by Maeve Binchy
“No use for what?”
“To attract the right kind of husband.” Her mother had laughed. And then before Connie could persist she said: “Believe me I know what I’m saying. I’m not saying it’s fair, but it’s the way things are, so if we know the rules why not play by them?”
“They might have been the rules in your day, Mother, back in the forties, but everything’s changed since then.”
“Believe me,” her mother said. It was a great phrase of hers, she ordered people to believe her on this and on that. “Nothing has changed, 1940s, 1960s, they still want a slim, trim wife. It looks classy. The kind of men we want, want women who look the part. Just be glad you know that and lots of your friends at school don’t.”
Connie had asked her father. “Did you marry Mother because she was slim?”
“No, I married her because she was lovely and delightful and warm and because she looked after herself. I knew someone who looked after herself would look after me, and you when you came along, and the home. It’s as simple as that.”
Connie was at an expensive girls’ school.
Her mother always insisted she invite her friends around to supper or for the weekend. “That way they’ll invite you and you can meet their brothers and their friends,” Mother said.
“Oh Mother, it’s idiotic. It’s not like some kind of society where we are all presented at court. I’ll meet whoever I meet, that’s the way it is.”
“That’s not the way it is,” her mother said.
And when Connie was seventeen or eighteen, she found herself going out with exactly the people her mother would have chosen for her, doctors’ sons, lawyers’ sons, young people whose fathers were very successful in business. Some of them were great fun, some of them were very stupid, but Connie knew it would all be all right when she went to university. Then she could really meet the kinds of people she knew were out there. She could make her own friends, not just pick from the tiny circle that her mother had thought suitable.
She had registered to go to University College Dublin just before her nineteenth birthday. She had gone in and walked around the campus several times and attended a few public lectures there so that she wouldn’t feel nervous when it all started in October.
But in September the unbelievable happened. Her father died. A dentist who spent a great deal of his time on the golf course, and whose successful practice had a lot to do with being a partner in his uncle’s firm, should have lived forever. That’s what everyone said. Didn’t smoke, only the odd drink to be sociable, took plenty of exercise. No stress in his life.
But, of course, they hadn’t known about the gambling. Nobody had known until later the debts that existed. That the house would have to be sold. That there would be no money for Connie or any of them to go to university.
Connie’s mother had been ice-cold about it all. She behaved perfectly at the funeral, invited everyone around to the house for salads and wine. “Richard would have wanted it this way,” she said.
Already the rumors were beginning to spread, but she kept her head up high. When she was alone with Connie, and only then, she let her public face fall. “If he weren’t dead I would kill him,” she said over and over. “With my own bare hands I would choke the life out of him for doing this to us.”
“Poor Daddy.” Connie had a softer heart. “He must have been very upset in his mind to throw money away on dogs and horses. He must have been looking for something.”
“If he were still here to face me, he would have known what he was looking for,” her mother said.
“But if he had lived, he would have explained, won it back maybe, told us.” Connie wanted a good memory of her father, who had been kind and good-tempered. He hadn’t fussed as much as Mother, and made so many rules and laid down so many laws.
“Don’t be a fool, Connie. There’s no time for that now. Our only hope is that you will marry well.”
“Mother! Don’t be idiotic, Mother. I’m not going to get married for years. I have all my college years to get through, then I want to travel. I’m going to wait until I’m nearly thirty before I settle down.”
Her mother looked at her with a very hard face. “Let’s get this understood here and now, there will be no university. Who will pay the fees, who will pay your upkeep?”
“What do you want me to do instead?”
“You’ll do what you have to do. You’ll live with your father’s family, his uncles and brothers are very ashamed about this weakness of his. Some of them knew, some didn’t. But they’re going to keep you in Dublin for a year while you do a secretarial course, and possibly a couple of other things as well, then you’ll get a job and marry somebody suitable as soon as possible.”
“But Mother…I’m going to do a degree, it’s all arranged, I’ve been accepted.”
“It’s all unarranged now.”
“That’s not fair, it can’t be.”
“Talk to your late father about it, it’s his doing, not mine.”
“But couldn’t I get a job and go to college at the same time?”
“It doesn’t happen. And that crowd of his relatives aren’t going to put you up in their house if you’re working as a cleaner or a shop girl, which is all you can hope to get.”
Maybe she should have fought harder, Connie told herself. But it was hard to remember how times were then. And how shocked and upset they all were.
And how frightened she was, going to live with her cousins whom she didn’t know, while Mother and the twins went back to the country to live with Mother’s family. Mother said that going back to the small town she had left in triumph long ago was the hardest thing a human should be asked to do.
“But they’ll be sorry for you so they’ll be nice to you,” Connie had said.
“I don’t want their pity, their niceness. I want my pride. He took that away. That’s what I will never forgive him for, not until the day I die.”
AT HER SECRETARIAL course Connie met Vera, who had been at school with her.
“I’m desperately sorry about your father losing all his money,” Vera said immediately, and Connie’s eyes filled with tears.
“It was terrible,” she said. “Because it’s not like the awfulness of your father dying anyway, it’s as if he were a different person all the time and none of us ever knew him.”
“Oh, you did know him, it’s just you didn’t know him liking a flutter, and he’d never have done it if he thought you were all going to be upset,” said Vera.
Connie was delighted to meet someone so kind and understanding. And even though she and Vera had never been close at school, they became very firm friends at that moment.
“I think you don’t know how nice it is having someone being sympathetic,” she wrote to her mother. “It’s like a warm bath. I bet people would be like that to you around Grannie’s home if you let them and told them how awful you felt.”
The letter back from her mother was sharp and to the point. “Kindly don’t go weeping for sympathy on all and sundry. Pity is no comfort to you, nor are fine soft words. Your dignity and your pride are the only things you need to see you into your middle age. I pray that you will not be deprived of them as I was.”
Never a word about missing Father. About the kind husband he was, the good father. The photographs were taken out of the frames. The frames were sold in the auction. Connie didn’t dare to ask whether the pictures of her childhood had been saved.
Connie and Vera got on very well at their secretarial college. They did the shorthand and typing classes, together with the bookkeeping and office routine that were all part of such a comprehensive type of training. The family of cousins that she stayed with were embarrassed by her plight and gave her more freedom than her mother would have done.
Connie enjoyed being young and in Dublin. She and Vera went to dances, where they met great people. A boy called Jacko fancied Connie, and his friend Kevin fancied Vera, so they often went out together as a foursome. But neither s
he nor Vera was serious, while both the boys were. There was a lot of pressure on both of them to have sex. Connie refused but Vera agreed.
“Why do you do it if you don’t enjoy it, if you’re afraid of getting pregnant?” Connie asked, bewildered.
“I didn’t say I didn’t enjoy it,” Vera protested. “I said it’s not as great as it’s made out to be and I can’t see what all the puffing and panting is about. And I’m not afraid of getting pregnant, I’m going to go on the Pill.”
Even though birth control was still officially banned in Ireland in the early 1970s, the contraceptive pill could be prescribed for menstrual irregularity. Not surprisingly a large number of the female population were found to suffer from this. Connie thought it might be a good idea to go the same route. You never knew the day or the hour you might need to sleep with someone, and it would be a pity to have to hang around and wait until the Pill started to work.
Jacko had not been told that Connie was taking the contraceptive Pill. He remained hopeful that she would eventually realize that they were meant for each other, just like Kevin and Vera. He dreamed up more and more ideas that he thought would please her. They would travel to Italy together—they would learn Italian before they left at some night school or from records. When they got there they would be scusi and grazie with the best of them. He was good-looking, eager, and besotted with her. But Connie was firm. There would be no affair—no real involvement. Taking the Pill was just part of her own practicality.
Whatever version of the Pill Vera was taking did not agree with her, and in the time when she was changing over to another brand she became pregnant.
Kevin was delighted. “We always meant to get married anyway,” he kept saying.
“I wanted to have a bit of a life first,” Vera wept.
“You’ve had a bit of a life, now we’ll have a real life, you and the baby and me.” Kevin was overjoyed that they didn’t need to live at home anymore. They could have their own place.
It didn’t turn out to be a very comfortable place. Vera’s family were not wealthy and were very annoyed indeed with their daughter’s having, as they considered it, thrown away her expensive education and costly commercial course before she ever worked a day in her life.
They were also less than pleased with the family that Vera was about to marry into. While they considered Kevin’s people extremely worthy, they were definitely not what they had hoped for their daughter.
Vera didn’t need to explain this tension to Connie, Connie’s own mother would have been fit to be tied. She could imagine her screaming: “His father a house painter. And he’s going into the business! They call that a business to be going into.” It was useless for Vera to point out that Kevin’s father owned a small builders, providers, and decorators that in time might well become fairly important.
Kevin had earned a living every week of his life since he was seventeen. He was twenty-one now and extremely proud of being a father. He had painted the nursery of the two-up, two-down house with three coats. He wanted it to be perfect when the baby arrived.
At Vera’s wedding, where Jacko was best man and Connie was the bridesmaid, Connie made a decision. “We can never go out with each other ever again after today,” she said.
“You’re not serious, what did I do?”
“You did nothing, Jacko, except be nice and terrific, but I don’t want to get married, I want to work and go abroad.”
His open, honest face was mystified. “I’d let you work, I’d take you away every year to Italy on a holiday.”
“No Jacko. Dear Jacko, no.”
“And I thought we might even make an announcement tonight,” he said, his face drawn in lines of disappointment.
“We hardly know each other, you and I.”
“We know each other just as much as the bride and groom here, and look how far down the road they are.” Jacko spoke enviously.
Connie didn’t say that she thought her friend Vera was very unwise to have signed on for life with Kevin. She felt Vera would tire of this life soon. Vera, with the laughing dark eyes and the dark fringe still in her eyes, as it had been at school, would soon be a mother. She was able to face down her stiff-faced mother and father, and force everyone to have a good time at her wedding party. Look at her now, with the small bump in her stomach obvious to all, leading the singing of “Hey Jude” at the piano. Soon the whole room was singing la la la la la la Hey Jude.
She swore to Connie that it was what she wanted.
And amazingly it turned out to be what she did want. She finished the rest of her course and went to work in Kevin’s father’s office. In no time she had organized their rather rudimentary system of accounts. There was a proper filing cabinet, not a series of spikes, there was an appointment book that everyone had to fill in. The arrival of the tax man was no longer a source of such dread. Slowly Vera moved them into a different league.
The baby was an angel, small and dark-eyed with loads of black hair like Vera and Kevin. At the christening Connie felt her first small twinge of envy. She and Jacko were the godparents. Jacko had another girl now, a pert little thing. Her skirt was too short, her outfit not right for a christening.
“I hope you’re happy,” Connie whispered to him at the font.
“I’d come back to you tomorrow. Tonight, Connie,” he said to her.
“That’s not only not on, it’s not fair to think like that,” she said.
“She’s only to get me over you,” he pleaded.
“Maybe she will.”
“Or the next twenty-seven, but I doubt it.”
The hostility that Vera’s family had been showing to Kevin’s had disappeared. As so often happened, a tiny innocent baby in a robe being handed from one to the other made all the difference…the looking for family noses and ears and eyes in the little bundle. There was no need for Vera to sing “Hey Jude” to cheer them up, they were happy already.
THE GIRLS HAD not lost touch. Vera had asked: “Do you want to know how much Jacko yearns over you or not?”
“Not, please. Not a word.”
“And what should I say when he asks are you seeing anyone?”
“Tell him the truth, that I do from time to time but you think I’m not all that interested in fellows, and certainly not in settling down.”
“All right,” Vera promised. “But for me, tell me have you met anyone you fancied since him?”
“Ones I half fancy, yes.”
“And have you gone all the way with them?”
“I can’t talk to a respectable married woman and mother about such things.”
“That means no,” Vera said, and they giggled as they had when they learned typing.
Connie’s good looks and cool manner were an asset at interviews. She never allowed herself to look too eager, and yet there was nothing supercilious about her either. She refused quite an attractive job in the bank since it was only a temporary one.
The man who interviewed her had been surprised and rather impressed. “But why did you apply if you didn’t intend to take it?” he asked.
“If you see the wording of your advertisement there was nothing to suggest that my job would be in the nature of temporary relief,” she said.
“But once with a foot in the bank, Miss O’Connor, surely that would be to your advantage.”
Connie was unflustered. “If I were to go in for banking I would prefer to be part of the natural intake and be part of a system,” she said.
He remembered her and spoke of her that night to two friends in the golf club. “Remember Richard O’Connor, the dentist who lost his shirt. His daughter came in to see me, real little Grace Kelly, cool as anything. I wanted to give her a job, out of decency for poor old Richard, but she wouldn’t take it. Bright as a button though.”
One of the men owned a hotel. “Would she be good at a front desk?”
“Exactly what you’re looking for, maybe even too classy for you.”
So next day Connie was ca
lled for another interview.
“It’s very simple work, Miss O’Connor,” the man explained.
“Yes, but what could I learn then? I wouldn’t like to do something that didn’t stretch me, require me to grow with it.”
“This job is in a new top-grade hotel, it can be what you make of it.”
“Why do you think I would be suitable for it?”
“Three reasons, you look nice, you talk well, and I knew your dad.”
“I didn’t mention anything about my late father in this interview.”
“No, but I know who he was. Don’t be foolish, girl, take the job. Your father would like you to be looked after.”
“Well, if he would have, he certainly didn’t do much during his lifetime to see that this would be the case.”
“Don’t talk like that, he loved you all very much.”
“How do you know?”
“He was forever showing us pictures on the golf course of the three of you. Brightest children in the world, we were told.”
She felt a stinging behind her eyes. “I don’t want a job from pity, Mr. Hayes,” she said.
“I would want my daughter to feel the same way, but also I wouldn’t want her to make a big thing about pride. You know it’s a deadly sin but that’s not as important as knowing it’s a very poor companion on a winter’s evening.”
This was one of the wealthiest men in Dublin sharing his views with her. “Thank you, Mr. Hayes, and I do appreciate it. Should I think about it?”
“I’d love you to take it now. There are a dozen other young women waiting for it. Take it and make it into a great job.”
Connie rang her mother that night.
“I’m going to work for the Hayes Hotel starting on Monday. When the hotel opens I’ll be introduced as their first hotel receptionist, chosen from hundreds of applicants. That’s what the public relations people say. Imagine, I’m going to have my picture in the evening papers.” Connie was very excited.
Her mother was not impressed. “They just want to make you into some kind of little dumb blonde, you know, simpering for the photographers.”