by Maeve Binchy
Moya thought she must be looking at the wrong page. Those were the kind of suitcases that Americans bought for going around the world.
Shane thought that Moya couldn’t be looking at the right page; they were just two normal suitcases, but smart and easy to identify on the carousel. Just right for a two-week holiday. But for how many people? Moya wondered wildly; surely the two of them wouldn’t have enough to fill even the smaller suitcase. Well for one person, me, Shane said with a puzzled look.
Between the two happy young people there was a sudden gray area. Up to now their relationship had been so open and free, but suddenly there were unspoken things hovering in the air. They had told each other that their friends’ romances had failed and even their marriages had rocked because they had never been able to clear the air. Shane and Moya would not be like that. But still, neither one of them seemed able to bring up the subject of the suitcases. The gulf between them was huge.
Yet in other ways they seemed just as happy as before. They went for walks along the pier, they played their squash and went to the gym, they enjoyed each other’s friends, and both of them managed to put the disturbing black cloud about the luggage into the background of their minds. Until April, when another storm came and settled on them.
It was Moya’s birthday, and she unwrapped her gift from Shane, which was a traveling iron. She turned it around and around and examined it in case it was something else disguised as a traveling iron. In the hope that it was something disguised as a traveling iron. But no, that’s what it was.
It was lovely, she said faintly.
Shane said he knew ladies loved to have something to take the creases out on holidays, and perhaps Moya shouldn’t throw away the tissue paper; it was terrific for folding into clothes when you were packing, it took out all that crumpled look, didn’t she find?
Moya sat down very suddenly. Absolutely on a different subject, she said she wondered how many shirts Shane took on holiday. Well, fifteen obviously, and the one he was wearing and sports shirts and a couple of beach shirts.
“Twenty shirts?” Moya said faintly.
That was about it.
And would there be twenty socks and knickers, too? Well, give or take. Give or take how many? A pair or two. There seemed to be a selection of shoes and belts, and the odd sun hat.
Moya felt all the time that Shane would smile his lovely familiar, heart-turning smile and say, “I had you fooled, hadn’t I?” and they would fall happily into each other’s arms. But Shane said nothing.
Shane was hoping that Moya would tell him soon where all this list of faintly haranguing questions was leading. Why she was asking him in such a robotic voice about perfectly normal things. It was as if she asked him did he brush his teeth or did he put on his clothes before leaving the house. He stared at her anxiously. Perhaps he wasn’t showing enough interest in her wardrobe? Maybe he should ask about her gear.
That did not seem to be a happy solution. Moya, it turned out, was a person who had never checked in a suitcase in her life; she had a soft squelchy bag of the exact proportions that would fit under an airline seat and would pass as carry-on baggage. She brought three knickers, three bras, three shirts, three skirts, and three bathing suits. She brought a sponge bag, a pair of flip-flop sandals, and a small tube of travel detergent.
She thought that a holiday should never involve waiting for your bags at any airport, and never take in dressing for dinner, and the idea of carrying home laundry bags of dirty clothes was as foreign to her as it was to Shane—that anyone would spend holiday time washing things and drying them.
“But it only takes a minute,” pleaded Moya.
“But it takes no time at all if you bring spares,” pleaded Shane. “The arms would come out of your sockets carrying that lot,” said Moya. “We wouldn’t get into the bathroom with all your clothes draped around it,” said Shane.
They talked about it very reasonably, as they had always promised each other they would do. But the rainbows had gone, and the glitter had dimmed.
It would have been better if they had actually met on holidays, they said, with Moya carrying the shabby holdall and Shane the handsome and excessive luggage. Then they would have known from the start that they weren’t people who had the same views about a package tour and how you packed for it. It was a hurdle they might have crossed before they fell in love. Not a horrible shock at the height of romance.
They were practical, Moya and Shane; they wondered if it would iron itself out if they paid the singleroom supplement. That way Moya wouldn’t see the offending Sultan’s Wardrobe, as she kept calling it, and Shane wouldn’t be blinded by wet underwear, as he kept fearing. But no, it went deeper than that. It seemed to show the kind of people they were: too vastly different ever to spend two weeks, let alone a lifetime, together.
As the good practical friends they were, they went back to the travel agency and transferred their bookings to separate holidays with separate hopes and dreams.
THE APPRENTICESHIP
It was to be one of the most stylish weddings of the year. Florrie thought that if anyone had been giving odds a quarter of a century ago when she was born whether this child would ever be a guest at something like this, those odds would have been enormous. A child born in a small house in a small street in Wigan didn’t seem likely to end up as the bride’s best friend at what the newspapers were calling the wedding of the decade. If only her mother had lived, Florrie thought, if only her father had cared. They might have been able to get some mileage out of it, some reward for the long hours of work, the high hopes.
There would be pictures of Florrie in tomorrow’s papers, probably a glimpse of her on tonight’s television news. She would figure certainly in the glossy magazines, her hat alone would ensure she was well snapped. She would be seen laughing and sharing a joke, probably with some youngish and handsome member of the aristocracy. This would not be hard, because unusually for a society wedding there might not be many young women friends of the bride around. And the groom’s friends, being horsey, would not be as photogenic. No, Florrie knew that she would figure in the Tatler and Harper’s. And she knew how to smile without showing a mouthful of teeth and how to raise her chin in a way that made her neck look long and upper class.
She knew that it looked much more classy not to be seen with a glass in her hand, but to appear fascinated by the particular braying chap that she was meant to be talking to.
Florrie knew all of this because she had worked at it, and learned it. Like she had never worked at anything when she was at school. Long ago in a different place and at a different time, with Camilla, except of course that Camilla had not been Camilla then, she had been Ruby. And Ruby and Florrie had been best friends. As in many ways they were still best friends today. The society columns might well describe Florrie tomorrow as a very close friend of the bride. But it would not say that they had grown up together, that they had shared great doorstep sandwiches in their lunch hour, that they had collected old newspapers just so that they could read the society pages and see how people lived in a different and better world.
They had read their subject carefully, young Ruby and young Florrie. No hint of social climbing or being a hanger-on. Not even the most suspicious could fault Camilla or catch her out in a lie today. Camilla had always said she was from way up north, that her parents were dead, that she had hardly any family. Better to stick as close to the truth as possible, she had advised Florrie, less for them to unearth, and you can never be caught out in a lie. Even if they found out she had once been Ruby, Camilla was prepared to say it had been a pet name. She thought it was terribly brave and funny of Florrie to hold on to her name. But then, Florrie was such a character! Florrie had held on to her name because she remembered her mother holding her as a little girl.
“I had a doll once called Florrie,” her mother had said. “I never thought I’d have a little baby of my own, a beautiful baby to look after.” Florrie was three when she heard this
first, hardly a baby, and still further from babyhood when her mother dressed her for school and held her face gently between red rough hands. “Florrie,” she had breathed in a voice full of admiration and love. “Such a beautiful name for a beautiful little girl. They wanted me to call you Caroline…but I wanted a beautiful name for you, one you’d love…Florence. It means a flower, little Florrie, beautiful little flower.”
Ruby’s mother might have thought she was a little jewel. She might even have said so, but Camilla never said it Camilla said nothing about her parents. Except that they were dead. Which was true.
They had died together in a coach crash, on the very first holiday of their married life. Florrie’s father had said that’s what you got for grand ideas, coach tours to the Continent, no less. Florrie’s mother had said maybe they should take in the child. Ruby was eleven, and she had nobody else. Everyone had said it was a great idea. After all, it was unusual to be an only child in their street. Now Ruby and Florrie were like twins. And apart from reading all those “silly books,” as people called the magazines they read, they were sensible girls, too. Not silly like some, not getting into trouble with boys. Hardworking. On Saturdays they worked in the beauty salon, and they learned how it was all done. The proprietor never had two such willing assistants. As well as sweeping floors and folding towels, they stood entranced watching the facials and manicures.
The customers liked them, two bright youngsters full of unqualified admiration. The customers didn’t know they had come to learn—as they went to the fashion stores to learn, and as they worked in the good hotel to watch. And they did secretarial courses at night. By the time they had their O levels they were ready for anything. Ruby was ready to leave, to go south to start Stage Two. Florrie could go nowhere, her mother was failing fast.
She sat by her mother’s bed and listened to the homespun wisdom, with a heart that was filled with impatience as well as love. She heard her mother beg her to believe that Dad was a good man really. It was just that he was a bit mulish, and drank a little too much. Dad had said no kind word in the seventeen years that Florrie had lived in his house. She nodded and pretended that she agreed with the mother, who would not be leaving hospital and coming home. Her mother said that Ruby was right to have gone to London, she was impatient, she would have been silly to stay around. The woman found nothing odd that the child she had taken in had abandoned her. Ruby has great unhappiness in her soul, she said. Florrie sat by the bed and gritted her teeth. Patience and forgiveness like this were unrealistic. Surely they couldn’t be considered virtues. The nurses liked her, the handsome tall girl, a blonde with well-cut hair and long pink fingernails, unlike her stooped and work-weary mother. The daughter had character, the nurses told each other. She wouldn’t stay long with the bad-tempered father once the poor woman passed away.
Florrie stayed a week. Her father’s farewell was grudging, as every other gesture had been. He had always known she would go, he said, too high and mighty by far for them. No, she needn’t keep coming back up, there wasn’t all that much more to say.
Florrie was astonished at the change in her friend in ten short months. Vowel sounds had altered, and that wasn’t all. Ruby was no longer Ruby. It’s only a name, she had explained, it could have been anything.
“I know,” Florrie had said. “I should have been Caroline.”
“Then BE Caroline,” Camilla had begged.
“Never.” Florrie’s eyes had flashed at the thought.
They looked at each other then, a long look.
“It’s only the name,” Florrie had said eventually. “I’m on for everything else.”
And it was like the old days. They laughed as they heard each other’s phrases; you never said you had been to the WC or the toilet, it was the lavatory. You didn’t say serviette, you said napkin, and it wasn’t posh to have paper ones that you could throw away when they got crumpled. They had plenty of time: It was an apprenticeship, they told each other. They had until they were twenty, then they would be ready. To move among the smart and the beautiful, to be at ease among them, to marry them and live in comfort for the rest of their lives.
It would only be hard if they were unprepared. They had heard too many tales of people being trapped by their humble origins. Camilla and Florrie would be different. They would invent no pedigree that could be checked and found faulty. They would shrug and ask did such things matter anymore. They would look so much the part and seem to care so little about proving themselves that soon they would be accepted. They would try hard but would never be seen to try at all; that was the secret.
And soon they were indeed ready. And it wasn’t nearly as difficult as they thought. There was a career structure. Chalet girls in ski resorts, a few weeks working in smart jewelers and in art houses so that they met the right type of girl. They were slow to take up with the right type of men at the beginning. They wanted other girls to be their allies at the start. And anyway they wanted to be ready when they found the really right men. They had noticed that it wasn’t only the Royals who liked their girlfriends not to have played the field; a lot of the Uppers thought that girls who had been around a lot might not be good wife material, and after all, one wouldn’t like to think that lots of chaps had been with one’s wife. What?
And in the meantime, because they were so bright and met so many people, they actually got good jobs. Camilla was high up in an estate agency and Florrie was now a partner in a firm of interior decorators. Years of watching for quality and trying to define it had paid off for both of them.
And then Camilla showed a couple of town houses to a chap who thought she was quite super and asked her to his place in the country for the weekend. She went, but she was slower than he thought to begin with a teeny affair, as he called it. In fact, she was adamant about not beginning it. He complained about her bitterly over a bottle of Bollinger to his friend Albert. Albert said that it was very rum, the girl must be mad. He’d like to meet her; he always liked meeting mad people.
Albert was of blood so blue that it almost frightened Camilla off. But she decided to take him on. This was the challenge she had spent years rehearsing for. This was the prize she had hardly dared to hope for.
Albert was intrigued by her. The girl who hadn’t been to bed with his friend, who wouldn’t go to bed with him either. Who wasn’t frightened of his mother, who was casual to the point of indifference about her own background. She was not a gold digger, she had a position of importance in her firm. Nobody could see the potential like Camilla, they said. She dressed well, she seemed to have lots of girlfriends who all spoke glowingly of her. She had no past.
Camilla played it beautifully. She waited until Albert was truly besotted and at that precise moment she told him she was thinking of moving to Washington, D.C. There had been interest and offers; she was vague lest he ask her what interest and which offers. But she had timed it right. Albert couldn’t let her leave. Albert’s father predictably said she was a fine-looking filly but had she any breeding; his mother unpredictably said she was about the only kind of woman who might make a success of Albert and the rolling acres, and the complicated property investments and the tied cottages. The wedding of the decade was on.
It was decided between them that Florrie should not be the bridesmaid; the press would be too inquisitive, would ask about their origins. Papers nowadays did horrible things. They might send a photographer up to that small street and, perish the thought, find Florrie’s father, surly in his suspenders. And he might tell that Camilla was Ruby and that her parents had been killed on their first coach tour abroad.
Better to have six flower girls and Albert’s horsey-looking sister. Wiser to have the lovely Florrie stand out among the guests. A young woman of elegance, successful in her field. Further proof, if any were needed, that the bride was the right stuff or as right as you can get in these days of social change and upheaval.
Florrie stood in the old church and looked up at the flags of the regiment th
at Albert’s family had fought in. The stained-glass windows remembered various ancestors, and the pews had brass plates recalling the family. The bishop was old and genial. He spoke of duty and of hope. Florrie listened as she looked at Camilla’s beautiful face; she knew that her friend was listening, too.
Then the bishop spoke of love. He told how it conquered everything and that it cast out envy and ambition and greed. His eyes became misty when he talked of love.
The night before, Florrie and Camilla had talked for a long time. They had talked as they had never been able to talk since that day when Florrie had come to London and said she would change everything, everything but her name. They laughed as they hadn’t laughed for years, they drank champagne instead of the lemon tea they had learned to like when they were fourteen because they had read it was lower class to take milk.
They had said that the battle had been half won, and now that Camilla was in, she could have the right kind of dinner parties and house parties to launch her friend. Her talented friend with the wonderfully funny name. They had embraced and congratulated each other on their magical apprenticeship.
But they hadn’t talked about love. And in the church where Albert’s bones would lie one day, very probably beside the bones of her friend Ruby, Florrie shivered. She knew that as far as she was concerned the apprenticeship was over. She had got far enough. Perhaps she had got much farther than her friend who would appear in tomorrow’s papers as the bride of the decade, who would be called Lady Camilla, who would live a life without love. They said that young girls’ heads were meant to be filled with stories of love, but that had never happened to Ruby or Florrie. There had been no room in their heads, the space was too filled with rule books on how to behave and how to say “glad to know you” rather than “pleased to meet you.” It had been too busy an apprenticeship to allow for thoughts of love.