Maeve Binchy's Treasury

by Maeve Binchy

This was an old refrain. Frankie didn’t want to hear it all over again, Robert’s plans for the day when he ran the place himself. This was an old set of lines they had said to each other, she wanted to know what was new.

  What was new was Ireland, a new plant, a lot of bother, nobody had been there to straighten it out, to tell the people on the ground what was happening, what was expected of them, what they could expect.

  ‘They’re bound to be suspicious of us, think we’re in it for what we can get out of it.’

  Frankie said nothing. For once she didn’t murmur her usual words of encouragement. In fact, she knew that Bensons were in it for what they could get out of it. That’s what business was about.

  ‘So you see what’s happened. In the very week of the conference in Cannes I have to be over in the middle of the boglands talking to the mutinous forces over there and promising them wealth beyond their wildest dreams.’

  ‘Can’t you go now? Before the conference?’

  ‘Don’t you think I asked that? But old man Benson is adamant. It has to be that bloody time, something to do with some European thing or other that’s being held there. They’re much more interested in Europe over there for some reason that escapes me. God, I could kill them for not setting it up right at the start, allowing all these discontents to grow up. If we don’t go in and fly the flag or show our face, whatever the expression is, then the whole thing could collapse like a pack of cards.’ He looked so handsome when he was annoyed.

  She could understand why so many people were impressed with him.

  ‘Will we have any honeymoon together this year, you and I?’ she asked in a small voice looking down at the ground lest he see all the pain in her green eyes.

  ‘You could come to Ireland,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I can’t be tied up with them all the time. We’d have some time together.’

  ‘To do what?’ She had no maps of Ireland, she had no magical names like Juan-les-Pins, like Saint-Tropez.

  ‘I don’t know, darling, I don’t know. Give me space. I only heard about this today, this afternoon. We’ll do something, it could be a rest for you, getting away from it all, and then I’d escape when I could.’

  A more courageous woman would have told him to forget it. A tougher woman would have told him in no uncertain terms what he could do with this half-hearted offer.

  Frankie was neither brave nor tough, which was why she found herself in the small hotel on the West Coast of Ireland, a hotel called ‘The Greener Grass’, standing on a low cliff over a long empty beach. When you looked across that sea the next stop was America they told you. Frankie could believe it, it looked endless. And on the first days it looked grey and lonely. She heard the seagulls calling to each other and watched the other sea birds coming in to perch on rocks. She saw a school of porpoises go by one day, she became familiar with the habits of a cormorant and a kittiwake and a tern and a gannet.

  ‘I could do another Open University course in the habits of sea birds,’ she said ruefully to the proprietor as he set her lobster before her at a table for one for the third time.

  ‘There are worse ways to spend your time you know,’ his voice was soft but it was distant. He was Thomas he said, a returned Irish-American. He had called his place ‘The Greener Grass’ because of the grass always seeming greener when it was far away. He had saved up for seven years to buy his own small hotel.

  He was different to the other local people who wanted to know all about Frankie and Robert, and what was their business in the place. Did they have any children? Where had they been for holidays before? Did they love the Irish way of life? Thomas asked none of these questions. He had the air of someone contented with his own way of life. She saw him choosing his own vegetables from the fields where he had tilled the land to grow them. She watched him sometimes writing the menus in slow careful calligraphic script.

  Robert set out in the early mornings and was rarely back to ‘The Greener Grass’ before dark.

  ‘Not much of a honeymoon, is it, darling?’ he asked more than once. Frankie saw his face white and tired.

  ‘The honeymoon bit is at night, remember?’ she said laughing.

  But at night the weary Robert slept suddenly and soundly as soon as he got into bed. Some nights Frankie sat at the bay window where there was a lovely three-part window seat and looked out at the night sky over the water. Sometimes she saw Thomas and his dog Tracey walking. So he couldn’t sleep either, Frankie thought, even though he had saved seven years to build his dream and had it now in his hands.

  She saw Thomas bend to pick up shells by the moonlight. He looked peaceful, she thought, and somehow at ease. Even though he didn’t really belong here, not like the locals, he had been away too long and he had a slight New York tinge to his voice.

  Next morning at breakfast she asked him about the shells.

  ‘You sat at the window and looked out over the moonlit sea?’ Thomas said.

  Robert seemed annoyed somehow. ‘You didn’t tell me you couldn’t sleep.’ She felt she had been disloyal.

  Later he came and gave her some cowrie shells.

  ‘You could do another Open University course on these and still know nothing about them,’ he said with a smile.

  Robert liked to think that it was somehow a rest for her, that sharing some fraction of his life was reward enough for the broken promise, the conference that never was . . . the ribbon of the French coast not visited.

  ‘I bet this is doing you no end of good,’ he said each morning as they ate brown soda bread and fish just in from the sea.

  For the first few days she had smiled bravely, and taken a book disconsolately to walk along the hilly cliff or down to the rock pools and try to stop thinking that her life was as grey as the skies all around her.

  But then one morning the sun came out and everything was different. Even Robert seemed loath to go.

  ‘It’s very beautiful this place, you know,’ he said as he stood beside his hired car, about to head off for the day with the mutinous men he was finding it harder to placate than he had thought possible.

  Frankie looked down at the beach she had walked so often in the dull days. Today it sparkled as if there were little particles of precious metal hidden behind the rocks instead of soft sand. She thought she could see the cowrie shells that Thomas had been collecting. The sea was twenty different colours of green and blue with little white flecks. ‘I might have a swim,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, well, be sensible. It’s the Atlantic Ocean, don’t forget.’

  ‘Next stop, America,’ Frankie laughed.

  Robert looked at her puzzled.

  ‘I hope I won’t be too late,’ he said, but doubtfully. ‘This lot seems to need conversation and explanation way into the night, as well as the day.’

  He drove away along the road and as Frankie looked after him up at the purple mountains and over beyond the small green fields with their stone walls to a dark velvety forest, she began to feel as if a film had just turned from black and white into technicolour. She ran lightly upstairs to fetch the red bathing suit that had cost her so much in the days she thought it would be seen on the Côte d’Azur. As she came down carrying the pricey beach bag and her red and white fluffy towel, Thomas’s dog, Tracey, came up and looked at her hopefully.

  ‘I’d be grateful if you would,’ Thomas said. ‘He needs a walk and with today’s weather I’ll have the world and its wife for lunch, so I can’t take him.’

  ‘I don’t know a lot about dogs,’ Frankie began.

  ‘Well, Tracey is half sheep dog and half setter, we think. A lovely nature, and he’ll bark if you start to drown or if anyone comes and bothers you.’

  ‘Who’d come and bother me?’ Frankie laughed, looking at the empty beach.

  ‘I haven’t seen you in that swimsuit, but it might attract a bit of local attention,’ he laughed too. The good weather made him seem less remote.

  ‘Would he run away or get into a fight or anything?’ It had neve
r been part of her life, walking with a big bounding dog.

  ‘Not a chance. And as a reward, I’ll come and find you and take you for a little late lunch and take Tracey off your hands.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it’s the minimum fee for dog minding. There’s a nice flat rock in the next bay. It makes a good table.’

  She had never spent a day on a beach like it. Tracey ran for sticks with never-ending energy. She really thought she could see his foolish face smile at her as she threw them again and again.

  Tracey barked at the waves but swam in and paddled near her as if to look after her when she swam. She collected shells and laid them out on the flat table rock.

  Soon, far sooner than she had expected, Thomas arrived with a picnic basket.

  ‘You abandoned your lunchers. How can you expect to earn a living?’ she said sternly.

  ‘You’re not wearing a watch. It’s after three o’clock. They’ve all been and gone. You must be starved.’

  Imagine, she had been playing with this idiotic dog for hours on a shell-covered beach, no cloud had come across the sky, and no thought of Robert and their situation had come across her mind.

  Companionably they shared the picnic, local prawns, home-made bread, cheese made by some nuns in a convent across the valley, red shiny apples from the small orchard behind ‘The Greener Grass’.

  ‘It’s like heaven,’ she sighed as they drained the bottle of wine to the dregs.

  ‘Thank God we don’t get weather like this all the time,’ said Thomas.

  ‘Why do you say that? Because you’d have to work too hard?’ Frankie had been about to say the very opposite. She had been on the point of wishing that every day could be so sunny.

  ‘Because we would be parched and dry. It would not be a green island, and we’d be so used to it we wouldn’t be calling out our thanksgiving to the very heavens as we are today,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I know, and that’s a point, but what about your business? If it was much sunnier there would be many more people here. This beach would be full.’

  ‘And could you and I and Tracey have had such a picnic if the beach was full?’ he asked.

  ‘We had meant to go to the South of France,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Yes, so your husband told me when he called to book.’ Thomas had his distant face on again. ‘He seemed very disappointed and told me in several different ways that this was not his first choice.’

  Frankie was going to explain that Robert was not her husband but she let it go. Instead she apologised for him.

  ‘He’s normally very charming and would never have given you that impression. He has work problems to see to here. We had thought we could have made a holiday out of a conference in Cannes.’

  ‘But why did he take you here and leave you all alone?’

  ‘I’m glad he did,’ Frankie said positively. ‘Now do you think it’s an old wives’ tale about not swimming after lunch or should we risk it?’

  ‘Just as long as we don’t go out too far, any of us,’ he said, and they raced to the edge where the foam was breaking and drawing out the sand with it as it gathered for another wave.

  ‘Have you ever been to the South of France?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ her voice sounded small.

  ‘Neither have I, so let’s pretend this is a hundred thousand times better,’ Thomas cried and threw himself into the waves.

  ‘You caught the sun,’ Robert said when he got back earlier than usual. He had phoned to ask if dinner could be kept for him, and had been surprised and not altogether pleased to hear Thomas say that his wife had had a late lunch.

  ‘Did you tell him we were married?’ Robert asked as they sat at a window table and watched the sunset leaving red and golden paths and criss-cross lines across the bay.

  ‘No darling, I didn’t, but in this country they are likely to assume it if we check into the same room and you have booked us as Mr and Mrs.’

  Robert looked at her sharply, but decided not to make it something to argue about.

  ‘Is it better, you know, are you sorting it out up at the plant?’ Frankie asked.

  ‘Yes, I think they believe our heart is in the right place,’ Robert said.

  ‘And it is?’ Frankie’s face was innocent, bland.

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Well, I mean that a lot of them came back from jobs overseas because they really believed that it was going to be a proper plant, not something that would pack up and fold its tent when things got a bit hairy.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Frankie. What do you think Bensons is, part of Mother Teresa? Of course we have to be practical. If things get hairy, as you put it, we can’t stay on here forever, bleeding hearts keeping returned immigrants in beer money.’

  ‘That’s all right as long as they know it.’

  ‘That’s all right whether they know it or not,’ Robert flashed.

  ‘You remind me more and more of Dale,’ Frankie said. ‘The same cynical way of looking at everything.’

  ‘You are beginning to remind me more and more of my wife. The same way of picking a row and nagging over everything.’

  Frankie had read somewhere that you know when something is over. You know that this is the moment but you won’t accept it. You try to say it was because one person had too many tiring days negotiating, and the other person had too much unexpected sun.

  Robert probably knew too because when he was called to the phone he went with eagerness and came back to say that some of the men needed him for a further conference.

  They parted pleasantly, almost with relief.

  Frankie went walking on the beach in the last rays of the sun. She felt Tracey rushing up to her before she knew Thomas was on the beach as well.

  ‘I had a friend in New York, a great friend, she was going to come here and run ‘The Greener Grass’ with me. You know, a joint enterprise. Then she said she’d join me later, then she said she needed thinking time, then she said she’d write.’

  They walked in silence. There seemed no need to say anything.

  Frankie thought about all those years and those two honeymoons where she had felt she needed to entertain Robert all the time, talk to him, be bright, show no hurt, no loneliness.

  ‘He’s not my husband,’ she said after a long time.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said Thomas.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Labels on suitcases, his instructions about not ever calling him to the phone if the office rang but always taking a name and a time he should call at. If you were married, he would have asked you to take the messages.’

  After another long time, Frankie asked, ‘Is it all right, you know, running the place as a single venture, not a joint one as you had thought?’

  ‘Yes, it’s all right. It mightn’t always be single. You never know your luck.’

  The sea was calm now, they skimmed flat stones and made them hop. ‘He’ll be going back soon, I imagine,’ Thomas said. ‘The lads tell me it’s all settled.’

  ‘Yes, well, they wouldn’t want to rely on too much.’

  ‘They’re smarter than they sound,’ Thomas said with a laugh. ‘All us fellows who worked over the water learned a bit about business.’

  ‘We had planned to stay on a bit when it was settled, but I don’t think so now.’

  ‘No, he’ll want to be off, he might even catch the tail end of the Cannes thing.’

  ‘A place where the sun shines all the time and there’s no sense of surprise?’ Frankie smiled at him.

  ‘The very spot,’ Thomas said.

  ‘And what’s the weather forecast like here?’ she wondered.

  ‘Optimistic, but unknown,’ said Thomas.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ said Frankie. ‘I’ll certainly stay on a while until I know how it turns out.’

  They walked back to ‘The Greener Grass’ in a companionable silence because they knew there was no need to say anything or plan anything or spell anything out o
r indeed say anything at all.

  The Homesitter

  IT WOULD BE A NEW START. NOT EVERYONE GOT SUCH A CHANCE, Maura told herself. Three months in a warm climate, the people were meant to be very friendly over there. Already she had got letters from faculty wives welcoming her. James would be Visiting Lecturer in this small university in the Mid-West of America. Both fares were paid and they would have a house on campus.

  The only problem was their house. James and Maura lived in a part of Dublin where people suspected burglars of lurking in the well-kept shrubbery waiting till the owners had left each day. If they were gone for three months the place would be ransacked.

  But it was quite impossible to let the place. First there was the fear that you might never get the people out. You heard such terrible stories. Then it would mean locking everything away; no, it would be intolerable. How could they enjoy three months in a faraway place terrified that everything they had was being smashed and they might have to go to the High Court to evict the tenants?

  There were no possibilities either in their families. Ruefully they agreed that James’s mother would be an unlikely starter. She was forgetful to a point where nobody could leave her in charge. The burglar alarm would be ringing night and day dementing the neighbours. She did love their dog Jessie but she would forget to feed her, or else give her all the wrong things. She would allow Jessie out and there would be litters of highly unsatisfactory puppies on the way when they got back.

  They couldn’t ask Maura’s sister Geraldine either, because she hated dogs. She would leap in terror when Jessie gave a perfectly normal greeting. And Maura feared that Geraldine would poke around, look in drawers and things. There would be so much hiding involved and having to send Jessie to a kennel that it literally wouldn’t be worth it.

  Their neighbours weren’t the kind of people you could give a key to. These were big houses with sizeable gardens. Not estates, or back-to-back terraces like Coronation Street where everyone knew everyone’s business. On one side there were the Greens, elderly, mad about gardening, hardly ever out of their greenhouse. Very pleasant to greet, of course, but that was all.