A Few of the Girls: Stories

by Maeve Binchy

  Bella put her back to the hall door.

  “I want no lists of options, or alternatives. You are going to go on living with me, that was the bargain, that’s what we said we’d do. What kind of a life would I have if you went away? What would I do?” She burst into very noisy tears and Jim looked at her with pity from a distance.

  By midnight it was clear that he was going; he sounded very weary and anxious to be gone. Nothing she said would sway him. He used very few phrases about how much they had shared together and she did not say at all that she would miss him, only that she couldn’t cope with a life without him. There were thousands of words, most of them useless. Everything that had to be said was said in the first five minutes. Jim slept on the sofa, and Bella slept not at all.

  She tried to preserve some air of normality at breakfast and made him a nice fry. He only wanted coffee. She begged him to give the marriage another chance; she said she’d never ask him to help with the housework if that was the problem. He shook his head and said nothing. As he left the house he said he would be home late and would take tomorrow off work so that they could sit down and draw up a proper financial settlement.

  “You’re never getting a divorce!” Bella shouted. “Never, never!”

  “Well, I’ll just go then,” said Jim simply. “And in a couple of years Emma and I will be able to get married anyway. I’d prefer if we could talk about things, because you might like a smaller house, or you might want rent paid on a flat for you. It would be much calmer if you accepted that I literally won’t be here again, and that I’m willing to make things as simple for you as possible.”

  He was gone.

  The morning was interminable. On a writing pad that she usually used for shopping lists, Bella wrote down all the possible courses of action she could take. None of them seemed any use at all when faced with the unchanging fact that Jim was going to go anyway.

  What did people do when their husbands walked out? Often enough she had gossiped and tut-tutted about other families where this had happened. But what did a wife actually do?

  By midafternoon, no housework done, endless tea and biscuits consumed, Bella had stopped blaming Jim and decided that it must be something in herself that was wrong. She took out the old photograph album she and Jim had kept meticulously during the fifteen years of marriage. It went back even further to the year that they had been engaged.

  The summers really did seem to have been hotter then, sleeveless floral dresses, funny bouffant hairdos, how thin she was. And how slim in the very formal wedding pictures. She had a real waist then, and her jaw looked very frail instead of padded as it did now. All Bella could see was more flesh and fewer smiles in the progression of snaps. The most recent were the most distressing. They had been taken at Christmas, when Jim’s sister and her husband had come for Christmas dinner.

  The curiously formal pictures of everyone holding up glasses at whoever was taking the snap seemed to explain everything to Bella. Look at her, for heaven’s sake, she had a roll of fat around her waist. Whatever had made her wear a silly tight dress, and how had she let herself become so fat anyway?

  In every magazine that Bella had read, the dangers of Letting Yourself Go were written large and menacing. Agony columns used to suggest that you had a facial or lost weight to revive an ailing marriage; girls who had no boyfriends were urged to slim down and they would be rewarded. Anyone who felt depressed or low would feel cheered and high if they were a few inches less around the middle.

  Bella must have been too complacent; that’s what it was. Jim had never said anything, but he was a man, and, as a man, he must have been put off by her flesh. What Bella must do now was to lose a lot of weight, dramatically, then he would come back again, and the whole horror of last night would be forgotten. In fact, there would come a time when they could laugh over it together.

  The biscuit tin was firmly closed. Then firmly opened again and its contents shaken into the rubbish bin. The remaining bread was put out in the garden for the birds. This was going to be a dramatic diet, not one of those where you started and stopped. This one had to work. But Bella knew that weight fell slowly, whereas people who were hungry fell quickly. Perhaps she would go to the doctor about it. Some people got marvelous tablets from doctors, which meant that you were never hungry again. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of this before.

  The doctor had surgery from four to six, and Bella sat in the waiting room, full of determination. Dr. Cecil, who was a kind young man, would help her. She had only visited him a couple of times, but he had been very pleasant on both occasions.

  “Well, a woman who wants to lose weight is a cheering thing for a medical man,” he said briskly. “Step up here and we’ll have a look, you don’t seem very overweight to me. Now let’s see…yes, a stone less and you’ll be in perfect health. Are you feeling short of breath or anything, is that why you want to lose weight?”

  “No, it’s because I’ve got so fat,” said Bella, amazed that he couldn’t see this for himself.

  He listened to her chest, took her blood pressure, and told her that she was a very healthy woman, but she looked a bit strained. Had she any other worries apart from her weight?

  “No,” lied Bella. She was going to fight this one on her own.

  Dr. Cecil could give her no tablets; she didn’t need them, he said, just more exercise, fewer fatty foods, plenty of protein, less carbohydrate. The usual advice.

  Could she have some sleeping pills perhaps? Not unless she told him why. He didn’t just hand out sleeping pills like candy.

  Bella was vague. Dr. Cecil was firm. She left with no prescription of any sort, and a cheery wave from Dr. Cecil, who decided that she was going through an early change of life and asked her to keep in touch, to drop in now and then just for a chat about her health.

  So it would have to be a health farm. That might get a stone off dramatically. Bella had plenty of housekeeping money. Three months ago Jim had opened a special account for her and put in a generous sum each month. With a sudden start she realized that he must have done this when he had decided to leave her anyway: a method of giving her money of her own in advance of the departure date. She had enough to pay for a week in one of those expensive places if she needed to, but might that be playing into Jim’s hand if she just cleared off at once? She would wait and see. Meanwhile, eating nothing.

  Bella was very hungry when Jim came in at midnight. She was wide awake and dying for a bowl of soup, but she would have nothing. Didn’t those magazines tell you that slimming should begin with a shock to the system? Jim looked tired and not anxious to talk. He got a throw ready to sleep on the sofa and said they’d have a proper conversation in the morning.

  Bella said that there was nothing to stop him sleeping in his own bed, where he had slept for fifteen years. He looked startled, as if she had said something in bad taste. No, he’d prefer to be in the sitting room, please.

  “You were able to sleep in our bed all the time this affair was going on, and it didn’t revolt you,” said Bella.

  “I know,” he said, ashamed of himself.

  That night was almost entirely sleepless for Bella, but she dozed a little.

  In the morning, she put on her long navy caftan, the most slimming thing she owned; she made up her tired face carefully and brushed her hair. She came down as Jim was making the coffee.

  “Let’s decide on a temporary parting,” she said before he could say anything. “Let’s just say a period like two months, and then we meet again and see how we are getting on without each other. If we are miserable then we’ll come back together and there’s no harm done. If we still want to stay apart then we can make all the arrangements then. How about that?”

  “No,” said Jim. “That wouldn’t do at all. You see, I’m not going to be miserable. It has nothing to do with trial separations. I want to marry Emma, and I don’t want some more hypocrisy—I’m responsible for enough of it already. So what I want to discuss today
is what you are going to do, how much money you’ll need, what way you’ll need it.”

  This wasn’t going as Bella had planned.

  She listened and watched as the sums were done on her shopping list pad. So much going in here, so much there, insurance policies to be kept up. Bella was to let him know if she would like him to sell the house—it might be better all round, new starts, and money in the bank.

  “Where are you going to live?” she asked dully.

  “I don’t know yet, it depends on whether we sell this place or not…”

  The calculations went on. She felt very low. She walked away from the kitchen table in the middle of it.

  “I’m going out,” she said suddenly. “We’ll talk about it again.”

  “I won’t be here again,” said Jim despairingly. “This is our day for talking about it.”

  “No, you can write to me about it,” she said.

  A shadow of relief came over Jim’s face.

  “So, I’ll take some of my things—well, most of my things—today then. I mean, I won’t take anything joint, we can discuss that again.”

  “Yes,” said Bella.

  She walked down to the shopping center and in the coffee shop looked up the National Marriage Guidance Council in the phone book, asking them for their nearest branch. It wasn’t far away. She rang the branch and they said to call in that afternoon and make an appointment. She filled in the time wandering around the shops. Perhaps they could cure her marriage? Why else would they have been set up if they couldn’t mend marriages that had gone bad?

  The woman said that Bella could make an appointment for counseling next week.

  “Why not now?” said Bella in distress.

  That wasn’t the system, apparently. It might have been based on the fact that people had run in for counseling after a row, and that they didn’t really need it at all. Bella didn’t know. Anyway, she had to accept next Thursday or nothing, so she took next Thursday.

  She went to a bad movie and went home. Jim had gone, leaving a note saying that he had put another hundred pounds into her bank account for emergencies and would write to her next week. His clothes, suitcases, and a few of his books had gone. Nothing else.

  —

  It’s a hard life if you keep up pretenses, but you can keep going on some kinds of hopes, and Bella had two lifelines, the diet and the marriage counseling. She parried questions about where Jim was, she refused one invitation, and canceled the people she was going to have for drinks. She accepted another invitation to a neighbor’s house, saying that Jim was away, but she felt dizzy from lack of food, and she wouldn’t eat anything there so the evening was not a success.

  Finally Thursday came and she found herself in front of a clergyman of all things. Bella hadn’t much time for clergymen, but this one seemed very nice and relaxed, and he never suggested that religion might be the answer for anything, which eased her mind.

  In fact, she thought, it must be very easy to be a counselor, you only have to listen and nod. He gave her no advice; he gave her no suggestions. She told him the whole story about Jim and how it was a middle-aged madness, and about Emma, who must be twenty-five years younger than him, and about the nice home that Bella and Jim had built up for years. But the counselor didn’t have any ideas about how to get Jim back. No helpful hints or schemes, no plans of campaign.

  “Well, naturally I’ve gone on a diet,” said Bella in a businesslike way. “That was probably half, if not two-thirds, of the whole problem. I’ve eaten practically nothing for six days now, and I’ve lost five pounds, so that side of it is under control at any rate. It’s just that I don’t know what to do in terms of making him come back, when I should expect him back, and how to work on it.”

  The gray eyes of the counselor were friendly and reassuring, as was his gray, shabby cardigan. But they didn’t seem to flicker with any recognition or pleasure when she mentioned her diet, he didn’t seem to see that this was the best thing she could have done.

  “It is a good idea to lose weight, don’t you think?” she asked anxiously.

  “Has your weight made you feel unhappy?”

  “Well, obviously since I’m much too fat, and this girl is probably a skinny little thing, it must have a lot to do with that. I know I have the willpower to lose the weight. What I was hoping you would tell me is what to do then?”

  He was a good listener; he had said nothing when she had gone into little bouts of self-pity about who was going to help her dig the garden, and why should she be turned out of her own house at the age of forty-five, and when was this country going to have laws that protected marriages?

  He had prompted her with a few little grunting remarks about why she and Jim had drifted apart, and whether she and he had been able to talk to each other about things that mattered. He said that it was usually better if both parties came to counseling, but she had said vacantly that Jim wouldn’t consider it. He seemed to have a debt of honor to this little tramp at the moment. When they got back together, perhaps he might come then. But she said it doubtfully.

  “You really think that the relationship was so alive that it will be saved,” the kind gray man said, not as if it was a question, more as if he was just saying a statement, expecting her to agree or disagree.

  “Well it must, if I get my figure back, and have as much to offer him as this teenager.”

  The counselor said nothing. So Bella went on, “I’ve decided I’m going to get as much money as I can from him, and the first thing I’m going to do is go to a health farm. I’ll stay for three weeks, and then I’ll be in such good shape that I’ll be able for anything. I’m not going to take this sitting down. Some women would let themselves go completely, but I’ve learned my lesson. Once I’m two stone lighter, and can fit into size ten dresses again, there’ll be no problem.”

  She felt a bit worried in case she had got the whole idea of counseling wrong, because he didn’t seem to have much cheer for her, just a friendly handshake as she was leaving him, assuring him that once she was slim, everything would be as it always had been, a wonderful, close, good relationship, which was, after all, what Jim had promised when they were married in a church all those years ago.

  Premonitions

  Sara had always been what they called anxious. She jumped at the slightest sound. She hated having to read aloud in class, and she was always afraid that something awful would happen.

  Mainly it didn’t. But you couldn’t explain that to Sara.

  They could have been in the caravan that was blown off the cliff—all right, so they were not, but they could have been. So it was the same principle.

  She worried about Nesbit, their dog, in case he might have rabies.

  “Darling, he’s just running around in circles. It’s what puppies do,” her mother said. But Sara was afraid that it was a mad thing to do and that Nesbit might have to be put down.

  When Sara went to work in the bank she was always afraid there would be a raid and that men with machine guns would come in and ask them to lie on the floor. The others shrugged. So they would lie on the floor. There was a procedure for this, no one was to be heroic. But still she scanned the faces of perfectly innocent customers.

  When she met Richard, who worked in an estate agency, he thought it was sweet that she was frightened of the world. “I’ll always protect you, Sara,” he would say, stroking her head.

  The day they married, Sara was afraid that the wedding car would not turn up, that the vicar, who was somewhat red-faced, would have a seizure at the altar, that Richard’s mother would get drunk, and that the guests would get food poisoning. None of these things happened, but the bridesmaid did twist her ankle by dancing too violently, so, as Sara said many, many times, you knew there would always be something.

  In their new house she would start to panic in case the deeds had not been properly drawn up, the roof adequately supported, the neighbors might be people on a witness protection scheme, and the whole area liable to b
e flooded at high tide. None of these fears was realized, but a car did crash on the corner and the learner driver was taken to hospital with whiplash, so, as Sara said over and over, you never know the day or the hour; there was always something.

  And Richard was very eager to have a family immediately but Sara was worried about it. They were so young still and there was so much to be planned and thought out and got right before they thought of children. She also said that it was an increasingly violent world to bring children into.

  Richard stroked her hair and said that it wasn’t right to be so upset about things. Perhaps they might go to the doctor who could give her some medicine that would make her less anxious, or get her to see a counselor. He wasn’t saying that he would protect her and keep her safe anymore—he was saying he had heard of this wonderful man or that wonderful woman.

  Sara was very upset by it all. Richard thought she was mad. She was far from mad. She was sensitive, that was all. She could see things before they happened. What was the word?

  Forebodings, was that it?

  Richard didn’t think so. Was it presentiment? he wondered. No, that wasn’t exactly it either. They looked it up together in the dictionary and found premonition. Yes, that was the word. It meant when someone got a kind of warning ahead of time. Like a soothsayer maybe, or a fortune-teller, or someone very sensitive to the vibes around them.

  Sara laughed, delighted with the word. And Richard suggested they go upstairs to bed.

  But Sara said there was far too much to do.

  What sorts of things?

  Oh, like unplugging all the appliances in case of an electrical fire, checking the smoke alarms, patrolling the garden with Nesbit because there might be people watching the house and it was good to let them see that there was a big guard dog on the premises.

  Richard said that Nesbit was such a fool of a dog he would welcome burglars in and lie down waiting for his tummy to be rubbed. Sara took no notice of this whatsoever. Instead, she reminded him that she had to check the house alarm in the kitchen: eighty percent of burglars came in the back door; you had to be prepared. So Richard went upstairs alone and was asleep when Sara came to bed. Something that happened more and more as the months went on.