by Maeve Binchy
Robert needed excuses to meet Frankie. Robert was married to his boss’s daughter—a marriage of convenience that he had entered into at a time before he knew what true love, real love, was like.
Robert and his wife had two children, who were eight and seven. They were at the age when they could not be upset by things that had nothing to do with them; it wasn’t their fault that Robert had found true love too late. Robert was the rising star in the organization; he must work harder than ever now that he intended to leave home and set up two establishments. He must make himself totally indispensable to his boss, his father-in-law, so that there would be no question of letting him go once the divorce was brought up. Frankie didn’t ask when that was going to be but thought that it would be unreasonable to expect it before the children went to boarding school. Three years, perhaps?
She would wait. Naturally.
But in the meanwhile there were wonderful things like the great summer honeymoon. They always called it that: Our Italian, Our Spanish, and now Our Riviera Honeymoon.
Frankie made her shopping list and took out the map of France. Whenever Dale passed by she looked as if she were making notes or looking up a reference. Dale would not stop to question her.
Frankie looked fine for the job, with her long dark curly hair and her bright green eyes. And even more important, she was the friend of Robert the whiz kid in Benson’s. Dale would have employed any kind of person in that front desk if it kept him well in with Benson’s. He regarded it as a bonus that Frankie was both bright and beautiful.
The only thing that bored Frankie was that she had to put in the actual hours in her horseshoe-shaped desk. If only she could have slipped away for the afternoon. She could have gone to the hairdresser and even had a manicure as a luxury; her hands would be greatly in view tonight as they traced the route south through the Côte d’Azur down from Cannes past St. Raphael to Saint-Tropez. Or should they go the other way from Cannes, over past Antibes to Nice and Monte Carlo? It was heady stuff even saying the names. Perhaps Frankie would even buy a little guidebook at lunchtime so that she would appear knowledgeable tonight.
It was all a rush, as she knew it would be. But the dinner had gone well. Robert was relaxed; he had loosened his tie and kicked off his shoes. Frankie had been able to wash her hair, and she had bought green earrings at lunchtime.
“They’re lovely,” he said. “The color of your eyes.”
She felt that the fuss and the bustle had all been worthwhile. She even felt glad that she had spent that money on a dishwasher. It had been very extravagant, but Robert adored it. His wife was playing Earth Mother, according to his reports, refusing modern gadgets, but for them it was all right—there was the help and the au pair. In Frankie’s flat, however, he loved to see technology. Cuts out all the fuss, he had said. They arranged the china and glass and cutlery carefully and listened to it humming away in the kitchen as Frankie got out the map.
“Darling,” he said. “Wrong map, I’m afraid.”
“It says Provence on top, but it’s all Cannes and Nice and everywhere down on the coast,” Frankie said, surprised. Normally Robert knew where everywhere was; that was why she had studied it so much in advance all afternoon.
“We’re not going, my love,” he said.
Her heart lurched with the kind of jump that almost reached her throat.
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, but it’s true. Listen, don’t think I’m pleased…. Stop looking at me like that, hey?”
“Why can’t I come? We’ve always been able to swing it before. I tell Dale I’m taking my vacation, you tell Mr. Benson you need someone from Dale’s to run over the implications of the conference with you. Why can’t I come this time? Why?” Frankie knew she was sounding like a seven-year-old, but her disappointment was so huge she couldn’t hide it.
She had bought her clothes, her terribly expensive shoes, the knockout beach gear. The operation was foolproof—why was he pulling out now? Was it possible that he had found someone new? If he had cheated on his wife once, then obviously he could do it again. But don’t go down that road. And don’t cry. Frankie forced her face to stop puckering.
Robert sounded weary and resigned.
“It’s not you, sweetheart, it’s me. It’s a nonstarter.”
“But you always go to the conference. You are Benson’s.” She was aghast. And yet there was a seed of hope. Suppose he had been discovered, and maybe even demoted. Did that not mean that the day they could be together might be nearer than they had thought?
“This year being Benson’s means going somewhere else and shoring up someone else’s cock-up,” he said. “A whole project is going down the Swanee, and apparently I’m the only one who can sweet-talk us back where we were. What a bloody crowd of fools he employs. I’d have got rid of three quarters of them. I will—I tell you I will one day.”
This was an old refrain. Frankie didn’t want to hear it all over again—Robert’s plans for the day when he ran the place himself. This was an old set of lines they had said to each other; she wanted to know what was new.
What was new was Ireland. A new plant, a lot of bother, nobody had been there to straighten it out, to tell the people on the ground what was happening, what was expected of them, what they could expect.
“They’re bound to be suspicious of us, think we’re in it for what we can get out of it.”
Frankie said nothing; for once she didn’t murmur her usual words of encouragement. In fact, she knew that Benson’s was in it for what they could get out of it, that’s what business was about.
“So you see what’s happened. In the very week of the conference in Cannes, I have to be over in the middle of the boglands talking to the mutinous forces over there and promising them wealth beyond their wildest dreams.”
“Can’t you go now? Before the conference?”
“Don’t you think I asked that? But old man Benson is adamant. It has to be that bloody time, something to do with some European thing or other that’s being held there. They’re much more interested in Europe over there, for some reason that escapes me. God, I could kill them for not setting it up right at the start, allowing all these discontents to grow up. If we don’t go in and fly the flag or show our face or whatever the expression is…then the whole thing could collapse like a house of cards.” He looked so handsome when he was annoyed. She could understand why so many people were impressed with him.
“Will we have any honeymoon together this year, you and I?” she asked in a small voice, looking down at the ground lest he see all the pain in her green eyes.
“You could come to Ireland,” he said doubtfully. “I can’t be tied up with them all the time. We’d have some time together.”
“To do what?” She had no maps of Ireland, she had no magical names like Juan les Pins, like Saint-Tropez.
“I don’t know, darling, I don’t know, give me space. I only heard about this today, this afternoon. We’ll do something. It could be a rest for you, getting away from it all, and then I’d escape when I could.”
A more courageous woman would have told him to forget it. A tougher woman would have told him in no uncertain terms what he could do with this halfhearted offer.
Frankie was neither brave nor tough. Which was why she found herself in the small hotel on the west coast of Ireland. A hotel called the Greener Grass standing on a low cliff over a long, empty beach. When you looked across that sea the next stop was America, they told you. Frankie could believe it—it looked endless. And on the first days it looked gray and lonely. The seagulls calling to each other and other seabirds coming in to perch on rocks. She saw a school of porpoises go by one day, and she became familiar with the habits of a cormorant and a kittiwake and a tern and a gannet.
“I could do another Open University course in the habits of seabirds,” she said ruefully to the proprietor as he set her lobster before her at a table, which, for the third time had been set for one.
“There are worse ways to spend your time, you know.” His voice was soft, but it was distant. He was Shane, he said, a returned Irish American. He had called his place the Greener Grass because of the grass always seeming greener when it was far away. He had saved up for seven years to buy his own small hotel.
He was different from the other local people, who wanted to know all about Frankie and Robert, and what was their business in the place, did they have any children, where had they been for holidays before. Did they love the Irish way of life? Shane asked none of these questions. He had the air of someone contented with his own way of life. She saw him choosing his own vegetables from the fields where he had tilled the land to grow them. She watched him sometimes writing the menus in slow, careful, calligraphic script.
Robert set out in the early mornings and was rarely back to the Greener Grass before dark.
“Not much of a honeymoon, is it, darling?” he said more than once. Frankie saw his face, white and tired.
“The honeymoon bit is at night, remember?” she said, laughing.
But at night the weary Robert slept suddenly and soundly as soon as he got into bed. Some nights Frankie sat at the bay window, where there was a lovely three-part window seat, and looked out at the night sky over the water. Sometimes she saw Shane and his dog Tracey walking.
So he couldn’t sleep either, Frankie thought, even though he had saved seven years to build his dream and had it now in his hands.
She saw Shane bend to pick shells by the moonlight. He looked peaceful, she thought, and somehow at ease. Even though he didn’t really belong here, not like locals—he had been away too long, and he had a slight New York tinge to his voice.
Next morning at breakfast, she asked him about the shells.
“You sat at the window and looked out over the moonlit sea,” Shane said. Robert seemed annoyed somehow. “You didn’t tell me you couldn’t sleep.” She felt she had been disloyal.
Later Shane came and gave her some cowrie shells. “You could do another Open University course on these and still know nothing about them,” he said with a smile.
Robert liked to think that it was somehow a rest for her, that sharing some fraction of his life was reward enough for the broken promise, the conference that never was…the ribbon of the French coast not visited.
“I bet this is doing you no end of good,” he said each morning as they ate brown soda bread and fish just in from the sea.
For the first few days she had smiled bravely, and taken a book disconsolately to walk along the hilly cliff or down to the rock pool, and try to stop thinking that her life was as gray as the skies all around her.
But then one morning the sun came out, and everything was different. Even Robert seemed loath to go.
“It’s very beautiful, this place, you know,” he said as he stood beside his hired car about to head off for the day with the mutinous men he was finding it harder to placate than he had thought possible.
Frankie looked down at the beach she had walked so often in the dull days. Today it sparkled, as if there were little particles of precious metal hidden behind the rocks instead of soft sand. She thought she could see the cowrie shells that Shane had been collecting. The sea was twenty different colors of green and blue, with little white flecks.
“I might have a swim,” she said.
“Yes, well, be sensible. It’s the Atlantic Ocean, don’t forget.”
“Next stop, America.” Frankie laughed.
Robert looked at her, puzzled.
“I hope I won’t be too late,” he said, but doubtfully. “This lot seem to need conversation and explanation way into the night, as well as all day.”
He drove away along the road, and as Frankie looked after him up at the purple mountains and over beyond the small green fields with their stone walk to a dark, velvety forest, she began to feel as if a film had just turned from black-and-white into Technicolor.
She ran lightly upstairs to fetch the red bathing suit that had cost her so much in the days she thought it would be seen on the Côte d’Azur. As she came down, carrying the pricy beach bag and her red and white fluffy towel, Shane’s dog Tracey came up and looked at her hopefully.
“I’d be very grateful if you would,” Shane said. “He needs a walk, and with today’s weather I’ll have the world and its wife for lunch, so I can’t take him.”
“I don’t know a lot about dogs,” Frankie began.
“Well, Tracey is half sheepdog and half setter, we think. A lovely nature, and he’ll bark if you start to drown or if anyone comes and bothers you.”
“Who’d come and bother me?” Frankie laughed, looking at the empty beach.
“I haven’t seen you in that swimsuit, but it might attract a bit of local attention.” He laughed too; the good weather made him seem less remote.
“Would he run away or get into a fight or anything?” It had never been part of her life, walking with a big, bounding dog.
“Not a chance. And as a reward, I’ll come and find you and take you to a little late lunch and take Tracey off your hands.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes. It’s the minimum fee for dog minding. There’s a nice flat rock in the next bay. It makes a good table.”
She had never spent a day on a beach like it. Tracey ran for sticks with never-ending energy. She really thought she could see his foolish face smile at her as she threw them again and again.
Tracey barked at the waves, but swam in and paddled near her as if to look after her when she swam. She collected shells and laid them out on the flat table rock.
Soon, far sooner than she had expected, Shane arrived with a picnic basket.
“You abandoned your lunchers. How can you expect to earn a living!” she said sternly.
“You’re not wearing a watch. It’s after three o’clock—they’ve all been and gone. You must be starved.”
Imagine. She had been playing with this idiotic dog for hours on a shell-covered beach, no cloud had come across the sky, and no thought of Robert and their situation had come across her mind.
Companionably they shared the picnic, local prawns, homemade bread, cheese made by some nuns in a convent across the valley, red shiny apples from the small orchard behind the Greener Grass.
“It’s like heaven.” She sighed as they drained the bottle of wine to the dregs.
“Thank God we don’t get weather like this all the time,” said Shane.
“Why do you say that? Because you’d have to work too hard?” Frankie had been about to say the very opposite; she had been on the point of wishing that every day could be so sunny.
“Because we would be parched and dry, it would not be a green island, and we’d be so used to it we wouldn’t be calling out our thanksgiving to the very heavens as we are today,” he said.
“Yes, I know, and that’s a point, but what about your business? If it was much sunnier, there would be many more people here. This beach would be full.”
“And could you and I and Tracey have had such a picnic if the beach were full?” he asked.
“We had meant to go to the South of France,” she said suddenly.
“Yes, so your husband told me, when he called to book.” Shane had his distant face on again. “He seemed very disappointed and told me in several different ways that this was not his first choice.”
Frankie was going to explain that Robert was not her husband, but she let it go. Instead she apologized for him.
“He’s normally very charming and would never have given you that impression. He has work problems to see to here. We had thought we could have made a holiday out of a conference in Cannes.”
“But why did he take you here, and leave you all alone?”
“I’m glad he did,” Frankie said positively. “Now, do you think it’s an old wives’ tale about not swimming after lunch, or should we risk it?”
“Just as long as we don’t go out too far, any of us,” he said, and they raced to the edge where
the foam was breaking and drawing out the sand with it as it gathered for another wave.
“Have you ever been to the South of France?” he asked.
“No.” Her voice sounded small.
“Neither have I, so let’s pretend this is a hundred thousand times better,” Shane cried, and threw himself into the waves.
“You caught the sun,” Robert said when he got back earlier than usual. He had phoned to ask if dinner could be kept for him, and had been surprised and not altogether pleased to hear Shane say that his wife had had a late lunch.
“Did you tell him we were married?” Robert asked as they sat at a window table and watched the sun set, leaving red and golden paths and crisscross lines across the bay.
“No, darling, I didn’t, but in this country they are likely to assume it if we check in to the same room and you have booked us as ‘Mr. and Mrs.’”
Robert looked at her sharply but decided not to make it something to argue about.
“Is it better? You know, are you sorting it out up at the plant?” Frankie asked.
“Yes. I think they believe our heart is in the right place,” Robert said.
“And it is?” Frankie’s face was innocent, bland.
“What are you trying to say?”
“Well, I mean that a lot of them came back from jobs overseas because they really believed that it was going to be a proper plant, not something that would pack up and fold its tent when things got a bit hairy.”
“Oh, come on, Frankie, what do you think Benson’s is, part of Mother Teresa? Of course we have to be practical. If things get hairy, as you put it, we can’t stay on here forever, bleeding hearts keeping returned emigrants in beer money.”