by Maeve Binchy
Nell said she should go to see some of the war graves when she was in Belgium, it might put her own troubles into perspective, but Maura thought it might depress her too much. She went to Waterloo instead. She didn’t know anyone whose grandfather had been killed there. It was easy to get there—she went on a local bus—and sat on the edge of the Lion’s Mound and tried to reconstruct it all with maps and guidebooks, but suddenly it seemed too sad, and such a ridiculous waste for all those boys to come from different lands and homes to be cut to bits here that she cried, and cried, until the careful makeup which was meant to make her thirty-nine-year-old face look better than Deirdre’s twenty-five-year-old one went into funny clown-like lines.
She didn’t even bother to wipe them away as she sat on the bus back to Brussels, and she heard a father tell his sons that Waterloo wasn’t the last battle in the world, that tomorrow they would go to see Ypres and Passchendaele and realize that battles went on forever. And very simply she realized that he was right, battles did. After she had won the American battle there would be another and another. Did anyone have that amount of energy? Certainly Nell didn’t. Otherwise why had she married nice, dull, safe Edward?
Maura went back to the hotel and washed her face. She sat and waited peacefully in their hotel bedroom. That would make it easier, nobody to witness the scene.
And when Dan came in the door, she poured him a drink from their bottle of duty free and asked him had he anything special that he wanted to say to her.
The Custardy Case
Bernard knew there was something special about his seventh birthday, because they seemed to be talking about it all the time at home. Mother and Father were very busy, always rushing in and out shouting to each other about it. There hadn’t been as much fuss since last Christmas with all the comings and goings and doors banging and not knowing where anyone was going to be.
His birthday appeared to be causing even more drama. Every time he came into a room people stopped talking. His grannie, or his auntie Helen, or Daddy’s friend from the office, the very fat lady Katy, also came to see them sometimes. And Mother must be working very hard because Grannie and Auntie Helen kept telling her she was wonderful to be able to give a children’s party in the middle of everything, and then at different times Katy would put her arm around him and say that he was a lucky boy because so many people loved him. Father didn’t say much because he was very busy and not home a lot. Sometimes he had to sleep at the office, he worked so hard.
Bernard had asked Katy did she have to sleep at the office too. For some reason everyone went very silent when he said this. They had looked at each other as if trying to guess the answer. Mother had come to the rescue.
“Not anymore, no need for that anymore,” Mother had said.
Father had got into a mood then, and had said that this was about as low as they had got, and that for everyone’s sake he had to hope that there was no lower to go.
The birthday party tea was going to be at McDonald’s, like everyone else at school did for their birthdays, so he didn’t know why they kept talking about the menu. At Gerald’s party his mother had taken down a list of what everyone wanted in advance and someone had driven ahead to order it. But that was all. In Bernard’s home they kept talking about the food. He couldn’t count the number of times he had heard them talking about the custardy case. It must be a new kind of pudding, and a huge secret. Because nobody mentioned the custardy case when he was there, it was only on the phone or when they didn’t realize he was in earshot. It must be a difficult pudding because Auntie Helen was saying that there was no knowing which way it would go, and Grannie was saying that these things were usually cut and dried, which sounded awful, but Mother was saying that there was nothing cut and dried about it at all.
Nobody spoke about the custardy case in front of Father or Katy. Maybe it was a surprise for them too.
Bernard liked Katy, even if she waddled a lot. She had a lovely smile and she was interested in his school report and the sports he played. She said she loved the high jump herself. Bernard thought that she was probably far too fat to jump even three inches above the ground but didn’t say anything of the sort. He nodded sagely as she told him about her school and how they had once put on a gymnastic display.
“Katy’s good at the high jump,” he told Mother and Auntie Helen.
“You can say that again,” Auntie Helen said grimly.
“Shush,” Mother said warningly.
He went out for walks with Father and Katy on Sundays; Mother never wanted to come, but Katy wasn’t a bit insulted.
“Your mother has to work very hard, even on Sundays,” she explained. Mother showed people houses for an estate agency. Sometimes couples wanted to see a place on weekends. It was the only time they had free. For as long as he could remember, Mother had to jump up suddenly when the phone rang.
“And don’t you have to work anymore?”
Bernard couldn’t quite understand: if Katy had been a friend of Father’s in the office, why did she not go there anymore? It was no use asking Mother about it after all that strange fuss when he had wondered about Katy sleeping in the office. He thought it better to ask her directly.
Katy didn’t seem a bit upset. They were walking together. Father had gone off to get ice cream.
“No, I’m having a baby, you see; it’s in here.” She held Bernard’s hand to her stomach. “So I can’t really go to work anymore. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“Why wouldn’t it be fair?”
“On the baby, and on everyone else.”
“When will it come out?” He looked at Katy fearfully.
“In about two weeks’ time.”
“After my birthday!” Bernard was pleased that none of this would interfere with the celebrations. He was going to ask Katy about this case of custard pudding that Mother, Grannie, and Auntie Helen were all so het up about. But he didn’t. If it was meant to be a surprise then he had better let it be a surprise for him.
Father came back with the three cones.
“Katy’s having a baby,” Bernard told him, thinking, Father would be pleased and interested at this news.
“I know,” Father said in a strange voice.
It sounded as if it was the most extraordinary thing in the world instead of something anyone could do. Harriet, the cat, had had four babies last month and the hamsters at school were always having them.
“Could we have a baby at home, do you think?” he asked Father. There was another of those silences. Bernard was beginning to find them very irritating. What could be wrong with people when you asked perfectly ordinary questions? Why did they suddenly get struck dumb?
At school the next day Bernard told Gerald that Katy was going to have a baby in two weeks. It was nearly ready, but not quite. “Will it be like a brother for you?” Gerald asked. Bernard was puzzled. How could it be like a brother when it was belonging to Katy from the office? He did what he did when he didn’t understand things. He gave Gerald a punch in the arm and Gerald gave him a wallop back and soon they were rolling about on the playground.
Miss Hayes separated them. “What was that about?” she asked. Bernard and Gerald looked at her blankly. They couldn’t remember. Miss Hayes believed them. Children often belted each other for no reason. She would have forgotten it if Bernard’s mother hadn’t called in at lunchtime and asked was everything all right with her son. Miss Hayes mentioned the unexpected fight and almost immediately regretted it when she saw the woman’s face.
Bernard was pleased to see his mother coming to collect him at home time.
“Can we bring Gerald for an ice cream?” he asked.
“I thought you and Gerald were fighting like tinkers?” Mother said. Bernard sighed; you couldn’t do much without it getting home.
“That was nothing,” he muttered.
“Why did he hit you?” Mother wouldn’t have dreamed that Bernard was the aggressor. But Bernard had a very strong sense of justice.
&n
bsp; “I sort of hit him first. He said I was having a brother—or something like that.”
Mother looked very upset. She was biting her lip. Bernard wanted to reassure her, let her know that he had sorted it out.
“It’s all right. I told him it was Katy that was having the baby, not you.” He expected her to be pleased at his grasp of events and his swift action in thumping anyone who got them wrong. To his horror, right there in full view of the school, Mother knelt and pulled him to her in a terrible bearlike hug.
“I love you so much, Bernard, don’t ever forget that. You’re the dearest, best boy in the whole world.” He knew she was crying.
Bernard wriggled, trying to escape, because all kinds of people were looking at them. He beat on Mother’s shoulders with his free fists, begging her to let him go.
When she loosened her arms from around him, he ran off as fast as he could.
He saw Mother standing looking after him but he didn’t care. He had to be away from all the people who would laugh at a boy of nearly seven being hugged by a mother kneeling on the road. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to him in his whole life.
When he got home Father was there, which was nice. Father was hardly ever home at this time of the day. Bernard was pleased when he saw the car outside the door and ran in shouting for him.
Grannie and Auntie Helen were sitting in the kitchen, but Father was upstairs.
There were three suitcases open on the bed. Father was packing, suits and clothes.
Bernard’s face lit up.
“Are we going on our holiday?” he cried out excitedly.
Father looked very annoyed to see him.
“Your mother said she was picking you up from school. She couldn’t even bloody do that. She couldn’t keep her word.”
Bernard hated when Father and Mother said bad things about each other. He was going to explain that Mother had been there, but he was too interested in the suitcases.
“Where are we going? Where, Father? Please tell me!”
Father sat down on the bed. He looked old and sad suddenly. “Bernard, you weren’t meant to be here, you were meant to be out for all of this.”
This whole business about surprises was getting very hard to handle. There was the cake at McDonald’s, there was this holiday…Bernard wished that people would let him in on things, let him look forward to it, tell people at school about what was happening.
He looked at the cases on the bed. These were the big ones; the ones they had taken to Spain and down to Kerry, and they only came out of the attic when it was time to go on a holiday.
“Will I go and pack too, Father?” he asked, hoping that this was the right thing to suggest. Father’s face looked a bit gray. Maybe he just needed to be left on his own for a bit. To Bernard’s utter horror, Father suddenly grabbed him in exactly the same awful hug that Mother had.
“Oh, Bernard, I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world,” he said into Bernard’s hair. And Bernard tried to fight the thought but he really believed that Father was crying too. He escaped just as he had done from Mother and got to his own room.
—
Bernard had got an early birthday present from Katy. It was a Super Walkman, and a little plastic rack for holding story tapes. Katy had said that it could be nailed up on a wall wherever he was and that he would always have his tapes near him and he could listen to them whenever he wanted to. Bernard had explained that Mother had said things shouldn’t be nailed on the wall but he’d put it beside the bed and it kept falling over. He wished Mother hadn’t said that about not nailing it to the wall, as Katy had said, what were old walls for anyway except to put things on?
He listened to his tapes, and wondered about the holiday and where it would be, and whether Katy would come too, and would the baby be ready while they were on holiday, and would Miss Hayes mind, and would they come back in time for the birthday?
He lay on his bed with his eyes closed and he thought he heard Grannie and Auntie Helen come in and go out, and he heard Mother’s voice, but it was arguing with Father’s, so he turned up the volume, and since it was only in his own ears, nobody else could get annoyed by it and come and tell him to turn it down. Sometimes, when he was changing the tapes, he heard Mother crying and Father shouting, and though he could hardly believe it, they were all still talking about the party and the pudding and who was going to order it or collect it or get it.
Mother was saying that a man never got custardy, never in the history of the whole thing. Father was saying it wasn’t a man; it was a ready-made family; it was people who would stay at home all day and mind children, not gallivanting off with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who waltzed into an estate agency for an outing.
Mother was saying that some of the judges were women nowadays; they weren’t medieval anymore, they knew a woman could work and mind a child.
Father said judges were judges whatever sex they were. They could see where the advantage lay. They weren’t fools. Bernard now saw that there was going to be some kind of competition, a cookery competition involved about the custard puddings. Everything pointed to it, there could be no other explanation.
He went into the room, where the suitcases were on the floor and where Mother and Father were both crosser than he had ever seen them in their lives.
“I don’t mind about the pudding,” Bernard said with the air of a man who had solved it all. “Let’s have no pudding, no custardy case at all.”
They stood looking at him, and it was like a freeze-frame on the video when you pressed the pause button.
He knew that none of them would ever forget this minute but he had no idea why.
It kept coming back to him in the days that followed, the days when everyone seemed to have stopped talking like they used to talk. There had been no holiday; of course that was a false alarm. And there had been no custardy pudding on his birthday at McDonald’s, but nobody thanked him for his solution to that one. And Katy’s baby got ready and came out and was a girl, and Father was very pleased, and said he’d better stay with Katy a lot more to look after things because he wasn’t able to stay in the old place anymore. He never called it home; he always called it the old place.
And there were all the conversations with other people who were called lawyers and Mother got more and more tired because she had to work so hard and Auntie Helen and Grannie got very cross and snapped the nose off everyone.
And Bernard still remembered the freeze-frame feeling on the day that he went to court and the judge said he wanted to see him in his chambers. Bernard knew that chambers didn’t mean what you thought it would mean, but he didn’t know it was going to be an ordinary room.
And the judge was nice. Bernard told him all about Mother having to work so hard and never being at home, and how hard it was to talk to Mother because of Grannie and Auntie Helen being there and being so cross. The judge seemed to know that kind of thing, and he was very interested when Bernard explained about not being able to nail things on the wall, and Mother kneeling down and crying outside the school. The judge asked about Katy, and Bernard said that it was amazing how thin she had got when the baby was ready and came out, and Katy often said that he, Bernard, was a lucky boy because so many people in the world loved him.
And no, Katy had never said a word against Mother. She had said that Mother was terrific but worked too hard, and was never there when you were looking for her, which Bernard, struggling to be fair, said was true.
And afterwards there was a lot of noise outside, and Grannie and Auntie Helen were saying terrible things to Katy and Father. Mother was very quiet and said nothing. Katy said that she had invited Bernard’s friend, Gerald, to come and stay for a few days, and she had put up lots of shelves and racks for them on the wall.
Bernard couldn’t understand why they seemed to think he wasn’t going home. He must be going to stay with Katy and Father and the new baby girl. He didn’t know when that had been arranged but it all seemed settled. He
didn’t know how long the visit would be for, but he thought it better not to ask.
Then Mother said she’d come to see Bernard on Saturday. About eleven o’clock, and they’d go somewhere nice. Mother’s eyes looked very strange, as if there was no light in them anymore.
She hardly waved when he got into the car with Father and Katy. She just kept looking in front of her as if she didn’t see anything at all.
RELATIVES AND OTHER STRANGERS
Be Prepared
It was to be their last Christmas as a family, all of them together. Next year, Sean would be married, Kitty would be in Australia, and it would only be the two of them, and Martin. So Nora decided that it would be something really special, something they would remember when Kitty was drinking beer from a can on Bondi Beach and Sean was dealing with his prissy in-laws. There was even an unworthy part of Nora that made her want this Christmas to be so good that they would remember it with longing for the rest of their lives and regret ever leaving the nest.
Everything she read in the papers said it was all about being prepared—buying the cooking foil in September, writing the Christmas cards in October, testing the lights for the tree, measuring the oven, cleaning out the freezer in November—all of it very admirable, and particularly for a couple as busy as Nora and Frank. She was very pleased with her progress; she had even booked the window cleaners and arranged for a neighbor’s child to bring her a ton of holly and ivy. And then she got the news that Girlie was coming for Christmas.
Girlie was Frank’s aunt. Eccentric was the kindest word you could find for her. Somewhere in her late sixties, maybe older; always vague about details like that, always diamond-sharp at remembering the things you wanted forgotten.