by Maeve Binchy
Why did people in the charity thrift shop press her hand and say that she was a great woman? Who had told them? Had they always known? Oh how she wished she could get away from all these people who knew. People who pitied her, patted her on the head and talked about her. She knew it would end when he gave up Bernadette and came home, but how long would she have to wait while all these people smiled indulgently as if Danny had a dose of the flu?
And of course she had to cope with the children. Annie's mood- swings went the whole way from blaming her mother to blaming herself. 'If you'd only been a bit more normal, Mam, you know, if you'd stopped yacking and cooking he wouldn't have gone away.' The next day it might be, 'It's all my fault… he called me his princess but I didn't spend any time with him, I was always in Kitty's house. He knew I didn't love him enough, that's why he went and found someone else not much older than me.'
Once or twice she asked Ria if they might write a letter to Dad saying how lonely they were without him. 'I don't think he knows,' Annie wept.
'He knows.' Ria was stony.
'If he knows why doesn't he come back?' Annie asked.
'He will, but only when he's ready. Honestly Annie, I don't think we can hurry him up.' And for once she noticed Annie nodding as if on this rare occasion she agreed with her mother.
Brian had his views as well. 'It was probably all my fault, Mam. I didn't really wash enough, I know.'
'I don't think that was it, Brian.'
'No, it could have been, you know the way Dad was always washing himself and wearing a clean shirt every day and everything?'
'People do that, you know.'
'Well, could we tell him that I wash more now. And I will, I promise.'
'If Dad left just because you were filthy he'd have left ages ago, you've been filthy for years,' Annie said gloomily.
Then Brian decided that his father had left on account of sex. 'That's what Myles and Dekko say. They say that he went off to her because she's interested in having sex night and day.'
'I don't think that's right,' Ria said.
'No, but it might be part of it. Could you telephone him and say you'd be interested in having it night and day too?' He looked a bit embarrassed and awkward to be talking to his mother about such things, but he obviously felt that they had to be said.
'Not really, Brian.' Ria was glad that Annie wasn't in the room.
Annie was in the room however when Brian came up with his trump card. 'Mam, I know how to get Dad back,' he said.
'This should be interesting,' Annie said.
'You and he should have a baby.' The silence was deafening. 'You could,' Brian went on. 'And I wouldn't mind, I've talked about it with Myles and Dekko, it's not as bad as you'd think. And we could babysit, Myles, Dekko and myself. It would be a great way of getting pocket money.' He looked at his mother's stricken face. 'Or listen, Mam, if Dad came back, I'd do it for nothing. No charge at all,' he said.
Wouldn't it be wonderful, Ria thought, if she could be miles away from here, not to have to reassure people that she was fine, and that everything was fine, when in fact the whole world was as far from fine as it would ever be. She put off going out because of the people she would meet, yet she knew it was dangerous to hole up in Tara Road and be the reclusive, betrayed wife.
She heard a sound at the hall door and her heart lifted for a moment. Sometimes Danny used to run back during the day. 'Missed you, sweetheart, have you a cuddle for a working man?' And she always had. When had it stopped? Why had she not noticed? How could the sound of a leaflet being pushed through a hall door still make her think that he had come back? She must make a big effort today to live in the real world. Like knowing what she was doing and what time it was. She looked at the clock automatically when she heard the Angelus bell ringing. Everyone did that, it was almost as if you were checking whether the church had got it right. At the same time the telephone rang.
It was a woman with an American accent. 'I do hope you'll forgive me calling a private home, but this was the only listing I could get for a Mr Danny Lynch, realtor and estate agent. Enquiries didn't have a commercial listing.'
'Yes?' Ria was lacklustre.
'Briefly, my name is Marilyn Vine and we were in Ireland fifteen years ago. We met Mr Danny Lynch and he tried to interest us in some property…'
'Yes, well do you mind if I give you his office number, he's not here at the moment…?'
'Of course, but if I could take one more minute of your time to ask you is this something he might do. There isn't really any money in it.'
'Oh, then I doubt it very much,' Ria said.
'I'm sorry?'
'I mean he only cares about the value of this and the price of that nowadays—but then I'm just a little jaundiced today.'
'I beg your pardon, did I get you at a bad time?'
'There aren't going to be any good times from now on, but that's neither here nor there. What exactly was it that you wanted Danny to do for charity?'
'It wasn't that precisely. He was such a pleasant, personable young man I wondered did he know anyone who might like to do a house exchange this summer. I can offer a comfortable and I think pleasant home with a swimming pool in Westville—it's a college town in Connecticut—and I was looking for somewhere within walking distance of the city but with a garden…'
'This summer?' Ria asked.
'Yes. July and August. I know it's not much notice… but I really felt that I wanted to be there last night. I couldn't sleep and I thought I'd make this call, just in case.'
'And why did you think of Danny?' Ria asked in a slow, measured voice.
'He was so knowledgeable and he was my only contact. I felt sure he might put me on to someone else if it wasn't his particular scene.'
'And would it be a big house or a small house you'd want?' Ria asked.
'I don't really mind, I wouldn't be lonely in a large place and anyone coming here to Westville would have a house with plenty of room for four or five people. They could have the car too, of course, and there are very attractive places to go.'
'And aren't there agencies and things?'
'Yes of course, and I can go through the Internet… it's just that when you actually met a person all those years ago, and remembered a friendly face, it seemed a little easier. He wouldn't remember me, us, at all. But just at the moment I don't feel like talking to strangers much, negotiating with them. I guess it does sound a little odd.'
'No, oddly enough I know exactly how you feel.'
'Am I talking to Mrs Lynch?'
'I don't know.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'We are going to get separated, divorced. There's divorce now in Ireland, did you know that?'
'This really was not a good time to ring. I can't tell you how sorry I am.'
'No, it was a great time. We'll do it.'
'Do what?'
'I'll go to your house, you come to mine, July and August. It's a deal.'
'Well, I suppose we should…'
'Of course we should, I'll send you a photo of it and all the details. It's lovely; you'll love it. It's in Tara Road, it's got all kinds of trees in the garden and lovely polished wooden floors and it's got some old stained-glass windows, and… and… and… the original mouldings on the ceilings and… and…' She was crying now. There was a silence at the other end of the line. Ria pulled herself together. 'Please forgive me, Marion is it?'
'Marilyn. Marilyn Vine.'
'I'm Ria Lynch and I can't think of anything I'd like to do more than get away from here and go to a quiet place with a swimming pool and nice drives. I could take my children for one month and the other month I could spend on my own, thinking out my future. That's why I got a bit carried away.'
'Your house sounds just what I want, Ria. Let's do it.'
You mightn't have known from her voice that she was standing in her kitchen looking out of her white wooden house and tears were running down her face also. When Marilyn Vine at last put down the
telephone on her kitchen counter, she went out into her garden with her cup of coffee. She sat by the pool where she had swum earlier. Fifteen lengths morning and afternoon; it was as routine now as brushing her teeth. It was ten minutes past seven in the morning. She had just agreed to exchange houses with an extremely agitated woman going through some kind of life crisis. A woman whom she had never met who lived three thousand miles away. A woman who might well not have the right to exchange houses, whose property could well be under some kind of legal review pending divorce.
All Marilyn knew was that it was very foolish to make early-morning, spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment decisions. It was so unlike her to make a telephone call like that at this hour of the morning. And even less like her to go along with the plans of the hysterical woman at the other end of the line. She would never do anything remotely like this again. The only question now was whether she should call back and unpick the entirely impractical arrangement before it had begun to take root in this woman's mind, or just write a letter?
She could call immediately, it might be a cleaner break, and say the home exchange was no longer possible from her end, that she had family duties which she could not ignore. Marilyn smiled wryly at the thought of her being someone with family responsibilities. But Ria in Ireland wouldn't know this. It would be easier to write or send an email—anything not to have to hear the disappointment in that voice. But there was no technology in Tara Road and Ria Lynch would not have had access to her husband's office where presumably such things existed.
She had sounded gutsy and lively as well as slightly unhinged. Marilyn tried to work out how old she was. That good-looking young estate agent must be about forty now, this woman was probably the same age. She mentioned having a daughter of fourteen and a son who was almost ten. Marilyn's face hardened. So her marriage was ending, but she hated her husband: that much was obvious—she spoke about him so disparagingly to a total stranger. She was going to be much better off without him.
Marilyn would not allow herself to brood. Very soon now she would need to go to work. She would drive up to the college campus and take her place in the car park. Then, greeting this person and that, she would walk to the Alumni Office where she worked, cool and self-sufficient in her crisp lemon-and-white suit.
They would look at her with interest. How strange she hadn't gone to Hawaii with her husband. Greg Vine's visiting lectureship had seemed exactly what the couple needed. But Marilyn had been adamant she would not go, and had been equally resolute in giving no explanation to her colleagues and friends. By now they had stopped enquiring and trying to persuade her. She knew she was an object of interest and speculation. Their interest was genuine but so was their mystification that she would not go to a sunny island with the urging of a loving husband and the support of a caring department in the college that would hold the job open for her until her return.
What would they say if they knew what an extraordinary alternative she had been contemplating? To exchange homes for two months with a woman who owned, or claimed she owned, a four-storey Victorian house in Dublin. They would say it was a foolish decision, and must under no circumstances be allowed to go ahead.
Marilyn finished her coffee, straightened her shoulders and squared up to what she had done. She was an adult woman, very adult indeed. She would have her fortieth birthday this summer, on the first of August. She would make whatever decisions she felt like making. Who else was going to tell her what was best for her?
She nodded towards the telephone as if affirming the conversation she had made on it earlier. She looked at her reflection in the hall mirror. Short auburn hair, cut so that she could swim and leave it to dry naturally, green anxious eyes, tense shoulders but otherwise perfectly normal. Not at all the kind of person who would have decided something so unbalanced.
Marilyn picked up her keys and drove to work.
Ria sat down and held on to the table very tightly. Not since she was a teenager had she been abroad alone. And with Danny very few times. Well, at least she had a passport and a few weeks to get everything organised at this end.
Marilyn had said she was perfectly happy to feed Annie's cat. The children would love a trip to America, a house with a swimming pool. Marilyn said it was easy to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road because the place was so quiet. Ria had warned Marilyn against any such foolhardy courage in Dublin, which was filled with traffic hazards and mad drivers.
Marilyn had said she would prefer to walk anyway.
From force of habit, Ria got a piece of paper, wrote the word List and underlined it. As she began to write down what she had to do, her chest tightened. Was she completely mad? She knew nothing about this woman. Nothing at all except they had both cried on the telephone. When you paused to think about it, wasn't it very odd that she should approach the business of exchanging her house this way? There were agencies, firms specialising in such things. There was the whole Internet waiting for the opportunity to match people together, find them the ideal house-swap.
What kind of a person would remember Danny's handsome face from years ago and try to track him down? Perhaps she had fancied him all that time ago; he was a striking-looking man after all. Maybe she had in fact been closer to him than she was saying; it might have been a fling, a whirl or whatever. This whole idea of taking his house could be a ploy, a ruse to get involved in his life.
Ria had seen so many movies where mad people sounded totally plausible, where innocent trusting folk admitted them willingly into their lives. These could be the first hours of a nightmare that could wreck them. She must try and be rational about all this and work out what she wanted. Why did it seem such a good idea? Was it only so that she wouldn't have to look at Hilary, her mother, Rosemary, Frances and Gertie and see the sympathy in their eyes? Was there any other reason that was taking her across the Atlantic Ocean?
I might half forget him out there, Ria told herself. I might actually not see his face everywhere I look. Suppose she was sleeping in a strange bed in America she might not wake up at four o'clock frightened, thinking he was very late, could he have been in a car crash, and then with the even more sickening realisation that he was not coming back at all. America might cure that.
And the awful belief that there may have been other Bernadettes. People always said that the man doesn't leave on the first affair. There could have been other people entertained in this house, even that had slept with her husband. How great to go to a place where nobody had met Danny, heard of him, and certainly not slept with him.
But still it was a very sudden decision to have made. Promising a total stranger that she could live here in Tara Road. In normal times she would not have done anything so wildly lacking in caution. But these were not normal times, they were times when two months in America might actually be what was needed. And it was idiotic really to think that this woman Marilyn might be a serial killer.
Ria remembered that Marilyn had not wanted this house in particular, and it was Ria who had pushed Tara Road. Marilyn had sounded apologetic and had tried several times to end the conversation, it was Ria who had made all the running. She had said she would send photographs and banker's references, and Ria would do the same. Of course she was above-board and normal. She wanted to escape and have time to get her head together; that was American-speak for exactly what Ria wanted to do. It wasn't so outrageous a coincidence that two people with identical needs should meet accidentally at the right time.
Why do I want it so much? Ria asked herself. When I got up this morning I hadn't a notion of going to a house in Connecticut for the summer. Is it for the children so that I'll be able to offer them something the equivalent of their father's trip on the Shannon? Is it that I want to be somewhere where Danny Lynch isn't the centre of the world and we are all waiting for what he will do next so that we can react?
She felt the answer was a mixture of all these things, but she still wasn't sure that she had the strength to go ahead with it. Should she talk t
o Rosemary about it? Rosemary was so clear-headed she cut straight to the chase on everything.
But Ria firmed up her shoulders. She was a strong person despite a lot of evidence to the contrary. She would not allow circumstances to turn her into one of those dithering women she despised so much when she served them at the charity shop. The ones who couldn't make up their mind between a blue tablecloth and a yellow one; they'd have to talk to a husband, a daughter, a neighbour about it all before they came back and paid three whole pounds.
She liked the sound of Marilyn; this woman was not a psychotic, deranged killer coming over to waste the neighbourhood of Tara Road. She was someone who had appeared just when she was needed. With bleak determination Ria applied herself to the list.
The meal with Annie and Brian was not going well.
Danny had taken them to Quentin's which he thought would be a treat for them, but was turning out to be a great mistake. For one thing they weren't dressed properly. Any other young people having an early dinner there with parents and grandparents were elegantly turned out. Brian wore scruffy jeans and a very grubby T-shirt. His zipped jacket had a lot of writing on it, the names of footballers and dead pop stars; he looked very like a young tearaway who might have been harassing tourists in Grafton Street, Annie was also in jeans, far too tight in Danny's opinion. Her blonde hair was not washed and shiny, it was greasy and pushed behind her ears. She wore an old sequinned jacket to which she was inordinately attached. It belonged to some old lady in St Rita's and was described as a genuine fifties garment if you commented on it at all.
'Would you look at the prices!' Brian said, astounded. 'Look what they charge for steak and kidney pie. Mam makes that for free at home.'
'Not for free, you eejit,' Annie said. 'She has to buy the steak and the kidney and the flour and the butter for the pastry.'
'But that's all there already,' Brian protested.
'No, it's not. It doesn't grow in the kitchen, you fool. That's so typical of a man. She has to go out and pay for it in the shops and then there's the cost of her labour; that has to be taken into consideration.'