Free Echoes by Maeve Binchy Page B

Then he saw its flaws. “Oh sure, sorry, Mummy, I didn’t know that was what it was about. I thought you had something against Gerry Doyle himself. You know, like Nolan’s mother went through that bit of thinking everyone had fleas. No, that’s fine. Of course I won’t ask people back without asking you first.”
    Molly smiled uneasily. She wasn’t at all sure that she had won.
    â€œAnd I’ll be going down to his house later on today, he said he’d show me the darkroom and let me help to develop some of the pictures his father took at a wedding.”
    He smiled brightly from one parent to the other and helped himself to a glass of orange squash.
    Â 
    Gerry Doyle’s sister was gorgeous looking. She wore an overall, which was like an artist’s smock, and she looked like an illustration in a book. She seemed a bit shy and answered yes and no when David asked her about anything. But she was very polite and helpful. She offered to go and make cocoa and said she’d run over to O’Brien’s for a quarter of a pound of broken biscuits as well.
    â€œWhy didn’t you ask her to the Seal Cave?” David wanted to know.
    â€œOh, you couldn’t ask your sister to a thing like that. It’s all right for Chrissie and Kath and Peggy and those—they’re the kind of girls you’d expect to have at a thing like that—but not Fiona.”
    David felt he had overstepped some limit he didn’t know about. He felt awkward. He felt too that it was hard on the girls who had been there. They had all had great fun and played spin the bottle; and the boys had given them cider and beer and encouraged them like mad. Then the girls had got a bit silly and one or two of them were crying and Kath had been sick and they had fallen and everything. But it was all part of the night. It was a bit cruel somehow to think that Fiona was a different type of girl, one you wouldn’t bring to a party like that, but it was true. When she came back with the tray of cocoa and biscuits David knew that he would not like Fiona to have been to a party like that either.
    He would have liked to ask her to write to him at school. Nolan had a girl who wrote him long letters. But he thought it was too complicated to set it all up. Firstly if Fiona had said yes he would have had to explain the whole system where the letters were read by the priests and so the girl who was writing had to pretend to be another boy. Nolan’s friend who was called Alice used to sign her name Anthony. She had to remember not to talk about hockey matches but say rugby instead, in fact the letter was in so heavy a code or disguise none of them could really work out what it meant. Still it was nice for Nolan to be able to get the letter and tell everyone how good-looking Alice was. It would be nice to do the same with Fiona. But if Gerry wouldn’t let her come to a party in a cave down the road he would almost certainly be very much against her writing letters in code to a boy in a boarding school. That would be fast, and Fiona Doyle was not going to be thought of as fast. David noticed that he kept thinking of them as orphans even though they lived with their mother and father. That was odd.
    â€œYour parents don’t take much part in things, do they?” he said enviously.
    â€œThey work too hard,” Gerry said. “It was always like that. It’s a dog’s life, and Mam hates the work but what else is there?”
    â€œWhat would she prefer to be doing?”
    â€œArranging flowers on a hall table in a house like yours,” Gerry laughed. “But isn’t that what every woman would want?”
    Â 
    The roof didn’t fall in and the skies didn’t flash with lightning when David got back home that evening. He sensed that his parents had had a little chat. His mother was sewing the Cash’s name tapes on some new socks and pajamas for him. She seemed to have