The Return Journey

by Maeve Binchy

  She did all she was asked to do. She studied the feeding schedules of the small, aggressive Beauty to reassure Janet. She took Heidi on an outing to Bloomingdale’s and with Heather’s dollars bought her bright-colored clothes to wear in the California sun. She planned the two bus trips so she could send the deceiving postcards for Francesca. She helped Marion pack romantic negligees for her week in the country inn.

  And, of course, she would do all the other things that made them think Miss Vogel was an angel. She would turn out their lights, pull their drapes at different times each evening, sort their mail, so, when they came back, it would be in a neat pile on their hall table. She would see their garments were returned from the dry cleaner and hung in their closets; she would admit a television repairman here and an interior decorator there and listen to their holiday tales and look at their holiday photos with great interest on their return.

  Often there was fuss and near hysteria at the actual time of departure; limousines had not been ordered in advance, for example, or taxis could not be hailed on the New York streets.

  This year, Miss Vogel decided to cut through all the drama and found a neighborhood car service. She spoke to Frank, a man with a tired, kind face, who was at the desk, telling him she had four trips over two days, to La Guardia Airport for Heather and Heidi, to Grand Central for Janet, to Penn Station for Marion and her husband, and some secret pickup place in New Jersey for Francesca.

  “What commission are you looking for?” Frank asked wearily.

  “Oh no,” Miss Vogel said. “I was only trying to arrange something for the people in my building. They’ll all pay you the rate. I don’t want anything…I don’t want anything for myself.”

  “You must be the only person in the world who doesn’t, then,” said Frank.

  “It’s just their vacations. They get very fussed, you know the way people do?”

  “I don’t know the way people do,” Frank said. “I’ve never had a vacation.”

  Miss Vogel gave him a big smile. “Do you know neither have I? We must be the only people in the world who haven’t.”

  A bond was established between them, and they worked out the times he would be there to pick up the holidaymakers.

  He was courteous and punctual, but more than that he was kind. He waited while Janet kissed Beauty good-bye; he told Heidi she’d love Disneyland—everyone came back from it a new person; he explained to Francesca that he was a genius at finding out-of-the-way spots in New Jersey; he told Marion and her husband that an inn in the countryside was the very best vacation anyone could choose.

  Miss Vogel was sorry when the last had gone. She enjoyed Frank’s company. She would miss regular visits when she always found time to make him a coffee and give him some of her own home-baked shortbread.

  To her surprise, he turned up again.

  “I was wondering, Miss Vogel, if you and I should have a vacation in New York,” he began tentatively. “We could pretend we were tourists here and see it through their eyes.” He looked at her, hoping that she would not laugh at this or dismiss it as a ridiculous idea.

  “A vacation in New York City?” she said thoughtfully.

  “Well, a lot of people do, you know.” Frank was defensive. “I drive them to places. I should know.”

  “That will be great,” said Miss Vogel. “But first I have to do a bit of fussing. That’s essential.”

  “Yes, I’ll come around tomorrow morning. Does that give you time enough to fuss?” he asked.

  Miss Vogel worked out that she could take a five-hour vacation each day. Then she ironed her clothes carefully and laid out a different outfit for each outing. She went to a beauty parlor on the corner and got her hair and her nails done.

  She prepared several picnic lunches they could have and left them ready in the freezer. She got new heels on her comfortable shoes. She checked the weather forecast. She was ready for her vacation.

  They went to Ellis Island and spent the day looking at where their grandparents had come into the United States from Italy and Germany, Ireland and Sweden.

  “I bet they were four young people who never had time for a vacation once they got here,” Miss Vogel said.

  “But they must have been adventurous young people,” Frank replied, “not the kind of folk who would like to believe their descendants would be stay-at-homes.”

  The next day they went to the World Trade Center to see the view and then back uptown to the zoo. Afterward, they walked in Central Park in the sunshine.

  They drove together companionably to the town where they had to mail Francesca’s postcards and talked about how old life was with so many people living a lie—Francesca herself and the two married men who were each taking her off for a week. They went to Chinatown and on a tour of the stock exchange on Wall Street.

  They went back to where Miss Vogel grew up and looked at the big delicacies shop, so much changed in appearance since her youth. They went to see where Frank was raised, changed so very much from when he was a boy. He pointed out where he had lived with his wife for three years a long time ago, and also the hospital where she had died.

  Neither had ever been to Carnegie Hall, so they booked a concert.

  And as she had seen a ball game only on television, never in reality, they went to Yankee Stadium.

  And the week flew by.

  Frank helped Miss Vogel to sort the mail, arrange the curtains, and arrange deliveries for the tenants. Miss Vogel went to the car-service office and brightened it up by washing the curtains and putting some colorful ornaments around.

  The next week, they could no longer afford five hours a day for vacation. Like everyone else in New York, they would now know that feeling which said the holiday was over.

  But for Frank and Miss Vogel, there was something new and wonderful. No longer did they keep their thoughts to themselves, there was someone with whom to talk over the events of the day. Not only holiday memories, but what was happening in the real world as well.

  So when Frank drove Heather and Heidi back from the airport, he could report that mother and daughter were hardly speaking and that the girl had been left alone in her hotel room looking at television, since Heather was tied up in meetings all day.

  Miss Vogel could tell him that something very odd had happened in Francesca’s life—perhaps both men had proposed marriage to her, both would leave their wives, but she wanted neither. Francesca was lying down with a cold compress on her eyes, trying to get the courage to tell them.

  Janet told Frank in the car her holiday with her sister had been a huge mistake—there would be no more family get-togethers. What did people want family for, anyway? A good dog was worth twenty sisters.

  Marion told Miss Vogel that her rat of a husband had taken her to the inn only to tell her he was leaving her. And amazingly, Marion didn’t really mind all that much. Once it was out in the open, she enjoyed the walking and peace of the countryside, and her husband had been startled and annoyed at how well she adapted to the new situation.

  But nobody asked Miss Vogel if she had enjoyed her time when they were away. And if they saw Frank around the place a lot, it was because they assumed he was driving people. Sometimes Miss Vogel wasn’t quite as available to baby-sit, walk dogs, listen to problems, arrange flowers. Nothing you could put your finger on. And if she looked happier and walked with a spring in her step and smiled with brighter eyes…they thought she might have lost a few pounds or something.

  Tony Bari’s wife noticed, however. She had returned from a tedious vacation in Italy with a lot of possessive in-laws and was glad to be back in New York. Her eyes narrowed when Miss Vogel came into the shop. She always suspected Tony Bari harbored feelings for the daughter of the house, and if she had had any money, he would very probably have asked Miss Vogel to marry him.

  “Did you have a good vacation, Miss Vogel?” she asked politely, her sharp glance taking in Miss Vogel’s improved posture, hairstyle, and general manner.

  “
Very pleasant, Mrs. Bari. I stayed in New York, got to know my own city. It was delightful.”

  Tony Bari’s wife, who would love to have done the same, was envious.

  “Well, at our age, Miss Vogel, we don’t expect very much from vacations, do we?” She was trying to remove the pleased smile from Miss Vogel’s face. But she was not succeeding.

  Miss Vogel paused in her choosing of expensive mushrooms, specialty cheese, and exotic olive oils and smiled confidently at the woman who had taken away her only hope of marriage and a home, merely because that woman’s father had money.

  “Oh, Mrs. Bari, how sad, how very sad to hear you say that,” she said, as deeply sympathetic as if she were offering condolences at a funeral.

  Tony Bari was at the other side of the shop. He was fat now and balding, his face set in lines of disappointment and greed. Life had not turned out as he might have wished. How could she ever have thought he would have made her a good husband? Had it all worked out at the time, then she would have just returned from a weary journey to Italy with this bad-tempered man. She would have known no other world but this one; she would never have gone in and out of the lives of the existing people who lived in her building.

  She might have looked wistfully at the kind face of Frank, a limousine driver, if she had ever met him, and wondered what it would be like to live in easy companionship with someone who saw beauty everywhere and gain and opportunity nowhere. Tonight, for his birthday, she would cook him a great feast They had plans for the future, plans young people were making all over the world, but were no less loving and hopeful just because Miss Vogel and Frank were no longer young.

  “Oh, Mrs. Bari,” she repeated, her voice full of genuine sorrow. She had been about to ask, “What is the point of living at all if we don’t expect something from every vacation and every day?” but it sounded a bit preachy, and Miss Vogel had learned firsthand from her apartment complex that happiness does not always go hand in hand with having a lot of possessions, so instead she said that to have unrealistic dreams should not be part of the aging process.

  And head high, her shopping basket full of exotic ingredients, Miss Vogel left the delicacies shop that had once been her father’s bakery and, without a backward glance, walked into the sun-filled streets of New York.

  THE HOME SITTER

  It would be a new start. Not everyone got such a chance, Maura told herself. Three months in a warm climate, and the people were supposed 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 Midwest 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, making the neighbors crazy. 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 neighbors weren’t the kind of people you could give a key to. These were big houses with sizable 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. And then, on the other side, there were that high-flying couple, the Hurleys, who were always being written about in the papers. They had started their own company. They had three children of their own and had adopted others. They had his mother and her father living in a kind of mews. They always seemed to have at least three students of different nationalities living with them and minding the children. You couldn’t ask the Hurleys to take on any more. They’d sicken you with how much they were doing already.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Maura heard herself say for the tenth time to James, and saw with alarm that familiar look of of irritation cross his face.

  “Everything is a problem these days,” he said. “Most people would jump at this opportunity. All it does for us is create more and more difficulties.”

  She knew that this was true. Other people would see it as an excitement, a challenge, an adventure. She was being middle-aged beyond her years to see the summer as another Bad Thing. She must pull herself together. This trip to America was probably the last chance she would have to make her marriage work. They would be together in a new place, sharing everything as they had ten years before. There would be freedom, there would be time. James wouldn’t work late at the college there, as he did at home. He wouldn’t stop for drinks at the club rather than coming back to her. He wouldn’t invent things to do on weekends to escape the house and the prospect of yet more time mending, fixing, and titivating their home.

  Maura reminded herself that she was resourceful, that that was how she had found James in the beginning, her lecturer in college whom everyone had fancied and yet Maura had won. That was how she had found the house. It was good to be hardworking and practical. That was what had saved them both when little Jamie had died, a cot death at three months. Maura had planted the garden and bought a young collie dog. James had always said that she was a tower of strength in those months.

  But that had been six years ago, and things had changed a lot since then. It wasn’t just the lack of a child. They both knew that. There seemed to be a gulf between them that no amount of shared interest would bridge. There were so many things that they did share already—the house, the garden, the walks with Jessie—and yet there were so many silences. Another child, even if it had come along, would not have cemented them together. James lived more and more in the college, Maura more and more in her office, which she didn’t really enjoy, but since the work was routine and simple it gave her plenty of time to think about her home and its constant improvement.

  There was something about the frown of impatience on James’s face that made Maura realize the urgency of sorting out the house matter without any more fuss.

  “Leave it to me,” she said reassuringly. “I’ll think of something. You have enough to do to prepare your lectures.”

  The frown went, and there was something of the old James. “That’s more like it,” he said. He was very handsome when he smiled. Maura realized with a sudden lurch of feeling that at least three marriages had ended in the college. It had been shock and horror and scandal at the time, but now all those men had settled down happily with their second choice. The furor had died down except in the hearts of the three women who had been left alone. It could happen with James very, very easily. If someone wanted him desperately enough. If Maura was foolish enough to drive him out of the home with her fussing and creating problems where none existed.

  She spent the next day on the phone. Did anyone know anyone? And eventually someone did. An old school friend Maura hadn’t seen for years knew someone called Allie.

 
“Is she an Arab?” Maura asked. The Hurleys had a boy called Ali staying one year.

  “No, it’s short for Alice, I think. She’s a kind of a home sitter.”

  “Is she in an organization? Does she get paid?”

  The friend, a colorless woman called Patsy, said no, Allie was a law unto herself. “She’s our age, but you’d think she was years younger. She hasn’t anywhere to live, no real job, she just moves on from place to place minding people’s houses.”

  “Sounds a bit unreliable,” Maura said disapprovingly.

  “No, she was very good here, actually.” Patsy sounded grudging.

  “And what did she do all day?”

  “I wish I knew, but she had the place in fine shape when we came back from Brussels. Everyone around spoke highly of her.” There was still something ungiving about Patsy. Maura wondered if she was being told the full story about this Allie.

  “You didn’t like her, did you?” she asked.

  Patsy sounded aggrieved. “Lord almighty, Maura, you asked for someone to mind your house, I found you someone. Did I like her? I hardly met her. I only saw her twice before we left, and once when we came back. She did everything she said she would, and what more can anyone ask?”

  Maura thanked her hastily and took Allie’s present phone number. She was minding an art gallery for someone. It would be lovely to go to a home with a dog and a garden, she said.

  “And two budgies?” Maura added.

  “Super,” said Allie.

  She sounded eighteen, not thirty-five-ish. When they met her, she looked much nearer to eighteen also.

  Allie had long, dark, curly hair, the kind you knew she shampooed every morning and just shook it dry. She had a great smile that lit up her whole face, she had long golden legs and arms, and she wore what Maura thought was an overshort denim dress.

  Allie sat on the grass as she talked to them in the garden. She smiled up at James, and Maura felt a resentment that she had not known possible. Not just at the fact that Allie could sit on the ground without falling over. But at the way she looked at James. It wasn’t flirtatious or coy, it was just a look that was full of interest. Everything he said seemed worthy of consideration; Allie would nod eagerly or shake her head. She was reacting on a very high level. Not for Allie the nods and grunts and half-attention that James must have been used to from Maura.