Circle of Friends

"And enjoy every minute of it," her mother said. "I'd better go for the bus, Mother. I don't want to be rushing, not carrying this parcel."

They stood at the door of Lisbeg - Mother, Father, Patsy and Shep. If Shep had known he would have raised his paw to wave. He would have.

"Enjoy the dance, Benny," Dr. Johnson called to her.

Clodagh, already rearranging her now much talked-of windows in Pine's shop made marvellous gestures, miming Benny ripping off a modesty vest and exposing enormous amounts of bosom.

Fonsie watched this from across the street with interest.

"Fabulous bird, isn't she?" he said.

"There's great talent here in Knockglen," Benny agreed. "Keep on rocking," Fonsie encouraged her. Outside Hogan's, Sean Walsh was polishing the brasses. "Tonight's the big night," he said with a slow smile. Remember Nan's advice. It doesn't hurt to be nice. It often helps.

Benny smiled back. "That's it, Sean," she said. "I was trying to persuade your father to let me drive them up to that reception he was invited to."

"It wasn't a reception. It was more a few drinks in Dr. Foley's house."

"The very thing. He showed me the letter inviting them. I said it would be a matter of nothing for me to drive them.

"But they refused." She knew her voice was high-pitched now.

"Ah, sure what would that be except to lift the phone and say they were able to come after all? I told them they owed it to themselves to go out once in a while."

"Did you?"

"Yes. And I said, when better than on the night of Benny's big dance?"

"What a pity they weren't able to take you up on it."

"The day's young yet," Sean Walsh said, and went back to the shop.

He was only saying it to annoy her. He must have known how much she would hate her parents to be at something like this. She felt slightly faint and leaned against the wall of Birdie Mac's.

Birdie knocked on the window, mouthing at her. God, Benny thought, this is all I need. She's going to give me some broken chocolate or something now to build me up.

"Hallo, Miss Mac." She tried to make her voice steady. She must try to be sane. Her parents had just said goodbye to her. They had no intention of coming to Dublin. There would have been preparations for a week.

Birdie was at the door. "Benny, I just had a phone call from your mother. She wants me to give her a home perm this morning. I forgot to ask her, does she have a hair dryer at home?" Birdie Mac looked at Benny anxiously. "Are you all right, child? You're very pale."

"A home perm you say."

"Yes. It's easy for me, I can run down now and wind it on, and then come back later and do the neutralising. It's the dryer I was wondering about.."

"There is a dryer." Benny spoke like a robot. She moved up to the square without realising it. She was startled by the hooting of the bus.

"Well, Benny, are you going to get on? Do you need a special invitation?"

"Sorry, Mikey. Are you leaving? I didn't notice."

"No, not at all. We've all day, and all night. Leisure is the keynote in our bus service, never hurry a passenger, that's our motto.

She sat down and looked unseeingly out. They couldn't have decided to come up to Dublin. Not to the Foleys. Not tonight.

Rosemary wasn't at her history lecture.

"She's gone to the hairdresser," said Deirdre, a busy, fussy girl who knew everything. "Apparently she's going to the big dance tonight in a party. They're all going to drinks in Jack Foley's house first.

Imagine. In his house."

"I know," Benny said absently. "I'm going too."

"You're what?"

"Yes." Benny looked up at the girl's highly unflattering surprise.

"Well, well, well," Deirdre said.

"Nobody's taking anyone. We're all paying for ourselves." She was determined to bring Rosemary down, in some respects anyway.

"Yes, but to be included. Heavens." Deirdre looked Benny up and down.

"I'm looking forward to it." Benny knew she had a grim, despairing look on her face.

In addition to all her anxieties she now feared that her parents would be there, fumbling and apologising and mainly horrified by the amount of bosom she would be revealing. It was not beyond the possible that they might actually order her out of the room to cover herself. The thought made Benny go hot and cold.

"I suppose it's being friendly with that Nan Mahon that does it," Deirdre said eventually.

"Does what?"

"Gets you invited to ,lots of places. It's a great thing to have a friend like that.

Deirdre had shrewd, piggy eyes.

Benny looked at her for a moment or two with dislike. "Yes. I usually choose my friends for that reason," she said.

Too late she remembered how Mother Francis had warned them to beware of sarcasm.

"It's a way to go, certainly," Deirdre said, nodding her head sagely.

The day seemed very long. She met Eve and they went out to Dunlaoghaire on the five o'clock train. There were a lot of office workers going home. And at some of the stations schoolchildren in uniform got on. Eve and Benny nudged each other in pleasure to be part of a different world. A world of going to a big dress dance, as part of a big, glittering circle.

Kit had sandwiches for them. "I'm too excited," Eve protested.

"I've been on a diet. I'd better not fall at the last fence," Benny explained.

Kit was adamant. She wasn't going to have them fainting at the dance, and anyway the food had to be digested and turned into fat, and there wouldn't be time for that to happen. There was no fear that Benny would burst through her outfit. Kit had declared the bathroom a no-go area for her lodgers, though she said that was not strictly necessary.

Most of them didn't see the need to spend hours in it.

The coffee and sandwiches were on a tray in their room. Kit seemed to understand their need to giggle and reassure each other.

The meal that night was her responsibility, she said. Eve wasn't to think of either preparing it or serving it.

They zipped and hooked each other. They held the light at a better angle for the application of eyeliner and eyeshadow. They advised on the amount of lipstick blotting, and they dusted a lot of powder over Benny's bosom, which was whiter than her neck and arms.

"Probably ,everyone's is. It's just we don't get a chance to see them.

Benny's hand flew to her cleavage.

"Don't do that. Remember Clodagh says it looks as if you're drawing attention to it."

"It's easy to say that. Specially wearing a smock like she does."

"Come on, now. Didn't she make you look marvellous?"

"Did she, Eve? Or did she and I make me look a fool?" Benny looked so troubled and upset, Eve was startled.

"Come on. We're all a bit nervous. I think I look like a horrible bird of prey, but when I try to be objective I think that's probably not so."

"Of course it's not so. You look terrific. You must know that.

Look at yourself in the mirror, for heaven's sake. You're so petite, and colourful." Benny's words were stumbling over each other in their eagerness to convince her small worried friend.

"And so must you know you look great. What's wrong? What don't you like?"

"My chest."

"Not again!"

"I'm afraid of what people will think."

"They'll think it's terrific.. "No, not fellows. Ordinary people."

"What kind of ordinary people?"

"Whoever's there first. You know, at the drinks bit. They might think I'm fast."

"Don't be stupid."

Kit called up the stairs. "Can I come and see you? Mr. Hayes will be here to drive you in in about ten minutes."

"Come on up and talk sense into my friend." Kit came in and sat on the bed. She was full of praise. "Benny's worried about her cleavage," Eve explained. "She shouldn't be. Let the other girls worry about it, and envy it." Kit said it as one who knew there was no argument.

"But.."

"It's not Knockglen. Your parents aren't going to be here." Eve stopped suddenly. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." Benny's eyes were too bright. Eve and Kit exchanged glances.

"Mrs. Hegarty, could I use your phone do you think?"

"Certainly," Kit said. "It's a coin-operated one, I'm afraid."

Benny snatched up her handbag and ran downstairs. They looked at each other in bewilderment. "What's that about?"

"I've no idea," Eve said. "Something to do with Knockglen. She's ringing home. You can bet on it."

"Hallo, Patsy. It's Benny.

"Oh, are you at the dance yet?"

"Just setting out. Is Mother there, or Father?"

"No, Benny. They're out. "They're what?"

"They're out. They went out about six o'clock."

"Where did they go?"

"They didn't tell me," Patsy said.

"Patsy, they must have. They always say where they're going."

"Well, they didn't. What did you want them for?"

"Listen, were they dressed up?"

"What do you mean?"

"What were they wearing, Patsy? Please."

"God, Benny, I never notice what people are wearing. They had their outdoor clothes on." Patsy was doing her best.

"Are they in Dublin do you think?"

"Surely not. Surely they'd have said?"

"Did Sean Walsh collect them?"

"I don't know. I was out in the scullery. "You must have noticed something." Benny's voice was very impatient. Patsy got into a huff.

"I'd have noticed plenty had I been told there was going to be a Garda enquiry on the phone," she said, offended. "I'm sorry.

"It's all right," said Patsy, but it wasn't. "I'll see you tomorrow and tell you all about it."

"Oh, very nice."

"And if they do come back.."

"Well, Mother of God, Benny, I hope they will come back."

"If they do come back, just say I rang to thank them for everything, and the lovely dress and all."

"Sure, Benny. I'll say you rang all sweetness and light." Benny stood in the hall for a few moments to catch her breath.

She would not burden Eve with the whole thing. She would put her shoulders back and her chest forward. She would go to this party.

If her parents turned up she would tell them she had lost the modesty vest. That it had blown away when she took it out of the parcel. She would be fun and make jokes and be jolly.

Even if her parents said mortifying things to people like Rosemary, if they made crass remarks about hospitality being repaid, she would hold her head up high.

Nobody would know that in these hoops of steel which were meant to be called an uplift brassiere there was a heart of lead surrounded by a lot of wavy, nervous, fluttery feelings.

The doorbell rang and she answered it. A man in a hat and overcoat stood there.

"I'm Johnny Hayes, to drive two ladies into Donnybrook," he said and, looking at the expanse of bosom approvingly, he added, "though it wouldn't take much to make me drag a grand armful like yourself into the car and head off for the Dublin mountains."

Now that it had started Lilly Foley was beginning to enjoy herself.

Jack had been right. It was indeed well time they gave a party, and this was an ideal occasion. Their neighbours could admire the young people heading off to the dance. The house could be filled with young men in dinner jackets and girls in long, sweeping dresses without it looking pretentious. That was the style these big houses were meant for, Lilly Foley told herself.

But she didn't tell her husband or sons. They had a habit of sending her up over what they called her notions. If Lilly Foley liked to see cars draw up in their tree-lined road and hear the sound of long dresses swishing up the steps to the hall door then she kept that little pleasure to herself.

An early arrival was Sheila, one of Jack's fellow students. To Lilly Foley she had been a fairly constant voice on the telephone, wanting to go over some notes with Jack. Now here in the house she was an attractive girl, in a yellow and black dress, over-eager to impress, Lilly thought, busy explaining that she had an uncle a Judge and a cousin a junior Counsel so that she was practically born to be a barrister. Soon, a young couple, Sean and Carmel, arrived, who talked animatedly to each other and no one else. Lilly was pleased to see Bill Dunne .. a personable and easygoing young man. He made a nice antidote to that Aidan Lynch, whose antics she had never understood and whose parents both had voices like fog horns.

She looked proudly at Jack who was extraordinarily handsome in his rented dinner jacket, welcoming people in and laughing his easy laugh.

He had an arm around this girl and then another.

You'd need to be a better detective than Lilly Foley considered herself to know which of them he liked most. The very pretty but rather over-madeup girl, Rosemary, had allowed her glance to fall only briefly on Lilly before turning the full-voltage charm on Dr. Foley.

Aengus was extremely solemn in his duty as waiter. He stood at the foot of the stairs with his glasses steaming, his new spotted bow tie resplendent. He felt the centre of attention, the figure that everyone would be aware of as they came in and left their coats in the dining room.

So far it had all been strangers. He was relieved to recogú nise Aidan Lynch, Jack's friend from school.

"Good evening," Aidan said to him formally. "Are you from a catering agency? I don't remember seeing you much on the social scene around Dublin."

"I'm Aengus," Aengus said, overjoyed not to have been recognised.

"You're very kind to let me use your first name. I'i'm Aidan Lynch.

My parents have gone ahead into the drawing room and I think are having their drink requirements met by Dr. Foley. Do I give you my order ..

er, Aengus is it?"

"Aidan, I'm Aengus, Jack's brother." The smile of triumph was wide on his face.

"Aengus. So you are. I didn't realise!" Aidan said, smiting his forehead.

"You can have a dry sherry, or sweet sherry or a beer or a club orange," Aengus said. "My goodness." Aidan was lost in indecision.

"But only one at a time."

"Ah, that's disappointing. I was just about to ask for them all together in a glass with a dollop of whipped cream on top." He looked saddened.

"Seeing that you're a friend of Jack's I'll ask if you can.. ."

Aengus was about to set out for the kitchen where the drink was.

"Come back, you fool. Listen, did a beautiful, small dark girl come in?"

"Yes, she's in there. She's with some fellow. She keeps licking his ear and drinking out of his glass."

Aidan pushed past him into the drawing room. How could Eve be behaving like this? Maybe she too had mixed all her drinks. But she was nowhere to be seen. His eyes went round the big room with its warm lights, its huge Christmas tree in the window. He saw a lot of familiar faces, but no Eve.

He came back to Aengus. "Where is she? Quick."

"Who?" Aengus was alarmed. "The beautiful dark girl."

"The one licking the fellow's ear?"

"Yes, yes." Aidan was testy.

Aengus had come to the door. "There!" He pointed at Carmel and Sean, who were, as usual, standing very close to each other.

Relief flooded over Aidan. Carmel and Sean saw him and waved.

"What was all the pointing about?" Carmel asked. "You look utterly beautiful, Carmel," Aidan said. "Leave this man instantly. I'll give you a better life. You have disturbed my dreams so much .. Come and disturb my waking hours as well!"

Carmel smiled a wise, mature, women-of-the-world smile and patted Aidan's hand.

At the same moment, Aidan heard Eve's voice behind him.

"Well, hallo, Aidan. Here you are tongue-tied and wordless as ever."

He turned and looked at her. She looked so good that he got a lump in his throat and for a few seconds he was literally unable to find words.

"You're gorgeous," he said. Very honestly and Unaffectedly.

Nan had warned Eve not to say that the red skirt was on loan. If it was praised then thank for the praise, Nan had said. Why throw people's compliments back in their faces?

Eve had never spoken to Aidan in anything other than joky terms.

But his admiration had been unqualified.

"Thank you," she said simply.

Then it was as if the mist had cleared and they went back to their old way of going on.

"I'm glad you arrived just when you did, because Carmel was propositioning me here. It's been deeply embarrassing in front of Sean, but what can I do?" Aidan looked at her helplessly.

"It's something you're going to have to cope with all your life.

I'd say it's a physical thing, you know the way animals give off scents. It couldn't be intellectual or anything."

Eve laughed happily and spun around to the admiring glance of Bill Dunne.

"You look terrific," Bill Dunne said to her. "Why don't you dress like that all the time?"

"I was just going to ask you exactly the same question," she laughed up at him.

Bill fixed his tie and smiled foolishly. Aidan looked put out. He spoke hastily to Jack, who was at his elbow.

"I don't know whether this was such a good idea."

"What?" Jack looked at the glass of beer in Aidan's hand.

"Is it flat?"

"No. I mean asking all the girls. We thought we'd have them under our control. Maybe we'll lose them all."

"Jack?" Aengus had arrived, looking anxious. "Aha, Mr. Fixit is here," Aidan said, looking malevolently at the small boy he would never forgive for confusing him so at the outset of the evening. "Jack, will I bring out the sausages yet? Mummy wants to know is everyone here."

"Nan's not here yet. Wait another few minutes."

"Everyone else is here, are they?" Aidan looked round the room. He didn't like the way Bill Dunne was making Eve laugh.

He didn't like the way everyone in the older set seemed to be making his parents laugh too loudly.

"I think so. Look, here's Nan now.

Standing at the door utterly naturally, as if she had entered a crowded room like this every evening of her life, was Nan Mahon.

She had a beautiful lemon dress, the skirt in flowing silk, the top a strapless bodice of thousands of tiny seed pearls on a lemon taffeta base. Her shoulders were graceful, rising from the dress; her hair, a mass of golden curls, was scooped up into a clasp, also decorated with tiny pearl ornaments. Her skin looked as if she had never known a spot or a blemish.

Jack went over to greet her, and take her to meet his parents.

"Is that Jack's lover, do you think?" Aengus asked Aidan Lynch hopefully. Aidan was the kind of person who sometimes told you unexpected things.

He was disappointed this time.

"You are a remarkably foolish and unwise young man to talk about lovers to boys who have been through a Catholic education and know that such things must be confined to the Holy Sacrament of Matrimony.

"I meant like in the pictures.." Aengus pleaded. "You don't know what you mean, your mind is a snake pit of confusion. Go and get the sausages while you still have a few brain cells left alive," Aidan ordered him.

"They're not all there," Aengus was mutinous. Yes, they are.

"No, there's someone in the cloakroom. She's been there since she came in."

"She probably got out the window and left," said Aidan. "Get the sausages or I'll tear the face off you."

Aengus knew it had all been going too well. The bow tie, the attention and people thanking him. Now Aidan Lynch was speaking to him just like he had at school.

He went gloomily out towards the kitchen in search of the party food.

In the hall a big girl was looking at herself in the mirror without very much pleasure.

"Hallo," he said.

"Hallo," she replied. "Am I the last?"

"I think so. Are you Nan?"

"No. She just went in, I heard her."

"They said I couldn't serve the sausages until Nan arrived. She was the only one missing."

"Well, I expect they forgot me," she said. "They must have," he said comfortingly. "Are you Jack's brother?"

"Yes, I'm Aengus Foley."

"How do you do. I'm Benny Hogan."

"Do you like sausages?"

"Yes, why?"

"I'm getting some now. I thought you could have a few before you went in, to stock up like."

"Thanks, but I'd better not. I'm afraid of bursting out of my dress."

"You've burst out of most of it already," said Aengus indicating her bosom.

"Oh God," said Benny.

"So you might as well have the sausages anyway," he said cheerfully.

"I'd better go in," she said.

She straightened her shoulders and trying not to look at the small boy who had thought her dress was ripped open, she held back her shoulders as she had promised Clodagh Pine she would and moved into the drawing room feeling like an ocean liner.

Bill Dunne and John O'Brien saw her first. "God, is that Big Benn?

Doesn't she look fantastic?" Bill said, behind his hand.

"Now, that's what I call a pair of Killarneys," John O'Brien said.

"Why Killarneys?" Bill was always interested in explanations of things.

"It's an expression." John O'Brien was still lookingat Benny.

"She's not bad-looking at all, is she?" Benny saw none of them.

Her eyes were roaming the room to see if in the middle of this happy and confident throng her parents were standing, awkward and ill at ease. Worse, would she find them holding forth on subjects of interest only in Knockglen? Worst of all, would they make a scene when they saw her dress?

But as far as she could see there was no sign of them. She peered and twisted, looking at the backs of people's heads, trying to see if they were hidden in that group of older people, where a man with a very loud laugh stood holding court.

No, they definitely weren't there.

She had seen a Morris Cowley pull away from the footpath just as they arrived. It was driven by one person. It was dark and hard to see either the face or the registration number. It could have been their car. That was what had unhinged her. She had fled straight into the cloakroom hissing at Eve to go in without her.

"I'll wait for you," Eve had said, thinking that she was just going to the lavatory.

"If you do, I'll kill you, here and now in front of everyone.

There'll be so much blood your blouse will be the same colour as your skirt."

"You've made your point. I'll go in without you, Eve had said.

For fifteen minutes Benny had sat in the Foleys' downstairs cloakroom.

Several times she felt the door handle rattle when a girl wanted to go in and check her appearance. But there was a mirror in the dining room and they made do with that.

Finally, she realised that there were no more sounds of people arriving and she emerged.

She felt foolish now, and a dull flash of anger with Sean Walsh for having tricked her into thinking that her night would be spoiled spread over her face. She felt a sense of rage with the unfortunate Patsy that she hadn't found out where the master and mistress had gone on a rare evening out. But most of all she felt an overpowering sense of annoyance with herself.

Now that she was sure they were not in the room she could ask herself what would have been so very terrible if they had turned up.

Slowly normality came back and she realised she was the centre of a lot of very interested attention.

"That's a very classy-looking outfit." Rosemary didn't even bother to disguise her surprise.

"Thanks, Rosemary. "So where did you get it?"

"Knockglen." Benny's answer was brief. She wanted to catch Eve's eye and tell her that she was all right again. But Eve had her back turned.

Before she could get to her there were several more compliments.

As far as she could see they were genuine. And mainly unflattering in their astonishment.

Still, it was heady stuff. She touched Eve on the shoulder. "I'm back," she said, grinning.

Eve turned away from the group. "Am I allowed to talk to you or do you still have some kind of plan to carve me up?"

"That's over."

Eve lowered her voice. "Well then."

"What is it?"

"Every single person in the room is looking at the pair of us. We're a Cinderella story come true." Benny didn't dare to look.

"I mean it," Eve said. "The glamour pusses like Rosemary and Sheila and even Nan are expected to look great at a dance. You and I are the surprise element. We're going to be danced off our feet. Mark my words."

"Eve, what would the Wise Woman do now?"

"In your case the Wise Woman would get a drink, and hold it in one hand and your evening bag in the other. That way you physically can't start covering up your bosom."

"Don't call it bosom," Benny begged.

"Sister Imelda used to call it the craw. You know, like in a bird.

"Make sure you cover your craw, Eve," she'd say. As if I had one to cover."

"As if any of us took any notice of her." Nan came up and put her arm into each of theirs. It was no treat for Nan to be admired, and she seemed to see nothing staggering about her two friends having emerged from the chrysalis. She behaved as if she had expected them to look magnificent. She spoke almost as a cat would purr. "Now, haven't we knocked those awful Rosemarys and Sheilas into a cocked hat?"

They all laughed happily, but Benny would have been happier if there had been any sign that Jack Foley, the handsome young host who was handing round plates with his little brother, had even by a flicker of his eye acknowledged that she was in the room, with most of her bosom bare, and if you were to judge by everyone else's glances, looking very well indeed.

The last car door banged as the young people left. John and Lilly Foley stood on the top step and waved goodbye. Inside there was still a lively drinks party with their own friends, and Aidan Lynch's parents. Lilly knew she looked well. It had taken a lot of time, but she had found exactly the right cocktail dress, glittery without being overdone, dressy without it looking as if she should be going to the dance with the youngsters. It was a heavy lilac silk and she had earrings to match it. Her feet hurt in her new shoes, but no one would know that, certainly not the tall handsome man beside her.

"That was lovely, wasn't it? You were a great host." She smiled at her husband, full of congratulations as if it were he rather than she who had organised everything. "You're wonderful, Lilly," he said, giving her a kiss on the forehead, and he put his arm around her as they closed the door and rejoined the guests.

All the work had been worth it, just for that.

The ladies' cloakroom was full of excited girls combing and lacquering their hair and flattening their lips out into grotesque shapes in order to apply lipstick. Two women behind a counter took their coats and gave them pink cloakroom tickets which the girls tucked into their bags.

There was a smell of perfume and face powder and a little nervous sweat.

Nan was ready before anyone else, unaware of the slightly jealous glances from others in the room. Suddenly their own strapless dresses looked a bit like something from the metal industry. They became aware of how the firm supports cut into their flesh. How could Nan's hair look so perfect without having to be licked into shape with cans of hair spray? Why didn't she need to dab at her chin and hide spots with tubes of covering paste?

"I'm just going to have a wander round until you're ready," she said to Benny and Eve. "Then I'll take you into the shop to meet my mother."

She left gracefully in a sea of other girls who were bouncing or bobbing or running up and down the carpeted stairs. She looked serene.

Nan walked in one side of the hotel bar smiling politely around her as if she were waiting to meet someone.

It was a place with dark oak panelling and red plush seats. By the bar a lot of men stood talking. Drinks here were very much more expensive than in an ordinary Dublin pub. This was a bar where the wealthy met.

You would find county people, up in Dublin for the bloodstock sales, or some kind of land business. There might be stockbrokers, bankers, visitors from England, people with titles.

It was not the kind of bar where you could ever come in on your own.

But on the night of a dance in the hotel ballroom, a lone girl looking for her partner would be quite acceptable. Nan stood where the light fell on her and looked around her. It wasn't long before everyone in the place saw her. She was aware without having to look at individual groups that everyone had seen her, and that they were admiring the cool young woman in the exquisite dress with the golden hair who stood confidently at the door.

Just when they had all had sufficient time to look at her, she turned around and with a wave of delight moved off to the foyer, where Eve and Benny were waiting. "What were you up to?" Eve asked. "Surveying the talent in the bar," Nan replied. "Won't there be enough of it at the dance? My God, you're insatiable, Nan Mahon."

"Yes, well less of that to my mother." Nan led them into the hotel shop where an attractive, rather tired-looking woman sat by the till.

She had fair hair too, like her daughter, but it was faded. She had a nice smile, but it was wary. Nan must have got her really striking good looks from her father, Eve decided. Her father who was hardly ever mentioned at all in Nan's conversation.

Nan did the introductions and they paraded their dresses for her.

Emily Mahon said all the right things. She told Eve that the scarlet skirt looked much better on a dark person. It had drained the colour from Nan's face. She told Benny that anyone could see at ten miles that this was beautiful expensive brocade, and that the girl who had remodelled it for her must be a genius.

She never mentioned the huge cleavage which cheered Benny greatly. If anyone else mentioned it she was going to dig out that modesty vest and reinstate it.

"And do any of you have any particular boyfriends tonight?" Emily asked eagerly.

"There's a fellow called Aidan Lynch who fancies Eve a bit," Benny said proudly, and then in order to define things properly for Mrs. Mahon she added, "And everyone fancies Nan.

"I think you're going to have a deal with Johnny O'Brien yourself," Nan said to Benny. "He's been following you around as if you had a magnet somewhere about your person.

Benny knew only too well what part of her person John O'Brien was following around.

Emily was pleased that her daughter had such nice friends. She had rarely met anyone that Nan knew. They had never been invited to the school plays or concerts like other parents. Nan had never wanted her father to know anything about school activities. It had always been her dread as a child that he would turn up the worse for wear at her convent school. To meet Eve and Benny was a big occasion for Emily Mahon.

"I'd offer you a spray of perfume from the tester, but you all smell so lovely already," she said. They said they didn't smell nearly nice enough. They'd love a splash of something.

They leaned over to Emily, who doused them liberally with Joy.

"The only problem is that you'll all smell the same," she laughed.

"The men won't know one of you from the other."

"That's good then," Nan said approvingly. "As a group we'll have made an impact on them. They'll never forget us.

They were aware that a customer had come into the shop and might want to be served.

"We'd better move on, Em, we don't want you sacked," Nan said.

"It's a treat to see you. Have a wonderful evening." Her eyes hated to see them go.

"Don't hurry on my account," the man said. "I'm just browsing.

His voice made Eve turn sharply.

It was Simon Westward. He hadn't seen her. He had eyes only for Nan.

As usual Nan seemed unaware that anyone was looking at her. She had probably grown up with those looks of admiration, Eve thought, like she herself had grown up with the sound of the convent bell. It became part of the scenery. You didn't notice it any more.

Simon did indeed start to browse among the shelves of ornaments and souvenirs, picking some up and examining them, looking at the prices on the box.

Emily smiled at him. "Tell me if you want any help. I'm just having a chat here..

She saw Nan frown at her slightly. "No, honestly.." He looked straight at Nan. "Hallo," he said warmly. "Did I see you in the bar a moment ago?"

"Yes, I was looking for my friends." Her smile was radiant. "And now I found them." She spread her hands out to indicate Eve and Benny.

Out of politeness he moved his eyes from Nan to acknowledge them.

"Hallo," Benny grinned. Simon looked at her startled. He knew her from somewhere certainly, but where? A big, striking girl, very familiar.

He looked at the smaller dark girl. It was his cousin Eve.

"Well, good evening, Simon," she said slightly mocking.

It was as if she had the advantage of him. She had already recognised him and had been watching while he ogled her friend.

"Eve!" There was warmth in his smile. Swift warmth. Now he remembered who Benny was also. She was the Hogan girl.

"Small world, all right," Eve said. "Are you all going to a dance?"

"No, heavens no. This is just our casual Friday night out. We dress up a lot in UCD, you know. Not scruffy Trinity students shuffling round in duffle coats." Her eyes danced, taking the sharpness out of her response.

"I was just going to compliment you and say you all looked splendid, but if it's like this every Friday, then I have been missing out on the social scene."

"Of course it's a dance, Simon," Benny said.

"Thank you, Miss Hogan." He couldn't remember her name. He waited expectantly to be introduced to Nan, but it didn't happen. "Will you be going to see Heather this weekend?" Eve asked.

"Alas no. I'm going to England, actually. You really have been frightfully good to her."

"I enjoy meeting her. She has a lot of spirit," Eve said. "And she'd need it in that mausoleum."

"It's meant to be the best.."

"Oh, it's about the only place for you lot to send her, certainly," Eve reassured him. But she did not imply that if Simon and his lot were less blinkered there would have been many more places to send the child.

Simon let another tiny pause develop, enough for him to be presented to the blonde girl if he was going to be. But no move was made.

She didn't stretch out her hand and introduce herself, and he wasn't going to ask.

"I must get on with my purchases and leave you all to enjoy the dance," he said.

"Was it anything in particular?" Emily was professional now in her manner.

"I wanted a gift, a small gift for a lady in Hampshire." His eyes were resting on Nan as he spoke.

"Something particularly Irish?" Emily asked. "Yes, not too shamrocky though."

Nan had been fiddling with a small paperweight made of Connemara marble. She left it back rather pointedly on the shelf.

Simon picked it up.

"I think you're right." He looked straight into her eyes.

"I think this is a very good idea. Thank you so much." He ended the sentence on a rising note, where if anyone was going to give a name it would be given now.

"It's very attractive," Emily said. "And if you like I could put it in a little box for you." His eyes were still on Nan.

"That would be lovely," he said.

Aidan Lynch appeared at the door.

"I know I'm always the spectre at the feast, but was there any question of you ladies joining us? It's not important or anything. It's just that the people at the door want to know where the rest of our party is and it's a question that's becoming increasingly hard to answer."

He looked from one to the other. Nan made the decision.

"We got sidetracked," she explained. "Come on, Aidan, lead us to the ball."

She gathered the other two with her like a hen clucking at chickens.

Benny and Eve said their goodbyes, and Nan smiled from the door.

"Goodbye, Em, I'll be seeing you.

She didn't say she'd be seeing her tonight, or at home. Simon watched them as they walked with Aidan Lynch towards the ballroom.

"What a very beautiful girl that is," Simon said. Emily looked after the three girls and boy walking through the crowded hotel.

"Isn't she?" said Emily Mahon.

They had a table for sixteen on the balcony. Dancing was well under way when they trooped in. Girls at other tables looked up when they saw Jack Foley, and people craned to see who he was with. They had no luck in guessing. He went in talking to Sean and Carmel.

Boys at the other tables saw with envy that Jack Foley's table had rosemary and Nan Mahon. That seemed too much for one party.

College beauties should be spread about a bit. Some of them wondered how that goofy Aidan Lynch always seemed to be in the thick of everything, and one or two asked each other who was the very tall girl with the wonderful cleavage.

At their table the plan of campaign was under way. Everyone was drinking a glass of water from the large jug on the table. Then as soon as it was empty the eight boys would each pour the quarter bottle of gin which they had in their pockets into the jug. For the rest of the evening, only minerals would be ordered.

They would ask for more and more club oranges, and the gin could be added from the jug.

Nobody could afford hotel prices for spirits. This was the clever solution. But the trick was not to let them remove the jug of so-called water, or worse still, fill it up, thus watering the gin.

The table was never to be left empty and at the mercy of waiters. The bandleader called out that they were to take the floor for a selection of caIypsos.

Bill Dunne was first on his feet with his hand out to Rosemary.

She had positioned herself near Jack, but that had been the wrong place. She should have sat opposite him, she realised too late.

That way he could have caught her eye. With a hard, forced smile she stood up and went down to join the dancers.

Johnny O'Brien asked Benny. She stood up eagerly. Dancing was something she was good at. Mother Francis had employed a dancing teacher who came once a week and they learned the waltz and the quickstep first, but she had also taught them Latin American dancing.

Benny smiled at the thought that girls from ~nockglen would probably beat any Dublin girls when it came to doing the samba, the mambo or the cha cha cha.

They were playing "This Is My Island in the Sun'. Johnny looked with open admiration at Benny.

"I never knew you had such a nice.." He stopped. "Nice what?"

Benny asked him directly. Johnny O'Brien chickened out. "Nice perfume," he said. It was nice, too, the perfume. It was heady, like a cloud around her. Of course he hadn't meant perfume at all, but he was right. That was nice also.

Aidan was dancing with Eve.

"This is the first time I've been able to hold you in my arms without your beating at me with your bony little fists, he said.

"Make the most of it," Eve said. "The bony little fists will be out again if you start trying to dance with me in your father's car."

"Were you talking to my father?" Aidan asked. "You know I was.

You introduced me to him three times."

"He's all right really. So's my mother - a bit loud but basically all right."

"They're no louder than you are," Eve said. "Oh they are. They boom.

I just talk forcefully."

"They talk more directly, normally. Sentences and everything," Eve said, thinking about them.

"You're very beautiful."

"Thank you, Aidan. And you look great in a dinner jacket."

"When are you going to stop fighting this hopeless physical passion you have for me and succumb? Allow yourself to have your way with me."

"Wouldn't you drop dead if I said I would?"

"I'd recover pretty quickly, I tell you."

"Well, it mightn't happen for a while. The succumbing bit, I mean. A good while."

"That's the trouble about being brought up by nuns. I might have to wait for ever.

"They weren't nearly as bad as everyone says. "When are you going to take me to meet them?"

"Don't be ridiculous.

"Why not? I took you to meet my family."

"You didn't arrange for your nuns to rent motorbikes and roar up to the party. I think that was socially rather inept of you," Aidan said.

"They couldn't make it," Eve explained. "Friday's their poker night and they just won't change for anyone.

Sean and Carmel danced entwined. The music played "Brown Skin Girl Stay Home and Mind Bay-bee'.

"Imagine, that won't be long now," Carmel said. "Another four years," Sean said happily. "And we've been together four years already if you count the year before Intermediate Cert."

"Oh, I do count that. I couldn't get you out of my mind that year."

"Aren't we lucky?" Carmel said, holding him tighter. "Very lucky.

Everyone in the room envies us," said Sean. "Wouldn't Sean and Carmel sicken you?" Eve said to Benny as they all went back up the stairs.

"Not much value out of asking them anywhere, certainly," Benny agreed.

"They remind me of those animals in the zoo that keep picking at each other, looking for fleas," Eve said.

"Don't, Eve," Benny laughed. "Someone will hear."

"No, you know, monkeys obsessed with each other. Social grooming I think it's called."

Back at the table Jack Foley and Sheila were sitting. Jack had elected to mind the jug of gin for the first watch. Sheila was pleased to have been chosen to sit with him, but she would have preferred to have been on the dance floor.

Nan came back to the table with Patrick Shea, an Architectural student, a friend of Jack's and Aidan's from school. Patrick Shea was hot and sweating. Nan looked as if she had been dancing on an ice rink in a cool breeze. There wasn't a sign of exertion on her face.

Benny looked across the table at her admiringly. She was so much in command of every situation and yet her mother was quite shy, and not a confident person at all. Perhaps Nan got it all from her father. Whom she never mentioned.

Benny wondered why Eve hadn't introduced her to Simon. It was rather gauche not to. If it had been anyone else Benny would have made the introduction herself, but Eve was always so chippy about those Westwards.

Still Nan had said nothing, and knowing Nan, if she had wanted an introduction she would have asked for one.

Johnny O'Brien was offering her a glass of orange. Benny took a great gulp of it thankfully and it was only when she had swallowed it she remembered it was full of gin.

She choked it back and saw Johnny O'Brien looking at her admiringly.

"You're certainly a woman who can hold her drink," he said.

It wasn't the characteristic she would most like to be praised for, but at least it was better than having gagged or got sick.

Rosemary had been looking at her.

"I envy you being able to do that," she said. "I get dizzy after even a little drink."

She looked around her, knowing that there would be silent praise and admiration for this feminine trait.

"I'm sure," Benny said gloomily.

"It must be coming from the country," Rosemary said, still with the look of mock admiration. "I expect they drink a lot there, don't they?"

"Oh, they do," Benny said. "But differently. I mean when I drink gin in the country it's usually by the neck out of a bottle. It's a rare treat to get it in a glass and mixed with club orange."

They laughed as she had known they would. It was never hard to make them laugh. It was hard to make them look at you with different eyes, though.

Benny looked at Jack, relaxed and happy, leaning back in his chair surveying the scene both around him and down on the tables near the dance floor. He would be the perfect host. He would ask every girl at the table to dance.

She felt an extraordinary urge to reach across and stroke his face, just touch his cheek gently. She wondered was she going mad? She had never known an urge like that before.

He would ask her to dance soon. Maybe now, perhaps the very next dance, he would lean across the table and smile. He would put out his hand towards her and smile with a slight questioning look.

She could see it happening so clearly she almost believed it had happened already. "Benny?" he might say, just like that, and she'd get up and walk down the stairs with him, hands touching lightly. And then they would just move towards each other.

The bandleader had said that their vocalist would knock strips off Tab Hunter in any singing contest and he would now sing "Young Love' to prove it.

Benny willed Jack to catch her eye and dance three soft slow numbers with her, beginning with "Young Love'.

But Rosemary caught his eye first. Benny didn't know how she did it, it might have been something to do with some awful beating of her eyelashes, but she managed to drag his glance over to her.

"Rosemary?" he said in that voice which he should have used to say "Benny?"

Her heart was like a lump of lead.

"Will you risk it, Benny?" Aidan Lynch was at her elbow. "Lovely, Aidan, thank you."

She stood up and went downstairs to the floor where Jack Foley and Rosemary were dancing and Rosemary had put both her arms around Jack's neck and was leaning back a bit away from him as if to study him better.

The dance was a success every year. This year the organisers seemed to think it was better than ever. They measured these things by enthusiasm. The spot prizes went very well.

"First gentleman up with a hole in his sock." Aidan Lynch won that easily. He pointed out that the part you put your foot in was a hole.

They had to give it to him. He got a huge cheer. "How did you know that?" Benny was impressed. "A friend of mine was a waiter here once.

He told me all the spots."

"What are the other questions?" Benny asked. "There's one which says"The first lady up with a picture of a rabbit". That's easy too.

"It is? Who'd have a picture of a rabbit?"

"Anyone with a threepence. There's a rabbit on the thruppenny piece."

"So there is. Aren't you a genius, Aidan?"

"I am, Benny, I am, but not everyone apart from yourself and myself recognises this."

They were welcomed as heroes back to the table and the wine they had won was opened.

"More drink. Aren't you marvellous, Benny?" Rosemary said. She had somehow managed to nestle her body into Jack's by leaning against him.

Benny wanted to get up and smack her face hard. But fortunately Jack had moved away and the need that she felt to separate them passed.

Some waltzes were announced. Benny didn't want to dance this set with Jack. Waltzes were too twirly, too active. No time to lean against him, to touch his face even accidentally.

The others were starting to go downstairs as the music soared up at them. "Che Sera, Sera, whatever will be, will be."

A tall, handsome boy came over to the table and asked courteously, "May I ask Nan for just one dance please, you have her all evening.. is that all right? Nan, will you?"

Nan looked up, everyone else seemed to be occupied. "Of course," she said, and went smiling to the dance floor. Benny remembered at school when you were picked for teams the awful bit about being the last one to be chosen. Or worse when there was an uneven number and Mother Francis would say "All right, Benny, you go with that team' at the very end. She remembered the musical chairs and being the first one out.

She had an uneasy feeling that it was all going to happen again.

Jack was with Rosemary again! She saw Bill Dunne and another boy, Nick Hayes, talking at the end of the table, miles from where she was. If they had noticed her and come to sit with her or asked them to join her that would have been all right.

Benny sat with a fixed smile on her face, fiddling with the menu which said they would have melon, soup, chicken and trifle. She wondered absently had they forgotten it was Friday? She poured out a fizzy orange drink into her glass and drank it. From the corner of her eye she saw a waiter approaching with a large metal jug about to refill the water jugs on the table.

Benny stood up. "No," she said. "No, they don't want any."

The waiter looked an old man. He looked tired. He had seen too many of these student dances, and danced at none of them. "Excuse me, miss, let me fill it."

"No." Benny was adamant.

"Even if you don't want any, the ones that did get to dance might want it when they come back," he said.

There was something in the mixed pity and scorn of his speech that brought a sharp sting of tears to her eyes. "They said they didn't like any more water. Before they went off to dance.

Truly." She must not make him suspicious either. Suppose he reported something odd about their table.

A great weariness came over her. "Listen," she said to him. "I don't give a damn. They told me they didn't want any more but I don't care.

Fill it up if you're set on it. What the hell."

He looked at her uneasily. He obviously thought she was slightly mad, and that it was kind of somebody to have given her an outing.

"I'll go on to the next table," he said hastily. "Great," Benny said.

She felt awkward sitting on her own. She would go to the ladies'.

There was no one to excuse herself to. Nick and Bill were having an animated discussion at the far end of the table; they didn't see her go. In the lavatory she sat and planned. The next dance would probably be rock and roll. That wasn't what she wanted for her dance with Jack either. She wouldn't catch his eye for this one. She'd wait until it was something lovely and slow again.

Maybe they'd have "Unchained Melody'. She loved that. Or "Stranger in Paradise'. That was nice too. "Softly, Softly' was a bit too sentimental. But it would do.

To her surprise she heard Rosemary's voice at the hand basins outside.

The waltzes wouldn't be over yet, surely. They normally had three of them.

"He is utterly gorgeous, isn't he?" Rosemary was saying to someone.

"And he's nice too, not full of himself like a lot of those sporty fellows are if they're any way good-looking."

Benny didn't recognise the other girl's voice. Whoever she was, she thought that Jack and Rosemary were together.

"Have you been going with him long?" she asked wistfully.

"No, I'm not going out with him at all. Yet, that is," she added menacingly.

"He looked pretty keen out there." Benny's heart lurched.

"He's a good dancer as well as everything else. The waltz isn't my strong point. I pretended I had turned my ankle. I just wanted to come in here for a rest. "That was clever."

"Well, you have to use every trick in the book. I said to him that I'd grab him for another dance later because we didn't finish this one."

"You've got no competition."

"I don't like the look of Nan Mahon. Did you see her dress?"

"It's out of this world. But you look just as good."

"Thanks."

Rosemary was pleased. "Where is he now?"

"He said he'd finish off the waltzes with Benny." Benny's face burned.

He had known she was a wallflower. He had bloody known.

He hadn't deigned to ask her for a full dance, but when ravishing Rosemary walked out on him, he'd get good old Benny for the rest of it.

"Who's Benny?"

"She's that huge girl - from way down the country. He knows her through her family or something. She's always turning up at these things."

"No competition there then?"

Rosemary laughed. "No, I don't think so. Whoever she is, her people must have money. They know the Foleys somehow and she's wearing a very expensive dress. I don't know where she got it, but it's fabulous, brocade and beautifully cut. It takes stones off her. She says she got it in Knockflash or wherever she lives."

"Knockflash?"

"Somewhere, real hick town. She no more got it there than she got it in the Bog of Allen."

Their voices faded. They had freshened themselves up, resprayed their hair, put on more perfume. They were ready to go out again, full of confidence, and face it all.

Benny sat on the lavatory. Ice cold. She was huge. She was no competition for anyone. She was the kind of person someone would come and finish off a dance with but not choose in the first place.

She looked at the small wristwatch her mother and father had given her for her seventeenth birthday. It was five to ten.

More than anywhere in the world she wanted to be sitting by the fire in Lisbeg. Her mother in one chair, her father in another and Shep looking at pictures in the flames and wondering what it was all about.

She would like to be hearing the kitchen door latch go and Patsy come in from her walk with Mossy and make them all a cup of drinking chocolate. She didn't want to be in a place where people said she was huge and no competition and must have lots of money and be a family friend of the Foleys to be invited anywhere. She didn't want to be fighting to save jugs of gin on tables for people who wouldn't dance with her.

But wishing wouldn't get her home out of this humiliating place.

Benny decided that she would take the good out of what she had overheard. It was good that her dress looked expensive and well cut.

It was good though sad that it was necessary to hear that it took stones off her. It was ood that Rosemary wasn't any way sure of Jack.

And it was good that he hadn't found her sitting at the table, lonely and abandoned, and now he couldn't feel he had fulfilled his obligation to dance with her. There were lots of good things, Benny Hogan told herself as she took the little piece of cotton wool that Nan's mother had soaked in Joy perfume for them and rubbed it behind her ears. She would go back and Rosemary would never know that her cruel dismissive remarks had only served to make Benny feel more positive and confident than ever.

They were making an announcement from the stage that the meal would be served shortly, and thanks to a special dispensation from the Archbishop's House the Friday abstinence need not be observed. There was a huge cheer. "How did they get that?" Eve asked.

"The Archbishop knows we've all been so good he wants to reward us," Jack suggested.

"No, it's just that chicken's the easiest to serve. You know everyone gets a wing. They breed special chickens for functions, with ten wings," Aidan said. "But why would the Archbishop want us to have chicken, seriously?" Benny asked.

"It's a deal," Aidan explained. "The dance organizers promise not to have dances on Saturday night that might run into the Sabbath day and the Church lets them eat chicken on Fridays."

"You ran away on me." Jack leaned over to Benny just as the soup was being served. "I what?"

"You ran off. I was looking for you to waltz with me."

"No, I didn't," Benny said smiling. "That was Rosemary that ran off on you. She hurt her ankle. I expect you mix us all up, we all look the same to you." The people around laughed, Rosemary didn't. She looked at Benny suspiciously. How did she know about the ankle?

Jack used the chance to make a flowery compliment. "You don't all look the same. But you all look marvellous. I mean it." And he was looking straight at Benny when he said it. She smiled back and managed not to make a joke or a smart remark.

There was a raffle during the meal, and the organizers came around to invite Rosemary and Nan to go and sell tickets.

"Why us?" Rosemary said. She didn't want to leave her post. The committee didn't want to explain that it was easier to force people to buy tickets if beautiful women were doing the asking.

Nan had stood up already.

"It's for charity," she said. "I certainly don't mind." Rosemary Ryan looked very annoyed. Nothing had been going her way this evening. Nan had won all the honours in this little incident and that big Benny across the table seemed to be smiling at her in some awful smug way.

"Of course I'll come too, she said, jumping to her feet. "Mind your ankle," Jack said, and she looked at him sharply. He was probably just being concerned, but there was something about Benny's eyes she didn't like.

The man who thought he was streets ahead of Tab Hunter but just hadn't got the breaks also thought he was a pretty good Tennessee Ernie Ford and went down to great depths in his version of "Sixteen Tons', a song Benny had detested since it had been popular when they were studying for the Leaving Certificate and Maire Carroll had always managed to be singing it when she was near Benny.

Benny was dancing with Nick Hayes. "You're very light to dance with.

It's like holding a feather," he said in some surprise.

"It's easy to dance if someone leads well." She was polite. He was all right, Nick Hayes, but only all right. Jack was dancing with Nan.

Somehow it was more disturbing than watching him dance with Rosemary.

Nan didn't make those very obvious little efforts. She really made no play for him at all and that must be maddening to someone like Jack Foley who was used to everyone adoring him. In fact they were very much alike, those two. She hadn't really noticed it before.

Both so sure of themselves because they didn't need to fight for anyone's attention like everyone else seemed to have to do. But just because they were sure, they could afford to be nice and easygoing.

Those kind of good looks freed you to be whatever kind of person you wanted to be.

"I never see you round anywhere in the evenings," Nick was saying.

"Nobody does much," Benny said. "What kind of places do you go?" She didn't care where he went. She just wanted to get him talking so that she could take her mind off the awful tune they were dancing to, and think more of Jack.

"I have a car," he was saying right across her happy thoughts of the next dance when surely Jack must choose her.

"I could come and see you in Knockglen some time. Jack said he had a very nice day when he went to your house."

"He did? Good, I'm glad he enjoyed it." This was hopeful. This was very good indeed. "Maybe you'll come back together one time and I'll try and entertain you both."

"Oh no, that's not the idea. The idea would be to keep you to myself," Nick said with a leer. "One doesn't want Jack Foley getting in on all one's discoveries, does one?"

He was putting on an accent deliberately trying to pretend he was being posh. Somehow it was flat and silly and didn't work. He couldn't make people laugh like Aidan Lynch could, like she herself could.

She tried to dull the pain she felt watching Nan and Jack dance together.

Nick Hayes was looking at her, waiting for a response. "I always hate this song," she said to him suddenly. "Why? It's quite nice I think."

"The words."

"I owe my soul to the company store," he sang along with the vocalist.

"What on earth's wrong with those words?" he asked, mystified. She looked at him. He genuinely didn't remember the first line - you load sixteen tons and what do you get?

He had made no connection.

It was there only in her mind. Nobody else in the room heard the song title and swivelled their eyes to Benny Hogan. She must remember this.

And she must remember that both Johnny O'Brien and Nick Hayes were asking her for a date.

These were the things she would remember from the night. As well as the dance with Jack when he asked her.

He asked her at twenty-five to twelve. When they had dimmed the lights and the vocalist had told them that since Frankie Laine hadn't been able to show he would sing Frankie's song, "Your Eyes are the Eyes of a Woman in Love', Jack Foley leaned across the table and said, "Benny?"

They danced together easily, as if they had been partners for a long time.

She forced herself not to prattle and chatter and make fifteen jokes.

He seemed to be happy to dance without conversation. Sometimes, looking over his shoulder she saw people looking at them. She was as tall as he was, so she couldn't have looked up at him to speak anyway, even if she had wanted to.

He drew her a little closer which was great except that she feared the place he had his hand on her back was just the part where the heavy-duty bra ended and there was a small roll of flesh.

God, suppose he held that bit of her - it would be like a lifebelt.

How could she get him to move his hand up her back?

How? These were the things you needed to know in life, rather than what was set out in a syllabus for you.

Mercifully the number ended. They stood beside each other companionably waiting for the next one to start. He leaned over and touched a lock of her hair.

"Is it all falling down?" Benny asked, alarmed. "No, it's lovely.

I just pretended it was out of place so that I could touch your face."

How extraordinary that he had wanted to feel her face as she had yearned to touch his all night. "I'm afraid.." she began.

She was going to say "I'm afraid it's a very sweaty face, your finger might get stuck to it."

But she stopped herself.

"What are you afraid of?" he asked.

"I'm afraid other Fridays are going to seem very dull after tonight."

"Don't knock Knockglen." He always said that. It was like a special phrase between them.

"You're right. We have no idea what plans Mario and Fonsie have for the place."

The singer was sorry that Dino couldn't make it so he was going to give his own rendition of the Dean Martin number "Memories Are Made of This'.

Benny and Jack drew towards each other, and this time his hand was higher on her back. The devil roll of flesh like a lifebelt was not in evidence.

"You're a marvellous person to have in a party anywhere," he said.

"Why do you say that?" Her face showed nothing of what she felt.

None of the despair that he only thought of her as some kind of cabaret. "Because you are, he said. "I'm only an ignorant old rugby player. What do I know of words?"

"You're not an ignorant old rugby player. You're a great host.

We're all having a great night because you got us all together and invited us to your home." She smiled and he gave her a little hug.

And when he had held her tight he didn't release her again.

Into her ear he whispered, "You smell absolutely lovely." She said nothing. She didn't close her eyes. It looked too confident.

She didn't look around and see the envious glances as she was held by the most sought-after man in the room. She just looked down. She could see the back of his dinner jacket, and the way his hair curled at the back of his neck. Pressed close to her she could feel his heart beating, or maybe it was her heart. She hoped it was his, because if it was hers it seemed a bit over-strong.

Even when the third song, "The Man from Laramie', was over Jack didn't suggest going back to the table. He wanted the next dance.

Benny blessed that dancing teacher who used to drive around in a battered old car teaching the tunic-clad girls of Ireland to dance.

She blessed her with all her heart as she and Jack did stirring versions of "Mambo Italiano' and "Hernando's Hideaway'.

Laughing and flushed they came back to the table. Sheila wasn't even pretending to listen to Johnny O'Brien and Rosemary looked distinctly put out. Nan caught Benny's eye and gave her a discreet thumbs-up sign. Eve sitting across the table with Aidan Lynch's arm loosely round her shoulder gave her a huge grin of solidarity. They were on her side.

"We thought we'd lost you for the night," Nick Hayes said waspishly.

Neither Benny nor Jack took any notice. Aidan Lynch had won yet another spot prize - this time a huge box of chocolates which were opened. Carmel was busy feeding Sean with the soft-centred coffee ones he liked.

Rosemary foolishly grabbed the box to offer it to Jack. "You must have one before they're all gone," she said. But her movement was too swift and she spilled them all.

Benny looked on. It was the kind of thing she would normally have done. How perfect that it should be Rosemary who did it tonight.

"You owe me another dance for the one we didn't finish," Rosemary said, as people tried to retrieve the chocolates.

"I do indeed. I wasn't going to let you forget it," Jack said gallantly.

His fingers were still touching Benny's slightly. She was sure he had been going to dance with her again.

Then suddenly and unbelievably the last dance was announced. They wanted to see everyone on the floor for California Here I Come.

Benny could have cried.

Somehow, yet again, she had lost the high ground to Rosemary Ryan. She was going to have the last dance with Jack. Nick had his hand out to her, and so had Johnny O'Brien. She thought she saw a look of regret on Jack's face. But she must have imagined it, because when she and Johnny O'Brien took to the floor Jack and Rosemary were whirling around both laughing. Though she couldn't be sure, she thought she saw him push some of the hair out of Rosemary's eyes as he had done to her.

She kept a happy smile on her face for Johnny O'Brien as she clicked through her brain the possibilities that Jack Foley was just a fellow who liked everyone, and said nice things to every single woman he met.

Not out of devious cunning, but because he genuinely did feel that every woman had some attraction for him.

This must be the case, Benny thought, because the way he had held her when they were dancing together was suspiciously like the way he held Rosemary when everyone was dancing to "Goodnight Sweetheart, See You in the Morning'.

There was a lot of excitement at the door where the photographers gathered to take snaps. They gave out little pink cards with the address of the places where the small prints could be inspected next day. Benny was leaving just as Jack called. "Here," he called.

"Benny, come here and let's pose for posterity."

Hardly able to believe that he had called her, she leaped to his side.

Just then Nan came down the steps. "Nan too," he said. "No, no." She moved away.

"Come on," he said, "the more the merrier." The three of them smiled at the flash. And then with a lot of calling goodnight, and see you, and wasn't it great, they were all in the cars that Jack had organized.

Nick Hayes was to drive Benny, Eve and Sheila home because they all lived on the south side. The others were within a couple of miles of the city centre.

Nan was going with Sean and Carmel. Rosemary, to her great rage, had a lift with Johnny O'Brien, who lived in the same road.

Kit had left sandwiches for them and a note saying that she had been out late playing cards so not to wake her until morning.

They crept up to bed.

"He's really nice, Aidan Lynch," Benny said as they got undressed. "I mean really nice. Not just all jokes and playing the fool."

"Yes, but he talks like the Goons, nine tenths of the time. It's like having to learn a new language understanding him," Eve complained.

"He seems very fond of you."

"I ask myself what can be wrong with him then. Hereditary insanity maybe. His parents are like town criers. Did you hear them?"

Benny giggled.

"And what about you and Jack? You were doing great.

"I thought I was." Her voice was heavy and sad. "But I wasn't really.

He's just a dreamboat who's nice to everyone. He likes to be surrounded by the whole world, and have the whole world in a good humour."

"It's not a bad way to be," Eve said. She lay in her bed with her arms folded behind her neck. She looked so much more cheerful and happy than she had a few short months ago.

"No, it's not a bad way to be. But it's not a good thing to hitch your star to. I must keep remembering that," Benny said.

Next morning they were woken by Kit.

"There's a call for you, Benny."

"Oh God, my parents." She leapt out of bed in her nightie. "No, not at all. A young man," Kit said, raising her eyebrows in approval.

"Hallo, Benny. It's Jack. You said you were staying with Eve. I asked Aidan for the phone number." Her heart was beating so strangely now, she thought she might fall down.

"Hallo, Jack," she said.

"I was wondering if you'd like to have lunch," he said. She knew what lunch was now. Thank God. Lunch was a lot of people gathered together in a crowd around a table, with Benny entertaining them.

He certainly was someone who liked all his friends around him all the time. Benny was glad that she had identified that last night to Eve.

That she hadn't allowed herself to build up any hopes.

She paused for a couple of seconds before she accepted. Only because she was thinking it all out.

"I meant on our own," he said. "This time just the two of us."

CHAPTER 10

Eddie and Annabel Hogan had raised their eyebrows at each other in surprise as Patsy banged around the kitchen getting breakfast and muttering to herself. They had no idea what it was about.

They could decipher parts of her muttering.. in all the years she had been in this house she had never been spoken to like that, shouted at, given dog's abuse. Mutter, mutter, crash, crash.

"Probably had words with Mossy," Annabel whispered as Patsy went out to give some scraps to the four hens in their little wire-covered run.

"If so, she must be the first who ever had. I never knew such a silent man," Eddie whispered back.

They had managed to get the information that Benny had telephoned from Dublin shortly before she went to the dance while they had gone for a walk.

Dr. Johnson had said that Annabel should take more exercise and form the routine of a regular walk. Last night they had taken Shep on a long and invigorating journey half a mile out along the Dublin road. So they had missed the call.

"It was only to say thank you for the dress again, is that all, Patsy?"

Annabel asked, yet again.

"That's what she said it was," Patsy said darkly. Benny's parents were mystified.

"She was probably overexcited," Eddie said, after a lot of thought.

"She was that all right," Patsy agreed.

Clodagh Pine told her aunt they should stay open at lunch time.

"Child, you'll have us all in the County Hospital if we work any more.

Peggy couldn't believe that she had thought this niece of hers was going to be a lazy lump. Already she had increased the turnover of the shop significantly, and despite her own appearance, which was to say the least of it eccentric, she had managed not to alienate any of the old customers either.

"But look at it, Aunt Peg. When else would people like Birdie Mac be able to come down and look at cardigans? When would Mrs. Kennedy come over and see the new blouses? Mrs. Carroll closes the grocery for lunch. She doesn't spend the whole lunch hour eating, by the look of her, thin string of misery that she is. Wouldn't she walk down and see what the new skirts are like?"

"It might seem a bit unfair somehow. Unfair on the others." Peggy knew her thinking was confused. "Tell me, Aunt Peg, have I missed something in my walks up and down Knockglen? Are there several women's draperies, open and competing with us? Is there a whole circle of women running shops like ours thinking that we're a bit sharp opening at lunch time?"

"Don't be impertinent," Peggy said.

"Seriously. Who would object?"

"They might think we were anxious to make money. That's all."

Peggy was defensive.

"Oh, gosh, wouldn't that be dreadful. And there you were all those years not trying to make a penny. Trying to lose it. How could I have been so stupid?" Clodagh put on a clowning face.

"We'll be dropping off our feet."

"Not when we get another girl in we won't."

"There'd never be the call for it."

"Go over the books with me today and you'll see."

Mrs. Kennedy looked without pleasure on the picture of Fonsie who stood in her shop.

"How's the drugs business, Mrs. K?" he asked. He always winked slightly at her as if she were engaged in something shady.

"What can I do for you?" she asked in a clipped voice. "I'm looking for a nice fancy cake of soap. "Yes .. well." She managed to suggest that it was not a moment before time.

"For girls, like," Fonsie said. "A gift?" She seemed surprised.

"No, for the new ladies' room," Fonsie said proudly. He had spent a long time persuading Mario that they should do up the two outhouses as toilets. And make the female one look attractive.

Girls liked to spend time painting themselves and doing their hair.

Fonsie had driven out to an auction and bought a huge mirror. They put a shelf underneath it. All they needed now was a couple of nice towels on a roller and a bit of smart soap to start off with.

"Would Apple Blossom be a bit too good for what you had in mind?"

Mrs. Kennedy brought out what was called a gift pack of soap.

Fonsie made a mental note to tell Clodagh to stock soaps and talcs.

Sneak them in before Peggy could protest that they were taking business from the chemist. Mrs. Kennedy was an old bat, and a bad old bat at that. She didn't deserve to have the monopoly on the town's soap. She wouldn't have, not for much longer. But in the meantime..

"That's precisely what we need, Mrs. Kennedy, thank you so much," he said with a great beam and handed the money across the counter without even wincing at the cost.

Sean Walsh saw from the shop window that Mrs. Healy across the road was polishing the brass sign for the hotel. She was looking at it critically. He wondered had it been defaced, she was frowning so much.

There was nobody in Hogan's so he strolled across the road to see what was happening.

"It's hard to get in and out of the letters," Mrs. Healy said.

"Bits remain in there clogging them up. "You shouldn't be doing this, Mrs. Healy, it's not fitting," he said. "A member of your staff should do the brasses. "You do the ones across the road.

I've seen you," she countered.

"Ah, that's different. It's not my place, across there."

"Not yet," said Mrs. Healy.

Sean ignored this. "You must have somebody, Mrs. Healy, one of the kitchen maids."

"They're so unreliable. Just standing chatting to people instead of getting on with it." Mrs. Healy seemed quite unaware that this is what she was doing herself. "If you like, I'll do yours when I'm doing ours," Sean offered. "But early in the morning, before anyone would see."

"That's extraordinarily kind of you." Mrs. Healy looked at him, surprised, as if wondering why he would do this. She prided herself on being able to understand human nature. Running a hotel you met all sorts and you had to make judgements about people.

Sean Walsh was a difficult person to categorise. It was obvious that he had his eye on the daughter of the house. A big strong-willed girl with a mind of her own. Mrs. Healy thought that Sean Walsh would be wise to make some contingency plans. Just because she was a large girl who might not get many offers, Benny Hogan, once she had her degree from Dublin, might well hightail it off somewhere else. Leaving Sean Walsh's plans in tatters.

Mother Francis was pleased that it was a nice bright Saturday morning and not drizzling with rain like it had been most mornings in the week.

She would go up to the cottage for an hour when school finished and see what else needed to be done. Sometimes she told herself that she was like a child with a doll's house.

Perhaps all the aching that a woman out in the world might have for her own home was coming to the surface. She hoped that this wasn't going to threaten the whole basis of her vocation to the religious life. You were meant to put your own home and family behind you and think only of your calling. But there was nothing in any rules that said you couldn't help to build up a home for an orphan who had been sent by the intervention of God into your care.

Mother Francis wondered how her orphan had got on at the dance last night. Kit Hegarty had phoned to say that Eve looked splendid. Mother Francis wished it hadn't been in a borrowed skirt, no matter how elegant and how rich a red. She wished that class would be over and she could release the girls who were dying to escape anyway and go to Mario's cafe and look in the very much changed windows of Peggy's shop.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if she could just ring the bell now, at eleven thirty in the morning, and shout "You're free'.

The children would remember it all their lives. But undoubtedly it would get to the ears of Mother Clare. Her heart sank as it always did at the thought of her sister in religion. If Mother Clare hadn't been coming they might have invited Kit Hegarty for Christmas. They couldn't now. Mother Clare would say they were turning a religious house into some kind of boarding house.

In two and a half hours she would be taking the key from its place in the wall and going into the cottage, polishing the piano and covering the damp stain on the wall with a lovely gold-coloured wall hanging.

One of the missionary Sisters had brought it from Africa. They had all admired it, but it wasn't a holy picture. It didn't really seem suitable to put it up in the convent. Mother Francis had kept it carefully. She knew just where it would be useful.

And maybe she might get some goldcoloured material somewhere and Sister Imelda could run up a couple of cushion covers too.

Eve was almost bouncing up and down on her bed when she heard about the invitation to lunch.

"I told you, I told you," she kept saying. "No, you didn't. You said he looked as if he was enjoying dancing with me. That's all."

"Well, you thought he looked as if it was Purgatory on earth and that he was making eyes at people over your shoulder to rescue him."

"I didn't quite think that," Benny said. But she had almost thought it.

When she had played the whole thing over in her mind again and again, those six lovely dances they had together, she was torn between believing that they were as enjoyable for him as they were for her, and that they were a simple courteous duty. Now it looked as if he really had liked her. The only problem was what to wear to the lunch.

Only the old cast-off clothes of yesterday were available. You couldn't wear a ball gown and expose your bosom on a November Saturday.

So much the pity! "I have seventeen pounds. I could lend you some if you wanted to buy something," Eve offered.

But buying was no use. Not for Benny. They simply didn't have the clothes in her size.

If it had been Eve they could have run up Marine Road in Dunlaoghaire to Lee's or McCullogh's and got something in two minutes. If it were Nan all she would have to do was open a cupboard and choose. But Benny's clothes, such as they were, were fifty miles away in Knockglen.

Knockglen.

She had better ring her parents. And find out where they had been.

And tell them it would be the evening bus, and say something to Patsy.

She got the coins and went back down to the phone. They were delighted to hear from her and pleased that the dance had gone well, and wanted to know what had been served for supper. They were very startled to hear about the dispensation to eat meat.

They had been out for a walk when she had telephoned last night.

It was very good of her. And had the party in the Foley's house been nice? And had she explained again how grateful they were to be asked?

Benny felt her eyes misting.

"Tell Patsy I have a pair of stockings for her as a present, she said suddenly.

"You couldn't have chosen a better time to give her something," Benny's mother said in a low, conspiratorial voice. "She's been like a weasel all day. A weasel with a head cold if you ask me."

Eve said that Kit would find a solution to the clothes problem.

Kit had an answer for everything.

"Not about huge clothes." Benny was gloomy. But she was wrong.

Kit said that one of the students who stayed in the house had a gorgeous emerald-green jumper. She'd borrow it off him. Say it needed a stitch or something. Boys never noticed that kind of thing. If he wanted to wear it today he bloody couldn't. That was all. Then Kit would sew a nice lacy collar of her own on it and lend Benny her green handbag. She'd be dressed to kill.

Fonsie wanted Clodagh to be the first to see the new ladies' cloakroom.

"God, it's lovely." She was full of admiration. "Pink towels, pink soap, and purple curtains. It's fabulous."

He was anxious about the lighting. Was it too bright?

Clodagh thought not. If they were old people, who didn't want to see wrinkles, then yes, have it subdued. But they'd be young. Let them see the worst in their faces. Clodagh wished she could get her aunt to install two fitting rooms. Peggy said that it wasn't needed in somewhere like Knockglen. People could take things on approval. If they didn't like them they could bring them back.

This was uneconomic and, with the increased volume of stock they carried, hard to organise. There was a storeroom that Clodagh had her eye on. All it needed was lights, mirrors, carpet and bright curtains.

They sighed, Clodagh and Fonsie, at the uphill battles with their relations.

"Will we go and have a drink in Healy's?" Fonsie said suddenly.

"I don't know. I said I'd unpack a whole lot of stuff that came in this morning."

"To celebrate my new bathrooms and to plan your new fitting rooms," he pleaded.

They walked companionably up the street, Clodagh in her short white wool dress worn over a pair of baggy mauve trousers and mauve polo-necked jumper. Great white plastic hoops of earrings dangled under a man's tweed hat with a ribbon of mauve and white on it.

Fonsie's spongy shoes made no sound on the footpath. His red crushed velvet jacket was bound in a yellow braid, his shirt neck was open and a red thin string like a tie hung down on each side of the collar. His dark red trousers were so tight that it appeared that every step would cause him pain in most of his body.

On Saturdays at lunch time the bar in Healy's Hotel was like a little club. Eddie Hogan would call in for a drink and meet Dr. Johnson coming back from his rounds. Sometimes Father Ross would appear, and if Dessie Burns was off the drink he would sip a club orange loudly and know he was welcome in their midst.

Mr. Flood hadn't been in much recently. The visions he had been seeing were preoccupying him. He had been seen standing in front of his shop looking thoughtfully up at the tree. Mr. Kennedy when he was alive had been a regular. His wife would not have dreamed of coming in his stead. Sometimes Peggy had gone in for a swift gin and vermouth with Birdie Mac.

Clodagh and Fonsie paused at the entrance to the bar; they didn't want to join the group of old people and yet it would have been rude to ignore them.

As it happened they didn't have to make the decision. Suddenly between them and the room stood the wellcorseted figure of Mrs. Healy.

"Can I do anything for you?" She looked from one to the other without hiding her distaste.

"Very probably, but I think we'll confine it to just having a drink at the moment," Fonsie laughed, and ran his hand through his mop of dark and well-greased hair.

Clodagh giggled and looked down.

"Yes, well, perhaps Shea's or somewhere might be nice for a drink," Mrs. Healy said.

They looked at her in disbelief. She could not be refusing them entrance to her hotel?

Their silence unsettled her. Mrs. Healy had been expecting a protest.

"So maybe we could see you, here, when you are.. um .. more appropriately dressed," she said, with an insincere smile on her lips, but nowhere near her eyes.

"Are you refusing to serve us a drink, Mrs. Healy?" Fonsie said in a very loud voice, intended to make every head in the place look up.

"I'm suggesting that perhaps you might present yourself for a drink in garb that is more in tune with the standards of a town like this and a hotel of this calibre," she said.

"Are you refusing us because we are the worse for drink?" Clodagh asked. She looked over to the corner where two farmers were celebrating a small field bought and sold and were distinctly the worse for wear.

"I think out of respect for your aunt, who is one of our most valued customers, you might mind your tongue," Mrs. Healy said.

"She's joking, Clodagh. Don't mind her," Fonsie said, trying to push past.

Two spots of red on Mrs. Healy's face warned everyone that she most certainly was not joking.

Fonsie said that there were four men in the bar without ties, and he was perfectly willing to close his tie if it meant he could get a half pint of Guinness. Clodagh said that if any of her garments offended Mrs. Healy she would be very happy to remove them one by one until she was in something acceptable like a vest and knickers.

Eventually they tired of the game. With exaggerated shrugs and bewildered expressions, they left the bar. They both turned at the door with the sad, bloodhound faces of condemned criminals, but their laughter could be heard all the way down the corridor and out into the street.

The group in the corner looked at each other in some alarm. The main problem was Peggy, one of the town's most respected citizens. How would she take to her niece being refused entrance to the hotel? The little group of people that Mrs. Healy cherished in her hotel looked down furtively.

Mrs. Healy spoke in a steady voice. "One has to draw the line somewhere," she said.

Lilly Foley said that Aidan Lynch's terrible parents never knew where to draw the line.

Jack asked why they hadn't stopped serving drink, then the Lynches would have gone home. That apparently had been done early on. The bottles had been physically taken away from Aengus, but.

they had still stayed on and boomed.

"It irritated your father," Lilly told Jack. "Why didn't he do something about it then, like saying "Good God, is that the time?"' Jack saw no problems in the tardy Lynch parents.

"It's a woman's place to organize these things. It was left to me. As things always are." Lilly Foley seemed put out. "But apart from that it was a great party. Thanks a lot. Jack grinned at her.

It mollified her a bit. She noted that her son had been on the phone already asking some girl out to lunch. She couldn't hear which one, but she assumed it was the glamorous Rosemary, who kept boasting of her relations in the Law, or the very beautiful girl, Nan, in the dress with all the little pearls on it. The girl who had said hardly anything, but was still the centre of attention.

Lilly looked affectionately at her eldest son. His hair was tousled, he smelled of Knight's Castille soap, he had eaten a huge breakfast and read the sporting pages of two newspapers. He had given Aengus half a crown for all his help at the party.

Lilly knew that like his father before him Jack Foley was a heartbreaker, and would be one until the day he died.

He had said the name of the restaurant as if everyone knew it.

Carlo's. Benny had heard of it. It was down near the Quays, her old stamping ground getting on and off the bus from Knockglen. It was small and Italian, and she had once heard Nan say that she had been there in the evening and they had candles in wine bottles like you saw in the pictures.

Much too early as usual, she went into a big store and examined the cosmetics. She found a green eyeshadow and smeared some on each lid.

It was exactly the same colour as the veterinary student's enormous jumper that she was wearing. The shop assistant urged her to buy it, insisting that it was often hard to find exactly the right shade when you were looking for it and you should seize the hour.

Benny explained that it wasn't her sweater. It was borrowed from a fellow. She wondered why she needed to tell so much to strangers.

"Maybe he'll lend it to you again," said the girl in the short pink nylon coat whose job was to sell cosmetics.

"I doubt it. I don't even know who he is. His landlady pinched it for me."

Benny knew she was sounding very peculiar but conversation of any kind made her feel less anxious. It filled that great empty echo chamber of anxiety she felt about the lunch that lay ahead.

It had been so easy when she smelled of Joy and when she was able to be in his arms. It would be quite different now, in a green sweater across a table. How would she smile and attract him, and hold him?

There must have been something about her that appealed to him last night. It couldn't have been all naked bosom, could it? "Do you think I could have a spray of Joy perfume without buying any?" she begged the girl. "We're not meant to. "Please."

She got a small splash. Enough to remind him of last night.

Carlo's had a small door. That was a poor start. Benny hoped it wouldn't have those awful benches, the kind of church pew seats that were popular now. They were desperately hard to squeeze into. Even though it was bright out on the street, with a cold, wintry sun picking everything out sharply, it was dark and warm inside. She gave her coat to the waiter. "I'm to meet someone here," she said. "He is here already."

That meant that Jack must be well known in this place, she thought with a wave of disappointment. Maybe he came every Saturday with a different girl. "How do you know it's the right person?" she asked the waiter anxiously. It would be humiliating to be led to the wrong table in front of everyone and for Jack to have to rescue her.

"There is only one person here," the waiter said. He stood up to greet her.

"Don't you look lovely and well rested considering the night that was in it?" he said admiringly. "That's the good bracing air of Dunlaoghaire," she said. Why had she said that? There were words like bracing you didn't say. They reminded people of big, jolly girls on bikes. Like the word strapping.

But he hadn't made any unfortunate word associations. He still seemed quite admiring.

"Whatever it is, it works. Our house is full of the dayafter feeling, glasses and ashtrays piled up in the kitchen."

"It was a lovely party, thank you very much."

"It was fine. Aengus sends you his regards. He was very taken with you.

"I think he thought I was mad."

"No. Why should he think that?"

It had been the wrong thing to say. Why had she said it? Bringing herself down, why couldn't she have asked about Aengus?

The waiter came and fussed over them. He was a kindly man, like a thinner version of Mario. Benny wondered was he any relation?

There couldn't be that many Italians working in Ireland.

Benny decided to ask him.

"Do you have a relative working in Knockglen?" He pronounced the name of her home town over an< over, rolling it around, but his eyes narrowing suspiciously.

"Why do you think I have relations in Knocka Glenna?"

"There's an Italian there, called Mario." Benny wished the purple and red sunburst carpet would open up at her feet and suck her into it, then close over her head.

Jack rescued her. "It's probably a bit like, do you know my Uncle Mo in Chicago?" he said. "I'm always doing that."

She couldn't imagine him ever doing it. Was there any way at all of trying to get back some of the magic of last night?

They hadn't even begun the lunch and already he must have regretted asking her. She had talked about the bracing air of Dunlaoghaire, reminding him of fat ladies on postcards. She had engaged the waiter in an endless and confused dialogue about whether he knew another Italian living miles away. What a great fun person she was. And there wasn't even anybody in the restaurant to distract him, to make him feel that the outing had any excitement at all. Benny wished she were back in the Dolphin hotel with half of Dublin there and all the Rosemarys and Sheilas and even Carmel and Sean picking at each other and feeding each other bread rolls.

Anything was better than this catastrophic setting.

"Isn't it super to have it to ourselves?" Jack said at that moment.

"I feel like a sultan, or some millionaire. They do you know - ring up restaurants and say they want to book all the tables so that they won't be disturbed."

"They do?" Benny asked eagerly.

At least it was conversation and he seemed to be making the best of the place being empty.

"Well, I did it today, of course! Carlo, we need the whole place to ourselves . . . a pianist possibly. No? Well, all right. Just a few violinists at the table later. Just don't let any hoi polloi in, no awful Dubliners having their lunch or anything sordid like that."

They laughed and laughed just like last night. "And what did Carlo say?"

"He said, "For you, Meester Foley, anything you like, but only eef the Signorina ees lovely."'

The words were bitten back. She was about to say, "Well, we fell down on that one, didn't we?"

She was going to put herself down for fear of thinking that she might actually believe herself to be acceptable. But something warned her it wasn't the right thing to do. She put her head on one side and smiled at him. "And then you arrived and he saw you were very beautiful, so he has now put a House Full sign on the door," Jack said.

"Is that Carlo who's serving us, do you think?" Benny asked.

"No idea," Jack said. "He looks much more like a man who has a secret cousin in Knockglen, but doesn't want anyone to know.

"I must remember every detail of this place to tell Mario about it," Benny said, looking happily around. "You're lovely, Benny," Jack said, and laid his hand on hers.

Clodagh told her aunt that she had been barred from Healy's. It didn't matter all that much because it wasn't a place she planned on visiting much anyway, but she felt that Peggy should know from her before anyone else told her.

"What were you doing, the pair of you?" Peggy asked. "I'd tell you if we were doing anything, you know that But as it happened we just walked in. She decided she didn't like the look of us."

"She can't do that under the Innkeeper's Act."

"I think she can.

Management reserves the right and all that. We thought you ought to know, you and Mario, but honestly Fonsie and I don't care.

That's the truth."

The truth also was that Peggy and Mario did care. Very much.

Neither of them liked the way that the young people dressed, in fact it was a source of great common grumbling between them. But to be refused service in the town's only hotel. That was something else. That was war.

It wasn't long before Mrs. Healy discovered how the lines were being drawn. Mr. Flood, who was having one of his clear spells where he neither saw nor mentioned the nun in the tree who had been visiting him with messages, said that it was time that someone had taken a stand.

Those two were an abomination. He had read in the papers that there was an international movement to take over the civilised world, and that its members knew each other by these kind of garish clothes. It was no accident that Fonsie and Clodagh had gravitated to each other, he said, nodding his head sagely. Mrs. Carroll was with Mrs. Healy too.

The sooner this very undesirable influence in the town was stamped on, the better. Neither of these two young people had parents to deal with them, relying only on a maiden aunt and a bachelor uncle. No wonder they had run wild. Her own daughter Maire, who was working in the shop and doing book-keeping by correspondence course, had often been drawn to the bright lights in the cafe, and to the garish clothes in what had once been a respectable window. Mrs. Healy had been quite right to make her point.

Mrs. Kennedy on the other hand took a different view. She was heard to say that Mrs. Healy had a cheek. She adn't even been born in Knockglen.

Who did she think she was, making rules and regulations for the people of the town? Mrs. Kennedy said that there were many unsavoury people seen in the corner of Healy's bar on a Fair Day and when commercial travellers had too much to drink and new they could always get a drink in the hotel. Mrs. Kennedy, who had never liked the young widow and thought that her own husband used to spend too many evenings there, was outraged that she should think of refusing a drink to a niece of Peggy Pine, no matter how unwisely the poor girl garbed herself.

Birdie Mac wasn't sure. She was a timid woman who had lived all her life looking after an aged mother. She had neither wanted to do this or not wanted to. It was just that Birdie was unable to make a decision. She had never made her own mind up about anything. Even though she was a friend of Peggy's she also listened to what Mrs. Carroll said. Even though Mario was a good customer and bought biscuits from her every day, she still agreed with poor Mr. Flood that Mario's nephew was going too far altogether and how could it be stopped unless somebody shouted stop?

She didn't like Mrs. Healy personally, but she admired her courage in running a business so well in a man's world, instead of retreating humbly behind the counter of a sweet shop, which was all that Birdie had been able to do in terms of independent living.

Dr. Johnson said that Mrs. Healy was free to serve or refuse whosoever she wanted. Father Ross wouldn't be drawn at all. Paccy Moore told his cousin Dekko that Mrs. Healy had two bunions, one on each foot.

That was his only comment. It was taken to be support for Clodagh and Fonsie.

Eddie and Annabel Hogan discussed it for a long time over their Saturday lunch. There were ways of course that Clodagh and Fonsie had misunderstood Knockglen and gone too far. They both looked as if they were in fancy dress almost all of the time. But they were hard workers, it couldn't be denied, and that was their great saving grace. If they had been standing smoking on the corner there would have been no sympathy for them.

But nobody could accuse either of them of being idle. And in Knockglen that would cover a multitude of sins, like dressing so mutinously.

"If someone came into your shop, you'd serve them no matter how they were dressed, wouldn't you, Eddie?"

"Yes, but if they had manure on their boots I'd ask them not to walk it in," he said.

"But they weren't walking anything in," Annabel Hogan said. She had always thought that Mrs. Healy had a special smile for the men and nothing nearly so warm for their wives. And also Clodagh had made such a lovely dress for Benny it would be hard not to be on her side. All that brocade had looked so well, there were little bits of chestnut colour in it, just like Benny's hair, and that beautiful dash of white at the front, that pleated insert over the bosom. It had given the whole thing such a classy touch. So elegant and ladylike, and not at all the kind of thing you'd ever have thought Clodagh would have dreamed up.

Mother Francis heard about the scene in the hotel as well. Peggy drove up to the convent that afternoon for tea and advice.

"Rise above it, Peggy. Rise right above it."

"That's not easy to do if you're out in the world, Bunty."

"It's not easy to do if you're inside a convent either. I have that Mother Clare descending on me for Christmas. Imagine trying to rise above that."

"I'll never go in there for a drink again."

"Think carefully, Peggy, think. If you do want a drink where will you go? The spit and sawdust in Shea's maybe? The poky little snugs of the other places? Don't do anything rash."

"God, Bunty, for a nun you've a great knowledge of all the bars in town," said Peggy Pine admiringly.

They talked about the dance, and how wonderful Aidan had been. No other table had won so many spot prizes. And there had been an incident Jack told her where a girl fainted at another table and when they had loosened her clothes and tried to revive her, two bread rolls had fallen out of her bra. Jack laughed good-naturedly at this. Benny thought of how the girl must be feeling today, and how she would never be able to remember the dance with anything but shame.

"Ah, go on, it is funny," he said. She knew she must see the light-hearted side. "Yes, and full of crumbs, very scratchy I'd say."

She felt like Judas to this girl she didn't even know, but she was rewarded with the smile. "Not anything you'd ever need, Benny," he said, smiling at her across the table.

"Everyone's different." She looked down, very, very embarrassed.

"You're different in a good way," he said. At least the veterinary student, whoever he was, had a nice floppy Jumper. You couldn't see the outline of her breasts. She looked at her front, relieved. What could she say now to change the subject?

The door opened and another couple came in. Jack shrugged.

"I said only people from Napoli could come, and then only if they stayed quiet." He looked at them warningly. They were a pair of middle-aged Dubliners. Cold and shivery.

"Probably civil servants having an affair," Benny whispered.

"No, two school inspectors planning to make everyone fail the Leaving Certificate next year," he countered. Most of the time it was easy to talk to him. He was so normal and relaxed, and there really was nothing in his manner that made her feel anxious. It was just herself.

Benny realised that she had spent years sending herself up and playing the fool. When it came to the time to play the romantic lead, she didn't have a clue. And worse, she wasn't at all sure that was the part she was actually being cast to play. She wished she could read his signals, and understand what he was saying.

If only she could know then she could respond. The ice cream was offered. The waiter explained cassata, a beautiful Neopolitan ice cream, he said, lovely bits of fruit and nuts chopped up in it, some candied peel, some rnacaroons.

Bellissima.

Something told Benny that the right thing was to have it, not to talk of diets or calories or waistlines. She saw Jack's face light up.

He'd have some too. The waiter saw them smile at each other. "It's a very dark afternoon. I light a little candle to give you light to see each other when you talk," he said.

Jack's open shirt over his navy sweater was a pale pink.

It looked beautiful in the candlelight. She felt again that urge to stroke him. Not to kiss his lips or press against him, just to reach out and rub her hand softly from his cheek to his chin.

She had drunk only one glass of wine. It couldn't be some drink-crazed feeling.

Benny watched as if it was happening to someone else as she leaned across and stroked his face softly three times. The third time he caught her hand and held it to his lips. He kissed it with his head bent over itso that she couldn't see his eyes.

Then he gave it back to her.

There was no way he was making fun of her, or making a silly extravagant gesture like Aidan might. Nobody would hold your hand like that and kiss it for such a long time unless they wanted to.

Would they? Would they?

Dessie Burns said that Mrs. Healy could be a bit uppity in herself, and there had indeed been times when she had spoken to him more sharply than was called for. But to be fair, there had been a question of drink involved and perhaps there were those who would say that the woman had been within her rights. There was nothing more scrupulously and boringly fair than Dessie Burns when he was on the dry.

And when all was said and done that young Fonsie had been told he couldn't walk around this town as if he owned it. Who was he? The nephew of an Eyetie, with no sign of the Eyetie mother and the Dub father since the day he'd set foot in the place. That was a young lad without a background, without a history, in Knockglen.

Let him take things more slowly. And as for Peggy's niece, she was a sore trial with the get-up of her. Maybe this would make her settle down.

Mario said that he would go and stand on the step of Healy's Hotel and spit in the door and then spit out the door, and then he'd come home and spit at Fonsie. Fonsie said that none of this would advance them, they should instead go to Liverpool and buy a beautiful secondhand Wurlitzer juke box that he had seen advertised there.

Mario developed a most unexpected loyalty to Fonsie. Having denounced him to everyone in the town individually and generally, he now said that his sister's child was the salt of the earth, the mainstay of Mario's old age and the shining hope for Knockglen.

He also said with a lot of pounding on whatever surface he was near that he would never drink in Healy's again. Which, considering he never drunk there anyway, was a threat more powerful in the utterance than the deed.

Simon Westward came into Healy's that afternoon to enquire if they did dinners.

"Every day, Mr. Westward." Mrs. Healy was delighted to se him in the place at last. "Might I offer you a little something on the house to celebrate your first visit to us?"

"Very kind of you .. er .. Mrs. .. "Healy." She looked rather pointedly at the hotel sign.

"Ah yes, how stupid of me. No, I won't stay for a drink now. You do do dinners. That's wonderful. I wasn't sure.

"Every day from noon until two thirty."

"Oh."

"Do those hours not suit you?"

"No, I mean they're perfectly fine hours. I was thinking of dinner in the evening." Mrs. Healy always prided herself on being ready when opportunity came to call.

"Up to now, Mr. Westward, we have merely served high teas, but coming up to the Christmas season and thereafter we will indeed be serving dinner," she said.

"Starting?"

"Starting next weekend, Mr. Westward," she said, looking him straight in the eye.

The waiter thought they must have a sambucca. It was a little Italian liqueur. This was with the compliments of the house. He would put a coffee bean in it and set it alight. It was a wonderful drink to have at the end of a lunch on a winter's day.

They sat there and wondered would the disgruntled couple get one too, or was it only for people who looked happy?

"Will we see you next weekend?" the waiter asked eagerly. Benny could have killed him. She was doing so well. Why must the waiter bring up the subject of another date?

"Certainly another time, I hope," Jack said, They walked along the Quays, which had often looked cold and wet to Benny, but this afternoon there was a glorious sunset, and everything had a rosy light.

The second-hand booksellers had wooden stands of books on display outside.

"It's like Paris," Benny said happily. "Were you ever there?"

"No, of course I wasn't," she laughed good-naturedly. That's me, just showing off. I've seen the pictures and I've been to the films."

"And you're studying French of course, you'd be able to take it in your stride."

"I doubt that. Great chats about Racine and Corneille in English would be more my line."

"Nonsense. I'll be depending on you to be my guide when I'm playing in the Parc des Princes," he said. "I bet you will," she said.

"No, that's me showing off. I'll never play for anyone if I keep eating like I did last night and today. I'm meant to be in training.

You'd never know It. "You're lucky you didn't have practice today.

You often do on Saturdays, don't you?"

"We did. I skipped it," he said.

She looked at him suddenly. The old Benny would have made a joke.

The new Benny didn't. "I'm glad you did. It was a lovely lunch."

She had her overnight bag in a shop near the bus stop. The woman handed it over the counter to her and together they walked towards the bus.

"What will you do tonight?" he asked her. "Go to Mario's cafe and tell people about the dance. What about you?"

"No idea. Hope there are some invitations when I get home." He laughed lazily, the kind of man who didn't have to plan his own life.

He passed her zippered bag on to the bus. Benny willed Mikey not to make any smart-aleck remarks. "There you are, Benny. I knew we didn't have you yesterday. The weight in the bus was lighter altogether," he said.

Jack hadn't heard, or if he had heard he hadn't understood Mikey's mumblings. That's what she told herself as She sat and looked out at the darkening city and the beginings of the countryside.

She had danced close to Jack Foley, who had then invited er out to lunch. She had said nothing too stupid. He had said he'd see her in the Annexe on Monday. He had kissed her hand. He had said she was lovely.

She was absolutely exhausted. She felt as if she had been carrying a heavy weight for miles and miles in some kind of contest. But whatever contest it was, and whatever the rules, it looked as if she had won.

CHAPTER 11

Heather wanted to know all about the dance and mainly what they had for pudding. She was stunned that Eve couldn't remember. She found it beyond comprehension that there could be too much else happening to remember pudding.

She broke the news that Simon said he was going to join them on their outing.

"I didn't know anything about this," Eve said, annoyed. "I didn't tell you in case you wouldn't come." Heather was so honest that it was hard to attack her. "Well, if you have him.."

"I want you," Heather said simply. Simon arrived in the car.

"Think of me as the chauffeur," he said. "You ladies are in charge."

Almost immediately he gave them his own plan for the afternoon. A drive through County Wicklow and afternoon tea in a rather nice hotel he knew. Eve and Heather had been planning to take the train to Bray, go on the bumpers and have ice creams with hot butterscotch sauce. Eve was pleased that Simon's outing sounded so dull and tame compared with her own. She knew which Heather would have preferred. But Heather was a dutiful sister, and she saw far too little of Simon already. She gave a mild show of enthusiasm. Eve after a deliberate pause did the same.

Simon looked from one to the other. He knew that this was second best.

He was very cheery and answered all Heather's questions about her pony, about Clara's puppies, and about Woffles the rabbit.

He explained that Mrs. Walsh was still as silent and as majestic on her bicycle as ever. That Bee Moore was upset over some young man she had wanted and he had turned his attentions to Another.

Eve had to put her hand over her face when Heather's questioning revealed the man to be Mossy Rooney and Another to be Patsy.

"How's Grandfather?" Heather asked. "The same. Come on, we're boring Eve."

"But he's Eve's grandfather too."

"Absolutely."

The subject was closed. Eve knew he wanted something. She had no idea what it was.

At tea time he brought it up.

"That was a remarkably beautiful girl, your friend."

"Which friend?"

"In the shop, at the dance. The blonde girl."

"Oh yes?"

"I was wondering who she is?"

"Were you?"

"Yes, I was." He was short now.

For ages afterwards Eve hugged herself with delight and congratulations that she had managed not to answer such a direct question with any kind of response that would please him. And yet she had remained perfectly polite. For the girl who used to speak so unguardedly, whose temper was a legend in St. Mary's, it was a triumph.

"Who is she? Oh, she's a student at UCD, doing First Arts, like about six hundred of us."

Her smile had told Simon Westward that this was all he was going to get.

The veterinary student was a nice boy called Kevin Hickey. He was very polite and he thanked Mrs. Hegarty for having taken his new green sweater to sew a tape on the back of it in case he wanted to hang it up with a loop. He had thought you should fold them, or put them on a clothes hanger, but still, it was very nice of her. He might wear it tonight. It was a great colour. When he picked it up he thought there was a faint smell of perfume, but he must have imagined it. Or else it was Mrs. Hegarty's perfume.

Kevin Hickey's mother was dead. It was nice to live in a house where there was a kind woman looking after him.

He had asked his father to send her a turkey for Christmas. It would come by train, wrapped in straw and tied well with string.

He smelled his green jumper again. There was definitely some cosmetic.

Maybe if he hung it up in the fresh air by the window it would go away.

He heard the gate opening and drew back. He wouldn't like Mrs. Hegarty to see him airing the jumper. But it wasn't Mrs. Hegarty back from her shopping. It was a dark-haired man he hadn't seen before.

The doorbell rang and rang, so Kevin ran down to answer it. Mrs. Hegarty was out, he said. The man wanted to wait. He looked respectable. Kevin was at a loss. "It really is all right." The man smiled at him. "I'm an old friend."

"And what's your name?"

"It's Hegarty also, as it happens."

As Kevin went back upstairs he turned and saw the man who was sitting in the hall pick up the picture of Mrs. Hegarty's son who had died.

Possibly he was a relation.

Sheila noticed that Jack ran off immediately after his law lectures these days. No hanging around and chatting. No little jokes, just off like an arrow. Once or twice she asked him why he needed to run so fast.

"Training." he had smiled at her with that boyish kind of laugh which meant he knew he would be forgiven anything. Sheila decided that he must be seeing that Rosemary Ryan in First Arts.

She enquired from Carmel if that was true. It was easy to talk to Carmel because she wasn't really playing in the same game, she was so preoccupied with Sean that other people were only a vague background to her. "Rosemary and Jack? I don't think so," Carmel said after a lot of thought. "No, I haven't seen them together at all. I've seen Jack in the Annexe a couple of mornings, but only talking to Benny hogan."

"Ah, well, that's all right, so," said Sheila with some relief.

Benny and Patsy were friends again. It had taken the promised stockings plus a tin of French Moss talcum powder and an explanation that her nerves were overwrought because she was frightened of going to the dance. Once Patsy had come round she was as usual a strong champion of the daughter of the house.

"What did you have to be frightened of? Aren't you a fine big girl who shows all the signs of being well fed and well looked after all her life?"

That was one of the things that Benny feared was only too obvious. But it was hard to explain to small, stooped Patsy who had been brought up without enough to eat in an orphanage. "How's your romance?" she asked instead. "He's not much with the words," Patsy complained. "But the words he does say? Are they nice?"

"It's very hard to know with men what they mean," Patsy said sagely.

"You'd need someone standing at your shoulder saying this means this, and this means the other."

Benny agreed fervently. When Jack Foley said he had missed her at a party did he mean that he had looked around and thought it would be lovely if only Benny had been there? Had he thought it all evening, or only once? And if he missed her that much why had he gone to it? At the party in Jack's house Aengus had asked Benny if she was one of the ones who was always phoning looking for Jack. She had decided that she would never be one of those.

It had worked so well the way things were. Or had it? Patsy was right. With men it was impossible to know what they meant. Nan used to say they never meant anything, but that was too depressing to contemplate.

Mrs. Healy had been disappointed not to see Sean- Walsh arriving full of support for her predicament. She knew his distaste for Fonsie and Clodagh and the kind of lifestyle they represented.

But then Sean was not a customer in Healy's hotel. It had something to do with not presuming, she imagined. Not putting himself forward, styling himself Mr. Hogan's equal when he was in fact a hired hand. It was nice to see that kind of respect but sometimes Sean carried it too far. Like polishing the brasses, like living in a cramped room over the shop. He seemed to be biding his time and maybe he might bide it too long. "You should invite young Sean Walsh in for a drink with you some time," she suggested to Eddie Hogan. Eddie's honest face told her what she already knew. "I've asked him a dozen times, but he won't come in with me. I don't think he's a drinking man. Weren't we blessed the day he arrived in Knockglen?"

Emily Mahon marvelled at the way her daughter kept her clothes and her room. Every garment was sponged and hung up when it was taken off.

Her coats and jackets always looked as if they had come straight from the dry cleaners.

The shoes had newspapers stuffed in the toes and stood in a small rack by the window. She polished her belts and handbags until they gleamed.

On the wash-hand basin in her room were samples of soaps that Emily had been able to get her through the hotel.

There was a book on how to apply make-up. Nan Mahon didn't rely on weekly magaúines or Sunday newspapers to teach her style. She did the thing thoroughly.

Emily smiled affectionately as she saw the books on etiquette that Nan studied as well as her university texts. Nan had once told her mother that anyone could talk to anyone if they knew the rules. It was a matter of learning them. The book was open at a section telling you how introductions are made.

"Marquesses, Earls, Viscounts, Barons and their wives are introduced as Lord or Lady X, Honourables as plain Mr." Imagine if Nan was in a world where such things would be of use to her.

But then it wasn't all that far beyond the possible. Look at the way she had looked at that dance. People who weren't even part of the student crowd were admiring her. She might very well end up in twinset and pearls on the steps of a big house, with dogs beside her and servants to do her work.

It had always been Emily Mahon's dream for her daughter. The only problem was, what part would she play in it? And it didn't bear thinking about how little a part Nan's father might be expected to take in any such lifestyle.

If Nan were to get there it was easy to see that she would no longer be any part of Maple Gardens.

Rosemary Ryan wore far too much make-up for the daytime. Benny could see that quite clearly now. There was a ridge at the side of her jaw where it stopped.

She was also brighter than people gave her credit for. When she was with a crowd she always simpered and played the dumb blonde, but in tutorials she was sharp as a razor. "What are you going to do when this is over?" she asked Benny.

"Go to the Annexe." Benny was meeting Jack. She hoped Rosemary wouldn't come too. "I have to meet a whole lot of different people," she said hastily, to discourage her. "No, I meant this.

All of this." Rosemary waved a vague hand around the university.

"Do a postgrad diploma and be a librarian, I think," Benny said.

"What about you?"

"I think I'll be an air hostess," Rosemary said. "You don't need a degree for that."

"No, but it helps." Rosemary had it worked out. "It's a great way to get a husband."

Benny didn't know whether she meant doing a degree was a good way or being an air hostess. She didn't like to ask. It was such a strange coincidence that Rosemary should say that, because only the day before Carmel had asked Nan would she think of joining Aer Lingus. She had the looks and the style. And she'd meet lots of men.

"Only businessmen," Nan had said, as if that settled it. Carmel's eyes had narrowed. Her Sean was doing a B.Comm. and was aiming hard to be a businessman.

"Carmel says Nan doesn't think it's a good job." Rosemary was probing.

"Do you think Nan's going out with JackFoley?"

"What makes you think that?"

"I don't know. He hasn't been sighted much. I wondered was he holed up with someone mysterious?"

"I see him from time to time," Benny said. "Oh, that's all right then." Rosemary was pleased. "He's around. He hasn't been snatched away from under our noses. What a relief!'

Kit Hegarty let herself in and found her husband Joseph sitting in the kitchen.

She put her shopping on the floor and steadied herself with a hand on the kitchen chair. "Who let you in?" she asked.

"A boy with freckles and a Kerry accent. Don't say anything to him.

He interrogated me and asked me to sit in the hall."

"Which you didn't."

"I was cold."

"Did you tell him who you were?"

"Just that my name happened to be Hegarty. Sit down, Kit. I'll make you a cup of tea."

"You'll make me nothing in my kitchen," she said. But she did sit down and looked at him across the table. He was fifteen years older than he was the day he had taken the mail boat out of their lives.

How long had she cried herself to sleep at night wanting him to return?

How often had she played the scene where he would come back and she would forgive him? But always in that version Francis would be young and would run towards them both, arms outstretched, crying out that he had a daddy and a real home again. He was still handsome. His hair had only little bits of grey, but he looked shabbier than she remembered, as if he were down on his luck. His shoes weren't well polished. They needed to be taken to a cobbler's. His cuffs were not frayed exactly, but thin.

"Did you hear about Francis?" she said. "Yes."

The silence hung long between them. "I came to tell you how sorry I was," he said. "Not sorry enough to see him ever, to care to be involved in his life when he had a life." She looked at him without hate, the man who had abandoned them. She had been told that he had gone to live with a barmaid. At the time somehow that had made it worse, more humiliating that the woman was a barmaid.

It was such an obvious kind of thing to do. Now she wondered why the woman's job had been remotely important.

She thought of all the questions she had parried and eventually answered while her son grew up asking about his father, and wondering why he didn't have what everyone else at the Christian Brothers school had in their homes.

She thought of the day Francis had got his Leaving Certificate and run home with the results, and how she had an urge to find her long-lost husband that day - only a few months ago - and tell him that the child they had produced together would go to university.

In those long nights when she had not been able to find any sleep and thoughts had run scampering around in her head, she remembered with relief that she hadn't raised the hopes of this philandering husband and led him to believe that he had fathered a university student.

She thought of all this as she looked at him sitting in her kitchen.

"I'll make you tea," she said. "Whatever you think."

"Did she throw you out?" Kit asked. She asked because he hadn't the look of a man who was cared for by a woman, not even a woman who had been brassy and taken him, even though she must have known he had a wife and child in Ireland.

"Oh, that all ended a long time ago. Years and years ago.

It had ended. But he had not come back. Once gone he was truly gone.

Somehow that was sadder than the other. For years she had seen him in some kind of domesticity with this woman. But in fact he might have been living alone, or in digs or bedsitters.

That was worse than leaving her for a grand passion, however ill advised. She looked at him with a look of great sadness.

"I was wondering.." he said.

She looked at him, kettle in one hand and teapot in the other.

He was going to ask, could he come back?

Nan wanted to know if Eve had taken Heather out at the weekend.

She often enquired about Heather, Eve noticed, rarely about the digs and Kit or the convent and Mother Francis.

She said they went to Wicklow and it had been wet and misty, and they went to a hotel where tea and sandwiches cost twice what real food like ice cream and butterscotch sauce would cost.

"You must have gone in a car to a place like that," Nan said.

"Yes." Eve looked at her. "Did Aidan drive you?"

"Lord, I couldn't let Aidan near her. He's quite frightening enough for our age. He'd give a child nightmares." Nan left the subject of Aidan Lynch. "So who did?"

Eve knew it was ridiculous not to tell her. She'd get to know some day. It was like being an eight-year-old, having secrets at school.

anyway it was making too much of it all.

"Her brother Simon drove us," she said. "The one we saw in my mother's shop at the dance, and you didn't introduce me.

"The very one.

Nan pealed with laughter. "You're marvellous, Eve," she said.

"I'm so glad I'm your friend. I'd really hate to be your enemy.

Most of the cottages on the road up by the quarry behind the convent were fairly dilapidated. It was never a place that anyone would really seek out to live. It had been different when the quarry was operating, in those days there had been plenty of people wanting to live there.

Now there were very few lights in windows. Mossy Rooney lived in a small house there with his mother. There had been rumours that Mossy had been seen with building materials and a consequent speculation that he might intend building an extra room at the back. Could this mean that he had plans to marry? Mossy was not a man to do things in a hurry. People said that Patsy shouldn't count her chickens too soon.

Sean Walsh sometimes went for a walk up that way on a Sunday. Mother Francis would nod to him gravely and he always returned the greeting very formally. If he ever wondered what the nun was doing pushing her way past the dark green leaves of the wild fuchsia and rolling up her sleeves to polish and clean he never gave any sign of his curiosity.

Neither did she pause to think why he walked there. He was a lonely young man, not very attractive to speak to. She knew that Eve had always disliked him. But that might just have been a childish thing, a loyalty to Benny Hogan, who had some kind of antipathy towards her father's assistant.

She was surprised when he addressed her. With a long preamble of apology he asked if she knew who owned the cottages and whether they might perhaps belong to the convent. Mother Francis explained that they had once belonged to the Westlands estate, and had devolved somehow to various quarry workers and others.

Politely with her head on one side in her enquiring manner she wondered why he wanted to know.

Equally courteously Sean told her that it had been an idle enquiry but the nature of small towns being what it as, perhaps an enquiry that might remain confidential between the two of them.

Mother Francis sighed. She supposed the poor fellow who had scant hope of making much of a living in Hogan's might be looking to the day when he could buy a house for himself and start a family, and that he was realistic enough to start looking up on this wild craggy road where nobody would really live by choice.

Benny hated going into the Coffee Inn. The tables were always so small. She was afraid that her skirt or her shoulder bag would swoop someone's frothy coffee off on to the floor. Jack's face lit up when he saw her. He had been holding a seat with some difficulty.

"These awful country thicks wanted to take your stool," he hissed at her. "Less running down the country people," Benny said. She glanced up and saw with a shock that the three students who had lost the battle for the seat were Kit Hegarty's students, the boys who lived where Eve worked. And one of them, a big fellow with freckles, was wearing his lovely emerald-green sweater.

idan Lynch asked Eve to come home and meet his parents.

"I've met them," Eve said ungraciously, handing him another dinner plate to dry. "Well, you could meet them again."

Eve didn't want to meet them again; it was rushing things. It was saying things that weren't ready to be said like that Eve was Aidan's girlfriend, which she wasn't.

"How is this relationship going to progress any further?" Aidan asked the ceiling. "She won't get to know my family. She won't let me near her body. She won't go on a date with me unless I come out to Dunlaoghaire and do the washing-up after all the culchies first." He sounded very sorry for himself.

Eve's mind was on other things. Aidan could amuse himself for hours when he was in one of his rhetorical moods. She smiled at him absently.

Kit was out. For the very first time since Eve had been in the house; what was more, there was no message. Kevin, the nice freckled vet student whose jumper had been purloined for Benny's date, had said that Mrs. Hegarty had gone out with a man.

"Everyone goes out with men," Aidan had interrupted. "It's the law of nature. Female canaries go out with male canaries. Sheep go out with rams. Women tortoises go out with men tortoises. Only Eve seems to have reservations."

Eve took no notice. She was also thinking about Benny. Almost every day for a week now Benny had met Jack Foley, either in the Annexe or the Coffee Inn or a bar. She said he was very easy to talk to. She hadn't put a foot wrong yet. Benny's face looked as if someone had turned on a light inside when she talked about Jack Foley. "And of course this Eve that I have the misfortune to be besotted with .. she won't even stay in Dublin for the Christmas parties. She's leaving me on my own for other women to have their way with, and do sinful things with my body."

"I have to go to Knockglen, you idiot," she said. "Where there will be no parties, where people will go out and watch the grass grow and see the rain fall and moocows will walk down the main street swishing their foul tails."

"You've got it wrong," Eve cried. "We'll be having a great time in Knockglen, down in Mario's every evening, and of course there'll be parties there.

"Name me one," Aidan countered.

"Well, I'll be having one for a start," Eve said, stung. Then she stood motionless with a dinner plate in her hands.

Oh God, she thought. Now I have to.

Nan rang the Irish Times, and asked for the Sports depart ment.

When she was put through she asked them to tell her what race meetings would be held before Christmas. Not many, she was told.

Things slackened off coming up to the festival season. There'd be a meeting every Saturdaye of course, Navan, Punchestown, run-of~the~mill things. But on St. Stephen's Day it would all get going again. The day after Christmas there'd be Leopardstown and Limerick. She could take her pick of those. Nan asked them what did people who usually went racing do when the season slackened off. In a newspaper office people are accustomed to being asked odd questions on the phone. They gave it some consideration. It depended on what kind of people. Some might be saving their pennies, some might be out hunting. It depended.

Nan thanked them in the pleasant unaffected voice that had never tried to imitate the tones of another class she wanted to join.

An elocution teacher at school had once told them that there was nothing more pathetic than people with perfectly good Irish accents trying to say "Fratefully nace'. Nothing would mark you out as a social climber as much as adopting that kind of accent.

They sat in a cafe in Dunlaoghaire, Mr. and Mrs. Hegarty. Around them other people were doing ordinary things, like having a coffee before going to an evening class in typing, or waiting for the pictures to start.

ordinary people with ordinary lives and nothing bigger to discuss than whether the electric fire would eat up electric ity or if they could have two chickens instead of a turkey on Christmas Day.

Joseph Hegarty fiddled with his spoon. She noticed that he didn't take sugar in his coffee now. Perhaps the woman had put him off that.

Perhaps his travels had taken him to places where there were no sugar bowls on the table. He had left one insurance company and gone to another. He had moved from that to working with a broker, to having a book himself, to working with another agent. Insurance wasn't the same, he told her.

She looked at him with eyes that were not hard, or cold. She saw him objectively. He was kindly and soft-spoken, as he had always been. In those first agonised months after he had left that was what she had missed above all. "You wouldn't know anyone here anymore," she said haltingly.

"I'd get to know them again."

"It'd be harder to find insurance work here than there. Things are very tight in Ireland."

"I wouldn't go back on that. I thought maybe I could help you ..

build up the business.

She thought about it, sitting very still and with her eyes down so that she wouldn't meet the hope in his. She thought of the way he would preside over the table, make the place seem like it was run by a family. She could almost see him giving second helpings, making boys like Kevin Hickey laugh, being interested in their studies and their social lives.

But why had he not done that for his own son? For Francis Hegarty who might still be alive this day if he had had a firm father who would brook no nonsense about a motorbike.

"No, Joseph," she said, without looking up. "It wouldn't work."

He sat there very silent. He thought about his son, the son who had written to him all these years. The son who had come to see him during the summer, on a weekend from canning peas. Frank, the boy who had drunk three pints with his father and told him all about the home in Dunlaoghaire and how maybe his mother's heart was softening. But he had never told his mother about the visit or the letters. Joseph Hegarty would keep faith with the dead boy. Frank must have had reasons, his father would not betray him now or change his mother's memory of him.

"Very well, Kit," he said. "It's your decision. I just thought I'd ask."

The Westwards were in the telephone book. The phone was answered by an elderly woman.

"It's a personal call for Mr. Simon Westward from Sir Victor Cavendish."

Nan spoke in the impersonal voice of a secretary. She had taken the name from Social and Personal.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Westward isn't here."

"Where can Sir Victor find him, please?" Mrs. Walsh responded immediately to the confident tone that expected an answer.

"He's going to have lunch in the Hibernian, I believe," she said.

"Perhaps Sir Victor could telephone him there."

"Thank you so much," Nan said, and hung up.

I want to give you your Christmas present today," Nan said to Benny in the main hall.

"Lord, Nan, I didn't bring anything in for you." Benny looked stricken.

"No, mine is a treat. I'm taking you to lunch." She would listen to no refusals. Everyone deserved to have lunch in the Hibernian at least once in their life. Nan and Benny were no exceptions.

Benny wondered why Eve wasn't being included.

They met Bill Dunne and Johnny O'Brien as they were crossing St. Stephen's Green.

The boys suggested a Christmas drink. When that was turned down, they came up with chicken croquette and chips in Bewley's with sticky almond buns to follow. laughing, Benny said they were going to the Hibernian.

"You must have a pair of sugar daddies then," Bill Dunne said crossly to hide his disappointment.

Benny wanted to tell them it was Nan's treat, but she didn't like to.

Perhaps Nan mightn't want to admit that it was just the two of them.

She looked hopefully at her friend for some signal. But Nan's face gave no hints of anything. She looked so beautiful Benny thought, again with a pang. It must be amazing to wake up in the morning and know your features were going to look like that all day, and that everyone who saw your face would like it.

Benny wished that Bill Dunne didn't look so put out. On an ordinary day it would have been lovely to have gone to Bewley's with him. Jack was up at the rugby club all afternoon. She would love to have been with Bill and Johnny in many ways. They were Jack's people. They were part of his life. She felt disloyal to Nan and her generous present.

And wasn't it marvellous to go inside the Hibernian for something better than walking through its coffee lounge to the ladies' cloakroom at the back which was all she had ever done before.

Eve had no lectures in the afternoon. She couldn't find either Benny or Nan. Aidan Lynch had invited her to join his parents, who liked to combine an hour of Christmas shopping and four hours of lunch several times in the weeks leading up to the festive season. She had declined, saying it sounded like a minefield.

"When we're married we'll have to see them, you know, invite them over for roast lamb and mint sauce," he had said.

"we'll face that when we come to it in about twenty years' time," Eve had said to him grimly.

You couldn't put Aidan Lynch off. He was much too cheerful, and totally confident that she loved him. which of course she didn't.

Eve didn't love anybody, as she had tried to explain. Just very strong affections for Mother Francis and Benny and Kit. Nobody had ever shown her why love was such a great thing, she told him.

Look what it had done for her mother and father. Look how boring it made Sean and Carmel. Look at the way it had wrecked Kit Hegarty's life.

Thinking about Kit made her think that that was where she would go, home to Dunlaoghaire. Kit had looked very strange in the last couple of days. Eve hoped that she wasn't sick, or that the man who had come back hadn't been who Eve feared it had.

She took the train out to Dunlaoghaire and let herself in. Kit was sitting in the kitchen with her head in her hands. Nothing had been touched since Eve had left that morning. Eve hung up her coat.

"Sister Imelda had a great saying. She used to believe that there was no problem on the face of the earth that couldn't be tackled better with a plate of potato cakes. And I must say I agree with her."

As she spoke she took the cold mashed potato from the bowl, opened a bag of flour and dropped a lump of butter into the frying pan.

Kit still didn't look up.

"Not that it solved everything, mind you. Like I remember when nobody would tell me why my mother and father were buried in different churchyards. We had potato cakes then, Mother Francis and I. It didn't really explain it, or make me feel better about it. But it made us feel great eating them.

Kit raised her head. The casual voice and the ritual actions of cooking had soothed her. Eve never paused in her movements as Kit Hegarty told her the story of the husband who had left and come back and been sent away again.

Nan had spotted Simon Westward the moment that she andbenny were led into the dining room. The waiter had been intending to put two such young-looking female students away in a corner, but Nan asked could they have a more central table. She spoke like someone who had been there regularly. There wasn't any reason why she shouldn't have a better table.

She studied the menu and Nan asked about the dishes she couldn't understand.

"Let's have something we never had before," she suggested.

Benny had been heading for lamb because it looked nice and safe.

But it was Nan's treat.

"Like what?" she asked fearfully. "Brains," Nan said. "I never had those."

"Wouldn't it be a bit of a waste? Suppose they were awful?"

"They wouldn't be awful in a place like this. Why don't you have sweetbreads or guinea fowl or snipe."

"Snipe? What's that?"

"It's with game. It must be a bird."

"It can't be. I never heard of it. It's a belt, taking a snipe at someone." Nan laughed. "That's taking a swipe, you idiot." Simon Westward looked up just then. Nan could see him from the corner of her eye. She had been aware that he was at a table with a couple, a very tweedy, older man and a younger, horsey-looking woman. Nan knew that she had been seen. She settled back int< her seat. All she had to do now was wait.

Benny struggled with the things they didn't know on the menu.

"I could have scampi, I don't know that."

"You know what it is.

It's a big prawn in batter."

"Yes, but I've never tasted it, so it would be new to me." At least she had got out of brains and sweetbreads and other strange-sounding things.

"Miss Hogan. Don't you dine in the best places?" Simon Westward was standing beside her.

"I hardly ever go anywhere posh, but any time I do you're there."

She smiled at him warmly.

He didn't even have to look enquiringly across the table before Benny introduced him. Very simply, very correctly. In Nan's books of etiquette she would have broken no rule, not that she had ever read them.

"Nan, this is Simon Westward. Simon, this is my friend Nan Mahon."

"Hallo, Nan," said Simon, reaching for her hand. "Hallo, Simon," said Nan, with a smile.

"You were out with a sugar daddy. I heard," Jack accused her laughingly next day.

"No, indeed I wasn't. Nan took me to the Hibernian for lunch, as a treat. A Christmas present."

"Why did she do that?"

"I told you. A Christmas present." Jack shook his head. It didn't add up.

Benny bit her lip. She wished now that she hadn't gone. In fact she wished at the time that she hadn't gone. She had ordered potatoes with the scampi and hadn't known you were meant to have rice until she saw surprise on the waiter's face. She had asked for a little of everything from the cheeseboard instead of just picking two cheeses, which is what other people did. She had asked for nice frothy cappuccino coffee and was told gravely that it wasn't served in the dining room.

And there was something about Simon and Nan that made her uneasy too.

It was as if they were playing some game, a game that only they understood. Everyone else was outside.

And now here was Jack implying that Nan must have some kind of ulterior motive to take her to lunch. What's wrong?" He saw her looking distressed. Nothing." She put on her bright smile. There was something very vulnerable about it. Jack could see Benny as what she must have been like when she was about four or five pretending that everything was all right even when it wasn't.

He put his arm around her shoulder as they walked across at the traffic lights between Stephen's Green and Grafton Street.

All the shops were done up with Christmas decorations. There were lights strung across the street. A group of carol singers shivering in the cold were starting "Away in a Manger'. The collection boxes were rattling. Her face looked very innocent. He felt a need to protect her from all sorts of things. From Bill Dunne who said that a big girl like that with an enormous chest would turn out to b a great court.

From drunks walking round with bottles in their hand, wild-eyed and with wild hair. He wanted to keep her on the footpath so that the busy Christmas traffic wouldn't touch her, and from the small children with dirty faces who would wheedle the last pennies from someone gentle like Benny Hogan. He didn't want her to go back to Knockglen on the bus this afternoon, and to be there for nearly three weeks of the holidays.

"Benny?" he said.

She turned her face to him to know what he wanted. He held her face in both his hands and kissed her very softly on the lips.

Then he drew away and looked to see the surprise in her eyes.

He put his arms around her then, standing right at the top of the busiest street in Dublin, and held her to him with his arms. He felt her arms go round him and they clung to each other as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

CHAPTER 12

Fonsie had a new black velvet jacket for Christmas. Clodagh had made him a set of lilac-coloured button covers, and a huge flouncy handkerchief to put in his breast pocket.

He startled most of Knockglen by moving very deliberately up the church to receive Communion in his outfit.

"He has added blasphemy to the list of his other crimes," Mrs. Healy hissed at the Hogans, who were sitting near her.

He must be in a State of Grace, otherwise he wouldn't come," Annabel said. She thought Mrs. Healy was making too much of this vendetta. She envied Peggy and Mario for having such lively young blood in their businesses. If only Benny and Sean had made a go of it, then perhaps the dead look of failure might not hang around the door of Hogan's, while the other two establishments went from strength to strength. She looked at Eddie beside her.

She wondered what he was praying about. He always seemed genuinely devout, as if he were talking to God when they were in the church, unlike herself. Annabel found that being at Mass seemed to concentrate her anxieties about daily life rather than raise her nearer to God.

Benny wasn't praying. That was for sure.

Nobody who was praying had such a strange faraway look on their face.

Annabel Hogan was fairly sure that her daughter was in love.

Clodagh Pine looked at her friend Fonsie with pleasure. He really did look smart. And he was a smart fellow. She had never thought she would meet anyone remotely like always buy men's handkerchiefs in Peggy Pine's, or boxes of cheroots in Birdie Mac's, or masculine-smelling soaps in Kennedy's. All those places would now be open to catch the trade. Knockglen was changing fast. "But you can't do that," Mr. Hogan had pleaded. "You'll miss your bus home."

"There's not going to be much of a Christmas there anyway, Mr. Hogan," Sean had said apologetically, knowing that now an invitation would have to be forthcoming. Sean was looking forward to sitting at Christmas lunch with the Hogans as if he were a person of status. He had bought a dried flower arrangement for Mrs. Hogan, something that could stand on her table all year, he would say. and a talcum powder called Talc de Coty for Benny. It was , a medium-range talcum powder that would please her, he thought, without embarrassing her by its grandness.

She had been pleasant this morning, smiled at him very affably and said she was glad he was coming to lunch and that they'd see him about one o'clock in Lisbeg. He had been pleased to be told what time they expected him. He was wondering if he should have gone back with them after Mass. It was as well to have it pointed out to him. Benny had realised that since Sean was inevitable, she might as well be polite about it. Patsy told her that her mother and father had been worried in case she'd make a fuss.

"It's only lunch. It's not a lifetime," Benny had said philosophically.

"They'd be well pleased if it was a lifetime."

"No, Patsy, you can't be serious. Not any more. Surely not any more.

Once they may have thought about it."

"I don't know. You can't lay down laws for what people think and hope."

But Patsy was wrong. Benny knew that her parents couldn't have any hopes that she should consider Sean Walsh. Business was poor.

Money was tight. She knew this. And she knew that they couldn't have embarked on the whole costly business of letting her have a university education unless they had hopes of better things for her. If they believed she would marry Sean Walsh and that he would run Hogan's, they would have tried to force her into doing a secretarial course and book-keeping. They would have put her into the shop. They would never have let her near a world that had all it had in it. The world that had given her Jack Foley.

The Mass in the convent was always a delight. Father Ross loved the pure clear voices of the younger nuns in the choir. There was never coughing or spluttering or fidgeting when he said Mass in the Chapel of St. Mary's. The nuns chanted responses and rang the bells perfectly.

He didn't have to deal with sleepy or recalcitrant altar servers. And there was nothing like the amazing and highly disrespectful fashion show to which the parish church in Knockglen had been treated this morning. Here everybody was in the religious life except of course young Eve Malone, who had grown up here. His eyes rested on the small dark girl as he turned to give the final blessing "Ite Missa Est'.

He saw her bow her head as reverently as any of the Sisters when she said "Deo Gratias'.

He had been worried to hear that she was going to live in that house where her mother had died, out of her senses in childbirth, and where her poor father too had lost his life. She was too young a child to have a place on her own, with all the dangers that this might involve.

But Mother Francis, who was an admirably sensible woman, was in favour of it.

"It's only up the garden, Father," she had reassured him. "In a way it's part of the convent. It's as if she never left us at all." He looked forward now to his breakfast in the parlour.

Sister Imelda's crisply fried rashers, with triangles of potato cakes which would make a man forget everything in the world and follow its smell and its taste wherever it led.

Mrs. Walsh cycled back to Westlands from Knockglen. Mr. Simon and Miss Heather would go out to church at eleven thirty. The old gentleman hadn't gone to any service for a long time. It was sad to see him so feeble in his chair and yet at times he would remember very clearly.

Usually things best forgotten. Sad incidents, accidents, disasters.

Never happy times, no weddings, christenings or festivities. Mrs. Walsh never spoke of her life in the Big House. She would have had a wide audience for tales of the child sitting talking to Clara about her puppies, to Mr. Woffles about his Christmas lettuce and to the pony about how she was going to become a harness maker and invent something softer than the bit for his poor tender mouth. Mrs. Walsh had warned Bee Moore that she didn't want to hear any stories coming from her reporting either. People were always quick to criticise a family which was different to the village. And the Westwards were a different religion, a different class and also a different nationality. The Anglo-Irish might consider themselves Irish, Mrs. Walsh said very often, to make her point more firmly to Bee Moore. But of course they were nothing of the sort. They were as English as the people who lived across the sea. Their only problem was that they didn't realise it.

Mr. Simon, now, he had his eye on a lady from England, from Hampshire.

He was going to invite her to stay. But not in Westlands. He was going to put her up at Healy's hotel, which was his way of saying that he hadn't made his mind up about her enough to have her at the house.

Mrs. Walsh cycled back to cook the breakfast and thought that Mr. Simon was ill advised. Healy's Hotel was no place to put a rich woman from Hampshire. It was a place with shabby fittings and cramped rooms. The lady would not look favourably on Mr. Simon and on Westlands, and on the whole place. She would go back to Hampshire with her thousands and thousands of pounds.

And the object of the invitation surely had been for her to stay and marry into the family, bringing more English blood and, even more important, bringing the finances the place needed so desperately.

Mother Clare looked at Eve with a dislike she barely attempted to conceal.

I'm pleased to see that you have recovered from all your various illnesses, such as they may have been," she said.

Eve smiled at her. "Thank you, Mother Clare. You were always very kind to me. I am so sorry that I didn't repay it properly at the time."

"Or at all," sniffed Mother Clare.

"I suppose I repaid it in some form by getting myself out of your way."

Eve was bland and innocent. "You didn't have to think about me any more and try to fit me into your world, just out of kindness to Mother Francis."

The nun looked at her suspiciously, but could find no mockery or double meaning in the words.

"You seem to have got everything you wanted," she said. "Not everything, Mother." Eve wondered whether to quote St. Augustine and say that our hearts were restless until they rested in the Lord. She decided against it. That was going over the top.

"Not every single thing, but a lot certainly," she said. "Would you like me to show you my cottage? It's a bit of a walk through the briars and everything, but it's not too slippery."

"Later, child. Another day, perhaps."

"Yes. It's just I didn't know how long you were staying.." Again her face was innocent.

Last night, as on so many Christmas Eves, she had sat and talked with Mother Francis. This time even telling the nun a little about Aidan Lynch and the funny quirky relationship they had.

Mother Francis had said the worst thing about Mother Clare's visit was that it seemed to be open-ended. She couldn't ask the other nun when she was going to leave. Eve had promised to do it in her stead.

Mother Clare did not like to be asked her plans so publicly.

"Oh .. I mean .. well," she stammered. "What day are you going, Mother Clare, because I want to be sure I can show it to you. You brought me into your home, the least I can do is bring you into mine." She forced Mother Clare to give a date. Then by an amazing surprise it turned out that Peggy Pine was driving to Dublin that day. The departure was fixed. Mother Francis flashed a glance of gratitude at Eve. A glance of gratitude and love.

Patsy had had a watch from Mossy for Christmas. That meant only one thing. The next present would be a ring. "Eve says she thinks he's building on to the back of the house," Benny said.

"Ah, it's hard to know with Mossy," Patsy said. They set the table with crackers, and crisscross paper decorations as they had done every year as long as Benny could remember.

Around the house they had paper lanterns. The Christmas tree in the window had had the same ornaments on It for years. This year Benny had bought some new ones in Henry Street and Moore Street in Dublin. She felt a lump in her throat when her father and mother examined them with pleasure as if they were anything except the most vulgar red and silver tatty objects you could come across.

They were so touched at anything she did for them, and she was the one who should be thanking them. You didn't need to be Einstein to see that the business was not doing well. That it was a struggle for them to keep going and to give her what they did.

And yet there was no way to tell them that she would one million times prefer to do what Eve was doing, to work her own way through college, staying in a house helping with the work, or minding children.

Anything at all, including being down on her hands and knees cleaning public lavatories. If it meant that she didn't have to come back to Knockglen every single night, if it meant that she would live in the same town as Jack Foley.

"Poor Sean. He won't be any trouble?" Benny's mother spoke in a question.

"And I couldn't let him work all day yesterday and not ask him for a bite to eat today, seeing that he missed his bus home?"

Benny's father's remark was a question too.

"Will he ever get a place to live himself, you know, a house here?"

Benny asked.

"Funny you should say that. There's talk that he's above on the road over the quarry looking at this place and that. Maybe that's what's on his mind."

"He'll have his job cut out for him saving enough for a house with what he's paid above in the shop." Eddie Hogan was regretful.

He didn't need to say, because they all knew it, that there wasn't a question of Sean being underpaid. It was just that the takings were so poor there wasn't much to pay anyone at all out of it. Everything happened at the same time. Sean Walsh knocked on the front door which nobody ever used, but he thought that on Christmas Day things would be different. Dessie Burns arrived at the back door as drunk as a lord saying that he only wanted a stable to sleep in, just a stable. If it was good enough for Our Saviour, it would be good enough for Dessie Burns, and perhaps a plate of dinner brought out to him wouldn't go amiss. Dr. Johnson came roaring out of his avenue to borrow Eddie Hogan's car. "Of all the bloody times that thoughtless bastard up in Westlands has to go and have a turn it has to be bloody Christmas Day just as I was putting my fork in the bloody turkey," he roared and drove off in the Hogans' Morris Cowley.

Birdie Mac arrived agitated saying that Mr. Flood, who had normally seen one nun in the tree above his house, now saw three and was out with a stick trying to attract their attention and get them to come in for a cup of tea. Birdie had been down to Peggy Pine to ask her advice and Peggy had been something akin to intoxicated and told her to tell Mr. Flood to get up in the tree with them. And Jack Foley rang from Dublin, braving the post office which hated connecting calls on Christmas Day unless they were emergencies.

"It is an emergency, he had explained. And when Benny came on the line he said that it was the greatest emergency in his whole life. He wanted her to know how much he missed her.

Patsy went for a walk with Mossy, when everything had been cleared away. This year for the first time, Benny suggested that they should all take part in the washing-up. They opened front and back doors to let out the smells of food. Benny said it was hardly tactful to the hens to let them smell the turkey dinner, but perhaps hens had closedsections of their minds on this subject. Sean didn't know how to react to this kind of chat. He debated several attitudes and decided to look stern.

The big grandfather clock in the corner ticked loudly as first Eddie Hogan and then Annabel fell asleep in the warm firelight.

Shep slept too, his big eyes closing slowly and unwillingly as if anxious not to leave Benny and Sean to talk on their own.

Benny knew that she could sleep too, or pretend to. Sean would regard this not as the rudeness it was, but as some kind of sign that he was a welcome intimate in their home. Anyway she was too excited to sleep.

Jack had phoned from his own house where he had said they were all playing games and had sneaked away to tell her that he loved her.

Benny was as wide awake as she ever had been. She longed for better company than Sean Walsh, and yet she was sorry for him.

Tonight he would go back to that small room two floors above the shop.

Nobody had telephoned to say they missed him. She could afford to be generous. "Have another chocolate, Sean." She offered the box.

"Thank you." He even managed to look awkward eating a simple thing like a sweet. It went slowly down his neck. There was a lot of swallowing and clearing his throat.

"You look very .. .. nice today, Benny," he said, after some thought.

Too much thought for the remark that resulted.

"Thank you, Sean. I suppose everyone feels well on Christmas Day."

"I haven't particularly, not up to now," he confessed. "Well, today's lunch was nice, wasn't it?" He leaned across from his chair. "Not just the lunch. You were nice, Benny. That gives me a lot of hope."

She looked at him with a great wave of sympathy. It was something she never thought would happen. Within an hour two men were declaring themselves to her. In films the women were able to cope with this, and even play one off against the other.

But this was no film. This was poor, sad Sean Walsh seriously thinking that he might marry into the business. She must make sure that he realised this was not going to happen. There had to be words somewhere that would leave him with a little dignity and make him realise that things would not be improved by his asking again. Sean was of the old school that thought women said "No' when they meant "Yes', and all you had to do was ignore the refusals until they became an acceptance.

She tried to think how she would like to hear it herself. Suppose Jack were to tell her that he loved someone else, what would be the best way for her to find out? She would like him to be honest, and tell her directly, no apologies, or regrets. Just the facts. And then she would like him to go away and let her digest it all on her own. Would it be the same for Sean Walsh? She looked into the changing pictures and leaping flames of the fire as she spoke. There was a background of her parents' heavy breathing. The clock ticked, and Shep whimpered a little.

She told Sean Walsh her plans and her hopes. That she would live in Dublin, and she had great hopes that it would all work out.

Sean listened to the news impassively. The part about the person she loved caused him to smile. A crooked little smile. "Would you not agree that this might be just what they call a crush?" he asked loftily. Benny shook her head.

"But it's not based on anything, any shared hopes or plans, like a real relationship is."

She looked at him astounded. Sean Walsh talking about real relationship as if he would have the remotest idea what it was.

She was still humouring him. "Well, of course you're right. It might not work out, but it's my hope it will." The smile was even more bitter. "And does he, this lucky man, know anything about your infatuation. Is he aware of all this .. hope?"

"Of course he is. He hopes too," she said, surprised. Sean obviously thought that she just fancied someone from afar like a film star.

"Ah well, we'll see," he said, and he sat looking into the fire with his sad pale eyes.

Patsy had been up in Mossy's house for the evening wearing her new watch and going through a further inspection by Mossy's mother.

Mossy's married sister and her husand had come in to give the encounter even further significance.

"I think they thought I was all right," she told Benny, with some relief.

"Did you think they were all right?"

"It isn't up to me to be having opinions, you know that, Benny.

Not for the first time Benny wanted to find the orphanage where Patsy had grown up with no hope and no confidence and strangle everyone in it. Patsy wanted to know what time Sean Walsh had left, because she saw him walking around up on the quarry path at all hours. He had looked distraught, she reported, as if he had something in his mind.

Benny wanted to know no more of this. She changed the topic. Were there lights on in Eve's cottage? she wanted to know.

"Yes, it looked lovely and cosy. She had a little Christmas crib in the window with a light in it. And there was a tree too, a small tree with lots of things hanging on it."

Eve had told Benny about the crib, a gift from the convent, and every single nun had made a decoration for the tree as well.

Angels with pipe cleaners and coloured wool. Stars made out of foil wrapping paper, little pom-pom balls, little figures cut out of Christmas cards and given a stiff cardboard backing. Hours of work had gone into those presents.

The Community was alternatively proud and sad that Eve had moved to her own home. But they had grown used to her being in Dublin.

In those first weeks they had missed her running through the convent, and sitting up in the kitchen talking to them.

And as Mother Francis said it was only at the other end of the garden.

Mother Francis never said that to Eve herself. She always stressed that the girl must come and go, using the ordinary path when she wished. It was her house and she must entertain whom she liked.

When Eve asked about having a party, Mother Francis said she could have half the county if she pleased. Eve admitted ruefully that she seemed to be having half of Dublin. Because of her boasting they all thought Knockglen was the place to be.

Mother Francis said that this was only the truth and wondered how Eve was going to cope. She wondered what Eve was going to do about food for half of Dublin.

"I've brought a lot of stuff. Clodagh and Benny are going to come in on St. Stephen's Day and help.

"That's great. Don't forget Sister Imelda would always love to be asked to make pastry."

"I don't think I could.."

"You know, I believe they eat sausage rolls all over the world, including Dublin. Sister Imelda would be honoured."

Clodagh and Benny were up at the cottage early. "A soup, that's what you want, Clodagh said firmly. "I don't have a big pot."

"I bet the convent does."

"Why did I take this on, Clodagh?"

"As a housewarming. To warm your house." Clodagh was busy counting plates, making lists and deciding where they would put coats. Benny and Eve watched her with admiration.

"That one could rule the world if she was given a chance," Eve said.

"I'd certainly make a better stab at it than the eejits who are meant to be in charge," said Clodagh cheerfully.

The Hogans were surprised to see Sean Walsh come in through the gate of Lisbeg on St. Stephen's Day. "We didn't ask him again, today? Annabel asked, alarmed.

"I didn't, certainly. Benny may have." Eddie sounded doubtful.

But nobody had invited Sean Walsh. He had come to have a discussion with Mr. Hogan about business. He had taken a long walk last night up round the quarry and he had sorted everything out in his head. Sean Walsh had a proposition to put to Mr. Hogan, that he should be taken on as a partner in the firm.

He realised that there wasn't sufficient cash flow to make him a more attractive salary offer. The only solution would be to invite him to be a full partner in the business.

Mario looked on as Fonsie backed the station wagon up to the door and loaded the record player into the back.

"We go back to the peace and quiet?" he asked hopefully.

Fonsie didn't even bother to answer. He knew that nowadays anything Mario said was more in the nature of a ritual protest than a genuine complaint.

The cafe was unrecognisable from the run-down place It was~ when Fonsie had arrived in town. Brightly painted, cheerful, it was attracting all kinds of clientele that would never have crossed its doorstep in the old days. Fonsie had seen that there was an opportunity for morning coffee for an older set, and he had gone all out to get it. This was the time of day when the younger set, the real customers, were tied up at school or working, so the place was almost empty.

Fonsie played old-style music and watched with satisfaction while Dr. Johnson's wife, and Mrs. Hogan, Mrs. Kennedy from the chemist and Birdie Mac all took to call in for a coffee that was cheaper than Healy's Hotel in an atmosphere that was distinctly less formal.

And as for the youngsters, he had plans for a magnificent juke box which would pay for itself in six months. But there would be time enough to explain that to his uncle later. In the meantime he just said that he was lending the player they had to Eve Malone for her party.

"That's a better place to play it than here," Mario grumbled. "Up on the quarry is good. It will only deafen the wild birds that fly around in the air."

"You won't stay too late at this party now, will you?" Benny's father was looking at her over his glasses.

It made him look old and fussy. She hated him peering like that.

Either look through them or take them off, she wanted to shout with a surge of impatience.

She forced a reassuring smile on to her face. "It's the only party there's ever been in Knockglen, Father, you know that. I can't come to any harm, just up at the back of the convent garden."

"That's a slippery old path through the convent."

"I'll come back by the road then, down through the square.

"It'll be pitch dark," her mother added. "You might be better coming through the convent.

"I'll have plenty of people to come back with me. Clodagh or Fonsie, Maire Carroll even."

"Maybe I could walk up that way myself about the time it would be ending. Shep, you'd like a nice late-night walk wouldn't you?"

The dog's ears pricked up at the thought of any kind of walk.

Please let her find the right words. The words that would stop her father walking out in the dark out of kindness and peering through the window at Eve's party, wrecking it for everyone, not only Benny.

Please could she say the right thing that would stop him in this foolish well-meant wish to escort her safely home.

Nan would know how to cope with this. What would Nan do? Nan always said stick as close to the truth as possible.

"Father, I'd rather if you didn't come up for me. It would make me look a bit babyish, you know, in front of all the people from Dublin.

And it's the only party that's ever been given in Knockglen and maybe the only one that ever will be. Do you see how I don't want to be taken there and collected as if I were a child?"

He looked a bit hurt, as if a kind offer had been refused. "All right, love," he said eventually. "I was only trying to be helpful."

"I know, Father, I know," she said.

This Christmas Nan's father had been worse than usual. The festive season seemed to bring him no cheer. The boys were almost immune to him. Paul and Nasey spent very little time in Maple Gardens.

Emily tried to excuse him. She spoke of him apologetically to Nan.

"He doesn't mean it. If you knew how full of remorse he is after."

"I do," Nan said. "I have to listen to it."

"He'll be so sorry he upset us. He'll be like a lamb today." Em pleaded for understanding.

"Let him be like anything he likes, Em. I'm not going to be here to look at it. I'm going to the races." She had rehearsed this outfit over and over. It seemed to be just right. The cream camel-hair suit with the brown trimmings, the hat that fitted so perfectly into the blonde curly hair. A small, good handbag and shoes that would not sink in the mud. She went to the races on the bus, along with other Dubliners going on a day out.

But while they talked form and record and likely outsiders, Nan Mahon just sat and looked out of the window.

She had very little interest in horses.

It didn't take her long to find him, and position herself in a place where she could be seen. She stood warming her hands at one of the many coal braziers placed around the enclosure. She appeared to concentrate very much on the heat as she saw him from the corner of her eye.

"How lovely to meet you again, Nan Mahon," he said. "Where are your supporting group of ladies?"

"What do you mean?" Her smile was warm and friendly. "It's only I never see you without a great regiment of women in tow.

"Not today. I came with my brothers. They've gone to the Tote."

"Good. Can I bear you off to have a drink?"

"Yes. I'd love that, but just one. I must meet them after the third race.

They went into the crowded bar, his hand under her elbow guiding her slightly.

There were smiles here and there and people calling to him. She felt confident that she was their equal. There were no pitying looks. Not one of those people would ever know the kind of house she had left this morning to get here on the bus. A house where drink had been spilled, where a lamp had been broken, where half the Christmas pudding had been thrown against the wall in a drunken rage. "These people accepted Nan as an equal. Eve looked around her little house with pleasure.

The oil lamps were lit and they gave a warm glow. The fire burned in the grate.

Mother Francis had left what she called a few old bits and pieces around the place. They were exactly the kind of thing that Eve wanted.

A big blue vase in which she could put the wild catkins she had gathered. A handful of books to fill a corner shelf. Two slightly cracked china candlesticks for the mantelpiece, an old coal scuttle polished and burnished.

In the kitchen on the old range there were saucepans which must have come from the convent. Nothing much useful had been left from her parents' time.

Only the piano. Sarah Westward's piano. Eve ran her fingers over it and wished yet again that she had paid attention and tried to learn when Mother Bernard had been giving her lessons. Mother Francis had wanted so much for Eve to share what must have been a great love of music. Her mother had a piano stool stuffed with sheet music, and books and scores in a cupboard. They had been neatly tidied and kept free of damp by Mother Francis over the years.

When the piano tuner came to the school he was always asked to do a further chore and had been led through the kitchen gardens up the path to the piano which he always told Mother Francis was twenty times better than anything they had in the music room of St. Mary's.

"It's not ours," Mother Francis used to say. "Then why am I tuning it?" he used to ask every year. Eve sat down at the fire and hugged herself. As in so many things, Mother Francis had been right. It was very nice to have a place of your own.

The Hogans had decided not to talk to Benny yet about Sean Walsh's proposition. Or ultimatum.

It had been very courteously couched, but there was no question about it. If he were not invited to be a partner in the business he would leave, and it would be known why he left. Nobody in Knockglen would think that he had been fairly treated. Everyone knew what his input had been, and how great his loyalty.

Sean did not need to spell out what would be the future for the business if he were allowed to leave. As it was, he was the one holding it together. Mr. Hogan had no real business sense in terms of what today's customers wanted. And old Mike in the shop wasn't going to be any help to him in that regard.

They would talk to Benny about it, but not now. Not since she had put herself out to be polite and courteous to him during the Christmas meal. She might flare up again and they didn't want to risk that.

"Has Sean been asked to the party above in Eve's cottage?" Eddie asked, although he knew that there was no question of the boy having been invited.

"No, Father."

To Benny's relief the telephone rang. But it was startling to have someone call at nine o'clock in the evening. She hoped that it wasn't Jack to say he wasn't coming.

Benny answered it. Nan Mahon was on the line, pleading, begging that she could come to stay tomorrow night for the party. Nan had said that she didn't think she would be able to come to Knockglen when the party was first mentioned. What had changed her mind? A lot of things, apparently. She would explain everything when she arrived. No, she wouldn't need to be met on the bus. She'd be getting a lift. She'd explain all that later too. No, no idea what time. Could she say she'd see Benny at the party?

Next morning, on the day of the party, Benny went up early to Eve's cottage to tell her the news.

Eve was furious.

"What does she think she's doing, announcing her arrival like some bloody old king from the olden days?"

"You did ask her to the party," Benny said mildly. "Yes, and she said no.

"I don't know what you're bellyaching about. It's just one more for the party. I'm the one who was dragging beds all night with Patsy and checking that there's no dust on the legs of the furniture in case Nan does a household inspection."

Eve didn't know why she was annoyed. It was, on the face of it, unreasonable. Nan was her friend. Nan had lent that beautiful red skirt for the dance. Nan had advised eve on everything from how to put on eyeliner to putting shoe trees in every shoe every night. The others would be delighted to see her. It would make the party go with an even bigger swing. It was strange that she felt so resentful.

They sat having coffee in the kitchen of Eve's home, the two of them puzzling out who was giving Nan a lift. Benny said it couldn't be Jack because he was coming in a car with Aidan and Carmel and Sean. They knew it wasn't with Rosemary Ryan and Sheila, still deadly rivals and driving discontentedly with Bill Dunne and Johnny o'brien.

Benny was thinking about Jack and how after tonight surely Rosemary and Sheila would have to give up their hopes of him, once they had seen how he and Benny felt about each other. To say straight out that he had missed her. To say it on the phone on Christmas Day. It was the most wonderful thing that could have happened. Eve's brow was furrowed.

She wished she could think Nan was just coming for the party. She felt sure that it was in order to wangle an invitation to Westlands. Which she would not get from Eve, and that was for sure and for certain.

Heather came to call wearing her hacking jacket and little hard hat.

"You look as if you've just got off a horse," Eve said.

"I have," and Heather proudly showed her the pony tied to the gate. It was eating some of the bushes within its reach. Eve leaped up in panic. Those were her only decoration, she said, and now this terrible horse was hoovering it all up. Heather laughed, and said nonsense, her beautiful pony was only nuzzling. He wouldn't dream of eating anything between meals. Benny and Eve went out and stroked the grey pony, Malcolm, the light of young Heather's life. They kept away from the mouth with the big yellow teeth and marvelled at how fearless Heather seemed to be. Heather had come to help. She thought she would be useful in setting up the games and was very perplexed when there seemed to be no games to set up. No ducking for apples like at Hallowe'en.

Heather wanted a party where they had advertisements all cut out of papers, just the words. The thing that was being advertised was cut out. Everyone had a pencil and paper and the one who got most of them right won.

In desperation they suggested she blow up balloons. That pleased her.

She had plenty of breath, she said proudly. As she sat in an ever-increasing heap of green, red and yellow balloons Heather asked casually if Simon had been invited to the party. "No, it's not really his kind, of party," Eve said. "And besides, he'd be very old for it.

She wondered why she was making excuses for not inviting this man for whom she had felt nothing but dislike all her life. But then who could ever have foreseen the way things would turn out? That she would be very fond of his younger sister, and that she would have been settled in this house where she had vowed never to live. The day might well come when her cousin Simon Westward could cross this door, but not for a long time yet.

Jack Foley was recognised as the expert on Knockglen. He had been there before, after all. He knew Benny's house. He had been given clear instructions on how to get to the quarry road. You came in like the bus to the square and took a hilly path that had no signpost on it, but looked as if it were leading to a farmhouse.

There was another way through the convent, but you couldn't take the car and Eve had been adamant that there was to be no horseplay anywhere near her nuns.

Aidan wanted them to go and have a look at the convent first. He stared out of the passenger seat at the high walls and the big wrought-iron gate.

"Imagine being brought up in a place like that. Isn't it a miracle that she's normal?" he said.

"But is she normal?" Jack wanted to know. "She does appear to fancy you, which doesn't augur well for her state of mind.

They wound their way up the perilous track. The curtains were pulled back in the cottage and they could see firelight, and oil lamps, a Christmas tree and balloons. "Isn't it gorgeous?" breathed Carmel, whose plans for the future when Sean was an established businessman now widened to include a small country cottage for weekends. Jack liked it too.

"It's away from everywhere. You could be here and nobody know a thing about it."

"Unless of course the sounds of "Good Golly, Miss Molly" were coming out of every window," Aidan Lynch said happily, leaping from the car and running in to find Eve.

Clodagh had brought a clothes rail and hangers up from the shop.

It meant that Eve's bed wouldn't be swamped with people's garments and there would be room for the girls to sit at the little dressing table to titivate themselves. Benny was in there doing a final examination of her face when she heard Jack's voice. She must not run out and fling herself into his arms as she wanted to. It was more important than ever now that she let him make the first move. A man like Jack used to having girls throw themselves at him would not want that.

She would wait, even if it killed her.

The door of Eve's bedroom opened. It was probably Carmel, coming in to dab her face and say something cosy about Sean.

She looked in the mirror and over her shoulder she saw Jack. He closed the door behind him and came over to her, leaning his hands on her shoulders and looking at her reflection in the mirror.

"Happy Christmas," he said in a soft voice. She smiled a broad smile.

But she was looking at his eyes, not her own, so she didn't know how it looked. Not too broad and toothy, she hoped.

Clodagh had covered a strapless bra in royal blue velvet to look like one of those smart boned tops, and then put a binding of the same material down a white cardigan. Naturally Benny had worn a blouse under it when she left Lisbeg, but the blouse had been removed and was folded neatly to await the home journey.

He sat on the edge of Eve's bed, and held both her hands. "oh, I really missed you;' he said.

"What did you miss?" She didn't sound flirtatious. She just wanted to know.

"I missed telling you things, listening to you telling things.

I missed your face, and kissing you." He drew her towards him, and kissed her for a long time.

The door opened and Clodagh came in. She was dressed from head to foot in black lace with a mantilla and a high comb in her hair.

She looked like a Spanish dancer. Her face was powdered dead white and her lips were scarlet.

"I was actually coming to see if you wanted any assistance with your dress, Benny, but it appears you don't," Clodagh said, without seeming the slightest confused by the scene she had walked in on.

"This is Clodagh," mumbled Benny.

Jack's face lit up as it did when he was introduced to any woman.

It wasn't that he was eyeing them up and down. He didn't even try to flirt with them. He liked women. Benny remembered suddenly that his father was like that too. At the big party in their house Dr. Foley had been pleased to greet each new girl who was presented to him. There was nothing but warmth and delight in his reaction. So it was with Jack. And tonight when all the others arrived he would be the same.

It must be a wonderful thing to be so popular, she thought, to be able to please people just by being there.

Clodagh was explaining to Jack how she had got the lace in an old trunk upstairs in the Kennedys' house. Mrs. Kennedy had told her she could go and rummage there and she had found marvellous things altogether. In return she had made Mrs. Kennedy four straight skirts with a pleat in the back. It was amazing with all the plumage available that some people still wanted to dress like dowdy sparrows.

Jack put his arm around Benny's shoulders. "I've hardly seen any sparrows in Knockglen. You're all pretty exotic birds to me."

Together with his arm around her shoulder and followed by Clodagh in her startling black and white they came out of Eve's room and, in full view of Sheila and Rosemary, of Fonsie and Maire Carroll, of Bill Dunne and Johnny O'Brien, they joined the party.

Without Benny Hogan having to manoeuvre it one little bit, they joined the party as a couple.

There never had been a party like it. Everyone agreed on that.

From Fonsie's wonderful solo demonstrations to the whole place on its feet, from Guy Mitchell and "I Never Felt More Like "Singing The Blues'. The soup had been a magnificent idea. Bowl after bowl disappeared, sandwiches, sausage rolls and more soup. Eve served it from the big convent cauldron, her face flushed and excited.

This was her house. These were her friends. It couldn't be better.

Only during the supper did she remember that Nan hadn't arrived.

"Perhaps she didn't get a lift after all." Benny was on a cloud of her own.

"Did we tell her how to find the house?"

"Anyone in Knockglen would tell her where you live." Benny squeezed Eve's arm. "It's going wonderfully isn't it?"

"Yes. He can't take his eyes off you."

"I don't mean that. I mean the party." Benny did mean that of course as well. Jack had been at her side all night. He had had a few dances with the others as a matter of form, but for the most of the night he was with her, touching, laughing, dancing, holding, swaying, including her in every conversation.

Rosemary Ryan watched them with some bewilderment for the first few dances.

"I didn't know anything about you and Jack," she said, as she and Benny were having a glass of punch. "Well, I did tell you I met him from time to time in the Annexe."

"That's right. You did."

Rosemary was quite fair-minded. Benny had said she was meeting Jack.

If Rosemary read nothing into it then it was her own fault.

"You do look very well," she said grudgingly, but again struggled to be just. "Have you lost a lot of weight or put on more make-up or what?"

Benny didn't even react. She knew that whatever it was, Jack seemed to like it. And he didn't care who else knew. Benny had thought that somehow it would have had to be a secret about them.

Aidan asked Eve for a pound of sugar.

"What do you want that for?"

"I read that if you put it in the carburettor of a car, then the car won't start."

"How about trying to find some discovery that would make it start?

That seems to me to be the better invention," Eve said.

"You're wrong. I want Jack's father's car never to start again.

Then we can stay here in this magical place and never go away."

"Yeah, terrific. And I'll have to put up Sean and Carmel for the night as well," Eve said.

"If I stayed, would you take me to meet the nuns tomorrow?" Aidan asked.

Eve told him that there was no question of his staying, at any time, but least of all now when Mother Clare was below watching every move.

Or indeed maybe outside in the fuchsia bushes with a torch, for all they knew. But she was glad that he liked the place. And when the weather got finer, he might come and spend a whole day. Aidan said they would probably be spending much of their adult life here. During the long vacations when he was called to the Bar. They would want to escape here with the children, away from the loud booming voices of his parents. "And what about my job?" Eve asked, entertained in spite of herself by the fantasy.

"Your job will of course be to look after me, and our eight fine children, using your university education to give them a cultured home background."

"You'll be lucky, Aidan Lynch." She pealed with laughter. "I have been lucky. I met you, Eve Malone," he said, without a trace of his usual joky manner.

Bill Dunne was the first to see Nan when she came in the door.

Her eyes were sparkling and she took in the scene around her with delight.

"Isn't it wonderful?" she said. "Eve never said it was anything like this."

She wore a white polo-necked jumper and a red tartan skirt, under a black coat. She carried a small leather case with her, and asked to be shown to Eve's bedroom. Benny called to the kitchen to let Eve know that Nan was here.

"Bloody hell, we've finished the soup," Eve said to Aidan. "She won't expect it, not at this hour," he soothed her. It was a late hour to arrive. Eve had thought she heard a car pull away down the track a few moments ago, but she had told herself she was imagining it.

someone must have left Nan at the door. It was raining outside and Nan looked immaculate. She could not have climbed up that path in this weather.

Eve put some sausage rolls and sandwiches on a plate, and took them through the sitting room, skirting Fonsie and Clodagh, who were doing such a spirited rendering of the Spanish Gypsy Dance that everyone had formed a circle to clap and cheer. She knocked on the door of her own bedroom in case Nan was changing, but she was sitting down at the dressing table exactly as she was; Rosemary Ryan was sitting on the bed, telling the mystery-of-the-year story. Jack Foley and Benny Hogan, of all people, were inseparable.

"Did you know?" Rosemary was asking insistingly. "Yes, sort of."

Nan didn't sound as if it mattered very much. Her mind seemed to be elsewhere.

Then she saw Eve. "Eve, it's fabulous. It's a jewel. You never told us it was like this."

"It's not always like this." Despite herself, Eve was pleased.

Praise from Nan was high praise.

"I brought you something to eat .. in case you were changing," she said.

"No, I'm all right like this." Nan hadn't thought of changing.

She was of course all right in whatever she wore. It wasn't very dressy. All the others had put on the style. Parties weren't so run of the mill that you went in a jumper and skirt. But on Nan it looked beautiful.

They all went into the room. Nan loved it. She was busy stroking everything, the polished oil lamps, the wonderful wood in those shelves, the piano. Imagine having a piano of your own. Could she see the little kitchen? Eve took her through and down the stone step. The place was covered with pots and pans and debris. There were boxes and bottles and glasses. But Nan saw only things she could praise. The dresser, it was wonderful. Where did it come from? Eve had never asked. And that lovely old bowl. It was the real thing, not like horrible modern ones.

"I'm sure a lot of those things came from your mother's ome," she said.

"They have a look of quality about them."

"Yes, or maybe they bought them together." Somehow Eve felt defensive about her father, and the thought that there could be no look of quality attached to him. Nan said she was too excited to eat. It was marvellous to be here. Her eyes were dancing. She looked feverish and restless. Everyone in the room was attracted to her, but she was aware of none of them. She refused any offer to dance, saying she had to take it all in. And she wandered around touching and admiring, and sighing over it all. She paused by the piano and opened it to look at the keys.

"Weren't we all very unlucky that we never learned to play?" she said to Benny. It was the first time Benny had ever noticed Nan Mahon sounding bitter. "Are you ever going to dance, or is this tour of inspection going to go on all night?" Jack Foley asked her. Suddenly Nan seemed to snap out of it. "I'm being appalling rude, of course," she said, looking straight at him. "Now, Johnny," Jack said to Johnny O'Brien. "I knew that all you had to do was wake her out of the trance, and it would work. Johnny says he's been asking you to dance for ten minutes and you can't even hear him.

If Nan was disappointed that Jack had not been inviting her to dance there was no way that anyone would have known. She smiled such a smile at Johnny that it almost melted him into a little puddle on the floor.

"Johnny, how lovely," she said, and put her arms straight round his neck.

They were playing "Unchained Melody', a lovely slow smoochy number.

Benny was so pleased that Jack hadn't left her for Nan just as Fonsie had put that one on. It was one of her favourite songs. She had never dreamed that she would dance to it, here in Knockglen with the man she loved, who had his arms wrapped around her, and seemed to love her too.