Whitethorn Woods

by Maeve Binchy

  Malka said the same thing about her mother too, that she had calmed down since she had a grandchild. But I had never thought that Mrs O’Brien was all that bad. Very superstitious, of course, and caring about what other people in Rossmore thought or would say, like all people of her age. But basically a nice person.

  Yet Malka said Mrs O’Brien had been quite horrific when she was younger, so I guess that generation just improved with age.

  Malka’s little boy Brendan was a darling, which was just as well since her husband turned out to be a lot less than we had all hoped he would be. I loved it when she brought Brendan over to stay with me for a few weeks that time, the time that Declan, the roving husband, had roved off with Eileen the school secretary. Malka was very depressed when she first arrived, she cried a lot. She said she hadn’t cried back home – she wouldn’t give her sisters-in-law nor her own mother the satisfaction of seeing her down. But she cried in my kitchen, and in my garden as we watched our children playing in the pool, and she cried when we went out to a piano bar one evening, she and I, and the pianist played ‘Blue Moon’, which had been their song, hers and Declan’s.

  ‘I never thought he’d fancy another woman,’ she wept. ‘He always said I was the only one. I thought that if I ever lost him it would be to the drink, I believed it was a battle between Callaghan’s licensed premises and myself for his attention.’

  I patted her hand in the piano bar, and passed her tissues. This was not the time to tell Malka that her intended had tried to jump me for three evenings before their wedding.

  If I hadn’t told her back then just on the eve of her wedding day when it might have been helpful, useful, wise, then there was no point in telling her any time afterwards.

  I had told myself that maybe it was just high spirits. I didn’t know these people and their culture, did I? Maybe for him and his friends it was just meaningless to press me, the bride’s best friend, up to a wall in a grip I couldn’t get out of and to kiss me. So I either spoke then and ruined her wedding and our friendship, or I shut up.

  You might have done it differently but I made my choice and was stuck with it.

  And I always told myself that if I had said anything that time, then maybe Brendan would not exist and her life would have been greatly the less.

  Brendan has been a fine son for her – won’t listen to advice, of course, but then what young person does listen these days? He was never any trouble to her, all that time he grew up in Dublin, with his father away from home. He always got himself a holiday job to help to pay his tuition fees. One summer Max gave him a position in one of the travel agencies and he worked so hard they were prepared to offer him a full-time post. But I said, no way, imagine if my friend Malka were to be deprived of saying, ‘My son the engineer’!

  Unfortunately he didn’t get to know my Lida that summer; she was in Ireland of all places. She and Malka had loved each other from the word go, but then I knew they would so that didn’t surprise me a bit. And I liked her Brendan too, very much, when he came to stay here at weekends. He was easy and relaxed and had no hang-ups about his father.

  ‘Dad was over-interested in women always, one was never enough for him,’ Brendan told me. ‘I think he felt he had to try it on with everyone to prove he was alive or something.’

  I nodded in agreement, he had it right. That’s exactly what Declan was doing, proving something.

  ‘And are you the same?’ I asked. Sort of joking.

  Apparently not, it’s like the children of a wino being teetotal. Brendan told me that his mates said someone would have to light a fire under him to get him going.

  ‘I expect my father made a pass at you, Rivka?’ he said.

  ‘Way back, it wasn’t important,’ I heard myself say.

  ‘Did you tell my mam? You know, later, when they split?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘As I said, it didn’t seem important.’

  He nodded approvingly.

  It was the only secret we had, Malka and I, that’s a fact. We told each other everything. I don’t think she had any secrets from me. I don’t think so, but then if she were to be asked had I kept anything back, she would have said no.

  And what could she have known or experienced that she couldn’t tell me? Max certainly never leaped at Malka like her husband-to-be had leaped on me. Max has a low libido, that’s what my mom says to explain his long absences. It might be true. She says I should be grateful. I suppose that tells me more about her life with Father than I want to know.

  It was never great sex with Max by my reckoning but I realise that he felt that it was never great with me.

  Malka always said that she had loved it with Declan but had always been nervous in case she got pregnant. His sisters had five children each and these were regarded as small families.

  Malka was the only person I ever talked to about sex and not very often. When you think of wars starting over sex, and murders being committed, and people breaking up families and getting publicly disgraced, it’s really very hard to understand.

  Lida, I gather, has had plenty of sex so far in her young life. She told me a long time ago that she went to a women’s clinic to get herself sorted out. When I imagine myself saying that sort of thing to my own mom, well, I almost feel faint. But times change.

  And who would have thought that I, Rivka Fine-Levy, would have my own specialist art tours agency and be highly thought of as the wife of the great Max Levy. Unlike so many women I knew, I never had a day’s worry about Max being unfaithful to me, I just sort of knew. It was the way he was with women, not interested, not like Declan who was always up for it, as even his own son recognised.

  Who would have known that I would become someone who loved my mom instead of hated her, and that I would really enjoy going shopping with her? That I would love my own daughter more than life; that I would still remain such a friend of Malka whom I had met plucking chickens all those years ago when she was going to convert to Judaism, marry Shimon and run a gladioli farm? The time when I was too timid to let that Algerian boy, Dov, get to first base.

  I do wish Lida had gone to Israel, but of course there was no point in mentioning it.

  She was proud of Israel, she explained, but she disapproved of something or other they were doing out there at the moment and she wouldn’t lend support by visiting.

  Lida was like that, taking stands, concerned about issues, standing up and being counted.

  Very laudable, admirable even. But it didn’t always make for an easy life.

  Max was hardly ever there to discuss it with. If I tried he just kept repeating that he was astounded to have a daughter at all, which wasn’t much of a help, and a bit repetitive.

  After nearly a quarter of a century you’d think he might have got used to the fact by now.

  So this summer I planned a little trip for Malka and myself. We would go for a week to Florence and a week by the sea in Sicily to recover from all the sightseeing and the pounding round art galleries. It was so odd to think that our two children would be also on the Mediterranean, swimming in the same sea. But we knew we must make no plans to meet them, nothing claustrophobic that would make them resent us. We had been through enough of that in the old days when our mothers were bad, suffocating people. We knew all about the long rein and letting them be free. Don’t let them know you miss them.

  I was so busy getting ready for the trip, I really didn’t miss Lida. I can pack two cases very quickly and scientifically now. Another of my talks on the breakfast or ladies’ lunch circuit is ‘intelligent packing’. People just love it.

  I tell them about having the typed master list and adding items like a small torch, your own favourite pillowcase, and a little wooden wedge to keep doors open – you won’t believe how useful that is.

  Anyway, out of a clear blue sky when I was folding the dresses between sheets of tissue paper, this young man called to the house, about thirty-something. I wondered if he had called for Lida. But no, he w
as looking for Max.

  Max was away, coming back tonight, I said. I was leaving for Europe next day, we would be having a rare dinner at home together – I could give him a message. What name would I say?

  The man said I was to tell him that Alexander had called by, and that he was very sorry, he thought I was leaving for Florence today, not tomorrow. He knew I was going to Florence this week and yet I had never even heard of him. I felt alarmed somehow. He refused tea, gave no details of what his business was with Max, then left very quickly.

  ‘Alexander came today,’ I said to Max that evening. ‘He thought I would already have left for Florence.’

  Max looked at me levelly.

  ‘I’m so very sorry you had to find out this way,’ he said.

  I had no idea what I had found out. None at all, as Malka would say. I looked at him blankly.

  ‘About Alexander,’ he said.

  And then suddenly it was all clear. Everything made sense. The long absences, the discretion, the way I was worn on Max’s arm for public occasions, the separate bedrooms.

  Malka asked me afterwards, did I behave well, did I react as I would like to have done.

  The answer is yes, I behaved perfectly out of sheer shock. I sat wide awake in my bedroom all night piecing things together. Of course that was the explanation. Why had I been so blind? But it’s not something you’d expect.

  Then I’m afraid I began to worry whether everyone else knew. Was I the only fool who didn’t realise that my husband played for the other team? And as the clock ticked on and dawn came to the sky, I decided that it was not generally known, that I was not a laughing stock. And that helped. Perhaps it shouldn’t have but it did. At least I wasn’t a public fool.

  I dressed carefully and did my face. My car was coming to pick me up at 10 a.m.

  Max looked terrible, white faced and unkempt. He hadn’t slept either. He looked at me like a puppy that knows it’s going to be punished.

  ‘What will you do?’ he asked fearfully.

  ‘I’ll tell you my plans when I get back, Max.’ I was cool, polite and slightly distant.

  I left everything else, the weeping, the railing, the questioning, the rage, until I got to Florence, and to Malka.

  She knew at once. You can’t fool Malka. She poured some duty-free and I told her everything, left nothing out. I can’t remember anything that we did on that holiday that didn’t involve both of us bawling, crying, deciding to kill Max, to sue him, to take him for everything that he had. We were going to ‘out’ him, make him look ridiculous, or we were going to be noble and say it didn’t matter.

  By the time we got to Sicily we were completely exhausted. We rented a car and drove around the island. We swam in the bright blue sea, we drank more wine than I had ever thought possible.

  ‘I’ll have to go into detox when I get back to real life,’ I said, not really wanting to think about getting back.

  ‘Shouldn’t you contact your office?’ Malka suggested.

  Normally I’m on my cellphone and picking up e-mails everywhere. The office was, of course and irritatingly, surviving fine without me.

  There was an e-mail from Lida:

  ‘Dad says he doesn’t know where you are in Italy, your office says you’ll call in but you haven’t, so it’s not my fault. I tried to find you everywhere to tell you my plans have changed and I am going to Israel after all. I met Brendan in Rome. We always planned to meet there, we’ve been in touch with each other for the past two years and meet a lot. We didn’t tell you and Malka because you’d fuss so much, and we wanted to be sure before we said anything. And now we are. Very sure.

  ‘And he asks me for you to tell his mom, because apparently she is hopeless about technology and expects a pigeon to come in carrying a letter. And there is to be none of this nonsense about culture and tradition and history and differences and all that kind of shit. You are to square it with Grandmother and Dad. You will, won’t you? You’ve always been terrific about everything. Brendan says the same about his mom. Can you tell us where this bloody gladioli farm is and we’ll go look for it and examine these guys who could have been our fathers if things had been different.’

  Malka and I know the letter off by heart. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? A letter that turned everything round and made sense of it all.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Plan

  Part 1 – Becca

  Mother was always saying to me, ‘Becca, you could do simply anything in this world if you had a proper plan.’ She would say this as we walked down Castle Street doing the shopping together or waited for the sheets and towels to dry at the Fresh as a Daisy Launderette or had coffee in the Jumping Bean.

  Mother did have lots of plans as life went on. Like when I was twenty-one and Father wouldn’t hear of paying for a big party, Mother developed a plan. She went to the new hotel that had just opened in Rossmore and showed them our guest list with lots of very important people on it. She insisted to the manager that they should give her half-price because of all the introductions she was giving them over her daughter Becca’s party. And she eked this bit of money out of Father and that bit. And there you were. A stunning twenty-first with just everyone there! Just because she had a plan.

  Dear Mother was so right about lots of things. Well, not always entirely right about Father, of course. But then, how could anyone have known what he was going to do? You’d need to have been some kind of mystic to have known. Father went off with Iris, this perfectly awful, common woman, when I was twenty-five and Mother was fast approaching fifty. The awful woman Iris wasn’t even young. She was a woman who wore a cardigan and walked through the Whitethorn Woods with a mongrel dog. Mother said it wouldn’t have been quite so bad if she had been a silly young girl with a huge bosom. But no, she was the same age as all of them. Humiliating.

  I foolishly suggested to Mother that she might go to St Ann’s Well, a lot of people got their wishes answered there. She was horrified at the very thought of it. Ludicrous place, pagan superstition, a place maids and women from cottages went. I wasn’t even to mention it again.

  Mother said that if she had the energy, she would kill Iris.

  I had begged her not to. ‘Please, Mother, don’t kill Iris. You’ll get caught, and arrested, and go to jail.’

  ‘Not if I did it properly,’ Mother said.

  ‘But you wouldn’t do it properly, Mother, and suppose for a moment that you did, imagine how terrible it would be if Father were to pine over this Iris. Think how terrible that would be.’

  Grudgingly Mother agreed. ‘If I were younger and could make a proper plan, then I could easily have killed Iris,’ she said calmly. ‘But, Becca darling, I should have started much earlier and it would all have been fine. I think you are right and that I’d probably be wiser to leave it now.’

  Mercifully she did.

  Father didn’t really stay in touch. He wrote from time to time to say that Mother was bleeding him dry. Mother said that he and that terrifying Iris had taken every penny she was entitled to – all she had left was the falling-down house in Rossmore. She sighed and sighed, and said that to hire yet another lawyer on top of Myles Barry was like throwing good money after bad.

  ‘When you grow older, Becca darling, I beg you to have a plan. Do nothing without a plan, and do it sooner rather than later.’

  And it always seemed a very good idea because everything Mother did later, having waited around, had gone belly up, while all the things that had been done sooner had been fine. She must have been right about striking when the iron was hot.

  So I tried to have a plan about most things. I worked in Rossmore’s new fashion boutique that catered for rich clients and I planned to get to know these people socially. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I also made a friend of Kevin the van driver, who drove a taxicab on the side, and he often gave me lifts to places – which was nice because I was fairly broke and I wouldn’t have had money for taxis.

  Kevin was n
ice. He had a terrible cough and he was a frightful hypochondriac, always thinking that a headache was meningitis, that sort of thing, but he was very fond of me and said that I could always ask him to come out and collect me on a wet night and he would. I never abused it but I did ask him from time to time.

  Mother was in bad form a lot but to be very honest I didn’t get too involved with Mother and her problems because there was so much going on in my own life. You see, I’d just met Franklin and everything changed then.

  You know the way people find it impossible to describe some huge event in their life, like seeing a film star, or the Queen of England, or the Pope, or the President of the United States, or something earth-shaking? You can remember all kinds of unimportant details but not the thing itself.

  It’s as if it was too big to take in.

  It was just like that when I met Franklin.

  I remember the dress I was wearing: a red silk dress with a halter neck that I had got at a thrift shop. I remember the perfume I wore: it was Obsession by Calvin Klein. I couldn’t afford it myself but amazingly a customer had left it behind her in the boutique.

  I can’t remember why I went to that particular party. It was to launch a new restaurant in Rossmore. The town was so big now and so different to the way it was when Mother was young. New restaurants, hotels, art galleries opening all the time. I hadn’t been invited or anything but I knew that if you turned up looking well dressed they always let you in. So about two or three times a month I would show up at a party and mingle a little. It got me out from under Mother’s feet and you never knew who you might meet.

  Well, up to now I had only met a lot of frogs actually and was beginning to despair of meeting a prince at any of these dos and then that night I met Franklin. It was at 7.43 p.m. on the huge pink neonlit clock. I had been thinking I might go home at eight. I wouldn’t call Kevin tonight, there was a bus stop outside the door, and just then Franklin said hallo.