by Maeve Binchy
Florrie would make time for it, she thought. She would not list the likely dinner guests that she might trap at her friend’s long table, smiling at them confidently through Albert’s family silver. When a bishop or vicar or a registrar came to say the word for Florrie, the word love wouldn’t have an alien ring to it.
She felt somehow that the mother who had thought of her as a flower would have been pleased with her and she was aware of tears beginning to well up in her eyes. But she willed them back, because the upper classes do not cry at christenings, weddings, or funerals. It is, after all, what sets them apart. Her apprenticeship had not been wasted.
THE BUSINESS TRIP
Lena had loved him for four long years. Not that he knew, of course. Men like Shay wouldn’t even consider that they could be loved silently and unselfishly like that. It didn’t make sense.
He probably assumed that Lena was fond of him, admired him, and might under the right circumstances be attracted to him. But if he thought of her at all, he might have assumed that she had a private life of her own. He would never have thought that this quiet, efficient assistant of his spent her entire life, both in and out of the office, thinking about him, trying to make his life easier and better, and in her dreams trying to share that life with him.
According to Maggie, Lena was not in love. She was suffering from an obsession, an infatuation. It wasn’t healthy for someone who was twenty-six to develop this kind of crush on a man who didn’t return it and wasn’t even aware of it. And however unwise it might have been to have allowed a temporary fascination to take over, it was positively dangerous to let it continue the way Lena had. She stopped being twenty-six and became twenty-seven, and twenty-eight and twenty-nine. Soon she would be thirty years of age, and what had she to show for it?
Lena said spiritedly that she had as much to show for it as anyone had to show for anything. She had been happy, she had made his life better. She hadn’t made a public fool of herself, as so many women had. She hadn’t settled for second best, as so many others had done. She loved every second of her working day, which was more than you could say for a lot of people. She was appreciated if not loved in her office, and only Maggie knew her secret. She was not an object of pity. Maggie wouldn’t tut-tut and shake her head over coffee with the girls about Lena’s foolishness. Maggie was an ally, even if she didn’t understand.
Maggie was Lena’s aunt. But they had always been much more like cousins or sisters. Only ten years divided them in age, and the teenage Maggie had loved the toddler, Lena, and treated her as a friend. Now Maggie, almost forty, with huge dark eyes and a great mane of black curly hair, looked and acted younger than her niece. Her life was fuller by far. Maggie’s problem had never been making men love her. It had been trying to stop them from loving her unwisely. And sometimes trying to stop herself from loving them in return—equally unwisely.
She had been married twice, widowed the first time, separated the second time, but these were only small milestones in the list of Maggie’s love: Sensible married men, fathers of large and settled families, wanted to throw up everything and move in with Maggie. She often had great trouble persuading them to do nothing of the sort. It wasn’t that she gave them unmentionable sexual favors, she told Lena with her big dark eyes full of honesty, it was just that they saw, however foolishly, a kind of life with her where they wouldn’t be hassled and troubled. They saw a strange and unrealistic freedom in living with Maggie, something they didn’t have at home. Maggie would never ask them to come to the supermarket and push the trolley, Maggie wasn’t a one for wanting the grass cut or the house painted, the car cleaned or the patio built up to impress the neighbors. Maggie would be happy to eat a meal of wild mushrooms and brown bread followed by strawberries. Very far from real life. Maggie would agree with them fervently that she was indeed far from real life and they must see her only now and then. The more she protested, the more they wanted her. Lena said she was outraged at the way Maggie got every man she wanted, and yet she, Lena, who kept all the rules, couldn’t get just the one.
Lena did keep the rules as written in the women’s magazines. She had shiny, well-cut hair, she was tall and slim, she had been to makeup lessons to make the most of her good complexion, her fair skin, and blue eyes. She dressed well and kept her clothes immaculately. Well, why wouldn’t she, Maggie grumbled, if she stayed at home every evening dreaming of lover boy Shay. There was all the time in the world to iron her blouses and sponge her skirts and polish her shoes, handbags, and belts till they shone. But had it done one bit of good in the department where she wanted it to succeed? No. None at all.
Lena’s friends and colleagues all said she looked very smart, but their praise and admiration was of no interest to her. Sometimes they wondered why she didn’t have a man in her life. She put them off with a laugh. And apart from Maggie, nobody had an inkling.
Maggie’s grumbling had always been good-natured. But now it was different. Two things were coming up: Lena’s thirtieth birthday, and a business trip with the famous Shay. Yes, he had asked the loyal Lena to London with him. Driving in his car, for a whole week.
Maggie felt it was time to play the heavy aunt for the first time in her life. She sat Lena down and told her to get ready for a serious lecture.
“Oh, not now,” Lena had cried. “Not now. There’s so much to be done, so many preparations. I have to decide what to wear, what to say, what social plans to set up, as well as all his business meetings. Can’t the lecture wait till I get home?”
“No, it can’t.” Maggie was adamant. “It’s about the trip; this has to be the make-or-break time. When you come back on the ferry and drive off the ramp, Shay must either be involved with you properly or else you will have given up all notion of him.”
Lena’s blue eyes filled with tears. “I don’t want anything as definite, as black-and-white, as that. Why does it all have to hinge on this trip?” She looked appalled at having to abandon what was after all the central part of her life.
“Because you are leaving your twenties and for the first time you are leaving the country with this beauty, and you have the rest of your life ahead of you.”
“It’s too frightening. I don’t want to try and seduce him or something like that.” Lena was trembling at the thought.
“Well, what’s all the fuss about what you’re going to wear and how you’re going to look? If you don’t want him to fancy you, why don’t you just go in an old sweater and a pair of jeans?” Maggie was ruthless.
“It’s different for you, you can make anyone fancy you.”
“So could you if you bothered. It’s got nothing to do with well-cut jackets and applying your blusher properly,” Maggie said.
“How, then?” Lena was eager.
“I’ll tell you, but only if you promise me that you will decide one way or another at the end of the week. When you come back off that car ferry, you’ll either be involved with him properly as two normal people who love each other, or you will leave that job, and put him out of your mind and heart.”
“It’s like doing a deal with the devil,” Lena complained.
“Much more like a guardian angel,” Maggie said.
They sat for three hours, Maggie with her notebook. At no stage were outfits or perfumes mentioned. There was no strategy about booking one room by mistake instead of two. There was to be no research into romantic restaurants in London where the lights would be low and there might even be violins in the background. No, if Lena was to get her man these kinds of cheap tricks were only Mickey Mouse efforts, according to Maggie. And since almost every man who moved in Dublin seemed to fancy Maggie in some way or other, she was worth listening to.
Maggie seemed shocked that Lena had worked for this man for four years, not to mention thinking that she had loved him for this length of time, and still knew so little about him. Maggie asked a string of questions. Lena knew nothing about his school days, whether he had liked it there or not, and how he had got into th
e business world in the first place. She didn’t know who his first employers had been, whether he had found it easy or frightening. She didn’t know what television programs he watched, and when he went to a match if it was because he knew all about the game or because he liked the sociability of it. Lena didn’t know how he got on with his two brothers and sister, how often he went to see his mother. She didn’t know if he liked being with his nephews and nieces. If he felt lonely on weekends, as so many people did in Dublin. How he decided what to eat and whether he had a washing machine or went to the launderette.
“What do you know about him, for heaven’s sake?” Maggie asked with some impatience.
Lena knew all about his current and past girlfriends, and she knew the restaurants he went to, and the nightclubs, and the bills for bouquets of flowers. She knew that and she knew about him at work, where he was tough and not afraid to go into a meeting and fight.
“Well-briefed by you, of course, with reports you have been working on all weekend when you weren’t putting more henna in your hair, hoping he’d notice.”
“I love him,” protested Lena.
“No, you don’t love him at all. You don’t know the first thing about him apart from this empty social thing. You might love him when you get to know him, and he might love you. But you might find him empty.”
Lena refused to accept this but agreed meekly to follow Maggie’s advice. In the ship’s dining room over a meal she would begin, and in the long drive across Britain she would not veer between business talk and gossip-column chat about nightclubs she didn’t even know. She would talk to him about himself.
“Suppose he asks me about myself?” Lena asked fearfully.
Maggie didn’t much think he would, but if he did, then she was to tell him the truth. Say she was perfectly happy, she had no wish to change from her life the way it was, assure him it was satisfactory. There was nothing that drove men as mad as that—the thought that women were actually contented the way they were, not scheming and conniving.
“But that’s not strictly true. I’m not totally contented the way I am,” Lena complained.
Maggie shrugged. “You always tell me you are when I try to change you.”
It was unanswerable.
The day before the trip Maggie rang her to wish her luck. “One thing, Lena, and remember this: He will notice you, he will fancy you. Truthfully, but you may not fancy him.”
“I probably gave you much too shallow a view of him,” Lena whispered in case anyone in the office would hear.
“If that was your view of him after four years of loving him, then I’m sure what you told me was very accurate,” Maggie said.
Lena learned a lot that night at dinner on board ship. She learned that his mother was demanding and never satisfied, that his brothers were discontented and jealous of his success. She heard that Shay’s sisters didn’t know how to bring up their children properly and gave in to them in everything. She heard that his school was full of sadistic teachers and moronic pupils, that they had ripped him off in his first job and cheated him in his second, and he had seen them coming in his third. He liked to cook but not to wash up; he thought these service apartments he lived in were a bit cramped, but he didn’t want to take on the whole palaver of gardens and roofs and drains in a house. He was probably looking for something like a town house.
In the old days, like every day up to this, Lena would have immediately said she would make inquiries about town houses, and go to endless trouble ringing up auctioneers and estate agents. This time she made no offers.
“What about your house or flat, is it what you want?” he asked, almost cursorily, as if he had felt that he might have been talking just a little too much about himself.
“Oh, it’s fine. I’m very happy there,” she said. She told him it was a garden flat and had plenty of light as well as nice shrubs and bushes outside big windows. He nodded briskly but seemed to look at her with slightly more interest.
On the long drive to London, they talked about friends. Shay said that he ran with a very lively crowd. No, they weren’t around on weekends much, but then, he often came into the office on Saturday afternoons to do a little catching up. Lena knew this only too well. She had to cope with the results of it on Mondays: confused notes, complicated questions. She had begun every week for as long as she could remember by sorting out his thoughts for a secretary to type up. He had got all the credit. Somehow it was disappointing to know he came in only because he was bored on Saturday afternoons. She had thought it was ambition.
He took his washing to his mother, it turned out. She could not believe it, but it was true. He had to go and see the woman once a week anyway, and she had a machine, so it made sense to leave her one load and collect another. And she liked it; what else had she to do?
By the time the signposts saying Central London came up, Lena had opened more doors than she might have wished to in Shay’s life.
He suggested they grab something to eat, and she said thank you but no. She had friends to see in London, so unless there was anything they wanted to discuss about work for the conference tomorrow, she would leave him to his own devices.
He seemed quite put out by this. Lena looked at his handsome face scowling with almost childlike disappointment.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to do the clubland circuit in London?” he asked, not very kindly.
“Lord no, that’s not my world at all. Just dinner with friends.”
It was true. Dinner with two old school friends—one a nun, one a nurse. They laughed and talked over old times. Something was lighter in Lena’s laugh; she felt it wasn’t an effort.
Next day they worked companionably at the conference, but she excused herself at lunchtime to sneak in a little shopping and said that she had a theater date in the evening. He was thoroughly bad-tempered on the second day of the conference.
“Are you going to keep running away all the time, or will we see each other at all?” he grumbled.
Big blue eyes wide, she said that honestly she was sorry…but since they never went out socially at home, she assumed it would be the same here. But, of course, she would be delighted to have dinner with him if he had anywhere in mind.
“I thought you might arrange somewhere,” he said.
“Oh no, I wouldn’t dream of it. If you are asking me to dinner, then you must, of course, choose where.”
It would once have been her wildest dream. Not only was the place expensive and romantic, but as he told her tale after tale of being misunderstood, betrayed, cheated, having got even, he took her hand.
“You’re very easy to talk to, Lena, and you look very lovely. I hadn’t realized.” She had smiled. It was a smile of someone who had known that this was predictable, not of someone who thought it was perfect.
When the evening ended and he suggested a brandy in his room, she said no. Perhaps she would prefer to have the nightcap in her room, he suggested, probably thinking that this was the height of sensitivity. No nightcap at all, Lena said. She who had planned this night for so long, and all it would lead to.
At one stage she began to wonder if Maggie had set her up. Every single harmless question she had asked had brought such a negative response that she had managed to strip Shay the man she had loved for years of any lovable quality. It was as if Maggie had known the answers in advance.
Maggie hadn’t suggested that Lena talk to Shay of love.
But that night she did. They were in a restaurant looking out on the river, and he told her that he thought he loved her—yes, strange as it might seem, and having worked together for so long—but he did think he loved her.
She looked at him for a long time.
“Well, say something,” he said petulantly.
“I don’t have any words,” she said truthfully.
He reached for her hands, but she pulled them away.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked him.
“How nice it is to love you,
how there you were under my nose all the time.”
At least, she thought, at least he is honest in a childish sort of way. It must be nice for him to think he’s found a ready-made love under his nose, as he put it.
For years she had seen how suitable she would be for him, how right as a companion, a friend, a wife. How much she would help his career and cope with his weaknesses.
Until tonight she had never seen what it would be like for her. A lifetime of putting up with his moods, building him up when he was low, lying for him, pretending for him. And turning a blind eye when he wanted to run with a lively crowd and do the clubs and walk the blondes.
She smiled at him affectionately. It was the way she had seen her aunt Maggie smile at a multitude of men.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked. He was sulking now; his declaration of love had not only not been returned, it had been smiled at, patted down, soothed away.
“I was thinking about going home, about driving out of the ferry and going home,” she said.
This was a very puzzling response. “Why, what will you do then?” he was anxious to know.
Lena wondered what would she do. She wouldn’t leave her job just because he had said he loved her and she wouldn’t love him back. She liked her work, she would stay there and overtake him if necessary. She would not fight with him or explain or apologize—Maggie never did that. She was happy in her garden flat, and now she was free as well. If some man came along—as men came along for Maggie—that she really did like, then she was free to love him.
“What will I do?” she answered him almost dreamily. The world was so full of possibilities now that the question was hard to answer. “What will I do when I get home? I think I’ll telephone my aunt.”
THE CROSSING