Authors: Maeve Binchy
5. Pregnant women are beautiful. They are, if they are sitting in a Chanel dress with a white collar framing an unworried face, thinking beautiful thoughts about a wonderful and miraculous event that is going to change everyone’s lives. They are considerably less than beautiful if they are wearing their sister-in-law’s maternity dress, elastic stockings, bemoaning the fact that they can’t drink gin, and wondering how on earth they are going to afford another child.
6. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t beautiful. You are quite right, it doesn’t matter a damn to anyone else, but it matters quite a lot to you.
M
y first evening dress was baby blue, and it had a great panel of blue velvet down the front, because my cousin who actually owned the dress was six inches thinner everywhere than I was. It had two short puff sleeves, and a belt which it was decided that I should not wear. It was made from some kind of good taffeta, and had, in its original condition, what was known as a good cut.
It was borrowed and altered in great haste, because a precocious classmate had decided to have a formal party. A formal party meant that the entire class turned up looking idiotic and she had to provide 23 idiotic men as well.
I was so excited when the blue evening dress arrived back from the dressmaker. It didn’t matter, we all agreed, that the baby blue inset was a totally different colour from the baby blue dress. It gave it contrast and eye-appeal, a kind next-door neighbour said, and we were delighted with it. I telephoned the mother of the cousin and said it was going to be a great success. She was enormously gratified.
I got my hair permed on the day of the formal party, which now many years later I can agree was a great mistake. It would have been wiser to have had the perm six months previously and to allow it to grow out. However, there is nothing like the Aborigine look to give you confidence if you were once a girl with straight hair, and my younger sister who hadn’t recognised me when I came to the door said that I looked 40, and I thought that was good too. It would have been terrible to look 16, which was what we all were.
I had bought new underwear in case the taxi crashed on the way to the formal party and I ended up on the operating table; and I became very angry with another young sister who said I looked better in my blue knickers than I did in the dress. Cheap jealousy, I thought, and with all that puppy fat and navy school knicker plus awful school belted tunic as her only covering, how could she be expected to have any judgment at all?
Against everyone’s advice I invested in a pair of diamante earrings, cost 1s. 3d. old money in Woolworths; they had an inset of baby blue also, and I thought that this was the last word in coordination. I wore them for three days before the event, and ignored the fact that great ulcerous sores were forming on my earlobes. Practice, I thought, would solve that.
The formal party started at nine p.m. I was ready at six, and looked so beautiful that I thought it would be unfair to the rest of the girls. How could they compete? The riot of baby blue had descended to the shoes as well, and in those days, shoe dyeing wasn’t all it is these days. By seven p.m. my legs had turned blue up to the knee. It didn’t matter, said my father kindly, unless, of course, they do the can-can these days. Panic set in, and I removed shoes, stockings and scrubbed my legs to their original purple, and the shoes to their off-white. To hell with coordination, I wasn’t going to let people think I had painted myself with woad.
By eight p.m. I pitied my drab parents and my pathetic family, who were not glitter and stardust as I was. They were tolerant to the degree of not commenting on my swollen ears, which now couldn’t take the diamante clips and luxuriated with the innovation of sticking-plaster painted blue. They told me that I looked lovely, and that I would be the belle of the ball. I knew it already, but it was nice to have it confirmed.
There is no use in dwelling on the formal party. Nobody danced with me at all, except in the Paul Jones, and nobody said I looked well. Everyone else had blouses and long skirts which cost a fraction of what the alterations on my cousin’s evening dress had set me back. Everyone else looked normal, I looked like a mad blue balloon.
I decided I would burn it that night when I got home, in the garden in a bonfire. Then I thought that would wake my parents and make them distressed that I hadn’t been the belle of the ball after all, so I set off down the road to burn it on the railway bank of Dalkey station. Then I remembered the bye-laws, and having to walk home in my underwear, which the baby had rightly said looked better than the dress, so I decided to hell with it all, I would just tear it up tomorrow, at dawn.
But the next day, didn’t a boy, a real live boy who had danced with me during one of the Paul Joneses, ring up and say that he was giving a formal party next week, and would I come? The social whirl was beginning, I thought, and in the grey light of morning the dress didn’t look too bad on the back of a chair.
And there wasn’t time to get a skirt and blouse and look normal like everyone else, and I checked around and not everybody had been invited to his formal party; in fact only three of us had. So I rang the mother of the cousin again, and she was embarrassingly gratified this time, and I decided to allow my ears to cure and not wear any earrings, and to let the perm grow out, and to avoid dyed shoes.
And a whole winter season of idiotic parties began, at which I formally decided I was the belle of the ball even though I hardly got danced with at all, and I know I am a stupid cow, but I still have the dress, and I am never going to give it away, set fire to it on the railway bank or use it as a duster.
M
ary’s father died on her 21st birthday, when she had been celebrating not only the key of the door but an honours BA. She missed him in a mild guilty sort of way because she never knew him too well. All those years at boarding school, then at university, she hadn’t brought friends home much because there was nothing to do, she thought, in the small country town, and her friends would be bored.
She had a sister years and years older who was a nun in America, and got leave to come over for the funeral, and two brothers, one who was courting, and one who was only a schoolboy.
She didn’t know her mother too well when she was 21, but now at 29 she knows her only too well, and doesn’t like what she knows. Or so she says.
The mother sold the house in the country town and came to Dublin. It would he handier, she said. Mary could live with her while doing the HDip. The courting son was married and living in Dublin in a year and the schoolboy son could go to a good school in Dublin. It was all a great idea said the mother, and Mary thought it would be cheaper certainly and it had been a bit lonely sometimes in Dublin on her own, and at least she would get good meals and have someone to talk to at weekends.
She forgot what it was like to be living at home again. A home where her mother always said, ‘If your poor father were only here he would …’, and he would always be doing or saying something so unlikely that Mary grew to resent the phrase, and the inevitable accusations that she didn’t respect the memory of her father began.
Mary got a job easily enough teaching in Dublin. It was a large convent school, and it was in this that I met her, because our school had a debating competition with hers and her pupils beat mine, and annoyed as I was because I thought my kids were better, I liked their teachers, who seemed kind of interested in the whole idea of giving them self-confidence and not teaching them typical debating phrases off by heart. So we went and had a coffee after we put our various charges on buses and sent them home with dire warnings about not getting distracted by chip shops en route.
She told me that she didn’t really like teaching, and wanted something abroad, that she found it difficult to find a sort of ‘set’ in Dublin now that she had left college. People were all scattered, and at school who on earth did you meet except the nuns, the other teachers, the children and the parents? I knew it only too well, but assured her that it sort of evolved. She was bored by her married friends, she said, they all seemed so complacent. I said mine weren’t because they were all poor and didn’t have much to be complacent about. We thought a bit about how to get a job for her abroad, and about how dreadful it was that the only kind of men you’d want to go out with were all married already.
Again I met her and this time she said she was going to start going to dances again; she told me a bit about her whining mother, who always went on about her missing her chances, and Mary wondered aloud even more whiningly to me and her mother where on God’s name were the chances?
The first Chance came at a dance hall where Mary spent a really appalling night. The dancers who weren’t her pupils were elderly nurses in cardigans, she said; the men were either children or ageing, dribbling drunks. One man in the room seemed to be neither a drunk of 50 nor a child of 15; at the second last dance, he eyed Mary and they jived away until the national anthem.
She had nothing in common with him, but he took her home, and when he said that he’d give her a ring next week he actually did. And Mary was delighted that she had a fellow, although it has to be said she did talk about him as you would about a worn-out carpet sweeper that someone had given you when they had bought a new electrical thing. She was grateful but not totally satisfied with her lot.
Her mother wanted to know all about him, who his people were, and didn’t like the sound of he works in Aer Lingus or Guinnesses or CIE or wherever it was, because his job was never defined there. So Mary didn’t bring him home, they went to the pictures a lot, and necked in the back of his car out at Burma Road in the nice car park built just for that purpose, and he gave her a handbag for her birthday, and he didn’t ask her home either which was a relief because Mary didn’t feel bad about her not doing the same, and just as she was getting ready to buy him a cashmere sweater for his birthday some Good Friend managed to tell her that it wasn’t his difficult mother he didn’t want her to meet, it was his difficult wife.
We agreed over a lunch one day that it had been a horrible shock, a great relief that she hadn’t been really interested in him and an even greater relief that Mary hadn’t given in to all his frightful sexual demands. That was the biggest bonus of all.
Her next Chance came when I introduced her to a professional bachelor, professional in the sense of always being determined to remain a bachelor. We were sure he wasn’t married, but I was equally sure he never would marry. It lasted about three months, dinner in little restaurants where you could dance, theatres.
I don’t think he made any frightful sexual demands, if so they weren’t mentioned, but she brought him home often, and he got very uneasy about the best china being brought out and Mary’s mother saying that she would leave you young people alone and vanishing, so he asked me to help him unload her which was a lousy rotten thing to do and I said he was to do it himself, the weak fool, and the weak fool just stopped ringing her, and her heart was broken, because school was getting more and more boring and mother was more and more trying and Mary had really thought that This might be It.
She met a man in a pub shortly afterwards while waiting for a girlfriend, he invited them both to a party, and there was a lot of drink and messing, Mary said, but it was better than nothing, and he and his gang had parties nearly every weekend up in Rathmines, where they all lived in bedsitters or flats, and it was getting harder and harder for Mary to take a taxi out nine miles home afterwards, so she got into the habit of staying with her friend Brenda in town. Mother would be a bit sour, but at least not suspicious, and indeed at this stage she had nothing to be suspicious about because Mary
was
staying with Brenda and they would both have glasses of milk and discuss the talent at the party and wonder which one of the lads they should try and settle for.
And then she fell in love. Yes, that’s what it was; she really found someone she loved much more than herself, and someone she couldn’t live without. I didn’t see her at all during this great period, but everyone who knew her said he was a total bastard, had got one of these funny divorces, because he had a load of money and a small luxurious flat that he actually called a ‘pad’ somewhere in Fashionable Dublin Four, and this was even further from Mary’s home than ever, and so Brenda was being used as a very real excuse this time.
Brenda had a phone, and if Mary’s mother rang, as she often did, Brenda would say, ‘Hold on a minute, she’s in the bath,’ and then ring Mary at the pad and tell her to ring her mother quick, for God’s sake.
I met them once and I agree he was very, very attractive and charming. He had a certain smoothness which I didn’t like, but then put that down to prejudice because I had heard he was a smooth bastard from people who are kind of right about these things. But that night when I was eating a very quick meal before going to the theatre, and was by myself, they asked me to join them, and he did have something very warm about him; he seemed to be interested in her, and pleasantly interested in whatever I had to say too. He talked a bit about ‘my little nipper’ and explained that he was divorced, so there didn’t seem to be any great deception or anything involved. Mary said her mother was going on a coach tour soon and that she and the guy would be having a party in his pad and I must come. The relevancy of the coach tour didn’t strike me for the moment until I remembered that naturally her mother thought she was staying with Brenda four to five nights a week. He said it had been very, very nice to meet me, which I thought was a bit overdoing it; it might have been nice enough, but since I was shovelling food into my mouth and looking at my watch, it could hardly have been very, very nice. Still, people talk different ways.
And act different ways, too.
He never suggested marriage to Mary, though she was quite willing to go to England and get married there, or in the registry office here, but apparently whenever she brought it up he said that the Irish laws were funny, and even though he did have a Mexican divorce or whatever it was, there was always the possibility that one could be prosecuted for bigamy here. Not likely, he said, because the courts hate doing it, it makes them look ridiculous, but possible. He would, however, like Mary to move in with him.