Maeve Binchy's Treasury

by Maeve Binchy

  ‘I suppose I’ll have the shakes if I drink anymore,’ Nick said.

  ‘Me too.’ Janet looked glum suddenly.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘I wish sometimes I could get out of that schoolgirl habit of saying me too, and me first. It’s the only downside of working with children; you start talking like them.’

  ‘Do you have children?’ His question was sudden and direct.

  ‘About two hundred and eleven at last count,’ she said, and then, as if trying to make up for being flippant, added, ‘but I say goodbye to them each day at four o’clock.’

  ‘I see.’ He seemed pleased.

  ‘And you?’ She hoped her voice sounded light.

  ‘About ninety at last count, but that’s only in the bank,’ he said. And she knew that he left them behind when he left the bank too.

  ‘I see.’ She was very pleased. She might have to fight a woman for him, but not adorable little toddlers who needed their Daddy.

  The sun was up now. They had been there for a long time.

  ‘Would you like to meet again?’ he asked simply.

  ‘Yes please,’ she said. It was a jokey thing to say. It hid her eagerness, her great relief. Would he ask her phone number? Would he give her his? When would he suggest? Janet felt the breath almost choke her.

  ‘So what do you suggest?’ he asked. He was leaving the decision to her.

  ‘I think saying same place, same time, next year is a bit on the long finger.’ She looked at him with her head on one side waiting. Janet hated women who behaved like this but she felt she had to. It was the only alternative to letting him see the eager longing in her face to see him again, to get to know him better.

  ‘Oh, I hope to know you very well by this time next year,’ he said softly. ‘Very well indeed.’

  Janet felt herself shiver. It was the kind of shiver that her mother said meant someone was walking over your grave.

  ‘Well then,’ he said. ‘Well then.’ He suggested a restaurant, he suggested lunch three days later.

  ‘Will they be open?’ Janet asked. She didn’t want to risk their missing each other.

  ‘Oh yes, they’ll be open.’

  They looked at each other as if there was still something more to be said. He picked up a brochure advertising all the different kinds of fish that were on sale and tore a piece off. It had a picture of a barramundi. He quickly wrote some figures.

  ‘In case you change your mind,’ he said.

  She tore another barramundi off and wrote her number. ‘In case you change yours,’ she said.

  ‘No, it’s the highlight,’ he said, with a mock bow of his head.

  ‘I look forward to it,’ Janet said and, skipping the puddles of water made from the hosing of the fish stands, she made her way to her car. She turned round to look back once, and he was still standing there. She wondered why they hadn’t wished each other Happy Christmas. Everyone else was saying that to people they had only just met. Perhaps it was because they each believed the other had something to do at Christmas, something to unpick or sort out.

  Janet shared a house with three other teachers. They each had a large, sunny room which acted as their own bedsitting room. They had a huge, shared kitchen, two bathrooms and a small garden with four sun-beds placed around it. Everyone said they were mad to rent this expensive property. They each could have found a deposit and a mortgage for a house of their own, but at this point none of them wanted that. And they got on very well together for women in their twenties and thirties. They didn’t live each other’s lives. They paid a woman to come in once a week to clean, nobody kept their television up too high, and if lovers were invited into people’s rooms it was not discussed, nor was anything untoward ever audible. They always laughed about their living arrangement, calling it Menopause Manor. But they could do that because it was far from the truth.

  This year, none of them had gone away for Christmas. They would eat together in their garden. There were various reasons. Janet had a new stepmother; she wanted to give the woman a breathing space before descending on her for holiday festivities. Maggie had a married lover who was not available for Christmas Day. Kate was writing her thesis and had decided to give it three solid weeks of six hours a day in Menopause Manor. Sheila was from Ireland; sometimes she flew all the way back there but this year she had not saved the money and couldn’t find the enthusiasm for rain and sleet, so she too was staying in Sydney. It would be a happy, undemanding day for the four of them. They would be unsentimental, probably a little tipsy. They would not mention Maggie’s man, and the futility of it all; they would not make Sheila sad about the Emerald Isle by singing ‘Danny Boy’; they would be supportive about Kate’s MA thesis; and they wouldn’t know that Janet had just met the most marvellous man in the whole world, so they could have no attitudes about it.

  On Christmas Eve, Janet sat out in the garden; the night was warm and smelled of flowers. She could hear the sea in the distance. She wondered where he was at this moment, the man called Nick with the crinkly smile, who said he was in banking. He had not said he worked in a bank, that was a subtle difference. It was ten o’clock. The telephone rang. Although she felt sure it must be from Ireland for Sheila, Janet went to answer the call.

  ‘Janet?’

  ‘Nick?’ she said immediately.

  ‘Just thought I’d wish you Happy Christmas. We forgot to do that today.’

  ‘So we did. Happy Christmas,’ and although she hated waiting she managed not to say anymore.

  ‘Have you still got the barramundi?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, indeed.’ Another pause.

  ‘Have a happy day,’ he said.

  ‘You too.’

  They hung up. Janet went back to the garden and hugged her knees as she looked up at the starlit sky. She knew exactly why she had been so unforthcoming. She wanted to be allowed to dream over this Christmas. She wanted to think of Nick and his smile, and the fact that he had been thinking of her at ten o’clock on Christmas Eve night. She did not want to hear about his wife and children if they existed, or his long-time, live-in lover who understood him, or his messy divorce. She wanted to think of him as a man who was looking forward to seeing her in three days’ time. A man who could talk about anything and who understood everything. A man who said that this time next year they would surely know each other very well.

  She sat and hugged her secret to herself. She had not been in love for six years. Not since she was twenty-two. Since then there had been people, but nothing that counted as real love. She had forgotten how utterly wonderful it felt, how silly and feathery and quite unconnected with the real world. She heard bells ring and she knew there must be church services. She heard merrymakers calling good night down the street. It was Christmas Day.

  There was no breeze yet she shivered. That was the second time today. For no reason, Janet remembered her mother helping to zip her into her first formal dress on her eighteenth birthday.

  ‘I’m so happy,’ Janet had said, looking delightedly at her reflection in the mirror.

  ‘You’ll never be as happy as you are now this minute,’ her mother had said. Janet had been furious. Her mother had taken all the gold and glitter away from the moment. And she had never forgotten it, even though her mother had been wrong.

  Janet had been happier than on her eighteenth birthday. When she was twenty-one, she had fallen in love with Mark and been happy for fourteen months, every day and every night. Why did she have to remember her mother’s words now, the words of a woman who was never truly happy, who always saw the bleak side? Too much laughter meant tears before bedtime, too much good weather meant headaches later on, people being nice and warm and welcoming meant that sooner or later they would prove to have feet of clay.

  Janet’s mother had been dead for four years. Her father had married again; a different kind of woman, small and round and giggling. Janet couldn’t understand what they saw in each other, but that was not r
emotely important. Maybe they found what she and Nick had found, however unlikely it seemed. After all, her father had met Lilian at a television studio where they were both members of a studio audience, and now they were married. Janet had met Nick at the fish market this morning and he had told her that this time next year they would know each other very well indeed. He had just telephoned to wish her Happy Christmas. The good times were only starting.

  On Christmas Day the others said that Janet must have had some attitude-changing substance. She had a funny, happy smile all day. Janet made the salads, set the table in the garden, baked the potatoes, and chilled the wine. Not the most domesticated of the four in the household, she insisted on doing it all this time. She cooked the ocean perch lovingly. This was a fish that Nick had touched with his own hand. This was a fish they had laughed over, a fish that had brought them together.

  The day seemed curiously long, happy but long. Janet thought that it must be seven o’clock when it was still only five o’clock. Somehow the days passed. And then it was the morning. The morning of the lunch. Janet realised that she had shadows under her eyes because she had slept so poorly. She was placing far too much hope on this, too much importance, reading more into it than there was. Very probably, but it still didn’t make her sleep. There was no hairdresser open so she shampooed her hair and spent hours trying to get it into the kind of shape she wanted. She had planned to wear her peach-coloured shirt and a grey denim skirt, but she thought it made her look as if she had stepped from the chorus of Oklahoma. It was too hot for a jacket, too smart a place for a beach dress. Janet had been wearing jeans when she met him at the fish market. She wanted him to know she had other clothes.

  By the time she had settled on a tartan skirt and plain white T-shirt it was time to call the taxi. The taxi was late. Janet was red-faced and anxious when she arrived at the restaurant.

  ‘I ordered us oysters,’ he said, his eyes anxious to know if he had done the right thing.

  Normally Janet hated the pushy-male thing of ordering for the little woman. But he was trying to be generous, to make a gesture. She smiled such a smile her face nearly broke in half.

  ‘What could be better?’ she asked.

  The lunch was like their coffee break at the fish market, only better. They talked about the world of banking and how hard it was for Nick to meet real people anymore. Instead he met corporate people and committees and read reports and acted on them. And Janet told him eagerly about school and how there was no time to get to know the children and find out what they really wanted to do, and what they were like and what they hoped for. Instead you had to follow a curriculum, and get them to pass exams and achieve a good result for the school.

  They couldn’t finish the prawns, the sauce was too rich. As they pushed them around their plate he said unexpectedly, ‘Will you spend the afternoon with me?’

  ‘Yes, of course, where?’ she asked.

  ‘I have a place.’

  Her smile was broad again. He couldn’t be married or tied up or have a whole complicated lifestyle that he was cheating on. Not if he said he had a place.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Janet said, face full of hope and eagerness.

  ‘Well yes, I booked, just in case, just in case you’d say yes,’ he said.

  It was a motel. A place you book. He had been so sure of her he had thought it worthwhile to make a reservation. Her heart felt heavy, and her face must have shown it.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Nick said.

  ‘No, not at all.’ Her smile was brave and his came back. He was so simple really, and straightforward. He had liked her, liked her enough to invite her to lunch, to call her on Christmas Eve, to order oysters, to book a place for the afternoon, to be with her. Perhaps she was the selfish one, she was the one demanding commitment, assurances that he was available, and a catch, and maybe even a meal ticket. She was a liberated woman. Janet knew you could meet and enjoy each other as equals if you wanted to. The days of demanding that a man be a protector or a provider were long gone.

  ‘So shall we stop pretending to eat these prawns?’ he asked with a laugh.

  ‘I’ve given up the struggle,’ she agreed.

  They drove to the motel. A place Janet had often passed and wondered idly how it made a living. Now she knew; they rented by the hour. It was clean and functional. He had a bottle of wine in a cool-bag that he had brought with him—another sign that he had known she would agree to the motel—and he poured her a glass. It was a good wine from a vineyard they had talked about, but today it tasted like vinegar.

  He was a gentle and courteous lover, and he lay afterwards with his arm around her shoulder, protectively, as if they had often lain like this before and would for many more years. Her heart lifted for a while. Perhaps this is the way people were nowadays. Behaviour had changed. You didn’t have to play games, pretend to be hard to get, exchange sexual favours for continued attention, trade sex for commitment.

  ‘I got you a little gift, a silly thing,’ he said, and he reached out for a wrapped parcel that he had on the bedside table. She couldn’t have loved him more. She was glad that she hadn’t played at being outraged when he suggested an afternoon in a motel.

  ‘What is it?’

  No present she had got this Christmas could compare. It was a little tin fish, the kind of thing you might hang on a Christmas tree, or if it had a magnet, it could be stuck to the refrigerator door.

  ‘It’s a barramundi,’ he said, pleased with what he saw as her pleasure. ‘To remind you of when we met pointing at that fish and fighting over it, and then becoming friends.’ His arm was around her again, squeezing tightly. ‘Great, great friends,’ he said, appreciatively.

  She turned over the little fish in her hand. ‘It’s great,’ she said. She knew her voice was flat, her pleasure was not real.

  ‘Well, it’s a jokey gift,’ he said, embarrassed.

  ‘No, it’s great.’ She wanted to be a million miles from here. Why had she not taken her car? She tried to remember. It had something to do with being available for him. Well, she had been that all right. In spades. Now she would have to ask him to drive her to somewhere near her home or to a taxi rank. It would be squalid. But she would not let it be that way. If only she could guard herself, not say anything foolish.

  ‘Where does your wife think you are?’ Janet heard herself ask.

  He looked as if she had hit him, but he rallied. ‘She didn’t ask. I didn’t say.’

  ‘And your children?’

  Why was she asking these things, ruining what was good between them.

  ‘They’re in the pool. They don’t know where I am. I work such long hours they don’t expect me to be around.’

  He had answered her truthfully. He had asked her nothing in return.

  They left the bed where they had been so happy, so close and she noticed he took a very long time having a shower. As if he had been to a sports club or a gym. He passed her a clean towel when she went into the shower, and she held it for a long time to her face to force away the tears that she thought might come.

  In the car, he was still boyish and happy. But he was so intelligent, surely he must know that whatever they had was over? He asked where she lived and she suggested that he leave her in Balmain.

  ‘No, no, door-to-door service,’ he laughed, then looking at her face realised it might be crass. He patted her on the knee. ‘I didn’t mean to be flip. It was lovely,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ she tried, but she couldn’t put any life into her words.

  He drove her to the gate. Out in the back garden, Maggie might have been half-sleeping in the sun, dreaming of her married man who could not leave his family at this festive time. Kate would be in her room studying. Sheila might have gone to play tennis and beat back the guilt about not having gone home to Ireland for Christmas Day. None of them would know that Janet’s heart had cracked in two.

  Nick was looking at her. ‘Will we meet again?’ he asked, his face was
enthusiastic. He liked talking to her, laughing with her, holding her, making love with her. He couldn’t see any reason why it could not go on, as sunnily and easily as it had begun.

  Struggling to be fair, Janet couldn’t see any reason either except that she knew it was over.

  ‘No, but thank you, thank you all the same,’ she said.

  He looked at her sadly. ‘Was it the fish? Was it the little Christmas barramundi?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Janet asked.

  His face was troubled. ‘I thought you’d like it. I thought it was silly and sentimental and not commercial. I could have got you a pin, a brooch or something for five hundred dollars, but I thought it looked wrong somehow.’

  ‘The fish is great,’ Janet said.

  ‘And we did meet over a barramundi,’ he said.

  ‘Or something,’ Janet said.

  There was a silence. Nick looked at the house. ‘It’s a nice place to live,’ he said, as if trying to bequeath her a good life.

  ‘Oh yes, it is.’ She realised he didn’t know. He had never asked if she lived with a man, a husband, or children. He just assumed she was a free spirit who could live life in compartments as he could.

  ‘Has it a garden at the back?’ They talked like strangers now, like people at a cocktail party.

  ‘Yes, a small garden. Do you know Nick, I was happier there on Christmas Eve than I ever was in my life, and than I ever will be again.’ She knew her voice was very intense and that he was looking at her uneasily. But somehow it was a great relief to have something defined. They said that women became more like their mothers as they grew older.