Maeve Binchy - Circle of Friends

Paccy Moore had said they were two fine ladies when they had gone to have heels put on Benny's good shoes. But with Sean Walsh it was different.

"Hallo, Sean." Benny's voice was lacklustre. "Surveying the metropolis, I see," he said loftily. He always spoke slightly disparagingly of Knockglen, even though the place he came from himself was smaller and even less like a metropolis. Benny felt a violent surge of annoyance.

"Well, you're a free agent," she said suddenly. "If you don't like Knockglen you could always go somewhere else."

"Did I say I didn't like it?" His eyes were narrower than ever, almost slits. He had gauged this wrong, he must not allow her to report his having slighted the place. "I was only making a pleasant remark comparing this place to the big city. Meaning that you'll have no time for us here at all soon." That had been the wrong thing too.

"I'll have little chance of forgetting all about Knockglen considering I'll be coming home every night," said Benny glumly.

"And we wouldn't want to anyway," Eve said with her chin stuck out.

Sean Walsh would never know how often she and Benny bemoaned their fate living in such a small town which had the worst characteristic any town could have: it was actually within striking distance of Dublin. Sean hardly ever let his glance fall on Eve, for she held no interest for him. All his remarks were directed to Benny. Your father is so proud of you, there's hardly a customer that he hasn't told about your great success." Benny hated his smile and his knowing ways. He must know how much she hated being told this, reminded about how she was the apple of their eye, and the centre of simple boastful conversation.

And if he knew why did he tell her and annoy her still further? If he did have designs on her, and a plan to marry Mr. Eddie Hogan's daughter and thereby marry into the business, then why was he saying all the things that would irritate and upset her?

Perhaps he thought that her own wishes would hardly be considered in the matter. That the biddable daughter of the house would give in on this as she had on everything else.

Benny realised she must fight Sean Walsh. "Does he tell everyone I'm going to college?" she asked, with a smile of pleasure on her face.

"Only subject of conversation." Sean was smug to be the source of information but somehow disconcerted that Benny didn't get embarrassed as he had thought she would.

Benny turned to Eve. "Aren't I lucky?" Eve understood. "Oh, spoiled rotten," she agreed. They didn't laugh until they were out of sight.

They had to walk down the long straight street past Shea's pub with its sour smell of drink coming out on to the street from behind its dark windows, past Birdie Mac's sweet shop where they had spent so much time choosing from jars all their school life. Across the road to the butcher's where they looked in the window to see back at the reflection of Hogan's Outfitters and realise that Sean Walsh had gone back inside to the empire that would one day be his.

Only then could they let themselves go and laugh properly.

Mr. Flood, of Flood's Quality Meat Killed On The Premises, didn't appreciate their laughter.

"What's so funny about a row of gigot chops?" he asked the two laughing girls outside his window. It only made them laugh more.

"Get on with you then, do your laughing somewhere else," he growled at them. "Stop making a mock and a jeer out of other people's business."

His face was severely troubled and he went out into the street to look up at the tree which overhung his house.

Mr. Flood had been staring into that tree a lot lately, and worse still having conversations with someone he saw in its branches.

The general thinking was that Mr. Flood had seen some kind of vision, but was not ready yet to reveal it to the town. His words to the tree seemed to be respectful and thoughtful, and he addressed whatever he saw as Sister.

Benny and Eve watched fascinated, as he shook his head.

"It's the same the whole world over, Sister," he said, "but it's sad it should come to Ireland as well."

He listened respectfully to what he was hearing from the tree, and took his leave. Vision or no vision, there was work to be done in the shop.

The girls only stopped laughing by the time they had reached the convent gates. Benny turned to go back home as usual. She never presumed on her friendship with Eve by expecting to be let in to the inner sanctum. The convent in holidays was off limits. "No, come on in, come in just to see my room, Eve begged.

"Mother Francis? Wouldn't they think "It's my home, they've always told me that. Anyway, you're not a pupil any more.

They went through a side door; there was a smell of baking, a warm kitchen smell through the corridors, then a smell of polish on the big stairway, and the wide dark hall hung with pictures of Mother Foundress and Our Lady, and lit only by the Sacred Heart lamp.

"Isn't it desperately quiet in the holidays?"

"You should be here at night. Sometimes when I've come home from the pictures and I let myself in, it's so quiet I'd nearly talk to the statues for company.

They went up to the small room where Eve had lived for as long as she could remember. Benny looked around with interest.

"Look at your wireless, right beside your bed!" The brown bakelite electric radio, where, like every other girl in the country, Eve listened at night to Radio Luxembourg, was on her night table. In Benny's house, where she was considered a very pampered only child, she had to borrow the kitchen radio and then perch it on a chair because there wasn't any socket near enough to her bed to plug it in.

There was a neat candlewick bedspread and a funny nightdress case shaped like a rabbit.

"Mother Francis gave me that when I was ten. Isn't it awful?"

"Better than holy pictures," Benny said. Eve opened a drawer in which there were piles of holy pictures, each one bound up with a rubber band.

Benny looked at them, fascinated. "You never threw them away!"

"Not here. I couldn't."

The small round window looked down over Knockglen along the tree-lined drive of the convent through the big gates and down the broad main street of the town.

They could see Mr. Flood fussing round the window of his shop as if he were still worried about what they could have found so amusing in its contents. They saw small children with noses pressed against the window of Birdie Mac's, and men with caps pulled well down over their faces coming out of Shea's pub.

They saw a black Morris Cowley pull up in front of Hogan's and knew it was Dr. Johnson. They saw two men walking into Healy's Hotel, rubbing their hands. These would be commercial travellers, wanting to write up their order books in peace. They could see a man with a ladder up against the cinema putting up the new poster, and the small round figure of Peggy Pine coming out of her dress shop to stand and look admiringly at her window display. Peggy's idea of art was to put as much in the window as could possibly fit without falling over.

"You can see everything! Benny was amazed. "It's like being God."

"Not really, God can see round corners. I can't see your house; I can't see who's having chips in Mario's; I can't see over the hill to Westlands. Not that I'd want to, but I can't."

Her voice was tight when she spoke of her mother's people in the big house. Benny knew from old that it was a thorny subject. "I suppose they wouldn't.."

"They wouldn't." Eve was firm.

They both knew what Benny was going to say: that there was no chance of the wealthy Westwards paying for a university education for Eve.

"Do you think Mother Francis might have approached them?"

"I'm sure she did, lots of times over the years, and she always got the door slammed in her face."