Maeve's Times by Maeve Binchy Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

Women Are Fools – Mary
7 May 1973
    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