by Maeve Binchy
But in the years of watching the visitors come and go, Olive gained what she thought was an insight into the returned emigrants, those who lived the greater part of their life in big English cities. What they seemed to appreciate so much when they came back was the smallness of the place, the fact that people saluted other people and knew all about them. These might have been the very things that they fled to London and Birmingham and Liverpool to avoid, but it certainly seemed to be something their souls cried out for now. Olive knew that when she had enough money she would run a place for Irish people in London, and she would make a small fortune. Not a big fortune, she didn’t want that, just a little fortune. So that she could live in comfort, and could surround herself with nice furniture, nice pictures, so that she needn’t worry about having two bars of the electric fire on. The kind of comfort which would mean she could have a bath twice a day, and take a taxi if it were raining.
And in her terraced house in Pimlico she built up the hotel of her dreams.
It had taken time. And a great deal of effort. For a year she lost money – heavy, frightening sums, even though she regarded it as an experiment. She advertised in local papers in boroughs where there were large Irish populations, she attracted lonely people, certainly, but not the ones she could help. Too many of her guests turned out to be working-on-the-Lump men who had forgotten their real names because they used so many in so many different jobs, men who appeared on no social welfare list, men who knew that if they got a bad dose of pneumonia or broke a leg that the other lads would pass a hat round for them, but there would be no pension, no insurance, no security.
They didn’t stay long in Olive’s little hotel, and she made them uneasy, asking where they were from and what they did.
‘Sure the police wouldn’t ask me that, Mam,’ a man had replied to her once when she had asked some simple and she thought courteous question about his origins.
Then she had the con-men. The charmers, the people who were expecting money shortly, who cashed cheques, who told tales. It was an apprenticeship, she was learning. Soon she thought she was ready and she advertised again. By this time she had the hotel the way she wanted it. Not splendid, nothing overawing, but comfortable. There wasn’t a hint of a boarding-house about it, no sauce bottles appeared with regularity on stained cloths. She arranged a weekly rate which included an evening meal, with no refund if the meal were not taken. She knew enough about her future clients to know that they were the kind of people who would like to be expected home at a quarter to seven. They could always go off out again afterwards.
She implied that those she was accepting were people of good manners and high standards. This was done very cunningly and without any hint of appearing restrictive. Whereas her mother would have said: ‘I want no drink brought into the bedrooms’, Olive said: ‘I want you to consider this house very much as your home. I know you don’t want to be in the kind of place where people have bottles in bedrooms.’
She chose the guests carefully. Sometimes after several interviews where she always gave them tea and managed to explain that it was simply a matter of having promised the place to somebody else who was to let her know by Thursday. It took her a year to build up to twelve and she sat back satisfied. They were right. They were the correct mix. They depended on her utterly, they needed her, and for the first time in her life she felt fulfilled. She felt she had got what other people got from teaching or nursing or maybe the priesthood. People who needed them, a little flock. She never included marriage and children in her list of fulfilling lifestyles. She had seen too many less than satisfactory marriages to be impressed by the state. And anyway she was too busy. You didn’t run the perfect hotel without a lot of work.
There had been a question of marriage two years ago. A very nice man indeed. A Scot, quiet and industrious. She had met him at a hoteliers’ trade fair, when she was examining a new system of keeping coffee hot. He had told her that it didn’t really work, he had tried one in his own hotel and it had been wasteful. Their friendship got to a stage where her twelve guests were rustling and ruffled like birds in a coop fearing the intrusion of an outsider. Alec came to tea so often on Sundays that there were definite fears he might either join the establishment or else spirit Olive away. The ruffled feelings were balm to Olive, the ill-disguised anxiety among those men and women who paid her hefty sums of money to live with her was almost exhilarating. Olive kept them and Alec in suspense for some weeks and finally sent Alec away confused, wallowing in the luxuriating relief and happiness of the civil servants, bank clerks, book keepers, shop assistants and bus driver who were now her family.
She finished her list of entries in the ring file with the information that Judy O’Connor, the nice girl who worked in the chemist shop, had a brother who was a missionary and that he was coming back from Africa and through London on his way home to Ireland for Christmas. Olive thought it might be a nice occasion to have a mass in the hotel.
Well, why not? They were all Irish, they were all Catholic. Even the three little Spaniards, José, his wife Carmen and her sister Maria, they were Catholics, they would love a Mass in the dining-room. It would make it all much more like home. She must start putting it in Judy’s mind soon. Olive was careful for people not to think that all the good ideas came from her. She let the guests think that it was their idea to strip their own beds on Monday mornings and leave all the dirty linen neatly ready for the laundrymen. The guests thought that they had suggested pooling fifty pence a week each to have wine with Sunday lunch.
Hugh O’Connor was absolutely certain that he had broken off his engagement to that rather forward hussy who had no morals and wanted to come in and share his room saying that it was perfectly all right since they were engaged. Annie never realised that it was Olive who suggested she should break her ties with Mayo, she thought she had done it herself. The guests thought that it had just come about that they all stayed in the hotel for Christmas, they saw nothing odd about it. Olive had carefully managed to distance herself from those who had been rash enough to go to relations or friends. They had felt lacking in some kind of spirit and had felt deeply jealous when they returned afterwards to hear about the wonderful turkey, and the presents and the carols by the Christmas tree and the Pope’s Blessing in the morning and the Queen’s speech in the afternoon – a combination of what was best about both cultures.
The last thing that Olive did on her List day was to write home. Her father was in hospital now, her mother almost crippled with arthritis. She sent them regular small contributions with pleasant cheering letters. She had no intention of returning home. They were nothing to her now. She had a real family, a family that needed her.
VAUXHALL
On the first Sunday of the month Andrew’s parents came to lunch. They arrived winter and summer at midday precisely . . . and every single time Andrew’s father would rub his hands and ask his son how he felt about a spot of fresh air. In response Andrew would rub his own hands, pretend to consider it and then nod as if finding it a satisfactory idea.
‘Back around two-fifteen – that all right dear?’ he would call in to the kitchen where his mother and June were oohing and ahhing over some little gift of homemade tea cakes or tray cloths, then he and his father set off, rain or shine, for a twenty-minute walk to the pub, two and a half pints and a twenty-minute walk back home. Twelve times a year for fifteen years. That was thirty pints a year, a total of four hundred and fifty pints, but little communication shared with his father in the crowded pub which was always filled with jaded young people recovering from last night’s swinging south-of-the-river party.
Then, looking at their watches anxiously in mock fear of great punishment, they left carefully at the time when last orders were being shouted and others were begging for that final injection to see them through the Sunday afternoon in Vauxhall. Andrew and his father walked back, more expansive about the roses in people’s gardens, the value of property and the increase in hooliganism. When they let
themselves into the flat, June and her mother-in-law would give little cries of mock relief, that the men hadn’t disappeared for ever, that the lunch had not been spoiled and that they could all now sit down and have Sunday lunch.
At this point June or Andrew would go nervously to Cora’s door and tap gently.
‘Time for lunch, darling, Gran and Gramps are here.’
There was always a rising note at the end of the statement, questioning. It was as if they didn’t know whether or not she would emerge. But she always did. Cora, their only daughter. Cora their tall fourteen-year-old only child.
The years had passed so inevitably, Andrew thought to himself that particular Sunday, as he felt the familiar relief surging through him when Cora came out, her long hair neatly held with a blue ribbon, her soft navy sweater coming well down over her jeans so that it actually looked some kind of formal attire. A huge smile for both grandparents, a kiss, an exclamation of pleasure over the joint – it was always lamb, beef or pork on a first Sunday but since Cora had been old enough to exclaim she had done so. Andrew looked at her with his constant bewilderment. How had he and June produced this lovely, blonde, distant creature? What went on in her head? What did she think of him really as she sat at his table and ate a Sunday roast with his wife and his parents? Would he ever know?
This Sunday was no different to any other. Mother had a hilarious tale about some new people who had moved into their road and had decided to invite all the neighbours in for drinks. The neighbours had disapproved strongly of such over-familiarity but had accepted, and everything had gone wrong – episode after episode of disaster from burst pipes, and clogged loos and stone cold cocktail sausages, to running out of sherry, were revealed to peals of laughters from June, grunts of recollection from father and a polite attention from Cora. To Andrew it seemed suddenly a cruel, heartless tale, unlike his mother’s normal generosity, but then he remembered she often told little stories of the discomfiture of others. It made her own position more satisfactory.
June followed it with stories of the Residents’ Association in the block of flats, and how they had forced the landlords to do up the entrance, and forced the council to improve the street lighting, and how they had forced the family in the top floor not to cook dishes which could be smelled all over the block.
Even though they often talked about the Residents’ Association Andrew thought that today the chat seemed very militant; he got a momentary vision of all those old ladies and retired bank officials who seemed to be its inner circle, dressed up with arm bands and high boots. He smiled to himself.
Father was brought into the conversation by the two chatty women – his wife and daughter-in-law didn’t want to monopolise the conversation: did he think that it was worth buying a cover for those plastic bags where people grew vegetables in cities, or should they be left to breathe, or would they look nice covered with attractive stones like a mini rockery or was there a danger that this might suffocate the tomatoes? To every one of these points Father gave his usual attention. His years of being a diplomatic clerk in chambers made him unwilling to come down too firmly on any side even in something as untendentious as this. He weighed everything happily and the audience listened respectfully.
It was a wet Sunday, which meant that they would not go for the little stroll down to the Albert Embankment, or the little walk to the park. When it rained they played Scrabble, looked at gardening catalogues, or Mother sometimes read an entire letter from Andrew’s sister in New Zealand, full of people that none of them knew; but Mother would speculate happily and say: ‘I think Vera is the one married to the Scottish chap, the couple they went camping with.’ Then at four-thirty they had tea, and at five they were in their car, thanking and explaining that they had to go, because of the light in the winter and because of the traffic in the summer. Six times a year Andrew’s father said to him: ‘We’d better push off so’s we can get home in the light, you know.’ Six times a year: ‘Have to leave now, otherwise we’ll get into a hell of a mess with all the traffic building up.’ Over fifteen years each phrase must have been said ninety times with an air of newness and discovery, and they had all nodded sagely. Since Cora had been old enough to nod she had always looked politely disappointed that they had to leave, but understanding as well.
‘They were in very good form weren’t they?’ said June brightly as she pushed the tea trolley to the kitchen. Cora had disappeared to her room.
‘Yes,’ said Andrew getting the tea-cloth.
‘Oh, will you? Thank you, love,’ said June, even though Andrew had wiped the dishes after one hundred and eighty lunches and afternoon teas attended by his parents. There had always been a tradition that the lunch table was cleared and stacked neatly in the kitchen, not washed up at once.
‘Andrew and I enjoy doing it later,’ June always said.
‘Next month is birthday month,’ June said cheerfully. ‘We’ll have to think of what to get.’
By an odd coincidence all their birthdays fell in the same month, and this year his parents would both be seventy-five, he and June would be forty-five and Cora would be fifteen.
They had always celebrated it as a big family feast, one birthday cake for everyone, lots of presents and cards; and his mother and father always brought the cards that they had received from all their friends as well, and Cora had to say which of her school friends had given her a card.
‘We’ve only got to hold out another fifteen years, and then we can have four generations,’ Andrew said thoughtfully. ‘Father and Mother could well make it to ninety don’t you think?’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ June paused in the violent scrubbing of a difficult saucepan.
‘Well, they’re thirty years older than us, we’re thirty years older than Cora . . .’
The same pang that always struck him when Cora was mentioned hit him sharply in the chest. He knew so little about her. Was it possible that this girl would soon be loved by a man, or desired by one?
He felt a chill at the thought. It wasn’t a question of thinking her too young and innocent. In fact he had been pleased rather than distressed when he had seen one of her schoolfriends, an attractive boy, with his arm across Cora’s shoulder one day walking from the bus. She had been carefully instructed in the Facts of Life by June with the help of an illustrated booklet. June had said that it was far more difficult than actually giving birth to her in the labour ward. Cora had read the pieces with interest and said; ‘Oh, I see, thank you very much.’
June had tried to leave the door open for more discussion but it never came from Cora. So, from time to time she tried to add little helpful hints.
‘You see, there’s nothing wrong with feeling sexually attracted to someone. In fact it’s all absolutely right if you see what I mean. The problem is that we start feeling these, um, feelings when we are rather too young to do anything about them. But they’re not wrong or shameful you know.’
‘Oh no,’ Cora had agreed. ‘I didn’t think they were.’
‘It’s just that, economically, it would be silly for boys and girls to get married to each other and what not at thirteen and fourteen because they have no wages or money for a house, you do see?’
‘Oh, yes, I see, it would be ridiculous,’ Cora had said.
‘I think she understood,’ poor June had whispered. ‘But she didn’t sort of react or anything, so I can’t be certain.’
Andrew knew exactly what she had meant.
Of course he was quite insane to think that because he and June had followed his parents so precisely in what they had done, Cora would do the same. She might even become part of a commune with lovers all over the house, he shuddered to himself. But then he dismissed that. It could involve a jollity, an intensity too, things that didn’t characterise his cool, young daughter. An attractive young teenager, almost a young woman.
‘I wonder,’ he said tentatively, ‘I wonder whether Cora should have her own party next month? You know, teenagers, recor
ds, dancing. She might like that. After all girls of fifteen seem grown up to each other these days.’
‘A party? Here?’ June was not aghast, but it was something that had never occurred to her. ‘Do you think she’d like that?’
‘Well, teenagers do,’ said Andrew. ‘Don’t they?’
‘And she has been to other people’s birthday parties I suppose,’ said June.
They looked at each other across the draining rack, their faces showing not so much shock that their daughter was turning into a young woman, but total confusion about what kind of young woman she might become. Neither of them knew.
‘Shall I ask her, or will you?’ asked June.
‘I will if you like,’ Andrew replied.
They finished the wiping and tidying in silence. Later on Cora would emerge from her room around seven and they would have a light supper. This was Cora’s little job. She had been doing it now for about three years. Baked eggs, or sardines on toast, or cold meat and tomatoes if there had been a lot left over from the Sunday joint. She always prepared it quietly with no complaints, and washed up after it. She had been no trouble. Ever. Andrew wondered why he was defending her to himself. Nobody had attacked her.
This Sunday it was sardines. He joined her in the kitchen as she was cutting the crusts from the bread.
‘Do you mind doing this Cora, would you prefer to be out with your friends?’
‘No, of course I don’t mind, Dad,’ she smiled at him remote as a stranger who has done you a small service, like giving you more room in a bus or picking up a parcel you have dropped.