by Maeve Binchy
It had been a mistake. Henry’s black disapproval came across the phone line loud and clear.
She had made her choice. She had decided for an extra day on this junket, and against going with him to his staff party. It was quite simple; she could take the consequences.
“What consequences?” Kay shouted, turning her back on the arty pseudo-bohemian in the next phone box.
He was handsome, she supposed, in that vain peacock way that a lot of actors or showbiz people adopt, mannered and self-aware, stroking his cravat. The kind of man she most disliked. But it was increasingly hard to talk to Henry, the kind of man she most admired. He was showing none of those qualities that had marked him out when she met him first.
He pointed out that if Kay, his constant companion, was not going to bother to turn up at an important corporate gathering, then he would regard himself as a single and unattached person with no commitments.
“That’s blackmail of the worst kind.” Kay was appalled at herself for reacting like a teenager.
“The solution is in your hands,” Henry said coldly. “Come back from the airport now and we will forget the whole incident.” She hung up immediately, not trusting herself to speak to him.
Martin told himself that Angie’s deep sleep was always important to her. She was a model; her face had to be unlined, untired at all times. She must have taken the telephone off the hook. His brow cleared when he remembered this, only to darken again when he remembered that as he kissed her good-bye he had said he would call from the airport and she had said that would be super. Why, then, had she cut off his way of getting through to her?
Lost in their thoughts, neither Martin nor Kay realized that they had in fact been seated beside each other on the plane…. They looked at each other without pleasure. Martin took out the long, complicated report on arts funding that he was going to have to explain to various theatrical and artistic organizations, all of which were going to brand him as a cultural philistine. Kay read a report on last year’s trade fair, and noted all the opportunities missed, contacts lost, and areas of dissatisfaction. Their elbows touched lightly.
But they were unaware of each other. From time to time they lifted their eyes from the small print in their folders and Martin thought of all the times he had driven Angie to her modeling assignments and Kay remembered all the corporate functions in her firm that Henry had refused to attend without even the flimsiest excuse.
Above the clouds it was a lovely day, bright and clear. Kay felt her shoulders relaxing, and some of the tension leaving her. They were far above the complications and bustle of everything they had left behind: buildings, traffic, rush, corporate functions. She breathed deeply. She wished they could stay up here forever.
At that moment Martin sighed too, and with the first sign of a pleasant expression that he had shown, he said that it was a pity they couldn’t stay up here forever.
“I was just thinking that. At exactly this moment,” Kay said, startled.
They talked easily, he of the problems ahead trying to convince earnest idealistic artists that he was not the voice of authority spelling out doom for their projects. He had been trying to dress like arty people, as he knew that otherwise he would be dismissed as a Man in a Suit, which was apparently marginally better than being a child molester.
She told him of the poor results the company had achieved at last year’s promotion, and how this was her first year in charge. There were many in the organization who hoped she would fail, and she feared they would be proved right. She knew that people thought she had got the post through some kind of feminine charm; she was dressing as severely as she could to show them that she wasn’t flighty.
They were sympathetic and understanding. Martin told her what Henry never had, that perhaps she was overcompensating, making herself look too stern and forbidding, killing off the good vibes she might otherwise have given.
Kay told Martin something that Angie had never thought of—that possibly the cravat might be over the top. There was the possibility that the disaffected artistic folk might think he was playing a role.
They fell into companionable silence in the clear, empty blue sky. And Martin thought that Angie probably didn’t care about him at all, she cared only about her face, the magazine covers she appeared on, and what bookings her agent might have for her next week. He would call her when they landed, a cheerful call, no accusations about taking the phone off the hook, she would wish him well, and he would take the whole thing much more lightly from now on.
Kay wondered if Henry would seriously take up with someone else, as he had threatened. And would she mind very much if he did. She decided she would ring Henry’s secretary and say how sorry she was to miss this evening’s function, she would wish it well and say that sadly work had taken precedence. She would ask that Henry not be disturbed but insist that her message of goodwill was passed to those in the right places. This was a professional businesslike approach, not a very loving one. But Kay didn’t feel very loving anymore.
Then just at the same moment she and Martin left their private thoughts and turned to each other to talk again. Angie wasn’t mentioned, nor was Henry, but strategy was, and optimism was exchanged.
Kay encouraged Martin to be straight with the groups, to tell them the worst news about funding first and try to work back into a position they felt was marginally more cheerful. Martin advised Kay to let her colleagues in on her hopes for their joint success, let them think they were creating it too. By the time they left the plane they were friends in everything but name. Martin considered asking her name but thought it might sound patronizing. Kay wondered about giving him her card but feared it would look stereotype female executive.
There was a bank of telephones facing them in Arrivals. They both headed toward them.
Kay paused with her hand on the receiver. In the next box she saw Martin’s fingers, not drumming this time but hesitating. Through the transparent walls they smiled at each other.
He looks less affected, she thought, the velvet jacket’s fine really.
She is quite elegant in spite of all that power dressing, he realized.
Neither of them made the phone call.
But it was too soon for any sudden decisions. There was work to be done. If they met each other somewhere again, well and good.
They wished each other luck and got into separate taxis.
As they settled back into their separate seats they each gave their taxi driver the name of the same hotel.
A HOLIDAY WITH YOUR FATHER
Rose looked at the woman with the two cardboard cups of coffee. She had one of those good-natured faces that you always associate with good works. Rose had seen smiles like that selling jam at fetes or bending over beds in hospitals or holding out collection boxes hopefully.
And indeed the woman and the coffee headed for an old man wrapped up well in a thick overcoat even though the weather was warm, and the crowded coffee bar in Victoria Station was even warmer.
“I think we should drink it fairly quickly, Dad,” said the woman in a half-laughing way. “I read somewhere that if you leave it for any length at all, the cardboard melts into the coffee and that’s why it tastes so terrible.”
He drank it up obediently and he said it wasn’t at all bad. He had a nice smile. Suddenly and for no reason he reminded Rose of her own father. The good-natured woman gave the old man a paper and his magnifying glass and told him not to worry about the time, she’d keep an eye on the clock and have them on the platform miles ahead of the departure time. Secure and happy, he read the paper and the good-natured woman read her own. Rose thought they looked very nice and contented and left, cheered to see a good scene in a café instead of all those depressing gloom scenes you can see like middle-aged couples staring into space and having nothing to say to each other.
She looked at the labels on their suitcases. They were heading for Amsterdam. The name of the hotel had been neatly typed. The suitcases had little whee
ls under them. Rose felt this woman was one of the world’s good and wise organizers. Nothing was left to chance; it would be a very well planned little holiday.
The woman had a plain wedding ring on. She might be a widow. Her husband might have left her for someone outrageous and bad-natured. Her husband and four children might all be at home and this woman was just taking her father to Amsterdam because he had seemed in poor spirits. Rose made up a lot of explanations and finally decided that the woman’s husband had been killed in an appalling accident that she had borne very bravely and she now worked for a local charity, and that she and her father went on a holiday to a different European capital every year.
Had the snack bar been more comfortable, she might have talked to them. They were not the kind of people to brush away a pleasant conversational opening. But it would have meant moving all her luggage nearer to them, which seemed a lot of fuss. Leave them alone. Let them read their papers, let the woman glance at the clock occasionally, and eventually let them leave. Quietly, without rushing, without fuss. Everything neatly stowed in the two bags on wheels. Slowly, sedately…they moved toward a train for the south coast. Rose was sorry to see them go. Four German students took their place. Young, strong, and blond, spreading coins German and English out on the table and working out how much they could buy between them. They didn’t seem so real.
There was something reassuring, she thought, about being able to go on a holiday with your father. It was like saying thank you, it was like stating that it had all been worthwhile…all that business of his getting married years ago and begetting you and saving for your future and having hopes for you. It seemed a nice way of rounding things off to be able to take your father to see foreign cities…because things had changed so much from his day. Nowadays young people could manage these things as a matter of course; in your father’s day it was still an adventure and a risk to go abroad.
She wondered what her father would say if she set up a trip for him. She wondered only briefly, because really she knew. He’d say:
“No, Rose my dear, you’re very thoughtful, but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
And she would say that it wasn’t a question of that. He wasn’t an old dog. He was only barely sixty, and they weren’t new tricks since he used to go to Paris every year when he was a young man, and he and Mummy had spent their honeymoon there.
Then he would say that he had such a lot of work to catch up on, so it would be impossible to get away, and if she pointed out that he didn’t really have to catch up on anything, that he couldn’t have to catch up on anything, because he stayed so late at the bank each evening catching up anyway…Well, then he would say that he had seen Europe at its best…when it was glorious, and perhaps he shouldn’t go back now.
But he’d love to go back, he would love it. Rose knew that. He still had all the scrapbooks and pictures of Paris just before the war. She had grown up with those brown books, and sepia pictures, and memos and advertisements, and maps carefully plotted out…lines of dots and arrows to show which way they had walked to Montmartre and which way they had walked back. He couldn’t speak French well, her father, but he knew a few phrases, and he liked the whole style of things French, and used to say they were a very civilized race.
The good-natured woman and her father were probably pulling out of the station by now. Perhaps they were pointing out things to each other as the train gathered speed. A wave of jealousy came over Rose. Why was this woman—an ordinary woman perhaps ten years older than Rose, maybe not even that—why was she able to talk to her father and tell him things and go places with him and type out labels and order meals and take pictures? Why could she do all that and Rose’s father wouldn’t move from his deck chair in the sun lounge when his three-week holiday period came up? And in his one week in the winter, he caught up on his reading.
Why had a nice good warm man like her father got nothing to do, and nowhere to go after all he had done for Rose and for everyone? Tears of rage on his behalf pricked Rose’s eyes.
Rose remembered the first time she had been to Paris, and how Daddy had been so interested, and fascinated, and dragging out the names of hotels in case she was stuck, and giving her hints on how to get to them. She had been so impatient at twenty, so intolerant, so embarrassed that he thought that things were all like they had been in his day. She had barely listened, she was anxious for his trip down the scrapbooks and up the maps to be over. She had been furious to have had to carry all his carefully transcribed notes. She had never looked at them while there. But that was twenty, and perhaps everyone knows how restless everyone else is at twenty and hopefully forgives them a bit Now at thirty she had been to Paris several times, and because she was much less restless she had found time to visit some of her father’s old haunts…dull, merging into their own backgrounds…those that still existed…she was generous enough these days to have photographed them, and he spent happy hours examining the new prints and comparing them with the old with clucks of amazement and shakings of the head that the old bakery had gone, or the tree-lined street was now an underpass with six lanes of traffic.
And when Mum was alive she too had looked at the cuttings and exclaimed a bit and shown interest that was not a real interest. It was only the interest that came from wanting to make Daddy happy.
And after Mum died people had often brought up the subject to Daddy of his going away. Not too soon after the funeral, of course, but months later when one of his old friends from other branches of the bank might call…
“You might think of taking a trip abroad again sometime,” they would say. “Remember all those places you saw in France, no harm to have a look at them again. Nice little trip.” And Daddy would always smile a bit wistfully. He was so goddamn gentle and nonpushing, thought Rose, with another prickle of tears. He didn’t push at the bank, which was why he wasn’t a manager. He hadn’t pushed at the neighbors when they built all around and almost over his nice garden…his pride and joy, which was why he was overlooked by dozens of bed-sitters now. He hadn’t pushed Rose when Rose said she was going to marry Gus. If only Daddy had been more pushing then…it might have worked. Suppose Daddy had been strong and firm and said that Gus was what they called a bounder in his time and possibly a playboy in present times…just suppose Daddy had said that. Might she have listened at all or would it have strengthened her resolve to marry the Bad Egg? Maybe those words from Daddy’s lips might have brought her up short for a moment…enough to think. Enough to spare her the two years of sadness in marriage and the two more years organizing the divorce.
But Daddy had said nothing. He had said that whatever she thought must be right. He had wished her well, and given them a wedding present for which he must have had to cash in an insurance policy. Gus had been barely appreciative. Gus had been bored with Daddy. Daddy had been unfailingly polite and gentle with Gus. With Gus long gone, Rose had gone back to live in Daddy’s house. It was peaceful despite the blocks of bed-sitters. It was undemanding. Daddy kept his little study where he caught up on things, and he always washed saucepans after himself if he had made his own supper. They didn’t often eat together…Rose had irregular hours as a traveler and Daddy was so used to reading at his supper…and he ate so early in the evening. If she stayed out at night there were no explanations and no questions. If she told him some of her adventures there was always his pleased interest.
Rose was going to Paris this morning. She had been asked to collect some samples of catalogues. It was a job that might take a week if she were to do it properly or a day if she took a taxi and the first fifty catalogues that caught her eye. She had told Daddy about it this morning. He was interested, and he took out his books to see again what direction the new airport was in…and what areas Rose’s bus would pass as she came in to the city center. He spent a happy half an hour on this, and Rose had looked with both affection and interest. It was ridiculous that he didn’t go again. Why didn’t he?
Suddenly she thou
ght she knew. She realized it was all because he had nobody to go with. He was in fact a timid man. He was a man who said sorry when other people stepped on him, which is what the nicer half of the world does…but it’s also sometimes an indication that people might be wary and uneasy about setting up a lonely journey, a strange pilgrimage of return. Rose thought of the good-natured woman and the man who must be ten or fifteen years older than Daddy; tonight they would be eating a meal in a Dutch restaurant. Tonight Daddy would be having his scrambled egg and deadheading a few roses. while his daughter, Rose, would be yawning at a French restaurant trying not to look as if she were returning the smiles of an aging lecher. Why wasn’t Daddy going with her? It was her own stupid fault. All those years, seven of them since Mummy had died, seven years, perhaps thirty trips abroad for her, not a mention of inviting Daddy. The woman with the good-natured countenance didn’t live in ivory towers of selfishness like that.
Almost knocking over the table, she stumbled out and got a taxi home. He was actually in a cardigan in the garden stratching his head and sucking on his pipe and looking like a stage image of someone’s gentle, amiable father. He was alarmed to see her. He had to be reassured. But why had she changed her mind? Why did it not matter whether she went today or tomorrow? He was worried. Rose didn’t do sudden things. Rose did measured things, like he did. Was she positive she was telling him the truth and that she hadn’t felt sick or faint or worried?
They were not a father and daughter who hugged and kissed. Pats were more the style of their touching. Rose would pat him on the shoulder and say: “I’m off now, Daddy” or he would welcome her home clasping her hand and patting the other arm enthusiastically. His concern as he stood worried amid his garden things was almost too much to bear.