Authors: Maeve Binchy
And Mary loved him so much and her mother was still so unaware of his existence, and Brenda was leaving town to go to London, that there really were problems.
‘Could you tell her the truth?’ I asked foolishly, because really it was a foolish question.
All right, so Mary was 26, she was entitled to do whatever she liked; she certainly didn’t love her mother enough to be deeply upset about hurting her. But then mothers are mothers and I can’t believe that four years ago a woman in her fifties would like her daughter to move in with a divorced man. I couldn’t believe for a moment that Mary’s mother, who was practically a law unto herself, would countenance it for a minute.
Selfishly I thanked heaven that I lived in Dalkey and there was no fear that Mary could ask me to pretend I was living with her, because there is no way you could say Dalkey was nearer her work than her own house was. What did the man say? Oh well, he said, it was up to her to arrange things and she was so desperately afraid that she’d lose him, and he did so need someone to get his shirts cleaned, and cook his supper, she couldn’t leave and there would have to be a way.
The way, when found, was so ludicrous and financially disastrous you will find it hard to believe.
Mary told her mother that she was going to do an evening course and would have to take a room in town. She rented a bedsitter and paid £6 a week for it, brought in some of her things. She now had clothes and possessions in three houses, her mother’s, her man’s and her new totally unused and useless bedsitter. Every Tuesday, which was her half day, she would bring in some more things from the pad to the bedsitter and ask her mother to tea. Mother was getting older, sadder and sourer. She couldn’t understand why Mary was paying £3 to her old home, £6 to a landlord, when she had a perfectly good home of her own, and, said the mother sinisterly, perfect freedom to entertain all her friends there. The house was now too big for mother. Tuesdays took on the nature of a nightmare.
Then there were the weekends. Mother couldn’t understand that Mary had suddenly joined An Óige and was going on winter and summer hikes, when she didn’t seem to know a thing about the organisation nor anyone in it.
I don’t know Mary very well, remember, but I think that the man loved her a lot. He certainly made her very happy and apart from all the deceptions at home and the effort and the covering up and trying not to meet people that might conceivably split on them, it was a good, happy relationship.
For nearly a year.
The man, it appeared, was a little mean. Mary was only taking home £22 a week from her teaching, and nine of that was gone on two other sets of accommodation already. He expected her to pay for half their housekeeping and he liked living well. He bought her nice presents of course, but Mary was getting into debt. He had pictures of his nippers all over the pad; and none of Mary. She thought that was a bit hard, but the price you pay for this kind of setup. He had to go to business dinners, and naturally couldn’t bring her along. So she spent long evenings looking at television, wondering what time he would come home. And she couldn’t ask her friends in because it wasn’t her place. So she would go out to a coin box phone occasionally and ring her mother, pretending she was phoning from the hall of the place she was meant to be living in, and her mother would have some other complaint. And she often went to the cinema on her own.
Then the doubts began. Was it a simple magazine case of letting herself go, did he find her less attractive now, had she moved in too easily, why were there so many business dinners now and hardly any at all six months ago? Was there someone else?
It couldn’t be that he was lonely for the children because his ex-wife had remarried and the children were living with her in Switzerland. He didn’t even have to send her alimony because this time, she had married a near millionaire. He never spoke of her at all, or why they had separated. Mary had never asked.
The summer holidays were coming up, and to get over the guilt feelings about Mother, Mary decided to get herself further in debt and take the two of them to Majorca. She wrote every day to tell him how she loved and missed him. He didn’t write at all, because her mother would probably ask who the letters were from. She admired his tact in not writing.
Eventually the 14 days were over, and for appearances Mary stayed the night in her mother’s home, and then looked in at her false flat to make sure it hadn’t been broken into, and happily trotted up to the pad.
He wouldn’t be home for ages, so she could make a great dinner. There was washing up in the sink, two of everything; he must have had Freddy to a meal. There was new talcum, and perfume in the bathroom, but they weren’t presents, they were half used. It couldn’t have been Freddy, he doesn’t use Blue Grass.
The door opened and the Man came in, finding Mary sadly looking at a white dressing-gown on the back of the door. He had been coming back to clear up the evidence. They looked at each other, according to her own tale, for five minutes without saying anything, and then he had to say something and mercifully for Mary he didn’t say, ‘I can explain everything.’
What he did say was, ‘Well, I suppose it had to end sometime.’
She doesn’t know why he took someone else in, she doesn’t know who the other person is or was, or if they are still there. She just knew that life was over. She packed there and then, borrowing one of his suitcases, and saying, ‘Is this record yours or mine?’ He stood stonily, and she never spoke to him again. That was three years ago.
Then Mary became known in the current attractive jargon of our times as ‘an easy lay’. She moved properly into what was her false flat and made it her real flat. She got drunk and told her mother all about the Man, her mother forbade her to come back again and told the priest, and Mary told her to keep to her lonely bitter ways, and hasn’t seen her mother properly for three years except at frosty Christmas lunches.
She had a short affair, which by her standards now means a relationship that lasts a month or two, with the father of one of her pupils, and was sacked from the school. She got another job in a provincial town for a while, but didn’t even need to be sacked from that one because her poker playing, drinking and sleeping with the commercial travellers at the hotel made her a town name in three months.
I met her at the races there a few weeks ago. I didn’t know her at first, but we met in the bar where I had lost my purse and it had been retrieved by an honest barman. She looked a little lost, and offered me a drink. I had people searching other corners of the race course for my purse so had to refuse but asked her to ring me during the Easter holidays, which she did.
She is pregnant; she hasn’t a clue in the world who the father might be. You name him, it could be that person. It’s now too late for an abortion, she thinks, she doesn’t even damn know. She supposes she’ll have it, and get it adopted. Would I know where she could do that? I would.
She also had a sort of half idea of keeping it, would I know how she could get help to do that? I would. What did I think about it all?
Well, what on earth could I think, except that life is unfair as I think more and more these days, and wonder was it ever meant to be fair? It’s unfair on Mary’s child who isn’t wanted, it’s unfair on Mary’s mother who has no husband, and a daughter a nun in America, and a married son, and an emigrated son, and a daughter who is going to be a Public Disgrace. And it’s unfair on Mary because she had no strength, and she has this belief that a lot of women have that they don’t control their own lives. That they are somehow blown along by fate.
And I said that perhaps a child would give her something to live for, and someone to love. But I knew when saying it that she would have loved it to be His child, the only man she ever cared about, not the child of a number of people who stopped the loneliness of the night for her by coming home to her flat.
And I also know that a teacher will not be able to rear a child alone, and that Mary’s mother won’t help. And I know that if Mary is going to carry on the way she is at the moment, she won’t be much of a mother or a teacher anyway. And so I gave her the addresses that we have listed in our little green note book, and hoped that the professionals will help her, and I rang Ally and Cherish about her, and said that she would be contacting them, and they said certainly they would do all they could for her. And I know they will, but I don’t know that Mary will do all she can for herself, because she has that kind of hopeless beaten look, which has nothing to do with being pregnant and unmarried, it was there before. It has a lot to do with expecting life to be beautiful and easy like it is for everyone else and bitterly disappointed when it isn’t. And that’s why we are all such fools.
L
orraine was at UCD with me in the late fifties and when everyone was wearing ten of those ridiculous stiff petticoats, Lorraine wore 20. She was in digs with a motherly kind of woman who liked her because Lorraine was obsessed with clothes and would lend Mrs whoever-she-was her good handbag in exchange for a blouse or one of her son’s long sweaters, which were all the rage then too.
I didn’t know her very well at this stage and always thought of her as one of those who used to be back combing their hair in front of the mirror in the Ladies’ Reading Room, as it was called.
When we went to dances in ‘86’ or in the Four Courts where the Solicitors’ Apprentices used to run a very great kind of hop, Lorraine always danced with this fellow called Martin who was good-looking and quiet and did Commerce. It was assumed, again in the language of the time, that they were doing a line.
The year we were all meant to be studying for our degree, I got to know Lorraine better because nobody was studying at all. We had all taken holiday jobs on the grounds that if we got away from the distractions and the barbecues at White Rock and all that sort of thing there would be more chance of getting some work done.
I was teaching in St Leonard’s-on-Sea, and by chance Lorraine was there too, working in a library in nearby Hastings so we used to meet a bit and talk. I was mainly worried in case I was teaching the pupils rubbish, and that I would fail my BA because I didn’t know one word, line or fact of American history. Lorraine was worried because she was always giving out books to people who looked like professional book thieves and she was hoping that her hard-to-get policy with Martin was going to pay off.
We had hours and days of Martin as we sat on the beach, me with American history books, Lorraine with unopened old English tomes. It
had
been the right thing, hadn’t it, to pretend that one wasn’t available? It would make him more interested, wouldn’t it? There was no danger he’d meet someone else at home, was there? Reassurances from me, struggling with names I had never heard of and battles I hadn’t known had taken place. Positively the right thing.
In August when everyone really
was
studying I heard that they were engaged, and would be married immediately after graduation. It seemed the most remarkable and romantic thing in the world, a triumph for all that Angela MacNamara advice about not giving your favours too easily, and not being too easy to get. She was just 20, he was her first and only boyfriend.
The rest of us went on sourly to do our HDip. Martin got a job in the Civil Service. Lorraine got a hopeless kind of job as someone’s personal secretary.
Then she was coyly pregnant, and they had to leave their flat and I used to meet them at the odd party and it was always whine, whine, whine about the price of houses, and the not knowing whether to knit things in pink or in blue, and we found them a bit of a drag. We who had so much else to live for, like trying to find a teaching job in Dublin and/or a boyfriend.
And again by chance they got a house next door to a great friend of mine, so I kept coming across her for years afterwards. My friend had advised her to knit everything in white; it would be safer, and she had been delighted with that idea and kept out of everyone’s way knitting until the girl was born, and a boy was born a year later and another girl after that.
This brings us to about 1964 and Lorraine and Martin had a new whine: it was about family planning. They just couldn’t afford any more children, and you just had to sneeze and Lorraine got pregnant, and they were both very good Catholics and really wasn’t it all terribly unfair? They had discussed it with Father Peter who had been very understanding and said that they should see a good doctor about the rhythm method, and with Father Brian who hadn’t been a bit understanding and said that God never brought a life into the world that He didn’t want, and there was never a mouth that He couldn’t feed. And we were all so helpful to Lorraine and Martin and said yes, isn’t Father Brian right? Look at the thousands who die of starvation, God just didn’t want those apparently. And they became bewildered and didn’t talk about it so much, which was what we wanted.
Martin was doing all right in his job, he was promoted and went back to College to do a post-graduate degree as a sort of part-time release. Lorraine just learned a bit of dressmaking and they went to the odd dance and my friend minded their three babies for them and they seemed just like any other married couple with a little too much money and a little too high aspiration in life.
I got the shock of my life when I saw Lorraine extremely drunk at a party about four years ago. She was simply incapable of standing up, so with the loyalty of the American-style old alumnae, a few of us got her out of it and brought her to the nearest house and sobered her up, with coffee, lots of it. Nobody could find Martin at the party.
He wasn’t there. He was minding the children but Lorraine had decided she was sick of everything and of him being so dull and not wanting to go anywhere and she was still attractive for God’s sake and she had no one to talk to all day, and he at least had his friends in the office, and all he wanted to do was to look at the telly and make love. And he had got round some priest, who said that if the doctor said she should take the Pill, then it was all right, and now she was taking the Pill and she and Martin would go to hell when they died. And she felt such a hypocrite at Mass every Sunday and it wasn’t fair. She hadn’t been to Communion for two years and she sobbed after we had all said something soothing about ‘If the priest says it’s all right ….’