Wise Follies

by Grace Wynne-Jones

  And I wonder if I ever will be.

  Chapter 3

  I hadn’t meant to tell Annie about my meal with Eamon. The thing is, I let it slip that I got home rather late last night, now she wants to know the reason.

  ‘Yes, what did you get up to last night?’ Mira adds unhelpfully. She’s just appeared in the kitchen and has plonked her very wet wetsuit beside me on the floor.

  ‘Look, could you put that thing in the bathroom?’ I demand irritably. ‘Just because you’ve taken up windsurfing doesn’t mean we have to have bits of the Irish Sea dripping all over the lino.’

  Mira pours herself a mug of freshly ground coffee and makes a face at me. ‘She dashed out of the cottage wearing her Laura Ashley dress,’ she murmurs sotto voce to Annie before she picks up her wetsuit and, with mug in hand, pads barefooted out of the room. She knows she’ll be able to prise the details from me later.

  ‘Was it a date?’ Annie is leaning towards me excitedly.

  ‘Yes,’ I mumble.

  ‘Oh, Alice, you’ve met someone. How wonderful!’ Annie almost spills her tea at the news. ‘Who is he? Come on…give me the juicy details.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ I sigh, ‘if you must know it was Brad Pitt. You know how he’s been pestering me lately.’ I look at her, hoping she will laugh. Far-fetched claims that Hollywood actors have been competing for my company are among our older jokes. ‘We went by Learjet to Nice,’ I continue. ‘I had asparagus for starters.’

  Annie eyes me stonily. ‘Who is he?’ she repeats.

  I look wistfully at the cat who is stretched out and purring on a cushion. I have a good reason for not wanting to tell Annie about Eamon. She believes that he and I are completely incompatible. I think it’s something to do with a dinner party I gave when we were going out together. Annie didn’t like the way he just sat there and didn’t help me with the food, or the crockery, or the conversation. I told her he was shy, but she wasn’t impressed by this excuse. She also didn’t like the way he’d disappear for days on end to play golf but ‘didn’t have time’ to go away on holidays with me. I complained to her about all this myself, in great detail, so I suppose I have contributed to her bias. The thing is she doesn’t know the ‘other’ Eamon. The one who sat with me in that restaurant. The one who is masterful and attentive and sporadically sensitive. The one who watches me closely while I’m daydreaming and then gives me a little smile.

  Annie herself is watching me – watching me with the resolve of a woman who bakes her own brown bread on a routine basis. I take a deep breath. It’s obvious that I’m going to have to tell her about Eamon’s proposal. And so I do.

  ‘Of course, you said “no”,’ Annie chuckles, as soon as I’ve spilled the beans.

  ‘No, I didn’t actually,’ I mumble, making a trellis with my fingers. ‘He’s in Peru for five months. I said I’d give him my answer when he gets back.’

  ‘You’re not actually taking this suggestion of his seriously, are you?’ Annie is looking horrified. I really didn’t think she’d react quite so dramatically.

  ‘Well, it does seem worth mulling over a little,’ I reply mildly. ‘I mean, it’s not every day someone asks you to be their wife.’

  ‘Your answer must be “No”.’ Annie says it most urgently. ‘You don’t love him. You know you don’t.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agree resignedly, ‘but he is quite practical. I mean, he put up that pine shelving very well. He’s very obliging, Annie. And he’s not at all difficult.’

  ‘Oh, Alice.’ Annie reaches out and pats my hand. ‘You poor sweetie. I didn’t realize you were feeling this – this romantically demoralized.’

  ‘It’s not just that.’ I pick up a biscuit and start to munch it. The crumbs trail down a corner of my mouth but I’m too preoccupied to wipe them away. ‘I’m trying to be sensible, Annie. If I want to have a baby I’ll have to get round to it soon. And I’m tired of these pipe dreams of meeting Mr Wonderful. Fantasies about him cheer me up on rainy evenings, but they don’t hug me when I get into bed. I can’t whisper to them, spoon up with them. They don’t give me cuddles – and I need cuddles.’ I stare at her bleakly. ‘I’m lonely, like Eamon. I don’t think either of us realized just how lonely we are until now.’

  Annie rubs my back comfortingly.

  ‘No man has shown a romantic interest in me for ages,’ I continue. ‘Eamon may not be Mr Wonderful but he wants me. I’d almost forgotten what being wanted feels like.’

  ‘Oh, Alice, what has happened to your self-esteem?’ Annie asks. ‘You’re pretty and interesting and kind and…and a very talented painter,’ she adds loyally, knowing this will please me. ‘If you’re determined to marry then there are some very pleasant men I could introduce you to. Men who are far more suitable.’

  I regard her with tender exasperation. ‘You’ve already organized quite enough dinner parties on my behalf, Annie. And, anyway, the men you introduce me to are already half in love with you. It is a tribute to your sweet and unassuming nature that you don’t realize this, but it’s a fact.’

  ‘Of course they aren’t in love with me!’ Annie says this with great vehemence. She looks just like she did at primary school when the teacher wouldn’t believe Alan O’Callaghan had given her a Chinese burn. ‘And what about Ernie?’ she adds, glancing at her watch worriedly and reaching for her handbag. ‘Ernie took your telephone number. He liked you.’

  ‘Yes, and he also borrowed my hand-painted silk scarf and didn’t give it back.’

  ‘What!’

  I hesitate. ‘Look, I hadn’t meant to tell you this but…but Ernie is a transvestite.’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ Annie exclaims.

  ‘Yes, he is. He admitted it to me after a number of Guinnesses in O’Donnell’s pub. He wanted to dress up as a woman on our next date, and I’m afraid I said I’d find it too embarrassing.’

  Annie is staring at me, dumbfounded. She is clearly distressed that her matchmaking went so awry.

  ‘But he was very nice,’ I add, now desperately trying to console her. ‘And’ – I smile at her wryly – ‘he gave me some really good tips about exfoliation.’

  ‘Oh, Alice, I’m sorry.’ Annie grimaces at me apologetically. ‘I’m beginning to understand why you’ve developed hermit tendencies.’ She gives me a hug and starts to head purposefully out of the room. ‘Sorry to dash,’ she adds, ‘but I’ve got to collect Josh from playschool.’

  ‘How is Josh?’ I ask, as I open the front door for her. Annie is a single mother and Josh, her five-year-old son, is one of my favourite people.

  ‘He’s decided he wants to be Wayne Rooney,’ she smiles, then she pauses and adds anxiously, ‘Alice, I know you’ve had some sobering romantic experiences, but I do hope you’ll start going out a bit more. I – I really do think you need to explore your options. Especially…now.’ She says the ‘now’ bit very firmly and I know she’s referring to Eamon’s proposal.

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right,’ I find myself mumbling, I don’t like seeing her this fretful.

  After Annie has left I find myself wishing that she and most of my other female friends didn’t have such strong opinions about romance. For example, Sarah, the features editor, claims that finding Mr Wonderful is a bit like tracking down some extremely rare and fleet-footed mammal and Mira makes flat, disturbing pronouncements like, ‘Love often finds you when you’ve stopped looking for it.’ The minute you do this, apparently, you are as in demand as Sellotape at Christmas. What she doesn’t mention, however, is that not looking for love probably has to find you too. Find you after years of spent illusion. Find you when you’ve turned into a sturdy soul who rings up radio gardening programmes and talks excitedly about brassicas. The minute you start doing this, apparently, Mr Wonderful tracks you down with the unlikely determination of the man in the Milk Tray ads. He swoops you off while you’re still mulling over whether to relocate your rhododendrons.

  I head grimly towards my laptop computer and the subject of
solo sexual stimulation. As I do so I glance at the photo of my mother, smiling wistfully out at me from her silver frame. I wish she was still alive. I wish I could ask her about Eamon and about so many other things. Because I know she heard whispers in other rooms. Whispers from another life that she might have lived, and now I often hear them too. Sometimes I think I mislaid a part of me a long time ago, and I just can’t seem to find it. Without it everything seems different, yet I’m not sure what it is. And maybe that’s why I so often find myself dreaming of the carefree childhood days Annie and I so seldom speak of. The days when the loudest whispers came from the wind as it blew through the tall trees by the river. The time when I loved Aaron and Aaron loved me, though we would have giggled if anyone had said it. I somehow need these memories, and yet if I could run away from them I think I might. For they are the ‘long perspectives’ Philip Larkin wrote about in his poem ‘Reference Back’. The long perspectives ‘Open at each instant of our lives’ that:

  …show us what we have as it once was,

  Blindingly undiminished, just as though

  By acting differently we could have kept it so.

  Chapter 4

  I think Annie is right. I do need to get out and meet more people. I doubt if I could manage that ‘singles dance’ she spoke of. Maybe joining an evening class would be a good tentative step towards sociability. An adult education brochure from the local college came through the door last night. I think I’ll opt for figurative painting. I’ve a nice photo of my childhood home in my album and I’d like to try to capture it in oils.

  I rather wish I hadn’t started to browse through that album actually. It’s made me very nostalgic. Even more so than usual. I didn’t know I’d kept quite so many photos of Aaron. He’s smiling out at me from every second page. As I look at his big wide smile memories come flooding back to me, startlingly undiminished. It’s almost as if I’m back in the small country village I grew up in. It’s as if he might tap gleefully on the window any moment.

  Aaron was my first best friend. He lived near me in a big house. He had long legs and a mop of browny blond hair and was very keen on ants. He kept some in a special container. You could see what they were up to through the perspex glass. He also had one of those strange things between his legs I learned was called a ‘willy’. I’d seen a bigger one on my father when he was having a bath, and on that man who didn’t manage to keep the towel wrapped around him on the beach in Ballybunion. But, apart from his willy, Aaron and I were very much alike. He was a bit more daring than me, and he had a catapult. But we could finish each other’s sentences. And frequently didn’t need to speak at all.

  Most afternoons, on the way home from school, Aaron and I used to go into the shop run by two spinster sisters – the Delaneys – and buy some pink marshmallow mice with proper tails. The Delaney sisters handed them to us with thin, careful hands. They always had the radio on and one bar lit on the electric fire. They were in their fifties and had Never Married.

  Never Married. Those words had a strange ring to them when I was a girl. A bit like Never Washed, only marginally less surprising. I studied the Delaney sisters as though they were a kind of finch in one of Aaron’s bird books. What on earth made a woman ‘never marry’ and therefore be ‘alone’, even if she lived with her sister?

  ‘We just never met the right man,’ Ethel said when I asked.

  This was not in fact entirely true. Agnes, her sister, had met the ‘right man’. I’d heard Mum talking about it. The thing was he lived in England and if Agnes went to join him who would help Ethel run the shop and look after their elderly mother? So she’d stayed in the village and this man was never mentioned, to us anyway. But when Agnes was behind the till she always had the radio on more loudly.

  Primary school always had a smell of old apples to it. A sandy-coloured man called Mr O’Donovan gave us ‘special’ French lessons late on Thursday afternoons. You had to pay for them so only about half the class stayed on.

  Mr O’Donovan used tapes and a lot of them were about a certain Monsieur Thibaud, only sometimes the tape went funny and he was called M on S i eeeeur TH I I b a uud. I liked when that happened. Mr O’Donovan used to get annoyed and started to fiddle with his machine while the rest of us got a break from Monsieur Thibaud, who seemed to lead an incredibly boring life. He told us all about himself in French. He got into his car and he got out of it. He went into a shop and reached into his pocket for his purse. He counted things very carefully, saying every number. He said ‘hello’ in many different ways and repeated his name and where he came from over and over again, as if we hadn’t heard him the first time. He went on and on.

  Mrs Forrest, the Sunday School teacher, did too. The best way not to let her get to you was to pretend she was a television. She was supposed to be talking about Jesus, but she went on a lot about herself. For instance, the Feeding of the Five Thousand might remind her of a picnic she’d organized when there hadn’t been enough bread rolls. If it wasn’t for the felt pictures I don’t know how we would have put up with her.

  The felt pictures were great. You could move say, Jesus, around, but the felt background remained the same. You could put donkeys on roofs and sheep in boats. You could move entire mountains.

  Aaron’s Dad was very keen on taking photographs. Mine wasn’t. I had to pester him about it. ‘Take one now – pleeeease,’ I’d plead at family gatherings. ‘Look – Berty has a rose stuck in his collar. That would be a good one.’

  Berty was my Aunt Phoeb’s Yorkshire terrier and she fussed over him far more than she fussed over her husband, Sean. Berty had piles of toys and doggy chocolate and stuff like that. He was rather neurotic. Aunt Phoeb had to be adored by someone and she’d groomed Berty for this task. When she was absent he was desolate. When she returned he was ecstatic. In the long bits in between he watched her and waited.

  Uncle Sean didn’t mind all this because he was a fanatical golfer. ‘I’m going to play golf,’ he’d say, as if the words themselves would clear a smooth, respectful space around him. Sean seemed more married to golf than to my aunt. She was not one of those wives who watch their husbands trot off on some ostensibly pointless pursuit with an indulgent smile. His preoccupation with small white balls eventually made her lose respect for him. She used to tell my mother he was ‘running away’ and ‘shirking his commitments’. In fact she became so angry with him about it one began to feel a certain reluctant sympathy for his absence. Though people spoke of marriage as the ‘icing on the cake’, my childhood observations led me to believe it was sometimes more like marzipan.

  I wonder if marriage to Eamon would make me revise this opinion.

  I’m looking at the adult education brochure again as I munch my breakfast. I decide that I’d better ring the college today before all the painting classes are booked up. Then, as I make myself a cup of coffee, I notice that the stray cat who has adopted Mira and myself is padding around the garden hungrily. He isn’t hungry actually. I know this because when I tried to feed him he just looked up at me in a bewildered manner. Mira must have given him breakfast before she left. I don’t know what he’s waiting for – love perhaps. The thing is, any time I try to stroke him, he just runs away. I open the back door and address him sternly. ‘Look, I’m tired of this charade,’ I say. ‘You’ll just have to conquer your fear of intimacy or you won’t get any more Whiskas.’ This of course is a lie, and he knows it. Cats are rather like men in that way.

  The handsome young man who’s just moved in – whose house overlooks the garden – is playing ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ on his guitar. He must be sitting outside. I can hear him quite clearly. He pauses at every chord change. All his chords sound much the same – a sort of loose twang. He’s singing very earnestly, lending great emotion to every word, but he’s off key half the time. He moves quickly on to Donovan and then Paul Simon. He doesn’t seem to be looking for a song to play so much as one that will play him. That will spring from the instrument with its ow
n volition. I hope he doesn’t make a habit of serenading his neighbours in this manner. I’d have to buy earplugs. The cat, however, seems fascinated by the noise. He jumps on to the wall to have a look.

  ‘Hello, puddy. Come to give me a bit of encouragement, have you?’ I hear the man saying in what sounds like a slightly American accent. The cat doesn’t run away. He usually does when strangers talk to him. Maybe he’s getting tamer after all.

  I glance in the hallway mirror before I leave. Dear God, I’ve got another small spiky hair on my chin. I know this can happen when one gets older, but why? Where on earth do they come from? I glance at my watch. Oh dear, I’m late. Time does funny things in the morning. It seems to speed up when I’m at home and slow down as soon as I reach the office.

  ‘Blustery day,’ says Mrs Peabody, my elderly neighbour, who’s picking up a carton of milk from her doorstep as I blast out my front door.

  ‘Yes, but quite bright,’ I answer, smiling from the teeth out. I can’t do a proper smile yet. It takes me a long time to wake up properly. I sometimes wonder if I’ve ever managed it completely.

  ‘It’s quite mild, but there may be showers later,’ says Mrs Peabody, who is an avid listener to weather forecasts.

  ‘Indeed, there is some patchy cloud,’ I agree. ‘Well, I’d better dash if I’m going to get my bus.’