A Few of the Girls by Maeve Binchy Read Free Book Online Page A

had a horrible hip injury; we talked a lot in those days. But she’s too busy to chat now.” Fenella’s voice was cold.
    She was not too busy however to come to the school. And they liked her enormously. She didn’t talk down to them. She said, quite truthfully, that she did have a dreadful mother herself but then so did most people, including her own children. They liked that; it made them think. It made me think, too. I thought about my own mother, long dead now, in Ireland. I had never visited her grave. Did that make me a dreadful daughter? She had been a dreadful mother in many ways, wanting me to live at home in the country and marry a man who owned a pub. She said it was fast to travel as I did, that no man would want me. Perhaps she had been right, after all. I talked about it for hours with Fenella.
    The children wanted Louise Mitchell too, the one who writes those so-called historical sagas. For once I saw eye to eye with the principal that they were, in fact, pornography. I wondered, was I becoming more conservative or was the principal becoming more aware of the world? We did have Maxwell Lawrie at the school, the creator of Vladimir Klein, Master Spy. He was marvelous with children, told them how to write spy books and thrillers by beginning on the last page and working it out from there. It was like a problem, he said, just see who couldn’t have done it and eliminate them and then find an improbable motive for who could have done it and start at the beginning.
    He stayed for coffee in the staff room and he seemed to be giving me the eye a bit. Said that he’d like ten children at least, wouldn’t I? I say yes, I agreed totally, might as well have a brood: they’d be company for each other and more fun, but if we were going to do it we’d better set about it fairly soon. He suggested that night. I think he was ninety percent joking. Fenella said he was sick, and it would have been madness to get involved before my wounds were healed. It was funny, that was when I realized that my wounds
had
healed. I rarely thought of John now, and that Maxwell Lawrie—which wasn’t his real name at all, he was Cyril Biggs—he did seem interesting. I didn’t think his approach was sick, I thought it was jokey. It was just a way of speaking. I mean, I’m twenty-eight and he is a great deal more; you don’t say things like “would you come on a date with me?” when you get to our stage. Do you? You make jokes about having to start soon to create ten people or whatever. Fenella’s lips were pursed. I let it go. I didn’t want to upset her.
    Cyril had told me that we should have Mavis Ormitage to talk at the school. A wonderful woman, he said, she is enormous, wears white just to make herself look a little larger still, people used to call her Moby Dick. She wrote true romances, hundreds of them, Cyril knew her because they met every summer at a writers’ school. She had a real gift in talking about life, made it all seem quite simple and easy to handle, somehow, and a great laugh like a roll of drums to go with it. I had thought that the principal mightn’t go for the Queen of the True as she was called. Cyril said he’d have a word; it was easy to make a superficial decision without meeting the person. Mavis would be good for those kids about to set out on Life—she knew it all, somehow, without being preachy. That’s why she was such a success. She drove around everywhere in a Land Rover, wearing a white raincoat and a white lifeboat man’s hat when it rained. She kept her books in plastic bags because she liked open cars and the feel of rain on her face. That sort of thing had to be helpful to children, Cyril said.
    Fenella knew Mavis Ormitage. I couldn’t believe it. In a city of twelve million people, she had known two people that I had come across too. And Mavis wasn’t even a client. Fenella said that there was no way
her
sort of writing would translate—it was amazing enough that it sold