by Maeve Binchy
“We don’t want to be difficult, but what is it, exactly?” I asked. She said she thought it might be a reception with some wine and maybe some finger food. We’d have a great time. I looked at Brian’s gray, empty face and doubted it but thanked her very much.
We went up, unpacked and lay beside each other in the big, cool bed. The unhappiest couple in the Western world, and it was nobody’s fault, really. That was the terrible thing. I sort of slept. I must have, because I dreamed of Margy and Mel when they were toddlers. They were asking me what was going to happen in life, and I was telling them it would all be great. I woke and found Brian sitting in a chair. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking at anything.
It was six p.m., and outside the window we saw people heading down the road in the early-evening sunshine. Old and young, men and women; they walked in twos and threes, on their own or in laughing groups. Heading towards the Spa Wells on a summer’s evening to have a couple glasses of wine and some finger food. “Come on,” I said. “We don’t want to be late.”
“Late?” he replied, astounded.
Anything was better than a long night looking at each other with nothing left to say. Soon I was out of the shower and choosing which dress to wear. Some of the men walking down the road wore collars and ties; some had open shirts. Some of the ladies had cardigans; some had smart suits, flowery dresses; some were in jeans. It looked fairly free and easy.
“I don’t know whether we should go to this thing, Kathy. We haven’t been invited.”
“Oh, come on, Brian,” I said. “Didn’t you hear the lady at the desk? Everyone is invited.”
“We may have to pay,” he said, sounding anxious.
“So we pay,” I told him.
We discovered that it was going to cost €120 each to sign up for the summer school’s week of activities. A bit expensive for a welcome reception, I thought, but then I looked at the brochure. There were all kinds of things: lectures, poetry readings, bus trips, dancing lessons, seminars and debates. And the main thing was, it would be a distraction. We wouldn’t be left on our own, facing each other with nothing left to say, forced to admit the emptiness of our lives.
It wasn’t men in tuxedos and women in gowns leaning on a ship’s railing, but a lot of these people had fairly playful eyes. You got a sense that there might be a fair amount of flirting in this lot, if you know what I mean. If not now, then in the past. They had all been coming here for years and years, apparently, to dance in squares and roam the countryside. They liked it so much they booked in again every year. It was all about Brian Merriman, some poet dead for hundreds of years, but people brought him back to life every summer.
Everyone was very friendly. They told us all sorts of things, like where to go for a swim, where to get cheap lobster, which translation of his poem Cúirt an Mheán Oíche to read. The poem wasn’t even in English, for heaven’s sake, but there seemed to be a stack of translations of The Midnight Court, and everyone recommended a different one. People were full of advice about everything. They said we should drive out and see the Burren—but not to pick the flowers—or maybe go to Doolin and get a boat to the Aran Islands, or go to places we had never heard of. Ballyvaughan, Ennistymon, Lahinch, Corofin: they tripped off the tongue. There were people speaking in the Irish language, which they told us we’d know in no time after a few lessons in the mornings.
So we listened to the opening of the school and to a lecture, and then we discovered that the theme of this year’s gathering was marriage. They could have had something less brutally relevant, I thought, but I kept a bright smile, as if I hadn’t a worry in the world about marriage and how it seemed to be panning out in our lives.
And then there was dancing. Mainly we couldn’t do it at all, because there were complicated things much more intricate than our square dancing at home. Caledonian sets, Ballyvourney sets, all way, way beyond us. But apparently we could learn all that, too, in special dancing lessons every day. By the end of the week we would be whirling with the best. There were a few waltzes, so eventually Brian and I took to the floor like everyone else. Everyone in the hall sang the words. “My mother died last springtime, when Irish fields were green. The neighbors said her funeral was the finest ever seen.” Brian listened in amazement. “Some topic for everyone to dance to,” he said. But at least he was smiling, and I hadn’t seen that for a while.
And so it went on for the week. We went to poetry readings and lectures. We learned about the construction of the Irish language at one seminar and about the courts of Munster poetry at another. We tried to keep up with horrifically fit dancing instructors, and soon we had our own eight and were swinging each other around in great style. We had conversations way into the night with poets, politicians and polka dancers.
If they asked us what we did, which was rarely, I told them I baked for people in their own dishes; Brian said he wrote poetry and had been doing some teaching on the side. Everyone seemed to think this was a completely reasonable thing to do. Nobody asked if there was money in it, or what he had published recently, or what his real job was, or what his ten-year plan was. I may have been imagining it, but, as the days went on, I thought that there were fewer lines etched on his face and that his eyes were brighter.
People kept assuring us that they were pacing themselves. They urged us to pace ourselves, too. This, I think, had to do with not staying up until six a.m. singing, which was a danger. And not starting to drink after the dancing class and forgetting to stop all day, which was another danger. And we heard amazing amounts of gossip. Things that happened some years back, when certain people had more energy than they currently did or had not been as wise as they were now.
One summer a man had lost his false teeth and asked rather sheepishly at reception if any had been handed in. He was discreetly given a set in an envelope. When they didn’t fit, he was told that all the other sets in the lost-and-found had been claimed. Once upon a time another man had made so many perambulations to the rooms of different ladies that he never knew which was his own room, and when he went to pay his bill there was nothing to pay, because the hotel had assumed he was a no-show and had relet it.
There was a marvellous woman who told us that it usually took her until November to recover from her indiscretions every third week of August. Another said regretfully that everyone was very old and staid and settled now, and that it was a pity we hadn’t met them in their heyday. They looked very much in their heyday to us. A great roaming band of people, old and young, serious drinkers and teetotalers, fit as fiddles or bent over canes, long retired or in their first jobs. Some went to every lecture, took notes and asked questions. Others adjourned to bars, golf courses, lunches in craft shops; or to have healing baths in the Centre, where ropes suspended from the ceiling had helped haul thousands out of the mineral salts over the years.
They talked about any number of subjects: the nature of evil, the joys and problems of being part of a united Europe, the wisdom or lack of it in having a celibate clergy. And because of the theme we discussed marriage at length: whether it was possible to have an equal partnership, what equal meant, if a marriage could last forever and whether it should last forever. My head was in a whirl.
As for Brian Merriman himself—they all talked about him so familiarly that I would not have been surprised to hear that he was up at the Roadside Inn, singing songs, and that we should hurry, in case we missed him. It was a mystery. At home we didn’t have gatherings like this. Or maybe we did, and Brian and I had never come across them. These people had come from all over the country, and even farther afield, for this celebration. Their conversation was full of “Do you remember?”s and “Aren’t you looking like a two-year-old?”s. I forgot all about looking for my roots. There wasn’t time, anyway. The Collins family tree would have to wait for another visit.
The man who ran the summer school was actually called Collins—Bob Collins—a very nice man, approachable when he was free. But he was always talking to some
one very important, like a former prime minister of Ireland or an ex-president who had a vacation house down the road. If the social climbers I make carrot cake for back at home only knew the high society we were mixing with, they’d be pea green with envy.
I did get to talk to Bob Collins once. I told him that I was a Collins, too, and was wondering where I should start to research the clan. (He gave me all kinds of tips, but, of course, there wasn’t one moment left to do any of it.) “Kathleen Collins?” he said. “You have the same name as Brian Merriman’s wife.” I don’t really believe any of this fate or coincidence thing, though you’d be surprised how many of my clients back home consult psychics. They’re always talking about them.
That evening Brian suggested we go out for an hour and watch the sunset. I wish I could tell you how unusual this was in our lives. If ever I suggested a sunset, he would say bleakly: “So the sun goes down and it comes up again. That’s what happens.” But now he’d heard of a place where you might see dolphins and porpoises or some such, and this other poet he had met told him it was a great place for the soul. It was called Fanore, and he pointed it out to me on a map, the same map he hadn’t had the interest or energy to pick up from his lap just a few short days ago. Of course I agreed to go, so we went.
At Fanore I looked at Brian and saw that there were no lines in his face. He was relaxed and happy. If he’d been wearing a tuxedo and leaning against the rail of a cruise ship he wouldn’t have looked better. I decided not to tell him about having the same name as Brian Merriman’s wife, in case he thought I was being fancy or trying to justify the holiday or something like that. It’s usually my instinct to prattle on, but this time I just patted his hand and looked out at the Atlantic Ocean.
“You’re very restful, Kathy,” he said. “I feel I could tell you anything, even something so crazy you won’t believe it.”
“Tell me,” I said, without the faintest idea of what he was going to say.
“I think we were led here in some way,” he said. “I think I am the reincarnation of Brian Merriman.”
My heart sank. I thought he was getting better, the depression was lifting, the clouds were parting, and instead he was coming out as clinically insane. “The what?” I asked.
“You know, Kathy, the way they say things don’t really die, they come back again. I have come back again. It’s as simple as that.” He beamed at me like a complete madman.
“How, exactly, a reincarnation?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound too much like Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“Well, don’t you see?” he said, his eyes blazing happily in the sunset. “My name is Brian Merman; his wife was Kathleen Collins; we have had exactly the same careers, married at the same age as he did; they had two daughters, like we do; he was a flax farmer and won prizes for growing it; I did, too, in Dakota, remember? And, of course, he was a teacher, like me, and, most of all—and here’s the whole heart of it—he was a poet.”
I nodded dumbly. Was this the time to tell him that when his grandfather had come to the United States from Russia, Merman was as near as Americans could come to pronouncing the family name? No, it was probably not the time. Anyway, I wouldn’t have got a word in. He was going on and on: they were born exactly two hundred years apart yet had followed the same path; the first Brian Merriman had been impatient about clergy and the Establishment, just as my Brian had been. It had to mean something. Something amazing. Something very significant.
I had thought it was terrible when he seemed to be suffering from depression, but why hadn’t I just left him the way he was? Now he was hallucinating he was a long dead poet who wrote in a different language, a person he had never heard of before last Saturday. And it got worse.
Brian Merriman had died two hundred years ago this very year. That’s what this gathering was all about. Did my poor Brian now think this was his fate, too? Had he actually given up on his life on account of all these coincidences? Had he brought me to this beautiful place to say good-bye? Was this the result of all my scheming and plotting and planning with Chester, Chief Vacation Buddy of the Snappy Seniors’ Travel Agency? I hadn’t helped him at all; I’d only managed to rot his mind.
“Well, Brian,” I said with a heavy heart, “you know there are a lot of ways of looking at things.”
“Of course there are,” he eagerly agreed. “And if we hadn’t come here I never would have known it. When he died, the first Brian Merriman that is, there were only a few short lines in the newspaper about him, and he might well have thought that he didn’t amount to much. But think, think, Kathy, two centuries later there are hundreds and hundreds of us celebrating him, reading his poetry, debating his ideas, studying his life and times.”
He hadn’t looked so young and hopeful for as long as I could remember. He said that he was going to show people his poetry, that he wasn’t going to keep it hidden. It had been the sign he needed, something to prove he wasn’t worthless. His arm was around my shoulders, his face nuzzling my cheek in a way it hadn’t done for some considerable time. The coy look of a Merriman was in his eye. What the hell, I thought. I know what’s changed him: he met a marvelous band of good-natured people who live life to the fullest. If he thinks he’s the reincarnation of some guy who walked these roads two hundred years ago, then I’m going to let him think it.
I would write a postcard to Chester before we left. I would tell him that the Snappy Seniors’ record is unbroken. He would have our repeat business; we would indeed come back here next year. Of course we would.
I know only four figures of one Clare set. There is much still to learn. Brian has read only one translation of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche. We have only skimmed the surface of Clare music and got the barest essentials of dolmens, holy wells and the lunar landscape of the Burren. Imagine leaving all these people and not knowing how their lives turned out. It’s more than flesh and blood could bear.
Anyway, this coming back as a butterfly or something else is a perfectly decent theory. Buddhists believe it, and they are gentle people. And, just as there are strong women in the famous poem, I have met many strong women this week. Surely one of them will get a summer school going on Mrs. Merriman, on Kathleen Collins—quite possibly my ancestor. I might be her reincarnation, too. And if she makes me as happy as her husband has made Brian, then we won’t be doing badly at all.
About the Author
Michael Lionstar
Maeve Binchy is the author of numerous best-selling books, including her most recent novel, Minding Frankie, in addition to Heart and Soul, Whitethorn Woods, Night of Rain and Stars, Quentin, Scarlet Feather, Circle of Friends, and Tara Road, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. She has written for Gourmet; O, The Oprah Magazine; Modern Maturity; and Good Housekeeping, among other publications. She and her husband, Gordon Snell, live in Dalkey, Ireland.
www.maevebinchy.com
By Maeve Binchy
FICTION
Light a Penny Candle
Echoes
London Transports
The Lilac Bus
Firefly Summer
Silver Wedding
Circle of Friends
The Copper Beech
The Glass Lake
This Year It Will Be Different
Evening Class
The Return Journey
Tara Road
Scarlet Feather
Quentins
Nights of Rain and Stars
Whitethorn Woods
Heart and Soul
Minding Frankie
NONFICTION
Aches & Pains
The Maeve Binchy Writers’ Club
America loves Maeve Binchy’s newest novel, Minding Frankie
“Maeve Binchy has done it again [with] yet another warm tale of individual growth and human community … There’s a good chance that many readers, like this one, will consider Minding Frankie one of Binchy’s best novels yet.” —Maude McDaniel, BookPage
“Joyful, q
uintessential Binchy.” —Karen Holt, O, The Oprah Magazine
“Binchy is a national treasure in her homeland of Ireland, and her latest novel is a perfect illustration of why … Your heart will have no trouble recognizing the landscape [of this] touching saga.” —Publishers Weekly
Maeve is back with a new tale of joy, heartbreak and hope, about a baby girl raised by a close-knit Dublin neighborhood.
When Noel learns that he is the father of a motherless infant, he agrees to take guardianship of little Frankie despite still struggling with his personal demons. Fortunately, he has a caring network of friends and family who are more than up to the challenge.
However, not everyone is pleased with this unconventional arrangement, especially a nosy social worker who’s convinced that Frankie would be better off in a foster home. Now it’s Noel’s job to convince her that everyone in the community has something special to offer when it comes to minding Frankie.
