Maeve Binchy - Circle of Friends

And she had other worries too, as she sat on the bus and started her university career. Mother Francis had told her that the bold Eve hadn't written or telephoned, and that all the Sisters were dying to hear from her. Yet Eve had phoned Benny twice in the last week to say that life in the Dublin convent was intolerable and she would have to meet her in Dublin because otherwise she would go mad.

"But how can we meet? Don't you have to stay in that place for lunch?"

Benny had asked.

"I've told them I have to go to hospital for tests. As long as she had known her, Eve had hardly ever told a lie. Benny had to tell a lot of little lies in order to be allowed out late or indeed at all. But Eve had been resolute about never lying to the nuns. Things must be bad in Dublin if she had gone this far.

And then there was Sean Walsh. Naturally she had not wanted to go out with him, but both her mother and father stressed how nice it was of him to take such an interest in the fact that she was going off to university and wanted to take her to the pictures as a treat. She had decided to take what might be the easiest way out and accept. After all, if it were to be something to mark the beginning of a new stage in her life, then she could make it clear that this new life wouldn't involve any further outings with him.

Last night they had gone to the film Genevieve. Almost everyone else in the world must have loved it, Benny thought grimly, all over the place people left cinemas humming the tune and wishing they looked like either Kay Kendall or Kenneth More. But not Benny. She had left in a black fury. All through the film Sean Walsh had put his thin bony arm around her shoulder or on her knee and even on one particularly unpleasant occasion managed to get his hand sort of around her back, under her arm and around her breast. All of these she had wriggled out of, and as they were leaving the cinema he had had the nerve to say, "You know, I really respect you for saying no, Benny. It makes you even more special, if you know what I mean."

Respected her! For saying no to him? That was the easiest thing she had ever done, but Sean was the type who thought that she enjoyed it.

"I'll go home now, Sean," she had said. "No, I told your father we'd have a cup of coffee in Mario's. They won't be expecting you.

She was trapped again. If she did go home they would ask why the coffee hadn't materialised.

Next to the cinema, Peggy Pine's shop had some new autumn stock.

Benny had looked at the cream-coloured blouses and soft pink angora sweaters. In order to talk about something that did not have to do with fondling and stroking she spoke of the garments.

"They're pretty, aren't they, Sean?" she had said, her mind barely on them. She was thinking instead that once she got to university she would never need to see him again. "Well, they are, but not on you.

You're much wiser not to draw attention to yourself. Wear dark colours. Nothing flashy."

There had been tears in her eyes as she crossed the road with him to Mario's and he brought two cups of coffee and two club milk chocolate biscuits to the plastic-topped table where she waited for him. "It's an ill wind," he had said. "What do you mean exactly?"

"Well, that brought Eve off to Dublin and out of your life."

"Not out of my life. I'm going to be in Dublin."

"But not in her world. Anyway, you're grown up now, It's not for you to be as thick as thieves with the likes of her.

"I like being as thick as thieves with her. She's my friend." Why do I have to explain this to him? Benny had thought. "Yes but It's not seemly Not any more. "I don't like talking about Eve behind her back."

"No, I'm just saying, it's an ill wind. Now that she's gone you won't always be saying that you're off to the pictures with her. I can take you."

"I won't have much time for the pictures any more. Not with study."

"You won't be studying every night." He had smiled at her complacently. "And don't forget, there's always weekends."

She had felt a terrible weariness.

"There's always weekends," she repeated. It seemed easier somehow.

But Sean had felt like making a statement. "Don't think that it's going to come between us, you having a university education," he had said. "Not come between us?"

"Exactly. Why should it? There are some men that might let it but I'm not one. I tell you something, Benny, I've always modelled myself a lot on your father. I don't know whether you know this or not.

"I know you work with him, so I'm sure you must learn from him."

"Much more than that. I could learn from any outfitter in the country.

I could learn tailoring by sitting at a bench. No, I watch the way Mr. Hogan has faced the world, and I try to learn from that."

"What have you learned in particular?"

"Well, not to be proud, for one thing. Your father married an older woman, a woman with money. He wasn't ashamed to put that money into his business, it's what she wanted and he wanted. It would have been a foolish, bull-necked man who would have looked a gift horse in the mouth .. so I like to see myself in a small way as following in his footsteps."

Benny had stared at him as if she had never seen him before.

"What exactly are you trying to say, Sean?" she had asked.

"I'm trying to say that none of it means anything to me. I'm above all that sort of thing," he had said loftily.

There was a silence.

"Just to make my point clear," he had ended. That had been last night.

Mother and Father had seemed pleased that she had spent time having coffee with Sean.

If that's what they want for me, Benny asked herself, why on God's earth are they allowing me to go to university? If they want to take it all away in the end and match me up with that slimy halfwit, why then take me up to the mountain and show me the world? It was too hard to answer, as was Eve's problem. Eve had said not only was she going to be free for lunch, she would meet Benny off the bus and walk her up to University college.

Hanged for a sheep was what Eve had said on the phone.

Jack Foley woke with a start. He had been dreaming that he and his friend Aidan Lynch were on Death Row in some American prison and they were about to die in the electric Chair. Their crime seemed to be that they had sung the song "Hernando's Hideaway' too loudly.

It was a huge relief to find himself in the big bedroom with its heavy mahogany furniture. Jack said you could hide a small army in the various wardrobes around the house. His mother had said that it was all very well to mock but she had stood many long hours at auctions all over the city finding the right pieces.

The Foleys lived in a large Victorian house with a garden in Donnybrook, a couple of miles from the centre of Dublin. It was a leafy place; professional people, merchants, senior civil servants had lived around here for a long time.

The houses on the road didn't have numbers; they all had names, and the postman knew where everyone lived. People didn't move much once they got to a road like this one. Jack was the eldest of the family and he had been born in a smaller house, but he didn't remember it. By the time he was a toddler his parents had arrived here. He noticed that in the photographs of his childhood the rooms looked a lot less furnished.

"We were building up our home," his mother had told him. "No point in rushing and getting the wrong type of thing entirely."

Not that Jack or any of his brothers really noticed the house much. It was there for them as it had always been. Like Doreen had always been putting the food on the table, like the old dog Oswald had been there for as long as they could recall.

Jack shook off his dream about Death Row and remembered that all over Dublin today there would be people waking to the first day of term.