by Maeve Binchy
“It’s like a real cruise, isn’t it?” Mary said, then wished she hadn’t said it. What did she know about a real cruise except reading the brochures?
“I was just thinking that too,” said Lavender, the older woman. “Not that I was ever on a cruise, mind, but it feels as if we should have two weeks, and visit exotic places every day instead of just getting out at Liverpool.” They laughed, united in never having been on a luxury cruise liner, united in admiring the seagulls, and valuing a few minutes away from the family.
“Are you going or coming back?” Lavender asked. She had a kind face and bright, interested eyes. Mary felt you could talk and she really might care what you said.
“Going over. The children have never seen their grandparents. It’s a bit of an ordeal really.”
Why had she told that to a stranger? She hadn’t told any of her neighbors, nor her best friend Kath, nor her sister Betty. Why did she blurt it out to a woman with a North of England accent on the B & I boat?
“Oh, I know,” Lavender consoled her. “It’s always an ordeal, isn’t it? Maybe we should have to live with our in-laws all the time in the same tribe and never move, or else we should never see them at all. It’s the in-between bit that causes all the guilt.”
This was so exactly true that Mary almost jumped to hear her own feelings echoed….
“Did you have that kind of…well, that kind of thing, you know, with your husband’s parents? Wanting to make it all closer and then getting it a bit wrong?”
“Tell me,” Lavender said.
And Mary did. Every bit of it. Slowly, hesitating sometimes, going back over bits in case they hadn’t been fair. How she met John when he was on a cycling holiday in Ireland. John was unhappy at college, he found it was hurting him inside his head, the stress and the worry. It wasn’t only exams and study. He didn’t think he would ever be happy as a teacher. He was too anxious in the classroom practice, he wouldn’t be able to keep control, and he could not look forward to a life that would be a constant battle and a series of confrontations in the classroom every day.
“Why don’t you do something else with your life, then?” Mary had asked him. “We only get to come onto the earth once. Wouldn’t it be a pity to spend it all doing something that makes you unsettled?”
It was like a revelation to John. There and then he decided to abandon the idea of being a teacher. He wrote to the college, he wrote to his parents and to his girlfriend in London. He said he had been feeling a bit lost; now he was going to find himself in Ireland. He was going to work on a farm while he was finding out what to do with the rest of his life.
Nobody was pleased—not the college, which worried about his grant, not his girlfriend in London, who worried for four weeks and then sent a card telling him it couldn’t matter less whether he found himself or didn’t, since she had found somebody more normal. And his parents worried most of all. He was an only child; they had their hopes set on his being a teacher, and now he was a farmhand in Ireland, for heaven’s sake. They were very disapproving. They were not people who wrote letters much or made cross-Channel phone calls. But they disapproved nonetheless. Heavily.
And when John and Mary got engaged, they assumed that it was a shotgun marriage, which it wasn’t, and that it would be in a Roman Catholic Church full of images of saints and the Virgin, which it was. And they said they couldn’t come to the wedding.
Mary sent pictures of the children, Jacinta, now eight, and John Paul, who was born the day the Pope came to Ireland and was seven. Looking back on it, Mary wondered if she should have chosen different names for the children. But surely that wasn’t important. John’s parents could hardly disapprove of a child’s name as being from a different tribe. And Mary had been careful to send pictures of the children at Christmas rather than the First Communion snapshot that she felt the instinct to send each time.
Lavender was full of praise. Mary had done more than her share. And where was the problem?
It wasn’t exactly a problem; there was no out-and-out war, just a distance in every sense of the word. And a dread of meeting these people, who wouldn’t come to Ireland, who had never shown any greater interest than a dutiful card at Christmastime. Mary was not looking forward to hearing what a brilliant career had been cut short when John had met her in Ireland ten long years ago.
She didn’t want to make excuses for the life they led in a small country town where John worked happily on a farm and Mary was a dressmaker.
And they were going now because John’s father was unemployed, had been for a year, and the word had trickled back from a woman neighbor that John’s dad was taking it hard. Mary had suggested they visit Ireland and as usual it had been turned down, so, gritting her teeth, she had then suggested that they take the children to visit their grandparents, and this had been agreed to. Ungraciously, of course. “You’ll have to take us as you find us.” But still agreed.
It was a two-week visit. Too long, Mary thought, but it was a huge undertaking, four of them to go to London; it would be a great waste to go for less time.
Lavender said that Mary was a positive gem among women. She said she was sure that the parents-in-law would be so pleased that in a few days they would all wonder whether the distance could possibly have been in their imaginations.
“Would you like a little advice?” she asked, almost shyly.
“Oh, I’d love anything you could tell me, you being English and a bit older, not that you’d be as old as them or anything, but you know…”
Lavender leaned her back against the rail, squinted into the sun, and talked not directly to Mary but as if she was speaking to herself. She looked very much like a woman who should be on a luxury cruise liner waiting for an executive husband to come back from a game of deck tennis with the captain.
“I wouldn’t apologize or explain too much. Maybe let them think they were part of your lives, even though they weren’t. The children should know a bit about them, like their birthdays and their names, and where they grew up themselves. And perhaps you might ask, all of you, about your husband as a little boy, you know, when he was seven or eight, what he read and what toys he played with. They probably have them still. And it could be assumed rather than said that one day, soon, but not a fixed day, the grandparents would come to Ireland.”
Lavender seemed apologetic. She felt she had talked too much.
“I wish you wouldn’t say you were laying down the law. I’m just overjoyed to get some ideas. That’s a very good thought, you know. I don’t know their birthdays and the children don’t know anything at all about them.”
“There’ll be plenty of time on the train to London.”
“You have children yourself?” Mary was diffident.
“One, a daughter.” There seemed to be a full stop.
“That’s nice,” Mary said. “Or isn’t it?”
“Not much at the moment, it isn’t.”
They had started to walk around the deck. People sat in chairs lathering themselves with Nivea. Duty-free bags were being tucked under the sunbathers, children ran round excited, passengers had all started to talk to each other in the relaxed way of holidaymakers. There might be long drives, or train journeys, or even family ordeals ahead, but on the ship they were suspended. It was time out of time. People spoke, as they often had no time to speak when on land.
“I’m sorry,” Mary said to Lavender. “You’re so easy, you should have a good time with a daughter.”
“I did until she was fourteen. Then she met this lad. Oh, I think a hundred times a day how different life would have been if she hadn’t met him.
“She never opened a schoolbook from that day to this. We were before the courts for her every month of the year. If it wasn’t truancy it was shoplifting, then it was glue sniffing, then it was a stolen car.”
It had certainly not been the life they had hoped for their Emma.
“And did she get over the lad?” Mary sighed, thinking that all this might easily
lie ahead for her with Jacinta in a troubled world.
“No, she’ll never get over him. She’s eighteen now and he’s found a new love. So Emma sits and cries. She’s sitting down in the restaurant now with her dad, crying. I couldn’t take it anymore; she cried all through this holiday in Ireland we took specially to give her a treat. I couldn’t see it for one second more. That’s why I came up on deck.”
“I’m glad you did,” Mary said.
“So am I,” said Lavender. “But you can see I’m not one to be handing out advice. You see how poor my own situation is. I can’t even sit and talk to my own daughter.”
“Wasn’t it nice of you to bring her to Ireland on a holiday, though?” Mary said admiringly. “A lot of mothers would not have done, with a girl who got into all that sort of trouble. She’s lucky.”
“She doesn’t think so, she thinks she’s cursed with middle-aged, old-fashioned parents. She’d like to be left alone with that yobbo.”
“Still, she came with you. She’s eighteen, grown up, she needn’t have come unless she wanted to.”
“True.” Lavender’s face was sad.
“What would be the best that could happen. The very best?”
Lavender was thoughtful. “I used to think if he disappeared off the face of the earth that would be the best. But in their mad white-faced Mohican-hair way with chains dangling and safety pins all over their ears…they love each other. So I suppose the best that could happen is for them to love each other without breaking the law and for him to be a bit civil to us. We are part of Emma’s life too; for years we held her by the hand and dreamed of what she would do. If he took that into consideration a bit…”
“That’s why you told me to ask John’s parents about the toys, wasn’t it?” Mary said.
“Love, it’s a different world to yours. You’re a lovely warm woman trying to build bridges; he’s just a yobbo with a face like the devil trying to break up everything he comes across.”
“They must have thought that about me too,” Mary said. “I only realize it now. I was so alien and so determined. All the time I was annoyed they couldn’t be a bit warmer. But I never thought what it was like to be them, having held John’s hand for years and listened to his baby talk and watched him starting out to school.”
They walked companionably on their tour. They would never meet again, nor write to each other. Mary would never know if the yobbo reformed, or if Emma dried her tears over him. She wouldn’t even know what Emma looked like, or her father, who was sitting patiently handing her more and more paper table napkins to wipe the sad, pale, punky face.
And Lavender would never know if the visit went well, and if John’s parents took out his old train for John Paul to play with and if Mary became friendly with his mum and helped in the kitchen. She would never hear if the invitation to Ireland, which would be just assumed rather than stated, would in fact be taken up.
Their lives would never cross again.
But while they did cross on a sunny day on a blue sea they talked as all shipboard passengers do in a way that would sound to the seagulls above that these people were friends for life.
And Lavender told Mary that all her sisters had been called after flowers and Mary told Lavender that in her class at school there were eleven girls called Mary and it had been very confusing.
They never knew that their husbands were having a drink at the bar.
Emma’s tears had dried, John Paul and Jacinta had found a new friend, and it happened that Lavender’s John and Mary’s John were standing having a pint. They talked about golf, they talked about the shambles the World Cup had been, and they talked about prices and Ronald Reagan and trade unions.
And Lavender’s John and Mary’s John had a second pint and that was it. They were getting near Liverpool now, and so they found their families and their luggage, and one family went north and one went south.
THE WOMEN IN HATS
It was very exciting watching people come on board, said the purser. After a few journeys you could size them up pretty well. That woman would fight with her husband two days out, he would spend all his time with the bar people, she would find a younger man and a little shipboard romance. That woman over there, she would keep her husband by her side with a rod of iron; she was one of these so-called “invalids” who had nothing wrong with them, except a very serious case of self-importance.
The purser was a beautiful dark-eyed gay Canadian who missed his boyfriend terribly, and rang him from every port and regarded his job as so much torture necessary in order to save enough money for a house on the Great Lakes.
He liked talking to Helen; she was forty and friendly and didn’t show any dangerous tendencies of jumping at him some night and assuring him of her powers of being able to make the earth move for him. She played gin rummy with him, told him funny tales about the people at her table, and seemed very interested in his tales of Garry. Helen used to advise him not to call Garry so much. “Telephone calls are very unsatisfactory and expensive,” she had said. Paul the nice agreeable purser was beginning to think she was right. He would miss her when she got off at Singapore. He’d have to find a new friend.
Leaning over the side at Piraeus, Paul saw a good-looking man squinting up into the sunshine. A pang of infidelity to Garry swept over Paul, but it was gone as soon as it arrived. Anyway the handsome man didn’t look very available. A very beautiful woman with sunglasses in her hair rather than on her face with a golden suntan, and a blue flowing dress exactly the same color as her eyes, seemed to have her hand possessively on his arm.
“What do you make of that pair?” he asked Helen.
“Honeymooners?” wondered Helen.
“No, they don’t have that absorbed look,” Paul said. “They seem to be talking about something, not just ‘Imagine, this is us getting on a ship.’ That’s the way honeymooners go on.”
The tanned girl had a huge blue and white hat tied by a ribbon around her neck. For no reason she annoyed Paul. People should put sunglasses on eyes, and hats on heads. What was she looking at anyway? He followed her gaze.
At the top of the gangway was the fattest woman Paul had ever seen. She wore a huge pink and white hat, on her head, he was relieved to notice. She had a flowing pink and white dress that could easily have been a tent for several people. She carried an enormous beach bag, white but with a name embroidered on it in pink. “Bonnie,” it said.
Paul couldn’t see her face, but he got the feeling she was young. Immediately Paul felt protective toward her. Even if it wasn’t his job, he would look after her. In fact, she might become his friend when Helen left.
“Let’s ask the pink elephant lady to have a drink with us?” he said to Helen. “I think she’s on her own and she’d appreciate it.”
“No,” said Helen. “She’s not on her own, she’s with the non-honeymoon couple—I saw them all get out of the same taxi. But I’m all for a drink with anyone anytime.”
Paul looked at Helen with affection. She had talked him out of phoning Garry because of the time difference, the known unreliability of Greek phones, and all the unnecessary angst he would cause himself if there was no reply. Helen must have been through all this love business too, but unlike most women, she didn’t seem to want to discuss it or recall it way into the night. Paul called her a purser’s joy, someone who didn’t complain and who helped other people to enjoy themselves; he said she should really be getting a fee, not paying a fare.
Paul thought Helen must be wrong about big Bonnie. She couldn’t be with the golden couple; she wasn’t old enough to be the mother, she wasn’t young enough to be their child. But when he went to see how they were all settling in, he found the threesome was as Helen had said.
The good-looking boy sat in the middle and on either side of him huge hats bobbed, one blue over the slim tanned girl, one pink over the enormous smiling Bonnie.
“I’m Paul Preston, the purser…you are very welcome on board.” Bonnie looked up with a
big welcoming smile and offered him a huge hand to shake.
“How nice and alliterative,” she said. “I’m Bonnie and this is Charlie and this is Charlotte….” She waved delightedly at the golden couple. Paul still couldn’t figure out what relation they were to her.
“That’s pretty nice and alliterative too,” he said about their names.
“I’m always saying that about them,” said Bonnie. “It’s the most amazing coincidence, my two best friends in the world both called after some no-good Stuart king.”
Paul thought it was more of a coincidence that two people called Charlie and Charlotte should have met and married each other than to have turned out to be friends of Bonnie’s, but he decided not to follow that line of chat.
They discovered he was from Ottawa originally, would like to live on the Lakes, had been a ship’s purser for four years and was aged twenty-nine. He discovered they were from Australia originally, but had lived so long in Europe now they had almost forgotten the Outback. Bonnie was twenty-nine and Charlie and Charlotte were twenty-seven each. Another coincidence. They had been living in Greece for the summer, all three of them, and now they were going to Hong Kong on this ship to see if they could set up a little import-export company, and then they were all going to take a cheap flight back to Australia where they would stay until Christmas. None of them were very enthusiastic about going back home. Bonnie said her parents were dead and she had no ties. Charlie said his father thought people who left Australia were traitors. Charlotte said that her mother wanted her to marry a man who had a big share in a sheep station. They all seemed so easy and relaxed in each other’s company that it looked as if they had been friends for years.
Had they been in business long together? he wondered. No, they had only met that spring. All of them had been working in London. Bonnie had advertised for fellow Australians to set up a venture, and that was how they had met.
“And that’s how you got together?” said Paul, smiling at the two golden heads of Charlie and Charlotte as they sat together near Bonnie’s knees on the deck. They looked like an advertisement for something, so healthy and happy did they seem.