Echoes (9 page)

He would have liked to ask her to write to him at school. Nolan had a girl who wrote him long letters. But he thought it was too complicated to set it all up. Firstly if Fiona had said yes he would have had to explain the whole system where the letters were read by the priests and so the girl who was writing had to pretend to be another boy. Nolan's friend who was called Alice used to sign her name Anthony. She had to remember not to talk about hockey matches but say rugby instead, in fact the letter was in so heavy a code or disguise none of them could really work out what it meant. Still it was nice for Nolan to be able to get the letter and tell everyone how good-looking Alice was. It would be nice to do the same with Fiona. But if Gerry wouldn't let her come to a party in a cave down the road he would almost certainly be very much against her writing letters in code to a boy in a boarding school. That would be fast, and Fiona Doyle was not going to be thought of as fast. David noticed that he kept thinking of them as orphans even though they lived with their mother and father. That was odd.

“Your parents don't take much part in things, do they?” he said enviously.

“They work too hard,” Gerry said. “It was always like that. It's a dog's life, and Mam hates the work but what else is there?”

“What would she prefer to be doing?”

“Arranging flowers on a hall table in a house like yours,” Gerry laughed. “But isn't that what every woman would want?”

 

The roof didn't fall in and the skies didn't flash with lightning when David got back home that evening. He sensed that his parents had had a little chat. His mother was sewing the Cash's name tapes on some new socks and pajamas for him. She seemed to have forgotten the row at lunchtime totally.

“I suppose in a way it will be hard to settle into all that studying again,” she said.

David was determined to be equally pleasant. “Yes, but I'm very glad that I had Miss O'Hara, very glad. Nolan said we were dead lucky down here to be able to get someone like that, up in Dublin teachers are sharks, he said, they ask for a fortune for grinds and they smell of drink.”

David's father laughed from the other side of the fire. “Your friend James is full of nonsense. You can't make generalizations about any job no more than you can about mine or his father's. Dear dear.”

“You know the way Nolan goes on,” David said.

“Of course I do. He's a very bright young fellow. We liked him, your mother and I did. Ask him down any time, or any of your other friends, the house is big and there's plenty of room. And it's nice to hear a bit of noise around the place.”

That's a different tune to the one they were playing at lunch, David thought to himself. Then I was invading the privacy of the house. He heard himself saying that he'd love to ask Nolan again, and he was very grateful to be allowed to invite people home. Nolan's mother was still fussing apparently and when she wasn't worrying about fleas she was worrying about ceilings falling down. Nolan said she was having a tonic for her nerves but it didn't seem to be doing much good.

 

On the last evening before he went back he said he'd like to go and say a proper thank you to Miss O'Hara, and maybe give her a small present. David's mother said that Angela O'Hara wouldn't like that at all, she had been paid adequately, but Dr. Power said no, David was right, why not give her a book of some kind from the shelf, she always admired the books when she came to the house.

“You don't need to go up to Dinny O'Hara's cottage,” Molly Power said.

“Dinny O'Hara has been in the churchyard for five years, he's unlikely to come out and corrupt the boy now,” said Paddy Power, and David saw his mother's face get that tight-lipped look again.

Nellie helped him to wrap up a book about Irish place names. They took the torn paper cover off it and it was lovely underneath. Nellie looked at the small print in admiration.

“Imagine Angela O'Hara being able to read all this and understand it. Ah well, that's what comes of keeping to your books.” She had been at school up at the convent with Angela herself, and had been there the day the news came of Angela's scholarship to the big town. In those days the nuns had been so proud that one of their girls had won the scholarship they used to make the uniform themselves with their own hands. They had kitted out the young Angela for her secondary school because they knew that anything Dinny O'Hara would get into his hand went straight across a bar counter and he wouldn't do much to help his little girl get on.

“She deserved to do well,” Nellie said unexpectedly, as she was making a nice neat corner on the parcel and tying the string tightly. “She never crowed about all her successes and her high marks and all. Nobody could say that it all went to her head.”

David didn't think that Miss O'Hara had all that much to crow about. To be teaching in that awful convent, to be here in Castlebay with her old mother—when she must have wanted to get far away. Why else did she go in for all those scholarships? He didn't think she had the huge success that Nellie seemed to think. But of course compared to Nellie it must be fine, she didn't have to clear out grates and ranges and scrub floors and make beds and cook meals and wash up and wash clothes and go out in the cold and see they weren't bashed down by the wind. Being a teacher must seem like a nice cushy job to Nellie.

He turned left outside the gate and went along the road toward the golf course. It was longer than he remembered, no wonder Miss O'Hara always flew round the place on her bicycle. There was a light downstairs in the O'Hara cottage: he hoped that her old mother wouldn't answer the door bent over the two sticks.

But the door was opened by Clare O'Brien. Clare was thin and alert, big brown eyes and fair hair tied in bunches. She always looked as if she was about to ask a question. He remembered meeting her in the Echo Cave and she had said that it would be like heaven on earth to have lessons from Miss O'Hara without the rest of the class. Maybe that's what she was doing now.

Clare seemed pleased to see him. “She's putting her mother to bed, she's got awful pains altogether today, she can neither sit nor stand. Miss O'Hara said she'd be back in a few minutes. Will you come in and sit down?”

David was a bit put out that she was there; he had wanted to make a flowery speech to Miss O'Hara without an audience. But he could hardly order the O'Brien girl to go home or say that his conversation was private. He looked around the kitchen.

“Isn't it like Aladdin's Cave?” whispered Clare in awe.

It was a typical kitchen for a cottage in this area. The fire had been replaced by a small range. That must have come from Angela O'Hara's salary—it never came when Dinny O'Hara was alive nor from the widow's pension that the arthritic old woman got every week. Perhaps the brother and sisters abroad sent money, David wouldn't know. Miss O'Hara was very private, she never told you all about herself and her family like everyone else in Castlebay did all the time, that's why you were interested to know more. David looked up at the walls. Everywhere there were shelves. Each alcove had shelves from ceiling to floor, and there were ornaments and books and biscuit boxes and more books and sewing baskets and statues. Clare was right. Almost like a toyshop on a Christmas card. There was no inch of wall without a shelf, and no inch of shelf without an object. Most of the objects were books.

“She knows where every single thing is, would you credit that?” Clare's big brown eyes looked larger than ever in the semidark of the room. There was a table with writing paper and a bottle of Quink ink and blotting paper. Miss O'Hara must have been writing letters with Clare when her mother took a turn.

“Are you getting lessons?” he asked. There was a touch of envy in his voice. He would have preferred to learn in this funny enclosed place where everything had a story and every item was known in its little place. It was a much better place to study than his mother's sitting room with the copies of
Tatler and Sketch,
and
Social and Personal
laid out beside
The Housewife
which came every month by post from England. When the copies were a couple of months old they went to the surgery, and of course there were all the encyclopedias and big leather-bound books. But they weren't read and touched and loved like things were here.

“Oh no, I wish I could, no, I'd like that more than anything. I'd be a genius if I had Miss O'Hara to teach me on her own.” She spoke with no intention of making him laugh. She was utterly serious.

He was sorry for her. It must be desperate not to have enough money for education. You always felt that came automatically.

“Maybe you could do things for her, you know, do the messages or cook or something in exchange.”

“I thought of that,” Clare said solemnly. “But I think it's a bit unfair, she'd have to be looking round for things for me to do. It would be like asking for charity.”

“I see.” He did see.

“But I came up tonight because Miss O'Hara
is
going to help me, I'm to write to the convent in the town, a kind of letter that would make them think well of me, and inquiring about their scholarships in two years' time.” Her eyes were shining over the very thought of it.

“Miss O'Hara got a scholarship there herself, years and years ago. She says you have to be dead cunning, and look on it as a war.”

Angela O'Hara came into the room then. “Don't give away all our secrets, Clare. Maybe College Boy here might be disguising himself and trying to get into the convent ahead of you.”

Nolan would have made a witty remark. David couldn't think of one, he just laughed. “I'm in your way. You're writing letters,” he said awkwardly.

“Don't worry about that, David. Clare's writing her own letter actually, and I am meant to be writing one to my brother. I find it so hard to know what will interest him about here. You know: got up, went to school, did not strangle Immaculata . . . every day it becomes a bit repetitive.”

“What does he write? I suppose his days are a bit samey too,” David said.

Angela took out an airmail envelope with the stamp neatly removed for the school collection. “I was just thinking that very thing. . . . My mother keeps all Sean's letters, every single one of them—look at the boxes of them—and he does seem to be saying the same thing over and over. But it's nice to hear.”

“When you get older I expect there's not much to write about,” Clare said helpfully.

“Or more when you don't really share the same kind of life,” David said. “That's why I never had a penfriend in India or anything, once you'd described your life and he'd described his that would be it.”

“It is a bit like that,” Angela agreed. She picked up a thin piece of airmail paper and read to them:

 

Angela broke off and said it was easy known that he never had to pass one day of his lifetime teaching little Irish children in a convent or he would think otherwise.

“It's a bit like the letter he wrote to the school, isn't it?” Clare said.

“It's a bit like every letter he writes,” Angela said, putting it back in the envelope. “There's nothing for him to say, I suppose, that we'd understand. I do ask him things myself sometimes, like do they ordain many Japanese priests out there, and what happened to all the Chinese they had converted before they left China, did they go back to their old religion or what? But he never answers those kind of things.”

She was silent in thought for a while. David coughed.

“I came to say goodbye and thank you,” he said. “And to give you this book to tell you how grateful I am.”

Angela sat down and reached for her cigarettes without saying anything. When she spoke it was with a softer voice than either Clare or David had ever heard her use. “That's very good of you,” she said and bent her head over the twine, fiddling with the knots.

“It's only old twine. You can cut it if you like,” David said helpfully and Clare found a knife. Miss O'Hara sawed through the string, and they all bent over the book. Time passed easily as they read why places they knew were called what they were called, and they were all enraged that Castlebay wasn't in it and said that the man who wrote the book hadn't traveled at all if he couldn't include a fine place like this. From the other room there were sounds of moaning but Miss O'Hara said not to take any notice, it was her mother trying to get into a comfortable position to settle for the night, it wasn't really sharp pain. They had a cup of tea and a bit of soda bread and eventually Miss O'Hara shooed them out into the night lest people think they had been kidnapped.

 

Angela told herself not to be so sentimental over David's present. It was very thoughtful of the boy certainly, but he came from a nice peaceful home where there was time to be thoughtful and there was ease and comfort. And his father was one of the most generous men that ever walked. It was in the boy's nature to be bright and generous. But it was so different to what she could expect from the children she taught up in the convent. Half of them would never do any kind of an exam, almost none of them would ever open a book again after they left her, except a novel or a magazine.