by Maeve Binchy
And Gianni wanted to know where I was from, so I took him home to Dunglass. And Mother laughed at him because he told her how poor his parents had been when they got the boat from Italy.
And I didn’t want to sleep with him Gina, I was twenty-three like you are now, but in those days we were so different. Not just me . . . everyone, I promise you. But I hated Mother so much for scorning him. And I despised her for saying that she hadn’t gone through so much just for me to throw myself away on the son of a chamber maid and a hall porter. Gianni had told with pride how his parents, your grandparents, had got these jobs. And Mother said it in front of Peggy. Just letting Peggy know how little she thought of Peggy’s role in life.
I was glad Gina, I was glad when I was pregnant even though I was frightened at the thought of living with Gianni forever. I felt it wouldn’t last, that we didn’t know each other, and that when we did we might be sorry. But we were never sorry we had you. And you will admit, that difficult as I have been, and stubborn, I have never said anything bad about your father. He thought he could live in Dunglass and marry in like my father had. But my Mother hunted him, and she hunted me too because I wouldn’t stay one minute to listen to her harsh words.
I left my room as it was, my books and letters and papers. I don’t know what happened to them. Ever. I closed that door and never opened it.
When Gianni left me I didn’t feel as sad as people thought. I knew it would happen. I had my home in America, my daughter, my job in the bookshop, my friends. I may marry again.
I won’t of course, but I say to myself cheerfully, like Peggy used to say, it may be a sunny day after all, little Freda. My heart is heavy when I think of Peggy. I didn’t write to her because I didn’t write to the big house, it would have been twisting a knife too harshly into Mother.
Her name was Peggy O’Brien, Gina, they lived in a cottage by the lake. I tried to write after Mother died. But there weren’t any words. You were always good with words Gina.
Love
Freda
The time gap is too long. I called you. Joseph’s mother told me you were still away. You didn’t say you were taking Joseph with you. It’s nearly a quarter of a century since I took Gianni there. Are we going to repeat history all over again? Dunglass hasn’t changed very much. I had forgotten it was so small.
I wait to hear anything you may write.
Freda
Dearest Freda,
Your letter was cold, there were no dears or darlings or loves anywhere. Are you afraid that like my mother and my grandmother, I will marry hastily the wrong man who will leave me, as happened to you and to Annabel? I went to her grave and I laid a big bunch of spring flowers on it. The countryside is glorious. There were little ducklings on the lake, and moorhens and two big swans. You never told me any of that. You never told me that you had a pony and that you fell off and broke your arm. You never told me about Peggy’s big soft bosom where I cried like you cried. She bought a lot of your things at the auction. She said she didn’t want strangers picking up your books and your treasures. She called them treasures, Freda, and she has them in a room. Waiting for you to come home and collect them. She was left nothing in the will. It all went to charity. She bought them from her wages because she knew one day you’d come back.
I told her it would probably be in June. When the sun shines long hours over the lake and the roses are all out on her cottage. Not far from the one that Joseph and I are looking at with our hearts full of hope.
Send me an open postcard to Joseph’s house so that his mother will know how much you and I love each other. See, I am like you after all. I want them to think well of us. In many ways I’m glad you kept it from me, it came as such a rainbow of happiness. But don’t keep it from yourself anymore. There are no ghosts in Dunglass. Only hedges and flowers and your great friends Peggy, Joseph and
Gina
Victor and St Valentine
VICTOR WAS BROUGHT UP IN A HOME WHERE THEY MADE A HUGE fuss of St Valentine’s Day.
His sisters spent weeks wondering whether anyone would send them a card. His mother cooked a special meal for her husband that evening and served it by candlelight. His father bought something romantic like a heart-shaped charm for her bracelet, a little pendant, a glass vase for a single rose. No wonder he thought it was a special day.
In the real world he discovered things were different.
At school, for example, fellows didn’t send girls cards unless they were jokey ones, often with hurtful remarks on them.
Nobody made any mention of St Valentine Day’s ceremonies in their homes so Victor stayed quiet about his own household. No point in inviting mockery. It was quite enough that he was already the subject of a lot of ridicule because of gentleness, good manners and a lack of interest in beating up his classmates in the playground.
Then later when he went to train as an electrician they did make a bit of a fuss and celebration at Technical College for a St Valentine’s Day dance, but mainly the chat was about which girls would be likely and which would not. Victor never wanted to talk about people being likely, he thought it was too personal a thing to be speculated over in the bars. So the others more or less gave up on him in that area.
His first boss was not a man with much time for St Valentine. A load of commercial claptrap, he said.
Around that time Victor sent a Valentine card to a nice girl called Harriet who had gone to the pictures with him several times. Harriet telephoned him at once.
‘Listen, Victor, I’m sorry, there has been some awful misunderstanding. I wasn’t being serious or committed or wanting to marry you or anything.’ Victor was alarmed.
‘No, heavens, no, neither was I,’ he said, panicking at the very thought.
‘Then why did you send me this card with all the roses and violets and sign your name?’ she asked.
‘Because it’s St Valentine’s Day,’ he said.
‘But you signed your own name, naturally I thought you wanted commitment.’ Harriet was outraged at the misunderstanding.
‘I’m very sorry,’ Victor said humbly. ‘I’ll never do it again.’
But of course he did do it again, when he met Muriel and did fancy her greatly.
Muriel said that he should have had the courage to come straight out and say it if he loved her rather than relying on a card and somebody else’s verses and sentiments. She couldn’t see a future for them. She was sorry.
Victor decided he was not good with women.
He wasn’t without dates, a social life and indeed the odd little romance but none of them led to anything.
He was, however, a very good electrician; he had a pleasant manner and a lot of skill and soon he didn’t have to have a boss at all, he had his own business. A mobile phone, a business card and a lot of word-of-mouth recommendation, and Victor had more customers than he could deal with.
Sometimes they asked him about his private life.
‘Never met the right woman, me,’ he would say. ‘And here am I a hopeless romantic but the girls don’t take me up on it at all.’
He was thirty-eight, tousled hair, a warm smile.
People didn’t really believe him. They thought that he might have a very colourful private life but just wasn’t telling.
People liked Victor and told him things. And he liked listening to them because in his own way he was a little lonely. He would have liked a companion to go out with at weekends; someone to go on a vacation with. Victor had saved money for a holiday but it wasn’t quite the same going alone.
So he enjoyed talking to clients. Like the couple who were going to adopt a baby, and were so excited when it arrived that they invited Victor to the welcome party.
‘Are you a relation?’ somebody asked him.
‘No, but I rewired the nursery,’ he said, and again nobody believed him.
And there was the man who dared not tell his wife that he had been made redundant. Victor had many a cup of tea with him on a day when Victor was
merely meant to be putting in new sockets.
But mainly there was old Mrs Todd. She was very fond of Victor. She told him all about her family, her son Peter who was so protective of her that he had set up this door entry system where she could see on a little screen who was there before letting them in.
Mrs Todd hadn’t wanted it at all but her son Peter had insisted, the world was full of bad dangerous people he said. Peter didn’t come much to visit his elderly mother, which Victor thought was a pity, but he laid down the law a lot from a distance. Mrs Todd said that Peter had given instructions she was not to invite any new people that she met to coffee. This was hard but she was sure Peter must be right.
Victor thought Peter sounded like a bully but was too tactful to say so; Peter’s daughter Amy had gone off to Australia as soon as she was old enough to leave. Mrs Todd said that Amy wrote regularly, she lived in Sydney, she worked in a flower shop there, and she was very happy. She wished that her Gran would come out and see her.
‘Why don’t you go?’ Victor encouraged her.
He was in Mrs Todd’s apartment yet again over an allegedly loose connection. He knew and she knew that there was nothing wrong electrically speaking but that she was very, very lonely. He would arrange that he call her at a time that suited him when he was in the area, and she paid him a token fee to keep the thing on some kind of professional basis.
‘Oh, I couldn’t go for lots of reasons,’ she said. ‘I’m not really able to travel on my own, and anyway it would be a bit awkward. You know, Amy doesn’t get on with her father, so even if I were strong enough to travel there alone, it would cause a family upset and we don’t want that.’
Vincent sent her a Valentine’s Day card, but after his earlier frights in such matters he didn’t sign it.
It was on her mantelpiece when he next called to check the mythical mystery of the immersion heater.
‘Thank you so much for the Valentine, Victor,’ she said.
‘What makes you think I sent it?’
‘Apart from my late husband you are the only really romantic person I know,’ she said.
The months went on, her son Peter appeared less and less and gave yet more and more directions. The letters from Amy were more and more yearning.
‘Please come out here, Gran, I want to show you my Australia; you are not old because you have a young heart. I’m saving to send you the fare.’
Around Christmas when it was cold and wet in London, Victor made a decision. ‘Mrs Todd, why don’t you and I go there early next year together? I’ll deliver you to your granddaughter, then I’ll go off and see a bit of the Outback. I might hire a car and drive to Broken Hill. I’d enjoy that, then I’d come back and take you back home.’
Her eyes filled with tears.
‘You are such a kind man, even to think of it. Believe me, that’s enough to make me very happy.’
‘No, Mrs Todd, you must believe me, this is for me as much as you. I’ve always wanted to go to Australia. I’ve had the money saved and waiting, I just couldn’t find the excuse.’
‘But Peter?’
‘Peter will have to accept it.’
‘No, Victor, that’s easy for you to say, you’re a young man, I’m an old woman. Peter is all I have. He wouldn’t dream of letting me go out all that way with . . . with . . .’
‘With the electrician,’ Victor finished for her.
‘Well, yes, in a word.’
‘Then I’ll have to be a friend of Amy’s, that’s what we’ll say.’
They smiled at each other. The adventure had begun.
It didn’t take long to become a friend of Amy’s, much less time than anyone would have thought possible and all because of email.
Every morning he got a message from her. It was night time in Sydney and Victor sent one back, before she went to sleep. Bit by bit they put together the subterfuge, they invented a way in which they had met and become friends. They rejoiced at each other’s inventiveness. She said nothing hostile about her father but made it clear that they were people who, while minimal courtesies would be maintained, would never have a meeting of minds.
Peter was told, as he had to be, about the upcoming trip; he had a dozen objections, all of them rehearsed and answered by the three conspirators. But he was up against unequal odds.
And then they were on the plane, Mrs Todd and Victor. They laughed when the steward thought they were mother and son.
‘No, we are partners in an enterprise,’ Mrs Todd explained.
They drank Australian wine to get into the mindset of the New World. They slept and woke. And slept.
They got out for coffee in the Middle East and for Tiger Beer in Singapore. Neither of them thought it was the slightest bit odd to travel together to a continent on the other side of the earth. They watched movies, they read magazines and they talked about their past.
Mrs Todd told Victor about Mr Todd who had been a wonderful kind man who brought flowers home every Friday night and had told her that she looked like a flower herself.
Victor told Mrs Todd about the various ladies in his life and how he had been a little too romantic for them.
Perhaps his luck would change, she suggested.
No, he didn’t really think it would in Australia. They were very modern there, forward looking, they would think he was a silly old Pom.
Mrs Todd said there were romantic people everywhere in the world and he must not make generalisations.
Then it was dawn and they saw the Opera House and the Bridge and all the things they had dreamed of and they landed.
Crowds waited in the sunshine.
Victor wheeled Mrs Todd out in her chair.
A girl with a wonderful smile was waving at them. She had pink shorts and sunglasses. Long black curly hair, dimples in her cheeks.
He knew immediately it was Amy. ‘We’re here,’ he shouted.
‘About time,’ she called back.
Mrs Todd and her granddaughter embraced each other. They hugged and cried, and looked at each other with amazement. Around them the same scene was being acted over and over again. Australians welcoming their rellies from Britain.
Victor, the electrician, stood a little apart. Then they remembered him.
‘This is Amy,’ said Mrs Todd with huge pride.
‘Welcome to Australia,’ said Amy. She had a warm smile.
Suddenly he wished he hadn’t made such firm arrangements about leaving Sydney to drive to the Outback. Sure it would be exciting and that was one of the reasons he had come all this way. But Sydney looked as if it had a lot to offer as well. And he had only given himself three days to see it.
Amy showed them the city in style. She drove them over the famous Harbour Bridge and got them on a ferry to sail under it. She rightly regarded nothing as being too tiring or adventurous for her elderly grandmother.
She brought them to small restaurants where she knew the Greeks and Italians who ran the place. She liked that, it was all so international, she said.
‘London’s getting like that too,’ Victor said.
‘Oh, London,’ Amy shrugged.
‘They’re not all like your father,’ Victor said before he could stop himself.
But she only smiled. ‘Just as well,’ she said.
They had pretended to be old friends as a ruse to fool her father. Already they felt they were old friends.
He longed to give her a Valentine card before he drove off across the bush, down the ribbon road which would take him past scrubland and emus. (Amy had told him to be very careful of the kangaroos at sunset, they could jump out in front of the car.) But Victor reminded himself of the many times his greetings had been misunderstood.
Perhaps there was a chocolate koala with hearts on it. But then there was no point in sending a jokey thing, he couldn’t understand a whole industry based on that. He wanted to say thank you for lighting up our lives. Why should it have to be dressed up as a joke?
He came to say goodbye and Amy h
anded him a single red rose. There was a card on it.
‘I’ll miss you, Victor Valentine.’
When he could speak, he said, ‘I was thinking I needn’t stay away all that long.’
Amy said, ‘And I was thinking maybe we might come with you.’
Excitement
EVERYONE SAID THAT ROSE WAS IMMENSELY PRACTICAL. SHE WAS attractive-looking, of course, and always very well groomed. A marvellous wife for Denis, and wonderful mother for Andrew and Celia. And a gifted teacher. People said that Rose was a shining example. Or if they were feeling less generous, they said that they had never known anyone to fall on her feet like Rose. Married at twenty-five to a successful young man, two children, a boy and a girl, a job to stop her going mad in the house all day, her own car, her own salary every month, no husband grousing about the cost of highlights. Why wouldn’t she be a shining example?
It had been Rose who suggested the idea of Sunday brunches. They had all come from the tyranny of family lunches with great roasts and heavy midday meals. So they moved from house to house every Sunday, everyone bringing a bottle of wine and some kind of salad thing. They all dressed up. The children played together. If any couple wanted to bring along a friend they could.
They congratulated themselves, it kept them young and exciting, they thought. Not dead and lumpen like their parents had been. And it had been Rose’s idea in the first place.
Of course another example of Rose’s luck was that her mother lived way down in Cork. She wasn’t constantly on the doorstep, criticising the way the grandchildren were being brought up. Twice a year Rose’s mother came to Dublin, twice a year Rose took the children to Cork. It was yet another example of how well she organised her life.
So her friends would have been very surprised if they had known how discontented Rose felt as half-term was approaching. She seemed to have been teaching forever. The same things every year, and in the same words. Only the faces in front of her were different, the younger sisters of the girls she had already taught.