by Maeve Binchy
That wasn’t so, and anyway she’d find it hard to make friends at first. “I’ll be relying on you and Clare to introduce me round.”
“We hardly know anyone.” He wasn’t apologetic; he was stating a fact.
“We’ll have to take up golf again. Will we do that, have a game every now and then?”
“I’d love that,” David said. “Yes, that’s something I really would like. I’m meant to have an afternoon off in the middle of the week, I hardly ever take it.”
“Well, now.” Caroline smiled at the marvelous notion. “There we’ll be, old country doctor, old country solicitor, out for an afternoon’s golf.” Her laugh pealed out like a bell. “Who would have thought it, David, that we’d come to this?”
Clare listened to them from her red-painted deckchair. Old country doctor, old country solicitor, and there was Clare—old country nothing.
The wasps were dying, the seaweed was coming in on the tide, the visitors were packing up. Angela was getting her books and charts ready for school.
Clare came to the door, wheeling Liffey in a push chair.
“She must be nearly a year.”
“Next week. Is Dick here, Angela?”
“No . . . oh, hell, he is. He said to say he was out if anyone came. But for you. Come on in.”
Dick was at the table with plans spread out all over it. He jumped guiltily.
“It’s only Clare, love,” Angela said.
“We were going to tell her anyway.”
They were going to make their cottage into a small hotel. Dick was getting his share out of Dillon’s, which would suit everyone there, and they were going to open a small twelve-bedroom hotel of their own. Angela owned the field behind the cottage: they would build a hotel just for golfers, with places to leave their clubs, with early breakfasts if they wanted it, with late suppers. They might not get a license to serve alcohol; but people could order a bottle of whiskey or whatever and it would be supplied in their room. Their plan was to open it next June, Angela was going to leave the school.
“Is that why you’ve been doing the cooking?” Clare asked eagerly.
“The one thing we proved is that we have to hire a cook before anything else. We’ll make the beds and wash up but not cook!”
They had tea and looked at the plans. “That should cost a fair bit of money,” Clare said.
“I’ll be owed a fair bit of money out of Dillon’s,” Dick said.
“Will your brother be pleased or furious?”
“He’ll be delighted I’m out of his hair, but he’ll be furious about this, that’s why it’s a secret you see, the money bit goes through this week. A firm in the town are handling it, in fact that girl—what’s her name?—was here.”
“Caroline Nolan?”
“The very one. Nice girl for a Dubliner, very straightforward.”
“Um,” said Angela.
“Um, indeed,” said Clare.
“What did you want Dick for, by the way?” Angela remembered why Clare had called.
“I was wondering would you give me a few secret golf lessons when Angela went back to school, I thought you’d have some time on your hands, but now I see you won’t.”
“I’m not the one to give you lessons, I’m very bad.”
“I don’t mind only learning a little.”
“No, Clare, you don’t understand. I’d teach you the wrong grip, the wrong stance. You’d have to unlearn it all over again.”
“Why don’t you go up to Jimmy the Pro?” Angela wanted to know.
“I wanted to learn secretly, without anyone else knowing.”
“That’s why you can’t ask David,” Angela said.
“Right.”
“What about Gerry Doyle? He’s a good golfer.” Dick suggested.
“No, I’d probably spend most of the lesson on the flat of my back in the sand dunes,” Clare laughed.
“I’ll tell you—that girl Caroline, she loves golf. She says she’s going to come over here and play as much as she can. She might be the one.”
Dick Dillon’s face shone with pleasure at having solved a problem.
“I’m sorry, Clare,” Angela said. “Some men are as thick as the wall. But you mustn’t worry.”
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about. You’ve come up with no suggestions. I’ve given two, and they’ve been laughed out of court,” Dick grumbled.
“I’ll solve it for you,” Angela said. “Why don’t I book lessons with Jimmy and you could so-called come along and watch, and join in? It wouldn’t look like you learning.”
“It would really, and anyway you don’t want to learn.”
“If I’m to be the genial coproprietor of a golfing hotel I’d better know how to play the damn game,” Angela said. “I’ll talk to Jimmy, and you come up casually like around Lesson Two or Three.”
“You’re always helping me,” Clare said. “It’s probably very silly.”
“No, I think you’re quite right,” Angela said seriously, in a way that let a shiver of cold go through Clare.
Josie was in tears at the Lodge that evening. Martin never wanted to see her again. He said she had made a fool of him over James Nolan. Oh how stupid she had been, Josie could kick herself from here to Dublin and back, she was so annoyed. What should she do? Clare was so good with men.
“I am not good with men. What makes you think that?”
Well, hadn’t Clare got David Power as her husband, and the town Romeo Gerry Doyle was saying only the other night in the hotel that he wished he had moved in before the young doctor.
“Gerry was saying that. In front of people?”
“Yes, yes.” Josie was much more interested in her own disasters. Should she write to Martin? Did James have any real interest in her? What did Clare think . . . ?
“I can’t tell you what I think until I know what you want,” Clare said, exasperated. “If you tell me straight out what you want, I’ll tell you what I think you should do.”
“I want James Nolan, but I don’t think he wants me, so if I’m sure of that and that there’s no hope there, I want Martin. Now is that honest and truthful enough for you?”
“You wouldn’t just like to be on your own for a bit and let life go by, and eventually meet someone else?”
“No, thank you.” Josie was firm.
“That’s what I think you should do.”
“I told you what I wanted. It’s easy for you to say that, and all this bit about being independent, you have a husband, a child, and Gerry Doyle ogling you as well.”
“Right. I’ll drive you out to his house. You can put a letter under his door: ‘Dear Martin, I behaved stupidly. I suppose I wanted to see did you really care about me. . . .’ That sort of thing. Not too cringing, not too apologetic, but don’t be defensive either, we’ll write it now if you like . . .”
“I don’t think James Nolan will ever . . .”
“I agree. I don’t think James Nolan ever will either . . .”
Two weeks later Josie and Martin bought the ring. Three diamonds in a cluster.
“You’re a genius, Clare,” Josie breathed to her a few days after the announcement.
“That’s what I am,” Clare agreed.
But Clare couldn’t be a genius for herself.
She despised women who were coquettish to men, and during those heady days when she and David had been so in love that Dublin just seemed like the backdrop on a stage for them, he and she used to laugh at the posturings of women who thought flirtatiousness was attractive, and the men who were fools enough to be taken in. They had sworn then that they would always be able to tell each other how they felt and say it straight out, the other was allowed ten minutes to be upset but after that he or she was to remember that this was the Love of the Century and that any plain speaking was a part of the very special relationship they had.
Clare wondered would it work if they went back to Dublin and raced round in duffle coats in the rain. In the winter and
spring of 1960 it had been easy to talk, in the winter and spring of 1962 they had lost it.
She wrote him a letter one day. A long letter trying to recapture how it had been. But she reread it and it sounded like a list of complaints so she tore it up.
She even tried to talk to his father about it. Very obliquely. But she realized soon that the old man thought that everything was fine between them. He acknowledged that Clare had been a little low after the birth of the baby, perfectly normal under all the circumstances, he saw no yawning gaps or wide distances now. It would have been cruel as well as pointless to try to tell him about them.
She found it very hard to study again. Almost impossible.
She wrote to the cheerful tutor who had said he never expected to hear from her again. She said that he might have heard what had happened on the day she was ready to sit her finals, but that the baby was now almost a year and a half, and that Clare would like to get back to work again. He wrote back saying that she had to apply formally of course, but he knew there would be no trouble once people knew the facts, the very dramatic facts. He admired her courage for starting again, because in eighteen months she must have got out of practice. He said to be sure to contact him if she were in Dublin.
And that was it. No other way of getting back into the frame of mind she had been in once. She looked at her notes. How had she been so intelligent? How could she have written those paragraphs on the lefthand side of each double page, paragraphs headed “essentials” and then on the other side quotes, references, details. Was there a possibility that she once knew all this? Did other people up in Dublin know this kind of thing now?
Should she go to Dublin for a few days? Would that make it more real?
She discussed it with David. He said he thought she should go.
She planned to stay with Emer and Kevin and the now monstrous Daniel. They were dying to see Liffey, having met her only at the christening. Would David come too? Just for a couple of days?
No, he said. It was the worst time to leave. Old people got pneumonia at this time of year. But he’d love her to go, really and truly.
“Have you gone off me, David?” she asked him that night without rancor.
“Well, really, what nonsense,” he said. “Are you sulking because I can’t get away?”
“Of course not, I meant it much more generally.”
“I haven’t gone off you, sweetheart. Why should I?”
“I don’t know. Who knows why people love and they don’t?” She was standing in the same spot of the kitchen as she had been when she had heard Gerry Doyle say those words from the kitchen table. She had echoed them unconsciously.
She shivered a little.
“Well, I know. I know I love you and I haven’t gone off you. So there.”
“Are you happy, David?”
“What’s happy?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders.
“This room is beginning to be like the Echo Cave,” Clare said. “You asked me a year ago if I was happy, when you were telling me that I wasn’t loopy. You asked me then was I happy.”
“This is very intense. What did you say?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“No and, love, don’t pick a fight because I can’t remember every word of every conversation we have had in two years. If I were to quiz you, there must be many things you’ve forgotten.”
“That’s fair. I’ll tell you what I said. I said I was happy. And you said ‘But . . .’ asking a question and I said, well, ‘But . . . we’d sort of got a bit settled down hadn’t we’ and you said yes you felt that too.”
“Well, what’s the production?”
“The production is that we’ve changed a lot. You were the one who was beseeching me and wanting to know how I was. Now I’m the one.”
“I’ve had a hard day, a really hard day. A woman of forty-four died today. Down the coast. She’d been fine, not a thing wrong with her. Cancer all over her in two months. She had six children and a big stupid husband and I had to stand there and talk about the good side of it. Clare, there was no good side to it—believe you me there was no good side.
“I came back and sewed up the eye of a child of five whose father hit her with a chair. The father is in a worse state than the child. I have to write a report of it all for Frank Conway. Frank Conway asked me how his mother was and I had to tell him she won’t come out of hospital.
“Then Dad asked me if I’d mind looking after everything on my own for a week in about a month’s time. He’s feeling very tired he says. He wakes at night with his heart racing. He’d like a little rest.
“Rest? He’s hardly doing a quarter of the load, so if he wants a rest at this level of work, the man is really bad. Then I come back here and I’m met with pleas and beggings to come to Dublin, which I cannot do much as I might like to. And now the whole fabric of life has to be analyzed.”
There was a silence.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“There’s no reason why you should be. These are the joys and horrors of my day, not yours.”
“What would you like from me? What would have been best tonight? Tell me.”
“I suppose a bit of peace, chat about other things, not about us and where we were going and who loved whom more.”
He stood up and put his arm around her. “It’s all right, Clare. It’s not magic all the time, but people in jobs like ours, well, like mine and when you were studying feverishly you were the same, you understood . . . in the time off you need just to relax, not to have to think of what love is and what it isn’t.”
“I see. I do,” she said.
The telephone rang. David answered it.
“Oh, hallo.” His face broke into a smile. She knew it was Caroline Nolan, who understood what people wanted in their time off. They didn’t want concepts, they wanted a nice effortless exchange of words and an arrangement to play golf.
She wrote to Emer and said she wouldn’t come just yet, she wanted to stay at home to sort out a few things. Emer said there was no bother, the bed was always there. Mention of the beds in Emer’s house always caused Clare to feel a little guilty.
Angela was a very good golfer, Jimmy the Pro said. She had a swing like a man. Angela did not regard this as the high praise which Jimmy intended it to be.
“Your little friend here now isn’t too bad either.” Clare made a face at him. “Try to keep your head still and you wouldn’t be a disgrace at all.”
“Great,” Clare said.
“Why don’t you come out and play with that husband of yours sometimes? When the solicitor lady isn’t around. I bet David would love a good game of a Saturday.”
“I must, but I’d be no match for him.”
“Oh, you’d give him a game. You did quite well there at the second. You were on the green in three and you only took two putts.”
“But it’s a par three.”
“It’s very respectable, I tell you.”
“Was it good, the golf today?” she asked him when he came home next time.
“No. I couldn’t hit a ball out of my way.”
“What did you get on the second?” she asked innocently.
“Don’t talk to me about the second. It’s a par three. I took seven,” he wailed.
“Never mind. There are days and days, aren’t there?”
He looked at her gratefully.
In women’s magazines they told you to smarten up your appearance, lose weight and turn back into the girl he married. She tried wearing makeup but rubbed most of it off again; it looked heavy on her and unnatural in this part of the world. Her clothes were all right; she had a few nice jumpers and skirts and she wore smart blouses as well. She didn’t need to lose weight. She was almost too thin if anything, and she was better-looking than the girl he had married. So there was no joy there. The women’s magazines had never met a wife who was so tense and irritating that she had driven her husband into the arms of a country solicitor. That wasn’t one the agony
aunts could handle.
But still she would try. She followed every bit of an article in Woman’s Own about how to do a perfect evening makeup.
She used the shadow and the eyeliner exactly as they directed.
She put on the taffeta skirt she had worn only once at the dance. And a nice top. She got her hair set in big loose ringlets.
Chrissie came over to the hairdresser’s and stood in her dirty overall.
“I saw you coming in here. Where are you going tonight?”
“Nowhere,” Clare hissed from under the dryer.
“You must be going somewhere. Why else are you getting your hair done?”
“Oh, go away, Chrissie,” she said.
“This is a public place. You can’t order me around here.”
Clare knew that everyone would hear of the pleasant sisterly exchange between the young doctor’s wife and the assistant in Dwyers’ butchers.
She called in to her mother.
“Are you all right, Clare? You look as if you’ve been crying.”
“It’s makeup, Mum.”
“Where’s Liffey?”
“Nellie’s minding her. I was getting my hair done.”
“Waste of money in this wind. It will be blown out before you get home.”
Jim came into the shop. Clare turned around and spoke to him, moving her lips deliberately.
“I wish you wouldn’t speak to Jim like that,” her mother said. “You make it sound as if he’s a halfwit. Jim’s not a halfwit. He’s only idle—aren’t you, Jim?” Her tone was affectionate but she got no reply. Jim hadn’t seen her lips move and he hadn’t realized that anyone had spoken to him.
She had slaved over a good dinner for David, he was tired and distracted, he didn’t notice her hair, her eyes, the food or the way she had made everything look nice.
He said he was exhausted, they went to bed early, and David fell asleep as she was about to move toward his side of the bed.
“Caroline?”