Maeve Binchy: Circle of Friends

"Lord, why, why, why," her father sighed. "At school they're always telling us to ask why. Mother Francis says that if you have a questioning mind you get to know all the answers." Benny was triumphant. "Her mother died giving birth, when Eve was being borrn And then a bit later, her poor father, may the Lord have mercy on him, went out one evening with his wits scattered and fell over the cliff into the quarry.

"Wasn't that desperate?" Benny's eyes were round with horror.

"So, it's a sad story, all over long ago, nearly ten years ago.

We don't start bringing it all up over and over."

"But there's more to it, isn't there . . . there's a kind of secret.

"Not really." Her father's eyes were honest. "Her mother was a very wealthy woman, and her father was a kind of handyman who helped out in the convent, and did a bit of work up at Westlands.

That caused a bit of talk at the time."

"But it's not a secret or a scandal or anything." Annabel Hogan's face was set in warning lines. "They were married and everything in the Catholic Church."

Benny could see the shutters coming down. She knew when to leave things. Later she asked Patsy.

"Don't ask me things behind your parents' back."

"I'm not. I asked them, and this is what they told me. I just wanted to know did you know any more. That's all."

"It was before I came here, but I heard a bit from Bee Moore . ..

Paccy's sister, she works above in Westlands you see.

"What did you hear?"

"That Eve's father did a terrible act at the funeral, cursing and shouting.."

"Up in the church, cursing and shouting "Not our church, not the real church, in the Protestant church, but that was bad enough.

You see Eve's mother was from Westlands - from the big house beyond.

She was one of the family and poor Jack, that was the father, he thought they'd all treated her badly..

"Go on."

"That's all I know," Patsy said. "And don't be asking that poor child and upsetting her. People with no parents don't like endless questions."

Benny took this as good advice not only about Eve, but about Patsy herself.

Mother Francis was delighted to see the new friendship developing, but far too old a hand in dealing with children to say so. "Going down to the Hogans again are you?" she said sounding slightly put out.

"Do you mind?" Eve asked.

"No, I don't mind. I can't say that I mind." The nun tried hard to conceal her enthusiasm.

"It's not that I want to be away from here," Eve said earnestly.

Mother Francis felt an urge to take the child in her arms as she used to do when Eve was a baby given into their care by the accident of her birth.

"No, no, of course, child. Strange though this place is, it is your home."

"It's always been a lovely home."

The nun's eyes filled with tears. "Every convent should have a child.

I don't know how we're going to arrange it, she said lightly.

"I wasn't a nuisance when I arrived?"

"You were a blessing, you know that. It's been the best ten years St. Mary's ever had .. you being here."

Mother Francis stood at a window and watched littl Eve go down the long avenue of the convent out to Sunday lunch on her own with the Hogans.

She prayed that they would be kind to her, and that Benny wouldn't change and find a new friend.

She remembered the fights she had had to keep Eve in the first place, when so many other solutions were being offered. There was a cousin of the Westwards in England who would take the child, someone who would arrange Roman Catholic instruction once a week.

The Healys who had come to start the hotel were reported to be having difficulty in starting a family. They would be happy to have Eve in their home, even after their own children came along, if they did. But Mother Francis had fought like a tiger for that small bundle that she had rescued from the cottage, on the day she was born. The child they had reared until some solution could be found. Nobody had seen that

Jack Malone's solution would involve throwing himself over the quarry one dark night. After that there had been no one with better claim to Eve than the nuns who had reared her.

It was the first of many Sunday dinners in Lisbeg for Eve. She loved coming to the house. Every week she brought something which she arranged in a vase. Mother Francis had shown her how to go up the long windy path behind the convent and pick leaves and wild flowers. At the start she would rehearse arranging them with the nun so that she would do it well when she got to the Hogans, but as the weeks went by she grew in confidence. She could bring armfuls of autumn colours and make a beautiful display on the hall table. It became a ritual. Patsy would have the vases ready to see what Eve would bring today.

"Don't you have a lovely house?" she would say wistfully and Annabel Hogan would smile, pleased, and congratulate herself on having brought these two together.

"How did you meet Mrs. Hogan?" she would ask Benny's father. And "Did you always want to run a business?" The kind of questions Benny never thought to ask but was always interested in the answers.

She had never known that her parents met at a tennis party in a county far away. She had never heard that Father had been apprenticed to another business in the town of Ballylee. Or that Mother had gone to Belgium for a year after she left school to teach English in a convent.

"You make my parents say very interesting things," she said to Eve one afternoon as they sat in Benny's bedroom, and Eve marvelled over being allowed to use an electric fire all for themselves.

"Well, they've got great stories like olden times."

"Yes.." Benny was doubtful.

"You see, the nuns don't have."

"They must have. Surely. They can't have forgotten, Benny said.

"But they're not meant to think about the past, you know, and life before Entering, they really start from when they became Brides of Christ. They don't have stories of olden days like your mother and father do."

"Would they like you to be a nun too?" Benny asked. "No, Mother Francis said that they wouldn't take me even if I did want to be a nun, until I was over twenty-one."

"Why's that?"

"She says it's the only life I know, and I might want to join just because of that. She says when I leave school I'll have to go out and get a job for at least three years before I even think of Entering."

"Wasn't it lucky you met up with them?" Benny said.

"Yes. Yes, it was.

"I don't mean lucky that your mother and father died, but if they had to wasn't it great you didn't go somewhere awful?"

"Like in stories with wicked stepmothers," Eve agreed. "I wonder why they got you. Nuns usually don't get children unless it's an orphanage."

"My father worked for them. They sent him up to Westlands to earn some money because they couldn't pay him much. That's where he met my mother. They feel responsible, I think."

Benny was dying to know more. But she remembered Patsy's advice.

"Well, it all turned out fine, they're mad about you up there."

"Your parents are mad about you too."

"It's a bit hard sometimes, like if you want to wander off."

"It is for me too," Eve said. "Not much wandering above in the convent.

"It'll be different when we're older."

"It mightn't be," Eve said sagely.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, we have to show them we're terribly trustworthy or something, show them that if we are allowed to wander off, we'll wander back in good time.

"How could we show them?" Benny was eager. "I don't know.

Something simple at the start. Could you ask me to stay the night here, for one thing?"

"Of course I could."

"Then I could show Mother Francis that I'd be back up in the convent in time for Mass in the chapel, and she'd get to know I was to be relied on."