CIRCLE OF FRIENDS [096-066-5.0]

By: Maeve Binchy

Synopsis:

Soon everyone in Knockglen thought of them as a pair.

The big stocky figure of Benny Hogan in her strong shoes and tightly buttoned sensible coat, the waif-like Eve in the clothes that were always too long and streelish on her.

When Birdie Mac in the sweet shop was unwise enough to say to Benny that those slabs of toffee were doing her no good at all, Eve's small face flashed in a fury.

"If you worry so much about things, Miss Mac, then why do you sell them at all?" she asked in tones that knew there could be no answer.

When Maire Carroll's mother said thoughtfully to Eve, "Do you know I always ask myself why a sensible woman like Mother Francis would let you out on the street looking like Little Orphan Annie," Benny's brow darkened.

"I'll tell Mother Francis you wanted to know," Benny had said quickly.

Before Mrs. Carroll could stop her Benny had galloped out of the shop and up the road towards the convent.

"Oh, Mam, you've done it now," Maire Carroll moaned. "Mother Francis will be down on us like a ton of bricks." And she was.

The full fiery rage of the nun was something that Mrs. Carroll had not expected and never wanted to know again.

None of these things upset either Eve or Benny in the slightest.

It was easy to cope with Knockglen when you had a friend.

CIRCLE OF FRIENDS

For my dear love Gordon Snell

CHAPTER 1

1949

The kitchen was full of the smells of baking. Benny put down her school bag and went on a tour of inspection.

"The cake hasn't been iced yet," Patsy explained. "The mistress will do that herself."

"What are you going to put on it?" Benny was eager. "I suppose Happy Birthday Benny." Patsy was surprised. "Maybe she'll put Benny Hogan, Ten."

"I never saw that on a cake."

"I think it is, when it's a big birthday like being ten."

"Maybe." Patsy was doubtful. "And are the jellies made?"

"They're in the pantry. Don't go in poking at them, you'll leave the mark of your finger and we'll all be killed."

"I can't believe I'm going to be ten," Benny said, delighted with herself.

"Ah, it's a big day all right." Patsy spoke absently as she greased the trays for the queen cakes with a scrap of butter paper.

"What did you do when you were ten?"

"Don't you know with me every day was the same," Patsy said cheerfully.

"There was no day different in the orphanage until I came out of it and came here."

Benny loved to hear stories of the orphanage. She thought it was better than anything she read in books. There was the room with the twelve iron beds in it, the nice girls, the terrible girls, the time they all got nits in their hair and had their heads shaved.

"They must have had birthdays," Benny insisted. "I don't remember them," Patsy sighed. "There was a nice nun who said to me that I was Wednesday's child, full of woe.

"That wasn't nice.

"Well, at least she knew I was born on a Wednesday .. Here's your mother, now let me get on with the work."

Annabel Hogan came in carrying three big bags. She was surprised to see her daughter sitting swinging her legs in the kitchen.

"Aren't you home nice and early? Let me put these things upstairs.

Benny ran over to Patsy when her mother's heavy tread was heard on the stairs.

"Do you think she got it?"

"Don't ask me, Benny, I know nothing. "You're saying that because you do know."

"I don't. Really.

"Was she in Dublin? Did she go up on the bus?"

"No, not at all."

"But she must have." Benny seemed very disappointed. "No, she's not long gone at all .. She was only up the town."

Benny licked the spoon thoughtfully. "It's nicer raw," she said.

"You always thought that." Patsy looked at her fondly. "When I'm eighteen and can do what I like, I'll eat all my cakes uncooked," Benny pronounced.

"No you won't, when you're eighteen you'll be so busy getting thin you won't eat cakes at all."

"I'll always want cakes."

"You say that now. Wait till you want some fellow to fancy you.

"Do you want a fellow to fancy you?"

"Of course I do, what else is there?"

"What fellow? I don't want you to go, anyway."

"I won't get a fellow, I'm from nowhere, a decent fellow wouldn't be able to talk about me and where I came from. I have no background, no life before, you see. "But you had a great life," Benny cried. "You'd make them all interested in you."

There was no time to discuss it further. Benny's mother was back in the kitchen, her coat off and down to business with the icing sugar.

"Were you in Dublin at all today, Mother?"

"No, child, I had enough to do getting things ready for the party."

"It's just I was wondering.."

"Parties don't run themselves, you know." The words sounded sharp but the tone was kindly. Benny knew her mother was looking forward to it all too.

"And will Father be home for the cake bit?"

"Yes, he will. We've asked the people for half past three, they'll all be here by four, so we needn't sit down to the tea until half past five, and we wouldn't have got to the cake until your father has the business closed, and is back here."

Benny's father ran Hogan's Outfitters, the big menswear shop in the middle of Knockglen. The shop was often at its busiest on a Saturday, when the farmers came in, or the men who had a half day themselves were marched in by wives to have themselves fitted out by Mr. Hogan, or Mike the old assistant, the tailor who had been there since time immemorial.

Since the days when young Mr. Hogan had bought the business.

Benny was glad that her father would be there for the cake, because that was when she might be given her present. Father had said it was going to be a wonderful surprise. Benny knew that they must have got her the velvet dress with the lacy collar and the pumps to go with it.

She had wanted it since last Christmas when they went to the pantomime in Dublin and she had seen the girls on the stage dancing in pink velvet dresses like this.

They had heard that they sold them in Clery's, and that was only a few minutes from where the bus stopped when it went to Dublin.

Benny was large and square, but she wouldn't look like that in the pink velvet dress. She would be just like the fairy dancers they had seen on the stage, and her feet wouldn't look big and flat in those shoes because they had lovely pointy toes, and little pom-poms on them.

The invitations to the party had been sent out ten days ago.

There would be seven girls from school, farmers daughters mainly from outside lKnockglen. And Maire Carroll, whose mother and father owned the grocery. The Kennedys from the chemist were all boys so they wouldn't be there, and Dr. Johnson's children were all too young so they couldn't come either. Peggy Pine who ran the smart clothes shop said that she might have her young niece staying with her. Benny said she didn't want anyone they didn't know, and it was with some relief that they heard the niece Clodagh didn't want to go amongst strangers either.

Her mother had insisted she invite Eve Malone and that was bad enough.

Eve was the girl who lived in the convent and knew all the nuns' secrets. Some people at school said look how Mother Francis never gives out to Eve, she's the real pet; others said the nuns had to keep her for charity and didn't like her as much as they liked the other girls whose families all contributed something to the upkeep of St. Mary's. Eve was small and dark. She looked like a pixie sometimes, her eyes darting here and there, forever watchful. Benny neither liked Eve nor disliked her. She envied her being so fleet and lithe and able to climb walls. She knew that Eve had her own room in the convent, behind the curtain where no other girl was allowed to step. The girls said it was the room with the round window that faced down the town and that Eve could sit at the window and watch everyone and where they went and who they were with. She never went on holidays anywhere, she stayed with the nuns all the time. Sometimes Mother Francis and Miss Pine from the dress shop would take her on an outing to Dublin, but she had never stayed away a night. Once, when they had gone on a nature walk, Eve had pointed to a small cottage and said that it was her house. It stood in a group of small houses, each separate and surrounded by a little stone wall. They looked down into the big disused quarry. When she was older she would live in it all on her own and there would be no milk allowed in the door, and no clothes hangers.

She would put all her things on the floor because it was hers to do what she liked with. Some of them were half afraid of Eve, so nobody denied the story, but nobody really believed it either. Eve was so strange, she could make up tales and then, when everyone had got interested, she would say, "Fooled you'.

Benny didn't really want her to come to the party, but for once Mother had been insistent.

"That child has no home. She must come to this one when there's a celebration."

"She has a home, Mother, she's got the run of the whole convent.

"That's not the same. She's to come here, Benny, that's my last word."

Eve had written a very neat correct letter saying that she accepted the invitation with pleasure.

"They taught her to write nicely," Benny's father had said approvingly.

"They're determined to make a lady out of her," Mother had said.

No one would explain why it seemed so important.

"When it's her birthday she only gets holy pictures and holy water fonts," Benny reported. "That's all the nuns have, you see.

"God, that would turn a few of them over in their graves up there under the yew trees," Benny's father had said, but again there was no explanation of why.

"Poor Eve, what a start for her," Benny's mother sighed. "I wonder was she born on a Wednesday like Patsy?" Benny was struck by something.

"Why would that matter?"

"She'd be miserable. Wednesday's child is full of woe," Benny parroted.

"Nonsense." Her father was dismissive. "What day was I born on?"

"A Monday, Monday September 28th, 1939," her mother said. "At six o'clock in the evening."

Her parents exchanged glances, looks that seemed to remember a long wait for a first and, as it turned out, an only child.

"Monday's child is fair of face," Benny said, grimacing. "Well, that's true certainly?" her mother said. "You couldn't have a fairer face than Mary Bernadette Hogan, spinster of this parish, almost ten years of age," said her father.

"It's not really fair, I mean I don't have fair hair." Benny struggled to fit in with the saying accurately.

"You have the most beautiful hair I have ever seen." Her mother stroked Benny's long chestnut locks.

"Do I really look nice?" she asked.

They reassured her that she looked beautiful, and she knew they had bought the dress for her. She had been worried for a bit but now she was certain.

At school next day, even the girls who hadn't been asked to the party wished her a happy birthday. "What are you getting?"

"I don't know, it's a surprise."

"Is it a dress?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Ah, go on, tell us."

"I don't know yet, really. I won't have it till the party. "Was it got in Dublin?"

"I think so."

Eve spoke suddenly. "It might have been got here, there's lots of things in Miss Pine's."

"I don't think so." Benny tossed her head. Eve shrugged. "Okay."

The others had gone away.

Benny turned on Eve. "Why did you say it was got in Miss Pine's?

You don't know, you don't know anything."

"I said okay."

"Have you got a frock?"

"Yes, Mother Francis got one at Miss Pine's. I don't think it's new.

I think someone gave it back because there was something wrong with it."

Eve wasn't apologetic. Her eyes flashed, she was ready with the explanation before anyone else could make the accusation.

"You don't know that."

"No, but I think it. Mother Francis wouldn't have the money to buy me a new frock."

Benny looked at her with admiration. She softened in her own attack.

"Well, I don't know either. I think they got me this lovely velvet one. But they mightn't."

"They got you something new anyway. "Yes, but I'd really look great in this," Benny said. "It would make anyone look great."

"Don't think about it too much," Eve warned. "Maybe you're right."

"It's nice of you to ask me. I didn't think you liked me, Eve said.

"Oh, I do." Poor Benny was flustered. "Good. Just as long as you weren't told to, or anything."

"No! Heavens no?" Benny was far too vehement. Eve looked at her with a measured glance. "Right," she said. "See you this afternoon."

They went to school on Saturday mornings, and at 12:30 when the bell went they all poured out of the school gates. All except Eve, who went to the convent kitchen.

"We'll have to feed you up with a good meal before you go," said Sister Margaret.

"We wouldn't want them to think that a girl from St. Mary's would eat all before her when she went out to tea, said Sister Jerome.

They didn't want to spell it out too much for Eve, but it was a big event, the child they had brought up being invited out to a party. The whole community was delighted for her.

As Benny had walked down the town, Mr. Kennedy called her into the chemist.

"A little bird told me it was your birthday," he said. "I'm ten," Benny said.

"I know. I remember when you were born. It was in the Emergency.

Your Mam and Dad were so pleased. They didn't mind at all that you weren't a boy.

"Did they want a boy do you think?"

"Everyone with a business wants a boy. But I don't know, I've three of them, and I don't think one of them will ever run this place for me."

He sighed heavily.

"Well, I suppose I'd better be."

"No, no. I brought you in to give you a present. Here's a pack of barley sugar all for you. "Oh, Mr. Kennedy.." Benny was overwhelmed.

"Not at all. You're a grand girl. I always say to myself, there's that little barrel Benny Hogan coming along.

A bit of the sunlight went out of the barley sugar. Moodily Benny tore the corner off the packet and began to eat a sweet. Dessie Burns, whose hardware shop was next door to Kennedy's, gave her a shout of approval.

"That's it, Benny, like myself, always head in the nosebag. How are you in yourself these days?"

"I'm ten today, Mr. Burns.

"Jaysus isn't that great, if you were six years older I'd take you into Shea's and put you up on my knee and buy you a gin and it."

"Thank you, Mr. Burns." She looked at him fearfully. "What's your father doing over there? Don't tell me he's after hiring new staff.

Half the country taking the emigrant ship and Eddie Hogan decides to expand."

Dessie Burns had small piggy eyes. He looked across the street towards Hogan's Gentleman's Outfitters with huge unconcealed interest. Her father was shaking hands with a man - or a boy, it was hard to see. He looked about seventeen, Benny thought, thin and pale. He had a suitcase in his hand. He was looking up at the sign over the door.

"I don't know anything about it, Mr. Burns," she said. "Good girl, keep your mind out of business, let me tell you it's a heart scald. If I were a woman I wouldn't have the slightest interest in it either. I'd just get myself a fine eejit of a man to keep me in barley sugar all day."

Benny went on down the street, past the empty shop which people said that a real Italian from Italy was going to open up. She passed the cobbler's shop where Paccy Moore and his sister Bee waved out to her.

Paccy had a twisted leg. He didn't go to Mass, but it was said that the priests came down to him once a month and heard his confession and gave him Holy Communion. Benny had heard that they had sent to Dublin and maybe even Rome for him to have a dispensation, and it wasn't a question of his being a sinner or outside the Church or anything. And then she was home to Lisbeg. The new dog which was half collie, half sheepdog, sat sleepily on the step loving the September sunshine.

Through the window she could see the table set for the party.

Patsy had cleaned the brasses specially, and Mother had tidied up the front garden. Benny swallowed the barley sugar rather than be accused of eating sweets in the public view, and let herself in the back.

"Not a word out of that dog to let me know you were coming," her mother said crossly.

"He shouldn't bark at me, I'm family," Benny defended him.

"The day Shep barks for anything except his own amusement there'll be white blackbirds. Tell me did you have a nice day at school, did they make a fuss of you?"

"They did, Mother."

"That's good. Well they won't know you when they see you this afternoon."

Benny's heart soared. "Will I be getting dressed, like in anything new, before the party?"

"I think we'll have you looking like the bee's knees before they come in."

"Will I put it on now?"

"Why not?" Benny's mother seemed excited about seeing the new outfit herself. "I'll just lay it out for you above. Come up and give yourself a bit of a wash and we'll put it on.

Benny stood patiently in the big bathroom while the back of her neck was washed. It wouldn't be long now.

Then she was led into her bedroom. "Close your eyes," said Mother.

When Benny opened them she saw on the bed a thick navy skirt, a Fair Isle jumper in navy and red. A big sturdy pair of navy shoes lay in their box and chunky white socks folded nice and neatly beside them.

Peeping out of tissue paper was a small red shoulder bag.

"It's an entire outfit," cried Mother. "Dressed from head to foot by Peggy Pine.." Mother stood back to see the effect of the gift. Benny was wordless. No velvet dress, no lovely soft crushed velvet that you could stroke, with its beautiful lacy trim. Only horrible harsh rough things like horse hair. Nothing in a misty pink, but instead good plain sensible colours. And the shoes! Where were the pumps with the pointed toes?

Benny bit her lip and willed the tears back into her eyes.

"Well, what do you think?" Her mother was beaming proudly. "Your father said you must have the handbag and the shoes as well, it would make it a real outfit. He said that going into double figures must be marked."

"It's lovely," Benny muttered.

"Isn't the jumper perfect? I'd been asking Peggy to get something like that for ages. I said I didn't want anything shoddy ..

something strong that would stand up to a bit of rough and tumble."

"It's gorgeous," Benny said. "Feel it," her mother urged.

She didn't want to. Not while she still had the velvet feel in her mind. "I'll put it on myself, Mother, then I'll come and show you," she said.

She was holding on by a thread.

Fortunately, Annabel Hogan needed to go and supervise the shaking of hundreds and thousands on the trifle. She was just heading off downstairs when the telephone rang. "That'll be your father." She sounded pleased and her step was quicker on the stair.

Through her sobs which she choked into the pillow, Benny heard snatches of the conversation.

"She loved it, Eddie, you know I think it was almost too much for her, she couldn't seem to take it all in, so many things, a bag and shoes, and socks, on top of everything. A child of that age isn't used to getting all that much at once. No, not yet, she's putting it on.

It'll look fine on her.."

Slowly Benny got off her bed and went over to the mirror on the wardrobe to see if her face looked as red and tearstained as she feared. She saw the chunky figure of a child in vest and knickers, neck red from scrubbing, eyes red from weeping. She was not a person that anyone would ever dream of putting in a pink velvet dress and little pumps with pointed toes. For no reason at all she remembered Eve Malone. She remembered her small earnest face warning her not to think about the dress from Dublin too much.

Perhaps Eve knew all the time, maybe she had been in the shop when Mother was buying all this .. all this horrible stuff. How awful that Eve knew before she did. And yet Eve had never had anything new, she knew that whatever dress she got for today would be a reject. She remembered the way Eve had said "They got you something new anyway'.

She would never let them guess how disappointed she was. Never.

The rest of the day wasn't very clear to Benny because of the heavy cloud of disappointment that seemed to hang over the whole proceedings.

For her anyway. She remembered making the right sounds and moving like a puppet as the party began. Maire Carroll arrived wearing a proper party dress. It had an underskirt that rustled. It had come from America in a parcel.

There were games with a prize for everyone. Benny's mother had bought cones of sweets in Birdie Mac's shop, each one wrapped in different-coloured paper. They were all getting noisy but the cake had to be delayed until Mr. Hogan returned from the shop.

They heard the angelus ringing. The deep sound of the bells rolled through Knockglen twice a day, at noon and at six in the evening, great timekeepers as much as reminders to pray. But there was no sign of Benny's father.

"I hope he wasn't delayed rameishing on with some customer today of all days," Benny heard her mother say to Patsy.

"Not at all, Mam. He must be on his way. Shep got up and gave himself a good stretch. It's always a sign that the master is heading home to us."

And indeed he was. Half a minute later Benny's father came in full of anxiety.

"I haven't missed it, we're not too late?" He was patted down and given a cup of tea and a sausage roll to bolster him up while the children were gathered and the room darkened in anticipation.

Benny tried not to feel the rough wool of the jumper at her neck.

She tried to smile a real smile at her father, who had run down the town to be here for the big moment.

"Do you like your outfit .. your first entire outfit?" he called over to her.

"It's lovely, Father, lovely. Do you see I'm wearing it all." The other children in Knockglen used to giggle at Benny for saying "Father'. They used to call their fathers Daddy or Da. But by now they were used to it. It was part of the way things were. Benny was the only one they knew without brothers and sisters, most of them had to share a Mam and a Dad with five or six others. An only child was a rare occurrence. In fact they didn't know any, except for Benny. And Eve Malone of course. But that was different. She had no family at all.

Eve was standing near Benny as the cake came in. "Imagine that's all for you," she whispered in awe. Eve wore a dress that was several sizes too big for her. Sister Imelda, the only nun in the convent who was good with the needle, had been in her sick bed so a very poor job had been done on taking up the hem. The rest of it hung around her like a curtain.

The only thing in its favour was that it was red and obviously new.

There was no way that it could be admired or praised, but Eve Malone seemed to have risen above this. Something about the way she stood in the large unwieldy garment gave Benny courage.

At least her horrible outfit fitted her, and though it was far from being a party dress, let alone the dress of her dreams, it was reasonable, unlike Eve's. She put her shoulders back and smiled suddenly at the smaller girl.

"I'll give you some of the cake to take back if there's any left over," she said.

"Thanks. Mother Francis loves a slice of cake," Eve said. Then it was there, the blurry light of the candles and the singing Happy Birthday and the big whoosh .. and the clapping, and when the curtains were open again Benny saw the thin young man that her father had been shaking hands with. He was far too old for the party. They must have brought him back to tea with the grown-ups who would come later. He was very thin and pale, and he had a cold hard stare in his eyes.

"Who was he?" Eve asked Benny on Monday.

"He's the new assistant come to work with my father in the shop."

"He's awful, isn't he?"

They were friends now, sitting on a schoolyard wall together at break.

"Yes, he is. There's something wrong with his eyes, I think."

"What's his name?" Eve asked.

"Sean. Sean Walsh. He's going to live in the shop."

"Ugh?" said Eve. "Will he go to your house for meals?"

"No, that's the great thing. He won't. Mother asked him to come to Sunday lunch and he made some awful speech about not assuming, or something."

"Presuming."

"Yes, well whatever it is he's not going to do it and it seems to mean coming to meals. He'll fend for himself he said."

"Good."

Eve approved of that. Benny spoke hesitantly. "Mother said.."

"Yes?"

"If you'd like to come any time.. that would be .. It would be all right."

Benny spoke gruffly as if fearing the invitation would be spurned.

"Oh, I'd like that," Eve said.

"Like to tea on an ordinary day, or maybe midday dinner on a Saturday or Sunday."

"I'd love Sunday. It's a bit quiet here on Sundays, a lot of praying, you see."

"Right, I'll tell her." Benny's brow had cleared. "Oh, there is one thing though.."

"What is it?" Benny didn't like the intense look on Eve's face.

"I won't be able to ask you back. Where they eat and I eat, it's beyond the curtain, you see.

"That doesn't matter at all." Benny was relieved that this was the only obstacle.

"Of course, when I'm grown up and have my own place, you know, my cottage, I could ask you there," Eve said earnestly.

"Is it really your cottage?"

"I told everyone." Eve was belligerent. "I thought it might only be a pretend cottage," Benny said apologetically.

"How could it be pretend? It's mine. I was born there. It belonged to my mother and my father. They're both dead, it's mine."

"Why can't you go there now?"

"I don't know. They think I'm too young to live on my own.

"Well, of course you're too young to live on your own," Benny said.

"But to visit?"

"Mother Francis said it was sort of serious, my own place, my inheritance she calls it. She says I shouldn't be treating it as a doll's house, a playing place when I'm young.

They thought about it for a while. "Maybe she's right," Benny said grudgingly. "She could be."

"Have you looked in the windows?"

"Yes."

"Nobody's gone and messed it all up on you?"

"No, nobody goes there at all."

"Why's that? It's got a lovely view down over the quarry."

"They're afraid to go there. People died there."

"People die everywhere." Benny shrugged. This pleased Eve. "That's true. I hadn't thought of that."

"So who died in the cottage?"

"My mother. And then a bit later my father."

"Oh."

Benny didn't know what to say. This was the first time Eve had ever talked about her life. Usually she flashed back with a Mind Your Own Business, if anyone asked her a question.

"But they're not in the cottage, they're in Heaven now, Benny said eventually.

"Yes, of course.

There seemed to be another impasse. "I'd love to go and look through the window with you some time," Benny offered.

Eve was about to reply when Maire Carroll came by. "That was a nice party, Benny," she said.

"I didn't know it was meant to be fancy dress though."

"What do you mean?" Benny asked.

"Well, Eve was in fancy dress, weren't you, Eve? I mean that big red thing, that wasn't meant to be ordinary clothes, was it?"

Eve's face tightened into that hard look that she used to have before.

Benny hated to see the expression come back.

"I thought it was quite funny myself," Maire said with a little laugh.

"We all did when we were coming home."

Benny looked around the schoolyard. Mother Francis was looking the other way.

With all her strength Benny Hogan launched herself off the wall down on Maire Carroll. The girl fell over, winded.

"Are you all right, Maire?" Benny asked in a falsely sympathetic tone.

Mother Francis came running, her habit streaming behind her.

"What happened, child?" She was struggling to get Maire's breath back, and raise her to her feet.

"Benny pushed me.." Maire gasped. "Mother, I'm sorry, I'm so clumsy, I was just getting off the wall."

"All right, all right, no bones broken. Get her a stool." Mother Francis dealt with the panting Maire.

"She did it purposely."

"Shush, shush, Maire. Here's a little stool for you, sit down now.

Maire was crying. "Mother, she just jumped down from the wall on me like a ton of bricks .. I was only saying

"Maire was telling me how much she liked the party, Mother. I'm so sorry," Benny said.

"Yes, well Benny, try to be more careful. Don't throw yourself around so much. Now, Maire, enough of this whining. It's not a bit nice.

Benny has said she was sorry. You know it was an accident. Come along now and be a big girl."

"I'd never want to be as big a girl as Benny Hogan. No one would."

Mother Francis was cross now. "That's quite enough, Maire Carroll.

Quite enough. Take that stool and go inside to the cloakroom and sit there until you're called by me to come away from it."

Mother Francis swept away. And as they all knew she would, she rang the bell for the end of break.

Eve looked at Benny. For a moment she said nothing, she just swallowed as if there were a lump in her throat.

Benny was equally at a loss, she just shrugged and spread out her hands helplessly.

Suddenly Eve grasped her hand. "Some day, when I'm big and strong, I'll knock someone down for you," she said. "I mean it, I really will."

"Tell me about Eve's mother and father," Benny asked that night.

"Ah, that's all long ago now," her father said. "But I don't know it.

I wasn't there."

"No point in raking over all that."

"She's my friend. I want to know about her."

"She used not to be your friend. I had to plead with you to let her come to the party," Mother said. "No, that's not the way it was."

Benny couldn't believe now that this was so.

"I'm glad that child's coming here to dinner on Sunday, Eddie Hogan said. "I wish we could persuade that young skinnymalinks above in the shop to come too, but he's determined not to trespass, as he calls it."

Benny was pleased to hear that. "Is he working out well, Eddie?"

"The best you ever saw, love. We'll be blessed with him, I tell you.

He's so eager to learn he almost quivers like Shep there, he repeats everything over and over again, as if he's learning it off by heart."

"Does Mike like him?" Benny's mother wanted to know.

"Ah, you know Mike, he likes nobody."

"What does he object to?"

"The way Sean keeps the books. God, it's simple to understand, a child could do it, but old Mike has to put up a resistance to everything.

Mike says he knows everyone's measurements, and what they paid and what they owed. He thinks it's like a kind of insult to his powers to write things down."

"Couldn't you keep the books, Mother?" Benny suggested suddenly.

"No, no, I'd not be able to."

"But if it's as simple as Father says "She'd well be able to but your mother has to be here this is our home, she runs it for you and me, Benny.

"Patsy could run it. Then you wouldn't have to pay Sean.

"Nonsense, Benny," her father said.

But she wasn't to be stopped. "Why not? Mike would like Mother being in there. Mike loves Mother, and it would b something for Mother to do all day."

They both laughed.

"Isn't it great to be a child?" said her father. "To think that the day isn't full already," agreed her mother.

Benny knew very well that her mother's day was far from full. She thought that it might be nice for Mother to be involved in the shop, but obviously they weren't going to listen to her. "How did Eve's parents die?" she asked. "It's not a thing to be talking about."

"Why? Were they murdered?"

"Of course not." Her mother sounded impatient. "Why then..

"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."

"Mass on a weekday?"

"Every day. At seven. "No?"

"It's quite nice. The nuns sing beautifully, it's nice and peaceful.

Really I don't mind it. Father Ross comes in specially and he gets a lovely breakfast in the parlour. He says the other priests envy him."

"I didn't know that .. every day."

"You won't tell anyone will you?"

"No. Is it a secret?"

"Not a bit, it's just that I don't tell anything, you see, and the Community likes that, they feel I'm part of them. I didn't have a friend before. There wasn't anyone to tell." Benny smiled from ear to ear. "What night will you come? Wednesday night?"

"I don't know Eve You don't have any smart pyjamas or anything to be going to stay with people. You don't have a good sponge bag, things that people who go visiting need."

"My pyjamas are fine, Mother."

"You could iron them, certainly, and you have a dressing gown."

She seemed to be faltering. "A sponge bag though?"

"Could Sister Imelda make one for me? I'll do extra clearing up for her."

"And what time will you come back?"

"I'll be at my prie-dieu in time for Mass, Mother."

"You won't want to get up that early if you're visiting people."

Mother Francis's face was soft.

"That's what I'd want, Mother."

It was a great evening. They played rummy with Patsy in the kitchen for a long time because Mother and Father went across the road to Dr. and Mrs. Johnson's house. It was a supper to celebrate the christening of their new baby.

Eve asked Patsy all about the orphanage, and Patsy told more details than she had ever told Benny. She explained how they used to steal food, and how hard it was when she came to the Hogans, her first job, to realise she didn't have to take any stray biscuit or a fistful of sugar and put it into her apron. In bed that night Benny said in wonder, "I don't know why Patsy told us all that. Only the other day she was saying to me that people with no parents didn't like being asked questions."

"Ah, it's different with me," Eve said. "I'm in the same boat."

"No you're not?" Benny was indignant. "Patsy had nothing. She had to work in that awful place and get nits and steal and be beaten for wetting the bed. She had to leave there at fifteen and come here.

It's not a bit like you.

"No. We are the same, she has no family, I don't. She didn't have a home like you do."

"Is that why you told her more than you told me?" Benny had been even more astounded at the questions Patsy felt free to ask. Did Eve hate the Westwards who were so rich for not taking her into the big house?

Eve didn't, they couldn't, they were Protestants, she explained. Lots more things Benny wouldn't have dared to ask.

"You don't ask things like that," Eve said simply. "I'd be afraid of upsetting you," Benny said. "You couldn't upset a friend," Eve said.

Benny and Eve, who had lived all their lives in the same village, were each amazed at the things the other didn't know about Knockglen.

Benny didnt know that the three priests who lived in the presbytery had been given the game of Scrabble, which they played every night, and sometimes rang the convent to ask Mother Francis questions like how you spelt "quixotic' because Father O'Brien was going to get a triple word score.

Eve hadn't known that Mr. Burns in the hardware shop was inclined to take to the drink or that Dr. Johnson had a very bad temper and was heard shouting about God never putting a mouth into the world that he didn't feed. Dr. Johnson was of the view that there were a lot of mouths, especially in the families with thirteen children, that God had forgotten to feed.

Benny didn't know that Peggy Pine was an old friend of Mother Francis, that they had been girls years ago and that when she came to the convent she called Mother Francis Bunty.

Eve hadn't known that Birdie Mac who ran the sweet shop had a man from Ballylee who had been calling for fifteen years, but she wouldn't leave her old mother and the man from Ballylee wouldn't come to Knockglen.

It made the town far more interesting to both of them to have such insights. Particularly because they knew these were dark secrets not to be shared with anyone. They pooled their knowledge on how children were born, and hadn't any new enlightenments to offer. They both knew that they came out like kittens, they didn't know how they got in.

"It's got something to do with lying down one beside the other, when you're married," Eve said. "It couldn't happen if you weren't married.

Suppose you fell down beside someone like Dessie Burns." Benny was worried.

"No, you have to be married." Eve knew that for certain. "And how would it get in?" It was a mystery. "It could be your Little Mary," Benny said thoughtfully. "What's your Little Mary?"

"The bit in the middle of your tummy."

"Oh, your tummy button is what Mother Francis calls it."

"That must be it," Benny cried triumphantly. "If they all have different names for it, that must be the secret.

They practised hard at being reliable. If either said she would be home at six o'clock then five minutes before the hour struck and the angelus rang she would be back in place. As Eve had anticipated, it did win them much more freedom. They didn't allow their hysterical laughing fits to be seen in public. They pressed their noses against the window of Healy's Hotel. They didn't like Mrs. Healy. She was very superior. She walked as if she were a queen. She always seemed to look down on children.

Benny heard from Patsy that the Healys had been up to Dublin to look for a child to adopt but they hadn't got one because Mr. Healy had a weak chest.

"Just as well," Eve had said unsympathetically. "They'd be terrible for anyone as a mother and father." She spoke in innocence of the fact that Knockglen had once thought that she herself might be the ideal child for them.

Mr. Healy was much older than his wife. It was whispered, Patsy said, that he couldn't cut the mustard. Eve and Benny spent long hours trying to work out what this could mean. Mustard came in a small tin and you mixed it with water. How did you cut it? Why should you cut it: Mrs. Healy looked a hundred but apparently she was twenty-seven.

She had married at seventeen and was busy throwing all her efforts into the hotel since there were no children.

Together they explored places where they had never gone alone. To Flood's, the butchers, hoping they might see the animals being killed.

"We don't really want to see them being killed do we?" Benny asked fearfully.

"No, but we'd like to be there at the beginning so that we could if we want to, then run away," Eve explained. Mr. Flood wouldn't let them near his yard so the matter didn't arise.

They stood and watched the Italian from Italy come and start up his fish and chip shop.

"Weel you leetle girls come here every day and buy my feesh?" he asked hopefully of the two earnest children, one big, one small, who stood watching his every move. "No, I don't think we'll be allowed," Eve said sadly. "Why is that?"

"It would be called throwing away good money," Benny said.

"And talking to foreign men," Eve explained to clinch matters.

"My seester is married to a Dublin man," Mario explained.

"We'll let people know," Eve said solemnly.

Sometimes they went to the harness maker. A very handsome man on a horse came one day to enquire about a bridle that should have been ready, but wasn't. Dekko Moore was a cousin of Paccy Moore's in the shoe shop. He was very apologetic, and looked as if he might be taken away and hanged for the delay. The man turned his horse swiftly. "All right. Will you bring it up to the house tomorrow, instead?" he shouted. "Indeed I will sir, thank you sir. I'm very sorry sir.

Indeed Sir." Dekko Moore sounded like a villain who had been unmasked in a pantomime.

"Lord, who was that, I wonder?" Benny was amazed. Dekko was almost dead with relief at how lightly he had escaped.

"That was Mr. Simon Westward," Dekko said, mopping his brow.

"I thought it must be," Eve said grimly.

Sometimes they went into Hogan's Gentleman's Outfitters. Father always made a huge fuss of them. So did old Mike, and anyone else who happened to be in the shop. "Will you work here when you're old?" Eve had whispered.

"I don't think so. It'll `have to be a boy, won't it?"

"I don't see why," Eve had said.

"Well, measuring men, putting tape measures round their waists, and all."

They giggled.

"But you're the boss's daughter, you wouldn't be doing that.

You'd just be coming in shouting at people, like Mrs. Healy does over in the hotel."

"Um." Benny was doubtful. "Wouldn't I need to know what to shout about?"

"You could learn. Otherwise Droopy Drawers will take over.

That's what they called Sean Walsh, who seemed to have become paler thinner and harder of the eye since his arrival.

"No, he won't, surely?"

"You could marry him."

"Ugh. Ugh. Ugh."

"And have lots of children by putting your belly button beside his."

"Oh, Eve, I'd hate that. I think I'll be a nun. "I think I will too.

It would be much easier. You can go any day you like, lucky old thing.

I have to wait until I'm twenty-one." Eve was disconsolate.

"Maybe she'd let you enter with me, if she knew it was a true vocation." Benny was hopeful. Her father had run out of the shop and now he was back with two lollipops. He handed them one each proudly.

"We're honoured to have you ladies in our humble premises," he said, so that everyone could hear him.

Soon everyone in Knockglen thought of them as a pair. The big stocky figure of Benny Hogan in her strong shoes and tightly buttoned sensible coat, the waif-like Eve in the clothes that were always too long and streelish on her. Together they watched the setting up of the town's first fish and chip shop, they saw the decline of Mr. Healy in the hotel and stood side by side on the day that he was taken to the sanatorium.

Together they were unconquerable. There was never an ill-considered remark made about either of them.

When Birdie Mac in the sweet shop was unwise enough to say to Benny that those slabs of toffee were doing her no good at all, Eve's small face flashed in a fury.

"If you worry so much about things, Miss Mac, then why do you sell them at all?" she asked in tones that knew there could be no answer.

When Maire Carroll's mother said thoughtfully to Eve, "Do you know I always ask myself why a sensible woman like Mother Francis would let you out on the street looking like Little Orphan Annie," Benny's brow darkened.

"I'll tell Mother Francis you wanted to know," Benny had said quickly.

"Mother Francis says we should have enquiring minds, that everyone should ask."

Before Mrs. Carroll could stop her Benny had galloped out of the shop and up the road towards the convent.

"Oh, Mam, you've done it now," Maire Carroll moaned. "Mother Francis will be down on us like a ton of bricks."

And she was. The full fiery rage of the nun was something that Mrs. Carroll had not expected and never wanted to know again. None of these things upset either Eve or Benny in the slightest. It was easy to cope with Knockglen when you had a friend.

CHAPTER 2

1957

There hadn't been many teddy boys in Knockglen, in fact no one could ever remember having seen one except on visits to Dublin where there were groups of them hanging round corners. Benny and Eve were in the window of Healy's Hotel practising having cups of coffee so that they would look well accustomed to it when they got to the Dublin coffee houses.

They saw him pass by, jaunty and confident in his drainpipe trousers, his long jacket with velvet cuffs and collar. His legs looked like spider legs and his shoes seemed enormous. He seemed oblivious of the stares of the whole town. Only when he saw the two girls actually standing up to peer at him past the curtains of Healy's window did he show any reaction. He gave them a huge grin and blew them a kiss.

Confused and annoyed they sat down hastily. It was one thing to look, another to call attention to themselves. Making a show of yourself was high on the list of sins in Knockglen. Benny knew this very well.

Anyone could have been looking out the window seeing them being cheap with the teddy boy. Her father maybe, with the tape around his neck, awful sleeveen Sean Walsh, who never said a word without thinking carefully of the possible effect it might have. He could have been looking. Or old Mike, who had called her father Mr. Eddie for years, and saw no reason to change.

And indeed everyone in Knockglen knew Eve as well. It had long been the nuns' ambition that Eve Malone be thought of as a lady.

She had even joined in the game herself. Eve didn't want it to get back to the convent that she was trick acting in Healy's Hotel and ogling teddy boys out of the window. While other girls with real mothers resisted all the attempts to gentrify themselves, Eve and Mother Francis studied books on etiquette and looked at magazines to see how nice people dressed, and to pick up any hints on behaviour.

"I don't want you to put on an artificial accent," Mother Francis had warned, "nor do I want you sticking out your little finger when you're drinking tea."

"Who are we trying to impress?" Eve had asked once. "No, look at it the other way. It's who you're trying not to let down. We were told we were mad and we couldn't rear you. It's a bit of human, non-saintly desire to be able to say "I told you so" to the begrudgers." Eve had understood that immediately. And there was always hope that the Westward family would see her one day as an elegant lady and be sorry they hadn't kept in touch with the child who was after all their own flesh and blood.

Mrs. Healy approached them. A widow now, formidable as she had always been, she managed to exude disapproval at fifty yards. She could not find any reason why Benny Hogan from the shop across the road and Eve Malone from the convent up the town should not sit and drink coffee in her bay window, but somehow she would have preferred to keep the space for wealthier and more important matrons of Knockglen.

She sailed towards the window. "I'll adjust the curtains they seem to have got all rucked up," she said. Eve and Benny exchanged glances.

There was nothing wrong with the heavy net curtains of Healy's Hotel.

They were as they always were: thick enough to conceal those within while giving a perfect view out.

"Well, isn't that a terrible poor ibex!" exclaimed Mrs. Healy, having identified easily what the girls had been looking at.

"I suppose it's only his clothes really," Eve said in a sanctimonious tone. "Mother Francis always says it's a pity to judge people by the garments they wear."

"Very admirable of her," snapped Mrs. Healy, "but of course she makes sure that the garments of all you pupils are in order.

Mother Francis is always the first to judge you girls by the uniforms you wear.

"Not any more, Mrs. Healy," Benny said happily. "I dyed my grey school skirt dark red."

"And I dyed mine black, and my grey jumper purple," Eve said.

"Very colourful." Mrs. Healy moved away like a ship under full sail.

"She can't bear us being grown up," Eve hissed. "She wants to tell us to sit up straight and not to put our fingers on the nice furniture."

"She knows we don't feel grown up," Benny said gloom ily. "And if awful Mrs. Healy knows then everyone in Dublin will know."

It was a problem. Mr. Flood the butcher had looked at them very strangely as they walked up the street. His eyes seemed to burn through them in disapproval. If people like that could see their awkwardness, they were indeed in a bad way.

"We should have a rehearsal - you know, go up for a couple of days ahead of everyone else so we won't look like eejits." Eve was hopeful.

"It's hard enough to get up there when we have to. There's no point in asking to go up there in order to waltz around a bit.

Can you see them agreeing to that for me at home?"

"We wouldn't call it waltzing around," Eve said. "We'd call it something else."

"Like what?"

Eve thought hard. "In your case, getting books listed or timetables there's endless things you could say." Her voice sounded suddenly small and sad.

For the first time Benny realised properly that they were going to live separate lives though in the same city. Best friends from the age of ten, now they would go down different roads.

Benny was going to be able to go to University College, Dublin, to study for a BA degree because her parents had saved to pay for her.

There was no money in St. Mary's convent to send Eve Malone to university. Mother Francis had strained the convent's finances already to provide secondary education for the daughter of Jack Malone and sarah Westward. Now she would be sent to a convent of the same order in Dublin where she would do a secretarial course.

Her tuition fees would be waived in exchange for some light housework.

"I wish to God you were coming to college, too," Benny said suddenly.

"I know. Don't say it like that, don't let your voice get drippy or I'll get upset." Eve spoke sharply, but without harshness.

"Everyone keeps saying that it's great, we have each other, but I'd see more of you if you were still in

Knockglen," Benny complained. "Your place is miles across the city, and I have to come home on the bus every night, so there'll be no meeting in the evenings."

"I don't think there's much of the night life planned for me either," Eve said doubtfully. "A few miles of convent floor to polish, a few million sheets to hem. A couple of tons of potatoes to peel."

"They won't make you do that!" Benny was horrified. "Who knows what light housework means? One nun's light could be another nun's penal servitude."

"You'll need to know in advance, won't you?" Benny was distressed for her friend.

"I'm not in much of a position to negotiate," Eve said.

"But they never asked you to do anything like that here." Benny nodded her head up in the direction of the convent at the end of the town.

"But that's different. This is my home," Eve said simply.

"I mean, this is where I live, where I'll always live."

"You'll be able to get a flat and all when you get a job." Benny sounded wistful. She didn't think she would ever see freedom.

"Oh yes, I'm sure I'll get a flat, but I'll come back to St. Mary's, like other people come home from flats on holidays," Eve said.

Eve was always so definite, Benny thought with admiration. So small and determined with her short dark hair and white elfin face. No one had ever dared to say that there was anything different or even unusual about Eve living in the convent, sharing her life with the Community.

She was never asked about what life was like beyond the curtain where the nuns went, and she never told. The girls also knew that no tales would be told of their own doings. Eve Malone was nobody's spy.

Benny didn't know how she was going to manage without her. Eve had been there for as long as she remembered to help her fight her battles.

To deal with the jibes of those who called her Big Ben. Eve had made short work of any one who took advantage of Benny's gentle ways. They had been a team for years: the tiny wiry Eve with her restless eyes never settling long on anything or anyone; the big handsome Benny, with her green eyes and chestnut-brown hair, tied back with a bow always, a big soft good-quality bow a bit like Benny herself.

If there had only been some way they could have gone in the doors of University College together and come home on the bus each night, or better still got a flat together, life would have been perfect. But Benny had not grown up expecting life to be totally perfect. Surely it was enough to have got as much as she had.

Annabel Hogan was wondering whether to change the main meal of the day to the evening. There were a lot of arguments for this and a lot against.

Eddie was used to his dinner in the middle of the day. He walked back from the shop and the plate of meat and potatoes was put in front of him with a regularity that would have pleased an army officer. As soon as Shep started his languid stroll out to meet the master at the turn of the road, Patsy began to heat the plates. Mr. Hogan would wash his hands in the downstairs cloakroom and always profess pleasure at the lamb chops, the bacon and cabbage, or the plate of cod and parsley sauce on a Friday.

Wouldn't it be a poor thing to have the man close his shop and walk back for a kind of half-hearted snack. Maybe it might even affect his work and he wouldn't be able to concentrate in the afternoon.

But then think of Benny coming back from Dublin after a day in the university: wouldn't it be better if they saved the main meal for her return?

Neither husband nor daughter had been any help. They both said it didn't matter. As usual the burden of the whole house fell on herself and Patsy.

The meat tea was probably the answer. A big slice of ham, or grilled bacon, or a few sausages, and they could put a few extra on Benny's plate in case she felt the need of it. Annabel could hardly believe that she had a daughter about to go to university.

Not that she wasn't old enough - she was well old enough to have seen a family through university. She had married late, at a time she had almost given up hope of finding a husband. She had given birth at a time when she thought miscarriages would be all she ever knew.

Annabel Hogan walked around her house: there was always some little thing to be done. Patsy was in the big, warm kitchen, the table covered with flour and crockery, but it would all be swept away and scrubbed by meal time.

Lisbeg was not a big house, but there was plenty to do in it.

There were three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. The master bedroom looked out over one side of the front door and Benny's bedroom was on the other. At the back of the house, the dark spare room and the big, old-fashioned bathroom with its noisy pipes and its huge woodsurrounded bath.

Downstairs if you came in the front door (which people rarely did) you would find a large room on each side. They were hardly ever used. The Hogans lived in the back of the house, in the big shabby breakfast room that opened off the kitchen. There was hardly ever a need to light a fire in the breakfast room because the great heat of the range came through. There was a big double door kept permanently open between the two rooms, and it was as comfortable a place as you could imagine.

They rarely had visitors, and if ever anyone was expected the front drawing room in its pale greens and pinks with damp spots over the wall could be aired and dusted. But in the main, the breakfast room was their home. It had three big red plush armchairs, and the table against the wall had three dining chairs with plush seats as well. A huge radio stood on the big sideboard, and shelves of ornaments, and good china and old books were fixed precariously to the wall.

Now that young Eve had becom~such a regular guest in the household, a fourth chair had been found, a cane chair rescued from one of the sheds. Patsy had tied a nice red cushion to it.

Patsy herself slept in a small room beyond the kitchen.

It was dark and had a tiny window. Patsy had always told Mrs. Hogan that it was like being dead and going to Heaven to have a room of your own. She had always had to share with at least two other people until the day she came to Lisbeg.

When Patsy had walked up the short avenue and looked at the square house with its creeper and its shabby garden it seemed to her like a house on the front of a calendar. Her small room looked out on the back yard, and she had a window box. Things didn't grow very well in it because it was in shadow and Patsy wasn't much of a gardener, but it was her own, and nobody ever touched it, any more than they ever went into her room.

Patsy was as excited as any of them about Benny going to university.

Every year on her annual holidays, Patsy paid a dutiful visit of one half day to the orphanage which had reared her, and then she went to stay with a friend who had married in Dublin. She had asked her friend to take her to see where Benny would be a student. She had stood outside the huge pillars of University College, Dublin, and looked at it all with satisfaction. Now she would know where Benny went and studied; she would know the look of the place. And indeed it was a big step for Benny, Annabel Hogan realised. No more safe trotting to and fro from the convent. It was life in the big city with several thousand other students from all kinds of places, with different ways and no one to force you to study like Mother Francis. It was not surprising that Benny had been as excited as a hen walking on hot coals all summer long, never able to keep still, always jumping up with some further excitement.

It was a relief to know that she was with Eve Malone for the morning, those two could talk until the cows came home. Annabel wished that there had been some way young Eve could have been sent to university too. It would have made things more fair somehow. But things rarely turned out nice and neatly in this life. Annabel had said as much to Father Ross the last time he had come to tea, and Father Ross had looked at her sternly over his glasses, saying that if we all understood the way the Universe was run what would there be left for God to tell us on the Last Day.

To herself Annabel thought that it wouldn't interfere with the running of the University if enough money could be found somewhere for the university fees and accommodation for Eve Malone, the child who had no home except the big bleak convent with the heavy iron gates.

Mother Francis had asked God very often for a way to send Eve Malone to university but so far God had not seen fit to show her one. Mother Francis knew it must be part of his divine plan, but at times she wondered had she prayed hard enough, had she examined every possibility. She had certainly been up every road as far as the Order was concerned. She had written to the Mother General, she had put Eve's case as persuasively as she could. The girl's father, Jack Malone, had worked all his life for the convent as handyman and gardener.

Jack had married the daughter of the Westward family, as unlikely a match as was ever known in the country, but necessary since a child was on the way. There had been no problem in having Eve brought up as a Catholic, since the Westwards had never wanted to know about her at all, and didn't care what faith she was raised in just as long as they never had to hear her name.

Mother General's view was that enough had been done for the child already. To provide a university education for her might mark her out as a favoured pupil. Would not others from needy backgrounds expect the same?

It had not stopped there. Mother Francis had taken the bus to their convent in Dublin and spoken to the very difficult Mother Clare who held sway there. With so many young nuns starting university education in the autumn and lodging in the Dublin convent was there not a chance that Eve might join them? The girl would be happy to do housework to earn her place among the students.

Mother Clare wouldn't even consider it. What an extraordinary suggestion, to put forward a girl - a charity child who was not a Sister, a novice, a postulant, nor anyone with the remotest intention of becoming a nun - and raise her up above the many Sisters in the Community who were all hoping and praying for a chance of higher education .. what would they feel if a girl who had already been pampered, it seemed, by the convent in Knockglen, were put in to study, over their heads? It would be an outrage.

And perhaps it was outrageous of her, Mother Francis thought sometimes.

It was just that she loved Eve as much as any mother could love a daughter. Mother Francis the celibate nun who had never thought she could know the joy of seeing a child grow up in her care had loved Eve in a way that might well have made her blind to the feelings and sensitivities of other people. Mother General and Mother Clare were indeed right, it would have been preferential treatment to have financed Eve's university education from the convent funds.

But when all was said and done, Mother Francis wished she could be sure that they would treat Eve well up in Mother Clare's convent. St. Mary's had always been a home to Eve; the fear was that she might find the sister house in Dublin more like an institution, and worse still she might find her own role there not that of an honoured daughter, but more that of a maid.

When Benny and Eve came out of Healy's Hotel, they saw Sean Walsh watching them from the doorway of Hogan's across the street.

"If you keep talking to me he might think we haven't seen him," Benny hissed out of the corner of her mouth. "Not a chance. Look at him standing there with his thumbs in behind his:braces, copying the way your father stands."

Eve knew only too well Sean Walsh's expectations: he had a long-term career plan, to marry the daughter of the house, the heir to Hogan's Gentleman's Outfitters, and inherit the lot.

They had never been able to like Sean Walsh, not since the very first day he had turned up at Benny's tenth birthday party. He had never smiled. Not once in all those years had they seen a real smile on his face. There were a lot of grimaces, and a little dry bark sometimes, but never a laugh. He didn't throw his head back like Peggy Pine did when she laughed, or giggle into his fist like Paccy Moore; he didn't make big gestures like Mario in the fish and chip shop, or even get wheezing and coughing fits like Dessie Burns often did. Sean Walsh seemed watchful the whole time. Only when he saw others smiling and laughing did he give the little barks.

They could never get him to tell anything about the life he had lived before he came to Knockglen. He didn't tell long stories like Patsy did, or wistful tales like Dekko Moore about the time he made harnesses for the Lords of the Soil somewhere down in Meath. Sean Walsh would not be drawn. "Oh, dear, you don't want to hear my stories," he would say when Benny and Eve plagued him for some information.

The years had not improved him: he was still secretive and insincerely anxious to please. Even his appearance annoyed Benny, although she knew this was unreasonable. He wore a suit that had seen a lot of pressing, and was obviously carefully looked after.

Benny and Eve used to tell each other in fits of laughter that he spent hours in his little room above the shop pressing all his ambitions into the suit with a damp cloth.

Benny didn't really believe Eve about Sean having ambitions to marry into the shop, but there was something deeply unsettled all right about the way he looked at her. She had so much wanted to be fancied, it seemed a cruel blow to think that if it ever happened it might only be by someone as awful as Sean Walsh.

"Good morning, ladies." He made an exaggerated bow. There was an insult in his voice, a sneer that he hadn't intended them to notice.

Other people had called them "ladies', even that very morning, and had done so without any offence. It was a way of acknowledging that they had left school and would shortly start a more grown-up life. When they had been in the chemist's buying shampoo, Mr. Kennedy had asked what he could do for the two young ladies and they had been pleased.

Paccy Moore had said they were two fine ladies when they had gone to have heels put on Benny's good shoes. But with Sean Walsh it was different.

"Hallo, Sean." Benny's voice was lacklustre. "Surveying the metropolis, I see," he said loftily. He always spoke slightly disparagingly of Knockglen, even though the place he came from himself was smaller and even less like a metropolis. Benny felt a violent surge of annoyance.

"Well, you're a free agent," she said suddenly. "If you don't like Knockglen you could always go somewhere else."

"Did I say I didn't like it?" His eyes were narrower than ever, almost slits. He had gauged this wrong, he must not allow her to report his having slighted the place. "I was only making a pleasant remark comparing this place to the big city. Meaning that you'll have no time for us here at all soon." That had been the wrong thing too.

"I'll have little chance of forgetting all about Knockglen considering I'll be coming home every night," said Benny glumly.

"And we wouldn't want to anyway," Eve said with her chin stuck out.

Sean Walsh would never know how often she and Benny bemoaned their fate living in such a small town which had the worst characteristic any town could have: it was actually within striking distance of Dublin. Sean hardly ever let his glance fall on Eve, for she held no interest for him. All his remarks were directed to Benny. Your father is so proud of you, there's hardly a customer that he hasn't told about your great success." Benny hated his smile and his knowing ways. He must know how much she hated being told this, reminded about how she was the apple of their eye, and the centre of simple boastful conversation.

And if he knew why did he tell her and annoy her still further? If he did have designs on her, and a plan to marry Mr. Eddie Hogan's daughter and thereby marry into the business, then why was he saying all the things that would irritate and upset her?

Perhaps he thought that her own wishes would hardly be considered in the matter. That the biddable daughter of the house would give in on this as she had on everything else.

Benny realised she must fight Sean Walsh. "Does he tell everyone I'm going to college?" she asked, with a smile of pleasure on her face.

"Only subject of conversation." Sean was smug to be the source of information but somehow disconcerted that Benny didn't get embarrassed as he had thought she would.

Benny turned to Eve. "Aren't I lucky?" Eve understood. "Oh, spoiled rotten," she agreed. They didn't laugh until they were out of sight.

They had to walk down the long straight street past Shea's pub with its sour smell of drink coming out on to the street from behind its dark windows, past Birdie Mac's sweet shop where they had spent so much time choosing from jars all their school life. Across the road to the butcher's where they looked in the window to see back at the reflection of Hogan's Outfitters and realise that Sean Walsh had gone back inside to the empire that would one day be his.

Only then could they let themselves go and laugh properly.

Mr. Flood, of Flood's Quality Meat Killed On The Premises, didn't appreciate their laughter.

"What's so funny about a row of gigot chops?" he asked the two laughing girls outside his window. It only made them laugh more.

"Get on with you then, do your laughing somewhere else," he growled at them. "Stop making a mock and a jeer out of other people's business."

His face was severely troubled and he went out into the street to look up at the tree which overhung his house.

Mr. Flood had been staring into that tree a lot lately, and worse still having conversations with someone he saw in its branches.

The general thinking was that Mr. Flood had seen some kind of vision, but was not ready yet to reveal it to the town. His words to the tree seemed to be respectful and thoughtful, and he addressed whatever he saw as Sister.

Benny and Eve watched fascinated, as he shook his head.

"It's the same the whole world over, Sister," he said, "but it's sad it should come to Ireland as well."

He listened respectfully to what he was hearing from the tree, and took his leave. Vision or no vision, there was work to be done in the shop.

The girls only stopped laughing by the time they had reached the convent gates. Benny turned to go back home as usual. She never presumed on her friendship with Eve by expecting to be let in to the inner sanctum. The convent in holidays was off limits. "No, come on in, come in just to see my room, Eve begged.

"Mother Francis? Wouldn't they think "It's my home, they've always told me that. Anyway, you're not a pupil any more.

They went through a side door; there was a smell of baking, a warm kitchen smell through the corridors, then a smell of polish on the big stairway, and the wide dark hall hung with pictures of Mother Foundress and Our Lady, and lit only by the Sacred Heart lamp.

"Isn't it desperately quiet in the holidays?"

"You should be here at night. Sometimes when I've come home from the pictures and I let myself in, it's so quiet I'd nearly talk to the statues for company.

They went up to the small room where Eve had lived for as long as she could remember. Benny looked around with interest.

"Look at your wireless, right beside your bed!" The brown bakelite electric radio, where, like every other girl in the country, Eve listened at night to Radio Luxembourg, was on her night table. In Benny's house, where she was considered a very pampered only child, she had to borrow the kitchen radio and then perch it on a chair because there wasn't any socket near enough to her bed to plug it in.

There was a neat candlewick bedspread and a funny nightdress case shaped like a rabbit.

"Mother Francis gave me that when I was ten. Isn't it awful?"

"Better than holy pictures," Benny said. Eve opened a drawer in which there were piles of holy pictures, each one bound up with a rubber band.

Benny looked at them, fascinated. "You never threw them away!"

"Not here. I couldn't."

The small round window looked down over Knockglen along the tree-lined drive of the convent through the big gates and down the broad main street of the town.

They could see Mr. Flood fussing round the window of his shop as if he were still worried about what they could have found so amusing in its contents. They saw small children with noses pressed against the window of Birdie Mac's, and men with caps pulled well down over their faces coming out of Shea's pub.

They saw a black Morris Cowley pull up in front of Hogan's and knew it was Dr. Johnson. They saw two men walking into Healy's Hotel, rubbing their hands. These would be commercial travellers, wanting to write up their order books in peace. They could see a man with a ladder up against the cinema putting up the new poster, and the small round figure of Peggy Pine coming out of her dress shop to stand and look admiringly at her window display. Peggy's idea of art was to put as much in the window as could possibly fit without falling over.

"You can see everything! Benny was amazed. "It's like being God."

"Not really, God can see round corners. I can't see your house; I can't see who's having chips in Mario's; I can't see over the hill to Westlands. Not that I'd want to, but I can't."

Her voice was tight when she spoke of her mother's people in the big house. Benny knew from old that it was a thorny subject. "I suppose they wouldn't.."

"They wouldn't." Eve was firm.

They both knew what Benny was going to say: that there was no chance of the wealthy Westwards paying for a university education for Eve.

"Do you think Mother Francis might have approached them?"

"I'm sure she did, lots of times over the years, and she always got the door slammed in her face."

"You can't be certain," Benny said soothingly. Eve looked out of the window down the town, standing as she must often have done over the years. "She did every single thing to help me that anyone could. She must have asked them, and they must have said no. She didn't tell me because she didn't want me to feel worse about them. As if I could."

"In a fairy story one of them would ride up to the avenue here on a white horse and say they'd been wanting you as part of their lives for years," Benny said. "And in a fairy story I'd tell him to get lost," Eve said, laughing.

"No, I wouldn't let you, you'd say thank you very much, The fees are this price, and I'd like a nice flat of my own with carpets going right up to the wall and no counting how much electric fire we use." Benny was gleeful. "Oh yes, and a dress allowance of course, so much a month put in Switzer's and Brown Thomas for me."

"And a holiday abroad each year to make up for not seeing you much over the past while!"

"And a huge contribution to the convent building fund or the new chapel to thank the nuns for doing the needful." Benny sighed. "I suppose things like that could happen."

"As you said, in a fairy story," Eve said. "And what would be the best happening for you?"

"Two men to get out of a van down there in a minute's time and tell my father that Sean Walsh is a criminal wanted for six murders in Dublin and that he has to be handcuffed and out of there this instant."

"It still leaves the business of you having to come home from Dublin on the bus every night," Eve said.

"Listen, don't go on at me. For all that you've been in and out of our house a thousand times you don't know the way they are.

"I do," Eve said. "They idolise you."

"Which means I get the six ten bus back every night to Knockglen.

That's what being idolised does for you."

"There'll be the odd night surely in Dublin. They can't expect you home every single night."

"Where will I stay? Let's be practical - there'll be no nights in Dublin. I'll be like bloody Cinderella."

"You'll make friends, you'll have friends with houses, families, you know, normal kinds of things."

"When did you and I have anything approaching a normal life, Eve Malone?" Benny was laughing to cheer them up and raise the mood again.

"It'll soon be time for us to take control, seriously." Eve refused to laugh at all.

Benny could be equally serious.

"Sure it will. But what does it mean? You're not going to hurt Mother Francis by refusing to go to this place she's sending you.

I'm not going to bring the whole world down on us by telling my mother and father that I feel like a big spancelled goat going to college and having to come back here every night as if I were some kind of simpleton. Anyway, you'll be out of there and you'll get a great job and be able to do what you like." Eve smiled at her friend. "And we'll come back to this room some day and laugh at the days when we all thought it would be so dreadful."

"We will, we will, and Sean Walsh will be doing penal servitude.."

"And the Westwards will have lost all their money and their land."

"And Mrs. Healy will have thrown away her corsets and be wearing a short skirt."

"And Paccy Moore will own a fleet of shoe shops throughout the country.

"And Dr. Johnson will have learned to smile."

"And Mother Francis will be the Reverend Mother General of the whole Order and can do what she likes, and go to see the Pope, and everything."

They laughed, delighted at the thought of such wonders.

CHAPTER 3

Emily Mahon stood in front of the gas cooker and grilled the ten rashers that she served every morning except Friday. Her white blouse hung neatly in the corner of the room. She wore a nylon jacket to make the breakfast lest her clothes gets spattered before she went out to work.

She knew that Brian was in a mood this morning. He hadn't a word to throw to a dog. Emily sighed as she stood in the shabby kitchen.

Theirs must be the least improved house in Maple Gardens. It was always the same - they say that the shoemaker's children are never shod. So it was logical that the builder's wife would be the only one in the road without a decent kitchen to work in. She had seen the jobs that were done on other people's houses. Kitchens that were tiled so that they only needed a wipe down the walls and a quick mop of the floor. There were units that all fitted together like a continuous counter rather than the cupboards and tables of different sizes that Emily had lived with for twenty-five years. It was useless trying to change him. "Who sees it but us?" was the reply.

Very few visitors came into 23 Maple Gardens. Brian's builder's yard was the centre of his social activities, such as they were.

The boys, Paul and Nasey, had never brought their friends home, and now they too worked with their father in the yard. That's where fellows called to pick them up, or to take them over to a pub for a pint.

And Nan, the baby of the family, eighteen years old and about to start at university today, Nan had not been one for inviting friends home either.

Emily knew that her beautiful daughter had a dozen friends at school, she had seen her walking down the street when classes were over, surrounded by other girls. She went to the houses of friends, she was invited everywhere, but not one of her schoolmates had crossed the door of Maple Gardens.

Nan was not just beautiful in Emily's eyes. This was the opinion of everyone. When she was a small child people had stopped in the street asking why this little girl with the blonde, almost white, curls had never been chosen for the Pears soap advertisement. . .

the one where it said, "Growing up to be a beautiful lady'. In truth Emily did have dreams that one day in a park or on the street a talent scout would stop and see the perfect features and flawless skin of this child and come to the house begging on bended knees to transform her life.

Because if there was anything that Emily Mahon wanted for her little princess, it was a transformed life. Emily wanted Nan to have everything that she had never had. She didn't want the girl to marry a bullying drunk like her mother had done. She didn't want a life of isolation stuck out here in a housing estate, only allowed to go out to work as a favour. Emily had read a lot of magazines, she knew that it was perfectly possible for a girl with Nan's looks to rise to be the highest in the land. You saw the very beautiful wives of rich businessmen, and the really good-looking women photographed at the races on the arms of well-known people from important families. It was obvious that not all these people could have come from the upper classes.

Their women were often plain and horsey. Nan was in the running for that kind of life, and Emily would do everything in her power to get it for her.

It had not been hard to persuade Brian to come up with the fees for university. In his sober moods he was inordinately proud of his beautiful daughter. Nothing was too good for her. But that was when he was sober.

And then, during this last summer, Nan had said, "You know, one day he'll break your jaw and then it'll be too late."

"I don't know what you mean.

"He hit you last night, while I was out, when the boys weren't here. I know he did."

"Now you know nothing of the sort."

"Your face, Em. What will you tell them today?"

"The truth. That I got up in the night and walked into an open press.

"Is it going to be like that always?

Will he get away with it for the rest of his life?"

"You know how sorry he is, Nan. You must know how he'd give any of us the moon after he's been - not himself."

"It's too high a price to pay for the moon," Nan had said. And now today she was going to start out as a student, this lovely girl that Emily still looked on with awe. Brian had been handsome before alcohol had thickened his face, and she herself had good features, high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. Their daughter seemed to have taken the best features and left the bad ones. Nan had no trace of the coarseness that was in her father's face. Nor did she have any of the pale and slightly apologetic stance of her mother.

As Emily Mahon stood in the kitchen she hoped that Nan would be warm and pleasant to her father this morning. Brian had been drunk last night, certainly, but there had been no dog's abuse out of him.

Emily turned the rashers expertly. There were three for Paul, three for Nasey and four for Brian. Neither she nor Nan ate a cooked breakfast. Just a cup of tea and a slice of toast each.

Emily filled the washing-up bowl with hot soapy water. She would collect their plates to steep when they had finished. Usually everyone left the house around the same time; she liked to have the table cleared before she closed the door behind her, so the place looked respectable when they came in again in the evenings.

That way nobody would raise too many objections about Emily going out to work. It had been a battle hard fought.

Nan had been so supportive during the long war waged with Brian.

She had listened wordlessly to her father saying, "No wife of mine is going to work. I want a meal on the table. I want a clean shirt.."

She had heard her mother say that she could provide these things, but that the days were long and lonely on her own and she would like to meet people and to earn her own money, no matter how small.

The boys, Paul and Nasey, had not been interested, but played the game to win and stuck with their father in the need to have a nice warm house and meals.

Nan had been twelve then, and it was she who had tipped the balance.

"I don't know what you're all talking about," she had said suddenly.

"None of you are ever in before six, winter or summer, and so there will be a meal. And if Em wants more money and will do all your washing and clearing as well, then I can't see what the fuss is about."

Nobody else could either.

So Emily had worked in a hotel shop since then; her own little world surrounded by nice things: glass and linen and high-class souvenirs for tourists. At first the hotel had been unwilling to employ someone with a young daughter. She would constantly need time off, they told her.

Emily had been able to look them straight in the eye even then and say that Nan would cause no trouble. And she had been right. It was only Brian who had ever interrupted the even style of her working life by phoning or calling, to ask idiotic questions about things that had already been agreed or arranged, but forgotten through drink.

She called them, as she did every morning. "Breakfast going on the table."

Down they came, her two big sons, dark like their father, square and looking as if they had been manufactured by a toy firm to look like younger versions of a father in a game. Then came Brian, who had cut himself shaving, and was dabbing the blood on his chin. He looked at his wife without pleasure.

"Do you have to wear that bloody garment in the house? Isn't it bad enough going out to work as a skivvy in someone's shop without dressing as a skivvy at home."

"It's to keep my blouse clean," Emily said mildly.

"And you have your clothes draped around so that the place looks like a hand-me-down shop," he grumbled.

Nan came in at that moment. Her blonde curls looked as if she had just come from a hairdresser rather than from the hand basin in her own bedroom which was where she had washed her hair this morning. Brian ~ahon might have skimped on comfort for the rest of the house, but his daughter's bedroom had the best of everything. A wash basin neatly boxed in, a big fitted wardrobe with even a rail for her shoes in it.

Nothing had been spared on Nan's room. Each item was an apology for a drunken bout. She wore a smart blue skirt, and her new navy three-quarterlength coat over her shoulders; a white lacy blouse with a navy-blue trimming. She looked like the cover of a magazine.

"That's right, attack Em for leaving her blouse there, but if it's seven of your shirts and seven each of the boys', that's twenty-one shirts ironed for you and there's no word of it being a hand-me-down shop then, is there?"

Her father looked at her in open admiration. "They're going to look twice when you walk in the door of University College," he said.

Nan showed no pleasure at the compliment - in fact Emily seemed to think it irritated her.

"Yes, that's all very well, but we never discussed the matter of pocket money.

Emily wondered why Nan brought it up now. If she were to ask her father on her own he would give her anything "There's never been any shortage of pocket money in this house." His face was red and angry already.

"Well, there hasn't been any question of it up till now. Paul and Nasey went in to work for you, so they got a wage from the start.

"A sort of wage," Paul said.

"More than any other human would give a lout like you, his father retorted.

Nan continued, "I wanted it to be clear from the start rather than having to ask every week."

"What's wrong with asking every week?" he wanted to know.

"It's undignified," she said shortly.

That was exactly what Emily had felt each week asking for her housekeeping; now she could work out a budget to suit herself.

"What do you want?" He was annoyed. "I don't know. I'm not really entitled to anything. I'm going to be dependent on you for three or four years. What do you suggest?"

He was at a loss. "We'll see."

"I'd prefer if we could decide today. It would get things off to a good start. I'd know what I could buy, how long it would take me to save for something.. a new dress or whatever."

"I bought you that coat there! It cost an arm and a leg it's an ordinary navy coat to me, and it cost as much as a fur."

"It's very well cut, that's why. It will last for years."

"I should hope so," he muttered.

"So you see in order not to have discussions like this all the time, don't you think.."

Emily held her breath. "A pound a week for.. "Fares and lunches, yes, that's fair.. ." She stood looking at him expectantly. "And what else is there.. ?"

"Well, I suppose there's cinema, newspapers, books, coffee, going to a dance."

"Another two pounds a week for that?" He looked anxiously at her.

"Oh, that's very generous, thank you. That would be marvellous."

"And what about clothes then.. ?" He nodded over at the coat that had cost him an arm and a leg.

"I could manage stockings out of what you've given me."

"I want you as well dressed as the next man's daughter." Nan said nothing.

"What would it cost?" He was like a child now. Nan looked at him thoughtfully, as if she knew he was in her power now. "Some people's fathers give them an allowance by the month for clothes. A sum like..

I don't know.. twenty ..

but I don't know..

"You'll have thirty pounds a month, nothing is shortchanged in this house." He almost roared it.

Emily Mahon watched Nan start to smile. "Thank you very much, Daddy, that's more than generous," she said.

"Well," he was gruff, "I won't have you saying I'm not generous."

"I never said that, never once," she answered him. "Well, all this business putting me on the carpet .. implying that I might leave you short."

"In your right mind, Daddy, you'd never leave me short, but I don't want to rely on your always being in your right mind."

Emily caught her breath.

"What do you mean?" He was like a turkeycock now. "You know exactly what I mean. You're two people, Daddy."

"You're in no position to be giving me lectures."

"I'm not. I'm explaining why I wanted it on a regular arrangement so that I wouldn't have to be annoying you when you're.. well, when you've had a drink I suppose.

There was a moment's silence. Even the boys wondered what would happen now. The usual way of coping with their father had been to make no reference to anything untoward that might have happened, for fear of bringing it all upon them again. But Nan had chosen her time and place well.

The silence was broken by Emily.

"Well, that's a very good allowance, there can't be many girls setting off today who'd get that."

"No indeed." Nan was undisturbed by the tension around her. "I mean it, Daddy. And I honestly think that if you are going to give me that much, it's probably easier for you to do it once a month."

"Yes, that's agreed," he said.

"So will I ask you for forty-two pounds today and then not come near you for a month?"

Paul and Nasey looked at each other with widened eyes. "Forty-two pounds?" Her father seemed astounded. "You said three pounds a week, and thirty pounds for clothes." She seemed apologetic. "It is a lot, I know."

"I'm not going back on my word." He reached into his back pockets and took out a wad of old notes. He peeled them off.

Emily willed her daughter to show the right amount of gratitude, she prayed that the girl wouldn't take it for granted.

But as usual Nan seemed to know better than everyone what to do.

"I'm not going to go down on my knees and thank you, Daddy, because that would just be words. I'll try to make you proud of me. Make you feel glad you've spent so much to put a daughter through college.

Brian Mahon's eyes misted slightly. He swallowed but could say nothing. "That's it. Now could a man have a cup of tea in this place does anyone think?"

In a big terraced house in Dunlaoghaire, another household was getting ready for the opening of the university term. Almost a town in itself, Dunlaoghaire was some miles from the centre of Dublin, a big harbour where the mail boat came in and left every day for Holyhead bringing the holiday visitors. Full also on the outgoing journeys with emigrants about to seek their fortune in London. Ever since the days it had been called Kingstown, it had been a lovely place to live; tropical palm trees along the coast line made it seem like somewhere much more exotic than it really was. The sturdy Victorian houses spoke of a time when this was a place of substance and quality. It was healthy too; the two great arms of piers reached out into the sea and were a regular walking spot for anyone in need of a breath of air or some exercise. It was a curious mixture of staid respectability with overtones of holiday fun. Every year there was a big noisy carnival with its ghost trains and chairoplanes, and yet matrons with shallow baskets did sociable shopping excursions usually ending with coffee in Marine Road and tut-tutting over the state of the borough.

Kit Hegarty moved swiftly around her large house in a quiet road that led down to the sea. She had a lot to do. The first day was always important, it set the tone for the whole year. She would cook them all a good breakfast and make it clear that she expected them to be at the table on time.

She had kept students for seven years now, and was known as one of the university's favoured landladies. Normally they didn't like to sanction a digs so far away from the city and the university buildings, but Mrs. Hegarty had been quick to explain how near her house was to the railway station, how short was the train journey into town, how good the bracing sea air.

She didn't need to plead for long; soon the authorities realised that this determined woman could look after students better than anyone.

She had turned her big diningroom into a study; there each boy had his own place at the big felt-covered table, books could be left undisturbed. It was expected in Kit's house that there would be some period of study after supper, most nights at any rate. And her only son Frank studied with them too. It made him feel grown up sitting at the same table as real university students; engineers and agricultural science students, lab or medicine, they had all sat and studied around the Hegarty dining table while young Frank was working for his Intermediate and his Leaving Certificate.

Today he would join them as a fully fledged student himself.

Kit hugged herself with pleasure at the thought that she had raised a son who would be an engineer. And raised him all on her own. Joseph Hegarty had been long gone now, his life in England was no concern of hers any more. He had sent money for a little while, and dates when he was going to be back; and then excuses, and little money. and then nothing.

She had tried not to bring up Frank with any bitterness against his father. She had even left a photograph of Joseph Hegarty in the boy's room lest he should think that his father was being banished from his memory on top of everything else. It had been a heady day when she noticed the photograph no longer in a place of honour, on the chest of drawers, but moved to a shelf where it could hardly be seen, and then face down, and then in the bottom of a drawer.

Tall, gangly Frank Hegarty didn't need any mythical father's picture any more.

Kit wondered whether Joseph, if he had stayed around, would have had any views on Frank's motorbike. It was a black 550cc BSA his pride and joy.

Probably not. He had never been a man to face up to anything unpleasant. And Frank's bike was unpleasant. And dangerous, and it was the only black cloud in her life on this morning when her son started university. In vain she had pleaded and begged him to use the train. They were only minutes from the railway station, the service was frequent. She would pay for his weekly ticket. He could make as many journeys as he liked. It was the only thing he had ever stood out for.

He had gone to Peterborough and worked long hours in a canning factory only so that he could own this bike. Why did she want to take away the one possession that was truly valuable to him? Just because she didn't know how to ride a motorbike or even want to, it was unfair that she should try to stop him.

He was eighteen years and six months. Kit looked at the statue of the Infant of Prague that she kept in the house to impress the mothers of the students who boarded with her. She wished she had a stronger conviction that the Infant of Prague might be any earthly use in keeping her son safe on this terrible machine. It would be nice to have been able to offload your worries on to someone or something like that.

Patsy asked Mrs. Hogan if she'd like her to wet another pot of tea.

"Ah, go on, Mam, you'd need tea on a bad day like this," Patsy said encouragingly.

"That would be nice, Patsy." She sank back into her chair, relieved.

It hadn't been so wet earlier, when Benny had left for her first day at college. Benny in her navy jumper and white blouse with the navy and grey check skirt.

"You'll be the belle of the ball," Eddie had said to her: bursting with pride.

"Oh, Father, I won't. I'm so big and drab-looking," she had said suddenly. "I'm like some kind of hearse. I caught sight of myself in the mirror."

Eddie's eyes had filled with tears. "Child, you're beautiful," he had said. "Don't talk about yourself like that. Please. Don't upset your mother and me.

Annabel had wanted to hug her and tell her that she looked lovely.

Big, certainly, but with that lovely skin and all that chestnut hair tied back in a navy and white ribbon, she looked what she was: a girl from a nice family, from a house in the country, whose father ran an established business.

But it wasn't a morning for hugging. Instead she had reached out her hand.

"You are a handsome, lovely girl, and they'll all see that," she said softly.

"Thank you, Mother," Benny said dutifully. "And what's more, you'll be very, very happy there. You won't be going back to dreary little bedsitters like a lot of girls have to do, or being half starved in some digs," Annabel sighed with pleasure. "You'll be coming home to your own good home every night."

Benny had smiled at her but again it had seemed a little as if it were expected. The girl was nervous, as any girl would be starting out in a new place, with strangers. "It'll be a quiet house from now on, Mam."

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.

It wasn't like a prison cell, it was like a maid's room, Eve told herself firmly. And in a sense that was how they must view her, a difficult prickly maid up from the country. Worst of all, a maid with airs and graces.

Eve sat on her bed and looked around the room. She could hear the regretful, gentle voice of Mother Francis telling her that life was never meant to be easy and that her best course was to work very hard now and get out of this place in record time. Study her grammalogues in the shorthand, take a sharp interest in the book-keeping, flex her fingers for the typing, practising over and over. Listen and take notes on office procedure. In a year's time or less she would land herself a good job, and a place to live.

Never again would anyone offer her an iron bed in a dark poky little room.

The Wise Woman would grit her teeth and get on with it, Eve told herself. That was a phrase she and Benny used all the time. What would the Wise Woman do about Sean Walsh? The Wise Woman would pretend that he did not exist. The Wise Woman wouldn't buy another half pound of toffees in Birdie Mac's because she'd get spots. The Wise Woman would do her homework because Mother Francis was on the warpath.

After a week Eve realised that the Wise Woman would also need to be a canonised saint to adapt to the new surroundings.

Mother clare had suggested a regime of light housework, "to cover all your obligations, my dear'.

And Eve would admit that she did have obligations. She was getting a free residential course for which others paid handsomely. There was no history of association with this convent as there was with St. Mary's in Knockglen. She would have been eager to help from a sense of justice and also to do Mother Francis credit. But this was different.

Mother clare's idea of covering obligations centred around the kitchen.

She thought perhaps that Eve might like to serve the breakfast in the refectory and clear away, and that she should also leave classes ten minutes before lunch and be back in the refectory to serve soup to the other students when they came in.

In all her years in St. Mary's Eve Malone had never been seen by the other girls to perform one menial task. She had been asked to help behind the scenes as would any girl in her own home. But in front of the other pupils Mother Francis had made an iron-hard rule that Eve must never be seen to do anything which would give her a different status.

Mother clare had no such qualms. "But my dear girl, you don't know these other pupils," she had said when Eve had politely requested t isn't that the case, Eve? You are here on a different basis," she had said, smiling very sweetly all the while.

Eve knew the battle had to be fought and won there and then before the other students arrived.

"I am happy to cover my obligation. I'd like you to rethink your plans for me?"

Two spots of red appeared on Mother clare's cheeks. This was pure insolence. But Mother clare had fought many battles since she had taken her vows and she always realised when she was on poor ground.

Like now. Gommunity in Knockglen would defend Eve vociferously.

Even some of the Sisters here in Dublin might see that the girl had a point.

"I'll tell you tomorrow," she had said and turned to swish her long black skirts and veil down the polished corridor.

Eve had spent the day wandering around Dublin with a heavy heart.

She knew she had visited heavy housework upon herself because of her attitude.

She looked in shop windows and willed herself to think of the days when she would be able to afford clothes like she saw there.

Imagine if you could go in and buy maybe four of the pencil-slim skirts in different colours. They were only twelve shillings and eleven pence each. It didn't matter that they were not great quality, you could have all these colours. And there was cotton gingham at two shillings a yard, you'd have a smashing blouse out of that at six shillings, maybe four of them to go with each of the skirts.

Eve dismissed the swagger coats. She was too short, they were too sweeping, they'd envelop her, but she'd love six pairs of the fully fashioned very sheer nylons just under five shillings each.

And tapered slacks in wine or navy; she saw those everywhere.

They varied in price, but usually around a pound a pair.

If she had a wallet of money she'd go and buy them now. This minute.

But it wasn't money for clothes that she wanted. Eve knew that only too well. She wanted a different kind of life entirely. She wanted to study, to spend three, even five, years at university.

She was prepared to make sacrifices for it, but there seemed to be no way she could even begin.

There were stories of people putting themselves through college by working during the day and studying at night. But that would still mean the year with the terrible Mother clare to qualify herself for any kind of work. Eve noticed that almost without realising it her journey had taken her up through St. Stephen's Green towards the big grey buildings of University College. It was still empty and she wandered at will around the main hall, seeing only those involved in administration moving about.

The term would start next week. Lucky Benny would arrive as would hundreds of first-year students from all over Ireland.

Eve realised that there were thousands like herself who would never gety had brains and insights like she had. That's what made it so hard.

Eve knew that through these doors next week would come girls who only intended to use university as part of their social life.

There would be unwilling students, who didn't want to be here at all, who had other plans and other dreams, but came to satisfy the wishes of parents. There would be those who drifted in and would use the time to make up their minds. She felt a boiling rage about the Westwards, the family who cut off their own flesh and blood, who let her be raised by the charity of the nuns and never bothered themselves to think that she was now of university age.

There was no fairness on earth if someone who would appreciate it and work hard was kept out just because of a greedy, uncaring family who would prefer to forget the child of an unsuitable union rather than make a generous gesture and ensure that some right was done at the end of the day.

She looked in the glass-fronted noticeboards and read of the societies that would be re-forming when term started, and the new committees and the sports arrangements and the practice times, and the appeals for people to join this group and that club.

And she saw the big staircases leading up to the libraries and the lecture halls. She saw the red plush benches which would be filled with students next week, and she ached to be amongst them.

To spend her days reading and writing and finding out more and talking to people, and to spend no time at all trying to outwit awful people like Mother clare.

The Wise Woman would get on with her life and stop dreaming. Then she thought how tiring it was going to be for the rest of her life trying to be the Wise Woman all the time. It would be great to be the very Unwise Woman on occasions.

Benny took the bus to Dublin on the first day of term with more trepidation than she would ever have expected. At home they had behaved as if she were a toddler going to a first party in a party frock rather than a huge ungainly student eighteen years of age going to university dressed from head to toe in dark clothes.

she could still see the tableau this morning: her father with tears of pride in his eyes - she knew he would go to the business and bore everyone to death with tales about how his wonderful daughter was going to university. Benny could see her mother sitting there stretching her hand out full of what she had been full of for months now: the huge advantages of being able to come home every night by bus. Patsy, looking like the faithful old black mammy slave in a film except that she was white and she was only twenty-five. It had made Benny want to scream and scream.

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.

The first day of term in the Foley household meant that Jack would put on a college scarf and head into UGD for the first time. In the dining room of the big Donnybrook house there was a sense of excitement. Dr. John Foley sat at the head of the table, and looked at his five sons.

He had assumed they would all enter medicine as he had, so it had been a shock when Jack had chosen law. Perhaps the same thing would happen with the others. Dr. Foley looked at Kevin and Gerry. He had always seen them somewhere in the medical field as well as on a rugby pitch.

His eye fell on Ronan. Already he seemed to have the reassuring kind of manner one associated with being a doctor. That boy Ronan could convince even his own mother that the wounds he got in a playground were superficial, that the dirt on his clothes would easily wash out.

That was the personality you needed in a good family doctor. Then there was Aengus, the youngest: his owlish glasses made him look studious and he was the only Foley boy not to be chosen for some kind of team in the school. Dr. Foley had always seen his son Aengus as going into medical research when the time came. A bit too frail and woolly for the rough and tumble of ordinary practice.

But then he had been wrong about his eldest son. Jack said he had no wish to study physics and chemistry. The term ~e had spent at school trying to understand the first thing about physics had been wasted.

Nor did he want botany and zoology, he'd be no good at them.

In vain Dr. Foley had pleaded that the pre-med year was a necessary term of purgatory before you started the real business of medicine.

Jack had been adamant. He would prefer law. Not the Bar either, but being apprenticed as a solicitor. What hee would really and truly like was to do this new degree course for Bachelor of Civil Law. It was like doing a BA but all in law subjects. He had discussed it with his father seriously and with all the information to hand. He could be apprenticed to his mother's brother, surely. Uncle Kevin was in a big solicitors' practice: they'd find a place for him. He timed his request well. Jack knew that his father's head was buried as deeply in the world of rugby as the world of medicine. Jack was a shining schoolboy player. He was on the pitch for his school in the Senior Cup final. He scored two tries and converted one of them. His father was in no position to fight him. Anyway it would have been foolish to force someone into a life so demanding. Dr. Foley shrugged. There were plenty of other boys to follow him down the good physician's route to Fitzwilliam Square.

Jack's mother Lilly sat at the far end of the table opposite her husband. Jack could never remember a breakfast when she had not presided over the cups of tea, the bowls of cornflakes, the slices of grilled bacon and half tomato which was the start to the day every morning except Fridays and in Lent.

His mother always looked as if she had dressed up for the occasion, which indeed she had. She wore a smart Gor-Ray skirt, always with either a twinset or a wool blouse. Her hair was always perfectly done, and there was a dusting of powder on her face as well as a slight touch of lipstick. When Jack had spent the night in friends' houses after a match he realised that their mothers were not like this. Often women in dressing gowns with cigarettes put food on kitchen tables for them.

The formal breakfast at eight o'clock in a high-ceilinged dining room with heavy mahogany sideboards and floor-to-ceiling windows wasn't everyone else's way of life.

But the Foley boys weren't pampered either; their mother had seen to that. Each of them had a job to do in the mornings before they left for school. Jack had to fill the coal scuttles, Kevin to bring in the logs, Aengus had to roll yesterday's papers into sausage-like shapes which would be used for lighting the fires later, Gerry, who was meant to be the animal lover, had to take Oswald for a run in the park, and see that there was something on the bird table in the garden, and Ronan had to open the big heavy curtains in the front rooms, take the milk in from the steps and place it in the big fridge and brush whatever had to be brushed from the big granite steps leading up to the house. It could be cherry blossom petals or autumn leaves or slush and snow.

When breakfast was finished the Foley boys placed their plates and cutlery neatly on the hatch into the kitchen before going to the big room where all their coats, boots, shoes, school bags and often rugby gear had to be left.

People marvelled at the way Lilly Foley ran such an elegant home when she had five rugby-playing lads to deal with, and marvelled even more that she had kept the handsome John Foley at her side.

A man not thought to be easy to handle. Dr. Foley had a wandering eye as a young man. Lilly had not been more beautiful than the other women who sought him, just more clever. She realised that he would want an easy uncomplicated life where everything ran smoothly and he was not troubled with domestic difficulties.

She had found Doreen at an early stage, and paid her over the odds to keep the house running smoothly. Lilly Foley never missed her weekly hair-do and manicure.

She seemed to regard her life with the handsome doctor as a game with rules. She kept an elegant attractive home. She put on not an ounce of fat, and always appeared well groomed at golf club or restaurant, as well as at home. This way he didn't wander.

Today when the four younger boys left for school, Jack helped himself to another cup of tea.

"I'll know what you two talk about when you're alone now, he grinned.

He looked very handsome when he smiled, his mother thought fondly.

Despite reddish-brown hair which wouldn't stay flat, those freckles on his nose, he really was classically good looking, and when Jack Foley smiled he would break any heart.

Lilly Foley wondered would he fall in love easily, or did the rugby take so much time that he would just be satisfied with the distant adulation of the girls who watched and cheered the games.

She wondered would he be as hard to catch as his father had been.

What would some wily girl see in him that he would respond to?

She had captured his father by promising an elegant uncluttered lifestyle very different from the neglected unhappy home he had come from. But this would not be the way to lure away her Jack.

He was happy and well looked after in this home. He wouldn't want to flee the nest for a long time yet.

"Are you sure you won't take a lift?" Dr. John Foley would have been proud to drive his eldest son up to Earlsfort Terrace and wave him into his first day at university.

"No, Dad, I told a few of the lads.." His mother seemed to understand.

"It's not like school, it's sort of more gradual, isn't it? There's no bell saying you all have to be there at such a time."

"I know, I know. I've been there, remember." Dr. Foley was testy.

"It's just that I said.

"No, your mother is right, you want to be with your friends on a day like this, and the best of luck to you, son, may it turn out for you just as well as you ever hoped. Even if you're not doing medicine.

"Ah, go on, you're relieved. Think of all the malpractice suits."

"You can get those in law just as well as medicine. Anyway, there's no reason why they shouldn't pick a law student for the first fifteen."

"Give me a bit of time, Dad."

"After the way you played in the Schools Cup? They're not blind in there. You'll be playing in the Colours match in December.