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

here.
    No, Fenella had met Mavis Ormitage in real life, oh, it must be about five years ago now. She had a daughter who was totally incapacitated and she had given her life to this girl. Well, she wasn’t a girl; she was a woman. The daughter must have been in her forties when Mavis had been forced to put her into a hospital. Fenella had a friend, Ruth, who worked in the hospital.
    I had never heard of Ruth.
    “Where is she now? Ruth, I mean.”
    Fenella had no idea. Ruth had been very depressed in those days—she had this really diabolical mother, talk of the mother in
Open Windows
! This one dressed like a teenager and was totally pathetic, going around accosting men in the street. Poor Ruth had been very low indeed, but in order to drag herself out of it she had taken up voluntary work in the hospital. And by chance Ruth had been to a writers’ course that Mavis Ormitage had been lecturing at, must have been the same one as that Cyril.
    I felt Fenella disapproved of that Cyril. And Mavis. And in some way her friend Ruth.
    Anyway, it was all very briefly told. Fenella didn’t ever go into much detail about herself. But Mavis recognized Ruth, who was working taking round trolleys of books and magazines, and they all used to talk in the hospital corridors and in the canteen and in the nice big garden of the hospital. I could see it very well. Mavis talking about her dying daughter and Ruth telling of the mad, groping mother. Both of them leaning on Fenella’s interest, her phenomenal memory for the minutiae of their stories.
    “Those were good days,” Fenella said. “We had good conversations under a tree in the hospital garden.” Her face looked far away as she thought of the good days, when she heard about the grossness of a mad old woman and the slow lingering death of a disabled girl. I felt a shiver and wished that I had gone out with Cyril Biggs that night.
    It wasn’t a question of procreating ten or indeed any children. He was a funny, self-deprecating kind of man, who didn’t take himself or anyone else seriously. Had I told him about John and Maria, which would have been highly unlikely, he would have dismissed it briefly. He would not have asked what Maria said when she first found out about John and how we had betrayed her.
    Mavis Ormitage was undoubtedly the most talked-of visitor the school had ever known. From the moment she roared up the drive in her open Land Rover and stepped, in billowing silk, into the school hall they loved her. She demanded questions afterwards and only when the school security men said it was time to lock the gates could she be prized away.
    Mavis Ormitage had a small brandy flask and she topped up everyone’s coffee in the staff room. Even the principal seemed enthusiastic about the celebration, something that had never been known. I brought myself to mention Fenella, though it wasn’t easy. For two reasons. It was hard to get Mavis alone for one thing and also, I was almost afraid that it was disloyal. It was like probing a sore tooth: ask about Fenella and I will hear something bad, I thought. Why do I want to hear something bad about a woman who has been so kind to me? Am I looking for an excuse to stop seeing her?
    Mavis had small beady eyes in the middle of all the creases of good-humored flesh.
    “One of the kindest people I ever met,” Mavis said. “At the time. There’s a time for Fenella, like the old psalm says, there’s a time for being born and dying and a time for Fenella.”
    “And when the time is over?” I asked.
    “You’ll know, but Fenella will never know. She is like a doomed ship, always encountering other stricken ships, helping them and then being abandoned by them.”
    It was a bit flowery and it also made me feel guilty.
    I was feeling better now. I didn’t
want
to talk about John and Maria or not having visited my mother’s grave or sleepless nights or uncaring colleagues. Things were looking up. Only Fenella was looking down.
    “What