A Few of the Girls: Stories

by Maeve Binchy

  And George must never know that the child was his. That would never do: he would be back in my life with free samples of baby biscuits or disposable nappies.

  So I wrote to my parents saying that I had been in a relationship which was now over and that I was delighted that I was going to have a child. They wrote back, totally bewildered, and said that if they lived to be one hundred years old they would never understand me.

  My mother said that if I wanted her there for the birth she would come. I did want her, badly, but then she would know how old Eve was and that George was the father, and they must never suspect this.

  I knew that the moment they held Eve in their arms it would be all right, so I waited until she was four months old, then I turned up on their doorstep and put her straight into their arms. And of course they loved her at once and they stopped trying to understand me and tried to understand her instead.

  They were absolutely wonderful grandparents, and we moved nearer to their home so that they could see more of little Eve. I had got into the habit of working very hard, so I sort of thought three jobs were the norm, and every year I took my mother and father and Eve on a holiday abroad. Our albums show us all in Italy, Spain, and Greece.

  Perfect family, happy little girl, secure and loved. Eve was great at school too. Glowing school reports, in the top of her class, enthusiastic, lots of friends. Sometimes, not very often but sometimes, I felt guilty about George. He was the child’s father, after all.

  He had never known her little arms around his neck; he couldn’t swell with pride when she got a gold medal in front of the whole school. But then, if he were allowed to be her dad, he would be filling her up with nonsensical ideas about saving money and the importance of possessions.

  No, better the way things were.

  George had married, so I heard, someone who obviously didn’t care about the way he collected jams and little packets of vinegar, maybe even helped him do it. He was going steadily upwards, he didn’t need Eve in his life.

  Of course, now that she was eleven, she did ask a bit about her father. But she seemed perfectly satisfied that I had once loved a young man but we had turned out not to be suited. He had gone away before I knew I was pregnant.

  “Why could nobody find him?” Eve asked.

  “Very difficult, back then.”

  And that seemed to be enough.

  Everything was just fine until that girl Hilda came to Eve’s school. They were best friends from day one, which was Eve’s twelfth birthday. And Hilda was a very unsuitable friend for my beautiful daughter.

  For one thing she didn’t have a brain in her little dyed head. For another, she was unable to dress winter or summer in a way that didn’t expose most of her stomach. She had nose piercing and belly-button piercing and toenails painted scarlet. She had a way of shrugging and saying “whatever” that drove me mad. Particularly since the little shoulders of my Eve had started to shrug in a deeply irritating way.

  There was a lot of talk about Hilda’s mum and what fun she was and what a terrific house they had and how Hilda’s dad, who was divorced from her mum, came to visit Hilda every weekend and took her to fantastic places.

  And suddenly Eve wondered why her dad did not come and provide treats like a theme park or an indoor swimming pool. Eve wanted to know why didn’t I join the golf club or the tennis club or play bridge with people or go to fashion shows like Hilda’s mum did. Honestly, I could have done without all that.

  Yes, I would love to have joined the tennis club. Loved it. But it would have meant big fees and a posh racquet, nice shoes, and buying rounds of drinks and maybe entertaining people I met there. Despite my three jobs there just wasn’t the money for all that.

  I needed to get endless amounts of school uniforms for Eve, and a laptop and an iPod and leisure clothes. And there was the holiday with my parents and Eve, and there were fares and dental work and expensive haircuts every six weeks for Eve. But of course I didn’t say any of this because it would sound so whining and self-pitying. Instead I smiled brightly and said that heavens, no, I was much too busy to play tennis.

  “Hilda’s mum thinks some women work so hard they don’t see the woods for the trees. Or the trees for the wood…or something,” Eve said.

  I wanted to hug her—she was only a little parrot, repeating the phrases of her empty-headed but exciting little friend. Surely I, who had coped with so much, could cope with this? Of course I could. It was harmless; it was called growing up. It was only when Eve said she wanted to go shopping with Hilda in the mall on a Friday afternoon that an alarm bell went off in my head.

  Of course I let her go, but when I began to think about it, I remembered that Eve didn’t even like shopping, and I hadn’t given her any money to buy things. Maybe I could slip down there and give her something. I could go around five, between my job as a doctor’s receptionist and my job at the cash desk in an Italian restaurant. I would have an hour to myself then.

  I saw them before they saw me.

  Eve’s blouse was tied up under her bra, leaving her stomach bare; her jeans were low over her hips and she was wearing not her nice school knickers but a thong. I could see it only too well. Her eyes were black with some kind of heavy makeup; her lips were scarlet.

  She was standing with a lager can in her hand talking to a group of admiring young male gangsters and criminals.

  She was smoking.

  I felt faint.

  I wished for the first time in over twelve years that I had let George play some part in Eve’s upbringing. Collecting little individual milk portions or not, he could scarcely have made a worse job of it than I had. What was I to do?

  I staggered away without them spotting me and managed to put in my hours at the restaurant.

  Eve was sitting at the kitchen table when I got back. She looked pink and white and normal.

  “You look very tired,” she said sympathetically. “You work too hard, I’m always telling you.”

  “Yes, you are.” I sat down.

  “I’ll get us some tea. Was it a bad day?”

  “So-so. Did you do a wash?”

  “Sure, there were a few things I needed, so I put in tea towels and table napkins to make up the load.”

  Yesterday I would have thought this was sweet-natured. Today I realized it was just concealing the evidence: the rolled-up shirt, the numbers of face flannels it must have taken to remove that makeup.

  “Did you buy anything?” I asked faintly.

  “Only a thong. It’s not very comfortable but I’ll be able to wear it on the beach when the weather gets hotter.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  Eve looked at me, startled.

  “I think I’ll take my tea to bed,” I said. I lay there for hours with my eyes open. Who did you consult over something like this? I thought about my mother. No, she would eventually say the unforgivable something about my bringing this on myself since I had decided to bring up Eve alone as a single parent. I couldn’t tell my mother about it.

  I didn’t have to, as it happened. The very next day, a Saturday, just before lunch, I was doing the ironing when my mother called in on a pretext to give me a recipe which I didn’t need and she didn’t need to deliver. I sat and waited to know what it would be about.

  It was about Eve, my mother said eventually.

  “Ah,” I said. It’s a useful little word; it means everything and nothing.

  “And her new friend, Hilda.”

  “Ah, indeed.”

  My mother came out straight and said she thought that Hilda, whom she had only seen twice, was rather a flashy little girl, not the right friend for our Eve.

  It was such a marvelously old-fashioned word, flashy. I don’t know what I would have said. Tarty? Trampish? Vulgar? Were these too destructive descriptions of Hilda—who was, after all, only a child?

  Maybe flashy was more accurate.

  I unplugged the iron and opened the sherry bottle. If my mother thought it
was a trifle early in the day she said nothing.

  “What do I do?” I asked humbly.

  “Well, it needs to be planned carefully,” Mother ventured.

  “Whatever I do will be wrong: if I say she can’t see Hilda then Hilda becomes a martyr and Eve wants to meet her more than ever. It’s just that Eve is just twelve, twelve years old, and she was dressed like a young prostitute yesterday in the mall!” I’m afraid I cried a bit then and my mother poured a refill.

  “Do you remember your friend Rosemary Roberts when you were about fourteen?” she said unexpectedly.

  “She was never a friend,” I explained. “She was in our class at school. I used to hang around a lot with her but I got bored by her in the end and used to avoid her.”

  “Ah,” said my mother.

  “Why do you ask about her?” I wanted to know.

  “When you were fourteen she was your unsuitable friend and there was no one to turn to so I wrote to an agony aunt in this magazine…” My mother’s face looked somewhere between proud and slightly guilty.

  But it wasn’t a similar case. I was never a friend of that Rosemary Roberts. My mother had got it wrong.

  But she went on calmly, “You see, Rosemary always wanted you to go on these ‘dares,’ that’s what she called them. We called it shoplifting. So in order not to have you going out on dares, we kept inviting her to our house. Lord, she was there morning, noon, and night for a while; we even invited her on holiday to Brittany with us when we went camping. Don’t you remember?”

  “Yes, she did come, I remember, and I was so sick of her then I didn’t know why she was there really.”

  “She was there because I wanted you to get sick of her and, amazingly, it worked. When we came back you didn’t want to go on dares anymore, you had different and nicer friends.”

  “You old fox,” I said, astounded. Imagine, it had all happened without my knowing! I would never have known, if it had not been for the fact that we needed to use the tactic again.

  We began planning in earnest.

  “Where is Eve now?” my mother whispered like a conspirator.

  “Still in bed. That’s what girls do nowadays, they sleep till lunch every Saturday morning.”

  “Wake her and ask her to invite Hilda to lunch today. Ask what Hilda particularly likes to eat.”

  “Are you sure, Mother?”

  “Absolutely sure.” There was a flash of steel in my mother’s eye.

  I shook Eve awake—she looked like a baby rubbing her eyes. I felt very devious but we were talking about a Greater Good here. It had to be done.

  Apparently, Hilda really liked sausages, but her mother never had them at home because they weren’t posh enough. So my mother and I looked up a dish called saucisses de Toulouse, which was just sausages in a fancy sauce. And Hilda came and said it was terrific, and was very interested that Eve’s gran had eaten it in a posh hotel, and then we played Monopoly on a French set that had all the posh streets in Paris. My mother admired the braids in Hilda’s hair and asked was it difficult keeping the color right all the time.

  Although Hilda yawned a bit and put her feet up on the furniture, I kept a smile on my face. I refused to think that the sofa had cost fifty-two long, tiring evenings working in the Italian restaurant and this girl had her boots on it. Boots. No. There must be calm. Great calm. Even enthusiasm when my mother was asking Hilda where she was going on her holidays and Hilda yawned and said that she wasn’t sure. Her mother was going with some ladies on a bridge holiday and her father and his girlfriend were going on a cruise. I saw my mother nodding at me like a madwoman. This was my cue.

  “Well, Hilda, I’m taking Eve and my mum and dad to Brittany for ten days this year. We know a lovely place and we’d just love if you came with us.”

  Eve’s little face lit up like a candle. “Oh do, Hilda, do come!”

  And so she came. Horrible, horrible Hilda, sulking, lying around expecting to be waited on all the time, complaining that the place didn’t have any celebs in it and that we weren’t members of the yacht club.

  “This is the worst, but,” my mother whispered to me, “but it’s working. Believe me.”

  I wished I could believe her. An entire holiday wasted as we pandered to this selfish girl.

  As the days went by I saw that Hilda was a lonely child. She had little real attention from either parent: her father’s only solution to a problem was to throw money at it and her mother’s was to find a pecking order and try to rise to the top. Possessions were good, membership of clubs was good, but talking and listening and understanding weren’t very high on anyone’s agenda, neither were they fun.

  I found myself genuinely trying to entertain the terrible Hilda, to give her a holiday she would remember. I suggested she might try tasting an oyster.

  “I don’t want to,” she said. “But it will be good to talk about afterwards.”

  “That’s really no reason to do anything,” I said. “No one is very interested.”

  Hilda thought about it for a while. “I think you’re right,” she said suddenly.

  “Oh, I think so. I’ve been around forever, you get to know things,” I said, not wanting to take too much credit for anything.

  “You’re not bad at all,” she said, patting me unexpectedly on the arm. I told my mother secretly that it wasn’t working at all. The monster Hilda was beginning to like me, and little Eve loved to see us all as a big happy family.

  “There were two ways it could have worked with Rosemary Roberts,” my mother said. “Either she began to bore everyone in Western Europe, which is what happened in our case, or else we reformed her and made her a nicer person, which could well be what’s happening with you and Hilda.”

  I didn’t want it that way. I wanted her out of here, miles away. She asked quite normal questions like why wasn’t Eve’s dad involved in her life, and I answered the same vaguely dishonest way as I had done before, saying he was long out of our lives before Eve was born and that he knew nothing of her.

  “He should pay something though, shouldn’t he?” Hilda said.

  I told her I didn’t think so at all. I had made all the decisions so the responsibilities were all mine. She gave me a sort of a hug.

  “You’re really all right, you are,” she said.

  I was furious, of course, but a little bit pleased. Like we all like to be all right. When the holiday was over, I told her that I was going to give up the Italian restaurant one day a week and that Eve and I were going to learn how to cook some terrific dish, on a Friday afternoon. Did she want to join?

  Did she want to join? Of course she did. And she chose things like apple tarts and chopped herrings because she liked the taste, not because they sounded posh or looked well.

  So that was a bit of reform along the way. And she was only a child, a child that nobody had been nice to. I got to like her. A lot. Never quite as much as on the day I told her that I was going to look for a husband next year and maybe she might give me some fashion advice and maybe she could come shopping for an outfit. Hilda looked at me thoughtfully and said that, honestly, she didn’t think it was all a matter of expensive outfits, that fellows probably just liked you as a person. You know, with views and ideas and jokes and things.

  I could barely find the usual lighthearted tone that I used with her. So I gave her an awkward sort of a bear hug and when it was over she said that I wasn’t to go and marry someone awful, that Eve and she were to be consulted all along the way. When I told my mother about it I had to do a lot of heavy blowing of my nose.

  My mother, who is much less sentimental than I am when all is said and done, said that we should regard that as a result.

  A result?

  Where does she find these phrases?

  Broken China

  It was as bad as a bereavement when Kay’s engagement was broken off. Nobody quite knew what to say. They were afraid to say that she was better off without Larry even though a lot of them might have thought
so. They didn’t want to say it was just a lovers’ tiff, because it was obviously much, much more than that. It would have been heartless to shrug and say that, like a bus, there was a new man around every corner.

  So, with the best of motives, Kay’s friends decided not to mention it at all. Sooner or later, they reasoned, Kay would give them an indication of how she wanted it discussed.

  Kay felt unbearably lonely. It was as if a hand had reached in and taken Larry out of her life: his name never came up in conversation and the subject of weddings was hastily dropped if, by accident, it was ever mentioned. For a group of young women who used to talk regularly about marriage and babies and engagement rings and wedding dresses, a huge and tactful lack of interest in the subject seemed to have descended on them.

  Kay was puzzled. These were her friends; they all worked together in the big delicatessen, making salads and pâtés and dips. They did outside catering as well and served food at business functions. This is where Kay had met Larry eighteen months ago.

  If not love, it had been huge interest at first sight, for both of them. She kept circling him with the best canapés, he kept following her and asking serious questions about what filling was in the tiny vol-au-vents and whether she was going anywhere after the reception.

  They had been so happy, so sure of each other. They had saved the deposit for their house together. Their wedding was planned for summer.

  Larry was getting four weeks’ holidays from his firm; Kay’s colleagues were giving them the wedding reception as a present; they had booked a honeymoon in Italy.

  And then he met another.