by Maeve Binchy
“Look, sorry, sorry for the language, and this, well, lack of feeling. I am sorry for the old bastard, he’s been very brave, and he’s very frightened, you know. But hell, Margaret, Helen, we are not fools. I mean, be straight. He’s hardly the love of my life.”
There was a silence. Whatever they had expected from afternoon tea with Jane in the Ritz, it certainly was not this.
Jane appealed to them: “I thought that being in the nanny school was blood brothers, you know, for life? I thought that those of us who survived could say anything, anything, and it wasn’t misconstrued.”
Margaret said, “Jane, of course you can say anything to me, but remember we’ve all lived a life since we came out of nanny school. Mine has been very sheltered. I’m a vicar’s wife for heaven’s sake. What can be more sheltered than that? I ask you. It’s the kind of thing people make jokes about, it’s so, well, so different from yours. Can you really expect me to take all this in my stride?”
“All what?” Jane wanted to know.
“Well, your wealth, your life-style, the fact that your husband, your common-law husband, is dying of cancer and you say awful words and…” Margaret looked genuinely distressed. Helen took up the explanation:
“You see, Jane, it’s not that either Margaret or I are trying to be distant. It’s just that we don’t really live in the same world as you anymore and I expect after a few minutes or an hour we’ll all settle down and be the same as we used to be. It’s just hard to expect us to act on your level.”
Jane walked around the room for a moment or two before she replied:
“I guess I was taking things a bit too much for granted. I guess I was reading too much into all that solidarity we had twenty years ago.”
She was silent, and looked perplexed. She looked young, beautiful, and puzzled, the two matrons stared up at her from their sofa in disbelief. It was as if they were watching a film of their youth where only Jane had stayed young. She used to look just like that when she was nineteen and thinking of a way to avoid detection by the nanny college principal.
“You needn’t think the friendship isn’t there,” said Helen. “In fact it is, enormously. I can tell Margaret things about my private life, my worries with Jeff and money. Susie was back from Kuwait and when we met she was telling us all about how she discovered she was lesbian and she could tell nobody.” Helen looked like a big innocent schoolgirl trying to join the senior girls by revealing secrets and showing herself to be mature.
“Oh I know, Susie wrote to me,” said Jane absently.
“I feel we’ve let you down, Jane,” said Margaret. “I feel there was something you wanted us to do for you, and just by racing the wrong way at the outset we’ve made that impossible.”
Jane sat down.
“You were always very astute, Margaret,” she said. “There was indeed something I wanted to ask you. But now I don’t know whether or not I can. You see I can only do it if I am utterly frank with you. I can’t go through any charade with anyone from nanny college. There are rules I break in life but never that.” She looked at them.
“Of course,” said Helen.
“Naturally,” said Margaret.
“Well, you see, I wanted to stay in England until Charles kicks it. No, sorry, if we are going to be frank, I simply will not use words like ‘passes away,’ he’s dying, he’s riddled with cancer, he’s not going to see Christmas. I don’t wish him any more pain, I wish he were dead. Dead now.”
Their faces were sad, less shocked than before but still not understanding.
“So if we stay here till the end, I want Charles to see that I have friends, good decent normal friends like you two. I want to take him to your homes. He’ll probably insult you and buy you new homes but we can get over that. I mean he’ll buy you and David a new parsonage certainly, Margaret, possibly the bishop’s palace, and as for Jeff, he’ll either buy him a book-making business or he’ll send him to a Harley Street specialist to have what he will consider compulsive gambling cured in some clinic at three hundred quid a day.”
There was a ghost of a smile passing over the faces of the two on the sofa.
“I wanted to ask your support in these last weeks. There’s nobody else I could trust, and I’ve worked so goddamn hard for ten years I can’t lose it all now.”
“What will you lose?” Margaret asked. “You’ve already said you won’t miss him. I don’t see how our inviting him to our homes can help anything at all.”
“Don’t you see?” Jane cried out. “He is going mad, he has premature senility, he’s paranoid. He thinks I’m unfaithful to him, he thinks I’m cheating on him. He’s busy trying to dispossess me of everything.”
“He can’t do that,” Helen gasped.
“You can’t think that,” Margaret gasped at the same time.
“He can, he can do a lot of it, and I can and do think it because I know it,” said Jane.
In simple terms she told them a tale of stocks and companies, of the properties she owned absolutely which could not be repossessed, of the shares that had been bought back. The two women sat mutely listening to companies which were merged and stock transferred. They heard of the invalid wife whom Charles would never divorce because in his part of Georgia only cads and men who were not gentlemen divorced invalids. They heard of his suspicions, none of them founded on any truth, that Jane was in fact using his riches to buy herself young lovers.
“Even so, even if he does dispossess you,” said Helen, trying to find a word of consolation, “you’ll still be very rich.”
Margaret thought of the corridors upstairs in the vicarage which would never have a carpet on them because they could afford to carpet only to the top of the stairs.
“You’ll still be young, Jane, and wealthy compared to almost everyone,” she said. “I can’t see how anything will be so terrible.”
“It’s terrible to be denied over ninety percent of what I could have had,” said Jane. “If the old bat had stayed sane. That’s why I want to try and recoup as much as I can. I can’t chain him to his bed. The lawyers for his various trusts are slobbering with greed. They’re helping him each bloody hour to get more away from me. My lawyers say it’s an unequal struggle. They even want to be paid in advance in case I’m left with nothing at the end.”
She looked like a thwarted child.
“How would coming to visit us help?” Helen asked, trembling at the thought of bodyguards and Charles and huge cars in her small terraced house.
“He’d see I was normal; came from some normal sinless background. He’s so heavily into sin now that he can’t commit any anymore. He’d see heavy respectability in your homes. We could act out a pantomime till he snuffs it.”
Margaret gave her a look of great distaste.
“You can’t mean it, Jane.”
“I do.”
Helen looked at her as if she had been someone apologising for a drunken scene.
“You can’t have been aware of what you were asking us to do. That’s why you feel you can no longer ask it,” she said.
Jane looked at them slowly.
“I’m asking you to join in a little deception with me, I’m telling you the whole score, I’m explaining why, and why I need it.”
“But, Jane, it’s so dishonest, it’s so phoney, so high-powered,” said Margaret.
“I think it’s only because you imagine it’s high-powered you’re asking me to drop it,” said Jane. “We went in for a lot of things that were phoney and dishonest in the old days. No holds were barred when you two were landing your men, but now that we’re older and the stakes are higher, it’s high-powered as well as dishonest, we can’t do it.”
With a very swift movement she lifted a telephone and cancelled afternoon tea, asking room service to make sure it was set for them downstairs instead.
“My guests will prefer to eat in the tea lounge instead,” she said crisply.
Her eyes were bright, she dismissed any further discussion of th
e matter, she shepherded them neatly downstairs, past another bodyguard at the door who plodded discreetly after them and eventually positioned himself in the hotel lobby where he could see them at all times.
As she poured tea Jane insisted on hearing of all their happenings, and little by little the guard relaxed sufficiently for them to talk about their homes and lives. She told them, too, about some of the things she had done. Nothing relating to Charles and his short future or his pathetic paranoia.
She told how she had met a famous film star, and she described what it was like to have a beautician arrive every morning at 7 A.M. and not to allow you to face the world until after nine. She ate no cream cakes but urged the others to finish the plate.
They parted at the door under the admiring glance of many people who thought Jane quite startlingly attractive, and under the watchful glance of the bodyguard who had instructions not to let Jane out of his sight. There were little kisses and assurances of further letters and visits and meetings, there were clasps and grins and pronouncements that it would all turn out fine in the end.
Helen and Margaret went down into the tube again. Green Park station looked less full of promise and giggles and a day out.
“Everything they say about money not bringing happiness is true,” said Helen as she fumbled in her shabby purse for the coins for her ticket.
“You would have thought that with all that money and high life she would have been contented, but no, it’s more, ever searching for more,” said Margaret.
They were very silent going home. It was unlike them to be silent. Such a long friendship meant that they could say things which others wouldn’t broach. But even the apprenticeship in the nanny college and all that it involved was no help to them now.
Helen thought about how Jane had helped her to raise the money for her wedding to Jeff, when Jeff had lost the whole three hundred pounds on a horse. Jane had been efficient and practical and dishonest. She had sold tickets for a charity that did not exist. She delivered the money to Helen without a comment.
Margaret was thinking of the early days when she had fallen for Dave, the handsome divinity student. Jane had helped her then, so well had Jane helped her that David’s fiancée had been dislodged. There was just a rumor here and tittle-tattle there so that poor David thought that he had become engaged to a Jezebel. While the same process in reverse was worked about Margaret. A blameless innocent was how Margaret appeared.
In those days it had seemed the normal thing to do, to support your friends. After all, everyone knew that men were notoriously difficult and could cause all kinds of hurtful problems. They were always misunderstanding things. It was only right that friends should help each other when there was a problem of that sort. Those were their thoughts, but they didn’t share them.
Victoria
* * *
Rose looked at the woman with the two cardboard cups of coffee. She had one of those good-natured faces that you always associate with good works. Rose had seen smiles like that selling jam at fêtes or bending over beds in hospitals or holding out collecting boxes hopefully.
And indeed the woman and the coffee headed for an old man wrapped up well in a thick overcoat even though the weather was warm, and the crowded coffee bar in Victoria Station was even warmer.
“I think we should drink it fairly quickly, Dad,” said the woman in a half-laughing way. “I read somewhere that if you leave it for any length at all, the cardboard melts into the coffee and that’s why it tastes so terrible.”
He drank it up obediently and he said it wasn’t at all bad. He had a nice smile. Suddenly, and for no reason, he reminded Rose of her own father. The good-natured woman gave the old man a paper and his magnifying glass and told him not to worry about the time, she’d keep an eye on the clock and have them on the platform miles ahead of the departure time. Secure and happy, he read the paper and the good-natured woman read her own. Rose thought they looked very nice and contented and felt cheered to see a good scene in a café instead of all those depressing, gloomy scenes you can see, like middle-aged couples staring into space and having nothing to say to each other.
She looked at the labels on their suitcases. They were heading for Amsterdam. The name of the hotel had been neatly typed. The suitcases had little wheels under them. Rose felt this woman was one of the world’s good and wise organizers. Nothing was left to chance, it would be a very well planned little holiday.
The woman had a plain wedding ring on. She might be a widow. Her husband might have left her for someone outrageous and bad-natured. Her husband and four children might all be at home and this woman was just taking her father to Amsterdam because he had seemed in poor spirits. Rose made up a lot of explanations and finally decided that the woman’s husband had been killed in an appalling accident which she had borne very bravely and she now worked for a local charity and that she and her father went on a holiday to a different European capital every year.
Had the snack bar been more comfortable she might have talked to them. They were not the kind of people to brush away a pleasant conversational opening. But it would have meant moving all her luggage nearer to them, it seemed a lot of fuss. Leave them alone. Let them read their papers, let the woman glance at the clock occasionally, and eventually let them leave. Quietly, without rushing, without fuss. Everything neatly stowed in the two bags on wheels. Slowly, sedately, they moved towards a train for the south coast. Rose was sorry to see them go. Four German students took their place. Young, strong, and blond, spreading German and English coins out on the table and working out how much they could buy among them. They didn’t seem so real.
There was something reassuring she thought about being able to go on a holiday with your father. It was like saying “Thank you,” it was like stating that it had all been worthwhile, all that business of his getting married years ago and begetting you and saving for your future and having hopes for you. It seemed a nice way of rounding things off to be able to take your father to see foreign cities because things had changed so much from his day. Nowadays, young people could manage these things as a matter of course; in your father’s day it was still an adventure and a risk to go abroad.
She wondered what her father would say if she set up a trip for him. She wondered only briefly, because really she knew. He’d say, “No, Rose, my dear, you’re very thoughtful but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
And she would say that it wasn’t a question of that. He wasn’t an old dog. He was only barely sixty, and they weren’t new tricks, since he used to go to Paris every year when he was a young man, and he and Mum had spent their honeymoon there.
Then he would say that he had such a lot of work to catch up on, so it would be impossible to get away, and if she pointed out that he didn’t really have to catch up on anything, that he couldn’t have to catch up on anything because he stayed so late at the bank each evening catching up anyway—well, then he would say that he had seen Europe at its best, when it was glorious, and perhaps he shouldn’t go back now.
But he’d love to go back, he would love it. Rose knew that. He still had all the scrapbooks and pictures of Paris just before the war. She had grown up with those brown books, and sepia pictures, and menus and advertisements, and maps carefully plotted out, lines of dots and arrows to show which way they had walked to Montmartre and which way they had walked back. He couldn’t speak French well, her father, but he knew a few phrases, and he liked the whole style of things French, and used to say they were a very civilized race.
The good-natured woman and her father were probably pulling out of the station by now. Perhaps they were pointing out things to each other as the train gathered speed. A wave of jealousy came over Rose. Why was this woman, an ordinary woman perhaps ten years older than Rose, maybe not even that, why was she able to talk to her father and tell him things and go places with him and type out labels and order meals and take pictures? Why could she do all that and Rose’s father wouldn’t move from his d
eck chair in the sun lounge when his three weeks’ holiday period came up? And in his one week in the winter, he caught up on his reading.
Why had a nice, good, warm man like her father got nothing to do, and nowhere to go after all he had done for Rose and for everyone? Tears of rage on his behalf pricked Rose’s eyes.
Rose remembered the first time she had been to Paris, and how Daddy had been so interested, and fascinated, and dragging out the names of hotels in case she was stuck, and giving her hints on how to get to them. She had been so impatient at twenty, so intolerant, so embarrassed that he thought that things were all like they had been in his day. She had barely listened, she was anxious for his trip down the scrap-books and up the maps to be over. She had been furious to have had to carry all his carefully transcribed notes. She had never looked at them while there. But that was twenty and perhaps everyone knows how restless everyone else is at twenty and hopefully forgives them a bit. Now at thirty she had been to Paris several times, and because she was much less restless she had found time to visit some of her father’s old haunts—dull, merging into their own backgrounds—those that still existed—she was generous enough these days to have photographed them and he spent happy hours examining the new prints and comparing them with the old with clucks of amazement and shakings of the head that the old bakery had gone, or the tree-lined street was now an underpass with six lanes of traffic.
And when Mum was alive she, too, had looked at the cuttings and exclaimed a bit, and shown interest that was not a real interest. It was only the interest that came from wanting to make Daddy happy.
And after Mum died people had often brought up the subject to Daddy of his going away. Not too soon after the funeral, of course, but months later when one of his old friends from other branches of the bank might call.
“You might think of taking a trip abroad again sometime,” they would say. “Remember all those places you saw in France? No harm to have a look at them again. Nice little trip.” And Daddy would always smile a bit wistfully. He was so goddamn gentle and unpushy, thought Rose, with another prickle of tears. He didn’t push at the bank, which was why he wasn’t a manager. He hadn’t pushed at the neighbours when they built all around and almost over his nice garden, his pride and joy, which was why he was now overlooked by dozens of bed-sitters. He hadn’t pushed Rose when Rose said she was going to marry Gus. If only Daddy had been more pushing then, it might have worked. Suppose Daddy had been strong and firm and said that Gus was what they called a bounder in his time and possibly a playboy in present times. Just suppose Daddy had said that. Might she have listened at all or would it have strengthened her resolve to marry the Bad Egg? Maybe those words from Daddy’s lips might have brought her up short for a moment, enough to think. Enough to spare her the two years of sadness in marriage and the two more years organizing the divorce.
