A Few of the Girls

by Maeve Binchy

  “He told me that you were a lovely girl, Cara, and he didn’t exaggerate,” he said with a big, broad smile just like his son’s.

  Jim’s sisters were in the kitchen, trying not to look too eager to examine her. The eldest one was Rose. The bossy one, Jim had said. She was married to a rich man about twenty miles away. A miserly man, Jim had said, who didn’t like Rose wasting his earnings on things like hairdos and clothes. She was very forthright, he said, sometimes too forthright. Rose looked Cara up and down.

  “We don’t often have visitors,” she said, “but we’ve prepared a room for you. It will be separate rooms, I’m afraid. This is my father’s house and we have standards.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Cara replied with spirit. “It would have been extremely embarrassing if it had been otherwise. Jim and I don’t know each other very well yet, and certainly not well enough to share a room.”

  The other girls giggled. And even Rose looked at her with some respect.

  Cara had won that round.

  Jim had said that he would build a house nearer to the town. He had the land already and she would help him choose what kind of house. They would have a big studio where Cara would write, a small office where Jim would do his accounts, and plenty of rooms for when the children came along.

  Together they would plant herbs and vegetables and flowers.

  She looked around the table as they sat down for a late lunch; a lunch in her honor, with a full turnout to inspect and welcome her. Would these be her closest friends and contacts from now on if she were to make this giant leap and live here?

  Could she bear trying to keep Rose in her place and to encourage the awkward, shyer younger ones, who seemed hesitant of themselves and doubting that they had anything to say unless it was drawn out of them?

  Would she become involved in the machinery that Jim and his father were buying and selling?

  Would she find anything to write about in this empty landscape and the small town with the four streets, one church, seventeen shops, and five public houses?

  It would be ridiculous to make a decision on the basis of one weekend.

  And anyway, Jim would have to come and meet her family and get to know them too. They didn’t need to rush things, did they?

  Then she looked across the table at him, his face beaming with pride that she was there, and she knew that there was no point in hanging about. This really was the kind of man she had dreamed of and never met. What did it matter where they lived, really?

  They would not let Cara help with the washing up. Cara noticed that Rose filled a container with leftover food. “Waste not, want not,” she said when she saw she was being observed.

  “Oh, you’re so right. Very sensible,” Cara said hastily.

  The younger girls took her on a tour to show her everything: the hens and geese, the old donkey, the orchard and the cow in the far field.

  They loved this place where they had grown up.

  They also loved their big brother.

  “He never brought anyone home before,” said one.

  “So we knew you were special,” said another.

  “He talked about you all week,” said the third.

  Then Jim came and drove her into town. They walked around and he saluted almost everyone he met.

  “We’ll have a drink,” he said.

  “Which is your local?” Cara asked.

  “In a place like this, with a job like mine, they’re all my local,” Jim said and he brought her into Ryan’s.

  He had obviously told everyone in the place about her. Cara realized that they were all expecting to meet her. She shook hands with a dozen people who all said to Jim that he had done well for himself up in Dublin. Amazing in the fumes of traffic and all the noise that he had managed to find such a lovely girl.

  Then they went to Walsh’s pub and the other three.

  In every place they had heard she was coming and Cara began to get edgy, as if she was some kind of traveling exhibition instead of a girl down from Dublin for the weekend.

  Jim had a lemonade in each place and so did Cara. She felt full of fizz and bubbles. Only the café and the garage to call on and then they could go home.

  “They all think you’re wonderful,” Jim said, “and so do I.”

  —

  She felt trapped and imprisoned by this marvelous man. She felt that it was all happening too quickly.

  In a moment he would introduce her to the priest and they would set a day and then she would spend the rest of her life in this small, faraway place.

  “It’s too soon, Jim,” she said, almost in tears. “You’re lovely. It’s all lovely. But it’s gathering too much speed, like something rolling downhill.”

  “We had a bargain,” he said sadly. “If you didn’t like it you were to say so.”

  “I can’t say yes or no in twenty minutes,” Cara begged.

  “So it’s no then…” His face was lined with disappointment.

  They drove back to Jim’s home in silence. His father and the girls were waiting inside eagerly. Rose had gone home to her mean husband, taking a plastic box of supper. Cara realized she hadn’t known any of these people a week ago and now she was expected to come and make her life with them.

  It wasn’t fair. She had to have time to get used to it.

  —

  The supper wasn’t as jolly as the lunch had been. Jim said nothing at all and one by one the others let their chatter die down.

  “I’m sure you must be tired, Cara,” Jim’s father said. “You’ll be needing an early night.”

  She looked at him gratefully.

  “It has been a long day. Wonderful. But it had a lot of people in it,” she said, and there was a chorus of good nights.

  Jim looked like a child who had lost his lollipop.

  In her bedroom Cara sat wretched on the side of her bed. It had been such a mistake to have rushed across the country after so short a time, giving rise to expectations that couldn’t be realized. Just as she was about to climb the stairs, Jim’s father had given her a big folder.

  “You might like to read this, my dear,” he said. “It’s my late wife’s diary. She wrote it every day.”

  “But I can’t. It’s too private. Too personal,” Cara began.

  “No, she would have liked you to read it,” he said.

  So she began at the start, when Maria had first come to this place. She had marveled that anyone could live so far from the bustling city where she had been born and grew up. She could not believe that it was possible to be so far from the theater and art galleries. How could anyone look out at those stony fields and go along the narrow roads without losing part of their soul?

  But as the pages went on, Maria began to love the place, to know the seasons, to go hunting for mushrooms, to finding sheep that had rolled over on their backs and couldn’t get up again. Maria wrote on how she started a mobile library. She had learned to drive and took books and art books to faraway farms and villages. She got to know everyone who lived within miles around. She wondered what she had been doing in a city of strangers, walking past people whose faces and life histories she did not know. And all through the story was a thread: even up to the very last weeks was her love for Mikey, Jim’s father.

  How she had been nervous of his certainty in the very start, how he was so sure she was the one for him and she feared it was a decision too quickly made.

  She wrote on and on about Jim’s birth and how proud she was of him and her hope that he might be like his father before him and find the right one before she died.

  Cara didn’t know what time it was. She looked out the window. The moon seemed high in the dark sky.

  The orchard looked beautiful with the old trees casting curled shadows.

  The old donkey was asleep, standing up with his head on the gate. Cara had read how Maria had rescued him from people who had been ill-treating him when he was just a foal or whatever you call a young donkey. He had never done any
work, just given the children rides on his back for years.

  Down in the farmyard the hens and geese were clucking contentedly behind the mesh doors that kept the beautiful red fox away from them.

  Cara could not understand now why she had feared this place. It was very like home already…

  She blessed her future father-in-law for giving her the diary. She wished she had met Jim earlier and she would have known her soon-to-be mother-in-law.

  Yes, of course she would marry Jim.

  She remembered counting the hours after she had said good-bye to him in Dublin last week.

  Now she was counting the hours until morning when she could tell him that they should see the priest while they were at it. She was going to live here—she might as well get married here.

  After all, that’s what Maria had done all those years ago, and she had never known a day’s regret.

  The Afternoon Phone-In

  It was amazing how quickly “Fiona’s Phone-In” took off. Fiona was very different from any of the others. She wasn’t concerned with issues and welfare and lifestyles like Marian and Gay and Pat and Derek and Des. Fiona specialized in one thing: her forte was getting people out of whatever ludicrous trouble they had got themselves into.

  If you had invited your future mother-in-law to afternoon tea and you had no idea what to serve, a listener would come to the rescue and advise.

  To make her phone-in on her part of the Afternoon Talk Show exciting, there had to be an element of urgency about it. The mother-in-law had to be coming today, the boss and his wife tonight, or the drunk you had agreed to go greyhound racing with would have bought the tickets for Shelbourne Park.

  Fiona was great at communicating the lurking danger. Unless someone phones in now, this poor person is up the creek! And, from all over Ireland, people began to phone their advice, showing the country to be utterly devious and cunning and able to get out of almost any situation, no matter how terrifying.

  For a radio personality, Fiona kept a very low profile. You never saw pictures of her at art exhibitions or theater first nights. She never opened supermarkets or presented prizes at schools, and nobody ever remembered seeing her in a fashionable restaurant or a country hotel. A small picture appeared from time to time in the RTÉ Guide. She had a lot of curly—well, frizzy—hair and wore huge glasses. It was impossible to guess her age. No papers ever said whether she was married or single. Fiona was one thing and one thing only: the frenetic excitement and drama of her own program.

  She sounded anguished about the problems that came her way twice a week. This boy who had intercepted his school report because he knew it would be bad. Now his parents were going to the school tonight to check. What should he do? There were only a couple of hours left before he had to act.

  This girl who had told her friends she knew all about boats had been invited out on a yacht this weekend. There were only two days for her to become an expert.

  And people rang in inviting the would-be yachtswoman out on their boats or getting the report stealer to repost the envelope and it would be delivered eventually.

  Fiona’s ratings were high. The station considered putting the program out more frequently but Fiona said there would be a danger it would falter and flag, better to leave them wanting more.

  If you asked anyone in RTÉ about Fiona they were always a bit vague. She was a freelance they said, she was always rushing in and out. No, she didn’t sit in the canteen much, or indeed ever. Did she drive a car? Well, it was hard to say; no one had seen her driving one or riding a bike. Most people found it hard to remember her second name. And still the program went from strength to strength.

  A woman who was afraid to go into her house because she thought that there might be intruders inside rang Fiona. She said she didn’t want to bother the Gardai in case it was a false alarm. In minutes she had a posse of people to escort her, and it turned out that there were burglars inside, who were caught red-handed.

  There was a lot about Fiona and her program in the papers on that occasion, but her only quote was to say that it was further proof that it was the listeners who made it all such a success.

  Rory had always been very interested in Fiona and her program, as he had been one of her very first callers. His ex-wife had suddenly decided to let him have their nine-year-old daughter for the whole weekend. She would be arriving in two hours. Having only been able to see the little girl for three hours on a Saturday up to now he had no idea what a nine-year-old girl would want for a whole weekend. The airwaves were swamped with advice, all of it marvelous.

  His daughter, Katie, had an unforgettable weekend, and even been invited to two children’s parties. It had formed the basis of all her future visits to him. He had written to thank Fiona and got a businesslike little postcard in return.

  He listened to her phone-in regularly and twice he was able to help people who called in. He minded a cat for a weekend for an old woman who wouldn’t have gone away to a wedding otherwise, and he had faxed clear instructions on how to program a video for someone who needed desperately to set the timer and couldn’t manage it.

  Rory had always hoped that Fiona would remember him when he called in, that she would say, “You’re the man with the nine-year-old girl! How good of you to come back to us.” He even fantasized that she might ring him and suggest they meet for a meal so that she could say a proper thank-you. He would be wonderful and lively and restless, and the meal would be interrupted from time to time with calls on her mobile phone and requests from other tables and waiters asking for her autograph.

  In his dreams she would wear a black dress and a simple gold chain. Her frizzy hair would stand like a halo around her head and she would take off her glasses, showing big dark pools of eyes.

  But Fiona never thanked him personally. At the end of her program she thanked all the good, kind people out there who proved that we were really all one big community ready to help each other if given the opportunity. And then, breathlessly, she would say good-bye, rushing her words at the end to be finished before the time signal and the next program started.

  Rory envied her so much—busy, active, caring, rushed off her feet.

  Wasn’t it amazing that some people had those kinds of lives while people like him had hardly any life at all?

  Perhaps it was just as well that he would never meet Fiona. She would scorn him as his wife, Helen, had eventually scorned him. A man without passions, without interest, without any sense of living, that’s what she said he was when she left with their daughter, Katie.

  “Why did you marry me, if I am all those things?” Rory had asked.

  “Because I didn’t know you were like that, I thought you were just quiet.”

  Helen had thought there were depths there, depths that apparently didn’t exist.

  Rory was philosophical about this; it was probably true. He didn’t support any causes, he was on no committees, he had never carried a placard, he didn’t always vote at elections, he was not a member of a trade union. He read a little, watched some television; he cooked simple meals like lamb chops or else bought convenience foods. Rory thought of himself as Mr. Average.

  Friends had introduced him to other women since Helen had left. But somehow he never followed anything up. He thought that people might describe him as perfectly pleasant. Which was fairly damning these days. It was funny that he could not get Fiona and her phone-in show out of his mind. He would love to do something to impress her, something where she would have to take notice of him. But he couldn’t think of anything. Not anything that didn’t need an accomplice.

  Like suppose he had a friend…He could say to her that she should pretend to be burning to death in her house and that Rory would run in and save her. There wouldn’t need to be a fire at all. And he would be a hero.

  But that wouldn’t work, even if he could find an accomplice.

  Fiona had fleets of people checking that calls were genuine. He would be unmasked at once. Maybe if he c
ould meet her socially and tell her that he had minded the cats and set the video…but they didn’t seem very brave things to have done. In fact, they seemed a bit wimpish. Yet he would dearly love to meet her. He might get some more life in him just by talking to her, some sense of purpose, a share in her electricity.

  It was perfectly possible that he could meet her. This was Ireland, not New York; he could say hello to any celebrity in Grafton Street, thinking he knew her and she had said hello back.

  Why shouldn’t he meet Fiona of the afternoon phone-in?

  Rory worked from nine to five so he couldn’t lurk outside RTÉ at four-thirty when Fiona’s show ended. But his holidays were coming up and Rory had nothing better to do with his time. He had painted Katie’s room for her since she now stayed over at least one night a week. He had toured bookshops and even gone to children’s book events to know what normal nine-year-olds would like.

  He didn’t like going off to a hotel for a holiday by himself since he always looked odd, he thought, and if he did approach people he seemed to do it wrong and they thought he was making advances or trying to go home and live with them. He really was a sad sack, Rory admitted to himself. Helen had been right to make her own life without him.

  Three days hanging outside the entrance to the radio and television station did him no good. There wasn’t a sign of Fiona. He watched the cars, the bicycles and pedestrians come in; he saw a lot of famous faces but nowhere the frizzy hair and big glasses of Fiona, solver of the nation’s dramas.

  He didn’t like to ask the security guards or people at the information desks. They might suspect he was some kind of pervert or nutter. And there was no point in writing to her saying he was a constant listener and would she like to join him for a supper one evening. No, it would have to be an accidental meeting or nothing. But what kinds of places did she go? She sounded as if she must know all sorts of people in every different class and age group. Nothing was alien or difficult to Fiona. She might be having a hamburger or she could be in a big posh restaurant. Was she at the theater or the cinema? At a party with her boyfriend? He didn’t think of her as married—a husband had never been mentioned.