by Maeve Binchy
‘Brian’s not going to have hotels booked. He says what they do down there is to drive on and when they see somewhere they like, they settle,’ Maura said doubtfully. It sounded very much what jet-set people did.
Even young Sean’s in-laws were impressed. Maura had felt very put down several times by Orla’s people, who managed to be lofty while pretending to be very friendly, but they were definitely impressed about the holiday.
‘We never thought of you as Riviera people,’ said Orla’s mother.
‘Well, well, well, you’ll be buying your own yacht next,’ said Orla’s father.
Maura wondered to herself once or twice during the summer, if they were mad to be going to such a place. She kept coming across articles in magazines describing the parties and the jewels, the film festivals and famous people. What were she and Brian thinking of hiring a car, driving on the wrong side of the road and spending a fortune in a fortnight. But she never said a word because the very mention of the place and the holiday brought more life to Brian’s face than she had seen for years.
‘Will you be getting your hair styled . . . you know, more like they wear it out there?’ he had asked once. She thought it was fine up in a curly swoop on top of her head, and good for the heat, too. But he had seemed to hesitate.
‘They seem to wear it loose down there,’ he had mumbled.
Loose? A middle-aged woman with a head of grey hair down her back. Still something in the way he said it made her hold her laughter back. She talked to Mrs Moore, the hairdresser, who still saw people in cubicles for nice confessional chats rather than in all that open plan noise and frenzy. Mrs Moore said they could try a bit of colour in it—highlights rather than full tint—and that she could wear it tied back with a ribbon if that was what Mr O’Neill liked. Mrs Moore implied that all men were missing their marbles but that it was easier for a quiet life to go along with what they wanted.
Maura had thought that the outfit she had bought for Sean and Orla’s wedding would be the mainstay of her holiday. She took it out of its plastic covers and admired it. Brian said that he didn’t think she understood about the Riviera, it was very casual, people wore jeans and T-shirts.
‘No it’s not, it’s smart, it’s very smart,’ cried Maura, her eyes stinging with the upset of it all.
‘It’s smart casual, that’s what it is. The people who go down there go to get away from it all, they wear bare feet, and simple clothes. That’s the beauty of it,’ said Brian.
‘Well, let them wear their bare feet and their raggedy jeans. Aren’t we only going to be looking at them?’ she said, a lot of the joy going out of the expensive silk coat and dress she thought she would be wearing in French society.
‘There’s no point at all in going out there and deliberately dressing ourselves up like sore thumbs is there?’ Brian had asked.
For a man who had never taken a blind bit of notice of what he or anyone else wore, this was a new departure. Maura watched with alarm the buying of jeans and four white T-shirts, she watched the packing of three pairs of espadrilles. Brian had no intention of taking his sandals. Irish sandals in the South of France? he had roared with laughter.
Maura had packed her own summer clothes, she had taken the sleeves out of two dresses, she had got lots of Nivea cream in case her skin dried up and conditioner for her hair in case the burning sun did unspeakable things to the new blonde bits in it. She felt she was prepared.
It was beautiful, of course, when they arrived. With all the goodbyes and the instructions about watering the garden and feeding the cat, and the envy of friends and the polishing up of the few French phrases, Maura had not had time to think what it would actually be like. Secretly she hoped in her heart that Brian would not be disappointed. She had felt very over-protective about him; like when Sean was a five-year-old and she had seen him off with his new satchel to school.
She hadn’t expected all the flowers and palm trees and the lovely blue sea and the big white buildings. She clasped her hands together and exclaimed with pleasure at it all. Brian was delighted; he patted her knee happily as he drove confidently on the wrong side of the road and coped with all the French drivers hooting horns aggressively.
‘Didn’t we do the right thing?’ he said.
‘Brian, imagine us here looking at all this!’ she cried happily.
‘Part of all this!’ Brian said equally sunnily.
It hadn’t been a bad summer at home; they had got a bit of a basis for their suntan. They weren’t going to be milk white as they might have been in another year. They had a glass of duty-free whiskey in their bedroom. Brian had booked only the first night in Nice and the hotel was a big one with a balcony looking out on the Mediterranean. Together they stood and drank to each other’s health as the sunlight dappled over the bodies which lay languidly on the wooden slatted beds covered with rubber mattresses on the beach.
‘This is the life. Now we’ll have another snifter and out to join the action,’ said Brian. He had his red open shirt over his jeans, his red espadrilles, and a medallion, which Maura had never seen before.
‘It’s my Child of Mary medal!’ she screamed with amazement.
‘Is that what it is?’ He looked shamefaced. ‘I found it at home, I didn’t know what it was, I thought it might look good.’
‘At least it might save us from being drowned or getting sunstroke,’ she said, and they laughed.
‘Aren’t you going to get changed?’ he asked.
‘Aren’t I grand in this dress? It’s nice and cool,’ she said.
You paid to go on the beach, or rather you paid for a slatted bed and a parasol. Maura had heard that the women didn’t wear bikini tops in this part of the world, but she thought it would be on special beaches . . . not here, not within a few feet of the main road. Oh well. And didn’t they look casual and carefree these young girls with their beautiful figures? Not an ounce of self-consciousness. They lay there almost unaware that they were naked or nearly naked. Nobody giggled, nobody whistled; their boyfriends or husbands or fathers seemed quite undisturbed by it also. Wasn’t it a great way of going on really, Maura thought to herself. No sense of shame and guilt, none of that covering yourself up and looking furtive like when she had been a youngster.
Brian looked about him happily.
‘Isn’t this the life?’ he said and he tucked up the edges of his briefs a bit to make them look shorter and more like the indecent-looking briefs that all the Frenchmen wore, briefs that only seemed to be a bit of string, to Maura’s averted eyes.
She didn’t feel out of it, she didn’t feel old. She didn’t feel plain and she didn’t feel provincial. She was happy to wander arm in arm with him that evening through the squares where the young and the pretty sat, where the older and more suave cruised slowly by in big, purring cars, where laughter tinkled through the hot evening and people discussed food with an intensity unknown at home.
They took out the map and planned the next day’s journey. They would go to Saint-Tropez . . . or would they go to Juan les Pains? Such a richness of choice and thirteen whole days to do what they liked. Thirteen days before Brian went back to work on the 8.50 bus every morning and Maura went back to the shopping and cleaning and getting the garden ready for winter.
That night he said that her blue panties were just like a bikini bottom and she could wear those next time on the beach. He himself was going to buy a proper ‘slip’, he thought was the French word. His own were ridiculous, like those old-fashioned ones you saw men wearing once with vests on them. She said firmly that she was not having her bosoms burned to a crisp. They were nice old bosoms; she said she was fond of them. She had to keep light-hearted because she was so shocked that he expected her to lie naked on a beach at her age.
He said she needn’t turn her bosoms up at the sun the whole time, she could lie on her front if she was afraid she was getting too burned.
‘Why do we have to do everything they do here? We only came to watch,’ she s
aid.
‘We didn’t come to watch, we came to be a part of it,’ Brian said, putting his arm around her. At home they slept in separate beds, but the French apparently hadn’t heard of such a thing. ‘If we wanted to watch it we could have gone to the pictures and seen a film about it, couldn’t we?’
He wore the jeans and the T-shirts, and her Child of Mary medal, and she wore the blue panties three times and lay uncomfortably with her face down and wondered what the nun who had placed the ribbon and medal around her neck nearly forty years ago would have thought to see it ending up like this. Brian bought the grotesque-looking slip, which cost a ridiculous amount of money for the cheapest one in the shop. He said it felt wonderfully free; he was surprised people at home hadn’t thought of them years ago. Maura was afraid to look at him when they went into the sea or when he sat up suddenly because she kept thinking he had fallen out of it.
She would have been quite happy to watch it all, as if it had been one great pageant put on for their benefit, which in a way it was. She liked looking at the old women, the brave old ones in turbans and high-arched eyebrows and long sari-type skirts, but still showing plenty of gnarled brown skin. She liked looking at the greying playboys and their antics with the young girls, and she loved the poutings and the headshakings of the girls themselves; it was better than watching a musical comedy.
At first she was embarrassed when Brian wanted to join in the parade from café to café, wanted to sit on the waterfront and throw the ball back if some little French dollies let their beach ball stray in his direction. Maura had thought he looked a little ridiculous, stomach still visible despite the noble efforts of the summer. It must be obvious to everyone that they were two middle-aged Dubliners who had no right to be taking part in the lovely silly games that people played on the Riviera.
But Brian didn’t think like that. No, he was never happier than when someone asked him for a light in French, or if a pretty French girl tried to sell him a bunch of roses for Madame, or if somebody asked him had he a boat. His big broad face was full of smiles. She couldn’t understand it, they had nobody to impress. Orla’s mother and father would never hear that someone mistook Brian for a person who owned a yacht, nobody that she knew would ever know that the hotelier could not believe they had a son about to be married. These were just little private perks, so why was Brian feeling so much in the swim of everything and acting out the fantasy as if his whole life depended on it?
That was it. He had actually stepped into the set. Maura suddenly understood. It was as if he had thought all this was real life and he felt you had to play according to the rules. It was very sad and silly, and in a million years she could never tell Brian that this is what he was doing. But in the end what did it matter? As long as it only lasted for the holidays, as long as they went back to normal afterwards, then why not? And if it made him happy, well she’d play along with him.
‘Will I get a pair of jeans like yours, just for the holiday, the rest of it?’ she asked one day. He was delighted. In the shop he had stood just like a Frenchman while she had tried on several pairs and then decided she looked best in pink denim Bermudas. She had let her hair fall loose, she caught sight of herself in a mirror and decided that if she were at home, a Garda car would pick her up and bring her to St Brendan’s Hospital. She looked wild and out of place. The shop assistant was pert and pleasant; she seemed to see nothing tragic and insane in Maura’s appearance.
Maura examined her hair.
‘Avez vous quelque chose . . . ?’ she asked timidly. Brian beamed at her. There she was speaking the language, playing the part.
The girl brought out a sun visor, the kind of thing people wear watching tennis matches. It was pink, like the shorts. She suggested pink shoes too, not the sensible sandals of three summers ago which had never had a proper airing until this holiday.
They walked out of the shop and along the promenade. Never in her life had Maura felt so foolish. They looked ridiculous, the two of them. They were ridiculous. What did they think they were doing here? This holiday had cost so much it meant that they would hardly be able to go to Kinsale again in their lives. They would never see the new curtains in the sitting room. And a kitchen like Orla’s mother’s kitchen would forever be a dream. People must be laughing at them, young people must look up from their tall glasses of cold white wine and cassis and smile indulgently at this old couple dressed like hippies wandering pathetically along the esplanades of a foreign land.
She raised her eyes nervously under the sunshade, but nobody seemed to be looking their way. Brian’s arm tightened on hers.
‘Isn’t it grand?’ he said.
She forced herself to smile. Why do all this unless some value was gained, unless one of them at least got something from it.
‘Grand,’ she said. ‘Would you ever have thought it?’
‘I wanted you to have this,’ he said, looking at her lovingly. ‘You’ve never had enough fun in your life, Maura, not enough style and splash. I was determined that before we got old, we’d show ourselves that we could be as much a part of anything as anyone else.’
And proudly he led her to a restaurant, where they were grilling fish out in the open air and lithe young girls in bikinis draped themselves over the railings at the entrance, but moved aside pleasantly as Maura and Brian O’Neill came up the steps.
The September Letters
JAMES WONDERED WHY PEOPLE THOUGHT IT WAS MORE GLAMOROUS to work in a bar in an airport than in an ordinary bar. They told him he must meet more interesting people, get a sense of the excitement of foreign travel maybe, huge tips from generous tourists.
But it wasn’t so at all.
He might have liked it more being in a place where there were regulars, a bar where people dropped in frequently and knew his name and he knew theirs. People who would say, ‘Another bloody day in the hell hole, James. I’ve been looking forward to this pint since four o’clock.’
And James would say, ‘Come on now, Harry, you love work, you’d have to have a surgical operation to separate you from your mobile telephone.’ And everyone would laugh.
They didn’t talk like that much at the airport. An airport was a place of High Anxiety, and great unease. James wondered why some people went on holiday at all. Husbands and wives fighting with each other about who had the tickets, the passports, whether the dog was happy in kennels or the gas had been turned off.
Children wanted to go and play computer games, husbands wanted to buy motorbike magazines, wives wanted to get waterproof mascara and no one seemed happy for anyone else to follow their wishes.
Oh James could write a book about Life just from two years of seeing people under the worst of conditions. He often said as much to Paula, the quiet Scottish girl who worked as his assistant. Paula agreed with him, but she always did. James felt that her mind was a million miles away. She was efficient and pleasant to the customers. She never got the change wrong, and she was able to hold contradictory orders in her head.
‘Two gin and tonics, one of them slimline, and a half of that lager over there, and a pint of best bitter. No, make that a half, and make one of the gins a large one. Come on, it’s a holiday, make them both large ones.’
Paula took it as part of the series of blows that each day dealt you in exchange for giving you a wage. Paula wanted to be a full-time student, she had been offered neither a place at a university nor a grant. But she knew that she would get both if she could just keep herself and keep studying.
James didn’t know what had happened to her after school. She was twenty-two now: why had she wasted the years when she might have been expected to go for a university place? But he had tried to ask and politely Paula had managed not to answer. So there the matter stood. It was her own business. He would never know.
Paula never seemed interested in weaving stories about the people whom they served. There was a businessman sweating and stammering and holding his briefcase tightly in front of him.
�
�Bet he’s got hot money in there,’ James said.
‘Could be,’ Paula agreed.
‘Or he’s off on his first naughty weekend, perhaps?’ James puzzled.
‘Left it a bit late,’ Paula remarked.
The sweating man was in his forties, but the young are very cruel, James thought to himself. James was almost in his forties and had not been on nearly enough naughty weekends. That could be part of his problem. But James never thought his own life was interesting enough to ponder on, he preferred to think about other people’s goings on. That’s why he would have liked to have been a Mine Host barman involved in the customers’ lives. That’s why his wife said he would never amount to anything. Too interested in passers-by and no attention to what was meant to be important. Like his own home life.
It was a quiet September day, not much business, so James noted the middle-aged American couple. Well, if he called them middle-aged, they must be getting old.
Quiet people in light raincoats, perfect for the mysteries of European weather. They had flat, sensible shoes and each read a book and sipped slowly at their white wines and sodas. They had a look of utter compatibility, as if they need only raise their eyes and smile and it would say a great deal.
And eventually they both raised their eyes because there seemed to be a disturbance at the next table. A much younger couple were having what looked like a serious argument. In fact, James realised with a sick feeling in his throat, it was much more than a serious argument: it was about to turn into violence. The woman, young, dark-haired and tear-stained, was shouting at the man and was totally out of control.
‘I’ve told you get away from me. Don’t come near me. Unless you leave at once I’ll make you leave.’
The man was aware of others listening even if the girl was not.