Maeve Binchy's Treasury

by Maeve Binchy

  Maeve Binchy was born in Co Dublin and was educated at the Holy Child Convent in Killiney and at UCD. After a spell as a teacher in various girls schools, she joined the Irish Times, for whom she still writes occasional columns. Her first novel, Light a Penny Candle, was published in 1982, and since then she has written twenty novels and short story collections, each one of them bestsellers. Several have been adapted for cinema and television, most notably Circle of Friends in 1995. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award at the British Book Awards in 1999; and at the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award ceremony in 2010 she was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese. She is married to the writer and broadcaster Gordon Snell.

  Treasury

  Over 40 heartwarming stories

  taken from The Return Journey and This Year It Will Be Different,

  with five new stories

  This edition published in 2011

  First published in 1995

  Copyright © Maeve Binchy 1995, 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74237 600 4

  EISBN 978 1 74343 400 0

  Text design by Christabella Designs

  Set in 12/15.8 pt Minion Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Golden Willow

  Miss Martin’s Wish

  The Extended Family

  Travelling Hopefully

  A Typical Irish Christmas

  What Is Happiness?

  The Best Inn in Town

  The Civilised Christmas

  Pulling Together

  The Christmas Barramundi

  This Year It Will Be Different

  A Hundred Milligrams

  The First Step of Christmas

  The Ten Snaps of Christmas

  Season of Fuss

  Christmas Timing

  How About You?

  Christmas Present

  The White Trolley

  The Feast of Stephen

  Affair Before Christmas

  The Christmas Child

  The Apprenticeship

  Bran’s Horizons

  The Sporting Decision

  Part of It All

  The September Letters

  A Villa for Four

  Gerald and Rose

  By the Time We Get to Clifden

  The Return Journey

  Victor and St Valentine

  Excitement

  Cross Lines

  Holiday Weather

  The Homesitter

  The Crossing

  A Holiday With Your Father

  Package Tour

  The Business Trip

  The Women in Hats

  The Wrong Suitcase

  Miss Vogel’s Vacation

  Golden Willow

  THE CHILDREN WERE DYING FOR THE SCHOOL BELL, OF COURSE, but Amy Moran was happy to stay in the warm, safe classroom. It only meant that the fearsome Friday rush began.

  She would race out and get into her four-wheel drive parked in the schoolyard. It was already packed with food in refrigerated bags since lunchtime and boxes full of extra duvet covers, pillowcases and towels, and table napkins. They were having a particularly showy lunch party this weekend and of course people would get drunk and be unable to drive home.

  ‘Don’t fuss,’ Dan would say to her. ‘They can all stay here, surely? Isn’t that the point of having a second home?’

  Amy knew the other teachers envied her her huge car, her farmhouse in the country, her successful husband and her two little girls at an expensive school.

  But she envied them the safety of living within their incomes and of not having to rush and shop and make lists and remember everything on a Friday. How much she would have preferred to sit down for a family meal and when the children had gone to bed to be able to talk to Dan by the fire. But this didn’t happen anymore.

  The home at Golden Willow was like his new toy; he loved showing it to people, boasting about the underfloor heating, the eco-friendly sun panels in the roof and, this time, for the first time, the new billiard room.

  This weekend there would be an opening ceremony, a tournament and a special cup which he had got engraved with the words ‘First Golden Willow Billiards Tournament’. He had laughed over it so often during the week that she felt almost protective about him, like a mother whose little boy laughed at the toys from Santa Claus. But then Dan Moran was not a little boy, he was a former insurance agent and now a very well-known financial advisor who refused to hear that all around him the Celtic Tiger was roaring a lot less than previously.

  He was a man who had always taken risks and they had paid off. When they wrote about him in the papers he was always described as ‘innovative financier’ Daniel Moran. They said he had a Midas touch. He loved the description. He felt that they had got him right. He had faith when all around were losing theirs; he held his nerve in a stock exchange crisis and always he had come up smiling, having bought options and made investments that others would think were foolhardy.

  He had little time for Amy’s tradition, coming as she did from a family of small farmers, guards and teachers. The pathetic stone-age belief that you had to earn money and save for something and then you bought it. Dan said the wheels would never have turned if Amy’s views had been listened to.

  And Amy had been glad to spend the money that Dan brought in. She had always admitted that.

  It had never been in her sights but there was something wonderful about being able to go on a holiday without spending seven nights on the internet looking for a cheap fare. It was so good not to have to worry about taking a bus on a wet day, or stay on a long waiting list to have Sophie’s grumbling appendix dealt with or Sasha’s orthodontist work.

  But even though she knew she had mixed feelings about all this, nothing could beat down her worries about the billiard room and the fact that they were unveiling it to their guests this weekend. Amy felt it was a step too far. She really believed that this time they had gone into dangerous territory and that the comfortable life they had enjoyed until now would all collapse like a pack of cards.

  But you couldn’t talk to Dan about anything like this, especially using the example of a house of cards.

  He would remind her that entirely due to Amy and her country superstitions he had given up playing poker, and had therefore deprived himself of a lot of Thursday-night fun and a nice little earner. Gambling meant nothing, he would say, unless you had the children’s school fees on the table.

  ‘It’s what I’m good at, darling,’ he said over and over.

  But no time to think of all this now, time only to leap into the car, pick up the l
aundry, the dry cleaning and be outside the big private school when the girls were coming out. She had filled up the petrol tank already.

  She smiled her goodbyes and wished her colleagues a great weekend. She knew how much they would all love a second home near Knockglass; they didn’t know about the billiard room and the ten people coming to lunch, and the fact that she had frozen prawns and papayas in her cold bag, as well as fillet steaks for Dan to cook on the barbecue.

  Amy worked with all these people; they all drew a teacher’s wage, no need to stress the differences in lifestyle. In fact, in the interest of cordial relations, every reason not to.

  ‘Mummy, I got an A for my essay!’ Sophie was delighted.

  ‘Well done, sweetheart. What was it on?’

  ‘The title was “Simple things are best”, so I wrote all about our weekends at Golden Willow.’

  ‘Good girl. And what did Miss Bailey say?’

  ‘She said that I had caught the true heart of the countryside,’ Sophie said proudly.

  ‘And so you did. I’m dying to read it.’

  ‘Will I read it to you now, Mummy?’ Sophie was afraid the moment would pass and the praise might stop.

  ‘No, darling, wait until we are back at Golden Willow. Just now I have to concentrate on the traffic, full of mad people trying to get out of town.’

  ‘Like us,’ Sasha said.

  ‘How did you get on, Sasha?’

  ‘Oh okay, you know,’ Sasha wasn’t forthcoming.

  ‘She had a detention at lunchtime,’ Sophie revealed.

  ‘Darling, why? What on earth for?’

  ‘It was my homework, last night’s homework. I hadn’t done it,’ Sasha was glaring at her older sister.

  ‘But you said you had finished it when I went in to the den.’

  ‘I just took a risk, Mummy.’ Sasha was penitent.

  ‘Or told a lie, Sasha.’

  ‘Dad says it’s all right taking a risk,’ Sasha sulked.

  ‘Yes, and in his work it is, but not for us, not when we work in schools as we three all do. Those are low-risk places.’

  Sasha seemed to think she was getting away lightly. The thing to do now was to change the subject.

  ‘Are you looking forward to the weekend, Mummy?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, of course I am. Back to Golden Willow—marvellous! And once we clear this traffic and get onto the open road we’ll be fine.’ She looked into the mirror to see if she looked as tired as she sounded.

  She saw the girls exchanging venomous glances: Sasha would not forgive this betrayal easily.

  Sophie thought that the younger girl was getting away with murder, as usual.

  Amy knew that she must say something to Dan about their giving conflicting signals to the girls. It couldn’t go on.

  They were old enough now to be able to play one of them against the other. She would sort it out. But not this weekend. This weekend there was far too much to do.

  First thing was to stop in Knockglass and visit her aunt Norah.

  ‘Do we have to, Mummy?’ The girls weren’t delighted with this. It meant that they would be asked to do their homework.

  ‘You will come in and say hello then you both go to the parlour, as they call it, and begin your prep.’

  ‘But it’s an awful room, Mummy, full of statues and images.’

  ‘You’re in no position to argue statues and images, Sasha Moran, you are in big trouble. Get half an hour’s homework done—that will be less to do when we get back to Golden Willow.’

  They grumbled but there was nothing for it. It was an iron rule. Homework had to be finished and examined every Friday before Dad came home. Dad hated seeing them with their heads bent over work when they should be relaxing and enjoying the second home he had built for them all.

  They drew into the courtyard of the home where Amy’s Aunt Norah lived.

  Norah had more or less brought her up. Amy’s father had been away a lot and her mother had drunk a lot of vodka. She realised now, of course, that the two facts were related.

  But Norah had always been there for Amy and her brother Brian. Norah, who was single and had been better than a mother to them.

  It was sad now when she could no longer manage on her own that neither Brian nor Amy could take her in. Nora was practical and cheerful, it made more sense for her to be here in Knockglass where she had worked so long as a solicitor’s clerk and had so many friends.

  And didn’t Amy come to see her every weekend, and bring her books and magazines.

  Brian and his family came mid-week so Norah said she hadn’t a care in the world.

  Sophie and Sasha came in to say hello and to hand over the little box of fudge and the packet of greetings cards that Amy had bought them to give to her aunt. Then they went unwillingly to the parlour and made faces at the statues of saints and grudgingly began their homework.

  Amy sat and talked easily to her aunt for half an hour. She would like to have spent longer there on a Friday to unwind from the journey down and to gear up for the weekend ahead. But they both knew that half an hour was the limit. Then Amy would have to be back at Golden Willow getting everything ready.

  Dan’s homecoming was a big event; it had to be orchestrated properly. There must be no occasion when he would ask her not to fuss. That meant serious time making the preparations.

  As the girls would do their school essays, their history questions and the algebra, Amy would fly around the house pulling on clean duvet covers, pillowcases and laying out towels. She would light the log fire.

  By the time she had put a supper dish in the oven, prepared the salad, checked the girls’ homework, combed her hair and put on some make-up and perfume it was ten to nine. Dan’s train got into Knockglass at nine.

  She would be standing on the platform to welcome him home for the weekend.

  He would be flushed with too many after-work drinks, maybe a fitful sleep on the train but through it all there would be his overpowering energy and a list of further plans for the already crammed schedule they had planned until Sunday evening.

  Tonight he was more excited than ever and seemed to have had more after-work cocktails than usual.

  But Amy made no comment. She lived in a different world to him in many ways, a world of staffrooms and pupils and timetables, and old aunts in residential homes and getting meals ready and changing bed linen. She wasn’t going to criticise his world, the one that provided them with such comfort, luxury even.

  She reversed expertly from the station and headed for home. It was always wonderful when you left Knockglass and drove along by the river, only a kilometre and a half to Golden Willow. But it was like moving into a different world.

  She had played here as a little girl, she had gone to the riverbank to these very wooded places where she now had a home. She would make up stories to take her away from the lonely life where her father cared only about his travels and her mother only about her vodka.

  Amy had learned to emphasise the good side of life and not the problems.

  She wouldn’t tell Dan about Sasha’s detention at her school. Nor Amy’s own fears that she might never find time to mark thirty essays for her students. Nor that Nora looked gaunt and pale and wasn’t eating properly.

  Instead she told him that there was a lovely chicken filo pie in the Aga, waiting for him. The girls would have some soup with him and then go off to bed. The journey down had been fine, and yes she had done all the shopping for the big lunch on Sunday.

  ‘It’s important this lunch,’ Dan had said.

  ‘Of course it is, they’re our friends,’ Amy said.

  ‘Not just that,’ Dan snapped.

  She wondered where to go now in the conversation. As she had done so often recently, she said nothing, waiting for him to develop the theme, which he did.

  ‘I want them to see how well we’re doing, there must be no doubt about that. No complaining about the price of things.’

  ‘I’d never do that if
anyone else was there.’ Amy was stung.

  ‘It’s only to you that I sometimes say, “Oh darling you fuss on and on day and night.” But this weekend there must be no hint of it.’

  She felt a cold alarm rising from under her breastbone to her throat. ‘Sure I get you. Anything in particular?’ She hoped she sounded light.

  ‘Nothing, nothing, only I had to take out another mortgage, this time on Golden Willow. You know, to pay for all the renovations and everything.’

  ‘We can meet it all right.’

  ‘Of course we can, darling, that’s what we do: make money, give you and the girls a good life.’ A blur of tears came suddenly across her eyes as Amy looked at Dan.

  He was doing it all to prove something. To show these people who were coming to lunch on Sunday that he was a huge success. That’s what it was all about.

  He had been delighted to see the girls all pink and clean from their baths, waiting in their pyjamas. He had funny stories for them about work. They loved this, and went off to bed like little lambs. Amy had no stories from her school that held their attention. Dan ate his chicken pie and patted his stomach, fearing that he might be putting on weight.

  ‘I told Joan and Martin to come on Saturday, and spend the night,’ he said.

  ‘Great,’ Amy said automatically.

  In her mind she was wondering about the logistics. She had enough bed linen, all that was fine, but as for meals, she hadn’t planned to cook a meal on Saturday evening. In fact she had been hoping that Dan would take the girls into Knockglass to the new Thai restaurant and give her a little space and time to get this important Sunday lunch together. Now it looked as if she would have neither.

  ‘Would they like a Thai take-away, do you think?’ Amy asked.

  She knew that Joan and Martin were easy company; they would be happy with anything. But not Dan.

  ‘I don’t think so, darling. I mean they are travelling miles to see us, it’s a bit inhospitable just to offer them a few noodles.’

  ‘I could go into Knockglass and get some chicken, I suppose. They’d like a chicken tarragon, wouldn’t they?’

  Dan had lost interest.

  ‘Yes sweetheart, whatever. Just don’t fuss about it, will you? Remember that Golden Willow is a fuss-free zone.’