by Maeve Binchy
Somehow this was entirely suitable, a ridiculous get-together with sausages and noise and some extraordinary liquor and nobody being totally certain who everyone was. And Jo felt dizzy and confused as it got dark and they all came and thanked her and said it was wonderful, and Janie sat beaming on the stairs, safe again in a world where everyone loved each other like they used to. And as the extended family left the ark, replete with food and mead, they were all saying that it had been better than Christmas Day.
Yes, at some stage every single person there had said to Jo that honestly this Saturday had truly been better than Christmas and that they must have one again.
Travelling Hopefully
THEY WERE FULL OF ENVY AT THE OFFICE WHEN MEG TOLD THEM she was going to Australia for a month on December 11th. ‘The weather,’ they said, ‘the weather.’
She would miss the cold, wet weeks in London when the streets were so crowded the traffic was at a standstill, when people were fussed and it was all so commercialised.
‘Lucky Meg,’ they said, and even the younger ones, the girls in their twenties, seemed genuinely jealous of her. This made Meg smile to herself.
Even though she was fifty-three, which didn’t feel terribly old, she knew that most of the people she worked with thought she was well over the hill. They knew she had a grown-up son in Australia but because they knew he was married they weren’t interested in him. That, and because he didn’t come back home to visit his Mum. Married or single they would have been interested had they only seen her handsome Robert. Robert who had been captain of his school, who had got so many A-levels. Robert, aged twenty-five and married to a girl called Rosa, a Greek girl whom Meg had never met.
Robert wrote and said the wedding would be quiet, but it didn’t look very quiet, Meg thought, when she got the photographs. There seemed to be dozens and dozens of Greek relatives and friends. Only the groom’s family was missing. She tried hard to keep her voice light when she asked him about this on the telephone. He had been impatient as she had known he would be.
‘Don’t fuss, Mum,’ he had said, as he had said since he was five years old and appeared with blood-soaked bandages around his knee. ‘Rosa’s people were all here, you and Dad would have had to come thousands of miles. It’s not important. You’ll come some day when we all have more time to talk.’
And, of course, he had been right. A wedding where most of the cast spoke Greek, where she would have to meet Gerald, her ex-husband, and probably his pert, little wife, and make conversation with them . . . it would have been intolerable. Robert had been right.
And now she was off to see them, to meet Rosa, the small, dark girl in the photographs. She was going to spend a month in the sunshine, see places that she had only seen in magazine articles or on television. They would have a big party to welcome her once she had got over the jet lag. They must think she was very frail Meg thought; they were giving her four days to recover.
Robert had written excitedly, they would take Meg to the Outback, show her the real Australia. She would not be just a tourist seeing a few sights, she would get to know the place. Secretly she wished he had said that she could sit all day in the little garden and use the neighbour’s swimming pool. Meg had never known a holiday like that. For so many years there had been no holiday at all, as she saved and saved to get Robert the clothes, the bikes and the extras that she hoped would make up for the fact that he was missing a father.
Gerald had done nothing for the boy except to unsettle him about three times a year, with false promises and dreams and then gave him a battered guitar which had meant more to the boy than anything his mother had worked so hard to provide. It was while playing his guitar during a year in Australia that he had met Rosa and discovered a love and a lifestyle that were going to be forever, he told his mother.
In Meg’s office, they clubbed together and bought her a suitcase. It was a lovely, light case, far too classy for her, she thought. Not at all the case for someone who never made a foreign journey. She could hardly believe it was hers when she checked it in at the airport. The plane was crowded, they told her. This time of year all the rellies were heading down-under.
‘Rellies?’ Meg was confused.
‘People’s grannies, you know,’ said the young man at the desk.
Meg had wondered whether Rosa might be pregnant. But then they would never be heading for the Outback wherever it was. She must not ask. She steeled herself over and over not to ask questions that she knew would irritate.
They settled into their seats on the plane and a big, square man beside her put out his hand to introduce himself.
‘Since we’re going to be sleeping together, in a manner of speaking, I think we should know each other’s names,’ he said in a broad Irish accent. ‘I’m Tom O’Neill from Wicklow.’
‘I’m Meg Matthews from London.’ She shook his hand, and hoped he wouldn’t want to talk for the next twenty-four hours. She wanted to prepare her mind and practise not saying things that would make Robert say, ‘Don’t fuss, Mum’.
In fact, Tom O’Neill from Wicklow was an ideal neighbour. He had a small chess set and a book of chess problems. He perched his spectacles on his nose and went methodically through the moves. Meg’s magazine and novel remained unopened on her lap. She did a mental checklist. She would not ask Robert what he earned a year or whether he had any intention of returning to the academic studies he had abandoned after two years of university, when he went to find himself in Australia and instead found singing in cafés and Rosa. Meg told herself over and over that she would say nothing about how infrequently he telephoned. She wasn’t aware that her lips moved as she promised that she would allow no words of loneliness or criticism to escape.
‘It’s only a bit of air turbulence,’ said Tom O’Neill to her, reassuringly.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I thought you were saying the Rosary. I wanted to tell you there was no need. Save it till things get really bad.’
He had a nice smile.
‘No, I don’t say the Rosary actually. How does it work?’
‘Irregularly, I would say, like maybe one time out of fifty, but people are so pleased when it does they think it works all the time and they forget the times it doesn’t.’
‘And do you say it?’ she asked.
‘Not nowadays . . . I did when I was a young fellow. Once it worked spectacularly. I won at the horses, the dogs, and poker. All in one week.’ He looked very happy at the memory.
‘I don’t think you were meant to pray about those kinds of things. I didn’t think it worked for gambling.’
‘It didn’t in the long run,’ he said ruefully, and went back to his chess.
Meg noticed that Tom O’Neill drank no alcohol and ate little though he had glass after glass of water. Eventually she commented on it. The meals were one of the few pleasures of long-haul flying, and the drink would help sleep.
‘I have to be in good shape when we arrive,’ he said. ‘I’ve read that the secret is buckets and buckets of water.’
‘You’re very extreme, the way you take things,’ Meg said to him, half-admiring, half-critical.
‘I know,’ Tom O’Neill said, ‘that has been the curse and the blessing of my life.’
There were still fifteen hours to go. Meg didn’t encourage any stories of his life. Not so early in the trip.
When they had only four hours left she began to ask him about his life. It was a story of a daughter who had been wild. Once the girl’s mother had died, Tom hadn’t been able to control her. The girl had done what she liked, when she liked. Now she was living in Australia. Not just staying there mind, but living there. With a man. Not a husband, but what they called a de facto. Very liberal, very modern, his daughter living with a man openly and telling the Australian Government this too, proud as punch. He shook his head, angry and upset by it all.
‘I suppose you will have to accept it. I mean, coming all this way, it would be a bit pointless if you were to attack her ab
out it,’ Meg said. It was so easy to be wise about other people’s business.
She told him in turn about Robert, and how she hadn’t been invited to the wedding. Tom O’Neill said, wasn’t it a blessing? She’d have had to make conversation with her ex and a lot of people who hadn’t a word of any language between them. Much better to go now. What was a wedding day? It was only a day—not that he seemed likely to be having the opportunity of seeing one in his circumstances.
His daughter was called Deirdre, a good Irish name, but now she signed herself Dee, and her man-friend was called Fox. What kind of name was that for a human being?
The blinds were raised. They had orange juice, and hot towels to wake them up. Meg and Tom felt like old friends by this stage. They were almost loath to part. As they waited for their luggage they gave each other advice.
‘Try not to mention their wedding day,’ Tom warned.
‘Don’t say anything about the living-in-sin bit. They don’t think that way here,’ she begged.
‘I wrote out my address,’ he said.
‘Thank you, thank you.’ Meg felt guilty that she hadn’t thought to write her son’s address. Perhaps it was because she did not want Robert to think she was pathetic, picking up a strange Irishman on the plane and giving him her phone number.
‘I’ll leave it to you then . . . to get in touch or whatever,’ he said, and she could sense the disappointment in his voice.
‘Yes, yes, what a good idea,’ Meg said.
‘It’s just that a month is a long time,’ he said.
Earlier they had both told each other that it was a very short time. Now they were on Australian soil and both of them slightly nervous of meeting their children . . . it seemed too long.
‘It’s in Randwick,’ Meg began.
‘No, no, you ring me if you’d like a cup of coffee some day. Maybe we could have a bit of a walk and a chat.’
He looked frightened. The endless glasses of water left him in no state to deal with a man called Fox on equal terms. He didn’t look like a man who was going to remember that his daughter called herself Dee and that she thought she was . . . was married, a de facto being more or less the same. Meg felt protective of him.
‘Certainly I’ll call you. In fact, I think we will both possibly need to escape a little from the culture shock,’ she said.
She knew she looked anxious. She could feel the frown developing on her forehead, the squeezing of her eyebrows together which made people at work say that Meg was getting into a tizz, and made her son beg her to stop fussing. She wished she could go on talking to this easy man. Why couldn’t they sit down on chairs and talk for an hour or so, get themselves ready for a very different kind of Christmas than they had ever had before, and for a different lifestyle?
She realised suddenly that this was what they were both doing. They were coming to give their blessing to new lifestyles. Tom was here to tell Dee that he was glad she had found Fox, and he didn’t mind about them not being married properly. She was here to tell Robert that she couldn’t wait to meet her new daughter-in-law and all her family, and not to hint that she ever gave her absence from their actual wedding day a thought. It would be good to meet Tom again and to know how it was all going. If they had been old friends then obviously they would have done, it was just with being single and middle-aged and having just met on the plane it would call for many more explanations. Possibly Robert would pity her. Or else, perhaps Rosa would think it was wonderful that Mother actually had found herself a bloke on a plane trip. In either case it would have been embarrassing.
‘I thought I might tell Deirdre, Dee, her name is Dee. Lord God I must remember her name is Dee,’ Tom began.
‘Yes?’
‘I thought I might tell her that you and I were friends from way back. You know?’
‘I know,’ she said, with a very warm smile.
They could have said more, a great deal more. In fact, they needed to find out about each other if they were meant to be friends. But it was too late. They were wheeling their trolleys through the passage to where a crowd of suntanned, healthy-looking, young Australians waited for their crumpled rellies to stagger from the long journey. And people were calling and crying out and raising children up in the air to wave. And it seemed to be the middle of summer.
And there was Robert in shorts with long, suntanned legs and his arm around the neck of a tiny, little girl with huge eyes and black, curly hair, biting her lip anxiously as they raked the crowd to find Meg. And when they saw her, Robert shouted, ‘There she is!’ as if nobody else had travelled all those hours on the plane, and they were hugging her and Rosa was crying.
‘You are so young, too young to be a grandmother,’ she said, and patted her little tummy with such pride that Meg started to cry too. And Robert held her and didn’t ask her not to fuss. Over her son’s shoulder, Meg could see Tom O’Neill’s beautiful daughter, the girl who had been wild all her life but didn’t look wild anymore. Dee was shyly introducing a round-faced red-headed, bespectacled boy who was loosening the unaccustomed collar and tie he had put on specially to meet the father-in-law from Ireland. Tom was indicating the boy’s hair, making some joke, maybe, about how he knew now why he was called Fox. Whatever he said, they were all laughing.
And now Robert and Rosa were laughing too as they wiped their tears and led her towards the car. Meg looked back in case she could catch the eye of her friend Tom O’Neill, the old friend she had met by chance on the plane. But he, too, was being bundled off. It didn’t matter. They would meet here in Australia, maybe two or three times so that they would not always be in the young people’s way. But not too often, because a month was a very short time for a visit. And Christmas was for families. And anyway they could always meet back on the other side of the world in a time and a place where there wouldn’t be so much to do.
A Typical Irish Christmas
EVERY ONE IN THE OFFICE WANTED TO ASK BEN FOR CHRISTMAS. He was exhausted trying to tell them that, honestly, he was fine. He didn’t look fine, he didn’t sound fine. He was a big, sad man who had lost the love of his life last springtime. How could he be fine? Everything reminded him of Helen. People running to meet others in restaurants, people carrying flowers, people spending a night at home, a night away.
Christmas would be terrible for Ben so they all found an excuse to invite him. For Thanksgiving he had gone to Harry and Jeannie and their children. They would never know how long the hours had seemed, how dry the turkey, how flavourless the pumpkin pie, compared to the way it had been with Helen.
He had smiled and thanked them and tried to take part but his heart had been like lead. He had promised Helen he would try to be sociable after she was gone, that he would not become a recluse working all the hours of the day and many of the night. He had not kept his promise. But Helen had not known it would be so hard. She would not have known the knives of loss he felt all over him as he sat at a Thanksgiving table with Harry and Jeannie and remembered that last year, his Helen had been alive and well with no shadow of the illness that had taken her away.
Ben really and truly could not go to anyone for Christmas. That had always been their special time, the time they trimmed the tree for hours and hours, laughing and hugging each other all the while. Helen would tell him stories about the great trees in the forests of her native Sweden; he told her stories about trees they had bought in stores in Brooklyn, late on Christmas Eve when all the likely customers had gone and the trees were half price.
They had no children but people said this is what made them love each other all the more. There was nobody to share their love but nobody to distract them either. Helen worked as hard as he did but she seemed to have time to make cakes and puddings and to soak the smoked fish in a special marinade.
‘I want to make sure you never leave me for another woman . . .’ she had said. ‘Who else could give you so many different dishes at Christmas?’ He would never have left her and he could not believe that she had l
eft him that bright spring day.
Christmas with anyone else in New York would be unbearable. But they were all so kind, he couldn’t tell them how much he would hate their hospitality. He would have to pretend that he was going elsewhere. But where?
Each morning, on his way to work, he passed a travel agency which had pictures of Ireland in the window. He didn’t know why he picked on Ireland as a place to go. Probably because it was somewhere he had never been with Helen. She had always said she wanted the sun: the poor, cold Nordic people were starved of sunshine, she needed to go to Mexico or the islands in winter. And that’s where they had gone. Helen’s pale skin had turned golden and they had walked together, so wrapped up in each other that they never noticed those who travelled on their own. They must have smiled at them, Ben thought. Helen was always so generous and warm to people, she would surely have talked to those without company. But he didn’t remember it.
‘I’m going to Ireland over Christmas,’ Ben told people firmly. ‘A little work and a lot of rest.’ He spoke authoritatively as if he knew exactly what he was going to do. He could see in their faces that his colleagues and friends were pleased that something had been planned. He marvelled at the easy way they accepted this simplistic explanation. Some months back, if a colleague had said he was doing business and having a rest in Ireland, Ben would have nodded too, pleased that it had all worked out so well. People basically didn’t think deeply about other people.
He went into the travel agency to book a holiday. The girl at the counter was small and dark, she had freckles on her nose, the kind of freckles that Helen used to get in summer. It was odd to see them in New York on a cold, cold day. She had her name pinned to her jacket—Fionnula.
‘That sure is an unusual name,’ Ben said. He had handed her his business card with a request that she send him brochures and details of Irish Christmas holidays.