Maeve's Times

by Maeve Binchy

  The year we were all meant to be studying for our degree, I got to know Lorraine better because nobody was studying at all. We had all taken holiday jobs on the grounds that if we got away from the distractions and the barbecues at White Rock and all that sort of thing there would be more chance of getting some work done.

  I was teaching in St Leonard’s-on-Sea, and by chance Lorraine was there too, working in a library in nearby Hastings so we used to meet a bit and talk. I was mainly worried in case I was teaching the pupils rubbish, and that I would fail my BA because I didn’t know one word, line or fact of American history. Lorraine was worried because she was always giving out books to people who looked like professional book thieves and she was hoping that her hard-to-get policy with Martin was going to pay off.

  We had hours and days of Martin as we sat on the beach, me with American history books, Lorraine with unopened old English tomes. It had been the right thing, hadn’t it, to pretend that one wasn’t available? It would make him more interested, wouldn’t it? There was no danger he’d meet someone else at home, was there? Reassurances from me, struggling with names I had never heard of and battles I hadn’t known had taken place. Positively the right thing.

  In August when everyone really was studying I heard that they were engaged, and would be married immediately after graduation. It seemed the most remarkable and romantic thing in the world, a triumph for all that Angela MacNamara advice about not giving your favours too easily, and not being too easy to get. She was just 20, he was her first and only boyfriend.

  The rest of us went on sourly to do our HDip. Martin got a job in the Civil Service. Lorraine got a hopeless kind of job as someone’s personal secretary.

  Then she was coyly pregnant, and they had to leave their flat and I used to meet them at the odd party and it was always whine, whine, whine about the price of houses, and the not knowing whether to knit things in pink or in blue, and we found them a bit of a drag. We who had so much else to live for, like trying to find a teaching job in Dublin and/or a boyfriend.

  And again by chance they got a house next door to a great friend of mine, so I kept coming across her for years afterwards. My friend had advised her to knit everything in white; it would be safer, and she had been delighted with that idea and kept out of everyone’s way knitting until the girl was born, and a boy was born a year later and another girl after that.

  This brings us to about 1964 and Lorraine and Martin had a new whine: it was about family planning. They just couldn’t afford any more children, and you just had to sneeze and Lorraine got pregnant, and they were both very good Catholics and really wasn’t it all terribly unfair? They had discussed it with Father Peter who had been very understanding and said that they should see a good doctor about the rhythm method, and with Father Brian who hadn’t been a bit understanding and said that God never brought a life into the world that He didn’t want, and there was never a mouth that He couldn’t feed. And we were all so helpful to Lorraine and Martin and said yes, isn’t Father Brian right? Look at the thousands who die of starvation, God just didn’t want those apparently. And they became bewildered and didn’t talk about it so much, which was what we wanted.

  Martin was doing all right in his job, he was promoted and went back to College to do a post-graduate degree as a sort of part-time release. Lorraine just learned a bit of dressmaking and they went to the odd dance and my friend minded their three babies for them and they seemed just like any other married couple with a little too much money and a little too high aspiration in life.

  I got the shock of my life when I saw Lorraine extremely drunk at a party about four years ago. She was simply incapable of standing up, so with the loyalty of the American-style old alumnae, a few of us got her out of it and brought her to the nearest house and sobered her up, with coffee, lots of it. Nobody could find Martin at the party.

  He wasn’t there. He was minding the children but Lorraine had decided she was sick of everything and of him being so dull and not wanting to go anywhere and she was still attractive for God’s sake and she had no one to talk to all day, and he at least had his friends in the office, and all he wanted to do was to look at the telly and make love. And he had got round some priest, who said that if the doctor said she should take the Pill, then it was all right, and now she was taking the Pill and she and Martin would go to hell when they died. And she felt such a hypocrite at Mass every Sunday and it wasn’t fair. She hadn’t been to Communion for two years and she sobbed after we had all said something soothing about ‘If the priest says it’s all right ….’

  So Lorraine said that wasn’t the point, she didn’t believe it was all right, it was just that Martin was a glutton for sex, and he had told it all to the priest in some dishonest way, she knew that. And perhaps the priest was one of those who were leaving. Priests were getting married all round the place, and you didn’t know who you were talking to these days, and the whole Church seemed to be very confused.

  More important than the Church being confused, in the short term we thought, was how to get her home to Martin sober and without explanation. She said she didn’t give a damn what he thought, he was a man who never thought about anything anyway.

  Pure Woman’s Own, we felt, as someone with a car deposited her on her doorstep and weakly drove away before she got out her key.

  And then I began seeing her everywhere, smartly dressed and laughing, and not drunk, but drinking, at press receptions that I had to go to because of work or coming out of smart bars that I wouldn’t go into because of what they charge for drink, justifying it on the decor and the fact they give you peanuts. She was always being photographed at the races ‘seen exchanging a joke’, and I caught a glimpse of her in a sports car with a fellow who is known for describing in detail every encounter he ever has with a female.

  The children were nine, eight and seven when I came across Martin in a country hotel with a woman who was not Lorraine. Two days of pretending not to see him, and rushing out of lounges as he came in, and eventually he said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll tell.’ Which annoyed me to hell for two reasons.

  The arrogant Edwardian assumption that the gent is allowed have his little fling and little floozy and that everyone will stand by him, and the other assumption that I might be on the phone to Dublin already saying, ‘Lorraine, dear, I think you ought to know ….’ I was just sad, the way anyone would be sad, and for some reason all her religious confusions came back to me, and I knew with a kind of instinct that she was not being unfaithful to him in the literal sense but was trying desperately to have a good time and be part of what she thought was a glamorous world, a world she missed by marrying so young, a world that confused her because its values weren’t the ones she had learned in a country town, a convent school, a motherly digs and one summer abroad working in a library in Hastings.

  You know the way it works. I wasn’t back in Dublin two days when I met her.

  ‘I believe you ran into Martin on a business trip,’ she said.

  Dishonest, mistrustful clown, I thought, and agreed that I had been talking to him for a few minutes. Had I time for coffee, she wondered? Oh God, I might as well hear it now. I might as well start saying I didn’t know who he was with, whether all men were sex fiends and brutes or not. It was now or sometime. Right, we’ll go to Bewley’s.

  But I was all wrong, couldn’t have been more wrong, in fact. She wanted a chat just. The children were all so well, she was on the committee of this and that and could we ever give a little publicity to their flag day, and now that everybody was interpreting Humanae Vitae so liberally and all these cardinals were saying it as well, she felt fine, and she went to Communion regularly. She was a member of a little group that did spiritual reading and met once a fortnight to discuss it with each other and a priest who knew a lot more than they did.

  She had stopped running around. It was all so silly, really, these parties and night clubs, people thought you were there for One Thing. And now that Marti
n was so busy and had to take so many business trips she spent much more time with the kids. Everything was going so well it was a pity that I had never married. Oh yes, I agreed, but I keep trying.

  That pleased her. Martin wouldn’t be at home next weekend either but when he was, they’d have a little dinner party and he could bring along some single men, and you’d never know. I wondered did Martin know any single men; but said it would be lovely, and she was right you know, you never did know. We parted very happily.

  Martin’s next affair was so public that the children even heard about it at school.

  Now Martin’s latest really was a tramp. It’s hard to give that description to anyone, but this girl was the end. She went with anyone who could give her a good time, she didn’t know the meaning of love, and she didn’t care about families or people. She was out for her pretty little self.

  Lorraine eventually got one of those ‘I think you ought to know’ calls. It was only a matter of time, I suppose, but it was terrible the way it hit her.

  She didn’t start any of the devious tricks of winning him back. She didn’t go and have a silly perm and wear glamorous nightgowns, she just decided that it was all over and assessed the whole situation over a lonely cup of instant coffee in the kitchen one morning. If he was having fun, well so would she.

  She picked on the most unlikely man in the world. A quiet, rather inarticulate man who had a fairly happy home life, and she just set herself at him. He had vague connections with libraries and publishing so she played up all she knew about the pathetic little holiday job she had a hundred years ago it seems, and assumed an interest in all his work. It took six weeks, they tell me, before he gave in. Then they started hiring rooms for the afternoon in Dublin hotels, and she just felt she was getting back at Martin, and he felt desperately worried in case someone might tell his wife.

  ‘Pure playboy’ we decided at this stage, because you see no one was very fond of Lorraine, and no one could understand her motives. It went on for about a year. If anyone thought anything I suppose it was about how dreadful it must have been for the children. Mummy with a worried man, Daddy with an out-and-out chancer. But anyway none of us had enough courage or interest to say Stop.

  And it stopped when the out-and-out chancer found someone else richer, freer, and more fun. And Martin wanted a bit of home life and it just wasn’t around. And about six months later the quiet, inarticulate man took a job about a thousand miles from here, to get out of the situation, and brought his fairly happy wife with him, and there they were. Mutually suspicious, and deeply unhappy.

  To this day I don’t know what Martin does with his life. I don’t really care because I never got to know him, but I care a bit, I suppose, because I see what a failure he and Lorraine made of the whole thing, the whole business that was meant to be sickness and health, in good times and bad times. I just see what had happened to her at the age of 32.

  She is probably the best-known easy lay in Dublin. You only have to be nice to her, if you are a man, and she will get a little drunk and a little emotional, and say that God was very unfair when He made the world, and go home to bed with you.

  It didn’t come home to me until a few months ago when a friend, a good friend of mine, said he had got himself stupidly involved with a very clinging woman, and she kept ringing him indiscreetly at his office. He was trying to get out of it, but she seemed so dependent and she seemed to have nothing to live for, and she was deeply religious, and guilty, and he wondered what the hell he should do.

  I knew it was Lorraine because I had seen them talking in a pub one day and knew that this is a village, not a capital city, and that it was the latest of her ‘involvements’. All right, what should I do, women are fools. Should I go out to her house and say this guy has a good job and a good wife and stop bothering him? Should I tell him to choke her off, and have her eventual breakdown on my neck? Should I ask Martin out to dinner and say, ‘You’re both young still, can’t you make a new start?’

  I did one thing. I had a party and asked a priest, and got him talking to Lorraine. I eavesdropped every few minutes and they seemed to be getting on fine. He was saying things like ‘Your teenage children will need you now more than ever’ and she was saying, ‘I know, I know, but I feel so dishonest and neglectful, how can I ever re-establish something?’ And I felt like some kind of Solomon. That evening anyway.

  But she didn’t stop her way of life. As I write she is involved with a boy, and I mean boy, of 22 who keeps ringing me and saying things like ‘That brute of a husband ill-treats her and how do you get an annulment in this country?’ And I don’t know what to say.

  And last week she rang me up and said that she would be very grateful if I could ask someone what that priest meant on television when he said that Marriage was dead when Love was dead, and could I tell her about all that old thing about annulment costing a lot of money. Was that true these days?

  ‘Why don’t you just go and live in England for a bit and get a divorce?’ I asked, tough but practical.

  ‘It has to be an annulment or nothing,’ she said.

  It appeared that God would sanction an annulment and just about everything else, but not a horrible secular thing like a divorce.

  ‘Oh God, Lorraine,’ I said, ‘you are a fool.’

  And I know she’ll never speak to me again.

  Women Are Fools – Sandy

  9 May 1973

  Sandy read Exodus when she was 18, about the same time as I did, but she read it in Yorkshire, and had married Johnny by the time she got to Israel. She believed that life was very commercial and rat race-ish in London and that in the orange groves and the purity of Israeli kibbutz life, they could really be both themselves and part of a greater movement. Johnny was easy going, he looked into the practicalities of the thing, and he decided that they would try it for a year or two anyway. He could always get a job in engineering again when they came back to London; it didn’t seem like a New Life, but if Sandy was so determined, there could be nothing lost. They bought eight good books on teaching yourself Hebrew, they bored a lot of their friends, with talk of going to a new land and a new life. They packed their two tiny children into a plane and went to the kibbutz.

  I saw them the day they arrived, pale and blonde and starry-eyed. They handed the two little boys over to the Children’s House and were given a bungalow to live in. They were told, as I had been, that the kibbutz could make no promises, if they were going to stay forever it would have to be by a vote from all the members. But then they didn’t have to spell it out so much for me, because I was going in September anyway, back to teaching. There were no problems in my case.

  And indeed there seemed to be none in Sandy’s either. That summer she became tanned and happy, she worked with me in the chicken house for a few weeks, we used to take day-old chicks and inject them against something, and we both cried the day that I choked one by mistake, because I held it too tightly, and Sandy was so soft that she buried it, instead of throwing it into the dustbin like the rest of them would have done.

  Johnny was working on the dam, we had all learned passable Hebrew, but Johnny was better because nobody at his end spoke any English at all.

  Their children were very happy. They were three and one, and the three-year-old was saying things in Hebrew to Sandy in one month, which excited her very much. She and Johnny were with them for five hours every day from two in the afternoon until seven, when they would put the baby to bed, and send little Tom to his tea. Nobody ever mentioned to any of us or to the children that we were any different to anyone else because we weren’t Jewish. We never thought about it ourselves anyway.

  And the long hot summer wore on and I was changed to making yoghurt from six a.m. until two instead of being in the chicken house, and Sandy was out picking grapes and got even browner and healthier, and she had a funny, happy smile, and a way of saying ‘Shalom’ to everyone with a grin that should have made us realise her happiness wasn’t going to
last. But then why should it? I mean, what was wrong with the setup? They were a young couple in love and idealistic, and getting on well with everyone. Sandy didn’t look a fool at all. Compared to all her other friends, the working wives that she had left behind in London, she was in a paradise; no money worries, no health worries, near the sea, part of a commune.

  They weren’t my best friends there, but I missed them and thought about them a lot when I went home. No one is much good at letter writing on a kibbutz, and apart from a New Year’s card I never heard from them. The following summer when I got off the bus for my three months visit, they were all there, as usual; nothing seemed to have changed. Miriam was still the cynical wit, David the fellow who got things done. Some of the older men and women with Polish names that I never got to know well threw their arms around me and said that I was one of the few summer visitors who ever returned. Sandy and Johnny were so good at Hebrew now that they could hardly bring themselves to talk in English, they said! They were terribly happy; a year and three months had gone by and no one had said anything about a vote. They were obviously there for life. Why didn’t I go up to Tel Aviv for a month, marry someone and bring him back to the kibbutz? Life was so perfect.

  And it was. No yoghurt making, no chickens, I was allowed to bring the kids for swims, if I could prove that I could shout, in Hebrew, all right and useful phrases like ‘Come in at once’ or ‘Nobody out further than their waists’. Sandy’s little boy Tommy was there and he literally couldn’t speak a word of English. He was golden and had lots of friends.

  One evening I was listening to the record player I had borrowed from a nice old Hungarian, who said that he now knew all the records in the library, and I could have the player until they got a few new ones. There were a lot of crickets outside competing with the music, and the laughter of a very young army group of boys and girls of about 18 who had been billeted on the kibbutz for a month and we all found them a terrible nuisance.