by Maeve Binchy
“Oh, David, don’t tell me you’re going to cancel the golf. I’ve been looking forward to it all morning.”
“So have I. No, of course, I’m not canceling it. Look, I was thinking. It’s such a long drive back for you after the game. Why don’t we have a meal before you head off?”
“Oh, that’s very nice, but I don’t want to put Clare to too much . . .”
“No, I thought we’d go out somewhere, you know.”
A pause.
“Yes, that would be super. Where did you think?”
“Well, I don’t know why I said somewhere. There only is one place, the hotel. We can get a nice enough meal there.”
“Great, that’s very nice. Give me the strength to drive back here again.”
“Good, good. I’ll book us a table then. I’ll ring them and reserve a table for the two of us.”
At first it was just a game of golf with Caroline; then it was golf and a couple of drinks at the club. Now it was golf, drinks and dinner. Josie was on the phone next day. Just for a chat.
“I hope the food wasn’t too good last night. You’ll be setting me impossible standards,” Clare laughed.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m going to ask the golfers to come here next week. Would you and Martin join us as well?”
Josie thought that would be great. She was relieved to know that Clare was in the picture about David playing golf and being seen with Caroline. Her sister Rose had come in all excited from the dining room last night to say that David Power and Caroline Nolan were holding hands under the table. But that mightn’t be true. Rose had always had a soft spot for David, and Rose had been very bitter and odd since Josie had announced her engagement.
Clare asked Molly if she’d like to come to dinner next Thursday.
“It’s a bit far in advance to be planning that, isn’t it?” Molly said. “But that would be very nice. Do you think you could manage it?”
Angela said that under any other circumstances she would drop everything and come, but the Mother Provincial of the order was visiting the school and the nuns were having a sort of feast for her. In all the years she had worked in that school since 1945 they had never offered them a bit of food and now it was happening. “It will be horrific. I’ll take notes in a jotter and tell you later.”
“In all the years you’ve known me this is the first time I’ve ever offered you a bite of food, and it would be the same night,” Clare sighed.
“Is it for anything special?”
“Survival or something,” Clare said.
“Oh, you’re inviting your mother-in-law?”
“And my husband’s golf partner.”
“That’s ambitious. What are you giving them to eat?”
“I haven’t thought yet.”
“Let me give you a hint. Give them something cold to start, like hard-boiled eggs with stuffing in them. Emer said that she went out to a house to dinner in Dublin and they had a whole lot of tins of sardines and lemon juice mashed up and served in a china bowl and people helped themselves and spread it on bread and it was lovely.”
“That might be fine in Dublin, but if you didn’t give them soup here they’d have you taken to the county home.”
“Soup’s hard to concentrate on and serve if you’ve got to think of the next bit.”
“Keep your fingers crossed for me, will you?”
“You’ll be fine,” said Angela with no confidence in her voice.
Old Mr. Kenny said that it was very nice of the young people to think of inviting him to dinner, he was very touched. And that made up her eight.
She asked Nellie to help her bring two chairs from the big house and she went through all her dishes and cutlery to make sure she had enough. She did all her preparations secretly when David wasn’t there. Any time he came home she dropped the fussing. He was pleased about the dinner, that meant that he couldn’t really have a great deal to hide, she thought. If he and Caroline had been up to anything more than these long relaxed conversations, the quick peck on the cheek as they said goodbye, surely he couldn’t bring her into the house and act as if nothing was going on. She had phoned Caroline at work, and she too had been pleased at the idea of dinner after golf.
“What a lovely thing to suggest, Clare. Will you be able to manage?”
“Manage what?” Clare asked pleasantly, seething with rage.
“Oh, dinner and everything.”
“Gosh, I hope so,” Clare said and went back to the kitchen in a fury.
She took Liffey out of the pram and spoke to her seriously. “Listen to me, kid. This world is full of bullshit, as my friend Mary Catherine, who is your godmother, used to say in her less refined moments. Now you and I aren’t going to put up with that. We are not going to be walked on, Liffey Power. And I make you a solemn promise. If you are a good baby on Thursday, if you don’t wet anyone or get sick over them or cry, I will give you a great life full of freedom and adventure, and if you want to go up in a Sputnik and your father says no, I’ll fight that you can go up in a Sputnik.”
Liffey clapped her hands, pleased with all the concentration.
“So that’s it, a deal. Good.”
Bones came into the kitchen.
“And you too, friend, no scratching your bum when they’re here, no huge unexpected howls because you’ve seen a bluebottle or the light-house or anything. Just look like a sweet affectionate hound who loves the young mistress. Of course, you could take a bite out of Miss Nolan’s rear end but make it look as if she attacked you first. What will I give you? I’ll tell you. I’ll save you from the knacker’s yard. David said you might have to be put down, I won’t hear of that.”
Bones smiled at her and she went back to the cookery book.
It would have been so easy if she could have had Nellie, and Nellie would love to have helped, but the whole point of it was that she couldn’t. She had to do it on her own. She couldn’t even let Nellie know how nervous she was. Nellie’s first loyalty was to her own household, she could well tell Molly that there was pandemonium out in the Lodge. That would defeat the whole thing. She had phoned Valerie for tips, and Val had said keep it simple and give them so much to drink they won’t remember what they had to eat, which might have been fine for Val’s people but was not much help here. Val said that she should warm the bread rolls and put cream in the soup, and to have mashed potatoes or roast potatoes because they couldn’t let you down.
Chrissie said wasn’t it great to be able to afford huge lumps of beef like this.
“Why didn’t you ring up and we’d have sent it over to you?”
“I hoped if I came you might give me a nice cut and show me what direction to carve it in,” Clare said humbly.
“Carve it? Just cut a lump off for each person like you always do,” said Chrissie, helpful and sensitive butcher-sister who could be relied on to put your nerves at ease before an occasion.
Thursday was early closing day in the town twenty miles away. It was David’s golf day, and it was the day of the dinner.
Clare thought the women’s magazines would be proud of her and the way she said to David that he must bring Caroline back to the house whenever he liked, she would want to change for dinner. The others were coming about seven, so after they had a few drinks in the club . . .
“Won’t we be in your way?”
“Not at all,” Clare trilled.
He kissed her goodbye on the nose and then kissed Liffey.
“Bones is creaking a lot, isn’t he? I wonder if he is in pain. The problem is he always seems to be smiling—you wouldn’t know.”
“Oh, Bones has plenty of life in him.” She patted the dog’s head. A promise is a promise and Bones wasn’t going to be sent to sweet dreams while Clare was around.
Liffey deposited all her carrots and mashed potato on her best hand-smocked dress. Clare snatched it off and washed it. It might just be dry enough to put back on her again. That was the dress Molly had made suc
h a fuss about. It was being worn in her honor. Then when she was cleaning the spoon, the beautiful silver spoon that Mr. Kenny had given the baby, Bones thought it was a toy and galloped off with it.
He took it round the garden three times and then buried it in a flowerbed.
The cream was off, of all days in the year, and two of the table napkins had tears in them. In her haste rushing past the table she knocked over a jug of water so she had to put pillowcases under the corner and pray it would dry out in time.
Because Caroline would change in their bedroom Clare deliberately made it look a much more cozy and loving place than it actually was. She bunched the pillows right up close as if this was the way they normally slept, and she took out her black nighty, the one that actually looked awful on, but exotic if draped around the place. She put a bunch of flowers in the room, and a soft romantic lamp.
She had also tidied up the cupboards and drawers in case Caroline would poke around. Any shabby old shoes or things that were not meant to be seen were hidden firmly in the spare room, and she removed the bulb so that no light could be thrown on that confusion, should somebody open the door in error.
They all arrived at once.
David poured sherries and everyone said wasn’t this all nice at least three times each.
Caroline looked glowing with health. Her hair looked shiny and smart. Clare had hoped it would have become matted and windblown. She said she’d simply love a quick wash, and came down in a commendably quick time wearing a long red wool skirt and white lace blouse.
“It was simply marvelous out there today,” she said. “You really should learn, Clare.”
“Did somebody tell me you were taking lessons, Clare?” Josie asked.
Clare could have smashed her face. “No, no, but they may have seen me once with Angela up there. She’s learning.”
“Oh, yes.” Angela Dillon was a sore subject in Dillon’s Hotel. There was great fear that Uncle Dick and the schoolteacher might well have lifted the entire golfing trade from the old hotel.
“James plays a lot in Dublin. In fact some think that he spends far too much time on the course,” Caroline said. That wasn’t a tactful subject either. Martin’s hand tightened round his glass at the mention of the perfidious James Nolan.
Clare decided the meal should be served.
Damn the magazines to the very blackest spot of hell.
The rolls had burned black in the oven. Black.
She sliced some of Nellie’s soda bread and put it on a plate. Molly said that Nellie had one of the lightest hands with pastry and bread in the country.
“This bread is very nice too,” Mr. Kenny said.
“This is Nellie’s bread,” Clare said in despair.
The beef was tough, the mashed potatoes were dry, the sprouts were soft and the gravy was lumpy.
Clare could see a series of plates with food left and eventually had to admit that no one was having more and that knives and forks had been left together. Burning with embarrassment she cleared the table.
There was no cream for the chocolate pudding. It had been too late to go and get any more. She had cursed her mother and father for not having a phone, because they could have sent someone over with cream or even ice cream. She should have gone herself, she should have put Liffey into the back of the car and raced down, but at the time she had thought it was better to stay at her post, it seemed less flurried.
They waded through the pudding. Nobody had the cheese she had laid out so carefully with biscuits in lines.
She went to make coffee and discovered that the full coffee jar she had seen in the press was not full of coffee, it was the jar she used to keep cowrie shells in, until she found a place to display them.
She said she had to go to Liffey for a moment and crept out of the house in the dark to see could she find coffee in her mother-in-law’s kitchen. It was Thursday, Nellie’s evening off. She wouldn’t be there. She fell over Bones and landed flat on her face. Bones barked joyfully and so loudly that Dr. Power came out to see what was happening.
“My God, Molly,” he called, “there’s somebody in our kitchen!”
David was masterful. He picked up a golf club and insisted that his father stand back.
As Clare crept out of the Powers’ kitchen with grazed hands, a bruised forehead and a suspicion of a loosened tooth, Bones was baying at the moon with excitement.
“I’ll kill you,” she said to the dog. “You’ll go for the chop and I won’t lift a finger to help you.”
Suddenly she saw the entire party framed in the light of the Lodge waiting for her, and David advancing slowly with a golf club.
In the distance she heard the familiar sound of Liffey waking and starting a crying jag that was going to last two hours.
Angela laughed till she cried.
Clare was crying as she told the story.
“No, I can’t see the funny side. Stop all that laughing. I’m so bloody fed up. I made a fool of myself. I might as well have got up and danced on the table in my knickers. It was dreadful. They pitied me, all of them, even Josie.”
“It’s your own fault,” Angela said. “You were always the one who was great with the advice to Mary Catherine. . . . Tell them your father’s a postman, see do they care. Why couldn’t you have told them you had a coffee jar of cowrie shells?”
“Not on top of the burned rolls, the lumpy gravy, the tough meat. I bet Chrissie did it on purpose, gave me some old hindquarters of a donkey.”
“What about David?”
“He patted me down afterward, he said first dinners are always a trial. First! First and last, more likely. How was Mother Provincial?”
“Like a hamster, wrinkling her nose, pointed little teeth.”
“What did they talk about?”
“The decline in faith and morals. And we had egg sandwiches and tea—that was the feast.”
“I’d have loved it,” Clare said feelingly. “Compared to what went on in my house last night it sounds like paradise.”
Gerry Doyle called in on a wet Thursday.
“I’m a bit busy, Gerry.”
“I can see that,” he said, looking at the open newspaper on the kitchen table.
“Well,” she said awkwardly.
“Well, it took some time. But it’s happened.”
“What has?” Her heart was full of fear.
“David.” He stood there smiling.
Her hand went to her throat. “What’s happened to him?”
“I think he’s found true love, Clare. In a caravan.”
“What?”
“Well, it’s much too wet to play golf isn’t it? Look at that, they’d be soaked through.” He had been sitting down uninvited, but when he had given her the news, he stood up.
“See you,” he said, and left.
David came home quite dry.
“Did you get a game or was it too wet?”
“No, we battled on, quite exhilarating you know in the wind and the rain.”
“I’m sure.”
“Horrible night for Caroline to have to drive all that way back,” he said.
“Isn’t it. Should we have asked her to stay or anything do you think?”
“No, no, but I’ll tell you she is thinking of getting a caravan here, just in case she wants to stay over. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?”
“Gerry Doyle is in a lot of trouble,” Clare’s mother said.
“What way?”
“Well, he has a big bill here for one thing, you know. Three months. All his groceries and cigarettes, it mounts up.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“Your father said I should ask him about it, what with my always getting on well with him.”
“And?”
“And he said he was a bit pushed. And Chrissie says he has a bill as long as your arm in Dwyers’ too, and he can’t get credit in Costello’s anymore. He over-extended himself with that place, they don’t get enough orders for that size of a
set-up. They were fine when they had the little hut and the developing in the house. Dick says he’ll have to sell up.”
“Gerry’s a survivor.”
“That’s what I’ve said always, but when I asked him about his bill here and he said he was broke, I said it was all right, pay a little off it here and there to keep Tom happy . . . and he said I wasn’t to be nice to him, he wasn’t going out with a whimper, when he went it would be with a bang that would be heard all over the county. What can he have meant?”
“I’ll take Liffey to Dublin in a week or two, show her the other Liffey, the river.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“Will you go and have your dinner with your parents when I’m gone?”
“Yes, some of the time. I’ll cook here a bit maybe if I feel up to it. Oh and Caroline will be in her caravan. I’ll probably have a meal or two with her to settle her in.”
Gerry came again.
“I have pictures this time,” he said.
“What kind of pictures?” She was feeding Liffey and needed her full concentration.
“Can I have a cup of tea?”
“No, Gerry. You know I don’t like you coming here.”
“Here, you’re making an awful mess of that. I’ll feed her. You put on the kettle.”
“Will you go then?”
He fed Liffey expertly, holding the spoon just long enough in her mouth for her to have to swallow what was on it.
Clare poured the tea. She had no sense of alarm. He looked vulnerable as he sat feeding Liffey and gurgling at her.
“Oh, the pictures. These ones.” He emptied an envelope on the table. About a dozen black-and-white prints of David and Caroline making love on the cramped bed of a caravan.
She put her hand over her mouth and went to the sink. She vomited and retched.
He moved her away and turned on the tap. He cleaned the sink and gave her a glass of water.
