by Maeve Binchy
To be fair, and Maura struggled to be fair, Allie seemed very interested in her too. She asked Maura about her job, and even James seemed surprised at some of the things he heard about Maura’s daily routine.
“I didn’t know that,” he said, interested, and Maura realized with a pang that she hardly ever told James anything about work nowadays except to complain about the manager or the difficulty in parking a car or getting any shopping done at lunch hour.
Allie had a big red notebook, and she wrote their names down neatly, and all contact addresses that she would need. She was practical, too, asking about plumbers and electricians, and the number to phone if she smelled gas. She asked them to be sure to put any silver in the bank and to spend a couple of hours assembling all their private papers and documents and to lock them up somewhere.
“We don’t need to do that.” James was smiling that slightly besotted smile men in their late thirties smile, Maura noticed.
“Oh, but you do, James.” Allie was firm. “You see, I come from having minded dozens of homes; you haven’t. When you are over in America you’ll suddenly remember that you left something out you’d prefer that nobody else saw. This way you’ll know you didn’t. Also, you can’t ask me to pay your dentist’s bill or find your income tax for you if it’s all locked away, so I’m protecting myself, too.”
Allie had a marvelous laugh; she threw her head back and laughed like a child. She had perfect teeth, and her neck was long and suntanned.
Maura felt herself patting her hair. She was middle-aged, frumpish and settled, in her tights and shoes beside this lovely, leggy thing, all canvas shoes and golden limbs. And if Maura noticed it, then you could be sure that James did.
Allie asked about relations and friends, noted their names and numbers. She wrote down that Maura’s sister didn’t like dogs, and that James’s mother didn’t lock doors behind her. She seemed to understand everything in an instant.
Allie told them that she would write every week and give them an update on everything. She took instructions about phone messages and redirection of mail.
“Well, wasn’t that the direct intervention of God,” James said when Allie had finally left.
Maura felt that this was both going too far and also ignoring her own part in finding the home sitter.
“Yes, well, and my friend Patsy!” she said mulishly.
“Of course.” He didn’t care about niceties like this. “Isn’t she a treasure?
“She’s exactly what we want,” he said happily. “I didn’t dream that anyone like that existed.”
A cold, hard knot formed in Maura’s stomach. She felt a physical shock, like the feeling you get if you think you’ve swallowed a piece of glass. She realized she must not show her anxiety.
“Yes, she seems terrific, all right.”
“Aren’t you clever?” James said.
Maura could feel the back of her neck get cold and clammy. As she sat in her garden, she knew in a disembodied way that she would remember this moment forever. She knew the time and the date, and the way she sat on the garden seat with her hand stroking the head of Jessie the collie dog. Maura knew, with a certainty that she had never felt before about anything, that Allie was going to bring danger into her life. Real danger, threatening everything she had hoped for.
She had often wondered how women behaved once they knew for certain. But then she supposed few women were possessed of the foresight that she had. Other women had to wait for evidence and proof, or a friend whispering that perhaps she ought to know. Or worse still, the husband saying there was something he had to tell her.
Maura wondered if it was better to know so far in advance. Did it give her any advantage over the others? Were there any points to be gained in the game of trying to keep James for herself, and resist the siren call of Allie, who had already captured his heart?
It wasn’t a question of competing. Maura had thick, fine, fair hair; she couldn’t grow a mop of dark curls to shake around. Her mouth was small, almost pursed; this had once been thought an advantage, but she couldn’t laugh showing all those pearly teeth as Allie did. Maura’s legs and arms were white, not long and golden. If it were a straight fight, Allie would have the scepter and the crown. It couldn’t be a straight fight.
They saw her once more before they left—the very morning of the departure. She had brought her own sheets, she told them, and they saw them peeping from a huge straw basket.
“Is that the only luggage you have?” Maura tried hard to stop her voice from sounding like Allie’s mother or her schoolteacher.
Allie dimpled back at her. “I’m a gypsy, you see. I don’t need possessions. I use everybody else’s. I’ll watch your television, look at your clocks, listen to your radio, boil your kettle…. I don’t need to clutter myself up with a lot of things.”
James was listening to this as if it were words from the Book of Revelations. He was also looking at the corner of Allie’s sheets. Pretty blue and pink flowers with frilly edges on them. Maura knew that her own dull fitted sheets in white and pink were uninviting by comparison.
It had never been difficult to work out James’s thought processes. They were very simple and direct; they went relentlessly from point A to point B.
“We never asked you, Allie, if there is anyone…any friend…boy…man…” He broke off in confusion.
“Allie knows she can invite any friend here.” Maura was crisp.
“No, I meant…you know.” James looked pathetic; he was dying to know if there was anyone. Maura held her breath, but not with any hope. What she had felt as she sat on that garden seat had not been a suspicion, it had been a foresight. It wasn’t a matter of fearing that this golden girl would destroy Maura’s life. She didn’t just fear it, she knew it.
Allie laughed lightly. “Oh, don’t worry about that, James,” she said. “I’m between lovers at the moment.”
“I’m sure that state won’t last very long.” He was being gallant, arch. Idiotic.
“You’d be surprised.” The smile was easy. “I have to wait for the right man.”
Maura knew that Allie would wait three months. The right man, James, was being taken out of the country temporarily, but she would wait and plot and plan for his return.
She wrote every week, addressing the letters to Maura, but this was only a ploy. She talked of long walks on the beach in Killiney throwing the sticks for Jessie, chatting with James’s mother. A remarkable woman for her age, and so interesting about the year she had spent in Africa.
“Poor Mum, delighted with a new audience,” James said.
Allie had contacted Maura’s sister Geraldine; they had, it seemed, been visiting each other a lot. Maura hoped this didn’t mean that Geraldine would be dropping in at all hours when they got back.
Geraldine had been frightened by a dog when she was young; this was where her fear stemmed from.
“I didn’t know that,” James said.
“Neither did I.” Maura was grim.
The visit to the midwestern campus was a sort of success. Only a “sort of,” Maura thought.
There was indeed a chance to get closer. Evenings on their own. Walks together. None of the pressures of home, no traffic to cope with or talk about, since they lived in the center of everything. No duty calls to people, no telephone ringing except from kind neighbors asking them to drop by for a barbecue or a drink.
But the week seemed to be spent waiting for Allie’s next letter and analyzing the last one.
“Imagine, the Hurleys asked her to dinner,” James said.
Maura had noted that too. “Very kind of them. They’re wonderful at looking after strays,” she said. It had been a mistake. James frowned.
“I don’t think you’ll find that they classified our Allie as a stray,” he said.
Maura hated her being called “our Allie.” She also hated hearing in a letter that old Mrs. Green was much better now and would be coming home from the hospital soon with a new hip.
“I didn’t know she had a hip replacement either,” Maura said. “They keep themselves very much to themselves.”
“Not anymore they don’t,” James said tersely.
“Will we send them a card?” Maura sounded tentative.
“You were always the one afraid of drawing them on ourselves.”
“Well, since they’ve been drawn…” She knew her voice sounded sharp.
“Up to you.” He sounded a million miles away. Or a few thousand miles away. Back in that house and garden, in those flowery sheets, on warm terms with the neighbors. Maura felt that cold knot return. Like a flashback in a film, she saw herself sitting with a hand on Jessie’s soft velvet fur.
There was a chill in the warm American evening, and she gave a little shiver.
“Are you all right?” he asked, concerned. He would always be kind to her, see that she managed as well as possible in the circumstances. She could see into the future, when he would call around once a year to discuss investments, and whether the roof needed to be redone.
But where would he call? She would not give him the house, she would not walk out and let Allie take over that place she had loved and lavished her heart on for ten years.
She would live there alone if need be. Her eyes filled with tears.
“You seem very tense here,” he said kindly. “If you like, we can get away a little earlier. I mean, I can cram the lectures together a bit towards the end. Be back sooner.”
“What about Allie? She thinks she is staying three months.”
“Oh, she can stay on with us surely? Until she goes to her next place. She’s not a fusser, our Allie.”
Maura said she didn’t feel a bit tense, she simply loved it here, there was no question of going home early. She knew her smile was small and pinched. Without surgery she would never have a broad, open smile like Allie’s.
It was a perfect September day when they got home. Maura rang Allie from the airport.
“How did she sound?” James was eager.
Maura wanted to say that she sounded like an overgrown schoolgirl, laughing and welcoming them back and words tumbling over each other. Instead she said that Allie sounded fine, and that she had arranged a few people to come in. “That was lovely of her.” James smiled happily. “Friends of hers, is it?”
“No, friends of ours, I think,” Maura said.
“We don’t have that many friends,” James said absently.
“Of course we do,” Maura snapped.
Around them in Dublin Airport passengers were being met, embraced, and ferried out to cars. Maura and James pushed their trolley of luggage to a taxi ungreeted.
“We could have been met if we had wanted it,” Maura said in answer to no question.
On their lawn, Allie had set up a table. She had vases of flowers, and jugs of sangria. James’s mother was there, helping and feeling as if she were in charge. Geraldine was there with her mute husband Maurice, chatting animatedly to the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Green, and discussing the success of the operation. The Hurleys were there with their extended family. The children all seemed to know Allie well. Maura had to struggle to remember their names, there were so many of them. A couple from across the road whom Maura and James had never met were among the crowd milling around.
“I do hope we aren’t intruding,” the woman said. “But Allie was so insistent, she said you’d love everyone here.”
“She was utterly right.” Maura strove to put the warmth and enthusiasm into her voice that she knew were called for.
“Have a shower, you must be exhausted.” Allie had thought of everything.
Maura stood under the water while James shaved at the washbasin nearby.
“What a girl,” he said at least three times. He was anxious to be back down there joining in the fun. “Wasn’t this a smashing idea of hers?”
Maura’s voice was shaky. “Great,” she said, hoping the running water covered the sound of a sob. “Simply great. You go on down. I’ll be out in a minute.”
She stood in her bedroom and tried to find something that might look festive and happy to wear. She seemed to see only blouses and skirts or matronly dresses that would make her fit into the generation of James’s mother or the Greens.
Allie was leaving that afternoon; she would not stay and destroy Maura’s life by taking her husband. Her next job was abroad. Minding a farmhouse in the Dordogne.
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.
PACKAGE TOUR
They met at a Christmas party, and suddenly everything looked bright and full of glitter instead of commercial and tawdry as it had looked some minutes before.
They got on like a house on fire and afterward when they talked about it they wondered about the silly expression. “A house on fire.” It really didn’t mean anything, like two people getting to know each other and discovering more and more things in common. They were the same age, each of them one quarter of a century old. Shane worked in a bank, Moya worked in an insurance office. Shane was from Galway and went home every month. Moya was from Clare and went home every three weeks. Shane’s mother was difficult and wanted him to be a priest. Moya’s father was difficult and had to be told that she was staying in a hostel in Dublin rather than a bedsitter.
Shane played a lot of squash because he was afraid of getting a heart attack or, worse, of getting fat and being passed over when aggressive, lean fellows were promoted. Moya went to a gym twice a week because she wanted to look like Jane Fonda when she grew old and because she wanted to have great stamina for her holidays.
They both loved foreign holidays, and on their first evening out together Shane told all about his trips to Tunisia and Yugoslavia and Sicily. In turn, Moya told her tales of Tangiers, Turkey, and of Cyprus. Alone among their friends they seemed to think that a good foreign holiday was the high spot of the year.
Moya said that most people she knew spent the money on clothes, and Shane complained that in his group it went on cars or drink. They were soul mates who had met over warm, sparkling wine at a Christmas party where neither of them knew anyone else. It had been written for them in the stars.
When the January brochures came out, Moya and Shane were the first to collect them; they had plastic bags full of them before anyone else had got around to thinking of a holiday. They noted which were the bargains, where were early-season or late-season three-for-the-price-of-two-week holidays. They worked out the jargon.
Attractive flowers cascading down from galleries could mean the place was alive with mosquitoes. Panoramic views of the harbor might mean the hotel was up an unmerciful hill. Simple might mean no plumbing, and sophisticated could suggest all-night discos.
The thing they felt most bitter about was the single-room supplement. It was outrageous to penalize people for being individuals. Why should travel companies expect that people go off on their holidays two by two like the animals into an ark? And how was it that the general public obeyed them so slavishly? Moya could tell you of people who went on trips with others simply on the basis that they all got their holidays in the first fortnight in June.
Shane said that he knew fellows who went to Spain as friends and came home as enemies because their outing had been on the very same basis. Timing.
But as the months went on and the meetings became more frequent and the choice of holiday that each of them would settle for was gradually
narrowed down, they began to realize that this summer they would probably travel together. That it was silly to put off this realization. They had better admit it.
They admitted it easily one evening over a plate of spaghetti.
It had been down to two choices now. The Italian lakes or the island of Crete. And somehow it came to both of them at the same time: This would be the year they would go to Crete. The only knotty problem was the matter of the single room.
They were not as yet lovers. They didn’t want to be rushed into it by the expediency of a double booking. They didn’t want it to be put off-limits by the fact of having booked two separate rooms. Shane said that perhaps the most sensible thing would be to book a room with two beds. This had to be stipulated on the booking form. A twin-bedded room. Not a double bed.
Shane and Moya assured each other they were grown-ups.
They could sleep easily in two separate beds, and suppose, just suppose in the fullness of time after mature consideration and based on an equal decision with no one party forcing the other…they wanted to sleep in the same bed…then the facility, however narrow, would be there for them.
They congratulated each other on their maturity and paid the booking deposit. They had agreed on a middle-of-the-road kind of hotel, in one of the resorts that had not yet been totally discovered and destroyed. They had picked June, which they thought would avoid the worst crowds. They each had a savings plan. They knew that this year was going to be the best year in their lives and the holiday would be the first of many taken together all over the world.
The cloud didn’t come over the horizon until March when they were sitting companionably reading a glossy magazine. Shane pointed out a huge suitcase on wheels with a matching smaller suitcase. Weren’t they smashing, he said; a bit pricey, but maybe it would be worth it.