by Maeve Binchy
It was time to ring Lilly. Lilly grumbled and said it was raining and she was going to be taking her dry cleaning anyway, but of course agreed. “I love a bit of excitement over people’s past,” said Lilly. “You’ve always been so uneventful, happy, safe, married, never trying to pick up clients’ husbands like we have. I’m glad there’s a bit of drama here.”
Drama indeed! It could hardly be described as that. Much more a middle-class acquisitive wish to show off, Rita thought sadly, as she woke Jeffrey and handed him a cup of tea because of some feeling that she was being disloyal to him by all this concentration on Ken. Jeffrey was pleased and touched, he looked very boyish and tousled sitting up in bed, drinking his tea as if it had been the most generous gift anyone had ever given him. Somehow this irritated Rita, and she said she was late and ran out of the flat.
She spent half an hour and almost a whole week’s salary in a department store before she went into the salon. The sweater was far too dear and so were the handbag and the earrings that she felt she needed as well. They were all items she would have defined as luxury and out of her reach. She felt a low gloom come down on her after the initial exhilaration. A lot of eyebrow plucking, contour massaging, skin peeling and salon chat went into earning that much money. She tried to tell herself that she needed a couple of nice things, but she felt guilty. The kind of people who bought handbags and sweaters at that price were usually debs or wives of tycoons. There would be problems at the end of the month when they came to do the hire-purchase repayments, but perhaps she could borrow something before then.
Lilly handed over the cape. They sympathized with each other again and again about working in the only beauty salon in London that didn’t incorporate a hairdresser’s, and the day’s work began. Between clients they had a giggle about how funny it would be if the dreadful Daisy came in to have a face-lift or something, and how Lilly would deliberately sabotage her.
Since she was already so much in debt Rita thought that it would be a pity to spoil the whole appearance by forgoing the hairdo, so that took care of the best part of a tenner and a half hour over her lunch hour. The afternoon seemed very long. Lilly wanted to know all about Daisy, but Rita didn’t know very much apart from her newly discovered frailty. She had been a nurse in the hospital where Ken ended up after one of his falls from a cliff, and had met Ken shortly after Rita left Wales. Rita had heard surprisingly little about her from the couple of friends she still had in Cardiff. She was said to be “very sensible” and “very good for Ken,” two remarks which Rita always assumed were in the nature of mild insults.
“Well, whatever she’s like, she can’t look as well as you do tonight,” said Lilly loyally and admiringly, when the salon finally closed and Rita dressed herself up.
“I don’t really care,” Rita said. “But I’d like him to have a bit of a pang about me. It’s only natural, isn’t it?”
Lilly agreed it was totally the right attitude, and asked if she could sort of pass by the station, too, so that she could have a look at them all meeting.
Rita didn’t want that at all. It seemed too stagey. “That’s not fair,” complained Lilly. “I’ve lent you my cape, I’ve been excited about it all day. I want to have a look. I won’t say a word, I won’t pretend I know you.”
“Jeffrey will recognize you,” said Rita.
“No, I’ll keep my head down. Oh go on, you can’t stop me anyway. It’s a public street, everyone has a right to be there.”
Very reluctantly Rita agreed, and they set off about thirty yards apart from each other.
It was a mild evening, and the lights of the shop were competing with the sunset as the girls walked towards the station. On evenings like this Rita felt that she had made London her own, she lost the impersonal side of it. It was like any big town, you had your own little quarters, the place where you lived, the place where you worked, the place where you shopped. It was a matter of breaking down a huge city and making it manageable.
Lilly was ahead. She stopped to buy a newspaper, and looked up the cinema times. This was her ruse, her cover for why she was hanging about. Rita saw Jeffrey there, looking at his watch. This irritated her, too, because he was early, at least five minutes early, and there he was already fussing about the time. She could see no sign of Ken and his frail bride.
Just as she reached Jeffrey, who began to make delighted sounds at the way she looked, she saw Lilly talking to a woman with a walking stick. They seemed to be greeting each other as old friends. Rita squinted. No, she didn’t know the woman, and by her appearance she was hardly a client from the salon. You had to have a certain kind of chic and a certain kind of money before you could come in and have your face slapped by Rita or Lilly. Then, with a shock that nearly knocked her down, she saw that the woman was introducing Lilly to Ken. There he was, all smiles and grins and eager handshakes, the kind of overeagerness that meant he was shy. My God, that woman couldn’t be Daisy. She was years older than everyone, she could be Ken’s mother. There had to be a mistake. Daisy was around the corner, this was some dreadful old woman who knew everyone, Ken, Lilly, half of London perhaps. Wave after wave of sickness passed over Rita, she actually thought she was going to faint. Jeffrey was talking away:
“…really smashing, and you bought earrings too. They do suit you. Love, you look like a magazine cover, that’s what you look like.”
“That’s Ken,” Rita rapped out, pointing.
“And he’s talking to Lilly,” beamed Jeffrey. “Isn’t that a coincidence?”
He started moving over in great bounds with his hand held out and Rita followed on legs that seemed too weak to carry her. She kept well away from the edge of the pavement, the slightest stumble she felt might push her out under the traffic.
“Ken!” she said. “And Lilly! Now who says London isn’t a village?”
“This is Daisy, Rita,” said Ken in the voice of a child coming home from school with his first prize.
Rita looked at her. She was forty, she couldn’t have been a day less. She had stringy hair pushed behind her ears, and she leaned on a stick, She had a great big smile, like someone’s elderly and kindly invalid aunt.
“You’re just the way I imagined,” beamed Daisy, and with her free hand clutched Rita’s shoulder and gave her a sort of clumsy hug. She gave Jeffrey a hug too. Jeffrey looked as if all his birthdays had come at once. A little world of good-natured nice people had all gathered together, he was as happy as a king.
Lilly was like someone with shell shock.
“Rita told me that she was meeting friends tonight, but…well, isn’t it absolutely extraordinary?”
“How do you know each other?” snapped Rita in a bark. She was just recovering from the hug. She hated women who embraced you, and particularly women who embraced you from the awkward position of leaning on a stick.
“Peggy’s an old…Peggy’s a family friend…” stammered Lilly.
“I used to nurse with Lilly’s mother,” said Daisy. “And when Lilly was a child I used to come to the house and scrounge Sunday lunch. Your mother was so good to us, Lilly. We young nurses never had a penny in those days and there was always a huge meal there. It was really like home.”
Ken couldn’t go to bed with this woman, Ken couldn’t be on honeymoon with her. She wasn’t frail, she was a cripple. What had he been thinking of? He must have had some kind of nervous breakdown. Why was she called Peggy and Daisy, and why was she standing there leaning on her stick in her shabby jacket and skirt smiling all around her and looking so horribly old?
“Let’s all go and sit down,” said Jeffrey happily. “There’s a pub near here or we can go straight to the restaurant. Lilly, you’ll come with us. Shall I get a taxi?” He was so excited by it all that Rita could have hit him hard with her new handbag.
“Oh no, I can’t, I have to, I mean I’m going,” said Lilly, who, to give her some credit, thought Rita, looked wretched about it all. She didn’t want to come and witness the shambles of an ev
ening that it was going to be.
“Nonsense,” said everyone at once including Rita, and suddenly there was a taxi and the five of them were in it, four of them chattering like birds in a box, Rita trying to calm down her mind, which seemed to be trying to get out of her forehead.
Why had nobody mentioned to her, even in passing, that this Daisy was an old woman? Very sensible, very good for Ken, what did they mean? Ken was fifteen years younger than she, at least. That might have merited a brief remark when Daisy’s name came up. Rita looked at her. She was laughing and saying how exciting it was to be in London, and that she had already seen a man who read the television news, and an actor, and thought she had seen a woman MP, but Ken said it wasn’t her after all.
“Why does Lilly call you Peggy?” asked Rita suddenly.
Daisy had an explanation for that too. Daisy had been her family name, like a nickname. When she was younger and worried about what people thought of her, she thought it was a silly name to have. So in the hospital she had pretended she was called Peggy. She had two identities now, one from the people she knew from those four years in the training hospital, who still called her Peggy, and her real name, which she had taken up again when she got a bit of sense and decided not to upset her parents any more than she need by rejecting the name they had given her.
They got to the restaurant. Everyone fussed about Daisy. The taximan helped her out of the cab.
“Did you have a fall, my girl?” he asked her kindly.
Girl! Rita nearly laughed aloud.
“No, it’s arthritis,” said Daisy. “It’s normally not nearly as bad as this. I feel such a fool with the stick, I’m always tripping people up with it. Most of the time I don’t need it at all, it’s just this week it’s bad. I couldn’t have timed it better, a wedding and a honeymoon and a stick, wouldn’t you know?” The taximan was delighted with her. So was the waiter in the restaurant. He found her a chair with arms to sit on. Quite naturally, as if she had been the one who invited them all there, Daisy started arranging where they should sit.
“Rita, sit there by Ken, you have so much to say to him after all these years, and I’ll take Jeffrey and Lilly here to tell me all about London.”
There was no fuss. They were seated. Rita raised her eyes to Ken.
“It’s great to see you,” she lied straight at him.
“You look lovely, like a model,” he said truthfully, straight back at her.
“I feel overdressed and stupid,” she said, with honesty and feeling.
“You were always lovely to look at,” he said. “But I think you’ve got even better-looking.” His voice had a simple quality about it, like the way he used to say that mountains were beautiful, or that some piece of wood they had been scraping and stripping all weekend looked perfect. Just objective, happy admiration.
“Jeffrey’s in insurance, isn’t he?” said Ken after Rita had just stared at her plate for a bit.
“Oh, yes, he’s with a company but he does a bit of free lancing as well.”
“Perhaps we could get a bit of advice from him. We’ve got a small house. Do you remember Rodney Row? It’s one of those.”
They used to laugh at Rodney Row and say they were doll’s houses for doll people.
“I’m sure he’d be glad to give you any tips,” she said. “Jeffrey loves helping people he knows, and not just to make a commission, you know.”
“Oh no I wouldn’t think that, but of course we’d be very happy to do anything through him if it would help. I mean if there was any value to him out of it,” said Ken.
“I don’t think he’d like to make money out of friends.”
“No, perhaps it’s better not to mix work and pleasure,” said Ken agreeably, looking at the menu.
Pleasure. Pleasure. Had she remembered it all wrong? Was it she, not Ken, who was going mad? Perhaps he had always been the man who was destined to marry some aging nurse with a walking stick? Those wild months of freedom and abandon, and being sure with each other because together it was easy to reject other people’s pretensions and nonsenses…had all that been real, or was it just in her head?
The others were laughing loudly. Daisy had said something endearing to the waiter, and he had brought her a rose. She put it behind her ear, in the middle of that lank greasy hair, and smiled a big smile with a lot of yellow teeth.
“Isn’t this all great, Ken?” she laughed at him down the table.
Rita wouldn’t let it go, there had to be something. There must have been something there, she couldn’t have got it all so wrong, her memories of what they had. If they had nothing it would be like some kind of surgery, something would have been taken out of her.
“Look at those four over there,” she said, desperately indicating a table where two middle-aged couples sat eating and making occasional little forays of conversation. “Looks like a real salon-talk setup, don’t you think?”
Oh please, please, let him fall back into it, let us both start like we did in the old days. He might say “One thing about the Italians is they know how to cook food” and she would say “Isn’t it funny the way all Italian restaurants seem to be run by families?” and he would say “And they always seem to be so good-humoured, it must be coming from all that sun” and together they would laugh about how people could and did talk in clichés from birth to death. Please, please, let him remember salon talk.
Ken looked obediently at the four eaters.
“They don’t seem to be having a good time, is that what you mean?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Rita flatly.
“I often think that people in restaurants must look over at other tables and envy them,” he said. “They must wish they were part of a good scene like this.” He beamed down the table at Lilly and Daisy and Jeffrey and raised his glass to his travesty of a wife, and Rita wondered with a sharp pain whether she was going to be wrong about everything else as well. Had she never got anything right?
Chancery Lane
* * *
Dear Mr. Lewis,
I’m sure you will think this very, very odd and you will spend the rest of your life refusing to talk to strange women at parties in case something of the sort should happen again. We met very briefly at the Barrys’ last week. You mentioned you were a barrister and I mentioned the Lord knows what because I was up to my eyebrows in gin. I was the one who was wearing a blue dress and what started out as a feather boa, but sort of moulted during the night. Anyway, your only mistake was to let me know where you worked, and my mistakes that night were legion.
I know nobody else at all in the legal world and I wonder if you could tell me where to look. In books people open the Yellow Pages and suddenly find exactly the right kind of lawyer for themselves, but I’ve been looking in the windows of various solicitors’ offices and they don’t seem to be the kind of thing I want. They’re full of files and girls typing. You seemed to have a lot of style that night, and you might know where to direct me.
I want to sue somebody for a breach of promise. I want to take him for everything he’s got. I want a great deal of publicity and attention drawn to the case and photographs of me leaving the court to appear in the newspapers. What I would really like is to see all the letters involved published in the papers, and I want to be helped through the crowds by policemen.
But what I don’t know is how to begin. Do I serve something on him, or send him a writ or a notice to prosecute? I feel sure the whole thing will gather its own momentum once it starts. It’s the beginning bit that has me worried. If you could write back as soon as possible and tell me where to start, I should be forever grateful.
I feel it would be unprofessional to offer you a fee for this service, but since it’s a matter of using your knowledge and experience for my benefit, I should be very happy to offer you some of mine in return. You may remember that I am a tap-dancing teacher (I probably gave several exhibitions to the whole room that night). So, if ever you want a lesson, I’d be delighted to give you
one.
Yours sincerely,
Jilly Twilly
Dear Tom,
Thanks belatedly for a wonderful party last week. I don’t know what you put in those drinks but it took me days to get over it all. I enjoyed meeting all your friends. There was a woman with the impossible name of Jilly Twilly, I think, but perhaps I got it wrong. She wore a blue dress and a feather boa of sorts. I seem to have taken her cigarette lighter by mistake, and I was wondering if you could let me have her address so that I could return it. She seemed a lively sort of girl, have you known her long?
Once more, thanks for a great party.
John Lewis
Dear John,
Glad you enjoyed the party. Yes, I gather her name is Jilly Twilly, unlikely as it sounds. I don’t know her at all. She came with that banker guy, who is a friend of Freddy’s, so he might know. Pretty spectacular dance she did, wasn’t it? The women were all a bit sour about it, but I thought she was great.
Greetings to all in chambers.
Tom
Dear Ms. Twilly,
Thank you for your letter. Unfortunately you have approached the wrong person. Barristers are in fact briefed by solicitors in cases of this kind. So what you must do if you have a legal problem is to consult your family solicitor. If this firm does not handle the kind of litigation you have in mind, perhaps he may recommend a firm who will be able to help you.
I enjoyed meeting you at the party, and do indeed remember you very well. You seemed a very cheerful and happy person, and I might point out that these breach-of-promise actions are rarely satisfactory. They are never pleasant things for anyone, and I cannot believe that you would actually crave the attendant publicity.