Whitethorn Woods

by Maeve Binchy

  ‘It’s the climate and the drink,’ he told Sharon. ‘Get Glenn away from the booze and the heat for a day, up to a nice shady village where you can talk without all this flesh around. You’ll be fine.’

  And he told Todd to stop behaving like a horse’s ass or he’d end up going home a total loser, and that that nice girl was only calling him a toe-rag because she fancied him. And Nick came to dinner all the nights except the last one when we went out by ourselves and discussed all the things we had in common.

  He had a little car but he was nervous of motorways and only liked driving on back roads. Maybe he could drive me down to Rossmore and I could show him these famous woods that everyone was getting excited about.

  ‘And I could meet your cousins,’ he said tentatively.

  ‘They will disapprove of you, they disapprove of everyone and everything,’ I told him.

  He thought this was great.

  ‘What will I talk about to them?’ he asked.

  ‘They will interrogate you,’ I explained. ‘And then when they have found out enough they will blind you with their views about a new bypass being a National Disgrace, and they will ask you to write letters to the papers about it.’

  ‘And is it a National Disgrace?’ Nick asked.

  ‘No, it’s totally necessary, Rossmore is like a car park except you can’t get in or out of it. Should have been done years ago.’

  ‘But this holy well?’

  ‘It’s a pagan shrine. The whitethorn is meant to have some kind of magic about it – farmers never want to cut it down. The whole thing is hysterical rubbish of the highest order.’

  Nick said he found me very entertaining. And wasn’t it great that he only lived a short bus ride away from me in Dublin, and how he had always wanted to learn about gardening but thought it might be too late and how I had always wanted to sketch but didn’t know how to begin, and how liking your own company was good but liking someone else’s was better.

  The next day when we were leaving, Glenn and Sharon were arm in arm, and Todd was carrying Alma’s suitcase for her.

  When the near-naked courier girl was checking us back on to the bus she asked me would I be coming back on another Singles holiday. I looked at her from under my flowery sun hat and said that next year I might well not qualify for a Singles holiday at all.

  Part 2 – Chez Sharon

  Well, I just hated coming home from that holiday. Hated it, I tell you. When we were pushing the trolleys through Dublin airport I had a big knot in my stomach. I was dead sure it was all over now, a summer romance kind of thing. He’d say, ‘See you around,’ or he’d call me and then it would be finished. No lovely places to go like in Bella Aurora. Only desperate work and rain, and I’d never liked anyone as much as Glenn, not in my whole life, and I’m twenty-three now so that’s been a fair old life.

  Anyway they were all shouting goodbyes and kissing each other and swearing that they’d see each other in this club or that, and Glenn just stood there looking at me. I wished to God I could think of something to say instead of what was racing through my head, things like don’t dump me, please, Glenn, or we will be all right even back home when we have to go to work and all … I could only think of awful tying-down things – the things fellows dread to hear.

  So I said eventually, ‘Here we are then,’ which wasn’t very bright. I mean, of course we were here. Where else would we be?

  Glenn just smiled. ‘Indeed we are,’ he said.

  ‘So it was great fun.’ I hoped I didn’t sound too intense, too tying down.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not over, is it?’ Glenn asked anxiously.

  ‘No way,’ I said and I knew I had this big silly grin all over my face.

  Just then Vera came up to say goodbye.

  ‘Nick will be coming back next week, he had a week longer than we all did, and I was going to have a few people round for a get-together in my house – a sort of a reunion. You will come? Todd and Alma are coming. You have my address so it’s Chez Vera, Friday of next week then? About eight o’clock?’

  ‘Shay Vera?’ I asked foolishly.

  She’s dead nice, Vera, she’d never make a fool of you.

  ‘It’s a silly expression. It means … at the house of someone, Chez Moi at my house, Chez Vous at your house … It’s just something we used to say a hundred years ago.’ She was apologetic under her ridiculous hat and with her faded jeans.

  She waved as she went off to catch her bus. Funny little figure, yet everyone was mad about her – and she’d pulled on the holiday, too.

  Glenn said that his brother and some mates were coming in from Santa Ponsa in an hour’s time and he was going to meet them in the bar. They’d give him a lift back to Chez Glenn. Would I like to wait and they’d drive me to Chez Sharon too?

  I would have liked to wait very much, to have given our holiday romance some kind of base in Ireland as well as out there under the blue skies. But there was no way I could let him see Chez Sharon. Now Glenn isn’t posh, it’s nothing like that, but there’s about a month’s work to be done tarting up our house before I’d even let him see it. This is not putting on airs or anything, this is survival.

  The garden is full of dandelions and bits of old metal that can never be thrown out. The kitchen window is boarded up after the last time Dad started throwing things, and they’re unlikely to have got any glass in it since I went away. The paintwork is all peeling. Whatever chance I had with Glenn it would be wiped out if he saw Chez Sharon.

  So I said no, that I had to run and that I’d hear from him soon, and I sat on a bus and cried the whole way home.

  My mam was getting the supper. She looked tired, as she had always looked tired for as long as I could remember.

  ‘Don’t upset your dad tonight,’ were her first words.

  ‘Is he on the piss again?’ I asked.

  ‘He had a bit of bad luck, Sharon, be a good girl now and don’t upset things, you’ve just had a lovely holiday, what have the rest of us had?’

  It was unanswerable.

  My mam had had nothing but dog’s abuse, and a desperate job cleaning offices from 4 a.m. until 8 a.m. and then turning round and going out to be a washer-up in a place that did all-day breakfasts. I had just had fourteen days of sunshine and sangria and great laughs and I’d met a fabulous fellow. I wasn’t going to upset things.

  I nailed a smile on my face when my dad came in, fulminating about some horse and some false friend who had told him wrong things about this horse.

  ‘Well for you, Sharon, out in foreign parts,’ he said, looking at me resentfully.

  ‘I know, Dad, I was very lucky,’ I said and saw my mam’s face relax. In fact I wasn’t lucky at all, I was just hard working. I had saved twenty Euro a week from the money I earn at the dry-cleaners for thirty-seven whole weeks! All to pay for this holiday and a few outfits to wear on it.

  Dad had never saved anything. Mam saved all right, but then she spent it all on us and the house and getting him a few decent shirts in case he ever had an interview and might ever get a job again.

  My young brothers came in for their tea and I gave them all the big box of Italian biscuits I had brought home and my dad dipped them into his tea because his teeth weren’t good and he hated chewing things.

  Suppose I had brought Glenn home here? To this room draped with clothes drying on the backs of chairs with newspapers open at the racing page thrown around the floor. With no cloth on the table. I gave a shiver at the thought.

  Next day it was back to work in the dry-cleaners in my uniform and it was as if I had never been on holiday. The girls who worked there did comment on my tan all right but the customers never noticed. They only cared about getting a red wine stain out of a white lace blouse without leaving a trace, or how to get tar out of an expensive skirt where someone had sat on something that couldn’t be shifted.

  Then I looked up and Glenn was standing there at the counter.

  ‘You look beautiful in yellow,’ he
said, and suddenly I thought it might well be all right. He hadn’t forgotten me, he wasn’t going to dump me.

  He worked for his uncle who was a builder and had a job which was quite near by. We could meet every day, he said. The question of where we might meet every night was one that could be dealt with later. He was one of six children so no space in his house, and there was no way he was going to be let within a mile of Chez Sharon.

  And then even the customers began to notice me – they said I was all smiles and good cheer. The girls who worked with me told them I was in love, and they loved to hear that. In a world of grease-based stains, water stains and fabrics that crumpled up as soon as you looked at them, it was pleasant and distracting to think about love, just for a moment or two.

  We went to Vera’s on the following Friday. It was in a very smart part of town, I don’t suppose the residents had ever seen people like Glenn and me and Todd and Alma visiting that area before. Vera had a three-storey house, much too big for her and Rotary the ginger cat who lived with her. Of course Nick might be going to live with her too the way things were working out. They got on together like a house on fire and he had obviously been visiting her every day since his return. He laughed so much at her jokes and told us that she was a wonderful woman. He closed his eyes when he said ‘wonderful’.

  Nick, it appeared, lived in rented accommodation a bus ride away. Surely he would come and live in this big place. They would be company for each other and they might even get married.

  Vera had made us a big spaghetti bolognese, and Nick had made a great pavlova full of strawberries, and everyone had a great time except Alma, who whispered to me that Todd had suggested they cool it a bit, which was bad news. And then when Todd said he had to leave early, Alma said she’d go with him, which I thought was a bad idea, it looked clinging. You could see that he was annoyed and that made poor Alma more anxious than ever.

  Anyway Vera and I were doing the washing up and Glenn was helping Nick to cut back some of the worst briars and brambles that were threatening to take over the back door of the house.

  ‘You two look nice and cosy together,’ I said as I dried the plates.

  ‘Yes, he’s a very, very good man,’ Vera said, pleased with it all.

  ‘So will you be moving in together?’ I asked. You could ask Vera that sort of thing even though she’s nearly ninety or something.

  ‘No, no, that wouldn’t do at all,’ she said unexpectedly.

  I was sorry I had asked now. ‘I didn’t mean for sex,’ I said, trying to take the harm out of it. ‘I meant for companionship.’

  ‘No, there’s no problem with the sex part of it, we’ll probably have sex again after you’ve gone,’ Vera said matter-of-factly.

  I wondered what the problem was. Could he have a wife, another woman hidden away somewhere? Did he have a rake of children who wouldn’t let him get together with Vera?

  Apparently not. It had all to do with being set in their ways. When you get old it seems that you don’t want to change your way of going on, in fact you can’t change it, much as you would like to. It has to do with space, and having your own things where they’ve always been.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind where my things were if I was with a fellow I was mad about,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but then you probably don’t have all that many things and they haven’t been in place as long as ours have.’

  ‘What sort of things?’ I wondered.

  ‘Oh it’s all cracked, Sharon, there’s things I couldn’t bear Nick to touch, like my collections of pressed flowers, and my boxes of things I’m going to put into a scrapbook one day. And he is very odd about his tubes of paint, almost worn out with hardly a squeeze of anything left in them, and torn sketchbooks and boxes of letters and cuttings that he will throw out sometime but not now. We couldn’t merge all that, Sharon, we’d be fighting in a week. What we have is much more important. We can’t risk losing that by moving in together.’

  Glenn and I talked about it when we left. It seemed a waste of two nice people not getting together for the time they had left. We sighed. No one had everything. We were just dying to live together and no problems about being set in our ways. It was just that we had no money, and we’d never find a place to live.

  ‘Could I not move into your house, Sharon? Share your room? At least you have a room – I have to share with my brother,’ Glenn pleaded.

  ‘No, Glenn, believe me, no. It won’t work. My dad’s a wino and a gambler.’

  ‘Well, sure, mine is a religious nutter, I told you, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It would if you were living there.’

  ‘I could bring in some money, couldn’t I?’

  ‘Ah, no, Glenn, it would just go towards getting more drink for my dad.’

  ‘So what will we do then?’ He seemed defeated.

  ‘We’ll think of something,’ I said, sounding much more confident than I was. I watched my mam’s life and was determined I would never settle for anything remotely like it. She cooked and washed and cleaned up around my dad and the boys every hour that she wasn’t working cleaning office floors or washing greasy plates.

  ‘I’m happy enough, Sharon,’ she would say if I questioned it. ‘I mean, I love him and we’ve got to remember that he didn’t walk away when I was expecting you.’

  A lifetime of gratitude that he had acknowledged what was after all his child too. Twenty-four years of saying thank you and calling that love.

  I met Alma from time to time. She said that Todd was definitely seeing someone else, but she loved him and would do anything to get him back. He was seeing another woman and she knew it but whatever she felt for him she called love.

  And then I would talk to Vera as well and she talked about loving Nick and what a delightful person to meet in the late afternoon of her years, yet at the same time she was prepared to lose it all over books of pressed flowers or his tubes of paint. It seemed a very peculiar definition of love to me. And there were Glenn and myself who really did love each other and wished the best for each other and we hadn’t a chance of getting a place to live together.

  It didn’t seem fair or just somehow. But there was some old wan on the radio going on about how we have to make our own luck, that it doesn’t come by magic and she had known people whose life turned out fine – they had got whatever they wanted. So I said to Glenn that’s what we’d have to do. Make something happen.

  I wish I could say that he was full of ideas – but then neither was I.

  I asked Vera, did she think this holy well thing in Rossmore might work. She said it wasn’t very likely. If there was a St Ann, and St Ann was listening, which was more problematical still, then she might be slow to bring about a situation where a couple could live in sin and have lots of extramarital sex. I said that I was desperate and might try it so Vera said she’d come with me to point me to the Whitethorn Woods and go and visit her hatchet-faced cousins.

  It was a lovely walk up to the well but once I got there I felt kind of ashamed. I mean, it’s not as if I knew who this St Ann was or went to Mass or anything. And there were nearly a hundred people there. Some of them had children in wheelchairs or on crutches and some didn’t look in good shape at all. And they were all asking desperately for favours. I felt I couldn’t ask for a place for Glenn and me to … well … it didn’t seem right.

  So I sort of said, ‘If you get a chance and the matter comes up it would be nice. But to be fair maybe you should deal with these people first …’

  And I told Vera this on the way home and she said I might well get what I want because I was far nicer than lots of people including herself.

  I asked her about the cousins, and she said they were like weasels. Weasels with small minds, pointed teeth and horrible voices. All they could talk about was the price of land and what compensation people would get when their homes were disturbed. When we got off the bus Glenn and Nick were waiting for us, Glenn with his motorbike and Nick with his little car.


  ‘We missed you girls,’ Glenn said, and I hoped that St Ann was listening. Glenn was so decent, any old saint would want you to be living with him. I must look St Ann up and see what kind of a private life she had herself.

  I asked Glenn what kind of things he and Nick had talked about when the four of us went out for a pint together. Apparently it was all about the basement in Vera’s house.

  Nick said he thought that despite the looming presence of Rotary the ginger cat, there might well be an r–a–t in it, and Glenn had said there were probably dozens of them. Nick wondered, was it the kind of place that could ever be done up to live in, and Glenn said he’d ask his uncle to look at the place and give an estimate.

  So I realised that they were still mulling over the possibilities of it all. But that crashed to the ground eventually because apparently it would cost a small fortune to get it done up right and Vera didn’t really like the notion of Nick living below stairs and they were both droning on about being so old and maybe needing someone to look after them in even later years. When they got older still.

  God, they’d make you sick. The two of them have twenty times more life in them than people half their age and now suddenly they start talking like geriatrics. It was the thought of change that had done it, they were fine as they were with their old paint tubes and books of pressed flowers.

  It’s only the thought of the merger that has unhinged the pair of them. The waste, the sheer waste of it all.

  And there, looking us all in the face, was a perfectly good rat-filled basement which Glenn and his uncle could clean up in three weekends for us to live in. We wouldn’t be picky – we’d do it up in time.

  It was hard to concentrate on work in the dry-cleaners when there were so many things churning through my head. I realised that this woman was going on and on about something and I hadn’t been paying any attention at all. It was about this outfit she had borrowed from her sister to wear to a wedding and some eejit had spilled an Irish coffee over it. Was there any way of getting the stain out completely? Her sister was like a lighting devil about most things but in particular about clothes that would be described as ruined.