Maeve Binchy's Treasury

by Maeve Binchy

  The night before, Florrie and Camilla had talked for a long time. They had talked as they had never been able to talk since that day when Florrie had come to London and said she would change everything, everything but her name. They laughed as they hadn’t laughed for years, they drank champagne instead of the lemon tea which they had learned to like when they were fourteen because they had read it was lower class to take milk.

  They had said that the battle had been half won, and now that Camilla was in, she could have the right kind of dinner parties and house-parties to launch her friend, her talented friend with the wonderfully funny name. They had embraced and congratulated each other on their magical apprenticeship.

  But they hadn’t talked about love. And in the church where Albert’s bones would lie one day, very probably beside the bones of her friend Ruby, Florrie shivered. She knew that as far as she was concerned the apprenticeship was over. She had got far enough. Perhaps she had got much farther than her friend who would appear in tomorrow’s papers as the bride of the decade, who would be called Lady Camilla, who would live a life without love. They said that young girls’ heads were meant to be filled with stories of love but that had never happened to Ruby or Florrie. There had been no room in their heads, the space was too filled with rule books on how to behave and how to say glad to know you rather than pleased to meet you. It had been too busy an apprenticeship to allow for thoughts of love.

  Florrie would make time for it, she thought. She would not list the likely dinner guests that she might trap at her friend’s long table, smiling at them confidently through Albert’s family silver. When a bishop or vicar or a registrar came to say the word for Florrie, the word love wouldn’t have an alien ring to it.

  She felt somehow that the mother who had thought of her as a flower would have been pleased with her, and she was aware of tears beginning to well up in her eyes. But she willed them back, because the upper classes do not cry at christenings, weddings or funerals. It is, after all, what sets them apart. Her apprenticeship had not been wasted.

  Bran’s Horizons

  BRAN HATED HIS NAME, AND HE HATED EVEN MORE THE EXPLANATIONS for it. His father used to say it was the name of a Celtic god reduced to human stature; his mother said that it was all very well to sit in ivory towers calling children after Celtic, which meant pagan, gods, but a different story when you sent the same children to the Brothers. Say it’s a pet name, she suggested, called after the faithful hound of Fionn MacCumhaill. Neither of these definitions appealed to Bran. Everyone thought he was called Brian and was just trying to say the name in a posh accent.

  Bran wished that he could be like some of the other fellows with grand, reasonable names like Seán and Jarlath and Carthage, fellows who didn’t start several rungs down. They were able to laugh at the awful things that happened because they didn’t have the daily indignity of apologising for their names. Nobody made jokes about high fibre to them. There were no awful books of F-Plan diets based on their names. Nobody ever said that you should have a spoonful of their name with each meal.

  Brother Simon, who was very nice, said Bran should rise above his name and not to be going on with this nonsense of changing it by deed poll. When Brother Simon told him a secret and said that for years at school, people used to call him Simple Simon, but he had risen far, far above it, ignoring them completely. He knew he wasn’t simple, that was the important thing, and the louts who had been jeering at him were on welfare, or getting their bones rotted in wet weather in farms they would never own, while Brother Simon lived a grand life, educating boys in the school on the hill.

  It was hard to rise above it. In Brother Simon’s day it was probably easier, the jeering wasn’t so sophisticated, so hard to think of an answer to. Hardly a week passed by without one of them bringing in a cutting about ‘The Need for Bran’, and even an article from a newspaper asking ‘Are we going Overboard on Bran?’ Brother Simon said he had risen above it by putting his mind to his books, but Bran wasn’t sure about the total honesty of that statement. It might be just a ploy to get Bran to work harder. If there was any rising above it, and this term there seemed to be a greater need than ever, then it would have to be by some other avenue.

  He was only average at everything and all he wanted was to be left alone. It didn’t seem much to ask. His mother was nice; she left him alone mainly because he wasn’t a bird with a broken wing or a small wounded deer. If he had been a badger with a bleeding paw, she would have lavished attention on him. The kitchen was full of overfed sparrows with splints made from matchsticks, and the outhouse was a litany of things that needed warm milk at one time and tins of catfood at others.

  His mother had a kind face and was often very tearful over animals. Animals had no voice, she told Bran, over and over; she was trying to be their voice for them. He agreed with her basically, even though some of them, like the dog with three legs, had very loud voices indeed. But Bran knew this wasn’t the point; the point was that they couldn’t get up a protest about the unfairness of their being used in laboratories to experiment on, and the meanness of their being starved or beaten.

  Sometimes he wished that his mother would concentrate a little bit on looking more ordinary, combing her hair and wearing a real skirt and coat rather than a poncho and waders, but his mother was so kind it seemed ungracious and bad to have such thoughts about her, and when they occurred, Bran tried to banish them.

  And his father was very kind to him too, and left him alone most of the time, which was what Bran wanted. His father left most people alone. He was in the bank, and, according to himself, he had been greatly over-educated, a fact that made him entirely unsuitable for any appointment in banking. He had made a resolution that the same fate would never befall his only son. No indeed, an ordinary education at the Brothers would fit a boy for life in this banana republic. Bran wished his father wouldn’t feel he had to deliver himself of this opinion so forcefully on every occasion he met the Brothers; they didn’t seem to share his belief that they were being regarded as an under-education, nor were they sure about the compliments he heaped on them about how well they were creating citizens for the new Ireland. But then again, compared to a lot of people’s fathers, his was really the berries. Jarlath’s father got drunk and belted him. Carthage’s father took off his shoes and put his feet up on the coffee table and drank beer out of a can, and Seán’s father was a religious maniac hung down with scapulars.

  Bran’s sister left him alone, too. Strictly alone. She lived in London and she sent him a fiver and a rude card for his birthday. She sent him marvellous things from a joke shop every Christmas; she never communicated with him at all, apart from that. She had a Cockney accent, like the people in EastEnders and Minder, and sometimes, if she got him on the phone, she’d say ‘You’re all right, our Bran’. She worked as a telephonist, so she could make free calls home. Sometimes she had to put up with their mother asking her to contact some animal lovers’ organisation or to send her posters about banning hunting, other times she had their father telling her that the plug had been pulled out on Ireland and that she was a wise young rossie to have emigrated while it was still possible, before the whole country thundered over to Holyhead looking for a job.

  Bran’s sister was called Morrigan, apparently a war-and-slaughter divinity who helped the Tuatha de Danaan at Moytura. She had risen above this name with great ease, and had worn her hair in spikes before anyone else in Ireland. She was living with a bloke, as she called him, but Bran’s mother said not to dwell on it, in fact, not even to mention it, since it wasn’t the accepted thing.

  It was the end of the Christmas term and it seemed to Bran as if everyone else in the world was going to have a great Christmas. Brother Simon said that it had all changed now since the bad old days and they would have a great feast. People in the town had given them plum puddings, cakes and bowls of brandy butter and tins of biscuits. The butcher nearly had a special room for the Brothers, so many geese and turkeys had bee
n given to them. Many of these they redistributed to needy people, but they kept a feast for themselves as well. There would be cards and songs and television.

  Morrigan was going on a sunshine holiday with her bloke. You just turned up at the airport with your bag packed and took the cancellations, to anywhere; it cost half nothing. It was going to be ‘brill’. Bran’s mother was organising a fast for funds to combat the use of live animals in experiments, and all the dogs and cats, the stoat, the plovers and assorted birds, howled their approval and gratitude at her being a voice for them.

  Bran’s father had been asked to deliver a lecture on ‘Whither Ireland?’ and he had been preparing it since September. It was the biggest and best forum he had ever been given. He deliberated nightly over whether he should buy a new jacket or whether that was giving in to the ethic and ambition of the gombeen man.

  Bran knew that boys of fourteen were meant to feel odd and lonely and left out. It was just the time of life, it would pass, all the books and the magazine articles said. And his position was made much worse by not having any brothers or sisters at home or a normal mother and father, not to mention a normal name.

  If he were to rise above things, he felt he must broaden his horizons. Brother Simon had often told them in class about people who broadened their horizons. It seemed a sound step. Bran decided to interest himself in something new. That was the advice that Frankie Byrne and Angela MacNamara and all the kind, wise people always suggested. Find some new interest.

  There was a private bus company in the town, a very successful organisation altogether. They had a big shop window displaying pictures of all the glittering places you could go on their buses.

  Not just Dublin, but you could go to Galway or up to Newry for the shopping or to anywhere there was a match, or even as far as London. They put the bus on the boat.

  It was run by a fellow with a lovely, ordinary name. He was called Seán Ryan. Bran envied him his name and his bus company. Bran’s father said Seán Ryan symbolised every single thing that was wrong with Ireland, from his big belly swollen with foreign lagers to his permed head of hair. Seán Ryan was King of the Gombeens, according to Bran’s father, nay more, he was Emperor Gombeen man.

  Bran liked looking in the window of the bus company headquarters; your horizons were broadened just by looking way way beyond the town. If he were able to go to these places, perhaps he would be able to rise above his name, like his sister Morrigan had, like Brother Simon had. Bran suspected it had a lot to do with travelling.

  In the window were details of an Exciting Christmas Competition. Seán Ryan wanted to find a new name for his bus company; he wanted his local townspeople to be involved. He was offering a prize of a trip of the winner’s choice plus ten Euros for the name and slogan chosen. It should be a name with dignity, and have an Irish dimension as well as somehow explaining the magnificent scope of Seán Ryan’s bus services.

  Bran had often read that opportunities come to everyone but that the trick is to see them. Millions of people are passing opportunities by every day of the week. If he were ever to rise above anything, this was the moment.

  ‘What is it, young lad?’ Seán Ryan didn’t see much of a potential customer in the thin young boy at the counter.

  ‘Is there any law that you have to be old to win the competition?’

  Seán Ryan sighed. ‘No law at all, but there’s no point in calling it Superbus, or Shamrock Bus . . . you’d need to be more a man of the world, if you know what I mean . . .’

  ‘If I were to give you a name now, how would I know you wouldn’t cheat me, we’ve no witnesses.’

  Seán Ryan had had a long day.

  ‘Hold on a minute. Miss O’Connor, please can you come and witness the entry that our young friend is writing for us. He’s a man of sound business sense, he doesn’t want to be conned.’

  Miss O’Connor, with an enormous bust and tight green skirt, came over to watch what was being written. Together with Seán Ryan, she read it out. The letters went downwards.

  Best

  Regionally

  And

  Nationally

  BRAN Bus Company

  Seán Ryan had adopted his most gombeen-man look. He put his arm around Bran’s shoulder. ‘Not bad at all, young fellow, not bad. I doubt if we’ll get much better than that. And if we don’t then you’re on your way to . . . well, wherever you would like to go. Dublin maybe.’

  ‘It’s not far enough,’ Bran said. ‘The horizon is too near. I’d like to go to the Continent of Europe, please.’

  ‘Wait now, it doesn’t say anything . . .’ Seán Ryan began to bluster.

  ‘Go on, Seán. Bran Buses, it’s terrific,’ said the busty Miss O’Connor.

  ‘You do make a point of advertising Continental connections,’ said Bran, who knew all the advertisements by heart.

  ‘You’re too young to go off on your own to Europe, they’d eat you for breakfast,’ said Seán Ryan.

  ‘I won’t want to go immediately,’ Bran said. ‘I might wait a bit until there’s no danger of them eating me for breakfast. By winning it, I’ll know that the horizons have been pushed back and that I have risen above it all.’

  Seán Ryan began to wonder was the young fellow unhinged. That’s all he needed, to award the prize to the local madman.

  ‘Where does your father work?’ he asked.

  ‘Not that it’s at all important, but he works in the bank,’ said Bran.

  As always, this seemed to make things more cordial. Bran wondered why. His father didn’t have power and influence; he wasn’t the man who would lend Seán Ryan the money to buy a further fleet of buses, but people always treated a bank person’s son with respect.

  ‘And we’re a travelling family,’ he said proudly. ‘My sister Morrigan has planned to go on a standby holiday from Gatwick airport with her bloke. To anywhere. Anywhere in the world.’

  ‘I’ll give you the tenner now. It’s a good name, it’s a name with power to it. Bran Buses. Best Regionally and Nationally. God almighty, that’s a good name, all right.’

  Seán Ryan peeled a ten-pound note off a pile of pink notes with pictures of Dean Swift on them. Bran nodded graciously and thanked Miss O’Connor for her participation in the whole business.

  Once he had risen above it, his name didn’t seem a bad one. He almost relished the thought of new wholefood recipes. There would be no ammunition for the fellows at school now, not when the bus company was called Bran, not when Mr Ryan the gombeen man had said it was a name with power to it and paid a tenner for it, plus a trip to the Continent of Europe when he was ready for it.

  The Sporting Decision

  MARTIN HAD WONDERED RECENTLY WHETHER HE WAS NOW totally past the possibility of falling in love. He used to consider himself quite a dashing lover when he was young. Well, not technically speaking, of course, not like Casanova or anything, but Martin was never without a girl on his arm, or in his sports car. And as time went on those girls became ladies.

  He had never married.

  ‘No one would have me,’ he’d laugh.

  But everyone knew this wasn’t true. Martin Grey was quite a catch. A very successful lawyer in mainly high-profile cases. If you got Martin Grey to defend you, it meant that you or someone close to you had money and that your case was tricky.

  He had spoken in the courts for religious communities, for bankers, for politicians, alleged murderers, gangland bosses, and increasingly, in post-divorce-referendum Ireland, for disturbed first wives. His name was rarely out of the papers, he was often seen on the evening television news, his handsome animated face talking to clients.

  He lived in a Georgian town house within walking distance of his work and the many dinner parties to which he was invited.

  People had almost given up hoping that he would form a permanent relationship with anyone he met over an elegant dinner in their homes. But he was always witty and good company. He sang for his supper and was universally charming, apparently
indiscreet, but in fact giving nothing away.

  People put his ongoing bachelor status down to his having been very busy in the marrying years and now, in his late fifties, having become too set in his ways to change them to accommodate anyone else.

  His little weakness, as he was often heard to say, was an over-concern for the horses. He was always to be seen at Punchestown, Leopardstown, the Curragh and down the country, too. He never seemed to be with anyone, but since he knew everyone, all he had to do was to say to people that he met that they should all meet up in this bar or that, or in some of the hospitality tents, and he had a ready-made circle of friends for the day.

  He was also interested in antique furniture, items that would suit his tall, narrow Georgian home. He never boasted about his Chippendale chairs, but he did arrange for them to be very well lit so that people could admire them, and only then would he tell a little of their origin, always slightly self-deprecating, as if he knew nothing about it really.

  Once or twice a year he took time off from the racecourses of Europe to go to some of the major antique markets. Which was why he found himself going into the Grosvenor House Hotel.

  He was in London anyway, for a case conference on a very sticky extradition matter. Martin Grey’s client was running out of time and excuses, but not money. A huge refresher fee had been handed over.

  Martin decided to look at some mirrors. He knew exactly what he wanted, something with an Adamesque urn and trailing foliage on it. A mirror that he could laugh at lightly and say how strange it was to think that people were examining themselves in it as long ago as 1770.

  And that was when he saw her.

  He saw the most striking woman he had ever seen. She looked about thirty, a good twenty-five years younger than he was. Tall and slim and wearing an oddly old-fashioned, full, black silk skirt with a crisp white shirt.