Wise Follies

by Grace Wynne-Jones

  The enormity of my misapprehension regarding this sea trip is evidenced by the fact that I actually brought a novel and a small sketchpad with me in case I got bored. The afternoon had started off so calmly. There was just a slight breeze. When this breeze grew a bit stronger it seemed bracing, but now that it’s a gale I’ve started to talk to God.

  I’ve obviously come on this boat by mistake. I try to scream this realization to the rest of the crew, only the statement tends to turn into ‘Aaaargh…’ as the yacht gives another dreadful heave and plunges into an enormous wave.

  ‘Oh, God, please, please help me,’ I start to moan as Josephine scrambles along the deck towards me. She’s leaning over me. She’s shouting something. Maybe she wants me to man the radio or send up a flare. It’s either that or launching the life raft. I try to smile up at her bravely.

  ‘Alice!’

  ‘Yes!’ I screech.

  ‘Alice, would you…?’

  ‘What?’ I roar. The wind is blowing her words away from me. It’s like talking to someone on a dodgy mobile phone.

  Her face is almost touching mine now. The wind is whipping up a tassel on the hood of her jacket. ‘Alice,’ she says earnestly. ‘Alice, would you like a bar of chocolate?’

  I stare at her.

  ‘Fruit and nut or just plain?’ she adds, delving deep into her pocket.

  ‘Plain,’ I reply, grabbing the bar from her as the boat tips over even further. Then, as she turns to scramble back across the deck she says, ‘Great day for sailing,’ as though she expects me to agree with her.

  ‘Oh, well, at least I have some chocolate now,’ I think, trying to reassure myself. I feel the bar in my pocket. It has eight slabs on it. If we do get stranded somewhere I could eat, say, two slabs a day. I check the fastener on my safety harness for the twentieth time and attempt to hum one of Elgar’s Enigma Variations. I simply have to try to calm myself somehow. I scan the horizon. Goodness! Is that land! Yes, it’s Dun Laoghaire harbour, and we’re heading towards it. I almost sob with relief.

  Sandie, Laura and Josephine are now discussing what a brilliant afternoon it was over pints of Guinness. We’re in a yacht club and I’m having a pint of Guinness myself but I’m not saying much. I’m quietly euphoric just to be back on dry land. There wasn’t a gale today, apparently. Just a very strong wind. Next weekend they may sail over to Fishguard.

  ‘Would you like to join us, Alice?’ Josephine enquires with a mischievous twinkle.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I reply rather firmly. They all smile at me and I smile back bashfully. ‘Oh dear, my terror must have been so obvious,’ I think guiltily and yet – and yet my smile has broadened and, as the others start to laugh, I do too. Maybe it’s just relief, or all that fresh air, or the Guinness, but it feels wonderful. It’s like we’re high on something. ‘I was frightened,’ I think. ‘I was frightened, and it doesn’t matter. And I still have a bar of chocolate in my pocket…’

  I take the bar out. I break it carefully into four slabs. ‘Goodness, Alice, we ate ours ages ago,’ Laura exclaims, as I offer her a piece. We’re all munching now and chatting and giggling. Part of me is watching, tenderly. I want to savour this. I need these moments of sweet silliness. I need them badly. For it seems to me suddenly that there are many ways to pull anchor. And maybe this is one of them.

  Chapter 10

  My afternoon’s sailing has provided me with some excellent anecdotes. I’ve embroidered them up a bit and have been dining out on them for days. I’ve even added in some nautical terms like aft and fore. In fact just the other day I was explaining the meaning of ‘port’ and ‘starboard’ to Mira, when she smiled at me warmly and said, ‘You know something, Alice, you haven’t mentioned James Mitchel for a whole week.’ I felt like a star member of AA – and I don’t mean the Automobile Association.

  I often wish there were AA type meetings for the frequently bewildered. If there were I bet I’d go on a regular basis. We could meet in a hotel room somewhere and air our ‘issues’ in a sympathetic atmosphere. We’d know that we all have small, scared, cowering creatures inside us, and once we start to bully them, we do it to other people too. In fact I bet if people were more open and sympathetic with each other in general more marriages would work. They wouldn’t have to provide such compensation…we wouldn’t come to them with such a big bag of dreams.

  I must have been lugging a huge trunk of dreams along with me when I met James Mitchel. I really didn’t realize I still had quite so many of them. I thought I’d managed to trim them down like travel books advise one to do with luggage. You’re supposed to put all the things you want to pack on a bed and then only take half of them, only I still tend to end up with two suitcases. And the funny thing is there is always one item I end up wearing more than all the others. One skirt or blouse, or dress or sweater that ends up being indispensable. It doesn’t seem special when I pack it, but unpacked it immediately announces its appropriateness. It’s one of life’s many mysteries. And my infatuation with James Mitchel is another.

  I must try to stop pining for him. I really don’t want to become like Cyril, Mrs Peabody’s budgerigar. He’s so busy missing the Australian outback that he’s hardly noticed the tasty sprig of millet I left in his cage the other day. Maybe James Mitchel is my Australian outback and Eamon is my sprig of millet – something quite tasty that I’m stubbornly overlooking. After all, very few of my married friends have ended up with the man of their dreams. They went for men who understood their dreams rather than embodied them all. Though they might once have longed for someone as passionate as Heathcliff they’re rather relieved that they didn’t get him. Kindness, tenderness, a sense of humour – that’s what proved most seductive in the end. They seem so sensible as they sit at my distressed pine table telling me about their new chintz suite or little Jamie’s viola lessons. If they’ve recently dined out at a restaurant they tell me the entire menu. Having kids seems to make them deeply appreciative of any personal pleasures they manage to grab. A friend called Bridget once spent twenty minutes telling me about a recent bath.

  She’d just had a baby girl and had taken to having showers. This was because she was breast-feeding and little Chloe always started to bawl just as she herself was reaching for the Badedas. But one amazingly serene evening this didn’t happen and four weeks later Bridget described her bath to me as though it had been a four-week cruise on the Caribbean.

  ‘I lit a candle,’ she told me, her face glowing at the memory. ‘I poured in the Badedas and watched it foaming under the tap. I turned on my Garth Brooks tape and stepped into the water. Honestly, Alice, as I lay there I felt a kind of weightlessness I have never felt before. I wonder…’ she looked at me dolefully. ‘I wonder if I’ll ever have a bath again.’

  ‘Of course you will,’ I reassured her. I’d talked to enough new mothers to realize such statements are prompted by sheer weariness. Motherhood tends to be far harder work than they’d realized. In fact I’ve heard so much about it I really don’t know why I’d like a baby of my own. It must be genetic programming.

  ‘Stay single, Alice,’ that’s what Bridget told me the last time I met her, which was some time ago. We were out on one of her ‘I have a life of my own’ evenings, which don’t happen very often. Her husband had been working late a lot and she was in a feisty mood. ‘They’ve done studies about it you know – single women are often happier than the married ones,’ she continued. ‘Men get more out of marriage than women. That’s what many of those studies conclude.’

  ‘Yes, I know, I’ve read them,’ I replied, wondering how any study could measure such a variable thing as human contentment. Bridget seemed to be envying my freedom, while I was cooing besottedly over photographs of her daughter. Faraway hills tend to seem greener. I wish they didn’t. It can be rather confusing.

  I discovered something rather confusing about Eamon last week. A friend of his told me that earlier this year he ‘disappeared’. He was gone for some days, apparently. It wa
s most unlike him. He hadn’t phoned work or anything. He missed appointments and left his phone off the hook. When people went to his house they found ‘Riverdance’ playing over and over on the stereo system. They were extremely worried.

  When he did eventually turn up he looked weary and unshaven. He hadn’t washed and had mud on his shoes. He said that he’d been ‘camping’ and had forgotten to tell people. ‘Look, there’s a tent on the back seat,’ he said. And indeed there was. He completely refused to talk about it further.

  ‘When exactly did this happen?’ I asked. Somehow I was not surprised by the answer. Eamon had ‘disappeared’ around the time of his proposal to me. One week before it in fact.

  ‘I suppose he needed to get away to really think things through,’ the friend said. ‘He’d often said he was lonely – dissatisfied.’

  ‘Really!’ I replied, considerably surprised. I didn’t think Eamon said things like that to other people. He finds it hard to be open, even with me.

  Funnily enough, I’ve begun to find the idea of Eamon’s ‘missing days’ strangely appealing. They hint at a kind of extremity I didn’t know he was capable of feeling. His steady, rather plodding behaviour has given no hint of this covert wildness. I like a bit of mystery in a man. But I’d like a little less of it in Mira.

  Mira and I met four years ago when I advertised for a housemate. The minute that half-eaten muffin fell out of her coat pocket I knew I’d like her, but I never suspected she’d become quite this puzzling. For example, she keeps going into hairdressers and getting her hair cut, even though it doesn’t need it. It’s so short now she’ll have to leave it for a while, unless she wants to resemble Sinead O’Connor in the earlier part of her career. She’s bought Laren Brassière’s tape and plays it every evening and she’s also begun to suspect there’s something valuable in her stamp collection. She stopped collecting stamps when she was ten. She’s taken the album to various experts and says they just flick through it. ‘They can’t possibly value five hundred stamps in a minute,’ she complains.

  I’ve been trying to be non-judgemental but I do rather wish Mira would drop this eccentric spinster thing and take up something more conventional. If she went deeply New Age, for example, I wouldn’t mind at all. I’d like to have more crystals and jasmine oil and aurasoma bottles around the place. We could say things like, ‘Have you cleansed your aura lately?’ and buy an even more bewildering array of herbal teas. Just as I’m thinking this I hear Mira open the front door.

  ‘Hi there,’ she says, giving me a tired smile. She’s wearing a blue beret, a multi-coloured silk Indian scarf, dungarees and a big woolly cardigan she knitted herself. She’s heading for her bedroom and I know the first thing she’ll do there is put on the huge furry slippers her brother gave her. She’s grown extremely fond of them lately, in fact she sometimes wears them to the corner shop. When I say this looks a bit odd she answers, ‘Oh, I do hope so.’ ‘It’s hard to feel purposeful while wearing these slippers,’ she once told me and that, of course, is why she’s so fond of them. I need a pair of slippers like that. I really do. I used to have slippers as a girl. When I put them on I felt different. I felt my slippers feeling. I didn’t even have to buy them. My parents bought them for me. Sometimes they were pink and furry and sometimes they were plainer. But they were always gentle. An acknowledgement that life needs soft places…times of retreat.

  My runners are now my slippers. Another sop to the fake athleticism I and many of my friends seem to share. They’re comfortable, but they’ve too much purpose. They’re not slightly silly. I miss my soft, silly shoes.

  When Mira reappears she curls up on the old and very creased leather armchair in the sitting-room. ‘Like a cup of tea?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she says gratefully. She has put on her earnest round-rimmed spectacles and is looking at her mail. She’s opened the blue envelope and is looking at its contents. Her hand is trembling slightly.

  ‘Who’s it from?’ I ask.

  She hesitates before replying, ‘It’s from Frank.’

  Frank is one of the reasons Mira says she wants to be an eccentric spinster. They were involved for a year. It was love with a capital L and the London Symphony Orchestra in the background. Frank was wonderful in all sorts of ways. The thing was, his wife and daughter thought he was wonderful too.

  ‘I would never, ever leave them. I couldn’t – they trust me,’ he used to tell her. ‘But I want you.’

  ‘I want you too,’ Mira agreed sadly. But as time passed she found there were lots of things about him she would gladly ditch. The long, lonely weekends, for instance. The needy but clipped phone calls and the furtive meetings in obscure locations. The passion of it all was blissful, but the secrecy was oppressive. She began to think him selfish.

  ‘It’s not like that,’ he’d protest, almost in tears.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she’d agree. ‘It’s not like that. But it is like that too.’

  They parted eventually. Mira put her foot down – she was wearing Nikes. ‘It’s just too complicated,’ she’d said.

  So now he’s gone, but every so often he sends her a letter to remind her that she is not forgotten. She keeps them carefully in a small, hand-carved rosewood box. She thinks they will meet again, in another life – she believes in reincarnation. She went to someone once who told her that she and Frank had been together before – about a hundred years ago. She was his concubine. She’s also been a Chinese peasant, an Indian soldier, a Spanish nun and a member of the Court of Versailles, apparently…and that’s just for starters. You wouldn’t think it to look at her.

  As I bring Mira her tea I notice something. I notice this time she hasn’t placed Frank’s letter in the rosewood box. She’s torn it into a clump of tiny pieces. She’s slumped in her chair and is staring at it. I study her worriedly. I can see by the deep silence on her face that she doesn’t want me to speak. I sigh and return to the kitchen. I usually cook the dinner if I’m home first. I peer into the fridge. According to the stickers a number of items in there will be inedible a minute past midnight. I take them out and try to cobble together some sort of meal.

  ‘Grub’s up, Mira,’ I call out. There is no answer. ‘Food’s ready!’ I yell. Still no reply. I go to the sitting- room. ‘Mira, dinner’s ready, didn’t you hear me?’

  She looks up at me apathetically. ‘Actually I’m not very hungry,’ she announces. ‘Maybe I’ll have a toasted sandwich later.’

  I frown and look at Frank’s torn-up letter, which is still lying on the coffee table. ‘Oh, come on, Mira,’ I coax. ‘Just have a small helping. It’s Marks and Spencer lasagne and there’s some salad too. It looks very tasty.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she mumbles, rising wearily from her armchair. She follows me into the kitchen and we commence our meal in complete silence. Mira does go silent occasionally. In fact sometimes she’s almost as evasive as Eamon.

  I wish she’d tell me what was in Frank’s letter. It must be something to do with the letter. She’s looking so sad and she’s hardly touched her dinner. Wine. That’s it. I’ll get some wine.

  ‘Mira, would you like some wine?’ I ask. ‘We’ve got that open bottle from the other evening. We might as well polish it off.’

  ‘OK,’ she replies glumly. When I bring the bottle to the table she grabs it and fills her tumbler right up to the rim. She gulps it down and I wait for it to make her more loquacious only it doesn’t. In fact if anything she seems to have retreated even further. She’s definitely brooding about something. Dear God, I hope she doesn’t become like Cyril too.

  ‘Mira,’ I say gingerly, ‘are you all right?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she frowns.

  ‘It’s just – it’s just I saw you’d torn up Frank’s letter.’

  A pained expression flits across her face and then changes into an ironic smile. ‘Yes, I thought I’d follow your artistic leanings and make a little collage.’ She takes another gulp of wine and stares at the table. I
decide not to probe the matter further. The subject of Frank is obviously about to be swept under the carpet again. In fact, I think Mira’s been sweeping quite a lot of things under the carpet recently. I wish our underlay could talk because she clearly isn’t going to.

  As soon as we finish our meal she starts to whip the plates from the table and almost throws them into the washing-up bowl. They clash together dramatically while she grabs the Lemon Quix and aims. She’s making this small domestic task seem like something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. I decide to leave her to it and exit the room swiftly.

  When Mira reappears about ten minutes later she seems a good deal calmer. We watch The Simpsons together and then I get a sudden urge to go for a walk. I get antsy sometimes, restive. There are moments when I could leave this cottage with just my passport. There are moments when I could dash to the airport and get on a plane without even asking where it’s going. It’s the wild wanton part of me. The Snickers buyer. ‘Mira, let’s go for a walk,’ I say. ‘It’s quite a sunny evening.’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ she asks.

  ‘I dunno. Where do you want to go to?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of going anywhere,’ she sighs. ‘I was going to fill in my membership form for the South Seas Club.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The South Seas Club. It’s for people who are interested in the South Seas.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were interested in the South Seas.’

  ‘Well, I am, now. The women wear grass skirts.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The women members wear grass skirts at meetings. It sounds fun.’

  ‘Well, yes, it certainly sounds…’ I leave the sentence unfinished and look at her ruefully.