by Maeve Binchy
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 unpushy, 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 neighbours when they built all around and almost over his nice garden, his pride and joy, which was why he was now overlooked by dozens of bed-sitters. 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 organising 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 traveller 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 which areas Rose’s bus would pass as she came in to the city centre. He spent a happy half-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 thought she knew. She realised 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 dead-heading 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 ageing lecher. Why wasn’t Daddy going with her? It was her own stupid fault. All those years, seven of them since Mum 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 scratching his head and sucking on his pipe and looking like a stage representation 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 among his garden things was almost too much to bear.
‘Come in and we’ll have a cup of tea, Daddy,’ she said, wanting a few moments bent over kettle, sink, tea caddy to right her eyes.
He was a shuffle behind her, anxiety and care in every step. Not wishing to be too inquisitive, not wanting, but plans changed meant bad news. He hated it.
‘You’re not doing anything really, Daddy, on your holidays, are you?’ she said eventually, once she could fuss over tea things no longer. He was even more alarmed.
‘Rose, my dear, do you have to go to hospital or anything? Rose, my dear, is something wrong? I’d much prefer it if you told me.’ Gentle eyes, his lower lip fastened in by his teeth in worry. Oh what a strange father. Who else had never had a row with a father? Was there any other father in the world so willing to praise the good, rejoice in the cheerful, and to forget the bad and the painful?
‘Nothing, Daddy, nothing. But I was thinking, it’s silly my going to Paris on my own. Staying in a hotel and reading a book and you staying here reading a book or the paper. I was thinking wouldn’t it be nice, if I left it until tomorrow and we both went. The same way, the way I go by train to Gatwick, or we could get the train to the coast and go by ferry.’
He looked at her, cup halfway to his mouth. He held it there.
‘But why, Rose dear? Why do you suggest this?’ His face had rarely seemed more troubled. It was as if she had asked him to leave the planet.
‘Daddy, you often talk about Paris, you tell me about it. I tell you about it. Why don’t we go together and tell each other about it when we come back?’ She looked at him; he was so bewildered she wanted to shout at him, she wanted to finish her sentences through a loud speaker.
Why did he look so unwilling to join? He was being asked to play. Now don’t let him hang back, slow to accept like a shy schoolboy who can’t believe he has been picked for the team.
‘Daddy, it would be nice. We could go out and have a meal and we could go up and walk to Montmartre by the same routes as you took in the Good Old Days. We could do the things you did when you were a wild teenager.’
He looked a
t her frightened, trapped. He was so desperately kind, he saw the need in her. He didn’t know how he was going to fight her off. She knew that if she were to get him to come, she must stress that she really wanted it for her, more than for him.
‘Daddy, I’m often very lonely when I go to Paris. Often at night particularly I remember that you used to tell me how all of you . . .’
She stopped. He looked like a hunted animal.
‘Wouldn’t you like to come?’ she said in a much calmer voice.
‘My dear Rose. Some time, I’d love to go to Paris, my dear, there’s nothing in the world I’d like to do more than to come to Paris. But I can’t go just like that. I can’t drop everything and rush off to Paris, my dear. You know that.’
‘Why not, Daddy?’ she begged. She knew she was doing something dangerous, she was spelling out her own flightiness, her own whim of doubling back from the station, she was defining herself as less than level-headed.
She was challenging him, too. She was asking him to say why he couldn’t come for a few days of shared foreign things. If he had no explanation, then he was telling her that he was just someone who said he wanted something but didn’t reach for it. She could be changing the nature of his little dreams. How would he ever take out his pathetically detailed maps and scrap-books to pore once more with her over routes, and happenings if he had thrown away a chance to see them in three dimensions?
‘You have nothing planned, Daddy. It’s ideal. We can pack for you. I’ll ask them next door to keep an eye on the house. We’ll stop the milk and the newspaper and, Daddy, that’s it. Tomorrow evening in Paris, tomorrow afternoon we’ll be taking that route in together, the one we talked about for me this morning.’
‘But Rose, all the things here, my dear, I can’t just drop everything. You do see that.’
Twice now he had talked about all the things here that he had to drop. There was nothing to drop. What he would drop was pottering about scratching his head about leaf curl. Oh Daddy, don’t you see that’s all you’ll drop? But if you don’t see and I tell you, it means I’m telling you that your life is meaningless and futile and pottering. I will not tell you, who walked around the house cradling me when I was a crying baby, you who paid for elocution lessons so that I could speak well, you Daddy who paid for that wedding lunch that Gus thought was shabby, you Daddy who smiled and raised your champagne glass to me and said: ‘Your mother would have loved this day. A daughter’s wedding is a milestone.’ I won’t tell you that your life is nothing.
The good-natured woman and her father were probably at Folkestone or Dover or Newhaven when Rose said to her father that of course he was right, and it had just been a mad idea, but naturally they would plan it for later. Yes, they really must, and when she came back this time they would talk about it seriously, and possibly next summer.
‘Or even when I retire,’ said Rose’s father, the colour coming back into his cheeks. ‘When I retire I’ll have lots of time to think about these things and plan them.’
‘That’s a good idea, Daddy,’ said Rose. ‘I think that’s a very good idea. We should think of it for when you retire.’
He began to smile. Reprieve. Rescue. Hope.
‘We won’t make any definite plans, but we’ll always have it there, as something we must talk about doing. Yes, much more sensible,’ she said.
‘Do you really mean that, Rose? I certainly think it’s a good idea,’ he said, anxiously raking her face for approval.
‘Oh, honestly, Daddy. I think it makes much more sense,’ she said, wondering why so many loving things had to be lies.
PIMLICO
Olive sat in her little office making her weekly lists. First she balanced her books. It didn’t take long. Her guests paid weekly and usually by banker’s order. Her staff bills were the same every week. The laundry was always precisely the same – thirty-two sheets, thirty-two pillowcases, thirty-two towels, seven large table-cloths, seven smaller teacloths. Olive had costed the business of getting a washing machine and a dryer and in the end decided that the effort, the space, and the uncertainty in case of breakdowns were simply not worth it. Her food bills were fairly unchanging too; she hadn’t been twenty years in the hotel business for nothing. And other bills were simple as well, she transferred a regular amount weekly to meet the electricity, telephone, gas, rates and insurance demands when they arrived. Olive could never understand why other people got into such muddles about money.
Then she made her list of activities for the noticeboard. This involved going through the local papers, the brochures from musical societies and theatres, appeals from charitable organisations for support for jumble sales. When she had a good selection, she would pin them up on her cork board and remove those which had become out of date. She took care to include some items that none of her guests would dream of choosing like Wagner’s Ring or a debate about philosophy. But she knew that they liked to be thought the kind of people who might want to patronise such things and it flattered them.
Then she would take out her loose-leaf file, the one she had divided into twelve sections, one for each guest, and in her neat small handwriting Olive would make some small entries under each name. It was here that she felt she could find the heart of her hotel, the memory, the nerve centre. Because Olive knew that the reason her twelve guests stayed with her, was not the great comfort, the food, the value, the style; it was simply because she knew all about them, she remembered their birthdays, their favourite films, their collar sizes, the names of their old homes or native villages. Olive could tell you quite easily the day that Hugh O’Connor had come to live there, all she had to do was open Hugh’s section in the file. But it warmed him so much to hear her say: ‘Oh, Hugh, don’t I remember well the day you arrived, it was a Wednesday in November and you looked very tired.’ Hugh would beam to think that he was so important that his arrival had seared itself into Olive’s mind.
She never saw anything dishonest or devious about this. She thought it was in fact a common courtesy and a piece of good sense in what people nowadays called ‘communications and relating’. In a way it was almost a form of social service. After all, if she was going to go and spend a half-hour with Annie Lynch on a Saturday afternoon, with Annie retired to her bedroom with what looked like the beginnings of a depression, then Olive thought how much more considerate to look up Annie’s file and remember the little farm in Mayo and how it had to be sold when Daddy took to the drink, and how Annie’s mother who was a walking saint had died and the boys were all married and the only sensible thing for Annie to do was to come and work in London. Olive had filed the kind of things that seemed to cheer Annie up, and would trot them out one by one. Yes, perhaps she should remember everything without writing it down, but really she lived such a busy life. It would be impossible to manage without her little Lists.
Nobody knew of Olive’s filing system; they weren’t even aware that she seemed to have a better than average memory. Each one of her guests simply marvelled at his or her own good fortune at having found a woman who ran such a comfortable place and who obviously understood them so well. Even the three Spaniards who had been with Olive for five years thought this too. They didn’t question their money or their small living quarters, they just appreciated that she could remember their names and their friends’ names and the village in the south of Spain where they went back once a year when Olive closed for her two-week break. She was determined that nobody would ever know and had even made preparations that after her death her executor should arrange to have her private records of her years in the hotel business destroyed unread. A solicitor had told her that such a request was perfectly in order.
She was only thirty years of age when she bought the small and then rather seedy hotel in Pimlico. Everyone had assured her that she was quite mad, and that if clever boys who knew about making money hadn’t made a go of it, how could an innocent Irish girl with ten years’ experience working in a seaside Irish boarding-house hope to do any be
tter? But Olive was determined; she had saved since her teens for the dream of a hotel of her own, and when her uncle’s legacy made it actually within her reach she acted at once. Her family in Ireland were outraged.
‘There’s more to it than meets the eye,’ said her mother who foresaw gloomy summers without Olive’s considerable help in the boarding-house.
‘Maybe she’ll find a fellow in London, she hasn’t found one here,’ said her sister cattily.
Olive’s father was enthusiastic that she should try working in London for a little bit before actually committing herself to the buying of a hotel. He had worked there himself for ten years and found it a lonely place.
‘When you’ve seen Piccadilly Circus and Buckingham Palace and you’ve said to yourself, this is me here sitting listening to Big Ben strike, well that’s it. You’ve seen it then. It’s time to come home. It’s a scaldingly lonely place.’
As determined as any young woman about to enter religious life and take vows as a nun, Olive went ahead with her plans.
Ten years in a third rate boarding-house had given Olive more of an insight into the psychology of hotel work than any amount of professional courses. She saw the old and the lonely who could barely endure the sea winds and the bracing air and who hardly left the sun lounge during their two-week visit. She knew they came for company, and that the anticipation was much better than the holiday. She saw the couples with their children hoping that the two-weeks vacation would be a rest, a bit of peace, a time to get to know each other again, and she saw her mother disappointing them year after year by frowning at the children, complaining about noise and in general making the parents much more anxious than they would have been had they remained at home in the normal daily round. Oh, the number of times Olive would have loved to have been in charge, she knew what she would have done. She would have had a special room for the children with lino on the floor, a room where it didn’t matter if they kicked the furniture or made a noise. She would have offered the guests a welcoming drink when they arrived instead of making an announcement about what time she expected them to be in.