A Few of the Girls: Stories

by Maeve Binchy

  People had loved her, or had said they loved her. Kate had read all about it, wept over love at the movies, listened to tales of love from her friends. She knew she would recognize it when it happened.

  But she nearly didn’t.

  Because it happened, of all places, in Birmingham. At a big trade fair in the exhibition center. And his name was Paul and he was an Englishman. This made it both inconvenient and unlikely.

  —

  Kate was a Dubliner and her job was there, and her life. All Kate’s family had married great, rangy-looking, loud people like themselves, many of them with red hair, all of them with opinions. Paul was small and dark and quiet, and had a habit of letting the other person have their say, which would be looked on with great suspicion by Kate’s family.

  They were both embarrassed by how quickly each of them seemed to recognize a kindred spirit in the other. They kept apologizing.

  “I know it’s none of my business but is there…I mean, do you…are you…have you anyone else?” he said after ten minutes.

  “Nobody at all, no one in the world. And you, tell me, tell me. Sorry to be so impatient,” she answered.

  They went to lunch and to dinner. They went to the pictures. They went on a bus tour. They went to bed. Then they went back to their offices in London and Dublin with little understanding of what they had been sent to inspect and learn. They spent days and nights writing to each other but, because letters took so long, they spent hours standing by faxes trying to send off their very private thoughts at exactly the time when the other would be there to intercept them at either end. They were practical.

  “It may have been just a few days out of time,” Kate wrote. “Perhaps we shouldn’t build on it.”

  “I’m possibly a bit of a dull chap,” Paul wrote.

  —

  Kate hugged the fax to her for days. Apart from school stories she had never heard anyone called a dull chap. After six weeks they couldn’t bear it anymore. “Come to London,” he wrote in a letter.

  It crossed with hers saying, “Come to Dublin.”

  “I’ve never been to Ireland,” he said on the phone. So that settled it. He would come for a long weekend. The letters and faxes changed. They were full of longing, and eagerness. As well as dying to see her, he was dying to see Ireland. Kate wasn’t sure if Ireland would live up to the expectations. She knew that she would be fine, like they had been fine in Birmingham, talking, learning, understanding, sharing…

  But would he be confused by Ireland?

  He’d want to meet her family! Would they all shout at him and talk at the same time, drowning him totally? Would it look foreign and strange to him with its churches and accents and monuments? Would he understand the jokes? Would he think that people sang too much? Or that it was such a different culture he would just give up on it?

  Or, on the other hand, might it be too ordinary, too tame, too like a British provincial city? Not exotic enough—not nearly as different as he had hoped? Kate looked at her own city with critical eyes. The parts she loved so much, like the outlines and shapes along the Liffey, he might think they were just higgledy-piggledy. Would he like to look at people crossing the Ha’penny Bridge like Kate did—watching their faces against a Dublin evening sky?

  Would he enjoy going out to Killiney on the little train? Everyone in Dublin was so proud of the DART. Did it get diminished when you called it the Dublin Area Rapid Transit? Kate thought it sounded a bit pretentious, but you’d have to tell him that’s what it meant. Paul wasn’t a man who just assumed things were called the DART for no reason. Would her mother start showing him wedding pictures?

  Kate wished that she had been the one to make the journey. But then that would have been stupid, she knew London. And he’d have to come to Ireland one day, wouldn’t he? She did love him, which was so inconvenient. Kate knew that the only way the visit could be a success was to plan it down to the last detail. She knew that he must meet her parents only at a time when there was no family gathering where he would be suffocated. He must meet her brother-in-law Gerry not at all. Gerry had a line of bad jokes that would put off any potential suitor, even if he were not a quiet Englishman. She would take him to pubs where there was no danger of an impromptu sing-song. She would book the theater and a couple of nice restaurants.

  They would go to Dalkey and on a drive to Kildare where she would make sure he saw wealthy properties and realized that the Irish were successful, smart people in their own right.

  She met him at the airport and they kissed and she almost forgot the carefully structured plan. She drove him home, pointing out sights. He was admiring and eager, but mainly he admired the way her hair curled over her cheek or how her eyes sparkled.

  “It’s lovely to have a capital city on the sea,” he said, and Kate was pleased. She hadn’t thought of that. It was indeed.

  “Everyone’s very young,” he said approvingly.

  Again, she thought this might be a disadvantage. It was a young country, certainly, but she had been afraid he wouldn’t like too many hordes of kids.

  By the time they got to her flat, Kate was so relaxed she had forgotten entirely about the roadworks that had been under way for some time. She fell straight into a trench and broke her leg. Paul found her house keys, phoned the ambulance, and got her to hospital.

  “I’ll look after you,” he promised into her ear as they carried the stretcher along.

  “But who’ll look after you?” she wept, her careful plans wrecked around her.

  —

  He telephoned her mother.

  “Are you the intended from England? You’re very welcome to these shores,” her mother said. Kate said she was never going to be better now; her leg would never heal. Why had her mother said that? But Paul just laughed.

  Then she heard that her brother-in-law Gerry had a few days off work and was going to take Paul under his wing.

  “I’ve lost him,” Kate wept to the nurse. “I finally fell in love and I’ve lost him before it even got to start properly.”

  “He seems very attentive,” the nurse said soothingly, touching the big bunch of flowers with the loving message.

  “That’s now. Wait until Gerry’s had his hands on him.” Kate was now without hope.

  —

  Through the blur of the days that followed she heard that Gerry had taken Paul on a pub crawl, ever looking for the perfectly poured pint and having to try four establishments before they found it. She heard that her father had taken him to Croke Park and explained the finer points of hurling to him; that her brother, who was a soccer fan, had taken him to Dalymount Park and shown him two hours of videos of the glorious summer of the World Cup. He had eaten most of his meals at her mother’s kitchen table.

  She remembered him sitting by the bed holding her hand saying that he only wished she was better so that she could come out and enjoy this fantastic city with him.

  “Shouldn’t you have gone home?” she asked groggily.

  “I got compassionate leave,” he said and kissed her hot, fevered forehead.

  —

  As she got better, the picture of Paul’s holiday seemed to become alarmingly clear. Kate’s twelve-year-old niece had taken him on a tour of the places where The Commitments had been filmed, and out to South Dublin, not to see the fishing harbors and eat in the smart restaurants but to take his camera and photograph where Bono lived, and Chris de Burgh and Def Leppard. Paul said his sister would die when she knew he had seen the places, she would probably be over on the next plane.

  He had been to markets, to church bazaars, he had been taken to the big cemetery to put flowers on the grave of Kate’s grandmother, whose anniversary it was; he had been encouraged to go out on his own and explore and told always to ask people’s advice, saying that he was a stranger. Soon he stopped doing this because people gave him so much advice it wore him out, and also because he didn’t feel like a stranger anymore.

  The day Kate came out of hospital they
had a big family get-together, the kind she had dreaded Paul having to witness. But now he was part of it all.

  “How did you get so much compassionate leave?” she asked, hoping to ease him out of Dublin before he saw them at their worst.

  “My fiancée broke her leg before we could even tell the family our plans,” he said simply. “What’s more compassionate than that?”

  —

  By the time she got to her mother’s home, they had planned the wedding. Without her. They had talked of the numbers, the food, the time of year, the priest who would be nice and ordinary and not frighten the wits out of what used to be called Our Separated Brethren. They were on to the honeymoon before Kate got a word in.

  “Are you all going to come with us?” she asked.

  Gerry, her brother-in-law, wondered where they were going. It would all depend.

  “I want the honeymoon in Dublin,” Paul said.

  Paul! In front of this mob he was giving a dissenting opinion.

  There was a chorus of other counties. It was like a geography lesson. Every sister and brother and spouse had a view.

  The compassionate leave would soon be over. Kate’s leg would be better. The roadworks would be completed. And it would be easier to have the wedding the way her mother wanted it. That’s what her sisters had done. And they had been fine weddings. And the tourist-as-husband had chosen the honeymoon.

  Kate sighed.

  Her mother said that Kate was tired. Her father said that Kate needed another drink.

  Only Paul knew she sighed because it had all turned out so well.

  Forgiving

  At the beginning of December, Mary decided to forgive them and go home for Christmas. She saw this documentary on television about people who held grudges and people who took stands and did things for a principle, but still the principle only made everyone else unhappy and meant nothing to anyone. It was as clear as daylight to her: she would forgive them and go home. She looked up the plane times, and decided to go on the Wednesday. That would give her a day in Dublin and she would travel home by train on Thursday night.

  She felt years younger, once she had decided to forgive them. She wondered whether anyone else who saw the television program had got such a clear insight. She might write to them afterwards and tell them about it. People said that television folk loved to hear from people that programs were good. She walked around her little room hugging herself. She hadn’t felt so lighthearted for years.

  She must tell them in plenty of time too—no point in all this surprise business, arriving, long-lost prodigal on the doorstep, on Christmas Eve. It was fine in the parable, but she’d always felt sorry for the Prodigal’s brother, the one that had been there all the time and nobody called him a scrawny chicken, let alone a fatted calf. No, they must have time to think about it. Because obviously they would need to adjust to the relief of it all, just as she would. She would write to her mother tonight.

  Her mother would be so happy; Mary could almost see the way she would hold the letter to her chest as she did whenever she got good news. In the old days, she had suspected that a letter meant bad news and it was always opened in fear. It would be funny to see her mother as an old woman—she would be seventy-five on Stephen’s Day. Imagine her mother being like one of the old women she saw in the supermarkets here. Imagine, her mother probably had a stick and glasses, her mother, who used to be so tall and strong. And so convinced that she knew everything. So sure of herself, and her notions.

  There had been none of that sureness and accusation in the letters she had written begging Mary to come back. Oh, no. There had been different rules. “Life is very short,” “families shouldn’t fall out,” “it’s very hard to have you turn your heart against us.”

  Mary remembered the letters; she had filed them neatly in a box that had once contained a rotary whisk. She had written on each envelope the date it had arrived. She had read them once and placed them in neat rows. She had answered none of them—there was nothing to say. She didn’t mind that they were saying an extra decade of the Rosary for her; she didn’t get any satisfaction out of the grudging admission that her father might have let himself go a bit far. She knew that there was no way she would forgive them because they didn’t want to have anything to do with Louis.

  Louis had said that she should be patient, that she should be sensible; they would see things differently in time. But Mary didn’t think there was enough time. Louis had said that her mother and father were kind to worry so much; he wished that he had someone to worry about him because he had no one, but if he ever had a daughter he’d be careful who she went off with. Mary told her mother this one night, with tears running down her face.

  “He’s all for us to wait, Ma, he says we’ll wait two years if you like, just if we can get engaged. See how sensible he is. Ma, how can you call him a fly-by-night?”

  To Mother and Father this was further evidence of Louis’s cunning. It proved that he must be after her money. But what money? Mary used to throw her eyes wildly up to the heavens; Lord God, they were talking about a few hundred pounds. Twelve hundred pounds. How could they be so stupid and so cruel as to think that Louis wanted to marry her so that he could get his hands on twelve hundred pounds?

  Ah, but her father had said, does he want to marry our Mary? That’s the point. Doesn’t he just want to go off and live with her until the money is spent? What was all this nonsense about not wanting a big wedding, because he had nobody to ask? What kind of trickery was that? What kind of a man had nobody to ask for a wedding, had appeared from nowhere in the town with no background, no recommendation? Wasn’t it funny that he had picked a girl that nobody else had seemed to make much of a run for? Answer him that. How was it that none of the other fellows in the town had seen fit to run and propose to Mary when it was time for them to pick a wife? No, only a fellow from God knows where, running from God knows what, picking the town’s settled spinster because she had a few pounds in the post office.

  —

  Mary Brennan had been twenty-nine the year she met Louis; he had come to work in Lynch’s grocery for the summer. He had cut ice creams and the children liked him because he made the fourpenny ones big and put a little extra in the threepenny cones. The Lynches liked him because he was always smiling and didn’t mind staying open late after the cinema crowds, or even until they came out from the dance, when he’d sell crisps, and he always knew how to move on anyone who was a bit noisy. They made more money that summer than ever before. He used to tell them to go in and listen to the wireless; he didn’t mind sitting in the shop.

  Mary had been dreading the end of the summer, but no, the Lynches had kept him on. Then, when all the tourists had gone, Mary used to have him to herself. They walked the cliffs in autumn, and when the winds got cold in October he put his coat around her shoulders and told her that she was lovely. Nobody had ever kissed her, except two lunks at the dance, and she thought it was great to have waited so long for it because it was even better than she had ever hoped. Then people started to tell her that he was making a fool of her.

  Her father had been the worst—even her mother and Nessa and Seamus had tried to stop her father when he got into one of his attacks. Nessa had turned away when her father had said to Mary that she should look in the mirror and have some sense. How would a young ne’er-do-well like Louis, six years younger than she—how could he want a woman like her?

  The winter days had melted into each other and Mary could only remember a blur. She used to go to work in the post office every day, she supposed. She must have come home for her tea, but did she have it on her own or were there rows every single night with them all? She remembered that Louis was always shivering because they used to talk on the street. They couldn’t come home: her father wouldn’t let him into the house and he couldn’t ask her into the Lynches’ house—it would be setting them up as enemies of her parents. Sometimes they talked in whispers in the back of the church, where it was warm, until
once Father O’Connor had said it wasn’t very respectful to the Lord to come into his house and talk and skitter in it like a couple of bold children.

  —

  The night that Louis had said maybe he was only being a cross for her to bear, she made up her mind. Louis had said maybe he was bringing her more bad luck than happiness and that he should go off and she would forget him. Mary was very calm. It was three days before Christmas, and she filled in all the forms about transferring the money from her post office account. She tidied up her little section of the counter and told the postmistress that she should look for someone else in the new year, and then she walked home and told her mother and father and Nessa and Seamus that she was leaving on the bus, and they would catch the train and they would go to England.

  She left the house in uproar and went to Lynch’s and told Louis. He said they couldn’t go now.

  She said simply, “You have to come with me, for I’m cleaving to you like it says in the Old Testament—you know, about a man cleaving unto a wife and leaving father and mother and all. That’s what I’m doing. Don’t leave me to cleave all by myself.”

  Louis had laughed and said of course he couldn’t do that; he packed his case, told the Lynches that they needn’t pay him the Christmas bonus because it wouldn’t be fair. He came and stood outside the Brennans’ house with his suitcase in his hand, a bit like he had looked when he arrived at the beginning of the summer but colder, and waited until the door opened and all the crying and the noise came out into the street and Mary came down the steps slowly, but without any tears.

  They had never cried on that journey; they laughed and thought what great times they would have and they found a room near Paddington Station, and though they pretended to be married, they slept in separate beds until they were married by an Italian priest three weeks later, with two Italians as witnesses.