Circle of Friends Part VII

Jack reacts very differently to Simon; he accepts that the baby is his and that he has to marry her. He goes to see Benny and tells her that he is going to have to marry Nan, because she is having his child. She is devastated, but Eve tells her she must put on a brave face and be the one who tells his group of friends about the upcoming marriage... she doesn't want to be pitied by them. Benny takes her advice and they go out on the town, meeting friends and telling them the news about Jack and Nan. Eve is furious with Nan for taking advantage of Benny's absences to steal her boyfriend, and she finds it hard to hide her anger. She also wonders about Nan's relationship with Simon, and why that came to an end. Nan isnt talking. Meanhwhile Sean has moved into the hotel and is soon proposing to Dorothy, the owner, and they plan to get married. Benny's mother starts working in the shop and seems to be enjoying it.

Circle of Friends Part VI

Benny tries talking to Sean hoping to catch him out, and she and their maid try and persuade Mrs Hogan to think about learning to manage the business. Sean gets uneasy and tells Benny, untruthfully, that if the books dont add up, it is because Eddie Hogan was a careless forgetful businessman.. and that he often took money out of the till and did not replace it. Benny has been looking through her father's papers and knows that her father paid for all her clothes by cheque, so he was not dipping into the shop's funds. She is not sure how she can prove this, however. But then she has to go to the rooms upstairs, where Sean lives, to get an old sewing machine, and she comes aross an old desk with numerous bags of money in its drawers. She finally has proof that Sean has been stealing from the business. She and her mother call in the local doctor as a witness and they confront Sean and tell him that they know how dishonest he has been and while they dont want to prosecute, they want him gone. Sean is furious and lashes out at them, insulting Benny.. and saying that the shop will close without him to run it. He leaves and goes to the local hotel where the owner-manager is a widow who likes him. She offers him a job as manager of the hotel and he decides to pay court to her and to grab at this opportunity to get a business of his own. Meanwhile, Benny and her mother prpeare to take over management of the shop. Benny notices that her mother seems happier with the prospect of having something to do, and they decide to sell their house and put the money in the business. Benny hopes that if her mother is occupied, she herself may become more able to spend time in Dublin and keep Jack company. Jack however has been a bit irritated by Benny's never being around, and he becomes friendlier with Nan. She has a crisis in her life, though and is driven to make a drastic change. She finds she is pregnant by Simon, and when she tells him, hoping that he will propose, he offers her money for an abortion. He tells her that she always knew they would never marry, and Nan starts to make other plans. She flirts with Jack and lures him to Eve's cottage, where they make love a few times. Then she tells him that she is pregnant by him.

Circle of Friends Part V

Meanwhile, Nan has been seeing Simon Westward and has decided to let him sleep with her in hopes of luring him into marriage. He takes her to hotels but he's not really well off enough to keep on doing that. Nan however thinks of Eve's cottage, in Knockglen, which belonged to her mother and father, and which she has never really liked. It is empty most of the time and Nan suggests that they can go there to make love. Benny tries to work out if there is any way of keeping Sean from getting a partnership, and wonders if her mother might take an interest in the shop and get her mind off her loss. She is relieved when she tells Jack that she has to go home one day, to help her mother and he wants to go to a film, and Nan, who happens by, says she will go with him. After the film, Jack goes home and Nan runs into Simon Westward and they go to Eve's cottage. He is very attracted to her but he has no intention of marrying a Catholic girl from a not very grand background. He is still looking around for a girl from England who has some family money.

Circle of Friends Part IV.

Benny can't stand Sean and worries that her parents seem to be pushing them into a relationship. In the new Year, she goes to Dublin one Saturday, to meet Jack and her friends, pleading that she has an extra lecture. Eddie, her father, dies suddenly of a heart attack during the afternoon. Benny, badly shaken, comes back to Knockglen as soon as she hears the news and she finds that her mother is completely devastated by her husband's death. She is very upset but she can see that she is tied to her home even more than before. Then Annabel, her mother and Benny get a nasty shock learning from Sean that Mr Hogan had recently offered him a partnership. The business was not doing well, and he had worked there for 10 years with no prospect of promotion so Mr Hogan agreed to make him a partner. Benny is worried at the idea of Sean being master of the business and she begins to wonder why the business was doing so badly. This additional worry means she has even less time to spend with Jack, and she worries about losing him to a girl who is in Dublin.

Circle of Friends Part III

Benny enjoys college but she is depressed by the fact that her parents expect her back at home every evening and she doesn't get much chance to socialise. She manages to get to a party being held at Jack's house and he realises that she is very attractive in an unusual way. He asks her out, and she is so thrilled. Nan however has higher ambitions than meeting a student. She has found out that Eve is a cousin to a well to do Protestant family, and decides to pursue Simon. Eve is grateful to Simon for helping her out but her pride won't let her have much to do with the family, in case they think she is trying to get on socially or be helped financially by them. Nan thinks Eve is a fool not to make use of her connexions, although she is not fully aware that the Westwards are not that well off any more, and that Simon himself hopes to marry someone with money to help out with the farm's problems. Benny starts to go out with Jack but she can't meet him that often, as she is still expected home every night. Eve is going out with Aidan now and Nan still has her eye on Simon. She persuades one of her admirers to go with her, to gatecrash a society wedding.. where the Protestant landowner will be a guest. Jack's parents know that he is going out with Benny and his mother is not too keen on the romance. Meanwhile Benny has an uneasy feeling about her parents. They wanted her to go to college but nowadays the shop isnt doing very well and she begins to wonder if they are hoping that she would marry Sean and go into the business.

Circle of Friends II

Benny meets Eve in Dublin on the first day of college, and Eve tells her she is going to find some way of getting to University. Then, both of them are involved in a traffic accident. Benny is not hurt but Eve is. When waiting in hospital for treatment they meet some of their fellow students who were also there when the car crashed. One is a very beautiful girl of 18 called Nan Mahon; she is a Dubliner, and her father is a small builder. However he is also given to drinking and hits her downtrodden mother Emily quite often. They also meet Jack and Aidan. Jack is the son of a well to do doctor and is studying law. He is very handsome and charming and Benny is attracted to him. Aidan fancies himself as a bit of a wit, and he takes a liking to Eve who laughs at him. Eve goes back home to the convent where the nuns make a fuss of her and she tells Mother Francis who has looked after her, that she could not stand the convent in Dublin. She decides to approach the Westward family to ask if they would pay for her to go to college. She approaches her cousin, Simon, who is managing the estate, his father is now an elderly invalid... and he feels a bit guilty that the family has neglected her and he agrees to pay for her university fees. She gets a job in Dublin helping out a lady who rents rooms to students...and prepares to start her new life. The 2 girls like Nan, but dont realise that she is very ambitious. She is not academic and is mainly going to college in hopes that she will meet someone well to do and marry him.

Circle of Friends by Maeve Binchy I

This is one of Binchy's mid life novels which was very successful and which was made into a film in the 1990s. It was not a very good film. The novel is set in the late 50s, and the heroine is a rather plain girl called Benny (Bernadette) Hogan. She is the only child of doting parents, who live in a village called Knockglen, not too far from Dublin. Benny becomes friendly with a girl from her school Eve Malone, who is an orphan; her parents were of different faiths and eloped. Her mother died when she was born and her father who had a drink problem died soon after. Her maternal family, the Westwards were the Protestant landlords of the area and were not keen to take in an infant who would have to be reared as a Catholic, so she was finally taken care of by the local nuns who ran the school. Eve was happy in her unusual home, but she was pleased when she and Benny became friends. Benny's father was a bit disappointed to have no son to take on his family business, a mens tailors, so he takes on an apprentice Sean who moves into rooms over the shop. Sean is a bit of an Uriah Heep and the 2 girls dont like him. When they are 18 Benny is expected to go to University but there is no money to send Eve. She is instead sent to a convent in Dublin, where she will learn typing.. and she hates the idea.