Maeve Binchy - Circle of Friends

Patsy arrived with the teapot and put it on the stand. She placed the quilted cosy on it and patted it approvingly.

"I expect she'll make friends." Annabel was doubtful. There had always been Eve and only Eve; it was going to be a big wrench.

"And will she be bringing them down here to stay do you think?"

Patsy's eyes shone at the excitement. She loved speculating.

"I hadn't thought of that. But I'm sure she will. After all she can't possibly stay up in Dublin with people we don't know or have never heard of. She knows that."

Mother Francis was thinking about Eve as she watched the rain fall steadily on the convent grounds. She would miss her.

Obviously she had to go to Dublin and stay in the convent there; this was the only way she could train for a career. Mother Francis hoped that the Community in Dublin would understand the need to make Eve feel important and part of the place as they had always done here in Knockglen. Eve had never felt remotely like a charity child, nor had there been any pressure on her to join the Order.

Her father had worked long hours for the convent in his time, he had paid many times over in advance for his child to be housed and educated, had he but known it. Mother Francis sighed and prayed silently that the Lord would look after the soul of Jack Malone.

At times there had been other options. Mother Francis and her old school friend of years ago, Peggy Pine, discussed it long and often.

"I could let her serve her time to me, and make her fit for a job in any shop in Ireland, but we want more than that for her, don't we?"

"Not that it isn't a very worthwhile career, Peggy," Mother Francis had said diplomatically.

"You'd love the few letters after her name though, wouldn't you now, Bunty?" Few people on earth called Mother Francis that and got away with it.

And what Peggy said was true. Mother Francis did want everything that might help to push Eve up some kind of ladder. She had been such an innocent victim from the start it seemed only fair to help her all they could now. There had never been enough money to dress the child properly and even if there had been they didn't have the style or the know-how. Peggy had advised from the wings, but Eve didn't want outside charity. Anything that came from the convent she regarded as her right. St. Mary's was her home.

It was certainly the only place she thought of as home. The three-room cottage where she had been born had lost its interest for Eve as her dislike of the Westwards had grown. When she was a youngster she was forever going up the long path through the convent kitchen gardens, past the briars and brambles and peering in its windows.

When she was about ten she had even started to plant flowers outside it. Mother Francis had nurtured them behind the scenes, just as she had taken cuttings from the various bushes and plants in the convent garden and made a garden around the stony waste ground, the ugly edge of the cliff where Jack Malone had ended his life.

It was hard to know when this hatred of her mother's family had begun.

But Mother Francis supposed it was only natural. A girl brought up in a convent with the whole town knowing her circumstances could not be expected to feel any warmth towards the people who lived in splendour over in Westlands. The man who used to ride around Knockglen as if it were all part of his estate; that was Eve's grandfather, Major Charles Westward. A man who had shown no wish to know his daughter's child.

He had not been seen much in recent years, and Peggy Pine - who was Mother Francis's line of communication with the outer world - said that he was now in a wheelchair as a result of a stroke. And that small, dark young man Simon Westward, who was seen from time to time around Knockglen, he was Eve's first cousin. He looked very like her, Mother Francis thought, or maybe she was being fanciful. There was another child, too, a girl, but at some fancy Protestant school up in Dublin, hardly ever seen around the place here. As Eve's resentment of the family had grown, so had her interest in the cottage dwindled. It stood empty. Mother Francis had never given up hope that Eve would live there one day, with a family maybe, and bring back some happiness to the little house that had known only confusion and tragedy.

And it was such a comforting little place. Mother Francis often sat there herself when she came up to tidy the place. It had always been the custom in St. Mary's for the nuns to go anywhere in the grounds to read their daily Office. You were as close to God in the gardens, under the big beech tree, or in the walled garden with its smell of rosemary and lemon balm, as you were in the chapel.

Nobody thought it odd that Mother Francis often went up the path past the blackberries to read her Office up by the cottage. She kept a watchful eye on any leaks that might have sprung. If there was anything she couldn't cope with herself she would ask Mossy Rooney, a man of such silence and discretion that he found it hard to reveal his own name in case it might incriminate someone.

If anyone were to ask whether the cottage was for sale or rent, Mother Francis was always ready with a helpless shrug of the shoulders to say that things hadn't been fully sorted out yet, but that it was in Eve's name and nothing could be done until she was twenty-one. Nobody ever brought the matter up with Eve; and as for Mossy Rooney, who had replaced some of the window frames and the guttering, it would have been pointless asking him for information. The whole town knew he was silent as the tomb, a man of deep thoughts, none of them revealed; or possibly a man of no thoughts at all.

Mother Francis would have loved that old cottage to be Eve's home; she could see in her mind's eye a kind of life where Eve would bring her student friends home from university to stay there for weekends, and they would call at the convent and have tea in the parlour. It was such a waste of a little stone house with a wooden porch and a view across the county as well as down the craggy rocks of the stone quarry.

The cottage had no name.

And the way things were it might never have a name or a life of its own.

Perhaps she should have approached the Westwards directly. But the reply to her letter had been so cold. Mother Francis had deliberately written on plain paper, not on the heavily embossed convent paper with Our Lady's name all over it. She had spent sleepless nights composing the right words, words that would sound neither sleeveen nor grasping.

Evidently she hadn't found them. The letter from Simon Westward had been courteous, but firm and dismissive. His aunt's family had raised no objections to her daughter being brought up in a Roman Catholic convent, and that was where their interest in the matter ended.

Mother Francis had not told Eve about the letter. The girl had hardened her heart so much; there was no point in giving her further cause. The nun sighed heavily as she looked back at her sixth year class, heads bent over their composition books all intent on their essay, "The Evils of Emigration'. She wished she could believe that Mother Clare in Dublin would welcome Eve and tell her that the Dublin convent would be her new home for the next year.

It wasn't Mother Clare's style, but God was good, and perhaps she had, for once, been open-hearted and generous.

She might have been generous; but on the other hand she probably hadn't been. There had been no word from Eve for a week, which was not a good sign.

Eve's room in the Dublin convent had no bedside table with a small radio on it. There was no candlewick bedspread. A small neat iron bed with a shabby well-washed coverlet had one lumpy pillow and sheets which were hard to the touch. There was a narrow, poky cupboard and a jug and basin from early times but possibly necessary still today since the bathroom was a long way away.