A Few of the Girls

by Maeve Binchy

  The mirror arrived in Geri and Seán’s house and was hung over the dining room mantelpiece.

  “It sort of dwarfs the room a bit, doesn’t it?” Seán said tentatively.

  “You have no idea how valuable this is,” Geri implored.

  “Oh well, all right then.” Seán was all for an easy life.

  “I’d have loved the bath. It was like something from a horror film,” said Shay wistfully.

  “It’ll fall down in the middle of their dinner party, mark my words,” said Marian confidently.

  But Geri took no notice. She planned the party relentlessly. Seán had met some fellow who was in the running to be an ambassador, and Geri insisted that he and his wife would be invited. She planned for happy hours how she would drop this piece of information in front of Frances and James.

  She had also invited an old and rather tedious woman who was leasing her castle to Americans and a man who was involved with the development of film. It would be a guest list that would impress anybody; all that and the new mirror—Frances and James would be stunned.

  The children were being well paid to serve the meal, money to be handed over discreetly when the coffee was on the table and Shay and Marian had said a courteous good night to the company.

  To Geri’s great disappointment, nobody mentioned the mirror when they filed into the dining room. She just couldn’t believe it. Frances and James had been in this house before: they must have noticed it. Perhaps they didn’t comment on it out of sheer jealousy. The young wannabe diplomats must surely have been in smart places with heirlooms and antiques before, maybe they just expected such elegance.

  The elderly castle owner and the future filmmaker said nothing.

  And so the meal was served. Geri noticed that Frances was constantly moving her hair from behind her ears to in front; twice she took out her lipstick and once even a powder compact. Her eyes never left her own reflection. She heard nothing of what was being said.

  The film man frowned at himself darkly, held up his chin with his hand, sucked in his cheeks, and kept bringing the conversation around to liposuction, laser therapy, and the unfairness that it should only be women who had a little nip and tuck under the eyes.

  The old castle owner sank into an ever-deeper despair and asked for neat whiskey.

  “I had absolutely no idea I looked like this,” she told Geri four times. “I’m a perfect fright. I shouldn’t be allowed out. What a depressing, depressing discovery.”

  The young diplomat couldn’t see himself, but he was so alarmed by the way everyone opposite him was looking over his shoulder that he kept turning around to see what was behind him. His wife said to him that he’d better stop acting so nervy if they were ever to land that plum post.

  Seán just talked on good-naturedly, smiling at her proudly from time to time, and noticing nothing of the disarray. Geri had never known such failure and letdown.

  Perhaps it was just too dark, the whole thing; she must light more candles. As she stood to do so, she saw her son, Shay, reflected in the mirror. He had worn a collar and tie, part of the exorbitant price she was paying him for his good behavior. She noticed that for every glass of wine he poured he was drinking one himself.

  Her eyes hardened as she sat down.

  “Perhaps you could just leave the decanters on the table,” she said in a voice of steel. One of the candles was dripping wax, so Geri went to sort it out. Again she looked in the mirror to see how what she had fondly believed to be the most elegant dinner party in Ireland was progressing.

  This time she saw Marian, who had worn a rather shorter black skirt than Geri would have liked, being fondled by the lecherous filmmaker. And Marian was not running away from him. She was smiling in a very upsettingly knowing way. Geri sat down abruptly. Nothing was going right.

  Her aunt had known. Nobody should have a mirror in their dining room, it was a disaster. Why had she not understood?

  Frances had momentarily stopped pouting at herself in the mirror. She was smiling at Seán: a very fetching smile.

  “Seán, will you please come and pour my wine for me, now that Shay has stopped being wine waiter?” she said. Seán stood up obligingly.

  This was the moment that the silk flowers on the mantelpiece caught fire and Geri leaped to her feet. Everyone’s eyes and attention were on the activity.

  Tears of rage and humiliation were in her eyes. And as she doused the candles and rescued the charred silk stems, she saw Frances smiling at Seán and reaching out her hand for his. Geri had thought there was nothing else that could go wrong; she believed that she had seen as much upset as was possible for one human to see in this terrible mirror.

  Geri looked down at her square, practical hands. She wished they were long and narrow and white, and had long pink nails. She wished her watch looked too heavy for the fragile wrist, as Frances’s did. But Seán had managed to move away from the perfectly groomed long white fingers and he was sitting back in his place.

  “Well done, Geri, firefighter,” he said. It wasn’t exactly the role she had wanted to play, nor the words she had wanted to hear, even though he spoke them with praise and love.

  “And the mirror didn’t get burned at all?” He was cheering her up.

  Please may he not mention the awful mirror and that it was valuable. Please let him understand that she had totally changed her view. There was so much she had to sort out, like Shay’s drinking, Marian’s sexual awareness, the fact that her admired neighbor Frances was coming on strong to Seán, that the two other guests were still staring at themselves gloomily in the damn mirror, and that the would-be diplomats were in the middle of a major row.

  “Geri took this mirror from her aunt’s estate,” Seán said proudly.

  Geri closed her eyes.

  “How very kind of you,” Frances said patronizingly.

  “Geri is the kindest person in the world,” Seán said.

  Geri opened her eyes. She stood up slowly and walked to her aunt’s mirror, which she was going to sell tomorrow. She looked deep into it and she saw the wreckage of what had seemed an important dinner party. She was a better-informed person, a better-armed person.

  She knew much more than she had known four hours ago. She knew that whatever old fool had said you shouldn’t have a mirror in a dining room was right. She knew that you could never impress James and Frances, no matter how you tried. She knew the old trout with the castle was self-obsessed and would be of interest to no one. She knew that the filmmaker was a pathetic old lech, driven to groping teenagers to prove he wasn’t over the hill. She knew that the future diplomats wouldn’t get to first base with the Foreign Service or with each other.

  She knew that Frances, elegant Frances, fancied Seán, her Seán, and that she couldn’t have him.

  Because Seán loved Geri.

  Geri hated to make a bad investment, and maybe the mirror had been a poor choice. If the sewing table hadn’t made its reserve at Aunt Nora’s auction, she would take that.

  Seán was helping the guests into their coats and waving them good-bye. He came back in and stood behind her as she looked in the mirror. He put his arms around her shoulders.

  “The mirror was a mistake, Seán,” she admitted in a small voice.

  He smiled into her hair.

  “Maybe, but it wasn’t a total mistake,” he said to her, and held her tighter.

  “I don’t know.” She wasn’t convinced.

  “Well, don’t the pair of us look fine in it,” he said. “Doesn’t that make it the bargain of the century?”

  Mr. Mangan

  They had this teacher at their boys’ boarding school, and he was called Mr. Mangan. Apparently he’d been there for years and years and all you ever had to do was to mention his name and they would all talk about him for hours.

  He had very pale blue eyes and nobody knew anything about his background. It was thought that he had once been a priest but that was never confirmed. There was no Mrs. Mangan, and he had live
d in a boardinghouse one mile from the school. He walked there and back every day, sunshine, rain, or snow.

  As boys, they had been very incurious about what kind of life he led. Only later, when the women wanted to know about him, did they ask each other and themselves what Mr. Mangan did to sustain his life in that remote part of the country.

  He could hardly have been propping up the local bars, of which there were many in the small town. Word would have reached the religious community; it would not have been viewed favorably.

  He certainly had no romantic interest that had ever reached their ears. That too would surely have been frowned on.

  There was no theater, no real library; the cinema changed its film every Sunday night in those days twenty years ago. It was hard to imagine Mr. Mangan going out to play bridge with the local ladies. He didn’t have a car or a bicycle to take him further afield. He was known to be against blood sports, so he would not have gone hunting or shooting with the local farmers. He would shake his head and say that sadly he was not a gladiator when they asked him about sport.

  So what did he do?

  He must have read a lot, thought his pupils, who last saw him when they left their school in 1975. Read a lot and thought a lot—this was all they could produce when pressed hard to come up with some explanation of his lifestyle. He seemed to know everything and be interested in everything.

  In theory, he taught them geography. In fact, he taught them everything: how to do crosswords, to interpret political dynasties, to translate road signs, to read palms, to make real mayonnaise, to explain proportional representation, to identify trees by their leaves, to avoid congeners in alcohol as the source of hangovers, to look at buildings, and to think about what words meant.

  In two decades they must all have remembered and repeated the things he had said over and over. And whenever they got together it was intensified. It was as if they were back in his classroom again.

  The wives and girlfriends sighed a lot whenever he was quoted—everything he had said seemed very banal, very obvious. Perhaps he was one of these people who was better to meet than to hear about, they decided.

  Renata, their beautiful friend who was single and glamorous and much feared by all the wives and girlfriends, was highly dismissive of him. “Sounds like a daft old queen to me,” she would say. But she could say that because she wasn’t involved with any of them.

  Officially, Renata was the one who had got away. She was her own woman—stylish, confident, and much lusted after. All the wives pretended a greater warmth towards Renata than they actually felt.

  Mr. Mangan was still there in the school, they heard from younger brothers and cousins. He was still hugely admired and widely quoted.

  “He must be a great age now,” said Hugh, who was going to be forty just before New Year and didn’t like the notion at all.

  Hugh’s wife, Kate, was already weary from the possible midlife crisis that lay ahead. First Hugh was going to have no party, then he was going to have a huge party, then just a gathering of old friends, then he decided to add new clients to the guest list and make it more of a business do.

  Renata would be there, of course. The Queen Bee.

  “He can’t be that old surely. He is still teaching after all. Why don’t you invite your famous Mr. Mangan to your party?” Kate suggested.

  It was an amazing suggestion—imagine seeing him again.

  They tried to work out how old he would be. Seventy? No, they retired at sixty, didn’t they? Still, he’d be able to walk and everything. Eat probably, and drink. Then all the men went back into an orgy of remembering all the subtle and enlightening things that Mr. Mangan used to say. Each one sounded more like a blinding glimpse into the obvious than the one before. Kate and the other wives looked at each other as mystified as ever. “Be good at some one thing, at one thing, find one area of excellence and revel in it. An old man once told me that we should all be brilliant at just one thing.” That was one of Mr. Mangan’s major pronouncements, apparently. It had seemed like something mint new to them when they heard it, and they all honestly believed that by following it they had changed their lives.

  Look at the way it had all turned out!

  Kevin was doing well in antiques, Martin was a barrister, Brian a dentist, Hugh had concentrated on cars. He had taken Mr. Mangan’s advice, and now he had the agency for the car that everyone would die for.

  What would they have done without this brilliant man?

  Privately, Kate thought that the man had the brains of a motto in a fortune cookie. A geography teacher mouthing platitudes to generations of impressionable schoolboys, and they all thought of him as one of the world’s great thinkers. What was so unusual about boys from an expensive boarding school ending up as dentists, doctors, lawyers, antique dealers, and souped-up car salesmen? That’s what the middle classes did.

  “What was his own area of excellence?” Kate had wondered.

  None of them knew.

  Boys, and indeed men, could be amazingly uninquisitive, and even uninterested in other people’s lives, Kate thought.

  Not for the first time. Hugh’s obsessions with being forty and flattening his stomach and halting the retreat of his hairline were becoming increasingly tedious. His hopes that he might be taken for the elder brother of their teenage daughter were embarrassing. The male bonding with Kevin, Martin, and Brian about the wonders of Mr. Mangan seemed more and more surreal.

  She sighed heavily and arranged the party. She gave him a present of a hand-tailored jacket that accentuated the positive. The cunning tailor pretended that he thought it was a thirtieth birthday and threw his hands up in the air at the thought of such a young man being forty.

  The house looked festive and Christmasy when the guests began to arrive. Kate was busy coping with a recently separated man, and trying to lower the volume of his complaints about the ex-wife who was demanding monstrous sums.

  She knew everyone except Mr. Mangan, and he didn’t seem to have turned up. Hugh and the fellows would be so disappointed, and she wished she had never suggested it. He had let them down by not appearing, even though he had sent a pleasant letter saying he would be delighted to attend.

  Renata was there, beautiful, cool, and never fussing like the wives fussed. Well, she had nothing to do except lavish attention on herself. No children, no in-laws, company entertaining, no patting down a forty-year-old husband. No wonder she looked well. She was the same age as all of them, very late thirties, but she looked twenty-five. And she had brought a man with her. That would annoy the fellows. They regarded her as their property.

  They were still buzzing around her as always. Kate narrowed her eyes and studied the scene. Renata had her hand lightly laid on the arm of a handsome man, mature, graying, maybe fiftyish. Confident but not arrogant, casually dressed but not sloppy. Trust Renata to find someone like that.

  And wasn’t it odd? The fellows, including the newly forty-year-old Hugh, seemed to be delighted with Renata’s new flame—they circled him as they had always circled the Queen Bee.

  Kate went to investigate. It was not a new flame, it was the old teacher. It was Mr. Mangan. There he stood, ten or twelve years older than the boys who had idolized him, a man without pretensions, and also, Kate realized instantly, a man without any real insights either.

  They introduced her rapturously and she was courteous and cool in her welcome. What did this pied piper have that excited these men? Some strange quality that brought a sparkle to them which no well-dressed trophy wife seemed able to do.

  “You are a magnificent wife for Hugh,” he said to her admiringly when they were alone.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you make him very happy and confident and you have given him two wonderful children. Who could ask more from a partner?”

  Kate was pleased but she would not let it show.

  “And you taught geography, Mr. Mangan. Why is it that they think you were a psychologist?” She tried to k
eep the irritation, the impatience—and indeed, the sheer jealousy—out of her tone. A man who had never been in this house until ten minutes ago, already knew and remembered that she had two children, and already had the lovely Renata laying claim to him, marking him out as her territory. Where did he find all this homespun philosophy?

  If Mr. Mangan noticed an edge in her question, he gave no sign of it.

  “Oh, I don’t think they saw me as anything but a pathetic old teacher, Kate, and I gather I wouldn’t have been invited here if you hadn’t suggested it. Schoolboys are very fickle, you know, they forget.”

  “They never forgot you. They go on and on about you.”

  “No, that can’t be so.”

  “Believe me, it is. All kinds of things you told them, like sunsets are good and killing small birds is bad.”

  “Oh, please, may I have said something less banal. Please!” He held his hands up in despair.

  “Nothing they remember.”

  He looked at her quizzically. Now Kate realized that her tone had been a little too sharp.

  “You talked about areas of excellence. What was your area of excellence, Mr. Mangan?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Well, it seems to me that anything you said to them about being good at one thing just reinforced what they already thought and hoped already.”

  “And if that were true, would it be so bad?”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” she said.

  “Which was?”

  “What were you good at?”

  “I wasn’t particularly good at anything.” He had a very warm smile.

  “And what do you do all the time buried in that remote part of the country? What kind of a life do you live that makes us all think you have some secret? Some inner track?”

  “Oh, I never claim to have that.”

  “Not in words, you don’t.” She knew she was going too far, that her face was flushed; she was weary from organizing this party, assuring Hugh that he was a young man, fearing that he was having an affair with Renata. It irritated her beyond measure that this smug man could hold her husband’s attention and admiration so easily.