by Maeve Binchy
‘I’m afraid I have no idea,’ I said apologetically.
Caroline looked disappointed. I could see it in her eyes.
‘Take your time,’ she said.
But the longer I looked at it the more confused I felt. Who would know what it was? I glanced at my parents and to my amazement I saw they were holding hands very tightly. My dad’s eyes were closed and my mum had that slightly exasperated look she sometimes had at the checkout when people were being stupid or fumbling in their handbags for their money. I realised that they knew what this thing was. I couldn’t believe it, how did they know? You’d need to be inspired to know.
‘No hurry,’ Caroline said again. She had big eyes, and she was willing me to know what it was. The others were startled that I didn’t know, I could see that.
They shuffled a bit as if to say that maybe my good performance so far had all been sheer luck or getting questions I knew. They couldn’t even work out a simple problem about how many nines the guy painted and yet they knew what this thing was.
I stared at the triangle until my eyes hurt. Was this what was going to keep me out of a great school? Did this stand between me and a terrific education? Would I be back in my old school, peering and straining and missing a lot of it? Would I be back in the concrete school yard and not here going to play hockey three times a week and with my own flower bed? I had been planning what to plant in it, tomato plants up against the wall and lots of dwarf conifers and winter pansies in the front for all the year-round colour.
‘No, I’m sorry, it really has defeated me,’ I said to Caroline.
‘Just guess,’ she begged.
‘Well, it is only a guess,’ I warned her.
‘That will do fine,’ she said.
‘It could be Cheshire,’ I said doubtfully. ‘A slice of Cheshire taken from the block but it might be Cheddar. I’m torn between the two of them.’
And then everything changed. They all seemed to be dissolving into tears and shaking each other’s hands and hugging me. Caroline had as many tears on her face as Mum and Dad had. Apparently after all my nearly killing myself trying to work out what variety it was, the word ‘cheese’ was all they had wanted me to say. Imagine. They didn’t even know what kind of cheese it was, they just wanted the word. And the fact that I thought this was too easy a question had just settled everything.
They showed us the dormitories and the dining hall, and my mother and father had stopped being nervous and were acting like normal people again.
Caroline said, ‘See you at the start of next term then.’
I said, ‘You are coming back then?’
She looked at me astounded that I seemed to know there had been a doubt about it although it had been written all over her face and she said yes, she was, that she had just decided it this very day. About ten minutes ago. And she looked a lot less troubled somehow.
As we went home on the train Mum and Dad got out a paper and pen to work out why the painter painted nine twenty times, and I looked at the card with the silly triangle of mousetrap cheese drawn on it, which Caroline had given me as a souvenir of the day.
Part 2 – Caroline’s Career
When we were young we had this aunt who came to the house all the time. She was my mum’s younger sister but we never called her Aunt or Auntie because she said it made her feel ancient. We always called her Shell.
She was a real glamour puss, Shell was, and she told me and my sister Nancy all kinds of things that our mum wouldn’t ever have told us, like that men just loved girls to wear very high-heeled black shoes and to have very big shiny hair and wear bright red lipstick. Shell kept all these rules herself and she was gorgeous and there were always men around her. But never the same man for any length of time, as my mum said, because apparently Shell was a bit flighty. She was always heading off somewhere for a while and always coming back.
Flighty or not, she was dead interested in us and plucked our eyebrows and got us push-up bras. She told Nancy and me that the world was full of opportunities and we must grab them all, which was so different from what everyone else told us. Our mum and dad were always telling us about studying hard and keeping our heads down, and that was what the grannies said too and they said it at school.
But Shell was her own woman. Life was full of promise, she said, and we must be ready to seize whatever came our way. She made us feel great and excited but only one thing worried me.
Shell often said to me, when we were on our own, that I shouldn’t bother getting a career or anything. I was a looker, she said, and I’d marry when I was twenty, just let me be sure to get a decent fellow with plenty of money. I didn’t like any of this, well, you don’t when you’re twelve, do you? I mean, saying that because I had a prettier face than Nancy, that I shouldn’t study and she should … it was a bit … I don’t know … making looks out to be everything or nothing.
But you don’t argue with Shell so I said nothing, just nodded and agreed with her.
When I left school I got a place in a training college and learned to teach the deaf. Nancy went to university and studied Economics and Politics. Shell was with a very rich guy at this stage and she gave us both a holiday; Nancy went on an art appreciation tour to Italy and I went on a skiing holiday in a posh resort, which was where I met Laurence.
Laurence was a lawyer in a very well-known law firm. He was a big, handsome, warm man with dark curly hair, and a great smile. And he had everyone around the dinner table in fits of laughter every night. The girls who ran the ski chalet said they would give him a free holiday any time, he was such fun.
He told me the very first night that I was just ravishing – that was the word he used – so often I almost began to believe it …
Shell had always said that some men were too perfect to be true and that the wise thing to do was to look for their flaws at the beginning, then you wouldn’t get so let down later.
Okay, let’s look for his flaws, I said. He was very handsome and they say handsome men are vain. He didn’t appear to be, but I had to remember that as a possible flaw. He was a little impatient with people who were slow on the slopes or who didn’t get the drift of the conversation at dinner. But for me he had all the time in the world, and he was interested in everything about me, my studies, my family, my hopes and dreams – and very interested in going to bed with me.
I told him that I didn’t do that on holidays.
‘Why did you come on this holiday then?’ he asked, irritated.
‘To ski,’ I said simply.
Surprisingly he accepted that and stopped bothering me about sex. I assumed that I would never hear from him again so was very surprised when he called two weeks after we returned from our holiday.
He lived only fifty miles away from me in a place called Rossmore so we had dinner a few times, and then he brought up the matter of whether I might come away with him for a weekend to a hotel in the Lake District of England.
I said, that would be great, thank you, that I’d love it.
It was great and I did love it.
He brought me to meet his family and they were posh but not overpowering.
And I brought him to meet my family and naturally Shell turned up to inspect him. Out in the kitchen she put her fingers in a bunch up at her mouth and blew a kiss in the air.
‘Exquisite, Caroline, that’s what he is. Didn’t I always tell you you’d be married before your twenty-first birthday and not to bother with a career?’
I looked at her open-mouthed. I had a career. I was going to teach the deaf, beginning with my probationary year the following September. What did she mean that I was not going to bother with a career?
But as usual with Shell, you say nothing. So nothing was what I said.
And as it happened things turned out differently. Laurence and I got married in September and there was such fuss getting the house and doing it up, everyone considered it better if I didn’t start my probationary year at once. The next year I was pregnant so
I couldn’t start then.
After that, well, I was looking after Alistair, so it would have been idiotic to try and fit in teaching hours with that. Then when he started going to his first school and I looked for some morning hours teaching, I just couldn’t find anything around home. Around Rossmore.
I don’t want you to think that I was aching to get out there and be at work or that I was bored, because truly that wasn’t the case. There weren’t enough hours in the day. Often Laurence would ring and say, could I escape and meet him for lunch; he always told me I was ravishing and he was always admiring me. I loved being with him and making a good life for him.
Money was never short. I had full-time help in the house and a gardener. I went to the gym regularly and to get my hair done at Fabian’s and had a manicure; every week we would have people to dinner on a Friday.
Always eight people – like the senior partners at Laurence’s work, and business people, and sometimes if there was an extra man we might ask Shell who, according to Laurence, performed very well at a dinner party. I had learned to be a very accomplished cook: I knew ten different starters and ten different main courses and I actually wrote down what I served people so that I would not give them the same thing over and over again. And across the candlelit table Laurence would raise his glass at me.
‘Lovely, Caroline, thank you so much,’ he would say and the other women at the table would look at me with envy.
We had decided from the start just to have one child but after I held Alistair in my arms I wondered, should we have more. Laurence was against it and he reasoned it out gently with me. We had always said that one child was fine. Alistair was very happy and had lots of friends – it wasn’t as if he pined for a brother or sister. We could have time on our own together, which was what we wanted most. It made a lot of sense, I agreed with him. I didn’t think I was being talked into it or anything.
Before I knew it Alistair was eleven and it was time for him to go to boarding school. Now this I didn’t want, it seemed inhuman really. But Laurence was very anxious that our son should go to the same place that he had been and his father had been. He brought me to the school several times and we saw where he had smoked his first cigarette, and played his first game of rugby and the library where he had studied hard to get his A levels. He said he had been very happy there and it had made him grow up and he had met most of his friends there, people he still knew. We could come up every second weekend and stay in the hotel and take Alistair and his friends out for a super lunch.
I asked Alistair what he really wanted. I asked him when we were on our own in the garden. I said he could tell me the complete and total truth because it was his life.
He looked up at me with his huge brown eyes and said he would love to go to the school.
So that was that.
That’s when I set about getting a job teaching.
I would have loved to get a job in St Martin’s. Well, anyone would have. The place was out on its own. They performed miracles there, better than any miracle ever worked at St Ann’s Well up in the woods where I took Alistair to play and the dogs to walk. But they had no openings.
Here in Rossmore we did not have a school specifically for the deaf, but there were facilities in St Ita’s and in the Brothers. The kids were terrific and like every teacher starting out I made all my mistakes on them and learned a great deal that first year.
I learned how to delegate at home so that the house and garden were in fine shape without me, and I arranged for the shopping to be delivered every Friday and kept up with the dinner parties.
When my mother-in-law said that I was wonderful to be going out to work – in a tone that meant she thought it anything but wonderful – I deliberately misunderstood her and thanked her for her praise.
I tried getting my hair done in Fabian’s at lunch-time, and transforming a small dark room which we had once used just for storage into a study for myself so as not to have all my papers and laptop and things strewn around the house. It meant there were no more sudden lunches with Laurence in smart little Italian places, and no long shopping trips with my charge card. I learned like every working wife has learned that if you stay up late and don’t do the clearing away, then it’s going to be bloody hard in the morning getting it all sorted before racing off to work.
Every second weekend we went to see Alistair and he was making lots of friends and was in a chess club and a birdwatching group, so I became reconciled to the idea that it was the right thing to do for him. We couldn’t have found these activities for him at home.
I used to listen to the women at work talking about their husbands and their partners or about the guys they were involved with. Every word that came out of their mouths made me realise just what a jewel I had in Laurence. A warm enthusiastic man, who told me all about his work, who shared everything with me, who told everyone I was lovely or even ravishing – he still used that word about me – to my embarrassment when he said it in front of people. I don’t even know why I needed to hear their stories to convince myself that he was marvellous.
I listened to their stories of how unfaithful they had found men to be. Many of them, even sophisticated women, had been to St Ann’s Well hoping for some kind of magic that would improve their marriages. I just knew that Laurence wasn’t unfaithful. And he was just as loving and eager as he had been all those years ago when we were out in the skiing chalet and I was keeping him at arm’s length. Sometimes when I was tired, or had to study my notes, or get up early, I wasn’t really able for his loving and sort of hoped that he might be tired or sleepy or lose interest for a bit. But when I heard the tales of my colleagues I realised this was a dangerous road to go down.
My sister Nancy often told me that I must be the luckiest woman on earth. As did my aunt Shell. So did my mother, and Laurence’s mother.
And so I was.
I just wished he was a little more interested in my job. I was very interested in his. I asked him about cases, and helped look things up in law reports for him. I knew all the partners in his office, the possible partners, the rivals, the allies. I had discussed with him for ever the date of his own possible partnership, which would happen within the next eighteen months.
I persuaded him not to tell Alistair that there was a room with his name on it in the office. He thought it was something that would make Alistair feel secure; I thought it might be something that might make him feel trapped.
Laurence discussed it all with me over a bottle of wine – it was a discussion, not an argument. He was always very reasonable and tried to see my point of view. Possibly I was right and that our son needed more freedom in his life, more chance to have hopes and dreams like we all had. When Laurence talked like that I asked myself why on earth I woke most nights at 3 a.m. and worried.
Surely I had nothing to worry about?
But suddenly when I was thinking about St Martin’s School I realised what was upsetting me. Laurence just didn’t get it about teaching. He didn’t know all the wonderful things they could do there for deaf girls. He tried to be interested when I told him about the school records and how they had placed so many of their pupils in positions that hearing children would have been so glad to reach.
He tried. I know he tried because he knew it meant so much to me, and he wanted to be part of my enthusiasm. If he said once he must have said one hundred times that the more he heard me tell him about my work, the more he thanked the Lord that our Alistair wasn’t deaf. And that was not what I was saying, hinting or even thinking.
If Alistair had been deaf I knew that with today’s techniques he would still have been able to have a great life. Laurence didn’t know this. He thought it was a matter of head shaking and tut-tutting and counting our blessings. Which drove me mad.
A chance came up for me to do a further degree. I needed to do practical work as well and St Martin’s School, the crème de la crème of deaf schools, was willing to take me on for six hours’ work a week. Suppose, ju
st suppose, that I made a success of that … then they almost definitely would offer me a full-time job.
I couldn’t have been more excited and was impatient for Laurence to come home so that I could tell him. He was full of some happening at the office, one of the chief partners was resigning. It was completely unexpected and, indeed, out of character. Some story about going to Arizona to find himself. A likely story. The man was off his head.
I remembered him. A dullish sort of person with an equally dull wife who was probably not going to Arizona with him in this search. I listened restlessly to the ramifications of all this, and people moving up and moving over, and someone taking over conveyancing and someone coming in from the cold.
Eventually I began to realise it would be the long-desired promotion for Laurence. He would be a partner at last. I tried to be pleased for him, I assured him that it wasn’t like stepping into a dead man’s shoes since the boring man going to Arizona to find himself was almost certainly going with someone twenty years younger than his wife and of his own free will.
‘It will mean a lot of changes in our lives,’ Laurence said sonorously. ‘A lot more entertaining for one thing, but you’re so brilliant at that, Caroline, and you’ll like it, you must be lonely with Alistair away at school.’
I don’t know what you would have done but somehow I decided not to tell him about the degree and the practical work at St Martin’s. Not that night. This was to be his night. Instead I ran him a nice bath with some sandalwood oil in it and brought him a Martini to drink while he was there. Then I got some fillet steaks from the freezer and opened a bottle of wine, dressed myself up in a little black dress and lit the candles. He must have told me twenty times that I was ravishing and that he adored me and that he was the luckiest man in the practice and indeed in the world.
It was four days before I could tell him, and when I did he was astounded.
‘But you can’t possibly go to St Martin’s, Caroline, it’s sixty miles away,’ he said.
