by Maeve Binchy
But Maura had been right that day on the garden seat. Allie had ruined her life, she had opened up golden doors and shown everyone else how wonderful things could be, but would never be again. James’s mother would never again be asked to tell long stories about Africa, Geraldine wouldn’t be invited to tell rambling tales of self-pity about barking dogs in her youth. The old Greens would go back into their greenhouse, and the high-flying Hurleys behind their hedge.
The people who lived across the road would never intrude again. James would frown without knowing why, and only Maura would know that nothing would ever be the same.
The Crossing
‘IT’S LIKE A REAL CRUISE, ISN’T IT?’ MARY SAID. THEN WISHED SHE hadn’t said it. What did she know about a real cruise except reading the brochures?
‘I was just thinking that too,’ said Lavender, the older woman. ‘Not that I was ever on a cruise mind, but it feels like as if we should have two weeks, and visit exotic places every day instead of just getting out at Liverpool.’ They laughed, united in never having been on a luxury cruise liner, united in admiring the seagulls, and valuing a few minutes away from the family.
‘Are you going or coming back?’ Lavender asked. She had a kind face and bright interested eyes. Mary felt you could talk and she really might care what you said.
‘Going over. The children have never seen their grandparents. It’s a bit of an ordeal really.’
Why had she told that to a stranger; she hadn’t told any of her neighbours, nor her best friend Kath, nor her sister Betty. Why did she blurt it out to a woman with a North of England accent on the B&I boat?
‘Oh, I know,’ Lavender consoled her. ‘It’s always an ordeal isn’t it? Maybe we should have to live with our in-laws all the time in the same tribe and never move, or else we should never see them at all. It’s the in-between bit that causes all the guilt.’
That was so exactly true that Mary almost jumped to hear her own feelings echoed . . .
‘Did you think that kind of . . . well, that kind of thing, you know, with your husband’s parents? Wanting to make it all closer and then getting it a bit wrong?’
‘Tell me,’ Lavender said.
And Mary did. Every bit of it. Slowly, hesitating sometimes, going back over bits in case they hadn’t been fair. How she met John when he was on a cycling holiday in Ireland. John was unhappy at College, he found it was hurting him inside his head, the stress and the worry. It wasn’t only exams and study. He didn’t think he would ever be happy as a teacher. He was too anxious in the classroom practice, he wouldn’t be able to keep control, and he could not look forward to a life which would be a constant battle and a series of confrontations in the classroom every day.
‘Why don’t you do something else with your life then?’ Mary had asked him. ‘We only get to come on to the earth once, wouldn’t it be a pity to spend it all doing something that makes you unsettled?’
It was like a revelation to John. There and then he decided to abandon the idea of being a teacher. He wrote to the College, he wrote to his parents and to his girlfriend in London. He said he had been feeling a bit lost, now he was going to find himself in Ireland. He was going to work on a farm while he was finding out what to do with the rest of his life.
Nobody was pleased, not the College which worried about his grant, not his girlfriend in London who worried for four weeks and then sent a card telling him it couldn’t matter less whether he found himself or didn’t since she had found somebody more normal. And his parents worried most of all. He was an only child, they had their hopes set on his being a teacher, now he was a farmhand in Ireland for heaven’s sake. They were very disapproving. They were not people who wrote letters much or made crosschannel phone calls. But they disapproved nonetheless. Heavily.
And when John and Mary got engaged, they assumed that it was a shotgun marriage, which it wasn’t, and that it would be in a Roman Catholic church full of images of saints and the Virgin, which it was. And they said they couldn’t come to the wedding.
Mary sent pictures of the children, Jacinta, now eight, and John Paul who was born the day the Pope came to Ireland and was seven. Looking back on it Mary wondered if she should have chosen different names for the children. But surely that wasn’t important. John’s parents could hardly disapprove of a child’s name as being from a different tribe. And Mary had been careful to send pictures of the children at Christmas rather than the First Communion snap which she felt the instinct to send each time.
Lavender was full of praise. Mary had done more than her share. And where was the problem?
It wasn’t exactly a problem, there was no out and out war, just a distance in every sense of the word. And a dread of meeting these people who wouldn’t come to Ireland, who had never shown any greater interest than a dutiful card at Christmas time. Mary was not looking forward to hearing what a brilliant career had been cut short when John had met her in Ireland ten long years ago. She didn’t want to make excuses for the life they led in a small country town where John worked happily on a farm and Mary was a dressmaker.
And they were going now because John’s father was unemployed, had been for a year and the word had trickled back from a woman neighbour that John’s dad was taking it hard. Mary had suggested they visit Ireland and as usual it had been turned down, so, gritting her teeth, she had then suggested that they take the children to visit their grandparents, and this had been agreed to. Ungraciously of course. ‘You’ll have to take us as you find us.’ But still agreed.
It was a two-week visit. Too long, Mary thought, but it was a huge undertaking, four of them to go to London, it would be a great waste to go for less time.
Lavender said that Mary was a positive gem among women. She said she was sure that the parents-in-law would be so pleased that in a few days they would all wonder whether the distance could possibly have been in their imaginations.
‘Would you like a little advice?’ she asked, almost shyly.
‘Oh, I’d love anything you could tell me, you being English and a bit older, not that you’d be as old as them or anything but you know . . .’
Lavender leaned her back against the rail, she squinted into the sun and talked not directly to Mary but as if she was speaking to herself. She looked very much like a woman who should be on a luxury cruise liner waiting for an executive husband to come back from a game of deck tennis with the Captain.
‘I wouldn’t apologise or explain too much. Maybe let them think they were part of your lives even though they weren’t. The children should know a bit about them, like their birthdays and their names, and where they grew up themselves. And perhaps you might ask, all of you, about your husband as a little boy, you know, when he was seven or eight, what he read and what toys he played with. They probably have them still. And it could be assumed rather than said that one day, soon, but not a fixed day, the grandparents would come to Ireland.’
Lavender seemed apologetic. She felt she had talked too much.
‘I wish you wouldn’t say you were laying down the law, I’m just overjoyed to get some ideas. That’s a very good thought, you know, I don’t know their birthdays and the children don’t know anything at all about them.’
‘There’ll be plenty of time on the train to London.’
‘You have children yourself?’ Mary was diffident.
‘One, a daughter.’ There seemed to be a full stop.
‘That’s nice,’ Mary said. ‘Or isn’t it?’
‘Not much at the moment it isn’t.’
They had started to walk around the deck. People sat in chairs lathering themselves with Nivea. Duty-free bags were being tucked under the sunbathers, children ran round excited, the passengers had all started to talk to each other in the relaxed way of holidaymakers. There might be long drives, or train journeys, or even family ordeals ahead, but on the ship they were suspended. It was time out of time. People spoke as they often had no time to speak when on land.
‘I’m sor
ry,’ Mary said to Lavender. ‘You’re so easy, you should have a good time with a daughter.’
‘I did until she was fourteen. Then she met this lad. Oh, I think a hundred times a day how different life would have been if she hadn’t met him.
‘She never opened a school book from that day to this. We were before the courts for her every month of the year. If it wasn’t truancy, it was shoplifting, then it was glue sniffing, then it was a stolen car.’
It had certainly not been the life they had hoped for their Emma.
‘And did she get over the lad?’ Mary sighed thinking that all this might easily lie ahead for her with Jacinta in a troubled world.
‘No, she’ll never get over him. She’s eighteen now and he’s found a new love. So Emma sits and cries. She’s sitting down in the restaurant now with her Dad, crying. I couldn’t take it any more, she cried all through this holiday in Ireland we took specially to give her a treat. I couldn’t see it for one second more. That’s why I came up on deck.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ Mary said.
‘So am I,’ said Lavender. ‘But you can see I’m not one to be handing out advice, you see how poor my own situation is. I can’t even sit and talk to my own daughter.’
‘Wasn’t it nice of you to bring her to Ireland on a holiday though?’ Mary said admiringly. ‘A lot of mothers would not have done that, with a girl who got into all that sort of trouble. She’s lucky.’
‘She doesn’t think so, she thinks she’s cursed with middle-aged old-fashioned parents. She’d like to be with that yobbo.’
‘Still, she came with you. She’s eighteen, grown up, she needn’t have come unless she wanted to.’
‘True.’ Lavender’s face was sad.
‘What would be the best that could happen, the very best?’
Lavender was thoughtful. ‘I used to think if he’d disappeared off the face of the earth that would have been the best. But in their mad white-faced Mohican-hair way with chains dangling and safety pins all over their ears . . . they loved each other. So I suppose the best that could happen is for them to love each other still, without breaking the law and for him to be a bit civil to us. We are part of Emma’s life too, for years we held her by the hand and dreamed of what she would do. If he had taken that into consideration a bit . . .’
‘That’s why you told me to ask John’s parents about the toys, wasn’t it?’ Mary said.
‘Love, it’s a different world to yours, you’re a lovely warm woman trying to build bridges, he is just a yobbo with a face like the devil trying to break up everything he comes across.’
‘They must have thought that about me too,’ Mary said. ‘I only realise it now. I was so alien and so determined. All the time I was annoyed they couldn’t be a bit warmer. But I never thought what it was like to be them, having held John’s hand for years and listened to his baby talk and watched him starting out to school.’
They walked companionably on their tour. They would never meet again, nor write to each other. Mary would never know if the yobbo reformed, or if Emma dried her tears over him. She wouldn’t even know what Emma looked like or her father who was sitting patiently handing her more and more paper table napkins to wipe the sad, pale, punky face.
And Lavender would never know if the visit went well, and if John’s parents took out his old train for John Paul to play with and if Mary became friendly with his Mum and helped in the kitchen. She would never hear if the invitation to Ireland which would be just assumed rather than stated would in fact be taken up.
Their lives would never cross again.
But while they did cross on a sunny day on a blue sea they talked as all shipboard passengers do in a way that would sound to the seagulls above that these people were friends for life.
And Lavender told Mary that all her sisters had been called after flowers and Mary told Lavender that in her class at school there were eleven girls called Mary and it had been very confusing.
They never knew that their husbands were having a drink at the bar.
Emma’s tears had dried, John Paul and Jacinta had found a new friend and it happened that Lavender’s John and Mary’s John were standing having a pint. They talked about the golf, they talked about the shambles the World Cup had been, and they talked about prices and Ronald Reagan and trade unions.
And Lavender’s John and Mary’s John had a second pint and that was it. They were getting near Liverpool now and so they found their families and their luggage, and one family went North and one went South.
A Holiday With Your Father
VICTORIA LOOKED AT THE WOMAN WITH THE TWO CARDBOARD cups of coffee. She had one of those good-natured faces that you always associate with good works. Victoria had seen smiles like that selling jam at fetes or bending over beds in hospitals or holding out collection boxes hopefully.
And indeed the woman and the coffee headed for an old man wrapped up well in a thick overcoat even though the weather was warm, and the crowded coffee bar in Victoria Station was even warmer.
‘I think we should drink it fairly quickly, Dad,’ said the woman in a half-laughing way. ‘I read somewhere that if you leave it for any length at all, the cardboard melts into the coffee and that’s why it tastes so terrible.’
He drank it up obediently and he said it wasn’t at all bad. He had a nice smile. Suddenly and for no reason he reminded Victoria of her own father. The good-natured woman gave the old man a paper and his magnifying glass and told him not to worry about the time, she’d keep an eye on the clock and have them on the platform miles ahead of the departure time. Secure and happy, he read the paper and the good-natured woman read her own. Victoria thought they looked very nice and contented and felt cheered to see a good scene in a café instead of all those depressing gloomy scenes you can see; like middle-aged couples staring into space and having nothing to say to each other.
She looked at the labels on their suitcases. They were heading for Amsterdam. The name of the hotel had been neatly typed. The suitcases had little wheels under them. Victoria felt this woman was one of the world’s good and wise organisers. Nothing was left to chance, it would be a very well-planned little holiday.
The woman had a plain wedding ring on. She might be a widow. Her husband might have left her for someone outrageous and bad-natured. Her husband and four children might all be at home and this woman was just taking her father to Amsterdam because he had seemed in poor spirits. Victoria made up a lot of explanations and finally decided that the woman’s husband had been killed in an appalling accident, which she had borne very bravely, and she now worked for a local charity and that she and her father went on a holiday to a different European capital every year.
Had the snack bar been more comfortable she might have talked to them. They were not the kind of people to brush away a pleasant conversational opening. But it would have meant moving all her luggage nearer to them, it seemed a lot of fuss. Leave them alone. Let them read their papers, let the woman glance at the clock occasionally, and eventually let them leave. Quietly, without rushing, without fuss. Everything neatly stowed in the two bags on wheels. Slowly, sedately . . . they moved towards a train for the south coast. Victoria was sorry to see them go. Four German students took their place. Young, strong and blond, spreading coins German and English out on the table and working out how much they could buy between them. They didn’t seem so real.
There was something reassuring, she thought, about being able to go on a holiday with your father. It was like saying thank you, it was like stating that it had all been worthwhile . . . all that business of his getting married years ago and begetting you and saving for your future and having hopes for you. It seemed a nice way of rounding things off to be able to take your father to see foreign cities . . . because things had changed so much from his day. Nowadays young people could manage these things as a matter of course, in your father’s day it was still an adventure and a risk to go abroad.
She wondered what her father wo
uld say if she set up a trip for him. She wondered only briefly, because really she knew. He’d say: ‘No, Victoria my dear, you’re very thoughtful, but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’
And she would say that it wasn’t a question of that. He wasn’t an old dog. He was barely sixty, and they weren’t new tricks since he used to go to Paris every year when he was a young man, and he and Mummy had spent their honeymoon there.
Then he would say that he had such a lot of work to catch up on, so it would be impossible to get away, and if she pointed out that he didn’t really have to catch up on anything, that he couldn’t have to catch up on anything because he stayed so late at the bank each evening catching up anyway . . . Well, then he would say that he had seen Europe at its best . . . when it was glorious and perhaps he shouldn’t go back now.
But he’d love to go back, he would love it. Victoria knew that. He still had all the scrapbooks and pictures of Paris just before the war. She had grown up with those brown books, and sepia pictures, and menus and advertisements, and maps carefully plotted out . . . lines of dots and arrows to show which way they had walked to Montmartre and which way they had walked back. He couldn’t speak French well, her father, but he knew a few phrases, and he liked the whole style of things French, and used to say they were a very civilised race.
The good-natured woman and her father were probably pulling out of the station by now. Perhaps they were pointing out things to each other as the train gathered speed. A wave of jealousy came over Victoria. Why was this woman . . . an ordinary woman perhaps ten years older than Victoria, maybe not even that . . . why was she able to talk to her father and tell him things and go places with him and type out labels and order meals and take pictures? Why could she do all that and Victoria’s father wouldn’t move from his deck chair in the sun lounge when his three weeks’ holiday period came up? And in his one week in the winter, he caught up on his reading.