by Maeve Binchy
Women Are Fools – Mary
7 May 1973
Mary’s father died on her 21st birthday, when she had been celebrating not only the key of the door but an honours BA. She missed him in a mild guilty sort of way because she never knew him too well. All those years at boarding school, then at university, she hadn’t brought friends home much because there was nothing to do, she thought, in the small country town, and her friends would be bored.
She had a sister years and years older who was a nun in America, and got leave to come over for the funeral, and two brothers, one who was courting, and one who was only a schoolboy.
She didn’t know her mother too well when she was 21, but now at 29 she knows her only too well, and doesn’t like what she knows. Or so she says.
The mother sold the house in the country town and came to Dublin. It would he handier, she said. Mary could live with her while doing the HDip. The courting son was married and living in Dublin in a year and the schoolboy son could go to a good school in Dublin. It was all a great idea said the mother, and Mary thought it would be cheaper certainly and it had been a bit lonely sometimes in Dublin on her own, and at least she would get good meals and have someone to talk to at weekends.
She forgot what it was like to be living at home again. A home where her mother always said, ‘If your poor father were only here he would …’, and he would always be doing or saying something so unlikely that Mary grew to resent the phrase, and the inevitable accusations that she didn’t respect the memory of her father began.
Mary got a job easily enough teaching in Dublin. It was a large convent school, and it was in this that I met her, because our school had a debating competition with hers and her pupils beat mine, and annoyed as I was because I thought my kids were better, I liked their teachers, who seemed kind of interested in the whole idea of giving them self-confidence and not teaching them typical debating phrases off by heart. So we went and had a coffee after we put our various charges on buses and sent them home with dire warnings about not getting distracted by chip shops en route.
She told me that she didn’t really like teaching, and wanted something abroad, that she found it difficult to find a sort of ‘set’ in Dublin now that she had left college. People were all scattered, and at school who on earth did you meet except the nuns, the other teachers, the children and the parents? I knew it only too well, but assured her that it sort of evolved. She was bored by her married friends, she said, they all seemed so complacent. I said mine weren’t because they were all poor and didn’t have much to be complacent about. We thought a bit about how to get a job for her abroad, and about how dreadful it was that the only kind of men you’d want to go out with were all married already.
Again I met her and this time she said she was going to start going to dances again; she told me a bit about her whining mother, who always went on about her missing her chances, and Mary wondered aloud even more whiningly to me and her mother where on God’s name were the chances?
The first Chance came at a dance hall where Mary spent a really appalling night. The dancers who weren’t her pupils were elderly nurses in cardigans, she said; the men were either children or ageing, dribbling drunks. One man in the room seemed to be neither a drunk of 50 nor a child of 15; at the second last dance, he eyed Mary and they jived away until the national anthem.
She had nothing in common with him, but he took her home, and when he said that he’d give her a ring next week he actually did. And Mary was delighted that she had a fellow, although it has to be said she did talk about him as you would about a worn-out carpet sweeper that someone had given you when they had bought a new electrical thing. She was grateful but not totally satisfied with her lot.
Her mother wanted to know all about him, who his people were, and didn’t like the sound of he works in Aer Lingus or Guinnesses or CIE or wherever it was, because his job was never defined there. So Mary didn’t bring him home, they went to the pictures a lot, and necked in the back of his car out at Burma Road in the nice car park built just for that purpose, and he gave her a handbag for her birthday, and he didn’t ask her home either which was a relief because Mary didn’t feel bad about her not doing the same, and just as she was getting ready to buy him a cashmere sweater for his birthday some Good Friend managed to tell her that it wasn’t his difficult mother he didn’t want her to meet, it was his difficult wife.
We agreed over a lunch one day that it had been a horrible shock, a great relief that she hadn’t been really interested in him and an even greater relief that Mary hadn’t given in to all his frightful sexual demands. That was the biggest bonus of all.
Her next Chance came when I introduced her to a professional bachelor, professional in the sense of always being determined to remain a bachelor. We were sure he wasn’t married, but I was equally sure he never would marry. It lasted about three months, dinner in little restaurants where you could dance, theatres.
I don’t think he made any frightful sexual demands, if so they weren’t mentioned, but she brought him home often, and he got very uneasy about the best china being brought out and Mary’s mother saying that she would leave you young people alone and vanishing, so he asked me to help him unload her which was a lousy rotten thing to do and I said he was to do it himself, the weak fool, and the weak fool just stopped ringing her, and her heart was broken, because school was getting more and more boring and mother was more and more trying and Mary had really thought that This might be It.
She met a man in a pub shortly afterwards while waiting for a girlfriend, he invited them both to a party, and there was a lot of drink and messing, Mary said, but it was better than nothing, and he and his gang had parties nearly every weekend up in Rathmines, where they all lived in bedsitters or flats, and it was getting harder and harder for Mary to take a taxi out nine miles home afterwards, so she got into the habit of staying with her friend Brenda in town. Mother would be a bit sour, but at least not suspicious, and indeed at this stage she had nothing to be suspicious about because Mary was staying with Brenda and they would both have glasses of milk and discuss the talent at the party and wonder which one of the lads they should try and settle for.
And then she fell in love. Yes, that’s what it was; she really found someone she loved much more than herself, and someone she couldn’t live without. I didn’t see her at all during this great period, but everyone who knew her said he was a total bastard, had got one of these funny divorces, because he had a load of money and a small luxurious flat that he actually called a ‘pad’ somewhere in Fashionable Dublin Four, and this was even further from Mary’s home than ever, and so Brenda was being used as a very real excuse this time.
Brenda had a phone, and if Mary’s mother rang, as she often did, Brenda would say, ‘Hold on a minute, she’s in the bath,’ and then ring Mary at the pad and tell her to ring her mother quick, for God’s sake.
I met them once and I agree he was very, very attractive and charming. He had a certain smoothness which I didn’t like, but then put that down to prejudice because I had heard he was a smooth bastard from people who are kind of right about these things. But that night when I was eating a very quick meal before going to the theatre, and was by myself, they asked me to join them, and he did have something very warm about him; he seemed to be interested in her, and pleasantly interested in whatever I had to say too. He talked a bit about ‘my little nipper’ and explained that he was divorced, so there didn’t seem to be any great deception or anything involved. Mary said her mother was going on a coach tour soon and that she and the guy would be having a party in his pad and I must come. The relevancy of the coach tour didn’t strike me for the moment until I remembered that naturally her mother thought she was staying with Brenda four to five nights a week. He said it had been very, very nice to meet me, which I thought was a bit overdoing it; it might have been nice enough, but since I was shovelling food into my mouth and looking at my watch, it could hardly have been very, very nice. Stil
l, people talk different ways.
And act different ways, too.
He never suggested marriage to Mary, though she was quite willing to go to England and get married there, or in the registry office here, but apparently whenever she brought it up he said that the Irish laws were funny, and even though he did have a Mexican divorce or whatever it was, there was always the possibility that one could be prosecuted for bigamy here. Not likely, he said, because the courts hate doing it, it makes them look ridiculous, but possible. He would, however, like Mary to move in with him.
And Mary loved him so much and her mother was still so unaware of his existence, and Brenda was leaving town to go to London, that there really were problems.
‘Could you tell her the truth?’ I asked foolishly, because really it was a foolish question.
All right, so Mary was 26, she was entitled to do whatever she liked; she certainly didn’t love her mother enough to be deeply upset about hurting her. But then mothers are mothers and I can’t believe that four years ago a woman in her fifties would like her daughter to move in with a divorced man. I couldn’t believe for a moment that Mary’s mother, who was practically a law unto herself, would countenance it for a minute.
Selfishly I thanked heaven that I lived in Dalkey and there was no fear that Mary could ask me to pretend I was living with her, because there is no way you could say Dalkey was nearer her work than her own house was. What did the man say? Oh well, he said, it was up to her to arrange things and she was so desperately afraid that she’d lose him, and he did so need someone to get his shirts cleaned, and cook his supper, she couldn’t leave and there would have to be a way.
The way, when found, was so ludicrous and financially disastrous you will find it hard to believe.
Mary told her mother that she was going to do an evening course and would have to take a room in town. She rented a bedsitter and paid £6 a week for it, brought in some of her things. She now had clothes and possessions in three houses, her mother’s, her man’s and her new totally unused and useless bedsitter. Every Tuesday, which was her half day, she would bring in some more things from the pad to the bedsitter and ask her mother to tea. Mother was getting older, sadder and sourer. She couldn’t understand why Mary was paying £3 to her old home, £6 to a landlord, when she had a perfectly good home of her own, and, said the mother sinisterly, perfect freedom to entertain all her friends there. The house was now too big for mother. Tuesdays took on the nature of a nightmare.
Then there were the weekends. Mother couldn’t understand that Mary had suddenly joined An Óige and was going on winter and summer hikes, when she didn’t seem to know a thing about the organisation nor anyone in it.
I don’t know Mary very well, remember, but I think that the man loved her a lot. He certainly made her very happy and apart from all the deceptions at home and the effort and the covering up and trying not to meet people that might conceivably split on them, it was a good, happy relationship.
For nearly a year.
The man, it appeared, was a little mean. Mary was only taking home £22 a week from her teaching, and nine of that was gone on two other sets of accommodation already. He expected her to pay for half their housekeeping and he liked living well. He bought her nice presents of course, but Mary was getting into debt. He had pictures of his nippers all over the pad; and none of Mary. She thought that was a bit hard, but the price you pay for this kind of setup. He had to go to business dinners, and naturally couldn’t bring her along. So she spent long evenings looking at television, wondering what time he would come home. And she couldn’t ask her friends in because it wasn’t her place. So she would go out to a coin box phone occasionally and ring her mother, pretending she was phoning from the hall of the place she was meant to be living in, and her mother would have some other complaint. And she often went to the cinema on her own.
Then the doubts began. Was it a simple magazine case of letting herself go, did he find her less attractive now, had she moved in too easily, why were there so many business dinners now and hardly any at all six months ago? Was there someone else?
It couldn’t be that he was lonely for the children because his ex-wife had remarried and the children were living with her in Switzerland. He didn’t even have to send her alimony because this time, she had married a near millionaire. He never spoke of her at all, or why they had separated. Mary had never asked.
The summer holidays were coming up, and to get over the guilt feelings about Mother, Mary decided to get herself further in debt and take the two of them to Majorca. She wrote every day to tell him how she loved and missed him. He didn’t write at all, because her mother would probably ask who the letters were from. She admired his tact in not writing.
Eventually the 14 days were over, and for appearances Mary stayed the night in her mother’s home, and then looked in at her false flat to make sure it hadn’t been broken into, and happily trotted up to the pad.
He wouldn’t be home for ages, so she could make a great dinner. There was washing up in the sink, two of everything; he must have had Freddy to a meal. There was new talcum, and perfume in the bathroom, but they weren’t presents, they were half used. It couldn’t have been Freddy, he doesn’t use Blue Grass.
The door opened and the Man came in, finding Mary sadly looking at a white dressing-gown on the back of the door. He had been coming back to clear up the evidence. They looked at each other, according to her own tale, for five minutes without saying anything, and then he had to say something and mercifully for Mary he didn’t say, ‘I can explain everything.’
What he did say was, ‘Well, I suppose it had to end sometime.’
She doesn’t know why he took someone else in, she doesn’t know who the other person is or was, or if they are still there. She just knew that life was over. She packed there and then, borrowing one of his suitcases, and saying, ‘Is this record yours or mine?’ He stood stonily, and she never spoke to him again. That was three years ago.
Then Mary became known in the current attractive jargon of our times as ‘an easy lay’. She moved properly into what was her false flat and made it her real flat. She got drunk and told her mother all about the Man, her mother forbade her to come back again and told the priest, and Mary told her to keep to her lonely bitter ways, and hasn’t seen her mother properly for three years except at frosty Christmas lunches.
She had a short affair, which by her standards now means a relationship that lasts a month or two, with the father of one of her pupils, and was sacked from the school. She got another job in a provincial town for a while, but didn’t even need to be sacked from that one because her poker playing, drinking and sleeping with the commercial travellers at the hotel made her a town name in three months.
I met her at the races there a few weeks ago. I didn’t know her at first, but we met in the bar where I had lost my purse and it had been retrieved by an honest barman. She looked a little lost, and offered me a drink. I had people searching other corners of the race course for my purse so had to refuse but asked her to ring me during the Easter holidays, which she did.
She is pregnant; she hasn’t a clue in the world who the father might be. You name him, it could be that person. It’s now too late for an abortion, she thinks, she doesn’t even damn know. She supposes she’ll have it, and get it adopted. Would I know where she could do that? I would.
She also had a sort of half idea of keeping it, would I know how she could get help to do that? I would. What did I think about it all?
Well, what on earth could I think, except that life is unfair as I think more and more these days, and wonder was it ever meant to be fair? It’s unfair on Mary’s child who isn’t wanted, it’s unfair on Mary’s mother who has no husband, and a daughter a nun in America, and a married son, and an emigrated son, and a daughter who is going to be a Public Disgrace. And it’s unfair on Mary because she had no strength, and she has this belief that a lot of women have that they don’t control their own lives. Tha
t they are somehow blown along by fate.
And I said that perhaps a child would give her something to live for, and someone to love. But I knew when saying it that she would have loved it to be His child, the only man she ever cared about, not the child of a number of people who stopped the loneliness of the night for her by coming home to her flat.
And I also know that a teacher will not be able to rear a child alone, and that Mary’s mother won’t help. And I know that if Mary is going to carry on the way she is at the moment, she won’t be much of a mother or a teacher anyway. And so I gave her the addresses that we have listed in our little green note book, and hoped that the professionals will help her, and I rang Ally and Cherish about her, and said that she would be contacting them, and they said certainly they would do all they could for her. And I know they will, but I don’t know that Mary will do all she can for herself, because she has that kind of hopeless beaten look, which has nothing to do with being pregnant and unmarried, it was there before. It has a lot to do with expecting life to be beautiful and easy like it is for everyone else and bitterly disappointed when it isn’t. And that’s why we are all such fools.
Women Are Fools – Lorraine
8 May 1973
Lorraine was at UCD with me in the late fifties and when everyone was wearing ten of those ridiculous stiff petticoats, Lorraine wore 20. She was in digs with a motherly kind of woman who liked her because Lorraine was obsessed with clothes and would lend Mrs whoever-she-was her good handbag in exchange for a blouse or one of her son’s long sweaters, which were all the rage then too.
I didn’t know her very well at this stage and always thought of her as one of those who used to be back combing their hair in front of the mirror in the Ladies’ Reading Room, as it was called.
When we went to dances in ‘86’ or in the Four Courts where the Solicitors’ Apprentices used to run a very great kind of hop, Lorraine always danced with this fellow called Martin who was good-looking and quiet and did Commerce. It was assumed, again in the language of the time, that they were doing a line.
