”

“And?”

“You never get a straight answer from Clare. She said she was on her way to Dublin to inquire about exams or some such nonsense.”

“Better say nothing, say nothing at all. You'll get little thanks for what you say.”

Agnes thought that for once he might be right. This could be one occasion when it might pay to take no notice.

 

People said that Gerry Doyle's poor mother had to take so many tablets now for her nerves that she would hardly realize what was happening at the funeral. Fiona had tried to get her a black coat and she said no, she always hated black, it reminded her of funerals. Gently Fiona had tried to persuade her that this actually was a funeral, and didn't know whether to be pleased or upset that her mother hadn't taken in the fact that Gerry was dead.

 

Nellie Burke's family asked her was it true that David Power and Clare were living apart. Nellie, stubborn and loyal, said she knew nothing of the sort. Her brothers' wives, who were spectacular gossips, were disappointed. They thought she would be the source of all information. So they had to make do with saying that a marriage like that could never work. They had known it from the start. She had been a silly little girl to think that a bit of education made her the equal of the doctor's son.

 

“Did David tell you that Caroline Nolan's packed up her job and gone back to Dublin?” Paddy Power asked Molly.

“I don't believe you.”

“So Mr. Kenny says, remember he got her the job in the first place—very upset he is about it all. Just told them she wasn't suited to country life, worked all day and all night to get her work finished and left. Same in her house. Wrote them a check for the rest of the quarter and vanished.”

“I must ring Sheila.”

“Maybe not, Moll. Maybe not. Let it settle down a bit yet.”

“Why do you say that?” She looked anxious.

“We don't know half of what goes on, we might be making it worse.”

“How could we make things worse, we're their friends, we haven't done anything to upset Caroline, to make her run off from here.”

“No Moll, you haven't and I haven't,” he said levelly.

She looked at him in alarm and realized he wasn't going to say any more.

 

“There'll be so many there they won't miss me. I'm not going,” Clare said.

They could hear the bell tolling on the cold, wet morning.

“You shouldn't hurt the living. Fiona, his mother.”

“I can't stand there and pray for the repose of his soul. It's a mockery.”

“It's what people do. It's a custom. Think of it like that.”

“You don't know . . . you don't know . . .”

“Clare, stop it this minute. Of course I don't know. You didn't tell me, and you are not going to tell me now when we have to be in the church in ten minutes' time. I've arranged for us to put Liffey in Mrs. Corrigan's. She'll not be going. She's got five babies in that house already.”

“No. I have to stay here and mind Liffey.”

“Clare, stop being a child. Put your coat on. Now.”

 

“Would you like to walk up to the church with me, son?”

“Dad, I was half thinking I wouldn't go. You know, stay here in case anyone needs one of us.”

“If they need us won't they know where to find us, where would anyone find anyone on the day the bell is ringing for a young man?”

“I know but . . .”

“There's going to be talk if you don't go.”

“That's nonsense. The church will be full. The whole of Castlebay will be there.”

“And you should be there.”

“But there are a lot of things I can't explain . . .”

“And there's no need why you
should
explain, just come up to the church with me now, come on David, it's a small thing to do, but it's a big thing if you don't do it.”

“If you think . . .”

“I do think. Come on now. The bell's ringing. Your mother's gone already in the car.”

 

With cold hands they blessed themselves. Almost all of Castlebay went into the familiar church. The only thing that was unfamiliar was the coffin up near the altar rails. It was covered with Mass cards and there were two wreaths, one from his mother arranged by Frank Conway, and one from Fiona and Frank also arranged by Frank Conway. For some odd reason other people hadn't sent flowers. You didn't associate Gerry Doyle with flowers for the dead.

The church always seemed colder at a funeral. In the front row Mrs. Mary Doyle knelt in the black coat that had been borrowed for her, her eyes vacant and her hands clasped. Beside her Fiona sat. Face paler than ever, wearing a loose black coat and a mantilla. She looked like a Spanish widow, she had never looked really Irish at all.

David and his father arrived just at the same moment as Angela, Dick and Clare. They exchanged the funeral words people spoke at such times—terrible tragedy, young man, makes you wonder at the sense of anything.

David and Clare let the others go in before them.

“Did you burn the caravan?” he asked.

“Yes. And the pictures. And the negatives.”

“It doesn't matter I suppose,” he said eventually.

“No.”

As if they were a million miles from each other they walked into the church side by side. Angela and Dr. Power sat beside each other deliberately. David and Clare joined them. So Castlebay was not treated to the sight of the young doctor and his wife having a public coldness right in the middle of a funeral. They genuflected and knelt down, where they had been maneuvered to be. Beside each other.

 

There had never been a Mass as long as this.

When she was certain it must be the communion it was only the offertory. When she was sure it was the last Gospel it was only the post-communion.

Sitting, and standing, and kneeling, beside David; looking at his cold hands clasped in front of him; noticing that he needed a haircut; seeing that his shoes were well-polished and wondering had Nellie done that for him.

And then every time she lifted her glance seeing that coffin which they said held Gerry Doyle.

Where would she go back to? If she could go back . . . ?

Before she got pregnant? No, that would mean no Liffey, and the only good thing that had come out of all this was Liffey.

After Liffey was born, had she been really terrible then? It was odd, she couldn't remember much about all that winter and spring. She must have been a poor companion. As drugged and vacant-looking as Gerry's unfortunate mother looked now.