A Few of the Girls: Stories

by Maeve Binchy

  “Think, that is all I say. Think before you go on with this pathetic charade of sulks and grunts and insults. Who needs it?

  “Your father doesn’t, and I certainly don’t.”

  Larry, Beth, Lara, and Anna left a bookshop they would be unlikely to visit again. They stood in silence on the pavement for a moment.

  “Did you say something about a pizza earlier, Dad?” Anna said.

  And, as a dangerously normal family, the four of them walked towards the restaurant.

  Beth’s only fear now was that they would want to come and live with her.

  YOUR CHEATING HEART

  The Afterthought

  She said that she’d come away with him when the children were old enough. How old is old enough? he had wanted to know. Old enough to understand, she had thought, but he was very sad about this and thought they would never be old enough to understand, not even if they were as old as anything. You never understand your mother going off with the great family friend. It’s not the kind of thing anyone could understand. So things went on the way they were for a long time.

  The way things were was extraordinary. He went to lunch with the family every Sunday, summer and winter, except the three Sundays they were away in the west for the summer holidays. And they saw him at least once a week, either at one of his suppers, as he called them, or else they went to the theater or the National Concert Hall. And in the summer he saw even more of them because they had a garden and he only lived in a flat so it made sense to drop in to have a drink and admire what Rita had done with the flowers that day. He hadn’t been very interested in gardening before but he had bought himself a beginner’s book and asked her lovely intelligent questions, which made her very happy. Mostly he was there before Alec got back from the office. Alec would park the car, see him, and be very pleased. Sometimes that gave Frank’s chest a small, tight feeling of guilt, but he was able to stifle it. There was no point in loving someone, offering them a new life, and being loved in return if you were going to cloud the whole thing up with guilt and destroy it for everyone. No, it was all luck and chance. Alec had the luck and had met Rita by chance before Frank had, otherwise everything would have been different and he would have married Rita. Think of it as chance, not betrayal. It was more positive.

  Of course he also met Rita on Tuesday lunchtimes and Thursday nights. Tuesday was when she did her little ramble, as it was called, around the shops. Mummy was always being asked to buy this or that when she went on her little ramble. The ramble had been in existence before Frank came to redirect it towards his flat. It was so lovely and vague and a perfect alibi because if ever they were seen what could be more natural than their having met accidentally and going back to the flat to look at some new purchase? Same with the Thursday night bridge lessons. Frank had taught her to play bridge quite adequately and there were so many at the bridge classes, which were extremely badly organized, all she had to do was go in, say hello to a few people she knew, and leave almost at once. They were all too busy frowning and puckering over their cards to notice which table, if any table, Rita had been given. The whole thing was foolproof and frustrating and it had been going on for three years.

  Sometimes in his office Frank had a little daydream. It went like this. Alec would call around, white-faced, to his flat and tell him that the most dreadful thing had happened. He, Alec, had fallen hopelessly in love with this woman from Brazil and he was going to leave with her the following week and become a partner in a solicitor’s office in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Oh yes, he spoke quite good Portuguese, actually. The thing was that this woman didn’t want him to have anything more to do with the children and he wondered if he could ask Frank to keep an eye on the family for him; move in, maybe, to look after them better. Then, as a parting shot, Alec would say that he had just realized that he and Rita had never been properly married because there had been an Impediment at the time. Frank saw himself in a very supportive role over the whole business: manly handshakes, assurances of solidarity, a quiet unobtrusive marriage to Rita.

  And always with a strong, supportive role towards the children. These things happen; you must not feel too harshly about your father; you must write him a cheery letter every month telling him how you are getting along. I know I can never replace him but at least I’m a friend. I’ve always been that. Gradually everything becomes natural and accepted and those early Tuesdays and Thursdays are long forgotten, part of a childish past, silly and never coming to mind again. Little by little changes would be made. The kinds of pictures that he and Rita liked would hang on the walls, a man would be paid to come and do the rough work in the garden twice a week to save Rita’s hands. They would put their car on the ferry and drive to France not to Galway. They would have garlic bread and vinaigrette dressing, not mayonnaise. Maybe if a good house that suited them came on his books in the estate agency then he might buy it and start a new phase in their lives. But the house wasn’t really important, not the food, not the holidays abroad. The children were what mattered—or really, the youngest child, Eoin.

  Eoin had always been a solemn little boy with big eyes. He looked like those Italian children who broke hearts and box office records in the fifties in those subtitled films. He was nine now and very lonely. The others were a great hulking seventeen and sixteen. They had no time for Eoin and he spent a lot of his time this summer sitting in the garden with his mother, and especially from the late afternoon with Frank as well. He had said that he’d like to drop the word Uncle, all on his own. His big brother, Jim, and his big sister, Orla, had said he was being a show-off, but Frank said he thought it was a great idea because Uncle made him feel a bit ho-ho-ho-ish, like Santa Claus, but to be called Frank by young people made him feel a dashing young man again.

  They had rolled around with what he thought was unnecessary mirth at the thought of him being a dashing young man, but still he was Frank now and that was better. If you are going to run away with someone’s mother it’s better that the someone doesn’t call you Uncle.

  Eoin always seemed glad to see him arrive at the house, Frank thought. He would ask him long, searching questions about his work at the auctioneer’s. You mean that one person wants to sell a house and another person wants to buy a house and they pay you? That’s brilliant, Frank. Frank felt somehow that he hadn’t totally explained the world of the estate agent to Eoin. But, it was the same apparently with his father. Alec confessed that Eoin’s grasp of the law would make the Incorporated Law Society shudder. Rita laughed at both of them and said they should listen to Eoin talking to her. He thought she had been very clever to marry Daddy so that she need never work again.

  Yet despite all this they loved him, the three of them, and Frank and Rita were always happy to have him sitting there when they met in the summer afternoons. They never whispered or plotted; they talked the talk of close friendship and laughed as companions. Sometimes Eoin looked up from his book and laughed too.

  Eoin didn’t talk much about himself. He seemed to be happy enough at school and he had a few friends who came round to the house but not many. Not enough to console him, Frank thought; not enough to lean on when his mummy was gone. He liked reading and said that he was going to have two jobs when he grew up—one would be writing books about children where the children were real, not eejits like they were in so many books, and his other would be teaching hardened criminals to read. Probably in California.

  Once, he said they called him E.T. at school. He said it sadly.

  “That’s because of your initials, Eoin Treacy.”

  “No, I think it’s because of my eyes,” he said matter-of-factly. “They’re a bit too big as eyes, you see,” he explained.

  The three grown-ups, sitting sipping their summer drink, all leaned towards him with words and gestures of protest. He smiled back and accepted their assurances that his eyes were magnificent.

  “You could be a film star with those eyes, a real Valentino.”

  “Yes, but is it a re
al job?” Eoin wanted to know.

  Sometimes he asked dangerous questions. Why did Mummy have to go on rambles on hot Tuesdays when they did all the shopping in the supermarket on Fridays anyway? Why did Frank not get married and have a garden of his own now that he knew all about gardens? Why did Mummy learn bridge with those awful people in that hall she didn’t like if she never played bridge? He seemed satisfied with all the answers. And full of innocent chat. Frank often felt he could talk to him for hours even if he wasn’t Rita’s son. In fact, he often forgot totally about the relationships as the boy chattered on.

  Eoin told Frank that it was hard on him having nobody his own age but really he was lucky he was here at all. He was an Afterthought. Frank had laughed, delighted at the grown-up language, thinking that Eoin had no idea what the term meant. But he was wrong. “Daddy and Mummy were having rows, you see, when Orla and Jim were about six and seven, and it was either go their own ways or have me.”

  “Nonsense!” Frank was shocked to the core. How could a child of nine know or think he knew such things? And anyway, Rita and Alec had no rows. There had not been a great deal of love or gaiety in their married life—Rita had told him this—but there had been no rows. That was why she found it so hard to leave Alec.

  “Oh yes, honestly.” Eoin’s huge eyes were full of sincerity.

  “But how would you know, even if it were true, who would have told you?”

  “Nobody told me, but people sort of forget I’m there. They say things in front of me.” He looked at Frank levelly. Yes, that was true. They did, Frank remembered only too well.

  “So that’s how I heard of Mummy’s friend then. He was in Daddy’s office. But he went away when they decided to have me as an Afterthought.” Eoin felt he had explained enough and decided to talk about cycling instead and whether you’d have to be very good very young like swimming or if it was something you could take up in later life, like at about nine. “You shouldn’t think of yourself as an Afterthought,” Frank said. “All that business about your mummy’s friend—who was he anyway? It’s all nonsense.”

  “He was called Stephen something, I don’t know. I wasn’t here, but that’s what I heard when people were talking, you know. Ask Mummy?” he said innocently but as a sort of question, knowing it was far from likely that Frank would ask Mummy.

  “Who was Stephen?” he asked her the next Tuesday.

  She sighed. “I knew Alec would mention Stephen sooner or later. He must suspect.”

  “Alec suspects nothing. He never said a word.”

  “Then how…?”

  “Eoin told me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She threw her head back and laughed. “Eoin wasn’t even born when I knew Stephen.”

  Frank was silent.

  “Not that there was anything in it,” she added.

  “No,” said Frank.

  “But who was gossiping, who really tried to stir things up?”

  “I told you, it was Eoin, but he wasn’t stirring things up. I think he was trying to dampen things down.”

  She looked at him slightly amused. “And has he?”

  “I think he has, for a while. A lot of the color seems to have gone, the freshness. I don’t know, the romance.”

  “Ah yes, my love, the Romance is all,” she was mocking him gently.

  “So,” he said. “Did you have little rambles and bridge lessons to meet Stephen?”

  “No. No, different things entirely.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “You’ll still come round to the house?” she asked.

  “For a little while anyway,” he said.

  He told Eoin later that he thought he might be going to the firm’s office in Cork and leaving Dublin altogether. Eoin was interested. “Do you think Mummy’ll have another baby? She’s forty, you know. Would that be too old for another Afterthought?”

  Bella and the Marriage Guidance Counselor

  Bella discovered that her husband was unfaithful to her by the purest chance. She wondered often what would have happened if she had never discovered, if she had never gone to the off-license that day for a bottle of sherry. Everything would have been different, or, more accurately, everything would have been the same, and gone on in the same old way, which was what she liked. None of the dramatic happenings would have happened. Life would have been as it always was.

  She needed sherry because she was going to make a real, old-fashioned trifle; there was nothing she could use instead. To have put in two glasses of brandy would have been ridiculously wasteful, and gin, she thought, wouldn’t have worked. Beer was out, so she had to go to the off-license, and since it was a nice day she decided to take the dog and have a proper little walk. She had been sitting down too much anyway; it would be good for her to have some exercise.

  She knew Mr. Elton in the off-license slightly. She and Jim usually called in there on Saturday mornings after they had been to the supermarket. They were very organized as a couple: she would provide the shopping list in two sections and Jim got the heavier, bulky items each weekend, she got the smaller ones; then, after stocking up on a couple of bottles, they would go to the pub, where Jim had a pint and she had a gin and tonic.

  Jim would read the morning paper and she would read a magazine, then they went home to lunch. She could never understand couples who found shopping a chore—all you had to do was be organized.

  “Lovely morning, madam,” said Mr. Elton, rubbing his hands happily behind the counter. Mr. Elton was a little too hearty for Bella, but then you can’t go around condemning everyone for their irritating little habits, she told herself firmly. She greeted him pleasantly and let her eyes roam around to find a cheap sherry, one which would be good enough to drink, yet not too good to waste by putting in a trifle.

  “Did you enjoy that bottle of bubbly last night, then?” asked Mr. Elton, all cheer and grins and winks.

  “Last night? Bubbly? No, we didn’t have any sparkling wine last night,” said Bella.

  “Aha, yes you did! Mr. B. was in here around seven looking for something nice, white and dry and sparkling. I asked him was it an anniversary or something; and he said no, just a little treat.”

  Bella looked at him in amazement. Jim wasn’t at home last night for dinner. He brought no bottle of anything sparkling when he did come home at midnight. He was exhausted from going over the papers with Martin at Martin’s house. Martin’s wife had fixed them a nice supper he said; nothing special—more a glorified snack. He had mentioned nothing about bubbly. Bella’s brow cleared. He had probably decided to buy something to take along to Martin’s house. He hadn’t implied it was a meal that went well with bubbly, but then men never tell you the things that are important.

  She thanked Mr. Elton as distantly as she could without actual coldness and left him with the cheapest sherry that might actually be drunk by human beings. The incident went from her mind and remained gone until Jim came home at six o’clock.

  “Well, you know,” were his first words, “I was going to tell you anyway, so I’ll tell you now.”

  Know what? Bella’s first thought was that he had been sacked. Made redundant. Nothing else could account for the look of seriousness on his face.

  “Tell me what?” she said, saucepan in one hand, tea towel in the other.

  “Elton told me he had mentioned the bottle of champagne and said he hoped he hadn’t let any cats out of any bags. I told him he had but it didn’t matter. He’s full of excitement up in the wine shop there, he thinks he’s in the center of some drama. Silly fool.”

  Jim had never spoken like that of Elton or of anyone. What cat had been let out of what bag? Bella was very confused.

  Jim sat down on a kitchen chair, took the phone off its hook, turned off the bubbling saucepan on the gas cooker, and explained to Bella that he was having an affair with a girl in the class he lectured in the polytechnic, and that he loved her. He was going to ask Bella for a divorce.

  It had been going on for
over six months. Martin knew and covered up for him; so did his secretary. Nobody else knew apart from Martin’s wife possibly, and now that jovial fool Elton in the off-license. The girl’s flatmate knew, of course, but she didn’t count, she was from another life, another world.

  Bella still had the tea towel in her hand; she began to twist it around and around.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she said in a little whimper. “Why don’t you want to live with me anymore? You promised to live with me when we got married, not someone else.”

  “I know,” said Jim. “I know I did, but I didn’t know it was going to be like this. Everything’s changed. Don’t say you haven’t noticed how dull we’ve got together. You must have been feeling that everything we’d ever hoped for and promised ourselves has all got in this dreary sort of routine of catching up with things, forever. Once the sitting room’s been done up it’s time to do up the hall, when the car is washed it’s time to clean the garage, when the roses are pruned it’s time to do the beds by the wall, when the shopping’s done it’s time to label things in the deep freeze…People weren’t meant to live like this—they were meant to spark away and react to each other. We’ve stopped doing that, haven’t we?”

  “I’ll try and spark and react a bit,” said Bella weakly.

  “It’s too late now,” said Jim, and he put on his coat again. “I’m just going for a drink, by myself, not with Emma. I’ll be back in an hour—I want to think out what we are going to do.”

  “We are going to do nothing,” screamed Bella in pain. “No, I tell you we are making no plans! You are making all the decisions and plans. I have no part in it. I’m quite happy to go on the way we are. If there are any changes to be made they are yours, not ours. Just present me with the list of how you are going to go back on all your promises. That’s all.”

  “Let me go and think things out. I know it will be simpler if I’ve time to think. I’ll write it all down and then we can discuss it as calmly as possible,” he said, not even fooling himself that it would be possible.