Maeve Binchy - Circle of Friends

She got up and sat by her window. Out in the moonlight she saw the shape of Dr. Johnson's house opposite, and the edge of Dekko Moore's, where young Heather said she was going to work as a harness maker.

What had Benny wanted when she was Heather's age, twelve? She had grown out of the wish for pink velvet dresses and pointed shoes with pom poms. What had she wanted? Maybe a crowd of friends, people that she and Eve could play with without having to be home at a special time. It wasn't very much.

And they had got it, hadn't they? A whole crowd coming down from Dublin to herself and Eve. How little you knew when you were twelve.

Heather Westward wouldn't want to be a harness maker when she was twenty. She'd forget that this is what she had wanted now.

She couldn't get Jack out of her mind tonight. The weeks in between had passed by without touching her. His face was just as dear as it always was, and never more dear than when he had cried on the canal bank and told her he still loved her and that he wouldn't have had this happen for all the world.

She wondered what he and Nan talked about. Did Nan ever tell him how she had helped Benny to put on make-up, and to use good perfume? How Nan had advised Benny to hold in her tummy and push out her chest?

But it was madness to suppose that they ever talked about her at all.

Or to suppose that either of them even remembered that they had been intending to spend this weekend in Knockglen.

"What are you going to wear?" Clodagh asked her next morning.

"I don't know. I've forgotten. I can't get interested. Please, Clodagh, don't nag me."

"Wouldn't dream of it. See you at Mario's tonight then."

"What about up above the shop first, that's where we're starting."

"If you can't be bothered to get dressed for it, why should I be bothered to go?"

"Damn you to Hell, Clodagh. What'll I wear?"

"Come into the shop and we'll see," said Clodagh, smiling from ear to ear.

By six o'clock they were coming up the stairs, exclaiming and praising.

The huge rooms, the high ceilings, the lovely old windows, the davenport, the marvellous frames on the old pictures.

It was like Aladdin's Cave.

"I'd live here if I were you," Bill Dunne said to Benny's mother.

"Not that your own house isn't terrific. .

"I'm half thinking about it," Annabel Hogan said to him. Benny felt her heart soar. The groundwork was beginning to pay off. She was afraid to smile too much. Clodagh had sewed her into a very tight country and western type bodice. She looked as if she were going to take out a guitar and give them a song. Johnny O'Brien said that she looked utterly fantastic. Fabulous figure, out-in-out, he said, showing her with his hands. Jack must be mad, he said helpfully.

They were all in high form to cross the street to rock the night away in Mario's.

Eve nudged Benny as Sean Walsh, Mrs. Healy and the two Jack Russells went for an evening constitutional around the town.

Mario was delighted to see them, rather over-welcoming, Fonsie thought, until he heard that Mr. Flood had been in with a message from the nun in the tree saying that his cale was a den of vice and must not only be closed down, but should be exorcized as well.

Any company other than Mr. Flood looked good to Mario at the moment.

Fonsie's new juke box, which Mario secretly thought looked like the product of a diseased mind, spat out the music. The tables were pushed back and those who couldn't fit in the cale watched and cheered from outside.

With a mixture of regret and amazement Mario looked back on the days before his sister's son had come to work with him. The peaceful poverty-stricken days when his till hardly ever rang and most people couldn't have told you there was a chip shop and a cale in Knockglen.

On Saturday Benny and Patsy fried a breakfast for Sheila, Rosemary and Carmel. Then they went up to the shop and did the same for Aidan, Bill, Johnny and the man who was always called Carmel's Sean.

"I do have an identity of my own," he grumbled when Benny called out to know if Carmel's Sean would like one egg or two.

"In this town if your name is Sean, you'd be wise to give yourself some other handle," Benny said. Patsy got a fit of the giggles. It was magical to be able to mock Sean Walsh in these very premises. Slowly the day took shape. The journey to Ballylee began. Never had the countryside looked lovelier. Benny turned round in the car twice to point things out to Jack. She wondered would it take her long to remember he wasn't there. And wouldn't ever be there again.

Bill Dunne and Eve got separated from the others as they walked up to see an old folly. A summer house facing the wrong way that a family even more unused to the land than the Westwards were had built.

"Benny's fine over all this Jack business, isn't she?" Bill asked, looking for confirmation.

"Hasn't she plenty of fellows looking for her attention? Of course she's fine," Eve was burningly loyal.

"Has she?" Bill seemed disappointed.

He told Eve that nothing had ever surprised him as much. Jack was inclined to talk, the way fellows do, the way girls did too amongst each other, he supposed. He never mentioned a word about Nan. Oh, he used to complain that Benny was a convent girl through and through which presumably meant she wouldn't go to bed with him, despite all his blandishments, and that she wasn't in Dublin enough. But not till the night of the rugby club party did Jack even go out with Nan, he knew that for a fact.

"That was only a few weeks ago," Eve said, surprised. "Yes, didn't the other business happen very quick?" Bill shivered in case talking about it might make him the putative father of someone's child.

"Well, it only takes once, that's what they always say." Eve's voice was light.

"That must have been all it was." Bill was sympathetic. Eve changed the subject. Bill's line of thinking was dangerously near to her own.

That the pregnancy had happened too suddenly. She had not been able to pinpoint Jack and Nan's first encounter until now, and that night was only a few weeks ago. It was the night she and Benny had gone to the pictures in Dunlaoghaire. Even with Benny's poor mathematics, that was surely too soon for anything to have happened and be confirmed. Surely they would know this.

Surely Jack's father, a doctor, would know?

And that meant something almost impossible to believe. It meant that Nan Mahon was pregnant with someone else's child, and had taken Benny's Jack to be its father.

Her mind was racing, but the race came to an abrupt end. The engagement was announced. The marriage date was fixed. This is what Nan and Jack were going to do. It wasn't a melodrama of blood tests and confrontations. It would go ahead, no matter what.

To cast any suspicions would only raise Benny's hope again and break her heart further.

And then there was the possibility that she could be wrong. Eve had never been sure where Simon and Nan could have made love, and had been forced to dismiss the possibility that they ever had.

Westlands was out, Maple Gardens was out, so was a car. Simon had no money for hotels. Nan had no friends. None at all except Benny and Eve. She was having great difficulty in finding anyone to be her bridesmaid.

Eve had been forced reluctantly to believe that they might not have been lovers at all. Which was disappointing, as it meant there was no chance of being able to blame the pregnancy on Simon.

But then if there had been any possibility of doing that, surely Nan would have done it. She wouldn't have let a chance like that pass by.

But there had been no tales of any rows with Simon. According to all accounts, or to Nan's account, the friendship had ended amicably a long time ago.

"You're muttering to yourself," Bill Dunne criticized her. "It's my only unpleasant habit. Aidan says it's a tiny flaw in an otherwise perfect character. Come on, I'll race you up to the folly."