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

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