Maeve Binchy's Treasury

by Maeve Binchy

  That evening the old lady came out and gave her a big cake full of honey and nuts.

  ‘A present to you from us,’ she said and vanished before she could hear the thanks.

  ‘How do you speak such good English?’ Molly asked Maria another evening.

  ‘Georgi says we must learn it for all the tourists we would have, but as you see, alas the tourists never come to us.’

  Molly thought about it that night. The place was really very shabby, the food was not really very good. It had to be said that nobody there, Georgi, his wife or his mother were real cooks. It was not really surprising that the visitors went to other places to be entertained. And yet what could be more entertaining than to see the people of the little fishing village enjoying themselves with their old songs and dances?

  Molly looked at Maria enviously. Imagine having such a marvellous husband, a great dancer, a huge smile, courteous to everyone. But then she was very beautiful.

  And beautiful girls got the nice men, that was the rule.

  Molly felt sad at the thought. It wasn’t really fairly divided, was it?

  If a girl was beautiful, she had so much luck already, with people admiring her, knowing that she caused a sensation just walking by. And then on top of all that she would get a nice man as well. Too much, Molly thought, her face despondent.

  Maria noticed her.

  ‘You look sad tonight, Molly,’ she said.

  Molly looked up at the girl’s face, perfect oval shape, huge dark eyes, olive skin and thick black curly hair. No wonder a man as marvellous as Georgi loved her and smiled so much at her.

  ‘I wish I was beautiful,’ Molly said suddenly.

  ‘Oh, but you are,’ said Maria with her dazzling smile. ‘You have a lovely face and you are a lovely person, everyone here loves you to come in.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I would love to have beautiful curls like you do, for one thing.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you?’ asked Maria. ‘My cousin runs the hairdresser’s shop, she gave me these curls.’

  ‘A perm?’ Molly couldn’t believe it.

  ‘I do not know the word perm.’

  ‘Body wave? Someone made the curls for you with hot things.’

  ‘Yes, this is what she did,’ Maria replied. They laughed like old friends.

  Next morning Sheila, Kitty and Brigid had terrible hangovers. ‘Are you making an omelette by any lovely chance?’ Kitty croaked.

  ‘No, I’m going to have a perm,’ said Molly and ran off down the steps with all the flowerpots on them.

  The hairdresser was called Anna. She said she would make beautiful curls for Molly and she did. She also told her that Maria was Georgi’s sister not his wife, and that it was Georgi’s mother who owned the lovely villa where the girls were staying and how they hoped to open a restaurant there. But now it didn’t look likely. They had not made any money in the little place and they couldn’t afford a cook.

  ‘I can cook,’ Molly said suddenly.

  ‘Then perhaps you are an answer to prayer,’ said Anna, offering her the mirror so that she could see how the curls looked at the back.

  Georgi said her hair looked beautiful when she went to the little café that night.

  ‘You have always looked beautiful but now your hair looks beautiful too. Orea . . . beautiful,’ he said again.

  ‘Thank you, Georgi, efkaristo. But now we must think of something more important. You buy nice chickens here but they are a little dry. Would you let me try to make a nice chicken dish for you tomorrow, chicken with olives and sun-dried tomatoes and wine?’

  ‘Well, yes . . .’

  Georgi seemed surprised.

  ‘Could you and Maria and I go to the market together do you think?’

  Georgi thought it was a terrific idea.

  When the girls got up the next day there was no sign of Molly. She had left a note saying she had a lot of things to do, she might see them that evening in the usual place.

  Sheila, Kitty and Brigid came to the little café and sat at the table. No sign of Molly, then they saw her in the kitchen, smiling at Georgi, no cardigan, lots of curls, and she actually seemed to be in charge of the food.

  Steaming plates of chicken casserole came out of the kitchen and people ate them eagerly. And baskets of Greek bread came out so that people could wipe up all the juices.

  ‘Hey, this is great,’ Sheila said in amazement. ‘Did you make it, Molly, and can I have some more?’

  ‘Shush, no way,’ Molly hissed. ‘There isn’t half enough.’

  ‘Where did you get the hair?’ Kitty was equally amazed.

  ‘I told you I was getting a perm. Listen will you, have cheese or something, and when you’re down at the nightclub can you tell the crowd you meet there to come here tomorrow night. We’ll give them a special price.’

  ‘We?’ said Brigid.

  ‘Georgi, his mother, Maria and I.’

  There was a silence. The three friends looked with new eyes at the girl who had come with them at the last moment. Molly, the plump girl in the cardigan who preferred cooking to dancing and preferred talking about ingredients than romancing under the moon, seemed to have got the undivided attention of the most handsome man in the whole place. Not only was it unexpected, it was very galling.

  Still, there was the wife to consider.

  ‘Will Maria like you moving into her place in the kitchen?’ Sheila said with a very thin smile.

  ‘Well, like any sister, she’d be pleased to see the fortunes of the café improve. If they do improve,’ Molly was confident but not arrogant.

  ‘Sister?’ they all chorused.

  ‘Yes of course, aren’t they the image of each other?’ Molly’s eyes rested fondly on the family who were beginning to depend on her.

  It was almost time for the fun crowd to move on to the nightclub. But they were loath to leave. So much had happened already in this place. But on the other hand, there might be magical things altogether up at the nightclub.

  If Molly, who was coming from so far behind in her cardigan, had done so well in this little backwater . . . what might the rest of them find where the thudding beat and the bright-coloured lights of the nightclub beckoned.

  They left Molly talking ingredients and trying to find the Greek word for sauce and planning tomorrow’s menus with the people who already saw her very much as part of their family.

  Gerald and Rose

  THEY MET BY CHANCE AT THE LITTLE NEWSPAPER SHOP IN THE hotel. The tiny blonde with the impossibly long eyelashes was sorting out newspapers from what seemed like every nation on earth.

  ‘Do you have any Irish papers?’ Gerald and Rose spoke almost in unison, then they turned to each other and laughed.

  ‘Isn’t it ridiculous,’ said Rose, ‘I feel lost unless I know what’s going on at home.’

  ‘No wonder we don’t assimilate as well as other races,’ Gerald said, full of shame at having been caught looking for a link with home.

  The blonde said they didn’t sell any.

  ‘You’ve got things from outlandish places here,’ Rose complained.

  Gerald didn’t want to be a Paddy seen demanding his rights. ‘I imagine we’ll have to survive,’ he said loftily.

  The tiny blonde whose bosom was even more improbable than her eyelashes dimpled up at him and wiggled around as she directed him to a newsstand that did deal in such things. She made it sound racy as if he had been asking for some very specialised pornography. She ignored Rose completely.

  They walked companionably to the newsstand. Back in Dublin, it turned out, they lived not far from each other at all.

  He saw a tall, handsome woman about thirty-five-ish, expensively dressed, possibly difficult, the kind of wife that made a scene at parties. Attractive but too independent. Too free a spirit for his liking. She saw a businessman, forty maybe, cautious, ungiving, for example he would not part with his name unless it was beaten out of him. She made two elegant efforts and failed.

  ‘Ho
w are you going to spend the day?’ she asked, knowing that he wouldn’t ask her.

  ‘Read the paper, now that I’ve got it, and then . . . well there was a meeting but it was cancelled so I have a little . . . er . . . a little unexpected free time.’

  Gerald spoke cautiously as if he were stepping dangerously, like Indiana Jones into the Temple of Doom, rather that just admitting in broad daylight to a harmless and respectable fellow Dubliner that he had some time on his hands. His face showed that he greatly regretted having been so frank and open. It was if he knew it would all end badly. Rose nodded as she absorbed this reckless throwing around of information. When she nodded, her great mane of brown-golden hair with its careful highlights bobbed at him tigerishly.

  ‘What a coincidence!’ she said. ‘I have a little unexpected free time too. I was going to the Wimbledon Tennis Museum, but the silly place isn’t open on a Monday so I’m at rather a loose end too.’ She looked helpless and beguiling and slightly roguish. Gerald knew it was up to him to say something, anything. He was never a man to speak before he had decided what he was going to say, that was why he felt so ill at ease at having blurted out that his meeting was cancelled. It left him at a disadvantage.

  ‘Well, heavens,’ he said inadequately.

  ‘Yes, heavenly, isn’t it?’ Rose deliberately misunderstood him. ‘Imagine a couple of hours away from everything, there’s nothing we couldn’t do.’ She registered the alarm in his face and decided to temper it. ‘That is until lunchtime. I’ll have to fly off and leave you then.’ She saw the relief start to flood into his face and after it a tiny touch of bravado. Gerald was thinking, slowly and creakily. A couple of hours. Until lunchtime, no question of getting tied up for a boozy session ending in real ambiguity. After two Armagnacs at 3 p.m.; no, no, nothing like that. He straightened his tie and put on a slightly jaunty look.

  ‘Let’s have a coffee and see what we could do,’ he suggested. And so Rose and Gerald went into a place with lovely fresh coffee and Danish pastries.

  They discovered that they both loved the flavour of cinnamon, they adored watching tennis on television but neither were very good on the court, they thought Japanese food was very bland, they found most things much cheaper in London than at home, but were appalled at the price of property.

  In the last year they had each been to London three times, and they had seen the same musicals. Three of them. In fact, it turned out that they had travelled over from Dublin on the same plane the previous day. At that point they risked introducing themselves but not fully.

  ‘I’m Rose,’ she said and shook hands formally across the table.

  ‘Oh . . . well . . . how do you do . . . Gerald,’ he admitted grudgingly and shook her hand firmly. The young Italian waitress looked at them and shook her head. She had thought they were long married. Life was very odd in London.

  ‘So . . . um . . . Rose,’ he said. ‘We’d better make plans for this morning. What were you thinking of?’

  ‘We could go to the Old Bailey,’ she said eagerly. ‘We might catch a murder trial and see the murderer being dragged off screaming and saying he didn’t do it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Gerald. ‘Yes, I suppose they do let people in.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’ she asked.

  ‘We could go to the National Portrait Gallery,’ he offered. ‘You know—start on the top floor and sort of work our way down, it’s chronological, you see.’

  ‘Is it?’ she said dully. ‘Yes, yes, we could do that, of course.’

  The magic was beginning to go out of the morning. The sun wasn’t as bright, the second Danish pastry, the one they had agreed to halve, wasn’t as crisp or as cinnamon-flavoured as the first. But Rose and Gerald were determined to rescue things.

  ‘What would you really like?’ they both said at exactly the same time, as they had asked for their Irish newspapers at the same moment. Then they burst out laughing and a lot of the magic came back.

  ‘I didn’t really want to go to the Old Bailey. We’d have to queue for hours, and it wouldn’t be like at home, we wouldn’t know anyone.’

  ‘No, and I didn’t really want to go to the Portrait Gallery. It’s just that I’ve been to London so often and always meant to and never got round to it.’

  They were conspirators now. They were going to do as they liked till lunchtime.

  ‘Let’s count to three and then each say what they want, we might come up with the same thing,’ Rose said. Her eyes were amazing. He had thought they were brown but in fact there were spots of gold in them. If you could have gold eyes. He smiled at her across the table of cakes and coffee cups.

  Rose thought he wasn’t bad at all when he smiled. Really, he was quite dishy. There was a little-boy look that didn’t go at all with his briefcase and his civil servant sort of edginess.

  They linked little fingers with each other as children do and then they counted one-two-three and shouted out, ‘Shopping!’ Again their laughter filled the café and again the young Italian wondered if they were mad or drugged and hastened to give them their bill.

  Exclaiming over the chance that two people with such similar tastes and such fortuitous free time could be thrown together like this, they walked companionably in the morning sunshine towards Oxford Street. Anyone who saw them would have thought, like the Italian girl had thought, that they were a couple who had left two young children at home with the au pair and were having a short break in London.

  Rose wondered about Mrs Gerald and decided that whatever she was like she was certainly not the kind of woman who would pick a man up at 9 a.m. and stride purposefully off to the shops with him. Gerald wondered about Mr Rose and thought that he might well be a man who was too busy with his work or indeed, dark suspicion, with a dalliance, to notice that his tall, attractive wife was bored and that it was unwise to allow a bored, beautiful woman to prowl in London’s morning sun. But neither of them mentioned the other’s spouse. To mention Mrs Gerald or Mr Rose was to bring some reality into this unreal time.

  They decided to take it in strict rotation. First a belt for Gerald because they would be passing some men’s shops, then a clock radio for Rose. After that they would look for casual pull-on shoes in soft leather for Gerald, who had always worn tie-up shoes and this was to be his first venture out of them. They would then find a handbag that was big enough to carry guide books and sunglasses and a camera but didn’t look like a rucksack. That was what Rose had said she needed.

  The time just flashed by. Rose said that she felt somebody must have been moving the hands of the clock like a speeded-up film. Gerald said that he had never enjoyed shopping before. Rose had steered him away from a gold buckle belt on the grounds that he had a silver watch strap. Gerald had advised her against a clock radio that was so small it would need tweezers to set the various functions.

  He was going to suggest she get a little earphone so that she could listen to it when Mr Rose was asleep and she didn’t want to wake him. But he decided against anything that might bring up the matter of bed. Or indeed of Mr Rose.

  When it came to the shoe shop, Rose sat and discussed the pull-ons with interest. She was most helpful about the little tassels and about beating away all the persuasive attempts to get him to buy shoe trees and special waterproof wax to clean them with. She was about to say that Mrs Gerald probably had a cupboard full of shoe-cleaning waxes herself. But she didn’t. She didn’t want to think of Mrs Gerald somehow.

  Gerald talked her into a smaller bag. She honestly didn’t need to carry guidebooks and cameras everywhere, now did she. He got halfway through a sentence which was going to be about married couples sharing the responsibility of carrying the guidebooks but he didn’t want to appear critical of Mr Rose or even to acknowledge him.

  It was lunchtime and they stood regretfully. Gerald had no appointment for lunch but Rose had said she did. She had said ages ago that she would have to fly at lunchtime. What a pity because they both liked French food and he knew of a pla
ce not too far and his afternoon meeting wasn’t until 4 p.m.

  Rose thought she saw him look a little longingly but she remembered that she had only managed to ensnare him for that happy morning by assuring him she wouldn’t hang around and be a nuisance. She would have loved to sit and sip cold French wine and eat something very light with a humdinger of a sauce.

  Gerald shook her hand formally and as he thanked her for all the help, he thought that Mr Rose should be taken out and shot.

  Rose said that she hadn’t enjoyed herself so much for years and thought viciously that it was always the same—Mrs Gerald was probably a small dull mouse who thought foreign food gave her an upset tummy and would tell him that his new shoes were a bit sissy.

  They turned and waved at exactly the same time. And they both laughed again and their smiles were real and warm. They had a great deal of telepathy, Rose and Gerald. But not enough for Rose to know that Gerald, who had been too busy to find a wife until he had become secure in his career, had decided that now he was going to look around, seriously. Or that Rose, who had been the other woman for so long, had recently told her married man that she was going to wait no longer, and he had found a younger and more patient lady friend.

  They stood on a warm summer day in this city with its red buses, full of thousands of people they didn’t know and waved goodbye, good-naturedly and wistfully to what they each thought would have been a handful of trouble.

  And as the traffic lights changed for them to cross in their different directions, they turned one last time and waved again.

  By the Time We Get to Clifden

  THEY WENT ON A WEEK’S HOLIDAY EVERY YEAR.

  Not abroad, since Harry didn’t like foreign food and Nessa was afraid to fly.

  But there were plenty of places in Ireland if you looked around you. One year they had been to Lisdoonvarna and another to Youghal. They had found nice B&B places and always kept the card in case they went back again. But they never did.

  In twenty-four years of summer vacations they never once went back to anywhere, no matter how wonderful they said it was at the time.